Before Political Economy: Debate over Grain Markets, Dearth and Pauperism in England, 1794-96

During the 1790s Britain experienced a series of poor harvests which, given an expanding population and wartime disruption to the European grain trade, resulted in sudden and rapid increases in the domestic price of wheat. In modern discussion of Corn and Poor Laws the severity of these fluctuations has been obscured by the use of annual average grain prices, despite weekly county prices being available from 1771 as published in the London Gazette. We highlight the uncertainties of grain prices during the period 1794-96, drawing upon extensive contemporary discussion published in the Annals of Agriculture of the problems arising from rapid fluctuations in the price of wheat. Our purpose is to demonstrate that the tropes usually today associated with the Corn and Poor Laws – pauperism, a clash between merchant, manufacturing and landlord interests, population and impoverishment – are absent from discussion during this period. A doctrinaire “political economy” would develop in the early 1800s, but did not yet exist. Policy argument drew upon casuistic reasoning from circumstance and past experience. We also show that this approach undermines any idea that Edmund Burke’s Thoughts and Details on Scarcity is in some way connected to “political economy”.