Food rioting is one of the most significant and, outside of Ireland, studied manifestations of purposeful crowd protest.
It famously inspired EP Thompson, the great English historian and nuclear disarmament activist, to conclude that it was a manifestation of what he termed a “moral economy”. According to Thompson, a moral economy existed when firstly, those who engaged in riotous protest – either to access food directly, to reduce food prices to a price they deemed appropriate or to prevent its movement out of a region – perceived that they were entitled to intervene in this manner to secure access to the necessaries of life. Secondly, the authorities acknowledged this by declining to apply the full range of sanctions at their disposal, to which they appealed unhesitatingly to suppress other riotous behaviours.
In the interval since it was first propounded, the concept of a “moral economy” has been applied by historians, anthropologists, sociologists and others to explain a diversity of phenomena from food rioting in the Middle Ages to drug dealing in US inner cities in the present. It has been invoked on occasion with reference to Ireland, but guided by Thompson’s contention that Ireland did not possess a moral economy because “there was no political space (as in England)” whereby those he labelled “the plebs” meaning the poor and marginalised “could exert pressure on their rulers”, no attempt has been made to trace the history of food protest in the country.