Mastering the Market
The State and the Grain Trade in Northern France, 1700–1860

Throughout the eighteenth and early nineteeenth centuries, French regimes developed strategies to control the crucial grain trade.

Judith A. Miller (Author)

9780521628891, Cambridge University Press

Paperback, published 18 October 2007

356 pages, 10 b/w illus. 6 tables
22.8 x 15.1 x 2 cm, 0.534 kg

"Although much has been written about the grain trade and the French government's gyrating policies for regulating it, the topic remains a crucial one for the proper understanding of the rise of a market economy and the fall of the old regime. Professor Judith Miller has written a book the clarity and breadth of which bring important new insights to the issues, and which should refresh the debates surrounding them...a lucid and well-written book." Journal of Economics

The grain trade, a crucial sector of the French economy, caused enormous concern throughout the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Bread was the staple of French diets, so harvest shortfalls triggered unrest. The royal government had only the most scattershot and ineffective means to draw foodstuffs into restless cities. Successive regimes developed strategies to dominate the baking trades, influence prices along vital supply lines, and amass emergency stocks of grain that could meet months-long demand. As free trade ideologies developed, French administrators at both the national and local levels sought to reconcile these ideologies with the perceived need to control the market. They created increasingly hidden, and effective, means to shape the grain trade. Thus, the French state played an instrumental role in establishing a viable form of free trade.

List of figures and tables
Abbreviations
Old Regime weights and measures for wheat
Acknowledgements
Introduction - two crises: 1709 and 1853
Part I. The Market of the Enlightenment, 1720–1789: 1. The structure of mill and market
2. Simulated sales: shaping supply and demand in the Old Regime marketplace
3. Scripting 'free' trade
4. Narrowing the focus: bakers and bread, 1760–1789
Part II. Maximum: Feeding France in Revolution and War: 5. 1789: municipal revolutions and the origins of radicalism
6. Unity and interests
7. Recreating the market: Thermidor and the directory
Part III. The State Learns, 1800–1860: 8. The last maximum: 1812
9. The routines of the restoration
10. Relinquishing control: bakers and the end of the Paris reserve
11. The market mastered
Archival sources
Selected bibliography
Index.

Subject Areas: Modern history to 20th century: c 1700 to c 1900 [HBLL], European history [HBJD]