The Price of Bread
Regulating the Market in the Dutch Republic

The humble loaf serves as a prism through which to study how public market regulation affected private economic life.

Jan de Vries (Author)

9781108476386, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 25 April 2019

534 pages, 59 b/w illus. 3 maps 106 tables
23.5 x 16 x 3 cm, 1 kg

'With The Price of Bread, Jan de Vries offers us new insight into the pre-industrial Dutch economy through the prism of one sector. The book is rich in analysis and has ramifications that extend far beyond the regulation of bread prices. A must-read for anyone interested in institutional economies, standards of living, consumption, fiscal policies and state formation, and moral economies.' Bruno Blondé, co-editor of City and Society in the Low Countries

A prime contemporary concern - how to maintain fair market relations - is addressed through this study of the regulation of bread prices. This was the single most important economic reality of Europe's daily life in the early modern period. Jan de Vries uses the Dutch Republic as a case study of how the market functioned and how the regulatory system evolved and acted. The ways in which consumer behaviour adapted to these structures, and the state interacted with producers and consumers in the pursuit of its own interests, had major implications for the measurement of living standards in this period. The long-term consequences of the Dutch state's interventions reveal how capitalist economies, far from being the outcome of unfettered market economics, are inextricably linked with regulatory fiscal regimes. The humble loaf serves as a prism through which to explore major developments in early modern European society and how public market regulation affected private economic life.

Introduction
Part I. The Regulatory Regime: Protecting the Consumer and Strengthening the State: 1. Bread price regulation in Europe before the 1590s
2. Free trade in grain?
3. The Dutch broodzetting: the introduction of a 'new system' of bread price regulation
4. Administering and enforcing the new bread price regulations
5. The Dutch 'peculiar institution'
Part II. Industrial Organization: The Producers in a Regulated Industry: 6. Grain: the interaction of international trade and domestic production
7. The milling sector: a trade harnessed to raison d'état?
8. The baking enterprise: efficiency versus convenience
9. The structure of bread prices
Part III. Consumer Welfare and Consumer Choice: 10. Crise de subsistence: did price regulation shelter consumers from food crises?
11. Choosing what to eat in the early modern era
12. Bread consumption: a wheat bread revolution?
13. Measuring the standard of living: a demand-side approach
Part IV. Perspective and Demise: 14. Dutch bread price regulation in international perspective
15. Bread price regulation renewed and abolished, 1776–1855
Conclusion.

Subject Areas: Economic history [KCZ], European history [HBJD]