Markets of one form or another have occupied a key place in the social, economic and political cultures of all peoples throughout recorded history. Exchange seems to have been known since the late stone age and marketing principles feature in the earliest documents of civilization. Market institutions such as regular fairs and markets have an unbroken continuity stretching back to the middle ages. When Adam Smith wroteThe Wealth of Nationsin 1776, commerce had become so ubiquitous that he saw ‘the propensity to truck, barter, and exchange one thing for another’ as an elementary psychological trait of the human...

Pre-nineteenth-century British systems of weights and measures are notoriously complicated and difficult for the modern observer to understand. As is well known, a profusion of apparently quaint and archaic weights and measures were to be found in use in the market place and farmyard into the eighteenth century and beyond. Thus, there were windles, rods, ells, elns, lagens, firkins, kilderkins, tuns, terses, pottles, poles and perch. One could have a bolt of oziers, a curnock of barley, a firlot of beer, a hobbit of wheat or a poke of wool. This abundance of frequently unrelated measures continues to bequeath problems...

In 1754, a correspondent to theGentleman’s Magazineargued a case for good roads when he wrote, ‘Whatever quickens and cheapens the transportation of goods, and makes their migration more easy from place to place, must of course render a state more wealthy.’ For the most part the correspondent was referring to good turnpike roads where ‘smoothness, spaciousness and the advantage of celerity in passage’ achieved these objectives.¹ Popular opposition to turnpikes in certain localities throughout the first half of the eighteenth century suggests that others had a less optimistic view of such highways and the trusts that administered them....

On 10 February 1763, Britain signed the Peace of Paris which successfully concluded the Seven Years War. Victory, however, proved costly. The war raised the National Debt to an unprecedented £146 million, of which only £137 million was funded. The result was that the Treasury faced annual debt interest payments of £4.7m. The embattled Prime Minister, the Earl of Bute, his low standing in national esteem slightly raised by the ending of the war, and his Chancellor of the Exchequer, Sir Francis Dashwood, faced a daunting fiscal challenge. Their solution was to impose an Act to raise the excise duty...

Past studies of scarcity in England have focused primarily upon the reactive behaviour of the labouring poor, and specifically the incidence and cultural precepts of riot. While some studies have laboured over the identification of ‘perennially’ riotous or non-riotous communities, measures taken by urban elites to manage and alleviate scarcity have been largely neglected. One scholar, John Bohstedt, has discussed the non-viability of ‘community politics’ in the modern ‘city of strangers’, setting up telling comparisons between the reciprocal paternalism of rural Devon and the nascent class antagonism that underpinned social relations in booming new industrial towns like Manchester. But studies...

John Seed has recently remarked upon the tendency of social historians of the nineteenth century ‘. . . whose attention has been concentrated upon the working class, or to a lesser extent, the landed aristocracy and gentry’, to produce a distorted image of the prevailing class structure, due to the absence of a middle class.² The same has been even more true of social historians of the eighteenth century. Where middling people do appear, it is rarely as the figures of power and influence upon which the structures for the administration of the local state were based, nor as the...

Many factors determined the incidence and character of eighteenth-century food riots. Most obviously, dearth, with its accompanying high prices and supply breakdowns, almost inevitably underlay outbreaks of food-related disturbances.¹ Oxford’s food riots certainly took place in the context of scarcity which not only produced straightforward effects on prices but also distorted normal patterns of marketing and trade.² However, it is the aim of this paper to concentrate on three interconnected themes which ran through the Oxford disturbances and which together help to explain both why the city should have been prone to riot and the way in which rioters and...

In Ireland, as in Britain, market forces exercised a powerful influence over the later eighteenth-century agrarian economy. Local marketing systems, with the numerous modest market towns drawing foodstuffs from limited hinterlands, were themselves subsumed in a national marketing system which embraced most of the country, with perhaps the partial exception of the remotest parts of Connacht. Dublin demand for food exercised a pervasive influence over the country, roughly paralleled by London’s predominance on the mainland. However, in Ireland, a countervailing force derived from the much larger British market, which sucked in exports of oats, oatmeal, wheat, meat and dairy products...