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

ISBN-13: 9780521621298 / Angielski / Twarda / 1998 / 356 str.

Judith A. Miller

Opis

The creation of free trade in France, and especially in the grain trade, came only through the most halting steps. In the eighteenth century, administrators crafted increasingly covert means to shape market processes even as they adopted liberal policies. In the early nineteenth century, which this book emphasizes, Napoleonic and Restoration officials and their successors developed hidden and finely-tuned strategies that allowed them to continue their intervention. By exploring those tactics, this book reveals how the state dominated the baking trades, influenced prices along supply lines, and amassed emergency stocks, thus effectively mastering this vital market.

Recenzje

"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

Spis treści

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.