hompson, E.P. 1993. Customs in Common: Studies in Traditional Popular Culture.

New York: New Press. [Ch. 4 & 5]

E.P. Thompsons essay The Moral Economy of the English Crowd questions the
usual portrayal of eighteenth century food riots as spasmodic episodes bereft
of deeper, sustained political consciousness and activity. Riot, a simple fourletter word (185), paints a picture of popular history composed of occasional
social disturbances spurred in lock-step with some sort of economic stimuli that
caused rebellions of the belly: a bad harvest, unfavorable weather, trade
disruptions (186). As opposed to such accounts, Thompson offers his own views
based on the moral economy of the poor:

It is possible to detect in almost every eighteenth-century crowd action some

legitimizing notion. By the notion of legitimation I mean that the men and women
in the crowd were informed by the belief that they were defending traditional
rights or customs and in general, that they were supported by the wider
consensus of the community. On occasion this popular consensus was endorsed
by some measure of licence afforded by the authorities. More commonly, the
consensus was so strong that it overrode motives of fear or deference.

But these grievances operated within a popular consensus as to what were

legitimate and illegitimate practices in marketing, milling, baking, etc. This in its
turn was grounded upon a consistent traditional view of social norms and
obligations, of the proper economic functions of several parties within the
community, which, taken together, can be said to constitute the moral economy
of the poor. An outrage to these moral assumptions, quite as much as actual
deprivation, was the usual occasion for direct action.

These moral economies and the direct actions embedded in its practices and
conceptions impinged widely on economic relations and governmental thought in
those daysboth directly and indirectly. The word riot is too small to
encompass all this (189). Thompson traces the contours of the bread-nexus
like the cash-nexus of the Industrial Revolutionduring a period in history in
which profit was still seen as more often beyond the pale of standard
communal relations. Millers and bakers were seen as servants of the community
and middlemen were immediately suspect characters. Underwritten by ideas of
customs and rights, the paternalist model tightly controlled economic practices
and relations around food with emergency measures, but these mechanisms

began to break down. One reason of the breakdown was the growing hegemony
of the new political economy that came disinfested of intrusive moral
imperatives (202).

People subject to dwindling access to food began mobilizing for price-setting

direct actions that literally (by force or threat of force) set the price of bread or
wheat. Consumers blocked export convoys on the roadways. The novelty? For in
one respect the moral economy of the crowd broke decisively with that of the
paternalists: for the popular ethic sanctioned direct action by the crowd, whereas
the values of order underpinning the paternalist model emphatically did not
(212). The power to set a price upon grain or flour rested, in emergency, halfway between enforcement and persuasion (225).

As evidence of the political undercurrent of the crowds, Thompson notes that

violent actions against millers rarely looted supplies: sometimes they reset the
price of purchase, other times the actions were wholly punitive against
profiteering, so theres a disciplining effect at work thats far more lasting than
the fleeting action itself. Occupying positions that allowed them an near-birds-eye
view of the economyporters, dock workers, mill workersthe poor could easily
monitor movements and production of grain. Thompson notes that women were
often the instigators of the revolts.

The food riots did not require a whole lot of organization, but it did rely on a
consensus of popular support if, at times, unspoken (238). In other words, social
protest derived from a consensus as to the moral economy of the commonweal
in times of dearth (246). The basis of this consensus and moral economy was
simple: it was unnatural and immoral for profit to reign over the dire necessities
of subsistence; instead, food provision should remain at a customary level even if
theres less to go around. Old habits die-hard: The death of the old moral
economy of provision was as long-drawn-out as the death of paternalist
intervention in industry and trade (253). In the end, Thompson finds, Dearth
always comes to such communities as a profound psychic shock. When it is
accompanied by the knowledge of inequalities, and the suspicion of manipulated
scarcity, shock passes into fury (257).

In revisiting his essay, Thompson explains the goal of the original essay on the
moral economy:

My object of analysis was the mentalite, or, as I would prefer, the political
culture, the expectations, traditions, and, indeed, superstitions of the working

population most frequently involved in actions in the market; and the relations
sometimes negotiations between crowd and rulers which go under the
unsatisfactory term of riot. (260)

Thompson clarifies that he wanted to explore how such dynamics play out in the
particular field-of-force of eighteenth-century English relations (261). And
beyond accounts that emphasize economically oriented explanationsnote:
beyond not againstThompson aims to explore how peoples behavior was
influenced and changed by custom, culture and reason. Imbued with such
cultural and customary forces riots were a dynamic constituent moment in the
system of property and power, though it takes different forms according to the
particularities of geography and history (294).

Nonetheless, Thompson notes the striking similarity between English and Indian
food riots in which people rallied to block exports, force down prices, and
pressing government into action. What was called looting of food shops was not
for consumption, but for destructionpunishing and humiliating the profiteers
and hoarders. Thus one function of riot was to moderate the appetite for profit
unleashed by the developing free market (294). Still, Thompson is careful to
ward against taking his ideas of moral economies as an alternative and
universal set of rememdies against the dearth of famine induced by free
market economies. It is exactly against such universalist dogma (the free
market) that I have been arguing (303).

Thompson spends dozens of pages fending off his critics with his famously
acerbic missives. Besides critics beholden to the logical but counter-empirical
theories of Adam Smith and showing the power of market as a mystifying
metaphor of capitalist process (305), he spends a good deal of pages on backing
his contested claim that women did indeed play a formative role in the English
food riots. He concludes:

For two hundred and more years these food riots were the most visible and
public expressions of working womens lack of deference and their contestation
with authority. As such these evidences contest, in their turn, the stereotypes of
feminine submission, timidity, or confinement to the private world of the
household. (335)

Finally, he returns to further clarifying his notion of moral economy amid its
growing application in diverse academic fields.

My own usage [of moral economy] has in general been confined to

confrontations in the marketplace over access (or entitlement) to necessities
essential food. It is not only that there is an identifiable bundle of beliefs, usages
and forms associated with the marketing of food in time of dearth, which it is
convenient to bind together in a common term, but the deep emotions stirred by
dearth, the claims which the crowd made upon the authorities in such crises and
the outrage provoked by profiteering in life-threatening emergencies, imparted a
particular moral charge to protest. All of this, taken together, is what I
understand by moral economy. (337-338)

Thompson reviews some of the more recent (at the time) applications of moral
economy by peasant studiesparticularly those of James Scott and Michael
Watts. He celebrates the latter, especially, for examining the norms and practices
of an imperative collective subsistence, but without sentimentality. And he notes
that Scott is particularly adept at applying the concept to explore how class
relations are variously and intricately negotiated.

The concept of a "moral economy" has proved useful in attempting to describe and explain
the contentious behavior of peasants in response to onerous social relations. Essentially, it is
the idea that peasant communities share a set of normative attitudes concerning the social
relations and social behaviors that surround the local economy: the availability of food, the
prices of subsistence commodities, the proper administration of taxation, and the operation of
charity, for example. This is sometimes referred to a "subsistence ethic": the idea that local
social arrangements should be structured in such a way as to respect the subsistence needs of
the rural poor. The associated theory of political behavior holds something like this: peasant
communities are aroused to protest and rebellion when the terms of the local subsistence ethic
are breached by local elites, state authorities, or market forces.
Here I want to highlight this concept by asking a few foundational questions. Fundamentally,
what kind of concept is it? How does it function in social interpretation, description, or
explanation? And how does it function as a component of empirical investigation?
The concept of moral economy was extensively developed by E. P. Thompson in The Making
of the English Working Class (1961) and an important essay, "The Moral Economy of the
English Crowd in the Eighteenth Century," originally published in Past and Present in 1971
and included in Customs in Common: Studies in Traditional Popular Culture . The concept
derives from Thompson's treatment of bread riots in eighteenth century Britain. In MEWC
Thompson writes:
In 18th-century Britain riotous actions assumed two different forms: that of more or less
spontaneous popular direct action; and that of the deliberate use of the crowd as an instrument
of pressure, by persons "above" or apart from he crowd. The first form has not received the
attention which it merits. It rested upon more articulate popular sanctions and was validated
by more sophisticated traditions than the word "riot" suggests. The most common example is
the bread or food riot, repeated cases of which can be found in almost every town and county
until the 1840s. This was rarely a mere uproar which culminated in the breaking open of barns

or the looting of shops. It was legitimised by the assumptions of an older moral economy,
which taught the immorality of any unfair method of forcing up the price of provisions by
profiteering upon the necessities of the people. (MTWEC, 62-63)
After describing a number of bread riots in some detail, Thompson writes, "Actions on such a
scale ... indicate an extraordinarily deep-rooted pattern of behaviour and belief .... These
popular actions were legitimised by the old paternalist moral economy" (66). And he closes
this interesting discussion with these words: "In considering only this one form of 'mob'
action we have come upon unsuspected complexities, for behind every such form of popular
direct action some legitimising notion of right is to be found" (68). And Thompson often
describes these values as "traditional" or "paternalist" -- working in opposition to the values
and ideas of an unfettered market; he contrasts "moral economy" with the modern "political
economy" associated with liberalism and the ideology of the free market.
In "The Moral Economy of the Crowd" Thompson puts his theory this way:
It is possible to detect in almost ever eighteenth-century crowd action some legitimising
notion. By the notion of legitimation I mean that the men and women in the crowd were
informed by the belief that they were defending traditional rights or customs; and, in general,
that they were supported by the wider consensus of the community. On occasion this popular
consensus was endorsed by some measure of licence afforded by the authorities. More
commonly, the consensus was so strong that it overrode motives of fear or deference. ("Moral
Economy," CIC 188)
It is plain from these passages that Thompson believes that the "moral economy" is a real
historical factor, consisting of the complex set of attitudes and norms of justice that are in play
within this historically presented social group. As he puts the point late in the essay, "We have
been examining a pattern of social protest which derives from a consensus as to the moral
economy of the commonweal in times of dearth" (247).
So the logic of Thompson's ideas here seems fairly clear: there were instances of public
disorder ("riots") surrounding the availability and price of food, and there is a hypothesized
"notion of right" or justice that influenced and motivated participants. This conception of
justice is a socially embodied historical factor, and it partially explains the behavior of the
rural people who mobilized themselves to participate in the disturbances. He recapitulates his
goal in the essay, "Moral Economy Reviewed" (also included in Customs in Common) in
these terms: "My object of analysis was the mentalit, or, as I would prefer, the political
culture, the expectations, traditions, and indeed, superstitions of the working population most
frequently involved in actions in the market" (260). These shared values and norms play a key
role in Thompson's reading of the political behavior of the individuals in these groups. So
these hypotheses about the moral economy of the crowd serve both to help interpret the
actions of a set of actors involved in food riots, and to explain the timing and nature of food
riots. We might say, then, that the concept of "moral economy" contributes both to a
hermeneutics of peasant behavior and a causal theory of peasant contention.
Now move forward two centuries. Another key use of the concept of moral economy occurs
in treatments of modern peasant rebellions in Asia. Most influential is James Scott's important
book, The Moral Economy of the Peasant: Rebellion and Subsistence in Southeast Asia .
Scholars of the Chinese Revolution borrowed from Scott in offering a range of interpretations
of peasant behavior in the context of CCP mobilization; for example, James Polachek ("The

Moral Economy of the Kiangsi Soviet" (1928-34). Journal of Asian Studies 1983 XLII
(4):805-830). And most recently, Kevin O'Brien has made use of the idea of a moral economy
in his treatment of "righteous protest" in contemporary China (Rightful Resistance in Rural
China). So scholars interested in the politics of Asian rural societies have found the moral
economy concept to be a useful one. Scott puts his central perspective in these terms:
We can learn a great deal from rebels who were defeated nearly a half-century ago. If we
understand the indignation and rage which prompted them to risk everything, we can grasp
what I have chosen to call their moral economy: their notion of economic justice and their
working definition of exploitation--their view of which claims on their product were tolerable
and which intolerable. Insofar as their moral economy is representative of peasants elsewhere,
and I believe I can show that it is, we may move toward a fuller appreciation of the normative
roots of peasant politics. If we understand, further, how the central economic and political
transformations of the colonial era served to systematically violate the peasantry's vision of
social equity, we may realize how a class "of low classness" came to provide, far more often
than the proletariat, the shock troops of rebellion and revolution. (MEP, 3-4)
Scott's book represents his effort to understand the dynamic material circumstances of peasant
life in colonial Southeast Asia (Vietnam and Burma); to postulate some central normative
assumptions of the "subsistence ethic" that he believes characterizes these peasant societies;
and then to explain the variations in political behavior of peasants in these societies based on
the moments of inconsistency between material conditions and aspects of the subsistence
ethic. And he postulates that the political choices for action these peasant rebels make are
powerfully influenced by the content of the subsistence ethic. Essentially, we are invited to
conceive of the "agency" of the peasant as being a complicated affair, including prudential
reasoning, moral assessment based on shared standards of justice, and perhaps other factors as
well. So, most fundamentally, Scott's theory offers an account of the social psychology and
agency of peasants.
There are several distinctive features of Scott's programme. One is his critique of narrow
agent-centered theories of political motivation, including particularly rational choice theory.
(Samuel Popkin's The Rational Peasant: The Political Economy of Rural Society in Vietnam
is the prime example.) Against the idea that peasants are economically rational agents who
decide about political participation based on a narrowly defined cost-benefit analysis, Scott
argues for a more complex political psychology incorporating socially shared norms and
values. But a second important feature is Scott's goal of providing a somewhat general basis
for explanation of peasant behavior. He wants to argue that the subsistence ethic is a widely
shared set of moral values in traditional rural societies -- with the consequence that it provides
a basis for explanation that goes beyond the particulars of Vietnam or Burma. And he has a
putative explanation of this commonality as well -- the common existential circumstances of
traditional family-based agriculture.
One could pull several of these features apart in Scott's treatment. For example, we could
accept the political psychology -- "People are motivated by a locally embodied sense of
justice" -- but could reject the generalizability of the subsistence ethic -- "Burmese peasants
had the XYZ set of local values, while Vietnamese peasants possessed the UVW set of local
values."
This programme suggests several problems for theory and for empirical research. Are there
social-science research methods that would permit us to "observe" or empirically discern the

particular contents of a normative worldview in a range of different societies, in order to

assess whether the subsistence ethic that Scott describes is widespread? Are peasants in
Burma and Vietnam as similar as Scott's theory postulates? How would we validate the
implicit theory of political motivation that Scott advances (calculation within the context of
normative judgment)? Are there other important motivational factors that are perhaps as
salient to political behavior as the factors invoked by the subsistence ethic? Where does
Scott's "thicker" description of peasant consciousness sit with respect to fully ethnographic
investigation?
So to answer my original question -- what kind of concept is the "moral economy"? -- we can
say several things. It is a proto-theory of the theory of justice that certain groups possess
(18th-century English farmers and townspeople, 20th-century Vietnamese peasants). It
implicitly postulates a theory of political motivation and political agency. It asserts a degree of
generality across peasant societies. It is offered as a basis for both interpreting and explaining
events -- answering the question "What is going on here?" and "Why did this event take
place?" In these respects the concept is both an empirical construct and a framework for
thinking about agency; so it can be considered both in terms of its specific empirical adequacy
and, more broadly, the degree of insight it offers for thinking about collective action