This is an outstanding volume, crucial for those with interests in crowd politics, protest, and the nature of the marketplace but also colleagues with interests in issues such as the nature of power, representation of the poor, and contemporary understandings of community. Running from the sixteenth to late nineteenth centuries, the overall intent of the volume is to trace both the nature of the supply of bread and the way in which that supply was contested through various forms of collective action. The ultimate conclusion that the final creation of an integrated national market in breadstuffs early in the nineteenth century, and on a sharper timescale than found elsewhere in Europe, undermined the logic and practice of collective action is familiar from the work of John Chartres and others. However, it is John Bohstedt’s attempt to trace in detail various phases of the relationship between the supply of breadstuffs and the nature, form, and intensity of collective action that offers the most significant contribution of the book. While it has long been accepted that collective action in the early modern period and nineteenth century shaped national and local political systems and networks of power, Bohstedt is the first author to attempt a comprehensive anatomization of this process.

Chapter 1 sets the tone for the combative nature of the volume as a whole. It questions the way in which historians have rather casually located food riots within variant models of moral economy. Bohstedt suggests instead that we need a more sensitive understanding of the way in which rioters themselves balanced paternalism and personal and communal understandings of the “law of necessity.” Only then, we are to understand, can we really locate the very broad range of concerns (spanning local power and personal grievances on the one hand to the stresses created by the gradual construction of a national market in breadstuffs on the other) that underpinned individual and regional instances of unrest and disobedience.

Chapter 2 argues that 1586, a year in which there were extensive riots against food exports, changed the landscape of provision politics, with wider socioeconomic trends creating the space for direct agency by the ordinary citizen. Rather than the overthrow of the system itself, Bohstedt argues, a key aim was simply to “bend” the system of the superintendence of the market to the needs of the laboring classes. In chapter 3, covering 1650–1739, we learn that unrest was more clearly attuned to definitive “crisis” periods and that it became more violent as those who superintended the market came to have less of a sense of their obligations to ordinary consumers, itself a function of the lack of pressure on the market mechanism during “ordinary” times. Chapter 4 deals with the waiting period between the demographic crisis of the 1730s and the demographic explosion from the 1770s, in which falling real incomes and local and national policy constraints intertwined to create a breeding ground for collective protest against all of the personnel and institutions of the food supply process. Collectively, these chapters are underpinned by a considerable database of instances of unrest. Indeed, the book as a whole is a model of how one might entwine general and quantitative survey with detailed case study. It is this approach that does so much to bring home how simple necessity drove the politics of provision. Chapter 5, covering the demographic take off from the 1780s, is arguably the best of the volume. It traces an upsurge in individual acts of unrest that, taken collectively, represent a national movement, one that honed the organizational, judicial, and philosophical responses to collective action and laid the foundation for its long-term elimination. Chapter 6 thus moves on to the final manifestations of provision politics, covering the period up to 1867. The cutoff date here is interesting, coincident as it is with the watering down of the central tenets of the New Poor Law and the passing of legislation that finally put to rest questions of pauper settlement, at least in a legal sense. In terms of clarity of writing, depth of research, and the development of an alternative model within which individual instances of more-or-less violent collective action might be inscribed, Bohstedt’s book is a triumph.