The story of deregulation, at least in the American telling, begins in the 1970s with interminable debates over energy and then, starting in 1976, enactment of a dozen laws eliminating federal economic oversight of transportation. Deregulation leaps to mind every time we buy a cheap (but nonrefundable) plane ticket and then curse the discomfort that comes with using it.

Gergely Baics approaches the subject from a very different perspective. In Feeding Gotham: The Political Economy and Geography of Food in New York, Baics tells a fascinating tale about food retailing in New York City in the first half of the nineteenth century. The book will interest food historians, scholars of urban history, and those who study daily life in nineteenth-century America. But it also reveals an unexpected story about what may have been America's first great adventure in deregulation.

In the postcolonial era, Baics tells us, residents of New York's newly built neighborhoods paid to erect market buildings, which were then managed by the municipal government. New York City, in those days, was limited to Manhattan Island, and the public markets were by law the only places in the fast-growing city where fresh food could be sold. Vegetable farmers, dairymen, fishermen, and oystermen occupied stalls in season, but the butcher aisle was busy year-round to serve a populace that ate astounding quantities of meat. Early each morning, licensed butchers would slaughter cattle and sheep in the city's dozens of killing sheds, located mainly along the Bowery, and then cart the warm carcasses through the crowded streets to their market stalls.

The lack of refrigeration shaped the market. Affluent buyers came early—with the man of the house doing the shopping—to buy the best cuts of meat before it deteriorated. The less prosperous shopped in the late morning, when the selection was more limited but prices were lower. At noon, whatever was left was sold to the unlicensed peddlers who served the city's poorest residents. Thus, butchers were able to dispose of all their meat each day even as low-quality products were kept out of the markets; while the poor may have ended up with putrid meat, they bought it at a sufficient remove to protect the reputations of licensed market butchers. This system, Baics points out, ensured an ample supply of beef, lamb, and veal and generated enough income from license fees, taxes, and market rents to make the markets an important source of municipal revenue. Strict limits on the number of licenses made the butcher trade a well-paid craft and gave butchers strong incentives to deal collectively with those who cheated customers, sold rotten beef, or otherwise harmed the image of their market.

But in the 1830s, this municipally sponsored oligopoly came under stress. As its population burgeoned, New York's urbanized area expanded quickly to the north, far from the established markets. Hundreds of thousands of new immigrants demanded cheap meat. Many of the Germans among them knew the butcher trade, and they could undercut the market vendors by avoiding the costs of obtaining licenses and renting market stalls. “Popular sentiment was shifting in favor of open access and free competition, reflecting the emerging market ethos of Antebellum America,” Baics writes (p. 40). The city fathers, struggling to pay for a new water-supply system, were only too happy not to spend money on the aging markets.

The market laws, now deemed archaic, were finally repealed in 1843. The public markets atrophied, with the largest becoming wholesale locations where grocers, store butchers, and other provisioners purchased goods for resale. Instead of buying meat freshly cut by a butcher and produce sold by the grower, shoppers patronized the retail stores springing up along Manhattan's thoroughfares. “The whole endeavor of wandering from shop to shop would have been foreign . . . to customers from just one generation earlier,” Baics notes (p. 190). The modern system of food distribution, segmented among producers, distributors, and retailers, began here.

The story ends on the eve of the Civil War. By then, more than eight hundred thousand people inhabited Manhattan Island, and teeming tenements, often unconnected to the pipes carrying clean water from the city's costly new aqueduct, stood not far from the slaughterhouses of the market butchers. The sanitary experts of the day demanded that the killing sheds be removed and in so doing hastened the rise of industrial-scale abattoirs overseen by neither health officials nor a powerful fraternity of licensed butchers. No one was in charge of food safety. “Without any government oversight to enforce quality standards, the food economy of antebellum New York had become much like its housing market, producing profoundly unequal outcomes for different segments of the population,” Baics reports (p. 213). The deregulation of food markets, he asserts, contributed to a worsening of nutritional standards among poor New Yorkers and played a role in the public-health crisis that enveloped the city in the 1850s.

Baics has taken an unorthodox approach to business history, examining the development of an entire industry across an entire city. He bolsters his discussion with a remarkable array of data obtained from municipal records, city directories, diaries, and other sources. Using sophisticated computer-mapping techniques, he is able to trace the changing locations of slaughterhouses, the residences of butchers, and the linkage between a neighborhood's wealth and its access to food markets. Color plates, painstakingly compiled, show the spread of retail stores in the 1840s and 1850s, while graphs and tables document everything from the value of market stalls to the volume of meat sales per butcher at Catherine Market (twice as much on Saturday as on weekdays, twice as much in fall as in winter and spring). The author is able to look beyond his data to understand the broader implications of the developments he describes, showing how New York City's retreat from regulation in the 1840s made life worse for hundreds of thousands of desperate people. Baics has written an important and insightful book.