Food Rioting in Ireland in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries: The ‘Moral Economy’ and the Irish Crowd

Food rioting is one of the most studied manifestations of purposeful protest. Practised in Ireland for a century and a half between the early eighteenth century and the Great Famine, 1846-7, this book seeks to provide a fully documented account of this hitherto underappreciated aspect of Irish life for the first time, and, by extension, to lay the foundations for a more structured analysis of popular protest during a period when riotous behaviour was normative. Though the study challenges E.P. Thompson’s influential contention that there was no ‘moral economy’ in Ireland because Ireland did not provide the populace with the ‘political space’ in which they could bring pressure to bear on the elite, its primary achievement is, by demonstrating the enduring character of food rioting, to move the crowd from the periphery to the centre. In the process, it offers a rereading of eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Irish history, and, not least, of the public response to the Great Famine.