Preliminary Programme

With the 1795 French conquest of the Southern Low Countries and their abolishment of the corporative framework, the three main pillars of the early modern Brussels meat trade were abolished. Century old guild-monitored legal limits on who could sell meat, where and at which price, disappeared overnight. The first would never return, even if new players appeared on the meat market only slowly (Libert, 2001). The second was restored only a few years later as meat sales were once again limited to the city’s two main meat halls (Arnout, 2018).
Direct price regulation, however, took a third and radically different direction. For 18 years meat prices were left over to market forces, before legally set maximum prices made an abrupt return in 1817. Such early-modern-like regulation was kept in place for over a decade, before disappearing abruptly in 1830. These major shifts, from a heavily regulated part of the economy to deregulation, back to regulation and back to deregulation take centre part in this paper.
International research has shown how the nineteenth century (western) urban world saw a shift from regulated to deregulated to differently regulated urban food markets (Baics, 2016; Albrecht, 2021), often equated with developing liberal ideas; a decreasing influence of food sellers on urban policy and a concomitant rise in power of medical and scientific experts (Horowitz, Pilcher and Watts, 2004). However, nowhere in the nineteenth century did early modern market controls return so intactly after so many years or did it remain in place for such a long time. The often assumed Polanyian shift from regulated embedded moral markets to deregulated disembedded free markets after a fashion took place twice in Brussels in less than forty years, with no less than three complete turn-arounds of the regulatory principles in 1795, 1817 and 1830. However, the political economy underlying such consecutive and diametrically opposed sea changes thus remain obscured from view.
This paper explores how the regulation and the political economy underlying it could oscillate on such an unseen scale and for such sizeable amounts of time. Combining regulatory texts, appeals to regulators, municipal council discussions and police records in seeks to reconstruct how these profound regulatory transformations came about. In doing so, this paper traces which urban actors were capable of swaying urban regulators and especially how they sought to convince them. As regulation itself flailed between early-modern-like price restrictions and a more modern free market, it is above all interested in the interaction between early-modern-like arguments on Nahrungsprinzip (or the right of producers to make a living (De Vries, 2019)) and more modern consumer-centred arguments and how actors called upon such arguments to navigate and attempt to shape an ever-changing regulatory framework. (Show less)

In the late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century English population growth, urbanization and industrialization came to depend increasingly on the import of grains from the North Sea and Baltic regions. Large quantities of wheat from the upper valleys of the main rivers of (present-day) northern Germany and Poland were channeled to English markets through ports like Gda?sk and Hamburg. In England, at the time, the political economy of grain and bread was shaped by a dialogue between governors and governed about the degree to which these commodities could be treated as marketable goods. This dialogue also took place in regions that were drawn into the English grain trade, where it was shaped by a process of negotiation that reflected economic, political and social conditions as well as changing ideas.
The paper studies the impact of grain exports on bread and grain politics in the German lands bordering the North Sea and Baltic Sea, focusing in particular on the cities Gda?sk and Hamburg, where the interests of international commerce and local provisioning met (and sometimes clashed). Comparisons are made with attitudes towards bread and grain in England. The paper is based on an analysis of local administrative sources regarding the regulation of the grain and bread trades and on German-language pamphlets (Flugschriften) and other contemporary literature expressing attitudes towards these trades. (Show less)

This paper will consider the arguments and strategies applied by food suppliers (food guilds, hawkers,…) in civil court cases at points of normative crisis in eighteenth-century Brussels. By studying the discourse used here and the dialectic relationship with the regulatory framework this paper provides a window into “a reality” of the early modern food supply beyond the legislative context.

A recent wave of historiography has eroded caricatures of an early modern system of food provisioning rooted in tradition and paternalistic expectation making way for a political economy based on Smith’s conceptualisation of free market supply and demand at the dawn of the modern era. Yet, the early modern food market (meaning both the physical marketplace and the abstract concept of market) was still bound by formal and informal norms. Not only who could sell food was regulated: where, when and what could be sold was also bound by ordonnance and decree. This was also organized in a corporative frame. The reported aim of this regulation was to guarantee the highest possible level of transparency and make the supply to the city as honest, trustworthy, and secure as possible. This corporative and paternalistic organization and regulation of food trade came to a legislative halt at the end of the eighteenth century. Throughout Europe and beyond, the corporative system was disassembled at a swift pace, which led to the production and sale of foodstuffs being based (in theory) on the principles of the free market.

The paper will present intermediary results on how practice differs from the theoretical. It will re-examine pre-conceptions on the role of different actors in the urban food landscape and critically trace historiographic staples of an early modern economy of provisioning and the rise of a political economy in the capital of the Habsburg Netherlands. (Show less)

While the consumption of natural mineral water has a long tradition in Europe going back to antiquity, only the last two centuries have seen its development into a mass consumer commodity. While the water itself has changed very little, its forms of commodification and consumption have diversified significantly since the beginning of the nineteenth century. Therefore, I propose four distinct but interrelated and coexisting consumption regimes of mineral water. Each comes with its own modes of production and distribution, but more importantly practices of consumption of discursive legitimations. While they all are still in existence today, they all underwent their own trajectories of development, periods of ascent, domination and decline, however not everywhere in Europe at the same time.
In my proposed talk, I will introduce and define each of the consumption regimes: the drinking cure in the spa town, the drinking cure elsewhere, the refreshing beverage and the lifestyle product. While touching matters of production and distribution, I will focus on the forms of consumption and their legitimization. (Show less)