This chapter makes four historical interventions. First, It argues that the relief program of the Ottoman central state during the continuum of crisis aimed to maintain agriculture, cities, and the army, but not pastoralists. Although pastoralists lost millions of herd animals, their source of food, financial capital, and sociopolitical power, available historical documents indicate that the Hamidian government did not distribute grain or flocks to pastoralists, and neither did they lend money to rebuild their herds, as they did for peasants. It is unclear whether this was a deliberate policy of the state in order to turn pastoralists into taxable agriculturalists. What is clear is that the traditional Ottoman famine relief policies contributed to mounting ecological and economic disequilibrium between peasants and pastoralists in times of crises and to irreversibly expanding this imbalance in the political ecology of Kurdistan in the post-crises period by triggering displacement, migration, and proletarianization among pastoralist communities.

This chapter addresses Wollstonecraft’s Historical and Moral View of the Origin and Progress of the French Revolution (1794), the work in which she engages most explicitly with contemporary political economic thought. Noting that she gives particular prominence to the liberation of the grain trade in the early years of the Revolution, it explores how Wollstonecraft uses the issue to yoke commercial with political forms of liberty. The free circulation of grain was a totemic issue in Adam Smith’s new political economy of ‘natural liberty’, but it also pitted the market against traditional notions of ‘moral economy’. The chapter also explores Wollstonecraft’s links with Girondin politicians, including Jacques Pierre Brissot, and theirs with the Shelburne circle of the 1780s, and discusses the involvement of Americans Joel Barlow and Gilbert Imlay in provisioning the French Republic in the mid-1790s: activity which informed the hostility to commerce of Wollstonecraft’s later works.

This chapter surveys the major developments in the economic history of the Greek world in the classical period (479–323 BCE). While agricultural practices and productive capacities did not change dramatically, this was a period characterized by a massive increase in the demand for certain commodities, especially timber for the ship-building and monumental-construction efforts of the period and grain to meet the dietary needs of a growing human population. It also considers the major developments in the supply and circulation of coinage in the classical period and the emergence of private banking and the expansion of credit, all of which facilitated both local and long-distance trade. As trade intensified throughout the Aegean and poleis developed more sophisticated institutions for local governance, they developed strategies to derive revenue from trade and imposed regulations on both the production and trade of commodities in which they had a special interest.

This first chapter introduces the primary source materials that make historical study of an institution possible, going on to sketch the patterns and ranks of employment - from choirboy, through chaplain, vicar, canon, dean and provost - that shape the functions of a collegiate church such as St Omer. It goes on paint a picture of the history and development of the town of Saint-Omer – its geography, population, politics and trade – to give a larger social and historical context to the story of the large collegiate church which constitutes the rest of the book.

Chapter 2 examines Burke’s fundamental beliefs on market economies. I first provide an outline of the agricultural economy in late eighteenth-century England in order to draw a specific historical context for Burke’s economic thought during that period. Then I use Thoughts and Details to explain his commentary on market liberty. I discuss Burke’s support for a free domestic grain trade; government restraint; supply and demand laws; and the competitive price system. For Burke, the internal grain market should be largely protected from state intrusion. The silent efficiency of supply and demand laws channeled provisions to communities without requiring the hand of government. Prices of goods should be determined by the market, not by magistrates, who lacked the knowledge of local market conditions necessary to establish equitable prices and create fair labor contracts. I also investigate Burke’s firm defense of middlemen in Thoughts and Details, and describe his efforts in 1772 to repeal long-standing statutes that had banned the middlemen trading activities of forestalling, regrating, and engrossing. According to Burke, middlemen played a crucial role in the provisions trade by helping promote the smooth distribution of goods and lower prices.