'The Politics of Hunger is a deeply learned and humane book, rich in archival detail and judiciously deployed anecdotes about the real lives of those who faced food scarcity as their primary, quotidian reality. [...] Malthus argued 'a satisfactory history of this kind, of one people, and of one period, would require the constant and minute attention of an observing mind during a long life.' Griffin's is such a mind and The Politics of Hunger is such a book.'
Journal of Historical Geography
'Francis Bacon once observed that "rebellions of the belly are the worst." This highly original monograph explores how "hunger politics" operated in the 18th and 19th centuries as a weapon of protest wielded by the undernourished urban and rural populations of England. The fierce suppression of the food rioters of the 1790s led to new forms of protest: incendiarism, cattle maiming, and threatening letters. By 1800 wages had replaced the price of food as the "critical component in working families' living standards." Griffin (Univ. of Sussex, UK) challenges the conventional idea that the "Hungry Forties" witnessed the rediscovery of hunger. Instead, he shows how the "twin discourses" of hunger and starvation survived from 1801 into the 1840s. A close-grained study of broadsides, ballads, letters, and speeches provides the evidence. Griffin also explores the effects of dubious local and national policies, such as the Speenhamland system for supplementing the wages of workers, which led to their impoverishment as farmers underpaid their workers, knowing that public assistance would make up the difference. English theorists reduced the poor to a "distinct and decidedly animalistic race." As Griffin concludes, "hunger defined popular protest and popular politics.'
--D. R. Bisson, Belmont University
Summing Up: Highly recommended.
Reprinted with permission from Choice Reviews. All rights reserved. Copyright by the American Library Association.
'The politics of hunger is a timely and welcome contribution to ongoing debates surrounding food security,
protest, and governmental policy in Britain. [...] This is a pertinent, well-researched, and compassionate
book that should become required reading for students of hunger, protest, politics, and public policy in modern Britain. In every chapter, Griffin combines studious archival research with acute theoretical insights to reveal how the discourses of hunger and starvation became engrained into the fabric of everyday life, governance and resistance. [...] The politics of hunger will stand as a foundational text for a promising vein of future research.'
Leonard Baker, Agricultural History Review
'The politics of hunger is a pioneering study that examines the concept of hunger including the ways in which policy makers and the poor constructed meaning about hunger. [...] It provides an excellent foundation for those who want to rethink the history of families and communities through the lens of hunger.'
Family & Community History
In the age of Malthus and the workhouse when the threat of famine and absolute biological want had supposedly been lifted from the peoples of England, hunger remained a potent political force - and a problem. And yet, hunger has been marginalised as an object of study by scholars of late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century England; studies either framed through famine or leaving hunger to historians of early modern England. The politics of hunger represents the first systematic attempt to think through the ways in which hunger persisted as something both feared and felt by the poor, was the subject of public policy innovations, and was central to the emergence of new techniques of governing and disciplining populations.
This study analyses the languages of hunger that informed food riots, other popular protests and popular politics, the resort to and effects of Speenhamland-style 'hunger' payments, workhouse dietaries, how hunger was made and used in making and disciplining the poor as racial subjects, and, finally, how popular responses to the Irish Famine framed understandings of hunger relationally. Conceptually rich but empirically grounded, the study draws together work on popular protest, popular politics, the old and new poor laws, Malthus and theories of population, race, biopolitics and the colonial making of famine, as well as reframing debates in social and economic history, historical geography and famine studies more generally. Complex and yet written in an accessible style, The politics of hunger will be of interest to anyone with an interest in the histories of protest, poverty and policy: specialists, students and general readers alike.
About the Author
Carl J. Griffin is Professor in Historical Geography at the University of Sussex
