page_title: Moral economy
hierarchical_section_title: Moral economy
caption_attribution_description: English: Rice farming in Cambodia
context_page_description: A moral economy is an economy that is based on goodness, fairness, and justice, as opposed to one where the market is assumed to be independent of such concerns. The concept was an elaboration by English historian E.P. Thompson, from a term already used by various eighteenth century authors, who felt that economic and moral concerns increasingly seemed to drift apart.
  Thompson wrote of the moral economy of the poor in the context of widespread food riots in the English countryside in the late eighteenth century. According to Thompson these riots were generally peaceable acts that demonstrated a common political culture rooted in feudal rights to "set the price" of essential goods in the market. These peasants held that a traditional "fair price" was more important to the community than a "free" market price and they punished large farmers who sold their surpluses at higher prices outside the village while there were still those in need within the village. In the 1970s the concept of a moral economy was developed further in anthropological studies of peasant economies.
context_section_description: A moral economy is an economy that is based on goodness, fairness, and justice, as opposed to one where the market is assumed to be independent of such concerns.  The concept was an elaboration by English historian E.P. Thompson, from a term already used by various eighteenth century authors, who felt that economic and moral concerns increasingly seemed to drift apart (see Götz 2015). 
  Thompson wrote of the moral economy of the poor in the context of widespread food riots in the English countryside in the late eighteenth century. According to Thompson these riots were generally peaceable acts that demonstrated a common political culture rooted in feudal rights to "set the price" of essential goods in the market. These peasants held that a traditional "fair price" was more important to the community than a "free" market price and they punished large farmers who sold their surpluses at higher prices outside the village while there were still those in need within the village. In the 1970s the concept of a moral economy was developed further in anthropological studies of peasant economies. The notion of a non-capitalist cultural mentality using the market for its own ends has been linked by others (with Thompson's approval) to subsistence agriculture and the need for subsistence insurance in hard times.
caption: Cambodian rice farming
exif: {"Image ImageDescription": "Lady farmers hand treshing rice in Cambodia.", "Image Make": "Nikon", "Image Model": "Nikon SUPER COOLSCAN 4000 ED", "Image Orientation": "Horizontal (normal)", "Image XResolution": "300", "Image YResolution": "300", "Image ResolutionUnit": "Pixels/Inch", "Image Software": "Adobe Photoshop CS2 Windows", "Image DateTime": "2007:05:31 13:12:09", "Image Artist": "Harry Nesbitt", "Image YCbCrPositioning": "Centered", "Image Copyright": "2000 IRRI. Some rights reserved.", "Image ExifOffset": "364", "Thumbnail Compression": "JPEG (old-style)", "Thumbnail XResolution": "72", "Thumbnail YResolution": "72", "Thumbnail ResolutionUnit": "Pixels/Inch", "Thumbnail JPEGInterchangeFormat": "536", "Thumbnail JPEGInterchangeFormatLength": "7045", "EXIF ExifVersion": "0220", "EXIF ComponentsConfiguration": "YCbCr", "EXIF FlashPixVersion": "0100", "EXIF ColorSpace": "sRGB", "EXIF ExifImageWidth": "3216", "EXIF ExifImageLength": "2136"}