Mastering the market
Subtitle: the State and the grain trade in Northern France, 1700-1860
By: Judith A. Miller.
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Published: 1998
Place of publication: Cambridge; New York
Language: eng
Number of pages: 334
Subjects: Grain trade -- France, Northern -- History -- 18th century.; Grain trade -- France, Northern -- History -- 19th century.
Description: The grain trade - a crucial sector of the French economy - caused enormous concern through-out the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Bread was the staple of French diets, so harvest shortfalls frequently triggered periods of unrest. The royal government had no effective means of drawing foodstuffs into restless cities during these times.

Successive regimes developed strategies to dominate the baking trades, influence prices along vital supply lines, and amass emergency stocks of grain that could meet months-long demand, as free-trade ideologies developed, French administrators at both the local and national levels sought to reconcile these ideologies with the perceived need to control the market.

Miller draws on an extensive range of archival material from Parisian and Departmental sources to show that free trade in grain was rendered workable only through the French state's intervention.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references (p. 305-323) and index.