Between Moral and Market Economies : Regulating Bread in Vienna, 1775-1885

Open Access

Abstract

Historians especially of the 18th and 19th centuries have taken up the questions about the development and impacts of marketisation before the 20th century. The beginnings of an "economic turn", many historians agree that Reinhard Koselleck's Sattelzeit witnessed a great transformation when "alternative and irreconcilable views of human order – one based on mutuality, the other on competition – confronted each other between 1815 and 1850", as eminent E.P. Thompson prominently diagnosed. Concepts of a great socio-economic transformation and the end of a social-economic order based on a certain set of morals around the turn on the 18th to the 19th century have become eminent reading material among social and economic historians. These are inherently bound to the names Karl Polanyi and E.P. Thompson, probably among the most influential scholars addressing the historic formation of marketisation. Rather informed by E.P. Thompson than by Karl Polanyi, both food and the city have been at the centre of such investigations into the relation between market and society. 18th century urbanites across Europe defended a moral economy of food as E.P. Thompson and his disciples have highlighted. Building on Thompson's work and perceiving urban centres across both Europe and North America with their extensive market laws, regulated guild economies and quite frequent food riots as loci classici of moral-economy settings of the market, historians have paid great attention to the changing politics of food supply in agglomerations as diverse as Paris and New York City over the course of the 18th and 19th centuries in order to describe and analyse the impacts of market transformation. Attempting to understand the logics and judge the consequences of market liberalisation and the commodification of food, the international investigations underline how politics affected the residents' access to and supply with food in general and how changes in the manners of food market regulation shaped such conditions. Drawing on the research on other European and American cities as well as on the theoretical approaches presented by Karl Polanyi and E.P. Thompson, which are supplemented with works by Michel Foucault, this contribution analyses the transformation from moral to market economies of bread in Vienna between 1775 and 1885. The city of Vienna as the capital of the Holy Roman Empire until 1806 and later of the Austrian Empire provides a fruitful case study for several reasons. Besides the striking absence of Austrian cities from an otherwise rich international school of research, the Habsburg capital represented not only an important political hub in Central Europe; it was also among the largest cities of the continent and the most important economic centre of the Habsburg realm. Moreover, Vienna's drastic population growth represented a fierce challenge to meeting the food demands of quickly rising numbers of inhabitants. Indeed, not only that challenge was met with a decisive deregulation of both the imperial trade law and the urban supply system determined by guilds, market laws and the bread assize. Comparable to other cities, around the middle of the 19th century Vienna's urban economy was liberalised thoroughly from traditional limitations and regulations. Against that background, this book has several main tasks for the systematic analysis of the transition from moral to market economies of bread provisioning in Vienna between 1775 and 1885. My main aim is to investigate and trace such a transformation in the case of the Habsburg capital and to examine the effects the transition had on producing, selling, and buying food. ; Author Mag. Jonas M. Albrecht ; Dissertation Universität Linz 2021