ABSTRACT
Food riots had long been a common form of popular protest, but they reached new intensity worldwide in the eighteenth century, precisely when food supplies were becoming more dependable overall. In 1789, Parisian women marched on Versailles to drag “the Baker” – Louis XVI – back to the capital and thus guarantee access to bread. Muslim women had staged an equally symbolic protest four decades earlier by occupying the minaret of Aleppo’s Great Mosque during prayer to hurl abuse at the Ottoman governor for negligence in times of famine. When the town council of Querétaro, Mexico, could not stem the high price of food in 1749, a mob rampaged through the streets and attacked the public granary. China maintained the most comprehensive granary system of the pre-modern world, but nevertheless, crowds of hungry people regularly looted storehouses and blocked shipments of rice. To understand this seeming paradox of protest in a time of rising expectations, it is necessary to examine the politics of provisioning from a global perspective.
