ABSTRACT
This conclusion presents some closing thoughts on the concepts discussed in the preceding chapters of this book. The book explains that during three centuries of commercial, social and political evolution, a politics of provisions comprising riots, repression and relief underwrote collective direct action, especially during wartimes, when harvest failure strained food supplies and military exigencies stretched state resources. Provision politics became a regular tissue of the polity and not just scattered episodes during the Tudor regime, when and where food supply and demand were both commercialized, making it possible to convert both popular and state power into relief for dearths. Food riots became a familiar response to harvest failures in the 1580s, as the great Tudor rebellions religious, peasant and/or dynastic receded. The book focuses on the royal proclamations denounced customary scapegoats, market manipulators called forestallers, engrossers and regraters, but that was mostly lip-service to a royal paternalism claiming to protect its subjects.
