This is a companion piece to Jack Sargeant’s article “Fishing, Freedom, and the Market in Early Modern London”, recently published in History Workshop Journal issue 97.
When, in 2021, the German economist Isabella Weber proposed that the rising cost of living might be curbed by the enforcement of ‘strategic price controls’ on essential goods, a fiery conflict swept through the world of economics. Nobel laureate Paul Krugman, in a remark since retracted, branded the proposal ‘truly stupid’. Professor Richard Holden declared that price controls have ‘never worked in the history of the world’. The idea of such a directly political solution to the inflationary problem scandalized those that held fast to the orthodox playbook: that central banks alone should tame surging prices through interest rate rises.
The controversy over price controls has revealed the continued ideological power of the ‘free market’: the notion that economics is a science apart from the grubby world of politics and works best when its laws are left to take their natural course. This, however, is a relatively recent invention. In an article in the latest issue of HWJ, I show how competing visions of market ‘freedom’ were espoused as part of a bitter commercial struggle for London’s Billingsgate fish market in the late-seventeenth century. The evidence demonstrates how economic common-sense is shaped by the social values and material conflicts of a given historical conjuncture. Economics, in other words, is always political.
Throughout much of the medieval and early modern periods, political authorities across Europe had the power to set prices on essential foodstuffs like bread, fish, and ale as a means of preserving fair prices and warding off the spectre of riot and social unrest. Authorities in England generally turned to active price-setting only in moments of acute economic crisis, but more frequently took measures to prevent and redress so-called market ‘abuses’, exemplified by a Tudor statute forbidding ‘forestalling’ (buying goods from producers before market) and ‘regrating’ (re-selling in the same market at a profit).
However, as expanding urbanization and market integration enhanced the economic role of merchant intermediaries, local authorities increasingly feared that the enforcement of market regulation would drive essential goods elsewhere in search of higher profits. Their scope for political intervention was thus ever more constrained by market dynamics. Commercial competition and conflict became increasingly prominent features of this burgeoning capitalist landscape and rival parties embraced new economic discourses in pursuit of their interests.
In the late-seventeenth century, such a conflict broke out between the Fishmongers’ Company, which had traditionally dominated the retail of fish in London, and an emergent company of Thames fishers known as the Free Fishermen. These commercial adversaries each marshalled the language of economic ‘freedom’ in asserting their right to the trade at Billingsgate, London’s largest fish market. The case offers evidence of an important transition in economic thinking. Whereas economic ‘freedom’ had customarily been understood as a condition secured through the proper enforcement of market regulation, from the late-seventeenth century it was increasingly associated with the freedom of retailers and merchants to engage in forms of commerce traditionally scorned by authorities. Though so-called ‘middlemen’ remained the focus of ‘intense popular suspicion’ throughout the early modern period, the speculative practices of merchant wholesalers became an increasingly normal, if contentious, feature of economic life.
As freedom was invoked to support ideas of free competition and the accumulation of profit, so a modern understanding of the economy as naturally self-regulating gained ever more traction: the invisible hand of the market, rather than the legislative apparatus of the state, would keep ordinary people well-fed. By the eighteenth century, the principle that political authorities should regulate food prices had dropped out of fashion. The celebrated liberal economist Adam Smith compared fears of profiteers to ‘the popular terrors and suspicions of witchcraft’. Yet the ‘free market’ was as much a fiction then as it is now: markets are invariably structured by a matrix of regulation and social norms that permit certain kinds of economic activity and forbid others.
Just as money, for the Marxist theorist Paul Mattick, ‘is a mechanism that organizes the exploitation of labor, not the exchange of commodities among equals’, so markets are not neutral zones of exchange but sites of conflict between competing economic interests, distributing resources unevenly. While such an observation would have been banal to a seventeenth-century Londoner, the power relations that underpin the distribution of commodities are today masked by what Bernard Harcourt describes as the ‘illusion’ of the free market, which negates the fundamentally political character of economic relations and thus any possibility of acting collectively to transform them.
As overlapping crises further envelop the globe, collective transformation is exactly what is required. Mounting geopolitical tensions and climate and environmental crises are set to render the global economy ever more vulnerable to supply shocks and traditional mechanisms of monetary tightening might only exacerbate social inequality. As the late J. K. Galbraith noted, such a response to inflationary pressures is not ‘socially neutral’. It favours those with money to lend, ‘the individually and institutionally affluent’. Since 2020, the world’s five richest men have doubled their fortunes at a rate of $14 million per hour. In 2022, Oxfam reported that ‘greedflation’ had increased the profits of food and energy corporations by 256%. Over the same period, in excess of 11 million people in the UK experienced food insecurity and cases of ‘Victorian’ diseases associated with malnutrition continued to rise.
Recently, a growing academic interest in the utility of price controls in safeguarding access to essential goods has been reflected in political action. Last year, several European governments from across the ideological spectrum reached agreements with supermarkets for the implementation of price caps. In the intervening period, some politicians have sought to embed these provisional measures more deeply in the functioning of their national economies. In July, in the wake of the Nouveau Front Populaire (NFP)’s success in France’s second-round legislative elections, Jean-Luc Mélenchon of La France Insoumise insisted that the left-wing coalition would implement ‘all of its programme’, including price freezes on basic necessities like food and energy. Economist Julia Cagé, who, alongside Thomas Piketty, contributed to the drafting of the NFP’s programme, insisted that the coalition had not committed to ‘fix the price of the baguette’, but to prevent further inflationary spirals and ‘superprofits’ accruing to major food corporations.
France offers only the most recent example of how the political and economic climate—as well as the Covid-19 pandemic—has forced a rethinking of how market economies function and the role that the state might play in their regulation. As economists seek to develop new policy tools for an era of multiple and overlapping crises, the past serves as a useful reminder that the relations between society, state and market are only ever provisional.