Food Riots and the Making of the European Welfare State

• In Event: The Development of Welfare States and Social Policy

Abstract

While most accounts of the origins of the welfare state focus on the role of labor, this paper argues that food riots are more rightfully understood as central to the development of the European welfare state. This paper uses comparative historical analysis to argue that the structure of the later welfares state can be traced to the policy responses by government officials to food riots in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In countries where government officials responded to food riots with price fixing policies the welfare state emerged earlier, in part, we argue, due to the normative expectations that officials had created that the government would respond to subsistence crises. This ideational path dependence is also reflected by the way in which the policy of agricultural institutionalism that has dominated EU agricultural policy for six decades, can be traced to those same food riot responses. EU agricultural policy in turn plays its own role in supporting the welfare state today. Thus, this paper challenges and deepens the conventional understanding of the origins of the welfare state, by focusing on contentious food politics and demands that scholars expand their conceptual understanding of the welfare state.

Author

• Jennifer Rutledge, CUNY-John Jay College