CONCEPT
The Moral Economy of the English Crowd
Thompson's 1971 framework for the customary norms governing fair dealing that communities develop and defend when violated — the analytical tool that makes the food riot legible as disciplined political practice rather than spasmodic hunger.
Thompson's 1971 essay in Past & Present introduced the concept of the moral economy to explain the food riots of eighteenth-century England. Earlier historians had dismissed these events as spasmodic reactions to hunger, but Thompson demonstrated they were disciplined assertions of a popular consensus about just prices and fair distribution. The rioters did not steal bread. They enforced what they understood to be a just price: selling grain at the rate the community regarded as fair and returning the proceeds to the merchant. The action was principled, targeted, and grounded in a shared understanding of economic justice that the rioters regarded as more legitimate than the emerging market economy. The framework has since been applied across disciplines to analyze peasant resistance, labor disputes, and — in this volume — the contemporary resistance to AI deployment terms.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The moral economy framework inverts the