The Moral Economy of the English Crowd
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 AI Story
The moral economy framework inverts the standard relationship between economic rationality and popular resistance. Classical political economy treated market prices as natural outcomes to which communities must adapt; Thompson demonstrated that prices were always already embedded in moral expectations — the just price, the fair wage, the customary rate — and that the eruption of what looked like irrational violence was in fact the enforcement of those expectations by communities whose formal mechanisms of enforcement had been dismantled.
The concept has proven remarkably portable. Scholars have applied it to Southeast Asian peasant resistance (James C. Scott), to industrial labor disputes (John Bohstedt), to environmental movements (Bhargav Rani), and in 2024 to AI deployment in Chinese elder-care programs (examining how moral appeals about filial duty were used to legitimize technological change while masking unevenly distributed burdens).
Thompson's framework distinguishes between legal norms (rules written in statute and enforced by courts) and customary norms (shared expectations carrying the weight of long practice). The moral economy lives in the second register. It is what makes violation feel like betrayal rather than mere inconvenience — the implicit bargain broken, the customary obligation abandoned, the social contract revoked without negotiation.
The AI transition has produced the most significant contemporary test of the framework's applicability. When artists discover their work scraped without consent to train image generators, when writers find their books in training corpora they never authorized, when actors face contractual terms permitting perpetual replication of their likenesses — each is a violation of the moral economy of creative labor, and each provokes the specific form of collective response that moral economy theory predicts.
Origin
The essay emerged from Thompson's research on the eighteenth-century English crowd and was first published in Past & Present in February 1971. It drew on magistrates' records, parliamentary papers, and local histories to reconstruct the disciplined character of what conventional accounts had dismissed as mere disorder.
Key Ideas
Custom as authority. Customary norms carry legitimate authority independent of legal enforcement, grounded in long practice and shared community judgment.
Violation as occasion. The violation of moral economy norms constitutes a legitimate occasion for collective action, even when the action itself is legally classified as criminal.
Discipline beneath apparent disorder. What looks like spontaneous violence from outside is often rule-governed enforcement from within — the community applying its norms when institutions refuse to.
Portable framework. The analytical structure travels across historical periods and technological contexts wherever communities develop shared expectations and face their violation.
Appears in the Orange Pill Cycle
Further reading
- E.P. Thompson, "The Moral Economy of the English Crowd in the Eighteenth Century" (Past & Present, 1971)
- E.P. Thompson, Customs in Common (Merlin Press, 1991)
- James C. Scott, The Moral Economy of the Peasant (Yale University Press, 1976)