The Moral and Market Economies of Bread: Regulation and Reform in Vienna, 1775-1885

From the 1770s the Vienna bread market was rocked by a series of politico-economic and technological changes that questioned the way this everyday foodstuff was sold and produced. In this book, Jonas Albrecht explores how this reconfiguration of the bread market had wide-reaching and significant consequences for a society who relied on this foodstuff to live.

Before 1860 the production and selling of bread was embedded into a moral economy with distinct regulations. But as the grain market expanded and new cereal varieties arrived from the empire’s peripheries reformers sought to create a ’free’ market through liberalizing reforms. The Moral and Market Economies of Bread shows that while terminating market regulation did mobilize and diversify Vienna’s bread market in spatial terms, it intensified inequality among consumers. As opaque prices, non-transparent market procedures and diverging power relations between producers and consumers led to unrest, city officials and bakers struggled to meet the shortcomings of the free market from within. This book brings economic, social and urban histories together and employs a spatial approach and GIS methods to explore the relationship between market and society, and capitalism at large.

Jonas M. Albrecht is Associated Researcher at the Institute of Rural History (IRH), St. Pölten, Austria.