Introduction; Part I. The Regulatory Regime: Protecting the Consumer and Strengthening the State: 1. Bread price regulation in Europe before the 1590s; 2. Free trade in grain?; 3. The Dutch broodzetting: the introduction of a 'new system' of bread price regulation; 4. Administering and enforcing the new bread price regulations; 5. The Dutch 'peculiar institution'; Part II. Industrial Organization: The Producers in a Regulated Industry: 6. Grain: the interaction of international trade and domestic production; 7. The milling sector: a trade harnessed to raison d'état?; 8. The baking enterprise: efficiency versus convenience; 9. The structure of bread prices; Part III. Consumer Welfare and Consumer Choice: 10. Crise de subsistence: did price regulation shelter consumers from food crises?; 11. Choosing what to eat in the early modern era; 12. Bread consumption: a wheat bread revolution?; 13. Measuring the standard of living: a demand-side approach; Part IV. Perspective and Demise: 14. Dutch bread price regulation in international perspective; 15. Bread price regulation renewed and abolished, 1776–1855; Conclusion.
The humble loaf serves as a prism through which to study how public market regulation affected private economic life.
Jan de Vries is Emeritus Professor of History and Economics and Professor of the Graduate School at the University of California, Berkeley. He is the author of numerous publications, including The Industrious Revolution: Consumer Demand and the Household Economy, 1650 to the Present (Cambridge, 2008), which won the Ranki Prize. In 2000, he was awarded the Heineken Prize in History, and is a past president of the Economic History Association.
'Like Galileo's telescope, The Price of Bread lets us see and
understand a distant world - early modern Europe and especially the
Dutch Republic. We learn what consumers ate, how standards of
living changed, and why, in the capitalist Netherlands, taxation
and market regulation took a fascinating and strikingly different
turn.' Philip T. Hoffman, author of Why Did Europe Conquer the
World?
'This intriguing masterpiece explores the municipal system of
Broodzetting introduced in the Netherlands in the 1590s that led to
high bread prices in both good times and bad. How did they get away
with it? Why did the poor not starve? Jan de Vries finds the
answers in the precocious commercialisation and growth of the early
modern Dutch economy.' Cormac Ó Gráda, author of Famine: A Short
History and co-editor (with Guido Alfani) of Famine in European
History
'The Price of Bread is Jan de Vries at his best. By analyzing the
price of bread, he uncovers deep underlying institutional
structures that characterize the Dutch Republic and had important
consequences for the country's development. His analysis sheds new
light on political economy, consumption patterns and real incomes,
and famines.' Jan Luiten van Zanden, author of The Origins of
Globalization
'With The Price of Bread, Jan de Vries offers us new insight into
the pre-industrial Dutch economy through the prism of one sector.
The book is rich in analysis and has ramifications that extend far
beyond the regulation of bread prices. A must-read for anyone
interested in institutional economies, standards of living,
consumption, fiscal policies and state formation, and moral
economies.' Bruno Blondé, co-editor of City and Society in the Low
Countries
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