The 1840s witnessed widespread hunger and malnutrition at home and mass starvation in Ireland. And yet the aptly named ‘Hungry 40s’ came amidst claims that, notwithstanding Malthusian prophecies, absolute biological want had been eliminated in England. The eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries were supposedly the period in which the threat of famine lifted for the peoples of England. But hunger remained, in the words of Marx, an ‘unremitted pressure’. The politics of hunger offers the first systematic analysis of the ways in which hunger continued to be experienced and feared, both as a lived and constant spectral presence. It also examines how hunger was increasingly used as a disciplining device in new modes of governing the population. Drawing upon a rich archive, this innovative and conceptually-sophisticated study throws new light on how hunger persisted as a political and biological force.
Table of Content
Introduction: ‘the unremitted pressure’: on hunger politics
Part I: Protesting hunger
1 Food riots and the languages of hunger
2The persistence of the discourse of starvation in the protests of the poor
Part II: Hunger policies
3 Measuring need: Speenhamland, hunger and universal pauperism
4 Dietaries and the less eligibility workhouse: or, the making of the poor as biological subjects
Part III: Theorising hunger
5 The biopolitics of hunger: Malthus, Hodge and the racialisation of the poor
6 Telling the hunger of ‘distant’ others
Conclusions
About the author
Carl J. Griffin is Lecturer in Historical Geography at Queen’s University, Belfast
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