Domestic Economy and Political Economy

The Development of Food as a Commodity

Introduction

In the past few weeks we have begun to place food decisions within moral and economic frameworks. Of utmost importance is the question of how we attend to what Patrick Murray calls  “the provisioning process” in the introduction to Reflections on Commercial Life. This term refers to the process whereby we provision ourselves with the necessities of life, first and foremost of which is the acquisition of nourishment. Murray defines a commercial society as a social arrangement in which the provisioning process is achieved through commerce, through markets. He traces the history of ideas of commercial society from the Greeks to the 20th century, documenting the way that the centrality of the market to the provisioning process has changed throughout history, at times becoming more important and others less so. By tracing the changing nature of the centrality of markets to the process of getting food on the table, we can also trace shifts in the conception of what we mean by the ‘economy.’ 

At the heart of this provisioning process is, again, the way that we get food from the farm to the table. How different societies conceive of the tools they have for achieving this reflects the values that are at work in their culture as a whole. Today, we will trace the development of the concept of the word ‘economy’ through this period of time, in order to understand how it is that our conception of food evolved into the one we use today. As we will see, it is in the modern period that this shifts radically from a basic necessity into a commodity to be bought and sold, reflecting a broader shift into a society that is organized around the market as such. In order to understand the ethical context in which we make decisions about food, we must understand the framework, both conceptual and historical, in which those decisions are made. Through this, we will be situated, in coming weeks, to continue evaluating the politics of food at this particular point in our history.

Classical Oikonomia 

The word ‘economics’ comes from the Greek οἰκονομία (oikonomia), itself a combination of the words οἶκος (oikos) and νόμος (nomos), meaning “home” and “law/rule”, respectively, so that in the Greek context, οἰκονομία referred to the art of managing the household. Which is to say, that speaking of home economics is like saying domestic home management, as opposed to political economy/home management. Aristotle, in the Politics, describes this science as the acquisition and disposition of property, or of acquiring what we need to live, putting it to use, and directing the labor within the household in order to achieve the happiness and health of everyone dwelling therein.

The term emerged alongside a genre of practical and ethical texts that began appearing in the fifth century BCE and continued to be popular into the third century CE in Greece and Rome. These texts, as Čelkytė explains, typically “present a discussion of property (its acquisition, preservation and expenditure) and then moves on to the discussion of the proper treatment of one’s servants, wife and (male) child, thus covering all the ground typical of oikonomia.” They offer both practical advice on the proper management of the household, as well as reflection on the proper ends of wealth acquisition and household management which allow their reader to live a good life. That is, they are both instruction manuals and works of practical philosophy, or ethics. 

The genre has its roots in Hesiod’s Works and Days, which describes the proper management of the home, as well as advice on agricultural production. Leshem argues, however, that the term oikonomia does not arise in Hesiod, or in many texts before the fifth century, because in the eighth to sixth centuries, when most Greeks lived in dispersed, loosely linked estates, it was tacitly assumed “that all of life that mattered took place within the bounds of one’s oikos,” and so there was no need for a term specific to domestic matters. As the polis began to replace the oikos as the center of life in the transition from the archaic to classical age, it became necessary to distinguish between affairs pertaining to the household and those of the city. Consequently, the term began to appear in passing in plays and speeches of the era, such as Socrates’ mention of it in his defense, and Sophocles’ use in his Electra. 

The first full text concerning the topic of Oikonomia, according to Diogenes Laertius, was written by Antisthenes, although this text has been lost. But after Antisthenes’ example, the genre became popular and would remain so for nearly five centuries. Every major philosophical school produced at least one text on the topic in the course of this period.The large number of these works, all written during the long transition from a home-estate to city-state based sense of existence, point to the importance of thinking critically about the relationship between domesticity, politics, and ethics, in the Classical and Hellenistic eras.

The earliest full, extant text is that of Xenophon, Plato’s contemporary and the other author from whom we have “Socratic dialogues.” In his Oikonomikos–which we will consider as a paradigmatic example of the genre–Xenophon presents a conversation between Socrates and an interlocutor named Critobulus, as well as an account from Socrates of an earlier conversation with one Ischomachus, whom Socrates says is “of all men [he] ever met” most deserving of “the appellation of a gentleman” due to his knowledge of the science of oikonomia. The dialogue  with Critobulus defines oikonomia as “the proper title of a branch of knowledge” whereby “men are enabled to enhance the value of their oikos,” which they define as “the whole of a man’s possessions,” understood in turn as all “those things which the possessor should find advantageous for the purposes of life,” which they find to be grounded in the arts of husbandry, or agriculture, which form the basis of a “beautiful and good” life. Socrates then recounts to Critobulus a conversation with Ischomachus to explain how to achieve such a life, with practical advice on the best way to instruct one’s wife, how to incentivize virtue and disincentivize vices among slaves, and how to plow, grow, harvest, and process typical foods such as grain, as well as tend to orchards. 

Of utmost importance in the entirety of the dialogue is the emphasis it places on making the work required by oikonomia as simple and minimal as possible. Ischomachus tells Socrates that agriculture is “of all arts…the noblest, the most generous” because it is “the easiest to learn,” and guides Socrates through the unfolding of its principles much like Socrates does with the slave boy in the Meno. All of the principles of oikonomia, in fact, depend not on a great deal of specialized knowledge, but on the virtue of epimeleia, or care and attentiveness, and more importantly on knowledge of the limits of wealth-getting and the self-mastery needed to prevent the greed of merchants. In the Oikonomia ascribed to Aristotle–written in fact probably by Theophrastus or another student of the Lyceum–we hear echoes of the claims made in the first book of the Politics about natural wealth-acquisition and the vice of pleonexia that accompanies commerce and surplus production. While the genre does of course include practical knowledge about the running of the household (some texts focus on this part more than others), the emphasis on the importance of limiting economic life tells us a great deal about the meaning of these texts in Greek culture.

In any case these texts are, before anything else, works of ethics. They instruct us in how to deal with the everyday necessities of managing the resources we need, of organizing our household and estate, so that we can live a flourishing life. The science of economics, of conducting our domestic life, which is centered primarily around the getting of food, in each of these texts is ultimately oriented towards achieving happiness, or as Xenophon puts it, to become “a beautiful and good man,” something that only occurs in the public realm of politics. In Greek society, it was assumed that if those in your community were unable to feed themselves, then they would be provided for. Often, as in Xenophon, the reason why we aim for wealth is not for personal satisfaction, but so that we can provide for neighbors and for the wellbeing of the state in times of need. Food and basic goods, in other words, are understood to be basic necessities, and under no circumstance are they to be considered items on which to make a profit. To do so, according to Aristotle, is to pervert the purpose of both goods and money. According to Leshem, Aristotle goes so far as to say in the Nicomachean Ethics that the virtue of sophrosyne, perhaps one of the most essential virtues insofar as it is the condition for the possibility of living with the right relation towards pleasure itself, is etymologically derived from keeping economic life (or the pursuit of profit) in check “because it keeps unharmed (suzei) economic rationality (phronesis).” For the economists of the Greek and Roman worlds, temperance and practical wisdom in the home in other words create the conditions for the possibility of a public, virtuous life in the polis, and thus should be considered a theory of the possibility of happiness.

Roman and Medieval ‘Political Economy’

In the centuries following the period from which most of these texts come from, a new form of power appears on the scene in the region, that of empire. The classical era saw the first intimations of the form of power represented by empire in the century after Xenophon and Socrates, with the rise of Aristotle’s student, Alexander of Macedon. At its height, the Macedonian empire stretched from Italy to India, and through its expansion, trade routes were created to move goods from one side of the empire to the other. With Rome, which reached the size of Alexander’s empire in the following centuries, this system of imperial trade was expanded. Food grown in one part of the empire was transported on extensive supply routes to parts of the empire that specialized in other trades. As the empire extended power over vassal states, entire economies of regions were transformed from a rich tapestry of largely self-sufficient households and city-states, to high efficiency production sites that were made dependent on other regions of the empire for some of their most basic needs. That is, before the intrusion of the Roman empire, cities and households were largely self-sufficient, producing most of the goods that they needed to thrive. But as the Roman administrative state exerted control over regions, they were gradually changed to produce whatever that region was most efficient at: grains, mining, olives, etc. in order to ship these goods elsewhere in the empire. The diversity of their economies were reduced in order to facilitate high yield productivity, and each region, in turn, became more and more dependent on other parts of the empire for basic needs that they had previously produced for themselves. This system was kept in place by the control of the Roman military state, which existed largely to facilitate the transfer of goods from place to place, under threat of violence. At the center of this system were the urban centers which relied on the productive capacity of the provinces and colonies and created the need for bureaucratic control. It doesn’t really work to call them systems of trade, since the exchange was not primarily taking place through a “market”, but through military bureaucracy, but still, since the cost of transporting, protecting, and maintaining the infrastructure for this exchange was high, regions began to have to produce ever more each year in order to keep up with quotas and maintain both the growing military and urban bureaucratic administration which controlled the system. 

This system might be called economic because, like the administration of the home in the Greek oikonomia, the system concerned the production, distribution, and consumption of goods that was ruled by a ‘head of household.’ Only in this case, the household was not just a single estate, but the entire empire. Oikonomia in this sense was simply an expanded version of a dwelling place economy with an authoritarian head that used the threat of violence to compel different regions to produce, distribute, and consume according to the plan of the empire itself. In other words, this is an economy that exists at the level of political states, or, as later writers in the middle ages will call it, ‘political economy.’ As you might imagine, the Roman system couldn’t be maintained forever, and as it grew, it also became more and more unstable. After the rule of Marcus Aurelius at the end of the 2nd century, the Roman Empire began to contract. It was simply too large to maintain, and too costly to continue its administration and keep up the massive army that was required in order to keep it moving. More and more slaves were required to maintain production as rich landholders sought to separate themselves from the production of food that kept the empire fed. At a certain point in the 3rd century, the system which had relied on forced labor and colonial importation schemes simply could not continue to grow. After a series of destabilizing events (slave revolts, plagues, invasions, civil war, and the destabilization of civil society with the adoption of Christianity in the 4th century), the Empire was divided into two separate states. The Western part fell in the 5th century, and the Eastern part became the Byzantine Empire that would remain a force in Euro-Asian politics until the 14th century. The imperial economy, in other words, collapsed under the weight of its own success, as well as the violence and military force that it required to keep a system of conquered and subjugated people producing and yet always falling deeper into debt.

For the next nearly thousand years after the fall of the Western Roman Empire, the region was again organized into a primarily agrarian system called feudalism. The feudal system was more decentralized than the imperial system of the Romans. Large, landholding nobles held title to land on which peasants worked and lived. The demesnes of the lords, their private holdings, were worked by peasants who were either paid wages or conscripted through systems such as the corvee. Outside of the demesnes, land was largely held in common, and peasants were allowed to work as much or as little as was needed to feed themselves and provide a minimal tithe to the nobility and church. Peasant labor was almost entirely less strenuous and demanding than under the imperial system, with laborers working only about one third of the year. The majority of the land in most parts of Europe was not privately held, and the ‘rent’ owed to landlords was generally paid in kind, meaning that a certain amount of grain or labor was owed to the local lord rather than coin in exchange for use of the land. The only ‘trade’ or ‘market’ that existed was for luxury goods. Lords, trading through the silk road to the east, purchased silks, china, spices, and other goods through traveling merchants. Beside this, each manor was largely self-sufficient, the peasants supporting each other through what David Graeber calls a kind of “baseline communism” organized around village level systems of credit and communal resource sharing. Because a massive administrative state was not needed to maintain transportation of goods from province to province, and because the whole system was centered primarily on agricultural products (which could not exactly be hoarded), the system held up for so long because there were not extraordinary demands placed on the commoners. I’m not saying this was a better system, disease, early death, and the occasional invading army were ever looming threats, but it did kind of strip everything back to basics: food was grown, some labor went to the local lord, and the rest of the year was spent on whatever peasants desired, mostly festivals. Theorists from this period talked about oikonomia, again, but this time called it “political economy.” That is, the economy of political powers, where the management of manors was both economic and political.

This began to change in the 14th century, when the black death wiped out nearly half of the European population.  Although it is difficult to ascertain the exact mortality rate because of a lack of nationwide records, we can find that in many towns and villages, the population was reduced by between a quarter and a half of residents, either by death or emigration. Because nine out of ten people in England lived in villages, rather than large cities, on the eve of the plague, “the story of the Black Death in England is above all the story of its impact on the village community,” meaning that the effect of the plague on the manorial system was deadly. Population had been at an all time high in the years before the plague entered England, and “so great was the surplus of labor…immediately before the Black Death that it proved relatively easy to fill the vacancies and get in the harvest without much recourse to specially hired workmen.” After the dust had settled, and as many as 2 million people had died in England, “there was a substantial drop in rents” for landlords, “either because the tenants were dead or because conditions were so difficult that all or part of the rent was remitted by the landlord.” As the recipients of the livestock of deceased tenants, landlords' rosters were swelled with cattle and sheep in the years following the plague, requiring land to be converted from arable to pasture land. 

Birth of the Modern Economy

In the coming years, many manors collapsed for lack of labor, and the cost of labor skyrocketed as larger manors attempted to lure workers from smaller, less financially capable ones in order to replace lost tenants. David Graeber writes that “Before long, so much wealth was flowing into the hands of ordinary people that governments had to start introducing new laws forbidding the lowborn to wear silks and ermine, and to limit the number of feast days, which, in many towns and parishes, began eating up one-third or even half of the year.” For centuries, economies had developed around systems of credit, payments in kind, labor exchanges, and other cashless transactions that arose out of the manorial system; but after the plague, as lords began to use money to entice workers from manor to manor, coin once again came into general circulation and payments for the use of land were increasingly articulated in terms of money, or ‘price,’ a term that came into usage just a hundred years before in the mid 13th century. This has led historians to call this period that of “the price revolution,” and it was here that the cash economy of the early modern period was brought slowly into focus. 

By 1450, Europe was experiencing the lowest recorded levels of precious metals in its history. But this was due in part to the fact that coins had to be continually doled out by the wealthy in order to keep labor on their estates as well as the pay the wages of the volunteer armies of the Hundred Years War, so the precious metals were simply not present in their ‘normal’ places–the coffers of kings and lords, the pocketbooks of merchants. Increased international trade between Europe and Asia in the wake of Henry the Navigator’s circumnavigation of Africa and the rise of the Italian merchant republics also made precious metals–in particular silver–a more common medium in economic relations, and much of what was still in stock began flowing eastward to the silver-based markets of China. As the stock of metals in the hands of nobles decreased, and as the Hundred Year’s War with France dragged on, steep taxes were levied–which increasingly had to be paid in metals–in an attempt to reclaim some of the distributed wealth.  This feedback loop of trade, taxes, and the movement of populations created a system in the 14th and 15th centuries that became increasingly dependent on the impersonal exchange of money, rather than the ancient pledge and agreement systems of the manorial era, when systems like the corvee and other feudal duties were transacted through in-kind payments. This ‘price-revolution’ was to change the nature of European society in short order. It was in this context of emerging coin-based market economies that it became possible, in the 15th and 16th centuries, to begin calculating the profits derived from the land and goods such as food in precise, mathematical figures. Money, after all, is an especially conducive tool for quantifying and articulating value.

In the centuries that followed, trade became a more international phenomenon again. Like during the axial age empires of Macedon and Rome, this was largely due to imperialism and colonialism. The invasion of the Americas and the establishment of the harsh plantation systems once again increased productivity through specialization, monoculture growing, and the creation of reliance upon other parts of the world for basic needs. This system was even more extreme than under Roman rule, with entire islands and regions being converted to the production of cash crops like tobacco, sugar, and later, cotton. The infamous ‘triangular trade’ system developed in this era, with goods like sugar, gold, lumber, cotton, and oil being shipped to Europe from the colonies; in Europe, luxury goods, textiles, guns, alcohol, and iron were shipped out to colonies in Africa and the Americas; and in the African colonies, slaves, ivory, gold, and spices were sent back. Specialization in each region allowed for a brutal efficiency and productivity to develop, and Europeans controlled the movement of goods from one area to another, ultimately forcing Africa and the Americas to depend on Europe for the food and other necessaries of life.

This colonial system was so extreme that there are countless situations where we hear of starvation occurring in these colonies because there is simply no food being grown apart from the commodity crop in question. Without enough production of the local cash crop, there are not enough resources to import food, leading to high mortality because of strenuous working conditions. What was different, this time around, was that, unlike the Roman system, this system was articulable in terms of trade, since it was an international market that was driving this specialization. Military force was, of course, necessary in order to subdue indigenous populations in the colonies and maintain slave economies. But the owners of these plantations where specialized crops were being grown were not bureaucrats working for the state (well, ok, sometimes and in some sense they were), but rather independent businessmen granted charters by the state. They were, in a much more explicit way, seeking primarily private profit rather than simply skimming profit off the top of official state resource distribution as the Roman and Macedonian grifters were. The state, unlike Roman imperialism, was simply the ones who were authorized to legitimate these systems, rather than the instigators of the policies themselves. This was the birth of an era when this mysterious entity, “the market”, increasingly stood apart from the political state, and states became less involved in the control of the movement of goods from one place to another, instead allowing for ‘the economy’ to manage itself.

Another thing to note in the shift between ancient and modern senses of economy, is that while the Greeks conceived of oikonomia as being first and foremost an ethical science, the modern economy is explicitly talked about as existing separate from the realm of ethics. There are many reasons why this is the case. For one, sometime between the 15th to 17th centuries, the medieval church began to relax its position on profiting off of trade, money-lending, and commerce. Prior to this period, the movement of goods was something regulated by church and state authorities, when they moved from one place to another at all. Limits on the cost of grains, when they did have to move from one region to another, was seen as a moral, religious necessity. As the power of the church waned in the modern period, and individual liberty became a more important part of European self-conceptions, this prohibition began to melt away, and trade was increasingly understood to be a service provided by merchants moving goods from one place to another. This, in turn, became more necessary as regions became specialized once again, and those controlling the movement of goods were given the autonomy by the state to charge what they saw fit given the cost of their individual risk. After the reformation, trade was increasingly understood to be a realm in which the seeking of profit and advantage was separate from the private, moral and ethical actions that took place outside of the market in civil society. Through this shift, in modernity we understand the market to be a region of activity in which ethics enters only as an afterthought, or a restriction upon the more fundamental exigencies of production and trade.

The other crucial difference under this system was that the goods being traded were increasingly conceived of as being ‘commodities’. The word itself does not appear in English until roughly the 16th century, just as this economic system is getting organized. While goods certainly always existed before this point, many of which were traded or shipped from one place to another, it is not until an independent market, apart from the state, begins to form that we can begin to conceive of goods like food as ‘commodities.’ That is, as measurable, tradeable, vendible goods that are exchanged between private buyers through the mediation of a cash economy. Such a conception was barely articulable in the axial and medieval periods, when goods like food and clothing were considered basic necessities, and not the sort of thing that would be traded. Trade was for luxury goods, it was the domain of the elites in which excess income was spent on things that were not needed for life, but rather for showing off one’s wealth. Food was simply produced, shared in communities, and often held in common for the maintenance of life. When, however, the market began to figure more centrally in the movement of goods from one region of the world to another, with each becoming more and more specialized, it became possible to think of food as a commodity, as something to be traded, bought and sold for the lowest and highest price possible. Again, the difference between the modern colonial system and the Roman system was that under the Roman military bureaucracy, different provinces were ultimately all under the rule of the same state. In modernity, these trade regions exist under different state leadership, meaning that each government is setting trade regulations (import and export duties, taxes, etc.) to stimulate and protect their own producers, while other states are doing the same for their citizens. As a result, the cost of goods is subject not just to environmental growing conditions, the state of technological development in any given region, supply and demand, the kind of goods a region specializes in, and so on, but also an increasingly complex system of international trade regulations that makes the movement of goods difficult and costly. The oikonomia of Ancient Greece, in this way, developed into the economy of the modern world, similar only in name to the discipline of classical resource management.

Commodity and Future Markets in the 20th and 21st Centuries

The 19th century ushered in an era where the implications of previous centuries' transformations were fully realized within the realm of food as a commodity. The Industrial Revolution marked a profound shift in agricultural practices, with mechanization and scientific advancements leading to unprecedented increases in productivity. However, these advancements also precipitated a shift in the relationship between producers and consumers, as food began to traverse vast distances to reach markets, necessitating the development of futures markets to hedge against the volatility of agricultural prices. The establishment of such markets in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, including the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, signaled a pivotal move towards a more speculative approach to agricultural commodities, laying the groundwork for modern futures trading. 

As the 20th century unfolded, two World Wars and the Great Depression had profound impacts on food markets, exacerbating volatility and leading to significant government intervention in agricultural sectors across the globe. This period saw the introduction of policies aimed at stabilizing food prices and ensuring supply, which, while effective in the short term, often distorted markets and led to inefficiencies. Post-World War II, the Green Revolution introduced new agricultural technologies and practices, further increasing productivity but also raising questions about sustainability and the environmental impact of intensive farming. The latter half of the century witnessed the globalization of food markets, with trade liberalization underpinning a significant increase in the international trade of agricultural commodities. This era set the stage for the contemporary issues of food security, trade disputes, and the complex interplay between agriculture, finance, and global markets.

In the 21st century, the narrative of food commodities and futures markets is increasingly defined by the challenges of climate change, sustainability, and geopolitical tensions. The advent of digital technology and the internet has transformed market dynamics, introducing a level of speed and volatility unseen in previous eras. Moreover, the rising awareness of ethical and environmental concerns has begun to influence market behaviors and consumer preferences, leading to the emergence of alternative investments and the increased valuation of sustainable and ethically produced food commodities. Meanwhile, the persistence of global inequalities and the impact of trade policies continue to raise questions about the role of futures markets in addressing or exacerbating issues of food security and equity. As we navigate these complex dynamics, the history of food commodities and futures markets serves as a reminder of the intricate relationship between agriculture, economics, and society—a relationship that continues to evolve in the face of ongoing challenges and innovations.

The evolution of economic systems from ancient to modern times reveals a profound transformation in the conceptualization and practicality of managing resources, particularly food. From the self-sufficient oikos of Ancient Greece, where the economy was embedded within the moral and social fabric of the household and extended to the political economy of city-states, to the globalized commodity markets of today, the journey has been marked by significant shifts in thought and practice. The transition from economies rooted in the ethical science of oikonomia, focusing on the well-being of the community and the ethical management of resources, to a global market system where food and other basic necessities are commodified, reflects a broader shift in societal values and the mechanisms of economic control. This journey underscores the complexity of our relationship with food as a fundamental human need, now subject to the vagaries of market forces and speculative investments. As we grapple with the challenges of sustainability, equity, and food security in the 21st century, it becomes increasingly important to reflect on the lessons of history. Perhaps in understanding the ethical and communal roots of economic thought, there lies potential for reimagining a future where the economy once again serves the well-being of all, balancing the efficiencies of global markets with the imperatives of environmental stewardship and social justice. The story of economics, from oikonomia to the modern market, is not just a tale of changing practices and theories but a reflection on the values that guide our collective life and the possibilities for a more equitable and sustainable world.