Roger Horowitz, Jeffrey M. Pilcher, and Sydney Watts

Meat for the Multitudes: Market Culture in Paris, New York City, and Mexico City over the Long Nineteenth Century

In 1981, a special Independence Day edition of theNational Provisioner boasted proudly of the meat-packing industry's success producing "meat for the multitudes." "Nowhere else," they asserted with imperial confidence, "have consumers been able to enjoy so much wholesome, healthful, and delicious meat."¹ Democratic access to beef thus was cast as the industry's mission, conveying legitimacy, and signifying more generally the inevitable superiority of U.S. capitalism. Yet the technology of feedlots and packinghouses, praised so lavishly in the National Provisioner's pages, also has raised fears of tropical deforestation and untested growth hormones, E. coli infection and "mad cow" syndrome. Contemporary protests have spurred governments to intervene in markets in much the same way that Upton Sinclair's novel, The Jungle (1906), fueled earlier demands for meat inspection in the United States.²

Figure 1: "Le boucher à l'Ancien Régime," from Cabinet d'Estampes, Collection Arts et Métiers. Reproduced with kind permission of the Bibliotheque nationalde France, Paris.

Just as capitalist economies pass through cycles of boom and bust, the "market culture" that shapes relations between state and civil society also seems prone to waves of expansion and contraction in response to popular attitudes and fears. This essay examines an earlier period of oscillation between state intervention and market liberalization in the meat trades of Paris, New York City, and Mexico City. Although the timing varied, these cities passed through three common episodes: an old regime characterized by paternalist intervention, a radical era of liberalization in which market controls relinquished their purview, and a subsequent expansion of state authority under a reformulated regulatory regime. In each city, monopolistic corporate guilds had inspired widespread dissatisfaction, but, contrary to their expressed goal of increasing supply, attempts to create free markets instead raised prices and increased pollution and meat adulteration, leading ultimately to renewed demands for government intervention. The new regulatory regimes mirrored the ideals of their paternalist predecessors with one important difference, a change in focus from ensuring adequate supply and distribution to regulating production so as to guarantee wholesomeness and public health. We map these shifting boundaries between state regulation and individual economic activity through a connected comparison of market organization and consumer culture drawn from three independent research agendas.³

Scholars generally use the term "market culture" to capture the tension between economic "rationality" and the social relationships in which such concepts and practices are embedded. Studies of market culture have thus taken a critical anthropological perspective to reveal the contingent and politically charged foundations of the supposedly universal axioms governing neoclassical economics. Such an approach has inspired major revisions of the historical narrative of European industrialization by showing just how early modern entrepreneurs first learned to behave in a "rational" economic fashion and why the resulting markets excluded workers, women, and other subordinate groups.⁴ These unequal power relations notwithstanding, historians have also demonstrated that markets remained tied to the popular expectations of consumers as well as to the material characteristics of goods. It is perhaps here that Americanists working in the fields of business, technology, and consumer culture have made their greatest contribution to this emerging literature. Although not using the term market culture, scholars in the United States have emphasized variations in the structure and behavior of firms depending on markets, production technologies, materials, and consumer demand.⁵ These studies view the market as a negotiated space between makers and users of goods and among those who sell, advertise, and design the material culture of their society.⁶

Contemporary critics of the neoclassical paradigm revisit, in turn, an older debate between "formalists" studying rational economic decisionmaking and "substantivists" concerned more broadly with the material acts of making a living, especially for societies in which reciprocity and redistribution assumed greater importance than market exchanges. The economic historian Karl Polanyi, who framed the terms of this debate, argued in his 1944 book, The Great Transformation, that the modern capitalist system and market rationality represented a radical departure from earlier forms of economic organization and mentalities.⁷ Yet subsequent research has complicated this notion by demonstrating significant continuities across this supposedly epochal divide; indeed, scholars now find it increasingly difficult even to agree on where to draw such a line.⁸ Moreover, the success of Asian industrial economies has challenged the unitary model of Western modernization and demanded recognition of the diversity of market culture.⁹ In this study, we look for an oscillation of popular attitudes over periods of revolutionary social and political change in place of a linear and deterministic "great transformation."

In Paris, New York City, and Mexico City, the rapid urbanization and industrial growth of the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries forced governments to grapple with questions that were both prosaic and political: how best to supply the populace with fresh, wholesome meat? To what degree should the state be held responsible for the basic necessities of its people? What aspects of the meat trade necessitated regulation and oversight? The rules governing the relationship between civil society and state power in the meat trade—an element of what Ira Katznelson has termed the "grammar of liberalism"—varied on many levels.¹⁰ These boundaries were first of all geographic, the physical locations of the supply chain that both regulators and purveyors sought to control. A related struggle arose over who was best qualified to regulate the trade, for while guild butchers possessed expertise and experience, the state asserted its power based on impartiality. Medical professionals who stood outside the market exchange ultimately claimed both knowledge and impartiality, although their authority gained recognition only gradually over the nineteenth century. Consumption formed yet another boundary, as the demands of city residents for a good piece of meat, usually expressed inchoately through thousands of individual commercial transactions, could rapidly congeal into powerful political movements to alter the balance of public and private power.¹¹

In these three cities—at different moments and under different circumstances—political revolutions built on liberal ideals replaced the paternalist state with a new deregulated marketplace in which supply and demand rather than government edict directed meat provisioning. By freeing the marketplace from the control of cartels and guild monopolies, these newly formed governments sought a more democratic labor pool and greater commercial transparency. Tensions arose from different ideas of how liberty in the marketplace would supposedly encourage supply and allow for a just price through competition. In each case, the paternalistic model came in direct conflict with the new liberal political economy over the role of cattle merchants and butchers, particularly in the establishment of health and safety standards. Free trade allowed the market to run amuck with soaring prices and dwindling supplies, prompting consumers and public health experts to call for renewed regulation.

These cases make ideal sites to explore the multiple ways producers, consumers, and state regulators regarded these provisioning demands and responded to changes in the marketplace. As the principal urban centers with privileged positions in their respective nations, Paris, New York City, and Mexico City remained relatively well provisioned with fresh meat, mainly in the form of beef and mutton. The politically influential elite became the trade's most demanding customers, and while these upper and middle-class shoppers were unlikely to emulate bread rioters by going out into the streets, through their own more inconspicuous connections they made known to political authorities the value of facilitating fresh meat supplies. Poorer city residents also grew accustomed to beef, often inferior pieces of the animal, but enough so that they were players in meat provisioning politics. The difficulties of obtaining regular supplies of fresh beef imparted much to its panache as a food and its resonance in daily politics, and provide a basis for considering subsequent transformations within each city occasioned by liberal reforms.¹²

Comparative history entails questions of periodization as well as of sample, and the search for an appropriate chronology must begin by rejecting the classical trinity of democratic revolution, 1776, 1789, and 1810, which suggests America's leading role in the advance of liberalism. This essay will instead follow the recent historiography of American republicanism and treat the half-century after independence as part of an old regime of privilege.¹³ Until the triumph of Jacksonian politics in the 1840s, New York City's public market system protected a butcher cartel similar to the guilds of monarchical France or the monopolies of colonial New Spain. France pioneered the liberal experiment with the 1791 d'Allard Law that abolished guilds, ending the corporate privileges of butchers.¹⁴ But revolutionary turmoil and economic crisis quickly led Parisians to abandon free markets, and Napoleon ultimately resolved the chaos in the meat trade through the creation of municipal abattoirs. The liberal experiment lasted longest in Mexico City, where opposition to Spanish mercantilism culminated in an 1813 declaration of free trade. Unregulated commerce persisted for almost a century, as large livestock merchants beat off successive efforts to reimpose municipal control.

To examine these changes, this essay begins with the institutions and customs of paternalist governments of the old regime. The focus here is on comparisons between supply regions and guild organizations, state forms of regulation and the corporate control of butchers and cattle merchants, as well as the ways that consumers expressed their preferences and asserted their power. The second section considers consumer discontent with monopolistic practices and how this coalesced into political pressure for market liberalization. In each case, the unfettered marketplace clashed with principles of subsistence, health, and hygiene. As the third section explains, culturally specific consumer expectations shaped the general disgust with the liberal regime, resulting in various attempts to regulate the market. The commonalities of these experiences with liberalism suggest the persistent need for regulation by an impartial group and the continued imposition of rules and controls on meat providers.

The rural-urban meat trade of the old regime assumed very different forms based on networks of cattle provisioning and the organization of commercial markets in New York City, Paris, and Mexico City. Yet each distinct system wrestled with the same intractable problem of assuring steady supplies of livestock to urban areas. In all three cases, the organization and effectiveness of the meat exchange worked within the limits of politically sanctioned cartels holding virtual monopolies. The focal points of control differed in each case, based on their organization of wholesaling and retailing. Wholesale cattle markets constituted one power center, the slaughter of livestock another, and retail meat sales a third. The politics of meat emerged from the pursuit of individual interests by producers, consumers, and regulators within these various sites and informed by the expectations of market culture.

These three cities had both prodigious appetites for meat and the political and financial resources to satisfy that hunger. Paris, the largest of the three, had more than half a million residents on the eve of the revolution, including a substantial elite of royal dignitaries and wealthy merchants, as well as transients and the working poor.¹⁵ Mexico City, home of the viceregal court of New Spain, became known as the "city of palaces," but the majority of its 110,000 inhabitants at the dawn of the nineteenth century lived in crowded tenements and crude shacks outside the elegant Hispanic city center.¹⁶ New York City, although not the national capital, had nevertheless become America's principal city by the early nineteenth century, with a population of more than 300,000 in 1840.¹⁷

In France, royal statutes entrusted meat markets to the guild of master and merchant butchers, giving them exclusive purview over the purchase of cattle in outlying markets as well as the sale of fresh meat within licensed Parisian shops and stalls. In Mexico City, the Spanish colonial state likewise afforded a monopoly, known as the abasto de carne (meat supply), to prominent merchants. In the United States, municipalities rather than the federal government held responsibility for provisioning, and the New York City council conferred de facto guild status on its licensed butchers, who held an exclusive right to retail sales but had no influence over cattle supplies. These political-economic structures ensured reliable provisioning and stable venues of control, but they simultaneously contributed to a phlegmatic economic environment by restricting both entry and internal mobility in the meat trades.

Livestock supply naturally framed regulation under the old regime, as no meat trade was possible without an adequate supply of animals. The paternalistic state extended its regulatory control over livestock markets throughout France and New Spain to ensure steady supplies of meat to the capital cities. Paris consumed 150,000 to 200,000 head of livestock (50,000 to 60,000 steer and cows) annually,¹⁸ largely from the provinces of Normandy and Limousin, although when herds were low, the crown commissioned livestock purchases from as far away as Switzerland and Ireland.¹⁹ By law, all cattle within the Paris region had to be sold at the two provisioning markets in the nearby towns of Sceaux and Poissy, which were carefully monitored by police.²⁰ Mexico City depended on a similarly complex, and paternalistic, livestock supply chain. Cattle were raised on haciendas in the piedmont along the Gulf and Pacific coasts and then driven to the central plateau using a complex network of intermediaries and feedlots.²¹ The viceroy, concerned about ensuring regular supplies for a restive populace, required cattle shipped into the Valley of Mexico held in the capital's common pastures until demand was satisfied, thereby conferring considerable market power to the city's wholesale merchants.²² (See Figure 2.)

Figure 2: "Le carne en el Mercado" (Meat in the market), El Mundo, September 5, 1891. Stylishly dressed Mexican livestock importers bargain with barefoot retail butchers over sides of beef displayed by slaughterhouse workers. Reproduced with kind permission of the Hemeroteca Nacional, Mexico City.

In contrast to the heavy-handed paternalism of France and New Spain, New York City's proximity to extensive grazing land allowed it to obtain supplies with minimal government oversight. Autonomous drovers dominated the trade, collecting herds from "upstate" Westchester and Duchess Counties or ferrying cattle from New Jersey farms.²³ Livestock also came from New England, and increasingly after 1820, from the west, principally Ohio.²⁴ As in Paris and Mexico City, however, the wholesale trade was closely circumscribed; New York City livestock sales could only take place behind the Bull's Head Tavern, a central stockyards located near 24th Street and Lexington Avenue.²⁵ (See Figure 3.)

Figure 3: "The Bull's Head in the Bowery," from D. T. Valentine, Manual of the Corporation of the City of New York (1861). Reproduced with kind permission of the Hagley Museum and Library, Wilmington, Delaware.

While officials in all three cities hoped to maximize the wholesale supply of livestock, retail markets functioned as legally sanctioned cartels, limiting competition and supply. The point at which both governments and butchers focused their control of the markets differed in each case. Parisian guilds carried out their trade in individual shops spread throughout the city, while New York City butchers worked out of city markets, and in Mexico City, a public abattoir served as the exclusive location for slaughtering cattle. A common theme in all three cases was the importance of butchers in regulating the quality of meat, while city officials acted more as overseers than inspectors, concerned primarily with licensing the trade and collecting taxes.

In Paris, an elite group of butchers used corporate privileges and guild leadership to dominate the wholesale to retail trade. The guild system acted as gatekeeper to the urban trade, and butchers seeking mastership had to complete three years as an apprentice and at least five years as a journeyman. While the long road to mastership guaranteed a level of skill and expertise, conferring prestige and distinction, the privilege of mastership—limited to 240 members—also encouraged members to police itinerant, "rogue" meat-sellers who worked outside the corporate system. Guild masters acted as quasi-public servants, pledging annually their duty to provide meat that was "good, trustworthy, and marketable."²⁶ The guild further protected the status of these masters through a strong sense of corporate identity built around several powerful family firms, who used extended family networks to evade city restrictions on businesses to three stalls per master. The wealthiest merchants dominated the trade by practicing vertical integration from wholesale cattle markets to privately owned slaughterhouses then finally to their own butcher stalls. Hence, paternalistic practices, imbued with a spirit of honor and service, pervaded the guild structure both internally and in retail sales.

While a handful of prominent families dominated Paris's fresh meat business, an equally restricted clique of Mexico City merchants maintained control over the municipal slaughterhouse. Following medieval Spanish custom, the city contracted wholesale markets for beef and mutton to a semi-private monopoly conferred through an annual auction. The enormous capital needed to satisfy the capital's demand for meat at a fixed price restricted the bidding to wealthy merchants and landowning nobles.²⁷ Retailing took place in thirteen markets (carnicerías) forming a circle around the Hispanic city center. Contrary to European guild practices, the meat trades were organized along functional lines to limit collusion, but by the eighteenth century, the nominally independent retail meat-cutters (tablajeros) had become de facto employees of supply merchants. Native American slaughterhouse workers occupied the lowest level of the social and economic hierarchy but nevertheless preserved a corporate identity as the comúna de carniceros (butchers' guild), despite their lack of recognition by officials and merchants.²⁸

A third system, based on access to retail outlets, gave municipally licensed butchers a dominant position over New York City's meat business for sixty years after independence. By law, the city government restricted meat sales to a given number of stalls located in twelve municipal food markets. These rules created a quasi-guild structure controlled by licensed butchers, who reserved the trade largely to descendents of British residents of colonial New York, excluding more recent immigrants such as the Germans. Becoming a market butcher was a long process, requiring an apprenticeship of four to seven years, followed by perhaps a decade as a journeyman. Butchers controlled the city's Market Committee and would only certify journeymen with recommendations from well-regarded masters. Market laws also restricted competition from wholesale vendors, known colloquially as "shirk" butchers, and farmers. City inspectors monitored market stalls closely, more to ensure that unauthorized persons did not sell to the public than to certify wholesomeness, although occasionally they seized poor meat, provoking the ire—and challenging the reputation—of trusted butchers.²⁹

These three cartels operated in a symbiotic relationship with paternalistic states seeking to guarantee a healthy, abundant food supply. On the one hand, livestock and meat purveyors received protections aimed to counter the vagaries of trade, which included losses due to cattle disease, agricultural shortfalls, the costs of transportation, and unbridled competition. On the other hand, these privileges acquired with the exclusive membership in a working community helped build their reputation as men of honor. The reciprocity inherent in this market culture existing between cattle merchants and retail butchers, elite butchers and their journeymen rested in a paternalistic logic bound by tradition and a clear sense of hierarchy.³⁰ But how did the ethos of market exchange meet the expectations of market-goers?

In all three cities, the elite and expanding middle class demanded regular supplies as meat provided an important demarcation of class status. Popular access to meat, in contrast, varied widely, at its greatest in New York City and most limited in Mexico City. During the eighteenth and into the nineteenth century, urbanization placed increasing burdens on city governments with longstanding commitments to assure adequate supplies of meat and—in the cases of Paris and Mexico City—at a fixed or "just" price. Almost imperceptibly, dissatisfaction with access to meat supplies grew, thereby undermining the legitimacy of the "old regime." Societal distinctions in the distribution of meat were particularly pronounced in old regime Paris, where a new culinary system was placing heavy emphasis on quality cuts of red meat. Beginning with Le cuisinier françois (1651), the Parisian elite began to abandon complicated medieval ragouts and pièces montées. Instead, diners sat before a single-joint roast served with a simple sauce made from the drippings (jus) that accentuated the meat's quality. Nor was this "nouvelle cuisine" limited to just the elite; it formed part of a larger shift in food habits whereby beef became a bourgeois staple.³¹ Although consumption of choice cuts were skewed to the upper ends of the social ladder, French magistrates and royal officers assumed a moral responsibility in overseeing the food supply for the common good.³² In 1717, the price ceiling of lesser cuts including the skirt, shoulder, and shank (called basse boucherie) stood at 6 sous a pound; by the mid-eighteenth century, this price rose to 8 sous a pound.³³ As a result, a fairly well-paid journeyman or water carrier making 15–20 sous a day might afford some kind of meat to supplement his diet, while a skilled worker making 30 sous a day could possibly eat some form of animal protein daily.³⁴

In colonial Mexico City, beef was considered the meat of the poor, while the rich consumed mutton. Therefore, the police allowed no price differential for different cuts; all had to be sold at the same fixed price.³⁵ Despite the class-based distinctions in consumption, wealthy Mexicans nevertheless shared many cultural preferences with their plebeian countrymen. Mutton, like beef, was commonly stewed or pit roasted, often with chiles in marinade (adobo). The Mexico City Council maintained a close surveillance over meat markets through magistrates of the fiel ejecutoria (market court). When shortages became common at the end of the eighteenth century, the mayor (alcalde) toured the markets to demonstrate the government's concern for the meat supply. Nevertheless, consumers had trouble obtaining even subsistence levels of meat, as prices rose to about five pounds for a real (an eighth of a peso) in the final decades of the colonial period. According to the best estimates, urban artisans may have earned about 72 pesos a year, but a family of four spent more than half of that amount, nearly 47 pesos, on the staple maize, so even small rises in the price of meat could make the difference between an occasional dish of mole con carne (beef in chile sauce) and puros frijoles (nothing but beans).³⁶ In Mexico City, fresh meat consumption was largely for the upper and middle classes.

By contrast, New Yorkers of all social strata expected to be able to obtain fresh meat at a reasonable price. An 1851 food budget for a working-class family indicated that annual per capita consumption of "butcher's meat" by family members was 146 pounds. For immigrants, such access defined their new American standard of living. "We buy the best of meat," English immigrant John Parks wrote to friends back home in 1827.³⁷ Nevertheless, even in this abundant market, class heavily influenced the types of fresh beef eaten by nineteenth-century Americans. Elites favored British-style roasts, cooked slowly for hours, and served with thick sauces and abundant side dishes. The poor were more likely to rely on tougher cuts of bony meat, such as the neck, shoulder, and thigh—judged "excellent for a sweet, strengthening soup."³⁸ The absence of formal price controls in New York City rendered such class distinction informal, but they were no less real.

The old regime's market culture of paternalism reflected and reinforced popular expectations that governments would ensure a steady supply of meat, and at reasonable prices. But two intertwined developments eventually undermined the system in each city: the increased difficulties of ensuring supplies for a growing population, and public dissatisfaction with protected cartels. Clamor for increases in meat's availability clashed with government regulations on meat distribution and production methods. In this sense, the revolutions in meat provisioning of all three cities were integrally part of the democratic revolutions of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.

Revolutions in all three cities swept away the old regime in favor of experiments in unregulated market economics—albeit of varying scope, duration and rhythm. The democratic demands enunciated by Parisian sans-culottes, Mexico City patriots, and Jacksonian New Yorkers gave special attention to the vital political issue of meat provisioning. Although market reforms were only part of broader social movements, they brought liberal political economy home to the dinner table, thereby making the contested boundaries of state regulation in the labor market and the meat markets significant for the consuming public.

The specific nature of the reforms differed from city to city, but a few common themes emerged in the shift away from state authority to the marketplace. Liberalization removed first the geographic limitations on the meat trade, and the proliferation of retail outlets magnified the problem of urban slaughter and pollution. Moreover, these reforms opened the trade without giving adequate attention to regulating quality. Attempts to reconfigure networks of supply resulted in the spread of urban pollution, price inflation, and meat adulteration, and, as a result, consumers fell back on an earlier market culture with reawakened interest in government intervention.

The French Revolution introduced the first bold experiment in ending corporate cartels and implementing liberalism. The August decrees, put forth in 1789 as the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen, virtually dissolved feudal obligations as an assault on the basic human right of liberty. This end of privilege had an immediate effect on commercial life, even before the 1791 d'Allard Law abolished all guilds as societies of exclusive master members: journeymen left their positions with masters and established their own businesses. Country butchers poured into cities to engage in free enterprise. The presence of self-proclaimed butchers increased rapidly; the number of shops and stalls grew from 370 in 1781 to nearly 700 in 1790.³⁹ (See Figure 4.)

Figure 4: "La boucherie urbaine," from Cabinet d'Estampes, Collection Arts et Métiers. Reproduced with kind permission of the Bibliotheque national de France, Paris.

The frenzied marketplace brought a new level of disorder and malfeasance to commerce in the absence of guilds to regulate the "unqualified" butchers who plied their trade from meat carts and makeshift stalls throughout the city. This dramatic shift posed problems for the municipality even with the continued presence of the guild. Jean-Sylvain Bailly, the mayor of Paris at the time, was a realist, closing his eyes to the abuses that were quickly becoming the norm. He conceded that "resistance [to the statutes] was general and universal, the public pressure was not big enough, one was hard pressed to employ it, and license and infractions were gaining ground everyday."⁴⁰ Moreover, "la liberté de travail" did not create competitive prices, but rather encouraged hoarding and speculation. The economic crisis in Paris was exacerbated as revolutionary pressures to supply the citizen-army disrupted cattle supplies through mandatory requisitions. Parisians experienced sudden meat shortages, thereby raising the real price of meat.⁴¹

As numerous problems faced revolutionary France, the necessity of keeping food prices within reach of the lower classes prompted renewed government regulation. Paris's meat supply, long touted as a "good of first necessity," became a political priority for authorities responding to the economic crisis.⁴² In response to the women's march on Versailles in October of 1789, the National Assembly set limits on the price of meat at 8 sous a pound.⁴³ In October of 1790, the popular demand for red meat had become an absolute necessity for Parisian revolutionaries addressing the newly constituted National Assembly.⁴⁴ Under the popular pressure of the sans-culottes, the Jacobins sought to guarantee food staples at affordable prices for the urban populace through an economic dictatorship under the Committee of Public Safety. The revolutionary government instituted strict price controls of meat and other widely consumed items. The law of the general maximum, adopted on September 29, 1793, set prices of necessary goods, with meat topping the list, at the 1790 price plus one-third, and wages at twice their 1790 level. Armed militias scoured the countryside to arrest hoarders and speculators, but the economic terror failed to accomplish its goals, and fresh meat soon disappeared from the stalls and shops of Paris.⁴⁵

The Thermidorian Reaction relaxed price controls in December 1794, and traces of the liberal experiment persisted as unlicensed butchers remained free to practice their trade. Not until 1799 did Napoleon again begin to limit the number of stalls and, later, the number of butchers. The creation of the Syndicat de la Boucherie de Paris in 1811 established a new corporate structure under municipal rule with no more than 300 registered stalls. Yet even with the return of state controls, more circumscribed liberal experiments reemerged when shortages and higher prices forced open the trade to outsiders. Regulations governing the number of licensed butchers waxed and waned in the 1840s and 1850s in response to political turmoil and meat shortages. In 1859, the Cour de Cassation opened the trade to all merchants while requiring sanitary inspection. French liberalism in the meat trade thus led a fugitive existence.⁴⁶

Just as the French Revolution overthrew the privileges of guild merchants, the hated meat monopoly was abolished during Mexico's wars of independence. As the insurgency spread, threatening food supplies, Viceroy Francisco Javier Venegas declared comercio libre in 1813, simultaneously abolishing taxes and freeing vendors from the official carnicerías.⁴⁷ In just five years, the number of shops increased from thirteen to more than a hundred, and critics painted a morbid image of individuals slaughtering cattle in every public thoroughfare and "selling the meat by the by."⁴⁸ City officials then spent the rest of the nineteenth century struggling to regain regulatory control to prevent adulteration and pollution.

Although independence brought an end to the official monopoly, a small cartel of merchants quickly asserted a grip on Mexico City meat markets and retained control for the rest of the century. These specialized merchants, known as importers (introductores) from the internal tariff (alcabala) on livestock entering the city, operated with minimal regulatory oversight. An official later recalled that "they slaughtered cattle in a corral on the side of the granary [recogidas], facing south, in another at the Cacahuatal [Street of the Peanut Field], in those [two] on the Garrapata [Street of the Tick, appropriately], and in all of the hidden ones of the city, without order, many without paying taxes, neither the alcabala, nor the municipal [fees], and without any policing."⁴⁹ (See Figure 5.)

Figure 5: "Noticia carnicera" (News from the meat market), El Hijo del Ahuizote, July 16, 1899. The importers' monopoly, represented by a balloon, suspends cattle, sheep, goats, hogs, and chickens out of reach of the Mexico City poor. Reproduced with kind permission of the University of Texas at El Paso Library, Special Collections Department.

This tightly knit group easily beat off efforts at re-regulation because of both the abrupt break from the former locus of control, the municipal slaughterhouse, and the difficulty of establishing the health profession as a new scientific regulatory body. In 1848, the city attempted to recreate the colonial position of meat inspector by hiring a former National Guard colonel, but the importers quickly drove him from office. Subsequent political appointees served only brief terms, reducing their effectiveness in regulating the trade.⁵⁰ Responsibility for assuring wholesome meat eventually passed to the physicians of the Mexico City Board of Health (founded in 1841). Nevertheless, this body fought for decades to assert its authority over the liberal property rights of the local meat industry. In 1869, for example, livestock merchants appealed successfully to President Benito Juárez to preserve their interests against renewed city regulations.⁵¹ Liberalization, albeit permitting the control of a tight coterie of merchants, thus continued unchecked, although the city still resurrected paternalistic practices such as price ceilings and municipal sales in times of serious supply disruptions, under both conservative and liberal regimes.⁵²

Yet merchants were less successful in transforming popular attitudes, despite their efforts to inculcate liberal ideas about supply and demand in place of their perceived monopolistic power. During one meat shortage, an editorial in La Patria used the colorful language of the streets to portray attitudes about price fixing, concluding: "The children of labor are nothing more than slaves to His Majesty the Monopoly."⁵³ A few days later, a representative of the butchers responded in a letter attributing price fluctuations to natural market conditions. He dismissed "the irritating belief that the livestock importers [have]... the absolute power to corner the market on meat and impose fanciful prices." Instead, he described them as "merchants like any others... subject to the incontrovertible laws of supply and demand."⁵⁴ The argument proved persuasive, at least to the editors of La Patria, who abandoned their populist line, although the lower classes remained skeptical of the disinterested service of their butchers.⁵⁵

Liberalization came last to New York City, and while persisting longer than in France, enjoyed considerably less latitude than in Mexico City. Andrew Jackson's election in 1828 and the subsequent termination of the Second Bank of the United States accompanied rising opposition to government-protected corporate groups. One influential New York political party attacked the entire public market structure, asserting that "our bread, our meat, our vegetables, our fuel, all pay tribute to monopolists."⁵⁶ Growth of the city's population and size added to popular discontent, as trips to the public markets to buy meat became more onerous and encouraged violations of market laws. By the late 1830s, market butchers complained about unsanctioned meat shops "established in almost every part of the city."⁵⁷ Harsher penalties for non-market sales proved ineffective because even though the "fact of the violation may be proved beyond dispute, the Jury will, very frequently, render a verdict for the defendant."⁵⁸ The refusal of juries to convict outlaw butchers reflected a sea change in popular attitudes toward provisioning; regulation, rather than a municipal responsibility, was an infringement on liberty and the right to engage in commerce.

In 1843, the city council legalized meat sales in private stores. Shopping for meat changed with extraordinary speed. While butchers still needed to obtain licenses to engage in their business, the new regulations opened the door to Irish and German immigrants by removing the apprenticeship requirement. By the end of the decade, one-half of New York City's butchers were foreign-born, and 531 shops operated in the city. A contemporary observed, "it has become fashionable to have a meat shop on almost every corner." The butchering trade changed equally dramatically by fragmenting into store owners, their hired meat cutters, wholesale butchers still operating out of the public markets, and slaughterhouse workers who now were utterly separated from actual meat sales.⁵⁹

While consumers may have found obtaining meat more convenient, the systemic effect was chaos. As population tripled to one million between 1840 and 1870, the dispersal of slaughterhouses and retail outlets magnified urban problems.⁶⁰ In 1866, New York's Board of Health decried how "wild Western steers" were herded four miles from the Bull's Head Tavern stockyards to slaughterhouses, "causing alarm and apprehension," while the heavy traffic of meat carts returning from the wholesale markets to butcher shops proved a "great annoyance" to the public. As in Mexico City, public health advocates acted as the opening wedge of a new regulatory regime. The Board of Health asserted its authority over the meat trade, and by the mid-1870s had restricted slaughterhouses to a few blocks around 40th Street along either the east and west riverbanks of Manhattan.⁶¹

Such modified liberalism still proved inadequate, as health officials continued to decry the "filthy condition" of the city's fifty-four private slaughterhouses.⁶² Meanwhile, wholesale beef prices nearly doubled during the 1860s, and remained high until the 1877 recession created a widespread deflation throughout the American economy. New Yorkers could find a place to buy meat more easily in 1870 than 1840, but it was much more expensive and almost certainly not as wholesome. Even if price increases could be attributed to other factors, especially shortages caused by the Civil War, the promises of a plentiful and affordable meat supply through liberalization had been thoroughly discredited.⁶³

In Paris, successive coups and radical swings in politics made for unstable governments that were often at the mercy of consumer demands for subsistence and commercial pressures for market freedoms. In New York City and Mexico City, operating under far less radical regimes, market liberalism had much greater opportunity to flourish, especially where powerful economic groups like the importers held sway over supplies. The oscillations and inconsistencies in these unstable provisioning regimes, their incomplete embrace of liberalism and experimentation with new forms of state controls, conceal a common shift of regulatory focus. In place of the early modern concern with consumption—protecting public access to supply—the new regulatory impulses turned primarily toward production.

Particularly revealing is the connected nature of the reconstituted regimes—dare we call it the regulatory Thermidor?—as each successive polity sought to reconstitute the boundaries between public and private to restore order to the chaos of market liberalism. Slaughtering, rather than retailing, became the common thread of political regulation and linchpin of economic power in each society. Market integration and centralized meat processing not only streamlined production but also altered the quality of the final product. The growing medicalization of nineteenth-century society and public health initiatives also inflected market culture. Urbanites sought cleaner cities, ridding themselves of the stench and pollution of the butcher trade, without sacrificing the availability and quality of fresh meat. Concurrently, increased industrial output in a centralized slaughterhouse, often far from central markets, forced producers to find ways to keep meat "looking" fresh. These challenges raised medical questions over the definition of wholesomeness and sanitation, questions that draw on culturally specific notions of palatability and cleanliness.

As Alexis de Tocqueville might have imagined, the French experiment with market liberalization ended quickly under Napoleon I. Aided by his army of engineers, the emperor attempted to rebuild Paris and reorganize the provisioning system as well as to beautify and glorify his capital. These plans were finally accomplished with the massive public works under Bonaparte's nephew, Napoleon III. During this first imperial rule, which followed nearly a decade of revolution and disorder in the marketplace, the meat trade returned to fixed prices and forced requisitions in order to quell unrest. In 1810, Napoleon I eliminated the filth and hazards of meat processing from the urban space by ending the traditional practice of slaughter in the streets and alleys alongside shops and stalls. In their place, the city established five municipal abattoirs located on its outskirts, divorcing the circulation of livestock and slaughter from retail sales.⁶⁴

Centralizing slaughter under municipal control broke the traditional organization of the trade into two halves: a group of wage-earning slaughterhouse workers and the more traditional merchant butchers. Nevertheless, among the latter, the practice of apprenticeship and the title of master persisted as traditional elements of the trade until well into the nineteenth century. Membership in the reformulated cartel, the labor association (syndicat) of butchers, reappeared as a requirement to practice butchery, yet now it was the prefect of police who licensed butchers and limited stalls. The privileges of guild masters had given way to a career open to skill, hard work, and of course, capital, but this renewed system of exclusion also brought back the traditional hierarchies based on the capital and reputation of family firms. During the emperor Napoleon's rule, the trade retrenched dramatically from revolutionary liberalization, even as city police gained power at the expense of the guild jurés.⁶⁵

More significant changes to the trade came when such public health pioneers as Parent-Duchâtelet and Dr. Louis Roux, like their counterparts in Mexico City and New York City, attacked the presence of urban waste and disarray.⁶⁶ These ideas were not new. From late in the eighteenth century into the early nineteenth century, scientists and scholars had focused their attention on public hygiene, pointing to the evil within the city walls: trapped, polluted air from cemeteries, cesspools, and slaughterhouses that contaminated the urban food supply and bred "dangerous classes." The problems of urbanization became more acute with the rapid population growth in the first half of the nineteenth century that spurred overcrowded living conditions, faulty sewers, lack of air and light, and urban unrest. Projects put forth by the anti-contagionists centered on public hygiene in the marketplace, seen as a breeding ground for disease and popular revolt.⁶⁷ Hygienists acting as consumer advocates inspired a public health movement beginning in the 1830s and continuing through the next three decades.⁶⁸

This process of urban renewal further reconfigured the meat supply, particularly after the installation of the Second Empire. Napoleon III transformed Paris underground as well as above, and in 1858, a new central market at Les Halles opened with connections to an underground railway linking it to the livestock market and abattoirs at La Villette. By joining the cattle market with the public slaughterhouse, where production and distribution could be carefully monitored by city inspectors, urban regulators decisively replaced the old regime provisioning system that had relied on guild merchants. Furthermore, they ensured a wholesome product from barnyard to market stall with minimum transaction costs.⁶⁹

A few years after the opening of the La Villette slaughterhouse, New York City meat provisioning underwent an equivalent movement away from the liberal experiment of mid-century. Similar to France, health concerns brought renewed state supervision but in an utterly different system framed by the nationalization of the meat supply under private corporate control. Acquisition of Western grasslands due to the U.S.-Mexican War and the expulsion of the Plains Indians shifted the locus of meat production to the Midwest. The development of refrigerated meat cars by Chicago-based Swift & Company then revolutionized America's meat business by permitting radical separation of slaughter from urban retail markets. In October 1882, Harper's Weekly confidently announced that the "era of cheap beef has begun for New York" with the opening of Swift's first refrigerated meat wholesale shop. Lower prices sped up consumer acceptance of chilled beef, and by the mid-1880s wholesale beef prices had declined to 1860 levels, even as wages increased.⁷⁰

Separating production so radically from consumption, however, brought a new set of problems. How was the wholesomeness of the meat to be guaranteed by municipalities when it was produced outside their jurisdiction? Meat-packing fragmented the division of labor so that the sobriquet "butcher" was a degraded category indicating not a skilled craftsman but rather someone trained to perform an individual step of the slaughtering process.⁷¹ Moreover, nationalizing meat production created incentives for firms to find methods to extend meat's salable life—even at the expense of wholesomeness. Greater productivity concomitantly induced firms to find new ways to keep meat fresh through the introduction of chemicals previously unknown in the food supply.

Boracic acid and borax were the principal ingredients added to meat by the large national firms. Both were antiseptic compounds used initially to treat wounds, but also employed to inhibit bacterial growth in food products, and turn-of-the-century meat industry formulas routinely contained substantial quantities. To maintain meat's "fresh appearance," one industry handbook recommended treating fresh beef with a solution containing one-and-a-third pounds of borax and boracic acid for every gallon of water. Borax was routinely sprinkled on fresh meat prior to shipment, "to prevent them [the meat] turning slippery or moldy."⁷²

These two ingredients were at the center of the public health controversy that finally resulted, after publication of Upton Sinclair's exposé, The Jungle, in federal regulation of meat industry. Defenders of boracic acid and borax claimed these materials were of "inestimable value" in safeguarding the public's health because of their prevention of contamination.⁷³ Critics, led by Harvey Wiley, countered by stressing the incremental impact of these products, alleging that over time these agents could damage the kidneys. In 1906, the Department of Agriculture banned use of borax and boracic acid in food products in the same measure that finally imposed federal inspection over the national meat industry.⁷⁴

Sparked by particular abuses, the 1906 Meat Inspection Act ultimately proved as significant for where it pointed as for what it legislated. Passage brought a close to the liberal experiment in American meat-packing. Meat was one of the last bastions of municipal regulation overthrown by the Jacksonian revolution, and its re-regulation was one of the opening salvos of the American Progressive era and its reconfiguration of the relationship between society and the state. Placed in the context of government policy since American independence, the nineteenth-century liberal experiment in the meat trade appears as merely an interruption in the dominant market culture of regulation governing this industry, rather than a marker of America's exceptional reluctance to regulate producers.

In Mexico City, the government attempted to install a system of refrigerated meat-packing technology, imported from the United States. Their failure to duplicate Swift's success demonstrates the limitations of the industrial model in the face of incompatible cultural traditions and constrained natural resources. The adoption of refrigerated meat-packing became possible once the country had achieved a measure of peace under the dictatorship of Porfirio Díaz (1876–1911). In 1908, the Mexican National Packing Company opened a packinghouse in the western cattle country of Michoacán and began shipments of chilled beef to the capital.

Company president John W. DeKay recognized that success depended on convincing Mexico City consumers of the superiority of refrigerated meat, and he advertised heavily, emphasizing the company's dedication to supplying "clean, wholesome, and properly prepared meats." The products bore the label "El Popo," after the volcano Popocatépetl, both for nostalgic appeal and because "DeKay Meat" made a poor brand name.⁷⁵ Local merchants fought back against the foreign rival with a promotional campaign of their own, not only implying that Popo brand tasted inferior to freshly slaughtered beef but also casting doubt on the company's claims of sanitary benefits from refrigerated meat. "It loses its juice, it becomes discolored, it is insipid and acquires a rare tenderness, due, perhaps, to the beginning of decomposition."⁷⁶

DeKay won the battle but lost the war for Mexican consumers. El Popo's success depended on achieving a decisive cost advantage over local competitors, but also on forcing prices low enough to allow regular meat purchases by the masses. Yet American expansion had deprived Mexico of lands on which to raise abundant supplies of corn-fattened cattle whose carcasses would age well under refrigeration.⁷⁷ DeKay's attempts to achieve vertical integration and industrial efficiency also caused the three branches of the local meat trade, wholesale importers, slaughterhouse workers, and retail meat cutters, to put aside their longstanding rivalries in order to fight the foreign interloper. This cross-class alliance of Mexican butchers engaged in union actions, industrial sabotage, even shop-floor attempts to murder the foreign managers.⁷⁸ Moreover, the campaign to build market share in the face of a strong consumer preference for fresh meat proved costly. Popo retail stores practically gave their meat away, selling for one-fifth of their competitors' prices, and by February of 1910, this price war forced the company into bankruptcy, allowing another generation of importers to gain control of the Mexico City market and continue the old, labor-intensive methods of supplying fresh meat.⁷⁹

Although DeKay failed to bring economies of scale to the local meat industry, his importation of chemical additives from the United States inspired the Mexican government to assume responsibility for regulating the meat trade. After the Díaz regime fell in 1911, members of the new revolutionary government discovered that the company had engaged in widespread adulteration. As a result, in 1912, the government published a new code for the sale of food and beverages, comparable to the American Pure Food and Drugs Act of 1906, imposing harsh penalties on the sale of unwholesome foods.⁸⁰ Further improvements in the nation's meat supply were interrupted by revolutionary violence, from which the country recovered only in the 1920s. Beginning in the 1930s, however, revolutionary governments established an elaborate welfare bureaucracy seeking to guarantee supplies of meat and other staples, although corruption within the ruling party worked to undermine the goals of this paternalistic policy. As an epilogue, the U.S. industrial model was abruptly adopted in 1992 when a neoliberal administration closed the municipal slaughterhouse while dismantling the revolutionary food program.⁸¹

In all three cities, a market culture of health regulation intended to ensure wholesomeness of supply replaced the prior government commitment to ensure sufficient supplies at reasonable prices for consumers. Liberalism had left its mark, but the public no longer trusted the unregulated market economy for meat supplies. Tensions among price, access, and wholesomeness remained, even as mass production began to transform the industry and as each new provisioning regime in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries operated under progressively thicker layers of state regulation.

The McDonald's hamburger has become one of the most universally recognized and most contentious icons of contemporary globalization. Supporters of the fast-food chain view it as a force for democracy, allowing people throughout the world the choice of an efficient, dependable, hygienic source of food containing more protein than vegetarian peasant cuisines.⁸² Careful observers point out, moreover, that McDonald's restaurants offer far more than simply food and that they have achieved such enormous popularity precisely because they allow people to experience the American lifestyle.⁸³ Critics of the chain such as the French burger-Luddite, José Bové, agree that the greatest danger of the transnational corporation is its ability to lure middle-class consumers—those who can afford fast food—away from traditional French symbols such as the baguette to an Americanized "McWorld," which not only lacks diversity but also threatens nutritional health.⁸⁴ American food has thus become a model of modernity, aspired to by the rest of the world, for better or worse.

Yet the hamburger is only the latest incarnation of an American meat culture with deep historical roots. Democratic access to meat has always been one of the great attractions for immigrants, whether arriving from eighteenth-century England or twentieth-century Mexico. Indeed, meat was so plentiful that price controls often seen as being the essence of a paternalistic, moral economy never took root. This abundance continued even during the massive urban growth of the nineteenth century, thanks to the timely development of industrial refrigerated meat-packing technology. At first glance, the examples of Paris and Mexico City, with their corporatist resistance to capitalist enterprise, serve only to magnify this apparent example of American exceptionalism.

Nevertheless, close attention to patterns of change in the grammar of liberalism reveals curious antinomies that belie the standard narrative of liberal, capitalist progress exemplified by American industry. All three cities followed similar patterns of deregulation followed by reaction against the unchecked power of the marketplace. Moreover, New York City emerges as the retrograde case in which liberal provisioning policies lagged a half century behind Paris and a generation behind Mexico City. Paris experienced the briefest period of liberal experimentation as a flashpoint of liberal reform and revolution that exposed the ravages of unbridled competition. Mexico City was the most committed to liberal reform despite its reputation for military coups rather than a developed civil society.⁸⁵ And the re-regulation that followed the collapse of liberal experiments shared key characteristics: the imposition of health controls at the point of production even as the site of production varied between the three cities.

Understanding the cross-cultural experience of meat provisioning therefore requires a deconstruction of the liberal narrative, starting with the faith in free market liberalization. Paris, New York City, and Mexico City each saw a dramatic increase in the number of retailers under their liberal experiments, but this did not initially translate to any real benefits in quantity, price, or quality, stimulating renewed political pressure for a return to regulation. Admittedly, the French experience took place during a period of general economic disorder. But while this liberalization democratized the métier for many workers, free trade did little to increase the availability of meat for the sans-culottes. The French government quickly saw the need for oversight and controls, although it remained difficult to find the right balance between regulating standards of sanitation in production and allowing for a free labor market. Political configurations in New York City allowed the chaotic liberal experiment to continue longer, essentially until the arrival of refrigerated meat removed the trade from the control of local health authorities and merchant butchers alike. Nevertheless, relocating production did not solve the problems of wholesomeness, and in 1906 the federal government finally stepped in to fill the regulatory gap. After a long struggle, Mexican officials attempted to emulate this U.S. industrial model to resolve their own supply shortages during the Porfirian era, but, without a solid financial basis, the private meat packers could not overcome the resistance of consumers and local tradesmen. When the revolutionary government finally ended the liberal market in meat, the dominance of fresh meat from local municipal slaughterhouses made the Mexican system more similar to France than to its northern neighbor.

The notion that a capitalist economy brings about a simultaneous shift in consumer expectations when a paternalist regime is replaced with a deregulated, free market system also appears oversimplified in light of the comparative experience of Paris, New York City, and Mexico City. The revolutionary mobilization of the Parisian sans-culottes after 1789 and of Mexico City vecinos after 1910 actually fell back on paternalistic rhetoric when popular demands from these new liberal regimes included basic food entitlements at a fair price for all. Such a notion of parity and justice forms an essential constituent of liberalism: equality. Even in New York City, where more or less abundant supplies and competitive prices were never seriously in doubt, the public continued to express its moral entitlement to wholesome meat. Thus the rise of the consumer movement drew on elements contained within an earlier epoch, when the government's moral obligations placed the meat trade within their purview of public service. Of course, the exact configuration of this market culture of meat did change over time, even as it differed between countries. Nevertheless, this continuity belies the totalizing assumptions of economics with its views of pure market functions and demonstrates the ways that markets remain embedded in social practices.

Comparing the experience of Mexico and the United States, finally, calls into question the benefits or even the possibility of universalizing the Western industrial meat-packing model. New York City increased its meat supplies only by tapping the resources of the far West, which left Mexico unable to achieve a similar transformation. Moreover, the cattle in what remained of northern Mexico were shipped across the border rather than south to the capital because of the higher incomes in the United States.⁸⁶ Meat-packing technology did not become entrenched in Mexico City until the 1990s, and even then it was due to administrative fiat rather than consumer preference. The change led not to the widespread availability of prime sirloin steaks but rather to the consumption of lean cattle that had lost its fresh taste without any corresponding gain in tenderness from the time spent under refrigeration.

The points of comparison examined here suggest many applications for the wider historical profession. This case, in particular, illustrates the material and symbolic centrality of food, a topic that remains marginalized in historical research. Foods, as commodities with social lives of their own, elicit "biographies" that place the political climate in stark relief. Historians can also follow "trails" along the supply chain to reveal detailed landscapes of economic activity and cultural nuance.⁸⁷ E. P. Thompson long ago pointed to the political significance of provisioning, but his concept of "moral economy" has been applied most often to subjects other than food riots.⁸⁸ And although individual foodstuffs such as sugar and corn have been recognized as crucial to the rise of capitalism,⁸⁹ studies of the food-processing industries have been more concerned with issues of labor, technology, and business than with the social context of the foods themselves.⁹⁰ Nevertheless, in the past decade, there has been a growing body of scholarship examining the crucial role of cuisine in the formation of ethnicity, class, gender, and national identity.⁹¹ Our connected comparison also indicates how market culture can provide a useful analytic vector with which to explore the intersection between economic production and social reproduction. These cases illustrate how market culture is grounded in social processes that shape and are shaped by particular claims of healthfulness, necessity, and what is just, if not democratic. Market culture highlights how consumer expectations vary depending on particular goods and services. Certainly meat, a perishable food that satisfies basic human needs, generates a range of demands and concerns that differ to some degree from those associated with durable products such as cars, services such as lodging, or government activities such as payments for medical care and old age pensions.⁹² Yet there is a relationship between these adjacent centers of social life, as the beliefs and (competing) claims associated with food influence expectations in other sectors. Because of popular sensitivity to food supplies, and the daily experience entailed in obtaining meat, there were more dramatic swings in the extent and character of state regulation than might be the case in other areas of society. Nevertheless, attention to market culture can help gain a larger recognition that, whether we like it or not, the experience of buying a piece of meat, or indeed most other commodities, is a constitutive part of our social fabric and helps to form the ideology through which citizens understand their societies.

Comparative analysis, closely focused, balances our use of market culture. Interpreting the embedded nature of markets requires close attention to cultural nuance, but the specialization that allows such an undertaking can also conceal the multiplicity of possible outcomes. Cross-cultural comparison is essential to avoid exceptionalist narratives of the sort voiced by the National Provisioner, with its predictions of the inevitable triumph of American industrial models. The comparison of market culture with respect to meat reveals the ways that people in Paris, New York, and Mexico City adapted to their own circumstances ideas drawn from a transatlantic dialogue about democratic reform, economic change, and health initiatives. Moreover, by framing our study across the "great transformation," we have looked for continuities in market culture that are equally relevant to scholars of pre-modern and contemporary times.⁹³ Certainly there are many unique political events in our story; there is little in the historical record to match the turbulence of the French Revolution. Yet our use of market culture to compare these distinctive national narratives rests on the common experience of urban residents, rich and poor, trying to find sufficient food to keep their families alive and healthy.

Ultimately, we find it significant that the scientific authority of health professionals as disinterested third parties trumped private interest in each case, although regulatory forms varied widely. Such convergence sharply contrasts with the enormous divergence in meat provisioning systems, as each nation solved the problems of animal supply, processing, and distribution in utterly different manners. Even with its progressive claims, the renewed regulatory framework harkened back to assumptions underlying the old regime provisioning systems, that public authority—rather than private economic interests—should have final oversight over the provisioning of meat for the multitudes.

This article began with a chance meeting at a Hagley Museum and Library conference, took form through panels at the Association for the Study of Food and Society, American Historical Association, and European Business History Association, and initially cohered into a single essay in a May 2002 research seminar at Hagley. At various stages, comments by Warren Belasco, Donna Gabaccia, Thomas Brennan, Mark Wasserman, Philip Scranton, William Sewell, James Brophy, Michael Grossberg, and several anonymous AHR readers vastly improved the essay. Given our culinary interests, we are indebted to our chef, Blair Grossman, who hosted a meeting in Richmond that first gave form to this article. The authors want to recognize support they received from the Hagley Museum and Library, University of Richmond, and The Citadel during the drafting process.

Roger Horowitz is Associate Director of the Center for the History of Business, Technology, and Society at the Hagley Museum and Library and currently serves as Secretary-Treasurer of the Business History conference and president of Oral History in the Mid-Atlantic Region (OHMAR). His published books include Negro and White, Unite and Fight! A Social History of Industrial Unionism in Meatpacking, 1930–1990 (1997), and, with Rick Halpern, Meatpackers: An Oral History of Black Packinghouse Workers and Their Struggle for Racial and Economic Equality (1999). Horowitz prepared the entry on "Meat" in the Oxford University Press Encyclopedia of American Food and Drink. In 2005 Johns Hopkins will publish his book Meat in America: Technology, Taste, Tranformation.

Jeffery Pilcher has written extensively on Mexican popular culture, including ¡Que vivan los tamales! Food and the Making of Mexican Identity (1998), and Cantinflas and the Chaos of Mexican Modernity (2001). His interest in comparative food history has led to research on the transnational meat-packing industry, the globalization of Mexican cuisine, and a forthcoming book entitled Food in World History. He is an associate professor of history at The Citadel in Charleston, South Carolina.

Sydney Watts is an assistant professor in the History Department at the University of Richmond. Her major fields of interest include early modern France and food history. She has recently completed a book manuscript entitled Meat Matters: Butchers, Politics and Market Culture in Eighteenth-Century Paris. Her current project is on the history of Lent and secular society from the sixteenth through the eighteenth centuries.

Notes

¹ The National Provisioner 185 (July 4, 1981): 5.

² Marion Nestle, Safe Food: Bacteria, Biotechnology, and Bioterrorism (Berkeley, Calif., 2003); Maxime Schwartz, How the Cows Turned Mad (Berkeley, 2003).

³ Roger Horowitz, "Negro and White, Unite and Fight!" A Social History of Industrial Unionism in Meatpacking, 1930–1990 (Urbana, Ill., 1997); Meat in America: Technology, Taste, Transformation (Baltimore, forthcoming); Jeffrey M. Pilcher, The Sausage Rebellion: Public Health, Private Enterprise, and Meat in Mexico City, 1890–1917 (Albuquerque, N.M., forthcoming); Sydney Watts, "Boucherie et hygiène à Paris au XVIII^e siècle," Révue d'histoire moderne et contemporaine 51: 3 (July–September 2004); "Meat Matters: The Butchers of Eighteenth-Century Paris" (PhD dissertation, Cornell University, 1999).

⁴ E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (New York, 1963); Albert O. Hirschman, The Passions and the Interests: Political Arguments for Capitalism before Its Triumph (Princeton, N.J., 1977); William M. Reddy, The Rise of Market Culture: The Textile Trade and French Society, 1750–1900 (Cambridge, 1984); Mary Poovey, A History of the Modern Fact: Problems of Knowledge in the Sciences of Wealth and Society (Chicago, 1998); Craig Muldrew, The Economy of Obligation: The Culture of Credit and Social Relations in Early Modern England (New York, 1998); John Smail, Merchants, Markets and Manufacture: The English Wool Textile Industry in the Eighteenth Century (New York, 1999); Victoria E. Thompson, The Virtuous Marketplace: Women and Men, Money and Politics in Paris, 1830–1870 (Baltimore, 2000); Lisa Tiersten, Marianne in the Market: Envisioning Consumer Society in Fin-de-Siècle France (Berkeley, Calif., 2001).

⁵ The paradigmatic work in economic and business history comes from Philip Scranton, especially Endless Novelty: Specialty Production and American Industrialization, 1865–1925 (Princeton, N.J., 1997). Other studies include the essays in Roger Horowitz and Arwen Mohun, eds., His and Hers: Gender, Consumption, and Technology (Charlottesville, Va., 1998); Susan Strasser, Satisfaction Guaranteed: The Making of the American Mass Market (New York, 1989); Regina Lee Blaszczyk, Imagining Consumers: Design and Innovation from Wedgwood to Corning (Baltimore, 2000). On the politics of consumer culture, see Lizabeth Cohen, A Consumers' Republic: The Politics of Mass Consumption in Postwar America (New York, 2003); Margaret Jacobs, Pocketbook Politics: Economic Citizenship in Twentieth-Century America (Princeton, 2005).

⁶ Economic historian Douglass C. North has dismissed the assumption of rationality as inappropriate for understanding historical change and called instead for an examination of the effects of institutions on economic behavior. See his Nobel Prize address, published as "Epilogue: Economic Performance through Time," in Lee J. Alston, Thráinn Eggertsson, and North, eds., Empirical Studies in Institutional Change (Cambridge, 1996), 347; as well as Institutions, Institutional Change, and Economic Performance (Cambridge, 1990). The historical literature on market culture simultaneously intersects with a rising insurgency by economic psychologists, feminist economists, and others who have probed the numerous situations in contemporary Western society that defy seeming economic rationality, particularly within the domestic sphere. Important works include Nancy Folbre, The Invisible Heart: Economics and Family Values (New York, 2001); Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman, "Rational Choice and the Framing of Decisions," in Robin M. Hogarth and Melvin W. Reder, eds., Rational Choice (Chicago, 1986).

⁷ The terms formal and substantive appeared in Karl Polanyi, "The Economy as Instituted Process," in Polanyi, Conrad Arensberg, and Harry Pearson, eds., Trade and Markets in the Early Empires (New York, 1957), 243–70. For a recent summary of the debate, see Richard R. Wilk, Economies and Cultures: Foundations of Economic Anthropology (Boulder, Colo., 1996), 5–13.

⁸ Thomas L. Haskell and Richard F. Teichgraeber III, eds., The Culture of the Market: Historical Essays (Cambridge, 1993).

⁹ Robert W. Hefner, ed., Market Cultures: Society and Morality in the New Asian Capitalisms (Boulder, Colo., 1998).

¹⁰ We draw from Katznelson's essay, "Working Class Formation and American Exceptionalism, Yet Again," where he argues for "a shift in the angle of vision away from the state as such to the character of the rules and institutions that govern the transactions between the state and civil society." Rather than see liberalism as a stable set of ideas and practices, Katznelson suggests that the most fruitful line of comparative inquiry would be at the level of its "grammar," the rules and relationships that were focal points for recurrent crises and reformulation, and through which scholars could explore "whether critical moments in American political development have coincided with such moments elsewhere." The essay may be found in Rick Halpern and Jonathan Morris, eds., American Exceptionalism? US Working Class Formation in an International Context (London, 1997), 36–55.

¹¹ E. P. Thompson has provided the most influential analysis of consumer politics through the "moral economy" of the crowd. Although this notion has been adopted as a handy yardstick for measuring collective violence of all sorts, Thompson used it as a mode for analyzing consumer expectations (not necessarily actions) that were bound to a paternalist model of food marketing where governments intervened for the public good. Conflict arose among producers, consumers, and public officials as this market culture (characterized by the moral imperatives that bound a paternalistic state to its people) confronted a liberal regime of the free market in grain. Meat, by contrast, as a good of heterogeneous nature and elastic demand, rarely incited riots but nonetheless remained a source of popular concern and, at times, collective action. Consumer expectations focused on the quality of this perishable rather than on price alone, along with economic structures such as the consistency of cattle supplies and the organization of distribution of this basic foodstuff to the urban populace. The elements of a "moral economy of meat" thus found expression under the old regime in popular consensus as to the legitimacy of cattle wholesaling and meat retailing practices. See "The Moral Economy of the English Crowd in the Eighteenth Century," Past and Present 50 (February 1971): 76–136; "The Moral Economy Reviewed," in Customs in Common (New York, 1993), 261.

¹² Beef was primarily consumed fresh because of its inadequacy as a cured product. Unlike pork, which takes well to curing because of the shorter, less dense muscle fibers and the distribution of fat throughout the flesh, beef is rendered hard and tasteless by the process of salting and drying.

¹³ See Joyce Appleby, Liberalism and Republicanism in the Historical Imagination (Cambridge, Mass., 1992); William J. Novack, The People's Welfare: Law and Regulation in Nineteenth-Century America (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1996), esp. chap. 3.

¹⁴ In March 1791, the National Assembly issued the d'Allard law, abolishing guilds across France. In June of that year, the Le Chapelier laws forbade workers' associations altogether.

¹⁵ According to a report to the procurator general, the butchers acknowledged "une augmentation de leur débit d'une cinquième depuis quelques années." Bibliothèque Nationale de France (hereafter, BNF), Collection Joly de Fleury, mss. 460, folio 191; A. Husson, Les consommations de Paris (Paris, 1875), 157; M. Lachiver, "L'approvisionnement de Paris en viande au XVIII^e siècle," in La France d'Ancien Régime: Etudes réunis en l'honneur de P. Goubert (Toulouse, 1984), 345–54, 352.

¹⁶ Juan Pedro Viqueira Albán, ¿Relajados o reprimidos? Diversiones públicas y vida social en la ciudad de México durante el Siglo de las Luces (Mexico City, 1987), 132–35.

¹⁷ U.S. Bureau of the Census, Ninth Census of the United States: Population (Washington, D.C., 1872), 51.

¹⁸ Livestock provisions included sheep, cows, steer, veal, and a nominal number of pigs. For statistics on cattle entries in 1637, see BNF, Collection Joly de Fleury, 1428, fols. 1–14, published in Arthur-Michel de Boislisle, ed., Mémoire de la généralité de Paris (Paris, 1881), 658–59. For later statistics, see Marcel Lachiver, "L'approvisionnement de Paris en viande au XVIII^e siècle," in La France d'Ancien Régime, 345–54; and Bernard Garnier, "Des boeufs pour Paris: Commercialisation et élevage en Basse-Normandie (1700–1900)," Annales de Bretagne et des Pays de l'Ouest 106, no. 1 (January–March 1999): 101–20, esp. 104–05.

¹⁹ Jean-Marc Moriceau, L'elevage sous l'Ancien Régime, XVI^e–XVIII^e siècles, (Paris, 1999); Bernard Garnier, "Les marchés aux bestiaux: Paris et sa banlieue," Cahiers d'histoire 42, no. 3–4 (1997): 575–609.

²⁰ Manuscript collection, "Commerce de la viande dans les marchés de Sceaux et de Poissy, 1705–1725," Archives Nationales de France (hereafter, ANF), G7 1668–70, fols. 157–213; see esp. letter dated March 1, 1724, fol. 161; ANF, G7 1677; F12 fol. 59.

²¹ François Chevalier, Land and Society in Colonial Mexico: The Great Hacienda, Alvin Eustis, trans. (Berkeley, Calif., 1970), 95, 116, 123; Herman W. Konrad, A Jesuit Hacienda in Colonial Mexico: Santa Lucía, 1576–1767 (Stanford, Calif., 1980), 175–82; Doris M. Ladd, The Mexican Nobility at Independence, 1780–1826 (Austin, Tex., 1976), 49.

²² Eric Van Young, Hacienda and Market in Eighteenth-Century Mexico: The Rural Economy of the Guadalajara Region, 1675–1820 (Berkeley, Calif., 1981), 202–03; Nils Jacobsen, "Livestock Complexes in Late Colonial Peru and New Spain: An Attempt at Comparison," in Jacobsen and Hans-Jürgen Puhle, eds., The Economies of Mexico and Peru during the Late Colonial Period, 1760–1810 (Berlin, 1986), 123; Charles H. Harris III, A Mexican Family Empire: The Latifundio of the Sánchez Navarros, 1765–1867 (Austin, Tex., 1975), 80; Guy P. C. Thomson, Puebla de los Angeles: Industry and Society in a Mexican City, 1700–1850 (Boulder, Colo., 1989), 131; Charles Gibson, The Aztecs under Spanish Rule: A History of the Indians of the Valley of Mexico, 1519–1810 (Stanford, Calif., 1964), 346.

²³ J. Ritchie Garrison, "Farm Dynamics and Regional Exchange: The Connecticut Valley Beef Trade, 1670–1850," Agricultural History 61 (1987): 1–17.

²⁴ Ulysses Prentiss Hedrick, A History of Agriculture in the State of New York (New York, 1933), 374–76. Thomas De Voe, "The Introduction and History of Cattle in America," unpublished manuscript, 169–78; undated article, "The Butchers and Drovers Bank" (c. 1877) in folder, "Notes and Clippings about Butchers"; entry for Ernest Keyser in folio volume, "List of Butchers in New York City"; all Thomas De Voe Papers, New-York Historical Society. David C. Smith and Anne E. Bridges, "The Brighton Market: Feeding Nineteenth-Century Boston," Agricultural History 56 (1982): 3–21.

²⁵ The World, February 3, 1877, De Voe Papers.

²⁶ The royal procurator and the lieutenant general of police administered this oath to the master and merchant butchers annually. As the text states: "Donnons pareillement lettres du Serment et soumission faits par ledits sindics [sic] et adjoints et par les autres marchands Bouchers presents [sic] de garnir en viande de boucherie bonne loyale et marchande [emphasis mine] chacune son égard les Etaux à eux cy [sic] dessus adjugé." ANF, Y 9503/B.

²⁷ Ivonne Mijares, Mestizo alimentario: El abasto en la ciudad de México en el siglo XVI (Mexico City, 1993), 98–99; William H. Dusenberry, "The Regulation of Meat Supply in Sixteenth-Century Mexico City," Hispanic American Historical Review 28 (February 1948): 45; Ward Barrett, "The Meat Supply of Colonial Cuernavaca," Annals of the Association of American Geographers 64 (December 1974): 527; Constantino Bayle, Los cabildos seculares en la America Española (Madrid, 1952), 473–79. On the Spanish abasto de carne, see María Antonia Carmona Ruiz, La ganadería en el reino de Sevilla durante la baja edad media (Seville, 1998), 300–06.

²⁸ Slaughterhouse workers' petition of May 20, 1813, in Archivo Histórico de la Ciudad de México (hereafter, AHCM), vol. 8, exp. 282. See also Actas, April 2, 1538, AHCM, vol. 632A; Gabriel Haslip-Viera, Crime and Punishment in Late Colonial Mexico City, 1692–1810 (Albuquerque, N.M., 1999), 76–77.

²⁹ The best source on New York City's antebellum public markets is Thomas F. De Voe, The Market Book: A History of the Public Markets of the City of New York (1862; New York, 1970).

³⁰ David Bien, "Offices, Corps, and a System of State Credit: The Uses of Privilege under the Ancien Régime," in Keith Michael Baker, ed., The French Revolution and the Creation of Modern Political Culture, 4 vols. (Durham, N.C., 1989), 1: 92.

³¹ Daniel Roche has demonstrated the growing presence of cooking implements through a study of the probate records of Parisian artisans and domestics. Roche concludes that quick-fried meats gradually replaced the slow, simmering stews known as pot au feu. Roche, "Cuisine et alimentation populaire à Paris," Dix-Huitième siècle 15 (1983): 7–18; Jean-Louis Flandrin, "Dietary Choices and Culinary Technique, 1500–1800," in Flandrin and Massimo Montanari, eds., Food: A Culinary History from Antiquity to the Present, Clarissa Botsford, trans., et al. (New York, 1999), 403–17.

³² Royal proclamation, "Portant Reglement sur les Estaux des Boucheries de Paris," announced in Paris March 13, 1719, published in 1720. BNF, Collection Delamare, mss. fr. 21656, fols. 216–17.

³³ The municipal government also controlled the price of tripe and other offal, as these were meats "destined for the poor." In the mid-eighteenth century, a shopper paid 2 sous for each beef's liver, 5 sous for the heart, 9 sous a pound for prepared tripe. By definition, the basse viande also included beef tongue, veal's feet, and tête de veau. BNF, Collection Joly de Fleury, mss. 77, fol. 289; BNF, mss. fr. 6687, cited in H. Monin, L'état de Paris en 1789 (Paris, 1889), 442.

³⁴ Jean Vidalenc, "Une industrie alimentaire à Paris au XVIII^e siècle: La préparation et la vente des tripes et abats," Mémoires de la Fédération des Sociétés Historiques et Archéologiques de Paris et de l'Ile-de-France 1 (1949): 279–95; Jeffry Kaplow, The Names of Kings (New York, 1972), 53–54.

³⁵ Joaquín García Icazbalceta, Noticias de México, recogidas por D. Francisco Sedano vecino de esta ciudad desde el año de 1756 (Mexico City, 1880), 67–68.

³⁶ Eric Van Young, La crisis del orden colonial: Estructura agraria y rebeliones populares de la Nueva España, 1750–1821 (Mexico City, 1992), 51–123.

³⁷ Richard Stott, Workers in the Metropolis: Class, Ethnicity, and Youth in Antebellum New York City (Ithaca, N.Y., 1990), 177, 179 (quote).

³⁸ Thomas De Voe, The Market Assistant (New York, 1867), 57.

³⁹ ANF, F11 1146, cited in Louis Bergeron, "Approvisionnement et consommation à Paris sous le Premier Empire," Mémoires de la Féderation des Sociétés Historiques et Archéologique de Paris et Ile-de-France 14 (1963): 197–232.

⁴⁰ Jean-Sylvain Bailly, Mémoires de Bailly, Berville and Barrière, eds., 3 vols. (Paris, 1822), 2: 275–76. See also Steven Laurence Kaplan, La fin des corporations (Paris, 2001), 364–71.

⁴¹ The downward spiral of the government's newly issued legal tender (the assignat) caused the price of meat to rise from 12 sous a pound in June 1790 to 19 sous in June 1793, far outpacing the rise in wages. George Rudé, The Crowd in the French Revolution (London, 1959), 125–26.

⁴² The phrase, "la viande de boucherie est la nourriture la plus ordinaire après le pain," appears in several eighteenth-century dictionaries including Denis Diderot and Jean Le Rond d'Alembert's Encyclopédie: Ou Dictionnaire raisonné des sciences des arts et métiers, 17 vols. (Paris, 1751), 2: 350–52, as well as the subsequent Encyclopédie méthodique, 46 vols. (Paris, 1782–1832), 26: 229; and Nicolas Delamare, Traité de la police (Paris, 1705), vol. 1, book 5, p. 571. In a 1719 royal regulation of Parisian butcher stalls, the crown announced its "singular intention to procure for their subjects and principal inhabitants of our good city of Paris the abundance and cheapness of goods [butcher's meat] necessary for their subsistence." Royal proclamation, "Portant Reglement sur les Estaux des Boucheries de Paris," announced in Paris March 13, 1719, published in 1720. BNF, Collection Delamare,