Uncertainty

Abstract This chapter returns to the question of why some elites and members of the middle and professional classes continued to endorse ideas of ‘artificial famine’, even as such language became increasingly associated with Jacobin sympathies and the increasingly violent revolution in France. I argue here that we can best explain the perseverance of artificial famine as a concept by pointing towards the uncertainty caused by the new efforts to compile agricultural statistics. This chapter focuses on the communications and views of England’s magistrates as compiled by the Home Office during its efforts to conduct its own agricultural surveys through the use of circular letters in 1795. It shows that magistrates across the country were deeply divided on the causes of scarcity, and that some endorsed the belief that there was real famine (not only scarcity and hunger) in their counties. Building on this consideration, the chapter views how committees within the House of Commons and also within the Board of Agriculture remained open to technical solutions to scarcity that presumed price manipulations and hoarding by agents in the food market chain. These solutions—such as distributing hand mills amongst Britain’s poor—would have increased consumption of wheat if enacted, directly contradicting the expressed aims of the Board to reduce consumption of this key foodstuff. The chapter introduces the concept of epistemic vulnerability to argue that these contradictory positions made sense given the uncertainty surrounding efforts to accurately count and measure the country’s harvests and food supply.