Rationing

Origins of an Idea

The modern notion of rationing can be traced to the Siege of Paris during the Franco-Prussian War of 1870–1871. The Prussian Army invested Paris in September 1870, lifting the siege four months later. With supplies cut and calls from the left for the introduction of requisitioning and rationing, the national and municipal governments took steps to control the distribution of food, fixing food prices and then requisitioning wheat, flour, cattle, and horses before rationing civilian consumption of meat and finally bread.

There was nothing new about the Parisian rationing system. The book of Ezekiel, thought to have been written between 593 and 571 BCE, records the prophet enacting the siege of Jerusalem and surviving on food and water rations. When under prolonged siege, city-states could, and sometimes did, ration the entire urban population and not just the urban poor, but this was rare. If a siege seemed likely, then a town's garrison was more likely to expel “useless mouths.” There are few instances of rural and urban communities, as opposed to individuals and households, rationing themselves during famines and in the wake of natural disasters. Such events overwhelmed small-scale communities who could not draw on resources from outside the effected area. A community's chances of survival depended on membership of larger imagined communities to whom it could appeal for aid.

Military, naval, and civilian expeditions practiced rationing too, determining the volume of supplies necessary to sustain an expedition for a given period of time. There was nothing new in Napoleon Bonaparte's much quoted observation that “an army marches on its stomach.” In fact, the logistics of food supply had always been central to military treatises. American and European expeditions to the polar regions, the greater ranges, and other remote destinations drew on this expertise. For this reason, the organizing committee of the British Everest expedition of 1953 appointed the army staff officer John Hunter, a climber of moderate ability, as expedition leader over the mountaineer Eric Shipton, who had led the earlier reconnaissance expeditions.

What was new about rationing in besieged Paris during 1870–1871 was the way in which the experience was understood and the number of people being rationed. Besieged political economists, such as Gustave de Molinari, and foreign commentators thought about the problem in terms of supply and demand, providing the intellectual justification for price fixing and rationing by showing that without these measures the poor would starve as the wealthy drove the price of basic foodstuffs upward. Although this analysis of food supply under siege had no lasting impact on the political economy of war, which continued to concern itself with issues of war finance, it refamiliarized Europeans with the idea of rationing and popularized the term, which entered the English vernacular around this time. Thirty years later, the sieges of Ladysmith and Mafeking during the Second Anglo-Boer War (1899–1902) underlined the importance of civilian rationing while reinforcing the view that it was only of relevance as an emergency measure in besieged urban areas. These experiences ensured that there was a vocabulary of rationing to be mobilized by the combatants once the military planners' vision of a short war of movement evaporated.

...