Summary This book presents ten case-studies by eminent scholars dealing with food supply, storage and markets from c. 1600 to c. 2000. Together they present a long-term history of the tools to regulate the rhythms and seasonal patterns of the food production and distribution process. How were the vast flows of staple food needed for metropolitan areas organised? What practical difficulties had to be overcome to preserve this food safely? Did people respond to price patterns in search for profit? Were governments successful in imposing regulation? In dealing with these issues, the contributing authors adopt different approaches and investigate cases from England, Belgium, Germany, Austria, Italy, France and Mexico. The focus on the stocks and flows of grains and other foodstuffs raises new questions combining economic, social, political, and environmental issues in the study of agricultural markets and food policies. TABLE OF CONTENTS Introduction: stocks, seasons and sales Wouter Ronsijn and Niccolò Mignemi 1. Landlords as rational investors? Grain storage on noble manors in the Rhineland area, 1650-1850 Friederike Scholten 2. Prices and seasons in late seventeenth-century England Richard W. Hoyle 3. A case study of corn sales: Harston Manor's corn book 1823-1842 Liam Brunt and Edmund Cannon 4. Production and provisioning: the Tumulto of 1692 in Mexico City Pablo F. Luna 5. The need for wheat: the pre-industrial expansion of Vienna's grain supply, 1800-1840 Jonas M. Albrecht 6. The respiration of Paris' catchment area in the nineteenth century: stocks and flows Laurent Herment 7. Urban development and local food production. Ability and inability of feeding growing cities by urban agriculture in nineteenth-century industrialising Belgium Pieter De Graef 8. Between fearing shortage and stockpiling fresh fish: did the Venetian Republic have an environmental policy in the eighteenth century? Solène Rivoal 9. Preventing subsistence crises: the state and granaries of abundance in Old Regime France Gérard Béaur 10. Storage and financing of the French wheat market in the inter-war period Alain Chatriot