Wheat, “annona” and controlled prices in Savoyard Sardinia

Abstract

Over the centuries, the wheat supply control and the strategies adopted to ensure the subsistence of the urban and rural population has gradually been intertwined with factors related to cereal production, the market, prices and wages, credit, regional trade and internationally, to the social dynamics between city and countryside, to the consolidation of state stability. Throughout the Modern Age, the abundance of grains, especially in the urban area, is in fact, one of the central themes of the strategies of consolidation of urban hierarchies, of stability of the social order and of the formation of regional states. Despite growing social resistance, even in Savoyard Sardinia, until the end of the Ancien Régime, the goal that the élites set themselves is to control the price of cereals to appropriate the surplus and use it to ensure the subsistence of the urban population, channeling the rest to the regional and international market.