New books from Carl Griffin
By: Martin Wingfield
Last updated: Tuesday, 17 March 2020
Carl Griffin, The Politics of Hunger: Protest, Poverty and Policy in England, c. 1750–c. 1840 (Manchester University Press, 2020)
The 1840s witnessed widespread hunger and malnutrition at home and mass starvation in Ireland. And yet the aptly named 'Hungry 40s' came amidst claims that, notwithstanding Malthusian prophecies, absolute biological want had been eliminated in England. The eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries were supposedly the period in which the threat of famine lifted for the peoples of England. But hunger remained, in the words of Marx, an 'unremitted pressure'. The politics of hunger offers the first systematic analysis of the ways in which hunger continued to be experienced and feared, both as a lived and constant spectral presence...
Carl Griffin, Roy Jones, and Iain Robertson (Eds), Moral Ecologies: Histories of Conservation, Dispossession and Resistance (Palgrave, 2019)
This book offers the first systematic study of how elite conservation schemes and policies define once customary and vernacular forms of managing common resources as banditry- and how the ‘bandits’ fight back. Drawing inspiration from Karl Jacoby’s seminal Crimes against Nature, this book takes Jacoby’s moral ecology and extends the concept beyond the founding of American national parks...