In France, between 1870 and 1914, the business world was very concerned with the increase in “fraud” and “counterfeiting” in beverages and foodstuffs. This paper explores the origin and significance of this phenomenon. Three main products and markets are analyzed: wine, butter, and milk. On the basis of primary research, the paper contests the traditional interpretation according to which adulteration was linked to an increasing demand for food by low-income classes in highly imperfect markets. The paper adopts a radically different approach by questioning the way innovation is defined and perceived in a market economy: why is it common to speak of “innovation” for manufactures while evoking the term “adulteration” when food and drinks are concerned? The argument is that food and drink adulteration had its origins in technical progress (the introduction of chemistry into the food industry), urbanization, and the internationalization of the economy. As such, adulteration was a juridical category that was mobilized on occasions by economic lobbies in order to benefit from rents in the market, while continuously regulating innovation by agreement and compromise.One clear implication is that quality is not an objective, ahistorical category but that at different times different definitions of an item's quality compete with one another. It was only after the institutional and legal framework had been defined that social conventions and consumers' choices could take effect.

A History of Food Adulteration and Analysis

Negotiating Innovation in a Market Economy: Foodstuffs and Beverages Adulteration in Nineteenth-Century France

(1991). Sophistication detected: Or, the adulteration of the milk supply, 1850–1914. Social History: Vol. 16, No. 3, pp. 317-339.

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Sophistication detected: Or, the adulteration of the milk supply, 1850–1914

Nowadays global concerns are tightly linked to the way wine production and labelling have been regulated in France. This paper aims to provide an historical explanation of this peculiar regulation of the wine market in France. Our argument will be that wine adulteration, as it is conceived and regulated nowadays, has to be distinguished from ancient and pre-modern forms of adulteration. From the last quarter of the nineteenth century, technical progresses (i.e. organic chemistry in food and wine making), extended commercial networks and an extending intermediation led to market failures. However, state regulation mainly aimed to ensure the circulation of information and fair trade rather than to protect public health. As a result, from the end of the nineteenth century up to the present, in France and in Europe, rules on beverages are more concerned with preserving AOC (collective trademarks) and wine producers' profits than with limiting alcohol consumption.

Information, quality and legal rules: Wine adulteration in nineteenth century France

The control of competition is designed, at best, to reconcile socioeconomic stability with innovation, and at worst, to keep competitors out of the market. In this respect, the nineteenth century was no more liberal than the eighteenth century. Even during the presumed liberal nineteenth century, legal regulation played a major role in the economy, and the industrial revolution was based on market institutions and organisations formed during the second half of the seventeenth century. If indeed there is a break in the history of capitalism, it should be situated at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, with the irruption of mass production, consumption and the welfare state, which introduced new forms of regulation. This book provides a new intellectual, economic and legal history of capitalism from the eighteenth century to the early twentieth century. It analyzes the interaction between economic practices and legal constructions in France and compares the French case with other Western countries during this period, such as the United Kingdom, the United States, Germany and Italy.

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Rules of Exchange: French Capitalism in Comparative Perspective, Eighteenth to Early Twentieth Centuries

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A History of Food Adulteration and Analysis

Citations

Negotiating Innovation in a Market Economy: Foodstuffs and Beverages Adulteration in Nineteenth-Century France

Sophistication detected: Or, the adulteration of the milk supply, 1850–1914

Information, quality and legal rules: Wine adulteration in nineteenth century France

Rules of Exchange: French Capitalism in Comparative Perspective, Eighteenth to Early Twentieth Centuries

Commentary: Bread and alum, syphilis and sunlight: rickets in the nineteenth century

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