Table of Contents

Introduction
The Political Economy of Meat
Meat and the Social Hierarchy
Liberty and Regulation in the Cattle Markets
Order and Disorder in the Urban Meat Markets
Guild Unity and Discord
In the Service of a Master: Apprentices and Journeymen
Building the Family Firm: Marriage and Succession
Butcher Fortune and the Workings of Credit
Conclusion: The Rise of Meat

About the Author

Sydney Watts is currently an assistant professor of history at the University of Richmond in Virginia.

Reviews

[Meat Matters] provides an often fascinating and very suggestive addition to the literature on the 'consumer revolution' that has rarely yet treated the literally consumable. As a student of Steven Kaplan, Watts brings a many-sided exploration to meat similar to that Kaplan has developed magisterially for bread. . . Meat Matters explores a little known but central slice of eighteenth-century Parisian life, provides a cut across political, economic, and cultural issues that were inevitably intertwined but which are too often separated analytically, and offers a morsel of a pre-revolutionary political economy that was central to Parisian subjects/citizens. Isn't leaving you wanting more the sign of the best kind of meal?
*H-FRANCE, June 2009*

Sydney Watts's remarkable book . . . examines the history of one of the oldest and most influential Parisian guilds -- the butcher trade and its development throughout the eighteenth-century. . . . Watts offers an excellent analysis of the complex relationship between the butchers and journeymen, guild members and governmental officials, husbands and wives, meat producers and consumers.
*JOURNAL OF MODERN HISTORY, Vol 81, No 1*