From Disorder to “the Normality”: Food Provisioning in Western, Central, and Southeast Europe, 1914–1924.

This article deals with the legal context and institutional features of a system of state-imposed constraints in wholesale and retail trade in foodstuffs in Western, Central, and Southeast European countries and regions. It introduces an innovative developmental typology of state intervention in this domain based on a sequence of implemented stages and intensity of state involvement with private ownership and freedom of trade. The typology is instrumental in enabling cross-country and cross-regional comparisons in the period under study. The regions under study are represented by doublet countries: France and UK for the Western European (WE) region, Germany and Austria for the Central European (CE) region, and Bulgaria and Yugoslavia (including its legal predecessors) for the Southeast European (SEE) region. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]