The aim of this paper is to analyse the role of wheat quality in the formation of wheat prices in the early modern period, adopting eighteenth-century northern Italy as a case study. Wheat prices have been widely used by economic historians to calculate living standards, determine the degree of market integration, and date famines. Rarely, however, have economic historians focused on how wheat prices were determined. By looking at the wheat supply chain, we will try to make more visible the extent to which wheat quality was crucial in determining the value of wheat and, as a consequence, the final price of grain.

Between the last decades of the eighteenth century and the middle of the nineteenth century, a large number of new markets were established in the Flemish countryside. The multiplication of rural markets tends to be seen as part of the process of market integration, with rural producers responding to the opportunities provided by increasing external demand, such as that from the growing towns. However, an analysis of the motivation behind new establishments, based on the files treating the requests for new markets, reveals that markets were more often established for entirely different reasons. In this period, markets were expected to permit households to intensify their activities in order to overcome increasing economic difficulties. Developments within rural society, particularly rising population pressure, the need to produce and sell more, and deteriorating informal exchange networks among countrymen, coupled to a decline in demand for rural industrial products, were the main drives behind the multiplication of markets. This contribution shows it is important to pay attention to how new markets and market integration in general fitted within the goals and strategies of the country dwellers themselves.

Recently, several studies have cast new light on the relative roles of commerce and exchange in rural areas. This article examines the importance of extra-local trade in two contrasting regions of the nineteenth-century Flemish countryside, Oudenaarde and Saint-Nicolas. In the first region, the size distribution of holdings was such that market dependence was ‘mediated’; rural output circulated via reciprocal personal relationships. In the second region, market dependence was ‘unmediated’ and rural producers were more directly involved in the market. The article also highlights the complexity of the commercialisation of the countryside, and the need to move beyond the traditional opposing views that have long dominated the debate on the commercialisation of the countryside.