Likewise, during the rapid expansion of capitalism over the past several centuries, the tradition of a pre-capitalist "moral economy" was used to justify popular action against unscrupulous merchants and traders. For example, the poor regularly rioted against grain merchants who raised their prices in years of dearth in an attempt to reassert the concept of the just price. The Marxist historian E. P. Thompson emphasized the continuing force of this tradition in his pioneering article on "The Moral Economy of the English Crowd in the Eighteenth Century" (1971). Later historians and sociologists have uncovered the same phenomenon in a variety of other situations, including peasants' riots in continental Europe during the nineteenth century and in many developing countries in the twentieth. The political scientist James C. Scott, for example, showed how this ideology could be used as a method of resisting authority in "" (1976).