Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-t8hqh Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-25T07:11:29.181Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

The Spatial Diffusion of Riots: Popular Disturbances in England and Wales, 1750–1850

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  31 October 2008

Andrew Charlesworth
Andrew Charlesworth
Affiliation:
Department of Geography, University of Liverpool, Liverpool, UK.
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

The form taken by the spatial diffusion of rioting offers valuable clues for the understanding of collective protest. Careful analyses of the space and time dimensions of collective protest reveal considerable variation with respect to the cause of the riot, the role of communications and accessibility, and the agency of radical leaders and state and local authorities. Some historians have failed to understand this. Even Wells who has been sympathetic to the potential of the spatial viewpoint in explaining popular disturbances has written of food riots in 1801 that “(r)iots spread. It is immaterial whether the cause was imitation, or a uniform reaction along lines of communication‘. Stevenson has gone further and written in the context of food rioting that “it is misleading to speak of riots spreading’. Both take a narrow, rather over simplified, position, particularly when discussing waves of concerted collective action. Such occurrences are rare and provide us with one of those “privileged instances which one can apprehend on the level of observation when the totality of society and its institutions is set in motion’. They present us with an opportunity to begin to identify those peculiar conditions under which massive mobilisation of people in different communities takes place. In this essay I consider several case studies of the spatial diffusion of disturbances in England and Wales between 1750 and 1850. These protests differ dramatically in their patterns of spatial diffusion.

Type
Research Article
Information
Rural History , Volume 5 , Issue 1 , April 1994 , pp. 1 - 22
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1994

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

1. Wells, R.Wretched Faces: Famine in Wartime England 1793–1801 (Gloucester, 1988) p. 180.Google Scholar

2. Stevenson, J., Popular Disturbances in England 1700–1870 (London, 1979) p. 110.Google Scholar

3. Levi-Strauss, C., The Scope of Anthropology (London, 1967) pp. 11–12.Google Scholar

4. For descriptions of these three types of protest see Charlesworth, A. (ed.) An Atlas of Rural Protest in Britain 1548–1900 (London, 1983) chapters 3, 6 and 7.Google Scholar

5. Hosbawm, E. J. and Rudé, G., Captain Swing (London, 1969).Google Scholar

6. Jones, D. V. J., ‘The Rebecca riots 1839–44’ in Charlesworth (ed) An Atlas p. 165.Google Scholar

7. Jones, D. V. J., Rebecca's Children (Oxford, 1989) p. 144.Google Scholar

8. Ibid., p. 198.

9. Quoted in Williams, D., The Rebecca Riots (Cardiff, 1955) p. v.Google Scholar

10. Wells, R. A. E. ‘The revolt of the south-west 1800–01’, Social History (1977) 6, 713–44.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

11. Stevenson, , Popular Disturbances, p. 110.Google Scholar

12. Bohstedt, J. H., ‘Riots in England 1790–1810 with special reference to Devonshire’, unpublished Ph.D. thesis, Harvard University, 1972 p. 140.Google Scholar

13. Ibid., p. 140.

14. Wells, , Wretched Faces, p. 48.Google Scholar

15. The most detailed account of the 1766 riots in the southwest is to be found in Williams, D. E., ‘English hunger riots in 1766’, unpublished Ph.D. thesis, University of Wales, 1978, chapter 3.Google Scholar I have drawn on that chapter for description of the riots.

16. Ibid., p. 121.

17. I have drawn on Bohstedt, J., Riots and Community Politics in England and Wales 1790–1810 (Cambridge, Mass. 1983)CrossRefGoogle Scholar chapter 2, Bohstedt ‘Riots’ passim; Wells, ‘The revolt’ passim; and Wells, Wretched Faces', tables 5 and 12 for the descriptions of the 1795 and 1801 riots.

18. See Charlesworth, , An Atlas, pp. 4–5Google Scholar and Wells, R. A. E., ‘Counting riots in Eighteenth-Century England’, Bulletin of the Society of the Study of Labour History (1978) 37, 68–72.Google Scholar

19. Brewer, J. and Styles, J., ‘Introduction’ in Brewer, J. and Styles, J. (eds.) An Ungovernable People (London, 1980) p. 17.Google Scholar

20. Charlesworth, A., Social Protest in a Rural Society: The Spatial Diffusion of the Captain Siving Disturbances 1830–31 (Norwich, 1979).Google Scholar

21. Bohstedt, J. and Williams, D. E., ‘The diffusion of riots: the patterns of 1766, 1795, and 1801 in Devonshire’, Journal of Interdisciplinary History (1988) 19, 1–24.Google Scholar

22. Williams, ‘English hunger riots’.

23. Bohstedt, and Williams, , ‘The diffusion’, p. 20.Google Scholar

24. Besides Williams, Randall's account of the Gloucestershire riots has also been drawn on: Randall, A. J., ‘The Gloucestershire food riots of 1766’, Midland History (1986) 10, 72–93.Google Scholar

25. Rule, J., The Experience of Labour (London 1981), p. 160.Google Scholar

26. Randall, A. J., ‘Labour and the Industrial Revolution in the West of England Woollen industry’, unpub. Ph.D. Thesis, University of Birmingham 1971, pp. 385–7.Google Scholar

27. Rule, J., ‘The Labouring Miner in Cornwall, c. 1740–1870’, unpub. Ph.D. Thesis, University of Warwick, 1971, pp. 349–95.Google Scholar

28. Bohstedt, , Riots and Community, p. 32.Google Scholar

29. Wells, , Wretched Faces, p. 272.Google Scholar

30. Bohstedt, , Riots and Community, p. 33.Google Scholar

31. Bohstedt, and Williams, , ‘The diffusion’, pp. 17–18.Google Scholar

32. Wells, , Wretched Faces, p. 155.Google Scholar

33. Wells, R., ‘Britain's avoidance of revolution in the 1790s revisited’, Bulletin of the Society of the Study of Labour History, 54 (1989) 35.Google Scholar

34. Ibid., p. 36.

35. The most recent account of the disturbances is Jones, Rebecca's Children.

36. Ibid., p. 203.

37. Verdery, K., ‘Ethnicity and local systems’, in Smith, Carol A. (ed.), Regional Analysis Volume II: Social Systems (London, 1976) p. 201.Google Scholar

38. Ibid., p. 202–3.

39. Ibid., p. 204.

40. Ibid., pp. 206–7.

41. Jones, , Rebecca's Children, p. 130, p. 93.Google Scholar

42. Ibid, p. 321.

43. For the most detailed description of the Captain Swing revolt see Hobsbawm and Rudé’, Captain Swing.

44. Ibid., chapter 3.

45. For a full account of the spread of the protests in Kent and Sussex see Hobsbawm and Rudé, Captain Swing chapter 5, and Charlesworth, Social Protest, pp. 8–13

46. For the spread of the 1816 and 1822 disturbances in East Anglia see Charlesworth, A., ‘A comparative study of spread of the agricultural disturbances of 1816, 1822 and 1830 in England’, Peasant Studies, 11 (1984) 91–110.Google Scholar

47. Wells, R., ‘Rural rebels in southern England in the 1830s’ in Emsley, C. and Walvin, J. (eds.), Artisans, Peasants and Proletarians 1760–1860, pp. 126–36.Google Scholar

48. A. Charlesworth, Social Protest.

49. Bohstedt, , ‘Riots’, p. 175.Google Scholar