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Reviews / Comptes Rendus
| John E. Archer, Social Unrest and Popular Protest in England, 1780–1840 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000) |
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THIS BOOK is published in the Economic History Society series entitled "New Studies in Economic and Social History," and like other works in that series it is intended as a concise and authoritative guide to current interpretations of key themes. The subject of popular protest is a major area for teaching and research, and Archer's book is an extremely welcome and engaging addition to the literature. The historiography has for some time needed bringing together and synthesising, and the book is all the more worthwhile for achieving that. It covers all the main subjects one would expect: with chapters on the historiography, sources and methods, agricultural protest, food riots, industrial protest, political protest, policing, a chapter assessing the "revolutionary" potential of the unrest, and a conclusion that considers how research could further develop these themes. |
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As one would expect from Archer's book, By a Flash or a Scare: Arson, Animal Maiming and Poaching in East Anglia, 1815–1870 (Oxford 1990), this work is very well-informed on rural protest, giving an excellent outline of the state of research on that topic, assessing for example the regional dimensions both of the historiographical coverage and of the agrarian unrest itself. The quality of writing is sustained thereafter, as the text extends to other matters. The subject of unrest has become quite compartmentalized among historians, and it can be difficult to reintegrate it. Archer stresses at a number of points the need to do this, arguing that "Food rioting, machine breaking and political radicalism might well have been present in the same dispute." (43) He notes "the dangers of separating trade union organisation and direct action and treating them as distinct activities in which the latter occurred where the former was weak or absent."(46) Historians, as he says, should avoid putting types of unrest into pigeon-holes and treating them in isolation from each other or indeed seeing them as evolving from one form into another. There may be some analytical purpose in that approach, but frequently such protests were concurrent with each other. This is a lesson that he extends to a number of episodes or contexts of unrest, and the book makes a convincing case for such lateral connectivity. |
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None of the revolutionary situations or episodes are thought to have threatened to convulse society, for they were mainly limited in time, place, and objectives. There is stress on the self-control of the English working-classes. Such emphasis on moral action includes a good retrospective survey of E.P. Thompson's idea of the "moral economy," for example assessing differences of views between Thompson and Roger Wells, pointing to some explanatory limitations of the moral economy with regard to food rioting, and broaching wider areas of explanation, like geography or community size, that also need to be taken into account. |
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Here, as elsewhere, a considerable range of the historiography is referred to. The interpretative positions emerge well, and the assessment of disparate views is even-handed and fair throughout. A clear sense is conveyed of how the subject has developed as a field of historical research, and of how publications by Hobsbawm, Rudé, and Thompson in particular, have influenced the field. As was intended in this publication series, the bibliography is a valuable part of the book (although Ian Dyck's name is incorrectly spelled, an error which must be amended in the next edition). The book concludes with suggestions for future research, and this section includes some very worthwhile ideas. Among them are the need for more micro-village or community studies, like the finely contextualized work by Barry Reay on Kentish villages and "Sir William Courtenay," study of popular symbolism and the languages of protest, fresh approaches to factory reform (which is indeed now neglected), and women's history and patterns of unrest — a subject that Archer has some interesting passages on. I might have been tempted to cover in more depth faction fighting, local xenophobia, antipathy towards the Irish, and further aspects of religious conflict, like anti-Methodist disorder. But the coverage is well balanced and inclusive, taking one up to Chartism. In short, this is a valuable, highly readable book that very ably assembles current knowledge, containing original pointers to the way the subject should now develop. I recommend it warmly for all levels of study. |
4
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K.D.M. Snell
University of Leicester
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