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Protest and the Politics of Space and Place, 1789-1848

Online ISBN:
9781526104144
Print ISBN:
9780719097058
Publisher:
Manchester University Press
Book

Protest and the Politics of Space and Place, 1789-1848

Katrina Navickas
Katrina Navickas
University of Hertfordshire
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Published:
1 January 2016
Online ISBN:
9781526104144
Print ISBN:
9780719097058
Publisher:
Manchester University Press

Abstract

This book is a wide-ranging survey of the development of mass movements for democracy and workers’ rights in northern England. It surveys movements throughout the whole period, from the first working-class radical societies of the 1790s to trade unions in the 1830s and Chartists and Owenite socialists in the 1840s. It offers a provocative narrative of the privatisation of public space and workers’ dispossession from place, with parallels for contemporary debates about protests in public space and democracy and anti-globalisation movements. Space and place are central to the strategies and meaning of protest. The book examines the reaction by governments and local authorities, who sought to restrict public and private political meetings, demonstrations and marches. It charts the physical and symbolic conflicts over who had the right to speak and meet in northern England. The Peterloo Massacre of 1819 marked a particularly significant turning point in the relationship between government, local elites and the working classes. Radicals, organised labour and Chartists fought back by challenging their exclusion from public spaces, creating their own sites and eventually constructing their own buildings. They looked to new horizons, including America. This book also examines the relationship of protesters with place. Rural resistance, including enclosure riots, arson and machine-breaking during Luddism in 1812 and the Captain Swing agitation of the early 1830s, demonstrated communities’ defence of their landscape as a place of livelihood and customary rights.

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