Protest and the politics of space and place, 1789-1848 [Paperback]

This book is a wide-ranging survey of the rise of mass movements for democracy and workers' rights in northern England. It is a provocative narrative of the closing down of public space and dispossession from place. The book offers historical parallels for contemporary debates about protests in public space and democracy and anti-globalisation movements. In response to fears of revolution from 1789 to 1848, the British government and local authorities prohibited mass working-class political meetings and societies. Protesters faced the privatisation of public space. The 'Peterloo Massacre' of 1819 marked a turning point. Radicals, trade unions and the Chartists fought back by challenging their exclusion from public spaces, creating their own sites and eventually constructing their own buildings or emigrating to America. This book also uncovers new evidence of protest in rural areas of northern England, including rural Luddism. It will appeal to academic and local historians, as well as geographers and scholars of social movements in the UK, France and North America.

Introduction

Part I: Spaces of exclusion, 17891830

1. Spaces of exclusion and intrusion in the 1790s

2. Defending the liberty to meet, 17951819

3. Peterloo and the changing definition of seditious assembly

Vignette 1: Radical locales

Part II: Spaces of the body politic in the 1830s and 1840s

Prelude: The Reform crisis, 18302

4. Embodied spaces and violent protest

5. Contesting new administrative geographies

Vignette 2: Processions

6. Constructing new spaces

Part III: Region, neighbourhood and the meaning of place

7. The liberty of the landscape

8. Rural resistance

9. Making Moscows, 183948

Vignette 3: New horizons in America

Conclusion

Select bibliography

Index

Navickas not only examines the ways in which local elites organised carefully choreographed and highl0