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Katrina Navickas provides a lively and detailed account of popular politics in Lancashire in this period. She offers fresh insights into the complicated dynamics between radicalism, loyalism, and patriotism, explaining how this heady mix created a politically charged region where both local and national affairs played their part.
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.
A fresh look at how three important twentieth-century British thinkers viewed capitalism through a moral rather than material lens What’s wrong with capitalism? Answers to that question today focus on material inequality. Led by economists and conducted in utilitarian terms, the critique of capitalism in the twenty-first century is primarily concerned with disparities in income and wealth. It was not always so. The Moral Economists reconstructs another critical tradition, developed across the twentieth century in Britain, in which material deprivation was less important than moral or spiritual desolation. Tim Rogan focuses on three of the twentieth century’s most influential critics of c...
Explores loyalism as a social and political force in eighteenth and nineteenth century British colonies and former colonies.
Coins from the 18th and early 19th centuries are physically and visually intriguing. In addition to their monetary uses, they were repurposed to communicate private and public messages - from ad hoc scratchings and punch marks to full-scale re-engraving of surfaces. This book aims to give 21st-century readers insight into that experience and to the many unofficial purposes these objects served.0Drawing on the largest extant collection of defaced coins and tokens, this publication brings together for the first time the full-range of expertise required to understand the phenomenon, with contributions from 11 scholars and collectors. It focuses on a significant period in British history, when modification expressed political commentary, commercial activity, familial and emotional commitment, personal identity and life history. It will examine the coins and tokens themselves and look at who modified them, where, why and how. The circumstances of the coins' subsequent survival is explained, and each aspect will be set in its specific historical contexts.
The superhero of comic books and blockbuster movies might be a State-side phenomenon, with its conservative notions of 'truth, justice and the American way.' But the cultural DNA of the superhero arguably lies in a much older, more progressive, British tradition: the folk heroes of British protest history. In this unique experiment, ten authors have been charged with resurrecting this tradition: to spawn a new generation of present-day British superheroes to bring the fight back to these shores, and to more progressive causes. From the statue-toppling Bristolian with otherworldly powers, to the Essex resident protecting public spaces and parks, these characters prove that it is possible to create a new breed of superhero in ways that capture essential truths about the society we live in.
An innovative new reading of the character of, and tensions in, London's radical intellectual culture at the time of the French Revolution.
The idea that land should be—or even could be—treated like any other commodity has not always been a given. For much of British history, land was bought and sold in ways that emphasized its role in complex networks of social obligation and political power, and that resisted comparisons with more easily transacted and abstract markets. Fast-forward to today, when house-flipping is ubiquitous and references to the fluctuating property market fill the news. How did we get here? In Marketable Values, Desmond Fitz-Gibbon seeks to answer that question. He tells the story of how Britons imagined, organized, and debated the buying and selling of land from the mid-eighteenth to the early twentiet...
Chartism was the first time ever that British workers fixed their eyes on the seizure of political power: in 1839, 1842 and again in 1848. In this struggle, they conducted a class war that at different times involved general strikes, battles with the state, mass demonstrations and even armed insurrection. They forged weapons, illegally drilled their forces, and armed themselves in preparation for seizing the reins of government. Such were the early revolutionary traditions of the British working class, deliberately buried beneath a mountain of falsehoods and distortions. This book sees Chartism as an essential part of our history from which we must draw the key lessons for today.
Challenging the view that England had no peasantry or that it had disappeared before industrialization, this text shows that common right and petty landholding shaped social relations in English villages. Their loss at enclosure sharpened social antagonisms and imprinted a pervasive sense of loss.