Suchergebnisse

Introduction: Understanding Rural Protest -- Work, Worklessness and the Poor Law -- Rural Worker, Custom and the State -- Land and Environmental Change -- Community, Custom and Religion: Unsettling the Everyday -- Protest Practice -- Rural Rebellion -- Rural Popular Politics -- Conclusion

The making private of hitherto public goods is a central tenet of neoliberalism. From land in Africa, Asia, and South America to the assertion of property rights over genes and cells by corporations, the process(es) of making private property matters more than ever. And yet, despite this importance, we know remarkably little about the spatial plays through which things become private property. In this paper I seek to address this imbalance by focusing upon the formative context of 18th- and early-19th-century England. The specific lens is wood, that most critical of all 'natural' things other than land in the transition to market-driven economies. It is shown that the interplay between custom, law, and local practices rendered stable and aspatial definitions of property impossible. Whilst law was the key technology through which property was mediated, the cadence of particular places gave these mediations distinctive forms. I conclude that not only must we take property seriously, but we must also take the conditions and contexts of its making seriously too.

SummaryPublished in 1969, Hobsbawm and Rudé's Captain Swing remains the sole national account of the so-called "Swing riots" that diffused throughout most of rural southern, central, and eastern England in the autumn and winter of 1830. Whilst much revisionist work has been published since, Hobsbawm and Rudé's contention that Swing's brutal judicial repression effectively ended the protests has remained essentially unchallenged. Through an archival re-examination of the resort to protest between the 1830 trials and December 1833, this paper contends that the received understanding that Swing was crushed is too simplistic. In some locales, Swing maintained its momentum, in others it revived. Swing also morphed into different forms, both real and phantasmagorical. But the intensity of protests did decline. By the autumn of 1833, protests were less frequent, now representing a fractured, isolated spatiality instead of a coherent protest campaign.