The Spatial Diffusion of Rural Protest: An Historical and Comparative Perspective of Rural Riots in Nineteenth-Century Britain

Abstract

A comparison is made between the spread of protests in two contrasting types of rural society, one predominantly capitalist arable, the other small-farmer pastoral. The first saw series of protests by agricultural labourers in 1816, 1822, and 1830. The second saw a major scries of collective protests by small farmers, primarily over the issue of turnpike tolls, between 1842 and 1844, Of these four series, only the 1830 labourers' revolt showed clear spatial patterns of diffusion. Accounts of the resistance to the coup d'etat in France of 1851 give a further comparative perspective. As in France in 1851, for a massive mobilisation to occur in Britain in 1830, in a relatively short time span, there needed to be a major political crisis. The complex nature of the analysis offered here to account for the different patterns of spatial diffusion of the four series of protests should be a salutory warning against the glib explanations of the spread of the 1981 urban disorders in Britain.