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This book traces the complex pattern of working-class radical endeavour in the West Riding textile district during the years from 1829 to 1839. It focuses in particular on questions of local leadership and organisation and stresses the importance of these elements to early working-class movements. The study assesses the significance of the trade union, popular radical, early co-operative and factory reform agitations of the late 1820s and early 1830s in shaping leadership cadres and organisational structures. It goes on to map out the varied, often mutually reinforcing campaigns of the mid 1830s which came together in the early Chartist movement. Chartism, with its more confident, experienced and self-reliant local leadership and its stress on organisation, is shown to be the culmination of a decade of escalating conflict and prodigious activity. It drew on the radicalising experiences of the early 1830s, on the incremental growth of working-class disillusionment in the post-Reform era, and on the common experiences and uncertainties which large sections of the local working population shared. Whilst building on traditional ideas and agitational tactics, the early Chartists increasingly articulated an assertive, class-conscious alternative to the widely-perceived evils of unregulated competitive industry and unrepresentative, uncaring government. Far from being peripheral figures, the local leaders who emerged in this era were central to the story of the emergence of the world's first mass working-class movement. For this reason, the efforts of contemporaries to perpetuate their memory deserve to be continued, so that a few more at least, do not share the fate of the many who 'died unknown'.

A number of British men and women with radical sympathies and links to the domestic reform movement travelled to Paris after 1789 to witness the events of the French Revolution. Many remained in residence or were prompted to visit the French capital with the fall of monarchy and establishment of a republic in late 1792.The British visitors who took part in and wrote about the debates animating the first French republic have received little attention in historical enquiry. While some studies have focused on noteworthy individuals who lived in in Paris in the early 1790s, the collective endeavours of British nationals have gone under the historical radar.British residents set up an emigrant political society in late 1792, based at White's hotel in the second arrondissement, under the name of the Société des Amis des Droits de l'Homme. The SADH was a hub of international political culture and served as a testing ground for ideas and written production destined for both a British and French audience. From White's hotel members launched joint writing projects, organised relief missions and contributed collectively to the debate over a new republican constitution at the turn of 1793.As well as such efforts, British nationals, along with their Irish counterparts on French soil, engaged in common business projects, took joint lodgings in Paris, helped each other with translation and interpreting services and supplied each other with financial assistance at times of severe hardship when many were incarcerated in makeshift prisons across the city. Some negotiated passports for fellow nationals out of Paris, or convinced the French authorities to allow their country men and women to remain in the capital. Many struck up binding links with local activists in the Paris sections or with figures in the revolutionary administrations which shaped their outlook on the Revolution.

Known for its protests, its squatting, and its resistance to central government and drawing on first-hand accounts from those involved, this book tells the story of 1980s Radical Lambeth, an inner London community that fought back.

England was a spy culture in the years 1790 through 1820. Restriction, regulation and surveillance formed the dominant discursive context. Ultra-radical artisans developed a discourse based on the revolutionary ideology of Thomas Spence which proposed the corporate ownership of land and the overthrow of the Government by physical force. The Spenceans were considered the most radical of the political groups active during this period, with William Blake, Jeremy Bentham, and Percy Shelley the best known of those spied upon for suspected Speancean activities.This book outlines the battle between repressive seditious laws and the radicals whose weapon was the written and spoken word. David Worrall explores the discursive context of the campaigns against sedition in the 1790s, Colonel Despard's intended coup of 1802, the Spa Fields rising of 1816, the planned Bartholomew Fair insurrection of 1817 and the debacle of the 1820 Cato Street conspiracy. He recovers a lost artisan culture recorded by spies, moles and informers who infiltrated the organizations, debating clubs and taverns where radical speakers called for violent revolution, examining for the first time the speeches, conversations, songs, poems, pamphlets, letters, handbills, trials, interrogations, and arrests which constituted the resistance to the Government's regulation of discourse.Radical Culture features a sympathetic portrait of these revolutionaries gleaned almost entirely from the records of the government spies who helped put them in jail. Worrall brings to life the ultra-radicals, dramatizing what they said, how they reacted under extreme conditions of arrest or impending execution, and how the Government hounded them in their last hours of life.

It has been generally accepted that the eighteenth century witnessed a series of transformative processes that dramatically changed the social, political and economic fabric of Britain, yet few have determined just when and where the transformation began to have meaningful effects. The process of industrialisation had undoubted revolutionary significance, not only in the manner in which it became integral to the commercial prospects of the country, but also that it gave birth to a distinctly different set of interpretations of how the economic process would take place.The region that initially saw the dawn of these new processes and industrial practices was the North-West of England. This book investigates how this process was begun, how the communities of working people were affected by these developments, and how they reacted. It looks at these transformations in a regional context and how this inter-related with national developments. The framework is widened to include important national and regional political and social developments that intersected with the momentous economic conversion from a system that had been in place for generations to one which was radically different and contained a set of values and practices which had far-reaching ramifications.The labouring classes held that the preservation of customary practices were both a guarantee of their established rights and were integral to the functioning of the industrial system. Indeed, they were convinced that they possessed the right to protest and to take matters into their own hands.

The full story of the riots in the Forest of Dean in 1831, and how they were suppressed, is told here for the first time. The book also gives the background to the riots; it discusses the simple lives of the foresters before the arrival in Dean of the Industrial Revolution, and how they lived in the Forest, pasturing their animals there and using it as if it was their own. It also describes the ancient way the free miners used to mine their iron and coal and how they regulated their mining activities through their Mine Law Court. It sets out the two main causes of the riots: the determination of the government to enclose large areas of the Forest for growing timber, thus restricting the foresters' access; and the influx of 'foreigners' eager to exploit not only the Forest's coal and iron resources but also the foresters themselves. Dominating the story is the enigmatic character of Warren James, the self-educated free miner who led the foresters in their attempt to stave off their increasing poverty and unemployment, and to protect their traditional way life from the threats of advancing industrial change. The tragic account of his unfair trial, his transportation to a convict settlement in Van Diemen's Land (Tasmania), his reprieve for political reasons, and his death far from the Forest is set against the background of the sordid and heartless times in which he lived.

Political philosophers (such as Gramsci) and social historians (such as E. P. Thompson) have suggested that rural customs and ceremonies have much more to them than the picturesqueness which has attracted traditional folklorists. They can be seen to have a purpose in the structures of rural society. But no historian has really pursued this idea for the English folk materials of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries: the period from which most evidence survives. Bringing together a wealth of research, this book explores the view that such rural folk practices were a mechanism of social cohesion, and social disruption. Through them the interdependence of the rural working-class and the gentry was affirmed, and infringements of the rights of the poor resisted, sometimes aggressively. By Rite represents the results of detailed research in a wide range of sources, including the local Press, Antiquarian and Field Studies papers, county journals, local collections and archives throughout England and Wales.

Two of the most common types of popular disorders in late Tudor and early Stuart England were the food riots and the anti-enclosure riots in royal forests. Of particular interest are the forest riots known collectively as the Western Rising of 1626-1632, and the lesser known disorders in the Western forests which took place during the English Civil War. The central aims of this volume are to establish the social status of the people who engaged in those riots and to determine the social and economic conditions which produced the disorders.The leaders and most active participants in riot were rural artisans - skilled men working in non-agricultural employments. These artisans, particularly those in the major industries of seventeenth-century England located in the forested West, were largely wage-earners. Virtually landless cottagers who relied on the market for food, clothworkers and other artisans frequently engaged in food riots and attempted insurrections during times of depression or harvest failure. These artisans exploited the common waste of the royal forests. Enclosure of the forests by the Crown threatened the livelihood of those workers who depended on the forests for raw material and pasturage. The result was the Western Rising, a series of massive anti-enclosure riots which took place in Gillingham Forest on the Wiltshire-Dorset border, Baydon Forest in Wiltshire and the Forest of Dean in Gloucestershire. There were also concurrent riots in Leicester Forest, and Feckenham Forest, Worcestershire. A similar series of riots followed in the 1640s.These conclusions challenge the dominant modern view that work in rural industry was merely the by-employment of members of peasant households. Contrary to the prevailing interpretation that disaffected men of standing were generally behind disorders such as the Western Rising, manipulating popular grievances for their own ends, In Contempt of All Authority concludes that in times of economic and social distress or political dislocation (such as the Civil War) the "lower orders" of Tudor and Stuart England were provoked into self-organised direct action by very basic issues of food supply, employment, and common rights. In the course of such actions they manifested an intense hatred of the gentry and the well-to-do, whom they held responsible for existing conditions.Buchanan Sharp is Professor of History at the University of California, Santa Cruz.