Protest, Politics and Work in Rural England, 1700–1850 by Carl J. Griffin (review)

Mr. Griffin explores the interactions of protest, politics, and work in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. He links protest culture from the Jacobite uprisings and food riots of the eighteenth century to the Swing Riots of 1830. By starting in 1700, Mr. Griffin acknowledges that he skims the protests that occurred in the aftermath of the Glorious Revolution, but his study is not intended to be a complete account of the period; he takes a thematic, rather than chronological, approach to his study of protest, organizing it into seven distinct chapters. He contextualizes riots through a consideration of work, under-and unemployment, poverty, and custom, arguing that they cannot be understood outside of social, economic, and political considerations. It is, therefore, a study of the politics of everyday life, of parish organization and, in the later years of the period, of attempts to expand the electorate.

A considerable portion of previous historiography is concentrated on opposition to the enclosure of common lands and the uprising of agricultural workers in the Swing Riots of 1830. Mr. Griffin, however, argues that these were only the tip of the iceberg. Far from being the demoralized passive force posited by Hobsbawn and Rudé, agricultural workers had developed a whole range of protest methods in the eighteenth century, including psychological actions such as "back chatting" and "foot-dragging," alongside more structured protests such as rioting, machine-breaking, and arson. Mr. Griffin accordingly argues that English rural workers throughout the eighteenth century were protesting their lot.

English rural workers have been usually regarded as landless and dependent on their ability to gain employment; they were also, it was thought, heavily dependent on Poor Laws for assistance. Mr. Griffin suggests that this was far from the truth and that large tracts of agrarian England were still farmed in common. This situation did not begin to change until between 1760 and 1830 when some thirty percent of agricultural land was enclosed by private Acts of Parliament. Consequently, the first half of the eighteenth century can be—and has been—alluded to as a golden age of agriculture, encompassing steady growth in the demand for produce, low and stable food prices, low population growth, and a competitive labor market as rural industries expanded. Contemporary observers, like Richard Cobden, while not agreeing with this idyll, did at least see the period as one where laborers were treated fairly and with respect. In reality, there were many local variations, and all rural workers were subject to acute shortages and bad winters. Seasonal under- and unemployment were already a recurrent problem, and food riots were not uncommon. While it has been argued that a prevalence of unrest astounded foreign visitors, it was not so much shortages per se, but the mismanagement and overregulation of the food supply that caused them. The emphasis on food riots being market-bound has tended to anchor them within the urban sphere, but Mr. Griffin suggests this scenario forgets that in the early period of industrialization many "country" communities were a mixture of agrarian and industrial activities. Even the most rural of areas contained a diverse mixture of laborers, artisans, and journeymen, all linked to both towns and cities through a complex network of kin and capital. In fact, Mr. Griffin believes that unrest in rural areas from 1700 onward was far more common than previously assumed.

Despite enormous transformations in the visual landscape of large swathes of rural England between 1700 and 1850, this work demonstrates quite successfully that the protest landscape remained remarkably unchanged during the same period. Even the increasing confidence placed in radical politics and trade unionism was present in the "protest canon" of 1700. Much of the discourse remained rooted in the defense of custom, the diffusion across time of cultural forms, and the similarity of grievances, which remained relatively unchanged. For Mr. Griffin however, this continuity fails to account totally for changes in scale, spatiality, and...