Protest and the Politics of Space and Place, 1789–1848 by Katrina Navickas (review)

On her website protesthistory.org.uk, Katrina Navickas offers a lucid introduction to her most recent monograph, Protest and the Politics of Space and Place, 1789–1848, which firmly links social movements in the nineteenth century with protests of the twenty-first century. Whether on her website, where she explicitly comments on twenty-first century protests such as the Occupy movement, or in this monograph, which zeroes in on social movements in northern industrial England between 1789 and 1848, Navickas focuses on the places and spaces of protest. Building from methodology affiliated with "the spatial turn," she brings new historical insight into the protest experience by offering a cogent interpretation that highlights continuities in both the methods of demonstration and the constraints authorities placed on popular protestors (xx).

After offering an introduction that ably situates her research inside the thick historiography on protest and popular politics, Navickas divides her book into three sections and follows each narrative part with a case study. These case studies, which she terms "vignettes," are intended to bring sharper focus to a particular space or place for testing or extending the interpretations offered in the three sections (20). Each section demonstrates Navickas's comfort with the primary and secondary literature of protest and extends our historical understanding as she brings in new source materials. In particular, she considers the ways in which buildings and streets were initially financed, constructed, and policed to bring attention to the physical activities of protest.

In the first section, "Spaces of exclusion, –1830," Navickas skillfully places the Peterloo Massacre of 1819 into a broader context by looking at mass protests from the 1790s to the 1830s. In contrast to many earlier studies that focus on texts, Navickas brings attention to the ways in which the protestors and their so-called oppressors shared the same geographical space. This methodological move allows her to show both protestors and the elite defining access to spaces and determining if the spaces were truly public. Of particular interest is Navickas's insight that these spaces were not just available or unavailable for protest, but rather shifted over time, from empty spaces into those such as St. Peter's Field in Manchester that held special meaning and whose memory could be used to further legitimize claims of liberty—or oppression.

The second section, "Spaces of the body politic in the 1830s and 1840s," turns specifically to the 1830s and 1840s, the heyday of Chartism. Again, by focusing on local spaces, Navickas brings a new lens to familiar events. Hers is not a narrative of leaders fighting for universal suffrage; rather, she claims that struggles over participation in local politics and the use of civic buildings for meetings were essential to creating class. She emphasizes, in other words, the cultural construction of class that emerges from the struggle, rather than from the outcome of the events. This approach allows Navickas to bring together struggles in these decades that might otherwise be approached through separate historical studies. Particularly useful is her examination of the ways in which loyalists and radicals used space in urban areas, the "streetscape," to illustrate both collective identity and hierarchies within these groups (139).

In the final section of the book, "Region, neighbourhood and the meaning of place," Navickas works to shift attention from spaces to places of protest. Employing the distinction between space and place offered by cultural geographers, she understands space to be "a social construction, formed by culture and in itself forming culture, shaping power and enabling agency" (14). Places, for Navickas, are customarily invested with "meaning, associations, performances, and codes" (16). The three chapters in this section are wide-ranging, as the reader is drawn over moorlands, into the agrarian countryside to witness the maiming of animals and trees (as acts of resistance), and on to the towns of Bradford and Oldham where local terrain gave a home...