Popular Contention in Great Britain, 1758-1834.

Hall, Robert G.

With the publication of Popular Contention in Great Britain, Charles Tilly sums up more than two decades of reflection and labor not only on the British experience but also on the nature and meaning of popular struggle in the modern world. Focusing on the changing repertoires of contention between 1758 and 1834, he seeks the answer to a very complex question: "how, why, and with what effects did the ways in which ordinary people made collective claims on other people change in Great Britain between the 1750s and 1830s?" (p. 48) In the 1760s mass intervention in national politics, Tilly argues, did not exist anywhere in the world. By the 1830s, however, the rise of mass politics had taken place, initially in Britain (and the young American republic) and then later on in Western Europe. The migration of the English word "meeting" into French, Spanish, and Russian, he notes, points to the influence of the pioneering British (or perhaps Anglo-American) example.

At the center of his analysis of the changing nature of popular contention is a massive, machine-readable catalog of contentious gatherings, or CGs. A contentious gathering is, in Tilly's words, "an occasion on which a number of people (here, a minimum of ten) outside of the government gathered in a publicly accessible place and made claims on at least one person outside their own number." (p. 393) Relying on the Gentleman's Magazine and three other publications, members of Tilly's research teams cataloged every CG that occurred in Middlesex, Surrey, Kent, or Sussex during thirteen selected years between 1758 and 1820. For the years 1828 to 1834, they also inventoried for the whole of Great Britain every CG that appeared in any of seven printed sources. There are, as Tilly himself carefully explains, a number of problems with this methodological approach. Skewed toward London and its hinterland, his catalog of CGs seriously underrepresents some forms of action, like strikes, and leaves out altogether others, like the radical dinner or the secret, nighttime gathering on the moors. For all its shortcomings, this is, however, still an impressive accomplishment. Rarely does the historian encounter quantitative research that is so grand in its scope and ambition.

In the late 1970s, several years after researchers at Michigan had begun to compile this database of CGs, Tilly introduced the notion of repertoires into the study. At any particular point in history, people learn, he argues, only a limited number of ways of making demands and taking collective action. In the mid-eighteenth century, men and women "learned" a repertoire of collective action that had the local community as its focus and typically took the form of direct action. On national issues, however, they usually turned to claim making of an indirect sort, working through patrons and local authorities. The forms of action that they drew upon were, as Tilly puts it, "particular"; that is, the routines of action varied from group to group, region to region, and issue to issue. To borrow Tilly's simile, the critical change in repertoires occurred in bursts, "more like a volcano than a glacier." (p. 6) For him, the great upheaval in the way that people acted collectively took place near the end of the eighteenth century. Between the 1790s and the end of the Napoleonic wars, a new repertoire, centered around the public meeting and related forms of action, emerged and ultimately went on to become the most widely accepted way of expressing political demands and mobilizing public opinion; the older repertoire went into decline.

Determined to explore both the roles of big structural changes and human agency in this transformation, Tilly traces the shift in repertoires of collective action to the dramatic growth and concentration of capital and state power and to the struggles of ordinary men and women. The increasing proletarianization and capitalization of economic life and the war-driven expansion and centralization of the British state pushed popular struggles from the local and the particular and reliance on patronage toward independent claim-making in national arenas. While these structural developments, together with interactions with the authorities, constrained and shaped the changing repertoire of collective action, these changes also emerged out of popular struggles themselves and the actions and decisions of "political entrepreneurs," like John Wilkes, Henry Hunt, and John Gast. (p. 371) Most innovations, Tilly suggests, took place at "the perimeter of the existing repertoire" and usually failed and disappeared. "Only a rare few," he adds, "fashion long-term changes in a form of contention."(p. 44)

It is almost as difficult to fashion a dramatically new and original way of understanding the much-studied subject of popular politics. No one is more aware of this than Tilly, who acknowledges the contributions of other scholars and modestly downplays the originality of his concept of repertoires. And yet, even though historians have traced the development and decline of particular forms of action, like the food riot or "the mass platform," they have never attempted a systematic, quantitative analysis of these changes and their causes on anything like the scale of Tilly's work. Unfortunately, in this age of austerity, we probably will not see the like again.

Robert G. Hall Ball State University