Interpreting Social Disorder

Abstract

On 8 August 2011, civil disorder seemed to be spreading without any effective state intervention in London. For hours, BBC correspondents broadcast shocked commentary live on air as looters broke openly into shops in Hackney and a long-established furniture business in Croydon burned to the ground. As commentators reached for explanations or even descriptions of the events as they unfolded, increasingly strident voices emerged, frequently accusing analysts of sympathy for the rioters merely because they sought to find an explanation.By coincidence, I found myself in the National Archives of the United Kingdom during this crisis, researching Britain's response to an older disorder, the 1907 anti- Asian riots in Vancouver. It was therefore unavoidable that I should spend the week minding the gap between a historical approach to events and the kinds of responses that emerged in the midst of social disorder.Historians spend quite a bit of time assessing events without necessarily excusing the behaviour of the participants. We address events with the assumption that, to a large extent, governments and rioters behave within a range of possibilities defined by both their character and the historical context. We are comfortable with explanations that include a variety of factors. In fact, historical inquiry encourages us to approach social crises as events with multiple causes and consequences for society and government at many levels. Some cases of local disorders have tales to tell about the international, even global, context of the time. How then might we use a historical approach to disorders to increase our public capacity for thoughtful engagement with current events? And what lessons can we identify and use to communicate the importance of analysis in the wake of a social crisis? We might begin with the following propositions: first, that even the villains act within a historical context and that acknowledging this does not necessarily excuse their behaviour; second, that fear may have real effects on people's choices even when it is based on misperceptions; and third, that local events are not always only about the local.This essay will begin with a description of one case of civil disorder, the 1907 Vancouver anti- Asian riot. It will describe the kinds of explanations that contemporary commentators reached for in the weeks immediately after the crisis. A brief inspection of historical writing about the same events will show how these three propositions emerge convincingly from a historical approach. The 1907 Vancouver crisis has significant implications for the international relations of a number of states and will therefore facilitate the practice of thinking historically and transnationally.On Labour Day, the 7 September 1907, a trade union march protesting against Asian immigration flared out of control, leading to significant property damage in Vancouver's Chinese and Japanese neighbourhoods. The Vancouver police managed to restore order by daybreak, but Vancouver awoke to see that almost every glass window in the Chinese and Japanese districts had been broken. While a handful of people were injured during the violence, no one was killed. Twenty-four people were arrested and charged with crimes related to the violence. Attention quickly turned to assessing the factors that led to this embarrassing breakdown in civility.The disquiet felt by Canadians was all the keener due to the fact that these events had an international authence and might have serious consequences not only for Canada's relationship with Japan, but for the web of relationships between the United States, Great Britain, China, Japan, and India. These anti-immigration disorders occurred at a time when Canada was a dominion of Great Britain, with its foreign policy still officially overseen by the Colonial Office in London. In addition to this legal and colonial relationship, British Columbia's geography and migration ensured close ties with the American Pacific northwest, where trouble over Asian migration and labour had been heating up since the 1880s. …