Protest History or the History of Protest?

Abstract

The history of popular protest and collective action in Britain and Ireland is currently enjoying a scholarly revival. New studies of early modern rebellions, rural resistance, the Luddite and ‘Captain Swing’ agitation of the early nineteenth century, Chartism and other events and forms of protest are appearing, and many of the classic texts in the history of protest have recently been republished. 1 Current approaches were explored at a workshop at the University of Hertfordshire on 1 July 2011. 2 It was supported by a subsidy from History Workshop Journal, and in the History Workshop tradition the day was collaborative and experimental. The original agenda had two aims. The first was to consolidate and expand knowledge and methodological frameworks for the understanding of protest and resistance in Britain over the long term; the second, to develop a network of historians, cultural geographers and those involved in public history institutions on the topic of popular protest and resistance in Britain. We went some way to achieving these goals, although perhaps neither the organizers nor the participants had predicted the directions which discussion took. I had expected debate about the roles of class, gender and agency in popular protest to predominate. Certainly most recent studies have called for these three themes to be revisited. 3 Yet although class and gender did underlie some of the discussions, something much more fundamental became a running theme of debate: what is ‘protest’? What did ‘protesters’ themselves consider to be ‘protest’? Is the history of protest worth studying as a singular topic, or should it form part of a wider social history of individuals and communities? Over thirty participants came from across the United Kingdom, with a couple of delegates from the USA. Research periods ranged from late middle ages to the late twentieth century, although most delegates were studying English and Welsh regions in either the early modern period or the early nineteenth century. Some comparative angles were offered by Thomas Darragh on late twentieth-century America and by Cecily Nowell-Smith regarding protests in Japan. Irish and Scottish historians were under-represented, as were delegates from the heritage and public-history sectors: we hope to attract historians from these groups to