Andrew Charlesworth

The Spatial Diffusion of Riots: Popular Disturbances in England and Wales, 1750–1850

The form taken by the spatial diffusion of rioting offers valuable clues for the understanding of collective protest. Careful analyses of the space and time dimensions of collective protest reveal considerable variation with respect to the cause of the riot, the role of communications and accessibility, and the agency of radical leaders and state and local authorities. Some historians have failed to understand this. Even Wells who has been sympathetic to the potential of the spatial viewpoint in explaining popular disturbances has written of food riots in 1801 that “(r)iots spread. It is immaterial whether the cause was imitation, or a uniform reaction along lines of communication‘. Stevenson has gone further and written in the context of food rioting that “it is misleading to speak of riots spreading’. Both take a narrow, rather over simplified, position, particularly when discussing waves of concerted collective action. Such occurrences are rare and provide us with one of those “privileged instances which one can apprehend on the level of observation when the totality of society and its institutions is set in motion’. They present us with an opportunity to begin to identify those peculiar conditions under which massive mobilisation of people in different communities takes place. In this essay I consider several case studies of the spatial diffusion of disturbances in England and Wales between 1750 and 1850. These protests differ dramatically in their patterns of spatial diffusion.