Derek Gregory

The discourse of the past: phenomenology, structuralism and historical geography

Abstract Historical geography has to be predicated on a critical examination of past and present discourses, and this necessarily involves a rejection of positivist epistemology. This was, in more general terms, the basis of Husserls critique, but two alternatives to this are the constitutive phenomenology of Alfred Schutz and the linguistic structuralism of Claude Levi-Strauss. Both present major difficulties. Schutz fails to recognize the necessity of a hermeneutic understanding of past societies and cannot account for the genesis and temporality of meaning, while Levi-Strauss provides for a formalism which is directed towards the structure of the human mind rather than the historically specific structures of particular discourses. The connections and contrasts between these two positions suggest several ways in which the examination of discourse might be constituted in order to contribute to a structural history.

The friction of distance? Information circulation and the mails in early nineteenth-century England

Postal charges in Britain were a step function of distance until 1840. Although these put a brake on information circulation through the General Post, the state made use of its Privileged Post (which was not distance-rated) to oil the wheels of official communications. But these privileges were regularly abused and on occasion extended, and there were in addition numerous illegal systems of conveyance. For many people in many places, therefore, the friction of distance was, in effect, the fiction of distance.

Progress past and present

In this contribution to the journal’s occasional past and present series, Derek Gregory comments on Alfred Weber’s Uber den Standort der Industrien, concentrating in particular on those sections which have not previously appeared in translation. These, it is argued, help to explain further the circumstances of its publication and lead to a reassessment of the position of Weber’s work within the contemporary development of location theory.

The Factory System in the Yorkshire Woollen Industry

The new factories, with their massive wheels churning in the mill-race and their great chimneys towering over the landscape, together provided probably the most potent symbol of the energies of the new industrial order. When Sir George Head visited Leeds in 1835, for example, he made a point of climbing up into one of the engine-houses of a woollen factory, where he found ‘the harmony of the movements of the engine altogether was so perfect, and free from friction, the brilliancy of the polish bestowed on so many of its parts so lustrous, and the care and attention paid to the whole so apparent, that imagination might readily have transformed the edifice to a temple, dedicated by man, grateful for the stupendous power that moved within, to Him who built the universe’.1 Not everyone had such a vivid imagination, however, and when William Dodd — an old factory-hand — visited the city some five or six years later, he was struck by ‘the many marks by which a manufacturing town may always be known, viz., the wretched, stunted, decrepit and, frequently, the mutilated appearance of the broken-down labourers, who are generally to be seen in the dirty, disagreeable streets; the swarms of meanly-clad women and children, and the dingy, smokey, wretched-looking dwellings of the poor.’

The Woollen Industry and the English Space-economy

The discussions contained in this chapter are intended to provide both context and counterpoint for the more detailed regional analyses which follow in later chapters: in particular, I want to determine the importance of the woollen industry to the national economy and to chart its aggregate fortunes, and to set the economic development of the industry in Yorkshire against its decline in other areas.

The Turning-point: Regional Crisis in the Woollen Industry

The clothiers and clothworkers had been cruelly disappointed by Parliament. The Select Committee’s proud boast that every man had the right to employ his capital as he wished ‘so long as he does not infringe on the rights and property of others’ had a viciously hollow ring to it, because that was precisely what they believed the factory system was doing to them. And now the same had happened in the highest court to which they could appeal: their skills and abilities had been, if not altogether denied, then publicly relegated to a secondary role with a rhetoric which smacked of an unfeeling condescension, and in calling upon the ideals of the traditional moral economy they had found themselves beaten about the head by a new statute book which was being rewritten in the unfamiliar language of political economy. Neither side accepted the notations of the other and it is not difficult, therefore, to see how E. P. Thompson could see Luddism, the machine-breaking riots and guerrilla campaigns which erupted in the northern manufacturing districts in 1811–12, as ‘arising at the imposition of the political economy of laissez-faire upon, and against the will and conscience of, the working people’ and to describe it as ‘a violent eruption of feeling against unrestrained capitalism, harking back to an obsolescent paternalist code, and sanctioned by traditions of the working community’.1

The Domestic System in the Yorkshire Woollen Industry

In 1725 Daniel Defoe began to compile his third volume of A Tour through the Whole Island of Great Britain. Drawing on a number of different visits to the West Riding, some of which he had perhaps made as a merchant as many as forty years earlier, he had his traveller ride over Blackstone Edge towards Halifax: ‘The nearer we came to Halifax, we found the houses thicker, and the villages greater in every bottom; and not only so, but the sides of the hills, which were very steep every way, were spread with houses, and that very thick; for the land being divided into small enclosures, that is to say, from two acres to six or seven acres each, seldom more; every three or four pieces of land had a house belonging to it …. Though we saw no people stirring without doors, yet they were full within; for, in short, this whole country, however mountainous … is yet infinitely full of people; these people are full of business …. ‘We found the country, in short, one continued village … hardly a house standing out of a speaking distance from another and (which soon told us their business) the day clearing up, and the sun shining, we could see that at every house there was a tenter, and almost on every tenter a piece of cloth, or kersey, or shalloon, for they are the three articles of that country’s labour…. We could see through the glades almost every way round us, yet look which way we would, high to the tops, and low to the bottom, it was all the same; innumerable house and tenter, and a white piece every tenter….