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Charles Tilly
Spatial organization interacts significantly with contentious politics, but figures uncertainly in current theories of the subject. A review of writing on the subject permits a rough distinction among bare space analyses using location and time-distance for non-spatial effects, textured space analyses introducing location and time-distance as explicit causes and effects, and place analyses treating interaction among location, time-distance, and representations of spaces as explicit causes and effects. Drawing chiefly on examples from England and France between 1750 and 1900, observations on four varieties of space-contention interactionthe geography of policing, safe spaces, spatial claim making, and control of places as stakes of contention illustrate the promise of place analyses for new investigations. An ample bibliography displays the range of resources available to students of contention.
November 1830 brought London to one of the greatest nineteenth-century peaks of its visible, vigorous, and often violent popular contention. When King William IV rode in state through Westminster from St. James to the opening of Parliament on 2 November, people who gathered along the streets cheered the king but jeered prime minister Wellington. Onlookers roared "Down with the New Police! No martial law!" (MC [Morning Chronicle] 3 November 1830). Near Parliament, two people waved tricolor flags, ten or a dozen men wore tricolor cockades, and members of the crowd cried out "No police" or "Vote by ballot" (LT [Times of London], 3 November 1830). Throughout London's festive day, Londoners denounced Wellington's likely opposition to parliamentary reform, decried Home Secretary Robert Peel's new police force, and physically attacked New Police officers. Over the next few days numerous hostile gatherings formed in London's financial and legal quarters. (Sensitive to the concentration of financial, commercial, and legal power in the largely autonomous City of London, Peel had left the City its own police force, keeping his New Police out of that jurisdiction.) Warned of a likely attack on Wellington, the king and queen canceled their engagement for a City of London dinner at Guildhall on Lord Mayor's Day, 9 November. City dignitaries would have to dine without the royal family. One day before the scheduled dinner, a meeting of the Radical Reform Association at the Rotunda (Blackfriars Road, Southwark) passed a resolution condemning the ministry for fearing to bring the king among his own people. As the session ended, meeting chair and radical firebrand Henry Hunt went outside and spoke to a thousand or so followers who had gathered ____________________________________
* This paper first saw light as my part of a joint effort with William H. Sewell Jr. Our schedules made collaboration too difficult, so we decided to write up our ideas separately. In addition to Sewell, I am grateful for criticism to Ronald Aminzade, Viviana Zelizer, and three anonymous reviewers. Charles Tilly is Joseph L. Buttenwieser Professor of Social Science at Columbia University, New York 10027-7001. Email: ct135@columbia.edu.
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there. Thereafter members of Hunt's audience rushed over Blackfriars Bridge, "headed by a man bearing a tri-coloured flag" and shouting "No Wellington," "No Peel," and "Down with the Police." They cheered the statue of Charles Ionly British king to lose his head in a popular rebellionat Charing Cross. Then they toured various public offices, Downing Street, and the Houses of Parliament before running into a cordon of New Police who dispersed them with truncheons (MC 9 November 1830). The same day, government opponents stoned Wellington in Downing Street. On the afternoon of 9 November, a thousand persons or so gathered near Richard Carlile's shop in Fleet Street, heard a speech from radical activist William Wiblin, then rushed down Fleet Street, through Temple Bar, and along the Strand until they met detachments of New Police. On the way they shouted "Down with the police!", "No Peel!" and "No Wellington!" (MC and LT 10 November 1830). Police drove the marchers back in what may have been history's first organized baton charge by otherwise unarmed police. In the evening City Police protected Guildhall and the Lord Mayor's carriage from an "immense crowd" whose members forced passersby to doff their hats and shout "Huzzah." But toward 10 P.M. "perhaps three hundred men" from Spitalfields arrived at the City's edge, Temple Bar, armed with clubs; they found that the New Police had barred the gate from Westminster territory, which lay just outside. Francis Place reported that the Spitalfields men had armed themselves by pulling down part of the Public Record Office, then under construction in Chancery Lane, and seizing its staves (BL ADD [British Library, London, Additional MSS] 227789). In an assertion of their prerogative to control the Temple Bar gate, City Police forced open the gate, but also sought to disarm the Spitalfields workers. From inside the gate members of the crowd pelted New Police on the Westminster side with stones and wood. Later, a band of 200-300 men (no doubt essentially the same group) carried tricolor flags into Spitalfields, the silk-weaving district at the far side of London's East End. They broke windows at a police station and elsewhere, then disappeared (Annual Register 1830; Spitalfields silk weavers had long supplied cudgel-bearers for Henry Hunt and his program of parliamentary reform; see Steinberg 1994). Faced with near-insurrection, the government hastily filled the Tower of London's moats with water to forestall an attack on the citadel. It also ringed London with 7,000 troops and stationed 2,000 New Police in Westminster alone. What was happening? On the model of the constabulary he had organized in Ireland as Chief Secretary there between 1812 and 1818, in September 1829 Peel had installed his uniformed, disciplined Metropolitan Police in Westminster and a number of adjacent parishes although not in the City of London. He placed the new force under direct control of his Home Office, abolished the old parish constabularies, yet levied higher taxes on parishes to pay for the new constables. The establishment of those police bothered not only the workers, radicals, and street criminals they were designed to control but also London ratepayers, parish officers, and magistrates whose previous authority over policing the New Police had escaped. Thus a variety of people saw the creation of "gendarmes" (in William Cobbett's epithet) as one more governmental tyranny. In contrast, political organizer and former tailor Francis Place was much more sympathetic to the New Police than his crustily radical rival Cobbett. Indeed, Place took credit in his memoirs for advising Peel's police on methods for containing crowds without excessive violence, including the baton charge. To Place's consternation, people fought the new force in Parliament, in public meetings, and on the streets. "Large mobs," recalled Place, "now assembled in the streets and assailed the police men, with all sorts of bad language, mud and stones, and on two or three occasions fighting with them" (BL ADD 27789). In these vignettes of London's popular contention from 1830 we see early stages of the mobilization that produced the Reform Act of 1832. The November events glitter with intriguing sidelights:
Spaces of Contention