Carl J. Griffin - The Rural War: Captain Swing and the Politics of Protest

This is the most recent serious book on the Captain Swing movement. Its author is keen to present it as the definitive work that surpasses two other earlier book lengths treatments. These are the Hammond's Village Labourer and Hobsbawm and Rudé's Captain Swing. Griffin's certainty of his works' improvement on its predecessors irked me somewhat as I don't think it's fair to say that neither book offers students of rural class struggle something.

However it is true, as Griffin can say, that both of them missed crucial parts of the struggle and his work does highlight how the Swing movement was brother more intense, and more extensive than hitherto understood. Of Hobsbawm and Rudé he writes that they "seriously underestimate the level of reported disturbances".

Griffin also attempts to introduce other missing aspects of the history of the period, including the role of women, of which more shortly.

This review will not repeat an account of the Swing movement itself, but essentially this was a movement of popular outrage at rural economic conditions. The origins of these problems were simple enough - wages were low, jobs were scarce and farming was now for profit. But the situation was made worse because the standard system of poor relief was so inadequate. Old traditions however remained. Griffin notes that rural workers believed that "public relief was a right" and that "field labour [w]as a right". He argues that this "fostered a 'culture of xenophobia'," (the quote is from the historian Keith Snell) against non-indigent and migrant workers. In the context of rural England in the 1830s this meant attacks on Irish migrant labourers. Certainly this aspect was neglected in earlier histories and is an interesting fact that helps understand some of the dynamics of the period.

Griffin also argues, and I think this is an extremely important point, that Swing was not a "bolt from blue" as Hobsbawm and Rudé suggested, instead it was an intensification of events. Attacks on migrant labourers, as well as earlier attacks on machines, riots, protests and threatening letters, are part of the Swing "prehistory". Griffin also highlights how the movement continued after 1830 arguing that the repression didn't simply destroy Swing, but changed its form. For instance there are a number of cases when labourers who had won a pay rise from local farmers protested and burnt down targets again when the increases were removed.

Swing took place in the context of economic downturn. But it also took place at a time of enormous political upheaval. The 1830 French Revolution drew some support from rural workers and there were cases of the French tricolour being waved at protests. Another factor was the struggle for Parliamentary Reform and Griffin is particularly useful at understanding the interplay between that and Swing itself.

But its the sections on gender politics and the Swing movement that Griffin clearly feels are some of the most significant developments on earlier work. Here he argues that the role of the male agricultural labourer was being challenged. Their labour, he says, was about a family wage and this was being undermined. Women themselves took part, on occasion in protests during Swing and "even if men were trying to reassert their economic and household-political primacy, women clearly too had much to gain from Swing and therefore might support their husbands and brothers".

Clearly there is likely some truth to these factors, though a lack of evidence is a problem. I find Griffin's discussion of the sexual nature of machine breaking more problematic. He quotes George Youens, a labourer arrested for destroying a threshing machine at Elham, remembering that some of the gang shouted "Kill Her - More Oil". Griffin argues "Threshing machines became proxies for female bodies, something they as men should control, dominate and discipline... the allusion in the quote is in all probability to sex. Not only wasa 'woman' going to be 'killed', but the machine-breakers also were going to rape 'her'."

From a "misogynistic perspective" writes Griffin, the "machine's rhythmic action combined with the fact that it had to be 'served' through 'entry' meant that it was not unlike the objectified sexualised female body."

Personally I feel that is somewhat contrived. That's not to say that gender politics did not play a role in the Swing movement - as with Rebecca and a host of other rural movements, symbolic cross-dressing was part of some of the actions. But this over-sexualised interpretation of the Swing movement doesn't seem to fit with the evidence that Griffin has. He asserts that "gender politics in the Kentish machine-breaking heartlands shows the ingrained nature of sexual violence towards women" that sexual violence against women was an "integral part of labouring life", but I'm sceptical that the evidence proves this (Griffin highlights five cases). Even if true it seems a big leap to suggest that machine-breaking was a "reassertion, as psychological as much as it was public, of male power". I suspect that the vast majority of those engaged in machine-breaking did not approach the action from this point of view, but rather because they wanted better conditions for them and their families. If this is because their traditional roles were being challenged then we must understand that this is how class struggle takes place - in the context of the ideas "inherited from the past" and "not in circumstances of our choosing".

However Griffin is right to explore the role of women (and gender politics) in rural movements like Swing, a role that is usually ignored or dismissed. While I was not convinced by his conclusions here, the question of how women joined in the struggles for social and economic justice in the early years of capitalism are of great importance.

In conclusion I found Griffin's book very useful, developing early history a great deal; expanding the coverage of the struggles and asking some important questions of both the historical material and previous historians. Anyone studying Captain Swing will gain a lot from reading this.

Related Reviews

Hobsbawm and Rudé - Captain Swing
Hammond and Hammond - The Village Labourer

E.J. Hobsbawm & George Rudé - Captain Swing

Hobsbawm and Rudé's Captain Swing is one of those books that dominates a particular historical field. Their examination of the 1830 Captain Swing movement was the first attempt to systematically understand the causes of that agrarian revolt and the nature of the movement itself. Written in the late 1960s it was the first real full length account of Swing. Prior to that, only the Hammonds in their book The Village Labourer had paid particular attention to Swing, and Hobsbawm and Rudé are critical of them for underestimating the scale and importance of Swing.

Later historians, in turn, have criticised these two authors, while celebrating the first foray proper historical study into Swing. Carl Griffin's more recent book is possibly the most detailed attempt to surpass Hobsbawm and Rudé, and I'll review that on this blog soon.

Nonetheless those attempting to understand the dynamics of rural capitalism, the nascent workers movement and class struggle in 19th century England should read Captain Swing if only because the two authors bring a sensitivity and eloquence to the history that is seldom seen in writing about this period.

The authors argue that the Swing movement, the largest "machine breaking episode in English history" is rooted in the proletarianisation that takes place in rural England as a result of the changes taking place to agrarian communities. The most obvious change is enclosure, which sets the scene for a transformation of rural society from one geared towards production for immediate use and need, to one where peasant producers become transformed into labourers. Swing is mostly remembered for its machine breaking, particularly the destruction of threshing machines, and hundreds of thousands of pounds of damage was done. But it was also characterised by different phases of destruction - the burning of hay ricks and other property, the sending of letters, the breaking of machines and mass meetings of labourers demanding higher wages and work.

But Swing is more than an economic response to hard times. Its roots in the changing social relations, and decades of failure to address rural poverty, in the context of continental revolution and growing Reform movements in England, make it potentially explosive. Rural poverty was significant. The Speenhamland system which was supposed to help alleviate poverty had been a "millstone" for forty years, Instead of helping the poor, it actively encouraged farmers to pay labourers low wages, placing burdens on the parish that had to subsidise the difference in pay. When Swing explodes then, we see a cross-class alliance between workers and some farmers who both understand that the existing system is wrong. The authors point to a number of occasions when local authorities effectively support the movement, as they see the need to transform the status quo. In particular a large number of farmers allow their machines to be broken without opposition (in some cases doing it on behalf of the labourers) because they can then ask the labourers to also oppose the tithes that they are paying to the parish. In many cases then, wage rises are won, and these are effectively paid for by a reduction in monies to the local parish.

We should be careful though. The authors do not suggest that this is a revolutionary movement - though a few individuals wanted that, and some of the slogans suggest that labourers recognised the nature of their oppression and wanted much larger change. In fact, Hobsbawm and Rudé argue that there was "no subversion of social order" during Swing, rather a desire for a better "regulation" of rural society. But even these limited changes could not be allowed. The government reacted with ferocity and the aftermath of Swing saw the greatest ever repression on a workers' movement in England. 19 men were executed, nearly 700 were transported and almost 2000 workers faced trial.

Hobsbawm and Rudé spend some time exploring what happened to those deported and this is an interesting, if not particularly relevant chapter to the study of the movement. More interesting is the appendix which analyses why threshing machines were being introduced in such vast numbers. The benefits to individual farmers in terms of money saved was minimal, which might explain the acquiescence by many in the face of rioters. But it seems the greatest benefit was that it allowed crops to be taken to the market quicker after harvest. At a time of big price fluctuations this could mean the difference between big profits or breaking even. However once the machines had become common, the benefit was no longer viable for the farmer and the labourers might well be better.

In conclusion there is no doubt that later historians built upon the pioneering work of these two authors. But this book gets across the nature of Swing - a mass movement of workers who wanted to fight for a living wage in the face of government indifference. Their struggles were partially successful, but the nature of their struggle - direct action and mass militant struggle - meant that their fight had been sidelined from the history books in favour of the much more palatable (for the trade union leadership at least) tale of the Tolpuddle Martyrs. Captain Swing was rescued by Hobsbawm and Rudé and any study of the period begins with their memorable work.

Related Reviews

George Rudé - Ideology and Popular Protest
Hammond & Hammond - The Village Labourer
Hammond & Hammond - The Skilled Labourer

Philip Lymbery - Dead Zone: Where the Wild Things Were

Philip Lymbery's Dead Zone is a highly readable, if frightening examination of the impact of industrial agriculture on the environment, and particularly biodiversity. Lymbery's style is part travel-book, part autobiography and part ecological critique. There's a lot in it, and this review cannot hope to highlight all of the fascinating content - my copy is covered in pencil markings just from a single read.But I want to try and explore what Lymbery rightly highlights as a major ecological crisis, and add a few additional thoughts.

The first thing to note is the breadth of Lymbery's coverage. From the impact of palm plantations on elephants in Asia, to the decline of Barn Owls, Nightingales and other birds in the UK, to the dead zones in the Mexican Gulf and the way that the European Union's Common Agricultural Policy has decimated Eastern European farming, this is a bleak picture.

One of the themes of Lymbery's book is that industrial farming is offered as a solution to "feeding the hungry" yet what it does in practice is to cause wider environmental destruction through highly technological, mono-cultural agriculture. The impact of this is enormous, not just on biodiversity but also on human health and climate change. A major aspect of the problem for Lymbery, is that meat production (whether its beef or chicken) is concentrated in factory farms, and while this uses smaller spaces, it requires food to be grown for the animals. Discussing palm oil, Lymbery explains:

The worry is that palm kernel helps drive more factory farming; as a readily available feed source, it tempts farmers to take animals off grass and into confinement feeding. It's a particular concern in relation to cattle, for which a greater proportion of the diet can be made up of palm that for other types of livestock... we have a vicious circle. The increasing availability of palm-kernel meal as feed drives industrial animal farming. In turn, factory farming drives demand for more cheap feed like palm kernel. Vast tracts of land are being lost to monocultures producing fodder for animals, rather than food for people.

Industrial farming like this requires vast quantities of pesticides and fertiliser, which in turn has as a knock on effect causing further pollution and a major impact on bio-diversity.

Lymbery is a keen bird-watcher based in the UK, so some of the most emotive chapters are those that look at the way bird life has declined in the country as a result of the increase use of chemicals. The over-reliance on chemicals leads to pollution of water-ways and, in the case of the many areas of ocean, huge dead-zones devoid of life. But sometimes the smaller scale impact is as shocking - Lymbery notes that the once prevalent water vole has declined to a "staggering" extent of 90 per cent in the last forty years a loss on a par with the black rhino in East Africa. Similar stories about creatures as varied as jaguars, penguins and butterflies come throughout the book.

The impact of agriculture on biodiversity has also decimated bee populations. In his first book Farmageddon Lymbery noted the way that bees are central to farming, and hence to human society. He also highlighted how they were now the subject of a massive industry that moved them around the United States to pollinate crops, and how the chemical heavy agriculture threatened them with extinction. Here he notes that it is possible to move away from such methods and quickly allow bees and other animals to return, even within the confines of the current system.

In fact, one of the strengths of Lymbery's book is that it argues that agriculture can feed the world easily and doesn't have to be done on the basis of highly industrialised practices.

we already produce enough food for twice the human population today: more than enough for everyone both now and in the foreseeable future. The trouble is that much of it is wasted. 

and

The suggestion that increased production will safeguard future generations from the hunger and malnutrition that already ravages parts of the world seems highly questionable. Particularly when hunger today is primarily a result of distributional problems, yet is relentlessly trotted out by food producers and policymakers who have too many vested interests, or simply don't ask if the suggestion bears scrutiny.

This is important. There is a narrative within sections of the environmental movement that the only way to feed the world is for individuals to switch to meat free, or vegan diets. I've argued elsewhere that this is based on mis-understanding the science and the economic system. Lymbery argues that we should eat less, but better meat and he also notes that just because food is vegan, doesn't make it good for the environment. Maize, for instance, is particularly blamed for pollution and is a 'needy crop, requiring relatively high inputs of pesticides and fertilisers. During heavy rain, water runs off the surface... causing rivers to become polluted and at greater risk of flooding." Once again, Lymbery notes how different farming practices can help solve these problems.

Brexit

Lymbery has some good examples from both the developed, and the developing world, of how alternative agriculture can reduce the appalling impact that modern farming has on the environment. In the context of current debates about Brexit, he also notes the way that bodies such as the European Union institutionalise the move towards high-intensity farming. In fact, one of the most powerful sections when he looks at how Poland's agriculture has been transformed. Since entry into the EU it has changed from a more sustainable model to a neo-liberal system with huge impacts on the environment, higher prices, worsening animal welfare and big changes to rural communities. He recounts one story of how, during negotiations for Poland's entry into the EU one negotiator declared that 'old-fashioned Polish farms would need to modernise so that they could compete on the global market... To do this it will be necessary to shift around one million farmers off the land.' As one Polish farmer explains to Lymbery "Now the best Polish food is illegal."

Such examinations of the modern food system provide important ammunition to those fighting for a sustainable agriculture that can feed the world. But I don't think Lymbery goes far enough in his critique. For instance, I don't think he quite gets across how a few tiny multinationals hold the agricultural system in their control. That's not to say that Lymbery doesn't get the scale of the problem, he notes at one point "a steady stream of soya trucks passing along the road... Sadly it will take more than the indomitable spirit of tribal warriors to stop the spread of Brazil's soya juggernaut."

But in the face of examples like this, to argue that "though our food choices three times a day, we can support the best animal welfare and bring landscapes to life" is an inadequate response.

As I said, many of Lymbery's examples of how farming has been turned back into a more sustainable practice are inspiring. But as I read them, I was struck that they seemed to be the consequence of enlightened individuals. What was lacking was any strategy to force change upon the multinationals and big-Agriculture.

The problem is the structure of farming under capitalism. People go hungry because they cannot afford to buy food, and because it is not profitable to feed those with no money. That's the system that needs to be broken and progressive movements will have to incorporate a new vision for agriculture into its struggles in order to do this. In part mean arguing for the type of changes that Lymbery has so eloquently explained in the face of the enormous environmental tragedy that he highlights. But it will also mean a radical struggle by those producers and workers in the fields and the factories to wrest power from the corporations.

Together with his earlier book Farmageddon, Dead Zone is an important read for activists. I've highlighted what I see as some weaknesses, but I don't hesitate to recommend it to people wanting to learn more about capitalist farming and how its helping to lay the basis for global environmental crisis.

Please support radical bookselling and publishing by buying Dead Zone from Bookmarks.

Related Reviews

Lymbery - Farmageddon
GRAIN - The Great Climate Robbery
McMahon - Feeding Frenzy
Graham-Leigh - A Diet of Austerity
Bello - Food Wars

Malcolm I. Thomis - The Luddites: Machine-Breaking in Regency England

Destruction of property - the burning of ricks, maiming or killing of animals, the breaking of machinery or the burning of buildings - was long a part of the resistance by rural labourers in the late 18th and early 19th century. Today the practice is most commonly associated with the movement known as the Luddites which peaked in 1812, and has wrongly become associated with an irrational hatred of technological advance.

The movements known collectively as the Luddites were a mass expression of anger and frustration at an economic system that provided little for the majority of the population. They cannot be understood without looking at the wider transformations that had taken place in English society over the preceding century or so - the development of capitalism which had transformed rural communities from, effectively peasant societies dominated by collective and communal production, to ones were the selling of wage labour had become the norm.

This transition to a market economy had created a system were it was possible to starve in the midst of plenty, where the pursuit of profits meant that food was taken away from the hungry, who could not afford to pay and sold were profits were possible. In particular, in the context of the Luddites, the introduction of machinery, to expand and accelerate production was creating unemployment and undermining the highly skilled labour of sections of the workforce. In the context of the growth of the factory system, which broke the more traditional relations between master and skilled labourer, and concentrated relatively unskilled workers in massive workplaces, workers could legitimately feel they were being sacrificed in the pursuit of wealth and that their skills which produced high quality products were being discarded. Hence the rebellion, which destroyed machinery and targeted the worst of those capitalists who were seen to drive forward this oppression.

Thomis' book is intended as a general over-view of the rebellion and its causes, and an attempt to understand events. Unfortunately it is a pedestrian read, which I think fails to really grasp the nature of events. Despite arguing that Luddism wasn't simply an economic movement, Thomis ends up suggesting that "Luddism came to an end... not because of the success of the authorities in rounding up its leaders but because of a substantial improvement in the conditions which originally gave rise to Luddism".

This is a somewhat conservative conclusion. Firstly it under-estimates the political crisis that the movement gave rise too. Luddism took place in the context of war with Napoleonic France and raised the terrifying spectre of revolution at home. The assassination of Prime Minster Percival Spencer in the midst of the events was unrelated, but the authorities clearly felt that it was the mark of things to come for the ruling classes. The repression that they unleashed - effectively introducing martial law, and using violent, summary military justice against protesting workers - certainly helped knock back the Luddite movement. Thomis rightly highlights that the Luddites lacked any real national network of organisation that hampered their ability to co-ordinate, and this meant that repression had an immediate effect. Secondly the improvements cannot have been that substantial as unemployment and resistance was to be part and parcel of life for both rural and urban workers over the following decades.

Thomis argues that "the greatest confusion, for both contemporaries and historians, has arisen from the difficulty involved in separating Luddism from the various political reform movements that were going on concurrently". This seems a very mechanical approach. Individual Luddites may not have been members of reform movements, but their frustrations (and their rebellion) was driven by many of the same concerns that would fuel the wider demand for reform in the early 19th century. To separate these issues is to argue that the economic and political are separate, which might fit Thomis' agenda as the author, but not the reality of the times.

Ultimately I found this a disappointing book. It has its uses, not least as a pointer to other material and containing a very useful set of time-lines. But its not the definitive book on Luddism that the author seems to think it is.

J.L. Hammond & Barbara Hammond - The Village Labourer: 1760-1832

J.L. Hammond and Barbara Hammond's trilogy of books, collectively titled The Labourer looms large over any English historical studies of the period from the mid part of the 18th century to the early years of the 19th century. This was a period of tremendous economic and political change, covering the mass of Parliamentary enclosures, the industrial revolution and the great battles for Reform.

The first volume The Village Labourer, deals with the impact of enclosure on village life and some of the rural resistance that took place. In isolation from the other works it feels like it is missing some parts, so the narrative skips the Luddite rebellion and moves directly to the Machine-Breakers of the 1830s. Confusing, until you realise that Luddism is dealt with in a later book. Much of The Village Labourer deals with the question of enclosure, some detailed appendices list the parliamentary reports and discussions about specific occurrences and are very interesting to read.

This part of the Hammonds' work is possible the part that receives heaviest scrutiny, some of which is dealt with by the authors in an updated introduction, but can be boiled down to the criticism that the Hammonds generalised far too much from a few examples and painted a portrayal of the violent consequences of enclosure that far exceeded reality. I think the authors defend themselves well enough, but should readers want to read more on the debates they might be interested in Michael Turners' Parliamentary Enclosures which summarises the criticisms of the Hammonds and the counter-arguments, and reaches the conclusion that the Hammonds were not too far from the mark as has been suggested, if not for their original reasons.

That said, the Hammonds do describe a reality. At the beginning of the period discussed the rural labourer and farmer were little more than peasants, in no way free to farm their strips of lands as they would like, reliant on a historical right to use the common and waste land that was associated with the farming of strips and suffering under the whim of the lord of the manor. By the end of the period,

The effect on the cottager can best be described by saying that before enclosure the cottager was a labourer with land, after enclosure he was a labourer without land. The economic basis of his independence was destroyed In the first place he lost a great many rights for which he received no compensation...

Cottagers were a slightly better off group of villagers than many, but the consequences were the same. Enclosure of land deprived the community of the rights that enabled them to survive. The Hammonds quote a contemporary in Norfolk who explains

I was informed that a gentleman of Lynn had brought that township and the next adjoining to it: that he had thrown the one into three, and the other into four farms; which before enclosure were in about twenty farms: and upon my further enquiring what was becoming of the farmers who were turned out, the answer was that some of them were dead and the rest were become labourers.

This neatly sums up the main point of the Hammonds argument, that enclosure was a economic process that the wealthy used to consolidate their land and property in the rural areas and the consequences were disastrous for large numbers of people who ended up becoming wage labourers in either rural or urban areas. The lose of rights such as access to common land, the right to collect firewood and gleaning were disastrous. The Hammonds have plenty of tragic stories to move the reader, but consider some of the economic points they make. Gleaning, the right to collect the grains that had been missed during the harvest, could for some families represent six or seven weeks wages. A staggering amount of income that lost that would have meant the difference between life and death to many. In consequence,

the labourer who now lived on wages alone earned wages of a lower purchasing power than the wages which he had formerly supplemented by his own produce... the normal labourer even with constant employment, was no longer solvent.

This obviously created a very real problem of poverty and hunger in the rural areas and two responses to this are dealt with by the Hammonds in the remainder of the book. One of these was the Speenhamland system eventually adopted by the government across the country. This created a minimum scale of wages linked to the price of bread which was supposed to be supplemented by the parish if wages dropped too low. In reality, the new capitalist farmers simply lowered wages and were subsidised by the community. Rather tongue in check, the Hammonds conclude that the

Speenhamland system was a safety value in two ways,. The farmers got cheap labour, and the labourers got a maintenance, and it was hoped thus to reconcile both classes to high rents and the great social splendour of their rulers. There was no encroachment on the surplus profits of agriculture, and landlords and tithe-owners basked in the sunshine of prosperity.

The other response was the resistance of the poor. The authors argue that the first sign of this response was the rioting of 1816, though I think its fair to say that the Luddite machine-breaking of 1811 onwards cannot be separated from the general economic conditions. Even though this was not rural rebellion, it was by workers still very close to rural communities. None the less, the riots and the renewed rebellion of the 1830s were part of a resistance to a system that ended up benefiting only the wealthy. There was also other resistance, as the poor tried to find ways to survive in the workhouse and get more from the parish. But these, by and large, were difficult and painful years for the bulk of the rural population.

The Swing protests of 1831 shook the government, in a period of general agitation for Reform. The putting down of the rebellion and the appalling sentences meted out to those found guilty of protest form the latter part of The Village Labourer. Over a century since the book was written and nearly 200 years since the events themselves, the accounts of teenagers transported to Australia, the execution of men guilty of only protesting to protect their livelihoods and the cruelty of a court system that preached liberty, but prevented the poor having a voice, has the power to shock. Evidence about distress caused by low wages or unemployment was consistently ruled out of order, as though rural riots could be explained without these factors.

The defeat of the Last Labourers Revolt was a turning point for the English economy. But it wasn't the end of resistance to the system, it was, in many ways the beginning. The Hammonds' book deserves reading today, in part because of its excellent approach to history, but in the main because they describe in detail the origins of the modern British economy - the result of a protracted class war that was won by the rich and powerful, who created a new world in their interests.

E.P.Thompson - Customs in Common

Described as a "companion" to E.P. Thompson's classic work The Making of the English Working Class, this is actually more of a series of essays around the changes that took place in rural and working class communities with the development of capitalism. As such it is very different to Making which had a much more coherent historical narrative and argument. Customs in Common's chapters tackle much more specific issues though this doesn't detract from a very well argument and fascinating book.

Several of these essays have appeared elsewhere. Thompson's essay on Time, Work-Discipline and Industrial Capitalism is a justifiably frequently cited article that explores the nature of time and how it has been marshaled and organised as a result of the interests of developing industrial capitalism. In this, as in other articles, the reader is struck by Thompson's expert knowledge of sources and his expertise in a breadth of subjects. He moves from the Nuer (a Nilotic herding people who I have also noted had a very different attitude to 'time') to the history of clockwork, carrying the reader from one satisfying nugget of information to another while building up a powerful argument. His conclusion - that capitalism imposes a rigid structure of time on a population that had no previous need for it - should come as no surprise to the worker who has experienced the tyranny of the clocking in machine.

However the most important arguments in this book centre on the question of "custom" and how it was challenged and destroyed by the development of capitalism, yet formed a site for resistance to those changes. Thompson writes:

Agrarian custom was never fact. It was ambiance. It may be best understood with the aid of Bourdieu's concept of 'habitus' - a lived environment comprised of practices, inherited expectations, rules which both determined limits to usages and disclosed possibilities, norms and sanctions both of law and neighbourhood pressures.... within this haitus all parties strobe to maximize their own advantages. Each encroached upon the usages of the others. The rich employed their riches, and all the institutions and awe of local authority. The middling farmers, or yeoman sort, influenced local courts and sought to write stricter by-laws as hedges against both large and petty encroachments [etc]... the peasantry and the poor employed stealth, a knowledge of every bush and by-way and the force of numbers. 

Such customs and lived experience involved everything from the expectations that people had from landowners and the wealthy, to the right to use land, or cut wood, or hunt animals. They were even, anticipating latter chapters in this book, concerned with how divorce took place and the right of the collective to discipline those who had gone beyond reasonable perceived behaviour in the community.

Two chapters deal with the question of Thompson's famous "moral economy". This is the idea that within struggle, collectives of the rural poor would try to impose a more moral and more rational economic reality on those that grew, traded and sold food and goods. In particular this takes place through the authors famous discussions on food riots. Space (and the current class struggle) precludes a detailed discussion of this here, but a highlight of this book is Thompson's defence of this thesis (and his arguments around the gender question in food riots) in a follow up chapter written years after the first, more famous article.

Too few modern day socialists read E.P.Thompson's classic Making of the English Working Class and I would suggest new readers begin there. Fewer still read this lesser known book, but this collection of writings contain some powerful polemics, and some of the best researched history by a radical historian. Its also laced with wit and fire, with no fear of stepping into modern day critiques of nuclear weapons and Tory governments. For all these reasons I highly recommend it.

Related Reviews

Thompson - The Making of the English Working Class
Sutton - Food Worth Fighting For: From Food Riots to Food Banks
Linebaugh - Stop Thief!
Sharpe - In Contempt of All Authority
Hill - Liberty Against the Law

Pamela Horn - Life and Labour in Rural England 1760-1850

Reading Pamela Horn's history is always a joy. Her writing is simultaneously entertaining as well as having the ability to draw out the historical trends. This short book covers some of the same ground as her longer book The Rural World but focuses on using examples from contemporary commentary and literature to explore how people in the period covered understood the changes taking place. But Horn never once sentimentalises the life of the people in rural England. This was a time of poverty, of (especially in the aftermath of the Napoleonic wars) economic crisis for the agricultural areas and there was a vast difference between the experience of those with money and those without. Horn points out, when discussing a Wordsworth's poem The Prelude (1805) that Wordsworth's

vision of pastoral serenity conveniently ignored the harsher realities of day-to-day life on the land. It gave no indication of the long hours of drudging labour expected from most peasant cultivators or the feudal dues exacted from them by many landowners in Wordsworth's native Cumbria... This is rather a 'countryside of the mind' - a place of intellectual refuge - than one rooted in the reality of Georgian England.

She continues by quoting W.J.Keith who highlighted that "it is no coincidence that the romantic cult of wild nature flourished just at the time when the Industrial Revolution was gaining momentum; the countryside is cherished only when it is seriously threatened - and it is cherished most by those who threaten it."

What the reality was for the people of rural England is ably drawn out by Horn's writing as well as the many writers she quotes. Some of these are well known, Horn draws on William Cobbett's extensive writings about the people and places of England, as well as quotes from Charlotte Bronte and others to illustrate the class contradictions. But I was struck by the power of the quotes from ordinary people. Here's a section from a long quote by Joseph Mayett, a Buckinghamshire labourer who was demobilised from the army in 1815 at the age of 32.

I gave up gathering rags and took to work for which I received 7 shillings per week to maintain me and my wife and bread was 3 shillings per loaf.. I was much distressed by the summer coming on I was soon relieved by an advance of wages but the harvest proved very wet so that I met with a disappoint[ment] by the great loss of time I sustained but after harvest I met with a place of work at the Esquire at 10 shillings per week and the price of bread was sunk to 2 shillings per loaf and by these means things of a temporal nature began to take a favourable turn... [but] in the month of January 1818 the esquire being gone out for a long time the baily took it upon himself to reduce the wages of me and several more of the men [who] had no children for he said a man without a family could live better upon 9 shilling per week than those that [had] Children could on 10 shilling but he required us to do as much work as they so in the month of March we all left.

Here we see the lot of the labourer... bounced between employers who could change salaries on a whim, food prices that rose and fell dramatically and short term working opportunities, for low pay. It is no surprise that men life Mayett would riot, protest and destroy farm equipment in order to try and defend their jobs and wages.

Horn does look at these protests (and there were significant ones such as the Captain Swing riots during the period covered). But her major focus is to try and get across the immense change that took place in the countryside in this period.

As a result of enclosure and, in particular, of the post-[Napoleonic]war agricultural depression the number of small owner-occupiers had dwindled, and the tripartite system of land cultivation, comprising landlord, tenant-farmer and agricultural labourorer had become ever more firmly entrenched.

As a French traveller noted in the early 1860s:

the commons have been continuously reduced; thus the peasant can no longer have recourse to his own small supplies of meat, and having sold his strip of land is left with nothing but his two arms, which he now hires out.

Thus, while Horn doesn't use the word particularly, this period sees the entrenchment of agricultural capitalism, and coming to dominance of urban industry in the British economy. The world had been transformed, and the rural population, rich and poor, but particularly the poor had been changed too. Horn's book is an excellent over-view of these changes, from the role of clergy to the laws on poaching, and the changes that hit the landowners. But her focus on those who worked the land is really key and is what makes this a lovely introduction to the subject and period.

Related Reviews

Horn - The Rural World 1780-1850
Thompson - The Making of the English Working Class
Hill - Liberty Against the Law

GRAIN - The Great Climate Robbery

GRAIN is a non-profit campaigning organisation that supports small farmers, peasant movements and fights for a more socially just agricultural food system. It has been at the forefront of these movements and has produced some important studies into the nature of modern agriculture and how that impacts on farmers, communities and the wider ecological systems. As such this book is a welcome addition to the literature that is attempting to understand how modern agriculture drives climate change and is impacted by it.

Agriculture today is a prime driver of environmental destruction.

Food is the world's biggest economic sector, involving more transactions and employing more people by far than any other. These days food is prepared and distributed using enormous amounts of processing, packaging and transportation, all of which generation GHG emissions... With transportation accounting for 25 per cent of global GHG emissions, we can use the EU data to conservatively estimate that the transport of food accounts for at least six per cent of global GHG emissions.

GRAIN continue by highlighting the waste of the agricultural systems, the emissions from processing, packaging, deforestation, and way that the destruction of soil is helping driving climate change.

A wide range of scientific reports indicate that cultivated soils have lost between 30 per cent and 75 per cent of their organic matter during the 20th century, while soils under pastures and prairies have typically lost up to 50 per cent. There is not doubt these losses have provoked a serious deterioration of soil fertility and productivity, as well as worsening droughts and floods.... it can be estimate that at least 200 to 300 billion tonnes of CO2 have been released to the atmosphere due to the global destruction of soil organic matter. In other words, 25 per cent to 40 per cent of current excess of CO2 in the atmosphere comes from the destruction of soils and its organic matter.

GRAIN argue that what needs to happen is a complete transformation of the food system in a way that puts the "world's small farmers" back in the driving seat and limits the influence and power of the massive agricultural corporations that push fossil fuel intensive monoculture farming as the alternative. GRAIN writes that there are three shifts that need to occur:

The first is a shift to local markets and short-circuits of food distribution, which will cut back on transportation and the need for packaging, processing and refrigeration. The second is a reintegration of crop and animal production, to cut back on transportation, the use of chemical fertilisers and the production methane and nitrous oxide emissions generated by intensive meat and dairy operations. And the third is the stopping of land clearing and deforestation...

But this is not a manifesto for "eat local". GRAIN understand that the changes needed involve the complete transformation of the food system and a struggle against the multinationals. This is not simply about individuals eating better, but requires "a structural scaling back of 'Big Food' and 'Big Retail' and those who finance them". Interestingly GRAIN also do not fall into the trap that has become all to prevalent within the environmental movement recently in arguing that everyone needs to stop eating meat to save the planet.

The scale of corporate influence is enormous. Since the 1960s, an area roughly the size of the European Union has been given over to just four crops, soybean, oil palm, rapeseed and sugarcane. But these crops are not about feeding people, they are about maximising "return on investment". In contrast, despite the pressures from corporate farming, small farmers continue to provide most of the food that people need. Partly because they are more productive when compared to monocropped giant farms, and partly because they are focused on feeding local communities, not maximising profits. GRAIN conclude:

The data shows that the concentration of farmland in fewer and fewer hands is directly related to the increasing number of people going hungry each day.

Most of this book focuses on the way that the interests of the food multinationals is facilitated and protected by national governments and international legislation. An emphasis on the increase in free trade and removing barriers to the operation of corporations dominates legislation such as TTIP. The World Bank, the IMF and other institutions have driven policies in the last forty years that have decimated small farmers in the interests of multinationals. In several of these essays GRAIN explores how this has taken place. Excellent chapters on REDD+ and GMOs show how feeding the world and reducing emissions has become secondary to profits. Indeed, despite claims that neo-liberal policies would reduce malnutrition and ensure food security, the opposite has happened:

global supply chains make consumers more susceptible to food contamination. A small farm that produces some bad meat will have a relatively small impact. A global system built around geographically concentrated factory-sized farms does the opposite: it accumulates and magnifies risk, subjecting particular areas to industrial-style pollution and consumers globally to poisoned products.

This book covers an extraordinary amount of ground, and my copy is covered in highlights and pencil markings. In terms of a polemic against the role of corporate power in the agricultural system, and an emphasis on the importance of bottom up farming, it's one of the best I've ever read. I did feel that it was limited in an argument about what can be done. For instance, I felt that some more detailed examples of the way that, even within the limits of the capitalist system, peasant struggles for food sovereignty and over land ownership can bring real victories would have been useful. Ending corporate influence will however mean much more than a few such victories - it will mean dismantling the multinationals and the governments that support them. Campaigning against TTIP and other trade "deals" is important, but we must go further. Increasingly as capitalism leads us towards climate disaster, our movements will have to challenge the system, rather than just the symptoms. This is the logical conclusion of GRAIN's detailed work, but it isn't reflected within the book.

I wish I had had a chance to read The Great Climate Robbery when writing my own piece on Food, Agriculture and Climate Change for International Socialism. In that piece I tried to explore further how workers and peasants might struggle for a more sustainable food system. GRAIN's work underlines the importance of that struggle and I encourage people to read it.

Support independent left-wing publishing and book selling. Buy The Great Climate Robbery here.

Related Reviews

Angus - Facing the Anthropocene
Sutton - Food Worth Fighting For
Magdoff & Tokar - Agriculture and Food in Crisis
McMahon - Feeding Frenzy
Lymbery - Farmageddon

Andrew Charlesworth - An Atlas of Rural Protest in Britain 1548-1900

Rebecca rioters in 1843

This short "atlas" describing rural protests is a surprisingly useful book for those trying to understand the dynamics of protest in Britain's rural areas and, in particular, how communities responded to the development of the capitalist mode of production and the changes that took place in the countryside as a result. The book is broken up into small sections, many authored by key historians of the subject. In fact many of the authors within have had other works reviewed on this book, or have written key texts on their subject I'll get around to sooner or later. Some of the links are below.

The book focuses on what are described as "direct collective action", such as mass protests, food riots, demonstrations and so on. These range from riots against high prices of food, to demonstrations against militia recruitment and turnpikes. The book covers many forgotten events (who today has heard of the Midlands Revolt of 1607, or the 1596 rising?) but sometimes is short on detail. One thing that does come across though is that despite the beliefs of the authorities at the time or often simple analysis by historians since, most rural "direct collective action" was not simply blind rage and frustration and landowners or the wealthy. Many of the protests were heavily organised attempts to protect the interests of the mass of the rural population, to fight unjust laws and pricing, or even to protest at symbols of wealth that represented the enforced changes communities were experiencing.

One of the latter examples is the sustained protests that took place from 1640 to 1740 which targeted deer parks. In part these were protests against the loss of land or access to common rights. But mostly:

Where forest communities opposed the presence of deer parks, they were resisting the social and economic repercussions of landscapes created for pleasure and social prestige. Indeed, deer parks were singled out for attack immediately before and during the Civil War partly because they were symbols of aristocratic power.

These protests often involved hundreds of individuals and lead to the loss of thousands of deer. Many of the parks never recovered.

While the book has much of interest and is a good summary of events like the Rebecca Riots or the Swing protests, I found the maps confusing and of little use - not least because they were often based on limited knowledge. That said, this is a key work for those, like myself, immersing themselves in this topic.

Related Reviews

Turner - Enclosures in Britain 1750 - 1830
Hunter - Set Adrift Upon the World
Sharp - In Contempt of All Authority
Yerby - The English Revolution and the Roots of Environmental Change
Sutton - Food Worth Fighting For

Michael Turner - Enclosures in Britain: 1750-1830

In Capital Karl Marx denounced the enclosure of common lands as a crime: "The parliamentary form of the robbery is that of Acts for enclosures of Commons, in other words, decrees by which the landlords grant themselves the people’s land as private property, decrees of expropriation of the people."

This robbery, the destruction of common lands in the interest of landlords, laid the basis for the capitalist economic system. Marx continued:

The spoliation of the church’s property, the fraudulent alienation of the State domains, the robbery of the common lands, the usurpation of feudal and clan property, and its transformation into modern private property under circumstances of reckless terrorism, were just so many idyllic methods of primitive accumulation. They conquered the field for capitalistic agriculture, made the soil part and parcel of capital, and created for the town industries the necessary supply of a “free” and outlawed proletariat.

For many historians of the left, such as the Hammonds and EP Thompson, this sort of analysis became the natural approach to the question of enclosure. Yet there have been a series of revisionist attempts, starting the 1940s to challenge these conclusions. This short book then, is a useful over-view of both the history of enclosure and the historiography of the subject.

Enclosure itself varied dramatically over time and geographically across the British Isles. There were two particular peaks - before 1780 and during the wars with France after the Revolution. But there was also variation in which areas were enclosed, related to the soil and the potential land use. These changes themselves had links to changing diets, the growth of urban, industrial areas and so on.

Turner argues that enclosure was a much more complex process than often understood, one that had the intention of improving agriculture and profits, but should not necessarily be understood as a deliberate attempt to capitalise agriculture. That said, at least some 19th century commentators saw things in this vein. Turner quotes the President of the Board of Agriculture, Sir John Sinclair, in 1803, "Let us not be satisfied with the liberation of Egypt, or the subjugation of Malta, but let us subdue Finchley Common; let us conquer Hounslow Heath, let us compel Epping Forest to submit to the yoke of improvement".

After 1700 Turner concludes that "enclosure by agreement" was limited, "Parliamentary enclosure" becoming the most important (if not the most dominant) form of enclosure. In studying why, Turner overturns some cherished ideals. For instance he argues that the costs of enclosure where much higher than has previously been acknowledged though these costs were disproportionately higher for smaller and poorer landowners.

The understanding that costs of enclosure were higher have led, Turner argues, to a new recognition of the "social repercussions of enclosure".

In general... it looks as though there was a considerable turnover in landowning personnel. Even if there was not a decrease in the numbers of landowners, and in particular in the numbers of the smaller owner-occupiers, the epitome of the independent peasant class, nevertheless many of these owners sold up at or shortly after enclosure. They were replaced by... people from their own agricultural and social class... Small owners also had difficulty in meeting enclosure expenses and often sold up at enclosure. 

Turner concludes then, that this

brings into fresh focus the appearance of a landless labour force to fuel the fire of industrialisation, especially if enclosure improved labour productivity rather than extended labour opportunities. ... Notwithstanding the demographic revolution which was in train and creating more hands than could be gainfully employed in an improved agricultural industry, enclosure is again under scrutiny as a possible contributor to the industrial labour force.

Turner's short but wide-ranging book then points out the limitations of an earlier generation of enclosure historians, but through an examination of more contemporary studies, finds that their conclusions about the consequences of enclosure and the political/economic situation that drove enclosure, were generally correct.

This short book was published in 1984 so there have been many studies and books that have looked at this since, but this will provide a useful basis for understanding that work and the debates that have taken place on the subject. [1]

[1] A very recent examination of this subject and of Michael Turners' book is Michael Zmolek's Rethinking the Industrial Revolution p272-274, though Zmolek incorrectly cites Turners' work as being published in 1968.

Related Reviews

Yerby - The English Revolution and the Roots of Environmental Change
Linebaugh - Stop Thief!
Horn - The Rural World - 1780 - 1850
Zmolek - Rethinking the Industrial Revolution

Lewis H. Berens - The Digger Movement in the Days of the Commonwealth

First published in 1906 this is an important study of the ideas of one of the most important radical thinkers of the English Revolution, Gerrard Winstanley. The edition I'm reviewing here is reprinted 2007 by Merlin Press and is a very useful overview of Winstanley's life and, most importantly, his ideas.

Winstanley is best known for leading a group of activists, the Diggers, in an attempt to create a radical agrarian society by creating a "colony" of like minded people on St. George's Hill in Surrey. Less well know is that Winstanley had developed a clearly thought through vision of how a network of such colonies could form the basis for a society of equality and freedom. The execution of Charles Stuart during the English Revolution helped encourage Winstanley's thinking along this direction. Many of his writings were made in response to events on St. George's Hill and the second colony that Winstanley created nearer his home in Cobham, after they were driven away from the hill.

Berens' makes it clear that, like many radicals of the time, Winstanley had a very clear understanding of society in the 17th century which helped fuel his radical visions of a new world. He rages against the inequality and oppression of class society. In 1648 he writes:

And this is the beginning of particular interest, buying and selling the Earth from one particular hand to another, saying ‘This is mine,’ upholding this particular propriety by a law of government of his own making, and thereby restraining other fellow-creatures from seeking nourishment from their Mother Earth. So that though a man was bred up in a Land, yet he must not work for himself where he would, but for him who had bought part of the Land, or had come to it by inheritance of his deceased parents, and called it his own Land. So that he who had no Land was to work for small wages for those who called the Land theirs. Thereby some are lifted up in the chair of tyranny, and others trod under the footstool of misery, as if the Earth were made for a few, and not for all men.

Winstanley understands that wealth comes from the labour of people and the rich get richer on the backs of others;

But all rich men live at ease, feeding and clothing themselves by the labors of other men, not by their own, which is their shame and not their nobility; for it is a more blessed thng to give than to receive. But rich men receive all they have from the laborer's hand, and what they give, they give away other men;s labors, not their own. Therefore they are not righteous actors in the Earth.

Berens' tells the story of Winstanley's life and struggles. More recent biographies have been able to make use of more sources and some of the conclusions about Winstanley that Berens' makes are probably no longer as clear cut as they were when he was writing. John Gurney argues, for instance, that links between Winstanley's ideas and Quakerism are much less clear than Beren's would have.

But the real joy in Beren's book is the writings of his subject. I was particularly struck by Winstanley's visions of agrarian Utopia. Arising out of the seizure of land by the ordinary people he imagined a world where the full fruits of the Earth would be available to all, through a system of decentralised villages. Storehouses would keep excess produce, overseen by "waiters" who would all those who need food or other goods to come and get them for free. There would be centralised government, each village required to produce a summary of its news at regular intervals which would be then distributed around the country so everyone would know what was happening. Officers would be elected and over-seers would ensure that everyone worked, though work was not intended to be excessive. While this was a patriarchal society, Winstanley also believed that people should be able to marry who they wanted and could do so easily when a couple wanted to.

When any man or woman have consented to live together in marriage, they shall acquaint all the Overseers in the Circuit therewith, and some other neighbors. And being all met together, the man shall declare with his own mouth before them all that he takes that woman to be his wife, and the woman shall say the same, and desire the Overseers to be witnesses.

Winstanley also saw a system of punishment that allowed the community to punish those who refused to take part in society, but also allowed those who broke the rules to return back to society. The death penalty was there as a final punishment for heinous crimes such as rape and murder.

Winstanley's Utopia, was an agrarian ideal. But it was based on a rational examination of the existing problems of society and communal rural life. Based on a rejection of private property his early Communism could never succeed as it meant challenging the wealth and power of those classes that the death of Charles had put in the saddle. Winstanley's pacifism meant he ultimately believed his new society could come about by simply stating clearly enough how well it could work. Unfortunately this would never convince those with wealth and power, and there was as yet no class in society powerful enough to overturn them.

But Winstanley's vision remains inspiring and his writings are entertaining and illuminating. Its excellent that this old book has been republished. Sadly in places the Merlin edition suffers from proofreading issues. These aren't significant enough to detract entirely, but are disappointing. That aside, students of radical ideas during the English Revolution will be pleased to find this available.

Related Reviews

Gurney - Gerrard Winstanley - The Digger's Life and Legacy
Hill - The World's Turned Upsidedown
Rees - The Levellers' Revolution
Manning - Aristocrats, Plebians and Revolution in England

James Hunter - Set Adrift Upon the World: The Sutherland Clearances

This study of the part of the Highland Clearances that took place on the Sutherland Estate in the first quarter of the 19th century makes for an important new book. James Hunter locates the Clearances, infamous for the role of Patrick Sellar and the Marquis and Marchioness of Stafford (later the Duke and Duchess of Sutherland), not as part of an inevitable economic development, but as a brutal part of the class struggle in the Scottish Highlands between landowner and tenant.

As a consequence the author shows how the modern Scottish landscape, enjoyed by thousands of tourists every year, has been fundamentally shaped by this struggle. A landscape that resulted from centuries of farming, was in turn transformed by sheep farming and a later switch to grouse and deer. Thus the "natural" landscapes are not natural in the slightest, they are the result of centuries of human labour and the victory of a tiny number of landowners over thousands of farming families. The homes, schools and churches that were used by thousands of people now lie buried and forgotten with the soil itself tainted by the blood spilt during the evictions.

Hunter notes that the Clearances had their origin in the way that capitalism was transforming how landowners could make money. This meant that those who wanted to "improve" the land and make more money were

rather like settlers on some North American frontier... at the cutting edge of an increasingly commercialised civilisation's advance into a region where older forms of social organisation remained the norm.... The clash, to be sure, was a lot less violent than analogous conflicts between homesteaders and Native Americans. But the issue at stake in this Sutherland collision was the same as that posed by North America's frontier fighting: which of two incompatible ways of life was to prevail?

It would be wrong to take this analogy too far. The tenants of the Sutherland Estate were not hunter-gatherers, or even pre-industrial societies. Nonetheless their methods of farming and their social organisation were a barrier to the maximisation of profits from the land. This is not to say they were backward, primitive, lazy or perpetually poor (all accusations thrown at them by the improvers and their propagandists). In fact, one of the strengths of this book is that it demonstrates the exact opposite.

Those at the forefront of the evictions, like Patrick Sellar, used this propaganda to justify to the world what they were doing. Describing those being cleared from land their families had farmed for generations as "barbarous hordes" and "aborigines" was to justify the same sort of terror that had been deployed against Native Americans, First Nations peoples and other victims of colonialism. And terror it was. The deaths, the destruction of "homes, barns, kilns and mills" in defiance of the law, the burning of homes with people still inside, the abuse of due process and the deliberate destruction of materials so that those evicted lost even the chance of rebuilding elsewhere was nothing less than terror.

Today, the scale of the Clearances still has the power to shock. In 1819 to 1820, for instance, some 5,500 people were forced from their homes in Sutherland. In one part of the estate, between 150 and 200 distinct communities were replaced by a mere eight landholdings. Many of those evicted ended up in far inferior coastal locations were they were expected to take up industries (like fishing) of which they had no knowledge and in unsuitable locations, lacking harbours to supplement meagre incomes from the smaller and less arable new plots of land.

It is no surprise then that people fought back. The book opens with the story of a mass protest that turned away surveyors. Real or threatened protests, demonstrations and the possibility of violence clearly terrified the landowners and their representatives (though not the potential for violence against former tenants). The scandal caused by the first set of Sutherland Clearances provoked enormous criticism of the Staffords, aided by journalists and campaigners across Britain.

There's no doubt that in an era of popular anger at government and the ruling class (James Hunter notes that military force was not used on a number of occasions because the army and government were frightened of another Peterloo) there was massive sympathy for the inhabitants of Sutherland.

Because the resistance was unsuccessful, former inhabitants were spread "adrift upon the world". Hunter traces those who ended up in North America and Canada, and their struggle to survive the passage across the Atlantic and the harsh winters. Many of these families eventually thrived, and there's a poignant report from years later, of some of those who remained in Scotland wishing that their families had made the trip.

Despite the bumper profits to be obtained from sheep farming, it didn't last. The arable land that initially provided for fat animals was the result of years of careful farming. When the soil fertility dropped, so did the sheep profits and a switch to grouse and deer was the only way to maintain profits. This did little for the landscape however, which continued to be empty. As one commentator wrote in the 1840s, after travelling through the area:

All is solitude within the valley.. except where, at wide intervals, the shieling of a shepherd may be seen; but at its opening, where the hills range to the coast, the cottages for miles together lies clustered as in a hamlet. From the north of Helmsdale to the south of Port Gower, the lower slopes of the hills are covered by a labyrinth of stone fences, minute patches of corn and endless cottages. It would seem as if, for twenty miles, the long withdrawing valley had been swept of its inhabitants and the accumulated sweepings left at its mouth, just as we see the sweepings of a room sometimes left at the door. And such generally is the present state of Sutherland.

The land had been, "improved into a desert". Karl Marx, an observer from afar of the Clearances, noted that "the history of the wealth of the Sutherland family [was] the history of the ruin... of the Scotch-Gaelic population".

James Hunter ends by pointing out that the present emptiness of the Highlands is something of a strange aberration and that one day the places that had been cleared will be full of people again. While this may or may not be true one day, it is an important reminder that the countryside we take for granted is not necessarily a pristine one, but rather is in the process of constant change. The Clearances, like the Enclosures in England that cleared landscapes, destroyed communities, and transformed people into wage labourers, were part and parcel of the emergence of a system that puts people before profit. The importance of James Hunter's book is that it shows this was not inevitable, nor necessary. In doing so he rescues the stories, and frequently the names, of those who would otherwise be simply remembered as victims of the greed of the Duke and Duchess of Sutherland.

Related Reviews

Sharp - In Contempt of All Authority
Hutchinson - Martyrs: Glendale and the Revolution in Skye
Cameron - The Ballad and the Plough
Richards - The Highland Clearances

Buchanan Sharp - In Contempt of All Authority: Rural Artisans and Riot in the West of England: 1586-1660

This is an important work of history which reminds us of the extensive class battles that took place between some of the poorest inhabitants of rural England and government and landlords. The book also challenges some commonplace views of English agrarian history, about the role of artisans within peasant rural communities in the period.

Sharp begins with a study of food riots between 1585-1631. This study isn't restricted just to the West of England, and again challenges some traditional views. In particular the author argues riots did not occur because of a shortage of food, rather because of poverty. This was the result of unemployment of those who worked in the textile and cloth industries. As Sharp points out, the economic backdrop to these riots meant that they tended to be more common than those that resulted simply out of failed harvests:

A depression by itself created more frequent and more severe disorders than a single bad harvest; as the exception case of the yeas 1594-1597 illustrates, more than on bad harvest was required to deplete food stocks and produce major rioting. The most serious situation was a depression during which a harvest failed: under such conditions, as in 1630, social problems were heightened to critical levels...One is led to agree with EP Thompson's conclusions about the eighteenth-century crowd: food riots were no... spasmodic outbursts of mindless rage or mere cloaks for criminal behavior, but were, rather, disciplined forms of popular action.

Sharp continues that "almost every riot involved an attempt to seize grain which was on the move" but, he argues that there was not, in these circumstances "indication of any moral economy governing the behavior of food rioters in the earlier period" when compared to eighteenth-century food riots... in other words food was taken and distributed, not sold at what was considered a fair price. Sharp notes that

Too much emphasis on the notion of a moral economy of the crowd can lead to an overly sentimental view of the life and behavior of the poor and can obscure the reality of the pain, desperation and anger they felt in times of depression and scarcity.

"Necessity hath no lawe" as one document sent to the mayor of Norwich complaining about the high price of grain and the greed of the rich has it. Partly in response to demands from the poor and partly to try and prevent further riots, the Elizabethan and then Stuart governments issued a Book of Orders on several occasions, this was an attempt to govern the sale of food at affordable prices. Restrictions on the export of grain and the brewing were also used. However the government was able to do very little to respond to the economic crises that were causing destitution. If the demand for cloth in Europe dropped there was not much more that could be done except to plead with merchants to buy more cloth and offer limited relief to the unemployed.

It is easy however to criticise the failings of Tudor and Stuart governments. Sharp notes however that while they could not produce miracles, they did seem to be able to transfer grain to areas with shortages. He concludes though that this was because "the hungry and unemployed in the economically more developed South and West who rioted and thereby gained the Crown's undivided attention". Areas that didn't riot, suffered more.

Western Rising

Rioting was also the key response to the question that takes up the bulk of Sharp's book, which is the enclosures and disafforestation of the Crown Forests in West England. In particular he looks at the Western Rising, a prolonged period of unrest and repeated riots against enclosures that took place from 1626-1632. At the time the governments thought that these riots were the work of agitators from among the more well-to-do sections of rural society. They could not believe that ordinary people would organise in the way that they did. During the Western Rising, the habit of some of the male rioters to dress in women's clothes and call themselves Lady Skimington, resulted int he government searching across the country for the Skimington responsible for the multiple outbreaks of criminal behaviour.

There was a common pattern to the rioting. Short of money, the Crown decided to parcel up the land. This they did through a process that Sharp calls "enclosure by agreement", this meant negotiation with the better off tenants and landowners and usually the provision of some land for the poorest. The poorest relying on the land for wood, resources, animals etc. This enclosure was often challenged legally, with the better off tenants trying to argue (and frequently winning) more land, based on historic use etc. Once the better sort had divided up the spoils, the rioting started. Fences were torn down, frequently on a huge scale. Those that rioted rarely overlapped with those that went to court as Sharp proves through detailed examinations of historical records. It should be no surprise that the poorest couldn't afford legal redress. Many of those who rioted had little or no land, and were engaged in the cloth industry, and, in the exceptional case of the Forest of Dean, the mining industry.

It could... be argued that there were two types of forest inhabitants, those with land who went to law to protect their rights and those with little or no land who rioted to defend their interests. The bitter irony of disafforestation was that those people most dependent on the forest as open waste either had no legal title to the rights of common they exercised and thus no valid claim to compensation, or the tenements for which they had a valid claim to common were so small that the compensation received was minuscule...one of the misconceptions integral to the orthodox interpretation of disafforestation is that all inhabitants in and around the forests had legal rights of common that they lost... this view simply ignores the cottagers and assumes that forests were inhabited only freeholders and substantial copyholders.

Sharp challenges other traditional views. Those who led the riots were artisans, not peasants. Their industrial labour was not a "by-employment" of people engaged predominately in agricultural work. These were people who were completely reliant on their work in the textile industries (and occasionally other work such as mining) and had yet to become part of wider, wage labour practises that were dominating elsewhere. Nor was this labour "urban". There were no urban centres near these forests. As Sharp points out, there were significant numbers of people without land. One study of the village of Brigstock in Northamptonshire near Rockingham Forest in 1596 shows that only forty percent of householders had land to farm. As Sharp concludes, "the cottagers had ceased to be peasants and had become members of a rural proletariat". This growing rural population would have an increasingly effect on the English economy. But in the period covered by this book they were the people most likely to fight back to prevent, limit or reduce enclosure of Forest lands that they needed to protect their livelihoods.

We can have no better summary of the class position of those who rioted, as that given by Thomas Yerworth, a yeoman, who said in 1631 of the rioters in Dean, "All the persons that ever he could heare of that were in the said accion were very beggerly and naughty people and such as he never saw or tooke notice of".

Sharp's book follows the story through into the Civil War period and the Restoration. Drawing links between struggles during the Wars and previously. Rarely do the population take particular sides in the Civil War, but their struggles are shaped and conditioned by the nature of that conflict and the factional political interests. There is also some overlap with the Clubmen who fought as neutrals to defend land and crops from both sides in the conflict.

In conclusion this book is an important work for those trying to understand the rural population in England in the era before capitalism and urban industry came to dominate. It combines excellent scholarship and brilliant studies of ordinary people fighting for justice and deserves a wider readership.

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Roger Hutchinson - Martyrs: Glendale and the Revolution in Skye

Karl Marx wrote at length about the nature of capitalism. But he also described capitalism's birth "dripping in blood". In Capital, he described how, in order for capitalism to develop, it first had to destroy the historic relationship between people and the land. He wrote:

The spoliation of the church’s property, the fraudulent alienation of the State domains, the robbery of the common lands, the usurpation of feudal and clan property, and its transformation into modern private property under circumstances of reckless terrorism, were just so many idyllic methods of primitive accumulation. They conquered the field for capitalistic agriculture, made the soil part and parcel of capital, and created for the town industries the necessary supply of a “free” and outlawed proletariat.

In Britain, the Enclosures and the Highland Clearances are bywords for the violence and destruction of entire communities as land was repurposed in the interests of profit. What is less well known is that rural communities frequently fought back, and in the case of Scotland, where the Highland Clearances took place in a later era than the bulk of the English enclosures, this resistance had a major impact - forcing government intervention and eventually legislation that gave crofters more rights than they ever had. While this was too late for thousands who had been forced from their homes, sent over-seas or made to work in the factories of Glasgow, as Roger Hutchinson's recent book shows, the resistance meant that thousands of crofters were able to live in safer and more secure circumstances.

Hutchinson's book focuses on one amazing story of resistance in the 1880s, that of the community in Glendale in the western most part of the Isle of Skye who through prolonged rent strikes, physical battles with the police and eventually military occupation eventually forced their landowner to improve conditions and reduce over-crowding. One of the key issues was that families forced from their land elsewhere were causing over-crowding, but rather than blame these people, the Glendale crofters turned their wrath on the landowner.

The solidarity and unity of the community in the face of fierce repression is inspiring. Hutchinson notes that

The communal nature of their daily lives - the work at the peats, at fishing at fathering and shearing - had taught them since childhood to act together, to put aside petty individual differences in the interest of an essential common cause.

But those on rent strike were also not prepared to let anyone break their unity. Acting, as Hutchinson says with the "rough discipline of a revolutionary cell", they wrote in a notice posted in the Post Office

Any one of the tenants at Skinidin who will pay the rent, not only that his House and Property will be destroyed, but his life will be taken away or anyone who will begin backsliding.

The same notice informed the landlord that his animals must be removed from what was seen as communal land that could be used by the crofters, "at Whitsunday punctually, if not, they will be driven off with full force".

So strong was the movement that Glendale effectively became a no-go area for representatives of the law. The men and women of Glendale drove off fifty police officers under Sherrif Ivory, a man who never forgave them for his humiliation, with stones and the contents of chamber pots and prompted a Glasgow newspaper to publish a satirical poem based on Tennyson,

Missiles to the right of them,
Brickbats to the left of them,
Old wives behind them
Volleyed and floundered.
Stormed at with stone and shell -
Whilst only Ivory fell -
They that had fought so well
Broke thro' the Island Host
Back from the mouth of - well!
All that was left of them -
All the half-hundred

With Glendale effectively declaring autonomy from Britain, the government had to act. Leading figures, including John MacPherson who became one of the most important and eloquent spokespersons for the Crofters, were imprisoned though their court appearances helped them spread their message. The Glendale rent-strikers received support and solidarity from communities across Scotland and the eventual deployment of hundreds of marines and armed naval ratings (on two occasions) must rank as one of the most ridiculous and inappropriate uses of military power in an era in which the British government was not afraid to use over-whelming force against unarmed opponents.

The struggle was eventually victorious and was instrumental in forcing the government to introduce a Royal Commission into the situation. When this proved limited in its recommendations and the Glendale crofters found that their circumstances did not improve, they continued their fight. The Crofters Act failed to redistribute land as the now Highlands wide movement demanded. The Radical Crofters Party MPs who were elected to Parliament on the back of this movement refused to vote for it. But the Act did give enough to mean that the Glendale strikers were proved to have been paying too much rent and eventually, the land they were fighting for was nationalised and sold to the Glendale community.

Hutchinson neatly brings the story up to date, putting the Glendale victory into the context of other, more modern legislation aimed at supporting the Crofting communities of Northern Scotland. He doesn't however romanticise the period, or the lifestyle. This was a hard, physically demanding and poverty stricken life. But the Crofters were not weak willed, passive victims, they were men and women whose strong communities were frequently prepared to resist those sent against them by the greedy landlords. This wonderful rich history of the Glendale Martyrs and their resistance is a must read for anyone trying to understand Scottish history, as well as the larger changes that have taken place in British rural communities.

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