Popular Contention in Great Britain

Between 1750 and 1840, ordinary British people abandoned such time-honored forms of protest as collective seizures of grain, the sacking of buildings, public humiliation, and physical abuse in favor of marches, petition drives, public meetings, and other sanctioned routines of social movement politics. The change created — perhaps for the first time anywhere — mass participation in national politics.

Charles Tilly is the first to address the depth and significance of the transmutations in popular collection action during this period. As he unravels the story of thousands of popular struggles and their consequences, he illuminates the dynamic relationships among an industrializing, capitalizing, proletarianizing economy; a war-making, growing, increasingly interventionist state; and the internal history of contention that spawned such political entrepeneurs as Francis Place and Henry Hunt. Tilly's research rests on a catalog of more than 8,000 contentious gatherings described in British periodicals, plus ample documentation from British archives and historical monographs.

The author elucidates four distinct phases in the transformation to mass political participation, and identifies the forms and occasions for collective action that characterized and dominated each. He provides rich descriptions not only of a wide variety of popular protests but also of such influential figures as John Wilkes, Lord George Gordon, William Cobbett, and Daniel O'Connell. This engaging study offers a vivid picture of Great Britain during a pivotal era.

To view Power Point slides of the last undergraduate course of Charles Tilly (with Ernesto Castaneda) in Spring 2007, which are related to his Paradigm book with Sidney Tarrow, Contentious Politics, please click here.

Tilly (social science, Columbia U.) discusses the social and political turmoil that led the British government to impose severely restrictive laws in the 1790s, officially aimed at revolutionaries and their supporters, and how those laws were progressively expanded and used against workers, political dissidents, and others inconvenient to the government. The 1995 cloth edition was published by Harvard University Press. Annotation ©2005 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

Charles Tilly was Joseph L. Buttenwieser Professor of Social Science at Columbia University, and author of fifty earlier books. Just before his death, he was honored with the Social Science Research Council's prestigious Albert O. Hirschman Prize. A founding friend of Paradigm, Tilly is author of several other Paradigm books including most recently, Explaining Social Processes.