Chartism: A Global History and other essays, Richard
Brown, Authoring History, 2016, 324 pp., £10.96, paper, ISBN 1534981438
This volume of essays written partly, the author reveals, as a
response to a student enquiring in 2003 ‘What impact did Chartism have on the
rest of the world brings the word total of the series of six volumes of which it
forms part to 850,000 words. Few if any individual historians have ranged so
widely and encompassed so many dimensions of the Chartist movement than Richard
Brown. Moreover, like so much of Richard Brown’s work it combines a pedagogic
enthusiasm with cutting edge research engaging particularly with the global
resonance of the movement, an aspect of Chartism that had not previously been
‘the subject of serious consideration’. The author revisits and develops in the
opening chapters of this volume of essays his previous consideration of ‘the
nature of Chartism as it looked outwards to Britain’s colonies’, exploring how
Chartist ideas spread across the globe. It also considers how and to what extent
Chartism influenced ‘the critique of Britain’s place in the world and
particularly how far Chartists and Chartist ideas influenced the definition of
colonial rule within and by white-settler colonies in opposition to colonial
rule as seen from the Colonial Office. It provides extended, detailed studies of
Chartism and North America and Chartism in Australia, whilst recognising that
the three decades after 1830 saw widespread rebellion against British colonial
rule from the Canadas to New Zealand and from India to South Africa and
Australia where there was ‘an upsurge of anti-colonial protest as indigenous
peoples and colonial settlers sought to assert their “rights” against the
overweening authority of coercive and largely unaccountable colonial
states’.
In the remainder of the book, Brown provides an up-to-date
perspective upon ‘issues that have been persistent themes’ in understanding the
genesis and impact of this absorbingly fascinating movement, encompassing
‘historiography, women, radicalism and Chartism’, Chartist leadership, and
Chartism and the state, re-affirming the continuing value of the groundwork of
F.C. Mather in exploring the reaction of the government to Chartism. He also
considers how Chartism has been viewed through ideological prisms ranging from
late-nineteenth century socialism to twentieth-first century Welsh nationalism
and remembered in memorials, literature, drama, sculpture and public art such as
the Newport Mural unveiled for the 150th anniversary of the rising of
1839. In contrast to the centennial discussions in 1939, which had focused upon
whether the event should be commemorated at all and the question of whether it
was ‘an accidental riot or a rebellion’, in 1989 ‘the Charter was no longer
controversial and the emphasis was on the benefits the commemoration brought to
the town in terms of the potential economic boost from tourism’. ‘Ironically’,
the author concludes ‘the rebellion was being given a capitalist slant by
generating civil pride’.
Finally, the cover, like all the preceding volumes in the
series features a distinctively atmospheric painting by the romantic artist
J.M.W. Turner, though its particular relevance here is perhaps less self evident
than in some of the illustrations selected for the other volumes, most notably
the Welsh sunset of 1838 on the cover of one of the companion volumes
Chartism: Localities, Spaces and Places, The North, Scotland, Wales and
Ireland. The illustration on the cover of the volume under review is
Petworth Park with Lord Egremont and his dogs c 1828 and distinctly
pre-Chartist. Given that one reviewer of Franny Moyle’s recent biography of
Turner has observed that there is ‘no evidence that Turner was ever distracted
by politics’ it is perhaps more tenuous in other respects also, though
implicitly it may have been chosen because it depicts a representative of an
ancien regime landed aristocracy in a world about to change a decade later as a
result of the People’s Charter.
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