The Make-Believe Space: Affective Geography in a Postwar Polity
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Carl Griffin, The Rural War: Captain Swing and the Politics of Protest. Manchester, Manchester University Press, 2012, xi þ 360 pages, £70 hardcover. The end of the Napoleonic wars ushered in a period of economic and social stress in the English countryside which culminated in a concerted attempt in late 1830 by rural workers to improve their conditions by overt and covert protest and violence. E.J. Hobs- bawm’s and George Rudé’s Captain Swing (London, 1969) was hailed on publication as a masterly evocation of this, the most serious uprising of rural workers England has ever seen. Its analysis was convincing and the long appendix showing the distribution by county of disturbances between 1830 and 1832 was impressive. Before long other accounts began to supplement their list, adding to the numbers of ‘Swing events’. These tended to be local or partial additions, and until now no-one has seriously challenged the overall narrative of 1969. Carl Griffin has set out to re-write the historical geography of the Swing movement in a closely argued text, building on his own doctoral thesis and many previous papers and conference accounts of this rising. Griffin acknowledges his obvious debt to Hobsbawm and Rudé and their predecessors such as the Hammonds’ Village Labourer (London, 1911) and the near contemporary writings of E.P. Thompson, together with subsequent work over the last 42 years. Griffin is also at great pains to contextualize the movement. In part one of the book he lays the groundwork for 1830 clearly and concisely by describing the demoralization and desperation of the agricultural workers and growing overt and covert protests which often built on pre-existing criminal, protest, and radical groups, including smugglers, in Kent, Sussex, Surrey, and Hampshire. The latter counties are the focus of the book, with occasional mentions of East Anglia, Berkshire, and other surrounding counties. We still await a national account of the rural protest movement taking in the northern and midland counties as well. Griffin shies away from such a task, claiming (probably correctly) that the local contexts for the events must be understood so that any single volume resulting from such work would be unwieldy. Certainly this would be true if the account was as detailed as Griffin’s, although an overall survey of rural unrest across England between 1820 and 1840, such as Hobsbawm and Rudé attempted, might be useful. We might then understand more fully why Swing is portrayed as going no further north than Berkshire and no further west than Dorset. We are given a detailed chronological and geographical narra- tive of the spread of Swing unrest, from its origins in east Kent across the southern counties, with information on the style of protest: incendiarism, the breaking of the hated threshing ma- chines, assemblies, threats, and physical violence. Griffin struggles, however, to correlate these protest types with their locations or their pre-Swing protest history. No one region, it seems, deployed only one type of protest, and different combinations of protest figured from one place to another. In trying to impose spatial pat- terns on the past Griffin, of course, comes up against a classic problem in historical geography: how to make time/space sense of a phenomenon in the absence of adequate data. Not that many people could possibly have collected more data. The book is based upon a most careful integration of primary sources from local and national archives, and comprehensive secondary source compilation. In a bold statement Griffin asserts that his book ‘supersedes Captain Swing’. In fact it draws attention to the importance of the 1969 publication in initiating ‘Swing studies’. But Griffin does provide new insights into several aspects of Swing, most notably his analysis of the mechanisms for the spread of unrest, and of the impact of Swing on local public policy and parish politics. The aftermath of the unrest is treated sensitively. The extended appendix listing protests between 24 August and 31 December 1830 extends that of Hobsbawm and Rudé for the south-eastern counties (other counties are excluded). And, perhaps most inter- estingly, Griffin devotes a chapter to ‘the gender politics of Swing’. This is certainly an addition to Swing studies, and builds on more recent historical research into the significant role of women (and children) in the domestic economy of nineteenth-century England, and combines it with a nuanced cultural analysis of the contem- porary linking of threshing machines with women’s bodies, and the way in which the machines threatened an emasculation of men’s role as family breadwinner. Swing cast a long shadow over rural social relations in the second quarter of the nineteenth century. In the context of Kent alone, the antagonism to the New Poor Law of 1834 prolonged the methods of Swing’s protests: the so-called ‘last rising of the agri- cultural labourers’ was put down by the military with deadly force in Bossenden Wood. And as threshing machines were re- introduced in 1849e50 there was more violence e a ‘Second Swing’. No wonder that Kent had a long list of Prosecution and Protection Societies, many starting after 1830, as listed by Coulson and Hastings in the Historical Atlas of Kent (2004), a publication which strangely escaped Griffin’s notice. It has always been a source of pride for this reviewer that Har- dres in east Kent, previously depicted as the location of the first Swing incident, was also where he began to play his club cricket. Unfortunately Griffin alters the location to the Elham valley nearby. He must be forgiven for that, but perhaps not for the minor proof reading errors. It is a pity also that there is no bibliography. But, despite these minor shortcomings, in Griffin’s book we now have a worthy successor to the classic Captain Swing. It is just as detailed, it provides a narrative and a thematic analysis, and is very carefully researched. Brian Short University of Sussex, UK http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jhg.2013.07.009 Yael Navaro-Yashin, The Make-Believe Space: Affective Geography in a Postwar Polity. Durham, Duke University Press, 2012, xiv þ 270 pages, US$24.95 paper. The Cypriot conflict has often been described as ‘bicommunal’,a term devised to emphasize the political and identity clash be- tween the two historically antagonistic communities in the island. Turkish Cypriot accounts of the conflict emphasize primarily the 1963e1974 period leading to their community’s seclusion into enclaves across the island, while Greek Cypriot narratives focus on their devastation brought by the 1974 Turkish invasion. The Make-Believe Space goes beyond most conventional definitions and understandings of the Cyprus problem to engage grassroots experience through a theoretically informed anthropological perspective. It draws on ethnographic fieldwork conducted be- tween 1998 and 2003 in the northern part of the island and aims to investigate the challenges of belonging to a post-conflict society ‘carved out as a separate space and defined as a distinct (de facto) polity’ (p. 272). As Navaro-Yashin argues although the territory was divided to create a ‘separate habitation of ‘Turks’, the Greek Cypriots remained there not physically, but through their material objects, their dwelling, and their fields’ (p. 13). The author presents the officially unrecognized state of the north through its sover- eignty claims and administrative practices as well as its new de- mographic makeup, ‘rid of its former Greek-Cypriot inhabitants’ Reviews / Journal of Historical Geography 42 (2013) 215e227 226
Transcript of The Make-Believe Space: Affective Geography in a Postwar Polity
Reviews / Journal of Historical Geography 42 (2013) 215e227226
Carl Griffin, The Rural War: Captain Swing and the Politics of Protest.Manchester, Manchester University Press, 2012, xiþ 360 pages, £70hardcover.
The end of the Napoleonic wars ushered in a period of economicand social stress in the English countryside which culminated in aconcerted attempt in late 1830 by rural workers to improve theirconditions by overt and covert protest and violence. E.J. Hobs-bawm’s and George Rudé’s Captain Swing (London, 1969) washailed on publication as a masterly evocation of this, the mostserious uprising of rural workers England has ever seen. Its analysiswas convincing and the long appendix showing the distribution bycounty of disturbances between 1830 and 1832 was impressive.Before long other accounts began to supplement their list, adding tothe numbers of ‘Swing events’. These tended to be local or partialadditions, and until now no-one has seriously challenged theoverall narrative of 1969. Carl Griffin has set out to re-write thehistorical geography of the Swing movement in a closely arguedtext, building on his own doctoral thesis and many previous papersand conference accounts of this rising.
Griffin acknowledges his obvious debt to Hobsbawm and Rudéand their predecessors such as the Hammonds’ Village Labourer(London, 1911) and the near contemporary writings of E.P.Thompson, together with subsequent work over the last 42 years.Griffin is also at great pains to contextualize the movement. In partone of the book he lays the groundwork for 1830 clearly andconcisely by describing the demoralization and desperation of theagricultural workers and growing overt and covert protests whichoften built on pre-existing criminal, protest, and radical groups,including smugglers, in Kent, Sussex, Surrey, and Hampshire. Thelatter counties are the focus of the book, with occasional mentionsof East Anglia, Berkshire, and other surrounding counties. We stillawait a national account of the rural protest movement taking inthe northern and midland counties as well. Griffin shies away fromsuch a task, claiming (probably correctly) that the local contexts forthe events must be understood so that any single volume resultingfrom such work would be unwieldy. Certainly this would be true ifthe account was as detailed as Griffin’s, although an overall surveyof rural unrest across England between 1820 and 1840, such asHobsbawm and Rudé attempted, might be useful. We might thenunderstand more fully why Swing is portrayed as going no furthernorth than Berkshire and no further west than Dorset.
We are given a detailed chronological and geographical narra-tive of the spread of Swing unrest, from its origins in east Kentacross the southern counties, with information on the style ofprotest: incendiarism, the breaking of the hated threshing ma-chines, assemblies, threats, and physical violence. Griffin struggles,however, to correlate these protest types with their locations ortheir pre-Swing protest history. No one region, it seems, deployedonly one type of protest, and different combinations of protestfigured from one place to another. In trying to impose spatial pat-terns on the past Griffin, of course, comes up against a classicproblem in historical geography: how to make time/space sense ofa phenomenon in the absence of adequate data. Not thatmany people could possibly have collected more data. The book isbased upon amost careful integration of primary sources from localand national archives, and comprehensive secondary sourcecompilation.
In a bold statement Griffin asserts that his book ‘supersedesCaptain Swing’. In fact it draws attention to the importance of the1969 publication in initiating ‘Swing studies’. But Griffin doesprovide new insights into several aspects of Swing, most notablyhis analysis of the mechanisms for the spread of unrest, and of theimpact of Swing on local public policy and parish politics. Theaftermath of the unrest is treated sensitively. The extended
appendix listing protests between 24 August and 31 December1830 extends that of Hobsbawm and Rudé for the south-easterncounties (other counties are excluded). And, perhaps most inter-estingly, Griffin devotes a chapter to ‘the gender politics of Swing’.This is certainly an addition to Swing studies, and builds on morerecent historical research into the significant role of women (andchildren) in the domestic economy of nineteenth-century England,and combines it with a nuanced cultural analysis of the contem-porary linking of threshingmachines with women’s bodies, and theway in which the machines threatened an emasculation of men’srole as family breadwinner.
Swing cast a long shadow over rural social relations in thesecond quarter of the nineteenth century. In the context of Kentalone, the antagonism to the New Poor Law of 1834 prolonged themethods of Swing’s protests: the so-called ‘last rising of the agri-cultural labourers’ was put down by the military with deadly forcein Bossenden Wood. And as threshing machines were re-introduced in 1849e50 there was more violence e a ‘SecondSwing’. No wonder that Kent had a long list of Prosecution andProtection Societies, many starting after 1830, as listed by Coulsonand Hastings in the Historical Atlas of Kent (2004), a publicationwhich strangely escaped Griffin’s notice.
It has always been a source of pride for this reviewer that Har-dres in east Kent, previously depicted as the location of the firstSwing incident, was also where he began to play his club cricket.Unfortunately Griffin alters the location to the Elham valley nearby.He must be forgiven for that, but perhaps not for the minor proofreading errors. It is a pity also that there is no bibliography. But,despite these minor shortcomings, in Griffin’s book we now have aworthy successor to the classic Captain Swing. It is just as detailed, itprovides a narrative and a thematic analysis, and is very carefullyresearched.
Brian ShortUniversity of Sussex, UK
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jhg.2013.07.009
Yael Navaro-Yashin, The Make-Believe Space: Affective Geography in aPostwar Polity. Durham, Duke University Press, 2012, xiv þ 270pages, US$24.95 paper.
The Cypriot conflict has often been described as ‘bicommunal’, aterm devised to emphasize the political and identity clash be-tween the two historically antagonistic communities in the island.Turkish Cypriot accounts of the conflict emphasize primarily the1963e1974 period leading to their community’s seclusion intoenclaves across the island, while Greek Cypriot narratives focus ontheir devastation brought by the 1974 Turkish invasion. TheMake-Believe Space goes beyond most conventional definitionsand understandings of the Cyprus problem to engage grassrootsexperience through a theoretically informed anthropologicalperspective. It draws on ethnographic fieldwork conducted be-tween 1998 and 2003 in the northern part of the island and aimsto investigate the challenges of belonging to a post-conflict society‘carved out as a separate space and defined as a distinct (de facto)polity’ (p. 272). As Navaro-Yashin argues although the territorywas divided to create a ‘separate habitation of ‘Turks’, the GreekCypriots remained there not physically, but through their materialobjects, their dwelling, and their fields’ (p. 13). The author presentsthe officially unrecognized state of the north through its sover-eignty claims and administrative practices as well as its new de-mographic makeup, ‘rid of its former Greek-Cypriot inhabitants’
Reviews / Journal of Historical Geography 42 (2013) 215e227 227
and repopulated as the author argues by ‘immigrants from Turkeywho were invited to settle in northern Cyprus by the TRNC[Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus] regime in the aftermath of1974’ (p. 272).
One of the most important achievements of the book is thestudy of repopulation practice as a significant aspect of the materialtransformation of the political and spatial landscape of northernCyprus. Much academic literature and policy couches the Cyprusquestion in terms of the two autochthonous communities. Thebook complements the conventional bicommunal frame of theCypriot conflict by integrating into its narrative settler commu-nities in the northern part of Cyprus.
As the settler question has received little academic or policyattention, the book adds critical insights to an oft-neglected aspectof the island’s everyday reality. Specifically, it demonstrates theheterogeneous character of the settler population (e.g., Kurds, Lazand Arab speakers) and highlights the frequently antagonistic rela-tionship between newcomers and indigenous narratives. Navaro-Yashin demonstrates how Turkish Cypriots have developed a dou-ble boundarydistinguishing them fromboth theirGreekCypriot andsettler neighbors, signified by the ‘othering’ terms gâvur and fellah,respectively (p. 57). What is particularly worrying in the book is thepessimism of the Turkish Cypriot respondents and the degree towhich they express concern over their ultimate disappearance fromthe island; for instance, autochthonous Turkish Cypriots describethemselves ‘as the last of the Mohicans’ (p. 219), fearing both thedemographic threat of settlers as well as international isolation.
Overall, this is an insightful and novel book which skillfullyunpacks the various aspects of citizenship and belonging in acontested territory. The case study by itself is very interesting; thetowns and villages of northern Cyprus comprise a territoryformerly inhabited predominantly by Greek Cypriots until 1974.Turkish Cypriots claim the same territory as their homeland whiletheir de facto state now possesses a population that could be almosthalf Anatolian settlers in ethnic background, according to someaccounts.
Addressing the past and specifically who belongs to NorthernCyprus constitutes a difficult question. Yet, The Make-Believe Spacemakes a remarkably novel contribution by demonstrating the un-usual complexity (and maturity) in thinking among those mostaffected by the conflict.
Most interesting is the sharp criticisms Turkish Cypriots havevoiced not only about their own veteran leader Rauf Denktas whohas obstructed the island’s reunification for decades, but also oftheir own actions, especially their treatment of the Greek Cypriotproperties and past. On this point, the book’s innovative engage-ment with ‘affect’ particularly with regard to the treatment of post-war objects and dwellings illustrates how ‘national belonging andethnicity have little validity in analyzing the complexity of emo-tions a community of people might have in relation to theirhomeland, its past, and its future’ (p. 215). Stories of amateur col-lectors in northern Cyprus who have amassed objects left behind inthe aftermath of war offer the reader an unconventional image of apost-conflict society where objects and the material environmentcreate both affect and uneasiness.
Navaro-Yashin’s theoretically rich anthropological emphasis isparticularly relevant to readers in anthropology. Yet more attentionto some of the recent works in several disciplines, particularly byrising Turkish Cypriot scholars, could have strengthened theempirical narrative. In addition, attention to the mainstream his-toriography of the Cyprus question could have prevented the book’sfew minor factual errors, e.g., Grivas is wrongly presented asorchestrating the military coup against Makarios in 1974 (p. 8).Likewise, the discussion of history books (p. 53) could havebenefited from references to the vigorous debates in the TurkishCypriot community that led to significant revisions (see especiallywork by Yücel Vural on Turkish Cypriot perceptions of intercom-munal relations).
Despite these minor issues, books such as The Make-BelieveSpace make an invaluable contribution that could shape theagenda for further research in and across disciplines. Navaro-Yashin’s book provides novel analytical tools with which toexamine grassroots perceptions in contested lands and de factostates. More fundamentally, it sheds much-needed light on thecomplexities and intellectual magnetism of divided societies,Cyprus in particular, and their use as laboratories for innovativesocial science research.
Neophytos LoizidesUniversity of Kent, UK
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jhg.2013.07.020
