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THE RURAL WAR: CAPTAIN SWING AND THE POLITICS OF PROTEST by Carl J. Griffin

Beginning in Kent in the summer of 1830 before spreading throughout the country, the Swing Riots were the most dramatic and widespread rising of the English rural poor. Seeking an end to their immiseration, the protestors destroyed machines, demanded higher wages and more generous poor relief, and even frequently resorted to incendiarism to enforce their modest demands. But occurring against a backdrop of revolutions in continental Europe and a political crisis, Swing was perceived to represent a genuine challenge to the existing ruling order, provoking a bitter and bloody repression. This uprising is pivotal in understanding the impacts of industrialisation and commercialization on rural English society, histories of the changing British state, social welfare, criminality and gender.

In the first systematic re-assessment of Swing in over forty years, Carl Griffin deftly analyses its form and scope, placing the movement into the context of social relations in the early nineteenth-century countryside. Focusing on the southeastern heartland of Swing – the area where it started and lasted longest – it is shown that protests were more organised, widespread, intensive and politically-motivated than has hitherto been thought. The author shows that Swing was not only an attempt to materially improve the lot of the rural worker but also represented complex statements about the nature of authority and the politics of rural life. Based on meticulous original research, The rural war offers a strikingly new and vivid account of this defining moment in British history. This book will become essential reading for anyone with an interest both in the history of the English countryside and protest history: specialists, students and general readers alike.

PORTRAIT OF AN INDUSTRIAL CITY: 'CLANGING BELFAST', 1750-1914 by Stephen Royle

Clanging Belfast in its industrial pomp must have been noisy: shipyards manipulating sheets of metal, the constant riveting being only one source of racket; the endless clatter from linen mills, the screeching of trams on unyielding rails, sirens and hooters marking time at the factories. There were steam trains and steam engines in addition to horses' hooves beating on the streets. The rumbustious, often riotous, eternally spirited Belfast people packed into the terraced houses as well as the alleys would have added their din, especially around the drinking dens. The noise is gone, one aspect of the urban past that cannot be recreated. However, the industrial city has left other remembrances, from many buildings which still grace the post-industrial city, to the humdrum details of citizens' lives revealed in newspapers, to more formal sources such as the corporation's minute books, the deliberations of the Linen Merchants' Association and the sometimes shocking revelations in parliamentary reports. Utilising where possible contemporary materials, this book details Belfast's development from the eighteenth century market town, where only hindsight can discover the seeds of industrial greatness, to the titanic city - in every respect - of the period prior to Great War, whose horrors were to usher in such changes. Belfast was a success: its unparalleled growth, its might in textiles, shipbuilding and other industries. However, the book cannot, does not, shy away from the darkness that imbued the clanging city, from the health problems of mill workers to the poverty behind the well-lit main streets a 'charnel house breaking in upon the gaiety and glitter of a bridal' as one description inelegantly had it. Then there were, of course, the 'intestine broils', the sectarian conflicts that blighted Belfast in the nineteenth century, as they were to do in the twentieth.

GEOGRAPHIES OF NINETEENTH-CENTURY SCIENCE by David N. Livingstone and Charles W. J. Withers (eds)

NATURE DISPLACED, NATURE DISPLAYED: ORDER AND BEAUTY IN BOTANICAL GARDENS by Nuala C. Johnson

From their origins in the Renaissance to their apogee in the nineteenth century, botanical gardens brought together in a single space the great diversity of the earth’s flora. They displaced nature from forest, foothill and countryside and rearranged it in their enclosed spaces to reveal something of the scientific principles underpinning the apparent chaos of the wild. Nature was tamed in order to divulge its hidden secrets and re-displayed in a fashion which heightened a sense of curiosity and wonderment but reassured that order could be disclosed. Nuala Johnson’s engaging study explores three botanical gardens – the University of Cambridge botanical garden, the Royal Dublin Society botanical garden, and the Belfast botanical garden – to show how the presentation and display of such gardens was influenced by place and how aesthetics, science, entertainment and ideas of empire all played important roles in the final outcome.The result is an outstanding work of scholarship that says much about the spatiality of scientific knowledge and embraces many of the key themes in contemporary historical geography.

'Nuala Johnson's masterful ethnography of three sites where the canons of science and aesthetics are refracted and blurred demonstrates why a geographical imagination matters. This is comparative history at its best.'  James S. Duncan, University of Cambridge.

SAGE HANDBOOK OF GEOGRAPHICAL KNOWLEDGE