Extended Information
Dr. Carl J. Griffin
Lecturer in Human Geography
Room 02.037
School of Geography, Archaeology and Palaeoecology,
Queen's University Belfast,
BT7 1NN, Northern Ireland, UK
Tel: +44 (0)2890 973394
Fax: +44 (0)2890 321280
Email: carl.griffin@qub.ac.uk
Current Research
Historical geographer and social historian
I joined the School of Geography, Archaeology and Palaeoecology in 2006 as a lecturer in human geography. I was fortunate to start my academic career at the University of Bristol, where after being awarded my PhD in 2002 I held an ESRC post-doctoral fellowship in the School of Geographical Sciences. After leaving Bristol I held a teaching fellowship at the University of Southampton (2004-5) before moving to the University of Oxford. At QUB my teaching spans the fields of cultural and social geographies and histories, specifically the geographies of social movements, everyday life and cultural landscapes.
My research attempts to understand the ways in which rapid capitalist change impacts upon both state, society and human/non-human relations. Focused upon the period c.1720-1850, this research fuses political economic models for understanding social change with more recent social theoretical advances. Capitalism is thus understood not as some monolithic entity but rather as something that has always been negotiated, resisted and remoulded by all actants (both human and non-human). The main way in which these dynamics is explored is through studies of popular protest. My initial research interests focused exclusively upon the geographies of protest in rural England during (after Polanyi) ‘The Great Transformation’. More recently my work has developed to embrace an agenda which whilst still focusing upon conflict examines all relations of transformation, whether between the poor and their employers, the local and the central state, or humans and the non-human. As such, an equal degree of emphasis is attached to the technologies of relations (for instance, laws, markets, property, policy) as it does to forms of legitimization (custom, practice).
My research follows three distinct, but interlinking, approaches:
1). Popular protest and the politics of labouring life
My interest in the protests of English rural workers began as an undergraduate student at Bristol, where I began to work on the so-called Swing Riots of 1830. Ever since, the central drive of my research has focused on the protests and politics of the farmworkers and artisans of the English countryside. Whilst my research has widened to consider both the pre- and post-Swing resort to protest and the ‘practices’ of protest - including food rioting for which a paper is in preparation – in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, Swing continues to be the pivotal focus. This research seeks to locate our understanding of popular protest in the local contexts of the politics of everyday life and the local-national-international interplay that determined experiences of work/worklessness and welfare, authority and custom. A monograph on Swing - the first such study in over 40 years - was published with Manchester University Press in 2012 (see below). I have also recently completed a second book - Protest, Politics and Labouring Life in Rural England, 1700-1850 - for Palgrave.
The Butter Cross, Winchester: site of a food riot, 20 September 1800. The dealers had refused to sell butter at 1/- a lb, the price agreed at a prior meeting with the 'principal inhabitants' of the city. On attempting to flee the dealers were compelled by the populace to return and sell their butter at the pre-agreed price.
The Great Hall, Winchester: location of the Hampshire Special Commission, 18-27 December 1830. The Commission tried 285 men for various different protest ‘offences’ committed during the Swing Riots that spread throughout southern England during the autumn and winter of 1830. The Commission sentenced 101 men to death, though ‘only’ two were actually hanged.
Key recent publications:
Griffin, C.J. 2012 The Rural War: Captain Swing and the Politics of Protest (Manchester University Press)
Griffin, C.J. 2010 The violent Captain Swing? Past and Present, 209, 149-180.
Griffin, C.J. 2010 'The mystery of the fires': Captain Swing as incendiarist. Southern History, 32, 22-44.
Griffin, C.J. 2009 Swing, Swing redivivus or something after Swing? On the death throes of a movement, December 1830 - December 1833. International Review of Social History, 54, 3, 459-497
Griffin, C.J. 2006 Knowable geographies? The reporting of incendiarism in the eighteenth- and early nineteenth century English provincial press. Journal of Historical Geography, 32, 1, 38-56.
The experience of economic and social change in the eighteenth and early nineteenth century English countryside cannot be divorced from the impact of the intensification of agrarian capitalism on the spaces and non-human things – plants, animals, machines… – that co-constituted them. The trend over the last twenty years – with some important exceptions – though has been to write the non-human out of rural histories, focusing squarely on a narrowly defined sociology of rural life. My research seeks to think through the consequences of capitalist change specifically in relation to human and non-human interactions. Again, protest and strategies of resistance provide a pivotal foci. This is perhaps best expressed through a session I organized on ‘Popular protest and moral ecology in Britain’ at the 79th Anglo-American Conference of Historians held at the Institute of Historical Research in July 2010. I am currently putting together a journal special issue on this theme. Click here for further information.
Milkham Enclosure, New Forest, Hampshire, created in 1861 as a result of the 1851 Deer Removal Act, an attempt to turn the Forest into a fiscally productive space. Such enclosures in the New Forest – and elsewhere – were bitterly resisted by commoners who foretold their means and way of life
The planting of hop gardens was a common response to the post-1815 agricultural depression, an attempt to diversify from cereal production. Planting hops though both changed the biophysical nature of the landscapes and the demography of labour, increasing opportunities for women workers and reducing those for men.
Griffin, C.J. 2012 Animal maiming, intimacy and the politics of shared life: the bestial and the beastly in 18th- and early 19th-century England, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 37, 2, pp.301-316
Griffin, C.J. 2011 Popular perceptions of forests: space and place, in Forster, P. & Ritter, E. (eds.) Society, Culture and Forests: Human-Landscape Relations in a Changing World (Springer), 139-158.
Griffin, C.J. 2010 More-than-human histories and the failure of grand states schemes. Cultural Geographies, 17, 4, 451-472
Griffin, C.J. 2008 Protest practice and (tree) cultures of conflict: understanding the spaces of 'tree maiming' in eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century England, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 40, 1, 91-108
Griffin, C.J. 2008 'Cut down by some cowardly miscreants’: plant maiming, or the malicious cutting of plants as an act of protest in eighteenth- and nineteenth century rural England, Rural History, 19, 1, 29-54
3). Law, labour and the state
Notwithstanding the lead given By E.P. Thompson’s seminal ‘The moral economy of the English crowd in the eighteenth century’ and his Whigs and Hunters, the vibrant field of social protest studies in the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s was often criticised for failing to consider the importance of law, regulation and the interaction between law makers and enforcers, policy creators and implementers, and rural workers. Whilst such considerations have long been central to my research on popular protest, recently my research has begun to systematically consider these relationships from two standpoints. First, a British Academy-funded project on the building of institutional knowledge and practices regarding labour disputes in the English West before the arrest of the so-called Tolpuddle Martyrs in 1834 ('Other Tolpuddles? Trade Unionism and Labour Regulation in the English Countryside'; Award reference: SG091233). Second, a nascent project on the ‘spatiality’ of state making in early modern England. This project examines the spatial transformations inacted both wittingly and unwittingly through state legislation, focusing on such diverse spaces as ‘navigations’, plantations, and oyster beds.
The Wey Navigation, Surrey: opened to barge traffic in 1653 two years after the passage of a dedicated act of parliament. This was one of several attempts to create parallel navigable channels to existing rivers. The Wey Navigation, as with the nearby Itchen Navigation in Hampshire, provoked sustained protests.
The arrest of the Tolpuddle Martyrs in 1834 was not, as is often claimed, the first act of rural proto trades unionism. Nor, my research asserts, was it an isolated and unexpected example of aggressive labour regulation. Magistrates in Dorset and Somerset had intervened with increasing vehemency in labour disputes during the post-1815 economic slump.
Key recent publications:
Griffin, C.J. 2011 Parish farms and the poor law: a response to unemployment in rural southern England, c.1815-1835, Agricultural History Review, 59, 2, pp. 176-198
Griffin, C.J. 2010 More-than-human histories and the failure of grand states schemes. Cultural Geographies, 17, 4, 451-472.
Griffin, C.J. 2010 Becoming private property: custom, law, and the geographies of 'ownership' in 18th- and 19th-century England. Environment and Planning A, 42, 3, 747-762.
Griffin, C.J. 2009 Placing political economy: organising opposition to free trade before the abolition of the Corn Laws. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 41, 4, 489-505.
Additionally, I am also interested in the practices of historical geography, something explored in three co-convened sessions on the ‘Historical geographies of embodied practice’ held at the 2007 AAG in San Francisco. The sessions were published in 2008 as a special themed issue of the journal Historical Geography. See:
Griffin, C.J. and Evans, A. (eds.) 2008. Historical geographies of embodied practice and performance. Historical Geography. 36, 5-162.
Editorial board member - Geographical Journal
Treasurer - Historical Geography Research Group
Committee member - Southern History Society
Elected Fellow (2011) - Royal Historical Society
Eleted Fellow (2011) - Higher Education Academy
Publications
Books
1. Griffin, C.J. 2012 The Rural War: Captain Swing and the Politics of Protest (Manchester University Press).
Edited Issues of Journals
2. Griffin, C.J. and Evans, A. (eds.) 2008. Historical geographies of embodied practice and performance. Historical Geography. 36, 5-162 DOI
Papers
3. Griffin, C.J. 2012 Animal maiming, intimacy and the politics of shared life: the bestial and the beastly in eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century England, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 37, 2, 301-16. DOI
4. Griffin, C.J. 2011 Parish farms: a policy response to unemployment in rural southern England, c.1815-1835, Agricultural History Review, 59, 2, 176-198.
5. Griffin, C.J. 2010 The violent Captain Swing? Past and Present, 209, 149-180. For free access click here
6. Griffin, C.J. 2010 More-than-human histories and the failure of grand states schemes. Cultural Geographies, 17, 4, 451-472. DOI
7. Griffin, C.J. 2010 'The mystery of the fires': Captain Swing as incendiarist. Southern History, 32, 21-40.
8. Griffin, C.J. 2010 Becoming private property: custom, law, and the geographies of 'ownership' in 18th- and 19th-century England. Environment and Planning A, 42, 3, 747-762 DOI
9. Griffin, C.J. 2009 Swing, Swing redivivus or something after Swing? On the death throes of a movement, December 1830 - December 1833. International Review of Social History, 54, 3, 459-497 DOI
10. Griffin, C.J. 2009 Placing political economy: organising opposition to free trade before the abolition of the Corn Laws. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 41, 4, 489-505. DOI
11. Griffin, C.J. 2008 Affecting violence: language, gesture and performance in early nineteenth-century English popular protest. Historical Geography, 36, 139-162 DOI
12. Griffin, C.J. and Evans, A. 2008 On historical geographies of embodied practice and performance. Historical Geography, 36, 5-16 DOI
13 . Griffin, C.J. 2008 'Cut down by some cowardly miscreants’: plant maiming, or the malicious cutting of plants as an act of protest in eighteenth- and nineteenth century rural England, Rural History, 19, 1, 29-54 DOI
14. Griffin, C.J. 2008 Protest practice and (tree) cultures of conflict: understanding the spaces of 'tree maiming' in eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century England, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 40, 1, 91-108 DOI
15. Griffin, C.J. 2006 Knowable geographies? The reporting of incendiarism in the eighteenth- and early nineteenth century English provincial press. Journal of Historical Geography, 32, 1, 38-56. DOI
16. Griffin, C.J. 2005 Negotiating capitalism: wood taking and customary practice in William Hunt’s Justices Notebook. Regional Historian, 2, 19-24.
17. Griffin, C.J. 2005 Social conflict and control in Hanoverian and Victorian England. Journal of Historical Geography, 31, 1, 168-176. DOI
18. Griffin, C.J. 2004 Policy on the Hoof: Sir Robert Peel, Sir Edward Knatchbull and the Trial of the Elham Machine Breakers, 1830. Rural History, 15, 2, 1-22. DOI
19. Griffin, C.J. 2000 (published 2002) ‘There was no law to punish that offence’ Re-assessing ‘Captain Swing’: Rural Luddism and Rebellion in East Kent, 1830-31. Southern History, 22, 131-163.
Book chapters
20. Griffin, C.J. 2011 Between companionship and antipathy: animal maiming in the nineteenth century English countryside, in Bull, J. (ed.) Movements•Moving Animals: Essays on Direction, Velocity and Agency in Humanimal Encounters (Uppsala University, Crossroads of Knowledge Series), 41-55.
21. Griffin, C.J. 2011 Popular perceptions of forests: space and place, in Forster, P. & Ritter, E. (eds.) Society, Culture and Forests: Human-Landscape Relations in a Changing World (Springer), 139-158.
22. Griffin, C.J. 2010 Geographies of resistance, in Warf, B. (ed.) Encyclopedia of Geography (Sage).2441-2444.
23. Griffin, C.J. 2009 Sylviculture vs. customary culture: campaigns against timber enclosures in the eighteenth-century New Forest, in Saratsi, E. et al (eds.) Woodland Cultures in Time and Space (Embryo). 72-79.
24. Griffin, C.J. 2009 East Anglian Wheat Country Riots, 1816, in Ness, I. (ed.) International Encyclopedia of Revolution and Protest (Wiley-Blackwell). 1040-1042. DOI
25. Griffin, C.J. 2009 Poor Law Britain, 1834, in Ness, I. (ed.) International Encyclopedia of Revolution and Protest (Wiley-Blackwell). 2720-2721. DOI
26. Griffin, C.J. 2009 Swing Riots, in Ness, I. (ed.) International Encyclopedia of Revolution and Protest (Wiley-Blackwell). 3211-3212. DOI
27. Griffin, C.J. 2005 Resistance, Crime and Popular Cultures in English Forests and Chases, c.1790-1831. In Langton, J and Jones, G (Eds) Towards a Survey of Forests and Chases in England and Wales, c. 1500 to c. 1850. Oxford. 49-54.
Other articles
28. Griffin, C.J. 2009 Writing embodied practices in historical geography. Past Place, 17, pp.7-8.
29. Griffin, C.J. and Evans, A. 2007 Historical geographies of embodied practice. Past Place, 15, 2, 3-7. DOI
Reviews
Recent reviews in: Agricultural History Review, Journal of Historical Geography, Progress in Human Geography, Rural History
Dissemination
Recent invited seminar papers
'The bestial and the beastly: Animal maiming, intimacy and the politics of shared life in 18th- and early 19th-century England', School of Geography, University of Exeter, March 2011.
'Prosecuting protest: Captain Swing, the Home Office and the magistracy', Department of Humanities, University of Gloucestershire, October 2010.
'Chopsticks' politics: rights, social cohesion and a very rural radicalism', Department of History, Trinity College Dublin, February 2010
'Delaying the time of the technoculture? Rural luddism in early nineteenth century England and Wales', Institute of Geography and Earth Sciences, University of Aberystwyth, May 2009
'Seeing like a commoner, gnawing on the state; or, the role of mice and men in the failure of grand schemes: the New Forest, c.1670-1834', School of Geography, University of Nottingham, November 2008
'More-than-human histories: On trees, mice and men and the failure of state schemes in English forests', School of Geosciences, University of Aberdeen, November 2008
'The bestial and the beastly: zoophilia and animal maiming', Department of Geographical and Earth Sciences, University of Glasgow, November 2008
'Ideological tokenism or a new criminal code? Crime and cultures of criminality in rural England after the Black Act', Centre for Eighteenth Centre Studies, Queen's University, Belfast, May 2008
‘Terror and the geographies that ensue: instant policy in early nineteenth century England’, School of Geography, Queen’s University Belfast, March 2007
‘Gesture, choreography and custom in popular protest: Or, the disciplining of bodies of men in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century England’, (presented as part of the ‘Challenging Geographies’ series), Institute of Historical Research, October 2005.
‘Negotiating Capitalism: Property Rights, Customary Rights and the Politics of Timber in Eighteenth and Nineteenth-Century’, School of Geography, University of Oxford, January 2005
‘The Politics of Timber: Custom, Criminality and Protest in Hanoverian England’, Department of History, University of the West of England, Bristol, December 2004
‘‘Cut down by some cowardly miscreants’: Plant maiming, or the Malicious Cutting of Plants as an Act of Protest’, School of Geographical Sciences, University of Bristol, May 2003.
Selected recent conference papers
'Swing in the "city": alien presences and phantasmagoria', Rural History 2010, Brighton, September 2010.
'Agrarian capitalism, animal maiming and human desire', Rural History 2010, Brighton, September 2010.
'The bestial and the beastly: past episodes of love and hate on human-animal borderlands', Animal Movements-Moving Animals, Centre for Gender Research, Uppsala University, May 2010
'Captain Swing and the politics of everyday life', British Agricultural History Society Spring Conference, Durham, March 2010
'The sexuality of Swing: female bodies, machines and imperilled masculinities', Captain Swing Reconsidered: 40 Years of History From Below conference, Reading, March 2009
'Instant history: on (re)writing movements, the Swing Riots, 1830 and onwards...', RGS-IBG Annual International Conference, London , August 2008
'Still Swinging, swing redivivus or something after Swing? On the death throes of a movement, December 1830 - December 1833', European Social Science History Conference, Lisbon , February 2008
'Sylviculture vs. Customary Culture: Popular Campaigns against timber enclosures in the eighteenth and early nineteenth century New Forest', Woodland Cultures in Time and Space, Thessaloniki, Greece, September 2007.
‘Affecting violence: language, gesture and performance in eighteenth and early nineteenth-century English popular protest’, Association of American Geographers (AAG), Annual Meeting, San Francisco , April 2007.
‘Terror, violence and social policy: parochial responses to popular protest in rural England , 1830-31’, European Social Science History Conference, Amsterdam , March 2006.
‘Resistance, crime and popular cultures in English forests and chases, c.1790-1831’, presented at the History of English Forests and Chases Conference, St. John’s College , University of Oxford , April 2005.
‘The Changing Place of Place: Shifting Disciplinary Identities and the Future of Area Studies’, presented (with Dr. John Canning, School of Modern Languages, University of Southampton) at the Disciplinary Identity of Area Studies Conference, National Centre for Languages, November 2004.
‘The Place(s) of Trees in Rural Society: The strange case of ‘Plant Maiming’ in Eighteenth-century England ’, presented at the International Conference of Historical Geographers, Auckland , December 2003.
‘Placing Political Economy, or playing through free trade before the abolition of the Corn Laws: The Kentish Fruit Farmers vs. the British Government’, presented at the International Conference of Historical Geographers, Auckland, December 2003.
‘No latent sparks of mischief’? The Decline of Food Rioting and the Rise of Arson: the Distortions of the English Provincial Press, 1790-1810, presented at the International Conference of Historical Geographers, Quebec City, August 2001.
‘The Peasantry will learn the secret of their own physical strength’: On the Possibilities of Actual, Symbolic, Simulated and Threatened Violence in the ‘Swing Riots’, presented at the International Conference on the History of Violence, Liverpool, July 2001.
International conference sessions organised
'Conceptualising "class" in the English countryside' (round table), Rural History 2010, Brighton, September 2010.
'Captain Swing's other spaces', Rural History 2010, Brighton, September 2010.
'Popular protest and moral ecology in Britain', 79th Anglo-American Conference of Historians, Institute of Historical Research, London, July 2010.
‘Historical geographies of embodied practice I: Towards new epistemologies of the past’ (with Adrian Evans, Cardiff University) Association of American Geographers (AAG), Annual Meeting, San Francisco, April 2007.
‘Historical geographies of embodied practice II: Encountering, understanding and consuming the 'exotic'’ (with Adrian Evans, Cardiff University) Association of American Geographers (AAG), Annual Meeting, San Francisco, April 2007.
‘Historical geographies of embodied practice III: Performing conflict and control’ (with Adrian Evans, Cardiff University) Association of American Geographers (AAG), Annual Meeting, San Francisco, April 2007.
