Spatial relations and the materialities of political conflict: the construction of entangled political identities in the London and Newcastle Port Strikes of 1768

Geoforum 35 (2004) 701–711 www.elsevier.com/locate/geoforum

Spatial relations and the materialities of political conflict: the construction of entangled political identities in the London and Newcastle Port Strikes of 1768 David Featherstone Department of Geography, Roxby Building, Liverpool University, Liverpool, L69 7ZT UK Received 23 May 2003; received in revised form 6 February 2004

Abstract This paper engages with the material geographies of political conflict. It applies the concerns of actor-network theory around the entangled character of material/social relations to the geographies of subaltern politics. It explores how interconnected strikes of riverside labourers and sailors in the London and Newcastle Port Strikes of 1768 contested the terms on which materials were enrolled into mercantile capitalist networks. The dynamic geographies of these strikes are used to unsettle constructions of subaltern spaces of politics as bounded and localised. The paper then demonstrates how labourers crafted multiple antagonisms through negotiating their location in materially heterogeneous networks. It uses this concern with contested material geographies to engage with the entangled construction of political identities. The paper concludes that interrogating the materialities of political conflict does not just add a neglected technical dimension to the study of political activity; it provides considerable resources for engaging with the inventiveness of subaltern political activity and agency [Barry, A., Political Machines: Governing A Technological Society, Continuum Publications, London, 2001]. Ó 2004 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. Keywords: Antagonisms; Enrolment; Actor-network theory; Geographies of resistance; Measurement; 18th-century

1. Introduction In May 1768, striking merchant sailors enforced an embargo on all shipping in the Thames, briefly preventing mercantile capitalist networks from functioning. Among them were sailors who had participated in strikes in the North East of England earlier that year where gangs of sailors had boarded ships, ‘striking’ their sails and yards to prevent them from sailing. 1 The Thames strikes drew on the success and styles of these actions, which had ‘brought their masters to comply with their demands’ (Stewart, 1768, p. 49). These port

E-mail address: [email protected] (D. Featherstone). On the Newcastle strikes see Annual Register, 1768: 92. Thomas Stewart, a home office official who observed the negotiations of merchants and sailors in the Thames strikes argued ‘I find they had risen at Newcastle [. . .] I understand it was those very colliers who, when they came here [London] [. . .] with a view to give security to the regulations they had obtained for themselves at Newcastle’ (Stewart, 1768, p. 49). 1

0016-7185/$ - see front matter Ó 2004 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.geoforum.2004.02.003

strikes intersected with the struggles of diverse riverside labourers. Sailors issued proclamations demanding that other riverside workers ‘Watermen, Lightermen, Ballast men, Ballast heavers, coal heavers & c’ join their action. Official correspondence registers the devastating effect of such co-operation: The sailors have this morning completed what was before unfinished with respect to unman[n]ing and otherwise disabling all the ships in the river [. . .] The watermen have like wise been pressing all of their corps to join [. . .] and this morning the coal porters have taken the same resolution [. . .] so that no kind of business is suffered to go on upon, or near the River (Home Office Domestic Entry Book, 1768, p. 80). This heterogeneous constituency of sailors and riverside labourers brought into contestation the power-relations that structured mercantile networks. The sailors’ actions cut into the networked practices of merchants, like

702

D. Featherstone / Geoforum 35 (2004) 701–711

those of the Hudson Bay Company which had acquired a bad reputation among sailors. These strikes threatened the methods of long-distance control which the Company used to negotiate the tides and seasons of the North Atlantic and their fragile relations with Indian trading partners (Home Office Domestic Entry Book, 1768, pp. 96–97, 128–130; Wilson, 1899, p. 35). The strikes contested the terms on which mercantile networks generated materials. Dockyard workers were involved in protracted struggles over their customary rights to waste wood, known as ‘chips’ (Gentleman’s Magazine, 1768, p. 198). Coopers contested the brewers’ use of ‘[t]ubs or large vessels, of a shape or construction that is not so profitable for their trade as another kind that was formerly in use’ (Stewart, 1768, p. 47). On the 10th May, 1768, hundreds of sawyers attacked a saw mill in Limehouse. They told the owner’s agent that ‘the Sawmill was at work when thousands of them were starving for want of bread’ (Proceedings of the Old Bailey, 1768, p. 468). Lightermen on the Thames struck for an increase in their coal allowance, as well as for more pay (Stewart, 1768, p. 49). Coal heavers contested not just the raft of deductions from their wages, but also their poor status and the ‘dirty and slavish’ character of their labour (Coal Heavers, 1764). These struggles then were not just contestations over wages. They were productive interventions in the social and material practices through which these trades and dockside spaces were constituted. This paper uses these strikes as a starting point to engage with the spaces of subaltern politics. There are two key elements to this project. Firstly, I locate labourers’ politics at the intersection of different routes of subaltern political activity. This move draws on the inspiring imaginative geographies of resistance developed by the historians Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker. Their accounts of the activity of a mobile and multi-ethnic Atlantic working class in the early modern period have foregrounded overlaps, exchanges and contacts between different subaltern groups (Linebaugh and Rediker, 1991, 2000). Secondly, I examine how labourers crafted their political agency through negotiating the material geographies shaped and reshaped by mercantile networks. Labourers’ politics in these strikes contested the terms on which materials were negotiated, constructed and generated. The configurations of mercantile networks were brought into contestation through these strikes, most notably in disputes by keelmen, riverside labourers in the North East, which contested practices of measurement of coal.

2. Actor-network theory and the material geographies of subaltern politics The dynamic geographies of the Port Strikes are oddly dissonant with much contemporary theorising on

the geographies of labour. David Harvey, for example, has argued that ‘working class movements are [. . .] generally better at organizing in and dominating place than they are at commanding space’ (Harvey, 1989, p. 236, emphasis in original, see also Harvey and Swyngedouw, 1993; Smith, 1993). As Castree has commented, Harvey and Syngedouw’s discussion of the Cowley Plant in East Oxford counterposes ‘the seemingly irresistible gales of capital’s creative destruction to the limited means that place-based workers have at their disposal to make their own history and geography’ (Castree, 2000, p. 275). Labourers’ politics have often been seen as most successful when it has been bounded in particular places (see Harvey, 1996; Herod, 1990). The spaces of politics of subaltern activity have as a result often been defined negatively as the settled opposite of the dynamism and networked spatialities of capital. This paper contends that the theoretical insights and concerns of actor-network theory (ANT) can contribute to accounts of the dynamic spaces of subaltern politics. The relevance of this work for subaltern struggles is twofold. Firstly, it emphasises that interaction is ‘never–– purely local’, but is ‘constituted, construed and configured by distant actions’ (Murdoch, 1997, p. 329). This unsettles a tendency to confine subaltern politics within bounded spaces and opens up possibilities for following more dynamic trajectories of subaltern political activity. Secondly, ANT’s focus on the entangled character of social/material relations provides resources for developing a materially heterogeneous account of the relations between space and politics (Hinchliffe, 2001; Murdoch, 1998). This understanding of the relations between space and politics might seem of little immediate relevance for the study of subaltern political struggles. Existing accounts in labour geography have assumed that labour struggles merely play out fixed interests that are constituted before engagement in political activity (Herod, 2002). Following how labourers’ political struggles engaged with social and material relations, however, opens up important possibilities for recovering the agency of subaltern political activity. This materially heterogeneous account of the political can tell stories about how subaltern struggles construct their agency and identities through intervening in the ongoing orderings of social and material practices (Hinchliffe, 1996; Murdoch, 1997). ANT’s focus on practices, its insistence on the materially heterogeneous character of social relations and on the networked constitution of activities has unsettled key aspects of contemporary understandings of the political (Akrich, 1992; Barry, 2001; Mol, 1999). Many different traditions of political theory have viewed non-humans and technologies as static, fixed goods or resources that remain unchanged through the conduct of political activity (for critiques of the humanism of

D. Featherstone / Geoforum 35 (2004) 701–711

political theory see Law, 1994, 2000; Latour, 1999b; Mol, 1999). Iris Marion Young’s influential account of justice, for example, adopts a narrowly social ontology. She argues that whereas social relations need to be thought of in dynamic procedural terms, relationships with materials and natural resources are fixed and static and that a justice relating to these factors can be thought of in simple distributional terms (Young, 1990, p. 33). The materialities of the disputes in 1768 suggest that such an ontology of the political is inadequate. The conceptions of justice mobilised through these disputes were about interventions in the ongoing configurations of humans-non-humans through mercantile networks. This reconfigures notions of justice and political activity as ongoing interventions in world-building activities, rather than the products of isolated and purified social actors. It is this challenge to the ontologies of the political which remains one of the most ‘untapped’ potentialities of ANT (Latour, 1999a, p. 23). ‘With Latour it now becomes possible to speak of ‘ontological politics’ of a world that is to be actively shaped rather than properly known’ (Braun and Disch, 2002, p. 507). These concerns with the entangled character of activity can foreground the work of configuring strategic arrangements of humans and non-humans. But arguably there are tensions with the liberal pluralism implicit in of some versions of ANT that have focused on ‘enfranchising’ non-humans (Lee and Brown, 1994, p. 776). This has implications for examining how political activity brings such strategic arrangements of humans and non-humans into contestation. The metaphor of enfranchising the non-human ‘other’ is developed most provocatively through Latour’s notion of a ‘parliament of things’; one of the most sustained attempts to think through the coconstitution of politics, science and nature. His writing usefully deconstructs the moderns’ tendency to denounce through reference to the modern constitution which enabled an ‘upper ground for taking a critical stance’ through appeals to the purified domains of Nature, Society and God (Latour, 1993, p. 43). Latour proposes that a rejection of these styles of denunciation can be productive. He argues for the ratification of unofficial forms of morality that have functioned through ‘arrangement, combination, combinazione, combine but also negotiation or compromise’ (Latour, 1993, pp. 45– 46). In a ‘parliament of things’ the two halves of the modern constitution can be patched together so that ‘the imbroglios and networks that had no place now have the whole to place themselves’ (Latour, 1993, p. 144). This does not demand a revolution, for it is simply ratifying ‘what we have always done’ (Latour, 1993, p. 144). This reworking of the political is significant. It is also important to ratify something else which ‘we have always done’, so as not to exclude this from the constitution of a ‘parliament of things’. This is the way that

703

these different combinations and arrangements have been the site of conflict and antagonism. This move can clarify ambiguities about the role of conflict that linger in Latour’s reworking of the political. Theorists associated with ‘radical democracy’ such as Chantal Mouffe, have criticised liberal democracy for excluding a concern with the constitutive nature of antagonisms. This work can hone a sense of how strategic arrangements of humans and non-humans can be configured in antagonistic ways (Mouffe, 1999, 2000). The insights of Mouffe warn us against patching the two halves of the modern constitution back together in a way which is structured by a liberal pluralism that evades the constitutive and ineradicable character of antagonism (Mouffe, 1999, p. 4). Thinking through the links between ANT and the concerns of radical democracy can reconfigure antagonisms as constituted through intervening in strategic arrangements of humans and non-humans. This strategy unsettles ‘the too often flat political and ethical landscapes of ANT’ and dislocates the liberal pluralism that structures some versions of ANT (Whatmore, 2003, p. 57). ANT has been persistently criticised for its lack of attention to the production of differentiated spatialities (Laurier and Philo, 1999, p. 1064; Thrift, 1999, p. 313). Laurier and Philo, for example, warn of the danger of a ‘homogenising indifference’ that occludes differences ‘not just between the overly familiar human-machine binary but also between kinds of humans and between kinds of machines’ (Laurier and Philo, 1999, p. 1064). It is also necessary to consider the the ways in which arrangements of humans and non-humans are configured in antagonistic ways. This offers resources for differentiating ways of articulating relations between humans and non-humans, rather than just considering differences between the humans or non-humans themselves. This has implications for the way in which some of the central terms of ANT are deployed. Enrolment is one key term which can be reconfigured through locating it as part of the materialities of conflict. Latour defines enrolment as the techniques through which non-humans are ‘seduced, manipulated or induced into the collective’ (Latour, 1994, p. 46). This paper develops Latour’s usage of the term, however, by interrogating how political activities construct practices of enrolment in antagonistic ways. Terms like enrolment can be used in ways that imply a relatively smooth translation of non-humans into socialised practices. Sarah Whatmore’s account of the various agricultural practices and techniques through which the soya bean has been enrolled gives little sense of the ways in which enrolment can become a deeply contested process (Whatmore, 2002, pp. 125–133). Despite a focus on the ‘volatile’ practices of enrolment, she argues that practices of ‘saving seed’ have merely become ‘redundant’ through the use of patents. This ignores the

704

D. Featherstone / Geoforum 35 (2004) 701–711

multifaceted trans-national resistances that have coalesced in opposition to these particular practices of enrolment (see Featherstone, 2003). This paper uses a discussion of the contestation of practices of measurement in the coal trade to develop a volatile and political account of enrolment. Measurement was a key practice through which materials such as coal were enrolled into mercantile networks in relatively standardised ways. Practices of standardisation have often been seen as closing down the space for antagonism and conflict. Andrew Barry, however, has argued that practices of standardisation, rather than producing harmonious social relations, can serve to ‘create new sites and objects of political conflict’ (Barry, 2001, p. 63). Locating subaltern politics as part of these emerging sites of political conflict can recover the inventiveness of subaltern agency. Barry suggests that what is inventive is not ‘the novelty of artefacts and devices in themselves, but the novelty of the arrangements with other objects and activities within which artefacts and instruments are situated, and might be situated in the future’ (Barry, 2001, p. 212 emphasis in text). Inventiveness here becomes refigured as an ‘index of the degree to which an object or practice is associated with opening up possibilities’ (Barry, 2001, p. 212 emphasis in text). This paper argues that riverside labourers through contesting mercantile practices produced possibilities that the social and material relations these networks generated could be conducted in different, potentially more equal ways. The following sections explore how keelmen intervened in the practices of measurement that were integral to shaping the power-relations of their labour.

3. Mercantile networks and labourers’ politics The Port Strikes of 1768 were the product of heterogeneous political constituencies brought together by mercantile networks. London’s riverside spaces were hubs of connection of Irish labourers (George, 1927; Linebaugh, 1992, pp. 288–326), of the black maritime workers and slaves who formed a significant presence in both the 18th-century Atlantic and London (Berlin, 1996; Bolster, 1997, pp. 19–20), and of riverside labourers from the North East, many of whom had deserted bound contracts as keelmen in Newcastle (Morgan and Rushton, 1998, p. 25, see also Rogers, 1998, p. 114). The repertoires of activity and organisation used in the strikes were products of the interrelations of these trajectories. These labourers were not necessarily positioned in absolute opposition to mercantile capitalist networks. They did, however, contest the terms of their location within these networks through negotiating the techniques through which mercantile networks generated and distributed materials. Commonalities and solidarities emerged from these interventions.

The strikes were products and active negotiations of London’s position as a key hub of trade routes and connections. These trading practices actively constituted and reconstituted spatial relations. They combined places through circulations of materials and labour. Ogborn’s discussion of the commercial expansionism that transformed London’s trans-national connections in the 18th-century has emphasised the ‘problems of coordination and control’ faced by merchants ‘who dealt in and created this new geography’ (Ogborn, 1998, pp. 206–208). A key challenge to this ‘new geography’ was the enrolment of heterogeneous materials into trade networks. The materially heterogeneous practices through which merchants sought to combine different places through trade are defined here as ‘mercantile networks’. These practices and geographies embodied mercantile assumptions and conventions about the importance of trade, its relationship to the formation of a national economy and about the ideal conduct and regulation of trade. This notion of mercantile networks draws on Brewer’s contention that mercantilism was an ‘adaptable framework’ which established the terms ‘within which merchant groups competed with one another’ (Brewer, 1994, p. 170). Merchants, and bodies like the Excise that regulated these economic networks, faced the challenge of producing durable and reliable techniques through which materials could be socialised and exchanged. Mercantile networks attempted to generate materials as constitutive parts of market practices and obligations, allowing different economic agents to construct calculative decisions (see Callon, 1999, pp. 183–185). Practices of measurement were a central technique for the ‘enrolment’ of materials into mercantile networks of calculation and exchange. Here I follow the practices through which techniques of enrolment were brought into contestation by examining disputes over the measurement of coal in the Port Strikes of 1768. 3.1. Contested practices of measurement The trajectories of materials through trade routes were long and arduous. A shipload of coal mined in the North East in January, ‘loaded into keels in May or June, might not find its way into the cellar of a London citizen until the succeeding January or February’ (Nef, 1966, vol. I, p. 396). The coal’s passage through these networks was negotiated through measurement at particular key sites. Coal was measured at the site of the colliery, at the wharves in the North East where it was loaded from flat-bottomed boats called keels to collier ships and again in London where it was unloaded at the Pool of London by coal heavers. Measurement was conducted both for tax purposes and for the satisfaction of the buyer (Flinn, 1984, p. 219). These practices, however, did not produce neatly standardised devices

D. Featherstone / Geoforum 35 (2004) 701–711

for enrolling coal into trade routes and market relations. This was partly due to the differentiated and multiple geographies of 18th-century metrology (see Sheldon et al., 1996). The ‘standard’ measure of coal was the chaldron, but the chaldron varied substantially over both time and space. At each point on the passage of coal through these networks it might be produced in relation to markedly different practices of measurement (on the fluctuating size of the chaldron see Levine and Wrightson, 1991; Nef, 1966, vol. II, pp. 368–369). A London chaldron differed substantially from a Newcastle chaldron and from the chaldron measurements employed at other ports. Further there were significant variations in the measures employed at different collieries (Ellis, 1981, p. 59). In the port of London ‘‘heaped’ measure was required’ in the vats used to unload coal from collier vessels but ‘no indication was given as to the size of the heap’ (Ashton and Sykes, 1964, p. 207). This variation exacerbated corruption (Linebaugh, 1992, p. 307, Colquhoun, 1800, p. 159). Through the 18th-century these practices of measurement in the coal trade were subject to many different forms of contestation. Under-meters, officials who oversaw the unloading of coal in London, noted that there were ‘particular gangs of Coal-heavers, whose Business it is to unlade the Ships’ who were ‘so unruly (because they gain the Favour of their Masters by slight measure) that no Words or Threats will compel them, to fill the Vatts’ (cited by Ashton and Sykes, 1964, p. 209). Coal was also volatile. The relations between coal and the vessels used to transport disrupted attempts to enroll it into mercantile networks. A note in the Newcastle Chronicle in 1770 drew attention to the ‘great uncertainties’ arising ‘from the present method of adjusting and occasionally determining the burden of the keels in our river’ (Newcastle Chronicle, June 16, 1770). These uncertainties related to variables such as the ‘different draught of a keel in wet and dry seasons’. The note argued that these uncertainties materially affected the ‘several branches of the coal trade and the various revenues arising from it’ (Newcastle Chronicle, 1770, June 16 1770). Coal was ‘heavier in wet weather than dry’ and if coals were wet they would begin to break up producing material less favoured by consumers in the powerful London market which favoured ‘round coals’ (Levine and Wrightson, 1991). The effects of these uncertain measures on the consumer were contested in numerous pamphlets (see Anon., 1747). It was in the political activity of the keelmen in Newcastle, however, that practices of measurement in the coal trade were most persistently articulated as a major grievance. On the 28th March 1768 Newcastle keelmen ‘stopped work for two days without applying or giving a reason to a justice of the

705

peace for so doing’. 2 Keelmen were dockside workers, often seasonal migrants from Scotland. They loaded coal from the wharfs on the North East Coast to the collier ships involved in the coal trade to London. On being sent for by magistrates the striking keelmen argued that they had stopped work because ‘they were oppressed, by carrying over measure’. 2 Overmeasure was a long-standing and multi-faceted grievance of the keelmen. It had been contested in earlier disputes in the 18th-century, including strikes in 1719 and in the 1740s. 3 It was the practice of loading the keels in excess of the eight chaldrons of coal, or just over 21 tons by modern measurement, which legal statutes dictated that they carry (Flinn, 1984, p. 167). There was a ‘statutory procedure for ensuring standard loading of the keels’, but since the collier vessels that transported coal to London bought the coal by the keel, ‘there was a tendency ‘under the pressure of persuading the collier’s master to buy, to give overweight’ (Flinn, 1984, p. 167). Colliery proprietors: gave over-measure as an allowance against the breakage of ‘great’ coals and losses in transit, as a bribe or sweetener to ensure rapid collection and good handling to keep the reputation of their coal in the market, or simply as a disguised way of reducing the price to effect a sale. The standard keel-load was eight chaldrons, but there is ample evidence to indicate that nine chaldrons, if not more, were commonly loaded (Flinn, 1984, p. 30). Overmeasure had a significant effect on the labour practices of keelmen. In the instance of the 1768 stoppages Newcastle magistrates enquired into the keelmen’s grievances. They found that overmeasure was carried on ‘in some instances’. They assured the keelmen that no more overmeasure ‘should be required to be carried by them’, and the keelmen returned to work on 31st March. But the keelmen’s disputes continued. They struck again on 25th April and disturbances among the keelmen were also reported the summer of 1768. In 1769 the House of Commons set up an inquiry into the disputes. The inquiry elicited submissions from ‘refugee’ keelmen who had deserted their bound contracts on the Tyne and were working as coal heavers on the Thames (Morgan and Rushton, 1998, p. 17). These submissions give an incisive sense of how central a contestation of practices of measurement were to the political identities of the keelmen. They also locate assertive political identities at the intersections and contacts between groups such as the Tyneside keelmen and the London coal-heavers, contacts which drew on the unofficial geographies of

2 3

Tyne and Wear Archive Service (TWAS) 394/21. See Fewster, 1957–1958 and TWAS 394/19.

706

D. Featherstone / Geoforum 35 (2004) 701–711

information that circulated through the routes established by the coal trade between the North East and London (see Rogers, 1998, pp. 94, 114). These connections were a key part of the spaces of politics of the strikes in 1768. The keelmen’s petitions, practices and submissions to the inquiry articulated their grievances about overmeasure on several different grounds. They contested the impact of overmeasure on their wages. The practice forced keelmen to handle significant amounts of extra coal for which they received no payment (Fewster, 1957–1958, p. 66, 120). Thomas Port told the enquiry he was paid ‘no more’ than ‘the usual dues of the river’ for handling overloaded cargoes (The Whole of the Evidence, 1769, p. 13). A keel skipper, John Price, noted that ‘we were forced to take it’ and were never ‘paid for overmeasure’ (The Whole of the Evidence, 1769, p. 24). As overmeasure involved significant quantities of coal these practices could have major impacts on the conduct of keelmen’s labour. Submissions to the enquiry suggested that keels could be overloaded by up to three Newcastle chaldron, in excess of five tons (The Whole of the Evidence, 1769, p. 19). This overloading of keels was also articulated as a grievance about the safety of keelmen’s labour. George Purvis argued that it was ‘not safe to carry more than 8 chaldron at all seasons of the year’ and that ‘men had lost their lives carrying more’ (The Whole of the Evidence, 1769, p. 27, see also Flinn, 1984, p. 167). Work-related fatalities of keelmen were certainly not uncommon (see Newcastle Chronicle September 17, 1768, November 12, 1768, Newcastle Courant June 18, 1768). Keelmen’s petitions and representations argued for an enforcement of the standardised, legal measure of eight chaldron; even suggesting that this measure was integral to their conduct and identities as keelmen. Thomas Port noted that a ‘bound man’ was ‘under conditions to take King’s measure and no more’ (The Whole of the Evidence, 1769, p. 17). The keelmen’s petitions gave rise to the parliamentary inquiry into the coal disputes in the North East. Couching their grievances in terms of official discourses of measurement may have been significant in the keelmen’s success in obtaining such an inquiry. The powerful networks of the coal trade attempted to exploit differences between keelmen in different parts of the North East, tried to discredit the support for their petition and made counter-accusations about their attitudes to measurement. 4 Moseley, the Newcastle magistrate and mayor vilified by keelmen for intimidating them in to taking overmeasure, argued in 1768 that keelmen ‘will never or rarely, take in ye statute or King’s measure’ and ‘frequently imbezel

4

Journal of House of Commons, 1770, 12th March: 775.

and dispose of coals in their way down to Shields’ (cited by Flinn, 1984, p. 269). 3.2. Enrolment and the constitution of antagonisms These contested accounts of measurement in the coal trade emerged at the intersection of diverse geographies of power. Moseley’s comments emphasise that the keelmen’s activity could combine appeals to legal statutes about measurement with subjectivities and practices that owed more to beliefs about their customary rights to materials. Practices such as ‘pilfering’ were often sanctioned by ‘customary rights’, but emerged at the interesection of different power-relations and were often recoded as theft by officials like Moseley. According to 17th-century statutes keelmen had rights to ‘sweepings’ of coal, so long as these were not larger than ‘two smale maunds or pannyers full, holdinge two or three pecks apeece’ (Dendy, 1901, p. 36). A keelmen’s petition in the 1740s combined contestation of overmeasure with accusations that the fitters had reneged on promises of a coal allowance of a chaldron for each keel’s crew per year. 5 Keelmen’s contestation of measurement emerged through practices that asserted labourers’ customary rights to the materials they worked with. Linebaugh argues that notions of popular metrology in the 18thcentury Atlantic World owed much to the ‘[m]osaic limitations upon commodity production found in the biblical commands against unequal weights, against taking more than can be used, and against reaping a field too cleanly’ (Linebaugh, 1992, p. 162, see also Sheldon et al., 1996). Keelmen’s contestations of measurement translated such expectations of fair conduct, associated with the ‘moral economy’, to a negotiation of emerging social relations in the coal trade. Thompson’s account of time and work discipline implies that standardised measurements of time were the sole property of the masters. He argues that workers went from simple resistance to standardised notions of time to struggles about time such as ‘short-time committees in the ten hour movement’. In doing so, Thompson argues, they ‘accepted the categories of their employers and learned to fight back within them’ (Thompson, 1991, p. 388, 390). This suggests that labourers were not inventive in the way they constructed antagonisms but were merely contesting the employers on fixed already constituted lines of conflict. Following the contestation of practices of enrolment allows a more plural, less stabilised politics to emerge. The context of keelmen’s struggles over measurement emphasise that standardised measurement was not to any significant degree simply the property of ‘merchants’. Indeed keelmen’s activity attempted to show 5

TWAS 394/19.

D. Featherstone / Geoforum 35 (2004) 701–711

that mercantile practices were endemically un-standardised. Their strikes, rather than rejecting a politics of standardisation, as many 18th-century contestations of measurement did, attempted to enforce a legal measure through appropriating and enforcing official versions of measurement (for struggles of riverside labourers against standardisation of measurement, see Alder, 1995, p. 46; Linebaugh, 1992, pp. 162–163). These antagonisms over the ways in which materials were being enrolled into mercantile networks were multiple. They were not playing out fixed, already constituted antagonisms. There was no universally constituted subaltern antagonism to standardisation of measurement. Rather measurement could be articulated in markedly different ways by subaltern political activity in different situations. Through constructing practices of measurement in antagonistic ways, labourers crafted political agency because the forms of mercantile networks were unfinished (see Massey, 1999, p. 37). There was the possibility that there were different ways in which materials might be enrolled into mercantile networks. These material practices were not a fixed, stable backdrop to the politics of the strikes. Rather the techniques and devices for generating materials through mercantile practices became what were at stake through this political activity. The next section explores the ways in which these material practices of measurement were bound up with the production of particular power-relations in the market in coal. It also explores how keelmen articulated contestation of measurement to a rejection of deferent social relations.

4. Measurement and the configuring of mercantile networks Michel Callon has argued that the market can function as ‘an institution which mixes humans and nonhumans and controls their relations’ (Callon, 1999, p. 182). Measurement can act as a device that formats and shapes the relations of power which structure through the market, precisely through the ways in which it combines humans and non-humans through specific orderings (Callon, 1998, see also Barry, 2002). This concern with the ways in which orderings of humans and non-humans configure the power-relations per-

707

formed through mercantile networks bears on the practices through which labourers crafted their agency in strikes over measurement. The practices of overmeasurement enforced by the owners and middlemen involved in the Newcastle coal trade were not arbitrary. They were devices used to intervene in the way the market in coal was structured. Measurement rather than being a neutral device, can shape the power-relations of institutions like the market in decisive ways (Kula, 1986, p. 155). Advance of measure was one of the techniques used by cartels of Newcastle coal owners to negotiate their subordinate relation to powerful London coal dealers, the effects of overproduction of coal and depressed periods in the coal trade (Ellis, 1998, p. 143, Sweezy, 1938; Fewster, 1957–1958, pp. 66–67). Cartels such as the Grand Allies, the alliance of key coal traders in the North East which dominated the coal trade between the early 1730s and 1749, were successful in ‘raising the true price of coal’ at Newcastle by intervening in practices of measurement (Ellis, 1998, pp. 143–144; Sweezy, 1938, p. 143). Ellis argues that membership of the Grand Allies offered appreciable gains ‘in both price and measure’ (Ellis, 1998, p. 144). There is evidence that cartels regulated the amount of overmeasurement to negotiate fluctuating prices and demand for coal. Extracts from the minute books of the Grand Allies in Table 1 emphasise how practices of over-measurement were varied as ‘trade demanded’ (Fewster, 1957–1958, p. 66). These minute books position overmeasurement as a dynamic device used by the cartel to intervene in the power-relations of the market in specific ways. It suggests that through overmeasurement cartels generated materials in ways that circumvented ‘official’ prescriptions and legislation about how the market in coal should be conducted. These contestations of the measurement of coal were not multiple, discursive ‘accounts of essentially the same thing’ (Hinchliffe, 1996, p. 667). Rather they bore directly on different ways in which coal was generated through mercantile networks. There was not a consensual agreement about how materials should be generated through the coal trade. Different practices of the enrolment of coal into mercantile networks had significant implications for the ways in which the powerrelations of these networks were configured.

Table 1 Practices of overmeasurement: from the minutes of the Grand Allies, drawn from material cited by Fewster (1957–1958, p. 66) June, 1731 December, 1731 April, 1732 July, 1732 September, 1732

The measure increased from the top of the plate to an inch and a half or such as would make double To the top of the plate only A plate-breadth over the top An inch and a half over Third of an inch thought to be sufficient as given as to make 15 [chaldron] a keel. But the measure given by all was much greater

The plate refers to the mark made to indicate statute measure by commissioners appointed to measure the keels.

708

D. Featherstone / Geoforum 35 (2004) 701–711

Collective practices of regulation of overmeasurement had disintegrated by the 1760s due to in-fighting, dissension and competition between different coalowners (Levine and Wrightson, 1991). Matthew Ridley, one of the major coal owners in Tyneside, lamented in February of 1768 that it ‘is a great pity that the Coal Owners will not act a little more for their own advantage’ concluding that at ‘present all or most of the Coal Owners are upon the Lossing Hand’ (cited by Fewster, 1957–1958, p. 66). He argued that a depression in prices and ‘ugly differences’ between coal owners was being negotiated by the ‘lowering of prices’ and the ‘Advance of Measure’ (cited by Fewster, 1957–1958, p. 66). It was this intensification of the advance of measure that was brought into contestation through the keelmen’s strikes of 1768. The strikes brought into contestation the production of keelmen’s labour practices in unequal ways due to overmeasurement. They contested the ways that particular materials were ‘disciplined, constituted, organised’ so as to produce the configurations of mercantile networks through particular power-relations (Law and Hetherington, 1999, p. 6). Through practices of overmeasurement these owners and middlemen were able to exploit the way that official practices in relation to coal in the 18th-century coal trade were riven by differentiated measurement and discrepancies. Practices of overmeasurement were dependent on the power of local dealers and middlemen to exert significant pressure on how measurement was conducted. These practices were delegated through particular ‘material inscriptions’ of these social relations (see Akrich, 1992, pp. 218–219). This configuration of the relations between objects through the material practices of measurement embodied particular relations of power. These were contested through the keelmen’s testimonies and articulated as unjust. Keelmen, for example, contested the ways that the tools and devices used to measure and regulate coal were generated. Keelmen in 1769 noted that the ‘staithmen’, who oversaw the loading of coal, had a ‘nick stick’ to regulate the amount of overmeasurement. This would produce a ‘measure of above two chaldrons and a half’ (The Whole of the Evidence, 1769, pp. 25–26). The materialities of coal could also reconfigure what was defined and accepted as just practice by keelmen. Their identities were produced in relation to practices of enrolment and the materialities of coal. George Purvis noted that just measure was calculated on the assumption of coal being ‘half wet half dry’ (The Whole of the Evidence, 1769, p. 24). John Price, a keel skipper, argued that if coals were wet ‘just measure will not sink the keel above the top of the plate’ (The Whole of the Evidence, 1769, p. 24). Particular techniques for generating materials, then, became integral to labourers’ definitions of ‘just’ practice. Attempting to regulate the practices through which coal was enrolled into mercantile networks was partly

what was at stake through these strikes. Keelmen’s political activity thus created the possibility of reconfiguring the orderings of these networks. One of the outcomes of the strikes of keelmen in 1768 was a proposal in 1771 for ‘an elaborate system of marking both stern and bow with nails to produce a ‘Plimsoll-line’ type of marking chaldrons up to nine chaldrons and allowing for both salt and fresh water’ (Flinn, 1984, pp. 169–170, Newcastle Chronicle, June 16, 1770). 6 Bringing these networks into contestation suggested the possibility of reconfiguring the ways they were performed. This illustrates the inability of coal merchants to configure mercantile networks through the particular orderings of materials, labour, and trade that they wished to generate. Possibilities of reconfiguring these networks were also produced by the kinds of performances and conduct seeded through the strikes. Laurier and Philo have argued that Latour’s accounts of science and politics privilege the calculative over the emotional. Latour’s people: spend their days calculating tacitly, reflexively, jointly, responsively, the pros and cons of taking stands, making statements, pursuing courses of action, fighting measured wars by other means; and they are decidedly not emotional, passionate, irrational, tub-thumping, lustful, wasteful, ‘real crappy human beings’ (Laurier and Philo, 1999, p. 1063). Calculative subjects have also been refigured as central in Callon’s application of ANT to discussions of the market (see Callon, 1998, 1999). There were technical aspects to the struggles of the keelmen, but their politics was not in any straightforward way ‘merely technical’. It does not make them merely rational, calculative agents, any more than were the coal merchants with their feuds, bribes and speculative ventures (see Ellis, 1981). The strikes suggest the extent to which ‘technical’ practices can frequently become articulated through political activity in ways which seed passionate, assertive performances and identities which are not reducible to rational, fixed, technical interests. The keelmen’s politics was ‘more than rational’, it articulated grievances, but the conduct of their politics had an inventiveness that positions them as more than just calculative agents. Attending to the conduct of their politics foregrounds the productiveness of activities that were ‘neither automatic behaviour characteristic of the authority or the cultural dope’ nor ‘a calculative redirection of events characteristic of the power or agent’ (Hinchliffe, 2000, p. 230).

6

The plimsoll line refers to the markings on ships to indicate safe levels of loading introduced in the Unworthy Ships Act of 1875.

D. Featherstone / Geoforum 35 (2004) 701–711

The conduct of the keelmen’s strikes was characterised by ‘audacious’, assertive activities. This drew on the legitimising notions associated with the ‘moral economy’, which sanctioned direct action or crowd activity against practices which were seen as transgressing norms of fair conduct. Repertoires of activity such as food riots and sabotage of machines had a strong history and vibrant presence in Newcastle’s subaltern politics (Ellis, 1980, Levine and Wrightson, 1991, pp. 409, 412–413, Thompson, 1991, pp. 231, 310–311). This also located keelmen’s politics as part of the production of assertive and violent masculinities. 7 These assertive identities had effects on the terms on which the orderings of mercantile networks were constructed as antagonisms. Discussions of subaltern political activity that invoked the norms and legitimising notions of the ‘moral economy’ have frequently asserted that subaltern groups mimicked the languages and norms of their betters. The activities through which keelmen articulated their contestation of measurement, however, were productive of more assertive political identities than their invocations of official discourses of measurement might imply. Keelmen articulated their contestation of measurement to a critique of the relationships between the coal trade and Newcastle’s local political elite (The Whole of the Evidence, 1769, p. 13, on local politics in Newcastle in the 18th-century, see Wilson, 1995, pp. 288–304). This was linked to spatial practices like desertion through which labourers used the mobility afforded by being part of mercantile networks to contest and negotiate the terms on which they were enrolled into these networks. Desertion appears to have been endemic among keelmen in the 1760s. John Price told the committee that he had known hundreds of keelmen who had deserted from their bound contracts (The Whole of the Evidence, 1769, p. 33). It was from this body of ‘refugee keelmen’, many of whom were working as London coal-heavers, that the inquiry solicited submissions. This was probably a matter of convenience for the London-based parliamentary committee. They locate the formation of assertive political identities at the intersection of different subaltern groups such as the keelmen and coal heavers; groups that were both involved in protracted struggles through the 18th-century. The testimonies of these ‘refugee keelmen’ suggests their practices of desertion had the unintended consequences of producing political spaces and networks through which they could contest the conduct of the coal interest in Newcastle without fear of immediate reprisal from the town’s magistrates.

7 On the exclusionary masculinities of labour combinations in the 18th-century (see Clark, 1995, Featherstone, forthcoming). These assertive and exclusionary masculinities had effects: for condemnation of keelmen’s domestic violence see the ‘The Sandgate Girl’s Lamentation’ (in de Sola Pinto and Rodway, 1965, pp. 530–531).

709

The submissions to the committee emphasise that assertive political identities moved with these ‘refugee keelmen’ to London. They articulated a contestation of conventional practices for redressing subaltern grievances through deferent appeals to magistrates. John Price, asked if he thought ‘magistrates’ would have given you relief if you had applied’ responded that ‘we were not likely to have relief from the magistrates of Newcastle because most of them were coal owners and fitters’ (The Whole of the Evidence, 1769). Asked if he believed that ‘the same law will not give you relief as will give your masters?’, John Douglas, replied that ‘it ought’ (The Whole of the Evidence, 1769). Keelmen were not only suspicious of the magistrates’ will to redress their grievances. They accused magistrates of intimidating them. Thomas Port alleged that they were forced to carry more than the legal measure ‘for fear of losing their bread’ (The Whole of the Evidence, 1769). John Price argued that they were discouraged from ‘making complaints to the magistrates’ ‘under great fear of [. . .] being turned away as vagabonds’ (The Whole of the Evidence, 1769, p. 25). Through these submissions, keelmen exceeded the bounds of what was expected of 18th-century labourers in relation to law and political representation. Keelmen’s contestations of overmeasurement were multifaceted interventions in the techniques through which coal was enrolled into and circulated through mercantile networks. Through combining appeals to statutes, appeals to custom and a rejection of deference, these interventions combined different political subjectivities. Inventive ways of configuring and articulating antagonisms around the generation of materials were articulated through these ongoing political activities. Through rejecting deferent practices for expressing grievances such as petitioning magistrates keelmen were not just mimicking dominant languages associated with the moral economy. They were changing the rules of the game, and intervening in the ways in which antagonisms were constituted. Passionate, audacious activities were central to this process. Considering the materialities of political conflict does not just add a neglected technical dimension to the study of political activity. It also permits a focus on how ‘technical practices’ get bound up, contested, articulated and reconfigured through diverse political activities and performances. 5. Conclusions This account of riverside labourers’ political activity has located political identities as entangled in multiple geographies of power. These geographies were not pregiven spaces but were relations which were reconstituted through these political activities (see Gregson and Rose, 2000, p. 438). Following the entangled geographies of political activity emphasises the generative and productive character of subaltern political interventions.

710

D. Featherstone / Geoforum 35 (2004) 701–711

This networked account of oppositional politics stands in marked contrast to some of the dominant work on geographies of resistance and labour, which have been theorised in terms of a concern with the politics of scale. This literature tends to view political activity in ‘fixed local places’ as part of a ‘nested hierarchy’ of scales (Mitchell, 2002, pp. 69, 71, see also Herod, 2002; Smith, 1993). This obscures how political activity can be the product of relations between places that cross-cut neat boundaries between such scales as the local and national, as the kinds of networks of sailors and riverside workers between Newcastle and London suggest. The activity of these labourers points to a further sense in which their political identities were entangled. The keelmen’s strikes emphasise that political activity is not a purified human achievement. Keelmen crafted their agency through intervening in the practices through which humans and non-humans are entangled. Locating labourers’ politics as part of the ongoing fashioning of mercantile networks can evoke the inventiveness of subaltern identity and agency. I have used these disputes to outline a materially heterogeneous account of the relations between space and politics. This account has drawn heavily on the insights of ANT, but it has also reconfigured key terms associated with this body of work. Thinking enrolment politically and geographically demands an account of how practices of enrolment can be articulated in antagonistic ways. Telling stories of the practices through which political activity are constituted by ‘more than rational’ ways of articulating relations with materials dislocates the centrality of ‘calculative’ subjects to the work of theorists like Latour and Callon. This move opens up plural, contested accounts of the ways in which materials are articulated through political activity. Further, it has implications for ways of defining political agency (Thrift, 1996, p. 2). Foregrounding the entanglements that characterise political activity reconfigures agency as not necessarily about ‘control’ of either ‘place’ or ‘space’. Indeed it calls into question the counterposition of these two terms. Rather it produces a conception of agency which bears on the techniques through which labourers’ politics brought injustices in the configuring of mercantile networks into contestation through their political activity. This move evokes a more modest sense of political agency. An agency which is about engaging with the on-going shaping of unfinished mercantile networks; but it is a political agency that mattered nonetheless. Acknowledgements This research was part of an Open University Research and Development Committee funded project. The arguments owe much to discussions with Doreen Massey and Steve Hinchliffe and their comments on an earlier draft of this paper. They have also benefited from

the insightful readings of Miles Ogborn, Ben Anderson, discussion of the paper at the conference on Material Geographies and the engaging comments of three anonymous referees. The responsibility for the arguments and any substantive errors is my own.

References Akrich, M., 1992. The description of technical objects. In: Bijker, W., Law, J. (Eds.), Shaping Technology/Building Society. MIT Press, Massachusetts, pp. 205–224. Alder, K., 1995. A revolution to measure: the political economy of the metric system in France. In: Wise, M.N. (Ed.), The Values of Precision. Princeton University Press, Princeton, pp. 39–71. Anon., 1747. Frauds and Abuses of the Coal Dealers Detected. London. Ashton, T.S., Sykes, J., 1964. The Coal Industry of the Eighteenth Century. Manchester University Press, Manchester. Barry, A., 2001. Political Machines: Governing a Technological Society. Continuum Publications, London. Barry, A., 2002. The anti-political economy. Economy and Society 31 (2), 268–284. Berlin, I., 1996. From Creole to African: Atlantic Creoles and the Origins of African-American Society in Mainland North America. William and Mary Quarterly 53 (2), 251–288. Bolster, W.J., 1997. Black Jacks: African American Seamen in the Age of Sail. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Massachussetts. Braun, B., Disch, L., 2002. Radical democracy’s ‘modern constitution’. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 20, 505–511. Brewer, J., 1994. The Sinews of Power: Ware, 1688–1783 Money and the English State. Routledge, London. Callon, M., 1998. Introduction: the embeddedness of economic markets in economics. In: Callon (Ed.), The Laws of the Markets. Blackwells, Oxford, pp. 1–57. Callon, M., 1999. Actor-network theory––the market test. In: Law, J., Hasard, J. (Eds.), Actor Network Theory and After. Blackwells, Oxford, pp. 181–195. Castree, N., 2000. Geographic scale and grass-roots Internationalism: the Liverpool Dock dispute, 1995–1998. Economic Geography 73 (3), 272–292. Clark, A., 1995. The Struggle for the Breeches: Gender and the Making of the British Working Class. Rivers Oram Clark, London. Coal Heavers, 1764. The Case of the Coal Heavers. London. Colquhoun, P., 1800. Treatise on the Commerce and Police on the River Thames. London. de Sola Pinto, V., Rodway, A.E., 1965. The Common Muse: Popular British Ballad Poetry from the 15th to the 20th Century. Penguin, Harmondsworth. Dendy, F.W. (Ed.), 1901. Extracts from the Records of the Company of Hostmen of Newcastle-Upon-Tyne. Surtees Society, Newcastle. Ellis, J., 1998. Cartels in the Coal Industry on Tyneside, 1669–1750. Northern History 34, 1–15. Ellis, J., 1981. A Study of the Business Fortunes of William Cotesworth c. 1668–1726. Arno Press, New York. Ellis, J., 1980. Urban conflict and popular violence: the Guildhall Riots of 1740 in Newcastle-Upon-Tyne. International Review of Social History xxv (3), 332–349. Featherstone, forthcoming. Towards the relational construction of militant particularisms: or why the geographies of past struggles matter for resistance to neo-liberal globalisation. Antipode. Featherstone, D.J., 2003. Spatialities of trans-national resistance to globalisation: the maps of grievance of the inter-continental caravan. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 28 (4), 404–421.

D. Featherstone / Geoforum 35 (2004) 701–711 Fewster, M.J., 1957–1958. The Keelmen of Tyneside in the Eighteenth Century. Durham University Journal, New Series Vol. XIX, pp. 24–33, 66–75, 111–123. Flinn, M., 1984. The History of the British Coal Industry Volume 1. Clarendon Press, Oxford. George, D., 1927. The London coal heavers: attempts to regulate waterside labour in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Economic Journal History Supplement 1, 229–248. Gregson, N., Rose, G., 2000. Taking butler elsewhere: performativities, spatialities and subjectivities. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 18, 433–452. Harvey, D., 1996. Justice, Nature and the Geography of Difference. Blackwells, Oxford. Harvey, D., 1989. The Condition of Postmodernity. Blackwells, Oxford. Harvey, D., Swyngedouw, E., 1993. Industrial restructuring, community disempowerment and grass-roots resistance. In: Harvey, D., Hayter, T. (Eds.), The Factory and the City: The Story of the Cowley Automobile Workers in Oxford. Mansell, London, pp. 11– 25. Herod, A., 1990. The production of scale in US labour relations. Area 23, 82–88. Herod, A., 2002. Labor Geographies. Guilford Press, London. Hinchliffe, S., 2001. Indeterminacy in-decisions––science, policy and politics in the BSE (Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy) crisis. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 26 (2), 182–204. Hinchliffe, S., 2000. Entangled humans-specifying powers and their spatialities. In: Sharp, J., Philo, C., Paddison, R., Routledge, P. (Eds.), Entanglements of Power: Geographies of Domination/ Resistance. Routledge, London, pp. 219–237. Hinchliffe, S., 1996. Technology, power and space––the means and ends of geographies of technology. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 14, 659–682. Home Office Domestic Entry Book, 1768. Public Record Office: SP/44/ 14. Kula, W., 1986. Measures and Men. Edited and Translated by R. Szreter. Princeton University Press, Princeton. Latour, B., 1993. We Have Never Been Modern. Harvester Wheatsheaf, London. Latour, B., 1994. On technical mediation-philosophy, sociology, genealogy. Common Knowledge 3, 29–64. Latour, B., 1999a. On recalling ANT. In: Law, J., Hasard, J. (Eds.), Actor Network Theory and After. Blackwells, Oxford, pp. 15–25. Latour, B., 1999b. Ein ding ist ein thing: a (Philosophical) Platform for a Left (European) Party. Soundings: a Journal of Politics and Culture 12, 12–25. Laurier, E., Philo, C., 1999. X-morphising: review essay of Bruno Latour’s Aramis, or the Love of Technology. Environment and Planning A 31 (6), 1047–1072. Law, J., 1994. Organising Modernity. Blackwells, Oxford. Law, J., 2000. Transitivities. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 18 (2), 133–148. Law, J., Hetherington, K., 1999. Materialities, Spatialities, Globalities. Department of Sociology, Lancaster University at: http:// www.comp.lancs.ac.uk/sociology/soc029jl.html Accessed, 20 March 2003. Lee, N., Brown, S., 1994. Otherness and the actor network: the undiscovered continent. American Behavioural Scientist 37, 772– 790. Levine, D., Wrightson, K., 1991. The Making of an Industrial Society Wickham 1560–1765. Clarendon Press, Oxford. Linebaugh, P., 1992. The London Hanged. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.

711

Linebaugh, P., Rediker, M., 2000. The Many Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves and Commoners and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic. Verso, London. Linebaugh, P., Rediker, M., 1991. The Many Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves and the Atlantic Working Class. In: Howell, C., Twomey, R. (Eds.), Jack Tar in History: Essays in the History of Maritime Life and Labour. Acadiensis Press, New Brunswick, pp. 11–36. Massey, D., 1999. Power-geometries and the politics of space-time. Department of Geography, University of Heidelberg, Heidelberg. Mitchell, D., 2002. Controlling space, controlling scale: migratory labour, free speech, and regional development in the American West. Journal of Historical Geography 28 (1), 63–84. Mol, A., 1999. Ontological Politics. A word and some questions. In: Law, J., Hasard, J. (Eds.), op. cit., pp. 74–89. Morgan, G., Rushton, P., 1998. Rogues, Thieves and the Rule of Law: The Problem of law enforcement in North-East England, 1718– 1800. UCL Press, London. Mouffe, C., 2000. The Democratic Paradox. Verso, London. Mouffe, C., 1999. Introduction: Schmitt’s Challenge. In: Mouffe, C. (Ed.), The Challenge of Carl Schmitt. Verso, London, pp. 1–6. Murdoch, J., 1998. The Spaces of Actor-Network Theory. Geoforum 29 (4), 357–374. Murdoch, J., 1997. Towards a geography of heterogeneous associations. Progress in Human Geography 21 (3), 321–337. Nef, J., 1966. The Rise of the British Coal Industry. Frank Cass, London. Vols. I and II. Ogborn, M., 1998. Spaces of Modernity: London’s Geographies 1680– 1780. Guilford Press, London. Proceedings of the Old Bailey, 1768. Rogers, N., 1998. Crowds, Culture and Politics in Georgian Britain. Clarendon Press, Oxford. Sheldon, R., Randall, A., Charlesworth, A., Walsh, D., 1996. Popular protest and the persistence of customary corn measures: resistance to the Winchester Bushel in the English West. In: Randall, A., Charlesworth, A. (Eds.), Markets, Market Culture and Popular Protest in Eighteenth-Century Britain and Ireland. Liverpool University Press, Liverpool, pp. 25–46. Smith, N., 1993. Homeless/global: scaling places. In: Bird, J., Curtis, B., Putnam, T., Robertson, G., Tickner, L. (Eds.), Mapping the Futures: Local Cultures, Global Change. Routledge, London, pp. 87–119. Stewart, T., 1768. Letters on Sailors Wages Shelburne Papers: Bowood Muniments Microfilm 21. William L Clements Library, University of Michigan. Sweezy, P., 1938. Monopoly and Competition in the English Coal Trade, 1550–1850. Greenwood Press, Westport, Connecticut. The Whole of the Evidence, 1769. Tyne and Wear Archive Service. Thompson, E.P., 1991. Customs in Common: Studies in Traditional Popular Culture. The New Press, New York. Thrift, N., 1999. Steps to an ecology of place. In: Allen, J., Massey, D., Sarre, P. (Eds.), Human Geography Today. Polity Press, Cambridge, pp. 295–322. Thrift, N., 1996. Spatial Formations. Sage, London. Whatmore, S., 2002. Hybrid Geographies: natures cultures spaces. Sage, London. Wilson, B., 1899. The Great Company being a History of the Honourable Company of Merchant Adventurers Trading into Hudson’s Bay. Toronto. Wilson, K., 1995. The Sense of the People: Politics, Culture and Imperialism in England, 1717–1785. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Young, I.M., 1990. Justice and the Politics of Difference. Princeton University Press, Princeton.