Chartism in the British World and Beyond

Bensimon, Fabrice

doi:10.1007/978-3-030-24459-0_14

Chartism in the British World and Beyond

Fabrice Bensimon⁶

Chapter
First Online: 12 November 2019

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Part of the book series: Britain and the World ((BAW))

Abstract

This chapter studies the interaction between the most significant working-class political movement of the nineteenth century and the British world. Although Chartism has traditionally been studied mostly as insular, its imperial and world dimensions are now appearing more clearly. One dimension is the way Chartism was influenced by ideas and political events in the overseas Empire, e.g. the rebellion in British North America in 1837-38. A second dimension is the Chartists commenting upon Empire. A third dimension is the overseas emigration of Chartists and their impact on the making of their democratic and land reforms ideals in Australia, New Zealand, and the United States. Last, this paper asks whether Chartism had an impact on Continental Europe, namely France, Belgium, and Germany.

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Notes

1.
This article has benefited from the comments of Malcolm Chase, Joanna Innes, Rachel Rogers, Jürgen Schmidt, Miles Taylor, and Callie Wilkinson, and from discussions with Paul Pickering. Many thanks also to the editors.
2.
Henry Weisser, British Working-Class Movements and Europe 1815–1848 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1975), 134–71; Salvo Mastellone, ‘Northern Star, Fraternal Democrats e Manifest der Kommunistische Partei’, Il Pensiero Politico 37 (2004), 32–59; and Malcolm Chase, Chartism: A New History (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007), Chapter 9.
3.
Ray Boston, British Chartists in America 1839–1900 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1971; and Jamie L. Bronstein, Land Reform and Working-Class Experience in Britain and the United States, 1800–1862 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999); Gregory Claeys, ‘The Example of America a Warning to England? The Transformation of America in British Radicalism and Socialism, 1790–1850’, in Malcolm Chase and Ian Dyck, eds., Living and Learning: Essays in Honour of J.F.C. Harrison (Aldershot: Scolar, 1996), 66–80; and Michael J. Turner, Radicalism and Reputation: The Career of Bronterre O’Brien (East Lansing, MI: Michigan State University Press, 2017).
4.
Malcolm Chase, The Chartists: Perspectives and Legacies (London: Merlin, 2015), Chapter 3.
5.
Paul Pickering, ‘The Oak of English Liberty: Popular Constitutionalism in New South Wales, 1848–1856’, Journal of Australian Colonial History 3 (2001), 1–27; Paul Pickering, ‘A Wider Field in a New Country: Chartism in Colonial Australia’, in Marian Sawer, ed., Elections Full, Free and Fair (Sydney: Federation Press, 2001), 28–44; ‘Ripe for a Republic: British Radical Responses to the Eureka Stockade’, Australian Historical Studies 34 (2003), 69–90; ‘Mercenary Scribblers and Polluted Quills: The Chartist Press in Australia and New Zealand’, in Joan Allen and Owen R. Ashton, eds., Papers for the People: A Study of the Chartist Press (London: Merlin Press, 2005), 190–215; ‘Was the “Southern Tree of Liberty” an Oak?’, Labour History 92 (2007), 139–42; and ‘Betrayal and Exile: A Forgotten Chartist Experience’, in Michael T. Davis and Paul A. Pickering, eds., Unrespectable Radicals? Popular Politics in the Age of Reform (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008), 201–17. See also Andrew Messner, ‘Chartist Political Culture in Britain and Colonial Australia, c. 1835–60’ (Uunpublished Ph.D. Thesis, University of New England [Australia], 2000).
6.
John Griffiths and Vic Evans, ‘The Chartist Legacy in the British World: Evidence from New Zealand’s Southern Settlements, 1840s−1870s’, History 99 (2014), 797–818.
7.
Shije Guan, ‘Chartism and the First Opium War’, History Workshop 24 (1987), 17–31; and Gregory Vargo, ‘The Chartist Press Reports the Empire’, Victorian Studies 54 (2012), 227–54.
8.
Andrew Messner addresses this absence in ‘Land, Leadership, Culture and Emigration: Some Problems in Chartist Historiography’, Historical Journal 42 (1999), 1093–109.
9.
On the ‘British world’, see Carl Bridge and Kent Fedorowich, ‘Mapping the British World’, in Carl Bridge and Kent Fedorowich, eds., The British World: Diaspora, Culture and Identity (London: Frank Cass, 2003), 1–15; and Phillip Buckner and R. Douglas Francis, ‘Introduction’, in Phillip Buckner and R. Douglas Francis, eds., Rediscovering the British World (Calgary: University of Calgary Press, 2005), 9–20.
10.
James Bronterre O’Brien, Buonarroti’s History of Babeuf’s Conspiracy for Equality (London: H. Hetherington, 1836).
11.
See Joanna Innes, Mark Philp, and Robert Saunders, ‘The Rise of Democratic Discourse in the Reform Era: Britain in the 1830s and 40s’, in Joanna Innes and Mark Philp, eds., Re-imagining Democracy in the Age of Revolutions: America, France, Britain, Ireland 1750–1850 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), Chapter 8; and Turner, Radicalism and Reputation.
12.
‘The United States’ and British Governments’, The Charter, 20 October 1839, 622.
13.
Dorothy Thompson, Outsiders: Class, Gender and Nation (London: Verso, 1993), 103–33.
14.
Malcolm Chase, The Chartists, 28–46.
15.
Quoted in Chase, The Chartists, 30.
16.
Quoted in Chase, The Chartists, 31.
17.
Quoted in Chase, The Chartists, 36.
18.
William Lovett, Life and Struggles of William Lovett, in His Pursuit of Bread, Knowledge, and Freedom (London: Trubner & Co., 1876), 191–92.
19.
Northern Star, 29 January and 5 February 1848.
20.
See Gregory Claeys, Imperial Sceptics: British Critics of Empire, 1850–1920 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 24.
21.
See Vargo, ‘The Chartist Press Reports the Empire’.
22.
Quoted in Guan, ‘Chartism and the First Opium War’, 20.
23.
Northern Star, 26 May 1849.
24.
Northern Star, 16 April 1842.
25.
See Margot Finn, After Chartism: Class and Nation in English Radical Politics, 1848–1874 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993).
26.
Northern Star, 7 March 1846; and Address of the Fraternal Democrats Assembling in London to the Working Classes of Great Britain and the United States (London, 1846).
27.
For examples of the latter, see Address of the Fraternal Democrats Assembling in London to the Working Classes of Great Britain and the United States (London, 1846); The Democratic Committee for Poland’s Regeneration, to the People of Great Britain and Ireland (London, 1846); The Fraternal Democrats (Assembling in London) to the Democracy of Europe (London, 1846); Address of the Fraternal Democrats Assembling in London, to the Members of the National Diet of Switzerland (London, 1847); and Principles and Rules of the Society of Fraternal Democrats (undated).
28.
Albert Schoyen, The Chartist Challenge: A Portrait of George Julian Harney (London: Heinemann, 1958), 150; Vargo, ‘The Chartist Press Reports the Empire’, 240; and Weisser, British Working-Class Movements and Europe, 172–78.
29.
Ernest Jones, ‘Evenings with the People’, in Gregory Claeys, ed., The Chartist Movement in Britain, 1830–1858 (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2001), VI, 276.
30.
Ernest Jones, ‘The Indian Struggle’, The People’s Paper, 5 September 1857.
31.
Ernest Jones, ‘The Indian Struggle’, The People’s Paper, 1 August 1857.
32.
George Rudé, Protest and Punishment: The Story of the Social and Political Protesters Transported to Australia, 1788–1868 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978), 129–37 and 138–44.
33.
Miles Taylor, ‘The 1848 Revolutions and the British Empire’, Past and Present 166 (2000), 170.
34.
Chase, Chartism, 377–84; Peter Fryer, ‘Cuffay, William’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/10.1093/ref:odnb/9780198614128.001.0001/odnb-9780198614128-e-71636 [accessed 6 May 2018]; John Saville, ‘Cuffay, William’, in Joyce M. Bellamy, David E. Martin, and John Saville, eds., Dictionary of Labour Biography (New York: Springer, 1993), VI; and Martin Hoyles, William Cuffay: The Life and Times of a Chartist Leader (London: Hansib, 2012).
35.
Ernest Jones, ‘Our Colonies’, Notes to the People (London: J. Pavey, 1851), I, 135.
36.
‘The Tropics’, The Morning Star; or, Herald of Progression: Advocate of the Tropical Emigration Society, 4 February 1845, 26.
37.
Gregory Claeys, ‘John Adolphus Etzler, Technological Utopianism, and British Socialism: The Tropical Emigration Society’s Venezuelan Mission and Its Social Context, 1833–1848’, English Historical Review 101 (1986), 351–75; Malcolm Chase, Chartism, 110–16; and Malcom Chase, ‘Exporting the Owenite Utopia: Thomas Powell and the Tropical Emigration Society’, in Noel Thompson and Chris Williams, eds., Robert Owen and His Legacy (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2011), 197–217.
38.
Chase, Chartism, 184.
39.
Taylor, ‘1848 Revolutions and the British Empire’, 153–54.
40.
Pickering, ‘Wider Field in a New Country’, 28–44.
41.
Pickering, ‘Oak of English Liberty’, 1–27.
42.
Quoted in Pickering, ‘Oak of English Liberty’, 5.
43.
Quoted in Pickering, ‘Oak of English Liberty’, 5.
44.
Pickering, ‘Oak of English Liberty’, 6.
45.
Paul Pickering, ‘“Mercenary Scribblers and Polluted Quills”: The Chartist Press in Australia and New Zealand’, in Joan Allen and Owen R. Ashton, eds., Papers for the People: A Study of the Chartist Press (London: Merlin Press, 2005), 204–6.
46.
Griffiths and Evans, ‘Chartist Legacy in the British World’, 814.
47.
John E. Martin, Honouring the Contract (Wellington: Victoria University Press, 2010), 26–67.
48.
Ray Boston, British Chartists in America 1839–1900 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1971).
49.
David Montgomery, Labor and the Radical Republicans 1862–1872 (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1981), 221–22.
50.
Neville Kirk, Labour and Society in Britain and the USA, II: Challenge and Accommodation, 1850–1939 (Aldershot: Scolar Press, 1994), 118–24.
51.
Sean Wilentz, Chants Democratic: New York City and the Rise of the American Working Class, 1788–1850 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 340; and Bronstein, Land Reform and Working-Class Experience.
52.
See Owen R. Ashton and Joan Hugman, ‘George Julian Harney, Boston, U.S.A., and Newcastle upon Tyne, England, 1863–1888’, Proceedings of the Massachusetts Historical Society, 3rd series, 107 (1995), 165–84.
53.
See W. O. Henderson, Britain and Industrial Europe 1750–1870: Studies in British Influence on the Industrial Revolution in Western Europe (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1954).
54.
L’Illustration, 27 October 1849, 141.
55.
Fabrice Bensimon, ‘British Workers in France, 1815–1848’, Past and Present 213 (2011), 147–89.
56.
Northern Star, 29 August 1846.
57.
Léon Faucher, Manchester in 1844: Its Present Condition and Future Prospects (London: Cass, 1969); and Flora Tristan, The London Journal of Flora Tristan, 1842; or, The Aristocracy and the Working Class of England (London: Virago, 1982), Chapter 5.
58.
Le Débat social. Organe de la démocratie, 29, 16 January 1848, 343.
59.
‘Nos journaux aristocratiques ne parlent jamais, ou ne parlent que très rarement de ce qui se passe en Angleterre, sous ce rapport. Ils ont peur d’instruire le peuple belge, par l’exemple du peuple anglais. […] Ce que le peuple anglais demande, et ce qu’il finira immanquablement par obtenir, à l’aide de l’agitation qu’il organise, comme on voit, de toutes parts, c’est d’abord le suffrage universel.’ L’Association du Peuple de la Grande-Bretagne et de l’Irlande, au 6 août 1838, proposée pour modèle au peuple belge, par L. Jottrand, avocat, ancien membre du Congrès national de 1830 (Brussels: Leroux, 1838).
60.
Friedrich Engels, ‘L’anniversaire de la révolution polonaise de 1830’, La Réforme, 5 December 1847.
61.
Arthur Lehning, From Buonarotti to Bakunin: Studies in International Socialism (Leiden: Brill, 1970); and Christine Lattek, Revolutionary Refugees: German Socialism in Britain, 1840–1860 (London: Routledge, 2006), 25.
62.
Lattek, Revolutionary Refugees, 25.
63.
Lattek, Revolutionary Refugees, 32.
64.
Lattek, Revolutionary Refugees, 33.
65.
Gareth Stedman Jones, Karl Marx: Greatness and Illusion (London: Allen Lane, 2016), 446.
66.
Christiane Eisenberg, ‘Variations in Socialism: The Rise of a Political Labour Movement in Britain and Germany’, Diplomacy and Statecraft 8 (1997), 124.
67.
Malcolm Chase, ‘Chartism and Latin America’, unpublished paper given to the Social History Society Conference at University College London, April 2017.

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Sorbonne Université, Paris, France
Fabrice Bensimon

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Department of History, Clemson University, Clemson, SC, USA
Stephanie Barczewski
School of History, Newcastle University, Newcastle Upon Tyne, UK
Martin Farr

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Bensimon, F. (2019). Chartism in the British World and Beyond. In: Barczewski, S., Farr, M. (eds) The MacKenzie Moment and Imperial History. Britain and the World. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-24459-0_14

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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-24459-0_14
Published: 12 November 2019
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-030-24458-3
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