Continuing our series reflecting on the Organise! Organise! Organise! conference hosted by Durham University and supported by the History of Parliament, guest blogger, Patrick Duffy, PhD candidate at Trinity College, Dublin, discusses the new interdisciplinary approaches presented at this conference.
The Organise! Organise! Organise! Conference in Durham last July was a hugely enjoyable, beneficial and thought-provoking experience. As a historian interested in issues such as identity and territory, for me the two key fruits from the conference were new interdisciplinary approaches to spatial politics and the welcome continuing shift in the study of politics from the centre to the nations and regions.
One got a sense coming to the conference that the idea of space and the effects of the physical environment on practical politics was going to be a significant feature, considering that Katrina Navickas was giving the keynote paper. Navickas built on her excellent Protest and the politics of space and place, 1789-1848 (2015) by focusing on the negotiation and contest between political authorities and those excluded from the formal political decision-making over access to space. Navickas also gave a useful overview of historiographical developments, such as the new political history which overtook Marxist and class-focused approaches in the 1990s. To Navickas, the new political history does not do enough to demonstrate the very real restrictions on public meetings. Her open question on how the historiography in thirty years’ time will treat politics in the long nineteenth century was a thought-provoking question which was an excellent way to begin the conference.
This focus on extra-parliamentary, public meetings was built on in many fine papers. Niall Whelehan showed how the Roman Catholic Church controlled the space of Land League meetings among the Irish diaspora in Great Britain, most of which were held in church halls and schools. Mary O’Connor contrasted the public meetings which focused on rhetoric emphasising the ‘national interest’ and the private meetings of interest groups. Dave Steele discussed the very important yet often overlooked practical aspects of large meetings, such as acoustics, distances travelled, food consumed and toilets.
One highlight of the conference for me was the paper given by Caitlin Kitchener. As a historical archaeologist, who aims to use archaeological and historical evidence together, Kitchener’s paper brought a welcome inter-disciplinary aspect to the conference. The paper focused on the role of memory and heritage in relation to landscape, and how, in the words of Paul Connerton, landscapes are ‘reshaped and rebuilt’ in ways which interfere with the ‘construction and continuation of memory’. For example, the ‘open space’ of St Peter’s Field in Manchester had been broken by the 1830s, which resulted in a different space in which to ‘perform and construct radicalism’. However, due to the martyrology surrounding Peterloo, shaping of the landscape means that memory is actively ‘remembering and remaking’ the event. A Free Trade Hall was built on the site and it was quite fitting that the last building constructed celebrated the repeal of the corn laws considering that there was a ‘No Corn Laws’ banner at the Peterloo meeting.
The concepts and literature presented in Kitchener’s paper were of particular interest to me considering my own research interests. In my paper, I discussed how Ulster Protestants mobilised to defend Ulster as a Protestant territory during a fundraising tour by Daniel O’Connell’s Catholic Association in 1828. Discussing the human geographer Robert Sack’s concept of territoriality in that an area must be classified, there must be an attempt to enforce access to it, and that the attempt to enforce access must be clearly communicated, I argued that 1828 was the first time Ulster Protestants mobilised to defend Ulster as a territory rather individual towns and villages. I also focused on how Ulster Protestants used historical memory to justify the territorial nature of their opposition to O’Connell. Some of the Protestant propaganda in the wake of the ‘invasion’ compared the Protestants who opposed the tour with the Protestants who defended Ulster from the Jacobite forces during the Williamite Wars in Ireland. As such, they were reinterpreting the past in light of contemporary politics to construct an Ulster Protestant identity based on geography as well as history and religion. Kitchener’s paper has provided a rich literature from historical archaeology on the role of landscape and memory that I will pursue.
The national and regional diversity of themes in the conference was the second major outcome of the two days. I shared a panel with Peter Gray, who likewise discussed opposition to Daniel O’Connell in Ulster, such as the Presbyterian minister Henry Cooke, and Belfast radicals such as William Sharman Crawford, with whom O’Connell had a difficult relationship over the former’s reluctance to support repeal of the union. Brian Casey brought an interesting multinational dimension to the historiography of the Irish land war by discussing Michael Davitt’s tour of the Scottish Highlands. Interestingly, demands for Scottish home rule in the 1880s by the Young Scots Society, as Kyle Thompson showed, were strongest not in the distressed agricultural highlands, but in the industrial centres of Glasgow and Edinburgh. Henry Miller, in his paper building on his newly published A nation of petitioners (2023), remarked how the inhabitants of Dwygyfylchi petitioned the earl of Derby to appoint a Welsh speaker as the bishop of Bangor.
One significant outcome of the conference was the focus on Wales, which, for all the welcome developments in four nations history, I have been guilty of not considering. Marion Löffler explored the rich radical literature in Welsh following the French revolution. 40% of such material was translated from English, which shows that radicals were catering for a population of whom most spoke Welsh only. Martin Wright, on the other hand, gave a useful overview of the decline of Welsh as a political language and the attempts to create a Welsh socialist identity amidst tensions between national identity and socialist politics in the early twentieth century. One of the most beneficial papers for my research was Lowri Ann Rees’ paper on the Rebecca riots in south-west Wales in the 1830s and 1840s which raises important questions on the exchange of ideas across the Irish Sea in the period. The production of threatening letters signed by ‘Rebecca’ calling for lower rents and the abolition of tollgates were remarkably similar, as Peter Gray pointed out in the subsequent discussion, to threatening letters signed by ‘Molly Maguire’ in Ireland at the same time. As I investigate the emergence of the north-south frontier in Ireland in the 1830s and 1840s, Rees’ paper has prompted me to explore how information travels and cultures encounter each other.
Finally, the hybrid nature of the conference was a very positive development in that it has brought the conference to a wider audience and to those who may have not the time, interest, or resources to travel or attend for an entire conference but who may wish to watch a paper or two. One of the few positives from the pandemic was the increase in the use of technology for remote participation. We all welcome the return to in-person conferences, which are extremely beneficial for networking opportunities and, as George Palmer points out in his blog, for social activities. However, the hybrid model is the ideal way to cater for both full-time academics and students and the wider public.
PD
Patrick Duffy is a PhD candidate at the Department of History at Trinity College, Dublin and an Irish Research Council Government of Ireland Postgraduate Scholar. His research investigates the emergence of a cultural, religious, and ethnic frontier between Ulster and the rest of Ireland during the campaigns for Catholic emancipation and repeal of the union from 1823 to 1845. This is done by studying popular politics and sectarian relations in County Monaghan. He has a B.A. in history and modern Irish from University College, Dublin and a master’s in modern British history from the University of Oxford.
