Violence, space, and the political logics of territoriality: a case of peasant resistance in early-nineteenth century Ireland

ABSTRACT

This article is a theoretically motivated and empirically informed study of the space-claiming practices of a group of Irish peasant rebels, ‘the Threshers’. In the early-nineteenth century, the Threshers mobilized to contest, often violently, practices and logics that were afoot in the Irish countryside, practices which were dislocating the rural poor's mode of life and livelihood. The contribution of this article is that by invoking the theoretical work of Ernesto Laclau, amongst others, it advances practices of territoriality, that is, space-claiming practices, as political logics. Political logics are the moments in which configurations of the social are instituted, upheld, or contested. Territorial practices are then those that spatially instantiate, or contest, imaginaries of the social/space. The account of space and territoriality vis-à-vis violence developed here helps to render more intelligible the imbrications of violence, space, and ‘the Political’. Theoretically, examining the Threshers’ practices of space-claiming enables a move away from the ‘originary’ violence of radical negativity that is implicated in the articulation of antagonistically constituted imaginaries of the social to situated practices of concrete violence by interrogating moments when such frontiers are spatially inscribed. That is, the violence implicated in the spatialization of the political comes into view. The Threshers’ resistance, along with revealing concrete practices of violence entailed in the enacting of their vision of the local space, also demonstrates how in contested space the contingency of the social is continually reactivated, casting a productive light on how space in such sites of struggle may be antagonistically reproduced.

KEYWORDS:

• Ernesto Laclau
• antagonism
• territoriality
• space
• violence
• resistance
• the political

Acknowledgements

The author is very grateful to the editors and reviewers of Distinktion for their generous and considered comments. The author wishes to express his appreciation to Dr John Cunningham, NUI Galway, for suggesting the Threshers case, and for supervising the initial archival work from which this article emerged back in 2013. Dr Niall Ó Dochartaigh and Liam Farrell at NUI Galway read iterations of this manuscript and gave helpful feedback. Aspects of this research were presented at the Power, Conflict, and Ideologies research cluster at the School of Political Science and Sociology NUI Galway, and at the Centre for Applied Philosophy, Politics, and Ethics at the University of Brighton. On both of these occasions, the author received productive critique for which he is appreciative.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on the contributor

Gary Hussey is a doctoral scholar at the School of Political Science and Sociology at the National University of Ireland, Galway. As a social theorist concerned with violence, space, and the political, his thesis interrogates violence and the spatialization of antagonism in the city of Derry, Northern Ireland, during moments of conflict in nineteenth and twentieth centuries. His thesis is due for submission in September 2019.

ORCID

Gary Hussey http://orcid.org/0000-0001-6045-2189

Notes

1. References to files from the National Archives of Ireland's State of the Country Papers collection will be denoted by ‘SOCP’ followed by the file number, e.g. SOCP 1120/47.

2. Here I use term ‘secret society’ as others do, to denote the clandestine oath-bound enterprise that was rural peasant revolt. This appellation, however, is problematic, in that while these undertakings were secretive, they often involved broad mobilization of the peasantry in these areas, and therefore, might be better understood as rural revolts or insurgencies.

3. For example, though a throw-away remark, Mullholland (2016, 385) suggests that the Whiteboy movements while having some ‘political content’ were ‘proto-nationalist’ is a very telling comment. While it is a false diagnosis, it also locates the struggles of such movements on a teleological linear continuum, whereby, such insurgencies are understood by what was to come later- hence the designation ‘proto’. Others such as George Boyce (2005, 27), again in a passing remark suggests the Thresher unrest was unpolitical, in that its participants were not ‘political in outlook’. Again, while such a diagnosis is not a result of an actual analysis of the movement, it is also premised on an unduly truncated notion of politics, and certainly lacks an understanding of the political.

4. These were, it seems, the most intense years of the Thresher agitation. The unrest did continue, however to varying degrees in subsequent years, with frequent references to the Threshers in the State of the Country Papers Collection being made until around 1815. References to the Threshers is overtaken by references to the ‘Carders’.

5. As Clark and Donnelly (1983) detail, Irish peasant revolt was regional in terms of widespread mobilization and diffusion, and while rebels shared items of grievance and aims, though they were not generally organized at a regional level. The label ‘Threshers’ then, refers not a single organization, but a widespread agitation- some local iterations using the term in threatening letters and so on, while the authorities generally used the term to denote this specific wave of agitation throughout a specific region and period.

6. As Clark and Donnelly detail, with expanding marketization the peasantry became increasingly reliant on money, which made them more exposed to the vicissitudes of distant market forces.

7. Indeed, the Oakboys, an Ulster based movement in the late eighteenth century, had been largely comprised of Presbyterians

8. As Jordan (1994) details, many deemed the priest's fee for rites and services of Catholicism excessive- such as baptism and marriages. The priest often expected a comparatively high level of hospitality. The only income the priest had available to him were the fees he levied on these services.

9. That is, carded.

10. Which begs the question, who wrote the letters? Some of letters are quite ‘crude’ in the hand they are written in. Some are in a much more refined hand, and may be the work of local school masters- who may have been sympathetic to the Threshers, or could be forced to write the letters. Furthermore, the Threshers in the attacks on the tithe system, etc., as discussed, could solicit support from sympathetic members of the upper strata of society (Gibbons 2004).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Irish Research Council.