by Isaiah Silvers (University of Durham)

In the question-and-answer period of an afternoon panel on ‘Politics of association’ at the Organise! Organise! Organise! conference, presenters Francis Boorman, Dan Weinbren, and Graeme Morton were asked about the relationship between associational cultures and nineteenth-century democratisation in Britain. Boorman elegantly summarised an impasse between two common historiographical positions: that habits and methods of democracy were seeded in nineteenth-century voluntary associations and slowly filtered into popular politics; or alternatively that associational culture was a sphere in which the unenfranchised pursued their own democratic practices in response to their exclusion from the political realm. Underlying both positions is the assumption that voluntary associations had an inherent affinity with political democracy due to their participatory structures. Dan Weinbren’s paper on friendly societies and the performance of democratic politics argued most forcefully in favour of this affinity. By his reading, these societies’ rituals, dramatic performances, and group governance expressed a common notion of democracy based on ‘independent brotherhood,’ which familiarised those unable to vote with both democratic mythmaking and democratic process.

Yet several papers at the Organise! conference prompted a potential challenge to the assumption of an underlying link between associational cultures and democratic politics. In her keynote presentation, Katrina Navickas used spatial evidence on the structures of political organising in late-nineteenth century London to argue for a view of democratisation not as phases in procession but as ‘a history of practices often performed simultaneously.’1 This framework provokes the possibility of a third position in answer to the specific question on voluntary associations and democracy—that these societies were flexible channels used to express and enact multiple, often opposing, political attitudes. In other words, we should consider the extent to which nineteenth-century associational structures were a venue—without straightforward or inherent ideological tilt—in which political and social reform were contested.

The theme of simultaneous practices in nineteenth-century politics saw keen development in presentations on popular conservative organising in the later part of the period. George Palmer described the Church of England Temperance Society in the 1880s and 1890s as a political paradox. It was one of the largest voluntary associations in the anti-drink movement, so often denounced as liberal faddism; yet it was the preserve of provincial conservatives and a key to the Anglican-Tory alliance of the late-nineteenth century.2 In Palmer’s terms, this ‘Tory faddism’ owed itself partly to the Liberal Party’s commitment to disestablishment, which precluded support from Anglican temperance advocates. It was also a function of electoral convenience. Many conservative candidates walked the line between assuaging publicans and taking up the cause of licensing reform and other moderate temperance priorities. His observations indicated that Liberals and Conservatives went through similar ideological and organisational processes in squaring reformist tendencies with electoral expediency.

These organisational parallels found a more general expression for the post-Third Reform political landscape in Kathryn Rix’s discussion of the competing regional machines of the Liberals and Conservatives. She problematised these regional associations as responses to the franchise expansion and particularly to the disproportionate enfranchisement of rural voters. Crucially, she argued that Conservative regional organising saw greater success through hierarchical controls enforced by the political agent Richard Middleton. Meanwhile, the Liberals’ embrace of an organic, associational model produced conflict between constituency organisers and challenges over the legitimacy of certain regions’ Liberal associations. In this case, the participatory traditions of British associational culture proved to be unwieldy for the expanded retail politics of the 1880s.

The use of associational structures as a medium for contestation over reform was not confined to the electoral politics of the period after Gladstone’s suffrage expansion. In the early- to mid-nineteenth century context, Boorman’s paper and a joint paper presented by Rix and Richard Huzzey described arbitration and ‘exclusive dealing’ respectively as protean voluntary structures which oscillated between expressions of egalitarian moral economy and weapons for the suppression of democratic practice depending on the legal and social context in which they were applied. Another intriguingly ambiguous case emerged in Philip Salmon’s paper on franchise by marriage in freeman boroughs prior to 1832. His sample of Maldon’s electoral rolls showed unusually broad electoral participation in the pre-reform period that relied on the exclusive associational network of the borough’s guilds and, to some extent, on the political agency of women in conferring the vote by marriage. Yet these complex connections between local associational networks and parliamentary politics were, of course, swept away by the Reform Act of 1832.3

For the period preceding the political shifts of the early 1830s, my own paper explored the way in which a series of parliamentary bills aimed at the regulation of chattel slavery in the Caribbean stoked political conflict in Barbados, which was expressed within the colony’s voluntary subscription societies. Such associations were patterned after counterparts in Britain and raised funds for running schools, constructing chapels, and relieving poverty. Their leaders also charted divergent positions on the rights of planters and the future of the enslaved. In 1827, William Harte, a parish rector and governor of the Society for the Education of the Poor, was brought to court by his white, slaveholding parishioners for ‘endeavouring to alienate their slaves from a sense of their duty, by inculcating doctrines of equality.’4 Meanwhile, the governors of Barbados’s planter-dominated Ladies Association for the Relief of the Indigent Sick and Infirm printed reports advertising its charity to ‘helpless strangers,’ by which they meant that their society’s aid was limited to a handful of destitute European sailors deemed deserving.5 In this context, ministration to strangers meant the exclusion of free and enslaved Black Barbadians. Just as moderate anti-slavery churchmen used associational structures to further their political aims, Barbadian planters found both the structure of subscription charities and the rhetoric of sympathy to be potent instruments for asserting racial hierarchy.

The long nineteenth century was replete with celebrated voluntary associations, from Wilberforce’s Abolition Society to the Social Democratic Federation to countless suffrage reform societies, yet we ought to carefully question the assumption that their ideological commitments were inherent to the voluntary structures that they exemplified. In this vein, the papers on associational cultures at the Organise! conference indicated rich meaning to be explored in the structural features of voluntary societies, especially those which may appear implicit, informal, or ephemeral.

Footnotes

¹Navickas traces this notion to Henk te Velde, and Maartje Janse, eds., Organizing Democracy: Reflections on the Rise of Political Organizations in the Nineteenth Century, Cham: Springer, 2017
²On putative ‘Liberal faddism,’ see also Naomi Lloyd-Jones, ‘The 1892 general election in England: Home Rule, the Newcastle programme and positive Unionism,’ Historical Research 93, no. 259 (2020): pp. 73–104
³On franchise and association in the freeman boroughs see also Barbara Crosbie, ‘Political Generations,’ in Age Relations and Cultural Change in Eighteenth-Century England, Boydell & Brewer, 2020, pp. 202–34
⁴‘Correspondence from the bishop of Barbados to the secretary of state,’ The National Archives (TNA): CO 28/147, p. 57
⁵‘Anniversary meeting of the Ladies’ Association for the Relief of the Indigent Sick and Infirm,’ (1829), TNA: CO 28/149, p. 127

In addition to the Past and Present Society this conference was supported by a British Agricultural History Society, the Centre for Nineteenth-Century Studies, the History of Parliament Trust, the Leverhulme Trust, the Social History Society and the Society for the Study of Labour History.

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