The form taken by the spatial diffusion of rioting offers valuable clues for the understanding of collective protest. Careful analyses of the space and time dimensions of collective protest reveal considerable variation with respect to the cause of the riot, the role of communications and accessibility, and the agency of radical leaders and state and local authorities. Some historians have failed to understand this. Even Wells who has been sympathetic to the potential of the spatial viewpoint in explaining popular disturbances has written of food riots in 1801 that “(r)iots spread. It is immaterial whether the cause was imitation, or a uniform reaction along lines of communication‘. Stevenson has gone further and written in the context of food rioting that “it is misleading to speak of riots spreading’. Both take a narrow, rather over simplified, position, particularly when discussing waves of concerted collective action. Such occurrences are rare and provide us with one of those “privileged instances which one can apprehend on the level of observation when the totality of society and its institutions is set in motion’. They present us with an opportunity to begin to identify those peculiar conditions under which massive mobilisation of people in different communities takes place. In this essay I consider several case studies of the spatial diffusion of disturbances in England and Wales between 1750 and 1850. These protests differ dramatically in their patterns of spatial diffusion.

When writing his final report in 1823 on the current state of affairs in the county of Kopparberg in Sweden, its governor, Hans Järta, made a short digression to ponder upon the differences between England and Sweden. According to Järta, England had been unfortunate in that it had deprived a large proportion of its rural population of the land on which they could otherwise have supported themselves. They had now, Järta remarked, no other choice but to work in the factories, and were the first to suffer when these had to close down. In some parts of Sweden, efforts were at this time being made to organise agricultural production in accordance with similar ideas, that is, through the use of wage labour. Järta was deeply sceptical about these experiments however, claiming that they led to nothing but poverty and social problems.

In 1833 in a small village in the eastern Netherlands, a school opened for training weavers in using a new technology imported from England: the flying shuttle. The school began by training boys and girls between the ages of 11 and 16; when that proved successful it opened its doors to all weavers sent by manufacturers from the greater region, which soon necessitated several branch schools. By far the majority who came were home-based workers and after their training, a matter of a few weeks for those not new to the task, they could take a new loom with them on a payment plan. Once home, they in turn trained others, while local carpenters learned to build new looms. As a result, weaving in the rural textile regions of Twente and the Achterhoek (see figures 1 and 2) was transformed rapidly so that by 1836 no more new pupils came, and the schools were closed.

On two cool mid-summer nights in 1884 the small west Kent market town of Sevenoaks was disturbed by what one of the County newspapers, echoing the Chief Constable's words, called ‘riotous and tumultuous proceedings’. During the evening of Thursday 18th June a large crowd of townspeople broke down obstacles blocking the entrance to Knole Park and ceremoniously and noisily dumped them in front of the main door of Lord Sackville's large Tudor mansion. On the next night an even larger crowd, reported as numbering 1,500 or more, also invaded the park and besieged the house. A dispute over rights to use a bridle way across the Park which had dragged on for many months united many of the people of Sevenoaks and neighbouring villages against what was seen as the obstructive, illegal and high-handed behaviour of a wealthy and arrogant aristocrat. Attempts by the Local Board to find a resolution to the dispute had been rebuffed by Sackville and in the end the people of Sevenoaks took the law into their own hands.

For rural Americans, the debate over establishing a parcel post evoked all the hopes and anxieties associated with the expansion of mass society at the turn of the century. Parcel post, today an accepted and seemingly inconsequential government service, was originally seen as a linchpin in the emerging industry of mass culture. The media of mass communication advertised products and ran stories acclimating readers to a consumer society, thereby encouraging demand for mass-produced goods that were distributed, finally, by parcel post. Opponents of parcel post foresaw a decline of small towns, a centralization of production and distribution, a disruption of the ‘natural’ relations among labor, retailers, and consumers, and the aggrandizement of urban culture. At the other extreme, proponents claimed that parcel post would increase consumer choice, reduce the cost of living, and bridge the widening chasm between urban and rural life. Thus, the simple act of carrying a parcel from Chicago to a farmer's lane became freighted with a panoply of issues agitating the nation.