Locating Agency: Space, Power and Popular Politics

In the latter half of the twentieth century, historians came to consider politics to mean more than simply the formal institutions and apparatus of government, run by a small minority of wealthy, educated elite men. The word has been adopted by historians of different genres as synonymous with power, or agency, and the scope for political activity has been widened to incorporate a variety of everyday events and ordinary people. These collected essays explore the quotidian experience of politics in the form of popular politics, religion and popular culture. The contributors consider, for example: the politics of the alehouse, the politics of Methodism, the interrelationship between plebeian agency, custom and memory, the politics of economics, dramatic agency and the politics of the spiritual parish. Collectively they suggest that political activity was embedded in almost every aspect of life. In addition they draw on interdisciplinary theory, in particular the spatial turn and how it can be used to better understand popular agency.