Book Review
Challenging Authority:
The Historical Study of Contentious Politics
Challenging Authority: The Historical Study of Contentious Politics. Edited by Michael P. Hanagan, Leslie Page Moch, and Wayne Te Brake (Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 1998) 284 pp. $54.95 cloth $21.95 paper
The school of contentious politics has served up a new collection of fifteen intellectual morsels, dedicated to Charles Tilly, its scholarly mentor. From Tilly's first chapter on "Political Identities," to Sidney Tarrow's concluding essay on transnational social movements ("Fishnets, Internets, and Catnets: Globalization and Transnational Collective Action"), an international group of scholars moves through familiar conceptual terrain. Part I includes five essays that explore "Networks, Identities, and Claim Making." Part II provides five examples of "repertoires of political contention." Part III examines "constellations of political opportunity."
The authors explore collective claim making and popular interactions with political authority at three different levels of analysis--subnational, national, and transnational. For the most part, the small studies presented in the book involve aspects of larger research projects in which the writers are engaged. The Tilly and Tarrow essays that frame the work are the two theoretical pieces; the remainder of the essays analyze empirical cases from the last three centuries. (The exception is William Christian, Jr.'s essay, "Six Hundred Years of Visionaries in Spain: Those Believed and Those Ignored," which considers the interactions between mystic visionaries, authorities, and interpreters in Spain since the fifteenth century.)
Five of the authors are practitioners of micro-history, teasing out the effects of general historical processes in the lived experience of townspeople and farmers. For example, Marc Steinberg ("The Riding of the Black Lad and Other Working-Class Ritualistic Actions: Toward a Spatialized and Gendered Analysis of Nineteenth-Century Repertoires") shows how the industrialization of a town in Lancashire "transformed the construction of social space" (19). Public space was under control of the mill owners who determined the location of factory buildings as well as the placement of workers' dwellings. Annual festivals such as the Riding of the Black Lad provided opportunities for "concerted symbolic contestations" concerning the spatial and social divisions connected with capitalist expansion (21).
A similar strategy is used by Marjolein 'T Hart ("Rules and Repertoires: The Revolt of a Farmer's Republic in the Early-Modern Netherlands") [End Page 76] in her study of the effects of state formation on a peripheral territory. 'T Hart "addresses the question of tradition and innovation in an early-modern repertoire of collective action by examining a revolt in a rural district in the far northeastern part of the Dutch Republic" (197). Although the farmers "demonstrated an enormous degree of local solidarity" in their revolt, their mobilization was ultimately curtailed because of a common belief in the legitimacy of contracts; they accepted a partially favorable verdict pronounced by the States General of the Dutch Republic (209).
A number of other authors favor a macro-historical approach. R. Bin Wong's chapter ("The Changing Horizons of Tax Resistance in Chinese History") traces the changing bases of tax resistance from the eighteenth century to the present. He describes different forms of tax protest to "identify the shifting character of state-society relations" (150). Wong uses his tax resistance narrative to draw attention to the processes of state formation in China--a neglected subject in the literature about state socialism. Both Wong and Andrew Walder ("Collective Protest and the Waning of the Communist State in China") analyze collective action in China as "a 'tracer' of historical change" (55), thus correcting a strong ahistorical bias in contemporary China scholarship.
The issue of boundaries is explored by a sociologist (Roger Gould), a cultural anthropologist (Anton Blok), and a social historian ('T Hart). Their research suggests that local social networks influence the configuration of national political interests when contention occurs at the local/national boundary. Two authors engage in cross-national comparisons: Kim Voss studies British and American labor activism, and Sonia de Avelar looks at Latin American and Caribbean women's political participation. All of the pieces in this book show, first, how social networks and organizations shape collective identities, and, second, how the different forms and outcomes of political contestation flow from the interaction of these three elements.
Challenging Authority would be a useful text for undergraduate courses in social movements or comparative history. It will whet the appetites of graduate students and researchers for the meatier feasts that the contributors have published on their own.
Maryjane Osa
University of South Carolina
