history is what’s happening
In the last three decades of the eighteenth century, pressure for reform of the political system grew throughout Britain. The electoral system was entirely designed to reinforce the power of the dominant class, the aristocracy. Just a tiny fraction of the population had the vote, mostly wealthy, all men; traditional constituencies controlled by powerful landowners…
In our last post we discussed the ongoing and intertwined links of the ownership of landed estates in England, the process of enclosure that concentrated the land in fewer hands, the massive profits some rich families made from the slave trade and owning slaves on Caribbean plantations, and the continuing networks of wealth power and…
Jamaican-born Black revolutionary Robert Wedderburn, writing in ‘The Axe Laid to the Root’, his series of open agitational letters urging Caribbean slaves to revolt against their ‘owners’ in 1817, urged the slaves among who he had been born, to not only overthrow their masters, but to then keep hold of the land they worked. He…
Report of a 2001 action at the Tate Britain Gallery in London, against a William Blake exhibition sponsored by the pharmaceutical giant GlaxoSmithKline. On the final day (11 February 2001) of the William Blake exhibition at the Tate Britain Gallery in London, 30 people gathered on the steps outside to reclaim Blake from ‘the dead…
1640s 1760s 1770s 1790s 1810s 1830s 1840s 1880s 1890s 1910s 1960s 1970s 1980s 1990s anarchists anti-fascism arrests Bloomsbury Brixton demonstrations East-End enclosures English-Revolution executions fascism occupations open-space Parliament policing Radical-publishing religion resistance-to-war revolt riots social-centres socialists SouthEast-London squatting state-repression strikes suffragettes trials West-London women-fight-back work-disputes
Past Tense is a publishing project based in London, exploring London radical histories, geographies, the past, present, the future…