During the 1820s and 1830s, reformers in Ireland, Britain and the United States developed new and efficient methods for mobilizing the masses and pressuring the government. Social movement scholars such as Charles Tilly, Sidney Tarrow and John Markoff have argued that the modern repertoire of social movements developed fully in those decades. The modularity of protest forms made transfer of specific forms of contestation to other causes and countries possible, which would explain the remarkable similarity in social movement repertoires across national borders. My current research into the birth of the modern mass pressure group, a process which took place in the 1820s-1840s, aims at broadening our historical understanding of this process.
Early pressure groups, among which the Catholic Association of Ireland, British and American temperance and antislavery societies, partly shaped their repertoire by following the best practices of other organizations, both at home and abroad. This paper offers a historical exploration of the varying channels in which knowledge of reform tactics abroad was disseminated. Correspondence between secretaries and leaders, avid copying from each other’s annual reports and periodicals, international lecturing tours such as that of George Thompson, all contributed to the transfer of reform tactics. Special attention will be given to general newspaper reports on reform movements, which offered information to a general public, including critics of modern reform tactics. The complicating factor in the transfer of reform tactics was that its transnational origins should be more or less concealed to the general public, because the accusation of introducing dangerous foreign influences was never far away.
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