The Signatures of Social Structure: Petitioning for the Abolition of the Slave Trade in Manchester Kinga Makovi This article considers the problem of popular, collectively organized political action in the context of the abolition movement of the slave trade (1788–1807). Various primary sources, a petition, a trade directory, church records, and a self-built historic GIS are used to locate petitioners for abolition in the social fabric of Manchester. Through matching and computational experiments the article highlights which social structural forces led individuals to support the abolition movement by signing a petition. Specifically, gathering places that were historically involved in the movement, as well as those that housed traveling merchants from communities with successful abolitionist petitions from preceding campaigns shaped abolitionist petitioning—and the impact of these institutions remained important over and above family ties, active religious congregations, and the occupational groups. The article gives a new understanding of the role that early industrialization played in the abolition movement, building it from the bottom up, forging cohesion within and across communities through local institu- tions, rather than creating new boundaries and divides through processes of class formation. Introduction Hundreds of thousands of individual acts of signing petitions amounted to the phenomenon of the first modern social movement—for the abolition of the slave trade. These waves of petitions, organized in campaigns, came in an unexpected moment, at a surprising scale, and swept to success over the brief, three-decade history of the movement from 1787 to 1807. The petitioning campaigns united Britons from all walks of life (Drescher 1994) under a shared template of action, expressing a set of ideas and emotions on behalf of people whose suffering was far removed from those petitioning. It is impossible to trace the inception of antislavery thought in each and every Englishman’s mind who considered the question of the slave trade and concluded that it was “a great evil.” What might, however, be possible is to trace how the movement for the abolition of the slave trade got off the ground, and to pin down the sociostructural conditions that enabled its spread. In this article, I shift the emphasis from individual characteristics and religious piety to the structure of social relations, and the institutions providing the foci for discussion and debate on questions I thank Peter Bearman, Delia Baldassarri, Paul Chang, Seymour Drescher, Richard Huzzey, Byungkyu Lee, Henry Miller, Debra Minkoff, Sanaz Mobbasseri, Adam Reich, Peter Stamatov, Alix Winter, and Christopher Winship, along with the participants of the History, Culture and Society Workshop at Harvard University, and the participants of the Berkeley Mathematical, Analytical, and Experimental Sociology Working Group for valuable comments on prior drafts. The work was supported by the NSF (#1435138). The usual disclaimers apply. Social Science History 43, Fall 2019, pp. 625–652 © Social Science History Association, 2019 doi:10.1017/ssh.2019.25 https://doi.org/10.1017/ssh.2019.25 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 207.241.231.108, on 05 Mar 2020 at 07:29:39, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms.