Presenter: Dr Neil Ketchley

It is fashionable to emphasize how the internet has enabled the rapid diffusion of protest. This paper explores to what extent telegraph, postal, railway, and road networks shaped protest The Defence Studies Department, JSCSC Watchfield is part of the War Studies Group, King’s College London, University of London diffusion in the early twentieth century. The argument is illustrated with the case of Egypt during the 1919 Revolution, when anti-British protests broke out across the country in just a few days. Matching event data derived from Arabic-language newspapers and colonial security reports with geo-referenced maps, the paper shows how the country's communications infrastructure facilitated the rapid spread of protest in a semi-agrarian context characterized by political disorganization. Protest also diffused faster to areas with more students. These findings point to the enduring role of communications infrastructure in processes of protest diffusion -- and highlight the potential uses of spatial data for historical sociology.

 

Dr Neil Ketchley is Lecturer in Middle East politics in the Department of Political Economy and a fellow of the Middle East Institute at King’s College London. His work focuses on protest and revolution in the Arabic-speaking Middle East and North Africa. His first book, Egypt in a Time of Revolution (2017 Cambridge University Press), was co-winner of the American Sociological Association’s 2018 Charles Tilly Distinguished Contribution to Scholarship Book Award. His research has appeared in venues including the American Political Science Review and Mobilization. Prior to joining King’s, Neil was Hulme Postdoctoral Research Fellow at Brasenose College, University of Oxford. For spring 2018, he was Visiting Professor of Political Science at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Neil received his PhD in Political Science from the London School of Economics