Crowds in world history

Ruth Watson, Associate Professor in African History and Fellow of Clare since 2010, was inspired to study the African past after growing up in the Yoruba city of Ile-Ife (southwestern Nigeria). Her current book project, Crowds in World History, examines the crowd as a global social and historical phenomenon—focusing especially on protest crowds from the seventeenth century to today.

"Crowds make history, but it’s worth unravelling how histories make crowds as well.”

“My current book project seeks to develop a global history of ‘the crowd’ as a social and historical category. Conceiving crowds as more than simply aggregations of people, I examine how people become conscious of being part of a crowd, and how in turn such crowds develop their own social momentum. The focus is particularly on protest crowds: my book argues that ideas about the crowd and instances of crowd action (such as riots) are an important theme in world history from the seventeenth century to contemporary times.

I conceived the project in the summer of 2020, when I was struck by the paradoxical juxtaposition of Black Lives Matter protests with the crippling pandemic of coronavirus: a new ‘crowd disease’. The pandemic necessitated social distancing: yet people still gathered to protest. Simultaneously, government-imposed lockdowns generated demonstrations across the world as people challenged restrictions on what they perceived as their right to assemble. During that summer I was trying to write a journal
article on the ‘Hooligan Riots,’ which occurred in Cape Town, South Africa, during 1906. Described as the ‘unemployed disturbances’ in newspapers as far afield as Australia, this episode of widespread unrest saw the urban poor take over the city for three days, causing extensive property damage and a great deal of anxiety for Cape Town’s elite. Since I could not do any archival research, I looked for histories of urban riots in Africa. There were surprisingly few to be found; especially when compared to the rich literature on the topic in modern European and British history. I decided to write the book myself and took the ambitious step of framing it as a global history.”

Black Lives Matter protest in Stockholm

Black Lives Matter protest in Stockholm

In 2023–2024, research leave took Ruth to Jamaica and South Africa, where she studied protests led by emancipated slaves, and investigated connections between nineteenth and twentieth century crowds in both regions. Her work explores how crowds gave marginalised people a political voice, and how the psychology of the crowd evoked strong emotions such as fear and joy. Crowds embody contradictions such as safety and danger, order and disorder. For some, being caught in a crowd feels risky and frightening, while others like to ‘get lost in the crowd.’

“A shared thread between these colonial crowds is the emergence of what one Jamaican newspaper described in 1859 as the ‘unwashed multitude’. This was an apparently unknowable group of people very threatening to colonial authority. In Jamaica and the Cape Colony this ‘multitude’ was largely made up of ex-slaves and their descendants. Its existence generated deep fear, pointing us to a central question that runs through the entire world history of crowds: to what extent do crowds transcend or override the intentions of the individuals involved?

EndSARS protest movement in Nigeria

This question becomes all the more pertinent when examining the relationship between virtual and physical crowds. For example, in Lagos, Nigeria, during October 2020, enormous crowds mobilised online and on the ground as part of the #EndSars movement, which protested police brutality. This was youth-led activism that organised protest crowds in a decentralised way and used diaspora-activated ‘crowdfunding’ to support activists. On one of my fieldwork trips, I collected oral histories from participants who subverted everything I had read about crowds so far. For them, the crowd was a place of safety against unpredictable and violent state authority. An ‘ethics’ was generated from within asserted one informant, which she claimed was connected to the ‘zeal’ she and her friends shared. It was government-sponsored thugs who ultimately ‘hijacked’ the crowd from outside, she asserted, not internal mob mindlessness. Nonetheless, it is still difficult to draw a sharp distinction between the intentions of the #EndSARS crowd and the individuals within it. Similar blends of online and offline dynamics appear in movements from the Arab Spring to the 2021 U.S. Capitol riot, and in events like the Southport riots in northern England during the summer of 2024, where online misinformation quickly produced realworld unrest.”

Ultimately, Ruth’s historical research focuses on a distinctive feature of crowds across time and space: the fluidity of their boundaries. In many ways, it is the capacity of crowds to shapeshift that gives them their meaning and purpose. This characteristic makes them unpredictable, because it reveals how thin the boundary is between the crowd and the mob. In a disconcerting way, crowds can be orderly, respectable and dangerous all at the same time. Thus, crowds make history, but it’s worth unravelling how histories make crowds as well.