Histories of Resistance: Disability, Agency and Embodiment in the Long Eighteenth Century

Speaker: David Turner (Swansea University)

Disabled people’s political activism is often assumed to be a product of the modern age, but for centuries people with physical, sensory and intellectual impairments have found ways to push back against negative societal framings of bodily difference and advocate for their needs. This paper explores the manifold dimensions of disabled people’s resistance in Britain from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries. Using sources ranging from Poor Law petitions to autobiographies and works of history and biography, it examines the strategies by which people with impairments from a range of social backgrounds have represented their experiences, claimed community with people in similar situations, and asserted a moral right to compassionate treatment by others in society. The paper provides an overview of developments while asking questions about how we frame disabled people’s political activism over the longue durée, how pre-modern perspectives can deepen our understanding of disabled people’s histories, and how we can develop more inclusive eighteenth-century studies.

IHR Seminar Series: British History in the Long 18th Century