“A question of power and war:” Social Conflict in Hamburg and London in the Late Nineteenth Century

It is stating the obvious if one stresses the intimate relationship between questions of security and those of power. The problem becomes more interesting, however, if one contrasts different conceptions of both power and security and their implications for empirical analysis. This is what this article tries to do, taking the reactions to social unrest in Hamburg and London at the end of the nineteenth century as the empirical example and the conceptual work of the Copenhagen School of security studies and the theoretical offerings of governmentality studies in a Foucauldian tradition as analytical tools.2 For London, we will concentrate particularly on three events: the West End Riots in February 1886, “Bloody Sunday” in November 1887 and the dock labourers’ strike in summer 1889, and for Hamburg on the riots of May 1890 and the dock workers’ strike of 1896/97.3 And since comparing two cases and two theoretical approaches at the same time is bound to confuse the reader, the main part of the article will demonstrate the usefulness of the terms ‘securitization’ and ‘desecuritization’4 for understanding our two metropolitan stories, while the comparative reflection of the tradition of governmentality studies will be reserved for a much briefer epilogue.