Beyond order and disorder : crowd behaviour in Kristiania in the 1890s

Abstract

This dissertation is a local history of crowd formation and crowd action in the city of Kristiania (today Oslo) in the 1890s. This was a decade of turbulent labour relations and one in which we can locate the beginnings of a lasting organised labour movement. As the title indicates, the main analytical goal is to overcome a dichotomous view of crowd behaviour at the end of the nineteenth century—a view that categorises crowds as expressions of ‘order’ or ‘disorder’. The dissertation disaggregates the idea of ‘the crowd’ that was imposed on these actions in the 1890s by observers and participants from both the political right and left, observers who sought both to make sense of and to use crowd actions for their own purposes. This dissertation teases out common traits of crowd actions, the causes of these actions, and how they were framed through post hoc categorisation. All the while, the dissertation draws on local context for sensible answers.