Beginnings . On the table beside Wilkes lies two editions of
The North Briton. The early growth of pressure groups was connected to broad economic and political changes in England in the mid-18th century, including
political representation,
market capitalization, and
proletarianization. The first mass social movement catalyzed around the controversial political figure,
John Wilkes. As editor of the paper
The North Briton, Wilkes vigorously attacked the new administration of
Lord Bute and the peace terms that the new government accepted at the 1763
Treaty of Paris at the end of the
Seven Years' War. Charged with
seditious libel, Wilkes was arrested after the issue of a
general warrant, a move that Wilkes denounced as unlawful – the
Lord Chief Justice eventually ruled in Wilkes favour. As a result of this episode, Wilkes became a figurehead to the growing movement for popular sovereignty among the middle classes – people began chanting, "Wilkes and Liberty" in the streets. After a later period of exile, brought about by further charges of libel and
obscenity, Wilkes stood for the Parliamentary seat at
Middlesex, where most of his support was located. When Wilkes was imprisoned in the
King's Bench Prison on 10 May 1768, a mass movement of support emerged, with large demonstrations in the streets under the slogan "No liberty, no King." Stripped of the right to sit in Parliament, Wilkes became an
Alderman of
London in 1769, and an activist group called the
Society for the Supporters of the Bill of Rights began aggressively promoting his policies. This was the first ever sustained social advocacy group – it involved public meetings, demonstrations, the distribution of pamphlets on an unprecedented scale and the mass petition march. However, the movement was careful not to cross the line into open rebellion – it tried to rectify the faults in governance through appeals to existing legal precedents and was conceived of as an extra-Parliamentary form of agitation to arrive at a consensual and constitutional arrangement. The force and influence of this social advocacy movement on the streets of London compelled the authorities to concede to the movement's demands. Wilkes was returned to Parliament,
general warrants were declared as unconstitutional and press freedom was extended to the coverage of
Parliamentary debates. Another important advocacy group that emerged in the late 18th century was the British
abolitionist movement against
slavery. Starting with an organised sugar boycott in 1791, it led the second great petition drive of 1806, which brought about the
banning of the slave trade in 1807. In the opinion of Eugene Black (1963), "...association made possible the extension of the politically effective public. Modern extra parliamentary political organization is a product of the late eighteenth century [and] the history of the age of reform cannot be written without it.
Growth and spread , London in 1848 From 1815,
Britain after victory in the
Napoleonic Wars entered a period of social upheaval characterised by the growing maturity of the use of social movements and special-interest associations.
Chartism was the first mass movement of the growing working-class in the world. It campaigned for political reform between 1838 and 1848 with the
People's Charter of 1838 as its manifesto – this called for
universal suffrage and the implementation of the
secret ballot, amongst other things. The term "social movements" was introduced in 1848 by the German Sociologist
Lorenz von Stein in his book
Socialist and Communist Movements since the Third French Revolution (1848) in which he introduced the term "social movement" into scholarly discussions – actually depicting in this way
political movements fighting for the social rights understood as
welfare rights. The
labor movement and
socialist movement of the late 19th century are seen as the prototypical social movements, leading to the formation of
communist and
social democratic parties and organisations. These tendencies were seen in poorer countries as pressure for reform continued, for example in Russia with the
Russian Revolution of 1905 and
of 1917, resulting in the collapse of the Czarist regime around the end of the
First World War. In the post-war period,
women's rights,
gay rights,
peace,
civil rights,
anti-nuclear and
environmental movements emerged, often dubbed the
New Social Movements, some of which may be considered "
general interest groups" as opposed to special interest groups. They led, among other things, to the formation of
green parties and organisations influenced by the
new left. Some find in the end of the 1990s the emergence of a new global social movement, the
anti-globalization movement. Some social movement scholars posit that with the rapid pace of globalization, the potential for the emergence of new
type of social movement is latent—they make the analogy to national movements of the past to describe what has been termed a
global citizens movement. ==United States==