The culture of combination: solidarities and collective action before tolpuddle

Beyond the repression of the national waves of food rioting during the subsistence crises of the 1790s, workers in the English countryside lost the will and ability to collectively mobilise. Or so the historical orthodoxy goes. Such a conceptualisation necessarily positions the Bread or Blood riots of 1816, the Swing rising of 1830, and, in particular, the agrarian trade unionism practised at Tolpuddle in 1834 as exceptional events. This paper offers a departure by placing Tolpuddle into its wider regional context. The unionists at Tolpuddle, it is shown, were not making it up as they went along but instead acted in ways consistent with shared understandings and experiences of collective action and unionism practiced throughout the English west. In so doing, it pays particular attention to the forms of collective action – and judicial responses – that extended between different locales and communities and which joined farmworkers, artisans and industrial workers together. So conceived, Tolpuddle was not an exception. Rather, it can be more usefully understood as a manifestation of deeply entrenched cultures, an episode that assumes its historical potency because of its subsequent politicised representation

Validation and interpretability of data-driven models

This is a Whitepaper submitted to the 2017 DOE ASCR Applied Math Meeting. It addresses research topics in the "Convergence of data- and model-driven discovery" subject area. In particular, it proposes research activities that would enhance the interpretability of data-driven models, such as neural nets, which are increasing being used in multiscale simulations for upscaling/downscaling operations e.g., as turbulence closures etc. The research would allow us validate such empirical, data-driven models against physics theory