Monarchs
on the Move: Geographical Inequalities and the Making of Anglo-Britain (1870 –
1949)

Speaker: Marta Pagnini

My paper contributes to the sociological analysis of nationalism by focusing on the role of the monarchy in historically consolidating geographical inequalities in Britain. In particular, I examine the role that the British monarchy played at the turn of the twentieth century in consolidating, through uneven royal visits, an Anglo-centric nation and the North-South divide. The paper analyses 60,173 locations visited by British monarchs and senior members of the royal family between 1870 and 1949, as officially reported in the Court Circular, the official record of royal activities (N > 150,000) published since 1803 in major national newspapers. In terms of methods, I digitised the Court Circular data with web-scraping and OCR techniques. I then extracted spatial variables from the corpus using customised named entity recognition models and obtained information on the longitude, latitude and postcode of these locations using the Google API. The data reveals segregation patterns of visits at the national, regional and city levels, with a continuous dominance of English territories, the South of England, and London, alongside the persistent exclusion of Ireland and Wales. The role of Scotland, despite its prominence in the Victorian era, wanes in the twentieth century. Despite being increasingly easier to move from one location to the other with more modern means of transportation, visits did not disperse but instead gravitated more and more around London, symbolically reinforcing a deeply unequal geographical union.

About the Speaker:

Marta Pagnini is an ESRC-funded PhD candidate at the Department of Sociology of the London School of Economics and Political Science. Her research project, under the supervision of Professor Mike Savage and Dr Milena Tsvetkova, examines the historical processes of legitimation and consecration of status hierarchies by the state. To that end, she analyses with text mining, time series and social network analysis the British monarchy’s public activities listed in the daily Court Circular from 1837 until present. Marta completed an Msc in Sociology at the LSE in 2020. She obtained a BA in Sociology from the University of Paris IV Sorbonne and a BA in Political Science at the University of Pisa. Before joining the LSE as a PhD fellow, she worked as Market Research Analyst at Euromonitor International and as Research Assistant in Economic History for the University of Groningen.