Chris Ealham

Ealham showed that in Barcelona working-class politics was not played out only in the factory but in the street, and that the dispute was literally territorial. The Raval, the Paral·lel, Barceloneta and the shanty districts of Montjuïc were spaces the authorities barely entered, with their own networks of solidarity, their athenaeums, their rationalist schools and their ways of getting by outside the law.

Against that, the elites and successive governments tried a programme of urban order: opening the Via Laietana at the cost of demolishing a working-class quarter, criminalising street vending, clearing shanties before the 1929 Exposition, and a police force dedicated specifically to working-class space. Class, Culture and Conflict in Barcelona tells that operation from both sides and explains why the CNT found here a social base it had in no other European city.

A British historian, Ealham teaches at Saint Louis University in Madrid and is one of the leading foreign specialists in the Spanish libertarian movement. His work draws on police archives, the workers' press and municipal files, a combination that shows how poverty was administered and how it was resisted.

Living Anarchism (2015) is his biography of José Peirats, militant, bricklayer and historian of anarcho-syndicalism, and works as a portrait of an entire generation. For anyone studying cities, Ealham's interest is methodological: he shows that planning, policing and social policy are three names for the same thing when it comes to deciding who is allowed on the street.