Reading the Riot Act – MIROIR

Steve Poole, Emeritus Professor of History and Heritage at the University of the West of England, Bristol, explains in depth what happened in Bristol in October 1831 when mass protests broke out in the context of the debates in Parliament over the passage of the First Reform Act. This crowd action needs to be situated in the particular framework of Bristol's political, commercial and economic land...

Specialist of Lancashire radical culture in the early 19th century, and author of Peterloo: The English Uprising (Oxford, 2019) Robert Poole provides context to and explanation of the events that took place in Manchester on 16th August 1819. Eighteen people were killed and nearly 700 injured when the local yeomanry cavalry was sent in to arrest the speakers due to address the gathered crowds. On t...

I talk to Matthew Roberts, a historian of Chartism at Sheffield Hallam University, about the Chartist rising which took place in Newport, South Wales, in November 1839, just after Parliament had rejected the first national petition for the People’s Charter. Chartism was a mass, working-class movement for democratic reform which emerged in industrialising Britain in the late 1830s. We discuss how a...

In this episode, the focus is on the ‘Luddite’ movement of 1811-12 when machine-breaking actions proliferated in the English cloth-making counties of Nottinghamshire, Lancashire, Cheshire and Yorkshire. In discussion with Katrina Navickas, a historian of British popular protest in the North who lectures at the University of Hertfordshire, the origin of the movement and the nature of the attacks on...

This episode looks in depth at the Gordon riots which took place in London in June 1780. What has often been seen as an anti-Catholic protest, occurring when Britain was fighting to retain its prized American mainland colonies, is given further thought in the company of Ian Haywood, Professor of English at the University of Roehampton. Dans ce premier épisode nous évoquerons les émeutes de Londres...