Peterloo: The English Uprising

- Blurb -

On 16 August,1819, at St Peter's Field, Manchester, armed cavalry attacked a peaceful rally of some 60,000 pro-democracy reformers. Under the eyes of the national press, fifteen people were killed and over 600 injured, many of them by sabres, many of them women, some of them children. The 'Peterloo massacre' was the bloodiest political event of the nineteenth century on English soil. In the short term the government resisted pressure for reform, but they could neverrisk another Peterloo.Peterloo was not only the most notorious episode of the industrial revolution, it also marked an attempt by a mass movement to build a new English identity, in which an over-mighty British state, recently victorious at Waterloo, was challenged by a radical new form of English popular democracy centred on the industrial north. Why did the cavalry attack? Who ordered them in? Were the radicals planning revolution? What would have happened if the troops had not intervened? Why were the perpetrators never brought to justice? What were the long-term consequences? Using hundreds of eye-witness accounts and numerous contemporary reports and archives, including previously secret government sources, Robert Poole now tells for the first time the full extraordinary story of the 'Peterloo massacre' in this definitive account ofa landmark event in the development of democracy.