Many issues in history are under-researched, usually because there is little to be gained from researching them, or because there are few actual sources to research. Manifestly, neither condition applies in this case, which makes the absence of serious historical enquiry into the Gordon Riots over recent decades all the more incongruous. This significant collection of twelve essays goes a long way towards filling this lacuna. Most of these pieces demonstrate methodological and conceptual sophistication far in excess of the metric of class-consciousness applied by the historians who last studied the riots in the mid-twentieth century, drawing synoptically as they do on the ‘politics’, ‘culture’ and ‘insurrection’ elements of the title.

The book grew out of a conference at the Centre for Research in Romanticism at Roehampton University in 2008, and reflecting the topography of eighteenth-century studies; even the contributions from historians tend to carry an imprint of literary scholarship to a far greater extent than would normally be found within urban history. The book is no worse for this, and scholars at every stage in their careers who work on British cities of the time, or the concept of protest within cities, should gain something from this work. While it is not possible to examine each of them here, the chapters are consistent, and of consistently high quality.

Dana Rubin's chapter is likely to draw particular interest from urban and cultural historians, given the assessment it makes of the multicultural aspects of the riots, using the depiction of different ethnicities in a contemporary engraving as proxy for wider insights into how London might not have been segregated along racial lines. This sits uncomfortably with conventional understanding of the riots, given how ‘the collaboration of black and white rioters seems like precisely the sort of metropolitan mixing represented as threatening to opponents of the Relief Bill and presumably what the riots set out to purge’ (p. 104).

Mark Knights goes back to the precedents of the Stuart era, with petitioning placed in the context of the eighteenth-century issue of how the public could – or should – influence parliament. This question applied to far more causes than that of the Gordon petition, but the extreme way in which the crowd used direct action in an attempt to force their objectives establishes a dichotomy between ‘the people’ and ‘the elite’, in this case members of parliament, and the extent to which the latter were intimidated by crowds and riots. This necessarily occurred within the urban centre of the capital city, and raises issues of spatiality, alienation and segregation, but is cross-cut by the way in which the same use of the cityscape could be seen either as sedition, or an attempt to assert individual rights.

In failing to establish that petitioners (an almost entirely legitimate activity by 1780) were also rioters, no attempt was made, as in 1795, to prevent public assemblies, rendering implicit the control of urban space that was at other times such an animated and acrimonious political controversy. Ian Haywood writes originally and convincingly on the same idea of spatial control: ‘not only has the crowd captured the public space . . . [it] has also converted this space into a counter-spectacle of symbolic popular violence, forcibly converting hegemonic power into street theatre’ (p. 124). Miriam Wallace assess the novelistic representations of the riots, which tend to be ‘filtered and rewritten through the revolutionary worldview that solidified in the 1790s and 1800s. The 1780 riots became a kind of fulcrum, pointing back on the one hand to traditions of carnivalesque popular revolt, and forwards on the other towards a nineteenth-century concept of mass protest and revolutionary action by the proletariat’ (p. 163), which most frequently occurred in urban settings.

The focus on London is important in providing coherence and structure to such a diverse range of essays, and also in framing some of the most innovative and meaningful examinations of the riots contained within them. The study of social unrest taking part in an urban setting also places this book in the vanguard of recent historiography on the broad arc of English social protest at this time. It would be churlish to levy substantive criticism at this book, but some of the sections within chapters are really very short indeed, and this topic lends itself perfectly to a discussion of economic issues – specifically economic protest – rather beyond that which occurs. It is now incumbent on other parts of the profession to research further the issues raised in this highly commendable collection.