Over the course of the long eighteenth century, Great Britain fought seven major wars. Excluding the rotation of military personnel in and out of the mother country, this meant that large numbers of men, most of them young and all of them newly unemployed, were unleashed on the country on seven separate occasions. We all know what happened next: crime went up, even when every possible allowance is made for the inevitable gap between reported crimes and their actual incidence. Douglas Hay said as much back in 1982, in an article that appeared in Past and Present, and four years later, in 1986, John Beattie made the same point in his magisterial Crime and the Courts in England.

Mayhem is ostensibly about postwar crime, in this case the crime wave that occurred at the conclusion of the War of Austrian Succession. Its real subject is something much broader: disorder, whether in the form of turnpike riots, smuggling, gin drinking, or simmering Jacobitism. Each, we are told, unsettled the mind of the Georgian establishment, prompting small but important changes in how the state intervened in the lives of its subjects. This was not the nineteenth-century state as we know it, but still less was it the eighteenth-century state as we know it.

Instability and the first glimmerings of Michel Foucault's “governmentality”: these are two quintessentially modern preoccupations, and the method by which they are approached, “cascading, overlapping narratives,” also has a distinctly modern ring to it (5). Whether narratives or simply stand-alone essays, each is by itself highly readable, and the topics, ranging from attempts to settle sailors in Nova Scotia to the gin craze to the London earthquakes of 1750, are deftly chosen and of inherent interest. Told mostly from the bottom up, they reflect Rogers's skill as a social historian and, it need hardly be added, his command of the field.

It is only when these separate episodes are then enlisted on behalf of an overarching theory that the results start to lose their way. Take the claim that the century's midpoint witnessed “a crisis in social relations in Britain” (210). To say that Sir Lewis Namier got it wrong, that the Georgian establishment was anxious and its foundation unstable, is of course the new orthodoxy in eighteenth-century scholarship, and if the old theory was already dying a natural death, it was Bob Harris who dealt it the coup de grâce in 2002 with the publication of Politics and the Nation. It may, of course, be argued that the change really reflects the tools being brought to the task: look at eighteenth-century England through the prism of social history, as Rogers does in Mayhem, and you are all but guaranteed to find inequality and all the insecurities that go with it.

What starts as a nod to Harris ends as a bow to Foucault and the current mania for finding instances of “biopolitics” behind every bush. This is most notably the case in the otherwise excellent chapter on the gin craze, where the various attempts to measure and manage the health of the laboring poor are held up as early examples of biopolitics—and so they were. But the implication that Britain was somehow ahead of the game in the march to biopolitics or governmentality—call it what you will—misstates the theory itself: go back to “The Politics of Health in the Eighteenth Century,” an essay first published in 1974, and you will find Foucault rummaging through that distant century for new ways of looking at the health and habits of entire populations, ways that would serve “as the basic core for the ‘social economy’ and sociology of the nineteenth century” (C. Gordon, ed., Michel Foucault: Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972–1977 [Brighton, 1980], 176).

Another point Rogers returns to several times is the growing irrelevance of religious voices in public discourse. Here again I suspect the dubious influence of “governmentality,” for a time-honored way of finding it is in the emergence of new forms of discourse—the more seemingly objective the better. The most interesting example occurs in his chapter on the London earthquakes of 1750, when providential explanations, numerous though they were, failed to carry the day. An interesting point and persuasively argued, but I wonder if Rogers overstates the case in then saying that established clergymen missed the boat by failing to master the secular discourse other reformers were now using to promote their causes. The exception he cites, Bishop Isaac Maddox, perhaps isn't so exceptional. Yes, he couched his opposition to gin in overwhelmingly secular terms, citing the Bills of Mortality rather than Scripture, but Thomas Wilson, also a bishop, had done so before him. In addition, to help him with his numbers Maddox had two other clergymen: the scientist Stephen Hales and the economist Josiah Tucker.

These are small quibbles. Take away the theory and you are left with eight first-rate essays. Or, if you prefer, good old-fashioned social history.