The serious study of popular disturbances and protest in Georgian Britain goes back to the postwar surge of interest in social history, of which it was a key constituent. Its appeal was in large measure due to its capacity to give a political voice to the huge section of the population omitted from traditional political history; to provide—in the title of Steve Poole and Nicholas Rogers's book—a “history from below.” However, what also attracted those historians engaged in recovering this voice was the specific period itself. Assuming that at some point in the nineteenth century a class-based politics emerged in Britain, in which horizontal social allegiances were as important, if not more, than vertical ones, what part did the popular protests of the long eighteenth century play in nurturing that transformation? It is a question that E. P. Thompson, whose hugely influential Making of the English Working Class (1963) focused on the period 1780 to 1832, never quite resolved, despite several forays into the earlier years of the eighteenth century. It is a question that also hovers, if more implicitly than explicitly, over this important and richly documented volume. How did the British move from popular protest to mature class conflict?

Poole and Rogers, for whom the book represents the work of many years, take as their subject Bristol. Enjoying dynamic growth as a port, by 1750 it had become the largest city in provincial England. If commercial capitalism and urbanization were the midwives of a class society, then Bristol should be in the vanguard of change. However, we are told, the “hallmark of Bristol radicalism in this era was ultimately one of impotence” (1), and that in later years Chartism obtained little traction among the city's working population. The “extraordinary popular uprising of October 1831” (325) was never quite Peterloo and has never achieved the same iconic status in the annals of radical history, despite constituting a “massacre” with a loss of human life greater than that of its Manchester counterpart.

That said, Bristol from Below demonstrates convincingly that Georgian Bristol was not a quiescent city. Popular protest and disturbances were woven into the fabric of its life. The people had a voice. Chapters on turnpike, food, and impressment riots, on popular Jacobitism, and on the “wreckers from without” (particularly the miners of Kingswood) point to a rumbustious and to a degree participatory political culture—one in which, to judge from the chapters on the American War of Independence, the 1790s, 1800–1820 (when Henry Hunt made a pitch for the city), and finally the 1831 riots, the levels of protest and the authorities’ responses became increasingly bitter and violent. The 1831 riot was not a flash in the pan but the culmination of over a century of protest politics. Why this did not lead to a more structured and sustained class-based politics is a question that the authors answer only obliquely.

It is not that the forces of class were absent in the city. By the 1820s Bristol was a society “coming apart at the seams” (34), a “class-fractured society” (35), one that “entered the Reform era … a class-divided city” (36). This was a consequence of economic decline and growing poverty, the responsibility for which Poole and Rogers lay squarely on the shoulders of an “introspective oligarchy that failed the city politically and economically” (1). It seems the problem was that Bristol's version of popular politics was essentially old-style. It depended upon a level of interaction between “patricians” and “plebeians” (to use E. P. Thompson's terms), in which both parties were able to exercise a measure of power, if not on an equal basis. However, by 1832 “the mutuality that once mediated tensions between the privileged elite and labouring poor was in tatters” (358). The governors were no longer listening to the governed, and the governed were too economically weak to break out of their traditional modes of protest and organize in a new way. This analysis raises a number of questions. What was the role of the middling orders or middle class? Poole and Rogers are well aware that this is a key problem with the patrician/plebeian model (38), but they largely dismiss the issue by arguing that “[a]fter the Napoleonic wars … Bristol's growing middle class, consigned to a client status, was unable or unwilling to mediate the distance” (358) between civic elite and poor. The issue surely demands more attention and explanation. We learn that 1792 was a “watershed … the first year in which the city could be said to have experienced a cross-trade strike wave” (76), but this issue is not taken much further. What role did the structure of trades in the city, compared say with London, Norwich, or Manchester, play in the formation, or lack of formation, of class consciousness?

The volume may raise questions, but there can be no doubt as to the richness and sophistication of the research that underpins it. Deeply rooted in the primary sources, clear about the historiography surrounding the subject, and very well written, it succeeds admirably in recovering the voices in the crowd. There is fascinating detail about quarrelsome neighbors, the public punishment of the pillory and gallows, the sodomy panic of the 1730s, as well as the nitty-gritty of riots themselves. Sometimes the sheer density of the detail militates against the clarity of the overall argument, a tendency exacerbated by the fact that the chapters can read like a series of essays, investigating particular riots or types of riots, rather than developing a closely structured thesis. But a brief introduction and postscript and a substantial contextual chapter do give shape to the volume. This may or may not be “the first urban history from below of the long eighteenth century” (4)—Ron Neale's 1981 study of neighboring Bath might, for example, dispute this claim—but Bristol from Below undoubtedly adds enormously to our understanding of popular politics in a major urban center during the Georgian era.