In Recasting Bourgeois Europe, his study of the responses of the major States of Western Europe to the conditions created by the First World War, Charles Maier makes only, according to his standards, passing reference to Great Britain. Initially this must appear quite reasonable, for if one compares the post-war situation of Britain with that of most of Continental Europe it must seem that Britain escaped, or at least experienced with a greatly reduced intensity, the disorder which beset other nations. It might therefore be assumed that the efforts of the British political elite to adjust to the post-war world are less worthy of attention than those of their Continental counterparts.

The 1820's constituted a watershed in United States life. By the end of that decade, about ten years after the last of the English Luddite risings had been suppressed, industrialism secured its decisive American victory; by the end of the 1830's all of its cardinal features were definitively present. The many overt threats to the coherence of emerging industrial capitalism, the ensemble of forms of resistance to its hegemony, were blunted at this time and forced into the current of that participation so vital to modern domination. In terms of technology, work, politics, sexuality, culture, and the whole fabric of ordinary life, the struggles of an earlier, relative autonomy, which threatened both old and new forms of authority, fell short, and a dialectic of domestication, so familiar to us today, broke through. The reactions engendered in the face of the new dynamic in this epoch of its arrival seem, by the way, to offer some implicit parallels to present trends as technological civilization likely enters its terminal crisis: the answers of progress, now anything but new or promising, encounter a renewed legitimation challenge that can be informed, even inspired, by understanding the past.

The theory of a secret revolutionary tradition, closely woven into the fabric of early working-class activity and surfacing at particular moments of crisis, continues to fascinate historians. In their attempts to assess its validity much recent effort has been directed at the ten years following the introduction of the infamous Two Acts in December 1795. There has been intensive study of the secret societies in the metropolis and their counterparts in the West Riding of Yorkshire and of their relationship to the Irish rebels. Yet whilst it si now generally recognised that radicalism did not simply evaporate in the oppressive aftermath of the “gagging acts”, its nature and significance continue to provoke disagreement. This paper is a contribution to this debate and an attempt to help stitch together a convincing account of plebeian protest in a region which, despite its prominent position in the radical history of this period, has received little systematic attention.