“Backward-looking Patterns of Behaviour”? Re-thinking the Bristol Reform Riots of 1831

Résumé

Steve Poole is Emeritus Professor of History and Heritage at the University of the West of England Bristol. He has written widely about popular politics, protest, criminality and disorder in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Britain, and is the author, with Nicholas Rogers, of ‘Bristol from Below: Law, Authority and Protest in a Georgian City’ (2017).

His talk at the University of Toulouse Jean Jaurès on 16th January 2025, entitled « ‘Backward-looking patterns of behaviour’? Rethinking the Bristol Reform Riots of 1831 » considers in depth the protests that broke out in the city of Bristol in October 1831, in the context of the Lords’ rejection of the First Reform Act, and explores the way in which the crowd actions were viewed at the time and by later historians of protest and reform.