Bristol from Below: Law, Authority and Protest in a Georgian City by Steve Poole, Nicholas Rodgers (review)

Eighteenth-century Bristol was one of England’s greatest cities. Made wealthy by maritime trade and slavery, as well as its medieval inheritance, it was the most important Atlantic port in the United Kingdom. But alongside Bristol’s great wealth and flourishing urban environment were the struggles of popular politics, protest, and the inevitable efforts of the city’s elites to police and to impose order. These provide the themes of Steve Poole and Nicholas Rodgers’s impressive and ground breaking study Bristol from Below—a remarkable and vivid reconstruction of plebeian life in eighteenth-century England and the boundaries imposed by wealth and power. Those who have followed the construction of this project from its infancy, particularly in the form of published articles, will recognize some of the research, but as a book, there is a fresh energy to it all. Of course, with a title that invokes history from below and features strikes, food riots, popular politics, and the crowd, there can be little doubt of the prevailing historiographical influences in the work: E. P. Thompson and George Rudé being the most obvious and pertinent. Yet this is, marvellously, not a work that has rested on long-established traditions but one which blends them with more recent instincts—readers will note chapters on Jacobitism, for instance, links to the American War of Independence, and, most strikingly of all, discussion of sexuality.

This is a portrait of a city that was—and is—socially and culturally vibrant and full of contradiction. In many respects, the Bristol of the twenty-first century, with its fusion of social democratic and ecologically minded politics, was made possible by the trajectory of reform and the breakdown of the city’s “once vaunted civic consensus,” (p. 359) which Poole and Rodgers depict. Indeed, at times it seems almost as though they were writing not about the eighteenth century, but about our own. As they observe of the 1831 riots, which occurred amid the 1830–1832 reform agitation and were a signature part of the demand for change, the disturbances “reflected the deepening alienation and anger of different marginal groups in Bristol society whose only common ground was a disgust, if not hatred, for the patriciate who continued to dictate Bristol’s destiny” (p. 358). The many and not the few, perhaps, or a struggle against the 1%? It is perhaps useful to recall here that Bristol in the twentieth century was closely associated with left-wing figures who pushed for similarly bottom-up reform of British society: Stafford Cripps and Tony Benn, both of whom represented the city in the Westminster parliament.

Bristol from Below comprises 12 chapters that address, in effect, though they are not so designated, four core themes taken directly from the “history from below” handbook: popular politics, the crowd, the moral economy, and labour. There is not enough space here to examine all of them in detail, so two exemplars will have to suffice: Chapter 4, which deals with class and sexuality, and Chapter 11, which tackles bottom-up politics in the decades prior to the 1832 Reform Act. In their different ways, these chapters exemplify the strengths of the book and the opportunities that arise from fusing traditional and contemporary methodologies to create new forms of history from below. They are, in short, a masterclass.

Compared with the situation on the opposite side of the Bristol Channel, in Wales, where sodomy and bestiality were generally unheard of in the courts—most cases that did come before judges and juries were dismissed—eighteenth-century Bristolians had a complex relationship with human sexuality. Some could express, in print, that they found “the sound of SODOMY […] odious and offensive,” (p. 131) others that no native Bristolian would ever engage in such practices and so it must have been brought into the city by foreigners—the Dutch or the Welsh (p. 128). Bristol had one...