In some rural riots, as in the French [riots] of 1789, the path of disturbance actually followed well-trodden and traditional routes.1 The notion that riots and other collective disturbances follow a common script is standard historical and sociological fare. In the passage from which this quote is drawn, Rude describes a script proceeding from general grievances to triggering events and on to a fixed repertory of rick-burning, machine-breaking, and so on. Throughout his earlier chapters he presents stories of individual riots, on the evidence of which this generalized sequence rests. But one may well ask when we can really speak of such a fixed sequence of events. How would we identify such a sequence quantitatively? How could we discover if the characteristic sequence in rural riots differed sharply from that of urban disturbances? How might we analyze the effects of the occupations of participants on such sequences of events? The answers to such questions are not easily found. The 2 Most attempts to explain riots and revolutions have focused on structural factors. E.g., Theda Skocpol, States and Social Revolutions (Cambridge, I979); Jeffery M. Paige, Agrarian Revolution (New York, I975). This is true even of Rude's own work, e.g., The Crowd and (with Eric J. Hobsbawm) Captain Swing (New York, I968). For overviews of the "compare by cases" method, see Skocpol and Margaret Somers, "The Uses of Comparative History in Macrosocial Inquiry," Comparative Studies in Society and History, XXII (1980), 174-197; Arthur Stinchcombe, Theoretical Methods in Social History (New York, 1978), 89-97. An overview of the sequence problem is Abbott, "Sequences of Social Events: Concepts and Methods for the Analysis of Order in Social Processes," Historical Methods, XVI (1983), I29-I47.