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This paper examines the situational dynamics of the 2011 London Riots. The empirical contribution is to challenge the dominant explanation of the riots as an outbreak of 'criminal opportunism'. I use the Metropolitan Police record of all riotrelated crimes in London to test several hypotheses and show that this 'criminal opportunism' theory cannot account for the riots' spatial patterning. This opens space for alternative explanatory mechanisms. I then use video footage and testimonies of events on the ground to examine the interactions which made up the London Riots. These suggest that the riots were, in part, a way for people to stake a claim to the public spaces in which they lived, to reclaim the everyday. Theoretically this builds on Randall Collins's 'micro-situational' approach to violence (2008) but extends it by embedding historical and structural factors into that micro perspective. Specifically, the emotional dynamics of these riot interactions cannot be understood without acknowledging participants' pre-existing expectations of the police and of the everyday places of the riot.

This article uses a systematic catalogue of 414 riots in Liverpool, Glasgow, and Manchester to examine the changing practice of rioting from 1800 to 1939. Three empirical findings emerge: first, over this period, riots went from being an autonomous tactic to one which was largely subordinated to other protest logics; second, the way rioters chose their targets changed: instead of targeting individuals with whom rioters had concrete relationships, they started targeting people as tokens of some wider type; third, throughout this period rioting remained a localized practice that reflected local traditions and dynamics. On the basis of these findings, I revisit the orthodox history of social movements and suggest we refine this narrative to explicitly acknowledge continuity in the repertoire of contention, regional variation, the uneven reach of the state, and to properly distinguish between individual practices like demonstrations, composite forms like social movements, and the repertoire as a whole.

This essay develops an original, temporal approach to the study of rioting. It uses a catalogue of 414 riots from nineteenth and early twentieth century Britain to trace some common developmental patterns, demonstrating that: (i) riots often begin with provocation, intervention by the police, or routines that license violence; (ii) riots are linked together by cycles of revenge and the feedback loop between action and identity; and (iii) the state’s monopoly of organised violence was often decisive in bringing riots to an end. These findings reveal significant limits to the explanatory power of two widely used concepts in this area: triggers and identity. More interestingly, they show that this power varies meaningfully over time. I therefore end by calling for a properly historicised theory of rioting and drawing attention to two key sites of historical change: the norms and traditions which govern public violence, and the state’s monopoly of force.

Debates about patterns of time use in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Britain go back to the seminal work of E. P. Thompson in the 1960s. But the lack of systematic evidence means that many of these questions remain unresolved. In an attempt to advance those debates, this essay uses three catalogs of political events to reconstruct the working week in Britain over the long nineteenth century. Three patterns emerge. First, observance of Saint Monday appears to have been widespread in the early nineteenth century before declining slowly in the mid-1800s, a process that happened faster in factory towns than elsewhere. This finding supports the orthodox narrative about Saint Monday against its recent challengers (in particular Hans-Joachim Voth). Second, I find that political organizers in the early nineteenth century were reluctant to profane the Sabbath by arranging public meetings on Sundays, but that this came to an end during the heyday of Chartism. Third, these catalogs also provide some, more speculative, evidence that the working day and the working week became more ordered as the nineteenth century wore on.