Riots, the Guardian, History & Policy

I'm not going to say much about what happened this week, but rather use this post to correct a couple of media things I've already done.

Here's an article in the Guardian by Aditya Chakrabortty.
I had a long chat with Aditya, but of course he's only used one quotation. Then, oddly, the paragraph was edited later in the day and now has a sentence about Swing. NB I did not talk about Swing, nor call them 'peasants'. We're not going back to a basic Marxist interpretation; indeed the masses of new research on Captain Swing has shown the riots of 1830-1 were not a straight-forward case of class conflict, but involved a varied range of people and grievances.


I've done a short opinion piece for History & Policy which you can read here.
Again, it's somewhat shorter than I'd like it to be, but essentially distinguishes the looting of the current week from more politically-minded riots.

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