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Democracy And Disorder: Electoral Violence And Political Modernisation In England And Wales, 1857-1880, Justin Wasserman

Theses: Doctorates and Masters

The thesis analyses mid-nineteenth century electoral violence in England and Wales in order to contribute to our understanding of the character of Victorian electoral politics, and to assess the pace of political modernization as it has recently been defined. Historians have long acknowledged the presence of physical violence, rioting and intimidation during British elections from at least the Middle Ages to the turn of the twentieth-century, and yet the precise nature, frequency and scale of this phenomenon has remained somewhat obscured by a lack of statistical data on the subject. Therefore, by compiling a numerical sample of violence, based on …