Could a feeling of discontent amongst the working classes have been harnessed by a movement that sought to overthrow the Government? This was certainly the worry of the governing classes. An intelligence report sent to the Minister of Munitions concluded that industrial discontent was being stirred up by revolutionary organisations.
Dr Martin Farr of Newcastle University highlights the Lansdowne letter as an illustration of the fear of revolution in Britain. There was a redoubling of propaganda as well as the utilisation of the secret State and surveillance. The greater Glasgow area was a huge industrial hub engaged in meeting the enormous demand for munitions and navy vessels. This meant it has a considerable working class populace which over the course of WWI became increasingly unionised and politically active.
Another was the No-Conscription Fellowship which had its offices raided by police on 14 November As part of the concerted effort to recommit the population to the war effort, the National War Aims Committee was formed to focus on propaganda at home. And a key target audience for this propaganda was industrial workers.
Understandably, strikes picked up because people noticed that they worked. It is class-based to the extent that most people who signed the chartist petitions are ordinary people. But really they saw themselves as moral reformers. They see themselves as trying to do — and it cuts across class lines.
The Reform Act of was passed by a conservative government because they knew that inevitably it was going to have to be passed.
Who knows? More people can vote. They are a minority within the Chartist movement. They are a very small minority, the physical force Chartists. What the government does is it deputizes 25, men of property. They become sheriffs. Louis Napoleon Bonaparte, who had not yet returned to France, he was one of those who was actually deputized as a sheriff. The business people in the City, which is what the financial capital that overlooks the British Empire was increasingly called, they come with their hunting rifles to work.
They get those file cabinets ready to barricade the door. There are 25, of these people. The number of marchers was far, far smaller to that. There is no revolution in Britain in But if there had been a revolution, where would it come from?
From where would the revolutionary ranks have come? That is the interesting question. Because of what I said before, helps the British re-invent or reconfigure, reconstruct their identity. They reformed. The biggest riots in the eighteenth century were the Gordon riots, which were anti-Catholic riots. They are not the French , not at all.
France has a centralized state and France is full of Catholics. Many of the Protestants who had left France after the revocation of the Edict of Nantes in come, not just to the Netherlands, but come to Britain as well. So, this may have already tipped you off on who is the unwanted, dangerous Other in the British — particularly upper-class, but not just upper-class — imaginary. They are the Irish. If there was going to be a revolution in April or any other month in , the components would be, from the point of view of the upper classes and from the police, the Irish and groups of physical force Chartists or revolutionaries who might join forces.
Chartists looked to the Irish to get them to sign the big petitions. They see them as allies. Remember, because of the Irish potato famine in the s that tens of thousands of Irishmen, hundreds of thousands of Irishmen — I have it in the book somewhere, but the number of people who leave Ireland in the s is in the millions, along with all those who just simply die in the fields.
They go to where? They go to the United States and they go to England, particularly Liverpool. The Rangers are the Protestant team, very anti-Catholic.
They played before , people in — one hundred thousand people at a soccer game in about All of these Irish are going to London, also.
They live in the Irish neighborhoods. Many of them believe that the only way Ireland is ever going to be independent is by rising up and rebelling. They were right about that. What if they start rebelling in ? What is it, ? What do I mean by that? Here, one of the interesting things is that John Belcher told me a long time ago, on a train in Germany coming back from a conference in Wurzburg, that there were more boxes of documents in the public record office about the surveillance of ships coming into the port of Liverpool, than there were any other documents about any other aspect of What are they doing?
Where is the potential insurgency or infusion of militants for Irish coming from? One of the interesting things about this, and you can see also in the time of the troubles in the s — I was in Ireland, ironically, when it all started up again in At the time they were really worried about the IRA, and there was a lot to worry about then.
The IRA was getting all sorts of money from Irish pubs in New York and Boston, just tons of money, big bucks all the time to buy weapons. In , one of the interesting things that Belcher and other people have discovered is that the real Irish militants, the most committed, were Irish immigrants, immigrants to and immigrants from Ireland living in Boston and New York. Our role will be that of the French Revolution, to carry liberty in principle across the borders and free Europe from nobles, from priests, etc.
What we will do, as first generation Irish living in New York, and Philadelphia, and Boston, and maybe Connecticut, too, is we will raise money and we will make Irish independence.
We will achieve this with violence, with guns. Every ship that came into any port that was coming from the United States was thoroughly searched for weapons and for money. These Irish immigrants to the United States were the most militant, arguably, within the Irish political movement for independence. For one thing, they had more means.
Some of them had come from Ireland to the United States maybe going through England and maybe not. They had jobs, and the people in Ireland themselves were just starving. They were dying in the fields. They were ending up in London living with other Irishmen, which is not surprising, maintaining these kinds of patterns by county, Cork, and all this.
The Catholic Church was terribly, terribly important in their lives. It was terribly important as a means of charity and all this. But what it meant for the upper classes is that the unwanted Other, Catholic — remember in they tried to ally with the French. What happens in World War I? Roger Casement, who is an Irish militant who is absolutely against the exploitation of workers in Peru, and in Africa, and in everywhere else, Roger Casement ends up being sent off with a little boat off of a submarine off the coast of Carey.
He tries to stop the Easter Insurrection. What he tried to do was organize, in prisoner of war camps in Germany, Irish militants to fight the good fight and to free Ireland.
This is looking later, but there was always this potential fear among the British upper classes that they — these Catholics who are no longer just across the channel. They are living in Liverpool in huge numbers. When his uncle died, Hancock inherited his lucrative Committees of correspondence were emergency provisional governments set up in the 13 American colonies in response to British policies leading up to the Revolutionary War also known as the American Revolution.
The exchange of ideas, information and debate between different He gave the local militia a key advantage during the Battles John Adams was a leader of the American Revolution and served as the second U. The Massachusetts-born, Harvard-educated Adams began his career as a lawyer.
Intelligent, patriotic, opinionated and blunt, Adams became a critic of Great It began as a street brawl between American colonists and a lone British soldier, but quickly escalated to a chaotic, bloody slaughter. The conflict energized anti-British sentiment From to , the Continental Congress served as the government of the 13 American colonies and later the United States.
The First Continental Congress, which was comprised of delegates from the colonies, met in in reaction to the Coercive Acts, a series of measures It included two crucial battles, fought eighteen days apart, and was a decisive victory for the Continental Army and a crucial turning point in the Revolutionary Live TV.
This Day In History. History Vault. Causes of the Revolutionary War. Recommended for you. How the Troubles Began in Northern Ireland. American Revolution: Continental Congress.
American Revolution: Key Military Figures. American Revolution: Events and Battles. American Revolution: Flags and Fliers. Battles of Lexington and Concord.
0コメント