About the Book: Peterloo
On 16 August, 1819, at St Peters Field, Manchester, armed cavalry attacked a
peaceful rally of some 50,000 pro-democracy reformers. Under the eyes of the
national press, 18 people were killed and some 700 injured, many of them by
sabres, many of them women, some of them children. The Peterloo massacre, the
subject of a recent feature film and a major commemoration in 2019, is famous as
the central episode in Edward Thompsons Making of the English Working Class. It
also marked the rise of a new English radical populism as the British state,
recently victorious at Waterloo, was challenged by