ABSTRACT
The politics of provisions decayed rapidly in the decade that began with masked Luddites swinging hammers and swinging from gallows, and ended with the Horse Guards shooting Queen Caroline's fans at Cumberland Gate in 1821. The metropolitan protests drew on older London crowd traditions, but contest endured as one of the decisive moments in the alienation of public opinion from the traditional ruling class of the Old Society. Food riots after Waterloo receded from mainstream bargaining into three paths: rural desperation, archaic community politics, or urban pandemonium. Rural desperation burst out in 1816, when farm workers and their village allies protested acute harvest failure and industrial slump with widespread riots, arson, and machine breaking. After 1812 violent food riots in rural villages, archaic communities and big cities seemed to revert to rioters older objectives, before 1750, when seizures of food shipments and attacks on mills had far outnumbered marketplace price-settings.
