ABSTRACT
The next two chapters focus on arguably the most destructive forms of public disorder seen in Britain and America this century. The present chapter examines the American ghetto riots of the 1960s, while Chapter 4 deals with the British inner-city riots of the 1980s. The American riots were much larger in scale than their British counterparts-not surprisingly, given the unequal sizes of their ethnic minority populations. Nevertheless, important similarities have been acknowledged between them (Benyon and Solomos, 1987; Field and Southgate, 1982), and the reasons why they occurred are to be found at the six levels of analysis referred to in Chapter 1.
