ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on greater detail on three countries with a British background: the United Kingdom, the United States and Australia. During the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the emergence of protests fuelled by the conditions of the Industrial Revolution and the growth of the working class caused the British authorities to frequently resort to the military as riot controllers. One of the most notorious mobilisations of the military against civilian protesters was the Peterloo Massacre of 1819. Amid the social discontent after World War I and the 1917 Bolshevik-led socialist revolution in Russia, armed military units were called out when half the Liverpool police force went on strike in 1919. Four battalions and a troop of tanks were deployed, and two alleged rioters were shot, one fatally. There is a barbaric history of the use of martial law throughout the British Empire.
