On April 1, 1820, a self-styled “provisional government” issued a proclamation from Glasgow, imploring the “inhabitants of Great Britain and Ireland” to take up arms. This was no April Fools’ day joke. Striking weavers in the city and surrounding industrial towns, numbering 60,000, provided the insurgents with hope, but the rebellion soon petered out following a botched armed rising. Its leaders were arrested, and at summer’s end, three met their ends in public execution. Armstrong’s engaging account of 1820 begins where his last work on late eighteenth-century radicalism—The Liberty Tree: The Stirring Story of Thomas Muir And Scotland’s Fight for Democracy (Edinburgh, 2014)—ended. It centers on the experience of Scottish weavers, the skilled craftsmen who provided both the industrial strength and dense political organization that made the 1820 rising possible. Their secret societies and oath taking spooked the British state as it recovered from the Napoleonic wars and faced...

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