At the beginning of our period, Bristol was the major Atlantic port, poised to lead the slave trade and become England's ‘second city’. At the end of our period, the city was in flames. When the ultra-Tory Sir Charles Wetherell came to open the assizes in October 1831, having contemptuously dismissed Bristol's enthusiasm for political reform, he was met by protests and an escalating momentum of unrest that resulted in the burning and pillage of large sections of Queen Square and the opening of the gaols. Bristol's burgeoning middle class, thoroughly alienated from the corporation and its allies in the Merchant Venturers, stood by and watched. The more broadly based Bristol Political Union, the political arm of Reform, offered its help, but on condition that its institutional status be recognised. That offer was rejected by the closed corporation, and this rejection paved the way for dragoon repression more savage than that at Peterloo in 1819.

To a considerable extent this narrative frames our book. The broader context charts how a prosperous port with a civic identity strong enough to survive the politico-religious purges of the Restoration degenerated into a narrow, introspective oligarchy that failed the city politically and economically. This means that the book is in part about the power and limits of paternalism, or patron–client networks. Bristol's hierarchical structures worked as long as the economy was buoyant and certain rules about civic responsibility were respected. But Bristol's economy began to lose momentum after the American war and revealed significant structural weaknesses after the Napoleonic, when it proved difficult to tap into the new enterprises of industrial change. And Bristol's politics was a chequered story of new possibilities and arrested development, of the stifling effects of caucus agreements and compromised elections that debased civic freedoms and prompted oscillating bouts of cynicism and hope among the excluded. We found elements of radicalism in Bristol politics: during the American war, the French, and under the banner of Henry Hunt as the Napoleonic wars came to a close. But it proved impossible to fashion a coherent cross-class alliance for radical political reform. The hallmark of Bristol radicalism in this era was ultimately one of impotence.