Martial Law: Legal and Administrative Problems of Civil Emergency in Britain and the Empire, 1800–1940

Abstract

Not the least significant constitutional difference between Britain and many continental states in the nineteenth century lay in the sphere of formal arrangements for the exercise of power during civil emergencies. Britain had no clearly understood concept of notrecht or of 'state of siege’. This omission certainly reflected the absence of foreign invasion as much as the feebleness of domestic revolutionary threats. Internal emergencies occurred, indeed, with a frequency hard to square with the old Whig interpretation; but while they often alarmed the authorities, none of them proved so formidable as not to be amenable to control by the civil power backed up by fairly small numbers of troops. A good deal of emergency legislation was passed until the 1820s, but thereafter a marked decline in the incidence and severity of violent disturbance, and in the violence of the government's responses, set in. The threat of revolution in Britain itself, in so far as it had ever existed, had faded. The terrible uncertainties revealed by the 1831 Bristol riots could be optimistically put aside: magistrates could get by with ‘reading the Riot Act’ and trusting to luck, and perhaps a few dragoons or yeomanry.