Calhoun, Craig

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  Craig Calhoun Book review: the army and the crowd in mid-Georgian England. by Tony Hayter  Article (Published version) (Refereed)     Original citation: Calhoun, Craig (1982) Book review: the army and the crowd in mid-Georgian England. by Tony Hayter. American journal of sociology, 88 (1). pp. 236-237. ISSN 0002-9602  © 1982 University of Chicago Press  This version available at: http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/42199/ Available in LSE Research Online: November 2012  LSE has developed LSE Research Online so that users may access research output of the School. Copyright © and Moral Rights for the papers on this site are retained by the individual authors and/or other copyright owners. Users may download and/or print one copy of any article(s) in LSE Research Online to facilitate their private study or for non-commercial research. You may not engage in further distribution of the material or use it for any profit-making activities or any commercial gain. You may freely distribute the URL (http://eprints.lse.ac.uk) of the LSE Research Online website.  The Army and the Crowd in Mid-Georgian England.  by Tony HayterReview by: Craig J. CalhounAmerican Journal of Sociology, Vol. 88, No. 1 (Jul., 1982), pp. 236-237Published by: The University of Chicago PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2779438 .Accessed: 23/11/2012 12:08Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at .http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp .JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range ofcontent in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new formsof scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org. .The University of Chicago Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access toAmerican Journal of Sociology.http://www.jstor.org This content downloaded by the authorized user from 192.168.52.66 on Fri, 23 Nov 2012 12:08:22 PMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and ConditionsAmerican Journal of Sociology settling disputes, and funneling payoffs to the right officials. Not only did the family explicitly discourage violence, it prohibited participation in ac- tivities considered to be too risky, for example, narcotics, kidnapping, and counterfeiting. The critical question we are not able to answer from Ander- son's data is how typical the rather benign Benguerra family is of other organized criminal groups, and the fact that the real name and location of the family are concealed makes it extremely difficult to arrive at an inde- pendent judgment. Anderson devotes considerable space in this short book to an analysis of the Benguerra family's legitimate business interests, and it is here that the limitations of her data become most apparent. She makes an effort to test five hypotheses about the reasons the family made legitimate invest- ments by analyzing the types of investments, but often her data are not up to the task. Her analysis could have been greatly clarified by direct interviews with just two or three willing informants. (The five hypotheses are, in descending order of empirical support: establishing a tax cover for illegal income, providing a front for illegal business, serving family mem- bers, diversification, and profit.) The only chapter of the book that does not deal with organized crime is in one respect its most important, for it provides significant new evidence in the debate about the structure of the Cosa Nostra. On one side in the debate, Cressey has argued that the Cosa Nostra is a formal organization wih a clearly defined hierarchical role structure, while Francis Janni (A Family Business [New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1972]), on the other, holds it to be a traditional social system based upon personal rela- tionships and without formal roles that continue beyond the participation of given individuals. The first chapter of Anderson's book reproduces nu- merous passages from the transcripts of the FBI's electronic surveillance of the office of Samuel Rizzo de Cavalcante, the boss of a Cosa Nostra family. The transcripts clearly show that the high commission which directs the overall organization, and the de Cavalcante family, contain formal con- tinuing organizational roles very much as described in Cressey's work. Despite the limitations of her data, Anderson's work is clearly a most valuable contribution to the study of organized crime and one that must be read by anyone seriously interested in this field. The Army and the Crowd in Mid-Georgian England. By Tony Hayter. Totowa, N.J.: Rowman & Littlefield, 1979. Pp. x+239. $22.50. Craig J. Calhoun University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill For a long time, the 18th century had the reputation of being a peaceful interlude in British history. It came between the dramatic and widely 236 This content downloaded by the authorized user from 192.168.52.66 on Fri, 23 Nov 2012 12:08:22 PMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and ConditionsBook Reviews known political and religious struggles of the 17th century and the social dislocations and insurrections that accompanied industrialization in the 19th century. During the 1960s this reputation began to change. The prev- alence of food riots, resistance to conscription, and, in the later years, riots on behalf of church and king gained increasing attention from historians. In particular, the "new" social history, concerned to look at events "from below" and not always from the perspective of kings and generals, con- tained several arguments that the 18th-century mob was not only more frequently in action than had been thought, but was also more organized and self-conscious. The most influential of such arguments were offered by E. P. Thompson. Tony Hayter's Ph.D. thesis, here published in what ap- pears to be a minimally changed form, represents an attempt to look once again from above at these insurrections newly discovered from below. In The Army and the Crowd in Mid-Georgian England, Hayter pays little attention to Thompson's work; indeed he does not cite any works of Thompson and his associates from the middle and late 1970s on the 18th century, not even those specifically addressed to problems of the rule of law (e.g., E. P. Thompson, Whigs and Hunters [London: Allen Lane, 1975] or D. Hay, P. Linebaugh, and E. P. Thompson, eds., Albion's Fatal Tree [London: Allen Lane, 1975] to cite only the most obvious). This book is emphatically not a work of social history. Its author dubs it "a study in administrative history" (p. ix), which is a fair enough assessment. Most of Hayter's attention is focused on the activities and problems of heads of the British War Office, between the 1750s and 1780s, as they were compelled to deal with popular protest at home. He offers some comments on the matter of tactics employed by troops in actual contact with crowds and makes preliminary statements regarding the "law of riot," the role of mag- istrates, the nature of the home army, and the character of the 18th- century mob. The bulk of the book, though, is a competent but very nar- row study of relations between the War Office and local magistrates and military commanders. Hayter draws on a thorough reading of primary sources but ignores the secondary sources and theoretical arguments which might have made his book more interesting. He offers sympathy to incumbents of the anomalous and ill-defined position of secretary of war, especially to Viscount Barring- ton, but tells us too little for us to understand the politics and constitutional debates which trapped the secretaries, let alone the larger social issues which kept the military recurrently deployed, usually despite its own dis- taste, against the English populace. There are really only 160 or so pages of text in this book, the rest being occupied with lists of which Horse Grenadier Guards were in what parish when, and with a siurprising number of blank pages for a book printed in our new age of austerity. In an earlier age, austerity might have dictated that a work of such narrow scope and such a descriptive nature would remain an unpublished thesis, to be con- sulted in libraries by specialists. It offers enough information to have made the specialists' efforts worthwhile. 237 This content downloaded by the authorized user from 192.168.52.66 on Fri, 23 Nov 2012 12:08:22 PMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

Book review: the army and the crowd in mid-Georgian England. by Tony Hayter

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