The Victorians called him "Bobby" after Sir Robert Peel, the Home Secretary who created the Metropolitan Police in 1829. The generations that followed came to regard the force in which he served as "the best police in the world." If 21st- century observers sometimes take a more jaundiced view of his efforts, the blue-helmeted, unarmed policeman remains an icon of Britishness, and a symbol of the relatively peaceful nature of our social evolution. In "The Great British Bobby," Clive Emsley traces the development of Britain's forces of law and order from the earliest watchmen and constables of...

Over the past thirty years social scientists and particularly social historians have stressed the need to take popular protest seriously. The corollary of this, the need to take the policing of protest seriously, seems to have been less well acknowledged. The aim of this volume is to redress this situation by probing, in depth, a limited number of incidents of public disorder and focusing particularly on the role of the police. In doing so, this collection will draw out general patterns of police provocation and public responses and suggest general hypotheses. The incidents explored range...