As soon as newspapers, catering to England’s new urbane peoples, began describing common executions, the crowds attending them were seen as indifferent to their moral message. By the middle of the eighteenth century, execution rituals seemed equally problematic. Critics perceived hangings to be so frequent, so large-scale and so brutalizing to an even minimally refined sensibility as to defeat their deterrent purpose. In 1783, London officials sought to redress these problems by devising a new execution ritual, staged immediately outside the prison and courthouse. Within four decades, this quintessentially urban execution ritual had been adopted in almost all other English counties, even as cities on the continent pointedly moved executions outside urban centres. Yet still executions seemed ineffective. Following a particularly intense crisis in the 1780s, England’s traditional ruling elites sought to preserve the “Bloody Code” by reducing the scale of hangings to historically low levels.

Although the execution crowd is a common mind’s-eye image of Victorian England, we still have much to learn or to reconsider about nineteenth-century executions. The Whig governments of the 1830s are rightly seen as far more restrained in using the gallows than their Tory predecessors, but they in fact sustained a surprisingly vigorous, residual “Bloody Code” – centred on violent crimes against property – until 1837. The prevailing conviction amongst historians that the removal of executions within prison walls in 1868 averted a move towards the complete abolition of execution is not supported by the actual character of the attempts to achieve this in parliament. The change of 1868 really did stem from concerns about the execution crowd and the complicity of urbane elites in their extent. To an under-appreciated degree, however, journalists kept the work of the gallows before the public eye through the turn of the twentieth century.

The chapter examines the relationships between music, sport and Welsh identity. Focusing on the national rugby union and football teams, it explores the ways in which performances of ‘Mae Hen Wlad Fy Nhadau’ by players and supporters have contributed to a cohesive sense of national identity. Examples range from its first recorded use prior to the rugby team’s famous victory over the New Zealand All Blacks in 1905 to its part in the Football Association of Wales’s efforts to galvanise supporters during the team’s successful Euro 2016 campaign. It also considers the adoption of popular hymns such as ‘Guide Me, O Thou Great Jehovah’ and ‘Calon Lân’ by supporters, investigating the extent to which affiliation to the national team takes on a spiritual quality. Drawing on the contributions of popular Welsh artists such as Max Boyce, the chapter also assesses the self-referential nature of connections between musicality and sporting pride in corporate expressions of national identity. It considers the ways in which language, religious practice and social structures encouraged and maintained a culture of massed patriotic singing, and how this has been reimagined and perpetuated in the twenty-first century through a combination of institutional support, technological developments and the influence of social media.

In 1971, E. P. Thompson published a seminal article on eighteenth century English bread riots which was to become a foundational text for the study of such protests. Challenging older elite notions of the irrationality, illegitimacy and even criminality of the ‘mob’, Thompson situated popular direct action in times of food crises within a very specific historical, economic and, most importantly, cultural context. This context produced a deeply held adhesion among the poor to the concept of a ‘moral economy’ and an equally profound rejection of the free market as enshrined in the new political economy of the eighteenth century. This chapter returns to Thompson's original text in order to assess to what extent his paradigm may be useful in understanding bread riots in Iran. It seeks in particular to identify the sources on which the poor drew to reinforce their sense of their own legitimacy. These sources included the Islamic, notably fiqh and the hisba manuals derived from it, elite notions of paternalism, especially the Circle of Justice, and popular folk culture. The chapter then examines the evidence which supports the notion that Iran experienced a ‘golden age’ of bread riots in the 1890s and early 1900s, just before, and indeed contributing to, the outbreak of the constitutional revolution.

In Chapter Four, “Crowds and Agility,” the project turns to the fully imagined agile movement and potential virtuosity of modernist crowds, their reworked vocabularies across, and between media, their effectiveness in turning situations to advantage, and their conflictual relations with federating powers, established inequities, and inherited elitisms. In order to demonstrate the full scope of potentials involved, the chapter opens up to range more widely across a variety of media, aesthetics, and categories of works within modernism that simultaneously contribute to contriving a social space and interfering with its undemocratic spectacularization. In its most fully realized form, the modernist agile crowd claims to be unclassifiable within previous categories of social fields, and insists on a fundamental heterogeneity at the level of demand and composition.

In this chapter, the author discusses similarities and differences between blockchain and democracy. Beginning with an account of Jerry Brito's efforts to promote bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies in policy circles, the chapter then goes on to explore the ways in which blockchain attempts to emulate democratic government, but also the ways in which it falls short.