Legacy of Violence: A History of the British Empire by Caroline Elkins

heads of its perpetrators among the great and the good of Manchester, Westminster, and Whitehall. Nor did the British revolution for which the conspirators yearned ever arrive; indeed, their final breaths arguably marked the last gasp of the British revolutionary tradition. In the next few years, the political temperature cooled considerably, as the relatively stable and prosperous 1820s progressed. A generation later, the conspiracy was all but forgotten, and the legal and extra-legal Terror of the immediate postwar years to which the conspirators had fallen victim was a quickly receding memory. But Thistlewood’s accusatory stare and Gatrell’s splendid book are unforgettable reminders that Austen’s age of civility was also one of ferocious repression.