Free Republic

On this date in 1744, Skinnar Per Andersson was beheaded in Stockholm — a cautionary examplar of the limits of electoral change. Andersson, (English Wikipedia entry | Swedish) a farmer from Dalarna, was his constituency’s most eloquent exponent of grievances against the ruling Hat party. The latter had proven deeply unresponsive to the complaints of farmers and peasants while also harrowing the countryside for recruits to die in the Hats’ insane war of choice against Russia. Andersson tore into the war policy at a public meeting in July of 1742, demanding punishment for the politicians who had launched it; he...

On this date in 1813, the British intensified their war against machine-wrecking Luddites by executing 14 at York. We touched last week on Mellor, Smith, and Thorpe, three Luddites hanged for assassinating a wool manufacturer during the dirty war that resulted from mechanizing formerly-artisanal textile production. The Luddite Bicentenary blog was prominently linked in that post; it’s been chronicling the real-time course of the Luddite rebellion from two hundred years’ remove, and is a recommended follow for anyone interested in this period. Today, the Luddite Bicentenary marks the mass hangings of January 16, 1813, pursuant to sentences issued by that...

On this date in 1775, the Russian Empress Catherine the Great had Cossack rebel Yemelyan Pugachev chopped to pieces in Moscow for sustaining a major insurrection whose effects would haunt Russia for decades to come. Pugachev’s Rebellion was the most spectacular specimen in populous family tree of 18th century peasant uprisings. Most such disturbances were local and fundamentally unthreatening. Pugachev’s was neither. The Cossack commander raised a revolt in the Urals in 1773, styling himself the long-lost tsar Catherine had overthrown a decade before. Catherine was slow to see the import, but this hinterlands pretender set up a state-like bureaucracy...