Riots and reform: burgh authority, the languages of civic reform and the Aberdeen riot of 1785

This article explores the understudied riots which occurred in Aberdeen in mid-October 1785. It charts the climate of politicization that characterised the burgh’s civic life in the immediate aftermath of the American Revolution and before the outbreak of the equivalent process in France. In doing so it challenges interpretations of the socially exclusive nature of the Scottish reform movement, the dynamics of continuity and change between this phenomenon and later political ‘radicalism’, and the role of Aberdeen as a ‘provincial’ metropolis in the Age of Revolution.