After a quarter of a century's debate, Edward Thompson's identification of revolutionary Englishmen engaged in insurrectionary plottings in the aftermath of the notoriously repressive Gagging Acts of 1795, has been accepted – perhaps grudgingly – by historians concerned with the 1790s. For example, Professor Dickinson in his British Radicalism and the French Revolution, an Historical Association study aiming to ‘critically summarise research on some of the central themes and key episodes of history’, devotes one quarter to ‘The Revolutionary Underground’. If the principal historical outlines of revolutionary groupings – the United Britons, the United Scotsmen, the United Englishmen and the United Irishmen – and their alliances, have been established, problems remain, notably over their hypothetical chances of success. This remains central to the bigger problematic, namely explaining non-revolution in Britain in the epoch of the French Revolution.

The magnitude of the latter question is reflected in Professor Christie's choice of topic when invited to give the prestigious Ford Lectures in 1984. His search for ‘a comprehensive answer’ to the problem, comprised an analysis of British ‘political, social… [and] economic interconnections’ which ‘displayed a sort of disordered cohesion’. This simultaneously absorbed and withstood the massive strains generated by the ideologically motivated war, on a global stage, the disequilibriums galvanised by relatively rapid economic change, and the challenge from democratic ideology germinating the first working-class movement for the political dismantling of the British ancien régime.