The Third Pillar: How Markets and the State are Leaving Communities Behind. Raghuram Rajan

For instance, after the failure of the harvests of 1829 and 1830 in England, agricultural labourers burned the fields of the gentry under the orders of a mysterious Captain Swing and destroyed threshing machines.29 Some argue that this led to the first voting Reform Act of 1832. Yet the state repressed the agitation fiercely, with over two thousand people arrested, five hundred transported to Australia, six hundred imprisoned, and nineteen executed. Moreover, the Reform Act gave the vote to those with property having a rental equivalent of 10 pounds a year, a sum far outside the reach of the labourer. It was widely alleged that the elite were buying off the middle class. At any rate, the newly enfranchised certainly were not in the crowd with pitchforks.