Protesters are dominating the news every day – from climate change to Brexit and Scottish independence. Writer at Large, Neil Mackay, investigates the history of people power and mass demonstrations.

WE live in an era of mass protest. Millions of people hit the streets around the world on Friday calling for action over climate change, and the demonstrations will continue this week. At home, marches and protests are ubiquitous now with citizens fired up over Brexit and Scottish independence.

Protest can led to war and revolution, or peaceful people-powered democratic change. Wherever governments enact laws which the people don’t like, there will be demonstrators on the streets. Here we look at the history of protest. What triggers mass protests? What makes a protest successful? Why do they fail? And what happens when they spin out of control?

The plebs rise up

The first recorded protest in history was the Secessio Plebis – the Withdrawal of the Plebs – in ancient Rome in 494 BC. The plebs – Rome’s working class – were at the bottom of the social pile, with the city ruled by Patrician aristocrats. The plebs wanted voting rights, and a fairer form of government.

So, in what was effectively a general strike, the plebs walked out of the city en masse, and decamped to a nearby mountain, leaving the Patricians to fend for themselves. Given that the plebs kept Rome running on a day to day basis, the Patricians were in trouble.

The timing couldn’t have been worse as

Rome was also at war with local tribes. The Patricians relented, writing off some plebeian debts and creating the office of Tribune of the Plebs. This was the first official position a pleb could hold in Rome, and its creation began the widening of rudimentary democracy in the Roman republic.

The peasants revolt

The Black Death of 1347-51 changed the face of society forever. One of the biggest disruptions came in the job market. With so many peasants dead from plague, surviving workers could demand higher wages, chipping away at the power of the rich.

By the summer of 1381 in England, this newly confident working class was growing increasingly angry over the introduction of a “poll tax” to fund the Hundred Years’ War with France. When attempts were made in Essex to collect unpaid taxes, large-scale protests broke out, and there were violent confrontations.

A party of protesters led by Wat Tyler set off for London to meet with royal officials to demand tax cuts and the end of serfdom. Negotiations didn’t go well. The king, 14-year-old Richard II, hid in the Tower of London as most of his troops were abroad. The peasants entered London and violence erupted as locals joined the protesters. The Savoy Palace was burned, and the Lord Chancellor and Lord High Treasurer were murdered. Londoners who resented foreigners in the city used the revolt as an excuse to attack Flemish workers.

The king agreed to most demands, and later went to meet Tyler. However, after behaving in a way deemed overly familiar – he called the king “brother” – Tyler was stabbed to death. The king immediately broke his promises and began a military crackdown. An army of 4,000 put down unrest across the country, and by the end of the year 1500, rebels and protesters were dead.

The Boston Tea Party

By the 1770s, the American colonies were in a state of outrage over the imposition of tax on imported tea levied by the British parliament. Boston in Massachusetts, which imported the most tea to America, was a hotbed of anger. The tax was seen as a grave breach of the rights of colonists who believed that as they had no elected representatives in the British parliament, then the Commons shouldn’t impose taxes on America. Their slogan was “no taxation without representation”.

In December 1773, some 7,000 people, out of an estimated population of 16,000, were protesting on the streets of Boston, as a number of British tea ships sat in port. Protesters wanted the tea ships to return to England. On December 16, the secret society the Sons of Liberty – some disguised as Native Americans – boarded the ships and dumped 342 chests of tea overboard.

The British Parliament passed the Intolerable Acts – punitive laws which took away the right of self-governance in Massachusetts – and the spark was lit which would go on to ignite the American War of Independence in 1775.

The Peterloo massacre

Democracy in the Britain of the early 1800s was a joke best summed up by Rotten Boroughs like the constituency of Old Sarum which had one voter but elected two MPs. By the end of the Napoleonic Wars in 1815, there was also widespread unemployment, hunger and poverty.

Protesters in Manchester wanted reform, and on August 16, 1819, a crowd of up to 80,000 people had gathered at St Peter’s Field demanding political change. Local magistrates called in the Yeomanry to arrest ringleaders including Henry Hunt. In the commotion, a child was killed, and mounted Hussars were sent in to disperse the crowd. The cavalry charged with sabres drawn and 18 people were killed, with 700 more injured. John Lees, who was injured and later died of his wounds, was a veteran of the Battle of Waterloo.

As he lay dying, he said: “At Waterloo there was man to man, but there it was downright murder.” His comments earned the massacre its bloody name.

The incident is seen as one of the defining moments of British history and a turning point for the rise of the left.

Gandhi’s salt march

Mahatma Gandhi brought the fight for Indian independence to the world’s attention with a mass protest and campaign of peaceful civil disobedience centred around salt. Britain had a monopoly on salt production in India. Officials could break into premises making salt and seize it. Gandhi saw salt as symbolic of the most basic human needs and chose to use it as a stick to beat the British Empire.

On March 12, 1930, Gandhi began a 24-day “Salt March” with 80 trusted followers. By April 6, millions of Indians were inspired to acts of civil disobedience across the country.

The world’s press was fascinated by the protest and obsessed by Gandhi, who famously broke laws against making salt during the protest march, with the words: “With this I am shaking the foundations of the British empire.” Gandhi was arrested and interned, and the British cracked down violently on protesters. Reporters were stunned by the peaceful behaviour of demonstrators. “Not one of the marchers even raised an arm to fend off blows,” wrote US journalist Webb Miller. Over 60,000 people were eventually jailed. India would finally gain its independence in 1947.

I have a dream

The zenith of the African-American civil rights movement came on a warm Wednesday in Washington on August 28, 1963. The March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom saw 250,000 people fill the centre of the US capital demanding civil rights for black America.

It was at the demonstration that Martin Luther King Jr gave his “I have a dream” speech – ranked as one of the most important in political history. The march led to the passing of the Civil Rights Act in 1964 which outlawed discrimination on the grounds of race, religion, sex or nationality.

In March 1965, the Selma to Montgomery Marches in Alabama saw King once again side by side with protesters demanding voting rights for African-Americans. Civil rights activist Jimmie Lee Jackson was shot by police and died, and state troopers brutally attacked demonstrators. The world was shocked – and the Voting Rights Act was passed later that year.

Civil rights in Ireland

Inspired by black activists in America, the Northern Ireland civil rights movement blossomed in the mid-1960s. Protesters wanted an end to discrimination against Catholics when it came to jobs, housing, and gerrymandered elections which discriminated against nationalists.

Protest marches were banned, demonstrators were beaten by police and riots broke out. As unrest worsened, killings began. Hundreds were wounded and Catholics were driven from their homes. The British army arrived to help keep the peace. The Troubles were now under way.

Internment without trial was introduced and civil-rights marchers took to the streets of Derry on January 30, 1972, in protest. The day would go down in history as Bloody Sunday.

France 1968

Left-wing and student anger over the state of France, capitalism and Vietnam erupted in protest in May 1968 and left the country on the brink of revolution. Students began occupying universities and then strikes broke out. Some 11 million people – one-fifth of the French population – went on strike continuously for two weeks.

Politicians feared civil war, and President Charles de Gaulle even fled to Germany, if only for a few hours, threatening the total collapse of law and order. Violent street battles broke out between police and protesters, and barricades went up.

When de Gaulle returned from Germany he called new elections and the violence wound down. When votes were counted, de Gaulle was in an even stronger political position than he had been before protests began.

Alain Geismar, a leading Soixante-Huitard, as veterans of the 1968 protests are known, says that the movement may have failed politically, but it was a success in the way it changed French society by showing the government the power of ordinary people.

Tiananmen Square

With mass protests threatening communist regimes in eastern Europe, the Chinese one-party state was in no mood to tolerate demands by pro-democracy activists in Beijing in 1989. Students began protesting for political reforms, including freedom of the press and freedom of speech. At the height of the protests around one million people were gathered in Tiananmen Square in central Beijing.

Protests spread across China and the Communist Party declared martial law, sending 300,000 troops into Beijing. On June 4, troops advanced through the city killing protesters and bystanders. The death toll is estimated in the several thousands.

The protests were summed up in one of the most iconic images of the 20th century, Tank Man. On June 5, the morning after protests were suppressed, an unidentified demonstrator stood in front of a row of tanks leaving Tiananmen Square. The man was led away – his fate remains unknown.

Tiananmen Square help secure the Communist Party’s grip on power, and ensured China’s status as a human-rights pariah.

The Iraq war

Between January 3 and April 12, 2003, it is estimated that 36 million people across the world took part in around 3,000 demonstrations against the Iraq War.

The largest demos came on February 15, just a month before the US-UK invasion. The protests took place in around 60 countries and 600 cities with up to 11 million people on the streets. They led one commentator to say there were only two superpowers on the planet: America, and public opinion.

Tony Blair was in Scotland on the day of the February 15 demo, and Labour tried to hinder protesters demonstrating outside the SECC in Glasgow where the party was having its annual conference. Blair rescheduled the timing of his speech to avoid protesters who claimed they “chased Blair out of town”.

The protests failed to stop the war. Iraq was invaded on the grounds that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction – a claim now known to be a lie. An estimated 200,000 Iraqi civilians died, and Blair trashed his place in the history books.

The Arab Spring

It began with a Tunisian street vendor called Mohamed Bouazizi who burned himself alive in December 2010 in protest at being hounded and harassed by the authorities. Protesters sick of the authoritarian regime took to the streets and eventually Tunisia’s leader, president Zine El Abidine Ben Ali, stepped down after 23 years in power.

Protests against oppression and poor living standards spread across North Africa and the Middle East to Libya, Egypt, Syria, Yemen, Algeria, and a dozen other nations. The regional uprising led to the fall and death of Colonel Gaddafi in Libya. Hosni Mubarak was ousted in Egypt.

The Arab Spring triggered the Yemeni civil war and the war in Syria which has cost an estimated half a million lives. The bloodshed that resulted from the Arab Spring was dubbed The Arab Winter. Only in Tunisia, where the protests began, has democracy taken hold.

Women march

On January 21, 2017, one day after the inauguration of Donald Trump as US president, more than seven million women took to the streets in America and 81 other countries.

Trump had caused outrage with boasts caught on tape of sexually touching women, and other derogatory and sexists comments directed at women. The aim of the Women’s March was to tell the president and other world leaders that “women’s rights are human rights”.

In Washington, 200,000 protesters took to the streets, while across America the total was over five million. There were marches on all seven continents, including one demonstration in Antartica. Crowds were peaceful and playful – the demos spawned the now famous “Pussyhat” – and there were zero arrests.

Some of the most famous women in the world took part including Cher, Madonna, Julia Roberts, Rihanna, Helen Mirren, Jane Fonda, Natalie Portman and Ariana Grande.