If the Cato Street Conspiracy had been successful, Britain would have been proclaimed a republic by tradesmen of English, Scots, Irish and black Jamaican backgrounds. This book explains the conspiracy, and why you have never heard of it.

Jason McElligott is the Director of Marsh's Library, Dublin, Ireland

Martin Conboy is Professor of Journalism History at the University of Sheffield

Introduction 'We only have to be lucky once': Cato Street, insurrection and the revolutionary tradition
Jason McElligott and Martin Conboy

1. When did they know? The cabinet, informers and Cato Street
Richard A. Gaunt

2. Joining up the dots: contingency, hindsight and the British insurrectionary tradition
John Stevenson

3. The men they couldn't hang: 'sensible' radicals and the Cato Street Conspiracy
Jason McElligott

4. Cato Street in international perspective
Malcolm Chase

5. Cato Street and the Caribbean
Ryan Hanley

6. Cato Street and the Spencean politics of transnational insurrection
Ajmal Waqif

7. State witnesses and spies in Irish political trials, 1794-1803
Martyn J. Powell

8. The shadow of the Pikeman: Irish craftsmen and British radicalism, 1803-20
Timothy Murtagh

9. The fate of the transported Cato Street conspirators
Kieran Hannon

10. Scripted by whom? 1820 and theatres of rebellion
John Gardner

Afterword
Caoimhe Nic Dháibhéid and Colin W. Reid