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Political assassination is the murder of a significant individual by an organized conspiracy in pursuit of political ends. Modern historians can rarely avoid the phenomenon of assassination. The history of the short twentieth century begins with the assassination of Franz Ferdinand at Sarajevo in 1914. The death of John F. Kennedy in 1963 has remained important within popular culture ever since: the question of whether this death was an assassination, or murder by a deranged individual, remains a starting point for politicians, screenwriters, journalists, and fanatics. These violent acts had both immediate political consequences and long-term symbolic meaning.1The assassin has become a figure of enduring fascination.2Despite the intense interest in the justification of political murder, however, most political science studies stress that assassination's importance is determined by the nature and response of the state.
During the first three-quarters of the twentieth century the main vector of political assassination for Britain was imperial. The imperial trend set Britain apart culturally from the 'four waves' of global terrorism posited in recent scholarship, assassination being the hallmark of the first, anarchist, and third, 'New Left', waves.3Before the imperial recrudescence of 1909, British commentators on assassination could confidently assert that 'anarchism finds no food to feed upon. It is greatly to the credit of the Irish Nationalists that even they ... have given up violence and threats of violence.'4
The difference between Britain and other countries was cultural rather than technological. Assassins operating against the British imperial state used the same tools as their global counterparts, most consistently the repeating handgun. They deployed, contemporaries noted, neither the traditional 'poison or the dagger' of the East nor the 'old Irish methods of assassination'.5The daggers of the Phoenix Park murders of 1882 and the dynamite of the 1883 bombing campaign were regarded as less threatening than modern assassination.6Comparing the 1880s and the 1920s, one commentator wrote, 'our political life has come under the menace of nickel and lead ... assassination, dormant since the seventeenth century, is again asserting itself as a political weapon, and the revolver makes its bid for rule'.7The revolver, using jacketed 'nickel and lead' bullets, had reached its...