Susan Mitchell Sommers. Parliamentary Politics of a County and its Town: General Elections in Suffolk and Ipswich in the Eighteenth Century. Westport, Conn.: Praeger. 2002. Pp. xxii, 218. $64.95. ISBN 0-275-97513-4.

2004 ◽  
Vol 35 (4) ◽  
pp. 659-660
Author(s):  
Bob Harris
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
General Elections ◽  
Parliamentary Politics

“Our Execrable Banditti”: Perceptions of Nabobs in Mid-Eighteenth Century Britain

1984 ◽  
Vol 16 (3) ◽  
pp. 225-241 ◽  
Author(s):  
Philip Lawson ◽  
Jim Phillips
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Full Length ◽  
West Indians ◽  
Horace Walpole ◽  
East Indian ◽  
The Social ◽  
General Elections ◽  
The Many ◽  
The One ◽  
English Politics

In March 1761 the diarist Horace Walpole complained that “West Indians, conquerors, nabobs, and admirals” were attacking every parliamentary borough in the general election. Although it lacked statistical proof, this sour observation became an accepted tenet in political histories of Britain written during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Even the one full-length study of nabobs published in 1926 echoes Walpole's refrain; Holzman depicted them as a group of nouveaux riches “determined to raise their power and position to the level of their credit. This precipitated a fierce class strife, which was signalised [sic.] by changes in the ownership of landed estates and pocket boroughs.” The investigations of the Namierite school have long since demolished the myth of an East Indian onslaught on English politics and society in the mid-eighteenth century. Only a handful of novice MPs were returned to parliament in the general elections of 1761 and 1768, and those elected did not constitute a concentrated and coherent East Indian lobby at Westminster.Yet should Walpole's observation be dismissed so readily? This was an age of ignorance of the nature of the British presence in India, of considerable misgivings over the many effects that an empire of conquest in the east would have on Britain, and of a resultant lack of enthusiasm for an Asian empire. The leading historian of the British connection with India in the eighteenth century has recently pointed out that this reluctance derived in part from fears that it would upset not only the social and political, but also the moral underpinnings of established society.

Contesting Elections

2019 ◽  
pp. 80-122
Author(s):  
Shirin M. Rai ◽  
Carole Spary
Keyword(s):  
Political Parties ◽  
Women's Representation ◽  
Women's Participation ◽  
Women’S Representation ◽  
Election Process ◽  
General Elections ◽  
Qualitative Methodologies ◽  
Parliamentary Politics ◽  
Over Time

The chapter argues that although women’s representation has increased in numerical terms over the last 20 years, this increase has been marginal. It traces this argument through an analysis of the role of political parties as gatekeepers to parliamentary politics. Using both quantitative and qualitative methodologies, this chapter explores women’s participation as candidates in general elections for the Lok Sabha over the last two decades to understand the role that elections and the election process have on opportunities for women to enter Parliament. By analysing trends in the nomination of women by political parties and across states and regions it contests notions of incrementalism, which are often used to counter proposals for quotas, and which argue that women’s presence in elected bodies will increase over time.

The Fabric of Interest in the County: The Buckinghamshire Election of 1784

1972 ◽  
Vol 4 (4) ◽  
pp. 206-218
Author(s):  
Karl von den Steinen
Keyword(s):  
Political Philosophy ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Public Opinion ◽  
Political Party ◽  
Government Policies ◽  
Careful Examination ◽  
The Political ◽  
House Of Commons ◽  
Political Awareness ◽  
Parliamentary Politics

A careful examination of the conduct of the Verney and Temple interests in the Buckinghamshire election of 1784 reveals that interest, not party, was the major determinant of political conduct in the eighteenth century English county constituency. The freeholder voted in deference to his head of interest, and he did so through an agent's performance of an unwritten but clearly understood code of electioneering conduct. By contrast, the more tangible relationship between tenant and landlord explains little about how individuals voted in the county.The importance of parliamentary politics in the 1784 election cannot be denied. The attempt of William Pitt the Younger to wrest the majority in the House of Commons from the Fox-North coalition occasioned this election three years earlier than a general election would normally have occurred. Yet to assume that party determined the course of the election far exceeds the evidence available at the level of the county constituency. The political awareness and rising interest in issues, described by J. H. Plumb and others, certainly existed in this election. But this tells us very little about the acquistion and exercise of political power, which Plumb rightly identifies as the essence of politics, though a great deal may thus be learned about literacy, public opinion, interests, tastes, and electoral tactics.Three aspects of the problem of party have dominated the studies of the period: the emergence of the modern political party in the sense of a group of electors consistently joined together because of a common devotion to a particular political philosophy; the emergence of the modern political party in the sense of a group of electors consistently joined together because of common attitudes toward government policies; and, the emergence of the modern political party in the sense of a group of electors consistently joined together in a structure suited to the winning of an opportunity to translate its desires and beliefs into government policies through success in elections. The 1784 Buckinghamshire election refutes the importance of party in any of these senses in the county constituency.

Elections and the Church of England

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joseph Hone
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Church Of England ◽  
Party Politics ◽  
Rhetorical Strategies ◽  
Parliamentary Elections ◽  
Recent Scholarship ◽  
General Elections ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Impact ◽  
The Church

Having explored in previous chapters how the circumstances of Anne’s accession affected portrayals of Stuart rule, this chapter turns to the impact of those representations on the general elections. Parliamentary elections in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries had been largely uncontested. By the start of the eighteenth century elections had become violently partisan. This chapter explores how domestic party politics became entangled with international dynastic and religious matters at a time when the Catholic Stuarts were in exile and the Protestant House of Brunswick beckoned from Hanover. By situating major works such as Clarendon’s History of the Rebellion (1702–4) and Defoe’s The Shortest-Way with the Dissenters (1702) in the midst of these elections, it uncovers rhetorical strategies and meanings that have been lost to recent scholarship.

Parties, Connections, and Parliamentary Politics, 1689-1714: Review and Revision

1966 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
pp. 45-69 ◽  
Author(s):  
Henry Horwitz
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Party System ◽  
Party Organization ◽  
Historical Methodology ◽  
The Many ◽  
William Iii ◽  
George Iii ◽  
Parliamentary Politics ◽  
Detailed Picture

The notion that parliamentary politics in the days of William III and Queen Anne revolved around the conflict of the Whig and Tory parties is deeply rooted in the historiography of the later seventeenth century. Nourished by the many contemporary references to the existence and activities of the Whig and Tory parties, the “two-party concept” had its first flowering in the nineteenth century and came to full blossom in the early decades of the twentieth in the works of W. C. Abbott, K. G. Feiling, W. T. Morgan, and G. M. Trevelyan.The canons of orthodoxy of one generation of historians, however, have often proved to be little more than the cannon fodder of their successors. In this case, it was one of Abbott's own students, Robert Walcott, who has led the way in the task of reinterpretation. As early as 1941, Walcott — remarking upon the obscurity enveloping accounts of party groupings in the period 1689 to 1714 — advanced the hypothesis that “the description of party organization under William and Anne which Trevelyan suggested in his Romanes Lecture on the two-party system is less applicable to our period than the detailed picture of eighteenth-century politics which emerges from Professor Namier's volumes on the Age of Newcastle.”Walcott's invocation of Sir Lewis's studies of mid-eighteenth-century politics was, of course, a testimony to the advance in historical methodology that had gained prominence with the appearance in 1929 of The Structure of Politics at the Accession of George III.

III The Diary and Speeches of Sir Arthur Kaye 1710-21

1992 ◽  
Vol 44 ◽  
pp. 322-348
Author(s):  
D. Szechi
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
British History ◽  
Negative Side ◽  
Early Eighteenth Century ◽  
Parliamentary Politics

Written ‘to supply the defect of an ill memory’, Sir Arthur Kaye's manuscript diary is one of the few early eighteenth-century accounts of Parliamentary politics that have survived to the present day. It is also one which scholars in the field have found very useful. As Geoffrey Holmes, the doyen of early eighteenth-century British history, has put it: ‘no contemporary material illustrates more vividly the negative side of the country member's prejudices’. The Parliamentary speeches also preserved amongst Kaye's papers are less well known but in their own way are just as valuable, hence the publication of the two in conjunction.

John Backhouse and the Origins of the Permanent Undersecretaryship for Foreign Affairs: 1828-1842

1974 ◽  
Vol 13 (2) ◽  
pp. 25-45
Author(s):  
Charles R. Middleton
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
The State ◽  
Foreign Affairs ◽  
The Other ◽  
The Political ◽  
Political Forces ◽  
Foreign Office ◽  
The Impact ◽  
Parliamentary Politics ◽  
Political Appointee

One of the more important features of the transformation of the departmental service of the eighteenth century into the civil service of the nineteenth century was the emergence of the permanent official. There had always been a degree of permanence in the bureaucracy, particularly in the clerical positions, but in the higher ranks and especially among the undersecretaries the distinction between political and clerical officers tended to be blurred and each man had responsibilities in both spheres. By 1830 these officials no longer occupied ambivalent situations. In most departments one was a political appointee whose position was dependent on the political fortunes of the minister. The other undersecretary, however, had shed his political responsibilities and as a consequence was more or less immune to the political forces of parliamentary politics.Yet the process whereby these events took place was to a certain extent individualized in different departments. In the case of the Foreign Office the impact of financial and political changes in the state was considerably less important than in departments such as the Treasury. Neither of the foreign undersecretaries had ever had much influence over the formation of policy, nor were they to gain responsibility in this area during the 1830s. Yet clearly by the time Lord Palmerston became foreign secretary one of these men, John Backhouse, occupied a permanent position while his colleague, Sir George Shee, held a more temporary status. The distinction between the two positions became more rigid during the period Backhouse remained in office not so much as a result of political forces in the state, though these forces contributed somewhat to the changes that occurred, but as a consequence of Backhouse's growing responsibility for supervising the establishment.

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