Pressure and Parliament From Civil War to Civil Society

This volume considers the varied forms of parliamentary pressure in the period between the civil wars and the advent of universal suffrage in the twentieth century. 

• The authors examine the ways in which parliament accepted, invited, or moulded channels of political pressure from those outside their ranks and outside the electoral process
• Chapters highlight the technologies of growth of private and public petitioning, the pressure to act on new national and international questions, and the ways in which parliamentarians themselves orchestrated pressure
• Includes a range of insights into the collaborative porousness of political pressures on parliament, not simply as the force of ‘pressure from without’

Richard Huzzey is a reader in history at Durham University. He has published Freedom Burning: Anti-Slavery and Empire in Victorian Britain (2012), and co-edited, with Robert Burroughs, a volume entitled The Suppression of the Atlantic Slave Trade (2015). Alongside Henry Miller, he leads the Leverhulme Trust research project ‘Re-thinking Petitions, Parliament, and People, 1780–1918’.

List of Illustrations

Notes on Contributors

Acknowledgements                                                                                                               

Introduction

1. Contesting Interests: Rethinking Pressure, Parliament, Nation, and Empire (Richard Huzzey)

The Politics of Pressure

2. The Lowest Degree of Freedom’: The Right to Petition Parliament, 1640–1800 (Mark Knights)

3. Conversations with Parliament: Women and the Politics of Pressure in 19th-Century England (Sarah Richardson)

Social and Economic Pressures

4. Petitions, Economic Legislation and Interest Groups in Britain, 1660–1800 (Julian Hoppit)

5. Social Reform and the Pressure of ‘Progress’ on Parliament, 1660–1914 (Lawrence Goldman)

Intellectual and Spiritual Pressures

6. From Estate under Pressure to Spiritual Pressure Group: The Bishops and Parliament (Stephen Taylor and Richard Huzzey)

7. Reforming Expectations: Parliamentary Pressure and Moral Reform (Amanda B. Moniz)

8. The Too Clever by Half People’ and Parliament (William Whyte)

Index

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