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. As such, the essays consider a variety of interests, identities, or ideas whose pressure might be exerted upon legislators. In particular, these 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. The result is a range of insights into the collaborative porousness of political pressures on parliament, not simply as the force of pressure from without .

List of Illustrations

Notes on Contributors

Acknowledgements                                                                                                               

Introduction

Richard Huzzey, Contesting Interests: Rethinking Pressure, Parliament, Nation, and Empire

The Politics of Pressure

Mark Knights, The Lowest Degree of Freedom : The Right to Petition Parliament, 1640 1800 

Sarah Richardson, Conversations with Parliament: Women and the Politics of Pressure in 19th–Century England

Social and Economic Pressures

Julian Hoppit, Petitions, Economic Legislation and Interest Groups in Britain, 1660 1800

Lawrence Goldman, Social Reform and the Pressure of Progress on Parliament, 1660 1914

Intellectual and Spiritual Pressures

Stephen Taylor and Richard Huzzey, From Estate under Pressure to Spiritual Pressure Group: The Bishops and Parliament 

Amanda B. Moniz, Reforming Expectations: Parliamentary Pressure and Moral Reform  

William Whyte, The Too Clever by Half People and Parliament

Index

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 .