Participation and representation before democracy: petitions and addresses in premodern Britain

Knights, Mark

doi:10.1017/cbo9780511813146.004

Cited by 14 publications

(11 citation statements)

References 28 publications

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“…Further research might not only uncover the networks through which the Scots and Irish, and perhaps the Welsh, participated in a London-oriented news culture but also further develop existing work by Mark Knights on the way in which claims "to a national voice" came to embrace Scotland, Ireland, and the American colonies. 77 Even if the republican era can be shown to have had a stifling effect on flows of news, it clearly did not last. Scottish interest in London and Westminster politics might, if anything, have intensified in the second half of the century.…”

Section: Cross-border Communication and Archipelagic Publicsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Introduction: Publics and Participation in Early Modern Britain

Stewart¹

2017

J. Br. Stud.

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The deconstruction of what is termed "the public sphere" in recent decades has resulted in an important shift in scholarly attention towards networks and forms of association. This article explores how greater sensitivity to the unstable and ephemeral nature of "publics," combined with a stronger awareness of the role of cultural exchange, has undoubtedly enriched our understanding of early modern politics. Some analytical precision has, nonetheless, been lost. A justifiable emphasis on the artificiality of the territorial borders that have defined units of enquiry has occurred at the expense of deeper consideration of the cultural boundaries that dictated the terms on which people could participate in and shape public discourse. Study of the British archipelago can offer new ways of thinking about these problems. Linguistic and ethnic differences, the search for religious concord as well as the reality of confessional division, institutional variation, and the consequences of London's increasing dominance of the archipelago, are key facets of the reassessments undertaken here. The article concludes by reflecting on how interactions between varieties of "public" and other forms of association can nuance our understanding of early modern state formation. J ust over a decade has passed since Peter Lake and Steven Pincus made their influential intervention, in this journal, into what was then an "ubiquitous" debate on the "public sphere." 1 Their aim was to historicize Jürgen Habermas's conceptually useful, but unconvincingly rigid, account of the emergence of a "rational-critical" public sphere that putatively appeared "first in Great Britain at the turn of the eighteenth century." 2 Lake and Pincus argued for a more flexible model that allowed a multiplicity of "publics" to take shape over a much longer period, from roughly the mid-sixteenth to the early eighteenth centuries. Habermas's work had centered on a polity called Great Britain, by which he really meant the state dominated by the English metropolitan core. Lake and Pincus retained this facet of the Habermasian thesis; their unit of study was necessarily English and "emphatically not" British. 3 Some years earlier, Joad Raymond's pioneering work on the emergence of the newspaper had prompted him to think about how Habermas's "resolutely metropolitan" conceptualization of the public sphere could be made to accommodate the existence of Scotland, Ireland, and Wales. His solution was the development of "several separate spheres … all strongly influenced by London" and operating "concurrently" alongside a "'British' sphere." 4 It was a thought-provoking interpretation, one that suggested parallels with Linda Colley's depiction of the emergence of a British national identity after 1707: Great Britain became "a workmanlike nation of sorts" that offered "an umbrella" under which "other, smaller nations" could "advantageously congregate." 5 Raymond's important collection appeared just as the then equally ubiquitous debate on what was termed New British...

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Section: Cross-border Communication and Archipelagic Publicsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Introduction: Publics and Participation in Early Modern Britain

Stewart¹

2017

J. Br. Stud.

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“…As a result, 'paper warfare' between political antagonists entered the nation's cultural mainstream in the 1690s. 35 Whilst much of this concerned long-established issues such as religious minorities or constitutional powers, an increasing share of commentary and complaint focused on economic affairs.…”

Section: The Politics Of Economic Distress In the Aftermath Of The Glmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Politics of Economic Distress in the Aftermath of the Glorious Revolution, 1689–1702

Waddell

2015

The English Historical Review

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The economic problems of the 1690s spurred an extraordinary surge in politicised debates and complaints about commercial, financial and other material affairs. This article begins by examining the magnitude of the shift in economic fortunes between the reigns of James II and William III (1689-1702, highlighting the main sources of concern: wartime disruption to trade, rising taxes, the currency crisis associated with the recoinage of 1696, and the high food prices of 1693-9. More significantly, it assesses the nature and extent of the public response. Trade, finance and fiscal impositions became increasingly pervasive topics of public conversation and printed debate, as evidenced both in anecdotal reports and in a crude but telling analysis of published titles. Moreover, national political divisions -between Williamites and Jacobites, Whigs and Tories, Court and Country, anti-French and anti-Dutch -were absolutely central to this economic discourse. Perceptions of the monarch and parliamentary leaders were directly linked to how people interpreted the hardships of this decade. This manifested itself in innumerable short tracts, broadside ballads, seditious conversations, riotous protests and many other modes of public communication. Finally, through comparisons with earlier and later periods such as the 1540s, 1590s, 1640s and the early eighteenth century, this article demonstrates that the tumult of the 1690s had a longterm impact and has been unjustly neglected in the historiography of economic crisis and political conflict. The Politics of Economic Distress in the Aftermath of the Glorious Revolution, 1689-1702For many people, the Revolution of 1688 that brought William III and Mary II to the throne seemed to coincide with a sharp reversal in the nation's economic fortunes. The reign of James II was a period of relative plenty and prosperity, but the 1690s were a decade in which England faced an unhappy conjunction of war, hunger, currency failure and financial dislocation.A conversation in a shop on London Bridge on 6 June 1696 offers an initial glimpse of how people interpreted the distressing conditions of the time. A man named Robert Morgan came in to buy a handkerchief and fell to talking with Edmund Baker, the shopkeeper's apprentice. Morgan was apparently angry about the current scarcity of lawful money -he had only old clipped shillings -and also questioned the official account of a recent assassination attempt against the king. In his eyes, England was a nation in decline:'Was not the tradeing better when King James was here then now?', asked Morgan. '[T]hen our Lives must have paid for it', Baker replied. ' [O]ur Livelyhoods & Lives goes now', countered Morgan. Here we have the views of both opponents and supporters of the Revolution neatly encapsulated. From the perspective of Morgan and many other dissidents, the consequences of 1688 were currency shortages, commercial 'decay' and the spread of economic misery. In contrast, Baker -like most loyal Williamites -saw any material hardships as...

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“…Nesse momento, o parlamento deixa de ser visto como instrumento de autoridade real ou de representação do rei para as pessoas, ou seja, uma representação perante o poder, para buscar sua legitimidade como representante do poder. A tradição de corpos representativos locais e a prática de petições coletivas forneceu aos parlamentares o ambiente de um aparente dever de se referir aos seus constituintes antes de tomar decisões (Knights, 2009;Vieira e Runciman, 2008, p. 16). A principal diferença entre os parlamentaristas e Hobbes está na concepção de quem pode congregar os interesses dos representados e de qual é a relação de representação estabelecida entre as partes.…”

Section: Representação Soberania E Governo Representativounclassified

A relação contingente entre representação e legitimidade democrática sob a perspectiva da sociedade civil

Almeida¹

2013

Rev. bras. Ci. Soc.

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Participation and representation before democracy: petitions and addresses in premodern Britain

Cited by 14 publications

References 28 publications

Introduction: Publics and Participation in Early Modern Britain

Introduction: Publics and Participation in Early Modern Britain

The Politics of Economic Distress in the Aftermath of the Glorious Revolution, 1689–1702

A relação contingente entre representação e legitimidade democrática sob a perspectiva da sociedade civil

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