Slavery and abolition could be contentious platform issues in 18th-century England [15-minute read] Understandings of Slavery In eighteenth-century political discourse, ‘slavery’ was a potent but often imprecise term, used across the century to describe many kinds of personal, political or religious oppression rather than specifically the ownership of people as property, as we now generally […]
An introduction to how many people could, and did, vote in the eighteenth century [5-minute read] The ‘electorate’ is the group of individuals who were entitled to vote in an election. This is different from the number of people who actually cast their votes at a poll, a group which we might call the ‘voterate’. […]
Although technically illegal, bribery was rife in eighteenth-century elections. [15-minute read] Technically, the Corrupt Practices Act of 1695 and the Bribery Act of 1729 made bribery illegal, but it remained endemic to the electoral process. Votes could often be bought, and, with no secret ballot, a candidate or his agents could check that individuals had […]
