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 […]
The canvass aimed to get the vote out, but also linked candidates to communities [25-minute read] Canvassing was, according to David Eastwood, ‘the critical electoral institution of later-Hanoverian England’, or, as Frank O’Gorman has argued, the ‘critical point of contact’ between the electoral system and the voters prior to Reform.[1] Canvasses were organized by local […]
Edmund Green gives the definitive guide to their varieties, formats and contexts [40-minute read] Voting is a means of aggregating individual preferences into collective decisions, and through which the authority to enforce those decisions is legitimated.[1] The point of voting is to have one’s vote counted. This makes the study of historical voting unusual, in […]
Learn how dress and decoration, made and worn by women, was part of campaigning [20-minute read] Paying heed to eighteenth-century women’s use of fashion for political ends, calls attention both to an understudied aspect of women’s political involvement as well as to the importance of material culture, visual impact, and the use of space in […]
One of the most curious and ludic phenomena of 18th-century popular politics [5-minute read] June 1768. Fifes, French horns, drums, and marrow bones can be heard in the streets of Wandsworth, now in south-west London but then still largely rural. A crowd has gathered, lining the high street in the tiny village of Garratt. Men […]
Standing as an MP was an expensive undertaking. Success often needed to be bought [15-minute read] The costs of campaigning remain expensive today, as they were in the eighteenth century. Over the course of centuries, however, the types of expenditures have shifted dramatically. In the eighteenth century, food and drink were key for ‘treating’ the […]
