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This is a major reassessment of the communications revolution of the seventeenth century. Using a wealth of archival evidence and the considerable output of the press, Jason Peacey demonstrates how new media - from ballads to pamphlets and newspapers - transformed the English public's ability to understand and participate in national political life. He analyses how contemporaries responded to political events as consumers of print; explores what they were able to learn about national politics; and examines how they developed the ability to appropriate a variety of print genres in order to participate in novel ways. Amid structural change and conjunctural upheaval, he argues that there occurred a dramatic re-shaping of the political nation, as citizens from all walks of life developed new habits and practices for engaging in daily political life, and for protecting and advancing their interests. This ultimately involved experience-led attempts to rethink the nature of representation and accountability.

This book covers the history of British electioneering from the 18th century right up to the present day. It explores the relationship between British politicians and their public as well as the important changes that have taken place, especially in the television age. It examines what the current state of electioneering in Britain implies for the future, asking questions as to how the media can shape that future. The book argues that in the past, British politics has been characterized by public rituals, intended to make politicians more legitimate by obliging them to face an often irreverent public. In 18th-century politics and Victorian and Edwardian elections, face-to-face interaction was central. This continued between the wars, despite the emergence of the new mass communication media of radio and cinema. However, the same cannot be said of the post-war era and the rise of television. Today, most politicians are content to offer the semblance of meaningful engagement with the public — hence, meetings are designed to ensure that politicians only come into contact with their party. Where Lloyd George and Churchill relished a tumultuous public meeting, their modern counterparts are more risk-averse. This book questions whether we can persuade our broadcasters that encounters with the public must form a staple of modern politics.

The Second Reform Act, passed in 1867, created a million new voters, doubling the electorate and propelling the British state into the age of mass politics. It marked the end of a twenty year struggle for the working class vote, in which seven different governments had promised change. Yet the standard works on 1867 are more than forty years old and no study has ever been published of reform in prior decades. This study provides the first analysis of the subject from 1848 to 1867, ranging from the demise of Chartism to the passage of the Second Reform Act. Recapturing the vibrancy of the issue and its place at the heart of Victorian political culture, it focuses not only on the reform debate itself, but on a whole series of related controversies, including the growth of trade unionism, the impact of the 1848 revolutions and the discussion of French and American democracy.

Perspectives on English Revolutionary Republicanism takes stock of developments in the scholarship of seventeenth-century English republicanism by looking at the movements and schools of thought that have shaped the field over the decades: the linguistic turn, the cultural turn and the religious turn. While scholars of seventeenth-century republicanism share their enthusiasm for their field, they have approached their subject in diverse ways. The contributors to the present volume have taken the opportunity to bring these approaches together in a number of case studies covering republican language, republican literary and political culture, and republican religion, to paint a lively picture of the state of the art in republican scholarship. The volume begins with three chapters influenced by the theory and methodology of the linguistic turn, before moving on to address cultural history approaches to English republicanism, including both literary culture and (practical) political culture. The final section of the volume looks at how religion intersected with ideas of republican thought. Taken together the essays demonstrate the vitality and diversity of what was once regarded as a narrow topic of political research.

In The Excommunication of Elizabeth I, Aislinn Muller examines the excommunication and deposition of Queen Elizabeth I of England by the Roman Catholic Church, and its political afterlife during her reign.

This wide-ranging volume goes to the heart of the revisionist debate about the crisis of government that led to the English Civil War. The author tackles questions about the patronage that structured early modern society, arguing that the increase in royal bounty in the early seventeenth century redefined the corrupt practices that characterized early modern administration.

This book explains how and why the New Labour governments transformed Britain's immigration system from a highly restrictive regime to one of the most expansive in Europe, otherwise known as the Managed Migration policy. It offers the first in-depth and candid account of this period of dramatic political development from the actors who made policy during 'the making of the migrant state.' Drawing on document analysis and over 50 elite interviews, the book sets out to explain how and why this radical policy change transpired, by examining how organized interests, political parties and institutions shaped and changed policy. This book offers valuable insights to anyone who wants to understand why immigration is dominating the political debate, and will be essential reading for those wanting to know why governments pursue expansive immigration regimes.

Offering a new overview of the Conservative modernisation project, this book assesses the efforts of David Cameron and his colleagues to rebuild the British Conservative Party in the period since 2005.

Drawing upon myriad literary and political texts, this book charts how some of the Stuart period’s major challenges to governance—the equivocation of recusant Catholics, the parsing of one’s civil and religious obligations, the composition and distribution of subversive texts, and the increasing assertiveness of Parliament—evoked much greater disputes about the mental processes by which monarchs and subjects imagined, understood, and effected political action. Rather than emphasizing particular forms of political thought such as republicanism or absolutism, the book investigates the more foundational question of political intellection, or the ways in which early modern individuals thought through the often uncertain political and religious environment they occupied, and how attention to such thinking in oneself or others could itself constitute a political position. Focusing on this immanence of cognitive processes in the literature of the Stuart era, the book examines how writers such as Francis Bacon, John Donne, John Milton, and other less familiar figures of the seventeenth century evidence a shared concern with the interrelationship between mental and political behavior. These analyses are combined with close readings of religious and political affairs that return our attention to how early Stuart writers understood the relationship between mental states and the forms of political engagement such as speech, debate, and letter-writing that expressed them. What results is a revised framework for early modern political subjectivity, one in which claims to liberty and sovereignty are tied not simply to what one can do but how—or even if—one can freely think.

Early modern England was marked by profound changes in economy, society, politics and religion. It is widely believed that the poverty and discontent which these changes often caused resulted in major rebellion and frequent ‘riots’. Whereas the politics of the people have often been described as a ‘many-headed monster’; spasmodic and violent, and the only means by which the people could gain expression in a highly hierarchical society and a state that denied them a political voice, the essays in this collection argue for the inherently political nature of popular protest through a series of studies of acts of collective protest, up to and including the English Revolution. The work of John Walter has played a central role in defining current understanding of the field and has been widely read and cited by those working on the politics of subaltern groups. This collection of essays offers a radical re-evaluation of the nature of crowds and protests during the period, and it will make fascinating reading for historians of the period.