‘Whatever Passed in Parliament Ought to be Communicated to the Public’: Reporting the Proceedings of the Reformed Commons, 1833–50

This article considers the opening up of parliamentary proceedings to greater public scrutiny in the two decades after the 1832 Reform Act. It examines developments in the publication of parliamentary debates, considering why proposals for an official parliamentary record were rejected in the 1830s. It also discusses two less well‐studied but equally vital means of publicising parliamentary activity: the publication of official division lists and the sale to the public of parliamentary papers. It argues that the 1830s was a critical decade of change, influenced by shifting perceptions of the relationship between the reformed house of commons and those it sought to represent. This was driven, in particular, by liberal notions of the importance of parliamentary accountability to public opinion: MPs were increasingly aware of the need to keep constituents informed of their parliamentary activities, whether in the chamber, committee room or division lobby. This article also highlights the extent to which the Commons' approach to publicising its activities was constrained not only by the fact that it remained a breach of parliamentary privilege to publish reports of debates, but also by the physical space that the Commons occupied. The destruction of much of the old Palace of Westminster by fire in 1834 provided an important opportunity to remodel existing arrangements, notably with the addition of a second division lobby and the construction of a reporters' gallery.     

The Queen’s Dolls’ House within the British Empire Exhibition: encapsulating the British imperial world

ABSTRACT

This article focuses on Queen Mary’s Dolls’ House, designed by Edwin Landseer Lutyens and unveiled to the public in 1924 at the British Empire Exhibition. The Dolls’ House epitomised the characteristics of Britain as a nation and an empire through its English exterior and British world objects within. Marginalised in academic discourses and regarded as a plaything, this article brings the Dolls’ House back to discourses of British material and visual culture as well as Lutyens scholarship. To this end, it analyses how the design and contents of the House encapsulated the British imperial world and materialised Britain’s position in the postwar world.     

A Parliamentary Victory: The British Labour Party and Irish Republican Deportees, 1923

After the 1918 general election the Labour Party became the official opposition party at Westminster. In response to the growing Irish republican campaign to establish an independent Irish state the Labour Party had to re-assess its relationship with Irish nationalism. The Labour Party was now acutely conscious that it was on the verge of forming a government and was concerned to be seen by the British electorate as a responsible, moderate and patriotic government-in-waiting. Although it had traditionally supported Irish demands for home rule and was vehemently opposed to the partition of Ireland, the Labour Party became increasingly wary of any closer relationship with extreme Irish nationalism which it believed would only damage its rapidly improving electoral prospects. Therefore the Labour Party supported the Anglo-Irish Treaty of 1921 even though it underpinned the partition of Ireland and sought to distance itself from any association with Irish republicanism as the new Irish Free State drifted into civil war. In early 1923 the Parliamentary Labour Party (PLP) alighted upon the new issue of the arrest and deportation without trial, to the Irish Free State, of Irish republicans living in Britain who were obviously British citizens. The attraction of this campaign for the Labour Party was that it enabled the party to portray itself as the defender of Irish people living in Britain without having to take sides in the Irish civil war. In addition the Labour Party was able to present itself as the protector of civil liberties in Britain against the excesses of an overweening and authoritarian Conservative government. One of the main reasons the issue was progressed so energetically on the floor of the House by the new PLP was because it now contained many Independent Labour Party (ILP) ‘Red Clydesiders’ who themselves had been interned without trial during the First World War. Through brilliant and astute use of parliamentary tactics Bonar Law's Conservative government was forced into an embarrassing climb-down which required the cobbling together of an Indemnity Bill which gave tory ministers retrospective legal protection for having exceeded their authority. By any standard, it was a major achievement by a novice opposition party. It enhanced the party's reputation and its growing sophistication in the use of parliamentary tactics benefited it electorally at the next election which led to the first Labour government.     

A Lingering Diminuendo? The Conference on Devolution, 1919–20

This article looks at one of the more obscure moments in British constitutional history, the rise of federal devolution in the United Kingdom in the early 20th century and, in particular, the context to the Conference on Devolution that sat between October 1919 and April 1920. The conference, as this article will briefly discuss, has been relegated to footnote status in the historiography on federal devolution and British politics. However, while the conference has not been the subject of detailed academic attention, the claim that devolution and constitutional reform in this period was a by‐product of the crisis in Ireland pre‐partition has gathered considerable traction among political historians. This article will redress both the paltry analysis of the Conference on Devolution within the academic literature and the Irish‐centric historiography on federal devolution in the early 20th century. On the latter front, this article will demonstrate that the conference was the product of forces that extended beyond the Irish crisis, in particular parliamentary congestion. As for the conference itself, this article will use a wide range of archival sources to examine critically the conference's deliberations and in doing so will challenge prevailing assumptions regarding the supposedly one firm source of agreement during the conference: the powers that the devolved bodies should enjoy.     

Ethnohistorical geography and aboriginal rights litigation in Canada: memoir of an expert witness

Since the early 1950s, evidence from ethnohistorical geography has played an important role in aboriginal rights claims and litigation in North America. I became involved in Canadian aboriginal and treaty rights litigation over 35 years ago. My participation has included several landmark cases: Regina v. Horseman (treaty rights), Delgamuukw v. Regina (Comprehensive title claim), and Regina v. Powley (Métis rights). Most of the evidence that I have presented over the years has dealt with various aspects of the changing spatial economies of First Nations and Métis communities from Ontario to British Columbia. The Hudson's Bay Company's vast archive has been the primary source for this data.     

The Trade Goes,and the Flag Follows? British State Intervention and Natural Resource Extraction in Colombia, 1989–2010

During the 1960s, agents of the Colombian state began carrying out a counterinsurgency campaign against elements of the domestic population considered ‘subversive’. Subversion, according to US counterinsurgency manuals, largely translated to involvement in social organisation. As a result, trade unionists, political activists and human rights defenders in Colombia became aggressively targeted. While violence in Colombia's past has been widely documented, recent British involvement has not. The official justification for British military and police assistance, beginning in 1989, was within the context of the drug war. By drawing on a wide range of sources including newly declassified documents from the UK National Archives in Kew, this article posits that British counter-narcotics assistance was contentious in nature and ineffective in outcome. Meanwhile, this assistance lent structural and active support to the counterinsurgency conflict. In this light, the protection of British capital interest in Colombia – specifically that of British Petroleum – is analysed as a persuasive underlying motive for British military and police assistance. Finally, British Petroleum's private security strategy in Colombia is investigated as a case study in the utilisation of counterinsurgency, with the result of the near-total elimination of social organisation within its areas of operations.     

Skeletal markers of occupational stress in the Fur Trade: A case study from a Hudson's Bay Company Fur Trade post

The Seafort Burial Site (FcPr100) is a Fur Trade Period cemetery located near the town of Rocky Mountain House, Alberta. The results of recent analysis of skeletons recovered during salvage excavations between 1969 and 1971 suggest that three males in this sample were voyageurs in the employ of the Hudson's Bay Company. Vertebral osteophytosis and osteoarthritis, Schmorl's nodes, muscle origin robusticity and new bone formation at entheses and syndesmoses, and osteoarthritis at the elbow and shoulder joints provide evidence for carrying, lifting, and paddling or rowing. The presence of accessory sacral facets also may be stress-related. In addition, the development of accessory articular facets on the metatarsals and proximal pedal phalanges may indicate activity-induced stress from hyperdorsiflexion of the toes in habitual kneeling, such as when river canoeing.     

The Levant Company under Attack in Parliament, 1720–53

Parliamentary debates concerning the British chartered companies in the 18th century are an important resource which can provide a range of insights into the fate of the companies, the concerns of British economic policy, and the process of political decision making on economic issues. Of all the parliamentary debates concerning chartered companies in the 18th century, those concerning the Levant Company have received the least scholarly attention. This article examines a series of debates involving the Levant Company during the period 1720–53. These debates saw the company increasingly put on the defensive. By the middle of the century, there was, in the words of the duke of Bedford, ‘a very great outcry against companies of all kinds’. However, the debates concerning the Levant Company did not turn on competing views regarding political economy. War was an influence on the timing of the debates, but it was the economic impact of the company's deteriorating competitive position on its woollen cloth suppliers from the west country which was crucial. As French competition gained momentum, cloth exports fell and the political pressure on the company intensified. In the face of this, the company was far from defenceless in parliament. It had influential supporters and did not hesitate to pander to fears about the potential domination of its trade by jewish merchants. The company was forced to lower its admission fee in 1753, but survived and continued to operate into the 19th century.     

‘But Private Notes for My Own Memory’? Parliamentary Diaries,Parliamentary History and the Politics of Information in Early Stuart England*

Early modern parliamentary diaries are a standard source for historians, and have long been used as a supplement to the official journals in reconstructions of debates and business at Westminster. This article adopts a contrasting approach and examines what diaries – viewed as sources in their own right – reveal about parliament and its members, methods of contemporary note-taking, and the circulation and readership of political information. It begins with a review of the evidence for why, how, and to what ends members kept parliamentary diaries, before exploring the extent of their dissemination in early Stuart England. While recent literature has emphasized the circulation of materials relating to Jacobean and especially Caroline parliaments during the early 17th century, the article recovers the existence of a simultaneous interest in the parliamentary proceedings of the Elizabethan era. At a time when the future of parliament seemed uncertain, it argues that the evident market for, and readership of, Elizabethan material reflects contemporaries’ increasing recognition of parliament's significance within the English state and their changing attitudes towards parliamentary history. Moreover, while Elizabethan parliamentary diaries and journals seemingly reinforced memories of a past ‘golden age’ of parliamentary rule, the article contends that contemporaries’ production, dissemination, and reading of that material was a conscious form of political action in response to the constitutional crisis of their day.     

Radicals,Tories or Monomaniacs? The Birmingham Currency Reformers in the House of Commons, 1832–67*

Benjamin Disraeli described Thomas Attwood as a ‘provincial banker labouring under a financial monomania’. The leader of the Birmingham Political Union, Attwood's Warwickshire accent and support for a paper currency were widely derided at Westminster. However, the themes of Attwood's brief parliamentary career were shared by the other men who represented Birmingham in the early‐ and mid‐Victorian period. None of these MPs were good party men, and this article illuminates the nature of party labels in the period. Furthermore, it adds a new dimension to the historical understanding of debates on monetary policy and shows how local political identities and traditions interacted with broader party identities. With the exception of Richard Spooner, who was a strong tory on religious and political matters, the currency men are best described as popular radicals, who consistently championed radical political reform and were among the few parliamentary supporters of the ‘People's Charter’. They opposed the new poor law and endorsed factory regulation, a progressive income tax, and religious liberty. Although hostile to the corn laws they believed that free trade without currency reform would depress prices, wages and employment. George Frederick Muntz's death in 1857 and his replacement by John Bright marked a watershed and the end of the influence of the ‘Birmingham school’. Bright appropriated Birmingham's radical tradition as he used the town as a base for his campaign for parliamentary reform. He emphasized Birmingham's contribution to the passing of the 1832 Reform Act but ignored the currency reformers' views on other matters, which had often been at loggerheads with the ‘Manchester school’ and economic liberalism.     

Chance and structure

The 1770s witnessed an attempt by Parliament to control how it was represented in the press: questions of parliamentary reporting and parliamentary privilege quickly became a national political crisis. Key political figures such as Edmund Burke, John Wilkes, George Onslow and the Marquis of Rockingham were involved with printers and booksellers such as John Almon, Robert Wheble and Henry Woodfall. The British Enlightenment was effectively interrupted, and its fault lines highlighted, as politicians clashed with the book trade—and with newspaper and periodical proprietors in particular.     

Vocabularies of Slavery and Anti-Slavery: The North American Fur-Trade and the Imperial World

This article examines the particular work that languages of slavery and abolition did in British North American fur-trade territories with an eye to comparing these histories with those of slavery and anti-slavery in Australia. Temporally, it focuses on the two decades following the abolition of slavery in the British Empire in 1833, and geographically it examines the parts of northwestern North America claimed by Britain and administered by the Hudson's Bay Company. Here traders, missionaries and critics wrote of slavery and anti-slavery in the fur-trade in ways that repeated metropolitan patterns but were also arguably distinct, and certainly merit our attention. In British fur-trade space, vocabularies of slavery and anti-slavery provided language for the particular unfreedom of Indigenous people, the experience of indentured migrant labourers, and the political arrangements of colonial space. Seeing how the vocabularies of slavery and anti-slavery tracked through different colonial spaces reminds us of the uneven and intertwined histories that cut across and through the nineteenth-century world.     

Consensus,Conflict, and Partisanship in House Decision Making: A Bill-Level Examination of Committee and Floor Behavior

Although conflict and partisanship are deeply entrenched in the public's view of the U.S. Congress, political scientists have noted that consensus characterizes much of the legislative branch's operations. We build on an expanding literature that moves beyond a focus on roll call voting and explore individual bills as the unit of analysis in an attempt to obtain an accurate picture of the broader context in which House decision making occurs. Drawing on evidence spanning 24 years, we document the extent to which consensus rather than conflict typifies House decision making. Our bill-level analysis facilitates a unique examination of the context in which committees operate as well as the ensuing floor environment. The results provide insight into the factors attending to the degree of consensus and conflict associated with bills—particularly the salience of the issue and the committee of origin—while painting a more complete picture of the day-to-day environment of the U.S. House.     

Free Trade Empire to Commonwealth of Nations: India,Britain and Imperial Preference, 1903–1932

This article examines the dialogue between British tariff reformers and Indian nationalists over the application of imperial trade preference in India from Joseph Chamberlain's 1903 Birmingham address to the 1932 Imperial Economic Conference. For both groups, this issue was a focal point to assess India's constitutional status and national participation within an emerging British Commonwealth and international system after the First World War. Specifically, it marked a comprehensive challenge to the orthodoxy of free trade and liberal empire seen increasingly as a determent to reconciling national prosperity and imperial unity. It is argued that prominent tariff reformers’ well-studied criticism of an ‘unpatriotic’ cosmopolitan free trade made them also sympathetic to longstanding Indian grievances that this fiscal policy exacerbated economic exploitation and racial discrimination. After 1919, Indian nationalists, including ‘historical economists’, utilized metropolitan advocacy for imperial preference to demand fiscal and political autonomy from Britain and national, as well as racial, equality in collective imperial decision. At the 1932 conference in Ottawa, India's voluntary and negotiated acceptance of preferential trade with Britain, beside the white self-governing Dominions, helped transform the British Commonwealth into an egalitarian organization recognizable after 1947.     

Volcanic politics: Executive–legislative relations in Britain, 1997–2005

The parliamentary decline thesis overstates the dominance of the executive. The relationship between the executive and legislature is actually far more complex and balanced than is commonly recognised. After exploring recent developments in Australia and New Zealand, this article draws upon an audit of parliamentary modernisation in Britain since the election of New Labour in 1997 and suggests that a reforming parliament occurred during 2001–05 in which an executive with a majority of 166 was forced to acquiesce in the introduction of a raft of reform measures in the House of Commons that were designed to shift the balance of power. At the same time, the ‘transitional’ House of Lords displayed a new-found zeal and activism in a way that further frustrated the executive's control of parliament. This is not to overstate the degree of change: party loyalty remains the primary glue in the executive–legislative relationship and the executive remains dominant. However, it does suggest that in the British context the executive must still work within the limits and constraints of the parliamentary framework.     

The Political Mistress: Intimacy,Emotion, and Parliamentary Politics in the Late 18th Century

Between c.1796 and 1809, Lady Harriet Ponsonby, Countess Bessborough and Lord Granville Leveson Gower were embroiled in a passionate affair. Their liaison created tensions in aristocratic society because they belonged to rival political parties, the Whigs and the Tories respectively. In the early years of their relationship, Leveson Gower was emerging on the political scene, while the countess was already well-versed in the complexities of party politics. Leveson Gower thus solicited her advice and support and Bessborough duly shared her knowledge and insight into the political world, which created an unusual dynamic that scholars have yet to explore. This article examines several letters that Bessborough wrote to Leveson Gower to analyse how she supported her lover's fledgling parliamentary career and how she navigated their political differences. I argue that Bessborough adapted a rhetoric of affection, deference, duty, and loyalty, that was typically used by aristocratic wives, to justify her interest in her lover's career and her passion for parliamentary politics. This article contributes to scholarship that explores aristocratic women's political participation by examining the strategies a political mistress could employ to exert influence over men. It also illustrates the value of using methodologies from the history of emotions to investigate the drives and passions that shaped interactions in the late 18th-century political sphere.     

How Not to Run a Political Campaign: The Failure of the Unionist Free Traders 1903–6*

In 1903, Joseph Chamberlain launched a campaign aimed at the economic and political union of portions of the British empire behind a system of tariffs. The attack on Britain's 60‐year‐old system of free trade led to a polarising of opinion and sparked fierce controversy in the political sphere. It also shattered the unity of the Unionist Party, dividing it into three factions. One faction supported Chamberlain's policy, a second a more moderate policy proposed by party leader, Arthur Balfour, and a third – the smallest – the fiscal status quo. This article concerns this last faction, its motivations, actions and effectiveness. It argues that its concern with parliamentary alliances and methods, rather than the mass campaigns that were launched by its fellow opponents of Chamberlain, not only meant it was always bound to fail in its objectives, but made the problems of the Unionist Party far worse than they might otherwise have been. It concludes that the main reason why it failed to stop, or even delay Chamberlain's domination of the Unionist Party, not to mention suffering serious electoral losses, was largely due to its own incompetence in failing to grasp the new reality of mass politics and the need for new political approaches to deal with it.     

An Alternative Approach to Canadian House of Commons Reform

Empowering backbench Members of Parliament in order to restore the effectiveness of the House of Commons has been a central theme in Canadian parliamentary reform for at least fifty years, but results are widely seen as disappointing. This article argues that unrealistic expectations, fostered by adherence to a traditional conception of the Westminster model of representative and responsible government, are part of the problem. A modernized conception of parliamentary government, recognizing the House as a forum for competing political parties between elections, could help us to better understand the House and improve its contribution to democratic governance. The proposed approach suggests innovative procedural options for legislative debate, Question Period, and other activities. It also offers a consistent basis for addressing issues such as floor-crossing, coalitions, and prorogations. More broadly, it points to the need for an integrated approach to the House, elections, political parties, public education, and citizen engagement in order to respond to contemporary democratic challenges.     

In Frank Bainimarama's Shadow: Fiji,Elections and the Future

ABSTRACT

Fiji's much anticipated election was held in September 2014, returning Frank Bainimarama's Fiji First Party to power under a proportional representation open list system sanctioned by the decreed 2013 constitution. It marks an important step on a long and fraught journey back to parliamentary democracy. A new start has been made, but a lot will depend on how deeply Bainimarama's publicly declared multiracial vision is shared by his own supporters, including the military, overwhelming Indigenous Fijian, which has a proven history of being a friend neither of multiracialism nor of democracy. Whether this turns out to be a pyrrhic victory for one man or a turning point in Fiji's modern history remains to be seen.     

The Curious Case of the Vanishing Debate over Irish Home Rule: The Dominion of Canada,Irish Home Rule,and Canadian Historiography

In the 1880s, the British Empire was abuzz with debate over the Irish Home Rule Bills being discussed at that time in the Westminster Parliament. The Dominion of Canada was no exception and the Canadian House of Commons held no fewer than three debates on the concept of Irish Home Rule. Studying these debates provides a way to explore British identity beyond the British Isles. Although the nineteenth century attempts to implement Irish Home Rule were ultimately a failure, for almost half a century the concept was discussed throughout the Empire. This article takes an in-depth look at the Canadian parliamentary response to Irish Home Rule. In doing so, it argues that the debates reveal much about British identity in the Dominion, at least at the parliamentary level, and sheds light on conceptions of Britishness in the wider British world. It also suggests that these imperial debates represent an important stage in the development of Canadian history and deserve to take their place in Canadian historiography.