II. Taverns, Coffee Houses and Clubs: Local Politics and Popular Articulacy in the Birmingham Area, in the Age of the American Revolution

Abstract

It has long been a commonplace among historians of eighteenth-century England that effective participation in the political affairs of the nation was confined to the privileged few. The substantial truth of this is undeniable, but its recognition has carried with it the questionable assumption that there wereTwo worlds of politics in the eighteenth century—a tight political establishment, linked to small groups of powerful managers in the provinces, who controlled parliament, the executive, and all that was effective in the nation, and outside this an amorphous mass of political sentiment that found expression in occasional hysteria and impotent polemic, but whose effective voice in the nation was negligible.