Parliament and international law in eighteenth-century Britain

Abstract

The study of Parliament and international law in the eighteenth century illuminates crucial distinctions among nation, state and empire. For example, after 1603 but before 1707, the Scottish Parliament in Edinburgh represented a nation but aroused English opposition whenever it tried to legislate as if Scotland were an independent state. Before 1801, the Irish Parliament in Dublin represented only a very narrowly defined Irish nation and, prior to the repeal of Poynings’s Law in 1782, made no pretence of legislating as if Ireland were a state rather than a dependent kingdom. Only the Westminster Parliament could claim that national representation authorised its legislating for the English – later, British – state and for the British Empire. Across the course of the century, war and revolution tested the limits of that Parliament’s sovereignty, especially in the decades succeeding the Seven Years’ War. These developments occurred within European, imperial and global contexts, with the imperial setting only gaining primacy in the latter third of the century. As scholars of nineteenth-century British history have shown, most strikingly in relation to the Reform Acts of 1832 and 1867, domestic contexts alone cannot explain the course of parliamentary history. The defining moments of British parliamentary history in the ‘long’ eighteenth century have often been associated with a single date: for example, 1688, 1707, 1765, 1776, 1801, 1832. At each of these points, so the story goes, the powers, the capacities or the scope of parliamentary authority changed. In 1688 and 1832 – the conventional boundaries of a long century of revolution and reform – the Glorious Revolution and the Great Reform Act shifted first the balance of power between Crown and Parliament and then that between Parliament and people (however narrowly defined). In 1765 and 1776, the crises following the passage of the Stamp Act and the American Declaration of Independence heralded years of arguments across the Atlantic and British bloodshed before the nature and extent of Parliament’s imperial sovereignty could be settled. In 1707, that sovereignty had been extended to encompass Scotland by incorporation; in 1801, it was further expanded to include Ireland, thereby to reach its greatest territorial extent. The process of incorporating the Three Kingdoms into the embrace of the Westminster Parliament extinguished the competing and parallel legislatures in Edinburgh and Dublin just as it also formally abolished the English Parliament in 1707.