Abstract
Abstract This article analyses nearly one million petitions received by the House of Commons to reveal a culture of petitioning that recast the political culture of modern Britain and Ireland. It argues, first, that petitions provided a much more regular and continuous form of interaction between people and Parliament than elections. Second, petitioning–meaning the practices associated with the drafting, signing and presentation of petitions–enabled a vibrant, performative public politics. Third, petitions and petitioning were relatively open, inclusive forms of political participation since all British subjects enjoyed the formal right to petition. We examine the role of formidable campaigns of mass mobilisation, but also humble appeals of marginalised individuals. Our data has significant implications for our understanding of the nationalisation, organisation, and popularisation of politics in this period. We argue that attention to petitions helps us to decentre parliamentary elections as the principal connection between local and national politics. Indeed, petitioners responded to the shifting boundaries between the central and devolved state in deciding to which authorities they would direct petitions. Petitioning campaigns pioneered the mass, organised, national movements that would gradually emerge as the hallmark of stronger political parties. This did not undermine petitioning. However, the consequent growth of disciplined parties strengthened executive power, at the expense of parliamentary government, redirected petitions from the Commons. Furthermore, the continuing expansion of petitioning alongside extensions of the franchise suggests that petitions did not function as an ersatz ballot. Rather, petitions and debates between parliamentarians and petitioners over the meaning of growing lists of signatories suggest that petitioning catalysed a range of other forms of participation and hence forged an ever more popular politics.
Highlights
Durham Research OnlineCitation for published item: Huzzey, Richard and Miller, Henry (2020) 'Petitions, Parliament and political culture : petitioning the House of Commons, 1780-1918.', Past and present., 248 (1). pp. 123-164
Fierce contests between trades continued, as, for example, the battle between butchers and tanners over horse-hide regulation, which produced more than 250 petitions between 1799 and 1824.106 much of the nineteenth-century growth in petitioning on material questions addressed and constituted the public as consumers or taxpayers as part of campaigns beyond specific sectors.[107]. This broader appeal explains why the agitation against the corn laws generated far more than a million signatures in each of the years 1840 to 1843 and, when the Anti-Corn Law League returned to the tactic, 1846.108 In 1816 MPs defeated the government’s plans to renew income tax after the Commons received 375 antirenewal petitions in just over a month. The legacy of such episodes shows that petitions provided an important popular political context to the formation of the mid-Victorian fiscal constitution, in which the state sought to maintain neutrality between competing interests, relied on a few high-yielding taxes for revenue, and exercised restraint to secure public trust.[109]
Instead, that petitions did not represent an early modern survival of tradition or a means for the disenfranchised to seek their real prize, the vote; rather, petitioning was a powerful organ of pressure on a parliament still often resistant to popular sovereignty and the linchpin of a wider popular politics
Summary
Citation for published item: Huzzey, Richard and Miller, Henry (2020) 'Petitions, Parliament and political culture : petitioning the House of Commons, 1780-1918.', Past and present., 248 (1). pp. 123-164. Petitioning grew amid other forms of political participation and grounded national interests and ideological clashes in local personalities and places.[30] Major petition drives, in developing broad popular coalitions on public issues that cut across geographical boundaries, established a more nationally integrated political culture. CLASSIFICATION OF ISSUES, PETITIONS AND SIGNATURES FOR PUBLIC PETITIONS TO THE COMMONS BY ORIGINAL CATEGORIES USED BY THE SELECT COMMITTEE ON PUBLIC PETITIONS (SCPP), 1833–1918*
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