Empire and parliamentary reform: the 1832 Reform Act revisited

Tür:

Kitap Bölümü

Yazar:

Miles Taylor

Yayın yılı:

2003

Yayıncı:

Cambridge University Press

The 1832 Reform Act enfranchised around half a million men in Britain and Ireland. By abolishing the small nomination boroughs, according to its critics, it disfranchised many millions more across the British empire. ‘How far’, asked Sir Robert Inglis, making the first opposition speech in the Commons against the Reform Bill, ‘the rights of distant dependencies, of the East Indies, of the West Indies, of the Colonies … could find their just support in the House, I know not.’ Other Tory opponents were more specific. Sir Richard Vyvyan reckoned the Reform Bill would create a ‘tyrannical assembly’ over 120 million in the colonial empire unless small boroughs remained open to men with imperial experience and interests. Michael Sadler thought ‘scores of millions’ in ‘this extensive empire’ would be left unrepresented. And Sir John Malcolm feared that 80 million people in India ‘would not find one Representative in the British Parliament’. Writing in Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine in May 1831, Archibald Alison summed up the Tory case against the imperial deficiencies of the Whig reform bill: ‘[n]ominally professing to extend, this bill is really destined to contract, the representation, to base the legislature, not upon the empire, but the island’. Without adequate representation, Tories believed that the empire – that is, the union with Ireland, the protected trade of India and Canada, and the plantation economies of the West Indies – would be lost, and, in the words of the ear…

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