IV. The Civil List in Eighteenth-Century British Politics: Parliamentary Supremacy versus the Independence of the Crown

1966 ◽  
Vol 9 (3) ◽  
pp. 318-337 ◽  
Author(s):  
E. A. Reitan
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Balance Of Power ◽  
Executive Power ◽  
British Politics ◽  
Parliamentary Government ◽  
Constitutional Evolution ◽  
Parliamentary Supremacy ◽  
The Right ◽  
George Iii

In the constitutional evolution of eighteenth-century Britain a major problem was the resolution of the tensions which arose between the executive powers vested in the Crown and the legislative supremacy of Parliament. Although the seventeenth-century conflicts of Crown and Parliament had settled the question of ultimate supremacy in favour of Parliament, eighteenth-century politics, by common consent, were confined to the level where a balance of power could be seen to operate, in which king, Lords, and Commons exercised agreed functions and powers and where the ultimate weapon—parliamentary supremacy—need not be used. The independence of the Crown—however it may have operated in practice—was a cardinal doctrine of the ‘mixed and balanced’ constitution. Although this doctrine was usually invoked to support the right of the king to choose his own ministers, it gave an important constitutional role to the Civil List, for by supplying the Crown with a financial provision not subject to parliamentary control the Civil List served the pur-pose of supporting the independence and the ‘influence’ of the Crown. The uncontrolled expenditure of the Civil List, with its large number of attractive places, pensions, and other benefits, was an important part of that ‘influence’ which some considered necessary for the effective exercise of executive power and which others decried as a threat to the independence of Parliament. The disputes and jealousies created by the Civil List developed in the reigns of George I and George II and came to a climax in the reign of George III. The result was an alteration of the constitutional foundation of the Civil List which further weakened the doctrine of the independence of the Crown and which marked an important step in the evolution of parliamentary government.

Cultures of collecting

2021 ◽  
pp. 138-164
Author(s):  
David Pearson
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Medieval Manuscripts ◽  
Printed Books ◽  
Book Collecting ◽  
The Right ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Material Evidence

Studies of private libraries and their owners invariably talk about ‘book collecting’—is this the right terminology? After summarizing our broadly held understanding of the evolution of bibliophile collecting from the eighteenth century onwards, this chapter considers the extent to which similar behaviours can be detected (or not) in the seventeenth, drawing on the material evidence of bookbindings, wording in wills, and other sources. Do we find subject-based collecting, of the kind we are familiar with today, as a characteristic of early modern book owners? Some distinctions are recognized in ways in which medieval manuscripts (as opposed to printed books) were brought together at this time. The relationship between libraries and museums, and contemporary attitudes to them, is explored. The concluding argument is that ‘collecting’ is a careless word to use in the seventeenth-century context; just as we should talk about users rather than readers, we should use ‘owners’ rather than ‘collectors’ as the default term, unless there is evidence to the contrary.

"FREELY ELECTED IN FEAR": PRINCELY ELECTIONS AND POLITICAL POWER IN EARLY MODERN TRANSYLVANIA

2003 ◽  
Vol 7 (3) ◽  
pp. 213-244 ◽  
Author(s):  
Graeme Murdock
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Political Power ◽  
Balance Of Power ◽  
Political Authority ◽  
Political Elite ◽  
Political Organization ◽  
Sufficient Power ◽  
The Right ◽  
Broad Consensus

AbstractTransylvania's survival was threatened by both its Habsburg and Ottoman neighbors. Given this precarious international position, ruling princes required sufficient power to govern effectively, and also needed to maintain a broad consensus for their right to exercise authority over the diverse political elite. A successful balance of power between princes and the estates was built around the freedoms granted to a number of different churches, and around the right of the diet to elect princes. This article examines the elections of Gábor Bethlen and other Calvinist princes in Transylvania during the early seventeenth century. Even though these elections were rarely free or fair, they provided a key basis for the growing political authority of princes who were widely identified as divinely-appointed rulers. Transylvania thus provides a model of a competence for elective monarchy, a form of political organization often thought to lead inevitably to unstable and ineffective government.

Introduction

2019 ◽  
pp. 1-20
Author(s):  
Susan Marks
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Human Rights ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
International Human Rights Law ◽  
Human Rights Law ◽  
International Human Rights ◽  
International Human ◽  
The Right

This chapter introduces the book’s enquiry into the idea of the rights of man in eighteenth-century England and into the earlier glimmerings of that idea in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century English thought. If protection of the right to property is an implicit and sometimes explicit principle of international human rights law, the chapter raises the question of whether there may exist an alternative tradition of thought about human rights, in which what is important is not the right to property, but instead the dispossession of the unpropertied.

Political Parties

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Angus Hawkins
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Political Parties ◽  
Party System ◽  
Local Level ◽  
British Politics ◽  
Party Government ◽  
Parliamentary Government ◽  
Late Eighteenth Century ◽  
Late Eighteenth

This chapter examines the emergence, roles, and meanings of ‘party’ within British politics from the late eighteenth century to the present day. It traces the transition from ‘mixed’ government to ‘parliamentary’ government and ultimately to ‘party’ government. The altered function and nature of political parties within these shifting constitutional contexts is assessed. How parties functioned at the parliamentary and local level is also explored. It moves on to consider how historians have approached different aspects of party activity—their organization of the contest for power in Parliament; specific party histories; embodiments of ideology; how parties have organized themselves; winning elections—and evaluates the role of the idea of a ‘two-party system’ within British politics and historiography as the ‘natural’ alignment of party activity.

scholarly journals МУСУЛЬМАНЕ «ТОЯНОВА ГОРОДКА»

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Evgenij Vodyasov
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
The South ◽  
Muslim Population ◽  
North West ◽  
The North ◽  
The Face ◽  
Early Eighteenth Century ◽  
The Right ◽  
Burial Rite

В статье публикуются итоги исследований мусульманских захоронений на могильнике «Тоянов городок», который является одним из самых ранних памятников ислама в Нижнем Притомье. Делается вывод, что в середине – второй половине XVII в. на кладбище сосуществовали две разные группы мусульманских захоронений. Первая группа мусульманских захоронений объединяет безынвентарные погребения с положением умерших головой на северо-запад с доворотом лица направо. Сделан вывод, что эта традиция не характерна для погребального обряда Нижнего Притомья и является привнесенной с территории Тарского Прииртышья. Появление на «Тояновом городке» захоронений с северо-западной ориентацией связано с переселением в окрестности Томска чатских татар в первой трети – середине XVII в. Для второй группы характерно соблюдение киблы положением умершего головой на юго-восток с доворотом лица налево. Инвентарь в этих захоронениях присутствует, что отражает пережитки доисламских верований. Происхождение этой группы захоронений объясняется трансформацией местного погребального обряда. Во второй половине XVII в. происходит исчезновение курганного способа захоронения, и растет количество безынвентарных погребений в связи с укреплением новой веры. При этом в обряде фиксируются пережитки доисламских верований, что само по себе закономерно для распространения любой религии в мире. Автор приходит к заключению, что на рубеже XVII–XVIII вв. исчезает обычай укладывать умерших головой на юго-восток, и «северо-западная» кибла вытесняет местную традицию. В начале XVIII в. в погребальном обряде происходят существенные перемены: окончательно исчезают курганные насыпи, могилы становятся глубже, появляются ниши (подбои), чего не отмечалось в более ранних мусульманских некрополях. Перемены связаны с прибытием мусульманского населения из Поволжья и Предуралья и их расселением в Татарской Слободе. С начала XVIII в. вплоть до рубежа XIX–XX в. мусульманский обряд унифицировался и существовал в неизменном виде.The article presents the results of research on Muslim burials in the hillfort named ‘Toyanov gorodok’ – one of the oldest Islamic sites in the Lower Tom region. The conclusion is drawn that in the middle to the second half of the seventeenth century, two different groups of Muslim burials coexisted here. The first group of the Muslim burials encompasses graves with no inventory, with the deceased placed with their heads to the north-west and their faces turned to the right. It is concluded that this tradition is not consistent with the burial rite spread in the Lower Tom and was brought in from outside, namely, the Tar Irtysh region. The emergence of such burials in the Toyanov Gorodok was associated with the settlement of the Chat Tatars on the outskirts of Tomsk in the first third to the middle seventeenth century. Characteristic of the second group was the placement of the deceased according to the Qiblah, with the head turned to the south-east and the face turned to the left. Some inventory was found in these burials, which is indicative of pre-Islamic beliefs. The origins of this group are accounted for by the transformation of the local burial rite. In the second half of the seventeenth century, the kurgan type of burials disappeared, whereas the number of burials with no inventory grew due to the strengthening of the new faith. At the same time, the vestiges of pre-Islamic beliefs can be seen in the burial rite, which in itself is natural for the spread of any religion in the world. The author concludes that at the turn of the seventeenth to the eighteenth centuries, the rite of placing the deceased with their heads to the south-east ceased to exist, and the ‘Qiblah north-west orientation’ replaced the local tradition. In the early eighteenth century, the burial rite changed significantly: the kurgan type of burials ceased to exist completely, the graves became deeper, and grave niches started to appear which were not reported to be found in older Muslim necropolises. These changes were connected with the arrival of the Muslim population from the Volga and the Ural regions and its settlement in the Tatar Sloboda. From the early eighteenth century up until the turn of the nineteenth to the twentieth centuries, the Muslim rite was consolidated and remained unchanged since.

II. Executive Monarchy and the Challenge of Parties, 1689–1832: Two Concepts of Government and Two Historiographical Interpretations

1970 ◽  
Vol 13 (3) ◽  
pp. 379-401 ◽  
Author(s):  
B. W. Hill
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
British Politics ◽  
Definite Form ◽  
Traditional Structure ◽  
Parliamentary Supremacy

Anyone who studies eighteenth-century British politics soon becomes aware of a lack of definite form in the major institutions of government. Contemporaries, although equally aware of this imprecision, did not consider that it detracted from the utility of the constitution. On the contrary the vagaries of the system were often cited as its chief asset, permitting such apparently irreconcilable elements as parliamentary supremacy and a royal executive to exist together in balanced harmony. Burke, the constitution's most eloquent defender, called this quality of comprehensiveness a ‘unity in so great a diversity of its parts’, and believed that such unity was capable of sheltering both prescriptive rights and necessary adaptations in society. But the quality which men of the eighteenth century were agreed to admire has been viewed less sympathetically by later writers, intent on clarifying points which contemporaries preferred to leave open. The whig historians of the nineteenth century attempted to cut through difficulties by treating as unworthy of consideration in the eighteenth-century scene those features which did not survive in the era of reform. The misinterpretations which thereby arose brought about a necessary reaction in the present century, especially from the late Sir Lewis Namier whose research revealed the Georgian scene as having a more traditional structure of politics and society than was previously supposed. But Namier's own work too paid disproportionate attention to parts of the scene at the expense of others, though he undoubtedly did so because the difficulty of dislodging a well-established whig orthodoxy led him to overstate his case.

Parties, Connections, and Parliamentary Politics, 1689-1714: Review and Revision

1966 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
pp. 45-69 ◽  
Author(s):  
Henry Horwitz
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Party System ◽  
Party Organization ◽  
Historical Methodology ◽  
The Many ◽  
William Iii ◽  
George Iii ◽  
Parliamentary Politics ◽  
Detailed Picture

The notion that parliamentary politics in the days of William III and Queen Anne revolved around the conflict of the Whig and Tory parties is deeply rooted in the historiography of the later seventeenth century. Nourished by the many contemporary references to the existence and activities of the Whig and Tory parties, the “two-party concept” had its first flowering in the nineteenth century and came to full blossom in the early decades of the twentieth in the works of W. C. Abbott, K. G. Feiling, W. T. Morgan, and G. M. Trevelyan.The canons of orthodoxy of one generation of historians, however, have often proved to be little more than the cannon fodder of their successors. In this case, it was one of Abbott's own students, Robert Walcott, who has led the way in the task of reinterpretation. As early as 1941, Walcott — remarking upon the obscurity enveloping accounts of party groupings in the period 1689 to 1714 — advanced the hypothesis that “the description of party organization under William and Anne which Trevelyan suggested in his Romanes Lecture on the two-party system is less applicable to our period than the detailed picture of eighteenth-century politics which emerges from Professor Namier's volumes on the Age of Newcastle.”Walcott's invocation of Sir Lewis's studies of mid-eighteenth-century politics was, of course, a testimony to the advance in historical methodology that had gained prominence with the appearance in 1929 of The Structure of Politics at the Accession of George III.

The Ashanti Question and the British: Eighteenth-Century Origins

1961 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 35-59 ◽  
Author(s):  
Margaret Priestley
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Balance Of Power ◽  
Gold Coast ◽  
Central Theme ◽  
Inland Empire ◽  
Trade Routes ◽  
Modern Times ◽  
History Of ◽  
Gradual Expansion

One of the major developments in West Africa since the later seventeenth century has been the emergence of the powerful inland Empire of Ashanti and its gradual expansion towards the coast. This process ultimately brought the Ashantis into contact with the Fantes, the conquest of whom was necessary if the Empire was to extend to the sea. Their relationship, therefore, forms a central theme in the history of the Gold Coast in modern times. But problems were created by it which extended far outside the bounds of native politics. The existence on the coast of European trading settlements in close rivalry with each other meant that any serious local upheaval was bound to have wide repercussions. For economic reasons, Europeans could not remain indifferent to changes in the balance of power which would affect trade routes from the interior to the forts and, in particular, the future of the Fante states whose people, by the eighteenth century, had long acted as middlemen in the slave trade.

Formation of the research tradition of studying the institute Parliamentarism as a mechanism for the establishment of democracy

2017 ◽  
pp. 187-198
Author(s):  
Akil Ibrahim Al-Zuhari
Keyword(s):  
Balance Of Power ◽  
Research Strategy ◽  
The State ◽  
Executive Power ◽  
Research Tradition ◽  
Stage Of Development ◽  
The People ◽  
Long Time ◽  
The Government ◽  
Parliamentary Regimes

The article defines the features of the process of forming the research tradition of studying the institute of parliamentarism as a mechanism for the formation of democracy. It is established that parliamentarism acts as one of the varieties of the regime of functioning of the state, to which the independence of the representative body from the people is inherent, its actual primacy in the state mechanism, the division of functions between the legislative and executive branches of government, the responsibility and accountability of the government to the parliament. It is justified that, in addition to the regime that fully meets the stated requirements of classical parliamentarism, there are regimes that can be characterized as limited parliamentary regimes. The conclusions point out that parliamentarism does not necessarily lead to a democracy regime. At the first stage of development of statehood, it functions for a long time in the absence of many attributes of democracy, but at the present stage, without parliamentarism, democracy will be substantially limited. Modern researchers of parliamentarism recognize that this institution is undergoing changes with the development of the processes of democracy and democratization. This is what produces different approaches to its definition. However, most scientists under classical parliamentarianism understand such a system, which is based on the balance of power. This approach seeks to justify limiting the rights of parliament and strengthening executive power. Keywords: Parliamentarism, research strategy, theory of parliamentarism, types of parliamentarism

Common Law Constitutionalism

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
William E. Nelson
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Common Law ◽  
Legal Profession ◽  
Legal Institutions ◽  
Law System ◽  
The Common ◽  
Common Law System

This chapter shows how common law pleading, the use of common law vocabulary, and substantive common law rules lay at the foundation of every colony’s law by the middle of the eighteenth century. There is some explanation of how this common law system functioned in practice. The chapter then discusses why colonials looked upon the common law as a repository of liberty. It also discusses in detail the development of the legal profession individually in each of the thirteen colonies. Finally, the chapter ends with a discussion of the role of legislation. It shows that, although legislation had played an important role in the development of law and legal institutions in the seventeenth century, eighteenth-century Americans were suspicious of legislation, with the result that the output of pre-Revolutionary legislatures was minimal.

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