Create a new account

It's simple, and free.

Political Evolution of 19th Century Britain

The Reform Act of 1867, which sharply reduced the property qualification for eligibility to vote in British parliamentary elections, was one of the major steps which, in the course of the nineteenth century, led Britain from a governmental system based on landed privilege to one approaching mass democracy. At a step, this Reform Act increased the number of electors in British elections by about fifty percent (Feuchtwanger, 1985, p. 2). While its shortterm effects proved to be somewhat limited, it also represented a major step in the "disenfranchisement" of the Monarch as an effective power in the British government. Finally, the Reform Act of 1867 is notable as being one of the historic highwater marks of "Tory reform"  that is, reform tending in a liberal, democratizing direction, but introduced and carried through by the conservative party  in this case, by the Tories, under Benjamin Disraeli, hard on the tail of the defeat of a (more modest) reform proposed by Gladstone and the Liberals the year before. Thus, the Reform Act of 1867 is notable both in and of itself, as a major step in the evolution of the unwritten British constitution, but also as an exemplar of the workings and development of British parliamentary government in the second half of the nineteenth century. Both these aspects will be considered in the pages following.

At the end of the Napoleonic Wars, in 1815, Great Britain was a commercial and protoindustrial power in its economic life, but still a thoroughly traditional, almost semifeudal society in its social and political life. It is enough to remind ourselves that, though Watt's steamengine and factories were spreading across the landscape  a spread to be accelerated dramatically by the growth of railroads from 1830 on  that this was also the age of Jane Austen's novels, of Cathy and Heathcliff.

A century later, at the beginning of World War I, while many elements of a traditional so...

Page 1 of 9 Next >

More on Political Evolution of 19th Century Britain...

Loading...
APA     MLA     Chicago
Political Evolution of 19th Century Britain. (1969, December 31). In LotsofEssays.com. Retrieved 09:54, March 29, 2024, from https://www.lotsofessays.com/viewpaper/1704937.html