Subject Introductions

During the nineteenth century, economics emerged as a recognisable and increasingly technical science of human behaviour and the production, distribution, and consumption of goods and services. Yet no amount of…

An understanding of how Britain’s electoral system operated is crucial in getting to grips with many other aspects of politics during this period, notably the development of political parties and…

Following the loss of the American colonies in the 1780s, the British Empire began to shift away from a dependence on mercantile trade and the geography of the Atlantic and…

By 1914, almost half a century after the first mass petition for women’s suffrage was presented to the House of Commons by John Stuart Mill in 1866, the campaign for…

In the wake of the French Revolution of 1789, a wide-ranging debate about the nature of Britain’s political institutions began. William Cobbett summarised the case for change when he described…

From the reflections prompted by the French Revolution in the closing decades of the eighteenth century to the debates surrounding the emergence of socialism in the late nineteenth century, this…

At the end of the eighteenth century, most politicians would have thought of themselves as Whigs, in that they supported the constitutional arrangements between the monarchy, the House of Lords,…

Religion played a prominent role in British politics during the long nineteenth century, determining both the terms upon which politics was conducted and the subject matter of many important debates.…

At the end of the eighteenth century, Britain’s central state assumed few other core responsibilities than defending the realm and administering the taxes required to fund the army and navy.…

Britain’s leading role in the defeat of France during the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars (1793–1802, 1803–15) gave it a major part in European affairs between 1815 and 1914. However, the…