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Seminar 5

Seminar Questions:

  • Were the Jacobites ever a serious threat in Britain between 1689 and 1746?
  • How independent were voters during the First Age of Party?
  • Examine the transition from revolution to Robinocracy.
  • How far can Walpole's England be described as ‘politically stable’?
  • Is the ‘Age of Oligarchy’ an apt description of the reigns of George I and II?
  • Did ‘party’ disappear from politics during the reigns of George I and George II?
  • How widespread was radicalism and dissent during the so-called Age of Oligarchy?
  • What was left of Toryism following the Hanoverian succession?

Reading

See O’Gorman, The Long Eighteenth century, Holmes, Making of a Great Power and Speck, Stability and Strife

J Black, Britain in the Age of Walpole

L Colley, In Defiance of Oligarchy

L Colley, 'Eighteenth Century English Radicalism before Wilkes', Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 1981

H T Dickinson, Walpole and the Whig Supremacy

M Jacob and J Jacob eds, The Origins of Anglo-American Radicalism Essays by Pocock and Rogers

C Jones ed., Britain in the First Age of Party

I Kramnick, Bolingbroke and his circle: the Politics of Nostalgia

Paul Langford, The Excise Crisis

B Lenman, The Jacobite Risings in Britain 1689-1746

F McLynn, The Jacobites

P Monod, Jacobitism and the English People

J H Plumb, The Growth of Political Stability in England

N Rogers, Whigs and Cities: Popular Politics in the Age of Walpole and Pitt

W A Speck, Stability and Strife, England 1714-1760

W A Speck, 'Whigs and Tories dim their glories' in J Cannon (ed.) The Whig Ascendancy

J Stevenson, Popular Disturbances in England 1700-1832

E P Thompson, Whigs and Hunters

K Wilson, The Sense of the People