Parliamentary reform and industrialization

The era of the Industrial Revolution was also a time of important constitutional change in Britain. The Reform Acts of 1832 and 1867, along with other related reforms, fundamentally altered the representational system of the House of Commons and thus changed the character of parliamentary politics. The Reform Acts were partly reactions to immediate political pressures and partly responses to a long-lasting campaign for parliamentary reform. That campaign had started in the 1770s and had survived several periods of apathy and persecution. Since the reform campaign roughly synchronized with the traditional dates for the Industrial Revolution, historians have tended to regard the two developments as somehow interconnected. They have assumed that either reform and industrialization went hand in hand, or else that one change spawned the other. But the demand for parliamentary reform had originated long before the era of the Industrial Revolution (Cannon 1972). Indeed there had been periodic pleas for reform for as long as parliament had been in existence. A few minor reforms had occasionally been effected, but the Crown and the executive persistently impeded more fundamental reform until the mid-nineteenth century.

Most parliamentary reformers, in the period of the Industrial Revolution, were inspired, not by ‘the shock of the new’, but by the precedents of the past.