Writing to the Quaker merchant Joseph Harford in April 1780, Edmund Burke talked of his chances of again representing Bristol in the forthcoming general election. He was reluctant because he stood ‘merely upon publick ground’ and did not have ‘what is called a natural Interest in that City’. By this he meant his appeal rested solely upon his reputation in the public sphere, what he achieved in the ‘Business of Parliament’ for his country and his constituents. In the short time he had been involved in Bristol politics he had been unable to build up the networks that were so useful in eighteenth-century politics: close contacts with important intermediaries in Bristol, links to clubs and associations, a familiarity with those channels of government patronage that would favour his friends and build up dependencies. ‘My circumstances’, Burke explained, ‘have prevented me from cultivating the private regards of the Citizens so much, as in common Course, might have been expected from me.’ In a hierarchical society in which whom you knew and whom you could influence mattered, such contacts were often the fabric of parliamentary politics. At the very least they undergirded the more turbulent shoals of political favour generated in the public domain.

Burke's comment encapsulates one of the central issues that have engaged historians of eighteenth-century politics tout court: the degree to which those politics might be regarded as intensely oligarchical, client based and local in orientation; the extent to which changes in the public sphere, in the modes of communication and culture, created extra-local identities that themselves had political traction.

Sixty years ago the convention was that British politics were intensely oligarchical and elite directed, and Bristol was offered as a classic case. In The Structure of Politics at the Accession of George III, Sir Lewis Namier used Bristol to repudiate the notion that the larger urban constituencies were ideologically independent and hostile to oligarchy. In his view Bristol politics was so dominated by merchant groups and their clubs that they were able to carve up the political representation of the city to their own satisfaction, frequently agreeing to share the representation of this two-member constituency city in ways that denied voter choice.