Hisotyr Coursework

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Tahmid Akthar        A2 History Lecturer: P Holborrow

Question: How far would you agree that fear of popular hostility was the main reason why governments enacted parliamentary reforms in the nineteenth and early twentieth century’s?

There are many arguments as to what was the main reason for the parliamentary reform during the nineteenth and early twentieth century. There is the one argument of that it was the fear and the actual popular pressure which pushed the reform acts through. But however it can also be argued that reform was inevitable and that it was pushed through for party advantage. In this essay I will be dealing with these arguments and coming to a conclusion.

The First Reform Act or the Great Reform Act as it is also known opened the door of reform and never shut. The First Reform Act was a like a tug of war battle between the two parties as each held a case as to why they wanted or not wanted the reform. The Tories were naturally against the idea but however the shocking thing was that the equally aristocratic Whigs wanted the reform. There were many problems to the system and social changes also during that time which warranted the reason for the act. The old system was riddled with corruption and rotten boroughs. This of course constantly favoured the rich who would bribe themselves back into power. Furthermore the rotten borough provided irregular representation especially of the major cities such as Manchester, Birmingham and Leeds. This allowed a lot of power to be held by the landed gentry. However revisionists have opened up a new debate by stating that actually the un reformed system and Old Corruption was in fact quite representative and responsive and that despite the high number of non voters, local people could still express their views and that the local elite had to work hard to keep control of their power. However there is scepticism about this argument as there is a lack of evidence. The changes in British Society was the first in the steps that led to pressure for change. A change in the population growth and growth of towns was mainly down to the industrial revolution which made the people flock from the countryside to the city. However this raised consequences such as it put huge strain on the towns it selves. Furthermore this created discontent amongst the people because major towns which were getting even bigger had no representation until the 1832 act. This also led to an increase in social tension. The industrial revolution also  created a man job losses as well this is because, the old ways of working became out of date this was a particularly true for cotton farm workers. Further pressure came from the fact that there was the new emergence of the middle and working class, with the middle having growing economic power but yielding little political power. With the working class there were earning good wages but however their employers were making massive profits. This had led the working class to form trade unions and take the first steps to pressuring the government. There was fear that the two classes would merge in order for the vote. One big factor which shows that the government may have wilted under public pressure was the fact there was a growing change in ideas. One form of this was the French Revolution in 1789 when the monarch was overthrown; this created the fear amongst the elite that what of the germ of revolution would jump across the channel. This was fear was not helped by the great book by Tom Paine called The Rights of man. This was based on male adult suffrage and derived from the idea of John Locke’s government based on consent of people. This provided pressure to the government as it sold a staggering 200,000 pamphlets within 6 months. This made the people aware of what was happening and created a new style of getting their message across and this was ‘mass demonstration’. Events of mass demonstration were highly popular with the most famous being the Spa Fields demonstration and the Pentrich March and the infamous Peterloo demonstration which led to the killing of 11 people and hundreds injured.

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There was continued pressure during the period of 1828-30. One of these reasons was the pressure from the middle class. The middle class people began to change their mind in the fact that they began to desire moderate change to system in order to protect their growing business interests. The middle class began to side with views of people such as Jeremy Bentham who felt that it was better to safeguard the greatest happiness for the greatest number of people against the selfish interests of the few.  This highlighted their continued resentment of the elite and it was further intensified by ...

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