Partisan Politics: Looking for Consensus in Eighteenth-Century Towns

New understandings of the middle order and of the post-1688 English Parliament have shifted the focus from Westminster to the constituencies in the study of eighteenth-century politics. It was the towns, and especially the smaller parliamentary boroughs, that set much of the legislative agenda and which defined partisanship. This is also where religious tension was most intense and enduring.

Yet there has never been a thoroughgoing comparative study of small-town economy, religion, governme...