Developing the insights of the new cultural history of politics, this book reexamines the debates over the meaning of the English constitution from the late eighteenth to the early twentieth centuries, and establishes clearly its centrality to our understanding of English politics, history and national identity. With contributions from some of the most innovative historians in the field, a challenging rereading is provided not only of nineteenth-century politics, but of the current state of English political and cultural history.

This ambitious and provocative study provides a unique narrative of nineteenth-century English political history. Based on extensive research the book draws on critical theory to read and interpret a vast range of oral, visual and printed sources, in an attempt to expand our conception of the politics of the period. Read in the context of such sources, nineteenth-century English politics becomes resolved into a story about the struggle to define the nation's constitution, past, present and future. It suggests the existence of a popular strain of English libertarian politics, albeit one whose...

In this wide-ranging volume, leading scholars across several disciplines--history, literature, sociology, and cultural studies--investigate the nature of liberalism and modernity in imperial Britain since the eighteenth century. They show how Britain's liberal version of modernity (of capitalism, democracy, and imperialism) was the product of a peculiar set of historical circumstances that continues to haunt our neoliberal present.