The Second Reform Act and the Politics of Empire

Abstract

This essay examines the place of imperial issues in the debates over the Second Reform Act. It argues that contemporaries did not readily associate the British empire with domestic constitutional reform in the 1860s; that relatively few references were made to imperial questions in the course of the debates; and that those references were of limited significance to the framing and interpretation of the legislation. It suggests, furthermore, that the act exercised minimal influence on the ways in which the empire was discussed immediately after 1867. The essay goes on to argue that this separation between visions of domestic constitutional reform and visions of empire in the 1860s had a number of causes, but that it was in large part a consequence of the resolution of specific anxieties about imperial policy, which had made imperial government a topic of sustained debate at home between the late 1820s and early 1850s.