Whigs and Cities: Popular Politics in the Age of Walpole and Pitt

by Nicholas Rogers

This is the first major study of urban politics in the early Hanoverian era. Rogers challenges the view that the political nation was of minimal significance, and highlights the critical contribution of larger towns to the agitations that beset Walpole and swept Pitt to power. He shows, through a study of Bristol, Norwich, and London, the relative strength of opposition sentiment, the persistence of local antagonisms, and the interplay of economic interest and political clientage. Offering a challenging reinterpretation of the role of the crowd in urban politics, Whigs and Cities sheds new light on the dynamics of urban political culture in the 18th century.

450 pages, Hardcover

First published March 8, 1990

About the author

For the archivist and medieval historian, see Nicholas J. Rogers

Nicholas Rogers is Professor of History at York University, Toronto, Canada. He is the co-author of Eighteenth-Century English Society: Shuttles and Swords (OUP) and the author of Crowds, Culture, and Politics in Georgian Britain (OUP), for which he received the 1999 Wallace K. Ferguson Prize of the Canadian Historical Association for the best book on non-Canadian history.