Time and Politics: Parliament and the Culture of Modernity in Nineteenth-Century Britain and the British World
Ryan A. Vieira
Abstract
This book is a cultural and transnational history of modern procedural reform in the Westminster parliamentary system. The book centres on the nineteenth-century emergence of a desire to modernize and make more efficient the procedural rules of parliamentary law-making. Contrary to existing interpretations, which see that history as a product of transformations in political structure and practice, this book demonstrates how the evolution of Parliament’s rules was structured by transformations within the wider culture of time. The spread of an increasingly rigorous time discipline in concert wi ... More
This book is a cultural and transnational history of modern procedural reform in the Westminster parliamentary system. The book centres on the nineteenth-century emergence of a desire to modernize and make more efficient the procedural rules of parliamentary law-making. Contrary to existing interpretations, which see that history as a product of transformations in political structure and practice, this book demonstrates how the evolution of Parliament’s rules was structured by transformations within the wider culture of time. The spread of an increasingly rigorous time discipline in concert with a growing consciousness of being modern, this book argues, worked to progressively erode the legitimacy of the historically developed rules of parliamentary debate and law-making while simultaneously implanting new ways of judging the effectiveness of parliamentary institutions. By the 1880s, this process had transformed efficiency into the ultimate criterion of parliamentary effectiveness. Using the conceptual framework of the British World, the book then demonstrates how this new understanding of parliamentary effectiveness was exported to the colonies of settlement through a series of communicative networks and provided colonial parliamentarians with the ability to imagine the inefficiencies of their own legislatures as part of a larger transnational problem.
Keywords:
parliamentary history,
British World,
modernity,
Westminster system,
culture of time,
law-making,
colonial parliament
Bibliographic Information
| Print publication date: 2015 |
Print ISBN-13: 9780198737544 |
| Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: August 2015 |
DOI:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198737544.001.0001 |
