The Sense of the People: Politics, Culture and Imperialism in England, 1715-1785.

Students of eighteenth-century Britain have eagerly anticipated this book, and it will not disappoint them. Kathleen Wilson is to be commended for the meticulousness of her research, the general clarity of her prose, and the acuity of her thematic perception. The Sense of the People is a book of the first importance, and it promises to be required reading in graduate seminars for some time to come.

Wilson's main argument is that the "sense of the people" was an ideological concept of great importance throughout the eighteenth century. It was a discursive weapon that the Whig oligarchy's critics used to considerable effect in legitimating extra-parliamentary politics in general, and opposition to ministerial conduct in particular. The "sense of the people" provided alternative definitions of patriotism - of what was politically best for Britons - to that offered by Whig ministers and their cronies, and it "challenged the seemingly ineffable structures and imperatives of patrician hegemony by defining the patriot through position and practice rather than birth, through merit and discipline rather than entitlement." (p. 438)

The first part of Wilson's book charts the course of this challenge. One of her main points is that it was by no means confined to London; provincial towns had their own vibrant political cultures, in which "the sense of the people" was vigorously debated. In her first chapter, Wilson builds on Peter Borsay's important work on the "English urban renaissance," tracing the lineaments of this provincial urban setting through the growth of the newspaper press and of voluntary associations - assembly rooms, theaters, hospitals, and the like. She convincingly argues that this culture "owed far less to aristocratic dominance or the emergency of an 'autonomous bourgeois public' than to the struggles within the urban milieu to reconstitute power and authority in ways that refused the hierarchies of the old regime while also containing their own strategies of exclusion and containment." (p. 28) In other words, while the press often invoked the "sense of the people" to justify widespread political participation, it tended to equate "the people" with white, well-to-do, non-Catholic Englishmen; the idea of "the people" was carefully restricted even in oppositional linguistic practice.

Chapter two deftly traces the multiple uses of the extra-parliamentary "people" from the Hanoverian succession to Walpole's heyday. Wilson shows that the court Whigs engaged in a large-scale propaganda campaign to try to win popular support for the new regime, that the Tories gave as good as they got, and that both sides enjoyed popular support at just about every social level. But the Whigs' increasingly authoritarian governing style enabled their opponents to use patriotic and libertarian language against them to considerable effect, especially during the Excise crisis of 1734.

Chapter three is an especially important contribution to the literature, as it is one of the first explorations of the political uses of British empire in the mid-eighteenth century. In it, Wilson provides a corrective to Linda Colley's pioneering work, which treats imperialism as an almost invariably unifying force in British politics, when in fact it was very often a divisive force. Bellicose expansionism provided critics with a stick with which to beat the Whig regime for its ostensibly flaccid and Eurocentric foreign policy: witness the wild popularity of Admiral Vernon, who became a hero among all ranks of Britons for whipping the Spanish and then criticizing the Walpole ministry for its reluctance to fight. Chapter four adds an important dimension to our understanding of Wilkite radicalism, as it shows that the Wilkites drew heavily on the radical Whig language of resistance to create an oppositional "sense of the people" that excoriated the governing elite not only for its exclusivity, but for its putative effeminacy as well. Chapter five is a valuable addition to the scholarship on British responses to the American Revolutionary War. It reveals the enormous strain that the colonial confrontation put on the well-established connection between aggressive imperialism and libertarian radicalism. The second section of the book, comprising the final three chapters, provides detailed (perhaps too detailed) case studies of the ways in which the "sense of the people" was articulated and contested in the cities of Norwich and Newcastle. These meticulously constructed local histories amply support Wilson's assertion of the richness and complexity of urban provincial politics.

Wilson's book is yet another proof of the revival of eighteenth-century British history. John Brewer, Nicholas Rogers, Linda Colley and others have already shown the complexity of a political culture that used to be characterized by elite domination and parliamentary in-fighting tout court, and Wilson of course owes much to their scholarship. What she adds to their work, above all else, is a remarkable sensitivity to the nuances of the language of political opposition. The one substantive criticism I can think of is really just a counsel of excellence: let us hear more about the language of the political status quo. Wilson, like many post-Namierite students of eighteenth-century politics, seems so intent on proving the vibrancy of opposition that she does not adequately account for the resilience of the Whig oligarchy. Surely one reason for its longevity was that ministers often took considerable pains - through speeches, newspapers, and pamphlets - to turn the "sense of the people" into a defensive weapon. In other words, they made palpable efforts to convince "respectable" out-of-doors observers, at least, that the existing constitution in church and state was a guarantor of stability and prosperity for the nation as a whole. Wilson takes a glance at "loyalist" counter-arguments from time to time - after the '15 and the '45 and during the last phase of the American War, for instance - but they remain shadowy. One hopes that at some point she will devote her formidable skills to as detailed an analysis of conservative political language as she provides here for its radical counterparts.

Philip Harling University of Kentucky