The Specter of Jacobitism and the Securing of Britain’s Financial Revolution
Abigail Swingen, Associate Professor of History, Texas Tech University
During the early 1700s, both Tories and Whigs utilized inflammatory rhetoric to portray their political adversaries as dangerous to the nation. Tories saw Whigs as undermining the monarchy and established Church, while Whigs painted Tories with the broad brush of “Jacobitism” to insinuate that Tories posed a threat to the post-1688 constitution. What has sometimes been overlooked is how the Whig establishment utilized the idea that a Jacobite insurrection or invasion, or a Tory government sympathetic to the Jacobite cause, would destabilize the nation’s nascent yet surprisingly complex public funding and financial system. This paper will explore the ways the Whig political establishment utilized this perceived threat to secure their political entrenchment by portraying Tories as Jacobites and therefore dangerous to the financial security of the state and British society. The use of such rhetoric became one ideological strategy that helped secure establishment Whig control of the government, particularly in the wake of the 1715 Jacobite Rebellion and the South Sea Bubble of 1720.
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The British Studies Seminar brings together scholars to discuss work that addresses the history of Britain and the British Empire from the early modern period to present day. The seminar is co-sponsored by the Graduate Cluster in British Studies at Northwestern, Northwestern History, and the Nicholson Center for British Studies at the University of Chicago.