THE TIME OF POLITICS AND THE POLITICS OF TIME: EXPLORING THE ROLE OF TEMPORALITY IN BRITISH CONSTITUTIONAL DEVELOPMENT DURING THE LONG NINETEENTH CENTURY By Ryan Vieira, B.A., M.A. A Thesis Submitted to the School of Graduate Studies In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Doctor of Philosophy i Doctor of Philosophy (2011) McMaster University (History) Hamilton, Ontario Title: The Time of Politics and the Politics of Time: Exploring the Role of Temporality in British Constitutional Development during the Long Nineteenth Century Author: Ryan Vieira, B.A., M.A. (Carleton University) Supervisor: Professor Stephen Heathorn Number of Pages: ix, 284 ii Abstract “The Time of Politics and the Politics of Time: Exploring the Role of Temporality in British Constitutional Development during the Long Nineteenth Century,” studies the role of time in the development of Britain’s liberal democracy. Conceptually, it explores time both as a structure that the procedural framework of the British Parliament produced and as an historical perception that the technological culture of modernity constructed. In both cases, the study focuses on the constitutional significance of perceived fluctuations within the scarcity of political time as well as imagined changes in the pace and continuity of history. Methodologically, I use these conceptualizations of time in order to examine the intersection of four seemingly disparate political phenomena in Victorian and Edwardian Britain: namely, the perceived expansion of democracy, the instrumentalization of rationality in political culture, the devaluation of deliberative practices as forms of political action, and the rise of mass political dissatisfaction with the efficiency of Parliament. iii Acknowledgments This dissertation could not have been completed without the assistance of a number of individuals. I owe a great debt to my supervisor Dr. Stephen Heathorn whose guidance, patience and commitment to original thinking helped to provide an excellent atmosphere for academic research. I am indebted as well to the other members of my supervisory committee, Dr. Pamela Swett and Dr. Michael Gauvreau, for having read through a number of drafts and for always providing helpful, insightful and supportive comments. I would like to also thank my colleagues in the graduate history program at McMaster University for making the past four years enjoyable and intellectually stimulating. Ron Collier and Leanna Fong deserve special mention for having read through parts of my work and for having collaborated with me on panels at the NECBS, PCCBS, and MACBS. I also owe thanks to Hannah Elias for her help during the research stage of this project and for her assistance and company while I was in London. I want to express my thanks as well to my colleagues who attended an early presentation of my research and who assisted me with comments and questions. This project has been completed with the financial assistance of the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council, the Ontario Graduate Scholarship, and McMaster University. I greatly appreciate this support and, as a recipient of public funds, I hope that the ideas expressed in this dissertation will have some public utility. Finally I would like to thank my family. To my wife, Jocelynn Vieira, who has not only put up with being married to a graduate student but who has always supported and iv encouraged my work: I love you very dearly. To my son, Alfred, and daughter, Lillian, who have been my motivation to finish this project. To my mother, Sharon Vieira, who died before this dissertation was complete but who taught me the dignity of hard work. v Table of Contents Introduction 1 Chapter 1 23 Chapter 2 78 Chapter 3 142 Chapter 4 203 Conclusion 258 Bibliography 268 vi Tables and Figures Table 1.1 Sittings per Session 40 Table 1.2 Bills per Session 41 Table 1.3 Notices of Motion per Session 41 Table 1.4 Questions to Ministers per Session 42 Table 1.5 Divisions per Session 42 Table 1.6 Speeches per Session 43 Table 1.7 Private Member’s Bills per Session 46 Table 1.8 Time Consumed by Divisions per Session 51 Table 1.9 Bills to Time Ratio 52 Table 1.10 Time Consumed by Questions 55 Figure 1.1 Shaving the Parliamentary Pig 57 Figure 1.2 Who Would Be A M.P.? 75 Figure 2.1 The Rising Generation – In Parliament 112 vii Figure 2.2 The New Continental Coach – Revolution 115 Figure 2.3 The Hour and the Man 115 Figure 2.4 The British Lion’s Feeding Time 115 Figure 2.5 The Sluggard 115 Figure 2.6 The Sleeping Beauty 117 Figure 2.7 The Boy-of-all-Work 119 Figure 2.8 Lord John Russell at Home 119 Figure 2.9 The Prime Minister’s Holidays 121 Figure 2.10 The Prolix Orator 126 Figure 3.1 The Block on the Line 156 Figure 3.2 Essence of Parliament 157 Figure 3.3 The Parliamentary Engine Driver 157 Figure 3.4 Museum of Modern Antiques 177 Figure 3.5 New Lights for Old 188 Figure 3.6 Mending the Machinery 188 viii Figure 3.7 The Old Horse 188 Figure 3.8 Boycotted 190 Figure 3.9 Essence of Parliament 192 Figure 3.10 Strangling the Monster 192 Figure 3.11 The Irish Devil Fish 192 Figure 3.12 On His Way 193 Figure 3.13 The Parliamentary Armoured Train 193 Figure 4.1 History Reverses Itself 230 ix Ph.D. Thesis, Ryan Vieira, McMaster University, Department of History Introduction: The Time of Politics and the Politics of Time: Exploring the Role of Temporality in British Constitutional Development during the Long Nineteenth Century This dissertation studies the role of time in the nineteenth and early twentieth- century development of Britain’s liberal democracy. Conceptually, it explores time both as a structure that the institutional and procedural framework of the British Parliament produced and as an historical perception that the instrumental (or means/ends rational) and technological culture of modernity constructed. In both cases, the study focuses on the constitutional significance of perceived fluctuations within the scarcity of political time as well as imagined changes in the pace and continuity of history. Methodologically, I use these conceptualizations of time in order to examine the intersection of four seemingly disparate political phenomena in Victorian and Edwardian Britain: namely, the perceived expansion of democracy, the instrumentalization of rationality in political culture (signified most explicitly by the imaginative transformation of Parliament from the “grand inquest of the nation” to the “legislative machine”), the devaluation of deliberative practices as forms of political action, and the rise of mass political dissatisfaction with the efficiency of Parliament. The study has two main arguments regarding the above listed points of intersection. First it argues that the perceived expansion of democracy in Britain and a rising sense of the public gaze amongst parliamentarians increased the amount of work demanded of the House of Commons and thus enhanced the degree to which law-making was a time-sensitive endeavour. This process facilitated a re-prioritization of parliamentary business that conceptually divorced “work” from “talk” (legislative 1 Ph.D. Thesis, Ryan Vieira, McMaster University, Department of History production from legislative deliberation) and led to the recognition that the law-making practices of the House of Commons required acceleration. While initially motivated by a structural shift in time-scarcity, however, the adoption of acceleratory reforms proceeded at a pace that was largely determined by changing visions of continuity/discontinuity in historical time, which manifested themselves in the perceived extent of the connection/disconnection between experience and expectation. When these two categories became divorced at the end of the century, major procedural reforms took place which privileged the action-based executive at the expense of the deliberative privileges of the legislature. Put differently, the study’s first argument suggests that the temporality of modernity circumscribed the potential for deliberative democracy in British constitutional development. The second argument posed in this study concludes that the increasing cultural prevalence of a distinction between experience and expectation as well as the growth and persistence of an image of parliamentary inefficiency helped to create, by the Edwardian period, a new time-based issue for political movements to contest: namely, the appropriate speed of political and legislative action. This temporality, in concert with the Edwardian experience of relative economic and military decline, provided a discursive terrain conducive to the emergence of alarmist political rhetoric which extolled the virtue of efficient political action at the expense of open-ended public political debate. While an emphasis on the virtue of action over talk was a central feature of a number of extra- institutional political movements, such as was evident in the “Deeds not Words” slogan of the Women’s Social and Political Union, the present study focuses its analysis on the 2 Ph.D. Thesis, Ryan Vieira, McMaster University, Department of History linguistic structure of the national efficiency movement and its eventual infusion of the rhetoric deployed by Joseph Chamberlain’s movement for tariff reform and imperial union. As we will see, the discursive structure of these movements actively pursued the construction of a “national time” that was defined by scarcity and discontinuity. In these ways, the cultural restriction of deliberative practices in the Edwardian public sphere contained distinct lines of continuity with the procedural limitation of discussion in Parliament.1 Taken together, the two arguments of this study suggest that a series of transformations within the “time of politics” (the perceived temporal dimension of politics) helped to produce a “politics of time” (the linguistic negotiation of temporality) which ultimately effected a fundamental shift in British political culture, one which significantly limited the potential for deliberative democracy.