Negotiating Political Power ‘Indoors’

This chapter delves into the Georgian political world, noting that it relied crucially upon negotiation. The chapter emphasizes that many Georgians were deeply hostile to ideological conflict and civil strife. They did not want a return to the bloodshed of the mid-seventeenth-century civil wars. Given its pluralist networks, the chapter defines the Georgian political world as one of an emergent constitutionalism. It argues that it was not an absolutist ancien regime on a par with Spain or France. It had an army but was not a militarised state on a par with eighteenth-century Prussia. It was ruled by an oligarchy, meaning the rule of the few, but this oligarchy was broad-based and economically diversified. The chapter looks at the prevalent culture of individual ‘rights’, claimed by a wide sector of the adult male population, including (in England) the right to participate in the jury system. It then considers a tradition of political due process and ‘reason’.