One of the main causes of the American Revolution was the notion of taxation without representation.
Did the George[sup]3[/sup] and Parliament ever consider granting the colonies an MP to represent them in Parliament?
Would this have had too much of an impact on Britain’s Imperial concerns elsewhere to be feasible?
(This topic kind of combines a General Question and an IMHO question. I chose GQ because I am really more interested as to whether this was ever debated and why the conclusion was reached not to allow representation in Parliament.)
As I recall, the British said that the colonies were represented in parliment, because every MP represented the interests of all Englishmen. As to wether they ever considered giving the colonists an MP of their own, I cin’t really say.
Franklin was negotiating for us, & it was going well.
But there was a problem; I believe it had to do with Franklin reading somebody else’s private mail.
Something like that.
Franklin was accused of an ethics violation, & the whole thing fell through.
I’m not an expert on the issue, but my understanding is that the concept of direct representation didn’t really exist back then - for England or America. Most MP’s were representing what, in modern terms, would be called a special interest rather than the population of a given geographic area. There were, for example, “Navy” districts (usually representing towns with navy dockyards) where the MP’s essentially were chosen by the Royal Navy and advocated the RN’s viewpoint in Parliament.
I once read an account where some British politician of the era said that the Americans should have just used this system. American businessmen could have pooled some of their money and “bought” elections in some small burroughs. These MP’s would have then represented the American interests in Parliament.
Did they really think they could get representation in the British parliament??
Here in the north, AFAIR from history class, the issue was more one of self-determination… whether provincial councils elected by the local populace had the authority to conduct their own affairs without being overruled by ‘crown appointed’ officials or not. Admittedly, that was a little later… the farmer’s rebellion and Lord Durham’s report… but it seems relevant. I would think that in those days of slow travel… having the north americans sending representatives back to London would probably not be so effective.
There was an attempt to settle the differences between the British and the Colonials at a house in southern Staten Island, near Tottenville. The Housde is still there. Obviously, they didn’t work out a usable solution. I don’t know if colonia representation was ever pushed as part of the deal there.
Little Nemo’s understanding agrees with my recollection. One of the big obstacles to giving the Colonies direct representation in Parliament is that this would result in a problem amongst all of the native Englishmen, living in England, who didn’t have direct representation themselves. Many, many members of the House of Commons were not chosen by the inhabitants of the districts they ‘represented’.
That was actually the main issue behind the American revolution too. Actually, there were two related issues…
Did Parliament have the authority to impose taxes on the colonies, or should colonial legislatures have the sole taxing power in its colony.
Should Crown officials and appointed colonial governors overrule the colonial legislature
with the third smaller problem:
Should public officials accused of crimes or malfeasance be subject to colonial jurisdiction or not? Does the colony have authority to try crown officials or members of the regular army?
Both sides agreed that direct colonial representation in Parliament was impossible under the transportation and communication conditions of the day.
The British attitude was, “Direct representation is impractical, and unnecessary in any case, since every MP acts in the best wishes of the entire Empire.”
The American attitude was, “Direct representation is impractical, so therefore we should be allowed to manage our own affairs and levy our own taxes.”
No British colony was ever represented in Parliament. Ireland was represented during the years in which it was merged into the United Kingdom (1801 to 1922, and of course the Northern part still is.)
The question is kinda irrelevant. The Americans had different ideas. To quote The Oxford History of the British Empire:
“Decentralized, loose-jointed, and guided by the principles of 1688, the Imperial constitution had allowed Americans to persuade themselves that their elective Assemblies were Houses of Commons in miniature, protecting the rights as Englishmen of every New Englander, New Yorker, Virginian, and Carolinian. No effective rebuttal from Britain had lent credence to these mistaken ideas. So the years of Imperial reform after 1763 inevitably brought confrontation, and Americans, incapable of adapting their ideas to new Imperial realities, rebelled.”
It depends on what you mean by “considered”. The idea did occur, from time to time, to people on both sides. Here is one comment from pamphleteer James Otis:
But, after making this argument, Otis concludes:
Certainly no group of colonists ever mounted an organized lobbying effort for representation. Here is a typical formulation from the First Continental Congress, which dismissed any thought of representation at Westminster in a few words:
On the British side, I don’t claim to be an expert in Parliamentary debates from this period (or any period), but I’m not aware that legislation was ever introduced or any serious advocacy mounted for colonial representation. The most common British counter-argument was “virtual representation”.
Well, were it not for the impracticality, the colonies wouldn’t have been colonies, they would have been an outlying part of Great Britain like the Shetland Islands.
Later on, after the steamboat and telegraph, a few deep thinkers did propose an Imperial Parliament to unite the British Empire. But by that time the “white colonies” already had achieved so much self-government that they had little interest in the project, and racial attitudes at the time didn’t conduce toward representation for persons not of British ancestry.
