Belfast Politics
Thoughts on the British Constitution

Author Biography

Rev. William Bruce (1757-1841) And Henry Joy (1754-1835) were leading cultural and political figures in late eighteenth-century Belfast, prominent in the Irish Volunteer movement and with many links to the British parliamentary reform cause. While retaining their commitment to substantial Parliamentary reform, Bruce and Joy eventually joined the Belfast yeomanry corps before the outbreak of the 1798 rebellion to resist domestic insurrection and foreign invasion and subsequently also became supporters of the Act of Union. John Bew is completing a PhD in history at Pembroke College, Cambridge.

Description

Belfast Politics, arguably one of the most important texts in modern Irish history, appeared in 1794 as a collection of twenty essays outlining a moderate political position in the increasingly polarised politics of 1790s Ireland. It contains the seeds of the so-called 'transformation' of so many late eighteenth-century Ulster radicals into the Unionists of the early nineteenth-century. Although sharing many of the political principles and much of the language which inspired the United Irishmen, including support for the American Revolution and the use of civic humanist and Enlightenment discourse, Bruce and Joy maintained that these ideas were consistent with, and best served within, the framework of the British constitution, and their book was unique in bringing an inclusive notion of 'Britishness' to the mainstream Irish reform movement.