Dr Ellen Filor (University College London, IASH Fellow): The Roxburghshire Election of 1812: A Referendum on Empire?
Mediating between the opposing forces of reform and corruption, this paper will build on my interest into how supposedly ‘venal’ systems functioned in Georgian Britain. Prior to the Reform Act of 1832, the Scottish electoral system contained many corrupt features: a tiny electorate, faggot votes, bribery and the use of Indian sinecures. Using a single contested election as a casestudy, this talk will examine the local and global issues which shaped such elections. What Roxburghshire in 1812 demonstrates is that elections were not always about what elite managers wanted them to be about. For this election became much more than a local issue of a Tory aristocrat versus an up-start liberal. Held in the shadow of the Napoleonic Wars and an increasingly frail East India Company, it became a referendum on the very shape of the British empire and the impact of this colonialism on the national interests of Scotland.