Property rights and competing for the affections of Demos: The Impact of the 1867 Reform Act on stock prices

The 1867 Reform Act in Britain extended the electoral franchise to the skilled but propertyless urban working classes. Using stock market data and exploiting the fact that foreign and domestic equities traded simultaneously on the London market, this paper finds that investors in British firms reacted negatively to the passage of this Act. We suggest that this finding is consistent with investors foreseeing future alterations of property rights arising from the pressure that the large newly enfranchised group would bring to bear on government policy. We also suggest that our findings appear to be more consistent with the Tory political competition explanation for the Act rather than the Whig threat-of-revolution explanation.

‘”Like an Old Cathedral City”: Belfast Welcomes Queen Victoria, August 1849’,

Belfast, with its history of communal violence, is normally seen as lying outside the mainstream of nineteenth-century British urban development. The visit of Queen Victoria in 1849 suggests a more complex, less linear picture. What emerges is an urban identity in transition, in which aspirations to conform to an ideal of civic harmony temporarily overrode acute sectarian and political divisions, where pride in recent economic achievement sat uneasily alongside an awareness of the town’s newcomer status, and where an emerging sense of regional difference competed with a continuing assumption of Irish identity.