An Historical Essay on the English Constitution: Or, an Impartial Inquiry into the Elective Power of the People, from the First Establishment of the Saxons in This Kingdom. Wherein the Right of Parliament, to Tax Our Distant Provinces...
- Obadiah Hulme (author)
- Jack P. Greene (collection editor)
This 1771 pamphlet, published anonymously (though attributed to Allan Ramsay) under the name Obadiah Hulme, examines the English constitution through the lens of its Saxon origins, focusing on the historical basis of the people’s elective power in Parliament. Its central argument extends this constitutional inquiry to a pressing contemporary issue: defending Parliament’s right to tax Britain’s American colonies. The work sits within the broader pamphlet literature of the era debating the constitutional legitimacy of colonial taxation in the lead-up to the American Revolution.
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The text of these 18th century pamphlets has been converted by machine from scanned PDFs of the original microfilm copies. While the text has been machine-proofed, transcription errors may still remain. For example, the 18th-century long S, ſ , may be rendered as “f,” some words may be incorrectly transcribed, and there may be repeated words or phrases.