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Aaron Graham receives Parliamentary History prize
23 January 2018
Congratulations to Leverhulme Early Career Fellow Dr Aaron Graham, who has been awarded the Parliamentary History Essay Prize 2017 for an article entitled 'Legislatures, Legislation and Legislating in the British Atlantic, 1692-1800'. The prize is awarded to early-career researchers by the journal Parliamentary History for the best essay submitted on an historical subject related to the history of parliaments and representative institutions in Britain, Ireland, and British colonial dependencies.
Using a new database of the legislation passed by (almost) every British colony in North America and the West Indies, Aaron's article identifies a huge upsurge in legislative output in the two decades before 1775 but argues that this was a product rather than a cause of the drift towards the American Revolution. It was commended by the panel as 'an ambitious survey, taking in patterns of legislation across the British North American colonies and Caribbean plantations and making a valuable contribution to debates over the American Revolution, the fiscal-military state, and the Atlantic world … it is impressively wide-ranging and cogently argued.' The article will appear in the October 2018 issue of Parliamentary History.