BRLSI invited Professor Joanna Innes, Emeritus Fellow of Somerville College, University of Oxford, to deliver a talk on Tuesday 21 July 2026, 7:30 pm – 9:00 pm BST. Professor Innes’s talk explores how British and American understandings of democracy, once closely related, gradually diverged following the American and French Revolutions, and what this history can tell us about democracy today. Ahead of her talk, we asked her five questions:
1. When the American War of Independence began, many political leaders on both sides of the Atlantic regarded “democracy” as a dangerous idea. What changed in the decades that followed to make democracy a positive political ideal?
The French Revolution had a huge effect in making ‘democracy’ something that it seemed urgent to talk about. Many were attracted by the ideal of equality, including people in both America and Britain, though others worried a lot about what was unfolding in France. Americans came away from that episode thinking that they could claim the concept as their own, and apply it to their broadly more stable institutions and society. Many Britons remained sceptical for a very long time, seeing it as un-British. Though the allied cause in both world wars was presented as the cause of democracy, I’m not sure the concept won complete acceptance in Britain until as recently as 1989! Britons had other ways of thinking about their form of government, which as they saw it had evolved from long before the American and French revolutions.
2. Americans often emphasise liberty and constitutional rights, while Britons tend to emphasise Parliament and representative government. How did these different democratic traditions emerge?
Currently we call a huge variety of regimes democratic, because they possess certain common features, notably broadly based representative government, coupled with liberties of expression and association that make political contestation possible. But these regimes often differ greatly in other ways. The United States was founded as a federation of republics, with an emphasis on the division of power. British government evolved through constitutional monarchy into a system centring on the interaction between ministers and Parliament. It’s not surprising that these different traditions produce different understandings of what we now call ‘democracy’. Though for many decades after American independence, Britons tended to be less struck by these institutional differences than by the different, more popular character of American political culture.
3. Was the divergence between British and American ideas about democracy inevitable, or might events have unfolded very differently?
In both Britain and America, people like to talk about long-run continuities in their histories. Of course, there’s something in that, but it’s easy to understate changes that made the issues look very different at different times. An important theme in my talk will be changes in what people thought the issues were over time. In the 1820s, many American states extended their franchises, and President Andrew Jackson introduced a more populist style of politics. That made Britons and other Europeans see America as even more democratic than it had been at the start. But at the same time they were beginning to think that their own futures might also be democratic, for better or worse, so they looked to the States to think about what those futures might hold, and reflected on whether they might develop different – better or worse — forms of democracy. Following that, the people most sympathetic to American democracy became increasingly likely to deplore its tainting by slavery. If the North hadn’t won the Civil War and abolished slavery, the stock of ‘American democracy’ would undoubtedly have gone down.
4. Many people today worry about political polarisation and declining trust in democratic institutions. Are there lessons from the early history of democracy that can help us understand these challenges?
Historians of democracy generally agree that democracy has always been a problematic political form: at least every other generation produces its own crisis of democracy. If we look at the worries people had about democracy in the eighteenth and much of the nineteenth century, much of it prefigures what we now worry about under the name of ‘populism’ – though the causes, forms and effects of these challenges also differ. I think that realising that democracy has never been plain sailing is a good start. Sad to say, I don’t think there are generic answers as to how one ratchets down levels of crisis. Political crises sometimes burn themselves out, but perhaps after wreaking lots of destruction along the way.
5. If an informed observer from around 1800 could visit Britain and the United States today, what features of each country’s democracy would surprise them most?
First I think they’d be amazed at the sheer power and reach of national governments – though they’d also quickly discern that those have limits, and that often they struggle to deliver. Still, they nurture expectations in their citizens that wouldn’t have been conceivable more than two centuries ago. Then they’d be amazed at the intensity of interaction between government and citizens, in practice and in terms of communication. Then thirdly they’d be amazed that political rights had been extended to all adult citizens, including women. Given all this, I think it would be clear to them that the representative systems they cherished now operate in a much more high pressure environment. But they’d also find much recognisable about the basic framework. If we went back to say 1600, the shock of the new would be much more severe.
Is there anything else you would like to add?
No, I think that’s enough, thanks.
