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Play this game recently? | Can a governing order reform enough to stave off revolution?Reform or Revolution? Britain in the 1840s places students in the British House of Commons across six sittings, from Sir Robert Peel's accession to office in autumn 1841 to the Corn Law crisis of 1846. Each student takes the part of a real Member and pursues that Member's aims through Prime Minister's Questions, floor debate, and division, arguing the great questions of the decade: the Corn Laws and the price of bread, the income tax, the workhouse and factory labor, the place of Catholics and Dissenters in a Protestant state, the government of Ireland, and the Chartist demand for a democracy that does not yet exist. The Parliament they enter divides along fault lines that run through the parties rather than between them, since Peel's Conservative majority contains both the Liberal-Conservatives who follow his project of measured reform and the Traditional Conservatives who hold that a party elected to defend the land and the Church has no business reforming either away, while the Whigs split over how far reform should go and the Radicals share benches with Irish Repealers who deny Westminster's right to govern Ireland at all. Because party discipline in these years remained loose and Members crossed the floor on the merits of a measure, students must build coalitions issue by issue, finding allies across the aisle and opponents within their own ranks. Peel's majority of seventy-six means the opposition cannot defeat him, so a government this secure falls only when its own supporters abandon it. The game asks how a governing order reforms itself without tearing itself apart, what a Member owes his party, his constituents, and his own judgment when the three conflict, and how much of a political settlement's survival turns not on the justice of the arguments made but on who can hold a majority together when the votes are called. |
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Using the Game
Class Size and Scalability Class Time |
GAME MATERIALS
Reacting Consortium members can download all game materials below. You will be asked to sign in before downloading.
Gamebook Students need a Gamebook, which includes directions, resources, and historical context. | Instructor's Manual The Instructor's Manual includes guidance for assigning roles, presenting historical context, assignments, activities and discussion topics, and more. | Role Sheets and Handouts Students also need a Role Sheet, which contains biographical information, role-specific resources or assignments, and their character's secret victory objectives. |
Additional Resources
Joseph Sramek
Joseph Sramek is Associate Professor of History at Southern Illinois University Carbondale, where his research and teaching fields are modern Britain and its empire, alongside early modern and modern European history. He is the author of two other Reacting to the Past games under review: Politics, Religion, and the Rise of the Public Sphere: England, 1685-1688 and The Condition of England, 1841. His first monograph, Gender, Morality, and Race in Company India, 1765-1858, was published with Palgrave Macmillan in 2011, and he is currently completing a second: Imperial Britishness in Nineteenth-Century India: The Promise of Equal Subjecthood and the Labor of Colonial Difference.
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