Reform, radicalism and revolution: Magna Carta in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Britain

Throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries Magna Carta was invoked extensively across Great Britain and its empire. Building on the foundations laid in the seventeenth century it had become a document of international scope and influence as vigorously debated by radicals in Westminster as by lawyers in Bengal or rebels in Massachusetts.¹ Throughout the period Magna Carta was used to champion press freedom and parliamentary reform, to challenge transportation and naval impressment, and in debates to regulate overseas trade and taxation.2 The range of media on which its image was reproduced was as broad and unusual as the principles and