Comment Serials and the Rise of Party Politics in Britain, 1640–1740

A fresh account of how Britain's serial press turned the circulation of commentary about current affairs into a recurring public practice, reshaping debate, readership and partisan culture across the long eighteenth century. The late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries transformed Britain's serial press, reshaping the relationship between news, opinion and public politics. Scholarship has often treated commentary as secondary to the history of news, but the development of eighteenth-century political culture cannot be understood without attention to the regular publication and reading of opinion, analysis and reflection on current affairs. Beginning with civil war newsbooks and tracing their legacy through the Exclusion Crisis, Queen Anne's reign and the age of Walpole, this study offers the first sustained account of the rise of published comment about current affairs in Britain. At its centre is the phenomenon of the "comment serial": a regularly issued publication designed primarily to provide opinion and analysis rather than to report the news itself. The book shows how this form became an important vehicle for political argument, public debate and readerly engagement during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and contributed to the emergence of party politics in Britain. Combining political history, literary studies, book history and media history, the study bridges scholarship on newspapers, journalism, periodical essays and print culture. It places figures including Defoe, Swift, Addison and Steele within a longer tradition of serial commentary, while also recovering less-studied publications and readers. By distinguishing comment from news, it casts new light on partisanship, pamphlet culture, reading practices, public political awareness and the development of the eighteenth-century press, while offering a historically-grounded perspective on enduring questions about news, opinion, fake news and polarisation. EDWARD TAYLOR is a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at the University of Birmingham. His work focuses on the news media and political culture of the early modern period and the eighteenth century.