Chapter 14: The Consent Problem

In 1839, a petition arrived at the Houses of Parliament. It bore over 1.25 million signatures — a staggering number in a nation where only about 800,000 men could vote. The signatories were workers, artisans, parish priests, and small traders. They asked for six things: the vote for every man, a secret ballot, equal electoral districts, payment for members of Parliament, annual elections, and the abolition of property qualifications for standing as an MP.

Parliament refused even to consider it.

In 1842, a second petition arrived. Over three million signatures. Parliament rejected it again.

In 1848 — the year revolutions swept across Europe — a third petition. The organizers claimed six million signatures, though the number was disputed. Parliament rejected it a third time, and this time, the movement that had carried the petitions broke apart.

The Chartists, as they were called, had failed. Every petition dismissed. Every demand refused. Their leadership fractured between those who favored constitutional methods and those who were preparing for armed uprising. By the mid-1850s, Chartism as a national movement was dead.

And yet. By 1918, five of the six demands had been enacted into law. Property qualifications for MPs were abolished in 1858. The secret ballot was introduced in 1872. MPs began receiving payment in 1911. Universal male suffrage came in 1918. Only annual parliaments — the least practical of the six — was never adopted.

The pattern is worth holding in the mind, because it will repeat throughout this chapter: demands rejected as dangerous radicalism become accepted norms within a generation or two. The governance system resists expanding its feedback mechanisms — resists including new voices, new interests, new perspectives — until the cost of exclusion exceeds the cost of inclusion. The Chartists' ideas won. The Chartists themselves were defeated. This is how governance changes: not through the victory of movements but through the slow, grudging absorption of their arguments by the institutions that opposed them.

The revolutions of the previous chapter had established a new vocabulary: rights, consent, popular sovereignty. But they had also established a new hypocrisy. Every revolution proclaimed governance by consent of the governed. None extended consent to the full population they governed. The nineteenth century was the era when that contradiction became unbearable — when the people excluded from "the people" began to demand inclusion, and the people already included fought, with remarkable ferocity, to keep them out.

The question was never abstract. It was always about power. Who gets to vote determines who gets to govern. Who governs determines whose interests are served. Expanding the franchise was not a matter of principle being gradually recognized. It was a political contest, fought by real people with real interests, in which the outcome was never guaranteed.

The most dramatic — and most instructive — example of franchise expansion and its violent reversal unfolded in the American South.

During Reconstruction (1865-1877), formerly enslaved Black Americans achieved political participation on a scale that astonished the nation and terrified those who had enslaved them. By 1868, over 80 percent of eligible Black men had registered to vote. Hiram Rhodes Revels was elected to the U.S. Senate in 1870. Black leaders won elections at every level — sheriffs, state legislators, lieutenant governors, members of Congress. Constitutional conventions were rewritten with Black participation. Schools for Black children became a priority of the new governments.

W. E. B. Du Bois, in his masterwork Black Reconstruction in America (1935), called this "the most radical experiment in interracial democracy in U.S. history." He wrote it against a wall of hostile scholarship that portrayed Black political participation as incompetent, corrupt, and doomed. Du Bois's prefatory note cuts through the historiographic fog with devastating clarity: "I am going to tell this story as though Negroes were ordinary human beings, realizing that this attitude will from the first seriously curtail my audience."

What Du Bois documented was not merely political participation but functional governance. Black officeholders passed public education laws, established hospitals, built roads, reformed tax systems. They governed. And the governance was, by the standards of the era, competent and progressive.

The response was not political opposition. It was war.

White supremacist violence spread across the South with systematic intent. The Memphis Massacre of 1866. The Colfax Massacre of 1873 — where an estimated 150 Black men were killed, many after surrendering. The Hamburg Massacre of 1876. These were not isolated incidents. They were a coordinated campaign to destroy Black political power through terror. Du Bois's chapter "The Propaganda of History" documented how historians had conspired to erase — or, in his words, had ignored "the ferocity of the violence that defeated Reconstruction."

The Compromise of 1877 made the betrayal official. In exchange for resolving the disputed 1876 presidential election, federal troops were withdrawn from the South. Without military protection, the institutions of Black governance were dismantled. The Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments remained on the books — formal inclusion persisted — but the substance was gutted. Poll taxes, literacy tests, grandfather clauses, and pervasive terror reduced Black voter registration to near zero across the former Confederacy. The feedback loop between Black citizens and responsive governance was created, demonstrated, and then severed by violence.

The lesson is harrowing: formal rights, without the power to enforce them, are parchment barriers against determined opposition. Inclusion on paper means nothing if the people with guns disagree. The Reconstruction experiment proved that Black Americans could govern. Its destruction proved that the capacity to govern does not protect against the willingness to kill.

Meanwhile, in the largest empire the world had ever seen, hundreds of millions of people were governed without their consent by a small island nation that had just fought a civil war over the principle that consent matters.

British colonial governance — and French, and Dutch, and Belgian, and Portuguese — was the most systematic contradiction of social contract theory ever practiced. Billions of people were governed by systems they never agreed to, through institutions they had no voice in creating. The social contract's requirement of consent was simply discarded. And the mechanism through which this discarding was achieved — particularly in British Africa — was a governance innovation of extraordinary cynicism.

Lord Frederick Lugard, drawing on his experience in Northern Nigeria, developed the doctrine of indirect rule. The principle was simple: govern Africans through their own institutions. Find the chiefs. Elevate their authority. Let them administer local affairs — taxation, justice, land allocation — under British "advisory supervision." The system was, above all, cheap. Britain could not afford to administer its vast territories directly. Indirect rule allowed a handful of European officers to govern millions through indigenous intermediaries.

But Mahmood Mamdani, in Citizen and Subject (1996), exposed the sleight of hand. The chiefs under indirect rule often exercised more power than they had held traditionally. Their authority was backed by colonial state power — which traditional accountability mechanisms could not check. Colonial governance preserved the form of indigenous authority while destroying its substance. Chiefs looked traditional but answered to colonial officers. Custom was invoked but reinterpreted to serve colonial interests. The feedback loop between the governed and their governors was not eliminated — it was redirected. It now ran upward, to the colonial administrator, rather than downward, to the community.

And indirect rule created something else: hardened ethnic identities. Colonial administrators, needing legible administrative categories, drew sharp boundaries between groups that had previously been fluid. "Tribal" identities were codified, catalogued, and made the basis of administrative organization. Groups that had intermarried, traded, and blended for centuries were sorted into distinct categories with distinct "customary" laws. The ethnic tensions that would tear post-colonial states apart were, in many cases, administrative constructions — governance categories that became political identities.

Colonial governance was governance without feedback. The governed could not replace their governors. They could not modify the laws that bound them. They could not even, in most cases, appeal to the nominal principles — justice, rule of law, consent — that the colonizing powers proclaimed as their own highest values. It was the social contract's promise of universal rights, applied everywhere except where the people governed were not white.

And then there were the women.

On September 19, 1893, in the small, remote, recently self-governing colony of New Zealand, the governor signed the Electoral Act. All women — including Māori women — who were British subjects aged twenty-one and over could now vote in parliamentary elections. New Zealand became the first self-governing country in the world to extend the franchise to women.

The campaign that produced this result was led by Kate Sheppard, the National Superintendent for Franchise and Legislation of the Women's Christian Temperance Union. Sheppard's strategy was the petition — the same tool the Chartists had used, and with better results. In 1891: nine thousand signatures. In 1892: nearly twenty thousand. In 1893: nearly thirty-two thousand — almost a quarter of the adult European female population of New Zealand. The final petition, 270 meters long, was unrolled across the chamber of the House of Representatives — the physical scale of the demand made visible. The members could see, in sheepskin and ink, the scale of the demand.

Why New Zealand first? Several factors converged. A small, recently established settler society had weaker entrenched elites than older democracies. The temperance movement connected women's voting to moral governance — liquor interests opposed suffrage because they expected women to vote dry. Māori men had already voted since 1867, establishing a precedent for expanded franchise. And Sheppard's movement was exceptionally organized — methodical, persistent, and strategically brilliant in its use of petitions as political theater.

What followed was a slow, uneven, global cascade. Australia in 1902 — though Aboriginal women and men were excluded until 1962. Finland in 1906 — the first country where women could both vote and stand for election. Norway in 1913. Denmark in 1915. Russia in 1917, through revolution. The United Kingdom in 1918, partially — women over thirty who met property requirements — and fully in 1928. The United States in 1920, through the Nineteenth Amendment. France not until 1944. Switzerland not until 1971. Saudi Arabia, in limited form, not until 2015.

The timeline reveals a governance generalization: franchise expansion tends to occur first in newer, smaller democracies with weaker institutional inertia, and last in older democracies with deeply entrenched power structures. France — the country that proclaimed the Rights of Man most loudly — was among the last Western nations to extend those rights to women. Switzerland — the country most associated with direct democracy — was among the last to let women participate in it.

Did expanding the franchise actually change anything?

The cynical answer — that voting is symbolic, that real power lies elsewhere — is contradicted by the evidence.

When American women got the vote, state governments immediately began spending more on health, education, and children's welfare. The pattern was consistent across states and unmistakable in the data: the franchise changed policy because it changed who politicians had to listen to. Mothers who could vote produced legislators who funded children's hospitals. The connection was not sentimental. It was mechanical. A new constituency entered the feedback loop, and the loop responded.

The people who had argued that women's votes would change nothing were wrong. The people who had argued that women's votes would change everything were also wrong. What changed was the range of interests the governance system could detect — the bandwidth of its feedback mechanisms. More voices meant more information. More information meant more responsive policy. This is not idealism. It is signal processing.

But the evidence also reveals a harder truth. The effects grew over time, meaning that legal inclusion did not produce immediate substantive power. Cultural barriers, organizational barriers, the simple unfamiliarity of political participation — all persisted after the legal barriers fell. Formal inclusion was necessary but not sufficient. Getting the vote was the beginning of a longer struggle, not its culmination.

Step back now and look at the whole century.

The Chartists demanded inclusion and were rejected; their ideas won anyway, absorbed by the system that had refused them. Black Americans during Reconstruction demonstrated that inclusion works — that expanded governance produces responsive governance — and were met with a campaign of terror that reversed their gains for nearly a century. Colonial subjects were governed without any pretense of consent, through systems designed to extract resources while preserving the appearance of indigenous authority. Women, globally, fought for decades to breach a franchise boundary that every democracy claimed was natural and permanent — and breached it, country by country, petition by petition, generation by generation.

The pattern that connects these struggles is the pattern that has run through every chapter of this chronicle, but here it becomes unavoidable: those in power define "the people" as people like themselves. The Chartists were excluded because they lacked property. Black Americans were excluded because they lacked whiteness. Colonial subjects were excluded because they lacked European ancestry. Women were excluded because they lacked maleness. In every case, the exclusion was defended not as prejudice but as nature — as a simple recognition of who was and was not capable of governance. In every case, the excluded proved the defense false. And in every case, the proof was insufficient on its own. It required organization, persistence, sacrifice, and the willingness to keep demanding inclusion long after the first demand was rejected.

The nineteenth century did not solve the consent problem. It exposed it. It demonstrated, with painful clarity, that the social contract's promise of governance by consent is not a fact but an aspiration — and that realizing the aspiration requires not just philosophical argument but political power. The franchise is a feedback mechanism. Like all feedback mechanisms, it works only when the signal is allowed to flow. And every expansion of the franchise is a battle over who gets to send a signal and who must remain silent.

The twentieth century would test these feedback mechanisms to destruction — through world wars, totalitarian experiments, decolonization, and the construction of welfare states that, for a brief period, came closer than any previous governance system to fulfilling the social contract's original promise. But the consent problem never disappeared. It merely changed form.

It is still changing now.