Whig Party (Great Britain)

The Whigs were one of the two major political factions in England, later Great Britain, active from the late seventeenth century into the mid nineteenth century, standing in general for limiting royal authority, expanding parliamentary power, and greater religious toleration, with a base among aristocratic landowning families and wealthy merchant interests. Whig political power for most of its history rested on an unreformed, patronage based parliamentary system dominated by those landowning families rather than broad popular representation, a system the Whig led Reform Act of 1832 itself began to dismantle; the party is also credited with backing the abolition of slavery in British colonies. In the 1850s, the Whigs merged with free trade Peelites and reformist Radicals to form the Liberal Party, generally dated to 1859, and the Whig label ceased to have significant political meaning thereafter. This is the original British Whig party, distinct from the unrelated American Whig Party (1833 to 1856) that borrowed its name.