history, and prescription with inherent natural law obligations". However, Sidney emphasised the main themes of republicanism and based Whig ideology in the sovereignty of the people by proposing a constitutional reordering that would both elevate the authority of Parliament and democratise its forms. Sidney also emphasised classical republican notions of virtue. Ward says that Locke's liberal Whiggism rested on a radically individualist theory of natural rights and limited government. Tyrrell's moderate position came to dominate Whiggism and British constitutionalism as a whole from 1688 to the 1770s. The more radical ideas of Sidney and Locke, argues Ward, became marginalised in Britain, but emerged as a dominant strand in American republicanism. The issues raised by the Americans, starting with the Stamp Act crisis of 1765, ripped Whiggism apart in a battle of parliamentary sovereignty (Tyrrell) versus popular sovereignty (Sidney and Locke). Across the British Empire Whiggism took different forms in England and Scotland, even though from 1707 the two nations shared a single parliament. While English whiggism had at its heart the power of parliament, creating for that purpose a constitutional monarchy and a permanently Protestant succession to the throne, Scottish Whigs gave a higher priority to using power for religious purposes, including maintaining the authority of the Church of Scotland, justifying the Protestant Reformation and emulating the Covenanters. There were also Whigs in the North American colonies and while whiggism there had much in common with that in Great Britain, it too had its own priorities. In the unfolding of the American Revolution such whiggism became known as republicanism. In India, Prashad (1966) argues that the profound influence of the ideas of Edmund Burke introduced Whiggism into the mainstream of Indian political thought. The Indians adopted the basic assumptions of Whiggism, especially the natural leadership of an elite, the political incapacity of the masses, the great partnership of the civil society and the best methods of achieving social progress, analysing the nature of society and the nation and depicting the character of the ideal state. Further reading Carswell, John, The Old Cause: Three Biographical Studies in Whiggism (London: The Cresset Press, 1954) deals with Thomas Wharton, George Dodington, and Charles James Fox H. T. Dickinson, Walpole and the Whig Supremacy (University of London Press, 1973) Dickinson, H. T. "Whiggism in the eighteenth century", in John Cannon, ed., The Whig Ascendancy: Colloquies on Hanoverian Britain (1981), pp. 28–44 William Herbert Dray,