In the aftermath of the Seven Years’ War, when a variety of conquered and ceded territories became part of an expanding British Empire, crucial struggles emerged about what it meant to be a “British subject.” In Grenada, Quebec, Minorca, Gibraltar, and Bengal, individuals debated the meanings and rights of subjecthood, with many capitalizing on legal ambiguities and local exigencies to secure access to political and economic benefits. In the hands of inhabitants and colonial administrators, subjecthood became a shared language, practice, and opportunity as individuals proclaimed their allegiance to the crown and laid claim to a corresponding set of protections. Approaching subjecthood as a protean and porous concept, rather than an immutable legal status, Subjects and Sovereigns demonstrates that it was precisely subjecthood’s fluidity and imprecision rendered it useful to a remarkably diverse group of individuals. This book revisits the traditional bond between subject and sovereign, arguing that this relationship endured as a powerful site for claims-making throughout the eighteenth century. Muller analyzes both legal understandings of subjecthood, as well as the popular tradition of declaring rights, to demonstrate why subjects believed they were entitled to make requests of their sovereign. She reconsiders narratives of upheaval and transformation during the Age of Revolution and insists on the relevance and utility of existing structures of state and sovereign. Emphasizing the stories of subjects who successfully leveraged their loyalty and negotiated their status, Subjects and Sovereign also explores how and why subjecthood remained an organizing and contested principle of the eighteenth-century British Empire.
This article uncovers a transimperial culture of petitioning that eased the transition for subjects who moved between the French and British empires. Although the petition was hailed as the birthright of Britons, and has consistently drawn attention from historians of Britain and its empire, this did not mean that petitioning was unknown elsewhere. Indeed, Quebec, which was transferred from France to Britain at the close of the Seven Years’ War (1756–63) and experienced lengthy periods of both French and British rule, provides an ideal site through which to document written traditions of expressing grievance. This article reveals not only that French subjects were familiar with addressing the monarch well before the British conquest, but also suggests an important continuity of form that transcended differences of language, shifting regimes, and imperial rivalries. The analysis of petitions from Quebec both before and after 1759 testifies to an identifiable commensurability in the lived experiences of inhabitants across the French and British empires, just as it underscores the petition's similar function in the overseas colonies more broadly. The petition's value to both subjects and sovereigns – its role in mediating relations between them across the globe – helps to explain its continued relevance in these two monarchical empires.
Subjecthood is most generally the state or condition of being a subject of a monarch. Although subjecthood was not actually a mainstay of 17th- and 18th-century vernaculars, it is a helpful term to evoke the legal and personal relationship between subject and sovereign that defined belonging in monarchical societies. The term simultaneously calls to mind the status, practices, and qualities associated with being a subject of a sovereign. Like citizenship, subjecthood implies that there is a larger community of belonging. With subjecthood, however, the community is one composed of subjects rather than of citizens. While citizenship and nationality are arguably more familiar terms, each relies on the relationship between a person and a state, rather than a person and a monarch, to define boundaries between peoples and nations. Subjecthood, like citizenship, also implies a sense of reciprocity, as there is an understanding that certain duties are owed by the subject to the monarch and that certain protections are owed by the monarch to the subject. Since it was the bond between subject and sovereign that was foundational to monarchical states and empires, subjecthood remains crucial to understanding the societies of the Atlantic world. Although citizenship studies has flourished for decades, scholarship focused on subjecthood, and more particularly on its meanings and implications, is very recent. Indeed, while legal shifts in subject status have consistently engaged historians, analysis of how individuals leveraged subjecthood, and of subjecthood’s political, cultural, and social significances, is only beginning to emerge. In general, the ways in which subjecthood, citizenship, and nationality can be related, as well as the ways in which they diverge, have remained largely unexplored and require more nuanced analysis. This entry identifies some of the most dynamic fields of inquiry, dividing recent scholarship into five categories: (1) primary and secondary sources that consider subjecthood primarily from a legal perspective in the (a) British Atlantic and (b) French and Iberian Atlantics; (2) secondary sources that insist on the centrality of monarchy in the Atlantic world; (3) secondary sources that explore the diverse individuals and groups who were recognized as subjects and that seek to understand how subjects leveraged their status in the (a) British Atlantic and (b) French and Iberian Atlantics; (4) primary and secondary sources that examine the rights and privileges often attributed to subjects; (5) secondary studies that examine the historical interconnections between subject and citizen. Although a majority of these sources address subjecthood in the British Atlantic of the 17th and 18th centuries, this entry also identifies emerging themes in studies of subjecthood across the French and Iberian Atlantics.
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