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Explores the central role of petitions in reshaping the political culture of the United Kingdom in their nineteenth-century heyday.
Since antiquity, European Jewish diaspora communities have used formal appeals to secular and religious authorities to secure favors or protection. Such petitioning took on particular significance in modern dictatorships, often as the only tool left for voicing political opposition. During the Holocaust, tens of thousands of European Jews turned to individual and collective petitions in the face of state-sponsored violence. This volume offers the first extensive analysis of petitions authored by Jews in nations ruled by the Nazis and their allies. It demonstrates their underappreciated value as a historical source and reveals the many attempts of European Jews to resist intensifying persecution and actively struggle for survival.
The first study of petitioning from the late medieval period to the era of e-petitions, Petitions and Petitioning in Europe and North America explains why these practices have been central to the exercise and contestation of power across North America and Europe.
This pioneering work of political history recovers the central and largely forgotten role that petitioning played in the formative years of North American democracy. Known as the age of democracy, the nineteenth century witnessed the extension of the franchise and the rise of party politics. As Daniel Carpenter shows, however, democracy in America emerged not merely through elections and parties, but through the transformation of an ancient political tool: the petition. A statement of grievance accompanied by a list of signatures, the petition afforded women and men excluded from formal politics the chance to make their voices heard and to reshape the landscape of political possibility. Democracy by Petition traces the explosion and expansion of petitioning across the North American continent. Indigenous tribes in Canada, free Blacks from Boston to the British West Indies, Irish canal workers in Indiana, and Hispanic settlers in territorial New Mexico all used petitions to make claims on those in power. Petitions facilitated the extension of suffrage, the decline of feudal land tenure, and advances in liberty for women, African Americans, and Indigenous peoples. Even where petitioners failed in their immediate aims, their campaigns advanced democracy by setting agendas, recruiting people into political causes, and fostering aspirations of equality. Far more than periodic elections, petitions provided an everyday current of communication between officeholders and the people. The coming of democracy in America owes much to the unprecedented energy with which the petition was employed in the antebellum period. By uncovering this neglected yet vital strand of nineteenth-century life, Democracy by Petition will forever change how we understand our political history.
The ‘humble petition’ was ubiquitous in early modern society and featured prominently in crucial moments such as the outbreak of the civil wars and in everyday local negotiations about taxation, welfare and litigation. People at all levels of society – from noblemen to paupers – used petitions to make their voices heard and these are valuable sources for mapping the structures of authority and agency that framed early modern society. The Power of Petitioning in Early Modern Britain offers a holistic study of this crucial topic in early modern British history. The contributors survey a vast range of sources, showing the myriad ways people petitioned the authorities from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries. They cross the jurisdictional, sub-disciplinary and chronological boundaries that have otherwise constrained the current scholarly literature on petitioning and popular political engagement. Teasing out broad conclusions from innumerable smaller interventions in public life, they not only address the aims, attitudes and strategies of those involved, but also assesses the significance of the processes they used. This volume makes it possible to rethink the power of petitioning and to re-evaluate broad trends regarding political culture, institutional change and state formation.
New research into petitions and petitioning in the middle ages, illuminating aspects of contemporary law and justice. The mechanics, politics and culture of petitioning in the middle ages are examined in this innovative collection. In addition to important and wide-ranging examinations of the ancient world and the medieval papacy, it focuses particularly on petitions to the English crown in the later middle ages, drawing on a major collection of documents made newly accessible to research in the National Archives. A series of studies explores the political contexts of petitioning, the broad geographical and social range of petitioners, and the fascinating worm's-eye view of medieval life that is uniquely offered by petitions themselves; and particular attention is given to the performative qualities of petitioning and its place in the culture of royal intercession. With their vivid new insights into judicial conventions and the legal creativity spawned by political crisis, these papers provide a closely integrated assessment of current scholarship and new research on these most fascinating and revealing of medieval social texts. CONTRIBUTORS: W. MARK ORMROD, GWILYM DODD, SERENA CONNOLLY, BARBARA BOMBI, PATRICK ZUTSHI, PAUL BRAND, GUILHEM PEPIN, ANTHONY MUSSON, SIMON J. HARRIS, SHELAGH A. SNEDDON, DAVID CROOK
Though many historians of colonial Africa are familiar with petitions preserved in archives, few have looked at what this genre of letter writing tells us about broader colonial society. In a rigorously researched and compelling narrative, Petition Writing and Negotiations of Colonialism in Igboland, 1892–1960: African Voices in Ink fills this gap through the exploration of petitions written by Igbo petitioners in southeastern Nigeria to British officials which shows how these Igbo individuals influenced colonial decision-making. In challenging colonial authority through petition writing, Igbo petitioners used language of rights and justice to navigate the colonial system. Utilizing a largely untapped archive of colonial petitions, Bright Alozie provides insights into petition writing as a significant tool for understanding colonialism beyond the contestation of power and highlights petition writers’ agency and engagement with colonial administration. This book integrates transnational, historical, geographical, and gender perspectives, capturing the profound complexities inherent in colonial governance and encouraging critical investigations into the nuanced dynamics of petition writing in colonial Africa. By extracting African voices from these petitions, Alozie evokes their richness and relevance to understand their colonial past and demonstrate the potential of re-evaluating familiar archival sources with innovative approaches and fresh eyes.
This book deals with one of the most pervasive ways by which people have addressed authority throughout history: petitioning. The book explores traditional practices and institutions, as well as the transformation of petitions as vehicles of popular politics. The ability or the right to petition was also a crucial element for the development and operation of early modern empires, playing a major role on the negotiated patterns of the Atlantic World. This book shows how petitions were used in Europe, America and Africa, by the governors and the governed, by the rich and the poor, by the colonists and the colonised and by the liberal and the reactionary groups. Broken down into three thematic parts, encompassing both in chronological and geographical scope, the book deepens our understanding of petitioning and its relation with ideas of consent and subjecthood, nationality and citizenship, political participation and democracy. This book provides a rare comparative platform for the study of a subject that has been receiving growing interest.