Petitioning in the Atlantic World, c. 1500–1840

“The sheer breadth of historical work here is astounding, encompassing Senegal to indigenous North America (including Florida) to South America and Europe. Neither scholars nor students of the petition will be able to understand its life-force without reference to this remarkable collection.” —Daniel Carpenter, Allie S. Freed Professor of Government, Harvard University “This remarkable volume fully demonstrates the fundamental role played by petitions in a crucial chronology: the final phase of European empires in the Americas and the emergence of the first Liberal regimes.” —Pedro Cardim, Universidade Nova de Lisboa “This book makes a valuable contribution to our understanding of how petitioning shaped political and social relations across the Atlantic world. It expands historical scholarship by illuminating this important dynamic in a wide range of imperial and colonial polities, stretching across the conventional late eighteenth-century divide.” —Brodie Waddell, Birkbeck, University of London “This book deals with one of the most pervasive ways by which people have addressed authority throughout history: petitioning. Based on a Congress held at the Instituto de Ciências Sociais da Universidade de Lisboa (Petitions in the Age of the Atlantic Revolutions), in February of 2019, 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.” Miguel Dantas da Cruz is an assistant researcher at Instituto de Ciências Sociais da Universidade de Lisboa, Portugal.