Ahead of next Tuesday’s Parliaments, Politics and People roundtable seminar, we hear from Dr Henry Miller of the University of Durham. On 27 June between 5.30 p.m. and 7.00 p.m., Henry will discuss his book A Nation of Petitioners with Prof. Katrina Navickas (University of Hertfordshire), Dr. Diego Palacios Cerezales (Complutense University of Madrid), Dr. Kathryn Rix (History of Parliament Trust) and Prof. Miles Taylor (Humboldt University of Berlin)
The seminar takes place on 27 June 2023, between 5:30 and 7.00 p.m. You can attend online via Zoom. Details of how to join the discussion are available here
Between 1780 and 1918 over one million petitions from across the four nations of the United Kingdom were sent to the House of Commons, containing over 165 million signatures. These petitions addressed over 33,000 different issues, ranging from the utopian, such as the calls for the moral reformation of humanity, to complaints about everyday nuisances like noisy dog-carts from city-dwellers.
A Nation of Petitioners is the first study of the nineteenth-century heyday of petitioning in the UK. Based on a study of these petitions, as well as the archives of leading politicians, political institutions, and social movements, the book explores how ordinary men and women engaged with politics in an era of democratisation, but not democracy. The book demonstrates the centrality of petitions and petitioning to emergent repertoires of mass campaigning, the practice and theory of parliamentary representation, and forging collective identities at the local and national level.
From the early nineteenth century, the massive growth of petitions underpinned and reshaped the popular authority of the UK state, including Parliament, the monarchy, and central government. In restoring the mass participation of ordinary people through petitions, this study challenges accounts that have stressed disciplinary or exclusionary processes in the evolution of popular politics.
Providing a social history as much as a political history, the book recovers the experiences of ordinary men and women as petitioners. This participation was underpinned by the openness of the right to petition, which was not formally restricted by literacy, the franchise, property, class, race, gender, or the right to vote.
Petitioning was particularly important in enabling the participation of women as signatories, canvassers, or organisers at a time when they were ‘borderline citizens’ who could not vote in parliamentary elections or sit in Parliament. Petitioning was a vehicle for the political mass mobilisation of women from early nineteenth-century abolitionism through to the Edwardian suffrage campaigns, as well as a tool used by women to seek the redress of individual grievances, such as the illiterate Elizey Price who complained of her mistreatment by local constables in 1845.
In terms of the history of modern British political culture, A Nation of Petitioners makes a series of contributions. Methodologically, the book shifts attention away from a focus on languages or ideas that was the hallmark of the ‘new political history’ of the 1990s and after, to practices as a key mechanism for understanding the dynamic interaction between elite and popular politics; state and citizens; or institutions and social movements.
More broadly it decentres the study of political culture away from institutions, elite politicians, political parties, elections and voting, and the reform acts through this focus on practices. Moreover, the book shows the extent to which petitions and petitioning provided dynamic mechanisms enabling the interaction of the ‘four nations’ with the UK Parliament.
Revising accounts that have emphasised the exclusivity or narrowness of the political nation based on the franchise or electoral reform, A Nation of Petitioners instead emphasises the openness, and participatory nature of popular politics. As a related point, the book calls into question the recent emphasis on ‘liberal governmentality’ in influential accounts of the nineteenth-century history, the argument being that the Victorian state used the management of information, and bureaucratic processes, to mould and ‘discipline’ subjects.
But the relationship between subjects and the state was not one way. UK subjects harassed all branches of the UK state – Parliament, government, monarchy, local authority – on an almost daily basis through their petitions. Recovering these petitions, then, restores a degree of popular agency that has all too often been absent from recent accounts of the British state in this period. Indeed, petitioners were seldom deferent in their appeals to the state. This was why one Irish judge complained in 1834 of
the turbulent abuse of the right to petition, making it a channel for the conveyance, not of submissive prayer, but of refractory invective and insolent dictation.
Beyond its contribution to the historiography of modern Britain and Ireland, the book’s significance lies in two further areas.
First, the book places the UK experience in a broader comparative perspective, thereby advancing the growing interdisciplinary literature on petitions and petitioning in historical and contemporary contexts. The volume of petitions in the nineteenth-century UK was historically exceptional but was also part of a wider trend in which petitions were transformed from being generic requests to power to their more distinct modern meaning as participatory practices linked to representative institutions, specifically legislatures. In other polities such as France, the USA, the Netherlands, and Spain, the ‘new’ type of petitioning was often associated with revolutionary change and the establishment of codified constitutions, whereas in the UK the flexible discourse and practice of popular constitutionalism allowed petitioners to reshape petitioning more incrementally.
Second, the book addresses important debates within social and political science regarding representation, democratisation, and collective action from a historical perspective. To give one example, Charles Tilly famously argued that the modern social movement was invented in Britain in this time; he saw petitioning as one component of the modern repertoire of collective action. In fact the historical record suggests that rather than being one element of a wider repertoire, petitions and petitioning enabled and underpinned other forms of collective action such as public meetings.
Most public meetings were called to petition Parliament or another authority. The delivery of petitions to Parliament, Buckingham Palace, or 10 Downing Street or other sites of power in Westminster provided a pretext for spectacular demonstrations in the heart of political power, as the Chartists, suffragettes, and many other campaigns recognised. Petitioning was also central to the formation of single-associations and other emergent forms of political organisation.
Across the long nineteenth century, millions of people from across the four nations of the UK and the wider empire concluded their petitions to Parliament with the customary phrase, ‘And your petitioners will ever pray, &c.’ Petitioners’ specific requests were rarely granted. Yet collectively, through tens of millions of signatures, affixed to documents that have long since been lost to posterity, these subscribers were part of a broader social phenomenon that decisively reshaped the modern political culture of the United Kingdom.
HM
The seminar takes place on 27 June 2023, between 5:30 and 7.00 p.m. You can attend online via Zoom. Details of how to join the discussion are available here
