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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 October 2011
Robert Steinfeld suggests that my article might be read in two entirely distinct ways—as a narrative of centralization, about which he is mildly enthusiastic, and as a narrative of citizenship, about which he is distinctly unenthusiastic. In my view, Steinfeld's understanding of citizenship, an understanding sharply at odds with my own, drives most of the criticisms he levels against the narrative of citizenship presented in the article.
1. Steinfeld, Robert J., “Subjectship, Citizenship, and the Long History of Immigration Regulation,” Law and History Review 19 (2001): 645–53CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
2. Incidentally, in this regard, I fully accept Steinfeld's observation that Massachusetts's decision in the late eighteenth century to retain the alien property disability might have been a deliberate decision, and not, as I suggest in the article, a vestige of English tradition. However, to my mind, that still leaves open the question of why citizenship entered the settlement laws.
3. An Act in Addition to the Act directing the Admission of Town Inhabitants, Made and Pass[e]d in the Thirteenth Year of the Reign of King William the Third, sec. 3, The Acts and Resolves, Public and Private, of the Province of the Massachusetts Bay, to which are Prefixed the Charters of the Province (Boston: Wright and Potter, 1869–1922), 2:244.