This introductory essay, firstly, offers a comparative, historical perspective on the transformation of petitioning into a vehicle for mass popular politics across North America and Western Europe during the “long” nineteenth century (1780–1914). While petitions were well established as an instrument of state in many early modern states, from the late eighteenth century a new type of mass, public, collective petitioning, based on established or invoked rights, emerged on an unprecedented scale in many countries. Mass petitioning underpinned the nascent repertoires of collective action pioneered by social movements. At the same time, the reception of petitions was institutionalized by political authorities, particularly legislatures elected under limited suffrage, as a potential source of legitimation. Secondly, the introduction suggests why people petitioned, and continued to petition, when their campaigns were often unsuccessful in achieving immediate results. The answer lies in the manifold advantages of petitioning in enabling political organization, mobilization, identity formation, citizenship, political change, and the forming of networks with elite political actors. By shaping an emerging field examining petitioning and petitions, raising awareness of petitions as sources and the methodologies to exploit them, and addressing broad questions of interest to historians and social scientists, this special issue hopes to stimulate further research and contribute to a rich dialogue in the years to come.

Before its deployment as a practice by insurgent social movements for mobilizing public opinion in the long nineteenth century, petitioning was a ubiquitous, relatively uniform practice with no connection to popular insurgency. It was nearly the inverse, though just as prominent, phenomenon: an instrument of state as opposed to an instrument of protest, occurring wherever rulership relied on administrative techniques for generating and deploying its authority. Humble subjects sought benevolent deployments of power in pursuit of goals that were within and not about the rules of the game. This mode of petitioning is aptly described as petition-and-response, a term of art from classical scholarship that is applicable to diverse patrimonial states across Eurasia with diverse ideological systems. The transition to modern petitioning as a repertoire for contentious politics was an extended, uneven process. It was facilitated initially by the unquestioned legitimacy of petitionary etiquette with regard to form and rhetoric, as opposed to explicit invocation of novel ideas about natural rights. Liminal petitioning had contradictory elements of deference to and defiance of power relations that diminished perceptions of novelty in novel activities that mobilized and invoked popular opinion on contentious political issues.

As much as any other site in the nineteenth century, Francophone Lower Canada saw immense waves of popular petitioning, with petitions against British colonial administration attracting tens of thousands of signatures in the 1820s. The petition against Governor Dalhousie of 1827–28 attracted more than 87,000 names, making it one of the largest mass petitions of the Atlantic world on a per-capita scale for its time. We draw upon new archival evidence that shows the force of local organization in the petition mobilization, and combine this with statistical analyses of a new sample of 1,864 names from the anti-Dalhousie signatory list. We conclude that the Lower Canadian petitioning surge stemmed from emergent linguistic nationalism, expectations of parliamentary democracy, and the mobilization and alliance-building efforts of Patriote leaders in the French-Canadian republican movement. As elsewhere in the nineteenth-century Atlantic, the anti-Dalhousie effort shows social movements harnessing petitions to recruit, mobilize, and build cross-cultural alliances.

This article examines collective petitioning in metropolitan Spain during the Age of Revolution, focusing on the practices and discourses that framed petitioning as a meaningful form of action. There was a deeply rooted tradition of petitioning in old regime Spain, which was part of the ordinary bureaucratic workings of the crown and also provided a legitimizing framework for rioting in specific contexts. The collective experimentation in popular participation after the 1808 Napoleonic invasion transformed petitioning. Petitioning was first reconceptualized in accordance with the emerging language of rights and popular sovereignty. Activists and commentators had some awareness of the use of public petitioning in Britain, and once the representative Cortes met in Cadiz in 1810, public petition drives on public issues became part of the political culture. At the same time, the need to legitimate unconventional forms of action in the context of a crisis in the state converted petitioning into an all-embracing right. The right to petition, not only encompassed signed protest texts but also legitimated the old tradition of petitioning by riot and further was used to justify provincial rebellions, juntas, and military pronunciamientos. In comparative terms, this article highlights the elasticity of the language of petitioning during the Age of Revolution and cautions against narrowly associating it with one particular form of collective action or historical trajectory.

This article focuses on large-scale petitioning campaigns, or petitionnementen as they were called, organized between 1828 and 1878, including contemporary reflections and debates on this new phenomenon. Although there were only a handful of petitionnementen, they had a remarkable impact—not only on the issues at hand but also on the balance of power between Crown, Cabinet, Parliament, and people. Mass petitions necessarily challenged the political system, whose legitimacy was based on elections under a limited franchise. Based on parliamentary reports, pamphlets, and other sources reflecting on petitioning in general and the petitionnementen more specifically, this article asks how petitioners claimed legitimacy, and how politicians and other observers responded to those claims. Special attention is given to the international context within which Dutch petitioning practices developed. The article focuses on three case studies, representing the major petitioning campaigns of this period: the Southern petition movements of 1828–1830 that were a catalyst for the Belgian revolution (thus reinforcing the association between mass petitioning and revolution), the Anti-Catholic “April Movement” of 1853, and the so-called People’s Petitionnement of 1878, against the liberal education law. Remarkably enough, in the Netherlands it was not progressive reformers, but most prominently conservative Orthodox Protestants who organized petitionnementen.

Chartism was in effect Britain’s civil rights movement and petitioning was at its heart: it defined who the Chartists were as well as the “other” against which they were implacably opposed. Its history has been effectively narrated around its three national petitions (1839, 1842, and 1848), and its decline almost habitually and directly linked to circumstances surrounding the last of these. More than 3.3 million people signed the 1842 National Petition. Chartism’s history after 1842 is partly one of how the State learned to manage the movement in general and petitioning in particular. The question posed by the title is deliberately ambiguous: What did the Chartists petition for and, equally, why did they bother? The first issue will be answered by a close reading of the three texts (surprisingly not undertaken by previous historians of the movement). The second will answered through an analysis of the wider uses of petitioning. The third issue addressed by this article is how petitioning constructed Chartism. In every contributing locality, canvassing was a major intervention in political life. The subscriptional community created by its petitions were “the people,” a term that clearly included not only men but also women and children. This was a different and wider meaning of the term “the people” from that used by Chartism’s opponents and it was a profound departure. Petitioning shaped, articulated, and mobilized the politics of a nascent working class, “banded together in one solemn and holy league” but excluded from economic and political power.

The national petitioning campaign for parliamentary reform in 1816–17 was the biggest such movement before Chartism. It generated more than 700 local petitions with approaching a million signatures, representing perhaps 25 percent of adult males and extending the political nation well into the working classes. It was particularly strong in the Lancashire manufacturing districts, where economic grievances such as hunger and exploitation were converted through petitioning into arguments for political reform. The moving figure was Major John Cartwright, a veteran reformer who emerges as a more radical figure than usually supposed. The rejection of so many petitions by Parliament provided a legitimation for remonstrance and resistance, feeding through into extraparliamentary protests such as the march of the Manchester “Blanketeers” in 1817 and the mass platform movement of 1819 and “Peterloo.” The research combines a study of the petitions and the radical press with a close examination of the Home Office material, yielding insights into both grassroots organization and the strategies of the authorities, local and national. While the strategy of mass action was defeated by repression, the right of the unenfranchised masses to engage in political petitioning was conceded in principle long before the advent of formal democracy.

With relatively few exceptions, personal petitions from individuals have received much less attention from historians than those from groups in the public political sphere. In one sense, personal petitions adopted many of the same rhetorical strategies as those delivered by a group. However, they also offer unique insights into the quotidian relationship between the people and their rulers. This article examines surviving personal petitions to various administrators at different levels of government in western India during the decades surrounding the East India Company’s conquests. The analysis of these petitions helps to refine our understanding of the place of the new judicial system in the social world of early-nineteenth-century India, especially by illuminating the discourse of justice that petitioners brought to the presentation of their cases to their new governors. The conclusion of this article seeks to place the rhetoric of personal petitioning within the larger context of mass political petitioning in India during the early nineteenth century.

This article refines our understanding of abolitionism as “the first modern social movement” through a microhistory of abolitionism in an eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British town. Examining requisitions, which collected signatures calling on a mayor to convene public meetings to launch parliamentary petitions or other associational activities, the article shows how antislavery mobilization in Plymouth grew amongst a multiplying variety of religious, political, cultural, and economic institutions. Through a prosopography of those initiating antislavery petitions, an analysis of the other requisitions they supported, and qualitative evidence from leading abolitionists’ personal papers, the article details the ways local leaders raised petitions for a national campaign. Civic and religious dynamism at this local level facilitated new forms of contentious mobilization on national and imperial issues. The article therefore directs causal attention to those socioeconomic changes that underpinned the associational cultures of abolitionism.

This article considers the problem of popular, collectively organized political action in the context of the abolition movement of the slave trade (1788–1807). Various primary sources, a petition, a trade directory, church records, and a self-built historic GIS are used to locate petitioners for abolition in the social fabric of Manchester. Through matching and computational experiments the article highlights which social structural forces led individuals to support the abolition movement by signing a petition. Specifically, gathering places that were historically involved in the movement, as well as those that housed traveling merchants from communities with successful abolitionist petitions from preceding campaigns shaped abolitionist petitioning—and the impact of these institutions remained important over and above family ties, active religious congregations, and the occupational groups. The article gives a new understanding of the role that early industrialization played in the abolition movement, building it from the bottom up, forging cohesion within and across communities through local institutions, rather than creating new boundaries and divides through processes of class formation.