Subjects and Sovereign

Bonds of Belonging in the Eighteenth-Century British Empire

Hannah Weiss Muller

Argues for the centrality of the traditional relationship between subjects and sovereign in the second half of the eighteenth century as opposed to rights-bearing citizens.
Argues for subjecthood as an organizing principlesof the British Empire, contrasting with literature on economic, political, and intellectual networks as those most useful to unifying empires.
Juxtaposes more familiar colonial territories (Quebec, Bengal) with less familiar ones (Grenada, Minorca, Gibraltar) .

Subjects and Sovereign

Bonds of Belonging in the Eighteenth-Century British Empire

Hannah Weiss Muller

Description

In the aftermath of the Seven Years' War, when a variety of conquered and ceded territories became part of an expanding British Empire, crucial struggles emerged about what it meant to be a "British subject." Individuals in Grenada, Quebec, Minorca, Gibraltar, and Bengal debated the meanings and rights of subjecthood, with many capitalizing on legal ambiguities and local exigencies to secure access to political and economic benefits. Inhabitants and colonial administrators transformed subjecthood into a shared language, practice, and opportunity as individuals proclaimed their allegiance to the crown and laid claim to a corresponding set of protections. Approaching subjecthood as a protean and porous concept, rather than an immutable legal status, Subjects and Sovereign demonstrates that it was precisely subjecthood's fluidity and imprecision that rendered it so useful to a remarkably diverse group of individuals.

In this book, Hannah Weiss Muller reexamines the traditional bond between subjects and sovereign and argues that this relationship endured as a powerful site for claims-making throughout the eighteenth century. Muller analyzes both legal understandings of subjecthood, as well as the popular tradition of declaring rights, in order to demonstrate why subjects believed they were entitled to make requests of their sovereign. She reconsiders narratives of upheaval during the Age of Revolution and insists on the relevance and utility of existing structures of state and sovereign. Emphasizing the stories of subjects who successfully leveraged their loyalty and negotiated their status, she also explores how and why subjecthood remained an organizing and contested principle of the eighteenth-century British Empire.

By placing the relationship between subjects and sovereign at the heart of her analysis, Muller offers a new perspective on a familiar period and suggests that imperial integration was as much about flexible and expansive conceptions of belonging as it was about shared economic, political, and intellectual networks.

Subjects and Sovereign

Bonds of Belonging in the Eighteenth-Century British Empire

Hannah Weiss Muller

Acknowledgments
Introduction: Of Sovereigns and Subjects
Chapter One: The Laws of Subjecthood
Chapter Two: The Free-Born Subject's Inheritance
Chapter Three: Real and Pretended Subjects: Mediating Subjecthood in the Mediterranean
Chapter Four: His Britannick Majesty's New Subjects: The Rights of Subjects in Grenada and Quebec
Chapter Five: The Promises and Perils of Subjecthood and Jurisdiction: Calcutta
Conclusion
Notes
Bibliography
Index

Subjects and Sovereign

Bonds of Belonging in the Eighteenth-Century British Empire

Hannah Weiss Muller

Author Information

Hannah Weiss Muller is Assistant Professor of History at Brandeis University.

Subjects and Sovereign

Bonds of Belonging in the Eighteenth-Century British Empire

Hannah Weiss Muller

Reviews and Awards

"In her illuminating and beautifully written book, Subjects and Sovereign, Hannah Weiss Muller reminds us that the Age of Revolutions was just as much about the boundaries of subjecthood as it was about citizenship...By pulling together familiar and unfamiliar case studies with forensic care, Muller shows us something important — the flexibility of subjecthood in the British Empire." -- Lisa Ford, University of New South Wales Sydney

"Our understanding of subjecthood in the eighteenth-century British Empire has been distorted and diminished by the widespread, long-standing historical fascination with the rise of new conceptions of citizenship in the American and French Revolutions ... In this ambitious study, Hannah Weiss Muller examines subjecthood outside this invidious comparative framework. With case-studies from around the eighteenth-century British Empire, she recovers a series of creative, fraught and consequential debates surrounding the rights and privileges of subjects of the British Crown ... Muller's book is the product of an impressive body of research." -- Geoffrey Plank, English Historical Review

"Fascinating and well-researched ... Muller's work highlights the importance of moving beyond analyses of British subjecthood rooted in narrow legalistic discussions ... and instead adopting as protagonists the actual people fighting for particular rights across the empire. As her work shows, this project entails taking a truly global perspective on the legal dimensions of empires. Bringing it to completion will allow us to firmly answer whether we can reconstruct a Europe in which Britain was an equal partaker rather than a distinct, perhaps even exceptional polity. Muller's beautiful, smart, and erudite work takes us well on our way there." -- Tamar Herzog, William and Mary Quarterly

"Hannah Weiss Muller makes an important contribution to scholarship on earlier phases of British imperial development ... In arguing for a widely accepted conception in the Anglophone world of a British Empire grounded in notions of the liberty of the subject, Muller ... relocates the discussion from the realms of jurists and political philosophers at the high end of print culture, and pamphleteers and newspaper writers at the lower end, to the lived reality of actual imperial subjects, gleaned from archival materials ... Muller argues persuasively from the bottom up." -- John Eglin, American Historical Review