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The Politics of Petitioning: Parliament, Government and Subscriptional Cultures in the United Kingdom, 1780-1918

Huzzey, Richard; Miller, Henry

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Abstract

Over the course of the long nineteenth century, people in the United Kingdom signed a wide variety of petitions, addresses, testimonials, and related documents. Though many forms of subscriptional culture had medieval and early modern origins, their transformations across this period reveal the shifting perceptions of the crown, parliament, the administrative state, and local government. The article draws on a dataset of more than 1 million petitions to the House of Commons and surviving data from the House of Lords, alongside qualitative evidence of signed addresses to other authorities. This reveals a pattern whereby applications and requests increasingly took new, bureaucratic forms, and petitions became more closely associated with the representation of public opinion. The study suggests the value of examining the practices and processes, alongside the languages and ideas, that shaped political culture. This emphasises the participatory and representative politics of name‐signing as a means to materialise popular opinion in a responsive ‐ but not democratic ‐ state.

Citation

Huzzey, R., & Miller, H. (2021). The Politics of Petitioning: Parliament, Government and Subscriptional Cultures in the United Kingdom, 1780-1918. History, 106(370), 221-243. https://doi.org/10.1111/1468-229x.13103

Journal Article Type Article
Acceptance Date Dec 9, 2020
Online Publication Date Apr 5, 2021
Publication Date 2021-03
Deposit Date Jan 6, 2021
Publicly Available Date Mar 29, 2024
Journal History
Print ISSN 0018-2648
Publisher Wiley
Peer Reviewed Peer Reviewed
Volume 106
Issue 370
Pages 221-243
DOI https://doi.org/10.1111/1468-229x.13103

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Publisher Licence URL
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Copyright Statement
© 2021 The Author(s). History published by The Historical Association and John Wiley & Sons Ltd

This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.




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