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Colonial Petitions, Colonial Petitioners, and the Imperial Parliament, c. 1780-1918

Huzzey, Richard; Miller, Henry

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Abstract

Petitioning was a common form of protest, request, or expression across the British Empire, and historians of colonial rule and resistance have often drawn on petitions as sources to investigate particular controversies. This paper assesses the significance, variety, and context of petitioning to the Imperial Parliament, both from the British Isles and the colonies. To do so, we present new data drawn from more than 1 million petitions sent to the House of Commons in the period c. 1780-1918 alongside qualitative research into a wider range of petitions to other metropolitan sources of authority. This permits us to assess how colonial subjects across the empire demanded attention from Westminster and what the practice of petitioning reveals about the British self-image of parliamentary scrutiny and equality before the law.

Citation

Huzzey, R., & Miller, H. (2022). Colonial Petitions, Colonial Petitioners, and the Imperial Parliament, c. 1780-1918. Journal of British Studies, 61(2), 261-289. https://doi.org/10.1017/jbr.2021.185

Journal Article Type Article
Acceptance Date May 11, 2021
Online Publication Date Dec 24, 2022
Publication Date 2022-04
Deposit Date Oct 7, 2021
Publicly Available Date Oct 7, 2021
Journal Journal of British Studies
Print ISSN 0021-9371
Electronic ISSN 1545-6986
Publisher Cambridge University Press
Peer Reviewed Peer Reviewed
Volume 61
Issue 2
Pages 261-289
DOI https://doi.org/10.1017/jbr.2021.185

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

Copyright Statement
This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives licence (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided that no alterations are made and the original article is properly cited. The written permission of Cambridge University Press must be obtained prior to any commercial use and/or adaptation of the article.

Copyright © The Author(s), published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of the North American Conference on British Studies






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