2026/01/16 by ROBERT POOLE · 1 voice
Arts and Humanities · Social Sciences · #Colonialism, slavery, and trade #Legal and cultural studies analysis #Seventeenth-Century Political and Philosophical Thought
paper · doi:10.1111/1468-229x.70082
openalex publication_date 2026/01/16 · openalex created_date 2026/01/17 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/14
Britain is historically well known for the propensity of its inhabitants to form clubs, but we can now add another characteristic: their propensity to launch petitions. From a debtors’ prison, Charles Dickens's Mr Micawber did both, hoping to persuade the House of Commons to alter the law of imprisonment for debt. He ‘set to work at the petition, invented, engrossed it on an immense sheet of paper, spread it out on a table, and appointed a time for all the club, and all within the walls if they chose, to come up to his room and sign it … [with] such phrases as “The people's representatives in Parliament assembled”, “your petitioners therefore humbly approach your honourable house”…’ (David Copperfield [1850], ch. 11). Those involved are unlikely to have been voters, yet all were aware of their right to petition and knew how to go about it. Michael Bentley has characterized nineteenth-century Britain as a case of ‘politics without democracy’; if Henry Miller is right, it was more a case of ‘democracy without representation’. The much-studied politics of the franchise were only part of the story; democracy in Britain developed most of all through the practical business of petitioning, which was open to all and exercised as of right by masses of citizens far beyond the formal electorate. A Nation of Petitioners investigates, clearly and systematically, the remarkable phenomenon of petitioning. At its core is a large-scale project – funded by the UK’s Arts and Humanities Research Council – which has examined over a million petitions, on over 33,000 different subjects, submitted to the House of Commons between 1780 and 1918. Its co-investigators, Richard Huzzey and Henry Miller, have published important articles in Past and Present 248 (2020) and History 106 (2021), but this book goes well beyond them. It is divided into three parts: petitions, petitioners and petitioning. Part 1, Petitions, maps out the sheer scale of petitioning over time, identifying the main trends and the numbers involved; petitioning emerges as a far more common activity than voting for most of the period. It surveys the issues involved, taking a ‘four nations’ approach; on both counts, hybrid religious and political issues such as Irish disestablishment fuelled a high proportion of petitions. Nor is it limited to petitions to the Commons: there were also petitions to the House of Lords and direct to the Crown, each with their own rationale and protocols, not to mention election petitions, petitions in support of private bills, memorials, and lobbying of all kinds. Part II, Petitioners, begins with a stimulating chapter on the right to petition. The passage of emergency legislation against seditious meetings in the 1790s and 1810s was accompanied by vigorous denials of any intention to restrict the right to petition which, along with the associated right to hold public meetings and speak freely, was firmly established by the time the legislation lapsed in the 1820s. There is a lot of interesting discussion in this section of what kind of communities the petitioners saw themselves as representing. Whether local, national, sectional, economic or religious, collective identities of all kinds were formed and mobilized through petitioning, which was also an important means through which women could organize politically and claim a stake in the state. Part III, Petitioning, expertly explains the process and practice of petitioning, showing both how it worked in practice and how it could forge and mobilize public opinion on contested issues. Mass petitioning emerges as central to nineteenth-century politics, not just in relation to particular issues but through the theory and practice of representation. The low success rate of petitions – most famously, the Chartists petitions of the 1830s and 1840s – was less significant than the way in which petitioning gave a political voice to the unrepresented. If there are criticisms to be made, they are of scope. In eighteenth-century France, for example, politely petitioning authority barely registered as politics; serious business meant revolution. Petitioning was, however, important in other hierarchical societies where parliamentary politics was non-existent. As with the Church of England, the peculiarities of the British parliamentary system only emerge clearly in relation to what was happening elsewhere. Miller and his Durham colleague Richard Huzzey have tackled this separately, in a special issue of Social Science History 43 (2019) devoted to petitioning, and in a forthcoming volume on Petitions and Petitioning in Europe and North America (Oxford). Nonetheless, some consideration of these comparative dimensions would have been welcome. ‘During the course of the long nineteenth century’, concludes Miller, ‘petitioning was converted into a mighty instrument for mass politics’ forging ‘an even more inclusive and demotic political culture than previously thought’ (pp. 276–7). The petitioning of parliament declined as the franchise widened towards the end of the period, which suggests that petitioning was a declining practice rooted in an undemocratic age. Miller however sees mass petitioning as an engine of modernization, resetting the relationship between governors and governed: ‘Nineteenth-century Britons typically experienced or “did” politics through petitioning’ (p. 278). A Nation of Petitioners immediately becomes essential reading for all students of modern Britain and democracy. Clearly arranged and memorably expressed, it changes our understanding of its field and will surely take its place as a classic text of British history.