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