This article analyses nearly one million petitions received by the House of Commons to reveal a culture of petitioning that recast the political culture of modern Britain and Ireland. It argues, first, that petitions provided a much more regular and continuous form of interaction between people and Parliament than elections. Second, petitioning–meaning the practices associated with the drafting, signing and presentation of petitions–enabled a vibrant, performative public politics. Third, petitions and petitioning were relatively open, inclusive forms of political participation since all British subjects enjoyed the formal right to petition. We examine the role of formidable campaigns of mass mobilisation, but also humble appeals of marginalised individuals. Our data has significant implications for our understanding of the nationalisation, organisation, and popularisation of politics in this period. We argue that attention to petitions helps us to decentre parliamentary elections as the principal connection between local and national politics. Indeed, petitioners responded to the shifting boundaries between the central and devolved state in deciding to which authorities they would direct petitions. Petitioning campaigns pioneered the mass, organised, national movements that would gradually emerge as the hallmark of stronger political parties. This did not undermine petitioning. However, the consequent growth of disciplined parties strengthened executive power, at the expense of parliamentary government, redirected petitions from the Commons. Furthermore, the continuing expansion of petitioning alongside extensions of the franchise suggests that petitions did not function as an ersatz ballot. Rather, petitions and debates between parliamentarians and petitioners over the meaning of growing lists of signatories suggest that petitioning catalysed a range of other forms of participation and hence forged an ever more popular politics.

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A B S T R A C T. This article reconsiders the sugar duties controversy in early Victorian Britain. Rather than representing the defeat of abolitionism by free trade zeal, the sugar question was a contest of two varieties of anti-slavery thought which had previously co-existed : one believing that slavery's immorality was accompanied by its productive inferiority to free labour and the other asserting that slavery's profits in this world were punished outside the marketplace. West Indian decline after the end of protection led to a revision of free labour superiority, with providential externalities replacing marketplace competitiveness. The episode demonstrates how little most Britons understood the welfare of black freedmen to be connected to anti-slavery after emancipation. A fuller appreciation of the slave sugar debate furthermore recovers an important abolitionist strand in the new 'human history ' of free trade.Singular article of produce ! What is the reason of this influence ? It is that all considerations mingle in it; not merely commercial, but imperial, philanthropic, religious; confounding

By examining British anti-slavery debates across a longue durée – before and after West Indian emancipation – the basis of moral responsibility for political action may be reassessed. Recent interest in humanitarian or transnational compassion may have underappreciated the geographical limitations of the moral responsibility Britons assumed for slavery and the slave trade. The notion of national complicity was crucial in mobilising individual Britons to petition, abstain from slave-grown produce or otherwise pressure parliament. While the peculiar aftermath of the Napoleonic Wars created a British responsibility for other nations’ slave trading, there was little comparable appetite for the internationalising responsibility for the slave-labour origins of traded goods. This meant that transnational obligations to police the slave trade did not translate into concern about the slave production behind overseas trade. By tracing these national debates over time, it is possible to discern the dominant and recessive arguments for how and when moral revulsion should translate into political action by Britons and the British state. This suggests a need to revisit scholarly conclusions about abolitionist campaigning, the basis of moral responsibility for slavery, and the antecedents of modern consumer responsibility.

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 article assesses the significance, variety, and context of petitioning to the Imperial Parliament from both the British Isles and the colonies. To do so, we present new data drawn from more than one million petitions sent to the House of Commons in the period from 1780 to 1918, alongside qualitative research into a wider range of petitions to other metropolitan sources of authority. This range 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.