6 - Petitioners II

Summary

This chapter examines petitioners and petitioning communities within a range of localities to explore the politics of place. First, the analysis demonstrates the ways in which particular topics, such as those associated with mass subscription campaigns, could bring together petitioners from across the four nations. Second, the chapter zooms in to survey a range of localities to offer a comparative study of petitioning communities, emphasising similarities and patterns as well as local variations and differences. Religious congregations were a particularly important, and enduring, form of petitioning community across the period. On other issues, petitioning communities were defined by occupation, profession, trade, or perceived economic interest, such as shipowners or merchants in port cities. Petitioning communities could also be defined by official roles, as when local boards of poor law guardians petitioned regarding social policy, or associational memberships. More generally, it is possible to discern particular continuities and traditions within particular places that reflected the interplay between local political culture and petitioning communities. A study of petitioning communities reveals the diversity of local political cultures, but also shows how they were connected horizontally to petitioners in other localities, and vertically, to national institutions such as Parliament.