Colonial Petitions, Colonial Petitioners, and the Imperial Parliament, ca. 1780–1918

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 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.

In his 1906 address to the Indian National Congress, Dadabhai Naoroji argued that “petitions are not begging for any favours any more than the conventional ‘Your obedient servant’ in letters makes a man an obedient servant. It is the conventional way of approaching higher authorities.” He insisted that “for every movement in England—hundreds, local and national—the chief weapons are agitation by meetings, demonstrations and petitions to Parliament.” Naoroji, the member of Parliament for Finsbury from 1892 to 1895 and in 1906 chairman of the National Congress, drew comparisons with women's suffrage campaigners and non-conformist resistance to educational reforms in the United Kingdom as models for their movement.¹ He made the case passionately because a new generation was challenging the constitutionalist approach of older nationalists; “that we have more or less failed hitherto,” Naoroji insisted, “is not because we have petitioned too much but petitioned too little.”²

From 1780 to 1918, British and colonial subjects sent more than one million public petitions to the House of Commons, bearing millions of signatures from the empire. Systematically recorded by parliamentary clerks, unlike petitions sent to other authorities, this data can be contextualized with qualitative evidence from nonofficial sources and the rich specialist historiographies of different regions. Examining the diverse range of petitioning on colonial issues and by colonial subjects serves two purposes. Firstly, this article addresses major historiographical questions about the nature and extent of Britons’ interest in the empire. Our chronology, from 1780 to 1918, is determined by the emergence and maturation of popular petitioning to Parliament but also encompasses the expansion and development of the British Empire after the loss of the American colonies. Late eighteenth-century debates on Irish and American affairs forged the claim and self-image of Westminster as an “Imperial Parliament.”³ Scholars have demonstrated in recent years how the constitutional, historical, and cultural authorities imagined and reproduced the separation of national politics from the business of empire in the long nineteenth century. In particular, historians have debated the degree—or, rather, the kinds—of Imperial consciousness in the British Isles.⁴ Drawing together a transimperial body of evidence allows us to show how parliamentarians and their British constituents encountered colonial issues and the ways in which these were marginalized in the Imperial Parliament. Far from being absent, colonial issues were instead reconceptualized or raised episodically around particular flashpoints, revealing the extent to which Britons’ political engagement with empire was structured by arbitrary procedure, bureaucratic ordering, and choices that served to underplay the overall importance of empire in the everyday business of the Imperial Parliament.

Secondly, examining colonial subjects’ petitioning to Parliament and other authorities provides a new perspective on contestation within the nineteenth-century empire, recently highlighted by Antoinette Burton and Priyamvada Gopal.⁵ As De and Travers have written of South Asia, “petitioning was a mechanism for state-centralization, institution-building and the bureaucratization of state-power” through incorporating subjects as supplicants; at the same time, petitioning could be “a potent vehicle for unpredictably creative forms of protest, dissent, and political agency, and for the forging of new political communities.”⁶ This article highlights how a universal right of British subjects held vastly different opportunities given the constraints and contexts of material resources, legal contexts, and other political rights enjoyed by those pursuing collective action in different colonies. The openness of petitioning exposed the convoluted ways in which colonial constitutionalism, supposedly variegated by territory and tradition, was the product of arbitrary intermediaries and racist partiality. At a time when white subjects in Britain and settler colonies increasingly deployed petitioning as an expressive form of political representation, imperial authorities were more likely to assume that colonized peoples of color should confine their petitions to transactional requests.⁷

Historians of colonialism have already made creative use of petition sources to illuminate conflict, negotiation, and resistance in a range of settings. Santhosh Abraham has explored how the East India Company's early imposition of governance by formal writing also created avenues for the “argumentative subject” to petition, while Majid Siddiqi has traced the growth of petitioning in India in the years before the 1857–58 rising and its continuing role in “despotism tempered by petition” as a crown colony.⁸ Advocates of the “gentlemanly capitalism” thesis have used rival petitions from manufacturers and agents to demonstrate government responsiveness to London financiers, while other scholars have studied the petitioning campaigns of metropolitan humanitarians.⁹ Petitioning practices were adapted and adopted by colonial subjects ranging from artisans in eighteenth-century Andhra to Chinese miners in South Africa, slaveholders on the Gold Coast, missionaries in Basutoland, rich West India merchants, and “people of colour” from Halifax, Nova Scotia, who in 1847 appealed to the House of Assembly for relief after the failure of their potato crop.¹⁰ Colonial societies adopted hybrid forms of petitioning, fusing customary modes and imported legal and political frameworks. For example, the governance of early colonial India included petitions to local legal tribunals, or panchayats, to deal with disputes, as well as the establishment of royal courts in the presidency towns of Madras, Bombay, and Calcutta.¹¹

The ecosystem of petitioning within the British Empire was highly variegated, depending on a complex web of overlapping authorities that was often specific to the context of the particular colony, which might include governors or local institutions. Petitioning was a product of—and a means for prosecuting—“the project of reordering the empire through law,” as Lauren Benton and Lisa Ford characterize “systemic, but not systematic” imperial reform in the first half of the nineteenth century. Just as “Law was everywhere,” so were petitions.¹² The East India Company was at the center of a complex institutional matrix to which petitioners could appeal; and in the five years before its abolition in 1857, its Court of Directors received more than 18,500 petitions.¹³ The company, of course, was an active petitioner to the Imperial Parliament and government in defense of its own privileges.¹⁴ As Julia Stephens argues, officials’ efforts to regulate petitioning under the Raj and rationalize the routine rejection of requests did not undermine the “emotive as opposed to functional” needs of petitioners to “confront the Raj's rule-bound rhetoric with the lived realities of day-to-day interactions with the government, in which officials’ discretionary judgement, and arbitrary whims, determined outcomes.”¹⁵

Other colonies, such as Jamaica (until 1865) and Nova Scotia, had assemblies founded during the expansion of the Atlantic empire that accepted petitions. The 1852–53 grant of so-called representative government to colonies such as Cape Colony, New Zealand, and New South Wales provided a further outlet for petitioners, especially settlers concerned with racial and ethnic supremacy.¹⁶ To give a further example, in her recent study of shifting imperial identities in the eighteenth-century Atlantic world, Hannah Weiss Muller has shown that subjecthood provided a means to incorporate inhabitants of formerly French territories into the British Empire, particularly as petitioners to the crown.¹⁷ A focus on the role of petitions from and about the colonies may therefore trace the distinctions drawn between subjects of the crown.

Indeed, a fragmented array of subscriptional practices and institutional contexts encompassed both de jure and de facto differences across colonies, distinguishing between the crown's subjects by race, culture, and location, including metropole and empire.¹⁸ A distinctive dynamic of petitioning within colonial societies was that petitioners could appeal to the central imperial state—monarch, Parliament, and government—for redress and call on it to assert supremacy over governors, colonial assemblies, or local officials. Maori and Aboriginal petitioners in New Zealand and Australia, for example, successively appealed to governors and, ultimately, the crown in an attempt to protect their rights against encroachment by self-governing settlers.¹⁹ After 1918, Susan Pedersen and Ravi de Costa have argued, Indigenous peoples increasingly directed their higher appeals to international public opinion and global bodies rather than imperial authorities, as a way to exert pressure on their governments.²⁰ In the period we studied, petitioners’ strategic judgment might identify the crown and the Colonial Office as much as the Imperial Parliament for appeals against colonial authorities.²¹

Our findings are based on research undertaken as part of a project analyzing the more than a million public petitions to the Commons during the long nineteenth century.²² We first analyze the data to reveal the extent of petitions on colonial topics to the Imperial Parliament and to evaluate how such petitions were categorized and recorded. Second, we explore how far petitions from the British Isles on imperial questions reveal the contours and chronology of popular interest in colonial affairs. We then examine petitions from colonial subjects to Parliament and other metropolitan centers of authority—the crown and the government—in three related sections. These focus, in turn, on petitions from white settlers, colonized peoples as petitioners, and a case study of the single largest petitioning drive by colonized peoples to the Commons, orchestrated by Dadabhai Naoroji and the Indian National Congress. We conclude by suggesting how a study of petitioning as a transimperial form of pressure can illuminate our understanding of the British Empire and provide a comparative framework that can enable further specialist research into particular colonies, colonized peoples, and episodes within the history of colonialism.

Petitions on Colonial Issues

The institutional framework or (to borrow the terminology of contemporary political scientists) the petitions system in which colonial subjects operated was at once formally open and accessible in terms of their constitutional rights, yet also ultimately underrepresented and marginalized colonial issues at Westminster.²³ The right of British subjects to petition the monarch and Parliament was contested during the revolutions of the seventeenth century but by the early nineteenth century had come to be widely acknowledged by politicians, petitioners, and public.²⁴ The 1689 Bill of Rights, which granted subjects the right to petition the crown, could be, and was, cited by colonial petitioners as, in the United Kingdom, permitting an absolute right to petition the crown-in-Parliament.²⁵ Colonial subjects formally enjoyed the right to petition Parliament, and, in theory, this was not restricted by race or language. Parliament accepted petitions from subjects in any language, providing that they were accompanied by an English translation vouchsafed by a member of Parliament.²⁶ However, while the right of subjects to petition Parliament seemed absolute and unlimited in terms of who could petition, in practice it amounted to a right of presentation.²⁷ The nineteenth-century petitions system of Parliament was “descriptive,” not “substantive,” since while it represented the petitioners’ views, it did not guarantee action, satisfaction, or even a response.²⁸

Between 1780 and 1918, the Commons received almost thirty-two thousand public petitions (3 percent of the total) relating to issues categorized as “colonial.” These fall very unevenly between the pre-1833 period, where we imposed categories retrospectively on data that were never categorized by the parliamentary clerks, and the post-1832 period, where we only reassigned the contemporary categories to eliminate the “miscellaneous” classification. Our count of more than ten thousand petitions on colonial issues in between 1780 and 1832 (nearly 22 percent of the total for this period) may reflect our greater willingness to use the “colonial” category than did parliamentary clerks, whose classifications are overwhelmingly responsible for the count of only 21,776 in the period between 1833 and 1918 (just over 2 percent of the total for that period). However, it appears that the imbalance does reflect a greater predominance of petitioning on colonial issues before 1832 and a secular growth in petitions relating to other categories thereafter.

A review of peaks in the recorded numbers of petitions on colonial issues clarifies this point (figure 1). Early spikes almost exclusively reflect petitions for the abolition of the slave trade (1788, 1792, and 1814) and the agitation for West Indian emancipation in the 1820s and 1830s. Surges of petitioning for emancipation in 1833 and an end to the subsequent system of apprenticeship in 1838 are similarly reflected in the clerks’ categorizations for post-1832 reports. The only other significant agitation in the earlier period concerned the renewal of the East India Company's charter in 1813, which, as the next section shows, was also an example of how episodic British mass petitioning on colonial issues was closely tied to questions that mobilized religious communities.

Figure 1 Public petitions to the House of Commons in the colonies category, 1780–1918. Sources: Journals of the House of Commons, 1780–1832; reports of the Select Committee on Public Petitions, 1833–1918.

Parliamentary records enable us to recover the number of signatures on petitions for particular issues for the period from 1833 to 1918. Based on these sources, issues categorized as “colonial” attracted a total of 4.8 million signatures, just under 3 percent of the total recorded for this period (figure 2). The two significant spikes in 1833 and 1838 were the product of the agitation over slavery and apprenticeship in the West Indies. After the latter date, the principal spikes in petitions associated with colonies all related to India: they included a series of annual grievances from East Indian Army officers in the later 1850s and mid-1860s, returning in significant numbers in 1901, attracting only a few hundred signatures in total. The third spike is especially notable as an example of petitioning from colonial subjects, rather than metropolitan Britons. In 1890, petitions bearing nearly four hundred thousand signatures supported the early Indian National Congress's demand for the representation of South Asians on the governing bodies of the Raj, which is examined in the final section of this article.

Figure 2 Numbers of signatures recorded for public petitions to the House of Commons in the colonies category, 1833–1918. Source: reports of the Select Committee on Public Petitions, 1833–1918.

As our analysis above suggests, petitions to the Commons on colonial issues were largely dominated in terms of geography by controversies about the Caribbean and India. Indeed, after 1833, these two regions between them accounted for 85 percent of petitions and signatures within the colonies category. The number of petitions and signatures relating to Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and southern Africa waned once responsible or representative government was granted, although Newfoundland petitioners periodically raised the question of fishing rights.²⁹ A guide to Canadian parliamentary procedure observed in 1884 that while the “right of petitioning the House of Commons was very frequently exercised by the people . . . there are now in these days of self-government very few occasions when it is necessary to make these appeals to the Imperial Parliament.”³⁰ Instead, local matters were directed to legislative councils, assemblies, and subnational bodies that developed petitions systems in the mold of the Westminster Parliament.³¹ The petition procedure of newly federated Canada closely followed that of the British model; similarly, in the words of a law scholar, New Zealand “incorporated petitioning the national parliament as part of its received British legal heritage.”³² In other cases, British practice was drawn upon informally by colonial officials, including those in Newfoundland and Ceylon, who corresponded with Erskine May, the clerk and doyen of parliamentary procedure, to ask for guidance.³³ Notably, Commons clerks categorized petitions from and about Ireland, part of the United Kingdom after the 1800 legislative union, by theme and not as separate to those from Great Britain, even as governments increasingly applied exceptional laws to Irish subjects.

The petitions data presented here underrepresent the extent and salience of colonial issues as they do not capture petitions directed to other metropolitan authorities, including the monarch, government departments, or the House of Lords.³⁴ Even more importantly, the “colonies” category underrepresented and marginalized the scale of colonial issues due to the system of classification used by officials. For example, petitions concerning the differential duties on West and East Indian sugar were classified by clerks as a colonial issue in the 1830s due to their connection with debates over enslaved and free labor, but in the following decade these issues were placed under “taxes” as they became part of the battle between free traders and protectionists.³⁵ The political context of colonial protection thus influenced how the question was categorized. To give another example, clerks filed questions relating to church establishments in colonial contexts as “ecclesiastical” rather than colonial matters; this includes, for example, 149 petitions and over 10,000 signatures regarding the Canadian clergy reserves bill in 1853.³⁶ Once contextualized in this way, the data reveal that through its system of classification the parliamentary petitions system compartmentalized, obscured, and marginalized colonial issues.

UK Petitioners and Colonial Issues

While the clerks’ classification of petitions to the Commons reveals where they did—and did not—see the colonies, their data should not be taken as a clear barometer of British public opinion on imperial issues. Taken at face value, the petitions data within the colonies category might lead one to conclude that imperial issues were of negligible interest to both petitioners and parliamentarians. Such a view would lend credence to Bernard Porter's contention that for the vast majority of nineteenth-century Britons, if not British elites and officials, empire was a politically peripheral concern.³⁷ However, petitioning did not represent the unmediated and spontaneous voice of the people, and the financial and organizational effort involved in mass petition drives was better suited to strategies influencing legislative deliberation rather than short-term emergencies. Peaks in the number of petitions and signatures in particular sessions typically reflected the activity of organized mass campaigns. If the records compiled by the parliamentary clerks cannot stand for public opinion, they can be used to reveal the structure and profile of particular agitations regarding the empire.

Religious communities remained critical to the mass mobilization of British petitioners throughout our period.³⁸ Those colonial issues that attracted the greatest numbers of petitions and signatures, such as the slave trade, slavery, or the promotion of Christianity in India, drew on religious networks and local congregations. For example, anti-slave-trade petitions of the 1780s and 1790s sought to represent the inhabitants of a county, town, or district, but clergy and zealous laypeople clearly took a vital coordinating role.³⁹ In terms of numbers, religious communities played a dominant role in parliamentary petitioning on colonial affairs. When the East India Company's charter came up for renewal in 1813, around six times as many petitions carried religious pleas to mandate evangelization as those pressing for commercial changes to the monopoly. Although more than 40 percent of the petitions regarding Christianity came from declared supporters of missionary societies, over half of the total represented civic communities, often identified as “inhabitants,” suggesting that church networks also mobilized lay meetings. More than two-thirds of those petitions representing a spiritual rather than temporal identity came from Baptists, with the ecumenical Mission Society contributing many of the remainder.⁴⁰

Thereafter, Wesleyans appear to have contributed the lion's share of petitions and signatures on colonial questions that aroused religious fervor. Protestant Dissenters identified themselves in 2,821 (56 percent) of the petitions for the immediate abolition of colonial slavery in the 1833 and comprised 352,071 (27 percent) of the total signatures. Of these, Wesleyan Methodists contributed 1,952 abolitionist petitions containing 229,426 signatures.⁴¹ In 1838, when 50,000 Britons petitioned the Commons to end state support for “idolatry” in India, over a third of signatories identified themselves as Wesleyans.⁴² The Lords did not collect petitions data routinely, but a report for 1860 reveals that Wesleyan congregations accounted for 61 percent of the 2,029 petitions, and 54 percent of the 163,000 signatures in favor of providing Bibles in government colleges and schools in India. Other religious bodies contributed 17 percent and 16 percent of the total petitions and signatures respectively.⁴³ By contrast, the 1859 agitation against the exclusion of the Bible from schools in India was notable for the significant contribution of Scottish religious communities, with United Presbyterians and Free Church congregations representing over a third of petitions.⁴⁴

Following emancipation in the West Indies, the mass mobilization of British petitioners on imperial matters generally focused on missionary complaints or expansionist demands for a forward policy. In the late nineteenth century, missionary organizations continued to stimulate petitions either demanding the extension of imperial rule or criticizing colonial governance, depending on their judgment of rivalries on the ground. In January and February 1893, the Commons received thirty-seven petitions bearing 4,427 signatures demanding that the Liberal government cancel its plans to evacuate Uganda (actually, the Kingdom of Buganda) following the failure of the Imperial British East Africa Company. All these petitions, apparently, had similar texts stressing that the “destruction of British influence” would create “imminent danger” to “British missionaries and native converts,” revive the east African slave trade, undermine local trust in British authority, and damage “the commerce and material interests of the English nation.”⁴⁵

Anglican networks took the lead in promoting these petitions on Uganda, as the collective self-descriptions of the petitioners suggest. More than twenty-three petitions came from congregations and parishioners, while a further four came from religious bodies, including a missionary group.⁴⁶ Just over a quarter of the remaining petitions professed a civic identity as “inhabitants,” yet the overlap in locations with petitions from congregations suggests that religious campaigners sought to mobilize further support from the same community or present existing support in a new guise. All of the petitions came from England, with around two-thirds from the southern counties. Henry Cadman Jones, an active member of the Religious Tract Society and the Victoria Institute, was the leading signatory of the Uganda petition recorded by the clerks as a sample of the genre, from the churchwardens and parishioners of St. Matthew, Paddington. His affiliations suggest that Anglican mission networks shared the call for congregational petitions between sympathetic clergy and lay members.⁴⁷

The Uganda petitions quoted above show how petitioners could interweave moral and religious motifs with a concern for upholding Britain's economic interests and imperial power. While religious causes and communities fueled a sustained expansion of parliamentary petitioning from the 1820s, they built upon—and sometimes overlapped with—an older tradition of discrete communities of economic interest raising petitions in a trial of strength to decide national policy and shape specific legislation.⁴⁸ By the 1780s, particular colonies and colonial interests, especially the West Indians, had honed petitioning as part of a broader lobbying strategy.⁴⁹ Across our period, increasing numbers of Chambers of Commerce combined parliamentary petitioning with extensive use of ministerial deputations, not systematically counted in official statistics, on questions of international trade, imperial expansion, and colonial government.⁵⁰ In many cases, it is clear why petitioners expressed local interests in distant colonies. The Chamber of Commerce for Manchester, the heart of the textile trade, repeatedly memorialized the East India Company and later the India Office about cotton supplies and duties upon them.⁵¹ In 1884, the Barrow-in-Furness Chamber of Commerce petitioned in favor of the development of India's railways; the interest of the town and the chamber's president, Sir James Ramsden, in iron, steel, and shipbuilding perhaps pointed to the sorts of development they envisaged.⁵² In such cases, petitioners placed their faith in their status and the sympathetic reception of members of Parliament and ministers rather than numbers of signatures.

In the case of the Uganda agitation, petitioning by religious groups complemented a wider lobbying effort—orchestrated by Frederick Lugard and others with business and career interests in retaining the Imperial British East Africa Company's territory—to tip the scales of government decision making. The pressure exerted by public petitioning, then, needs to be assessed in the context of rival forces contesting the desirability of particular imperial expansions.⁵³ The evidence of parliamentary petitioning suggests, as Andrew Thompson has argued, that popular metropolitan engagement with imperial politics focused on flashpoints, such as the debates over Caribbean slavery. While these eruptions of activity do not explain politicians’ decision making, which could often defy a vocal demonstration by petitioners or the press, records of petitioning can reveal which groups sought to mobilize such support for particular causes.⁵⁴

Besides religious groups and commercial lobbies, political parties and their affiliates played a role in mobilizing petitions as part of attacks on their opponents, though they sometimes attempted to disguise their partisanship. Nominally neutral, but founded to support Disraeli's foreign policy in 1877, the Patriotic League manufactured imperialist outrage in meetings and petitions. Rather than petition as local members of the league, supporters often gathered signatures as a collection of private individuals; the group's founder, MP Ellis Ashmead-Bartlett, presented almost half of the petitions, containing nearly a third of the forty thousand signatures, during the 1881 agitation for the retention of Kandahar.⁵⁵ Between late April and mid-July 1884, Conservative petitioners produced 117 petitions with more than thirty-three thousand signatures demanding an expedition to Sudan to relieve General Charles Gordon.⁵⁶ Though some petitioners presented their calls as members of party organizations, the overwhelming bulk of signatures came from petitions thrown open to “inhabitants” of a local area. In a sign of the potential scale of petitioning, but also the dependence of signature numbers on the skills of local organizers, a monster petition from residents of Glasgow contributed 15,706 signatures, not far from half the total number of signatures nationally.⁵⁷

In many cases, petitioning campaigns agitated for expansion or, as in the case of General Gordon, for action beyond the current borders of the empire. In these cases, imperialist causes would be classified by the clerks, like most foreign policy matters, as “miscellaneous.” In fact, much of what interests historians of British imperial culture fell outside the clerks’ original “colonies” category, pointing to the ways that international status and formal colonialism blended together in domestic politics and culture.⁵⁸ Furthermore, these examples emphasize that before imperial annexations or colonial boundaries were formalized and fixed, petitions were highly flexible mechanisms for different groups—religious, economic, and political—to debate, contest, and articulate what the policy of the British state should be toward these regions.

Petitions from Settlers and Colonists

We now turn to evaluating how—and which—colonial subjects used petitions to address the Commons and how this related to wider strategies of protest or persuasion. Many colonial petitioners to the Commons were white settlers, or resident merchants, or—as in the case of officers of the East India Army—military personnel. In order to understand the wider context of colonial subjects’ petitions to Westminster, the next two sections examine the respective experiences of white settlers and colonized peoples in the British Empire. As noted above, colonial issues are underrepresented in petitions to the Imperial Parliament, and these sections incorporate evidence of petitions to other sources of authority to explain why. Many colonial subjects petitioned different authorities sequentially or simultaneously. However, petitioning also formed the principal constitutional means of embodying conflicts between the Imperial Parliament and these other authorities.

Before the establishment of responsible or representative government, settler colonists made use of petitions to the Imperial Parliament to complain about misgovernment by local officials or resist policies from the center. The American Revolution, most famously, emerged from a transatlantic crisis over taxation and political authority in which petitions were initially a weapon of choice.⁵⁹ The petition to the Commons for the recall of Governor Dalhousie in 1827 was signed by over 87,000 Francophone subjects in Lower Canada—one of the highest per capita rates of subscription across the Atlantic world during a period when mass petitioning was emerging in a number of different polities.⁶⁰ In the continuing crises of the 1830s, Anglophone and Francophone communities alike used mass petitions to mobilize and demonstrate their support for different institutions of imperial rule in the Canadas. In March 1834, the speaker of the legislative assembly of Lower Canada, Louis-Joseph Papineau, communicated ninety-two resolutions of patriote grievances by means of a petition to the Commons. In the following months, a series of mass meetings rallied support for the resolutions—and their criticism of the Legislative Council—by generating 78,503 signatures on petitions to the Commons.⁶¹ While the total number of signatures did not compare with those generated by Daniel O'Connell's Irish nationalist petitions of the 1830s, they represented roughly 14 percent of the population (of all ages) of Lower Canada.⁶² The patriotes warned menacingly in 1835 that inattention to their petition increased “to an alarming degree the discontents” and would “ultimately alienate the affections of the People even from the Government of England itself.”⁶³ Moreover, as Carol Wilton has demonstrated, reformers in Upper Canada observed the methods of popular agitation in Great Britain and concluded that “numbers of signatures are the only means by which they have, in England, of judging the extent of public feeling and opinion.” By 1829, constitutional committees were organizing the simultaneous signature of petitions each addressed to different authorities in order to maximize the impact of their pressure on every level of imperial power.⁶⁴ The 1837–38 rebellions in Lower and Upper Canada were thus the culmination of popular agitation in which petitioning did not merely express community resistance to established authority but constituted and organized it.⁶⁵

In many cases, discontent with the balance of colonial authority emerged from specific policy grievances. Separately, these might be overlooked in the larger volume of petitions to the Commons from residents of the British Isles. Cumulatively, however, these concerns point to particular episodes of crisis across the colonies of the empire. Miles Taylor has suggested an imperial dimension to Britain's experience of the transnational revolutionary crisis of 1848–49.⁶⁶ Our data provide further evidence of the pressure brought to bear by discontented settlers in these years, with numerous petitions to provide economic aid to sugar estates in the West Indies; to abolish transportation to Van Diemen's Land; to abort plans to begin transportation to Cape Town; to extend the franchise in New South Wales; for representative institutions in New Zealand; to reform administration in Ceylon; to investigate malfeasance in the public finances of Newfoundland; and to address a variety of other concerns.⁶⁷ In some cases, the number of signatures represented a large proportion of colonists; around a quarter of white adults in Van Diemen's Land signed the 1848 protest to Westminster.⁶⁸ On occasion, these petitions were successful in having their requests granted, especially when backed by influential supporters. For example, Hilary Carey highlights how petitions against transportation benefited from the organizational aid of missionaries in the colonies and their supporters in the United Kingdom.⁶⁹ In 1850, the inhabitants of Cape Town objected to the scheme in eighteen petitions bearing more than six thousand signatures, equivalent to over a quarter of the total population of the city; as a result, the transportation proposal was shelved.⁷⁰ These examples highlight that signatures from colonies could be highly significant in per capita terms and that white colonial petitioners could and did make use of “colonial connections” with influential supporters to boost the impact of their petitions. This pressure could coerce unwilling British governments, establishing demographic and representative privileges for white colonists.⁷¹

Besides disputing their own rights, settler colonists might petition as part of a broader British world in pan-imperial controversies. Hence, Catholic subjects in Natal and Rhodesia joined their co-religionists in Britain and in other colonies to request a revision of the coronation oath in 1902; two of these petitions to the House of Lords survive, containing more than two thousand and five hundred signatures, respectively.⁷² However, far more subjects across the empire asked the Commons to reject any alteration of the Protestant constitution and the act of settlement (figure 3). Of nearly 620,000 of these signatures recorded in the 1902 session, 28 percent came from the colonies and dominions.⁷³ Australia and New Zealand jointly contributed more than a fifth of the total signatures recorded. Their petitions represented 2.8 percent of the non-aboriginal population of Australasia and 4.4 percent of those aged fifteen and older.⁷⁴ This signature rate was more than twice that of those aged fifteen or older in Scotland and not far off three times the equivalent rate for England and Wales.⁷⁵ Canada, with a long history of responsible government by this point and a two-fifths Catholic population, provided a comparatively lower rate of signature.⁷⁶ While the statistics may simply measure divergent practices on whether communities signed en masse or left clerics to subscribe on behalf of their congregation, this example shows how religious identities could be mobilized across the British Empire through petitions.

Figure 3 Pareto chart of signatures on petitions to the House of Commons opposing any change to the Royal Declaration, 1902 session. Source: Select Committee on Public Petitions, reports for 1902.

Petitions, Colonized Peoples, and “the Colour Line”

To disaggregate the experiences of colonial subjects, it is crucial to consider how both the opportunity to petition and the reception that petitioners received were structured by race and wealth. The permissive rights of petitioners to bring complaints in any language from any part of the empire still rested on a political culture and broader set of liberties that was particularly accessible to white settlers. On the simplest level, parliamentary clerks mishandled or ignored proper nouns from unfamiliar cultures and languages, as when the lead signatory's surname was transcribed as “illegible” for a 1853 petition from 1,757 supporters of the Madras Native Association.⁷⁷ Yet petitions also offered opportunities for well-organized groups of “respectable Natives” or “principal Natives” to pursue their own interests, to seek redress, or to challenge colonial administration.⁷⁸ In the late eighteenth century, the bankers Krishnachandra and Jaynarayan Ghoshal petitioned the East India Company to build a shelter for beggars, widows, and orphans in Kidderpore, which Indrani Chatterjee identifies as an attempt “to train Englishmen . . . in their obligation to govern according to well-established norms of the subcontinent.”⁷⁹ In other cases, the leaders of the colonized peoples used petitions to warn against neglecting obligations owed to them. In 1853, the grand chiefs of the Iroquois, Hurons, Abenakis, and Nipissing petitioned the Commons to highlight a breach of their supplies guaranteed by treaty, reminding MPs in their prayer of their service in suppressing the 1837–38 rebellion.⁸⁰ Yet given the overall underrepresentation of colonial subjects as petitioners in the data, it would seem that petitioning a legislature in which colonies were not directly represented was less attractive to these groups than other forms of imperial authority; as discussed below, those alternatives were also often resistant or obstructive to the demands of petitioners from other races.

When examining colonial petitioning, it is not always easy to discern where the boundary of elite self-interest ends and anti-colonial resistance begins. In West Africa, Kwabena Akuarang-Parry has revealed how petitions from Gold Coast elites, including the “Native Ladies of Cape Coast,” opposed the swift, uncompensated abolition of slavery, following the 1873–74 Anglo-Ashanti war.⁸¹ Their efforts to win compensation or slow emancipation involved collaboration with James Hutton Brew, the editor of the Gold Coast Times, who penned a variety of petitions on behalf of the royal family of Wassa Fiase and disgruntled slaveholders. It also drew on the experience of the resident diasporic African “intelligentsia,” some of whom had settled in the Gold Coast after service in the Caribbean and could attest that in “the West Indies . . . they at once petition the Home Government” to redress threatening initiatives.⁸² In these cases, it is clear that social elites in colonized territories could adopt petitioning to lobby the crown, the government, or Parliament for their own rights. They were quite aware of transimperial precedents.

Given the imbalance of legal power and racial prejudice in many British colonies, however, it should be recognized that petitioning allowed colonial officials and wealthy individuals to fabricate or exaggerate “native” opinion. As early as 1787, Warren Hastings's agent in India was mobilizing petitions as demonstrations of his support from Indian merchants and local elites.⁸³ Moreover, any popular mobilization of petitioning required privileged financial and political resources, not to mention social capital, to circulate and transmit the documents. In the colonies, as much as in the United Kingdom, petitioning campaigns were the products of disciplined organization, not spontaneous professions of popular support. Hence, Pratap Singh commissioned a demonstration of popular support after being deposed as the maharaja of Kashmir on charges of treason in 1889 and Zalim Singh, maharaja of Jhalawar, secured more than twenty-eight thousand signatures on petitions to the Commons after he was deposed in 1896.⁸⁴ Pratap Singh's paid agent, a newspaper editor, secretly briefed local organizers that they should not let “the Government connect the petitions with you” and to get each signatory “to sign his name twenty times on twenty pieces of paper” and then send the duplicate petitions to different MPs, in the hopes of producing a greater impact. The technique relied on clerks being less likely to notice or discern the duplication of unfamiliar Indian names across the signatory lists; the ignorance of parliamentary officials opened up opportunities to evade the usual surveillance against irregularities or fraud.⁸⁵

In most cases, however, procedural norms impaired rather than assisted petitioning from colonized subjects. If financial resources circumscribed the exercise of a right formally possessed by all British subjects, then the prejudices and attitudes of authorities also determined how they interpreted petitions, or indeed, if they accepted the petitions at all. In 1904, the Select Committee on Public Petitions published a special report, telling Indian subjects that they were under a “misapprehension” in believing that “Parliament must take action” upon petitions relating to “judicial disputes.” The committee further speculated that “a class of legal practitioner” was profiting from “uninformed” petitioners, whose judicial appeals were better directed to other authorities. In this case, then, the Imperial Parliament went to considerable lengths to advertise the “limited result of petitioning” to Indian subjects.⁸⁶ When imperial authorities did receive petitions, racial prejudices often determined their response. In March 1899, a petition to Queen Victoria from almost twenty-two thousand British subjects from Witwatersrand protested that their liberties (including the right to petition) had been infringed by the Afrikaner government of the South African Republic. Commending the petition, the British high commissioner, Sir Alfred Milner, observed that “at least three-fourths of the total signatures were those of men of pure European race,” of which “a large number, to judge from the handwriting, are well educated.” These signatures appear to have impressed him more than others from women and “coloured people.”⁸⁷

In other cases, colonial authorities were quick to impede or discredit petitions of which they disapproved. In 1860, Governor Gore Browne of New Zealand dismissed the authenticity of a petition to the queen from 508 Otaki Māori requesting that she remove him from his post. Suggesting that the influence of the missionary Octavius Hadfield in drafting the petition fatally undermined its legitimacy, Browne transmitted the documents back to London while pointing to white settlers’ petitions of support.⁸⁸ In 1884, King Tāwhiao and Wiremu Te Wheoro, a member of Parliament for one of the New Zealand Parliament's Māori constituencies, led a high-profile mission to present a petition on land rights and settler abuses to the queen; the colony's government lobbied in advance that Tāwhiao's kingship was not widely recognized and his plea should carry no weight. The colonial secretary, Lord Derby, granted the king's delegation an audience but insisted he would not overrule the responsible government of New Zealand and would send the petition back to the colony.⁸⁹

The efforts of the South African Native National Congress faced similar opposition, illustrating the arbitrariness of the petitioning process for colonized peoples. Before the creation of the Union of South Africa in 1910, black subjects had petitioned the crown, Parliament, and the government to oppose their disenfranchisement.⁹⁰ These pleas were ignored, and thereafter disenfranchised South Africans found it hard to transmit petitions to Westminster or the king. In 1912, Sol Plaatje, a founder of the South African Native National Congress, entrusted a women's petition against pass laws to the dominion's Department of Native Affairs but never knew whether it actually reached its addressee, the wife of the governor general.⁹¹ In 1913, he formed part of a delegation to Lord Gladstone, the governor general, against the colonial assembly's native land bill, having previously petitioned the legislature and the South African prime minister, Louis Botha. Plaatje was disappointed to find that “the Governor-General only made it the opportunity to urge the deputation not to go to England” to deliver their petition to the king to veto the law. The representatives responded that “in native politics there was always an appeal from the action an induna to the native chief and from the latter to the ruler; that it was straining the loyalty of the black millions of South Africa to tell them that there was no appeal to His Majesty the King against the oppressive laws of a Parliament in which they had no representatives.”⁹² The delegates subsequently made the voyage to take the petition to London, though their appeal would be disappointed, not least because the recently merged Anti-Slavery and Aborigines’ Protection Society sided with the South African government and did not raise any supportive petitions from Great Britain.⁹³ In these cases, colonial authorities could frustrate and retard petitions for imperial redress; moreover, Parliament and the government proved less responsive to the demands of black South Africans, perhaps because they did not seriously fear the threat of rebellion contained in Plaatje's warning about “straining” loyalties.

Such arrogance is surprising because of the long-standing relationship between frustrated petitioners and active rebellion against colonial authority. The 1865 rising in Morant Bay, Jamaica, emerged after the dismissal of a petition from struggling freed people in St. Ann's parish. It had been supported by 108 “poor people,” three-quarters of whom signed with a mark.⁹⁴ The petition did not cause the uprising, but the reply, on behalf of the queen, stoked tensions by advising black Jamaicans to alleviate their own problems by working harder. In July, Governor Eyre circulated fifty thousand copies of the response, amid a series of parish meetings, which he sanctioned as an opportunity for residents to discuss the economic and legal regime of the colonial assembly, dominated by former slave owners. These meetings generated petitions to Eyre with various demands and differing degrees of humility. But they also saw critics of the Assembly, such as the mixed-race assemblyman George Gordon, challenge the queen's reply as “all trash” and so could not possibly be authorized by her. The lack of faith in the governor to communicate concerns to the crown—and elicit a reply—thus fueled the tensions that triggered the October courthouse confrontation in Morant Bay and Eyre's campaign of terror against black Jamaicans, including the execution of Gordon under martial law.⁹⁵ While petitions from white settlers might prompt metropolitan action to preempt rebellion—especially after the precedents of the American Revolution and the 1837–38 Canadian risings—complaints from subjects of other races could be met by a reliance on the colony's settlers to constrain resistance or a resort to imperial violence.

Authorities’ indifference to appeals from colonized subjects did not make petitioning pointless, especially in cases where petitioners challenged individuals or particular policies rather than broader economic and political norms. In 1846, Aboriginal Australians on Flinders Island, off Van Diemen's Land, petitioned the queen to protest their poor treatment. Having agreed to settle on this land more than a decade earlier, the petitioners found British promises unfulfilled and the commandant abusive; he promptly proved this accusation by imprisoning the Aborigines’ leader, Walter Arthur. However, the appeal found favor in the Colonial Office, leading to the dismissal of the commandant and the removal of the petitioners to new land near Hobart.⁹⁶ As a series of recent studies suggest, nineteenth-century Aboriginal petitioning for land rights and other concerns continued from the knowledge that “higher authority figures could sometimes press lower and local ones into action, even when it was the latter who held primary responsibility.”⁹⁷ The same tactics seem to have informed personal appeals to the Commons. While Parliament did not take any action on individual grievances, the presentation and printing of grievances allowed petitioners to alter the balance of power in disputes: hence, the unlikely result of the Oxfordshire provincial press carrying details of how “cultivators, puttals, and zamadars of the 50 villages” in Sikar petitioned the Commons for redress in the “severe oppressions” by local officials, after failing to get satisfaction from their petition to the British resident to the Jaipur Durbar, in 1893.⁹⁸ Khan Mohamed and ninety-three other “East Indian destitutes in Trinidad” petitioned the Commons in 1917 for repatriation to India, a tactic that strengthened the bid they had separately raised with the Privy Council.⁹⁹ While reliant on the capricious intervention of imperial power and vulnerable to disruption by hostile intermediaries, petitioning offered a tactic for resistance to colonial policies or the pursuit of rights against settlers. The double-edged nature of petitioning ensured that it was potentially subversive of colonial rule. On the one hand, the petition was an institutionalized form acknowledged by imperial authorities as a tool of government. On the other hand, petitioning could metamorphose into modes of collective action that could expose the fragile governability of the empire, as Burton has recently emphasized.¹⁰⁰

Anticolonial and Nationalist Petitioning

The most extensive and sustained petitioning campaigns of colonized people emerged within early Indian challenges to imperial rule, and they demonstrate the distinctions in how British politicians responded to metropolitan and colonial mobilization. The medium helped underscore a message of disenfranchisement; as a petition noted in 1879, Indians had “no voice in Parliament or in the administration of their revenues, but they enjoy[ed] the dearly-prized right of petition.”¹⁰¹ Indeed, as early as 1828, Rammohun Roy had petitioned the Commons over discrimination in jury service, and political petitions would multiply over subsequent decades, with expanding numbers of signatures and diverse requests.¹⁰² In 1831, thousands of “respectable native inhabitants” of Bombay petitioned Parliament for the extension of habeas corpus, British courts, and Indian witnesses.¹⁰³ From the 1850s, early nationalist groups in Bombay, Calcutta, and Madras used petitions to represent concerns on diverse demands from civil service reform to the need for secondary and higher education in India.¹⁰⁴ In 1856, the British Indian Association petitioned Parliament to provide for “native” representation on the Legislative Councils ruling British India.¹⁰⁵ In 1859, the association used a petition to lay out a detailed, five-page manifesto for the ways that direct government by the British state should improve on Company rule; again, they emphasized the need for representation of Indian subjects on the new legislative councils.¹⁰⁶ The Indian National Congress, founded in 1885, focused on the need to elect such representatives and provide them with full powers to scrutinize rather than merely advise. Petitioning remained their obvious route for constitutional protest.¹⁰⁷ At this time, as Sandra den Otter has written, “most Victorian liberals asserted that representative government was not a gift that England could confer on India immediately,” and indeed the prospect of it grew “more and more remote;” instead, they emphasized the need for an “impartial and universal law” that would provide the basis for social progress that could enable a culture of political liberty.¹⁰⁸ Petitions from colonized subjects were thus a political as well as an ideological challenge to much of contemporary thinking about Indian government.

While early petitions on behalf of committees and members of nationalist groups provided information or proposed reforms for MPs to consider, petitioning also provided the opportunity for the mass demonstration of popular support, as imperial authorities had long feared. In 1886, the viceroy of India, Lord Dufferin, privately expressed his anxiety of “the importation . . . from Ireland of the perfected machinery of modern democratic agitation” to “obtain a less or greater measure of Home Rule.”¹⁰⁹ Denigrating the Indian National Congress as a “microscopic minority,” Dufferin came to the conclusion—endorsed by his successor, Lord Lansdowne—that the Unionists should embrace moderate opinion with new representation and powers, with a view to isolating radical demands from the Congress.¹¹⁰ In the same period, Naoroji emerged as a leading advocate for Congress to place pressure on Parliament by proposing an Indian petition “signed by hundreds of thousands” to help elicit popular support within the British Isles.¹¹¹ When Lord Salisbury's government delayed and deferred reform in India for fear of dissent within their Unionist coalition, Congress placed the issue back on the parliamentary agenda through a mass petition drive. They had welcomed the Liberal MP Charles Bradlaugh to India in the winter of 1889–90, where he had blessed Congress's efforts to eschew sedition. In accordance with his radical beliefs, Bradlaugh instead endorsed petitioning as “you have the constitutional right, not of going into the House and being heard yourselves, but of sending your petition there . . . from every town, from every division . . . so that India's people may kneel—and there is no shame in kneeling—on the threshold where the mother of Parliament[s] sits.”¹¹² In 1890 the campaign fulfilled Naoroji's hopes—and Dufferin's fears—with 394,946 signatures to 748 petitions that supported Indian representation on the legislative councils. This volume was significant: the names accounted for 21 percent of the total number of signatures on public petitions to the Commons in 1890; the only issue to gain more petitions or signatures that session was a local taxation bill that was backed by a mass petition drive organized by the temperance movement.¹¹³ The Indian campaign represented the largest single attempt by colonial subjects to petition the Imperial Parliament during the long nineteenth century.

The petitioners styled themselves as inhabitants or residents of both the smallest villages and larger cities in India. In some cases, petitions emerged from formally convened public meetings, following the pattern of English municipal politics, with 10,071 signatures resulting from a February meeting in Madras's Town Hall, for example.¹¹⁴ In a letter to Bradlaugh accompanying the petition of 433 residents of Chhatak, a village in Assam, Shorat Chandra Purkcista testified to the range of support, from “a ragged peasant having half a meal a day [to] the biggest of the merchants.”¹¹⁵ While some British colonists may have signed as residents and inhabitants in urban areas, the majority of signatures came from those of South Asian descent. Only one petition on the issue came from Britain, and that was signed by Indians studying in Edinburgh.¹¹⁶ Thousands of further signatures supported Indian petitions submitted under similar titles.¹¹⁷ The British Committee of the National Congress, founded in 1889, reported on the progress of the petitioning effort in its own new publication, India. Acidly, the December issue reprinted the list of petitions found in the parliamentary reports “as we receive it,” and noted “Chenglepett, Chinglepet, Chingleput, and (probably) Chuglepat, refer to one and the same place.”¹¹⁸ While the numbers of signatures did not stretch to the three million electors claimed to have voted in elections of delegates to the National Congress, they materialized Indian opinion on a scale never before presented to the Commons.¹¹⁹

The petitions from India supported a broader strategy whereby, in the words of Surendra Nath Banerjee, “they brought their case before the high court of English public opinion.” Public meetings in Britain served to launch petitions to the Commons expressing sympathy with the “constitutional means” used by the Indian petitioners. The twin colonial-metropolitan agitation therefore aimed to “Educate! Educate! Educate!” and ensure that “constituents influence their representatives so that those representatives may vote right on Indian reform.”¹²⁰ This approach was vital given that India was not directly represented in Parliament; petitioners thereby sought to exert pressure on members of Parliament through their constituencies. The Taunton Echo got the message, asserting that it was “not enough to say that we passed the resolution at Monday's meeting and sent a petition to the House of Commons.” Presciently, the editor suggested that this was “only the beginning” of the parliamentary pressure needed from Britons.¹²¹

The Indian National Congress's delegates struggled to balance the desire to present their cause on a non-party basis with the overwhelmingly Liberal audiences that greeted them. They remained reluctant to accept the contention of a Kennington radical that “the volume of agitation would greatly increase if Indian Reform were made a Party Question.”¹²² The impression would only have been strengthened by the role of Liberal front-benchers, including leader William Gladstone, joining Bradlaugh to present the Indian petitions. More surprisingly, the Tory rebel Lord Randolph Churchill and the arch-imperialist Joseph Chamberlain also presented petitions.¹²³ Yet, as the reactionary Homeward Mail carped, “the presentation of a petition by a Member of Parliament does not necessarily imply any sympathy with its object.”¹²⁴ The desire to use other MPs to present Congress's petitions might have been encouraged by Bradlaugh's demand, from June onward, for financial donations in return for each petition he presented.¹²⁵

While the Congress's petitioning campaign was unprecedented in the numbers of signatures from colonial subjects, it did not speak for India unchallenged. Some 45,896 “Mahomedans of India” subscribed to three petitions challenging the legitimacy of the National Congress and its demands. Petitioners from Islamic associations and Muslim communities dispersed across India insisted that “the demand for the introduction of an elective system into the Government of India proceeds from the class of English educated Hindus, a class that is exceptionally well able to make its voice heard both in England and in India, while the Mahomedans, being very backward in English education, have been unable to give equal prominence to their views.” They beseeched MPs to heed the “quantity and quality” of “native opinion opposed” to elected representatives.¹²⁶ The opposition was quickly noted by critics of the Congress, who pointed to Muslim petitioners in “numbers extraordinary, considering that they are of an illiterate population.”¹²⁷ Claims by petitioners to represent people, places, or opinions, as shown in many British petition drives, always sparked rival representative claims and appeals to authority. Such contestation should be viewed as intrinsic to the process of petitioning and one of the ways in which it stimulated popular politics.

Seeking to contradict the rival account of petitioning against the bill put forward by Sir Syed Ahmad Khan in the Aligarh Institute Gazette, the National Congress published testimonies as to the cross-community support for its own petitions. Dr. Lardli Mohan Ghose, the secretary of Bhagulpur's committee, testified that more than 10 percent of the ninety thousand signatures in his petitions were from Muslims and that the “howls and cries which you hear are from the side of the Anglo-Indians only.”¹²⁸ In a parallel to accusations of clerical coercion or fraudulent canvassing made in countless British and Irish campaigns, Congress activists accused Imams of bullying worshippers with threats of God's displeasure and suggested that many Hindu signatories had been conned into signing what they were told was a petition for the reforms.¹²⁹ When the Unionists finally brought the 1892 act to a vote, James Mackenzie Maclean, a Conservative former proprietor of the Bombay Gazette, insisted that the dissenting Muslim petitions proved that “Representative Government has nowhere succeeded where antipathies of race and religion have prevailed.” In this conclusion, he echoed the rhetoric deployed in the petition from Lahore's Anjaman-i-Islamia (Islamic Society) that he had presented two years earlier.¹³⁰ As in countless earlier petitioning drives addressed to the Commons, critics in and outside Westminster bitterly contested the representative quality of even the largest campaigns.¹³¹

Ultimately, this counter-petitioning fueled metropolitan debate about Congress's support within India, but the demand for elected representation faltered for other reasons. When Parliament finally voted on the reform of legislative councils in 1892, Gladstone and other Liberal sponsors of the Indian petitions proved content to leave the “elective principle” ambiguous, after intimations that the Unionist prime minister Lord Salisbury would rather drop the bill entirely rather than accept such an amendment. Congress supporters were disappointed, though divided on how far to criticize the Liberals’ cowardice.¹³² More generally, their success in mobilizing a mass petition to Parliament proved to be an exceptional case that underscores the general rule that colonized peoples could not make the same use of a universal constitutional right. The absolute number of signatures produced in 1890 was sizable, but by no means unprecedented when set against petitions to the Commons from the British Isles. The large population of India obscured the difficulties of producing so many petition signatures; while the absolute numbers of educated, urban elites, who formed the core constituency of the Congress, was significant, they faced challenges in broadening their signature lists. The literacy rates of India and the United Kingdom, according to the 1891 censuses, were approximately 6 percent and 94 percent respectively, although this was not necessarily a barrier to signing petitions in either country, given the possibility of making a mark.¹³³ Moreover, despite the acknowledged legality of petitioning Parliament or the crown, colonial officials discriminated against the careers of lawyers and other professionals supporting the Congress, while the Indian police resorted “to open violence against the supporters.” Since signing depended upon public subscription, the risks of supporting a controversial petition were even greater than those facing workers and tenants in Britain.¹³⁴ In producing an exceptionally large petition from a colonized people, Indian nationalists demonstrated the broader reality that colonized peoples lacked the related privileges that made petitioning a more potent tool in British or settler campaigns.

As Liberal MP for Finsbury from 1892 to 1895, Naoroji continued to see petitions as a prime way to win metropolitan attention. In both 1893 and 1895, he was able to present many of the petitions, bearing tens of thousands of Indian signatures, demanding examinations for the Indian civil service be offered in India to enable Indians to compete with English clerks.¹³⁵ He advised the lawyer M. K. Gandhi and other leaders of the Indian community in South Africa when, following the 1893 inauguration of responsible government in Natal, the white political elite sought to exclude South Asians who would otherwise qualify to vote under property qualifications.¹³⁶ Gandhi organized petitions, first, to the Natal Legislative Assembly and the Natal premier, the sponsors of the odious franchise bill, at the end of June 1894, then, one pair of petitions to the governor and another pair to the Natal Council, in early July, and, lastly, to the British colonial secretary, in mid-July. For the final petition, historian Judith Brown notes, “10,000 signatures were collected in two weeks, and Gandhi's main helpers were Muslim traders who used their own transport without payment.”¹³⁷ In 1902, following the Boer War, Naoroji convened a conference of British Indians and their supporters in the Westminster Palace Hotel to protest the civil disabilities placed on South Asian residents of South Africa; he signed, on behalf of the delegates, a petition to the Commons. The following year a petition to the House of Lords from a meeting of Indians resident in London objected to charging a portion of the costs of the South African War to the Indian revenues, which they construed as “dishonouring to the Empire and destructive to the welfare of India.”¹³⁸ In 1909, more than eight thousand inhabitants of Madras protested against the lack of civil rights of South Asian subjects resident in South Africa, emphasizing that this was a sustained, trans-imperial campaign to different centers of power.¹³⁹ However, it is perhaps telling that Gandhi and the community in South Africa enjoyed one of their few successes from a petition requesting that Natal authorities provide a third entrance to public buildings for them, so they did not have to share a “non-whites” entrance with Africans.¹⁴⁰ Their petitions could modify the accommodation of Indians within a racial hierarchy but could not overturn it, emphasizing the limitations of petitioning for colonial subjects.

Naoroji offered such a detailed defense of petitioning to Congress in 1906 because other campaigners had advocated direct, self-reliant modes of contesting colonial rule, rather than seeking to claim and exercise their full rights as British subjects. Bepin Chandra Pal, Shyamji Krishnavarma, and other leaders of a new generation of nationalists preferred a boycott of the colonial government, withholding petitions that would, by their nature, be interpreted as endorsing British authority. It is tempting to see petitioning as inhibiting these new modes of Indian nationalist protest, which Gandhi would embrace and refine as Swaraj following his return to India.¹⁴¹ However, Dinyar Patel has recently argued, “Parliament was a weapon of the weak, but it was nevertheless a weapon that had yielded some results” for Indian nationalists.¹⁴² Moreover, he points to Gandhi's comments in 1931 that he and Naoroji had been following the same path, beginning with petitioning, that provided a platform on which ultimately to develop different tactics.¹⁴³ From this perspective, petitioning developed a movement and publicized the nationalist cause, even as it demonstrated the limits of the right to petition transplanted to a restricted and repressive political culture. Indeed, the lesson that one Congress supporter drew from the Victorian petition campaign was that the pressures that stir “Parliament are those of its constituents, and of general public opinion at home.”¹⁴⁴

Conclusion

As this article has revealed, the ubiquitous practice of petitioning, celebrated as a universal right of British subjects, operated in distinct ways in the different territories, legal regimes, and political cultures of the empire. This suggests three interpretive points. First, an analysis of petitions to the Commons reveals the key role of Parliament and parliamentarians, as well as colonial authorities, in ordering the business of colonialism. The formal openness of Parliament to receiving petitions from all contributed to a self-image of tolerance and constitutionalism. Second, studying the petitions on colonial issues from the British Isles helps to explain some of the everyday processes through which empire was silenced, marginalized, or repackaged by popular engagement with parliamentary government. Petitioning, when orchestrated by missionary groups or political parties, could provide episodic public participation in the politics of empire, but many other issues that touched on empire or colonial matters were obscured through the arcane workings of the contemporary petitions system. The episodic nature of petitioning on colonial topics demonstrates the growing use of insider strategies by pressure groups, missionaries, and business lobbies in influencing imperial policy, and hence the sporadic manufacture of public opinion on imperial questions.

Third, despite the formal equality of the right of subjects to petition, the practical inequities of opportunity to petition Parliament ensured that this freedom merely confirmed the political peripheralization of colonized subjects, just as property qualifications or—as in India—the absence of representative institutions ensured that the rule of law upheld white supremacy without necessarily specifying race. The ability to petition Parliament meant something less in the absence of the political culture and legal norms enjoyed within Great Britain. Sandra Den Otter, writing of the law in colonial India, has pointed to the contradiction between “liberal jurisprudence and the requirements of an authoritarian state.”¹⁴⁵ In this article, we have traced such a tension between the right of all subjects to petition and the desire to preserve imperial authority and racial hierarchies, which ultimately placed limits on the exercise of that right in practice. Hence, British subjects might translate precolonial practices or learn from other parts of the empire in petitioning Parliament and other authorities but encounter arbitrary judgments and impediments. Translation errors extended beyond clerks’ inability to transcribe unfamiliar scripts or languages. Without sympathetic MPs or a metropolitan lobby, complaints might be silenced or ignored back in Westminster.

Reviewing the diverse experiences of colonial petitioners emphasizes the essential duality between citizens in the imperial metropole and colonial subjects. This duality, Josep Fradera argues in his comparative study of the British, French, Spanish, and American empires, was an important marker of the “imperial nation” that emerged in the aftermath of the age of revolutions. In the British imperial context, “the concept of citizenship as a precise political status made little sense,” with subjecthood instead being central to claiming rights and invoking the law.¹⁴⁶ Yet despite the formal equality of British subjects’ rights to petition the Imperial Parliament, the experiences we have traced in this article helped to contribute to the political and legal drawing of a “global colour line” and “widened some distinctions among classes of colonial subjects.”¹⁴⁷ Amanda Behm has recently suggested that “historical racism” as much as biological racism justified segregationist practices under a shared subjecthood to the crown and the Imperial Parliament.¹⁴⁸ James Bryce is one of those she identifies as a late-imperial craftsman of historical and legal justifications for binary constitutional privileges across the British Empire, which would eventually see discriminatory property or literacy tests transmute into explicitly racial citizenship. One wonders if Bryce was recalling his own experience as a member of Parliament presenting some of the 1890 Congress petitions on Legislative Councils to the Commons, when he compared the experiences of subjects of the British and Roman empires in a celebrated 1901 essay, “The Roman Empire and the British Empire in India.” Colonized peoples, he judged, could only appeal through petition to the imperial center, whether in Rome or in a Westminster Parliament, “in which the Indian subjects of the Crown have not been, and cannot be represented.”¹⁴⁹

Yet colonial petitioners could and did use an array of subscriptional forms to represent concerns to imperial authorities in myriad ways, even allowing for constrained opportunity. As this article has shown, inequalities of power and the anxiety to maintain colonial authority served to undercut the self-image of enlightened British imperial rule. In unearthing “hidden transcripts,” James Scott has noted, “collective insistence, through petitioning, on the ‘rights’ to which subordinate groups feel entitled carries an understood ‘or else’ with the precise consequences of a refusal left to the imagination.”¹⁵⁰ As this article has suggested, petitioners in the British Empire regularly exposed the ways in which authorities discriminated, by race where territory proved insufficient as a proxy, between whose “rights” might be reasonable to request and whose “collective insistence” might constitute authentic representation.