This chapter explores a history of ideas and hopes about freedom in late- sixteenth-century Sevilla through the lives and affairs of enslaved and liberated Black people who lived in a central parish of the city in this period. In particular, the analysis explores ideas about freedom of an enslaved Black woman named Felipa de la Cruz who penned two letters to her absent husband beseeching him to send funds for her liberation from slavery. The chapter explores the varied conversations and fractured memories about paths to liberation from slavery among free, enslaved, and liberated Black populations in Sevilla and the mutual aid practices that sometimes spanned vast distances across the Atlantic world. Assembling diverse archival materials that catalog how hundreds of free and liberated Black men and women crossed the Atlantic Ocean as passengers with royal licenses on ships also reveals spheres of communication between free Black residents of Sevilla with kin and associates in the Spanish Atlantic world, especially through relays of word of mouth and epistolary networks. In other words, enslaved and free Black residents of late sixteenth-century Sevilla were often members of a nascent Black lettered city and participated in informal relays of word of mouth.

This chapter explores how free-born and liberated Black people in the Spanish Americas invested significant resources to defend and expand the meanings of Black freedom and political belonging in the Spanish empire. In particular, when facing repressive policies introduced by local or municipal authorities or disturbances of their freedom enacted by private individuals, free born and liberated people often deftly negotiated various legal jurisdictions and expended social and political capital to carefully craft petitions for royal justice and grace. The chapter traces the development of infrastructures of Black political knowledge, and how people and communities learned about events and political discourses in faraway places and exchanged ideas and news in their daily lives that they later might deploy in their own petitions. With a focus on the cities of Sevilla and Mexico City, the chapter traces a history of infrastructures of Black political knowledge through the activities of Black religious confraternities, and the significance of Black petitioning to speculate about the possible moments of fellowship and exchange between Black petitioners from different cities in the Spanish empire, and the impact of any such exchanges on Black political ideas about freedom in this period.

Chapter Six offers a careful reading of the first two sedition trials of Bal Gangadhar Tilak (1898 and 1908). While existing scholarship has studied his subversive performances within the courtroom, I extend this analysis to incorporate his efforts at winning executive mercy and commutation from prison. More than any other political leader, Tilak spent his imprisonment exhausting every avenue to petition and appeal against his sentence. This included multiple approaches to the Privy Council and serious plans to petition the House of Lords. In an important and original breakthrough in anticolonial political thought, it was when Tilak failed to win freedom on the basis of justice alone that he connected the availability of mercy to the curtailment of political rights in India.

Chapter Five charts the creation of standardized and uniform bureaucracies managing pardons and scaffolds across British India. Unlike in England when the number of hangings declined during this period, the colonial state would continue to hang Indians in high numbers until independence. In a bloody context, I ask when did the state pardon or execute, and how? As the chapter demonstrates, the codification of criminal law did not initially produce clear rules about what rights were owed to the condemned. As I argue, the gradual development of standardized procedures and rules to manage the petition for mercy and the spectacle of the scaffold emerged in response to constant challenges from convicts and their supporters. The decisive turn away from the public scaffold in certain executions evidenced the abject failure of the state to deploy terror and mercy to cultivate fearful and obedient subjects in the age of Indian nationalism.

Amongst the thousands of papyrus and paper documents from medieval Egypt written in Greek, Coptic and Arabic there are a large number of letters of requests and petition letters. This chapter examines how the senders of these letters used the argument of being alone and helpless to persuade the letter’s recipient to undertake some action to help the petitioners. By presenting the petitioner as someone without friends, family or anyone else to help them, a relationship is created with the petitioned who can help based on the social and moral expectations that prevailed in early Islamic Egyptian society.

This chapter delves into the politics of factionalism in Gaza, its causes, development, the impact of external factors, and its effects. It surveys the main bones of contention within the Gazan elite, presents portraits of elite families and political personalities, and discusses the relationships between the Gazan elite and outside forces. It focuses on the rise of the Shawwa family and its allies the Busaysus, erstwhile supporters of the Husaynis, who at some point in the mid-1890s turned against them for unknown reasons and eventually were able to oust them from control over the city’s politics in 1898, when the leadership of the Husayni family was exiled by the Ottoman government to Ankara. The rise of the Shawwa–Busaysu coalition, whose source of power was the newly created municipality, was accompanied by a spatial divide of the city between the neighborhood of Daraj where most of the elite families, including the Husaynis, resided, and the relatively poor neighborhood of Shajaʿiyya, the stronghold of the opposition. This led to what here is termed “spatialized factionalism,” a new concept that is discussed at length. Gaza’s factionalism is then analyzed in comparison to late Ottoman cities in Bilad al-Sham.

Chapter 5 explores the use of political correspondence (mursalāt), in the form of petitions and firmans, during the early Qajar period. Like marriage, political correspondence had a long history in Iran, but a manuscript collection of correspondence between Qajar rulers and Kangarlu tribal khans in the Caucasus helps us see how and why the use of correspondence changed during the early nineteenth century. The manuscript collection from the Majlis Library contains correspondence dating to the eighteenth century and up to 1828, with the numbers of petitions and firmans increasing dramatically during the Russo-Persian Wars (1804–13 and 1826–28). The collection suggests that correspondence was critical to Qajar efforts to protect the ‘Guarded Domains of Iran,’ that Qajar rulers in Tehran and Tabriz were well-informed of events on the war’s front, and that local circumstances and conditions in the Caucasus influenced political decisions.

Over nearly three decades of British rule, mental illness sparked complex, consequential interactions in Palestine: between colonial state and society, Arabs and Jews, and Palestine and the wider region. The introduction outlines Mandatory Madness’s focus on the social and cultural history of colonial psychiatry in mandate Palestine, and argues for its significance across three distinct fields: as offering a novel account of the mandate period, which stresses entanglement rather than assuming division; as shifting the focus in histories of psychiatry away from institutions and experts and towards encounters; and as challenging methodological nationalism by revealing regional and global forms of interconnection. The introduction also reflects on the possibilities and perils of working with the archives of colonial psychiatry in mandate Palestine, and provides an overview of the political history of the period to orient readers across the rest of the book.

This chapter focuses on the hundreds of so-called criminal lunatics who appeared to slip between the gaps in psychiatric provision over the 1940s and ended up in the lunatic sections of the mandate’s prisons. Their abandonment, this chapter argues, was the product of often- fraught negotiations across state and society: mandate officials in particular worried that the families of the mentally ill were staging minor criminal offences in order to have their relatives bypass long waiting lists and access institutional provision. Through a careful reading of case files from the rich archive of the criminal lunatic section at Acre, this chapter delves into the complex dynamics that surrounded these individuals’ routes into – as well as out of – this institutional site. These stories reveal that neither insanity nor criminality was a stable category in mandate Palestine. But the case files, particularly the ‘delusions’ they record, also hold out the possibility of recovering the experiences and perspectives of those deemed criminally insane, and indeed their capacity to exercise a degree of agency over their lives.

This chapter brings to the fore a key theme across the second part of Mandatory Madness: the considerable agency exercised by families over the management of their mentally ill relatives. This chapter focuses in particular on the petitions that flooded the mandate government from the 1930s onwards, seeking the admission of relatives to the government’s mental institutions. These petitions are read both for what they reveal about the often-complex therapeutic strategies pursued by families, and as carefully crafted arguments about mental illness and the state’s obligations to its subjects. Petitions make clear that Palestinian Arab families in particular were much more actively engaged with questions of psychiatric care than has been often represented, incorporating the mandate’s processes, institutions, and indeed anxieties into their strategies for managing the mentally ill. Petitions reframe our understanding of the interactions between state and society in mandate Palestine, by revealing how these played out in the intimate stretches of people’s lives.

Chapter 6 reconstructs the process of petitioning to the king, once a dispute had set in and the decision to litigate before the highest authorities had been taken. Firstly, the chapter establishes the extent of knowledge and understanding about royal justice among Tudor subjects. Returning to some of the themes set out in Chapter 1, it explores the wider culture of complaint with which all prospective supplicants were familiar, provides evidence for growing awareness of the format required for petitions to the king, and surveys the range of professional legal advice available to produce these documents. The contents of the petitions that litigants and their counsel put together is further explored, with some consideration of the potential for the plaintiff’s ‘voice’ to break through the formula. Finally, the chapter sets out the practical steps required to reach the royal household and to seek out the king himself. Throughout this analysis, bills of costs submitted by Requests’ litigants facilitate further scrutiny of its accessibility, and particularly whether its shift from itinerancy to settlement at Westminster negatively affected its poorest suitors.

Chapter 5 turns from the demography of the Court of Requests to the issues that its plaintiffs presented. It begins with a breakdown of the subject matter of petitions, including violent assaults, debt and goods disputes, and quarrels over the possession of land. Thereafter, the chapter abandons firm legal categorisations used in other single-court studies, observing that supplicants to the king more often framed their cases in terms of emotions, relationships, and social values – of personal status and a wider social order that they perceived to be at risk. Finally, the chapter examines claims made by Requests’ petitioners about their inability to find justice elsewhere, in other parts of the legal system. This serves to trace the various possible steps between the onset of a localised feud and the pursuit of litigation before the king, and therefore to better contextualise the Court of Requests and the conciliar justice network. It also demonstrates how subjects and supplicants perceived this new jurisdiction: not as a forum for trying particular areas of case law but as a mechanism for remedying tangled feuds that could not be so simply defined nor easily remedied elsewhere.

This chapter looks at the impact of the American Revolution and its war on both Britain and Ireland. Its central concern is to explore whether Britain and Ireland can be incorporated in the Atlantic Revolution thesis, first advanced by Robert Palmer, which suggests the migration of revolutionary impulses eastwards. The argument developed here lays less emphasis on the inspiration provided by the democratic ideas associated with the American Revolution than on the importance of British military setbacks and ultimate defeat in the War of American Independence. It also highlights domestic and wider imperial influences on reform within Britain and Ireland, which also seem to have played a more significant role than the democratic tendencies of the American Revolution. By no means all the different reform programs and proposals in Britain and Ireland envisaged movement in a democratic direction. Indeed, the chapter makes the case for our considering most of the calls for reform in this period as attempts to turn the clock back, and recover lost or declining safeguards against misrule, or remedy long-standing grievances, rather than as forward-looking attempts to embrace democracy.

Shakespeare and George Peele’s Titus Andronicus (1591–94) stages both the proliferating texts and the religious violence of the early 1590s. These years saw a spate of sectarian libels from persecuted Puritans and Catholics alike. In Titus, the marginalized Andronici likewise launch ephemeral scraps of writing into the sky, texts that join appeals for redress with violent threats. These libels bear an especially close resemblance to those scattered in the streets by the Puritan extremist William Hacket and his accomplices in 1591. But the echoes are also cross-confessional, indicating a broader interest in the “manner” of religiopolitical speech. The play folds its topical allegory into a Tacitean-humanist history of political communication: the rise of the emperor, Saturninus, brings about the end of public oratory. Their speech silenced, the Andronici unleash a flurry of texts that takes the Tacitean story of rhetorical decline into its early modern future. By yoking libels not just to the pursuit of justice but also to factionalism and violence, Titus takes a hard look at the viral and virulent media of the late Elizabethan public sphere.

This chapter explores the changing nature of property rights over more than five decades in China through a case study of an individual family. Tracing the Zhu family’s demand for justice in the post-Mao era for the six houses it had owned and lost – the first five to Mao’s 1950s socialist reforms and the last one to post-Mao urbanization – the chapter notes how the post-Mao transition initially brought a small measure of justice when the family was allowed to reclaim their house and offered a token payment for their prior losses. This was undone in the rapid urbanization that led to the eviction of the family and the destruction of their home in 2005 to make way for a twenty-four-storey grand hotel that now stands in its place. The case demonstrates how the concept of transitional justice and limited past success in regaining property continue to motivate the family to engage in an ongoing struggle for justice.

This chapter reflects upon the role of petitions in the history of transnational anticolonialism at the United Nations. Even though the UN circumscribed the right to petition in 1948 by excluding it from the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, anticolonial nationalists used petitions to oppose the return of colonial rule, condemn human rights abuses, and demand self-determination. The independence movement in Somaliland and the other former Italian colonies in Africa sent petitions to the Trusteeship Council, which in turn were supported by anticolonial UN delegations from the global South. Although Italy returned as the administering authority when the Trust Territory of Somaliland was formed, this collective effort led to the defeat of the Bevin–Sforza Plan and contributed to increasing international support for decolonization.

The thirteenth-century kingdom of England was a political, jurisdictional and administrative unit consisting of thirty-nine contiguous counties which the Norman and Angevin kings of England had in large part inherited from their Anglo-Saxon predecessors – although two of those counties (Cheshire and Durham) had by the thirteenth century come to enjoy an enhanced degree of autonomy, which for many, if not all, purposes placed them outside direct royal control. The kings of England also possessed a limited degree of control over the marcher lordships of Wales which had been conquered from native Welsh rulers by ‘English’ lords and constituted a barrier between England and the kingdoms of Wales. The rest of Wales remained under the control of native Welsh rulers until Edward I in successive campaigns in the 1270s and 1280s destroyed the last remaining native princes and their independence. He did not annex the conquered Welsh lands to the kingdom of England or dispossess all the conquered Welsh, but he established a separate principality of Wales in the north and west of Wales under English control and in 1301 the king’s eldest son became ‘prince’ of Wales. Edward also imposed a version of English law and of the English local administrative system on this area through the Statute of Wales of 1284.1