In her illuminating and beautifully written book, Subjects and Sovereign, Hannah Weiss Muller reminds us that the Age of Revolutions was just as much about the boundaries of subjecthood as it was about citizenship. So much is clear in the British Empire, where, from the middle of the eighteenth century, the spongey bounds of subjecthood left space for formerly French Catholics, South Asians, privateers and traders to claim privileges from (or spurn duties owed to) the king of England.
At the heart of Muller's story is the eighteenth century when conversations about subjecthood reverberated around the empire. After its acquisitions in 1713 in the Mediterranean and 1763 in the Americas and South Asia, with some notable exceptions, the British Empire waxed inclusive. Often, for very local and specific reasons, judges and administrators welcomed conquered subjects of foreign princes into the protection of the British king. They did so sometimes to build empire in places where foreigners dominated (Grenada and Quebec), sometimes to facilitate trade, commerce, and defense in fragile garrisons (Minorca and Gibraltar), and sometimes to best political rivals (Bengal). More often than not, these projects were inflected with representations made by new and fragile subjects seeking inclusion or immunity depending on whether they sought to escape enslavement by Barbary pirates, criminal prosecution, or civil liability or to win a say in local government.
The book begins with a very careful and useful exposition of the endemic uncertainties of early modern English subjecthood. Calvin's Case (1608), Muller astutely notes, might have extended the rights of subjecthood to a Scot born after James VI acceded to the throne of England, but other cases demonstrate that it did very little to settle the issue of subjecthood in empire. Most importantly, Calvin's Case did not settle the status of people living in colonies at the time of conquest, determine whether subjecthood carried jurisdiction into foreign territories or, indeed, define subjecthood's bounties and burdens.
From the mid-seventeenth century, Muller tells us, commentators and pundits threw prolific and occasionally comic content into this void. Notions of subjecthood bounced among lists of duties, privileges, and, increasingly, natural rights, which spanned freedom from arbitrary arrest and hunting. Asserters of rights and privileges liked to call them ancient; most were nothing of the sort. What is clear is that subjecthood was a hot topic in the eighteenth century, and treatise writers and pamphleteers were just some of many people making claims on the basis of their relationship with the British king.
This fluidity made the incorporation of new and diverse colonies in the eighteenth century particularly interesting. Though Minorca and Gibraltar were very different places, administrators in both doled out subjecthood to survive. British regimes there were food insecure and vulnerable. The protections afforded by British subjecthood lubricated supply chains by attracting traders, financiers, and, perhaps most importantly, crews willing to run the gamut of incessant international hostilities and Barbary pirates to feed or defend the outposts. In these places, British deserters, Catholic locals, and Hanoverians were usually called subjects, but an array of useful foreigners were also allowed to claim protection from George III. Curiously, the fiercest policers of the boundaries of British subjecthood in these places were Barbary princes who thought Britain was taking advantage of safe passage treaties to defend non-subjects. It is amusing and instructive that it fell to a Barbary prince to remind the British that his captive was “a good for nothing Vagabond, & was turned Maltese & Neapolitan & Roman Catholic too; and that shewd he had deserted his Country's Service & Religion exclusive of liberty” (220).
The next chapter, on Grenada and Quebec, develops a line of argument established some time ago by Philip Lawson and others. In the Seven Years’ War, Britain accumulated an array of new possessions, key among them French colonies with Catholic majorities. In Grenada, the white Catholic majority ran to about twelve hundred, but there were seventy thousand Catholics in Quebec. The task of binding these erstwhile Frenchmen to the British king reanimated a legal argument that had been around for decades—that penal laws should not apply to the colonies. New Catholic subjects in Grenada lobbied successfully for the vote and a fixed number of positions in the legislature. In Quebec, things went quite differently. French law was reinstated in civil matters and Catholics were allowed places on an appointed council. I think Muller does not make enough of the fact that, in Quebec, a local legislature was withheld. To borrow from the title of Muller's chapter 5, there was promise and peril in the empire's qualified embrace of Catholic subjects.
Muller's final chapter also returns to familiar ground in its careful articulation of the debates about subjecthood that bounded the jurisdiction of the Supreme Court of Calcutta established by the Regulatory Act of 1773. The Regulatory Act gave the court limited jurisdiction over Calcutta, company servants, “British subjects” or “subjects of the King.” Early judges used this convoluted mandate to wrest significant (but still very limited) jurisdiction from the East India Company, which, from 1765, exercised significant judicial powers on behalf of the Mughal emperor. In doing so, the court not only claimed an array of businessmen from Europe, the Middle East, and East Asia for the king and court, but it also heard litigation about the affairs of Indians, sometimes in very contingent relationships with the company or Calcutta. The moment was very short-lived, however. Indeed, company pushback resulted in significant and sudden hardening of the racial boundaries of subjecthood in Empire.
By pulling together familiar and unfamiliar case studies with forensic care, Muller shows us something important—the flexibility of subjecthood in the British Empire. The periodization of the book usefully reminds us that much more was going on in legal history than revolutions predicated on popular sovereignty. But the porosity of subjecthood she describes has a much longer history. Donna Merwick demonstrated the clashes of law and culture occasioned by the incorporation of Dutch subjects in post-conquest New York in the late seventeenth century. As Lauren Benton and others have shown, pirates had been banking on generous interpretations of subjecthood for centuries. Hundreds of volumes of foreign office documents attest to the fact that European states were willing to go into bat for almost any slave trader who carried their flag until at least the middle of the nineteenth century. The partial emancipation of French Catholics in Grenada and Quebec after 1763 certainly differs from the sorry history of Irish colonization, but needs to be tempered by the almost contemporaneous expulsion of the Arcadians. Meanwhile, the Calcutta Supreme Court's jurisdictional arrogations were so temporary and self-serving that they barely look like a moment of inclusivity at all.
The achievement of this excellent book, in the end, is less the identification of a unique moment in empire than it is a convincing exploration of one moment of many in “an empire in which inhabitants and administrators were constantly choosing, challenging, and extending definitions of allegiance and protection” (218).
