Table of Contents

Acknowledgments
Introduction: Of Sovereigns and Subjects
Chapter One: The Laws of Subjecthood
Chapter Two: The Free-Born Subject's Inheritance
Chapter Three: Real and Pretended Subjects: Mediating Subjecthood in the Mediterranean
Chapter Four: His Britannick Majesty's New Subjects: The Rights of Subjects in Grenada and Quebec
Chapter Five: The Promises and Perils of Subjecthood and Jurisdiction: Calcutta
Conclusion
Notes
Bibliography
Index

About the Author

Hannah Weiss Muller is Assistant Professor of History at Brandeis University.

Reviews

"Our understanding of subjecthood in the eighteenth-century British Empire has been distorted and diminished by the widespread, long-standing historical fascination with the rise of new conceptions of citizenship in the American and French Revolutions ... In this ambitious study, Hannah Weiss Muller examines subjecthood outside this invidious comparative framework. With case-studies from around the eighteenth-century British Empire, she recovers a series of
creative, fraught and consequential debates surrounding the rights and privileges of subjects of the British Crown ... Muller's book is the product of an impressive body of research." -- Geoffrey Plank,
English Historical Review
"Fascinating and well-researched ... Muller's work highlights the importance of moving beyond analyses of British subjecthood rooted in narrow legalistic discussions ... and instead adopting as protagonists the actual people fighting for particular rights across the empire. As her work shows, this project entails taking a truly global perspective on the legal dimensions of empires. Bringing it to completion will allow us to firmly answer whether we can
reconstruct a Europe in which Britain was an equal partaker rather than a distinct, perhaps even exceptional polity. Muller's beautiful, smart, and erudite work takes us well on our way there." -- Tamar
Herzog, William and Mary Quarterly
"Hannah Weiss Muller makes an important contribution to scholarship on earlier phases of British imperial development ... In arguing for a widely accepted conception in the Anglophone world of a British Empire grounded in notions of the liberty of the subject, Muller ... relocates the discussion from the realms of jurists and political philosophers at the high end of print culture, and pamphleteers and newspaper writers at the lower end, to the lived reality of
actual imperial subjects, gleaned from archival materials ... Muller argues persuasively from the bottom up." -- John Eglin, American Historical Review