Hannah Weiss
“An Empire of Subjects: Unities and Disunities in the British Empire, c. 1750 – 1790”
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Abstract
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“An Empire of Subjects: Unities and Disunities in the British Empire, c. 1750-1790” explores the ways in which the term “British subject” was applied and negotiated in the continuously expanding eighteenth-century empire. This category, legally applicable to all persons born within territory held by the monarch of England, facilitated grouping together individuals living in disparate territories and under a variety of legal systems, and at the same time allowed for hierarchies between subjects of the same king. This project focuses on the period during and after the Seven Years’ War (1756-1763) in which questions about the status, duties, and rights of the multi-religious, multinational, and multiracial “new subjects” added to the empire by the Treaty of Paris (1763) became increasingly important as Britain sought to reassert imperial control. It raises issues common to the European (and other) empires whose territories and peoples were also in flux. Materials to be used span the English Law Reports and eighteenth-century treatises on law; pamphlets and sermons relating to subjects’ rights and duties; and, most importantly, the official and unofficial correspondence of the Board of Trade and East India Company, petitions submitted by “subjects” throughout the empire, copies of royal charters and proclamations, and parliamentary discussions related to subject status. Through chapters that examine attempts to incorporate Catholics, non-British Europeans, and non-whites into the British Empire, this dissertation ultimately probes an issue raised in all empires and states – namely, how an empire can integrate and exercise jurisdiction over an increasingly varied population.
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