In February 1766, Governor Robert Melvill received a memorial from “His Majesty's Adopted Subjects in the Island of Grenada,” which he forwarded to superiors in London. The authors, thirty-four French Catholics, were among the French settlers who had chosen to remain on the island after its cession to Britain at the close of the Seven Years' War (1756–63). Affirming loyalty to their new sovereign, George III, they carefully emphasized their usefulness to the colony.Footnote ¹ Perhaps most significantly, they argued that as British subjects, they were entitled to vote for assembly members in upcoming elections. Their identification as subjects and their declaration of rights would not go unchallenged. In fact, both provoked rancorous struggles that threatened the political and economic stability of this Caribbean island in the 1760s and 1770s—struggles that had striking parallels in other territories of the empire. Yet, by insisting that they were subjects and by doing so in a petition that was circulated among colonial administrators, these French Catholics had inscribed themselves as instrumental members of the British Empire.

Such claims of subjecthood were omnipresent in the eighteenth century. What might be called a language of subjecthood surfaced in treaties, parliamentary papers, pamphlets, newspapers, sermons, and official correspondence, just as it did in countless petitions, or memorials. The historical and archival record reveals that individuals of various ranks and backgrounds throughout the British realm and empire systematically used this language to swear fealty and to demand certain rights. Everyone from members of the House of Lords, who routinely addressed the reigning monarch as “humble subjects,” to lowly villagers, who regularly beseeched their sovereign for relief or privileges, wielded it. From indigenous peoples who sought protection from the encroachments of colonists, to colonists who themselves pleaded for assistance against the attacks of their “savage neighbors,” many described themselves as loyal subjects.Footnote ² Across outposts in North America, the Mediterranean, and the Indian Ocean, a dizzying range of peoples proclaimed their subject status.

This article examines assertions of subjecthood made by a particular set of these individuals during the 1760s and 1770s, focusing on the claims of French Catholics in both Grenada and Quebec, another formerly French territory that became British over the course of the Seven Years' War.Footnote ³ It then analyzes similarities in the petitions drafted by subjects in both territories, emphasizing the shared understanding of subjecthood that prevailed and highlighting several characteristics that made subjecthood crucial to the later eighteenth-century British Empire. As formulaic and routine as these petitions and pronouncements of subjects may seem, they underline not only the centrality of subjecthood during this period but also the fundamental role that “new” and “adopted” subjects played in shaping the boundaries of “British” subjecthood. Although the loyalties of French Catholics were constantly suspect—both because they were born within the dominions and allegiance of the French king and because of their Catholic faith—they were nonetheless individuals whom administrators readily recognized as subjects and who handily leveraged that status to secure coveted privileges.Footnote ⁴ They were active participants in debates over the very meanings of subjecthood. They consistently challenged received understandings of indelible allegiance and unchanging national status. Above all, the assertions of the French Catholics in both of these ceded territories reveal that subjecthood in the British Empire would be chosen, negotiated, and defined by many who were not natural-born subjects.

Uncertainties about British subjecthood became particularly pronounced as peace returned after the Seven Years' War. Britain emerged from this global conflict as the dominant imperial power, having inherited numerous territories and populations, including the formerly French and Spanish inhabitants of Grenada, Canada, Florida, and Minorca. Not only were the boundaries of the European empires redrawn, but the character of the British Empire was also altered irrevocably. Whereas scholars have noted that the early eighteenth-century empire was conceived of as predominantly Protestant, commercial, maritime, and free, the British Empire of the 1760s, as Peter Marshall has so succinctly observed, also included “subject populations of Native Americans, French Canadians, and Indians, none of whom were Protestant, British, or free, according to ‘British notions of freedom.’”Footnote ⁵ The end of war thus provoked immediate and pressing concerns about how to integrate multinational, multireligious, and multiracial new populations as well as about how to hold together these far-flung territories.

When the Treaty of Paris concluded hostilities in February 1763, it redistributed huge swaths of territory and detailed the conditions under which the various European monarchs ceded territories to one another. Perhaps even more significantly, its numerous articles foreshadowed the central but ambiguous role that subject status, and particularly Catholic subject status, would play in the empires that had been reconstituted. The agreement was explicitly framed as one between monarchs and subjects of “their Britannick, Most Christian, Catholick, and Most Faithful Majesties.” Signatories vowed that no articles would be “infringed” by “their respective subjects.” Most important, in Articles IV and IX, George III pledged to protect freedom of worship for “his new Roman Catholick subjects” in formerly French territories.Footnote ⁶ Because the phrasing of the document itself acknowledged the transfer of subjects from one king to the next, it is tempting to assume that signatories at least had a common understanding of words they used so readily. Closer analysis reveals, however, that no clear or agreed-upon definition of subjecthood existed. If anything, the Treaty of Paris signaled a moment when traditional understandings of subjecthood began to fluctuate and when alternative definitions of subjecthood were proposed and then embraced by new additions to the British Empire and by colonial administrators.

Historians have typically sought definitions of subjecthood in cases tried before the English courts. The most famous of these cases, Calvin v. Smith (1608), came about in the years after the 1603 union of the crowns, when James VI of Scotland ascended the English throne as James I. In the aftermath of this important event, questions arose as to whether subjects born in James's Scottish kingdom had the same rights as those born in his English kingdom. After extensive debate at the highest levels of the judiciary, the 1608 ruling held that all individuals born within the king's “ligeance and obedience” were subjects.Footnote ⁷ Sir Edward Coke's landmark opinion clearly established that allegiance and subjecthood were immutable birthrights and that allegiance stemmed from birth within the king's dominions. What this meant in practical terms was that subjecthood was available to all those born within the king's territories—regardless of which dominion and regardless of religion, race, or ancestry. Furthermore, Calvin's case recognized that subjects of the king might reside within separate political units and live under different systems of law.Footnote ⁸ The vision of subjecthood enunciated was thus one that theoretically allowed a range of individuals living under various laws to maintain their separate identities even as they shared allegiance to the same monarch.

Although Sir Edward Coke had articulated a definition of subjecthood in 1608 that would prove critical to accommodating the many peoples and places of the empire, both his opinion and those offered in subsequent judicial rulings were silent on several important issues.Footnote ⁹ Cases like Craw v. Ramsey (1681) extended the rulings of Calvin's case beyond Scotland, arguing that a subject “born in any dominion belonging to the Crown of England is inheritable in England as well as native Englishmen.”Footnote ¹⁰ Others, such as Fabrigas v. Mostyn (1773), tackled the problem of subjects born in territories like the formerly Spanish and French island of Minorca, maintaining that Anthony Fabrigas, a native of Minorca, was a subject, “being born in Minorca since its subjection to the crown of England.”Footnote ¹¹ None, however, addressed the status of inhabitants born in these dominions before their subjection to the English crown, provoking several pressing questions. Because they had not technically been born in the king's dominions, were individuals born in a territory before it became British eligible for British subject status? Could subjects of one monarch ever truly become subjects of another if subjecthood was, as Coke had argued, indissoluble and permanent?Footnote ¹² Furthermore, by the 1760s, case law had established only a very limited number of rights for British subjects: they could own land in England, sue for justice before the courts in England, and petition the king.Footnote ¹³ But were there other rights actually due British subjects? Given the array of rights typically associated with British subject status in the colonies, there was a clear discrepancy between how judges described subjecthood and how subjects themselves did.

To complicate matters further, many other nonlegal sources reveal that the phrase “British subject” had at least two possible and recurrent meanings, which contributed to confusion at the time. In the eighteenth century, everyone from members of Parliament to pamphleteers used the term to describe and also to categorize individuals.Footnote ¹⁴ At times, it was intended simply as an explanatory term, an adjective and a noun that put together described someone as the monarch's subject who was of British origin. It also, however, had a more provocative and expansive use. The term could be a weightier phrase and category wielded to evoke a set of inherent rights and privileges, not unlike those liberties often associated with the man who was described as a “freeborn Englishman.” “British subject” was therefore a potentially expansive legal status as well as a powerful turn of phrase whose meanings remained contested and open to interpretation in Grenada, Quebec, and elsewhere.

As formerly French territories were rapidly ceded under the Treaty of Paris and as newly incorporated French Catholics began asking about their status and rights as members of the British Empire, they therefore encountered great uncertainties and inevitably found that case law was inadequate in providing answers. Often left to their own devices and in the absence of clear legal guidance, these subjects and their colonial administrators began to construe subjecthood in ways that reflected practical and everyday realities in the colonies. French Catholics, alongside British Protestants, themselves debated who counted as a British subject and opined on what rights were their due, yielding ideas that often filtered back to London and shaped colonial policy. Local administrators sometimes relied on their own judgments about what constituted fair practice or sought the guidance of superiors.Footnote ¹⁵ Many officials tended to recognize as subjects not only those born within the king's dominions, as case law permitted, but also those who remained in conquered territories after their cession to Britain and whose assistance was needed during times of war. In such ways, other extra-judicial understandings of subjecthood began to circulate within the broader framework of colonial administration—in the correspondence between inhabitants, governors, and representative bodies in the colonies and their superiors in London who included individuals and entities such as secretaries of state, the board of trade, and the Privy Council to the king. Within this correspondence, which includes letters, reports, commentaries, and numerous petitions, the voices of new subjects were pronounced and definitions of subjecthood emerged as many and malleable.

To date, numerous studies have called attention to how the financial and military exhaustion wrought by the Seven Years' War was a pivotal precursor to both the American and the French revolutions.Footnote ¹⁶ But while it is true that administrators worried about strengthening the army and navy, and about extracting revenues from the colonies, it is also true that they were preoccupied by how best to govern conquered peoples who, almost overnight, had become British subjects. This period witnessed the adoption of reforms that alienated many in the thirteen North American colonies and elsewhere, just as it was also marked by flexible and expansive attitudes toward subjecthood and toward the rights of subjects. The 1760s and 1770s were not merely a prelude to subsequent upheavals; rather, the postwar era represented a distinct period of remarkable adaptation. Moreover, the changed international landscape that characterized these decades put many new peoples, such as the French Catholics of Grenada and Quebec, as well as colonial administrators, in a position to leverage loyalties and the bonds of newfound subjecthood.

If the economic, intellectual, and cultural networks explored by scholars thus far were critical in integrating the British Empire and its peoples in the eighteenth century, so too were claims of subjecthood.Footnote ¹⁷ The British Empire was realized and unified by words and demands in common, just as it was by shared texts and taxes. But whereas the importance of these other factors and of monarchy as unifying forces across empires is well documented, the ways in which subjecthood also served to bind the empire have received little attention.Footnote ¹⁸ Those who have examined subjecthood have tended to be historians with an interest in law, and the possibilities of subjecthood for the British Empire as a whole have generally been overlooked.Footnote ¹⁹ As French Catholics insisted on their subject status, and engaged administrators and fellow subjects in debates about their rights, they were not only rewriting the meanings and possibilities of subjecthood. Perhaps more important, as these individuals pronounced their loyalties and circulated petitions, they were also articulating understandings of subject status that were far more broadly applicable and significant. Indeed, by the 1760s, the bonds between subject and sovereign, the ones articulated and performed each time subjects approached their monarch or his representatives, would operate at a symbolic and functional level to hold together an empire that had come to include many who were non-British, non-Protestant, nonwhite, and non-natural-born subjects.

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Among the territories acquired by Britain at the close of the Seven Years' War, both the island of Grenada and the province of Quebec would experience prolonged and virulent disagreements between “old subjects,” who identified as British born and Protestant, and “new subjects,” who were predominantly French Catholic.Footnote ²⁰ In Grenada, the vast majority of the 1,200 or so white inhabitants were French Catholics, and in Quebec, 60,000 to 70,000 French Catholics dwarfed the population of a few hundred British merchants and traders.Footnote ²¹ For colonial administrators and for the central government more generally, these populations provoked similar and widespread concerns about integrating and governing French Catholics in an empire in which non-Protestants were historically treated as second-class subjects. In the 1760s and 1770s, uncertainties about the status of these inhabitants and about whether they could be exempt from the penal laws against Catholics in force within the realm, sit in local assemblies, and retain their own civil laws bedeviled the colonies as they did members of the Privy Council and Parliament.Footnote ²² But whereas the Acadians had been forcibly removed from Nova Scotia in 1755 when their presence was deemed a threat to the “security and protection” of the province, colonial administrators responded very differently to Grenadian and Canadian French-speaking Catholics in 1763.Footnote ²³ Instead of provoking deportations, the presence and assertions of these new subjects forced important discussions about the rights due British subjects and ultimately signaled that understandings of subjecthood would play a far larger role in the expanding British Empire.

A few lines in the Treaty of Paris specified the conditions under which the king of France relinquished sovereignty and possession of Grenada and Canada, merely requiring that George III allow his new Roman Catholic subjects to “profess the worship of their religion” or allow them to sell their estates and “bring away their effects as well as their persons.”Footnote ²⁴ This was not necessarily the most comprehensive or reassuring set of rights for Frenchmen, particularly those of a faith long mistrusted, who chose to remain in these territories. However, the Royal Proclamation of October 1763 and subsequent instructions sent to governors of both colonies established basic forms of civil government in each new colony and seemed to portend integration into the British Empire. The proclamation was clearly intended to provide the new colonies with a constitutional model like that of royal colonies along the Atlantic coast.Footnote ²⁵ It permitted governors to convoke assemblies as soon as circumstances should permit and stipulated that inhabitants should enjoy the protection of English laws. Promises of representative assemblies and English laws, as well as favorable grants of land, were held out to entice settlers whom administrators initially expected would be predominantly Protestant. Grenada and Canada were treated like East and West Florida, and as many noted at the time and have asserted since, little attention was paid to the position or needs of their majority French Catholic populations.Footnote ²⁶

Nonetheless, as it became clear that British-born settlers would flock to neither ceded colony and that French Catholics would likely remain a majority in both, governors and secretaries of state increasingly came to recognize that the allegiance and contributions of these non-British-born populations were critical. One 1763 pamphlet, which extolled expansion in the West Indies, noted that the “smallness of our numbers” was a threat to security but that the “bodies and estates of the colonists are as much the riches of our country, as tho' comprehended within the same territory.”Footnote ²⁷ Turning to the advantages of Quebec, the same author argued not only that Quebec would serve as a crucial buffer should the French try to attack the continental colonies but also that “the possession of Canada with its inhabitants” increased security because these individuals became “English subjects.”Footnote ²⁸ Although some feared that the new colonies might drain Britain's population, there were just as many who insisted that these territories might bolster its numerical strength. The perennial fear of Britain's “small numbers” loomed large, and the transfer of subjects and settlers, even those whose faith was suspect, was seen as integral to the safety and growth of the British Empire.Footnote ²⁹

Seeking to appease various constituencies in the new colonies, governors struggled to balance well-intentioned promises that French Catholics who remained would be granted religious freedoms and treated as subjects with often-conflicting demands made by the small number of British-born settlers and merchants whose loyalty was also essential to the imperial enterprise. Many French Catholics believed that a tacit covenant had been made when they left the French empire and transferred their loyalties to George III.Footnote ³⁰ As some would articulate over the years, they understood that they had “become British subjects” when they chose to continue cultivating their plantations rather than “retiring to France.”Footnote ³¹ Their understandings of their privileges as subjects, however, frequently conflicted with the understandings of their Protestant brethren. Administrators in each of these ceded colonies were thus faced with recurrent, often virulent, struggles over the time-honored rights of the British subject and the meanings of the Protestant constitution. Even as debates centered on the subject's right to sit in a representative assembly in Grenada and revolved around the subject's right to live under the law of his ancestors in Quebec, the heated contests that ensued in both of these Atlantic territories confirmed that subject status was one being actively chosen, proclaimed, and leveraged by colonial inhabitants.

Indeed, it did not take long for subjects in Grenada to seize the opportunity to define their rights and privileges. When Britain acquired Grenada in 1763, it was a lesser-known island strategically located off the coast of Venezuela and praised for its two harbors of “incomparable excellence” and its “cultivable,” “improvable” land.Footnote ³² Many hoped that this new colony would increase British “strength and commerce in that part of the globe,” augment its “wealth, trade, and navigation,” and dramatically increase its sugar production.Footnote ³³ Preserving the peace and taking advantage of Grenada's natural endowments, however, required administrators to retain French planters, whose skills were essential to keeping the plantations in working order and whose numbers were just as crucial in guarding against revolts among a growing slave population.Footnote ³⁴ By 1763, Grenada had 1,225 white inhabitants, who were predominantly French Catholic, and 12,000 slaves.Footnote ³⁵ Soon thereafter, these new subjects began to share the island with increasing numbers of British Protestants, who arrived throughout the 1760s to take advantage of new economic opportunities and to purchase the estates of departing Frenchmen. Unfortunately for the peace and stability of the island, incoming British Protestant planters had very different ideas from their Catholic counterparts about how representative government should work.

Tensions were already brewing by 1766, the year that elections were first called after the island became British. In anticipation of these elections, a bitter debate erupted over which subjects should be allowed to vote—a debate whose competing sides were articulated in three noteworthy petitions submitted to Governor Robert Melvill and attested in February of that year. In a first petition, eighteen “British Protestant Inhabitants of Grenada” insisted that French Catholics resident in the island were aliens rather than subjects. They argued that allowing Catholics to vote in upcoming elections would endanger the safety of the island and the property of “natural born Protestant subjects,” but, most important, that it would also violate laws that forbade Catholics from participating in representative government.Footnote ³⁶ They questioned whether foreign Catholics were actually British subjects and relied on the age-old argument that within the community of British subjects, only those who had sworn the oath against transubstantiation were entitled to vote for assembly members or to sit in the assembly and council. British Protestants in Grenada believed that their rights as subjects entitled them to a government free of the influence of French Catholics, and they fiercely articulated that vision.

Not to be deprived of rights they believed to be their due, thirty-four French Catholics issued the counterpetition cited at the beginning of this article. Insisting that they were “adopted subjects of His Majesty,” they expressed alarm at the prospect of being called aliens. They asserted that both as subjects and as freeholders, they were entitled to vote in the forthcoming elections.Footnote ³⁷ According to their understanding of subjecthood, they had every right to participate in representative government regardless of their Catholic faith. Finally, in a third memorial, twenty-five people, styling themselves “His Majesty's Natural Born Subjects,” declared their support for the French Catholics around them. This third group of individuals, who identified as British subjects by birth but did not describe themselves as “British Protestants,” argued that the “adopted subjects” were entitled to the “name and immunities of British Subjects” and should be allowed to vote.Footnote ³⁸ They were inspired to petition by the “dictates of justice and humanity,” and believed that many other Grenadians were in favor of wider Catholic suffrage.Footnote ³⁹ Like the French Catholics, the “Natural Born Subjects” believed that, in Grenada, the British subject was an individual entitled to participate in representative government regardless of religious persuasion.

If these petitions shed light on fundamentally opposing ideological positions on subjecthood and representative government, they also foreshadowed a far more widespread and acrimonious debate that gained in intensity during the actual elections in 1766 and 1767. The tense situation alluded to in the above petitions soon became more strained as Protestant members of the assembly and council sought to maintain their seats and ascendancy. By late 1767, a certain Mr. Demouchy, one of the new subjects, presented himself as a candidate for election, having been led to believe by an unpublished bill that new subjects were going to be allowed not only to vote for representatives but also to stand for elected office.Footnote ⁴⁰ When the returning officer refused to include Demouchy's name on the poll or to accept votes for him because he was a Catholic, a protest signed by many of the new subjects was read by one Alexandre Cazaud. Soon thereafter, both Demouchy and Cazaud were taken into custody, released only when they accepted that they had incurred the council's displeasure and promised to appear before it to answer all questions. Cazaud managed to flee to London, where he then worked tirelessly to advance the cause of the new subjects before senior administrators.Footnote ⁴¹ Meanwhile, both old and new subjects continued to forward lengthy petitions, including one with 337 signatures, to administrators, attesting to the rancor that persisted over questions of subjecthood and representative government.Footnote ⁴²

Grenada might well have remained at an impasse and the rights of subjects uncertain but for the temporary resolution provided by a Privy Council ruling in September 1768. After reviewing numerous materials from the island, and influenced by petitions from prosperous French Catholics and by the necessity of retaining them to run plantations in Grenada, the Privy Council finally issued its decision on the contentious matter of French Catholic participation in Grenada's representative bodies. The council ruled not only that French Catholics in Grenada could vote for assembly members but also that two of their number might actually sit in the assembly and council without having sworn the oath against transubstantiation. Despite enduring opposition from influential old subjects, exemption from the test would remain a foundational paragraph in instructions sent to the governors of Grenada well into the 1790s, reflecting administrative attempts to conciliate and retain their new subjects.Footnote ⁴³ While many British Protestants in Grenada continued to insist that they were entitled to live under the “happy constitution” and “laws of the mother country,” which had always excluded Catholic participation in assemblies, their arguments were temporarily overturned in the 1760s and 1770s. For the time being, the boundaries of subjecthood had been defined expansively, allowing all propertied subjects to participate in representative government regardless of religious background, and the Privy Council ruling underlined the active role played by French Catholics in shaping the rights now deemed fit for British subjects in Grenada.

Privy Council rulings notwithstanding, the fundamental disagreement regarding subject status in Grenada would escalate over the course of the ensuing decade and become a focus of numerous other petitions and a vitriolic pamphlet war.Footnote ⁴⁴ The amount of official correspondence dedicated to the conflicts between old and new subjects was unrivaled, except in a few years when discussion of the island's defenses or its difficulties with runaway slaves seemed particularly relevant. Moreover, the decision from London was met by consistent and sustained protest from a small but vocal portion of the old subjects. Observers would continually opine as to whether being a British subject entitled a freeholder of any denomination to vote for his representatives or whether a bona fide British subject was someone who participated in representative government only if he had sworn an oath against transubstantiation. On at least two occasions in the late 1760s and early 1770s, governors suspended British Protestant members of the council who resisted the 1768 Privy Council orders and refused to take their seats alongside appointed Catholics of French origin. Even when they had London's endorsement, the hard-won freedoms of the Grenadian Catholics were thus constantly under attack, underscoring the fundamentally unstable nature of subjects' rights.

By the 1780s and 1790s, the more expansive interpretation of subjecthood that had temporarily found favor in Grenada was losing ground. Although planters had secured coveted privileges despite being practicing Catholics, their numbers dwindled between the early 1760s and the late 1770s.Footnote ⁴⁵ Furthermore, the bitterness bred by the French seizure of the island from 1779 to 1783, a period during which almost all the new subjects deserted to the French, did little to encourage toleration of Catholic rights when the British reassumed control in 1783. At a local level, anger, mistrust, and suspicion gained the upper hand. Bills eroding Catholic privileges were passed with little resistance, including a local act that required all Catholics to take the test before they could hold political office.Footnote ⁴⁶ The ultimate reversal came in 1792, when the Privy Council overturned its earlier ruling in favor of Catholic representation and stipulated that Catholics in Grenada should be treated like Roman Catholics in Britain rather than like Roman Catholics in Quebec.Footnote ⁴⁷ Rather than being favored with exemptions from the penal laws in force against Catholics, Catholics in Grenada were to suffer the discrimination experienced by their peers in the British Isles.Footnote ⁴⁸ Concessions to these planters may have seemed practical immediately after the Seven Years' War, but by the 1780s, they seemed like dangerous bargains with inhabitants who had betrayed their allegiance to the British monarch and who were no longer as prominent or desirable as landowners as they had once been. Whereas British subject status had briefly entitled propertied freeholders in Grenada to sit in a representative assembly regardless of religious persuasion, it was soon defined more rigidly, entitling individuals only to an assembly composed of Protestants.

Nonetheless, for almost two decades after the Treaty of Paris, Grenada provided a terrain in which the rights of subjects were repeatedly contested and successfully extended. The petitions of new subjects confidently proclaimed the idea that British subjects were entitled to sit in representative assemblies regardless of religious affiliation, and colonial administrators, hoping to retain these valuable settlers, agreed with them for a brief moment in time.Footnote ⁴⁹ Departing from notions of birthright allegiance and indefeasible loyalties made famous by Calvin v. Smith and propagated by popular treatises like William Blackstone's Commentaries on the Laws of England (1765–69), many new subjects proposed alternative interpretations of British subjecthood.Footnote ⁵⁰ A British subject no longer necessarily meant someone who was born within the monarch's dominions, whose allegiance was unchanging, or who lived under statutes that required all office holders to take the test. Instead, it came to include a wide range of inhabitants, of various religious backgrounds and born within the allegiance of foreign monarchs, individuals who defined themselves as subjects and thereby claimed the right to sit in a representative assembly and to petition their superiors to ensure that these rights were upheld. Most significantly, for those few years, the rights of new subjects in Grenada were allowed to differ from those of their fellow subjects in Great Britain, where Catholics were barred from seats in Parliament and numerous penal laws were still in effect until 1829.

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While French Catholics in Grenada were able to choose and define their subjecthood for almost two decades, their compatriots to the north were perhaps even more effective. Although parallel questions about participation in representative government were raised in Quebec, a somewhat different debate emerged about whether the British subject was an individual who lived under English law or a person who lived under the time-honored customs of his ancestors.Footnote ⁵¹ The royal proclamation of 1763 that applied to Grenada also extended to Quebec, and when combined with the commission sent to the province's first governor, it had established English law to the satisfaction of many British-born Protestants. Several local ordinances, however, had also permitted numerous French laws and customs to endure.Footnote ⁵² The result was a rather murky legal system that seemed precarious to both old and new subjects. If the Canadiens were understandably concerned about preserving access to their time-honored customs, based largely on the Coutûme de Paris, British-born inhabitants were equally worried about maintaining familiar English laws that they understood and could navigate. It was thus on the terrain of law, rather than on the issue of representative assemblies, that the rights of the British subject were first successfully renegotiated in Quebec.

Like Grenada, the population of Quebec remained largely French Catholic in the 1760s. Unlike Grenada, however, the numerical predominance of non-Protestants persisted. When Parliament considered questions relating to the province of Quebec in the 1770s, observers noted that there were anywhere from 80,000 to 150,000 French Catholics as compared to a few thousand British Protestants.Footnote ⁵³ Colonial governors, most of whom recognized that the security and survival of the province depended on the contributions of this majority population, were typically inclined to grant various concessions to their “new subjects.” Hector Theophilus Cramahé, a lieutenant governor of Swiss Huguenot origin, went so far as to argue that indulgence of the Catholic faith and confirmation of the ancient French laws were the only “sure and effectual method of gaining the affections of His Majesty's Canadian Subjects.”Footnote ⁵⁴ The governors' opinions notwithstanding, disagreements about the status of “His Majesty's Canadian Subjects” and about their rights raged well into the 1770s.

Shortly after Canada's cession, the Canadiens began addressing George III and offering interpretations of subject status. Initially, they implored their new monarch to allow justice to be administered by individuals who understood their language and customs, and to confirm the legal system that had been in place under their former sovereign. This request had practical ramifications for many whose lands had been granted under French seigneurial tenure and who feared confiscations or changes made to their ownership.Footnote ⁵⁵ As inhabitants initially testified in 1764, they worried that unless their customs were upheld, they would become “veritable Slaves” instead of “favoured Subjects of Your Majesty.”Footnote ⁵⁶ Later, they argued that restoration of their ancient usages would actually enable them to understand their rights more fully and render them more able to serve their monarch as loyal subjects.Footnote ⁵⁷ That these customs were influenced by French precedent was immaterial. As they pleaded that their privileges and customs be established as the law of the province, the new subjects regularly entreated the king “to grant us, in common with your other subjects, the rights and privileges of citizens of England.”Footnote ⁵⁸ From the early 1760s onward, the Canadiens forcefully used the language of subjecthood and citizenship to articulate a connection between “ancient usages and customs” and the status of freeborn subjects.

In response, numerous other inhabitants, mostly British Protestants, proposed a conflicting vision of subjecthood, insisting that English law was an integral part of the rights of the subject. Not only did they attack the inferior courts responsible for administering French law as “tiresome litigious and expensive in this poor Colony,” but, more important, they insisted that a government that allowed foreign civil law violated the constitution and laws of England, denying the British subject his birthright.Footnote ⁵⁹ Loyalists would attempt to bring back these arguments well into the 1780s; shortly after their arrival in Canada, many of these refugees tried to persuade administrators that “they were born British Subjects & have ever been accustomed to the Government & Laws of England.” They demanded the blessings of the British constitution and detailed the hardships they feared if forced to live under French laws and land tenures.Footnote ⁶⁰ They too linked the status of subjects to the question of law. Whereas the French Canadians contended that true subjects were those entitled to their ancient laws, many British-born subjects claimed just as passionately that bona fide subjects were those who lived under English law. Both positions drew on familiar arguments that British liberties were protected by time-honored customs, but each offered a radically different interpretation of how those “ancient usages” were to be defined.

Much as in Grenada, conflicting ideas about law and subjects' rights in Quebec were voiced in petitions from inhabitants, just as they found their way into official correspondence more generally and into the many publications of individuals like Francis Maseres.Footnote ⁶¹ But whereas the Privy Council had temporarily defined the rights of French Catholics in Grenada, it was the British Parliament that finally intervened with legislation clarifying the rights of subjects in Quebec. The Quebec Act, passed in June 1774, was the first parliamentary legislation to address the actual government of a specific colony, adjusting the boundaries of the province and establishing a “more effectual provision for the government.”Footnote ⁶² Among other things, the Quebec Act granted Catholics the free exercise of their religion subject to the king's supremacy and the right to assume offices of trust without subscribing to the test but by taking an oath designed for those purposes. Most significantly, this statute determined that “His Majesty's Canadian Subjects . . . may also hold and enjoy their Property and Possessions, together with all Customs and Usages relative thereto, and all other their Civil Rights . . . as may be consistent with their Allegiance to His Majesty.”Footnote ⁶³ By formally allowing the coexistence of English criminal law and French civil law, the act had ultimately redefined the loyal subject's inheritance.

Despite popular backlash and an attempted repeal in 1775, the Quebec Act's successful passing upheld a controversial definition of the loyal subject's rights: subjects were entitled to live under their ancient “customs and usages” even if these were French. But it was not just the book of statutes that reflected this expanded understanding of British subjecthood. A range of grateful and angry petitions reached the king in 1774, each of which clearly regarded the act as having made certain determinations about subjecthood. The ones from Canadiens noted the joy at being granted the “rights, advantages, and prerogatives of British subjects” and having been “adopted as sons of the Nation and as English citizens.” The ones from old subjects lamented that, by the act of Parliament, individuals had lost the “protection of the English Laws . . . disgraceful for us as Britons.”Footnote ⁶⁴ Inhabitants widely believed that the Quebec Act had either upheld or betrayed their rights as subjects.

While the Quebec Act had vocal detractors, it was ultimately endorsed by a central government that recognized that an inclusive definition of subjecthood was more appropriate for a territory where the French Catholic population continued to grow. If the governor of the province was repeatedly frustrated by these new subjects' failure to mobilize for the war effort against the thirteen mainland colonies, the French Catholics did not rally to the American or French causes en masse.Footnote ⁶⁵ Unlike Grenadian Catholics, the Canadiens tended to remain relatively quiescent. The rights of subjects, a source of acrimonious dispute for over a decade in Quebec, had been debated and at least partially settled within the highest echelons of government in large part because French Catholics remained numerically predominant in Quebec and because, given discontent brewing in the thirteen colonies to the south, their continued loyalty was paramount.

French Catholic success at securing privileges they believed stemmed from British subject status thus varied considerably across the British Empire, hinting at the ways in which the preponderance of loyal Catholics and their responses to local and global developments might also shape the rights associated with subjecthood. Nevertheless, in both Grenada and Quebec, French Catholics played a critical role in determining the nature and extent of those rights. Whereas their birth in formerly French territories rendered their subject status questionable under case law and their faith meant that any concessions made to them would be contested repeatedly, French Catholics nonetheless engaged their opponents in debates that molded the boundaries and existing understandings of subjecthood. Outside the formal realm of case law and statute, old and new subjects alike waged interpretive struggles that generated alternative definitions of subjecthood. Within the framework of colonial administration, Grenadian and Canadian Catholics secured rights that diverged from those of their peers within the British Isles. What struggles over French Catholic participation revealed in the 1760s and 1770s was that although all members of the British Empire were subjects and might insist on certain privileges, not all subjects had comparable rights. And it was because subjecthood could include so many and yet preserve distinctions between them that it remained crucial to integrating the British Empire.

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If outcomes for French Catholics differed across the Atlantic world, the struggles over subjecthood in both Grenada and Quebec suggest that there was no specific set of rights associated with British subject status and that understandings of subjecthood were numerous, flexible, and coexisting in the 1760s. Disagreements between the French Catholics and their opponents—conflicts that were ultimately submitted to the Privy Council and to Parliament for resolution—confirm at the very least that the attributes of subjecthood were strikingly imprecise. What is notable about these moments in French Catholic history, however, is not just that diverging ideas about subjecthood occasioned such debate, but that, for all their antagonisms, French Catholics and British Protestants each turned to the age-old tradition of the petition when they wished to express their grievances. In so doing, they expressly assumed the identity of British subjects.

Although subjects articulated ideas about rights in numerous forms,Footnote ⁶⁶ petitions, or memorials, submitted to the king and to royal governors in Grenada and Quebec during the 1760s and 1770s remain particularly illuminating. Examining these petitions reveals that members of contending factions often proclaimed their allegiance and their understandings of its meanings in remarkably comparable ways. They confirm that both old and new subjects resorted to the same humble language of subjection and depended on a common subject status to articulate conflicting ideas about rights. For each of these numerous petitioners, purported belonging to a community of British subjects allowed them to demand certain rights, while wielding the language of subjecthood enabled them to instantiate themselves as key participants in a monarchical empire. Perhaps most important, because so many diverse inhabitants relied on petitions in order to proclaim their subject status, these Grenadian and Canadian petitions suggest that inhabitants possessed a common understanding of subjecthood. Indeed, a close analysis of the form and language of these petitions underlines some of the characteristics that made a shared subjecthood important for the British Empire more generally.

Among the variety of eighteenth-century written documents, the memorial was ideally suited to subscribers who needed to approach a distant monarch or his representatives and who simultaneously wished to assert their claims as British subjects. In the annals of British history, the right to petition had been recognized as “the indisputable right of even the meanest subject,” whatever his origins.Footnote ⁶⁷ Petitions were an acknowledged means for expressing collective grievances precisely because they were worded in a language of deference, humility, and supplication. If anything, the petition itself “encapsulated the relationship of lordship and dependence that was the core of ideal political relations” and confirmed that the monarch was the locus of loyalty.Footnote ⁶⁸ For many, the petition was the only form of political expression to which they had access, and individuals who were not entitled to elect assembly or council members could nonetheless make themselves heard by submitting memorials. Everyone from colonial governors and assemblies, to members of the Privy Council and Parliament, to the Crown, might consider petitions, and administrators expected to receive numerous examples in the course of their duties. Often drafted by trained lawyers or writers, the petition also remained a form that was generally accessible to both the literate and the illiterate, provided that they had the necessary funds. As an approved form for voicing complaints to various authorities, individuals of all backgrounds submitted them.Footnote ⁶⁹

Indeed, the formulaic quality of the petition provided a certain safety, allowing signatories to articulate what were conflicting opinions in a template that concealed hostilities through similarity of form. Memorials from subjects in both Grenada and Quebec, for example, had several essential component parts, each of which was framed by claims of subject status and professions of loyalty, beginning with the address. The 1766 petitions from Grenada were directed “to His Excellency, Robert Melvill” and to members of the council, all of whom were servants of the Crown. Petitions from both British merchants and “the principal inhabitants of Canada” from 1764 and 1765, respectively, opened with “To the King's Most Excellent Majesty” or “To the King.”Footnote ⁷⁰ Petitioners characterized themselves as devoted subjects who were thereby entitled to approach the monarch: the Grenadian Protestants stressed that they were “His Majesty's Protestant Subjects”; the Grenadian French Catholics identified as “His Majesty's adopted subjects”; the British merchants and traders of Quebec promised that they were “Your Majesty's most faithful and loyal subjects”; and the principal inhabitants of Quebec proclaimed that they had “sworn at the foot of the altar, unalterable fidelity to Your Majesty.” The very form of the petition required that signatories articulate a hierarchical relationship with their monarch, which had the subtle effect of making them all equal supplicants.

Following the opening address, memorials proceeded with humble declarations of allegiance, and various constituents detailed their enduring faithfulness as subjects. The French Catholics of Grenada, for example, emphasized their persistent loyalty, reminding the governor of the “oaths of allegiance, supremacy, and abjuration” they had taken “as well to give a Testimony of their Attachment as to entitle them to the Rights of British Subjects.” For their part, the British Protestants in Grenada explained that they were motivated by “a just respect and veneration for the most fundamental and constitutional laws of the Mother Country” and concern for the welfare of the island. The British merchants of Quebec similarly noted the “zeal and attachment we have to your Majesty's Person and Government.” From Grenada to Quebec, petitioners insisted on their past and present devotion to king, country, and law, and underlined that it was their devotion as subjects that prompted them to submit memorials.

Next, signatories summarized their activities and contributions to the empire. True to form, the Grenadian Catholics noted that “they have endeavour'd by every effort of industry, by additional purchases, and by settlement of new Lands, to become as useful as they shall ever be faithfull subjects.” Their advocates—the natural-born subjects of Grenada—noted that their Catholic brethren had proven themselves “loyal peaceable and useful subjects.” In their petition, British merchants in Quebec observed that they had worked tirelessly for the new colony, “causing an additional increase to her Manufactures.” In this section, petitioners of both French and British descent reflected on the actions that had qualified them to seek royal justice and intervention, often vying with one another to establish their usefulness to the empire.

Formalities complete, petitioners proceeded to detail their grievances, arriving at what might be called a statement of rights and a proposed remedy to alleged injustices. This was the heart of the memorial, where supplicants explained which injustices had been committed and made arguments about their rights as they believed them to exist. In Grenada, the French Catholics specified that “His most gracious Majesty, by adopting them as Subjects, by permitting them the enjoyment of their properties,” had also made certain promises. As subjects, they were entitled to have the government recognize their right to vote. For their part, the British Protestants proposed that the government consider their request and pursue measures that would preserve “their most sacred rights and properties.” In Quebec, the principal French-speaking inhabitants noted “that it was His Majesty's Intention that the Customs of our Fathers should be adhered to” and stated simply that “what was done before the Conquest of Canada should be adhered to.” Differing requests notwithstanding, fervent declarations of loyalty reappeared throughout these parts of the memorial, as often-opposing groups described themselves as subjects and clearly, though deferentially, made demands of their monarch for privileges they believed to be their due.

The closing lines of these memorials were also remarkably similar. Most petitions concluded by reiterating requests and confirming the submission and loyalty of signatories. The language of subjecthood was itself often prominent, suggesting the weight it conferred if used as the final word: the French Catholics, for example, closed by asking that the government “be pleas'd to confirm and declare the right of your Memorialists, as British Subjects, and as Freeholders, to vote at the ensuing Election of Representatives.” Whereas they had begun their address as “adopted subjects,” they had completed it as “British subjects” whose rights merely needed confirming. They had, by the end of the petition, inscribed themselves as loyal to the king and critical members of his empire. Similarly, before affixing their signatures, the principal inhabitants of Quebec promised that “most faithful Subjects, we do, with the most unalterable Respect, hereby declare Ourselves.” The British merchants and traders would conclude with an analogous phrase to underscore their loyalties: “and for Your Majesty and your Royal House your Petitioners as in Duty bound shall ever pray.” In this sense, the petition operated at two levels: first, it provided a forceful and written declaration of inhabitants' loyalty to the monarch in anticipation of certain protections and privileges; and second, it worked to establish that inhabitants were both British subjects and fellow subjects to many others scattered throughout the empire.

Whether they represented the interests of French speakers or English speakers, these and other petitions submitted to the British crown, Parliament, and colonial authorities displayed fairly predictable structure and wording. The petition's widely recognized form and its familiar turns of phrase allowed many to strategically assume the identity of British subject, to evoke their unfailing obedience and usefulness to the colonies, to detail injustices done or rights denied, and to plead for certain privileges and liberties. Scattered across the British Empire, many subjects would thus walk the line between humbly professing loyalty and actively demanding benefits they believed stemmed from that allegiance. Even though they were worlds apart, each of these individuals demanded vastly different rights by using a shared language of subjecthood. Above all, whether they were British Protestants, French Catholics, Spanish mariners, or inhabitants of Bengal, many relied on purported belonging to a community of British subjects to seek redress and to forge symbolic links with peers across the British Empire.

If petitioners often disagreed about who was a British subject and about what rights were his due, their memorials nonetheless suggest that they shared certain common understandings about subjecthood and about how subject status might be used. Indeed, recurrent language and forms in the Grenadian and Canadian petitions highlight three key characteristics of subjecthood—characteristics that were relevant not only in these particular colonies but also across the empire. First, the language of most memorials suggests that the term “British subject” was highly elastic and encompassed individuals who might actually claim several identities. In the 1766 petition drafted by “His Majesty's Adopted Subjects in the Island of Grenada,” the Grenadian Catholics, for example, alternatively described themselves as “adopted subjects,” “new subjects,” “Roman Catholic” subjects, and “British subjects,” labeling themselves even as they swore allegiance and loyalty. Their compatriots in Quebec similarly used several monikers, calling themselves “new subjects,” “faithful subjects,” and “principal Inhabitants of Canada” when addressing the king in 1765. Referring to many who were not of British origin, “British subject” became a term that could not only describe individuals but also characterize them as members of a broader community. The identity of British subject transcended boundaries of class, race, and nation. Although the petitioners examined here were likely all white Europeans, this very elasticity would also allow free men of color in Grenada or East Indians in Calcutta to wield the language of subjecthood in the nineteenth century, just as it would allow administrators to count them as subjects loyal to the British Empire.

Second, memorials from both Grenada and Quebec illustrate how individuals employed the language of subjecthood to stress their utility and to shape the rights associated with subject status. The Grenadian French Catholics, for example, emphasized Grenada's precarious economic, social, and political situation, using it to underline why Catholic suffrage was essential. They observed that Grenada was a colony “long distressed and much unsettled,” whose limited industry required constant “encouragement.” Because cultivating the island was possible only with a large slave population, the colony required the assistance of every freeholder “in order to maintain them [the Negroes] in proper discipline & respect.” Positioning themselves as instrumental subjects and freeholders, these petitioners asserted that they were therefore entitled to certain “common rights,” which they believed included suffrage for Catholics. Likewise, when the British merchants of Quebec entreated the king to appoint a new governor, permit a representative assembly, and protect their rights and liberties in 1764, they reminded him that since Canada's cession to the British, they had worked only to “the advantage of our Mother Country,” diligently attempting to “promote the Commercial Interests of this Province and render it flourishing.” All of these petitioners confidently embraced their status as British subjects and leveraged the fact that they were desirable contributors to negotiate rights. Their memorials provide an enduring reminder that the economic value of inhabitants mattered greatly in defining the ever-shifting boundaries of subjecthood.

Third, in the aftermath of the Seven Years' War, the struggles alluded to in the Grenadian and Canadian petitions indicated that subjecthood would be neither consistently interpreted nor uniformly granted. In the 1760s and 1770s, the boundaries of subjecthood were frequently defined differently than they would be at the end of the eighteenth century, reflecting a burgeoning empire's reliance on new populations as it wrestled with how to administer and control its expanding coastlines and huge tracts of land. In the case of Grenada, the conflict between French Catholics and British Protestants persisted for decades, and the Privy Council's initial ruling in favor of the French Catholics was eventually replaced by a ruling against them, revealing a reduced dependence on a population that was no longer perceived to be valuable to the empire. In Quebec, fierce debates occurred over whether British subjects were entitled to English law or the law of their ancestors. Elsewhere, questions arose about whether adopted subjects were entitled to economic privileges or had access to royal courts. Responses to these debates vacillated as well, so that British subjects' rights remained transient and unpredictable. Repeated questions with varying answers would throw fledgling British colonies into turmoil, feature prominently in colonial correspondence, require rulings from the Privy Council or other judicial forums, and ultimately enable the articulation of competing and coexisting ideas about the rights of British subjects.

These three characteristics, evident in petitions from Grenada and Quebec, and evoked in so many other declarations of subject status, together ensured that subjecthood retained both a critical expansiveness and a noteworthy imprecision in the popular understanding. Members of Parliament might continue to speak of their “fellow subjects,” hoping to rally communities of constituents by appealing to notions of fellowship that transcended separate territories and peoples. Pamphleteers might persist in evoking the mythic qualities of the “freeborn English subject,” demanding an array of rights unconfirmed by formal law. Individuals like Salvador Cosino, a Minorcan by birth, might write to his local governor, insisting that he, too, was a subject and that “all His Britannick Majesty's Subjects are entitled to a free trade to the Coast of Barbary.”Footnote ⁷¹ Groups of subjects in Bengal, a territory under East India Company jurisdiction and surrounded by lands still ruled by Indian nawabs, might appeal to Parliament, arguing, among other things, that they “humbly conceived” trial by jury to be their indefeasible birthright.Footnote ⁷² However repetitive and formulaic petitioners' frequent use of the language of subjecthood and evocation of subject status appeared, subjecthood ultimately became an organizing principle of the later-eighteenth-century British Empire.

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Defined by inhabitants themselves as expansive and imprecise, subjecthood would enable inhabitants and officials to conceive of the British Empire as a global but unified community of subjects and would serve to integrate the British Empire at both a symbolic and a functional level. Whether or not they personally identified as British or as British subjects, when individuals like the French Catholics proclaimed themselves subjects, they both used a broadly recognized convention to secure their ends and inserted themselves into a wider community. In an era when fealty to a monarch who governed from afar remained one of the only commonalities between new and old subjects, between peoples who lived in territories under various systems of law, spoke different languages, and practiced different religions, this was first and foremost a monarchical community. Each individual had a personal relationship to the monarch as his or her subject and related to others as fellow subjects, whatever the varied rights accorded across the empire. The Grenadian Catholics, for example, did not portray themselves merely as inhabitants of Grenada, as wealthy planters, or as former subjects of France. Instead, as they noted repeatedly, their sense of loyalty had been transformed when they became “adopted subjects” of Great Britain and of King George III.Footnote ⁷³ Similarly, although their compatriots to the north described themselves as “principal Inhabitants of Canada,” they were far more inclined to insist on their “unalterable fidelity to Your Majesty” and to conclude memorials by inscribing themselves as “the most faithful subjects” of their new king.Footnote ⁷⁴ Each time they proclaimed their loyalty, inhabitants were reinforcing the bonds of allegiance that tied them to their monarch and their belonging to a far larger community of fellow subjects.

In many respects, this was an “imagined” and symbolic community, a dispersed community of subjects who nonetheless shared a language and certain written words. While there were many peoples, nationalities, religions, and races across the empire, they all shared one expansive label: “British subject.” Even if it might take months to travel between colonies and even if few inhabitants of Grenada or Quebec likely ever visited colonies outside the Atlantic world, a common subjecthood allowed individuals in Grenada or Quebec to identify with those in Minorca or Bengal. Repeated evocation of subject status by so many individuals and in so many written sources allowed individuals throughout the colonies to fashion themselves as subjects and to imagine themselves as part of a broader imperial community. As H. V. Bowen has argued, a sense of “simultaneity” emerged in the mid-eighteenth-century empire as Britons read reports of battles happening on the same days in the Americas and in Asia, and began to conceive of them as part of one imperial frame.Footnote ⁷⁵ Bowen echoes Benedict Anderson's earlier argument that novels and newspapers, among other forms, allowed people to situate themselves within one field of exchange and communication, within one “imagined community.”Footnote ⁷⁶ Both Bowen and Anderson have contributed immensely to scholarly understanding of how the written word can bind together peoples dispersed across extended polities. But subjecthood, which provided both a common language and a status, also imbued an empire that spread from the Atlantic to the Mediterranean to the Pacific with a degree of coherence that it might otherwise have lacked. Wielded, repeated, and written by individuals throughout the globe, the language of subjecthood proved instrumental in forging symbolic links.

In addition, subjecthood integrated a diverse and disparate empire at an administrative level. Had the benefits of subjecthood been only symbolic, debates over subject status might well have been dismissed, viewed merely as a drain on colonial resources and on officials' time. An elastic subjecthood provided significant advantages, however, making it appealing not only to inhabitants who perceived its utility in securing rights and membership but also to many administrators who sought to harness the labor and manpower of new populations. The very absence of a uniform definition of subjecthood and the very inability to agree upon a set of rights due subjects provided administrators with tremendous flexibility in responding to demands in individual colonies and allowed them to offer or withhold concessions and incentives as needed. The dual expansiveness and imprecision of subjecthood—observable in the petitions examined in previous sections—was ultimately what rendered subjecthood so crucial in managing and organizing the British Empire on a functional and day-to-day level.

For example, inhabitants who articulated their belonging to a wider community of fellow subjects also participated in a process of binding themselves to the empire. Because one of the only codified rights of subjects was the fundamental right to petition or appeal directly to the Crown, an expansive interpretation of subjecthood meant that numerous inhabitants could claim that right. Petitioning involved an inherent recognition of sovereign authority and of certain hierarchies of power. Mary Sarah Bilder notes that the appeal to the Privy Council represented an “exchange wherein the litigant promised to recognize authority in return for the case's being reheard. Authority was constructed at the moment of appeal.”Footnote ⁷⁷ When subjects throughout the empire were permitted to approach the monarch directly, they confirmed their allegiance each time they did so, thereby reinforcing the framework of royal authority.

Furthermore, if large numbers of inhabitants could petition the monarch, this also meant that they had access to nonviolent means to voice complaints and outlets for dissatisfaction. As Daniel Hulsebosch argues, the petition was one of several “calibrated forms for expressing grievance,” and a more general pattern of complaint and response was built into the British Empire's structure.Footnote ⁷⁸ When individuals proclaimed their belonging and then relied on subject status to articulate claims or grievances, colonial administrators, Parliament, and the Crown also had a written means to gauge problems or frustrations in the empire. Administrators presumably had an opportunity to respond with concessions as necessary before mere discontent erupted into violence or threatened to disrupt imperial unity. Allowing myriad subjects to engage the monarch worked effectively to defuse tension in the empire and preserved an illusion of equality and integration.Footnote ⁷⁹ Thus, expansive definitions of subjecthood served to uphold power structures across the various colonies and to bind the empire.

Inclusive approaches to subject status also worked to strengthen the hand of individual administrators in the colonies. British colonial administrators understood that by recognizing numerous inhabitants as subjects, they might secure valuable conscripts for future wars with their European rivals. Strategic extensions of subjecthood were widespread. Hoping to promote desertion during the War of Jenkins's Ear (1739–48), the British, then under the command of Lord Cathcart, planned to use subject status as a bargaining chip to lure subjects of the Spanish monarch into the British orbit. They intended to distribute a proclamation to the inhabitants of the Spanish colonies promising them “in all cases and in all respects they shall be attended to, assisted, favored, and treated as the natural born subjects of Great Britain.”Footnote ⁸⁰ Other officials also capitalized on the enticements of subject status during peacetime. Understanding that the lands, expertise, and slaves of myriad settlers were essential to the survival and cultivation of new colonies, many administrators endeavored to retain them as British subjects. Sir William Young, responsible for surveying and granting lands in Grenada in the 1760s, argued that the island would be rendered most productive by securing the “greatest number of useful and faithful subjects.” The more property and settlers who could be retained for Britain, “the fewer advantages will accrue to the French King, in the population and settlement of his possessions in these seas.”Footnote ⁸¹ Similarly, as one secretary of state would note about the province of Quebec, nothing was more essential to the king's service than retaining “as many French subjects as possible,” lest they resort to colonies still in the French king's possession.Footnote ⁸² From a mercantilist perspective, keeping the trade and economic contributions of those marked as British subjects within the empire strengthened the economic power of the British vis-à-vis the French or Spanish.

Moreover, the bodies of subjects might themselves serve to demarcate, and sometimes extend, the sphere of British jurisdiction. When asked whether the king might establish any kind of civil government or jurisdiction over British subjects residing in the Bay of Honduras, which was nominally Spanish, the advocate general offered a provocative opinion: he determined that “such as the subject is such is the jurisdiction,” arguing that British subjects were entitled to civil regulations according to the laws of Great Britain.Footnote ⁸³ The persons of British subjects could therefore serve as a kind of territorial and jurisdictional marker even in territory that had been ceded to the crown of Spain. Elizabeth Mancke has noted elsewhere that the polities of Europe were often “dependent on the bodies of subjects establishing and perpetuating claims.”Footnote ⁸⁴ By welcoming many as British subjects, colonial administrators could conceivably extend the sphere of British authority and jurisdiction. Even as they often remained uncertain about which rights they might grant, colonial administrators nonetheless continued to claim numerous individuals as subjects, always recognizing the necessity of additional settlers and additional bodies.

The imprecisions of subjecthood would also provide administrators with tremendous flexibility in responding to demands and crises in the colonies. Not only were legal and popular understandings of subjecthood expansive; they were ambiguous. Although many subjects assumed they were entitled to certain rights, very few of those rights were formally recognized, meaning that ideas about the rights of subjects proliferated throughout the empire. A vaguely defined subjecthood served to preserve differences and divisions, fostering unequal rights across the empire and facilitating administrative maneuvering on the ground in response to local needs. It meant that administrators might extend the privileges of suffrage to French Catholics in Grenada when this was perceived to be useful in the 1760s and 1770s, but they might then rescind those privileges when those same French Catholics were viewed as a liability. It meant that governors might cultivate the goodwill of the Canadiens by allowing them to live under French civil law in Quebec well before an act of Parliament formally upheld this right. And it even meant that fellow Catholics in Britain, against whom suspicions of a majority Protestant population ran high, did not obtain parallel rights until the nineteenth century. The uncertainties of subject status acted to preserve differential rather than uniform rights across the British Empire, strengthening the hand of administrators who did not necessarily feel that all subjects should have the same rights and who might, on occasion, have to reward some subjects at the expense of others.

Precisely because common allegiance to a king or queen could transcend the confines of the body politic or the limits of newly emerging colonies, subjecthood allowed both inhabitants and administrators to envision the British Empire as a single entity from a new perspective. However fragile this entity was, it was one in which the relationship between monarch and subject was central. It was an entity held together by the bonds between subject and monarch and yet inhabited by myriad subjects each with individual identities and sets of often-conflicting rights. As one prominent observer wrote of the new colony of Quebec, “[T]he King makes no distinction between a man born in Canada and one born in Middlesex—we are all His Majesty's subjects—He is the fountain of honor—His Royal favor will extend to the worthy, be they new, or be they natural born subjects.”Footnote ⁸⁵ Subjecthood thus acted to unify the British Empire of the 1760s both symbolically and functionally because its shifting, flexible, and expansive parameters were best poised to integrate a constantly changing group of colonial territories and peoples. For an empire that had a vested interest in suggesting that all of its inhabitants were equal while simultaneously maintaining distinctions, British subjecthood was a crucial concept and tool.

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Of the thirty-four signatures on the petition from “His Majesty's Adopted Subjects in the Island of Grenada,” with which this article opened, one name in particular stands out: that of a certain “Devoconnu.” Paul Mignot Devoconnu was one of two French Catholics sworn in as a member of the Grenada Council on 22 June 1770 without ever having “subscribed the declaration against Popery.”Footnote ⁸⁶ Despite the administration's vacillating approaches to subjects' privileges between the 1760s and the 1790s, what remains significant is that Devoconnu, a newcomer to the British Empire, inserted himself into the community of British subjects in 1766 and wielded the language of subjecthood to claim new rights. He was joined in this act not only by other French planters in Grenada but also by numerous compatriots in Quebec who affirmed their devotion to the British monarch and leveraged this loyalty to seek restoration of their ancient laws and customs.Footnote ⁸⁷ His signature, like those of so many other petitioners throughout the empire, points to the contributions and demands of individual subjects in the British Empire more generally. Even if many in this empire were unable to participate in representative government, even where illiteracy, lack of access to administrators, and religious and racial prejudices limited some individuals' opportunities, there were nonetheless many who actively made their concerns and demands heard. The language of subjecthood provided inhabitants with a means of addressing their governors and monarch, and lent them a voice that might not otherwise have been heard.

But the assertions of subjects like Devoconnu should also encourage historians to revisit some of the conventional understandings of eighteenth-century history and to reconsider the profound role played by subjecthood. The last third of the eighteenth century is often hailed as an age of revolution, even of global crisis, a turning point in world history when monarchies became republics and subjects morphed into citizens.Footnote ⁸⁸ Yet this was also a period when an even larger number of individuals continued to acknowledge their hereditary leaders and to recognize royal authority. As monarchs reiterated their vows of protection, subjects responded with declarations of allegiance. A common monarchical culture continued to link a range of peoples living in the kingdoms and colonies of the various European empires.Footnote ⁸⁹ For the American and French republics that emerged at this time, this period may have marked a moment of substantial rupture, but elsewhere it saw subjecthood widely asserted and affirmed. Loyal subjects remained invaluable to monarchs who relied on their labor and bodies to fuel the engines of global war or to mark the boundaries of overseas empires and who promised them certain privileges in exchange.

What the assertions of French Catholic subjects and others reveal is that, at this moment in history, rights were secured not only through the disruptions of revolution but also through the existing structures of state and sovereign. Historians and political scientists have all too often classified subjecthood as a kind of precursor to citizenship, viewing subjects as the passive forerunners to the assertive and civic-minded citizens who came of age during the era of revolution.Footnote ⁹⁰ In the struggles of the 1760s and 1770s, however, subjects, alongside citizens, were successfully insisting on political, economic, and legal concessions, inserting their distinct voices into the annals of history. They were hardly disenfranchised citizens awaiting their revolutionary moment. Rather, they were individuals who consistently made demands of their monarchs and, in the process, expanded the number of privileges that became associated with subjecthood. Subjecthood may not have guaranteed numerous rights from a legal standpoint, but it was nonetheless invoked to secure some and wielded to invent many more. Understanding the active roles assumed by “old” and “new” subjects thus allows us to view the British Empire as an entity where the boundaries of belonging were constantly being negotiated and where the actions and interpretations of individual subjects were essential to preserving its unity.