Public petitions to the Commons encompassed a diverse range of political, religious, social, and economic topics. This chapter examines the 33,000 or so different issues that were raised by petitioners to the House of Commons. The initial expansion of petitioning in the late eighteenth century was associated with subjects relating to economic regulation and taxation. From the early nineteenth century, the volume of petitions (and signatures) on economic topics was outstripped by the surge of petitioning on religious and social issues. The analysis reveals that petitions were a crucial means for addressing religious issues across the four nations, as well as for debating the UK’s constitutional arrangements. The chapter then considers the different types of issue, from those linked to mass campaigns, to the ‘long’ tail of petitions concerning medium and small-scale topics. Petitions remained an important mechanism for raising individual grievances, particularly from women, in Parliament. Finally, one of the limitations of the petitions data is the relative absence of petitions concerning the empire or foreign policy, which is attributable to the clerks’ system of categorisation and the appeal of petitioning other authorities.

The chapter discusses how citizenship, violence and participation are usually interconnected with the rise of modern political systems. In the Arab Middle East, these democratic articulations went missing during the pre-colonial and colonial periods. Different forms of external encroachments (capitalist encroachment, imperialism, and colonial encroachment) explain the presence of negative or latent citizenship in the Middle East. This chapter offers a historical account of early state-formation in the Middle East and discusses theories of civilization and civility between Europe and the Middle East in a relational manner. It concludes by suggesting the metaphor of the Moebius strip of citizenship.

Wallace’s interest in the metanarrative systems that guide and govern human behavior persisted throughout his career, from urban geography, pharmacology and language through entertainment, taxation and alienation. One such system is that of citizenship, which arguably grows in significance the later we look in Wallace’s writing, reaching its zenith in The Pale King. This chapter outlines the configuration and operation of citizenship throughout Wallace’s work, situating it against a critical backdrop of studies of American space and citizenship more generally and working in dialogue with the accompanying chapters on ecologies, geographies and politics. A decisively American writer, Wallace’s writing deploys a complex set of images associated with citizenship and civic duty. Examining the shifting, almost hallucinatory qualities of nation space at play in Wallace’s late capitalist cultural imaginary, this chapter argues that Wallace’s image of citizenship emerges from a concept of community – individually and locally constructed by means of engagement with civic systems – rather than nationalist or historicist in nature.

While supersanctions may not have improved the terms of Liberia’s loans very much, they did have unanticipated impacts on the structure of domestic political institutions. This chapter examines these effects, and in doing so offers a new interpretation of one of the more infamous phases in Liberia’s economic history: the 1930 League of Nations investigation into forced labor, when an investigative commission established by the League found that Liberian government officials had engaged in the use and export of forced labor. Over the first decades of the twentieth century, foreign financial controls imposed on the Liberian government as a condition of borrowing expanded from control over customs revenue to include nearly all sources of cash revenue by 1927. This chapter documents the Liberian government’s efforts to develop alternative sources of revenue with which to pay an expanded administrative establishment during repeated periods of fiscal crisis, and their ultimate turn toward a decentralized system of in-kind taxation in the form of forced labor and seizures of goods. These practices led to both domestic political upheaval and international isolation, and the threat of a League of Nations mandate over Liberia. This chapter contributes to a growing understanding of the contributions of forced labor to African government budgets in this period, as well as to work on the impacts of supersanctions on domestic institutions.

This chapter presents the first annual estimates of Liberia’s economic performance based on archival data since its declaration of independence in 1847 until 2000. A lack of easily accessible data has been one of the main reasons why Liberia has appeared so infrequently in comparative work in African economic history. The collection of data was a central component of imperial governance, and historians have relied on the legacy of those efforts; independent states had both different incentives and, often, lower capacity. However, this chapter shows that it is possible to reconstruct through qualitative records annual estimates of trade and government finances dating back to Liberia’s foundation. These estimates then form the foundation for the first series of historical national accounts which can be used to compare Liberia to other countries. They show the Liberian economy during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when many other African economies were growing. A period of rapid economic growth began during the 1930s, which continued for much of the next half century before a catastrophic reversal from 1980. This chapter sets the stage for the more thematic chapters to follow.

We conclude with an analysis of the constraints that the connections world imposes on Asia’s growth prospects, and the policy options for relaxing them. One is the ability of powerful businesses and families to entrench themselves by virtue of their connections to government and/or politicians. Both parties gain so there is no incentive to change. Because marginal changes are unlikely to be credible, we propose a series of interrelated radical measures to disrupt and refashion the connections world including prohibitions on cross-holdings and inheritance taxation, as well as boosting competition policy and improving political transparency. We also outline some of the main pressure points in Asia going forward. These include the ability to innovate and construct effective entrepreneurial ecosystems and the pressure to create sufficient jobs. There is also the ballooning inequality of income and wealth. High inequality is associated with economic under-performance and susceptibility to political turmoil. Progressive taxes can mollify inequality, but permanent solutions rest in targeting their source: the connections world.

This concluding chapter considers the reforms of Governor-general Charles, Lord Cornwallis (1786-93) as the culmination of a decades-long process of imperial co-option, whereby British authorities had gradually expropriated and recast a late Mughal, Persianate system of taxation and justice. Cornwallis’s famous minute on civil justice from 1793 proclaimed itself as a great leap forward in its assertion of ‘British’ justice, making all civil disputes over land and taxation cognizable in separate law courts. Yet Cornwallis, like earlier British reformers, while he railed against the supposedly despotic practices of earlier Indian rulers, was also intensely aware of the multitudes of Indian petitioners and agents (wakils) crowding the Company’s ‘adalats and making legal claims on the Company. His minute on civil justice therefore did not simply announce the arrival of a new rule of law, but envisioned it as a crucial engine of colonial pedagogy, which would eventually turn clamorous and unruly Indian litigants into law-abiding subjects.

This chapter shows how the judicial reforms of Governor Warren Hastings in 1772 attempted to recentre sovereign authority in the British settlement of Calcutta by co-opting and recasting late Mughal venues and practices of petitioning and dispute resolution. It explores how Hastings attempted to found the Company's legal system, not just on 'religious' forms of Muslim and Hindu law, but on Mughal practices of revenue administration. Even after 1772, the chief revenue office in Calcutta (khalisa sharifa or ‘khalsa’) – retained an important role as a site for investigating disputes over land and revenues, and for discovering a new form of ‘civil law’ based on the Company’s interpretations of late Mughal precedents.

This chapter explores the late Mughal context for colonial-state-formation, focusing on Persianate practices of claimsmaking and dispute resolution in nawabi Bengal. It examines Persian accounts of Mughal and nawabi governance circulating in the orbit of the East India Company government in late eighteenth century Bengal, as well as British views of Mughal institutions, highlighting the role of late Mughal tax officials administering justice to petitioning subjects in disputes about land and taxation. It shows how the central revenue office of the Bengal nawabs, the khalisa sharifa, became a key site for the Company's colonization and transformation of Mughal, Persianate practices of legal ordering.

Defeat in the Franco-Prussian War stimulated an overhaul of the fiscal-military system, but in a way that largely suited the notables. The government rebuffed considerable pressure for an income tax, instead largely opting to raise indirect taxes and a new tax on securities; the post-Revolutionary tax system survived, minimising the burden on the landed classes. The greatest changes were for the army, with the imposition of universal military service. Thus, this concluding chapter underscores the durability of the post-Revolutionary fiscal system that emerged in the early nineteenth century.

Following Napoleon’s final defeat at Waterloo in 1815, the victorious allies imposed 700 million francs of reparations on the French – around 10 per cent of GDP. To pay these, the Restoration developed the final element of the nineteenth-century French fiscal system: public credit, which the government modelled largely on that of Britain. With the payment of reparations, the Restoration reintegrated France into the international order, facilitating the stabilisation of Europe and thus that of France’s domestic politics. At the same time, Napoleonic conscription was overhauled, and replaced with a system of limited military service that lasted until the 1870s. Though often overlooked by historians, the Restoration therefore did much to facilitate the creation of a sustainable, stable post-revolutionary fiscal-military state.

While the foundations of the fiscal-military state changed little either side of 1830, the new Orleanist regime did much to extend the state’s developmental dimension. The government took responsibility for the development of the railway network, which entailed extensive public investment in the 1840s. In part, this extension of public works was motivated by a desire to manage the ‘social question’, the fear of a potentially subversive underclass; indeed, despite the limited extension of the franchise after 1830, the July Monarchy was attentive to public opinion. The desire for popular legitimation also pushed the regime to seek glory abroad through the conquest of Algeria, which entailed higher military expenditure, as did an international crisis in 1840. As under the Restoration, the growth of public expenditure was financed through credit, which enabled the government to avoid painful tax reforms, while increasing the numbers of people invested in public credit and thus with a stake in the social and political order.