¹ Memorial of His Majesty's Adopted Subjects in the Island of Grenada, attested 14 February 1766, The National Archives (TNA): Public Record Office (PRO), CO 101/1.

² The question of whether indigenous peoples considered themselves, and were considered, “subjects,” “allies,” or “dependent nations,” though beyond the scope of this article, is incredibly complex and still highly contested. What is clear, however, is that indigenous peoples in many parts of the British Empire used the language of subjecthood to seek protections and privileges. See, in particular, Curthoys, Ann and Mitchell, Jessie, “Bring This Paper to the Good Governor: Aboriginal Petitioning in Britain's Australian Colonies,” in Native Claims: Indigenous Law against Empire, 1500–1920, ed. Belmessous, Saliha (New York, 2011), 182–203CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Dowd, Gregory Evans, “Domestic, Dependent, Nations: The Colonial Origins of a Paradox,” in Backcountry Crucibles: The Lehigh Valley from Settlement to Steel, ed. Soderlund, Jean R. and Parzynski, Catherine S. (Bethlehem, 2007), 125–57Google Scholar; Pulsipher, Jenny Hale, Subjects unto the Same King: Indians, English, and the Contest for Authority in Colonial New England (Philadelphia, 2005)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Yirush, Craig Bryan, “Claiming the New World: Empire, Law, and Indigenous Rights in the Mohegan Case, 1704–1743,” Law and History Review 29, no. 2 (May 2011): 333–73CrossRefGoogle Scholar. The term “savage neighbors” is taken from Silver's, Peter seminal book bearing that title: Our Savage Neighbors: How Indian War Transformed Early America (New York, 2008).Google Scholar

³ I will use the term “the province of Quebec” or “Quebec” to refer to the Province of Quebec as it was defined after the cession of “Canada” to the British in 1763. The three districts of Québec, Trois Rivières, and Montréal remained united in the British “Province of Quebec.” When appropriate, I will also use the term “Canada” to refer to this same region during the period of French rule. “Canada” was one of the French territories in North America known as “New France,” which also included Acadia, Hudson Bay, Newfoundland, and Louisiana at various points in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

⁴ Traditional hostility toward Roman Catholics in Great Britain has usually been attributed to their perceived untrustworthiness and potential threat to the establishment, as well as to the ongoing wars that were fought against the Catholic powers of Europe. Caitlin Anderson makes the argument that Catholics in Britain and its empire were often viewed as being of “compromised allegiance.” See Anderson, Caitlin, “Old Subjects, New Subjects, and Non-subjects: Silences and Subjecthood,” in War, Empire, and Slavery, 1770–1830, ed. Rendall, Jane, Guyatt, Nicholas, and Bessel, Richard (New York, 2010)Google Scholar, 204.

⁵ For the early eighteenth-century empire, see, among others, Armitage, David, The Ideological Origins of the British Empire (New York, 2000)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For the 1760s, see Marshall, Peter, The Making and Unmaking of Empires: Britain, India, and America (New York, 2005), 6–7.Google Scholar

⁶ For a readily accessible published copy of the Treaty of Paris, see Shortt, Adam and Doughty, Arthur G., Documents Relating to the Constitutional History of Canada, 1759–1791 (Ottawa, 1918), 113–22Google Scholar. Article IX merely reiterated Article IV. In addition, Article XX extended “the liberty of the Catholick religion” to “new Roman Catholick subjects” in territories ceded by the king of Spain (what became East and West Florida).

⁷ “Calvin's Case,” in The Seventh Part of the Reports of Sir Edward Coke (London, 1738)Google Scholar. This case is also found under Calvin v Smith 7 CO. REP. 1b, 77 English Reports 377.

⁸ Coke and his fellow jurists argued that the “ligeance” and “faith” of the subject were due to the sovereign by “law of nature.” Because the bond between monarch and subject predated the enactment of municipal or judicial laws, there might be a “union of ligeance” without a corresponding union of laws. See The Seventh Part, 13–15.

⁹ This is a point made by many other legal historians. In “The Ancient Constitution and the Expanding Empire: Sir Edward Coke's British Jurisprudence,” Law and History Review 21, no. 3 (Autumn 2003)Google Scholar, Daniel Hulsebosch asserts that Coke was “on the verge of recognizing a new kind of imperial subjectship” (466). In “Calvin's Case and the Law of Alien Status,” Journal of Legal History 17, no. 2 (1996)Google Scholar, Keechang Kim argues that lawyers in 1608 acted purposefully to liberate allegiance from the boundaries of the kingdom of England, insisting on a definition of allegiance that was appropriate “for a warlike and magnanimous nation fit for empire” (158).

¹⁰ Craw v Ramsey Vaughan 274, 124 English Reports 1072. The ruling stated that “a subject born in any dominion belonging to the Crown of England is inheritable in England as well as native Englishmen. So the natural born subjects of Ireland, Guernsey, Jersey, Berwick, and all the English plantations inherit . . . they are born liege-men to the same king.”

¹¹ Howell, T. B., A Complete Collection of State Trials, 34 vols. (London, 1816), 20:82–238.Google Scholar

¹² As Coke stated in Calvin's case, “[N]aturalization due and vested by Birth-right, cannot by any Separation of the Crown afterward be taken away: nor he that was by Judgement of Law a natural Subject at the Time of his Birth, become an Alien by such a Matter ex post facto.” See The Seventh Part, 28.

¹³ Calvin v. Smith established that, as a subject, Robert Calvin was able to sue for the freehold in question before the courts of King's Bench and Chancery in England. The case of Christian v. Corren confirmed the subject's right to petition (made explicit in the 1689 Bill of Rights) by noting that it was the “right of subjects to appeal to the sovereign to redress a wrong done to them in any court of justice.” See Christian v Corren (1716) 1 P. Wms. 329, 24 English Reports 411.

¹⁴ See, for example, discussions in Parliament during the 1760s, particularly The history, debates, and proceedings of both Houses of Parliament of Great Britain from the year 1743 to the year 1774, 7 vols. (London, 1792)Google Scholar, 4:101, 140. The number of pamphlets that claimed to describe the rights and liberties of British subjects is impressive. Important representative titles include Anonymous, A Critical Review of the Liberties of British Subjects (London, 1750)Google Scholar; Anonymous, British Liberties; or, the Free-Born Subject's Inheritance (London, 1767)Google Scholar; Plowden, Francis, An investigation of the native rights of British Subjects (London, 1784).Google Scholar

¹⁵ Colonial governors might consult secretaries of state, the Lords Commissioners for Trade, or the Privy Council. These bodies might in turn refer legal matters to the law officers of the Crown. The law officers of the Crown included the attorney general (who was traditionally the primary representative of the sovereign in the courts), the solicitor general (who was the attorney general's deputy and assistant in all responsibilities), and the advocate general (who served as a standing advisor to the government on matters relating to questions of international, maritime, and ecclesiastical law). For more on these law officers, see Chalmers, George, Opinions of Eminent Lawyers on Various Points of English Jurisprudence, Chiefly Concerning the Colonies, Fisheries, and Commerce of Great Britain (London, 1814)Google Scholar; Edwards, J., The Law Officers of the Crown (London, 1964)Google Scholar; Oldham, James, English Common Law in the Age of Mansfield (Chapel Hill, 2004).Google Scholar

¹⁶ For a small sample of recent works that assess the impact of this indebtedness, see relevant chapters in Anderson, Fred, Crucible of War: The Seven Years' War and the Fate of Empire in British North America, 1754–1766 (New York, 2000)Google Scholar; Gould, Eliga H., The Persistence of Empire: British Political Culture in the Age of the American Revolution (Chapel Hill, 2000)Google Scholar; Schama, Simon, Citizens: A Chronicle of the French Revolution (New York, 1989)Google Scholar; and Wood, Gordon S., The American Revolution: A History (New York, 2002).Google Scholar

¹⁷ Scholarship that examines the various economic, intellectual, and cultural networks of the British Empire, particularly the British Atlantic, is extensive. Important representative studies include Armitage, David and Braddick, Michael J., eds., The British Atlantic World, 1500–1800 (New York, 2002)Google Scholar; Canny, Nicholas and Morgan, Philip, The Oxford Handbook of the Atlantic World, 1450–1850 (New York, 2013)Google Scholar; Hancock, David, Citizens of the World: London Merchants and the Integration of the British Atlantic Community, 1735–1785 (New York, 1995)Google Scholar; Landsman, Ned, From Colonials to Provincials: American Thought and Culture, 1680–1760 (New York, 1997)Google Scholar; Linebaugh, Peter and Rediker, Marcus, The Many-Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners, and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic (Boston, 2000).Google Scholar

¹⁸ For the role played by the British monarch and the centrality of monarchical culture in the British Empire, see Bushman, Richard L., King and People in Provincial Massachusetts (Chapel Hill, 1992)Google Scholar; James Joseph Caudle, “Measures of Allegiance: Sermon Culture and the Creation of a Public Discourse of Obedience and Resistance in Georgian Britain, 1714–1760” (PhD diss., Yale University, 1996); Constantine, Stephen, “Monarchy and Constructing Identity in ‘British’ Gibraltar, c. 1800 to the Present,” Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 34, no. 1 (2006): 23–44CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Halliday, Paul, Habeas Corpus: From England to Empire (Cambridge, 2010)Google Scholar; Jasanoff, Maya, Liberty's Exiles: American Loyalists in the Revolutionary World (New York, 2011)Google Scholar; McConville, Brendan, The King's Three Faces: The Rise and Fall of Royal America, 1688–1776 (Chapel Hill, 2006)Google Scholar. For the role of monarchy within Europe and across the Spanish, French, and British Empires, see in particular Elliott, John H., Empires of the Atlantic World: Britain and Spain in America, 1492–1830 (New Haven, 2006)Google Scholar and Pagden, Anthony, Lords of All the World: Ideologies of Empire in Spain, Britain, and France, 1500–1850 (New Haven, 1995).Google Scholar

¹⁹ These historians have generally worked to document legal definitions of subjecthood at specific moments in time and changes in the “law of subject and alien.” Examples include Caitlin Anderson, “Britons Abroad, Aliens at Home: Nationality Law and Policy in Britain, 1815–1870” (PhD diss., University of Cambridge, 2004); Baldwin, M. Page, “Subject to Empire: Married Women and the British Nationality and Status of Aliens Act,” Journal of British Studies 40, no. 4 (October 2001): 522–56CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed; Fahrmeir, Andreas, Citizens and Aliens: Foreigners and the Law in Britain and the German States, 1789–1870 (New York, 2000)Google Scholar; Karatani, Rieko, Defining British Citizenship: Empire, Commonwealth, and Modern Britain (Portland, 2003)Google Scholar; Kettner, James, The Development of American Citizenship, 1608–1870 (Chapel Hill, 1978)Google Scholar; Kim, Keechang, Aliens in Medieval Law: The Origins of Modern Citizenship (Cambridge, 2000)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Sen, Sudipta, “Imperial Subjects on Trial: On the Legal Identity of Britons in Late Eighteenth-Century India,” Journal of British Studies 45, no. 3 (July 2006): 532–55CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Cultural theorists have also been interested in the positioning of the subject and in questions of subjectivity, but these studies have not approached the question of how subjecthood itself operated in Britain or its empire. See, for example, Balibar, Etienne and Wallerstein, Immanuel, Race, Nation, Class: Ambiguous Identities (New York, 1991).Google Scholar

²⁰ These were the terms used by inhabitants themselves in petitions and memorials. They were also the phrases employed by governors and secretaries of state in their official correspondence from the 1760s and 1770s.

²¹ Population figures for Grenada are drawn from Devas, Raymond, Conception Island: The Troubled Story of the Catholic Church in Grenada (London, 1932)Google Scholar, 38; Javier A. Gonzalez, “A Strange Discordant Mass of Heterogeneous Animals: The Role of Ethnic Divisions in British Grenada, 1763–1779” (unpublished BA thesis, Harvard University, 1994), 19–21. Population figures for Quebec are estimated based on several sources: Lawson, Philip, The Imperial Challenge: Quebec and Britain in the Age of the American Revolution (Montreal, 1994)Google Scholar; George, Pierre, Le Quebec (Paris, 1979)Google Scholar; Tousignant, Pierre, “The Integration of the Province of Quebec into the British Empire, 1763–1791,” in Dictionary of Canadian Biography, 6 vols. (Toronto, 1979), 4:xxxii–xlixGoogle Scholar. Tousignant puts the number of French Catholics at 60,000 in the early 1760s; George at 65,000 in 1763; Lawson at 70,000 for the 1760s.

²² The assorted penal laws were designed to protect Britain against the possibility that Catholic subjects might nurture and abet plans for a foreign invasion of the British Isles, might seek to restore the deposed Catholic Stuarts to the throne, or might more generally subvert the government by obtaining positions of trust. The question of whether these various penal laws extended to the colonies was a problematic one. In one 1722 ruling, the judges had stated that after an uninhabited country was settled by the English, “Acts of Parliament made in England, without naming the foreign plantations, will not bind them” (Anonymous [1722] 2 P. Wms. 75, 24 English Reports 646). The 1759 decision in Rex v. Cowle similarly insisted that Berwick, “not being part of the realm of England, is not bound by Act of Parliament, unless named” (Rex v. Cowle [1759] 2 Burr. 834, 97 English Reports 587). These decisions made clear that colonies in the monarch's possession must be named if Parliament intended that a given statute should extend to them. However, did statutes extend to colonies added after their passing and therefore not named in the original statute? This was particularly important for territories with majority Catholic populations that were added after the passing of the 1678 Test Act. The Test Act had not referred to these territories, but did this mean that Catholics in Grenada and Quebec were to be exempt from the penal laws? In 1765 and again in 1768, law officers of the Crown argued that the “incapacities, disabilities, and penalties to which Roman Catholicks in the Kingdom, are Subject by the Laws thereof” did not apply to the ceded territories or to Canada (see Letter to the Lords Commissioners, dated 10 June 1765, TNA: PRO, CO 42/2 and Report from Marriott to the Privy Council, dated 18 January 1768, TNA: PRO, CO 42/7). These rulings do not seem to have persuaded all colonial inhabitants and administrators that the Catholics among them were exempt from the penal laws in force within the realm.

²³ Brebner, John Bartlett, New England's Outpost: Acadia before the Conquest of Canada (New York, 1927)Google Scholar; Griffiths, N. E. S., From Migrant to Acadian: A North American Border People, 1604–1755 (Ithaca, 2005)Google Scholar; Hodson, Christopher, The Acadian Diaspora: An Eighteenth-Century History (New York, 2012)Google Scholar; Plank, Geoffrey, An Unsettled Conquest: The British Campaign against the Peoples of Acadia (Philadelphia, 2001)Google Scholar. The Acadians were descendants of the seventeenth-century French colonists who settled in Acadia, a colony of New France. They were predominantly, though not always, Roman Catholic.

²⁴ “The Treaty of Paris,” in Shortt and Doughty, Documents Relating, 113–22.

²⁵ Tousignant, “The integration,” xl.

²⁶ See Humphreys, R. A., “Lord Shelburne and the Proclamation of 1763,” English Historical Review 49, no. 194 (April 1934): 241–64CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Attorney-General James Marriott commented on how “hurried” the provisions of 1763 seemed, and Robert Henley, Lord Northington, who was Lord Chancellor at the time, called the proclamation a “very silly document.”

²⁷ Ignotus, Thoughts on trade in general, our West-Indian in particular, our Continental colonies, Canada, Guadeloupe, and the preliminary articles of peace addressed to the community (London, 1763)Google Scholar, 5, 12.

²⁸ Ibid., 44.

²⁹ By the 1770s, the population of England was about three and a half times smaller than that of her archrival, France, which boasted 25 million inhabitants and was the most populous country in Europe. See Tousignant, “The integration,” xlvii.

³⁰ For a recent discussion of this “tacit covenant” and “contractual relationship between the ruler and the ruled” in two empires, see Elliott, Empires of the Atlantic World, 131–33. For a wide-ranging analysis of oaths and covenants, including the “covenant” between king and subjects, see Vallance, Edward, Revolutionary England and the National Covenant: State Oaths, Protestantism, and the Political Nation (New York, 2005), 77–78.Google Scholar

³¹ Memorial of His Majesty's Adopted Subjects in the Island of Grenada, attested 14 February 1766, TNA: PRO, CO 101/1.

³² Campbell, John, Candid and impartial considerations on the nature of the sugar trade (London, 1763)Google Scholar, 177.

³³ Sir Young, William, Some observations which may contribute to afford a just idea of the nature, importance, and settlement, of our new West-India colonies (London, 1764)Google Scholar, 25. Campbell commented that the sugar produced in Grenada was of “fine grain” and much more valuable than that produced in Guadeloupe and Martinique.

³⁴ See, for example, Representation of the Board of Trade upon a Plan for the Disposal of His Majesty's Lands in Grenada, St. Vincent's, Dominica & Tobago, dated 3 November 1763, TNA: PRO, PC 1/59/5/2. Administrators worried that French planters might be induced to leave for the neighboring French islands where they would be welcomed with open arms given “the property in Slaves and other Effects which they would carry with them, and from their knowledge of the Culture peculiar to these Islands.” The argument that new subjects were thought to be essential in guarding against slave revolts is made most persuasively for Grenada by Cox, Edward, Free Coloreds in the Slave Societies of St. Kitts and Grenada, 1763–1833 (Knoxville, 1984)Google Scholar. He suggests that in an attempt to maintain control over its nonwhite population, the government “had over time made limited yet important concessions to the new subjects” (80–81).

³⁵ Cox, Free Coloreds, 13–14.

³⁶ Memorial of the Undersigned British Protestant Inhabitants of the Island of Grenada, attested 14 February 1766, TNA: PRO, CO 101/1.

³⁷ Memorial of His Majesty's Adopted Subjects in the Island of Grenada, attested 14 February 1766, TNA: PRO, CO 101/1.

³⁸ The religious identities of these petitioners are difficult to ascertain. They were likely a diverse group: some may have been Catholics of Irish or Scottish origin; some were likely nonconformists or dissenters with a vested interest in seeing rights extended to non-Anglicans; some may have been Anglicans but chose to differentiate themselves from the “British Protestants” who attacked the French Catholics.

³⁹ Memorial of several of His Majesty's Natural Born Subjects in the Island of Grenada, attested 14 February 1766, TNA: PRO, CO 101/1.

⁴⁰ The Grenada Gazette reported that existing members of the Protestant council and assembly had requested leave to bring in a bill that declared “all his Majesty's new adopted Subjects capable of enjoying every Liberty and Immunity of natural-born Subjects” (see Anonymous, The Grenada Planter; or, a Full and Impartial Answer to a Letter in the Gazetteer of October 22, 1768 [London, 1768], 15)Google Scholar. This led many of the propertied French Catholics to assume that they were going to be allowed not only to vote for representatives but also to stand for elected office. Continually frustrated in their attempts to obtain a copy of this bill, which passed on 14 October 1766, the new subjects still had not seen it on the eve of the election itself. In fact, the bill stipulated that only persons “taking the oaths of Allegiance and Supremacy, and subscribing the Test before the Governor and Council, if otherwise duly qualified, had a Right to sit in the Assembly, but refusing to do so was liable to a Penalty of one hundred Pounds” (The Grenada Planter, 18–19).

⁴¹ For a full account of these events, see The Grenada Planter and Anonymous, Audi alteram Partem; or, a Counter-Letter to the Right Honourable E-l of H-ll-gh (London, 1770).Google Scholar

⁴² For a copy of this petition, see appendix VI in Audi alteram Partem. The Grenada Planter notes that it was signed by 337 persons on page 24.

⁴³ It should be noted, of course, that instructions sent to governors rarely show much change or change only very slowly. Nonetheless, the instructions sent to Melvill (1768), Fitzmaurice (1769), Leyborne (1771), Macartney (1775–76), and Green (1796) still include the paragraph(s) noting that a certain number of new subjects were entitled to sit in the council and assembly and to be exempt from the test.

⁴⁴ The pamphlet war resulted not only in numerous entries in The Political Register (particularly 1769 and 1770) but also in Anonymous, The Grenada Planter; Anonymous, A Letter to the Right Honourable the Earl of H-b-h, His M-y's S-y of S-te for the C-l-s, on the Present Situation of Affairs in the Island of Gr-n-da (London, 1769)Google Scholar; Anonymous, A Narrative of the Proceedings Upon the Complaint against Governor Melvill (London, 1770)Google Scholar; Anonymous, Audi alteram Partem.

⁴⁵ By 1771, the number of white inhabitants in Grenada had climbed to 1,661, a majority of whom were still of French Catholic origin. That number began to fall soon thereafter. By 1777, white inhabitants totaled 1,324, and by 1783, they amounted to 996 settlers, whereas the number of slaves had risen to 24,620 by the mid-1780s (see Cox, Free Coloreds, 13–14). Moreover, records of land ownership indicate that just over 50 percent of plantations were in the hands of British settlers by the early 1770s (see Devas, Conception Island, 38; Gonzalez, “A Strange,” 19–21). One report from the mid-1780s suggested that “there is not at this time above one-tenth of the whole property of the Island which can really be called French” (TNA: PRO, CO 101/26).

⁴⁶ In 1785, a local act stipulated that only marriages, baptisms, and burials performed in, or registered in, the established Anglican Church were valid. A new election bill passed by the assembly in 1786 resolved that “none but British Born Subjects professing the Protestant religion and otherwise qualified according to the said ordinance, can be, or of right ought to be, elected representatives of the Freemen of this Colony” (see Resolutions dated 2 March 1786, TNA: PRO, CO 101/26). By 1792, the local act requiring all Catholics to take the test before they could hold political office was passed, despite the fact that the Privy Council ruling of 1768 was still in effect.

⁴⁷ By 1792, French Catholics in Quebec had secured numerous advantages not enjoyed by Catholics in Britain. See the subsequent section for further details. The date for this Privy Council ruling is taken from secondary sources about Grenada and from an incomplete draft of the attorney general's report on the status of Roman Catholics in the Privy Council papers. I have been unable to locate the text of the original ruling. The correspondence for Grenada indicates awareness that this matter was before the Privy Council. A letter sent to Governor Mathew, dated 22 May 1790, noted that the claims of the new subjects were “still under consideration of the Privy Council” (TNA: PRO, CO 101/30).

⁴⁸ See note 22. Despite reports filed by law officers of the Crown arguing that Roman Catholics in the ceded colonies were not subject to the penal laws in force within the realm, the Privy Council ruled otherwise. It also bears noting that some of the restrictions against Roman Catholics in the British Isles were removed by the 1791 Catholic Relief Act.

⁴⁹ The only governor of Grenada who was recognizably hostile to some French demands in his official letters was Robert Melvill of Grenada. It would appear that he helped push through a 1766 ordinance that gave French inhabitants the right to vote for assembly representatives but that he turned against the French Catholic planters when a small group of them demanded the right to sit in the assembly and sent Alexandre Cazaud to London with a petition to that effect in 1767. Melvill's responsibility for the animosities that plagued Grenada in the 1760s and 1770s is the subject of many of the pamphlets listed in note 44.

⁵⁰ Sir Blackstone, William, Commentaries on the Laws of England, ed. Katz, Stanley N. (Chicago, 1979)Google Scholar. In volume 1, chapter 10, for example, Blackstone notes that “natural allegiance is such due from all men born within the king's dominions immediately upon their earth” (357). He goes on to argue that it is a principle of “universal law” that “the natural-born subject of one prince cannot by any act of his own, no, not by swearing allegiance to another, put off or discharge his natural allegiance to the former: for this natural allegiance was intrinsic and primitive, and antecedent to the other” (358). Interestingly, Blackstone seems to suggest that if the prince to which his natural allegiance is due concurrently agrees to divest him of this allegiance, it may be possible for the subject to renounce his birthright allegiance. In this, Blackstone appears to depart from Coke.

⁵¹ For various reasons beyond the scope of this article, governors did not encourage demands for representative institutions, and assemblies allowing Catholic participation were not secured until 1791. In general, many governors harbored very real fears about whether an assembly in Quebec could really be representative. There were only a few hundred merchants and traders of British origin in the province, and the vast majority of Canadiens were thought to be rarely in favor of representative bodies that they feared would breed trouble and taxes. See, for example, a letter from Governor Carleton to the Earl of Shelburne in which he argues that “the better sort of Canadians fear nothing more than popular assemblies” (letter dated 20 January 1768, TNA: PRO, CO 42/7).

⁵² The scholarship about the legal system in the province of Quebec during the 1760s and early 1770s is extensive. For recent and innovative treatments of this topic, see Fyson, Donald, “The Conquered and the Conqueror: The Mutual Adaptation of the Canadiens and the British in Quebec, 1759–1775,” in Revisiting 1759 (Buffalo, 2012)Google Scholar. See also the work of Michel Morin, particularly “The Reactions of the ‘New’ Subjects of Quebec to British Justice, 1760–1774” (unpublished paper).

⁵³ Studies of the Quebec Act tend to concur that there were approximately 90,000 inhabitants in “Canada,” of whom the vast majority were of French origin in 1774. However, contemporaries offered a range of other estimates. Tousignant notes that the reports of law officers suggested that there were more like 80,000 “new subjects” (“The integration,” xlvii). When he was examined by Parliament in 1774, Guy Carleton stated that he believed that there were 150,000 Canadiens then in the province. See Wright, J., ed., Debates of the House of Commons in the year 1774, on the Bill for Making More Effectual Provision for the Government of the Province of Quebec (London, 1839).Google Scholar

⁵⁴ Letter from Cramahé to Dartmouth, dated 22 June 1773, TNA: PRO, CO 42/8, and Letter from Cramahé to Dartmouth, dated 12 December 1773, TNA: PRO, CO 42/33. James Murray made similar arguments for admitting Catholics to the juries and for allowing the Canadiens access to lawyers and judges who were versed in French law. Guy Carleton went even further in urging concessions, recommending, among other things, acceptance of some of the Canadian noblesse into the council because the “only way to make them faithful subjects is to place a prudent confidence in and employ them.” (See various letters from Carleton to Shelburne, Hillsborough, and the Lords Commissioners of Trade, in TNA: PRO, CO 42/27).

⁵⁵ Land in New France was most commonly granted in fief et seigneurie. A seigneur claimed honorary and real rights based on written titles to land but exercised those rights under the supervision of the state and, more specifically, of the intendant in New France. By contrast, English land was granted in free and common socage. The individual landholder paid a “service” or “rent,” but these obligations were specific and generally involved a fixed annual payment. Land held in free and common socage was alienable and could be bought and sold. See Trudel, Marcel, The Seigneurial Regime, Canadian Historical Association Booklets 6 (Ottawa, 1976).Google Scholar

⁵⁶ “Address of French Citizens to the King regarding the legal system,” in Shortt and Doughty, Documents Relating, 228.

⁵⁷ “Petition for the Restoration of French Law and Custom (dated sometime in 1770),” in Shortt and Doughty, Documents Relating, 419–22.

⁵⁸ “A Petition of diverse of the Roman-Catholick Inhabitants of the Province of Quebeck to the King's Majesty (signed December 1773 and presented February 1774),” in Shortt and Doughty, Documents Relating, 504–08.

⁵⁹ “Presentments of the Grand Jury of Quebec,” in Shortt and Doughty, Documents Relating, 212–15.

⁶⁰ The Petition of Sir John Baronet and others . . . Loyalists, their Associates, who have taken Refuge in Canada, dated 11 April 1785, TNA: PRO, CO 42/47.

⁶¹ Maseres, Francis, An Account of the Proceedings of the British and other Protestant Inhabitants of the Province of Quebeck in North America in order to obtain an House of Assembly in that Province (London, 1775)Google Scholar; Additional papers concerning the Province of Quebeck: being an Appendix . . . (London, 1776)Google Scholar; The Canadian Freedholder: in two dialogues between an Englishman and a Frenchman settled in Canada . . . (London, 1777)Google Scholar. Many of these treatises address the issue of a house of representatives and the issue of which law should be administered in the province of Quebec.

⁶² Marshall, Peter, “The Incorporation of Quebec in the British Empire, 1763–1774,” in Of Mother Country and Plantations: Proceedings of the Twenty-Seventh Conference in Early American History (Bowling Green, 1970)Google Scholar, 63. It should be noted that the Regulating Act (1773) made comparable provisions and established an administration of justice for Bengal. However, Bengal was technically a territory governed by the East India Company rather than by colonial administrators such as the Lords Commissioners, the secretaries of state, and the governors who were responsible for Quebec.

⁶³ “The Quebec Act (1774),” in Short and Doughty, Documents Relating, 373.

⁶⁴ See Petitions of 1774, TNA: PRO, CO 42/34. Original French text reads: “la jouissance de tous les droits avantages & prerogatives des sujets Britanniques” and “nous sommes adoptés comme fils de la Patrie et Citoiens anglois.”

⁶⁵ See Sketch of the Military State of the Province of Quebec, 25 July 1778, TNA: PRO, CO 42/38; Secret and Confidential Letter from Haldimand, 14 September 1779, TNA: PRO, CO 43/14; and Most Secret Letter from Haldimand, 23 November 1781, TNA: PRO, CO 42/42. In the 1781 letter, Haldimand noted that the French alliance with the American rebels had had a dangerous effect upon the minds of the Canadians. He mentioned, however, that British successes in battle, when combined with his vigilant attention to the Canadians' conduct, “have hitherto kept them if not within the limits of their Duty, at least within those of decency.”

⁶⁶ Declarations of rights, published treatises, correspondence with administrators, and court documents were some of the forms used most frequently. For more about these other forms, see Hannah Weiss Muller, Subjects and Sovereign: Bonds of Belonging in the British Empire (in progress).

⁶⁷ Zaret, David, Origins of Democratic Culture: Printing, Petitions, and the Public Sphere in Early-Modern England (Princeton, 2000)Google Scholar, 86. For centuries, parliamentary statutes had upheld subjects' right to petition the monarch. In the seventeenth century, for example, statutes such as the 1661 Tumultuous Petitioning Act were passed, which put limits on petitions but which nonetheless confirmed the subject's right to petition. In 1689, the Bill of Rights confirmed that the subject was entitled to petition the monarch for redress.

⁶⁸ Koziol, Geoffrey, Begging Pardon and Favor: Ritual and Political Order in Early Medieval France (Ithaca, 1992), 44–45Google Scholar, as cited in Zaret, Origins of Democratic Culture, 81. See also Zaret more generally.

⁶⁹ Wickramasinghe, Nira, “La Petition Coloniale: Objet de Contrôle, Objet de Dissidence,” Identity, Culture & Politics: An Afro-Asian Dialogue 7, no. 1 (2006): 1–16.Google Scholar

⁷⁰ For the various petitions from Grenada, attested 14 February 1766, see TNA: PRO, CO 101/1. For copies of the two petitions from Quebec, see Shortt and Doughty, Documents Relating . The first petition is titled “The Petition of the Quebec Traders” (1764), and the second is titled “The Address of the Principal Inhabitants of Canada to the King relative to the Establishment of Courts of Justice” (1765). Quotations in this section, unless indicated otherwise, are drawn from these particular petitions.

⁷¹ Memorial of Salvador Cosino to William Blakeley, 31 January 1754, TNA: PRO, CO 174/16.

⁷² See The Several petitions of the British Inhabitants of Bengal, of the Governor-General and Council, and of the Court of Directors of the East India Company to Parliament (London, 1780).Google Scholar

⁷³ Memorial of His Majesty's Adopted Subjects in the Island of Grenada, attested 14 February 1766, TNA: PRO, CO 101/1.

⁷⁴ See, for example, “Address of French Citizens to the King Regarding the Legal System,” in Shortt and Doughty, Documents Relating, 161–66.

⁷⁵ Bowen, H.V., “British Conceptions of Global Empire, 1756–1783,” Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 26, no. 3 (1998): 1–27.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

⁷⁶ Anderson, Benedict, Imagined Communities (New York, 1991).Google Scholar

⁷⁷ Bilder, Mary Sarah, “Salamanders and Sons of God: The Culture of Appeal in Early New England,” in The Many Legalities of Early America, ed. Tomlins, Christopher L. and Mann, Bruce H. (Chapel Hill, 2001)Google Scholar, 69; Bilder, Mary Sarah, The Transatlantic Constitution: Colonial Legal Culture and the Empire (Cambridge, 2004).Google Scholar

⁷⁸ Hulsebosch, Daniel, “The American Revolution (II): The Origin and Nature of Colonial Grievances,” in The Oxford History of the British Empire: The American Colonies in the British Empire, 1606–1776, ed. Foster, Stephen (forthcoming).Google Scholar

⁷⁹ See Hulsebosch, “The American Revolution (II).”

⁸⁰ Pares, Richard, War and Trade in the West Indies (Oxford, 1936), 71–75.Google Scholar

⁸¹ Young, Some observations, 43.

⁸² As quoted in Calloway, Colin, The Scratch of a Pen: 1763 and the Transformation of North America (New York, 2006)Google Scholar, 114.

⁸³ Letter from James Marriott to John Pownall in response to the 21 April 1766 letter referred to His Majesty's Advocate General from the Lords of Trade and Plantations, TNA: PRO, CO 123/1. I am grateful to Peter Silver for having referred me to this volume of correspondence.

⁸⁴ See Elizabeth Mancke, “Sites of Sovereignty: The Body of the Subject and the Creation of Britain's Overseas Empire” (paper presented at the University of Chicago Early Modern Workshop, 21 February 2005).

⁸⁵ Letter from Finlay to Nepean, dated 9 February 1789, TNA: PRO, CO 42/66.

⁸⁶ This is the language that the governor used to report the event to the secretary of state. See Letter from Melvill to Hillsborough, dated 5 July 1770, TNA: PRO, CO 101/3.

⁸⁷ See, for example, the “Petition for the Restoration of French Law and Custom (dated sometime in 1770),” in Shortt and Doughty, Documents Relating, 419–22.

⁸⁸ Thomas Paine referred to “the age of revolution” in The Rights of Man, Part 1 (1791), ed. Kuklick, Bruce, in Paine: Political Writings (New York, 1989)Google Scholar, 143. The late eighteenth century itself bears this moniker, made most famous by Hobsbawm, Eric, The Age of Revolution, 1789–1848 (New York, 1996)Google Scholar and Palmer, R. R., The Age of Democratic Revolution: A Political History of Europe and America, 1760–1800 (Princeton, 1959).Google Scholar

⁸⁹ See note 18.

⁹⁰ The perceived differences between subjects and citizens are aptly summarized by Baker, Rodney in Political Legitimacy and the State (Oxford, 1990)CrossRefGoogle Scholar: “[W]hilst all citizens are subjects, not all subjects are citizens. . . . [A]s a mere subject she is not participant in the activity of governing, the activity whereby she is subjected. Citizenship contributes another dimension. The citizen engages in politics and by so doing authorizes and influences government” (3). The argument that the individual evolves from subject to citizen, from someone who obediently accepts law and membership to a person who actively manages and chooses his relationship to the state, is replicated in a variety of studies.