Introduction: Atlantic Petitionary traditions and developments

This introductory essay bridges the gap between two historiographical fields that rarely engaged with each other: Atlantic history and the history of petitions and petitionary practices. The essay emphasises the importance of petitioning within and across Atlantic empires, from the initial European expansion to the Age of Revolutions.Petitioning played a major role in the negotiated patterns of early modern empires, irrespective of the political regime of each state or empire. Petitioning practices underwent a very unique development in the Atlantic World, the essay argues. This was partly dictated by a background of common features that did not converge anywhere else in the same timeframe, namely the shared Greco-Roman and medieval petitionary heritage, the simultaneous expansion and colonisation processes, and the infectious reverberations of the Age of Atlantic Revolutions. The essay goes through the traditional practices and institutions and revisits the unique petitionary experience of colonised peoples. It also pays a special attention to the transformative role of the Revolution, which began to convert petitioning into a vehicle for mass popular politics on both sides of the Atlantic.