On 31 December 1870, the Swiss philosopher, Henri-Frédéric Amiel (1821–1881), petitioned the municipal authorities of Geneva on behalf of his neighbours and himself. They lived in a street called the Rue des Belles Filles (“beautiful girls' street”) and wanted to have the name of their street changed because it alluded to prostitutes. This is just one among a multitude of historical facts that have come down to us because humble (or not so humble) suppliants put them on paper in the form of a petition, and the authorities to which these petitions were addressed took care to preserve them. Writing petitions was a common human experience. “Everybody is free to write petitions and have a drink of water”, as a traditional German saying would have it. However, as opposed to drinking water, writing petitions is an act which produces historical sources, many of which have survived. The aim of this volume is to give an overview of their importance as sources for social history.

Social historians have quite frequently referred to the “silent masses” in history. They have thereby hinted at the problem that most preserved documents derive from a tiny elite. The great majority of the people, being illiterate, only very rarely left private letters, diaries, autobiographies and testaments, or official acts, charters, statistics, and reports. Besides the source problem, this view reflected concerns of structuralism and Marxism, both very fashionable among social historians up to the 1970s, who related the masses' interests to socioeconomic conditions. Ordinary people thus appeared rather as objects of economic structures than as subjects of historical processes. Though some German-speaking social historians integrated the anthropological category of “experience” into their studies in the 1980s, they assumed that ordinary people had interests in, and experiences of, but still no influence on historical processes. Merely local and reactive early modern social protest thus remained historically unimportant – in sharp contrast to the nineteenth-century working class movement. During the 1990s, studies of social conflict focused on the concept of agency and discussed the influence historical actors had on processes such as modernization.

“Those who think to do away with petitions would overthrow the entire system of the State”. This remark – taken from an anonymous eighteenth-century account of the political organization of the Duchy of Parma and Piacenza – describes well the importance attributed to complaints in the organization of the state. Through complaints, or petitions, it is generally possible to verify a number of fundamental forms and modes of communication between society and the institutions of the ancien regime, and to reconstruct the procedures of mediation, repression, acceptance, and agreement adopted by princes, sovereigns, or magistracies in response to social demands.

There are very few sources available to historians which allow us to hear the voices of Anglo-American women. How can we understand what ordinary women believed were their responsibilities to their families and communities and the responsibilities of their government to them? Petitions provide historians with one of the few opportunities to “hear” non-elite women voice their concerns. In provincial New Hampshire, women regularly approached the royal government with individual requests. By viewing the rights associated with petitioning, the procedure involved, and the variety of applications for petition use, female agency in colonial society becomes more apparent. Through petitions, it is possible to understand under what circumstances women turned to the government for assistance, and under what circumstances the government granted their petitions.

The cahiers de doléances of 1789 have generally been regarded as unique historical documents. In convening the Estates General, the royal government followed centuries-old precedent in asking the nation not only to elect representatives to an assembly, but to provide them with lists of the demands, wishes, and grievances of their constituents as well. One could hardly describe these documents as resources unknown to historians. Apart from a very few who have seen these documents essentially as fraudulent, historians have generally seen them as uniquely vox populi. Tocqueville, for example, described them as “an authentic account” of the ideas and feelings of the nation drawn up “in perfect freedom”. More recently, Guy Chaussinand-Nogaret saw them as “the truest sampling of opinion ever realized in the France of the Old Regime”.

This paper examines the form, content, and role of petitions in the context of protests occasioned by the handloom weavers of colonial Andhra, particularly the northern districts of the northern Coromandel region, between 1770 and 1820. Minor and major protests and revolts by weavers erupted with increasing frequency from around the middle of the eighteenth century, whenever their socioeconomic structures and conditions of work and trade were under threat from the old and new elites, as well as from the commercial interests of the colonial state. On these occasions, weavers expressed their grievances through petitions and representations, either in combination with other strategies or independently. These petitions therefore offer opportunities to study and identify the economic and social conditions that prompted weavers to resort to collective action. Careful analyses of the petitions yield considerable insights with respect to the causes of the protests; their spatial and social diffusion; the social profile of contending parties, and their mentalities; the changing organizational structure of the textile industry; the petitions' consequences; and, finally, the attitude of the colonial state towards these petitions.

Petitioning as a method of expressing grievances in British history was not peculiar to any particular set of individuals, but was widely used by all sections of society for a range of issues. Given its origins, however, it became ritualized as the means of labour negotiation for workers who were employed by the state, and, by the nineteenth century, by municipal authorities. This was before the institutionalization of trade unions and their recognition as representative agencies for industrial bargaining. One of these groups of workers in the state sector were naval dockyard employees, engaged in the construction, repair, and maintenance of British naval ships. For these workers, the nature of labour relations, and the importance of petitioning as an instrument of negotiation between employees and employer, was both complex and dynamic.

A great part of the political movement in the Revolution of 1848 took place in the form of group and mass petitions. The National Assembly in Frankfurt, the first national German parliament, received 17,000 petitions from more than three million people. A great number of petitions, analysed by German scholars such as Best, dealt with the question of a liberal market economy, with problems resulting out of the developing process of industrialization, and with protective duties. The petitions expressed different group interests, articulated by craftsmen, merchants, entrepreneurs, and workers, who responded to current economic and social restraints. Another complex of petitions formulated requests regarding the constitution, the liberalization of the political system, or the organization of education, especially the separation of church and state. Another large mass of revolutionary petitions was addressed to the rulers or the ruling bodies of the different German states and was concerned with regional conflicts, and the adoption of ideas that were developed at national level.

The disintegration of the USSR, and of the communist system, in the last decade of the twentieth century, the rekindling of ethnic strife, and scholarly research into nationalism – all have renewed interest in the images that different ethnic and religious groups in eastern Europe have had of each other. In this context, the image of Jewishness has been of particular importance, both in political science and in history. An adequate analysis of ideas about Jewishness requires access to numerous mass sources. However, the number of sources available for this kind of enquiry is limited, compared, for instance, to the sources open for traditional Hebrew studies. This is especially true when we speak about the periods of autocracy and dictatorship. Both the Russian Empire and the USSR had – besides periods of overt anti-Semitism – a tradition of hidden anti-Semitism. The hidden and unofficial nature of this prejudice would not allow for mass opinion polls on anti-Semitism before the fall of the USSR.

The premise of the Nationalist government at Nanjing (1927–1937) rested on a precarious balance of democracy and paternalism. The Nationalists drew their power from China's citizens, but they also subjected them to a regimen of training and control. Petitions from the “Nanjing decade” highlight the resulting tensions between government and the governed. Citizens from all walks of life accepted the ruling party's invitation to participate in the construction of the republic. Yet they also used petitions to seek redress when they believed the Nationalists had fallen short of their obligations. These documents mark a turbulent period of transition from imperial rule to representative democracy. They also characterize an era when new political ideas, new media, and new social organizations helped people take an old device and transform it into a useful weapon for asserting their rights as modern citizens.

The US Constitution preserves the right of the people to petition the government for redress of grievances. This right allows individuals to request private legislation from Congress and, as such, private bill petitions involve individual claims or pleas for relief for a specified person, or persons. Private petitions to Congress fall into two principal categories: claims against the US government (e.g., claims stemming from automobile accidents with government vehicles) and relief from immigration and naturalization laws. Although private laws concerning immigration and naturalization have influenced later public legislation by highlighting areas in need of reform, the private laws have limited application. Other than serving as precedent for subsequent private legislation for similarly situated individuals making requests for enactment of private laws, the laws do not benefit anyone other than the named beneficiaries of the bills.