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Reviewed by: Subjects and Sovereign: Bonds of Belonging in the Eighteenth-Century British Empire by Hannah Weiss Muller Tamar Herzog Subjects and Sovereign: Bonds of Belonging in the Eighteenth-Century British Empire. By Hannah Weiss Muller. New York: Oxford University Press, 2017. 343 pages. Cloth, ebook. In this fascinating and well-researched book, Subjects and Sovereign, Hannah Weiss Muller reconstructs the ways subjecthood operated in the eighteenth-century British Empire. Against common wisdom that tends to assume that subjecthood indicated subjugation whereas citizenship entailed active participation, she argues that contemporaries viewed subjecthood as a status that bestowed privileges and rights in return for allegiance. Whether springing naturally from birth in royal dominions or generated in other ways, subjecthood embodied a contract demanding that subjects would be loyal to a monarch who would in return defend them. This could entail the employment of force—such as in the rescue of enslaved subjects or in providing military escorts for merchants—but it could also include economic, political, and, above all, legal protections such as those embodied in consent for taxation, the right of representation, and trial by jury. This vision of subjecthood outlined by Muller operated in such distinct places as Calcutta, England, Gibraltar, Grenada, Minorca, and Quebec. It bound together a coherent but flexible polity whose extent and meaning changed according to when, where, and why an individual's ascription to the community was required. For example, in the Mediterranean, those classified as subjects would win the protection of their persons and goods by British consuls; by contrast, in Calcutta, subjection to the jurisdiction of the Supreme Court of Judicature—which dispensed English law rather than Mughal or company justice—was at stake. Because the agents demanding recognition, the interests they represented, and the aims of the superior officials differed in each setting, who qualified for subjecthood and what this implied also varied, sometimes dramatically. The imperial polity that resulted came into existence not by virtue of formal declarations, laws, or jurisprudence but because of the constant demand for privileges and rights by subjects (or potential subjects) and the will of administrators to grant them; subjecthood was a legal resource that knit together an empire when it advanced mutual interest. Thus, although the meaning and path to subjecthood in each case depended on both local and imperial conjunctures, it was always propelled by alignments between the request for rights and the desire of the authorities to tie petitioners to the polity. This allowed subjecthood to remain a shared practice and a common language across the empire, despite variations in how it was understood. [End Page 179] As Muller shows, the malleability of subjecthood generated endemic debate concerning its meaning. The community of subjects demarcated in this discourse was not exclusively defined by religion, place of origin, or even race; instead, it was rooted in the personal ties that each subject allegedly had to a just monarch. As a result, the question of how these ties could be created and guaranteed provoked heated contestation, most particularly when new territories and peoples joined the empire. In Grenada, debates raged over uncertainty about whether "new subjects" should receive the same treatment as "old subjects" (122). Were they as loyal to the king? Were their foreign birth and their Catholicism permanent markers of difference and enduring reasons to suspect them? In Calcutta, other distinctions were elaborated, separating inhabitants from subjects (mainly to marginalize individuals who were not of European descent) and temporary from permanent subjects (to differentiate those Europeans who were "truly British" [191] from all others who were only provisionally so). It is therefore not surprising that in the Declaration of Independence, the thirteen North American colonies invoked the language of subjecthood when lamenting that the monarch's unilateral rupture of the pact he had made with his loyal subjects had precipitated their rebellion. That political subjecthood was a legal status based on some sort of mutual exchange is of course not surprising. Before the category of "feudalism" was criticized for conflating practices that had little in common, most historians agreed that the greatest contribution of the feudal period to European history was the idea of contractual relationships between lords and...

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