This chapter revisits the classic issue of the origins of Latin American independence and questions a set of prevailing historiographic assumptions. From a review of political conspiracies and mobilizations in eighteenth-century Latin America, it argues that Spanish and Portuguese colonial sovereignty faced significant challenges well before the Napoleonic invasion of the Iberian Peninsula in 1807; that the role of popular sectors was crucial to revolutionary and counterrevolutionary politics in the eighteenth century; and that the conflicts in Iberian American territory were linked to wider political dynamics in the Atlantic world. Without adopting a determinist argument that Bourbon reform or American identity explains Latin American independence in the nineteenth century, the chapter disputes the idea that a stable and legitimate “old regime” only unraveled after 1808. It also suggests that significant patterns of political contestation in the late colonial period found new expression in the novel context of the early nineteenth century.

The Introduction situates the nineteenth-century heyday of petitions and petitioning within a series of literatures. First, it places the book in the context of existing understandings of British political culture and debates about popular politics that have hitherto focused primarily on political languages and electoral culture, whereas the book redirects attention to practice and forms of political activity outside of voting. A study of petitions and petitioning furthermore challenges revisionist accounts that have emphasised the ‘closing down’ of popular politics or the growing regulation of subjects by the Victorian state. Second, it traces the tracing the genealogy of petitions within British history over the longue durée. While the was part of a common trend towards mass, collective, public petitioning across Europe and North America, the UK experience was exceptional. Third, the Introduction underlines the book’s intervention into a number of important debates within social and political science concerning collective action and social movements, theories and practices of representation, and trajectories of democratisation. Finally, the Introduction provides a chronological overview of petitions and petitioning during the long nineteenth century and an outline of the book’s structure.

The conclusion summarises the key findings of the book. Not only were petitions and petitioning a central, and hitherto, missing component of our understanding of UK political culture, but these practices contributed to the transformation of political culture. The remainder of the conclusion considers how a study of petitionary culture reconnects and pushes forward the currently fragmented field of nineteenth-century political history, before considering three major implications of the book for the wider historiography. First, it demonstrates that UK political culture was even more inclusive than previously thought, thereby qualifying the emphasis on the exclusivity of the political nation. Second, it charts how the authority and legitimacy of the Commons in particular, and Parliament more generally, was renewed by petitions, although it could also, on occasion, be challenged by petitioners. Third, it shows how the UK state was transformed by the continuous interaction with petitioners, and restores the place of the people within accounts of the relationship between state and subjects. Ultimately, petitions and petitioning were part of a broader social phenomenon that decisively reshaped the modern political culture of the UK.

Between the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century the context for petitioning changed. The number of public petitions addressed to the House of Commons declined, and commentators and politicians increasingly regarded petitioning as redundant in an era of mass electoral politics ushered in by the Third Reform Act (1884–85). Yet, as this chapter shows, petitioning did not decline but was rather reinvented in this period. Campaigners increasingly addressed singular mass petitions to a range of different authorities, including the monarch and Downing Street, in ways that emphasised the performative presentation of petitions to maximise coverage in the mass media. High-profile examples, such as petitions organised by the militant suffragettes or the Ulster Covenant and Declaration (1912) associated with Unionist opposition to Irish Home Rule, were part of a broader reimagining of petitioning with the UK’s nascent democracy. Finally, contemporaries also considered petitions to be a mechanism for calling referendums, as shown in a number of bills of the time, and also in the numerous mass petitions from Unionists and others to the king calling for Home Rule to be referred to the people via referendum or general election. As this chapter shows, while the practice of petitioning changed during an era of rapid democratisation it retained an important place within UK popular politics and political culture.

An examination of the practice of petitioning at the grassroots level shows how it stimulated a vibrant popular politics. Revisionist scholarship emphasising the supposed taming or disciplining of political culture has ignored the lively local culture of petitioning. The chapter first outlines the process and practice of petitioning: the drafting, signing, and presentation and reception of petitions. Of all these different stages in the process of petitioning, it was the practice of signing petitions that was most important to nineteenth-century popular politics. Not only did it underpin other forms of political activity, such as public meetings, but opened up new informal spaces for political activity and engendered new forms of political behaviour. The practice of petitioning stimulated a never-ending cycle of claim and counter-claim about the forging of signatures, the undue influence of landlords or employers, and outright misrepresentation. This endless contestation was intrinsic to the practice and process of petitioning and one of the most important ways in which it energised popular politics at the local level.

Chapter 16 of Earthopolis: A Biography of Our Urban Planet explores cities’ role as creators and creations of their own majority populations during the industrial Urban Planetary acceleration of the nineteenth century. Millions of new urban industrial workers and colonial subjects profoundly shaped cities by means of their own massive, often very-long-distance migrations; their grueling, often indentured and semi-servile labor; their construction and habitation of new housing; and their multifarious forms of political activism. The chapter examines the built structures and the associated political contests required for movement, changes in home life, factory work, associational life, and street protest. Urban political institutions also changed amidst a radicalization of revolutionary movements exemplified by the Paris Commune of 1871 and massive strike waves that followed everywhere on the Urban Planet at the turn of the twentieth century.

Chapter 17 of Earthopolis: A Biography of Our Urban Planet explores the Urban Planet from the bourgeois Belle Époque to World War I and the protest, strikes, and revolutions that followed on the left and the right. It begins in Vienna, St. Petersburg, and Tokyo to show how forces of both revolution and counterrevolution gained strength in an age of apparent bourgeois triumph, and how rival nationalist imperialists and their industrial military industrial complexes, railroads, and new oilfields predisposed Europe toward global war. The chapter also delves into the micro- and macro-geography of the newly renamed city of Petrograd to understand how Bolshevik revolutionaries were able to seize power there and then in Moscow. A wide-ranging survey of general strikes, revolutions, and counterrevolutions follows, showing how anti-capitalist and anti-imperial movements then spread to cities worldwide, followed by ominous resurgences of racist and right-wing forces in the streets of Chicago, Johannesburg, Istanbul, Rome, and Munich.

Chapter 11 of Earthopolis: A Biography of Our Urban Planet explores cities’ role as creators and creations of the political revolutions of the late-eighteenth-century Atlantic world. It argues that traditions of urban “freedoms” going back to the revival of European cities, imperial conflict throughout the world between regimes based in London and Paris, restive settler colonial cities in the Americas, and the Atlantic economy’s reliance on enslavement made the Atlantic into the world’s first “cauldron” of modern revolution. It traces the close connections between the American Revolution that started in Boston and the French one in Paris, while investigating the ways revolutionaries used the spaces of a cities designed for colonial or authoritarian control to overthrow otherwise all-powerful-seeming regimes, replacing them with structures designed for democracy or People Power.

This chapter begins by tracing the strong links between traditional political history writing and identity politics, be it national identity, the identity of empires or religious identity. It then analyses the crisis of political history writing in the 1960s and 1970s. Finally it examines the remaking of the ‘new’ political history, highlighting (a) a stonger concern for popular politics, (b) a major emphasis on the languages of politics, (c) the desire to look for links between popular politics and popular religion and (d) the study of political transfers. Overall the new political history has done much to problematise the strong link between political history writing and identity formation.

A free and open discussion is always limited. It depends on specific linguistic conventions, forms of expression and norms of social engagement that make mutual understanding possible. Together with Chapter 4, this chapter explores the nature and scope of plural and open discussions in everyday Mombasa. They identify the possibilities and limits on how people might engage in public based on the specific characteristics of discussion. This chapter focuses on street parliaments, which are gatherings that form on the ground both in the central business district and in residential neighbourhoods. Together, these chapters make an important contribution to understanding the openness of publics in Mombasa. They not only show how everyday publics existed in Mombasa, but also differentiate between forms of exclusion. They show how some forms of exclusion prevented public discussion from taking place at all, while others constrained its openness but were refutable or contestable, such as gender.

The concluding chapter considers this book’s implications for understanding popular politics in Kenya and the study of publics. It emphasises how potential change through public discussion in urban Kenya is more precarious than ever. Change does not neatly follow from intentional efforts to alter the terms of debate. Features that contradicted normative visions have been crucial to the power of publics to change shared imaginaries, for instance, material insecurity or elite networks. Further, social media has brought its own challenges. The conclusion finally reflects on the implications of this book for engagement with Arendtian scholarship on publics. Everyday publics in Mombasa show deeper and more varied insights into publics are possible when extending Arendt's ideas to take into account the implications of colonialism, anti-colonial struggles and postcolonial contexts. It also argues there is a need for serious engagement with the particularities of digital technology, and how they provide for a disjuncture between experience and control in publics.

Elections are moments when political hierarchies and differences become more visible and more contestable. Chapter 8 examines how the people’s parliaments responded to the 2013 General Elections in Mombasa. It reveals how instrumental and personalised political campaigns had a tense but mutually constitutive relationship with everyday publics. The intrigues of electoral competition sparked interest in public discussion and made it seem relevant to people’s everyday lives, while at the same time sharpening the contours of debate. A key finding concerns the challenges that faced civil society campaigns in attempting to realise changed discourses. This chapter argues that peace narratives purported by civil society in 2013 struggled to shift deep-set shared imaginaries. Explicitly non-partisan civil society groups struggled to keep out partisan competition as it was a source of perceived individual agency in politics. Also, formal structures were easily instrumentalised by politicians within their campaigns.

The introduction sets out the context and framework for exploring popular politics in Kenya in the 2010s. It begins by juxtaposing a dynamic political communication landscape, with protracted and familiar repertoires through which political differences are understood. From here, it lays out the purpose of the book: to make sense of how, and to what extent, everyday publics explain continuity and change in shared political imaginaries in Kenya. It considers conceptual resources in Africanist scholarship on publics that exist to help understand the power of everyday publics on the continent, and suggests a revision of Hannah Arendt’s ideas of the power of publics as a way expand this scholarship to better account for the power of everyday publics. Finally, it also introduces Mombasa’s people’s parliaments, everyday informal gatherings that are the empirical window through which Kenya’s popular politics are examined.

Chapter 7 unpacks the conditions of place on Facebook. It highlights contingencies in convening in Facebook-mediated spaces tied to physical infrastructure, group administration, algorithmic and corporate controls, and state oversight. This chapter makes the case that on Facebook, experiences have not matched the actual – and potential – conditions of ownership over digital infrastructure and space. Public discussion on social media obscured, rather than removed, unequal ownership structures and physical dependencies. Participants experienced discussion on Facebook as open and unpredictable, but this was premised upon a limited view of underlying structures and controls. This raises a critical question about the nature of publics online: if spatial configurations of publics mask their constraints, resulting in experiences that seem unpredictable but are not necessarily so, what does this mean for the actual scope of unpredictability of the interactions?

Chapter 5 explores the relationship between material insecurity and publics in Kenya. It provides empirical insight into the relationship between welfare and publics in a postcolonial context. Material wellbeing was a constant concern for the average resident in Mombasa. More widely in Kenya, and built up through the British colonial state, welfare has been a source of political grievance or advantage, as well as an individual concern. This has resulted in a contradictory and contingent relationship between welfare, and the nature and scope of everyday publics. For men, idleness was an opportunity to participate in political and public discussion. Unemployment and insecurity also become the subject of public concern, attributed to disadvantage in systems of political patronage. Equally, individuals would easily turn away from public discussion when money was at stake.

Chapter 6 interrogates how controversies over land affected the convening of public discussion on the ground in Mombasa in the 2010s. Land conflicts are longstanding in Kenya, with particular tensions on the Coast. They have been a central tenet in narratives of historical injustice, and have been instrumentalised by political elite for electoral gain. Kenya’s 2010 Constitution brought new conditions, actors and ambiguities into debates over land and citizen–state relations. Ambiguities over land had very real and distinct effects on Mombasa’s street parliaments. None of the gatherings observed occupied a clearly recognised and uncontested ‘public’ space, and none were without the threat of eviction. This chapter argues that ambiguity over the gatherings’ legal right to occupy space in the city could protect the street parliaments from state control. Their spontaneous and informal nature helped them to adapt to dynamic contentions over land.