Petitioning and Power Relations in Pre-Modern Eurasia

Petitioning was the main route by which the agency of subjects engaged the authority of rulers. Most studies explore it as a practice for sending requests to central and local representatives of state power in empires, kingdoms, and city-states. Yet the practice occurs in other fields of power, for example, in medieval papal governance, seigneurial regimes and other types of lordship, e.g., queenship. Petition-and-response was the inverse twin to command-and-obey, and just as inherent and indispensable for managing pre-modern power relations. Requests by petitioners were endlessly diverse. Petitions were the universal request form for subjects who sought assistance with every conceivable problem or opportunity. In addition to resolving conflicts with other subjects or officials, there were requests for appointments, promotions to higher positions or social ranks, exemptions, pardons, privileges, pensions, salary increases, charitable relief, and more. Some petitioners were docile and ingenuous; others were ingenious, even predatory petitioners whose initiatives reveal high levels of agency.

This is the first truly comparative analysis of pre-modern petitioning across Eurasia. Across a wide range of historical case studies and cutting against the grain of the dominant, one-dimensional social science perspective on pre-modern power relations, David Zaret shows petitioning in pre-modern Eurasia to have been a dynamic tool of state, and not (as is often assumed) merely an instrument of protest or imitation of religious prayer. Comparative study shows the practice to have been remarkably uniform, and one whose ubiquity and prominence are astounding for its diverse socio-cultural contexts: there are Sumerian, Akkadian, and Aramaic petitions in ancient Mesopotamia, demotic petitions in Egypt when Pharaohs ruled, then Greek ones after imposition of Ptolemaic rule. Other contexts for the practice include Zoroastrian Persia, Hellenic and Roman cultures of benefaction, Christianity, Islam, Daoism, Confucianism, and the syncretic mix of Shinto and Buddhism in Japan.

In so doing, Zaret bridges literatures of two fields and makes important contributions to both - historical research on petitioning, which is often confined to case studies, and theories of power relations, arguably the most heavily plowed field in social theory - to offer revisionist perspectives on the fluid nature of power and politics in the pre-modern world.

David Zaret

David Zaret received his D.Phil. from the University of Oxford where he was a student of Christopher Hill and Steven Lukes. From 1977 to 2018 he worked at Indiana University, from 2011-18 as its Vice President for International Affairs. In his early career he advocated a revival of historical sociology and creation of a comparative/historical section for the American Sociological Association, and published studies that span the fields of early modern British history and social theory. His current comparative research on Eurasian petitioning evolved in invited papers and keynote presentations organized by international networks of scholars (mostly historians) who study petitions.