In the 1760s and 1770s, rancorous struggles over the rights of French Catholic subjects threatened the political and economic stability of Grenada and Quebec, both formerly French colonies ceded to Britain at the close of the Seven Years' War (1756–63). This article analyzes claims of subject status made during those decades, focusing on petitions in which numerous inhabitants made demands for privileges they believed to be their due. These memorials reveal the fundamental role that “new” and “adopted” subjects played in shaping the boundaries of “British” subjecthood, as well as highlight key characteristics that made subjecthood an organizing principle of the mid-eighteenth-century British Empire. Indeed, the bonds between subject and sovereign, the ones articulated and performed each time subjects approached their monarch or his representatives, operated at a symbolic and functional level to integrate an empire that had become increasingly diverse by the 1760s.

As the first official English ambassador to the Mughal court, Sir Thomas Roe found himself at the outer reaches of English knowledge, experience, and influence in the early seventeenth century. This article examines the difficult position Roe felt himself to occupy, triangulating between the different interests he represented—his own interests, those of the East India Company that employed him, and those of the Crown that accredited him. Roe's letters revealed his difficulties in conducting what he saw as the essential tasks of the ambassador, and his limited success in establishing his status and authority both at the Mughal court and over the Company factors in India. As someone at the forefront of English overseas activities in the early seventeenth century, Roe's experiences shed light on the lived experience of English expansion. His case demonstrates the difficulties of adapting the tools of Tudor-Stuart statecraft to England's widening global reach.

In 1772, entrepreneur George Cartwright brought five Inuit people to England from Nunatsiavut (Labrador). Most of their time was spent in London, where they encountered many of the city's sights and experienced its social divisions and environmental conditions. This article explores their voyage, challenging the notion that “primitives” such as the Inuit visitors were necessarily awed into submission by the urban landscape. Rather, they understood it according to their own cultural logics and even articulated critiques of the city. Illustrating the entanglement of urban and Inuit spaces and places across the Atlantic, and ending by telling the story of the death of four of the five visitors from smallpox in 1773, the article argues for a new kind of scholarship that shows connections between Indigenous and urban histories at the transoceanic and imperial levels.