Creating Citizenship in the Nineteenth-Century South

Introduction

Introduction William A. Link and David Brown In societies struggling to make sense of the post–Cold War geopolitical world, the U.S. War on Terror has provoked a battle of values and ideals as real as the earlier conflict with the Soviet Union. The brave, new post-9/11 world requires that young people should be educated in their duties as citizens ; fierce battles have raged over school and university curricula. Citizenship has also been the subject of a steady stream of academic inquiry, most notably by sociologists and political scientists and also historians. They do not necessarily agree with one another on a formal definition of citizenship, but point to many different types of experiences—something underlined by the essays in this volume. However they disagree, scholars from different disciplines concur that “citizenship is not just a matter of formal legal status; it is a matter of belonging and being recognized as belonging . . . by other members of the community.” Members police formal boundaries established by legal statutes, but they also interpret those boundaries in their own, sometimes idiosyncratic, ways.1 Citizenship has a long and complex history. The classical civilizations of Greece and Rome form the starting point for discussions of civic republican citizenship, a wide-ranging concept that broadly conceives of citizenship as the preserve of a minority of independent, property-owning males. The onus lay with the individual to participate, as a matter of duty, wisely and enthusiastically in governing by cultivating a sense of civic virtue and devotion to the common good. In the early modern period , citizenship gradually, and usually incrementally, moved from civic republicanism toward a liberal conception of the individual’s basic entitlement to justice from his or her government based on the idea of universal rights. This changing view of citizenship began with debates over individual entitlement to legal rights in the Atlantic world, which then shifted 2 · William A. Link and David Brown to citizenship as political rights in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries , underpinning the rise of liberal democracies in Western societies.2 The liberal notion of citizenship as rights has significant implications for individual and group identity. As Rogers M. Smith writes in the most comprehensive study of American citizenship: “Citizenship laws—laws designating the criteria for membership in a political community and the key prerogatives that constitute membership—are among the most fundamental of political creations. They distribute power, assign status and define political purposes.” But citizenship can become even more than that. Rights and duties accorded to each citizen become an integral part of that individual’s social makeup, potentially intertwining with and shaping identity. To quote Smith again: “Citizenship laws also literally constitute— they create with legal words—a collective civic identity. They proclaim the existence of a political ‘people’ and designate who those persons are as a people, in ways that often become integral to individuals’ senses of personal identity as well.” This suggests that, far from a given or a label assigned to individuals, citizenship is much better understood as an ongoing and ever-evolving process.3 Current scholarly understandings of citizenship, much like those of race, class, and gender, thus seek to interpret citizenship within specific historical contexts.4 This position is heavily influenced by the work of T. H. Marshall, the post–World War II British theorist. His historicized interpretation identified three integral strands to the development of citizenship in the modern era: civil, political, and social. Civil rights were drawn up and guaranteed by the legal process. Political rights allowed the citizen inclusion in the process of government by providing the opportunity to hold office as well as by voting. A third strand was broadly defined as social citizenship. In a departure from orthodox views locating citizenship primarily in the legal sphere, Marshall interpreted social citizenship as the state’s provision of welfare and education to all within its jurisdiction , guaranteeing inclusion regardless of individual circumstances. For him, the history of citizenship reflected a fundamental tension between the principles of equality and inclusion and the practice of inequality and exclusion.5 Modern scholars remain indebted to Marshall’s insights. They have demonstrated how the process of citizenship—that is, deciding who is entitled to what—became tied to the growth of bureaucracy and to the rapid expansion of local and national government. From the great revolutions Introduction · 3 of the eighteenth century to the present, political struggles...