Experimenting and Contesting Citizenship in New Jersey

The book aims at retracing the history of New Jersey from the 17th century to the early 19th, with particular reference to the history of citizenship — mostly understood as the evolution of New Jerseyans' modes of political participation and evolving patterns of inclusion and exclusion. This history has shown that those who remained on the margins of formal political rights nevertheless found informal ways, with more or less success, to express their political views (writings; demonstrations; boycotts, etc.). Alongside less conventional citizenship, the present study devotes considerable attention to electoral participation and party competition too, recognizing the centrality of elections in the history of the state. It documents the history of the extension of voting rights in the colony, then state, of New Jersey, which is of particular interest because, towards the end of the 18th century, it displayed clear signs of moving towards a relatively progressive citizenship regime compared to other states. This extension was precocious and explicit. However, the history of the extension of voting rights was not linear and married women with property, for instance, continued to struggle later on in history to recover voting rights that they had only gained temporarily. This history of citizenship in New Jersey shows the importance of contextual specificities and local practices, some of them being shared with other colonies and states. All in all, by combining an attention for informal participation with a more conventional understanding of politics, and by examining the debates as well on the extension of the suffrage at various points in time, the book offers a comprehensive history of citizenship in New Jersey, reflecting broader developments in the politics of the early American Republic. By doing so, the book also seeks to make this history more accessible to a wider readership, in particular European readers. Compared to its close neighbors — New York and Pennsylvania —, New Jersey has received relatively less attention from historians, in particular in Europe.