"National Characters": Law, Migration, and Identity in the British Legal World, 1776-1830

Caitlin Anderson

Based primarily on printed law reports and supplementary documents in Britain’s Public Record Office, this paper considers the relationship between law, migration, and the various forms of national legal identity recognized in British courts in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. For individuals, national status, usually known as “national character,” carried with it a host of privileges and disabilities. Migration offered such individuals, mostly merchants, means of moving chameleon-like from one status to another so as to maximize privileges and minimize disabilities. For their part, judges recognized the destabilizing effect of migration on legal identities and regarded the phenomenon as a new and subversive development that demanded an innovative judicial response. To cope with the protean individuals passing through their courts, judges in the Admiralty and ecclesiastical courts developed and refined a flexible theory of legal identity that could keep pace with people’s movements and foil their evasions.

[WP# 04CR013]