Before its deployment as a practice by insurgent social movements for mobilizing public opinion in the long nineteenth century, petitioning was a ubiquitous, relatively uniform practice with no connection to popular insurgency. It was nearly the inverse, though just as prominent, phenomenon: an instrument of state as opposed to an instrument of protest, occurring wherever rulership relied on administrative techniques for generating and deploying its authority. Humble subjects sought benevolent deployments of power in pursuit of goals that were within and not about the rules of the game. This mode of petitioning is aptly described as petition-and-response, a term of art from classical scholarship that is applicable to diverse patrimonial states across Eurasia with diverse ideological systems. The transition to modern petitioning as a repertoire for contentious politics was an extended, uneven process. It was facilitated initially by the unquestioned legitimacy of petitionary etiquette with regard to form and rhetoric, as opposed to explicit invocation of novel ideas about natural rights. Liminal petitioning had contradictory elements of deference to and defiance of power relations that diminished perceptions of novelty in novel activities that mobilized and invoked popular opinion on contentious political issues.

中文翻译：

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比较/历史视角下的请愿与回应与阈限请愿

在漫长的 19 世纪，在起义社会运动将其部署为一种动员公众舆论的做法之前，请愿是一种普遍存在的、相对统一的做法，与民众起义无关。这几乎是相反的现象，尽管同样突出：一种国家工具，而不是抗议工具，出现在统治依赖行政技术来产生和部署其权威的任何地方。谦逊的受试者寻求善意的权力部署，以追求游戏规则之内而不是游戏规则的目标。这种请愿模式被恰当地描述为请愿与回应，这是古典学术中的一个艺术术语，适用于欧亚大陆不同的世袭国家，具有不同的意识形态体系。过渡到现代请愿作为有争议的政治手段是一个漫长的、不平衡的过程。最初，请愿礼仪在形式和修辞方面的合法性毋庸置疑，而不是明确援引有关自然权利的新观念，从而促进了这一点。最低限度的请愿具有对权力关系的尊重和蔑视的矛盾因素，这些因素削弱了对新活动的新颖性的看法，这些活动动员并引发了对有争议的政治问题的公众舆论。