Citizenship Beyond the State: Thinking with Early Modern Citizenship in the Contemporary World

In our introduction, we pose some of the broader questions raised by the interdisciplinary and inter-period work of our contributors, while also drawing upon our own research on early modern London and contemporary Mexico. We argue that elements of the early-modern tradition of urban citizenship have indeed survived alongside national citizenship, at least in certain contexts. Beyond that, we argue that early modern citizenship also helps to set in relief the scalar, emancipatory vision of nineteenth- and twentieth-century national-territorial projects; that it helps to think about keeping a distance from nation-states and transnational institutions while still partaking of them; that it draws our attention to the complexities of inclusion and exclusion in contemporary citizenship; and that it helps us think beyond the narrowly-defined “rights” of national citizenship to include the freedom that is entailed in the pursuit of livelihoods.