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Reflections Upon ‘Merchant politics, capitalism and the English Revolution: Robert Brenner’s Merchants and Revolution revisited’

By Josh Allen - March 7, 2024 (0 comments)

by Thomas Leng (University of Sheffield)

In February 1973, an article appeared in Past and Present by a young American historian, with the deceptively prosaic title ‘The Civil War Politics of London’s Merchant Community’. Here, the author traced the emergence of a succession of merchant groupings linked to changes in the structure of overseas trade which unfolded in the 80 years up to the outbreak of civil war, culminating in a cohort of ‘new men’ who rose from England’s early colonial exploits, and who differed from the traditional trading company merchants who preceded them. Whereas the latter would cleave to the crown which privileged them, in the civil war these ‘new merchants’ came to occupy a pivotal position parliament’s victory, ushering in a regime that supported their commercial goals. In the case of the merchant community at least, civil war allegiance was rooted in socioeconomic position.

This was not Robert Brenner’s first publication- in the previous year he had published a revisionist interpretation of English commercial expansion in the late Tudor and early Stuart periods as driven by the search for imports to feed an expanding domestic market. But his Past and Present article bought this analysis to bear on what was then one of the chief scholarly battlegrounds on which competing grand narratives were pitted against each other: the debate on the causes and nature of the English Revolution. In doing so, Brenner launched what remains as its last major Marxist interpretation. Last November, twenty or so historians met at The University of Sheffield, supported by the generosity of the Past and Present Society, in order to discuss this work on its fiftieth anniversary (in fact 2023 was a double anniversary for Brenner, it being 30 years since he presented his ‘new social interpretation’ of the Revolution in full, in his book Merchants and Revolution. Commercial Change, Political Conflict, and London’s Overseas Traders, 1550-1653, published by Cambridge and Princeton). That this work is still capable of generating discussion attests to its enormous range, and the enduring significance of the questions that it raises.

Cover of Merchants and Revolution. Commercial Change, Political Conflict, and London’s Overseas Traders, 1550-1653 (Verso edition, 2003), cover image all rights reserved

Reflections on landmark publications such as this provide an opportunity to assess how scholarly priorities have changed over time, and certainly the field of civil war history looks very different now than it would have done in 1973. At that time, the world-historical importance of England during ‘Tawney’s Century’ (1540-1640) was widely accepted, at least within Anglophone academia. As the festschrift later published by Past and Present for Brenner’s doctoral supervisor, Lawrence Stone, put it, this was the crucible from which the world’s first modern society’ emerged, the English Revolution its undoubted climactic. Three years later, Brenner would publish another even more impactful Past and Present article on the agrarian origins of capitalism in preindustrial England, prompting the well-known Brenner debate largely conducted in the pages of the same journal. It was here that Brenner would flesh out his classically Marxist vision of capitalism as rooted in the social relations of production and first realised in England. Although his field of interest increasingly turned to twentieth century political economy, Brenner would restate this position in the face of scholarly turns which switched attention to the development of capitalism as a world-system, or placed the ‘great divergence’ between Europe and Asia in the eighteenth century, long after ‘Tawney’s Century’.

But already in 1973 debates were underway (Stone having been an early participant) which would ultimately bring to question the English Revolution’s role in this story, even its status as a ‘revolution’ at all. By 1993, Brenner had to take into account a historiographical terrain transformed by revisionism, which questioned socioeconomic interpretations of civil war allegiance and emphasised short term causes over deep seated structural changes. In many senses, however, Brenner’s account of the agrarian origins of capitalism in the English countryside had little need for a Revolution which, in his reading, broke out in an essentially already capitalist society. Why, then, did Brenner go to such lengths to incorporate the English Revolution into his account of the emergence of capitalism? Given that he had developed his account on agrarian capitalism during his Masters thesis, Brenner’s switch of focus to the English Revolution for his doctorate might appear a digression. This was an issue which participants in the workshop grappled with as we struggled to reconcile what essentially, in its fullest form, became three books in one: an account of the rise of new social interests associated with early English colonialism; a study of their role in the course of London politics in the 1640s; and a new grand narrative of the English Revolution as a contest for control of the state in an already capitalist society (the biggest claim, but given the least amount of space in Merchants and Revolution). To some participants, at least, the civil war appeared to be something of a red herring which only muddied Brenner’s explanations for the emergence of capitalism.

That Brenner evidently did see it as important to provide a social interpretation of the English Revolution is itself indicative of the status this event once possessed in English grand narratives of all stripes. Producing an account of the transition to capitalism without the Revolution was perhaps, for him, out of the question. If he had been commencing his studies today, would Brenner have felt the same urge? Early modern English history has by-and-large been dethroned from its status as ‘master-subject’ of modernising narratives, leaving its Revolution as an event of local significance, perhaps, at best. But if this had led to the crumbling if not collapse of Brenner’s new social interpretation of the Revolution, then perhaps the foundations on which it was built can be revealed in new light. Throughout the workshop, participants were reminded that Brenner’s work did uncover developments which were indeed momentous. More than any of his contemporaries, Brenner was conscious of the interconnections between domestic political crisis, colonial development and commercial expansion, including of course the emergence of an English slave trade, pioneered by his new merchants. Brenner’s work sketched out a vast terrain which remains fully to be explored, and which the workshop ranged across freely (if at times following several directions at once). Certain themes emerged that participants will no doubt pursue in their own work. Whereas Brenner’s account of the emergence of agrarian capitalism centred on the English countryside, colonial plantations were revealed as key sites for the assertion of individual property rights and the application of innovative methods of labour management- including, of course, coerced labour and ultimately slavery- with ramifications for developments in England. Domestically, the Stuart crown appeared as itself heavily implicated in agrarian transformation and commercial innovation. But the deployment of political power to achieve such ends was universal, putting some pressure on Brenner’s category of ‘politically constituted property’ as characteristically pre-capitalist, both in terms of commercial organisation (monopolistic privileges) and agricultural production (coercive powers of surplus-extraction). Indeed the phrase is ambiguous in Brenner’s own work, which acknowledges that the ‘free market’ in land and labour rests ultimately on political power in the form of state-backed property rights. Brenner as a Marxist fully conscious of the compulsive character of free market competition would surely appreciate how coercive labour practices could be concealed through notions of consent. His ‘new merchants’ were deeply associated with the traffic in indentured servants and their deployment in plantation labour at the same time as they were arguing in favour of greater freedom to access global market opportunities, not to mention the defence of English freedoms in the civil war. That these efforts would coalesce on the establishment of England’s Caribbean colonies as slave-based plantation machines, politically secured by the Republic’s warships, is a grim irony: the Revolution played its part in enshrining this ultimate form of ‘politically constituted property’ at the centre of England’s nascent empire. Here if anywhere might rest the claim of the English Revolution as an event of world historical importance. Any historian wishing to challenge the poet John Dryden’s assertion that the civil wars ‘brought nothing about’ would do worse than to start by reading Brenner.

Past & Present was pleased to support this event and supports other events like it. Applications for event funding are welcomed from scholars working in the field of historical studies at all stages in their careers.

Registration Opens for "Popular Knowledge of the Law in Early Modernity"

By Josh Allen - March 4, 2024 (0 comments)

Received from Dr. Laura Flannigan (St. John’s College, Oxford)

Popular Knowledge of the Law in Early Modernity – one-day online workshop (3rd April 2023)

Join us for an exciting online workshop exploring Popular Knowledge of the Law in Early Modernity. This one-day event will feature short papers and discussion on the study of law and litigiousness from new and established researchers in the field.

Kindly supported by a workshop grant from The Past and Present Society, papers will be given in person at St John’s College, Oxford. Due to limited capacity at the venue for this event, additional attendees are invited to register to watch the papers, and to join us for questions and discussions, through a virtual platform.

Registration

Provisional programme:

10am – Welcome

10:15 – Panel 1

Mike Kipling (PhD, Oxford) – ‘Elizabethan Merchants and the Court of Requests’

Mabel Winter (Postdoctoral research associate, Sheffield) – ‘Through ‘advice & promocion’: legal knowledge and mill disputes in the Court of Exchequer’

Chloe Ingersent (PhD, Oxford) – ‘Defrauding the Elizabethan judiciary’

Jason Peacey (Professor of History, UCL) – ‘Power and Practices: Litigants as Petitioners in Early Stuart England’

11:30 – BREAK

11:45 – Panel 2

Brodie Waddell (Senior Lecturer in History, Birkbeck)- ‘Voices and Hands: The Composition of Petitions to Judicial Authorities’

Hannah Worthen (Postdoctoral research associate, Hull) – ‘The role of space and place in early modern justice seeking’

Daniel Gosling (Principal Legal Records Specialist, The National Archives) – ‘Limiting Litigants in the early modern period? The effect of court abolition on access to justice’

12:45 – LUNCH BREAK

2:00 – Panel 3

Sue Wiseman (Professor of History, Birkbeck) – ‘Not work: Law, Labour and Lament in Seventeenth-Century Writing’

Sung Yup Kim (Associate Professor, Seoul) – ‘Local Magistracy and Popular Expectations of the Law in Early New York’

Clare Egan (Lecturer in Literature, Lancaster) – ‘‘Libellous Articles’ and ‘Scandalous Interrogatories’: Defamatory Uses of Popular Legal Knowledge in Early Modern England’

3:00 – BREAK

3:15 – Panel 4

Joanna McCunn (Senior Lecturer in Law, Bristol) – ‘‘You tickled the points o’the’law’: depicting legal language in early modern English literature’

Imogen Peck (Assistant Professor, Birmingham) – ‘Keep sure your wrytynges’: The Family Archive as/and Legal Knowledge in Early Modern England’

Jonathan McGovern (Professor, Xiamen University) – ‘A booke bynders shope in Estchepe’: Popular Knowledge of Statute Law in the Reign of Henry VIII’

4:15 – BREAK

4:30 – Roundtable: ‘What was ‘Popular’ about Law in Early Modernity?’ featuring Amanda Bevan (Head of Legal Records, The National Archives), Tom Johnson (Senior Lecturer in Late Medieval History, York), Deborah Youngs (Lecturer in Medieval History, Swansea), and Ian Wiliams (Associate Professor, Faculty of Laws, UCL)

5:30 – Conference end

Past & Present is pleased to support this event and supports other events like it. Applications for event funding are welcomed from scholars working in the field of historical studies at all stages in their careers.

Solitude and Soul Union: the Seraphic Friendship of John Evelyn and Margaret Godolphin

By Josh Allen - February 12, 2024 (0 comments)

by Barbara Taylor (Queen Mary, University of London)

What is solitude? The question tends to stop people in their tracks. The commonsense definition – an absence of other people – clearly won’t do, first because one can be wrong about this, that is be in the presence of others when one thinks one isn’t, but also because being with others is for many people the most solitary condition of all. Isolation, seclusion, privacy: none of these are solitude, although some may be preconditions for it. Sometimes aloneness is lonely – for some people unbearably lonely: ‘Solitude,’ the poet John Donne wrote after a period of confinement with illness, ‘is a torment which is not threatened in hell it selfe’. For other people – especially but not exclusively religious solitaries – solitude is a privileged site of intimate connection, an always-accompanied condition. ‘Never less alone than when alone’; ‘[nothing] so companionable as solitude’; ‘Alone in a crowd’; ‘solitude is best society’…The famous epigrams say it all; the language of solitude is crammed with such paradoxes.

Solitude is a human eternal that is nonetheless historical, its meanings and valuations varying over time. Its history is one of controversy: from antiquity on people have argued about the relative merits of solitude versus sociability, the active life as opposed to the contemplative life, retirement versus public duty. Solitude has been widely perceived as egoistical, slothful, and psychologically debilitating. ‘Be not solitary, be not idle’ the Oxford don Robert Burton counselled in his compendious 1621 The Anatomy of Melancholy, for those that are solitary risk ‘feare, sorrow, suspition…discontent, cares, and wearinesse of life’ [sic]. And still today a marked preference for solitude tends to be perceived as eccentric and/or neurotic.

Exploring this long, complex history is challenging, not least because the historiography is thin. This is now changing, but when I first began my research (on Mary Wollstonecraft and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, two solitude-lovers) relevant studies were hard to come by. My familiarity with 18th Century ideas about selfhood and subjectivity made my work slightly easier, but the 17th Century was entirely new terrain. Sometimes a book makes all the difference. Frances Harris’s prizewinning Transformations of Love: the Friendship of John Evelyn and Margaret Godolphin (2002) is not a study of spiritual solitude but it is rich in sources for such a study. I was fortunate enough to get to know Frances, who sadly died in 2021. For over a year I learned from her, shared my ideas with her, and was taught by her how to read John and Margaret’s copious correspondence. My article “Solitude and Soul in Restoration Britain” in Past & Present No. 262 is dedicated to her.

The ‘soul union’ between John and Margaret was rooted in a mutual passion for a numinous solitude that both expressed and disguised a deep emotional entanglement that, in John’s case, clearly had an erotic component. It was both an enriching and parlous connection, lived out in the steamy, seedy atmosphere of the Restoration court. This was a period when secular and spiritual solitude were, in related ways, flashpoints of contention. A deeply intellectual man, steeped in the classical tradition, John publicly intervened in debates over the merits and demerits of the solitary life. By contrast, Margaret’s reflections on solitude were private, shared only with John himself.

Godfrey Kneller “John Evelyn 1687”, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Women’s relationship to solitude has always differed from men’s. In Margaret’s day they were perceived as exceptionally vulnerable to solitude’s perils, including diabolic seduction, while lacking the mental and moral resources to take advantage of the vita solitaria. In fact her commitment to solitude was well-informed and thoughtful. Nonetheless, her six-year relationship with John provides a valuable case-study of the complex relationship between gender difference and solitude.

Matthew Dixon “Margaret Godolphin 1673” Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

While seraphic friendships, as these relationships were also known, were not unusual in the Restoration elite, John and Margaret’s passionate fraught liaison provides a unique window into the early modern history of solitariness. I welcome comments on my treatment of this and the historiography of solitude more generally.

E.P. Thompson Centenary

By Josh Allen - February 8, 2024 (0 comments)

by the Past & Present editorial team

Saturday 3rd February 2024 was the 100th anniversary of the birth of Edward Palmer Thompson (best known by his publication initials E.P.).

E.P. Thompson was a key member of the Communist Party Historians Group out of which Past & Present emerged. However, he is widely remembered today for his pioneering approach and significant contribution to the study of social history, exemplified by the work The Making of the English Working Class, as well as his trenchant interventions in the fields of historiography and politics.

E P Thompson at 1980 protest rally (cropped)

E P Thompson addresses anti-nuclear weapons rally, Oxford, England, 1980, Kim Traynor (1980), image via WikiMedia;Commons

Between the 1960s and the 1990s Thompson published three articles in Past & Present. The first of which “Time, Work Discipline and Industrial Capitalism” (No. 38, 1967) is according to Altmetrics the “most citied” in the history of the journal.

In honour of Thompson’s centenary our publisher Oxford University press has made his three articles for the journal free to read for the next fortnight:

*“Time, Work Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism”, Past & Present, Volume 38, Issue 1, December 1967, Pages 56–97

*“The Moral Economy of the English Crowd in the Eighteenth Century”, Past & Present, Volume 50, Issue 1, February 1971, Pages 76–136

*”Hunting the Jacobin Fox”, Past & Present, Volume 142, Issue 1, February 1994, Pages 94–140

Past & Present journal masthead

Past & Present logo, 2017 all rights reserved

 

Germs of doubt

By Josh Allen - February 6, 2024 (0 comments)

by Will Pooley (University of Bristol)

Where did “Doubt and the dislocation of magic: France, 1790–1940” my piece in Past & Present No. 262 come from?

All origin stories are, of course, excuses. Historians are no more immune than anyone else from inventing their own pasts to suit the present. After all, historical fictions are fun.

So let me tell it like this: I wanted the piece to do what the Wild on Collective have called ‘historically grounded theory’.

I wanted to take seriously the possibility of ‘alternative epistemological inquiries, orientations, or starting points’. Historians are not passive consumers of ‘theory’: we have a record of proposing theoretical categories that are applied in other fields, too: ‘emotives’, ‘moral economy’, ‘critical fabulation’.

I did not want to take a set of existing theories and applying them to an example, but wanted to ask how historical evidence challenges historians to – perhaps – rethink categories that appear commonsensical. What does it mean to say that people in the past ‘believed’ something? Is ‘belief’ really what the sources convey? And how do historians think about what the sources habitually omit, mischaracterise, or misunderstand?

‘Drawing by a “paranoid demoniac”’ from a clinical report by J. Capgras, 1911, via BnF Gallica

So, the truth is that I started with the category of belief.

When I began this research, I thought – for some stupid reason – that what I could do would be to survey what kinds of people ‘believed’ in witchcraft in France in the long nineteenth century. Were they men or women, young or old? What kinds of work did they do? Where did they live? I still think those social historical questions are important, and they underpin the book project I’m writing about witchcraft.

I am now embarrassed by the naivety of the category of ‘belief’ that I wanted to use to frame these social and quantitative questions.

Take an example I mention in the article, a man named Joseph Auloi who murdered a neighbour in 1886. All of the circumstantial evidence indicated that Auloi suspected his victim of bewitching his family. Yet after his arrest, Auloi fervently denied believing in witches. I cannot see this as some kind of strategy. If anything, juries and even judges in this period proved surprisingly sympathetic to people who committed murder out of a fear of witches. I think he was telling the truth. The ways that people talked and behaved about witchcraft in this period were inconsistent. Auloi may have been a dramatic example, but he was not even the only witch-killer who denied believing in witches after the fact. Whatever these people were doing, belief came to seem to me to be far too blunt, too total.

The article is my attempt to fashion something truer to the attitudes I find in the sources: uncertain, inconsistent, even incoherent, perhaps unconscious, often contagious. I have called these attitudes ‘doubts’ and tried to explain how different they are to disbelief, as well as to belief.

It’s an attempt to ground a theoretical insight of wider importance in the specific evidence that puzzled me. It led me down some relatively familiar paths – such as anthropology – and down some that felt riskier – philosophy, and especially Tamar Gendler’s theories of ‘aliefs’, and the psychological research that inspired those ideas.

If all origin stories are excuses, what am I trying to excuse?

Well, to write about incoherence is to risk obscurantism. When I look back at it now, I can see how dense and tortuous the piece ended up being. It’s not easy going.

When I try to recall the argument in my head, it is something quite simple: instead of ‘beliefs’, let us think about doubts. But on the page, that simplicity is so hard to pin down and spell out with any precision. It’s not an easy piece to read. But I could not find simpler ways to make the arguments the piece makes, to show the consequences of thinking about doubts rather than beliefs.

There is a sterile argument that resurfaces periodically that laments the inaccessibility of most academic historical writing, as if all history must be written for a general reader.

I am very sympathetic to the ideal of writing for broad publics. But not all history. Sometimes historians need to make difficult arguments, with specialist terminologies, or that challenge the concepts that are taken for granted. Sometimes, to return to the Wild on Collective’s call for theoretically grounded history, historians need to go to ‘the obscure navel of the dream, the place where narratives and interpretation stop making conventional sense’.

The challenge is coming back, to try to make it make sense.