This iconoclastic and satirical book provides a radical reconstruction of the recent historiography of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. It creates an alliance between those revisionist historians who have rewritten the received account of the origins of the English Civil War and those historians who have been rethinking the Hanoverian era. Revolution and Rebellion is thus a companion volume to the author’s English Society 1688–1832. The book counters the Marxist interpretation of the 1640s and the ‘English Revolution’ by developing our new understanding of the non-revolutionary nature of the world after 1660: it challenges the appropriateness of ‘revolution’ as a description of events like those of 1688, 1715, 1745, the American Revolution, the Industrial Revolution or the Reform Bill, drawing attention instead to the idea of ‘rebellion’. This is the first book so to link English history in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and it will be required reading for students and teachers of both eras.
Contents
List of abbreviations; Preface; 1. Introduction; 2. A disclosure on method; 3. Social change explanations; 4. The case of the provinces; 5. The monarchy and parliament; 6. Political ideology; 7. Party structure and the House of Commons; Conclusion; Appendix A; Appendix B; Index.
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