Parliament and the slave trade during the Interregnum

 Stephen Roberts's observations can be found on The World Turned Upside Down website here  .

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Lawrence Stone and the historiography of the 'gentry controversy'

  LAWRENCE STONE AND THE HISTORIOGRAPHY OF THE GENTRY CONTROVERSY The controversy over the economic and social origins of the English Revolution was a topic that excited ferocious debate over sixty years ago. Historians of the calibre of R.H.Tawney and Hugh Trevor-Roper, J.P.Cooper, Christopher Hill and Lawrence Stone advanced radically different interpretations to explain the violent events of the 1640s and 1650s in the British Isles. American scholars, most famously of all, J.H.Hexter, like Willson Coates, Harold Hulme, Judith Shklar and Perez Zagorin also commented with varying degrees of sharpness on the issues at stake. But only one of the major participants, Lawrence Stone, offered an account of the historiography of the dispute, first of all in his introduction to the anthology of academic articles and documentary sources entitled Social Change and Revolution in England 1540-1640 which he edited in 1965 and then, in slightly revised form, in Chapter 2 of his work...
Read more

Transcribing Walter Yonge's notes on proceedings in the House of Commons between 1642 and 1645

  In the spring of 1967, Professor Hugh Trevor-Roper, then the Regius Professor of Modern History in the University of Oxford, wrote to me to ask if I would assist Dr Pearl in her work by transcribing Walter Yonge’s diaries held (in Additional Mss.18,777-18,780) in the Manuscript Department of the British Museum at that time. I agreed and it was settled that I would be paid £150 per volume by the History Faculty of the University. I duly transcribed the first of these volumes in 1967 and the remaining three by 1973. I was not her “assistant” in this task but undertook it myself. I did not, moreover, keep copies of the first three volumes. In mid-1975, I read in The Times Higher Education Supplement that she was preparing the Yonge volumes for publication. But nothing happened. By 1984, seventeen years after I had transcribed the first volume and eleven years after finishing the last one I was puzzled by this failure to proceed and, having asked several academic friends if they th...
Read more

A comment on the podcast on A Trumpet of Sedition about Jonathan Healey's book, The Blazing World

  I have read this comment on Jonathan Healey’s book, The Blazing World, with some interest. The authors – Pip and Mara – put forward what they consider to be the failings of Healey’s analysis well written though they rightly agree that the work was. Their case is that Healey’s narrative account of the events of the early-1640s was incomplete because it did not identify the underlying structural causes; there was no class analysis of the kind Marxists consider essential to explain the rise of the bourgeoisie over the preceding century. Feudal and absolutist rule had blocked the development of capitalist social relations and had to be overthrown. Healey offered colour without explanation and subscribed to the ‘revisionist’ project of Conrad Russell and John Morrill in denying the existence of a rising bourgeoisie and, by implication, that of a bourgeois revolution. Mid-seventeenth century politics appeared to be merely instrumental, the revolution as unjustified and Healey’s presen...
Read more