Conference on the English Revolution in July, 2027

 

What was revolutionary about the English revolution? 

Tuesday, 20 and Wednesday, 21 July 2027

Institute of Historical Research 

Opening keynote Professor David Como (Stanford)

Closing address Professor Emerita Ann Hughes (Keele)


Speakers Sophie Aldred (Jesus College, Oxford); Sam Fullerton (North Texas)

Will White (Birmingham Newman); Waseem Ahmed (UCL)

Alex Beeton (History of Parliament); Ellen Paterson (Keele)

Michael Bennett (Sheffield); Elizabeth Hines (Johns Hopkins)

Courtney MacPhee (Stanford)


Commentators   Kate Peters (Murray Edwards, Cambridge); John Walter (Essex)



 Generously supported by: 

The Elizabeth and Conrad Russell Fund

Anglo-California/Stansky Fund for British Studies (Department of History, Stanford University) 

The causes and consequences of the civil wars of the 1640s are amongst the most heavily contested and intensively studied periods in the history of these islands. Although deep research in a widening range of sources and archives has given historians a greatly enriched understanding of the period, it has arguably come at the expense of the ‘bigger picture’. Much more attention has been paid to the ‘causes’ of revolution, than to the consequences of the upheaval. Theories of revolution and long-term change are currently unfashionable, both within the discipline and more widely in our public culture. This is partly a reflection of the influence of Conrad Russell’s contention that early Stuart England was ‘unrevolutionary’. Although much scholarship now questions this formulation, pointing instead to a turbulent and divided society full of tensions and contradictions, the contours of change across the revolutionary era need to be revisited. 


Designed to showcase new research by early career scholars, with commentaries and discussion led by senior figures in the field, our aim is to identify new agendas for future development. We seek to integrate current cutting-edge work on the practices, structures, and ideas that ‘made’ the revolution, with older questions about long-term socio-economic and cultural change. If models of class conflict are no longer integral to framing the revolution, historians are aware that deeper knowledge is needed of the social tensions and divisions that gave the revolutionary era its distinctive characteristics. Established thinking about the ways in which the wars transformed both the power of the state and discourses about state power demand renewed attention, in light of fresh work on how state institutions were shaped ‘from below’ by the active engagement of local communities and social groups of middling and subordinate status. The role of religion, especially radical religion, has received considerable scholarly attention, as have republican ideas, but law and legal culture much less so. 


The workshop focuses on the English Revolution, but we recognise that interactions across political boundaries had a profound influence on what made England ‘revolutionary’. Although Conrad Russell understood the ‘problem of multiple kingdoms’ as a European phenomenon, and posited that the breakdown in England was almost impossible without a ‘British’ context, his framework was avowedly ‘high political’. There remains much to do on how the English Revolution was influenced by archipelagic, Continental European, and transatlantic movements of peoples, texts, and ideas.



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