Thursday 12 November 2009

The Impact of the English Civil Wars (A History Today Book) [Paperback] J.S. Morrill (Editor) 1991


This collection of new essays covers a whole range of subjects military, political, social, religious, cultural and economic that were impacted by the civil war. Primarily aimed at the student and the general reader the book combines charts, extracts from original documents and illustrative material drawn largely from contemporary pamphlets and sources to provide the reader with a basic understanding of the impact of the civil war.

Like many other aspects of the history of the English Civil War, its impact on society, politics and the economy has caused serious disagreements among historians. While a substantial minority (albeit in the past) have said it is impossible to ignore or deny that the civil war did have some impact and that changes did occur in the social, economic and political superstructure, others have played down appreciably the consequences. Some have even tried to deny that social changes were crucial in determining the outcome of the war.

Certainly, over the last quarter of a century, it has been highly fashionable to question the social context of the civil war. In the book, The Causes of the English Civil War on p117 Ann Hughes says this changing historical fashion can be illustrated from the titles of two collections of sources covering early modern social history. In 1965, Lawrence Stone published Social Change and Revolution in England 1540-1640, whereas Barry Coward produced Social Change and Continuity in Early Modern England1550-1750. The coupling of continuity rather than revolution with social changes in the latter work reveals a more qualified assessment of the extent of transformation at the beginning of modern England.

The New Social History historiography appeared in the early 1970s. According to some historians, it was perhaps the last major historiography of the 20th century to try and explain the complex historical phenomenon known as the English Civil War. Before the 1970s, Social History had mostly been limited to a study of everyday life. During the last thirty-odd years, the subject has come to prominence because some aspects of it have become the bête noir of several revisionist historians. The most positive side of the new history is that it has brought into the public domain the lives of working people or the poor who had largely been ignored by historians. On the downside, this new history became divorced from any form of economic or materialist explanation of the civil war.

This collection of essays comes predominantly from historians who in one way or another are sceptical regarding the impact of the war with the sole exception of John Walters. The majority of contributors are against any form of Marxist historiography.
Given John Morrill's editorial role in preparing this collection of essays, it is, necessary to understand his take on these events. He was clearly influenced by the New Social History historiography in an interview he describes his attitude towards those historians who were in the forefront of the group "So there came along the new social history which opened up a whole range of types of evidence, and so one of the most important things to happen for my period was the work which is most naturally associated with Keith Wrightson (who trained in Cambridge, spent many years in St Andrews, returned to Cambridge and then moved to Yale). And the Wrightson revolution indeed, in the way in which social history is done, had an enormous impact on those of us who were more interested in high politics. I mean traditional politics, constructed high politics. Wrightson's importance for my work is again something that people might be a bit surprised to hear about, but I personally, in my mid-career, saw it as absolutely fundamental.[1]

In his introduction, John Morrill is correct to point out while there is general agreement amongst historians of what to call the events in France around 1789 or 1917 in Russia. However, there is little agreement as to what to call the revolutionary events in 1640s England.

A reader coming to these events for the first time will find out that this problem is down to many factors.  A major one being the political bias of the historian.  Another is the sheer complexity of the historical crisis that gripped the English state. The book is recommended in the sense that it does give the reader a broad range of differing views, albeit absent is a Marxist explanation. The book is simple in design but has a generous supply of fantastic illustrations which in themselves are worth further exploration.

Chapter one is Charles Charlton's Impact of the fighting. Charlton begins by assessing the number of dead and wounded during the conflict. Another ground for disagreement.  Charlton does highlight one of the biggest problems is that when dealing with primary sources regarding causalities, they are open to bias depending on which side they came .

In a striking passage in his memoirs, Richard Baxter "said he watched the battle of Langport as a young chaplain in the army of the parliament.  Baxter witnessed fierce fighting. Facing defeat, the Royalists panicked. Standing next to Baxter was Major Thomas Harrison. As the Parliamentary army charged the Royalists fled, Baxter heard him 'with a loud voice break forth into the praises of God with fluent expressions, as if he had been in a rapture.'[2]

According to D H Pennington, "it was the bloodiest conflict in relative terms in English history" crops and land were seized; cattle and horses were taken. Pennington makes the point that the Royalists were often more brutal than the Parliamentarians.

Another useful source on the impact of the civil war is the work of Steven Porter. While careful not to exaggerate the destruction, he has some relevant statistical data on the scale of the impact of the civil war. 150 towns and 50 villages suffered the destruction of property. According to the House of Lords Record Office, Main Papers,23 Sept. 1648 "…miserable it is to see the multitudes of inhabitants and their children flocking in the streets of the bordering towns and villages and have not a house to putt their heads therein, whereby to exercise their calling."

Taunton according to the Earl of Clarendon heavily destroyed by fire, but according to Sprigge a flourishing city was all but destroyed. A number of books have come out recently which contain important sources of eyewitness accounts of the civil war. Jogh adair's book contains important eye witness accounts. Adair highlighted one particular aspect "which was the development of social advancement inside the army and service in the armies of parliament certainly provided opportunities for social advancement. At first, the rival armies were officered by men of much the same social status, but gradually new people from the middle, lower middle and artisan classed moved into positions of responsibility, both on committees that ran the war and in the wider army. John Hampden's Shepherd, Thomas Shelbourne, rose to be colonel of Cromwell regiment of Ironsides and there were similar stories. The more conservative Puritan gentry objected to their newcomers as much as on social grounds as on account of their often unorthodox or radical religious views".[3]

Forced requisitioning took place but a lot of goods were paid for at market prices. Adair says while there was "decay of life" there was also opposition to this massive growth of profits for many people. Also, things such as the legal system remained relatively healthy and survived unscathed. In London, the impact of the civil war is hard to assess in many respects everyday life carried on as normal. London also avoided sack or siege, however, emergency wartime powers were resented by large sections of the population. Its economy was vital for the New Model Army and this state of affairs led one Royalist to lament "if posterity shall ask who pulled the crown from the king's head said it was proud unthankful schismatically, rebellious, blood City of London".Charlton who came from a military background is particularly keen on military matters, but when it comes to a more in-depth understanding of why people fought and how the war came about, the chapter is very light. People on both sides of the war "chose deliberately which side they fought on".

Chapter Two the Impact on Government by David L Smith.  Smith seems to argue that the civil war was largely a defensive manoeuvre by parliament against a corrupt and inept monarchy. Smith believes that no appreciable changes occurred during the civil war and protectorate, and we quickly move onto a united monarchy after Cromwell's death.

Chapter 3 The Impact of Puritanism is by John Morrill is well written, and Morrill argues his point well but a lot more could have been said on this subject. The Puritan religion did have a material basis. For the understanding of some of the great problems of human history, the study of religion is a necessity. Cliff slaughter posed this question "What are the relationship between the social divisions among men and their beliefs about the nature of things? How do ruling classes ensure extended periods of acceptance of their rule by those they oppress? Why was the 'Utopians' wrong in thinking that it was sufficient only to work out a reasonable arrangement of social relations in order to proceed to its construction? It was out of the examination of questions like this in the German school of criticism of religion that Marx emerged to present for the first time a scientific view of society. 'The criticism of religion is the beginning of all criticism.' [4]

Suffice to say this is not Morrill's position. Therefore, I find his analysis on Puritanism a little one-sided.  Also, there appears to be an absence of struggle in Morrill's chapter. Morrill writes nothing about the differing radical Puritan groups that were outside mainstream Puritan politics.

This is the history of the victors as Christopher Hill would have said. Little is mentioned of radical sects such as the Ranters, who flourished in England at the time of the Puritan Revolution. While it is generally accepted that there was not a massive amount of unrest and protest during the civil war, there was riots and unrest. John Morrill has made the point that changes in social and economic policy were mostly controlled by the middling sort and large-scale outbreaks were prevented by this class.

However, there was a tangible fear amongst sections of the middle class who feared the little people As Lucy Hutchinson writes with disdain, "almost all the Parliament garrisons were infested and disturbed with like factious little people, in so much that many worthy gentlemen were wearied out of their command, some oppressed by a particular sort of individuals in the House whom, to distinguish from the most honorable gentlemen, they called worsted stocking men".[5]

Hutchinson is probably referring to the people that were increasingly being influenced by the Levellers who expressed an awareness especially among the lower sections of society that in order to have a say in these changes they must organise through some kind of political organisation.

The ideas of this group came from the lower strata of society. Their ideas of wider democracy and equality were an anathema to the victorious upper-middle classes. It was as necessary for Cromwell to crush the Ranters as to liquidate Lilburne's Levellers and Winstanley's Diggers.

Chapter IV The Impact on Political Thought by Glen Burgess. For a substantial part of the 20th-century, civil war historiography was dominated by Marxist historians who were clear that social and economic changes did bring about changes in people's thinking.

Burgess in this chapter does not agree that there is a connection between economics and politics which Marxists have commonly described as the relationship between base and superstructure.

As Karl Marx explained in his Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (1859) "In the social production of their existence, men inevitably enter into definite relations, who are independent of their will, namely [the] relations of production appropriate to a given stage in the development of their material forces of production. The totality of these relations of production constitutes the economic structure of society, the real foundation, on which arises a legal and political superstructure, and to which correspond definite forms of consciousness. The mode of production of material life conditions the general process of social, political, and intellectual life. It is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but their social existence that determines their consciousness. At a certain stage of development, the material productive forces of society come into conflict with the existing relations of production or — this merely expresses the same thing in legal terms — with the property relations within the framework of which they have operated hitherto. From forms of development of the productive forces, these relations turn into their fetters. Then begins an era of social revolution. The changes in the economic foundation lead, sooner or later, to the transformation of the whole, immense, superstructure. In studying such transformations, it is always necessary to distinguish between the material transformation of the economic conditions of production, which can be determined with the precision of natural science, and the legal, political, religious, artistic, or philosophic — in short, ideological forms in which men become conscious of this conflict and fight it out. Just as one does not judge an individual by what he thinks about himself, so one cannot judge such a period of transformation by its consciousness, but, on the contrary, this consciousness must be explained from the contradictions of material life, from the conflict existing between the social forces of production and the relations of production".

Burgess goes on to explain that previous approaches to ideological struggles in the revolution were expressed through an examination of pamphlets of the 1640s. While recognising that the literature was partisan, they were taken "at face value, as part of a philosophical debate." This approach, says Burgess, maybe "inherently distorting."
Burgess believes that politics were fluid and that no one stuck to their principles but ideas were mere "rhetoric." His examination of the different groups, including radical groups guides his approach. He believes that the various political groups were mostly acting empirically. Taking advantage of changes in the political situation with some rhetorical statements.

This, in my opinion, does not explain the complex philosophical problems that were being tackled by people like Thomas Hobbes and James  Harrington, to name just two. In Anti Duhring Engels said if "Englishmen nowadays do not exactly relish the compliment they paid their ancestors, more's the pity. It is none the less undeniable that Bacon, Hobbes and Locke are the fathers of that brilliant school of French materialists which made the eighteenth century in spite of all battles of land and sea won over Frenchmen by Germans and Englishmen, a primarily French Century, even before that crowning French revolution, the results of which we outsiders, in England as well as in Germany are still trying to acclimatise".[6]

Chapter V the Impact of the New Model Army. Ian Gentles does an excellent introduction to the New Model Army. John Walters chapter is a bit of a strange choice in this selection of essays in so much as you would not classify him as a revisionist historian. He would be much closer to Marxist historians. His work is always impressive, and this essay carries on in the same vein. Walters actually believes that the world was turned upside down.

Walters examines large swathes of primary sources, but as a good historian does not take them at face value. He recognises that these are not impartial documents but were weapons of war.  Significantly it is in this chapter that we get a real feel of the social turmoil that existed during the civil war. Walter's believes that large segments of the population were becoming radicalised and became involved in a number of political and military activities. 

Riots broke out all over the place and many of these reflected the level of poverty that existed. Walters believes that these disorders threatened the social order. Walters is the only chapter that women get a look in. while not examined in any depth Walters recognises that large sections of the female population were being radicalised alongside their menfolk.



[1] Professor John Morrill Interview Transcript This interview took place at Selwyn College, Cambridge, 26 March 2008
[2] Quoted in -Going to the Wars: The Experience of the British Civil Wars 1638-1651 by Charles Carlton Routledge, 428 pp, £25.00, October 1992, ISBN 0 415 03282 2
[3] By the Sword Divided: Eyewitness Accounts of the English Civil War (Sutton Illustrated History Paperbacks) Paperback – 22 April 1998
by John Adair
[4] Cliff Slaughter Religion and Social Revolt From Labour Review, Vol.3 No.3, May-June 1958,
[5] ] Memoirs of the life of Colonel Hutchinson, publ. by J. Hutchinson. To which is prefixed The life of Mrs. Hutchinson, written by herself (Google eBook)
[6] Socialism: Utopian and Scientific-By Friedrich Engels

Sunday 1 November 2009

The Exile and Murder of Leon Trotsky-Bertrand M. Patenaude

“There is life in the old boy Trotsky yet—but if the ice pick did not quite do its job-killing him off, I hope I have managed it.”  Robert Service London, October 2009,

“Everyone has the right to be stupid on occasion, but Comrade Macdonald abuses the privilege.” Leon Trotsky

The last few years have seen a spate biographies examining the life of the co-leader of the Russian Revolution Leon Trotsky. Over the past ten years, we have seen four English-language novels and four English-language academic books. This is not counting books produced in other languages. Robert Service’s book on Trotsky as can be seen from the quote above is one of many disgraceful examples.

Patenaude’s book is not quite the same Service’s hatchet job, but it does not measure up to others from previous decades. The former Stanford lecturer doors attempt to set the record straight, and opposes Service’s attempt to assassinate Trotsky all over again but he does retain a political hostility to Trotsky and his supporters.

The book appears at the end of a decade of which has seen a relentless campaign to promote the death of Marxism. It is perhaps then a little surprising that over the corresponding period we saw a plethora of biographies on the Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky. 

Bertrand M. Patenaude’s book is one of the better ones. The book, published in Britain as Stalin’s Nemesis: The Exile and Murder of Leon Trotsky and in the United States as Trotsky: Downfall of a Revolutionary has been widely reviewed in both the capitalist press and various pseudo-left publications. One has sympathies with any historian who attempts a biography of Trotsky since he or she will have to “drag him out from under a mountain of dead dogs, a huge load of calumny and oblivion.”

Patenaude, a fellow at the Hoover Institution, had unprecedented access to Trotsky’s papers at Harvard and of course to documents held at the Hoover archives. Even this privileged access has not prevented him from repeating some distortions and fabrications about Trotsky and the Russian Revolution.

It is unfortunate, but Patenaude’s book is not the only one to give an inaccurate and politically driven portrait of Leon Trotsky. Many of these recent books do not have even the most basic academic integrity.

Recent Historiography

The current low standard of books on Leon Trotsky has not always been the case. A significant number of historians who while not being close to Trotsky’s politics have written excellent and in most cases, objective books. It is not possible to examine all of them, E.H. Carr is one of those historians. 

Carr was one of the first major historians to attempt a rehabilitation of Trotsky. His publications on the history of Soviet Russia are “monumental.” According to the Marxist writer David North, “Carr was not politically sympathetic to Trotsky, but he brilliantly summarised and analysed the complex issues of program, policy, and principle with which Trotsky grappled in a challenging and critical period of Soviet history.”[1]

Carr was followed by the writer and historian Isaac Deutscher who had close links with Trotsky’s Fourth International. He published three biographical trilogies: The Prophet Armed, The Prophet Unarmed, and The Prophet Outcast. Unlike Carr, Deutscher was sympathetic to Trotsky and his ideas. Deutscher was expelled from the Polish Communist Party for Trotskyism in the 1930s.  He was a delegate to the first conference of the Fourth International. However, he disagreed with Trotsky over the founding of the Fourth International in a period of defeats and believed that the new group was too weak.  His books are still standard reading for anyone interested in the topic.

While this cannot be said of the current spate of biographies? These books are, in many ways, a useful barometer to the growing shift to the right in academia. After all, academics do not live not in a vacuum and are subject to the many ideological pressures that rage throughout society.

It is churlish to say that every writer who produces work on the figures of the Russian Revolution should adhere to Marxism but is it too much to ask for some objectivity or even real serious history. Most history departments have become little more than production lines for anti-Marxist books.

Many of these books are as Oscar Wilde said “hitting below the intellect.” By far the worst of these books is Robert Service’s biography of Trotsky. In the preface of his book Service boasts that he is "the first full-length biography of Trotsky written by someone outside of Russia who is not a Trotskyist."[2] This is simply not true. It is hard to believe that the editor of this book would have let this comment pass without checking it.

Patenaude correctly criticises Service’s book for its level of factual inaccuracies. Writing in the American Historical Review, he says “I have counted more than four dozen [mistakes],.” He continues, “Service mixes up the names of Trotsky's sons, misidentifies the largest political group in the first Duma in 1906, botches the name of the Austrian archduke assassinated at Sarajevo, misrepresents the circumstances of Nicholas II's abdication, gets backward Trotsky's position in 1940 on the United States' entry into World War II, and gives the wrong year of death of Trotsky's widow. Service's book is entirely unreliable as a reference…. At times the errors are jaw-dropping. Service believes that Bertram Wolfe was one of Trotsky's ‘acolytes’ living with him in Mexico (pp. 441, 473), that André Breton was a ‘surrealist painter’ whose ‘pictures exhibited sympathy with the plight of the working people’ (p. 453), and that Mikhail Gorbachev rehabilitated Trotsky in 1988, when in fact, Trotsky was never posthumously rehabilitated by the Soviet government.”[3]

Patenaude goes on to explain how he came to review the book saying he was “initially inclined to turn down the review request.” He felt that working on the study would lead him away from other tasks. “Nonetheless, after checking to make sure that David North's book did not mention my own recent book on Trotsky, I accepted the invitation, fully expecting that I would add my voice to the chorus of praise for Service's biography.”

 “I wrote the review at the request of the editors of the AHR,” They asked me to review both Service's book and North's book. I did find this a little curious because Service is a major figure in the field of Soviet history and his Trotsky has been hailed by several reviewers as the definitive biography -- so why dilute the effect by combining it with a slender, essentially self-published volume written by an avowed Trotskyist who devotes most of his pages to criticism of Service and his book?”

Bertrand M. Patenaude

Patenaude would later retract his sharp opinion of North who after all is a leading authority on Leon Trotsky. Patenaude wrote “Enter David North. David North is an American Trotskyist whose book collects his review essays of Service’s volume and of earlier biographies of Trotsky by Ian Thatcher and Geoffrey Swain. (He does not mention my 2009 book, Trotsky: Downfall of a Revolutionary.) Given North’s Trotskyism, he might reasonably be suspected of hyperbole in his brief against Service. But a careful examination of North’s book shows his criticism of Service to be exactly what Trotsky scholar Baruch Knei-Paz, in a blurb on the back cover, says it is: ‘detailed, meticulous, well-argued and devastating.’”

North has his criticism of Service’s book on Trotsky. In his review, he writes that Service’s book “is a crude and offensive book, produced without respect for the most minimal standards of scholarship. Service’s “research,” if one wishes to call it that, has been conducted in bad faith. His Trotsky is not history, but, rather, an exercise in character assassination. Service is not content to distort and falsify Trotsky’s political deeds and ideas. Frequently descending to the level of a grocery store tabloid, Service attempts to splatter filth on Trotsky’s personal life. Among his favourite devices is to refer to “rumours” about Trotsky’s intimate relations, without even bothering to identify the rumour’s source, let alone substantiate its credibility.”[4]

Swain and Thatcher

North has also been heavily critical of other biographies of Trotsky by Geoffrey Swain and Ian Thatcher. Thatcher from Leicester University produced his Trotsky in 2003 published by Routledge.

In his opinion “Thatcher and Swain belittled Deutscher for creating the “myth” of Trotsky. The Thatcher-Swain biographies set out to create a new anti-Trotsky narrative, utilising slanders and fabrications of old Stalinist vintage in the interest of contemporary anti-communism”.[5]

Thatcher’s Trotsky North says is little more than character assassination. The book is also heavily pregnant with undocumented assertions. Like Service’s book both make it exceedingly difficult for the average reader to trace articles and evaluate for themselves Thatcher’s and Swain’ comments. Even something basic as footnotes are not very accurate and sometimes misleading.

Patenaude

Patenaude is not immune to the right-wing shift in academia. His book, despite being better than some others, does sufferer by repeating the same myths and mistakes of previous books. Patenaude’s use of sources close to Trotsky who were either hostile or had broken with his politics is not useful, and Patenaude is far too uncritical of them.

Patenaude relies a great deal on the testimonies of Trotsky's bodyguards. These are mainly from the American Trotskyist movement. Many of these people had broken with Trotskyism and should have been treated with caution.

It is clear that Patenaude is not entirely acquainted with Trotsky’s writings and politics and still less so with the major political ‘social and cultural subjects tackled by Trotsky. This limitation on his part could have been rectified by quoting from writers that did.

Patenaude does portray a certain amount of sympathy for his subject, which is done so from a liberal, not Marxist standpoint. He also has the annoying habit of using throwaway lines such Trotsky attempted to "cloak the Bolshevik coup" and that Trotsky "helped create the first totalitarian state." Aside from not being true, Patenaude does little to back up such a serious charge. His viewpoint on other struggles inside the Bolshevik party is predominantly impressionistic.

'Warts and all.'

On the plus side, Patenaude’s account is important because it brings together a wide range of sources on Trotsky’s murder. Some of these sources have not been available in English before. He also makes use of the personal papers of the Alexander Buchman, Albert Glotzer and the FBI and the GPU agent Joseph Hansen.

Patenaude employs a novelist type writing style. It is a shame that this style does not work when he tries to use this method when encountering Trotsky’s revolutionary past.

The primary focus of the book centres on the last decade of Trotsky's life and work. Patenaude portrayal of Trotsky’s life while 'imprisoned' in Blue House would in some instances not look out of place in cheap adult books and sometimes borders on the salacious.  Having said that he does manage to show the element of tragedy in Trotsky’s life. Barely a member of Trotsky’s family and close friends survived Stalin’s murderous clutches.

Despite having unpatrolled access to Trotsky’s archive, Patenaude has nothing to say politically that has not been saying before. Not much is said about Trotsky’s followers around the world. Next, nothing is written in the preparation and discussion following the publication of the Transitional Programme.

Patenaude also tends to repeat a lot of the salacious gossip surrounding Trotsky which there is no reason to do other than to sell books his description of |trotysk’s affair with Freida Kahlo being one example Writes Patenaude: “It is no mystery why Trotsky was attracted to Frida Kahlo. The daughter of a German-Jewish immigrant father and a Mexican mother, at 29 she was a striking and exotic beauty with black hair, audacious almond eyes beneath batwing eyebrows, and sensuous lips.” Or this piece of irrelevance “Dressed in a tweed suit and knickerbockers, carrying a cane and a briefcase, he projected an image of civilised respectability, looking not at all like a defiant revolutionary. And at five feet eleven inches tall, he hardly resembled the Soviet cartoon image of him as ‘the little Napoleon,'" Patenaude notes.

Conclusion

Patenaude has no sympathy for the Trotskyist movement. He believes it is full of “sects” and is riddled with “splits and mergers.” Trotskyist’s will need a strong stomach if they read this book. The book is likely to gain a wide readership, but young people and workers and the general reader interested in the life and ideas of Leon Trotsky who struggled against Stalinism, fascism, and capitalism, should read as much as possible of the great man himself and, at least, a few biographies from a much earlier period these should be read in conjunction with this book.









[1] Leon Trotsky & the Post-Soviet School of Historical Falsification
By David North
[2] Robert Service, Trotsky, A Biography (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009)
[3] The American Historical Review (2011) 116 (3): 900-902
[4] In The Service of Historical Falsification: A Review of Robert Service's Trotsky
By David North-11 November 2009- https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2009/11/serv-n11.html
[5] In Defense of Leon Trotsky-By David North-Mehring Books