W.H.Coates on the ‘Major Conflicts in Seventeenth-Century England’

(This is an article written by Chris Thompson. I do not know much about Wilson H Coates but I would like to publish Chris's article here. The Storm over the Gentry is a complex debate and although it took place over half a century ago the debate is still relevant to today's historiography on the English revolution.)

The ferocious debates over the fortunes of the English aristocracy and gentry that dominated historical debates over the origins and course of the English Revolution in the 1940s and 1950s were played out by the mid-1960s. They are now distant memories, best known probably for the methodological issues they raised and polemical edge to the exchanges between R.H.Tawney and Lawrence Stone on one side and Hugh Trevor-Roper and J.P.Cooper on the other. Undergraduates and, perhaps, postgraduates are most likely to come across this disputed territory when reading J.H.Hexter’s discussion of the ‘storm over the gentry’ and R.C.Richardson’s comments in his work on the historiography of the  Revolution. Assessments by other scholars – by W.H.Coates, Christopher Hill and Perez Zagorin, for example, - are less familiar or even forgotten.

This neglect of their views lends them interest. The first of these figures, Willson H.Coates, contributed an essay on the ‘Analysis of Major Conflicts in Seventeenth-Century England’ to the festschrift published in Wallace Notestein’s honour in 1960. It had originally been given at the meeting of the American Historical Association in December, 1956 to which Hexter and Zagorin had also given papers. It would have been fascinating to have been present then as a fly on the wall. In its apparently revised version, Coates began by addressing the claims of an American historian, Alexander Thomson, on the significance of the crises through which England passed in the seventeenth-century before moving on to discuss the rival claims of English historians since then. I am not going to comment on his discussion  of Alexander Thomson’s views but rather to focus my attention on his analysis of the claims and counter-claims of Tawney, Trevor-Roper and others, which formed the bulk of his essay.

Coates’s analysis focused initially on the Whig interpretation of the English Revolution. Whigs, he argued, viewed it as “essentially a war of ideas concerning religion and politics which rent families and divided members of the ruling gentry class. The seventeenth century was the crucial period in the emergence of constitutional government and of religious and intellectual freedom in England. Whether or not such a result was the intent of the Puritans, the Parliamentarians, the Cromwellians or the Restoration Whigs, it was – partly because powerful opponents of their particular views survived – their main historical achievement.” There is little or nothing in this to which Whig historians from Hallam and Macaulay to G,M,Trevelyan might have objected.

The most formidable assault on the Whig version of the English Revolution had, however, been made by R.H.Tawney according to Coates. He had found the cause of this political upheaval in antecedent social change and had described the economic transformations in England after 1540 to which political institutions had had to be adjusted to meet the requirements of a new social structure. Coates was not, however, convinced by this argument. Tawney’s hypothesis was not adequately linked in his view to the events in the early-1640s it was meant to explain. Tawney himself had conceded as much in his introduction to Brunton and Pennington’s book on the members of the Long Parliament’s House of Commons when he admitted that, as far as the members of the lower House were concerned, divisions between Royalists and Parliamentarians had little to do with diversities of economic interest and social class: even so, Tawney evidently still hankered after an explanation based on economic divisions amongst the ruling elite in and after 1642. Coates’s conclusion was that Tawney’s pre-occupation with underlying causation prevented him from appreciating that there had been other possible outcomes to the events of 1637-1642 and that he had thus failed to account for the English Revolution.

Essentially, Coates stated or re-stated the standard objection of historical empiricists to all forms of economic and social determinism, namely, that the connection between events and their assumed causes had not been made. Lawrence Stone’s progress from a view of the Revolution as “inevitable” in 1948 to one in which the old regime was overthrown peacefully in 1640-1641 and subsequently on to one in which the political struggle could no longer be explained primarily in economic terms was discussed more summarily. Despite his remaining reservations about Stone’s approach to the Civil Wars of the 1640s, Coates was apparently sympathetic to this evolution in Stone’s thinking.

He was much more critical of Trevor-Roper’s hypothesis about the fortunes of the declining and mere gentry. The idea that the Country-house radicalism of the mere gentry might lead either to Catholic desperation or Puritan Independency struck him as implausible. Indeed, the historical irresponsibility of this kind of diagnosis deserved to be ‘anatomized’ itself in the Trevor-Roper manner. Moreover, neither the declining gentry nor the Puritan Independents could be held to have controlled events between 1637 and 1642. And those M.P.s recruited to the House of Commons after the start of the Civil Wars were scarcely more radical than those elected in the autumn of 1640. Changes in the composition of county committees in a more radical direction after 1642 were hardly enough to vindicate Trevor-Roper’s contentions. Once again, the substance of Coates’s objections appear to lie in the inability of such claims to sustain a secure political analysis.

Interestingly enough, Coates had relatively little, if anything, to say about the validity of manorial counts as guides to changing economic fortunes or on the relative rewards of Court office compared to those from landownership that had preoccupied his colleagues in England. He was not opposed in principle to deploying insights gained into the operation of economic and social forces but thought that the dialectical methods of Tawney and Trevor-Roper belonged to “a kind of scholastic world of twentieth-century economic history.” Coates preferred the complex analysis to be found in C.V.Wedgwood’s narrative works and seventeenth-century realities presented in those of William Haller. “Major historical changes can be analysed only on assumptions of multiple causation and the intricate interdependence of a succession of events.”

Coates did, however, have his own analytical framework to suggest. Three categories of conflict in seventeenth-century England might be distinguished. First of all, there was the “continuous social conflict” of interest to economic historians. A good deal was known about the price revolution of 1540-1640, about the expansion of banking, commerce and industry, the sale of Crown and former monastic lands and the shifting patterns of property ownership among the aristocracy and gentry, industrialists, merchants and yeomen. “Innumerable shifts in property divided members of a class, cut across the well-demarcated class lines and effected new combinations of interest” even if the social revolution was a silent one incapable of large-scale organization. Such vast social changes did not culminate in one single historical event but could be seen, for example, in the political legislation of the Long Parliament in 1641 and in the uncontested sway of mercantilist doctrines later in the century. This category of social conflict had strong economic roots and was “closely related to the emergence of modern Western capitalism.” Calvinism, as Weber and Tawney had argued, placed an emphasis of prudence, industry and frugality, which were the appropriate ideological tools for the accumulation of wealth, including land. It was, Coates claimed, “a moulding factor in economic conflict and change.”

The second distinct category identified by Coates concerned the issues contemporaries thought they were fighting about, i.e. over the roles of the royal prerogative, of Parliament and the judiciary as well as the character of the State Church. In essence, the nineteenth-century picture of the conflict was right although the part of the Tories in the post-1688 settlement needed to be recognised alongside that of the Whigs.

Finally, there was “the real class conflict that loomed up in the mid-seventeenth century” with rising demands from the lower classes articulated by the Levellers and the Diggers. Behind these radical movements lay social and economic discontent. But they were premature and hopeless: the threat of social revolution was easily crushed. Even so, these movements had drawn on intellectual and social circumstances that permitted free discussion and the democratic tendencies of English Puritanism. Religious ideas and concepts of natural law as well as a selective reading of history and law fashioned Levellers’ demands.

What remained to be explained was the relationship between the two main factors in these conflicts, the political and the religious. In 1641, men were concerned with both: by 1688, they were obviously more secularly minded.

The ground upon which Coates chose to stand was clearly demarcated. He saw the economic and social changes of the period up to the English Revolution as critical to its explanation and focused on the influence of Calvinism and the rise of Capitalism as fundamental. Broadly speaking, he accepted the Whig interpretation of political and religious conflicts in the course of the seventeenth-century and an explanation in terms of class conflict for the appearance of the Levellers and Diggers in the late-1640s. The idea of an abortive revolution from below would have appealed to Christopher Hill.

But the objections Coates had made against Tawney’s case for the ‘rise of the gentry’ could have been made with equal validity against his own analytical framework. The economic and social changes he postulated in the century before 1640 were not linked either to the key events of 1637-1642 or to the subsequent period. His approach was based on the old claims of Marx, Weber and Tawney for Calvinism and the rise of Calvinism. This was the Tawney thesis shorn of its untenable statistics and without its analytical failings.

Secondly, of course, Coates gave succour to the Whig interpretation that economic and social explanations were supposed to have rendered redundant. He himself shared the presuppositions of economic and social determinism at the same time as he protested against such preconceptions. Logically, he could not begin by making such a protest and then end by offering a synthesis of the two.

Finally, there is the matter of his use of the language of ‘class’ and of ‘class conflict’. Contemporaries did not use such terminology and the consensus of historical opinion is that attempts to apply these terms to seventeenth-century English society have failed, although some, if not very many, historians believe they can be deployed in this way. When Coates wrote that Royalists and Parliamentarians alike found “the rising demands from the lower classes were ominous” and that the Levellers and Diggers constituted a “social revolutionary movement”, he was using anachronistic language and testifying to his own antique intellectual equipment.

This is why this essay from a mature historian in his prime was so conservative. It is in part confused. It is in part confusing because it has nothing new to offer. The powerful stimulus that the ‘storm over the gentry’ had already given to studies of the origins and course of the English Revolution in economic and social history, in county and urban history was never recognised by Coates. That, perhaps, more than anything explains why his comments have languished in obscurity for so long. 

Comrade Jacob and the Class Limits of the English Revolution: A Marxist Reappraisal

Introduction: A Lost Alternative and Its Historical Moment

Over three and a half centuries after a small group of dispossessed people started digging on common land at St George’s Hill, the questions their actions raised—about the origins of property, the meaning of freedom in a market economy, and who has the right to the land—remain unanswered. David Caute’s "Comrade Jacob," first published in 1961 and reissued in 1973, revisits this event not as a historical curiosity but as a serious exploration of one of the truly radical perspectives from the English Revolution: the Diggers, led by Gerrard Winstanley.

Caute wrote the novel during a specific political period. The crisis within the Communist Party following the Soviet-led suppression of the Hungarian uprising in 1956 led a new generation of intellectuals to explore fresh perspectives on radicalism, dissent, and the betrayal of revolutionary ideals. Influenced by his years at Oxford studying with Christopher Hill, Caute turned to the seventeenth century not as an escape from current issues but to analyse them. Therefore, Comrade Jacob is not a nostalgic costume drama but a political novel in a historical context — an exploration of how poor movements emerge, are suppressed, and how religious beliefs and social revolts are connected.

Caute’s novel effectively portrays the importance of the revolution. However, its limitations, along with those of the historiographical tradition it draws from, reveal essential aspects of the class character of the English Revolution and the role of the Diggers in history. Comprehending Caute’s work is crucial for understanding the revolution's boundaries.

The Diggers as Pre‑Proletarian Communists

Caute’s novel and most sympathetic portrayals of the Diggers highlight that they “had no coherent programme for transforming society and never contemplated overturning it by force.” While accurate, the more profound question is why. The answer is rooted not in psychology but in class background. The Diggers originated from dispossessed small producers, rural workers, demobilised soldiers, cottagers, and artisans squeezed by agrarian capitalism. They were not, in the modern sense, proletarians. The industrial working class—the social force capable of abolishing private property in the means of production—had not yet formed. As a result, the Diggers exemplify a form of pre-proletarian communism: a utopian ideal born of hardship but lacking the social power to realise its goals.

Engels’ distinction in "Socialism: Utopian and Scientific" is crucial here. Utopian socialists could highlight societal flaws and envision a better future, but they could not identify the class that could realise it. Winstanley fits this tradition. His idea of a “common treasury for all” was morally compelling and historically necessary, yet it was not achievable in the 1640s. This isn't a moral critique but a historical-materialist one. The tragedy of St George’s Hill isn't that Winstanley was prematurely Lenin; it's that the Diggers represented hopes extending beyond the bourgeois revolution, which was the only revolution on the table in the 1640s. Their defeat was rooted in the revolution's class structure.

Christopher Hill, Caute, and the Stalinist “People’s History” Tradition

Caute’s novel is deeply rooted in the historiographical tradition that influenced it. Christopher Hill’s significant contribution—defining the English Revolution as a bourgeois revolution—was groundbreaking. However, Hill’s work also reflected the constraints of the Stalinist “People’s History” tradition, such as prioritising a national over an international perspective, romanticising religious sects, viewing history through a Popular Front lens that grouped rebels into a continuous “radical tradition", and lacking a thorough analysis of the rational, scientific, and materialist aspects of the revolution.

Caute inherits these strengths and weaknesses. His structural device — alternating Winstanley’s first-person voice with a detached authorial perspective — is a genuine literary achievement. But the framework remains essentially national. The English Revolution was not a self-contained eruption of English radicalism. It was part of a continental crisis stretching from the Thirty Years’ War to the Fronde. The ideological currents coursing through it — natural rights theory, anti-monarchical republicanism, radical scriptural hermeneutics — were European phenomena. A novel that situated the Diggers more fully in this international context would have captured something essential about the revolution’s character.

The Diggers and the Pseudo‑Left: Two Movements Without a Revolutionary Class

The Diggers of 1649 and today’s pseudo-left seem vastly different at first. One excavated the commons in Surrey; the other engages in ideological battles on social media. However, both reveal the same underlying issue: a social group expressing aspirations they cannot fulfil due to a lack of class power. The Diggers were not proletarians but dispossessed small producers, rural workers, and demobilised soldiers—victims of primitive accumulation rather than architects of a new social order. Their genuine, even heroic, communism was rooted in pre-proletarian conditions. They envisioned a “common treasury for all" but lacked the class consciousness and power to realise it.

Their strategy relied on moral appeal, scriptural argument, and the hope that Cromwell would complete the revolution for them. However, the English Revolution was fundamentally a bourgeois revolution, and Cromwell was its most consistent figure. While he could overthrow the monarchy, he couldn't eliminate private property. The Diggers were defeated not due to their errors but because they were ahead of their time.

The Pseudo‑Left: Moralism Without Class

The pseudo‑left is the modern equivalent of this limitation — not in content, but in structure. It is the politics of a middle‑class layer: academics, NGO professionals, media workers, identity‑politics entrepreneurs. Economically insecure, politically anxious, socially dependent on the existing order, it cannot imagine working‑class power and therefore retreats into moralism, identity, and therapeutic self‑expression.

Where the Diggers referenced scripture, the pseudo-left relies on privilege, representation, "harm," and symbolic gestures. Both favour appealing to authority over empowering the working class. The Diggers looked to Cromwell; the pseudo-left turns to HR departments, university officials, NGOs, and social media. Both seek protection from above instead of driving change from below.

The pseudo-left serves capitalism by fragmenting workers, replacing class analysis with moral accusations, substituting symbolic politics for real material struggle, and channelling anger into safe, state-controlled avenues. It is not a revolutionary force but an ideological containment mechanism—radical in rhetoric but conservative in effect.

What Caute Leaves Out

Caute briefly mentions the Putney Debates and the Presbyterian–Independent split, but these are more than mere omissions. They are pivotal points in the entire revolutionary process. In 1647 at Putney, the Levellers challenged the Army leaders over the franchise, marking a crucial moment when the bourgeois revolution set its boundaries. This debate was not theoretical; it reflected the recognition that extending political rights to the propertyless would threaten the foundations of the emerging capitalist order. Putney becomes the setting where the revolution defined its limits.

The dividing line in politics between Presbyterians and Independents was clear and impactful. Local Presbyterian gentry primarily led the effort to displace the Diggers from St George’s Hill. Fairfax, on behalf of the Independents, was hesitant to use force against them and did not actively defend them either. This was not simply a struggle between the poor and the wealthy. Instead, it was a conflict rooted in a revolution itself, split over the extent of social change desired.

Cromwell’s Role

Cromwell did not betray the revolution; he embodied its core principles. His suppression of the Levellers and disregard for the Diggers were not mistakes but acts of the revolution firming up its class limits. Trotsky’s observation in Where Is Britain Going? is crucial: the bourgeois revolution could topple the feudal monarchy but could not eliminate private land ownership. The Diggers aimed for goals beyond the revolution’s main objective. Their defeat was thus inevitable, not accidental.

Caute’s refusal to secularise Winstanley is one of the novel’s strengths. The film adaptation flattened Winstanley into a socialist-realist tribune, stripping away the mysticism, torment, and scriptural intensity inseparable from his politics.

This matters. The religious form was not a veil behind which a secular class consciousness was hiding. It was the ideological medium available to people of that class in that period. As Ann Talbot observed in her appraisal of Hill, the ideologues of the English Revolution “ransacked the Bible and half understood historical precedent for some kind of theory to explain what they were doing.”

But the religious form was also a limit. Millenarian Christianity could inspire the poor to dig the commons, but it could not provide a scientific analysis of class forces or a strategy for confronting state power. Winstanley’s appeals to Cromwell — “we are your brothers” — were not tactical manoeuvres. They were the strategy. They could not succeed.

Primitive Accumulation and Contemporary Resonance

Today, St George’s Hill stands as one of England’s most costly and heavily protected residential areas. While this fact appears ironic, it reflects a deeper historical continuity. Winstanley linked the origin of property to the “Norman yoke,” whereas Marx associated it with primitive accumulation. Both recognised that property isn’t an inherent right but a product of historical force and dispossession. The violent removal of the majority from the land isn’t a flaw of capitalism; it’s its very foundation. The housing crisis, land financialization, and the exclusion of the poor from cities aren’t anomalies but parts of a systemic process rooted in dispossession. The Diggers could dig the commons, but they couldn’t lay the foundations of capitalism, which were only beginning to be established. Today, we live after that process. The challenge is greater, but so is the social power we can harness to meet it.

The Unfinished Question

Comrade Jacob is not a perfect history book, but it genuinely helps by portraying the Diggers as real historical figures rather than romanticised forerunners. An even better book would explore their questions sincerely and delve into why they couldn’t find answers. That book still needs to be written. However, the question the Diggers raised — who has the right to land? — remains as pressing today as it was in 1649. It can't be resolved within capitalism's limits and requires a different class, a different revolution, and a new historical basis.

Sources and Bibliography

Primary and Seventeenth‑Century Sources

• Gerrard Winstanley, The Law of Freedom and Other Writings, ed. Christopher Hill (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1973).
• Gerrard Winstanley, Selections from His Works, ed. Leonard Hamilton, introduction by Christopher Hill (London: 1944).
• The Clarke Papers, ed. C.H. Firth — essential for the Putney Debates.
• The Acts and Ordinances of the Interregnum, 1642–1660 — for state policy toward radicals.

Modern Scholarship on the Diggers

• John Gurney, Brave Community: The Digger Movement in the English Revolution (Manchester University Press, 2007). The most comprehensive modern study of the Diggers; covers St George’s Hill, Cobham, Iver, Wellingborough, and the wider political context.
• John Gurney, Gerrard Winstanley: The Digger’s Life and Legacy (London, 2013). Important for understanding the modern reception and appropriation of Winstanley.
• Christopher Hill, The World Turned Upside Down: Radical Ideas During the English Revolution (London: Penguin, 1972). Classic Marxist treatment of sectarian radicalism; foundational but shaped by the “People’s History” tradition.
• Christopher Hill, The Religion of Gerrard Winstanley (Past & Present Supplement No. 5, 1978). Key text on Winstanley’s millenarianism.

Marxist Historiography and Theory

These works underpin the essay’s analysis of class limits, bourgeois revolution, and pre‑proletarian communism:

• Karl Marx, Capital, Vol. I — chapters on primitive accumulation.
• Karl Marx, The German Ideology — on class, ideology, and historical development.
• Friedrich Engels, Socialism: Utopian and Scientific — essential for situating Winstanley as a pre‑scientific communist.
• Leon Trotsky, Where Is Britain Going? — the clearest Marxist analysis of Cromwell and the class character of the English Revolution.
• Leon Trotsky, History of the Russian Revolution — methodological model for analysing class forces and revolutionary limits.

On the Pseudo‑Left and Contemporary Politics

These works provide the theoretical grounding for the second half of the essay:

• David North, The Frankfurt School, Postmodernism and the Politics of the Pseudo‑Left (Mehring Books, 2015). The most systematic Marxist critique of identity politics and middle‑class radicalism.
• Chris Marsden & David North, The Heritage We Defend (Mehring Books, 1988). Essential for understanding the degeneration of Stalinism and the emergence of pseudo‑left tendencies.
• Ann Talbot, “Christopher Hill and the English Revolution,” World Socialist Web Site (2003). A sharp critique of Hill’s national‑popular framework and its political limitations.

Additional Contextual Works

• Brian Manning, The English People and the English Revolution (1976). Strong on class structure and popular radicalism.
• Austin Woolrych, Britain in Revolution, 1625–1660 (Oxford University Press, 2002). For broader political context.
• Michael Braddick, God’s Fury, England’s Fire (Allen Lane, 2008). A modern scholarly synthesis of the revolution.

Film and Cultural Reception

• Kevin Brownlow & Andrew Mollo, Winstanley (1975). Important for understanding the secularising distortion of Winstanley’s religious radicalism.

 

55 Days by Howard Brenton – Nick Hern Books 2012

"We are not just trying a tyrant, we are inventing a country."    

  

Howard Brenton's short play deals with the 55-day military coup in the mid-1600s when Oliver Cromwell's army took control of Parliament and moved to put King Charles Ist on trial for treason. The book works on many levels. While just shy of one hundred pages, it nonetheless is a substantial historical work.

Brenton is correct to centre the play on the relationship between Charles I and Cromwell. Brenton's heavy emphasis on the struggle of Cromwell to reach an agreement with the King is, to a certain extent accurate but Brenton takes a few liberties with the historical record.

Some reviews have correctly picked up on the point that Brenton uses the past to analyse the present.  Like a Bertolt Brecht play, it does shows the conflict between theory and action, as individuals and parties debate the future of the sovereignty of Parliament. As Michael Billington says "the real pleasure lies in seeing a pivotal moment in English history presented with such fervent dramatic power."[1]

The book like the play itself is demanding, and it is advisable to have at least a working knowledge of the English revolution in order not only to understand but enjoy the play. As one critic put it "if you do a bit of homework first, this is an evening that grips."

The play is historically accurate and correctly portrays the differences that existed over the judicial murder of a king. Brenton is clear on the point that the killing of the King was a necessary step by the bourgeoisie to clear the way for its rule and establish a parliamentary democracy.

It is clear from the reviews of the play that the historical controversy surrounding the English revolution still generates heat even today. One reviewer described Cromwell as a "thundering hypocrite who claims to be an instrument of God's will, while craftily packing the commissioners who will pass sentence on the King with yes-men. Charles I, in contrast, is at least consistent in his belief that he is divinely appointed."

The play has certain objectivity in that Brenton makes us see two sides of the war. Brenton's inclusion of the Levellers in the form of their leader John Lillburne is a bit of a surprise until you have a look at Brenton's radical sympathies. Brenton is not averse to collaborating with modern radicals such as Tariq Ali. Brenton's collaboration with a political scoundrel of the calibre of Ali was not one of his best decisions. Not surprisingly Brenton was heavily attacked by right-wing sections of the media as Janelle Reinelt relates that "in the late 1990s, Brenton endured a drubbing in the British press from which he is only now emerging.

It seems that taking on the new Labour government early in its first term was considered to be in bad taste, and satire, an ancient genre of dramatic writing that Brenton had earlier successfully mixed in with more "serious" dramas, was now considered terrible writing. Brenton formed a group called Stigma with longtime friends and collaborators Tariq Ali and Andy de la Tour to shake up the British electorate by making them laugh at the expense of the newly triumphant New Labourites. Ugly Rumors (1998), the first of three plays over three years attempted by Stigma, drew savage criticism from the press. Even Michael Billington, the Guardian critic whose left-leaning views and intelligent theatrical judgment usually serve as a reliable bell-weather wrote, "you feel it is still too early to accuse the Government of some kind of grand betrayal".[2]

The inclusion of the Levellers is a brave move given current historical revisionism's hostility to the Levellers being included in the historical drama that was the English revolution. One minor criticism of the play is that Brenton could have developed Lilburnes opposition to the regicide.

The play at the Hampstead Theatre has come into criticism for the use of modern dress. Charles is suited with a Vandyke collar and cane, yet others like Cromwell are dressed like something out of the 1940s. Some critics have said this is to emphasise the middle-class nature of the revolt. I am sure that if current historians had reviewed the book and play. I feel a different interpretation would be forthcoming.

Perhaps the most important and historically significant part of the play is the meeting of the two main protagonists Cromwell and the King.  The scene is invented as the two did not meet during the trial. Although they did meet once, before the Civil War.  Cromwell was in a Parliamentary group that went to Charles with a petition.

I am not against a counterfactual argument or the use of an artistic license. Friedrich Schiller, used it to tremendous effect when he invented a meeting between Elizabeth I and Mary, Queen of Scots, Brenton adds a fictional scene in which Cromwell desperately tries to persuade Charles Ist to save his life.[3]

The problem I have is that Brenton portrays his characters too much as individuals and not really in the context of the time. While it is true that Cromwell may have wanted a compromise with the King at an earlier time, there were larger objective forces that were moving Cromwell at this time. Cromwell was enough of a politician to know that at that moment to move against the army, which was the most radical force in the country would have been suicidal. The army was far to the left of the Levellers who at that stage were the revolutions left wing.

To conclude, there is no doubt that Brenton is a gifted writer and director. His 55 days is well worth going to see. Brenton has a significant grasp of history. His play as one writer puts it "provides an insight into the pivotal, tumultuous historical background to the drama, and the men who embodied it.

Brenton said "recently I met a Frenchman in London and we fell to talking about the high drama of the climax of the French Revolution: the struggle between Danton and Robespierre. 'In this country, you don't remember you also had a revolution,' he said, adding, rather waspishly, 'and you don't realise you still live with the consequences'.[4]

It is true, the modern-day English bourgeoisie does not like to be reminded of its revolutionary history. The same goes for some historians who go as far as to deny a revolution took place. It is good that people like Brenton reminds them and us of this revolutionary past.

---

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/stage/2012/oct/25/55-days-review

[2] The "Rehabilitation" of Howard Brenton- Janelle Reinelt Source: TDR (1988-), Vol. 51, No. 3 (Fall, 2007), pp. 167-174

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Stuart_(play)

[4] Howard Brenton: A forgotten revolution – the historical context to 55 Dayshttp://nickhernbooksblog.com/2012/10/25/howard-brenton-a-forgotten-revolution-the-historical-context-to-55-days/

The Impact of the English Civil Wars — A Marxist Critique of the Revisionist Counter Revolution in Historiography

Introduction

The historiographical struggle over the English Civil War has never been a mere academic quarrel. It is a battle over the meaning of revolution itself. J.S. Morrill’s The Impact of the English Civil Wars (1991) stands as a defining statement of the revisionist school that, from the 1970s onward, sought to dismantle the Marxist interpretation forged by Christopher Hill and the Communist Party Historians’ Group. The revisionists rejected the English Revolution as a bourgeois revolution, denied the existence of a rising bourgeoisie, and insisted that the conflict was driven not by social transformation but by religious sensibilities and constitutional misunderstandings. Morrill and his allies “set out to demolish this framework,” replacing class analysis with a focus on “short-term political accidents” and local particularities that fragment the national narrative.¹

This historiographical turn did not arise in a vacuum. It coincided with the international shift to the right: the defeats of the working class, the collapse of the post-war consensus, the rise of Thatcher and Reagan, and the deepening crisis of Stalinism. In this climate, an academic orthodoxy emerged that denied the revolutionary character of the seventeenth century and, by implication, the possibility of revolutionary change in the present. The new orthodoxy insisted “there was no bourgeois revolution because there was no rising bourgeoisie,” a position that functioned to teach that “mass movements cannot fundamentally alter the social order.”² Morrill’s volume must therefore be understood not simply as a scholarly intervention but as a contribution to the intellectual counter‑revolution of the late twentieth century.

The Revisionist Project: Methodological Fragmentation as Ideology

The Marxist interpretation, developed most powerfully by Christopher Hill and the Communist Party Historians’ Group, located the English Civil War within the world‑historical process of bourgeois revolution. It understood the conflict as the overthrow of a feudal‑absolutist state by social forces aligned with emergent capitalist relations. Morrill and his revisionist colleagues—Conrad Russell, Kevin Sharpe, and others—explicitly set out to dismantle this framework. They denied “there was a rising bourgeoisie,” insisted that “people of all social classes fought on both sides,” and rejected the very notion of a revolution, portraying the conflict instead as a “contingent breakdown of the constitution that got out of hand.”³

This methodological shift was not innocent. The revisionists replaced structural analysis with short‑term political accidents, substituted national dynamics with micro‑studies of localities, and elevated religious discourse to an autonomous causal force. In doing so, they evacuated the conflict of its social content. The result was an historiography that dissolved the English Revolution into a series of disconnected episodes, stripped of class dynamics and historical necessity.

The Political Context: Revisionism and the Neoliberal Turn

The ascendancy of revisionism in the 1970s and 1980s coincided with profound political transformations: the defeats of the working class, the collapse of the post‑war consensus, the rise of Thatcherism and Reaganism, and the accelerating crisis of Stalinism. These developments created fertile ground for an academic orthodoxy hostile to the very idea of revolution.The new orthodoxy insisted “there was no bourgeois revolution because there was no rising bourgeoisie,” a position that functioned to teach that “mass movements cannot fundamentally alter the social order.”⁴

This was not merely a shift in scholarly fashion. It was the intellectual counterpart to the political counter‑revolution of the period. By denying the revolutionary character of the seventeenth century, revisionism implicitly denied the possibility of revolutionary change in the present.

The Flaws of Revisionism: A Caricature of Marxism

The revisionist claim that the presence of nobles on the Parliamentary side and commoners on the Royalist side disproves the class character of the conflict rests on a crude misunderstanding of Marxism. “No serious Marxist has ever expected a chemically pure revolution where every member of one class lines up neatly against every member of another.”⁵ The decisive question is not the social origins of individual participants but the class interests served by the contending forces and the objective historical outcomes of the struggle.

By these criteria, the English Civil War was unmistakably a bourgeois revolution. It abolished feudal tenures, destroyed the Crown’s independent executive power, established the supremacy of Parliament as an organ of the gentry and merchant classes, and cleared the path for capitalist agriculture and trade. These transformations were not accidental by‑products of a constitutional misunderstanding; they were the necessary results of deep‑seated social and economic contradictions.

Morrill’s insistence on religion as the primary cause is an evasion. The question is not whether religion mattered—of course it did—but why religious conflict assumed the forms it did at that specific historical moment. The rise of Puritanism, the proliferation of radical sects, and the ideological ferment of the 1640s cannot be understood apart from the processes of enclosure, the dissolution of the monasteries, and the broader dynamics of primitive accumulation. To treat religion as autonomous is to retreat into idealism.

The Stakes: Historical Materialism and the Meaning of Revolution

The revisionist dismissal of the English Revolution has implications far beyond seventeenth‑century studies. If the English Civil War was merely a constitutional accident or a religious quarrel, then the concept of bourgeois revolution itself collapses. And if bourgeois revolutions are mythical, then the Marxist conception of history—rooted in class struggle and the transformation of modes of production—is fatally undermined.

This is precisely the intellectual climate in which postmodernism, identity politics, and the rejection of “grand narratives” have flourished. The denial of the English Revolution is part of a broader ideological offensive against historical materialism.

Hill’s work, despite its limitations, remains valuable because it insists on what the revisionists deny: that the English Civil War was a revolution, that it was made by the mass of the population, and that it fundamentally transformed English society. Morrill’s volume, by contrast, must be read as a document of the intellectual counter‑revolution—a scholarly expression of the political reaction of the late twentieth century.

Conclusion

Morrill’s The Impact of the English Civil Wars is emblematic of a historiographical project that seeks to sever the English Revolution from its social foundations and to deny its revolutionary character. By elevating religion to an autonomous causal force, by dissolving national dynamics into local contingencies, and by caricaturing Marxism as a theory that demands “chemically pure” class alignments, the revisionists obscure the profound social transformations that shaped the conflict.⁶ The abolition of feudal tenures, the destruction of the Crown’s independent executive power, the rise of Parliament as the political instrument of the gentry and merchant classes, and the clearing of obstacles to capitalist development were not accidental by‑products of a constitutional crisis. They were the objective outcomes of a bourgeois revolution.

The stakes of this debate extend far beyond seventeenth‑century historiography. To deny the English Revolution is to deny the historical reality of bourgeois revolution itself, and with it the Marxist conception of history as the unfolding of class struggle. It is no coincidence that revisionism flourished alongside the rise of postmodernism, identity politics, and the repudiation of “grand narratives.” Morrill’s volume must therefore be read critically, not as a neutral scholarly contribution but as a document of the intellectual counter‑revolution that accompanied the political reaction of the late twentieth century. Against this, the Marxist tradition—despite its own internal contradictions—remains indispensable for understanding the English Civil War as a transformative moment in world history, a revolution made by the mass of the population and one that fundamentally reshaped the social order.

Notes

1. “Set out to demolish this framework… short-term political accidents.”
2. “There was no bourgeois revolution because there was no rising bourgeoisie… mass movements cannot fundamentally alter the social order.”
3. “There was no rising bourgeoisie… contingent breakdown of the constitution.”
4. “The prevailing academic orthodoxy is that there was no bourgeois revolution…”
5. “No serious Marxist has ever expected a chemically pure revolution…”
6. “The revisionist argument… reveals a crude, caricatured understanding of Marxism.”

 

Men and Women in the English Revolution

By Gaby Mahlberg 

Over the summer I agreed to review two books on the English civil wars. One Blair Worden’s God’s Instruments (2012), the other Ann Hughes’s Gender and the English Revolution (2012). The first, aside from a few fleeting references to Lucy Hutchinson, deals almost exclusively with Oliver Cromwell and other men who fought in the Civil War and determined the politics of the country in its aftermath. The second focuses mainly on women, though never studying them separately from the men they supported and challenged.

What I conclude from this is, that nearly half a century after the emergence of women’s history, it is still possible to write history books that largely ignore women, while it is virtually impossible to write anything at all that ignores men. I.e. as far as high political history is concerned, gender is only a ‘relational concept’ with regards to women.

I do not blame Blair Worden. In fact, I admire his work and frequently cite it in my own. Besides, I am no less guilty of having written entire book chapters or journal articles without mentioning a single woman. Political correctness and indeed the contribution of women to politics and political decision making easily slip our mind when the evidence is so much focused on a male political sphere – especially for students of the early modern period. But I still think we should try and change our practice and ask ourselves every time we look at a political issue: and what was the contribution of women?

As Hughes shows in her recent book, aside from Lucy Hutchinson (the author, translator and biographer of her husband, the republican Colonel John Hutchinson), there were thousands of other ‘Women at war’ (35). There was ‘Elizabeth Alkin, also known as “Parliament Joan”’, who ‘spied for the armies of the Earl of Essex, Sir William Waller and Sir Thomas Fairfax’, or the ‘royalist … conspirator … Katherine Stuart, Lady Aubigny’, who came to London ‘to raise supporters in the city’ and prompted ‘an abortive plot’ (36).

Women frequently ‘played a full part in organising the defences of besieged towns’ (36), while soldiers’ wives ‘helped with civil war administration’ (37). Queen Henrietta Maria herself was one of Charles I’s most trusted advisors; Elizabeth Cromwell presumably kept the household up and running while husband Oliver was out killing royalists; and Elizabeth Ludlow remained the faithful companion and co-conspirator of her regicide husband Edmund, who had to flee England for continental exile in 1660. There were also many others without whose contribution history might have developed differently.

I know the case has been made many times before, but the gender segregation in works on political history shows that it’s worth repeating.

Electing Cromwell: A Study in Empiricism and its Limits

Andrew Barclay’s Electing Cromwell: The Making of a Politician (Pickering & Chatto, 2011) is a work of considerable archival diligence. It reconstructs, with painstaking attention to detail, the local political world of the eastern counties in the decades preceding the English Revolution. Its central question is narrow but not insignificant: how did an obscure, financially troubled gentleman from Huntingdonshire become, by 1640, the Member of Parliament for Cambridge and, within a few years, one of the most consequential figures in the revolutionary overthrow of the English monarchy?

Barclay’s answer is rooted in the methodological tradition of the History of Parliament Trust — an antiquarian empiricism that privileges documentary accumulation over social analysis. Parish registers, drainage petitions, corporation minute books, kinship networks, and municipal quarrels are assembled with impressive care. The book’s most valuable sections illuminate the political economy of the Fenlands: the conflicts over drainage schemes that set commoners and smallholders against improving landlords and court‑connected “adventurers,” the factional struggles within Cambridge’s godly elite, and the coordinated campaign that secured Cromwell’s election in both Parliaments of 1640.

Yet the very strength of Barclay’s method reveals its fundamental limitation. The narrative remains confined within the boundaries of localism. Cromwell’s emergence is presented as the product of personal grievances, inheritance disputes, and the tactical manoeuvring of borough elites. What disappears almost entirely is the broader social and political crisis engulfing the English state — a crisis that made Cromwell’s rise possible and gave his actions national significance. The reader is left with a meticulously described landscape of local rivalries but without an explanation of why these rivalries were becoming explosive, or why they were about to be overtaken by a revolutionary confrontation between the monarchy and the rising forces of bourgeois society.

This absence is not merely a matter of emphasis. It reflects the ideological retreat of contemporary academic historiography from any engagement with class dynamics. Earlier generations of historians — above all Christopher Hill — understood that the Fen drainage disputes were not parochial quarrels but part of a systematic assault on customary rights by an emergent agrarian capitalism. The “adventurers” were not simply ambitious landlords; they were agents of a new social order, backed by monopolists and courtiers tied to the crown. Cromwell’s defence of commoners’ rights in the 1630s cannot be understood apart from this transformation. It was an early expression of the political alignment that would, in the revolutionary crisis of the 1640s, propel him into national leadership.

The contrast between Christopher Hill and Andrew Barclay is not merely one of style or emphasis; it reflects two fundamentally different conceptions of what history is and what it is for.

Method: Social Interpretation vs Empirical Reconstruction

Hill approaches Cromwell as a product of the long‑term transformation of English society — the rise of agrarian capitalism, the crisis of absolutism, and the ideological ferment of Puritanism. His method is synthetic and explanatory. Local conflicts, such as the Fen drainage disputes, are read as expressions of national class antagonisms. Cromwell’s defence of commoners’ rights becomes an early political alignment with forces that would soon challenge the monarchy.

Barclay, by contrast, works within the antiquarian empiricism of the History of Parliament Trust. His Cromwell emerges from parish records, corporation minutes, kinship networks, and electoral manoeuvring. The material is rich, but the explanatory horizon is narrow. Social conflict dissolves into personal grievance; class dynamics into local factionalism.

The English Revolution: Structural Crisis vs Local Politics

For Hill, the English Revolution is a bourgeois revolution — the overthrow of a decaying absolutist order by forces shaped by capitalist development. Cromwell’s rise is inseparable from this structural crisis. His political trajectory is meaningful because it expresses the interests of a class whose ascendancy was reshaping the English state.

For Barclay, the Revolution remains largely offstage. His narrative ends in 1640, just before the crisis becomes national. The reader receives a detailed account of how Cromwell entered Parliament, but little sense of why the political world he entered was about to collapse into civil war.

Ideology: Puritanism as Class Expression vs Puritanism as Local Faction

Hill treats Puritanism as the ideological form of a rising bourgeoisie — a worldview shaped by market relations, individual responsibility, and hostility to feudal privilege. Cromwell’s godliness is therefore not a psychological curiosity but a political language through which class interests were articulated.

Barclay treats Puritanism primarily as a network of local alliances and religious affinities. Its social content is acknowledged but not analysed. The “godly” faction in Cambridge becomes a municipal pressure group rather than a political expression of broader social forces.

Historical Purpose: Explanation vs Description

Hill writes history to explain the movement of society. His Cromwell is a figure whose significance lies in his relationship to the revolutionary transformation of England.

Barclay writes history to describe political processes. His Cromwell is a figure whose significance lies in the mechanics of his election.

Hill provides the why of Cromwell’s rise; Barclay provides the how. Hill shows the forces that made Cromwell possible; Barclay shows the circumstances that made him electable. Hill’s Cromwell is a revolutionary agent; Barclay’s is a local politician.

Both approaches have value. But without Hill’s structural analysis, Barclay’s empirical reconstruction floats free of the social crisis that gave Cromwell historical weight. Without Barclay’s archival precision, Hill’s broad synthesis risks abstraction.

Barclay acknowledges this literature in his footnotes but declines to integrate it into his analysis. The result is a portrait of Cromwell that is empirically rich but theoretically impoverished. The man who would preside over the trial and execution of Charles I, suppress the Levellers, and wage a brutal campaign in Ireland appears here as a figure shaped primarily by local patronage networks and municipal disputes. The revolutionary content of his politics — the class forces that made him both the instrument and the beneficiary of a bourgeois revolution — is left unexplored.

None of this negates the genuine contributions of Electing Cromwell. Barclay’s reconstruction of the Cambridge elections of 1640 is a valuable corrective to providential or psychological accounts of Cromwell’s “calling.” He demonstrates convincingly that Cromwell’s emergence was neither accidental nor mystical but the product of deliberate political organisation by a coherent godly faction. This is an important insight, and it enriches our understanding of the pre‑revolutionary conjuncture.

But the larger task — situating Cromwell’s early career within the crisis of the Stuart state, the pressures of the Thirty Years’ War, the fiscal‑military breakdown of absolutism, and the rise of capitalist social relations — lies beyond the scope of Barclay’s empiricism. The English Revolution was not the sum of local grievances; it was the overthrow of a decaying social order by forces whose development Barclay’s method cannot grasp.

In an era when contemporary bourgeois democracies confront their own insoluble contradictions — widening social inequality, the erosion of parliamentary norms, and the turn toward authoritarian forms of rule — the study of the English Revolution demands more than antiquarian reconstruction. It requires an understanding of how individuals like Cromwell become the political expression of deeper class forces. On this decisive question, Electing Cromwell remains silent.

 

Eric Hobsbawm-1917-2012

The death of Eric Hobsbawm at aged 95 marks the end of an era when a group of Communist historians dominated their respective fields of study. The purpose of this obituary is to place the historian in the context of his politics and his role as a dominant force inside and out of the Communist Party Historians Group.

The influence of this group of 'Marxist historians' has since waned mainly due to the 'Marxism is Dead' campaign which found support amongst an aggressive collection of revisionist historians who sought to counter Marxist historiography and to replace it with a hodge-podge of theories that in one way or another denied that class or economic issues had anything to do with the revolutionary upheavals of the last four hundred years.

Hobsbawm, who was born in Egypt in 1917 just a few months before the Bolshevik revolution. His father worked as a colonial officer, and his mother was Austrian. 

Hobsbawm spent his childhood mainly in Berlin. He saw the early dangers of the rise of Fascism, and the Nazi's hatred of Jews. Hobsbawm said later on in his life "Anybody who saw Hitler's rise happen first hand could not have helped but be shaped by it, politically. That boy is still somewhere inside, always will be".[1]

Hobsbawm left Berlin in 1933 and came to London. His life spanned all the significant events of the 20th century. It is safe to say his politics, personality and history writing were shaped by these developments. He became a communist in 1931. It was unfortunate that the party he joined had broken decisively with orthodox Marxism and the German Communist party would later commit the stupendous betrayal in allowing Hitler to come to power without a shot being fired. The refusal of CPSU to acknowledge any fault for this calamitous defeat of the German working class led to the Russian Marxist Leon Trotsky forming a new Fourth International.

In many ways, Hobsbawm perception of the events in Germany would be important in shaping his future political and historical career. Even at an early period in his political career, Hobsbawm was on the right of his newly adopted party, how else do you explain the following extraordinary statement about the developments in Germany, "Liberalism was failing. If I had been German and not a Jew, I could see I might have become a Nazi, a German nationalist. I could see how they would become passionate about saving the nation. It was a time when you did not believe there was a future unless the world was fundamentally transformed". In Germany, there was not any alternative left".[2]

It was untrue. There was a Left Opposition to the rise of Fascism which sought to oppose both the fascists and the betrayal of the party that Hobsbawm had just joined. From an early part of his life, it is clear that Hobsbawm rejected the Trotskyist view of events in Germany.

Hobsbawm's acquiescence to the Stalinist programme and perspective would be a problem for him in later life and for that matter other members of the CPHG. Hobsbawm wrote more than 30 books; his most famous works were the trilogy, The Age of Revolution, The Age of Capital and The Age of Empire. He characterised the period he wrote about as the "the long 19th century" from the start of the French revolution in 1789 to the outbreak of war in 1914, but he wrote very little in the 20th century and most of this when it was relatively safe to do so.

One striking aspect of the CPHG was that none of them specialised in twentieth-century history. More specifically, the experiences of the Russian revolution were never to be explored by the group apart from one book by Christopher Hill, which in reality was an apology for Stalinism.

According to A Talbot "In more recent areas of history, as in politics, the control of the Stalinist bureaucracy was too high to allow the free development of Marxist thought and whether deliberately or not they all avoided venturing into the modern arena". [3]

As Matt Perry correctly points out, the group had particular academic freedom on the subject of English history pre 20th century because the CP had no official line on that period of history.

Hobsbawm was acutely aware that broaching the subject was largely taboo according to him "it raised some notoriously tricky problems". According to one essay on the CPHG a study of the journal Our History between 1956 and 1992 showed there was not a single article dealing with any part of Soviet history.

Eric Hobsbawm was the de facto leader of the historian's group. It would be fair to say that for good or bad Hobsbawm writings have shaped the world-historical view of a generation of students, academics and laypeople. Hobsbawm was part of an extraordinary group of historians that took on many of the characteristics of a political party. It had membership subscriptions, a secretary and a chairman.

Despite his politics, Hobsbawm did write some very good stuff. His essay "The General Crisis of the European Economy in the Seventeenth Century" and "The Crisis of the Seventeenth Century, II" were particularly important.

It is a very useful guide to deepen our understanding of the 17th century, which contained a large number of revolutions. It is important to bear in mind one piece of advice on this subject according to Spinoza "the order and connection of ideas is the same as the order and connection of things".[4] While the revolutions in Europe had many differences, they also had significant similarities.

Hobsbawm's The "general crisis" thesis-like many ground-breaking essays provoked significant controversy from historians who opposed the emphasis on the social and economic origins of the revolutions that were carried out throughout Europe. Also, several historians refused to believe that there was any "general crisis" at all such as the Dutch historian Ivo Schöffer, or the Danish historian Niels Steengsgaard.

Eric J. Hobsbawm's essay, which was printed in two parts in 1954, as "The General Crisis of the European Economy in the Seventeenth Century" and "The Crisis of the Seventeenth Century, II" sought to present a Marxist analysis of the transformation from a feudal society to a capitalist one in the 17th century. This change was held responsible for the revolutions, wars and social unrest that took place. Hobsbawm put forward that most of the social and economic structures associated with capitalism had grown and developed during "long sixteenth century." He believed that feudal "elements fatally obstructed growth" of capitalism. He believed that a revolution was needed to clear away the feudal rubbish for a new capitalist system to develop.

The most pronounced expression of this process of was to be found in England. Hobsbawm writes, "It will be generally agreed that the I7th century was one of social revolt both in Western and Eastern Europe. This clustering of revolutions has led some historians to see something like a general social-revolutionary crisis in the middle of the century. France had its Frondes, which were significant social movements; Catalan, Neapolitan and Portuguese revolutions marked the crisis of the Spanish Empire in the I64os; the Swiss peasant war of I653 expressed both the post-war crisis and the increasing exploitation of peasant by town, while in England revolution triumphed with portentous results. Though peasant unrest did not cease in the West - the "stamped paper " rising which combined middle class, maritime and peasant unrest in Bordeaux and Brittany occurred in 1675, the Camisard wars even later- those of Eastern Europe were more significant. In the i6th century, there had been few revolts against the growing enserfment of peasants. The Ukrainian revolution of I648-54 may be regarded as a major servile upheaval.

So must the various " Kurucz " movements in Hungary, their very name harking back to Dozsa's peasant rebels of I5I4, their memory enshrined in folksongs about Rakoczy as that of the Russian revolt of I672 is in the song about Stenka Razin. A major Bohemian peasant rising in i68o opened a period of endemic serf unrest there. It would be easy to lengthen this catalogue of the large social upheavals - for instance by including the revolts of the Irish in 164I and 1689".[5]

Hobsbawm has gone on the record to say that he "was not a Stalinist. I criticised Stalin, and I cannot conceive how what I've written can be regarded as a defence of Stalin. But as someone who was a loyal Party member for two decades before 1956 and therefore silent about a number of things about which it's reasonable not to be silent - things I knew or suspected in the USSR. Why I stayed [in the Communist Party] is not a political question about communism, it's a one-off biographical question. It wasn't out of idealisation of the October Revolution. I'm not an idealiser. One should not delude oneself about the people or things one cares most about in one's life. Communism is one of these things and I've done my best not to delude myself about it even though I was loyal to it and to its memory. The phenomenon of communism and the passion it aroused is particular to the twentieth century. It was a combination of the high hopes which were brought with progress and the belief in human improvement during the nineteenth century along with the discovery that the bourgeois society in which we live (however great and fruitful) did not work and at certain stages looked as though it was on the verge of collapse. And it did collapse and generated awful nightmares ".[6]

According to the Marxist writer and expert on Leon Trotsky David North Hobsbawm's writing on the Russian Revolution mostly portrays the revolution as being "doomed to failure" and a "fatal enterprise." This leads to the assumption that the breakdown of the Soviet Union was the "Shipwreck of Socialism."

North admits Hobsbawm has produced some excellent work but," the subject of the Russian Revolution is dangerous territory for Professor Hobsbawm, for in this field his scholarship is compromised by his politics. Hobsbawm once confessed that as a member of the CPGB he had avoided writing about the Russian Revolution and the 20th century, because the political line of his party would have prevented him from being entirely truthful. Why he chose to remain a member of a party that would have compelled him to tell lies is a question to which he has never given a convincing answer. At any rate, it would have been best for him and no loss to the writing of history, had he continued to limit himself to events before 1900"?[7]

As North points out Hobsbawm did not in later life limit himself to write on events pre 1900. Hobsbawm was very active writing about politics. It is in this regard I would like to examine his political career. While I believe that the plaudits Hobsbawm got recently for his history writing are thoroughly deserved. Given the level of press coverage and favourable obituaries from establishment figures highlight the importance Hobsbawm was for the ruling elite in Britain and internationally.

He was, after all, made– a Companion of Honour. A rarity for a historian especially of his political persuasion. Hobsbawm was lauded from both sides of bourgeois democracy in Britain. Labour leader Ed Miliband said Prof Hobsbawm was "an extraordinary historian, a man passionate about his politics and a great friend of his family". His historical works brought hundreds of years of British history to hundreds of thousands of people. He brought history out of the ivory tower and into people's lives. But he was not simply academic; he cared deeply about the political direction of the country. Indeed, he was one of the first people to recognise the challenges to Labour in the late 1970s and 1980s from the changing nature of our society."

In this respect, Milliband says more than he intended. Hobsbawm was a major theoretical architect of the right-wing shift of New Labour. During his membership of the "Eurocommunist" wing of the CPGB and his time with the Marxism Today theoretical journal, he wrote many articles urging Labour to adopt a more right-wing trajectory. In 1978 he wrote the essay "The Forward March of Labour Halted". Which in many ways, laid the basis for Labours future development? "If anything, I was an extremely right-wing Communist and generally attacked by the leftists, including the leftists in the Labour Party".

Hobsbawm relationship with the origins of New Labour is explored in an article by Chris Marsden, which reveals Stalinism's role in spawning new Labour. Marsden said the Communist Party of Great Britain "Euro-Communist" tendency acted as the midwife of New Labour."

Marsden continues with the observation that Marxism Today laid the "ideological framework for what was to become New Labour was first established in the editorial offices of Marxism Today. And it was mostly made possible to implement the project so defined due above all to the liquidation of the Soviet Union".

Hobsbawm had no real faith in the revolutionary capacity of the working class as can be seen in his Marx Memorial Lecture in 1978 and as Marsden concluded "Hobsbawm too began by asserting that the crisis of the labour movement could be attributed to the decline of the working class itself. His evidence for this mainly consisted of a presentation of the fall in the number of workers employed in heavy industry and the supposedly concomitant fall in support for the Labour and Communist parties. He then argued that industrial militancy had failed to provide an answer to the failures of the Labour government of the time. Hobsbawm's lecture was not just unconvincing. It was an attempt to provide an apologia for the betrayal of the working class by Labour and the TUC. He was writing after the election of a Labour government in 1974 as a result of a mass militant movement that culminated in the downfall of the previous Conservative government of Edward Heath. After making sure minimal concessions to the miners, who had led that campaign, Labour had proceeded to implement austerity measures demanded by the International Monetary Fund and, when this produced a major decline in its support amongst workers, had formed a coalition with the Liberal Party in order to continue with its attacks. Hobsbawm responded to this by blaming the working class—and identifying a supposed decline in its numerical strength—for Labour's loss of support".

Hobsbawm was not an orthodox Marxist. Politically speaking Hobsbawm was closer to social democracy and the right-wing side of the Labour Party than to Marxism. The harsh tone of this obituary should not take anything away from Hobsbawm's historical writing, especially pre the 20th century, but you cannot separate his historical writing with his politics. This should be borne in mind when reading him.

---

[1] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-19786929

[2] Interview with Maya Jaggi published in The Guardian newspaper in 2002

[3] . "These the times ... this the man": an appraisal of historian Christopher Hill By Ann Talbot 25 March 2003

[4] http://www.philosophypages.com/hy/4h.htm

[5] https://academic.oup.com/past/article-abstract/5/1/33/1452973?redirectedFrom=PDF

[6] https://www.theguardian.com/books/2002/sep/22/history.politicalbooks

[7] Leon Trotsky and the Fate of Socialism in the 20th Century A Reply to Professor Eric Hobsbawm By David North 3 January 1998.