Clarendon, Providence and the Historical Revolution

1990 ◽  
Vol 22 (4) ◽  
pp. 607-632 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael Finlayson
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Rate Of Change ◽  
The Political ◽  
English Revolution ◽  
The Past ◽  
Political Events ◽  
English Society ◽  
Political Turmoil

Historians and literary scholars have long agreed that the rate of change in English society in the seventeenth century was so great that only the label “revolution” can do justice to its magnitude. For the past hundred years, most historians who have written about the political upheavals of the middle decades of the century, for example, have taken it for granted that these events constituted a “revolution.” Indeed, the custom of referring to the political turmoil in England between 1640 and 1660 as the “English Revolution” is so established that many scholars would deny that they are relying upon an assumption at all, but would insist that they are simply stating an obvious fact. After 1660, most scholars agree, England's political and constitutional practices and presuppositions were fundamentally different from what they had been before 1640. The permanence of the change, combined with the extraordinary character of political events during the Interregnum, makes the label “revolution” the obvious and appropriate one.

WHERE THE PAST GOES. THE HISTORY OF THE TERM “WRECKING”

2021 ◽  
pp. 114-140
Author(s):  
Yana E. Kanevskaya ◽  
◽  
David M. Feldman ◽  
Keyword(s):  
The Political ◽  
The Past ◽  
Political Events ◽  
History Of ◽  
Historical Times

The article considers the history of the term “wrecking.” The study allows describing and analyzing political events which the chosen terms correlate with. The authors manage to trace the functions of the term “wrecking” at different historical times, as well as to establish a connection between the function of the term and the political tasks of the leadership.

Conclusion

2019 ◽  
pp. 147-156
Author(s):  
Matthew C. Bingham
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
The Self ◽  
Men And Women ◽  
Self Identity ◽  
English Revolution ◽  
The Past ◽  
Baptist Identity ◽  
Central Argument

The conclusion considers how the book’s central argument might impinge more broadly upon the widespread historiographical assumption that one can appropriately and coherently describe a distinctive “Baptist” identity during the English Revolution and Interregnum. The labels with which we describe the past inevitably presuppose and project an interpretation of that past. But these embedded interpretations are almost always implicit rather than explicit and often inherited from historiographical predecessors rather than chosen with intention and care. Religious labels often confuse rather than clarify, and it is not at all obvious that the labels affixed to mid-seventeenth-century “Baptists” have helped to clarify the self-identity of the men and women they purport to describe.

Outside the Ghetto: Jews and Christians in the Duchy of Modena

2013 ◽  
Vol 17 (3) ◽  
pp. 245-271
Author(s):  
Katherine Aron-Beller
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Social Relations ◽  
Rural Areas ◽  
Jewish Life ◽  
The Political ◽  
The Past ◽  
Jewish Immigrants ◽  
City States ◽  
Main City

Abstract Historians have in the past concentrated their studies of early modern Jewish life on the main city-states of Northern Italy where the largest Jewish communities existed. These areas have been categorized as territories which absorbed Jewish immigrants, enclosed them in ghettos, and monitored their actions with the creation of specific agencies. My essay turns to Jewish existence in the smaller towns and rural areas of the duchy of Modena in the seventeenth century, and attempts to question how this alienated minority was able to fare in areas which housed no ghettos. Here the political and religious decentralization, particularly in the early seventeenth century, generated retaliatory hostility as well as intimacy between Jews and Christians. Sources for this study will be Inquisitorial documents that concerned professing Jews. These sources, once decoded, provide extraordinarily rich images of daily life and provide a unique picture of social relations between the two religionists.

The Precarious Life and Slow Death of the Mixed Courts of Egypt

1993 ◽  
Vol 25 (1) ◽  
pp. 33-52 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nathan J. Brown
Keyword(s):  
Middle East ◽  
The Political ◽  
Past Century ◽  
Court System ◽  
Legal Systems ◽  
The Past ◽  
Political Turmoil

Over the past century, most states of the Middle East have attempted to strengthen and centralize their legal systems, often following European models. Egypt undertook one of the first steps in that direction with its mixed-court system. These courts, which had jurisdiction in civil and commercial cases that involved a foreigner, however remotely, operated from 1876 until 1949. That this system could survive the political turmoil of those years, far outliving the circumstances which brought it into being, is remarkable.

I. History and Ideology in the English Revolution

1965 ◽  
Vol 8 (2) ◽  
pp. 151-178 ◽  
Author(s):  
Quentin Skinner
Keyword(s):  
Point Of View ◽  
Customary Law ◽  
English History ◽  
English Revolution ◽  
The Past ◽  
English Society ◽  
History Of ◽  
Early English ◽  
Ideological Attitudes ◽  
Constitutional Revolution

Ideological arguments are commonly sustained by an appeal to the past, an appeal either to see precedents in history for new claims being advanced, or to see history itself as a development towards the point of view being advocated or denounced. Perhaps the most influential example from English history of this prescriptive use of historical information is provided by the ideological arguments associated with the constitutional revolution of the seventeenth century. It was from a propagandist version of early English history that the ‘whig’ ideology associated with the Parliamentarians—the ideology of customary law, regulated monarchy and immemorial Parliamentary right—drew its main evidence and strength. The process by which this ‘whig’ interpretation of history became bequeathed to the eighteenth century as accepted ideology has of course already been definitively labelled by Professor Butterfield, and described in his book on The Englishman and his History. It still remains, however, to analyse fully the various other ways in which awareness of the past became a politically relevant factor in English society during its constitutional upheavals. The acceptance of the ‘whig’ view of early English history in fact represented only the triumph of one among several conflicting ideologies which had relied on identical historical backing to their claims. And despite the resolution of this conflict by universal acceptance of the ‘whig’ view, the ‘whigs’ themselves were nevertheless to be covertly influenced by the rival ideologies which their triumph might seem to have suppressed. It is the further investigation of the complexity and interdependence of these historical and ideological attitudes which will be attempted here.

The Company-Commonwealth

Virginia 1619 ◽  
2019 ◽  
pp. 193-214
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Political Thought ◽  
The Political ◽  
Political Society ◽  
Political Discourses ◽  
Reason Of State ◽  
Commercial Enterprise ◽  
English Society ◽  
A Company ◽  
Stock Corporation

The Virginia Company, this chapter argues, was not merely a commercial enterprise, a joint-stock corporation, created in order to attract and invest resources in the colony of Virginia. It was a conceived by its members as a political society in itself whose purpose was, in turn, to establish political society in Virginia, to some degree in its own image. It was conceived in terms of the language of the commonwealth—a society of self-governing virtuous citizens—and also in terms of the language of greatness, a company that, through its own pursuit of glory, would augment the power of the state in its rivalry with other European states. These political languages were largely consistent with the political thought employed in English society more generally in the seventeenth century. As a civil society that was separate from the national stage, however, the Company also afforded a space in which it was possible to experiment with political discourses that were regarded as dangerous in other contexts. Two such discourses were the interrelated traditions of democracy and reason of state, which came to the fore in the final years of the Company.

The Political Thought of Richard Cumberland: Sovereignty and the Escape from the Search for Origins

1977 ◽  
Vol 25 (4) ◽  
pp. 535-548
Author(s):  
Linda Kirk
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Political Theory ◽  
Political Thought ◽  
The Political ◽  
Human Society ◽  
The Past ◽  
Important Stage ◽  
De Legibus

Much of what seventeenth-century writers and preachers had to say about allegiance was framed in terms of deference to the past: subjects owed obedience now because they were heirs to some ancient obedience rightfully exacted. Patriachalists and contractualists alike supposed that questions of legitimacy were best resolved by examining what they took to be the origins of human society. Eventually it became possible to construct a utilitarian political theory which instead judged a given system in terms of the needs it met; Richard Cumberland's De Legibus Naturae (1672) marks an important stage in this process. His cosmology is Christian and his political theory shares many trappings with those of his contemporaries, but from an examination of human interdependence he succeeds in establishing an unequivocally utilitarian account of sovereignty.

Conscription and English Society in the 1620s

1972 ◽  
Vol 11 (2) ◽  
pp. 1-23 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stephen J. Stearns
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Social Order ◽  
Military Service ◽  
The Political ◽  
Mind And Body ◽  
Stuart Period ◽  
English Society ◽  
History Of ◽  
Standing Army

Few habitual activities of government engender more dissatisfaction than conscription for military service. Complaints about taxation are, perhaps, more frequent but only because governments wage war more spasmodically than they collect revenues. From the perspective of the twentieth century, which has seen more men pressed into military service than any other period in the known past, the history of conscription and its impact on the political and social order ought to be of some interest.The seventeenth century, like the twentieth, was wracked with continuous warfare, naked power struggles for international hegemony and fierce ideological combat. As a consequence, while at the beginning of the century no major European state had a standing army, at its end all had. In England, as in the rest of Europe, the century echoed to the banging of the recruiter's drum. Our view of the recruiting process under the Stuart monarchs is framed at each end of the century by two brilliant and brutally satirical portraits, Shakespeare's Falstaff and Farquahar's recruiting officer Captain Plume with his ever present Sergeant Kite. What they tell us is that the crown was horribly served, getting for soldiers the Feebles of mind and body, that providing men for military service (whether pressed or “recruited”) was a dirty, unfair and corrupt process and that the situation under good Queen Anne was the same as it had been under good Queen Bess. This “Falstaffian perspective” on the early Stuart period has never been challenged or examined in detail.

‘Unhallowed Wedlocks’: the Regulation of Marriage during the English Revolution

1988 ◽  
Vol 31 (1) ◽  
pp. 45-59 ◽  
Author(s):  
Chris Durston
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Cultural Change ◽  
Political Institutions ◽  
Cultural Norms ◽  
Short Term ◽  
Traditional Practice ◽  
English Revolution ◽  
Religious System ◽  
The Everyday ◽  
English Society

Most seventeenth-century English historians and analysts of periods of revolutionary activity, have viewed events in England between 1640 and 1660 as, at most, a failed political revolution which, while it may have temporarily transformed the political institutions of the English state, had little lasting impact on the everyday lives of its inhabitants. Repeated emphasis of this fact, however, has tended to obscure another important aspect of these years – the concerted efforts of successive puritan governments during the 1640s and 1650s to make substantial alterations in the accepted cultural norms of seventeenth-century English society. More recently this latter point has been highlighted in the work of historians like John Morrill, who has investigated the attempt to impose an alien presbyterian religious system on the country, and David Underdown, who has described puritan efforts to regularize and restrict the more unruly elements of rural popular culture. They have shown that, although such reformist initiatives were unpopular and often resisted, they nevertheless represented a determined thrust for cultural change, and in the short term were seen by many as a real intrusion and a serious threat to traditional practice.

The French Revolutionary Tradition in Russian and Soviet Politics, Political Thought, and Culture

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jay Bergman
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Soviet Union ◽  
Political Thought ◽  
Holy Grail ◽  
English Revolution ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
Marxist Ideology ◽  
The Future ◽  
Before And After

Because they were Marxists, the Bolsheviks in Russia, both before and after taking power in 1917, believed that the past was prologue: that embedded in history was a Holy Grail, a series of mysterious but nonetheless accessible and comprehensible universal laws, that explained the course of history from beginning to end; those who understood these laws would be able to mould the future to conform to their own expectations. But what should the Bolsheviks do if their Marxist ideology proved to be either erroneous or insufficient—if it could not explain, or explain fully, the course of events that followed the revolution they carried out in the country they called the Soviet Union? Something else would have to perform this function. The underlying argument of this book is that the Bolsheviks saw the revolutions in France in 1789, 1830, 1848, and 1871 as supplying practically everything Marxism lacked. In fact, these four events comprised what for the Bolsheviks was a genuine Revolutionary Tradition. The English Revolution and the Puritan Commonwealth of the seventeenth century were not without utility—the Bolsheviks cited them and occasionally utilised them as propaganda—but these paled in comparison to what the revolutions in France offered a century later, namely legitimacy, inspiration, guidance in constructing socialism and communism, and, not least, useful fodder for political and personal polemics.

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