Chapter Eight The Evolution and Dissemination of Historical Knowledge

2005 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael Bentley
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Turn Of The Century ◽  
English Civil War ◽  
Glorious Revolution ◽  
Historical Knowledge ◽  
English History ◽  
Norman Conquest ◽  
Victorian Britain ◽  
Parliamentary History ◽  
The Glorious Revolution

This chapter discusses the nature and development of historical knowledge and understanding in Victorian Britain. It describes the pervasive tendencies within the period as a whole with respect to what needed to be taught and learned. Historians preserved an eighteenth-century tradition throughout the 1820s — the parliamentary history and Catholic vision of English history from the Romans to the Glorious Revolution. Narratives concentrated on the Norman conquest, Magna Carta, the reign of Henry VII, the seventeenth-century constitution, the English Civil War and the apotheosis of whiggery in the eighteenth century. Later versions faltered in face of the need to demonstrate deeper knowledge of events and a denser narrative texture. Thereafter, histories of England, written in the grand manner and across many centuries, petered out until after the turn of the century, and prompted treatments of more modern periods.

The Last English Civil War

Daedalus ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 147 (1) ◽  
pp. 15-24 ◽  
Author(s):  
Francis Fukuyama
Keyword(s):  
National Identity ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Civil War ◽  
Rational Choice ◽  
English Civil War ◽  
Glorious Revolution ◽  
English History ◽  
Norman Conquest ◽  
Normative Factors ◽  
The Glorious Revolution

This essay examines why England experienced a civil war every fifty years from the Norman Conquest up until the Glorious Revolution of 1688–1689, and was completely stable after that point. The reasons had to do with, first, the slow accumulation of law and respect for the law that had occurred by the seventeenth century, and second, with the emergence of a strong English state and sense of national identity by the end of the Tudor period. This suggests that normative factors are very important in creating stable settlements. Rational choice explanations for such outcomes assert that stalemated conflicts will lead parties to accept second- or third-best outcomes, but English history, as well as more recent experiences, suggests that stability requires normative change as well.

Unnecessary revolution: the case of France

1983 ◽  
Vol 24 (2) ◽  
pp. 291-318 ◽  
Author(s):  
W. G. Runciman
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Social Structure ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
English Civil War ◽  
Glorious Revolution ◽  
Nineteenth Century France ◽  
Distribution Of Power ◽  
Definition Of ◽  
The Glorious Revolution ◽  
Eventual Outcome

For all the controversy that continues to surround the course of events in France between the summoning of the Estates-General and the fall of Brienne in the summer of 1788 and the summoning of the Convention and the fall of the monarchy in the summer of 1792, it is nowhere in dispute that they constituted a revolution— that is, in the definition of the Oxford English Dictionary (s.v. III.7), ‘a complete overthrow of the established government in any country or state by those who were previously subject to it’. Indeed, they constituted such an overthrow in a manner and to a degree without precedent. Neither the English Civil War (and still less the ‘Glorious Revolution’ of 1688) nor the War of American Independence are properly comparable with them. In calling the French Revolution ‘unnecessary’, therefore, I am not seeking to minimize either its importance (of which more later) or its novelty. Nor do I maintain that the problems by which the ancien régime was confronted could have been resolved by any scheme of reform which would have preserved intact the existing forms and distribution of power. I mean only that the Revolution was unnecessary in two different senses: first, it only took place as it did because of a wholly unfore-seeable series of coincidences; second, its eventual outcome in terms of the broad difference in social structure between eighteenth-century and nineteenth-century France would have happened in any case. These assertions, moreover, are not—or so I hope to show—as controversial as they may seem: properly stated, both should be equally acceptable to ‘orthodox’ and ‘revisionist’ historians alike.

Mr Spectator and the Doctor

2021 ◽  
pp. 40-60
Author(s):  
Brian Cowan
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Literary Culture ◽  
Glorious Revolution ◽  
College Life ◽  
Joseph Addison ◽  
Patron Saint ◽  
The Glorious Revolution

Joseph Addison and Henry Sacheverell were almost exact contemporaries. Born within two years of one another, both men attended Magdalen College, Oxford in their youth, and they both took up their studies at the college in the wake of the Glorious Revolution. From this moment onward, the lives and public careers of Addison and Sacheverell would be curiously intertwined. Scholarship and college life would bring them together as friends, but politics and public fame would pull them apart. A contrast between the agreeable Addison and the distasteful Sacheverell is commonplace in eighteenth-century studies, and not without reason. As perhaps the chief proponent of a new culture of ‘politeness’ for post-revolutionary Britain, Addison is well known for his friendliness, if not perhaps for his volubility, in company. Addison’s powerful reputation as the patron saint of eighteenth-century politeness did not sit well with his ties to Sacheverell, whose firebrand reputation was deeply controversial in his lifetime and only declined further as time went by. For this reason, the youthful friendship of the two Magdalen scholars has been a source of awkwardness for later commentators. This chapter places the friendship between Addison and Sacheverell within the context of post-revolutionary political and literary culture.

Addison as Translator

2021 ◽  
pp. 18-39
Author(s):  
David Hopkins
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Literary Culture ◽  
Glorious Revolution ◽  
College Life ◽  
Joseph Addison ◽  
Patron Saint ◽  
The Glorious Revolution

Joseph Addison and Henry Sacheverell were almost exact contemporaries. Born within two years of one another, both men attended Magdalen College, Oxford, in their youth, and they both took up their studies at the college in the wake of the Glorious Revolution. From this moment onward, the lives and public careers of Addison and Sacheverell would be curiously intertwined. Scholarship and college life would bring them together as friends, but politics and public fame would pull them apart. A contrast between the agreeable Addison and the distasteful Sacheverell is commonplace in eighteenth-century studies, and not without reason. As perhaps the chief proponent of a new culture of ‘politeness’ for post-revolutionary Britain, Addison is well known for his friendliness, if not perhaps for his volubility, in company. Addison’s powerful reputation as the patron saint of eighteenth-century politeness did not sit well with his ties to Sacheverell, whose firebrand reputation was deeply controversial in his lifetime and only declined further as time went by. For this reason, the youthful friendship of the two Magdalen scholars has been a source of awkwardness for later commentators. This chapter places the friendship between Addison and Sacheverell within the context of post-revolutionary political and literary culture

The Fourth English Civil War: Dissolution, Desertion and Alternative Histories in the Glorious Revolution

1988 ◽  
Vol 23 (2) ◽  
pp. 151-166 ◽  
Author(s):  
J. G. A. Pocock
Keyword(s):  
Civil Society ◽  
Civil War ◽  
Just War ◽  
Political Process ◽  
English Civil War ◽  
Edmund Burke ◽  
Glorious Revolution ◽  
The Glorious Revolution ◽  
The Revolution

EDMUND BURKE, REVIEWING IN 1790 THE EVENTS OF 102-101 years previously, saw no objection to penning and printing the following remarkable words: ‘The Revolution of 1688 was obtained by a just war, in the only case in which any war, and much more a civil war, can be just. Justa bella quibus necessaria’. He cannot have meant that the revolution was ‘obtained’, in the sense of ‘secured’, by the wars in Europe which followed from 1688 to 1697, for he speaks of ‘civil war’; nor is it likely that he intended his words to refer to the war in Ireland which ended with the Treaty of Limerick. Burke's Irish perspectives might indeed lead to his viewing this as a civil war rather than a war of conquest, but the context which surrounds the words quoted makes it clear that he is thinking of the ‘Revolution of 1688’ as an English political process and an English civil war. The ‘cashiering’ or dethroning of a king, he is instructing readers of Richard Price's sermon to the Revolution Society, is not a legal or a constitutional process, which can form one of the normal procedures of an established civil society.

God & the Gothic

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alison Milbank
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Literary Canon ◽  
Glorious Revolution ◽  
Ghost Story ◽  
Material World ◽  
Historical Continuity ◽  
The Reformation ◽  
Gothic Novels ◽  
The Glorious Revolution

God and the Gothic undertakes a complete reimagining of the Gothic literary canon to examine its engagement with theological ideas, tracing its origins to the apocalyptic critique of the Reformation female martyrs, and to the Dissolution of the Monasteries, now seen as usurpation of power by the authorities. A double gesture of repudiation and regret is evident in the consequent search for political, aesthetic, and religious mediation, which characterizes the aftermath of the Glorious Revolution and Whig Providential discourse. Part I interprets eighteenth-century Gothic novels in terms of this Whig debate about the true heir, culminating in Ann Radcliffe’s melancholic theology which uses distance and loss to enable a new mediation. Part II traces the origins of the doppelgänger in Calvinist anthropology and establishes that its employment by a range of Scottish writers offers a productive mode of subjectivity, necessary in a culture equally concerned with historical continuity. In Part III, Irish Gothic is shown to be seeking ways to mediate between Catholic and Protestant identities through models of sacrifice and ecumenism, while in Part IV, nineteenth-century Gothic is read as increasingly theological, responding to materialism by a project of re-enchantment. Ghost-story writers assert the metaphysical priority of the supernatural to establish the material world. Arthur Machen and other Order of the Golden Dawn members explore the double and other Gothic tropes as modes of mystical ascent, while raising the physical to the spiritual through magical control, and the M. R. James circle restores the sacramental and psychical efficacy of objects.

The Political-Economic Foundations of Representative Government

2019 ◽  
Vol 18 (2) ◽  
pp. 454-469
Author(s):  
Kevin Narizny
Keyword(s):  
Institutional Design ◽  
Rent Seeking ◽  
English Civil War ◽  
Representative Government ◽  
Equal Rights ◽  
Glorious Revolution ◽  
Coordination Problem ◽  
The Glorious Revolution ◽  
Political Economic ◽  
Economic Foundations

The dominant interpretation of the Glorious Revolution portrays it as an innovative compromise that used clever institutional design to solve a coordination problem between rival elites. In contrast, I argue that it was neither innovative nor a compromise and that it was the product of structural change rather than institutional design. Following Barrington Moore, I focus on the rise of agrarian capitalism and economically autonomous elites, who, in contrast to rent-seeking elites, do not depend on favor from the state for their income. They have an interest in the creation of a political system that ensures their equal rights under the law, open access to markets, and opportunities to form broad coalitions against rent-seeking. This makes them a critical constituency for representative government. I test this argument through an analysis of patterns of allegiance for Crown and Parliament at the outset of the English Civil War and address its relevance to the Glorious Revolution.

scholarly journals THE GLORIOUS REVOLUTION IN ENGLAND AND THE PROBLEM OF THE NATIONAL ELECTORAL SYSTEM MODERNIZATION IN THE “LONG EIGHTEENTH CENTURY”

Manuscript ◽  
2019 ◽  
pp. 76-80
Author(s):  
Leonid Vladimirovich Sidorenko ◽  
◽  
Nina Eduardovna Adamova ◽  
Yuliya Igorevna Kuznetsova ◽  
◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Electoral System ◽  
Glorious Revolution ◽  
Long Eighteenth Century ◽  
The Glorious Revolution

scholarly journals The Hurry and Uproar of Their Passions

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Katarzyna Kozak
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Public Opinion ◽  
Political Parties ◽  
The Political ◽  
Right Wing ◽  
Glorious Revolution ◽  
Negative Image ◽  
Political Situation ◽  
The Government ◽  
The Glorious Revolution

The period between the Glorious Revolution and the end of Queen Anne’s reign was a time of fierce antagonism between the political parties. This rivalry defined the political situation in early eighteenth century Britain and laid the foundation for the development of the ministerial machine of propaganda aimed at discrediting opponents and justifying the policies of the government. Methodically developed, the system was well applied during Oxford’s Ministry (1710-14). The establishment of a ministerial newspaper –The Examiner –played a significant role in solidifying public opinion behind the transfer of power to the Tories. Remaining a ‘right-wing’ organ, it became a sharp edge of anti-whig propaganda. The main objective of this article is to analyse the rhetoric of passions, one of the literary tools used inThe Examinerto build up a negative image of Whigs. This image, created on the pages ofThe Examiner, represents an element of a wider vision depicting passionate Whigs and reasonable Tories.

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