A Commonwealth of the People: Popular Politics and England's Long Social Revolution, 1066-1649

by David Rollison

Overview

In 1500 fewer than three million people spoke English; today English speakers number at least a billion worldwide. This book asks how and why a small island people became the nucleus of an empire 'on which the sun never set'. David Rollison argues that the 'English explosion' was the outcome of a long social revolution with roots deep in the medieval past. A succession of crises from the Norman Conquest to the English Revolution were causal links and chains of collective memory in a unique, vernacular, populist movement. The keyword of this long revolution, 'commonwealth', has been largely invisible in traditional constitutional history. This panoramic synthesis of political, intellectual, social, cultural, religious, economic, literary and linguistic movements offers a 'new constitutional history' in which state institutions and power elites were subordinate and answerable to a greater community that the early modern English called 'commonwealth' and we call 'society'.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780521853736
Publisher:	Cambridge University Press
Publication date:	01/21/2010
Pages:	474
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 1.10(d)

About the Author

David Rollison is an independent scholar and Honorary Research Associate at the University of Sydney. He is the author of The Local Origins of Modern Society: Gloucestershire 1500–1800 (1992).

Table of Contents

Preface: points of departure; Introduction: an uncommon tradition; Part I. The Emergent Commonalty: 1. What came before: antecedent structures and emergent themes; 2. The formation of a constitutional landscape, c. 1159–1327; 3. The power of a common language; Part II. Accumulating a Tradition: Popular Resistance and Rebellion, 1327–1549: 4. Discords, quarrels and factions of the commonalty: an ensemble of popular demands, 1328–81; 5. The spectre of commonalty: popular rebellion and the commonweal, 1381–1549; Part III. The English Explosion: 6. How trade became an affair of state: the politics of industry, 1381–1640; 7. Touching the wires: industry and empire; Part IV. The Empowered Community: 8. 'The first pace that is sick': the revolution of politics in Shakespeare's Coriolanus; 9. 'Boiling hot with questions': the English Revolution and the parting of the ways.

Editorial Reviews

"This work of breathtaking synthesis will provoke much debate. Highly recommended." -Choice

"Readers can find in this book much to value..." -David Chan Smith, Canadian Journal of History

"This sweeping argument should be read by those interested in the relation between the early modern state and people, or in the origins of modernity, if only to rediscover one’s own assumptions about the premodern world." -Newton E. Key, The Journal of Modern History

From the Publisher