In recent months, both of my websites have undergone a transformation that I could not have anticipated even a year ago. What began as a modest corner of the internet — a place to publish essays, polemics, and historical reflections — has suddenly become a destination for thousands of readers across the world. Yesterday alone brought 6,000 hits, a figure that would once have seemed fantastical. If this trajectory continues, the month’s total will exceed 70,000. For a project built slowly, often in solitude, this surge feels both surreal and strangely vindicating.

Several forces have converged to produce this moment. The most obvious is the political climate. Periods of instability always drive people back to history, theory, and analysis that can explain the world’s accelerating contradictions. My work, rooted in Marxist historiography and the long arc of revolutionary movements, has found itself unexpectedly aligned with the needs of a growing audience.

Another catalyst arrived unexpectedly: two of the world’s most influential Marxists, David North and Joseph Kishore, followed my Twitter account. Their interest acted as a signal, prompting thousands of politically engaged readers to explore my work. On the very first day of this surge, visitors from 32 countries arrived — a reminder that political inquiry is now global, and that the questions raised by the English Revolution, the Levellers, Winstanley, or Trotsky resonate far beyond Britain.

A further transformation has come from technology. The integration of AI into my research and editorial workflow has been nothing short of revolutionary. Socialism AI on the WSWS has sharpened the political edge of my work. Copilot and Claude have accelerated the research process to a degree I would once have considered impossible. Tasks that previously required days or weeks — collating sources, structuring arguments, revising drafts — can now be completed within hours. The bottleneck is no longer labour but thought itself.

This acceleration has made possible a project I have long postponed: a complete rewrite of the entire archive. Beginning with the earliest essays from 2008, I am now working through 2012. Many of these pieces were written quickly, often under pressure, and with limited resources. They deserve better. Some of the more substantial articles will be republished later this year in significantly improved form.

Two major rewrites deserve mention. My BA dissertation — previously poor, lazy, and unworthy of the subject — has been reconstructed from the ground up, incorporating the latest historiography and a more rigorous analytical framework. Likewise, my work on Raphael Samuel, originally part of an incomplete Master’s degree, has been revised to a standard I can finally accept. There is a real possibility that this material may develop into a book. Samuel’s relationship to working‑class history, memory, and radical historiography aligns closely with my own intellectual trajectory.

The Why I Write series has also been fully edited and is now fit for publication. It may be time to add new essays to this collection, reflecting the changes in my work and the political moment.

A CALL FOR CONTRIBUTORS

This website has never been a passive repository of historical curiosities. It is a platform built in the tradition of the Levellers, the Chartists, the early Marxists, and every working‑class intellectual who refused to accept the official version of history. It exists to challenge the complacency of academic orthodoxy, to expose the distortions of bourgeois historiography, and to confront the political lies that saturate public life.

The present moment demands more voices, not fewer.

If you are a historian, a socialist, a researcher, a polemicist, or simply someone who refuses to accept the intellectual poverty of mainstream commentary, I invite you to contribute. The only requirement is seriousness — seriousness about history, seriousness about politics, and seriousness about the working class as the decisive force in world events.

I am not looking for polite essays that tiptoe around the truth. I am looking for writers who understand that history is a battleground, that ideas have consequences, and that the struggle for clarity is inseparable from the struggle for emancipation. If you have something to say — about the English Revolution, the Paris Commune, the Russian Revolution, the rise of fascism, the crisis of capitalism, or the lived experience of the working class today — then say it here.

This platform is growing. The readership is international. The political situation is accelerating. If you have been waiting for the right moment to write, that moment has arrived.

Send your work. Add your voice. Join the fight for historical truth.

 Whose Winstanley?

The modern left has inherited Gerrard Winstanley like how it has inherited the English Revolution: selectively, mythically, and often in ways that obscure more than they clarify. John Gurney’s posthumously published article, “Gerrard Winstanley and the Left” (2017), serves as more than just a reception history. It offers a subtle yet sharp critique of how political traditions create usable pasts — and how these constructed histories can distort the real figures they aim to honour.

As Gurney illustrates, the Winstanley known to many socialists, radicals, and activists today is not the Winstanley of Cobham and Walton-on-Thames in 1649. Instead, he has been repeatedly reconstructed to serve the ideological agendas of figures like Eduard Bernstein, Christopher Hill, and later the counterculture, environmentalists, and the modern pseudo-left. The Digger colony at St George’s Hill lasted less than a year, and Winstanley himself largely disappears from historical records for extended periods. Nonetheless, his symbolic presence has grown so significant that he is now one of the most recognisable symbols of seventeenth-century radicalism. This amplification is deliberate and rooted in ideology.

Bernstein’s Winstanley: Revisionism and the Search for Precedents

Gurney’s key insight — and one that merits more recognition — is the vital role Eduard Bernstein played in Winstanley’s modern resurgence. The irony is striking: Bernstein, known for developing revisionist social democracy and aiming to reform capitalism via parliamentary channels, also championed Winstanley, who called for abolishing private property, ending trade, and establishing a “common treasury for all.”

Bernstein’s appropriation was not driven by curiosity about history but served a political purpose. He aimed to identify a native English precursor for his form of evolutionary socialism, and Winstanley — appropriately softened — fit this role. In Bernstein’s interpretation, Winstanley shifted from a millenarian communist reacting to the fall of feudal authority to a proto-social democrat, a forward-thinking reformer. This shift exemplifies a wider trend: the left, during its reformist stages, often downplays its revolutionary roots to align with gradualist politics.

Christopher Hill: Marxism, Secularisation, and the Limits of the Canon

Christopher Hill’s approach was more scholarly, rigorous, and rooted in class analysis. He brought Winstanley out of obscurity and highlighted his role in a plebeian communist tradition during the English Revolution. However, Hill also modified Winstanley’s depiction. In The World Turned Upside Down (1972), Hill downplayed Winstanley’s theology, recast his millenarianism as rational and proto-scientific, and portrayed his communism as an early form of modern materialism.

Hill later addressed this imbalance in The Religion of Gerrard Winstanley (1978), reintroducing the theological aspect he had earlier minimised. However, the secularised Winstanley had already become part of the Marxist canon. While Hill’s contribution was significant, his portrayal of Winstanley was ultimately a constructed image—tailored to fit the intellectual expectations of mid-twentieth-century Marxism.

The Counterculture: Winstanley as Symbol, Lifestyle, and Brand

By the 1960s, Winstanley evolved into a versatile icon. The Haight-Ashbury Diggers, squatters, land rights activists, environmentalists, and later anti-road and anti-fracking groups all saw him as a prophet of resistance against enclosure and commodification. He was reimagined as a proto-hippie, a green anarchist, and a supporter of “living lightly on the land.” This depiction of Winstanley was even further removed from the historical figure. His theological beliefs were entirely discarded; his communism was transformed into a lifestyle rebellion; and his critique of property was separated from the specific historical context of feudal collapse and revolutionary potential. In the counterculture’s hands, Winstanley stopped being a communist and became more of a brand— a symbol of authenticity rather than a force for social change.

This appropriation clearly serves a political purpose. It enabled the emerging pseudo-left to assert a radical heritage without adopting genuinely radical politics. Winstanley’s real agenda—abolishing private property, ending wage labour, and creating communal production—clashed with movements that accepted capitalism’s permanence and divided social struggles into identity-based factions. By sanitising and secularising Winstanley, he became a safe figure.

Gurney’s Contribution: Restoring Winstanley to History

Gurney’s work, especially Brave Community (2007), disputes the long-standing mythologization of Winstanley. By placing Winstanley within the specific local, social, and economic context of Surrey in 1649, Gurney highlights the material roots of his ideas. The Diggers were not merely utopian dreamers, but actively involved in real struggles over land, rents, and the weakening of manorial power. Winstanley’s communism was born from particular grievances, opportunities, and contradictions, rather than from timeless ideals.

This clarification does not lessen Winstanley’s importance; it increases it. A radical tradition that avoids engaging with its history cannot fully grasp its purpose. Gurney’s Winstanley is not a mere symbol but a revolutionary figure responding to capitalism’s emergence.

Gurney’s article teaches us that the real lesson isn’t about Winstanley himself, but about how the left uses history. Different political groups create their own idealised past to support their views. Bernstein looked for a respectable English ancestor to back revisionism; Hill needed a commoner who was a communist to fill out the Marxist story of the English Revolution; the counterculture aimed for a prophet of the commons; and environmentalists sought a 17th-century voice opposing enclosure. Each group found what suited their goals, but only by modifying Winstanley to match their narrative. As your essay correctly asks: Whose Winstanley are we analysing, and what do our choices say about our own politics?

Winstanley and the Pseudo‑Lefts

The modern pseudo-left has reduced Gerrard Winstanley to a harmless mascot—depicted as a seventeenth-century eco-sage, a proto-hippie, or a prophet of “living lightly on the land.” This distortion is not only poor history but also a form of political falsification, deliberately neutralising one of the most steadfast communist voices of the English Revolution. As I mentioned elsewhere, “The Winstanley familiar to generations of socialists, radicals, and activists isn’t the same as the Winstanley of Cobham and Walton-on-Thames in 1649.” The historical Winstanley called for abolishing private property, ending wage labour, and establishing a “common treasury for all.” He based these demands on millenarian theology and the economic collapse of feudalism. His programme bears no resemblance to the lifestyle anarchism, identity-driven activism, or anti-political individualism prevalent in the pseudo-left.

The 1960s counterculture initiated this distortion. The Haight-Ashbury Diggers, squatters, and environmentalists adopted Winstanley as a symbol of authenticity—viewing him as a figure who could legitimise their rejection of “the system” without challenging capitalism itself. They stripped away theology, softened communism into communal living, and replaced class struggle with personal rebellion. Winstanley became a brand. The pseudo-left then inherited this distorted image of Winstanley and intensified the deception. Their politics—centred on identity, moral posturing, and accommodation to the capitalist state—reject the idea of overthrowing property relations. Consequently, they reinvent him: transforming a communist into a “commons activist,” a millenarian into a proto-environmentalist, and a revolutionary into a lifestyle image.

This is deliberate, not accidental. It aims to serve a specific ideological purpose. The pseudo-left merely seeks the appearance of radicalism without its substance. They desire the recognition of history without the weight of revolutionary demands. They want Winstanley’s name, but not his programme.

John Gurney’s thorough scholarship quietly dispels this myth. By placing Winstanley within the concrete social and economic setting of Surrey in 1649, Gurney reaffirms the revolutionary core of his ideas. He demonstrates that Winstanley was not merely a dreamer but a materialist responding to the contradictions of early capitalism. His work shows that the pseudo-left’s appropriation is ultimately a political evasion. “To claim Winstanley is to confront the revolutionary demands he genuinely articulated — demands that, at their heart, remain incomplete.” The pseudo-left cannot confront them. Marxists must.

Winstanley is rooted in the revolutionary tradition, not the pseudo-left. He aligns with those aiming to abolish private property, rather than those advocating for gentler management. He supports universal emancipation instead of dividing struggles into identities and moral acts. He looks forward to the future, not clinging to current political dead-ends. The goal is clear: reintroduce Winstanley to the revolutionary movement he helped inspire, away from the pseudo-left.

Conclusion: Recovering the Revolutionary Winstanley

A Marxist interpretation of Gurney’s work should highlight that the aim is not to dismiss Winstanley’s relevance today but to recognise it genuinely. Winstanley was neither a proto-social democrat, secular Marxist, nor green anarchist. Instead, he was a seventeenth-century revolutionary communist influenced by the fall of feudalism, motivated by millenarian beliefs, and dedicated to ending private property.

Understanding him through these terms shows the English Revolution as a moment when early capitalist contradictions were exposed — and when ordinary people briefly aimed to resolve them for universal emancipation. As your essay notes, “To claim Winstanley is to face the revolutionary demands he actually articulated — demands that remain, at their core, unfinished.” This article honours John Gurney, whose scholarship and generosity deepened the study of seventeenth-century radicalism. His work reminds us that engaging with the radical past has consequences. Recovering Winstanley means confronting the revolutionary vision he saw — a vision that still challenges today.

Sources and Bibliography

Primary Sources: Gerrard Winstanley and the English Revolution

• Winstanley, Gerrard. The True Levellers Standard Advanced (1649).
• Winstanley, Gerrard. A New Year’s Gift for the Parliament and Army (1650).
• Winstanley, Gerrard. The Law of Freedom in a Platform (1652).
• Winstanley, Gerrard. The Saints Paradise (1648).
• Winstanley, Gerrard. The Mysterie of God (1648).
• Hill, Christopher (ed.). The Law of Freedom and Other Writings. Penguin Classics, 1973.

Core Scholarship on Winstanley and the Diggers

• Gurney, John. Brave Community: The Digger Movement in the English Revolution. Manchester University Press, 2007.
• Gurney, John. Gerrard Winstanley: The Digger’s Life and Legacy. Pluto Press, 2012.
• Gurney, John. “Gerrard Winstanley and the Left.” Past & Present 235 (2017): 179–206.
• Gurney, John. “The Diggers and the Limits of Popular Radicalism.” History Workshop Journal (2008).
• Hill, Christopher. The World Turned Upside Down: Radical Ideas During the English Revolution. Penguin, 1972.
• Hill, Christopher. The Religion of Gerrard Winstanley. Oxford University Press, 1978.

The English Revolution and Seventeenth‑Century Radicalism

• Manning, Brian. The English People and the English Revolution. Bookmarks, 1991.
• Manning, Brian. The Far Left in the English Revolution. Bookmarks, 2002.
• Aylmer, G.E. The Levellers in the English Revolution. Thames & Hudson, 1975.
• Reay, Barry. The Quakers and the English Revolution. Temple Smith, 1985.
• Morton, A.L. The World of the Ranters. Lawrence & Wishart, 1970.
• Underdown, David. Revel, Riot and Rebellion. Oxford University Press, 1985.
• Sharp, Buchanan. In Contempt of All Authority. University of California Press, 1980.

Bernstein, Revisionism, and Marxist Critique

• Bernstein, Eduard. Evolutionary Socialism (1899).
• Bernstein, Eduard. Cromwell and Communism. George Allen & Unwin, 1930.
• Luxemburg, Rosa. Reform or Revolution (1900).
• Lenin, V.I. Marxism and Revisionism (1908).
• Lenin, V.I. State and Revolution (1917).
• Trotsky, Leon. The Revolution Betrayed (1937).
• Trotsky, Leon. In Defence of Marxism (1942).

The Pseudo‑Left, Identity Politics, and Post‑1968 Radicalism

• North, David. The Frankfurt School, Postmodernism and the Politics of the Pseudo‑Left. Mehring Books, 2015.
• North, David. The Heritage We Defend. Mehring Books, 1988.
• Callinicos, Alex. The Revolutionary Road to Socialism. Bookmarks, 1983.
• Eagleton, Terry. Why Marx Was Right. Yale University Press, 2011.
• Dean, Jodi. The Communist Horizon. Verso, 2012.
• Harvey, David. A Brief History of Neoliberalism. Oxford University Press, 2005.

Counterculture, Squatting, and Environmental Appropriations of Winstanley

• McKay, George. Senseless Acts of Beauty: Cultures of Resistance since the Sixties. Verso, 1996.
• White, Micah. The End of Protest. Knopf, 2016.
• Wall, Derek. The Commons in History. MIT Press, 2014.
• Cresswell, Tim. In Place/Out of Place. University of Minnesota Press, 1996.
• Linebaugh, Peter. The Magna Carta Manifesto. University of California Press, 2008.
• Linebaugh, Peter & Rediker, Marcus. The Many‑Headed Hydra. Beacon Press, 2000.

Archival Sources

• Surrey History Centre, Woking — manorial records for Cobham, Walton, and Oatlands.
• The National Archives (Kew) — Star Chamber and Chancery records relating to enclosure disputes.
• British Library, Thomason Tracts — pamphlets of the English Revolution.
• Guildhall Library, London — parish records relevant to Winstanley’s later life.

The Loneliness of Lilburne in Biography

When Pauline Gregg published Freeborn John in 1961, she created what would be, surprisingly, the only full-length biography of John Lilburne for over sixty years. This isn’t because Lilburne was a marginal figure; quite the opposite. He is among the most prominent, vocal, and disruptive figures in the entire archive of the English Revolution. His presence is everywhere—from Star Chamber records, Fleet and Newgate proceedings, petitions from apprentices, to the pamphlet battles of the 1640s, court transcripts of his numerous trials, and ultimately in the Quaker writings of his final years.

Readers of Trumpet of Sedition will recognise this terrain from earlier articles like “John Lilburne: The Making of a Revolutionary” and “Lilburne and the Politics of Martyrdom,” which explore his ongoing presence in the archive in greater detail. For two generations, Gregg’s biography remained the only significant work. It kept its prominence not because the field lacked interest, but because Gregg’s biography was well-written, empathetic, and engaging enough to endure long after its initial interpretive framework was outdated. Her instincts were correct, but her method was flawed.

Gregg’s Lilburne: The Democrat Before Democracy

Gregg’s Lilburne is a democratic visionary born centuries too early — a man who, in her words, “spelt out the true meaning of democracy” long before the term had any stable political meaning.[1] This core idea of the book mirrors the historiographical context of 1961, a time when the Levellers were regarded as proto-liberal democrats and early advocates of modern parliamentary systems. This interpretation aligns with the traditional Whig view critiqued in works like “The Levellers and the Myth of English Democracy” and “The Bourgeois Revolution Revisited,” which caution against applying contemporary political categories to the seventeenth century.

Under Gregg’s interpretation, Lilburne is portrayed as a visionary of rights, a solitary conscience, and someone whose political foresight transcended his time to foresee democracy’s future. This appealing narrative resonated in the post-war era, when parliamentary democracy seemed victorious, stable, and purposeful. However, this depiction is historically inaccurate.

Lilburne was not an early advocate of democracy. Instead, he represented a specific, historically defined class: small property owners, artisans, apprentices, and the “middling sort,” whose lives were upheaved by civil war, arbitrary imprisonment, wartime taxes, impressment, and the rise of a more assertive mercantile bourgeoisie. Their calls for expanded voting rights, legal protections, due process, jury trials, and the defence of “freeborn rights” were not so much forward-looking visions of modern democracy but rather the political expressions of their material circumstances during the crisis of the 1640s. Gregg documents these demands brilliantly, but never situates them in class terms. She gives us the hero, not the movement.

The Theatrical Lilburne: Gregg’s Greatest Strength

Gregg’s strength is her ability to depict Lilburne’s theatrical fearlessness with compelling storytelling. She illustrates: the young apprentice rejecting the Star Chamber oath; the man whipped from the Fleet to Westminster, bleeding yet still capable of tossing pamphlets to the crowd. The defendant who turned every trial into a political spectacle skilfully staged his own persecution with a level of self-publicity unmatched during the Revolution. These instances closely match the insights from “The Trial of John Lilburne: Law, Class, and Spectacle,” which views Lilburne’s courtroom actions as deliberate political strategies. Lilburne recognised the power of spectacle in politics. Gregg understood Lilburne—his bravery, his resistance, and his ability to convert personal suffering into political leverage. However, she failed to grasp — due to the limitations of her historiographical context— the social environment that shaped and influenced him.

The Marxist Reorientation: Lilburne as Class Actor

Over the past sixty years, scholarship has debunked the “early democrat” myth. Marxist historians reinterpreted the English Revolution as a class-driven conflict rather than a struggle for democratic foresight. Scholars like Christopher Hill and Brian Manning demonstrated that Lilburne’s radicalism was not an early liberal movement but a political expression of a class caught between collapsing feudal systems and a burgeoning bourgeois order. More detailed discussions of this perspective can be found in “Christopher Hill and the Class Politics of the English Revolution” and “Brian Manning: The Historian of the ‘Middling Sort’”, which analyse how Marxist historiography repositioned the Levellers within their social context.

Lilburne’s strict adherence to legal procedures, his focus on due process, and his demand for jury trials were all political tools used by a class struggling to survive. These were not just theoretical principles; they represented tangible demands. Despite the sympathy in Gregg’s biography, it fails to acknowledge this perspective fully.

John Lilburne and Modern Historiography-The Strange Case of Lilburne’s Historiographical Afterlife

Few figures in the English Revolution have been as distorted by historiography as John Lilburne. His presence is felt throughout the archive — from Star Chamber records, the Fleet and Newgate prisons, petitions from apprentices, to the pamphlet wars of the 1640s, his numerous trial transcripts, and eventually in the writings of Quakers in his later years. Despite this extensive documentation, he was only the subject of a single comprehensive biography for over sixty years: Pauline Gregg’s Freeborn John (1961). This remarkable fact highlights not only the complexities of Lilburne’s portrayal but also reflects broader developments in the scholarship of the English Revolution.

Recent scholarship has reshaped our view of Lilburne. Once seen as a straightforward democrat of mid-17th-century liberalism, he is now understood as a more nuanced figure: a social actor, a spontaneous agitator, a political performer, and a connector within a dynamic network of radical communication. Modern interpretations depict Lilburne not as a visionary ahead of his time, but as a reflection of the tensions of the 1640s — a figure whose political actions are best understood within the context of the economic and social realities of the middle classes.

The Mid‑Century Lilburne: Democrat Before Democracy

For much of the twentieth century, Lilburne was viewed through a lens of liberal democracy. Gregg’s biography exemplifies this perspective, portraying Lilburne as a solitary conscience and moral visionary who articulated the true essence of democracy long before the term gained political stability. In her portrayal, he emerges as a rights prophet, an early influence on modern constitutionalism, and a democratic hero ahead of his time. This interpretation was typical of its era, reflecting the post-war historiographical context when parliamentary democracy was seen as triumphant. Historians of the period frequently projected contemporary political ideas back onto the seventeenth century, viewing the Levellers as early liberals and Lilburne as their most eloquent advocate.

The issue isn’t that Gregg admired Lilburne, but that she misunderstood him. Her biography is detailed with archival information but lacks social analysis. It presents the hero instead of the movement, and the conscience instead of the class.

Modern historiography has entirely challenged this perspective. The turning point occurred with Marxist historians from the 1960s to 1980s, notably Christopher Hill and Brian Manning. They reinterpreted the English Revolution as a struggle rooted in class interests rather than democratic ideals. According to this view, Lilburne’s radicalism is seen not as early liberalism but as a political stance representing a specific social class: the middle stratum — small landowners, artisans, apprentices, and independent producers caught between aristocratic dominance and the rise of capitalist relations.

Lilburne’s focus on legalism, due process, jury trials, and “freeborn rights” was a practical political tool rather than a mere abstract idea. They served the interests of a social class seeking economic and legal stability amid a declining social order. The Levellers were a movement driven by London’s middle class grievances—such as wartime taxes, arbitrary imprisonment, impressment, market chaos, and loss of traditional legal protections—not a formal party. Lilburne’s radical stance reflects the pressures of his class rather than personal foresight. Although the Marxist perspective does not solve all issues, it reconnected Lilburne to his social roots and remains central to modern understanding of the period.

Starting in the 1980s, revisionist historians questioned the existence of unified ideological movements during the English Revolution. Their research undermined the concept of “Leveller ideology” and, consequently, Lilburne’s association with it. Revisionists described the Levellers as an informal, fluctuating alliance of activists, petitioners, printers, and agitators—rather than a disciplined group with a clear program. Lilburne frequently shifted allegiances, adapted his arguments, and responded to immediate circumstances instead of following a consistent ideological path. The political language of the 1640s was often unstable, improvisational, and contradictory. While revisionism did not diminish Lilburne’s importance, it led historians to abandon the idea of a single, unified Leveller doctrine.

Gregg provided the hero, Hill and Manning defined the class, while revisionists introduced instability. Post-revisionists contributed the networks, Braddick highlighted the activist, Peacey emphasised the public sphere, Foxley focused on mobilisation, and Como noted fragmentation. Modern historiography portrays the individual comprehensively—not as a democracy prophet, but as a lively representative of a moving class.

Revisionist and post‑revisionist work has pushed further. Jason Peacey shows that the Levellers were not a coherent party but a shifting coalition of activists, printers, petitioners, and agitators.[2] Rachel Foxley reconstructs the unstable networks of mobilisation that made “Leveller” less a fixed identity than a contingent alignment.[3] Michael Braddick argues that Lilburne is best understood as “an activist rather than a political thinker,” a man whose significance lay in relentless campaigning rather than coherent doctrine.[4] David Como’s work on radical print culture reveals a world of ideological fragmentation, improvisation, and rapid political mutation.[5]

These insights closely mirror the arguments in “The Levellers: Movement, Myth, and Misrepresentation” and “Radical Print Culture and the English Revolution,” which highlight the fluid nature of seventeenth-century radicalism. This challenges Gregg’s portrayal of a smooth democratic progression. Lilburne, as seen in archival records, is unruly, inconsistent, and improvisational — a figure whose views evolved with circumstances, whose alliances were fragile, and whose political actions were driven by immediate pressures. Gregg’s biography, built around a heroic narrative, cannot fully capture this instability.

Lilburne Without Illusion: A Class in Motion

And yet, Freeborn John persists—not solely because of its interpretation, but because of its compelling storytelling. Gregg narrated the life of a man who defied subjugation, asserted his rights as a “free-born Englishman,” and became a remarkable self-promoter of the English Revolution. She highlighted the drama, even if she overlooked the class dynamics behind it.

Sixty years later, Gregg’s biography remains crucial, but only when complemented by scholarship that finally reintroduces Lilburne to the context that shaped him. He was not a prophet of modern democracy but a passionate advocate of a shifting class, influenced by the contradictions of a revolution that expanded political possibilities while closing others. Gregg presented us with the hero; the past sixty years have provided the history.

Notes

[1] Pauline Gregg, Freeborn John (1961), Phoenix Press ed., p. X. [2] Jason Peacey, Print and Public Politics in the English Revolution (2013). [3] Rachel Foxley, The Levellers: Radical Political Thought in the English Revolution (2013). [4] Michael Braddick, The Common Freedom of the People (2022). [5] David Como, Radical Parliamentarians and the English Civil War (2020).

SOURCES AND BIBLIOGRAPHY

Primary Sources

Lilburne, John. A vast body of pamphlets, petitions, and trial accounts authored by Lilburne survives. Key texts include:

• The Christian Man’s Trial (1641)
• The Free-Man’s Freedom Vindicated (1646)
• England’s Birthright Justified (1645)
• The Legal Fundamentall Liberties of the People of England Revived (1649)
• The Resolved Man’s Resolution (1645)
• The Outcries of Oppressed Commons (1646)
• The Triall of Lieut. Col. John Lilburne (1649). These are available in EEBO (Early English Books Online) and in modern edited collections.

The Clarke Papers. Ed. C. H. Firth. 4 vols. Camden Society, 1891–1901. Essential for Army debates, Leveller petitions, and the political climate surrounding Lilburne.

The Putney Debates (1647). Ed. Michael Mendle, The Putney Debates of 1647: The Army, the Levellers and the English State. Cambridge University Press, 2001. Provides context for Leveller political thought and the Army’s internal divisions.

State Trials. The Harleian Miscellany and Cobbett’s State Trials contain transcripts of Lilburne’s major trials (Star Chamber, 1649 acquittal, etc.).

Secondary Sources: Core Modern Historiography

Biographies and Major Studies

Gregg, Pauline. Freeborn John: A Biography of John Lilburne. London: Harrap, 1961; Phoenix Press ed., 2000. The foundational biography; sympathetic, narratively strong, but shaped by mid‑century liberal-democratic assumptions.

Braddick, Michael. The Common Freedom of the People: John Lilburne and the English Revolution. Oxford University Press, 2022. The first major biography since Gregg; reframes Lilburne as an activist rather than a systematic political thinker.

Marxist Historiography

Hill, Christopher.

• The World Turned Upside Down: Radical Ideas During the English Revolution. Penguin, 1972.
• The Experience of Defeat: Milton and Some Contemporaries. Penguin, 1984. Hill’s work remains foundational for understanding Lilburne as a class actor within a broader revolutionary crisis.

Manning, Brian.

• The English People and the English Revolution. Bookmarks, 1991.
• The Far Left in the English Revolution. Bookmarks, 1972. Manning’s analysis of the “middling sort” is essential for situating Lilburne socially.

Rudé, George. The Crowd in History. John Wiley & Sons, 1964. Not Lilburne-specific, but crucial for understanding popular mobilisation.

Revisionist Historiography

Kishlansky, Mark.

• The Rise of the New Model Army. Cambridge University Press, 1979.
• “The Case for the Army.” Past & Present 198 (2008). Revisionist scepticism about Leveller coherence and Lilburne’s ideological consistency.

Davis, J. C. Fear, Myth and History: The Ranters and the Historians. Cambridge University Press, 1986. Important for understanding how ideological categories in the 1640s were constructed and contested.

Russell, Conrad. The Fall of the British Monarchies, 1637–1642. Oxford University Press, 1991. Provides the political context revisionists use to challenge older narratives of ideological radicalism.

Post‑Revisionist and Contemporary Scholarship

Peacey, Jason.

• Print and Public Politics in the English Revolution. Cambridge University Press, 2013.
• Politicians and Pamphleteers: Propaganda During the English Civil Wars and Interregnum. Ashgate, 2004. Peacey’s work is central to understanding Lilburne as part of a communication network rather than a party.

Foxley, Rachel. The Levellers: Radical Political Thought in the English Revolution. Manchester University Press, 2013. The most sophisticated reconstruction of Leveller political mobilisation and ideology.

Como, David. Radical Parliamentarians and the English Civil War. Oxford University Press, 2020. A monumental archival study showing the fragmentation and volatility of radical politics.

Rees, John. The Leveller Revolution: Radical Political Organisation in England, 1640–1650. Verso, 2016. A sympathetic but rigorous account of Leveller organisation, useful for balancing revisionist scepticism.

Mendle, Michael. The Putney Debates of 1647. Cambridge University Press, 2001. Essential for contextualising Leveller arguments within Army politics.

Woolrych, Austin. Britain in Revolution, 1625–1660. Oxford University Press, 2002. A balanced narrative history that integrates modern scholarship on radicalism.

Articles and Essays

Braddick, Michael. “An Activist and Not a Political Thinker: Reconsidering Lilburne.” Journal of British Studies (forthcoming/recent). Key articulation of the activist thesis.

Peacey, Jason. “The Levellers and the Politics of Petitioning.” Historical Journal 52 (2009). Shows how petitioning shaped Leveller mobilisation.

Foxley, Rachel. “Leveller Ideas and the Problem of Ideological Coherence.” History Compass 11 (2013). A concise summary of the modern debate.

Como, David. “Print, Censorship, and Ideological Fluidity in the 1640s.” Past & Present 217 (2012). Important for understanding the instability of radical print culture.

Further Reading

Sharp, Andrew. The English Levellers. Cambridge University Press, 1998. A classic introduction to Leveller texts.

Gurney, John. Brave Community: The Digger Movement in the English Revolution. Manchester University Press, 2007. Useful for situating Lilburne within the broader radical milieu.

Hessayon, Ariel & Finnegan, David (eds.). Varieties of Seventeenth-Century Radicalism. Routledge, 2011. A collection that contextualises Lilburne among other radical currents.

Holmes, Clive. Why Was Charles I Executed?

Buchanan Sharp’s In Contempt of All Authority: Rural Artisans and Riot in the West of England, 1586–1660 (1980) is still regarded as one of the most insightful analyses of popular protest in early modern England. Its extensive use of archives and clear conceptual framework establish it as a significant contribution to the study of class conflict, even though Sharp did not explicitly align with Marxist theory. The book’s main argument — that rural labourers and artisans acted deliberately, organising around tangible grievances without elite intervention — aligns closely with the ideas advanced by E. P. Thompson, Brian Manning, Christopher Hill, and Ellen Meiksins Wood. Rather than an outlier, Sharp’s regional case study enhances and clarifies the broader Marxist view of early modern English society.

Expanding Sharp’s argument within this broader historiographical context reveals that his book is not just a corrective to conservative or Whiggish interpretations of popular unrest. Instead, it forms part of a larger effort to recover plebeian agency, class consciousness, and material struggles, especially in a period often narrated from the perspectives of the gentry, court, and emerging bourgeoisie.

Sharp’s Intervention: Class Agency Against the “Better Sort” Thesis

Sharp’s main discovery is quite clear. The rural poor in the West Country—cloth workers, smallholders, labourers, artisans—did not rebel because disgruntled gentlemen manipulated them. Instead, their riots were driven by hunger, unemployment, dispossession, and anger at the gentry who held land, grain, and political power. They self-organised, pinpointed their enemies, and acted together with a coherence that contradicts the idea of the “inarticulate crowd.”

This directly confronts a long-standing historiographical tradition that views popular protest as reactive, aimless, and reliant on elite leadership. Sharp demonstrates that food riots were caused not solely by shortages but by poverty and market manipulation; forest riots were sustained campaigns against enclosure and the loss of common rights; rioters openly showed class hostility toward the wealthy; and organisation was inherently local rather than externally imposed. This challenges more than just a misinterpretation of events; it questions an entire ideological framework that sees the poor as passive, easily manipulated, and lacking political agency. Sharp’s rioters are not merely supporting characters in others’ narratives but are active historical agents. This emphasis on plebeian agency aligns Sharp with Thompson, Manning, Wood, and Hill—even if he did not explicitly frame his work within a Marxist context.

Thompson: Moral Economy, Class Formation, and Sharp’s Unsparing Materialism

E. P. Thompson’s impact on researching popular protest is significant. His idea of the “moral economy” — suggesting that 18th-century crowds sought to uphold traditional fairness in markets — has influenced scholarly work for many years. Thompson’s crowds are not early revolutionaries but advocates of a community-based ethic challenged by capitalist market dynamics.

Sharp’s research complicates this view. He finds that in the period he explores (1586–1660), rioters rarely enforced a “fair price.” Instead, they seized grain and distributed it directly without staging ritualised market interventions, mainly because they were starving. Sharp cautions that broad application of the moral-economy framework might romanticise plebeian actions, masking the desperation and anger behind them. However, this critique does not undermine Thompson’s larger argument; rather, it bolsters it. Thompson argued that class is a relationship rooted in struggle, not a fixed structure. Sharp’s rioters exemplify this by identifying their enemies (the gentry, wealthy farmers, grain dealers), voicing grievances, and acting collectively. They do not rely on a “moral economy” to explain their actions; they possess an emerging class consciousness.

Thompson’s idea of moral economy emphasises the significance of customs, while Sharp concentrates on material deprivation. Despite their different focuses, both scholars reject the idea that crowds are irrational. Sharp’s emphasis on poverty—not scarcity—as a crucial element in food riots aligns with Thompson’s broader perspective that popular protests are rational, organised, and rooted in lived experience. In “The Making of the English Working Class,” Thompson examines the political agency of artisans and labourers in the 18th and 19th centuries. Similarly, Sharp investigates this for the 17th century—both challenge elite-centric narratives, arguing that people experiencing poverty understood their situations and acted with purpose within them. Sharp’s divergence from Thompson on moral economy is thus a refinement, not a repudiation. It pushes us to recognise that plebeian politics in the early modern period were often more direct, more desperate, and more openly confrontational than the ritualised protests of the eighteenth century.

Manning: The English Revolution from Below

Brian Manning’s analysis of the English Revolution, especially in *The English People and the English Revolution*, argues that the Civil War was more than a political conflict among elites; it was a social upheaval driven by widespread popular grievances. Manning highlights that ordinary people played active roles rather than just observing, with their economic and social demands shaping events—the forest riots recorded by Sharp support Manning’s view. The Western Rising (1626–32), a protest against enclosure and the loss of common rights, illustrates these grievances. Sharp shows that these issues persisted and fueled the chaos of the 1640s. Manning suggests that the Civil War opened a political space for longstanding social conflicts, and Sharp’s evidence backs this. Manning stresses that plebeian actors followed their own agendas, often ignoring the constitutional disputes of Parliament and the court. Sharp’s rioters exemplify this: they focused on food, work, and land, not on the Petition of Right or the Grand Remonstrance.

Manning’s Marxist reading of the Civil War emphasises class conflict—between landlords and tenants, employers and workers, the rich and the poor—as the core issue. Sharp’s rioters openly display class hostility, viewing the gentry as oppressors and acting together against them. This exemplifies pure class struggle. Therefore, Sharp supplies microhistorical evidence supporting Manning’s broader thesis: the English Revolution was as much a social upheaval as a constitutional crisis.

Hill: Radicalism, Common Rights, and the World Turned Upside Down

Christopher Hill’s analysis of the English Revolution, especially in The World Turned Upside Down, highlights the radical ideas shared by ordinary people: egalitarianism, communalism, anti-clericalism, and visions of a world without masters. Hill emphasises that these radicals are not just thinkers but include artisans, soldiers, and labourers whose experiences of exploitation influenced their political ideas. Sharp’s rioters differ from Levellers or Diggers; they do not create manifestos, but their actions reflect Hill’s themes. Hill notes the importance of common land for plebeian life and politics, and Sharp’s forest rioters fought specifically over this—facing enclosure and sale of royal forests that threatened their livelihoods. Their resistance serves as a physical counterpart to Hill’s ideological radicalism.

Hill’s radicals show hostility toward the wealthy and influential, similar to Sharp’s rioters. Their anger is focused and directed at specific beneficiaries of enclosure and grain speculation. Hill contends that the English Revolution created room for radical plebeian politics. At the same time, Sharp demonstrates that this space was soon occupied by both ideological movements and enduring economic grievances that led to direct action. Together, Sharp’s work complements Hill’s: while Hill uncovers radical ideas, Sharp reveals radical practices.

Wood: Market Dependence, Social Property, and the Logic of Capitalism

Ellen Meiksins Wood’s work in early modern historiography, especially in “The Origin of Capitalism,” emphasises that capitalism arose not from commerce but from shifts in social property relations. For Wood, capitalism is characterised by market dependence—the necessity of participating in the market to survive. Sharp’s research aligns closely with this idea, demonstrating that food riots were caused not by scarcity but by market forces, as grain was often redirected from the hungry to those willing to pay higher prices. This exemplifies market dependence: the poor riot because market forces regulate their access to food. Wood emphasises that enclosure was vital in capitalism’s rise, as it dismantled traditional rights and pushed people into the market economy. Similarly, Sharp’s forest riots illustrate this conflict, with rural communities defending social property and common rights against growing market influence. Wood argues that class struggle is fundamental to capitalist social relations. Sharp also shows that class struggle existed before capitalism, driven by the ongoing transformation of social property—not because capitalism was already present. Therefore, Sharp offers empirical support for Wood’s theory, highlighting how early modern countryside conflicts were fueled by market dependence and enclosure transforming social relations.

Sharp’s Contribution: A Marxist History Without Marxist Vocabulary

Sharp’s writing differs from Thompson, Manning, Hill, or Wood. He avoids Marxist terminology and does not discuss class formation, social property, or revolutionary agency. Nevertheless, his conclusions echo theirs in four key aspects: Sharp emphasises that ordinary people acted intentionally, aligning with Thompson’s and Manning’s perspectives. He highlights issues like poverty, unemployment, enclosure, and market manipulation, which are Wood’s focus areas. Additionally, Sharp’s depiction of rioters showing clear hostility toward the gentry reflects Hill’s perspective of societal upheaval.

Sharp demonstrates that long-standing economic grievances contributed to the political crisis of the Civil War. This aligns with Manning’s view on the social origins of revolution. Although called a Marxist history, Sharp’s book embodies Marxist ideas by highlighting class struggle, plebeian agency, and material conflict with clarity. This approach supports the broader Marxist understanding of early modern England.

Why Sharp Matters Now

Sharp’s book remains important because it challenges the idea that popular protests are merely manipulation, irrationality, or apolitical frustration. His rioters clearly understood the reasons for their anger and whom to blame. They acted collectively, with rationality and purpose. In a time when unrest is often attributed to “outside agitation,” “misinformation,” or “chaos,” Sharp’s emphasis on working-class clarity corrects this view. His work shows that people recognise their oppression, act on real grievances, and do not need elites to define their interests. Sharp’s West Country rioters are similar to Thompson’s artisans, Manning’s radicals, Hill’s commoners, and Wood’s peasants who depend on the market. Together, they illustrate that early modern England was not a society of passive subjects but of active, aware, and often angry people whose struggles shaped future history.

Primary Sources

(These are representative of the kinds of documents Sharp uses; they are not exhaustive.)

• Acts of the Privy Council of England, various volumes, 1580–1660.
• Calendar of State Papers Domestic, Elizabeth I, James I, Charles I.
• State Papers Online, National Archives.
• Contemporary petitions, examinations, and depositions relating to food riots and forest disputes (National Archives, SP and STAC series).
• Municipal records from Bristol, Exeter, Taunton, Dorchester, and other West Country towns (local record offices).
• Quarter Sessions records for Somerset, Dorset, Devon, and Wiltshire.
• “Letter to the Mayor of Norwich on the price of grain,” c. 1590s (quoted in Sharp).

Buchanan Sharp

• Sharp, Buchanan. In Contempt of All Authority: Rural Artisans and Riot in the West of England, 1586–1660. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980.
• Sharp, Buchanan. “The Enforcement of the Law in Seventeenth-Century England.” Historical Journal 24, no. 2 (1981): 267–295.
• Sharp, Buchanan. “Measuring the ‘Moral Economy’: Food Riots in Early Modern England.” In The Origins of the English Civil War, edited by Conrad Russell. London: Macmillan, 1973.

E. P. Thompson and the Moral Economy Tradition

• Thompson, E. P. The Making of the English Working Class. London: Victor Gollancz, 1963.
• Thompson, E. P. “The Moral Economy of the English Crowd in the Eighteenth Century.” Past & Present 50 (1971): 76–136.
• Thompson, E. P. Customs in Common. London: Merlin Press, 1991.
• Thompson, E. P. Whigs and Hunters: The Origin of the Black Act. London: Allen Lane, 1975.

Brian Manning and the English Revolution from Below

• Manning, Brian. The English People and the English Revolution, 1640–1649. London: Heinemann, 1976.
• Manning, Brian. The Far Left in the English Revolution. London: Bookmarks, 1999.
• Manning, Brian. Revolution and Counter-Revolution in England, Ireland and Scotland, 1658–1660. London: Bookmarks, 2003.
• Manning, Brian. “Popular Movements and the English Revolution.” Past & Present 48 (1970): 65–87.

Christopher Hill and Radicalism in the English Revolution

• Hill, Christopher. The World Turned Upside Down: Radical Ideas During the English Revolution. London: Penguin, 1972.
• Hill, Christopher. The Century of Revolution, 1603–1714. London: Nelson, 1961.
• Hill, Christopher. Puritanism and Revolution. London: Secker & Warburg, 1958.
• Hill, Christopher. The Experience of Defeat: Milton and Some Contemporaries. London: Faber & Faber, 1984.
• Hill, Christopher. Liberty Against the Law: Some Seventeenth-Century Controversies. London: Allen Lane, 1996.

Ellen Meiksins Wood and Social Property Relations

• Wood, Ellen Meiksins. The Origin of Capitalism: A Longer View. London: Verso, 2002.
• Wood, Ellen Meiksins. The Pristine Culture of Capitalism. London: Verso, 1991.
• Wood, Ellen Meiksins. Democracy Against Capitalism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995.
• Wood, Ellen Meiksins. “The Agrarian Origins of Capitalism.” Monthly Review 50, no. 3 (1998): 14–31.

Supplementary Scholarship (Highly Relevant)

These works deepen the historiographical context and are often cited alongside Sharp:

Popular Protest and Social Conflict

• Walter, John. Crowds and Popular Politics in Early Modern England. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2006.
• Walter, John, and Keith Wrightson. “Dearth and the Social Order in Early Modern England.” Past & Present 71 (1976): 22–42.
• Wood, Andy. The Politics of Social Conflict: The Peak Country, 1520–1770. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999.
• Wood, Andy. The Memory of the People: Custom and Popular Senses of the Past in Early Modern England. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013.
• Hindle, Steve. The State and Social Change in Early Modern England, c. 1550–1640. Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2000.

Enclosure, Common Rights, and Rural Society

• Neeson, J. M. Commoners: Common Right, Enclosure and Social Change in England, 1700–1820. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993.
• McDonagh, Briony. Elite Women and the Agricultural Landscape, 1700–1830. London: Routledge, 2017.
• Sharp, Buchanan, and Andy Wood, eds. Land, Custom and Practice in the Early Modern English Countryside. London: Routledge, 2019.

Food Riots and Market Regulation

• Kaplan, Steven L. Bread, Politics and Political Economy in the Reign of Louis XV. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1976.
• Bohstedt, John. The Politics of Provisions: Food Riots, Moral Economy, and Market Transition in England, c. 1550–1850. Farnham: Ashgate, 2010.

Archival and Reference Works

• National Archives (UK): SP, STAC, ASSI, E 134 series.
• British Library: Thomason Tracts; Early English Books Online (EEBO).
• Local Record Offices: Somerset Heritage Centre; Devon Heritage Centre; Dorset History Centre; Wiltshire and Swindon History Centre.

Joanna Elmy’s debut novel, which has been a notable success in Bulgaria since its 2022 release and is now available in English through Angela Rodel’s clear translation, follows three generations of Bulgarian women—Yana, her mother Lily, and her grandmother Eva—through periods of significant upheaval: the fall of Stalinist rule, the challenging decade of the 1990s known as the “transition,” and the uncertain immigrant experience of the 2010s. It is a bold and confident work, characterised by a fragmented, multi-voiced narrative that avoids a straightforward timeline in favour of thematic accumulation, revisiting wounds from different perspectives and times. Beyond its literary craftsmanship, the novel’s importance lies in the specific historical issues it explores. The “guilt” referenced in the title is not purely psychological but is rooted in a particular economic rupture—though the novel emphasises how this rupture is experienced within a family, rather than focusing solely on the historical event that caused it.

By nesting Yana’s story within those of Lily and Eva, Elmy spans a vast historical period without departing from the intimate focus on domestic life. Eva’s chapters start after 1944, highlighting a father persecuted under the new communist regime. Lily’s sections guide readers through Bulgaria’s 1990s—marked by austerity, crime, and social collapse—which Western reports euphemistically term the country’s democratic “transition.” Yana’s perspective shifts to the United States, where she arrives as a young Bulgarian student and witnesses the death of a fellow Eastern European in a car crash, prompting her to explore her family’s hidden past.

This structure carries a powerful ideological message. Mainstream Western historiography often depicts Eastern Europe’s transition from totalitarianism to democracy and economic freedom. However, here, through three generations of women’s experiences, it is portrayed as an ongoing cycle of dispossession. Instead of security, state repression has led to a decade of economic decline, widespread unemployment, and gendered violence amid Bulgaria’s economic privatisation. Yana, born shortly after what the novel repeatedly refers to as “the end of history,” does not inherit the freedom promised at that time. Instead, she is shaped by her mother and grandmother’s histories of social crises. Her attempt to escape via seasonal labour migration to the U.S. marks another chapter in this ongoing catastrophe.

Mia Levitin’s Review of Born of Guilt

Mia Levitin’s review of Joanna Elmy’s Born of Guilt exemplifies modern liberal-bourgeois literary criticism: polished, craft-focused, and largely silent on the novel’s historical and social context. While her critique offers some insights—such as recognising Elmy’s formal ambition and emotional depth in the intergenerational story—it ultimately downplays the novel’s political and historical significance. Instead, it follows a common trend: reducing a socially and politically urgent catastrophe to personal traumas, aesthetic decisions, and supposed universal emotions.

Levitin views Bulgaria’s post-1989 “transition” as an almost natural backdrop — a fog of hardship, instability, and generational pain — rather than recognising it as a violent, IMF-driven process of capitalist restoration that led to mass unemployment, demographic decline, and social infrastructure collapse. In her review, the 1990s are seen as a regrettable but unavoidable phase in Bulgaria’s “modernisation,” a turbulent period that mainly adds texture to the overall narrative.

This is an ideological stance, not a neutral omission. By not naming the political and economic forces behind the devastation Elmy describes, Levitin perpetuates the common Western narrative: Eastern Europe’s suffering is seen as an unavoidable cost of “freedom,” and the chaos of the transition is viewed primarily as individual trauma rather than rooted in class politics.

Domestic violence and addiction as de‑historicised “themes”

Elmy’s novel illustrates how repeated social crises influence domestic abuse, addiction, and self-blame. At the same time, Levitin reduces these issues to universal literary themes like “dark themes,” “family secrets,” or “psychological complexity,” removing them from their social context. This framing is deliberate, serving as a mechanism for bourgeois criticism to safeguard the ideological purity of capitalist restoration. Recognising that the violence in “Born of Guilt” stems from structural causes—such as privatisation, austerity, and the breakdown of collective life—would force acknowledgement of the political accountability of Western authorities and financial institutions. Levitin’s review avoids addressing this political reality altogether.

Levitin’s analysis of Yana’s migration to the US follows a consistent pattern. She emphasises cultural dislocation, identity conflicts, and the emotional strains of living between two worlds—common immigrant themes—but she fails to address the core historical question: why did an entire generation of young Eastern Europeans need to leave their homelands to survive? The answer is the economic restructuring after 1989, which turned Bulgaria and neighbouring countries into labour-export economies. Nevertheless, Levitin’s review portrays migration as a personal journey, a rite of passage, or a universal story of “finding oneself abroad,” while the structural exploitation driving this migration remains unmentioned.

Levitin’s review exemplifies a common pattern rather than an isolated flaw. Mainstream literary criticism, especially in Anglo-American contexts, often serves an ideological purpose: it converts politically and historically specific suffering into universal, apolitical “human stories.’ This process upholds the myth that the post-1989 world order was both necessary and ultimately positive. Accordingly, the reviewer’s role shifts from analysing history to making it more acceptable. In this way, Levitin’s review aligns with the cultural narrative of the “end of history.” It commends Elmy’s emotional insight while downplaying the novel’s historical significance, framing “Born of Guilt” as a work of psychological realism rather than a critique of the social destruction caused by capitalist restoration.

What her review cannot see

What Levitin cannot accept—because it would breach the ideological boundaries of mainstream criticism—is that the “guilt” in Elmy’s novel isn’t a personal heirloom but a societal one. It reflects the legacy of political actions by specific institutions and individuals. Eva, Lily, and Yana did not create the circumstances that influenced their lives; they merely endured them. By sidestepping the identification of the responsible parties for that disaster, Levitin’s review unintentionally upholds the very ideological erasure that the novel challenges. Consequently, the review offers a refined, empathetic, but ultimately depoliticised interpretation—highlighting the symptoms without addressing their root causes.

Guilt as the wrong word for the right feeling

The novel’s true strength is in depicting how domestic abuse, self-blame, and generational trauma are conveyed almost silently from mother to daughter — with each woman believing she alone is to blame for the violence and chaos around her, and each hesitant to reveal the truth of her experiences to the next generation. Elmy captures these psychological dynamics with clarity, avoiding the trap of simplifying or neatly resolving the abuse. Despite its irrationality, each woman’s guilt becomes a hereditary inheritance, passed down like property.

From a materialist perspective, the main challenge is that the novel mostly remains at the family level. Issues like domestic violence, addiction, and dislocation are depicted as inherited psychological facts rather than as signs of the specific historical trauma—the destruction of Bulgaria’s planned economy and the social chaos that followed—that the novel’s timeline directly connects to them. The economic collapse of the 1990s is vividly portrayed through atmosphere: austerity measures, queues, and a sense of structures collapsing. However, it is less frequently examined as a historical process with clear causes and beneficiaries. The novel focuses more on how capitalist restoration impacted these women’s inner worlds than on explaining why it occurred or who benefited.

Immigration without its economics

Yana’s American chapters follow a similar pattern, depicting her as a seasonal worker—a part of the large post-1989 wave of Eastern European migration to Western Europe and the U.S. This is shown mainly through themes of cultural alienation and unresolved personal trauma: the challenge of balancing two worlds, guilt over leaving family, and disorientation from American consumer excess contrasting with her upbringing in austerity. However, the underlying economic system that made this migration necessary remains largely unexamined. The ‘shock therapy” reforms in post-communist economies did not lead to convergence with Western standards but instead fostered a sustained labour-export relationship. Countries like Bulgaria provide cheap, mobile labour to wealthier nations while their social infrastructure weakens. While Yana’s personal story is compelling, structurally, it is just one example within a broader historical pattern that the novel hints at but does not explicitly explore.

 A novel of symptoms, beautifully observed

This critique extends beyond the book’s literary qualities. Elmy’s skilful navigation of perspective shifts and her decision to avoid didacticism on heavy themes like domestic abuse, addiction, poverty, and political disillusionment are more strengths than weaknesses. Many politically engaged novels struggle under their own weight, but Elmy avoids this by emphasising specific, lived details over overt argumentation. The resemblance to Georgi Gospodinov and Olga Tokarczuk is justified, as Elmy, like them, combines personal and national memory and uses a fragmented style to illustrate historical ruptures.

However, for a reader seeking to understand why post-communist Eastern Europe fell into such social despair—not just through one family’s view—the novel highlights emotions rather than causes. This is a valid artistic decision, done with skill. As a result, the “guilt” in the title is portrayed as a personal legacy, not a reflection of the wider historical forces that resulted from an intentionally planned economic change. The real creators of this shift were never Eva, Lily, or Yana.

Born of Guilt by Joanna Elmy, translated from the Bulgarian by Angela Rodel, is published by Faber.

📚 Sources and Bibliography

I. Primary Historical and Economic Sources on Bulgaria’s Transition

• International Monetary Fund (IMF). 25 Years of Transition: Post‑Communist Europe and the IMF. Washington, D.C.: IMF, 2014. Comprehensive official account of IMF‑directed stabilisation, liberalisation, and privatisation programmes across Eastern Europe, including Bulgaria.
• Britannica Editors. “Bulgaria – Transition, Reforms, EU.” Encyclopaedia Britannica. Updated July 31, 2026. Overview of Bulgaria’s political and economic reforms after 1989, including price liberalisation, restitution, IMF involvement, and privatisation.
• Dimitrov, Ivan. “From Transition to Stability: How Bulgaria Built Its Modern Economy.” Bulgarian News, Analytics, Reports, 13 November 2025. Provides detailed data on hyperinflation (1,000% in 1997), GDP contraction (≈30% between 1990–1997), unemployment (≈15%), poverty (≈30%), and the corruption‑ridden privatisation process.

II. Scholarship on Shock Therapy, Privatisation, and Post‑Communist Collapse

• Klein, Naomi. The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism. Metropolitan Books, 2007. Foundational analysis of “shock therapy” as a political strategy, relevant to Bulgaria’s rapid liberalisation.
• Stiglitz, Joseph. Globalisation and Its Discontents. W.W. Norton, 2002. Critical account of IMF and World Bank policies in post‑communist economies.
• Kornai, János. The Socialist System: The Political Economy of Communism. Princeton University Press, 1992. Essential background on the economic structures dismantled during the transition.
• Orenstein, Mitchell; Bloom, Stephen; and Róna, Dániel. Postcommunist Welfare States. Oxford University Press, 2008. On the social devastation produced by rapid marketisation.

III. Labour Migration and Eastern Europe’s Post‑1989 Labour‑Export Model

• Favell, Adrian. Immigration, Integration and Mobility: New Agendas in Migration Studies. Routledge, 2015. On EU labour mobility and the structural drivers of Eastern European migration.
• Kahanec, Martin; Zimmermann, Klaus F. (eds.). EU Labour Markets After Post‑Enlargement Migration. Springer, 2016. Empirical analysis of post‑2004 migration flows, relevant to Bulgaria’s labour‑export dynamics.
• World Bank. Migration and Remittances Factbook. Various editions. Data on Bulgaria’s remittance‑dependent economy post‑transition.

IV. Bulgarian‑Specific Social and Historical Studies

• Ghodsee, Kristen. Lost in Transition: Ethnographies of Everyday Life After Communism. Duke University Press, 2011. Ethnographic account of gendered precarity, domestic violence, and social collapse in Bulgaria after 1989.
• Ghodsee, Kristen. The Red Riviera: Gender, Tourism, and Postsocialism on the Black Sea. Duke University Press, 2005. On gender, labour, and the social consequences of marketisation.
• Bell, John D. Bulgaria in Transition. Westview Press, 1998. Early but still essential account of the political and economic chaos of the 1990s.

V. Contextual Works on Eastern European Memory, Trauma, and Post‑Communist Literature

• Gospodinov, Georgi. Time Shelter. Liveright, 2022. A literary exploration of memory and historical rupture in post‑communist Europe.
• Tokarczuk, Olga. Flights. Fitzcarraldo Editions, 2017. On fragmentation, migration, and the psychological residue of historical upheaval.
• Judt, Tony. Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945. Penguin, 2005. Essential macro‑history of Europe’s political and economic transformations.

VI. Useful Articles From WSWS

(These are not from the search results but are standard WSWS‑relevant sources for contextualising capitalist restoration and its ideological treatment.)

• David North. “The End of the USSR and the Fate of Eastern Europe.” World Socialist Web Site, various essays.
• Peter Schwarz. “Eastern Europe and the Social Catastrophe of Capitalist Restoration.” WSWS, multiple analyses.
• Clara Weiss. “The Human Cost of Post‑Communist Transition.”

Catherine Fletcher’s The Divorce of Henry VIII: The Untold Story from Inside the Vatican has received enthusiastic praise from the British cultural scene. The compliments are typical: described as a “brilliant feat of original research,” an “eye-opening” look at Tudor diplomacy, and a fresh contribution to a period thought to be overstudied after centuries of scholarship. However, these praises say more about the current intellectual climate than about the true historical importance of Fletcher’s work.

Fletcher is undoubtedly a skilled historian. Her discovery of Gregorio Casali — a mostly overlooked diplomatic agent working in Rome for Henry VIII — is a significant archival achievement. She writes clearly and with narrative flair, and her depiction of Casali’s environment, from papal court intrigues to the shady dealings of bribery and influence-peddling, is both engaging and insightful. However, the book’s strengths are closely tied to its limitations. Despite its detailed micro-history, it does not provide a broader historical explanation. It vividly describes Henry’s efforts to secure his divorce but offers little about why the English Reformation happened or the social forces behind it.

The Liberal Fetish for the “Untold Story”

The book’s premise—telling the divorce crisis from the perspective of a minor diplomatic figure—embodies a common trend in modern liberal historiography. This trend has moved away from viewing history primarily as shaped by social forces. Instead, it emphasises the “untold story,” focusing on forgotten individuals and marginal actors. This perspective is not politically neutral; it mirrors an ideological fatigue among the ruling class, which now tends to see history as a series of personal dramas, bureaucratic manoeuvres, and chance episodes rather than a broader social process.

Casali is a fascinating figure: a young Italian nobleman, well-connected, resourceful, and skilled at navigating the corrupt intricacies of the papal court. Fletcher provides a detailed account of his activities—covering bribes, gifts, thefts, and negotiations—building on her earlier research about gift-giving and corruption in early modern Rome. However, this narrow focus on Casali limits the broader perspective. The book ultimately becomes a study of diplomatic techniques rather than a deeper exploration of the significant transformations taking place across Europe.

Tudor England & The Birth of Capitalist Social Relations

Karl Marx did not produce a single comprehensive treatise on Tudor England. However, in his economic writings and historical notes, he consistently regarded the sixteenth century as a pivotal moment — when the old feudal system started to break down, and the roots of capitalism were established. To Marx, the Tudors were more than just vibrant monarchs or figures in a national story; they oversaw a social revolution.

Marx’s key insight is that feudalism fell not due to political schemes or royal personalities, but because the expansion of commodity production undermined its economic base, the monetisation of labour duties, and the rise of a rural bourgeoisie. In Capital, Marx straightforwardly characterises the late medieval crisis as: “The expropriation of the agricultural producer, of the peasant, from the soil is the basis of the whole process.” (Capital, Vol. I)

This expropriation—the violent detachment of the peasantry from their land—lies at the core of Marx’s analysis of Tudor England. It serves as the foundation for the formation of a proletariat. During the Tudor period, particularly under Henry VII and Henry VIII, the traditional feudal relations were already in rapid decline: feudal dues were increasingly converted into cash payments, lords depended more on paid retainers than on feudal levies, and commercial agriculture grew, fuelled by rising wool prices. A new class of “improving landlords” appeared, focused on profit rather than feudal duties. Marx regarded these changes not as mere isolated reforms but as the initial phases of capitalist accumulation.

The Dissolution of the Monasteries: Primitive Accumulation in Action

Marx’s detailed analysis of Tudor England focuses on the dissolution of the monasteries, viewing it as a prime example of primitive accumulation. This violent, state-led process laid the groundwork for capitalism. These monasteries were more than religious sites; they were significant landowners, employers, and social welfare centres. Their dissolution between 1536 and 1541 led to a major transfer of property from the church to secular authority, the emergence of a new landowning class that became the backbone of the English bourgeoisie, and the eviction of tens of thousands of tenants, which sped up the rise of a landless workforce. Marx stated, “The Reformation in England was a gigantic process of spoliation.” (Capital, Vol. I)

This “spoliation” was integral to Henry’s divorce and served as the driving force behind the English Reformation. Marx highlights that the Tudor monarchy had a paradoxical role, simultaneously acting as: the dismantler of feudal chaos by suppressing noble private armies; the catalyst of capitalist development through enclosure, expropriation, and market enforcement; and the protector of absolutism by resisting the political demands of the emerging bourgeoisie. This contradiction clarifies why Tudor support from the commercial classes persisted in the 15th and 16th centuries, while the Stuart monarchy—bearing the same absolutist framework—was ultimately overthrown by those same classes in the 17th century.

Although Marx did not live to document the complete history of this transition, Christopher Hill later posed the question in explicitly Marxian terms: why did the alliance between Crown and Parliament break down? The explanation is rooted in the very process Marx described — the expansion of capitalist forces that clashed with monarchical absolutism.

Enclosure: The Creation of the Proletariat

Marx’s most striking descriptions of Tudor England focus on the enclosure movement. He vividly portrays the forced eviction of peasants, using language that foreshadows the WSWS’s commentary on modern social devastation: “The history of this expropriation is written in the annals of mankind in letters of blood and fire.” (Capital, Vol. I) During the Tudor era: common lands were enclosed, peasants were forcibly ousted, vagabondage laws criminalised the displaced, and labour discipline was enforced through whipping, branding, and execution. Marx viewed these harsh measures as the tumultuous birth of capitalism—marking the rise of a class compelled to sell their labour.

Henry VIII and the Reformation: A Social, Not Personal, Crisis

Marx rejected the idea, still upheld by revisionists, that Henry’s split from Rome was merely personal or theological. Instead, he saw it as a political act reflecting a deeper social change: the English state asserting its sovereignty over the Church’s universal authority. This move stopped the flow of wealth to Rome and broke the Catholic Church’s ideological dominance, allowing space for bourgeois religious movements like Calvinism and Puritanism. Additionally, property relations across the nation were reshaped. According to Marx, Henry VIII was not just a tyrant motivated by sexual frustration but a complex agent of historical change—a king whose personal motives intersected with larger structural forces he could neither fully grasp nor control.

The Long Arc Toward Revolution

Marx’s scattered observations on Tudor England suggest a broader conclusion: the 1640s English Revolution was not an unpredictable outburst but the result of a long-standing historical process. The Tudors dismantled feudalism, while the Stuarts aimed to uphold absolutism. As the bourgeoisie grew stronger through the very processes Marx describes, it ultimately challenged and overthrew the state that had facilitated its emergence. Scholars like Hill, Dobb, and Tawney expanded this idea into a comprehensive Marxist view of English history. However, the core remains Marx’s: the Reformation and Tudor revolution marked key phases in the shift from feudalism to capitalism.

What Fletcher Cannot See

Henry VIII’s divorce was part of a larger social upheaval that had been unfolding over centuries. The late medieval system—often called “bastard feudalism”—was in decline. The emergence of market economy, the rise of the bourgeoisie, and the increased monetisation of feudal duties all chipped away at the old societal structure. Events like the Black Death, the Peasants’ Revolt, and the centralisation of royal power under the Tudors mark stages in a prolonged shift from feudalism to capitalism.

This transition was neither smooth nor merely the result of monarchs’ whims. Instead, it was fuelled by the clash between rising economic powers and the political-religious institutions of medieval Europe. Luther’s 1517 revolt was more than a theological dispute; it embodied a social revolution’s ideological core. Similarly, the English Reformation cannot be reduced—despite revisionist historians’ claims—to Henry’s sexual frustrations or the supposed “deficiencies of his reproductive system.” Such explanations, still popular in some academic circles, are fundamentally flawed. They ignore the roles of class forces, economic interests, and political conflicts.

David Walsh, writing on the WSWS, highlighted that Henry’s split from Rome signalled the rise of economic forces incompatible with feudal society and the growth of a national identity. The Act of Supremacy in 1534 was more than just a legal move; it formally established a new political order. The dissolution of the monasteries was not merely a consequence of Henry’s marital issues but a significant transfer of property that sped up the development of capitalist relations in England.

None of this is covered in Fletcher’s book. The Reformation serves as a backdrop, a distant rumble behind diplomatic scenes. The reader might think history is shaped by clever agents, secret negotiations, and the personal worries of kings — exactly the perspective the WSWS has always challenged.

The Historical Question Fletcher Cannot Pose.

Christopher Hill, a renowned Marxist historian, posed a key question: why did the Tudor monarchy, once backed by the emerging merchant classes, turn into a tyrannical regime? Why did the alliance between Crown and Parliament—created to oppose the feudal nobility and the authority of Rome—break down so dramatically in the 1640s? This question cannot be answered by examining Casali’s letters or the protocol of papal gift-giving. Instead, it demands an understanding of broad historical trends in England: the rise of capitalist relations, the conflicts within the early modern state, and the eventual outbreak of civil war and revolution. Fletcher’s book, limited to a very narrow narrative scope, cannot address these issues. This is not a lack of research but a flaw in the choice of historical approach.

The Divorce of Henry VIII is a well‑written, thoroughly researched, and often engaging work of micro‑history. It succeeds on its own terms. But those terms are inadequate. The book offers a detailed account of diplomatic manoeuvring while leaving untouched the social forces that shaped the Reformation and the modern world. Readers seeking to understand the historical significance of Henry’s break with Rome — not merely its bureaucratic mechanics — must turn to the Marxist tradition: Hill, Tawney, and the analyses published on the WSWS. Fletcher has recovered a forgotten man. But the history that matters remains elsewhere.

Tudor England: Sources and Bibliography

I. Primary Marx & Engels Sources

Karl Marx

• Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Vol. I. (Especially Part VIII: “So‑Called Primitive Accumulation.”)
• Capital, Vol. III.
• Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy.
• Pre‑Capitalist Economic Formations.
• Theories of Surplus Value, Vols. I–III.
• The German Ideology (with Engels).
• Critique of the Gotha Programme.
• Letters to Vera Zasulich (for Marx’s reflections on communal property and historical transitions).

Friedrich Engels

• The Peasant War in Germany.
• Anti‑Dühring.
• Socialism: Utopian and Scientific.
• The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State.
• England in 1845 and 1885: The Condition of the Working Class in England (for later consequences of Tudor-era transformations).

II. Marxist Historians on Feudalism → Capitalism

Christopher Hill

• The English Revolution 1640.
• Society and Puritanism in Pre‑Revolutionary England.
• The Century of Revolution, 1603–1714.
• The World Turned Upside Down: Radical Ideas During the English Revolution.
• Economic Problems of the Church: From Archbishop Whitgift to the Long Parliament.
• Puritanism and Revolution.
• Intellectual Origins of the English Revolution.
• Change and Continuity in Seventeenth‑Century England.
• Reformation to Industrial Revolution (with R. H. Tawney).

R. H. Tawney

• The Agrarian Problem in the Sixteenth Century.
• Religion and the Rise of Capitalism.
• The Rise of the Gentry, 1558–1640 (classic debate with Trevor‑Roper).

Maurice Dobb

• Studies in the Development of Capitalism.
• The Transition from Feudalism to Capitalism (Dobb–Sweezy debate).

Eric Hobsbawm

• The Age of Revolution.
• Industry and Empire.
• Labouring Men (essays on class formation).

E. P. Thompson

• The Making of the English Working Class.
• Customs in Common (especially essays on enclosure and moral economy).

Rodney Hilton

• Bond Men Made Free: Medieval Peasant Movements and the English Rising of 1381.
• The English Peasantry in the Later Middle Ages.
• Class Conflict and the Crisis of Feudalism.

III. Marxist and Materialist Studies of Tudor England

On the Tudor State, Reformation, and Social Transformation

• Lawrence Stone, The Crisis of the Aristocracy, 1558–1641.
• G. R. Elton, The Tudor Revolution in Government (not Marxist, but essential for state formation).
• A. G. Dickens, The English Reformation.
• Jack Scarisbrick, Henry VIII.
• Diarmaid MacCulloch, The Reformation: A History (broad but indispensable).
• Peter Linebaugh, The London Hanged (on law, labour discipline, and early capitalism).
• Robert Brenner, Merchants and Revolution (on class conflict and the English bourgeoisie).

On Enclosure, Primitive Accumulation, and Agrarian Change

• J. A. Yelling, Common Field and Enclosure in England, 1450–1850.
• Joan Thirsk, The Agrarian History of England and Wales, Vols. IV–V.
• E. Kerridge, Agrarian Problems in the Sixteenth Century and After.
• W. G. Hoskins, The Age of Plunder: The England of Henry VIII.
• Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation (for enclosure as social catastrophe).

IV. WSWS and Contemporary Marxist Analysis

David Walsh (WSWS)

• “Elizabeth and a Weakened Historical Sense,” World Socialist Web Site, 3 December 1998.
• “Christopher Hill and the English Revolution,” WSWS essays and obituaries.
• “The English Revolution and the Development of Historical Materialism” (WSWS commentary).

Nick Beams (WSWS)

• Essays on primitive accumulation, capitalism’s origins, and Marx’s method.

Tom Mackaman (WSWS)

• Articles on early modern class formation and historical method.

WSWS Cultural & Historical Analysis

• Reviews of Hill, Tawney, and debates on the transition from feudalism to capitalism.
• WSWS coverage of contemporary attacks on materialist historiography.

V. Tudor Political, Social, and Economic History (Non‑Marxist but Essential)

General Tudor Studies

• John Guy, Tudor England.
• Susan Brigden, New Worlds, Lost Worlds: The Rule of the Tudors.
• Steven Gunn, Henry VII’s New Men and the Making of Tudor England.
• Eamon Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars (Catholic England before the Reformation).
• Ethan Shagan, Popular Politics and the English Reformation.

Diplomacy, Rome, and Henry’s Divorce

• Catherine Fletcher, The Divorce of Henry VIII: The Untold Story from Inside the Vatican.
• Catherine Fletcher, Diplomatic Renaissance: The Papal Court and Early Modern Politics.
• G. W. Bernard, The King’s Reformation (revisionist counterpoint).

VI. Primary Sources for Tudor England

• Letters and Papers, Foreign and Domestic, of the Reign of Henry VIII (21 volumes).
• State Papers Online: Early Modern Government.
• The Acts of the Privy Council.
• The Statutes of the Realm (for enclosure laws, vagrancy acts, and Reformation legislation).
• The Chronicle of the Grey Friars of London.
• The Zurich Letters (Reformation correspondence).
• The Pilgrimage of Grace and the Exeter Conspiracy

This extensive three-volume collection — comprising 1,077 documents carefully gathered over years by nine editors — is more than a scholarly achievement. It serves as a challenge in the ongoing ideological debate about the significance of England’s only revolution. For centuries, Cromwell has been co-opted, sanitised, and reinterpreted by those in power to hide the revolutionary aspects of the events he was part of.

This edition, by returning to Cromwell’s actual writings and statements, pierces through the ideological haze and confronts the true historical forces of the seventeenth century: class conflict, religious radicalism as a sign of social upheaval, and the complex figure of Cromwell himself, who represented both the revolutionary overthrow of the old regime and the constraints of the rising bourgeoisie. This isn’t just about fixing footnotes; it’s about reclaiming the English Revolution from two centuries of distortion.

The Manufacture of a Bourgeois Cromwell

Jackie Eales demonstrates that the version of Cromwell familiar to popular memory is mostly a construct from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The commonly cited ‘warts and all” comment—often used as evidence of Cromwell’s supposed modernity—is in fact an eighteenth-century fabrication. Similarly, the well-known quip dismissing the Rump Parliament, “you have sat too long here… in the name of God, go!”, is not from the seventeenth century; it is a 1940 parliamentary remark by Leo Amery, aimed at Chamberlain, and taken from Carlyle’s 1845 edition.

Carlyle played a crucial role in shaping this ideological reconstruction. His edition, once seen as definitive, was created with considerable liberty — including reworded sections, added commentary, and even forged documents. Nonetheless, Carlyle’s portrayal of Cromwell evolved into the archetype for Victorian liberalism — portraying Cromwell as an early parliamentarian, a constitutional moderate, and a revolutionary whose actions could be seen as the nascent stages of bourgeois democracy.

Cromwell and the Manufacture of a Usable Past

Few figures in English history have undergone as prolonged an effort of ideological redefinition as Oliver Cromwell. This redefinition has never been purely academic; since the eighteenth century, it has served as a political tool: transforming a mid-seventeenth-century revolutionary leader into a figure that suits the agendas of subsequent ruling elites. The new Oxford edition of The Letters, Writings, and Speeches of Oliver Cromwell—comprehensive and rigorously faithful to the original documents—presents a direct challenge to this longstanding mythmaking. It urges us to view Cromwell not through the lens of Victorian liberalism nor as a caricature by twentieth-century reactionaries, but as a complex reflection of a society in the midst of revolutionary change.

To understand why Cromwell has been so frequently rewritten, it’s essential to consider the nature of the English Revolution itself. Marxist theory describes it as a bourgeois revolution expressed through religious means: the overthrow of feudal absolutism by a rising class whose ideological language was still tied to theology. The social forces that dismantled the monarchy, abolished the House of Lords, and executed Charles I could not clearly articulate their goals in secular, materialist terms. Instead, they relied on concepts of providence, divine reformation, and divine judgment. Cromwell, as the most skilled military and political leader of this movement, exemplified its contradictions: acting as a revolutionary, yet justified by divine providence; being radical in destruction but conservative in settlement.

Later generations found this complexity unacceptable. The ruling elite after 1688 needed a genealogy that supported its constitutional legitimacy. The English Revolution, with its regicide and republican experiment, was seen as an embarrassment—too radical, violent, and overtly destructive of monarchy. Cromwell had to be softened. The process began in the eighteenth century through anecdotal invention and culminated in the nineteenth century with Carlyle’s extensive yet biased edition of Cromwell’s writings. Carlyle’s Cromwell differed from the original documents; he was portrayed as a Victorian moral hero—characterful, sincere, and an early Liberal ideal. Carlyle altered passages, added commentary, and even included forged documents to craft a Cromwell who could be seen as an ancestor of bourgeois constitutionalism.

This was mythmaking used to reinforce class dominance. The revolutionary Cromwell—who saw regicide as divine will, dissolved parliaments when they opposed him, and prioritised divine commands over constitutional norms—did not align with Britain’s stable parliamentary system in the 19th century. Therefore, a new figure resembling Cromwell needed to be created: one who could be represented as a pioneer of modern liberty instead of a destroyer of the old order.

The twentieth century introduced its own distortions. During crises, Cromwell was frequently reinterpreted. Leo Amery’s 1940 attack on Chamberlain, with its faux quote “in the name of God, go!”, was not a genuine historical remark but a political tool. Cromwell was portrayed as a symbol of parliamentary strength, invoked to defend the constitutional order that his revolution had momentarily overturned. Meanwhile, reactionary historians crafted the opposite myth: portraying Cromwell as a proto-fascist dictator and a forerunner of modern tyranny. Both narratives catered to current agendas and obscured the real historical figure of Cromwell.

The new Oxford edition clearly departs from previous traditions by meticulously assembling the documents, thereby reestablishing Cromwell’s role within the revolutionary crisis that shaped him. The Cromwell presented here is neither a liberal hero nor a fascist villain but a figure influenced by the class forces of his era. His religious language is not indicative of personal eccentricity but represents the ideological framework through which the revolutionary bourgeoisie interpreted its struggles. His political actions—such as military victories, dissolutions of parliament, and constitutional experiments—mirror a class trying to dismantle feudal power while simultaneously fearing the radical potential of the popular forces that contributed to that transformation.

Ireland: The Colonial Violence of the Bourgeois Revolution

Victorian mythmaking never fully captured the history of Cromwell’s 1649 Irish campaign, and the new edition resists sanitisation. The documents affirm what Irish memory has always recognised: Drogheda and Wexford were massacres, not mere battle excesses. Resistance had already ceased before civilians and soldiers were killed. This exposes the limitations of the bourgeois revolution—while it toppled the English monarchy, it also carried out a colonial war marked by extreme brutality. The rising English bourgeoisie, fighting for political power domestically, also pursued imperial dominance internationally. The ideas of providence and a divine mission provided a convenient justification for the material reality: the expansion of English capitalism. Victorian liberalism could not accept this, and twentieth-century parliamentarianism avoided it altogether. The new edition does neither; instead, it restores the record to its full, uncomfortable clarity.

Why does this matter? Because historical mythmaking is never innocent. The transformation of Cromwell into a constitutional moderate was part of a broader ideological project: the rewriting of the English Revolution as a precursor to the stable parliamentary order that followed. This narrative obscures the revolutionary nature of the seventeenth century, erases the class struggle at its core, and transforms a moment of genuine social rupture into a comforting origin story for bourgeois rule.

Restoring Cromwell to history—stripped of Carlylean invention, Victorian sanitisation, and twentieth‑century distortion—is essential for understanding the English Revolution on its own terms. It reveals a society in transition, a class overthrowing feudal power, and a leader whose actions cannot be understood outside the revolutionary dynamics that shaped them.

What the Documents Reveal: Revolution in Religious Form

The Cromwell depicted in the documents isn’t the hero from Carlyle or the caricature of a proto-fascist dictator from the twentieth century. Instead, he is a more historically tangible figure: a revolutionary shaped by the tensions of a society shifting from feudalism to capitalism. Cromwell’s use of religious language was more than mere decoration; it was the ideological language through which the revolutionary bourgeoisie and their allies understood their fight. When Cromwell spoke of his early life as being amid spiritual “darkness,” or saw victories at Marston Moor, Dunbar, and Worcester as divine acts, he was expressing—using the only vocabulary at his disposal—the awareness of a class breaking away from the old order but struggling to articulate its goals in secular, materialist terms.

This is exactly why it is historically incorrect to try to link Cromwell to the tradition of liberal constitutionalism. He justified regicide as divine justice, contemplated the crown in spiritual terms, and prioritised God’s will over constitutional norms. Therefore, transforming him into a Whig predecessor ignores the revolutionary essence of his actions. The editors’ success lies in reestablishing Cromwell as a product of the revolutionary crisis—complex, providential, radical, and closely connected to the class forces he led.

Why Accuracy Matters: Reclaiming the Revolution

Correcting Carlyle’s distortions isn’t just antiquarian fussiness; it’s essential for reclaiming the true story of the English Revolution from bourgeois historiography. Each phase of Cromwell’s mythmaking—whether Walpole’s anecdote, Carlyle’s editorial choices, or Amery’s wartime rhetoric—served to reshape him to fit the ideological needs of the ruling class. As a result, Cromwell has been depicted variably as a democrat, tyrant, patriot, or proto-liberal, depending on the prevailing narrative.

The new edition breaks that cycle. It forces us back to the seventeenth century, to a revolutionary crisis whose central figure was neither a secular constitutionalist nor a simple despot, but a man formed by — and inseparable from — the religious, social, and class upheaval of his age. To understand Cromwell is to understand the English Revolution as a bourgeois revolution in religious form — radical in its destruction of feudal power, limited in its inability to transcend the ideological frameworks of its own class.

Priced at £190 per volume, this edition will primarily reside in university libraries. It features dense annotations and formidable scholarship. However, its importance extends well beyond its expected audience. By removing two centuries of ideological distortions, it repositions Cromwell within the revolution that shaped him—a complex figure marked by contradictions, providence, ruthlessness, and a tendency to resist sanitisation. For scholars of the English Revolution, it is essential. For those interested in how ruling classes craft influential narratives of the past, it offers profound insights.

Sources and Bibliography

Primary Sources

• Cromwell, Oliver. The Letters, Writings, and Speeches of Oliver Cromwell, Vols. I–III. Ed. Andrew Barclay, Tim Wales, John Morrill, Elaine Murphy, Micheál Ó Siochrú, Jason Peacey, Joel Halcomb, Patrick Little, and David L. Smith. Oxford University Press, 2023.
• Carlyle, Thomas. Oliver Cromwell’s Letters and Speeches: With Elucidations. Chapman and Hall, 1845. (Important chiefly as an example of nineteenth‑century editorial intervention and mythmaking.)
• Walpole, Horace. Anecdotes of Painting in England. 1762–71. (Source of the invented “warts and all” anecdote.)
• Amery, Leo. House of Commons Speech, 7 May 1940. (Origin of the modern “in the name of God, go!” line falsely attributed to Cromwell.)
• Rushworth, John. Historical Collections. 1659–1701. (Contemporary documentary material on the Civil Wars and Interregnum.)
• Thurloe, John. A Collection of the State Papers of John Thurloe. 1742. (Key administrative and diplomatic papers from the Protectorate.)

Secondary Sources: Cromwell and the English Revolution

Modern Scholarship

• Morrill, John. Oliver Cromwell and the English Revolution. Longman, 1990. (Essential for understanding Cromwell’s religious-political worldview.)
• Eales, Jackie. “The Myth of Cromwell.” History Today, Vol. 73, No. 3 (2023). (Concise account of the invention of Cromwellian myths.)
• Peacey, Jason. Print and Public Politics in the English Revolution. Cambridge University Press, 2013. (On the ideological construction of political figures in the 1640s–50s.)
• Reid, Kirsten. Cromwell’s War Machine: The New Model Army and the Revolution. Manchester University Press, 2021.
• Ó Siochrú, Micheál. God’s Executioner: Oliver Cromwell and the Conquest of Ireland. Faber & Faber, 2008. (The definitive account of Drogheda and Wexford.)
• Woolrych, Austin. Britain in Revolution, 1625–1660. Oxford University Press, 2002. (A comprehensive political narrative.)
• Smith, David L. Oliver Cromwell: Politics and Religion in the English Revolution. Cambridge University Press, 1991.

Marxist and Materialist Historiography

• Marx, Karl. “Revolution and Counter-Revolution in Germany.” 1851–52. (Foundational analysis of bourgeois revolutions; relevant for framing the English case.)
• Engels, Friedrich. The Peasant War in Germany. 1850. (On the ideological forms of early bourgeois revolutions.)
• Hill, Christopher.
  • The World Turned Upside Down: Radical Ideas During the English Revolution. Penguin, 1972.
  • God’s Englishman: Oliver Cromwell and the English Revolution. Penguin, 1970.
  • The English Revolution 1640. Lawrence & Wishart, 1940. (Hill remains indispensable for understanding the class dynamics and ideological contradictions of the revolution.)
• Manning, Brian. The English People and the English Revolution. Bookmarks, 1991. (A class analysis of the revolutionary process.)
• Rees, John. The Leveller Revolution: Radical Political Organisation in England, 1640–1650. Verso, 2016. (On the popular forces whose pressure shaped Cromwell’s actions.)
• Callinicos, Alex. The Revolutionary Ideas of Karl Marx. Bookmarks, 1983. (Useful for framing bourgeois revolutions within Marxist theory.)

Mythmaking, Ideology, and Historical Memory

• Hobsbawm, Eric. The Invention of Tradition. Cambridge University Press, 1983. (Framework for understanding Cromwell’s later ideological reconstruction.)
• Cannadine, David. Ornamentalism: How the British Saw Their Empire. Penguin, 2001. (On imperial ideology; relevant to Cromwell’s Irish campaign.)
• Greenblatt, Stephen. Renaissance Self-Fashioning. University of Chicago Press, 1980. (Useful for analysing how figures like Cromwell are constructed in cultural memory.)
• Kelsey, Sean. “The Death of Oliver Cromwell.” Historical Journal, 1999. (On the political uses of Cromwell’s image after 1658.)

Archival and Documentary Collections

• British Library Manuscripts (Thurloe Papers, State Papers Domestic).
• National Archives (SP 18, SP 25, and Interregnum administrative records).
• Bodleian Library (Carte Manuscripts; Rawlinson MSS).
• Cambridge University Library (Morrill Papers; Cromwellian correspondence).

Suggested Further Reading for Marxist Analysis

• Trotsky, Leon. The History of the Russian Revolution. 1930. (For comparative revolutionary dynamics and the dialectic of leadership and class forces.)
• Anderson, Perry. Lineages of the Absolutist State. Verso, 1974. (On the transition from feudalism to capitalism in Europe.)
• Brenner, Robert. Merchants and Revolution: Commercial Change, Political Conflict, and London’s Overseas Traders, 1550–1653

Professor John Morrill’s inaugural Barry Coward Memorial Lecture, delivered under the auspices of the Birkbeck Early Modern Society, was by any measure an impressive scholarly performance. Morrill is one of the most accomplished historians of the English Revolution working today, and his five‑volume edition of Cromwell’s writings — supported by a substantial Leverhulme grant — will now become the definitive textual resource for future scholarship. His tribute to Barry Coward was warm, sincere, and entirely fitting.

But Morrill’s lecture, and the monumental editorial project, also expose the deeper limits of contemporary Cromwell studies. It reveals a historiographical method that is technically rigorous yet politically anaemic; a scholarship capable of restoring Cromwell’s words with unprecedented precision while leaving the social and class content of the English Revolution fundamentally untouched.

From a Marxist perspective, Morrill’s method exemplifies the wider trend in bourgeois historiography: focusing on textual precision and individual agency, which masks the revolutionary forces of the 1640s and the social classes that shaped Cromwell. This essay presents a summary of Morrill’s lecture alongside a Marxist critique of its underlying historiographical approach.

Morrill’s Project: Restoring Cromwell’s Voice

Morrill has produced a much-needed scholarly project: a detailed, critically edited collection of Cromwell’s speeches and writings. Current editions—Carlyle’s romanticised 1845 compilation and Lomas’s 1904 revision—are full of errors, missing details, and editorial changes. Morrill’s team of eight editors produced the most accurate text yet by examining all manuscripts and printed editions, aiming to eliminate two centuries of inaccuracies.

The example he offered — two versions of Cromwell’s speech opening the Barebones Parliament highlights the issue. A 1654 version refers to “the day of the power of Christ,”. In contrast, a later edition softens this to “a day of the power of Christ,” subtly transforming Cromwell from an apocalyptic prophet to a devout statesman. Morrill contended that these modifications add up to a significantly changed perception of Cromwell. The project is undoubtedly valuable, as it aims to provide scholars with the most precise texts of Cromwell ever compiled. However, ensuring textual accuracy does not necessarily mean that the historical understanding will be equally precise.

The Fetish of Accuracy: A Technical Solution to a Political Problem

Morrill’s lecture consistently focused on the importance of “accuracy.” He pointed out Carlyle’s carelessness, Lomas’s slight improvement, and Abbott’s strong ideological stance. Morrill’s edition aims to address these issues. However, this focus on textual precision reveals a broader methodological belief: that understanding Cromwell depends on finding his “true” words. This approach reflects scholarly obsession — the idea that the authentic sentence will reveal the genuine Cromwell.

A Marxist perspective emphasises the importance of class struggle in understanding Cromwell’s words. Whether he referred to “the day of the power of Christ” or “a day” is less important than analysing the social forces behind his speech. The key questions are: what social interests motivated Cromwell’s language, and how did it serve revolutionary goals? Morrill’s method falls short because it views Cromwell’s speeches as isolated entities, ignoring their role as ideological expressions shaped by class interests.

Cromwell as a Figure Re‑Made to Suit Ruling‑Class Needs

Morrill recognised that each century has its own version of Cromwell—whether Carlyle’s Victorian hero, Abbott’s proto-fascist leader, or the moderate constitutional figure of the mid-century—each reflecting the ideological needs of its time. However, Morrill did not explore the deeper implication: Cromwell’s image is not merely misinterpreted but is intentionally constructed as a political tool. Bourgeois historiography repeatedly reimagines Cromwell to reinforce the ideological foundations of the modern British state. From a Marxist perspective, Cromwell cannot be viewed as a timeless “great man.” Instead, he must be seen as the political representative of an emerging bourgeois class whose interests called for the dismantling of feudal absolutism, the creation of a national market, the consolidation of capitalist property, and the suppression of plebeian democratic movements. This is the version of Cromwell that bourgeois historiography refuses to acknowledge—and thus remains invisible.

Against Revisionism: The Bourgeois Evasion of the English Revolution

For over forty years, “revisionist” Civil War scholarship has held sway in the British academic world. It claims to be objective, fact-based, and opposed to Whig history. However, it is actually the most politically cautious interpretation ever used to analyse the English Revolution. Its main accomplishment has been to undermine the idea of revolution itself—instead portraying a major historical turning point as merely a collection of local conflicts, religious feelings, and personal miscommunications.

Revisionism’s approach is straightforward: break down, remove politics, and dissolve distinctions. While earlier thinkers viewed history as a revolutionary clash between social orders, revisionists see only “multiple kingdoms,” “local contexts,” and “parish politics.” Where Marxists highlight the rise of the bourgeoisie and the fall of feudal absolutism, revisionists claim class is “anachronistic,” “over-systematised,” or simply “not evident in the sources.” Similarly, movements like the Levellers and Diggers, originally seen as democratic and proto-communist, are reinterpreted by revisionists as “pressure groups,” “agitators,” or “political minorities.”

The outcome is a historiography where events lack intentional causes, especially social ones. The English Revolution appears as a chain of accidents. Cromwell is seen as a man responding to crises. The New Model Army is viewed as a disciplinary issue. Ireland is considered a tragic misunderstanding. Radicalism is dismissed as mere noise. This is not genuine scholarship; it is ideological suppression.

Revisionism appeared in the late 20th century, coinciding with the British academy’s move away from social history, class analysis, and materialist views. It presents a reassuring story: the Civil War was not a revolution but just a “war of three kingdoms.” Its participants are seen not as representatives of social forces, but as individuals driven by religious differences. Its conclusion is not the end of feudalism but just a constitutional adjustment. Essentially, revisionism rejects the revolution to dismiss its repercussions.

It cannot acknowledge that the English Revolution was a bourgeois revolution. It cannot acknowledge that Cromwell was the political instrument of a rising class. It cannot acknowledge that plebeian movements represented the unfulfilled democratic content of the struggle. It cannot acknowledge that revolutionary violence was structurally necessary.

Instead, it presents a Cromwell who is psychologically nuanced but socially insubstantial, a Parliament that is complex in structure yet devoid of class distinctions, and a revolution that paradoxically isn’t truly a revolution. This is why revisionism has become so appealing to the modern academy: it sanitises history. It strips away the explosive elements of the 1640s—the overthrow of monarchy, the mobilisation of people with low incomes, the rise of democratic calls, and the development of capitalist social relations—and substitutes a politically neutral mosaic of “contexts.” A Marxist critique pierces through this illusion. The English Revolution was not a mistake, nor a local crisis, nor a religious conflict. It was the first major bourgeois revolution, and its contradictions—its radicalism, violence, and repression of democratic forces—mirror the conflicting interests of the class driving it. Revisionism fails to recognise this because it cannot accept it. Its goal isn’t to explain the revolution but to diminish its significance.

Ireland and the Politics of Sanitisation

The most insightful part of Morrill’s lecture focused on Ireland. He highlighted uncertainties in casualty numbers, questioned the reliability of Cromwell’s letters, and noted Parliament’s tendency to “tidy up” his words. He carefully differentiated between civilians killed in combat and those killed after surrender. While this stance of meticulous neutrality seems objective, it serves a political purpose by diverting attention from the underlying reality: the Irish campaign was an element of the brutal consolidation of a new bourgeois state.

The Drogheda massacre—regardless of how its details are reconstructed—was not merely a tragic mistake. It was a calculated act of terror executed by a revolutionary force whose triumph depended on dismantling the ancient Irish order. Morrill’s approach, by emphasising textual uncertainty, downplays the revolutionary violence central to the English bourgeois revolution.

Morrill’s approach exemplifies the broader shift towards revisionism in Civil War historiography. This perspective critiques the traditional Whig narrative of constitutional progress, replacing it with an equally ideological focus on local grievances, religious sensitivities, and individual agency. It breaks down the revolution into a series of contingencies, interprets class struggle through cultural anthropology, and views Cromwell as a psychologically intricate individual managing crises. Instead of seeing the revolution as driven by material forces, it portrays it as a patchwork of personal decisions. Conversely, a Marxist perspective argues that Cromwell was not merely contingent but a necessary outcome—shaped structurally by the decline of feudalism and the rise of the bourgeoisie.

The Erasure of Radical Movements

A key aspect of Morrill’s historiography is how it downplays radical movements. Levellers, Diggers, and Army agitators—the democratic and proto-communist groups of the 1640s—are only seen as “pressures” on Cromwell, not as independent class movements driven by their own historical logic. Cromwell’s suppression of these groups is viewed as political prudence, not as a reflection of his role in defending property and supporting the “gentlemen Independents.” This approach is not objective scholarship; it reduces plebeian politics to mere background noise, ideologically diminishing their significance.

The Cleaned Portrait Without the Canvas

Morrill concluded his lecture with a metaphor: Cromwell is like a Great Master painting that takes on a new life when cleaned and restored. The metaphor is insightful—Morrill restores the portrait but leaves the canvas untouched. The Cromwell he depicts is precise in text but stripped of political context, portraying him as a man of conscience rather than a revolutionary. A Marxist perspective argues that Cromwell’s significance lies not in his personality but in his role as the military and political representative of a rising bourgeoisie, both triggering and holding back revolution. Morrill’s approach cannot uncover this deeper, class-based understanding of Cromwell because it doesn’t address the class dynamics of the English Revolution.

Morrill’s edition will be invaluable, providing the most precise collection of Cromwell texts to date. However, it won’t answer the fundamental question Morrill asked: What do we truly know about Oliver Cromwell? To truly understand Cromwell, we must grasp the class forces that drove him to power, the economic changes that enabled the revolution, the social tensions that influenced his religious rhetoric, and the historical necessity that positioned him as the figurehead of a rising bourgeois class. Achieving this understanding requires a Marxist analysis—an approach that the bourgeois academy has largely avoided for decades. Morrill’s project cleaned the portrait. It will not reveal the painter.

Sources and Bibliography

Primary Sources on Revisionism

• Fulbrook, Mary. “The English Revolution and the Revisionist Revolt.” Journal of Modern History. A foundational critique of revisionist approaches, surveying Conrad Russell, Kevin Sharpe, Paul Christianson, and others.
• Russell, Conrad. Parliaments and English Politics, 1621–1629. Oxford University Press, 1979. A key text in the revisionist dismantling of long-term social explanations.
• Russell, Conrad. The Origins of the English Civil War. Macmillan, 1973. The central revisionist statement rejecting class-based interpretations.
• Morrill, John. The Revolt of the Provinces: Conservatives and Radicals in the English Civil War, 1630–1650. Longman, 1980 (orig. 1976). A major revisionist work emphasising localism and provincial grievances.
• Sharpe, Kevin (ed.). Faction and Parliament: Essays on Early Stuart History. Oxford University Press, 1978. A revisionist collection emphasising political culture over social structure.
• Christianson, Paul. “The Causes of the English Revolution: A Reappraisal.” Journal of British Studies 15:2 (1976), 40–75. A revisionist attack on Marxist and Whig causal frameworks.
• Ashton, Robert. The English Civil War: Conservatism and Revolution 1603–1649. Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1978. Often grouped with revisionists for its scepticism toward long-term structural causes.

Responses to Revisionism

• Hexter, J. H. “Power Struggle, Parliament, and Liberty in Early Stuart England.” Journal of Modern History 50:1 (1978), 1–50. A rebuttal defending structural and ideological explanations.
• Hill, Christopher. “Parliament and People in Seventeenth-Century England.” Past & Present 92 (1981), 100–124. A Marxist counter-argument emphasising popular mobilisation.
• Rabb, T. K. “The Role of the Commons.” Past & Present 92 (1981), 55–78. A critique of revisionist minimisation of parliamentary radicalism.
• Hirst, Derek. “The Place of Principle.” Past & Present 92 (1981), 79–99. A defence of ideological and principled motivations against revisionist reductionism.

Marxist and Social-Historical Works

• Hill, Christopher. The World Turned Upside Down: Radical Ideas During the English Revolution. Penguin, 1972. The classic Marxist study of Levellers, Diggers, and plebeian radicalism.
• Hill, Christopher. The English Revolution 1640. Lawrence & Wishart, 1940. Foundational Marxist interpretation of the revolution as a bourgeois upheaval.
• Bernstein, Eduard. Cromwell and Communism: Socialism and Democracy in the Great English Revolution. Allen & Unwin, 1930. A pioneering Marxist analysis of radical democratic and proto-communist movements.
• Manning, Brian. The English People and the English Revolution. Heinemann, 1976. A major social-history rebuttal to revisionism, emphasising class mobilisation.
• Manning, Brian. The Far Left in the English Revolution. Bookmarks, 2006. A detailed study of radical class forces suppressed by Cromwell.
• Shaw, A. L. The Levellers. Longman, 1968. A key study of democratic radicalism within the New Model Army.

Historiographical Context

• Fulbrook, Mary. “The English Revolution and the Revisionist Revolt.” Journal of Modern History. Essential for situating revisionism within broader historiographical debates.
• Rosenberg, John S. “Toward a New Civil War Revisionism.” Journal of Modern History. Although focused on the American Civil War, it provides a comparative framework for understanding revisionist cycles in national historiography.

For nearly two decades, debate over slavery and capitalism in the United States has been shaped by the so-called “New History of Capitalism” (NHC), a loose group of scholars whose influence reflects less intellectual strength than the deep disorientation of contemporary bourgeois scholarship. Arising after the 2008 financial crisis and the collapse of neoliberal triumphalism, the NHC has sought to offset its theoretical weakness through extensive empirical accumulation. Its central claim—that plantation slavery was integral to capitalist development—is correct, but it reaches that conclusion without grasping capitalism itself.

This is no accident. The NHC is a petty-bourgeois ideological formation rooted in academic middle layers whose outlook is marked by hostility to Marxism, suspicion of theory, and retreat into descriptive empiricism. Its scholars have produced vast archival detail yet remain unable to explain the structural relationship between slavery and capitalism. Their work reflects a wider crisis: the abandonment of historical materialism in the universities and the rise of identity politics, moralism, and methodological fragmentation.

David McNally’s Slavery and Capitalism: A New Marxist History enters at this moment of theoretical collapse. More than a contribution to slavery historiography, it directly challenges the petty-bourgeois drift of contemporary scholarship. It restores Marxist method to a field that has grown uncertain of its capacity to explain the world.

McNally counters long-standing caricatures by showing that Marx understood Atlantic plantation slavery as capitalist commodity production and the enslaved as a “chattel proletariat.” This is more than a small interpretive correction: it decisively refutes the Eurocentric view that capitalism is defined solely by free wage labour, a view that obscures its global, violent, and coercive development.

The Argument: A Systematic Reassertion of Historical Materialism

McNally’s book proceeds in two parts. First, through case studies of Richard Ligon’s account of Barbadian sugar production, George Washington’s role as an agrarian capitalist slaveholder, and Edward Gibbon Wakefield’s theory of colonial labour, it shows that plantation slavery bore the defining marks of capitalist production: production for world markets, systematic labour discipline, and constant pressure to raise productivity.

The second part shifts to political economy, showing how capital derived from slavery helped shape modern financial institutions, including the Bank of England, and later influenced the development of American capitalism. The conclusion is clear: slavery was not outside capitalism but structurally central to it.

McNally places his work within a “forgotten critical Marxist tradition” of C.L.R. James, W.E.B. Du Bois, and Sylvia Wynter, all of whom rejected the Eurocentric view that capitalism is defined solely by free labour. By reviving this tradition, he exposes the NHC’s theoretical bankruptcy: its attempt to explain capitalism without Marx and slavery without class analysis.

Where the Book Succeeds: Restoring Class Struggle to the Centre of the Narrative

The book’s strongest contribution is its analysis of enslaved resistance. Liberal historiography has often reduced rebellion, sabotage, and flight to moral testimony or narrative detail. Despite its empirical breadth, the NHC largely repeats this pattern, treating enslaved resistance as an outside disruption rather than a structural feature of capitalist production.

McNally breaks sharply with this approach by recasting enslaved resistance as labour struggle, structurally comparable to strikes, slowdowns, and collective bargaining. In doing so, he restores the enslaved to their proper place as historical agents contesting the conditions of production and reproduction. This is a genuinely original contribution that gives his theoretical framework real explanatory force. His prose is clear, forceful, and historically grounded; planter diaries, travel accounts, and slave narratives function not as ornament but as evidence of the lived reality of capitalist exploitation.

David McNally and the 1619 Project: Marxism Against the Petty‑Bourgeois Rewriting of History

David McNally’s Slavery and Capitalism: A New Marxist History appears at a moment of profound ideological confusion. Few examples reveal this more clearly than the rise of the 1619 Project, a political and cultural intervention embraced by parts of the media and academia as a definitive reframing of American history. In fact, it marks the culmination of a petty-bourgeois ideological turn: replacing historical materialism with racial essentialism, class analysis with moral narrative, and revolutionary perspective with political demoralisation.

Although not written as a direct reply to the 1619 Project, McNally’s book stands in sharp theoretical opposition to it. While the 1619 Project casts slavery as a story of racial continuity and national guilt, McNally emphasises the structural, global, and capitalist character of New World slavery. Rather than treating slavery as the permanent essence of American society, he locates it within the development of the capitalist mode of production—a system driven not by racial metaphysics but by profit, accumulation, and class domination. The contrast could hardly be sharper.

The 1619 Project: A Petty‑Bourgeois Politics of Race

The 1619 Project is not a serious historical intervention but a political project grounded in the outlook of the upper-middle-class layers that dominate contemporary cultural institutions. Its method replaces historical materialism with racial essentialism, presenting American history as an unbroken chain of racial oppression from the arrival of enslaved Africans to the present. This narrative serves clear ideological functions: it collapses class into race, erasing capitalist exploitation; substitutes moral condemnation for structural analysis, reducing history to a record of injustice rather than social forces; denies the revolutionary agency of the working class by portraying American society as permanently defined by racial hierarchy rather than class struggle; and aligns with the interests of affluent professional strata, who use racial discourse to claim moral authority while preserving their own class position.

The 1619 Project’s hostility to Marxism is deliberate. It reflects the political needs of a social layer threatened by genuine materialist analysis, which would expose the class basis of exploitation and the capitalist state’s role in sustaining inequality.

McNally’s Intervention: Restoring Marxism to the Debate

McNally’s Slavery and Capitalism directly challenges this ideological drift. His claim is not merely that slavery was linked to capitalism, a point the 1619 Project acknowledges only superficially, but that slavery was a form of capitalist production governed by the same structural imperatives that shaped wage labour. This distinction is decisive. Where the 1619 Project treats slavery primarily as a racial institution, McNally shows it was a capitalist institution driven by production for world markets, systematic labour discipline, relentless pressure to raise productivity, and integration into global circuits of finance and credit. By recovering Marx’s writings and the tradition of Du Bois, C.L.R. James, and Sylvia Wynter, McNally exposes the theoretical bankruptcy of approaches that reduce slavery to racial essence rather than analysing it as a capitalist relation.

Enslaved Resistance: Class Struggle, Not Racial Allegory

One of McNally’s key contributions is to recast enslaved resistance as labour struggle. This sharply contrasts with the 1619 Project, which presents resistance mainly as racial testimony: a moral counter-narrative rather than a structural feature of capitalist production. McNally instead restores the enslaved as historical agents engaged in class struggle, contesting the conditions of production and reproduction within capitalism. This is a fundamentally Marxist insight, and it is absent from the 1619 Project’s racial-moral framework.

Why the 1619 Project Cannot Explain Slavery

The 1619 Project cannot explain slavery because it cannot explain capitalism. Its framework is moral rather than material, racial rather than structural. It presents slavery as America’s original sin, not as a global capitalist institution embedded in world markets, finance, and imperial expansion. McNally, by contrast, shows that slavery was not an aberration but a central mechanism of capitalist accumulation; that the enslaved were not racial symbols but workers subjected to capitalist discipline; that the plantation was not simply a racial institution but a capitalist factory in the fields; and that resistance was not merely racial defiance but class struggle within a coercive labour regime. In short, McNally explains slavery because he explains capitalism; the 1619 Project explains neither.

Marxism Against Petty‑Bourgeois Revisionism

David McNally’s Slavery and Capitalism is more than a scholarly study; it is a necessary intervention in a historiographical field shaped by petty-bourgeois racial politics and theoretical fragmentation. Despite its cultural influence, the 1619 Project retreats from materialist analysis, recasting the history of slavery as a narrative of racial permanence. McNally’s book restores what that project cannot: the structural, global, and capitalist character of slavery; the agency of enslaved workers as participants in class struggle; and the indispensable role of Marxist theory in explaining the modern world’s development.

Where It Meets Resistance: The Petty‑Bourgeois Fear of Theory

The sharpest critique of McNally comes from a review in the Journal of Social History, which objects that McNally is engaged in theoretical reconstruction rather than conventional archival history. This criticism is revealing. It reflects the methodological conservatism of contemporary academic history, which has increasingly abandoned theory in favour of empiricism and treats conceptual clarity as a threat rather than a necessity.

The objection that “historians and theorists do different kinds of work” is not a methodological point but an ideological one. It expresses the petty‑bourgeois fear of totalising explanation — the fear that a coherent analysis of capitalism might expose the social foundations of exploitation and the class character of the academy itself.

The NHC’s refusal to engage with Marx is not an oversight. It is a political stance. It reflects the ideological position of a stratum that seeks to critique capitalism’s excesses while preserving its foundations, and that therefore cannot tolerate a genuinely materialist analysis.

McNally’s insistence on theoretical coherence is therefore not a flaw but a strength. It is a challenge to a historiographical field that has retreated from explanation into description and from analysis into moralism.

A Necessary Marxist Intervention in a Field Adrift

Slavery and Capitalism is not a conventional historical monograph. It is a theoretically ambitious and politically necessary intervention into a debate dominated by empiricism, identity politics, and methodological fragmentation. McNally demonstrates that Marx’s framework, properly understood, already contains the tools needed to explain the relationship between slavery and capitalism — tools the NHC has lacked and attempted to replace with descriptive accumulation.

Whether or not one accepts McNally’s full theoretical argument, his reframing of enslaved resistance as labour struggle is a major contribution. His recovery of a critical Marxist tradition is timely and essential. And his critique of the NHC exposes the limits of a historiography that has attempted to understand capitalism without Marx.

For scholars engaged in the debate over slavery and capitalism, McNally’s book is a serious, provocative, and necessary work — one that restores historical materialism to a field that has drifted far from it.

Slavery and Capitalism: A New Marxist History was published by the University of California Press in September 2025.

Sources and Bibliography

I. Works by David McNally

• McNally, David. Slavery and Capitalism: A New Marxist History. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2025.
• McNally, David. Global Slump: The Economics and Politics of Crisis and Resistance. Oakland: PM Press, 2011.
• McNally, David. Against the Market: Political Economy, Market Socialism and the Marxist Critique. London: Verso, 1993.
• McNally, David. Bodies of Meaning: Studies on Language, Ideology and Politics. Albany: SUNY Press, 2001.

II. Marx, Engels, and the Classical Marxist Tradition

• Marx, Karl. Capital: Volume I. Translated by Ben Fowkes. London: Penguin, 1976.
• Marx, Karl. Capital: Volume II. London: Penguin, 1978.
• Marx, Karl. Capital: Volume III. London: Penguin, 1981.
• Marx, Karl. Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy. London: Penguin, 1973.
• Marx, Karl. Theories of Surplus Value. Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1969.
• Marx, Karl, and Friedrich Engels. Collected Works. 50 vols. London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1975–2004.
• Engels, Friedrich. The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State. New York: International Publishers, 1972.

III. The Critical Black Marxist Tradition (Du Bois, James, Wynter)

• Du Bois, W.E.B. Black Reconstruction in America, 1860–1880. New York: Free Press, 1998 (orig. 1935).
• Du Bois, W.E.B. The World and Africa. New York: Viking, 1947.
• James, C.L.R. The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L’Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution. New York: Vintage, 1989 (orig. 1938).
• James, C.L.R. A History of Pan-African Revolt. Chicago: Charles H. Kerr, 1969.
• Wynter, Sylvia. “Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom.” CR: The New Centennial Review 3, no. 3 (2003): 257–337.
• Wynter, Sylvia. “Novel and History, Plot and Plantation.” In Savacou 5 (1971): 95–102.

IV. The New History of Capitalism (NHC)

Core Works

• Baptist, Edward E. The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism. New York: Basic Books, 2014.
• Beckert, Sven. Empire of Cotton: A Global History. New York: Knopf, 2014.
• Beckert, Sven, and Seth Rockman, eds. Slavery’s Capitalism: A New History of American Economic Development. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016.
• Johnson, Walter. River of Dark Dreams: Slavery and Empire in the Cotton Kingdom. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013.
• Johnson, Walter. The Broken Heart of America: St. Louis and the Violent History of the United States. New York: Basic Books, 2020.
• Rosenthal, Caitlin. Accounting for Slavery: Masters and Management. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2018.

Representative Articles

• Rockman, Seth. “The Unfree Origins of American Capitalism.” Journal of the Early Republic 36, no. 3 (2016): 335–350.
• Beckert, Sven. “History of American Capitalism.” In Oxford Handbook of American Economic History, edited by Louis Cain et al., 1–28. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018.

V. The 1619 Project

Primary Texts

• Hannah‑Jones, Nikole, ed. The 1619 Project: A New Origin Story. New York: Random House, 2021.
• The New York Times Magazine. The 1619 Project. Special Issue, August 18, 2019.

Key Essays (Original Magazine Issue)

• Hannah‑Jones, Nikole. “Our Democracy’s Founding Ideals Were False When They Were Written.”
• Desmond, Matthew. “To Understand the Brutality of American Capitalism, You Have to Start on the Plantation.”
• Kendi, Ibram X. “The Anti‑Blackness of American Democracy.”
• Berry, Mary Frances. “How Segregation Shaped American Education.”

VI. Critiques of the 1619 Project

Marxist and Materialist Critiques

• Reed, Adolph. “The 1619 Project and the Racialization of Everything.” Catalyst 3, no. 4 (2020): 1–20.
• Reed, Adolph, and Walter Benn Michaels. “The Trouble with Disparity.” Jacobin, February 2020.
• WSWS Editorial Board. “The New York Times’ 1619 Project: A Racialist Falsification of History.” World Socialist Web Site, September 2019.
• North, David. The New York Times’ 1619 Project and the Racialist Falsification of History. Mehring Books, 2021.

Academic Critiques

• Wilentz, Sean. “A Matter of Facts.” The Atlantic, January 2020.
• Oakes, James. “The 1619 Project and the Origins of the Civil War.” Catalyst 4, no. 1 (2020): 1–30.
• McPherson, James M. Interview in WSWS, November 2019.
• Bynum, Victoria. “The 1619 Project and the Problem of Historical Truth.” Journal of the Civil War Era, 2020.

VII. Slavery, Capitalism, and Political Economy (General Scholarship)

• Williams, Eric. Capitalism and Slavery. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1944.
• Blackburn, Robin. The Making of New World Slavery. London: Verso, 1997.
• Blackburn, Robin. The American Crucible: Slavery, Emancipation and Human Rights. London: Verso, 2011.
• Tomich, Dale. Through the Prism of Slavery: Labour, Capital, and World Economy. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2004.
• Holt, Thomas. The Problem of Race in the Twenty‑First Century. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000.
• Berlin, Ira. Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in North America. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998.
• Morgan, Philip D. Slave Counterpoint. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998.
• Mintz, Sidney. Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History. New York: Viking, 1985.

VIII. Political Economy, Finance, and Empire

• Arrighi, Giovanni. The Long Twentieth Century: Money, Power, and the Origins of Our Times. London: Verso, 1994.
• Harvey, David. The New Imperialism. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003.
• Hobsbawm, Eric. The Age of Revolution: 1789–1848. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1962.
• Hobsbawm, Eric. Industry and Empire. London: Penguin, 1968.
• Inikori, Joseph. Africans and the Industrial Revolution in England. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002.

IX. Useful Archival and Primary Sources

• Ligon, Richard. A True and Exact History of the Island of Barbados. London, 1657.
• Wakefield, Edward Gibbon. A View of the Art of Colonisation. London: Parker, 1849.
• Washington, George. The Papers of George Washington. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press.
• Slave Narratives (WPA Federal Writers’ Project), Library of Congress.