Investigations of a Dog

A couple of weeks ago George Simmers at Great War Fiction posted about some problems with applying the Marxist concept of ideological hegemony to the outbreak of the First World War. He criticized some vaguely Marxist influenced historians and literary critics who said that people were tricked by propaganda into supporting the war and then became disillusioned. I wanted to reply to his post, but every time I drafted a comment in my head it just ended up saying “I don’t really know”. I do know that George is right to say “These are words to be used with care.” Like many things, the concept of ideology can be useful if used well but can also be counterproductive if used badly. So in this post I’m going to try and explain what ideology means to me, and how it’s useful in my own work. Bear that in mind while reading, as when you see the words “ideology is”, that’s shorthand for “I think ideology is”, and not the definite assertion that it looks like. (more…)

When I posted about Brian Manning’s The Far Left in the English Revolution I wondered whether it was worth investigating any of his other works. Mercurius Politicus said it was, so I got a copy of The English People and the English Revolution out of the library. It shouldn’t be too much of a surprise that MP was right as he knows a lot more about civil war historiography than I do. As well as a lot of useful material on the outbreak of war in 1642 there are plenty of examples of poaching, deer massacres, and livestock being driven onto disputed enclosures, which is an unexpected bonus for my work on animals.

The Stour valley riots get good coverage, pre-empting many of the major points of John Walter’s argument, apart from Manning’s determination to see class war everywhere . As Walter pointed out, the victims were all suspected royalists or catholics. Manning took elite perceptions of the mob’s motives too much at face value. Sir Thomas Barrington and Harbottle Grimston might have been alarmed by the many-headed monster, but they weren’t attacked themselves and probably weren’t in much danger compared to Countess Rivers. As Manning acknowledged, the Earl of Warwick’s steward was saved from a mob when someone recognised that he really was the Earl of Warwick’s steward.

The thing I found most interesting was an enclosure dispute in Huntingdonshire in 1641 in which Oliver Cromwell supported the commoners and Lord Mandeville acted on behalf of his father, the Earl of Manchester. This was the same Lord Mandeville who, after succeeding to his father’s title, became general of the Eastern Association. The feud between Manchester and Cromwell in 1644 is very well-known but I had no idea that animosity between them might go back this far. Other people might well have made the connection, but there isn’t any mention of it in Malcolm Wanklyn’s reassessment of Manchester.

1. Brian Manning, The English People and the English Revolution, 1640-1649 (Heinemann Educational: London, 1976).
2. Brian Manning, The far left in the English Revolution 1640 to 1660 (Bookmarks,: London :, 1999).
3. John Walter, Understanding Popular Violence in the English Revolution (Cambridge University Press: Cambridge, 1999).
4. Maclolm D. G. Wanklyn, ‘A General Much Maligned’, War In History, 14 (2007), pp. 133-156.

And now the return of my series of posts about English/British Civil War(s)/Revolution(s) historiography. Today I’m considering Brian Manning’s The Far Left in the English Revolution. Published in 1999, this is one of the most recent examples of old-school Marxism. If you’ve read any of my previous posts on causes and allegiance you’ll know that I’m not really a fan of Marxism, but I’m trying to see the good as well as the bad. I’ll always have a certain amount of respect for him simply because he’s always been prepared to offer a clear, succinct, and empirically testable definition of “revolution”. It’s surprising how unusual that is for a historian of this period.

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Causation has always been a problem for me. I remember as an undergraduate struggling to write a 2,000 word essay explaining the French Revolution, and ending up thinking “what’s the point?”. My PhD thesis was mostly about describing rather than explaining, and where the conclusion touched on the reasons for the outcome of the English Civil War it was particularly weak. My first article mostly revolves around the question “continuity or change?” rather than “why?”, and I only ended up making strong claims about the causes of price changes in order to win an argument with the reviewer. But now I’m working on the Difficult Second Article, where I decided I could make the empirical data sexier by linking it to the debate on the causes of the English Civil War. That was probably a bad idea as it’s taking much longer than I expected, but I’ve put too much time and effort into it to abandon it now, and I need another publication on my CV as soon as possible to help with funding applications. So as well as digging into the mountain of historiography on the civil wars/revolution/whatever I’ve been looking into theories of causation.

There now follow some esoteric theoretical thoughts on an article by Steve Rigby (from 1996, so not necessarily the latest thing, but it’s a useful starting point even if the author might have moved on since then) on causal hierarchies, taking in Keith Jenkins along the way. Don’t be surprised if I’ve misunderstood some of it – this blog was always meant to be about thinking in public. (more…)

This week I’m going through some anthologies of important articles about the English Civil War, still looking at definitions of war/revolution and approaches to allegiance. This post is a brief summary of some of the articles in Peter Gaunt’s The English Civil War: The Essential Readings (2000). Despite the title, Gaunt acknowledges in the introduction the problems of defining and naming whatever it was that happened in the 1640s and 1650s. However, he doesn’t pay much attention to the problems of defining when in 1642 war broke out, just asserting that it was the raising of the standard at Nottingham in August which marked the official start of the war. It’s interesting that Gaunt pays some attention to the neglected question of how and why the First Civil War ended as it did, attempting to redress the balance in the historiography which has been far more concerned with why it started.

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