Merchants and Revolution: Commercial Change, Political Conflict, and London's Overseas Traders, 1550-1653

Rating:
Summary: The doyen of Marxist historiography strikes again
Review: This book is both exhaustive and, at times, exhausting. Brenner's thesis, encapulated in the lengthy postscript to the book, is that socio-political forces remain at the forefront of explanations of the English Civil War, despite the overthrowing of the older consensus that the Revolution represented the comprehensive destruction of feudal remnants by an increasingly confident, largely urban bourgegoisie. In this Brenner is at odds with revisionist historians like Conrad Russell and Mark Kishlansky, both of whom stress the exogenous character of factors like religion and war. Brenner painfully amasses evidence for the decisive role of what he calls the London colonial, inter-loping merchants, whose radical religious and commercial agendas were finally fully adopted in the establishment of the Commonwealth in opposition to the older London merchants elites ensconced first in the Merchant Adventurers and then in the East Indies Company. These latter had their power and prestige directly from the monarchy and thus represented a form of socio-political power that was anti-capitalist even if still bourgeois and based on mercantile trade. The battle between the Royalists and the Parliamentary forces represented divergent understandings of the place of the sovereign in a country whose principal subjects were increasingly coming under the sway of capitalist values, and whose ideas of absolute ownership of property, religion, political consensus and the proper use of foreign policy were repeatedly traduced by a monarchy who insisted on out-moded concepts of sovereignty.