Fire under the ashes
Subtitle: an Atlantic history of the English revolution
By: John Donoghue
Publisher: The University of Chicago Press
Published: 2013
Place of publication: Chicago; London
Language: eng
Number of pages: 373
ISBN-13: 9780226157658; 9780226072869
Copyright date: 2013
Subjects: History; Colonies; Slavery
Description: "In Fire under the Ashes, John Donoghue recovers the lasting significance of the radical ideas of the English Revolution, exploring their wider Atlantic history through a case study of Coleman Street Ward, London. Located in the crowded center of seventeenth-century London, Coleman Street Ward was a hotbed of political, social, and religious unrest. There among diverse and contentious groups of puritans a tumultuous republican underground evolved as the political means to a more perfect Protestant Reformation. But while Coleman Street has long been recognized as a crucial location of the English Revolution, its importance to events across the Atlantic has yet to be explored. Prominent merchant revolutionaries from Coleman Street led England's imperial expansion by investing deeply in the slave trade and projects of colonial conquest. Opposing them were other Coleman Street puritans, who having crossed and re-crossed the ocean as colonists and revolutionaries, circulated new ideas about the liberty of body and soul that they defined against England's emergent, political economy of empire. These transatlantic radicals promoted social justice as the cornerstone of a republican liberty opposed to both political tyranny and economic slavery--and their efforts, Donoghue argues, provided the ideological foundations for the abolitionist movement that swept the Atlantic more than a century later." -- Publisher's description.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references (pages 295-351)  and index.
Table of contents: title: Reformation work -- $t Colonization and its discontents: the English Atlantic before the English revolution --; title: "To engage you all to rise up in your might": the outbreak of the English revolution --; title: "Monsters," "savages," and "turbulent carriages": the revolutionary Atlantic in motion --; title: "An arrow against all tyrants": popular republicanism and the English revolution --; title: " That Crimson street of blood": the imperial turn of the English revolution --; title: "The axe is laid to the root": freedom against slavery in the revolutionary atlantic.