A Commonwealth of the People
Cambridge University Press, 1/21/2010
EAN 9780521853736, ISBN10: 0521853737
Hardcover, 492 pages, 23.4 x 15.9 x 2.6 cm
Language: English
In 1500 fewer than three million people spoke English; today English speakers number at least a billion worldwide. This book asks how and why a small island people became the nucleus of an empire 'on which the sun never set'. David Rollison argues that the 'English explosion' was the outcome of a long social revolution with roots deep in the medieval past. A succession of crises from the Norman Conquest to the English Revolution were causal links and chains of collective memory in a unique, vernacular, populist movement. The keyword of this long revolution, 'commonwealth', has been largely invisible in traditional constitutional history. This panoramic synthesis of political, intellectual, social, cultural, religious, economic, literary and linguistic movements offers a 'new constitutional history' in which state institutions and power elites were subordinate and answerable to a greater community that the early modern English called 'commonwealth' and we call 'society'.
Preface
points of departure
Introduction
an uncommon tradition
Part I. The Emergent Commonalty
1. What came before
antecedent structures and emergent themes
2. The formation of a constitutional landscape, c. 1159–1327
3. The power of a common language
Part II. Accumulating a Tradition
Popular Resistance and Rebellion, 1327–1549
4. Discords, quarrels and factions of the commonalty
an ensemble of popular demands, 1328–81
5. The spectre of commonalty
popular rebellion and the commonweal, 1381–1549
Part III. The English Explosion
6. How trade became an affair of state
the politics of industry, 1381–1640
7. Touching the wires
industry and empire
Part IV. The Empowered Community
8. 'The first pace that is sick'
the revolution of politics in Shakespeare's Coriolanus
9. 'Boiling hot with questions'
the English Revolution and the parting of the ways.