British History

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Below are groups and resources (books, articles, websites, etc.) related to this topic. Click on an item’s title to go its resource page with author, publisher, description/abstract and other details, a link to the full text if available, as well as links to related topics in the Subject Index. You can also browse the Title, Author, Subject, Chronological, Dewey, LoC, and Format indexes, or use the Search box.
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Connexions Library

The Age of Empire 1875 - 1914
Hobsbawm, E.J.
Book
1987
Covers the rise of bourgeois society, the growth of free market capitalism and the expansion of European colonialism abroad.
Age of Extremes: The Short Twentieth Century 1914 - 1991
Hobsbawm, Eric
Book
1994
A overview of the history of the years 1914 - 1991.
An Agreement of the Free People of England: Manifesto of the Levellers
Lilburne, John; Walwyn, William; Prince, Thomas; Overton, Richard
Article
1649
The Levellers were an informal alliance of agitators and pamphleteers who came together during the English Civil War (1642-1648) to demand constitutional reform and equal rights under the law. Levelle...
An Agreement of the People for a firm and present peace upon grounds of common right
Article
1647
Having by our late labours and hazards made it appear to the world at how high a rate we value our just freedom, and God having so far owned our cause as to deliver the enemies thereof into our hands,...
Ancestors of the Proletariat: Tercentenary of the English Revolution: 1649-1949
James, C.L.R. (as G.F. Eckstein)
Article
1949
After Charles I had been executed, the Levellers aimed directly at the overthrow of the military government of Cromwell in the name of the people. The great political act of the abolition of the monar...
An Atlas of Rural Protest In Britain 1548-1900
Charlesworth, Andrew (ed.)
Book
1983
This volume surveys, compares, and contrasts a range of rural riots in Britain, including land protests, food riots, turnpike disturbances, militia protests, and protests by agricultural labourers. Th...
The Battle of Cable Street
Malik, Kenan
Article
2016
Eighty years ago this week, anti-fascists in East London confronted Oswald Mosley's Blackshirts as they tried to march though what was then a largely Jewish area. Mosley's British Union of Fascists wa...
Bloody Legislation Against the Expropriated, from the End of the 15th Century. Forcing Down of Wages by Acts of Parliament: Capital, Volume One: Chapter 28
Marx, Karl
Article
1867
Agricultural people: first forcibly expropriated from the soil, driven from their homes, turned into vagabonds, and then whipped, branded, tortured by laws grotesquely terrible, into the discipline ne...
Britain - Its contribution to Socialism, Marxism and Workers' Organisation
Article
Links to writings from the history of the British Isles, relevant to the development of socialist ideas and Marxism.
The British Camps: Though it reached its horrific heights at Auschwitz and Buchenwald, the British, not the Nazis, pioneered the concentration camp.
Webb, Simon
Article
2017
Today, the expression "concentration camp" evokes the horrors of Nazi Germany, conjuring up black-and-white images of Auschwitz and Belsen. But Germans were neither the first nation to make use of con...
Capitalism is a Waste of Time: Godwin, Malthus & the Ideology of "No Alternative"
Rhodes, Jason
Article
2010
The "no alternative" of permanent scarcity is both the all too familiar essence of our daily politics as well as the ideology at the heart of the discipline of economics, defined in the most widely us...
The Charter of the Forest
Article
1217
A complementary document to the Magna Carta of 1215, defining the rights of vassals, freemen, and serfs, reducing penalties, and restoring common land taken by the Crown.
Chartism: Connexipedia Article
Article
A movement for political and social reform in the United Kingdom during the mid-19th century between 1838 and 1850 which takes its name from the People's Charter of 1838.
Commonwealth of Thieves: The Improbable Birth of Australia
Keneally, Thomas
Book
2005
A history of the first four years of the convict settlement in Australia, examining the interplay of soldiers, convicts, and Aborigines.
The Condition of England
Engels, Friedrich
Article
1844
Cromwell and the Levellers: Tercentenary of English Revolution: 1649-1949
James, C.L.R. (signed G.F. Eckstein)
Article
1949
Levelers were a loose organisation of kindred political thinkers who from stage to stage expressed the rapidly developing political consciousness of a great social and political mass movement.
Decline of the English Murder: And Other Essays
Orwell, George
Book
1950
A collection of essays by George Orwell.
Democracy in the British Army
Orwell, George
Article
1939
Destroying the Commons: How the Magna Carta Became a Minor Carta
Chomsky, Noam
Article
2012
Our rights and liberties are under ever-increasing attack.
Diggers: Connexipedia Article
Article
An English group of agrarian communists in the 17th century.
The End of Parliamentary Socialism: From New Left to New Labour
Panitch, Leo; Leys, Colin
Book
1997
Argues against the assertion that there is no alternative to neo-liberalism. This account of the British Labour Party's recent history argues that Tony Blair's modernizing tendency was profoundly mist...
Engels, Manchester and the Working Class
Marcus, Steven
Book
1974
An account and interpretation of the writing of Friedrich Engels' first major work, The Condition of the Working Class in England in 1844.
England's 17th Century Revolution: A Review of Francois Guizot's 1850 pamphlet Pourquoi la revolution d'Angleterre a-t-elle reussi?
Marx, Karl; Engels, Friedrich
Article
1850
For Guizot, English history ends with the consolidation of the constitutional monarchy. For him, everything that follows is limited to a pleasant alternating game between Tories and Whigs. In reality,...
English coffeehouses in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries: Connexipedia Article
Article
Describes the origins, the popularity, and the decline of the English Coffeehouse.
The English Government and the Fenian Prisoners
Marx, Karl
Article
1870
On the treatment of Fenian prisoners.
The English Peasantry in the Later Middle Ages: The Ford Lectures for 1973 and Related Studies
Hilton, Rodney H.
Book
1975
Investigates the question of whether or not peasants might be considered their own social class.
The English Revolution: Connexipedia Article
Article
The period of the English Civil Wars and Commonwealth period 1640-1660, in which Parliament challenged King Charles I's authority, engaged in civil conflict against his forces, and executed him in 164...
The English Revolution 1640
Hill, Christopher
Article
1940
Exploited Earth: Britain's Aid and the Environment
Hayter, Teresa
Book
1990
Hayter's book examines British aid policy and practice and how it effects the world's forests.
The Fight for Freedom for Women
Tremain, Rose
Book
1973
The fight for women's rights in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, primarily focusing on Britain and the USA.
General Strike of 1842: Connexipedia Article
Article
The strike started among the Staffordshire miners and soon spread through the country affecting factories, mills and coal mines from Dundee to South Wales and Cornwall.
Germany and Britain: Memory and Myopia
Malik, Kenan
Article
2014
Ernst Barlach was one of Germany's great expressionist artists of the early twentieth century. A virulent nationalist in the run-up to the First World War, Barlach found that his experience of the Wes...
The Great Transformation: The political and economic origins of our time
Polanyi, Karl
Book
1944
Polanyi analyzes the social and political upheavals that took place in England during the rise of the market economy. Polanyi contends that the modern market economy and the modern nation-state should...
Hegemony or Survival: America's Quest for Global Dominance
Chomsky, Noam
Book
2003
Chomsky documents how, for more than half a century, the United States has been pursuing a grand imperial strategy with the aim of dominating the globe.
Hidden Agendas
Pilger, John
Book
1998
Pilger's book is an indictment of Tony Blair's government and his easy acceptance of the Thacherite view of foreign affairs. Using the examples of Indonesia, East Timor, Burma, Murdoch and China he ch...
Hill, Christopher: Connexipedia Article
Article
English Marxist historian and author. (1912-2003).
Hill, Christopher - Writings - Index
Hill, Christopher
Article
Writings of Christopher Hill (1912-2003).
The History of Democracy: A Marxist Interpretation
Roper, Brian S.
Book
2013
Roper traces the history of democracy from ancient Athens to the emergence of liberal representative and socialist participatory democracy. He argues that democracy cannot be understood separately fro...
The History Thieves: Secrets, Lies, and the Shaping of a Modern Nation
Cobain, Ian
Book
2016
Ian Cobain uncovers the role of secrecy in the British state - and the lies, omissions and misrepresentations we've been fed to maintain the facade of a fair and just Britain.
The History Thieves - Review: How Britain covered up its imperial crimes
Jack, Ian
Book
2016
A review of Ian Cobain's book The History Thieves, an engrossing study which identifies secrecy as a 'very British disease', exploring how, as the empire came to an end, government officials burned th...
How the aristocracy preserved their power
Bryant, Chris
Article
2017
After democracy finally shunted aside hereditary lords, they found new means to protect their extravagant riches. For all the modern tales of noble poverty and leaking ancestral homes, their private w...
Inclosure Acts: Connexipedia Article
Article
A series of United Kingdom Acts of Parliament which enclosed open fields and common land in the country. This meant that the rights that people once held to graze animals on these areas were denied.
Karl Marx's Theory of Revolution: Volume I: State and Bureaucracy
Draper, Hal
Book
1977
A wide-ranging and thorough exposition of Marx's views on democracy.
Lilburne, John: Connexipedia Article
Article
English political agitator before, during and after English Civil Wars 1642-1650. (1614-1657).
Live Working or Die Fighting: How the Working Class Went Global
Mason, Paul
Book
2010
Mason realtes a series of struggles for worker and human rights over the past two hundred years and compares them to current struggles.
Luddites: Connexipedia Article
Article
A social movement of British textile artisans in the early nineteenth century who protested - often by destroying mechanized looms - against the changes produced by the Industrial Revolution, which we...
The Magna Carta
Article
1215
The Magna Carta consists of concessions wrung from the unwilling King John by his rebellious barons in 1215. It established for the first time a very significant constitutional principle: that the pow...
Manchester's Radical History: Exploring Greater Manchester's Grassroots History
Website
2009
Manchester Radical History Collective is a small group of politically active people living in Manchester. We share an interest in the city’s radical and grassroots history – the local struggles and ca...
Marx and Engels Collected Works Volume 4: Marx and Engels 1844 - 1845
Marx, Karl; Engels, Friedrich
Book
1845
Includes The Holy Family, or Critique of Critical Criticism, and The Condition of the Working-Class in England.
A Marxist History of the World part 41: 1640-1645: revolution and war in England
Faulkner, Neil
Article
2011
The attempt to impose Absolutism by Charles I led to a revolutionary civil war in which the King would be executed - Neil Faulkner looks at the English Civil War.
A Marxist History of the World part 42: The Army, the Levellers, and the Commonwealth
Faulkner, Neil
Article
2011
Neil Faulkner looks at how even the most radical bourgeois forces, if they are to preserve their property and status, must break the momentum of the movement that has brought them to power.
A Marxist History of the World part 43: Colonies, slavery, and racism
Faulkner, Neil
Article
2011
Capitalist contradictions were most evident in the 18th century, when the wealth of the merchant-capitalist class of Britain’s port-cities was contrasted with the untold human misery of the slaves, ra...
A Marxist History of the World part 44: Wars of empire
Faulkner, Neil
Article
2011
The English Revolution transformed Britain into a capitalist economy engaging in geopolitical competition. Neil Faulkner looks at how Britain became the dominant global superpower of the 19th Century.
A Marxist History of the World part 45: The Enlightenment
Faulkner, Neil
Article
2011
What gave the Enlightenment its subversive, politically corrosive character was its critique of institutions and practices which appeared comparatively irrational in the light of modern thinking, argu...
A Marxist History of the World part 46: The American Revolution
Faulkner, Neil
Article
2011
In 1764, Americans thought of themselves as British subjects of King George III. By 1788, they would, by their own decisions and actions, have made themselves the free citizens of a new republic forge...
A Marxist History of the World part 50: The Industrial Revolution
Faulkner, Neil
Article
2011
Frederick Engels was sent to Manchester, centre of the Industrial Revolution, to dispel his radicalism. Instead it made him the revolutionary he is remembered as today, Neil Faulkner explains.
Midland Revolt: Connexipedia Article
Article
A popular uprising which took place in the Midlands of England in 1607.
On E.P. Thompson's Legacy
Cohen, Sheila
Article
2014
In a tribute to E.P. Thompson, Cohen gives insights into his work "The Making of the English Working Class" regarding its valuable focus on the self-activity and self-organization of the people.
Other Voices: The Connexions Newsletter - July 2, 2016: Brexit, Jeremy Corbyn, and Contempt for Democracy
Diemer, Ulli (ed.)
Article
2016
Brexit, the British vote to leave the European Union, has thrown the political elites into turmoil and confusion. The referendum was supposed to be a safe political manoeuvre, a way to produce an appe...
Other Voices: The Connexions Newsletter - July 22, 2017: Secrecy and Power
Diemer, Ulli (ed.)
Serial Publication (Periodical)
2017
Secrecy is a weapon the powerful use against their enemies: us. This issue of Other Voices explores the relationship of secrecy and power.
The People's Charter
Article
1839
The Chartists' Peoples Charter of 1839.
A People's History of the World: From the Stone Age to the New Millennium
Harman, Chris
Book
1999
Harman describes the shape and course of human history as a narrative of ordinary people forming and re-forming complex societies in pursuit of common human goals.
The People's Petition
Article
1838
The Chartist Petition of 1838.
Petition of Right, 1628
Article
1628
A document setting out the rights and liberties of the subject as opposed to the prerogatives of the crown.
Postcolonial Theory and the Specter of Capital
Chibber, Vivek
Book
2013
Against the thesis that Western subalterns are made of different stuff, Chibber argues that human beings are, at their core, not that different across contexts. The winds of history and culture may ch...
The Road to Wigan Pier
Orwell, George
Book
1937
George Orwell's investigation of an English working class community in the 1930s.
Scargill, Arthur: Connexipedia Article
Article
British trade unionist and political party leader. (Born 1938).
The Scramble for Africa: White Man's Conquest of the Dark Continent from 1876 to 1912
Pakenham, Thomas
Book
1991
Describes the brief vicious scramble by Europe's imperial powers to seize colonies throughout the continent of Africa. Pakenham strips the impresarios of imperialism of their veneer of Victorian heroi...
Seeds of Fire: A People's Chronology
Diemer, Ulli
Article
2012
Recalling events that happened on this day in history. Memories of struggle, resistance and persistence.
Selected Works of the Levellers
Website
The Levellers were a group of English reformers mainly active during the period from 1645 through 1649.
The Slave Trade: The Story of the Atlantic Slave Trade 1440 - 1870
Thomas, Hugh
Book
1997
A comprehensive history of the Atlantic slave trade in which approximiately eleven million black slaves were carried from Africa to the Americas to work on plantations, in mines, or as servants in hou...
The Socialist Register 1985/1986: Volume 22: Social Democracy and After
Miliband, Ralph; Saville, John; Liebman, Marc; Panitch, Leo (eds.)
Serial Publication (Periodical)
1986
Staying Power: The history of black people in Britain
Fryer, Peter
Book
2010
Peter Fryer reveals how Africans, Asians and their descendants, previously hidden from history, have profoundly influenced and shaped events in Britain over the course of the last two thousand years.
Studies in the Development of Capitalism
Dobb, Maurice M.A.
Book
1947
A Marxist interpretation of economic development in the period of modern capitalism. Starting with the decline of serfdom, the book deals with the beginnings of the bourgeoisie in the rising urban com...
The True Levellers Standard Advanced: Or, The State of Community opened, and Presented to the Sons of Men
Winstanley, Gerrard and the Diggers
Book
1649
Winstanley and 14 others published this pamphlet in which they called themselves the True Levellers to distinguish their ideas from the Levellers. Once they put their idea into practice and started to...
United Kingdom general strike of 1926: Connexipedia Article
Article
The 1926 General Strike in the United Kingdom was a general strike called by the General Council of the Trades Union Congress (TUC) in an unsuccessful attempt to force the government to act to prevent...
UK miners' strike (1984 - 1985): Connexipedia Article
Article
1984
A major industrial action affecting the British coal industry.
The War after the War
Maclean, John
Book
1918
Who Could Ever Feel Pride in the Balfour Declaration?
Fisk, Robert
Article
2017
Although the Balfour Declaration itself has been parsed, de-semanticised, romanticised, decrypted, decried, cursed and adored for 100 years, its fraud is easy to detect: it made two promises which wer...
Winstanley & The Diggers: The Spirtual and Political Story of a Seventeenth Century Communist Movement
Spritzler, John
Article
Spritzler sets out to show that the resistance to the Hobbesian ideas that rule our lives today is as old as those ideas themselves. Hobbes' basic assumption is that men are necessarily locked into a ...
Winstanley, Gerrard: Connexipedia Article
Article
English Protestant religious reformer and political activist, a member of the True Levellers. (1609-1676).
Winter of Discontent: Connexipedia Article
Article
A term used to describe the British winter of 1978-1979, during which there were widespread strikes by local authority trade unions demanding larger pay raises for their members.
The World Turned Upside Down: Radical Ideas During the English Revolution
Hill, Christopher
Book
1984
Hill looks at radical groups such as the Diggers, Levellers, Ranters, and others, whose ideas threatened to overturn the established order in the mid-seventeenth century.

Connexions Directory of Groups & Websites

Bureau of Public Secrets
Articles from a Situationist perspective.
History & Policy
History & Policy: * Demonstrates the relevance of history to contemporary policymaking * Puts historians in touch with those discussing and deciding public policy today * Increases the influence of...

Sources Experts & Spokespersons

Sources Library

George Orwell: A Life
Crick, Bernard
1980
A biography of George Orwell.
Maps of Britain and Ireland's ancient tribes, kingdoms and dna
Rimmer, Sandra
2016
Looks into the various territories and DNA evidence in Britan and Ireland and analyzes maps of these territories.
The politics of display
The redesign of the Ashmolean in Oxford provides a chance to reflect on how we understand the meaning of collections
Hall, James
2009
The Ashmolean Museum in Oxford is the oldest museum in Britain, founded in 1693. The institution has grown, thanks to a new postmodern building by architect Rick Mather. The open concept design of the...
The Print Shop Window
A blog about Georgian caricature and satirical print culture in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.
Slavery in Britain and Ireland
Sources Select Resources Encyclopedia
Slavery in Britain and Ireland dated from before Roman occupation. Chattel slavery virtually disappeared after the Norman Conquest. It was finally abolished by the Slavery Abolition Act 1833 (which ma...
Ukip: the battle for Britain
Harris, John
2013
A exposé on Ukip, which wonders: is it a lunatic fringe or a sign of things to come?