1. The Age of Empire 1875 - 1914
   Resource Type: Book
   First Published: 1987   Published: 1996
   Covers the rise of bourgeois society, the growth of free market capitalism and the expansion of European colonialism abroad.
2. Age of Extremes 
   The Short Twentieth Century 1914 - 1991
   Resource Type: Book
   First Published: 1994   Published: 1997
   A overview of the history of the years 1914 - 1991.
3. An Agreement of the Free People of England
   Manifesto of the Levellers
   Resource Type: Article
   First Published: 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. Levellers believed all men were born free and equal and possessed natural rights that resided in the individual, not the government. They believed that each man should have freedom limited only by regard for the freedom of others. They believed the law should equally protect the poor and the wealthy.
4. An Agreement of the People for a firm and present peace upon grounds of common right
   Resource Type: Article
   First Published: 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, we do now hold ourselves bound in mutual duty to each other to take the best care we can for the future to avoid both the danger of returning into a slavish condition.
5. An Agreement of the People of England, and the places therewith incorporated, for a secure and present peace, upon grounds of common right, freedom and safety
   Resource Type: Article
   First Published: 1647   Published: 1649
   
6. Ancestors of the Proletariat
   Tercentenary of the English Revolution: 1649-1949
   Resource Type: Article
   First Published: 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 monarchy, dramatized in the execution of the King, was in their eyes entirely subordinate to the positive reorganization of society.
   
7. An Atlas of Rural Protest In Britain 1548-1900
   Resource Type: Book
   First Published: 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. The volume includes seventy-maps which together demonstrate the shifting geography of protest, illustrating how the distribution of protest changed over time and how certain forms of protest changed as Britain developed from a feudal to a capitalist society.
8. The Battle of Cable Street
   Resource Type: Article
   First Published: 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 was notorious for using marches and rallies as cover for vicious attacks on Jews. The confrontation has gone down in folklore as 'The Battle of Cable Street'.
9. The Blackest Streets
   The Life and Death of a Victorian Slum
   Resource Type: Book
   First Published: 2008
   
10. 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
    Resource Type: Article
    First Published: 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 necessary for the wage system.
11. Britain - Its contribution to Socialism, Marxism and Workers' Organisation
    Resource Type: Article
    Links to writings from the history of the British Isles, relevant to the development of socialist ideas and Marxism.
12. The British Camps
    Though it reached its horrific heights at Auschwitz and Buchenwald, the British, not the Nazis, pioneered the concentration camp.
    Resource Type: Article
    First Published: 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 concentration camps nor the last.
13. Capitalism is a Waste of Time
    Godwin, Malthus & the Ideology of "No Alternative"
    Resource Type: Article
    First Published: 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 used economics textbook of the 20th century as "the study of how men and society choose to employ scarce resources."
14. The Charter of the Forest
    Resource Type: Article
    First Published: 1217   Published: 1225
    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.
15. Chartism
    Connexipedia Article
    Resource Type: 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.
16. Commonwealth of Thieves
    The Improbable Birth of Australia
    Resource Type: Book
    First Published: 2005   Published: 2006
    A history of the first four years of the convict settlement in Australia, examining the interplay of soldiers, convicts, and Aborigines.
    
17. The Condition of England
    Resource Type: Article
    First Published: 1844
    
18. The Condition of the Working Class in England
    Resource Type: Book
    First Published: 1845
    
19. Cromwell and the Levellers
    Tercentenary of English Revolution: 1649-1949
    Resource Type: Article
    First Published: 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.
    
20. Decline of the English Murder
    And Other Essays
    Resource Type: Book
    First Published: 1950   Published: 1981
    A collection of essays by George Orwell.
21. Democracy in the British Army
    Resource Type: Article
    First Published: 1939
    
22. Destroying the Commons 
    How the Magna Carta Became a Minor Carta
    Resource Type: Article
    First Published: 2012
    Our rights and liberties are under ever-increasing attack.
23. The Digger Movement in the Days of the Commonwealth
    As Revealed in the Writings of Gerrard Winstanley, the Digger, Mystic and Rationalist, Communist and Social Reformer
    Resource Type: Book
    First Published: 1906
    
24. Diggers
    Connexipedia Article
    Resource Type: Article
    An English group of agrarian communists in the 17th century.
25. The End of Parliamentary Socialism
    From New Left to New Labour
    Resource Type: Book
    First Published: 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 mistaken in asserting that the only alternative to traditional social democracy and narrow parliamentarianism was an acceptance of neo-liberalism.
26. Engels, Manchester and the Working Class
    Resource Type: Book
    First Published: 1974
    An account and interpretation of the writing of Friedrich Engels' first major work, The Condition of the Working Class in England in 1844.
27. England's 17th Century Revolution
    A Review of Francois Guizot's 1850 pamphlet Pourquoi la revolution d'Angleterre a-t-elle reussi?
    Resource Type: Article
    First Published: 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, however, the consolidation of the constitutional monarchy is only the beginning of the magnificent development and transformation of bourgeois society in England. Where M. Guizot sees only gentle calm and idyllic peace, in reality the most violent conflicts and the most penetrating revolutions are taking place.
28. English coffeehouses in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries
    Connexipedia Article
    Resource Type: Article
    Describes the origins, the popularity, and the decline of the English Coffeehouse.
29. The English Government and the Fenian Prisoners
    Resource Type: Article
    First Published: 1870
    On the treatment of Fenian prisoners.
30. The English Peasantry in the Later Middle Ages
    The Ford Lectures for 1973 and Related Studies
    Resource Type: Book
    First Published: 1975
    Investigates the question of whether or not peasants might be considered their own social class.
31. The English Revolution
    Connexipedia Article
    Resource Type: 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 1649.
32. The English Revolution 1640
    Resource Type: Article
    First Published: 1940
    
33. Exploited Earth
    Britain's Aid and the Environment
    Resource Type: Book
    First Published: 1990
    Hayter's book examines British aid policy and practice and how it effects the world's forests.
34. The Fight for Freedom for Women
    Resource Type: Book
    First Published: 1973
    The fight for women's rights in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, primarily focusing on Britain and the USA.
35. General Strike of 1842
    Connexipedia Article
    Resource Type: 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.
36. Germany and Britain: Memory and Myopia
    Resource Type: Article
    First Published: 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 Western Front stripped him of his jingoism. Much of his subsequent work explored the sorrow and suffering that he saw as the human condition.
37. The Great Transformation 
    The political and economic origins of our time
    Resource Type: Book
    First Published: 1944   Published: 1968
    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 be understood not as discrete elements, but as a single human invention he calls the "Market Society".
38. Hegemony or Survival 
    America's Quest for Global Dominance
    Resource Type: Book
    First Published: 2003   Published: 2004
    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.
39. Hidden Agendas
    Resource Type: Book
    First Published: 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 chronicles the scale and intensity of injustice around the world.
40. Hill, Christopher
    Connexipedia Article
    Resource Type: Article
    English Marxist historian and author. (1912-2003).
41. Hill, Christopher - Writings - Index
    Resource Type: Article
    Writings of Christopher Hill (1912-2003).
42. The History of Democracy 
    A Marxist Interpretation
    Resource Type: Book
    First Published: 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 from the social and economic contexts in which democratic states operate.
43. The History Thieves
    Secrets, Lies, and the Shaping of a Modern Nation
    Resource Type: Book
    First Published: 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.
44. The History Thieves - Review
    How Britain covered up its imperial crimes
    Resource Type: Book
    First Published: 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 the records of imperial rule.
45. How the aristocracy preserved their power
    Resource Type: Article
    First Published: 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 wealth and influence remain phenomenal.
46. Inclosure Acts
    Connexipedia Article
    Resource Type: 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.
47. The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes
    Resource Type: Book
    First Published: 2001
    Now in its second edition, this landmark book provides an intellectual history of the British working classes from the preindustrial era to the twentieth century.
48. Karl Marx's Theory of Revolution 
    Volume I: State and Bureaucracy
    Resource Type: Book
    First Published: 1977
    A wide-ranging and thorough exposition of Marx's views on democracy.
49. Liberty Against the Law
    Some Seventeenth-century Controversies
    Resource Type: Book
    First Published: 1996
    
50. Lilburne, John
    Connexipedia Article
    Resource Type: Article
    English political agitator before, during and after English Civil Wars 1642-1650. (1614-1657).
51. Live Working or Die Fighting 
    How the Working Class Went Global
    Resource Type: Book
    First Published: 2010
    Mason relates a series of struggles for worker and human rights over the past two hundred years and compares them to current struggles.
52. Luddites
    Connexipedia Article
    Resource Type: 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 were leaving them without work.
53. The Magna Carta
    Resource Type: Article
    First Published: 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 power of the king could be limited by a written grant.
    
54. Manchester's Radical History
    Exploring Greater Manchester's Grassroots History
    Resource Type: Website
    First Published: 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 campaigns that have shaped the city of Manchester and the towns that make up Greater Manchester, and the people that live in them. And we’re inspired by the way that Manchester’s people have maintained a spirit of independence and resistance which has endured down the years.
55. Marx and Engels Collected Works Volume 4
    Marx and Engels 1844 - 1845
    Resource Type: Book
    First Published: 1845
    Includes The Holy Family, or Critique of Critical Criticism, and The Condition of the Working-Class in England.
56. A Marxist History of the World part 41: 1640-1645: revolution and war in England
    Resource Type: Article
    First Published: 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.
57. A Marxist History of the World part 42: The Army, the Levellers, and the Commonwealth
    Resource Type: Article
    First Published: 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.
58. A Marxist History of the World part 43: Colonies, slavery, and racism
    Resource Type: Article
    First Published: 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, ramping up the historical significance of racist ideology.
59. A Marxist History of the World part 44: Wars of empire
    Resource Type: Article
    First Published: 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.
60. A Marxist History of the World part 45: The Enlightenment
    Resource Type: Article
    First Published: 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, argues Neil Faulkner.
61. A Marxist History of the World part 46: The American Revolution
    Resource Type: Article
    First Published: 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 forged in revolution and war.
62. A Marxist History of the World part 50: The Industrial Revolution
    Resource Type: Article
    First Published: 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.
63. Midland Revolt
    Connexipedia Article
    Resource Type: Article
    A popular uprising which took place in the Midlands of England in 1607.
64. Observations on the Effect of the Manufacturing System
    With Hints for the Improvement of Those Parts of it Which are Most Injurious to Health and Morals
    Resource Type: Book
    First Published: 1817
    
65. On E.P. Thompson's Legacy 
    Resource Type: Article
    First Published: 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.
66. Other Voices: The Connexions Newsletter - July 2, 2016
    Brexit, Jeremy Corbyn, and Contempt for Democracy
    Resource Type: Article
    First Published: 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 appearance of democratic legitimacy for the profoundly undemocratic structures of the EU. The gambit turned out to be a spectacular miscalculation, as millions of people turned out to express their opposition to a state of affairs that is leaving the majority worse off while enriching a small minority. This issue of Other Voices looks at the Brexit referendum, elite loathing for democracy, and the related attempt to get rid of Labour's leftwing leader, Jeremy Corbyn.
67. Other Voices: The Connexions Newsletter - July 22, 2017
    Secrecy and Power
    Resource Type: Serial Publication (Periodical)
    First Published: 2017
    Secrecy is a weapon the powerful use against their enemies: us. This issue of Other Voices explores the relationship of secrecy and power.
68. Palestine is a loud echo of Britain's colonial past - and a warning of the future
    Resource Type: Article
    First Published: 2022
    In moving from Nazareth back to the UK, I have stepped out of the frying pan and into the fire.
69. The People's Charter
    Resource Type: Article
    First Published: 1839
    The Chartists' Peoples Charter of 1839.
    
70. A People's History of the World 
    From the Stone Age to the New Millennium
    Resource Type: Book
    First Published: 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.
71. The People's Petition
    Resource Type: Article
    First Published: 1838
    The Chartist Petition of 1838.
    
72. Petition of Right, 1628
    Resource Type: Article
    First Published: 1628
    A document setting out the rights and liberties of the subject as opposed to the prerogatives of the crown.
73. Postcolonial Theory and the Specter of Capital 
    Resource Type: Book
    First Published: 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 change many things, but not human constitutions. His defense of this argument sets the stage for a deliberate, careful explication of the key tenets of historical materialism. This argument is that humans, everywhere, take an interest in defending their well-being and their dignity.
74. The Road to Wigan Pier
    Resource Type: Book
    First Published: 1937
    George Orwell's investigation of an English working class community in the 1930s.
75. Scargill, Arthur
    Connexipedia Article
    Resource Type: Article
    British trade unionist and political party leader. (Born 1938).
76. The Scramble for Africa
    White Man's Conquest of the Dark Continent from 1876 to 1912
    Resource Type: Book
    First Published: 1991   Published: 2003
    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 heroism and reputations for statemanlike vision, to reveal them as men with bloated and often vicious egos.
    
77. Seeds of Fire 
    A People's Chronology
    Resource Type: Article
    First Published: 2012   Published: 2017
    Recalling events that happened on this day in history. Memories of struggle, resistance and persistence.
78. Selected Works of the Levellers
    Resource Type: Website
    The Levellers were a group of English reformers mainly active during the period from 1645 through 1649.
79. The Slave Trade
    The Story of the Atlantic Slave Trade 1440 - 1870
    Resource Type: Book
    First Published: 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 houses.
    
80. The Socialist Register 1985/1986
    Volume 22: Social Democracy and After
    Resource Type: Serial Publication (Periodical)
    First Published: 1986
    
81. Staying Power: The history of black people in Britain
    Resource Type: Book
    First Published: 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.
82. Studies in the Development of Capitalism
    Resource Type: Book
    First Published: 1947   Published: 1968
    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 communities of Europe, with the growth of industrial investment, and with monopoloy in its various forms as a crucial instrument in the growth of capitalism.
83. The True Levellers Standard Advanced
    Or, The State of Community opened, and Presented to the Sons of Men
    Resource Type: Book
    First Published: 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 cultivate common land, they became known as "Diggers" by both opponents and supporters. The Diggers' beliefs were informed by Gerrard Winstanley's writings, which encompassed a worldview that envisioned an ecological interrelationship between humans and nature, acknowledging the inherent connections between people and their surroundings. Winstanley declared that "true freedom lies where a man receives his nourishment and preservation, and that is in the use of the earth".
84. United Kingdom general strike of 1926
    Connexipedia Article
    Resource Type: 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 wage reduction and worsening conditions for coal miners.
85. UK miners' strike (1984 - 1985)
    Connexipedia Article
    Resource Type: Article
    First Published: 1984   Published: 1985
    A major industrial action affecting the British coal industry.
86. The War after the War
    Resource Type: Book
    First Published: 1918   Published: 1973
    
87. Who Could Ever Feel Pride in the Balfour Declaration?
    Resource Type: Article
    First Published: 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 were fundamentally opposed to each other -- and thus one of them, to the Arabs (aka "the existing non-Jewish communities"), would be broken.
88. Winstanley & The Diggers
    The Spirtual and Political Story of a Seventeenth Century Communist Movement
    Resource Type: 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 struggle for power over one another This assumption is also the basis of the most powerful political forces at work in the world today. Winstanley, and many of his contempoaries, defy this dominant paradigm.
89. Winstanley, Gerrard
    Connexipedia Article
    Resource Type: Article
    English Protestant religious reformer and political activist, a member of the True Levellers. (1609-1676).
90. Winter of Discontent
    Connexipedia Article
    Resource Type: 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.
91. Working Class Communism
    A Review of the Literature
    Resource Type: Book
    First Published: 1971
    
92. The World Turned Upside Down
    Radical Ideas During the English Revolution
    Resource Type: Book
    First Published: 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.

Experts on Histoire britannique in the Sources Directory

1. BFI - British Film Institute
2. The British Museum
3. History & Policy