Talk:English Revolution

Bronowski

FWIW, Jacob Bronowski in his The Ascent of Man says he prefers to think of the Industrial Revolution as the 'English Revolution'. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 86.112.55.169 (talk) 21:19, 27 January 2011 (UTC)

Marxism?

I'd just like to point out that while Marxist Historians may indeed describe the English Civil War as an English Revolution (specifically one of a bourgeois nature.) The use of the term English Revolution to describe the English Civil War and in a broader sense the Wars of the Three Kingdoms is widespread within academic circles. The reader has only to look at for instance the works of John Morrill and Conrad Russell to see that the use of the term is not limited in any way to Marxists.

If there is no objection I propose to change the section titles to "Glorious Revolution" and "English Civil War" then within these sections to discuss the terms usage by various parties.

Scrooge (talk) 12:05, 21 September 2011 (UTC)

I think thats a sensible proposal and as it occurred before the "Glorious Revolution" should precede it in the article but think it should be called the 'British Revolution' rather than English, for obvious reasons. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 2.121.32.109 (talk) 20:15, 20 September 2012 (UTC)

British is a confusing name because Britain did not exist as a political entity (hence the preference for the article title Wars of the Three Kingdoms rather than British Civil War). While it can be argued whether the political upheavals in England were or where not a revolution, the same sort of political upheavals did not happen in Ireland or Scotland. The Irish wars were closer to colonial wars and the Scottish wars were primarily either a confrontation motivated by religious considerations and/or an escalation of the old McDonald Campbell clan war. Even if one looks at the Remonstraters or those, such as Archibald Strachan, who took a more extreme position, their motive seem to have been mainly religious with a sprinkling of real-politic: If we don't support Charles II ambitions to be king of all three kingdoms we may save ourselves from invasion by the New Model Army (which by most peoples assessment at the time and since was both very good militarily and very radical). Winston Churchill's statement about the New Model Army sums up this view:

The Story of the Second English Civil War is short and simple. King, Lords and Commons, landlords, merchants, the City and the countryside, bishops and presbyters, the Scottish army, the Welsh people, and the English Fleet, all now turned against the New Model Army. The Army beat the lot!

We must not be led by Victorian writers into regarding this triumph of the Ironsides and of Cromwell as a kind of victory for democracy and the Parliamentary system over Divine Right and Old World dreams. It was the triumph of some twenty thousand resolute, ruthless, disciplined military fanatics over all that England has ever willed or ever wished.(LIFE November 12, 1956 p. 200)

-PBS (talk) 15:26, 11 December 2012 (UTC)

Trevelyan's book is quoted with the wrong dates in the title

GM Trevelyan's book "The English Revolution: 1688-1689" is mistakenly called "The English Revolution: 1686-1689" in the footnotes of this article.

I suspect this is because Google Books has an entry with 1686 in the title (Oxford, 1956), but I cannot find such a title on the Oxford University Press website (they do a later edition with the dates 1688-1689)

I own a 1948 reprint of the 1938 first edition of the book and can confirm that it's title has the dates 1688-1689, not 1686-1689.

On no other website can I find reference to a 1686 dated version, so Google Books must simply have a typographical error in their entry.

217.43.161.19 (talk) 17:17, 17 February 2013 (UTC)

Specialized aspect tag

This article at the time I placed the tag begins with "Marxist" and associates the term "English Revolution" with Marxism. This is a bad idea on many counts. I put the tag on there because the problem was already mentioned in this talk page without result. To me that means it is time for a stronger request. First of all, I do not know if the term "English Revolution" was originally Marxist. It seems to me, in order to characterize it as such, you would need to cite the original sources of the term. This is the very least I would expect. Note, the English Revolution was long before Marx and his famous theories of society, based partly on Morgan. Morgan, Hegel, these are people whose theories have long been superseded or revised. However, that has nothing to do with it. The native revolutionaries used many concepts and many terms. To cast them as Marxist is grossly inaccurate. Note that these concepts were reasserted in the American Revolution and no one dares to characterize that as Marxist. Moreover, the French Revolution originated many concepts of use in the Russian Revolution, but not even the Russian Marxists called the French Revolution Marxist. To call the English Revolution "Marxist" is a gross anachronism. Now, there are many biased groups that would prefer "Marxist" terminology. The worst one I see in effect here is what I would call counter-revolutionary. The author is disdainful of revolution. He therefore attempts to bring it under the aegis of "Marxism" hoping to direct the anti-Marxist emotional content of the term against the English Revolution. I am going to refrain, with difficulty, from using all terms that in ordinary conversation I would employ. A second possibility is that the author is trying to advertise the term marxism. Many adherents of the British Labor Party did so unrestrainedly as did many British liberal intellectuals. For myself I do not either accept or rejct the tenets of Marxism unqualifiedly. Hegel and Morgan are certainly way out of date as is a lot of the detail of Marx. The state of knowledge does not stand still. Galileo was condemned in yesteryear, exalted today. Wegener was a fool in yesteryear, a great scientific prophet today. Bottom line. Unless the Marxists actually invented the term "English Revolution", I would expect to see something said about the origin of the term and to see the "Marxist" aspect reduced to a speciliazed view.Botteville (talk) 16:20, 25 December 2014 (UTC)

One of the problems you are not addressing is what the term "revolution" means. In the usage before the French Revolution (and possibly the end of the American Revolution) people meant that they were returning to the good old day (revolution in its other meaning--that meaning that has not been co-opted as it has in politics--still means turning about an axis until one arrives back where one started)), hence one of the reasons for the New Model Army's use of the phrase "Good Old Cause". So in the eyes of the Whigs the Glorious Revolution was a return to the ways the country had been governed before James II's radical changes. What Marx meant by "revolution" was not a return to the past but an advance to a new social state. I do not know what word he used in German, but he certainly did not mean revolution as it had been used by the Whigs in the 17th century. Your spelling is American (so you are either an American or using an American spell checker). This articles is about the use of the term English Revolution in the historiography of the English Civil War. It is not an article about the general meaning of revolution but what it meant when Macaulay a Whig historian,[1] or Hill and other mid 20th century Marxist meant when they used the term.[2]

I am not sure what you mean by "This article only describes one highly specialized aspect of its associated subject". we have dozens of articles on the English Civil War and you can not mean that we ought to duplicated those articles here, so I am removing the template because it is a maintenance template and such templates ought to be place on the talk page. As you have successfully started a thread there is no need for the template which has no immediate advantage for people who wish to read the article. -- PBS (talk) 14:10, 27 December 2015 (UTC)

Inappropriate picture

The heading picture is from the French Revolution of 1830. 24.90.195.111 (talk) 14:56, 6 March 2021 (UTC)