Customer Reviews

Merchants and Revolution: Commercial Change, Political Conflict, and London's Overseas Traders, 1550-1653

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This book is both exhaustive and, at times, exhausting. Brenner's thesis, encapulated in the lengthy postscript to the book, is that socio-political forces remain at the forefront of explanations of the English Civil War, despite the overthrowing of the older consensus that the Revolution represented the comprehensive destruction of feudal remnants by an increasingly confident, largely urban bourgegoisie. In this Brenner is at odds with revisionist historians like Conrad Russell and Mark Kishlansky, both of whom stress the exogenous character of factors like religion and war. Brenner painfully amasses evidence for the decisive role of what he calls the London colonial, inter-loping merchants, whose radical religious and commercial agendas were finally fully adopted in the establishment of the Commonwealth in opposition to the older London merchants elites ensconced first in the Merchant Adventurers and then in the East Indies Company. These latter had their power and prestige directly from the monarchy and thus represented a form of socio-political power that was anti-capitalist even if still bourgeois and based on mercantile trade. The battle between the Royalists and the Parliamentary forces represented divergent understandings of the place of the sovereign in a country whose principal subjects were increasingly coming under the sway of capitalist values, and whose ideas of absolute ownership of property, religion, political consensus and the proper use of foreign policy were repeatedly traduced by a monarchy who insisted on out-moded concepts of sovereignty.

I would add to C. Skala's excellent review more on the "exhaustive and exhausting" front. If you are looking for an overview of English mercantile and economic expansion you would be hard pressed to find a better source than this book. I would recommend it to anyone looking to get a grasp on English merchants and trade in the period for Brenner's exhaustive coverage of every major English commercial market. The organization of the work leaves much to be desired, however, in that its mostly chronological structure leaves your bouncing back and forth visiting the same merchants and markets again and again at slightly later points in time. Altogether it is a difficult but important book and, in my opinion, the best work on the subject.