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5.0 out of 5 stars
I recommend it highly. It's a very good read and I continue to learn, June 21, 2011
Having been inadequately educated and having been brought up amidst Toryism and surrounded by what passes for Tory 'thought,' I have long known that what was missing in my reading at least was more study of the radicals in our British history. I have tried to remedy the omission. I came to admire David Lloyd George for his sticking up for the down-trodden in Wales and elsewhere and for his opposing the war with the Boers and, likewise, James Ramsay Macdonald for his principled but unsuccessful stand against British involvement in war in 1914. Another book has now come along that has helped me again.
'A Radical History of Britain.' by Edward Vallance, is a massive (600-plus pages, including notes and the index) and important study of British history as seen via radical eyes. It starts (after an 'introduction' that brings in King Alfred) with the Magna Carta. It moves on to the turbulent fourteenth, fifteenth and sixteenth centuries and I can now better distinguish my Jack Cade from my Robert Kett, my John Ball from my Jack Straw, and my Wat Tyler from my Lollards.
The English Revolution - one of my favourite periods of history - is well covered and such as the Levellers, the Diggers and the Muggletonians become people and causes rather than the footnotes to which they are often consigned. No radical history would be worthwhile without chapters on Thomas Paine, the Rights of Man and a description of the torn British attitudes towards the French Revolution. The Peterloo Massacre is given pride of place, as are the Tolpuddle Martyrs and the Chartists. I knew about these but I now know much more.
Later in the nineteenth century, the emergence of the women's suffragists brought to prominence the rights of women as much as the 'rights of man.' The latter didn't always embrace the former. One of my reservations about the book was that too much space is given to the suffragists' cause at the expense of other aspects of radicalism.
Another reservation was that some great radicals are not mentioned at all. For example, Mr Joseph Arch, M.P. (1826 - 1919), founder of the first union of agricultural labourers and an outstanding advocate of better pay and votes for many of the labourers - not won until 1884 - as well as a strong supporter of freedom of religion in the country areas where the Church of England was dominant and the introduction of Parish Councils. I recall in my own lifetime the mutual antagonism of the respective adherents of 'church' and 'chapel.' Sadly, both church and chapel are finding these secular times hard. Parish Councils thrive, however. Maybe that is what some of those early British radicals desired.
All in all, though I had reservations about this book, I recommend it highly. It's a very good read and I continue to learn.
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5.0 out of 5 stars
A solid and well-considered radical history of Britain, September 4, 2010
If one writes a book called "A Radical History of Britain" and even the Daily Mail and Sunday Express find something to like about it, one must be doing a good job. This honor goes to Edward Vallance, whose popular historical work of this title makes for an invigorating, enjoyable and above all historically reliable read. Although Vallance's intent with the book is clearly to show the extent and importance of radical movements in British history, he does not indulge in overly simplistic narratives of radicalism in which even medieval rebellions might appear as conscious working-class uprisings along Marxist lines, even in embryo. At the same time, Vallance is also not one of the grumpy type of Tory historian who attempts to downplay the classical examples of radicalism and revolt in British history as being all counterproductive or 'simply rioters' and the like. Instead, this book sets out not just an appreciation of the best known examples of radical moments in British history, from Magna Carta to the Chartists and onward, but in particular focuses on establishing the lasting effect on improving the state of the English and later British people they had. Also, the book is strong on showing how the movements themselves in their different historical periods were consciously interconnected, with each new great radical movement deliberately referring to the prior ones in terminology and commemoration.
Although the title refers to a radical history of Britain, the focus is strongly on England. Vallance begins with the Magna Carta, its real background and the mythological way in which it functions as the 'original freedom of the English', as well as the equally invented tradition of the 'Anglo-Saxon freedoms' supposedly obtained by Alfred the Great. From there on, it's on to Wat Tyler, to the 15th century revolts, the Civil War period, Thomas Paine, the British Jacobins, Chartists, and finally women's suffrage. This book differentiates itself from the standard narrative by the strong and consistent emphasis paid to the development of women's freedoms, both in terms of analysis and in terms of the proportion of the book spent on them. The author very rightly makes the slow development of the movement for women's freedom and equality the single most important cause of the book, rather than the sort of tacked-on 'sideshow' it usually becomes in the traditional left narrative. After all, the women's suffrage movement appears often as a latecomer addition to the achievements of the late 19th century electoral reformers, but in reality, it is and was much more than that. Not only are women (over) half the population, making any appeal to a 'movement of the great majority for the benefit of the great majority' an empty phrase if it does not include women's equality; but as Vallance shows, the women's political movement from the late 18th century on had itself a great influence on the development and success of other movements. It is important to show, as the author does, that the Labour Party managed to transform itself from a party still mainly dependent on the Liberals to a mass party in its own right that would obtain government mainly by the financial and political support of the WSPU and the NUWSS, which together had both much more funds and many more members than Labour did!
Vallance's narrative itself is a well-written mixture of a biographical approach to the main figures of each radical movement and a social-political context to the same. As a result, there is a relatively strong concentration on the action of individual heroes and leaders of each movement, and there will be a great many names mentioned; but it is not done in such a manner as losing track of the overall historical development. Edward Vallance is clearly a talented writer of popular history and together with a useful critical but supportive eye towards the historiography of each movement in turn, it makes for a happy combination. One can make some minor objections: the epilogue chapter in which he reflects on the meaning of the radical movements for the British today is a bit weak and seems to detract from the supportive tone of the rest of the work, and one could also point out that the focus is too strongly on English events only, with Ireland, Wales and Scotland, let alone any foreign developments, coming into the picture only insofar as they became part of an English movement. This English-only approach is so strong that even a figure like Karl Marx does not play a role in the work. But if one reads it with that in mind, something of an Englishman's patriotic radical history, it is really worth the read.
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