A study of three centuries of radical ideas and activity in English political and social history.

Early industrial England witnessed significant interactions between millenarianism and traditions of radical popular politics, including the first English socialisms. This book provides a detailed archive-based study of Southcottianism from 1815 to 1840 that revises many previous assumptions about this popular millenarian movement.

Suffering and Happiness in England 1550-1850 pays tribute to one of the leading historians working on early modern England, Paul Slack, and his work as a historian, and enters into discussion with the rapidly growing body of work on the 'history of emotions'. The themes of suffering and happiness run through Paul Slack's publications; the first being more prominent in his early work on plague and poverty, the second in his more recent work on conceptual frameworks for social thought and action. Though he has not himself engaged directly with the history of emotions, assembling essays on these themes provides an opportunity to do that. The chapters explore in turn shifting discourses of happiness and suffering over time; the deployment of these discourses for particular purposes at specific moments; and their relationship to subjective experience. In their introduction, the editors note the very diverse approaches that can be taken to the topic; they suggest that it is best treated not as a discrete field of enquiry but as terrain in which many paths may fruitfully cross. The history of emotions has much to offer as a site of encounter between historians with diverse knowledge, interests, and skills.

New insights into the nature of the seventeenth-century English revolution - one of the most contested issues in early modern British history.

This book address the relationship between utopian and radical thought, particularly in the early modern period, and puts forward alternatives approaches to imagined ‘realities’. Alternative Worlds Imagined, 1500-1700 explores the nature and meaning of radicalism in a traditional society; the necessity of fiction both in rejecting and constructing the status quo; and the circumstances in which radical and utopian fictions appear to become imperative. In particular, it closely examines non-violence in Gerrard Winstanley’s thought; millennialism and utopianism as mutual critiques; form and substance in early modern utopianism/radicalism; Thomas More’s utopian theatre of interests; and James Harrington and the political necessity of narrative fiction. This detailed analysis underpins observations about the longer term historical significance and meaning of both radicalism and utopianism.

Moderate Radical explores an exciting period of English, and British, history: Elizabethan and Early Stuart religious politics. Tobie Matthew (c. 1544-1628) started Elizabeth's reign as a religious radical, yet ended up running the English Church during the tumultuous years leading up to the British Civil Wars. Moderate Radical provides a new perspective on this period, and an insight into the power of conforming puritanism as a political and cultural force. Matthew's vision of conformity and godly magistracy brought many puritans into the Church, but also furnished them with a justification for rebellion when the puritanism was seriously threatened. Through exciting new sources - Matthew's annotations of his extensive library and newly discovered sermons - Rosamund Oates explores the guiding principles of puritanism in the period and explains why the godly promoted the national church, even when it seemed corrupt. She demonstrates how Matthew protected puritans, but his protection meant that there was a rich seam of dissent at the heart of the Church that emerged when the godly found themselves under attack in the 1620s and 1630s. This is a story about accommodations, conformity and government, as well as a biography of a leading figure in the Church, who struggled to come to terms with his own son's Catholicism and the disappointments of his family. Moderate Radical makes an important contribution to the emerging field of sermon studies, exploring the rich cultures derived from sermons as well as re-creating some of the drama of Matthew's preaching. It offers a new insight into tensions of the pre-Civil War Church.

This collection of essays studies the expression and diffusion of radical ideas in Britain from the period of the English Revolution in the mid-seventeenth century to the Romantic Revolution in the early nineteenth century. The essays included in the volume explore the modes of articulation and dissemination of radical ideas in the period by focusing on actors ('radical voices') and a variety of written texts and cultural practices ('radical ways'), ranging from fiction, correspondence, pamphlets and newspapers to petitions presented to Parliament and toasts raised in public. They analyse the way these media interacted with their political, religious, social and literary context. This volume provides an interdisciplinary outlook on the study of early modern radicalism,with contributions from literary scholars and historians, and uses case studies as insights into the global picture of radical ideas. It will be of interest to students of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century literature and history.

This is a political, cultural and intellectual biography of the neglected but important figure, Henry Redhead Yorke. A West Indian of African/British descent, born into a slave society but educated in Georgian England, he developed a complex identity to which politics was key. The most revolutionary radical in Britain between 1793-5, Yorke then recanted his radicalism and died a loyalist gentleman. This book raises important issues about the impact of "outsider" politics in England and the complexities of politicization and identity construction in the Atlantic World. It restores a forgotten black writer to his due place in history.

This book is a history of the emergence and development of the concept of proportional representation and its relation to political theory within the context of nineteenth-century British party politics focusing on Thomas Hare (1806-1891).

“Never before to my knowledge has the cross-fertilisation of Western and Islamic ideas been so encyclopedically documented as it is here. In reading Islam and the English Enlightenment, you will never see the relationship between Islam and the West in the same way again.” ROBERT F. SHEDI NGER Professor of Religion, Luther College “Dr. Zulfiqar Ali Shah’s Islam and the English Enlightenment is one of the most profoundly enlightening books I have read in years. Dr. Shah compellingly demonstrates that the thinkers of English Enlightenment were undeniably indebted to Islamic sciences and thought, and that the foundational principles of rationalist thought, scientific inquiry and religious toleration were deeply anchored in the Islamic tradition.” KHALED ABOU EL FADL Omar & Azmeralda Alfi Distinguished Professor of Law, UCLA School of Law “This is a book that anyone interested in stepping outside a Eurocentric view of the rise of the West and of the modern age must read.” MICHAEL A. GILLESPIE Professor of Political Science & Philosophy, Duke University “Dr. Shah convincingly demonstrates the central role that Islam played in shaping the values and ideas of the Enlightenment reformers such as John Locke and Isaac Newton who had helped to produce the modern world.” GERALD MACLEAN Emeritus Professor, University of Exeter