The Tudor revolution
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Thanks, L. Bird.
Capitalism had been developing in Russia since Peter. (But there, indeed, it was hampered by a feudal class – with whom Peter was at odds).
My argument is that the English Civil War was not bourgeoisie vs feudal nobility, but bourgeoisie vs king and his rural bourgeois allies.
And the Devereux family? Noble enough? But, like others, for parliament.
HistoryExtra.com:
Cavaliers were aristocrats, Roundheads were yeomen
Wrong, says Ronald Hutton
When I was a schoolboy, there was a textbook on the Tudor and Stuart period, part of which followed the fortune of a mythical family from 1485–1660. When the family divided during the Civil War, the two brothers were pictured arguing; the text pointed out that the elder, the Cavalier, wore satin and lace, while the younger, the Roundhead, wore linen and leather. It went on to state that the Cavaliers were mostly formed of aristocracy and gentry, while the Roundheads were drawn from the lesser gentry and the middle classes.
The reality was that, to challenge the authority of the king, parliament had to have a substantial number of great nobles on its side. In the words of John Adamson, it was a “noble revolt”. The older nobility, who had served in government and at court, tended to fight against the king (their long-establishment gave them a greater confidence in challenging the crown). The classic royalist noble tended to hail from a family that had not been involved in government or court, or a nouveau riche who had got their title since 1600.
Both sides had more or less equal support among the rest of society. And on both sides, rank-and-file troops on the ground came from the lower classes and fought for the same reasons: partly ideological, but mostly because big money was offered upfront for service at the beginning of the war. Then, when the money ran out, they were conscripted by force by both sides.
But there is a twist to the story. Both sides gradually pushed out the nobility from their armies during the course of the war, because in order to win, they had to grab talent wherever they found it rising. By 1649, just 8 per cent of the senior officers in parliament’s New Model Army had been to university, by then the mark of a gentleman. When you look at the king’s field officers throughout the war, you find that three-quarters of them didn’t have a coat of arms. In other words, they weren’t even drawn from the class that traditionally ran local government, let alone central government.
Ronald Hutton is professor of history at the University of Bristol
Ibid:
“Recent archival research has revealed that Charles I’s aristocratic opponents, particularly the group around the Earl of Warwick, were preparing to use military force as early as the summer of 1640. They did this by calling in the Scottish army and by suborning English militia regiments that had been mobilised to meet the Scottish challenge. Warwick’s group had a military strategy in case the king refused to call a parliament: four Yorkshire militia regiments were to join the Scots and march on London.”
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Next you’ll be saying the Jacobites represented feudalism, because they fought against the bourgeoisie!
‘So Wez, you must think the bourgeoisie led the revolutions in Japan, Russia and China?’
Why must I think so? I know little of Chinese or Japanese history. As for Russia I believe the bourgeoisie were an important element within the failed revolutions of 1905 and February 1917. Indeed you can make the case that, in the long term, the Bolshevik coup d’etat of October 1917 also ultimately failed in respect that despite some initial socialist idealism they were forced by history to become a state capitalist economy which was finally destroyed by the bourgeoise in 1991. What is so important about the English revolution is that it created the model of capitalism that now dominates the world.
But that English Revolution was not confined to the 17th century civil war, and feudal society was already gone.
In Germany, where Marx came from, there still was feudalism in many parts, including a protestant feudal nobility.
And England was not the first capitalist nation-state. Spain was.
Britain was the first industrialised capitalist state.
The Spanish economy diverged from the British economy in terms of GDP during the middle of the seventeenth century. The explanations for this divergence are unclear, but “the divergence comes too late to have any medieval origins, whether cultural or institutional” and “it comes too early… in order for the Napoleonic Invasions to be blamed.”<sup id=”cite_ref-2″ class=”reference”>[2]</sup>
It does seem odd, TM, to describe the landlord class created by the dissolution of the monasteries, etc and whose descendants you say are still great landowners as a “rural bourgeoisie”. Of course they weren’t feudal barons but bourgeois? You know more about the period than me but did they farm their land directly or did they lease it out to tenant farmers?
I would have thought that in the period we are talking about Spain was a dynastic Empire (like Tsarist Russia later) rather than a capitalist nation-state (like post-Revolution France with “citizens” identifying themselves as a “nation”). Actually, the Dutch Republic or England would seem to qualify better as “the first capitalist nation-state”. Spain was a state that participated in the capitalist world-market but not as a “nation-state”.
“Habsburg Spain refers to Spain over the 16th and 17th centuries (1516–1700), when it was ruled by kings from the House of Habsburg (also associated with its role in the history of Central and Eastern Europe). The Habsburg rulers (chiefly Charles I and Philip II) reached the zenith of their influence and power. They controlled territory that included the Americas, the East Indies, the Low Countries, Belgium, Luxembourg, Italy, and territories now in France and Germany in Europe, the Portuguese Empire from 1580 to 1640, and various other territories such as small enclaves like Ceuta and Oran in North Africa. ” (Wikipedia)
The people living in these territories may well have regarded themselves as subjects of the King of Spain but hardly as members of a Spanish “nation”. In fact, I wonder to what extent those living in the Iberian peninsula would have done.
The marriage of Ferdinand and Isabella united Spain as a nation-state. How could a feudal conglomeration have run a vast colonial empire based on trade?
What its subjects thought is irrelevant. It was much disliked by everyone.
The English too are not citizens, but subjects. Capitalism did not require Jacobin ideology everywhere.
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