Maurice Thomson’s War

Perry Anderson

  • Merchants and Revolution: Commercial Change, Political Conflict and London’s Overseas Traders 1550-1653 by Robert Brenner
    Cambridge, 734 pp, £40.00, March 1993, ISBN 0 521 37373 5
  • The Nature of the English Revolution by John Morrill
    Longman, 466 pp, £32.00, June 1993, ISBN 0 582 08941 7

The English Civil War occupies a strange niche in contemporary memory. To all official appearances, no episode of the country’s modern past is so parenthetical. Leaving no reputable trace in common traditions or public institutions, it looks in established retrospect like a temporary black-out in the growth of the national psyche. Our only republic remains under ban, a historical freak. Rosebery could raise a statue to Cromwell outside Parliament: eighty years later, Benn could not even get him onto a postage-stamp, at a time when Rosa Luxemburg adorned West German mail.

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