The Politics of Commonwealth: Citizens and Freemen in Early Modern England

The Politics of Commonwealth offers a major reinterpretation of urban political culture in early modern England. Examining what it meant to be a freeman and citizen during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, it also shows the increasingly pivotal place of cities and boroughs within the national polity. It considers the beliefs and practices that constituted urban citizenship as well as its impact on the economic, patriarchal, and religious life of towns and the larger commonwealth. The author recovers the language and concepts used at the time, whether by eminent citizens like Andrew Marvell or more humble merchants and artisans. Unprecedented in terms of the range of its sources and freshness of its approach, the book reveals a dimension of early modern culture that has major implications for how we understand the English State, economy, and public sphere; the political upheavals of the mid-seventeenth century; and popular political participation more generally.