Nominated for the Deutscher Memorial Prize!Selected by Counterfire as a best book of 2022!Select Praise: "Feisty, fearless and fascinating!" - Penelope J. Corfield, Fellow of the Royal Historical Society (UK) and President of the International Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies Sturza is a vital addition to the canon. An excellent reader for students and the general public alike. -Marvin Surkin, co-author of Detroit: I Do Mind Dying
The London Revolution opens critically important new ground for understanding the English Revolution as a bottom up bourgeois revolution. Sturza picks up where Christopher Hill left off. -Robert Ovetz, author of When Workers Shot Back: Class Conflict from 1877 to 1921
The London Revolution 1640 - 1643: Class Struggles in 17th Century England chronicles England's history through the revolution in 1641 - 1642, which toppled the feudal political system, and its aftermath. It explores how the growing capitalist economy fundamentally conflicted with decaying feudal society, causing tensions and dislocations that affected all social classes in the early modern period. In contrast with most other works, this book posits that the fundamental driving force of the revolution was the militant Puritan movement supported by the class of petty-bourgeois artisan craftworkers, instead of the moderate gentry in the House of Commons.
The London Revolution 1640 - 1643 further traces the detrimental effects of the political alliance between the free-trade Atlantic merchants and the gentry for the revolution. Despite the conservative and contradictory nature of the English bourgeois revolution, the experience in London is the original source for democratic ideas that were codified in the 1689 Bill of Rights and the U.S. Bill of Rights a century later.
Taken in its entirety, The London Revolution 1640 - 1643 refutes the virulent attacks on Marxist social class analysis spearheaded by revisionist historians who would rather write the concept of revolution out of history.
