Fire under the Ashes: An Atlantic History of the English Revolution, by John Donoghue

Abstract

Fire under the Ashes: An Atlantic History of the English Revolution, by John Donoghue. Chicago, The University of Chicago Press, 2013. xii, 373 pp. $45.00 US (cloth). An early-modern Londoner walking in a north-easterly direction from St Paul's would soon reach the principal setting for John Donoghue's evocative Fire under the Ashes: Coleman Street. However, far from offering a parochial perspective on a well-trodden part of London's urban history, Donoghue locates the street in a grander--and global--scale. It is the centre of a compelling study of how the English Revolution should be understood as an Atlantic event. The cast of characters Donoghue resurrects include godly radicals, republicans, merchant revolutionaries and New England puritans. What emerges is an ambitious effort to demonstrate how the trans-Atlantic circulation of people, ideas and goods contributed to some of the most important events, and political and religious ideas of the Revolution. Moreover, the people Donoghue traces were, on the one hand, integral to the early days of English imperialism, and, in the opposing other hand, laid the foundation for abolitionist thought. In short, the Revolution resulted in a dialectic between advocates for slavery, and those for freedom. Donoghue's work demonstrates the fecund possibilities of interconnecting several, often distinct historiographies and fields of research under the general rubric of Atlantic history. The book benefits from a generation of scholarship emphasizing the influence that the Atlantic could have over the political, religious, and economic experiences of people living in the British archipelago. Fire under the Ashes rests upon a close reading of the networks of associates who lived, worked or passed through Coleman Street, and their connections and movement to the English colonies. Indeed, with such an approach Donoghue provides scholars of the English Revolution with fresh perspectives upon the conventional narrative of the 1640s and 1650s, and the lasting significance of those tumultuous decades. Through a series of, by turns, escalating and cascading arguments, Donoghue switches between the local of Coleman Street, with its close links to the antinomian underground of the 1630s, to the global, signified by English colonies, trading companies and settler-Native American relations. Chapters on New and Old England alternate in a structure that serves the author's aim to move beyond national historiography [and] recapture the seventeenth century view of colonisation and the English Revolution and interrelated, interdependent developments in a wider Atlantic history (p. 3). Chapter one introduces the Coleman Street Ward, establishing its radical credentials. Donoghue illustrates how it was home to both the founding participants in a militant Protestant empire grounded in English humanist thought, and, conversely, to people who sought to build opposition to the political enslavement of the poor and itinerant class. Chapter two moves to New England, and demonstrates how the network of associates in Coleman Street spread across the Atlantic. …