Introduction: Christopher Hill's The World Turned Upside Down, revisited

Abstract

This essay introduces six articles exploring the importance, and limitations, of Christopher Hill's classic work, The World Turned Upside Down. They arise from a conference held in Sheffield in 2012 to mark the 40th anniversary of its publication and discuss the contemporary and subsequent appeal of the book and the stimulus that it gave to the study of the radicals and their writing during the 1640s. In this sense, The World Turned Upside Down is a prose work of some significance in its own right. However, these chapters also consider damaging flaws in the conceptualization of the book and in its underlying methodology. The reputation of the book among professional historians fell dramatically as a result of these flaws, and of its place in a broader Marxist and marxisant historiography that came under sustained attack from the mid-1970s, not long after the book appeared. The essay concludes with some reflections on recent developments in the historiography of the English Revolution, which offer new ways to revisit the topics and questions raised by Hill.