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

Abstract

A decade ago, new scholarly interest in the English Revolution was sparked by Carla Gardina Pestana's The English Atlantic in an Age of Revolution, 1640–1661 (2004). John Donoghue acknowledges Pestana's work and goes deeper into the English side of the subject, particularly into the role of a single London neighborhood—the Coleman Street Ward—in the revolution in England and in its colonies. His claims are thought provoking, his findings are intriguing, and comparisons with Pestana's work are inevitable. The “godly entrepot” (p. 5) of Coleman Street Ward was home to a surprising number of merchants and preachers who were prominent in both the magisterial and radical aspects of the Revolution, the Commonwealth, and the Protectorate. Donoghue discovers 21 merchant revolutionaries, led by Martin Noell, Maurice Thomson, and Isaac Pennington, who encouraged and effectively used local militancy in their parliamentary politics while profiting from trade and military ventures to the English empire. Noell and Thomson transported tens of thousands of Scots, Irish, and English prisoners of war and other migrants as “bonded slaves,” as well as African slaves, to English America. These merchants helped create the Navigation Act of 1651 that was foundational to English “plantation capitalism” and they profitably armed and provisioned the fleets that brought royalist Barbados and Virginia into subjection, as well as the fleet and army that captured Jamaica. Donoghue uses class rhetoric unapologetically, and praises Marxist historians generously, but this is no Marxist analysis. Economics are always off stage in this detailed study of politics and religion.