Revolutionising Politics

Revolutionising politics presents twelve chapters that reflect on and engage with the scholarship of the late Mark Kishlansky. As a historian of seventeenth-century Britain, Kishlansky made major contributions to our understanding of England’s mid-century revolution. He challenged the idea that it was the result of a long process of political transformation and emphasised how dramatically it reshaped and modernised English politics.

Contributors to this volume explore an array of topics relating to the revolution. They range widely, from shipboard to urban conflicts, from court sermons to local finances, from debates over hairstyles to debates over the meanings of regicide, from courtrooms to pamphlet wars and from religious rights to human rights. By engaging and often challenging some of Kishlansky’s most important arguments about the era, these chapters indicate how we might improve our understanding of a turbulent epoch by approaching it more modestly and quietly than historians of recent decades have often done. The volume thus offers new ways for considering the history of conflict as practices we associate with modern political thought and action came into being nearly four centuries ago.

Featuring contributions from an international group of distinguished historians, Revolutionising politics will be of interest to students and scholars of seventeenth-century British history and politics.