Varieties of Seventeenth- and Early Eighteenth-Century English Radicalism in Context by David Finnegan Ariel Hessayon

Author:David Finnegan, Ariel Hessayon [David Finnegan, Ariel Hessayon]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, General
ISBN: 9781409482215
Google: n6uoHx_nuxIC
Publisher: Ashgate Publishing, Ltd.
Published: 2013-07-28T16:13:00+00:00

The champions of empire in the 1650s – Milton, Sidney, Nedham, Harrington, Waring, Dillingham, Hawke and others – exhibited a variety of sometimes overlapping political positions. They included Independents, classical republicans, Protestant providentialists and de facto theorists. What they shared besides their imperialism was an ingrained and impregnable sense of English superiority – undergirded, more often than not, by a belief in England’s destiny as an elect Nation. Hawke, for example, simply could not conceive of the possibility that the conquered peoples might not welcome the communication of English privileges, laws and language with anything less than unmixed gratitude. Similarly, Commonwealth promises of social, legal and economic reform for Scotland and Ireland were couched in terms of rooting out archaic and inequitable practices and dragging those backward nations into line with English standards. The national cultural confidence is palpable: ‘future generations, we hope, shall acknowledge that the English laws and government introduced into Ireland, shall be as new life to the natives, and yet the incorporation that is intended of both nations, shall make the Irish great gainers by al their losses’.69 Nor, in the 1659 parliamentary debates, were the ‘Scottish’ and ‘Irish’ members willing to cede an inch of their Englishness. Some had ‘never saw Scotland, but in a map’, while Sir Thomas Stanley stated ‘I am not to speak for Ireland, but for the English in Ireland … The members for Ireland, and the electors, are all Englishmen.’ But perhaps this pride of race is best caught in one Colonel Parsons’ happy formula that the House, ‘deal no less kindly with the Irish than with the Scotch. They are all English.’70 As ethnography this is flat nonsense. As a statement of imperial policy and legal doctrine, any citizen of the Roman Empire would have understood and applauded.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.