Driven by the work of the often overlooked A. L. Morton and Dona Torr, the famed postwar British Marxist historians (e.g., Eric Hobsbawm, E. P. Thompson, Dorothy Thompson, Rodney Hilton, Christopher Hill) developed an extensive body of research on the historic role of religious radicalism among peasants, artisans, middle-class dissenters, working class, etc. Some of these publications remain classics across the humanities and social sciences, e.g.: Morton, A People’s History of England (1938), The English Utopia (1952), and The World of the Ranters (1970); Hobsbawm, Primitive Rebels (1959) and Bandits (1969), E. P. Thompson, William Morris (1955) and The Making of the English Working Class (1963); Hill, The World Turned Upside Down (1972); Hilton, Bond Men Made Free (1973); and Dorothy Thompson, The Chartists (1984). Their overarching historical materialist agenda was formulated in the Communist Party Historians’ Group between 1946 and 1956. Explanations of religion in English and British history were about its role in the transformation from feudalism to capitalism (whether as hindrance or spur) and how religious radicalism was in the process of being absorbed into emergent socialism.
The British Marxist historians are still discussed in scholarship (and beyond), and their main legacy is typically seen as their central role in history ‘from below’ and vague notions of the emancipatory potential of religious radicalism. What is largely overlooked today is their historical materialist agenda—and the role of religion within it—which was central to their work. This paper will explain how we got from historical materialist understandings of religion to class and religion as identity markers from below in the reception of the British Marxist historians.
The paper will begin with an outline of the key ideas of the British Marxist historians on class, religion, and historical change and their interest in groups and individuals like the Diggers, Ranters, Levellers, Blake, Morris, etc. This outline will include discussion and contextualisation of the shift in the emphases among the British Marxist historians from the 1930s to the 1950s, from scepticism towards what they saw as naïve radicalism of revolutionary thinking from below (especially in Morton’s A People’s History of England) to a re-evaluation of such movements as important developments in the history of English democratic thinking. Their early postwar interpretations and reception of their interpretations focused on how the utopianism of English (and occasionally British) religious radicalism was effectively ahead of its time but remained a recurring hope among the labouring and dissenting classes. By the mid-twentieth century, the standard argument was that the working class had matured sufficiently to bring these dreams to fruition.
The paper will then move on to the legacy of the British Marxist historians. By the 1970s, their influence was widespread. Yet their ideas were being reinterpreted away from class as a driver of historical change and towards more romanticised notions of history ‘from below.’ These tendencies fed into one important trajectory in scholarship on millenarianism and apocalypticism, namely that it was/is generally progressive in essence but with historical materialist connotations sidelined.
These changes of emphasis among the British Marxist historians and their receptions will be contextualised in light of changes in British politics and capitalism more generally. The Popular Front against fascism in the 1930s was crucial in framing history in terms of broader class alliances and downplaying excessive utopianism. The popularity of socialism during and after the War propelled a popular form of left patriotism and an accompanying history among the British Marxist historians. However, the most intense period of research in the early postwar years was in the face of the conservative turn in British politics of the 1950s. Here, the presentation of an English radical tradition functioned as an attempt to provide an alternative narrative for the working class. 1960s radicalism enabled the most popular period for their work while marking a period of long-term decline or shift in their legacy. In different ways, disillusionment and dampening enthusiasm for imminent social change among the British Marxist historians played a role as the Left fragmented from the 1960s onwards. The loss of faith in the Soviet Union was an obvious problem, whether for those historians who remained Communist Party members or those who became highly critical of Soviet Communism they once supported. The rise of postmodern or neoliberal capitalism further saw their work regularly drained of its historical materialism. This process took different forms, such as romantically focusing on their work as giving a voice to the ‘common folk’ or dismissing their work either for being too Marxist or too romantic. Put crudely, the resulting legacy is the presentation of British Marxist historians as historians from below and their understanding of religious radicalism deprived of its class basis and explanatory force in historical change.
Driven by the work of the now overlooked A. L. Morton and Dona Torr, the famed postwar British Marxist historians developed extensive research on the historic role of religious radicalism of peasants, artisans, middle-class dissenters, working class, etc. Their explanations of religion were its role in the transformation from feudalism to capitalism and how its progressive ideas were being absorbed into emergent socialism. After outlining the key ideas of the British Marxist historians, this paper looks at their legacy and reception. This discussion includes early receptions focused on expectations of the working class being able to realise the utopianism of historic religious radicalism. The paper then looks at how and why understanding the transformation of class relations was increasingly downplayed in the reception of the British Marxist historians over the twentieth century and why the emphasis shifted to a romanticised history of religion ‘from below.’