Early Modern Communism: the Diggers and Community of Goods (original) (raw)
Related papers
Revolutionary Self-Sufficiency: the Diggers' Digging in the English Civil War, 1648-1650
2016
that the royal lands that had been seized as a result of the Civil War belonged to and should be redistributed to the people as an extension of those commons. Insisting that ‘kingly power’ should have died with the executed king, they harked back to what they believed were the ancient freedoms of England, before the ‘Norman Yoke’ of new, feudal-law governed land management practices was placed around the necks of the people. Winstanley tells the Parliament to ‘be not ashamed or afraid of Levellers, hate them not’ (Winstanley 1650b: 38) as he exhorts them to write new laws for the new Commonwealth. His proposals are presented as religious arguments. Jesus Christ himself is proclaimed as the restorer, Saviour, Redeemer, yea and the true and faithfull Leveller’ (Winstanly 1650: 7). The Diggers’ message was one that insisted on the people’s God-given rights to be self-sufficient through common access to the land, and their associated rights to do what was necessary with that land to sup...
Diggers, Levellers and Agrarian Capitalism: Radical Political Thought in Seventeenth Century England
This book situates the development of radical English political thought within the context of the specific nature of agrarian capitalism and the struggles that ensued around the nature of the state during the revolutionary decade of the 1640s. In the context of the emerging conceptions of the state and property—with attendant notions of accumulation, labor, and the common good—groups such as Levellers and Diggers developed distinctive forms of radical political thought not because they were progressive, forward thinkers, but because they were the most significant challengers of the newly-constituted forms of political and economic power. Drawing on recent re-examinations of the nature of agrarian capitalism and modernity in the early modern period, Geoff Kennedy argues that any interpretation of the political theory of this period must relate to the changing nature of social property relations and state power. The radical nature of early modern English political thought is therefore cast in terms of its oppositional relationship to these novel forms of property and state power, rather than being conceived of as a formal break from discursive conventions. 'This impressive study takes on a major challenge. Geoff Kennedy not only offers a clear and persuasive account of political ideas in their historical context, but also engages in methodological debate with other historians of political thought and explores the controversies among scholars of this much contested period in English history. He manages to interweave these different strands with commendable clarity and in accessible prose, suitable to a wide audience from specialists to students and the intelligent general reader.' Ellen Meiksins Wood - York University, Canada"
Enemies in the Early Modern World: Conflict, Culture and Control., 2021
The context of the British Civil Wars experienced a spread of millenarian and apocalyptical expectations. A key point within millenarian beliefs is that there is an elected group of people who are going to be saved on judgment day, in order to enjoy the rightly established kingdom of Christ on Earth – these were the Saints. The Diggers were a radical group that not only shared such millenarian expectations for England (regarding themselves as the Saints), but also envisaged deep social, political, cultural and religious change – usually being remembered for their interpretations of the earth as a “common treasure”, rebelling against what they considered to be the tyranny of land ownership. But other aspects concerning the group’s practices and perspectives where given less historiographical attention. Such is the case concerning the disputes and formation of their identities, differentiating who were the Saints and who were the followers of the antichrist. Their process of “othering” certain groups as their enemies, in the godly battle they believed to be in, consisted, for instance, in resorting to the Norman Yoke, in claiming they were the “True Levellers”, in detaching themselves from the Ranters, etc. However, in the eyes of many, the Diggers themselves were the enemy: often accused of being drunks and beggars claiming absurd ideas and disrupting communities. Thus, our aim is to understand these representation disputes they were in, through the analysis of discourse in their own pamphlets, as well as newsbooks and pamphlets by other groups which referenced them.
© Michigan State University Press
Ecology is a complex subject, and one needs to acknowledge the varieties of modern environmental beliefs from the light and dark shades of Greens to the social and deep ecologists. While it is illuminating to witness how various and sometimes divergent strands of thought have been teased out and traced back to the Diggers, it does them an injustice to read their texts with a present-centered perspective. Abusing the past in the service of modern ideological movements is unfortunately widespread, and the Diggers’ afterlife vividly illustrates how, since their rediscovery in the nineteenth century, they have been successively appropriated by Liberals, Socialists, Marxists, Protestant nonconformists, and, latterly, Greens. Though this process is instructive, most of the arguments advanced by politically committed scholars remain, to my mind, unconvincing, functioning more as a vane for shifting academic political allegiances than as a sensitive representation of the surviving evidence. Accordingly, it must be emphasized that Winstanley and the Diggers cannot easily be accommodated within emerging Green narratives, which at their worst seem little more than exercises in legitimation.
Digger Radicalism and Agrarian Capitalism
Historical Materialism, 2007
This article examines Gerrard Winstanley's contribution to early modern debates regarding enclosure, property and politics within the context of the 'improvement' literature of the interregnum.
Agricultural History Review, 2021
Book Reviews Book Reviews UK and Ireland ro s a m o n d fa i t h , The moral economy of the countryside: Anglo-Saxon to Anglo-Norman England (Cambridge University Press, 2019). xii + 235 pp. £19.99. More than two decades after the release of her commanding survey of the English peasantry, Rosamond Faith returns once again to the vexing subject of relationships between lords and peasants in her latest monograph. Having worked on the agriculture, farmers, and peasantry of England and France for the better part of fifty years, Faith now turns her attention not only to the mechanics of how the peasantry were exploited but, rather, why lords in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries were able to appropriate their labour. This is a particularly timely contribution to the field given something of a flurry of publications addressing the topic of early medieval peasant society (see, for examples, recent works by Constance Bouchard, G. G. Astill, Alexander Langlands and Charles West). Despite the focused nature of this question, Faith's monograph also seeks to intervene in another, much older debate: when did 'feudalism' appear in early medieval England? In a distant echo of John Horace Round, Faith argues that the Norman Conquest of England in 1066 marked a distinct moment of transition between a 'profoundly un-feudal society' to a 'profoundly feudal one'. This is not Chris Wickham's steady but sure march of the feudal mode, but, rather, a mutation féodale. Faith suggests that pre-Conquest lords and institutions controlled one of the two Marxist means of production: land. However, she argues it was only after the Norman influx that lords 'gained control' over the second: labour.
Representation Disputes and Identity Construction in Digger Pamphlets (1648-1652).
NEMN Annual Conference Papers, June 2022, 2022
During the Wars of the Three Kingdoms (1640-1660), religious and political dissent flourished in a variety of ways, and many such disputes developed through print. Within this context, identity and collectivity played important roles in mobilising support for the many different perspectives being disseminated. Especially so within radical groups, as was the case of the Diggers. They were a radical group that, among other things, promoted occupations against enclosures, opposed monarchy and institutionalised religion, as well as social hierarchies, and published a series of pamphlets and broadsides between 1649 and 1652. Although much research has been conducted on the Digger since the mid-twentieth century, this paper focuses on one aspect that we consider has been neglected by the historiography: the way the Diggers self-fashioned and represented themselves in such pamphlets. We understand the process of identity construction within a broader scenario of dispute of representation, one which involved the London press of the time, other radical groups such as the Levellers and the Ranters, as well as the government authorities, for example. Thus, we aim to demonstrate how the ‘diggers’ of St. Georges Hill became ‘The Diggers’, a group that simultaneously addressed, and believed to be speaking on behalf of, the ‘poor oppressed people of England’. It is our belief that the process of identity dispute and formation is essential to complexify our understanding of radical experiences, promoting the view that disputes fought on the symbolic field played an important part within the political action of such groups.
History, 2014
For the majority of ordinary people in early modern England, the moral and the economic were closely aligned. Alongside material changes and a growing market ideology, traditional ideas about religion, duty, and community continued to influence economic relationships and practices well into the 18th century. This is the subject of Brodie Waddell's new book, which sets out to explore the economic culture of later Stuart England. Focusing on concepts such as divine will, social duty, and communal ties, Waddell shows how these all have an underlying logic in common, combining to form a world view based on notions of reciprocity, hierarchy, mutuality, and order. His central contention is that these cultural ideas and moral codes did not decline in importance over the 17th century, as some historical narratives have suggested, but rather continued to shape and define the social and economic lives of ordinary people in later Stuart England.