Fifty Years of the World Turned Upside Down

Is what I am doing worthwhile? How can I make a difference? I often ask myself these questions. They feel especially pressing in the midst of the current cost of living crisis, in the face of impending environmental disaster, and in a situation of growing inequality both within Britain and between us and the global south. In this context, writing books and articles on obscure early modern figures and their ideas - and teaching classes to students who are relatively privileged - can feel self-indulgent. It was, therefore, reassuring to learn from Penny Corfield, at a recent conference to celebrate 50 years since the publication of The World Turned Upside Down, that the eminent early modern historian Christopher Hill was troubled by these questions too. Like me, Hill was no doubt partly prompted by the inspiring phrase from Gerrard Winstanley, which I have quoted before in this blog: 'action is the life of all, and if though dost not act, though dost nothing' (Gerrard Winstanley, A Watch-Word to the City of London and the Armie, London, 1649).

The programme for the conference, which was expertly organised by Waseem Ahmed in conjunction with John Rees.

In his excellent paper on Hill's life and thought, which marked the culmination of the conference, Mike Braddick explained that as a young man in the 1930s Hill was already 'thinking like a Marxist' but did not yet know what to 'do'. Of course, he soon found his role. As Mike explained, writing history was Hill's contribution. As one obituary of him noted, Hill was 'an historian's historian' and yet works like The World Turned Upside Down spoke not just to academics, but also to ordinary people. Moreover, as Ann Hughes explained in her paper, Hill also reached out in many different ways to a wider public through his involvement with organisations such as the Workers' Educational Association, the Open University, and the BBC. I was bemused to learn that Hill's piece 'James Harrington and the People' was originally written for radio. Oh if only someone would commission a radio programme on Harrington today! Similarly John Rees reported, on the basis of his own experience, that Hill was always happy to be associated with the organised left and gave inspiring speeches to large crowds.

There is an interesting parallel between Hill's commitment to venture beyond academia, presenting his historical research (and that of others) to the general public, and the subject matter of The World Turned Upside Down. That book took seriously the ideas of ordinary people. Its protagonists are not the 'great' thinkers of the seventeenth century but rather the ordinary people (some of them very humble indeed) who were caught up in events. Hill was interested in ideas that inspire practical political action, regardless of the social status or level of education of those who voiced those ideas and took that action.

A poster advertising the film Winstanley about the Digger movement, one of the key groups to feature in Christopher Hill’s The World Turned Upside Down. Author’s own copy.

This focus was reflected in several of the papers at the conference, including papers that dealt with figures who feature in The World Turned Upside Down and papers on those who perhaps should have done, but do not. It was apt to have Ariel Hessayon talking about the Ranters and Bernard Capp to say something about the Fifth Monarchists. Ariel contextualised Hill's account of the Ranters in The World Turned Upside Down and emphasised the fact that the strength of Hill's book lay in making these rather obscure figures visible. He also noted that Hill came to the Ranters quite late. Capp extended this point, acknowledging that the radicals are not prominent in many of Hill's earlier works such as The English Revolution 1640 and The Century of Revolution (though this partly reflects the nature of those publications). Capp also suggested that the Fifth Monarchists and Muggletonians ranked lower in Hill's estimations than the Ranters and the Diggers, not least because their ideas did not all sit comfortably with his understanding of radicalism.

Author’s copy of Hill’s book showing the tub-thumping preacher on the cover.

Several speakers made the case for particular individuals to be considered as radicals. Jackie Eales's paper focused on the radical preacher James Hunt of Sevenoaks, who does not appear in The World Turned Upside Down despite probably being the tub-thumping preacher on the cover of the original edition. Jason Peacey argued the case for George Wither and asked the thought-provoking question: How would our view of radicalism change if Wither were taken more seriously? Ed Legon's paper focused on individuals even more obscure than Hunt and Wither, textile workers-cum preachers such as one Thomas Moore, 'Dingle', and others for whom we do not even have a name. The link between textile workers and radical puritanism has long been recognised, if not fully explored, but other speakers found radicals in even more unexpected places. Will White made the case for the neutral Francis Nethersole as a radical of sorts. He pointed out that refusing to take sides was itself a political act, which might lead to disobedience and required considerable courage. He also noted the similarities between ideas put forward by Nethersole to justify his neutrality and those expressed by the Leveller William Walwyn in The Bloody Project. The fluidity implicit in Walwyn's position (and acknowledged by Hill) was also reflected in the activities of another Leveller, Captain William Bray, who was the subject of Ted Vallance's paper. Ted showed how Bray haunted the boundary between the Levellers and the Ranters. In part, this fluidity stems from thought being geared to political action, since engaging in politics (rather than merely contemplating it) may require pragmatism: deploying different arguments for different audiences; rearranging priorities in response to events; and even setting aside key principles at certain moments.

The image of the world turned upside down from the pamphlet of the same name.

This leads to another point that was reflected in both Hill's life and his work. The importance of free and open debate, and even the possibility that ideas might be changed through it. As Ann, John and Mike all noted, Hill experienced this himself in the debates in which he engaged as a member of the Communist Party Historians’ Group between the late 1930s and 1957. The idea of open debate was also reflected in papers that themselves turned conventional interpretations upside down. For example, Richard Bell showed that the interest of key Levellers in prisons was not a case of them bringing political consciousness to prisoners, but rather of the Levellers tapping into a long-standing campaign for prison reform. Similarly, Laura Stewart made a convincing case for the notion of a Scottish Revolution, emphasising the need for it to be understood on its own terms.

Laura's paper was one of many that either ventured beyond Hill's field of enquiry or even challenged key aspects of his thought. As Penny Corfield made clear, Hill would have enjoyed and appreciated the debate. He welcomed respectful disagreement on the grounds that thinking could be advanced in the process. As Mike explained, the members of the Communist Party Historians’ Group were not aiming to impose an orthodox view of the English Revolution but rather engaged in lengthy, deep and open discussion to try to work out the relevance of Marxist theory for English history. For Hill it was important that ideas were debated and kept in use.

Sketch of the bust of Thomas Spence. From the collection of the Literary and Philosophical Society of Newcastle upon Tyne. Hedley Papers. Reproduced with kind permission. With thanks to Harriet Gray.

The conference papers and discussions certainly inspired me, helping me better to understand and articulate the meaning of my own life and work. I too am committed to analysing not simply the ideas of great political thinkers of the past, but also those of ordinary people caught up in events. My PhD research examined the ideas of relatively humble French revolutionaries who were members of the Cordeliers Club, and considered the ways in which they adapted English republican ideas to their own situation. In my current research I am exploring how reformers and radicals in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Britain articulated their arguments. In this regard, the Newcastle-born radical Thomas Spence is of particular relevance. Despite being from a very humble background, Spence developed innovative political ideas of his own and believed strongly in the value of providing political education to all members of society, regardless of their wealth or social status.

At the same time, I am committed to engaging with audiences beyond academia. I have been involved with a number of exciting projects alongside our excellent educational outreach team from Newcastle University's Robinson Library and staff at the National Civil War Centre. Our current project involves working with Year 12 students on oracy and debate. Meanwhile, the Experiencing Political Texts project (https://experiencingpoliticaltexts.wordpress.com) has provided an opportunity to work with members of the public in a regular reading group where discussions are always thought-provoking. We will develop this further as we put together two exhibitions, one at the Robinson Library, Newcastle University this summer and another at the National Library of Scotland, opening in December. Finally, this blog has provided a valuable opportunity to share my research with a wider audience, but also to reflect on the implications of the ideas of the past today. I can only dream of producing a book like The World Turned Upside Down, but by taking seriously the ideas of all people - including those who have so often been silenced - perhaps I can make a small contribution and heed Winstanley's injunction to 'act'.

Transcultural Conversations

Having just returned from a fascinating conference at the European University Institute (EUI) near Florence I feel I must interrupt my series of posts on Republicanism to offer some reflections on that event.

Villa Salviati. Image by Rachel Hammersley.

Villa Salviati. Image by Rachel Hammersley.

The conference was expertly organised by four PhD students based at the EUI: Thomas Ashby, Ela Bozok, Muireann McCann and Elisavet Papalexopoulou. It was held in the beautiful Villa Salviati. Medici imagery appears throughout the villa in reference to the family link via Lucrezia, the wife of Jacoo di Giovanni Salviati who owned the villa in the sixteenth century and whose renovations determined the current layout. Contributors to the conference were lucky enough to be shown the private chapel that Jacopo constructed, probably for his daughter's wedding, with its beautifully decorated ceiling bearing heraldic devices alluding to the alliance between the Medici and Salviati families.

The ceiling of the private chapel at Villa Salviati. Image by Rachel Hammersley.

The ceiling of the private chapel at Villa Salviati. Image by Rachel Hammersley.

The conference theme, 'transcultural conversations', is not only academically popular at present (as evidenced by the excellent papers), but also has potential contemporary relevance. My own work in this area has tended to focus on the crossing of linguistic boundaries particularly through translations. In my paper I reflected on this work arguing that to fully understand the impact of translations we need to go beyond the conventional texts to look not only at  explicit and acknowledged translations, but also at works that perform similar functions; to consider the form and materiality as well as the content of the text; and to look at the uses to which translations and associated texts were put. The conference organisers and participants very deliberately chose the term 'transcultural' rather than 'transnational' and took a broad approach.

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Some papers did consider conversations that took place across national and linguistic boundaries - for example Arnab Dutta's paper on discussions between Bengali and German scholars and intellectuals in the 1920s and 30s over the meaning of the term 'kultur' and Simone Muraca's paper on cultural diplomacy between Italy and Portugal in the same period. Others considered conversations that occurred across confessional divides. Thomas Pritchard's paper on pan-European Anti-Spanish polemic highlighted the distinction between Anti-Catholic and specifically Anti-Spanish arguments. Concerns about the establishment of a Spanish universal monarchy were articulated not just by Protestant authors but also by Catholics such as Trajano Boccalini and Paolo Sarpi, whose works were then translated into English and used to further English campaigns. Such conversations could even cross the religious/secular divide as Agathe de Margerie's paper on the Austrian Paulus Gesellschaft made clear. She showed how in the late 1960s attempts were made by the group to open up a dialogue between Catholic and Marxist thinkers and the ideologies they embraced. Other papers explored conversations across philosophical boundaries, as in Nicholas Devlin's paper on 'The continental Marxist origins of American totalitarian theory' and Luke Illott's paper exploring Michel Foucault's crossing of the boundary between the English and Continental philosophical traditions. Moreover, Benjamin Thomas, in his paper 'Intra-Party Contestation: Ideological Transformations and Neoliberalism', emphasised the importance of considering conversations within, as well as between, ideological groups. In a number of these cases, conversations took place across multiple cultural boundaries simultaneously.

The means by or through which these conversations occurred were equally complex. While some participants focused on the reading, translation, and writing of published texts, others engaged with conversations that took place in private correspondence or even face-to-face. Thus, the kind of 'conversation' that Hugo Bonin explored in his paper on  Henry Reeve's English translation of Alexis de Tocqueville's Democracy in America, and the British reception of the work that resulted from it, was very different from the face-to-face encounters discussed by Dutta's Indian and German intellectuals or de Margerie's Marxists and Catholics. In both types of conversation, however, it was noted that the engagement could be either monolingual or multilingual (the conversations Dutta described took place in English, French, and German as well as in various Indian languages).

Alex Collins's paper looked more theoretically at methods of communication. He argued that the pioneering seventeenth-century scientist Henry Oldenburg expressed an explicit preference for knowledge gained via acquaintance (for example news that came directly from his contacts) as compared with knowledge by description (such as the information he might gain from newspapers). For Oldenburg the advantage lay primarily in the importance of trust in knowledge formation. In our discussion, however, we also considered the fact that direct engagement between people tends to encourage cultural conversations that are multi-directional rather than ones in which ideas flow in only one direction.

Portrait of Henry Oldenburg, attributed to Jan van Cleve. Reproduced from Wikimedia Commons.

Portrait of Henry Oldenburg, attributed to Jan van Cleve. Reproduced from Wikimedia Commons.

All of this complexity inevitably generates obstacles to communication. These might include problems of vocabulary and language. Dutta noted that initially there was no Bengali word for kultur, it simply had to be transliterated from the German. But there was another word from the west of India, 'Sanskrita', the etymology of which derived from the notion of krishe/krishti or cultivated ground, which brought fresh connotations to the Indian version of the kultur/civilisation debate. Similarly, Bonin noted that 'democracy' had different connotations in English from how the word was used in French. For British readers it still tended to be understood to refer to a type of regime, whereas in Tocqueville's French account it had a broader meaning, referring to a relatively egalitarian form of society.

One way around obstacles to communication is to use different formats for the transmission of ideas.  This was a particular focus of Panel 2 'Transfer through print, visual arts and music'. As Lia Brazil demonstrated, English pamphlets engaging with the South African War took very different forms, with the strong graphics and poetry of the Stop the War Committee publications contrasting starkly with the much more plain, cautious approach of those produced by the South African Conciliation Committee. Here, form was probably designed to mirror content, with the Conciliation Committee publications engaging in much deeper legal and philosophical debate, which Brazil expertly analysed. Arthur Duhé focused to an even greater degree on form in his paper 'Affective transfer in revolutionary times'. He noted how engravings and songs were used to convey the emotional aspect of the 1848 revolutions - and particularly the impact of the deaths of revolutionary martyrs - to foreign audiences. Duhé argued persuasively that historians of revolutions need to pay more attention to visual and musical sources, their production and material transfers. In a later panel Jessica Sequeira picked up this theme. Her protagonists - Pedro Prado and Antonio Castro Leal - did not merely translate poetry, but actually went so far as to invent an Afghan poet Karez-i-Roshan. As Sequeira argued, this playfulness was not simply a prank or joke, but had a deeper meaning and resonance as a deliberate method of enacting a transcultural conversation.

Il Duomo. Image by Rachel Hammersley.

Il Duomo. Image by Rachel Hammersley.

Other contributors explored other means by which different communities could dialogue with each other when holding conflicting views and opinions. Luke Illot made a strong case for the fact that it was Foucault's reading of the Oxford Analytic philosophers - and the conception of language that he derived from that reading - that provided a basis on which he could open a dialogue between the English and Continental philosophical traditions, one which had seemed impossible at the time of the Royaumont Conference in 1958. Highlighting the contingency that often facilitates or frustrates these conversations, Illot noted that it was in Tunisia, and via the library of Daniel Defert, that Foucault gained access to these ideas. Similarly, Anna Adorjána referred in her paper 'Conceptualising and experiencing (inter) nationalism. The Case of the Social Democratic Party of Hungary in 1903' to Martin Fuchs's concept of the 'third idiom'. This is an overarching or higher level discourse that provides space for communication in a conflicted situation. In the case of the Hungarian Social Democrats, international class struggle performed this role, but in cases discussed by other participants human rights or religion enacted a similar function.

Yesterday's 'Brexit Day' reflects the huge political and ideological divisions that not only affect Britain's relations with the rest of Europe but also run right through the UK itself. Now, more than ever, it would seem we need to find ways to engage in positive and constructive transcultural conversations. The diverse and myriad ways in which such conversations have taken place across more than five centuries is perhaps grounds for some small hope and optimism.