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British History
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  1. The Age of Empire 1875 - 1914
    Resource Type: Book
    Published: 1996
    Covers the rise of bourgeois society, the growth of free market capitalism and the expansion of European colonialism abroad.
  2. Age of Extremes
    The Short Twentieth Century 1914 - 1991

    Resource Type: Book
    Published: 1997
    A overview of the history of the years 1914 - 1991.
  3. An Agreement of the Free People of England
    Manifesto of the Levellers

    Resource Type: Article
    Published: 1649
    The Levellers were an informal alliance of agitators and pamphleteers who came together during the English Civil War (1642-1648) to demand constitutional reform and equal rights under the law. Levellers believed all men were born free and equal and possessed natural rights that resided in the individual, not the government. They believed that each man should have freedom limited only by regard for the freedom of others. They believed the law should equally protect the poor and the wealthy.
  4. Ancestors of the Proletariat
    Tercentenary of the English Revolution: 1649-1949

    Resource Type: Article
    Published: 1949
    After Charles I had been executed, the Levellers aimed directly at the overthrow of the military government of Cromwell in the name of the people. The great political act of the abolition of the monarchy, dramatized in the execution of the King, was in their eyes entirely subordinate to the positive reorganization of society.
  5. Arthur & George
    Resource Type: Book
    Published: 2005
    A novel about Aruthur Vonan Doyle.
  6. An Atlas of Rural Protest In Britain 1548-1900
    Resource Type: Book
    Published: 1983
    This volume surveys, compares, and contrasts a range of rural riots in Britain, including land protests, food riots, turnpike disturbances, militia protests, and protests by agricultural labourers. The volume includes seventy-maps which together demonstrate the shifting geography of protest, illustrating how the distribution of protest changed over time and how certain forms of protest changed as Britain developed from a feudal to a capitalist society.
  7. Austerity Britain, 1945-1951
    Resource Type: Book
    Published: 2008
    A review of the period immediately after World War Two in Britain illustrating the measures taken to rebuild the country and its economy.
  8. The Battle of Cable Street
    Resource Type: Article
    Published: 2016
    Eighty years ago this week, anti-fascists in East London confronted Oswald Mosley's Blackshirts as they tried to march though what was then a largely Jewish area. Mosley's British Union of Fascists was notorious for using marches and rallies as cover for vicious attacks on Jews. The confrontation has gone down in folklore as 'The Battle of Cable Street'.
  9. The Blackest Streets
    The Life and Death of a Victorian Slum

    Resource Type: Book
    Published: 2008
  10. Britain - Its contribution to Socialism, Marxism and Workers' Organisation
    Resource Type: Article
    Links to writings from the history of the British Isles, relevant to the development of socialist ideas and Marxism.
  11. British Biographical Index
    Resource Type: Book
  12. The British Camps
    Though it reached its horrific heights at Auschwitz and Buchenwald, the British, not the Nazis, pioneered the concentration camp.

    Resource Type: Article
    Published: 2017
    Today, the expression "concentration camp" evokes the horrors of Nazi Germany, conjuring up black-and-white images of Auschwitz and Belsen. But Germans were neither the first nation to make use of concentration camps nor the last.
  13. The Charter of the Forest
    Resource Type: Article
    Published: 1225
    A complementary document to the Magna Carta of 1215, defining the rights of vassals, freemen, and serfs, reducing penalties, and restoring common land taken by the Crown.
  14. Chartism
    Connexipedia Article

    Resource Type: Article
    A movement for political and social reform in the United Kingdom during the mid-19th century between 1838 and 1850 which takes its name from the People's Charter of 1838.
  15. Commonwealth of Thieves
    The Improbable Birth of Australia

    Resource Type: Book
    Published: 2006
    A history of the first four years of the convict settlement in Australia, examining the interplay of soldiers, convicts, and Aborigines.
  16. The Condition of the Working Class in England
    Resource Type: Book
    Published: 1845
  17. Cromwell and the Levellers
    Tercentenary of English Revolution: 1649-1949

    Resource Type: Article
    Published: 1949
    Levelers were a loose organisation of kindred political thinkers who from stage to stage expressed the rapidly developing political consciousness of a great social and political mass movement.
  18. Decline of the English Murder
    And Other Essays

    Resource Type: Book
    Published: 1981
    A collection of essays by George Orwell.
  19. Democracy in the British Army
    Resource Type: Article
    Published: 1939
  20. Destroying the Commons
    How the Magna Carta Became a Minor Carta

    Resource Type: Article
    Published: 2012
    Our rights and liberties are under ever-increasing attack.
  21. Diggers
    Connexipedia Article

    Resource Type: Article
    An English group of agrarian communists in the 17th century.
  22. The End of Parliamentary Socialism
    From New Left to New Labour

    Resource Type: Book
    Published: 1997
    Argues against the assertion that there is no alternative to neo-liberalism. This account of the British Labour Party's recent history argues that Tony Blair's modernizing tendency was profoundly mistaken in asserting that the only alternative to traditional social democracy and narrow parliamentarianism was an acceptance of neo-liberalism.
  23. Engels, Manchester and the Working Class
    Resource Type: Book
    Published: 1974
    An account and interpretation of the writing of Friedrich Engels' first major work, The Condition of the Working Class in England in 1844.
  24. English coffeehouses in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries
    Connexipedia Article

    Resource Type: Article
    Describes the origins, the popularity, and the decline of the English Coffeehouse.
  25. The English Peasantry in the Later Middle Ages
    The Ford Lectures for 1973 and Related Studies

    Resource Type: Book
    Published: 1975
    Investigates the question of whether or not peasants might be considered their own social class.
  26. The English Revolution
    Connexipedia Article

    Resource Type: Article
    The period of the English Civil Wars and Commonwealth period 1640-1660, in which Parliament challenged King Charles I's authority, engaged in civil conflict against his forces, and executed him in 1649.
  27. The Fight for Freedom for Women
    Resource Type: Book
    Published: 1973
    The fight for women's rights in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, primarily focusing on Britain and the USA.
  28. General Strike of 1842
    Connexipedia Article

    Resource Type: Article
    The strike started among the Staffordshire miners and soon spread through the country affecting factories, mills and coal mines from Dundee to South Wales and Cornwall.
  29. George Orwell: A Life
    Resource Type: Book
    Published: 1980
    A biography of George Orwell.
  30. Germany and Britain: Memory and Myopia
    Resource Type: Article
    Published: 2014
    Ernst Barlach was one of Germany's great expressionist artists of the early twentieth century. A virulent nationalist in the run-up to the First World War, Barlach found that his experience of the Western Front stripped him of his jingoism. Much of his subsequent work explored the sorrow and suffering that he saw as the human condition.
  31. The Great Transformation
    The political and economic origins of our time

    Resource Type: Book
    Published: 1968
    Polanyi analyzes the social and political upheavals that took place in England during the rise of the market economy. Polanyi contends that the modern market economy and the modern nation-state should be understood not as discrete elements, but as a single human invention he calls the "Market Society".
  32. Hegemony or Survival
    America's Quest for Global Dominance

    Resource Type: Book
    Published: 2004
    Chomsky documents how, for more than half a century, the United States has been pursuing a grand imperial strategy with the aim of dominating the globe.
  33. Hidden Agendas
    Resource Type: Book
    Published: 1998
    Pilger's book is an indictment of Tony Blair's government and his easy acceptance of the Thacherite view of foreign affairs. Using the examples of Indonesia, East Timor, Burma, Murdoch and China he chronicles the scale and intensity of injustice around the world.
  34. Hill, Christopher
    Connexipedia Article

    Resource Type: Article
    English Marxist historian and author. (1912-2003).
  35. Hill, Christopher - Writings - Index
    Resource Type: Article
    Writings of Christopher Hill (1912-2003).
  36. The History of Democracy
    A Marxist Interpretation

    Resource Type: Book
    Published: 2013
    Roper traces the history of democracy from ancient Athens to the emergence of liberal representative and socialist participatory democracy. He argues that democracy cannot be understood separately from the social and economic contexts in which democratic states operate.
  37. The History Thieves
    Secrets, Lies, and the Shaping of a Modern Nation

    Resource Type: Book
    Published: 2016
    Ian Cobain uncovers the role of secrecy in the British state - and the lies, omissions and misrepresentations we've been fed to maintain the facade of a fair and just Britain.
  38. The History Thieves - Review
    How Britain covered up its imperial crimes

    Resource Type: Book
    Published: 2016
    A review of Ian Cobain's book The History Thieves, an engrossing study which identifies secrecy as a 'very British disease', exploring how, as the empire came to an end, government officials burned the records of imperial rule.
  39. How the aristocracy preserved their power
    Resource Type: Article
    Published: 2017
    After democracy finally shunted aside hereditary lords, they found new means to protect their extravagant riches. For all the modern tales of noble poverty and leaking ancestral homes, their private wealth and influence remain phenomenal.
  40. I May Be Some Time
    Ice and the English Imagination

    Resource Type: Book
    Published: 1996
    Spufford explores the British obsession with the world's coldest and bleakest climes, using their literary representation as his guide.
  41. Inclosure Acts
    Connexipedia Article

    Resource Type: Article
    A series of United Kingdom Acts of Parliament which enclosed open fields and common land in the country. This meant that the rights that people once held to graze animals on these areas were denied.
  42. The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes
    Resource Type: Book
    Published: 2001
    Now in its second edition, this landmark book provides an intellectual history of the British working classes from the preindustrial era to the twentieth century.
  43. Karl Marx's Theory of Revolution
    Volume I: State and Bureaucracy

    Resource Type: Book
    Published: 1977
    A wide-ranging and thorough exposition of Marx's views on democracy.
  44. Liberty Against the Law
    Some Seventeenth-century Controversies

    Resource Type: Book
    Published: 1996
  45. The Life of Bertrand Russell
    Resource Type: Book
    Published: 1975
    A biography of the political activist, philosopher and mathematician.
  46. Lilburne, John
    Connexipedia Article

    Resource Type: Article
    English political agitator before, during and after English Civil Wars 1642-1650. (1614-1657).
  47. The Long Revolution
    Resource Type: Book
    Published: 1965
  48. Luddites
    Connexipedia Article

    Resource Type: Article
    A social movement of British textile artisans in the early nineteenth century who protested - often by destroying mechanized looms - against the changes produced by the Industrial Revolution, which were leaving them without work.
  49. The Magna Carta
    Resource Type: Article
    Published: 1215
    The Magna Carta consists of concessions wrung from the unwilling King John by his rebellious barons in 1215. It established for the first time a very significant constitutional principle: that the power of the king could be limited by a written grant.
  50. Manchester's Radical History
    Exploring Greater Manchester's Grassroots History

    Resource Type: Website
    Published: 2009
    Manchester Radical History Collective is a small group of politically active people living in Manchester. We share an interest in the city’s radical and grassroots history – the local struggles and campaigns that have shaped the city of Manchester and the towns that make up Greater Manchester, and the people that live in them. And we’re inspired by the way that Manchester’s people have maintained a spirit of independence and resistance which has endured down the years.
  51. Maps of Britain and Ireland's ancient tribes, kingdoms and dna
    Resource Type: Article
    Published: 2016
    Looks into the various territories and DNA evidence in Britan and Ireland and analyzes maps of these territories.
  52. Marx and Engels Collected Works Volume 4
    Marx and Engels 1844 - 1845

    Resource Type: Book
    Published: 1845
    Includes The Holy Family, or Critique of Critical Criticism, and The Condition of the Working-Class in England.
  53. A Marxist History of the World part 41: 1640-1645: revolution and war in England
    Resource Type: Article
    Published: 2011
    The attempt to impose Absolutism by Charles I led to a revolutionary civil war in which the King would be executed - Neil Faulkner looks at the English Civil War.
  54. A Marxist History of the World part 42: The Army, the Levellers, and the Commonwealth
    Resource Type: Article
    Published: 2011
    Neil Faulkner looks at how even the most radical bourgeois forces, if they are to preserve their property and status, must break the momentum of the movement that has brought them to power.
  55. A Marxist History of the World part 43: Colonies, slavery, and racism
    Resource Type: Article
    Published: 2011
    Capitalist contradictions were most evident in the 18th century, when the wealth of the merchant-capitalist class of Britain’s port-cities was contrasted with the untold human misery of the slaves, ramping up the historical significance of racist ideology.
  56. A Marxist History of the World part 44: Wars of empire
    Resource Type: Article
    Published: 2011
    The English Revolution transformed Britain into a capitalist economy engaging in geopolitical competition. Neil Faulkner looks at how Britain became the dominant global superpower of the 19th Century.
  57. A Marxist History of the World part 45: The Enlightenment
    Resource Type: Article
    Published: 2011
    What gave the Enlightenment its subversive, politically corrosive character was its critique of institutions and practices which appeared comparatively irrational in the light of modern thinking, argues Neil Faulkner.
  58. A Marxist History of the World part 46: The American Revolution
    Resource Type: Article
    Published: 2011
    In 1764, Americans thought of themselves as British subjects of King George III. By 1788, they would, by their own decisions and actions, have made themselves the free citizens of a new republic forged in revolution and war.
  59. A Marxist History of the World part 50: The Industrial Revolution
    Resource Type: Article
    Published: 2011
    Frederick Engels was sent to Manchester, centre of the Industrial Revolution, to dispel his radicalism. Instead it made him the revolutionary he is remembered as today, Neil Faulkner explains.
  60. Midland Revolt
    Connexipedia Article

    Resource Type: Article
    A popular uprising which took place in the Midlands of England in 1607.
  61. Never had it So Good
    A History of Britain from Suez to the Beatles

    Resource Type: Book
    Published: 2005
  62. On E.P. Thompson's Legacy
    Resource Type: Article
    Published: 2014
    In a tribute to E.P. Thompson, Cohen gives insights into his work "The Making of the English Working Class" regarding its valuable focus on the self-activity and self-organization of the people.
  63. Other Voices: The Connexions Newsletter - July 2, 2016
    Brexit, Jeremy Corbyn, and Contempt for Democracy

    Resource Type: Article
    Published: 2016
    Brexit, the British vote to leave the European Union, has thrown the political elites into turmoil and confusion. The referendum was supposed to be a safe political manoeuvre, a way to produce an appearance of democratic legitimacy for the profoundly undemocratic structures of the EU. The gambit turned out to be a spectacular miscalculation, as millions of people turned out to express their opposition to a state of affairs that is leaving the majority worse off while enriching a small minority. This issue of Other Voices looks at the Brexit referendum, elite loathing for democracy, and the related attempt to get rid of Labour's leftwing leader, Jeremy Corbyn.
  64. Other Voices: The Connexions Newsletter - July 22, 2017
    Secrecy and Power

    Resource Type: Serial Publication (Periodical)
    Published: 2017
    Secrecy is a weapon the powerful use against their enemies: us. This issue of Other Voices explores the relationship of secrecy and power.
  65. Palestine is a loud echo of Britain's colonial past - and a warning of the future
    Resource Type: Article
    Published: 2022
    In moving from Nazareth back to the UK, I have stepped out of the frying pan and into the fire.
  66. Paper-contestations and Textual Communities in England 1640 - 1675
    Resource Type: Book
    Published: 2005
  67. The Penguin Atlas of Modern History (to 1815)
    Resource Type: Book
  68. The Penguin Atlas of World History - Vol. 1: From the Beginning to the Eve of the French Revolution
    Resource Type: Book
    Published: 1974
  69. The Penguin Atlas of World History - Vol. 2: From the French Revolution to the Present
    Resource Type: Book
    Published: 1978
  70. The People's Charter
    Resource Type: Article
    Published: 1839
    The Chartists' Peoples Charter of 1839.
  71. A People's History of the World
    From the Stone Age to the New Millennium

    Resource Type: Book
    Published: 1999
    Harman describes the shape and course of human history as a narrative of ordinary people forming and re-forming complex societies in pursuit of common human goals.
  72. The People's Petition
    Resource Type: Article
    Published: 1838
    The Chartist Petition of 1838.
  73. The politics of display
    The redesign of the Ashmolean in Oxford provides a chance to reflect on how we understand the meaning of collections

    Resource Type: Article
    Published: 2009
    The Ashmolean Museum in Oxford is the oldest museum in Britain, founded in 1693. The institution has grown, thanks to a new postmodern building by architect Rick Mather. The open concept design of the new galleries is perfect for the curatorial focus on the impact of trade and the legacy of intercultural exchange titled "Crossing Cultures Crossing Time".
  74. Postcolonial Theory and the Specter of Capital
    Resource Type: Book
    Published: 2013
    Against the thesis that Western subalterns are made of different stuff, Chibber argues that human beings are, at their core, not that different across contexts. The winds of history and culture may change many things, but not human constitutions. His defense of this argument sets the stage for a deliberate, careful explication of the key tenets of historical materialism. This argument is that humans, everywhere, take an interest in defending their well-being and their dignity.
  75. The Print Shop Window
    Resource Type: Website
    A blog about Georgian caricature and satirical print culture in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.
  76. The Road to Wigan Pier
    Resource Type: Book
    Published: 1937
    George Orwell's investigation of an English working class community in the 1930s.
  77. Scargill, Arthur
    Connexipedia Article

    Resource Type: Article
    British trade unionist and political party leader. (Born 1938).
  78. The Scramble for Africa
    White Man's Conquest of the Dark Continent from 1876 to 1912

    Resource Type: Book
    Published: 2003
    Describes the brief vicious scramble by Europe's imperial powers to seize colonies throughout the continent of Africa. Pakenham strips the impresarios of imperialism of their veneer of Victorian heroism and reputations for statemanlike vision, to reveal them as men with bloated and often vicious egos.
  79. Seeds of Fire
    A People's Chronology

    Resource Type: Article
    Published: 2017
    Recalling events that happened on this day in history. Memories of struggle, resistance and persistence.
  80. The Slave Trade
    The Story of the Atlantic Slave Trade 1440 - 1870

    Resource Type: Book
    Published: 1997
    A comprehensive history of the Atlantic slave trade in which approximiately eleven million black slaves were carried from Africa to the Americas to work on plantations, in mines, or as servants in houses.
  81. The Socialist Register 1985/1986
    Volume 22: Social Democracy and After

    Resource Type: Serial Publication (Periodical)
    Published: 1986
  82. Staying Power: The history of black people in Britain
    Resource Type: Book
    Published: 2010
    Peter Fryer reveals how Africans, Asians and their descendants, previously hidden from history, have profoundly influenced and shaped events in Britain over the course of the last two thousand years.
  83. The Story of English
    Resource Type: Book
    Published: 1992
  84. Studies in the Development of Capitalism
    Resource Type: Book
    Published: 1968
    A Marxist interpretation of economic development in the period of modern capitalism. Starting with the decline of serfdom, the book deals with the beginnings of the bourgeoisie in the rising urban communities of Europe, with the growth of industrial investment, and with monopoloy in its various forms as a crucial instrument in the growth of capitalism.
  85. To the Ends of the Earth
    Resource Type: Book
    Published: 2011
    A history of Scotland's diaspora, and a critique of some of the myths that surround it.
  86. A Tour Through the Whole Island of Great Britain
    Resource Type: Book
    Published: 1978
  87. Ukip: the battle for Britain
    Resource Type: Article
    Published: 2013
    A exposé on Ukip, which wonders: is it a lunatic fringe or a sign of things to come?
  88. United Kingdom general strike of 1926
    Connexipedia Article

    Resource Type: Article
    The 1926 General Strike in the United Kingdom was a general strike called by the General Council of the Trades Union Congress (TUC) in an unsuccessful attempt to force the government to act to prevent wage reduction and worsening conditions for coal miners.
  89. UK miners' strike (1984 - 1985)
    Connexipedia Article

    Resource Type: Article
    Published: 1985
    A major industrial action affecting the British coal industry.
  90. Victorian People
    A Reassessment of Persons and Themes 1851-1867

    Resource Type: Book
    Published: 1967
  91. The War after the War
    Resource Type: Book
    Published: 1973
  92. Who Could Ever Feel Pride in the Balfour Declaration?
    Resource Type: Article
    Published: 2017
    Although the Balfour Declaration itself has been parsed, de-semanticised, romanticised, decrypted, decried, cursed and adored for 100 years, its fraud is easy to detect: it made two promises which were fundamentally opposed to each other -- and thus one of them, to the Arabs (aka "the existing non-Jewish communities"), would be broken.
  93. Winstanley, Gerrard
    Connexipedia Article

    Resource Type: Article
    English Protestant religious reformer and political activist, a member of the True Levellers. (1609-1676).
  94. Winter of Discontent
    Connexipedia Article

    Resource Type: Article
    A term used to describe the British winter of 1978-1979, during which there were widespread strikes by local authority trade unions demanding larger pay raises for their members.
  95. Working Class Communism
    A Review of the Literature

    Resource Type: Book
    Published: 1971
  96. The World Turned Upside Down
    Radical Ideas During the English Revolution

    Resource Type: Book
    Published: 1984
    Hill looks at radical groups such as the Diggers, Levellers, Ranters, and others, whose ideas threatened to overturn the established order in the mid-seventeenth century.

Experts on British History in the Sources Directory

  1. BFI - British Film Institute
  2. The British Museum
  3. History & Policy


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