In 1500 fewer than three million people spoke English; today English speakers number at least a billion worldwide. This book asks how and why a small island people became the nucleus of an empire 'on which the sun never set'. David Rollison argues that the 'English explosion' was the outcome of a long social revolution with roots deep in the medieval past. A succession of crises from the Norman Conquest to the English Revolution were causal links and chains of collective memory in a unique, vernacular, populist movement. The keyword of this long revolution, 'commonwealth', has been largely invisible in traditional constitutional history. This panoramic synthesis of political, intellectual, social, cultural, religious, economic, literary and linguistic movements offers a 'new constitutional history' in which state institutions and power elites were subordinate and answerable to a greater community that the early modern English called 'commonwealth' and we call 'society'.
In 1500 fewer than three million people spoke English; today English speakers number at least a billion worldwide. This book asks how and why a small island people became the nucleus of an empire 'on which the sun never set'. David Rollison argues that the 'English explosion' was the outcome of a long social revolution with roots deep in the medieval past. A succession of crises from the Norman Conquest to the English Revolution were causal links and chains of collective memory in a unique, vernacular, populist movement. The keyword of this long revolution, 'commonwealth', has been largely invisible in traditional constitutional history. This panoramic synthesis of political, intellectual, social, cultural, religious, economic, literary and linguistic movements offers a 'new constitutional history' in which state institutions and power elites were subordinate and answerable to a greater community that the early modern English called 'commonwealth' and we call 'society'.
"How easily we forget God is in control. How arrogant of us to think we are running anything!" ?Marilyn MebergMany of us spend our time placing invisible chains on ourselves and those closest to us. O
A House Dividing compares Virginia and Pennsylvania to answer a crucial question of American history: how did slavery undermine the development of the southern economy? Extensive archival research reveals that in the first decades of the nineteenth century, local residents in each state financed transportation improvements to raise land values and spur commercial growth. In the 1830s, however, Philadelphia capitalists began financing Pennsylvania's railroad network, eventually building integrated systems that reached deep within the Midwest. Virginia's railroads, still dependent upon local investment and funds from the state government, remained a collection of local lines without western connections. The lack of a great city that could provide capital and traffic for large-scale railroads was the Achilles' heel of Virginia's slave economy. The chains of slavery, Virginians learned to their dismay, also shackled the invisible hand of the market.
