George Rude – författare

The new edition of this classic account of Revolutionary Europe brings to life many of the key issues that have fascinated historians since the fall of the Bastille and now includes a new introduction examining RudU's life and works and an updated list of readings.

Europe in the Eighteenth Century is a social history of Europe in all its aspects: economic, political, diplomatic military, colonial-expansionist. Crisply and succinctly written, it describes Europe not through a history of individual countries, but in a common context during the three quarters of a century between the death of Louis XIV and the industrial revolution in England and the social and political revolution in France. It presents the development of government, institutions, cities, economies, wars, and the circulation of ideas in terms of social pressures and needs, and stresses growth, interrelationships, and conflict of social classes as agents of historical change, paying particular attention to the role of popular, as well as upper- and middle-class, protest as a factor in that change.

In this pathbreaking work originally published in 1980, the late George Rude examines the role played by ideology in a wide range of popular rebellions in Europe and the Americas from the middle ages to the early twentieth century. Rude was a champion of the role of working people in the making of history, and Ideology and Popular Protest was the first book devoted to the comparative study of popular political ideas and consciousness in both preindustrial cultures and the age of the Industrial Revolution. According to Rude, the development of modern revolutionary struggles depended on a crucial merger of the culture and ideas of the common people with the radical ideologies of intellectuals. In a new foreword, Harvey Kaye reviews Rude's career as a pioneer in the critical study of social movements and highlights the enduring value of Ideology and Popular Protest as a classroom text.

Sir Your name is down amongst the Black hearts in the Black Book and this is to advise you and the like of you, who are Parson Justasses, to make your willsYe have been the Blackguard Enemies of the People on all occasions, Ye have not yet doneas ye ought - SwingIn our increasingly mechanized age, the Swing revolts are a timely record of the relationship between technological advance, labour and poverty. With the onset of the Industrial Revolution, capitalism swept from the cities into the countryside, and tensions mounted between agricultural workers and employers. From 1830 on, a series of revolts, known as the "Swing" shook England to its core. Landowners wanting to make their land more profitable started to use machinery to harvest crops, causing widespread misery among rural communities. Captain Swing reveals the background to that upheaval, from its rise to its fall, and shines a light on the people who tried to change the world and save their livelihoods.