One of the enduring historical questions is why the Industrial Revolution started in England, rather than somewhere else. One theory—that of Robert Brenner—gives a lot of credit to England’s agricultural revolution.
Thanks to agriculture, England developed the ability to provide enough food for a growing population (famines ended completely by 1700). At the same time, the changing agriculture reduced the need for so many people on farms. The former manor tenants moved to the towns and cities and became the human engines of the industrial revolution.
For a class this fall, I read a 1976 article by Robert Brenner explaining how this agricultural revolution came about.[1] By the way, I may have earlier overstated the case when I said that historians don’t take Marxism all that seriously. Brenner was either a Marxist or a neo-Marxist, and his paper is laced with Marxist references to “class,” “class consciousness,” and “surplus-extraction.”
In a sense, all historical writing is revisionist. In their writing, most historians attempt to show that some aspect of history has been slighted, ignored, or undiscovered, and they have come up with a remedy. Sometimes, though, revisionist history is very powerful.
In his 1992 book The Stripping of the Altars, Eamon Duffy offered a revisionist view of the Protestant Reformation in England. His goal was to “contribute a shovelful of history to the burial of the venerable historiographical consensus” about the English Reformation.[1]
That consensus (which echoes the “whig version” of history challenged by Herbert Butterfield) pictured an open-minded, modern religion (Protestantism) replacing a superstitious, populist “folk” religion (Catholicism). Historians, says Duffy, were under the sway of A. G. Dickens, the “doyen of English Reformation studies,” who disdained what Duffy calls “late [Catholic] medieval piety.” Duffy’s 654-page volume (which I am reading for a class this fall) was designed to restore respect for Catholic England, and apparently it did.
