So I'm going to try to do some regular writing here in order to practice thinking and in order to avoid having thoughts about the world tumbling all around my head. I'll probably just do short posts about what I'm reading/learning and current events and the such.

This week I'm listening to the Revolutions podcast series on the English Civil War. It's a pretty popular series by this guy named Mike Duncan who started out doing a podcast on the history of Rome and now has moved on to one about revolutions. I think he does his research on the topic before putting together the podcast but has no particular training in these areas of history. It's a pretty decent way to keep myself entertained while aligning optics in the lab. The podcasting style is pretty engaging. Duncan makes sure to introduce all the characters when they first appear and does a good job of keeping the different concurrent plot threads straight. I think there's a little bit of presentism -- a few parts where the podcaster talks about modern political structures as if they're a self-evident progression rather than getting into the reasons expansion of republican and democratic structures was marginalized at the time -- but overall the tone is good. Though I feel like the podcast is more sympathetic to leaders like Cromwell and even Charles I than to the Parliament, due to some biases against squabbling politics and for strong action in government. I'll need to look things up when I'm done listening because I think Cromwell is not as principled as presented. Though I guess it follows up the Wolf Hall Cromwell-ancestor revisionism!

The English Civil war is interesting because we didn't cover it extensively in history class and its pretty complicated (lots of factions that switch sides) and so hard to just skim Wikipedia to learn about. And I feel like in US history we spend so much time talking about the Puritans who were oppressed and had to make their own colony to escape persecution while ignoring that only a few decades later the Puritans themselves took over the whole country for almost 20 years. There must have been some interactions there -- but we never covered them because US and European history were in different classes.

As I listen, I'm mostly noting parallels between the English Civil War and the French Revolution. The overall structure is surprisingly similar! There's a monarch forced to summon a legislature due to budget problems, conflict between the monarch and the legislature escalating, the monarch rapidly losing influence, purges and defections in the legislature leading to radicalization until the king is executed. And then after that there's rotation between various newfangled forms of government and finally takeover by a military leader who built his reputation on military victories abroad (Cromwell in Ireland). Of course the causes and political forces are different, but the ways the revolutions played out are similar, in a way that feels tied to the modern rather than medieval age. In both, the main conflict is between the king and an assembly of commoners, rather than between the king and his nobles or vassals. The commoners then had the opportunity to rethink the structure of government and formulate new forms of governmental legitimacy without a king. Again, of course the French Revolution was much more radical and inclusive in its conception of national politics, but it did come a century later.

Actually, speaking of the intervening century, I'm not sure if it the bias of the podcast or just the fact that the English Civil War was mostly centered on religious questions, but its interesting that there's very little influence of political theory on the way the politics developed. The people who launched the French and American revolutions were well versed in all the political philosophers of the Enlightenment and were ready to apply their favorite theories to their new government. That impulse seems less present in this telling of the English Civil War. I can think of a few explanations. First of all, the events take place in the 1640s-1650s, so a lot of the political theory hasn't been written yet. Second, the Parliamentarians were mostly interested in religion and so were intellectually motivated by religious doctrine instead. Third, some of the intellectual history may be cut out of the podcast -- he does mention separation of powers, but it turns out Montesquieu hadn't been born at the time so I don't know if this was intellectually rigorous.

Maybe my comparisons to the French Revolution are too far-reaching, and I should keep the English Civil War in the context of the wars between Protestants and Catholics ravaging all of Europe at the time. In all of those, the religious questions were paramount, and political questions were limited to balances of power between central and regional rulers as well as state religions. However, the English Civil War did set the course to Parliamentary supremacy in England -- and they did chop off the king's head! -- so I do feel like it has to be seen as a precursor to the 18th century revolutions.

Those revolutions are the topics of the next two part of the podcast, but I probably won't listen to them since I know a bunch about them already (and I have the Chernow Hamilton biography to read for the American revolution!). But then he has a series on the Haitian Revolution and a current one on South America so I might check those out because those are some cool topics.