In Fire under the Ashes, John Donoghue recovers the lasting
significance of the radical ideas of the English Revolution, exploring
their wider Atlantic history through a case study of Coleman Street
Ward, London. Located in the crowded center of seventeenth-century
London, Coleman Street Ward was a hotbed of political, social, and
religious unrest. There among diverse and contentious groups of puritans
a tumultuous republican underground evolved as the political means to a
more perfect Protestant Reformation. But while Coleman Street has long
been recognized as a crucial location of the English Revolution, its
importance to events across the Atlantic has yet to be explored.
Prominent merchant revolutionaries from Coleman Street led England's
imperial expansion by investing deeply in the slave trade and projects
of colonial conquest. Opposing them were other Coleman Street puritans,
who having crossed and re-crossed the ocean as colonists and
revolutionaries, circulated new ideas about the liberty of body and soul
that they defined against England's emergent, political economy of
empire. These transatlantic radicals promoted social justice as the
cornerstone of a republican liberty opposed to both political tyranny
and economic slavery--and their efforts, Donoghue argues, provided the
ideological foundations for the abolitionist movement that swept the
Atlantic more than a century later.
