Despite its dubious ancestry, the word "revolution" by now has a Pavlovian effect on some historians: applied to any event, it leads at once to eager… - J. C. D. Clark

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Despite its dubious ancestry, the word "revolution" by now has a Pavlovian effect on some historians: applied to any event, it leads at once to eager expectations of radical structural change, profound discontinuity, a sweeping away of the old order. We may indeed wonder whether England has ever experienced a revolution in the extensive terms of the social scientists' definitions in the 1640s, 1688 or 1714, or even under the later impact of "Industry". How much was destroyed in the Civil War? Apart from the large extent to which royalist peers and gentry retained their estates, local studies suggest the widespread and deeply rooted survival of Anglican religious loyalties and practices, even reinvigorated by the experience of persecution.

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About J. C. D. Clark

Jonathan Charles Douglas Clark (born 28 February 1951) is a British historian of both British and American history. He was an undergraduate at Downing College, Cambridge. Having previously held posts at Peterhouse, Cambridge and All Souls College, Oxford into 1996, he has since held the Joyce C. and Elizabeth Ann Hall Distinguished Professorship of British History at the University of Kansas.

Also Known As

Alternative Names: J C D Clark Jonathan Clark Jonathan Charles Douglas Jonathan Charles Douglas Clark
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The model of the atomised, acquisitive individual, dealing with others only through secularised market relations regulated by self-interest, is disastrously inadequate as an account of how real men behaved in real societies, as real historians ultimately discerned.

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It has been traditional in British historiography to trace industrial growth and technological innovation to the sturdy virtues of bourgeois individualism, and especially to the individualism of Protestant-democratic England... [T]he example of Japan in our time refutes the necessity of any such connection, for Japan has demonstrated the possible industrial dynamism of a highly deferential society, indeed a society which has only recently masked the values and practices of a divine-right monarchy. It is perhaps possible in the changed climate of the 1980s to re-emphasise the extent to which England's commercial and industrial achievement in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries rested not only on success in war, averting revolution and eliminating French competition, but also on the virtues of loyalty, diligence, discipline, subordination and obedience in the work-place, whether factory, mine or office (indeed the British economy was eventually overtaken by others which practised these virtues to a higher degree). But such practices had already been elevated to the status of social ideals within the Anglican-aristocratic nexus; and it was the military elite, not the nation of shopkeepers, which won the wars. The values of nineteenth-century industrial society owed far more to the values of the ancien regime than the Victorians were prepared to admit.

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