This is the largest collection of Thompson's historical work, with the full range of his scholarly output. A superb introduction for those new to his work and a valuable addition to existing fans.

This classic collection of essays by E.P. Thompson, one of England's most renowned socialist voices, remains a staple text in the history of Marxist theory. The bulk of the book is dedicated to Thompson's famous polemic against Louis Althusser and what he considers the reductionism and authoritarianism of Althusserian structuralism. In lively and erudite prose, Thompson argues for a self-critical and unapologetically humanist Marxist tradition. Also included are three essays of considerable importance to the development of the New Left.

First Published in 1968. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

First Published in 1968. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

E. P. Thompson (1924-1993) was one of the preeminent British historians of the second half of the twentieth century; his "The Making of the English Working Class" (1964) is arguably the most influential work of British history published during that period. In the present work, originally presented as a set of lectures at Stanford University, Thompson returned to a question that had been on his mind since the war years, the circumstances surrounding the death of his older brother Frank as a British Liaison Officer with the Bulgarian partisans in 1944.
Though these events, Thompson admitted, constituted only a historical footnote, they afforded him an opportunity to engage larger intellectual and political matters that we now associate with the early beginnings of the Cold War and to illustrate certain elements of historical method. Thompson was here concerned not so much with what is fact and what is interpretation as with "the activities of anti-historians, how sensitive evidence is destroyed or screened, how myths originate, how historical anecdote may simply be a code for ideology, how the reasons of state are eternally at war with historical knowledge."
Early in 1944, a British Special Operations mission was parachuted into Serbia to make contact with a group of Bulgarian partisans operating in the area. Their aim was to arrange air drops of supplies for the partisans and to assist them in extending guerrilla warfare across the frontier into Bulgaria itself. Frank Thompson was head of the British mission when it entered Bulgaria with the partisan forces. By the end of May, the entire group had been killed or captured. After a show trial, Frank (though a British officer in uniform) was executed by a firing squad together with the remaining leaders of the partisans and the villagers who had aided them.
The book shows how the status of the actors in this drama--and the respect accorded to them in the decades that followed--varied with changes in the political climate of Europe and the world. It does not simply examine the events themselves, although these are clarified, but also analyzes the politics that lay behind the events, notably the conflicting interests of the "western" and "eastern" allies in supporting the partisans and the British liaison mission.

E. P. Thompson (1924-1993) was one of the preeminent British historians of the second half of the twentieth century; his The Making of the English Working Class (1964) is arguably the most influential work of British history published during that period. In the present work, originally presented as a set of lectures at Stanford University, Thompson returned to a question that had been on his mind since the war years, the circumstances surrounding the death of his older brother Frank as a British Liaison Officer with the Bulgarian partisans in 1944. Though these events, Thompson admitted, constituted only a historical footnote, they afforded him an opportunity to engage larger intellectual and political matters that we now associate with the early beginnings of the Cold War and to illustrate certain elements of historical method. Thompson was here concerned not so much with what is fact and what is interpretation as with "the activities of anti-historians, how sensitive evidence is destroyed or screened, how myths originate, how historical anecdote may simply be a code for ideology, how the reasons of state are eternally at war with historical knowledge." Early in 1944, a British Special Operations mission was parachuted into Serbia to make contact with a group of Bulgarian partisans operating in the area. Their aim was to arrange air drops of supplies for the partisans and to assist them in extending guerrilla warfare across the frontier into Bulgaria itself. Frank Thompson was head of the British mission when it entered Bulgaria with the partisan forces. By the end of May, the entire group had been killed or captured. After a show trial, Frank (though a British officer in uniform) was executed by a firing squad together with the remaining leaders of the partisans and the villagers who had aided them. The book shows how the status of the actors in this drama-and the respect accorded to them in the decades that followed-varied with changes in the political climate of Europe and the world. It does not simply examine the events themselves, although these are clarified, but also analyzes the politics that lay behind the events, notably the conflicting interests of the "western" and "eastern" allies in supporting the partisans and the British liaison mission.

Fifty years since first publication, E. P. Thompson's revolutionary account of working-class culture and ideals is published in Penguin Modern Classics, with a new introduction by historian Michael Kenny This classic and imaginative account of working-class society in its formative years, 1780 to 1832, revolutionized our understanding of English social history. E. P. Thompson shows how the working class took part in its own making and re-creates the whole-life experience of people who suffered loss of status and freedom, who underwent degradation, and who yet created a cultured and political consciousness of great vitality. Reviews: 'A dazzling vindication of the lives and aspirations of the then - and now once again - neglected culture of working-class England' Martin Kettle, Observer 'Superbly readable . . . a moving account of the culture of the self-taught in an age of social and intellectual deprivation' Asa Briggs, Financial Times 'Thompson's work combines passion and intellect, the gifts of the poet, the narrator and the analyst' E. J. Hobsbawm, Independent 'An event not merely in the writing of English history but in the politics of our century' Michael Foot, Times Literary Supplement 'The greatest of our socialist historians' Terry Eagleton, New Statesman About the author: E. P. Thompson was born in 1924 and read history at Corpus Christi, Cambridge, graduating in 1946. An academic, writer and acclaimed historian, his first major work was a biography of William Morris. The Making of the English Working Class was instantly recognized as a classic on its publication in 1963 and secured his position as one of the leading social historians of his time. Thompson was also an active campaigner and key figure in the ending of the Cold War. He died in 1993, survived by his wife and two sons.

"Thompson's book has been called controversial, but perhaps only because so many have forgotten how explosive England was during the Regency and the early reign of Victoria. Without any reservation, The Making of the English Working Class is the most important study of those days since the classic work of the Hammonds."--Commentary

"Mr. Thompson's deeply human imagination and controlled passion help us to recapture the agonies, heroisms and illusions of the working class as it made itself. No one interested in the history of the English people should fail to read his book."--London Times Literary Supplement

E.P. Thompson's book on William Blake explores the religious and political traditions which helped form this most original of poets and artists. The book begins by liberating Blake from the academic straitjacket in which recent criticism has placed him, emphasizing his rootedness in a culture that did not share our values or perceptions. Thompson then offers a historical account of radical thought from the 1640s to the late 18th-century, identifying Blake in this context and probing his unique distillation of heretical religion and radical politics. Thompson offers an close reading of the poetry, detecting in its rhythms, symbolism and vocabulary a repeated call to resist compromises with the materialism of the Antichrist embodied by the contemporary church and state.

William Morris-the great 19th century craftsman, architect, designer, poet and writer-remains a monumental figure whose influence resonates powerfully today. As an intellectual (and author of the seminal utopian News From Nowhere), his concern with artistic and human values led him to cross what he called the 'river of fire' and become a committed socialist-committed not to some theoretical formula but to the day by day struggle of working women and men in Britain and to the evolution of his ideas about art, about work and about how life should be lived. Many of his ideas accorded none too well with the reforming tendencies dominant in the Labour movement, nor with those of 'orthodox' Marxism, which has looked elsewhere for inspiration. Both sides have been inclined to venerate Morris rather than to pay attention to what he said. Originally written less than a decade before his groundbreaking The Making of the English Working Class, E.P. Thompson brought to this biography his now trademark historical mastery, passion, wit, and essential sympathy. It remains unsurpassed as the definitive work on this remarkable figure, by the major British historian of the 20th century.

This pioneering book examines different aspects of the inheritance customs in rural Western Europe in the pre-industrial age: for families and whole societies, the roles of lawyers in reducing them to a common system, and the recurring debate on the merits of various inheritance customs in shaping particular kinds of society. At first sight the study of inheritance customs may appear to be a dull affair, concerned with outdated practices of hair-splitting lawyers; certainly, little academic interest has been shown in the subject. Yet inheritance customs are vital means for the reproduction of the social system, by the transmission of property and other rights through the family. Various family structures and social arrangements are linked by different means of inheritance. This book will interest a wide range of historians, students, postgraduates and teachers alike, whether they are concerned with social, economic, demographic or legal history, in the medieval, early modern or modern periods, and whether their interests are directed to England or other countries of Western Europe; it will also be valuable to social anthropologists, sociologists and historians of ideas. A comprehensive glossary of technical terms has been added for the non-specialist.

E. P. Thompson's long-awaited book on William Blake was published shortly after the historian's death in August 1993. Acclaimed as one of his best and most deeply felt works, it appears now for the first time in paperback. Written with a vivid passion, and bearing the marks of Thompson's lifelong struggle against authoritarian and anti-humanitarian politics both at the level of the individual and of the state, Witness Against the Beast: William Blake and the Moral Law is a profound enquiry into the structure of Blake's thought and the character of his sensibility. Its qualities are among those which place Thompson himself in the same tradition of dissenting values and non-conforming radicalism represented by Blake some two hundred years earlier.

With Whigs and Hunters, the author of The Making of the English Working Class, E. P. Thompson plunged into the murky waters of the early eighteenth century to chart the violently conflicting currents that boiled beneath the apparent calm of the time. The subject is the Black Act, a law of unprecedented savagery passed by Parliament in 1723 to deal with 'wicked and evil-disposed men going armed in disguise'. These men were pillaging the royal forest of deer, conducting a running battle against the forest officers with blackmail, threats and violence. These 'Blacks', however, were men of some substance; their protest (for such it was) took issue with the equally wholsesale plunder of the forest by Whig nominees to the forest offices. And Robert Walpole, still consolidating his power, took an active part in the prosecution of the 'Blacks'. The episode is laden with political and social implications, affording us glimpses of considerable popular discontent, political chicanery, judicial inequity, corrupt ambition and crime.

A fascinating and original view of the turbulent 1790s, "The Romantics" is the last work of the acclaimed historian E. P. Thompson.

Combining his incomparable knowledge of English history with an interpretation of British literature of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, Thompson traces the intellectual influences and societal pressures that gave rise to the English Romantic movement. Writing with great passion and literary force, Thompson examines the interaction between politics and literature at the beginning of the modern age, focusing in on the late1790s--the time of the French and American revolutions--through the celebrated writings of William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and Mary Wollstonecraft.

Witness Against the Beast is a groundbreaking interdisciplinary study in which the renowned social historian E.P. Thompson contends that most of the assumptions scholars have made about William Blake are misleading and unfounded. Brilliantly reexamining Blake's cultural milieu and intellectual background, Thompson detects in Blake's poetry a repeated call to resist the usury and commercialism of the "Antichrist" embodied by contemporary society to "witness against the beast."

This is the first collection of essays on Chartism by leading social historian Dorothy Thompson, whose work radically transformed the way in which Chartism is understood. Reclaiming Chartism as a fully blown working-class movement, Thompson intertwines her penetrating analyses of class with groundbreaking research uncovering the role played by women in the movement. Throughout her essays, Thompson strikes a delicate balance between on-the-ground accounts of local uprisings, snappy portraits of high-profile Chartist figures as well as rank-and-file men and women, and more theoretical, polemical interventions. Of particular historical and political significance is the previously unpublished substantial essay coauthored by Dorothy and Edward Thompson, a superb piece of local historical research by two social historians then on the brink of notable careers.

In the popular imagination, informed as it is by Hogarth, Swift, Defoe and Fielding, the eighteenth-century underworld is a place of bawdy knockabout, rife with colourful eccentrics. But the artistic portrayals we have only hint at the dark reality. In this new edition of a classic collection of essays, renowned social historians from Britain and America examine the gangs of criminals who tore apart English society, while a criminal law of unexampled savagery struggled to maintain stability.

Douglas Hay deals with the legal system that maintained the propertied classes, and in another essay shows it in brutal action against poachers; John G. Rule and Cal Winslow tell of smugglers and wreckers, showing how these activities formed a natural part of the life of traditional communities. Together with Peter Linebaugh s piece on the riots against the surgeons at Tyburn, and E. P. Thompson s illuminating work on anonymous threatening letters, these essays form a powerful contribution to the study of social tensions at a transformative and vibrant stage in English history.

This new edition includes a new introduction by Winslow, Hay and Linebaugh, reflecting on the turning point in the social history of crime that the book represents

The fall of Communism has been an epoch-making event. The distinguished contributors to After the Fall explain to us the meaning of Communism's meteoric trajectory - and explore the rational grounds for socialist endeavour and commitment in a world which remains dangerous and divided. The contributors include the Italian political philosopher Norberto Bobbio, the British historian Eric Hobsbawm, the French economist Andre Gorz, and the German social theorist Jurgen Habermas. Eduardo Galeano explains how the now world looks from the South, Diane Elson explores how the market might be socialized, Ralph Miliband writes on the harshness of Leninism, Hans Magnus Enzenberger argues that the capitalist 'bad fairy' granted the Left's wishes in disconcerting ways. Lynne Segal looking at the condition of women sees no reason to abandon her libertarian, feminist and socialist convictions, while Maxine Molyneux considers the implications for women of the fall of Communism. Giovanni Arrighi asks whether Marxism understood the 'American Century', Fredric Jameson pursues a conversation on the new world order, Ivan Szelenyi explains who will be the new rulers of Eastern Europe, and Robin Blackburn reflects on the history of socialist programmes, with the benefit of hindsight. Fred Halliday and Edward Thompson disagree about how Communism ended but share worries about what is in store for the post-Communist countries. Alexander Cockburn regrets the death of the Soviet Union. And Goeran Therborn eloquent proves that it is still possible to imagine a future beyond capitalism... and beyond socialism?