The role of ordinary people during some crucial turning points in modern history.

In this pathbreaking work originally published in 1980, the late George Rude examines the role played by ideology in a wide range of popular rebellions in Europe and the Americas from the middle ages to the early twentieth century. Rude was a champion of the role of working people in the making of history, and "Ideology and Popular Protest" was the first book devoted to the comparative study of popular political ideas and consciousness in both preindustrial cultures and the age of the Industrial Revolution. According to Rude, the development of modern revolutionary struggles depended on a crucial merger of the culture and ideas of the common people with the radical ideologies of intellectuals. In a new foreword, Harvey Kaye reviews Rude's career as a pioneer in the critical study of social movements and highlights the enduring value of "Ideology and Popular Protest" as a classroom text.

Europe in the Eighteenth Century is a social history of Europe in all its aspects: economic, political, diplomatic military, colonial-expansionist. Crisply and succinctly written, it describes Europe not through a history of individual countries, but in a common context during the three quarters of a century between the death of Louis XIV and the industrial revolution in England and the social and political revolution in France. It presents the development of government, institutions, cities, economies, wars, and the circulation of ideas in terms of social pressures and needs, and stresses growth, interrelationships, and conflict of social classes as agents of historical change, paying particular attention to the role of popular, as well as upper- and middle-class, protest as a factor in that change.

Sir Your name is down amongst the Black hearts in the Black Book and this is to advise you and the like of you, who are Parson Justasses, to make your wills Ye have been the Blackguard Enemies of the People on all occasions, Ye have not yet done as ye ought - Swing In our increasingly mechanized age, the Swing revolts are a timely record of the relationship between technological advance, labour and poverty. With the onset of the Industrial Revolution, capitalism swept from the cities into the countryside, and tensions mounted between agricultural workers and employers. From 1830 on, a series of revolts, known as the "Swing" shook England to its core. Landowners wanting to make their land more profitable started to use machinery to harvest crops, causing widespread misery among rural communities. Captain Swing reveals the background to that upheaval, from its rise to its fall, and shines a light on the people who tried to change the world and save their livelihoods.

Historians generally--and Marxists in particular--have presented the revolution of 1789 as a bourgeois revolution: one which marked the ascendance of the bourgeois as a class, the defeat of a feudal aristocracy, and the triumph of capitalism. Recent revisionist accounts, however, have raised convincing arguments against the idea of the bourgeois class revolution, and the model on which it is based. In this provocative study, George Comninel surveys existing interpretations of the French Revolution and the methodological issues these raise for historians. He argues that the weaknesses of Marxist scholarship originate in Marx's own method, which has led historians to fall back on abstract conceptions of the transition from feudalism to capitalism. Comninel reasserts the principles of historical materialism that found their mature expression in Das Kapital; and outlines an interpretation which concludes that, while the revolution unified the nation and centralized the French state, it did not create a capitalist society.

In this survey of the life of London throughout the eighteenth century, Professor Rude outlines the main themes in the development of the metropolis, and deals with every aspect of the greatest capital city in Europe: the physical growth of the town both as a capital and as a residential area; economic life and communications; social classes, social life and the arts; the small traders, craftsmen wage-earners and the poor; religion and the churches; government and administration, and the bewildering medley of controlling and contending bodies; the role of London in the political and economic life of the nation; the machinery of political manipulation; the almost continuous opposition to the Court and government; the outbreaks of social protest from below; trades unions, strikes, industrial riots and the mob; the emergence of Radicalism and the phenomenon of Wilkes; the changing pattern of London during the French Wars and on the brink of the nineteenth century.