Fire under the Ashes

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.

John Donoghue is an associate professor at Loyola University Chicago specializing in the history of the early modern Atlantic world. He lives in Chicago.

— Journal of American History

— Canadian Journal of History

— Matthew Taylor Raffety, author of The Republic Afloat: Law, Honor, and Citizenship in Maritime America

— Karen Ordahl Kupperman, author of The Atlantic in World History

— Alison Games, author of The Web of Empire: English Cosmopolitans in an Age of Expansion, 1560-1660

— European Journal of American Studies

— Europe & the Wider World