The Green Ribbon Books

To Hell or Barbados: The Ethnic Cleansing of Ireland

Sean O'Callaghan
Brandon
2001

To Hell or Barbados describes the fate of the thousands of Irish sold into slavery in the West Indies and Virginia after Cromwell's invasion in the Seventeenth Century.

The book illustrates the links between Cromwell's policies in England, the invasion of Ireland and the 'Western design' in the Caribbean. Irish rebels and English dissidents were sold into slavery along with millions of Africans.

It conveys a strong impression of an era whose legacy is still with us today. That is partly down to the power of O'Callaghan's description of the colonial West Indies. It is a vivid, not to say lurid account, of a society of exploitation and cruel debauchery maintained by systematic violence.

This is a powerful book, well worth reading for anyone interested in Caribbean, American, Irish or English history

Buy this book at the Green Ribbon aStore: UK - US - France - Deutschland - Canada

Hell or Connaught: The Cromwellian Colonisation of Ireland 1652-1660

Peter Berresford Ellis
Hamish Hamilton 1975
Blackstaff Press 1988

 

The Cromwellian plantation of Ireland is an event that still resonates to this day, and in Beresford Ellis it has a worthy chronicler. His highly readable account of the period shows a mastery of original sources, both native and settler.

Beresford Ellis draws on English political pamphlets of the 1640s to argue that the Levellers opposed the invasion. Yet it was in many cases the most radical parliamentarians who ended up in Ireland, perhaps as part of a deliberate policy to keep them from making trouble in England. Some such as Edmund Ludlow, would themselves become exiles following the restoration of Charles II.

The World Turned Upside Down: Radical Ideas During the English Revolution

Christopher Hill
Penguin
1972

Magisterial study of the left-wing of radical puritanism in England during the Civil War and the Commonwealth.

Hill describes a period of intellectual and social ferment that gave rise to a huge range of radical sects, Levellers and True Levellers, Ranters, Diggers and Quakers, and which left its mark on great writers like John Bunyan and John Milton.

For Hill, these ideas represent the germ of a deeper social upheaval, 'the world turned upside down' within what ultimately became a bourgeois revolution.

This Marxist reading has been subject to much criticism from later scholars, but this book remains a classic study of an inspirational period in English radical history.

Buy this book at the Green Ribbon aStore: UK - US - France - Deutschland - Canada

The Tyrannicide Brief

The Story of the man who sent Charles I to the scaffold
Geoffrey Robertson
Chatto & Windus
2005

Buy this book at the Green Ribbon aStore: UK - US - France - Deutschland - Canada

The Tryannicide Brief explores the trial and execution of Charles I in 1649, and the life-story of John Cooke, the lawyer who prosecuted the King and paid for it a decade later with his own life.

The death of Charles I has often been seen as nothing more than a settling of scores at the end of the English Civil War. Robertson argues that it was in fact a blow for human rights, establishing the principle that the head of state is not above the law.

Free-Born John

The biography of John Lilburne
Pauline Gregg
Phoenix Press
1961

The definitive biography of a neglected but decisive figure in English history, the Leveller leader John Lilburne.

Gregg's account focuses on the Levellers' fight for legal and political rights for ordinary people, a story which has many parallels with struggles for human rights around the world today.

Lilburne's repeated confrontations with authority were pivotal for the development of English common law. Gregg shows how he used propaganda and mass organisation in a way which made him arguably the first modern political activist, and the Levellers the first modern political movement.  The book is particularly good on the network of underground printing presses which sustained the Puritan opposition to Charles I.

Required reading for anyone who wants to understand the human struggle underneath the costume drama of the English Civil War.

Buy this Book at the Green Ribbon aStore: UK - US - France - Deutschland - Canada