Explanations of the rise of industrial capitalism often emphasize urban centres as the focus of change. Combining the empiricism of English historiography with the rationalism of Annales, David Rollison argues that the origins of change lie in the countryside, with the flight of manufacturing industry from towns to rural districts. Through a series of sharply focused local studies spanning three centuries, Rollison explores the rise of capitalist manufacturing in the English countryside and the revolution in consciousness which accompanied it. Adopting a conjunctural approach, he focuses on...

In 1500 fewer than three million people spoke English; today English speakers number at least a billion worldwide. This book asks how and why a small island people became the nucleus of an empire 'on which the sun never set'. David Rollison argues that the 'English explosion' was the outcome of a long social revolution with roots deep in the medieval past. A succession of crises from the Norman Conquest to the English Revolution were causal links and chains of collective memory in a unique, vernacular, populist movement. The keyword of this long revolution, 'commonwealth', has been largely...

Commune, Country and Commonwealth suggests that towns like Cirencester are a missing link connecting local and national history, in the immensely formative centuries from Magna Carta to the English Revolution. Focused on a town that made highly significant interventions in national constitutional development, it describes recurring struggles to achieve communal solidarity and independence in a society continuously and prescriptively divided by gross inequalities of class and status. The result is a social and political history of a great trans-generational epic in which local and national...

A devastatingly intense thriller written by David J Rollison, his charmingly deadly hero Mike Kelly Department of Homeland Security counterterrorism operative foils al Qaeda attempts to assassinate the President of the United States and G8 World Leaders. The actions begins with a Saudi assassin in the Bahamas seeking to smuggle deadly Sarin gas to be used at the G8 Summit on St. Simons Island, Georgia. The elite unit of joint counterterrorism operatives of the DHS, FBI and CIA team up to stop the assassin and the al Qaeda mastermind, Sheik Abdullah bin Wadi. After years without a terrorist...

My Grandfather told me this story before he made his final journey. He said the prophet Half Deer was born to a village near the village of his Grandfather's, Grandfather's Grandfather's village. The exact time is hard to determine, but he said he thought the white buffalo would be born between the years 1990 and 2000 and the new leader would follow fifty years later. My Grandchildren will see the completion of the prophecy

Through a series of sharply focused studies spanning three centuries, David Rollison explores the rise of capitalist manufacturing in the English countryside and the revolution in consciousness that accompanied it. Combining the empiricism of English historiography with the rationalism of Annales, and drawing on ideas from a wide range of disciplines, he argues that the explosive implications of the rise of rural industry created new social formations and altered the communal, cultural and social contexts of peoples lives. Using localized case studies of families and individuals the book...