Fire under the Ashes

Located in the crowded center of seventeenth-century London, the rough community of Coleman Street Ward was a hotbed of political and religious unrest. There among diverse and contentious groups of puritans a seething republican underground developed 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.

In Fire under the Ashes, John Donoghue recovers the lasting significance of the radical ideas of Coleman Street Ward by exploring their wider Atlantic history and revealing how republican radicals redefined themselves against the emergent economy of empire. While some prominent revolutionaries led England’s imperial expansion by investing deeply in the slave trade and projects of colonial conquest, other Coleman Street puritans crossed and re-crossed the ocean as colonists and revolutionaries, circulating new ideas about the liberty of body and soul. These 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 which swept the Atlantic world over a century later.