Seventeenth-century England saw the first capitalist revolution of the modern world, but also the first anti-capitalist revolution. In Ehud’s Dagger, James Holstun reconstructs five radical projects of the time in a stirring development of Marxist “history from below.” A Caroline prologue examines the political and poetic furore surrounding John Felton, who assassinated the Duke of Buckingham in 1628, creating a republican cause célèbre for circulators of verse libels. Holstun then turns to the Revolution proper, focusing on the common soldiers of the Puritan New Model Army, who formed a military soviet in the summer of 1647 and bested their capitalist officers in debate; the Fifth Monarchist visionary Anna Trapnel, who publicly prophesied against the Protectorate on behalf of sectarian small producers; the Leveller theorist and desperado Edward Sexby, who wrote the brilliant tyrannicidal treatise Killing Noe Murder, and attempted to assassinate Cromwell; and the agrarian communist Diggers of Surrey, whose comrade and leader Gerrard Winstanley was the foremost social theorist of seventeenth-century England.
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