Modern Mind

primarily economic. 41 He put it this way: ‘The English revolution of 1640–60 was a great social movement like the French Revolution of 1789. The state power protecting an old order that was essentially feudal was violently overthrown, power passed into the hands of a new class [the bourgeoisie], and so the freer development of capitalism was made possible…. Furthermore, the Civil War was a class war, in which the despotism of Charles I was defended by the reactionary forces of the established Church and conservative landlords. Parliament beat the king because it could appeal to the enthusiastic support of the trading and industrial classes in town and countryside, to the yeomen and progressive gentry, and to wider masses of the population whenever they were able by free discussion to understand what the struggle was really about.’ 42 He added that the revolution also took some of its colour from recent developments in science and technology, very practical concerns that could in time be converted into new commercial outlets.
    Like Hilton and Hill, E. P. Thompson also left the British Communist Party in 1956. Like them he remained convinced that English history was determined mainly by class struggle. In a long book,
The Making of the English Working Class,
one of his aims was to ‘rescue’ the working classes from ‘the enormous condescension of posterity’ and render visible such neglected people as weavers and artisans. In the process, he redefined the working classes as essentially a matter of
experience.
It was the experience – between 1790 and 1830 – of a declining and weakening position in the world. This, he said, was the essence of the industrial revolution for the working class in England – the loss of common rights by the landless, the increasing poverty of many trades brought about by the deliberate manipulation of employment to make it more precarious. 43 Part of the attraction in Thompson’s book lies in the fact that it is so vividly written and humane, but it was original in a social Darwinian sense too. Before 1790 the English working classes existed in many disparate forms; the experience of oppression and the progressive loss of rights, far from resulting in their extinction, proved to be a major unifying (and therefore strengthening) force. 44
    The final element in this ‘Great Leap Forward’ of historical studies came in 1973 from the archaeologist Colin Renfrew, in Britain. Like the
Annales
schooland the Marxists, and like archaeologists everywhere, he had an interest in
la longue durée.
But, again like the French and British historians, his main aim was less an obsession with dating as such as with a new understanding of history. Then professor at Southampton University, and now at Cambridge, his book was entitled
Before Civilisation: The Radiocarbon Revolution and Prehistoric Europe. 45
The title sold the book short, however, for Renfrew gave an admirably clear, albeit brief history of the development of dating in archaeology in the twentieth century and how – and this was his main point – it has changed our grasp of the past, not just in terms of chronology but in the way we conceive of man’s early development.
    He began with a crisp statement of the problem, so far as archaeology was concerned. Various early-twentieth-century studies by geologists in Switzerland and Sweden had confirmed that the last ice age endured for 600,000 years and ended 10,000 years ago. The problem with ancient human history therefore stemmed from the fact that the written records stretched back no further than about 3,000 BC. What had happened between the end of the ice age and the birth of writing? Renfrew’s main aim was to take a look at archaeology in the wake of the various new dating mechanisms – dendrochronology, radiocarbon dating, and potassium-argon dating. Radiocarbon dating was first devised by Willard F. Libby in New York in 1949 (he won the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 1960 for his innovation), but his insight was added to significantly by the
American Journal of Science,
which in 1959 started an annual radiocarbon supplement, which quickly became an independent publication,
Radiocarbon.
This provided an easily accessible forum for all the revised dates that were then being obtained from across the world. It was perhaps the biggest intrusion of science into a subject that had hitherto been regarded as an art or a humanity.
    Before Civilisation
had two core arguments.