![]() ![]() These changes seemed minor - about the rights of people to trade without interference, about tax levels, and about the balance of power between king and parliament. These were decades when fundamental changes in the economy and politics of Europe were beginning to reshape the old feudal order. ![]() The first couple of pages of the book begin with a beautifully written summation of the changes taking place in Europe during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Thus this book contains very little about Cromwell's detailed life (his children and wife get a bare couple of mentions for instance) and much more about the changes going on in English society. In this "decisive century in English history", the "decisive figure" according to Hill, was Oliver Cromwell. ![]() As Hill points out at the very beginning of the book, the first forty years of Cromwell's life a "tangled knot of problems was forming which was only to be unravelled, or cut through, in the revolutionary decades 1640-60". Christopher Hill's biography of Oliver Cromwell is less of the history of the man, and more a history of the world that shaped him and was shaped by Cromwell's life. ![]()
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