Urban history has experienced something of a comeback in recent years. No longer are occupational structure and economic development the dominant themes in urban studies; instead, following the lead of historians like Robert Tittler, political culture forms the core of the new urban history, at least for early modern England. Phil Withington's ambitious book pushes forward this trend, making the connection between the urban context and the political culture of England more broadly. He suggests that towns offer critical insight into political culture, since townsmen stood at the forefront of England's dynamic changes in economy, social structure, political order, and manners. Others have placed this as an eighteenth-century phenomenon, but Withington moves it back into the sixteenth, and particularly the seventeenth century. Ranging widely across ideas of citizenship, civility, economic change, gender relations, and religion, The Politics of Commonwealth argues for the centrality of England's towns to early modern political culture.

Withington focuses on what he refers to as “city commonwealth,” that is, “an expansive, ambitious, and essentially humanist conception of cities, boroughs, and corporate towns” reminiscent of the Aristotelian polis (10). City commonwealths embodied the civic governing institutions, such as common councils or guilds; the neighborhoods, households, and individuals; and the economic interaction, or commerce, of an urban locality. These city commonwealths (by which is mostly meant incorporated boroughs) were developing, in both their trade and in their governing structures, throughout the sixteenth century and into the seventeenth. Withington suggests that the sixteenth century marks the emergence of a “system” of city commonwealths, spreading from the southeast toward the west and north. This system was marked by growing new markets as well as swelling numbers of newly incorporated towns with parliamentary representation. Commerce and governance went hand in hand as England became more urbanized across the period. And the ideology and values of that corporate system, says Withington, were increasingly integrated into the larger society.

Withington locates the ideologies that guided the emergent corporate system in various places, but principally in humanist ideas of reform. Towns were conceived of both as the centers of civic virtue and responsive government seen in Thomas More's Utopia and the collections of economic actors governed by sovereign authority seen in Francis Bacon's New Atlantis. While all part of the long humanist tradition, these ideas presented quite different models of reformed commonwealth. These models, as dichotomous as they were, left open to question the extent to which citizens were responsible for their own government. Did cities, particularly great ones like London, have ultimate control over their doings, or (as Bacon would have it) were they simply subaltern authorities, under control of the crown? The latter was of course true on a basic level, but interpretations of self-government varied. Citizens were both free and subordinate. Withington suggests that the ambiguity in understanding such things as the relationship of the citizen to the state and the degree of democracy or aristocracy that should be present in good government caused a fundamental tension in early modern towns. That tension transcended the urban context and filtered into the wider discourse of politics.

The impact of ideological and practical strains can be seen clearly in the conflicts of the mid-seventeenth century, according to Withington. The Politics of Commonwealth is not an investigation of the causes of the English Civil War per se. But Withington argues that the conflict should be understood in the context of the political culture of city commonwealths. The reforming, and frankly democratic, impulses that informed civic life were not unique to towns but helped frame political discourse more generally. In particular, he sees “a degree of resonance” (75) between parliamentary rhetoric and that of city commonwealths. He takes care not to suggest that citizens caused the war or that somehow all towns were automatically parliamentarian. But because significant numbers of representatives to the Long Parliament were steeped in the traditions and rhetoric of city commonwealth, the purveyors of political argument had to use that idiom in order to make their points, influencing the discourse ever more in that direction. Even the king, belatedly, came to use this language.

This and other intriguing arguments offer helpful insights into the nature of English politics. Withington also explores ideas of patriarchy and gender in regard to city commonwealth, as well as the role of Calvinism in forming civic—and national—discourse. Many of these arguments convince. But the book leaves open to question some key points. To what extent, for instance, did “city commonwealth” actually promote a democratic ideal? While there is no doubt that urban government offered a less aristocratic model for order than county government did, it would be difficult to say that most towns were truly democratic. Freemen were free in only a limited sense. Even some of the guilds and other institutions that Withington characterizes as intensely participatory had their own hierarchies, and “one man one vote” could easily be influenced by factors such as personal prestige and wealth. Participation certainly helped define civic authority structures, but the extent to which these people themselves valorized the notion of democracy is not clear.

The Politics of Commonwealth is not easy to characterize succinctly. It is a complex book, bringing together sources of all sorts from a wide variety of places. It moves back and forth between methodologies, using, for instance, both close textual analysis of literary sources and detailed charting of occupational structures and wealth statistics based on hearth-tax returns. This impressive breadth of approach and subject matter leads to an exciting and expansive treatment of political culture, making connections between ideas and actions in subtle and useful ways. The underlying notion—that urban political culture should be seen as connected to, and to some degree constitutive of, the wider political culture—is intriguing and to a large extent convincing. The very breadth of the book, however, can make it difficult. It moves quickly from topic to topic, and subjects can sometimes seem adrift, with connections occasionally murky. The chapter on ideas of patriarchy and gender in regard to city commonwealth seems to sit somewhat awkwardly within the larger themes of the book. Deeper engagement with historians like Robert Tittler and Paul Halliday, who have covered some of the same ground themselves, would have added nuance to the book. But The Politics of Commonwealth offers an original contribution to the study of political culture, both urban and otherwise, in early modern England. Phil Withington makes the citizen central to the burgeoning modern state.