A Marxist map of European history

Update: High resolution versions available here.

Today the snow came down, so my bicycle stayed warm and inside while we set out for … the DDR shop! The real find was the following, a map of European history between 1476 and 1648 – from the perspective of class struggle.

The two major centres of bourgeois revolution took place first in the Netherlands (the bigger the flag the larger the revolution):

And then in England where capitalist manufacturing took off after the Dutch had laid the groundwork in agricultural capitalism and trade:

In fact, much of western Europe is covered in bourgeois revolutions:

Meanwhile, in the rest of Europe class war was underway, with the red triangles signalling peasant class struggle:

There was a fair bit of that going on:

But the real flashpoints came with the Peasant Revolution, marked by a white triangle and flag within a red square:

Thomas Müntzer, a leader of the peasants and key ‘theologian of the revolution’ (as Bloch called him) was, of course, one of Luther’s students who took his teacher’s points to their logical conclusion. Who said Protestantism doesn’t have radical revolutionary potential? Luther was horrified, backtracking from what he had instigated and – to his eternal shame – calling for everyone else to kill, crush and destroy any peasant they might meet.

Ah, they don’t make such maps as much as they used to. Time for a revision of the high school history curriculum, it seems to me.

Meanwhile, the bicycles left outside shivered in the wintry weather:

(ht cp)

About these ads