DR 29-MAY

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But these global enmeshments were not mere historical afterthoughts that descended upon the Diggers once they abandoned their utopian camps, nor were they some distant reality that emerged after Gerrard Winstanley penned his retrospective in 1650 – “I have writ, I have acted, I have peace.” Contrary to any illusion of domestic insularity, the Diggers were always global, intricately bound within a burgeoning lattice of economic and imperial connectivity. Their humble cottages and laboriously tilled vegetable plots were never isolated from the ever-thickening web of international flows of capital, domination, and extraction. The seventeenth century – their century – saw the rise of ventures such as the East India Company, the Virginia Company, and the Guinea Company, each serving as arteries in the lifeblood of an expanding English empire, drawing sustenance from the intercontinental movement of commodities, humans, and humans commodified.

Thus, the Digger enclaves at Walton and nearby Cobham were not anomalous retreats but instead domestic projects incubated in the shadow of England’s increasingly aggressive colonisation of America, the Caribbean, and Ireland. In the epochal year of 1649, when the Diggers broke the ground of St George’s Hill, England convulsed with the reverberations of its king’s execution and the establishment of a republican Commonwealth. But such tremors did not cease at England’s shores: they reverberated across the Atlantic. In Barbados, a thwarted uprising among predominantly white indentured servants sowed terror among plantation owners and culminated in 18 executions. Meanwhile, Oliver Cromwell’s conquest of Ireland was dogged by persistent mutinies from war-weary soldiers of the New Model Army. These mutinying forces, many of whom had been radicalised by the Civil War, openly questioned the ethical cost of imperial ambition: “what have we to doe with Ireland,” they asked, “to fight, and murther a People and Nation … which have done us no harme, only deeper to put our hands in bloud?”

Even as the Diggers were erecting their vision of a new world unshackled from the old bonds of ‘hire’ and ‘rent’, England’s imperial musculature was beginning to flex – reaching outward, stretching across oceans, yet encountering resistance both within and without. In this dialectic, one might ask: to what extent were the Diggers’ aspirations and the Commonwealth’s colonial agenda in contradiction? Could Winstanley’s millenarian vision – prisons emptied, labor unchained, tyranny cast off – harmonise with a state embarking on projects of overseas domination?

To approach these questions, we must look to the contours of Winstanley’s life and the intellectual trajectory etched into his Digger pamphlets. His personal history illuminates how the seismic upheavals of the Civil War molded a singular revolutionary consciousness. Yet it also unearths how ordinary English men and women were caught in, and shaped by, the same transborder circuits of exchange that scaffolded imperial architectures. In Winstanley’s own theological idiom, mankind was ‘one family’ yoked by a shared fate – an idea rendered not merely spiritual but increasingly historical by the economic realities of the 17th century.

Before he sowed seeds into the commons, Winstanley’s hands labored in cloth – the material linchpin of his early life. Born in Wigan, a textile hub in northwest England, he was rooted in networks of regional and global trade. Irish flax began to supplement local supplies, woven into linen destined for London markets. Winstanley himself, migrating to the capital in 1630 as an apprentice and later establishing his own cloth business by 1638, personified the deep entanglement of domestic livelihood with international commerce.

Word Count: 595
Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level: 17.2
Difficult Words with Meanings:

  • Millenarian: relating to belief in a coming major transformation of society.

  • Commoning: the practice of collectively managing shared resources.

  • Pamphlets: small booklets or brochures often containing political or social commentary.

  • Mutinying: rebelling against authority, especially by soldiers or sailors.

  • Dominion: control or the exercise of sovereignty over a territory.

  • Interwoven: intricately connected or combined.

  • Thwarted: prevented from accomplishing something.

  • Pious: deeply religious or spiritually devout.

  • Republican: relating to a government in which power resides in elected individuals.

  • Ferment: agitation or excitement among a group of people, typically concerning change.

  • Hire: the practice of labor in exchange for wages.

  • Rent: the payment made for the use of property or land.

  • Colonisation: the act of establishing control over indigenous people and their territories.


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