Publications: BRHG Books

Publications from the Bristol Radical History Group, formed in 2006, continue the [Bristol Broadsides] tradition. Although the group’s roots are exhilaratingly radical, veering on the anarchic, their publications are scrupulously researched and well-worth reading. Mike Manson, Bristol Civic Society, 2021.

We now have a range of four types of publications: Books, Reprints, Activist Memories oral history and the Bristol Radical Pamphleteer series.

Also, checkout the publications from our friends:

Voyage of Despair

The Hannibal, its captain and all who sailed in her, 1693–1695

By Rosemary L Caldicott
Front cover with picture of a slave ship off Africa, colourised in blue, purple and pink
The brutality of the slave trade. In 1693, Captain Thomas Phillips embarked on a voyage from London to Guinea, where he purchased enslaved Africans on behalf of the Royal African Company. The subsequent journey across the Atlantic witnessed a tragic toll, with hundreds of the enslaved captives, and many of the crew, losing their lives before the ship reached the shores of Barbados. Three centuries later, in 2010, Brecon Town Council made a startling and controversial decision—to honour Captain […]
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From Wulfstan to Colston

Severing the sinews of slavery in Bristol

By Mark Steeds, Roger Ball
Front cover showing a stained glass window with St Wulfstan and Colston as depicted on his tomb
Tracing a thousand-year history, Mark Steeds and Roger Ball examine the involvement in slavery of Bristol’s merchants, from Anglo-Saxon times through the era of exploration and colonisation, to the transatlantic slave trade and the plantation system of the Americas. During this period, Bristol’s merchant elite seized economic and political power, making slave-trader Edward Colston an icon and shaping the city’s present-day historical memory of slavery. Throughout the millennium, determined […]
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Refusing to Kill

Bristol's World War I conscientious objectors

By Jeremy Clarke, Lois Bibbings, Colin Thomas, Mary Dobbing
Refusing to Kill front cover
Over 580 men from the Bristol area refused to fight in World War 1. They claimed the status of conscientious objector (CO) for moral, religious or political reasons. Some agreed to take non-military roles while others spent much of the war in prison, often under harsh conditions. This booklet and the exhibition on which it is based tell the story of these COs and the men and women who supported them. It also briefly considers COs in World War 2 as well as the position for present day members of […]
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Zionism And History

Reading the wrong lessons from the persecution of the European Jews

By Mike Levine
How can we explain the persecution of Jews throughout European history, culminating in the horror of the Nazi holocaust? The founders of the Zionist movement argued that the cause of the persecutions was an inherent and incurable anti-Jewish prejudice on the part of the people amongst whom Jews lived. The only remedy was the creation of a Jewish State. Mike Levine questions this thesis. He argues that antisemitic prejudice, although long-standing and widespread, doesn’t fully explain when and […]
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The Enigma of Hugh Holmes Gore

Bristol’s Nineteenth Century Christian Socialist Solicitor

By Mike Richardson
Hugh Holmes Gore Front Cover
The Anglo – Catholic convert to the left, Hugh Holmes Gore, was a key figure in Bristol’s labour movement during the last two decades of the nineteenth century. Gore linked Clifton Christian Socialists, morally concerned about the poverty and suffering caused by economic depression, with the working class revolutionaries in the Bristol Socialist Society. His eloquence as a speaker moved dockers and miners and attracted working class votes in local elections. He was popular as the ‘people’s […]
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Strikers, Hobblers, Conchies & Reds

A Radical History of Bristol, 1880-1939

By Roger Ball, Mike Richardson, Stephen E. Hunt, Dave Backwith
Strikers, Hobblers, Conchies & Reds front cover
This book can be bought from breviarystuff.org.uk. In the 1970s and 80s a revival of interest emerged in researching Bristol’s vigorous radical past, reflected in the publications of the Bristol branch of the Historical Association and Bristol Broadsides. This revival has continued, echoed in the more recent historical studies that have advanced the work of filling in Bristol’s remarkable past — especially the involvement of the Bristol women’s movement in the nineteenth century in anti-slavery […]
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