The London Hanged - Softcover

Linebaugh, Peter

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0521457580 ISBN 13: 9780521457583

Publisher: Cambridge University Press, 1993

Synopsis

In eighteenth-century London the gallows at Tyburn was the dramatic focus of a struggle between the rich and the poor. Most of the London hanged were executed for property crimes, and the chief lesson that the gallows had to teach was: 'Respect private property'. The executions took place amid a London populace that knew the same poverty and hunger as the condemned. Indeed, in this stimulating account Peter Linebaugh shows how there was little distinction between a 'criminal' population and the poor population of London as a whole. Necessity drove the city's poor into inevitable conflict with the laws of a privileged ruling class. Peter Linebaugh examines how the meaning of 'property' changed substantially during a century of unparalleled growth in trade and commerce, analyses the increasing attempts of the propertied classes to criminalize 'customary rights'--perquisites of employment that the labouring poor depended upon for survival--and suggests that property-owners, by their exploitation of the emergent working class, substantially determined the nature of crime, and that crime, in turn, shaped the development of the economic system. Peter Linebaugh's account not only pinpoints critical themes in the formation of the working class, but also presents the plight of the individuals who made up that class. Contemporary documents of the period are skilfully used to recreate the predicament of men and women who, in the pursuit of a bare subsistence, had good reason to fear the example of Tyburn's 'triple tree'.

About this title

About the Author

Peter Linebaugh is Professor of History at the University of Toledo. He writes extensively on British history, Irish history, labor history and the history of the colonial Atlantic. His books include The Magna Carta Manifesto, The Many-Headed Hydra and The London Hanged, and he contributes frequently to CounterPunch.

From Publishers Weekly

In 18th-century Britain, most victims of capital punishment were hanged for property crimes-some as petty as the pilfering of spoons. A brutal and benighted age, we like to think, but to the author of this epic social history (originally published in 1991, it's now in its second edition), the gallows were an indispensable tool in inculcating the primary lesson-"Respect Private Property"-of a modern capitalist economy. Historian Linebaugh, co-author of The Many-Headed Hydra: The Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic, explores how the disruption of a traditional economy of regulated guilds and agricultural commons by a capitalism built on cash wages and competitive markets worked itself out as crime and punishment. Customary forms of payment-in-kind, in which workers took part of the wood they sawed, the silk they wove, or the cargo their ship ferried as wages, were criminalized as theft of the owner's property; capitalists developed new methods of workplace control to circumvent workers' attempts to appropriate the fruits of their labor; and romantic criminal figures like the highwayman expressed working-class resentment at the economic transformations that forced them to steal to live. Linebaugh draws on diverse sources, including judicial archives, family budgets, dietary customs and the writings of Locke and Milton to paint both micro-historical character studies of condemned souls and a panorama of class struggle in proto-industrial Britain. The results are as teeming-and sometimes as confusing-as the London street itself, and the broad Marxian abstractions Linebaugh invokes do not always clarify things. Still, this is a rich and thought-provoking portrait of a time when "class warfare" was an all-too-violent reality. Illustrations.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: Cambridge University Press
• Publication date: 1993
• ISBN 10: 0521457580
• ISBN 13: 9780521457583
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 484