- Hardcover: 484 pages
- Publisher: Verso Books; New edition edition (5 Feb 2003)
- Language English
- ISBN-10: 1859846386
- ISBN-13: 978-1859846384
- Product Dimensions: 24.4 x 16.1 x 4.4 cm
- Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: 1,450,238 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
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Product Description
Amazon.co.uk Review
This handsome new edition of Peter Linebaugh's classic The London Hanged is a fully updated version of a seminal and groundbreaking study of the rise of consumer society, which the author contends arose via the crushing and criminalising of the English working class.
With The London Hanged, Linebaugh, a student of the great EP Thomson (whose Making of the English Working Class still occupies a pinnacle of historiography and which should certainly be consulted in parallel with this work), takes his place alongside his teacher, and writers like Christopher Hill (The World Turned Upside Down, Intellectual Origins of the English Revolution, as a historian of considerable stature.
He argues that hanging in 18th-century London was not about punishment--hanging was a public spectacle used to demonstrate the power of a ruling class and to force the acceptance by the poor populace of that power and its use in criminalising, forbidding and removing traditional rights and freedoms. Capital punishment was about disciplining all the poor. Hanging was part of the ideological process of turning London's downtrodden masses into a suppliant industrial working class.
In this new edition Linebaugh reinforces the arguments he previously made and responds vigorously to a number of his critics. A book that provides a number of rare insights towards an understanding of the rise of capitalism, The London Hanged is also a powerful, often moving, lambent and vital work. --George Bowman
Review
"A bold, sweeping and provocative book ... it offers the most engrossing and stirring slice of London's history to have appeared in a long time." - Times Higher Educational Supplement
--This text refers to the
Paperback
edition.
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Customer Reviews
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
7 of 7 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
Peter Linebaugh's "The London Hanged" is an exceedingly well-done overview of the relation between proletarian crime and capital accumulation in the London boroughs of the 18th Century. Together with Marcus Rediker, Linebaugh is the primary Marxist historian of crime, political economy and civil society in this period, and his extensive research pays off - "The London Hanged" is, as the (Daily Mail!) review on the cover says, history as it should be written.
Linebaugh makes much use of the records of the hanged, as well as popular folk-tales about gangs, escaped convicts and trade records to build a clear picture of a London where extreme poverty and extreme violence, the latter from both the wealthy leaders of state and the urban poor, went together to enable the accumulation of capital. This sinister process of hangings for stealing a few shilling on one hand and corruption, slave trade and press gangs on the other hand is well described by Linebaugh in such terms as "Tyburnography" (after Tyburn where hangings were carried out) and "Thanatocracy".
The style of discussion of the subject is best described as narrative. Peter Linebaugh examines various aspects of the London life of those times in the successive chapters, blending anecdotes, statistics and jargon from those days into a powerful whole that leaves one with the impression of having been in London in those days as an investigative journalist. What additionally makes the research of this work so outstanding is the masterful way in which Linebaugh is able to use many different sorts of sources, from anonymous political pamphlets to the works of John Locke, showing the place of each in the ideology of the time and its relation to the underlying socio-economic developments. In this way he shows that historical materialism need not be a regurgitation of vague Marxist jargon, but is the most powerful tool for historical analysis of a whole society we have.
From corn manipulations to Levellers, from plantation lords to famous highwaymen, from black gang leaders to the Black Act, hogsheads and tobacco theft - this book reads as an adventure story and critique of political economy in one. The only possible downsides are the rather high degree of repetition inherent in the anecdotal nature of the work, and Linebaugh's tendency to pretentious terminology. Still, much recommended for anyone with historical interest.
Linebaugh makes much use of the records of the hanged, as well as popular folk-tales about gangs, escaped convicts and trade records to build a clear picture of a London where extreme poverty and extreme violence, the latter from both the wealthy leaders of state and the urban poor, went together to enable the accumulation of capital. This sinister process of hangings for stealing a few shilling on one hand and corruption, slave trade and press gangs on the other hand is well described by Linebaugh in such terms as "Tyburnography" (after Tyburn where hangings were carried out) and "Thanatocracy".
The style of discussion of the subject is best described as narrative. Peter Linebaugh examines various aspects of the London life of those times in the successive chapters, blending anecdotes, statistics and jargon from those days into a powerful whole that leaves one with the impression of having been in London in those days as an investigative journalist. What additionally makes the research of this work so outstanding is the masterful way in which Linebaugh is able to use many different sorts of sources, from anonymous political pamphlets to the works of John Locke, showing the place of each in the ideology of the time and its relation to the underlying socio-economic developments. In this way he shows that historical materialism need not be a regurgitation of vague Marxist jargon, but is the most powerful tool for historical analysis of a whole society we have.
From corn manipulations to Levellers, from plantation lords to famous highwaymen, from black gang leaders to the Black Act, hogsheads and tobacco theft - this book reads as an adventure story and critique of political economy in one. The only possible downsides are the rather high degree of repetition inherent in the anecdotal nature of the work, and Linebaugh's tendency to pretentious terminology. Still, much recommended for anyone with historical interest.
6 of 6 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
I agree with the above review. I now have this book in hardback as well as paperback as I knew that I would return to it and didn't want to read a paperback that was falling apart. History is only one of my subjects and although I find it fascinating I am often frustrated that the author is not able to match the fascinating events he/she is describing with the quality of the writing. This guy oozes confidence in his work and writes with a real passion. I have now read all of the books that he has available on Amazon and each of them is a gem. The London Hanged draws a picture of the city in the Eighteenth century but much better than other books on the subject, (that I have read anyway) it describes and explains the forces at work that created this history. For me its this that make it a truly great book.
41 of 46 people found the following review helpful
Format:Hardcover
This is the most exciting history that I have ever read. I read the book in the early 1990s and I remember it primarily for the way it reorganized my overall picture of the eighteenth century. It was, of course, "history from below"; it was also a kind of outsider's history, since it challenged the way we've been led to interpret our ancestors and ourselves - and the way we have felt ourselves to be marginalized in our own history as a result. I'm not a professional historian, and I am not normally interested in the eighteenth century, but I strongly recommend this book. I read it without effort and finished it with the sense that I had arrived at a new perspective - that is, that I'd actually learned something worth knowing.
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