The London Hanged: Crime and Civil Society in the Eighteenth Century [Paperback]

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 --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

"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 an alternate Paperback edition.

In 18th-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, this account shows how there was little distinction between a criminal population and the poor population of London as a whole.

Peter Linebaugh is Assistant Professor of History at the University of Toledo. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.