Customer Reviews

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

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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.

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.

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.

My husband read this book whilst researching 18th c crime. Although there were some very interesting facts in the book, a dictionary needed to be kept constantly at hand. Even the dictionary did not know some of the words. Obviously intented for those at Phd level! An example would be: ' The picaresque proletariat during the Robinocracy'.