Bøger af Peter Linebaugh

Winner of the International Labor History AwardLong before the American Revolution and the Declaration of the Rights of Man, a motley crew of sailors, slaves, pirates, laborers, market women, and indentured servants had ideas about freedom and equality that would forever change history. The Many Headed-Hydra recounts their stories in a sweeping history of the role of the dispossessed in the making of the modern world.When an unprecedented expansion of trade and colonization in the early seventeenth century launched the first global economy, a vast, diverse, and landless workforce was born. These workers crossed national, ethnic, and racial boundaries, as they circulated around the Atlantic world on trade ships and slave ships, from England to Virginia, from Africa to Barbados, and from the Americas back to Europe.Marshaling an impressive range of original research from archives in the Americas and Europe, the authors show how ordinary working people led dozens of rebellions on both sides of the North Atlantic. The rulers of the day called the multiethnic rebels a 'hydra' and brutally suppressed their risings, yet some of their ideas fueled the age of revolution. Others, hidden from history and recovered here, have much to teach us about our common humanity.

'May Day is about affirmation, the love of life, and the start of spring, so it has to be about the beginning of the end of the capitalist system of exploitation, oppression, war, and overall misery, toil, and moil.' So writes celebrated historian Peter Linebaugh in an essential compendium of reflections on the reviled, glorious and voltaic occasion of the first of May. The Incomplete, True, Authentic, and Wonderful History of May Day is a forceful reminder of the potentialities of the future, for the coming of a time when the powerful will fall and the commons restored.

In this tour de force, celebrated historian Peter Linebaugh takes aim at the thieves of land, the polluters of the seas, the ravagers of the forests, the despoilers of rivers and the removers of mountaintops. Scarcely a society has existed that has not had commoning at its heart. These essays kindle the embers of memory to ignite our future commons. From Thomas Paine to the Luddites, from Karl Marx to the practical dreamer William Morris, to the 20th-century communist historian E.P. Thompson, Linebaugh brings to life the vital commonist tradition.

This remarkable book shines a fierce light on the current state of liberty and shows how longstanding restraints against tyranny-and the rights of habeas corpus, trial by jury, and due process of law, and the prohibition of torture-are being abridged. In providing a sweeping history of Magna Carta, the source of these protections since 1215, this powerful book demonstrates how these ancient rights are repeatedly laid aside when the greed of privatization, the lust for power, and the ambition of empire seize a state. Peter Linebaugh draws on primary sources to construct a wholly original history of the Great Charter and its scarcely-known companion, the Charter of the Forest, which was created at the same time to protect the subsistence rights of the poor.

In eighteenth-century London the spectacle of a hanging was not simply a form of punishing transgressors. Rather it evidently served the more sinister purpose - for a privileged ruling class - of forcing the poor population of London to accept the criminalization of customary rights and new forms of private property.