The London Hanged - Softcover

Linebaugh, Peter

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0521457580 ISBN 13: 9780521457583

Publisher: Cambridge University Press, 1993

Synopsis

In 18th-century London the gallows at Tyburn were the focus of a struggle between the rich and the poor. This study shows how there was little distinction between a criminal population and the poor population of London as a whole. The meaning of property and how it changed is also examined.

About this title

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

"A remarkable book ... this is history as it should be written."--Alec Campbell, Daily Mail

Edition details

• Publisher: Cambridge University Press
• Publication date: 1993
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0521457580
• ISBN 13: 9780521457583
• Binding: Paperback