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The London Hanged: Crime and Civil Society in the Eighteenth Century
In eighteenth-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 'Respect private property'. The executions took place amid a London populace that knew the same poverty and hunger as the condemned. Indeed, in this stimulating account Peter Linebaugh shows how there was little distinction between a 'criminal' population and the poor population of London as a whole. Necessity drove the city's poor into inevitable conflict with the laws of a privileged ruling class. Peter Linebaugh examines how the meaning of 'property' changed substantially during a century of unparalleled growth in trade and commerce, analyses the increasing attempts of the propertied classes to criminalize 'customary rights'--perquisites of employment that the labouring poor depended upon for survival--and suggests that property-owners, by their exploitation of the emergent working class, substantially determined the nature of crime, and that crime, in turn, shaped the development of the economic system. Peter Linebaugh's account not only pinpoints critical themes in the formation of the working class, but also presents the plight of the individuals who made up that class. Contemporary documents of the period are skilfully used to recreate the predicament of men and women who, in the pursuit of a bare subsistence, had good reason to fear the example of Tyburn's 'triple tree'.
484 pages, Paperback
First published September 26, 1991
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About the author
Peter Linebaugh
16 books95 followersPeter Linebaugh is an American Marxist historian who specializes in British history, Irish history, labor history, and the history of the colonial Atlantic.
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Displaying 1 - 21 of 21 reviews
July 17, 2024
It was never going to be easy to write a century’s worth of a city’s history, but with the scalpel of “The London Hanged” - literally, those hanged by the city - in hand, Linebaugh is as fine an metropolitan anatomist as one could hope for. A characteristic sentence: “The 74 prosecutions brought against [the river workers] provide a guide to global wealth: 26 involved the theft of sugar; 15 tea; 9 coffee; 7 tobacco; 7 coal; 3 indigo; 2 rum; and 1 each of chintz, logwood, cochineal, copper and anchors.” Here, criminal prosecutions work to index and trace the through-lines of eighteenth-century London, an index vividly and exhaustingly explored by Linebaugh, whose book on London is just as much a book on sugar, on tobacco, on coal, and the many lives (and deaths, sometimes state imposed), entwined with them. A book on (unsteadily employed) workers and their industries, but as seen through the darkened prism of those who crossed the Powers that be and ended up on the side of eternity.
While every century no doubt has its claim to interest, the eighteenth in London is one of particular contemporary significance: a city and a time in which an emergent capitalism found itself in deathly struggles - deathly class struggle, let’s call it - with all those upon whom the sentence of capitalism was slowly being pronounced. While the book’s subtitle speaks of “crime”, this is less a chronicle of crimes whose form was already known, than the story of criminalization itself: the birth of entirely new sets of crime-forms alongside - what else? - the strengthening power of the property-form. Tracking, in elaborate detail, the way in which workers (and others) slowly and grindingly lost their rights to appropriate materials from work for their own use, the century painted here is one in which the boundaries of property began to harden and calcify, with “Albion’s fatal tree” working as the ultimate agent of their coagulation.
While ‘enclosure’ in the countryside has now famously come to define the rise of English capitalism (the partitioning of common land for private use), in the city, it was less land than commodities themselves to which the work of partition was directed. If, for a time, goods lent themselves to - if not exactly common use - but uses other than that of commercial ends, it was just these myriad other uses which were eventually clamped down upon, all the better to secure the dominion and domination of property. Hence the tangle of now almost-extinguished terms whose trajectories are traced across the beating-heart of eighteenth-century London: perquisites, chips, ‘cabbage’, vails, sweepings, samplings, ‘customs’, and even ‘rights’: a once living vocabulary that spoke to fugitive economies operating far below the threshold of what we now call ‘the economy’, economies of stuff against which battle was waged - on behalf of the wage.
For with the wage came control, or at least greater control of - of course - the means of production. As if they were seized, one might say, by means of the gallows. If I’ve condensed the theoretical punch of The London Hanged, it’s worth mentioning that Linebaugh is nonetheless a writer of deep human sensitivity. In here are gripping tales and fireside stories: of jail-breakers and highwaymen, shoemakers and immigrants. This is very much ‘history from below’, if not a history of the low. Across the book’s 500 or so pages are populated a roll-call of the hanged, names upon forgotten names, their crimes scribbled alongside them, with Linebaugh mobilising all his considerable powers to do them a justice in history that they were never granted in life. To read The London Hanged is to read a history of the making of the modern world, but equally and with no less significance, a history of its takings - lives on the one hand, and balls of smuggled silk on the other.
While every century no doubt has its claim to interest, the eighteenth in London is one of particular contemporary significance: a city and a time in which an emergent capitalism found itself in deathly struggles - deathly class struggle, let’s call it - with all those upon whom the sentence of capitalism was slowly being pronounced. While the book’s subtitle speaks of “crime”, this is less a chronicle of crimes whose form was already known, than the story of criminalization itself: the birth of entirely new sets of crime-forms alongside - what else? - the strengthening power of the property-form. Tracking, in elaborate detail, the way in which workers (and others) slowly and grindingly lost their rights to appropriate materials from work for their own use, the century painted here is one in which the boundaries of property began to harden and calcify, with “Albion’s fatal tree” working as the ultimate agent of their coagulation.
While ‘enclosure’ in the countryside has now famously come to define the rise of English capitalism (the partitioning of common land for private use), in the city, it was less land than commodities themselves to which the work of partition was directed. If, for a time, goods lent themselves to - if not exactly common use - but uses other than that of commercial ends, it was just these myriad other uses which were eventually clamped down upon, all the better to secure the dominion and domination of property. Hence the tangle of now almost-extinguished terms whose trajectories are traced across the beating-heart of eighteenth-century London: perquisites, chips, ‘cabbage’, vails, sweepings, samplings, ‘customs’, and even ‘rights’: a once living vocabulary that spoke to fugitive economies operating far below the threshold of what we now call ‘the economy’, economies of stuff against which battle was waged - on behalf of the wage.
For with the wage came control, or at least greater control of - of course - the means of production. As if they were seized, one might say, by means of the gallows. If I’ve condensed the theoretical punch of The London Hanged, it’s worth mentioning that Linebaugh is nonetheless a writer of deep human sensitivity. In here are gripping tales and fireside stories: of jail-breakers and highwaymen, shoemakers and immigrants. This is very much ‘history from below’, if not a history of the low. Across the book’s 500 or so pages are populated a roll-call of the hanged, names upon forgotten names, their crimes scribbled alongside them, with Linebaugh mobilising all his considerable powers to do them a justice in history that they were never granted in life. To read The London Hanged is to read a history of the making of the modern world, but equally and with no less significance, a history of its takings - lives on the one hand, and balls of smuggled silk on the other.
February 7, 2024
I want an extra star to give this book because it was, in the words of the friend who recommended I read it, such a "banger." The subtitle doesn't do it justice, but the first paragraph alone is worth the cost of the book, and the insights into the development of modern capitalism as seen through the lens of the people the state killed for transgressing against it...oh, just go read it, already. I tore through it and I kind of just want to start it again from the beginning.
December 6, 2011
Before there was a wage economy, people kept themselves alive through a variety of means; wages were small and often irregularly paid, and the gap between starvation and survival was filled partly through customary perquisites, more flexible than wages and more responsive to changing conditions. If you cut patterns for a tailor, you could keep (for use or sale) the scraps of material left over; if you worked in a shipyard, you could keep scraps of leftover lumber and rope; if you were a weaver, you kept the trimmings when a piece of cloth was cut from the loom; if you carried hogsheads of sugar or tobacco on the docks, you kept the sweepings and the spillage. As part of the rationalisation of economic and industrial structures, employers and the governing class sought to do away with such customary perquisites and replace them with a more rigid and controllable basis for economic relations (i.e. wages), the level of which can be fixed and decided from above: "Customary appropriations appear as inefficiency or waste to the technologist, as an inventory loss or transaction cost to the economists, and a depredation or crime to the police" (430). Thus customs that had prevailed for centuries were designated as crimes and the newly invented crimes ruthlessly punished as part of a theatre of power. This shift, and resistance to it, is part of a larger move to criminalise poverty and reorganise class relations and property structures. In the course of tracing the stages of this struggle in early modern London, Linebaugh gives fascinating glimpses into the lives of working people.
August 2, 2017
Peter Linebaugh explores the links between Capital Punishment and the rise of wage labour and a form of global capitalism in the 18th Century with this magisterial book. Let me be frank, this is not an easy read, and provided you can sit through the academic prose, you will find this book to be a treasure trove of nuggets of great information.
As someone who studied criminal law to a Masters level, this history of crime (although it is arguable if the book is this) was one that had me riveted from start to finish. Linebaugh starts with the rise of finance capitalism in 1690 onwards. The start of the 18th Century also saw the rise of Capital Punishment being doled out for crimes against property. Thus was born the edifice of State Terror (that Linebaugh calls the Thanatocracy) that symbolised the awesome power of the sovereign. The hanging tree, or gibbet scaffold was a place that was designed to instill terrors in to the hearts of those who would break the laws of the sovereign, and in the aftermath of the Restoration, this meant the King.
Linebaugh exposes how the bulk of the London Hanged were apprentices, especially within trades such as food and drink, weaving and tailoring. These apprentices were drawn into London by the rise of wage labour, but with the rise of Wealth (and thus creation of Poverty), they were easily immiserated. As the customary forms of remuneration (such as 'chips' of wood for shipbuilders) were lost, the plight of the poor became more and more untenable, and with it rose 'crime'.
Indeed, the bulk of the hanged were hanged for crimes against property, designed to alleviate the poverty being wrought by enclosure and factory. Sadly, women play a peripheral role in Linebaugh's tome, but they are present on the margins, their voices softly sighing through the pages. What is evident, throughout this book, is how the notion of crime went from detection to prevention, and how customary rights to part of the fruits of labour were replaced with notions of 'moral fortitude' and payment in lieu. Linebaugh presents a wonderful history of the roles of Patrick Colquhoun (the father of police), and the Bentham brothers' roles in seeking to create the primacy of the wage (or in Marxist terms, the alienation of labourer from product).
Overall, this is a great and well researched piece of history, showing how migration to the City, colonial repression, the ideology of the "free market" and the moral sensibilities of the propertied classes combined to provide technical, economic and legal/moralistic arguments to ensure that as the forces of Capitalism extended their tentacles, those tentacles were placed firmly around the necks of the working classes.
As someone who studied criminal law to a Masters level, this history of crime (although it is arguable if the book is this) was one that had me riveted from start to finish. Linebaugh starts with the rise of finance capitalism in 1690 onwards. The start of the 18th Century also saw the rise of Capital Punishment being doled out for crimes against property. Thus was born the edifice of State Terror (that Linebaugh calls the Thanatocracy) that symbolised the awesome power of the sovereign. The hanging tree, or gibbet scaffold was a place that was designed to instill terrors in to the hearts of those who would break the laws of the sovereign, and in the aftermath of the Restoration, this meant the King.
Linebaugh exposes how the bulk of the London Hanged were apprentices, especially within trades such as food and drink, weaving and tailoring. These apprentices were drawn into London by the rise of wage labour, but with the rise of Wealth (and thus creation of Poverty), they were easily immiserated. As the customary forms of remuneration (such as 'chips' of wood for shipbuilders) were lost, the plight of the poor became more and more untenable, and with it rose 'crime'.
Indeed, the bulk of the hanged were hanged for crimes against property, designed to alleviate the poverty being wrought by enclosure and factory. Sadly, women play a peripheral role in Linebaugh's tome, but they are present on the margins, their voices softly sighing through the pages. What is evident, throughout this book, is how the notion of crime went from detection to prevention, and how customary rights to part of the fruits of labour were replaced with notions of 'moral fortitude' and payment in lieu. Linebaugh presents a wonderful history of the roles of Patrick Colquhoun (the father of police), and the Bentham brothers' roles in seeking to create the primacy of the wage (or in Marxist terms, the alienation of labourer from product).
Overall, this is a great and well researched piece of history, showing how migration to the City, colonial repression, the ideology of the "free market" and the moral sensibilities of the propertied classes combined to provide technical, economic and legal/moralistic arguments to ensure that as the forces of Capitalism extended their tentacles, those tentacles were placed firmly around the necks of the working classes.
September 28, 2021
Incredible. Linebaugh, by examining the life history and circumstances of those hanged at Tyburn in the 18th century, unveils the class relations that prevailed in London at the time and the way that the poor working class, particularly their way of life in which wages were supplemented with "customs" or "perquisites", were criminalized. Most of the hangings were for crimes against property, and Linebaugh's study is a tour-de-force in laying out the way that the new capitalist society cracked down on the working class and used the legal system and exemplary executions to repress them and force them to submit to their new way of life as wage laborers for the capitalists. Eye opening and extraordinary.
December 26, 2024
Late entry for the best non fiction book I read this year. The author uses evidence about hangings in 18th century London - official court records but also ballads and other cultural texts - to tell a fascinating story about working class life at a turning point in the development of capitalism. Many of those hanged were dockers, coal heavers or silk workers punished for taking what had been for centuries considered their due, skimming off a bit of the commodities they had produced for their own use. With advances in the technology of capitalism, communication networks, the decline of the guilds, every second and every ounce now had to be accounted for. I also loved learning about the folk heroes who were hanged - Jack Sheppard being the most notable example for escaping the law on several spectacular occasions, but also the highwaymen, a disproportionate number of whom were butchers affected by the deregulation of their trade. The author also always pays attention to the boomerang effects of the ever expanding British Empire - the success of militant silk weaver proto-unions was ended by the conquest of Bengal and it's cheap silk imports, the dispossession of Irish smallholders creating a mass of spalpeen labour which spearheaded a general strike of river workers, the linguistic origins of the London "thieves' cant" traced from India, America and Africa. As you can see by the length of this review I could talk about this book for hours.
April 6, 2011
Linbaugh focuses on urban life in 18th century London through the birth of Enclosure (of the rural Commons and, later, of urban environs) and the Industrial Revolution.
It might sound tedious, but it's not - Linebaugh delves into the lives of working class Londoners of many trades, detailing specific work and the development of the new production arrangements which drew tradespeople out of their homes and into the factories - or the streets. Wage Work and Private Property are born, and with them "idleness" as defined by a continually frustrated ruling class. In the 18th century, regular public executions (as well as branding, transportation to America and Australia, etc) were a violent attempt to assert new definitions of criminality and maintain control over a populace that practiced customs of skimming off the top at the workplace to supplement their meager income - taking with them "cabbage", "chips", "sweepings", or any other such "samplings" of the individual trades as an understood matter of course. What had traditionally been informal custom in trade was now criminalized as wasteful in this new era of production, making what seem, today, like petty thefts into transgressions punishable by death. Londoners readily turned to sabotage, retributive violence, basic thievery and highway robbery to exact revenge or simply support their families. The regular anecdotes on anonymous robbers as well as celebrated Robin Hood-types give the notion of "survival crimes" new weight, and the century comes to a head with the uprising of the Gordon Riots in 1780 and the sacking of Newgate Prison, followed by both the abolition of centralized public executions (though not the dismissal of the power of public executions on the whole) and the creation of a new state-monitored police force as a means of protecting both property and production into the newly mechanized era.
Linebaugh draws especially from "The Ordinary of Newgate: His Account of the Behaviour, Confession, and Dying Words of the Malefactors Who Were Executed at Tyburn" to bring to light the names, words and stories - if only the fragmented anecdotes - that are all we can ascribe to these forgotten, executed people and the difficult (although rarely gory) details of their public executions at the hands of proto-capitalist England. The London Hanged is a full work of deep research, drawn out but worth the time spent delving into it.
It might sound tedious, but it's not - Linebaugh delves into the lives of working class Londoners of many trades, detailing specific work and the development of the new production arrangements which drew tradespeople out of their homes and into the factories - or the streets. Wage Work and Private Property are born, and with them "idleness" as defined by a continually frustrated ruling class. In the 18th century, regular public executions (as well as branding, transportation to America and Australia, etc) were a violent attempt to assert new definitions of criminality and maintain control over a populace that practiced customs of skimming off the top at the workplace to supplement their meager income - taking with them "cabbage", "chips", "sweepings", or any other such "samplings" of the individual trades as an understood matter of course. What had traditionally been informal custom in trade was now criminalized as wasteful in this new era of production, making what seem, today, like petty thefts into transgressions punishable by death. Londoners readily turned to sabotage, retributive violence, basic thievery and highway robbery to exact revenge or simply support their families. The regular anecdotes on anonymous robbers as well as celebrated Robin Hood-types give the notion of "survival crimes" new weight, and the century comes to a head with the uprising of the Gordon Riots in 1780 and the sacking of Newgate Prison, followed by both the abolition of centralized public executions (though not the dismissal of the power of public executions on the whole) and the creation of a new state-monitored police force as a means of protecting both property and production into the newly mechanized era.
Linebaugh draws especially from "The Ordinary of Newgate: His Account of the Behaviour, Confession, and Dying Words of the Malefactors Who Were Executed at Tyburn" to bring to light the names, words and stories - if only the fragmented anecdotes - that are all we can ascribe to these forgotten, executed people and the difficult (although rarely gory) details of their public executions at the hands of proto-capitalist England. The London Hanged is a full work of deep research, drawn out but worth the time spent delving into it.
May 16, 2019
This is a very good history book. Linebaugh writes from a leftist Marxist perspective, in the tradition of other notable English historians which helps maintain a clear and intelligible narrative. Very simply this is a story of how working people were forced out of rural areas, completed apprenticeships, and worked as best they could, as sailors, soldiers, servants, longshoremen, etc. Over time they found the mechanisms that allowed them to survive, from the traditional aspects of employment were slowly eliminated.
Simply put it's an account of who was hanged and for what. It also tells of the culture of the poor from Jenny Diver (of Beggar's Opera and thence to Three Penny Opera fame) to Punch ( of the Punch and Judy Show).
As an American and also as someone who listens to "In Our Time" (the podcasted retransmission of the BBC 4 radio show) I found the contrast and discussion of the Gordon Riots illuminating. In the US we learn nothing about the UK at this time other than that they were busy losing a was, so the United States could be created. The Gordon Riots which are seen mostly as anti-Catholic are retold as an excellently documented account of class warfare.
While nominally about who was hanged at the Tyburn tree in 18th Century the book is really a wealth of information about the jobs and working traditions of working class people.
Simply put it's an account of who was hanged and for what. It also tells of the culture of the poor from Jenny Diver (of Beggar's Opera and thence to Three Penny Opera fame) to Punch ( of the Punch and Judy Show).
As an American and also as someone who listens to "In Our Time" (the podcasted retransmission of the BBC 4 radio show) I found the contrast and discussion of the Gordon Riots illuminating. In the US we learn nothing about the UK at this time other than that they were busy losing a was, so the United States could be created. The Gordon Riots which are seen mostly as anti-Catholic are retold as an excellently documented account of class warfare.
While nominally about who was hanged at the Tyburn tree in 18th Century the book is really a wealth of information about the jobs and working traditions of working class people.
October 31, 2011
This guy seriously knows how to write. The London Hanged is interesting, funny, and extremely informative. Linebaugh combines hefty research with captivating stories from the eighteenth century. He goes so far as to use metaphor and other literary devices to embellish his study, making it a really, really fascinating read. I just ate it up. And when I write my own academic works, I tend to keep this gem in mind as a blueprint for success.
December 14, 2021
A staggering indictment of a tyrannical system of justice tied to property and power that prevailed at a time that a fair few of its present day beneficiaries, whether knowingly or in ignorance, might have us return to. Anyone who bleats about its golden age or the virtues of capitalism, should be made to read this book and then eat its pages, laced with arsenic, in a vat of boiling oil.
June 8, 2023
Impeccably researched and argued, and yet not anywhere near as interesting as I expected. Or maybe it just travelled in places I was disinterested in visiting. Entirely more about the individuals and their lives than I wanted to read. I felt he made, and then over-emphasized, his point about "who the hanged" were. I wanted more about the "why the hanged were", though he does write about that too, and more than well enough. The book felt bloated with biographical details that didn't add any weight to his scholarship, just pages. An impersonal sketch of the hanged - as they shared many traits, per his argument - would have sufficed. Or quite possibly this is a book for someone significantly more interested in the finer details of history. I tend to not be that person, which is why I became a bit bored. I enjoy theory and ideas and analysis. People and their lives are boring. Ha! Linebaugh's academic bona fides are real and on display, and his points are made well, just be prepared to wade through some extras to find them.
December 18, 2025
detailed account of capital punishment in London in the 18th century and how it primarily codified class relations. almost unbelievable how widespread capital punishment was in cases of crimes against the property but only for the proletariat - of course stealing a loaf of bread is worse than defrauding the people!
January 28, 2018
Meandering and pretentious, there is some good information buried in the book, but it takes far too much sifting (and putting up with the author's writing quirks) to get to them.
December 21, 2017
basically a better version of "the making of the english working class" that serves as prologue, tribute, and challenge to that epic but sorta slow-paced book. the london hanged is similarly slow-paced, full of prosopographical detail, but the end result is the definitive study of a world before wage and before (modern) property crime, of quasi-criminal laborers, rogues, and ruffians poking back at the oppressors who eventually overwhelmed and destroyed them via industrial innovation and financial capital (the book is more about "punishment by capital" than "capital punishment," you see). it's also a challenge to foucault's discipline and punish, since linebaugh is unconvinced that the discipline imposed by modernity is "softer" or "gentler," just worse.
July 10, 2013
Linebaugh´s book is a mixed blessing. He is very good at showing the social problems of the poor eighteenth century proletariat and how exploitation drove these persons into committing crime. However, for Linebaugh crime is always the result of poverty and never the result of individual guilt. The legal authorities are always the tool of a malicious ruling class and never the just administrators of justice.
I myself am a strong critic of the exploitative neoliberal creed so dominant in our days. But I will never go so far as to see crime and punishment only as the result of class struggle. Many 18th. century criminals were definitely guilty themselves and deserved punishment. There is too much marxist ideology in Linebaugh`s book. Moreover, with his book he does not try to provide an objective piece of legal history writing but an ideologically biased fighting tool against the present use of capital punishment. No matter how one thinks about capital punishment, that is not the way to go. Therefore only three stars.
Further reading:
John Beattie: Crime and the Courts in England, 1660-1800 (1986)
Markus Eder: "At The Instigation of the Devil":
Capital Punishment and the Assize in the early modern England,
1670-1730 (2009, adapted epub ebook edition 2013)
Andrea McKenzie: Tyburn`s Martyrs (2007)
I myself am a strong critic of the exploitative neoliberal creed so dominant in our days. But I will never go so far as to see crime and punishment only as the result of class struggle. Many 18th. century criminals were definitely guilty themselves and deserved punishment. There is too much marxist ideology in Linebaugh`s book. Moreover, with his book he does not try to provide an objective piece of legal history writing but an ideologically biased fighting tool against the present use of capital punishment. No matter how one thinks about capital punishment, that is not the way to go. Therefore only three stars.
Further reading:
John Beattie: Crime and the Courts in England, 1660-1800 (1986)
Markus Eder: "At The Instigation of the Devil":
Capital Punishment and the Assize in the early modern England,
1670-1730 (2009, adapted epub ebook edition 2013)
Andrea McKenzie: Tyburn`s Martyrs (2007)
March 13, 2012
I've been wanting to read this book for a few years and finally got a copy of it. I'm slowly making my way through it, and so far am enjoying it a lot. It's a notch more academic in language and ideas than The Many-Headed Hydra, which I'm okay with, but it always kind of shitty to read something that I enjoy but won't recommend to very many people.
A line I enjoyed from the beginning of Part One: "An important meaning of liberation with continuities to the Revolution of 1640 is suggested in the first chapter: namely, the growing propensity, skill and success of London working people in escaping from the newly created institutions that were designed to discipline people by closing them in. This tendency I have dubbed 'excarceration' because I wish to draw attention to the activity of freedom in contrast to its ideological or theoretical expressions. I see that activity as a counter-tendency to a recent historiographical trend exemplified by Michel Foucault, who stresses incarceration in 'the great confinement' and *who makes the rulers of government and society seem all-powerful.*" Emphasis is my own.
A line I enjoyed from the beginning of Part One: "An important meaning of liberation with continuities to the Revolution of 1640 is suggested in the first chapter: namely, the growing propensity, skill and success of London working people in escaping from the newly created institutions that were designed to discipline people by closing them in. This tendency I have dubbed 'excarceration' because I wish to draw attention to the activity of freedom in contrast to its ideological or theoretical expressions. I see that activity as a counter-tendency to a recent historiographical trend exemplified by Michel Foucault, who stresses incarceration in 'the great confinement' and *who makes the rulers of government and society seem all-powerful.*" Emphasis is my own.
February 6, 2013
I liked the fact that it was history from a different standpoint, beyond that I didn't like much. I am not sure why this book got such good ratings (I guess I'll have to go back and re-read them). It provided new information but it was a bit too "class conflict" for me. Obviously, the period in question involved a lot of change which upset people's lives and the hangings for (ultimately) small monetary amounts is tragic, however there weren't a lot of comparisons with other countries' policies and specifically capital punishment regimes. Also if you look back in English history there were also periods of societal change (Black Death), violence, lower class rebellion (1388) etc. Additionally, there wasn't a lot of comparison with other poor people at the time who didn't get hung and seem to have survived one way or the other. It reminded me of required reading at the Uni, I got through more than half then skimmed the rest. Enough is enough.
December 12, 2020
An amazing social, economic and political history of how capitalism imposed itself by destroying the commons and the customs through the capital punishment. A must-read. Some chapters, by their attention to details, are mesmerizing.
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December 27, 2012Source: Barnes and Noble
June 19, 2009
A fun read about 18th century justice in the London (remember Oliver Twist? the corrupt trial in Pilgrim's Progress? Yeeeeeah.....)
Displaying 1 - 21 of 21 reviews