Peter Linebaugh's groundbreaking history has become an inescapable part of any understanding of the rise of capitalism. 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. Necessity drove the city's poor into inevitable conflict with the changing property laws such that all the working-class men and women of London had good reason to fear the example of Tyburn's triple tree.

—

In criminology as in economics there is scarcely a more powerful word than 'capital'. In the former discipline it denotes death; in the latter it has designated the 'substance' or 'stock' of life: apparently opposite meanings. Just why the same word, 'capital', has come to mean both crimes punishable by death and the accumulation of wealth founded on the produce of previous (or dead) labour might be left to etymologists were not the association so striking, so contradictory and so exact in expressing the theme of this book. For this book explores the relationship between the organized death of living labour (capital punishment) and the oppression of the living by dead labour (the punishment of capital).

The intensification of capital punishment has become a worldwide trend since the mid 1970s precisely when capital, reacting to the prior period of colonial emancipation, unprecedented wage demands and cultural revolutions, gained a new lease of life. Considering five of the countries that have utilized it most frequently or broadened its application, we find that South Africa has executed more than a hundred a year since 1980; that Iran since 1979 has tripled the annual number of executions, now measured in the thousands; that Nigeria between 1974 and 1977 extended the death penalty to include crimes against money; that large numbers have been executed in China since 1980; and that in the United States, following an unofficial ten-year moratorium, the execution of the death penalty was resumed in 1977. All told, acccording to Amnesty International, there have been about a thousand executions a year since 1985, a figure that excludes unofficial deaths that governments have nevertheless acquiesced in - the 'disappeared', the assassinations, the victims of death squads. Thus, the tendency to capital punishment has been clear, alarming and specific to a historical period that has been reactionary in every sense.

In contrast to eighteenth-century London when news of hangings, the last words of the condemned, their biographies and descriptions of their behaviour were widely published, remarkably little is known about the recent victims of capital punishment, or about the attitudes oif their peers. This is unusual considering that nineteen countries permit public executions. The international press is strangely silent, and the national press is terse. One reason for such silence is suggested by a Pakistani journalist who, following a public execution in 1988 before 10,000 people, observed 'Such punishments will project the image of the state as a perpetrator of violence.' Occasionally, such violence has met a violent response, despite unequal forces. The prisoners of the Virgina State Penitentiary rioted unsuccessfully in April 1985 to prevent the execution of James Briley. Very few condemned have had their last words recorded. In China, it is said, a choke cord around the neck of the condemned prevents the uttering of sounds during the 'public humiliation' ceremonies that precede execution. An exception to this silence was provided by Dr Nawal el Saadawi, who recorded the words of Firdaus, executed in Egypt in 1974. Firdaus has declined to plea for a pardon when asked to do so by the warden. 'Everybody has to die,' she explained, 'I prefer to die for a crime I have committed rather than to die for one of the crimes which you have committed.' Thus she did express a contradiction inherent in capital punishment and which poses a problem that must be faced by all who contemplate it. Free alike of hope and fear, Firdaus approached her fate with concentrated fortitude. 'This journey to a place unknown to everybody on this earth fills me with pride.'

[…]

The [seventeenth-century London] hangings were permitted and ordered by men of a ruling class who had studied the applications of death throughout human history and had power to apply that knowledge. The hanging was one of the few occasions (coronations were another) that united the several parts of the government (monarch, courts, Parliament, City and Church). Equally important to the meaning of these awful dramas was the renewal of the 'social contract'. Most of those hanged had offended against the laws of property. It could therfore be argued that, just as each hanging renewed the power of the sovereignty, so each hanging repeated the lesson: 'Respect Private Property.' So, if the hangings are to considered as dramas, the conflict that they represented was the conflict of the Powerful and the Propertied against the Weak and the Poor - a futile, unchanging conflict whose lesson, it seemed, was never learnt. Malcolm X, a prisoner at the Norfolk Correctional Facility in Massachusetts, recognized this in 1949. He was a member of the debating team that defeated MIT. In arguing the affirmative to the proposition, 'The Death Penalty is Ineffective as a Deterrent', he reminded the judges that the eighteenth-century pickpocket plied his trade within the crowd at the hanging of another pickpocket.

[…]

Contents
List of Illustrations
List of Tables, Fugures and Maps
Abbreviations
Acknowledgements
Preface to the Second Edition
Introduction
Part One: Pandaemonium and Finance Capitalism, 1690-1720
1 'The Common Discourse of the Whole Nation': Jack Sheppard and the Art of Escape
2 'Old Mr Gory' and the Thanatocracy
3 Tyburnography: The Sociology of the Condemned
Part Two: The Pedagogy of the Gallows under Mercantilism, 1720-1750
4 The Picaresque Proletariat During the Robinocracy
5 Socking, the Hogshead and Excise
6 'Going Under the Accompt': Highway Robbery under the Reigns of the Georges
Part Three: Industry and Idleness in the Period of Manufacture, 1750-1776
7 The Cat Likes Cream: The Waging Hand in Five Trades
8 Silk Makes the Difference
9 If You Plead for Your Life, Plead in Irish
Part Four: The Crisis of Thanatocracy in the Era of Revolution, 1776-1800
10 The Delivery of Newgate, 6 June 1780
11 Ships and Chips: Technological Repression and the Origin of the Wage
12 Sugar and Police: The London Working Class in the 1790s
Afterword to the Second Edition
Bibliography
Index

(For an extract, see the workers of the world: relax post.)

Certain Queries Propounded to the Consideration of such as were Intended for the Service of Ireland was a short pamphlet or broadside which was apparently printed illegally in late April or early May, 1649, and distributed among soldiers of the Commonwealth's army on the eve of Oliver Cromwell's reconquest of Ireland. The text had been refused a licence by one of the Commonwealth government's censors, Theodore Jennings, and greatly alarmed the leadersof the army and Commonwealth, who regarded it as a real threat to their plans to conquer Ireland. It seems to have been quickly and thoroughly suppressed, for no independent copy of it survives.

Yet the content of this tract was radical and threatening enough for the Cromwellian party to make considerable efforts to counter its subversive ideas about the natural right of the Irish people to resist conquest by the English. The editor of one of the pro-Comwellian newspapers, John Dillingham, devoted leading articles in his Moderate Intelligencer for six weeks to refuting these ideas, and on 9 May the Council of State, the Commonwealth's executive body, commissioned several people to write in defence of its position against "obstructers" of the Irish expedition who were raising "causeless Cavills and Queries".

[…]

The ideas in Certain Queries were very widely associated at the time with the radical group known to history as the Levellers. This well-organised group of writers and activists had ideas on freedom and popular sovereignty which challenged the radical but authoritarian "Godly Rule" of the Cromwellians and had a lasting significance in the development of political thought in England and America. Despite many arguments among historians about their actual impact on the situation in 1647-1649, there is no doubt that they actively sought to mobilise and lead a radical opposition to the Commonwealth in 1649.

From the publication of England's New Chains Discovered by John Lilburne in February, 1649, the Levellers denounced the Commonwealth as an authoritarian millitary government which had taken over without the people's consent, called upon soldiers and others to resist it, and demanded a new constitution which would guarantee representative government and individual liberty. They saw the army as crucial to the achievement of this further revolution, and called upon the soldiers to re-establish the representative General Council of the Army which had existed from June to November, 1647.

The Levellers' enemies not only blamed them for the unrest in the army in the spring of 1649, but accused them of holding pro-Irish views which were by implication treasonous and a challenge to the Protestant view of Ireland held by most of the radicals as well as by the Commonwealth government. The group as a whole was accused of arguing "that it is an unlawful War, a cruel and bloody work to go to destroy the Irish Natives for their Consciences," and William Walwyn in particular was alleged to have said, "that the cause of the Irish Natives in seeking their just freedoms, immunities and liberties, was the very same with our cause here, in indeavouring our own rescue and freedom from the power of oppressors." The official government account of the army mutinies in May alleged that the Levellers "have endeavoured what they can, to render the service of Ireland either as unlawful (wherein they comply with Popish demands) or exceeding difficult" […]

The heresy of the Free Spirit is often considered to have been the most important continental European heresy of the fourteenth century. Many historians have described its membership as a league of anarchist deviants who fomented sexual license and subversion of authority. Free spirits are supposed to have justified nihilism and megalomania and to have been remote precursors of Bakunin and Nietzsche and twentieth century bohemians and hippies. This volume examines the Free Spirit movement as it appeared in its own age, and concludes that it was not a tightly-organized sect but rather a spectrum of belief that emphasized voluntary poverty and quietistic mysticism. Overall, the movement was far more typical of the late-medieval search for God and godliness than is commonly supposed.

Contents
Acknowledgements
Abbreviations
Introduction
Heresy and Fornication
1 Three Racy Stories
2 The Heresy in the Swabian Ries
3 Heresy and Fornication: a Topos of the Thirteenth Century
4 Adamites and Luciferans in the Fourteenth Centruy
Beghards and Beguines
1 Origins and Sources of Hostility
2 The Heresy of Lay Piety
3 Conrad of Megenberg and John Wasmod of Homburg
The Condemnation
1 The Thirteenth Century
2 The German Decrees
3 Marguerite Porete
4 The Council of Vienne
The Inquisition in Strassburg
1 The Campaign of John of Zürich
2 The Second Wave of Persecutions
3 The Case of John Malkaw
4 The Third Wave of Persecutions
The Inquisition in the East
1 John and Albert of Brünne
2 The Beguines of Schweidnitz
3 The Hussite Problem
The Inquisition in the West
1 Hermann Kuchener and Constantine of Erfurt
2 The Revival of the Papal Inquisition
3 The Campaign of Walter Kerlinger: John Hartmann and the Beguines of Thuringia
4 Conrad Kannler
5 The Campaigns of Martin of Prague, Peter Zwicker, and Eylard Schoenveld
6 Nicholas of Basel and the Campaign of John Mulberg
7 The "Men of Intelligence"
The Fifteenth Century
1 The Polemics of Gerson
2 The Era of the Council of Basel
3 Hans Becker
The Predicament of the Mystics
1 Meister Eckhart
2 Eckhart's Orthodox Followers
3 Ruysbroeck
4 Groote and the Brethren of the Common Life
The Literature of the Free Spirit
1 The Mirror of Simple Souls
2 The Pseudo-Eckhart Literature
3 De onbekende leek and Schwester Katrei
4 The Rhineland libelli and The Book of Spiritual Poverty
5 Conclusions
The Place of the Heresy of the Free Spirit in Social and Cultural History
1 Who Were the Free Spirits?
2 Motivation
3 "The Pursuit of the Millennium" or "Beyond Good and Evil"?
4 The Lay Spirit and the Dignity of Man
5 Ultimate Failure
List of manuscripts
Index