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This remarkable book shows how long standing restraints against tyranny — habeas corpus, trial by jury, due process of law, prohibition of torture, and the commons — are being abridged.

In providing a sweeping history of Magna Carta, the source of these protections since 1215, this powerful essay demonstrates how these ancient rights are repeatedly laid aside when the greed of privatization, the lust for power, and the ambition of empire seize hold of a state. Peter Linebaugh draws on a breathtaking array of 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. Linebaugh points to this historic document as a means to redress the circumstances of today's victims of rampant globalization.

In detailing the way in which these charters have been used for centuries, across oceans and empires, in their moments of being forgotten and in current opportunities for revitalization, Linebaugh recounts the history of racism, the story of dispossession, the formation of class societies, and the constitutional histories of democracies and republics. The people's history of Magna Carta makes vivid the breadth of age-old struggle — from the streets to the parliaments, and in prisons, slave ships, and the press — and triumphantly shows how the restoration of political rights can be achieved by the recovery of economic rights.

Contents

Illustrations

Preface

1. Introduction

2. Two Charters

3. The Commodity and the Commons

4. Charters Lost and Found

5. The Charters in Blackface and Whiteface

6. 1776 and Runnamede

7. The Law of the Jungle

8. Magna Carta and the U.S. Supreme Court

9. Icon and Idol

10. This Land Was Made by You and Me

11. The Constitution of the Commons

12. Conclusion

Appendix

1. Magna Carta

2. The Charter of the Forest

Glossary

Further Reading

Index