Peter Linebaugh: The London Hanged: Crime and Civil Society in the Eighteenth Century.(Book review)

Peter Linebaugh The London Hanged: Crime and Civil Society in the Eighteenth Century Verso, 2006, 492 pp. (second edition) ISBN 1-85984576-2 (pbk) 11.99 [pounds]

Coming as it does at a time of international and domestic conflict and disputes over law--over competing definitions of 'justice' and 'right'--the reprinting by Verso of this exemplary work of historical materialism in the British Marxist historian tradition is most welcome. Peter Linebaugh, a student and comrade of E.P. Thompson, has revisited here the political and economic transformations that were necessary to change feudalism into capitalism, which were not simply a question of regime or law and enforcement substitution, since these alterations happened on a piecemeal basis over centuries. The main story in the 'history from below' approach is the protest and resistance that the proto-working class was engaged in during its struggles for survival.

The book begins with an exploration of 'the relationship between the organised death of living labour (capital punishment) and the oppression of the living by dead labour (the punishment of capital)'. This is not merely a sartorial literary flourish: it describes state terror at crucial times of economic change. A hanging at Tyburn in eighteenth-century London was never only punishment, just as death by lethal injection in the twenty-first century USA is an active part of the war between classes.

The life histories of the 1,142 men and women who were hanged on the gallows at Tyburn form the basis of this book. A handful were selected to be hung every six weeks--a legal massacre--because they had been found guilty of breaking the 'death statutes' written by the ruling and propertied classes. Their lives and class experience are portrayed here through the exploration of the wage form, working practices, and the new international division of labour.

It portrays the interrelations between different peoples--Afro-American, Irish, Jewish and other--whose class consciousness was informed by slavery and imperialism (e.g. by the plantations in the West Indies), and who were active in resistance in London and beyond. London's black population alone formed approximately 6-7 per cent of the general population in 1780. Britain's empire was formed by its predominant maritime operations, and the empire and capitalism grew through super-exploitation, as sailors came from all over the world and helped to form London into the world's leading cosmopolitan city. This in turn formed its nemesis: the proletariat.

Highwaymen formed a part of this class composition; and these former artisans driven into highway robbery by hard times provide an example of a major theoretical innovation famously provided by Thompson et al. (1975): the 'social crime' thesis. Here we see these former butchers using knowledge from their trade--the provisioning routes into London, often across commons--which would be the location in which they relieved merchants and gentlemen farmers of their money.

A further crucial point is that the social-protest aspect of this kind of action is sometimes blurred, with the activity being regarded as straightforward crime, since others apart from the rich may be involved, such as passengers and coach drivers. However, Thompson et al. (1975) responded to this when they argued that there is not 'nice social crime here and nasty crime over there'. A focus on legality merely leads to a cul-de-sac. Instead, it is the social relations in action that are important as they develop; and therefore social crime is always 'becoming'. Indeed, it is possible to speculate that contemporary carjacking is ...