BRATTLEBORO — In 1803 an Irish renegade, Ned Despard, stood on the gallows in London to be hanged for revolutionary conspiracy. His final speech, written with his Caribbean-born wife, Kate, expressed the hope that “the principles of freedom, of humanity, and of justice will triumph over falsehood, tyranny, and delusion.”
The radical love between Kate and Ned serves as a cornerstone for Red Round Globe Hot Burning, a monumental history of the origins of capitalism (and, simultaneously, the U.K. and U.S.) as well as resistance to it, told through the lives and deeds of people whose opposition to war, privatization, exploitation, and inequality resonates into the present.
The book, with its author, Peter Linebaugh, will be discussed at a free public event at Everyone's Books, 25 Elliot St., on Friday, July 19, at 6 p.m. The event is co-sponsored by the Kopkind Colony.
Kopkind's first seminar/retreat session this year is bringing activists and media makers involved in solidarity economy projects to exchange ideas and experiences around the theme “Democratizing the Economy.” Understanding history and its continued relevance is central to Kopkind's mission.
Linebaugh has been called “the best, most creative, most original historian living today” by Robin D.G. Kelley, himself a celebrated historian. Specializing in the making of what he has called the Atlantic working class, especially from the 17th to 19th centuries, Linebaugh published his first major work, The London Hanged, in 1991.
That groundbreaking book, with its extraordinary archival excavations, explored the rise of capitalism and the spectacle of hanging - “capital punishment and the punishments of capital,” as Linebaugh has said - demonstrating that the creation of new forms of private property and a new elite depended on the criminalization of the poor and the annihilation not just of people's old customary rights but of the people themselves, whether through the gallows or enclosure, slavery or wage slavery, the work house, the penitentiary or the indenture, on ships and on stolen, colonized land.
Central to his work since - including The Many-Headed Hydra (with Marcus Rediker), Stop Thief! and The Incomplete, True, Authentic, and Wonderful History of May Day - and to this new book, is the popular struggle over “the Commons.”
The term denotes not just those customary rights and communal property traditions that were attacked by capitalist privatization but the very idea of community, universality, and human mutuality in practice.
“This book looks at many forms of the actual Commons throughout the Atlantic world, starting in Ireland,” Linebaugh said recently. “Practitioners in these Commons, or commoners, began to exchange experiences, and from those the idea of the Commons became part of general discourse and of the revolutionary upheavals of the 1790s.
“It spread so widely and so fast it caused a tremendous backlash among the powers that be. The ruling class of the U.K., like the Founding Fathers of the USA, were deathly afraid of 'the agrarian law' or 'the people's common.'”
He quotes a short rhyming quatrain from the time that sums up the interlocking complexities of prison, law, and enclosure:
The law locks up the man or woman
Who steals the goose from off the Common
But lets the greater villain loose
Who steals the Common from the goose.
Red Round Globe Hot Burning (the title is from a poem by Robert Blake, written after the American Revolution, in the midst of the French Revolution, and at the start of the Haitian Revolution) explores the inherent conflict from the side of the people: through Ned and Kate and the working class, or “common folk,” with whom they worked against what they called “the system of man-eaters.”
Language itself was part of the struggle, and the capitalist victors made “common” a dirty word.
The book's subtitle captures the breadth of the author's interests as well as the strange beauty of Linebaugh's own language: A Tale at the Crossroads of Commons & Closure, of Love & Terror, of Race & Class, and of Kate & Ned Despard.
It's enough to make one's head spin, but Linebaugh genially unpacks it.
“As we know from the Blues,” he says, “the crossroads signifies a place of danger and choice, and this book reaffirms both. It does so by telling the tale of a man and a woman from different parts of the revolutionary Atlantic who united as part of a struggle for humanity.
“He lost his life for his efforts; she was exiled and forgotten, until now! The year Ned was hanged and beheaded as a traitor, more slaves were embarked by force to America than ever before, and in the U.K. more parliamentary acts of enclosure were passed than ever before. In the midst of shattering events a mixed-race couple, 'violently in love,' pointed in a different direction, toward freedom, openness, justice, equality.”
Speaking of this new book, the writer Rebecca Solnit has said, “It's often assumed that superb scholarship and beautiful writing are rival forces, but in Peter Linebaugh's work they are the same tremendous force evoking and contextualizing moments of crisis and possibility in the past with a vividness that casts new light on our own time.”
On the evening of July 19 at Everyone's Books, the public is invited into this slice of the past, to think together with a great historian about its meanings for the present.