Crime and Civil Society in the 18^th Century

Peter Linebaugh     1991     524p     6 x 9

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 most sinister purpose — for a prvileged ruling class — of forcing the poor population of London to accept the criminalization of customary rights and the 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. Foucault says this is the period of incarceration, while Linebaugh says it’s the period of excarceration!

$9-15