Vol. 13 No. 23 · 5 December 1991
pages 10-11 | 2605 words
Poor Man’s Crime
Ian Gilmour
- The London Hanged: Crime and Civil Society in the 18th Century by Peter Linebaugh
Allen Lane, 484 pp, £25.00, September 1991, ISBN 0 7139 9045 7
Whatever may have happened recently to the Communist regimes Eastern Europe, Marxist historiography seems alive and defiant. Lenin’s tomb may be under threat, but the historical certainties of Marxism lie undisturbed. ‘Broadly speaking,’ Peter Linebaugh tells us, ‘the English Revolution was a conflict among three social forces. The bourgeoisie, led by Oliver Cromwell and organised in Parliament, aroused the English proletariat to make war against Charles I, the High Church and the aristocracy. Having vanquished them, Cromwell then turned against his erstwhile class ally, the many-headed multitude, which during the course of the struggle against the King had developed a movement of teeming freedom that was antithetical to the capitalist order that Cromwell and Parliament sought to impose.’ Even twenty-five years ago that would have been considered a little crude. Today, after the revisionist history of the last two decades, the claim that the English Civil War was a class one seems the historical equivalent of Stalinism.
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Letters
Vol. 14 No. 1 · 9 January 1992
From John Charlton
It would be a terrible shame if Ian Gilmour’s review of Peter Linebaugh’s The London Hanged (LRB, 5 December) was to deter potential readers. Whilst there is some grudging acknowledgment of the author’s scholarship, the general tone is one of slightly weary cynicism over the book’s Marxist (Stalinist?) framework, which, we are assured, retains only ‘a period charm’ in the light of recent events in Eastern Europe. Curiously perhaps, Gilmour sees ‘common ground’ with Linebaugh in his contention that ‘most of the hanged were poor, most had committed minor property crimes, and the rich were content with the system,’ while offering us no alternative explanation to the one he rubbishes.
Peter Linebaugh’s is a fine achievement and his central analytical mode is both indispensable and credible. His picture is of a society in an earth-shattering process of change. Here are the birthpangs of capitalism, an infant impatient to impose its will upon traditional society. Here are the Africans ripped from their homes and transported in chains to the plantations of the New World to produce sugar, cotton, tobacco. Here are the peasants arriving in droves from a countryside disrupted by enclosure, from a country, Ireland, dominated by rapacious landlords. Here are the craft workers, their customary rights criminalised. And here are the great ideologues, modernisers like Jeremy Bentham (against capital punishment), who could send his servant of five years to the gallows for taking two silver spoons. It is these different worlds, and a number of others, that Linebaugh re-creates and integrates with enormous verve and excitement, and not a little appropriate rage. Here is a book fit to stand next to The Making of the English Working Class. Finally, it is perhaps more than a little careless for Ian Gilmour to imply a Stalinist analysis in a pupil of Edward Thompson’s, but we can no doubt leave it to the author to answer that particular slur.
John Charlton
Leeds
