Kamera & Foto

Kurzbeschreibung

Amazon.co.uk

This handsome new edition of Peter Linebaugh's classic The London Hanged is a fully updated version of a seminal and groundbreaking study of the rise of consumer society, which the author contends arose via the crushing and criminalising of the English working class.

With The London Hanged, Linebaugh, a student of the great EP Thomson (whose Making of the English Working Class still occupies a pinnacle of historiography and which should certainly be consulted in parallel with this work), takes his place alongside his teacher, and writers like Christopher Hill (The World Turned Upside Down, Intellectual Origins of the English Revolution, as a historian of considerable stature.

He argues that hanging in 18th-century London was not about punishment--hanging was a public spectacle used to demonstrate the power of a ruling class and to force the acceptance by the poor populace of that power and its use in criminalising, forbidding and removing traditional rights and freedoms. Capital punishment was about disciplining all the poor. Hanging was part of the ideological process of turning London's downtrodden masses into a suppliant industrial working class.

In this new edition Linebaugh reinforces the arguments he previously made and responds vigorously to a number of his critics. A book that provides a number of rare insights towards an understanding of the rise of capitalism, The London Hanged is also a powerful, often moving, lambent and vital work. --George Bowman

Kurzbeschreibung

A young white officer, bedevilled by the kidnapping of his girlfriend, leads a platoon of black soldiers along with irreplaceable construction experts and equipment across guerilla-infested mountains to build a critically needed airstrip on the west side of the Isle of St. Margaret's just days from its independence from Great Britain in 1973. on the way, he shoots his sergeant major to prevent a mutiny and the failure of the mission. The mission is ultimately successful but the political leadership determines to court martial him for the ?murder of a noncommissioned officer whilst on a mission under arms?. The penalty is death by firing squad. This is the story of that court martial, its breathtaking conclusion and its impact on the unification of the various peoples that make up the new nation's population.