Red Round Globe Hot Burning: A Tale at the Crossroads of Commons and Closure, of Love and Terror, of Race and Class, and of Kate and Ned Despard

On February 21, 1803, Colonel Edward (Ned) Marcus Despard was publicly hanged and decapitated in London before a crowd of 20,000 for organizing a revolutionary conspiracy to overthrow King George III. His Black Caribbean wife, Catherine (Kate), helped to write his gallows speech in which he proclaimed that he was a friend to the poor and oppressed. He expressed trust that “the principles of freedom, of humanity, and of justice will triumph over falsehood, tyranny, and delusion.”
 
And yet the world turned. From the connected events of the American, French, Haitian, and failed Irish Revolutions, to the Anthropocene’s birth amidst enclosures, war-making global capitalism, slave labor plantations, and factory machine production, Red Round Globe Hot Burning throws readers into the pivotal moment of the last two millennia. This monumental history, packed with a wealth of detail, presents a comprehensive chronicle of the resistance to the demise of communal regimes. Peter Linebaugh’s extraordinary narrative recovers the death-defying heroism of extended networks of underground resisters fighting against privatization of the commons accomplished by two new political entities, the U.S.A. and the U.K., that we now know would dispossess people around the world through today. Red Round Globe Hot Burning is the culmination of a lifetime of research—encapsulated through an epic tale of love.
 

Table of Contents:
Acknowledgments
Foreword

Introduction

PART ONE • THE QUEST

SECTION A • THE QUEST
1 • The Grave of a Woman
2 • Quest for the Commons

SECTION B • THANATOCRACY
3 • Despard at the Gallows
4 • Gallows Humor and the Gibbets of Civilization
5 • Apples from the Green Tree of Liberty

SECTION C • UNDERGROUND
6 • The Anthropocene and the Stages of History
7 • E. P. Thompson and the Irish Commons

PART TWO • ATLANTIC MOUNTAINS

SECTION D • IRELAND
8 • Habendum and the Anglo-Irish Ascendancy
9 • Hotchpot, or Celtic Communism
10 • “That’s True Anyhow”
11 • A Boy amid the Whiteboys
12 • The Same Cont.

SECTION E • AMERICA
13 • America! Utopia! Equality! Crap.
14 • Cooperation and Survival in Jamaica
15 • Nicaragua and the Miskito Commons
16 • Honduras and the Mayan Commons

SECTION F • HAITI
17 • Haiti and Thelwall
18 • Ireland and Volney
19 • A Spot in Time
20 • Their Son

SECTION G • ENGLAND
21 • “A System of Man-Eaters”
22 • The Goose and the Commons, c. 1802
23 • “The Den of Thieves”
24 • Commons or True Commons

PART THREE • LOVE AND STRUGGLE

SECTION H • THE "BUSINESS"
25 • “The Business”
26 • The Kiss of Love and Equalization
27 • Criminalization in the Labor Process
28 • Irish Labor, English Coal

SECTION I • PRISON
29 • In Debt in Prison
30 • In Prison without a Spoon: The Commons of the Meal
31 • Rackets in King’s Bench Prison: The Commons of Play
32 • Catherine Despard Confronts the Penitentiary

SECTION J • TWO STORIES
33 • “The Whole Business of Man”
34 • The Red Cap of Liberty
35 • The Red-Crested Bird and Black Duck
36 • What Is the Human Race?

Works Cited
Index

About the Author :
Peter Linebaugh is an historian and the author of The London Hanged, The Magna Carta Manifesto,The Incomplete, True, Authentic, and Wonderful History of May Day, and Stop, Thief!, and the coauthor, with Marcus Rediker, of The Many-Headed Hydra. His articles have appeared in publications that include CounterPunch, the New Left Review, and Radical History Review.
 

Review :
“Peter Linebaugh is acknowledged as a chronicler with a left-wing view. He is also described as a historian of genius. His book presents us with the facts, and what a glorious luxury that is. But of course we have a choice about which facts we want to examine, and he assiduously takes us up neglected side roads on a journey to America, England, Haiti, Honduras, Ireland and Nicaragua. And to prison. In Red Round Globe Hot Burning he invites us to benefit from his lifetime of reading and writing.” “Offers unconventional biography and unconventional history. Linebaugh goes where biographers and historians are often taught not to go: to places where there are no archival records and where a writer has to be inventive and imaginative. . . . Few tomes are as much fun to read." "Red Round Globe Hot Burning is a disturbing and challenging book. It kept me awake and note-taking through a whole night. . . . Linebaugh’s exploration of the assault on the Commons and how our antecedents struggled to resist the depredations is an invaluable education."

"While it is nearly impossible to convey the flow of subjects embodied in Red Round Globe Hot Burning, the sweep of interracial history, the place of seemingly ordinary people in challenging the very basis of class society, will be understood better by those reading this worthy volume."

“Peter Linebaugh has produced another masterful history ‘from below' . . . . In language that is sometimes visceral, imaginative and often sublimely eloquent he analyses the conditions in which people were living and working, making connections, while leaving the reader with a global overview of the struggle against colonial and imperial power.”

“An erudite work by a scholar who adapted classic ‘history from below’ to more diverse subjects, while integrating environmental history and literary studies . . . Red Round Globe Hot Burning will hold the interest of a wide array of historians. The vignettes collected in the book display the burning power of ideas in a period of tumultuous change.”