Ned Ludd & Queen Mab: Machine-Breaking, Romanticism, and the Several Commons of 1811–12
Please select all options before adding to cart.
Peter Linebaugh, in an extraordinary historical and literary tour de force, enlists the anonymous and scorned 19th century loom-breakers of the English midlands into the front ranks of an international, polyglot, many-colored crew of commoners resisting dispossession in the dawn of capitalist modernity.
Praise:
“Sneering at the Luddites is still the order of the day. Peter Linebaugh’s great act of historical imagination stops the scoffers in their tracks. It takes the cliche of ‘globalization’ and makes it live: the Yorkshire machine-breakers are put right back in the violent world economy of 1811–12, in touch with the Atlantic slave trade, Mediterranean agribusiness, the Tecumseh rebellion, the brutal racism of London dockland. The local and the global are once again shown to be inseparable—as they are, at present, for the machine-breakers of the new world crisis.”
—T.J. Clark, author of The Absolute Bourgeois and Image of the People
“My benediction”
—E.J. Hobsbawm, author of Primitive Rebels and Captain Swing
“E.P. Thompson, you may rest now. Linebaugh restores the dignity of the despised luddites with a poetic grace worthy of the master. By a stunning piece of re-casting we see them here not as rebels against the future but among the avant-garde of a planetary resistance movement against capitalist enclosures in the long struggle for a different future. Byron, Shelley, listen up! Peter Linebaugh’s Ned Ludd and Queen Mab does for ‘technology’ what his London Hanged did for ‘crime.’ Where was I that day in Bloomsbury when he delivered this commonist manifesto for the 21st century? The Retort Pamphet series is off to a brilliant start.”
—Mike Davis, author of Planet of Slums and Buda’s Wagon
About the Author:
Peter Linebaugh is the author of The London Hanged (London: Penguin, 1991), The Magna Carta Manifesto (University of California Press, 2008), and with Marcus Rediker, The Many-Headed Hydra (Beacon Press, 2000). He has written introductions to a book of Thomas Paine’s writing (Verso, 2009) and to a new edition of E.P. Thompson’s, William Morris: Romantic to Revolutionary (PM Press, 2011). He works at the University of Toledo in Ohio.
See and hear author interviews, book reviews, and other news on Peter Linebaugh’s page HERE
Click here for one-page information sheet on this product
You May Also Like
Stop, Thief!: The Commons, Enclosures, and Resistance
This majestic tour de force takes aim at the thieves of land, the polluters of the seas, the ravagers of the forests, the despoilers of rivers, and the removers of mountaintops.
When Miners March
The definitive insider's history of the 20th century Mine Wars and the treason trial of Bill Blizzard, the fearless leader of the Red Neck Army.
West of Eden: Communes and Utopia in Northern California
Explores the roots and legacies of the pulse of radical energies that generated forms of collective life beyond the nuclear family and the world of private consumption.
Demanding the Impossible: A History of Anarchism
Navigating the broad "river of anarchy," from Taoism to Situationism, from anarcho-syndicalists to anarcha-feminists, this volume is an authoritative and lively study of a widely misunderstood subject.
William Morris: Romantic to Revolutionary
Two impressive figures, William Morris as subject and E.P. Thompson as author, are conjoined in this immense biographical-historical-critical study.
Recently Viewed
Pistoleros!: The Chronicles of Farquhar McHarg - I: 1918
A thrilling tale of adventure, treachery, and betrayal... a fascinating insight into the ideas and optimism that set the world ablaze in the first part of the twentieth century.
Burning Britain: The History of UK Punk 1980-1984
The true story of the UK punk scene from '80–84 told by the bands and record labels that created it; profiling bands like Vice Squad, Angelic Upstarts, Blitz, Anti-Nowhere League, Cockney Rejects, and more obscure groups.
Women and the Subversion of the Community: A Mariarosa Dalla Costa Reader
These essays provide critical and relevant ideas for anticapitalists, antiracists, and feminists who are attempting to build counterpower in the age of austerity.
Spain 1936-39 Revolution and Civil War Volume 1, Posters Pocketbook (A6)
This collection was hand-picked by RPC collective members to give a feel for the posters used by anarchist, socialist, and communist groups in circulation during the Spanish Revolution and Civil War.