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.