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.

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.

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