This remarkable book shines a fierce light on the current state of liberty and shows how longstanding restraints against tyranny—and the rights of habeas corpus, trial by jury, and due process of law, and the prohibition of torture—are being abridged. In providing a sweeping history of Magna Carta, the source of these protections since 1215, this powerful book demonstrates how these ancient rights are repeatedly laid aside when the greed of privatization, the lust for power, and the ambition of empire seize a state. Peter Linebaugh draws on primary sources to construct a wholly original history of the Great Charter and its scarcely-known companion, the Charter of the Forest, which was created at the same time to protect the subsistence rights of the poor.
Table of Content
Illustrations
Preface
1. Introduction
2. Two Charters
3. The Commodity and the Commons
4. Charters Lost and Found
5. The Charters in Blackface and Whiteface
6. 1776 and Runnamede
7. The Law of the Jungle
8. Magna Carta and the U.S. Supreme Court
9. Icon and Idol
10. This Land Was Made by You and Me
11. The Constitution of the Commons
12. Conclusion
Appendix
1. Magna Carta
2. The Charter of the Forest
Glossary
Further Reading
Index
About the author
Peter Linebaugh is Professor of History at the University of Toledo. He is the author of The London Hanged: Crime and Civil Society in the Eighteenth Century and coauthor (with Marcus Rediker) of Many-Headed Hydra: The Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic.
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