Peter Linebaugh– Stop Thief !

"Through his books, Peter Linebaugh has transformed our understanding of the commons, the Atlantic proletariat, and eighteenth-century thanatocracy.

Stop, Thief! is the first collection of his essays to be published, and it is a great addition to our conceptual tool chest.

It allows us to see Linebaugh's revolutionary historical method in action in shorter pieces, but with more concentrated application.

The essays range spatially from London to the Adirondacks, temporally from medieval times to the present, and thematically from machine-breaking to indigenous American struggles for land. There are worlds here, but there is also Linebaugh's poetry and passion for those he writes about, as he shares their desire for the commons and hatred for oppression, in a living example of participatory history at its best."
-SILVIA FEDERICI, AUTHOR OF CAL /BAN AND THE WITCH AND REVOLUTION AT POINT ZERO

In this majestic tour de force, celebrated historian Peter Linebaugh 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. Scarcely a society has existed on the face of the earth that has not had commoning at its heart. "Neither the state nor the market," say the planetary commoners. These essays kindle the embers of memory to ignite our future commons.

From Thomas Paine to the Luddites, from Karl Marx to the practical dreamer William Morris, who advocated communizing industry and agriculture, to the twentieth-century communist historian E.P. Thompson, Linebaugh brings to life the vital "commonist" tradition.

He traces the red thread from the great revolt of commoners in 1381 to the enclosures of Ireland, and the American commons, where European immigrants who had been expelled from their commons met the immense commons of the native peoples and the underground African American urban commons. Illuminating these struggles in this indispensible collection, Linebaugh reignites the ancient cry, "Stop, Thief!"

"E.P Thompson, you may rest now.... A commonist manifesto for the 21st century."
-MIKE DAVIS, AUTHOR OF PLANET OF SLUMS
"Peter Linebaugh's great act of historical imagination ... takes the cliché of 'globalization' and makes it live. 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 FAREWELL TO AN IDEA

PETER LINEBAUGH used to edit Zerowork and was a member of the Midnight Notes Collective. He coauthored Albion's Fatal Tree and is the author of The London Hanged, The Many Headed Hydra (with Marcus Rediker), and The Magna Carta Manifesto. He lives in the Great Lakes region and works at the University of Toledo in Ohio.

Cover design by John Yates www.stealworks.com