<p>PeterLinebaugh's groundbreaking history has become an inescapable part ofany understanding of the rise of capitalism. In eighteenth-centuryLondon the spectacle of a hanging was not simply a form of punishing transgressors.</p><p>Rather it evidently served the most sinister purpose - for a prvileged ruling class - of forcing the poor population of London to accept the criminalization of customary rights and the new forms of private property.</p><p>Necessity drove the city's poor into inevitable conflict with the changing property laws such that all the working-class men and women of London had good reason to fear the example of Tyburn's trible tree.</p><p>In this newedition Peter Linebaugh reinforces his original arguments with responses to his critics based on an impressive array of historicalsources.</p><p>As the trend of capital punishment intensifies with the spread of global capitalism, <em>The London Hanged</em> also gains in contemporary relevance.</p>