Peter Linebaugh - Red Round Globe Hot Burning

This book has been the product of many years and many people. Looking back on its production, I am filled with gratitude for those who have helped it along. I cannot describe everything and everybody who made it possible, but it is with affection that I try to describe some. And it is with respect that I acknowledge the generosity implicit in this immense though imperfect commons of Truth.

Long ago, Edward Thompson gave me his copy of the Trial of Despard, and ever since it has been in my luggagein South Africa, Ireland, India, Costa Rica, Europe, and New York. Dorothy Thompson gave me her husbands extensive typed transcripts from the English Home Office papers for the years 1802 and 1803, as well as notes from French archives which had been composed by Alfred Cobban. Well after I began work on this book, two biographies of Despard appeared. Their authors, Clifford Connor and Mike Jay, have been exceptionally generous.

Marcus Rediker and I wrote The Many-Headed Hydra, whose eighth chapter is the first approximation of the story told here. One day, looking at my photographs, which I had not yet provided words for, he let me know I was on a kind of quest. This insight led me to the quest for the commons and the quest for a woman who lived over two hundred years ago. Shipmate, thanks!

On May Day 2000, I asked my Irish colleagues at the Keough Centre at Notre Dame University how to say workers of the world unite in the Irish language. After a little effort, a literal rendition was offered, though it did not please everyone in the assembly. An old Irish saying was provided instead: ar scth a chile a mhaireann na davine (we live in the shadow of each other). So has it been with this book.

Kevin Whelan of the Keough Centre of Dublin and Notre Dame and his wife, Ann Kearney, offered unstinting hospitality in every respect, scholarly and otherwise. A remarkable 1798 conference held in Belfast, Dublin, and the train in between the two cities felt like an initiation into an international and ancient fraternity of scholars. It took place as the Good Friday Agreement was signed! Thanks to Luke Gibbons for his generous introductions to poetry, film, and social history, and to the Field Day tendency. Thanks to Louis Cullen and the graduate history seminar at Trinity College, Dublin, and to Patrick Bresnihan of Dublins Provisional University, 2014.

I thank the ever-helpful staff of the National Library of Ireland, Mr. Gregory Connor of the National Archives of Ireland, the Royal Irish Academy, the Trinity College Library, the Rathmines Public Library, and the Friends Historical Library, Swanbrook House, Dublin.

I thank Dermit Ferriter and Daire Keogh of St. Patricks College, Drumcondra; I thank Fidelma Maddock, who visited the source of the Nore and described the salmon run for me; and I thank Geraldine and Matthew Stout, who introduced me to the old earthen monuments of the Boyne Valley. Bill Jones accompanied me on a ramble in Upperwoods of county Laois. After I had jumped off a mossy slab of stone in an old graveyard, he rubbed it clean of moss and lichen to reveal aslant the chiseled letters of William Despard and his wife, Elizabeth: we had stumbled on the grave of Despards grandfather and grandmother.

The quest was interrupted by a state of emergency, which in addition to the familiar combination of war and domestic repression propounded a discourse of empire and the unitary executive that swept all before it. This emergency required recovering the hidden traditions of the commons forgotten by the domineering effects of the twentieth-century Communist parties. So, in response, I wrote the Magna Carta Manifesto , along with studies of John Ball, Wat Tyler, Thomas Paine, William Morris, and the Luddites, whom I tried to reintroduce to a new generation. Later these were collected in my volume Stop, Thief!

I am grateful to my hosts at several universities that invited me to speak: the University of West England, November 2006; Duke University, 19 October 2001, and Yale University a week later; Sharzad Majab and David McNally of the University of Toronto; the Creative Destruction Conference, Graduate Center, CUNY, 17 April 2004; and John Roosa and Ayu of the University of British Columbia, Vancouver, 2013. I also thank Professor Nick Faraclas and his colleagues in the literature and linguistics department at the University of Puerto Rico for wonderful discussions on these themes in March 2004; Barry Maxwell and Fouad Makki of the Terra Nullius Project at the Institute for Comparative Modernities, Cornell University; the National Lawyers Guild at the University of Seattle in 2009; Goldsmiths College, London, in 2014; Ruskin College, Oxford, in 2014; and the University of Cape Town in 2015.

Besides being supported by universities, this book has origins in many gatherings at locations outside the walls of universities: The May Day Rooms, 88 Fleet Street; the Blue Mountain Center (Adirondacks), for a week on the commons, 2010; the Andrew Kopkind Center, Vermont, for a week on the commons, summer 2014; the Marxist School of Sacramento; and the Marx Memorial Library, 2013. I am grateful to the Bristol Radical History Groups 2008 conference, Down with the Fences! The Struggle for the Global Commons; the Re-Thinking Marxism conference, Amherst, November 2003; Andre Grubacic of the California Institute of Integral Studies, San Francisco; Anarchist Bookfairs in London and San Francisco, 2014; the Liverpool Writing on the Wall conference, 2001; Sheila Rowbotham in Cork, Ireland, for her company on May Day; the Left Forum of New York City; and Boxcar Books, Indianapolis. I thank Tom Chisholm for a remarkable visit in 2003 to the Ojibway Reservation in the Upper Peninsula of the Great Lakes.