:The Magna Carta Manifesto: Liberties and Commons for All

At the conclusion of Whigs and Hunters (1975), E. P. Thompson famously reflected on the rule of law, concluding that the rhetoric and rules of a society “are something a great deal more than a sham,” more than merely an ideological prop of the ruling class; he cautiously asserted the universal value of the rule of law. Two decades later, Ranajit Guha, just as famously, countered that the British colonial state ruled by means of “dominance without hegemony,” decrying the notion that rule of law ever existed under the Raj or could have the universal benefits suggested by Thompson. Peter Linebaugh was himself among that group of gifted scholars who studied with Thompson at the University of Warwick and who have subsequently done much to influence our historical understanding of the law, custom, and crime. He now offers a wide-ranging book on Magna Carta, seeking to recover its vital properties in their fullness. If Thompson worried aloud about the contemporary significance of his exhaustive reconstruction of forest government and the origins of the infamous Black Act of 1723, Linebaugh shows no such doubt about demonstrating the medieval charter of liberties' relevance for securing global social justice. To this end, readers are first introduced to Subcomandante Marcos and the indigenous peasants of Chiapas, outraged Nigerian women who in 2003 seized a Chevron oil terminal, women of the upland hamlets of Vietnam suffering from the enclosure of forest reserves, and then to the Native Americans of the Adirondacks, the seventeenth-century conquest of Ireland, colonial Kashmir, and Amazon rubber tappers. The red and green threads connecting these regions and historical moments are environmental havoc, expropriation, and ordinary peoples' struggles to protect common rights, resources, and social norms.