Peter Linebaugh's groundbreaking history has become an inescapable part of any understanding of the rise of capitalism. In 18th-century London the use of hanging forced the poor to accept the criminalization of customary rights and to respect new forms of private property. Often the gallows also became the place where the waste and nuisance products of mercantilism—the hungry, poor and far-from-home—were efficiently dispatched. Necessity drove the city's poor into an inevitable conflict with the changing property laws such that all the working-class men and women had reason to fear the example of Tyburn's triple tree.

In this new edition, Peter Linebaugh reinforces his original arguments with detailed responses to his critics based on an impressive array of historical sources.