“Peter Linebaugh has produced another masterful history ‘from below' . . . . In language that is sometimes visceral, imaginative and often sublimely eloquent he analyses the conditions in which people were living and working, making connections, while leaving the reader with a global overview of the struggle against colonial and imperial power.”
“Once more, Peter Linebaugh highlights uncomfortable truths.”
“An erudite work by a scholar who adapted classic ‘history from below’ to more diverse subjects, while integrating environmental history and literary studies . . . Red Round Globe Hot Burning will hold the interest of a wide array of historians. The vignettes collected in the book display the burning power of ideas in a period of tumultuous change.”
“Red Round Globe Hot Burning is [Linebaugh's] greatest masterpiece yet in a lifetime of triumphs. It is a mind-blowing contribution to his lifelong quest for the commons. . . . You have a writer of such extraordinary power that reading him can move you to tears (and will always lift your spirits).”
"A live, immediate, textured portrait."
“Far-ranging and fascinating. . . . It is impossible to summarize briefly the enormously rich content of this work.”
"Very occasionally a book comes along that anyone with an interest in history and politics must read, and this is such a book. . . . An immensely rewarding book and worth the effort to accompany Linebaugh on his journey through history."
“Astonishing . . . . Builds on decades of research and investigation, the meticulous sifting of popular archives that span the Atlantic and combine political broadsheets, scientific tracts, and folksongs.. . . . Reading the book as the murder of George Floyd sparked the Black Lives Matter movement into a global reckoning with legacies of slavery, war, colonialism and empire, it was hard not to feel a tingle on the back of the neck."
"It is a treat to have a wonderfully erudite scholar determined to instruct and entertain readers. . . . In an historiographical world in which historians are expected to be balanced and practise cool ironic detachment, it is fun to read a book where the writer’s heart is always on his sleeve. Linebaugh gives a marvellous portrait of one of the most interesting periods in British and Irish history, taking the side of the disadvantaged against those who wanted to keep the disadvantaged in their place."
"Red Round Globe Hot Burning is a culmination of Linebaugh’s lifework. . . .impressionistic and multi-layered, an approach…that advances rather than occludes understanding of such a richly overlayered and conflicted world."
— The European Legacy
"Hypnotic and compelling. . . .Red Round succeeds in evoking the textures and feverish emotional pitch of radicalism in the 1790s, as well as the crushing disappointments of the early nineteenth century."
— Journal of Modern History
“This wide-ranging, intricate, penetrating analysis of the developing process of enclosure and exploitation during a critical era of the development of capitalism in the Atlantic world, and the manifold modes of popular resistance, provides fascinating insight into the origins of our society, with rich implications for addressing its crimes and its current race to destruction.”—Noam Chomsky
“It’s often assumed that superb scholarship and beautiful writing are rival forces, but in Peter Linebaugh’s work they are the same tremendous force evoking and contextualizing moments of crisis and possibility in the past with a vividness that casts new light on our own time.”—Rebecca Solnit, author of A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities That Arise in Disaster
“Poetic and moving, Red Round Globe Hot Burning shows what history can do. This is the work of a historian of genius, rich in detail, powerfully written, and animated by a passion for justice.”—Silvia Federici, author of Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation
"A remarkable tour de force of eloquence and erudition, Peter Linebaugh's new book brilliantly recovers the popular-democratic histories of the late 18th and early 19th centuries, tracking them back and forth across the Atlantic Ocean and the Irish Sea. Histories of capitalist modernity, he shows, are inseparable from the courageous creativity of the popular struggles whose defeats enabled them."—Geoff Eley, author of A Crooked Line: From Cultural History to the History of Society
“Peter Linebaugh is the best, most creative, most original historian living today. Red Round Globe Hot Burning can be seen as a distillation of his life’s work. This is a window on the 600-year struggle over the commons that has a lot to say about our current times. Writing in prose that channels the poetry of William Blake in every sentence, this may be his most innovative book, yet.”—Robin Kelley, author of Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination
