Roja esfera ardiente. Una historia en la encrucijada de lo común y los cercamientos, del amor y el terror, de la raza y la clase, y de Kate y Ned Despard

by Peter Linebaugh

El 21 de febrero de 1803, el coronel Ed­ward (Ned) Marcus Despard fue ahorca­do y decapitado en Londres ante una mul­titud de 20.000 personas por organizar una conspiración revolucionaria para de­rrocar al rey Jorge III. Catherine (Kate), su esposa de origen caribeño y raza negra, le ayudó a escribir el discurso que pronun­ció desde el patíbulo, en el que se procla­maba amigo de los pobres y los oprimidos. En él expresó también su confianza en que «los principios de la libertad, la humani­dad y la justicia triunfarán finalmente so­bre la falsedad, la tiranía y el engaño».Y sin embargo el mundo giró. Desde los sucesos de las revoluciones estadouni­dense, francesa y haitiana, y la fallida re­volución irlandesa, conectadas entre sí, al nacimiento del Antropoceno en medio de los cercamientos, el belicoso capitalis­mo global, las plantaciones con trabajo esclavo y la producción con máquinas en las fábricas, Roja esfera ardiente introduce a los lectores en el momento crucial de los dos últimos milenios. Esta historia mo­numental ofrece, con gran riqueza de de­talle, una crónica extensa de la resistencia a la desaparición de los regímenes comu­nales. El extraordinario relato de Peter Linebaugh recupera el heroísmo de redes extensas de resistentes soterrados que, de­safiando a la muerte, lucharon contra la privatización de lo común impuesta por dos entidades políticas nuevas, Estados Unidos y Reino Unido, que, ahora sabe­mos, seguirían desposeyendo a personas de todo el mundo hasta la actualidad. Roja esfera ardiente es la culminación de toda una
vida dedicada a la investigación, condensada en un épico relato de amor.

Genres: History

651 pages, Kindle Edition

Published November 22, 2021

About the author

Peter Linebaugh is an American Marxist historian who specializes in British history, Irish history, labor history, and the history of the colonial Atlantic.

Reviews

[Scott Neigh]

A sprawling, intricate history set in the Atlantic world, particularly Ireland and England but also connecting events there to America and Haiti and France and beyond, during the revolutionary ferment of the decade and a half following the French Revolution. It is organized around the story of two people – Ned Despard, a younger son of the Anglo-Irish gentry and erstwhile British military officer, and his wife Kate, a Black woman from the Caribbean. At some point along the way, they developed revolutionary politics. Ned was playing a leading role in planning an uprising in England that was to seek Irish liberation, a restoration of the commons, and the overthrow of George III, when he and the other leaders were arrested. He was hanged in 1803. Kate organized a vigorous campaign for his release, co-wrote his gallows speech, and disappeared afterwards into the underground for freedom fighters that existed in Ireland at the time. But while the story of the Despards serves as a sort of centre to the book, they are just one small part – important, yes, but small – of a dizzying excursion across topics and time, a series of digressions and lateral associations and circular explorations. It reaches back and forth through years and geography, wanders off to explore this detail over here, illustrates a larger point by a carefully accounting of that theme over there. It makes skilful use of speculation and draws attention to connections, including those that are not (and often could not) be known for sure from the documentary record but that are, on balance, likely. It does all of this to create a sense of the era that a plodding linear history could never match. Linebaugh, I think, has a very lateral way of thinking, and when combined with his voluminous knowledge it results in a unique way of writing history that can sometimes be a bit overwhelming but that I think is magnificent. A key focus for him in this book is drawing together two themes of history-from-below that are often treated separately, the struggles of the working class (very broadly understood) and the struggle for the commons. In these early years of the modern working class in England, the fact that these are not just connected but often the very same fight can be made quite clearly.

Even though it's not something Linebaugh particularly draws attention to in the writing, I also felt moments of keen connection to today. Some of those moments were when he, for instance, quoted radicals of 1790s London writing stridently against the evils of war or the tyranny of the rich men who own what should be held in common, and the exact same words written today would be just as relevant and just as inspiring. And some of those moments were because the struggles of ordinary people today are so often connected to the struggles he wrote about – where I live, two of the most important struggles happening right now are by homeless people to make use of public space to live as safely as they can in the midst of a pandemic, and by Haudenosaunee people and their allies to prevent the settler-colonial enclosure of yet more stolen land via the #1492LandBackLane reclamation at Six Nations. The details are different two centuries on, and (contrary to how some left-leaning scholars and radicals sometimes treat the commons) the difference in continent really does matter quite a lot. But you get the sense that Irish peasants, Caribbean sailors, English labourers, members of the London Corresponding Society, and all the rest would, if magically transported to Hamilton in 2020, instinctively *get* those struggles based on what was going on around them back then. As well, in the context of the growing precarity today of the limited but real democratic constraints that the subsequent two centuries of struggle has put on Western states, it is also sobering to read about the more naked use of state terror in defence of wealth and empire in those years – by the year after Despard was hanged, such terror had managed to drive working-class organizing in England underground, where it remained for at least a decade and a half.

I don't have too much to say that's critical about this book. I think some people might not enjoy the way it's written as much as I did, just because it has a sort of frenetic feel to it and because in its relentless drive to make connections it doesn't always explain everything so it makes you work a bit as a reader. As well, while I really like the approach to writing history employed here, with its expansive circuits orbiting the core of the story, it does mean that sometimes topics that are further to the periphery might occasionally miss the mark a bit. Another element of Linebaugh's method is taking sources produced back then by oppressors and their institutions and reading them against the grain, to see traces of resistance and tell-tale silences. He is mostly great at that, but there were a few moments when he was doing that in relation to experiences of Indigenous people in North America in that era that felt a little off-key, and I wondered if perhaps greater engagement with Indigenous struggles and Indigenous writers and scholars today might strengthen the work in these instances.

Anyway, this is a great book, and I highly recommend it.

[Guillermo · Rating 5 out of 5]

«Ar scátch a chéile a mhaireann na davine». Viejo dicho irlandés que viene a decir «todos vivimos a la sombra unos de otros»
.
.
Gran ensayo sobre la toma de conciencia de la clase obrera en una época histórica concreta (1789-1803), pero que trasciende las dimensiones del tiempo y el espacio para contar los casi trescientos años de la izquierda política. ‘Roja esfera ardiente’ es un trabajo que va más allá de pensar «lo común».

[Mathieu · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is disconcerting book, full of surprises and erudition. Linebaugh does not write so much the biography of Catherine and Edward Despard than he connects their lives with the "red round globe hot burning" around them, making sense of their lives and of Despard's execution in relation with all the systemic forces at play in the late 1790s and early 1800s -- namely the forces of capitalism (enclosures, slavery, imperialism, counter-revoltionary war).

It is an impressive achievement, but one that maybe will puzzle readers (as it did for me): it is not very informative on the famous Despard conspiracy nor on Despard's life and it is also quite difficult to understand all the threads that Linebaugh weaves together, refering to a wide range of different themes and questions. Neither a new account of the conspiracy nor a synthetic presentation of the period, it will be hardly accessible to undergraduates and perhaps not too convincing to confirmed researchers of the period.

Despite this, it is an enthralling book, one that raises many questions, and which has an immense merit -- to show that history is about how individual lifes make sense in their context, and in this case these two lives are very meaningful.

[Harris]

A Marxist history of Haiti, America, Ireland, and England and the revolutions and enclosure laws that happened at the end of the 18th and beginning of the 19th century.

Frenetic and ambitious. Pretty cool overall. The highlight for me was the novel use of William Blake’s ideology as the framework for thinking through the multitude of intersections present.

[Heather G · Rating 1 out of 5]

Painful

Clearly this author thinks highly of himself. Instead of writing about Depard like the title implies, Despard just happens to be a way for him to attempt to get his beliefs and feelings out there. So many tangents, so many repeated theories made this the most dry and painful book I have read in years. I cannot stress enough how much this book did not hold my attention.

[mariam hasan · Rating 4 out of 5]

loving and radical. history from below.

[Nacho Calvo · Rating 4 out of 5]

Este libro enseña como Gran Bretaña pasó a convertirse en la potencia colonial mundial observando las consecuencias en los extractos más bajos de su sociedad, y la consecuente lucha de clases.

[Black Spring · Rating 4 out of 5]

An amazing book of great import. I love Peter Linebaugh. Deducted one star for the chapters that are hard to read/follow because Linebaugh's style of telling history as fever dream, a welter of names and dates and concepts told out of order and kinda just at his whim when he sees a light in the distance and he's off chasing it no matter what he was just saying a sentence before. A slightly heavier editorial intervention could have sent this up another level. I would have appreciated a bit more of a system to his telling, but nonetheless I tried throughout to wrap my head around his dream, often with great reward.