Abolishing the police requires abolishing capitalism, argues historian Peter Linebaugh. Today, he joins Allen on the program to discuss the origins of policing as an institution in the eighteenth century; the relationship between policing, private property, and wealth; and the intertwined histories of racial capitalism and state violence.
Peter Linebaugh is a historian who has written extensively on British history, Irish history, labor history, and the history of the colonial Atlantic. His is the author of The London Hanged: Crime and Civil Society in the Eighteenth Century (Verso, 1991; 2006), The Many-Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners, and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic (with Marcus Rediker; Beacon Press, 2000), The Magna Carta Manifesto: Liberties and Commons for All (University of California Press, 2009), and Red Round Globe Hot Burning: A Tale at the Crossroads of Commons and Closure, of Love and Terror, of Race and Class, and of Kate and Ned Despard (University of California Press, 2019).
Cover photo by Andrew Martin from Pixabay