Peter Linebaugh is one of the most distinguished socialist historians of the modern period. He studied under E P Thompson at Warwick in the late 1960s and is the author of some ground breaking books including (with Marcus Rediker ) The Many-Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic. Boston: Beacon Press, 2001.
Linebaugh’s review of Mike Leigh’s Peterloo in Counterpunch generally praises the film and sees it as being very much in the tradition set out in E P Thompson’s Making of the English Working Class (1963/68):
He does suggest that the film has rather too much history from above (as opposed to below) but his main and most important criticism is that in depicting the Peterloo Massacre Leigh’s film is just too English (he makes and has made the same criticism of Thompson’s book) as have others including Marika Sherwood.
His point is that many of the workers in the mills were Irish and that the cotton used was produced by black slaves in the US South. The working class is not just English it is global. Linebaugh writes:
Just look down the alley next to the factory wall, and what do you see? Bales of cotton stacked upon one another. It is not enough to hint at it. There are circuits of money and circuits of labor that are global; neither’s in the film. Capitalism is not merely an English affair. So many of those early factory proletarians were Irish immigrants fleeing starvation. But who produced the cotton and how did it get to Manchester?
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