Peter Linebaugh, in an extraordinary historical and literary tour de force, enlists the anonymous and scorned 19th century loom-breakers of the English midlands into the front ranks of an international, polyglot, many-colored crew of commoners resisting dispossession in the dawn of capitalist modernity.

Peter Linebaugh is the author of The London Hanged (London: Penguin, 1991), The Magna Carta Manifesto (University of California Press, 2008), and with Marcus Rediker, The Many-Headed Hydra (Beacon Press, 2000). He has written introductions to a book of Thomas Paine's writing (Verso, 2009) and to a new edition of E.P. Thompson's, William Morris: Romantic to Revolutionary (PM Press, 2011). He works at the University of Toledo in Ohio.