"Peter Linebaugh's great act of historical imagination ... takes the cliché of 'globalization' and makes it live"--Cover. "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."--Cover. "As Ned Ludd is the mythic symbol of Luddite resistance to unwelcome industrialisation in England, so Queen Mab, through her personification in Shelley's poem of that name composed in 1812, becomes the symbol of a radical critique of western civilisation as a whole ... From the vantage point of 1811-12, Linebaugh launches a sweeping survey of the processes underway which were dispossessing not only the Luddites and the English common people of the means of production, including the land, but were also impacting on traditional communities across the world."--Book review, Underground Histories.