Reading list

Reading Beyond Western Politics: Verso Student Reading

Look beyond the histories of Western countries with this selection of books.

Verso Books22 August 2023

Reading Beyond Western Politics: Verso Student Reading

Expand your student reading with this list of some of our titles on the history and politics of countries often overlooked in the curriculum. We have futher suggestions for decolonizing your student reading here.

All our books are up to 40% off until the end of September as part of our Student Reading Sale. See all our recommended student reading here.

Student reading sale: ends September 30
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40% off if you buy 4 or more titles
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See all our recommended Student Reading here.

Red Africa

by Kevin Ochieng Okoth

Red Africa makes the case for a revolutionary Black politics inspired by Marxist anticolonial struggles in Africa. Contemporary debates on Black radicalism and decolonisation have lost sight of the...

Loot

by Adam Raz

Translated by Philip Hollander

During the 1948 War, Israeli fighters and residents alike plundered Palestinian homes, shops, businesses, and farms. This bitter truth was then suppressed or forgotten over the coming years.Tens of...

The Jewelers of the Ummah

by Ariella Aïsha Azoulay

Can we return to worlds destroyed by colonial violence? In a series of letters to her father, her great-grandmothers, and her children—and to thinkers such as Frantz Fanon and Hannah Arendt—Ariella...

Lula

by Fernando Morais

One of seven children raised in abject poverty by a single parent, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva acquired his politics on the hard road of personal suffering, inspired by the selfless example of his mo...

Carbon Democracy

by Timothy Mitchell

With the rise of coal power, the producers who oversaw its development acquired the ability to shut down energy systems, a threat they used to build the first mass democracies. Oil offered the Wes...

How Europe Underdeveloped Africa

by Walter Rodney

Foreword by Angela Davis

How Europe Underdeveloped Africa is an ambitious masterwork of political economy, detailing the impact of slavery and colonialism on the history of international capitalism. In this classic book, R...

Loved Egyptian Night

by Hugh Roberts

Loved Egyptian Night fundamentally reassesses the Arab Spring, refuting the stories the Western powers fed to the world. There is no doubt that the toppling of Ben Ali in Tunisia in January 2011 an...

The Reckoning

by Robin Blackburn

The Age of Revolution (1776–1848) destroyed the main slave regimes of the Caribbean but a ‘Second Slavery’ surged in the US South, Cuba and Brazil, powered by demand for plantation produce and a sy...

Imagined Communities

by Benedict Anderson

What are the imagined communities that compel men to kill or to die for an idea of a nation? This notion of nationhood had its origins in the founding of the Americas, but was then adopted and tran...

Decolonial Marxism

by Walter Rodney

Foreword by Ngugi wa Thiong'o

Early in life, Walter Rodney became a major revolutionary figure in a dizzying range of locales that traversed the breadth of the Black diaspora: in North America and Europe, in the Caribbean and o...

Toussaint Louverture

by C.L.R. James

Illustrated by Sakina Karimjee and Nic Watts

The end of slavery started in what was then San Domingo. In 1791, the enslaved people of the most prized French sugar plantation colony revolted against their masters. For over twelve years, agains...

Conversations with Allende

by Régis Debray

Introduction by Camila Vergara

Translated by Peter Beglan and Ben Brewster

The election in Chile of the Marxist leader of the Socialist Party, Salvador Allende, to the presidency in October 1970 inaugurated a political situation unique in Latin America and of world-wide s...

Abortion Beyond the Law

by Naomi Braine

Drawing on years of research with activists around the world, sociologist Naomi Braine describes the strategies, politics, and tactics of direct action feminists bringing abortion pills, informatio...

Human Capital

by Laura Robson

Historian Laura Robson unveils the dark heart of our purportedly humanitarian international regime. Tracing the century-long history of attempts to remake refugees into disposable migrant labor, Ro...

Towers of Ivory and Steel

by Maya Wind

Afterword by Robin D.G. Kelley

Foreword by Nadia Abu El Haj

Israeli universities have long enjoyed a reputation as liberal bastions of freedom and democracy. Drawing on extensive research and making Hebrew sources accessible to the international community, ...

Late Victorian Holocausts

by Mike Davis

Examining a series of El Niño-induced droughts and the famines that they spawned around the globe in the last third of the 19th century, Mike Davis discloses the intimate, baleful relationship betw...

Gwangju Uprising

by Lee Jae-eui, Hwang Sok-yong and Jeon Yong-ho

On 18th May 1980, student activists gathered in the South Korean city of Gwangju to protest the coup d’état and martial law government of General Chun Doo-hwan. The security forces responded with u...

The Forty-Year War in Afghanistan

by Tariq Ali

The NATO occupation of Afghanistan is over, and a balance-sheet can be drawn. These essays on war and peace in the region reveal Tariq Ali at his sharpest and most prescient.Rarely has there been s...

Proletarian China

Edited by Ivan Franceschini, Kevin Lin, Nicholas Loubere and Christian Sorace

In 2021, the Chinese Communist Party celebrated a century of existence. Since the Party’s humble beginnings in the Marxist groups of the Republican era to its current global ambitions, one thing ha...

Radius

by Yasmin El-Rifae

In 2012, the joyful hopes of the democratic Egyptian Revolution were tempered by revelations of mass sexual assault in Tahrir Square in Cairo, the revolution’s symbolic birthplace. This is the sto...

The Panthay Rebellion

by David G. Atwill

Foreword by Tariq Ali

The Panthay Rebellion of 1856-1873 held the armies of the Qing dynasty at bay for nearly two decades. This account by David Atwill offers a remarkable panorama of the cosmopolitan frontier society ...

De Colores Means All of Us

by Elizabeth Sutherland Martînez

Foreword by Angela Davis

Introduction by Karma R. Chavez

Elizabeth Martínez’s unique Chicana voice arises from over thirty years of experience in the movements for civil rights, women’s liberation, and Latina/o empowerment. In De Colores Means All of Us,...

The Red Years

by Gavin Walker

Edited by Gavin Walker

The analysis of May 68 in Paris, Berkeley, and the Western world has been widely reconsidered. But 1968 is not only a year that conjures up images of Paris, Frankfurt, or Milan. It is also the pivo...

Gandhi's Assassin

by Dhirendra Jha

Dhirendra Jha's deeply researched history places Nathuram Godse's life as the juncture of the dangerous fault lines in contemporary India: the quest for independence and the rise of Hindu nationali...

Crooked Plow

by Itamar Vieira Junior

Translated by Johnny Lorenz

Shortlisted for The International Booker Prize 2024'I heard our grandmother asking what we were doing.'"Say something!" she demanded, threatening to tear out our tongues. Little did she know that ...

The Russian Revolution

by Walter Rodney

Afterword by Vijay Prashad

Introduction by Robin D.G. Kelley

Preface by Jesse Benjamin and the Walter Rodney FoundationIntroduction by Robin D.G. KelleyAfterword by Vijay PrashadIn his short life, the Guyanese intellectual Walter Rodney emerged as one of the...

The Forty-Year War in Afghanistan

by Tariq Ali

The Making of New World Slavery

by Robin Blackburn

The Making of New World Slavery argues that independent commerce, geared to burgeoning consumer markets, was the driving force behind the rise of plantation slavery. The baroque state sought—succes...

The Battlefield

by Hugh Roberts

The violence that has ravaged Algeria has often defied explanation. Regularly invoked in debates about political Islam, transitions to democracy, globalization, and the right of humanitarian interf...

Revolution and Counterrevolution in China

by Lin Chun

Over recent decades China has experienced massive change and development. China is the world’s fastest growing economy, and has become a global superpower once again. But this development has throw...

Lord Leverhulme's Ghosts

by Jules Marchal

Introduction by Adam Hochschild

Translated by Martin Thom

In the early twentieth century, the worldwide rubber boom led British entrepreneur Lord Leverhulme to the Belgian Congo. Warmly welcomed by the murderous regime of King Leopold II, Leverhulme set u...

The Indian Ideology

by Perry Anderson

The historiography of modern India is largely a pageant of presumed virtues: harmonious territorial unity, religious impartiality, the miraculous survival of electoral norms in the world’s most pop...

Insurgent Empire

by Priyamvada Gopal

Much has been written on the how colonial subjects took up British and European ideas and turned them against empire when making claims to freedom and self-determination. The possibility of reverse...

Algiers, Third World Capital

by Elaine Mokhtefi

Introduction by Jeremy Harding

Mokhtefi (née Klein), a Jewish American from Long Island, has had an exhilarating life. In the 1960s, she served as a press adviser to the National Liberation Front in postwar Algiers, before going...

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