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.

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See all our recommended Student Reading here.

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...

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...

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...

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...

I, Rigoberta Menchú

by Rigoberta Menchú

Introduction by Elisabeth Burgos-Debray

Edited by Elisabeth Burgos-Debray

Translated by Ann Wright

Now a global bestseller, the remarkable life of Rigoberta Menchú, a Guatemalan peasant woman, reflects on the experiences common to many Indian communities in Latin America. Menchú suffered gross i...

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...

Intent to Deceive

by Linda Melvern

It is twenty-five years since the 1994 genocide of the Tutsi of Rwanda when in the course of three terrible months more than 1 million people were murdered. In the intervening years a pernicious ca...

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 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...

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...

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...

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...

Making the Revolution Global

by Theo Williams

Making the Revolution Global shows how black radicals transformed socialist politics in Britain in the years before decolonisation. African and Caribbean activist-intellectuals, such as Amy Ashwood...

Holding aloft the Banner of Ethiopia

by Winston James

Marcus Garvey, Claude McKay, Claudia Jones, C.L.R. James, Stokely Carmichael, Louis Farakhan—the roster of immigrants from the Caribbean who have made a profound impact on the development of radica...

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 Assassination of Lumumba

by Ludo De Witte

Translated by Renee Fenby and Ann Wright

The Assassination of Lumumba unravels the appalling mass of lies, hypocrisy and betrayals that have surrounded accounts of the 1961 assassination of Patrice Lumumba—the first prime minister of the ...

Arid Empire

by Natalie Koch

**Longlisted for the 2023 Cundill History Prize**The iconic deserts of the American southwest could not have been colonized and settled without the help of desert experts from the Middle East. For ...

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 ...

Heart Of The Race

by Beverley Bryan, Stella Dadzie and Suzanne Scafe

Introduction by Lola Okolosie

Heart of the Race is a powerful corrective to a version of Britain’s history from which black women have long been excluded. It reclaims and records black women’s place in that history, documenting...

Feminism and Nationalism in the Third World

by Kumari Jayawardena

Foreword by Rafia Zakaria

For twenty-five years, Feminism and Nationalism in the Third World has been an essential primer on the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century history of women’s movements in Asia and the Midd...

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,...

Marx: Towards the Centre of Possibility

by Kojin Karatani

Introduction by Gavin Walker

Edited by Gavin Walker

Translated by Gavin Walker

Originally published in 1974, Kojin Karatani’s Marx: Towards the Centre of Possibility has been among his most enduring and pioneering works in critical theory. Written at a time when the political...

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...

Down with Colonialism!

by Ho Chi Minh

Introduction by Walden Bello

Ho Chi Minh, the founder of the Vietminh and President of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam, having defeated Japanese and French colonialist became a hate figure of the USA during the Vietnam War....

African and Caribbean Politics

by Manning Marable

What explains the proliferation of authoritarian regimes—some calling themselves “socialist”—in contemporary African and Caribbean politics?One of America’s leading black scholars assesses the hist...

Imagining Home

Contributions by David H. Anthony, Barbara Bair, Patrick Bellegarde-Smith, Paul Buhle, Horace Campbell, Maryse Conde, Paul Gilroy, Barbara Harlow, Marian Kramer, Ntongela Masilela, Gersham A. Nelson, Kathy J. Ogren, Cedric J. Robinson, Ann Seidman, Lako Tongun and William H. Watkins

Edited by Robin D.G. Kelley and Sidney J. Lemelle

This collection of original essays brilliantly interrogates the often ambivalent place of Africa in the imaginations, cultures and politics of its “New World” descendants. Combining literary analys...

The Groundings With My Brothers

by Walter Rodney

In his short life, the Guyanese intellectual Walter Rodney emerged as one of the leading thinkers and activists of the anticolonial revolution, leading movements in North America, South America, th...

The Russian Revolution

by Walter Rodney

Afterword by Vijay Prashad

Introduction by Robin D.G. Kelley

The Forty-Year War in Afghanistan

by Tariq Ali

The Making of New World Slavery

by Robin Blackburn

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

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...

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