Reading list

History: Verso Student Reading

History from below for the new academic year.

Verso Books 2 September 2025

History: Verso Student Reading

For radicals, the best guide to the present is our past successes and failures. Use this list to navigate our wide array of books on global histories of revolutions, colonial plunder, and class struggle.

Walter Rodney: A Lightning Rod of Black Working Class Power

Walter Rodney described himself as a guerrilla intellectual, committed to studying the concrete realities of the working class. Forty-five years on from his assassination, his work remains incredibly prescient.

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Verso World History

Covering a timespan stretching from Ancient Greece and Rome to the twentieth century, this series makes landmark texts available to a new generation of readers.

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Robin Blackburn: A Lifetime of Scholarship on Slavery and its Abolition

Blackburn charts the historic impact of slavery and anti-slavery, of black and white activists, of fugitive slaves, feminists, writers, clerics and soldiers.

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Verso’s Southern Questions

The Southern Questions series features first-hand accounts written by participants in the drama of decolonisation and its aftermath.

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The Histories of Revolutions

These books dive into how revolutions are made, and what we can learn from their successes and failures.

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Experiments in Communes

Ever wanted to move to a commune with your friends? You’re not the first.

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Disruption and counterculture

How can we build a resurgence of disruptive politics in the twenty-first century?

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  • The History of the Paris Commune of 1871
    In 1871, the working class of Paris, incensed by their lack of political power and tired of being exploited, seized control of the capital. This book is the outstanding history of the Commune, theh...
    Paperback
  • The Meaning of the Second World War
    The very scale of the 1939–45 war has often tempted historians to study particular campaigns at the expense of the wider panorama. In this readable and richly detailed history of the conflict, the ...
    Paperback (2011)

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  • The Overthrow of Colonial Slavery
    In 1770 a handful of European nations ruled the Americas, drawing from them a stream of products, both everyday and exotic. Some two and a half million black slaves, imprisoned in plantation coloni...
    Paperback (2011)
  • The Making of New World Slavery
    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...
    Paperback (2010)

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