Series: Verso World History

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 from which the rebellion sprang. The rebel leader, Du Wenxiu, took the name of Sultan Suleiman, established a Muslim court at the ancient city of Dali, and sought...

Nevertheless comprises essays on Machiavelli and on Pascal. The ambivalent connection between the two parts is embodied by the comma (,) in the subtitle: Machiavelli, Pascal. Is this comma a conjunction or a disjunction? In fact, both. Ginzburg approaches Machiavelli’s work from the perspective of casuistry, or case-based ethical reasoning. For as Machiavelli indicated through his repeated use of the...

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 colonies, toiled to produce the sugar, coffee, cotton, ginger, and indigo craved by Europeans. By 1848, the major systems of colonial slavery had been swept away either by...

In 1871, the working class of Paris, incensed by their lack of political power and tired of being exploited, seized control of the capital. The History of the Paris Commune of 1871 is the outstanding history of the Commune, the heroic battles fought in its defence, and the bloody massacre that ended the uprising. Its author, Prosper-Olivier Lissagaray, was a...

Though not without its rivals, Latin stood at the apex of Western culture from the Renaissance until relatively recently. Françoise Waquet offers an enthralling, original history of the language's uses, its detractors and defenders, and the social hierarchies its practitioners inscribed. Granted a new lease of life by the Humanists and the Catholic Church, Latin was the form in which...

The Class Struggle in the Ancient Greek World is an original and influential reconstruction of Classical Antiquity through a Marxist lens. Geoffrey de Ste. Croix explores the personality of the Ancient world as a slave economy. He traces the social origins of Athenian democracy and the later decline of the Greek city-states in the Roman era, and offers an innovative...

The controversial thesis at the center of this study is that, despite the importance of slavery in Athenian society, the most distinctive characteristic of Athenian democracy was the unprecedented prominence it gave to free labour. Wood argues that the emergence of the peasant as citizen, juridically and politically independent, accounts for much that is remarkable in Athenian political institutions and...

In this classic text, Sheila Rowbotham explores four centuries of feminist struggle and revolutionary politics. She shows how women rose against the dual challenges of an unjust state system and social-sexual prejudice. First published in 1972, Women, Resistance and Revolution is a major statement of second-wave feminism on the imperative for revolution within the revolution. It is also a rich...

America's Fatal Leap deconstructs US geopolitics after the end of the Cold War, informed by its author's unsurpassed command of modern history. Paul W. Schroeder, an acclaimed historian of international diplomacy, was a conservative and a natural supporter of American leadership in the world. But he wrote scathing op-eds for the National Interest and the American Conservative about the hubris...

Max Weber is widely recognised as the greatest of the founders of classical sociology. Yet whilst his thought is often associated with the development of capitalism in Western Europe or the analysis of modernity, Weber also had a profound scholarly interest in ancient societies and the Near East. The Agrarian Sociology of Ancient Civilizations — Weber's neglected masterpiece which first...

For much of human history, the motive force behind war, conquest, social conflict, and world exploration has been the drive to acquire gold. From the ancient world of Croesus to the wealthy dynasties of Renaissance Italy, from the earliest European explorations into Africa, America, and Asia to the gold rushes of the nineteenth century and the banking crises that lay...

Passages from Antiquity to Feudalism is a sustained exercise in historical sociology that shows how the slave-based societies of Ancient Greece and Rome eventually became the feudal societies of the Middle Ages. In the course of this study, Anderson vindicates and refines the explanatory power of historical materialism, while casting a fascinating light on the Ancient world, the Germanic invasions,...