THE VERSO WORLD HISTORY SERIES
To commemorate its fortieth anniversary in 2010, Verso launched the World History series. These attractive new editions of classic works of history aim to make landmark texts available to a new generation of readers. Covering a time span stretching from Ancient Greece and Rome to the twentieth century, and with a global geographical range, the series will also include thematic insights into such topics as the spread of print cultures and the history of money.
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Titles in the WORLD HISTORY SERIES:
Published in September 2010
THE MAKING OF NEW WORLD SLAVERY: FROM THE BAROQUE TO THE MODERN, 1492 – 1800 by ROBIN BLACKBURN
THE COMING OF THE BOOK: THE IMPACT OF PRINTING, 1450 - 1800 by LUCIEN FEBVRE and HENRI-JEAN MARTIN
THE PERSISTENCE OF THE OLD REGIME: EUROPE TO THE GREAT WAR by ARNO MAYER
Published in May 2011:
THE MEANING OF THE SECOND WORLD WAR by ERNEST MANDEL
THE HISTORY OF GOLD AND MONEY:1450-1920 by PIERRE VILAR
THE OVERTHROW OF COLONIAL SLAVERY:1776-1848 by ROBIN BLACKBURN
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THE MAKING OF NEW WORLD SLAVERY: FROM THE BAROQUE TO THE MODERN, 1492 - 1800
By ROBIN BLACKBURN
‘Sombre, dark and masterly.’ Linda Colley, INDEPENDENT ON SUNDAY
‘An exhaustive, powerfully written and compelling book.’ Anthony Padgen, TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT
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—successfully—to feed upon this commerce and—unsuccessfully—to regulate slavery and racial relations. To illustrate this history, Blackburn examines the deployment of slaves in the colonial possessions of the Portuguese, the Spanish, the Dutch, the English and the French. Plantation slavery is shown to have emerged from the impulses of civil society, not from the strategies of the individual states. Robin Blackburn argues that the organization of slave plantations placed the West on a destructive path to modernity and that greatly preferable alternatives were both proposed and rejected. Finally he shows that the surge of Atlantic trade, predicated on the murderous toil of the plantations, made a decisive contribution to both the Industrial Revolution and the rise of the West.
ROBIN BLACKBURN teaches at the Graduate Faculty of the New School University, New York, and in the Sociology Department of the University of Essex. He is the author of THE OVERTHROW OF COLONIAL SLAVERY, The Overthrow of Colonial Slavery, 1776–1848 and, most recently, AGE SHOCK.
ISBN: 978 1 84467 632 3 / £60 / $95 / Hardback / 608 pages
ISBN: 978 1 84467 631 6 / £19.99 / $29.95 / Paperback / 602 pages
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THE COMING OF THE BOOK: THE IMPACT OF PRINTING, 1450 - 1800
By LUCIEN FEBVRE and HENRI-JEAN MARTIN
‘It ranks easily among the most consequential works of recent French scholarship.’ TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT
‘It is one of the most exciting scholarly books ever written on printing … This book is serious work – marvellously rich and stimulating.’ Hugh Trevor-Roper, TIMES
At a moment when the future of the printed page seems far from certain, and the death of the book is predicted with increasing regularity, this is a timely reissue of the classic study on the birth of the book.
The emergence of the book was not merely an event of world historical importance, but the dawn of modernity. In this much praised work, Lucien Febvre and Henri-Jean Martin mesh together economic and technological history, sociology and anthropology, with the study of consciousness itself to root the development of printing in the changing social relations and ideological struggles of Western Europe.
AUTHOR: LUCIEN FEBVRE, who died in 1956, was cofounder of the influential journal ANNALES, and is widely recognized as one of the foremost historians of the twentieth century. HENRI-JEAN MARTIN is a distinguished historian of the development of early printing.
ISBN: 978 1 84467 634 7 / £60 / $95 / Hardback / 384 pages
ISBN: 978 1 84467 633 0 / £16.99 / $24.95 / Paperback / 378 pages
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THE PERSISTENCE OF THE OLD REGIME: EUROPE TO THE GREAT WAR
By ARNO MAYER
‘A seminal book - extremely challenging. The historical and political implications of the 'Mayer thesis' will be widely discussed in years to come - certainly not only by specialists.’ Carlo Ginzburg
‘A revolutionary book about an era that was without doubt different than we believed. In Europe on the eve of 1914, imperialism did not represent the “supreme state of capitalism”, but rather its first murmurings mixed in with the long persistence of the old regime.’ Pierre Vidal-Naquet
In this classic work, which analyses the context in which thirty years of war and revolution wracked Europe, esteemed historian Arno Mayer examines the backwardness of the continent’s economies and their political subjugation under aristocratic elites and their allies.
Mayer turns upside down the received notions of these societies. Instead of modernization and a forward-thrusting bourgeoisie, he uncovers a social system imprisoned by inertia. In doing so, he transforms our understanding of the traumatic crises of the early twentieth century.
ISBN: 978 1 84467 636 1 / £60 / $95 / Hardback / 684 pages
ISBN: 978 1 84467 635 4 / £16.99 / $26.95 / Paperback / 368 pages
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THE MEANING OF THE SECOND WORLD WAR by ERNEST MANDEL
“One of the most creative and independent-minded revolutionary Marxists of the post-war world.” – THE GUARDIAN
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 Belgian scholar Ernest Mandel (author of the acclaimed Late Capitalism) outlines his view that the war was in fact a combination of several distinct struggles and a battle between rival imperialisms for world hegemony. In concise chapters, Mandel examines the role played by technology, science, logistics, weapons and propaganda. Throughout, he weaves a consideration of the military strategy of the opposing states into his analytical narrative of the war and its results.
ISBN: 978 1 84467 480 0 / £60 / $95 / Hardback / 212 pages
ISBN: 978 1 84467 4794 / £16..99 / $24.95 / Paperback / 224 pages
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THE HISTORY OF GOLD AND MONEY:1450-1920 by PIERRE VILAR
“A work of sweeping scholarship, it is impressive and welcome in English.” – THE ECONOMIST
“One of the greatest historians of the twentieth century.”
- THE GUARDIAN
“A wonderful historian.”
– Eric Hobsbawm
Anyone interested in the changing sources and functions of gold and money in Western society will be enlightened and at times diverted by Vilar’s pioneering history. Beginning with a survey of the role of gold and the various currencies used in ancient and medieval societies, Vilar goes on to analyze the drive for gold and silver behind European voyages of discovery and conquest, and the subsequent impact on Western European economies of the influx of looted treasure. He concludes his comprehensive account with a fascinating discussion of the crisis of the 1920s.
ISBN: 978 1 84467 478 7 / £60 / $95 / Hardback / 368 pages
ISBN: 978 1 84467 477 0 / £16.99 / $24.95 / Paperback / 368 pages
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THE OVERTHROW OF COLONIAL SLAVERY:1776-1848 by ROBIN BLACKBURN
“One of the finest studies of slavery and abolition.”—Eric Foner
“A challenge to those who fondly suppose that slavery declined as ideas of Western ‘enlightenment’ spread … Blackburn deserves praise for undermining complacency about the past—and the present.”
– Christopher Hitchens, NEW YORK NEWSDAY
“Blackburn’s highly intelligent and well-written book is a substantial contribution.”
– Victor Kiernen, LONDON REVIEW OF BOOKS
In 1770 a handful of European nations ruled the Americas, drawing from them a stream of exotic products and popular pleasures. Some two and 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 independence movements, slave revolts, Abolitionist movements or some combination of all three. Robin Blackburn shows how in some cases colonial rule was overthrown while slavery flourished (as in the South of the United States and in Brazil), in others slavery was suppressed but colonial rule conserved (the British West Indies, French Windwards) while in French St. Domingue, the future Haiti, and in Spanish South and Central America both colonialism and slavery were defeated.
This narrative of slave liberation and American independence highlights the pivotal role of the “first emancipation” in the French Antilles in the 1790s, the parallel action of slave resistance and metropolitan Abolitionism and the contradictory implications of slaveholder patriotism.
The dramatic events of this epoch are examined from an unexpected vantage point, showing how the torch of anti-slavery passed from the medieval communes to dissident Quakers, from African maroons to radical pirates, from Granville Sharp and Ottabah Cuguano to Toussaint L'Ouverture, from the black Jacobins to the Liberators of South America, and from the African Baptists in Jamaica to the Revolutionaries of 1848 in Europe and the Caribbean.
ISBN: 978-1-84467-476-3 / £60 / $95 / Hardback / 560 pages
ISBN: 978-1-84467-475-6 / £16.99 / $29.95 / Paperback / 576 pages
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