Books in the Verso World History Series series

A history of the Panthay Rebellion against the Chinese imperial court

An acclaimed history of the Holocaust.

Classic study of slavery and abolition.

Analyzing the context in which thirty years of war and revolution wracked the European continent, this title emphasizes the backwardness of the European economies and their political subjugation by aristocratic elites and their allies.

The emergence of the book was an event of world historical importance, and heralded the dawning of modernity. This title presents the history of that process, combining technological history, sociology and anthropology, with the study of modes of consciousness to root the development of printing in the ideological struggles of Western Europe.

Max Weber, widely recognized as the greatest of the founders of classical sociology, is oftenassociated with the development of capitalism in Western Europe and the analysis ofmodernity. But he also had a profound scholarly interest in ancient societies and the NearEast, and turned the youthful discipline of sociology to the study of these archaic cultures.The Agrarian Sociology of Ancient Civilizations Weber's neglected masterpiece, first publishedin German in 1897 and reissued in 1909 is a fascinating examination of the civilizations ofMesopotamia, Egypt, Hebrew society in Israel, the city-states of classical Greece, theHellenistic world and, finally, Republican and Imperial Rome. The book is infused with theexcitement attendant when new intellectual tools are brought to bear on familiar subjects.Throughout the work, Weber blends a description of socio-economic structures with aninvestigation into mechanisms and causes in the rise and decline of social systems. Thevolume ends with a magisterial explanatory essay on the underlying reasons for the fall ofthe Roman Empire.

The rise of the modern absolutist monarchies in Europe constitutes in many ways the birth of the modern historical epoch. Passages from Antiquity to Feudalism, the companion volume to Perry Anderson's Lineages of the Absolutist State, is a sustained exercise in historical sociology to root the development of absolutism in the diverse routes taken from the slave-based societies of Ancient Greece and Rome to fully-fledged feudalism. In the course of this study Anderson vindicates and the refines the explanatory power of a Marxist conception of history, whilst casting a fascinating light on Greece, Rome, the Germanic invasions, nomadic society, and the different patterns of the evolution of feudalism in Northern, Mediterranean, Eastern and Western Europe.

The political nature of Absolutism has long been a subject of controversy within historical materialism. Developing considerations advanced in Passages from Antiquity to Feudalism, this book situates the Absolutist states of the early modern epoch against the prior background of European feudalism. It is divided into two parts. The first discusses the overall structures of Absolutism as a state-system in Western Europe, from the Renaissance onwards. It then looks in turn at the trajectory of each of the specific Absolutist states in the dominant countries of the WestSpain, France, England and Sweden, set off against the case of Italy, where no major indigenous Absolutism developed. The second part of the work sketches a comparative prospect of Absolutism in Eastern Europe. The peculiarities, as well as affinities, of Eastern Absolutism as a distinct type of royal state, are examined. The variegated monarchies of Prussia, Austria and Russia are surveyed, and the lessons asked of the counter-example of Poland. Finally, the structureof the Ottoman Empire in the Balkans is taken as an external gauge by which the singularity of Absolutism as a European phenomenon is assessed. The work ends with some observations on the special position occupied by European development within universal history, which draws themes from both Passages from Antiquity to Feudalism andLineages of the Absolutist State together into a single argumentwithin their common limitsas materials for debate.

A historical essay on old regimes and modern states In this lively and wide-ranging book, Ellen Meiksins Wood argues that what is supposed to have epitomized bourgeois modernity, especially the emergence of a ';modern' state and political culture in Continental Europe, signaled the persistence of pre-capitalist social property relations. Conversely, the absence of a ';modern' state and political discourse in England testified to the presence of a well-developed capitalism. The fundamental flaws in the British economy are not just the symptoms of arrested development but the contradictions of the capitalist system itself. Britain today, Wood maintains, is the most thoroughly capitalist culture in Europe.

The classic history of the Paris Commune.