Showing 85–96 of 101 resultsSorted by latest
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£9.99
Slavery helped finance the Industrial Revolution in England. Plantation owners, shipbuilders, and merchants connected with the slave trade accumulated vast fortunes that established banks and heavy industry in Europe and expanded the reach of capitalism worldwide. Eric Williams advanced these powerful ideas in this text, originally published in 1944. Years ahead of its time, his profound critique became the foundation for studies of imperialism and economic development. Binding an economic view of history with strong moral argument, Williams’s study of the role of slavery in financing the Industrial Revolution refuted traditional ideas of economic and moral progress and firmly established the centrality of the African slave trade in European economic development. He also showed that mature industrial capitalism in turn helped destroy the slave system.
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£18.99
The Fall of the Tory Party
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£9.99
What would a fair and equal society look like? Imagine it is now 2025 and that years earlier, in the wake of the world financial crisis of 2008, a new post-Capitalist society had been born. In this ingenious book, world-famous economist Yanis Varoufakis draws on the greatest thinkers in European culture from Plato to Marx to offer us a dramatic and tantalising glimpse of this brave new world, where the principles of democracy, equality and justice are truly served. But in setting out what would be needed to forge such a society, he identifies a painful but important truth: that the greatest obstacles to making such a vision a reality lie within each of us. This text offers answers to some of the most pressing questions of today. It also challenges us to consider how we might answer them in our lives.
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£9.99
As democracy shows signs of decay, how do we not only arrest its decline but build something better – a state which is democratic in the fullest sense?
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£20.00
The far right is on the rise across the world. From Modi’s India to Bolsonaro’s Brazil and Erdogan’s Turkey, fascism is not a horror that we have left in the past; it is a recurring nightmare that is happening again – and we need to find a better way to fight it. Paul Mason offers a radical, hopeful blueprint for resisting and defeating the new far right. The book is both a chilling portrait of contemporary fascism, and a compelling history of the fascist phenomenon: its psychological roots, political theories and genocidal logic.
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£12.99
In the years just before and after the fall of the Berlin Wall, conservative politicians and intellectuals across Europe and America celebrated a great achievement, felt a common purpose and, very often, forged personal friendships. The euphoria quickly evaporated, the common purpose and centre ground gradually disappeared and eventually – as this book compellingly relates – the relationships soured too. Anne Applebaum traces a familiar history in an unfamiliar way, looking at the trajectories of individuals caught up in the public events of the last three decades. When politics become polarized, which side do you back? If you are a journalist, an intellectual, a civic leader, how do you deal with the re-emergence of authoritarian or nationalist ideas in your country?
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£20.00
The story starts with the initial moments of Covid’s appearance in Wuhan and ends with Joseph Biden’s inauguration in an America ravaged by well over 400,000 deaths – a mortality already some ten times worse than US combat deaths in the entire Vietnam War. This is an anguished, furious memorial to a year in which all of America’s great strengths – its scientific knowledge, its great civic and intellectual institutions, its spirit of voluntarism and community – were brought low not by a terrifying new illness alone, but by political incompetence and cynicism on a scale for which there has been no precedent. With insight, sympathy, clarity and rage, ‘The Plague Year’ follows the unfolding of this great tragedy, talking with individuals on the frontline, bringing together many moving and surprising stories and painting a devastating picture of a country literally and fatally misled.
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£25.00
Disasters are by their very nature hard to predict. Pandemics, like earthquakes, wildfires, financial crises and wars, are not normally distributed; there is no cycle of history to help us anticipate the next catastrophe. But when disaster strikes, we ought to be better prepared than the Romans were when Vesuvius erupted or medieval Italians when the Black Death struck. We have science on our side, after all. Yet the responses of a number of developed countries to a new pathogen from China were badly bungled. Why? The facile answer is to blame poor leadership. While populist rulers have performed poorly in the face of the pandemic, more profund problems have been exposed by COVID-19. Only when we understand the central challenge posed by disaster in history can we see that this was also a failure of an administrative state and of economic elites that had grown myopic over much longer than just a few years.
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£30.00
THE SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER
‘A radical book that speaks out accessibly’
BONO
‘Indispensable ? This is the essential handbook’
CHRISTINE LAGARDE
‘A remarkably good read’
GILLIAN TETT, Financial Times
‘A landmark achievement’
WILL HUTTON, Observer
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£10.99
We are often told that the 21st century is bound to become China’s century. Never before has Chinese culture been so physically, digitally, economically or aesthetically present in everyday life in the Western world. But how much do we really know about its origins and key beliefs, especially compared to the many histories of Western philosophy? How did the ancient Chinese think about the world? In this enlightening book, Roel Sterckx, one of the foremost experts in Chinese thought, takes us through centuries of Chinese history, from Confucius to Daoism to the Legalists. With evocative examples from philosophy, literature and everyday life, he shows us how the ancient Chinese have shaped the thinking of a civilisation that is now influencing our own.
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£10.99
‘The election happened’, remembers Elizabeth Sherwood-Randall, then deputy secretary of the Department of Energy. ‘And then there was radio silence’. Across all departments, similar stories were playing out: Trump appointees were few and far between; those that did show up were shockingly uninformed about the functions of their new workplace. Some even threw away the briefing books that had been prepared for them. Michael Lewis’s narrative takes us into the engine rooms of a government under attack by its own leaders.
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£10.99
The signs of climate change are unmistakable even today, but the real transformations have hardly begun. We’ve been taught that warming would be slow – but, barring very dramatic action, each of these impacts is likely to arrive within the length of a new mortgage signed this year. What will it be like to live on a pummelled planet? What will it do to our politics, our economy, our culture and sense of history? And what explains the fact we have done so little to stop it? These are not abstract questions but immediate and pressing human dramas, dilemmas and nightmares. In ‘The Uninhabitable Earth’, David Wallace-Wells undertakes a new kind of storytelling and a new kind of social science to explore the era of human history on which we have just embarked.
