History

Spokesman Books | History

History

Our History section includes titles such as
J. A. Hobson's Imperialism, The Levellers by H. N. Brailsford and edited by Christopher Hill, A History of British Socialism by Max Beer, A Radical Reader by Christopher Hampton and The Making of the Labour Movement: The Formation of the Transport and General Workers' Union 1870-1922 by Ken Coates and Tony Topham.

Spokesman publishes selected writings of historical figures such as Nikolai Bukharin and his wife Anna Larina, Thomas Spence, John Wheatley, Harry Gosling, George Lansbury and Fenner Brockway.

<span style='font-size: 14px;'>Imperialism</span>Imperialism
A Study
by J. A. Hobson
Introduction by Nathaniel Mehr
Foreword by Jeremy Corbyn MP


First published in 1902, Hobson’s seminal work was among the first to make the link between political economy and the imperialist expansionism of the advanced capitalist nations at the turn of the 20th Century. A devastating moral critique of the murderous cynicism of imperialism, Hobson’s book paved the way for the influential Marxist theories of imperialism advanced by Lenin and Bukharin and others. It provides an invaluable framework for understanding militarism and war in the 21st Century.

'It’s a depressing reflection on our condition that J A Hobson’s pioneering study of the relationship between finance and empire retains much actuality today, more than a hundred years after it was first published. It is good to have this classic work available again. Nathaniel Mehr’s critical introduction admirably situates Imperialism both historically and in relation to the debates it helped to shape among Marxists from Lenin and Bukharin to Harvey and Negri.'
Alex Callinicos, Professor of European Studies, King's College London, and author of Imperialism and Global Political Economy.

'Hobson's book remains an indispensable starting point for the understanding of imperialism. Spokesman are to be congratulated for making it available once more.'
John Newsinger, author of The Blood Never Dried: A People’s History of the British Empire.

‘Hobson's Imperialism belongs to the small group of books in the years from 1900 to the outbreak of war that have definitely changed the contours of social thought.'
The Guardian.

Reviews:
Gwyn Griffiths - Morning Star, Wednesday 4 May, 2011
Llewellyn James - Socialist Review, March 2011

Price: £19.95

336 pages | Indexed
ISBN: 978 0 85124 7885
Paperback


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<span style='font-size: 14px;'>Imperialism: A Study - ePub</span>Imperialism: A Study - ePub
by J. A. Hobson
Introduction by Nathaniel Mehr
Foreword by Jeremy Corbyn MP


This is the ePub version of Imperialism: A Study, which can be downloaded onto your PC, Sony eReader, iPad and iPhone.

Once bought please SAVE THE FILE and add it to your eReader as required.

Price: £8.95

ISBN: 978 0 85124 7922
ePub format


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<span style='font-size: 14px;'>This I Cannot Forget</span>This I Cannot Forget
The Memoirs of Nikolai Bukharin's Widow
By Anna Larina
Introduction by Stephen F. Cohen

'I lived with Nikolai Ivanovich Bukharin, my husband, through what were both the happiest and the most exciting days of our lives. But our last six months together were made so difficult, so painful, that each day felt like a century. This memoir of that time was written over the many years since, set down in fragments whenever I found relief from family worries and cares. Yet, not for a moment did I forget the disastrous events of my youth. Not for a single day did terrible memories fail to trouble my mind and shake my very soul.

You must understand that, from childhood, I lived among people who were totally dedicated to the cause of socialist revolution. First, of course, was my father, Yury Larina (Mikhail Aleksandrovich Lurye). Amazingly brilliant and astonishingly courageous, he probably played the decisive role in the formation of my character and convictions. In addition, since he was a steadfast friend of Bukharin, it was as a young girl that I first came to know the man to whom I would later be linked
by destiny.' Anna Larina, from her preface


'As Stephen Cohen notes in this fine introduction, apart from the books of Trotsky and Stalin's daughter, this is "the only uncensored memoir ever to appear from inside the highest levels of that historic and doomed world." It is an enthralling book.' Foreign Affairs


Price: £19.95

384 pages | Indexed | 43 pictures
ISBN: 978 085124 7809
Paperback


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<span style='font-size: 14px;'>Who Was This Bukharin?</span>Who Was This Bukharin?
By Ken Coates

Bukharin was the youngest of the senior leaders of the Russian October Revolution, sometimes described in the earliest days of 1917 as Lenin's favourite. He had been judicially murdered after a grisly show trial which marked the culmination of Stalin's round of purges in the late thirties. His widow and son struggled for decades to secure his rehabilitation. Who was this Bukharin?



Price: £8.95

72 pages | illustrated
ISBN: 978 0 85124 7816
Paperback


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<span style='font-size: 14px;'>Up and Down Stream</span>Up and Down Stream
by Harry Gosling

Harry Gosling was born in 1861. He left school at thirteen and was soon apprenticed as a lighterman on the River Thames. The great dock strike of 1889 engendered a rash of new unionism, and much activity within the old unions. By 1893, Gosling had been elected General Secretary of his Union, a full-time post. He was also extremely active in local government, becoming a member of the London County Council in 1904.

It was in July 1910 that Ben Tillett, the leader of the Dockers' Union, convened a meeting of waterside unions to discuss the formation of the National Transport Workers' Federation. Harry Gosling was elected President. Ernest Bevin was soon elected to the Executive, after which he and Gosling worked very closely together. Eventually, the Transport and General Workers' Union was formed out of the multiplicity of unions constituting the Federation, and Gosling was its founding President.

After several attempts to win election to Parliament, Gosling was finally victorious in a by-election in 1923, at Whitechapel. The following year the first Labour Government was formed and MacDonald appointed Gosling as Minister of Transport. He died while still a Member of Parliament, in 1930. All these adventures and insights, recounted in his own words in his autobiography, which has long been out of print, will resonate with new generations.

Price: £19.95

292 pages
ISBN: 978 0 85124 7786


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<span style='font-size: 14px;'>Inside the Left</span>Inside the Left
By Fenner Brockway

"Fenner Brockway lived a long life and it was certainly packed with colourful action. Here we are reproducing the first volume of his autobiography, which was written on the eve of the Second World War. Never afraid to court controversy, this book celebrated the Socialist movement's opposition to the First World War, and the activities of an anti-war movement which continued after that conflict.

A pupil of Keir Hardie and Bernard Shaw, the young Brockway found his natural home in the Independent Labour Party, which developed his talents as an editor and public agitator. He became acquainted with many of the key personalities of international socialism, and with all the leading figures on the British Left, including H. G. Wells, Bertrand Russell and the political spokesmen of the growing Labour movement.

This book contains Brockway's detailed account of the efforts of the British Left to find some kind of political unity during the years of the Labour Party's split, when Ramsay MacDonald formed a National Government. The ILP left the Labour Party, and entered into a variety of negotiations with the Communists and others to attempt to crystallise a Socialist opposition."

Ken Coates
Foreword to the new edition

Reviews:
Morning Star, 22nd March 2010 - John Green

Book of the Month: Fenner Brockway's Inside the Left - by John Green in London Progressive Journal


Price: £18.00

352 pages | Indexed
ISBN: 978 085124 7748
Socialist Classic


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<span style='font-size: 14px;'>Tom Mann's Memoirs</span>Tom Mann's Memoirs
Introduce by Ken Coates

The first secretary of the Independent Labour Party, the President of the dockers' union, the first General Secretary of the Amalgamated Engineering Union: a mere roster of the positions he held in the Labour Movement, of which this is a tiny fraction, would establish Tom Mann as a Pioneer. But what he did was always more impressive than the positions from which he did it. He was an initiator, a catalyst, a goad to action. Whenever a real crisis came, his stature found its true proportions, and again and again Tom Mann became a pivot for the actions of downtrodden people. Throughout his lifetime as a militant socialist, whatever the stages of evolution of his thought, he invariably displayed a gift for finding himself at the centre of every major struggle of his time. For this reason it is important that these Memoirs, first published in 1923, should again become available.

Price: £15.00

278 pages | Paperback | Indexed
ISBN: 978 0 85124 7588
Socialist Classic Series


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<span style='font-size: 14px;'>The Miracle of Fleet Street</span>The Miracle of Fleet Street
The Story of the Daily Herald
By George Lansbury

'The Daily Herald is now dimly remembered as a forerunner to the disgraceful Sun. But it is not widely known that it began life as a daily strike bulletin when the London print unions struck for a forty-eight hour working week. This blossomed out to cover general news items and even sport, and spread its reach from London to some provincial cities. It died after the strike, but had already whetted the appetite of trade union activists for a move to relaunch it. It set off on an eventful life with a capital of £300 as a co-operative Labour daily, staunchly "unofficial" and rebellious, a veritable hell raiser ...

The demise of the Herald, and the rise of the Sun, are sad stories of the afterlife. But this book contains the account of George Lansbury, the Herald's consistent sponsor and campaigner. It was published in 1925 and has a racy account of the early struggles which established the paper ... It should reappear on the bookshelves in its own right because its author was not only a notable contender for all the good causes that distinguished the Labour Movement in the early days of the Twentieth Century, but also a most generous and decent man, well worth remembering in his own words for what were, in large measures, his own deeds.'

Ken Coates from his Foreword to the new edition

Cover 'Fantasy (Labour Leaders at their Devotions)'
by Will Dyson, Daily Herald, 3 December 1913.

A further 19 illustrations by Will Dyson can be found in
The Miracle of Fleet Street.

Reviews
Bill Hagerty - British Journalism Review
Geoffrey Goodman in Tribune
Nathaniel Mehr in the Morning Star


Price: £15.00

168 pages | Paperback
ISBN: 978 0 85124 7663
Socialist Classic


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<span style='font-size: 14px;'>The Levellers</span>The Levellers
By H. N. Brailsford
Edited by Christopher Hill

To our generation fell the good fortune of re-discovering the Levellers. To the classical liberal historians they meant rather less than nothing. This neglect is puzzling. At the crisis of the English Revolution it was the Levellers and not from its commanders that the victorious New Model army derived its political ideas and its democratic drive.


Price: £18.00

816 pages | Indexed
ISBN: 978 0 85124 1548
Paperback | Socialist Classics 5


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<span style='font-size: 14px;'>Pigs Meat</span>Pigs Meat
Selected writings of Thomas Spence,
Radical and Pioneer Land Reformer


In the history of the emergence of British radicalism and socialism in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the works of Thomas Spence are an indispensable element.

Price: £9.99

192 pages
ISBN: 978 0 85124 4242
Paperback | Socialist Classics 2


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<span style='font-size: 14px;'>A Radical Reader</span>A Radical Reader
By Christopher Hampton

This major anthology spans 500 years of radical protest from the Peasants’ Revolt to the First World War. Provides an alternative political and social history of England.

This is history as creative defiance, as communal action, involving the intellectual and imaginative witnesses of those among the privileged poets, writers, and thinkers who have had the strength and courage to make themselves passionate spokesmen for the dispossessed.

Read reviews by:
Lorna Sage
Jim Murphy
Denis Smyth
David Boulton


Price: £18.00

600 page | Paperback
ISBN: 978 0 85124 7250


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<span style='font-size: 14px;'>A History of British Socialism</span>A History of British Socialism
By Max Beer

Max Beer's History is a classic, not only because it was a brilliant pioneering study, but also because it is still urgently relevant to a new generation of socialists.

Price: £11.99

271 pages
ISBN: 978 0 81524 4082
Paperback | Socialist Classics 6


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<span style='font-size: 14px;'>The Making of the Labour Movement</span>The Making of the Labour Movement
The Formation of the Transport and General Workers' Union 1870-1922
by Ken Coates and Topham

This authoritative and comprehensive history does more than tell a story. It shows how trade unions created permanent organisation, based on "recognition" as a key concept. Those who had formerly been locked out from society now recognised their own strength in association, and saw that strength reflected in the eyes of their bosses.

Price: £15.00

909 pages | Indexed
ISBN: 978 0 85124 5652
Paperback


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<span style='font-size: 14px;'>The Attack & Other Papers</span>The Attack & Other Papers
R H Tawney was a major figure in the development of English socialist thought.

Tony Benn contributes an introduction which is itself a thoughtful development of the argument in which Tawney was engaged throughout his long and stimulating life.

Price: £9.99

194 pages | Indexed
ISBN: 978 0 85124 3115
Paperback | Socialist Classics


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<span style='font-size: 14px;'>Practice and Theory of Bolshevism</span>Practice and Theory of Bolshevism
By Bertrand Russell

Bertrand Russell's Practice and Theory of Bolshevism is a first-hand account of the great British philosopher's journey to Russian in 1920. It is a classic and enduring analysis of communism in practice, and a careful polemic with Communist ideology. But more than this, it is a portrait of the turbulent infancy of the Soviet Republic, and a report on Russell's meeting with such great historic figures as Lenin, Trotsky, and Gorky.

Price: £7.99

134 pages | Paperback
ISBN: 978 085124 5416


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<span style='font-size: 14px;'>Roads to Freedom</span>Roads to Freedom
By Bertrand Russell

"This book was written to give an account of Socialism, Anarchism, and Syndicalism. It was completed in the early months of 1918 and before the end of the First World War was imaginable. The prospect of peace seemed remote. So much has happened since that time … and the solutions, urgent problems and immediate hopes are no longer what they were in 1918. But the problem of preserving as much liberty as possible under Socialism is even more urgent now than then, and the greater part of what is said on this problem in this book still seems to me valid."

Bertrand Russell, from his 1948 preface.

Price: £9.99

158 pages | Indexed
ISBN: 978 0 85124 7144
Paperback


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<span style='font-size: 14px;'>German Social Democracy</span>German Social Democracy
By Bertrand Russell

Originally published in 1896, this was Bertrand Russell's first book. Its purpose then was to provide a convenient introduction to German Social Democracy - its history, its goals, its tactics, and the influence upon it of such thinkers as Marx, Engels, and Lassalle.

German Social Democracy is a vital document for students of European history, and for all those who read and admire the works of Bertrand Russell.

Price: £11.99

184 pages | Paperback
ISBN: 978 0 85124 5713


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<span style='font-size: 14px;'>The Life of John Wheatley</span>The Life of John Wheatley
By John Hannan

John Wheatley was the architect of left-wing opposition on Red Clydeside during the the First World War. He alone commanded the loyalty and respect of all the different groupings amongst the socialists, including such diverse firebrands as Maxton, Gallagher and Kirkwood. It is to Wheatley that the main credit must go for the achievement of the Independent Labour Party in Glasgow which provided two-thirds of the city's elected representatives at Westminster.

Price: £9.99

178 pages | Paperback
ISBN: 978 0 85124 4967


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<span style='font-size: 14px;'>Thomas Paine: </span>Thomas Paine:
In Search of the Common Good
Edited by Joyce Chumbley and Leo Zonneveld

Thomas Paine was a man of words. He inspired the American struggle for independence; he defeated the causes of the French Revolution. He was the greatest of the English/American 18th-century radical writers, with timeless works such as Common Sense, The Rights of Man, and The Age of Reason. This book, Thomas Paine: In Search of the Common Good, offers reflections on his life and writings by a group of experts and specialists who came together at a Thomas Paine Colloquium held at the United Nations in New York.

About the editors:
Joyce Chumbley is a researcher, writer, activist. For over three decades, she has been involved in education, the arts, and progressive environmental, social, and political issue from her base in Florida.

Leo Zonneveld is an author and editor. He served the United Kingdom government, as high technology specialist and lastly as science attaché at the British Embassy in The Hague, for 37 years.


Price: £12.00

144 pages | Paperback
ISBN: 978 085124 7625


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Spokesman Books | History