Bücher der Reihe Verso World History Series

A classic of political economy that traces the influence of religious thought on capitalismIn one of the true classics of twentieth-century political economy, R. H. Tawney investigates the way religion has moulded social and economic practice. He tracks the influence of religious thought on capitalist economy and ideology since the Middle Ages, shedding light on the question of why Christianity continues to exert a unique role in the marketplace. The book offers an incisive analysis of the morals and mores of contemporary Western culture.In tough, muscular, richly varied prose, Tawney tells an absorbing and meaningful story. Today, the dividing line between the spheres of religion and the secular is shifting, and Religion and the Rise of Capitalism is more pertinent than ever.

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 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.

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.

Classic study of slavery and abolition.

Compelling and succinct History of WWII