Definitive Book on Imperialism?

[RadioRaheem84]

Any books that document the atrocities of Imperialism and Capitalism?

I was thinking maybe Harry Magdoff's Age of Imperialism ?

I am wanting a comprehensive and systematic account of capitalist crimes.

I know that it's arbitrary to apply the same foolish standards of the Black Book of Communism onto any opposing ideology, but I would like to know if there is a book out there that at least shows the trend of capital and militarism/imperialism.

Sword and the Dollar by Michael Parenti was great but it wasn't as probing into imperialism as a whole, just what the US crimes were.

[blake 3:17]

Mike Davis Late Victorian Holocausts is terrifying and brilliant.

[RadioRaheem84]

Isn't that more of climate science book?

[RadioRaheem84]

Anyone ever read Imperialism:From Colonial Age to the Present by Harry Magdoff?

Also, Cambridge Economist Ha Joon Chang wrote Bad Samaritans and Kicking Away the Ladder. Both are good books. they mostly deal with neo-imperialism.

[Decolonize The Left]

This (http://www.revleft.com/vb/revleft-resource-list-t143793/index.html) thread may be of help.

- August

[RadioRaheem84]

Any google books you guys can recommend too?

Documentaries, lectures online, mp3?

[RadioRaheem84]

http://www.infoshop.org/page/AnarchistFAQSectionD5

Anarchist FAQ is a godsend. Good Stuff

[Adil3tr]

How about the little black book of capitalism? I can;t find it in any language but French though, but there are few chapters on the MIA.

[RadioRaheem84]

I would like to read the Black Book of Capitalism but I do not read or speak French.

I wish it were translated into English.

[RadioRaheem84]

How about the little black book of capitalism? I can;t find it in any language but French though, but there are few chapters on the MIA.

Link!

[KC]

I would like to read the Black Book of Capitalism but I do not read or speak French.

Get Rosetta Stone. It's the best.

[Pawn Power]

The Wretched of the Earth by Fanon is pretty important.

[WeAreReborn]

Get Rosetta Stone. It's the best.
Disagree I didn't find it useful at all.

[Reznov]

Now the real question comes, where the hell can we read these online for free?

[bailey_187]

If you just want a repetitative account of what happened where, why and how many people died, John Newsinger's The Blood Never Dried: A Peoples History of the British Empire

Its pretty boring after a while though.

If you want to understand Imperialism aswell as an overview of its history, get Alex Callinicos's Imperialism and Global Political Economy

[blake 3:17]

Late Victorian Holocausts isn't so much an account climate but of histories of colonialism and natural disaster.It's an account of imperialism(s) in China, India and South America. A large part of it deals with the sufferings unleashed by the imposition of largely British agricultural methods in places very different from Britain.


It's the smashing of the commons, the creation of artificial scarcities and destruction of indigenous knowledges. There's a very moving account of a benign British colonial over seer who seemed in India who actually wanted to end a famine and the rules were so effed up you had people starving beside trains loaded with food that was being sent elsewhere, and by they arrived somewhere else were rotten and insect infested. Anyways, it's great.

Incorporating nature into a Marxist theory is a bigger challenge than we've thought. I think it can be done but needs some open thinking.

Workers in a Lean World by Kim Moody is excellent too.

I guess neither book is a meta theory of imperialism, but applies Marxist theories of imperialism to examine specific social conditions, the irrationality of capitalist production, and some of the weak links in imperial social relations.

[Barry Lyndon]

The greatest impact of Late Victorian Holocausts on me was the fact that I had no idea these famines had ever occurred at all before I read those books. It's astonishing how mainstream history can simply ignore the well-documented unnatural deaths of 30-50 million people. As Mike Davis pointed out, writing a history of the 19th century and leaving out the colonial famines in India and China out would be like writing a history of the 20th and leaving out one of the World Wars. But that is what has happened. This is the only book I know of that goes into this momentous event in any depth.

If bourgeois historians, liberal and conservative alike, can lie by omission about something this big, is there any limit to what they will distort and lie about?

It demonstrates that even if the Soviet Union and Red China were every bit as monstrous as capitalist propaganda portrays them as, capitalism has no moral superiority whatsoever. Not only that, but the very foundation of the economic primacy of the advanced capitalist countries was in large part due to the beggary these disasters reduced hundreds of millions of Asians to.

IMHO one of the best works of radical history in modern times.