A portable history of people refusing to behave. 

The Verso Book of Dissent gathers three millennia of rebellion into one enormous chronological anthology. It's full of speeches, manifestos, poems, songs, pamphlets, declarations and assorted acts of rhetorical insubordination from across the world. The cast runs from ancient rebels and religious heretics through revolutionary socialists, anti-colonial movements, feminists, anarchists, labour organisers, artists and dissidents; the pages here alone jump from Sylvain Maréchal’s 1796 Manifesto of the Equals to Eugene Debs, the IWW and Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain’s feminist utopia Sultana’s Dream.

Eventually, as you delve deep, dissent stops looking like a collection of isolated historical eruptions and starts looking like a long, argumentative inheritance. Ideas disappear, mutate, return under new names; people separated by centuries find themselves yelling versions of the same sentence at power. It is less a history of radical politics than a sourcebook of what radical politics has actually sounded like. 

Verso, London, 2010. First edition paperback. Moderate shelf wear to covers with rubbing, creasing and edge wear, particularly along the upper and lower edges; some surface marking to front cover. Internally clean and firmly bound. Very good condition.