by Clare Doyle
“Our strategy should be not only to confront empire, but to lay siege to it. To deprive it of oxygen. To shame it. To mock it. With our art, our music, our literature, our stubbornness, our joy, our brilliance, our sheer relentlessness — and our ability to tell our own stories. Stories that are different from the ones we’re being brainwashed to believe.” — Arundhati Roy, War Talk, 2003.
This issue of OTH Bookshelf comprises more than 100 academic open access title on the topics of colonialism and imperialism, focusing on books that would be of most interest and value to HSS scholars and students.
The titles on this list cover locations ranging from Ghana to Guam, from India to Ireland, from Latin America to Sub-Saharan Africa. These works look as far back in time as the Ottoman and the Roman Empires to remind us that colonies and empires as forces have been with us for most of human history. However, books like Rocio Zambrano’s Colonial Debts: The Case of Puerto Rico (Duke University Press, 2021), examining the concept of neoliberal coloniality in light of Puerto Rico’s debt crisis, make us ponder how colonialism in some form is still with us today.
The OTH list includes the book’s author or editor names, title and title remainder, year of publication, publisher, and open access format (PDF, EPUB, MOBI, etc.) Subject headings in the list are taken from WorldCat records or Library of Congress records, if available: if not, original cataloging of subject headings is provided in WorldCat format, for consistency. The DOI (Digital Object Identifier) of the book is given if it is available on the publisher’s website; if not, the URL is provided. The ISBNs listed are for the online version of the book if available, and if more than one online ISBN is available the ISBN for the PDF version has been preferred; if there is not an online or e-book ISBN, the ISBN featured on the publisher’s website is included. The book’s license type (Creative Commons, etc.), terms of use or copyright restrictions are included if these have been provided by the publisher.
OTH Bookshelf: Colonies and Empires lists titles from some 30 publishers: if our readers are aware of any title or publishers that are not included, please feel free to submit them for consideration. (To be included in OTH Bookshelf, a book must be available to read online and/or download for free and must have been assigned an ISBN.) And we welcome your suggestions for topics that might be covered in a future issue of OTH Bookshelf.
Download OTH Bookshelf List (excel)