History

These Bodies of Water
Notes on the British Empire, the Middle East and Where We Meet

'Sabrina Mahfouz is a tidal wave of truth swallowing the banks of empire with a torrent of information which will not be damned' Lemn Sissay

'A bold, brave look at the ways imperialism affects us all, from the universally political to the insightfully intimate' Riz Ahmed

'Impossible to put down while you're reading, and impossible to forget about when you've finished' Glamour

Are you not made of Suez silt?
How do we know you won't
shore our boats
by making yourself bigger
than we made you?

Sabrina Mahfouz once sat in a Whitehall interview room and was interrogated about everything from her political leanings to her private life. It was ostensibly a job interview, but implicit in their demands was the unspoken question: as a woman of Middle Eastern heritage, could she really be trusted?

Years later, Sabrina found herself confronting the meaning behind this interrogation, and how it was specifically informed by the British Empire's historical dominance in the Middle East. THESE BODIES OF WATER investigates this history through the Middle Eastern coastlines and waterways that were so vital to the Empire's hold. Interwoven with her own personal experiences, Sabrina combines history, politics, myth and poetry in a devastating examination of this unacknowledged part of Britain's colonial past.

Part history, part polemic and part intimate memoir, THESE BODIES OF WATER is a tapestry of writing that tells the story of Britain's relationship with the Middle East in the most revealing terms.


We Refuse To Starve In Silence
A History of the National Unemployed Workers' Movement, 1920-46

Mass unemployment between the wars produced one of the most imaginative and combative oranisations in British working-class history, the National Unemployed Workers' Movement. This is the first overall history of the NUWM, and traces its previously unrecorded final years as well as making clear the movement's impressive achievements and enduring legacy.


Welsh Industrial Workers Housing, 1775-1875

This booklet illustrates buildings which until recently were thought to be just a commonplace background to everyday life. It is not a history of industrial housing in Wales - that has yet to be written - but it does try to link the variety of house form which can (or rather, could) be seen in our towns with the conditions of life experienced by our ancestors. After this introduction, there are five sections in the booklet, each dealing with one aspect of the development of house design.


What Is To Be Done?

In "What Is to Be Done?", Lenin argues that the working class will not spontaneously become political simply by fighting economic battles with employers over wages, working hours and the like. To convert the working class to Marxism, Lenin insists that Marxists should form a political party, or "vanguard", of dedicated revolutionaries to spread Marxist political ideas among the workers. The pamphlet partly precipitated the split of the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party (RSDLP) between Lenin's Bolsheviks and the Mensheviks and is perhaps the hallmark of Leninism.