Exit Stalin The Soviet Union as a Civilization 1953-1991 by Mark B Smith

The Big Book of Kashmiri Literature by Onaiza Drabu

Poems, Songs, Plays, Stories | Anthology of Kashmiri Poetry, Folk Songs, Plays And Stories This anthology of literature translated from the Kashmiri language is the first of its kind. It is as much an introduction into the literary landscape of Kashmir as a journey through its history. From premodern verse to radio plays, folk chants to metaphysical ghazals, flash fiction to excerpts from a novel, The Big Book of Kashmiri Literature is a compilation of memory and an anthology of voices. The reader will encounter scholars, saints, experimental dramatists and unlettered poets starting from the fourteenth century to today. Kashmir has a thriving oral tradition, a literary culture that borrowed from the East and a print culture that engaged with the West and it all comes together in this volume with a promise of immersion into the emotional topography of the land, the language and the people. Penguin India Onaiza Drabu

Nicholas Radburn’s pivotal work, 𝑇𝑟𝑎𝑑𝑒𝑟𝑠 𝑖𝑛 𝑀𝑒𝑛: 𝑀𝑒𝑟𝑐ℎ𝑎𝑛𝑡𝑠 𝑎𝑛𝑑 𝑡ℎ𝑒 𝑇𝑟𝑎𝑛𝑠𝑓𝑜𝑟𝑚𝑎𝑡𝑖𝑜𝑛 𝑜𝑓 𝑡ℎ𝑒 𝑇𝑟𝑎𝑛𝑠𝑎𝑡𝑙𝑎𝑛𝑡𝑖𝑐 𝑆𝑙𝑎𝑣𝑒 𝑇𝑟𝑎𝑑𝑒

Christopher L. Brown delves into

, featured in the April 2026 issue of the 𝑊𝑖𝑙𝑙𝑖𝑎𝑚 𝑎𝑛𝑑 𝑀𝑎𝑟𝑦 𝑄𝑢𝑎𝑟𝑡𝑒𝑟𝑙𝑦: https://vastearly.am/3UkbLWU According to Brown, Radburn’s insightful analysis illuminates the dynamic changes in the British slave trade during the pivotal 18th century, revealing how institutional transformations reshaped trading practices and expanded marketplaces across West Africa and the Americas. By meticulously examining merchant logs, account books, and the groundbreaking Slave Voyages database, Radburn not only sheds light on the complex networks of commerce but also highlights the stories of those who navigated these turbulent waters. Join us as we honor interdisciplinary scholarship that enriches our understanding of Vast Early America and the intricate histories that connect us all. #WilliamWilberforceDay #VastEarlyAmerica #TransatlanticSlaveTrade #HistoryScholarship Yale University Press | Columbia University

Born in Darkness Africa, Africans & making of the modern world 1471 to the 2nd World War by Howard W. French - 2026

Here's something that will unsettle you: the most famous map of the medieval world doesn't show Europe at its center. The Catalan Atlas of 1375 depicts a crowned Black king seated on a throne, holding a golden orb and scepter. His name is Mansa Musa, ruler of the Mali Empire, and at the time, he was likely the richest person who ever lived. When Mansa Musa passed through Cairo on his pilgrimage to Mecca, he brought an entourage of sixty thousand people and so much gold that he crashed the Egyptian economy. Word of his wealth reached Europe, and that, Howard French argues, was the true spark for the Age of Discovery. This is the central provocation of Born in Blackness: the history we've been taught is not just incomplete. It's a deliberate act of erasure. French, a journalist and Columbia professor, spent years researching this book, tracing six centuries of history from 1471 to World War II. His argument is simple and devastating: you cannot understand the modern world without placing Africa and Africans at the center of the story. The standard narrative tells us that Europeans set out to find Asia, accidentally bumped into the Americas, and slowly built the modern world through ingenuity and hard work. But French flips this entirely. The real impetus for exploration, he writes, was Europe's centuries-old desire to trade with the legendary gold-rich kingdoms of West Africa. The Portuguese established Elmina in present-day Ghana in 1471 specifically to acquire gold. That river of gold refloated Portugal's economy and financed the voyages that would reshape the world. The Spanish, locked out of African gold, had no choice but to head westward—and we all know what happened next. Gold led to sugar. Sugar demanded labor. And labor came from the trade in enslaved Africans. The rest is not just history. It's the foundation of everything we recognize as the modern world. What French Makes You See: 1. The Scourge of Erasure French is descended from an enslaved woman named Priscilla, purchased in 1812 by a Virginia governor who fathered a child with her. That's not conjecture, he has the bill of sale. The book is deeply personal, written with a "steely and elegant indignation" at the "centuries-long process of diminishment, trivialization, and erasure of Africans and people of African descent from the story of the modern world". 2. The True Scale of Suffering Around 12 million Africans were shipped across the Atlantic in chains. But French notes that another 6 million lives were lost in or near their homelands in the hunt for slaves. The demographic strain transformed African societies, agriculture, gender relations, and political structures were all warped by the removal of so many able-bodied young men. 3. The Barbadian Template In 1636, Barbados passed a decree declaring that slaves would remain in bondage for life. It was the template for servitude across the hemisphere. By the 1680s, black slaves made up 75% of Barbados's population and 95% of its workforce. The island's planters bought slaves with money borrowed from English creditors against future deliveries of sugar. This wasn't just exploitation, it was a financial system that powered global capitalism. 4. The Poverty of "Discovery" French devotes a chapter to "Rethinking Exploration" and makes a simple point: once Bartolomeu Dias rounded the Cape of Good Hope in 1488, standard histories basically forget about Africa. It's treated as a geographic obstacle to overcome on the way to Asia's spices. But as French shows, West Africa brought Portugal about a tenth of the world's gold supply, and the Portuguese treasury was known as the House of Guinea, a reflection of Black Africa's commercial importance. 5. The Haitian Exception The Haitian Revolution, the only successful slave revolt in history, was a direct challenge to the idea of Black slavery itself. French argues that ex-slaves who liberated Haitians "profoundly altered the course of American history". It's a reminder that the story isn't just one of victimhood. It's also one of resistance, pride, and survival. Born in Blackness is not a comfortable read. It's not a book you finish and forget. It's a book that changes how you see everything, the wealth of nations, the foundations of democracy, the very idea of "modernity." French has done something extraordinary: he's restored Africa to its rightful place in the story of the world. And in doing so, he's shown us that the story we thought we knew was built on a lie. BOOK: https://amzn.to/4zC1h5i See less

SriChaitanya Mahajiban. edited by Chaitanyamoy Nanda. [Kolkata], Girija Library, Rs 600/-.

Sekaler Sanbadpatre Swadhinatar Sadhana. Edited by Nabakumar Bhattacharya. Prekshapat [Kolkata], Rs 250/-; 2026

Swamijir Bonera -ekti tathybhittik anusandhan by Swami Sambuddhananda -Eastern Zonal Cultural Centre. Price not stated. 2026