This textbook examines Marxism’s enormous impact on the way historians approach their subject. Tackling current historiographical questions in an accessible way, the author offers a clear introduction to Marxist views of history, key Marxist historians and thinkers, and the relevance of Marxist theory and history to students’ own work. This is a concise, thorough overview of an important area of historiography. The second edition incorporates significant new developments in research, including Marxist contributions to the emergence of global, maritime and transnational history; the discovery of Marx’s ecologism and the historical critique of fossil capitalism as a source of environmental disaster; a reassessment of gender oppression through social reproduction theory; and the contribution of Marxism to debates on race, Eurocentrism and whiteness. 

Matt Perry is Reader in Labour History at Newcastle University, UK. Amongst his publications in social and labour history are the biography Red Ellen Wilkinson: Her Ideas, Movements and World (2014) and a study of the mutinies of 1919: Mutinous Memories: A Subjective History of French Military Protest in 1919 (2019).