We are excited to release our first alternative reading list for 2026. We have gathered a selection of recent economics titles that may have slipped under the general economics radar. Some might have been overlooked due to the authors’ backgrounds, their geographic contexts, or because the subjects don’t always align with typical interests in economic reading. This year’s reading list brings together ten thought‑provoking works that expand how we understand economics by situating it within broader social, political, and ecological contexts. These books could help broaden our conceptualisation of economics as a discipline, highlighting voices, regions, and themes that are often overlooked yet essential for grasping the forces shaping our world today.
We are always interested in knowing if you agree with our recommendations and if you have any suggestions for our next reading list. You can send us an email at info@d-econ.org
The Modern World After Colonialism: Remaking the Social Sciences
Edited by Gurminder K Bhambra, Ipek Demir, Paul Robert Gilbert, Su-ming Khoo and Lucy Mayblin
This book is a thought provoking and accessible collection that invites readers to see the world, and the subjects we study in it, a little differently. Rather than treating colonialism as something that’s firmly in the past, the book shows how it still shapes the way we understand social sciences and issues like migration, inequality, citizenship and climate change. The authors make an important point of how many of the ideas we learn in social sciences such as economics, sociology or politics are built on a story of modernity that focuses on Europe. This book challenges that story. It shows how the modern world was deeply shaped by empire, enslavement and global connections, and asks what changes when we take those histories seriously. Each chapter explores a different topic, from the Haitian Revolution to racism and climate change, linking these back to longer histories. Along the way, it highlights how today’s inequalities and global challenges didn’t just appear out of nowhere, but are tied to past decisions and systems that still matter now. While the book is grounded in academic research, the book is designed to be engaging and usable for a broader audience. With clear explanations, case studies, lesson plans and prompts for reflection, it encourages readers to question familiar ideas and think more critically about the world around them. This book is useful for anyone curious about how colonial histories continue to shape the present, or for anyone looking to broaden their perspective of social science beyond standard textbooks as it offers an insightful and eye opening read that connects key themes to real-world issues. We want to highlight that one of the editors is a member of the D‑Econ steering committee, and while we have reviewed the book aiming to avoid bias we want to be transparent about this connection.
Uprooted: A Graphic Account of the Struggle for Forest Rights
By Ita Mehrotra
This graphic novel is an exciting combination of a powerful story in combination with a visual exploration of land, belonging and resistance. Told through a mix of sketches, conversations and field notes, the book centres the lives of the Van Gujjars and Taungyas, forest‑dwelling communities in India, who have lived in and cared for forest environments for generations. Rather than presenting forests as commercially available, empty spaces, Uprooted shows them as deeply lived-in worlds, shaped by everyday labour, memories and relationships between people, animals and land. Mehrotra draws on years of engagement with communities and activists to trace how these ways of life have been disrupted by development projects and governmental interventions that often exclude the very people most connected to these environments. The book highlights how these forest communities continue to struggle for recognition and rights, even as they are treated as outsiders on their own land. It presents a story of resilience. What makes Uprooted particularly engaging is its graphic form. The illustrations feel immediate and personal, bringing readers closer to the stories being told and emphasising the emotional weight of displacement and survival. For readers interested in development, environment and justice, this book offers an accessible yet thought‑provoking account of how struggles over land and resources are lived on the ground, and why they matter far beyond the forest
I Deliver Parcels in Beijing
By Hu Anyan
As gig work begins to expand all around the world, Hu Anyan’s memoir offers a compelling account of (largely invisibilised) life at the margins of China’s economy. Drawing on two decades of work across 19 different jobs in six different cities, Hu recounts his working life taking on roles such as that of a security guard, night-shift warehouse worker, shop assistant, and as a courier. While the majority of the book focuses on his work as a delivery worker, he also focuses on the other forms of precarious labour that he followed.
This book began as a blog, wherein Hu would document his work in the warehouse; the popularity of the blog led to an eventual publication. With its deadpan, direct, and understated delivery on what is a brutal and unforgiving job, he captures the physical exhaustion, psychological strain, and the constant uncertainty that underline these jobs.
Hu Anyan paints a picture of a low-paid Chinese gig worker, examining interactions with customers in a culture, where they are always “the king”, incessant demands by employers, and the complex dynamic between co-workers. The story is ultimately rooted in the struggle for survival, making the contrast between the severity of experiences and the flatness of the narration, particularly powerful.
A striking point within this book is the idea that time does in fact mean money for some, and that this is undeniably an extremely embodied process. The book provides invaluable insights into the lived experiences of gig workers and the human costs of an increasingly precarious economy.
Occupying the Everyday Militarisation and Gendered Politics of Living in Kashmir
by Niharika Pandit
Using a feminist and anticolonial lens, Niharika Pandit analyzes how militarisation shapes daily life in Kashmir following the abrogation of Article 370 in 2019. In her book, Occupying the Everyday, Niharika draws on ethnographic research to examine how discourses of integration and heterosexist nationalism intersect with practices of surveillance, silencing, and violence.
While centering Kashmiri women’s experiences and voices, the book explores everyday spaces as sites where militarisation is both enforced and contested. The book highlights occupation as not only a geopolitical reality but also an embodied, affective, and temporal condition. This text contributes to decolonising economics by showing how militarisation reshapes social reproduction, gendered labor, and community survival, thereby linking political violence to economic dispossession. Niharika uses an innovative methodology of “patchwork ethnography” to foreground fragmented yet resilient narratives, offering a counter-archive to statist accounts.
For students of decolonial thought, the book underscores how occupation and militarisation are deeply entangled with global imperialism and capitalist logics, making it a vital resource for understanding the intersections of gender, economy, and coloniality. For the anticolonial scholar, the work is relevant in locating everyday as a site of resistance, where the refusal to be consumed by state power generates liberatory politics.
The Climate Trial: Law and Justice on a Melting Planet
By Noah Walker-Crawford
In The Climate Trial, Noah Walker-Crawford examines the groundbreaking case of Saúl Luciano Lliuya, a Peruvian farmer who sued the German energy giant RWE for its contribution to glacial melt threatening his community in Huaraz. Using anthropological fieldwork in Peru and Germany, Walker-Crawford traces the legal, scientific, and moral dimensions of climate litigation, situating the case within broader debates on corporate accountability and transnational justice. The book highlights how climate change disproportionately affects marginalized communities in the Global South while evidencing the responsibility with industrial polluters in the Global North. For a political economist, the author frames litigation as a question of “neighborliness” and moral responsibility across the globe, while challenging conventional economic frameworks that externalize environmental costs. Noah’s narrative underscores the role of law as both a site of contestation and a potential tool for decolonial justice, where communities demand recognition of historical responsibility and reparations. This book contributes to diversifying institutional economics by foregrounding ecological justice, transnational solidarity, and the politics of responsibility in climate change. It acts as a critical text for understanding how law, science, and lived experience intersect in struggles against planetary crisis, offering pathways for reimagining solidarities and accountability beyond borders.
Revolutions of Our Times: An Internationalist Manifesto
By The Peoples Want Network
The book is a collectively authored political text developed by The Peoples Want network that brings together revolutionaries from Asia, Africa, Europe, and the Americas with the aim of creating an internationalist practice based in mutual aid in the face of the polycrises of our times. Written by nine revolutionaries from different parts of the world — Lebanon, France, Syria, Tunisia, Chile, Kurdistan, and Iran — the manifesto draws on encounters with participants in uprisings stretching from Sudan to Sri Lanka, Chile to Iran. Rather than celebrating these revolts, the text asks why they keep failing: why insurrectionist momentum so rarely survives contact with the institutions, opportunists, and repressive forces that move in to contain it.
The manifesto is honest and direct in its reflections. It looks at who starts uprisings and why different groups find each other (or don’t). It talks about the exhaustion of permanent crisis, the way international solidarity has been replaced by humanitarian management, and how popular anger gets absorbed by the right when the left has nothing to offer. Written collectively, across languages and borders, the text itself enacts the internationalism it makes a strong argument for.
What makes it worth reading is the rootedness of the text in lived experience. They are people who organised within these movements, fled because of them, and kept going across displacement. The manifesto is an attempt to understand what was built, what was lost, and what the next wave of struggle will inherit.
The pdf version is available in four different languages on their website here.
Making Death and Life in Palestine: Social Reproduction in Settler Colonialism
Edited by Tithi Bhattacharya and Susan Ferguson
Edited by Tithi Bhattacharya and Susan Ferguson, two leading voices in social reproduction theory (SRT), this volume extends SRT’s lessons from the context of “a gendered, racialised capitalism” to the specificity of settler colonial capitalism. These are lessons about the dual logic of life-making: “the daily and generational reproductive work that working-class people do”, work that is necessary to and necessarily devalued by capital as it expands. Nine chapters, a foreword, and a coda, extend this dialectic to Israeli settler colonialism, where the Zionist state vacillates between the logic of eliminating Palestinian life-making and that of exploiting it by turning “Palestinians into a cheap, mobile labour force”. As the editors point out, explicating this vacillation is important because it governs not only the Israeli state’s genocidal logic of eliminating, while exploiting, Palestinian life, but also the social reproduction of Israeli citizens and, most starkly, of Israeli settlers. The latter’s own life-making is premised on the availability of cheap, mobile Palestinian labour, all while their status as settlers depends on “erasing Palestinian life on Palestinian land”. Importantly, however, against settler colonial capitalism’s logic of death-making, this book centres SRT’s logic of life-making, where life exceeds mere survival. It is here, Ruth Wilson Gilmore’s foreword reminds us, that “creative aggression” can plant the seeds of “emancipation in rehearsal”. The book would thus be illuminating for readers who want to learn not just what it takes, to paraphrase the title of Bhattacharya’s contribution to the volume, to ‘forget to die’ under settler colonialism but also what it takes to ‘remember to live’─and flourish.
Behind Our Backs: Feminized Poetry and Capitalist Abstraction
By Amy De’Ath
Capitalism’s violent, zombie-like, real abstractions, Karl Marx told us─abstractions such as gender and race─rule the social world of human beings by fragmenting and disconnecting their lived experiences. That is, capital both violently makes and purports to ameliorate the gendered and racial differences that fragment human beings’ lives. This book offers an antidote by attending to the underlying desire of contemporary feminized poetry for transcending the “histories of separation that define subjective experiences of being socially bound by the logic of capital”. This is a genuinely novel approach, which rejuvenates the marriage between, on the one hand, critical theory and Marxism and, on the other hand, literary and feminist criticism. Through deeply researched engagement with the history of Marxism, including critical theory and social reproduction theory, and through creative, politicised close readings of the poetry of Bernadette Mayer, Kay Gabriel, Bhanu Kapil, Alli Warren, Marie Annharte Baker, and Hannah Black, among others, Amy De’Ath casts light on capital’s ‘impersonal compulsions’ that structure us ‘behind our backs’. In doing so, the book invites its readers to find and attune to a rhythm of life that is discordant with the “rhythms of capital accumulation”; one that may exceed what can be consciously articulated but also, for that very reason, one that, through lyricism and linguistic innovation, can dismantle capital’s silent compulsions behind capital’s own back.
The future that was: A History of Third World Feminism Against Authoritarianism
By Durba Mitra
If you have wanted to better understand how former colonies in South Asia, Africa, the Caribbean and beyond, used research on the history and ideas of women to radically reimagine a more just world, then this book is for you. These ideas of self-determination and equality focused on a new internationalism which stood in opposition to neocolonialism and postcolonial authoritarianism writing Third World feminism into being. By grappling with women’s intellectual production and activism from the 1970s onwards, Mitra is fundamentally trying to understand the role of women as knowledge producers themselves.
In Mitra’s own words when she first began to write the book, her first question was: What is the archive for the history of Third World feminism? Throughout this book, Mitra analyzes the “promises, challenges and failures of feminist thought in the decolonizing world”. There are richly illustrated portions of the work, which layers the analysis by providing contextualization of cartoons, photographs and posters throughout. This book would also be of interest to anyone who wanted to better understand the international industry of professional social scientific research on women, led by foreign funded research projects on development economics. This work is an opportunity to ask how we might create, imagine, demand a shared understanding which centres human flourishing as a shared right for everyone.
Escape from Capitalism: Economics is political and other liberating truths
By Clara E. Mattei
In clear, approachable language Mattei not only critiques and deconstructs, but also importantly offers alternative ways to begin organizing our economies beyond capitalism as an economic system. The book also does so, in just over 200 pages. This makes it a useful and important read for anyone wanting to engage on this topic, not just academics and policymakers.
This work emphasizes that capitalism doesn’t just naturally occur, but that it needs to constantly be maintained and is often violently enforced. Mattei unpacks the system by focusing on better understanding concepts like austerity, unemployment, Western domination, and democracy – and how very specific choices have been made in each of these cases which provide the very few with undue power and influence. The official blurb for this book states: Capitalism, isn’t inevitable, scientific, or natural – it’s a relatively young system that can be replaced. Inspired by a lineage of political resistance, Escape from Capitalism calls for us to challenge the broken economics of our times, and pave the way towards liberation. Whilst it would be impossible to be exhaustive in one piece of work, reading this would be opportunity to begin to ask how one can start organizing to make that a reality for those who are fundamentally critical of the current economic system.
This reading list was compiled by Alex Arnsten, Afreen Faridi, Michelle Groenwald, Pooja Patki, Marina Uzunova