Society

Beyond kingdoms and empires

A revolution in archaeology is transforming our picture of past populations and the scope of human freedoms

David Wengrow

Societies of perpetual movement

Why do hunter-gatherers refuse to be sedentary? New answers are emerging from the depths of the Congolese rainforest

Cecilia Padilla-Iglesias

One ship, many stories

How a single, unglamorous, workaday merchant vessel tells the history of the 19th-century world in many violent chapters

Boyd Cothran & Adrian Shubert

One story, in a sea of millions, of swimming from China to freedom in Hong Kong

14 minutes

Asians in early America

Asian sailors came to the west coast of America in 1587. Within a century they were settled in colonies from Mexico to Peru

Diego Javier Luis

Matrimony and the market

The sexual revolution promised new norms of intimacy based on egalitarianism. So far, only the rich have cashed in

Daniel Tutt

Finding the First Americans

Archaeology and genetics can’t yet agree on when humans first arrived in the Americas. That’s good science and here’s why

Jennifer Raff

How the world’s harshest lockdown hit India’s millions of migrant workers

27 minutes

Living closer together

Urban density was once seen as a sign of unhealthiness and poverty. But today it is necessary to make cities sustainable

Max Holleran

The ungreat replacement

Workers in the West have indeed been repressed – but not by immigrants. The policies of their own governments are to blame

John Rapley

In 1980, two feuding professors bet on the fate of humanity. Who won?

5 minutes

Tension, bureaucracy and deep humanity define life aboard a refugee rescue ship

27 minutes

Safety is fatal

Humans need closeness and belonging but any society that closes its gates is doomed to atrophy. How do we stay open?

David Napier

The hopes and fears of the migrants selling souvenirs in the shadow of the Eiffel Tower

15 minutes

Exiles on Main Street

To respect exiles as real and important political actors, we should get over casting them as saints, threats or victims

Ashwini Vasanthakumar

Gulf slave society

The glittering city-states of the Persian Gulf fit the classicist Moses Finley’s criteria of genuine slave societies

Bernard Freamon

How the Barbican brought back living into the working heart of London

22 minutes