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Society

Essays and videos on social issues, history, political life and the future
Many figures in traditional dress are gathered beneath a structure from which hang paper lists. In the foreground are horses. The colours are muted with age
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essay

Education

The exam that broke society

Keju, China’s incredibly difficult civil service test, strengthened the state at the cost of freedom and creativity

Yasheng Huang

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video

Global history

Meet the jesters who’ve spoken truth to power around the globe and across centuries

5 minutes

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Religion

Praying in shoes

The Sunni movement of Salafism was born at the beginning of the 20th century, with the goal of modelling life on the 7th

Aaron Rock-Singer

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Nations and empires

Settler colonialism

Displacing and destroying peoples by colonisation is not just a historical Western evil but a global and contemporary one

Lachlan McNamee

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Nations and empires

Dream of the Russian tropics

Imperial Russia had little access to the bountiful tropics that other empires enjoyed. So it created its own in the Caucasus

Oleksandr Polianichev

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video

Architecture

Tour the European architecture that dreamed of a wondrous, fictitious China

16 minutes

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Thinkers and theories

Photographs offer a colonialist window to the past – one that must be challenged

14 minutes

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Cities

The rise and fall of Kowloon Walled City, Hong Kong’s infamous urban monolith

18 minutes

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Global history

The polycrisis

Is this the word we need to describe unprecedented convergences between ecological, political and economic strife?

Ville Lähde

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Environmental history

Masts like a forest

How the trees of China – fir, camphor, ironwood and nanmu – were used to build an empire that lasted for centuries

Ian M Miller

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Demography and migration

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

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Nations and empires

The strange tale of how mangoes became hallowed objects in Maoist China

6 minutes

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Art

Tracing Goya’s ‘dark’ journey from Spanish court painter to macabre visionary

51 minutes

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Global history

The famed medieval map that stretched beyond Earth to heaven, history and myth

5 minutes

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Language and linguistics

The problem with English

Is Earth’s most-spoken language a living ‘gift’ or a many-headed ‘monster’? Both views distract us from the real dilemma

Mario Saraceni

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Global history

After the mother tongues

Cultural exchange between Iran and India led to the creation of literary histories that inspired modern nationalism

Alexander Jabbari

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Global history

The strange journey of the Parthenon Marbles to the British Museum

10 minutes

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Global history

It never existed

The idea of a ‘precolonial’ Africa is theoretically vacuous, racist and plain wrong about the continent’s actual history

Olúfẹ́mi Táíwò

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Economic history

The golden fuel

Asia’s rise to economic power and food security has been powered not by rice but by American maize, the ultimate flex-crop

Peter A Coclanis

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Global history

Geopolitics is for losers

The concept of geopolitics comes from German and Russian attempts to explain defeat and reverse loss of influence

Harold James

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The ancient world

What did the Rosetta Stone’s inscription actually communicate?

17 minutes

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Comparative philosophy

Medieval but not Christian

It’s shocking that histories of medieval philosophy celebrate only Christian thinkers, ignoring Islamic and Jewish thought

Yitzhak Y Melamed

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Gender and identity

Timothée built his identity around his absent father. What happens when they meet?

17 minutes

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Global history

Ever more land and labour

Centuries of capitalism saw the global countryside ruthlessly converted into cheap commodities. But at what cost?

Sven Beckert & Ulbe Bosma