Society

Vikings on the Silk Roads

The Norse ravaged much of Europe for centuries. They were also cosmopolitan explorers who followed trade winds into the Far East

Neil Price

Raising the threshold

The World Bank’s poverty line is inaccurate and out of date – an error that obscures the feebleness of market solutions

Attrishu Bordoloi

Could conquest return?

It’s only a century since US diplomats first persuaded the world that it’s wrong for countries to annex their neighbours

Kerry Goettlich

What’s an ancient Greek brick doing in a Sumerian city? An archeological investigation

16 minutes

There are no pure cultures

All of our religions, stories, languages and norms were muddled and mixed through mobility and exchange throughout history

Inanna Hamati-Ataya

From Afghanistan to Virginia – the Muslims who fought in the American Civil War

22 minutes

A frontline soldier’s moving account of the fabled ‘Christmas truce’ of 1914

12 minutes

‘She is living on in many hearts’ – Otto Frank on the legacy of his daughter’s diary

12 minutes

When a burial for slave trade victims is unearthed, a small island faces a reckoning

29 minutes

The route to progress

Anticolonial modernity was founded upon the fight for liberation from communists, capitalists and imperialists alike

Frank Gerits

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

Reconstructed hemisphere

In the 19th century, civil wars tore apart the US, Mexico and Argentina. Then came democracy’s fight against reaction

Evan C Rothera

The Asian world order

Before modern Europe existed there was a grand, interconnected political world, rich in scientific and artistic exchange

Ayşe Zarakol

A silken web

From its mythic beginnings in a Chinese garden, the story of silk is a window into how weaving has shaped human history

Peter Frankopan, Marie-Louise Nosch & Feng Zhao

Hear from blasphemes, sceptics and free-thinkers in this ‘tour of medieval unbelief’

52 minutes

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

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

5 minutes

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

Settler colonialism

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

Lachlan McNamee

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