Society

Secularism in Iran

Postcolonial intellectuals and Iran’s rulers agree that secularism is just Western imperialism in disguise. They are wrong

Patrick Hassan & Hossein Dabbagh

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

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

The Arab Kingdom

Amid the chaos of the First World War, a new pan-Arab empire was proclaimed. It faltered, but its historical lessons remain

Adam Mestyan

The great libraries of Rome

Passersby could wander at will into grand public libraries in imperial Rome. Could they trust what they found inside?

Fabio Fernandes

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

Models of antiquity

Radicals in the Age of Revolution saw the classical world as a common inheritance that could aid their fight for liberty

Francesca Langer

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

6 minutes

Guide to a foreign past

The iconoclastic French historian Paul Veyne illuminated the past by showing how deeply alien it is to the present

Carlos Noreña

At the Kremlin in 1943

Stalin presented Orthodox leaders with a proposal: the Soviet state that had destroyed their Church would bring it back

Kathryn David

After the mother tongues

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

Alexander Jabbari

The strange journey of the Parthenon Marbles to the British Museum

10 minutes

Hitozukuri

Japan’s Cold War education policy used religion to ‘make’ the ideal humans needed by its nascent economy. Did it work?

Jolyon Baraka Thomas

The other Cleopatra

Daughter of Cleopatra and Mark Antony, she became the influential queen of a mysterious, abundant North African kingdom

Jane Draycott

It never existed

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

Olúfẹ́mi Táíwò

Wanderlust of the ancients

The Roman Empire enabled an early version of globalisation that offered travellers adventure, novelty and opportunity

Fabio Fernandes

An unholy alliance

Authoritarian leaders who play the religious card are not mere hypocrites. There’s something far more troubling going on

Suzanne Schneider