Society

Beyond kingdoms and empires

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

David Wengrow

The route to progress

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

Frank Gerits

Archeological discoveries animate the life of the warrior queen who took on Rome

6 minutes

Chastising little brother

Why did Japanese Confucians enthusiastically support Imperial Japan’s murderous conquest of China, the homeland of Confucius?

Shaun O’Dwyer

A United States of Europe

A free and unified Europe was first imagined by Italian radicals in the 19th century. Could we yet see their dream made real?

Fernanda Gallo

India and indigeneity

In a country of such extraordinary diversity, the UN definition of ‘indigenous’ does little more than fuel ethnic violence

Dikshit Sarma Bhagabati

Why America fell for guns

The US today has extraordinary levels of gun ownership. But to see this as a venerable tradition is to misread history

Megan Kang

Legacy of the Scythians

How the ancient warrior people of the steppes have found themselves on the cultural frontlines of Russia’s war against Ukraine

Peter Mumford

Inventing Hindu supremacy

Vinayak Savarkar ridiculed Gandhi, preaching that anti-Muslim violence was the only means to unite India into a nation

Mihir Dalal

The mythos of leadership

How the biblical King David and Machiavelli’s Prince can help us understand the dominant view of leaders as individualists

Moshik Temkin

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

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