Society

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

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