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Imagine. It’s 1965, you’re at home in on Prenzlauer Berg, the Berlin Wall is visible from your window, and you’re having friends over to your flat. Someone brings the latest Thelonious Monk record, smuggled across the border from the West, and everyone gathers round in excitement. You could go to jail for this, you realize—after […]
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In my recent Cambridge University Press book, A Renaissance of Violence, I document a frightening rise in civil violence in the Italian city of Bologna in the seventeenth century. I show how what began as a spike of homicides in the rural countryside in the 1630s moved into the province’s urban core by the 1650s […]
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Sister Mary Aloysia Joseph Wright of the English Canonesses of the Holy Sepulchre, Liège; oil painting
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German soldier on home leave with his family, 1942.
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No state can do without taxation. States need to pay for bureaucrats, soldiers, policemen, infrastructure, and the more ambitious ones also pay for schools, hospitals and social security programs. Fiscal capacity forms the backbone of the state, and both sovereign and colonial regimes confront the revenue imperative. But how, in the case of colonial rule, […]
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Great children’s stories embody the spirit of nations. How else would they become classics? Kornei Chukovsky’s Krokodil, Soviet Russia’s first children’s story, appeared when Russian culture was pivoting from its prerevolutionary past to a Soviet future. By nature, rather than design, the work carried key features of earlier cultural traditions and presaged changes on the […]
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The decades following the demise of the Carolingian Empire in 888 were traditionally seen as a downward spiral of political fragmentation and cultural stagnation: a ‘mind-the-gap’ period between the ninth-century Carolingian achievement and the intellectual vibrancy and royal assertiveness of the eleventh and twelfth centuries. The humanist Lorenzo Valla famously described this period as ‘an […]
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