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Illustration: Paul Delaroche, Portrait of James Alexandre de Pourtales-Gorgier (1846)
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How we understand and respond to failure is one of the most defining features of how our lives pan out. Some people refuse to fail. Some people expect to fail. Some people always hide from their own failings (most of these currently seem to be in politics). Others always look for failings in themselves, or […]
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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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