As the mob incited by President Donald Trump ransacked the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Mark Milley, “saw the Nazi imagery in the crowd.” Milley told his staff: “These guys look like the brown shirts to me. This looks like a Reichstag moment.” He was […]
Read MoreHow to view the history of India in a global perspective ? One answer is to frame it within a project of ‘provincialisation’ of Europe as advocated by Dipesh Chakrabarty. But there is an alternative possibility with Sanjay Subrahmanyam’s call for ‘connected histories’. I have explored it in ‘India and the World : A History […]
Read MoreAs the United Kingdom scrambles to find a new place for itself in the world following its withdrawal from the European Union in January 2020, there is much talk in political circles of building a ‘Global Britain’. The promise of the country’s transformation into an independent global power is for many a tantalising one – […]
Read MoreJune 5th is World Environment Day, an annual event of the United Nations Environment Programme since 1974. This year the theme is Time for Nature. June 5 falls at a hectic time in 2020, with one crisis nested inside another like Russian matryoshka dolls. The United States is roiling in civil unrest more serious than […]
Read MoreWriting in The Guardian, Marina Hyde eloquently illustrated why the last thing we need just now is Second World War metaphors. ‘Plague is a standalone horseman of the apocalypse’ she observed, ‘he doesn’t need to catch a ride with war’. Looking back at the war isn’t going to tell us how to ‘defeat’ an invisible […]
Read MoreNo 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, […]
Read MoreIn this post, Professor Daniel Woolf, author of A Concise History of History: Global Historiography from Antiquity to the Present cuts to the core of the debates around the internet and its pros and cons as a tool for historical research, teaching and public awareness of the past. Can we limit the potential spread of misinformation […]
Read MoreIgnacio Sánchez-Cuenca, author of 'The Historical Roots of Political Violence', on the causes of 20th century revolutionary terrorism.
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