The Qing Empire was about to feel the full force of history’s most successful narco-state: the British Empire.
The Armenian genocide was a horrific illustration of the convulsions that could seize a multi-ethnic polity trying to mutate from empire into nation state.
Some [surrendering Germans] would crawl on their knees,’ recalled one British soldier, ‘holding a picture of a woman or a child in their hands above their heads but everyone was killed. The excitement...
Protection Certificate) to open a lemonade stand in New York City?
People born in other countries accounted for 14.6 per cent of the population in 1910 compared with 12.9 per cent at the 2010 census.
My generation feels like it’s the lucky one,’ she told me one night. ‘Our grandparents had the Great Leap Forward, our parents had the Cultural Revolution. But we get to study, to travel, to make mone...
Let every nation know, declared Kennedy in his inaugural address, that we shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe, in order to assure the survival a...
John [Ivan] the Terrible,
Japan in the 1930s became a garrison state.43 But it was one which carried within it the promise of a ‘warfare-welfare state’, offered social security in return for military sacrifice.
It was the Germans who first spoke of the war as ‘der Weltkrieg’, the world war; the British preferred the ‘European War’ or, later, the ‘Great War’.
Indeed, there were those who maintained that Russia’s defeat at the hands of the Japanese was itself the result of a Jewish conspiracy. According to S. A. Nilus, a secret Jewish council known as the S...
In 1515 a decree of Sultan Selim I had threatened with death anyone found using the printing press.36 This failure to reconcile Islam with scientific progress was to prove disastrous. Having once prov...
I, the British Empire began as a primarily economic phenomenon, its growth powered by commerce and consumerism. The demand for sugar drew merchants tot he carribean. British were not the first Empire...
Giving the world’s poor mobile telephony is proving easier than providing them with clean water
Aunque Chamberlain seguía negándose a escuchar el consejo de Churchill de vincular a Rusia al tratado anglofrancés, Halifax hizo pública una nota de prensa afirmando que, en el caso de un ataque alemá...
August Belmont was widely attacked in the North during the American Civil War because he favoured a negotiated peace with the South and supported General George McClellan’s nom ination as Democrat can...
Any investor unwise or patriotic enough to hang on to gilt-edged securities (consols or the new UK War Loans) would have suffered inflation-adjusted losses of -46 per cent by 1920. Even the real retur...
Americans of all ages, all conditions, all minds constantly unite. Not only do they have commercial and industrial associations in which all take part, but they also have a thousand other kinds: relig...
American society was justly famed in the nineteenth century for the richness of its associational life. Indeed, as we have seen, Alexis de Tocqueville had seen this as one of the foundations of the co...
American legislators scarcely rested until Chinese immigration to the United States had been altogether stopped. The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 suspended immigration of Chinese for ten years, intro...