video
Human rights and justice
When a burial for slave trade victims is unearthed, a small island faces a reckoning
29 minutes
essay
Global history
The route to progress
Anticolonial modernity was founded upon the fight for liberation from communists, capitalists and imperialists alike
Frank Gerits
video
Architecture
West Africa was once an architectural laboratory. Is it time for a revival?
12 minutes
essay
Global history
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
essay
Global history
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
essay
Global history
The Asian world order
Before modern Europe existed there was a grand, interconnected political world, rich in scientific and artistic exchange
Ayşe Zarakol
essay
History of technology
A silken web
From its mythic beginnings in a Chinese garden, the story of silk is a window into how weaving has shaped human history
Peter Frankopan, Marie-Louise Nosch & Feng Zhao
video
Religion
Hear from blasphemes, sceptics and free-thinkers in this ‘tour of medieval unbelief’
52 minutes
essay
Education
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
video
Global history
Meet the jesters who’ve spoken truth to power around the globe and across centuries
5 minutes
essay
Religion
Praying in shoes
The Sunni movement of Salafism was born at the beginning of the 20th century, with the goal of modelling life on the 7th
Aaron Rock-Singer
essay
Nations and empires
Settler colonialism
Displacing and destroying peoples by colonisation is not just a historical Western evil but a global and contemporary one
Lachlan McNamee
essay
Nations and empires
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
video
Architecture
Tour the European architecture that dreamed of a wondrous, fictitious China
16 minutes
video
Thinkers and theories
Photographs offer a colonialist window to the past – one that must be challenged
14 minutes
video
Cities
The rise and fall of Kowloon Walled City, Hong Kong’s infamous urban monolith
18 minutes
essay
Global history
The polycrisis
Is this the word we need to describe unprecedented convergences between ecological, political and economic strife?
Ville Lähde
essay
Environmental history
Masts like a forest
How the trees of China – fir, camphor, ironwood and nanmu – were used to build an empire that lasted for centuries
Ian M Miller
essay
Demography and migration
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
video
Nations and empires
The strange tale of how mangoes became hallowed objects in Maoist China
6 minutes
video
Art
Tracing Goya’s ‘dark’ journey from Spanish court painter to macabre visionary
51 minutes
video
Global history
The famed medieval map that stretched beyond Earth to heaven, history and myth
5 minutes
essay
Language and linguistics
The problem with English
Is Earth’s most-spoken language a living ‘gift’ or a many-headed ‘monster’? Both views distract us from the real dilemma
Mario Saraceni
essay
Global history
After the mother tongues
Cultural exchange between Iran and India led to the creation of literary histories that inspired modern nationalism
Alexander Jabbari