history

I’m just back from France, where my direct experience of riots and looting was non-existent, although I had walked past a Montpellier branch of Swarkowski the day before it ceased to be. My indirect experience was quite extensive though, since I watched the talking heads on French TV project their instant analysis onto the unfolding […]

What a particular shade of black can teach us about an ancient civilization.

The post Finding the Color of an Empire appeared first on Nautilus.

Quinn Slobodian’s new book, Crack-Up Capitalism is an original and striking analysis of a weird apparent disjuncture. Libertarians and classical liberals famously claim to be opposed to state power. So why do some of them resort to it so readily? In his previous book, The Globalists, Quinn argued that globalization was poorly understood. It wasn’t […]

"I want to find a place of grace far from the stench of the media. I want to go where I am not reminded of the social media sewer."

Genuine anti-racist internationalism calls for much greater radicalism, writes Sunit Bagree

Jon Bloomfield examines the similarities between the 1905 Aliens Bill and the current Illegal Migration Bill and inflammatory rhetoric around refugees

In the age of self-experiment, scientists took mind-altering drugs to test the limits of subjectivity.

The post The 19th-Century Trippers Who Probed the Mind appeared first on Nautilus.

The push to recognise the Frontier Wars at the Australian War Memorial, the teaching of this history in many high schools, and growing commemoration of Frontier War incidents is seeing parallels being drawn between the heroism of First Nations’ warriors and that of the ANZACs. A proud warrior tradition Australia is experiencing a quantum shift Continue reading »

Tianxia, ‘under Heaven’, is a concept deriving from ancient China, but undergoing numerous interpretations over the ages. It refers to an idealised territorial/moral world order, equal but harmonious. Tianxia should be associated with Tianming, “the mandate of Heaven”. A democratic notion, this asserts that once a ruler loses the mandate, he also loses legitimacy and Continue reading »