International Relations

Relations across the UK, Europe and globally are frequently changing, and have done so across our history. How these relations are recorded, monitored and treated are discussed in the collection of articles and podcasts here. The very concept of international relations is explored as are when boundaries and discussions between states and groups started to matter. What are the procedures, protocols and outcomes of a world according to the history of international relations are all under scrutiny?

Sort by: Date (Newest first) | Title A-Z
Show: All | Articles | Podcasts | Multipage Articles
  • Podcast Series: The Spanish Golden Age

    Multipage Article

    An HA Podcasted History of the Spanish Golden Age featuring Dr Glyn Redworth of Manchester University and Dr Francois Soyer of the University of Southampton.

    Click to view
  • Podcast Series: The Tudors

    Multipage Article

    An HA Podcasted History of the Tudors featuring Dr Sue Doran, Dr Steven Gunn, Dr Michael Everett & Dr Anna Whitelock.

    Click to view
  • Podcast Series: The Umayyad and Abbasid Caliphates

    Multipage Article

    In this set of podcasts Emeritus Professor Gerald Hawting of SOAS, University of London provides an introduction to the Umayyad (661-750) and Abbasid (750-1258) Caliphates.

    Click to view
  • Podcast: Richard Evans Medlicott -The Origins of the First World War

    Article

    This year the Historical Association's Medlicott medal for services to history went to Professor Sir Richard Evans. Richard Evans is the Regius Professor of History at Cambridge and President of Wolfson College, Cambridge. He has written numerous highly respected and internationally best-selling books. Evans is bests known for his works on...

    Click to view
  • Political and social attitudes underpinning the 1924 Olympics

    Article

    The 1924 Olympics in Paris are best known to many British people through the ‘Chariots of Fire’ film from the early 1980s. The film touches on some of the political and social attitudes prevalent in the 1920s and Steve Illingworth explores these issues further in this article. It is argued...

    Click to view
  • Polychronicon 143: the Balfour Declaration

    Article

    In a letter from the British Foreign Secretary, A.J. Balfour, to Lord Rothschild, the Anglo-Jewish leader, on 2 November 1917, the British Government declared its intention to ‘facilitate' the ‘establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people'. The Balfour Declaration, as it became known, was endorsed by...

    Click to view
  • Real Lives: A German captain’s perspective on the end of WWI

    Article

    Our series ‘Real Lives’ seeks to put the story of the ordinary person into our great historical narrative. We are all part of the rich fabric of the communities in which we live and we are affected sto greater and lesser degrees by the big events that happen on a daily...

    Click to view
  • Real Lives: Alexander Stewart

    Article

    Our series ‘Real Lives’ seeks to put the story of the ordinary person into our great historical narrative. If you have any people that you think might also fit this category and would like to write about them, please do contact: martin.hoare@history.org.uk  Alexander Stewart’s life combined hardship, resilience and moral conviction....

    Click to view
  • Real Lives: Cecily Cook

    Article

    Our series ‘Real Lives’ seeks to put the story of the ordinary person into our great historical narrative. We are all part of the rich fabric of the communities in which we live and we are affected to greater and lesser degrees by the big events that happen on a daily...

    Click to view
  • Real Lives: Henry Allingham and the First World War

    Article

    Our series ‘Real Lives’ seeks to put the story of the ordinary person into our great historical narrative. We are all part of the rich fabric of the communities in which we live and we are affected to greater and lesser degrees by the big events that happen on a daily...

    Click to view
  • Real Lives: Maharaja’s German: Anthony Pohlmann in India

    Article

    Our series ‘Real Lives’ seeks to put the story of the ordinary person into our great historical narrative. We are all part of the rich fabric of the communities in which we live and we are affected to greater and lesser degrees by the big events that happen on a daily...

    Click to view
  • Real Lives: Surviving the War in the Soviet Union: recollections of a child deportee

    Article

    This 'Real Lives' piece is based on a series of interviews Annette Ormanczyk carried out in 2019 with Mrs Irena Persak, who was deported as a five-year-old child with her family in February 1940. As well as offering a fascinating personal account of life in the Soviet Union during the Second...

    Click to view
  • Real Lives: The Reverend John Chilembwe

    Article

    Our series ‘Real Lives’ seeks to put the story of the ordinary person into our great historical narrative. We are all part of the rich fabric of the communities in which we live and we are affected to greater and lesser degrees by the big events that happen on a daily...

    Click to view
  • Recruiting volunteers to fight in the First World War

    Article

    ‘Your Country Needs You’ and other posters are still remembered today as a prominent vehicle by which men were encouraged to fight in the First World War. Virtually absent from the literature, however, is analysis of the impact of thousands of recruitment meetings and their speakers. Robert Bullard explores the contribution...

    Click to view
  • Refugees in twentieth-century Britain

    1st June 2021

    In this recorded session from the 2021 HA virtual conference, Dr Becky Taylor of the University of East Anglia uses a selection of documents to explore what the sudden arrival of vulnerable strangers might reveal about the changing nature of modern Britain. 

    Click to view
  • Shadow states and armed struggle

    Article

    How did groups resisting the creation of new borders after 1947 use shadow state structures?  Luke Rimmo Lego, Abigail Tamang and Sneha Singh with Laishram Bullion and Chinglai Ngamba Moirangthem explore the history of these structures and their development over the past half century.

    Click to view
  • Stalin, Propaganda, and Soviet Society during the Great Terror

    Article

    Sarah Davies explores the evidence that even in the most repressive phases of Stalin’s rule, there existed a flourishing ‘shadow culture’, a lively and efficient unofficial network of information and ideas. 'Today a man only talks freely with his wife — at night, with the blankets pulled over his head.’...

    Click to view
  • Stalinism

    Article

    Stalin's remarkable career raises quite fundamental questions for anyone interested in history. Marxists, whose philosophy should cause them to downgrade the role of ‘great men' as an explanation of great events, have problems in fitting Stalin into the materialist interpretation of history: did not this man ride rough-shod over the...

    Click to view
  • Sutton Hoo and long-distance contacts

    Article

    This article looks at the importance of long distance connections between the English kingdoms and the eastern Mediterranean in the sixth to eighth centuries. The relationship between the ship burial at Sutton Hoo – in the eastern English county of Suffolk – the people who discovered and excavated it, and what...

    Click to view
  • Sweden’s forgotten revolution

    Article

    People are sometimes surprised to learn that for much of the seventeenth and early eighteenth century, Sweden was one of Europe’s great powers. The revolution that transformed Swedish government following the death of Karl XII at the end of the Great Northern War is still less widely-known. But though largely carried...

    Click to view