During the last century or so there has developed a new ‘public role’ for history: the past as personal history, a vital element in the nourishing of people in society. During the past decades a new perception of what history is has manifested itself on two levels: first a shift of...

This classic pamphlet takes you through the Paris Peace Conference and the 'German Question', Peacemaking and the Treaty of Versailles, Europe and the German question after Versailles.

This Classic Pamphlet was published in 1937 (the centenary of the accession of Queen Victoria, who succeeded to the throne on June 20, 1837). Synopsis of contents: 1. Is the Victorian Age a distinct 'period' of history? Landmarks establishing its beginning: the Reform Bill, railways, other inventions, new leaders in...

Zheng Yangwen shows that despite its association with trade, war and politics, opium was first of all a history of consumption. Opium has fascinated generations of scholars and generated excellent scholarship on the opium trade, Anglo-Chinese relations, the two opium wars, and Commissioner Lin. The field has diversified in the post-Mao...

On 29 January 1949 there was a debate in the British House of Commons. When Winston Churchill, the leader of the opposition, interrupted Ernest Bevin’s history of the Palestine problem he was told by the Foreign Secretary: ‘over half a million Arabs have been turned by the Jewish immigrants into...

Aadam Patel offers an insight into the complexities of the recent economic history of a remote Pacific island. Nauru is an isolated island located in the Pacific Ocean approximately 4,400km north-east from Australia and 1,300km north-east from the Solomon Islands. With an area of just below 21 squared kilometres, it is...

At 9am on 27 August 1896, following an ultimatum, five ships of the Royal Navy began a bombardment of the Royal Palace and Harem in Zanzibar. Thirty-eight, or 40, or 43 minutes later, depending on which source you believe, the bombardment stopped when the white flag of surrender was raised...

Friendly societies were designed to help members to cope with the illness, death or unemployment of a household's breadwinner. Each month members, mostly men, paid into the society, often at a meeting in a pub and in return payments from the pooled funds were made to ill members and to...

In our continuing Aspects of War series Hugh Gault reveals that the flu pandemic, which began during the First World War, presented another danger that challenged people’s lives and relationships. Wounded in the neck on the first day of the battle of the Somme, 1 July 1916, Arthur Conan Doyle’s son Kingsley...

John Major discusses an astonishing aspect of past Anglo-American history. All great powers have developed contingency plans for war with each other, and the United States in the early twentieth century was no exception. Each of Washington’s schemes was given a distinctive colour. Green mapped out intervention in neighbouring Mexico,...

Michael Sturma examines an aspect of the cultural impact of the West in the South Pacific. ‘States of undress, or the partially clad body, invite particularly ambivalent responses.’ One of the main preoccupation’s of early European visitors to the South Pacific was the nudity or partial nudity of the indigenous...

The historiography of the British Empire has taken a long course since the era of decolonisation. Political histories of the late twentieth century considered the mechanisms connecting crises at the ‘periphery’ with metropolitan decision-making. One rather overused stereotype was the so-called ‘man on the spot’ pushing empire forward, be they...

The murder of George Floyd during the summer of 2020 and the ongoing ‘culture war’ in Britain over the legacy of the British Empire have reignited interest in imperial history. This focuses, in particular, on the question of the empire’s impact on Britain itself: on how the act of conquering...

Decolonisation is a contested term. When first used in 1952, it referred to a political event: a colony gaining independence; it has since come to describe a process. When, where and why this process began, however, and whether it has ended, are all fiercely debated. Is it about new flags...

Michael T. Davis compares the parallels between the democratic expectations, or possibilities, of modern-day China with Britain's democratic evolution from the eighteenth century to the emerging democracy of the nineteenth century. The future is an unfamiliar place for historians. Yet we stand on the edge of an historic shift away...

Winston Churchill had a major impact on British and world history in the twentieth century. A great deal has been written on his roles in the two world wars and on many aspects of his career. Yet relatively little attention has been paid to his relations with the Islamic world....

On the surface, the period 1914 to 1945 seems to have encompassed massive changes in the position of women in Europe, in response to the demands of war and revolution. Yet historians have questioned the extent of the transformation, since the acquisition of the vote, as well as improvements in...

Rowan Cookson offers us the opportunity to compare our contemporary anxieties with a stressful era in American history. Eighteenth-century women’s friendship is worth considering at this time. In my undergraduate dissertation, I concluded that white wealthy women’s friendship in eighteenth-century America equired long distance communication, involved labour and perpetuated race and class...

Michael Dunne reveals the complex background to the modern elaborate constitutional process of electing a United States President. On Wednesday, 20 January 2021, Joseph R. Biden, Jr., was inaugurated as the 46th President of the United States of America.  In years to come these simple words may seem prosaic and...

Henry Unwin Addington, a nephew of the former British prime minister, Henry Addington, had joined the Foreign Office at the age of 16 in 1806. After serving in various junior diplomatic posts in Europe he learnt in 1822 that he was to be promoted to secretary of legation in Washington....