Britain’s Cold War in the Caribbean

Some historians such as the bullish right-wing TV pundit Niall Ferguson have tried to celebrate the British Empire as a kind of civilising mission and a genuinely co-operative endeavour between coloniser and colonised.  Britain’s imperium, they suggest, should be a model for the current troubled nation-building efforts of the USA. It might be thought that …

Dark Age Climate Change

In recent years historians have challenged the idea of the “Dark Ages.”  From the Renaissance onwards many writers began to think of this period in European history, roughly from the fall of Rome in the 5th century AD up to the first millennium, as an era of social and cultural disintegration, lawlessness and barbarism. Historians …

Angry white men?

Have you ever wondered why the political beneficiaries of the current crisis tend to be right-wing populist parties such as UKIP in Britain, the Tea Party in America, or the Five Star movement in Italy?  With UKIP now contesting 73 % of seats in the local council elections in Britain on the 2nd May, as …