Alexander Clapp

Two thousand miles​ north-west of Rio de Janeiro, the Javari Valley is a swathe of the Brazilian Amazon larger than Scotland and accessible only by boat or helicopter. Its ecological riches and isolated tribes – sixteen known groups, the largest concentration of uncontacted peoples on earth, with drones intermittently detecting the vestiges of other tribes – have tempted...

Scamming is no less grotesque an example of globalisation than the seafood slave industry operating out of Thailand or the cargo-ship dismantling business devastating the shores of Bangladesh. One particularly striking aspect of cyber-slavery is that its victims are trapped in remote compounds, isolated from their friends and family, even as they remain constantly connected to the outside world through the internet.

In August​ 2011, a Montenegrin sailor called Goran Radoman fled the scene of a late-night car crash in Havana. He was arrested three months later at José Martí International Airport and sentenced to seven years in prison for manslaughter. According to the Serbian TV channel Insajder, the highest levels of the Serbian state lobbied the Cuban government for Radoman’s...

The Greeks threatened the painstakingly constructed post-Napoleonic order. There were three million of them, Christians who lived across an area stretching from the Greek mainland to Cyprus to the coasts of Asia Minor to Constantinople itself, all within an Ottoman Empire whose decline was the subject of open diplomatic speculation. ‘What is Greece?’ Metternich had asked when the prospect of an independent Greek state was raised at the Congress of Vienna. No one could give a precise reply. 

The hotel​ where I worked was called the Mykonos Grace. It was a whitewashed stucco building of 32 rooms. Most went for hundreds of euros a night – around what each of the staff made in a month. The cheapest rooms were at street level. An angry French couple once uploaded a video to TripAdvisor of every truck that rumbled past their room over the course of an afternoon. Rooms on the...