Oliver Cussen

Jean-​Paul Marat did not have many friends in politics. Most of the members of the revolutionary assemblies were lawyers, and Marat had a habit of writing the kind of thing that makes a lawyer nervous. Throughout the summer of 1790 the readers of his daily pamphlet, L’Ami du peuple, were urged ‘to lop off six hundred heads’ to save ‘five or six million...

Alittle more​ than a decade ago, the historian Dipesh Chakrabarty organised a conference at the University of Chicago on the history and politics of the Anthropocene. Chakrabarty had published an article four years earlier in which he argued that the science of anthropogenic climate change undermined assumptions about agency, experience and causation that are fundamental to the writing of...

On the​ Des Plaines River, just south of Chicago, the United States Army Corps of Engineers is at war with Asian carp. The fish were first imported to America in the 1970s to eat up the weeds and algae in catfish ponds and sewage treatment lagoons around Little Rock. But they soon escaped into the Arkansas River, and from there into the Mississippi River basin, disrupting food chains and...

The Earth​ aged millions of years over the course of the 18th century. In 1650 the Irish archbishop James Ussher had dated creation to around 6 p.m. on 22 October 4004 BCE. His estimate was based on a synthesis of sacred history and Persian, Greek and Roman myth, and so it satisfied both theologians and citizens of the Republic of Letters. A century later, neither the church nor classics...

For​ the late French historian Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, Thomas Robert Malthus was an indispensable guide to the agrarian past. Le Roy Ladurie applied Malthus’s argument that population grows faster than subsistence to the archives of Languedoc, where, in the empirical detail of parish registers, cadastral surveys, tax rolls and price series, he perceived ‘the immense respiration...