Erasures

Colm Tóibín: The Great Irish Famine, 30 July 1998

... and, as Taoiseach, he decided to make public money available for this. The project was taken on by Robert Dudley Edwards from University College Dublin, who promised that a book, one thousand pages long, made up of essays by various experts, would be in print by 1946. The Government released a grant of £1500. Over the next few years Edwards worked with a ...

Societies

Perry Anderson, 6 July 1989

A Treatise on Social Theory. Vol. II: Substantive Social Theory 
by W.G. Runciman.
Cambridge, 493 pp., £35, February 1989, 0 521 24959 7
Show More
Show More
... a rare moment of apparent inadvertence, he paradoxically classifies the Norman monarchy after the Conquest as absolutist. There have been so many perverse claims for English exceptionalism in this period that it would be churlish to make too much of this contradiction. But it points to a more general problem. The tacit modulation from society to state in the ...

Peace without Empire

Perry Anderson, 2 December 2021

Conquering Peace: From the Enlightenment to the European Union 
by Stella Ghervas.
Harvard, 528 pp., £31.95, March, 978 0 674 97526 2
Show More
Show More
... by the covenant of the League of Nations that Wilson winched into it. With British helpmeets – Robert Cecil, Walter Phillimore – assisting, it was this initiative that gave rise to the spirit of Geneva. Lauding the League as the first international organisation for peace in which smaller powers set the tone, Ghervas is at pains to clear it of customary ...

Belt, Boots and Spurs

Jonathan Raban: Dunkirk, 1940, 5 October 2017

... England’, and the town earned a chapter to itself in an 1897 book on women’s sweated labour, Robert Harborough Sherard’s White Slaves of England. In the 19th and early 20th centuries, Cradley Heath was known as the world’s capital of hand-hammered chain-making, and boasted, somewhat weirdly, that the anchor chain of the Titanic had been manufactured ...

Red Power

Thomas Meaney: Indigenous Political Strategies, 18 July 2024

Indigenous Continent: The Epic Contest for North America 
by Pekka Hämäläinen.
Norton, 571 pp., £17.99, October 2023, 978 1 324 09406 7
Show More
The Rediscovery of America: Native Peoples and the Unmaking of US History 
by Ned Blackhawk.
Yale, 596 pp., £28, April 2023, 978 0 300 24405 2
Show More
Our History Is the Future: Standing Rock Versus the Dakota Access Pipeline and the Long Tradition of Indigenous Resistance 
by Nick Estes.
Haymarket, 320 pp., £14.99, July, 979 8 88890 082 6
Show More
Show More
... The conquest​ of most of the North American continent by Anglophone settlers took roughly three hundred years, from the first stake at Jamestown to the last bullet at Wounded Knee. The Spanish had subdued a much vaster population of Indigenous peoples in Mexico and Peru in just under half a century and expected to repeat the formula, mobilising the Indigenous tributaries against the Indigenous core as they moved up from their outposts in Florida, only to find there was no power centre to replace ...

The Righteous Community

Jackson Lears: Legacies of the War on Terror, 24 July 2025

Homeland: The War on Terror in American Life 
by Richard Beck.
Verso, 556 pp., £30, March, 978 1 83674 072 8
Show More
Show More
... through missionary commitment: this shared sensibility also intensified the craving for conquest within Israel’s leadership and among its American defenders. There are many reasons war fever has raged out of control, as Homeland brilliantly shows, but the millenarian worldview contributed to igniting the conflagration. How else can we explain the ...

Ever Closer Union?

Perry Anderson, 7 January 2021

... in Ethiopia. On resigning his post in 1937, Pilotti took part in the celebrations in Genoa of the conquest of Ethiopia; and during the Second World War headed the high court of occupied Ljubljana after Italy’s annexation of Slovenia, where resistance was met with mass deportations, concentration camps, and police and military repression. The German judge on ...

How to Grow a Weetabix

James Meek: Farms and Farmers, 16 June 2016

... tune of about £650,000. Between Agnew’s place and Sandringham is Houghton Hall, family seat of Robert Walpole, Britain’s first prime minister, now the home of David, 7th Marquess of Cholmondeley, Lord Great Chamberlain and beneficiary of £260,000 in subsidies. The land Agnew’s house stands on was part, until relatively recently, of Marquess ...

Who do you think you are?

Jacqueline Rose: Trans Narratives, 5 May 2016

... a matter of months before the Corbett-Ashley case by the psychiatrist and psychoanalyst Robert Stoller, who proposed the distinction in his 1968 study, Sex and Gender – the second volume was called The Transsexual Experiment. For Stoller, gender was identity, sex was genital pleasure, and humans would always give priority to the first (many ...

The Hijackers

Hugh Roberts: What will happen to Syria?, 16 July 2015

From Deep State to Islamic State: The Arab Counter-Revolution and Its Jihadi Legacy 
by Jean-Pierre Filiu.
Hurst, 328 pp., £15.99, July 2015, 978 1 84904 546 9
Show More
Syrian Notebooks: Inside the Homs Uprising 
by Jonathan Littell.
Verso, 246 pp., £12.99, April 2015, 978 1 78168 824 3
Show More
The Rise of Islamic State: Isis and the New Sunni Revolution 
by Patrick Cockburn.
Verso, 192 pp., £9.99, January 2015, 978 1 78478 040 1
Show More
Isis: Inside the Army of Terror 
by Michael Weiss and Hassan Hassan.
Regan Arts, 288 pp., £12.99, February 2015, 978 1 941393 57 4
Show More
Show More
... Ottomans’ victory over the Mamluk sultanate in the battle of Marj Dabiq opened the way for their conquest of the Arab lands. In Islamic eschatology, Dabiq is one of the two possible locations of a battle between Muslims and an invading Christian army which the Muslims will win, their victory marking the beginning of the end of days. Dabiq is the title of ...

The Divisions of Cyprus

Perry Anderson, 24 April 2008

... antiquity been Greek in population and culture, with a Turkish minority introduced after Ottoman conquest in the 16th century. But in the 19th century, distant four hundred miles from Greece, it remained unaffected by the national awakening that produced, first Greek independence itself, then successive risings against Ottoman rule in Crete and its union ...

Day 5, Day 9, Day 16

LRB Contributors: On Ukraine, 24 March 2022

... American mythology the world’s leading neofascist is Vladimir Putin. Thanks to this madman, Robert Reich announced, ‘the world is currently and frighteningly locked in a battle to the death between democracy and authoritarianism.’ Rather than face up to the major global realignment that is underway, with the convergence of Russia, China and ...