One has to wonder whether the advocates of a new Cold War have taken the measure of the challenge posed by 21st-century China. For Americans, part of the appeal of allusions to Cold War 2.0 is that they...
The East India Company’s relations with the British state had always been ambivalent. Its increasing territorial and military pretensions after 1750 attracted growing attention and demands...
On some days, bad days, I wonder if our survival in spite of enslavement, lynching and mass incarceration, our refusal to be annihilated, our mere presence is perceived as a sign of contempt for and challenge...
Where Bolton’s most deep-seated desire is to lay waste to America’s enemies, Trump is absorbed by the prospect of abandoning old friends, or at least extorting them with the threat of abandonment....
He was a heretic who remained on the left, never a Cold War renegade who sang the virtues of capitalism or colonialism. Had he done so, many avenues would have opened up for him in the West. His books...
Anglo-America’s dingy realities – deindustrialisation, low-wage work, underemployment, hyper-incarceration and enfeebled or exclusionary health systems – have long been evident. Nevertheless,...
The past decade should have taught governments to beware of hasty large-scale remodelling. But it seems only to have emboldened the Johnson apparat to go flat out for more of the same. It may still seem...
The true significance of Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus’s election, and of Trump’s attack on the WHO and China, may be as markers of how radically the world has changed since the WHO was founded,...
The colour-coding on Charles Booth’s maps was far from innocent. At one extreme the glamour and heraldic grandeur of gold for, say, Grosvenor Square or Hyde Park; at the other, black for Whitechapel...
The sort of city government Rahm Emanuel champions has only been made possible because the nation-state now exists to shoulder much of the burden of warfare and finance. It is one of the luxuries of the...
Sex workers compare their struggle to that of care workers. Trans activists compare the control they want over their bodies to the control demanded by abortion activists. Single women fight...
Many of the secrets uncovered weren’t particularly significant or indeed very secret. In themselves they don’t explain the degree of rage WikiLeaks provoked in the US government and its allies....
The United States now faces a serious challenge to its international legitimacy – as serious as the one it faced during the Jim Crow era. The demonstrators have put not just the police but the nation...
In late March, Yonas heard that another rescue boat, the Alan Kurdi, was on its way to Libyan waters. But he didn’t manage to get on board. On 7 April, the boat, crammed with 150 migrants,...
I replied no to each question and then asked: ‘What if someone hides this information?’ Without looking up she said: ‘Nobody can hide. Everything is under control.’
According to Thomas Piketty, history demonstrates that the means deployed to address the problem of legitimacy are only ever partly material. The more important means are ideological: at the very least,...
Throughout his presidency, Trump has had a favourability rating of around 40 per cent. (He is the only president never to have gone above 50 per cent.) Now, despite the tens of thousands dead and the...
Priyamvada Gopal’s focus isn’t on the ways colonial subjects negotiated, resisted and reclaimed the empire, so much as on the ways in which imperial crisis awakened dissent at the metropolitan...