In Riga this summer I went to a ceremony at the Freedom Monument to commemorate the deportations of 1941, when Soviet authorities removed 14,000 citizens in less than 24 hours, sending many of...
Sea power isn’t just a matter of building a bigger navy. Nor is it reducible to the skill of admirals. Even the best ships with the ablest captains will struggle without conveniently located ports and...
Where there are signs of chaos to rival the ‘winter of discontent’ – the twenty-mile queues of trucks waiting to get through the port of Dover, the six-hour waits at A&E, the missed holidays...
Why did something as colossal as the industrial revolution fail to shift the balance of British political power decisively towards industry and the North? The organic ‘levelling-up’ achieved by the...
Volkswagen didn’t need to pay any attention to what regulators thought, because it knew better than the people who made the rules. We are the car people; we want to make diesel engines; our diesel engines...
Geopolitics is never untethered from political struggles and the world’s prime mover isn’t located somewhere in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, even if so much malignant power has emanated from Europe...
There was a film of Condoleezza Rice interviewing Larry Ellison about what could be learned from the vertically integrated corporate model being pioneered by Elon Musk at Tesla. Barring Blair’s, Musk’s...
The next prime minister will most likely be chosen by an electorate of two hundred thousand wealthy geriatrics and small-town Poujadistes, who nurture obsessions with Europe, taxation, migrants and other...
New group chats have sprung up to share the latest intel on which spots are secretly open. The best coded advertisement was for a badminton gym: ‘Due to Covid restrictions, our gym is not open to the...
In 1852 California introduced its first anti-Chinese law, a tax on foreign miners that targeted Chinese migrants in particular. In order to work, foreigners had to pay three dollars a month; before long,...
Each of the five Acts of Parliament is intended to increase government control: over Parliament, over elections, over the courts, over immigrants and over public demonstrations. How it all brings back...
IN one of the many videos circulating on social media of people celebrating the results of Colombia’s presidential election run-off on 19 June, a man bursts from a door onto a small...
The legacy of two decades of war can’t be measured just by the number of abandoned airbases and military installations, or by the tens of thousands of Afghans killed. In these years of suicide bombings...
The internet was supposed to be different. The new technologies central to contemporary capitalism offer the possibility of improving our working lives, even if they do so partly by eliminating our jobs....
Silence is the defining quality of wealth. Private security operatives whisper into their fists while patrolling a zone of distrust. Silence repels unexplained outsiders who dare to trespass on the shaved...
The corruption allegations against Lula may have been hazy, but those against his party were well-founded and damning. This fact is often lost in a soup of accusations and counter-accusations, and the...
Lea Ypi recovers the sensory world of communist Albania: its privations, its ecstasies, but also its banalities. Young people in Albania fretted over what to wear to school just like children elsewhere....
Cheap palm oil is part of an interlocking late capitalist system. When we say there is a demand for RBD palm oil, we mean there is a demand for instant noodles and foamy shampoo in plastic bottles and...