Society

One ship, many stories

How a single, unglamorous, workaday merchant vessel tells the history of the 19th-century world in many violent chapters

Boyd Cothran & Adrian Shubert

Reconstructed hemisphere

In the 19th century, civil wars tore apart the US, Mexico and Argentina. Then came democracy’s fight against reaction

Evan C Rothera

The Asian world order

Before modern Europe existed there was a grand, interconnected political world, rich in scientific and artistic exchange

Ayşe Zarakol

A silken web

From its mythic beginnings in a Chinese garden, the story of silk is a window into how weaving has shaped human history

Peter Frankopan, Marie-Louise Nosch & Feng Zhao

Hear from blasphemes, sceptics and free-thinkers in this ‘tour of medieval unbelief’

52 minutes

The exam that broke society

Keju, China’s incredibly difficult civil service test, strengthened the state at the cost of freedom and creativity

Yasheng Huang

Meet the jesters who’ve spoken truth to power around the globe and across centuries

5 minutes

Praying in shoes

The Sunni movement of Salafism was born at the beginning of the 20th century, with the goal of modelling life on the 7th

Aaron Rock-Singer

Settler colonialism

Displacing and destroying peoples by colonisation is not just a historical Western evil but a global and contemporary one

Lachlan McNamee

Dream of the Russian tropics

Imperial Russia had little access to the bountiful tropics that other empires enjoyed. So it created its own in the Caucasus

Oleksandr Polianichev

The rise and fall of Kowloon Walled City, Hong Kong’s infamous urban monolith

18 minutes

The polycrisis

Is this the word we need to describe unprecedented convergences between ecological, political and economic strife?

Ville Lähde

Masts like a forest

How the trees of China – fir, camphor, ironwood and nanmu – were used to build an empire that lasted for centuries

Ian M Miller

Asians in early America

Asian sailors came to the west coast of America in 1587. Within a century they were settled in colonies from Mexico to Peru

Diego Javier Luis

The strange tale of how mangoes became hallowed objects in Maoist China

6 minutes

The famed medieval map that stretched beyond Earth to heaven, history and myth

5 minutes

After the mother tongues

Cultural exchange between Iran and India led to the creation of literary histories that inspired modern nationalism

Alexander Jabbari

The strange journey of the Parthenon Marbles to the British Museum

10 minutes

It never existed

The idea of a ‘precolonial’ Africa is theoretically vacuous, racist and plain wrong about the continent’s actual history

Olúfẹ́mi Táíwò