His characters—in 1919 Ireland, 1857 India, and 1940 Singapore—intuit that the world is about to collapse. But they can do nothing to save it.
Tag: Empire
The Best Classroom Is the Struggle
“As a historian and educator of college students, my experience teaching on US imperialism is one of disappointment.”
Living with the Future in South Asia
For decades, South Asian architecture was impelled by the promise of a new society after empire. Now, such buildings are being demolished.
Baghdad: The Once and Future City of Stars
The city testifies to the vast intellectual curiosity of medieval Muslims, and the splendor they translated from astrology into their designs.
When Nature Is Valued over Human Life
White South Africans used wildlife conservation to build a narrative as a race. Unfortunately, this pursuit came at the expense of Africans.
Homing Empire
Family memoirs are a special kind of historical offering. They have the power to tell fine-grained stories of the past, of epochal events—wars, migrations, empires—and to intricately connect them to ...
Migration and the Remains of US Empire
The way we talk about history matters. And this is especially true in the case of the Philippines, which, in many ways, served as a laboratory for America’s imperial ...
Turkey’s “Ghost Empire”
A Turkish academic I once met in a provincial Anatolian city insisted to me that Turkey is a country where a lot goes unsaid, a place where much is buried, and where fairy tales are told to hide a ...