A review in The New Republic of Cambridge historian Tim Harper's Underground Asia: Global Revolutionaries and the Assault on Empire. The book looks fascinating. A couple of bits caught my eye. This one: The locales that interest him are cosmopolitan ports that were at least partly incorporated into Western empires—cities such as Canton, Kuala Lumpur, … Continue reading Magnets for Militants on the Move
Tag: history
The Arc of Presidential Libraries
Paul Musgrave, a political scientist at the University of Massachusetts - Amherst, has published an op-ed on problems with the Presidential library system in the US, and how the current (outgoing) President could exploit it to his usual ends. The essay is a fine complement to Jill Lepore's New Yorker piece on the transition politics … Continue reading The Arc of Presidential Libraries
If you can keep your head when all about you are losing theirs and blaming it on you
Context is everything. As Maya Jasanoff, the Harvard historian, asks, in lyrical terms: "If a writer harbored bias, shall we never speak his name? Or when he wrote with insight, might we read him all the same?" The questions appear in her review in The New Republic, of Christopher Benfey's If:Â The Untold Story of … Continue reading If you can keep your head when all about you are losing theirs and blaming it on you
An area, call it what you will, of safety
Colleagues at Arab Digest have just published an interesting commentary on "Boundaries in the Arab world and their remarkable durability." It's not publicly available, but I do hope they'll release it as a sample for general readers. The piece, authored by Chatham House's Greg Shapland, ex of the Foreign Office, alludes to one of those … Continue reading An area, call it what you will, of safety
Left in folders next to the trivial and the mundane
Trawl industry news or employment classifieds (pick your preferred sector) using keywords like "research" and "information", and you might find yourself thinking that the sum total of reality is digital, too big for mere human minds to process, and that making sense of it is best left to machines and software. It's a world in … Continue reading Left in folders next to the trivial and the mundane
