Colonialism & Empire

Harvard professor and Pulitzer prize-winning historian Bernard Bailyn recommends reading on three centuries of empire, conflict and slave trading between the Americas, Europe and Africa

Discussions about Tibet are often reduced to arguments about China's right to run it. Tibetologist Robbie Barnett says this obscures a much more subtle debate about what it means to be Tibetan in modern Tibetan society.

Historian David Cannadine tells us why it’s less interesting to argue about whether the British Empire was a force for good or ill, than to understand how it worked and why it fell apart. He suggests a reading list to get us started.

There's a lot more to the story of colonists and Native Americans than the tale of the first Thanksgiving taught in school, says history professor Colin Calloway.

The journalist and author discusses five books with strikingly different interpretations of what it means to be South African today, whether black or white

British novelist and poet Adam Foulds discusses fading empire in the context of Kenya, including the horrors of British gulags, the Mau Mau uprising, and the social deprivation endured by the Kikuyu.

All empires are obsessed with the prospect of their own decline, says British journalist and novelist James Meek. He recommends books on the death of empires, from Austria-Hungary to Kublai Khan.

Expert in Spanish Colonial History describes Christopher Columbus as a character from science fiction. Huge political irony that the first exploration of North America was led by a black man

Byzantine scholar Judith Herrin, professor emerita at King's College London, selects five books to help us understand the place of Byzantium in world civilisation.

'Wherever you go today in the Congo, you will find monstrous warlords. But you will find far more volunteer nurses and Red Cross workers and teachers who haven’t been paid for 20 years but are still doing their job, not allowing things to fall apart.'