History
Reflections from the distant past and disputed present. Wisdom lies where truth and repetition meet. The pursuit of tomorrow begins with the study of yesterday.
The Clerk Who Saw
the Empire End
From the household ledgers of a middling Byzantine functionary, May 1453: the price of cabbage, a daughter's dowry, and the morning the walls came down.
Salt, Silver, & the
First Globalization
Long before the container ship, the world was already small. A mountain in Bolivia paid for a war in Flanders and a porcelain bowl in Macau.
The Library That
Burned Twice
Alexandria, of course. But also Sarajevo, August 1992. What a city loses when it loses its catalog, and the librarians who carry it anyway.
Letters from a
Forgotten Treaty
The peace of Westphalia did not end a war so much as exhaust one. The diplomats' correspondence — querulous, hungry, brilliant — reads like a slow-motion novel.
Marginalia
of Empire
Beside the official record of the East India Company, a quieter archive: the scribbled doubts, jokes, and complaints of the men who kept its books.
On the Weather
of Revolutions
1789 was the coldest winter in a hundred years. 1917 the wettest spring. History is in part a meteorology — a story of which crowds were willing to stand outside.