History Today

‘Trade follows the flag’ is a truism of imperial expansion but in the 1680s it was the other way round, as the East India Company attempted to challenge the might of the Mughal emperor Aurangzeb.

Julie Richards-Williams on the salvaging of a 17th-century Swedish warship.

The deep conservatism of Castilian life militated against the attempts of reformers to regenerate the kingdom through transformed social values.

The newly-found voices of the slaves caught up in the American Civil War, and heard through letters to their families, are a testimony to their tenacity and unity in the struggle for emancipation.

The hubris of Louis XI's Constable produced his nemesis against a background of incipient French nationalism and a growing royal sense of 'majesty'.

'Take but degree away... and hark what discord follows' was a Tudor and Stuart commonplace but the neatness and fixity of what we think of as their social order is a creation of historians.

The symbols, slogans, ideas and architecture of the Founding Fathers were saturated in the world of Ancient Greece and Rome.

John Slater looks at the school curriculum and politically sensitive debates.

Buying and selling with our 'kith and kin' was the hallmark of an intensive inter-war campaign for the idea of Empire.

Jack-of-all-trades and master of a period of English history which he both lived through and epitomised.