Empire

Hywel Williams revisits an article by Peter Munz, first published in History Today in 1959, and asks who needed whose approval most, the great ruler of the Franks or Pope Leo III?

Rosie Llewellyn-Jones recalls the Victorian economist who helped resolve the financial crisis in India after the Mutiny of 1857.

Bernard Lewis writes that the fall of Constantinople was no “victory of barbarism, but rather of another and not undistinguished civilization.” 

Football became a potent expression of Algeria’s struggle for independence, never more so than during the dramatic events that preceded the 1958 World Cup, as Martin Evans explains.

The Great Exhibition of 1851 was not only a celebration of Victorian Britain’s scientific and economic pre-eminence but also a hymn to the religion that underpinned it, argues Geoffrey Cantor.

The Democratic Republic of the Congo was founded on June 30th, 1960. Within a few days, however, there were army mutinies and disturbances around the country.

For centuries, Africans were shipped to the Indian subcontinent and sold as slaves to regional rulers. Rosie Llewellyn-Jones tells the story of those who went to Lucknow to serve the Nawab of Oudh and who joined the Indian Mutiny when he was deposed by the British. For this allegiance their descendants, whom she has traced, still pay a price.

In 1759, Admiral Hawke secured a daring victory over the French fleet at Quiberon Bay. It surpasses Nelson’s triumph at Trafalgar in its significance.

A.J.P. Taylor gives a decidedly mid-20th century view of a mid-19th century war, its aims, and legacy. 

A century ago, the British authorities in India passed a series of reforms that they hoped would appease the subcontinent’s increasingly confident political movements. But, writes Denis Judd, it was too little, too late.