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Whatever the medievalists might say when they think you’re not listening, 20th-century European history is hard, and post-1945 history can be the trickiest bit. The decades after 1945 are much less precisely understood, in historical terms, than the decades before. They are more subject to unchallenged platitudes and uninformed controversy: they are surrounded by white noise.

In 1920, Sir Lionel Abrahams, an Assistant Under Secretary of State at the India Office, likened India’s finances in Britain to ‘rivers running into a lake on one side and so many rivers running out of the lake at the other side’.

Popular views of the US civil rights movement remain focused on the post-war South.

Indigo plantation in India came under scholarly examination initially in the context of colonial oppression and the indigenous protest against it, as a part of the history of freedom struggle. Over the years, it has become an aspect of economic history and of the history of the peasant movement.

Peter Sawyer is one of our most distinguished Anglo-Saxon or, perhaps better, Anglo-Scandinavian historians.

The social and economic landscape of the United States shifted significantly after the financial crash of 2008. The ensuing downturn led both businesses and consumers to face severe restrictions on their access to credit. The subprime mortgage crisis changed the nature of home ownership for many Americans. Growth rates and unemployment figures became the subjects of intense political debate.

Jonathan Sperber has so far been mainly known as a historian of 19th-century Germany, and of the Rhineland in particular.

Sweden, I think it fair to say, is a source of considerable interest and intrigue in Britain. Nowhere has this been more evident than in the realm of British politics.

In September 2012, United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki Moon officially opened a new reading room for the League of Nations archives in Geneva. After four decades in a room with barely enough space for more than a handful of scholars, the League's archives are now accessible in the refurbished ‘Rockefeller room’, with seating for 24 researchers.

At first sight this looks like another of those increasingly common commodity books, some of which are intended to be global in scope, and which include studies of chocolate, sugar, cod, salt and many others (digestible or not!). As Riello points out, commodities are a good way to tell a global story since many of them have been traded throughout the world for centuries.