Burning Archive

In 1054 in Constantinople (now Istanbul), the Great Schism between the Eastern Orthodox and the Western Latin Christian Churches began. Or so the story goes. As you will discover the petty dispute between clerics has been greatly exaggerated, especially after Europe was divided ideologically after 1917.

In 540 CE a volcano erupted at Ilopango in today’s Guatemala. It changed the course of European history. This is how the story of Ragnarök began. Not with a Roman whimper, but a Central American bang. Welcome to The Other Europe Series Over the next month, I will be travelling to Europe, to the other Europe of Istanbul and to cities East of Vienna.

This week the world has debated illiberalism, migration and nostalgia for national political communities. I spoke with one of the world’s leading experts on these issues, Marlène Laruelle, historian, sociologist, and political scientist. And I also reflected on Marlène Laruelle’s concept of the political imaginary and a new imaginative history of globalisation to develop an alternative vision of cooperation in a society of islands. The interview with Marlène Laruelle is a must-watch.

I have been thinking this month about three paired issues: migration and de/colonisation; the imagined cohesive nation and social fragmentation; and illiberalism and ressentiment. Several months ago I scheduled the topic of migration for this month’s Long Read. The news cycle has not let me down. From Ceuta to Saxony-Anhalt, even down here in Melbourne, banshees scream warnings of cultural death by migration.

After four and a half years - or twelve years (depending on your perspective) - of the war in NATO-Russia-Ukraine War, some proposals for a peace process are emerging. It is way past time. Here on Substack in late 2025 TFF Transnational Foundation made a proposal, based on deep expertise in conflict resolution and peace studies. But the proposal made no head way, even in the alternative media.

Every month for paid subscribers I host a live call discussion of one of the ten ‘books of the month’ for my World History Book Club. Ten Top Histories to Change Your Worldview in 2026 At this morning’s live call to discuss Lyndall Roper, Summer of Fire and Blood: the German Peasants’ War I changed up the approach, and I would love to get your feedback on the new approach. As a result I am sharing this post with all subscribers as a special gift and invitation to future conversations.

This week I interviewed Nel Bonilla about the concepts of empire that underpin her analysis of the “imperial cage” that is NATO 3.0. The world is surely becoming more multipolar, but does that mean the grip of empires on our lives is any less?

I trained as a social historian in the traditions of “history from below.” This perspective places the lower orders and ordinary life centre stage in history, rather than the cardboard cut-outs of great powers and national glory. This sub-discipline of social history reminds our world of liquid modernity that no great power has influenced world history more than that human symbol of pre-modernity, the peasant.

On Monday I live streamed on YouTube and Substack my historian’s reading of Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness. Over the last ten weeks I have been reading Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness, slowly. Each week I read a section of this famous modernist novella, set in the Belgian Congo, and paired it with reflections from history, based on on the prize-winning, genre-crossing history book by Maya Jasanoff, The Dawn Watch: Joseph Conrad in a Global World.

Earlier this week, I published on YouTube my conversation with Warwick Powell (Dr Warwick Powell) on the theory that the USA became an industrial giant through the “American System” of national protection, in opposition to the British Empire’s system of Free Trade. It is part of a series of conversations with Warwick on the economic fables in this ‘time of monsters’ (Gramsci). We will appraise the competing grand narratives of politics, economics and world history in these puzzling times.