Michael Ledger-Lomas is a historian and writer who lives in Vancouver, British Columbia. His most recent book is Queen Victoria: This Thorny Crown.
Born to Rule makes it clear that wealth and inheritance, not merit, are still the way to get ahead in Britain. Its case for a meritocratic elite, however, misses the point: Britain’s problems run much deeper than talent misallocation among its upper classes.
Sunil Amrith’s The Burning Earth takes us on a gloomy and bleak tour of how, in the name of progress, Western empires made a mess of everything.
Stefanos Geroulanos argues in The Invention of Prehistory that the scientific investigation of human origins fueled Western racism and colonialism. Yet his heightened sensitivity to the political abuses of prehistory introduces exaggerations of its own.
The small wars waged by European empires generated arguments for the legitimacy of state violence that remain in use today. Lauren Benton’s new book, They Called it Peace, finds that the era of gunboat policing anticipated the age of the predator drone.
Reformation-era preacher Thomas Müntzer’s menacing of elites and his role in the Peasants’ War won him a lasting reputation as a theologian of revolution. Müntzer fostered apocalyptic dreams of equality in a time of tyrants, only to find his head on a spike.
French demographer Emmanuel Todd’s new book argues that secularization has left Western societies weak and divided. But his account of the US and Europe’s secular nihilism is deeply reductive, leaving no space for forward-looking political change.
German philosopher G. W. F. Hegel may not have been an early champion of modern values, but his dynamic view of history didn’t advocate a simplistic revival of the past either. He was a critic of extremes, with complex views on state violence and historical progress.
The self-deception that has plagued Canada’s response to the changing climate should be harder to sustain in the face of this summer’s wildfires. The 2016 Horse River wildfire in Alberta’s tar sands region was a powerful early warning of the current catastrophe.
Peter Frankopan’s epic history of humanity and the environment offers sweeping perspectives on anthropogenic climate change, but little hope of resolving it.
A new book shows how the grand designs of Edwardian architects expressed the anxieties and illusions of their time. Imperial confidence in the peaceful integration of the world ran alongside fears of decline and collapse, echoing the dilemmas of our own age.
Vancouver consistently earns top ranks in international livability indexes, yet it is brutally unaffordable. A new book plumbs the city’s history, revealing how past tensions between its elites and masses define its present — and may shape its future.