“The Great Necessity”: Salt and Power in the Late Mississippian Native South

Image Description: Excerpt from Guillaume L’Isle’s “Carte de la Louisiane et de cours du Mississippi, 1718.” This map provides estimates of various French and Spanish incursions into the territories of the Caddo, Tunica, and other Indigenous polities in the western Mississippi Valley and Red River region. The map’s highlighted routes include De Soto’s original route […]

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‘Death Knows No Colour’: The Forgotten African Soldiers of WWII

By Lauren Brown. ‘To the people death knows no colour, and, as such, rates of pay should be adjusted in that spirit.’[i] This statement, featured in the West African Pilot in 1941, encapsulates a key issue faced by British African soldiers who fought during the Second World War. It is an issue that has still […]

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Scottish Settlers in Patagonia and Tierra del Fuego: Sheep Farming Capitalisms in a South American Frontier

By Nicolás Gómez Baeza. Between 1888-89, John Hamilton, Henry Jamieson, John McLean and Thomas Saunders, among others, participated in the so-called “big sheep-ride” [“gran arreo”] through southern Patagonia.[1]  Who were they? Three were born in Scotland, worked as shepherds in the Falkland Islands, and became landowners and businessmen in southern Patagonia and Tierra del Fuego; […]

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Britain’s Mau Mau Detention Camps

By Lauren Brown. The history of the British Empire has long been framed as a heroic, civilising mission that successfully thrust ‘inferior’ societies into modernity. Thankfully, such rose-tinted nostalgia has begun to fade. The Mau Mau Rebellion of 1952-1964 was a particularly brutal period of British colonial history. Fed by decades of anger over the […]

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