Europe Solidaire Sans Frontières
Historian Vazira Zamindar asks if history has the disciplinary tools to practice repair, part of the Verso roundtable “Unlearning Imperialism” considering the work of Ariella Aïsha Azoulay.
Ariella Aïsha Azoulay’s book Potential History: Unlearning Imperialism (Verso, 2019) is an incendiary text, (...)
Biography is among the canonical genres of historical writing. It is also one particularly riddled with clichés: too often authors put their protagonists on a pedestal instead of providing a complex, nuanced picture of them as personalities and historical actors. In response to this, recent (...)
We present a review of the Hungarian-language debate organised on Mérce portal, connecting assessments of today’s anti-racist mobilization and de-colonizing agendas with assessments of victim narratives and attempts to re-examine the relations between Eastern Europe and the West regarding history (...)
The historian Enzo Traverso, a professor at the Cornell University (USA), is one of the most distinguished specialists in memory studies. In the following pages he answers a series of questions focusing on the memory of the perpetrators and their legacies, the current rise of new far-right (...)
The removal of racist and oppressive pasts through the toppling of monuments standing in the epicentres of colonial and slave dominions, the US, UK and across Europe, has ruffled the feathers of leading conservative politicians, historians and even some ‘liberal’ thinkers and representatives, who (...)
This article is a response to some of the criticisms made of How Revolutionary were the Bourgeois Revolutions? by Gerstenberger, Post and Riley. In particular, it focuses on two issues of definition – that of capitalism and the capitalist nation-state – which arise from the book’s (...)
‘Concentration camps’ are difficult to define. Even the survivors of the most notorious and universally recognised camps in history discovered this problem in the aftermath of the Second World War.
Jewish children arrested in the 1942 Vélodrome d’Hiver Roundup in Paris. Many of them were taken (...)
The controversy around Bruce Gilley’s article “The Case for Colonialism” has drawn global attention to a stream of revisionist claims and visions on the history of colonialism that has emerged in academia and in the media in recent years. Authors such as Nigel Biggar in the UK, Niall Ferguson in (...)
The historian Enzo Traverso, a professor at the Cornell University (USA), is one of the most distinguished specialists in memory studies. In this interview he answers a series of questions focusing on the memory of the perpetrators and their legacies, the current rise of new far-right movements (...)
One of the most hyped “events” of American television, The Vietnam War, has started on the PBS network. The directors are Ken Burns and Lynn Novick. Acclaimed for his documentaries on the Civil War, the Great Depression and the history of jazz, Burns says of his Vietnam films, “They will inspire (...)
This interview was designed to highlight the differences of thought between two Marxist historians, each focused on radically different parts of the world, with one more experienced colleague and one exciting prospect for the future. In effect, I sought to highlight how differences in (...)
History and mythology both try to explain the past but while history relies on evidence, myths rely on fantasy and must be examined differently, says the scholar
The role of a public intellectual is not easy, especially when it comes to interrogating the government in power and holding it (...)
An Oxford don wants Britons to stop feeling guilty about colonialism. But evidence suggests it already inspires more pride than shame
What did we learn about the British empire at school? In my case, which is the case for a generation born just before the empire’s long collapse, nothing very (...)
As the nineteenth century neared its close, revolutionary socialists were hostile to the world’s imperial powers and to their colonial empires, which then encircled the globe. They foresaw the overthrow of colonialism as a by-product of socialist revolution in the industrialized capitalist (...)
MY FATHER SHIH-LIN Yang died on August 14, 2013. He was born in 1920 — E.P. Thompson’s senior by four years — and, like EPT’s father Edward John, a Christian missionary and minister who cut his historical consciousness in the crucible of war and imperialism (the Japanese military suspected him, a (...)
I READ THE Making Of the English Working Class in 1966 when I was on my junior year abroad at the University of Leeds, not realizing that E.P. Thompson was a lecturer in the Extramural (read adult education) Department at the very same university.
It was not until I studied with Thompson at (...)
WHEN E.P. THOMPSON’S The Making of the English Working Class came out in 1963, there still existed a vibrant anti-capitalist culture on the intellectual left, which flourished with a special vigor among the British Marxist historians, a remarkable group to which Thompson belonged. Within little (...)
THE YEAR 1963 was momentous on many levels. In our previous issue (#165) we commemorated the assassination of civil rights organizer Medgar Evers, one among many martyrs of the bloody racist response to the growing civil rights movement. It was also the year of the military overthrow and (...)
A YOUTUBE VIDEO dating to 1982 surfaced some months ago, with E.P. Thompson and C.L.R. James discussing the exciting developments of the day.
Thompson, a leading figure in the European anti-missile/antiwar movement directed against Reagan’s global madness but also closely in touch with East (...)
I FIRST READ The Making of the English Working Class as a radical-minded college student in the late 1960s. Its focus on “anonymous” working people certainly did inspire me and help launch me on my own subsequent studies of labor and laboring classes.
I assume, though, that all these years later (...)
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