The Harvard historian Caroline Elkins stirred controversy with her work on the crushing of the Mau Mau uprising. But it laid the ground for a legal case that has transformed our view of Britain’s past. By Marc Parry.

Joshua Ehrlich on an obscure text found on the shelves of a Bengali library and the light it sheds on the idea of the public in 19th-century Calcutta.

Once again, corporate and government interests win; the environment loses. By Jason Koebler.

Belgium Colonization and the Ignition of the HIV Global Pandemic. “HIV-1 was ignited in Leopoldville, but the resulting HIV global pandemic is also the apparition of a grotesque and horrific legacy—the European infection of mass historical trauma and the devastation of Congolese health wrought by King Leopold II, the Force Publique, and Belgian colonization.” By Dr. Lawrence Brown. (Apr. 20, 2015)

A diplomat in British India blundered a border. The consequences continue to shape world politics. By Rafia Zakaria.

Today, as the world reconsiders the role played by colonial-era imagery and profits in our lives through actions such as removing celebratory statues and seeking to give reparations to the descendants of slaves, it is also time to take into account the histories of violence and subjugation behind the aesthetic pleasures of European museums. By Erin Thompson.

KINDERHOOK, NY — Meleko Mokgosi’s eponymous solo show, well installed at The School, Jack Shainman gallery’s outpost in Kinderhook, New York, will hit your sweet spot if you’re in the m…

In conversation with [Patrick Cockburn] one of the most respected Middle East correspondents in the world. By Yohann Koshy.

In 2014, an American dad claimed a tiny parcel of African land to make his daughter a princess. But Jack Shenker had got there first – and learned that states and borders are volatile and delicate things.

“Grierson concluded that the female emigrants consisted of four groups: prostitutes, the wives of men who had already been to the colonies and had come back to fetch them, destitute widows with no one to take pity on them, and ‘married women who have made a slip, and who have either absconded from their husband’s house with or without a lover, or who have been turned out of doors by their husbands.’ The widows were blameless. The colonies would gladly take them.” By Gaiutra Bahadur. (Spr. ’11)

All too often we draw a clean, hard line between science and dogma — and between reforming unjust structures and validating them. By Jack Meserve.

“More broadly, looting committed by the British in India was so vast in scale that Powis Castle (in Wales) alone holds more Mughal artefacts ‘than are on display at any one place in India – even the National Museum in Delhi.’” By Louis Allday.

‘Mad Max: Fury Road’ as Totem Transfer Narrative. By Dallas Hunt.

The British public are generally proud of their country’s role in subjecting the world to colonialism and the British Empire, according to a new poll. At its height in 1922 the British Empire governed a fifth of the world’s population and a quarter of the world’s total land area, but its legacy divides opinion.