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But Milton also stirringly articulated  how the formation of private convictions required public spaces, public institutions—what Jürgen Habermas so famously defined as the “public sphere.”

By the time, he wrote Areopagitica, it was robust: coffee houses, newspapers, book publishers and bookstores, theatres, and meeting places—the locales that allowed individuals to come together to form a public. These were spaces largely outside the grasp of church and state—and, in fact, many of these institutions emerged with the express purpose of liberating society from the grasp of church and state.

Nobody designed the public sphere from a dorm room or a Silicon Valley garage. It just started to organically accrete, as printed volumes began to pile, as liberal ideas gained currency and made space for even more liberal ideas. Institutions grew, and then over the centuries acquired prestige and authority. Newspapers and journals evolved into what we call media. Book publishing emerged from the printing guilds, and eventually became taste-making, discourse-shaping enterprises. What was born in Milton’s lifetime lasted until our own.

It took centuries for the public sphere to develop—and the technology companies have eviscerated it in a flash. By radically remaking the advertising business and commandeering news distribution, Google and Facebook have damaged the economics of journalism. Amazon has thrashed the bookselling business in the U.S. They have shredded old ideas about intellectual property—which had provided the economic and philosophical basis for authorship

Big tech has made a fetish of efficiency, of data, of the wisdom of the market. These are the underlying principles that explain why Google returns such terrible responses to the God query. Google is merely giving us what’s popular, what’s most clicked upon, not what’s worthy

This assault on the public sphere is an assault on free expression. In the West, free expression is a transcendent right only in theory—in practice its survival is contingent and tenuous.

We’re witnessing the way in which public conversation is subverted by name-calling and harassment. We can convince ourselves that these are fringe characteristics of social media, but social media has implanted such tendencies at the core of the culture. They are in fact practiced by mainstream journalists, mobs of the well meaning, and the president of the United States. The toxicity of the environment shreds the quality of conversation and deters meaningful participation in it

it becomes harder and harder to cling to the idea of the rational individual, formulating opinions on the basis of conscience. And as we lose faith in that principle, the public will lose faith in the necessity of preserving the protections of free speech.

The public sphere was always rife with manipulation—political persuasion, after all, involves a healthy dose of emotionalism and the tapping of submerged biases

humankind is entering into an era where manipulation has grown simultaneously invisible, terrifyingly precise, and embedded in everyday life.

And now, the tech giants are racing to insert themselves more intimately in people’s lives, this time as  personal assistants. The tech companies want us to tie ourselves closely to their machines

These machines don’t present us with choices. They aren’t designed to present us with a healthy menu of options. They anticipate our wants and needs, even our informational and cultural wants and needs.

What’s so pernicious about these machines is that they weaponize us against ourselves. They take our data—everywhere we have traveled on the web, every query we’ve entered into Google, even the posts we begin to write but never publish—and exploit this knowledge to reduce us to marionettes

To state the obvious, these are multinational corporations, with an ultimate interest in their bottom lines. They will never be capable of regulating the public sphere that they control in any name other than their own profit.

the Facebook CEO supplied a response that befuddled the senator: “I think the real question, as the internet becomes more important in people's lives, is what is the right regulation, not whether there should be or not.”

now that these companies bestride the markets in which they roam, the primary danger they face isn’t meddling regulators or hyperactive legislators. What the behemoths of Silicon Valley truly fear is the possibility that antitrust laws will be deploye

tech companies carry a very different sort of cargo—they trade in the commodities of speech. Once we extend the state into this realm, we’re entering danger territory.

We don’t need to use our imaginations here. There are examples all over the world—in Russia, in China—where governments have made their peace with social media, by setting the terms that govern it. These regimes permit a cacophony of ideas, except for the ones that truly challenge political power.

The present global explosion of anxiety and hate is unlike anything most of us have ever witnessed. People don’t know how to confront these evils

In the face of such menace, it’s natural to appeal to a higher power for protection—but in our panic we need to be clear about which threats are genuine and which are merely rhetorical. And panic shouldn’t lead us to seek protection that inadvertently squashes our own liberties.

Silicon Valley doesn’t understand truth as a quest or trial, but as an engineering challenge. They believe human behavior and human choices can be predicted by algorithms on the basis of past behavior

They believe that our lives can be programmed to be more efficient. By steering and nudging us, by designing the architecture of our decision-making process, they claim to be relieving of us of the burden of choice. Silicon Valley talks endlessly about the virtues of the frictionless life.

As we join Zuckerberg’s community, he fantasizes that the sense of connection will cause our differences to melt away—like a digital version of the old Coca Cola commercial, or, as I argue in my book, World Without Mind, a revival of the sixties counterculture and the vision of life on a commune.

In other words, preservation of democracy requires preserving this ecosystem of ideas that has miraculously persisted with us since the 17th century. People can’t afford to be seduced by the false prophets of disruption, the charlatans who argue that we abandon old wisdoms in the face of new gadgets

We need to shape the culture so that the prestige of engineering doesn’t continue to come at the expense of the humanities. We need to preserve literature as a primary technology for interrogating the meaning of life. We need to resist the tendency to reduce the world to data.

The Ainu worshiped as gods objects in nature including fire, water, wind and thunder.

The Ryukyuan people are the indigenous people who occupied the Ryukyu islands, which are essentially the Okinawan islands plus some to the north.

The Ryukyuan Kingdom came under the control of the Satsuma Domain of Kyushu when the Satsuma invaded in the early 17th century.

this period is unique in human history because it is the first time our species is on the verge of wiping out most life as it now exists on this planet. It’s the mother of all emergencies.

Thatcher: a radical remaker of an economy and society, but in the context of previous economic stagnation, social breakdown, and a stifling collectivism, something of a moderate.

So FDR was in many ways an extremist in the context of American history; but his extremism was a form of moderation given the dire economic crisis he had to handle.

That’s why the Green New Deal has appeal. Its vast ambition is actually well-suited to the humongous scale of the challenge

When AOC’s critics say her idea is preposterously expensive and unnecessarily socialist (as it is), she is perfectly right to ask: So what’s your alternative?

Here’s a suggestion: Focus on a non-carbon energy source that is already proven to be technologically feasible, can be quickly scaled up, and can potentially meet all our energy demands. What we need, given how little time we have, is a massive nuclear energy program

The speediest drop in greenhouse gas pollution on record occurred in France in the 1970s and ‘80s, when that country transitioned from burning fossil fuels to nuclear fission for electricity, lowering its greenhouse emissions by roughly 2 percent per year. The world needs to drop its global warming pollution by 6 percent annually to avoid “dangerous” climate change in the estimation of [respected climate scientist James] Hanse

For the U.S. to get half its energy from nuclear would cost around $14 trillion. But if we committed to a huge nuclear investment, and the innovation that comes with it, that cost would come down. Compared with one estimate of $93 trillion for the Green New Deal, it’s a bargain

A build rate of 61 new reactors per year could entirely replace current fossil fuel electricity generation by 2050. Accounting for increased global electricity demand driven by population growth and development in poorer countries, which would add another 54 reactors per year, this makes a total requirement of 115 reactors per year to 2050 to entirely decarbonise the global electricity system in this illustrative scenario.

By the start of the 19th century, slavery and cotton had become essential to the continued growth of America’s economy. However, by 1820, political and economic pressure on the South placed a wedge between the North and South. The Abolitionist movement, which called for an elimination of the institution of slavery, gained influence in Congress. Tariff taxes were passed to help Northern businesses fend off foreign competition but hurt Southern consumers. By the 1850s, many Southerners believed a peaceful secession from the Union was the only path forward.

By war’s end, the Confederacy had little usable capital to continue the fight. In the conflict’s waning days, it is believed that Confederate officials stashed away millions of dollars’ worth of gold, most in Richmond, Virginia. As the Union Army entered the Confederate capital in 1865, Confederate President Jefferson Davis and millions of dollars of gold escaped to Georgia. What happened after that is disputed, the subject of many myths and legends.

“Owning one’s moment” is a clever way to rebrand “surviving the rat race.” In the new work culture, enduring or even merely liking one’s job is not enough. Workers should love what they do, and then promote that love on social media, thus fusing their identities to that of their employers. Why else would LinkedIn build its own version of Snapchat Stories?

Most visibly, WeWork — which investors recently valued at $47 billion — is on its way to becoming the Starbucks of office culture. It has exported its brand of performative workaholism to 27 countries, with 400,000 tenants, including workers from 30 percent of the Global Fortune 500.

hymns to the virtues of relentless work remind me of nothing so much as Soviet-era propaganda, which promoted impossible-seeming feats of worker productivity to motivate the labor force

Mr. Heinemeier Hansson said that despite data showing long hours improve neither productivity nor creativity, myths about overwork persist because they justify the extreme wealth created for a small group of elite techies. “It’s grim and exploitative,” he said.

Elon Musk

He tweeted in November that there are easier places to work than Tesla, “but nobody ever changed the world on 40 hours a week.” The correct number of hours “varies per person,” he continued, but is “about 80 sustained, peaking about 100 at times. Pain level increases exponentially above 80.”

This is toil glamour, and it is going mainstream.

Today’s messages glorify personal profit, even if bosses and investors — not workers — are the ones capturing most of the gains. Wage growth has been essentially stagnant for years.

the concept of productivity has taken on an almost spiritual dimension. Techies here have internalized the idea — rooted in the Protestant work ethic — that work is not something you do to get what you want; the work itself is all. Therefore any life hack or company perk that optimizes their day, allowing them to fit in even more work, is not just desirable but inherently good.

this is dehumanizing and toxic. “It creates the assumption that the only value we have as human beings is our productivity capability — our ability to work, rather than our humanity,

Jonathan Crawford, a San Francisco-based entrepreneur, told me that he sacrificed his relationships and gained more than 40 pounds while working on Storenvy, his e-commerce start-up. If he socialized, it was at a networking event. If he read, it was a business book. He rarely did anything that didn’t have a “direct R.O.I.,” or return on investment, for his company.

Bernie Klinder, a consultant for a large tech company, said he tried to limit himself to five 11-hour days per week, which adds up to an extra day of productivity. “If your peers are competitive, working a ‘normal workweek’ will make you look like a slacker,” he wrote in an email

Millennials, Ms. Petersen argues, are just desperately striving to meet their own high expectations. An entire generation was raised to expect that good grades and extracurricular overachievement would reward them with fulfilling jobs that feed their passions. Instead, they wound up with precarious, meaningless work and a mountain of student loan debt.

In 17th-century England, work was lauded as a cure for vice, Mr. Spencer said, but the unrewarding truth just drove workers to drink more.

“People aren’t going to stand for this,” he said, using an expletive, “or buy the propaganda that eternal bliss lies at monitoring your own bathroom breaks.” He was referring to an interview that the former chief executive of Yahoo, Marissa Mayer, gave in 2016, in which she said that working 130 hours a week was possible “if you’re strategic about when you sleep, when you shower, and how often you go to the bathroom.”

Ms. Mayer’s comments were widely panned on social media when the interview ran, but since then, Quora users have eagerly shared their own strategies for mimicking her schedule. Likewise, Mr. Musk’s “pain level” tweets drew plenty of critical takes, but they also garnered just as many accolades and requests for jobs.

The grim reality of 2019 is that begging a billionaire for employment via Twitter is not considered embarrassing, but a perfectly plausible way to get ahead. On some level, you have to respect the hustlers who see a dismal system and understand that success in it requires total, shameless buy-in. If we’re doomed to toil away until we die, we may as well pretend to like it. Even on Mondays.

Although France sought an extensive colonial empire in Asia, its defeat in the Napoleonic Wars left it with just a handful of Asian territories. Those included the 20th-century mandates of Lebanon and Syria, and more especially the key colony of French Indochina - what is now Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia.

Some idealistic French sought not just to dominate their colonial holdings, but to create a "Greater France" in which all French subjects around the world truly would be equal. For example, the North African colony of Algeria became a depertment, or a province, of France, complete with parliamentary representation. This difference in attitude may be due to France's embrace of Enlightenment thinking, and to the French Revolution, which had broken down some of the class barriers that still ordered society in Britain.

Nonetheless, French colonizers also felt the "white man's burden" of bringing so-called civilization and Christianity to barbaric subject peoples.

On the personal level, French colonials were more apt than the British to marry local women and create a cultural fusion in their colonial societies

The Dutch competed and fought for control of the Indian Ocean trade routes and spice production with the British, through their respective East India Companies. In the end, the Netherlands lost Sri Lanka to the British, and in 1662, lost Taiwan (Formosa) to the Chinese, but retained control over most of the rich spice islands that now make up Indonesia.

As time went on, social pressure increased for French colonials to preserve the "purity" of the "French race."

For the Dutch, this colonial enterprise was all about money. There was very little pretense of cultural improvement or Christianization of the heathens - the Dutch wanted profits, plain and simple.  As a result, they showed no qualms about ruthlessly capturing locals and using them as slave labor on the plantations, or even carrying out a massacre of all the inhabitants of the Banda Islands to protect their monopoly on the nutmeg and mace trade.

Portugal became the first European power to gain sea access to Asia. Although the Portuguese were quick to explore and lay claim to various coastal parts of India, Indonesia, Southeast Asia, and China, its power faded in the 17th and 18th centuries, and the British, Dutch, and French were able to push Portugal out of most of its Asian claims.

Although Portugal was not the most intimidating European imperial power, it had the most staying power. Goa remained Portuguese until India annexed it by force in 1961; Macau was Portuguese until 1999, when the Europeans finally handed it back to China; and East Timor or Timor-Leste formally became independent only in 2002. 

Portuguese rule in Asia was by turns ruthless (as when they began capturing Chinese children to sell into slavery in Portugal), lackadaisical, and underfunded. Like the French, Portuguese colonists were not opposed to mixing with local peoples and creating creole populations. Perhaps the most important characteristic of the Portuguese imperial attitude, however, was Portugal's stubbornness and refusal to withdraw, even after the other imperial powers had closed up shop.

Portuguese imperialism was driven by a sincere desire to spread Catholicism and make tons of money. I

The history of capitals, as well as countries, confirms the importance of courts. The rise of Berlin, Vienna, Madrid (often called Corte), St Petersburg and Istanbul cannot be understood except as court cities, apparent in the appearance of their streets and squares or, in Istanbul, mosques. A final, fatal expression of that role occurred in July 1914. Thousands, eager for war, gathered in front of palaces in London, Berlin, Munich (where, in a photograph, the young Hitler can be seen in the crowd) and St Petersburg, to wave hands, flags and hats, cheer and sing the national anthem as their monarch appeared on the palace balcony

The Louvre was a royal palace before it became an art gallery, founded by Francis I and principal residence of Louis XIV from 1652 to 1671. After the Revolution Paris again became a court city and remained one from 1804 to 1870.

The development of constitutions also owed much to courts. The rise of the House of Commons was helped by disputed royal successions – no monarchy had more of them than England – as well as the needs of royal finances. The founding document of constitutional monarchy in 19th-century Europe was the Charte constitutionelle des francais, promulgated by Louis XVIII (who was one of its authors) on June 4th, 1814. The Charte became the principal model for other constitutions in Europe, including those of Bavaria (1818), Belgium (1831), Spain (1834), Prussia (1850), Piedmont(1848) and the Ottoman Empire (1876). Britain could not have a comparable influence, since it did not have a written constitution to copy

A constitution was a royal life insurance policy: when Louis XVIII’s brother Charles X violated it in July 1830 the dynasty was deposed. Nevertheless France finally became a republic, after 1870, only after three dynasties – the Bourbons, Orléans and Bonapartes  – had been tried and found wanting

Having helped to finance the struggle against the French Empire, the Rothschilds became financiers to the Holy Alliance. They financed Louis XVIII’s return to France in 1814, Charles X’s departure in 1830, the Neapolitan Bourbons both before and after their exile in 1861 and the Austrian monarchy. As one Rothschild wrote to another, on February 8th, 1816: ‘A court is always a court and it always leads to something.

Under Edward VII public ceremonial increased in splendour, the court entertained more frequently than before and there were more royal warrant-holders

He wrote admiringly about monarchs, from Henri IV and Louis XIV to Charles XII. In the 19th century Walter Scott was an admirer of George IV, whose visit to Edinburgh he arranged; Chateaubriand was a brilliant royalist pamphleteer and memorialist; Stendhal and Mérimée were convinced Bonapartists

Court history also subverts national boundaries. The Tudors came to power with French help: Henry VII, after 14 years of exile in Brittany and France, had French as well as English troops in his victorious army at Bosworth. One aspect of Anne Boleyn’s appeal to Henry VIII was her French education and the skills she had acquired while serving at the French court. The House of Orange was both German and Dutch (and partly English), the Bourbons acquired Spanish, Neapolitan and Parmesan branches. The Habsburgs were  able to switch nationalities and capitals between Prague, Vienna, Budapest, Brussels, Barcelona, Madrid, Lisbon and, in the brief reign of Philip I, London

Through the prism of courts and monarchy, Cortes could communicate with Montezuma. The Sunni-Shi’a struggle now destroying Syria and Iraq is another war of succession. It began as a dynastic dispute, between the prophet Muhammad’s Umayyad cousins and his son-in-law Ali over succession to the caliphate: from the start Islam was a state as well as a religion. In 680 the struggle culminated in the murder of Ali’s son, the Imam Hussein, in Kerbela in Iraq. Every year, on the Day of Ashura, this murder is commemorated by Shi’a in mournful flagellatory processions

Above all, courts subvert boundaries between the sexes. Because of a European consort’s role in assuring the succession and enhancing dynastic prestige, her household and apartments could rival in size and splendour those of the monarch. Sometimes she controlled her own finances. The court of France was called ‘a paradise of women’. A court was therefore the only arena where women could compete with men, on near equal terms, for power and influence. Hence the decisive impact on national and international politics of, to name only a few consorts, Anne Boleyn, Catherine the Great and Marie Antoinette. Or, among rulers’ mothers: Catherine de’ Medici and Anne of Austria in France; 17th-century Valide Sultans in the Ottoman Empire; and the Empress Dowager in China

Henry is now seen as a highly intelligent and conscientious monarch who tried to bring peace to his troubled kingdom

Henry was also seriously interested in reform, as Greengrass has indicated in a fine study of the Estates-General

Parisians also became deeply suspicious of Henry’s attempts to persuade his heir under Salic law, the Protestant Henry of Navarre, to become a Catholic. Preachers denounced him as a hypocrite and a tyrant

While Henry's mother, Margaret Beaufort, was an indispensable agent of his interests in England, Jasper was his political mentor in the years spent in exile

Henry VI bestowed the English honour of Richmond on Edmund, while the younger brother, Jasper, was endowed with a title and estates in Wales

After the death of Gloucester, and after several mishaps, they recovered favour under the indulgent protection of the young Henry VI

His Welshness was thus of crucial importance in easing Henry's path to the throne, for quite literally no other route was feasible than that which took him through Wales. It was also to be an essential ingredient in the success of Tudor policy in Wales

As a landless exile, Jasper's most common point of con- tact continued to be Wales: most of his incursions during the reign of Edward IV

In the reign of Richard III, as events were to show, Wales and the Marches were the most vulnerable parts of his dominions

Edward IV himself, as a descendant through the Mortimer connection of Llywelyn Fawr (the Great), could be regarded by Guto'r Glyn and Lewis Glyn Cothi as the potential deliverer of the Welsh and the heir to the kings of Britain

He had been a patron of the bards since the 1450s, and was praised as a faithful supporter of Henry VI and as the man who would unite Wales under the Lancastrians.

He predicted a victory for Henry as the last of the triumphant line of Brutus and Cadwalader, kings of the Britons

The route of the march from Milford Haven avoided the south eastern Marches, which were dominated by the lords loyal to Richard III

How Welsh was Henry Tudor? In blood he was a quarter Welsh, a quarter French and half English (or at least Platagenet). In so far as place of birth and residence could determine his nationality, he was certainly Welsh

Nothing daunted, the resourceful author dedicated it instead to King James and his son Prince Henry, whom he addressed as the future Prince of Wales. The adaptation was plausible enough, in all senses of that word, for James, after all, was descended from Henry VII and his forebears, the Welsh Tudors; and with this reminder Holland's readers in Wales could the more readily transfer their loyalty to the Scottish Stuarts

Unless he had been presented at Henry VI's court in his youth (and there is no evidence for this), Henry was a stranger to England before his ar6val at Shrewsbury on August 17th, 1485

In his first proclamation, on August 25th, 1485, Henry announced his titles to be, besides King of England and of France, 'Prince of Wales and lord of Ireland'. This was the first time any King who had not himself been invested with the principality as heir apparent to a reigning monarch had appropriated the title to himself

Whereas letters of denizenship conferred English status upon individuals, charters of privileges were granted between 1504 and 1508 to the ancient principality and five marcher lordships in North Wales, dispensing the inhabitants from various civic disabilities imposed by the penal laws of Henry IV and Henry V

The inhabitants of North Wales were released not only from the prohibitions of Lancastrian penal laws but from those of the Edwardian settlement of 1284, which had excluded the Welsh from the plantation boroughs.

Edward IV had used motifs from the British Legend in his court rituals and had fostered an Arthurian cult in celebration of his own descent from British kings and the princes of Gwynedd

By marrying Elizabeth, Henry thus enhanced his connection with British as well as English kingship, and their son and heir personified both traditions

Richard III had referred disparagingly in two proclamations to the rebel 'Henry Tydder'; this may well have stung, so that the new King was all the more concerned to establish an honourable lineage for his family. A commission of Welsh genealogists was therefore set up to trace his pedigree. Only the report has survived, to show Henry's descent from medieval Welsh and British rulers. However fantastic its remoter claims, there is no sound reason to doubt its authenticity as an official document. Even Sir Edward Coke in his Fourth Institutes of the Laws of England (1644) accepted its validity and gave as his source for the original commission the patent rolls for Henry VII, though no-one else has found any trace of it there. (The great champion of the common law who set such store by precedents was notoriously careless in his scholarship.) Henry did not draw on this pedigree to confirm the legitimacy of his monarchy, only to embellish it. What was important for him was the historical associations with British, rather than Welsh, royalty. That these also proved to be flattering to the Welsh nation was an incidental and inexpensive form of propaganda.

His beneficence was a distinct policy that culminated in Henry VIII's measure of incorporation of 1536-43

This consolidated and elaborated upon a form of administration that had existed in its essentials in the principality of North Wales since Edward I's Statute of Wales of 1284

Owen spoke for his own class of prosperous Protestant gentry, but the very fact that Welsh commentators thought of the extension of English law as a boon and an act of grace ensured the success of Tudor rule in Wales

There was no tacit acknowledgement of their Welsh identity by Henry VII's son and grandchildren – it was something claimed for them by the Welsh

In 1603 Hugh Holland published the first (and only) book of his Pancharis, which related the love between Owen Tudor and Katherine of Valois

Henry VI had commissioned both his half-brothers to represent and defend the crown's interests in Wales against the Yorkist enemies, the Vaughans, the Herberts and the Earl of March, later Edward IV.

The family of monarchs who ruled England and Wales from 1485 to 1603 did indeed form a dynasty, but they do not seem to have called themselves the 'Tudor' dynasty: the only con- temporaries who regarded them as such were the Welsh

At the front the month continued as it had begun. On August 17th Marshal Foch, the Allied Generalissimo, extended the offensive southward in the Battle of Noyon, pulling in the French Third Army. On the 21st Haig extended it northward, bringing in the British Third Army for the Battle of Albert; on the 26th the British First Army began the Fourth Battle of the Scarpe; on the 30th the Third and Fourth Armies were engaged in the Battle of Bapaume

An emissary of the High Command set off for Berlin on the evening of September 29th to demand that the Government should take immediate steps to procure an armistice; six weeks would elapse before that became effective. During those weeks, the quiet Belgian town of Spa became the last citadel of the German Empire

The Kaiser had returned to Berlin, where this demand (signed ‘Hindenburg’, but actually from Ludendorff) was naturally regarded as a cry of despair, gravely complicating the search for a new Chancellor

The only likely candidate at this stage was Prince Max of Baden, ‘the one prominent royalist liberal in the Empire’, who was known to want an early peace. But not that early: every instinct of statemanship indicated the need to prepare the ground, to avoid what must otherwise look like sheer capitulation. The High Command, however, was adamant; and the Kaiser supported it

An obvious divergence between the views of the German leaders and the American President existed in the matters of Alsace-Lorraine and the Polish districts of East Prussia, both regarded by the High Command as integral German territory

The High Command, in fact, regarded the Fourteen Points merely as heads of discussion, admissible only to bring the disastrous fighting to a stop. With misgiving, Prince Max composed a Note to President Wilson which was forwarded to him via Switzerland on October 4th; it accepted the Fourteen Points, and certain subsequent elucidations by the President, ‘as a basis for peace negotiations’

was the German Note simply a new move in an old game, or was there a more estimable thrust behind it

Absolute freedom of navigation upon the seas, outside territorial waters, alike in peace and war...’ - a concept that had threatened to bring Britain and America to blows in 1915

There could be, he said, no cessation of hostilities until the Germans had evacuated the invaded territories, and returned their inhabitants. Among these territories he firmly listed Alsace-Lorraine. He demanded bridgeheads over the Rhine and Allied occupation of the whole left bank as security for reparations; everything that the Germans could not remove in the prescribed time should become allied property

And the Germans, with that extraordinary talent for self-destruction which they sometimes displayed, now powerfully reinforced every instinct towards harshness on the Allied side. On October 10th the mail-packet Leinster was twice torpedoed in the Irish Channel with a loss of 527 lives, causing, as Lloyd George says, ‘a howl of indignation’. The timing could hardly have been worse; but one cannot blame the U-boat captain; it is the German Government that has to be blamed for not suspending the submarine campaign while negotiations were in progress

But now the President reminded the Germans that, in a speech on the Fourth of July, he had also spoken of ‘the destruction of every arbitrary power anywhere that can separately, secretly and of its single choice, disturb the peace of the world’; and this was one of the supplementary pronouncements that the Germans had also agreed to accept. It now became clear that the ‘arbitrary power’ in question was the German Empire; the Allies were either unaware of, or chose to ignore, the fact that the Empire had undergone a drastic change; nothing would satisfy them now but the abdication of the Kaiser

Ahmed I did go on to produce sons, but, at his death in 1617, his eldest was only 13 years old. This prompted the imperial council to allow Mustafa, then aged 25, to ascend the throne as Mustafa I, although he would be deposed and re-enthroned several times throughout his life

a key turning point in the power structures of the Ottoman Empire

The introduction of the ‘cage’ and the survival of a number of other viable candidates for the throne meant the sultan faced a greater danger of depositions and coups by interested individuals or parties seeking to wield power.

That Osman II announced his intention to undertake the pilgrimage immediately after returning to Istanbul from Edirne provoked fears that he might become an absentee monarch, who might be seeking to return the capital to its original site – Edirne

It is a truth universally acknowledged that royal depositions must, sooner or later, be in want of a regicide. The first in the history of the Ottoman Empire occurred on Friday 20 May 1622, with the death of Osman II, son of Ahmed I. Known as Osman the Young, he had ascended the throne in 1618 at the age of 14, following the coup that deposed Mustafa I, his uncle, for the first time. In 1622, aged 17, he had still not succeeded in legitimising himself as a conqueror of territory and so sought to cultivate the role of a pious sultan instead

The dynasty continued with variable succession methods until the end of the sultanate, with Mehmed VI, who ruled from 1918 until 1922. Following the official declaration and recognition of the Republic of Turkey in 1923, Mehmed VI went into exile

the title of Head of the House of Osman is still passed down and used today

The growth of a large royal army, however, was only one effect of the increased level of military activity. The financial administration of the country also underwent a drastic reorganization

By the reign of Francis I, the king, even in times of peace, was unable to make do with his ordinary revenue from rents and seigneurial dues. In 1523 Francis established a new central treasury, the Trésor de l’Épargne, into which all his revenues, ordinary and extraordinary, were to be deposited.

Successive monarchs were forced, therefore, to seek additional revenue. This was no simple matter, because French kings traditionally could not tax their subjects without their consent.

The early Valois kings had negotiated with the Estates-General or with the provincial Estates for their extra money; but in the middle of the 15th century, when the Hundred Years’ War with England was reaching a successful conclusion, Charles VII was able to strike a bargain with the Estates. In return for a reduction in overall taxation, he began to raise money to support the army without having to seek the Estates’ approval.

Shah Jahan commissioned a jewel encrusted gold throne to be built on a pedestal in the courtroom, where he could then be seated above the crowd, closer to God. Among the hundreds of rubies, emeralds, pearls, and other jewels embedded in the Peacock Throne was the famed 186-carat Koh-i-Noor diamond, which was later taken by the British.

1739, when Nader Shah of Persia sacked Delhi and stole the Peacock Throne.

experts believe that the legs of the 1836 Qajar Throne, which was also called the Peacock Throne, might have been taken from the Mughal original.

But the bigger questions in any democracy are always about the how: how will governments exercise the extraordinary powers we give them? And how will we respond when they do?

These are the questions that have always preoccupied political theorists. But now they are not so theoretical.

As the current crisis shows, the primary fact that underpins political existence is that some people get to tell others what to do.

At the heart of all modern politics is a trade-off between personal liberty and collective choice. This is the Faustian bargain identified by the philosopher Thomas Hobbes in the middle of the 17th century, when the country was being torn apart by a real civil war.

As Hobbes knew, to exercise political rule is to have the power of life and death over citizens. The only reason we would possibly give anyone that power is because we believe it is the price we pay for our collective safety. But it also means that we are entrusting life-and-death decisions to people we cannot ultimately control.

The primary risk is that those on the receiving end refuse to do what they are told. At that point, there are only two choices. Either people are forced to obey, using the coercive powers the state has at its disposal. Or politics breaks down altogether, which Hobbes argued was the outcome we should fear most of all.

Autocratic regimes such as China also find it hard to face up to crises until they have to – and, unlike democracies, they can suppress the bad news for longer if it suits them. But when action becomes unavoidable, they can go further. The Chinese lockdown succeeded in containing the disease through ruthless pre-emption.

The rawness of these choices is usually obscured by the democratic imperative to seek consensus. That has not gone away. The government is doing all it can to dress up its decisions in the language of commonsense advice.

But as the experience of other European countries shows, as the crisis deepens the stark realities become clearer

This crisis has revealed some other hard truths. National governments really matter, and it really matters which one you happen to find yourself under.

In a democracy, we have the luxury of waiting for the next election to punish political leaders for their mistakes. But that is scant consolation when matters of basic survival are at stake. Anyway, it’s not much of a punishment, relatively speaking. They might lose their jobs, though few politicians wind up destitute. We might lose our lives.

for now, we are at the mercy of our national leaders. That is something else Hobbes warned about: there is no avoiding the element of arbitrariness at the heart of all politics. It is the arbitrariness of individual political judgment.

Under a lockdown, democracies reveal what they have in common with other political regimes: here too politics is ultimately about power and order. But we are also getting to see some of the fundamental differences. It is not that democracies are nicer, kinder, gentler places. They may try to be, but in the end that doesn’t last. Democracies do, though, find it harder to make the really tough choices.

We wait until we have no choice and then we adapt. That means democracies are always going to start off behind the curve of a disease like this one, though some are better at playing catch-up than others.

Though the pandemic is a global phenomenon, and is being experienced similarly in many different places, the impact of the disease is greatly shaped by decisions taken by individual governments.

Some democracies have managed to adapt faster: in South Korea the disease is being tamed by extensive tracing and widespread surveillance of possible carriers. But in that case, the regime had recent experience to draw on in its handling of the Mers outbreak of 2015, which also shaped the collective memory of its citizens

It is easier to adapt when you have adapted already. It is much harder when you are making it up as you go along

In recent years, it has sometimes appeared that global politics is simply a choice between rival forms of technocracy

In China, it is a government of engineers backed up by a one-party state. In the west, it is the rule of economists and central bankers, operating within the constraints of a democratic system

This creates the impression that the real choices are technical judgments about how to run vast, complex economic and social systems.

But in the last few weeks another reality has pushed through. The ultimate judgments are about how to use coercive power.

These aren’t simply technical questions. Some arbitrariness is unavoidable. And the contest in the exercise of that power between democratic adaptability and autocratic ruthlessness will shape all of our futures.

our political world is still one Hobbes would recognise

The Irish slave narrative is based on the misinterpretation of the history of indentured servitude,

it was a completely different category from slavery,” said Liam Hogan, a research librarian in Ireland who has spearheaded the debunking effort. “It was a transitory state.”

Unlike slaves, servants were considered legally human. Their servitude was based on a contract that limited their service to a finite period of time, usually about seven years, in exchange for passage to the colonies. They did not pass their unfree status on to descendants.

any form of coerced labor can be described as slavery, from Ancient Rome to modern-day human trafficking

But in colonial America and the Caribbean, the word “slavery” had a specific legal meaning. Europeans, by definition, were not included in it.

“An indenture implies two people have entered into a contract with each other but slavery is not a contract,

It is true that anti-Irish sentiment was present in the United States until well into the 20th century, but that is a separate issue from 17th century indentured servitude, Ms. Harris said. The descendants of indentured servants, Irish or otherwise, did not face a legacy of racism similar to the one faced by people of African descent

Central to the memes is the notion that historians and the media are covering up the truth. He said he has received death threats from Americans for his work.

“These memes are the No. 1 derailment people use when they talk about the slave trade,” he said. “Look in any race-related or slavery-related news story from the last two years and someone will mention it in the comments.”

“It almost becomes a race to the bottom of who suffered more,” Mr. Reilly said, adding that the memes are “an effort to claim a certain ancestry of suffering in order to claim a certain political position.”

The white slavery narrative has long been a staple of the far right, but it became specifically Irish after the 2000 publication of “To Hell or Barbados: The Ethnic Cleansing of Ireland,” a book by the late journalist Sean O’Callaghan

In America, the book connected the white slave narrative to an influential ethnic group of over 34 million people, many of whom had been raised on stories of Irish rebellion against Britain and tales of anti-Irish bias in America at the turn of the 20th century. From there, it took off.

The memes became popular on white nationalist message boards, neo-Nazi websites and far-right sites like InfoWars. On social media, they are primarily a creature of Facebook, where they have been shared millions of times.

The memes sometimes pop up in apolitical settings, like history trivia websites, but their recent spread has mirrored escalating racial and political tension in the United States

“This continued misuse of Irish history devalues the real history,” Mr. Hogan said. “There are libraries filled with all the bad things that actually did happen. We don’t need memes and these dodgy articles full of lies.”

extreme wealth, there’s extreme poverty, neither of which really exists in America. As a result they don’t need to design a House of Lords and a House of Commons, they don’t need a tribune of the plebs in order to make their constitution work.

What we have is a constitutional system that doesn’t build class in at all, and the reason why is that America was shockingly equal at the time in ways that seem really surprising to us today.

The idea is that the Constitution relies on a relatively equal society for it to work. In societies that are deeply unequal, the way you prevent strife between rich and poor is you build class right into the structure of government—the House of Lords, House of Commons idea. Everyone has a share in government, but they also have a check on each other.

In a country that doesn’t have a lot of inequality by wealth, you don’t need that kind of check. There’s no extreme wealth, there’s no extreme poverty, so you don’t expect there to be strife, to be instability based on wealth. And so there’s no need to put in some sort of check like that into the Constitution.

That’s how our Constitution works. The reason why it works this way is that when the founders looked around, they thought America was uniquely equal in the history of the world.

We have to distinguish between two separate things. The first is what I’m calling the tradition of the middle-class Constitution, and the idea here is that to have a republic, you have to have relative economic equality, and that’s within the political community.

And in an unequal society, the only possible government you could have would be some sort of aristocracy or monarchy.

there’s another question which is, who is in the political community? And that’s a question that’s been fiercely debated over our history, fiercely contested over our history.

There’s a second tradition that we call the tradition of inclusion, which over time has fought to expand the community to include minorities, to include women. The challenge for anyone who’s interested in continuing both of these traditions is, how do they work together?

I think the key thing is, when you expand the political community, you have to make sure that every member of the political community then has the opportunity to join the middle class, or else you can't maintain the structure of the republic and the preconditions for having a republic.

In the 17th century in England, James Harrington writes a book called The Commonwealth of Oceana, and it’s a pivotal book, extremely important in the history of political thought. What Harrington argues is that the balance of power in politics in any society will inevitably mirror the balance of property in society, and he talks a lot about property. We can think about that as wealth

What Harrington does is he explains this by saying that power has to follow property.

his views were well known in the time period. In fact, more so than being known, they were just believed by everyone. Everyone embraced them, in some cases without even necessarily knowing their source, although throughout the founders’ writings they list Harrington as one of the great political thinkers who can comment on what it means to create a republic.

their intellectual fountain, is Harrington, who suggests that, if you have an equal society, it is possible to have what he called a commonwealth, or a republic.

there’s actually a radical change in our Constitution that we don’t build economic class directly into these institutions. The purpose of the Senate, with its longer terms, is to allow representatives to deliberate in the longer-term interest of the republic, and that’s the goal of the Senate.

by the late 19th century, industrialization has reached full force.

These are all huge changes in the economy, and they put serious pressure on the economic foundations of the Constitution.

The response that starts really in full force in the populist era of the late 19th century and moves into the Progressive Era is to try to combat both economic power and to prevent economic power from turning into political power.

antitrust laws

People in this time period do a lot of extraordinary things.

an income tax

the first campaign-finance regulations

a constitutional amendment to require the direct election of U.S. senators

These factors, these actions, both economic and political, were designed to create what Teddy Roosevelt called an economic democracy that was necessary as a precondition for political democracy.

After World War II, something changes. In this period, post-World War II, the idea that economic equality is necessary for our constitutional system falls out of the consciousness of most people.

it happens for three reasons. The first is that we experience a huge economic boom. This is a period that economists call the Great Compression. GDP goes up, median wages go up, we build America’s middle class during this period.

a lot of things that contributed

we regulated the financial industry through the Securities and Exchange Commission, Glass-Steagall during the Great Depression.

We also invested a lot in the kinds of things that would build a strong middle class. We sent a generation to college through the GI bill. We invested in infrastructure, which created jobs. We invested in research and development

We also encouraged homeownership, and in addition to all of that, we also undertook policies that would help the people who were worst-off in society: Medicare, Medicaid, Head Start. Together, these things meant that we created a society that was more equal economically than we had seen in generations.

constitutional debates over the economy waned, because the New Dealers won the fight over the Constitution. Debates about economic policy now just moved into regulatory terms. There was no question that the Constitution empowered the federal government to be able to regulate and operate within the economy.

The third big factor is the Cold War.

After World War II, the contrast is now between capitalism and communism, not between republics and aristocracies. As a result, the egalitarian tradition in America wanes because of the fear of communism.

The fear in that period switches from a fear over aristocrats, oligarchs, and plutocrats to a fear of becoming too much like the Soviet Union and too much like the communists.

first had a period of about 30 years where things went really well. We had a growing middle class, an expanding middle class; in fact, it was in this period that we first made serious efforts to make our country more inclusive.

then, just at that moment, we started turning in a different direction and undermining many of the policies that had actually built the middle class. So over the last generation, we’ve significantly reduced taxes on the wealthy, we’ve abandoned a serious antitrust policy, we’ve started investing less in the things that create a broad middle class—education, infrastructure, research. And the result of all of this was the stagnating middle class

One of the important things about having a large middle class for society is that there’s a sense of everyone being part of the shared project. No one’s so different from each other when there’s a large middle class.

People don’t have different economic interests, and as a result, they often don't have very different social interests. People send their kids to the same public schools, they live in the same neighborhoods, they shop in the same places, they play on the same sports teams.

When the middle class starts to crumble, people increasingly see themselves as different from others. They sort themselves by wealth, by education level, and the result is that there’s an increasing fracturing of society, a loss of the solidarity that comes with having a large middle class

throughout our history, you see big divergences between the tradition of inclusion and the tradition of the middle class. In some cases, they overlap.

there’s lots of places we could think about this in our Constitution today

I think the most interesting moments in our history, though, are when there were people who understood that these two things had to go together, and in fact tried to build movements around them. The Civil Rights Era is a good example

One of the most exciting things about writing this book is discovering how often throughout our history people talked about the Constitution in economic terms. Throughout our history there was a deep sense that to have a republic, to have our Constitution work, we had to have economic equality, and that the Constitution in fact relied on this and in some cases even required action from political leaders to fulfill this economic equality.

In Reconstruction, in the Jacksonian Era, the populists, the progressives, the New Dealers. Throughout our history, there is a strong tradition of people who believe this.

These two things don’t necessarily have to go together.

To take a simple example, a case like Citizens United uses the First Amendment in order to stop efforts, it seems, to make our political and economic system more equal by enabling corporations and wealthy people to have outsized power over the political process. We could think about a wide variety of constitutional provisions differently if we took this seriously—the Equal Protection Clause, the First Amendment, the 13th Amendment, which was seen by the Reconstruction Republicans as not just ending slavery but also empowering Congress to create economic opportunity for people who were struggling economically.

Even going back to the ancients there was a fear that economic power would turn into political power and undermine the republic. That’s an oligarchy.

First, the wealthy start believing that they’re better than everybody else, that they’re more virtuous, that they deserve to govern

The second thing that happens is that the wealthy now have different interests than everybody else. The things that are good for them aren’t actually in the common good, so when they do govern, they start pursuing policies that improve their well-being and wealth at the expense of everyone else.

the “doom loop of oligarchy”: once you start down this path, it’s very hard to get out of it.

The problem with the vicious cycle that leads to oligarchy is that people are smart, and they see it happening, and they know, and they feel that the system is rigged against them. And in that context, people revolt against the system. This doesn’t happen through some sort of mass uprising. What the people do is they look for a leader, they look for someone who will help them overthrow the oligarchy.

The threat for unequal republics is on the one hand oligarchy and then on the other hand tyranny. That is a pretty unfortunate fate in either direction.

Castration was performed not only as a punishment but also as a prerequisite for entering imperial service. Towards the end of the Ming Dynasty in the mid-17th Century some 70,000 eunuchs were employed to serve the emperor.

In an entirely different context, castration has also been carried out on young boys before puberty to prevent their voices from breaking

Men castrated before puberty retain an unusual high-pitched singing voice broadly comparable to that of a soprano, mezzo-soprano, or contralto, but covering a strikingly wide range.

the effects of castration, including strikingly long limb-bones, incomplete bone fusion and low bone density (osteoporosis

With Italy as its epicentre, enthusiasm for musical performances of castrati prevailed for over three hundred years,

Researchers also found wheat, barley, millet, lentils, bananas and mung beans at the site.

curry pub of the year, favourite restaurant, and best signature dish.

At least one farmer reportedly died.

After nightfall Tuesday, those unions called off the tractor rally. Farmers climbed down from the ramparts of the Red Fort. But they did not go home. They returned only to their protest camps, on the outskirts of Delhi — from which they're planning another march on the capital in less than a week.