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“Never before have so many opportunities existed for pathogens to pass from wild and domestic animals to people,” she told the Guardian, explaining that 75% of all emerging infectious diseases come from wildlife.“Our continued erosion of wild spaces has brought us uncomfortably close to animals and plants that harbour diseases that can jump to humans.”

“There are too many pressures at the same time on our natural systems and something has to give,” she added. “We are intimately interconnected with nature, whether we like it or not. If we don’t take care of nature, we can’t take care of ourselves. And as we hurtle towards a population of 10 billion people on this planet, we need to go into this future armed with nature as our strongest ally.”

Human infectious disease outbreaks are rising and in recent years there have been Ebola, bird flu, Middle East respiratory syndrome (Mers), Rift Valley fever, sudden acute respiratory syndrome (Sars), West Nile virus and Zika virus all cross from animals to humans.

Cunningham said other diseases from wildlife had much higher fatality rates in people, such as 50% for Ebola and 60%-75% for Nipah virus, transmitted from bats in south Asia. “Although, you might not think it at the moment, we’ve probably got a bit lucky with [Covid-19],” he said. “So I think we should be taking this as a clear warning shot. It’s a throw of the dice.”

“The animals have been transported over large distances and are crammed together into cages. They are stressed and immunosuppressed and excreting whatever pathogens they have in them,” he said. “With people in large numbers in the market and in intimate contact with the body fluids of these animals, you have an ideal mixing bowl for [disease] emergence. If you wanted a scenario to maximise the chances of [transmission], I couldn’t think of a much better way of doing it.”

Aaron Bernstein, at the Harvard School of Public Health in the US, said the destruction of natural places drives wildlife to live close to people and that climate change was also forcing animals to move: “That creates an opportunity for pathogens to get into new hosts.”

The billion-dollar illegal wildlife trade is another part of the problem, said John Scanlon, the former secretary general of the Convention on International Trade of Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora.

The Covid-19 crisis may provide an opportunity for change, but Cunningham is not convinced it will be taken: “I thought things would have changed after Sars, which was a massive wake up call – the biggest economic impact of any emerging disease to that date,” he said.

“because they could.” There’s no sense in anything that anyone is doing—only the instinct to exert control.

The second category of risk concerns the future potential for runaway climate change, which will take hold at that hard-to-call moment when the world falls prey to ruinous feedback mechanisms

A general recognition of climate change as a threat to national security in the short term and national existence in the long term would allow the mobilisation of the only modern ideological force that retains wide enough popularity to inspire collective sacrifice: nationalism (or patriotism,

If the last few years have taught us anything, it is that the combination of material disappointment with national insecurity and decline is a potent one. Climate change threatens both things, and so could translate into a politics of rage that though it rises through the ballot box, goes on to destroy democracy.

Clear-eyed national establishments will need to make a radical shift in focus and resources away from traditional great power threats (which, though real, are minor by comparison), and towards a new understanding of national security in a much wider sense, requiring new forms of national mobilisation in response.

In Europe, the most dramatic direct effects will be seen in the Mediterranean states, where the summer is predicted to last for an additional month, heatwaves (with temperatures over 35 degrees) to be extended by more than a month, and rainfall to decrease by up to 20 per cent.

The when and even the if of truly runaway climate change taking hold are uncertain, but should we slide down this slipway it would be so catastrophic—involving the destruction of the nations which militaries are sworn to defend—that even a remote possibility should be enough to mobilise militaries in response

In the decades to come, the most important single branch of the US armed forces will become not the Marines or the special forces but the Army Corps of Engineers.

But the need for western security establishments to prioritise climate change is not just about such practical reallocation of resources; an even more important impact could be about political persuasion.

The Greens’ blindness to the political importance of stable and rooted national communities risks driving voters into the arms of the chauvinists, while their contempt for the nation state leads to an overwhelming focus on international agreements demanded and driven by global movements.

Nationalism therefore helps address one of the greatest obstacles to action against climate change: namely, that considerable sacrifices will have to be made by present generations, but the most terrible results of refusal to make these sacrifices will only affect generations yet unborn.

It was only when I began to read how mainstream economists thought about climate change that I came fully to understand our moral decadence as a culture.

They look at things from a standpoint that deems that the interests of future generations matter little, or even not at all. One “discount rate” which has been used by economists when it comes to valuing future benefits is 6 per cent.

While the existential threat to humanity as a whole from runaway climate change would probably only appear in the next century, the threat to many individual states—and to western democracy—will appear in the next decades.

“To assume such a rate comes close to saying ‘forget about issues concerning 100 years or more from now.’” Such an attitude is antithetical not just to nationalism, but to the very idea of a nation (or of a family, for that matter).

The idea of a nation thinking of itself as living for only one generation is a contradiction in terms

Above all, with communism gone and religion in abeyance in the west, a sense of nationalism is essential to motivate sacrifice

We should not be surprised that individualistic and materialist cultures struggle with the most collective of all collective action problems. Even where these cultures are liberal and rational, they can do nothing to challenge the mindset of the individual who looks at the potentially big sacrifice being asked of them, and rationally judges that it will on its own make no difference to the big picture. Real change will need a new political dispensation.

Appealing to nationalism in the fight against climate change is abhorrent to most environmentalists, coming as they do from liberal and socialist internationalist traditions. Indeed, in many cases this hostility extends to the nation state itself,

 this is no innocuous technicality. It implies that a “unit of benefit” in 50 years is being valued 18 times lower than it would be today, and in 100 years, 339 times lower:

The language of “empowerment” that permeates much left-wing environmentalist discourse misses an absolutely central point. If you really want to act for the climate, then you need powerful allies, not powerless ones whom you have to expend energy empowering. This means state elites, state institutions, and, in the democracies, sweeping electoral majorities who can push through the painful changes required.

The centrality of states and nationalism also applies to very important proposals in the US and elsewhere for “Green New Deals” combining different goals: to support a new industrial revolution based on alternative energy and thereby convince dubious voters that climate change action is not an enemy of economic progress and prosperity; to build social solidarity by providing jobs and social welfare to the population, and especially workers in fossil fuel industries; and to legitimise the necessary sacrifices by ensuring that they will be shared through progressive taxation.

Any Green New Deal and the new bonds of social solidarity that it can engender will inevitably be national, not internationa

The alternative idea of massive transfers of resources from wealthy countries through systems of international solidarity has long been proved a complete fantasy, and will remain so

The fundamental issue at stake has been well expressed by the development economist Paul Collier: “The brute fact is that the domain of public policy is inevitably spatial… elections generate representatives with authority over a territory… The non-spatial political unit is a fantasy

So nationalism is indispensable, even though we also know it can often be dangerous. Thankfully, it does not have to be nationalism of an ethnic chauvinist variety.

Looking back at us from the perspective of a hundred years hence what may strike historians most (assuming for the moment that civilisation remains vigorous enough for historians still to exist) is the extent to which our institutions and political classes have become trapped by their own traditions

Military establishments amass huge arsenals at huge cost, though the existence of nuclear weapons has long banished any serious risk of direct war between the great powers; conservatives adhere blindly to a free-market ideology that has long been proved to be inadequate to the management of great modern states; and progressives remain fixated on dreams of an internationalist utopia that stand no chance whatsoever of being realised

For me at least, reading Haque is like trying to hold a conversation with somebody who only speaks in apocalyptic jazz scat.

I read a tweet the other day that said, “looking at Twitter is like microdosing poison.” It’s true

How? The internet of 2020 is ruled by the “attention economy”. People’s attention is commodified in a way that never happened before. In the attention economy there’s an arms race to capture clicks and reads. Nuance, painstaking insight and subtlety does not deliver attention.

Marshall McLuhan wrote “The medium is the message”. What he meant by that is that the medium through which information is transmitted structures that information. It does so either through changing the behaviour of the author or the receiver of the information, or both. It is the medium that shapes the character of interaction.

From a very basic perspective, think of a lightbulb in a windowless room. The lightbulb is the medium by which people in the room can see each other. It enables people to behave in a way that they wouldn’t or couldn’t if there was no lightbulb in the room.

Now think of Twitter as a medium, how do you convey nuance and deep insight into a 280 character “microblog”? Is it any wonder that scrolling on Twitter feels like you’re speeding through hell in a convertible? You feel the sizzle of rage but somehow come out intact.

His articles read like old school sales letters: each short paragraph makes you read the next. He “twists the knife”, as copywriters say, by layering agitation on agitation, directly addressing his reader:

The text is breathless, rhythmic with machine-gun punctuation, and imaginatively vivid

If you read the articles, you’ll see that Haque is well-meaning. He wants positive change. And to be fair, he has his own answers to society’s problems. He has credentials too, he’s a trained economist, he’s been a contributor to some serious academic publications and an author of books, real books.

Believe me, I’m sold on the destination but feel a bit carsick on the journey. The tone is so hysterical as to be meaningless. It serves only to entrench people deeper into their world-views rather than engaging and enlightening them.

only 22% of French people thought globalisation a “good thing” for their country.

the question of whether the benefits of globalisation outweigh the downsides is more complicated than this

it is impossible to say how much of a “good thing” a process is in history without first defining for how long it has been going on.

Although Adam Smith himself never used the word, globalisation is a key theme in the Wealth of Nations. His description of economic development has as its underlying principle the integration of markets over time.

As villages, towns, countries and continents started trading goods that they were efficient at making for ones they were not, markets became more integrated, as specialisation and trade increased. This process that Smith describes starts to sound rather like “globalisation”

The discovery of Native Americans by European traders enabled a new division of labour between the two continents. He mentions as an example, that the native Americans, who specialised in hunting, traded animal skins for “blankets, fire-arms, and brandy” made thousands of miles away in the old world.

Kevin O’Rourke and Jeffrey Williamson argued in a 2002 paper that globalisation only really began in the nineteenth century when a sudden drop in transport costs allowed the prices of commodities in Europe and Asia to converge.

The influx of about 150,000 tonnes of silver from Mexico and Bolivia by the Spanish and Portuguese Empires after 1500 reversed the downwards price trends of the medieval period. Instead, prices rose dramatically in Europe by a factor of six or seven times over the next 150 years as more silver chased the same amount of goods in Europe (see chart).

what historians have called the resulting “price revolution” dramatically changed the face of Europe.

Price rises only stopped in about 1650 when the price of silver coinage in Europe fell to such a low level that it was no longer profitable to import it from the Americas.

The German historical economist, Andre Gunder Frank, has argued that the start of globalisation can be traced back to the growth of trade and market integration between the Sumer and Indus civilisations of the third millennium BC.

Global historians such as Tony Hopkins and Christopher Bayly have also stressed the importance of the exchange of not only trade but also ideas and knowledge during periods of pre-modern globalisation.

it is clear that globalisation is not simply a process that started in the last two decades or even the last two centuries. It has a history that stretches thousands of years, starting with Smith’s primitive hunter-gatherers trading with the next village, and eventually developing into the globally interconnected societies of today.

Whether you think globalisation is a “good thing” or not, it appears to be an essential element of the economic history of mankind.

arguing that western discourse and behaviour had systematically ‘othered’ the eastern world. In it he says: “Arabs, for example, are thought of as camel-riding, terroristic, hook-nosed, venal lechers whose undeserved wealth is an affront to real civilisation.

Just as Said explored the depictions of the Middle East as passive and feminised, this one-way power dynamic has similarly diminished the cultural exchange between East and West. While it’s clear that the colonial aspects of Orientalism took far more than they ever gave from the subjects they depicted

As much as the Middle East and North Africa were colonial playgrounds for western powers, literature, art and architecture across Europe are testament to a long, rich tradition of Islamic art that pre-dated 19th-Century colonialism and has, gratefully, outlived it. Is western art really ‘inspired’ by the East? Or is it indebted to it?

This can be seen in the way migration into Europe has been portrayed as an “invasion” of different cultures and a “clash of civilisations” – in a way that is similar to the justifications of the colonial era where the colonised were cast as racially inferior beings. Colonialism still casts its shadow over the immigration debate.

“The extent to which there was a connection between the two arrested persons and the alleged assassin is currently the subject of ongoing clarifications and investigations which are being carried out by the responsible authorities.”

The young man had deliberately created the impression that he was eager to reintegrate into Austrian society in his meetings with the deradicalisation programme

the terrorist had managed to deceive his mentors in such a way that no early warning signs pointing to his radicalisation had been registered.

“Fact is: the terrorist managed to deceive the judiciary’s deradicalisation programme … We need to evaluate and optimise the system on the side of the judiciary.”

One of the appeals of deradicalisation programmes is that they allow authorities to monitor individuals who are considered a potential risk to society for a longer period than if they were to simply sit out a prison sentence.

“Our enemies are not the members of a religious community, these are terrorists. This is not a fight between Christians and Muslims, or Austrians and migrants, but a fight between civilisation and barbarity.”

“Jihadi terrorism is not new to Austria but [in recent years] we have only seen low-profile attacks by people using any available weapon … and not able to acquire explosives or AK-47s. What was surprising was not that there was an attack was not surprising, but the way it was carried out,”

many of today’s key political concepts have their origins in Latin

Latin also continues to have a practical purpose. Any student of Law or Medicine is expected to be familiar with technical Latin or even Greek terms.

“A lot of people are arguing that these kinds of zoonotic pandemics [originating in other species] are expressive of biodiversity ecosystems coming under uncontrollable stress. “And so the question is whether in 100 years, people will look back and see this as being the first of a number of epidemics [caused by] humanity crashing into ecosystems that previously humans were not part of. “I suspect that they will, and I feel quite pessimistic about that.

Holland – who has written widely about the ancient world, Rome and the influence of Christianity – believes social movements in the west such as BLM are part of a cultural and moral upheaval that began in the 1960s, and which he sees as being as significant as the Protestant Reformation.

Describing herself as “a global historian who thinks in big waves”, Damodaran says what we are living through is “clearly a period of heightened uncertainty where the old ideologies no longer work” – naming liberalism, colonialism and the free market economy.

In specific local contexts around the world, she says, small- and large-scale tipping points are being reached, all of which add up to a global sense of crisis, the impact of which, particularly on the environment, is being felt even by those in more prosperous and comfortable societies.

But the problem is not new, she says: “There’s this hubris which comes out of the Enlightenment of the 18th century, that humans in some senses can dominate nature” – and we should not claim to be surprised.

“There is a price we are paying for intensive farming practices. Covid has not just suddenly sprung upon us. You just have to be a historian to understand this moment.”

“Everything that is going on at the moment, it seems to me, all links together.”

History has seen great civilisations in China, India and across Eurasia, “but they’ve not caused these crises that we are living through now, and nor has the African world. “You know what happened? Roughly 500 years ago, these small, aggressive maritime powers on the shores of Europe went across the world with their technology and created their empires by sea.

Other societies may now be enthusiastic participants, but it was not they who created western industrial capitalism, he argues.

His most recent book is about China, and he argues that for all that country’s environmental problems, the scale of the climate crisis is well understood in Beijing given the risks to its society from food and water insecurity. “Everything comes back to the climate crisis, because everything is affected by it – the political order, social order, food, water, the migration of people. So we are in a very, very dangerous epoch.”

In that sense, is not history – and the significance or otherwise of this time – in our own hands? “It is totally in our hands,” says Wood

“And if you were going to be really hopeful, you’d say this is the moment when we are going to wake up and realise that our true interests on the planet are served by cooperating.

“These are things that are self-evident, there’s no denying them. What we will do about it is the imponderable.”

Except, that was then, this is now, and a lot has happened in between. And a lot of that has been deconstructing what the Victorians thought they knew and wrote down to teach others. It has been noticed, for example, that Evans’s records entirely omit the fact that he had been shown the findings of excavations at Knossos that had taken place 20 years before he got there by a man called Minos Kalokairinos, who had hoped to use them to improve the vexed relations between Crete and mainland Greece.

It has also been noticed that once you don’t see everything through a Christian monarchist lens, the 1,000-room network looks a lot less like a palace or temple and much more like an administration centre for the thriving commercial empire the Minoans had going. And that the art unearthed suggests their society was – and if this remains hard to believe now, it was inconceivable to Arthur – one that considered women to be perhaps wholly equal to men. I know. Excavate THAT.

Extravagant buffoons, building their power base through the visual media, displace the wooden technocrats who once dominated political life. Debate gives way to symbols, slogans and sensation. Political parties that once tolerated a degree of pluralism succumb to cults of personality.

Politicians and political advisers behave with impunity. During the impeachment hearings, Trump’s lawyer argued, in effect, that the president is the nation, and his interests are inseparable from the national interest.

Trump shamelessly endorses nativism and white supremacy. Powerful politicians, such as the Republican congressman Steve King, talk of defending “western civilisation” against “subjugation” by its “enemies”. Minorities are disenfranchised. Immigrants are herded into detention centres.

Political structures still stand, but they are hollowed out, as power migrates into unaccountable, undemocratic spheres: conservative fundraising dinners, US political action committees, offshore trade tribunals, tax havens and secrecy regimes.

The bodies supposed to hold power to account, such as the Electoral Commission and the BBC, are attacked, disciplined and cowed. Politicians and newspapers launch lurid attacks against parliament, the judiciaryand the civil service.

Political lying becomes so rife that voters lose the ability to distinguish fact from fiction. Conspiracy theories proliferate, distracting attention from the real ways in which our rights and freedoms are eroded

With every unpunished outrage against integrity in public life, trust in the system corrodes. The ideal of democracy as a shared civic project gives way to a politics of dominance and submission.

All these phenomena were preconditions for – or facilitators of – the rise of European fascism during the first half of the 20th century. I find myself asking a question I thought we would never have to ask again. Is the resurgence of fascism a real prospect, on either side of the Atlantic?

It is easier to define as a political method. While its stated aims may vary wildly, the means by which it has sought to grab and build power are broadly consistent. But I think it’s fair to say that though the new politics have some strong similarities to fascism, they are not the same thing.

Trump’s politics and Johnson’s have some characteristics that were peculiar to fascism, such as their constant excitation and mobilisation of their base through polarisation, their culture wars, their promiscuous lying, their fabrication of enemies and their rhetoric of betrayal

But there are crucial differences. Far from valorising and courting young people, they appeal mostly to older voters. Neither relies on paramilitary terror

Neither government seems interested in using warfare as a political tool.

Trump and Johnson preach scarcely regulated individualism: almost the opposite of the fascist doctrine of total subordination to the state.

Last century’s fascism thrived on economic collapse and mass unemployment. We are nowhere near the conditions of the Great Depression, though both countries now face a major slump in which millions could lose their jobs and homes.

Not all the differences are reassuring. Micro-targeting on social media, peer-to-peer texting and now the possibility of deepfake videos allow today’s politicians to confuse and misdirect people, to bombard us with lies and conspiracy theories, to destroy trust and create alternative realities more quickly and effectively than any tools 20th-century dictators had at their disposal.

this isn’t fascism. It is something else, something we have not yet named. But we should fear it and resist it as if it were.

In Poland, the government has just passed an emergency law allowing authorities to turn back refugees who cross into the country “illegally”. It is the latest development in a diplomatic standoff with Belarus, which has cynically been encouraging people from Iraq, Iran and parts of Africa to cross into the EU, in response to sanctions imposed on it earlier this year. Poland’s hardline response leaves many people trapped in the no man’s land between the two countries.

Priti Patel, the home secretary, claims this is an essentially benevolent measure: if boats in the Channel are turned around, it will eventually stop people attempting the dangerous trip in the first place. In fact, it undermines a key principle of international maritime law that makes it a duty to rescue people in distress.

In the UK, the Home Office has quietly tried to amend its draconian nationality and borders bill, currently at committee stage, by introducing a provision that gives Border Force staff immunity from prosecution if they fail to save lives at sea.

These developments are harmful in their own right, but they also set a disturbing precedent for how countries in rich parts of the world might deal with future displacements of people – not just from war and persecution, but from the climate crisis as well.

Three recent stories, from three different corners of Europe, suggest that governments are crossing a new threshold of violence in terms of how they police their borders.

This is not only a problem for today: it is a dress rehearsal for how our governments are likely to deal with the effects of the climate crisis in years to come.

a new report by the World Bank projects that 216 million people could be displaced within their own countries by water shortages, crop failure and rising sea levels by 2050.

Unfortunately, many of our politicians are primed to see displacement first and foremost as a civilisational threat. That was the logic of Boris Johnson’s comments ahead of the launch of Cop26 in Glasgow, when he claimed – incorrectly – that “uncontrolled immigration” was responsible for the fall of the Roman empire, and that a similar fate awaits the world today

In this telling, an environmental disaster that affects us all is transformed into a question of how the wealthy and powerful can preserve their privileges.

they are backed up by a burgeoning border security industry. A recent report by the Transnational Institute warns of what it calls “the border-industrial complex”, a growing multibillion dollar industry that ranges from security infrastructure to biometrics and artificial intelligence. The global market in fences, walls and surveillance alone is projected to be worth $65-$68bn by 2025.

Richer parts of the world have already begun to militarise their borders, a process that has accelerated in response to the refugee movements of the past decade.

What’s required, instead – beyond action to reduce emissions – is a plan to help people adapt to changing living circumstances and reduce global inequality, along with migration policies that recognise the reality of people’s situations

A major new US study commissioned by the Biden administration recommends new laws to protect climate migrants, but it is strikingly light on detail.

The need to let the Baltic states go was clear—and when they left the Soviet Union in 1990, Solzhenitsyn, Yeltsin and most of Russia rallied against revanchist attempts to keep them in. Much the same was true of Central Asia and the Caucasus; they were colonies. Belarus and Ukraine were part of the metropolitan core. The bonds which tied “Little Russians” (ie Ukrainians), “Great Russians” and Belarusians together, Solzhenitsyn argued, must be defended by all means short of war.

The agreement reached, in draft form, at 4am on Sunday morning achieved those aims with a rather neat piece of casuistry. For Russia simply to have followed Ukraine into independence would have left moot the question of the Soviet Union’s residual powers. So instead they abolished the union itself.

“the Kyivan myth of origins…became the cornerstone of Muscovy’s ideology as the polity evolved from a Mongol dependency to a sovereign state and then an empire.” Russian empire required Ukraine; and Russia had no history other than one of empire. The idea of Kyiv as just the capital of a neighbouring country was unimaginable to Russians.

When, as the economy worsened, Mr Gorbachev went to President George Bush for $10bn-15bn, Bush’s top concern was the nuclear threat. The same worry had led him to oppose Ukraine’s secession in a speech given just before the August coup. “Do you realise what you’ve done?” Mr Gorbachev demanded of Mr Shushkevich. “Once Bush finds out about this, what then?”

Yeltsin was overcome by a sense of lightness and freedom. “In signing this agreement,” he later recalled, “Russia was choosing a different path, a path of internal development rather than an imperial one…She was throwing off the traditional image of ‘potentate of half the world’, of armed conflict with Western civilisation, and the role of policeman in the resolution of ethnic conflicts. The last hour of the Soviet empire was chiming.” Maybe the convoluted interdependency of Russia and Ukraine did not matter as much as people thought; maybe democratic nationhood was enough. Maybe the problem had been a failure of imagination.

But when pollsters asked people what they expected of their incoming president, reducing this corruption was not their highest priority. The standing of the state was. Russians wanted a strong state and one respected abroad. As Mr Putin’s successful manifesto put it,

The strong state which provided an effective cover for kleptocracy in Mr Putin’s Russia was not an option for Mr Kuchma’s similarly oligarchic Ukraine. It had no real history as a state, let alone a strong one. Its national myth was one of Cossacks riding free. So in Ukraine the stealing was instead dressed up in terms of growing into that distinctive national identity. The essence of the argument was simple. As Mr Kuchma put it in a book published in 2003, “Ukraine is not Russia”.

Mr Kuchma could have used force against them; Mr Putin encouraged him to do so. But various considerations, including Western opprobrium, argued against it.

Mr Putin’s return to the presidency in 2012 came at a time when the global financial crisis had choked the Russian economy.

The degree to which Ukraine was not Russia became clearer, though, in 2004, when a rigged presidential election saw hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians protesting in the streets.

Mr Yanukovych did not want to be Russia’s vassal. Nor did he share western Europe’s values—especially when applied to matters of anti-corruption. But eventually he had to choose a side. At a secret meeting in Moscow in November 2013, as European leaders were preparing to sign their agreement with Ukraine, he was promised a $15bn credit line with $3bn paid up front. He ditched the European deal. And at 4am on November 30th his goons bludgeoned a few dozen students protesting against his betrayal in Kyiv’s Independence Square, known as Maidan.

This was far worse, for Mr Putin, than the Orange revolution. Ukraine had made geopolitical reality, to coin a phrase, of the independence it had claimed two decades before. Its demands for dignity resonated with Russia’s middle class and some of its elite, making it a genuinely dangerous example. So Mr Putin annexed Crimea and started a war in Donbas.

According to Russian state media, Mr Putin was not undermining a revolution against a corrupt regime quite like his own; he was protecting the Russian people and language from extermination at the hands of western Ukrainian fascists. The relevance to Russia of the issues that had led to what was being called in Ukraine “the revolution of dignity” was thus obscured

the annexation was supported by nearly 90% of the Russian population.

tract published in both Russian, Ukrainian and English in July 2021, Mr Putin described how the inheritors of “Ancient Rus” had been torn apart by hostile powers and treacherous elites, and how Ukraine had been turned from being “not Russia” into an anti-Russia, an entity fundamentally incompatible with Russia’s goals.

The only way Russia can escape chaos, he argued, is to export it to a neighbouring country.

Ukraine is not a province, or a colony; it is a beleaguered nation in a messy, perilous process of self-realisation. Belarus, for its part, is a grim illustration of how “severe and inflexible” things have to get in order to stop such aspirations welling up. Mr Lukashenko has met a nationalist resurgence with ever more brutal and well-orchestrated repression—a bloody irony given that he helped start it.

But change is afoot; it can be seen in the way that demography increasingly trumps regional allegiance. Even in the east nearly 60% of those born since 1991 see their future as in the EU—countrywide, the figure is 75%. All told 90% want Ukraine to stay independent, and nearly 80% are optimistic about its future.

That is why Alexei Navalny was first poisoned and is now jailed. As the leader of the opposition to Mr Putin he has championed the idea of Russia not as an empire but as a civic nation: a state for the people. It is why Russia has recently become much more repressive. It is why Mr Putin cannot tolerate a true peace on his borders.

Napoleon’s legacy is now wrapped up in France’s cultural wars. France grapples with him just as Americans weigh Jefferson and Washington’s contributions to the country with their ownership of slaves. However, history is not black and white. Both sides leave out large swaths of history when making their cases. Macron, ever the politician, attempted to appease them both by visiting the Little Corporeal’s tomb at Les Invalides, while also attacking him in his remarks. The self-proclaimed emperor of Europe has turned into a pawn in France’s 2022 presidential elections. The conqueror of Europe is dividing France today. Selectively remembering history only inflames tensions in the present. Politicians, institutions and the broader society alike need to be more responsible in order for an honest telling of history to be remembered.

Salt in the soil can aid archaeologists in some circumstances, but the same mineral can also be destructive, and is destroying heritage sites, according to the geoarchaeologist Jaafar Jotheri, who described salt as “aggressive … it will destroy the site – destroy the bricks, destroy the cuneiform tablets, destroy everything”.

The destructive power of salt is increasing as concentrations rise amid water shortages caused by dams built upstream by Turkey and Iran, and years of mismanagement of water resources and agriculture within Iraq.

“The salinity in Shatt al-Arab river started to increase from the 90s,” said Ahmad N A Hamdan, a civil engineer who studies the quality of the water in Iraq’s rivers. In his observations, the Shatt al-Arab – formed by the confluence of the Tigris and Euphrates - annually tests poor or very poor quality, especially in 2018, which he called a “crisis” year when brackish water sent at least 118,000 people to hospital in southern Basra province during a drought.

The climate crisis is adding to the problem. Iraq is getting hotter and dryer. The United Nations estimates that mean annual temperatures will rise by 2C by 2050 with more days of extreme temperatures of over 50C, while rainfall will drop by as much as 17% during the rainy season and the number of sand and dust storms will more than double from 120 per year to 300. Meanwhile, rising seawater is pushing a wedge of salt up into Iraq and in less than 30 years, parts of southern Iraq could be under water.

“Imagine the next 10 years, most of our sites will be under saline water,” said Jotheri, a professor of archaeology at Al-Qadisiyah University and co-director of the Iraqi-British Nahrein Network researching Iraqi heritage. He started to notice damage from salt at historic sites about a decade ago.

One spot suffering significant damage is Unesco-recognised Babylon, the capital of the Babylonian Empire, where a salty sheen coats 2,600-year-old mud bricks. In the Temple of Ishtar, the Sumerian goddess of love and war, the base of the walls are crumbling. In the depths of the thick wall, salt accumulates until it crystallises, cracking the bricks and causing them to break apart.

Other sites that have been affected are Samarra, the Islamic-era capital with its spiral minaret that is being eroded by sandstorms, and Umm al-Aqarib with its White Temple, palace and cemetery that are being swallowed up by the desert.

This year, Iraq lost a piece of its cultural heritage. On the edge of the desert, 150km south of Babylon, is a bed of salt that was once Sawa Lake. The spring-fed water was home to at least 31 species of bird, including the grey heron and the near-threatened ferruginous duck. Now, it is completely dry because of overuse of water by surrounding farms and climate change. Lack of enforcement of regulations over groundwater use means farmers can freely drill wells and plant wheat fields that are an eruption of lush green in the dusty desert landscape.

“When I was a child I remembered that Sawa Lake was a big lake, a large lake. It looked like the sea. But now it’s gone. Totally gone. We don’t have any lake any more,” said Jotheri.

It feels like being shown around a fascinating exhibit by an enthusiastic curator. Yet The Reality Bubble is essentially a warning: our blind spots, Tong contends, are responsible for the destruction of our habitat

showing why there is a balance to nature, while making clear that there is so much about other creatures we are blind to.

humans have subordinated the elements and the animal kingdom to our will and our desire for consumption, and in doing so have sown the seeds of our own demise.

the folly of the idea of human exceptionalism and how, if we are to survive as a species, we need to get very good at scale, and fast. But she doesn’t preach

From a chimpanzee with a photographic memory to beetles that navigate by means of the Milky Way, Tong’s revelatory examples inspire a sense of wonder

Tong also discusses time, space and ownership as initially useful concepts that became co-opted in the march towards efficiency and more profit. In a striking passage she writes that “the illusion of free time is the ouroboros of capitalism. Leisure has entered the marketplace so that it feeds back into the economy”.

The Reality Bubble is no knock-off but a new addition to the “human journey” genre. It is not just a book that tells a story of humanity; it is a gentle but highly effective wake-up call.

Guillaume Lancereau, Max Weber fellow at the European University Institute in Florence, was part of a group of historians who published the book Puy du Faux (Puy of Fakes), analysing the park’s take on history. They viewed the park as having a Catholic slant, questionable depictions of nobility and a presentation of rural peasants as unchanged through the ages.

Lancereau did not question the park’s entertainment value. But he said: “Professional historians have repeatedly criticised the park for taking liberties with historical events and characters and, more importantly, for distorting the past to serve a nationalistic, religious and conservative political agenda. This raises important questions about the contemporary entanglement between entertainment, collective memory and politically oriented historical production …

“At a time when increasing numbers of undergraduates are acquiring their historical knowledge from popular culture and historical reenactments, the Puy du Fou’s considerable expansion calls for further investigation of a phenomenon that appears to be influencing the making of historical memory in contemporary Europe.”

Outside the park’s musketeers show, André, 76, had driven 650km (400 miles) from Burgundy with his wife and grandson. “We came because we’re interested in history,” he said. “The shows are technically brilliant and really make you think. You can tell it’s a bit on the right – the focus on war, warriors and anti-revolution – but I don’t think that matters.”

the many sins of empire, from draining India of its resources and destroying its industry, to the manner in which the British implemented a policy of divide-and-rule, giving rise to conflict between Hindus and Muslims, which ultimately led to the partition of India and Pakistan

As for the railways, post and industrialisation, he asks, “Why would India, which throughout its history had created some of the greatest (and most modern for their time) civilisations the world has ever known, not have acquired all the trappings of developed or advanced nations today, had it been left to itself to do so?”

Mumbai is in many ways unlike the rest of India: it is far richer, less caste-bound and a lot more easy-going. Yet it is also all of India in a single place

As the country’s commercial capital, it has long attracted migrants from all over the country. Most of India’s communities, languages and cuisines are represented here, if not all of its pathologies. The cliché about Mumbai is that it is a place of extreme contrasts: sprawling shantytowns nestled in the shadows of multi-million-dollar homes

He explains with great clarity the links between big Indian business and politics, and the implications for India’s industrial economy. Even so, India is no post-Soviet Russia. The historical analogy Mr Crabtree uses instead is America in the era of the Rockefellers and Vanderbilts. In America, it gave way to a progressive era of greater prosperity for all, he writes. The fate of nearly 1.4bn people hangs on whether India makes a similar journey.■

We tend to take it for granted, but it is an astonishing novelty in human history. For thousands of years, military expenditure was by far the biggest item on the budget

The decline of war didn’t result from a divine miracle or from a change in the laws of nature. It resulted from humans making better choices. It is arguably the greatest political and moral achievement of modern civilisation.

he fact that it stems from human choice also means that it is reversible.

Technology, economics and culture continue to change. The rise of cyber weapons, AI-driven economies and newly militaristic cultures could result in a new era of war, worse than anything we have seen befor

Maybe the law of the jungle is a choice rather than an inevitability?

a poor choice by just one side can lead to war.

This is why the Russian threat to invade Ukraine should concern every person on Earth

The first and most obvious result of a return to the law of the jungle would be a sharp increase in military spending at the expense of everything else

A return to the jungle would also undermine global co-operation on problems such as preventing catastrophic climate change or regulating disruptive technologies such as artificial intelligence and genetic engineering.

If you believe that historic change is impossible, and that humanity never left the jungle and never will, the only choice left is whether to play the part of predator or prey.

To enjoy peace, we need almost everyone to make good choice

If so, any leader who chooses to conquer a neighbour will get a special place in humanity’s memory, far worse than your run-of-the-mill Tamerlane. He will go down in history as the man who ruined our greatest achievement

perhaps we can learn from the Ukrainians.

They endured two centuries of tsarist autocracy (which finally collapsed amidst the cataclysm of the first world war). A brief attempt at independence was quickly crushed by the Red Army that re-established Russian rule. Ukrainians then lived through the terrible man-made famine of the Holodomor, Stalinist terror, Nazi occupation and decades of soul-crushing Communist dictatorship. When the Soviet Union collapsed, history seemed to guarantee that Ukrainians would again go down the path of brutal tyranny – what else did they know?

Despite history, despite grinding poverty and despite seemingly insurmountable obstacles, Ukrainians established a democracy. In Ukraine, unlike in Russia and Belarus, opposition candidates repeatedly replaced incumbents

Every old thing was once new. It all comes down to human choices