It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a woman in possession of a love of history, must be in want of a blog.
The eighteenth century was, as any landlubber knows, the Golden Age of swashbuckling Pirates-of-the-Caribbean style piracy. Eighteenth-century pirates (as opposed to their unglamorous modern counterparts) have acquired their own roguish mystique. What is less commonly known is that women, too, had their place in eighteenth-century piracy. I remember, when I was small, being entranced by their stories in my Ladybird …
Continue reading Anne Bonny and Mary Read, two 18th-century pirates
Notwithstanding the recent diplomatic thaw between the US and Iran, most people in the West, if asked to envisage the Islamic Republic, would probably think of a country of religious zealots, full of oppressed women swathed in black robes. What's perhaps not so well-known is that for much of the 20th century, Iran was a …
Continue reading Before the Revolution: images of secular Iran
One consequence of the expansion of European colonialism in the 17th and 18th centuries was that many Europeans came into closer contact with African peoples as the slave trade boomed alongside the plantations of the West Indies and the American colonies. With European planters and their slaves living in close proximity, it was inevitable that …