Population

Christian apocalyptic literature and ecological predictions both anticipate the end of the world. Are they born of the same tradition, asks Jean-François Mouhot?

Roger Hudson on a moment in the story of Scottish emigration captured in 1923.

When the world’s population reached seven billion it prompted a great deal of nonsense to be written about Thomas Malthus. Robert J. Mayhew sets the record straight.

The death-obsessed and inward-looking Aztec civilisation sowed the seeds of its own destruction, argues Tim Stanley.

The 2009 Nobel Prize winner for literature is well placed to describe the trials of Eastern European minorities through the maelstrom of the 20th century, writes Markus Bauer.

At a time of widespread concern about the patriotism of 'economic migrants' and political refugees, Peter Barber tells the story of one 19th-century immigrant whose affection for Britain grew as political crisis severed his attachment to home.

For centuries, Africans were shipped to the Indian subcontinent and sold as slaves to regional rulers. Rosie Llewellyn-Jones tells the story of those who went to Lucknow to serve the Nawab of Oudh and who joined the Indian Mutiny when he was deposed by the British. For this allegiance their descendants, whom she has traced, still pay a price.

Andrew Boxer traces the origins of a historical issue still as controversial and relevant today as in past centuries.

 In 1909 Beatrice Webb produced a controversial report which proposed abolishing the stigma and penury of the Poor Law and its workhouses. James Gregory argues that this plea for a less judgemental approach to poverty created the foundations of the modern Welfare State.

David Abulafia, author of the newly published The Discovery of Mankind, considers Columbus’ first encounters with the indigenous peoples of the Caribbean, and shows how, in the flesh, newly discovered peoples challenged European preconceptions about what it meant to be human.

As Britain gets used to the ban on smoking in public spaces, Virginia Berridge looks at the way attitudes to public health have changed in the last fifty years, particularly among the medical profession.

Murray Watson looks at the historical roots of a phenomenon few commentators have noted: the sizeable English presence in Scotland.

Elizabeth A. Fenn examines a little known catastrophe that reshaped the history of a continent.