History Today

Gerald Aungier and Bombay

Sue Pyatt Peeler describes how, during the 1670s, a servant of the East India Company founded a flourishing city and port upon the western coast of India.

Pepys and the Thirty Ships

Bernard Pool describes how Pepys regarded the Naval shipbuilding programme of 1677 as his greatest administrative achievement.

Dante and Politics

If the world were ruled by a single Christian monarch, peace and justice would prevail: such was Dante’s vision in the early fourteenth century, writes Robert F. Murphy.

Akbar and the Jesuits

Iris Macfarlane assesses how Christian missions from Goa operated at the Mughal Emperor’s court.

Doctors' Commons

Leonard W. Cowie traces the development of a peculilarly English legal institution, from the pre-Reformation era, into Dickensian times.

Longitude and the Sea Clock

John F. Bailey describes how all early navigators, until the mid-eighteenth century, were baffled by the problem of longitude in finding their ships’ position.

A Sixteenth-Century Farmer’s Year

Michael Paffard opens for the visitor Thomas Tusser’s books on husbandry, which expounded the practical virtues of ‘thrift’ to Tudor farmers.