Volume 57 Issue 6 June 2007

Tulipmania: An Overblown Crisis?

Historians have overplayed the extent of the moral, social and economic impact of the 17th-century craze for trading tulip bulbs. The original Dutch sources reveal a much more subtle cultural turning point behind its collapse in 1637.

The Battle of Plassey

The British victory at Plassey in Bengal, on 23 June, 1757, was a crucial event in the history of India.

Decoding Domesday

David Roffe asks why exactly Domesday Book, the oldest and most precious of the English public records, was compiled – and for whom.

Picture Post

Colin Jacobson looks at the history of a pioneering photojournalism magazine.

Bismarck and the German Right

Robert Gerwarth looks at the ways in which Otto von Bismarck was turned into a mythical hero-figure of the right and shows how the ‘Bismarck myth’ contributed to the widespread hunger in German society for a towering leader.

The Mughal Dynasties

Francis Robinson looks for the distinctively tolerant and worldly features of Mughal rule in India and that of the related Islamic dynasties of Iran and Central Asia.