32 Histories of Nations
The Default Library
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A Brief History of the United States: Promise, Conquest, and the Argument That Never Ends
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How a strip of English colonies on other peoples' land became the most powerful country on Earth, and why the questions its founders left open are still being argued in its courts and at its ballot boxes.

Follows: United States: A Condensed History of Reinvention, Power, and Contradiction
On 4 July 2026 the United States turned 250. Four days before the anniversary, its Supreme Court had to rule on whether a baby born on American soil to parents who are in the country unlawfully, or only temporarily, is an American citizen. The Court said yes: the Fourteenth Amendment, written in 1868 to make freed slaves citizens, still means what it has long been read to mean. Earlier that year the same Court had ruled on whether a president may set taxes on imports by himself under an emergency law. It said no.
Two and a half centuries in, the country was still arguing about who belongs and who holds power. That is not a sign that something has gone wrong with the American story. It is the American story. The condensed piece in this library gives the outline; this is the full version, from the first footprints to the eve of the midterm elections of November 2026.
In this history

Before the United States: the peoples of North America (to 1492)
Colonies and slavery (1492–1763)
Revolution (1763–1783)
The Constitution and the early republic (1783–1828)
Expansion and dispossession (1803–1890)
Cotton, slavery and the road to war (1820–1861)
Civil War and Reconstruction (1861–1877)
Industry, immigration and empire (1877–1914)
World wars, the Depression and the New Deal (1914–1945)
Superpower, Cold War and civil rights (1945–1974)
From the 1970s to the 2000s (1974–2008)
Polarisation and the present (2008–2026)
How to understand the United States today

Part 1 — Before the United States: the peoples of North America (to 1492)
In the gypsum sands of southern New Mexico, at what is now White Sands National Park, there are human footprints pressed into the mud of an ancient lakeshore. Most were made by teenagers and children. Seeds lying in the layers above and below them have been radiocarbon dated to roughly 21,000 to 23,000 years ago. If those dates hold (some archaeologists still question them), people were walking across North America many thousands of years earlier than the textbook story, which had them arriving from Asia around 13,000 to 16,000 years ago.
Either way, the land that became the United States was not empty and not new. By 1492 it had been home to people for at least fifteen thousand years, long enough for them to develop hundreds of distinct societies, languages and ways of life. "Native American" or "American Indian" is a label that lumps together peoples as different from one another as Norway is from Ethiopia.
Many Americas

Region
Ways of life before 1492 (broad strokes)

Eastern woodlands
Farming villages growing the "Three Sisters" (maize, beans, squash), plus hunting and fishing; powerful confederacies such as the Haudenosaunee (Iroquois)

Mississippi valley
Mound-building towns of the Mississippian culture, the largest at Cahokia

Southwest
Irrigated maize farming and multi-storey adobe towns built by the Ancestral Puebloans and their descendants

Great Plains
Bison hunting on foot (horses arrived only with the Spanish), and farming along river valleys

Pacific Northwest
Rich salmon and cedar economies supporting dense, hierarchical societies with no need for farming

California and Great Basin
Many small, highly varied societies built on acorns, seeds, fish and game

Cahokia, across the Mississippi from modern St. Louis, is the place that most upsets the old picture of scattered wanderers. Around the year 1100 it was a planned city of plazas and earthen mounds. Its largest, Monks Mound, still stands about 30 metres high: the biggest earthwork north of Mexico. Estimates of its peak population vary with the method, mostly from about 10,000 to 20,000 people, which would make it one of the larger towns in the world at the time. By about 1350 it had been abandoned, for reasons archaeologists still argue over.
The Haudenosaunee Confederacy (the Iroquois) joined five nations of what is now upstate New York, the Mohawk, Oneida, Onondaga, Cayuga and Seneca; the Tuscarora became the sixth in 1722. Its oral history credits the Peacemaker (Dekanawida), Hiawatha and Jigonhsasee with founding it under the Great Law of Peace, an unwritten constitution governing a council of fifty chiefs. Proposed founding dates range from 1142 to the mid-1400s or later, and there is little agreement. Whether the Confederacy influenced the framers of the U.S. Constitution, as some historians and many Haudenosaunee argue, is also debated.
How many people?
Nobody knows how many people lived north of Mexico in 1492, and the guesses have swung wildly with each generation of scholars.

Estimate (for what are now the U.S. and Canada)
Scholar and year

About 0.9 million
Alfred Kroeber, 1939

About 1.2 to 2.6 million
Douglas Ubelaker, 1988

About 7 million
Russell Thornton, 2005

About 10 to 12 million, or more
Henry Dobyns, 1966 and later

Ordinary life
For most people in most of these societies, life was organised around family, clan and season. In the farming villages of the East, women usually owned and worked the fields, and among the Haudenosaunee clan mothers chose and could remove the men who sat on the council: a kind of political power few European women had. Trade networks carried goods over enormous distances; archaeologists find Gulf Coast shells and Great Lakes copper hundreds of miles from where they began. War, slavery and conquest existed too, between Native nations as among European ones. These were not peoples outside history, waiting to be discovered, but peoples in the middle of their own. Many of their place names are still on the map, including the names of states: Massachusetts, Connecticut, Ohio, Michigan, Mississippi, the two Dakotas and Utah among them.
How many people, again?
Most current estimates fall between about 2.5 and 7 million. The low numbers of the early 20th century were partly an artefact: scholars counted the survivors of epidemics that had already swept the continent and assumed that was how things had always been. Whatever the starting figure, what followed was a demographic catastrophe, which the library's The Columbian Exchange describes in full.

The continent Europeans called a "new world" was an old one, crowded with nations that had their own wars, trade routes, diplomacy and histories. What was new was the arrival of people and germs from the other side of the ocean.

Part 2 — Colonies and slavery (1492–1763)
This part and Parts 5 to 8 describe slavery, the violent dispossession of Native nations, massacres and racial terror, including lynching. The descriptions are factual and not graphic, but they can be hard to read.
The first Europeans to plant lasting settlements in what became the United States were not English. Spain founded St. Augustine, in Florida, in 1565, and pushed north from Mexico into New Mexico, where in 1680 the Pueblo peoples rose up in a coordinated revolt and drove the Spanish out for twelve years. France built a trading empire along the St. Lawrence and Mississippi (the story of A Brief History of Canada, in this series). The Dutch held New Netherland, with its port of New Amsterdam on Manhattan, until the English took it in 1664 and renamed it New York.
England came late and came for different reasons. Jamestown, founded in Virginia in 1607 by the Virginia Company, a joint-stock business, was meant to make money. It nearly failed, until colonists discovered that tobacco grew well and sold well in Europe. The Pilgrims who landed at Plymouth in 1620, and the much larger Puritan migration that followed, came to build godly communities on their own terms. Later colonies had their own motives: Maryland as a haven for Catholics, Pennsylvania for Quakers, and Georgia, the last, was founded in 1732.
Two foundations at once
From the beginning, English America was built on two foundations that would shape everything after.
The first was self-government. Colonists governed themselves through elected assemblies, town meetings and juries far more than most people in Europe did. Land was abundant (because it was being taken from Native peoples), so a far larger share of white men owned property and could vote than in England. The habits of argument, petition and local control that later fuelled the Revolution were learned here.
The second was slavery. In 1619 an English privateer, the White Lion, landed "twenty and odd" Africans at Point Comfort in Virginia. They had been captured in Portuguese-backed raids on the Kingdom of Ndongo, in today's Angola. Whether they were treated as slaves for life or as servants is debated, since Virginia had no slave law yet, but over the following decades the colonies built one: slavery became lifelong, hereditary and racial. By the 18th century it was legal in every one of the thirteen colonies, in New York and Boston as well as Charleston.

Year
Colonial population (approx.)

1625
about 2,000

1775
about 2.4 million

1790 (first federal census)
3,929,326, of whom 694,280 (about 18%) were enslaved

The scale of the American slave system is often misunderstood. Of the roughly 12.5 million Africans forced onto slave ships for the Americas over more than three centuries, the great majority went to Brazil and the Caribbean. Only about 389,000, around 4 percent of those who survived the crossing, landed in mainland North America. The enslaved population of the United States grew mostly through births, which meant American slavery was a system for owning families, generation after generation.
Ordinary colonial life
Most colonists, free or enslaved, worked the land. A New England family farm grew its own food and traded a little; a Chesapeake tobacco plantation shipped its crop to London; a South Carolina rice plantation was worked by enslaved Africans, some of whom, many historians argue, brought rice-growing skills with them from West Africa. Many white immigrants arrived as indentured servants, working several years for whoever paid their passage. In 1676 frontier settlers, servants and some enslaved people joined Bacon's Rebellion against Virginia's governor; one long-standing (and debated) interpretation is that elites afterwards leaned harder on African slavery and on drawing a sharper line between white and Black workers.
Religion mattered enormously. Waves of revivals in the mid-18th century, later called the Great Awakening, sent itinerant preachers through every colony, split churches, and taught ordinary people that they could judge spiritual authority for themselves, a habit that carried over into politics. New England had some of the highest literacy rates in the world, thanks to Puritan insistence that everyone read the Bible, and by the mid-1700s colonial newspapers and almanacs, such as Benjamin Franklin's, circulated widely.
The colonies were also a meeting ground. Trade, alliances and intermarriage with Native nations shaped the frontier as much as war did. French and English empires competed for Native allies, and Native nations played the empires off against one another. That balance broke in the French and Indian War (1754–1763), the North American front of a world war between Britain and France. Britain won, took Canada and the land east of the Mississippi, and found itself with an enormous debt and a continent to police.

The same colonies that taught ordinary men to govern themselves also wrote the laws that made other men property. Neither foundation can be removed from the American story without the building falling down.

Part 3 — Revolution (1763–1783)
Britain's victory in 1763 created the conditions for its defeat. To pay its war debts and garrison its new territory, Parliament began taxing the colonies directly, through the Sugar Act, the Stamp Act of 1765 and duties on imports like tea. To keep the peace with Native nations, the Crown also tried to stop colonists settling west of the Appalachians. Both policies collided with what colonists had come to see as their rights as Englishmen: to be taxed only by their own assemblies, and to expand onto land they considered theirs for the taking.
The slogan "no taxation without representation" captured the first grievance. Protests escalated through the 1760s and 1770s: boycotts, riots, the Boston "Massacre" of 1770, the Boston Tea Party of 1773. Parliament responded with punitive laws, which colonists called the Intolerable Acts, meant to end self-government in Massachusetts. On 19 April 1775, British troops marching out of Boston exchanged fire with colonial militia at Lexington and Concord, and the war began.
The Declaration
On 2 July 1776 the Continental Congress voted for independence; on 4 July it adopted the Declaration, drafted mainly by Thomas Jefferson of Virginia and eventually signed by 56 delegates. Its second paragraph contains the most quoted sentence in American history:

"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness." — Declaration of Independence, 1776

Jefferson enslaved hundreds of people over his lifetime. The contradiction was noticed at the time, and it has been argued about ever since.
Winning the war
The Continental Army under George Washington survived for years mainly by not losing decisively. The turning point was the capture of a British army at Saratoga in October 1777, which encouraged France to sign an alliance with the United States in February 1778. French money, troops and ships made possible the siege of Yorktown, which ended with the surrender of a British army on 19 October 1781. By the Treaty of Paris, signed on 3 September 1783 by John Adams, Benjamin Franklin and John Jay, Britain recognised American independence, with a western boundary on the Mississippi.
Not everyone celebrated. Many colonists had stayed loyal to the Crown, and tens of thousands of these Loyalists left, many for what is now Canada. Many Native nations sided with Britain, judging that an independent United States would be hungrier for their land; they were not party to the peace treaty, and Britain largely abandoned them. Enslaved people, too, fled to British lines after the royal governor of Virginia, Lord Dunmore, offered freedom to those who escaped rebel masters to fight for the king, and some left with the British at the war's end.
Living through it
The war was fought in farmyards and towns, not on distant frontiers. Armies on both sides took food and fuel from civilians; Loyalist and Patriot neighbours burned each other out in the backcountry of the Carolinas and New York. Washington's soldiers went months without pay, and many without shoes, through hard winters in camp. Women ran farms and shops in their husbands' absence, followed the armies as cooks and nurses, and organised boycotts of British goods; a few fought in disguise. For many ordinary families, the Revolution was less a debate about rights than years of scarcity, fear and divided loyalties.
What kind of revolution?
Historians still argue about what the Revolution was, and the argument has become public.

View
The case

A revolution of ideas
The historian Gordon Wood argues that the Revolution was genuinely radical: it overturned a world of monarchy and deference and made the ordinary citizen the source of authority, setting in motion the later abolition of slavery and the expansion of democracy

A revolution for some
Other historians stress that it secured the liberty of propertied white men, accelerated the seizure of Native land and left slavery intact, and that its benefits reached others only through later struggles

The 1619 versus 1776 debate
In 2019 The New York Times' 1619 Project argued that slavery, not 1776, should be placed at the centre of the national story, and that protecting slavery was one motive for independence. A group of leading historians, among them Wood, James McPherson and Sean Wilentz, publicly disputed that claim. In 2021 a presidential commission issued the 1776 Report in reply; professional historians widely criticised it for errors and thin sourcing, and the next administration disbanded the commission

Both sides of that last debate agree on more than the shouting suggests: slavery was central to the colonial economy, and the Declaration's words became a weapon that abolitionists, suffragists and civil rights activists later used against the very men who wrote them.

Part 4 — The Constitution and the early republic (1783–1828)
The first national government, under the Articles of Confederation (in force from 1781), was deliberately weak. It could not tax, could not regulate trade between the states, and needed nine states to agree on anything important. When indebted farmers in western Massachusetts rose in Shays' Rebellion, many leaders concluded that the union was failing.
From 25 May to 17 September 1787, 55 delegates met in Philadelphia, behind closed doors, and wrote a new constitution instead of amending the old one. It created a stronger national government split into three branches (Congress, the presidency and the courts), each able to check the others, and divided power again between the national government and the states. It came into force once nine states had ratified it; New Hampshire became the ninth in the summer of 1788. George Washington took office as the first president on 30 April 1789. A Bill of Rights, the first ten amendments, protecting speech, religion, the press, the right to bear arms, jury trial and more, was ratified on 15 December 1791.
The compromises
The Constitution was a bundle of bargains, and two of them shaped the next seventy years.

Large versus small states. The House of Representatives would be apportioned by population; the Senate would give every state two seats regardless of size. That bargain still governs American politics: by the Census Bureau's 2025 estimates, Wyoming's roughly 590,000 people elect as many senators as California's 39 million, nearly 67 times as many.
Slave versus free states. The words "slave" and "slavery" do not appear in the original document, but slavery is everywhere in it. The three-fifths clause counted three of every five enslaved people when apportioning House seats and electoral votes, giving slaveholding states extra power. Congress could not ban the import of slaves before 1808. A fugitive slave clause required escaped slaves to be returned.

Supporters of the Constitution argued their case in the essays later known as The Federalist, written by Alexander Hamilton, James Madison and John Jay. Opponents, the Anti-Federalists, feared a distant government that would swallow the states and the liberties of ordinary people. They lost the ratification fight but won the Bill of Rights, and their suspicion of central power never left American politics.
Parties, courts and a peaceful handover
The founders disliked political parties, and then immediately formed them. Hamilton's Federalists wanted a strong national government, a national bank and close ties with Britain; Jefferson and Madison's Democratic-Republicans wanted a more agrarian, decentralised republic and sympathised with revolutionary France. In 1798, during a naval conflict with France, the Federalists passed the Alien and Sedition Acts, which made it a crime to publish "false, scandalous and malicious" writing against the government. The election of 1800 was bitter, and its result, the transfer of power from Federalist John Adams to his rival Jefferson, was one of the first peaceful handovers between opposing parties in modern history.
In 1803 the Supreme Court, under Chief Justice John Marshall, decided Marbury v. Madison, establishing that federal courts can strike down laws that conflict with the Constitution. That power, judicial review, is not written explicitly in the text, and it made the Court the arena where many of the country's later fights would be decided.

Founding figure
What they're remembered for

George Washington
Commander in the war; first president; stepped down after two terms, setting a precedent

Thomas Jefferson
Declaration of Independence; third president; Louisiana Purchase; slaveholder

James Madison
Chief architect of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights; fourth president

Alexander Hamilton
Federalist essays; first Treasury secretary; built the national credit and financial system

John Marshall
Chief Justice for more than three decades; established judicial review in Marbury v. Madison (1803)

A changing society
The Revolution's language worked on the country slowly. One by one, the Northern states abolished slavery, mostly through gradual laws that freed the children of enslaved mothers at adulthood, so that slavery became a Southern institution. Religious revivals swept the young republic, building new Baptist and Methodist churches that welcomed the poor, women and Black Americans, and fed the reform movements of the next generation, from temperance to abolition. Roads, canals and steamboats began to tie farms to distant markets. Women were shut out of voting and most property rights, but the idea that mothers had a civic duty to raise virtuous citizens gave them a public role, and arguments, that would grow.
In the early 19th century most states dropped property qualifications for voting by white men. The 1828 election of Andrew Jackson, a Tennessee planter, general and self-made "man of the people", is often taken as the start of a new, more democratic, more raucous era. It was also the start of the most systematic campaign yet to remove Native nations from the East.

Part 5 — Expansion and dispossession (1803–1890)
In 1803 Jefferson's government bought the Louisiana Territory from France for $15 million: about 828,000 square miles west of the Mississippi, at roughly four cents an acre. The purchase roughly doubled the size of the country. What France sold, though, was mainly its claim against other European empires. Almost all of that land was owned, lived on and governed by Native nations who had sold nothing.
The story of the next ninety years is how the United States turned paper claims into possession, and it has two sides that are both true. For millions of settlers, many of them poor immigrants, the West was a chance at land and independence that was unthinkable in Europe. For Native nations, it was invasion, broken treaties, war, starvation and removal.
Removal
In the Southeast, the Cherokee, Muscogee (Creek), Choctaw, Chickasaw and Seminole nations had farms, towns and, in the Cherokee case, a syllabary for writing their language (completed by Sequoyah around 1821), a written constitution (1827) and the first Native American newspaper, the Cherokee Phoenix (1828). Some wealthy Cherokee, like their white neighbours, also held enslaved Black people. White settlers in Georgia and neighbouring states wanted the land.
On 28 May 1830 President Andrew Jackson signed the Indian Removal Act, authorising him to negotiate the exchange of eastern Native lands for territory west of the Mississippi. His administration concluded almost 70 removal treaties. In 1832 the Supreme Court ruled in Worcester v. Georgia that Georgia's laws had no force inside the Cherokee Nation. Jackson did not enforce the decision. A small group of Cherokee leaders signed the Treaty of New Echota, which the Cherokee National Council never approved; the U.S. Senate ratified it in 1836. Most Cherokees rejected it, and in 1838–39 the army forced them west, some walking a thousand miles over four months.

The removals, in numbers
Estimate

Native people removed from the East, 1830s–1840s
about 50,000 to 60,000

Cherokee forced west, 1838–39
about 16,000

Cherokee deaths on the "Trail of Tears"
about 4,000 (some estimates up to 8,000)

Taking the West
In the 1840s expansion became a national creed that its champions called "manifest destiny". The United States annexed Texas, and the war with Mexico that followed (1846–48) ended with the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo on 2 February 1848: Mexico ceded 55 percent of its territory, including present-day California, Nevada and Utah and most of Arizona, New Mexico and Colorado, for $15 million. Mexican citizens living in the ceded lands became Americans overnight, with treaty promises about their property that were often not kept. (The Mexican side of this story is in Mexico: A Condensed History.)
Gold was discovered in California the same year, and what followed there was among the darkest chapters of the whole expansion. California's Native population, already reduced by Spanish missions and disease to perhaps 150,000 by 1848, fell to about 30,000 by 1870. Historian Benjamin Madley counts between 9,492 and 16,094 Native people killed in direct violence between 1846 and 1873, and thousands more died of starvation or overwork; settlers held an estimated 10,000 to 27,000 Native people in forced labour, thousands of them children. In 1851 California's governor, Peter Burnett, told the legislature to expect "a war of extermination" until the state's Native peoples were gone. In 2019 the state's governor formally called it a genocide and apologised. Whether "genocide" fits the wider national record is a live scholarly debate; for California, many historians now use it.
Land for settlers, war on the Plains
The Homestead Act of 20 May 1862 offered 160 acres of surveyed public land to settlers who would live on and farm it. It was one of history's great land giveaways to ordinary people, though smaller than its legend: of some 500 million acres the government dispersed between 1862 and 1904, only about 80 million went to homesteaders. On 10 May 1869 the tracks of the first transcontinental railroad met at Promontory, Utah. On the western section, Chinese labourers, paid less than white workers, did most of the heavy manual work.
On the Great Plains, the Lakota, Cheyenne, Comanche and other nations, whose horse-and-bison way of life was itself a product of the Columbian Exchange, fought the longest. The 1868 Fort Laramie Treaty recognised a Great Sioux Reservation that included the Black Hills, "set aside for exclusive use" of the Sioux. In 1874 an army expedition under George Custer found gold there; miners poured in, the army moved against the Lakota, and after Custer's command was destroyed at the Little Bighorn in 1876 the government took the Black Hills in 1877. Ownership is still disputed today.
Meanwhile the bison, the Plains nations' food, shelter and economy, were shot almost out of existence: from tens of millions early in the century to a few hundred in the United States by 1889. Commercial hunters did most of the killing; some army officers and officials welcomed it as a way to force Native peoples onto reservations.

On 29 December 1890, at Wounded Knee Creek in South Dakota, U.S. soldiers killed between 250 and 300 Lakota, many of them women and children. It is usually taken as the end of the armed resistance, and the end of an era.

The last great instrument of dispossession was legal rather than military. The Dawes Act of 8 February 1887 broke up reservation land held in common into individual allotments and sold the "surplus" to settlers. Native-held land fell from about 138 million acres in 1887 to about 48 million by 1934, when the Indian Reorganization Act ended allotment.

Part 6 — Cotton, slavery and the road to war (1820–1861)
In 1794 Eli Whitney patented a cotton gin that could clean up to fifty pounds of cotton a day. Raw cotton output then doubled every decade after 1800. By the middle of the century the American South grew about three-quarters of the world's cotton and supplied three-fifths of all U.S. exports. Britain's mills, and New England's, ran on it.
The gin did not reduce the need for enslaved labour; it multiplied it. Planters moved west into Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana and Texas, onto land taken from the removed nations. About a million enslaved people were forcibly moved from the older states of the Upper South to the new cotton lands, many sold away from their families, in what the historian Ira Berlin called the Second Middle Passage.

Census
Enslaved people in the United States

1790
694,280

1860
3,953,761 (about one in eight Americans)

By 1860 the people held in slavery were valued, as property, at more than $3 billion, an immense sum for the time. That is why slaveholders fought so hard to protect slavery and extend it into new territory: new slave states meant more votes in Congress, and new land meant demand for the people they owned.
Lives under slavery
Enslaved people worked from first light to dark in gangs under overseers, faced the whip and the constant threat of sale, and had no legal right to marriage, to learning to read, or to their own children. They also built a life the system could not erase: families held together across plantations, a Black Christianity of spirituals and secret worship, music, folk knowledge and constant, mostly quiet resistance, from slowing work to running away. Some, like Harriet Tubman, escaped and went back to lead others north. Others, like Frederick Douglass, escaped and became the abolition movement's most powerful voices.
An American culture
The decades before the war were also when the country found a literary voice of its own. Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau argued for self-reliance and conscience against conformity; Herman Melville and Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote about sin, obsession and the American soul; Walt Whitman wrote poems that tried to contain a whole democratic people. Harriet Beecher Stowe's novel Uncle Tom's Cabin turned the cruelty of slavery into a story millions of Northern readers wept over. Frederick Douglass's Narrative of his own life in slavery did the same from inside. Popular entertainment, meanwhile, was dominated by the minstrel show, in which white performers in blackface mocked Black Americans, an origin of American popular music that the country is still reckoning with.
A house dividing
The sectional fight over slavery's expansion shaped every decade before the war.

Year
Event
What it did

1820
Missouri Compromise
Missouri admitted as a slave state, Maine as free; slavery barred north of latitude 36°30′ in the rest of the Louisiana Territory

1848
Seneca Falls Convention
A women's rights meeting rewrote the Declaration to say "all men and women are created equal"; Frederick Douglass spoke for the suffrage resolution

1850
Compromise of 1850
California admitted free; a tougher Fugitive Slave Act forced Northern officials and citizens to help capture escapees

1854
Kansas-Nebraska Act
Repealed the 36°30′ line and let settlers vote on slavery; violence followed in "Bleeding Kansas"

1857
Dred Scott v. Sandford
Supreme Court ruled Black Americans could not be citizens and Congress could not ban slavery in the territories

Many white Northerners were not abolitionists, and many shared the era's racism. But the Fugitive Slave Act brought slavery into their own towns, and Dred Scott suggested that nothing could stop slavery spreading. A new Republican Party formed around one idea: no more slave territory.
Northern society was changing fast in the same years. Factories, canals and railroads were spreading; cities filled with immigrants, above all Irish Catholics fleeing famine and Germans, who met a fierce nativist backlash. The North was becoming a society of wage labour and small farms; the South remained one of plantations and slavery. Each came to see the other as a threat to its way of life.
On 6 November 1860 Abraham Lincoln won the presidency with 39.7 percent of the popular vote and every electoral vote from the free states. He was not even on the ballot in ten Southern states. Before he took office on 4 March 1861, seven states had seceded: South Carolina, Mississippi, Florida, Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana and Texas. Their own documents were explicit; Mississippi's declared its position "thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery". The later "Lost Cause" story, that the war was mainly about states' rights or tariffs, is rejected by the overwhelming majority of historians. On 12 April 1861 Confederate forces opened fire on Fort Sumter, in Charleston harbour.

Part 7 — Civil War and Reconstruction (1861–1877)
After Fort Sumter, four more states joined the Confederacy, including Virginia, and the war became the bloodiest in American history. The North had far more people, most of the factories and most of the railroads. The South had the advantage of fighting on its own ground, needing only not to lose, and some of the war's ablest generals, above all Robert E. Lee.
A war that changed its purpose
Lincoln began the war to save the Union, not to end slavery. Enslaved people forced the question by fleeing to Union lines wherever the armies came near. On 1 January 1863 the Emancipation Proclamation declared free all enslaved people in the areas still in rebellion. It did not apply to the loyal border states or to Confederate areas already under Union control, and it could only be enforced as Union armies advanced. But it changed what the war was for, and it opened the army to Black men. By the end of the war almost 200,000 Black soldiers and sailors had fought for the Union.
On 9 April 1865 Lee surrendered to Ulysses S. Grant at Appomattox Court House, Virginia. Five days later, on the evening of 14 April, the actor and Confederate sympathiser John Wilkes Booth shot Lincoln at Ford's Theatre in Washington; he died the next morning.

The war's cost
Figure

Deaths (traditional count)
about 620,000, roughly 2 percent of the population

Deaths (2011 census-based recount by J. David Hacker)
about 750,000

Share of deaths from disease
about five of every eight

Black Union soldiers and sailors
almost 200,000

For scale: about 405,000 Americans died in the Second World War, out of a population more than four times larger.
The war reached deep into civilian life. Both sides introduced conscription; in the North, men could pay for a substitute, which fed the anger of the July 1863 draft riots in New York City, where mobs attacked Black residents. Women ran farms and businesses, and thousands served as nurses, among them Clara Barton, who went on to found the American Red Cross. In the South, Union blockades and the destruction of farms and railways brought hunger and inflation, and the march of William T. Sherman's army through Georgia in 1864 deliberately destroyed the Confederacy's capacity to keep fighting.
The second founding
Between 1865 and 1870 the country amended its Constitution three times, in ways the historian Eric Foner calls a "second founding".

The 13th Amendment (ratified 6 December 1865) abolished slavery, "except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted", an exception later exploited by Southern convict-leasing systems.
The 14th Amendment (ratified July 1868) made everyone born or naturalised in the United States a citizen and barred states from denying any person "due process of law" or "the equal protection of the laws". It became the foundation of most modern civil rights law, and it is the amendment the Supreme Court applied to birthright citizenship in 2026.
The 15th Amendment (ratified 3 February 1870) barred denying the vote on account of race.

Reconstruction and its overthrow
Lincoln's successor, Andrew Johnson of Tennessee, wanted a quick and lenient readmission of the Southern states, which promptly passed "Black Codes" restricting freedpeople's lives. Congress, controlled by Radical Republicans, took over. The Reconstruction Acts of 1867 put most of the former Confederacy under military districts and required new state constitutions guaranteeing Black men the vote. The House impeached Johnson in February 1868; the Senate acquitted him by one vote.
For a few years the South saw something unprecedented: biracial democracy. Black men voted in large numbers and served in state legislatures and, from 1870, in Congress: 22 Black men sat in Congress between 1870 and 1901. A federal Freedmen's Bureau provided food and shelter to the newly freed, and Black churches, schools and colleges multiplied.
It was destroyed by terror and by Northern fatigue. The Ku Klux Klan and similar groups murdered Black voters and officeholders and their white allies. The disputed presidential election of 1876 was resolved by the informal Compromise of 1877: Republican Rutherford B. Hayes took the presidency, and the last federal troops were withdrawn from Southern politics. "Redeemer" Democrats took over the Southern states. From the 1890s they used literacy tests, "grandfather clauses" and violence to strip Black citizens of the vote; by 1905 most Black Southerners were effectively disenfranchised. After George White of North Carolina left Congress in 1901, no Black American was elected to it again until 1928.

Reconstruction is the hinge of American history. For a decade the country tried to make the promise of 1776 real for everyone, and then it stopped trying for most of a century.

How Reconstruction is remembered has itself been contested. For decades, textbooks influenced by the "Dunning School" portrayed it as a corrupt mistake imposed on a defeated South. Since the 1960s, and especially since Foner's work, most historians see it as a noble, unfinished experiment defeated by violence.

Part 8 — Industry, immigration and empire (1877–1914)
In the half-century after the Civil War the United States became the largest economy in the world. By the Maddison Project's long-run estimates, the American economy had already passed Britain's by about 1870 and passed China's by the late 1880s. By 1913 it was more than twice Britain's size.

Year
Population
U.S. GDP per person (Maddison, 2011 dollars)

1820
9.6 million
$2,674

1870
39.8 million
$4,803

1900
76.2 million
$8,038

1910
92.2 million
$9,637

This was the age of railroads, steel, oil, electricity and the telephone. Andrew Carnegie's steel mills, John D. Rockefeller's Standard Oil and J. P. Morgan's banks built fortunes larger than any before them. Standard Oil was organised in 1882 as a "trust", a structure that let one board run a web of nominally separate companies as a single monopoly. Mark Twain gave the era its name: the Gilded Age, golden on the surface, base metal underneath.
Who did the work
The workers were increasingly immigrants. Between 1892 and 1924 more than 12 million people were processed through the federal immigration station on Ellis Island in New York harbour alone. The peak year was 1907, when nearly 1.3 million people entered the country. Most of the new arrivals came not from Britain, Ireland and Germany, as before, but from Italy, Poland, Russia's Jewish Pale, Greece and the Austro-Hungarian Empire. The foreign-born share of the population reached 14.8 percent in 1890 and 14.7 percent in 1910, a share matched again only in recent years.
Life in the industrial cities was hard. Families crowded into tenements, children worked in mills and mines, and twelve-hour days were common. Workers organised, and strikes were often met with private guards, state militias or federal troops. Reformers, the Progressives, fought back through journalism, the vote and the law: the Sherman Anti-Trust Act of 1890 made monopolising trade illegal (it was used against Standard Oil by 1911); the 16th Amendment (1913) allowed a federal income tax; the 17th (1913) let voters, not state legislatures, elect senators.
Not every newcomer was welcome. The Chinese Exclusion Act of 6 May 1882 suspended the immigration of Chinese labourers and barred Chinese immigrants from citizenship, the first major law restricting immigration by nationality. It was extended and made permanent, and repealed only in 1943.
A new way of living
By the 1910s American cities had electric light, streetcars, telephones, department stores, mass-circulation newspapers and, soon, cinemas. Baseball became the national game. Settlement houses, the most famous Jane Addams's Hull House in Chicago, offered immigrants classes and help, and trained a generation of women reformers. In New Orleans, Black musicians fused blues, ragtime, brass-band music and church singing into jazz, the first of the American musical forms, from blues to rock and roll to hip hop, that would go on to conquer the world. Almost all of them were born in Black communities.
The Jim Crow South and the Great Migration
In the South, the "separate but equal" doctrine was blessed by the Supreme Court in Plessy v. Ferguson (18 May 1896), which upheld a Louisiana law segregating railway cars. Justice John Marshall Harlan dissented alone:

"Our constitution is color-blind, and neither knows nor tolerates classes among citizens." — Justice Harlan, dissenting in Plessy v. Ferguson (1896)

Segregation was enforced by law and by terror. The Equal Justice Initiative has documented more than 4,000 racial terror lynchings of Black Americans in twelve Southern states between 1877 and 1950. Beginning in the 1910s, Black Southerners voted with their feet: in the Great Migration, about six million people moved to the cities of the North, Midwest and West between the 1910s and the 1970s, remaking Chicago, Detroit, New York and Los Angeles, and American music, politics and culture with them.
An overseas empire
The closing of the continental frontier coincided with a reach overseas. In January 1893 American businessmen, backed by the U.S. minister and Marines from a U.S. warship, overthrew Queen Lili'uokalani of Hawaii; the islands were annexed in July 1898. That year the Spanish-American War, triggered after the battleship Maine exploded in Havana harbour, lasted under four months. By the Treaty of Paris (10 December 1898) Spain ceded Puerto Rico and Guam and sold the Philippines to the United States for $20 million. The Senate ratified it by a single vote, after a fierce debate between those who saw a duty or an opportunity and anti-imperialists who saw a republic betraying itself. Filipinos who had been fighting Spain for independence then fought the United States in a long, brutal war (the story is in Philippines: A Condensed History).

Part 9 — World wars, the Depression and the New Deal (1914–1945)
When war broke out in Europe in 1914, most Americans wanted no part of it. Germany's renewed unrestricted submarine warfare in February 1917, and the "Zimmermann Telegram", a German proposal to Mexico for an alliance against the United States, changed that. On 2 April 1917 President Woodrow Wilson asked Congress for war, saying "the world must be made safe for democracy." American troops arrived late, but in large enough numbers to help tip the balance in 1918. About 116,500 Americans died in the war; the influenza pandemic that followed killed about 675,000 at home.
At home, the war years and the decade after brought quick, uneven change. Women won the vote nationally with the 19th Amendment, ratified on 18 August 1920, though many Black women in the South remained barred by state laws for decades more. Congress shut the door on mass immigration with the 1924 Immigration Act, which set quotas of 2 percent of each nationality counted in the 1890 census (deliberately favouring northwestern Europeans) and excluded Asian immigrants entirely. The 1920s were a decade of radio, cars, jazz, film, the Harlem Renaissance and booming stock prices, and also of a revived Ku Klux Klan and fierce cultural conflict between city and countryside.
The crash
The stock market crashed in the autumn of 1929, and the economy fell off a cliff. By the Maddison Project's estimates, real output fell by about 30 percent between 1929 and 1933. Thousands of banks failed, wiping out savers who had no deposit insurance. Unemployment, which no agency measured officially at the time, is estimated to have reached about a quarter of the workforce in 1933. On the southern Plains, drought and over-ploughed soil produced the Dust Bowl.

Indicator
1929
1933

Real GDP (Maddison, 2011 dollars)
$1.46 trillion
$1.02 trillion

GDP per person
$11,954
$8,048

The unemployment figure is a later reconstruction: the economist Stanley Lebergott put the 1933 peak at 24.9 percent; another estimate, by Michael Darby, at 22.5 percent in 1932.
The New Deal
Franklin D. Roosevelt, a Democrat, took office in 1933 and over the next six years built the modern American state. The New Deal included, among much else:

federal deposit insurance and new rules for banks and stock markets;
public works and job programmes that built dams, schools, roads and parks, and the Tennessee Valley Authority (1933), which brought electricity to one of the poorest regions;
the Social Security Act (14 August 1935), creating old-age pensions and unemployment insurance;
the National Labor Relations Act (5 July 1935), guaranteeing workers the right to organise and bargain collectively, which drove a surge in union membership.

The New Deal did not end the Depression; the war did. Its defenders argue it saved American capitalism and democracy at a moment when much of the world turned to fascism or communism, and built protections that still define ordinary life. Its critics, then and now, argue that it expanded federal power beyond what the Constitution intended, and that some policies prolonged the slump. A third critique comes from the left and from historians of race: the Social Security Act excluded agricultural and domestic workers, which in practice left out most Black workers in the South, and federal housing programmes systematically denied mortgages in Black neighbourhoods ("redlining"), a legacy still visible in the racial wealth gap.
The Second World War
The United States stayed formally neutral as war engulfed Europe and Asia, while aiding Britain through Lend-Lease (1941). On 7 December 1941 Japan attacked the U.S. fleet at Pearl Harbor in Hawaii, killing or wounding more than 3,500 Americans. Congress declared war the next day, with a single dissenting vote in the House; Germany declared war on the United States days later.
The war transformed the country. Factories turned out ships, planes and tanks at a pace no other country matched. Women entered industrial jobs in huge numbers. After protests by Black leaders against discrimination in war work, Roosevelt's Executive Order 8802 (June 1941) banned it in defence industries. Black soldiers fought in a segregated army, abroad against an enemy preaching racial supremacy.
The war also produced one of the gravest civil liberties violations in American history. Executive Order 9066 (19 February 1942) led to the forced removal of about 122,000 people of Japanese ancestry from the West Coast into camps; nearly 70,000 of them were American citizens. The Supreme Court upheld the policy. In 1988 Congress formally apologised and paid $20,000 to each surviving internee.
The Manhattan Project built the first atomic bombs. On 6 August 1945 one destroyed Hiroshima; on 9 August another destroyed Nagasaki. Between them they killed somewhere between 150,000 and 246,000 people by the end of 1945. Japan surrendered, formally, on 2 September 1945. Whether the bombings were necessary to end the war without a costly invasion, or whether Japan was already close to surrender, remains one of the most argued questions in modern history.

About 405,000 Americans died in the Second World War. The country came out of it with intact cities, the atomic bomb and no rival among the democracies; five years later it was producing more than a quarter of the world's output.

Part 10 — Superpower, Cold War and civil rights (1945–1974)
In 1950, by the Maddison estimates, the American economy produced about 27 percent of everything made on Earth. The country that had refused to join the League of Nations now led the founding of the United Nations, and quickly found itself in a global rivalry with the Soviet Union.
Containment
In March 1947 President Harry Truman told Congress that it must be "the policy of the United States to support free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation", and asked for $400 million for Greece and Turkey. The Marshall Plan, signed in April 1948, gave $13.3 billion over four years to rebuild Western Europe. The United States led the founding of NATO, rebuilt occupied Japan and West Germany as allies, and fought a war in Korea (1950–53) in which about 36,500 Americans died.
The Cold War reshaped domestic life too. Fear of Soviet espionage, some of it real, fed a "Red Scare". In February 1950 Senator Joseph McCarthy claimed to have a list of 205 Communists in the State Department; he offered little proof but ruined many careers before the Senate censured him on 2 December 1954. In October 1962 the discovery of Soviet nuclear missiles in Cuba brought the world closer to nuclear war than at any other time; the crisis ended after two weeks when Khrushchev agreed to withdraw the missiles, the U.S. promised not to invade Cuba and, privately, agreed to remove its own missiles from Turkey.
The affluent society
For tens of millions of Americans, the postwar decades were the best economic times in history. The G.I. Bill (1944) sent about 2.3 million veterans to college and backed 4.3 million home loans by 1955. Suburbs spread around every city. The Interstate Highway Act of 1956 authorised a 41,000-mile network of motorways. Television, washing machines and two-car garages spread. Factory workers in unions could buy homes and send children to college on a single income. A baby boom pushed the fertility rate to about 3.7 children per woman in 1960; it is about 1.6 today.
That prosperity was unequally shared. Many of the new suburbs used restrictive covenants and federal mortgage rules to exclude Black families, so Black Americans were largely shut out of the era's biggest engine of family wealth, home ownership.
The civil rights revolution
The movement that overthrew legal segregation was built over decades by lawyers, churches, unions, students and ordinary people.

Date
Event

July 1948
Truman's Executive Order 9981 desegregates the armed forces

17 May 1954
Brown v. Board of Education: "Separate educational facilities are inherently unequal" (unanimous)

Dec 1955 – Dec 1956
Montgomery bus boycott, sparked by the arrest of Rosa Parks and led by Martin Luther King Jr., ends in victory after 382 days

Sept 1957
Eisenhower sends 1,000 paratroopers to protect the "Little Rock Nine" at Central High School, Arkansas

28 Aug 1963
More than 250,000 attend the March on Washington; King gives the "I Have a Dream" speech

2 July 1964
Civil Rights Act bans segregation in public places and discrimination in employment

6 Aug 1965
Voting Rights Act bans literacy tests and puts federal examiners and "preclearance" in the South

4 April 1968
King assassinated in Memphis; riots break out in more than 100 cities

The results were rapid in law and slower in life. By the end of 1965 a quarter of a million new Black voters had registered. The movement also inspired others: the women's movement, Mexican American farmworkers, Native activists, and gay Americans all drew on its methods and language.
Lyndon Johnson, who took office after John F. Kennedy's assassination in November 1963, used his legislative skill to pass not only the civil rights laws but the "Great Society": Medicare and Medicaid (30 July 1965), federal aid to schools, and the war on poverty. The Immigration and Nationality Act of October 1965 abolished the national-origins quotas of the 1920s. It transformed the country, as immigration from Asia, Latin America and later Africa rose and the foreign-born share climbed from about 5 percent in 1965 to about 14 percent by 2016.
Vietnam and the breaking of trust
The same years brought the war that broke the postwar consensus. After the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution in August 1964, which only two senators opposed, Johnson escalated U.S. involvement in Vietnam. American troop numbers peaked at about 543,000 in 1969. More than 58,000 Americans died, and estimates of Vietnamese dead range from under one million to around three million. The war divided a generation, fuelled a mass antiwar movement and destroyed Johnson's presidency.
His successor, Richard Nixon, wound down U.S. ground combat in Vietnam and opened relations with Communist China. He was also brought down by the Watergate scandal, which began with a break-in at Democratic headquarters on 17 June 1972 and ended, after the Supreme Court ordered him to hand over his secret tapes, with his resignation on 9 August 1974. Two years earlier American astronauts had walked on the Moon (20 July 1969). The country that could do that could no longer agree on much else.

Part 11 — From the 1970s to the 2000s (1974–2008)
The 1970s were a decade of humbling. The 1973 Arab oil embargo first doubled and then quadrupled oil prices. Inflation reached 11 percent in 1974 and 13.5 percent in 1980, while unemployment also rose, a combination ("stagflation") the economics of the time said should not happen. Saigon fell to North Vietnamese forces on 30 April 1975. In November 1979 Iranian revolutionaries seized the U.S. embassy in Tehran and held 52 Americans hostage for 444 days; they were freed minutes after Ronald Reagan's inauguration on 20 January 1981.
The Reagan era
Reagan, a former actor and governor of California, won by promising to restore national confidence and shrink government: "government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem," he said in his first inaugural address. His administration cut income tax rates sharply, deregulated industries, confronted unions and built up the military, while the Federal Reserve broke inflation with punishing interest rates and a deep recession in 1981–82.
How to judge it is one of the clearest left-right divides in American history. Supporters credit Reagan with ending stagflation, launching a long boom and, through pressure and then diplomacy with Mikhail Gorbachev, helping end the Cold War on Western terms. Critics point to a federal debt that more than tripled between 1980 and 1989 (from $914 billion to $2.7 trillion), the weakening of unions (Reagan fired more than 10,000 striking air traffic controllers in 1981), and the start of a long rise in inequality. Both sides agree he changed the terms of debate for a generation: the next Democratic president, Bill Clinton, declared in 1996 that "the era of big government is over."
The Berlin Wall fell in November 1989; Gorbachev resigned and the Soviet Union dissolved in December 1991. The United States was, briefly, the only superpower.
The 1990s
The 1990s combined a long boom, the birth of the commercial internet, and the North American Free Trade Agreement with Canada and Mexico (in force from 1 January 1994). Clinton was impeached by the House in December 1998 for perjury and obstruction of justice over an affair with a White House intern, and acquitted by the Senate in February 1999.
Underneath the boom, the economy was being reshaped. Manufacturing employment fell as production moved abroad and machines replaced workers; finance and technology boomed; and the gains went increasingly to those with college degrees, capital and the right postcodes. The condensed piece in this library summarises the result: an economy "unmatched at generating aggregate wealth and innovation, persistently uneven at distributing it."
Culture wars and new technologies
Social change after the 1960s produced its own counter-movement. Roe v. Wade (1973), which established a constitutional right to abortion, the spread of no-fault divorce, and the gay rights movement mobilised a new religious right, mostly evangelical Protestants and conservative Catholics, which became a core part of the Republican coalition from Reagan onward. Prison populations grew for three decades, driven largely by tougher sentencing laws, until by 2008 about one American adult in a hundred was behind bars, among the highest rates in the world; violent crime fell from the early 1990s. Whether mass incarceration caused much of that fall, and whether its costs, borne heavily by Black and poor communities, were worth it, became an argument of its own. In the Bronx in the 1970s, Black and Latino teenagers invented hip hop. In California garages and university labs, the personal computer and then the internet turned into industries that would make American technology companies the most valuable on Earth.
The new century
The 2000 election was decided by a few hundred votes in Florida and a 5–4 Supreme Court ruling, Bush v. Gore (12 December 2000), that ended the recount. George W. Bush won the Electoral College while losing the national popular vote.
On 11 September 2001, nineteen al-Qaeda hijackers flew passenger jets into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon; a fourth plane crashed in Pennsylvania. The attacks killed 2,977 people from 90 nations. The United States invaded Afghanistan in October 2001 and, on 20 March 2003, invaded Iraq, citing claims that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction. No such stockpiles were found.

War
U.S. military deaths (approx.)

Iraq (2003–2011)
about 4,500

Afghanistan (2001–2021)
about 2,300 to 2,400

Estimates of Iraqi deaths vary enormously by method: from about 100,000 to 115,000 recorded civilian deaths (Iraq Body Count) to 400,000 to more than 600,000 total deaths in household-survey studies. The wars, the treatment of detainees and the failure to find weapons damaged American standing abroad and trust in government at home.

By 2008 the United States had won the Cold War and lost something harder to measure: the confidence, shared across parties, that its institutions told the truth and worked for ordinary people.

Part 12 — Polarisation and the present (2008–2026)
The financial crisis that began in 2007, when a bubble in American housing and mortgage lending burst, became the worst economic downturn since the 1930s. The recession officially ran from December 2007 to June 2009. About 8.7 million jobs disappeared, unemployment peaked at 10 percent in October 2009, and Congress authorised a $700 billion rescue fund for the banks. Millions lost homes. Many Americans concluded that the people who caused the crisis had been bailed out and those who suffered from it had not; that feeling powered movements on both the right (the Tea Party) and the left (Occupy Wall Street).
In November 2008 Barack Obama, a Democrat, was elected the first African American president, with 52.9 percent of the vote. His Affordable Care Act (23 March 2010) extended health insurance to some twenty million people and became the most fought-over domestic law of the era. In 2015 the Supreme Court recognised a constitutional right to same-sex marriage in Obergefell v. Hodges (5–4).
Two Americas, two stories
In 2016 Donald Trump, a New York property developer and television personality who had never held office, won the presidency on a platform of restricting immigration, raising tariffs and "America First". He lost the popular vote to Hillary Clinton by about 2.9 million votes but won the Electoral College, 304 to 227. His supporters saw a long-overdue revolt against a political class that had shipped jobs abroad, ignored the communities left behind and looked down on their values. His opponents saw a threat to democratic norms, a coarsening of public life and an appeal to racial and nativist resentment. Both groups were large, and they increasingly lived in different places, watched different media and trusted different facts.

Year
Event

Dec 2019
Trump impeached by the House over his dealings with Ukraine; acquitted by the Senate

2020
COVID-19 pandemic; about 1.2 million U.S. deaths are eventually recorded

25 May 2020
George Floyd murdered by a Minneapolis police officer; protests in more than 2,000 U.S. cities

Nov 2020
Joe Biden defeats Trump; Trump refuses to accept the result, repeating false claims of fraud

6 Jan 2021
A mob of Trump supporters attacks the Capitol to stop the count of electoral votes; certification is completed the next morning

13 Jan 2021
Trump impeached a second time, for incitement of insurrection; acquitted (57–43, short of the 67 needed)

24 June 2022
Dobbs v. Jackson overturns Roe v. Wade (1973); abortion law returns to the states

2022
Inflation averages 8 percent, the highest in four decades

Nov 2024
Trump wins again, 312 electoral votes to Kamala Harris's 226, and 49.8 percent of the popular vote

On 20 January 2025, his first day back in office, Trump pardoned or commuted the sentences of all those charged over the January 6 attack. He became only the second president, after Grover Cleveland, to win non-consecutive terms.
The United States in 2026
Here is the state of affairs as of late October 2026, from dated sources, with the main lines of argument. It will date quickly.
Population and people. The World Bank puts the 2025 population at about 341.8 million. The share born abroad is about 15 percent (2024), back near the record levels of 1890–1910. Net international migration, by the Census Bureau's estimates, fell from a peak of 2.7 million in 2024 to 1.3 million in the year to mid-2025, and was projected to fall to about 321,000 in 2026: the result of both less immigration and more emigration, under very different policy regimes. Life expectancy (78.9 years in 2024) remains several years below most other rich countries; fertility (1.6) is below replacement, as in most of them.
Economy. At about $30.8 trillion in 2025 (World Bank, current dollars), the U.S. economy is the world's largest at market exchange rates, at about $90,000 per person. Measured at purchasing-power parity, China's economy has been larger since about 2014, by the Maddison estimates. The administration's sweeping tariffs have been the central economic argument of 2025–26: supporters say they protect industry, bring back jobs and give leverage in negotiations; critics, including many economists, say they function as a tax on American consumers and businesses and invite retaliation. On 20 February 2026, in Learning Resources, Inc. v. Trump, the Supreme Court held 6–3 that the International Emergency Economic Powers Act "does not authorize the President to impose tariffs"; the administration turned to other trade laws to keep many of them in place.
Courts and the Constitution. Two other rulings of the 2025–26 term show how many old questions are live again. In Louisiana v. Callais (29 April 2026), the Court held 6–3 that Louisiana's second majority-Black congressional district was an unconstitutional racial gerrymander, because the Voting Rights Act had not required it; analysts expect the ruling to reshape districts across the South. In Trump v. Barbara (30 June 2026) the Court held that children born in the United States to parents who are in the country unlawfully or temporarily are "citizens at birth" under the Fourteenth Amendment, rejecting the administration's executive order to the contrary.
Immigration enforcement. The administration's large-scale deportation drive, including surges of federal immigration agents into particular cities and states, is the most visible domestic fight of the period. Supporters say it restores the rule of law after years of record border crossings; opponents point to wrongful detentions and to fatal shootings by federal immigration agents in Minneapolis in January 2026, and argue that it violates civil liberties.
War and the world. On 3 January 2026 U.S. forces raided Caracas and seized Venezuela's president, Nicolás Maduro, who was flown to New York to face drug-trafficking charges; he pleaded not guilty. The administration called it a law-enforcement operation; many governments and international lawyers called it a violation of the UN Charter. On 28 February 2026 the United States and Israel launched strikes on Iran, and Iran counterattacked Israel, U.S. bases and neighbouring states. A ceasefire in April and a memorandum signed through Pakistani mediation in June did not end the conflict; as of a UN Security Council debate on 27 October 2026, diplomacy over Iran's nuclear programme and over the war's aftermath remained unresolved, with Council members sharply divided. The government also withdrew from the World Health Organization and dozens of other international bodies in January 2026.
Politics. A record 43-day federal shutdown ran from 1 October to 12 November 2025. Both parties fought over mid-decade redistricting in several states ahead of the midterm elections due on 3 November 2026 (still to come as this was written, at the end of October 2026), with all 435 House seats, 35 Senate seats and 36 state governorships on the ballot. The country celebrated its 250th birthday on 4 July 2026 with events from Philadelphia to New York harbour, and argued, characteristically, over whether the official celebrations had become too political.
Science. In April 2026 NASA's Artemis II carried four astronauts, three American and one Canadian, around the Moon and back: the first crewed lunar flight in more than fifty years.

The questions Americans fought over in 2026 (who is a citizen, how much power a president holds, what the Voting Rights Act requires, whether to fight abroad) are recognisably the ones of 1787, 1868 and 1965. The answers keep changing; the questions don't.

Part 13 — How to understand the United States today
Key dates

Date
Event

c. 21,000–23,000 years ago
Footprints at White Sands (dates debated); people in North America

c. 1050–1350
Cahokia, the largest city north of Mexico

1565
Spanish found St. Augustine, Florida

1607
Jamestown, the first permanent English colony

1619
First recorded Africans arrive in English Virginia

4 July 1776
Declaration of Independence

1787–1789
Constitution written, ratified and put into effect

1803
Louisiana Purchase

1830
Indian Removal Act

1846–1848
War with Mexico; Mexico cedes 55% of its territory

1861–1865
Civil War; 13th Amendment abolishes slavery

1865–1877
Reconstruction, then its overthrow

1868
14th Amendment: birthright citizenship, equal protection

1882
Chinese Exclusion Act

1890
Wounded Knee

1896
Plessy v. Ferguson upholds segregation

1917–1918
First World War

1920
19th Amendment: women's suffrage

1929–1939
Great Depression; New Deal from 1933

1941–1945
Second World War

1954
Brown v. Board of Education

1964–1965
Civil Rights Act, Voting Rights Act, Medicare, Immigration Act

1969
Moon landing

1974
Nixon resigns

1989–1991
End of the Cold War

11 Sept 2001
Al-Qaeda attacks

2008
Financial crisis; Obama elected

6 Jan 2021
Capitol attack

2026
250th anniversary; Iran war; midterms due on 3 November

Who's who

Person
Why they matter

The Peacemaker (Dekanawida) and Hiawatha
Founders, in Haudenosaunee tradition, of the Confederacy and its Great Law of Peace

George Washington
Led the Continental Army; first president; set the two-term precedent

Thomas Jefferson
Wrote the Declaration; bought Louisiana; enslaved hundreds of people

James Madison
Chief architect of the Constitution and Bill of Rights

Andrew Jackson
Populist president; drove Indian removal

Frederick Douglass
Escaped slavery; the greatest abolitionist orator and writer

Harriet Tubman
Escaped slavery and led others to freedom on the Underground Railroad

Abraham Lincoln
Led the Union through the Civil War; issued the Emancipation Proclamation

Sitting Bull
Hunkpapa Lakota leader of the resistance on the northern Plains

Franklin D. Roosevelt
New Deal; led the country through the Second World War

Martin Luther King Jr.
Leader of the civil rights movement; "I Have a Dream"

Lyndon B. Johnson
Civil Rights Act, Voting Rights Act, Medicare; escalated Vietnam

Ronald Reagan
Remade American conservatism; presided over the end of the Cold War

Barack Obama
First Black president; Affordable Care Act

Donald Trump
Two-time president (2017–21, 2025–); reshaped the Republican Party around "America First"

Five ideas that unlock the country
1. It is a nation founded on an argument, not an ethnicity. Most nations explain themselves by blood, language or soil. The United States explains itself by a set of propositions in the Declaration and the Constitution, which is why its politics so often turn into fights over what those texts mean. Conservatives tend to emphasise fidelity to the founders' original meaning; liberals tend to emphasise the principles the founders stated but did not live up to. Both are arguing inside the same tradition, which is itself a source of unity.
2. Race and slavery are not a side story. Slavery shaped the Constitution, caused the Civil War, defined the South's politics for a century after, and drove the civil rights revolution that reshaped both parties in the 1960s. You cannot understand American geography, wealth, music, religion or elections without it. How central to make it in the national story is itself a live and bitter argument, as the 1619 and 1776 projects showed.
3. Land came from Native nations. The United States grew from thirteen coastal colonies to a continent by purchase, war, treaty and removal, almost all of it at the expense of Native peoples. Today the federal government recognises 575 tribes and Alaska Native villages, many with their own governments, courts and lands (the Bureau of Indian Affairs administers about 55 million acres in trust): a living reminder that the story did not end in 1890.
4. Federalism and checks are features, not bugs. Power is split between Washington and fifty states, and among Congress, the president and the courts, because the founders feared concentrated power more than gridlock. That design makes sweeping change slow, gives the Supreme Court enormous weight, and lets states run very different experiments, from abortion law to taxes. Every era's fights (over slavery, the New Deal, civil rights, tariffs, immigration) are also fights over who gets to decide.
5. Immigration is the engine and the flashpoint. The United States has taken in more immigrants than any country in history, and each wave, Irish and German, Chinese, Italian and Jewish, Mexican and Asian, has met a backlash before becoming part of "us". The 1924 quotas and the 1965 reopening were the two great hinge laws; the 2025–26 enforcement drive and the falling migration numbers are the newest turn of the same wheel.

The United States has never been one story. It has been, at the same time, a refuge and a conquest, a democracy and a slave republic, a nation of immigrants and a nation that kept closing its doors. Every generation has had to decide which of those stories to carry forward.

The takeaway
The United States was built on land taken from Native nations, with a constitution that protected slavery and a Declaration that condemned the idea of anyone ruling another without consent. Its history is the collision of those foundations: a continental expansion and dispossession, a civil war that killed some 620,000 to 750,000 people and ended slavery, a Reconstruction that briefly made multiracial democracy real and was then overthrown, an industrial and immigrant boom that made it the world's largest economy, a New Deal and two world wars that made it a superpower, and a civil rights revolution within living memory. At 250, in 2026, Americans were still arguing in court and at the ballot box over who is a citizen, how much power a president holds, and who gets to vote: the same questions, in new forms, that the founders left open.
Try this: pick one founding document from the National Archives' list of milestone documents (the Declaration, the 14th Amendment, the Voting Rights Act) and read it in full; most take under ten minutes. Then find one news story from this week that turns on what that document means. You will be reading American history the way Americans actually live it: as an argument still going on.

Sources & Further Reading
Sources
- U.S. National Archives, Milestone Documents (archives.gov): texts and explanatory notes for the Declaration, Constitution, Bill of Rights, Louisiana Purchase, Indian Removal Act, Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, Missouri Compromise, Dred Scott, Emancipation Proclamation, 13th–15th and 19th Amendments, Homestead Act, Fort Laramie Treaty, Dawes Act, Chinese Exclusion Act, Plessy, Hawaii annexation, Social Security and National Labor Relations Acts, Executive Orders 8802, 9066, 9981 and 10730, the G.I. Bill, Marshall Plan, Brown, Civil Rights Act, Voting Rights Act and Medicare; and the Vietnam casualty file (58,220).
- U.S. Department of State, Office of the Historian: the 1924 Immigration Act, the Spanish-American War, the Truman Doctrine, the Cuban missile crisis, the 1973 oil embargo and the collapse of the Soviet Union.
- National Park Service: White Sands footprints, Jamestown, Ellis Island, the transcontinental railroad. U.S. House of Representatives, Black Americans in Congress (Black members 1870–1901).
- U.S. Census Bureau: decennial census totals; Historical Census Statistics on the Foreign-Born Population (Working Paper 29); "New Population Estimates Show Decline in Net International Migration" (27 January 2026).
- World Bank, World Development Indicators (updated October 2026): population, GDP, GDP per person, inflation, life expectancy, fertility, migrant share. Maddison Project Database (University of Groningen), via Our World in Data: long-run GDP and GDP per person.
- Supreme Court of the United States, slip opinions: Learning Resources, Inc. v. Trump (20 Feb 2026), Louisiana v. Callais (29 Apr 2026), Trump v. Barbara (30 June 2026). UN press release SC/16491 (27 Oct 2026) on the Security Council's Iran debate. NASA mission page for Artemis II.
- American Battlefield Trust (Civil War deaths, traditional count); J. David Hacker, "A Census-Based Count of the Civil War Dead" (Civil War History, 2011); Equal Justice Initiative, Lynching in America; Benjamin Madley, An American Genocide (2016), for California figures; 9/11 Memorial & Museum; CDC (1918 influenza).
- Pre-1492 population estimates, Cahokia, colonial population, and some events of 2025–26 (the Venezuela raid, the Iran war's chronology, the shutdown, election results) were taken from Wikipedia summaries of cited scholarship and reporting, cross-checked where possible against the official sources above. Figures where scholars disagree are given as ranges.
Go deeper
- 📘 These Truths: A History of the United States — Jill Lepore (the best single-volume history; organised around the gap between the founding ideals and the country's practice)
- 📘 The Rediscovery of America: Native Peoples and the Unmaking of U.S. History — Ned Blackhawk (the whole national story retold with Native nations at the centre, not the margins)
- 📘 Battle Cry of Freedom — James M. McPherson (the classic one-volume history of the Civil War era)
- 📘 The Second Founding — Eric Foner (short and clear on how the Reconstruction amendments remade the Constitution, and how they were undermined)
- 📘 Freedom from Fear — David M. Kennedy (the Depression, the New Deal and the Second World War in one strong volume)
- 🌐 National Archives: Milestone Documents (read the founding texts themselves, each with a short explanation)
- 🌐 Equal Justice Initiative: Lynching in America (the documented history behind the Jim Crow era)
- 🌐 Related pieces in this library: United States: A Condensed History and Mexico: A Condensed History; A Brief History of Canada (this series); The Columbian Exchange; Rights, Constitutions & the Rule of Law


A Brief History of Mexico: Corn, Conquest, Revolution, and the Long Road to Democracy
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Three thousand years of cities before Spain arrived, three centuries of New Spain, a century of wars over what kind of country to be, and a hundred years of trying to make a revolution's promises come true.

Follows: Mexico: A Condensed History of Empires, Revolution, and Identity (the six-minute version). Companion piece: If I Was Born in Mexico (what daily life feels like now; this is how it got that way).
On 22 February 2026, Mexican soldiers killed Nemesio Oseguera, "El Mencho", the head of the Jalisco New Generation Cartel and the most wanted drug trafficker in the world, in the mountains of Jalisco. Within hours, roadblocks of burning cars, buses and trucks appeared across at least eight Mexican states. Four months later, Mexico, which had hosted the World Cup in 1970 and 1986, co-hosted it again with the United States and Canada. In between, on 1 July, Washington announced that it would not simply renew the trade agreement that ties the two economies together, and a week after the final it announced a new wave of tariffs on its sixty biggest trading partners.
A country that is at once a cartel battlefield, a global party host and a factory floor for North America can look baffling from outside. It is less baffling once you know the story. Mexico's arguments today, about who owns the land and the oil, how strong the president should be, how close to stand to the United States, and whose Mexico it is (Indigenous, mestizo, criollo, northern, southern), are the same arguments its history has been having for five hundred years.
This is that history, told at length. The condensed piece gives the outline in six minutes; here we slow down.
In this history

Before the state: corn, the Olmec, Teotihuacan and the Maya (to 900 CE)
The Mexica world and the conquest (900–1600)
New Spain: silver, saints and the casta order (1521–1810)
Independence, the young republic and the war with the United States (1810–1848)
Reform, empire and the Porfiriato (1855–1911)
The Revolution and its constitution (1910–1920)
Building the PRI state: Cárdenas, the miracle and 1968 (1920–1970)
Oil, debt, earthquakes and NAFTA (1970–2000)
Democracy, the drug war and Mexico in 2026 (2000–2026)
How to understand Mexico today

Part 1 — Before the state: corn, the Olmec, Teotihuacan and the Maya (to 900 CE)
Every Mexican meal has an ancestor older than writing. Maize was domesticated by Indigenous farmers in southern Mexico about nine thousand years ago, from a wild grass called teosinte whose cobs were barely the size of a thumb. Over thousands of years of patient selection, farmers turned it into the fat ears that feed the planet. Beans, squash and chiles followed. Once a reliable food supply existed, people could stay in one place, and villages appeared. By around 1500 BCE they were making fine pottery and clay figurines.
What came next makes Mexico one of the handful of places on Earth where civilisation, meaning cities, writing, calendars and states, arose on its own rather than being borrowed. Archaeologists call the cultural region that stretched from central Mexico into Central America Mesoamerica, and its peoples shared a family of ideas for thousands of years: maize as sacred, a 260-day ritual calendar, a ball game played on stone courts, pyramids as artificial mountains, and the belief that gods required offerings, sometimes of blood.
The Olmec
The first great Mesoamerican culture grew up in the hot, wet lowlands of the Gulf coast, in today's Veracruz and Tabasco. The Olmec flourished from about 1200 to 400 BCE, first at San Lorenzo and later, after San Lorenzo declined around the 10th century BCE, at La Venta. Their most famous works are the colossal heads: basalt portraits of rulers, the largest more than three metres high, carved from boulders brought from the volcanic Tuxtla mountains. Seventeen have been found, ten of them at San Lorenzo.
Nobody knows what the Olmec called themselves; "Olmec" is a much later Nahuatl word meaning "people of the rubber country". Scholars still argue whether they were a "mother culture" from which later Mesoamerican civilisations descended, or one brilliant culture among several that grew up in conversation with each other. Either way, Olmec motifs (the were-jaguar, the ball game, jade as precious) turn up across Mesoamerica for centuries afterwards.
Teotihuacan, the city of the gods
Forty kilometres north-east of today's Mexico City stand the ruins of the largest city of the ancient Americas. People were settling there by around 600 BCE, and over the following centuries Teotihuacan grew into a planned metropolis laid out along the 2-kilometre Avenue of the Dead, with the Pyramid of the Sun, the Pyramid of the Moon and the Temple of the Feathered Serpent. At its height, in roughly the 4th and 5th centuries CE, estimates of its population run from about 25,000 to as many as 200,000; many archaeologists settle around 100,000, which would have put it among the largest cities on Earth at the time.
We do not know what language its people spoke or what they called their city. "Teotihuacan" is the Aztec name, given centuries after it fell, and means something like "the place where the gods were born". Its influence reached hundreds of kilometres: Teotihuacan-style objects and even Teotihuacan envoys appear in the Maya cities of Guatemala. Then, around 550 CE, its central monuments were burned, probably in an uprising, and the city declined over the following century.
The Maya
In the south and south-east, in today's Chiapas, Tabasco, Campeche, Yucatán and Quintana Roo, as well as Guatemala, Belize and Honduras, the Maya built dozens of city-states. Their Classic period, roughly 250–900 CE, produced Palenque, Calakmul, Tikal (in Guatemala) and Copán (in Honduras). The Maya developed the most complete writing system in the pre-Columbian Americas, a place-value number system with a symbol for zero, and astronomical tables precise enough to predict eclipses. The Spanish-language piece Antes de Colón in this library tells that story in more detail.
The Maya were never one empire. They were more like ancient Greece: rival kingdoms with shared gods and script, allying and warring. Between about 800 and 900 CE the great southern lowland cities emptied out. The causes are still debated (repeated droughts, warfare, overpopulation and soil exhaustion are all candidates, and most scholars now think several worked together), but the Maya did not vanish. Northern cities such as Chichén Itzá and later Mayapán flourished afterwards, and millions of people still speak Maya languages in Mexico and Central America today.
To the south-west, in the Oaxaca valley, the Zapotec built Monte Albán on a levelled mountaintop, a capital that lasted over a thousand years. Their descendants, Zapotec-speakers, include the most important Mexican of the 19th century, as Part 5 will show.

Culture
Heartland
Main period
What it left

Olmec
Gulf coast (Veracruz, Tabasco)
c. 1200–400 BCE
Colossal heads; shared Mesoamerican motifs

Zapotec
Oaxaca valley
c. 500 BCE–800 CE (Monte Albán)
One of the earliest Mesoamerican scripts; a millennium-long capital

Teotihuacan
Valley of Mexico
c. 100 BCE–650 CE
The largest city of the ancient Americas

Classic Maya
Yucatán peninsula, Chiapas, Guatemala
c. 250–900 CE
Full writing, zero, astronomy, city-states

Toltec
Tula, Hidalgo
c. 900–1150 CE
A militarised state later Aztecs claimed as ancestors

Mexico is one of the few places on Earth where cities, writing and states were invented from scratch, not borrowed. Its story does not begin in 1519; by then it was already some three thousand years old.

Part 2 — The Mexica world and the conquest (900–1600)
After Teotihuacan, central Mexico entered a more warlike age that archaeologists call the Postclassic. Cities built walls. Warfare became a way to take captives and collect tribute. The Toltecs of Tula, in today's Hidalgo, dominated part of the region for a time and became, in later memory, a golden age that every ambitious dynasty claimed to descend from.
The people from Aztlan
The last major arrivals in the Valley of Mexico were a Nahuatl-speaking people who called themselves the Mexica. ("Aztec", from their legendary homeland Aztlan, is a later label; here Mexica means the people of Tenochtitlan, Aztec the wider empire.) Their own account says they wandered for generations, guided by their war and sun god Huitzilopochtli, until they saw an eagle perched on a cactus on an island in Lake Texcoco, the sign that they had found home. That eagle, cactus and serpent are on the Mexican flag today. The traditional founding date of their city, Tenochtitlan, is 1325.
The Mexica began as mercenaries and tribute-payers to stronger neighbours. In 1428 they joined Texcoco and Tlacopan in a war against their overlords in Azcapotzalco, won, and formed the Triple Alliance. Over the next ninety years the alliance pushed its armies and its tax collectors across central and southern Mexico, though never into the Maya lands and never into the stubborn mountain state of Tlaxcala, which stayed independent and hostile.
How the empire worked
The Aztec empire was not a territorial state with borders and governors in the modern sense. It was closer to a protection racket on a continental scale. Conquered cities kept their own rulers and gods but had to send tribute: cotton cloaks, cacao beans, feathers, jade, jaguar skins, maize, soldiers. The tribute lists painted for the Mexica rulers, some of which survive in the colonial Codex Mendoza, read like a treasury ledger. The arrangement was cheap to run but brittle, because subject peoples resented it and had every reason to switch sides if a stronger power appeared.
The island city
Tenochtitlan itself astonished the Spaniards who later saw it. It stood in the lake, linked to the shore by causeways, laced with canals, and fed by chinampas: raised fields built up from lake mud and anchored with willow trees, among the most productive farming systems ever devised. Estimates of its population run to 200,000 or more, which would have made it larger than any city in Spain at the time. Fresh water came by aqueduct from Chapultepec hill. At its centre the Templo Mayor, a twin pyramid to Huitzilopochtli and the rain god Tlaloc, rose over a sacred precinct.
How ordinary people lived
Most people were farmers and artisans organised in calpolli, neighbourhood or clan units that held land in common, ran schools and supplied men for war. Every boy went to school; noble boys to the calmecac, a priestly school, commoner boys to the telpochcalli, a house of youth focused on war training. Markets were huge and orderly: Cortés reported that the great market at Tlatelolco, the Mexica's twin city, drew 60,000 people a day, with judges to settle disputes and cacao beans used as small change.
Sacrifice, honestly
Mexica religion held that the gods had sacrificed themselves to set the sun moving and needed nourishment in return. Human sacrifice was central to state ritual, and archaeology has confirmed it on a large scale: excavations at the Templo Mayor have uncovered racks of skulls (tzompantli) once displayed there. Numbers given in Spanish chronicles were often inflated to justify conquest, and historians argue about the true scale, but the practice was real. So was a sophisticated poetry, philosophy and law. Both facts belong in the same picture.

Mexica ruler (tlatoani)
Reign
Remembered for

Itzcóatl
1427–1440
Formed the Triple Alliance (1428)

Moctezuma I
1440–1469
Expanded the empire toward the Gulf

Ahuítzotl
1486–1502
Greatest expansion; rebuilt the Templo Mayor

Moctezuma II
1502–1520
Ruled when Cortés arrived

Cuitláhuac
1520
Drove the Spanish out; died of smallpox

Cuauhtémoc
1520–1521
Last ruler; captured at the fall of the city

Conquest and catastrophe, 1519–1600
In February 1519, Hernán Cortés sailed from Cuba with eleven ships and, by the Library of Congress country study's count, over 700 men, in defiance of the governor who had first commissioned him. He landed on the Gulf coast near today's Veracruz, founded a town there so that he could claim authority directly from the king, and scuttled most of his ships so that nobody could turn back.
How a few hundred men toppled an empire
The old schoolbook answer, that Spanish steel, horses and guns simply overwhelmed people who had never seen them, explains part of the first battles and very little of the outcome. Historians now stress three other things.
Allies. The decisive fact is that the conquest of Tenochtitlan was fought mostly by Indigenous armies. After fierce fighting, Tlaxcala chose to ally with Cortés against the Mexica, its old enemy, and other subject cities followed. Tens of thousands of Indigenous warriors marched with the Spaniards. From their point of view this was a war against the Triple Alliance in which some useful foreigners took part; many expected, wrongly, to be the winners.
An interpreter. Cortés's ability to negotiate rested on Malintzin, a Nahua woman given to the Spaniards as a slave in Tabasco, who spoke Nahuatl and Maya and soon Spanish. Mexicans have argued about her ever since. For generations "malinchista" meant a traitor who prefers foreigners; feminist and Indigenous historians have recast her as a survivor with no good choices who shaped events more than any Spaniard but Cortés.
Disease. The story told for centuries, that Moctezuma believed Cortés was the returning god Quetzalcoatl, is now doubted by many specialists; the earliest sources for it were written decades later, after the conquest, by people with reasons to tell it. What is beyond doubt is that smallpox arrived in 1520 and tore through the city.
The sequence
Cortés reached Tenochtitlan in November 1519 and was received as a guest by Moctezuma II, then took him hostage. In 1520, while Cortés was away fighting a rival Spanish force, his lieutenant Pedro de Alvarado massacred Mexica nobles during a religious festival. The city rose. Moctezuma was killed (Spanish accounts say by his own people's stones, Indigenous accounts say by the Spaniards). At the end of June 1520, the Spaniards fled the city by night across the causeways and lost a large part of their force, the Noche Triste (Sad Night). Then the epidemic struck the city they had left behind, killing among many others the new ruler, Cuitláhuac.
In 1521, Cortés returned with his Tlaxcalan allies and boats built to control the lake, and laid siege to a city already weakened by famine and smallpox. It fell on 13 August 1521, when Cuauhtémoc was captured. He was later executed on Cortés's orders, in February 1525, and became in the 19th century Mexico's first national hero, the young emperor who resisted to the end.
The great dying
What followed was one of the worst demographic disasters in human history. How many people lived in Mexico in 1519 is genuinely disputed, and the range is enormous:

Estimate
Who
What it covers

About 4.5 million
Ángel Rosenblat (1954)
All of Mexico, a "low count" from colonial records

Over 25 million
Sherburne Cook and Woodrow Borah (1960s)
Central Mexico alone

30 to 37.5 million
Henry Dobyns (1966)
All of Mexico, a "high count"

Whatever the starting figure, the losses were staggering. A study in the US Centers for Disease Control's journal Emerging Infectious Diseases summarised the reconstructions: smallpox in 1519–20 killed an estimated 5 to 8 million people; two later epidemics that the Nahua called cocoliztli ("pestilence"), in 1545–48 and 1576–80, killed perhaps 7 to 17 million more. The 1545 outbreak alone may have killed up to 80% of the surviving native population. Its cause is still debated: the authors argued for a native haemorrhagic fever made worse by megadrought, while later genetic studies have pointed to a form of Salmonella that causes enteric fever. Either way, it was not only the famous Old World diseases.
War, forced labour, famine, displacement and the shattering of communities made every epidemic worse. The Spanish friar Bartolomé de las Casas denounced the abuses, and the crown's New Laws of 1542 tried to rein in the worst, as the library's Spanish piece 1492: El choque de dos mundos describes. But the population of central Mexico did not recover to its pre-conquest level for centuries.

The conquest was fought mainly by Indigenous armies, won partly by a Nahua woman's words and decided above all by microbes no one could see. None of that makes it less a conquest.

Part 3 — New Spain: silver, saints and the casta order (1521–1810)
The Spaniards built their capital squarely on top of Tenochtitlan, using its stones. Mexico City's cathedral stands beside the excavated base of the Templo Mayor; you can see both from the same spot in the Zócalo. The new colony was called New Spain, and in 1535 the crown sent its first viceroy, Antonio de Mendoza, to govern it. At its greatest extent the Viceroyalty of New Spain stretched from today's New Mexico and California to Costa Rica, and also governed the Spanish Caribbean and, across the Pacific, the Philippines.
Silver
What made New Spain matter to Spain was silver. Between 1546 and 1552 prospectors found the great lodes of Zacatecas, Guanajuato and Pachuca, and by the late 16th century silver made up some 80% of New Spain's exports, according to the Library of Congress country study. Mexican silver, minted into the famous pieces of eight, flowed east to Seville and west across the Pacific: from 1565 to 1815 the Manila galleon sailed between Acapulco and Manila, trading American silver for Chinese silk and porcelain. For two and a half centuries, a coin struck in Mexico City was ordinary money from Boston to Canton. (How big Mexico's share of the world's silver was varied a lot by century: by one economic historians' reconstruction, about a quarter in the 1600s, when Peru and Bolivia led, more than half in the 1700s, after Mexico overtook them, and over 60% in the first decade of the 1800s. For the colonial era as a whole, Spanish America, Mexico plus Peru and Bolivia, is the safer subject of superlatives.)
The silver was dug by Indigenous and mixed-race workers, first under the encomienda (grants of the labour and tribute of whole communities to conquistadors), then under the repartimiento, a rotating forced-labour draft, and increasingly for wages, debts and contracts. Hundreds of thousands of enslaved Africans were also brought to New Spain, especially in the 16th and 17th centuries, to work in mines, sugar mills, workshops and households. Their descendants are part of the Mexican population today, although for a long time the national story barely mentioned them; only in recent decades has Mexico begun counting Afro-Mexicans in its official statistics.
The casta order
Colonial society was ranked by birth and colour, though less rigidly than the famous paintings suggest. At the top were peninsulares (Spaniards born in Spain), who held the highest posts. Below them, and resenting it, were criollos (people of Spanish descent born in the Americas), who owned much of the land and mines. Then came the castas, people of mixed ancestry (mestizos, mulattos and dozens of named combinations), then Indigenous people, and enslaved Africans.
The 18th-century cuadros de castas, series of paintings showing "from Spaniard and Indian, a mestizo" and so on through sixteen combinations, are often taken as a portrait of a rigid caste system. Historians now read them more cautiously, as the library's Spanish piece El virreinato explains: they were partly an exotic genre painted for European buyers, and archive records show people changing category in their lifetimes through wealth, marriage or simply how a priest chose to write them down.
Indigenous communities were legally a separate "republic", with their own councils, lands and courts, protected from the Inquisition and charged a head tax. That legal shield kept many villages and their common lands alive for three centuries, a fact that matters for the land battles of 1910.
Saints and syncretism
The Church was the colony's other great institution: it ran schools, hospitals and charity, owned vast estates and lent money like a bank. Its most enduring creation was the devotion to the Virgin of Guadalupe. Tradition holds that in December 1531 the Virgin appeared to an Indigenous man, Juan Diego, at Tepeyac hill and left her image on his cloak. Devotion at a chapel there is documented by 1556, when the archbishop praised it and the head of the Franciscans preached against it; the full written narratives were printed in 1648 and 1649. Historians debate how the story grew, and some argue the site continued an older devotion to the goddess Tonantzin, a link others dispute. For believers, none of this touches the heart of it. The library's Spanish piece La Virgen de Guadalupe takes the debate in full; what matters here is that the dark-skinned Virgin became the emblem of a people who were neither Spanish nor Indigenous but both, and in 1810 she would ride on the rebels' banners.
The colony also produced one of the great writers of the Spanish language, Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz (c. 1648–1695), a self-taught nun-poet whose defence of women's right to learn still reads as fearless.
The Bourbon squeeze
In the 18th century the new Bourbon kings of Spain tried to run the empire more like a business: more taxes, more Spanish-born officials, a standing army, and in 1767 the expulsion of the Jesuits, many of them criollos. In 1804 a forced loan made the Church call in its mortgages, ruining many landowners. Criollos, already shut out of top jobs, felt pushed out of their own country.

New Spain at a glance

Founded
1521 (conquest); viceroyalty from 1535

Capital
Mexico City, on the ruins of Tenochtitlan

Main export
Silver (about 80% of exports by the late 1500s)

Pacific link
Manila galleon, 1565–1815

Legal orders
A "republic of Spaniards" and a "republic of Indians"

Population around 1810
Several million (estimates vary), mostly Indigenous and mixed

Part 4 — Independence, the young republic and the war with the United States (1810–1848)
In 1808 Napoleon invaded Spain and put his brother on the throne. Across Spanish America, people asked the same question: if the king is a prisoner, who rules in his name? In Mexico City the peninsulares answered with a coup against a viceroy they suspected of siding with criollos. The criollos began to conspire.
Hidalgo's cry
One of the conspirators was Miguel Hidalgo, a priest in the small town of Dolores, Guanajuato, known for teaching his parishioners to grow vines and make pottery. When the plot was discovered, he moved first. Before dawn on 16 September 1810 he rang his church bell and called on the people to rise: the Grito de Dolores, re-enacted every year by Mexico's president from the balcony of the National Palace on the night of 15 September. Hidalgo spoke in the name of the captive king Ferdinand VII and against bad government, under the banner of the Virgin of Guadalupe.
What followed shocked even him. Tens of thousands of peasants and mine workers joined, and the rising became a social war. At Guanajuato they stormed the granary where Spaniards had taken refuge and killed those inside. Criollos who had wanted autonomy, not revolution, recoiled. Hidalgo's huge, untrained army reached the edge of Mexico City in October 1810 but turned back; it was defeated, and Hidalgo was betrayed, captured and executed by firing squad on 30 July 1811.
Morelos and the long war
Leadership passed to another priest, José María Morelos, a mestizo and a far better general. In 1813 he wrote his Sentimientos de la Nación, and a congress he installed at Chilpancingo declared independence outright on 6 November: sovereignty of the people, abolition of slavery and of caste distinctions, Catholicism as the only religion. Morelos was captured and executed in 1815. By 1820 the insurgency had shrunk to guerrilla bands, the strongest led by Vicente Guerrero in the southern mountains.
Independence from the right
Independence finally came from the side that had fought against it. In 1820 a liberal revolt in Spain forced the king to restore a liberal constitution. Mexico's conservatives, fearing for their privileges, decided they were better off alone. A royalist officer, Agustín de Iturbide, made a deal with Guerrero, and on 24 February 1821 they proclaimed the Plan of Iguala: independence, Catholicism, and equality between Spaniards and Mexicans, the "three guarantees" still remembered in the green, white and red of the flag. On 27 September 1821 Iturbide's army entered Mexico City. Spain did not formally recognise the new country until 1836.
Empire, republic, chaos
Iturbide had himself crowned Emperor Agustín I in 1822 and was overthrown within a year. The 1824 Constitution made Mexico a federal republic of nineteen states and four territories. Its first president, Guadalupe Victoria, finished his term; for decades almost nobody else did. Vicente Guerrero, president in 1829, abolished slavery that September; within two years he had been overthrown and executed. The army, the Church and regional strongmen made and unmade governments. Spain tried to reconquer the country in 1829 and was forced to surrender at Tampico; France attacked Veracruz in 1838 over unpaid claims, in what is remembered as the Pastry War (one of the claims came from a French pastry cook).
The man who dominated the era was Antonio López de Santa Anna, a general who occupied the presidency eleven times between 1833 and 1855, completing none of his terms. He switched from liberal to conservative and back as convenient. In 1836 his supporters replaced federalism with a centralised constitution, the Siete Leyes, and several regions rebelled.
Texas
One of them was Texas. Spain, and then Mexico, had invited American settlers to populate the province, on condition they become Catholic Mexican citizens; they soon far outnumbered the Tejanos. By 1834 an estimated 30,000 Anglo settlers lived there, against about 7,800 Mexican-born residents. Many had brought enslaved people, though Mexico had abolished slavery. When Santa Anna moved to impose central control, the Texans revolted. His army destroyed the defenders of the Alamo in March 1836 and executed several hundred prisoners at Goliad, then was routed at San Jacinto on 21 April 1836. Santa Anna, captured, signed away Texas; Mexico's congress refused to recognise it. The question would explode a decade later.

Mexico won independence in 1821, but it took another half-century to settle what kind of country it would be: monarchy or republic, federal or central, Catholic state or secular one.

The war with the United States, 1846–1848
In early 1845 the US Congress voted to annex Texas, and Mexico broke off relations. The two countries also disagreed about where Texas ended: the United States claimed the Rio Grande, Mexico the Nueces River further north. President James K. Polk, a firm believer in expansion to the Pacific, sent General Zachary Taylor's army into the disputed strip. On 25 April 1846 Mexican cavalry clashed with an American patrol there, and Polk told Congress that Mexico had "shed American blood upon the American soil". A young congressman named Abraham Lincoln challenged the claim and later called it "a bold falsification of history"; the war went ahead anyway.
The fighting
The war was lopsided. American armies took New Mexico and California almost without resistance and won a string of battles in the north. In March 1847 General Winfield Scott landed at Veracruz, shelled it into surrender, and marched inland roughly along Cortés's route. Mexico City fell in September 1847 after the storming of Chapultepec Castle, then the military college. Mexican memory holds on to the Niños Héroes, six young cadets said to have died defending it, one supposedly wrapping himself in the flag and leaping from the walls; historians treat the leap as legend, but the cadets' deaths were real.
Mexico's politics never stopped fighting during the war, and Santa Anna, back from exile, lost battle after battle. In the US the war was bitterly contested too, as a war for land and, critics said, for the expansion of slavery. Ulysses S. Grant, who fought in it as a lieutenant, wrote in his 1885 memoirs that he regarded it as "one of the most unjust ever waged by a stronger against a weaker nation".
The price

United States
Mexico

Troops engaged
About 79,000
About 82,000

Deaths
About 13,300 (most from disease)
Perhaps 25,000, including civilians

Result
Gained the Southwest and California
Lost about half its territory

The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, signed on 2 February 1848, set the border along the Rio Grande and then westward to the Pacific. The US National Archives describes it this way: Mexico ceded 55% of its territory (counting Texas, which it had never recognised losing), including present-day California, Nevada and Utah, New Mexico, most of Arizona and Colorado, and parts of other states. The United States paid US$15 million and assumed about US$3.25 million of debts Mexico owed to American citizens. Gold was discovered in California just days before the treaty was signed. In 1853–54 Santa Anna, back in power once more, sold another strip in southern Arizona and New Mexico (the Gadsden Purchase) for US$10 million.
The tens of thousands of Mexicans living in the ceded lands were promised citizenship and property rights; many lost their land over the following decades through courts, debts and fraud. "We didn't cross the border; the border crossed us" is still said in the American Southwest.

For Americans the war is a footnote between independence and the Civil War. For Mexicans it is a wound: the moment the country learned how dangerous its northern neighbour could be, and that lesson shapes every negotiation since.

Part 5 — Reform, empire and the Porfiriato (1855–1911)
Defeat discredited the old order. In 1854 liberals in exile and in the provinces proclaimed the Plan of Ayutla against Santa Anna; in August 1855 he resigned for the last time. The generation that took over set out to remake Mexico into a secular republic of citizens equal before the law. They called their project simply La Reforma.
Benito Juárez
Its central figure was Benito Juárez, born on 21 March 1806 in the Zapotec village of San Pablo Guelatao, Oaxaca. Orphaned young, he spoke only Zapotec as a child, moved to the city of Oaxaca at twelve to work as a servant, learned Spanish, trained for the priesthood, switched to law, and became governor of his state. He remains Mexico's most revered president, and his most quoted line still appears on public buildings: "Among individuals, as among nations, respect for the rights of others is peace."
The Reform laws
The liberals passed a series of laws aimed at the two great corporate powers of the old Mexico, the Church and the army, and at the communal property that, in their view, kept the economy frozen.

Law
Year
What it did

Ley Juárez
1855
Abolished special courts (fueros) for clergy and soldiers in civil cases

Ley Lerdo
1856
Forced corporations, including the Church and Indigenous villages, to sell land not used for their direct functions

Constitution of 1857
1857
Federal republic, civil liberties, no special privileges

Laws of Reform
1859–60
Nationalised Church property, separated Church and state, created civil marriage and civil registry

The Ley Lerdo is the hardest to judge. Liberals meant it to create a nation of small private farmers. In practice, when applied to Indigenous villages' common lands, it let speculators and haciendas buy them up, a process that accelerated under Porfirio Díaz and helped light the fire of 1910.
Civil war and a European emperor
Conservatives and the Church hierarchy rejected the 1857 Constitution, and Mexico fell into the War of the Reform (1858–61), which the liberals won; Juárez was elected president in 1861. The treasury was empty, and Juárez suspended payments on foreign debts. Spain, Britain and France sent forces to the Gulf coast to collect. Spain and Britain soon withdrew. France stayed: Emperor Napoleon III wanted a Catholic, Latin, French-aligned empire in the Americas while the United States was paralysed by its own civil war.
On 5 May 1862 a Mexican army under General Ignacio Zaragoza beat the French at Puebla. Cinco de Mayo is a bigger party in the United States than in most of Mexico, but in Puebla it is a matter of pride. The French came back with more troops, took Mexico City in 1863, and invited an Austrian archduke, Maximilian of Habsburg, to become emperor. He and his wife Carlota arrived in June 1864.
Maximilian turned out to be more liberal than the conservatives who had invited him; his embrace of liberal policies cost him his own side's support. Juárez never surrendered, keeping the republic's government alive on the move, as far as the northern border. When the US Civil War ended in 1865, Washington pressed France to leave and let arms flow to Juárez; Napoleon III, facing a threat from Prussia at home, withdrew his army in 1866–67. Maximilian stayed, was captured at Querétaro, and, despite pleas for clemency from across Europe, was shot by firing squad on 19 June 1867.
The Restored Republic
Juárez returned to Mexico City in 1867 and governed until he died of a heart attack on 18 July 1872. The Restored Republic was a time of comparative peace, and the liberal idea of the nation, secular and republican, became the official one. One of Juárez's generals, a hero of the war against the French, rebelled against presidential re-election, first against Juárez and then, under the Plan of Tuxtepec in 1876, against his successor Sebastián Lerdo de Tejada. The second time he won. His name was Porfirio Díaz.

Juárez, a Zapotec shepherd boy who became president, defeated an emperor from the most famous royal family in Europe. Every later Mexican government has claimed his inheritance.

The Porfiriato: order and progress, for some
Porfirio Díaz occupied Mexico City on 21 November 1876. Apart from one four-year term (1880–84) when a loyal ally held the presidency, he ruled until 1911. The historian Daniel Cosío Villegas named the period the Porfiriato.
The bargain
Díaz offered Mexico what it had lacked since independence: peace and a functioning state. His slogan was "order and progress", and his method was "pan o palo", bread or the stick: jobs and favours for those who cooperated, the army and the rural police (the rurales) for those who did not. Elections continued to be held and were managed. Díaz was re-elected again and again, first by amending the very no-re-election principle he had rebelled for.
The progress
The economy changed faster than at any time since the conquest. Foreign capital, American, British, French and German, poured into railways, mines, oil and banks. Legal reforms in 1884 allowed foreigners to own subsoil resources. Railways reached the US border and opened the north to cotton and cattle; cotton production doubled between 1887 and 1910. Manufacturing output doubled between 1877 and 1910. Mexico City got electric light, grand avenues and a marble opera house (now the Palacio de Bellas Artes), begun under Díaz and finished long after him. Oil began flowing from the Gulf coast in the early 1900s.
For whom?
The bill was paid in the countryside. Land laws invited private companies to survey "vacant" public land and take a share of it; by 1888 such companies held more than 27.5 million hectares, and by 1894 about a fifth of the national territory. By 1910, according to the Library of Congress country study, most villages had lost their communal lands, a few hundred wealthy families held some 54 million hectares of the best land, and more than half of all rural Mexicans worked on their haciendas, often tied by debts passed from father to son. Despite growth averaging 2.6% a year, real income per head in 1911 was only back to the level of before 1821.
Resistance was crushed. In 1906 striking copper miners at Cananea, Sonora, were put down by Díaz's rural police with help from Arizona Rangers called in from across the border; in 1907 textile strikers at Río Blanco, Veracruz, were shot.
Mexico on paper and in fact
The Porfirian elite looked to Paris for style and to positivist "scientists" (the científicos) for policy, and some of them openly regarded Indigenous Mexicans as an obstacle to progress. Yet the period also produced a national culture: José Guadalupe Posada's satirical prints, including the skeletal Catrina that now leads every Day of the Dead parade, were made for the cheap broadsheets of Díaz's Mexico City.

"Poor Mexico, so far from God and so close to the United States." The line is popularly attributed to Porfirio Díaz, though there is no firm evidence he said it. That it sticks to him makes sense: few rulers did more to tie Mexico to American money.

In 1908 the ageing Díaz told an American journalist, James Creelman, that Mexico was ready for democracy and that he would welcome an opposition party. Mexicans took him at his word. It was a mistake he would not survive politically.

Porfiriato: two sides of the ledger

Built
Railways to the border, ports, mines, oil fields, banks, Mexico City's boulevards

Grew
Cotton output doubled (1887–1910); manufactured goods doubled (1877–1910)

Lost
Most villages' communal lands; a few hundred families held some 54 million hectares by 1910

Repressed
Cananea (1906) and Río Blanco (1907) strikes

Ended
Díaz resigned 25 May 1911, aged 80

Part 6 — The Revolution and its constitution (1910–1920)
The library's Spanish piece La Revolución Mexicana tells this decade in close detail; here is the arc, and what it left behind.
From an election to a war
In 1910 Francisco I. Madero, a wealthy landowner from Coahuila, ran against Díaz on the slogan "effective suffrage, no re-election". Díaz had him jailed and declared himself the winner. Madero escaped to Texas and issued the Plan of San Luis Potosí, calling for an uprising on 20 November 1910, the date Mexico still commemorates. In the northern state of Chihuahua, Pascual Orozco and a former bandit and cattle rustler named Francisco "Pancho" Villa took up arms; in Morelos, south of the capital, the peasant leader Emiliano Zapata was already leading villagers to retake land from the sugar haciendas. The regime proved hollow. On 25 May 1911 Díaz resigned and sailed for Paris.
Madero became president in November 1911, but for many of his followers elections were not enough. Zapata broke with him within weeks and in November 1911 proclaimed the Plan of Ayala, demanding the return of stolen lands: "Tierra y Libertad". In February 1913 a military coup in the capital, the Decena Trágica (Ten Tragic Days), brought General Victoriano Huerta to power with the help of the US ambassador, Henry Lane Wilson. Madero and his vice-president were murdered on 21 February 1913.
Everyone against Huerta, then everyone against everyone
Almost the whole country rose against Huerta: Venustiano Carranza, governor of Coahuila, as "First Chief" of the Constitutionalist army; Álvaro Obregón in Sonora; Villa in Chihuahua; Zapata in the south. The US occupied Veracruz in April 1914. Huerta resigned on 8 July 1914 and fled into exile. Then the winners split. Villa and Zapata stood on one side; Carranza and Obregón on the other. In 1915 Obregón, who had studied the trench warfare of Europe, destroyed Villa's cavalry at Celaya with machine guns and barbed wire. In March 1916 Villa raided Columbus, New Mexico, and the US Army chased him through Chihuahua for eleven months without catching him.
The people of the Revolution
The Revolution was also a mass migration and a social upheaval. The soldaderas, women who cooked, nursed, carried and fought, followed every army. Hundreds of thousands of people fled north to the United States; many Mexican-American family histories begin there. The war had dark chapters the murals leave out, such as the massacre of more than 300 Chinese residents of Torreón by Maderista troops and a mob in May 1911.
The Constitution of 1917
Carranza's faction won, and it summoned a constitutional congress that opened in Querétaro on 1 December 1916. Villistas and Zapatistas were excluded, yet the delegates, many of them young radicals from the Constitutionalist army, wrote a text far bolder than Carranza wanted. Promulgated on 5 February 1917, it is still Mexico's constitution, amended hundreds of times.

Article
What it said
Why it mattered

3
Free, secular public education
Took schooling from the Church

27
The nation owns land, water and the subsoil; land can be restored to villages
Basis of land reform (the ejido) and of the 1938 oil expropriation

123
Eight-hour day, minimum wage, right to unionise and strike
One of the most advanced labour codes in the world in 1917

130
Strict limits on the Church and clergy
Fuel for the Cristero War of 1926–29

The killing of the leaders
Carranza was sworn in as constitutional president on 1 May 1917, but the killing went on. Zapata was lured into an ambush and shot at Chinameca on 10 April 1919, in an operation planned by Carranza's government. Carranza himself was killed in 1920 while fleeing a revolt by Obregón, who became president that November, the moment many historians take as the end of the armed Revolution. Villa was assassinated in 1923; Obregón, re-elected in 1928, was shot by a Catholic militant before he could take office.
The cost
No one knows exactly how many died. The most-cited figure is about one million. The demographer Robert McCaa estimated about 1.4 million excess deaths between 1910 and 1921, within a plausible range of 0.8 to 1.7 million, plus hundreds of thousands of births that never happened and a large emigration. Mexico's census shows its population falling from 15.2 million in 1910 to 14.3 million in 1921, the only drop in its modern record. Most victims died not in battle but of hunger, epidemics (including the 1918 influenza) and displacement.

Historians still argue whether it was a genuine social revolution or, in one historian's phrase, "a great rebellion" whose northern winners built a new authoritarian state. Probably both are true: the land was eventually redistributed, and the regime that did it used the Revolution's name to stay in power for seventy years.

Part 7 — Building the PRI state: Cárdenas, the miracle and 1968 (1920–1970)
The 1920s belonged to the victorious generals from Sonora. Álvaro Obregón (president 1920–24) began to apply the 1917 Constitution carefully, so as not to provoke the United States: he handed out about 1.2 million hectares to landless villages, a fraction of the eligible land, and his government opened more than 1,000 rural schools and 2,000 public libraries. Its education ministry, under the philosopher José Vasconcelos, also commissioned painters to cover public walls with Mexico's history. Out of that commission came the muralists: Diego Rivera, José Clemente Orozco and David Alfaro Siqueiros, whose crowded, angry, heroic frescoes taught a mostly illiterate nation a new story about itself, with Indigenous people and peasants at its centre.
The Cristero War
Plutarco Elías Calles (1924–28) enforced the Constitution's anticlerical articles strictly. In 1926 the Church answered with an economic boycott, churches closed, and Catholic peasants in the centre-west rose under the cry "¡Viva Cristo Rey!". The Cristero War (1926–29) was brutal on both sides; estimates of the dead run to about 250,000 including civilians, though such figures are uncertain. It ended in a negotiated truce in 1929, in which the laws stayed on the books but were not fully enforced.
The party is born
After Obregón's assassination in 1928, Calles, now the power behind the presidency, created the National Revolutionary Party (PNR) in 1929 to settle succession inside one big tent instead of by rebellion. It was renamed the Party of the Mexican Revolution in 1938 and in 1946 the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI). The six-year presidential term, the sexenio, was first served in full by Lázaro Cárdenas from 1934. One rule became sacred: the president, however mighty, served a single term and then left, having chosen his successor by the famous dedazo (the tap of the finger).
Lázaro Cárdenas
The general who did more than anyone to make the Revolution's promises real was Lázaro Cárdenas (1934–40). He broke with Calles and sent him into exile in 1936. He distributed almost 18 million hectares of land, more than all his predecessors combined, mostly as ejidos, communal farms whose members held use rights but could not sell. He organised workers into the Confederation of Mexican Workers (CTM) and peasants into their own confederation, and folded both, with the army and the "popular" sector, into the ruling party.
His boldest act came on 18 March 1938, when he expropriated the foreign oil companies, mostly British and American, after they defied a Supreme Court labour ruling. The new state company, Pemex, became a symbol of sovereignty; crowds lined up to donate jewellery, money and even chickens towards the compensation. Cárdenas also gave refuge to tens of thousands of exiles from the Spanish Civil War, who enriched Mexican universities, publishing and science, and to Leon Trotsky, assassinated in Coyoacán in 1940.
The "Mexican miracle"
After Cárdenas, the party turned steadily more pro-business. Mexico joined the Allies in 1942 after German submarines sank two Mexican tankers, and the bracero programme sent hundreds of thousands of Mexican workers to American farms from 1942 into the 1960s. Behind high tariffs, and later with a stable peso, industry grew under "import substitution". From the 1940s to around 1970, the economy grew strongly year after year, a run later called the Mexican miracle; World Bank figures, which begin in 1961, show growth averaging almost 7% a year through the 1960s. President Miguel Alemán (1946–52) quadrupled the paved road network and built the great campus of the National Autonomous University (UNAM). In 1953 women won the vote in federal elections, and in 1958 they voted for president for the first time.
Mexico became a different country. Its population more than doubled in less than thirty years, from about 16 million in the mid-1930s to 34.9 million in the 1960 census, as death rates fell faster than birth rates. Millions moved from villages to cities, above all Mexico City. Life expectancy rose from about 54 years in 1960 to 59 by 1970.

How the PRI system worked

Presidency
One six-year term, no re-election, enormous informal power

Party sectors
Labour (CTM), peasants (CNC), "popular" (civil servants, professionals); the army until 1940

Elections
Regular and contested, but the PRI almost always won, by fair means or foul

Opposition
Tolerated in small doses (the PAN from 1939)

Glue
Jobs, land, contracts, subsidies, and repression at the margins

The Peruvian novelist Mario Vargas Llosa called it "the perfect dictatorship" in 1990: a dictatorship disguised as a democracy, which changed its dictator every six years. Its defenders answer that it gave Mexico seventy years without coups, while most of Latin America suffered military regimes, and built schools, clinics and a middle class.
1968
The system's mask slipped in the summer of 1968. Student protests against police brutality in Mexico City grew into a mass movement for political freedoms, with a rally in late August that drew an estimated 500,000 people. The Olympic Games, the first held in Latin America, were due to open on 12 October. On 2 October 1968, at a rally of about 5,000 people in the Plaza of the Three Cultures in Tlatelolco, soldiers and plain-clothes agents opened fire. The government admitted to a few dozen deaths; estimates, as the Library of Congress summarised them, range from several dozen to more than 400. Ten days later the Olympics opened as planned. For a generation, "2 de octubre no se olvida" ("2 October is not forgotten") was the rallying cry of the Mexican left, and the massacre marked the beginning of the regime's long loss of legitimacy.

Part 8 — Oil, debt, earthquakes and NAFTA (1970–2000)
Luis Echeverría (1970–76), interior minister at the time of Tlatelolco, tried to win back the young and the left with spending and Third-World rhetoric. State subsidies ballooned, the government bought stakes in more than a thousand companies, and public foreign debt rose by 450% in six years. In 1976 the peso was devalued for the first time since 1954. Behind the scenes, his government waged a "dirty war" against leftist guerrillas and activists, especially in Guerrero, with disappearances that Mexico has only recently begun to investigate.
The oil boom and "the crisis"
Then came luck, or what looked like it. In the mid-1970s vast oil reserves were found under the Bay of Campeche and in Chiapas and Tabasco. President José López Portillo (1976–82) built his plans on oil. Production tripled between 1976 and 1982, and by 1981 Mexico was the world's fourth-largest oil producer. Foreign banks, flush with petrodollars, lent freely against the oil. When oil prices fell in 1981 and US interest rates soared, the bill came due all at once.
In August 1982 Mexico told its creditors it could not meet its payments, setting off the Latin American debt crisis. In September López Portillo nationalised the banks, blaming them and wealthy Mexicans for capital flight. Inflation passed 100%. The 1980s became Mexico's "lost decade": between 1982 and 1988, the Library of Congress country study reports, real incomes fell by about 40%.
Miguel de la Madrid (1982–88) answered with austerity, the first privatisations and a start at opening the economy to trade. Then, on 19 September 1985, a magnitude 8 earthquake struck Mexico City. Between 5,000 and 10,000 people died and some 300,000 lost their homes. The government's slow, secretive response contrasted with the speed with which ordinary citizens dug neighbours out of the rubble, and many historians date the rise of Mexican civil society to those days.
1988: the computer that "crashed"
In 1987 a group of the PRI's left wing, led by Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas, son of Lázaro, broke away. In the July 1988 election the official count was interrupted by a "system failure", and when it resumed the PRI's Carlos Salinas de Gortari had 50.36%. The opposition, and many observers, believed the election was fraudulent. Cárdenas's supporters founded the Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD) in 1989, and in the same year the PRI for the first time lost a state governorship, to the conservative National Action Party (PAN).
Salinas, NAFTA and 1994
Salinas, a Harvard-trained economist, ran the most ambitious liberalisation in Mexico's history: hundreds of state firms sold, including the banks and the telephone company; foreign investment welcomed; and in 1992 a reform of Article 27 that allowed ejido land to be sold, formally ending land redistribution. The crowning achievement was the North American Free Trade Agreement with the United States and Canada, in force from 1 January 1994.
That same day, in the jungles and highlands of Chiapas, the Zapatista Army of National Liberation (EZLN), mostly Maya peasants led by a masked spokesman calling himself Subcomandante Marcos, seized several towns, declaring that NAFTA was a death sentence for Indigenous farmers. The fighting lasted about twelve days before a ceasefire; the Zapatistas' communiqués, mixing Maya tradition with sharp humour, made them a global cause. Then, on 23 March 1994, the PRI's presidential candidate, Luis Donaldo Colosio, was shot dead at a rally in Tijuana. In September the party's secretary-general was assassinated too.
The new president, Ernesto Zedillo, took office on 1 December 1994. Nineteen days later, on 20 December, his government devalued the peso, which then collapsed. The "Tequila crisis" forced a rescue of about US$50 billion led by the United States and the IMF, and the economy shrank by about 6% in 1995, according to World Bank figures. Millions of families lost savings, homes and jobs.
The opening
Zedillo, a technocrat with little taste for the old party machine, made a choice with lasting effects: he let democracy happen. Electoral reforms in 1996 made the Federal Electoral Institute (IFE) fully independent of the government. In 1997 the PRI lost its majority in the Chamber of Deputies for the first time. On 2 July 2000, Vicente Fox of the PAN, a former Coca-Cola executive in cowboy boots, won the presidency with about 43% of the valid vote. Zedillo went on television that night to acknowledge Fox's victory before his own party's candidate had conceded.

After seventy-one years, the PRI handed over power peacefully, without a shot fired. It is one of the quietest revolutions of the twentieth century.

What NAFTA did, argued both ways

Supporters point to
Exports multiplied; the north became an industrial powerhouse for cars, electronics and aerospace; inflation tamed; a middle class with credit, cars and mortgages

Critics point to
Slow overall growth per head; maize farmers undercut by subsidised US corn; wages that stayed low; migration north surged in the late 1990s and 2000s

Both agree
Mexico's economy is now tightly bound to the United States

Part 9 — Democracy, the drug war and Mexico in 2026 (2000–2026)
Fox's victory raised hopes that alternation would bring rapid change. It mostly brought gridlock: the PRI and PRD still controlled Congress, and Fox's big reforms stalled. The 2006 election showed how fragile the new democracy was. The PAN's Felipe Calderón beat the PRD's Andrés Manuel López Obrador, a former mayor of Mexico City, by 0.58 percentage points, about 244,000 votes out of more than 41 million. López Obrador alleged fraud, refused to accept the result, had himself sworn in as "legitimate president" before a huge crowd, and occupied central Mexico City with protest camps for weeks. The electoral tribunal upheld Calderón's win after a partial recount.
The war
Drug trafficking was not new. Mexican growers had supplied American marijuana and heroin for decades, and in the 1980s and 1990s Mexican organisations took over much of the route for Colombian cocaine. Under the PRI, critics and some later testimony say, traffickers operated with arrangements of tolerance and payment with officials. Democracy and the fragmentation of power broke those arrangements, and gangs fought for routes and towns.
In December 2006, days into his term, Calderón sent thousands of soldiers and federal police into his home state of Michoacán, the start of what became known as the war on drugs. Troops were deployed across the country; capos were killed or extradited. The cartels split and multiplied. The violence that followed is measured in a grim series of numbers.

Year
Homicide rate (per 100,000)
Context

2005
9.4
Before the military offensive

2010
22.7
Calderón's war at full intensity

2014
16.7
Temporary decline

2018
29.5
Record high as cartels fragment

2022
25 (32,223 homicides)
INEGI preliminary count

2023
24.9
Still among the world's highest

Sources: World Bank / UNODC series; INEGI for 2022.
Behind the homicide figures stands a second toll: the disappeared. Mexico's official register counted more than 130,000 missing people in 2025, a total that includes cases since 1952 but is overwhelmingly from the drug-war years, according to Human Rights Watch. Groups of mothers, the madres buscadoras, now search hillsides with shovels and iron rods for clandestine graves. In 2025 one such group found a ranch near Teuchitlán, Jalisco, with hundreds of shoes and human remains.
The case that became a national symbol was Ayotzinapa: on the night of 26 September 2014, in Iguala, Guerrero, local police detained 43 students from a rural teachers' college and handed them over, according to the official investigations, to a criminal group. They were never seen alive again. The government of Enrique Peña Nieto (PRI, 2012–18) announced a "historical truth" that international forensic experts later discredited, and the case is still open.
Peña Nieto's term also brought the Pacto por México, a cross-party deal that passed major reforms, including a 2013 energy reform that opened oil and gas to private and foreign investment for the first time since 1938. It also brought corruption scandals, including the "White House" affair over a mansion built for his wife by a government contractor, that sank the PRI's credibility.
López Obrador and the "Fourth Transformation"
In July 2018 López Obrador won the presidency at his third attempt, with about 55% of the valid vote, at the head of a new party he had founded, Morena. He called his project the Fourth Transformation, the successor to Independence, the Reform and the Revolution. He gave daily morning press conferences (the mañaneras), raised the minimum wage sharply, created universal pensions for the elderly and scholarships for students, built a new airport, refinery and the Tren Maya railway around the Yucatán, and reversed much of the 2013 energy opening in favour of Pemex and the state electricity company. Human Rights Watch credits his government with lifting 13 million people out of poverty; the World Bank's figures show the share living below the national poverty line falling from 43.9% in 2020 to 29.6% in 2024.
His critics, including Human Rights Watch, describe the same years as democratic backsliding: attacks on the electoral institute, the courts and independent regulators, the National Guard placed under army command, and the military given control of ports, customs, airports and railways. On security his slogan was "abrazos, no balazos" ("hugs, not bullets"), meaning attacking the social causes of crime; homicides stayed near record levels throughout his term.

Mexico's two big stories of the 21st century, democracy and violence, arrived together. Political scientists still argue how far one caused the other.

Mexico in 2026
On 2 June 2024, Morena's Claudia Sheinbaum, an energy and climate-change scientist with a doctorate in energy engineering and a former mayor of Mexico City, won the presidency with nearly 36 million votes, about 60% of the total, and took office on 1 October 2024 as the first woman to lead Mexico. Her coalition won 73% of the seats in the Chamber of Deputies, and soon a two-thirds majority in the Senate as well, enough to amend the constitution.
The judicial reform
The most consequential change of the new era was passed in September 2024 at the end of López Obrador's term: a constitutional amendment requiring all federal and state judges, including Supreme Court justices, to be chosen by popular vote. The first judicial elections took place on 1 June 2025, with turnout of about 13%, the lowest in Mexico's democratic history. Supporters say the old judiciary was elitist, corrupt and unaccountable and that voters should choose judges. Critics, including the UN Special Rapporteur on the independence of judges, warn that elections dominated by the governing party undermine the courts' independence and public confidence in justice. 
Security
Sheinbaum's government, with Omar García Harfuch as security chief, reported in mid-2025 that the daily average of homicides had fallen by about a quarter since she took office. Human Rights Watch put the official 2024 homicide rate at more than 25 per 100,000, among the highest in the world, and disappearances remained a grave problem. Fighting between factions of the Sinaloa cartel, after one of its kingpins was taken to the United States and detained in July 2024, killed more than 1,800 people in Sinaloa within about a year, according to official figures. On 22 February 2026 the military killed El Mencho in the mountains of Jalisco, triggering roadblocks across central Mexico.
The United States, again
The second Trump administration made Mexico the test case of its trade and security policy. It designated the major cartels as terrorist organisations in February 2025, pressed Mexico to hand over dozens of suspects, and wielded tariffs; in July 2026 it imposed new 10–12.5% tariffs on its sixty largest trading partners. On 1 July 2026, the date of the USMCA's six-year joint review, it announced it would not renew the agreement and would instead open a decade of annual reviews and renegotiation; the treaty stays in force unless a member withdraws, and is due to expire in 2036 if not renewed. By February 2026, under US pressure, Mexico had halted oil shipments to Cuba, while continuing humanitarian aid. Sheinbaum's style has been to negotiate quietly, concede on security cooperation and avoid open confrontation, a stance that has kept her approval high at home.
The country in numbers

Mexico, latest figures

Source

Population
126.0 million (2020 census); about 132 million (2025 estimate)
INEGI; World Bank

Life expectancy
75.3 years (2024)
World Bank

Fertility
1.9 children per woman (2024), below replacement
World Bank

GDP
About US$1.83 trillion (2025); growth 0.6% in 2025
World Bank

GDP per person
About US$13,900 (2025)
World Bank

Poverty (national line)
29.6% (2024), down from 43.9% in 2020
World Bank / INEGI

Remittances received
About US$65 billion (2025), down from a record US$68 billion in 2024
World Bank

Disappeared (official register)
More than 130,000 (2025)
Human Rights Watch

The year of the World Cup
From 11 June to 19 July 2026 Mexico co-hosted the World Cup, its third, with the United States and Canada. For a few weeks the country's image abroad was football, not cartels, and the government made the most of it. The structural questions did not pause: how independent the newly elected courts will be, whether the security gains will last, and whether the annual USMCA reviews will turn into a slow renegotiation of the North American economy.

Part 10 — How to understand Mexico today
Key dates

Date
Event

c. 7000 BCE
Maize domesticated from teosinte in southern Mexico

c. 1200–400 BCE
Olmec civilisation on the Gulf coast

c. 100 BCE–650 CE
Teotihuacan, the largest city in the ancient Americas

c. 250–900 CE
Classic Maya city-states

1325
Traditional founding of Tenochtitlan

1428
Triple Alliance formed

1519
Cortés lands; enters Tenochtitlan in November

13 August 1521
Fall of Tenochtitlan

1535
First viceroy of New Spain

1545–48, 1576–80
Great cocoliztli epidemics

1565–1815
Manila galleon

16 September 1810
Hidalgo's Grito de Dolores

27 September 1821
Independence: the Army of the Three Guarantees enters Mexico City

1824
First federal constitution

1836
Texas secedes

1846–48
War with the United States; Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo (2 February 1848)

1857
Liberal constitution

5 May 1862
Battle of Puebla

1864–67
Maximilian's empire; executed 19 June 1867

1876–1911
Porfiriato

20 November 1910
Revolution begins

5 February 1917
Constitution of 1917

1926–29
Cristero War

1929
Ruling party founded (PRI from 1946)

18 March 1938
Oil expropriation; Pemex created

1953
Women win the vote in federal elections

2 October 1968
Tlatelolco massacre

August 1982
Debt crisis; banks nationalised in September

19 September 1985
Mexico City earthquake

1 January 1994
NAFTA in force; Zapatista uprising

December 1994
Peso crisis

2 July 2000
Vicente Fox wins; PRI loses presidency

December 2006
Military offensive against cartels begins

26 September 2014
Ayotzinapa students disappeared

1 July 2018
López Obrador elected

1 July 2020
USMCA replaces NAFTA

1 October 2024
Claudia Sheinbaum, first woman president

1 June 2025
First judicial elections

22 February 2026
El Mencho killed

1 July 2026
US declines to renew USMCA; annual reviews begin

Who's who

Person
Dates
Why they matter

Moctezuma II
c. 1466–1520
Mexica ruler when the Spanish arrived

Malintzin (La Malinche)
c. 1500–c. 1529
Interpreter and negotiator of the conquest; a symbol argued over ever since

Hernán Cortés
1485–1547
Led the Spanish conquest of Tenochtitlan

Cuauhtémoc
c. 1497–1525
Last Mexica ruler; first national hero

Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz
c. 1648–1695
Poet and scholar; defender of women's learning

Miguel Hidalgo
1753–1811
Priest who launched the independence war

José María Morelos
1765–1815
Insurgent general; declared independence in 1813

Agustín de Iturbide
1783–1824
Royalist officer who achieved independence; briefly emperor

Antonio López de Santa Anna
1794–1876
Caudillo who held the presidency eleven times

Benito Juárez
1806–1872
Zapotec lawyer; Reform president; beat the French

Maximilian of Habsburg
1832–1867
Emperor imposed by France; executed

Porfirio Díaz
1830–1915
Ruled 1876–1911; modernisation and repression

Francisco I. Madero
1873–1913
Started the Revolution; murdered in the 1913 coup

Emiliano Zapata
1879–1919
Peasant leader; "Land and Liberty"

Pancho Villa
1878–1923
Northern revolutionary general

Venustiano Carranza
1859–1920
Constitutionalist leader; promulgated the 1917 Constitution

Lázaro Cárdenas
1895–1970
Land reform and oil nationalisation

Diego Rivera, Frida Kahlo
1886–1957, 1907–1954
The painters who gave modern Mexico its face

Octavio Paz
1914–1998
Poet-essayist (The Labyrinth of Solitude); Nobel 1990

Carlos Salinas de Gortari
b. 1948
President 1988–94; NAFTA

Subcomandante Marcos
b. 1957
Spokesman of the Zapatista uprising

Vicente Fox
b. 1942
First opposition president (2000–06)

Andrés Manuel López Obrador
b. 1953
President 2018–24; founder of Morena

Claudia Sheinbaum
b. 1962
First woman president (2024– )

Five ideas that unlock the country
1. Mestizaje is a story Mexico tells about itself, and a contested one. After the Revolution, thinkers like Vasconcelos (La raza cósmica, 1925) made the mixed-race mestizo the national ideal, and murals and schoolbooks spread it. It celebrated the Indigenous past while often expecting living Indigenous people to assimilate. Today Mexico officially recognises dozens of Indigenous languages and its Afro-Mexican population, and many Mexicans now describe their identity as plural rather than blended. The argument between "one mestizo nation" and "a nation of many peoples" runs through politics, schooling and the census.
2. The land question never closed. From the calpolli to the Ley Lerdo to the haciendas, to Zapata, Cárdenas's ejidos and Salinas's 1992 reform, who owns the land and on what terms has been the single most persistent fight in Mexican history. In Chiapas, Oaxaca and Guerrero, disputes over communal land, mining concessions and water still drive conflict.
3. Sovereignty is a reflex, and the United States is the reason. The 1848 war, the US role in Madero's murder, the 1914 occupation of Veracruz and the 1916 Punitive Expedition taught Mexicans to guard their oil, their soil and their dignity. Yet the two economies are welded together by trade, by some US$65 billion a year in remittances, and by tens of millions of people of Mexican origin living in the United States. Every Mexican leader has to be both close and proud.
4. Strong presidents, weak checks, recurring pendulum. Santa Anna, Díaz and the PRI each answered chaos with concentrated power; Madero, the 1990s reformers and the electoral institute tried to spread it out. Morena's supporters see their reforms as finally putting power in the hands of the majority that votes for them; critics see the PRI's old dominance returning in new form. Which way the pendulum swings next is the central question of Mexican democracy.
5. Death and memory are part of everyday life. The Day of the Dead, with its marigolds and sugar skulls, mixes Mesoamerican and Catholic traditions; Posada's Catrina mocks the vanity of the living. Mexico remembers out loud: 2 October 1968, 19 September 1985 (and the second deadly earthquake on the same date in 2017), the 43 of Ayotzinapa. It is a country that keeps its dead close, which is one reason the disappeared are such an open wound.

Mexico is not a country that has a history so much as a country made of several histories at once, Mesoamerican, colonial, liberal, revolutionary, democratic, still talking over each other at the same dinner table.

The takeaway
Mexico was a cradle of civilisation for three thousand years before Cortés, and its conquest was fought mainly by Indigenous armies and won above all by epidemics that killed most of its people. Three centuries of New Spain built a silver economy, a Catholic and mixed-race society and a ranked order of castas. Independence (1810–21) opened half a century of war over what kind of nation to be, including the loss of half its territory to the United States, before Juárez's Reform and the defeat of a French-imposed emperor settled it as a secular republic. Díaz's modernisation dispossessed the countryside; the Revolution of 1910–20 killed perhaps 1.4 million people and wrote a constitution promising land, schools and labour rights; the PRI delivered much of it while ruling for seventy-one years. Since 2000 Mexico has been a democracy, and a country fighting cartels whose violence has killed and disappeared hundreds of thousands. Its arguments today, about land, power, identity and the United States, are the ones its history keeps returning to.
Try this: next time you eat a tortilla, a taco or a bar of chocolate, trace it backwards through this piece: the Mesoamerican farmers who bred the maize and cacao, the Spanish wheat and pork that joined them, the 1940s migration that took the taco north. Then find one thing in your own city named after a person in the "Who's who" table. Mexico's history is usually closer than it looks.

Sources & Further Reading
Sources
- Tim L. Merrill and Ramón Miró (eds.), Mexico: A Country Study (Library of Congress, Federal Research Division, 1996), historical chapters, via countrystudies.us: ancient Mexico, the Aztec, conquest (eleven ships, over 700 men), encomienda and colonial administration (silver as 80% of exports), independence, Texas and the 1846–48 war, the Reform and French intervention, the Porfiriato (land figures, growth), the Revolution, Obregón, Calles, Cárdenas (18 million hectares; oil expropriation), Alemán, Tlatelolco (estimates from several dozen to more than 400 dead), the 1976 and 1982 crises, the 1985 earthquake (5,000–10,000 dead) and the 1988 election.
- US National Archives, "Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo (1848)", Milestone Documents (55% of territory ceded, counting Texas).
- A. Calderón, R. Dobado, A. García-Hiernaux and J. Flores Zendejas, paper for the III Seminar in Economic History, Bank of Spain (5 October 2017; a preliminary version), table of world silver output by century (New Spain about 24% in 1601–1700, 57% in 1701–1800 and 62% in 1801–1810).
- Rodolfo Acuña-Soto et al., "Megadrought and Megadeath in 16th Century Mexico", Emerging Infectious Diseases 8(4), 2002 (CDC): epidemic death estimates.
- Robert McCaa, "Missing Millions: The Demographic Costs of the Mexican Revolution", Mexican Studies/Estudios Mexicanos 19(2), 2003.
- INEGI, Defunciones por homicidio, enero a diciembre de 2022 (press release 418/23, 25 July 2023).
- World Bank, World Development Indicators (data updated 8 October 2026): population, GDP, growth, life expectancy, fertility, homicide rate (UNODC), national poverty headcount, personal remittances.
- Human Rights Watch, World Report 2026, Mexico chapter (judicial reform and elections, homicide rate, Sinaloa, disappearances, poverty reduction).
- 2026 events: El País English (killing of El Mencho, 22 February 2026); NBC News and CNBC (US decision not to renew USMCA, 1 July 2026); BBC News (new US tariffs, 24 July 2026); The Guardian (roadblocks after El Mencho's death); Anadolu Agency (halt of oil shipments to Cuba, 10 February 2026). Estimates of pre-conquest population follow the scholarly table compiled from Denevan (ed.), The Native Population of the Americas in 1492; Olmec, Teotihuacan, Maya and Mexica details cross-checked against the World History Encyclopedia and the Library of Congress study.
Go deeper
- 📘 Mexico: Biography of Power — Enrique Krauze (the lives of Mexico's rulers from 1810 to 1996, told by its leading liberal historian)
- 📘 Fifth Sun: A New History of the Aztecs — Camilla Townsend (the Mexica told from their own Nahuatl-language annals; overturns many conquest myths)
- 📘 The Mexican Revolution — Alan Knight (the definitive two-volume modern history; demanding but unmatched)
- 📘 The Labyrinth of Solitude — Octavio Paz (the classic essay on Mexican identity, masks and the fiesta of death)
- 📘 Distant Neighbors: A Portrait of the Mexicans — Alan Riding (a journalist's portrait of the PRI-era country, still sharp on the US relationship)
- 🌐 Related pieces in this library: Mexico: A Condensed History of Empires, Revolution, and Identity; If I Was Born in Mexico: Family, Tacos, and the Living Memory of Ancestors; A Brief History of Venezuela in this series; and in Spanish, Antes de Colón: Las Grandes Civilizaciones, 1492: El Choque de Dos Mundos, El Virreinato: Cómo Se Gobernaba un Imperio, La Revolución Mexicana: La Guerra que Hizo el México Moderno, La Virgen de Guadalupe: Historia, Fe y Debate Histórico and México: Historia Condensada de Imperios, Revolución e Identidad.


A Brief History of Canada: Peoples, Empires, and the Art of Staying Together
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How a northern half-continent, home to Indigenous nations for millennia, became a French colony, a British one, and then a country that has spent 159 years negotiating with itself, and still is.

Companion piece: If I Was Born in Canada: Multiculturalism, Ice Hockey, and the Culture of Care (what daily life feels like now; this is how it got that way).
On 5 October 2026, voters in Quebec elected the Parti Québécois, whose founding purpose is to make Quebec an independent country. Its leader had promised a third referendum on sovereignty. That same autumn, Statistics Canada reported that the country's population had grown by just 0.5 percent in a year, the slowest pace since the First World War, after two years of growth at a pace almost unheard of in a rich country. And Canada was negotiating, again, with a United States whose president had spent much of 2025 suggesting it become the 51st state.
Each of those stories is new. None of them is surprising to anyone who knows Canadian history. This is a country built out of negotiations: between Indigenous nations and European empires, between French and English, between provinces and Ottawa, between newcomers and those already here, and between Canada and the giant to its south. It has survived by compromise more than by conquest, though there was conquest too. Here is the whole story, from the first peoples to the autumn of 2026.
In this history

First peoples (to 1500)
New France (1534–1763)
Conquest and the Loyalists (1754–1815)
Rebellion and responsible government (1815–1864)
Confederation and the West (1864–1896)
The residential schools (1831–1990s)
Wheat, immigrants and the Great War (1896–1919)
Between the wars and the Second World War (1919–1945)
Building the modern state (1945–1968)
Quebec: the Quiet Revolution, the October Crisis and the referendums (1960–1995)
Patriation, the Charter and multiculturalism (1968–2000)
Canada in the 21st century, and in 2026 (2000–2026)
How to understand Canada today

Part 1 — First peoples (to 1500)
People reached what is now Canada at least 14,000 years ago, and possibly much earlier. In the Yukon, at Old Crow Flats and the Bluefish Caves, archaeologists have found some of the oldest traces of human life in North America. Marks on a mammoth bone from Bluefish Caves, apparently made by human tools, have been radiocarbon dated to about 12,000 years ago, and some researchers argue for even older dates there; others are not convinced. What is not in doubt is that by the time Europeans arrived, the land had been home to people for hundreds of generations.
Canada today recognises three groups of Indigenous peoples in its Constitution: First Nations, Inuit and Métis. The first two were here long before Europeans. The Métis are a distinct people who emerged later, from the meeting of the two worlds (more in Part 2).
A continent of nations
First Nations were never one people. They spoke languages from many unrelated families, and their ways of life were shaped by very different lands.

Region
Peoples (examples)
How they lived

Atlantic coast
Mi'kmaq, Wolastoqiyik (Maliseet), Beothuk
Fishing, sea-mammal hunting, seasonal camps

St. Lawrence and Great Lakes
Haudenosaunee (Iroquois), Wendat (Huron), Anishinaabe
Farming villages of maize, beans and squash in longhouses (Haudenosaunee, Wendat); hunting, fishing and wild rice further north

Subarctic forests
Cree, Innu, Dene
Small mobile hunting bands following caribou, moose and fish across vast territories

Plains
Siksika (Blackfoot), Plains Cree, Nakota
Bison hunting

Pacific coast
Haida, Kwakwaka'wakw, Nuu-chah-nulth, Coast Salish
Rich salmon and cedar economies; large plank houses, ocean-going canoes, totem poles, the potlatch

Arctic
Inuit (and before them the Dorset)
Hunting seal, whale, caribou; snow houses in winter; dog sleds and kayaks

The Haida of Haida Gwaii, off the northern coast of British Columbia, show how wrong the old stereotype of a "simple" wilderness people is. Their villages of great cedar houses, their carved poles recording family histories, and their seagoing trade made them one of the most sophisticated societies on the continent, with little farming, because the sea and the forest provided so much.
The Inuit are the most recent of the old peoples to arrive. Their ancestors, the Thule, spread east from Alaska across the Arctic from around the year 1000, with dogs, sleds and whaling technology, and replaced the earlier Dorset people, whom Inuit tradition calls the Tuniit. In a single great migration, they made one of the harshest environments on Earth their home.
Life, law and belief
Most of these societies were organised around extended families and clans, and land was not owned as private property in the European sense: it was held, used and cared for by communities, with rights to hunt, fish or gather often shared through kinship and agreement. Many nations governed themselves through councils that sought consensus. Among the Haudenosaunee, clan mothers chose and could remove chiefs. Spiritual life was bound up with the land, the animals and the obligations between people and the rest of creation, ideas that shape how many Indigenous people think about land rights and treaties to this day.
Nobody knows how many people lived in what is now Canada before contact. Estimates for North America north of Mexico as a whole range from under one million to well over ten million, with most current scholarship between about 2.5 and 7 million; Canada's share is impossible to pin down. The first Canadian census, in 1871, counted about 102,000 Indigenous people, after centuries of epidemic disease.
The first Europeans
About a thousand years ago, Norse sailors from Greenland built a small settlement at L'Anse aux Meadows, on the northern tip of Newfoundland. It is the only confirmed Norse site in the Americas, and it did not last. The Norse sagas tell of fighting with the local people, whom they called Skrælings; who exactly they were is uncertain.
Five centuries later, Europeans came back to stay, drawn first by fish. The cod of the Grand Banks off Newfoundland were so thick, sailors said, that they could be scooped up in baskets. Basque, Portuguese, French and English fishing fleets crossed the Atlantic every summer from the early 1500s, long before anyone built a colony.
Those early fishermen met peoples who had their own trade networks, diplomacy and wars, and who would decide, as much as any European king, what happened next. That is the thread that runs through the next four centuries of Canadian history: newcomers could not survive, trade or claim land in the north without dealing with the nations already there, and the terms of those dealings, fair or not, honoured or broken, are still being argued over in courts and treaty negotiations today.

"Canada" itself comes from an Indigenous word. In 1535, people near today's Quebec City used the St. Lawrence Iroquoian word kanata, "village" or "settlement", to direct the French explorer Jacques Cartier to their town, Stadacona. Cartier applied it to the whole region, and the name spread from there.

Part 2 — New France (1534–1763)
Jacques Cartier sailed into the Gulf of St. Lawrence in 1534 and up the river the next year, claiming the land for France. His attempts to found a colony failed, and France then largely ignored the region for half a century, apart from its fishermen and fur traders.
The fur trade changed that. Europeans wanted beaver pelts for felt hats, and Indigenous trappers and traders could supply them. In 1608 Samuel de Champlain founded the settlement of Quebec with 28 men, at a narrowing of the St. Lawrence. In 1642 a group of devout settlers led by Paul de Chomedey de Maisonneuve founded Ville-Marie, which became Montreal.
Built on alliances
New France could not have survived without Indigenous allies. Champlain allied with the Wendat, Algonquin and Innu, who controlled the trade routes into the interior, and joined them in war against their enemies, the Haudenosaunee. That choice set off generations of conflict between the French and the Haudenosaunee, who were allied first with the Dutch and then the English. The Wendat confederacy, devastated by European epidemics and by Haudenosaunee attacks, was destroyed as a nation in the mid-17th century; some of its survivors still live at Wendake, near Quebec City.
The wars ended with the Great Peace of Montreal of 1701, signed by the French and dozens of Indigenous nations, including the Haudenosaunee. It remains one of the great diplomatic achievements of colonial North America, negotiated on Indigenous terms of gift-giving, speeches and wampum as much as on European ones.
Jesuit missionaries lived among the Wendat and other nations, learned their languages and wrote detailed accounts of them, the Jesuit Relations, which are still one of the main sources on 17th-century Indigenous life. Several were killed; the Catholic Church later made eight of them saints. To the nations they lived among, the missionaries were also agents of a foreign religion that divided communities.
A small colony

Year
Population of New France (approx.)

1608
28 settlers at Quebec

1663
about 3,200

1672
about 6,700

1754
about 69,000 (55,000 Canadiens, 10,000 Acadians, 4,000 in Louisiana)

New France stayed small. The British colonies to the south, by contrast, held more than a million people by the 1750s. To boost the population, Louis XIV's government sent about 800 young women, the filles du roi ("the king's daughters"), between 1663 and 1673, with dowries paid by the Crown, to marry settlers. A large share of today's French Canadians descend from them.
Ordinary life in the St. Lawrence valley was organised by the seigneurial system: land granted to seigneurs (lords) in long, narrow strips running back from the river, farmed by habitants who paid them modest dues. You can still see the strip pattern from the air today. The Catholic Church ran the schools, hospitals and parishes. Young men went west as coureurs des bois and voyageurs, paddling canoes loaded with trade goods thousands of kilometres into the interior.
Rivals and the Métis
New France had competitors. In 1670 King Charles II of England chartered the Hudson's Bay Company, giving a group of investors a monopoly over trade in all the lands draining into Hudson Bay, a territory they called Rupert's Land, covering a vast part of what is now Canada. For two centuries the company was, in effect, the government of much of the Northwest. It survived for 355 years as a fur trader and then a department-store chain, before going into creditor protection in 2025 and being wound up; its royal charter was sold at auction.
On the Atlantic coast, French settlers in Acadia (today's Nova Scotia, New Brunswick and Prince Edward Island) built farms behind dykes on the tidal marshes of the Bay of Fundy. By the Treaty of Utrecht in 1713, France ceded mainland Acadia, Newfoundland and Hudson Bay to Britain, keeping Île Royale (Cape Breton), where it built the great fortress of Louisbourg.
Out on the fur-trade frontier, a new people was being born. From the mid-17th century, French (and later Scottish and English) traders married First Nations women, often Cree, Ojibwe or Saulteaux, and their descendants developed a distinct culture, language (Michif) and identity: the Métis. By the early 19th century, the Métis of the Red River valley, in what is now Manitoba, saw themselves as a nation, with buffalo hunts run like military campaigns and a fierce sense of their own rights.
New France also held slaves, on a small scale: the historian Marcel Trudel found records of 2,087 enslaved people over its history, about four in five of them Indigenous captives (often called panis), the rest of African descent. It is a part of the story that was long left out.

New France never had many people. What it had was alliances, rivers and canoes, and for a century and a half that was enough to hold half a continent against far more numerous rivals.

Part 3 — Conquest and the Loyalists (1754–1815)
The long rivalry between France and Britain in North America came to a head in the Seven Years' War (in the American colonies, the French and Indian War). In 1755, with war looming, the British authorities in Nova Scotia demanded that the Acadians swear unconditional loyalty to the British Crown. When they refused to promise to take up arms against France, the British began the Expulsion of the Acadians, which Acadians call le Grand Dérangement.

The Expulsion, 1755–1764
Estimate

Acadians in the region
about 14,100

Deported
about 11,500

Died of disease, starvation or shipwreck
about 5,000

Sent to the Thirteen Colonies (first wave)
about 6,950

Sent to France (second wave, after 1758)
about 3,500

Families were separated and farms burned. Many Acadians who were sent to France later sailed to Spanish Louisiana, where Acadien became Cadien and then, in English, Cajun. Others hid in the woods or eventually returned. Today's Acadian communities in New Brunswick, Nova Scotia and Prince Edward Island descend from the survivors and the returnees.
The Plains of Abraham
The decisive battle came outside Quebec City on 13 September 1759. British troops under General James Wolfe climbed the cliffs from the river at night and formed up on the Plains of Abraham. The battle against the French under the Marquis de Montcalm lasted about an hour. Both commanders were mortally wounded. Quebec surrendered five days later, Montreal in September 1760, and by the Treaty of Paris of 1763 France ceded New France to Britain.
For French Canadians the Conquest is the founding trauma of their history, la Conquête. For English Canadians it was long told as a heroic victory. Both memories are still alive: Quebec's licence plates carry the motto Je me souviens, "I remember".
Two foundational documents
Britain now ruled some 70,000 French-speaking Catholics, and it had to decide what to do with them, and with the Indigenous nations of the interior.

The Royal Proclamation of 7 October 1763 reserved the lands west of the Appalachians for Indigenous peoples, barred colonists from settling there, and banned private purchases of Indigenous land: only the Crown could acquire it, at a public meeting with the nations concerned. It is often called the "Indian Magna Carta", the first legal recognition of Aboriginal title, and it is still part of Canada's constitutional order. The treaty-based approach to Indigenous land in Canada, imperfect as its practice has been, grows from it.
The Quebec Act of 1774 went the other way from what the American colonists wanted. It let Catholics hold office without renouncing their faith, restored the Church's right to collect tithes, kept French civil law for property and civil matters (English criminal law remained) and restored the seigneurial system. Quebec's civil-law tradition, unique in Canada, dates from it. To the Thirteen Colonies it was one of the "Intolerable Acts", and the Declaration of Independence listed it among their grievances.

When the American Revolution came, the Canadiens mostly stayed out of it. The Quebec Act's concessions had kept the seigneurs and the clergy loyal, though many habitants had little enthusiasm for either side.
The Loyalists
The Revolution created English Canada. Tens of thousands of Americans who had stayed loyal to the Crown fled north after the war.

Loyalist migration (estimates)
Number

To Nova Scotia (including what became New Brunswick)
about 35,000–40,000

To Quebec (much of it the future Upper Canada, now Ontario)
about 10,000

Black Loyalists resettled in Nova Scotia
about 3,500

Black Loyalists who left for Sierra Leone in 1792
about 1,300

New Brunswick was split from Nova Scotia in 1784 to govern the newcomers. The Loyalists were not all wealthy Anglican gentlemen, as later myth had it; they came from every class, and some later went back. Black Loyalists, many of them people who had escaped slavery by fighting for Britain, were given poorer land, and in 1784 white veterans rioted against them in Shelburne, Nova Scotia; disillusioned, many left for Sierra Leone. Loyalists also brought about 2,000 enslaved people with them.
Indigenous allies of Britain came north too. The Mohawk leader Joseph Brant (Thayendanegea) led many Haudenosaunee to new lands along the Grand River in Ontario, where Six Nations of the Grand River is today one of the largest First Nations communities in Canada.
The Constitutional Act of 1791 divided the old province in two: Upper Canada (English-speaking, upriver, today's Ontario) and Lower Canada (French-speaking, today's Quebec), each with an elected assembly. In 1793 Upper Canada passed an Act Against Slavery, banning the import of enslaved people and freeing the children of enslaved women at age 25: a gradual law, but one of the first anywhere in the British Empire to limit slavery. Slavery was abolished across the empire from 1 August 1834.
The War of 1812
The United States declared war on Britain in 1812, and its armies invaded the Canadas. Many Americans expected an easy conquest. They were wrong. British regulars, Canadian militia and Indigenous warriors led by the Shawnee leader Tecumseh turned back invasion after invasion. Laura Secord walked through enemy territory to warn British troops of an American attack. American troops burned York (Toronto); British troops later burned Washington. The Treaty of Ghent (signed in December 1814) restored the pre-war borders.
Canadians remember the war as the moment they refused to become American. Tecumseh, killed in 1813, and the nations who fought with him lost the most: their hopes of an Indigenous homeland in the Great Lakes region died with the peace.

Part 4 — Rebellion and responsible government (1815–1864)
After 1815, British North America filled with immigrants from Britain and Ireland: farmers clearing the forests of Upper Canada, Irish labourers digging canals, Scots in the fur trade and the Maritimes. Timber, wheat and fish were shipped to Britain. Life on a backwoods farm meant years of brutal labour to clear land, isolation, and long winters; it also meant land of one's own, which few of these immigrants could have dreamed of at home.
The worst year was 1847, during the Irish famine. Of nearly 90,000 emigrants who sailed for Canada from British ports that year, more than 5,000 died at sea, and 3,452 died at the quarantine station on Grosse Isle, downriver from Quebec City, most of them from typhus. Thousands more died in the "fever sheds" of Montreal and in hospitals in Quebec City, Kingston and Toronto. Many of the orphans were adopted by French-Canadian families, which is why some Quebeckers today have Irish surnames.
Canals, timber and the fear of the Americans
After the War of 1812, Britain built for defence as much as for trade. The Rideau Canal, completed in 1832, linked Kingston to the Ottawa River by a route safely away from the American border on the St. Lawrence; as many as a thousand of its workers, mostly Irish and French-Canadian labourers, died during construction, mainly of malaria. The canal, now a UNESCO World Heritage Site, is still in use, as a summer waterway and, in Ottawa, a winter skating rink.

Year
Building British North America

1832
Rideau Canal completed

1847
Famine migration; 3,452 deaths at Grosse Isle

1854
Reciprocity Treaty: free trade in natural products with the United States

1858
Fraser River gold rush; colony of British Columbia founded

1866
United States ends reciprocity

The economy turned on timber, squared logs and later sawn lumber floated down the Ottawa and St. Lawrence to Quebec City for shipment to Britain, and on wheat from Upper Canada's new farms. In 1854 the Province of Canada and the Maritime colonies won a Reciprocity Treaty with the United States, which allowed free trade in natural products and brought a decade of prosperity.
On the Pacific, gold was found on the Fraser and Thompson rivers in 1858, and about 30,000 men poured into Victoria within a month of the news. Britain created the colony of British Columbia that year to keep control. The miners clashed with the Nlaka'pamux people of the Fraser Canyon, in what is known as the Fraser Canyon War.
The rebellions of 1837–38
Politically, both Canadas were run by small elites close to the appointed governors: the "Family Compact" in Upper Canada and the "Château Clique" in Lower Canada. Elected assemblies had little real power. Reformers demanded it, and in 1837 both provinces rose in rebellion. In Lower Canada the Patriotes led by Louis-Joseph Papineau fought British troops; in Upper Canada William Lyon Mackenzie led a smaller, quickly defeated uprising near Toronto. Further risings in 1838 also failed. Rebels were hanged or transported to Australia.
Britain sent Lord Durham to investigate. His 1839 report made two recommendations that shaped the next century. The first was responsible government: the colonial cabinet should answer to the elected assembly, not to the governor. The second was to unite the two Canadas so that the French would be outnumbered and, he hoped, assimilated; he described French Canadians as a people with no history and no literature. The first idea was a gift to Canadian democracy. The second was an insult that French Canadians have never forgotten.
Union, and an unusual partnership
The Act of Union joined Upper and Lower Canada into the Province of Canada from 10 February 1841. Assimilation failed. Instead, reformers on both sides of the language divide made common cause. Robert Baldwin, an English-speaking reformer from Toronto, and Louis-Hippolyte LaFontaine, a French-speaking reformer from Montreal, built an alliance that won a majority. On 11 March 1848, Governor General Lord Elgin swore in their ministry, and responsible government arrived in the Province of Canada, a month after Nova Scotia (2 February 1848). In 1849 Elgin signed a bill compensating people in Lower Canada for property losses in the rebellions, against fierce Tory opposition; a mob burned the parliament building in Montreal in protest. The principle held: the elected majority governed.

The Baldwin–LaFontaine partnership set a pattern that recurs throughout Canadian history: governing the country requires an alliance across the French–English divide.

Freedom's northern terminus
For enslaved Americans, British North America was the end of the Underground Railroad. Between 30,000 and 100,000 freedom-seekers reached it in the years after the United States' Fugitive Slave Act of 1850. Black communities grew in Canada West (Ontario), around Chatham, Windsor and St. Catharines. They found freedom, but not equality: segregated schools and discrimination were common. One of them, Mary Ann Shadd, founded the Provincial Freeman in 1853, becoming the first Black woman newspaper publisher in North America; she used it to urge Black Americans to come north and to demand equal treatment once they arrived.
Pressures toward union
By the 1860s, the Province of Canada's politics had jammed. English and French halves of roughly equal weight, with a requirement for majorities in both, produced unstable governments and paralysis. The British colonies on the Atlantic wanted railway links and help with their debts. The United States ended its trade reciprocity treaty. And the American Civil War had produced a huge, battle-hardened army next door, with some Americans eyeing British territory and Irish-American Fenians launching raids across the border. Britain, for its part, wanted to stop paying for the colonies' defence. All of that pushed toward a bigger union.

Part 5 — Confederation and the West (1864–1896)
The deal was made at three conferences. At Charlottetown in September 1864, Maritime delegates meeting to discuss a union of their own were joined by politicians from the Province of Canada. At Quebec in October 1864 they agreed 72 resolutions. At London in 1866–67 they turned them into the British North America Act, which received royal assent on 29 March 1867 and took effect on 1 July 1867. Canada was born as a Dominion of four provinces: Ontario, Quebec, Nova Scotia and New Brunswick.
The key leaders were John A. Macdonald of Canada West, a Conservative and the first prime minister; George-Étienne Cartier of Canada East, who persuaded French Canadians that a federation with their own province of Quebec would protect them better than the existing union; and George Brown of Toronto, a Reform rival who put aside his feud with Macdonald to make it happen. Nobody asked the Indigenous nations whose land most of the new country would cover.
A federation, not a melting
The 1867 constitution gave Ottawa the big national powers (defence, trade, banking, criminal law and "Indians, and Lands reserved for the Indians") and gave the provinces control of education, civil law, health and local matters. That split let Quebec keep its language, Church and civil code. It is the root of a century and a half of arguments between Ottawa and the provinces.

Joined Confederation
Year

Ontario, Quebec, Nova Scotia, New Brunswick
1867

Manitoba; Northwest Territories
1870

British Columbia
1871

Prince Edward Island
1873

Yukon
1898

Alberta, Saskatchewan
1905

Newfoundland
1949

Nunavut
1999

Red River and Louis Riel
In 1869–70, the new Dominion bought Rupert's Land from the Hudson's Bay Company without consulting the people who lived there, including the Métis and other settlers of the Red River colony. Led by Louis Riel, a young, Montreal-educated Métis, they declared a provisional government in December 1869 and negotiated terms of entry. The result was the Manitoba Act of 1870, which created a province with guarantees for French and English, Catholic and Protestant schools, and Métis land. One act stained the resistance: on 4 March 1870 Riel's government executed an Ontario Protestant, Thomas Scott, which made Riel a hated figure in Ontario. He fled into exile. The promised Métis lands were largely lost to delays, fraud and speculators in the following years.
Treaties and the Indian Act
To open the Prairies for settlement and a railway, the Crown negotiated the Numbered Treaties, eleven of them between 1871 and 1921, covering a vast arc from northwestern Ontario across the Prairies and into the North. In return for the surrender of land title, the Crown promised reserves, annual payments, hunting and fishing rights on unoccupied Crown lands, schools, farm tools and, in Treaty 6, a "medicine chest" and famine relief. The First Nations who signed understood many of these agreements as sharing the land and establishing a lasting relationship of mutual obligation, not selling it; the written texts said cession. Promises made orally but left out of the written texts were disputed from the start. That gap between the two understandings is the heart of Canadian treaty law today.
The Indian Act of 12 April 1876 consolidated federal control over First Nations. It defined who counted as an "Indian", put reserves under the control of federal Indian agents, and was later amended to ban ceremonies such as the potlatch on the Pacific coast and the Sun Dance on the Prairies. It is still in force, much amended, and still defines status for First Nations people.
As the bison vanished in the late 1870s, Plains nations faced famine. The Cree chief Big Bear held out against Treaty 6's terms for years, until hunger forced him to adhere in 1883. Some historians, notably James Daschuk in Clearing the Plains (2013), argue that Ottawa deliberately withheld food to force nations onto reserves and clear the way for the railway; others stress drought, the collapse of the herds and administrative failure. That rations were withheld as a tool of control is well documented.
The railway and the North-West Resistance
British Columbia had joined Confederation on the promise of a railway to the Pacific. The Canadian Pacific Railway was completed on 7 November 1885. About 17,000 Chinese labourers were brought in to build its most dangerous western sections, paid a third to a half less than white co-workers. The year the railway was finished, Parliament imposed a head tax of $50 on every Chinese immigrant.
In 1885 Riel returned from exile at the invitation of Métis in the Saskatchewan valley, whose land claims were being ignored. In March they declared a provisional government at Batoche. This time Ottawa sent troops on the nearly finished railway. Some Cree warriors fought too, though Big Bear himself tried to restrain them. The Métis were defeated at Batoche (9–12 May 1885). Riel was tried for treason in Regina; the jury found him guilty but recommended mercy. He was hanged on 16 November 1885. Eight Cree and Assiniboine men were hanged at Battleford the same month.
Riel's execution split the country along its oldest line. Ontario largely cheered. Quebec saw a French-speaking Catholic hanged for defending his people, and the backlash brought Honoré Mercier's nationalists to power in the province in 1886. Today Riel is recognised as a founder of Manitoba: Parliament said so in 1992, and in 2024 Manitoba formally named him its first premier.

Part 6 — The residential schools (1831–1990s)
This part describes abuse of children, including deaths. Many Survivors and their families are still living. In Canada, the 24-hour Indian Residential Schools Crisis Line offers support to former students and their families.
No part of Canadian history has been more painfully re-examined in the past two decades than the residential schools. They were boarding schools for Indigenous children, funded by the federal government and run mostly by churches (Roman Catholic, Anglican, Methodist and later United, and Presbyterian). The first church-run residential school opened in 1831; the federal system expanded from the 1880s, after the government decided to establish large industrial schools in the West; the last federally supported residences closed in the late 1990s.
The purpose was assimilation: to separate children from their families, languages and cultures and raise them as Christian, English- or French-speaking Canadians. Children were often taken far from home, sometimes by force or under threat of penalties to their parents. Many were punished for speaking their own language. Schools were underfunded and overcrowded; children were badly fed, worked hard, and died of tuberculosis and other diseases at rates far above those of other Canadian children. Physical and sexual abuse was widespread, and many abusers were never punished.

The residential school system
Figure

Schools and residences covered by the Settlement Agreement
139

First Nations, Métis and Inuit children who attended
at least 150,000

Peak number of schools operating
about 80 (1930)

Deaths recorded in the TRC's named and unnamed registers (2015 analysis)
3,201

Student deaths documented to date in TRC and National Centre records
more than 4,100

The real death toll is unknown. Records were incomplete, often destroyed, and many children were buried in school cemeteries that were later neglected or forgotten. The Commission's chair, Justice Murray Sinclair, said the true number may be far higher.
Survivors, the courts and the Commission
Survivors spoke up for decades before the country listened. From the late 1990s thousands sued the federal government and the churches. The result was the Indian Residential Schools Settlement Agreement, which compensated former students and, in 2008, created the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC).
On 11 June 2008, Prime Minister Stephen Harper rose in the House of Commons to apologise. "The Government of Canada sincerely apologizes and asks the forgiveness" of Indigenous peoples, he said, for the schools and what they did.
Over six years the TRC heard from about 6,500 Survivors and witnesses and reviewed millions of documents. It released its final report, with 94 Calls to Action, in 2015. Its central finding was blunt:

"The establishment and operation of residential schools were a central element of this policy, which can best be described as 'cultural genocide.'" — Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada, Honouring the Truth, Reconciling for the Future (2015)

The Commission defined the policy it was describing: for over a century, it wrote, Canada aimed to eliminate Aboriginal governments, ignore Aboriginal rights, terminate the treaties and, through assimilation, cause Aboriginal peoples to cease to exist as distinct peoples.
Since the Commission
Progress on the Calls to Action is disputed. The federal government says more than 85 percent of the 76 calls that require its leadership are complete or well underway, citing the Indigenous Languages Act (2019), a 2020 law giving Indigenous communities authority over child welfare, and a National Day for Truth and Reconciliation on 30 September, a federal holiday since 2021. Independent trackers are much less generous: CBC News's Beyond 94 project counted 15 of the 94 calls as complete in May 2025.
In May 2021 the Tk'emlúps te Secwépemc First Nation announced that a ground-penetrating radar survey of part of the grounds of the former Kamloops Indian Residential School had found what it described as the likely graves of 215 children; the specialist who led the survey later described about 200 "probable burials" or "targets of interest". Other First Nations announced similar findings at other former schools. The announcements produced national grief: flags were lowered for months, and in 2022 Pope Francis travelled to Canada to apologise for the role of members of the Catholic Church, later describing what happened as genocide.
The findings have also become a subject of controversy. Radar cannot confirm human remains, and at Kamloops no excavation had taken place and no remains had been confirmed as of early 2025. Some commentators argue that early reporting presented possible graves as confirmed mass graves; many Indigenous leaders and historians respond that the deaths of thousands of children are documented in the archives regardless, that communities have the right to decide whether to disturb burial sites, and that the debate over one site has been used to cast doubt on the whole history. Both points can be held at once: the specific claims at particular sites remain to be verified, and the system's documented toll does not depend on them.
Many Indigenous Canadians trace present-day problems, from lost languages to family breakdown, addiction and the over-representation of Indigenous children in foster care and of Indigenous adults in prison, to the intergenerational effects of the schools and of the child-welfare removals that followed them, known as the Sixties Scoop.

Part 7 — Wheat, immigrants and the Great War (1896–1919)
In 1896 Wilfrid Laurier became the first French-Canadian prime minister. He governed for fifteen years, and he presided over the greatest boom in the young country's history. His term, from 1896 to 1911, is still the longest unbroken run of any Canadian prime minister.
Settling the Prairies
The government advertised free homesteads across Britain, the United States and continental Europe. Immigrants poured in: British and American farmers, and, unusually for the time, hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians, Poles, Germans, Scandinavians, Doukhobors, Mennonites and Jews. They came on the CPR, in "colonist cars", and broke the prairie sod for wheat.

Year
Immigrants admitted

1905
141,500

1907
272,400

1910
286,800

1912
375,800

1913
400,900 (a single-year record that stood until 2021)

Between 1905 and 1913 alone, about 2.3 million people arrived, in a country of fewer than 8 million. Alberta and Saskatchewan became provinces in 1905. Gold was found in the Klondike in August 1896, setting off the rush that brought tens of thousands north to the Yukon. Canada's GDP per person, by the Maddison Project's estimates, rose from $4,937 in 1901 to $7,088 in 1913 (in 2011 dollars), a remarkable jump for twelve years.
Prairie life was hard: sod or log houses, brutal winters, isolation, and dependence on a single crop and the railway's freight rates. It also built a distinctive political culture of farmers' co-operatives, grain pools and protest parties that later gave Canada its social-democratic movement.
The colour line
The welcome had limits. The Chinese head tax, $50 in 1885, was raised to $100 in 1900 and $500 in 1903, about two years' wages for a labourer. A 1908 "continuous journey" rule barred immigrants who did not sail directly from their country of birth, which in practice excluded people from India, since no such direct voyage existed. In May 1914 the Komagata Maru arrived in Vancouver carrying 376 passengers from British India, most of them Sikhs. Only about twenty were allowed to land. After two months in the harbour, the ship was forced to leave; when it reached India, British troops opened fire on the passengers, killing about twenty. Canada apologised in the House of Commons in 2016.
The First World War
When Britain declared war in August 1914, Canada, as a Dominion, was automatically at war. About 650,000 Canadians and Newfoundlanders served, from a country of fewer than 8 million. More than 66,000 died, and more than 170,000 were wounded.

The First World War
Canada and Newfoundland

Served
about 650,000

Went overseas with the Canadian Expeditionary Force
424,000

Died
more than 66,000

Wounded
about 170,000

On 1 July 1916, the Newfoundland Regiment was almost wiped out at Beaumont-Hamel on the first day of the Somme; Newfoundlanders still mark 1 July as a day of mourning as well as Canada Day. On 9 April 1917 the four divisions of the Canadian Corps, attacking together for the first time, captured Vimy Ridge, a position that British and French attacks had failed to take. Vimy became the national legend of a colony that had become a nation in battle, though the reality was a hard-fought success in a war of horrifying losses, not a turning point of the war.
At home, the war divided the country along its old fault line. In 1917 Prime Minister Robert Borden introduced conscription. French Canadians, who felt little attachment to Britain or France and resented a military that operated almost entirely in English, overwhelmingly opposed it. The 1917 election, fought on the issue, gave Borden's pro-conscription Unionists 153 seats; Laurier's Liberals won 82, 62 of them in Quebec. In Easter 1918 anti-conscription riots in Quebec City ended with soldiers firing on the crowd and several civilians dead. About 125,000 men were conscripted; only about 24,000 reached the front.
On 6 December 1917 a French munitions ship, the Mont-Blanc, collided with another ship in Halifax harbour and exploded, in the largest human-made explosion before the atomic bomb. About 2,000 people were killed and some 9,000 injured.
Women won the federal vote at the end of the war: some women with relatives in uniform voted in 1917, and most women received the federal vote in May 1918. Manitoba had been the first province to grant it, in 1916; Quebec would be the last, in 1940. Indigenous people with status and Asian Canadians were still excluded.
The war ended in a wave of labour unrest. In the Winnipeg General Strike (15 May – 26 June 1919), some 30,000 workers walked off the job, and the strike ended after "Bloody Saturday", 21 June 1919, when the Royal North-West Mounted Police charged a silent parade and fired into the crowd, killing two men. It remains one of the most influential strikes in Canadian history.

Part 8 — Between the wars and the Second World War (1919–1945)
Canada came out of the war more independent. It signed the peace treaty in its own right, joined the League of Nations as a member, and in the 1920s began to run its own foreign policy. The Statute of Westminster (11 December 1931) confirmed that the Dominions were equal partners with Britain, free to make their own laws. Canada was now independent in almost everything except the power to amend its own constitution, which, oddly, stayed in London until 1982.
In 1929 a landmark ruling, the Persons Case, settled whether women could be appointed to the Senate. Five Alberta women, the "Famous Five" (Henrietta Muir Edwards, Nellie McClung, Louise McKinney, Emily Murphy and Irene Parlby), had asked whether "persons" in the constitution included women. Canada's Supreme Court said no. On 18 October 1929 the British Privy Council, then Canada's highest court, said yes, and its judgment described the constitution as "a living tree capable of growth and expansion within its natural limits", a phrase that still guides how Canadian courts read it.
The Famous Five were also complicated heroes. Emily Murphy, the best known of them, campaigned for the compulsory sterilisation of people judged "mentally deficient", and supported Alberta's 1928 sterilisation law, under which thousands of people were sterilised before its repeal in 1972. Canadians now honour the achievement and reckon with the views at the same time.
The Depression
The Great Depression hit Canada harder than almost any other country, because it depended so heavily on exporting wheat, timber, minerals and newsprint, whose prices collapsed.

Indicator (Maddison Project, 2011 dollars)
1929
1933

Real GDP
$83 billion
$59 billion

GDP per person
$8,074
$5,372

Output fell by about 29 percent and output per person by a third. By 1933 close to 30 percent of the workforce was unemployed, by contemporary estimates. On the Prairies, drought turned farms to dust and wheat prices hit record lows. Men "rode the rods" on freight trains looking for work; the federal government sent single unemployed men to remote relief camps. In 1935 camp workers organised the On-to-Ottawa Trek to protest; police stopped them in Regina, where a riot on 1 July 1935 left a police officer and a trekker dead.
The crisis spawned new parties that changed Canadian politics: the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation (CCF), democratic socialists rooted in Prairie farmers and labour, and the ancestor of today's New Democratic Party; and Social Credit, a populist movement that took power in Alberta. Prime Minister R. B. Bennett, a Conservative, was defeated in 1935, and the Liberal William Lyon Mackenzie King returned. King, prime minister for a total of more than 21 years, the longest in Canadian history, was cautious, secretive and, in private, a spiritualist who used mediums to contact his dead mother; he was also a master of holding a divided country together.
In June 1939 Canada refused to take in the St. Louis, a ship carrying more than 900 Jewish refugees from Nazi Germany, after Cuba and the United States had already turned it away. The ship returned to Europe, and about 250 of those passengers were later murdered in the Holocaust. The historians Irving Abella and Harold Troper told the story of Canada's closed door in None Is Too Many (1983), taking the title from an official's reported remark.
The Second World War
This time Canada decided for itself. Parliament declared war on Germany on 10 September 1939, a week after Britain. More than one million Canadians and Newfoundlanders served in uniform, from a population of about 11 million, and more than 45,000 died.

Date
Event

Dec 1941
Canadian troops captured or killed defending Hong Kong

19 Aug 1942
Dieppe raid: a disastrous assault on the French coast, mostly by Canadians

1943
Canadians fight through Sicily and Italy

6 June 1944
D-Day: Canadians land at Juno Beach in Normandy

Sept 1944 – May 1945
Canadians clear the Scheldt and liberate much of the Netherlands, completed 5 May 1945

Canada also ran the British Commonwealth Air Training Plan, which trained more than 130,000 aircrew for the Allies. Its navy, which began the war with 11 combat vessels, grew into a major force that escorted more than 25,000 merchant-ship crossings of the Atlantic. Its factories made ships, vehicles and munitions. The Dutch still send Canada tulips every year in thanks for the liberation.
Conscription again divided the country. In the plebiscite of 27 April 1942, King asked voters to release him from a promise not to conscript for overseas service. Almost two-thirds of Canadians said yes; about 73 percent of Quebec voters said no. His formula, "not necessarily conscription, but conscription if necessary," held until November 1944, when a manpower crisis forced him to send a one-time levy of about 16,000 conscripts overseas. Only about 2,500 of them reached front-line units before the war ended.
The war also brought the gravest injustice to a group of Canadians since Confederation. After Pearl Harbor, more than 22,000 Japanese Canadians, most of them born in Canada, were removed from the British Columbia coast, interned in camps or sent to work on farms, and had their homes, boats and businesses sold without their consent. After the war, nearly 4,000 were exiled to Japan. They were not free to return to the coast until 1 April 1949. In 1988 Prime Minister Brian Mulroney apologised and the government paid $21,000 to each survivor.

Canada went into the 1930s a depressed exporter of raw materials. It came out of 1945 with a large air force and navy, booming industry and a new sense of what a national government could do.

Part 9 — Building the modern state (1945–1968)
The quarter-century after the war turned Canada into a prosperous, urban, industrial country, and created much of what Canadians now think of as their identity.
Newfoundland joined on 31 March 1949, after two referendums in 1948 in which voters chose Confederation over a return to self-government. The second referendum, on 22 July 1948, was close: 52 percent for Confederation, 48 percent for a return to responsible government. Joey Smallwood, who led the campaign for joining, became the province's first premier and governed until the 1970s. Some Newfoundlanders still regard the vote as a mistake, others as the best decision they ever made.
Prosperity and the welfare state
The economy boomed on resources (oil in Alberta after the Leduc strike of February 1947, iron ore, uranium, pulp and paper) and on manufacturing, much of it American-owned. A baby boom pushed the fertility rate to about 3.8 children per woman in 1960. Suburbs, cars and television spread. Governments built a welfare state piece by piece.

Program
Origin

Hospital insurance
Federal act of 1957; adopted by all provinces by 1961

Medicare (doctors' care)
Saskatchewan, 1962, under Premier Woodrow Lloyd, amid a doctors' strike; federal Medical Care Act 1966, in force 1968

Canada Pension Plan
Enacted in April 1965 by the Pearson government; began January 1966

Canada Health Act
1984: five principles (public administration, comprehensiveness, universality, portability, accessibility)

The Diefenbaker years
In 1957 the Conservative John Diefenbaker, a Saskatchewan lawyer and a spellbinding speaker, ended 22 years of Liberal government. Diefenbaker championed "one Canada" and the North, appointed the first woman to a federal cabinet, and passed the Canadian Bill of Rights on 10 August 1960. It was an ordinary federal law that applied only to federal statutes, and the courts used it sparingly; its weakness was one reason the Charter of 1982 was entrenched in the constitution.
Two projects of his years still divide memory. On 26 June 1959 Queen Elizabeth II, Diefenbaker and President Eisenhower formally opened the St. Lawrence Seaway, which let ocean-going ships sail from the Atlantic to the Great Lakes; building it flooded six Ontario villages and three hamlets, now called the Lost Villages. And on 20 February 1959, Diefenbaker's government cancelled the Avro Arrow, an advanced supersonic interceptor jet. About 14,500 Avro employees were laid off that day, and nearly 15,000 more in its suppliers. Defenders of the decision point to the Arrow's soaring cost in an age of missiles; for many Canadians, it remains a symbol of a national technological future thrown away.
Culture and the American shadow
A Royal Commission chaired by Vincent Massey reported in 1951 that Canadian culture risked being overwhelmed by cheaper American popular culture, and that American literature's influence could be "almost overpowering." It led to federal funding for universities, a stronger CBC (which began television broadcasting in the 1950s), the National Library (1953) and the Canada Council for the arts (1957). French-speaking critics argued that its vision of culture was an English-Canadian elite's. Its fear, that a small population next to the United States had to deliberately protect its own voice, became a permanent theme of Canadian cultural policy, from Canadian-content rules on radio to support for film and publishing.
Medicare's father, in popular memory, is Tommy Douglas, the CCF premier of Saskatchewan from 1944 to 1961, whose government introduced North America's first public hospital insurance for all citizens and planned the medicare program his successor launched; in 1961 he became the first leader of the federal NDP. In 2004 viewers of a CBC series voted him "the Greatest Canadian". It is the institution Canadians most often say defines them, and the subject of constant argument over waiting times and funding, between those who want more public money and those who want more private options within it.
A place in the world
Canada was a founding member of NATO and fought in the Korean War. Its diplomats, above all Lester B. Pearson, specialised in being useful: in the 1956 Suez crisis Pearson proposed a United Nations Emergency Force to separate the combatants, and won the 1957 Nobel Peace Prize. Peacekeeping became part of Canada's self-image for a generation, even as most of its defence effort went into NATO and the joint North American air defence command with the United States, NORAD.
Symbols of a new nationalism
As prime minister (1963–68), Pearson's minority governments produced an extraordinary run of nation-building: medicare, the Canada Pension Plan, the Canada–U.S. Auto Pact of January 1965 that built Ontario's car industry, the Royal Commission on Bilingualism and Biculturalism, and, after a bitter debate in which many English Canadians wanted to keep the Red Ensign with its Union Jack, the maple leaf flag, raised for the first time on 15 February 1965. In 1967 Canada celebrated its centennial, and Montreal's Expo 67, opened on 27 April, drew the world.
Rights expanded too. Asian Canadians won the federal vote in the late 1940s; status First Nations people won it, without having to give up their status, in 1960. In the 1960s Canada removed explicit racial preferences from its immigration rules, opening the door to the far more diverse immigration of the decades that followed.

Part 10 — Quebec: the Quiet Revolution, the October Crisis and the referendums (1960–1995)
For most of the century after Confederation, French Canada had defended itself through the Catholic Church, large families, rural parishes and a cautious, conservative provincial politics. The Church ran most schools and hospitals. English-speaking Canadians and Americans owned most of the big businesses, and in Montreal the language of the boardroom and often of the shop floor was English. French Canadians were a majority in Quebec and, on average, earned less than its English-speaking minority.
The Quiet Revolution
In June 1960 the Liberals under Jean Lesage won the provincial election, and in a few years Quebec remade itself so thoroughly that the period is called the Révolution tranquille, the Quiet Revolution. The provincial state took over education and health care from the Church, creating a Ministry of Education in 1964. Under the slogan Maîtres chez nous ("Masters in our own house"), on which Lesage fought the 1962 election, the government nationalised private power companies into an expanded Hydro-Québec, which became a symbol of what French-speaking engineers and managers could build. A new, confident nationalism replaced the old defensive one: Quebeckers began to call themselves Québécois rather than Canadiens français.
The social change was just as fast. Church attendance collapsed. Quebec's fertility rate, among the highest in the Western world, fell from about 3.8 children per woman in 1960 to about 1.9 by 1970. A people that had survived by having large families now had to think about survival in other ways: through language law, immigration and the power of the state.

The Quiet Revolution
What changed

Education
Moved from the Church to a new provincial ministry (1964)

Energy
Private electric companies taken into Hydro-Québec

Identity
From Canadiens français to Québécois

Family
Fertility roughly halved in a decade

Politics
A modern nationalism, soon split between federalists and sovereigntists

On 24 July 1967, during the centennial year, the French president Charles de Gaulle visited Expo 67 and ended a speech from the balcony of Montreal's city hall with "Vive le Québec libre!", the slogan of the independence movement. Ottawa was furious; many Quebeckers were thrilled.
The October Crisis
A small minority chose violence. From 1963 to 1970, the Front de libération du Québec (FLQ) set off more than 200 bombs. On 5 October 1970 one FLQ cell kidnapped the British trade commissioner James Cross; on 10 October another kidnapped Quebec's labour minister, Pierre Laporte. On 16 October Prime Minister Pierre Elliott Trudeau invoked the War Measures Act, the only time it was used in peacetime, suspending civil liberties. The next day Laporte's body was found. Police arrested 497 people, most without charge; only 62 were charged. Cross was released in December in exchange for his kidnappers' safe passage to Cuba.
At the time, opinion polls showed overwhelming public support for the crackdown. Many Quebeckers, then and since, remember it differently: as the moment Ottawa sent soldiers into the streets and jailed poets, union leaders and activists for their opinions. Both memories are real, and both are part of why the crisis still matters.
The Parti Québécois and the first referendum
The mainstream independence movement chose the ballot box. On 11 October 1968 René Lévesque, a former television journalist and Lesage minister, founded the Parti Québécois (PQ). On 15 November 1976 it won 71 of 110 seats in the National Assembly. The new government passed the Charter of the French Language, Bill 101, on 26 August 1977. It made French the language of work, commerce and government, required most immigrant children to attend French schools, and restricted English on commercial signs. English-speaking Quebeckers saw it as an attack on their rights, and many left the province in the years that followed. Most francophones saw it as the law that saved their language on a continent of English speakers, and still do.
On 20 May 1980 Quebec voted on a mandate to negotiate "sovereignty-association", political independence with an economic partnership with Canada. Trudeau, himself a Quebecker, promised "renewed federalism" if Quebec voted No.

Quebec referendum
Yes
No
Turnout

20 May 1980
1,485,851 (40.4%)
2,187,991 (59.6%)
85.6%

30 Oct 1995
2,308,360 (49.42%)
2,362,648 (50.58%)
93.5%

Meech Lake, Charlottetown and 1995
Trudeau's renewal turned out to be the patriation of the constitution in 1982 (Part 11), which Quebec's government did not sign. Brian Mulroney, the Conservative prime minister elected in 1984, tried to bring Quebec in with the Meech Lake Accord (1987), which would have recognised Quebec as a "distinct society". It needed every province's approval. In Manitoba, the First Nations MLA Elijah Harper blocked a vote, objecting that Indigenous peoples had been left out; Newfoundland's premier cancelled his legislature's vote; and the accord died on 23 June 1990. Many Quebeckers took its failure as a rejection. Many English Canadians had seen it as special treatment. A second attempt, the broader Charlottetown Accord, was put to a national referendum in 1992 and lost, 54.3 percent No nationally, with majorities against it in six of the ten provinces, Quebec among them.
Out of Meech's failure came the Bloc Québécois, a federal party founded in 1990 by Lucien Bouchard, a former Mulroney cabinet minister, to work for sovereignty in Ottawa. In 1994 the PQ returned to power under Jacques Parizeau, and on 30 October 1995 Quebec voted again. The No side won by 54,288 votes out of more than 4.6 million, with 93.5 percent of voters turning out. That night Parizeau blamed the defeat on "money and ethnic votes," a remark that was widely condemned, and resigned the next day.

In 1995 a country of 29 million people came within about one percentage point of beginning to break apart, on a question that had been argued over, in one form or another, since 1763.

The Supreme Court, asked by the federal government, ruled on 20 August 1998 that Quebec has no right to secede unilaterally, under Canadian or international law, but that a clear majority on a clear question would oblige the rest of Canada to negotiate. Parliament followed with the Clarity Act (2000), which lets the House of Commons judge whether a referendum question and majority are clear. Sovereigntists regard the law as an illegitimate federal veto on Quebec's choice; federalists regard it as a basic safeguard.

Part 11 — Patriation, the Charter and multiculturalism (1968–2000)
Two languages, many cultures
Pierre Trudeau, prime minister from 1968 to 1979 and again from 1980 to 1984, had an answer to Quebec nationalism: make all of Canada a home for French speakers, so that they would not need a separate state. The Official Languages Act (1969) made English and French equal in federal institutions and services across the country. In practice, bilingualism took hold mostly in Quebec, in New Brunswick (Canada's only officially bilingual province) and in the federal government.
The Royal Commission on Bilingualism and Biculturalism, set up in 1963, had described Canada as a partnership of "two founding peoples". Ukrainian, German, Italian, Jewish and other Canadians objected that the phrase left them out, and Indigenous peoples pointed out that they had been there first. On 8 October 1971, Trudeau announced a policy of multiculturalism within a bilingual framework: Canada would have two official languages but no official culture. The Canadian Multiculturalism Act followed on 21 July 1988.

Canada's languages (2021 census)
Share of population

French as first official language spoken
21.4% (22.2% in 2016)

Bilingual in English and French
18.0%

Mother tongue other than English or French
about 1 in 4 (9 million people)

Mainly speak a non-official language at home
12.7%

In Quebec: mainly speak French at home
77.5% (79.0% in 2016)

Multiculturalism became, for many Canadians, a core part of national identity. It also has critics. The Trinidad-born novelist Neil Bissoondath argued in the 1990s that the policy kept newcomers in ethnic compartments instead of helping them belong. Many Quebeckers have seen it as a way of reducing their nation to one "culture" among many, and Quebec prefers the term interculturalism: integration into a French-speaking society that respects diversity. A Quebec commission led by Gérard Bouchard and Charles Taylor examined these "reasonable accommodation" debates in 2008.
Bringing the constitution home
Canada's constitution was still a British law, and amending it required a vote of the British Parliament. Trudeau decided to "patriate" it, with a charter of rights attached. Most provinces objected. In September 1981, the Supreme Court ruled that patriation without provincial consent was legal but broke constitutional convention. Trudeau then negotiated. On the night of 4–5 November 1981, federal and provincial ministers agreed on a deal, later called the "Kitchen Accord", that nine provinces accepted. Quebec, whose premier René Lévesque was not present when it was struck, did not. In Quebec it is still remembered as the "night of the long knives".
Queen Elizabeth II proclaimed the Constitution Act, 1982 on Parliament Hill on 17 April 1982. It included an amending formula and the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms.

Key clauses of the 1982 Constitution
What they do

Section 1
Rights are subject to "reasonable limits" that can be justified in a free and democratic society

Section 33
The "notwithstanding clause": Parliament or a legislature may override certain rights for renewable five-year periods

Section 35
Recognises and affirms the existing Aboriginal and treaty rights of the Indian, Inuit and Métis peoples

Section 27
The Charter is to be interpreted in a way consistent with Canada's multicultural heritage

The Charter changed Canadian public life profoundly. Courts struck down laws on abortion, recognised same-sex rights, and expanded the rights of the accused. Admirers call it the country's greatest modern achievement; critics argue it has shifted power from elected legislatures to unelected judges. Section 33 was the compromise between those views. Quebec has used it repeatedly: in 1988, after the Supreme Court struck down part of Bill 101's sign rules, Quebec passed Bill 178 under the notwithstanding clause, and in 2022 it pre-emptively used the clause to shield Bill 96, a broad strengthening of French-language rules. Other provinces, including Ontario and Saskatchewan, have used or threatened it more often in recent years, and its use is a live national debate.
First peoples, again
Section 35 opened a new era of Indigenous rights litigation. A series of Supreme Court decisions since then has recognised Aboriginal title and a government duty to consult Indigenous peoples on projects that affect their rights. Modern treaties, called comprehensive land claims, were signed in the North. The largest, the Nunavut Land Claims Agreement of 1993, led to the creation on 1 April 1999 of Nunavut, a territory of about 2 million square kilometres in the eastern Arctic where 84 percent of the people are Inuit.
The decade also brought confrontation. In the summer of 1990, the town of Oka, Quebec, planned to expand a golf course onto a pine forest that included a Mohawk burial ground claimed by the Kanesatake community. Mohawks set up barricades. On 11 July 1990 Quebec provincial police stormed them, and Corporal Marcel Lemay was killed in the exchange of gunfire. The standoff lasted 78 days, until 26 September, and the federal government sent in the army. For many Mohawks the Oka Crisis was the defence of land taken from them over centuries; for many of their neighbours it was an armed blockade that paralysed the region for a summer. It helped prompt the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples, which reported in 1996.
Free trade
The other great debate of the period was about the United States. Mulroney negotiated the Canada–U.S. Free Trade Agreement, in force on 1 January 1989, after an election fought almost entirely on the question in 1988. Opponents warned it would make Canada an economic colony; supporters argued it would secure access to the market that mattered most. NAFTA, adding Mexico, followed on 1 January 1994. The United States became by far the largest buyer of Canadian exports, which is why every later turn in Washington's trade policy hit Canada so hard.

Part 12 — Canada in the 21st century, and in 2026 (2000–2026)
The early 21st century brought rising oil wealth in Alberta and a conservative revival. Stephen Harper, prime minister from 2006 to 2015, led a newly united Conservative Party and governed as a cautious conservative: he emphasised the military, the North and resource development, and apologised for the Chinese head tax (2006) and the residential schools (2008). Same-sex marriage became legal nationwide on 20 July 2005, under his predecessor Paul Martin; Canada was among the first countries in the world to make it so.
Justin Trudeau, Pierre's son, won in 2015 and governed until 2025. His governments legalised recreational cannabis, introduced a carbon price and a child benefit, renegotiated NAFTA into the Canada–United States–Mexico Agreement (CUSMA, in force 1 July 2020), and invoked the Emergencies Act for the first time, on 14 February 2022, to end the trucker "Freedom Convoy" occupation of downtown Ottawa against pandemic mandates. Supporters saw a firm response to an illegal blockade; critics, including civil-liberties groups, saw government overreach. In January 2024 the Federal Court ruled the invocation unreasonable and in breach of the Charter, and in January 2026 the Federal Court of Appeal upheld that ruling; on 22 October 2026 the Supreme Court agreed to hear the government's appeal. The inquiry into missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls reported on 3 June 2019, with 231 Calls for Justice, and called the violence a "genocide", a conclusion some politicians and commentators disputed.
The population boom and the backlash
Canada's population grew by 2.8 percent in a single year, 2023–24, mostly because of temporary residents: international students, temporary workers and asylum seekers. The number of non-permanent residents peaked at nearly 3 million on 1 October 2024. Housing costs became the country's central political issue, and the long national consensus in favour of high immigration came under strain. The government cut its targets for both temporary and permanent residents. Growth slowed to 1.1 percent and then to 0.5 percent in the year to 1 July 2026, the slowest since the First World War.
Climate struck too: in 2023, wildfires burned about 18.5 million hectares, the largest area in Canada's recorded history, and forced more than 185,000 people from their homes by one estimate, among them almost the whole population of Yellowknife.
Trump, tariffs and Carney
On 6 January 2025, Trudeau announced his resignation. Two months later the new U.S. administration of Donald Trump imposed 25 percent tariffs on most Canadian goods (10 percent on energy), from 4 March 2025, before exempting goods that comply with CUSMA from 6 March. Trump repeatedly suggested that Canada should become the "51st state". The reaction in Canada was a wave of patriotism. Provincial liquor boards pulled American alcohol from their shelves, an Angus Reid poll in February 2025 found 85 percent of respondents replacing at least some American products, and Canadian-resident return trips from the United States fell by about a quarter in 2025, according to Statistics Canada.
Mark Carney, a former governor of both the Bank of Canada and the Bank of England, won the Liberal leadership on 9 March 2025 with 85.9 percent of the vote and became prime minister on 14 March. He called an election for 28 April 2025 and won it.

Federal election, 28 April 2025
Seats (of 343)

Liberal (Mark Carney)
169

Conservative (Pierre Poilievre)
144

Bloc Québécois
22

New Democratic Party
7

Green
1

The Liberals fell just short of a majority on election night. A series of opposition MPs crossed the floor to join them, giving the government a majority from 8 April 2026. On 31 October 2026, the House of Commons website showed 173 Liberals, 137 Conservatives, 21 Bloc Québécois, 5 New Democrats and 1 Green, with 6 seats vacant.
Where things stand, autumn 2026
All figures below are as of the dates given; check the sources for later updates.

Trade with the United States. CUSMA's 2026 joint review did not produce the renewal Canada sought: on 1 July 2026 the United States declined to extend the agreement, which moves it into annual reviews. In October 2026 the U.S. Trade Representative opened public consultations for what it called the "2027 joint review".
Quebec. On 5 October 2026 the Parti Québécois under Paul St-Pierre Plamondon won 60 of the National Assembly's 127 seats with 28.0 percent of the vote, four short of a majority, on a turnout of about 67 percent. It had promised a referendum on sovereignty. Whether and when one is held, and on what question, will shape the next chapter of the story told in Part 10.
People. Statistics Canada estimated the population at 41,798,407 on 1 July 2026, up 0.5 percent in a year, with a median age of 40.9. About 23.0 percent of the population were immigrants at the 2021 census, the highest share since Confederation and the highest in the G7. About 1.8 million people (5.0 percent) identified as Indigenous: 1,048,405 First Nations, 624,220 Métis and 70,545 Inuit.
Economy. The World Bank put Canada's GDP at $2.32 trillion in 2025, or $55,698 per person. Life expectancy was 82.1 years in 2024. The fertility rate had fallen to 1.25 children per woman, among the lowest in the world, from 3.81 in 1960.
Space. In April 2026 the Canadian astronaut Jeremy Hansen flew around the Moon aboard NASA's Artemis II, the first Canadian to travel around the Moon.

Part 13 — How to understand Canada today
Key dates

Date
Event

At least 14,000 years ago
People living in what is now Canada

c. 1000 CE
Norse at L'Anse aux Meadows; Thule (ancestors of the Inuit) spread east across the Arctic

1534–1535
Jacques Cartier in the St. Lawrence; the word kanata recorded

1608
Champlain founds Quebec

1670
Hudson's Bay Company chartered

1755–1764
Expulsion of the Acadians

13 Sept 1759
Battle of the Plains of Abraham

1763
Treaty of Paris; Royal Proclamation

1774
Quebec Act

1783–1784
Loyalists arrive; New Brunswick created

1812–1814
War of 1812

1837–1838
Rebellions in Upper and Lower Canada

1848
Responsible government in Nova Scotia and the Province of Canada

1 July 1867
Confederation

1869–1870
Red River Resistance; Manitoba joins

1871–1921
Numbered Treaties

1876
Indian Act

1885
North-West Resistance; Riel hanged; CPR completed; Chinese head tax

1896–1913
Klondike gold rush; Prairie settlement boom

1914–1918
First World War; Vimy Ridge (9 April 1917); conscription crisis

1918
Most women win the federal vote

1929
Persons Case

1931
Statute of Westminster

1939–1945
Second World War; internment of Japanese Canadians

1949
Newfoundland joins

1960
Quiet Revolution begins; status First Nations win the federal vote

1965
Maple leaf flag

1966–1968
National medicare

1969
Official Languages Act

1970
October Crisis

1971
Multiculturalism policy

1977
Bill 101

1980
First Quebec referendum (59.6% No)

17 April 1982
Constitution Act and Charter of Rights and Freedoms

1989 / 1994
Free trade with the United States; NAFTA

1990
Meech Lake fails; Oka Crisis

30 Oct 1995
Second Quebec referendum (50.58% No)

1997
Last federally supported residential school residences close

1999
Nunavut created

2005
Same-sex marriage nationwide

2008
Residential schools apology; TRC begins

2015
TRC final report and 94 Calls to Action

2025
U.S. tariffs; Carney becomes prime minister; 28 April election

2026
Liberal majority via floor crossings; CUSMA not renewed; PQ wins Quebec election

Who's who

Person
Why they matter

Samuel de Champlain
Founded Quebec in 1608 and built New France on alliances with Indigenous nations

Joseph Brant (Thayendanegea)
Mohawk leader who led Haudenosaunee Loyalists to the Grand River

Tecumseh
Shawnee leader whose alliance with Britain helped defend Upper Canada in 1812–13

Louis-Joseph Papineau and William Lyon Mackenzie
Led the rebellions of 1837–38

Robert Baldwin and Louis-Hippolyte LaFontaine
Won responsible government through an English–French alliance

John A. Macdonald
First prime minister; architect of Confederation and the CPR; also of policies toward Indigenous peoples now widely condemned

George-Étienne Cartier
Brought French Canada into Confederation

Louis Riel
Métis leader of two resistances; hanged for treason in 1885; now honoured as a founder of Manitoba

Big Bear (Mistahimaskwa)
Cree chief who resisted Treaty 6's terms

Wilfrid Laurier
First French-Canadian prime minister; presided over the Prairie boom

Robert Borden
Wartime prime minister; imposed conscription in 1917

The Famous Five
Won the Persons Case, 1929

William Lyon Mackenzie King
Longest-serving prime minister; held the country together through Depression and war

Tommy Douglas
Saskatchewan premier; father of medicare in popular memory

Lester B. Pearson
Nobel Peace Prize 1957; prime minister of the flag, the pension plan and medicare

Jean Lesage
Premier who launched the Quiet Revolution

René Lévesque
Founder of the Parti Québécois; premier from 1976

Pierre Elliott Trudeau
Prime minister of bilingualism, multiculturalism, the War Measures Act and the Charter

Brian Mulroney
Prime minister of free trade and Meech Lake

Jacques Parizeau and Lucien Bouchard
Led the Yes side in 1995

Jean Chrétien
Prime minister during the 1995 referendum and the Clarity Act

Elijah Harper
First Nations MLA who blocked the Meech Lake Accord in Manitoba

Stephen Harper
Conservative prime minister, 2006–2015; residential schools apology

Justin Trudeau
Liberal prime minister, 2015–2025

Mark Carney
Prime minister from March 2025, through the tariff war

Paul St-Pierre Plamondon
Parti Québécois leader; premier of Quebec after October 2026

Five ideas that unlock the country
1. Canada was made by negotiation, not revolution. It has no founding war of independence. It got its self-government by petition, compromise and act of Parliament: responsible government in 1848, Confederation in 1867, the Statute of Westminster in 1931, patriation in 1982. That history explains a political culture that prizes accommodation, distrusts grand gestures, and treats federal–provincial bargaining as the normal business of the state. It also explains why the hardest moments (1837, 1885, 1917, 1970, 1990) are remembered so vividly: they are the times compromise broke down.
2. There are at least three founding peoples, and they tell the story differently. English-speaking Canadians have often told it as a steady growth of freedom and independence from Britain. French-speaking Quebeckers tell it as the survival of a nation conquered in 1759, which has had to defend its language and institutions ever since. First Nations, Inuit and Métis tell it as the story of peoples who were here first, who made treaties as nations, and whose lands, children and governments were taken. Each account is true to its own experience. Understanding Canada means holding them at the same time.
3. The treaties are not history; they are law. Section 35 of the Constitution affirms Aboriginal and treaty rights, and the courts have given that sentence real force. Pipelines, mines, dams and forestry across much of the country now depend on negotiations with Indigenous nations. Reconciliation, after the residential schools and the TRC, is both a moral project and a constitutional one, and Canadians argue about how far and how fast it should go.
4. Immigration is the national project. Canada has always needed people: from the filles du roi to the Loyalists, the Prairie homesteaders, postwar Europeans and, since the 1960s, newcomers from Asia, Africa, Latin America and the Caribbean. In 2021 almost one in four people living in Canada was an immigrant, a higher share than in any other G7 country. The country also has a long record of exclusion, from the head tax to the Komagata Maru to the St. Louis. The surge of 2023–24 and the backlash that followed are the latest test of a consensus that has always depended on public confidence that growth is managed well.
5. Living next to the United States is the permanent condition. Canada was founded partly to avoid being absorbed by the United States, and every generation has had its version of the question: reciprocity in the 1850s, free trade in 1988, tariffs and the "51st state" in 2025. Canadians share a continent, a language (for most), and a deeply integrated economy with their neighbour, and define themselves in large part by what makes them different: medicare, gun laws, multiculturalism, the monarchy, and a more communitarian idea of government.

Canada has never had a single founding story. It has had treaties, conquests, compromises and referendums, and an unusual habit of turning its arguments into institutions rather than wars.

The takeaway
Canada began as the homelands of hundreds of Indigenous nations, became a French colony built on the fur trade and Indigenous alliances, and was conquered by Britain in 1759–60. Loyalists made it English-speaking, Confederation in 1867 made it a country, and the railway, the Numbered Treaties and the defeat of the Métis made it continental, at a heavy cost to its first peoples, including more than a century of residential schools that the TRC called cultural genocide. Two world wars made it a nation in its own eyes; the postwar boom built its welfare state; the Quiet Revolution and two referendums came within a percentage point of breaking it apart; and the 1982 Charter and multiculturalism gave it a new self-image. In autumn 2026, with a sovereigntist government in Quebec, a trade relationship with the United States in question, and population growth at its slowest in a century, Canadians are again doing what their history has taught them: negotiating.
Try this: look up the treaty or land agreement that covers the place where you live, or a Canadian city you know, on the Government of Canada's treaties map or a First Nation's own website. Find out which nation signed it, when, and what each side understood it to mean. Then read one of the TRC's 94 Calls to Action and check whether it has been completed. You will see that the history in this piece is still being written.

Sources & Further Reading
Sources
- Statistics Canada, The Daily and analytical publications: population estimates (23 September 2026); "150 years of immigration in Canada" (Canadian Megatrends, 2016); 2021 Census releases on immigration (26 October 2022), Indigenous peoples (21 September 2022) and languages (17 August 2022).
- National Centre for Truth and Reconciliation and the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada, Honouring the Truth, Reconciling for the Future: Summary of the Final Report (2015) and NCTR residential school history pages. Crown–Indigenous Relations and Northern Affairs Canada: the Numbered Treaties, the 2008 apology and the government's progress report on the Calls to Action. CBC News, Beyond 94.
- Veterans Affairs Canada: the First and Second World Wars. Justice Laws Website: Constitution Act, 1982 and Charter of Rights and Freedoms; Clarity Act.
- Élections Québec: official results of the 1980, 1992 and 1995 referendums and the 5 October 2026 general election. House of Commons, party standings (31 October 2026). Elections Canada, 45th general election.
- World Bank, World Development Indicators (updated October 2026): population, GDP, GDP per person, life expectancy, fertility. Maddison Project Database (University of Groningen), via Our World in Data: long-run GDP and GDP per person.
- Office of the U.S. Trade Representative: request for public comment on the 2027 USMCA joint review (October 2026). NASA: Artemis II mission page.
- Many dates and figures for New France, the Loyalists, the Riel resistances, the head tax, the Komagata Maru, the conscription crises, the Halifax explosion, the Persons Case, Japanese Canadian internment, the Quiet Revolution, the October Crisis, Oka, Meech Lake, the Emergencies Act litigation and the events of 2025–26 were taken from Wikipedia summaries of cited scholarship and reporting, and cross-checked against the official sources above where possible. Where historians disagree, the text says so.
Go deeper
- 📘 A Concise History of Canada — Margaret Conrad (a clear, modern one-volume history that gives Indigenous peoples, women and the regions their place)
- 📘 A Short History of Canada — Desmond Morton (brisk and readable; the classic short version)
- 📘 The Inconvenient Indian — Thomas King (a funny, angry and personal account of Indigenous peoples and North American governments)
- 📘 I Have Lived Here Since the World Began — Arthur J. Ray (the history of Canada's Indigenous peoples from the earliest times to the present)
- 📘 None Is Too Many — Irving Abella and Harold Troper (how Canada closed its doors to Jewish refugees, 1933–1948)
- 🌐 National Centre for Truth and Reconciliation: Reports (the TRC's final report and related documents, free to read)
- 🌐 Élections Québec: Results and statistics (official results of every Quebec election and referendum)
- 🌐 Related pieces in this library: If I Was Born in Canada; A Brief History of the United States (this series); The Columbian Exchange


A Brief History of Venezuela: Cocoa, Caudillos, Oil, and a Revolution Contested
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
From the first hunters of the Caribbean coast to Bolívar's wars, from a century of strongmen to the richest democracy in Latin America, and from Chávez's revolution to collapse, exodus and a future still being negotiated in 2026.

Companion piece: Si Hubiera Nacido en Venezuela (in this library's Spanish collection: what daily life feels like; this is how the country got here).
In the early hours of 3 January 2026, United States special forces struck targets in and around Caracas and flew Nicolás Maduro, who had ruled Venezuela since 2013, and his wife Cilia Flores to New York to face drug-trafficking charges. The UN Secretary-General said he was "deeply alarmed" and called it a dangerous precedent. Many Venezuelans at home and in the diaspora celebrated in the streets. Within days, Maduro's own vice-president, Delcy Rodríguez, was running the country as acting president, and the government she led was releasing political prisoners, negotiating oil deals with Washington and promising elections.
How did a country that once had the highest income in Latin America, the oldest unbroken democracy in South America and the largest proven oil reserves on Earth end up there? Why did millions of Venezuelans love Hugo Chávez, and why did millions of others leave the country under his successor? Why do Venezuelans of every political stripe invoke the same man, Simón Bolívar?
The answers run back five centuries: through a colony that grew cocoa rather than silver, a war of independence that killed perhaps a third of the population, a hundred years of strongmen on horseback, and an oil boom that turned a poor farming country into a petro-state almost overnight. Venezuela's politics have always been, in one way or another, a fight over who controls the central state and the wealth that flows through it. This is that story, told at length and, on the most contested chapters, told so that each side can recognise its own account.
In this history

The first peoples and the conquest (to 1600)
The cocoa colony and the war of independence (1600–1830)
Caudillos and the coming of oil (1830–1935)
From dictatorship to the oil democracy (1935–1989)
The Caracazo, Chávez and the Bolivarian Revolution (1989–2013)
Maduro: collapse, hyperinflation and exodus (2013–2023)
The disputed election, the fall of Maduro and Venezuela in 2026 (2024–2026)
How to understand Venezuela today

Part 1 — The first peoples and the conquest (to 1600)
People have lived in what is now Venezuela for a very long time. Stone spear points found at El Jobo, in the north-western state of Falcón, have been radiocarbon-dated to between about 13,000 and 7,000 BCE, and nearby sites in Falcón such as Taima-Taima have yielded archaeological material from the same remote era. These were Ice Age hunters, among the earliest known inhabitants of South America.
Over the following millennia, farming took hold along two broad axes. In the west, people grew maize; in the east, manioc (cassava), still eaten today as the flat casabe bread. On parts of the great plains, the llanos, they combined slash-and-burn fields with permanent settlements.
Unlike Mexico or Peru, the land had no single empire. The Library of Congress country study describes what the Spaniards found as a large number of small, unrelated peoples "of widely varying degrees of cultural sophistication": some nomadic hunters and gatherers, others town-dwellers who irrigated and terraced their fields. On the coasts and along the Orinoco lived Carib- and Arawak-speaking peoples, fishers, farmers and traders who moved by canoe between the mainland and the islands. In the Andes of the west, the Timoto-Cuica, a series of chiefdoms rather than one state, built terraces and roads and traded with the plains and the Maracaibo basin.
How many people lived there before 1498 is not known. Estimates of around a million are sometimes given, but they are guesses from fragmentary evidence; what is certain is that the number fell drastically after contact, mainly through epidemics of Old World diseases, as well as slave raids and war.
The peoples who remain
Venezuela's Indigenous peoples were never wiped out, though they became a small minority. At least thirty Indigenous peoples live in the country today. The largest by far are the Wayuu of the Guajira peninsula on the Colombian border, followed by the Warao of the Orinoco delta, the Kari'ña, the Pemón of the Gran Sabana in the south-east, the Yanomami of the Amazonian south, and others. In the state of Amazonas they make up close to half the population.

People
Homeland
Way of life (traditionally)

Wayuu
Guajira peninsula (north-west)
Herding, trade, weaving; matrilineal clans

Warao
Orinoco delta
Fishing and canoe-building in the delta channels

Kari'ña (Carib)
Eastern plains and coast
Farming manioc, fishing

Pemón
Gran Sabana (south-east)
Farming and hunting below the tepuis

Yanomami
Upper Orinoco, Amazonas
Forest villages, hunting and gardening

Timoto-Cuica (historic)
Andes of Mérida and Trujillo
Terraced farming, roads, trade

Venezuela had no Aztec or Inca empire for the Spaniards to decapitate. That single fact shaped the next three centuries: conquest was slow, piecemeal and fought village by village.

Pearls, slaves and German bankers: the conquest, 1498–1600
On his third voyage, in 1498, Christopher Columbus sighted the Paria peninsula from off the coast of Trinidad. On 1 August 1498 he went ashore, the first European known to set foot on the South American mainland. He spent two weeks exploring the mouths of the Orinoco and was so struck by the flood of fresh water pouring into the sea that he believed he had found the approaches to the Garden of Eden.
A year later, Alonso de Ojeda and the Florentine navigator Amerigo Vespucci sailed west along the coast as far as Lake Maracaibo. There they saw Indigenous houses built on stilts over the water, and the sight reminded them of Venice. The name Venezuela, "little Venice", stuck.
Pearls, then people
What first drew the Spaniards was pearls. The oyster beds between Cumaná and the island of Margarita were stripped within a generation; by the 1520s they had been played out. Then, in the Library of Congress study's blunt phrase, the next native riches to be extracted were the people themselves. Spanish slavers raided the coast and then the interior, shipping captives to work in Panama and the Caribbean islands. The raids bred a hatred that fuelled more than a century of low-level war.
The Welsers
In 1528 the indebted Spanish crown handed western Venezuela to an unlikely conqueror: the Welser banking house of Augsburg in Germany, as security for its loans. For nearly three decades, German governors ran the territory, not to settle it but to extract as much wealth as possible as fast as they could, and they marched expedition after expedition into the interior in search of El Dorado, the legendary golden kingdom. They found none. Their conduct was brutal even by the standards of the conquest, and in 1556 the contract was ended.
Resistance and the founding of Caracas
Spaniards meanwhile pushed east from El Tocuyo, founding Valencia in 1555. The valley of Caracas was held by peoples who fought back hard. The most famous of their leaders, Guaicaipuro (c. 1530–1568), united several groups and resisted the Spaniards for years before he was killed; another leader, Tamanaco, was killed in 1573. After more than a decade of fighting, Diego de Losada founded Santiago de León de Caracas in 1567, in a fertile valley close to the harbour that became La Guaira.
Today Guaicaipuro is a national symbol, whose name has been given even to a military fort. That captures a modern Venezuelan way of remembering the conquest: not only as Spain's arrival but as a resistance that the nation now claims.
For centuries, much of the country remained outside Spanish control. Franciscan and Capuchin missionaries, rather than soldiers, carried Spanish rule into the Orinoco basin and much of the Maracaibo region during the 17th and 18th centuries, and large parts of the western plains and the lands south of the Orinoco were still unknown to Spain at the end of colonial rule.

Date
Event

1 August 1498
Columbus lands on the Paria peninsula

1499
Ojeda and Vespucci name "Venezuela"

1520s
Pearl beds exhausted; slave raiding intensifies

1528–1556
The Welser concession in the west

1555
Valencia founded

1567
Caracas founded by Diego de Losada

1568
Death of Guaicaipuro

Part 2 — The cocoa colony and the war of independence (1600–1830)
Venezuela had no great silver mines, and for most of the colonial period Spain treated it as a backwater. Its main value was its long Caribbean coastline, which helped guard the treasure fleets sailing between Panama and Cuba. Oil seeping from the ground was noticed as early as 1500 and then ignored for almost four centuries.
Until 1777 there was no "Venezuela" as a single unit, only a scattering of provinces governed from Santo Domingo and later from Bogotá, which in 1718 became the seat of the Viceroyalty of New Granada. Distance gave Venezuela's town councils, the cabildos, unusual freedom to run their own affairs.
Cocoa and chocolate
From the 1620s onward, cocoa became Venezuela's principal export, and stayed so for two centuries. The beans grown in the coastal valleys were prized across the Spanish empire, above all in Mexico, where chocolate was a daily drink. Cocoa made a planter class rich. It also drew new settlers from the Canary Islands and created heavy demand for enslaved Africans, who worked the plantations in the 17th and 18th centuries.
Much of the cocoa was sold, illegally, to Dutch, British and French traders, who offered better prices than Spanish merchants. To stamp out the smuggling and capture the profits, the crown in 1728 granted a monopoly over Venezuelan trade to a Basque company, the Real Compañía Guipuzcoana de Caracas, the Caracas Company. It succeeded in curbing contraband, but paid growers less, and resentment boiled over in 1749 in a revolt led by a Canary Islander cocoa farmer, Juan Francisco de León. It was crushed. In 1777 Caracas became the seat of the Captaincy General of Venezuela, the first time the territory was treated as one political unit.
A ranked society
Cocoa produced a social pyramid that the Library of Congress study calls "virtually a caste system":

Group
Who they were
Share of population (late colonial estimates)

Peninsulares and criollos
White elite born in Spain or in the Americas
Small minority

Canary Islanders
White immigrants, often wage labourers
Small minority

Pardos
People of mixed African, European and Indigenous descent
More than half

Enslaved Africans
Plantation and household workers
About 20%

Indigenous people
Survivors of conquest and epidemics
Less than 10% at independence

The pardos are the key to Venezuelan history. By the end of the colony they were the majority, many of them free artisans, smallholders, soldiers and plains cattlemen, but law and custom barred them from the honours, offices and schools reserved for whites. When independence came, their choice of side would decide wars.
Daily life
For most people life was rural. Enslaved workers and free labourers tended cocoa under the shade trees of the coastal valleys; on the vast plains, the llaneros, mixed-race horsemen, herded half-wild cattle and lived largely beyond the reach of the law. Caracas was a modest city of churches, merchant houses and the mansions of the cocoa aristocracy, the so-called mantuanos.

The colony bequeathed a society in which the majority were neither white nor enslaved, but mixed and excluded. Every Venezuelan conflict from 1810 to the Bolivarian Revolution has, in part, been about that majority's place.

Independence: Miranda, Bolívar and the war to the death, 1810–1830
Venezuela produced both the best-known precursor of Spanish American independence and its greatest hero. Francisco de Miranda, born in Caracas in 1750, had a chequered career in the Spanish army, then spent most of his life in countries at odds with Spain, lobbying for support for Spanish American independence. In 1806 he landed at Coro with an expedition from New York, expecting a popular uprising; he met hostility instead and sailed away.
The First Republic
Napoleon's invasion of Spain in 1808, and his capture of the Spanish royal family, gave the criollo elite of Caracas its chance. On 19 April 1810, the city council deposed the Spanish governor and set up a junta governing in the name of the captive King Ferdinand VII. On 5 July 1811, a congress declared Venezuela independent from Spain; 5 July is still Independence Day. A constitution followed on 21 December 1811.
The First Republic, known to Venezuelan historians as La Patria Boba, the Silly Republic, lasted barely a year. Three major cities, Coro, Maracaibo and Guayana, refused to join. Above all, the criollo leaders failed to win over the pardo majority, who had no wish to be ruled by the white elite of Caracas and largely stayed loyal to the crown. Then, in March 1812, a great earthquake devastated the patriot strongholds while sparing almost every royalist town; it seemed that nature itself had joined the crown. On 25 July 1812 Miranda surrendered to the Spanish commander. His young officers, including Simón Bolívar, felt betrayed. Miranda died in a Spanish prison in 1816.
Bolívar
Bolívar was born in 1783 into one of the richest criollo families of Caracas, orphaned at nine, educated in Europe and inflamed by the Enlightenment and the French Revolution. In 1813 he proclaimed a "war to the death" against Spanish rule, swept through the Andes and took Caracas, where he was hailed as El Libertador.
Again the patriots overlooked the people who did the fighting. The llaneros of the plains rode for the royalist caudillo José Tomás Boves, fighting, as they saw it, for social equality against an army of the white criollo elite, in a ferocious war of race and class. By September 1814 Boves had driven Bolívar out of Caracas and ended the Second Republic. Boves was killed in battle at the end of 1814, but Spain, its king restored, sent an army that crushed most resistance. Bolívar fled to Jamaica, where he wrote his famous Jamaica Letter on the future of Spanish America.
The turn
The war turned when the patriots finally won over the plainsmen. José Antonio Páez, a llanero of humble birth, persuaded the horsemen of the Apure that Spain, not the criollos, was the true enemy of their equality, and his cavalry became the patriots' hammer. Bolívar was also ruthless with rivals: when another caudillo, Manuel Piar, openly urged his Black and pardo troops to press their claims for social change, Bolívar had him captured, tried and executed.
From a base on the Orinoco, and with several thousand European veterans of the Napoleonic Wars, Bolívar convened the Congress of Angostura in 1819, which made him president of a Third Republic. Then he did something astonishing: he marched his army across the plains and into the Andes to surprise the Spanish garrison at Boyacá, near Bogotá, liberating New Granada. In June 1821, at Carabobo, Páez's lancers and Bolívar's army won the decisive battle for Venezuela. That August, delegates at Cúcuta adopted the constitution of Gran Colombia, a union of today's Venezuela, Colombia, Panama and Ecuador, with its capital at Bogotá. Bolívar marched on to free Ecuador, Peru and Bolivia, the country named after him.
The dream that failed
Venezuelans resented rule from distant Bogotá, and Páez embodied that resentment. In 1829 he led Venezuela out of Gran Colombia. Bolívar, sick and friendless, was ordered into exile by Páez and died at Santa Marta, on the Caribbean coast of today's Colombia, on 17 December 1830, aged 47. Shortly before his death, as the Library of Congress study records, he compared his efforts for Latin American unity to having "plowed the sea". The library's Spanish piece La Independencia: Cómo Nació un Continente follows the wider continental story.
The cost was terrible. Two decades of war killed between a quarter and a third of Venezuela's people, according to the Library of Congress study; by 1830 the population was estimated at about 800,000. The cocoa economy lay in ruins.

Every Venezuelan government since 1830 has wrapped itself in Bolívar. Conservatives honour the Liberator who feared anarchy; Chávez renamed the country the Bolivarian Republic for the Bolívar who fought empire. Both are quoting a real man who said contradictory things.

Independence at a glance

Junta formed
19 April 1810

Independence declared
5 July 1811

First Republic falls
July 1812

"War to the death"
1813

Congress of Angostura
1819

Battle of Carabobo
June 1821

Venezuela leaves Gran Colombia
1829

Death of Bolívar
17 December 1830

Human cost
A quarter to a third of the population

Part 3 — Caudillos and the coming of oil (1830–1935)
Independent Venezuela was ruled for most of the next century by caudillos: regional strongmen with private armies of followers, who fought each other for control of Caracas and of the customs houses whose revenue paid for everything. The Library of Congress study describes the era as a competition among social and regional factions for the Caracas bureaucracy that ran the export trade.
Coffee and Páez
The economy shifted from cocoa to coffee, whose price was booming in Europe and North America; by the 1830s Venezuela was the world's third-largest exporter. Páez, twice elected president under the 1830 constitution, gave the country sixteen fairly peaceful years, putting down regional revolts while generally respecting legitimate opponents. When coffee prices plunged in the 1840s, the elite split into Conservatives, around Páez, and Liberals.
Slavery, the Monagas brothers and the Federal War
In 1846 Páez chose General José Tadeo Monagas as his successor; Monagas turned on him, sent him into exile and ruled with his brother José Gregorio for a decade. Their one lasting act was the abolition of slavery in 1854. Their attempt to found a family dynasty provoked a revolt in 1858, and the country collapsed into the Federal War (1858–63), a chaotic civil war fought in the name of federalism between Liberals and Conservatives and among dozens of local chiefs. The Liberals won, but "federalism" in practice meant local caudillos ruling their fiefdoms as they pleased.
Guzmán Blanco, the "Illustrious American"
Central authority came back in 1870 with Antonio Guzmán Blanco, who dominated the country for eighteen years. He replaced disloyal regional chiefs with loyal ones and paid them with revenue from coffee exports and foreign loans. The result was peace and progress: schooling expanded, and roads, railways, ports and telegraph lines were built. Caracas acquired boulevards and public buildings in the Parisian style. Guzmán also dedicated as many monuments as possible to himself, made a fortune, and governed partly from Paris, where he finally stayed after anti-Guzmán riots in 1888.
Castro and the gunboats
After years of instability, in 1899 Cipriano Castro, the first of four military rulers from the Andean state of Táchira, marched on Caracas and took power. He refused to pay foreign debts, and in 1902–03 British, German and Italian warships blockaded and bombarded the Venezuelan coast to force him. The arrival of US warships in 1902 persuaded Castro to accept a financial settlement. He provoked another intervention, by the Dutch, a few years later. In 1908 he went to Europe for medical treatment, and his right-hand man seized power behind his back.

Leader
In power
Remembered for

José Antonio Páez
1830–1846 (with gaps)
Founding president; peace and coffee

José Tadeo and José Gregorio Monagas
1847–1858
Abolition of slavery (1854); dynastic ambitions

Juan C. Falcón
1860s
Liberal victor of the Federal War

Antonio Guzmán Blanco
1870–1888 (with gaps)
Modernisation, monuments, personal fortune

Joaquín Crespo
1892–1898
Instability; killed 1898

Cipriano Castro
1899–1908
Foreign blockade of 1902–03

For seventy years after Bolívar, the way to become president of Venezuela was usually to ride into Caracas at the head of an army.

Gómez and the coming of oil, 1908–1935
Juan Vicente Gómez, a cattle rancher from Táchira, ruled Venezuela from 1908 until his death in 1935, alternating between the presidency and the post of minister of war, and having puppet congresses write six constitutions to suit him. He built a genuinely national army, well paid and well armed, and a secret police that filled prisons with opponents, many of whom died of hunger or torture. His regime's ideologue, the writer Laureano Vallenilla Lanz, justified it in a book called Democratic Caesarism, which argued that a mixed-race people needed a strong man. Venezuelans called Gómez the "Tyrant of the Andes".
Oil
Under Gómez, Venezuela changed for ever. The first commercial oil drilling came in 1917, and foreign exploitation of the country's petroleum began in earnest in 1918. In 1922 the Barroso No. 2 well at Cabimas, on Lake Maracaibo, blew out in a gusher that announced the scale of the reserves to the world, and foreign oil companies poured in. By 1928, according to the Library of Congress study, Venezuela was the world's leading oil exporter and second only to the United States in production, and it remained the largest exporter until 1970.
The money transformed the state. Gómez paid off the entire foreign debt and built roads. A new urban middle class grew around the oil industry. But the Library of Congress study is clear about who gained most: Gómez, the army and the dictator's associates from Táchira. For most Venezuelans oil meant few jobs (it is a capital-intensive industry), high food prices as farming declined and imports rose, inflation, and falling real wages. Little was spent on schools or hospitals.
This is the beginning of what economists call the resource curse, and of a slogan Venezuelan governments would repeat for a century, the need to "sow the oil": to use petroleum income to build a productive economy before the oil ran out or its price fell. Whether any Venezuelan government managed it is the question that hangs over the next century.
The Generation of 1928
The most important opposition came from students. In February 1928, student leaders at the Central University in Caracas made speeches against the regime and were arrested; when their classmates demanded to be jailed too, Gómez obliged, arresting about 200. A popular demonstration was dispersed with gunfire; a group of students and young officers briefly stormed the presidential palace. Many were sent to labour gangs or died in prison. Those who escaped into exile, among them Rómulo Betancourt, Jóvito Villalba and Raúl Leoni, would become the founders of Venezuelan democracy. Historians call them the Generation of 1928.
Gómez died of natural causes in December 1935, after twenty-seven years in power. Mobs in Caracas and Maracaibo looted the property of his family and associates. Many historians date modern Venezuela from that moment.

Venezuela before and after oil
Before (c. 1910)
After (c. 1935)

Main export
Coffee
Oil (over 90% of exports by the 1930s)

Foreign debt
Burdensome
Paid off entirely

Who gained
Coffee planters, merchants
The state, the army, foreign companies, a new urban middle class

Who lost

Farmers and rural workers, as agriculture declined

Part 4 — From dictatorship to the oil democracy (1935–1989)
Gómez's minister of war, General Eleazar López Contreras, succeeded him. He freed political prisoners and allowed exiles to return, and the first mass political organisations in the country's history appeared. When a general strike in 1936 frightened him, he cracked down, but he also created a central bank and adopted the slogan sembrar el petróleo. His successor, General Isaías Medina Angarita (1941–45), went further: a 1943 oil law substantially raised the state's revenue from the foreign companies, Venezuela got its first income tax and social security laws, and Betancourt's party, Acción Democrática (AD), was legalised.
The trienio (1945–1948)
On 18 October 1945, AD joined a lodge of young army officers in overthrowing Medina. A junta headed by Betancourt governed for three years, the trienio. In March 1946 it decreed universal suffrage for all citizens over eighteen, women included, and legalised all parties, among them the Christian Democratic COPEI, founded by Rafael Caldera. AD won overwhelmingly: 79% of the vote in the 1946 Constituent Assembly election and 73% in the general election of December 1947, which made the novelist Rómulo Gallegos, author of the classic plains novel Doña Bárbara, the first president elected by universal vote.
AD pushed hard: a law ensuring the state 50% of oil-company profits, a land reform, a vast expansion of public schools. It alienated the oil companies, landowners, the Church and the officers all at once. On 24 November 1948, after barely ten months in office, Gallegos was overthrown in a nearly bloodless coup.
Pérez Jiménez
The military junta voided the 1947 constitution and outlawed AD. Its leader, Colonel Carlos Delgado Chalbaud, was assassinated in November 1950, and his colleague Marcos Pérez Jiménez took control. When early returns in the 1952 election showed an opposition party far ahead, he halted the count and declared himself president.
What followed was a brutal dictatorship and a construction boom. The secret police, the Seguridad Nacional, hunted down opponents; hundreds, perhaps thousands, were tortured or killed, many at a prison camp on Guasina Island in the Orinoco. At the same time rising oil income paid for showpiece construction: a replica of New York's Rockefeller Center, a luxurious mountaintop hotel and what the Library of Congress study calls the world's most expensive officers' club. One estimate cited by the Library of Congress study holds that half the state's revenue was squandered or stolen; Pérez Jiménez left with a personal fortune estimated at US$250 million. His anticommunism won him American support; President Eisenhower awarded him the Legion of Merit in 1954.
In December 1957 a plebiscite announced, two hours after the polls closed, that 85% had voted for him to continue. Outrage was universal. Air-force planes bombed Caracas on 1 January 1958; civilian opposition groups, united in a clandestine Patriotic Junta, called mass demonstrations and a general strike. When the navy rebelled, army officers forced the dictator out. On 23 January 1958 he fled the country. About 300 people had been killed in the uprising.

The date became a political creed: the "spirit of 23 January", the idea that rival parties, unions, business and the Church could cooperate to keep the soldiers out of power.

Punto Fijo: the oil democracy, 1958–1989
In October 1958, before the December election, the leaders of the three main democratic parties, AD, COPEI and the Democratic Republican Union (URD), signed the Pact of Punto Fijo: whoever won, they would respect the result, share government posts and follow a common programme. A companion agreement guaranteed business that private property would be respected and expropriated land compensated. The pacts excluded one group, the extreme left, including the Communist Party.
Betancourt won with 49% of the vote and took office on 13 February 1959. According to the Library of Congress study, historians "invariably" treat his inauguration as the turning point of four centuries of Venezuelan history: for the next forty years, civilians governed without interruption.
Defending the new democracy
The first years were dangerous. Inspired by the Cuban Revolution, part of AD's youth broke away to form the Movement of the Revolutionary Left (MIR), and with the Communists it launched a guerrilla war in 1961–62 under the banner of the Armed Forces of National Liberation (FALN). From the right, the Dominican dictator Trujillo's agents bombed Betancourt's car in June 1960, badly burning him. Betancourt held firm, pursuing the "Betancourt Doctrine" of refusing recognition to any government, left or right, that took power by force.
The guerrillas never won over the poor, and the most honest elections in the country's history so far, on 1 December 1963, drew nearly 90% of voters despite threats. On 11 March 1964, for the first time in Venezuelan history, one elected president handed the sash to another, Raúl Leoni. In 1969 power passed peacefully to the opposition when Caldera of COPEI won by just 31,000 votes; his government offered guerrillas an amnesty and legalised their parties, and most laid down their arms.
OPEC and the oil state
Venezuela's oil minister, Juan Pablo Pérez Alfonso, was the main architect of the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC), founded in 1960 by Venezuela with Iran, Iraq, Kuwait and Saudi Arabia. The Punto Fijo governments steadily raised the state's share of oil profits, to 60% in 1958 and to 70% by 1971.
Then came the windfall. The Arab-Israeli war of October 1973 and the oil embargo that followed quadrupled the price of crude in two months. Carlos Andrés Pérez (AD), elected in 1973 with 48.8% of the vote on a turnout of 97%, took office in 1974 with an extra US$6 billion a year to spend. He had promised to "manage abundance with the mentality of scarcity"; instead, as the Library of Congress study puts it, he embarked on a spending spree. Price controls, subsidies and cheap imported goods fed a consumer boom; Venezuelans became among the world's biggest per-head consumers of Scotch whisky. Public employment doubled to 750,000 in five years. The state built steel mills, aluminium smelters and hydroelectric dams in the Guayana region.
In August 1975, Congress approved the nationalisation of the oil industry. Fourteen foreign companies received about US$1 billion in compensation, a fraction of the assets' replacement cost, and were merged under a new state holding company, Petróleos de Venezuela (PDVSA), headed at first by a respected technocrat, General Rafael Alfonso Ravard, and run for years with considerable independence from party politics.
The bill
By 1978 the public foreign debt had grown fivefold in four years, to nearly US$12 billion; the Pérez government, the Library of Congress study notes, spent more in five years than all previous governments in 143 years combined, and much was lost to mismanagement and kickbacks. Despite the boom, income distribution was less equal in 1976 than in 1960, and one study found 40% of the population ill-fed.
His successor, Luis Herrera Campins (COPEI), warned in 1979 that Venezuela could not go on as a nation that consumed "rivers of whiskey and oil", then abandoned austerity when oil prices jumped again. When prices softened in the early 1980s, the debt reached about US$32 billion and capital fled. In February 1983, remembered as Viernes Negro (Black Friday), the bolívar was devalued and exchange controls imposed. Growth, which had averaged 6.1% a year between 1974 and 1978, fell to an average of minus 1.2% between 1979 and 1983.

Punto Fijo presidents
Party
Term
Notable

Rómulo Betancourt
AD
1959–1964
Defeated guerrillas and coup plots; 1961 constitution; OPEC

Raúl Leoni
AD
1964–1969
First elected-to-elected handover; growth about 5.5% a year

Rafael Caldera
COPEI
1969–1974
First handover to the opposition; pacification

Carlos Andrés Pérez
AD
1974–1979
Oil boom; nationalisation; PDVSA

Luis Herrera Campins
COPEI
1979–1984
Debt; Viernes Negro (1983)

Jaime Lusinchi
AD
1984–1989
Won with 56.8%; deepening disillusion

Carlos Andrés Pérez
AD
1989–1993
Caracazo; impeached

Rafael Caldera
Convergencia
1994–1999
Banking crisis

Punto Fijo democracy was real: forty years of free elections and peaceful handovers in a region of coups. It was also a club. Two parties, AD and COPEI, shared the state and its oil rents, and when the rents shrank, so did the club's legitimacy.

Part 5 — The Caracazo, Chávez and the Bolivarian Revolution (1989–2013)
By the end of the 1980s, the oil decline had eaten away at the middle class, and poverty had risen sharply. Carlos Andrés Pérez won a second term in December 1988 by campaigning against the International Monetary Fund and promising a return to the boom years. On taking office in February 1989 he did the opposite: facing nearly empty reserves and a large debt, he announced an IMF-backed shock programme, El Gran Viraje ("the Great Turn"), which included raising the price of petrol.
The Caracazo
On 27 February 1989, when bus fares rose overnight, commuters in Guarenas, outside Caracas, rebelled. Protest and looting spread to Caracas and other cities. The government sent in the army, and troops fired into poor neighbourhoods. The violence lasted about a week. The official count was 277 dead; independent estimates run into the thousands, and the true number is still unknown. The Caracazo shattered the image of Venezuela as a stable, prosperous democracy and became, for the left, the founding wound of the era that followed.
"Por ahora"
Within the army, a group of young officers had been organising for years in a secret lodge, the Revolutionary Bolivarian Movement. One was a lieutenant-colonel, Hugo Chávez Frías. On 4 February 1992, they attempted a coup against Pérez. It failed, and Chávez was allowed to appear on television to ask his comrades to lay down their arms. He took responsibility and said they had failed only por ahora, "for now". Many poor Venezuelans, in particular, saw a man who had stood up to a discredited government. A second coup attempt, by higher-ranking officers, failed on 27 November 1992.
In May 1993 Pérez became the first Venezuelan president to be impeached, on charges of embezzling 250 million bolívars; he was later imprisoned and then held under house arrest. In December 1993 voters returned Rafael Caldera, the 77-year-old founder of COPEI, who ran against his own old party. He faced a severe banking crisis in 1994 and re-imposed exchange controls; the same year, Chávez was released from prison.
1998
By 1998 many Venezuelans had given up on AD and COPEI altogether. Chávez founded the Fifth Republic Movement and ran for president promising to sweep away the old party system and rewrite the constitution. In December 1998 he won with 56.2% of the vote, on a 63% turnout. The two parties that had dominated Venezuelan politics for forty years collapsed.

The Caracazo of 1989 and the coup of 1992 are remembered very differently. For chavistas they were the people's awakening; for many others they were the moment violence re-entered Venezuelan politics. Both memories are sincerely held.

Chávez and the Bolivarian Revolution, 1999–2013
No figure in modern Latin America divides opinion like Hugo Chávez. He won election after election, he gave millions of poor Venezuelans a sense of dignity and political voice they had never had, and he presided over a period in which poverty fell sharply. He also concentrated power, weakened the institutions that might have checked it, and left an economy dangerously dependent on oil and on the state. This part sets out both accounts, as their own advocates would state them, with the figures each side relies on.
A new republic
Chávez moved fast. A referendum approved a constituent assembly; the assembly, dominated by his supporters, wrote a new constitution, approved by 72% of voters in December 1999. It renamed the country the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela and enshrined a long list of social rights, including, after Indigenous organisations marched on Congress in September 1999, extensive rights for Indigenous peoples to their lands, languages and cultures. Chávez was re-elected under the new constitution in 2000 with 59.8%.
Coup and strike
In 2001 a new hydrocarbons law and a package of decree-laws alarmed business, the Church and much of the middle class. Opposition swelled. On 11 April 2002, a huge opposition march in Caracas ended in shootings that killed and wounded people, and military commanders removed Chávez. The business leader Pedro Carmona was installed as interim president; during his brief rule the National Assembly and the Supreme Court were dissolved and the 1999 constitution declared void. The overreach turned much of the army; crowds of chavistas gathered outside the presidential palace; and on 13–14 April loyal troops brought Chávez back.
From December 2002 to February 2003, the opposition, PDVSA's managers and the main labour federation staged a national strike and oil lockout that lasted more than two months and almost stopped oil production. When it collapsed, Chávez dismissed nearly 19,000 PDVSA employees, most of them experienced professionals, and brought the company under direct political control. In August 2004 the opposition forced a recall referendum; 59% voted to keep Chávez, on a 70% turnout, and international observers, including the Carter Center, endorsed the result.
The missions: the case for Chávez
With the opposition defeated and oil prices rising through the 2000s, Chávez poured oil revenue into social programmes called misiones:

Mission
Purpose

Robinson (launched July 2003)
Adult literacy, using volunteers

Barrio Adentro ("Inside the Neighbourhood")
Free medical care in poor districts, with many Cuban doctors

Mercal
Affordable, subsidised food

The results, in the years of high oil prices, were striking. World Bank figures based on Venezuela's national poverty line show the share of people in poverty falling from 54.0% in 2003, in the wake of the strike, to 27.5% in 2007. Income inequality fell too: the Gini index, a standard measure, dropped from 48.0 in 1998 to 44.7 in 2006. Even ENCOVI, the independent survey run by Venezuelan universities that later documented the collapse, describes poverty as declining between 2005 and 2013 as oil prices rose. For supporters, the missions, the community councils and the constant elections amounted to a "participatory democracy" that put the poor majority, the descendants of the excluded pardos, at the centre of national life for the first time.
Abroad, Chávez used oil to build alliances. Through Petrocaribe and other schemes, Caribbean and Central American countries received Venezuelan oil on favourable terms, and Cuba sent doctors, teachers and other professionals. He became the leading voice of a resurgent Latin American left and of opposition to US policy in the region.
The case against
Critics, including many former allies, describe the same years differently. Their account rests on the following points.
Institutions. After the 2002–03 crisis, critics say, the government packed the Supreme Tribunal and brought the electoral council, the prosecutor's office and the armed forces under loyalist control, and used state money and media in elections. In 2007 it declined to renew the broadcast licence of RCTV, the most popular opposition-leaning television channel, which went off the air on 27 May 2007.
Term limits. In December 2007 voters narrowly rejected, by 51%, a constitutional reform that would have allowed indefinite re-election, Chávez's first defeat at the polls. In February 2009 a revised referendum abolishing term limits for all offices passed with 54%.
Expropriations. Using record oil revenues, the government nationalised key industries and expropriated numerous farms and businesses, from oil-service companies to, in 2011, the gold-mining industry. Price and currency controls were meant to protect the poor but bred shortages, a black market for dollars and vast opportunities for corruption.
Oil. PDVSA's payroll roughly tripled while, by most estimates, its oil production fell by hundreds of thousands of barrels a day. Instead of saving the windfall, the government spent it and borrowed, leaving the economy more dependent on oil than ever.
Poverty, revisited. The gains in poverty were real but rested on oil prices. The same World Bank series shows poverty rising again to 29.4% by 2013 and 33.1% by 2015, and ENCOVI's later surveys show it soaring once prices fell.
Chávez won re-election in 2006 with 62.8% and again in October 2012 with 55.1%, already ill with cancer. He was unable to be sworn in for his new term and died in Caracas on 5 March 2013, aged 58. Before he died he had named his vice-president and former foreign minister, a one-time union leader, Nicolás Maduro, as his chosen successor.

Chávez was both the most democratic and the least liberal president Venezuela had known: elected repeatedly by large majorities, and determined that no institution would stand between him and the people he claimed to embody.

Part 6 — Maduro: collapse, hyperinflation and exodus (2013–2023)
Maduro won the special election of April 2013 by the narrowest of margins, 50.61% to 49.12% for the opposition's Henrique Capriles, who disputed the result. A year later, in the second half of 2014, world oil prices collapsed. For a country whose exports were overwhelmingly oil, with no savings and an economy riddled with controls, it was a catastrophe.
The economic collapse
What followed was one of the deepest peacetime economic collapses anywhere in modern times. The World Bank's figures show the economy shrinking every year from 2014 to 2020; compounded, those annual declines mean that by 2020 Venezuela's output was roughly three-quarters smaller than in 2013. GDP per person fell from about US$13,650 in 2010 to about US$1,500 in 2020.

Year
GDP growth (World Bank)
Inflation (Central Bank of Venezuela)

2014
−3.9%

2015
−6.2%

2016
−17.1%
274%

2017
−15.7%
863%

2018
−19.6%
130,060%

2019
−27.6%
9,586%

2020
−29.8%

The Central Bank's figure for 2018, published only in May 2019, was 130,060%; the IMF estimated nearly a million percent for the same year. Prices doubled within weeks. In August 2018 the government introduced a new "sovereign bolívar", knocking five zeros off the currency, and inflation simply carried on. People carried stacks of banknotes to buy basic goods, and much of the economy shifted informally to US dollars.
The human cost was measured in hunger. Shortages of food and medicine became chronic. The ENCOVI survey run by Venezuelan universities found that by 2021, 94.5% of Venezuelans lived in income poverty and 76.6% in extreme poverty.
Why?
Here, too, the explanations divide. The government blamed an "economic war" waged by business and the United States, and above all US sanctions: financial sanctions in August 2017, which barred Venezuela from refinancing its debt in US markets, and oil sanctions on PDVSA from January 2019. Some economists agree that the sanctions did great damage; a 2019 report by Mark Weisbrot and Jeffrey Sachs estimated they had cost the country some US$38 billion between 2016 and 2019 and prevented a recovery. Most economists, and the World Bank figures, point out that the collapse began years before the oil sanctions: output and imports were already falling steeply in 2014–18, after years of price controls, expropriations, mismanagement of PDVSA and the absence of any savings from the boom. A fair summary is that the crisis was home-made, and that sanctions made it worse.
Politics: the road to authoritarianism
In December 2015 the opposition won a large majority in the National Assembly. The outgoing assembly packed the Supreme Tribunal with government allies, and the tribunal then stripped opposition deputies of their seats and, in effect, the assembly of its powers. In 2017, months of street protests followed; Maduro called the election of a National Constituent Assembly, boycotted by the opposition, which was installed in August 2017 and declared itself supreme over all other branches of government. Independent estimates put turnout far below the official figure.
In May 2018 Maduro was declared re-elected with 67.85% on a turnout of 45.73%, in an election that most of the opposition boycotted and many governments rejected. On 23 January 2019, citing the constitution, the president of the National Assembly, Juan Guaidó, swore himself in as interim president. The United States and many other governments recognised him. But the army stayed loyal to Maduro, and Guaidó's challenge slowly faded.
What the UN found
UN human-rights bodies documented a pattern of abuses. A report by the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, Michelle Bachelet, in July 2019 said that the government had itself registered 5,287 killings in 2018 for "resistance to authority" during security operations, and described arbitrary detentions, torture and "excessive use of force" against protesters. The UN Human Rights Council created an independent Fact-Finding Mission on Venezuela, which in September 2021 concluded that the justice system had become so "deeply eroded" that it played an important role in state repression. In November 2021 the prosecutor of the International Criminal Court opened a formal investigation into possible crimes against humanity.
The exodus
The result was the largest exodus in the modern history of the Americas. By mid-2019 the UN refugee agency estimated that about four million people had left in four years. By December 2025, according to UNHCR, there were nearly 7.9 million Venezuelan refugees and migrants worldwide, more than 6.9 million of them in Latin America and the Caribbean, most of them in neighbouring countries. Venezuela's population, which the World Bank puts at a peak of 30.8 million in 2016, fell to about 28.2 million by 2022.
A partial recovery
From around 2019 the government quietly relaxed many of its controls and tolerated the de facto use of the US dollar. Venezuela left hyperinflation in early 2022. The economy grew 8.1% in 2022, 4.0% in 2023 and 5.5% in 2024, according to the World Bank, though from a very low base, and inflation was still 190% in 2023. Since March 2022 the legal minimum wage has been 130 bolívars a month, about one US dollar, according to Human Rights Watch; most income now comes as bonuses and dollars.

Venezuela lost about three-quarters of its economy and about a quarter of its people in less than a decade, without a war.

Part 7 — The disputed election, the fall of Maduro and Venezuela in 2026 (2024–2026)
In 2023 María Corina Machado, a liberal engineer who had long been one of the government's fiercest critics, won the opposition's primary election. The government-aligned courts confirmed her disqualification from office in January 2024. The opposition united behind a little-known retired diplomat, Edmundo González Urrutia, as her stand-in.
28 July 2024
The presidential election was held on 28 July 2024. The National Electoral Council (CNE) declared Maduro the winner with 51.95% against 43.18% for González, without publishing results broken down by polling station. The opposition, which had had witnesses at most polling stations, collected and published copies of the official tally sheets (actas) printed by the voting machines from a majority of polling centres; by its count, González had won about 67% and Maduro about 30%.
Independent observers sided with the critics. The Carter Center, which had observed the vote, said on 30 July 2024 that the election had not met international standards of electoral integrity "and cannot be considered democratic", and that the CNE's failure to announce disaggregated results was a serious breach of electoral principles. A UN panel of electoral experts made similar criticisms in a report made public in August 2024. On 22 August 2024, the Supreme Tribunal, at Maduro's request, declared the CNE's result "validated". Russia, China, Iran, North Korea and Cuba recognised Maduro; most Western and many Latin American governments did not.
Protests broke out, above all in poor neighbourhoods that had once been chavista strongholds. The government responded with what it called "Operación Tun Tun" ("Operation Knock Knock"), a nationwide campaign of arrests. According to Human Rights Watch, 24 protesters and bystanders died, many at the hands of security forces and armed pro-government groups (colectivos), and thousands were detained. González left for asylum in Spain on 7 September 2024. Maduro was sworn in for a third term on 10 January 2025. In September 2025, the UN Fact-Finding Mission reiterated that acts of "extreme cruelty" before and after the election amounted to crimes against humanity.
The government's account was that its institutions had lawfully certified the result and that the opposition, with foreign backing, was attempting a coup. No independent observer endorsed the official result.
2025: the pressure builds
In July 2025 Venezuela released 10 US citizens and residents and 80 Venezuelan nationals in exchange for 252 Venezuelan migrants whom the United States had deported to the CECOT mega-prison in El Salvador, according to Human Rights Watch. In October 2025 the Norwegian Nobel Committee awarded the Nobel Peace Prize to Machado "for her tireless work promoting democratic rights for the people of Venezuela and for her struggle to achieve a just and peaceful transition from dictatorship to democracy". Through the autumn the United States built up a large naval force in the Caribbean, carried out a series of deadly strikes on boats it said were carrying drugs, and seized sanctioned oil tankers. As of 3 November 2025, the human-rights group Foro Penal counted 884 political prisoners in Venezuela.
3 January 2026
Then, in the early hours of 3 January 2026, US forces struck targets in and around Caracas and captured Maduro and Flores, who were flown to New York to face a 2020 narco-terrorism indictment. Venezuela's government called it an "extremely serious military aggression". Cuba said 32 of its military and security personnel, part of Maduro's protection, had been killed. UN Secretary-General António Guterres said he was "deeply alarmed" and that the action set a "dangerous precedent"; the Security Council split, with Russia and China among the strongest critics, and some Latin American governments, such as Paraguay's, welcoming Maduro's removal while calling for a democratic transition.

Two truths sit uncomfortably together. Most Venezuelans, by every independent measure, wanted Maduro gone and had voted him out. And his removal came not through their votes but through a foreign military raid, which many governments and international lawyers saw as a breach of international law.

Venezuela in 2026
What followed Maduro's capture was not a revolution but a negotiated continuity. Delcy Rodríguez, his vice-president, became acting president, with the security forces and the ruling party's structures largely intact. Under heavy US pressure, her government moved quickly on several fronts.
Prisoners and amnesty
More than 100 political prisoners were released within ten days of the raid; UN investigators noted on 12 January that, of an estimated 800 political prisoners, only about 50 appeared to have been freed at that point. In February 2026 Rodríguez signed an amnesty law, which excluded people convicted of murder, drug trafficking, corruption or human-rights violations. Hundreds of prisoners were eventually released.
But on 16 September 2026, the UN Fact-Finding Mission reported that the institutions responsible for repression and crimes against humanity "remain fundamentally intact": laws used to criminalise opponents were still in force, the intelligence services and security forces kept the same structures and practices, the colectivos had not been disarmed, and at least 19 officials the mission had previously identified for gross violations remained in, or had been moved to, key posts. It also recorded improvements: a significant decline in long-term detentions and enforced disappearances. "The reduction in some of the harshest forms of repression is notable," said its chair, Sofía Macher, but it was not yet a transformation of the system.
Oil and Washington
The United States reopened its embassy in Caracas on 14 March 2026. On 30 August 2026, President Trump hailed a "historic" deal giving the United States control of more than 65 billion barrels of Venezuela's proven reserves, the world's largest; Venezuela said it covered the development of 17 strategic oil fields. Rodríguez said the deal would run for 25 years, target an increase in output to 1.5 million barrels a day and preserve Venezuela's sovereignty over its resources; opposition figures including Henrique Capriles criticised it.
The earthquakes
On 24 June 2026, two powerful earthquakes, of magnitude 7.2 and 7.5 according to the US Geological Survey, struck northern Venezuela. A month later the BBC reported more than 5,300 confirmed deaths and more than 16,500 injured, with tens of thousands still missing; the official toll had been disputed from the start. Families searching for the dead in La Guaira and elsewhere became the defining images of the year.
Elections?
Addressing the UN General Assembly on 23 September 2026, Rodríguez said Venezuela was "being reborn", thanked the Trump administration for restoring relations, and promised: "There will be elections." She said political talks were under way so that all sides could compete on an equal footing. On 25 October 2026 María Corina Machado returned to Venezuela after more than ten months abroad.
Maduro and Flores, meanwhile, remain in custody in New York awaiting trial.
The country in numbers

Venezuela, latest figures

Source

Population
About 28.5 million (2025), down from a peak of 30.8 million (2016)
World Bank

Venezuelans abroad
Nearly 7.9 million refugees and migrants (December 2025)
UNHCR

GDP per person
About US$3,500 (2025), against about US$13,650 in 2010
World Bank

GDP growth
+5.5% (2024), +1.6% (2025); economy still about two-thirds smaller than in 2013
World Bank

Inflation
190% (2023)
Central Bank of Venezuela

Life expectancy
72.7 years (2024)
World Bank

Homicide rate
12.7 per 100,000 (2022), down from 62.9 (2014)
World Bank / UNODC

Undernourishment
Almost 18% of the population
UN FAO, via Human Rights Watch

Poverty
Falling but still widespread; 1 in 3 households' income does not cover food (2025)
ENCOVI

Part 8 — How to understand Venezuela today
Key dates

Date
Event

c. 13,000 BCE
Hunters at El Jobo and Taima-Taima

1 August 1498
Columbus lands on the Paria peninsula

1499
Ojeda and Vespucci name "Venezuela"

1528–1556
Welser concession

1567
Caracas founded

1620s
Cocoa becomes the main export

1728
Caracas Company founded

1749
Revolt of Juan Francisco de León

1777
Captaincy General of Venezuela

19 April 1810
Caracas junta

5 July 1811
Declaration of independence

June 1821
Battle of Carabobo

1829
Venezuela leaves Gran Colombia

17 December 1830
Death of Bolívar

1854
Abolition of slavery

1858–1863
Federal War

1870–1888
Guzmán Blanco

1902–1903
European naval blockade

1908–1935
Gómez dictatorship

1917–1922
First commercial oil wells; Maracaibo boom

1928
Student revolt; Venezuela the world's leading oil exporter

1945–1948
The trienio; universal suffrage (1946)

1952–1958
Pérez Jiménez dictatorship

23 January 1958
Fall of Pérez Jiménez

October 1958
Pact of Punto Fijo

1960
OPEC founded

11 March 1964
First handover between elected presidents

1975–1976
Oil nationalised; PDVSA created

February 1983
Viernes Negro devaluation

27 February 1989
Caracazo

4 February 1992
Chávez's coup attempt

December 1998
Chávez elected

December 1999
Bolivarian constitution

11–14 April 2002
Coup and counter-coup

December 2002–February 2003
Oil strike

5 March 2013
Death of Chávez

2014
Oil price collapse; start of economic contraction

2018
Hyperinflation peaks; disputed re-election of Maduro

23 January 2019
Guaidó claims the interim presidency

28 July 2024
Disputed presidential election

October 2025
Machado wins the Nobel Peace Prize

3 January 2026
US forces capture Maduro

24 June 2026
Twin earthquakes

25 October 2026
Machado returns

Who's who

Person
Dates
Why they matter

Guaicaipuro
c. 1530–1568
Indigenous leader of resistance in the Caracas valley

Francisco de Miranda
1750–1816
Precursor of independence; led the First Republic

Simón Bolívar
1783–1830
The Liberator; dreamed of a united Spanish America

José Antonio Páez
1790–1873
Llanero general; first president of independent Venezuela

Antonio Guzmán Blanco
1829–1899
Liberal caudillo and moderniser

Cipriano Castro
1858–1924
Táchira strongman; the 1902 blockade

Juan Vicente Gómez
1857–1935
Dictator 1908–35; opened the country to oil

Rómulo Gallegos
1884–1969
Novelist; first president elected by universal vote (1947)

Rómulo Betancourt
1908–1981
Founder of AD; "father of Venezuelan democracy"

Marcos Pérez Jiménez
1914–2001
Dictator 1952–58

Rafael Caldera
1916–2009
Founder of COPEI; president twice

Carlos Andrés Pérez
1922–2010
President in the boom (1974–79) and the Caracazo (1989–93)

Hugo Chávez
1954–2013
Leader of the Bolivarian Revolution, president 1999–2013

Nicolás Maduro
b. 1962
President 2013–2026; captured by US forces

Juan Guaidó
b. 1983
Claimed the interim presidency in 2019

María Corina Machado
b. 1967
Opposition leader; Nobel Peace Prize 2025

Edmundo González Urrutia
b. 1949
Opposition candidate in 2024; in exile in Spain

Delcy Rodríguez
b. 1969
Vice-president; acting president from January 2026

Five ideas that unlock the country
1. Oil made the state, and the state made politics. Since the 1920s, Venezuela's government has received most of the country's foreign earnings directly, from oil, rather than taxing its citizens. That made the state rich and the presidency the ultimate prize, and turned politics into a fight over the distribution of oil rent. Gómez, Pérez Jiménez, Punto Fijo, Chávez and Maduro all ran versions of the same petro-state, and when the oil price fell, each in turn ran into trouble. "Sowing the oil", turning that rent into a productive economy, remains the unfinished task of the century.
2. Bolívar is everyone's. The Liberator is the country's civic religion. Every government uses his image, his sword and his words; Chávez went furthest, renaming the republic after him. To understand any Venezuelan political speech, listen for which Bolívar is being quoted: the democrat, the soldier, the anti-imperialist or the man who feared anarchy.
3. The excluded majority. From the colonial pardos to the residents of the hillside barrios who rose in 1989 and voted for Chávez in 1998, a large part of Venezuela's history is the story of a mixed-race, poor majority demanding a place in a state run by others. Chavismo's enduring strength came from speaking to that demand; its collapse came when it could no longer feed the people it spoke for. Any lasting settlement will have to answer the same demand.
4. Soldiers never left politics for long. Caudillos on horseback ruled for a century; Gómez and Pérez Jiménez were generals; the 1945 and 1948 coups and the 1992 attempts came from the barracks; Chávez was a paratrooper; and under Maduro officers ran ministries and, from 2018, even the state oil company. The forty years of Punto Fijo, when civilians ruled, are the exception, and the question of what the army will accept is still central in 2026.
5. A divided memory. For chavistas, the Punto Fijo years were a corrupt pact of elites, the Caracazo a massacre of the poor, and the revolution the moment the people took power, later strangled by US sanctions and now ended by US troops. For their opponents, Punto Fijo was the best democracy Latin America had, Chávez the man who destroyed it, and the collapse the inevitable result of his policies. Most Venezuelans hold some of both views. Any history, this one included, must be read knowing that.

Venezuela is not a poor country that became rich, or a rich country that became poor. It is a country that has been very rich and very poor at the same time, and has spent a century arguing about why.

The takeaway
Venezuela was a land of many small Indigenous peoples, conquered slowly and violently by Spanish slavers, German bankers and missionaries, and turned into a cocoa colony whose majority were mixed-race pardos excluded from power. It produced Spanish America's greatest liberator, Simón Bolívar, at the cost of a war that killed perhaps a third of the population, followed by a century of caudillos. Oil, from 1917 on, made it a petro-state: Gómez's dictatorship, then, after 1958, the forty-year Punto Fijo democracy, the 1976 nationalisation and a boom that ended in debt and the Caracazo of 1989. Hugo Chávez's Bolivarian Revolution, elected in 1998, cut poverty sharply during an oil boom while concentrating power; under Nicolás Maduro, the oil crash, mismanagement and later sanctions shrank the economy by about three-quarters, unleashed hyperinflation and drove nearly 7.9 million people abroad. After an election in 2024 that independent observers said Maduro did not win, US forces seized him in January 2026. As of October 2026, an acting government drawn from his own camp promises elections that have not yet been scheduled, while the repressive structures the UN documented largely remain.
Try this: pick one Venezuelan you know of, a neighbour, a colleague, a footballer, a musician in exile, and ask yourself which of the eight parts of this story their family lived through. Then read the Spanish companion piece Si Hubiera Nacido en Venezuela and compare its picture of daily life with the numbers in Part 7. The gap between them is where most Venezuelans have lived for the last decade.

Sources & Further Reading
Sources
- Richard A. Haggerty (ed.), Venezuela: A Country Study (Library of Congress, Federal Research Division, 1990), historical, economic and energy chapters, via countrystudies.us: conquest, Welsers, colonial society (pardos, enslaved and Indigenous shares), cocoa and the Caracas Company, independence and its human cost, caudillos, Gómez and oil, the trienio, Pérez Jiménez, Punto Fijo, OPEC, the 1973–83 boom and debt, election results to 1983.
- World Bank, World Development Indicators (data updated 8 October 2026): GDP growth, GDP per person, population, life expectancy, Gini index, national poverty headcount, homicide rate (UNODC).
- Banco Central de Venezuela inflation series, as published (2016–2019 figures released May 2019; 2022–23).
- ENCOVI (Encuesta Nacional de Condiciones de Vida, Universidad Católica Andrés Bello and partners): 2021 results (income poverty 94.5%, extreme 76.6%) and 2025 results, published 7 May 2026.
- UNHCR, Venezuela situation (December 2025 figures).
- UN News: Bachelet report (5 July 2019); Fact-Finding Mission on the justice system (16 September 2021); Guterres on the US operation and Security Council debate (3–5 January 2026); prisoner releases (12 January 2026); Fact-Finding Mission report (16 September 2026); Rodríguez at the General Assembly (23 September 2026).
- The Carter Center, statement on the Venezuelan election, 30 July 2024.
- Human Rights Watch, World Report 2026, Venezuela chapter (post-election repression, CECOT exchange, political prisoners, wages, undernourishment).
- Nobel Prize Outreach, Nobel Peace Prize 2025 summary.
- 2026 events: Al Jazeera (Cuban deaths, 5 January; US embassy reopening, 14 March); BBC News (one month after the earthquakes, 24 July; US–Venezuela oil deal, 30 August); US Geological Survey event pages for the 24 June earthquakes; CNN (Machado's return, 25 October 2026).
- Leads and cross-checks (not cited as authorities): English Wikipedia articles on the Caracazo, Hugo Chávez, the Bolivarian missions, PDVSA, the 2002 coup, the 2024 election and the crisis in Venezuela, each followed back to the sources above where possible.
Go deeper
- 📘 Comandante: Hugo Chávez's Venezuela — Rory Carroll (a Guardian correspondent's vivid, critical portrait of the Chávez court)
- 📘 Things Are Never So Bad That They Can't Get Worse — William Neuman (a New York Times bureau chief on the collapse under Maduro)
- 📘 The Magical State: Nature, Money, and Modernity in Venezuela — Fernando Coronil (the classic anthropology of the petro-state, sympathetic to the left)
- 📘 Bolívar: American Liberator — Marie Arana (an absorbing, prize-winning life of the Liberator)
- 📘 Doña Bárbara — Rómulo Gallegos (the 1929 novel of the plains, by the president who was overthrown in 1948)
- 🌐 The Carter Center: Venezuela election statement, July 2024 (the observers' verdict in their own words)
- 🌐 UNHCR: Venezuela situation (the latest figures on the exodus)
- 🌐 Related pieces in this library: in Spanish, Si Hubiera Nacido en Venezuela: Calor, Ingenio y la Fuerza de la Familia, La Independencia: Cómo Nació un Continente and Las Dictaduras del Siglo XX y el Regreso de la Democracia en América Latina; in English, A Brief History of Mexico in this series.


A Brief History of Brazil: Sugar, Gold, Empire, and the Unfinished Republic
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
How a strip of coast claimed on a papal line became a continent-sized democracy, and why its oldest arguments about land, labour, race and power are still on the ballot.

Companion piece: If I Was Born in Brazil: Warmth, Jeitinho, and the Joy of Community (what daily life feels like now; this is how it got that way).
On 25 October 2026, an 80-year-old former metalworker who had lost a finger to a factory press as a young man won Brazil's presidency for the fourth time. He had come second in the first round three weeks earlier. The man he beat was the son of a president who was, that same autumn, serving a 27-year sentence for plotting a coup. The loser refused to concede, flew out of the country and announced himself the "president-elect" from Florida, then deleted the post. His own party recognised the result the next day.
You could read that as chaos. Brazilians mostly read it as a test their institutions passed, again. Either way, none of it makes sense without the five centuries behind it: an economy built on enslaved labour for longer than almost anywhere else in the Americas, a monarchy that survived independence, a republic founded by soldiers, a dictatorship that ended by negotiation rather than collapse, and a constitution written in 1988 by people who had lived through all of that and wanted it never to happen again.
This is that history, told at length.
In this history

Before Brazil: the peoples of the land (to 1500)
Brazilwood, sugar and slavery (1500–1690)
Gold, rebellion and a court in the tropics (1690–1822)
An empire in the Americas (1822–1889)
The First Republic: coffee, colonels and Canudos (1889–1930)
Vargas, Brasília and the road to the coup (1930–1964)
The military dictatorship (1964–1985)
The New Republic: the 1988 Constitution and the Real (1985–2002)
Lula, Dilma and Lava Jato (2003–2018)
Bolsonaro, 8 January, and Brazil in 2026 (2018–2026)
How to understand Brazil today

Part 1 — Before Brazil: the peoples of the land (to 1500)
Start with the size of the thing. Brazil covers about 8.5 million square kilometres, nearly half of South America. It borders every South American country except Chile and Ecuador. Most of its history, though, happened within a few hundred kilometres of the Atlantic, and for a reason worth remembering: for most of the last five centuries, the people who wrote Brazil's history were facing the sea, looking at Europe and Africa. The people who were already there were facing inland.
Humans reached what is now Brazil many thousands of years before any European. The skeleton nicknamed "Luzia", found in the Lapa Vermelha cave in Minas Gerais, belongs to a woman who lived roughly 11,000 years ago or more, and is one of the oldest human remains in the Americas. Some archaeologists argue for much older occupation at sites such as Pedra Furada in Piauí; others think the "tools" there may be broken by nature rather than by hands. That argument is still open.
What is no longer in doubt is that pre-contact Brazil was not an empty forest with a few scattered hunters, as European chroniclers and later Brazilian elites liked to imagine. Along the Amazon, people built large, long-lived settlements. On Marajó Island at the river's mouth, the Marajoara culture raised earth mounds and made elaborately painted pottery for centuries before the Portuguese arrived. Across the basin, archaeologists keep finding terra preta, "black earth": dark, fertile soils deliberately enriched with charcoal, pottery shards and waste. The forest itself, in places, is partly a human garden.
How many people lived there in 1500? Nobody knows, and the estimates are a good lesson in how history handles uncertainty.

Estimate of the population of Brazil c. 1500
Who
Basis

About 2.4 million
Historian John Hemming
Counting known peoples and their territories

About 8.4 million (3.6 million in the Amazon basin, 4.8 million elsewhere)
Geographer William Denevan
Carrying capacity of different environments

5 million in Amazonia alone
Other scholars
Higher-density readings of the archaeology

Source: Library of Congress, Brazil: A Country Study (1997), summarising the scholarship.
Even the lowest figure is larger than the population of Portugal at the time, which was about a million.
The peoples of the coast were mostly speakers of Tupí–Guaraní languages, who had been migrating along the shore and pushing earlier Gê-speaking peoples inland. Further in lived Gê, Arawak and Carib speakers and many others whose languages belonged to no large family at all. These were not one nation but hundreds of societies: farmers of manioc (cassava), maize, beans and peanuts; fishers; hunters; some semi-nomadic, some settled in villages of several hundred to a few thousand people. Warfare between them was common, and among some Tupí peoples captives taken in war were ritually killed and eaten, a practice that Europeans seized on as a justification for conquest and that modern anthropologists study as part of a whole system of vengeance, honour and kinship.

The four great language families (as scholars classify them)
Where they lived around 1500

Tupí (Tupí–Guaraní)
The coast, having pushed the Gê inland; the first peoples the Portuguese met

Gê
Originally the coast; by 1500 mainly the central plateau and the dry scrublands

Carib
The north and parts of Amazonia

Arawak
Amazonia

Source: Library of Congress, Brazil: A Country Study (1997).
The Tupí migration down the coast had set off continual warfare with non-Tupí peoples. As the Library of Congress study notes, the Portuguese, like the Spanish in Mexico and Peru, profited from arriving in the middle of that turmoil: they found allies among some peoples against others, and traded with them for captives.
Much of everyday Brazilian life still comes from these peoples. The national staple of farinha (toasted manioc flour), the hammock, words like jacaré (caiman), mandioca, capim (grass) and thousands of place names (Itaquera, Ipanema, Paraná) are Tupí. So is the very first Brazilian food fusion: Portuguese settlers who survived did so by eating what Indigenous women cooked.

The conquest of Brazil was not the toppling of one empire, as in Mexico or Peru. It was a slow, uneven war against hundreds of separate peoples, fought over centuries and thousands of kilometres.

What happened to them is the first great fact of Brazilian history. European diseases (smallpox, measles, influenza) spread along Indigenous trade routes, often ahead of the Europeans themselves. Enslavement and war did the rest. By the 20th century, the Indigenous population had fallen to a few hundred thousand. It has since recovered: in the 2022 census, about 1.7 million Brazilians identified as Indigenous, and the census before it counted more than 300 peoples speaking more than 270 languages. Their land rights, written into the 1988 Constitution, are one of the hottest political arguments in the country today, as Part 11 explains.

Part 2 — Brazilwood, sugar and slavery (1500–1690)
A line on a map
Brazil was Portuguese before any Portuguese had seen it. In the Treaty of Tordesillas of 1494, Spain and Portugal divided the non-Christian world along a line 370 leagues west of the Cape Verde Islands. Everything east of it went to Portugal. Nobody knew yet that a bulge of South America stuck out across that line.
On 22 April 1500, a thirteen-ship fleet under Pedro Álvares Cabral, bound for India, anchored off the coast of what is now Bahia. Whether Cabral stumbled on Brazil or was quietly aiming for it is an old debate; the evidence does not settle it. His scribe, Pêro Vaz de Caminha, wrote the king a long, curious letter, often called Brazil's birth certificate, describing people who laid down their bows when asked, traded a feathered headdress for a sailor's cap, and watched Mass with interest. The fleet stayed nine days, left two convicts behind to learn the language, and sailed on.
For three decades Lisbon barely cared. India's spices and silks were worth far more than a coast of parrots and naked people. What Brazil did have was a tree: pau-brasil, brazilwood, whose red heartwood made a prized dye for European textiles. The country is named after a commodity. That turns out to be a fitting start.
Captaincies and a capital
By around 1530, French ships were loading brazilwood too, and Portugal faced a choice: occupy the coast or lose it. In 1532 Martim Afonso de Sousa founded São Vicente, the first permanent Portuguese town. In the mid-1530s the crown carved the coast into hereditary "captaincies", strips of land handed to private lords who were supposed to settle them at their own expense. Most failed, through poor management, lack of money, and wars with the peoples whose land it was. Two prospered, São Vicente and Pernambuco, and both did so largely through marriage alliances with Indigenous chiefs' families, which brought food, labour and military allies.
In 1549 the crown took direct control and sent Tomé de Sousa as the first governor-general, with orders to build a capital at Salvador on the Bay of All Saints. With him came the Jesuits. Their mission villages (aldeias) gathered Indigenous people for conversion, and in 1554 one of them, on a plateau above São Vicente, became São Paulo. The Jesuits defended Indigenous people from settlers who wanted to enslave them and, at the same time, broke up their societies and exposed them to epidemics. Both things are true. A wave of smallpox and measles in 1562–63 killed huge numbers in the villages around Bahia, and the famine that followed drove survivors to sell themselves or their children into slavery to eat.
Sugar
The real colony was built on sugar. Sugar cane had been grown with enslaved labour on Portugal's Atlantic islands, and the hot, wet coast of the Northeast suited it perfectly. By 1585 Pernambuco alone had more than sixty mills (engenhos). Sugar made a few planter families extraordinarily rich; there was a saying that Pernambuco had more luxury than Lisbon.
A sugar mill was a factory in the fields. Cane had to be cut and crushed within hours or it spoiled, and the juice boiled down in a chain of copper cauldrons, day and night, through the harvest. It needed a large, disciplined and expendable workforce. Settlers first tried to enslave Indigenous people, who resisted, fled into the interior and died of disease. The planters turned to Africa.

Brazil's colonial economy was, in the historian Caio Prado Júnior's phrase, one vast commercial enterprise, and its engine was enslaved Africans.

The largest slave society in the Americas
Brazil received more enslaved Africans than any other place in the world. The numbers come from the SlaveVoyages database, which historians have built voyage by voyage from shipping records over several decades.

The transatlantic slave trade, 1501–1866
People

Embarked in Africa, all destinations
12.5 million

Arrived alive in the Americas and elsewhere
10.7 million

Embarked for Brazil
5.5 million

Arrived alive in Brazil
4.9 million (about 45% of all arrivals)

For comparison: arrived in mainland North America
0.39 million

For comparison: arrived in the British Caribbean
2.3 million

Source: SlaveVoyages, Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Estimates (accessed 31 October 2026). Estimates, not counts; they are revised as new voyages are documented.
Read that table slowly. More than twelve times as many enslaved Africans landed in Brazil as in what became the United States. Roughly 670,000 people died in transit on ships bound for Brazil alone. And the Brazilian trade did not peak in the colonial era but after independence: between 1801 and 1850, more than two million Africans arrived, more than in any other half-century.
The largest share came from West Central Africa (the coasts of today's Angola and the two Congos), which supplied more captives than any other region to the Atlantic trade as a whole, and many others from the Bight of Benin, especially to Bahia. Portugal held Luanda, and Brazilian merchants ran much of the trade directly, trading tobacco, cachaça and gold for captives without the goods ever touching Portugal. The South Atlantic was, in effect, one economy, with Brazil at one end and Angola at the other.
Life expectancy for enslaved workers on sugar estates was brutally short, and planters often calculated that it was cheaper to buy new captives than to keep people alive and let them raise families. That is part of why the trade had to keep running at such scale. It is also why Brazil's African heritage, from Yoruba religion to the rhythms behind samba, is so deep: it was renewed directly from Africa until 1850.
Resistance: quilombos and Palmares
Enslaved people resisted in every way available: slowing work, sabotage, flight, revolt. Runaways formed communities called quilombos or mocambos in the forests and hills. The largest, Palmares, in the hills of what is now Alagoas, lasted for most of the 17th century, governed by its own leaders; one estimate puts its population around 20,000 in the 1690s, though recent scholarship questions that figure. Portuguese and colonial forces, with Indigenous allies, attacked it repeatedly before overrunning its main settlement in 1694. Its last leader, Zumbi, was killed on 20 November 1695. That date is now Brazil's Black Consciousness Day, a national holiday.
The Dutch interlude
Sugar also attracted rivals. Between 1580 and 1640, Portugal and Spain shared one king, which made Brazil a target for Spain's enemies, above all the Dutch. The Dutch West India Company captured Pernambuco in 1630 and held much of the Northeast until 1654. Under Count Johan Maurits of Nassau (governor 1637–44), Dutch Recife built canals and bridges, tolerated Jews and Catholics alike, and brought painters and naturalists who made some of the first scientific records of Brazilian nature. The Dutch also seized Portuguese slaving ports in Angola. When planters, soldiers, Indigenous allies and Afro-Brazilian fighters finally drove them out, the Dutch took their sugar know-how to the Caribbean, which became a cheaper competitor. Brazilian sugar never fully recovered its dominance.
The bandeirantes
Meanwhile, in São Paulo, a poorer, rougher frontier society was forming, heavily mixed between Portuguese men and Indigenous women and speaking a Tupí-based "general language" more than Portuguese. Its men organised expeditions called bandeiras deep into the interior, hunting Indigenous people to enslave, raiding Jesuit missions in Spanish territory, and searching for gold. São Paulo today celebrates the bandeirantes with statues and highway names; Indigenous and Black activists see them as slave raiders. Both descriptions are accurate, which is why the statues are contested. What is not contested is the result: the bandeiras pushed Portuguese claims far west of the Tordesillas line, and Brazil's eventual borders owe a great deal to them.

Part 3 — Gold, rebellion and a court in the tropics (1690–1822)
The gold rush
Somewhere between 1693 and 1695, Paulista prospectors found gold in the mountains of what became Minas Gerais, "General Mines". It seemed that every stream glittered. Around 1730, diamonds were found further north, near what became Diamantina. The rush that followed was the greatest the world would see until California in 1849.
It pulled Brazil's centre of gravity south. Tens of thousands of fortune-seekers poured in from the Northeast and from Portugal, with enslaved Africans to do the digging. By 1709 there were perhaps 30,000 people in the mining district; tax records for 1735 counted more than 100,000 enslaved people there. Fighting between the Paulista pioneers and the newcomers (the "War of the Emboabas", 1708–09) gave the crown its excuse to take control. In 1763 the colonial capital moved from Salvador to Rio de Janeiro, the port through which the gold flowed out.

Colonial Brazil's export cycles
Roughly
Centre

Brazilwood
1500s
Atlantic coast

Sugar
mid-1500s–1600s (and beyond)
Pernambuco, Bahia

Gold and diamonds
1690s–c. 1760
Minas Gerais, Goiás, Mato Grosso

Cotton, revived sugar, early coffee
late 1700s
Maranhão, Rio, the Northeast

The mining towns became something new. Ouro Preto, Mariana and Sabará filled with baroque churches carved and painted by local artists, many of them of mixed African and European descent. The greatest was Antônio Francisco Lisboa, known as Aleijadinho, "the little cripple", whose soapstone prophets at Congonhas are among the masterpieces of colonial American art. Some 3,000 musicians, mostly mulatto, played and composed sacred music in the region in the later 1700s. By 1782, Minas Gerais held about a fifth of Brazil's roughly 1.56 million people.
Where the gold went
Very little of it stayed. In 1703 Portugal signed the Methuen Treaty with England, swapping cheap English woollens for a favourable tariff on Portuguese wine. Brazilian gold went to Lisbon and straight on to pay for English goods. Many historians argue that it helped finance Britain's industrial take-off while Portugal's own industries withered. Some wealth stayed in Brazil in churches, fountains and bridges, but it did not build schools: the crown forbade universities and even printing presses in the colony. Brazil's first universities date only from the 20th century.
From 1750 the Marquis of Pombal, Portugal's reforming chief minister, tried to squeeze more out of the colony and modernise it at once. He created trading monopolies, encouraged new crops, made Portuguese compulsory over the Tupí-based general language, and in 1759 expelled the Jesuits, destroying the colony's best schools in the process. As gold output fell after about 1750, the crown pushed harder, threatening a collective head tax (derrama) to make up the shortfall.
The Minas Conspiracy and Tiradentes
That squeeze produced Brazil's most famous failed rebellion. In 1789 a group of officials, priests, poets, officers and mine owners in Minas Gerais plotted to break with Portugal, inspired partly by the American Revolution. Some had studied at Coimbra; one had sounded out Thomas Jefferson in France. They were betrayed before they acted. Lisbon chose to make an example of only one: a junior officer and part-time dentist, Joaquim José da Silva Xavier, nicknamed Tiradentes ("tooth-puller"), who was hanged in Rio on 21 April 1792 and his body quartered.
He might have been forgotten. Instead, 19th-century republicans made him a martyr and a counter-symbol to the monarchy, and after 1889 the republic put his face everywhere. 21 April is a national holiday. The plot itself was, as the Library of Congress's history of Brazil puts it, more a conspiracy of indebted oligarchs than a people's revolution; it proposed freeing only enslaved people born in Brazil, not ending slavery. A more radical plot followed in Salvador in 1798, the "Tailors' Conspiracy", led largely by free and enslaved men of colour who did call for equality. Four of them were hanged. The Haitian Revolution of the 1790s, where enslaved people overthrew their masters, terrified Brazil's elite and made most of them want independence, if at all, without social upheaval.
The court that crossed the ocean
Then history did something it has done nowhere else. In November 1807, as Napoleon's army marched on Lisbon, the Portuguese royal family and court boarded ships under British escort and sailed for Brazil. The prince regent, Dom João, ruling for his mentally ill mother Queen Maria I, brought with him the government, the treasury and thousands of courtiers and officials; the royal library followed. Nearly 10,000 people embarked. They landed in Salvador on 22 January 1808 and went on to Rio de Janeiro, which became the empire's capital.
For the first and only time, a European empire was ruled from one of its colonies.
The effects were immediate. In Salvador, within days of landing, João opened Brazil's ports to friendly nations, ending Portugal's trade monopoly (in practice, opening them to Britain). He founded a national bank, a printing press, a royal library, a botanical garden, military and medical schools and a fine-arts academy. Foreign ships anchoring in Rio rose from 90 in 1808 to 354 in 1820. In 1815 Brazil was raised from colony to kingdom, an equal partner in a "United Kingdom of Portugal, Brazil and the Algarves".

Brazil became independent largely because the metropolis had moved in, and then tried to move back out.

When the Portuguese, having driven out the French, demanded their king's return and the colony's demotion, João (now King João VI) sailed home in 1821, leaving his son Pedro as regent. The Lisbon parliament ordered Pedro back too. On 9 January 1822 he refused, with a phrase every Brazilian schoolchild learns: Fico, "I'm staying". On 7 September 1822, by the Ipiranga stream near São Paulo, after receiving more hostile orders from Lisbon, he declared independence. The famous cry was reported as "Independence or death!" He was acclaimed Emperor Pedro I in October and crowned on 1 December 1822.
Independence was not bloodless. Portuguese garrisons fought in Bahia, Maranhão, Pará and the Cisplatine province (today's Uruguay), and Bahia's Independence Day is still 2 July 1823, when the Portuguese left Salvador. But compared with the long, ruinous wars of Spanish America, it was quick, it kept the territory in one piece, and it kept a European royal on the throne. That made Brazil unique in the hemisphere, and conservative in a particular way: the people who ran the colony ran the new country.

Part 4 — An empire in the Americas (1822–1889)
Pedro I and the 1824 Constitution
Pedro I was impulsive, liberal in talk and autocratic in practice. When the constituent assembly drafted a constitution limiting his powers, he dissolved it and imposed his own, in 1824. It lasted 65 years, longer than any Brazilian constitution since. It created an elected parliament with a narrow, income-based franchise, and gave the emperor a "moderating power" above the other three branches, allowing him to dismiss cabinets and dissolve the chamber. The Catholic Church was the state religion.
Pedro lost a war with Buenos Aires over the Cisplatine province (Uruguay became independent in 1828), clashed with parliament, and was distrusted as too Portuguese. In April 1831 he abdicated in favour of his five-year-old son and sailed to Portugal, where he fought and won a civil war to put his daughter on that throne.
The Regency: the empire nearly breaks
The nine years of regency that followed were the most dangerous in the country's history. With no adult emperor, provincial elites, the urban poor and the enslaved all tested the centre.

Revolt
Where
When
Who and why

Cabanagem
Pará (Amazon)
1835–1840
Poor Indigenous, mixed-race and Black river people against the provincial elite; tens of thousands died

Malê Revolt
Salvador
1835
Enslaved and freed African Muslims, mostly Yoruba and Hausa; crushed in a night

Farroupilha (Ragamuffin War)
Rio Grande do Sul
1835–1845
Ranchers declaring a republic over taxes and autonomy

Sabinada
Salvador
1837–1838
Middle-class and military federalists

Balaiada
Maranhão
1838–1841
Rural poor and runaway slaves

The government responded with force and, in 1840, with a constitutional shortcut: parliament declared the 14-year-old Pedro II of age. It worked. He reigned for 49 years.
Pedro II and the coffee empire
Pedro II was studious, cautious and genuinely interested in science and the arts; he was Brazil's first photographer, spoke several languages, and counted Louis Pasteur, Richard Wagner and Alexander Graham Bell among his correspondents. Under him, a stable two-party parliamentary system emerged, Conservatives and Liberals rotating in office as the emperor dismissed one cabinet and called the other. Critics noted that elections reliably produced whatever result the government wanted.
The economy ran on a new crop. Coffee spread from the hills around Rio into the Paraíba Valley and then onto the red soils of São Paulo. Coffee shipments along one route from Minas to Rio rose from 2 tonnes in 1792 to about 82,000 tonnes in 1850. By the 1840s coffee was half of Brazil's exports, and by the 1870s close to 60 percent. And coffee, like sugar before it, was grown by enslaved people. The 1850 Land Law, which ended the old ways of acquiring land by squatting or royal grant and required purchase, kept the frontier in the hands of those who already had money, a pattern that shaped Brazilian landholding to this day.
The Paraguayan War
The empire's great war was fought against Paraguay from 1864 to 1870, alongside Argentina and Uruguay. After Brazil intervened in Uruguay's civil war, Paraguay's ruler, Francisco Solano López, invaded Brazilian and then Argentine territory; the allies took five years to defeat him. Paraguay was devastated: scholarly estimates of its losses range from under a tenth to more than two-thirds of its pre-war population, and historians still argue over the figures. Brazil lost tens of thousands of men, many from disease. The war mattered at home for two reasons. It created a large, self-confident army that would soon see itself as the nation's guardian. And it put enslaved men in uniform: some were freed to fight, which made it harder to argue that Black Brazilians were fit to die for the country but not to be free in it.
The slowest abolition
Britain had been pressing Brazil to end the slave trade since independence. A law of 1831 declared it illegal; it was so openly ignored that "for the English to see" (para inglês ver) became a Brazilian phrase for laws made for show. Hundreds of thousands of Africans were imported illegally after it. Only in 1850, under British naval pressure, did the Eusébio de Queirós law actually stop the trade.
Slavery itself took 38 more years to die, in stages:

Year
Law
What it did

1850
Eusébio de Queirós Law
Ended the African slave trade in practice

1871
Law of the Free Womb (Rio Branco Law)
Children born to enslaved mothers were free, but owners raised them to age eight and could then keep their labour until 21 (or hand them to the state for compensation)

1885
Sexagenarian Law
Freed enslaved people over 60 (after more unpaid years of work)

13 May 1888
Golden Law (Lei Áurea)
Abolished slavery outright, with no compensation to owners and none to the freed

By the 1880s abolition had become a mass movement, with lawyers like Luís Gama (himself sold into slavery as a child), journalists like José do Patrocínio, the politician Joaquim Nabuco, and above all enslaved people themselves, who fled plantations in such numbers that the system was collapsing. The army refused to hunt runaways. Princess Isabel, regent while her father was abroad, signed the two-article law. Brazil was the last country in the Americas to abolish slavery.

The Golden Law has only two articles. The first declares slavery extinct. The second revokes anything to the contrary. There is no third article about land, schools or wages.

That silence matters. Freed people received nothing. Within a few years the state was paying to bring European immigrants to work the coffee farms instead, partly from an explicit belief that they would "whiten" the population. Many freed families moved to the edges of cities, into the hillside settlements that would become favelas. Historians on all sides agree that much of Brazil's racial inequality today runs straight back to the way abolition was done.
The fall of the monarchy
The empire outlived slavery by eighteen months. It had lost the support of the planters, who felt betrayed by uncompensated abolition; of the Church, after a quarrel over Freemasonry; and of the army, whose officers, many influenced by the positivist philosophy of Auguste Comte, despised the civilian politicians. On 15 November 1889, Marshal Deodoro da Fonseca led troops in Rio in a coup that proclaimed a republic. There was almost no fighting and little popular involvement; a famous contemporary remark had the people of Rio watching "bestialized", not understanding what was happening. Pedro II went into exile in France, where he died in 1891.

Part 5 — The First Republic: coffee, colonels and Canudos (1889–1930)
A republic of the states
The 1891 Constitution, modelled on the United States, created a federal republic, separated church and state, and gave the states wide powers, including their own militias and the right to borrow abroad. It also dropped the income requirement for voting but kept a literacy requirement, which in a country where most adults could not read excluded the majority. Turnout in presidential elections was a few percent of the population.
After two military presidents, civilian rule settled into what Brazilians call the café com leite ("coffee with milk") arrangement: the presidency rotated, mostly, between the coffee state of São Paulo and the dairy-and-coffee state of Minas Gerais. In the countryside, local bosses called coronéis ("colonels", from old militia titles) delivered their dependants' votes to the state governor in exchange for patronage, and governors delivered their states to the president. Ballots were open; fraud was routine.
Canudos
The republic's founding trauma came from the backlands of Bahia. In the 1890s a wandering lay preacher, Antônio Conselheiro, gathered thousands of poor followers at a settlement called Canudos, which grew into one of the largest towns in the state. Republican politicians in Rio, seeing monarchist plots everywhere, sent expedition after expedition against it. The first three were defeated. The fourth, in 1897, used thousands of soldiers and artillery and destroyed the town completely, by then home to perhaps 30,000 people; many prisoners had their throats cut. Estimates of the dead vary widely. The journalist Euclides da Cunha, who covered the campaign, put the toll at about 30,000, attackers included, and wrote Os Sertões (1902; in English Rebellion in the Backlands), which began as a celebration of the republic's civilising army and ended as an indictment of it. It is still one of the essential Brazilian books, and its most famous line is a tribute to the people the army had come to destroy:

"The man of the backlands is, above all, a strong man." — Euclides da Cunha, Os Sertões (1902)

Immigration and the coffee economy
The republic was built on coffee, and coffee on immigrants. São Paulo subsidised the passage of millions of Europeans, above all Italians, Portuguese and Spaniards, and from 1908 Japanese, who now form the largest Japanese-descended community outside Japan. Germans and Italians settled the southern states. Arabic-speaking Christians from Ottoman Syria and Lebanon became merchants across the country. São Paulo grew from a provincial town into an industrial city, and the first factories, mostly textiles and food, brought the first strikes, led largely by Italian and Spanish anarchists; a general strike in São Paulo in 1917 shut the city down.
Brazil was also the world's coffee. By the early 20th century it supplied most of the planet's coffee, and the government repeatedly bought and stored surplus beans to hold up the price. Meanwhile the Amazon had a boom of its own: rubber, tapped by migrant workers from the drought-stricken Northeast under conditions close to debt slavery, made Manaus rich enough to build an opera house in the jungle. Then rubber grown from smuggled Brazilian seeds in British Malaya undercut it, and the Amazon boom collapsed in the 1910s.

The First Republic at a glance

Coffee
Brazil grew about three-quarters of the world's coffee around 1900

Labour
São Paulo was already subsidising immigrants before abolition: about 156,000 arrived there in 1875–87 alone

Voters
A literacy test kept most adults off the rolls; ballots were open

Power
Presidency rotated mainly between São Paulo and Minas Gerais

Source: Library of Congress, Brazil: A Country Study (1997).
Restless cities and young officers
Rio de Janeiro, the capital, was rebuilt on Parisian lines in the 1900s, with tenements torn down and the poor pushed uphill. A compulsory smallpox vaccination campaign in 1904, carried out with heavy-handed inspections of homes, set off the "Vaccine Revolt", days of rioting. In 1910 sailors, mostly Black and mixed-race, mutinied against the navy's use of the whip, in the "Revolt of the Lash", and won its abolition before many were later killed or imprisoned.
In 1922, the centenary of independence, two things happened that pointed to the future. In São Paulo, a Week of Modern Art announced a new Brazilian culture that would "devour" European influences and make something its own (the poet Oswald de Andrade later called it "cannibalism"). In Rio, young army lieutenants (tenentes) rose against the oligarchic republic and were crushed. Their movement continued through the 1920s, including the Prestes Column, which marched some 25,000 kilometres through the interior between 1925 and 1927 without being defeated or winning over the peasantry. Its leader, Luís Carlos Prestes, would become head of the Communist Party.
The Great Depression broke the system. The price of coffee collapsed in 1929. When the outgoing president, a Paulista, broke the rotation by backing another Paulista in the 1930 election, the losing candidate, the governor of Rio Grande do Sul, rose in revolt with the backing of Minas Gerais and the young officers. His name was Getúlio Vargas.

Part 6 — Vargas, Brasília and the road to the coup (1930–1964)
No one has shaped modern Brazil more than Getúlio Vargas, and no one is harder to sum up. He ruled for 15 years as a provisional president and then a dictator, came back for nearly four more as an elected one, and left office by shooting himself in the heart. He was a gaúcho rancher-lawyer from the far south who created the Brazilian welfare state, and a dictator who jailed and tortured opponents. Brazilians still argue about which of those is the real Vargas. The answer is both.
From revolution to dictatorship
The "Revolution of 1930" put Vargas in power as provisional president. He replaced elected governors with appointed "interventors", started building a national state on top of the old federation, and in 1932 issued an electoral code with the secret ballot and votes for women, among the earlier such reforms in Latin America. That same year São Paulo rose in the "Constitutionalist Revolution" demanding a return to constitutional rule; it was defeated militarily after about three months, but a new constitution followed in 1934.
Politics then polarised between a communist-led front and the Integralistas, Brazil's green-shirted fascist movement. A failed communist uprising in 1935 gave Vargas the pretext for emergency rule. In November 1937, citing a supposed communist plot (the "Cohen Plan", later shown to have been forged), he closed Congress and declared the Estado Novo, the "New State", with a constitution modelled partly on authoritarian European ones. Political parties were banned. The press was censored by a Department of Press and Propaganda. The political police imprisoned and tortured communists and others; the German-born communist Olga Benário, Prestes's partner, was deported, pregnant, to Nazi Germany, where she was killed in 1942.
The father of the poor
The same regime built the institutions that still define work in Brazil. It created a Ministry of Labour, a minimum wage (1940), labour courts, state-recognised unions under government tutelage, pensions for many urban workers, and in 1943 the Consolidation of Labour Laws (CLT), a labour code that still governs formal employment. A carteira de trabalho, the worker's booklet stamped with each job, became for millions the document that made them full citizens. Rural workers, the majority, were left out.
Vargas also built a national economy: a state steel mill at Volta Redonda, financed with US help in exchange for Brazil joining the Allies, a national oil council, and a determined push for industry. He built national culture too, with radio, the promotion of samba and carnival as national symbols, and football as a national passion. His propaganda called him the pai dos pobres, "father of the poor", and many poor Brazilians agreed.

The Vargas years

1930
Takes power after the "Revolution of 1930"

1932
Electoral code: secret ballot, women's vote; São Paulo revolt defeated

1934
New constitution; Vargas elected president by Congress

1937
Estado Novo dictatorship begins

1940
National minimum wage

1942
Brazil declares war on Germany and Italy

1943
Consolidation of Labour Laws (CLT)

1945
Deposed by the army

1950
Elected president by popular vote

1953
Petrobras created as a state oil monopoly

24 August 1954
Dies by suicide in the presidential palace

War, fall and return
Brazil was the only Latin American country to send ground troops to fight in the Second World War. After German submarines sank Brazilian ships, Brazil declared war in 1942, and a Brazilian Expeditionary Force of about 25,000 fought in Italy in 1944–45. The contradiction was obvious: soldiers sent to fight dictatorship in Europe came home to one. In October 1945 the army removed Vargas.
He came back. Elected president by a large margin in 1950, he governed as a nationalist and labour champion. "The oil is ours" (O petróleo é nosso) became a mass slogan, and in 1953 he created Petrobras as a state monopoly. But inflation, a fierce opposition press led by the journalist Carlos Lacerda, and a scandal in which Vargas's bodyguard organised an attempt on Lacerda's life that killed an air force major brought the military to demand his resignation. On the morning of 24 August 1954, Vargas shot himself in his bedroom in the Catete Palace. He left a letter accusing foreign interests and domestic enemies, ending with a line Brazilians still quote:

"I leave life to enter history." — Getúlio Vargas, farewell letter, 24 August 1954

The suicide turned public anger against his enemies and made his successors' path harder. It also froze Brazilian politics into a shape that lasted decades: for or against Vargas's legacy of a strong state, labour rights and economic nationalism.
Fifty years in five: Juscelino and the new capital
The democratic republic of 1946–64 is often remembered through one man and one city. Juscelino Kubitschek, a doctor and governor of Minas Gerais, was elected president in 1955 promising "fifty years of progress in five". His Target Plan poured money into roads, power plants and industry, and invited foreign carmakers to build factories around São Paulo. Volkswagen Beetles rolled off Brazilian lines. The economy grew fast.
And he built a capital. Moving the capital inland had been proposed since the 19th century and written into the 1891 Constitution. Kubitschek did it in under four years. The urban planner Lúcio Costa designed a city shaped like an aeroplane or a bird, with government in the "body" and housing superblocks along the "wings"; the architect Oscar Niemeyer designed its white, curving modernist buildings; the landscape designer Roberto Burle Marx did the gardens. Brasília was inaugurated on 21 April 1960, Tiradentes Day, on what had been empty savanna.

Brasília was a statement that Brazil would stop facing the sea and start facing its own interior. The bill was paid in inflation and foreign debt.

The construction workers, mostly migrants from the Northeast called candangos, were not part of the plan; they settled in satellite towns outside it, which today hold most of the Federal District's people. The cost fed inflation and debt that the next governments inherited.
The 1950s also gave Brazil a new image of itself. Brazil won its first football World Cup in Sweden in 1958, with a 17-year-old Pelé. Bossa nova, born in Rio's beach neighbourhoods with João Gilberto's guitar and Antônio Carlos Jobim's songs, went round the world. The film movement Cinema Novo began to film the poor Northeast with a hard, political eye. For a few years Brazil seemed to be inventing modernity on its own terms.
Crisis and coup
The next two presidencies collapsed. Jânio Quadros, elected in 1960 on an anti-corruption platform with a broom as his symbol, resigned after less than seven months in August 1961, apparently hoping to be begged to return with greater powers. He was not. The military tried to block his vice-president, João Goulart ("Jango"), a Vargas protégé they considered a leftist. A compromise let Goulart take office under a hastily created parliamentary system, which a 1963 referendum abolished.
Goulart governed amid high inflation, a slowing economy and the Cold War, months after the Cuban Revolution had alarmed Washington and Latin America's right. He pushed "base reforms": land reform, votes for illiterate people and enlisted soldiers, controls on foreign profits. Peasant leagues in the Northeast were occupying land; sergeants and sailors were organising. On the right, conservatives, much of the Catholic middle class, business leaders and most of the press feared a communist takeover; in March 1964 hundreds of thousands marched in São Paulo in a "March of the Family with God for Liberty". On the left, Goulart's allies believed the reforms were long overdue and that he was being blocked by the same elite that had blocked every reform since abolition.
On 31 March 1964 troops moved from Minas Gerais toward Rio, and within two days Goulart's government fell. He went into exile in Uruguay. The United States, which had funded opposition groups, recognised the new government almost immediately and had prepared naval support ("Operation Brother Sam") in case of civil war; declassified documents released decades later confirmed this. Whether the coup was a defensive move against an imminent left-wing takeover, as its supporters said, or a pre-emptive strike against democratic reform, as its opponents said, is still argued. What came next is not in dispute.

Part 7 — The military dictatorship (1964–1985)
Many of the civilians who backed the coup expected a short intervention and elections in 1965. They got 21 years of military rule.
How the regime worked
Brazil's dictatorship was unusual in keeping a façade of constitutional government. Congress usually stayed open, with two permitted parties: the pro-government ARENA and the tolerated opposition MDB (Brazilians joked they were the parties of "Yes" and "Yes, sir"). Generals took turns as president, chosen by the high command and ratified by a Congress purged of opponents. The regime ruled through "Institutional Acts" that overrode the constitution, stripped politicians of their rights, and dissolved the old parties.

President
Term
In brief

Humberto Castelo Branco
1964–1967
Purges, Institutional Acts, two-party system

Artur da Costa e Silva
1967–1969
AI-5 and the hardening of the regime

Emílio Garrastazu Médici
1969–1974
The "economic miracle" and the worst repression

Ernesto Geisel
1974–1979
"Slow, gradual and safe" opening; ends AI-5

João Figueiredo
1979–1985
Amnesty, return of exiles, transition

The turning point was Institutional Act No. 5, decreed on 13 December 1968 after a year of student protests and strikes. AI-5 closed Congress, suspended habeas corpus for political crimes, imposed censorship and gave the president near-unlimited power. Some on the left had already turned to armed struggle, with urban guerrilla groups robbing banks and, in 1969, kidnapping the US ambassador to exchange him for political prisoners. The regime's answer was a system of repression in which torture became routine.
The "miracle"
At the same time, the economy boomed. From 1968 to 1973 growth averaged more than 10 percent a year, peaking above 12 percent, driven by state investment, foreign borrowing and industry. Brazil built giant dams, highways into the Amazon, a nuclear programme, and a car industry. In 1970 it won its third World Cup with what many consider the greatest team ever, and the regime's propaganda rode the victory ("Brazil: love it or leave it").
The miracle had costs that the propaganda left out. Wages for the poorest fell behind; inequality widened sharply. The finance minister, Antônio Delfim Netto, was paraphrased as saying the cake had to grow before it could be shared. And it was financed by debt. When the oil shocks of 1973 and 1979 and soaring US interest rates hit, Brazil was left with one of the developing world's largest foreign debts, and the 1980s became a "lost decade" of stagnation and spiralling inflation.
What the Truth Commission found
For decades the regime's defenders described repression as limited excesses against armed terrorists. In 2012, under President Dilma Rousseff (herself a former guerrilla who had been tortured), Brazil created a National Truth Commission (Comissão Nacional da Verdade, CNV). It delivered its final report on 10 December 2014. Its findings are the most authoritative official account:

CNV finding (2014)

Deaths and disappearances confirmed and documented individually
434 (191 killed, 210 disappeared, 33 disappeared whose bodies were later located)

Nature of the violations
Arbitrary detention, torture, executions, forced disappearances and concealment of bodies by state agents

Character
"Generalised and systematic", the result of a state policy, amounting to crimes against humanity

Officials named as responsible
377, from presidents and ministers down to torturers

Indigenous people killed, 1946–1988 (thematic volume)
At least 8,350, through direct action or omission of the state, an estimate covering only the cases studied

Source: CNV, Relatório, vol. I, ch. 18 (conclusions), and vol. II, text 5 (2014).
The commission stressed that 434 is not the total, only the number it could prove, given that the armed forces said their records had been destroyed. It also found that violence against peasants and Indigenous peoples, largely in the countryside, had produced far more victims than the urban political cases. Many thousands of Brazilians were detained, and many of them were tortured; thousands went into exile, among them future presidents and ministers. Compared with neighbouring Argentina, where the dictatorship's victims number in the many thousands (see A Brief History of Argentina in this series), the number of political killings in Brazil was smaller; the system of torture was not.

"The repression and elimination of political opponents became state policy." — National Truth Commission, final report, vol. I (2014)

The CNV's conclusions remain contested by some former officers and many on the right, who emphasise the guerrillas' violence and regard the 1979 Amnesty Law as a settled bargain. That law, which pardoned political crimes by both sides, still blocks almost all prosecution of state agents; Brazil's Supreme Court upheld it in 2010, even as the Inter-American Court of Human Rights ruled the same year that it could not bar investigation of grave violations.
The negotiated exit
Opening came from inside the regime, under pressure from outside it. President Ernesto Geisel began a "slow, gradual and safe" political opening and revoked AI-5 at the end of 1978, while hardliners resisted with bombings and murders. In 1975 the journalist Vladimir Herzog died in an army intelligence centre in São Paulo; the official story of suicide was disbelieved, and an ecumenical service in his memory became one of the first mass acts of protest.
The opposition grew through the cracks. Metalworkers in the industrial suburbs south of São Paulo, the "ABC" region, staged huge strikes from 1978, led by a union leader from Pernambuco named Luiz Inácio da Silva, known as Lula. In 1979 the Amnesty Law let exiles return. In 1980 Lula and others founded the Workers' Party (PT). In 1984 millions filled the streets for Diretas Já ("Direct elections now"), the largest demonstrations in Brazilian history to that point. The constitutional amendment they demanded failed in Congress. But in January 1985 the regime's own electoral college chose an opposition politician, Tancredo Neves, as president. Then, on the eve of his inauguration, he fell ill. He died on 21 April 1985 without taking office. His vice-president, José Sarney, a former regime ally, became the first civilian president in 21 years.

Part 8 — The New Republic: the 1988 Constitution and the Real (1985–2002)
The Citizens' Constitution
The defining act of the new democracy was a constitution. A Constituent Assembly, elected in 1986, worked for 20 months, under intense lobbying from every group in the country, and promulgated the new text on 5 October 1988. Its president, Ulysses Guimarães, called it the "Citizens' Constitution". It is long, detailed and ambitious:

Direct elections for president, votes for illiterate people and optional voting from age 16.
Racism defined as a crime without bail or statute of limitations, and torture as a crime without bail or amnesty.
Health as a "right of all and a duty of the state", creating the Unified Health System (SUS), today one of the largest public health systems in the world, free at the point of use.
Indigenous peoples' "original rights" to the lands they traditionally occupy, and a duty on the state to demarcate them; land titles for the descendants of quilombos.
A powerful, independent Public Prosecutor's Office (Ministério Público), a strong Supreme Court and electoral courts.
Pensions and social-security rights, extended to rural workers, written into the constitution itself.

Its defenders see it as the foundation of everything Brazil got right after 1988: falling poverty, universal health care, the resilience of elections. Its critics argue that it locked so many spending commitments and special interests into the constitution that Brazil became hard to govern without constant amendment (it has been amended well over a hundred times) and that it baked in fiscal problems. Both are serious arguments.
Hyperinflation
What ordinary Brazilians remember about the late 1980s and early 1990s is prices. Inflation had been high for decades; by the late 1980s it was out of control. Shops relabelled goods daily, sometimes twice a day. People were paid and rushed to the supermarket the same afternoon. Anyone with a bank account kept money in overnight indexed deposits; the poor, who did not, lost the most. Five currencies came and went between 1986 and 1994. Annual consumer inflation exceeded 2,000 percent in 1993.
Plan after plan failed. Sarney's Cruzado Plan (1986) froze prices, briefly made him the most popular man in Brazil, and then collapsed into shortages. Fernando Collor de Mello, a young governor elected in 1989 in the first direct presidential vote since 1960 (narrowly beating Lula), took office in March 1990 with inflation running at about 90 percent a month and on his first day froze every bank account above 50,000 cruzeiros, then about US$500. It wrecked his credibility without ending inflation. In May 1992 his own brother, Pedro Collor, accused him of condoning an influence-peddling scheme run by his campaign treasurer, Paulo César Farias; students with painted faces filled the streets, and the Chamber voted to impeach him. He resigned in December 1992 as the Senate was trying him. The process was messy but constitutional, and it set a precedent.
The Real Plan
The fix came, unusually, from a team of economists working for Collor's vice-president and successor, Itamar Franco, under his finance minister, the sociologist Fernando Henrique Cardoso. The trick was psychological as much as economic. From March 1994, prices and wages were expressed in a virtual unit, the URV, that tracked inflation daily, while people kept using the old money. The URV was set at roughly one US dollar, so for four months Brazilians saw two prices on every label: one in cruzeiros reais that rose every day, and one in URVs that stayed still. Once everyone was thinking in URVs, on 1 July 1994 the URV became a new currency: the real. People already trusted the number that did not move. The poor felt the difference first: they had never had indexed bank accounts to shelter them, so for millions the end of runaway prices worked like the largest pay rise of their lives. Combined with high interest rates, an open economy and later a commitment to fiscal discipline, it worked.

The Real Plan changed what people expected before it changed the money in their pockets. That was its genius.

Brazil's consumer inflation (IPCA), year to December

1993
about 2,480%

1994
about 916% (the real arrived in July)

1995
about 22%

1998
under 2%

2024
about 4.8%

2025
about 4.3%

Sources: IBGE IPCA series as reported by Brazil's Central Bank and Agência Brasil; figures rounded.
Cardoso rode the success to two presidential victories, in 1994 and 1998 (a constitutional amendment allowed re-election). His governments privatised steel, mining (including the giant Vale do Rio Doce), telecoms and much of the electricity sector, created independent regulators, passed a Fiscal Responsibility Law in 2000, and introduced the first targeted cash-transfer programmes. Supporters credit him with building the macroeconomic foundations that every later government relied on. Critics on the left accused him of selling public assets cheaply and keeping interest rates crippling; the 1999 currency crisis, which forced a devaluation, and slow growth made him unpopular by the end.

Part 9 — Lula, Dilma and Lava Jato (2003–2018)
This is the most contested stretch of recent Brazilian history, and it is impossible to tell in a way that pleases everyone. What follows tries to set out what is established, then the main competing readings.
The Lula years
On his fourth attempt, Lula won the 2002 election with 61.3 percent of the valid vote in the runoff, still the largest share of any president since 1989. A metalworker who had left school early, trained as a lathe operator, lost a finger in a factory accident and known hunger as a child became president of one of the world's ten largest economies. To markets' surprise, he kept Cardoso's macroeconomic framework: an inflation target, a floating currency, primary budget surpluses.
Inside that framework, his governments did three things that changed millions of lives. They merged earlier programmes into Bolsa Família, a cash transfer paid mainly to mothers on condition that children attend school and get vaccinated, which by the end of the decade reached about a quarter of the population at a cost of around half a percent of GDP. They raised the minimum wage well above inflation year after year. And credit, formal jobs and a commodity boom driven by China's demand for iron ore and soya lifted tens of millions into what Brazilians call the "new middle class". Extreme poverty fell sharply, and in 2014 Brazil was taken off the UN's Hunger Map for the first time (it fell back on, and left again in 2025). Lula left office in 2010 with approval near 83 percent.
There was another side. In 2005 the Mensalão scandal revealed that the PT's operation had paid monthly sums to allied congressmen for votes. Lula said he had not known; his chief of staff and others were eventually convicted by the Supreme Court. Critics on the right saw proof that the PT had captured the state; critics on the left saw a party that had adopted the old methods of Brazilian politics to govern in a fragmented Congress.
Dilma, the streets and the recession
Lula's chosen successor, Dilma Rousseff, an economist and former guerrilla, won in 2010 and narrowly again in 2014. Her first term coincided with the end of the commodity boom. Her government expanded state lending, cut energy prices by decree and tried to push down interest rates. In June 2013, protests that began over a bus-fare increase in São Paulo exploded into nationwide demonstrations, by some counts more than a million people on a single night, against corruption, poor public services and the cost of the 2014 World Cup.
Then the economy fell off a cliff. Brazil's GDP shrank by around 3.5 percent in both 2015 and 2016, one of the worst recessions in its history. Unemployment nearly doubled. Defenders of Rousseff blame the commodity collapse and a hostile Congress that blocked her adjustment; critics blame her own interventionist policies and budget manipulation.
Lava Jato
In March 2014, federal police investigating a money-laundering operation at a petrol station and car wash in Brasília pulled a thread that led to Petrobras. Operação Lava Jato (Operation Car Wash) uncovered a cartel of construction companies that had paid bribes to Petrobras executives and to politicians from many parties, including the PT, its coalition partners and the opposition, in exchange for inflated contracts. It became one of the largest anti-corruption investigations in the world, spreading across Latin America after the construction giant Odebrecht admitted to paying bribes in a dozen countries. Hundreds of people were charged; billions of reais were recovered; senior executives and politicians went to prison. The investigating judge in Curitiba, Sérgio Moro, became a national hero to many.
The impeachment
In this atmosphere, Congress impeached Dilma Rousseff. The formal charge was not personal corruption, of which she was never accused, but fiscal manoeuvres: delaying payments to state banks to make the budget look better (pedaladas fiscais) and issuing spending decrees without congressional approval. On 31 August 2016 the Senate removed her by 61 votes to 20. Her vice-president, Michel Temer of the MDB, took over and pushed through a constitutional cap on federal spending and a labour reform.

To her supporters, the impeachment was a parliamentary coup dressed in accounting language. To her opponents, it was the constitution working against a government that had broken fiscal law and lost all support. Both camps still use those words.

The Lula case
In July 2017 Moro convicted Lula of corruption and money laundering, finding that a construction company had reserved and refurbished a seaside apartment for him in exchange for contracts. An appeals court upheld and increased the sentence, and in April 2018 Lula went to prison in Curitiba, where he spent 580 days. As a convicted person he was barred from the 2018 election, in which he had been leading the polls.
Then the case unravelled. In 2019 The Intercept Brasil published leaked messages showing Moro advising prosecutors on strategy, which is incompatible with a judge's role. Moro had by then become justice minister in the government of the man who won the 2018 election. Lula was released in November 2019 after the Supreme Court ruled that sentences could not be served before all appeals were exhausted. In March 2021 a Supreme Court justice annulled his convictions on the ground that the Curitiba court had never had jurisdiction, and the court later ruled that Moro had been biased. Lula's political rights were restored. Note what this means: the courts did not declare Lula innocent; they declared his trials invalid, and the cases were not retried.
Lava Jato's legacy is a live argument. For its defenders, it was the first time Brazil's powerful were held to account, and it was dismantled by the political class it threatened. For its critics, including many jurists who are not on the left, it became a political project that broke rules, used pre-trial detention to extract plea bargains, damaged major companies and helped elect a far-right president, whose justice minister its judge became. Both accounts rely on real facts.

Part 10 — Bolsonaro, 8 January, and Brazil in 2026 (2018–2026)
The outsider
Jair Bolsonaro was a former army captain who had spent nearly three decades as a backbench congressman, known mainly for defending the dictatorship and for provocative remarks about women, gay people and Indigenous Brazilians. In 2018, amid recession, Lava Jato, record violence and fury at the political class, he ran as the anti-system candidate. He was stabbed at a campaign rally in September and nearly died, and campaigned largely from hospital and social media. He won the runoff with 55.1 percent.
His supporters saw a plain-spoken patriot who defended family, faith, gun ownership and free enterprise against a corrupt left. His government passed a long-blocked pension reform in 2019, granted the central bank formal independence and pursued deregulation. Evangelical Christians, now more than a quarter of the population, were central to his coalition.
His critics saw an authoritarian who praised torturers, attacked journalists and the courts and undermined environmental enforcement. Amazon deforestation rose sharply on his watch. His handling of COVID-19, in which he dismissed the virus as a "little flu", promoted unproven drugs and resisted vaccines, became the main charge against him: Brazil recorded more than 700,000 COVID deaths, among the highest totals in the world, and a Senate inquiry in 2021 recommended charges against him.
The 2022 election and 8 January 2023
In the 2022 runoff Lula, now free to run, beat Bolsonaro with 50.9 percent, the narrowest margin since redemocratisation. Bolsonaro had spent months claiming without evidence that Brazil's electronic voting machines could be rigged. He never clearly conceded. His supporters blocked highways and camped outside army barracks, calling for the military to intervene.
On Sunday 8 January 2023, a week after Lula's inauguration, thousands of them marched on Brasília's Three Powers Square and stormed and ransacked the Congress, the Supreme Court and the presidential palace, smashing windows, artworks and furniture. Security forces regained control the same day; more than a thousand people were detained. The attack was widely compared to the 6 January 2021 assault on the US Capitol.
In June 2023 the Superior Electoral Court barred Bolsonaro from running for office until 2030 for abusing his power by attacking the voting system before ambassadors. Federal police investigations then went further, alleging an organised plot, involving senior officers, to keep him in power after his defeat. On 11 September 2025 the Supreme Court convicted Bolsonaro of leading an attempted coup and sentenced him to 27 years and 3 months in prison. It was the first time a former Brazilian president, or the military officers convicted with him, had been punished for trying to overthrow democracy. His supporters called it political persecution by a Supreme Court that had become too powerful; his opponents called it the moment Brazil finally broke its habit of amnesty for coups. That argument continues.
Lula's third term
Lula's third government (2023–2026) restored and expanded Bolsa Família, relaunched housing and infrastructure programmes, oversaw a steep fall in Amazon deforestation (satellite alerts for August 2025–July 2026 were the lowest since that series began in 2016, according to the space agency INPE), hosted the UN climate conference COP30 in Belém in November 2025, and faced a hostile, conservative-leaning Congress. It also faced Washington: in 2025 the US administration imposed tariffs of up to 50 percent on many Brazilian goods, explicitly linking them to Bolsonaro's prosecution, which Lula's government denounced as interference.
Where things stood in late October 2026, by the numbers:

Brazil, autumn 2026
Figure
Source (date)

Population
about 203 million (2022 census); about 213 million (2025 estimate)
IBGE; World Bank (2026)

GDP
about US$2.28 trillion (2025)
World Bank (Oct 2026)

GDP per person
about US$10,700 (2025)
World Bank (Oct 2026)

Unemployment
5.2%, lowest for a third quarter since records began in 2012
IBGE PNAD, reported 30 Oct 2026

Informal workers
37.5% of the employed
IBGE PNAD, Q3 2026

Inflation (IPCA-15, 12 months)
4.62%, above the 4.5% tolerance ceiling
IBGE, 23 Oct 2026

Gross public debt
82.9% of GDP, highest since 2021
Central Bank, 29 Oct 2026

Income inequality (Gini)
50.3, among the world's highest, though the lowest Brazil has recorded outside the pandemic-aid year of 2020
World Bank (2024 data)

Religion
56.7% Catholic, 26.9% evangelical (aged 10+)
2022 census

The criticism of Lula's economics from investors and the centre-right is that it has kept growth going on public spending and credit while debt rises and interest rates stay among the highest in the world; the defence is that record employment and falling inequality show the strategy working for ordinary people. Growth forecasts for 2026 were being cut toward 1.5–2 percent.
The 2026 election
In the first round on 4 October 2026, Senator Flávio Bolsonaro, Jair's eldest son and his endorsed heir, finished ahead of Lula, and no candidate who had come second in a first round had ever won a runoff since 1989. In the runoff on 25 October, Lula came from behind and won with 51.8 percent of the valid vote, 64.3 million votes, the most any candidate has ever received in Brazil. Turnout rose between rounds, and abstention was the lowest in two decades. He became the first person elected president of Brazil four times, and the first to win a runoff after finishing second in the first round. Flávio Bolsonaro took 48.2 percent.
Election day was messy. Transport shortages in several states led a Supreme Court justice to extend voting until 7 p.m. at stations still open, at the request of both campaigns. Flávio Bolsonaro cited the extension to refuse to concede and demand annulment, though the electoral court counted fewer than 35,000 votes cast after the normal closing time, against a margin of more than 4.4 million. His own Liberal Party, his campaign coordinator, the governor of São Paulo and the main centre-right parties all recognised the result within days. He then left Brazil, reaching Florida, and briefly proclaimed himself "president-elect" on social media before editing the post.
Lula's fourth term begins on 5 January 2027, under a constitutional amendment that moved the inauguration from New Year's Day. He will be 81.
All 2026 facts in this part come from Agência Brasil, the Buenos Aires Times and the official figures they report, dated 13–31 October 2026. Brazil's story is moving fast; check the latest before quoting any of it.

Part 11 — How to understand Brazil today
Key dates

Year
Event

c. 11,000+ years ago
Humans living in what is now Brazil (Luzia, Lapa Vermelha)

1494
Treaty of Tordesillas divides the Atlantic world

22 April 1500
Cabral's fleet reaches the coast of Bahia

1549
Salvador founded as capital; Jesuits arrive

1630–1654
Dutch rule in the Northeast

1690s
Gold found in Minas Gerais

1695
Zumbi of Palmares killed (20 November)

1763
Capital moves to Rio de Janeiro

1792
Tiradentes executed

1808
Portuguese court arrives in Brazil

7 September 1822
Independence; Pedro I becomes emperor

1850
Slave trade ended in practice

1864–1870
Paraguayan War

13 May 1888
Golden Law abolishes slavery

15 November 1889
Republic proclaimed

1897
Destruction of Canudos

1930
Vargas takes power

1937–1945
Estado Novo dictatorship

1954
Vargas's suicide

21 April 1960
Brasília inaugurated

1964
Military coup

1968
AI-5

1985
Return to civilian rule

5 October 1988
New constitution

1994
The real is launched

2003
Lula's first term begins

2014
Lava Jato begins; Truth Commission reports

2016
Dilma Rousseff removed by impeachment

2018
Bolsonaro elected

8 January 2023
Attack on Brasília's Three Powers

11 September 2025
Bolsonaro convicted of attempting a coup

25 October 2026
Lula elected to a fourth term

Who's who

Person
Lived
Why they matter

Pedro Álvares Cabral
c. 1467–c. 1520
Led the fleet that claimed Brazil for Portugal

Zumbi dos Palmares
d. 1695
Last leader of the largest runaway-slave community; symbol of Black resistance

Aleijadinho (Antônio Francisco Lisboa)
c. 1738–1814
Sculptor and architect of Minas baroque

Tiradentes
1746–1792
Executed conspirator; republican martyr

João VI
1767–1826
Moved the Portuguese empire to Rio

Pedro I
1798–1834
Declared independence; first emperor

Pedro II
1825–1891
Reigned 49 years; deposed by the republic

Princess Isabel
1846–1921
Signed the Golden Law

Joaquim Nabuco / Luís Gama
1849–1910 / 1830–1882
Leading abolitionists

Getúlio Vargas
1882–1954
Dictator, then elected president; built the labour state

Juscelino Kubitschek
1902–1976
Built Brasília

Fernando Henrique Cardoso
b. 1931
Real Plan; president 1995–2002

Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva
b. 1945
Union leader; president 2003–10, 2023–, re-elected 2026

Dilma Rousseff
b. 1947
First woman president; impeached 2016

Sérgio Moro
b. 1972
Lava Jato judge; later Bolsonaro's justice minister

Jair Bolsonaro
b. 1955
President 2019–22; convicted of attempting a coup

Five ideas that unlock the country
1. The shadow of slavery is long, and recent. Brazil imported nearly half of all the Africans who survived the Atlantic crossing, kept slavery until 1888, freed people without land or schooling, and then subsidised European immigrants to replace them. More than half of Brazilians now identify as Black (preto) or mixed (pardo). The gaps in income, schooling, policing and political representation between them and white Brazilians are documented in every census. The old national story of "racial democracy", popularised from the 1930s by the sociologist Gilberto Freyre, celebrated real mixture and real cultural fusion; the data show it was never an equality of outcomes. Since the 2000s Brazil has adopted racial quotas in universities and public jobs, a policy its supporters credit with transforming who goes to university and its critics argue sorts a mixed people into rigid categories.
2. Land is still the deepest argument. From the captaincies to the 1850 Land Law to today's soy and cattle frontier, Brazilian land has been concentrated in few hands. The Landless Workers' Movement (MST) occupies unproductive estates to demand redistribution; agribusiness, which produces a large share of exports and is backed by one of Congress's strongest lobbies, defends property rights and productivity. Indigenous land demarcation sits at the same fault line: one side sees constitutional rights and the protection of the forest; the other sees vast areas closed to farming and mining. The Supreme Court and Congress have repeatedly clashed over where to draw the line.
3. The state is both mother and obstacle. Vargas's labour laws, Petrobras, the SUS, Bolsa Família and public universities are cherished by millions. So is the complaint that the state is expensive, slow and captured by insiders: the endless bureaucracy that the jeitinho (the creative workaround) exists to get round. Every Brazilian election since 1950 has been in some way a vote about how big that state should be.
4. The military and the courts are political actors. The army proclaimed the republic in 1889, removed Vargas in 1945, took power in 1964 and supervised its own exit in 1985. After 1988, power shifted toward courts and prosecutors, who impeached, jailed and freed presidents. Whether the Supreme Court's role in 2019–2026 saved democracy from a coup or overreached into politics is the central constitutional argument in Brazil today.
5. Brazil is a continent with a single language. Its regions are as different as European countries: the industrial, Italian-and-Japanese-flavoured Southeast; the Afro-Brazilian, deeply religious, poorer Northeast that votes heavily for Lula; the German- and Italian-settled South; the Amazon North, where evangelical churches are now the largest group; the agribusiness Centre-West. Yet it has held together since 1822, speaking Portuguese, watching the same telenovelas, singing the same samba and suffering together over the same national football team. That unity, against the odds, is perhaps the most remarkable fact in this whole history.

Brazil has been called "the country of the future" so often, starting with Stefan Zweig's 1941 book of that title, that Brazilians add the punchline themselves: "and always will be." The joke is self-mocking. The history above suggests a different reading: the future keeps being postponed by the same few unsolved questions from the past.

The takeaway
Brazil was built by the Atlantic economy: on Indigenous land, with the labour of nearly five million enslaved Africans, for sugar, gold and coffee sold abroad. It became independent without a revolution, ended slavery last in the Americas, and alternated between oligarchic democracy, populism and dictatorship until 1985. Since its 1988 Constitution it has tamed hyperinflation, cut poverty, and survived impeachments, a vast corruption scandal and an attempted coup whose leaders were convicted. The arguments that drive its politics now (land, race, the size of the state, the power of courts and soldiers) are the same ones its history keeps returning to.
Try this: pick one Brazilian thing you already love (a song by Jobim or Gilberto Gil, a plate of feijoada, a Pelé clip, a cup of coffee) and trace it back through this history. Which era made it? Who worked to produce it? You will usually find all three of Brazil's founding peoples in a single object, and one of the unresolved questions above.

Sources & Further Reading
Sources
- SlaveVoyages, Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database, Estimates (Emory University and partners), accessed 31 October 2026: embarkations and disembarkations by region, 1501–1866.
- Comissão Nacional da Verdade, Relatório (December 2014), vol. I ch. 18 (conclusions and the 434 confirmed deaths and disappearances) and vol. II text 5 (violations against Indigenous peoples); Human Rights Watch, World Report 2016, Brazil chapter (377 named perpetrators).
- Rex A. Hudson (ed.), Brazil: A Country Study (Library of Congress, 1997), historical chapters: Indigenous population estimates, colonial economy, gold, the court, the empire and republic.
- Maddison Project Database 2023 (University of Groningen): long-run GDP per capita.
- World Bank, World Development Indicators (updated October 2026): GDP, population, Gini.
- Agência Brasil (Brazil's public news agency) reports of IBGE, Central Bank and Superior Electoral Court data, 2025–26: census results (religion, quilombola population), unemployment, inflation, public debt, and the 2026 election results; Buenos Aires Times reporting of the 2026 runoff and of Bolsonaro's sentence.
- Indigenous population and language counts for 2022 follow IBGE's census as summarised in secondary sources; IBGE's own site could not be reached for this piece.
Go deeper
- 📘 Brazil: Five Centuries of Change — Thomas E. Skidmore (the classic single-volume English history; clear on the 20th century)
- 📘 Brazil: A Biography — Lilia M. Schwarcz & Heloisa M. Starling (a vivid, recent history by two leading Brazilian historians, strong on race and culture)
- 📘 Rebellion in the Backlands (Os Sertões) — Euclides da Cunha (the eyewitness epic of Canudos, and a founding text of Brazilian self-examination)
- 📘 The Masters and the Slaves — Gilberto Freyre (the 1933 book that shaped the idea of "racial democracy"; read it alongside its critics)
- 🌐 SlaveVoyages (explore the voyages to Bahia, Pernambuco and Rio yourself)
- 🌐 Related pieces in this library: If I Was Born in Brazil; The Columbian Exchange; A Brief History of Argentina (this series)


A Brief History of Spain: Caves, Caliphs, Empire, and the Long Road to Democracy
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How a peninsula of many peoples became the centre of a world empire, lost it, tore itself apart in a civil war, and then negotiated its way into democracy, and why every one of those chapters is still argued over at Spanish dinner tables.

Companion pieces: in the Spanish track, España: Historia Condensada, Al-Ándalus y la Herencia Árabe en el Español, 1492: El Choque de Dos Mundos and Si Hubiera Nacido en España (what daily life feels like now; this is how it got that way). In this series, A Brief History of France follows.
At about twenty past six on the evening of 23 February 1981, a lieutenant colonel of the Civil Guard named Antonio Tejero walked into Spain's Congress of Deputies with a pistol in his hand and about two hundred armed guards behind him. The deputies were in the middle of voting on a new prime minister. Tejero climbed to the speaker's platform and shouted at everyone to stay still. His men fired into the ceiling. Almost every deputy dived under the benches.
Three men did not. The outgoing prime minister, Adolfo Suárez, stayed in his seat. The deputy prime minister, an elderly general called Manuel Gutiérrez Mellado, stood up and ordered the guards to stand down, and was nearly wrestled to the floor. The Communist leader, Santiago Carrillo, sat smoking. In Valencia, tanks rolled into the streets. For a long night, a country that had buried its dictator only five years earlier did not know whether it still had a democracy.
It did. Shortly after one in the morning, King Juan Carlos appeared on television in the uniform of captain general of the armed forces and ordered the army to obey the constitution. By the next day the coup had collapsed.
To see why that night mattered so much, and why Spaniards are still arguing in 2026 about the dictatorship, the civil war before it, and even about what to call events of the eighth century, you need the whole story. This is it, told at length.
In this history

Before Spain: caves, Iberians, Celts and traders (to 218 BC)
Hispania: Rome and the Visigoths (218 BC–711)
Al-Andalus: the emirate and the caliphate of Córdoba (711–1031)
Taifas, frontiers and the "Reconquista" debate (1031–1479)
The Catholic Monarchs and 1492 (1469–1516)
Empire and Golden Age: the Habsburgs (1516–1700)
Bourbons, Napoleon and the Constitution of Cádiz (1700–1833)
A century of civil wars and pronunciamientos (1833–1931)
The Second Republic and the Civil War (1931–1939)
Franco's Spain (1939–1975)
The Transition and the new democracy (1975–2008)
Crisis, Catalonia and Spain in 2026 (2008–2026)
How to understand Spain today

Part 1 — Before Spain: caves, Iberians, Celts and traders (to 218 BC)
Spain covers most of the Iberian Peninsula, about 85 percent of it, with Portugal holding the rest. Its heart is the Meseta, a high, dry plateau averaging about 660 metres above sea level, ringed and crossed by mountain chains. Keep that map in mind. It explains a great deal: why the peninsula's regions have so often had their own languages, laws and loyalties; why the coasts looked outward to the Mediterranean and the Atlantic while the interior looked inward; and why whoever held the centre, from Toledo to Madrid, has always had to work hard to hold the edges.
The oldest Europeans
Some of the oldest human remains in Europe come from a low limestone ridge near Burgos, the Sierra de Atapuerca. When railway engineers cut a trench through it in the late nineteenth century, they sliced open caves full of bones. UNESCO, which listed the site in 2000, calls it "the earliest and most abundant evidence of humankind in Europe", covering nearly a million years.
The numbers are staggering. In 2025, researchers published in Nature a partial face from the site called Sima del Elefante, dated to between 1.4 and 1.1 million years ago, the oldest human face yet found in western Europe. At the neighbouring Gran Dolina site, excavators found fossils that, in 1997, they assigned to a new species, Homo antecessor, dated to between 900,000 and 800,000 years ago. In a deep pit called the Sima de los Huesos, the "pit of bones", lie the remains of dozens of individuals who look like early relatives of the Neanderthals.

Atapuerca is not a single discovery but a library of human evolution, still being read: excavation there has run every summer for decades.

The painters of Altamira
Much later, after modern humans reached Iberia, people in the caves of the Cantabrian coast began to paint. The most famous cave is Altamira, near Santillana del Mar. A local man found its entrance in 1868. In 1879 an amateur archaeologist, Marcelino Sanz de Sautuola, was exploring it when his eight-year-old daughter, María, looked up and saw the ceiling covered in red and black bison.
Sautuola published the find. Many leading experts of the day refused to believe that "primitive" people could have painted so well and suspected a forgery. He died before the scholarly world came round, which it did only after similar art was found in French caves around 1900.
Modern dating has made the cave older still. Uranium-series dating of thin mineral crusts over the paint, published in Science in 2012, showed that a red claviform (club-shaped) sign in Altamira was at least 35,600 years old, and that a red disk in nearby El Castillo was at least 40,800 years old. The great polychrome bison were painted thousands of years later. UNESCO listed Altamira in 1985 and in 2008 added seventeen more painted caves of northern Spain. The real cave is closed to almost all visitors, because human breath was damaging the paintings; a full-size replica stands nearby.
Farmers, metal and the first towns
Farming arrived from the eastern Mediterranean several thousand years later, followed by megalithic tombs and, in the far southeast, some of Europe's earliest fortified towns. At Los Millares, in Almería, people of the Copper Age built a walled settlement with stone houses, ringed by communal tombs, more than four thousand years ago. Iberian metal (copper, silver, tin and later iron) would draw outsiders for the next two thousand years.
Iberians, Celts and the traders from the sea
By the first millennium BC, two broad groups of peoples dominated the peninsula, though neither was a single nation.

People
Where
What we know

Iberians
The Mediterranean coast and the south
Towns, writing in their own scripts (still only partly understood), fine sculpture such as the Lady of Elche

Celts
The north, west and centre
Hill forts (castros), especially in Galicia; Indo-European languages

Celtiberians
The central Meseta
Mixed Celtic and Iberian culture; fierce resistance to Rome at Numantia

Basques (ancestors of)
The western Pyrenees
Spoke a language unrelated to any other living language, the ancestor of Basque

Tartessians
The lower Guadalquivir valley
A rich kingdom known to the Greeks; Herodotus tells of its long-lived King Arganthonios

Into this world came traders from the eastern Mediterranean. The Phoenicians, from the cities of what is now Lebanon, founded Gadir, today's Cádiz, which ancient writers dated to around 1100 BC; archaeologists have found Phoenician remains there from roughly the ninth century BC onward. Cádiz therefore competes with Lisbon and a few others for the title of oldest continuously inhabited city in western Europe. The Phoenicians wanted silver, and they brought the alphabet, the potter's wheel, new crops and new gods. Greeks from Phocaea, via their colony at Marseille, founded Emporion (Empúries, in Catalonia) in the sixth century BC; its name simply means "market".
Then came Carthage, the Phoenician colony in North Africa that became a great power. After losing the First Punic War to Rome, the Carthaginian Barca family built a new empire in Iberia, founding Carthago Nova, today's Cartagena. From there, in 218 BC, Hannibal set out with his army and his elephants across the Pyrenees and the Alps to invade Italy. Rome's answer was to send an army to Iberia to cut off his base. It landed at Emporion that same year. It would not leave for six centuries.

Part 2 — Hispania: Rome and the Visigoths (218 BC–711)
Two hundred years of conquest
Rome came to Iberia to fight Carthage and stayed to conquer. Publius Cornelius Scipio, the future Africanus, captured Cartagena and drove the Carthaginians out in a series of campaigns between 210 and 206 BC. What followed was the longest conquest in Roman history: about two centuries of on-off war against the peninsula's peoples.
The names of the resisters became Spanish legends. Viriathus, a Lusitanian shepherd turned guerrilla leader, beat Roman armies for years until, in 139 BC, Rome bribed three of his companions to kill him in his sleep. The Celtiberian town of Numantia, near today's Soria, held out against a Roman siege until 133 BC; its people chose to die or burn their town rather than surrender, and "Numantine resistance" is still a Spanish phrase for holding out against all odds. Only under Augustus, in the wars against the Cantabrians and Asturians that ended in 19 BC, was the whole peninsula finally pacified.
Becoming Roman
Then something remarkable happened: Hispania became one of the most Roman places in the empire.

Language. Spoken Latin slowly replaced most local languages, and over the next thousand years it would grow into Castilian Spanish, Catalan, Galician and Portuguese. The great exception was Basque, which survived in its mountain valleys.
Cities and roads. Rome founded or rebuilt cities such as Emerita Augusta (Mérida), Tarraco (Tarragona) and Italica near Seville, linked by roads and supplied by aqueducts. The aqueduct of Segovia still carries its double row of arches across the city.
Wealth. Hispania exported olive oil, wine, fish sauce (garum) and metals. At Las Médulas, in León, Roman engineers brought down whole mountains with water to get at the gold.
People. Hispania gave Rome the philosopher Seneca and the poets Lucan and Martial, and two of its greatest emperors, Trajan and Hadrian, came from families settled at Italica.

Rome's legacy in Spain is so deep it is easy to miss: the language, the law, the Catholic Church, the layout of half its cities.

Christianity spread in the second and third centuries. By the time the empire made it the official religion, Hispania had bishops in every important town.
The Visigoths
In 409 three Germanic peoples, the Vandals, Suebi and Alans, broke across the Pyrenees as the western empire fell apart. Rome sent its allies the Visigoths to restore order from 415. The Visigoths had already had a remarkable journey: they had crossed the Danube into Roman territory in 376, destroyed a Roman army and killed an emperor at Adrianople in 378, and sacked Rome itself in 410. Their first real kingdom was not in Spain at all but in southwestern Gaul, with its capital at Toulouse, and for most of the fifth century Hispania was only its southern annex.
That changed in 507, when the Frankish king Clovis, newly converted to Catholicism, defeated and killed the Visigothic king Alaric II at Vouillé, near Poitiers. (The same battle appears at the start of the history of France; the two stories begin tangled together.) The Visigoths lost almost all their Gallic lands and fell back on the peninsula. The Byzantine emperor Justinian took advantage of their quarrels to seize a strip of the southern coast. King Athanagild was the first to fix the royal residence at Toledo, and Leovigild (reigned c. 568–586), brother of Athanagild's successor Liuva I, conquered the Suebian kingdom in Galicia. By the late sixth century, the Visigoths ruled almost the whole peninsula.
They were a small warrior elite ruling a much larger Hispano-Roman population, and at first the two were divided by religion: the Visigoths were Arian Christians, who rejected the Catholic doctrine of the Trinity. Leovigild, an Arian, persecuted Catholics; his own son Hermenegild, who had converted, rebelled and was killed. His other son, King Reccared (586–601), converted to Catholicism, and the bishops became partners in government through the great Councils of Toledo. Until then Goths and Romans had lived under separate laws. In the next century King Recceswinth (649–672) issued a single code for everyone, the Liber Iudiciorum, twelve books of law, Roman in spirit, which survived in Castilian translation (the Fuero Juzgo) for centuries. The scholar-bishop Isidore of Seville wrote the Etymologies, an encyclopedia of everything then known, which Europe would copy for a thousand years.
The kingdom had two fatal weaknesses. Its monarchy was elective, so nearly every succession meant a struggle and several kings were murdered or deposed. And its rulers harshly persecuted the peninsula's Jews, with forced baptisms in the seventh century. When an invading army arrived in 711, the kingdom fell almost at once, and later chroniclers would spend centuries trying to explain why.

Hispania in brief

218 BC
Roman army lands at Emporion

133 BC
Fall of Numantia

19 BC
Augustus completes the conquest

c. AD 53 and 76
Trajan and Hadrian born into Hispano-Roman families

409
Vandals, Suebi and Alans cross the Pyrenees

415 onward
Visigoths in Hispania; capital later at Toledo

589
Third Council of Toledo: the Visigoths become Catholic

711
Muslim conquest begins

Part 3 — Al-Andalus: the emirate and the caliphate of Córdoba (711–1031)
The conquest
In 711 an army of Berbers and Arabs, led by a Berber general named Tariq ibn Ziyad, crossed from North Africa. The rock where he landed still carries his name: Gibraltar comes from Jabal Tariq, "the mountain of Tariq". He defeated and killed the Visigothic king Roderic near the river Guadalete, and within a few years almost the whole peninsula was under the rule of the Umayyad caliphs of Damascus. Its new rulers called it al-Andalus.
Why so fast? The Visigothic nobility was divided, and the conquerors usually offered generous terms: towns that surrendered kept their property and their religion in exchange for tribute. Many local people seem to have accepted the change of masters with little resistance.
Only in the mountains of the far north did small Christian lordships hold out. Tradition says that a nobleman named Pelayo beat a Muslim force at Covadonga, in Asturias, in 718 or 722. Historians doubt the scale of the battle, but the kingdom of Asturias that grew from it is the ancestor of León, Castile and, eventually, Spain.
Córdoba, capital of the West
In 750 the Umayyad dynasty in Damascus was overthrown and almost wiped out by the Abbasids. One prince, Abd al-Rahman, escaped across North Africa and in 756 made himself emir of Córdoba, independent of Baghdad in all but name. Córdoba, a Roman city and then the seat of a Visigothic duke, became the capital of al-Andalus. In 785 work began on its great mosque, a forest of double-arched columns that later rulers kept enlarging for two centuries.
The building's later history is a small history of Spain. When Ferdinand III of Castile took Córdoba in 1236, the mosque was consecrated as a church. In the sixteenth century the cathedral chapter built a Renaissance cathedral nave in the middle of it, cutting through the forest of columns. Today it is officially the cathedral of Córdoba, and the name visitors use, the Mezquita ("mosque"), is itself a small argument about what it really is.
In 929, his descendant Abd al-Rahman III (912–961) went further and proclaimed himself caliph, a title claiming leadership of the whole Muslim community. This was the high point of al-Andalus. Córdoba became one of the largest cities in western Europe (estimates of its population vary so widely that it is wiser not to quote one), with paved streets, public baths, markets and libraries. Near it the caliph built a palace-city, Madinat al-Zahra. Under the caliph Hisham II, the general and regent al-Mansur ("the victorious", Almanzor in Spanish) raided the Christian north again and again, sacking Barcelona and, in 997, Santiago de Compostela, the shrine of Christian pilgrimage.
How people lived
Al-Andalus was not a land of one people.

Group
Who they were
Their position

Arabs
A small ruling elite
Top of the social ladder

Berbers
The bulk of the conquering armies
Often given poorer lands; frequent revolts

Muwalladun
Local people who converted to Islam
Over generations, most of the population

Mozarabs
Christians living under Muslim rule
Protected, but paying a special tax

Jews
An old Iberian community
Protected, paying the same tax; some rose to high office

Christians and Jews had the status of dhimmi: protected peoples who could keep their religion, property and own courts, in return for loyalty and a special poll tax, the jizya, and some restrictions. Over the centuries, many Christians converted to Islam or adopted Arabic language and dress. Under the caliphs, a Jewish physician and diplomat, Hasdai ibn Shaprut, served Abd al-Rahman III, and Jewish learning flourished.
The economy changed too. Irrigation systems, many building on Roman ones, spread new crops through the south and east: rice, citrus fruit, sugar cane, cotton, aubergines and more. Spanish still names them with Arabic words, as the library's Spanish-language piece on al-Andalus explains: arroz, naranja, azúcar, aceite, acequia (irrigation channel), alcalde (mayor, from the Arabic for "judge").

The caliphate of Córdoba was, for a century, the richest and most sophisticated state in western Europe. That is not a romantic claim; it is what its Christian neighbours thought too, which is why they raided it, paid it tribute, and sent their sick kings to its doctors.

The fall of the caliphate
After al-Mansur died in 1002, his sons and the Umayyad princes fought over the state, Berber and Slav soldiers turned on each other, and Córdoba itself was sacked. In 1031 the caliphate was abolished. In its place rose a patchwork of rival small kingdoms, the taifas (from the Arabic for "faction"), ruled from Seville, Toledo, Zaragoza, Badajoz, Granada and elsewhere. They were rich, cultured and weak, and their Christian neighbours noticed. Córdoba was never again the capital of al-Andalus.

Part 4 — Taifas, frontiers and the "Reconquista" debate (1031–1479)
The frontier moves south
For the next two and a half centuries the frontier between Christian and Muslim Iberia moved, unevenly but mostly southward. The Christian kingdoms (León and Castile in the centre, Navarre and Aragon in the Pyrenees, the county of Barcelona in the east, and Portugal in the west) at first preferred to squeeze the taifas for protection money, called parias, than to conquer them.

Date
Event

1085
Alfonso VI of Castile takes Toledo, the old Visigothic capital

1086
The Almoravids, Berber reformers from Morocco called in by the taifa kings, defeat Alfonso at Sagrajas (al-Zallaqa)

1094
Rodrigo Díaz, "El Cid", takes Valencia, which he rules until his death in 1099

1137
Aragon and the county of Barcelona united by marriage: the Crown of Aragon

1195
The Almohads, a second wave of Moroccan reformers, defeat Castile at Alarcos

1212
Las Navas de Tolosa: a coalition of Christian kings crushes the Almohads

1229–1238
James I of Aragon takes Mallorca and Valencia

1236–1248
Ferdinand III of Castile takes Córdoba, Jaén and Seville

c. 1270
Only the Nasrid kingdom of Granada remains in Muslim hands

El Cid is a good example of why the simple story fails. Castile's great national hero, celebrated in the epic poem Cantar de mio Cid, spent years in exile serving the Muslim king of Zaragoza, fought Christians as well as Muslims, and in the end ruled Valencia as his own prince. His nickname comes from the Arabic sayyid, "lord".
Three religions, one peninsula
As Christian kings conquered Muslim cities, they ruled large Muslim populations, called mudéjares, and kept, for a time, the large Jewish communities. In Toledo, scholars of all three faiths translated Arabic works of philosophy, astronomy and medicine, including Arabic versions of Aristotle and the commentaries of the Córdoban philosopher Averroes, into Latin and Castilian. King Alfonso X, "the Wise" (1252–1284), sponsored law codes (the Siete Partidas), astronomical tables and poetry, and made Castilian a language of learning.
Each Christian kingdom grew its own institutions. Towns received charters, fueros, that set out their rights and drew settlers to the empty frontier lands. Kings consulted assemblies, the Cortes, which in León met with town representatives as early as 1188, among the earliest such assemblies in Europe. Castile's economy turned to sheep: the powerful herders' guild, the Mesta, moved huge flocks of merino sheep between summer and winter pastures, and Castilian wool fed the looms of Flanders. The Crown of Aragon, led by the merchants of Barcelona and Valencia, built a Mediterranean empire that at its height took in Sicily, Sardinia and, briefly, parts of Greece.
The fourteenth century was cruel. The Black Death reached Iberia in 1348. Civil wars brought a new dynasty, the Trastámaras, to the throne of Castile in 1369, and, by the Compromise of Caspe in 1412, to Aragon as well. And in 1391 a wave of attacks on Jewish quarters, beginning in Seville, spread across Castile and Aragon. Thousands were killed and many more were forcibly baptised. Those converts and their descendants, the conversos, would become the main target of the Spanish Inquisition a century later.
What should we call it?
For a long time, Spanish schoolbooks called this whole period the Reconquista, the "reconquest": a single, eight-century war in which Christian Spain took back its land from Muslim invaders. That word is now one of the most argued-over in Spanish history.

The case for the term. Medieval Christian chroniclers did describe their wars as a recovery. A chronicle written at the Asturian court in the late ninth century presented its kings as the heirs of the Visigoths, fighting to restore a lost Christian Spain. Popes granted crusade privileges for Iberian campaigns. And the result, a Christian peninsula, is a fact. Many historians keep using the word as convenient shorthand, as they use "Middle Ages".
The case against it. The word itself was not used by medieval writers; it became standard only in the nineteenth century, when romantic nationalists were writing a story of the Spanish nation. It implies that "Spain" already existed and was simply waiting to be recovered, when in fact the Christian kingdoms were rivals that fought each other constantly and often allied with Muslim rulers. And it treats the Muslims of al-Andalus, most of whom descended from Iberians who had converted, as foreigners in a land their families had lived in for centuries.

The argument goes back to two exiled Spanish historians of the twentieth century. Claudio Sánchez-Albornoz saw Spain's character as forged in centuries of struggle against Islam. Américo Castro argued that Spain was made by the living-together, the convivencia, of Christians, Muslims and Jews. Modern historians mostly reject both extremes. There were centuries of real exchange, and centuries of war, hierarchy and persecution, often at the same time. Most now prefer neutral phrases such as "the Christian conquest of al-Andalus", while accepting that the people at the time believed they were restoring something. The word still carries a political charge in Spain today.

Part 5 — The Catholic Monarchs and 1492 (1469–1516)
A marriage that made a country
In October 1469 two teenagers married in Valladolid: Isabella, heir to Castile, and Ferdinand, heir to Aragon. Isabella had to fight a civil war (1474–1479) against the supporters of her niece Juana to win her throne, and in 1479 Ferdinand inherited Aragon. Their two crowns were joined only in their persons; each kingdom kept its own laws, coins, Cortes and customs. Not until their grandson Charles would a single monarch inherit both. But from this point it begins to make sense to speak of "Spain". Pope Alexander VI later gave the couple the title by which they are still known: los Reyes Católicos, the Catholic Monarchs.
They tamed the great nobles, created a rural police force (the Santa Hermandad), and in 1478 obtained from Pope Sixtus IV the right to appoint their own inquisitors. The Spanish Inquisition, unlike the medieval one, answered to the crown. Its main targets at first were conversos suspected of secretly practising Judaism. Its first inquisitor general, the Dominican Tomás de Torquemada, gave it its rules. It would last, with interruptions, until 1834.
1492: the hinge year
Three events of 1492 shaped Spain for the next three centuries.
Granada. After a ten-year war, Muhammad XII, known to the Spanish as Boabdil, surrendered the last Muslim kingdom on 2 January 1492. The terms of surrender promised Granada's Muslims that they could keep their faith, mosques and laws.
The expulsion of the Jews. On 31 March 1492, in the newly conquered Alhambra, the monarchs signed an edict ordering every Jew in their kingdoms to convert or leave within four months. The stated reason was that Jews were leading conversos back to Judaism. Many Jews converted; many others went to Portugal (which forced conversions on them five years later), North Africa, Italy and above all the Ottoman Empire, where Sultan Bayezid II welcomed them. How many left is genuinely uncertain. Older estimates ran to hundreds of thousands; most modern historians put it at somewhere between about 40,000 and 100,000. Their descendants, the Sephardim (from Sefarad, the Hebrew name for Iberia), carried a form of medieval Spanish, Judaeo-Spanish or Ladino, to Salonica, Istanbul, Sarajevo and beyond, and kept it for five centuries. In 2015 Spain passed a law offering citizenship to their descendants.
Columbus. In April, at their camp outside Granada, the monarchs agreed to back the Genoese sailor Christopher Columbus, who had spent years trying to sell his plan to sail west to Asia, first in Portugal and then in Castile; experts had rejected it, correctly, on the grounds that he had badly underestimated the size of the Earth. He sailed from Palos on 3 August with three small ships and on 12 October 1492 reached an island in the Bahamas. He died in 1506 still insisting he had reached Asia. Spain's national day is still 12 October, fixed by a law of 1987, though what the date should celebrate is itself argued over, in Spain and across the Americas.
Two years later, in 1494, Castile and Portugal signed the Treaty of Tordesillas, dividing the newly found lands between them along a line drawn down the Atlantic: the lands to the west for Castile, to the east for Portugal. That line is the reason Brazil speaks Portuguese while the rest of South America speaks Spanish. What followed in the Americas, conquest, epidemic, the encomienda, silver and the mixing of peoples, is the subject of the library's Spanish-language piece 1492: El Choque de Dos Mundos.
In the same year the scholar Antonio de Nebrija published his Gramática de la lengua castellana, often called the first grammar of a modern European language. In its prologue, addressed to the queen, he wrote that language had always been the companion of empire.

In one year, Spain became territorially whole, religiously exclusive and suddenly global. The three facts would be bound together for centuries.

Unity by force
The promises made at Granada did not last. Between 1499 and 1502, under pressure from Cardinal Cisneros, the Muslims of Granada and then of all Castile were made to choose baptism or exile. Most were baptised, becoming moriscos. Ferdinand added Naples (1504) and the Spanish part of Navarre (1512), and Castile planted outposts on the North African coast and completed its conquest of the Canary Islands, a rehearsal, in many ways, for the Americas.
The monarchs also built a new idea of who counted as a true Spaniard. Converts and their descendants were increasingly barred from offices, religious orders and colleges by statutes of "purity of blood" (limpieza de sangre), which made ancestry, not belief, the test. Those rules lasted for centuries.
When Isabella died in 1504 her daughter Juana inherited Castile, but she was judged unfit to rule, and her father and then her son governed in her name. History calls her Juana la Loca, "the Mad"; some historians now ask how much of that madness was real and how much was useful to the men who ruled in her place. Ferdinand died in 1516. Their grandson, a young man raised in Flanders who spoke no Spanish, was about to inherit more of the world than anyone had ever done.

Part 6 — Empire and Golden Age: the Habsburgs (1516–1700)
The empire on which the sun never set
Charles (Charles I of Spain, 1516–1556, and from 1519 the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V) inherited Castile and its American conquests, Aragon with Naples, Sicily and Sardinia, the Netherlands and Franche-Comté from his Burgundian grandmother, and the Austrian lands of the Habsburgs. Castile resented a foreign king who filled offices with Flemings and spent its money on German wars: the revolt of the Comuneros (1520–1521), led by the towns of Castile, was crushed at Villalar.
Meanwhile conquistadors, operating under royal licence, toppled the Aztec Empire (1521) and the Inca Empire (1532 onward), and the crown organised its American lands into the viceroyalties of New Spain (1535) and Peru (1542). In 1545 a mountain of silver was found at Potosí, in what is now Bolivia, and the following year rich mines opened at Zacatecas in Mexico. American silver, mined largely by forced Indigenous labour, flowed through Seville and paid for Spain's armies, and then flowed out again to bankers in Genoa and Augsburg and on to China. Spain's own theologians debated the morality of all this: in 1550–1551 the crown convened a formal debate at Valladolid in which the friar Bartolomé de las Casas condemned the conquest's violence and Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda defended it. (The debate was about whether wars of conquest were just, not, as is often said, about whether Indigenous people had souls.)
His son Philip II (1556–1598) ruled from a new, fixed capital, Madrid (1561), and from the monastery-palace of El Escorial. He was the most powerful ruler of his age and in some ways its most hard-pressed:

His fleet, with Venice and the Papacy, beat the Ottomans at Lepanto (1571).
He inherited Portugal in 1580, and with it Portugal's empire in Brazil, Africa and Asia; for sixty years the whole peninsula had one king.
The Dutch Revolt, from 1568, began an eighty-year war he could never win.
His Armada against England was wrecked in 1588.
The crown repeatedly suspended payments to its bankers. Spain was rich in silver and permanently short of cash.

"The sun never sets on my dominions" is a line attributed to Philip II. Like most famous lines, the exact words are hard to pin down. The fact behind it is not: his realms spanned every time zone of the known world.

The Golden Age
The same century and a half produced Spain's Siglo de Oro, its Golden Age of literature and painting. Most of it came out of an empire that was, politically, already in trouble.

Figure
Lived
Why they matter

Teresa of Ávila
1515–1582
Mystic, reformer of the Carmelite order, one of the great prose writers in Spanish

El Greco
c. 1541–1614
Cretan-born painter of Toledo, with elongated, visionary figures

Miguel de Cervantes
1547–1616
Don Quixote (parts I and II, 1605 and 1615), often called the first modern novel

Lope de Vega
1562–1635
Inventor of the Spanish comedy; claimed to have written hundreds of plays

Diego Velázquez
1599–1660
Court painter; Las Meninas (1656)

Pedro Calderón de la Barca
1600–1681
Life Is a Dream (La vida es sueño)

The anonymous Lazarillo de Tormes (1554) started the picaresque novel, the story of a poor boy surviving by his wits, which held a mirror to a society obsessed with honour and "purity of blood". At the University of Salamanca, theologians such as Francisco de Vitoria argued about the rights of conquered peoples and laid foundations for international law, while others developed early ideas about money and prices.
Decline, or something more complicated?
The seventeenth century was hard. The crown expelled the moriscos between 1609 and 1614, perhaps around 300,000 people, by the classic estimate (recent research suggests a significant number managed to stay or return). Plague returned in waves. Castile's population stagnated.

Spain and its neighbours
1500
1600
1700

Population of Spain
6.8 million
8.2 million
8.8 million

GDP per person, Spain
$1,118
$1,295
$1,280

GDP per person, Netherlands
$2,332
$4,270
$3,377

GDP per person, France
$1,670
$1,576
$1,758

Maddison Project Database 2023; GDP per person in 2011 international dollars. Early figures are rough reconstructions.
Under Philip IV (1621–1665) his minister Olivares tried to make the other kingdoms share Castile's burden. In 1640 both Catalonia and Portugal revolted. Barcelona surrendered in 1652; Portugal won its independence for good. The Peace of Westphalia (1648) recognised the Dutch Republic, and the Peace of the Pyrenees (1659) gave France Roussillon and part of Cerdanya, moving the border to where it is today. The last Habsburg, Charles II (1665–1700), was sickly and childless, and Europe watched his body as if it were a stock market.
Spaniards at the time, the arbitristas, wrote endless memoranda on the causes of decline: too many nobles and clergy, too few workers, too much silver, too little industry. Some modern historians, such as Henry Kamen, argue that "decline" is the wrong frame: that Spain had never been as strong as its empire looked, since it relied on Italian bankers, Flemish soldiers and American silver, and that the empire held together far longer than its rivals expected. Either way, by 1700 the question was not how great Spain would be, but who would get it.

Part 7 — Bourbons, Napoleon and the Constitution of Cádiz (1700–1833)
A French king for Spain
Charles II died on 1 November 1700, leaving his crown to Philip of Anjou, a grandson of Louis XIV of France. The rest of Europe, fearing a single Bourbon superpower, backed a rival Habsburg candidate, and the War of the Spanish Succession (1701–1714) became both a European war and a Spanish civil war: Castile mostly backed Philip, while much of the Crown of Aragon, including Catalonia, backed the Habsburg Archduke Charles.
Philip won his throne, but at a price. By the treaties of Utrecht (1713) and Rastatt (1714) Spain lost its European possessions in Italy and the Netherlands, and Britain kept Gibraltar, which it still holds. Barcelona fell to Philip's army on 11 September 1714, after a long siege; Catalans now mark that day, the Diada, as their national day. Philip V then abolished the separate laws and institutions of Aragon, Valencia, Catalonia and Mallorca by the Nueva Planta decrees (1707–1716), imposing a centralised, Castilian-style government. To defenders of the Bourbon state, this was modernisation; to many Catalans, it is the moment their nation lost its liberties, and the memory of it powers Catalan nationalism to this day.
Enlightened despotism
The eighteenth century was a recovery. Spain's population grew from under 9 million to about 12 million by 1820. Royal academies were founded, including the Real Academia Española (1713), which still publishes the official dictionary, and the Real Academia de la Historia (1738). Charles III (1759–1788), previously king of Naples, was the model "enlightened despot": he improved Madrid's streets and lighting, built the museum building that would become the Prado, curbed the Church's privileges, expelled the Jesuits (1767), and loosened Cádiz's monopoly on trade with the Americas. Reform came from above; the king's ministers were reformers, not democrats.
Then the French Revolution broke the alliance between the two Bourbon crowns. Spain fought revolutionary France, made peace, switched sides again, and saw its fleet destroyed alongside the French at Trafalgar in 1805. The court of Charles IV was dominated by his favourite, Manuel Godoy, and by a feud between the king and his son Ferdinand.
1808: the people rise
In March 1808, a riot at Aranjuez forced Charles IV to abdicate in favour of Ferdinand. Napoleon, whose troops were already in Spain on their way to Portugal, summoned both to Bayonne, in France, forced them both to give up the crown, and made his brother Joseph Bonaparte king of Spain.
But the Spanish people had not been consulted. On 2 May 1808, crowds in Madrid rose against the French garrison; the next day French firing squads shot hundreds of prisoners. Francisco de Goya painted both days six years later, and The Third of May 1808, with its man in a white shirt, arms raised before the faceless rifles, became one of the first great images of modern war. In July a Spanish army forced a whole French corps to surrender at Bailén. Napoleon came in person with a huge army and retook Madrid, but he could never pacify the country.
What followed, the War of Independence (1808–1814), was fought by regular armies, by a British army under Wellington, and by bands of irregular fighters waging what Spaniards called a guerrilla, a "little war". The word passed into English and every other language.
The Constitution of Cádiz
While the French occupied most of Spain, the resistance governed from the besieged port of Cádiz. There, in 1810, a parliament, the Cortes, assembled, with deputies from Spain and from the American territories. On 19 March 1812, Saint Joseph's Day, it promulgated a constitution that Spaniards nicknamed La Pepa.

The Constitution of 1812

Sovereignty
Resides "essentially in the Nation", not the king

The nation
"The union of all Spaniards of both hemispheres", including the American territories

Powers
Separated: the Cortes makes laws, the king executes them, courts judge

Voting
Broad, indirect male suffrage

Freedoms
Press freedom; abolition of feudal jurisdictions

Religion
Catholicism, "the only true one", the sole permitted religion

It was one of the most liberal constitutions in the world, and it travelled: revolutionaries in Naples and Piedmont proclaimed it in 1820–1821, Portugal's first constitution, of 1822, was modelled on it, and its influence reached Latin America. The deputies who supported it were called liberales, and that is the origin of "liberal" as a political word.
It did not last. When Ferdinand VII came home in 1814, welcomed as "the Desired", he abolished the constitution and arrested its authors. In 1820 an army officer, Rafael del Riego, led a revolt that forced the king to restore it, but in 1823 a French army, sent by the conservative monarchies of Europe, put Ferdinand back in absolute power. Meanwhile, the American territories had begun their own wars of independence in 1810; by the mid-1820s, of the great empire, only Cuba, Puerto Rico and the Philippines remained. That story is told in the Spanish-language piece La Independencia: Cómo Nació un Continente.

Part 8 — A century of civil wars and pronunciamientos (1833–1931)
Carlists and liberals
When Ferdinand VII died in 1833, he left the throne to his two-year-old daughter, Isabella II, having changed the succession law to let a woman inherit. His brother Carlos refused to accept it. His supporters, the Carlists, stood for God, the king, and the old local laws, the fueros; they were strongest in Navarre, the Basque Country and rural Catalonia. Isabella's regents turned to the liberals for support. The result was the first of three Carlist wars (1833–1840, 1846–1849, 1872–1876), real civil wars that set the conservative, Catholic countryside against the liberal cities.
The liberal state that won was weak, and the army filled the gap. Through the century, generals made and unmade governments by pronunciamiento: a formal declaration by an officer, backed by his troops, demanding a change of government. Spain had constitutions in 1812, 1834, 1837, 1845, 1869, 1876 and 1931 (and drafts that never took effect). The rule of thumb was that each political faction wrote its own.
Land, railways and the two Spains
Liberal governments sold off the vast lands of the Church and the towns, in the desamortización of Mendizábal (1836) and Madoz (1855), hoping to create a nation of small farmers and to pay the debt. Instead, most of the land went to those who already had money, and in the south it strengthened the great estates, the latifundios, worked by landless day labourers. That rural poverty would feed anarchism and, in the 1930s, revolution.
Industry came late and unevenly. Catalonia built a textile industry, the Basque Country an iron and steel industry, and foreign, mostly French, capital built the railways. Most of the country remained agricultural and poor. In 1900, Spain's GDP per person was about 60 percent of France's.
Revolution, a king from Italy, and a republic
In 1868 a liberal revolt, La Gloriosa, drove Isabella II into exile. The new constitution of 1869 brought universal male suffrage and freedom of religion. Spain then went shopping for a king and found one in Amadeo of Savoy, son of the king of Italy, who arrived in 1871 and, worn down by Carlist war, republican opposition and quarrelling politicians, gave up in early 1873. The First Republic (1873–1874) had four presidents in under a year, faced a new Carlist war, a revolt in Cuba and local "cantonal" uprisings in which cities such as Cartagena declared themselves independent. A general's pronunciamiento ended it.
The Restoration and the "Disaster"
The monarchy came back with Isabella's son, Alfonso XII, and a new constitution in 1876, which lasted until 1923. Its architect, Antonio Cánovas del Castillo, designed a system in which two parties, his Conservatives and Práxedes Sagasta's Liberals, took turns in power, the turno pacífico. Elections were fixed by local bosses, the caciques. It brought stability and corruption in equal measure.
Outside the system, new movements grew: the Spanish Socialist Workers' Party (PSOE), founded in 1879; the anarchist trade union, the CNT, founded in 1910, which became one of the largest anarchist movements in the world; and regional nationalist parties in Catalonia and the Basque Country.
In 1898, war with the United States over Cuba cost Spain its last major colonies: Cuba, Puerto Rico and the Philippines. Spaniards call it simply el Desastre. A group of writers known as the Generation of '98 (Miguel de Unamuno, Antonio Machado, Pío Baroja and others) turned it into a searching examination of what was wrong with Spain.

Year
Event

1833–1840
First Carlist War

1868
La Gloriosa: Isabella II deposed

1873–1874
First Republic

1876
Constitution of the Restoration

1879
PSOE founded

1898
War with the US; loss of Cuba, Puerto Rico, the Philippines

1909
"Tragic Week" in Barcelona: riots against call-ups for Morocco

1910
CNT founded

1921
Disaster of Annual: Spanish army routed in Morocco

1923
General Miguel Primo de Rivera seizes power with the king's support

Spain stayed neutral in the First World War, and grew rich selling to both sides, but the boom brought inflation and strikes, and in Barcelona employers and anarchists fought a small war of assassinations. A new colonial war in Morocco went badly; at Annual, in 1921, Moroccan fighters led by Abd el-Krim routed a Spanish army, killing thousands. In 1923 General Miguel Primo de Rivera made himself dictator with the support of King Alfonso XIII. He built roads and dams, but by 1930 he had lost the army's support and resigned. The king had tied himself to the dictatorship, and he would fall with it.
In the decades around 1900, very large numbers of Spaniards, many from Galicia, Asturias and the Canary Islands, left for the Americas, especially Argentina and Cuba. A Spanish surname in Buenos Aires or Havana today is often the trace of that migration.

Part 9 — The Second Republic and the Civil War (1931–1939)
The Republic of hope
In municipal elections on 12 April 1931, republicans and socialists swept the cities. Two days later, on 14 April, the Second Republic was proclaimed, and Alfonso XIII left the country without formally abdicating. Crowds danced in the streets.
The new Republic's leaders, above all Manuel Azaña, wanted to modernise Spain in a hurry. The constitution of December 1931 declared Spain "a democratic republic of workers of all classes". It separated Church and state, legalised divorce, and gave women the vote, after a famous parliamentary battle won by the deputy Clara Campoamor. Women voted in a general election for the first time in 1933. Catalonia received a statute of autonomy in 1932. The government cut the bloated officer corps, built thousands of schools, and began an agrarian reform to give land to the landless.
Each reform made enemies. The Church saw itself persecuted; the army humiliated; landowners threatened. On the other side, anarchists and many socialists thought the reforms far too slow, and land seizures and strikes spread. Spain had become two Spains, a phrase Antonio Machado had used years before.

The Second Republic

April 1931
Republic proclaimed; king leaves

December 1931
New constitution; women's suffrage

1932
Catalan autonomy statute; failed monarchist coup (the Sanjurjada)

November 1933
The centre and the right win elections

October 1934
Revolutionary strike and uprising in Asturias, crushed by troops under General Franco

February 1936
Popular Front (left coalition) wins elections

July 1936
Military coup; civil war begins

The coup that became a war
After the Popular Front won the elections of February 1936, the country slid into violence: street battles between left and right militants, land occupations, church burnings, assassinations. On 13 July the monarchist leader José Calvo Sotelo was murdered by police officers and socialist militants. On 17 July 1936, army garrisons in Spanish Morocco rose, and the next day the rising spread to the mainland.
The coup was meant to take power in days. It failed in half the country. Where workers' militias and loyal police beat the rebels, as in Madrid, Barcelona and Valencia, the Republic held; where the officers won, as in Seville, Galicia and Old Castile, they took control. Spain split in two, and a coup became a war.
The rebels called themselves the Nationalists. Their commander in Morocco, Francisco Franco, flew in African troops with German and Italian help and, on 1 October 1936, was named head of state. On the other side, the Republicans were a coalition of liberals, socialists, communists, anarchists, and Basque and Catalan nationalists, who fought one another as well as the enemy. In the first months, anarchist and socialist revolutionaries collectivised factories and farms in Catalonia and Aragon.
A world war in rehearsal
The war became international almost immediately. Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy sent planes, tanks and troops to Franco. The Soviet Union sent equipment and advisers to the Republic, which paid in gold. Britain and France chose "non-intervention", an agreement that Germany, Italy and the USSR signed and then ignored. Around 40,000 foreign volunteers fought for the Republic in the International Brigades, and about 20,000 more served in medical and support units.
On 26 April 1937, aircraft of Germany's Condor Legion, with Italian planes, bombed the Basque town of Guernica. How many died is still disputed: the Basque government reported 1,654 at the time, while later local research identified about 150 victims by name, and most recent estimates are in the low hundreds. Pablo Picasso's huge painting of it, made weeks later for the Spanish pavilion at the Paris International Exhibition of 1937, is now in the Reina Sofía museum in Madrid. Writers and artists from across the world came to see or fight: George Orwell's Homage to Catalonia describes the Republican infighting in Barcelona in May 1937; Ernest Hemingway's For Whom the Bell Tolls was set in the war.
The Nationalists, better armed and united under one command, won slowly. They besieged Madrid from November 1936 but never took it by assault. They conquered the north in 1937, cut the Republic in two by reaching the Mediterranean in April 1938, won the long battle of the Ebro, and overran Catalonia in January 1939. In the last days of the war, Republicans fought each other in Madrid. Nationalist troops entered the capital on 28 March, and on 1 April 1939 Franco declared the war over.
Counting the dead

"Nationalist forces put the figure at 1,000,000 ... More recent estimates have been closer to 500,000 or less." — Encyclopaedia Britannica, "Spanish Civil War"

How many died is still argued, partly because so many were killed far from the front, buried in unmarked graves, and never recorded. Historians' estimates:

Category
Range of estimates
Notes

All deaths from the war
about 500,000 or fewer (older claims of 1 million)
Excluding many deaths from hunger and disease

Killings behind Nationalist lines during the war
from under 50,000 to about 200,000; many recent estimates 100,000–150,000
Organised and approved by rebel authorities

Killings behind Republican lines
roughly 38,000 to 55,000
Mostly in the first months, including more than 6,000 priests, monks and nuns

Executions after the war, to the mid-1940s
about 20,000 to 50,000
Through military courts

Refugees who crossed into France in early 1939
roughly 450,000 to 500,000
Many interned in camps on the beaches

Both sides killed civilians in their rear zones. Most historians, as Britannica summarises, conclude that Republican violence was concentrated in the early chaos, before the government re-established control, while Nationalist killing was a deliberate policy of terror and continued long after the war, and that the Nationalist toll was higher. Francoist accounts, for decades the only permitted version inside Spain, presented the war as a crusade to save Christian Spain from a "red terror". Exiled Republicans presented it as the defence of an elected government against a fascist coup. Both had their dead to point to.

Part 10 — Franco's Spain (1939–1975)
Victory, not peace
Franco did not offer reconciliation. His regime was a military dictatorship with one legal party (the Falange, merged with other right-wing groups), one official trade union, and a Church restored to its privileges. The statutes of autonomy were abolished, and public use of Catalan, Basque and Galician was suppressed. Under the Law of Political Responsibilities, people could be punished for having supported the Republic since 1934. Tens of thousands were executed, hundreds of thousands passed through prisons, camps and labour battalions, and around half a million had fled abroad. Among the exiles were the poet Antonio Machado, who died just over the French border weeks after crossing it, and the Catalan president Lluís Companys, handed back by the Gestapo and shot in Barcelona in 1940.
The economy suffered too. Franco tried self-sufficiency, autarquía: state control, rationing and import substitution. The 1940s are remembered as los años del hambre, the years of hunger. According to the Maddison Project, Spain's output per person did not regain its 1929 level until the mid-1950s.
The Second World War and the Cold War
Franco owed his victory to Hitler and Mussolini, and in 1940 he met Hitler at Hendaye, on the French border, to discuss entering the war. He asked a high price (much of French North Africa) and did not join. Spain sent a volunteer force, the Blue Division, to fight beside the Germans against the Soviet Union, and supplied Germany with minerals, but stayed officially out of the war. After 1945 the victorious Allies shunned the regime, and Spain was kept out of the new United Nations.
The regime dressed itself for the new world. In 1947 a Law of Succession, approved by referendum, declared Spain a kingdom again, with Franco as head of state for life and the right to name the future king. There was no king yet; there would not be one until Franco died.
The Cold War rescued Franco. An anticommunist dictatorship looked useful to Washington. In 1953 Spain signed a concordat with the Vatican and the Pact of Madrid with the United States, which allowed American bases in exchange for aid. In 1955 Spain joined the United Nations.
Outside Madrid, near El Escorial, the regime built its monument to the war: the Valley of the Fallen, a vast basilica cut into a mountain beneath a giant cross, built in part by Republican prisoners and opened in 1959. Franco was buried there in 1975. Few places in Spain are argued over more.
The "miracle"
By the late 1950s the economy was close to bankruptcy. Franco let a new team of technocrats, several linked to the Catholic organisation Opus Dei, take over economic policy. Their Stabilisation Plan of 1959 opened Spain to foreign trade and investment. What followed was one of the fastest booms in the world.

Spain's economy under Franco
GDP per person (2011 int'l $)
As % of France's

1929
$4,169
56%

1939
$2,881
38%

1950
$3,459
42%

1960
$5,032
43%

1975
$12,613
61%

Maddison Project Database 2023. Between 1960 and 1975, output per person grew by about 6 percent a year.
Three forces drove it. Northern European tourists poured into the Mediterranean coast. Huge numbers of Spaniards moved from the poor countryside of Andalusia, Extremadura and Castile to Madrid, Barcelona and the Basque Country, and many more went abroad to work in France, Germany and Switzerland, sending money home. And foreign companies built factories behind tariff walls: the SEAT 600, a small car built under Fiat licence, became the symbol of a family's first taste of prosperity.
Defenders of Franco's record point to this growth, to the forty years without war, and to a modern middle class that would later make democracy possible. Critics answer that the boom came after the regime abandoned its own economic policies; that similar growth happened in democratic neighbours; that it was paid for by emigrants and by workers without free unions; and that nothing excuses the repression. Both points can be true at once, and Spain still argues about the balance.
The regime's last years
Society changed faster than the regime. Students and workers began to organise illegally, with clandestine unions (the Workers' Commissions, CCOO), strikes and protests. The Catholic Church, after the Second Vatican Council, started to distance itself. In the Basque Country a new group, ETA (Euskadi Ta Askatasuna, "Basque Homeland and Freedom"), founded in 1959, turned to violence; its first deliberate killing came in 1968. In 1969 Franco named Prince Juan Carlos de Borbón, grandson of Alfonso XIII, as his successor, expecting him to continue the regime. In December 1973 ETA killed Franco's prime minister and closest ally, Admiral Luis Carrero Blanco, with a bomb that threw his car over a building in Madrid.
Franco died in bed on 20 November 1975, after a long illness. Two days later Juan Carlos was proclaimed king. Almost nobody knew what he would do.

Part 11 — The Transition and the new democracy (1975–2008)
Reform, not rupture
The king's first government changed little. In July 1976 he appointed a 43-year-old former official of the regime's own party, Adolfo Suárez, as prime minister. The opposition was disappointed. Suárez then did what few expected. He persuaded the Francoist parliament to pass a Law for Political Reform that created an elected two-chamber parliament, in effect voting itself out of existence, and put it to a referendum in December 1976, which approved it overwhelmingly. Political parties were legalised, including, in April 1977, the Communist Party, a move that enraged much of the army. Exiles came home.
The transition was not peaceful, whatever its later reputation. ETA's deadliest years were 1978 to 1980, just as democracy was being built; in January 1977 far-right gunmen burst into a labour lawyers' office on Atocha street in Madrid and murdered five people, three lawyers, a law student and an office worker; and the threat of a military coup hung over everything.
On 15 June 1977 Spain held its first free general election in 41 years. Suárez's centrist coalition, the UCD, won, with Felipe González's Socialists second. The new parliament passed an amnesty law in October 1977, freeing political prisoners and, at the same time, shielding the officials of the dictatorship from prosecution. That same month, the government and the opposition signed the Moncloa Pacts, a deal on wages and economic reform to fight high inflation.
The Constitution of 1978
Seven deputies from across the spectrum, the "fathers of the constitution", drafted a new text by consensus: centrists, a socialist, a communist, a conservative ex-minister of Franco, and a Catalan nationalist. Voters approved it in a referendum on 6 December 1978, now a national holiday. In 2026 the Congress of Deputies marked it with an exhibition titled, simply, "our longest-lived constitution".

The Constitution of 1978

Form of state
Parliamentary monarchy; the king reigns but does not govern

Unity and diversity
Founded on "the indissoluble unity of the Spanish Nation", while recognising the right to autonomy of its "nationalities and regions"

Territorial design
The "State of the Autonomies": 17 autonomous communities and two autonomous cities (Ceuta and Melilla)

Rights
Broad civil and social rights; death penalty abolished (except under military law in wartime, later removed)

Religion
No state religion, but cooperation with the Catholic Church and other faiths

Languages
Castilian is the official language of the state; other languages co-official in their communities

The deliberate ambiguity of "nationalities" was the price of consensus: Catalan and Basque nationalists could read it as recognition that they were nations; Spanish centralists could read it as nothing of the kind. Much of the politics of the next half-century has been a fight over what that word means.
23-F and after
Suárez resigned in January 1981, worn out by his own party's divisions. On 23 February, during the vote to install his successor, Leopoldo Calvo-Sotelo, came Tejero's assault on Congress, described at the start of this history. The coup's real leaders were senior generals, Jaime Milans del Bosch in Valencia and Alfonso Armada, a former close aide of the king. When Juan Carlos refused to back them and ordered the army to obey the constitution, the plot collapsed. The plotters were tried and imprisoned. The king's conduct that night won him the loyalty of many Spaniards who had no particular love of monarchy; his later reputation would fall a long way.
In October 1982 the Socialists won a landslide, and Felipe González governed until 1996. That a party defeated in the Civil War could take power peacefully, and that the army accepted it, is often taken as the moment the transition ended.
Joining Europe
González took Spain into the European Economic Community, which it joined on 1 January 1986 together with Portugal. Spain had joined NATO in 1982; after promising to take it out, González instead campaigned to stay in and won a referendum in 1986. EU structural funds paid for motorways and high-speed trains; in 1992, Barcelona hosted the Olympic Games and Seville a World Expo, and Spain showed the world a country that seemed to have reinvented itself in fifteen years. It introduced divorce and a limited abortion law in the 1980s, built a universal national health system, and decentralised power to the regions.
The González years ended in scandal: corruption cases and, worst of all, the revelation that officials had organised death squads, the GAL, which killed suspected ETA members and some innocent people in the 1980s. The conservative People's Party (PP) under José María Aznar won in 1996, privatised state companies, met the criteria to join the euro from its launch in 1999, and presided over a long boom.
11-M
Aznar backed the US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003, against the views of most Spaniards. On 11 March 2004, three days before a general election, bombs planted by a jihadist cell exploded on four commuter trains in Madrid, killing 193 people. The government insisted for days that ETA was responsible; when the evidence pointed to jihadists, angry voters turned against it, and the Socialists under José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero won. Zapatero withdrew Spanish troops from Iraq and passed a series of social laws, among them, in 2005, the legalisation of same-sex marriage, making Spain the third country in the world to do so, after the Netherlands and Belgium, and in 2007 the Law of Historical Memory, which condemned the dictatorship and helped families search for the bodies of relatives in mass graves.
Throughout this period, ETA kept killing: politicians, police officers, soldiers, journalists and bystanders. Between 1968 and 2010 it killed 829 people. In October 2011 it announced the definitive end of its armed campaign, and in May 2018 it dissolved itself.

Part 12 — Crisis, Catalonia and Spain in 2026 (2008–2026)
The bubble bursts
In the 2000s Spain built houses as no European country ever had, financed by cheap euro-denominated credit, and its savings banks lent freely to developers. When the global financial crisis hit in 2008, the bubble burst. Construction collapsed, and so did employment.

Spain's unemployment rate

Q1 2013 (peak)
27.2% (6.2 million people)

Q3 2026
10.18% (2.6 million)

INE, Encuesta de Población Activa (Labour Force Survey), as published for each quarter.
In 2012 the eurozone agreed a package of up to €100 billion to recapitalise Spain's banks, and the PP government of Mariano Rajoy, elected with an absolute majority in November 2011, cut spending and raised taxes. Output per person fell by about 7 percent between 2007 and 2013. A generation of young Spaniards, many with degrees, emigrated or stayed home with their parents.
The crisis broke the two-party system. On 15 May 2011, protesters occupied Madrid's Puerta del Sol and squares across the country: the Indignados or 15-M movement, angry at unemployment, corruption and politicians who "don't represent us". From it came Podemos, founded in 2014 on the radical left; at the same time a liberal party, Ciudadanos, rose in the centre, and later, from 2018–2019, the nationalist, anti-immigration right-wing party Vox became the first party of the hard right to win seats in parliament since the early 1980s. In 2014, King Juan Carlos, damaged by scandals including an elephant-hunting trip in Botswana during the crisis, abdicated in favour of his son, who became Felipe VI on 19 June 2014.
In June 2018 a court ruling on a PP corruption case led to the first successful motion of no confidence in Spain's democratic history, and the Socialist leader Pedro Sánchez became prime minister. He has governed ever since, in minority governments and from 2020 in coalition with parties to his left, through the Covid pandemic and repeated elections, often depending on the votes of Catalan and Basque nationalists.
Catalonia, 2017
Catalonia, with about 8 million people, its own language, its own institutions and a strong economy, has always had a distinct identity inside Spain. For decades most Catalan nationalists sought more autonomy, not independence. Three things changed that. In 2006, Catalonia approved a new statute of autonomy that described Catalonia as a nation; in 2010, after a challenge by the PP, the Constitutional Court struck down or reinterpreted parts of it, which many Catalans experienced as a breach of a pact. The economic crisis made many feel that Catalonia was paying for the rest of Spain. And from 2012, huge peaceful demonstrations on the Diada turned support for independence into a mass movement.
On 1 October 2017 the Catalan government held a referendum on independence that the Constitutional Court had suspended and the Spanish government declared illegal. National police tried to stop the voting, and images of officers baton-charging voters went around the world. The Catalan government reported that about 2.3 million people had voted, roughly 43 percent of the electorate, and that 90 percent had voted yes; most opponents of independence had boycotted the vote, and there was no independent oversight of the count. On 27 October the Catalan parliament declared independence. The same day, the Spanish Senate authorised the government to apply Article 155 of the Constitution: Madrid dismissed the Catalan government, dissolved the Catalan parliament and called new regional elections. The Catalan president, Carles Puigdemont, left for Belgium. In the elections of December 2017, pro-independence parties again won a majority of seats (70 of 135), though not of votes.
How each side sees it:

The independence movement: Catalonia is a nation, with its own language and a history of lost liberties going back to 1714. It sought an agreed referendum, as Scotland had in 2014, and was refused. The vote of 1 October was a peaceful exercise of democracy met with police violence, and the leaders later jailed were political prisoners.
Spanish governments and unionists: the Constitution, approved in 1978 by more than 90 percent of Catalan voters, places sovereignty in the Spanish people as a whole; no region can secede by itself. The Catalan government's laws for the referendum were passed in a rushed session that overrode its own parliament's rules and the minority's rights. The vote had no electoral roll or independent oversight. Roughly half of Catalans, by every count, did not want independence, and hundreds of thousands of them marched for unity in Barcelona days after the vote.
Those in between: many Catalans, including the Catalan Socialists and parts of the left, opposed both the unilateral declaration and the police response, and argued for dialogue, a federal reform or an agreed vote.

The aftermath went through the courts and then through politics. In October 2019, Spain's Supreme Court sentenced nine leaders to between 9 and 13 years for sedition and other crimes. In 2021 the Sánchez government pardoned them. After the 2023 general election, Sánchez needed the votes of Puigdemont's party, Junts, to stay in power, and in exchange passed an amnesty law in 2024 for those involved in the independence process, which his opponents called a bargain for power and his supporters a step toward reconciliation. In the Catalan elections of May 2024, the Catalan Socialists came first and the pro-independence parties lost their majority for the first time in more than a decade; in August 2024 Salvador Illa became Catalonia's president. Puigdemont, still living in Belgium, remained outside the amnesty's full protection while the courts argued over the embezzlement charges against him. The question has not gone away, but in 2026 it is quieter than at any time since 2012.
Spain in 2026
Spain entered the mid-2020s with an economy that had recovered from the crisis, driven by tourism, services and immigration, and an unemployment rate that, though still high by European standards, had fallen to about 10 percent, less than half its 2013 peak. Its population reached a record 49.8 million on 1 July 2026, according to the INE, and more than 10.2 million of those residents were born abroad; in the second quarter of 2026 the largest groups of new arrivals were Colombians, Venezuelans and Moroccans. Almost all of Spain's recent population growth has come from immigration. In July 2026 its football team won the World Cup, beating France in the semi-final and Argentina in the final.
2026 was also a year of shocks. In January a high-speed rail collision near Adamuz, in Andalusia, killed 46 people. Over the summer a mass crossing of migrants into the North African enclave of Ceuta set off a crisis with Morocco and a fierce domestic argument. Rents and house prices became the country's central political issue, and housing protests filled the streets in the autumn. When the coalition's housing laws were voted down, by the right and the far right and without the support of Junts, Sánchez dissolved parliament: by Royal Decree 806/2026 of 5 October, a general election was called for 29 November 2026. Then, on 28 October, two high-speed trains collided near Urda, in the province of Toledo, killing at least 69 people, Europe's deadliest rail accident since a derailment near Santiago de Compostela in 2013. The campaign began, as the Guardian put it, in a country "deep in shock and grief", with Sánchez also facing corruption investigations around his family and inner circle, and the PP and Vox competing over how hard to attack him.

Part 13 — How to understand Spain today
Key dates

Date
Event

c. 1.4–1.1 million years ago
Oldest human face in western Europe, Atapuerca

at least 35,600 years ago
Oldest dated sign in Altamira

c. 1100 BC (tradition)
Phoenicians found Gadir (Cádiz)

218 BC
Rome arrives

19 BC
Roman conquest complete

589
Visigoths become Catholic

711
Muslim conquest

929
Caliphate of Córdoba proclaimed

1031
Caliphate collapses into taifas

1085
Castile takes Toledo

1212
Las Navas de Tolosa

1469
Isabella and Ferdinand marry

1478
Spanish Inquisition authorised

2 January 1492
Fall of Granada

31 March 1492
Edict expelling the Jews

12 October 1492
Columbus reaches the Americas

1516
Charles I, first Habsburg king

1588
The Armada

1605
Don Quixote, part I

1609–1614
Expulsion of the moriscos

1700–1714
War of the Spanish Succession; Bourbons take the throne

2 May 1808
Madrid rises against the French

19 March 1812
Constitution of Cádiz

1898
Loss of Cuba, Puerto Rico and the Philippines

14 April 1931
Second Republic proclaimed

17–18 July 1936
Military coup; Civil War begins

1 April 1939
Franco declares the war over

1959
Stabilisation Plan; ETA founded

20 November 1975
Franco dies

15 June 1977
First free elections since 1936

6 December 1978
Constitution approved by referendum

23 February 1981
Coup attempt (23-F)

1 January 1986
Spain joins the European Communities

11 March 2004
Madrid train bombings

2008–2013
Financial crisis; unemployment peaks

19 June 2014
Felipe VI becomes king

1 October 2017
Catalan independence referendum

2018
First successful no-confidence motion; ETA dissolves

29 November 2026
Snap general election

Who's who

Person
Lived
Why they matter

Abd al-Rahman III
891–961
First caliph of Córdoba, ruler at al-Andalus's height

Averroes (Ibn Rushd)
1126–1198
Córdoban philosopher whose Aristotle commentaries shaped Christian Europe

Maimonides
1138–1204
Córdoban Jewish philosopher, physician and legal scholar

El Cid (Rodrigo Díaz)
c. 1043–1099
Castilian warrior, hero of Spain's first epic

Alfonso X
1221–1284
"The Wise"; law, science and the Castilian language

Isabella I and Ferdinand II
1451–1504 / 1452–1516
The Catholic Monarchs

Charles I (Emperor Charles V)
1500–1558
Ruler of the first global empire

Philip II
1527–1598
Its most powerful and most burdened king

Miguel de Cervantes
1547–1616
Author of Don Quixote

Diego Velázquez
1599–1660
Painter of Las Meninas

Francisco de Goya
1746–1828
Painter of the war of 1808 and its horrors

Clara Campoamor
1888–1972
Won Spanish women the vote

Manuel Azaña
1880–1940
Leading figure of the Second Republic; died in exile

Francisco Franco
1892–1975
Dictator, 1939–1975

Juan Carlos I
b. 1938
King 1975–2014; backed the transition and stopped 23-F; abdicated amid scandals

Adolfo Suárez
1932–2014
Prime minister who dismantled the dictatorship from within

Felipe González
b. 1942
Socialist prime minister, 1982–1996

Carles Puigdemont
b. 1962
Catalan president who declared independence in 2017

Pedro Sánchez
b. 1972
Prime minister since 2018

Felipe VI
b. 1968
King since 2014

Five ideas that unlock the country
1. Spain is plural, and has never fully settled how plural. From the Iberians and Celts to the Crowns of Castile and Aragon to the seventeen autonomous communities, the peninsula's regions have repeatedly had their own languages, laws and loyalties. Catalan, Basque and Galician are spoken by millions. The Constitution's balancing of "the indissoluble unity of the Spanish Nation" with the autonomy of "nationalities and regions" is a truce, not a final answer, and every Spanish government must manage it.
2. Religion shaped the state, then the state broke with religion. Spain was built in 1492 on religious unity enforced by expulsion and the Inquisition, and Catholicism was the official faith for most of its history, including under Franco. Today the Constitution says that no faith shall have the character of a state religion, Spain was the third country in the world to legalise same-sex marriage (2005), and it legalised euthanasia in 2021. Few countries have moved so far, so fast.
3. The past is not past: the argument over memory. The transition of 1975–1982 worked partly through an informal "pact of forgetting": no trials, no truth commission, amnesty for all. Its defenders say it bought peace and democracy at a moment when the army could have crushed both. Its critics say it left tens of thousands of murdered Republicans in unmarked graves and let the dictatorship off the hook. The Historical Memory Law of 2007, under whose rules Franco's remains were moved out of his monumental tomb in 2019, and the Democratic Memory Law of 2022, which renamed the Valley of the Fallen as the Valley of Cuelgamuros and commits the state to searching for the missing, are cherished by one side and condemned by the other as reopening wounds.
4. Spain looks two ways: to Europe and to the Americas. Joining the European Communities in 1986 was the seal of its return to democracy. But Spanish is spoken by hundreds of millions of people in the Americas, and Colombians and Venezuelans are now among the largest groups of new arrivals in Spain. A history that begins in Iberian caves runs, through 1492, straight into Bogotá, Lima and Mexico City.
5. Booms and busts are a pattern. American silver, then bankruptcy; the 1960s miracle, then the 1970s oil shocks; the euro boom, then 27 percent unemployment. Spain's economy is now more diverse and its banks better regulated, but its dependence on tourism and construction, and its housing crisis, show that the pattern has not been fully broken.

Spain is a country that turned a civil war into a democracy by agreeing not to settle its arguments, only to stop killing over them. Nearly fifty years later, it is still arguing. That is not a failure. It is what democracy is supposed to look like.

The takeaway
Spain is one of the oldest inhabited places in Europe and one of the youngest democracies in the West. A peninsula of many peoples was unified by Rome, divided by the conquest of 711, slowly conquered by Christian kingdoms, forged into a single, Catholic monarchy in 1492 and, within a generation, made the centre of a global empire. It lost that empire over three centuries, lived through a nineteenth century of civil wars and coups, a brief democratic Republic, a devastating civil war and nearly four decades of dictatorship, and then built, by negotiation, a democracy that has survived a coup, terrorism, a deep economic crisis and an attempted secession. The questions it argues about today, how to hold together nations within a nation, how to remember the Civil War, and how to keep its booms from turning into busts, are the oldest in its history.
Try this: next time you hear Spanish, pick one word and trace it. Aceite (oil) and alcalde (mayor) are Arabic; Gibraltar is "the mountain of Tariq"; guerrilla left Spain for every language in 1808; liberal was born in Cádiz in 1812. Each word is a layer of the history above. If you visit Spain, stand in the Mezquita of Córdoba, where a Renaissance cathedral sits inside an eighth-century mosque, and ask yourself which story the building is telling.

Sources & Further Reading
Sources
- UNESCO World Heritage Centre, "Archaeological Site of Atapuerca" and "Cave of Altamira and Paleolithic Cave Art of Northern Spain" (inscription 1985, extension 2008); a 2025 paper in Nature on the Sima del Elefante face (1.4–1.1 million years); Bermúdez de Castro et al., Science 276 (1997), naming Homo antecessor; Pike et al., Science 336 (2012), uranium-series dates for Altamira and El Castillo (via PubMed).
- Enciclopedia Treccani, "Spagna" (history sections, updated to October 2026), for the chronology from Roman Hispania to 2026; "Visigoti" for the Visigothic kingdom; "Cordova" for the mosque-cathedral; "Inquisizione" for the Spanish Inquisition (1478–1834).
- NATO, "Spain and NATO" (accession 1982, referendum 1986); Boletín Oficial del Estado texts of the Constitution of 1978 and of the laws cited (amnesty 1977, national day 1987, same-sex marriage 2005, Historical Memory 2007, Sephardic nationality 2015, euthanasia 2021, Democratic Memory 2022, amnesty 2024); Reina Sofía museum, Guernica collection notes.
- Encyclopaedia Britannica, "Spanish Civil War" (revised October 2026): dates, foreign intervention, International Brigades, overall death toll, and the character of the two terrors. Ranges of repression and exile follow the historians named there and in the scholarly literature (Paul Preston, Julián Casanova, Hugh Thomas, Stanley Payne, Antonio Montero Moreno).
- Maddison Project Database 2023 (University of Groningen): population and GDP per person, 1500–2022.
- Instituto Nacional de Estadística (INE): Labour Force Survey for Q1 2013 and Q3 2026; Estadística Continua de Población, 1 July 2026.
- Boletín Oficial del Estado, Real Decreto 806/2026, de 5 de octubre (dissolution of the Cortes and election of 29 November 2026); La Moncloa, list of prime ministers since 1978.
- The Guardian, reporting of 19 July 2026 (World Cup final), 29–30 October 2026 (Urda and Adamuz rail collisions; the election campaign).
- Expulsion of the Jews and of the moriscos: estimates as summarised in the scholarly literature (Joseph Pérez; Henri Lapeyre; Trevor Dadson), and the library's own Al-Ándalus y la Herencia Árabe en el Español.
Go deeper
- 📘 Spain: A Unique History — Stanley G. Payne (a compact, opinionated single-volume history by a leading historian of modern Spain)
- 📘 Imperial Spain, 1469–1716 — J. H. Elliott (the classic account of the empire's rise and troubles)
- 📘 The Spanish Civil War: Reaction, Revolution and Revenge — Paul Preston (the best short history of the war, by its leading British historian; read with Payne for a different emphasis)
- 📘 The Ornament of the World — María Rosa Menocal (the most-read case for al-Andalus as a culture of coexistence; pair it with its critics, such as Darío Fernández-Morera's The Myth of the Andalusian Paradise)
- 📘 Ghosts of Spain — Giles Tremlett (a journalist's travels through modern Spain's memory of the Civil War and Franco)
- 🌐 Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía (home of Picasso's Guernica)
- 🌐 Related pieces in this library: España: Historia Condensada; Al-Ándalus y la Herencia Árabe en el Español; 1492: El Choque de Dos Mundos; Si Hubiera Nacido en España; A Brief History of France (this series)


A Brief History of France: Caves, Kings, Revolutions, and the Republic That Keeps Arguing
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How a patchwork of Gaulish peoples became Europe's most centralised kingdom, overthrew it, and spent the next two centuries trying out empires and republics, and why the French still take to the streets to decide what their Revolution meant.

Follows: France: A Condensed History of Revolution, Republic, and Grandeur
Companion pieces: If I Was Born in France: La Laïcité, Baguettes, and the Art of Deconnexion (what daily life feels like now; this is how it got that way), and, in this series, A Brief History of Spain, the neighbour across the Pyrenees whose history keeps crossing this one.
On Saturday 31 October 2026, in Lyon, a protester dressed as Marie Antoinette held up a placard that read "Give them brioche". It was the third weekend in a row that hundreds of thousands of people had marched across France. The movement had started in mid-September with high school students protesting about leaking roofs, missing teachers and classrooms without enough chairs. Trade unions, parents and a revived "yellow vest" movement had joined them. Two weeks earlier, the fringes of the marches had turned into some of the worst rioting in years, and the president, Emmanuel Macron, six months from the end of his last term, was more isolated than ever.
The placard was a joke that every French person understood. The line it twisted, "let them eat brioche", is pinned on Marie Antoinette as the perfect symbol of a royal court that did not understand hunger. She almost certainly never said it: Jean-Jacques Rousseau put a version of it in the mouth of an unnamed "great princess" in his Confessions, written when the future queen was still a child in Vienna. But the joke worked because, in France, every protest is measured against 1789. The motto, the flag, the anthem, the words "left" and "right", even the habit of settling arguments in the street, all come from the Revolution.
The condensed history in this library tells that story in ten minutes. This is the long version.
In this history

Before France: painted caves, standing stones and the Gauls (to 58 BC)
Roman Gaul and the kingdom of the Franks (58 BC–987)
The Capetian kings, the Hundred Years' War and Joan of Arc (987–1483)
Renaissance and the Wars of Religion (1483–1610)
The Sun King, the Enlightenment and the crisis of the old regime (1610–1789)
The Revolution, part one: from the Estates-General to the end of the monarchy (1789–1792)
The Revolution, part two: Republic, Terror and Directory (1792–1799)
Napoleon, and a century of kings, revolutions and empire (1799–1870)
The Third Republic (1870–1914)
Two world wars and Vichy (1914–1945)
Rebuilding, decolonisation and de Gaulle's Fifth Republic (1945–1969)
From Pompidou to Macron, and France in 2026 (1969–2026)
How to understand France today

Part 1 — Before France: painted caves, standing stones and the Gauls (to 58 BC)
France is a country the French like to call l'Hexagone, the hexagon, for the rough six-sided shape of its mainland: three sides of sea (the Channel, the Atlantic, the Mediterranean) and three of land, guarded in the south by the Pyrenees and in the east by the Alps and the Jura, with the Rhine on the northeast. Only one side, the northeast, is open plain, and that is the side from which most of its invasions have come. Inside, the land is generous: wide river basins (the Seine, the Loire, the Garonne, the Rhône), good soils and a mild climate. For most of European history this was western Europe's most populous country, and that simple fact explains much of its power.
The painted caves
The deep past of France is written on cave walls. Two caves in particular changed how the world thinks about early human beings.
The first is Lascaux, in the Dordogne. On 12 September 1940, a few months after the German army had overrun France, four teenagers exploring a hole in the ground near Montignac slid down into a cave whose walls were covered with horses, bulls, deer and strange signs. The French culture ministry dates the paintings to about 21,000 years ago; radiocarbon dates from the cave, once calibrated, spread across roughly 18,000 to 23,500 years. Lascaux opened to the public after the war and became so popular that the breath and bacteria of visitors began to damage the paintings. It was closed, and replicas took its place: Lascaux II in 1983, a travelling Lascaux III in 2012, and the full-scale Lascaux IV in 2016.
The second is Chauvet, in the gorge of the Ardèche. Three cavers, Jean-Marie Chauvet, Éliette Brunel and Christian Hillaire, found it on Sunday 18 December 1994. The ministry calls it one of the oldest decorated Palaeolithic caves in the world. Its lions, rhinoceroses and horses, drawn with a sense of movement and shading that startled the experts, are more than 30,000 years old by most estimates, older than Lascaux by many thousands of years. UNESCO listed it as a World Heritage Site in 2014.
Farmers and standing stones
Farming reached what is now France from two directions, along the Mediterranean coast and up the Danube and Rhine, some seven or eight thousand years ago. Its most famous monuments are in Brittany, where at Carnac thousands of standing stones march in long rows across the fields, raised in the fourth and third millennia BC by people who left no writing. Megalithic tombs (dolmens) are scattered across much of the country.
Greeks and Gauls
In about 600 BC, Greek settlers from Phocaea, in Asia Minor, founded Massalia, today's Marseille, often called France's oldest city. From it, Greek goods, wine and the habit of writing spread up the Rhône. (Its colonists in turn founded Emporion in Catalonia, which the Spain history in this series describes.)
Most of the land, though, belonged to the peoples the Romans called Galli, the Gauls. They were Celtic-speaking peoples, divided into dozens of tribes, some of them very large, who lived by farming, herding and trade. By the second and first centuries BC many lived in fortified hill towns, oppida, struck their own coins, and traded wine and metal with the Mediterranean. Their religious and legal experts, the druids, taught orally, so most of what we know about them comes from their enemies.

Peoples of Gaul in Caesar's day
Where
What we know

Belgae
The north, between the Seine and the Rhine
Caesar called them the bravest of the Gauls

Celtae (Gauls proper)
The centre, from the Seine to the Garonne
The largest group; tribes such as the Arverni, Aedui and Parisii

Aquitani
The southwest, between the Garonne and the Pyrenees
Related to the ancestors of the Basques

Greek cities
The Mediterranean coast
Massalia (Marseille) and its colonies

Roman Provincia
The south, from the Alps to the Pyrenees
Already Roman before Caesar came; still called Provence

Julius Caesar began his famous account of his wars with the words "All Gaul is divided into three parts". He meant the Belgae, the Celtae and the Aquitani, but the line has become shorthand for something truer: there was no "Gaul" as a nation. There were peoples who shared a language family and a religion and who fought each other as readily as they fought Rome. The schoolbook phrase "our ancestors the Gauls", taught in the nineteenth century from Brittany to Algeria, says more about the nineteenth century than about the Gauls. France's ancestors also include Greeks, Romans, Franks, Goths, Vikings, Bretons, Basques and, in modern times, millions of immigrants.
Rome already held the south, its Provincia. The rest of Gaul was independent, rich and divided, and an ambitious Roman governor was about to notice.

Part 2 — Roman Gaul and the kingdom of the Franks (58 BC–987)
Caesar and Vercingetorix
In 58 BC Julius Caesar, governor of the Roman province, used a migration of the Helvetii from what is now Switzerland as his reason to march into free Gaul. Over the next eight years he conquered all of it, tribe by tribe, playing them against one another. In 52 BC the Gauls finally united behind a young noble of the Arverni, from what is now the Auvergne: Vercingetorix. He beat Caesar at Gergovia, but was then besieged in the hill town of Alesia, in Burgundy. Caesar built a double ring of walls, one facing in and one facing out, and held off a huge Gaulish relief army. Vercingetorix surrendered. He was kept prisoner in Rome for six years, displayed in Caesar's triumph in 46 BC, and then executed.
Vercingetorix became a national hero only in the nineteenth century, when Napoleon III paid for excavations at Alesia: a defeated rebel who stood for a nation that loses battles but not its spirit.
Gallo-Roman civilisation
What followed was five centuries of Roman rule, and, as in Spain, one of the most thoroughly Roman places in the empire.

Cities. Rome founded or rebuilt towns across Gaul. Lugdunum, Lyon, became the capital of the Three Gauls; Nîmes kept its temple, the Maison Carrée, and its arena; Arles and Orange their theatres. The aqueduct bridge of the Pont du Gard still stands over the river Gardon.
Language. Latin slowly replaced Gaulish. The French language is spoken Latin, changed over a thousand years, with a few hundred Gaulish words (often for country things) and many more from the Germanic Franks.
Wealth. Gaul exported wine, pottery, grain and wool, and Gaulish nobles became Roman senators.
Religion. Christianity arrived along the trade routes. Christians were martyred at Lyon in the second century; by the fourth century there were bishops in the towns, and Martin of Tours, a former soldier who famously cut his cloak in half to share it with a beggar, became the most popular saint in Gaul.

From the third century onward, Germanic peoples pressed on the Rhine frontier. In the fifth, as the western empire collapsed, they came in to stay: Visigoths in the southwest, Burgundians in the Rhône valley (they gave their name to Burgundy), and Franks in the north.
Clovis and the Franks
The Franks gave France its name. Their greatest early king, Clovis (481–511), united most of their tribes, defeated the last Roman ruler in northern Gaul, and, crucially, became a Catholic Christian, baptised at Reims around the year 500. Most other Germanic kings were Arian Christians, and Clovis's choice made him the ally of the Gallo-Roman bishops and of the Catholic majority. In 507 he defeated and killed the Visigothic king Alaric II at Vouillé, near Poitiers, driving the Visigoths south into Spain. He made Paris his capital.
His dynasty, the Merovingians, divided the kingdom among sons, as Frankish custom required, and fought endlessly. Real power passed to their chief officials, the "mayors of the palace". One of them, Charles Martel, defeated an Umayyad army from al-Andalus near Poitiers in 732. Later writers made the battle the moment Christian Europe was saved; most modern historians see a large raid turned back, important but not world-changing. Charles's son Pepin deposed the last Merovingian in 751 and became king, founding the Carolingian dynasty.
Charlemagne
Pepin's son Charlemagne (king from 768) conquered the Lombards in Italy, the Saxons in Germany, and a frontier zone in Spain. On Christmas Day 800, in Rome, the pope crowned him emperor. His empire stretched from the Ebro to the Elbe. At his court at Aachen, scholars such as the Englishman Alcuin revived Latin learning, copied classical texts, and developed a clear new handwriting, the Carolingian minuscule, which is the ancestor of the lower-case letters you are reading now.
Both France and Germany claim Charlemagne, and both are right. When his grandsons divided the empire by the Treaty of Verdun in 843, the western part, West Francia, became the kingdom of France, and the eastern part the core of Germany.

Dynasties of Francia
Dates
Notable rulers

Merovingians
c. 481–751
Clovis

Carolingians
751–987
Pepin, Charlemagne, Louis the Pious, Charles the Bald

Capetians (with the later branches of Valois and Bourbon)
987–1792, 1814–1848
Hugh Capet, Philip Augustus, Louis IX, Louis XIV

Vikings, lords and the end of the Carolingians
The ninth and tenth centuries brought new invaders, Vikings above all. Kings were too weak to defend everyone, and power passed to local lords who could. In 911 the king granted a Viking leader, Rollo, land at the mouth of the Seine; it became Normandy, the land of the Northmen, whose duke would conquer England in 1066. This was the world of feudalism, of lords and vassals bound by oaths, and of peasants bound to the land.
In 987 the great nobles chose as king Hugh Capet, count of Paris. Nobody at the time could have guessed that his family, in one branch or another, would reign for most of the next eight centuries.

Part 3 — The Capetian kings, the Hundred Years' War and Joan of Arc (987–1483)
Small kings, long luck
The first Capetians ruled directly only a small territory around Paris and Orléans, the Île-de-France. Many of their vassals, such as the dukes of Normandy and Aquitaine, were richer and stronger than they were. But the Capetians had two great assets. They had the sacred aura of anointed kings, crowned at Reims. And they had extraordinary luck: for more than three centuries, every king left a son to succeed him. Slowly they turned a title into a state.
Their great problem was the dynasty across the Channel. From 1154 the Plantagenet kings of England, through inheritance and marriage (above all Henry II's marriage to Eleanor of Aquitaine), held more of France than the French king did, from Normandy to the Pyrenees. Philip II Augustus (1180–1223) took most of it back: he seized Normandy from King John in 1204, and on 27 July 1214, at Bouvines, beat a coalition of John's allies and the German emperor.
Cathedrals, crusades and a saint king
The twelfth and thirteenth centuries were a time of growth. The population rose, forests were cleared, towns and fairs flourished. In the abbey church of Saint-Denis, north of Paris, the abbot Suger began in the 1140s to build in a new style, with pointed arches, ribbed vaults and huge windows; we call it Gothic, but at the time it was called opus francigenum, "French work". Chartres, Notre-Dame de Paris, Reims and Amiens followed.
The same age was harsh to dissent. In the south, the Cathars, Christians whom the Church judged heretics, were strong around Toulouse and Albi. In 1209 the pope launched the Albigensian Crusade against them; twenty years of massacres ended with the south absorbed into the French crown.
Louis IX (1226–1270) was the model of the Christian king: just, pious, generous to the poor, and a crusader who died of disease besieging Tunis. He was made a saint in 1297, and "Saint Louis" became the ideal against which later kings were judged. He also persecuted Jews and had the Talmud burned.
His grandson Philip IV the Fair (1285–1314) was the first ruler of a recognisably modern state, run by lawyers. He quarrelled with Pope Boniface VIII, whom his agents seized at Anagni in 1303; and called the first assemblies of the three orders of society, the clergy, the nobility and the towns, which later became the Estates-General. From 1309, popes lived not in Rome but at Avignon, on the Rhône, under French influence, until 1376.
The Hundred Years' War
In 1328 the direct Capetian line finally ran out of sons. The French barons chose a cousin, Philip VI of Valois. But the king of England, Edward III, was the dead king's nephew through his mother, and in 1337 he claimed the French crown. The result was a century of intermittent war.

The Hundred Years' War

1337
Edward III claims the French throne

1346
English victory at Crécy

1348
The Black Death reaches France

1356
English victory at Poitiers; King John II captured

1360
Peace of Brétigny: England gets Aquitaine and Calais

1368–1380
Charles V wins most of it back

1407 onward
Civil war between the Burgundian and Armagnac factions

25 October 1415
Henry V of England wins at Agincourt

1420
Treaty of Troyes: Henry V named heir to the French throne

1428–1429
English siege of Orléans, lifted by Joan of Arc

1435
Peace of Arras: Burgundy makes peace with Charles VII

1453
War ends; England keeps only Calais (lost in 1558)

Fought mostly on French soil by armies that lived off the land, and combined with the Black Death, which arrived in 1348 and kept returning, the war devastated the countryside.
Joan of Arc
By 1429 the English and their Burgundian allies held Paris and the north, and the uncrowned heir, Charles, was penniless south of the Loire. Then a peasant girl from Domrémy, in Lorraine, aged about seventeen, arrived at his court saying that the voices of saints had told her to drive out the English and have him crowned. Joan of Arc was given armour and a place with an army that lifted the siege of Orléans in May 1429. In July she stood beside Charles as he was crowned at Reims.
A year later she was captured by the Burgundians and sold to the English. A Church court at Rouen tried her for heresy, and on 30 May 1431, aged about nineteen, she was burned at the stake. A later trial annulled the verdict in 1456, and the Catholic Church made her a saint in 1920.

Joan of Arc has been claimed by almost every French camp: by Catholics as a saint, by republicans as a daughter of the people betrayed by the powerful, by the far right as the symbol of a nation defending itself against foreigners, and by feminists as a young woman who led men and was killed for wearing their clothes.

Louis XI and the making of a kingdom
The war's end left a stronger monarchy. Charles VII created the first permanent royal army and a permanent tax to pay for it. His son Louis XI (1461–1483), "the universal spider", outlasted his great rival, Charles the Bold of Burgundy, killed in battle in 1477, and took much of his land. By the time Louis died, the kingdom had nearly its modern outline in the centre and west, and its king was one of the strongest in Europe.

Part 4 — Renaissance and the Wars of Religion (1483–1610)
Italy, and a king of the Renaissance
In 1494 King Charles VIII marched into Italy to claim the kingdom of Naples. It was the start of the Italian Wars (1494–1559), sixty-five years of fighting, mostly against the Spanish and Habsburg rulers whose story is told in the Spain history. France lost the wars but won something else: the Italian Renaissance.
Its great patron was Francis I (1515–1547). He brought Italian artists to his châteaux on the Loire, among them Leonardo da Vinci, who spent his last years at Amboise and died there in 1519, leaving the Mona Lisa in France. Francis rebuilt the Louvre and Fontainebleau, founded the lecturers' college that became the Collège de France, and made a deal with the pope in 1516, the Concordat of Bologna, that let French kings choose their own bishops. And in August 1539, by the Ordinance of Villers-Cotterêts, he ordered that legal acts and official documents be written in French rather than Latin. Parts of it are still in force, the oldest French legislation still used by the courts.
Francis also spent most of his reign fighting the emperor Charles V, who surrounded France on almost every side. He was captured at the battle of Pavia in 1525 and held in Madrid. To break the encirclement he did something that shocked Christian Europe: he allied with the Ottoman sultan Suleiman.
The Reformation comes to France
The Protestant Reformation reached France in the 1520s. Its most influential leader was a Frenchman, John Calvin, who fled persecution and built his model Protestant city at Geneva. Calvin's ideas spread fast among French nobles, merchants and artisans. French Protestants came to be called Huguenots; by the 1560s they may have been a tenth of the population, concentrated in the south and west, and included some of the greatest noble families.
The kings tried persecution, then compromise. Neither worked. After King Henry II died in a jousting accident in 1559, his widow, Catherine de' Medici, ruled for a series of young, weak sons, and the great Catholic and Protestant noble families fought for control of them.
The Wars of Religion
From 1562 to 1598 France went through eight civil wars between Catholics and Protestants, interrupted by truces that never held.

The Wars of Religion

1562
Massacre of Protestants at Wassy starts the first war

23–24 August 1572
St Bartholomew's Day massacre

1576
The Catholic League is formed

1589
Henry III assassinated; the Protestant Henry of Navarre becomes Henry IV

1593
Henry IV converts to Catholicism

1594
Henry enters Paris

1598
Edict of Nantes; peace with Spain

1610
Henry IV assassinated in Paris

The worst moment came in August 1572. Huguenot nobles had gathered in Paris for the wedding of the king's sister to the Protestant Henry of Navarre. In the night of 23 to 24 August, St Bartholomew's Day, the royal court ordered the killing of the Protestant leaders, beginning with Admiral Gaspard de Coligny. The killing spread through Paris and then to provincial towns. Several thousand people were murdered in Paris; modern estimates for the whole of France vary from about 5,000 to 30,000. In Rome, the pope ordered a Te Deum of thanksgiving.
Henry IV and the Edict of Nantes
By a chain of deaths, the Protestant Henry of Navarre became heir to the throne, and in 1589, when Henry III was assassinated by a Catholic friar, king. Catholic Paris refused him. In 1593 he converted to Catholicism. The line "Paris is well worth a Mass" is attributed to him, probably falsely, but it sums up the bargain. In 1598, by the Edict of Nantes, he gave Protestants freedom of conscience, freedom to worship in many places, equal access to offices, and some fortified towns as security.
The edict was not toleration in the modern sense. It was a peace treaty between two armed communities in one state. But it was one of the first times a major European monarchy accepted that its subjects could, legally, hold two religions. Henry, the "good king Henry" of popular memory, who reportedly wished every peasant a chicken in the pot on Sundays, was stabbed to death in a Paris street in 1610 by a Catholic fanatic, François Ravaillac.

The Wars of Religion taught the French state a lesson it never forgot: that religion, left to itself, could tear the country apart, and that the state must stand above it. Louis XIV would draw one conclusion from that lesson, and the Republic of 1905 the opposite one.

Through the horrors, French writing came of age. Michel de Montaigne, a magistrate from Bordeaux whose family had Catholics and Protestants in it, retired to his tower and wrote his Essays (first published in 1580), a new form for a new kind of thinking: doubtful, personal, tolerant. François Rabelais had already written the giant comic novels of Gargantua and Pantagruel. The French language was ready for its classical age.

Part 5 — The Sun King, the Enlightenment and the crisis of the old regime (1610–1789)
Richelieu
Henry IV's son, Louis XIII, was nine when his father was murdered. The man who made his reign was his chief minister from 1624 to 1642, Cardinal Richelieu. Richelieu had two aims: to make the king obeyed at home and to make France the first power in Europe. At home he besieged and took the Protestant stronghold of La Rochelle (1628), ending the Huguenots' political and military independence, though not yet their freedom of worship; destroyed the castles of nobles who might resist; and sent royal officials, the intendants, into the provinces. He founded the Académie française in 1635 to watch over the French language, which it still does. Abroad, though a cardinal of the Catholic Church, he paid and then joined the Protestant side in the Thirty Years' War against the Catholic Habsburgs of Spain and Austria, because they were France's rivals. Reason of state came first.
The Fronde
When Louis XIII died in 1643, his son Louis XIV was four years old. His mother, Anne of Austria, and the Italian-born Cardinal Mazarin governed for him, and the heavy taxes of war provoked a revolt. The Fronde (1648–1653), named after a children's slingshot game, began with the Paris parlement (the high court) and then drew in the great nobles. The royal family had to flee Paris. The boy king never forgot it.
The Sun King
When Mazarin died in 1661, Louis XIV, aged twenty-two, announced that he would govern without a chief minister. He reigned for seventy-two years in all, from 1643 to 1715, the longest reign in European history for a major monarch, and he gave his name to an age.

Versailles. He turned his father's hunting lodge at Versailles into the largest palace in Europe, and in 1682 moved the court and government there. The great nobles, once rebels, now competed for the honour of handing him his shirt in the morning. The palace was a theatre of power, and the whole of Europe copied it.
The state. His minister Jean-Baptiste Colbert built roads, canals, a navy, and royal manufactures of tapestries, glass and silk, and protected French industry with tariffs. The king's bureaucracy, army and police grew. The famous line "L'État, c'est moi", "I am the state", is almost certainly a later invention, but it describes the theory: the king answered to God alone.
Culture. It was the classical age of French literature: the plays of Molière, Racine and Corneille, the fables of La Fontaine. French became the language of European diplomacy and of the educated classes from Lisbon to St Petersburg.
Empire and slavery. France held colonies in Canada, the Caribbean, and trading posts in Africa and India. In 1685 the crown issued the Code Noir, the law code governing slavery in the French colonies.

One king, one faith
In October 1685, by the Edict of Fontainebleau, Louis XIV revoked the Edict of Nantes. Protestant churches were destroyed, pastors expelled, and Protestants ordered to convert; dragoons were billeted in Huguenot homes to force them. Emigration was forbidden, but a mass exodus followed anyway, to the Netherlands, England, Prussia, Switzerland and South Africa, taking skills and capital with them. Many historians count it among the reign's worst mistakes.
Glory and its bill
Louis also spent his reign at war, for territory and for gloire. He took Franche-Comté and parts of Flanders and Alsace, and built a ring of fortresses, designed by the engineer Vauban, around the frontiers. But the later wars united Europe against him. The last, the War of the Spanish Succession (1701–1714), was fought to put his grandson on the throne of Spain. Philip V kept the Spanish crown, which is why Spain's kings are still Bourbons, but France was exhausted. The bitter winter of 1709 brought famine.

France and its neighbours
1500
1600
1700

GDP per person, France
$1,670
$1,576
$1,758

GDP per person, Spain
$1,118
$1,295
$1,280

GDP per person, Netherlands
$2,332
$4,270
$3,377

Population of France (1700)

about 21.5 million

Population of Spain (1700)

about 8.8 million

Maddison Project Database 2023; GDP per person in 2011 international dollars. Early figures are rough reconstructions.
The table shows the paradox of the Sun King's France. It was not especially rich per person; the Dutch, with their trade and finance, were far richer. But it had more than twice as many people as Spain, and a state able to tax and conscript them. That was the foundation of its power, and of the burden on its peasants. When Louis died on 1 September 1715, he is said to have told his great-grandson and heir, aged five, that he had loved war too much. The crowd, by some accounts, jeered at the funeral procession.
The century of light
The eighteenth century was France's century of ideas. In salons run by educated women, in cafés, academies and Masonic lodges, a new kind of public opinion grew up, and the writers called philosophes argued that reason, not tradition or revelation, should judge every institution.

The Enlightenment in France
Lived
Key work
Big idea

Montesquieu
1689–1755
The Spirit of the Laws (1748)
Liberty needs power divided between separate branches

Voltaire
1694–1778
Letters on the English, Candide
Religious toleration, free thought, scorn for fanaticism

Denis Diderot
1713–1784
The Encyclopédie (1751–1772), with d'Alembert
All knowledge, including crafts and trades, organised by reason

Jean-Jacques Rousseau
1712–1778
The Social Contract (1762)
Sovereignty belongs to the people's "general will"

The philosophes did not want revolution. Voltaire admired enlightened kings and despised the mob. But they made it normal to ask of any institution, the Church, the nobility, the monarchy itself: what is it for, and does it work?
A kingdom of orders
French society was still divided by law into three "estates". The First Estate was the clergy; the Second, the nobility; the Third, everyone else, from rich bankers to landless labourers, the overwhelming majority. The first two were largely exempt from the main direct tax, the taille. Peasants owned much of the land, more than in most of Europe, but still owed dues to lords, tithes to the Church and taxes to the king. It was a society of privilege, where almost everything (a town, a guild, a province, a noble family) had its own rights and exemptions.
The economy grew. Atlantic ports such as Bordeaux and Nantes grew rich on the colonial trade, above all the sugar and coffee of Saint-Domingue, today's Haiti, produced by hundreds of thousands of enslaved Africans; it was the richest colony of its time. Nantes was the leading French slave-trading port.
War, debt and a stuck monarchy
Louis XV (1715–1774) began as "the well-beloved" and ended despised. In the Seven Years' War (1756–1763), France lost Canada and most of its position in India to Britain. Then, to take revenge, Louis XVI (1774–1792) backed the American colonists against Britain. French troops and ships were decisive at Yorktown in 1781, and America won its independence. France won nothing except a vast debt.
The kingdom was not poor. The state was. Its tax system was riddled with exemptions, and every attempt to reform it ran into the privileged, above all the parlements, the high courts that had to register royal edicts. The reforming minister Turgot tried to free the grain trade and abolish the guilds (1774–1776) and was dismissed. His successors borrowed. By the late 1780s, paying the interest on the debt swallowed a huge share of royal revenue. In 1787 the minister Calonne proposed a land tax on everyone, privileged or not, to an Assembly of Notables; they refused, saying only the nation, assembled in the Estates-General, could approve new taxes.

The old regime did not fall because the French were poorer than other Europeans, or because the king was a tyrant. It fell because a state that needed money could not get it without changing who paid, and those who would have paid were strong enough to say no.

So in August 1788 the king called the Estates-General, which had not met since 1614. That same summer, hail and drought ruined the harvest. Bread prices soared in the spring of 1789, just as the country was electing its deputies and writing its lists of grievances, the cahiers de doléances. In January 1789 a priest, the Abbé Sieyès, published a pamphlet that set the terms of the coming fight: What is the Third Estate? Everything. What has it been until now in the political order? Nothing. What does it ask? To become something.

Part 6 — The Revolution, part one: from the Estates-General to the end of the monarchy (1789–1792)
The Third Estate becomes the nation
The Estates-General opened at Versailles on 5 May 1789. At once the deputies of the Third Estate demanded that the three orders sit together and vote by head, not by order, since otherwise the clergy and nobility could always outvote them. When the king delayed, they acted. On 17 June they declared themselves the National Assembly, claiming to speak for the whole nation. On 20 June, locked out of their usual hall, they gathered in an indoor tennis court nearby and swore the Tennis Court Oath: not to separate until they had given France a constitution. The king gave way, then moved troops towards Paris.
14 July
Paris was hungry and frightened. When the king dismissed the popular minister Necker on 11 July, crowds took to the streets, looking for weapons. On 14 July 1789 they stormed the Bastille, a fortress-prison in the east of the city, to seize its gunpowder. Its governor was killed and his head carried on a pike. The prison held only seven inmates. But the Bastille was the symbol of arbitrary royal power, and its fall was the moment the Revolution became unstoppable. Within days the king was wearing the new tricolour cockade, the red and blue of Paris with the white of the monarchy.
In the countryside a wave of panic, the Great Fear, sent peasants to attack châteaux and burn the records of their dues.
The night of 4 August and the Declaration of Rights
On the night of 4 August 1789, in a burst of enthusiasm, noble and clerical deputies rose one after another to give up their privileges: feudal dues, the tithe, the sale of offices, the special rights of provinces and towns. In a few hours the legal framework of the old society was abolished.
On 26 August the Assembly adopted the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, seventeen articles that are still part of French constitutional law today. Its first article reads: "Men are born and remain free and equal in rights." Sovereignty, says Article 3, "resides essentially in the nation." It promised equality before the law, freedom of opinion, religion and the press, the presumption of innocence, taxation by consent, and the right to property, "inviolable and sacred".

What the Declaration said
What it left out

All men born free and equal in rights
Women, whose rights it did not mention

Sovereignty belongs to the nation
The enslaved people of the colonies

Freedom of opinion, press and religion
Voting rights for the poor (the 1791 constitution limited the vote by wealth)

Equality before the law and in taxes

During those debates, as the condensed history explains, deputies who supported a royal veto sat to the right of the president, and their opponents to the left. The words "left" and "right" have meant what they mean ever since.
In October, a crowd of Parisian women angry at the price of bread marched to Versailles and brought the royal family back to Paris.
Remaking France
Over the next two years the Assembly redesigned the country from top to bottom.

In 1790 it replaced the old provinces, each with its own laws and privileges, with 83 new departments of roughly equal size, most named after rivers or mountains. Departments still exist today.
To pay the debt it nationalised the vast lands of the Church and sold them, backed by a paper currency, the assignats, which soon lost much of its value.
By the Civil Constitution of the Clergy of July 1790 it made priests elected, salaried officials of the state and required them to swear an oath to the constitution. About half refused. The pope condemned the reform. This split, between the Revolution and the Church, divided France for more than a century.
In 1791 France became one of the first countries in Europe to give Jews full civil equality as citizens.

Not everyone counted equally. The playwright Olympe de Gouges answered the Declaration in 1791 with her own Declaration of the Rights of Woman and of the Female Citizen: if a woman has the right to mount the scaffold, she wrote, she must also have the right to mount the speaker's platform. She was guillotined in November 1793. French women would not win the vote until 1944, and first voted in 1945.
In August 1791 the enslaved people of Saint-Domingue rose in the largest slave revolt in history, which would end in 1804 with the independence of Haiti.
Flight, war and the fall of the king
Louis XVI never accepted the Revolution in his heart. On the night of 20 to 21 June 1791, the royal family fled Paris in disguise towards the eastern frontier. They were recognised and stopped at Varennes and brought back. From then on, many saw the king as a traitor. The constitution of September 1791 kept him as a constitutional monarch, but trust was gone.
In April 1792 the Assembly, pushed by the faction called the Girondins, who believed war would spread the Revolution and unmask its enemies, declared war on Austria; Prussia joined Austria. The war went badly. On 10 August 1792 armed Parisians and volunteers from the provinces, among them men from Marseille singing a new war song that became the Marseillaise, stormed the royal palace of the Tuileries. The king was suspended and imprisoned. In early September, fearing that prisoners would rise to help the invaders, mobs killed more than a thousand of them in the Paris jails, the September Massacres.
On 20 September 1792, at Valmy, a French army of volunteers and old regulars stopped the Prussian advance with an artillery duel. The German writer Goethe, who was with the Prussians, later recalled telling his companions that a new era of world history had begun that day. The next day, 21 September 1792, the newly elected Convention abolished the monarchy. France was a republic.

Part 7 — The Revolution, part two: Republic, Terror and Directory (1792–1799)
The king's death
The Convention, elected by all adult men, put the king on trial for treason. "Citizen Louis Capet" was found guilty almost unanimously; on the sentence, 361 of 721 deputies voted for immediate death, a majority of one. On 21 January 1793, Louis XVI was guillotined in what is now the Place de la Concorde. Marie Antoinette followed in October.
By then the Republic was at war with most of Europe, including Britain, the Dutch Republic and Spain. To fill the armies the Convention ordered a levy of 300,000 men in February 1793, and in August a mass levy, the levée en masse, which put the whole nation on a war footing: young men to fight, married men to make weapons, women to make tents and nurse. It was the first modern national army.
The Vendée
The levy provoked a great rising in the west, south of the Loire, in the region called the Vendée, where peasants already resented the attack on their priests. In March 1793 they rose in a Catholic and royalist "Grand Army", killing republicans and winning a string of battles. On 1 August 1793 the Convention ordered the rebel region destroyed. After the rebels were defeated in the winter, in early 1794 the "infernal columns" of General Turreau were ordered to kill the inhabitants and burn villages, houses and woods. At Nantes, prisoners were drowned in the Loire.
The death toll is disputed; one widely cited study puts it at about 200,000, including about 170,000 inhabitants of the rebel region, but estimates vary widely. Whether it was a "genocide" is one of the fiercest arguments in French history. Historians such as Reynald Sécher argued that it was, as an attempt to exterminate a population; most specialists accept that it involved mass atrocities against civilians but reject the word, arguing that the killing was aimed at a political and religious rebellion, not at a people. The argument is also about the Revolution itself: those who distrust it see the Vendée as proof of where it led.
The Terror
In June 1793, armed crowds forced the Convention to expel the Girondin leaders. Power passed to the Jacobins and, above all, to the twelve men of the Committee of Public Safety, among them Maximilien Robespierre, a lawyer from Arras famous for his incorruptibility, and the young Saint-Just. The Constitution of 1793, the most democratic yet, was suspended "until the peace".
What followed is called the Terror. The Law of Suspects of 17 September 1793 allowed the arrest of anyone vaguely suspected of hostility to the Revolution. Revolutionary tribunals abolished defence lawyers and pre-trial investigation.

The Terror in numbers

Official death sentences carried out, 1793–1794
16,594 (2,639 of them in Paris)

Others who died in prison or were executed without trial
an estimated 10,000 to 20,000

People arrested as "suspects"
at least 300,000, by a widely cited estimate

Deaths in the Vendée war
perhaps 170,000 to 200,000, though estimates vary widely

Victims included the queen, Girondin deputies, Olympe de Gouges, the chemist Lavoisier, many nobles and priests, and, most of all, ordinary people from the rebellious provinces. In the spring of 1794 Robespierre turned on his own side, sending the radical Hébert and then his old ally Danton to the guillotine. On 9 Thermidor (27 July 1794), deputies afraid that they would be next turned on Robespierre. He was guillotined the next day.
Remaking time, weights and the soul
The radical Republic also tried to remake daily life. It introduced a new calendar, starting from Year I of the Republic, with ten-day weeks and months named after the weather and the harvest (Thermidor is "the hot month"). It invented the metric system, which most of the world now uses. Some Jacobins tried to "de-Christianise" France, closing churches and holding festivals to Reason; Robespierre himself preferred a cult of the Supreme Being. And on 4 February 1794 the Convention abolished slavery in all French colonies, one of the first acts of its kind anywhere. Napoleon would restore it in 1802.
The Directory and the general
After Thermidor, the wealthier middle classes regained control. A new constitution in 1795 created the Directory, a five-man executive and a two-chamber parliament elected by property owners. It lurched between royalist and neo-Jacobin threats and relied more and more on the army. The armies, meanwhile, had turned from defence to conquest. In 1796–1797 a young Corsican general named Napoleon Bonaparte conquered northern Italy. In 1798 he led an expedition to Egypt. In 1799 he abandoned his army there, came home, and on 18 Brumaire (9 November 1799) helped organise a coup that ended the Directory.
What was the Revolution?
French historians have argued for two centuries about what the Revolution was, and the argument is political as well as scholarly.

The classic, "social" interpretation, associated with historians such as Georges Lefebvre and Albert Soboul, saw a bourgeois revolution: a rising middle class, backed by peasants and urban workers, overthrowing a feudal aristocracy. The Terror was a tragic but understandable response to war and counter-revolution.
The "revisionist" or political interpretation, led above all by François Furet in the 1970s, rejected that class story. It saw the Revolution as a new political culture, a belief that the people's will must be one and that its enemies must be eliminated, which led to the Terror from inside its own logic, and which foreshadowed the totalitarian movements of the twentieth century.
Many recent historians look beyond Paris: at women, at the colonies and Haiti, at the provinces, at the Revolution's global echoes. Most would agree that it was both an immense advance (rights, citizenship, equality before the law) and a source of terrible violence, and that the two cannot be neatly separated.

Part 8 — Napoleon, and a century of kings, revolutions and empire (1799–1870)
The Consul
The coup of Brumaire made Bonaparte First Consul, in effect a dictator with a constitution approved by a plebiscite. He was thirty. In a few years he built the institutions of the modern French state, many of which still exist.

What Napoleon built
When
Still there?

Prefects, appointed by Paris, to run each department
1800
Yes

The Banque de France
1800
Yes

The Concordat with the pope, ending the religious war
1801
Still in force in Alsace and Moselle

Lycées, state secondary schools
1802
Yes

The Legion of Honour
1802
Yes

The Civil Code (the Code Napoléon)
21 March 1804
Yes, much amended

The Civil Code is his greatest legacy. In clear, short articles it set out a single law for all French citizens: equality before the law, freedom of contract, secure private property, civil marriage and divorce, and equal inheritance among sons and daughters. It also made wives legally subordinate to their husbands. Carried by French armies and admired by lawyers, it shaped legal systems from Belgium and Italy to Latin America and Louisiana.
He also made peace, for a while: with Austria at Lunéville (1801) and with Britain at Amiens (1802). And in 1802 he restored slavery in the French Caribbean. In Saint-Domingue his army failed to reconquer the island, and Haiti declared its independence on 1 January 1804.
The Emperor
In May 1804 the Senate proclaimed him Emperor of the French, and on 2 December 1804, at Notre-Dame, he crowned himself, with the pope looking on. A new imperial nobility followed.
His armies, organised in fast-moving corps and living off the land, seemed unbeatable. At Austerlitz, on 2 December 1805, he crushed the Austrians and Russians; the Holy Roman Empire, which traced itself back a thousand years to Charlemagne, was dissolved the next year. Prussia was destroyed in 1806. He made his brothers kings of Holland, Naples, Westphalia and, in 1808, Spain. In 1809, after defeating Austria again at Wagram, he married the Austrian emperor's daughter, Marie-Louise, to found a dynasty. At its height his empire and its satellites covered most of continental Europe.
But the empire had fatal weaknesses. Britain's navy, which had destroyed the French and Spanish fleets at Trafalgar in 1805, controlled the seas. His "Continental System", a ban on trade with Britain, hurt Europe more than Britain. And his conquests provoked the very nationalism the Revolution had invented: the Spanish rising of 1808, described in the Spain history, tied down hundreds of thousands of his troops for six years.
Russia and the fall
In June 1812 he invaded Russia with the largest army Europe had ever seen, more than 450,000 men at the start and perhaps 600,000 in all, half of them non-French. The Russians retreated, burning as they went. Napoleon took Moscow, which burned, and waited for a peace offer that never came. The retreat through the Russian winter destroyed the army: only a small fraction of the men who had crossed into Russia came back.
The rest of Europe rose against him. Defeated at Leipzig in October 1813, he abdicated at Fontainebleau in April 1814 and was exiled to the island of Elba. In March 1815 he escaped, landed in the south, and marched on Paris as the soldiers sent to stop him joined him: the Hundred Days. On 18 June 1815, at Waterloo, in today's Belgium, Wellington's British-led army and Blücher's Prussians defeated him for the last time. He was sent to the remote Atlantic island of Saint Helena, where he died on 5 May 1821.

Napoleon is the hardest figure in French history to judge, because he was everything at once: the heir of the Revolution who ended it, the law-giver who crushed liberty, the soldier whose wars killed hundreds of thousands, and the founder of a state that still runs France.

His defenders, then and now, see the man who saved the Revolution's achievements (equality before the law, the end of feudalism, careers open to talent) by giving them order. His critics see a dictator who abolished free elections and a free press, restored slavery, reduced women's rights, and drowned Europe in blood for his own glory. In 2021, the two-hundredth anniversary of his death, the French argued over whether, and how, the Republic should commemorate him.
The Restoration
The victors restored the Bourbons in the person of Louis XVI's brother, Louis XVIII (1814–1824). He did not try to turn the clock back to 1788. His Charter of 1814 kept the Civil Code, equality before the law and the sale of Church lands, and created a parliament elected by a small electorate of rich men. In the south, royalist mobs killed Bonapartists and Protestants in the "White Terror" of 1815.
His brother Charles X (1824–1830) was different: crowned at Reims with the full medieval ritual, he favoured the ultra-royalists and the Church. In 1830 his army conquered Algiers, the start of 132 years of French rule in Algeria. That same July, when he issued ordinances abolishing press freedom and cutting the electorate, Paris rose. In the Three Glorious Days of 27 to 29 July 1830 the barricades went up, and Charles fled into exile.
The bourgeois king
The liberal deputies chose his cousin, Louis-Philippe of Orléans (1830–1848), "King of the French", who wore a frock coat and carried an umbrella. His regime was run for and by the wealthy; the vote was extended, but only to a small minority of property owners. France began to industrialise, building railways and textile mills, and a new working class grew in the cities. So did socialist ideas. The writers of the age, Victor Hugo, Honoré de Balzac, George Sand, Stendhal, described the new society of money and ambition.
1848
In February 1848, when the government banned a political banquet called to demand a wider vote, Paris rose again. In three days the king had abdicated. The Second Republic acted fast: it introduced universal male suffrage, among the first countries in the world to do so, and on 27 April 1848 abolished slavery in the colonies for good, the work of Victor Schoelcher. It also created "national workshops" to give jobs to the unemployed. When the new conservative assembly closed them, the workers of Paris rose in the June Days of 1848 and were crushed by the army, with thousands killed.
In December 1848, in France's first presidential election, voters chose by a landslide the nephew of the emperor, Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte, whose name was his whole programme. Barred by the constitution from a second term, he staged a coup on 2 December 1851, the anniversary of Austerlitz, and a year later made himself emperor, Napoleon III.
The Second Empire
The Second Empire (1852–1870) was authoritarian at first and more liberal later. Under it France became a modern industrial economy. Railways spread across the country; banks such as Crédit Lyonnais and department stores such as Le Bon Marché were founded; and from 1853 to 1870 the emperor's prefect, Baron Haussmann, rebuilt Paris, tearing down medieval slums for wide boulevards, parks, sewers and the uniform apartment buildings that still define the city.

France's regimes, 1814–1870
Dates
How it ended

Restoration (Louis XVIII, Charles X)
1814–1830
July Revolution of 1830

July Monarchy (Louis-Philippe)
1830–1848
February Revolution of 1848

Second Republic
1848–1852
Coup of December 1851

Second Empire (Napoleon III)
1852–1870
Defeat by Prussia at Sedan

Abroad, Napoleon III fought Russia in the Crimea, helped drive Austria out of northern Italy (gaining Nice and Savoy), and tried to install an Austrian archduke as emperor of Mexico, an adventure that ended with his execution in 1867.
It was also a great age of French art and letters. Gustave Flaubert was tried, and acquitted, for Madame Bovary in 1857. In the 1860s and 1870s painters such as Manet, Monet, Renoir and Degas broke with the official academy. Paris became the capital of modern art, which it would remain until the Second World War.
Sedan
The emperor's downfall came from Germany. The Prussian chancellor, Otto von Bismarck, wanted a war to unite the German states, and provoked one over the candidacy of a German prince for, of all things, the throne of Spain. In July 1870 France declared war. It was a disaster. On 1 September, at Sedan, the French army was surrounded and the emperor himself captured. On 4 September, in Paris, crowds proclaimed the Third Republic.

Part 9 — The Third Republic (1870–1914)
Defeat and the Commune
The new Republic kept fighting. Paris was besieged through the winter of 1870–1871; its people ate horses, cats, rats and the animals of the zoo. On 18 January 1871, in the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles, the king of Prussia was proclaimed German emperor. France signed a harsh peace at Frankfurt on 10 May 1871: it lost Alsace and most of Lorraine and paid an indemnity of five billion francs.
Paris, radical, patriotic and humiliated, refused to accept the conservative, monarchist assembly elected in February, which sat at Versailles under Adolphe Thiers. On 18 March 1871 the city rose and elected its own government, the Paris Commune. For two months it ran the capital, separated church and state, and planned social reforms. Then the national army attacked. In the "Bloody Week" of 21 to 28 May, fighting street by street, it retook Paris; the Communards shot hostages, including the archbishop, and burned the Tuileries palace and the town hall. Government troops killed somewhere between about 6,700 and 20,000 Communards, many by summary execution, and tens of thousands more were arrested and thousands deported to New Caledonia. For the left, the Commune became a sacred memory; for the right, a warning.
A republic by one vote
The Third Republic was born almost by accident. The monarchists who dominated the assembly could not agree on a king. In 1875 they passed the laws that became its constitution, including an amendment recognising the president of the Republic that passed by a single vote. The president, Marshal MacMahon, tried to impose a monarchist government in 1877, lost the elections, and resigned in 1879. The republicans had won.
They set about making a republican nation. The Marseillaise became the national anthem in 1879, 14 July the national day in 1880. Above all, the Jules Ferry laws of 1881 and 1882 made primary schooling free, compulsory and secular. In every village a schoolteacher, the "black hussar of the Republic", taught French (not the regional languages that millions still spoke), the metric system, the history of the nation and the duties of the citizen, in open rivalry with the village priest.

The Third Republic in brief

4 September 1870
Republic proclaimed after Sedan

March–May 1871
Paris Commune

1875
Constitutional laws

1881–1882
Ferry laws: free, compulsory, secular schooling

1889
Eiffel Tower built for the Universal Exhibition

1894–1906
The Dreyfus affair

1904
Entente cordiale with Britain

9 December 1905
Law separating the churches and the state

1914
War

Empire
The Third Republic also built the second-largest colonial empire in the world. It made Tunisia a protectorate in 1881, conquered Indochina, Madagascar and vast areas of West and Equatorial Africa, and later Morocco (1912). Its champions, Jules Ferry among them, argued that France had a "civilising mission"; Ferry told the Chamber in 1885 that the "superior races" had a duty towards the "inferior" ones. Opponents on the left, such as Georges Clemenceau, attacked colonial conquest as a betrayal of the rights of man, and nationalists on the right argued that it distracted France from recovering Alsace-Lorraine. Colonised peoples experienced conquest, forced labour and the denial of the rights the Republic proclaimed at home.
Dreyfus
The great crisis of the age began in December 1894, when Alfred Dreyfus, a Jewish artillery captain from Alsace, was wrongly convicted of passing military secrets to Germany and sent to Devil's Island in French Guiana. Evidence soon emerged that the real traitor was another officer, Major Esterhazy, but the army covered it up and Esterhazy was acquitted. On 13 January 1898 the novelist Émile Zola published an open letter to the president under a front-page headline, J'accuse…!, accusing the generals of a cover-up.
France split in two. The anti-Dreyfusards (the army's defenders, most Catholics, nationalists and an openly antisemitic press) argued that the honour of the army and the nation came before one man. The Dreyfusards (republicans, socialists, intellectuals; the word "intellectual" in its modern sense dates from this affair) argued that justice for one innocent man was what the Republic was for. Dreyfus was pardoned in 1899 and fully cleared in 1906.
The affair's political result was the law of 9 December 1905 separating the churches and the state. The Republic guaranteed freedom of conscience and the free exercise of religion, but would "neither recognise, nor pay, nor subsidise any religion". This is the founding text of laïcité, French secularism, which the companion piece If I Was Born in France describes in daily life.
The Belle Époque
The years before 1914 are remembered as the Belle Époque, the beautiful era: the Eiffel Tower, the cinema of the Lumière brothers (1895), Marie Curie's two Nobel prizes, the first Tour de France (1903), the paintings of Cézanne, Matisse and the young Picasso. Most French people still lived in the countryside; France's population grew very slowly, because the French had begun limiting family size earlier than any other people in Europe. In 1913 France had about 41.5 million people, fewer than Germany's, a fact that haunted its generals.

Part 10 — Two world wars and Vichy (1914–1945)
The Great War
In August 1914 France went to war with Germany, allied with Russia and Britain, in a mood of "sacred union" that silenced political quarrels. The German army swept through Belgium towards Paris and was stopped at the Marne in September. Then the front froze into trenches from the Channel to Switzerland, most of it on French soil.
The worst battle for France was Verdun, from 21 February to 18 December 1916, the longest of the war. Most of the French army rotated through it. "They shall not pass" became its slogan, and its commander, Philippe Pétain, a national hero. After mutinies in 1917, Georges Clemenceau, prime minister from November, drove the country on to victory. The armistice came on 11 November 1918.
About 1.3 to 1.4 million French soldiers were killed, one of the heaviest tolls relative to population of any major combatant, and millions more were wounded. Almost every town and village in France has a war memorial listing its dead. At the peace of Versailles, signed on 28 June 1919, France recovered Alsace and Lorraine and demanded reparations from Germany.

France's economy in two world wars
GDP per person (2011 int'l $)

1913
$5,555

1918
$3,819

1939
$7,640

1944
$3,861

Maddison Project Database 2023. Output per person fell by about a third in the First World War and by about half in the Second.
Between the wars
The 1920s brought recovery and reconstruction; the 1930s, depression, political violence and fear. After far-right leagues rioted outside parliament in February 1934, socialists, communists and radicals formed a Popular Front, which won the elections of May 1936. Léon Blum became the first Socialist, and the first Jewish, prime minister. A wave of factory occupations followed, and the Matignon Agreements gave workers collective bargaining, the 40-hour week and, for the first time, two weeks of paid holiday, the congés payés. The government fell within a year, but the paid holiday became part of French identity.
1940
France and Britain declared war on Germany on 3 September 1939. For eight months little happened. Then, on 10 May 1940, Germany attacked through the Low Countries and the wooded Ardennes, bypassing the fortified Maginot Line. The French army, one of the largest in the world, collapsed in six weeks. The Germans entered Paris unopposed on 14 June. Pétain, now 84, became prime minister and asked for an armistice, which was signed on 22 June 1940.
On 18 June a little-known brigadier-general who had fled to London, Charles de Gaulle, spoke on the BBC, calling on the French to continue the fight and insisting that the defeat was not final. Few heard the broadcast at the time. It became the founding act of the Resistance.
On 10 July 1940, meeting in the spa town of Vichy, the two chambers of parliament voted by 569 to 80, with 20 abstentions, to give full powers to Pétain. The Third Republic was over.
Vichy and the Holocaust
The new "French State" replaced "Liberty, Equality, Fraternity" with "Work, Family, Fatherland". Its "National Revolution" blamed the defeat on the Republic, the left, Freemasons and Jews. Germany occupied the north and west; Vichy governed the south until November 1942, when the Germans occupied the whole country.
Vichy's persecution of Jews was its own initiative before it was a German demand. In October 1940 its first Statute of the Jews excluded Jews from the civil service, the army, teaching and the press, without being asked. From 1942, French police took part in the deportations. In the Vel d'Hiv roundup of 16 and 17 July 1942, French police arrested more than 13,000 Jews in Paris, many of them children, and held many of them in a cycling stadium in terrible conditions before sending them to Drancy and on to Auschwitz.

The Holocaust in France

Jews living in France in 1940
about 350,000, fewer than half of them French citizens

Deported, 1942–1944
more than 75,000

Murdered
about 72,500

Survived in France
about three-quarters, one of the higher survival rates in occupied Europe

Both the last two lines are true, and France has argued over how to hold them together. Vichy's defenders long claimed that it had shielded French-born Jews by sacrificing foreign ones; historians have shown that Vichy offered up foreign Jews eagerly and that survival owed much to ordinary French people who hid Jews, to the Church's later protests and to the Italian occupation zone. For fifty years the official position was that Vichy was not France, so the Republic owed no apology. On 16 July 1995 President Jacques Chirac broke with that line, acknowledging the responsibility of the French state in the persecution and deportation of Jews.
Resistance and liberation
The Resistance began small and grew, especially after 1942, when Vichy started sending young men to work in Germany and many fled to the hills to join the maquis. Communists, Catholics, socialists and conservatives fought side by side. Jean Moulin, de Gaulle's envoy, united the movements in the National Council of the Resistance in 1943, before being captured and dying after torture by the Gestapo.
The Allies landed in Normandy on 6 June 1944. Four days later, an SS unit massacred 642 men, women and children at Oradour-sur-Glane, whose ruins have been left as they were. Paris rose on 19 August, and on 25 August the German garrison surrendered; de Gaulle walked down the Champs-Élysées the next day. In the purges that followed, thousands of collaborators were executed, many without trial. Pétain was sentenced to death, commuted to life imprisonment. And, by an ordinance of 1944, French women gained the right to vote; they voted for the first time in 1945.

Part 11 — Rebuilding, decolonisation and de Gaulle's Fifth Republic (1945–1969)
A new republic, and thirty glorious years
De Gaulle led the provisional government after the liberation, with communists, socialists and Christian democrats, the parties of the Resistance. It nationalised coal, electricity, the big banks and Renault, created a national social security system, and set up a planning office. When the parties insisted on a parliamentary constitution with a weak executive, de Gaulle resigned in January 1946. The Fourth Republic (1946–1958) followed.
Its governments were famously unstable: more than twenty in twelve years, as coalitions formed and collapsed. Yet the Fourth Republic presided over an economic transformation. The demographer Jean Fourastié later named the years 1945–1975 les Trente Glorieuses, the thirty glorious years. A baby boom, Marshall Plan aid, cheap energy and planning turned a country of small farms and small shops into an urban, industrial economy. Real output per person, as the condensed history notes from World Bank data, rose by about 85 percent between 1960 and 1975 alone.
And it laid the foundations of modern Europe. On 9 May 1950 the foreign minister Robert Schuman proposed pooling French and German coal and steel under a common authority, so that war between the two would become "not merely unthinkable, but materially impossible". The Coal and Steel Community followed in 1951, and the European Economic Community in 1957. France was also a founding member of NATO in 1949.
The end of empire
The Fourth Republic could not solve the problem of empire. In Indochina, a war against the communist-led Viet Minh ended in defeat at Dien Bien Phu on 7 May 1954; at the Geneva conference that year, Prime Minister Pierre Mendès France accepted withdrawal. Tunisia and Morocco became independent in 1956. That same year, the Suez expedition with Britain and Israel against Egypt ended in humiliation under American pressure. Most of sub-Saharan French Africa became independent, largely peacefully, in 1960.
Algeria was different. Conquered from 1830, it was legally not a colony but part of France, divided into departments, and home to about a million settlers of European origin, the pieds-noirs, alongside a far larger Muslim Algerian majority who were, for most of the period, denied equal rights. Already on 8 May 1945, the day the war ended in Europe, a nationalist demonstration at Sétif led to riots in which about a hundred Europeans were killed, and to a repression by the army and settler militias in which thousands of Algerians died; estimates range from about 3,000 to 45,000.
On 1 November 1954 the National Liberation Front (FLN) launched its armed struggle. The Algerian War (1954–1962) was savage on all sides: FLN bombings and massacres of civilians, French army torture, collective punishment, and the forced removal of some two million Algerians into "regroupment" camps.

The Algerian War

8 May 1945
Sétif and Guelma: riots and massacres

1 November 1954
FLN uprising begins

13 May 1958
Settlers and army officers seize power in Algiers; de Gaulle recalled

17 October 1961
Paris police attack an FLN-organised march of Algerians; dozens or more killed

18 March 1962
Évian Accords signed

8 April 1962
French voters approve the accords (about 91 percent yes)

5 July 1962
Algeria independent

Total deaths
from about 400,000 (many French historians) to 1.5 million (the Algerian state's figure)

When the war ended, between about 900,000 and a million pieds-noirs left for France within months. So did tens of thousands of harkis, Algerian Muslims who had served with the French army; many more who stayed behind were killed in reprisals, and those who reached France were often confined to camps. The war's memory still divides French, Algerian, pied-noir, harki and immigrant families, and every French president since has had to decide what to acknowledge.
De Gaulle's return and the Fifth Republic
In May 1958, with the army in Algeria in open revolt and fearing a military coup in Paris, the parliament turned to de Gaulle, then aged 67, and gave him full powers for six months to write a new constitution. The Constitution of the Fifth Republic was approved by referendum on 28 September 1958 by about 80 percent of voters. It created a strong president, who names the prime minister, can dissolve the National Assembly, call referendums and take emergency powers, and a government able to force bills through parliament. In 1962 a further referendum made the president directly elected by universal suffrage.
Its first article, still in force, declares France "an indivisible, secular, democratic and social Republic". The presidential term, originally seven years, was cut to five by referendum in 2000, and a limit of two consecutive terms was added later.
De Gaulle, elected president, ended the Algerian war he had been brought back to win, surviving several assassination attempts by the OAS. Then he pursued grandeur: an independent nuclear force (the first French atomic test came in 1960), recognition of communist China (1964), criticism of the American war in Vietnam, withdrawal from NATO's integrated military command (1966), and vetoes of British entry to the European Community in 1963 and again in 1967.
May 1968
The young people of the baby boom found de Gaulle's France stiff, paternal and old. In May 1968, student protests at the Sorbonne and the new university at Nanterre turned into street battles with riot police in the Latin Quarter, with barricades and slogans such as "It is forbidden to forbid" and "Be realistic, demand the impossible". Then the workers joined in. About ten million people went on strike, the largest general strike in French history, occupying factories and paralysing the country. At the end of May, de Gaulle secretly flew to see army commanders in Germany.
He came back, dissolved the Assembly, and called on the "silent majority". A huge march in his support filled the Champs-Élysées, and in the June elections the Gaullists won a landslide. But a year later, in April 1969, de Gaulle lost a referendum on regional reform and the Senate, and resigned at once.

May 1968 failed as a revolution and succeeded as a change of manners. Within a decade France had a new attitude to authority in families, schools and workplaces, and a new feminism. Whether that was liberation or the start of an age of individualism is still argued.

Part 12 — From Pompidou to Macron, and France in 2026 (1969–2026)
Modernisers and the end of the boom
Georges Pompidou (1969–1974), de Gaulle's former prime minister, set out to industrialise France and launched the great nuclear power programme. After his death, Valéry Giscard d'Estaing (1974–1981) brought in rapid social reforms: the age of majority lowered to eighteen, divorce by mutual consent, and, in 1975, the law legalising abortion steered through parliament by the health minister Simone Veil, a survivor of Auschwitz, against fierce attacks from her own side. But the oil shocks of 1973 and 1979 ended the thirty glorious years. Unemployment rose to about one and a half million by early 1981.
The Socialist years
In 1981 François Mitterrand became the first Socialist president of the Fifth Republic, with communist ministers in his government. A wave of reforms followed: the abolition of the death penalty (the law of 9 October 1981, championed by the justice minister Robert Badinter), nationalisations of banks and industry, a wealth tax, the 39-hour week, a fifth week of paid holiday, retirement at sixty and decentralisation of power to the regions. Within two years, inflation and a currency crisis forced a "turn to rigour" in 1983: France chose to stay in the European monetary system and accept market discipline. That same year the far-right National Front of Jean-Marie Le Pen began its rise.
From 1986 the Fifth Republic learned to live with cohabitation, a president of one camp and a parliamentary majority and prime minister of the other. Mitterrand, re-elected in 1988, and his German partner Helmut Kohl drove forward European integration, and in 1992 French voters approved the Maastricht Treaty, which created the European Union and the path to the euro, by a narrow 51 percent.
Chirac, Sarkozy, Hollande

Presidents of the Fifth Republic
Term
Camp

Charles de Gaulle
1959–1969
Gaullist

Georges Pompidou
1969–1974
Gaullist

Valéry Giscard d'Estaing
1974–1981
Centre-right

François Mitterrand
1981–1995
Socialist

Jacques Chirac
1995–2007
Gaullist / centre-right

Nicolas Sarkozy
2007–2012
Centre-right

François Hollande
2012–2017
Socialist

Emmanuel Macron
2017–
Centre (his own movement)

Jacques Chirac (1995–2007) acknowledged the state's role in the Holocaust, cut the presidential term to five years, and in 2003 led the opposition to the American-led invasion of Iraq. Under the Socialist prime minister Lionel Jospin (1997–2002), France introduced the 35-hour week. In 2002 Jean-Marie Le Pen shocked the country by reaching the presidential run-off; Chirac won it with more than 80 percent as the left voted for him, the first great "republican front" against the far right.
In 2005 French voters rejected the proposed European constitution, by about 55 to 45. That autumn, riots spread through the poor suburbs, the banlieues. Nicolas Sarkozy (2007–2012) governed through the 2008 financial crisis. François Hollande (2012–2017), a Socialist, legalised same-sex marriage in 2013, and in 2015 led the country through its worst terrorist attacks since the war: in January on the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo and a kosher supermarket, and on 13 November at the Bataclan concert hall, cafés and the national stadium, in which 130 people were killed.
Macron
In 2017 Emmanuel Macron, a 39-year-old former banker and economy minister who had never held elected office, founded his own movement and won the presidency, beating Marine Le Pen in the run-off with about two-thirds of the vote. For the first time, neither of the parties that had structured the Fifth Republic, the Socialists and the Gaullist right, reached the second round.
His presidency was a long struggle between reform and revolt. A fuel-tax rise set off the yellow vests (gilets jaunes) movement of small-town France in November 2018. He was re-elected in 2022, again against Le Pen, with 58.5 percent. In 2023 he raised the minimum retirement age from 62 to 64, using the constitutional power to force the bill through without a vote, despite months of mass protest.
Then he gambled. After Marine Le Pen's National Rally won about 31.5 percent in the European elections of June 2024, Macron dissolved the National Assembly. The far right led the first round, but in the second a left-wing alliance, the New Popular Front, came first with 182 seats, Macron's camp second with 168, and the National Rally and its allies third with 143. No bloc had a majority. Michel Barnier's government was brought down by a censure vote on 4 December 2024, the first since 1962; François Bayrou's lost a confidence vote on 8 September 2025; and Sébastien Lecornu, appointed in September 2025, resigned within weeks and was reappointed days later. As the condensed history notes, Macron went through seven prime ministers between 2017 and 2025.
France in 2026

France in numbers, 2026

Population, 1 January 2026
69.1 million (66.8 million in metropolitan France)

Births and deaths, 2025
645,000 births, 651,000 deaths: more deaths than births for the first time since the Second World War

Fertility rate, 2025
1.56 children per woman

Life expectancy at birth, 2025
85.9 years for women, 80.3 for men

Unemployment, second quarter 2026
8.3 percent

Economic growth, third quarter 2026
−0.1 percent

Public debt (as reported, October 2026)
about 119 percent of GDP, the highest since 1946

INSEE (population, births, deaths, fertility, life expectancy, unemployment, growth); the Guardian, 19 October 2026 (debt and deficit).
By the autumn of 2026 France was a rich country in a bad mood: growth stalled, unemployment edging up, and a budget deficit of about 5.1 percent of GDP leaving little room to spend.
The school protests that began in mid-September became, by October, the biggest youth movement in years. On the weekend of 17 and 18 October the marches were followed by riots: more than 2,000 shops looted, a town hall set ablaze in Limoges, more than 2,000 arrests, and a thousand police officers injured. The interior minister admitted police had "lost control" in places. Macron banned demonstrations he called "illegitimate" and blamed "ultra far-left groups"; critics accused the government of heavy-handed policing of schoolchildren. About 400,000 people marched on 24 October, by the government's count, and about 320,000 on 31 October.
The country's politics was already turning to the presidential election of spring 2027, in which Macron, limited by the Constitution to two consecutive terms, cannot stand. Marine Le Pen, convicted in 2025 of embezzling European Parliament funds, had won a partial victory on appeal on 7 July 2026: the conviction was upheld, but her ban from office was shortened so that she could run, and she appealed again to the Cour de cassation and launched her campaign. Her party, the National Rally, led the polls, and in September 2026 won enough Senate seats to form its first group in the upper house. On the centre left, Raphaël Glucksmann won the Socialists' primary (the first time since 1969 that the party would have no candidate of its own), but polled behind Le Pen, the former prime minister Édouard Philippe and the radical-left Jean-Luc Mélenchon.

Part 13 — How to understand France today
Key dates

Date
Event

more than 30,000 years ago
Chauvet cave paintings

58–50 BC
Caesar conquers Gaul; Alesia, 52 BC

c. 500
Clovis, king of the Franks, baptised

25 December 800
Charlemagne crowned emperor

987
Hugh Capet becomes king

1337–1453
Hundred Years' War

24 August 1572
St Bartholomew's Day massacre

1598
Edict of Nantes

1685
Revocation of the Edict of Nantes

14 July 1789
Storming of the Bastille

26 August 1789
Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen

21 September 1792
Monarchy abolished; the Republic

9 November 1799
Napoleon's coup of 18 Brumaire

18 June 1815
Waterloo

1848
Second Republic; universal male suffrage; slavery abolished for good

1870–1871
Defeat by Prussia; the Paris Commune

9 December 1905
Separation of churches and state

1914–1918
First World War; Verdun, 1916

10 July 1940
Full powers to Pétain; Vichy

25 August 1944
Liberation of Paris

1954–1962
Algerian War

28 September 1958
Fifth Republic constitution approved

May 1968
Student revolt and general strike

9 October 1981
Death penalty abolished

Autumn 2026
School protests and riots

Spring 2027
Presidential election

Who's who

Person
Lived
Why they matter

Vercingetorix
d. 46 BC
Gaulish leader against Caesar; national hero

Clovis
c. 466–511
First Catholic king of the Franks

Charlemagne
c. 747–814
Emperor of the West, claimed by France and Germany

Joan of Arc
c. 1412–1431
Peasant girl who turned the Hundred Years' War

Henry IV
1553–1610
Ended the Wars of Religion; Edict of Nantes

Louis XIV
1638–1715
The Sun King; Versailles

Jean-Jacques Rousseau
1712–1778
Theorist of popular sovereignty

Maximilien Robespierre
1758–1794
Leader of the Jacobins during the Terror

Napoleon Bonaparte
1769–1821
General, emperor, law-giver

Alfred Dreyfus
1859–1935
Officer whose wrongful conviction split France

Léon Blum
1872–1950
Popular Front prime minister

Philippe Pétain
1856–1951
Hero of Verdun, head of Vichy

Charles de Gaulle
1890–1970
Free French leader; founder of the Fifth Republic

Simone Veil
1927–2017
Auschwitz survivor; legalised abortion

Emmanuel Macron
b. 1977
President since 2017

Marine Le Pen
b. 1968
Leader of the far right; 2027 frontrunner

Five ideas that unlock the country
1. The state came before the nation. Kings built the state first, and then the state made the nation, imposing French on millions who spoke Breton, Occitan, Basque or Alsatian, and sending prefects from Paris to every department. That is why the French expect so much of the state, and blame it for so much.
2. 1789 is the reference point for everything. Modern French politics is an argument about the Revolution's legacy. The left tends to celebrate 1789 and 1793; the right, liberty and order without the Terror; the far right, the nation. Each claims to be the true heir.
3. Secularism is a peace treaty, not just a principle. Laïcité grew out of the Wars of Religion and the long battle between the Republic and the Catholic Church. Supporters see it as the guarantee of equal citizenship; critics, including many French Muslims, say it is applied most heavily to them. Both claim to defend the Republic.
4. France has lived with defeat and occupation, and its memory is unfinished. 1870, 1940, Dien Bien Phu, Algeria: the national story has had to make room for defeat, for Vichy and for the crimes of colonial war. Each official acknowledgement is welcomed by some as honesty and attacked by others as self-flagellation.
5. Reform comes in leaps, often through crisis. France has had more than a dozen constitutions since 1791, and has tended to change by ruptures rather than small steps. The question in 2026, with a hung parliament and angry streets, is whether the Fifth Republic can still deliver change without another rupture.

France is a country that argues about principles because it was built on them. The argument is noisy and permanent, and it is the reason the rest of the world still borrows France's words to describe its own politics.

The takeaway
France was built by kings who turned a small domain around Paris into the strongest state in Europe, on top of a land that had been Gaulish, Roman and Frankish. Its monarchy tried to impose one faith and one will, and fell in 1789 to a revolution that declared the rights of man, abolished feudalism and slavery, and also produced the Terror and Napoleon. The nineteenth century tried every form of government on offer, and the Third Republic finally made republicanism stick, with free secular schools and the separation of church and state. Two world wars, Vichy and the end of empire nearly broke it; de Gaulle's Fifth Republic rebuilt it. In 2026 France is rich, secular, ageing and anxious, arguing in the streets and in a hung parliament about how much state it can afford, who belongs to the nation, and who will lead it after Macron.
Try this: read the seventeen articles of the 1789 Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen alongside Olympe de Gouges's reply of 1791, and ask what each would say about the protests of October 2026. In Paris, walk from the Place de la Bastille to the Place de la Concorde, where the king was guillotined: the whole Revolution in one walk.

Sources & Further Reading
Sources
- French Ministry of Culture, archaeology collections: "Lascaux" (discovery 12 September 1940; dating; replicas) and "Grotte Chauvet-Pont d'Arc" (discovery 18 December 1994).
- Enciclopedia Treccani, "Francia" (history sections, from Roman Gaul to Sébastien Lecornu's reappointment in October 2025), "Guerra dei Cent'anni", "Vercingetorige", "San Bartolomeo, notte di", "Terrore", "Vandea", "Versailles" and "Visigoti".
- Conseil constitutionnel: texts of the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen (1789) and of the Constitution of 4 October 1958 as now in force (Articles 1, 2, 6, 49 and the Preamble); list of French constitutions since 1791. Élysée: list of presidents of the Republic.
- United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, "France" (Holocaust Encyclopedia), for 1940, the Statutes of the Jews, the Vel d'Hiv roundup and the number of Jews in France; deportation and death figures as given in the condensed history and the standard historical literature (Serge Klarsfeld).
- Maddison Project Database 2023 (University of Groningen): population and GDP per person.
- INSEE: Bilan démographique 2025 (January 2026); unemployment, second quarter 2026 (August 2026); GDP, third quarter 2026 (30 October 2026).
- The Guardian, reporting of 8 July, 28 September, 12, 19, 22, 24 and 31 October 2026 (Le Pen's appeal, Senate elections, the centre-left primary, public debt, the protests and riots).
- Death tolls for the Terror, the Vendée, the Commune, the First World War and the Algerian War follow the ranges in the library's condensed history and the scholarly literature it summarises; all remain debated, the Algerian figures politically so.
Go deeper
- 📘 The Discovery of France — Graham Robb (how un-French most of France was until the twentieth century)
- 📘 Citizens: A Chronicle of the French Revolution — Simon Schama (vivid and opinionated; read with a more sympathetic account, such as Peter McPhee's Liberty or Death)
- 📘 Vichy France: Old Guard and New Order, 1940–1944 — Robert O. Paxton (the book that showed France how much Vichy did on its own initiative)
- 📘 A Savage War of Peace: Algeria 1954–1962 — Alistair Horne (the classic English-language history of the Algerian War)
- 📘 France: A Modern History from the Revolution to the War with Terror — Jonathan Fenby (a readable single-volume overview)
- 🌐 Conseil constitutionnel: the 1789 Declaration (the full text, in French)
- 🌐 Related pieces in this library: France: A Condensed History of Revolution, Republic, and Grandeur; If I Was Born in France; A Brief History of Spain (this series)


A Brief History of the United Kingdom: Four Nations, One Crown, and the Long Argument About Who Rules
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How a cluster of islands off the edge of Europe produced Parliament, the first industrial economy and the largest empire in history, and why its four nations are still negotiating the terms on which they live together.

Follows: United Kingdom: A Condensed History of Islands, Empire, and Reinvention
On Friday 30 October 2026, the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, Andy Burnham, sat down in Glasgow with the First Minister of Scotland, and then with the First Minister of Wales. The Welsh First Minister, Rhun ap Iorwerth, leads Plaid Cymru, a party that wants Wales to be independent; it had won the most seats in the Senedd election in May, ending Labour's unbroken hold on the Welsh government since devolution began in 1999. In the Scottish meeting, Downing Street's own summary records the Prime Minister saying that a second Scottish independence referendum was "off the table."
Three heads of government, two of them leading parties that would prefer not to be in the same country, discussing "regional empowerment" and "reindustrialisation" in the city where James Watt, working at the university in the 1760s, hit on the improvement that made the steam engine efficient. That one Friday holds most of what this long read is about: a state made of several nations, a Parliament that has always had to argue for its power, an industrial past that still shapes its politics, and a constitution that changes by negotiation rather than revolution.
The condensed piece in this library gives the outline. This is the full version, from the first footprints on a Norfolk beach to the autumn of 2026.
In this history

Before England: the first peoples and Roman Britain (to c. 410)
English, Welsh, Scots, Vikings and Normans (c. 410–1215)
Magna Carta, Parliament and the medieval wars (1215–1485)
The Tudors and the Reformation (1485–1603)
Civil wars and the Glorious Revolution (1603–1707)
Union, slavery and the Industrial Revolution (1707–1837)
The Victorian century and the Irish question (1837–1922)
Empire: the view from London and the view from the colonised (1600–1997)
Two world wars (1914–1945)
The welfare state, the end of empire and the Troubles (1945–1979)
Thatcher, New Labour and devolution (1979–2010)
Austerity, Brexit and Britain in 2026 (2010–2026)
How to understand the United Kingdom today

A note on names, because they matter here. Britain or Great Britain is the largest island, holding England, Scotland and Wales. The United Kingdom is the state: Great Britain plus Northern Ireland. The British Isles is a geographical term that many people in Ireland reject, since the Republic of Ireland is not British. And "England" is not a synonym for any of them, however often outsiders (and some English people) use it that way.

Part 1 — Before England: the first peoples and Roman Britain (to c. 410)
In 2013, waves at Happisburgh on the Norfolk coast stripped away sand and exposed a patch of hardened mud printed with dozens of human footprints. Before the tide destroyed them, archaeologists photographed and measured them. The sediments they were pressed into date to between roughly a million and 780,000 years ago. Whoever made them, probably an early human species rather than our own, walked along an estuary in what was then a peninsula of Europe.
For most of the following million years, "Britain" was not an island. During ice ages the sea level fell and a broad plain, now called Doggerland, joined it to the continent. People came and went with the climate: Neanderthals, then modern humans, then nobody when the ice was thickest. Britain's continuous human story begins after the last ice age, about 12,000 years ago, when hunter-gatherers followed herds of deer and horse back north.
One of them has a face. Cheddar Man, found in a cave in Somerset in 1903, lived about 10,000 years ago and is the oldest nearly complete skeleton of our species found in Britain. When his DNA was read in 2018, it showed genetic markers for dark skin and blue eyes, which fits what we know of other European hunter-gatherers of the time. According to the Natural History Museum, modern Britons carry only around 10 percent of his population's ancestry. His people were mostly replaced, twice.
Two great turnovers

When
What arrived
What the DNA says

c. 4000 BC
Farming: wheat, barley, cattle, sheep, pottery
Britain's first farmers descended mostly from people whose ancestors had left the Aegean and moved west along the Mediterranean; the local hunter-gatherers were largely replaced

c. 2450 BC onward
The "Beaker" culture, named after its distinctive pots, and metalworking
A 2018 study in Nature found the Beaker spread was associated with the replacement of about 90 percent of Britain's gene pool within a few hundred years

Neither turnover was necessarily a conquest. Disease, intermarriage and farming's higher birth rates can all replace a population over centuries. What the genetics rules out is the old idea of an island people who stayed put while ideas washed over them.
Stonehenge
The farmers who arrived around 4000 BC built long barrows for their dead, causewayed enclosures and, eventually, stone circles. The most famous began around 3000 BC as a circular ditch and bank on Salisbury Plain. The giant sarsen stones, some weighing around 25 tonnes, were raised around 2600 to 2400 BC, hauled from about 25 kilometres away. The smaller "bluestones" came from the Preseli Hills in west Wales, about 240 kilometres away, and in 2024 geologists traced the flat Altar Stone at its centre to north-east Scotland, roughly 700 kilometres away. The monument is aligned on the midsummer sunrise and the midwinter sunset.
Why it was built is still argued over: a temple, a calendar, a monument to ancestors. Whatever it meant, it shows that around 2500 BC people across the whole island could co-operate on an enormous project. Britain was connected long before it was united.

Stonehenge was being rebuilt with stones from Wales and Scotland around the time the Great Pyramid was going up in Egypt. "Britain" as a shared space is much older than any British state.

The Iron Age
By the first millennium BC, Britain was a land of farming tribes, hill forts and Celtic languages, ancestors of Welsh, Cornish and the Gaelic of Ireland and Scotland. These peoples left no writing of their own; we see them through archaeology and through the eyes of their enemies. Julius Caesar landed in 55 and 54 BC, fought, collected promises of tribute and left. For the next century the tribes of the south-east traded with the Roman world, minted coins and played Roman politics. Then Rome came back to stay.
Roman Britain (43–c. 410)
In AD 43 the Emperor Claudius, who needed a military triumph, sent four legions across the Channel. Within a few years the south and east were Roman. The north and west took decades, and the far north never fell at all.
The most famous resistance came from a woman. In AD 60 or 61, after Roman officials flogged Boudica, queen of the Iceni of East Anglia, and assaulted her daughters, she led a revolt that burned Colchester, London and St Albans. The Roman historian Tacitus, writing decades later, put the number killed by the rebels at 70,000; ancient numbers like this are rarely reliable. The revolt was crushed, and Boudica died soon after. Victorian Britain later turned her into a national heroine and put her statue, in a chariot, beside Parliament, a striking choice for an empire that was then suppressing revolts of its own.
What Rome built

Roman legacy
Still visible

Towns
London (Londinium), York, Bath, Chester, Colchester and dozens more

Roads
Straight routes such as Watling Street, many still followed by modern roads

Frontier
Hadrian's Wall, begun in AD 122, running about 117 km coast to coast

Writing
The Vindolanda tablets: thin wooden letters from a fort near the Wall, including a birthday invitation from one officer's wife to another

Religion
Christianity, which reached Britain under Roman rule; Saint Alban is remembered as Britain's first Christian martyr

For the great majority of people, Roman Britain meant farming the same land under new landlords and paying taxes in coin and grain. A wealthy minority lived in villas with mosaics and underfloor heating. In the cities, inscriptions record soldiers, traders and slaves from across the empire, including North Africa and Syria. Roman Britain was more ethnically mixed than the Britain of a thousand years later.
Scotland was different. The Romans pushed north more than once, built a second wall (the Antonine Wall) between the Forth and the Clyde in the 140s, and abandoned it within a generation. The peoples beyond, whom the Romans called Caledonians and later Picts, were never conquered. That fact, more than any later myth, is why the island's northern third developed separately.
The end of Roman Britain
By the late 300s the western empire was under strain everywhere. Commanders in Britain repeatedly took troops to the continent to make their own bids for the throne. Around 410, according to a later source, the Emperor Honorius told the British cities to look to their own defence. There was no single dramatic departure; the money stopped coming, the army stopped being paid, and within a generation or two towns were emptying, coins were no longer used and the villa economy had collapsed.
What happened next is the most argued-over period in British history, because almost nobody was writing it down.

Part 2 — English, Welsh, Scots, Vikings and Normans (c. 410–1215)
The traditional story comes from a British monk named Gildas, writing in the 500s, and from the Northumbrian monk Bede, whose Ecclesiastical History of the English People was finished in 731. In it, the Britons invited Germanic warriors (Angles, Saxons and Jutes) to help defend them, and the guests turned on their hosts and took the land. For much of the 20th century, archaeologists doubted it: perhaps a small warrior elite had arrived and the natives simply adopted their language and fashions.
Ancient DNA has settled part of the argument. A 2022 study in Nature of nearly 280 early medieval individuals from England found that people buried in eastern England derived up to 76 percent of their ancestry from the continental North Sea zone, today's northern Germany, the Netherlands and Denmark, with a great deal of local variation. There was mass migration, and there was also intermarriage. Both old stories were partly right.
The newcomers' language became English. In the west and north, the Britons' language survived and became Welsh and Cornish; their people called themselves Cymry, "fellow countrymen." The English called them wealas, "foreigners," which is where the word "Welsh" comes from. Meanwhile in the far north, Irish settlers in Argyll (the kingdom of Dál Riata) brought Gaelic, and over the following centuries Gaelic-speaking kings merged with the Picts into a kingdom called Alba: the core of Scotland. The name "Scot" itself originally meant an Irish raider.
Kingdoms, crosses and the Sutton Hoo ship
Early England was a patchwork of rival kingdoms: Northumbria, Mercia, East Anglia, Wessex, Kent and others. In 597 a mission sent by Pope Gregory the Great and led by Augustine arrived in Kent; Irish monks were converting the north from the island of Iona at the same time. Within a century the English kingdoms were Christian, and Northumbria produced some of the finest art in Europe, including the Lindisfarne Gospels.
The grandest burial in English history dates from this world. At Sutton Hoo in Suffolk, excavated in 1939, a king (very probably Rædwald of East Anglia, who died around 624) was laid in a 27-metre ship under a mound, with a great helmet, gold and garnet fittings, silver from Byzantium and coins from France. The pagan ship burial and the Christian spoons in the same grave catch a kingdom in the middle of changing its gods.
The Vikings
In 793, raiders from Scandinavia sacked the monastery of Lindisfarne off the Northumbrian coast. For seventy years they raided; in 865 a much larger force, which English chroniclers called the "Great Heathen Army," came to conquer. Within a decade it had destroyed every English kingdom except Wessex.

Ruler
Dates
Why remembered

Offa of Mercia
r. 757–796
Dominated southern England; built Offa's Dyke along the Welsh border

Alfred of Wessex
r. 871–899
Defeated the Vikings at Edington (878); built about 33 fortified burhs; promoted learning in English

Athelstan
r. 924–939
Alfred's grandson; ruled all England from 927, often called the first king of England

Hywel Dda
d. 950
Welsh king remembered for codifying Welsh law

Cnut
r. 1016–1035
Danish king of England, Denmark and Norway

Alfred's treaty with the Viking leader Guthrum split England in two: Wessex and western Mercia in the south and west, and the Danelaw in the north and east. Scandinavian settlers left thousands of place names (those ending in -by and -thorpe) and many everyday English words, among them sky, egg, window and the pronoun they. Alfred's successors reconquered the Danelaw piece by piece, and by 927 his grandson Athelstan ruled a single kingdom of the English. In 1016 that kingdom fell again, to the Dane Cnut, who ruled it as part of a North Sea empire.
By 1066 England was one of the richest and best-administered kingdoms in Europe, with shires, sheriffs, a silver coinage controlled by the king and a tax system that could raise huge sums. That wealth is exactly why it attracted conquerors.
1066 and the Norman kingdom
When King Edward the Confessor died childless in January 1066, three men claimed his throne. The English nobleman Harold Godwinson took it. Harald Hardrada, king of Norway, invaded in the north and was killed at Stamford Bridge on 25 September. Three days later William, Duke of Normandy, landed in Sussex. On 14 October, at Hastings, after a battle that lasted most of a day, Harold was killed and his army broken. William was crowned in Westminster Abbey on Christmas Day.
It was the last successful invasion of England, and it changed almost everything at the top.

A new ruling class. Within twenty years nearly the entire English aristocracy had been replaced. By 1086, only about 5 percent of land south of the River Tees was still held by English lords.
A new language of power. Norman French became the language of the court and the law for three centuries; Latin the language of documents. English survived as the language of everyone else, absorbing thousands of French words. That is why English has cow and pig in the field but beef and pork on the table.
Castles. The Normans built them in unprecedented numbers, first wooden motte-and-bailey forts and then stone keeps such as the Tower of London, to hold down a hostile population.
The Harrying of the North. When the north rebelled in 1069–70, William's armies destroyed crops, livestock and villages across Yorkshire and beyond. A monk writing a generation later claimed 100,000 people died of the resulting famine; historians treat the figure as a guess but agree the devastation was real and still visible in the records sixteen years later.
Domesday Book. In 1086 William ordered a survey of his whole kingdom: who held each estate, how many ploughs, mills, pigs and people it had, and what it was worth. Nothing like it existed elsewhere in Europe. Its nickname came from the English, who compared its finality to the Day of Judgement.

A kingdom straddling the Channel
For the next century and a half, England was one part of a cross-Channel realm. William's successors spent much of their time in France. After a civil war between Henry I's daughter Matilda and his nephew Stephen (1138–1153), known simply as "the Anarchy," Matilda's son Henry II (r. 1154–1189) inherited an empire stretching from the Scottish border to the Pyrenees. Henry built the foundations of English common law, with royal judges travelling the country and juries of local men. His quarrel with his archbishop, Thomas Becket, ended with Becket's murder in Canterbury Cathedral in 1170, and with Canterbury becoming the most popular shrine in England.
Henry II also opened a story with no end yet. In 1169–71, Anglo-Norman lords and then the king himself landed in Ireland. Over the next centuries English rule there waxed and waned, often reduced to the area around Dublin called the Pale, but the claim was never dropped.
Wales, meanwhile, remained a land of Welsh princes, squeezed by Norman "Marcher" lords along the border. Scotland's kings, though they often held English lands and sometimes paid homage, ran their own kingdom, and the Normans who settled there, families such as the Bruces and the Balliols, became Scottish.
King John
Henry's younger son John (r. 1199–1216) lost Normandy to the king of France in 1204. Trying to win it back, he squeezed his barons for money with unusual ruthlessness: huge fees to inherit their fathers' lands, fines to marry, confiscations from anyone who displeased him. In 1214 his continental allies were defeated at Bouvines. In 1215 the barons rebelled, took London and forced him to negotiate in a meadow by the Thames.

Part 3 — Magna Carta, Parliament and the medieval wars (1215–1485)
At Runnymede, on 15 June 1215, John set his seal to a long list of promises that later became known as Magna Carta, the Great Charter. Most of its 63 clauses deal with feudal grievances: inheritance fees, widows' rights, fish weirs in the Thames, the return of hostages. Two have echoed ever since. In the translation by the British Museum scholar G. R. C. Davis:

"No free man shall be seized or imprisoned, or stripped of his rights or possessions, or outlawed or exiled... except by the lawful judgement of his equals or by the law of the land. To no one will we sell, to no one deny or delay right or justice." — Magna Carta, clauses 39 and 40

As a peace treaty, it failed within weeks. John persuaded the Pope to condemn it, the barons invited a French prince to take the throne, and the civil war ended only with John's death in 1216. But the regents of his nine-year-old son Henry III reissued the charter to win back support, and it was reissued again in 1217 and 1225, and confirmed again and again. Four copies of the 1215 original survive (two in the British Library, one at Lincoln and one at Salisbury), and three of its clauses, as revised in 1297, are still law in England and Wales.
Its real importance was the idea it planted: that the king was bound by rules, and that if he broke them, the political community could hold him to account. The 17th-century lawyers who fought the Stuart kings, the American colonists of the 1770s and the drafters of the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights all invoked it, usually reading into it more than its authors meant.
The birth of Parliament
What turned that idea into an institution was money. Medieval kings needed taxes to fight wars, and the barons, knights and townsmen who paid them increasingly demanded something back: grievances heard, laws changed, counsel taken. In 1265 the rebel baron Simon de Montfort summoned not only lords but two knights from each shire and two burgesses from each of many towns, the first time townsmen had been called. Edward I's "Model Parliament" of 1295 made the mixture regular, and by the mid-1300s the knights and burgesses were sitting apart as the House of Commons. Their power rested on one principle that would matter enormously later: taxes required consent.
Conquest in Wales and war with Scotland
Edward I (r. 1272–1307) is remembered very differently in each of the island's nations. In England he was a lawmaker. In Wales he was a conqueror. After the last native Prince of Wales, Llywelyn ap Gruffudd, was killed in December 1282, Edward annexed his principality by the Statute of Rhuddlan (1284) and ringed it with massive castles (Caernarfon, Conwy, Harlech, Beaumaris) that are now World Heritage Sites. He gave the title "Prince of Wales" to his own son, and the heir to the English, later British, throne has held it ever since. The last great Welsh rising, led by Owain Glyndŵr from 1400, held much of Wales for several years before it was crushed.
In Scotland, Edward exploited a succession crisis to claim overlordship and then conquest. Resistance found leaders in William Wallace, who won at Stirling Bridge in 1297 and was executed in London in 1305, and Robert the Bruce, who made himself king and destroyed an English army at Bannockburn in 1314. In 1320 Scotland's barons sent a letter to the Pope, the Declaration of Arbroath, that contains one of the most quoted sentences in Scottish history:

"As long as but a hundred of us remain alive, never will we on any conditions be brought under English rule." — Declaration of Arbroath, 1320 (translated by Sir James Fergusson)

England recognised Scottish independence in 1328. For the next three centuries the two kingdoms were separate and usually hostile, and Scotland's "Auld Alliance" with France was a standing threat on England's northern border.
Plague and revolt
In June 1348 the Black Death reached a port in Dorset. Historians now widely accept that it killed 40 to 60 percent of England's population, perhaps six million people before the plague, in under two years. Scotland, Wales and Ireland suffered too.
The survivors inherited a changed economy. With labour suddenly scarce, peasants demanded higher wages and left their lords for better offers. Parliament tried to freeze wages at pre-plague levels with the Ordinance of Labourers (1349) and the Statute of Labourers (1351). When a series of poll taxes followed, the Peasants' Revolt of 1381 broke out: rebels from Kent and Essex marched on London, burned the palace of the king's uncle, killed the Chancellor and demanded an end to serfdom. The fourteen-year-old Richard II met them, promised concessions and then broke the promises once they had gone home. Yet within a generation serfdom had largely withered away anyway. The plague had done what the rebels could not.
A century of wars

War
Dates
Outcome

Hundred Years' War
1337–1453
English kings claimed the French crown; after famous victories (Crécy 1346, Agincourt 1415), England lost everything in France except Calais

Wars of the Roses
1455–1487
Rival branches of the royal family, York and Lancaster, fought for the throne; ended when Henry Tudor killed Richard III at Bosworth in 1485

By the late 1300s, fighting the French had made French unfashionable: English was back in Parliament and the law courts, and Chaucer was writing The Canterbury Tales in it.

Part 4 — The Tudors and the Reformation (1485–1603)
Henry Tudor, who became Henry VII after Bosworth, had a thin claim to the throne and knew it. He married the Yorkist heiress, built up the royal treasury, kept the nobility on a short leash and died in his bed in 1509, a rare achievement in that century. His family was Welsh in origin, a point Welsh poets celebrated; Wales had, in a sense, conquered England.
His son Henry VIII (r. 1509–1547) is remembered for six wives, but his marriages mattered because of what they did to religion. When Pope Clement VII refused to annul his marriage to Catherine of Aragon, who had not given him a son, Henry broke with Rome. The Act of Supremacy of 1534 made the king Supreme Head of the Church of England; refusing to accept it became treason, and Thomas More and Bishop John Fisher were executed for it in 1535. Between 1536 and 1540 Henry's minister Thomas Cromwell dissolved every monastery, nunnery and friary in England and Wales, and the Crown sold off their vast lands. A great northern rising in defence of the old church, the Pilgrimage of Grace (1536), was crushed and its leaders executed.
Henry's reign also redrew the internal map. The Laws in Wales Acts of 1536 and 1543 annexed Wales fully to England, divided it into shires, gave it seats in Parliament and made English the only language of law and administration. In 1542 Henry took the title King of Ireland.
Five monarchs, three religions

Monarch
Reign
Religious direction

Henry VIII
1509–1547
Broke with Rome; kept much Catholic doctrine

Edward VI
1547–1553
Thorough Protestant reform; first English Book of Common Prayer (1549)

Mary I
1553–1558
Restored Catholicism; nearly 300 Protestants burned for heresy

Elizabeth I
1558–1603
Moderate Protestant settlement (1559); Catholic priests executed as traitors

(Scotland) Mary, Queen of Scots
1542–1567
Catholic queen of a country that turned Protestant in 1560

Historians used to describe the English Reformation as a popular movement against a corrupt church. Since the 1990s, work such as Eamon Duffy's The Stripping of the Altars has argued the opposite: that late-medieval Catholicism was vigorous and loved, and that Protestantism was imposed from above and accepted slowly. Most historians now see something in between, a reformation that was both imposed and, over two generations, genuinely adopted.
Scotland took a different road. Its Reformation, led by the preacher John Knox, came in 1560 through a revolt of Protestant nobles against the French-backed Catholic regime, and produced a Presbyterian church, governed by elders rather than bishops, that would shape Scottish identity for centuries. Mary, Queen of Scots, was forced to abdicate in 1567, fled to England, and spent nineteen years as Elizabeth's prisoner before being executed in 1587 for plotting against her.
Elizabeth's England
Elizabeth's reign is remembered for the defeat of the Spanish Armada in 1588, for Shakespeare, Marlowe and the London theatres, and for the first English voyages of trade, piracy and colonisation across the Atlantic. Sir Francis Drake's raids on Spanish treasure ships were patriotic heroism in England and state-sponsored robbery in Spain, depending on where you stood. The same decades saw the first English slaving voyages, led by John Hawkins in the 1560s, who seized Africans on the coast of West Africa and sold them in the Spanish Caribbean: a small beginning of a trade England would later dominate.
In Ireland, Elizabeth's reign was a war of conquest. English governments confiscated land after each rebellion and "planted" it with English settlers. The Nine Years' War (1594–1603), led by Hugh O'Neill, Earl of Tyrone, was the most serious challenge to English rule in Ireland before the 20th century; its defeat, in the year Elizabeth died, opened the way for the Plantation of Ulster.
How people lived
For most people in Tudor England, life meant farming, and most farming was changing. Landlords were enclosing open fields and common land, often to graze sheep for the profitable wool trade, and preachers and pamphleteers denounced the evictions that followed. Prices rose sharply through the 1500s. Begging and vagrancy alarmed the authorities, whose answer culminated in the Poor Law of 1601: every parish had to look after its own poor, raising a local tax to do so. It was harsh to "sturdy beggars," but it was also one of the earliest national systems of poor relief in Europe, and in modified form it lasted until 1834. Most people still lived in villages of a few hundred souls, worked from dawn to dusk in summer, married in their mid-twenties rather than in their teens, and buried a large share of their children before the age of ten. Literacy spread with the printing press and the Protestant insistence on reading the Bible in English. The Welsh Bible of 1588 is often credited with keeping Welsh alive as a language of learning when it might have faded.

Part 5 — Civil wars and the Glorious Revolution (1603–1707)
When Elizabeth died childless in 1603, the heir was James VI of Scotland, son of the executed Mary. He became James I of England as well: one king, two kingdoms (three, counting Ireland), two parliaments, two churches and two legal systems. James called himself King of Great Britain and wanted a full union; neither Parliament was interested.
His reign saw the Gunpowder Plot of 1605, in which Catholic conspirators tried to blow up Parliament and the king (still remembered every 5 November with bonfires), the King James Bible of 1611, and the beginning of the Plantation of Ulster from 1609, when land in the north of Ireland confiscated from Gaelic lords was granted to Protestant settlers from England and, especially, Scotland. The plantation created the Protestant community of Ulster, and with it the fault line that would split Ireland three centuries later.
Why the civil wars happened
James's son Charles I (r. 1625–1649) believed kings answered to God alone. From 1629 to 1640 he ruled without calling Parliament, raising money through old feudal levies such as "ship money." He also tried to make his kingdoms' churches uniform. When he imposed an English-style prayer book on Presbyterian Scotland in 1637, the Scots rose, signed a National Covenant (1638) and invaded northern England. To pay for the war, Charles had to recall Parliament, which seized the chance to dismantle his personal rule. In 1641 the Catholic Irish rebelled, killing thousands of Protestant settlers, and the question of who would control the army to suppress them split Parliament from the king. In August 1642 Charles raised his standard at Nottingham.
Historians now call it the Wars of the Three Kingdoms (1639–1653), because it was never only an English civil war. Scotland, Ireland and England fought one another and themselves.

Year
Event

1642
War begins in England

1645
Parliament's New Model Army wins at Naseby

1649
Charles I is tried and beheaded in Whitehall on 30 January; monarchy and the House of Lords are abolished

1649–50
Oliver Cromwell's campaign in Ireland, including massacres at Drogheda and Wexford

1651
Charles II's Scottish army is defeated at Worcester

1653–58
Cromwell rules as Lord Protector

1660
Monarchy restored under Charles II

The cost was enormous. One estimate for England and Wales alone is around 85,000 killed in combat and another 127,000 dead from disease and other war-related causes. Ireland suffered proportionally worse still, from war, famine and plague, though estimates vary widely. After the conquest, almost all land owned by Irish Catholics was confiscated, and much of it given to soldiers and investors. In Ireland, Cromwell's name is still a curse. In England, he is remembered more ambiguously: a statue of him stands outside Parliament.
The wars also produced astonishing ideas. In the army debates at Putney in 1647, radicals called Levellers argued that every man should have a vote. "The poorest he that is in England hath a life to live, as the greatest he," said Colonel Thomas Rainsborough. They lost, and the vote for all men took another 271 years.
Restoration and revolution
Charles II (r. 1660–1685) returned to cheering crowds. His reign saw the Great Plague of London (1665), the Great Fire (1666), the founding of the Royal Society (1660) and the beginnings of political parties: the Whigs, who wanted to exclude Charles's Catholic brother James from the throne, and the Tories, who defended his right to it.
James II became king in 1685 and tried to give Catholics equal rights by royal decree, overriding Parliament. When his queen gave birth to a son in June 1688, raising the prospect of a Catholic dynasty, seven leading politicians invited his Protestant son-in-law, William of Orange, ruler of the Dutch Republic, to intervene. William landed at Torbay on 5 November 1688 with a large army. James's support collapsed and he fled to France.

The Bill of Rights of 1689 is the hinge of British constitutional history. It declared that the Crown could not suspend laws, levy taxes or keep a standing army in peacetime without Parliament's consent, and that elections and parliamentary debate should be free. From then on, the monarch reigned with Parliament, not over it.

Whig historians later called this the "Glorious Revolution": bloodless, sensible and the foundation of English liberty. It was far from bloodless in Ireland, where James's Catholic army was defeated by William at the Boyne in 1690 and finally at Aughrim and Limerick in 1691. Penal laws then barred Catholics, the large majority of Irish people, from Parliament, the professions and most landowning. Protestant Ulster still marches every July to celebrate the Boyne; Irish nationalists remember it as the start of the Protestant Ascendancy. In Scotland, the Highlands rose for James in 1689, and in 1692 government troops massacred members of the MacDonald clan at Glencoe.
Money, and a union
The revolution brought a new financial machine. To pay for wars against Louis XIV's France, the government created the Bank of England (1694) and a permanent national debt, backed by Parliament's power to tax. Lenders trusted a parliamentary government to repay them more than they had ever trusted a king, and that trust let Britain borrow cheaply and fight long wars for the next century.
Scotland, meanwhile, had suffered famine in the 1690s and then disaster. The Darien scheme, an attempt to found a Scottish trading colony on the isthmus of Panama, collapsed in 1698–1700 with the loss of much of the capital Scots had invested. In 1705 England's Parliament passed the Alien Act, threatening to treat Scots as foreigners and block their trade unless Scotland negotiated a union.
The Treaty of Union was agreed in 1706 and ratified by the Scottish Parliament, 110 votes to 69, in January 1707. On 1 May 1707 England (with Wales) and Scotland became the single Kingdom of Great Britain. Scotland sent 45 MPs and 16 peers to Westminster and gained free trade with England and its colonies; it kept its own legal system, its own Presbyterian church and its own universities. Part of a lump sum called "the Equivalent" compensated investors who had lost money at Darien.
Was Scotland bought or did it choose? Opponents at the time, and Robert Burns later ("bought and sold for English gold"), saw a nation sold by its aristocracy, and historians have documented payments and promises of office. Others argue the union was a hard-headed bargain that gave Scotland access to the largest free-trade area in Europe and, within a century, a leading share in the empire. The argument is not academic: it is a version of the independence debate today.

Part 6 — Union, slavery and the Industrial Revolution (1707–1837)
The new state was not yet secure. The exiled Stuarts, the "Jacobites" (from Jacobus, Latin for James), rose in 1715 and again in 1745, when Charles Edward Stuart, "Bonnie Prince Charlie," led a Highland army as far south as Derby before turning back. At Culloden, near Inverness, on 16 April 1746, it was destroyed in under an hour. The government then broke the Highland clan system: it banned the wearing of tartan and the carrying of arms and ended the chiefs' legal powers. Over the following century many Highland landlords evicted tenants to make way for sheep, in the Highland Clearances, and tens of thousands of Gaelic-speaking Scots emigrated to Canada, America and Australia.
The same Scotland, at the same time, produced the Scottish Enlightenment: the philosopher David Hume, the economist Adam Smith (The Wealth of Nations, 1776), the geologist James Hutton, and Edinburgh's reputation as "the Athens of the North." Union, it turned out, could coexist with a very Scottish flowering.
The slave empire
The 18th-century British economy was built partly on the Atlantic. British ships became the leading carriers of enslaved Africans: by the estimates of the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database, between about 3.1 and 3.5 million people over the whole history of the British trade. Liverpool, Bristol and London grew rich on it. In the Caribbean colonies, above all Jamaica and Barbados, enslaved Africans grew sugar under a regime of violence that killed them faster than they could have children, so more were always bought. Sugar sweetened British tea, and the profits flowed into British banks, country houses and, historians still argue how much, British industry.
The movement to end it was one of the first mass political campaigns in history. Formerly enslaved writers such as Olaudah Equiano, Quaker activists, the campaigner Thomas Clarkson and the evangelical MP William Wilberforce organised petitions signed by hundreds of thousands, sugar boycotts and the famous diagram of the slave ship Brookes, showing how people were packed below decks. Enslaved people themselves made the strongest case: revolts in the colonies, above all the Haitian Revolution in neighbouring French Saint-Domingue (1791–1804) and the great Jamaican rising of 1831–32, made slavery look both immoral and dangerous.
Parliament abolished the British slave trade in 1807. The Slavery Abolition Act of 1833, in force from 1 August 1834, freed roughly 800,000 people across most of the empire, but on terms that still shock. The government paid £20 million in compensation, about 40 percent of the Treasury's annual income at the time, to slave owners. The enslaved received nothing, and most were first made to work as unpaid "apprentices" for their former owners, a system cut short in 1838 after protests in Britain and the colonies. The government borrowed most of the money, and the last of the related debt was only redeemed in 2015.
Revolution elsewhere, reform at home
In 1776 thirteen of Britain's American colonies declared independence, and by 1783 they had won it with French help. Britain then fought revolutionary and Napoleonic France almost continuously from 1793 to 1815, ending with Wellington's victory at Waterloo. In Ireland, a republican rising inspired by the French Revolution, the 1798 Rebellion of the United Irishmen, was crushed with great brutality. Its result was the Act of Union with Ireland: from 1 January 1801 the state became the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, with 100 Irish MPs at Westminster. Prime Minister William Pitt had hoped to pair union with Catholic emancipation; George III refused, and Catholics could not sit in Parliament until 1829.
The first industrial nation
Britain's first census, in 1801, counted about 10.5 million people in Great Britain. Over the next half-century the country changed more than it had in the previous five hundred years.

Change
Before
After

Raw cotton used by British industry
about 2.5 million lb (1750)
about 588 million lb (1850)

Typical power source
water wheels, horses, human muscle
steam engines burning coal

Transport
horse and canal barge
railways, from the Liverpool and Manchester line of 1830

Where people lived
mostly in villages
by mid-century, roughly half in towns and cities

The key inventions were mostly practical improvements by tinkerers and businessmen. Richard Arkwright patented the water frame for spinning cotton in 1769 and built a water-powered mill at Cromford in Derbyshire in 1771, often called the first modern factory. James Watt's separate condenser cut the coal a steam engine needed to a quarter or less of earlier designs. George Stephenson's locomotives, and the railway mania of the 1840s, tied the country together.
Why Britain first? Historians still disagree, and their answers are worth knowing because each one is also an argument about the present.

Explanation
Leading proponent
The case

High wages, cheap coal
Robert Allen
British labour was expensive and coal was cheap, so it paid to invent machines that swapped one for the other

Culture and knowledge
Joel Mokyr
An "industrial enlightenment" connected scientists, engineers and entrepreneurs who believed nature could be understood and used

Coal and colonies
Kenneth Pomeranz
Britain's luck in accessible coal and its colonies' land, food and cotton freed it from the ecological limits that held back other advanced economies, including China's

Slavery's profits
Eric Williams (1944)
Atlantic slavery supplied capital and markets; critics reply that its profits were too small a share of investment to explain industrialisation alone

For the people who worked in the new mills, early industrialisation was hard. Children as young as six worked long shifts; the Factory Act of 1833 began, slowly, to limit their hours. Cities grew faster than sewers, and cholera arrived in 1832. Whether ordinary living standards rose or fell between 1780 and 1840 is a long-running debate; many economic historians now think real wages stagnated for decades while output soared, a period Allen has called "Engels' pause," after Friedrich Engels, whose The Condition of the Working Class in England described Manchester's slums in the 1840s.
Political pressure grew with the towns. In August 1819 cavalry charged a peaceful crowd of tens of thousands gathered in Manchester to demand parliamentary reform; about 18 people were killed and hundreds injured. The journalists called it Peterloo, in ironic echo of Waterloo. The Great Reform Act of 1832 abolished many "rotten boroughs" (Gatton in Surrey had seven voters) and gave seats to the new industrial cities, but it raised the electorate only from about 400,000 to about 650,000 in a population of millions. Reform had begun; democracy had not.

Part 7 — The Victorian century and the Irish question (1837–1922)
Victoria came to the throne in 1837, aged eighteen, and reigned until 1901. Her era began with hunger and protest and ended with Britain at the centre of the world economy.
The Chartists of 1838–48 demanded six things, including a vote for every man, secret ballots and pay for MPs so that workers could stand. They gathered millions of signatures and were turned down three times. Every one of their demands except annual elections eventually became law. In 1846 Parliament repealed the Corn Laws, tariffs that had kept bread prices high to protect landowners, and Britain became the world's great champion of free trade. In 1851 the Great Exhibition in Hyde Park's Crystal Palace showed off "the workshop of the world" to six million visitors.
The Great Famine
While England industrialised, Ireland's rural poor depended on one crop. When potato blight struck in 1845, and again in the following years, the result was the worst catastrophe in modern Irish history. Between 1845 and 1852 about a million people died, with estimates ranging from roughly 775,000 to 1.5 million, and more than a million emigrated. Ireland, which had held more than eight million people in 1841, lost a fifth to a quarter of its population within a generation and did not recover it for well over a century.
The British government's response is still argued over. Robert Peel's government imported maize and was relatively effective; its successor, under Lord John Russell, relied on public works and the market, and Charles Trevelyan, the official in charge of relief, saw the famine in part as a providential correction of Irish "overpopulation." Food continued to be exported from Ireland during the famine, though in the worst years more grain was imported than exported. Most historians reject the claim of deliberate genocide but agree that ideology and indifference turned a natural disaster into a mass death. It hardened Irish nationalism for good, and created an Irish diaspora in America, Britain and Australia that never forgot it.
Towards democracy

Year
Reform

1832
First Reform Act

1867
Second Reform Act gives the vote to many urban working men

1870
Education Act begins a national system of elementary schools

1872
Secret ballot

1884
Third Reform Act extends the vote to many rural men

1900
Labour Representation Committee founded; becomes the Labour Party in 1906

1908–11
Liberal government introduces old-age pensions and National Insurance

1911
Parliament Act removes the House of Lords' power to veto most laws

1918
All men over 21 and women over 30 who met a property qualification get the vote

1928
Women vote on equal terms with men

Votes for women were won by two movements that often disliked each other: the patient, law-abiding suffragists led by Millicent Fawcett, and Emmeline Pankhurst's militant suffragettes, who smashed windows, set fires and went on hunger strike in prison. Historians still debate which did more. The 1918 Act tripled the electorate, from about 7.7 million in 1912 to 21.4 million.
Victorian Britain was also the Britain of the slums described by Dickens, the social surveys of Charles Booth and Seebohm Rowntree (who found around a quarter to a third of the people of London and York living in poverty), of trade unions and friendly societies, Methodist chapels and football clubs, seaside excursions by train and the music hall. By 1901 the large majority of people in England and Wales lived in towns and cities. It was the first predominantly urban society in history.
Home Rule and partition
From the 1870s, Irish MPs at Westminster, led by Charles Stewart Parnell, demanded Home Rule: an Irish parliament within the United Kingdom. Liberal Prime Minister William Gladstone introduced bills in 1886 and 1893; both failed. A third passed in 1914, after the Parliament Act had removed the Lords' veto, but it was suspended for the duration of the war. Meanwhile the Protestant majority in north-east Ulster, who saw themselves as British and feared Catholic rule from Dublin, signed the Ulster Covenant (1912) in their hundreds of thousands and formed an armed militia to resist.
At Easter 1916, a few thousand Irish republicans seized Dublin's General Post Office and proclaimed an Irish Republic. The Easter Rising was crushed in a week and was unpopular at first; then the British executed its leaders by firing squad over ten days, and opinion swung. In the general election of December 1918, the republican Sinn Féin won the great majority of Irish seats, refused to go to Westminster, and set up its own parliament, the Dáil, in January 1919. A guerrilla War of Independence followed (1919–21), fought by the Irish Republican Army against the police and British auxiliaries, notorious for reprisals on both sides.
The settlement came in two pieces. The Government of Ireland Act 1920 created two home-rule parliaments, one for six north-eastern counties, which opened in Belfast in June 1921, and one for the rest. The Anglo-Irish Treaty of 6 December 1921 then gave the south dominion status as the Irish Free State, established a year later; Northern Ireland immediately opted to stay in the United Kingdom. The treaty split Irish nationalists, and a short, bitter civil war (1922–23) followed in the south. The Free State became the Republic of Ireland and left the Commonwealth in 1949.
The border was drawn to give unionists a safe majority. Two of the six counties, Fermanagh and Tyrone, had Catholic majorities, while three Ulster counties with large Catholic majorities were left out. For the next fifty years unionists governed Northern Ireland without a break; its first prime minister, James Craig, boasted in 1934 of "a Protestant Parliament and a Protestant State." Nationalists saw partition as an artificial carve-up; unionists saw it as their right not to be forced into a state they did not belong to. Both views are still alive today.

Part 8 — Empire: the view from London and the view from the colonised (1600–1997)
The British Empire was not built in one era, so it does not fit in one. This part steps back across four centuries. At its greatest extent, in the years after the First World War, it covered roughly a quarter of the world's land. In 1913, by Angus Maddison's estimates, it governed about 412 million people, around 23 percent of humanity.
How it grew

Phase
Dates
What happened

Atlantic empire
1600s–1783
Colonies in North America and the Caribbean; tobacco, sugar and slavery; lost the thirteen American colonies in 1783

Company rule in India
1757–1858
The East India Company, a private corporation with its own army, won the Battle of Plassey (1757) and took over Bengal's revenues, then most of the subcontinent

Settler colonies
1788 onward
Australia (from the First Fleet of 1788), New Zealand, Canada and South Africa received millions of British emigrants, at catastrophic cost to Indigenous peoples

The Raj and the "new imperialism"
1858–1914
After the 1857 uprising, the Crown took over India; Britain seized large parts of Africa in the "Scramble" of the 1880s and 1890s and forced trade on China in two Opium Wars

High point and strain
1914–1945
Expanded after 1918 to include former German and Ottoman territories, including Palestine and Iraq; nationalist movements grew everywhere

Decolonisation
1947–1997
From India's independence in 1947 to the handover of Hong Kong in 1997

The view from London
For most of the 19th and 20th centuries, British people were taught that the empire was a gift to the world. Its modern defenders, most prominently the historian Niall Ferguson in Empire (2003) and the ethicist Nigel Biggar in Colonialism: A Moral Reckoning (2023), make a more careful case: that the empire spread the rule of law, representative institutions, the English language and global trade and investment; that it abolished slavery across its territories after 1833 and used the Royal Navy to suppress the Atlantic slave trade; that it was often less brutal than the empires it replaced or competed with; and that many former colonies inherited parliaments, courts and civil services from it. Hundreds of thousands of colonial subjects fought for it in both world wars, and many saw themselves as British.
The view from the colonised
Historians writing from the colonised side, and many from Britain too, point to a different ledger. Some of its entries:

Bengal, 1770. A few years after the East India Company took control of Bengal's revenues, a famine killed a very large share of the population, while the Company kept collecting tax.
India's economy. The Indian politician and writer Shashi Tharoor, in Inglorious Empire (2017), argues that Britain deindustrialised India's textile industry, drained its wealth through taxes and "home charges," and presided over repeated famines; India's share of the world economy shrank sharply under British rule.
The Opium Wars (1839–42 and 1856–60). Britain fought China to protect its merchants' right to sell opium there. A young William Gladstone told the House of Commons in 1840 that he knew of no war "more unjust in its origin, a war more calculated in its progress to cover this country with permanent disgrace." The government survived the censure vote by nine votes. One result was Hong Kong (see this series' A Brief History of Hong Kong).
Australia and Tasmania. British settlement brought disease, dispossession and frontier killings that devastated Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander societies.
South Africa, 1899–1902. In the Boer War, British forces burned farms and moved civilians into concentration camps. At least 27,927 Boers died in them, most of them children, and at least 14,154 Black Africans died in separate camps (one estimate is 20,000). The campaigner Emily Hobhouse exposed the conditions.
Amritsar, 1919. On 13 April, Brigadier-General Reginald Dyer ordered troops to fire into an unarmed crowd in an enclosed garden, the Jallianwala Bagh. The official count was 379 dead; Indian estimates were around 1,000. Even Winston Churchill, then a minister, called it "monstrous."
Bengal, 1943. In wartime India, a famine killed somewhere between 800,000 and 3.8 million people, most often cited as about 3 million. Its causes are argued over: the loss of Burmese rice after Japan's conquest, a cyclone and crop disease, wartime inflation, and decisions in London and Delhi about shipping and food imports. The economist Amartya Sen argued it was a failure of distribution rather than a shortage of food.
Kenya, 1952–60. Fighting the Mau Mau rising, the colonial government detained tens of thousands of Kikuyu in camps where torture was used. In 2013, after documents hidden for decades were disclosed, the British government settled with 5,228 Kenyan victims for £19.9 million and said it "sincerely regrets that these abuses took place." The historian Caroline Elkins's work was central to the case.

For Ireland, for India, for Kenya and for the Caribbean, the empire is not a chapter that ended. Borders, languages, legal systems, diasporas and memories of famine and violence are living inheritances, and so is the presence in Britain of millions of people whose families came from the places Britain once ruled.

These two views are not as opposite as they sound. Most serious historians on both sides agree on most of the facts above; they disagree about how to weigh them, about what the counterfactual would have been, and about whether a whole empire can be given a single moral verdict. What has changed is that the colonised side is now part of the British conversation, in schools, museums and politics, rather than outside it.

Part 9 — Two world wars (1914–1945)
Britain declared war on Germany on 4 August 1914, after German troops invaded Belgium, whose neutrality Britain had guaranteed. Most people expected a short war. It lasted over four years and killed roughly 744,000 servicemen from the British Isles, with hundreds of thousands more from the empire; more than a million Indian soldiers served overseas.
The war's defining image for Britain is the Somme. On its first day, 1 July 1916, the British Army suffered 57,470 casualties, of whom 19,240 were killed, still the bloodiest day in its history. Many of the dead belonged to "Pals battalions," raised from single towns, workplaces or football clubs, so that a street or a village could lose most of its young men in a morning. The 36th (Ulster) Division, recruited from the unionist militia of 1912, was among the units shattered that day, and the Somme became part of Ulster Protestant memory just as the Easter Rising, three months earlier, became part of Irish nationalist memory.
At home, conscription began in 1916, women took over jobs in munitions factories, transport and offices, and the state took control of shipping, railways, food and wages to an extent nobody had imagined before. The war broke the old political order: in 1918 most men without property and many women voted for the first time, and by the 1920s Labour had replaced the Liberals as the main alternative to the Conservatives, forming its first, short-lived government in 1924. The war left a culture of mourning that still shapes the calendar: the two-minute silence on 11 November, the red poppies worn in the weeks before it, and the war memorial that stands in almost every town and village in Britain.
The hungry years
The interwar years were good for some and terrible for others. Southern and Midland England, with new industries such as cars, electrical goods and chemicals, and spreading suburbs of semi-detached houses, grew more prosperous. The old industrial regions, built on coal, cotton, steel and shipbuilding, never recovered their prewar markets. In May 1926 a General Strike in support of locked-out miners brought out well over a million workers for nine days before the union leaders called it off. After the 1929 crash, unemployment in towns such as Jarrow on Tyneside reached levels that seem unimaginable now, and in 1936 two hundred men from Jarrow walked to London to petition Parliament for work. They were politely received and sent home.
In 1931 the Statute of Westminster recognised the full independence of the "dominions" (Canada, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, the Irish Free State and Newfoundland). In 1936 Edward VIII abdicated to marry Wallis Simpson, an American divorcee. Through the 1930s, Neville Chamberlain's government tried to avoid another war by negotiating with Hitler, a policy, called appeasement, that peaked at Munich in September 1938 and is still argued over: a shameful mistake, or a way of buying time to rearm?
"Their finest hour"
Britain and France declared war on 3 September 1939, after Germany invaded Poland. In May 1940, as Germany overran the Low Countries and France, Winston Churchill became prime minister. Between 26 May and 4 June, ships of every size, from destroyers to pleasure boats, evacuated 338,226 British and French troops from the beaches at Dunkirk. France surrendered in June. For the next year, Britain and its empire fought Germany without a major ally.

1940–1941
What happened

Battle of Britain (summer and autumn 1940)
The Royal Air Force defeated the Luftwaffe's attempt to win control of the skies, a precondition for invasion

The Blitz (Sept 1940 – May 1941)
German bombing of London and other cities killed roughly 40,000 to 43,000 civilians and damaged or destroyed around two million homes

Lend-Lease (March 1941)
The United States began supplying Britain with weapons and food on credit

June and December 1941
Germany invaded the Soviet Union; Japan attacked the United States and the British Empire in Asia; Britain now had allies who would decide the war

In all, about 383,700 British military personnel and 67,200 civilians died in the Second World War. The empire's contribution was huge: the Indian Army, about 2.5 million strong, was the largest volunteer army in history, and soldiers from Africa, the Caribbean, Canada, Australia and New Zealand fought from Burma to Normandy. That contribution, and the famine in Bengal in 1943, are part of why independence movements came out of the war stronger.
The war also made the welfare state thinkable. In December 1942 a report by the civil servant William Beveridge proposed a national system of social insurance to slay five "giants": Want, Disease, Ignorance, Squalor and Idleness. It sold hundreds of thousands of copies. People who had been told the state could not afford to help the unemployed in the 1930s had now seen it run the whole economy for victory, and they voted accordingly.

Part 10 — The welfare state, the end of empire and the Troubles (1945–1979)
In July 1945, two months after victory in Europe, voters threw out Churchill and elected a Labour government under Clement Attlee with a landslide. Its programme built the Britain that lasted until 1979:

The National Health Service, launched on 5 July 1948 by the health minister Aneurin Bevan, a former miner from south Wales: medical care free at the point of use, paid for from taxation.
National Insurance pensions, sickness and unemployment benefits, built on Beveridge.
Nationalisation of coal, railways, electricity, gas, steel and the Bank of England.
Housing and New Towns, with over a million new homes built and planned towns such as Stevenage and Harlow.

All of this was done by a country that was nearly bankrupt, rationing bread (never rationed in the war) and borrowing from the United States. Rationing ended only in 1954. Historians argue whether postwar governments spent too much on welfare and too little on modernising industry; Correlli Barnett made that charge famously, and David Edgerton has argued that Britain was a much more technocratic, military and productive state than the "decline" story allows.
The end of empire
The empire dissolved faster than anyone in London had planned. India and Pakistan became independent at midnight on 14–15 August 1947, after the last viceroy, Lord Mountbatten, brought the date forward from June 1948. The hasty partition along religious lines set off killings and mass flight in which somewhere between 200,000 and 2 million people died and 12 to 20 million were displaced. Burma and Ceylon followed in 1948; Britain gave up its mandate in Palestine the same year, leaving Arabs and Jews to war.

Year
Event

1948–60
Malayan Emergency: a long counter-insurgency against communist guerrillas, followed by independence in 1957

1952–60
Kenya Emergency (Mau Mau)

1956
Suez crisis: Britain and France invade Egypt to retake the canal, and are forced out by US pressure; Prime Minister Anthony Eden resigns weeks later

1957
Ghana becomes the first sub-Saharan colony to gain independence

1960
Harold Macmillan's "wind of change" speech in Cape Town accepts African independence as inevitable

1960s
Most African and Caribbean colonies become independent

1997
Hong Kong is handed to China, often taken as the end of empire

Suez was the moment the British establishment discovered it was no longer a great power able to act without American approval. The former US Secretary of State Dean Acheson summed it up in 1962: Britain "has lost an empire and has not yet found a role." Many would say the search is still on.
Coming to the "mother country"
Empire also came home. In June 1948 the Empire Windrush docked at Tilbury carrying 1,027 passengers, 802 of whom gave their last residence as the Caribbean. It became the symbol of a generation of migration from the Caribbean, India, Pakistan and later Bangladesh and East Africa, by people who were British subjects with the right to settle, and who staffed the NHS, London Transport and the textile mills of the north. Many met open racism: "no blacks, no Irish, no dogs" signs, violence such as the Notting Hill riots of 1958, and the 1968 speech in which the Conservative MP Enoch Powell predicted "rivers of blood." The Commonwealth Immigrants Act of 1962 began restricting entry; Race Relations Acts in 1965, 1968 and 1976 began outlawing discrimination.
In 2018 it emerged that hundreds of Windrush-generation migrants, who had lived legally in Britain for decades but lacked paperwork, had been told they were illegal immigrants, sacked, refused healthcare, detained and in some cases deported. The Windrush scandal led to the resignation of the Home Secretary and a compensation scheme, and it was a reminder that the empire's last chapters are being written in Britain.
Europe and the 1960s
Britain stayed out of the European Economic Community when it was founded in 1957, applied in 1961 and 1967 as the Commonwealth's trade declined, was vetoed both times by France's President de Gaulle, and finally joined on 1 January 1973. In a referendum on 5 June 1975, 67 percent voted to stay in.
The 1960s changed private life. Parliament suspended the death penalty for murder (1965) and abolished it for good in Great Britain (1969), decriminalised sex between men in England and Wales (1967) and legalised abortion (1967). London was "swinging," the Beatles and the Rolling Stones conquered the world, and a new youth culture was born. Secondary education was reorganised into comprehensive schools across much of the country, and new universities opened.
The Troubles begin
In Northern Ireland, Catholics faced discrimination in housing, jobs and voting, and from 1968 a civil rights movement modelled on America's marched for equal treatment. Marches were attacked by loyalists and police; in August 1969 rioting in Derry and Belfast led the British government to send in troops, at first welcomed by many Catholics as protectors. Within two years the army was fighting a revived and violent Provisional IRA, and loyalist paramilitaries were murdering Catholics.
On 30 January 1972, in Derry, soldiers of the Parachute Regiment shot dead thirteen men at a civil rights march, and another of the wounded died later. A first inquiry largely exonerated the soldiers. A second, under Lord Saville, reported in 2010 that the firing was "unjustifiable" and that none of the dead was posing a threat; Prime Minister David Cameron apologised in the Commons. In March 1972 London suspended Northern Ireland's parliament and imposed direct rule. That year was the worst of the conflict: 480 people were killed.
The crisis of the 1970s
The postwar economy ran into trouble. Inflation reached 24.2 percent in 1975; in 1976 the government borrowed $3.9 billion from the International Monetary Fund. Strikes became frequent, and in the "Winter of Discontent" of 1978–79, public-sector strikes left rubbish uncollected in the streets and, in one notorious case in Liverpool, the dead unburied. North Sea oil began to flow in the late 1970s, but too late to save James Callaghan's Labour government, which lost a vote of confidence in March 1979.

Part 11 — Thatcher, New Labour and devolution (1979–2010)
Margaret Thatcher, Britain's first woman prime minister, took office on 4 May 1979 promising to reverse decline.

Thatcher's Britain
The record

Inflation
Retail price inflation fell from 18 percent in 1980 to under 5 percent in 1983, at the cost of a deep recession

Unemployment
Rose from about 1.4 million in 1979 to a peak of about 3.2 million (11.8 percent) in 1984, by the ONS's modern measure

Privatisation
British Telecom (1984), British Gas (1986), British Airways, the water and electricity companies and others sold to private shareholders

Housing
The 1980 "Right to Buy" let council tenants buy their homes at a discount; more than a million homes had been sold by 1987

The City
"Big Bang" deregulation of financial markets on 27 October 1986

Trade unions
Laws restricting strikes; defeat of the year-long miners' strike of 1984–85

The Falklands War of 1982, after Argentina's military government invaded the islands on 2 April, ended with Britain retaking them in June; 255 British servicemen, 649 Argentines and three islanders died. Victory helped Thatcher to a landslide in 1983. The miners' strike (March 1984 to March 1985), led by Arthur Scargill against pit closures, was the bitterest industrial dispute in modern British history. Its defeat was followed by the closure of most of the coalfields, and many mining communities in Yorkshire, the north-east, Scotland and south Wales are still among the poorest places in the country.
Her admirers credit her with ending the strikes, inflation and state control of the 1970s, restoring Britain's confidence and making London a world financial centre. Her critics point to deindustrialisation, rising inequality and the destruction of communities, and to her line, in a 1987 magazine interview, that "there is no such thing as society." Her full sentence went on: "There are individual men and women and there are families." Scotland, which had voted Conservative in large numbers in the 1950s, turned decisively against her party, a shift that fed the demand for a Scottish parliament. Her end came over the "poll tax," a flat local tax per adult, introduced in Scotland first in 1989; after riots in London in March 1990 and a revolt by her own MPs, she resigned in November 1990.
Peace in Northern Ireland
The 1980s were among the darkest years of the conflict. In 1981, ten republican prisoners starved themselves to death in the Maze prison, demanding to be treated as political prisoners. The first, Bobby Sands, was elected to Parliament during his strike and died on 5 May after 66 days. The hunger strikes turned Sinn Féin, the IRA's political wing, into an electoral force. In 1984 the IRA bombed the Conservative conference hotel in Brighton and nearly killed Thatcher.
Slowly, secretly, the shape of a deal emerged. The Anglo-Irish Agreement (1985) gave Dublin a consultative role in the north. John Major's government held back-channel talks with the IRA; the Downing Street Declaration of December 1993 said Britain had "no selfish strategic or economic interest" in Northern Ireland; the IRA declared a ceasefire in August 1994. After Tony Blair's election, all-party talks chaired by the American former senator George Mitchell produced the Good Friday Agreement (Belfast Agreement) on 10 April 1998.

The Good Friday Agreement
What it did

Consent
Northern Ireland stays in the UK as long as a majority there wishes; if a majority ever votes for a united Ireland, both governments will make it happen

Power-sharing
A devolved Assembly and an executive that must include both unionist and nationalist parties

Identity
People can identify as British, Irish or both, and hold either or both passports

North–south
Bodies for co-operation across the Irish border; the Republic dropped its constitutional claim to the north

Prisoners and policing
Early release of paramilitary prisoners; reform of the police; decommissioning of weapons

On 22 May 1998 the agreement was approved by 71 percent of voters in Northern Ireland, on an 81 percent turnout, and by 94 percent in the Republic. Estimates suggest that nearly all nationalists voted yes but only a narrow majority of unionists. Three months later a republican splinter group's bomb in Omagh killed 29 people, the worst single atrocity of the Troubles, and the peace held anyway.
In all, between 1969 and 2001, the Sutton Index of Deaths at Ulster University counts 3,532 people killed in the conflict. Responsibility for those deaths is often misremembered on all sides:

Responsible for the death
Deaths

Republican paramilitaries
2,058

Loyalist paramilitaries
1,027

British security forces
366

Irish security forces
5

Not known
76

More than half of those killed (1,840) were civilians. The IRA formally ended its armed campaign in 2005, and in May 2007 the hardline unionist Ian Paisley and the former IRA commander Martin McGuinness became First and deputy First Minister together, a sight almost nobody had thought possible.
New Labour and devolution
Tony Blair's Labour Party won a landslide on 1 May 1997. Its first acts included giving the Bank of England control of interest rates and holding devolution referendums.

Referendum
Date
Result

Scottish Parliament
11 September 1997
74.3% yes (63.5% for tax powers)

Welsh Assembly
18 September 1997
50.3% yes, a margin of 6,721 votes

Good Friday Agreement (Northern Ireland)
22 May 1998
71.1% yes

The Scottish Parliament and the Welsh Assembly (now the Senedd) first met in 1999. England, with 84 percent of the UK's people, got no parliament of its own, an asymmetry that has never been resolved. Blair's governments also introduced a national minimum wage (1999) and the Human Rights Act (1998), removed most hereditary peers from the Lords (1999) and spent heavily on the NHS and schools.
His reputation, though, is dominated by one decision: joining the United States in the invasion of Iraq in March 2003, on intelligence about weapons of mass destruction that proved false. The official Chilcot inquiry reported in 2016 that the UK had gone to war before peaceful options were exhausted. On 7 July 2005, four British-born suicide bombers killed 52 people on London's Tube and buses. Gordon Brown succeeded Blair in 2007 and within months faced the first run on a British bank in over a century, at Northern Rock, and then the 2008 global financial crisis, in which the government partly nationalised some of the country's largest banks.

Part 12 — Austerity, Brexit and Britain in 2026 (2010–2026)
The 2010 election produced the first coalition since the war, between David Cameron's Conservatives and Nick Clegg's Liberal Democrats. Its central policy was austerity: deep cuts in public spending, especially for local councils and working-age benefits, to reduce the deficit left by the crash. Supporters said it restored confidence in Britain's public finances; critics, including many economists, said it choked the recovery and frayed public services. Underneath was a deeper problem the condensed piece in this library describes: real output per person, which had grown by about 2.3 percent a year from 1960 to 2007, grew by only about 0.4 percent a year from 2007 to 2025.
Two referendums
On 18 September 2014, Scotland voted on independence. On an 85 percent turnout, 55.3 percent voted No. The result was meant to settle the question for a generation; within two years it had been reopened.
On 23 June 2016, the UK voted on its membership of the European Union. Leave won by 51.9 percent to 48.1 percent, on a turnout of 72 percent.

Area
Leave
Remain

England
53.4%
46.6%

Wales
52.5%
47.5%

Scotland
38.0%
62.0%

Northern Ireland
44.2%
55.8%

London
40.1%
59.9%

Leave voters' strongest case was about democratic control: that laws, borders and trade should be decided by a Parliament British voters could remove, not by EU institutions; many also wanted lower immigration, which had risen sharply after the EU enlarged in 2004. Remain voters' strongest case was that shared rules were the price of frictionless trade with Britain's largest market, of peace and open borders in Ireland, and of influence in the world. Leave voters were older, more often outside the big cities and without degrees; Remain voters younger, more urban and more often graduates. The split ran through families as well as regions.
Cameron resigned. Theresa May negotiated a withdrawal deal that Parliament rejected three times, largely over the Irish border: the Good Friday Agreement assumed an open border, and leaving the EU's single market and customs union implied checks somewhere. Boris Johnson won an 80-seat majority in December 2019 promising to "get Brexit done." The UK left the EU at 11 pm on 31 January 2020, and the transition period ended on 31 December 2020. Johnson's solution for Ireland put a customs border in the Irish Sea, between Great Britain and Northern Ireland, which unionists bitterly opposed; the 2023 Windsor Framework eased it. In February 2024 Sinn Féin's Michelle O'Neill became the first nationalist First Minister of Northern Ireland.
Whether Brexit has helped or harmed is still argued in 2026. Most economists and the government's own fiscal watchdog estimate that it has reduced trade and long-run productivity; supporters point to new trade deals, control over immigration rules and regulatory freedom, and argue that the costs have been exaggerated or confused with those of the pandemic.
The pandemic and the revolving door
The first COVID-19 lockdown began on 23 March 2020. By September 2021, according to the Office for National Statistics, more than 160,000 deaths in the UK had COVID-19 on the death certificate. The parties held in Downing Street during lockdown ("Partygate") contributed to Johnson's fall in 2022. His successor, Liz Truss, lasted 49 days after a budget of unfunded tax cuts caused turmoil in the bond markets. Rishi Sunak, the first British Asian prime minister, followed. Inflation peaked at 11.1 percent in October 2022, the highest in four decades, driven by energy prices after Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine.
On 8 September 2022 Elizabeth II died at Balmoral, aged 96, after seventy years on the throne. Her son was crowned Charles III on 6 May 2023.
Labour, Reform and the 2026 upheaval
On 4 July 2024 Labour under Keir Starmer won 411 of 650 seats on only 33.7 percent of the vote, a majority of 172. The first-past-the-post system was rarely so lopsided: Reform UK, the anti-immigration, Eurosceptic party led by Nigel Farage, won 14.3 percent of the vote but five seats.
Starmer's government struggled to lift growth or its own popularity. In the elections of 7 May 2026, Labour suffered historic losses in English councils, while Reform UK and the Greens made their biggest gains ever. In Wales, Plaid Cymru won 43 of the Senedd's 96 seats and Reform UK 34, with Labour reduced to 9; Plaid's Rhun ap Iorwerth became First Minister. In Scotland, the SNP stayed the largest party with 58 of 129 seats, short of a majority, with Reform UK and Labour on 17 each.
In June 2026 Andy Burnham, the long-serving Mayor of Greater Manchester, returned to Parliament at a by-election in Makerfield. Starmer announced he would step down; Burnham was elected Labour leader unopposed in mid-July and became Prime Minister on 20 July 2026.
The country in numbers, autumn 2026

Indicator
Latest figure
Source

Population
69.5 million (mid-2025)
ONS

Net migration
171,000 in 2025 (provisional), down from a peak of 944,000 in the year to March 2023
ONS, May 2026

Unemployment
4.7% (June–August 2026)
ONS

Inflation (CPI)
3.5% (September 2026)
ONS

Real GDP growth
1.0% (2024), 1.3% (2025)
ONS

GDP per person
about $57,600 (2025)
World Bank

Monarch
Charles III (since 2022)
—

Prime Minister
Andy Burnham, Labour (since 20 July 2026)
gov.uk

In the autumn of 2026, the questions on the table were familiar ones in new combinations: how to make the economy grow faster outside London and the south-east; how to fund an ageing population's health and care; how much immigration the country wants and how to control it; whether the union can hold when the governments in Edinburgh and Cardiff are led by parties that want out; and where Britain stands between the United States and a Europe it left.

Part 13 — How to understand the United Kingdom today
Key dates

Year
Event

c. 3000–2400 BC
Stonehenge built

AD 43
Roman invasion

c. 410
End of Roman rule

927
Athelstan rules a united England

1066
Norman Conquest

1215
Magna Carta

1314
Bannockburn secures Scottish independence

1348
Black Death

1534
Act of Supremacy: Church of England breaks with Rome

1603
Union of the Crowns

1642–51
Civil wars; Charles I executed 1649

1688–89
Glorious Revolution; Bill of Rights

1707
Union of England and Scotland: Great Britain

c. 1760–1840
Industrial Revolution

1801
Union with Ireland: the United Kingdom

1807 / 1833
Slave trade abolished / slavery abolished

1845–52
Great Famine in Ireland

1914–18
First World War

1918 / 1928
Votes for women over 30 / for all women

1921–22
Partition of Ireland; Irish Free State

1939–45
Second World War

1947
Independence and partition of India and Pakistan

1948
NHS founded; Windrush arrives

1973
Joins the European Economic Community

1969–1998
The Troubles

1979–90
Margaret Thatcher prime minister

1997
Hong Kong handed to China

1998
Good Friday Agreement

1999
Scottish Parliament and Welsh Assembly open

2014
Scotland votes No to independence

2016
EU referendum

2020
UK leaves the EU

2022
Elizabeth II dies; Charles III king

2026
Plaid Cymru leads Wales; Andy Burnham becomes prime minister

Who's who

Person
Dates
Why they matter

Boudica
d. c. 61
Led the great revolt against Roman rule

Alfred the Great
c. 849–899
Saved Wessex from the Vikings; laid foundations of an English state

Robert the Bruce
1274–1329
King of Scots; won Bannockburn

Owain Glyndŵr
c. 1359–c. 1415
Led the last great Welsh rising

Henry VIII
1491–1547
Broke with Rome; annexed Wales

Elizabeth I
1533–1603
Protestant settlement; Armada; age of Shakespeare

Oliver Cromwell
1599–1658
Parliament's general; Lord Protector; conqueror of Ireland

Olaudah Equiano
c. 1745–1797
Formerly enslaved writer and abolitionist

William Wilberforce
1759–1833
Led the parliamentary campaign against the slave trade

Queen Victoria
1819–1901
Reigned 1837–1901 over the imperial century

William Gladstone
1809–1898
Liberal prime minister four times; champion of Irish Home Rule

Emmeline Pankhurst
1858–1928
Leader of the militant suffragettes

Winston Churchill
1874–1965
Wartime prime minister

Clement Attlee
1883–1967
Built the postwar welfare state

Aneurin Bevan
1897–1960
Founded the NHS

Margaret Thatcher
1925–2013
Prime minister 1979–90; remade the economy

John Hume
1937–2020
Nationalist leader; Nobel Peace Prize for the peace process

Tony Blair
b. 1953
Prime minister 1997–2007; devolution; Iraq

Elizabeth II
1926–2022
Reigned 1952–2022

Andy Burnham
b. 1970
Prime minister since July 2026

Five ideas that unlock the country
1. It is a union of nations, not a nation-state. England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland joined at different times, on different terms, and kept different churches, laws, schools and memories. The English often experience "Britain" and "England" as the same thing; the Scots, Welsh and Northern Irish almost never do. Devolution since 1999 has made the union more like a negotiation than a fixed fact, and the 2026 results put parties seeking independence in charge in two of its four parts.
2. The constitution is unwritten and evolves by stealth. There is no single founding document. Parliamentary sovereignty, conventions about how ministers behave, and old statutes from Magna Carta to the Bill of Rights do the work. Admirers say this lets Britain change without revolutions; critics say it depends on politicians behaving well and leaves minorities, and the smaller nations, exposed.
3. Empire is still being digested. The empire made Britain rich and powerful, and made millions of its subjects poor, dead or displaced. Its consequences are in Britain's cities, in its Commonwealth ties, and in its arguments about statues, museum collections, school curricula and reparations. British people disagree about it more sharply than about almost anything else in their history.
4. Class and region are written into the map. The Industrial Revolution made the north, the Midlands, south Wales and central Scotland the engine of the world; deindustrialisation after the 1970s left many of those places behind London and the south-east. Much of British politics since 2016, from Brexit to "levelling up" to the National Economic Council meeting in Glasgow in October 2026, is about that gap.
5. Britain changes by reform rather than revolution. Since 1689 it has had no successful revolution and no invasion. The vote was extended in stages over a century; empire ended without a war at home; Northern Ireland's conflict ended in a negotiated compromise. The habit makes the country stable and slow. Its old questions (who belongs, who decides, what the union is for) are rarely answered once and for all. They are renegotiated, again and again.

The takeaway
The United Kingdom was assembled over centuries from separate kingdoms, by conquest (Wales, Ireland), by inheritance (Scotland's king took England's throne in 1603) and by negotiation (the unions of 1707 and 1801). Its Parliament won power from its monarchs step by step, from Magna Carta to the Bill of Rights to universal suffrage in 1928. It became the first industrial nation and the largest empire in history, built in part on slavery and conquest, and spent the 20th century fighting two world wars, building a welfare state and giving up that empire. Since 1998 it has made peace in Northern Ireland, devolved power to Scotland and Wales, and left the European Union. In 2026 its central question is the one it has always had: on what terms its nations, regions and peoples choose to stay together.
Try this: pick the town or city in Britain you know best, or the one your family came from, and trace three of its layers: a Roman or Anglo-Saxon or Viking place name, a building from the industrial century, and a community whose families arrived from the former empire. You will have walked through most of this history in a single high street.

Sources & Further Reading
Sources
- Office for National Statistics (accessed 31 October 2026): population estimates (mid-2025); Long-term international migration, provisional: year ending December 2025 (21 May 2026); unemployment series MGSX and MGSC; CPI series D7G7; GDP series IHYP.
- GOV.UK: Prime Minister's page and ministerial biography (Andy Burnham); "PM meeting with the First Minister of Wales" and "PM meeting with First Minister of Scotland", 30 October 2026; "Statement to Parliament on settlement of Mau Mau claims", 6 June 2013. The Scottish Parliament's current party balance (October 2026).
- CAIN Archive, Ulster University: Malcolm Sutton, An Index of Deaths from the Conflict in Ireland (tables by year, organisation and status); 1998 referendum results; Bloody Sunday summary; 1981 hunger strike chronology.
- Ancient DNA: Olalde et al., "The Beaker phenomenon and the genomic transformation of northwest Europe", Nature (2018); Brace et al., Nature Ecology & Evolution (2019); Gretzinger et al., "The Anglo-Saxon migration and the formation of the early English gene pool", Nature (2022); Ashton et al., PLoS One (2014) on Happisburgh; Natural History Museum on Cheddar Man.
- The National Archives, teaching resource Magna Carta 1214–1225; Magna Carta clauses 39–40 in G. R. C. Davis's translation; Historic Hansard, House of Commons debates on the war with China, 8–9 April 1840.
- World Bank, World Development Indicators (GDP per person, 2025); Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database (British carrying estimates, as cited in the condensed piece).
- Election and referendum results for 1975, 1997, 2014, 2016, 2024 and 2026, and death tolls for the Somme, the Blitz, Partition, the Bengal famine, Amritsar, the Boer War camps and Kenya, follow the official counts summarised in Wikipedia and its cited sources, with ranges given where historians disagree. The 2026 Senedd seat counts follow Senedd Research, "Senedd election: an initial analysis of the results" (May 2026), and ITV Wales's full results; the Scottish Parliament counts follow the Scottish Parliament Information Centre briefing SB 26-26, "The result" (12 May 2026).
Go deeper
- 📘 The Isles: A History — Norman Davies (the four-nation history: Britain and Ireland told without making England the whole story)
- 📘 Empire — Niall Ferguson, and Inglorious Empire — Shashi Tharoor (read together: the strongest case for the empire's legacy and the strongest case against)
- 📘 Legacy of Violence: A History of the British Empire — Caroline Elkins (how coercion and emergency rule worked, by the historian behind the Mau Mau case)
- 📘 The Rise and Fall of the British Nation — David Edgerton (a 20th-century history that dismantles the familiar story of decline)
- 📘 Lost Lives — David McKittrick and others (a short entry for every person killed in the Troubles; the most humane history of the conflict)
- 🌐 CAIN Archive, Ulster University (primary documents, chronologies and data on the Northern Ireland conflict)
- 🌐 Related pieces in this library: United Kingdom: A Condensed History; A Brief History of Hong Kong and A Brief History of the United States (this series); France: A Condensed History


A Brief History of Iran: Empire, Faith, Revolution, and the Long Argument over Who Rules
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Five thousand years of kings, poets, clerics and revolutionaries, and why every Iranian argument about the present turns out to be an argument about the past.

A note on how this piece is written: Iran's recent history is fought over by its government, its domestic opponents and its very large diaspora. Where they disagree, each account is given in its own terms. Casualty figures are attributed to whoever produced them, with dates, because almost all of them are disputed.
On 28 February 2026, American and Israeli aircraft struck targets across Iran. Among the dead was Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who had ruled the Islamic Republic as Supreme Leader for almost 37 years. Iranian state television at first denied it; then a presenter, in tears, announced forty days of mourning. Eight days later, an assembly of 88 clerics chose his son, Mojtaba, to replace him.
Some Iranians wept in the streets. Others went out to celebrate, and some of them, according to footage and rights groups' reports, were shot at by security forces. In Los Angeles, London and Toronto, diaspora Iranians argued with each other about whether to celebrate or to mourn the bombing of their own country. Seven weeks earlier, the same government had killed thousands of its own citizens to put down the largest protests in its history.
Nobody understands any of this by starting in 2026. Iranians invoke Cyrus the Great and the poet Ferdowsi, the martyrdom of Imam Hussein in 680 and the British oil concession of 1901, the CIA coup of 1953 and the war with Iraq in the 1980s, as if they all happened last week. In a sense they did: each is still a live argument about what Iran is, who it belongs to, and who has the right to rule it. This is that history, told at length.
In this history

Elam and the first world empire (to 330 BCE)
Parthians, Sasanians and the Persian renaissance (247 BCE–1501)
Safavids, conquerors and Qajars (1501–1905)
Constitution, Reza Shah, oil and the coup (1905–1953)
The Shah's Iran and the White Revolution (1953–1978)
Revolution and the Islamic Republic (1978–1989)
Reform, repression and the bomb question (1989–2021)
Woman, Life, Freedom, and Iran at war (2022–2026)
How to understand Iran today

Part 1 — Elam and the first world empire (to 330 BCE)
Look at a map and Iran is a fortress. A high, dry plateau, ringed by mountains, the Zagros to the west and the Alborz to the north, with deserts at its heart and two seas, the Caspian and the Persian Gulf, at its edges. Rivers are few. For most of history, Iranians lived by bringing water to land: the qanat, a gently sloping underground tunnel that carries groundwater from the foot of the mountains to fields many kilometres away, is one of the great inventions of the ancient world, and some are still in use.
The plateau was never empty. Farming villages spread across it from the early Neolithic. But the first state that we can name, with writing and kings, grew up in the lowland of what is now Khuzestan, in the south-west, an extension of the Mesopotamian plain. Its people called it Haltamti; the Mesopotamians called it Elam.
Elam
The city of Susa was founded around 4000 BCE, and for the next three and a half thousand years it alternated between Mesopotamian and Elamite control, according to the Encyclopaedia Iranica. From about 3200 BCE, tablets in a script now called proto-Elamite appear at Susa and at sites up on the plateau. It is one of the world's earliest writing systems, and it has still not been fully deciphered.
Elam's history comes to us mostly through its enemies' records, since far more Mesopotamian texts survive than Elamite ones. What emerges is a kingdom that was usually a federation, joining the lowland around Susa with the highland kingdom of Anshan, near modern Shiraz, and a culture that borrowed freely from Mesopotamia while keeping its own gods and its own language, which is related to no other known language.

Period
Dates (approximate)
What happened

Proto-Elamite
c. 3200–2700 BCE
Earliest writing on the plateau; trade networks reaching into Central Asia

Old Elamite
c. 2400–1600 BCE
Dynasties of Awan, Shimashki and the sukkalmahs; wars with Akkad and Babylon

Middle Elamite
c. 1500–1100 BCE
Kings "of Anshan and Susa"; the ziggurat of Chogha Zanbil built

Neo-Elamite
c. 1100–539 BCE
Iranian-speaking peoples arrive in numbers; Assyria sacks Susa in 646 BCE

Source: Encyclopaedia Iranica, "Elam".
The great monument of Elam is the ziggurat at Chogha Zanbil, built in the Middle Elamite period by King Untash-Napirisha. It is one of the best-preserved stepped temples anywhere in the ancient Near East. The end came at the hands of the Assyrian king Ashurbanipal, who in 646 BCE devastated the province and sacked Susa, boasting that he had reduced it to a wasteland. Iranica notes that his annals exaggerated: Elamite kings ruled again afterwards, until the region was absorbed by the Persians, perhaps by Cyrus in 539 BCE.
The Iranians arrive
Meanwhile, from the second millennium BCE, peoples speaking Iranian languages, part of the great Indo-European family that also includes Sanskrit, Greek and English, moved onto the plateau from the north and east. The two that mattered most were the Medes, in the north-west around Ecbatana (modern Hamadan), and the Persians, who settled in the south-west in the old Elamite highlands of Anshan, in the region the Greeks called Persis and Iranians call Fars. That name, Fars, is where "Persia" comes from. "Iran" comes from the older Aryan, the name these peoples used for themselves, which meant something like "the noble ones" and has nothing to do with the racial fantasies the word was later made to carry in Europe.
The religion most associated with ancient Iran, Zoroastrianism, traces itself to the prophet Zarathustra (Zoroaster in Greek). When he lived is one of the great open questions of ancient history. Older estimates ranged across most of a thousand years; the closest thing to a scholarly consensus today, based on the archaic language of his hymns, the Gathas, places him around 1000 BCE, give or take a century or more. His teaching, a cosmic struggle between truth (asha) and the lie (druj), with humans free to choose sides, a final judgement and a renewed world, would shape Judaism, Christianity and Islam, though how directly is still debated.

Iran's first great state was not Persian at all. Elam was older than Persia, spoke a language unrelated to Persian, and lasted longer than any empire that came after it. The Persians inherited its land, its scribes, and its capital.

The first world empire: the Achaemenids (550–330 BCE)
The Persian kings of Anshan had been vassals of the Medes. In 550 BCE, one of them, Cyrus II, whom the Greeks called "the Great", overthrew the Median king Astyages and took his empire. What followed was, in Iranica's words, "a first world-empire of historical importance". In 547 or 546 BCE Cyrus conquered Lydia, the kingdom of the famously rich Croesus, and with it most of Asia Minor; in 539 BCE he took Babylon. His son Cambyses added Egypt.
Cyrus and the Cylinder
Cyrus has had a long afterlife. In Babylon he presented himself as the restorer of local gods and temples, and a barrel-shaped clay cylinder inscribed in Akkadian, now in the British Museum, records his claims to have let deported peoples return home. The Hebrew Bible remembers him as the anointed king who ended the Babylonian exile of the Jews (Ezra 1; Isaiah 45:1). In the 1960s and 1970s the last Shah promoted the Cyrus Cylinder as "the first charter of human rights". Most historians consider that anachronistic: it is royal propaganda in a standard Mesopotamian form. But it records a genuine policy of ruling a vast multi-ethnic empire through tolerance rather than terror, which was rare enough to be remembered.
For many Iranians today, especially secular nationalists and the diaspora, Cyrus is a symbol of an Iranian identity older than Islam, and his tomb at Pasargadae is a place of pilgrimage. The Islamic Republic's attitude to him has swung between suspicion and cautious embrace.
Darius and the machinery of empire
Cambyses died in 522 BCE amid a succession crisis, and a distant member of the royal clan, Darius I, seized the throne after killing a man he said was an impostor. Darius told his own version of events, carved high on the cliff at Bisotun (Behistun) in Old Persian, Elamite and Akkadian. That trilingual inscription later became the key to deciphering cuneiform, as the Rosetta Stone was for hieroglyphs.
Darius was the empire's great organiser:

He divided it into provinces, satrapies, each under a governor, with a list of peoples that ran from Egypt and Ionia to Bactria and Gandhara.
He standardised taxation and coinage, and built roads with relay stations; the Royal Road from Susa to Sardis in Asia Minor was famous among the Greeks for its speed.
He began Persepolis, a ceremonial capital in Fars whose staircases are carved with tribute-bearers from across the known world. Iranica records that the kings celebrated Nowruz, the spring new year still celebrated by Iranians today, there.
Aramaic served as a common administrative language, so that a clerk in Egypt and a clerk in Bactria could read the same orders.

At its height the empire stretched from the Aegean to the Indus. It was the largest the world had yet seen.
The Greek wars and the end
For Greek writers, especially Herodotus, the Persian Wars of 490 and 480–479 BCE, with Marathon, Thermopylae and Salamis, were the founding drama of freedom against despotism. From Persepolis they looked like failed punitive expeditions on a distant frontier. The empire survived them easily, and for another century and a half Persian gold shaped Greek politics more than Greek armies troubled Persia.
The end came from Macedon. Between 334 and 331 BCE, Alexander the Great defeated Darius III at the Granicus, at Issus and finally at Gaugamela. In 330 BCE Persepolis was burned, and Darius III was murdered by one of his own nobles. Iranian memory of Alexander is double: Zoroastrian tradition remembered him as a destroyer, while the Shahnameh, a thousand years later, turned him into a half-Persian prince. Both memories still exist.

Ruler
Reigned
Remembered for

Cyrus II ("the Great")
c. 559–530 BCE
Founded the empire; took Media (550), Lydia (c. 547) and Babylon (539)

Cambyses II
530–522 BCE
Conquered Egypt

Darius I
522–486 BCE
Satrapies, coinage, roads, Persepolis, the Bisotun inscription

Xerxes I
486–465 BCE
Invasion of Greece, 480–479 BCE

Darius III
336–330 BCE
Defeated by Alexander

Persepolis was built to be looked at: a stone catalogue of the peoples of the earth bringing gifts to one king. Two and a half thousand years later, the last Shah held a party among its ruins to say the same thing about himself. It did not end well for him either.

Part 2 — Parthians, Sasanians and the Persian renaissance (247 BCE–1501)
Alexander's empire broke apart at his death. Iran fell to his general Seleucus and his heirs, who planted Greek cities and Greek culture across the plateau. Then, around 247 BCE according to Iranica, a nomadic people from the steppe east of the Caspian, the Parni, proclaimed a king named Arsaces and began to take over the Seleucid east. They became known as the Parthians, and the dynasty as the Arsacids.
The Parthians
The Parthians ruled for almost five centuries, longer than any other Iranian dynasty, but they left few written records of their own, so they are mostly seen through Roman eyes. Their empire was loose: a high king over a federation of great noble houses and vassal kingdoms. Their armies were built around armoured lancers and horse archers, and their speciality, the "Parthian shot" fired backwards while apparently retreating, gave English the phrase "a parting shot".
In 53 BCE the Roman general Crassus, rich and ambitious, invaded Mesopotamia and was destroyed at Carrhae (modern Harran in Turkey); his legions' standards were lost and he was killed. For the next seven centuries the Euphrates was a frontier between two superpowers, Rome and Iran, neither able to conquer the other.
The Sasanians
In 224 CE a Persian prince from Fars, Ardashir, defeated the last Parthian king and took the title "King of Kings of Iran". The Sasanian dynasty he founded was more centralised, more self-consciously Persian and more closely tied to Zoroastrianism than the Parthians. It used the name Eranshahr, "the realm of the Iranians", and in many ways invented Iran as a political idea.
Ardashir's son Shapur I inflicted on Rome its worst humiliation: in 260, near Edessa, he captured the emperor Valerian and his army, and carved the scene into the cliffs at Naqsh-e Rostam, with the Roman emperor's wrist held in the Persian king's hand. Valerian died a prisoner.
The Sasanian centuries were a high point of Iranian civilisation:

Religion. Zoroastrianism became the established faith, with a powerful priesthood. It was not the only one. Christians, Jews, Buddhists and, for a time, followers of the prophet Mani, whose Manichaeism blended Zoroastrian, Christian and Buddhist ideas and spread from North Africa to China, all lived in the empire. Mani himself died in captivity, or was executed, on a later king's orders in the 270s.
Social upheaval. Around 500 a movement associated with a preacher named Mazdak preached the sharing of wealth, and for a while had royal backing, before it was crushed. Iranica notes that historians now question how central Mazdak himself was.
Khosrow I (531–579), remembered as Anushirvan, "of the immortal soul", reformed taxation and the army and became the model of the just king in later Persian literature. Indian chess and the animal fables of the Panchatantra reached Iran at his court.
Cities and crafts. Silk weaving, silverwork and great palaces such as the vaulted hall at Ctesiphon, near modern Baghdad, whose ruined arch still stands, made the Sasanian court a model for its neighbours. Sasanian Iran also controlled much of the trade along the Silk Roads.

The last great war with Rome, now the Christian Byzantine Empire, ran from 602 to 628. Khosrow II's armies took Jerusalem and Egypt and besieged Constantinople; then the Byzantine emperor Heraclius struck back into Mesopotamia. Both empires ended the war exhausted. Within a decade, a new power from Arabia would conquer one of them completely and strip the other of its richest provinces.
Islam and the Persian renaissance (651–1501)
Conquest
The Arab armies of the early caliphate defeated the Sasanians at al-Qadisiyya in Iraq in the mid-630s and at Nahavand in the Zagros in the early 640s. The last king, Yazdegerd III, fled east and was killed near Merv around 651. The empire that had faced Rome for four centuries was gone in about fifteen years.
What did not happen next is as important as what did. Iran was conquered, but it was not Arabised the way Egypt, Syria and Iraq were. Iranians became Muslims, slowly: the historian Richard Bulliet's influential estimate, based on the spread of Muslim names in family trees, is that the Muslim share of Iran's population rose from around 40 per cent in the mid-ninth century to close to 90 per cent by the end of the eleventh. But they kept their language. And they remade Islamic civilisation in their own image.
Persians make the caliphate
When the Abbasid dynasty overthrew the Umayyads in 750, its revolution was launched from Khorasan, in north-eastern Iran, and its new capital, Baghdad, was built a few kilometres from the ruins of Ctesiphon. Persian families ran its bureaucracy. Sasanian court manners, statecraft and the very idea of a vizier shaped the caliphate. A literary movement, the Shu'ubiyya, even argued that non-Arab Muslims were the cultural equals, or superiors, of Arabs.
Some of the greatest figures of "Islamic" science and philosophy were Iranian:

Figure
Lived
Known for

al-Khwarizmi
9th century
Algebra; the word "algorithm" comes from his name

al-Razi (Rhazes)
9th–10th century
Physician; distinguished smallpox from measles

al-Biruni
10th–11th century
Astronomy, geography, a pioneering study of India

Ibn Sina (Avicenna)
10th–11th century
The Canon of Medicine, used in European universities for centuries

Omar Khayyam
11th–12th century
Mathematician, calendar reformer, and poet of the Rubaiyat

Most of them wrote their science in Arabic, the shared learned language of the Muslim world, as Europeans wrote theirs in Latin. But something else was happening at the same time.
Ferdowsi and the Book of Kings
From the ninth century, under local dynasties such as the Samanids of Bukhara, a new form of Persian, written in Arabic script and full of Arabic loanwords but Persian in grammar and core vocabulary, became a language of poetry and government. Poets like Rudaki wrote in it. Then came Abu'l-Qasem Ferdowsi, born in 940 near Tus in Khorasan, according to Iranica's reconstruction from his own verses.
Ferdowsi spent some three decades writing the Shahnameh, the Book of Kings, which he finished around 1010. It runs from the creation of the first king to the fall of the Sasanians: a vast mythical and legendary history, with the hero Rostam, the tragedy of Rostam killing his own son Sohrab unaware, the tyrant Zahhak with serpents growing from his shoulders, and the doomed love and betrayal of royal families. Tradition says Ferdowsi deliberately avoided Arabic words; in fact he used relatively few, and the poem became the anchor of Persian as a literary language.

"I have suffered much these thirty years; with this Persian I have revived Iran." The line is attributed to Ferdowsi and quoted constantly in Iran. Its exact wording varies between manuscripts, but its claim is accurate: the language, and with it a sense of Iranian identity, survived conquest because of poems like his.

Iranians still name their children after Shahnameh heroes, and traditional zurkhaneh gymnasiums still exercise to its verses. When a culture lost its empire and its religion, its poets kept the memory of both.
Turks, Mongols and poets
From the eleventh century, Iran was ruled mostly by dynasties of Turkic or Mongol origin: the Ghaznavids, the Seljuks, the Mongol Ilkhanate after the devastating invasions of the 1220s and the sack of Baghdad in 1258, and the armies of Timur (Tamerlane) in the late fourteenth century. The Mongol conquest in particular was catastrophic: cities such as Nishapur and Merv were destroyed and irrigation systems ruined.
And yet the conquerors kept adopting Persian as the language of their courts. Persian became the high culture of a world stretching from Anatolia to Bengal; the Mughal emperors of India and the Ottoman sultans wrote Persian poetry. These centuries produced the poets Iranians still quote daily:

Saadi of Shiraz (thirteenth century), whose Golestan (Rose Garden) contains the lines on human solidarity, "the children of Adam are limbs of one body", that are woven into a carpet at UN headquarters.
Rumi (thirteenth century), born in Balkh in what is now Afghanistan, who wrote his mystical masterpiece in Persian in Konya, in Turkey (see this library's Rumi: The Ecstasy of Divine Love and the Longing of the Soul).
Hafez of Shiraz (fourteenth century), whose Divan sits in many Iranian homes. Opening it at random to read one's fortune, the fal-e Hafez, is still a family ritual on the winter solstice night of Yalda.

Iranians in this period were, by a large majority, Sunni Muslims. That was about to change.

Part 3 — Safavids, conquerors and Qajars (1501–1905)
The Safavids began as a Sufi order based in Ardabil, in north-western Iran, in the early fourteenth century. By the late fifteenth century the order had become a militant movement whose Turkmen followers, called the Qizilbash ("red heads", after their red caps), believed their leader was a semi-divine figure. Iranica describes their beliefs as having "little relation to orthodox Twelver Shi'ism".
In 1501, a fifteen-year-old Safavid leader, Ismail, took Tabriz, proclaimed himself shah, and decreed that Twelver Shi'ism would be the official faith of his realm.
What Twelver Shi'ism is
Shi'a Muslims believe that leadership of the Muslim community after the Prophet Muhammad belonged to his cousin and son-in-law Ali and then to a line of Ali's descendants, the Imams. Twelvers recognise twelve Imams. The third, Hussein, was killed with his small band of followers at Karbala in Iraq in 680 by the army of the Umayyad caliph; his martyrdom, mourned every year in the month of Muharram and on its tenth day, Ashura, is the emotional centre of Shi'a piety. The twelfth Imam, Twelvers believe, went into hiding (occultation) in the ninth century and will return as the Mahdi to establish justice.
That belief raises a political question that still shapes Iran: in the Imam's absence, who has legitimate authority? For most of history, the dominant answer among Shi'a scholars was cautious. The clergy should guide believers in religious matters, but no government could be fully legitimate until the Imam returned. Khomeini's answer, three centuries later, would be radically different.
Converting a country
Making Iran Shi'a took two centuries and a good deal of force. The Safavids persecuted Sunni scholars and Sufi orders, and imported Shi'a clerics from Arab lands, notably Jabal Amel in what is now southern Lebanon, to staff their new religious establishment. Iranica notes that historians still debate how many came and how much they shaped the faith. Over time a powerful, landed Shi'a clergy emerged, financed by religious taxes and endowments, and increasingly independent of the shahs.
The new faith also drew a sharp line between Iran and its Sunni neighbours, the Ottomans to the west and the Uzbeks to the east. In 1514 the Ottoman sultan Selim I routed Ismail at Chaldiran, his artillery and musket-armed infantry shattering the Qizilbash cavalry, and briefly took Tabriz. The border fought over in those wars is, roughly, the border between Iran and Turkey and Iraq today.
Shah Abbas and Isfahan
Shah Abbas I (reigned 1587–1629), "universally regarded as the greatest Safavid ruler" in Iranica's words, rebuilt the state. He curbed the Qizilbash chiefs by creating a standing army of slave soldiers drawn from Georgian, Armenian and Circassian captives, drove the Ottomans and Uzbeks back, expelled the Portuguese from the island of Hormuz in alliance with the English East India Company, and moved his capital to Isfahan.
He made Isfahan one of the most beautiful cities on earth. Its great square, Naqsh-e Jahan, "image of the world", is lined by a royal mosque, a palace and a bazaar. He settled Armenian merchants in a suburb, New Julfa, and they ran the silk trade that funded the state. European visitors came and wrote home that Isfahan was "half the world" (Isfahan nesf-e jahan), as the Persian rhyme still says.
Daily life in Safavid Iran
Most Iranians were villagers or pastoral nomads. Tribes, often Turkic-speaking, migrated with their flocks between summer and winter pastures and supplied much of the army. In the cities, the bazaar, a covered maze of guilds and merchants with its mosques, schools and bathhouses, was the economic and social heart, and the alliance between bazaar merchants and the clergy, who often came from the same families, would become one of the most important forces in Iranian politics right up to 1979.
The Safavid state decayed in the late seventeenth century. In 1722 an army of Afghan tribesmen besieged Isfahan for months; the starving city surrendered and the shah abdicated. Iran fell into half a century of turmoil.

Iran's Shi'ism, now its defining public identity, is younger than the Shahnameh by five hundred years. It was a state project before it was a national faith, and the clergy it created eventually outlasted the dynasty that created them.

Conquerors, Qajars and the Great Game (1722–1905)
Nader Shah and the Zands
Out of the chaos came Nader, a soldier of the Turkic Afshar tribe, who drove out the Afghans, deposed the last Safavids and crowned himself shah in 1736. He was a brilliant and brutal general. In 1739 he invaded Mughal India, sacked Delhi and carried home its treasure, including the jewel-encrusted Peacock Throne. His growing cruelty led his own officers to murder him in 1747.
The Zand ruler Karim Khan then governed much of Iran from Shiraz, never calling himself shah, only "deputy of the people" (vakil). Historians often describe his rule as a rare interval of calm. His death in 1779 brought more civil war, won by a Turkic tribe from the Caspian region, the Qajars.
The Qajars and the foreigners
The Qajar founder, Agha Mohammad Khan, made Tehran his capital in 1786 and was proclaimed shah in 1789; his dynasty ruled until 1925. These were the decades when Iran met European imperialism, and lost.
Two wars with Russia ended in the treaties of Golestan (1813) and Turkmenchay (1828), which surrendered Iran's territories in the Caucasus, roughly modern Georgia, Armenia, Azerbaijan and Dagestan, to the Russian Empire. Turkmenchay also gave Russian subjects legal immunity in Iran. To this day, "Turkmenchay" is Iranian shorthand for a humiliating treaty imposed by foreigners. Britain, guarding the road to India, pressed from the south and forced Iran to give up its claim to Herat, in what is now Afghanistan, in 1857. Iran was never formally colonised; instead, it became a buffer between the Russian and British empires in what the British called the "Great Game".
Short of money, the Qajar shahs sold concessions: rights over customs, banks, telegraphs, fisheries and mines. In 1872 the founder of the Reuters news agency, Paul Julius Reuter, a German-born British businessman, was granted a concession so sweeping (railways, mines, a bank, much of the economy) that George Curzon, later Britain's foreign secretary, described it as an extraordinary surrender of a kingdom's resources into foreign hands. It was cancelled under domestic and Russian pressure.
The Tobacco Protest
Then, in 1890, the shah granted a British company a monopoly over the production, sale and export of all Iranian tobacco. Merchants and clerics joined forces. In late 1891 a ruling attributed to the senior Shi'a scholar Mirza Hasan Shirazi declared tobacco use forbidden while the concession lasted. Iranians stopped smoking, reportedly even in the shah's own palace. In early 1892 the concession was cancelled.
The Tobacco Protest was a rehearsal for a century of Iranian politics: the bazaar and the clergy, allied with modern-minded intellectuals, mobilising the public against a ruler they saw as selling the nation to foreigners.
Two new faiths, and a society in change
The nineteenth century also produced a new religion. In 1844 a merchant from Shiraz, the Bab, announced himself as a gate to the hidden Imam and then as the bearer of a new revelation. His movement was crushed and he was executed in 1850. One of his followers, Baha'u'llah, went on to found the Baha'i Faith. The Baha'is became Iran's largest non-Muslim religious minority, and, because Shi'a clerics regard their faith as heresy against the finality of Muhammad's prophethood, among its most persecuted, then and now.
Ordinary life changed slowly. Most Iranians were still peasants working land owned by absentee landlords under sharecropping arrangements. A great famine struck in 1870–72. But printing presses, the telegraph and newspapers published abroad by Iranian exiles carried new ideas: law, constitution, nation.

Year
Event

1813, 1828
Treaties of Golestan and Turkmenchay: Caucasus lost to Russia

1872
Reuter concession (cancelled)

1891–92
Tobacco Protest forces cancellation of the tobacco monopoly

1896
Naser al-Din Shah assassinated

1901
William Knox D'Arcy granted the oil concession

Part 4 — Constitution, Reza Shah, oil and the coup (1905–1953)
The Constitutional Revolution
By 1905 Iran was bankrupt, its shah, Mozaffar al-Din, ill and in debt to Russia and Britain. A new intelligentsia, inspired by Japan's victory over Russia in 1904–05 and Russia's own revolution of 1905, joined the old alliance of merchants and clerics. Protests in Tehran escalated when the government beat sugar merchants accused of raising prices.
In summer 1906, protesters took sanctuary, bast, a traditional form of protest, in the grounds of the British legation in Tehran. Iranica's account is vivid: by 2 August 1906, 14,000 people were camped there, each guild with its own tent, meals cooked in huge communal cauldrons. Their demand grew from the dismissal of a hated prime minister to a majles, a national assembly. In August the shah conceded. The first Majles met that autumn and wrote a constitution, which the dying shah signed at the end of 1906; a supplementary law of 1907 added a bill of rights.
It was one of the first constitutional revolutions in Asia, earlier than the Young Turk revolution of 1908. It also contained a tension that never went away. The supplementary law created a committee of senior clerics to check that legislation conformed to Islam, and some of the revolution's clerical supporters, notably Sheikh Fazlollah Nuri, turned against it, demanding a mashrute-ye mashrue, a constitution limited by sharia. Nuri was hanged by the constitutionalists in 1909. Seventy years later, Khomeini's supporters would honour him as a martyr.
The new shah, Mohammad Ali, had the Majles building shelled by his Russian-officered Cossack Brigade in June 1908 and closed parliament. Constitutionalist fighters from Tabriz and Gilan, joined by Bakhtiari tribesmen, marched on Tehran in 1909 and deposed him. But the revolution was strangled from outside. In 1907 Britain and Russia had already agreed, without consulting Iran, to divide it into spheres of influence. When the Majles hired an American, Morgan Shuster, to reform its finances in 1911, Russia issued an ultimatum, occupied the north, and the Majles was closed in December 1911.
Reza Khan becomes Reza Shah
During the First World War, though Iran was neutral, Ottoman, Russian and British armies fought on its soil, and the famine of 1917–19 killed huge numbers, though how many is fiercely disputed: mainstream estimates are around two million, and some writers claim far more. In February 1921, an officer of the Cossack Brigade, Reza Khan, marched on Tehran with a few thousand men and, with the journalist Seyyed Zia Tabatabai, took power in a coup that British officers in Iran had encouraged. Reza became war minister, then prime minister, and in 1925 the Majles deposed the Qajars and made him shah. He took the name Pahlavi, after the language of pre-Islamic Iran.
Reza Shah set out to make Iran a modern nation-state on the model of Atatürk's Turkey, by force:

He built a national army and crushed autonomous tribes and regions.
He built the Trans-Iranian Railway, from the Caspian to the Persian Gulf, completed in 1938 and paid for largely by taxes on tea and sugar.
He established the University of Tehran, the country's first modern university, a secular court system and state schools, taking education and law out of clerical hands.
In 1935 he asked foreign governments to call the country Iran, not Persia.
In 1936 he banned the veil for women in public, the kashf-e hijab. Police tore chadors from women in the street. For some women it was liberation; for many religious families it meant women stopped leaving home. The memory of that compulsion fuels both sides of Iran's arguments about the hijab to this day.
Protest was crushed. In 1935 a demonstration against his dress laws at the Imam Reza shrine in Mashhad was put down by troops with heavy loss of life.

He also acquired a great deal of land for himself. When the Second World War came, he was suspected of sympathy for Germany and refused British and Soviet demands to expel German residents. In August 1941 Britain and the Soviet Union invaded, needing Iran's railway to supply the USSR. Reza Shah abdicated in favour of his 21-year-old son, Mohammad Reza, and died in exile in South Africa.

In 1906 Iranians demanded a constitution. In 1979 they demanded an Islamic Republic. In 2022 they demanded "Woman, Life, Freedom". The constitutional revolution's question, whether law comes from the people, from God, or from whoever commands the army, has never been settled.

Oil, Mosaddegh and the coup of 1953 (1901–1953)
The oil
In 1901 the Qajar shah had granted a British investor, William Knox D'Arcy, a sixty-year concession to find and sell oil across most of Iran. In 1908 his engineers struck oil at Masjed Soleyman in Khuzestan. The Anglo-Persian Oil Company, later the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company and later still BP, built at Abadan what became for a time the largest oil refinery in the world. In 1914 the British government bought a controlling stake, to fuel the Royal Navy.
Iranians watched their main resource enrich a foreign company and a foreign treasury. Iran's royalties were a small share of the profits; the company's Iranian workers lived in slums next to the British managers' neat bungalows. Renegotiation in 1933 changed little. By the late 1940s, oil was the national question.
Mosaddegh
Mohammad Mosaddegh was an aristocrat, a veteran of the constitutional era, a lawyer trained in Switzerland and a famously theatrical parliamentarian. His National Front, a coalition formed in 1949, demanded nationalisation of the oil industry and a shah who reigned rather than ruled.
In March 1951 the prime minister who opposed nationalisation was assassinated by a militant Islamist group, the Fada'iyan-e Islam, linked to the cleric Ayatollah Abol-Qasem Kashani. In late April 1951 the Majles made Mosaddegh prime minister, and two days later, as Iranica records, the oil industry was nationalised.
Britain responded with a worldwide boycott of Iranian oil, a naval show of force and a case at the UN and the International Court of Justice. Iran's oil revenue collapsed. Mosaddegh became a hero across the developing world (Time magazine made him its Man of the Year for 1951) and a problem at home, as the economy weakened and his coalition split. The communist Tudeh party grew. Kashani and other clerics broke with him. In 1953 he dissolved the Majles by a referendum widely criticised as rigged.
The coup
What happened next is the most consequential event in modern Iranian history, and the hardest to discuss without starting an argument.
Britain had been planning Mosaddegh's removal since 1952. The Truman administration refused; after Eisenhower took office in January 1953, Washington agreed. The plan, code-named TPAJAX by the CIA, was run on the ground by Kermit Roosevelt. On 15–16 August 1953, an officer delivered the shah's decree dismissing Mosaddegh; Mosaddegh's supporters arrested him, the coup appeared to have failed, and the shah fled to Baghdad and Rome. On 19 August (28 Mordad in the Iranian calendar), crowds, some of them paid, poured into central Tehran, army units joined them, and after a day of fighting in which between about 200 and 300 people were killed, Mosaddegh's house was taken. General Fazlollah Zahedi became prime minister and the shah returned.

What is established
Source

The coup was planned jointly by the CIA and Britain's MI6
CIA internal history; British records

The CIA itself says the coup was carried out "under CIA direction" as "an act of U.S. foreign policy, conceived and approved at the highest levels of government"
CIA documents declassified and published by the National Security Archive, 19 August 2013

A US Secretary of State publicly acknowledged the US role
Madeleine Albright, March 2000

Britain has been far more guarded; London has not made a comparable official acknowledgement, and British officials pressed to keep "very embarrassing" material out of the official US history
National Security Archive, 2013

Mosaddegh was tried for treason, imprisoned for three years and kept under house arrest until his death in 1967
Standard accounts

How much did the foreigners matter? Here historians genuinely disagree. The majority view, associated with scholars such as Mark Gasiorowski and Ervand Abrahamian, is that the coup would not have happened without American and British planning, money and propaganda. A minority, including the former Iranian diplomat Darioush Bayandor (Iran and the CIA, 2010) and the American historian Ray Takeyh, argue that the CIA's operation had in effect failed by 16 August and that the decisive push on 19 August came from Iranian actors: the army, royalists, and clerics such as Kashani who had turned against Mosaddegh. Both sides agree that foreign powers intervened and that many Iranians also wanted Mosaddegh gone.

For the Islamic Republic, 1953 proves that America will always try to overthrow an independent Iran. For secular nationalists, it proves that Iran's democratic experiment was killed by foreigners and the clergy together. For monarchists, it was a rescue from communism. All three are reading the same event.

Part 5 — The Shah's Iran and the White Revolution (1953–1978)
Oil, America and SAVAK
After 1953, a consortium of Western companies, now including American firms alongside the old British company, ran Iran's oil, splitting profits with Iran. Iran became a close American ally, a member of the Western-backed Baghdad Pact, and a buyer of American weapons on a vast scale. In 1957 the shah created a secret police, SAVAK, trained in part by American and Israeli services. Political parties were reduced to approved ones; from 1975 there was only one, the Rastakhiz (Resurgence) party.
The White Revolution
In January 1963 the shah launched a reform programme he called the White Revolution, white because, he said, it was a revolution from above without bloodshed, as opposed to a red one. It was approved in a referendum on 26 January 1963, with official figures of 5,598,711 votes for and 4,115 against, in a vote boycotted by the shah's opponents, a result that tells you as much about the referendum as about the reforms. Its main points:

Land reform: large estates were bought up and sold to the peasants who worked them, with landlords compensated in shares of state factories.
Votes for women, and later reforms of family law that restricted polygamy and men's unilateral divorce.
A Literacy Corps of conscripts sent to teach in villages, and health corps.
Nationalisation of forests, profit-sharing for factory workers, privatisation of state enterprises.

The results were real and mixed. Income per person rose greatly over the following years, and oil revenue paid for factories, dams and a rush to the cities. Literacy rose; malaria was pushed back; roads, dams and universities were built; a modern middle class grew, and women entered universities and professions. But many peasants received plots too small to live on, and millions moved to the slums of Tehran, where the mosque and the cleric were often the only institutions that welcomed them.
Khomeini's first stand
The White Revolution's loudest opponent was a cleric in Qom, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. He attacked the land reform and votes for women, but above all he attacked the shah's dependence on America and his relations with Israel. In June 1963 (15 Khordad in the Iranian calendar), after Khomeini was arrested, riots broke out in several cities and were put down by the army, with a death toll still disputed. In 1964 Khomeini denounced a law granting American military personnel immunity from Iranian courts, comparing it to the capitulations of the Qajar era. He was exiled, first to Turkey, then for thirteen years to the Shi'a shrine city of Najaf in Iraq.
In Najaf, in a series of lectures in 1970, published as Islamic Government, he developed the doctrine that would become the Islamic Republic's constitution: velayat-e faqih, the "guardianship of the Islamic jurist". In the hidden Imam's absence, he argued, a qualified senior cleric had the right, and the duty, to govern. It broke with the cautious mainstream of Shi'a thought, and most of the senior clerics of his generation did not accept it.
Boom, glitter and anger
In 1971 the shah held a celebration of 2,500 years of Persian monarchy in a tent city beside Persepolis, with heads of state flown in and food from Paris. After the oil price quadrupled in 1973–74, oil money flooded in; the shah promised Iran would soon rival Europe. Instead the economy overheated: inflation soared, the countryside emptied, and the gap between a westernised elite and the pious majority in the bazaars and the new slums grew obvious to everyone.
Opposition came from many directions: the old National Front liberals; the Tudeh communists; Marxist and Islamist guerrilla groups, among them the People's Mojahedin (MEK), which blended Islam and Marxism; and religious intellectuals like Ali Shariati, whose lectures recast Shi'ism as a revolutionary ideology of the oppressed. SAVAK's prisons and torture were widely reported by human rights organisations.
The shah also founded Iran's nuclear programme. It began in 1957 under an American civil nuclear agreement, part of President Eisenhower's "Atoms for Peace" initiative, and in 1974 the shah created the Atomic Energy Organization of Iran and announced plans to generate 23,000 megawatts from a network of nuclear power stations within twenty years, signing contracts with Western firms. Construction began at Bushehr on the Gulf coast. The same programme, inherited and transformed by the Islamic Republic, would become the centre of an international crisis half a century later.

Indicator
1960
1979
2000
2025

Population (millions)
21.5
38.4
66.4
92.4

Births per woman
7.5
6.5
2.0
1.7 (2024)

Source: World Bank, World Development Indicators (updated 8 October 2026). The fertility collapse after the 1980s, one of the fastest ever recorded, happened under the Islamic Republic, helped by a state family-planning programme launched in 1989.

Part 6 — Revolution and the Islamic Republic (1978–1989)
The revolution
In January 1978 a government-inspired newspaper article insulting Khomeini set off protests in Qom; police fired on them. In Shi'a custom, the dead are mourned on the fortieth day, and each forty-day memorial produced new demonstrations and new dead, in a rhythm that carried the movement across the country.
On 19 August 1978 the Cinema Rex in Abadan was set on fire with its doors locked; around 400 people died. Much of the public blamed SAVAK. Later evidence pointed to Islamist militants, and a man who confessed was eventually executed by the Islamic Republic. On 8 September, Black Friday, troops fired on demonstrators in Tehran's Jaleh Square under newly declared martial law; the toll was disputed then and remains so, with figures in the dozens by later counts and thousands in the claims made at the time. Strikes, above all in the oil industry, paralysed the economy. In December, during the Shi'a mourning days of Muharram, millions marched.
The shah, secretly ill with cancer, hesitated between repression and concession. On 16 January 1979 he left Iran. On 1 February, Khomeini flew home from Paris to a reception by millions. On 11 February the army declared itself neutral and the old regime collapsed.
How many died in the revolution? Khomeini spoke of 60,000 martyrs. A researcher at Iran's own Martyrs' Foundation, Emadeddin Baghi, later counted 2,781 protesters and revolutionaries killed in 1978–79. That gap, between the founding myth and the state's own archive, is typical of Iranian history.
Who made the revolution?
It was not only, or at first, an Islamist revolution. Students, workers, bazaar merchants, secular liberals, Marxists, the MEK and the clergy all took part. Khomeini's genius was to unite them behind a simple demand, that the shah must go, while being vague about what would follow. Within three years, his followers had defeated or destroyed almost all of their former allies.
Building an Islamic Republic
In a referendum at the end of March 1979, voters were asked a yes-or-no question: Islamic Republic? The official result was about 98 per cent yes. A constitution drafted that year, and approved in another referendum in December 1979, wrote velayat-e faqih into law. Its structure still defines Iran:

Institution
How it is chosen
What it does

Supreme Leader
Chosen by the Assembly of Experts
Head of state; commands the armed forces; appoints the heads of the judiciary, state broadcasting and the Revolutionary Guards

Assembly of Experts
88 senior clerics, elected from candidates vetted by the Guardian Council
Chooses and in theory supervises the Leader

Guardian Council
12 members: six clerics appointed by the Leader, six jurists nominated by the judiciary and approved by parliament
Vets all candidates for election; can veto any law

President
Elected by popular vote, four-year terms
Runs the government and economy, within the Leader's limits

Majles (parliament)
290 members, elected
Passes laws and budgets, subject to the Guardian Council

Expediency Council
Appointed by the Leader
Settles disputes between parliament and the Guardian Council; advises the Leader

Revolutionary Guards (IRGC)
Answer to the Leader
A second army, an intelligence service and, increasingly, a business empire

It is a hybrid: real elections, sometimes fiercely contested, inside a frame drawn by unelected clerics and guarded by an ideological army.
The hostage crisis
On 4 November 1979, after the deposed shah was admitted to the United States for cancer treatment, students loyal to Khomeini stormed the US embassy in Tehran. Fifty-two Americans were held for 444 days, until 20 January 1981. Khomeini endorsed the seizure; it destroyed the moderate provisional government of Mehdi Bazargan, which resigned, and it fixed the image of the new Iran in American minds. A US rescue attempt failed in April 1980 in the desert. The two countries have had no diplomatic relations since.
The war with Iraq
On 22 September 1980, Saddam Hussein's Iraq invaded Iran, expecting a quick victory over a state in chaos and hoping to seize the oil province of Khuzestan. Instead, Iranians rallied. The new Basij militia sent waves of young volunteers, many in their teens, against Iraqi lines; Iran retook Khorramshahr in 1982 and then, against advice from some of its own leaders, carried the war into Iraq. It became a war of trenches, of attacks on cities, of attacks on oil tankers in the Gulf, and of chemical weapons. Iraq used mustard gas and nerve agents against Iranian soldiers and, in March 1988 at Halabja, against Iraqi Kurdish civilians. Most Western governments and the Soviet Union backed Iraq to varying degrees.
On 3 July 1988 a US warship, the USS Vincennes, shot down an Iranian civilian airliner, Iran Air Flight 655, killing all 290 people on board; the US said its crew had mistaken the plane for a fighter. Later that month, Iran accepted UN Security Council Resolution 598, which had been passed a year earlier. Khomeini said that in accepting it he had drunk "the poisoned chalice", in the usual English rendering of his words. The guns fell silent on 20 August 1988. Neither side gained territory.

Iran–Iraq War deaths
Estimate
Source

Iranian military dead (Iran's official figures)
about 123,000–160,000, plus about 60,000 missing
Iranian government, as summarised by historians

Iranian military dead (outside estimates)
about 200,000 to 600,000
Range across scholarly estimates

Iraqi military dead
about 105,000 to 500,000
Range across scholarly estimates

Total deaths, both sides, including civilians
about 450,000 to 500,000 or more
Range across scholarly estimates

The Islamic Republic calls the war the "Imposed War" and the "Sacred Defence". Its martyrs' murals, cemeteries and museums are central to the state's identity.
The terror of the 1980s
The war years were also years of internal terror. In June 1981 the MEK turned to armed struggle; a bombing of the ruling Islamic Republican Party's headquarters that month killed around 70 senior officials, and further attacks followed. The regime replied with mass arrests and thousands of executions. Leftists, Kurds and Baha'is were persecuted. In the summer of 1988, after an MEK force based in Iraq invaded western Iran, Khomeini ordered the execution of political prisoners who refused to recant. Estimates from Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International put the number killed between about 2,800 and 5,000; the MEK claims 30,000. Among the officials on the committees that sent prisoners to their deaths, according to survivors and rights groups, was a young prosecutor named Ebrahim Raisi.
Khomeini died on 3 June 1989. The Assembly of Experts chose as his successor Ali Khamenei, then president, a mid-ranking cleric who did not meet the constitution's requirement that the Leader be a senior source of emulation (marja); the constitution was amended to drop it.

"Neither East nor West, Islamic Republic" was the revolution's slogan. It meant independence from both superpowers. To its supporters it still means that. To its critics it came to mean independence from the Iranian people, too.

Part 7 — Reform, repression and the bomb question (1989–2021)
Rebuilding, and a reform movement
President Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani (1989–1997), a wily cleric and businessman, rebuilt the war-shattered economy and relaxed some social controls. Then, in May 1997, a little-known cleric, Mohammad Khatami, won the presidency in a landslide on a platform of civil society, rule of law and "dialogue among civilisations". Young people and women voted for him in huge numbers.
The reform era opened space: newspapers multiplied, women's magazines flourished, and Iranians talked politics openly. But the unelected institutions struck back. Newspapers were closed by the dozen; a series of murders of dissident writers and activists in late 1998, the "chain murders", was traced to "rogue elements" in the Intelligence Ministry, whose alleged leader died in prison before trial, and agents convicted in 2001 were tried in proceedings that victims' families and rights groups dismissed as a sham; student protests in July 1999 were crushed by vigilantes and police. The Guardian Council blocked reform laws. Reformists learned that winning elections did not mean winning power.
Ahmadinejad and the Green Movement
In 2005 the populist mayor of Tehran, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, won the presidency, promising to put "oil money on people's tables". He spent heavily, denied the Holocaust at international forums, and pressed ahead with the nuclear programme.
On 12 June 2009, the government declared him re-elected with nearly 63 per cent of the vote. His main challenger, the former prime minister Mir-Hossein Mousavi, and many Iranians believed the vote had been rigged. Millions marched under the slogan "Where is my vote?" and the green colour of Mousavi's campaign. The Green Movement was crushed over the following months, with dozens killed, thousands arrested and televised show trials. The shooting of a young woman, Neda Agha-Soltan, filmed on a phone, became the movement's image worldwide. Mousavi and the other reformist candidate, Mehdi Karroubi, were placed under house arrest from 2011.
The nuclear programme
Iran's nuclear programme began under the shah, with American help. After 2002, when an exile group revealed undeclared facilities at Natanz and Arak, it became the centre of a long international confrontation. Iran insisted, and the Islamic Republic still insists, that it seeks only civilian nuclear power and that the Supreme Leader has issued a religious ruling against nuclear weapons. Israel, the United States and European governments did not believe it, pointing to enrichment far beyond civilian needs, hidden sites and evidence of past weapons work. The UN Security Council passed sanctions resolutions from 2006. Israel assassinated Iranian nuclear scientists; a computer worm, Stuxnet, widely attributed to the US and Israel, sabotaged centrifuges at Natanz.
In 2013 Iranians elected Hassan Rouhani, a centrist cleric who promised to end Iran's isolation. On 14 July 2015 in Vienna, Iran and six powers (the US, UK, France, Germany, Russia and China) with the EU agreed the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA). Iran accepted strict limits on enrichment and stockpiles and intrusive inspections by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA); in return, UN, EU and US nuclear sanctions were lifted from Implementation Day, 16 January 2016, under UN Security Council Resolution 2231.
The deal's defenders said it blocked Iran's paths to a bomb for a decade or more; its critics, led by Israel's prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, said its limits expired too soon and ignored Iran's missiles and regional militias. In May 2018 President Donald Trump withdrew the United States and reimposed sanctions under a policy of "maximum pressure". From 2019 Iran stepped up its enrichment in stages, eventually reaching 60 per cent purity, close to the 90 per cent used in weapons.
Protest and a downed plane
Economic pain brought new protests, now from poorer Iranians rather than the urban middle class: in 2017–18, and in November 2019, when a fuel price rise set off nationwide unrest. Security forces killed hundreds of protesters by Amnesty International's count; a Reuters report citing Iranian officials put the toll at about 1,500.
On 3 January 2020 an American drone strike in Baghdad killed Qasem Soleimani, commander of the Revolutionary Guards' foreign operations arm, the Quds Force, and architect of Iran's network of allied militias, the "Axis of Resistance". Iran fired missiles at US bases in Iraq. Hours later, on 8 January, Revolutionary Guards air defences shot down Ukraine International Airlines Flight 752 just after take-off from Tehran, killing all 176 people on board. The authorities denied it for three days.
These years also built the regional alliance the Islamic Republic calls the "Axis of Resistance". It began with Hezbollah in Lebanon, organised in the early 1980s with the help of Revolutionary Guard instructors and pledged to Iran's Supreme Leader, and grew to include Palestinian Islamist groups, militias in Iraq and Syria and the Houthis in Yemen. Its supporters see it as Iran's shield against Israel and the United States; many domestic critics see money and lives spent abroad while Iranians grew poorer.
In 2021, with almost every serious rival disqualified by the Guardian Council, Ebrahim Raisi was elected president on the lowest turnout in the Islamic Republic's history to that point.

Part 8 — Woman, Life, Freedom, and Iran at war (2022–2026)
Mahsa Jina Amini
On 13 September 2022, a 22-year-old Kurdish woman, Mahsa Amini (Jina was her Kurdish name), was arrested in Tehran by the morality police for wearing her hijab "improperly". Witnesses said she was beaten in the van; the authorities denied it. She collapsed in custody and died in hospital on 16 September.
Protests began at her funeral in her home town of Saqqez and spread across the country under a slogan born in the Kurdish women's movement, Jin, Jiyan, Azadî in Kurdish, Zan, Zendegi, Azadi in Persian: Woman, Life, Freedom. Schoolgirls tore off their headscarves and waved them; young women burned them in bonfires and cut their hair in public. Unlike earlier movements, which had mostly asked for fair elections or cheaper fuel, this one openly chanted against the Islamic Republic itself.
By September 2023 at least 551 people, including 68 children, had been killed, according to rights groups' counts; executions of protesters followed. A UN fact-finding mission created by the Human Rights Council in November 2022 concluded in early 2024 that the crackdown included crimes against humanity. The movement did not topple the state, but it changed the street: reporters and residents described large numbers of women in Tehran going out uncovered, in open defiance of the law. In October 2023 the imprisoned human rights activist Narges Mohammadi was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.
Direct war with Israel
For decades, Iran and Israel had fought indirectly: Israel through assassinations and sabotage, Iran through allies such as Hezbollah in Lebanon, Hamas and Islamic Jihad in Gaza, the Houthis in Yemen and militias in Iraq and Syria. After Hamas's attack on Israel on 7 October 2023 (see this series' A Brief History of Israel), that shadow war came into the open. In April 2024, after Israel struck an Iranian consular building in Damascus, Iran launched its first ever direct attack on Israel, with hundreds of drones and missiles, most shot down. In May 2024 President Raisi died in a helicopter crash; a reformist-backed former health minister, Masoud Pezeshkian, won the election that followed. In October 2024 Iran fired some 180 ballistic missiles at Israel, and Israel struck back at Iranian air defences and missile factories.
The nuclear crisis and the Twelve-Day War

Date
Finding or event
Source

31 May 2025
IAEA confidential report: Iran holds over 400 kg of uranium enriched to 60%, a near 50% increase in three months; the agency cannot confirm the programme is entirely peaceful
IAEA report, as reported by the BBC

12 June 2025
IAEA Board of Governors finds Iran in non-compliance with its safeguards obligations, 19 votes to 3 with 11 abstentions
BBC, 12 June 2025

13–24 June 2025
Israel strikes Iran's nuclear and military sites and kills senior commanders and scientists; the US bombs Fordow, Natanz and Isfahan on 22 June; ceasefire on 24 June
Multiple; dates uncontested

28 June 2025
IAEA chief Rafael Grossi says damage is "severe" but "not total" and Iran could resume enrichment "in a matter of months"
BBC, 29 June 2025

28 September 2025
UN sanctions reimposed after the UK, France and Germany trigger the JCPOA "snapback"; Iran calls this illegal
BBC, 28 September 2025

Iran's government said 1,060 people were killed in Iran in the June 2025 war; the US-based rights group HRANA counted 1,190, including at least 436 civilians. Israel reported 32 civilians and one off-duty soldier killed by Iranian missiles. Iran suspended cooperation with the IAEA, accusing it of helping Israel choose its targets.
The uprising of 2025–26
On 28 December 2025, shopkeepers in Tehran's bazaar went on strike as the currency collapsed. The protests spread nationwide within days and turned, again, into demands for the end of the Islamic Republic. On 8 and 9 January 2026, behind a near-total internet blackout, security forces opened fire on crowds across the country.
The death toll is the most disputed figure in this history. On 17 January 2026, Khamenei himself acknowledged that "several thousand" had been killed, blaming the United States and Israel. By 9 February, HRANA had confirmed 6,872 protesters killed, including more than 150 children, while the authorities acknowledged at least 3,000 deaths, some of them security personnel (BBC, 9 February 2026). Other estimates, citing hospital data and Health Ministry sources, ran above 30,000. In January 2026 the UN Human Rights Council ordered its fact-finding mission to investigate urgently. Executions of people convicted over the protests continued through 2026.
The 2026 war
In January and February 2026 the United States assembled its largest military build-up in the region since the 2003 invasion of Iraq, while also holding talks with Iran over its nuclear programme. On 28 February 2026, the US and Israel struck. Khamenei and much of Iran's military and security leadership were killed in the first hours. The US and Israeli governments described the war as necessary to stop Iran obtaining a nuclear weapon, to protect Iranians from their own government, and to secure the region. Iran called it "wholly unprovoked, illegal, and illegitimate", and the UN Secretary-General and many governments condemned the attack (BBC, 28 February 2026).
Iran fired missiles and drones at Israel, at US bases and at Gulf states that host them, and closed the Strait of Hormuz, through which a large share of the world's oil passes, causing what has been described as the largest supply disruption the global oil market has ever seen. On 8 March, the Assembly of Experts named Mojtaba Khamenei, 56, a cleric who had never held government office, as Supreme Leader; days earlier President Trump had said Khamenei's son was "unacceptable to me" (BBC, 8 March 2026). The internet was cut for almost three months.

Date (2026)
What happened

28 February
US–Israeli strikes; Ali Khamenei killed

8 March
Mojtaba Khamenei named Supreme Leader

8 April
Two-week ceasefire mediated by Pakistan

12–13 April
Talks in Islamabad fail; US blockades Iranian ports

mid-June
14-point US–Iran memorandum of understanding commits both sides to end the war and negotiate a final deal within 60 days

8 July
Ceasefire collapses after Iranian attacks on ships in the Strait of Hormuz

September–October
Renewed fighting at sea; record numbers of ship attacks near Hormuz; Iran rejects a Qatari peace proposal on 28 October

By 7 April HRANA had documented 3,636 deaths in Iran from the strikes, 1,701 of them civilians. Israel reported dozens of its own civilians and soldiers killed; by 21 July, 21 US service members and one contractor had been killed, according to tallies of US official figures. As of the end of October 2026, the war was unresolved: the US was blockading Iranian oil exports, Iran was attacking shipping near Hormuz, and indirect talks through Qatar continued. For the economy, the World Bank estimated that GDP per person fell from about $5,190 in 2024 to about $3,920 in 2025, with inflation of 42 per cent in 2025, figures that predate the worst of the war.

In the space of fourteen months, Iranians lived through a war, a massacre, another war, the death of the only Supreme Leader most of them had ever known, and the succession of his son. Whatever comes next, it will be built on that.

Part 9 — How to understand Iran today
Three ways of telling the story
Every Iranian history is, underneath, an argument about which of these stories is true. Here each is set out as its own adherents would tell it.
The Islamic Republic's story. For two centuries Iran was humiliated by foreigners: Russian treaties that tore away its provinces, British concessions that sold its tobacco and its oil, the Anglo-American coup that destroyed its elected government in 1953, and a shah installed and armed by Washington who mocked his own people's faith. In 1979 the Iranian nation, led by its clergy, threw off that dependence. The revolution brought electricity, roads, clinics and schools to villages the shah had ignored, and it sent a whole generation of village girls to university. Then the world, East and West alike, armed Saddam Hussein to destroy it, and Iran's young men defended their country in the Sacred Defence while the world looked away from Iraq's chemical weapons. Since then America and Israel have assassinated its scientists and commanders, strangled its economy with sanctions, and in 2025 and 2026 bombed it while it was negotiating. Its unrest, in this account, is stirred up and financed by those same enemies, and its "resistance" is the price of independence.
The domestic opposition's story. There is no single opposition inside Iran; there are reformists who once hoped to change the system from within and have largely given up, secular democrats, women's rights activists, labour organisers, students, and ethnic movements among Kurds, Baloch, Arabs and Azerbaijanis. What they share is this account: the revolution of 1979 was made by many Iranians and stolen by one faction, which then executed thousands of its former allies, imposed the hijab by force, and turned a mosaic of peoples into subjects of a clerical state. The Iranian people voted for reform in 1997, for change in 2009 and against the system in the streets in 2017, 2019, 2022 and 2025–26, and each time were answered with bullets and the noose. Foreign enemies exist, but the Islamic Republic's worst enemy has been its own disregard for the Iranians it rules. "Woman, Life, Freedom" names what they want. Many of them also opposed the foreign bombing of their country in 2025 and 2026.
The diaspora's story, or stories. Several million Iranians live abroad, most of them having left after 1979, with large communities in the United States (especially Los Angeles), Canada, Germany, the UK, Turkey and the Gulf. They are as divided as the country they left:

Monarchists look back on the Pahlavi era as a time of modernisation, women's freedom and national pride, and many look to the late shah's son, Reza Pahlavi, as a figure who could lead a transition.
Secular republicans and liberals, heirs of Mosaddegh's National Front, remember 1953 as the crime that made 1979 possible and reject both the clerics and the monarchy.
The MEK, now based in Albania, presents itself as the democratic alternative; most other Iranians, inside and outside the country, distrust it deeply, not least because it fought alongside Saddam Hussein's army in the 1980s.
Younger diaspora Iranians, many born abroad, have often been drawn into politics by the Woman, Life, Freedom movement rather than by the older quarrels.

The 2026 war split the diaspora painfully, between those who welcomed foreign strikes on a government that had just massacred its own people and those who saw foreign bombs falling on their families' cities.
Ideas that unlock the country
1. Iran is old, and knows it. Few countries have a continuous sense of themselves stretching back two and a half thousand years. Iranians quote Ferdowsi and Hafez in ordinary conversation, celebrate Nowruz, a festival older than Islam, and see their history as a series of foreign conquests (Greek, Arab, Mongol, Turkic, Russian, British, American) that Iran survived by absorbing its conquerors. That long memory explains the deep suspicion of foreign interference that runs through every political camp.
2. Faith and nation are intertwined, and contested. Iran is the only major state where Twelver Shi'ism is the state religion, and Shi'a rituals, Muharram, Ashura, the shrines of Mashhad and Qom, are woven into national life. But Iranian identity is also Persian, pre-Islamic and, for millions, increasingly secular. Iran's ethnic map is diverse too: alongside a Persian-speaking majority are Azerbaijanis (Iran's largest minority), Kurds, Lurs, Arabs, Baloch and Turkmen, and religious minorities including Sunni Muslims, Christians, Jews, Zoroastrians and the persecuted Baha'is.
3. Oil has shaped every regime. Oil money funded Reza Shah's railways, the shah's White Revolution and the Islamic Republic's subsidies and militias. It has also made every Iranian government less dependent on its own citizens' taxes and consent, and made Iran a prize for outside powers.
4. The state is a hybrid. The Islamic Republic has held elections since 1979, some of them genuinely competitive and surprising, inside limits set by the Supreme Leader, the Guardian Council and the Revolutionary Guards. Whether that hybrid can survive the loss of its founding generation, war and the alienation of much of its youth is the central question of 2026.
5. Iranian society has changed faster than its government. Iran is now overwhelmingly urban and literate. Women are educated in large numbers. Fertility has fallen from more than six children per woman in 1979 to under two. Much of the population was born after the revolution and has known no other system, and opinion research and street protests alike suggest that many of them reject it. That gap between society and state is where the next chapter of Iranian history will be written.
Key dates

Date
Event

c. 4000 BCE
Susa founded

646 BCE
Ashurbanipal of Assyria sacks Susa

550 BCE
Cyrus II overthrows the Medes

539 BCE
Cyrus takes Babylon

522–486 BCE
Darius I; Bisotun inscription; Persepolis begun

330 BCE
Alexander burns Persepolis; end of the Achaemenids

c. 247 BCE
Parthian (Arsacid) dynasty founded

224 CE
Ardashir founds the Sasanian dynasty

260
Shapur I captures the Roman emperor Valerian

c. 651
Death of Yazdegerd III; Arab conquest complete

c. 1010
Ferdowsi completes the Shahnameh

1258
Mongols sack Baghdad

1501
Ismail I proclaims Twelver Shi'ism the state religion

1587–1629
Shah Abbas I; Isfahan made capital

1722
Afghan capture of Isfahan

1828
Treaty of Turkmenchay

1891–92
Tobacco Protest

1906
Constitution and first Majles

1908
Oil struck at Masjed Soleyman

1921
Reza Khan's coup

1925
Reza Shah founds the Pahlavi dynasty

1941
Anglo-Soviet invasion; Mohammad Reza Shah succeeds

1951
Oil nationalised; Mosaddegh prime minister

19 August 1953
Coup overthrows Mosaddegh

1963
White Revolution; Khomeini's uprising

11 February 1979
Monarchy collapses

4 November 1979
US embassy seized

1980–1988
Iran–Iraq War

1988
Mass execution of political prisoners

3 June 1989
Death of Khomeini; Ali Khamenei succeeds

1997
Khatami elected; reform era

2009
Disputed election; Green Movement

14 July 2015
JCPOA agreed

8 May 2018
US withdraws from the JCPOA

September 2022
Death of Mahsa Jina Amini; Woman, Life, Freedom protests

13–24 June 2025
Twelve-Day War with Israel; US strikes nuclear sites

28 September 2025
UN sanctions reimposed

January 2026
Protest crackdown; thousands killed

28 February 2026
US–Israeli war on Iran begins; Ali Khamenei killed

8 March 2026
Mojtaba Khamenei named Supreme Leader

Who's who

Person
Lived
Why they matter

Cyrus II
d. 530 BCE
Founder of the Achaemenid empire

Darius I
c. 550–486 BCE
Organiser of the empire; Persepolis

Shapur I
d. c. 270
Sasanian king who captured a Roman emperor

Khosrow I Anushirvan
r. 531–579
Model of the just king

Ferdowsi
940–c. 1020
Poet of the Shahnameh

Hafez
14th century
Iran's most beloved lyric poet

Ismail I
1487–1524
Founded the Safavid state; made Iran Shi'a

Abbas I
1571–1629
Greatest Safavid shah; built Isfahan

Nader Shah
1688–1747
Conqueror who sacked Delhi

Mozaffar al-Din Shah
1853–1907
Signed the 1906 constitution

Reza Shah
1878–1944
Founder of the Pahlavi dynasty; forced modernisation

Mohammad Mosaddegh
1882–1967
Nationalised oil; overthrown in 1953

Mohammad Reza Shah
1919–1980
Last shah; White Revolution

Ruhollah Khomeini
1900 or 1902–1989 (sources differ)
Leader of the revolution; first Supreme Leader

Ali Shariati
1933–1977
Revolutionary Islamic thinker

Ali Khamenei
1939–2026
Supreme Leader 1989–2026; killed in US–Israeli strikes

Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani
1934–2017
President 1989–97; pragmatist power-broker

Mohammad Khatami
b. 1943
Reformist president 1997–2005

Mir-Hossein Mousavi
b. 1942
Green Movement leader; under house arrest since 2011

Mahsa Jina Amini
2000–2022
Her death in custody sparked Woman, Life, Freedom

Narges Mohammadi
b. 1972
Imprisoned activist; Nobel Peace Prize 2023

Masoud Pezeshkian
b. 1954
President since 2024

Mojtaba Khamenei
b. 1969
Supreme Leader since March 2026

Reza Pahlavi
b. 1960
Son of the last shah; monarchist figure in the diaspora

The takeaway
Iran is one of the world's oldest continuous civilisations: Elam, then the empires of Cyrus and Darius, the Parthians and Sasanians who held Rome at bay, a Persian culture that survived the Arab conquest by remaking Islam in its own language, and a Shi'a identity built by the Safavids. Its modern history is a running argument, through the constitution of 1906, the oil nationalisation and coup of 1953, the revolution of 1979 and the protests of 2009, 2022 and 2026, about whether the people, the clergy, the king or foreign powers get to decide Iran's future. In 2026 that argument is being fought under bombardment, after a massacre, with a new Supreme Leader, and with no agreement among Iranians at home or abroad about how it should end.
Try this: pick one date from the Key dates table, 1953, 1979 or 2022 are good choices, and look for two accounts of it written by Iranians on opposite sides: one from Iranian state media and one from an opposition or diaspora outlet. Notice which facts each includes, which each leaves out, and which words each uses for the same people. That is the fastest way to understand why Iranians argue the way they do.

Sources & Further Reading
Sources
- Encyclopaedia Iranica (Columbia University), articles "Elam", "Achaemenid Dynasty", "Arsacids ii", "Sasanian Dynasty", "Ferdowsi i", "Safavid Dynasty", "Constitutional Revolution i–ii", "Coup d'état of 1332 Š./1953" and "Iraq vii. Iran–Iraq War", read via archived copies on 31 October 2026.
- National Security Archive (George Washington University), CIA Confirms Role in 1953 Iran Coup, Electronic Briefing Book No. 435 (19 August 2013).
- World Bank, World Development Indicators, Iran (updated 8 October 2026): population, fertility, life expectancy, GDP per capita, inflation.
- UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, Independent International Fact-Finding Mission on the Islamic Republic of Iran, mandate page (Human Rights Council resolutions S-35/1, 55/19, 58/21 and S-39/1 of 23 January 2026).
- BBC News reporting, 2025–26: IAEA report (31 May 2025) and Board resolution (12 June 2025); Grossi interview (29 June 2025); snapback sanctions (28 September 2025); Khamenei's acknowledgement of protest deaths (17 January 2026); BBC Persian victims project and HRANA figures (9 February 2026); Khamenei's killing (28 February 2026); Mojtaba Khamenei's appointment (8 March 2026); Pakistan-mediated ceasefire (8 April 2026); internet restoration (26 May 2026); text of the US–Iran memorandum (18 June 2026); Hormuz shipping attacks (16 October 2026).
- Human rights organisations' figures as summarised in the record: Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International (1988 executions); HRANA (2025 and 2026 war casualties; 2026 protest deaths); rights groups' count of 551 killed in the 2022–23 protests.
- Emadeddin Baghi's count of revolution deaths and the Iran–Iraq War casualty ranges as summarised in the secondary literature; ranges given where estimates differ.
Go deeper
- 📘 A History of Modern Iran — Ervand Abrahamian (the clearest single-volume account of the 20th century, from the constitutional revolution to the Islamic Republic)
- 📘 The Persians: Ancient, Mediaeval and Modern Iran — Homa Katouzian (a sweeping interpretation built around the cycle of arbitrary rule and chaos)
- 📘 Shahnameh: The Persian Book of Kings — Abolqasem Ferdowsi, translated by Dick Davis (the national epic in an English version that reads beautifully)
- 📘 The Mantle of the Prophet — Roy Mottahedeh (a classic portrait of a cleric's education in Qom, and the best way into how the revolution felt from inside)
- 📘 Persepolis — Marjane Satrapi (a graphic memoir of growing up through the revolution and the war, and leaving)
- 🌐 Encyclopaedia Iranica (the scholarly reference on everything Iranian, free online)
- 🌐 Related pieces in this library: Rumi: The Ecstasy of Divine Love and the Longing of the Soul; The Silk Roads; The 1970s: Malaise, Punk, Détente, and the Rise of Personal Computing (Khomeini); A Brief History of Israel (this series)


A Brief History of Israel: Israelis, Palestinians, and the Land Both Call Home
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Three thousand years of kingdoms, empires, exiles and returns, and the century-long conflict between two peoples who each see the same small land as their home.

A note on how this piece is written: almost every word in this history is disputed, starting with the name of the land. Where Israelis and Palestinians use different names for the same thing, both are given. Where international bodies such as the UN or the International Court of Justice have made findings, they are reported as findings, with dates, alongside the response of whoever disputes them. Casualty figures are attributed to whoever produced them. The aim is that an Israeli Jew, a Palestinian, and a supporter of either could each read the account of their own history and recognise it as fairly told.
Every spring, Israelis celebrate their Independence Day with fireworks, flags and barbecues in the parks. It marks the declaration of the State of Israel on 14 May 1948, the return of the Jewish people to sovereignty in their ancestral land after nearly two thousand years, three years after the Holocaust. The day before, sirens sound across the country and Israelis stand in silence for soldiers and victims of terrorism who died so that the state could exist.
On 15 May, Palestinians mark Nakba Day, al-Nakba, "the catastrophe". It remembers the same war, in which more than 700,000 Palestinian Arabs, about half of the Arab population of the land, fled or were driven from their homes and were never allowed to return. Many families still keep the iron keys of houses that no longer stand.
Both memories are true. They are memories of the same events, seen from opposite sides, and most of the history of this land since 1948 has been shaped by the collision between them. This is that history, told at length, and beginning long before either modern people existed.
In this history

The land and ancient Israel (to 586 BCE)
Exile, Rome and the empires (586 BCE–1516)
Ottoman Palestine and two national movements (1516–1917)
The British Mandate (1917–1947)
1948: Independence and Nakba (1947–1949)
The new state, 1967 and the occupation (1949–1987)
Intifadas, Oslo and the Gaza stalemate (1987–2023)
7 October and the Gaza war (2023–2026)
How to understand Israel and Palestine today

Part 1 — The land and ancient Israel (to 586 BCE)
The land between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River is small. From the coast to the river it is a morning's drive. Yet within it are coastal plains and citrus groves, the green hills of Galilee, the stony uplands where Jerusalem, Hebron and Nablus stand, the Negev desert in the south, and the Dead Sea, the lowest point on the surface of the earth. It sits on the land bridge between Africa and Asia, which is why every empire of the ancient and medieval world wanted it, and why so many peoples passed through.
Its names are themselves a history.

Name
Origin
Who uses it

Canaan
The name in Egyptian and Mesopotamian texts and the Bible for the land before the Israelites
Historians of the ancient period

Israel / Eretz Yisrael ("Land of Israel")
The Bible's name for the land promised to the descendants of Jacob, also called Israel
Jews, as a religious and historical term; since 1948 also the state

Judea (Judaea)
The southern kingdom of Judah, later a Roman province; the root of the word "Jew"
Historians; Israelis use "Judea and Samaria" for the West Bank

Palestine / Filastin
From the Philistines, who lived on the southern coast; used by Greek writers, made official by Rome after 135 CE as Syria Palaestina, and used by Arabs, Ottomans and the British
Palestinians; the British Mandate (1920–48); the State of Palestine, recognised by most UN members

The Holy Land
Christian usage, from the Middle Ages onward
Pilgrims and churches

Some terms in this piece need defining at the start, because they are contested:

Israel means the State of Israel within the lines where the fighting stopped in 1949, often called the Green Line, unless stated otherwise.
The West Bank (including East Jerusalem) and the Gaza Strip are the territories Israel captured in 1967. The UN, the International Court of Justice and most governments call them the Occupied Palestinian Territory. Israel's government disputes that description for the West Bank, which many Israelis call Judea and Samaria, and regards East Jerusalem as part of its capital.
Palestinians means the Arab people of this land and their descendants, Muslim and Christian, wherever they now live, including the Arab citizens of Israel, many of whom call themselves Palestinian citizens of Israel.

Ancient Israel and Judah (c. 1200–586 BCE)
Two kinds of evidence
There are two main sources for ancient Israel, and they need to be kept apart. One is the Hebrew Bible, the sacred scripture of Judaism and the Old Testament of Christianity, which tells a story running from Abraham through the exodus from Egypt, the conquest of Canaan under Joshua, and the kingdom of David and Solomon. The other is archaeology and inscriptions from the region and its neighbours. Sometimes they agree; often they do not; and the question of how far to trust the Bible as history is one of the oldest debates in scholarship (see this library's How the Sacred Texts Were Written).
Most archaeologists today think the Israelites did not arrive as a conquering army from Egypt. The evidence suggests instead that they emerged from within the Canaanite population itself, in hundreds of small new highland villages that appear in the central hills around 1200 BCE. Those villages have one striking feature: almost no pig bones, unlike nearby Canaanite and Philistine sites. That dietary rule would become one of the markers of Jewish identity for the next three thousand years.
The first mentions
The earliest known mention of Israel outside the Bible is on a granite slab carved for the Egyptian pharaoh Merneptah around 1208 BCE, which lists peoples he claims to have defeated in Canaan and says, in a standard translation, "Israel is laid waste, its seed is no more". The stele was discovered by the British archaeologist Flinders Petrie in 1896. The hieroglyph used marks Israel as a people, not a city or country.
Around 300 years later, an Aramaic inscription found at Tel Dan in northern Israel in 1993–94 mentions the "House of David", the first reference outside the Bible to a royal dynasty of that name. It is dated to the ninth century BCE.
David, Solomon and the debate over the kingdom
The Bible describes a great united kingdom under David and Solomon, around the tenth century BCE, with a magnificent Temple in Jerusalem. Here archaeologists divide. Scholars such as Israel Finkelstein argue that tenth-century Jerusalem was a modest highland town and that the kingdom of the Bible is a later idealisation; others, such as Amihai Mazar, defend a more modest but real united monarchy. What is not in doubt is that by the ninth century BCE there were two Israelite kingdoms: Israel in the north, with its capital at Samaria, and the smaller Judah in the south, with its capital at Jerusalem.

The northern kingdom was conquered by the Assyrian Empire; its capital Samaria fell in 722–720 BCE and much of its population was deported.
Judah survived as an Assyrian vassal. In 587 or 586 BCE the Babylonian king Nebuchadnezzar II destroyed Jerusalem and its Temple and deported much of Judah's elite to Babylon.

In these centuries, many scholars believe, the core of the Hebrew Bible took shape, and with it monotheism, the belief in one God, which Judaism gave to Christianity and Islam.

The Merneptah Stele, about 3,200 years old, is the first time "Israel" appears in writing. It is a boast of destruction. The people it claimed to have wiped out are still here, and so is the argument about the land.

Part 2 — Exile, Rome and the empires (586 BCE–1516)
Return and the Second Temple
In 539 BCE the Persian king Cyrus the Great conquered Babylon (see this series' A Brief History of Iran). The Bible records that he allowed the exiles to return, and around 538 BCE some did, rebuilding the Temple in Jerusalem. Many stayed in Babylon, where a Jewish community would flourish for 2,500 years. The diaspora, the Jewish people living outside the land, begins here, centuries before the Romans.
Judea was then ruled by the Persians, by Alexander the Great and his successors, and after a revolt in the 160s BCE that is still celebrated in the festival of Hanukkah, by a Jewish dynasty of its own, the Hasmoneans, from 164 to 37 BCE. Then came Rome. Herod the Great, a client king of Rome, rebuilt the Temple on a vast scale; its retaining wall, the Western Wall, is today the holiest place where Jews pray.
In this Roman province, a Jewish preacher from Galilee, Jesus of Nazareth, was executed around the year 30. The movement his followers founded became Christianity, and made this small land holy to billions more people.
Revolt and destruction
Two great Jewish revolts against Rome ended in catastrophe.

Revolt
Dates
Outcome

The Great Revolt
66–73 CE
Roman legions besieged Jerusalem and destroyed the Second Temple in 70 CE; the last rebels fell at Masada

The Bar Kokhba revolt
132–135/136 CE
Crushed after a brutal war; Jerusalem refounded as a Roman colony, Aelia Capitolina, which Jews were barred from entering; the province renamed Syria Palaestina

The destruction of the Temple is still mourned by Jews on the fast of Tisha B'Av. Judaism survived it by transforming itself: rabbis replaced priests, prayer and study replaced sacrifice. In Galilee, around 200 CE, Rabbi Judah ha-Nasi compiled the Mishnah, the foundation of rabbinic law, and later the Jerusalem Talmud was produced there too. Jewish communities remained in the land, especially in Galilee, through every century that followed, though for long periods they were a minority.
The question of what happened after 135 matters politically today. Jewish tradition and Zionism emphasise exile and the continuous longing for return ("Next year in Jerusalem", recited each Passover). Many Palestinian historians emphasise that the land's population never disappeared: farmers stayed, converted to Christianity and later mostly to Islam, adopted Arabic, and many of today's Palestinians are, in part, their descendants. Both continuities are real, and both peoples' ancestry runs deep in the region.
A land of many rulers (135–1516)
Christian Holy Land
After the Roman emperor Constantine converted to Christianity in the fourth century, the land was transformed into the Holy Land of the Byzantine Empire. Churches rose over the sites of Jesus's life and death, among them the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem. Pilgrims came from across the Christian world. During the Byzantine centuries much of the population became Christian, and Palestinian Christians today, though now a small minority, belong to some of the oldest Christian communities on earth.
The Islamic conquest
In 636 Arab armies of the early caliphate defeated the Byzantines at the Yarmuk river, and Jerusalem surrendered to the caliph Umar shortly afterwards. Jerusalem, al-Quds, "the Holy", became Islam's third holiest city, associated with the Prophet Muhammad's night journey. Around 685–692 the Umayyad caliph Abd al-Malik built the Dome of the Rock on the Temple Mount, the plateau Muslims call al-Haram al-Sharif, the Noble Sanctuary; the al-Aqsa Mosque stands beside it. The same platform is the holiest place in Judaism and the third holiest in Islam. Much of the conflict's emotional charge sits on those few hectares.
Over the next centuries the population gradually became Arabic-speaking and mostly Muslim, though Christian and Jewish communities remained. Under the caliphates, Jews and Christians lived as protected but subordinate dhimmi communities, paying a special tax, generally freer than Jews in much of medieval Christian Europe, but never equal.
Crusaders, Mamluks
In 1099 the armies of the First Crusade took Jerusalem after a five-week siege and massacred many of its Muslim and Jewish inhabitants. For almost two centuries a Crusader kingdom held much of the land. The Kurdish-born sultan Saladin destroyed the Crusader army at Hattin in July 1187 and retook Jerusalem the same year. The Mamluks, a dynasty of slave soldiers ruling from Cairo, stopped the Mongol advance at Ain Jalut in Galilee in 1260 and captured Acre, the last major Crusader stronghold, in 1291.
Under the Mamluks, Palestine was a provincial backwater of the Egyptian state, but Jerusalem was filled with Islamic schools, hostels and endowments that still stand in the Old City. These are the centuries in which the Arab Muslim society of Palestine, with its villages, its holy places and its scholarly families, took the shape it would keep into modern times.

Byzantines, Arabs, Crusaders, Mamluks and Ottomans all ruled this land as part of someone else's empire. For most of the last two thousand years, the people living here did not govern themselves. That changed only in the twentieth century, and two peoples tried to do it at once.

Part 3 — Ottoman Palestine and two national movements (1516–1917)
Four centuries under the sultans
The Ottoman Turks took the land from the Mamluks in 1516–17 and held it for four hundred years. Sultan Suleiman the Magnificent rebuilt the walls of Jerusalem's Old City that visitors walk today. "Palestine" was not one Ottoman province: it was divided into districts governed from Damascus, Sidon or Beirut, with Jerusalem eventually made a special district answering directly to Istanbul.
In the sixteenth century the Galilee town of Safed became a great centre of Jewish learning, home to mystics of the Kabbalah and to Joseph Karo, whose law code is still used today. Small Jewish communities lived in the four "holy cities" of Jerusalem, Hebron, Safed and Tiberias, many supported by charity from abroad.
Arab Palestinian society
Most of the population were Arab peasants, fellahin, living in hundreds of villages, growing olives, wheat and fruit. Nablus was famous for its olive-oil soap; Jaffa exported oranges to Europe. Bedouin tribes grazed the Negev. In the towns, notable families such as the Husseinis, Nashashibis and Khalidis of Jerusalem held religious offices, land and influence; they would lead Palestinian politics into the twentieth century.
The nineteenth century brought change. Ottoman reforms (the Tanzimat) and a land law of 1858 required land to be registered; many peasants registered land in the names of urban notables to avoid tax and conscription, which later allowed absentee owners to sell land out from under the villagers who worked it. Steamships and railways linked Palestine to world markets. Christian missions, schools and consulates multiplied. By 1896 Jews made up an absolute majority in Jerusalem itself, while across the whole land the population was overwhelmingly Arab: about 88 per cent Muslim and 9 per cent Christian by one late-Ottoman estimate.
A distinctly Palestinian Arab public sphere was emerging. In January 1911, two Christian Arab cousins in Jaffa, Issa and Yousef El-Issa, founded the newspaper Filastin, which became a leading voice of Palestinian identity and of opposition to Zionist land purchases.

Group
Place in late-Ottoman Palestine

Muslim Arab villagers
The large majority; lived by farming, often under heavy debt and tax

Christian Arabs
Concentrated in towns such as Jerusalem, Bethlehem, Nazareth, Jaffa; prominent in trade, education and the press

Urban notable families
Religious offices, landholding, local politics

Old Yishuv (Jewish communities)
Mostly religious Jews in the holy cities; some Sephardi families resident for centuries

New Jewish immigrants
From 1882, mostly from the Russian Empire, founding agricultural colonies

Bedouin
Pastoral tribes, especially in the Negev

Two national movements (1880s–1917)
Zionism
In 1881–82 a wave of anti-Jewish violence, the pogroms, swept the Russian Empire, followed by discriminatory laws. Millions of Jews left for America. A small number, inspired by groups such as the Lovers of Zion, went to Ottoman Palestine to farm: the First Aliyah ("ascent") began in 1882.
In 1896 a Viennese journalist, Theodor Herzl, shaken by antisemitism in supposedly enlightened Western Europe, including the Dreyfus affair in France, published Der Judenstaat, "The Jewish State". He argued that assimilation had failed and that Jews needed a state of their own. In 1897 he convened the First Zionist Congress in Basel, which declared the aim of a publicly recognised home for the Jewish people in Palestine.
Zionism was the national movement of the Jewish people: the belief that Jews were a nation, not only a religion, and needed self-determination in their historic homeland. It took many forms, socialist, liberal, religious, revisionist. Its pioneers drained swamps, founded collective farms called kibbutzim, built the new Hebrew city of Tel Aviv (1909) beside Arab Jaffa, and revived Hebrew as a spoken language, an achievement with almost no parallel.
How to describe Zionism is itself contested:

For most Israelis and most Jews, it is a liberation movement, the return of an indigenous people to its homeland after centuries of persecution, and the reason Jews survived the twentieth century at all.
For most Palestinians, it was a movement of European settlers that took land from the people already living on it, a form of settler colonialism, backed by the imperial power of the day.
Many historians argue that it was, in different ways, both: a national movement of a persecuted people that also, inevitably, came into conflict with the people already in the land.

The Arab national movement
At the same time, Arabs across the Ottoman Empire were developing their own national consciousness, in literary clubs, newspapers and secret societies. In Palestine, opposition to Zionist immigration and land purchase began early: from the 1880s and 1890s, villagers clashed with new colonies over land, and notables petitioned Istanbul to restrict Jewish immigration. A distinct Palestinian identity, tied to the land, to Jerusalem and to the Arab world, grew alongside a wider Arab nationalism.
The war and the promises
In the First World War the Ottomans joined Germany. Britain, fighting them, made promises in three directions that historians still argue over:

Promise
Date
What it said

McMahon–Hussein correspondence
1915–16
The British high commissioner in Egypt promised Sharif Hussein of Mecca support for Arab independence in return for an Arab revolt against the Ottomans; whether Palestine was included is disputed

Sykes–Picot Agreement
1916
Britain and France secretly agreed to divide the Ottoman Arab lands between them, with an international administration for much of Palestine

Balfour Declaration
2 November 1917
The British government promised to support a Jewish "national home" in Palestine

The Balfour Declaration, a letter from the foreign secretary Arthur Balfour to Lord Rothschild, is 67 words long. Its key sentence:

"His Majesty's Government view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, and will use their best endeavours to facilitate the achievement of this object, it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine, or the rights and political status enjoyed by Jews in any other country."

Zionists saw it as a charter. Palestinians note that it was issued by a foreign power about a land it did not yet control, and that it referred to the great majority of the population, then about nine in ten people, only as "existing non-Jewish communities", with civil and religious, but not political, rights. In December 1917 British forces took Jerusalem.

Part 4 — The British Mandate (1917–1947)
A mandate with two promises
In 1922 the League of Nations gave Britain a Mandate for Palestine, incorporating the Balfour Declaration. Its Article 4 recognised a "Jewish agency" to cooperate with the administration; Article 6 required Britain to facilitate Jewish immigration and encourage "close settlement by Jews on the land", while ensuring that "the rights and position of other sections of the population are not prejudiced". Transjordan, east of the river, was separated from the Jewish national home provisions and became an Arab emirate.
In 1922 Palestine had about 750,000 people, of whom Jews were about 11 per cent. By 1946, after waves of immigration, especially of Jews fleeing Nazi Germany in the 1930s, there were about 608,000 Jews out of a population of about 1.85 million, according to figures compiled for the UN. Jewish-owned land remained a small share of the total, about 7 per cent by 1947 in the estimate most often cited, but it was concentrated in the most fertile coastal plains and valleys, and Zionist land purchase, often from absentee landlords, sometimes displaced the tenant farmers who worked it.
The Jewish community, the Yishuv, built a state in all but name: elected institutions, the Jewish Agency, a labour federation (the Histadrut), schools, the Hebrew University (opened 1925) and an underground militia, the Haganah. Palestinian Arabs, led by divided notable families and refusing institutions that accepted the Mandate's terms, did not build equivalent structures; the British offered a legislative council, but Arab leaders rejected it as an arrangement that would legitimise Jewish immigration.
Violence
The Mandate was punctuated by violence, at first mostly between communities, later against the British.

Year
Event
Deaths

1920–21
Nebi Musa riots in Jerusalem; Jaffa riots
Dozens of Jews and Arabs

August 1929
Riots over the Western Wall; massacre of Jews in Hebron and Safed
133 Jews killed (67 in Hebron), 116 Arabs, most by British police

1936–1939
Arab revolt: general strike and armed uprising against British rule and Jewish immigration, crushed by the British with Jewish auxiliaries
About 5,000 Arabs, about 500 Jews and 262 British security personnel killed

1944–1947
Jewish insurgency against the British by the Irgun and Lehi, later joined for a time by the Haganah
Including 91 killed in the Irgun's bombing of the British headquarters at the King David Hotel, Jerusalem, 22 July 1946

Figures from the standard historical record as summarised in recent scholarship; Arab-revolt deaths are approximate.
The Arab revolt was the great formative event of Palestinian nationalism, and its defeat left Palestinian society disarmed and its leadership exiled or divided on the eve of 1948. Its most prominent leader, the Mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin al-Husseini, fled, and in 1941 met Hitler in Berlin, collaborating with the Nazis for the rest of the war. Israelis often cite that collaboration; Palestinians often point out that the Mufti did not speak for all Palestinians, many of whom had opposed his faction, and that Palestinian Arabs, like Palestinian Jews, also served in the British forces in the same war.
In 1937 a British commission under Lord Peel proposed for the first time to partition the land into a small Jewish state and a larger Arab state joined to Transjordan. Zionist leaders reluctantly accepted the principle; Arab leaders rejected it. Then, in May 1939, with war coming and Arab goodwill needed, Britain reversed course. Its White Paper limited Jewish immigration to "some 75,000 immigrants over the next five years", after which further immigration would require Arab consent, and set the objective of "an independent Palestine State" within ten years.
The Holocaust
The White Paper closed the doors of Palestine just as the Jews of Europe were trapped. Between 1933 and 1945 Nazi Germany and its collaborators murdered six million Jews, about two out of every three Jews in Europe, according to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Ships carrying refugees to Palestine were turned away. After the war, hundreds of thousands of survivors were in displaced persons' camps, many wanting to go to Palestine.
For Jews, the Holocaust is the final proof of Zionism's argument: that a people without a state of its own could be destroyed while the world watched. Palestinians reply that they bore no responsibility for European antisemitism, yet were asked to pay for it with their land.
The UN steps in
In 1947 an exhausted Britain handed the problem to the new United Nations. A UN Special Committee on Palestine (UNSCOP) of 11 countries visited the land; a majority of seven recommended partition, and a minority proposed a federal state. On 29 November 1947, the UN General Assembly adopted Resolution 181, the Partition Plan, by 33 votes to 13 with 10 abstentions.

Proposed Arab state
Proposed Jewish state
Jerusalem

Status
Independent
Independent
International zone (corpus separatum) under UN administration

Share of Mandate territory
about 43%
about 56% (much of it the Negev desert)
small

Population (UN estimates)
about 725,000 Arabs, 10,000 Jews
about 498,000 Jews, 407,000 Arabs
about 105,000 Arabs, 100,000 Jews

The Jewish Agency accepted the plan. Many Zionist leaders saw it as a starting point; some opposed the borders. The Arab Higher Committee and the Arab states rejected it, arguing that the UN had no right to divide a country against the will of its majority, and that it gave more than half the land to a third of the population, who then owned about 7 per cent of it. Each side still cites the other's response in 1947 as proof of who was to blame for what followed.

Part 5 — 1948: Independence and Nakba (1947–1949)
The civil war
Fighting began the day after the vote. From December 1947 to May 1948, Jewish and Palestinian Arab militias fought a civil war, with bombings of markets and buses on both sides, ambushes on the roads, and a siege of Jewish Jerusalem. In April 1948 the Haganah went on the offensive under a strategic plan known as Plan Dalet. On 9 April, fighters of the Irgun and Lehi killed about a hundred or more villagers, including women and children, at Deir Yassin near Jerusalem (estimates range from about 93 to 140); the Jewish Agency condemned the killings. Four days later, Arab fighters ambushed a Jewish medical convoy to the Hadassah hospital on Mount Scopus, killing 79 Jews, among them doctors and nurses, and a British soldier. Arab towns, among them Haifa and Jaffa, fell, and their populations fled or were expelled.
On 14 May 1948, as the British left, David Ben-Gurion read the Declaration of the Establishment of the State of Israel in Tel Aviv. It promised that the state would "ensure complete equality of social and political rights to all its inhabitants irrespective of religion, race or sex". The next day, the armies of Egypt, Transjordan, Syria and Iraq, with contingents from Lebanon and elsewhere, entered the former Mandate.
The war
The new Israeli army held, then pushed forward. By the armistice agreements of 1949, Israel controlled about 78 per cent of Mandate Palestine, considerably more than the partition plan had allotted. Transjordan held the West Bank and East Jerusalem, including the Old City, and annexed them in April 1950; in 1949 Transjordan had renamed itself the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan. Egypt held the Gaza Strip. No Palestinian Arab state was created.

1948 war deaths
Estimate

Israelis
6,373 (about 4,000 fighters and 2,400 civilians), about 1% of the Jewish population

Arab armies
about 3,700–7,000

Palestinian Arabs
estimates range from about 3,000 to 13,000

The refugees
During the war, more than 700,000 Palestinian Arabs, about half the Arab population of Mandate Palestine, fled or were expelled from the territory that became Israel. A UN estimate of the time put the number of refugees at about 726,000; the UN agency created for them, UNRWA, counted about 750,000 when it began work in 1950. Between about 400 and 600 Palestinian villages were depopulated and most were later destroyed. In July 1948, during the capture of the towns of Lydda and Ramle, Israeli forces expelled some 50,000 to 70,000 inhabitants. About 156,000 Arabs remained inside Israel and became its citizens.
On 11 December 1948 the UN General Assembly passed Resolution 194, which resolved "that the refugees wishing to return to their homes and live at peace with their neighbours should be permitted to do so at the earliest practicable date", with compensation for those choosing not to return. Israel did not allow the refugees to return, arguing that they would be a hostile population inside a state just attacked by its neighbours, and that the refugee problem had been caused by a war the Arab side had begun. Palestinians regard the right of return as a fundamental right that has never lapsed. In 1949 the UN created UNRWA (Resolution 302) to provide relief. Its definition covers Palestinians whose normal residence was Palestine between 1 June 1946 and 15 May 1948 and who lost home and livelihood in the conflict, and their descendants: about 5.9 million people today are eligible for its services.
The historians' argument
Why did the refugees leave? For decades the two sides told incompatible stories. The traditional Israeli account held that they left mainly at the urging of Arab leaders, expecting to return after an Arab victory. The Palestinian account, documented by historians such as Walid Khalidi (whose All That Remains, 1992, catalogues the destroyed villages), held that they were driven out under a deliberate plan.
From the late 1980s, Israeli "new historians" working in newly opened Israeli archives transformed the debate. Benny Morris found no evidence of a general Arab order to flee, and much evidence of expulsions, massacres and fear; but he concluded that the refugee problem was "born of war, not by design", the product of a war rather than a master plan. Others went further: Ilan Pappé argued that Plan Dalet amounted to a plan of ethnic cleansing. Palestinian historians such as Nur Masalha and Rashid Khalidi stressed the long Zionist discussion of "transfer" of Arabs before 1948. Israeli historians such as Efraim Karsh and Yoav Gelber criticised the new historians and emphasised Arab leaders' role, Arab violence and Palestinian society's collapse. Morris himself later said, in a 2004 interview with Haaretz, that if Ben-Gurion had carried out "a full expulsion, rather than a partial one, he would have stabilized the State of Israel for generations", a view many of his former allies found shocking.

Israelis call it the War of Independence: a war of survival, fought by a people three years after the Holocaust, against neighbouring armies that rejected the UN plan. Palestinians call it the Nakba: the catastrophe in which they lost their homeland. This history uses both names, because both describe something that happened.

Part 6 — The new state, 1967 and the occupation (1949–1987)
Ingathering
Israel's population grew at extraordinary speed in its first years. Holocaust survivors came from Europe. And from 1948 onward, the ancient Jewish communities of the Arab world and Iran came too. About 900,000 Jews left, fled or were expelled from Muslim-majority countries over the twentieth century, amid hostility, legal discrimination and in some places violence that sharpened after 1948; about 650,000 of them resettled in Israel. These Mizrahi ("Eastern") and Sephardi Jews and their descendants are today a large part of the Israeli Jewish population. Many Israelis see their story as the other refugee story of 1948, rarely told abroad.
The Law of Return (1950) gave every Jew the right to immigrate and become a citizen. New immigrants were housed in tented transit camps; many Mizrahi Jews were sent to remote development towns and felt looked down on by the European-born Labour elite, a grievance that would reshape Israeli politics.
The young state was built on a pioneering, secular, social-democratic ideal: kibbutzim, a national water carrier, universal conscription, Hebrew as the common language of immigrants from a hundred countries. In 1961 the trial in Jerusalem of the Nazi organiser Adolf Eichmann made the Holocaust central to Israeli identity.
Arab citizens under military rule
The roughly 156,000 Arabs who remained became citizens with the vote, and Arab members sat in the Knesset from the first parliament. But until 1966 most lived under military rule, needing permits to travel, while much of their land was expropriated under laws that treated refugees and internally displaced people as "absentees". On 29 October 1956, the first day of the Suez war, Israeli Border Police killed 48 Arab citizens of the village of Kafr Qasim returning from work, unaware of a curfew imposed that day; the border policemen involved were tried and sentenced to prison terms, and the massacre remains a defining memory for Arab citizens.
The refugees and the rise of the fedayeen
The Palestinian refugees lived in camps in the West Bank, Gaza, Jordan, Lebanon and Syria, many in tents and later in concrete blocks. Jordan gave them citizenship; Lebanon and Syria did not. From the camps, armed infiltrators, fedayeen, crossed into Israel; Israel replied with reprisal raids.
In 1956 Israel joined Britain and France in attacking Egypt after President Gamal Abdel Nasser nationalised the Suez Canal. Israel captured Sinai and Gaza but withdrew under American and Soviet pressure. In 1964 the Arab League created the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO). Meanwhile Yasser Arafat and others had founded Fatah, which insisted that Palestinians must liberate themselves rather than wait for Arab states.
1967, 1973 and the occupation (1967–1987)
The Six-Day War
In May 1967 Nasser expelled UN peacekeepers from Sinai, closed the Straits of Tiran to Israeli shipping and massed troops; Arab leaders spoke of destroying Israel. Israelis feared a second Holocaust. On 5 June 1967 Israel struck first, destroying Egypt's air force on the ground. In six days it took the Sinai and Gaza Strip from Egypt, the West Bank and East Jerusalem from Jordan, and the Golan Heights from Syria.

Six-Day War
Losses

Israel
about 776–983 killed

Egypt
about 9,800–15,000 killed or missing

Jordan
about 700 killed

Syria
about 1,000–2,500 killed

Civilians displaced
about 280,000–325,000 Palestinians from the West Bank, and about 100,000 Syrians from the Golan

For Israelis it was a miraculous deliverance; soldiers wept at the Western Wall, which Jews had not been allowed to visit since 1948. For Palestinians it was the Naksa, "the setback", and the beginning of an occupation that would shape every Palestinian life for the next six decades.
At Khartoum in September 1967, Arab leaders declared "no peace with Israel, no recognition of Israel, no negotiations with it". In November the UN Security Council passed Resolution 242, still the foundation of every peace plan. It called for "withdrawal of Israeli armed forces from territories occupied in the recent conflict" and for the "acknowledgement of the sovereignty, territorial integrity and political independence of every State in the area and their right to live in peace within secure and recognized boundaries", and for "a just settlement of the refugee problem". The English text says "territories", not "the territories", and Israel and the Arab states have argued ever since over whether it requires withdrawal from all of them.
Black September, Munich, Yom Kippur
After 1967 the PLO, now led by Arafat, became the voice of Palestinian nationalism. Its factions carried out hijackings and attacks. In September 1970, Jordan's army turned on the PLO in a war Palestinians call Black September; by July 1971 the last fighters had been driven out of the kingdom, and the PLO moved to Lebanon. At the 1972 Munich Olympics, gunmen from a group named after it killed eleven Israeli athletes and coaches.
On 6 October 1973, the holiest day of the Jewish year, Yom Kippur, Egypt and Syria attacked in a coordinated surprise. Israel recovered and counter-attacked, but lost between about 2,500 and 2,800 soldiers. The shock of being caught unprepared brought down Prime Minister Golda Meir and, eventually, the Labour party's long dominance. In 1977 Menachem Begin's Likud won power, carried by many Mizrahi voters.
Peace with Egypt
In November 1977 Egypt's president Anwar Sadat flew to Jerusalem and addressed the Knesset. The Camp David Accords of 1978, brokered by US President Jimmy Carter, led to the Egypt–Israel peace treaty, signed in Washington on 26 March 1979. Israel returned all of Sinai by 1982. Sadat was assassinated by Islamist officers in 1981; the peace held, cold but unbroken, through every war since.
Settlements and annexation
After 1967 Israel began building settlements in the occupied territories: first mainly for security in the Jordan Valley, then, especially after 1977, across the West Bank, driven by a religious-nationalist movement, Gush Emunim, which saw settling the biblical heartland as a religious duty, and by governments offering cheap housing. In 1980 the Knesset passed the Jerusalem Law declaring "Jerusalem, complete and united" the capital of Israel; the UN Security Council declared it null and void in Resolution 478. In December 1981 Israel applied its law to the Golan Heights, which most of the world regards as annexation.
The legal status of the settlements is one of the sharpest disputes in the conflict. The Fourth Geneva Convention bars an occupying power from transferring its own civilian population into occupied territory; the UN Security Council, the International Court of Justice and most governments regard the settlements as illegal on that basis. Israel argues that the West Bank was not the sovereign territory of any state when it was captured (Jordan's annexation was recognised by almost no one), that it is "disputed" rather than "occupied" territory, and that Jews have a historic right to live there.
Lebanon
In June 1982 Israel invaded Lebanon to destroy the PLO, which had been firing on northern Israel. Israeli forces besieged Beirut; the PLO leadership was evacuated to Tunis. In September, Lebanese Christian militiamen allied to Israel entered the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps and massacred between about 1,300 and 3,500 or more Palestinians and Lebanese Shi'a, by differing estimates. An Israeli commission of inquiry, the Kahan Commission, found that Israel bore indirect responsibility and that Defence Minister Ariel Sharon should resign, which he did. The occupation of southern Lebanon helped give birth to Hezbollah, a Shi'a militia backed by Iran, founded in 1982.

Part 7 — Intifadas, Oslo and the Gaza stalemate (1987–2023)
The first intifada
On 9 December 1987, the day after an Israeli truck collided with cars in Gaza, killing four Palestinians, protests erupted and spread across the territories. The intifada, "shaking off", was a popular uprising: stone-throwing youths, strikes, boycotts and local committees, along with some armed attacks. Israel, with Yitzhak Rabin as defence minister, responded with mass arrests, curfews, deportations and beatings. By its end in 1993, about 1,962 Palestinians had been killed, including several hundred killed by other Palestinians as suspected collaborators, and about 179 to 200 Israelis.
The intifada had lasting consequences. In 1987, a new Islamist movement, Hamas (the Islamic Resistance Movement), emerged from the Muslim Brotherhood in Gaza. Its 1988 charter sought a state in all of former Mandatory Palestine and was widely described as antisemitic; a new charter in 2017 removed the antisemitic language, declared Zionists rather than Jews the target of its struggle, and signalled acceptance of a Palestinian state on the 1967 lines, without recognising Israel. Meanwhile, on 15 November 1988 in Algiers, the PLO proclaimed a State of Palestine, in a declaration written by the poet Mahmoud Darwish.
Oslo
Secret talks in Norway produced the Oslo Accords. On 13 September 1993, on the White House lawn, Rabin, now prime minister, and Arafat shook hands. The PLO recognised Israel's right to exist; Israel recognised the PLO as the representative of the Palestinian people. A Palestinian Authority (PA) took over Gaza and Jericho in 1994 and later the main West Bank cities. The hardest issues, borders, Jerusalem, refugees, settlements and security, were postponed to "final status" talks within five years. The West Bank was divided into Areas A (Palestinian civil and security control), B (Palestinian civil control, Israeli security control) and C (full Israeli control, about 60 per cent of the West Bank). In October 1994 Jordan signed a peace treaty with Israel.
Oslo was attacked from both sides. On 25 February 1994, an Israeli settler, Baruch Goldstein, shot dead 29 Palestinian worshippers at the Cave of the Patriarchs in Hebron. Hamas and Islamic Jihad began suicide bombings of Israeli buses and cafés. On 4 November 1995, after a peace rally in Tel Aviv, Rabin was assassinated by Yigal Amir, a Jewish extremist opposed to giving up land. Settlement building continued throughout the Oslo years.
Camp David and the second intifada
In July 2000 US President Bill Clinton brought Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak and Arafat to Camp David. The summit failed. Israelis, and the American negotiators, largely blamed Arafat for rejecting what they saw as the most generous offer any Israeli leader had made. Palestinians and many analysts replied that the offer fell short of a viable, contiguous state with East Jerusalem as its capital and did not address the refugees.
On 28 September 2000, Sharon, then opposition leader, visited the Temple Mount/Haram al-Sharif escorted by more than a thousand police. Protests the next day were met with lethal fire, and the second intifada (the al-Aqsa intifada) began. It was far deadlier than the first: Palestinian suicide bombings inside Israel and Israeli military reoccupation of West Bank cities. By its end in early 2005, about 1,000 Israelis and between about 3,200 and 3,350 Palestinians had been killed.
The second intifada broke the Israeli peace camp. Most Israelis concluded that Palestinians did not want peace; most Palestinians concluded that Israel did not want a Palestinian state. Israel built a separation barrier, part fence and part wall, which it credits with stopping suicide bombings. Much of its route runs inside the West Bank, and on 9 July 2004 the International Court of Justice, in an advisory opinion, found that its construction in the occupied territory and "its associated régime are contrary to international law". Israel rejected the opinion. Arafat died in November 2004 and was succeeded by Mahmoud Abbas.

Uprising
Dates
Palestinians killed
Israelis killed

First intifada
Dec 1987 – Sept 1993
about 1,962 (including several hundred killed by Palestinians)
about 179–200

Second intifada
Sept 2000 – Feb 2005
about 3,200–3,350
about 1,000

Gaza, Hamas and the long stalemate (2005–2023)
Disengagement and the Hamas takeover
In August and September 2005, Prime Minister Sharon, the patron of the settlement movement, withdrew all 21 Israeli settlements and more than 8,000 settlers from Gaza, along with four small settlements in the northern West Bank. Many Israelis remember it as a painful sacrifice for peace that was answered with rockets. Palestinians and the UN note that Israel kept control of Gaza's airspace, sea and most of its borders, which is why the UN continued to regard Gaza as occupied.
In January 2006 Hamas won Palestinian legislative elections, taking 74 of 132 seats. Israel, the US and the EU refused to deal with a Hamas government unless it recognised Israel, renounced violence and accepted past agreements. In June 2006 Hamas fighters captured an Israeli soldier, Gilad Shalit, who was held for five years. In June 2007, after fighting between Hamas and Fatah, Hamas seized control of Gaza; Abbas dismissed the Hamas-led government and the Palestinian territories split in two, Fatah ruling parts of the West Bank, Hamas ruling Gaza. No national Palestinian election has been held since.
Israel and Egypt imposed a blockade on Gaza, restricting movement of people and goods. Israel said it was necessary to stop weapons reaching Hamas; the UN and humanitarian groups called it collective punishment of two million people. Gaza became one of the most densely populated places on earth, with high unemployment and repeated wars:

War
Dates
Deaths

Gaza war (Operation Cast Lead)
Dec 2008 – Jan 2009
about 1,166–1,417 Palestinians; 13 Israelis

Gaza war (Operation Protective Edge)
July–August 2014
about 2,100–2,300 Palestinians, by Israeli, UN and Gaza figures; 67 Israeli soldiers and 6 civilians in Israel

Operation Guardian of the Walls
May 2021
at least 256 Palestinians; at least 13 people in Israel

Figures as summarised from UN and Israeli sources in the historical record; Palestinian figures from the Gaza Health Ministry and the UN.
Israel transformed
Inside its own borders, Israel became wealthier and more powerful. A high-tech boom earned it the nickname "Start-up Nation"; by 2025 its income per person, about $60,000 by World Bank figures, was among the highest in the world. Its population passed 10 million: at the end of 2025, according to Israel's Central Bureau of Statistics, 10.18 million people, of whom 76.3 per cent were Jews and "others" (the bureau's category for non-Arab Christians and people with no recorded religion), 21.1 per cent Arabs and 2.6 per cent foreign nationals. Its politics moved right. Benjamin Netanyahu, first elected in 1996 and prime minister again from 2009 to 2021, became the longest-serving leader in its history, arguing that the conflict could be managed while Israel made peace with Arab states over the Palestinians' heads.
That bet seemed to pay off. In 2018 the United States moved its embassy to Jerusalem. In 2020 the Abraham Accords normalised relations between Israel and the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain, followed by Morocco and Sudan. Talks on Saudi recognition were reported to be advanced in 2023.
But other trends ran the other way. In 2018 the Knesset passed the Nation-State Law, by 62 votes to 55, declaring that the right to national self-determination in Israel is "unique to the Jewish people" and downgrading Arabic from an official language; Arab and Druze citizens protested that it made them second-class. In June 2021 the Islamist Arab party Ra'am became the first independent Arab party ever to join a governing coalition (small Arab lists allied to Labour's forerunner, Mapai, had sat in coalitions until 1977). The settler population kept growing: by the mid-2020s more than 500,000 Israelis lived in West Bank settlements outside East Jerusalem, and about 246,000 in East Jerusalem, in a West Bank of more than three million people, 85 per cent of them Palestinian (Peace Now, from Israeli and Palestinian statistics, end of 2023). After a year in opposition, Netanyahu returned to power in 2022 with far-right partners, and in 2023 his government's plan to curb the Supreme Court's powers brought hundreds of thousands of Israelis into the streets in some of the largest protests in the country's history.
Human rights organisations, including the Israeli group B'Tselem in 2021 and Amnesty International in 2022, began describing Israel's rule over Palestinians as a system of apartheid. The Israeli government and many of its supporters rejected the term as false and defamatory, pointing out that Arab citizens of Israel vote, sit in parliament and serve as judges, and that the West Bank's status is a consequence of an unresolved conflict, not racial ideology.

Part 8 — 7 October and the Gaza war (2023–2026)
7 October 2023
Early on the morning of 7 October 2023, a Jewish holiday, thousands of Hamas-led fighters broke through the fence around Gaza under cover of thousands of rockets. They attacked army posts, border towns and kibbutzim, and the Nova music festival. About 1,200 people were killed in Israel, the large majority of them civilians: by a tally based on Israeli official figures, 1,195 people, including at least 828 civilians, among them 36 children and 71 foreign nationals, and 364 people at the festival. 251 people were taken into Gaza as hostages, from babies to people in their eighties. Survivors and investigators documented killings of families in their homes and burnings, and a UN team led by Pramila Patten reported on 4 March 2024 "reasonable grounds to believe" that conflict-related sexual violence had occurred.
Many, including then-US President Joe Biden, called it the deadliest day for Jews since the Holocaust. In October 2026, on the third anniversary, UN Secretary-General António Guterres called it an "abhorrent, large-scale terror attack" and said: "Nothing can justify these atrocities." Hamas described the attack as a response to the occupation, the blockade and threats to al-Aqsa; Israel, the US, the EU, the UK and many other governments designate Hamas a terrorist organisation.
The war in Gaza
Israel declared war, with the stated aims of destroying Hamas's military and governing capacity and bringing the hostages home. Its bombing and ground offensive over the next two years devastated Gaza.

Measure
Figure
Source and date

Palestinians killed in Gaza
more than 70,000, including about 20,000 children
UN agencies, cited by UN News, 5 October 2026

Wounded
more than 100,000
Same

Displaced
nearly all of Gaza's 2.1 million people
Same

Killed since the October 2025 ceasefire
1,559 (as of 26 October 2026)
Gaza Ministry of Health, as reported by UN OCHA, 29 October 2026

Israeli soldiers killed in the Gaza ground operation
260 by April 2024 alone; several hundred over the war
Israeli military figures, as reported

How to read the Gaza figures. The death toll in Gaza comes from the Gaza Ministry of Health, which operates under the Hamas-run authorities. UN agencies use its figures, which they attribute to it and describe as reported by the ministry; the BBC notes they are "considered reliable by the UN". Israel says the ministry is a Hamas instrument whose figures do not distinguish combatants from civilians, and it has claimed to have killed many thousands of fighters. Independent researchers, including studies in The Lancet, have concluded that the ministry's counts of the identified dead are broadly accurate and that the true toll is likely higher, because thousands remain under rubble. In March 2026 the ministry published a list of more than 72,000 named dead. All these figures remain disputed in their details, especially the share of combatants.
In August 2025 the UN-backed Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC) declared famine in Gaza Governorate. Israel disputed the finding and blamed Hamas for diverting aid.
International courts and findings

Date
Body
What it did or found

29 December 2023
International Court of Justice
South Africa files a case accusing Israel of violating the Genocide Convention in Gaza

26 January 2024
ICJ (order)
Found "at least some of the rights claimed by South Africa" under the Convention "are plausible" and ordered Israel to prevent genocidal acts and allow aid. The court's then president, Joan Donoghue, later explained this was not a finding that genocide was plausibly occurring

24 May 2024
ICJ (order)
Ordered Israel to "immediately halt its military offensive, and any other action in the Rafah Governorate, which may inflict on the Palestinian group in Gaza conditions of life that could bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part". Israel read the order as conditional and continued operations

19 July 2024
ICJ (advisory opinion, 11 votes to 4)
Found Israel's continued presence in the Occupied Palestinian Territory unlawful; Israel must end it "as rapidly as possible", cease new settlement activity, evacuate settlers and make reparation. Netanyahu called it "a decision of lies", saying "the Jewish people are not occupiers in their own land"

21 November 2024
International Criminal Court
Issued arrest warrants for Prime Minister Netanyahu and former Defence Minister Yoav Gallant (alleged war crimes including starvation as a method of warfare, and crimes against humanity) and for Hamas military commander Mohammed Deif. Israel rejected the court's jurisdiction and the charges

16 September 2025
UN Commission of Inquiry
Concluded that Israel had committed genocide in Gaza. Israel "categorically rejected" the report as "distorted and false"

12 March 2026
ICJ
Israel files its counter-memorial, rejecting the genocide accusation

21 May 2026
ICJ (order)
Set further deadlines: South Africa's reply by 22 November 2027, Israel's rejoinder by 22 May 2029. A final judgment is years away

Israel's position is that its war was one of self-defence against an enemy that deliberately embedded itself among civilians, that it warned and evacuated civilians on a scale unmatched by other armies, and that accusations of genocide invert the meaning of a word coined to describe the murder of Jews. Palestinians and many international lawyers and human rights groups argue that the scale of killing, the destruction of homes, hospitals and food systems, and statements by Israeli officials show intent to destroy Palestinians in Gaza as a group. The genocide question is before the ICJ and has not been decided.
Ceasefires, hostages, and the plan
A first ceasefire in January 2025 collapsed in March. On 29 September 2025 US President Donald Trump announced a 20-point plan, and its first phase took effect on 10 October 2025. On 13 October the last 20 living hostages were released, in exchange for about 1,968 Palestinian prisoners and detainees. In November 2025 the UN Security Council, in Resolution 2803, endorsed the plan, including a US-chaired Board of Peace to oversee Gaza's transitional administration and an International Stabilization Force. The remains of the last hostage held in Gaza, Ran Gvili, were recovered in January 2026.
The second phase, the disarmament of Hamas, Israeli withdrawal and reconstruction, has stalled. In July 2026 Hamas announced the resignation of its civilian administration, and Trump announced an agreement for Hamas's "complete disarmament"; Hamas said it agreed, but tied the handover of heavy weapons to an Israeli withdrawal. Israel rejected the Board of Peace's disarmament roadmap and said its troops would not pull back without "genuine" disarmament (BBC, July–August 2026). As of late October 2026, Israeli forces held a large part of Gaza behind a demarcation known as the "yellow line"; the UN human rights office reported that Israel had said it aimed to extend its military deployment to 70 per cent of the territory. More than 1,400 Palestinians had been killed since the ceasefire, by Gaza ministry figures cited at the UN Security Council on 15 October 2026, and the UN said around two-thirds of Gaza's two million people were living in tents or makeshift shelters (August 2026).
The West Bank, Lebanon and Iran
The West Bank saw its worst violence in decades. Between January 2025 and September 2026, according to UN OCHA, 331 Palestinians, including 77 children, were killed, more than 42,000 people were displaced, 21 Israelis were killed, and 3,684 attacks by settlers were recorded. In late October 2026, after two Israeli soldiers were killed in a shooting in Hebron, an Israeli military operation in the city led the UN human rights chief, Volker Türk, to warn of ethnic cleansing, as more than 3,000 people were evacuated from their homes by Israeli forces.
The war also spread. Israel fought Hezbollah in Lebanon in 2024, killing its leader Hassan Nasrallah; it struck Iran directly in 2024 and in the Twelve-Day War of June 2025; and from 28 February 2026, with the United States, it fought a much larger war against Iran (see this series' A Brief History of Iran), in which Iranian missiles hit Israeli cities and the Lebanese front reopened. In September 2025, the UK, France, Canada, Australia and other states recognised the State of Palestine; by then 157 of the 193 UN member states had done so.
The election of October 2026
On 27 October 2026 Israelis voted in the first general election since the war began, called after the Knesset dissolved in July. Turnout was 77.7 per cent, the highest in more than twenty years. Partial results reported by the BBC the next day put Netanyahu's Likud-led bloc on about 53 of the Knesset's 120 seats, a bloc of Jewish opposition parties led by the former army chief Gadi Eisenkot's Yashar party on about 48, and Arab-led parties on an unprecedented 19, leaving no bloc with a majority. Likud figures claimed the election had been "stolen by Arab parties"; the Central Elections Committee rejected claims of fraud. As of 31 October 2026, final results were due the following week, and coalition talks had not begun.

Three years after 7 October, Israel is a country still grieving and divided, Gaza is a wasteland where two million people live in tents, and the West Bank is more violent than at any time in decades. No one, on either side, has a plan that the other side accepts.

Part 9 — How to understand Israel and Palestine today
Many peoples, many stories
There is no single Israeli story or single Palestinian story. Here are the main ones, as their own adherents would tell them.
Israeli Jews. We are an ancient people who never forgot our land. After two thousand years of exile, persecution and finally genocide, we came home, bought land, drained swamps, revived our language and built a democracy. We accepted the UN's partition plan in 1947; the Arab states rejected it and invaded. Half of us descend from Jews driven out of Arab countries and Iran. We have offered to share the land repeatedly, in 1937, 1947, 2000 and 2008, and have been answered with war and terror; when we left Gaza in 2005 we got rockets, and on 7 October we got a massacre. We want peace, but we cannot risk our survival on the promises of people who celebrate our deaths. Israeli Jews themselves are deeply divided: secular and religious, left and right, settlers and those who would give up the settlements, and they argued fiercely over judicial reform, the war's conduct and the hostages.
Palestinian citizens of Israel. About one in five Israeli citizens is Arab, Muslim, Christian or Druze. Our families stayed in 1948 while our relatives became refugees; we lived under military rule until 1966 and lost much of our land. We vote, we are doctors and judges and members of the Knesset, but we live with discrimination in land, housing and budgets, and the Nation-State Law told us this country belongs to someone else. We are Palestinian by identity and Israeli by citizenship, and we are often distrusted by both. In the 2026 election, we voted in record numbers.
Palestinians in the West Bank and East Jerusalem. We have lived under military occupation since 1967, longer than most of us have been alive. Our lives are governed by permits, checkpoints, a separation barrier and settlements that grow on our land, while the Palestinian Authority, which many of us see as weak and corrupt, administers our cities without sovereignty. Settler violence has become a daily fear. We were promised a state at Oslo; instead the settlements kept growing. Many of us have lost faith in negotiations, in our own leadership, and in the world's promises.
Palestinians in Gaza. Most of us are refugees or descendants of refugees from 1948. We lived under blockade from 2007, then through war after war, ruled by a Hamas government many of us did not choose or no longer support. Since October 2023 we have lost tens of thousands of family members, our homes, our schools, our hospitals and our universities. We want to live, to rebuild, and not to be driven out again.
The Palestinian diaspora and refugees. About 8 million Palestinians live outside historic Palestine, about 6.8 million of them in Arab countries, according to the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics (end of 2025). For many, the right of return to the homes their grandparents left in 1948 is the heart of the cause: a matter of justice that no agreement can sign away. Others, especially younger diaspora Palestinians, increasingly frame the struggle as one for equal rights in one land.
Supporters abroad. Supporters of Israel, Jewish and non-Jewish, see a small democracy and refuge for a persecuted people, defending itself against enemies who reject its existence, and judged by standards applied to no other country; many see much criticism of Israel as tipping into antisemitism, which rose sharply worldwide after 7 October. Supporters of the Palestinians see a people dispossessed, occupied and besieged, whose suffering is ignored or excused by powerful governments; many describe Israel's rule as colonial or as apartheid, and see accusations of antisemitism used to silence them, while Islamophobia and anti-Palestinian racism go unremarked. Many people, including many Jews and Palestinians, hold parts of both views.
Ideas that unlock the conflict
1. Two peoples, one land, and both are indigenous to their own story. The deepest source of the conflict is not a misunderstanding. Two national movements claim the same land, each with real historical and emotional ties to it. Any honest account begins there.
2. 1948 is the core. The 1967 occupation dominates the news, but for Palestinians the wound is 1948, the loss of the homeland and the refugee question; for Israelis, the core is the Arab world's refusal in 1948 to accept a Jewish state at all. Every negotiation that has tried to solve 1967 without touching 1948 has failed.
3. Security and fear shape everything. Israelis remember the Holocaust, the wars of 1948, 1967 and 1973, the suicide bombings and 7 October; Palestinians remember the Nakba, Deir Yassin, Sabra and Shatila, the occupation and Gaza. Each side's fear of the other is grounded in real events, and each side's actions confirm the other's fears.
4. The two-state solution is official policy almost everywhere, and has rarely looked further away. A Palestinian state alongside Israel, roughly on the 1967 lines, has been the basis of international diplomacy since the 1990s. Settlement growth, Palestinian division, the collapse of trust after the second intifada and 7 October, and the destruction of Gaza have led many on both sides to doubt it, while the alternatives, one state for both peoples or permanent control, satisfy neither.
5. International law and power pull in different directions. The UN, the ICJ and most governments regard the occupation and settlements as unlawful and have recognised Palestine; the United States, Israel's main ally, has repeatedly shielded it. Much of the diplomacy of 2026 is about which matters more.
Key dates

Date
Event

c. 1208 BCE
Merneptah Stele: first mention of "Israel"

9th century BCE
Tel Dan inscription mentions the "House of David"

722–720 BCE
Assyria destroys the northern kingdom of Israel

587/586 BCE
Babylon destroys Jerusalem and the First Temple

70 CE
Rome destroys the Second Temple

132–135/136
Bar Kokhba revolt; province renamed Syria Palaestina

636–638
Arab conquest; Jerusalem surrenders to the caliph Umar

c. 685–692
Dome of the Rock built

1099
Crusaders take Jerusalem

1187
Saladin retakes Jerusalem

1516–17
Ottoman conquest

1882
First Aliyah

1897
First Zionist Congress, Basel

1911
Filastin newspaper founded in Jaffa

2 November 1917
Balfour Declaration

1922
League of Nations Mandate for Palestine

1929
Riots; Hebron massacre

1936–1939
Arab revolt

1939
British White Paper

1933–1945
The Holocaust: six million Jews murdered

29 November 1947
UN Partition Plan (Resolution 181)

14 May 1948
Israel declares independence

1948–1949
War of Independence / Nakba; armistice lines

11 December 1948
UN Resolution 194 on refugees

1950
Law of Return

29 October 1956
Kafr Qasim massacre; Suez war begins

1964
PLO founded

5–10 June 1967
Six-Day War; occupation of West Bank, Gaza, East Jerusalem, Golan, Sinai

November 1967
UN Security Council Resolution 242

6 October 1973
Yom Kippur War

26 March 1979
Egypt–Israel peace treaty

1982
Lebanon war; Sabra and Shatila

9 December 1987
First intifada begins; Hamas founded days later

13 September 1993
Oslo Accords signed

26 October 1994
Israel–Jordan peace treaty

4 November 1995
Rabin assassinated

July 2000
Camp David summit fails

28 September 2000
Second intifada begins

9 July 2004
ICJ advisory opinion on the barrier

2005
Israel withdraws from Gaza

June 2007
Hamas takes control of Gaza; blockade

2018
Nation-State Law; US embassy moves to Jerusalem

2020
Abraham Accords

7 October 2023
Hamas-led attack on Israel; Gaza war begins

19 July 2024
ICJ advisory opinion on the occupation

21 November 2024
ICC arrest warrants

10 October 2025
Gaza ceasefire takes effect

17 November 2025
UN Security Council Resolution 2803

28 February 2026
US–Israeli war on Iran begins

27 October 2026
Israeli general election

Who's who

Person
Lived
Why they matter

Theodor Herzl
1860–1904
Founder of political Zionism

Chaim Weizmann
1874–1952
Zionist diplomat behind the Balfour Declaration; Israel's first president

Haj Amin al-Husseini
c. 1897–1974
Mufti of Jerusalem; leader of Palestinian nationalism under the Mandate

David Ben-Gurion
1886–1973
Declared Israel's independence; first prime minister

Golda Meir
1898–1978
Prime minister during the 1973 war

Gamal Abdel Nasser
1918–1970
Egyptian leader; champion of Arab nationalism

Menachem Begin
1913–1992
Irgun commander, later Likud prime minister who made peace with Egypt

Anwar Sadat
1918–1981
Egyptian president who went to Jerusalem; assassinated

Yasser Arafat
1929–2004
Leader of Fatah and the PLO; signed the Oslo Accords

Yitzhak Rabin
1922–1995
General of 1967, prime minister of Oslo; assassinated

Ariel Sharon
1928–2014
General and prime minister; settlement patron who left Gaza

Mahmoud Abbas
b. 1935
President of the Palestinian Authority since 2005

Benjamin Netanyahu
b. 1949
Israel's longest-serving prime minister

Yahya Sinwar
1962–2024
Hamas leader in Gaza; architect of 7 October; killed by Israeli forces in October 2024

Gadi Eisenkot
b. 1960
Former army chief; opposition leader in the 2026 election

Benny Morris
b. 1948
Israeli historian of 1948

Walid Khalidi and Rashid Khalidi
1925–2026; b. 1948
Palestinian historians of the Nakba and Palestinian identity

Mahmoud Darwish
1941–2008
Palestinian national poet; wrote the 1988 Declaration of Independence

The takeaway
The land between the river and the sea has been home to Israelites and Judeans, Romans and Byzantines, Arab Muslims and Christians, Crusaders and Ottomans, and for the last century to two modern national movements, Zionism and Palestinian nationalism, which each claim it as a homeland. The war of 1948 created Israel and a Palestinian refugee people at the same moment; the war of 1967 put millions of Palestinians under an occupation that still continues; and the attack of 7 October 2023 and the Gaza war that followed produced the worst suffering on both sides in generations. In 2026, with Gaza in ruins, the West Bank in turmoil, the ICJ still weighing genocide allegations and Israel choosing a new parliament, the conflict's oldest question, how two peoples can live in one small land, remains unanswered.
Try this: read two short first-person accounts of 1948, one by an Israeli who fought in the War of Independence or arrived as a refugee, and one by a Palestinian who left a village that year. Note the places that appear in both, the events each leaves out, and the words each uses for the same people. Then do the same for 7 October 2023. You will not need anyone to tell you why the conflict is so hard to end.

Sources & Further Reading
Sources
- The Avalon Project (Yale Law School): texts of the Balfour Declaration (1917), the Mandate for Palestine (1922), the British White Paper of 1939, the Declaration of the Establishment of the State of Israel (1948), and UN Security Council Resolution 242 (1967).
- United Nations: General Assembly Resolutions 181 (1947), 194 (1948) and 302 (1949); Security Council Resolutions 242, 478 and 2803; UN Division for Palestinian Rights, The Origins and Evolution of the Palestine Problem (a study produced for a UN committee mandated to support Palestinian rights; used here for Mandate-era population and land figures and the 1947 vote).
- UNRWA, "Palestine Refugees" definition and figures (archived copy, May 2026).
- International Court of Justice, case pages: Legal Consequences of the Construction of a Wall (Advisory Opinion, 9 July 2004); Application of the Genocide Convention in the Gaza Strip (South Africa v. Israel), orders of 26 January, 28 March and 24 May 2024 and procedural orders of 2025–26; Legal Consequences arising from the Policies and Practices of Israel in the Occupied Palestinian Territory (Advisory Opinion, 19 July 2024).
- International Criminal Court, Situation in the State of Palestine, warrants of 21 November 2024 (archived press release).
- UN News and UN OCHA, 2025–26: Guterres anniversary message (5 October 2026); Security Council briefing (15 October 2026); West Bank figures (27 October 2026); OHCHR on Gaza and Hebron (26 and 30 October 2026); OCHA humanitarian situation report (29 October 2026).
- United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, "Introduction to the Holocaust".
- Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics, Palestinians at the end of 2025 / World Population Day release (11 July 2025).
- Israel Central Bureau of Statistics, end-of-2025 population estimate, as reported by JNS, "Israel's population hits 10,178,000" (end-of-year release).
- Peace Now, settlement data (Israeli and Palestinian CBS figures, end of 2023); World Bank, World Development Indicators (updated 8 October 2026).
- BBC News reporting, 2025–26: UN Commission of Inquiry report (16 September 2025); hostage remains recovered (January 2026); Board of Peace disarmament plan (30–31 July 2026); Board envoy at the Security Council (27 August 2026); Israeli election partial results (28 October 2026).
- Casualty figures for 1929, 1936–39, 1948, 1967, 1973, the intifadas, the Gaza wars and 7 October as summarised in the scholarly and official record; ranges given where sources differ.
Go deeper
- 📘 The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem Revisited — Benny Morris (the most influential archival study of 1948, by an Israeli historian)
- 📘 The Hundred Years' War on Palestine — Rashid Khalidi (a Palestinian historian's account of the conflict since 1917, partly through his own family's story)
- 📘 My Promised Land — Ari Shavit (an Israeli journalist's honest, conflicted portrait of Zionism, including Lydda in 1948)
- 📘 Palestine: A Four Thousand Year History — Nur Masalha (the long history of the land from a Palestinian perspective)
- 📘 The Lemon Tree — Sandy Tolan (one house in Ramle, one Palestinian family that lost it and one Jewish family from Bulgaria that moved in)
- 📘 A History of Modern Israel — Colin Shindler (a clear single-volume history of the state)
- 🌐 UN OCHA, occupied Palestinian territory (current humanitarian data, updated weekly)
- 🌐 Related pieces in this library: How the Sacred Texts Were Written; The World's Religions, One Page Each; The 1970s: Malaise, Punk, Détente, and the Rise of Personal Computing (Sadat and Begin); A Brief History of Iran (this series)


A Brief History of China: The Mandate, the Fall, and the Return
---------------------------------------------------------------
How the world's oldest continuous state rose, ruled a third of the world economy, broke apart, starved, and then lifted hundreds of millions out of poverty, and why Beijing and its critics tell that story so differently.

Follows: China: A Condensed History of Dynasties, Revolution, and Return
Some time around 1250 BCE, a priest at the court of a king named Wu Ding took the flat shoulder blade of an ox, drilled small hollows into its back, and pressed a hot point against it until the bone cracked. The king read the cracks. Would the harvest be good? Would his consort's childbirth go well? Would the enemy attack from the west? Then someone carved the question, and sometimes the answer, into the bone.
Three thousand years later, in 1899, bones like that were being ground up and sold in Chinese pharmacies as "dragon bones", a medicine. Scholars noticed the scratches on them were writing. When the bones were traced to their source near the city of Anyang, they turned out to be the archive of a royal court, written in a script that is the direct ancestor of the characters a schoolchild in Shanghai learns today.
That is the first thing to understand about China: the continuity is real. The second is that the continuity has been broken, violently and repeatedly, and that the most recent breaks happened within living memory. A woman born in Sichuan in 1950 could have lived through land reform, a famine that killed tens of millions, a decade of political terror, the end of collective farming, the rise of the world's largest factory economy, a city of skyscrapers where her village's rice fields had been, and a granddaughter who has never known hunger and may never have children.
The condensed piece in this library gives the outline. This is the full version, from millet farmers to the Communist Party plenum of October 2026. One warning before we start: on some of the most important questions, the People's Republic of China's official history and the account of its critics, scholars and victims differ sharply. Where they do, this piece says so, gives each side's case, and states the evidence and who produced it.
In this history

Before the empire: farmers, bronze and Heaven (to 771 BCE)
Philosophers and the first empires (771 BCE–220 CE)
Division, the Tang and the Song (220–1279)
The Mongols and the Ming (1271–1644)
The Qing: from high empire to the "century of humiliation" (1644–1911)
Republic, warlords and war (1911–1949)
Mao's China (1949–1976)
Reform, Tiananmen and the great boom (1976–2012)
Xi Jinping's China (2012–2026)
The contested edges: Xinjiang, Tibet, Hong Kong and Taiwan (1950–2026)
How to understand China today

Part 1 — Before the empire: farmers, bronze and Heaven (to 771 BCE)
The first farmers
There was no "China" when people started farming along its great rivers, and the word is anachronistic for most of this part. But the landscape already shaped what came later. Two river systems define the country's heartland. In the north, the Yellow River cuts through soft, wind-blown loess soil that is easy to dig and fertile, but floods catastrophically. In the south, the Yangtze runs through warm, wet country suited to rice. Between and around them lie mountains, deserts, steppe and the high Tibetan plateau, which for thousands of years made the region a world of its own.
The oldest pots and the first fields
Some of the oldest pottery found anywhere comes from Xianrendong cave in Jiangxi, in the south, dated to around 20,000 years ago, long before farming. People here were cooking in clay while they were still hunting and gathering.
Farming came later and in two places at once. In the north, people domesticated millet, a hardy grain that grows on dry loess. In the Yangtze valley, they domesticated rice. Archaeologists can name a long sequence of cultures, each identified by its pottery, houses and graves. The dates below are approximate, and different sources give different ranges.

Culture
Roughly when
Where
What it's known for

Xianrendong
c. 18,000–7000 BCE
Jiangxi (south)
Some of the world's oldest pottery

Peiligang
c. 7000–5000 BCE
Middle Yellow River
Early millet farming villages

Yangshao
c. 5000–3000 BCE
Yellow River
Painted pottery, large villages

Hemudu
c. 5000–4500 BCE
Lower Yangtze
Rice farming, wooden houses on stilts

Liangzhu
c. 3400–2250 BCE
Lower Yangtze
Walled city, waterworks, finely carved jade

Longshan
c. 3000–2000 BCE
Yellow River
Black pottery, walled towns, rising inequality

Erlitou
c. 1900–1500 BCE
Near Luoyang
Palaces, bronze vessels: an early state

The Xia question
Traditional Chinese history begins with a dynasty called the Xia, founded by Yu the Great, a hero who tamed the floods. Later historians gave it dates and a list of kings. For a long time scholars outside China treated it as legend.
Then, from 1959, archaeologists excavated Erlitou, a large site near Luoyang with palace foundations and some of the earliest bronze ritual vessels in the region. Many Chinese historians identify Erlitou with the Xia. Others are cautious: no writing has been found there that names it, and some argue the Xia may have been a later story, perhaps a myth the Shang told about a rival people. This is still an open question, and an emotionally charged one, because a confirmed Xia would push documented Chinese statehood back several centuries.

The first verifiable Chinese state is the Shang, because the Shang wrote things down. Everything before it is archaeology without names.

How people lived
Life in a Neolithic village on the Yellow River was hard and local. Families lived in half-sunken houses of earth and timber, kept pigs and dogs, grew millet, and buried their dead with pots of food. Over two or three thousand years, graves became more unequal: a few people were buried with jade, fine pottery and sometimes sacrificed humans, most with almost nothing. That gap between a ruling few and a farming many, legitimised by ritual, is the seed of every later Chinese state.
The Shang
The Shang ruled the middle and lower Yellow River from roughly 1600 BCE until 1046 BCE. Those dates come from China's Xia–Shang–Zhou Chronology Project, a state-funded research effort; a Han-dynasty scholar had calculated 1766–1122 BCE, and modern proposals for the end date alone vary by more than a century.
Their last capital, called Yin, lies at Yinxu near modern Anyang. Excavations there since the 1920s have found royal tombs, palace foundations and the remains of people and animals killed in state rituals. They have also found the bones.
The oracle bones
The "dragon bones" noticed in 1899 were traced to Yinxu in 1928. Excavations in the 1920s and 1930s recovered more than 20,000 inscribed pieces, and several times that number have turned up since. They are divination records, carved on turtle shells and ox shoulder blades, and the earliest date from the reign of Wu Ding, around 1250 BCE.
They let us see the Shang court from the inside: kings asking their ancestors about rain, war, tooth-aches, hunting and harvests; sacrifices of cattle and of prisoners; and a constant anxiety about displeasing the spirits. They also introduce a remarkable person. Fu Hao, a consort of Wu Ding, appears in around 170–180 inscriptions, leading armies as well as conducting rituals. Her tomb, found undisturbed in 1976, held more than 200 bronze ritual vessels.
Shang bronzes are among the great achievements of the ancient world: massive cauldrons and wine vessels cast in sectional clay moulds, covered with masks of staring, abstract animals. They were not tools. They were how the elite fed its ancestors.
The Zhou and the Mandate of Heaven
Around 1046 BCE a people from the Wei River valley to the west, the Zhou, defeated the last Shang king at the Battle of Muye. They faced a problem every conqueror faces: why should anyone obey us?
Their answer became the most durable political idea in Chinese history. Heaven (tian), they said, grants the right to rule to a virtuous house, and withdraws it when that house becomes cruel or incompetent. The Shang had lost the Mandate of Heaven through their misrule; the Zhou had received it. The idea is associated above all with the Duke of Zhou, who served as regent for his young nephew, put down a rebellion, and is remembered in Confucian tradition as the model of a selfless minister.

The Mandate of Heaven was a theory of legitimacy with a built-in escape clause: a ruler who loses it may be overthrown, and success is the proof that he had lost it.

The idea cut two ways. It told rulers that power came with duties. It also meant any successful rebel could claim Heaven had changed its mind, which is why later Chinese history is punctuated by peasant risings that founded dynasties.
Fiefs and decline
The Zhou governed through a system later called fengjian: relatives and allies received hereditary territories in return for loyalty and military service. It worked while the centre was strong. Over generations the local lords grew stronger and the bonds of kinship thinner. In 771 BCE nomadic Quanrong warriors, allied with a disaffected noble, sacked the Zhou capital at Haojing and killed King You. The court moved east to Luoyang. The Zhou kings survived as ritual figureheads for five more centuries, but real power had passed to the states.

Period
Dates (BCE)
In brief

Shang
c. 1600–1046
Bronze, oracle bones, ancestor sacrifice

Western Zhou
c. 1046–771
Mandate of Heaven; fiefs held by royal kin

Eastern Zhou: Spring and Autumn
770–476
Zhou kings nominal; dozens of states compete

Eastern Zhou: Warring States
475–221
Seven great states fight to the finish

Part 2 — Philosophers and the first empires (771 BCE–220 CE)
The age of the philosophers
The centuries after 771 BCE were violent and creative at once. Dozens of states shrank, through conquest, to seven: Qin, Chu, Qi, Yan, Han, Zhao and Wei. Armies grew from aristocratic chariot bands to mass infantry of conscripted peasants. Iron tools spread. States built walls, canals and bureaucracies. And rulers, desperate for an edge, listened to anyone who claimed to know how to govern well. Later Chinese writers called the result the "Hundred Schools of Thought".
Confucius
Kong Qiu, known in the West by the Latinised name Confucius, was born around 551 BCE in the small state of Lu, in modern Shandong, and died around 479 BCE. He came from the minor gentry, held office for a time (by tradition rising to Minister of Crime), failed to curb the great families who really ran Lu, and spent years travelling from court to court without finding a ruler who would put his ideas into practice. He returned home in his late sixties to teach.
His sayings were collected by his disciples long after his death as the Analects. Their core is simple to state and hard to live: society is held together not by force but by people fulfilling their roles with sincerity and ritual propriety, from father and son to ruler and subject; the gentleman (junzi) cultivates himself through learning and example; and the ruler governs best by virtue.

"Lead them by laws and keep them in line with punishments, and the people will avoid trouble but have no sense of shame. Lead them by virtue and keep them in line with ritual, and they will have a sense of shame and set themselves right." — Confucius, Analects 2.3 (paraphrased from Legge)

And the line most often quoted, his summary of a whole ethic in one sentence: "What you do not want done to yourself, do not do to others" (Analects 15.24).
The rivals
Confucius was one voice among many. A few of the others:

School
Key figures
The big idea

Confucians
Confucius, Mencius, Xunzi
Moral cultivation, ritual and family duty make a good society; Mencius held human nature is good, Xunzi that it must be shaped

Mohists
Mozi
Impartial care for all, against aggressive war and lavish ritual; a school of practical engineers of defence

Daoists
Laozi, Zhuangzi
Stop forcing things; follow the Way (dao) of nature through effortless action (wu wei)

Legalists
Shang Yang, Han Feizi, Li Si
People respond to reward and punishment; clear laws, harsh penalties and a strong state

(This library's Laozi: The Way of the Dao and the Art of Wu Wei covers the Daoist strand in depth.)
Qin's terrible efficiency
The Legalists won the war. In the western state of Qin, the minister Shang Yang carried out reforms between 359 and 338 BCE that turned it into a machine: land and ranks given for military merit, households grouped into units responsible for each other's crimes, the old nobility stripped of privilege. Qin's armies ground down the other six states one by one. In 256 BCE Qin extinguished what was left of the Zhou royal house. By 221 BCE it had conquered everyone.
The lesson later Chinese thinkers drew from the Warring States was not that Legalism was right. It was that disunity was a catastrophe. "All under Heaven" (tianxia) ought to be one. That conviction outlived every dynasty and is alive in Beijing's politics today.
The First Emperor
The king of Qin, Ying Zheng, was born in 259 BCE. In 221 BCE, having conquered the last of his rivals, he took a new title that combined words for divine and legendary rulers: Shi Huangdi, the First Emperor. He meant his heirs to rule for ten thousand generations.
With his chancellor Li Si he standardised the empire with a thoroughness that still shapes China. One script (the "small seal" style) replaced regional variants, which is a large part of why Chinese speakers of mutually unintelligible dialects can read the same texts. One coinage, one set of weights and measures, even one standard axle width so carts could run in the same ruts. The old states were abolished and replaced by commanderies run by appointed officials, not hereditary lords. Existing northern walls were joined into a long defensive line, the ancestor of the Great Wall.
The Han historians who came after him remembered him as a tyrant: in 213 BCE, they wrote, he burned books of history and philosophy, and in 212 BCE he had hundreds of scholars killed. The earliest account is in Sima Qian's Shiji, written about a century later by a historian serving the dynasty that replaced Qin, and some modern scholars think it is exaggerated. In 1974, near Xi'an, the most famous product of his reign was discovered: the Terracotta Army, thousands of life-size clay soldiers built to guard his tomb.
He died in 210 BCE. Revolts broke out almost at once. In 206 BCE rebels destroyed the Qin capital. The first empire had lasted fifteen years.
The Han
Out of the civil war came a commoner, Liu Bang, who became emperor in 202 BCE. The dynasty he founded, the Han, lasted with one interruption for four centuries, and the majority of Chinese people still call themselves the Han people (Han ren) and their characters "Han characters" (hanzi).
The Han kept Qin's centralised structure but softened its ideology. Under Emperor Wu (reigned 141–87 BCE) Confucian learning became the official philosophy of the state and the basis for recruiting officials, a marriage of Confucian ethics and Legalist administration that lasted, in one form or another, until 1912.
Emperor Wu was also an expansionist. He fought the Xiongnu, a steppe confederation to the north, and sent the envoy Zhang Qian west on journeys between 139 and 125 BCE that opened contacts with Central Asia, the beginning of the trade networks later called the Silk Roads (this library's The Silk Roads: The World's First Internet Ran on Camels follows them). To pay for war, the state took over the salt and iron industries in 117 BCE, provoking a famous court debate about whether government should run businesses at all, a debate China is still having.

The Han in numbers

Western Han
202 BCE–9 CE

Wang Mang's Xin dynasty (usurpation)
9–23 CE

Eastern Han
25–220 CE

Census of 2 CE
57,671,400 people in 12,366,470 households

Rough comparison
The Roman Empire at its height is usually estimated at a similar order of size

The census of 2 CE is the first surviving nationwide count of its kind anywhere. It shows the Chinese state's defining ambition: to know, register and tax every household.
How people lived
For most Han subjects, life meant a family farm, taxes in grain and coin, labour on state projects, and military service. The great families who accumulated land at the expense of indebted farmers were a constant problem for the court, which repeatedly tried, and failed, to limit them. Paper, invented in the Han era, spread slowly; Buddhism arrived from Central Asia along the trade routes in the later Han.
The Eastern Han declined amid court intrigue between eunuchs and consort families, and was shaken by the Yellow Turban rising, a mass rebellion tied to Daoist religious societies. Real power passed to generals. In 220 CE the last Han emperor abdicated, and the empire split.

Part 3 — Division, the Tang and the Song (220–1279)
Three and a half centuries apart
After the Han came the Three Kingdoms (immortalised in the much later novel Romance of the Three Kingdoms), a brief reunification, and then nearly three centuries in which the north was ruled by dynasties of steppe origin and the south by a succession of Chinese courts based near modern Nanjing.
These centuries are often treated as a dark interval between two empires. They were not. Buddhism spread widely in both north and south, carving vast cave temples and shaping art and thought. Northern peoples and Chinese mixed; southern migration pushed Chinese settlement deep into the Yangtze region and beyond, slowly shifting the country's economic centre of gravity southward. Calligraphy and poetry flourished in the southern courts.
The Sui: short, harsh, enormous
In 581 a northern general founded the Sui dynasty, which soon reunified the country. The Sui lasted only until 618, but in that time it did two things that endured. It began the imperial examinations: a test-based route into officialdom, first held around 605, with the prestigious jinshi degree created in 607. And Emperor Yang linked older waterways into the Grand Canal, completed around 609, joining the rice-growing south to the political north. Its main line still runs about 1,800 kilometres from Beijing to Hangzhou and is a UNESCO World Heritage Site. The cost in forced labour, plus costly foreign wars, destroyed the dynasty.
The Tang: a cosmopolitan empire
The Tang (618–907) is the dynasty many Chinese people think of as the high point of their civilisation. Its capital, Chang'an (modern Xi'an), was for much of the period the world's most populous city, where merchants, monks, students and envoys from across Asia mixed. Japan's court copied its institutions so closely that its capital at Nara was laid out on Chang'an's pattern (this series' A Brief History of Japan picks up that story).

Tang highlights

Founded
618, by Li Yuan (Emperor Gaozu)

Emperor Taizong
626–649; destroyed the Eastern Turkic Khaganate

Wu Zetian
Ruled in her own name as emperor of a "Zhou" dynasty, 690–705; the only woman generally recognised as a legitimate Chinese emperor

Population
Censuses suggest around 50 million in the 7th–8th centuries

An Lushan Rebellion
755–763; ended the dynasty's prosperity and broke central control

Poetry
Li Bai and Du Fu: the classic age of Chinese verse

The An Lushan rebellion, launched by a frontier general, devastated the north. The Tang survived it for another century and a half, but provincial military governors became semi-independent. In 907 the dynasty ended, and China split again into the "Five Dynasties and Ten Kingdoms".

Tang China looked outward. Its art borrowed from Persia and India, its religion from India, its music from Central Asia. Much of what later seemed "traditionally Chinese" was once foreign and new.

The Song: an economic revolution
The Song dynasty, founded in 960, never controlled as much territory as the Han or Tang. It lost the north to the Jurchen Jin dynasty in 1127, when invaders captured the capital Kaifeng and two emperors (the "Jingkang incident"), and continued as the Southern Song from Hangzhou until 1279. Militarily it was usually on the defensive. Economically and intellectually it was astonishing.
Economic historians Stephen Broadberry and colleagues, reconstructing incomes from historical records, conclude that Song China around the year 1000 was probably the richest country in the world per person, and that Europe only caught up in some regions by the 14th century. The country's population roughly doubled between the 10th and 11th centuries, reaching perhaps 90 to 100 million or more.
What drove it?

Rice and the south. The rice-growing Yangtze region became the empire's breadbasket and its economic centre.
Commerce. Trade, cities and markets grew; the Southern Song capital, Hangzhou, was among the great cities of its age.
Money. The Song issued the world's first true paper money.
Technology. The first surviving written formula for gunpowder, the compass used for navigation, and movable-type printing in the 11th century, centuries before Gutenberg (this library's Johannes Gutenberg: The Machine That Copied Minds compares the two).

Government by examination
The Song made the examinations the main road into government. Candidates sitting the prefectural exams rose from around 30,000 a year in the early 11th century to some 400,000 by the late 13th, and the dynasty awarded about 38,500 jinshi degrees, nearly six times the Tang's total. For centuries afterwards, the ideal Chinese man was the scholar-official: a landowner's son who spent his youth memorising the classics, passed the exams, and governed a county far from home.
The system was meritocratic in principle and narrower in practice, since only families who could afford years of study could compete. But it created something unusual in the pre-modern world: an elite whose prestige came from learning rather than birth or war.
The intellectual life of the age produced Neo-Confucianism, the synthesis of philosophers like Zhu Xi, who reworked Confucian ethics with a metaphysics partly borrowed from Buddhism. His synthesis shaped the intellectual foundations of later imperial China, including what examination candidates had to learn.
Politics was argumentative. The chancellor Wang Anshi pushed his "New Policies" (state loans to farmers, tax reform, local militias, changes to the exams) against fierce conservative opposition. The fight between activist reformers and cautious traditionalists over how much the state should do in the economy is a recurring theme of Chinese history.
The fall
The Song's wealth could not buy security. The Mongols, having destroyed the Jin in the north, took the Southern Song capital Hangzhou in 1276. At the naval battle of Yamen, on 19 March 1279, the last Song resistance was destroyed.

The Song is the strongest argument against the idea that pre-modern China was static. For three centuries it was the most commercial, urban and inventive society on the planet.

Part 4 — The Mongols and the Ming (1271–1644)
The Yuan
Kublai Khan, grandson of Genghis Khan, proclaimed the dynasty of the "Great Yuan" in 1271, building his main capital, Dadu, on the site of modern Beijing. For the first time all of China was ruled by conquerors from the steppe.
The Yuan divided its subjects into a hierarchy of four classes: Mongols at the top, then western and central Asian peoples, then northern Chinese, and at the bottom southern Chinese, the most numerous and most recently conquered. The examinations were suspended for decades. Foreigners served in high posts, the most famous European visitor being the Venetian Marco Polo, whose account shaped European fantasies about Cathay. Kublai's fleets tried to invade Japan twice, in 1274 and 1281, and failed, the second time in a typhoon the Japanese remembered as the kamikaze, the "divine wind".
Mongol rule was cosmopolitan and connected China to a Eurasia-wide trading world, but it was also resented, and in the 14th century disasters and rebellion weakened it. The Red Turban rebellion, from 1351, pulled it apart. Dadu fell on 14 September 1368.
Zhu Yuanzhang, the beggar emperor
The man who founded the next dynasty, the Ming, was Zhu Yuanzhang: a penniless peasant who had been a Buddhist monk, joined the Red Turbans in 1352 and rose to command them. He took Nanjing in 1356 and proclaimed the Ming ("Brilliant") in 1368, reigning as the Hongwu Emperor until 1398.
His son, the Yongle Emperor, seized the throne in 1402 from his nephew after a civil war, moved the capital to Beijing in 1420, and built the palace complex now called the Forbidden City. Most of the brick and stone Great Wall that tourists walk on is Ming work from the late 15th and 16th centuries.
Zheng He's fleets
Yongle also sponsored the most famous voyages in Chinese history. Between 1405 and 1433 the Muslim court eunuch Zheng He, born in Yunnan in 1371, commanded seven expeditions across the Indian Ocean. The first fleet had 317 ships and almost 28,000 men. They visited Southeast Asia, India, the Persian Gulf, Arabia and the Swahili coast of East Africa. From Malindi, in modern Kenya, a giraffe came back to Beijing, where courtiers presented it as a qilin, an auspicious beast confirming the emperor's virtue.

Zheng He's voyages
What we know
What's disputed

Purpose
Display Ming power, enrol rulers in the tribute system, control trade; possibly hunt the deposed emperor
How much was trade versus prestige

Ship size
Very large wooden ships
A 1597 novel claims about 127 metres; most scholars now estimate the largest at around 60–75 metres

Why they stopped
Halted in 1424, a final voyage under the next emperor, then ended
Court politics (scholar-officials versus eunuchs), cost, and the Mongol threat on land

The voyages ended because the court decided that the northern frontier, not the ocean, was where the dynasty's survival lay. A disastrous defeat by the Mongols in 1449, in which an emperor was captured, seemed to prove the point. Popular claims that Zheng He's ships reached the Americas have no support among historians.
Silver, sea bans and a crowded country
The Ming tried, for long periods, to ban private maritime trade (haijin) to suppress piracy; the effect was to turn coastal traders into smugglers and pirates. Yet the Ming economy became deeply tied to the world. Portuguese traders arrived from 1516 and settled Macau in 1557; Spanish galleons brought silver from the mines of the Americas through Manila. That silver flowed into China to pay for silk and porcelain, and the Ming came to collect taxes in silver. (This library's The Columbian Exchange tells how American crops such as maize and sweet potatoes also arrived and fed a growing population.)

Ming population (estimates)

c. 1393
65 million

c. 1500
125 million

c. 1600
160–200 million

How people lived
For the great majority, Ming China was a world of villages: rice in the south, wheat and millet in the north, taxes increasingly paid in silver, and a population that roughly doubled or tripled over the dynasty. The examinations remained the dream of every ambitious family. Across the whole dynasty the Ming awarded only about 24,500 jinshi degrees, so the odds were tiny, but a single success could lift a lineage for generations, so families invested heavily in educating a promising son.
The late Ming was a world of booming commercial towns, printing, popular novels, refined gardens and connoisseurship, and also of fiscal crisis, factional infighting and, in the 17th century, a run of cold years and famines. Peasant rebels led by Li Zicheng entered Beijing on 25 April 1644. The last Ming emperor hanged himself in the palace garden. A Ming general holding the Great Wall at Shanhai Pass, Wu Sangui, opened the gate to the Manchu armies from the northeast, perhaps to fight the rebels. The Manchus came in and did not leave.

Part 5 — The Qing: from high empire to the "century of humiliation" (1644–1911)
The Manchu conquest
The Manchus were a Jurchen people from beyond the northeastern frontier. Their leader Nurhaci proclaimed a "Later Jin" dynasty in 1616; his son renamed it the Great Qing in 1636. After taking Beijing in 1644, the Qing completed the conquest of China proper by 1683.
They ruled as a minority over a vast Han majority, and made submission visible: in 1645 every Han man was ordered to shave his forehead and wear the Manchu queue (braid), on pain of death. Resistance to the order cost tens of thousands of lives. Yet the Qing also governed through Chinese institutions, the exams and the Confucian classics, and patronised Chinese culture lavishly.
The High Qing
Three long reigns, those of the Kangxi (1661–1722), Yongzheng and Qianlong (1735–1796) emperors, are remembered as an era of peace, prosperity and expansion. The Qing pushed the empire's frontiers deep into Inner Asia, and by 1790 ruled about 14.7 million square kilometres, the largest extent of any Chinese dynasty and the basis of most of the PRC's borders today. The population climbed, by the 19th century, past 400 million.
On the economist Angus Maddison's long-run estimates, China produced about a third of the world's output in 1820, more than any other economy. That was a product of its enormous population rather than high incomes per person: by then average incomes had fallen behind those of northwestern Europe, and historians still argue over when and why the "Great Divergence" opened up.

China's share of world GDP (Maddison estimates)

1600
about 29%

1700
about 22%

1820
about 33%

1870
about 17%

1913
about 9%

1950
under 5%

In 1793 a British embassy under Lord Macartney reached the Qianlong Emperor at his summer retreat at Chengde, seeking expanded trade and a permanent embassy. After a famous dispute over whether Macartney would kowtow, the mission got nothing. The emperor's edict to George III declared that "Our Celestial Empire possesses all things in prolific abundance and lacks no product within its borders." It is often quoted as proof of Chinese arrogance; historians now also read it as a confident statement of a system that had worked for centuries.
The Opium Wars
The British problem was a trade deficit: Britons bought tea, silk and porcelain, but China wanted little that Britain made, so silver flowed east. The British East India Company's answer was opium grown in India. Imports rose from about 4,000 chests a year in the early 1800s to some 20,000 by 1831, and kept rising. Addiction spread; silver flowed out.
In 1839 the emperor sent an incorruptible official, Lin Zexu, to Canton to stop the trade. He forced foreign merchants to surrender more than 20,000 chests and destroyed the opium publicly at Humen from 3 June 1839. He also wrote to Queen Victoria asking how Britain could sell a poison it banned at home; she never received the letter. Britain went to war.

The unequal treaties, in brief

Treaty of Nanking, 29 August 1842
Ended the First Opium War: Hong Kong Island ceded to Britain; five ports opened; an indemnity; British subjects exempt from Chinese courts (extraterritoriality)

Second Opium War, 1856–1860
Britain and France; the Old Summer Palace outside Beijing looted and burned; more ports and rights conceded

Treaty of Shimonoseki, 1895
After defeat by Japan: Taiwan ceded, Korea lost as a tributary, 200 million taels

Boxer Protocol, 7 September 1901
After the Boxer Rising: 450 million taels over 39 years, more than a year's state revenue; foreign troops in Beijing

The Taiping
The worst catastrophe of 19th-century China was not foreign. Hong Xiuquan, a Hakka from Guangdong who had repeatedly failed the civil-service exams, read Christian missionary tracts, had visions, and came to believe he was the younger brother of Jesus, sent to destroy the Manchu "demons". His Taiping Heavenly Kingdom rose in 1850, took Nanjing in March 1853 and made it the "Heavenly Capital". It banned opium, foot-binding and private property in principle, and was fanatically violent in practice.
The war lasted until 1864. It was won for the Qing not by the dynasty's own armies but by regional forces raised by Confucian gentry, above all Zeng Guofan's Xiang Army, helped by a Western-officered force. The death toll is uncertain. The most widely cited estimates are 20 to 30 million; some scholars argue for far more. Either way it was among the deadliest wars in human history, fought at the same time as the American Civil War and killing dozens of times as many people.
The "century of humiliation"
From the Opium Wars to 1949, the PRC teaches, China suffered a "century of humiliation" (bainian guochi): foreign invasion, unequal treaties, lost territory, and a weak and divided state. The framing emerged after China's defeat by Japan in 1895 and was popularised by both Nationalists and Communists in the 1920s. Under Xi Jinping it is central to official history and to the promise of "national rejuvenation"; a 2023 Patriotic Education Law made the period a core theme for schools and museums.
The framing rests on real events. China was invaded repeatedly, compelled by force to legalise a drug trade, carved into foreign concessions, and made to pay indemnities that crippled its finances. Critics and historians add complications: the narrative can be selective, emphasising foreign blame over the Qing's own failures and over disasters like the Taiping that were largely domestic; most peasants, the historian Jane Elliott argues, never experienced the period as humiliation by foreigners; and the story can be used to deflect criticism of the present. Both things can be true: the grievance is historical, and its use is political.
Reform too late
The Qing did try to change. A "self-strengthening" movement in the later 19th century built arsenals and shipyards; after the humiliating defeat by Japan, and the anti-foreign Boxer Rising of 1899–1901 that ended with foreign armies in Beijing, the court of the Empress Dowager Cixi (1835–1908) attempted sweeping late reforms. On 2 September 1905 it abolished the examination system after roughly thirteen centuries. It promised a constitution. It was too late. The new armies it created became the instrument of its fall.

Part 6 — Republic, warlords and war (1911–1949)
1911
On 10 October 1911 soldiers of a modernised army unit mutinied in Wuchang, on the Yangtze. Province after province declared independence from the Qing. On 1 January 1912 revolutionaries in Nanjing proclaimed the Republic of China, with Sun Yat-sen, a doctor and long-exiled revolutionary, as provisional president. On 12 February 1912 the six-year-old Xuantong Emperor, Puyi, abdicated. Two thousand years of imperial rule ended almost without a fight.
Sun's programme, the "Three Principles of the People" (nationalism, democracy and the people's livelihood), is revered on both sides of the Taiwan Strait today. But he lacked an army. Power passed to the strongest general, Yuan Shikai, who became president in March 1912, sidelined parliament, proclaimed himself emperor in December 1915, was forced to abandon the attempt within months, and died in June 1916.
Warlords, May Fourth and two parties
After Yuan, China fragmented among regional militarists, the "warlords". Yet the 1910s and 1920s were also a period of intense intellectual ferment. On 4 May 1919 students in Beijing protested the Versailles peace settlement, which handed Germany's former rights in Shandong to Japan. The May Fourth Movement became shorthand for a whole generation's revolt against Confucian tradition, in favour of "Mr. Science and Mr. Democracy".
Two parties emerged from it. The Nationalist Party (Kuomintang, KMT), reorganised by Sun with Soviet help. And the Chinese Communist Party, founded at a congress in Shanghai in July 1921; among its founders were the May Fourth intellectuals Chen Duxiu and Li Dazhao, and among the delegates was a young Mao Zedong.
The two parties cooperated in a "United Front" to defeat the warlords. In 1926 the Nationalist army, led after Sun's death by Chiang Kai-shek, launched the Northern Expedition. Halfway through, on 12 April 1927, Chiang turned on his allies in Shanghai and massacred Communists and labour activists; the party lost most of its members. The Nationalists then ruled much of China from Nanjing.
The Long March
The Communists retreated to rural bases, especially the "Jiangxi Soviet". Under Nationalist encirclement, about 86,000 troops broke out in October 1934 and began the Long March, a fighting retreat through the southwest and north. At a conference in Zunyi in January 1935, Mao emerged as the dominant leader. About 7,000 to 8,000 of the original marchers reached the northern province of Shaanxi in October 1935 and made their base at Yan'an.
The official account speaks of 25,000 li, about 12,500 kilometres. Two British researchers who retraced the route in 2003 estimated about 6,000 kilometres; a Beijing newspaper replied that the main army covered over 9,000. The distance matters less than what the March became: the founding epic of the party, its proof of endurance and its claim to Heaven's favour.
The war with Japan
Japan had seized Manchuria after staging an incident at Mukden on 18 September 1931, and set up a puppet state under the last emperor, Puyi. Chiang's priority remained crushing the Communists, until December 1936, when two of his own generals kidnapped him at Xi'an and forced him into a second United Front against Japan.
Full-scale war began after a clash at the Marco Polo Bridge near Beijing on 7 July 1937. Shanghai fell after months of fighting; then the capital, Nanjing, where Japanese troops carried out the massacre described in this series' history of Japan. The Nationalist government retreated to Chongqing in the far west. The war lasted until Japan's surrender on 2 September 1945.

Chinese losses in the war with Japan, 1937–45
Estimate
Who

Nationalist military dead
about 1.32 million killed
Nationalist government figures

Civilian deaths
more than 12 million
Historian Rana Mitter

Total deaths
14–22 million
Mitter; Clodfelter

Total casualties (dead and wounded)
35 million
Official PRC figure

Who did most of the fighting is itself politically contested. For decades the PRC told the war as a Communist-led resistance; historians, including some in China, now emphasise that the Nationalist armies bore most of the major battles and the heaviest losses, while the Communists expanded their guerrilla bases and party membership behind Japanese lines.
Civil war and 1949
After Japan's defeat the uneasy truce collapsed; full-scale civil war resumed in June 1946. The Nationalists had more men and American aid, but were exhausted by eight years of war, discredited by inflation and corruption, and outmanoeuvred by Communist armies that recruited peasants by redistributing land. On 1 October 1949, from the gate of Tiananmen in Beijing, Mao Zedong proclaimed the People's Republic of China. In December the Nationalist government moved to Taipei, on the island of Taiwan, which it governs to this day as the Republic of China.

The Communist Party's founding claim to legitimacy is simple and powerful: it ended a century of division and foreign domination. Even many Chinese who reject its later record accept that claim.

Part 7 — Mao's China (1949–1976)
Building the new state
The first years of the People's Republic brought real achievements: inflation tamed, opium suppressed, the country unified, a marriage law of May 1950 that broke radically with patriarchal custom, mass campaigns against disease and illiteracy. They also brought terror.
Land reform, carried out village by village through "speak bitterness" meetings where peasants denounced landlords, transferred land to poor farmers and destroyed the old rural elite, often by killing them. A parallel Campaign to Suppress Counter-revolutionaries targeted former Nationalists, bandits and religious sects. Estimates of the combined deaths range widely: the historian Benedict Stavis estimated 400,000 to 800,000; the Cambridge History of China gives 1 to 2 million executed in land reform; Maurice Meisner about 2 million for 1950–52; some estimates are higher. An official 1954 report counted 712,000 counter-revolutionaries executed.
In 1950 China entered the Korean War, fighting the United States to a stalemate by 1953 at great cost. In 1956–57 Mao invited criticism in the "Hundred Flowers" campaign; when it came, the Anti-Rightist Campaign that followed persecuted at least 550,000 people, mostly intellectuals.
The Great Leap Forward and the famine
In 1958 Mao launched the Great Leap Forward, meant to catch up with the industrial nations within years through mass mobilisation. Peasants were organised into huge people's communes; private plots were abolished; tens of millions were diverted into building dams and smelting iron in "backyard furnaces". Local officials, competing to report miracles, inflated harvest figures. The state took grain based on those false numbers, and kept exporting it.
In July 1959, at a party conference at Lushan, Defence Minister Peng Dehuai sent Mao a private letter criticising inflated reports and the backyard furnaces. Mao denounced him; Peng was purged, and a campaign against "right deviation" penalised more than three million party members. After Lushan, almost no one dared tell the truth. The famine deepened.
What followed was the deadliest famine in human history. Nobody knows exactly how many died, and the Chinese government has never published a full official figure. Scholars have estimated it in two main ways: from population statistics (comparing expected and actual deaths) and from local archives.

Excess deaths in the famine, c. 1959–61
Estimate
Basis

Sun Jingxian (2011); Yang Songlin (2013)
3.5–4 million
Revisionist demographic readings arguing the data are distorted by migration and registration; rejected by most specialists

Chinese Academy of Sciences report (1989)
at least 15 million
Official research body

Ansley Coale (1984)
27 million
Demographic reconstruction

Basil Ashton et al. (1984); Judith Banister (1987)
about 30 million
Census-based demography

Cao Shuji (2005)
32.5 million
Records from about 1,050 localities

Yang Jisheng, Tombstone (2008/2012)
36 million
A Xinhua journalist's archival research

Frank Dikötter, Mao's Great Famine (2010)
at least 45 million
Party archives

Most scholars place the toll somewhere between about 15 and 45 million, with many converging around 30 million. World Bank data show what that meant: China's population actually fell between 1960 and 1961, and life expectancy at birth fell to about 33 years in 1960.
The party's own judgement came in its 1981 resolution on party history, which blamed the famine chiefly on the mistakes of the Great Leap and the campaign against "right deviation", alongside natural disasters and the split with the Soviet Union. Liu Shaoqi, then head of state, had already told a party meeting in 1962 that the disaster was 30 percent nature and 70 percent human error. Inside China, the term long used was the "Three Years of Natural Disasters", later the "Three Years of Difficulty".

In the famine, the problem was not that China had no food. It was that the people who knew the truth could not say it, and the people who could have acted would not hear it.

The Cultural Revolution
By the mid-1960s pragmatic leaders such as Liu Shaoqi and Deng Xiaoping had quietly undone some of the Leap's policies, letting farmers keep private plots. (Deng defended this in 1962 with an old Sichuan proverb he had learned from a fellow general: "Yellow cat or black cat, as long as it catches mice, it is a good cat." The yellow later became white.) Mao saw his revolution being betrayed.
On 16 May 1966 he launched the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution. He called on students to attack "capitalist roaders" inside the party; in August he posted his own "Bombard the Headquarters" poster, aimed at Liu Shaoqi. Millions of teenage Red Guards attacked teachers, officials, intellectuals and anyone from a "bad" class background, destroyed temples and antiques, and then fought each other in armed factional wars. Liu Shaoqi was expelled from the party and died in detention in 1969, denied medical care. Deng Xiaoping was purged and sent to work in a tractor factory; his son was crippled after a fall from a building while being persecuted. From late 1968, more than ten million urban young people were "sent down to the countryside" to learn from the peasants, among them a teenage Xi Jinping.

Deaths in the Cultural Revolution
Estimate
Who

Unnatural deaths
1.73 million
CCP History Research Center (1996), from internal investigations of 1978 and 1984

Deaths, 1966–71
1.1–1.6 million
Sociologist Andrew Walder (2014), from county annals; probably an undercount

Deaths
about 2 million
Ding Shu

Including labour-camp deaths
about 7.7 million
R. J. Rummel (1991)

The same 1996 party source counted 125 million people implicated in investigations. Mao's designated successor, Lin Biao, died in a plane crash on 13 September 1971 while apparently fleeing after an alleged plot against Mao. The 1981 party resolution called the Cultural Revolution "responsible for the most severe setback and the heaviest losses suffered by the party, the state and the people since the founding of the People's Republic".
The other side of the ledger
Mao's admirers in China, and the party's official verdict (its 1981 resolution says his "merits are primary and his errors secondary", a judgement popularly summed up as "seventy percent right, thirty percent wrong"), point to real changes: life expectancy rose from very low levels; literacy spread; women entered paid work; rural "barefoot doctors" brought basic care to villages; China tested its first atomic bomb in 1964, took China's UN seat in 1971 and received a US president in 1972. The artemisinin anti-malaria drug, discovered by Tu Youyou's team in a secret military project of those years, has saved millions of lives (see Tu Youyou: A 1,600-Year-Old Recipe and a Nobel Prize).
Critics reply that much of that progress happened despite Mao's campaigns, and that the man who caused the famine and the Cultural Revolution killed more of his own people than almost any ruler in history. That argument has not ended; in China it cannot be fully held in public.
Mao died in September 1976. Within a month his widow Jiang Qing and three associates, the "Gang of Four", were arrested.

Part 8 — Reform, Tiananmen and the great boom (1976–2012)
Deng's turn
Mao's chosen successor, Hua Guofeng, was outmanoeuvred by Deng Xiaoping, rehabilitated for the second time. At the Third Plenum of the party's Central Committee in December 1978, the party shifted its central task from class struggle to economic development. "Reform and opening up" had begun.
It started in the fields. Farmers, beginning in some of the poorest villages, quietly divided collective land among households and promised to deliver a quota to the state in return for keeping the rest. The "household responsibility system" spread across the country; harvests jumped. Rural "township and village enterprises" sprang up. On the coast, special economic zones such as Shenzhen, Zhuhai and Xiamen invited foreign investors with low taxes and cheap labour. Shenzhen, across the border from Hong Kong, became one of the world's great manufacturing cities.
The reforms were not a plan unfolding. They were experiments, many started locally, defended by Deng and his allies Hu Yaobang and Zhao Ziyang against conservative opposition, and expanded when they worked.
Tiananmen, 1989
Economic change brought inflation, corruption and demands for political change too. When Hu Yaobang, a liberal-minded former party chief, died on 15 April 1989, students gathered in Tiananmen Square to mourn him. Mourning turned into a movement: calls for press freedom, dialogue and an end to official corruption. Students began a hunger strike; workers joined them; protests spread to some 400 cities. On 17 May about a million people filled the square. Martial law was declared on 20 May. On 30 May art students raised a ten-metre "Goddess of Democracy" facing Mao's portrait.
On the night of 3–4 June the army moved into central Beijing with live fire. Most of the killing happened not in the square itself but along Chang'an Avenue, the main road leading to it, especially around Muxidi in the west. On 5 June an unknown man stood in front of a column of tanks; the photograph is censored in China. Zhao Ziyang, the party chief who had sided with the protesters against martial law, was removed and never held office again; he died in 2005.
How many died is still unknown, because the government has never released a full accounting.

The death toll of 4 June 1989
Figure
Source and date

Official
"Nearly 300", including soldiers; 23 students
State Council spokesman Yuan Mu, 6 June 1989

Official
241, including soldiers
Chinese government report, June 1989

Named and documented victims
202
Tiananmen Mothers, a group of victims' relatives

Estimate
Up to 1,000
Amnesty International

Diplomatic cable
At least 10,000 civilians, later revised to 2,700–3,400
British ambassador Sir Alan Donald, June 1989, citing a Chinese source; declassified decades later

Rumoured
2,600
Attributed to the Chinese Red Cross, which denied giving it

The government's position is that it suppressed "political turmoil" and that the decision brought decades of stability and growth. In 2019 China's then defence minister, Wei Fenghe, called the events "a turmoil" that the government had been right to stop. Critics, survivors and most historians outside China call it a massacre of unarmed civilians.

The bargain of the post-1989 era, as it is often described, was this: the party would deliver prosperity and order, and the people would stay out of politics.

The Southern Tour and the boom
After Tiananmen, conservatives tried to slow reform. In early 1992 Deng, retired and aged 87, toured the southern zones and insisted that development was "of overriding importance". Growth resumed at speed. State-owned enterprises were restructured, and tens of millions of state workers were laid off in the late 1990s. In 2001 China joined the World Trade Organization, and became the workshop of the world.
The scale is hard to grasp. The economy grew about 9.5 percent a year on average from 1978 to 2013. World Bank data show GDP per person rising from about $157 in 1978 to $969 in 2000 and $4,629 in 2010. In 2010 China passed Japan to become the world's second-largest economy.

China's transformation
1978
2000
2025

Population
956 million
1.26 billion
1.41 billion

GDP per person (current US$)
$157
$969
$13,862

Share living in cities
18%
36%
66%

Life expectancy at birth
63
72
78 (2024)

Source: World Bank, World Development Indicators (updated October 2026).
Hundreds of millions out of poverty
The most important number of the era is this one. A joint report by the World Bank and two Chinese government bodies, Four Decades of Poverty Reduction in China (released 31 March 2022), found that close to 800 million people had escaped extreme poverty (then defined as living on under $1.90 a day) over the previous four decades, close to three-quarters of the entire reduction in extreme poverty worldwide over that time. On the World Bank's current line of $3 a day, 97 percent of Chinese people were poor in 1981; by 2019, by its measure, essentially none were.
No poverty reduction on that scale has happened anywhere else. The party credits its leadership and planning. Economists emphasise that the gains came mainly from letting markets, private firms, trade and migrants do what Mao's system had forbidden, a point the party also partly accepts in calling it "socialism with Chinese characteristics". Both agree it was the largest improvement in material living standards in human history.
How people lived: migrants and the hukou
The engine of the boom was migration. Under the household registration (hukou) system, inherited from the 1950s, Chinese people were registered as rural or urban, with access to schools, healthcare and pensions tied to the registration. Hundreds of millions of rural people moved to the cities and factories anyway, often without urban hukou, living in dormitories and sending money home to children left with grandparents. In autumn 2026 China's statistics bureau still counted 192.7 million rural migrant workers.
The one-child policy, formally imposed in September 1980, shaped family life for a generation. It was enforced through fines, pressure and, especially in 1983–84, forced sterilisations and abortions. The sex ratio at birth rose to about 117 boys for every 100 girls, as some families aborted or abandoned daughters. The party credits the policy with preventing 400 million births; many demographers argue fertility was already falling and would have fallen anyway as China grew richer. The policy was replaced by a two-child limit on 1 January 2016, a three-child limit in May 2021, and no limit from July 2021.
Hong Kong returns
On 1 July 1997, after 156 years of British rule, Hong Kong returned to Chinese sovereignty under the 1984 Sino-British Joint Declaration, which promised it "one country, two systems", with its own laws, courts and freedoms, for fifty years. Macau followed in 1999.

Part 9 — Xi Jinping's China (2012–2026)
The man
Xi Jinping was born in Beijing on 15 June 1953, the son of a revolutionary veteran, Xi Zhongxun, who was purged in the early 1960s. As a teenager in the Cultural Revolution Xi was sent to Liangjiahe, a village in Shaanxi, where he spent about seven years. He joined the party, rose through provincial posts, and became general secretary on 15 November 2012 and state president on 14 March 2013.
He has concentrated power more than any leader since Mao. A sweeping anti-corruption campaign has disciplined officials at every level, including top generals and Politburo members; supporters see a necessary purge of a party rotting from within, critics a tool for removing rivals. In March 2018 the National People's Congress removed the two-term limit on the presidency, and in 2022–23 Xi began a third term. His ideas, "Xi Jinping Thought on Socialism with Chinese Characteristics for a New Era", are written into the party and state constitutions.
The programme

The "Chinese Dream" of national rejuvenation: restoring China's place in the world, with the century of humiliation as its backdrop.
The Belt and Road Initiative, announced in Kazakhstan on 7 September 2013: Chinese-financed infrastructure in more than 150 countries. Critics allege "debt-trap diplomacy"; many researchers dispute that claim, while agreeing that some projects have created serious debt problems.
Party control everywhere: in private firms, universities, the internet and civil society.
Technology and industry: electric vehicles, batteries, solar panels and AI, sectors in which Chinese firms now lead the world.
Zero-COVID: China suppressed the virus with lockdowns for nearly three years, then abandoned the policy abruptly at the end of 2022 after rare nationwide protests.

How people live now
The everyday texture of Chinese life has changed beyond recognition within one lifetime. Two people in three now live in cities, against fewer than one in five in 1978. A child born in China today can expect to live to about 78, roughly as long as an American child. The family has shrunk: a generation of only children is now caring for ageing parents, often from a city far away, and women now have, on average, about one child each, roughly half the number needed to keep a population stable. In 2025 there were more than 11 deaths for every 8 births.

The great story of Chinese history used to be the struggle to feed a vast, growing population. The new story is how a rich-ish, ageing and shrinking one will be cared for.

China in autumn 2026

China, autumn 2026
Figure
Source (date)

Population, end of 2025
1,404.89 million, down 3.39 million in a year; the fourth straight annual fall
National Bureau of Statistics (Jan 2026)

Births in 2025
7.92 million, against 11.31 million deaths
NBS (Jan 2026)

Fertility rate
about 1.0 child per woman (2024)
World Bank (Oct 2026)

Aged 65+
about 15% of the population (2025)
World Bank (Oct 2026)

GDP
about US$19.5 trillion (2025)
World Bank (Oct 2026)

GDP growth
5.0% in 2025; 4.6% in the first three quarters of 2026
NBS (Jan, Oct 2026)

Real-estate investment
down 20.6% year on year, Jan–Sept 2026
NBS (19 Oct 2026)

Consumer prices
+0.9%, Jan–Sept 2026
NBS (19 Oct 2026)

The economic picture is double-edged. China dominates world manufacturing and leads in electric cars, batteries and solar power; its growth, near 5 percent, is fast for an economy its size. But the property sector, once the main store of household wealth, has been contracting for five years; prices barely rise; local governments are deeply indebted; youth unemployment has been high; and the population is shrinking and ageing faster than almost any large country's in history. The party's answer is "new quality productive forces": high technology and self-reliance. Its critics, foreign and Chinese, argue the country needs more household consumption and a less controlling state.
Politics is entering a new cycle. In January 2026 the defence ministry announced that Zhang Youxia, the most senior general on the Central Military Commission, and the chief of the joint staff, Liu Zhenli, were under investigation for "serious violations of discipline". The party's Fifth Plenum, held on 26–29 October 2026, adopted a resolution on "full and rigorous Party self-governance", confirmed the expulsion of 33 senior figures including Zhang, Liu and the former Xinjiang party chief Ma Xingrui, declared the 15th Five-Year Plan "off to a good start", and set the 21st Party Congress for the second half of 2027. That congress will show whether Xi, then 74, begins a fourth term.
The 2026 facts in this part come from China's National Bureau of Statistics, Xinhua (29 October 2026), the World Bank (October 2026), France 24 and NPC Observer, dated as given. China's story is moving fast; check the latest before quoting any of it.

Part 10 — The contested edges: Xinjiang, Tibet, Hong Kong and Taiwan (1950–2026)
Four places test the party's central claim, that it has made China whole again. Beijing describes each as an internal matter of sovereignty, security and development. Many of the people who live there, and many governments and rights bodies abroad, describe something else. What follows gives the findings of outside bodies, Beijing's answers, and the dates of each.
Xinjiang
Xinjiang, the vast northwestern region, is home to the Uyghurs and other mainly Muslim Turkic peoples. After deadly attacks attributed to Uyghur militants, Beijing launched a "Strike Hard Campaign against Violent Terrorism" in May 2014. From 2017, under party secretary Chen Quanguo, authorities built a network of facilities into which large numbers of Uyghurs and other Muslims were sent without trial, alongside dense surveillance.
What outside bodies found:

On 31 August 2022, the UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) published its assessment. It concluded that "serious human rights violations" had been committed, found allegations of patterns of torture or ill-treatment "credible", and said the arbitrary detention of Uyghurs and others "may constitute international crimes, in particular crimes against humanity". It did not use the word genocide.
The researcher Adrian Zenz estimated in 2020 that up to 1.8 million people may have been detained at some point. The United States government and several Western parliaments have described the policies as genocide; others, including the UN office, have not used that term.

What Beijing says: the facilities were voluntary "vocational education and training centres" for de-radicalisation, established in accordance with law, which brought an end to terrorist attacks; all "trainees" had "graduated" by 2019; accusations of forced labour and genocide are lies spread by the United States and its allies to contain China; and Xinjiang has enjoyed rapid economic growth. China's formal response to the OHCHR report called its conclusions groundless.
Tibet
The People's Liberation Army entered eastern Tibet in October 1950; in 1951 Tibetan representatives signed a "Seventeen Point Agreement" in Beijing recognising Chinese sovereignty, which the Tibetan government in exile says was signed under duress. After an uprising in March 1959, the 14th Dalai Lama fled to India, where an exile administration remains. The Tibet Autonomous Region was set up in 1965. During the Cultural Revolution most of Tibet's monasteries were destroyed. Since 2009, around 160 Tibetans have set themselves on fire in protest (as of 2022).
Beijing's account is that it "peacefully liberated" Tibet from a feudal theocracy in which most people were serfs, and has since brought roads, schools, hospitals and rising incomes. Tibetan exiles and rights groups describe restrictions on religion, mass boarding schools that separate children from their language and families, and the resettlement of herders. Both sides now look ahead to the Dalai Lama's succession: Beijing insists the next Dalai Lama must be approved by the central government; the exile leadership says, as its former head Lobsang Sangay put it on 22 October 2026, that "the one selected by his office and by our monks will be the real one".
In March 2026 the National People's Congress passed a Law on Promoting Ethnic Unity and Progress, in force from 1 July 2026, which promotes standard Chinese in public life and a shared "Chinese nation" identity and claims jurisdiction over people abroad who undermine ethnic unity. Beijing presents it as protecting national cohesion; critics, including the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, Volker Türk, warned it "could restrict freedom of religion and culture".
Hong Kong
In 2019, a bill allowing extraditions to the mainland triggered months of protests, at times involving millions of people and, as they went on, violent clashes. Beijing's answer was a National Security Law imposed on 30 June 2020, criminalising secession, subversion, terrorism and "collusion with foreign forces". Opposition politicians were jailed or went into exile, and pro-democracy newspapers closed. On 9 February 2026 the media owner Jimmy Lai was sentenced to 20 years in prison for collusion and sedition. Beijing called the sentence "reasonable, legitimate and legal"; Human Rights Watch called it "effectively a death sentence" for the 78-year-old. Beijing's case is that the law restored order after 2019, protecting "one country"; critics argue it ended "two systems" decades early.
Taiwan
Taiwan's Republic of China government, which ruled under martial law for decades, became a democracy in the late 1980s and 1990s. Its people's sense of who they are has shifted. In the long-running survey by National Chengchi University's Election Study Center, those calling themselves "Taiwanese" rose from 17.6 percent in 1992 to 63.1 percent in June 2026; "both Taiwanese and Chinese" fell from 46.4 to 30.7 percent; and "Chinese" from 25.5 to 2.5 percent.

The positions, stated in their own terms

Beijing
Taiwan has been part of China since ancient times; the 1949 split was an unfinished civil war; reunification, peacefully if possible, is a core interest; force is not ruled out (the 2005 Anti-Secession Law provides for military means if peaceful reunification becomes impossible)

Taiwan's governing DPP (President Lai Ching-te, since May 2024)
The Republic of China (Taiwan) and the PRC are not subordinate to each other; Taiwan's future can be decided only by its 23 million people

Taiwan's opposition KMT
Supports the "1992 Consensus" that there is one China (with each side interpreting what that means) and favours dialogue with Beijing; its chair Cheng Li-wun met Xi in April 2026

The United States
Recognises the PRC as China's government since 1979, "acknowledges" Beijing's position without endorsing it, opposes unilateral change to the status quo, and sells Taiwan weapons under the 1979 Taiwan Relations Act

Pressure has grown. Large Chinese military exercises around the island have been held every year since 2022. From 29 December 2025 the "Justice Mission 2025" drills rehearsed a blockade of Taiwan's main ports, eleven days after Washington announced $11.1 billion in arms sales. During a state visit to Beijing on 13–15 May 2026, Xi warned President Trump that mistakes on Taiwan could lead to "conflict"; Trump afterwards said he was "not looking to have somebody go independent". Taiwan's government said it was a sovereign nation.

Part 11 — How to understand China today
Key dates

Year
Event

c. 20,000 years ago
Pottery at Xianrendong, among the oldest anywhere

c. 7000–5000 BCE
Millet and rice farming villages

c. 1600–1046 BCE
Shang dynasty; oracle bones from c. 1250 BCE

c. 1046 BCE
Zhou conquest; the Mandate of Heaven

c. 551–479 BCE
Confucius

221 BCE
Qin unifies China; the First Emperor

202 BCE–220 CE
Han dynasty

605–609
Sui exams begin; Grand Canal completed

618–907
Tang dynasty

960–1279
Song dynasty; paper money, printing, gunpowder

1271–1368
Mongol Yuan dynasty

1368–1644
Ming dynasty

1405–1433
Zheng He's voyages

1644–1912
Qing dynasty

1839–1842
First Opium War

1850–1864
Taiping war

1905
Examination system abolished

1911–1912
Revolution; Republic of China; the last emperor abdicates

4 May 1919
May Fourth Movement

1921
Chinese Communist Party founded

1934–1935
Long March

1937–1945
War with Japan

1 October 1949
People's Republic of China proclaimed

1958–1962
Great Leap Forward and famine

1966–1976
Cultural Revolution

December 1978
Reform and opening up begins

4 June 1989
Tiananmen crackdown

1 July 1997
Hong Kong returns to China

2001
China joins the WTO

2010
China becomes the world's second-largest economy

2012–13
Xi Jinping takes power

2020
Hong Kong National Security Law

31 August 2022
OHCHR report on Xinjiang

2022
China's population begins to fall

October 2026
Fifth Plenum; 21st Congress set for 2027

Who's who

Person
Lived
Why they matter

Wu Ding
r. c. 1250–1190 BCE
Shang king whose divinations are the earliest Chinese writing

Duke of Zhou
11th c. BCE
Regent associated with the Mandate of Heaven

Confucius
c. 551–479 BCE
Teacher whose ethics shaped East Asia

Qin Shi Huang
259–210 BCE
First Emperor; unified and standardised China

Emperor Wu of Han
r. 141–87 BCE
Made Confucianism state orthodoxy; expanded the empire

Wu Zetian
r. 690–705
The only woman to rule as emperor in her own name

Zhu Xi
1130–1200
Neo-Confucian philosopher; his commentaries became the exam syllabus

Kublai Khan
r. 1260–1294
Founded the Yuan dynasty

Zheng He
1371–c. 1433
Admiral of the Ming treasure fleets

Qianlong Emperor
r. 1735–1796
Ruled the Qing at its height

Lin Zexu
1785–1850
Destroyed the opium at Humen

Hong Xiuquan
1814–1864
Leader of the Taiping

Empress Dowager Cixi
1835–1908
Dominated the late Qing court

Sun Yat-sen
1866–1925
Father of the Republic, revered in both Beijing and Taipei

Chiang Kai-shek
1887–1975
Nationalist leader; ruled Taiwan after 1949

Mao Zedong
1893–1976
Founder of the PRC; Great Leap, Cultural Revolution

Zhou Enlai
1898–1976
Mao's long-serving premier and diplomat

Deng Xiaoping
1904–1997
Architect of reform; ordered the 1989 crackdown

Xi Jinping
b. 1953
Party leader since 2012

Five ideas that unlock the country
1. Unity is the supreme political value. From the Warring States to the warlord era, Chinese history teaches that division brings chaos and suffering. That is why Beijing treats Taiwan, Tibet, Xinjiang and Hong Kong as questions of national survival rather than of self-determination, and why many Chinese people who criticise their government still share that view. Those on the other side (Taiwanese voters, Tibetan exiles, Uyghur activists, Hong Kong democrats) argue that unity imposed without consent is not unity.
2. Legitimacy is earned by results. The Mandate of Heaven made performance the test of a ruler. The modern party grounds its claim in delivering order, prosperity and national strength rather than in elections. When growth slows, as it is now, that bargain is under strain; the party has increasingly added nationalism and the memory of humiliation to performance as sources of support.
3. The past is political. The party treats history as part of its legitimacy, so its official accounts of the famine, the Cultural Revolution and 1989 are guarded. Many Chinese historians, journalists and families have nonetheless documented that past, sometimes at personal risk. To understand China, read both the official account and theirs.
4. The state and the market are partners, not opposites. Imperial salt monopolies, Song paper money, Ming silver taxes and today's state banks lending to private electric-car makers all show a tradition in which the state sets the direction and merchants operate within it. Whether that makes China's model uniquely effective or uniquely fragile is the central argument among economists (see Communism: The Idea, the States, and What Happened and the rest of this library's Political Economy series).
5. Demography is destiny, again. For two thousand years China's power rested on its numbers. Now its population is falling, its fertility rate is among the lowest in the world, and it will grow old before most of its people grow rich by Western standards. How a shrinking, ageing China behaves may be the most important question about it for the rest of this century.

China's leaders speak of a "great rejuvenation". The word assumes a return to something. The history above suggests the real question is which China they mean: the cosmopolitan Tang, the commercial Song, the vast Qing, or something that has never existed before.

The takeaway
China is a civilisation with three thousand years of written continuity and a century and a half of extreme rupture. It invented the examination-based bureaucracy, paper money and printing; was for long periods the world's richest and largest economy; and was then defeated, divided and invaded. The Communist Party unified it in 1949 and then presided over the deadliest famine in history and a decade of political terror, before a market reform that lifted close to 800 million people out of extreme poverty. Today it is a superpower with a shrinking population, ruled by a party that bases its legitimacy on results and on the memory of humiliation, and whose accounts of Xinjiang, Tibet, Hong Kong, Taiwan and 1989 are fiercely contested by its critics.
Try this: pick one object in your home that was made in China, and one idea you hold that came from China (tea, a Confucian proverb, a Daoist "go with the flow", even paper). Place each in this history: which dynasty or decade made it possible, and who did the work? Then read one short account of the same event from each side, say, Beijing's white paper on Xinjiang and the OHCHR assessment, and notice what each leaves out.

Sources & Further Reading
Sources
- World Bank, World Development Indicators (updated 8 October 2026): population, GDP, GDP per person, life expectancy, fertility, urbanisation, poverty at $3.00 a day.
- World Bank and Development Research Center of the State Council, Four Decades of Poverty Reduction in China (31 March 2022), and the World Bank press release of 1 April 2022.
- National Bureau of Statistics of China, statistical releases of 19 January 2026 (2025 population and GDP) and 19 October 2026 (first three quarters of 2026).
- UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, OHCHR Assessment of Human Rights Concerns in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region (31 August 2022), as reported by UN News, 31 August 2022, including China's response.
- Xinhua, communiqué of the Fifth Plenary Session of the 20th CPC Central Committee (29 October 2026); NPC Observer on the Law on Promoting Ethnic Unity and Progress (2026); France 24 reporting on Taiwan drills (29 December 2025), the Trump–Xi summit (15 May 2026), the Jimmy Lai sentence (9 February 2026) and Lobsang Sangay (22 October 2026).
- National Chengchi University Election Study Center, Taiwanese/Chinese identity trend, 1992–June 2026.
- Famine estimates: Yang Jisheng, Tombstone; Frank Dikötter, Mao's Great Famine; Cao Shuji (2005); Ansley Coale (1984); Ashton et al. (1984); Judith Banister (1987). Cultural Revolution: Andrew Walder, China Under Mao (2015) and the CCP History Research Center (1996). Land reform: Stavis (1978), The Cambridge History of China, Meisner (1999).
- Long-run economy: Angus Maddison's historical statistics; Broadberry, Guan and Li on Chinese GDP per head, 980–1850.
- Dynastic history (dates, censuses, Zheng He, Taiping, the Opium Wars, Tiananmen) cross-checked against the scholarly works cited in the relevant encyclopaedia articles; Britannica could not be reached for this piece. Each claim is logged with its source.
Go deeper
- 📘 The Search for Modern China — Jonathan Spence (the classic narrative from the late Ming to the reform era; elegant and balanced)
- 📘 China: A History — John Keay (a readable single-volume history from the beginnings to the present)
- 📘 Tombstone: The Great Chinese Famine, 1958–1962 — Yang Jisheng (a Chinese journalist's devastating archival account; banned in mainland China)
- 📘 Forgotten Ally: China's World War II — Rana Mitter (how the war with Japan made modern China, and why both Beijing and Taipei remember it as they do)
- 📘 Age of Ambition — Evan Osnos (the human experience of the reform era, told through individual lives)
- 🌐 Asia for Educators, Columbia University (free primary sources and timelines on Chinese history, from oracle bones to the PRC)
- 🌐 Related pieces in this library: China: A Condensed History of Dynasties, Revolution, and Return; A Brief History of Japan (this series); The Silk Roads; Laozi: The Way of the Dao and the Art of Wu Wei; Communism: The Idea, the States, and What Happened


A Brief History of Hong Kong: Fishing Villages, Opium Wars, Refugees, and Two Systems Under One Flag
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How a scatter of islands at the mouth of the Pearl River became a British colony, a refuge, a factory, a financial capital and then a Chinese city with its own laws, and why the people who live there, and the governments that claim to speak for them, tell its story so differently.

Companion pieces: China: A Condensed History of Dynasties, Revolution, and Return and A Brief History of the United Kingdom (this series). There is no condensed piece for Hong Kong; this is the first.
On 11 September 2026, a court in Hong Kong sentenced Chow Hang-tung, a barrister, to seven years and three months in prison. Her co-defendant Lee Cheuk-yan, a veteran trade unionist, got seven years. They had led the Hong Kong Alliance, the group that for thirty years organised candlelit vigils in Victoria Park every 4 June to remember the people killed in and around Beijing's Tiananmen Square in 1989. The court convicted them of incitement to subversion under the National Security Law.
The Hong Kong government welcomed the verdict. It said the Alliance's aim had always been to end the leadership of the Communist Party of China and overthrow the country's constitutional system, and that the court had stressed the defendants were tried for their acts, not their beliefs. A British minister, responding to the verdict, said that "even peaceful acts of remembrance in Hong Kong are now treated by the authorities as threats to national security."
That same year, Hong Kong's stock exchange ranked second in the world for money raised by new share listings, and an international index ranked the city the third-largest financial centre on Earth. Both things are true at once, and holding them together is the first lesson of Hong Kong's history.
How this history handles four different accounts
Hong Kong's story is told in at least four voices, each sincere and each partial:

Voice
Its core story

The government of the People's Republic of China
Hong Kong was always Chinese land, seized by Britain through unjust wars and unequal treaties; its 1997 "return to the motherland" ended a century of humiliation; since 2020 national security laws have restored order after foreign-backed turmoil

The Hong Kong SAR government
"One country, two systems" is working; the National Security Law brought a "transition from chaos to order"; the city remains free, capitalist, common-law and international

Pro-democracy Hong Kongers
The handover came with promises of a high degree of autonomy and, eventually, universal suffrage; those promises have been broken, and freedoms of speech, assembly and the press have been dismantled

Foreign governments (the UK, US, EU and others)
China is not complying with the treaty it signed in 1984; national security laws are being used against peaceful opposition, journalists and activists abroad

Most Hong Kongers have never fitted neatly into any one of these. Many have been proud of being Chinese and suspicious of Beijing; attached to British-era institutions and resentful of colonial rule; supportive of democracy and tired of disorder. This history states plainly what is established: dates, laws, court verdicts, arrest counts, election turnouts, population figures. Where the four accounts differ about what those facts mean, it gives each in its own words.
In this history

Before the colony, and the Opium Wars (to 1898)
The colonial city and the Japanese occupation (1841–1945)
Refugees and the boom (1945–1966)
Riots, reform and the Hong Kong miracle (1966–1982)
Negotiating the handover (1982–1997)
Two systems under strain (1997–2018)
The 2019 protests (2019–2020)
The national security era (2020–2024)
Hong Kong in 2026 (2025–2026)
How to understand Hong Kong today

Part 1 — Before the colony, and the Opium Wars (to 1898)
Hong Kong is small: about 1,100 square kilometres of hills, islands and reclaimed land, most of it too steep to build on. It sits on the eastern lip of the Pearl River delta, where China's third-longest river system reaches the South China Sea. That position is the whole reason for its history. The delta's great city, Guangzhou (which Europeans called Canton), lay upriver; Hong Kong's deep harbour and sheltering islands lay at the door.
People lived here long before any state. Archaeologists have found stone tools and pottery across the territory, and settlements on the beaches of Lamma, Lantau and other islands date back about six thousand years. Their makers were coastal fishers and foragers, probably related to the peoples Chinese records later called the Yue, who were not yet Chinese-speaking. They carved spirals and animal shapes into seaside rocks, and some of those carvings, at Big Wave Bay and on Tung Lung Island, can still be seen.
Into the empire
The Qin dynasty conquered the far south in 214 BC, and from then on the area was formally part of a Chinese state, though for centuries it was a remote frontier of salt pans, pearl beds and fishing villages. In 1955 workers levelling a hillside at Sham Shui Po found a brick tomb from the Eastern Han dynasty (AD 25–220), now the Lei Cheng Uk Han Tomb Museum: the oldest standing building in Hong Kong, and physical proof of Han Chinese presence nearly two thousand years ago. Under the Tang dynasty, a garrison at Tuen Mun guarded the sea route to Guangzhou, through which Arab and Persian ships came to trade.
The most dramatic moment came at the end of the Song dynasty. Fleeing the Mongols, the last Song court took refuge around the delta in the 1270s; a rock at Kowloon called Sung Wong Toi, "terrace of the Song king," marks the place where tradition says the boy emperor rested. In 1279 the Song fleet was destroyed at the Battle of Yamen, west of Hong Kong. Refugees from the north came with the Song and after it, and some founded families that still hold land in the New Territories today.
The people of the land and the people of the water
By the Ming and Qing dynasties the area had a settled society with distinct communities:

Community
Way of life

Punti ("local") clans
Cantonese-speaking farming lineages; the "Five Great Clans" (the Tang, Hau, Pang, Liu and Man) built walled villages, ancestral halls and lineage schools in what became the New Territories

Hakka ("guest people")
Later migrants from the north and east, often farming poorer hill land; many arrived to repopulate the coast after the 1660s

Tanka
Boat people who lived their whole lives on the water as fishers, often looked down on by land-dwellers

Hoklo
Fishing and seafaring people of Fujianese origin

The walled village of Kat Hing Wai, still lived in by members of the Tang lineage, and the temples of Tin Hau, goddess of the sea, along every stretch of coast, are the clearest survivors of that world.
It was not a peaceful world. In the 1660s the early Qing government, trying to starve out Ming loyalists based on Taiwan, ordered the whole southern coast evacuated inland: the Great Clearance. Villages in the Hong Kong area were emptied and burned, and many residents died. When the ban was lifted in the 1680s, the government encouraged Hakka settlers to farm the deserted land, which is part of why the New Territories became such a mixture of peoples.
Europeans at the door
The Portuguese reached the delta in 1513 and by 1557 had a permanent trading post at Macau, on the other side of the estuary. From 1757 the Qing confined all Western trade to Guangzhou under the Canton System: foreign merchants could live there only in a narrow strip of warehouses during the trading season and deal only with licensed Chinese firms. The arrangement suited the Qing, who regarded foreign trade as a favour, not a right. It frustrated the British East India Company and the private British merchants who followed it, because Britain bought vast quantities of Chinese tea and had little that China wanted in return. The difference was paid in silver, until the merchants found a product the Chinese would buy.
Opium and war
The product was opium, grown in British-ruled India, shipped to the delta and smuggled ashore by Chinese dealers in defiance of Qing law. Imports rose from around 4,000 chests a year in the early 1800s to nearly 20,000 chests a year by the early 1830s, each chest holding about 60 kilograms. Silver now flowed out of China, addiction spread, and officials in Beijing debated whether to legalise the drug or crush it.
The Daoguang Emperor chose to crush it. In 1839 he sent the official Lin Zexu to Guangzhou. Lin blockaded the foreign merchants in their warehouses until they surrendered their stock, more than 20,000 chests, and from 3 June 1839 had it destroyed at Humen, mixed with lime and salt and flushed into the sea. He also wrote a famous letter to Queen Victoria asking how Britain would feel if foreigners brought poison into England.
The British government responded with war. In Parliament the decision was bitterly contested. On 8 April 1840 a young Conservative MP, William Gladstone, told the House of Commons:

"A war more unjust in its origin, a war more calculated in its progress to cover this country with permanent disgrace, I do not know, and I have not read of." — William Gladstone, House of Commons, 8 April 1840

The next day the government survived the opposition's censure motion by just nine votes, 271 to 262.
Three treaties

Treaty
Date
What China gave up

Treaty of Nanking
29 August 1842
Hong Kong Island "in perpetuity"; five ports opened to British trade; a large indemnity

Convention of Peking
24 October 1860
Kowloon peninsula, south of what is now Boundary Street, and Stonecutters Island, after the Second Opium War

Convention for the Extension of Hong Kong Territory
9 June 1898
A 99-year lease of the "New Territories": the land north to the Shenzhen River and more than 200 islands, most of today's Hong Kong by area

British naval forces had in fact occupied Hong Kong Island already, raising the flag on 26 January 1841 at what is still called Possession Point. The Foreign Secretary, Lord Palmerston, was unimpressed with the prize: he complained that his envoy had obtained "a barren island with hardly a house upon it." There were, by a British count, about 7,500 people on it, most of them fishers and stone-cutters.
The 1898 lease is the detail that decided Hong Kong's fate a century later. Island and Kowloon were ceded forever; the New Territories, where the farmland, the water reservoirs and eventually most of the population would be, had to be returned on 30 June 1997. When British officials took possession in April 1899, the Punti clans of the New Territories took up arms; their resistance, sometimes called the Six-Day War, was put down within a week, and the British then largely left village customs and land law in the clans' hands.
Two ways of remembering
In China's official history, the Opium Wars open the "century of humiliation": the period from 1839 to 1949 when China was defeated, carved up and forced into what Chinese writers came to call the "unequal treaties." Hong Kong was the first piece of territory lost and, in that telling, its return in 1997 closed the circle. That account is taught in every Chinese school, and the government has argued that, because the treaties were imposed by force, Britain's sovereignty was never legitimate.
British accounts at the time spoke of free trade, the rights of merchants and the Qing's refusal to treat Britain as an equal. Few British historians now defend the opium trade itself; many add that the Qing state was facing far larger internal crises, including the Taiping Rebellion, and that the colony which grew on the island became, for millions of Chinese people, a refuge from China's own disasters. Both of those things can be true without cancelling the first.

Part 2 — The colonial city and the Japanese occupation (1841–1945)
Hong Kong was declared a free port from the start, and it grew because of it. Its harbour became the base for the China trade: for opium (legal in Hong Kong until the 20th century), and then for everything else. British trading houses such as Jardine Matheson and Swire made it their headquarters. The Hongkong and Shanghai Banking Corporation was founded there in 1865 to finance trade across Asia, and is still one of the largest banks in the world.
The colony's population was overwhelmingly Chinese from the beginning, and it rose and fell with conditions on the mainland. It reached about 530,000 by 1916 and about 725,000 by 1925, swelling every time the mainland suffered war, rebellion or famine and shrinking when things improved.
Two cities in one
Colonial Hong Kong was run by a governor appointed in London, advised by appointed Executive and Legislative Councils dominated by British officials and merchants. The first Chinese member of the Legislative Council, the lawyer Ng Choy, was appointed in 1880, and for decades afterwards Chinese representation remained small and hand-picked. English was the only official language until 1974.
Segregation was written into the city's geography. After the plague outbreak of 1894, the authorities used health fears to justify racial zoning, and the Peak Reservation Ordinance of 1904 reserved the cool, breezy heights above the city for non-Chinese residents. Exceptions were made only for a few, such as the wealthy Eurasian businessman Robert Ho Tung. Most Chinese residents lived crowded into tenements below.
And yet Chinese Hong Kong built its own institutions alongside the British ones. In 1870 Chinese merchants founded the Tung Wah Hospital, which provided Chinese medicine, care for the poor and, crucially, a way for the community's leaders to speak to the colonial government. Clan associations, guilds, temples, schools and newspapers flourished. Some practices that the British tolerated, such as mui tsai, the sale of young girls into domestic service, became scandals that reformers in Hong Kong and London campaigned against in the 1920s.

Year
Event

1841
British occupation of Hong Kong Island

1865
Hongkong and Shanghai Bank founded

1870
Tung Wah Hospital founded

1887
Hong Kong College of Medicine for Chinese founded; Sun Yat-sen is among its first graduates in 1892

1894
Bubonic plague; thousands die

1904
Peak Reservation Ordinance

1911
University of Hong Kong founded (opened 1912)

1925–26
Canton–Hong Kong strike and boycott

The city of revolutionaries
Hong Kong was a British colony on the edge of a collapsing Chinese empire, and that made it a base for Chinese revolutionaries. Sun Yat-sen, later revered as the founding father of modern China by both the Communists and the Nationalists, studied medicine in Hong Kong and later said that it was there that his revolutionary ideas formed. Rebels plotted in Hong Kong, raised money there and fled there when they failed.
The most serious challenge to the colony in this era came from the mainland's rising nationalism. In 1925, after British-led police in Shanghai shot demonstrators and British and French troops then fired on a march in Guangzhou, killing more than fifty people, unions backed by the Nationalist and Communist parties called a general strike. About a quarter of a million people left Hong Kong for Guangdong. For sixteen months the Canton–Hong Kong strike and boycott strangled the colony's trade, which fell by about half. It ended in October 1926 after the Nationalist leader Chiang Kai-shek turned on the left. The lesson for the British was that Hong Kong's prosperity depended, always, on the mainland's consent.
Ordinary life
For most residents, colonial Hong Kong meant hard work for low pay: dock coolies, rickshaw pullers, factory girls, servants and hawkers living several families to a floor in tenements with no running water. It also meant a degree of order, and freedom from the warlords and civil wars of the mainland, that drew people in. The colonial state did little for them directly. Welfare, health and education for the Chinese majority were largely left to charities, clans and churches. That pattern, a minimal state with a vibrant civil society, lasted into the 1960s.
War and occupation (1941–1945)
Japan invaded China in 1937, and Hong Kong filled with refugees: by 1941 its population had reached about 1.6 million. The British knew the colony could not be defended against a determined attack and garrisoned it anyway, with British, Canadian and Indian troops and local volunteers.
On the morning of 8 December 1941, hours after the attack on Pearl Harbor (which was 7 December on the other side of the date line), Japanese forces crossed the border from the mainland. They overran the New Territories and Kowloon in days, landed on the island on 18 December and fought their way across it. On 25 December the governor, Sir Mark Young, surrendered. Hong Kongers still call it "Black Christmas." Japanese troops committed atrocities during and after the battle, including the killing of wounded soldiers and medical staff at St Stephen's College in Stanley.
"Three years and eight months"
The occupation lasted three years and eight months, a phrase every older Hong Konger knows.

Occupation policy
What it meant

Population reduction
The occupiers forcibly deported large numbers of residents to the mainland to save food; many died on the way or after arrival

Military yen
The Hong Kong dollar was replaced by Japanese military currency, at worsening rates, and hyperinflation followed

Terror
The military police executed suspected opponents; one estimate is that around 10,000 civilians were executed during the occupation

Hunger
Rice rations shrank; by 1944–45 starvation was common

Internment
British and Allied civilians were held in Stanley camp; prisoners of war in Sham Shui Po and elsewhere, and many were shipped to labour camps in Japan

By 1945 the population had fallen to somewhere between about 600,000 and 750,000 (the estimates differ), less than half its prewar level.
Resistance came from two directions. The East River Column, a Communist-led guerrilla force based across the border in Guangdong, rescued Allied prisoners and downed American airmen and ran operations in the New Territories. The British Army Aid Group, organised by escaped prisoners, ran intelligence networks into the camps and the city. Both stories were later claimed by competing national narratives, and the East River Column's role in particular is emphasised in mainland accounts today.
After Japan's surrender in August 1945, a Royal Navy squadron arrived on 30 August 1945, and the formal Japanese surrender in Hong Kong was signed on 16 September. Whether Britain would get its colony back had been genuinely uncertain: China's Nationalist government under Chiang Kai-shek wanted it returned, and the American president Franklin Roosevelt had sympathised. In the end Britain moved first, and Chiang, dependent on Western support in his coming civil war with the Communists, let it pass.

Part 3 — Refugees and the boom (1945–1966)
The Chinese Civil War, which the Communists won in 1949, transformed Hong Kong more than the British ever did. Hundreds of thousands, and then over a million, people fled south: Nationalist soldiers and officials, landlords, ordinary peasants and workers, and the entrepreneurs of Shanghai, then China's industrial capital, who brought their capital, machinery, skills and sometimes whole workforces. By the 1961 census the population had passed three million.
Mao Zedong's new government chose not to take Hong Kong back. It never recognised the treaties, but it calculated that a British colony was more useful as a window to the world than as another Chinese city: a source of foreign currency, a channel for trade during the Western embargo of the Korean War years, and later a listening post. The policy was summarised as "long-term planning, full utilisation." The border was closed in the early 1950s, and Hong Kong was left in an uneasy limbo: a colony that its own neighbour could take at any moment, and chose not to.
Squatters, fire and public housing
Most refugees arrived with nothing. They built shacks of wood, tin and cardboard on the hillsides of Kowloon. On the night of 25 December 1953, one of these squatter areas, at Shek Kip Mei, burned down, leaving more than 53,000 people homeless. The government's answer marked a break with a century of minimal government: it began building multi-storey resettlement blocks, crude by later standards (shared toilets and kitchens on each floor, a whole family to a single room), but fireproof and cheap. It was the start of one of the largest public housing programmes in the world. Today about 45 percent of Hong Kong's households live in public rental flats or in subsidised flats bought from the government (2025 figures).
The factory of the world, first edition
With its old role as a China entrepôt cut off by the embargo, Hong Kong turned to manufacturing. Shanghai textile tycoons built spinning mills; then came garments, plastic flowers, wigs, toys, watches and electronics. Factories filled the floors of high-rise industrial buildings, and families did piecework at home. Wages were low, hours long and unions weak, but work was plentiful, and the colony's exports soared. The government kept taxes low and intervened little, a policy later named "positive non-interventionism" by the financial secretary John Cowperthwaite's successor; the economist Milton Friedman later held up Hong Kong as the world's purest example of free-market capitalism.

Hong Kong through time
Population
GDP per person (current US$)

1961
3.17 million
about $440

1971
4.05 million
about $1,100

1981
5.18 million
about $6,000

1991
5.75 million
about $15,500

1997
6.49 million
about $27,300

2019
7.51 million
about $48,400

2025
7.50 million
about $57,000

Population at mid-year, from the Census and Statistics Department; GDP per person from the World Bank. Figures are not adjusted for inflation.
Tensions
The refugee city was politically divided, between supporters of the Communist People's Republic and of the Nationalists who had fled to Taiwan. On 10 October 1956, the Nationalist national day, riots by pro-Nationalist crowds in Kowloon left dozens dead. In 1962, during the famine that followed Mao's Great Leap Forward, mainland border guards briefly stopped stopping people, and tens of thousands poured across; most were caught and sent back, in scenes that shocked the colony. In 1963 a drought left the taps running for four hours every four days, until in 1965 water began flowing from the Dongjiang river in Guangdong, under an agreement that still supplies most of Hong Kong's water. The colony's survival depended, literally, on the mainland.
How people lived
For a refugee family in the 1950s and early 1960s, life was crowded and precarious and, for many, better than what they had left. Parents worked twelve-hour shifts in factories six or seven days a week; children threaded plastic flowers or assembled toys at home for piece rates in the evenings, and went to school, if they went at all, on rooftops of resettlement blocks where charities ran classes. A family of five might share a single room of about 11 square metres, with a communal tap down the corridor. Social life ran through the extended family, the native-place association of one's home district in Guangdong or Fujian, the street market, the tea house and the mahjong table. Cantonese, not Mandarin or English, was the language of daily life, and it absorbed the accents of refugees from every part of the south.
The most extreme example of the city's improvised growth was the Kowloon Walled City, the old Qing fort that had been left out of the 1898 lease. Neither Britain nor China would govern it, so it grew into a dense, unregulated warren of high-rise blocks, with unlicensed dentists, food factories and, for a time, triad-run vice. It was demolished in 1993–94, and is now a park.

Part 4 — Riots, reform and the Hong Kong miracle (1966–1982)
In April 1966 a young man went on hunger strike against a five-cent rise in the fare of the Star Ferry across the harbour. The protest grew into several nights of rioting in Kowloon. An official inquiry concluded that the causes ran far deeper than ferry fares: a generation of young people born or raised in the colony felt no stake in a government that did not speak their language, did not consult them and was visibly corrupt.
1967
A year later came something much more dangerous. In May 1967 labour disputes, including one at a plastic flower factory in San Po Kong, turned into confrontations with the police. Mainland China was in the frenzy of the Cultural Revolution, and local leftist organisations, inspired and encouraged by it, turned the disputes into a campaign against British rule. Crowds waved Mao's Little Red Book outside Government House. By the summer the campaign had moved to bombs: police and soldiers dealt with as many as 8,000 suspected devices, about 1,100 of them real. In August a popular radio commentator, Lam Bun, who had mocked the leftists on air, was burned alive in his car with his cousin. In July, gunmen from across the border killed five policemen at the frontier village of Sha Tau Kok.

The 1967 riots

Deaths
51, including police officers, rioters, bystanders and bomb victims

Injured
832

Arrested
4,979

Convicted
1,936

End
The bombing faded after Premier Zhou Enlai ordered leftists in Hong Kong to stop, in December 1967

The two sides still remember it differently. For the colonial government and most Hong Kongers at the time, the riots were Communist terrorism, and the public largely rallied behind the police (who were granted the title "Royal" in 1969 for their role). For the leftists, and for some in Beijing's camp today, they were a patriotic struggle against colonial oppression; in 2001 the first post-handover government awarded its highest honour, the Grand Bauhinia Medal, to the man who had chaired the leftists' "struggle committee," a decision that caused an outcry. Among those jailed in 1967 was a schoolboy, Tsang Tak-sing, who had handed out leftist leaflets at his school; decades later he served as a minister in the post-handover government.
The MacLehose decade
The riots frightened the colonial government into reform. Under Sir Murray MacLehose, governor from 1971 to 1982, it did more for ordinary Hong Kongers than in the previous 130 years:

Housing. A ten-year programme, announced in 1972, aimed to rehouse 1.8 million people in self-contained flats with their own kitchens and toilets, and built new towns at Sha Tin, Tuen Mun and Tsuen Wan.
Education. Free and compulsory schooling was extended to nine years by 1978.
Language. Chinese became an official language alongside English in 1974.
Transport. The Mass Transit Railway opened in 1979, and the Cross-Harbour Tunnel in 1972.
Corruption. In 1973 a senior police officer, Chief Superintendent Peter Godber, fled to England while under investigation over assets worth more than HK$4.3 million. Public fury, led by students, forced the creation in February 1974 of the Independent Commission Against Corruption (ICAC), answerable directly to the governor. It brought Godber back, saw him jailed for four years, and then took on the police force's syndicates themselves. Within a decade a city where bribes for everything from ambulance rides to fire hoses had been routine became one of the cleanest in Asia.

The ICAC did not just catch corrupt officials. It changed what Hong Kongers expected of government, and it became one of the institutions that made them feel Hong Kong was different from the mainland. That sense would matter enormously later.

A Hong Kong identity
The children of the refugees grew up thinking of themselves as Heunggongyahn, Hong Kong people. They watched Cantonese television (TVB began broadcasting in 1967), listened to the new Cantopop, and filled cinemas for kung fu films from the Shaw Brothers and Golden Harvest studios. Bruce Lee, born in San Francisco and raised in Hong Kong, became the first Asian global film star before his death in 1973. Hong Kong cinema would go on, in the 1980s and 1990s, to influence Hollywood through directors such as John Woo and Wong Kar-wai, and stars such as Jackie Chan.
Boat people and a new China
From 1975, after the fall of Saigon, refugees fled Vietnam by sea, and Hong Kong declared itself a "port of first asylum" in 1979, the year more than 68,700 arrived. The camps held as many as 64,300 people at their peak in 1991. From 1988 new arrivals were screened, and those judged to be economic migrants were sent back, some of them forcibly, which drew international criticism. The last camp closed in 2000.
The decisive change came from the mainland. After Mao's death in 1976, Deng Xiaoping began opening China's economy, and in 1980 created a Special Economic Zone at Shenzhen, then a small town just across the border. Hong Kong factory owners, squeezed by rising wages, moved production north by the thousand. Within two decades Hong Kong's own factory jobs had largely gone, replaced by trade, logistics, finance and services, with Hong Kong as the gateway through which money and goods flowed into and out of the new China. Between 1971 and 1981 Hong Kong's income per person rose more than fivefold in US dollar terms.

Part 5 — Negotiating the handover (1982–1997)
The lease on the New Territories still ran out in 1997, and by the late 1970s that date was beginning to matter: banks would not lend on mortgages that ran past it. In 1979 MacLehose raised the question with Deng Xiaoping in Beijing and was told that Hong Kong's sovereignty belonged to China, though investors should "put their hearts at ease."
In September 1982 Margaret Thatcher, fresh from victory in the Falklands, flew to Beijing hoping to keep British administration in some form. Deng refused. Thatcher later recalled him saying that he could walk in and take the whole lot that afternoon. Leaving the Great Hall of the People, she slipped and fell on the steps, a picture Hong Kongers read as an omen. In September 1983, as talks stalled, the Hong Kong dollar collapsed and shoppers stripped supermarkets of rice; the government stabilised the currency by pegging it to the US dollar at 7.80, a link that still holds.
The Joint Declaration
The Sino-British Joint Declaration, signed in Beijing on 19 December 1984 by Thatcher and the Chinese premier Zhao Ziyang, came into force in May 1985 and was registered with the United Nations as a treaty. Britain would hand over all of Hong Kong on 1 July 1997. In return China set out its "basic policies" for the territory, in language that would be quoted, argued over and cited in courts for the next forty years:

The Hong Kong Special Administrative Region "will enjoy a high degree of autonomy, except in foreign and defence affairs... The current social and economic systems in Hong Kong will remain unchanged, and so will the life-style... and they will remain unchanged for 50 years." — Sino-British Joint Declaration, 1984

The formula was Deng's: "one country, two systems." It had been designed for Taiwan, and Hong Kong would be its test. The Declaration also promised that the region would be "vested with executive, legislative and independent judicial power, including that of final adjudication," that its laws would "remain basically unchanged," and that rights and freedoms "of speech, of the press, of assembly" would be protected by law.
China's National People's Congress then wrote the details into the Basic Law, adopted on 4 April 1990, Hong Kong's mini-constitution from 1997. Article 1 declares Hong Kong "an inalienable part of the People's Republic of China." Article 5 says the socialist system will not be practised there for fifty years. Articles 45 and 68 say that "the ultimate aim" is the selection of the Chief Executive and the election of all members of the legislature by universal suffrage, "in the light of the actual situation" and "in accordance with the principle of gradual and orderly progress." And Article 23 says that Hong Kong "shall enact laws on its own" to prohibit treason, secession, sedition and subversion against the Central People's Government, and the theft of state secrets.
Every later conflict is folded into those articles. Pro-democracy Hong Kongers read Articles 45 and 68 as a promise. Beijing read the qualifiers ("actual situation," "gradual and orderly") as its right to decide the pace, and Article 23 as Hong Kong's duty.
1989
On the night of 3–4 June 1989, the People's Liberation Army cleared Tiananmen Square and the streets of Beijing of the protest movement that had filled them for seven weeks, killing hundreds or more; the true number has never been published. Hong Kong had already watched the protests with passion: on 21 May, organisers estimated, around 1.5 million people marched in sympathy, out of a population of under six million. After the killings, a group of Hong Kong activists and businessmen ran a secret operation, later known as Operation Yellowbird, to smuggle wanted student leaders and intellectuals out of China via Hong Kong.
The new Hong Kong Alliance in Support of Patriotic Democratic Movements of China began holding a candlelit vigil in Victoria Park every 4 June. For thirty years, until the authorities banned it in 2020, it was the only large public commemoration of the massacre on Chinese soil. The vigil, and the Alliance that organised it, are where this history began.
Leaving, and staying
Confidence collapsed. Over half a million people are estimated to have emigrated between 1987 and 1996, mostly middle-class professionals heading for Canada, Australia, the United States and Britain. Britain had already created a new nationality for Hong Kong's British subjects, British National (Overseas), which gave a passport but no right to live in the UK. Under pressure, Parliament agreed in 1990 to give full citizenship to a limited number of selected families, a scheme critics in Hong Kong found grudging and critics in Britain found too generous. Many emigrants later returned, keeping a foreign passport as insurance.
Patten and the last governor
Britain introduced the first directly elected seats in the Legislative Council in 1991. The last governor, Chris Patten, a senior Conservative politician rather than a diplomat, arrived in July 1992 and widened the franchise for the 1995 elections, making the council fully elected for the first time, though most seats were still chosen by small professional and business "functional constituencies" whose voter base he greatly enlarged. Beijing said this broke the understandings reached on the transition. The director of its Hong Kong office, Lu Ping, denounced Patten as a "sinner" who would be condemned for generations. China set up a Provisional Legislative Council, chosen by a selection committee, to replace the elected one on the day of the handover.
Patten's defenders say he gave Hong Kong a taste of real democracy that Britain should have offered decades earlier. His critics, including some British diplomats who had negotiated the Joint Declaration, say he provoked Beijing for little gain, and that the council he created lasted barely two years. Both camps agree on the awkward fact behind the argument: for 150 years Britain had governed Hong Kong without democracy, and discovered its virtues only on the way out.
The handover
At midnight between 30 June and 1 July 1997, in a ceremony at the new Convention and Exhibition Centre on the harbour, the Union flag came down and the flag of the People's Republic went up, beside the new Bauhinia flag of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region. China's president, Jiang Zemin, and Britain's Prince Charles spoke. Patten and the prince sailed away on the royal yacht Britannia in the rain. People's Liberation Army troops crossed the border at dawn. Hong Kong's first Chief Executive, the shipping magnate Tung Chee-hwa, took office, chosen by a 400-member selection committee.
For Beijing, the day was a national triumph: the first of the lost territories recovered. For many Hong Kongers it was a day of mixed feelings. For Britain, it was the end of an empire on which, it used to be said, the sun never set.

Part 6 — Two systems under strain (1997–2018)
Shocks and a first constitutional crisis
Hong Kong's first years as a Special Administrative Region were dominated not by politics but by shocks. The Asian financial crisis struck weeks after the handover; speculators attacked the Hong Kong dollar, property prices collapsed, and in August 1998 the government spent heavily buying shares on the stock market to defeat them, a startling move for the world's supposed free-market model. A bird-flu outbreak in 1997 led to the slaughter of every chicken in the territory.
The first constitutional crisis came in 1999. Hong Kong's Court of Final Appeal ruled that hundreds of thousands of mainland-born children of Hong Kong residents had a right to live in Hong Kong. The government, alarmed by the numbers, asked the Standing Committee of China's National People's Congress (NPCSC) to "interpret" the Basic Law, and the NPCSC effectively reversed the ruling. It was legal under the Basic Law, which gives the NPCSC the final power of interpretation. It also showed, for the first time, that the common-law courts did not have the last word.
2003: SARS and Article 23
In March 2003 an atypical pneumonia, SARS, spread through Hong Kong's hospitals and housing estates. By the end of the outbreak, according to the World Health Organization, Hong Kong had 1,755 probable cases and 299 deaths, more than a third of the world's SARS deaths. The city's medical workers were among the dead.
While the city was still recovering, the government pushed its Article 23 bill on national security. Critics, including the Bar Association, journalists and church leaders, feared that its offences of sedition and subversion, and powers to ban groups linked to organisations banned on the mainland, could be used against peaceful dissent. On 1 July 2003, the sixth anniversary of the handover, hundreds of thousands marched against it: the police counted 350,000, and around half a million is the commonly accepted figure. When the pro-business Liberal Party withdrew its support, the government lacked the votes and shelved the bill. The security secretary, Regina Ip, resigned; in 2005 Tung Chee-hwa himself stepped down, citing health.
Beijing drew its own conclusions. That summer it signed CEPA, a free-trade agreement with Hong Kong, and allowed mainland tourists to visit as individuals rather than in tour groups, a scheme that eventually brought tens of millions of visitors a year. In 2004 the NPCSC ruled that any change to the electoral system needed its approval first, and ruled out universal suffrage for 2007 and 2008. In 2007 it said that the Chief Executive "may" be elected by universal suffrage in 2017.

Chief Executive
In office
How chosen

Tung Chee-hwa
1997–2005
400-member selection committee, then an 800-member Election Committee

Donald Tsang
2005–2012
Election Committee; a career civil servant from the colonial era

Leung Chun-ying
2012–2017
1,200-member Election Committee

Carrie Lam
2017–2022
1,200-member Election Committee

John Lee
2022–
1,500-member Election Committee; sole candidate

Two systems, one city
For the rest of the 2000s, many Hong Kongers felt that "one country, two systems" was working. The courts were independent, the press was lively, the June 4 vigil drew tens of thousands every year, and the economy boomed on mainland money. But integration also brought friction. Mainland shoppers emptied pharmacies of baby milk after a 2008 contamination scandal on the mainland. "Parallel traders" crowded border towns. Mainland mothers came to give birth in Hong Kong so their children would gain residency, until the government banned the practice in 2013. Property prices soared beyond the reach of young people, and many blamed mainland buyers.
In 2012 the government proposed compulsory "moral and national education" in schools. Critics said the draft materials praised the Communist Party uncritically. A group of secondary-school students called Scholarism, led by a 15-year-old named Joshua Wong, organised protests and hunger strikes, and tens of thousands surrounded government headquarters. The government backed down. Beijing later described the episode as one of a series of "unprecedented crises" stirred up by "anti-China elements." Its leaders, the students who had won, would be in prison a decade later.
Occupy and the umbrellas
The promise of universal suffrage in 2017 came to a head in 2014. A law professor at the University of Hong Kong, Benny Tai, with a sociologist and a Baptist minister, proposed Occupy Central with Love and Peace: if Beijing did not allow genuine choice of candidates, citizens would peacefully block the financial district.
On 31 August 2014 the NPCSC decided that from 2017 Hong Kongers could vote for their Chief Executive, but only from two or three candidates approved by a majority of a nominating committee structured much like the existing Election Committee. Supporters called it universal suffrage. Opponents called it the right to choose between Beijing's candidates.
Students went on strike. On 28 September police fired tear gas at crowds outside government headquarters in Admiralty, and the protesters, who had been using umbrellas against pepper spray, became the Umbrella Movement. For 79 days, until 15 December, tens of thousands occupied main roads in Admiralty, Causeway Bay and Mong Kok, with tents, study corners, recycling stations and an enormous yellow banner reading "I want genuine universal suffrage." It was overwhelmingly non-violent. It won nothing. In June 2015 the Legislative Council voted down Beijing's reform package, 28 votes to 8, so the old system stayed.

The Umbrella Movement

Trigger
NPCSC decision of 31 August 2014 on the 2017 election

Duration
28 September to 15 December 2014 (79 days)

Sites
Admiralty, Mong Kok, Causeway Bay

Outcome
Reform vetoed in June 2015; no change to the electoral system

Aftermath
Benny Tai and others convicted of public-nuisance offences in 2019

Harder edges
The failure of peaceful protest pushed parts of a younger generation toward localism: the view that Hong Kong was a distinct community, even a nation, whose interests differed from China's. A few advocated outright independence, a position that had barely existed before. Then came events that made the "second system" feel less secure.

The booksellers. Between October and December 2015, five people linked to a Causeway Bay bookshop that sold gossipy political books banned on the mainland disappeared. One, the Swedish citizen Gui Minhai, was taken from Thailand; another, Lee Bo, vanished from inside Hong Kong. They later appeared in mainland custody, some making televised confessions. One, Lam Wing-kee, returned and publicly described his detention.
Mong Kok, 2016. On the night of the Lunar New Year, a clash over unlicensed street-food hawkers turned into a riot; protesters threw bricks and police fired warning shots. The localist leader Edward Leung was later jailed for six years for rioting.
The oaths. After the 2016 Legislative Council elections, two young localists used their swearing-in to display a "Hong Kong is not China" banner. The NPCSC issued an interpretation of the Basic Law on oath-taking, and the courts disqualified them and then four other pro-democracy legislators.
A party banned. In 2018 the government banned the small Hong Kong National Party, which advocated independence, on national security grounds.

The HKSAR government and Beijing saw these as a rising separatist threat to the country's sovereignty, encouraged from abroad, which the city's laws were too weak to stop. Many pro-democracy Hong Kongers saw a shrinking space for opposition and a promise of democracy withdrawn. Both perceptions hardened. Into that atmosphere, in 2019, came a bill about extradition.

Part 7 — The 2019 protests (2019–2020)
In February 2018 a young Hong Kong man killed his pregnant girlfriend, Poon Hiu-wing, while the two were on holiday in Taiwan, and fled home. Hong Kong had no extradition agreement with Taiwan, or with mainland China. In February 2019 Carrie Lam's government proposed amending the law to allow case-by-case transfers of suspects to any jurisdiction, including the mainland.
That last part was the problem. For many Hong Kongers, the firewall between their courts and the mainland's, where the Communist Party controls the judiciary and conviction rates are near total, was the heart of "two systems." Lawyers, business chambers and foreign governments raised objections. The government pressed on.
A city in revolt

Date
Event

9 June 2019
Organisers estimate over a million marchers; police say 270,000

12 June
Protesters surround the Legislative Council; police fire tear gas and rubber bullets; the police chief calls it a "riot"

15–16 June
The government suspends the bill; the next day organisers estimate about 2 million march, police say 338,000 at peak

1 July
Protesters break into and occupy the Legislative Council chamber

21 July
Men in white shirts attack passengers and protesters at Yuen Long station; police are slow to arrive, and trust in the police collapses among much of the public

4 September
Lam announces the bill will be withdrawn (formally done on 23 October)

1 October
On China's National Day, a police officer shoots an 18-year-old protester in the chest

4 October
Emergency powers used to ban face masks at gatherings

8 November
Student Chow Tsz-lok dies after a fall in a car park during a police operation

November
Sieges of the Chinese University and Polytechnic University; a 70-year-old cleaner, Luo Changqing, dies after being hit by a brick thrown during a clash

24 November
District Council elections: turnout about 71 percent, a record; pro-democracy candidates win control of 17 of the 18 councils

The protesters adopted "Be water," Bruce Lee's phrase, as a strategy: leaderless, organised on encrypted apps and online forums, appearing and vanishing across the city. They issued five demands: full withdrawal of the bill, retraction of the "riot" label, release of those arrested, an independent inquiry into police conduct, and universal suffrage. The bill was withdrawn; the other four were refused. The movement split between "peaceful, rational, non-violent" marchers and "frontliners" who fought police with bricks and petrol bombs, vandalised pro-Beijing businesses and metro stations, and in some cases attacked people who argued with them. The two wings largely refused to condemn each other.
By the latest police statistics cited by the British government in 2026, at least 10,286 people were arrested in connection with the 2019 protests. The HKSAR government said in February 2026 that more than 2,400 had been "held accountable" in the courts.
Four accounts of 2019

Account
How it describes 2019

Beijing
A "colour revolution" backed by foreign forces, especially the United States and Britain, aiming to seize power in Hong Kong and destabilise China; a time when Hong Kong was "undefended" in national security

HKSAR government
"Black-clad violence": months of rioting, arson and attacks that left people living in fear and nearly destroyed the economy; the police acted with restraint against extreme violence

Pro-democracy Hong Kongers
A popular uprising against the erosion of promised freedoms, met with excessive police force and no political concessions; the District Council landslide showed which side most voters were on

Foreign governments
The US Congress passed the Hong Kong Human Rights and Democracy Act in November 2019, requiring annual checks that Hong Kong was sufficiently autonomous to keep special trade treatment; the UK and others called for an independent inquiry

The facts that are not in dispute are also these: that both sides used violence, that the government made no concession beyond withdrawing the bill, that public trust in the police and the government fell to the lowest levels recorded since the handover, and that turnout and the result of November's election were exceptional. What they meant is the argument. Even the inquiry into the police became part of it: in May 2020 the statutory Independent Police Complaints Council published a report that broadly found officers had acted within guidelines, while recommending improvements; the international experts advising it had quit months earlier, saying it lacked the powers needed for a real investigation.
The movement also built a culture of its own: "Lennon Walls" of coloured sticky notes on underpasses and footbridges, human chains across the city, and an anthem, "Glory to Hong Kong," written anonymously in August 2019 and sung in shopping malls. In 2024 the government obtained a court injunction against broadcasting or distributing the song with seditious intent. For its supporters it was a hymn to a city's identity; for the government it was the soundtrack of a riot.
In January 2020 COVID-19 reached Hong Kong. Gatherings were restricted under health rules, and the street protests faded.

Part 8 — The national security era (2020–2024)
On 30 June 2020, the NPCSC in Beijing passed the Law on Safeguarding National Security in the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region, by 162 votes to none. It came into force in Hong Kong that night. Its text had not been published in advance.

The National Security Law (2020)

Offences
Secession, subversion, terrorist activities, and collusion with a foreign country or external elements

Maximum penalty
Life imprisonment

New bodies
A mainland Office for Safeguarding National Security in Hong Kong, outside local jurisdiction; a national security department in the police; designated judges chosen by the Chief Executive

Reach
Article 38 applies to offences committed outside Hong Kong by people who are not residents

Legal basis
A decision of the National People's Congress of 28 May 2020, citing Hong Kong's failure to legislate under Article 23

The HKSAR government's case for the law, restated on its fifth anniversary in June 2025, was that Hong Kong had been "undefended" for 23 years, that a series of crises culminating in 2019 had threatened the city and the country, and that the law "immediately stopped violence and curbed disorder," allowing a "major transition from chaos to order." It pointed out that the UK, the US, Canada, Australia and Singapore all have national security laws.
Within hours, the student group Demosistō, co-founded by Joshua Wong, dissolved. Britain, which said the law breached the Joint Declaration, and 26 other countries condemned it. Over the next eighteen months, most of the institutions of pro-democracy Hong Kong disappeared:

July 2020. The government postponed the September Legislative Council election by a year, citing COVID-19.
November 2020. After the NPCSC ruled that legislators who supported sanctions or did not genuinely uphold the Basic Law should be disqualified, four were removed, and the remaining pro-democracy members resigned together.
January 2021. Police arrested dozens of opposition figures over an unofficial "primary" election held in July 2020, in which more than 600,000 people had voted. Forty-seven were charged with conspiracy to commit subversion. The prosecution argued that their plan, to win a majority, veto the budget and force the Chief Executive to resign, was a plot to paralyse the government. The defendants argued it used powers the Basic Law itself provides.
June 2021. After police raided its newsroom and arrested its editors, Apple Daily, the pro-democracy tabloid founded by the businessman Jimmy Lai, printed its final edition. Lai had been arrested in August 2020.
Mid-2021. The Civil Human Rights Front (organiser of the great marches), the Professional Teachers' Union (the largest union in Hong Kong) and the Hong Kong Alliance (organiser of the 4 June vigil) all dissolved; the government struck the Alliance off the companies register.
December 2021. National security police arrested six current and former senior staff of the online outlet Stand News for conspiring to publish seditious material; it closed the same day.

"Patriots administering Hong Kong"
On 11 March 2021 the National People's Congress decided to overhaul Hong Kong's electoral system, which the NPCSC then rewrote. Carrie Lam's statement that day said the changes would ensure "patriots administering Hong Kong" and get the city "back on the right track."

Before 2021
After 2021

Legislative Council seats
70
90

Directly elected seats
35 (half)
20 (about a fifth)

Seats chosen by the Election Committee
none
40

Candidate screening
Returning officers could disqualify
A Candidate Eligibility Review Committee vets every candidate for patriotism

The new system's first Legislative Council election, in December 2021, had a turnout of 30.2 percent in the directly elected seats, the lowest in Hong Kong's history. The 2023 District Council elections, in which most seats were no longer directly elected, had a turnout of 27.5 percent. In 2022 the former security secretary John Lee became Chief Executive as the only candidate.
The British government declared in March 2021 that China was in "a state of ongoing non-compliance" with the Joint Declaration, a judgment it has repeated in every six-monthly report to Parliament since. China's position, stated in 2017 and repeatedly since, is that the Joint Declaration was a historical document that dealt with the handover, that Britain has no remaining responsibility or right of supervision over Hong Kong, and that foreign criticism is interference in China's internal affairs.
Leaving
Hong Kongers responded the way previous generations had: many left. In January 2021 Britain opened a new visa route for people with British National (Overseas) status and their families, offering a path to settlement and citizenship. China responded by ceasing to recognise BN(O) passports as travel documents. By 30 June 2026 the Home Office had granted 187,552 BN(O) visas to people applying from outside the UK and 54,284 extensions to people already there; grants peaked in the year to March 2022, at 86,439. Canada, Australia and Taiwan also eased entry. Hong Kong's resident population fell from 7.51 million in mid-2019 to 7.35 million in mid-2022, according to the Census and Statistics Department, before recovering to 7.54 million by mid-2023 as the government launched schemes to attract mainland and foreign "talent" and pandemic border closures ended.
Article 23, at last
On 19 March 2024 the Legislative Council unanimously passed the Safeguarding National Security Ordinance, the local Article 23 law that had been shelved in 2003, after a one-month consultation and a fast-tracked debate. It took effect on 23 March. It added offences including treason, insurrection, sabotage, external interference and theft of state secrets, and raised the maximum sentence for sedition from two years to as much as ten. John Lee called it "a historic moment that Hong Kong has been waiting for 26 years, 8 months and 19 days." The UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, Volker Türk, called its rushed passage "a regressive step for the protection of human rights," and the US, the UK and the EU criticised it. The HKSAR government replied that "safeguarding national security is an inherent right of all sovereign states" and condemned the criticism as smears.
In May 2024 the court in the case of the 47 democrats convicted 14 of the 16 who had pleaded not guilty; the rest had pleaded guilty. In November it sentenced 45 of them. Benny Tai, judged the organiser, received ten years. The government said the "Project 35+" plan had aimed "to undermine, destroy or overthrow" the political system. Foreign governments and human rights organisations called it a trial of peaceful political participation.
Since 2023 the police have also issued warrants, with rewards, for activists living abroad, including in Britain, the United States, Canada and Australia; by June 2026 there were 34 such warrants. Their passports have been cancelled, and some of their relatives in Hong Kong have been questioned or prosecuted.

Part 9 — Hong Kong in 2026 (2025–2026)
By the autumn of 2026 the institutions of the old opposition were almost all gone. The two longest-surviving pro-democracy parties, the League of Social Democrats and the Democratic Party, founded in 1994 and once the largest party in the legislature, both disbanded in 2025. In December 2025 every one of the 90 seats in the new Legislative Council went to candidates of the pro-Beijing establishment; turnout in the directly elected seats was 31.9 percent, slightly up on 2021. In February 2026 the Hong Kong Federation of Students, founded in 1958, announced its dissolution.
Three trials

Case
Outcome

Jimmy Lai and Apple Daily
Convicted on 15 December 2025 of conspiracy to collude with foreign forces and conspiracy to publish seditious publications; sentenced on 9 February 2026 to 20 years in prison, after a trial of 156 hearing days. Eight co-defendants received six years and three months to ten years

The 47
The Court of Appeal dismissed the appeals and upheld the convictions and sentences on 23 February 2026

The Hong Kong Alliance
Chow Hang-tung and Lee Cheuk-yan convicted of incitement to subversion on 21 August 2026; on 11 September, sentenced to seven years and three months and seven years; Albert Ho, who pleaded guilty, to five years and two months

John Lee said after the Lai sentence that Lai's "evil deeds were beyond measure," that he had "openly begged for external forces to impose sanctions" on China, and that the verdict showed "the rule of law is upheld and justice is done." Britain's Foreign Secretary, whose department reports to Parliament on Hong Kong every six months, wrote in October 2026 that the UK was "deeply concerned and disturbed by the continued imprisonment of Jimmy Lai," a British citizen, and called for his release; Prime Minister Keir Starmer had raised the case with President Xi Jinping in Beijing in January 2026. The European Parliament passed a resolution condemning the conviction. China's State Council published a white paper in February 2026 stating that the central government bears "fundamental responsibility" for national security in Hong Kong.
According to Hong Kong police statistics quoted by the British government, 385 people had been arrested for national security offences by the end of 2025, 69 of them in 2025. At least 47 had been arrested under the 2024 ordinance by mid-2026.
The fire
On the afternoon of 26 November 2025, a fire broke out in the bamboo scaffolding and protective netting wrapped around Wang Fuk Court, a subsidised housing estate of eight 31-storey towers in Tai Po that was being renovated. It spread to seven of the towers and burned for two days. When police completed forensic identification of the remains in January 2026, they confirmed that 168 people had died, Hong Kong's deadliest fire in generations.
An Independent Committee chaired by a judge reported on 29 October 2026. It found that fire-retardant scaffolding nets had apparently been replaced with non-fire-retardant ones, that flammable foam boards had been used on windows, and that openings had been cut into escape staircases; that regulation had relied on contractors and professionals who had abandoned their responsibilities; that four government departments had failed in their regulatory duties; and that triads and criminal syndicates had rigged bids for building-maintenance contracts. The government announced reforms, including a new criminal offence of bid-rigging, and the same day the Secretary for Housing resigned. Dozens of people were arrested on manslaughter or corruption charges.
The aftermath also showed how the national security era had changed public life. A university student who started an online petition calling for an independent inquiry was arrested on suspicion of sedition and later expelled by his university, and others were charged with seditious publications over their commentary on the fire. Officials, including Beijing's top official for Hong Kong affairs, warned against "politicising" the disaster. Supporters of the government argue that it acted fast, compensated victims and commissioned an inquiry that criticised its own departments. Critics argue that, in the old Hong Kong, the questions would have been asked by a free press, an elected opposition and protesters in the street.
The economy and the people

Hong Kong, 2026
Latest figure
Source

Population
7.52 million (mid-2026, provisional)
Census and Statistics Department

Births
about 29,700 in the first half of 2026, against about 53,300 in the first half of 2019
C&SD

Fertility rate
0.84 children per woman (2024), among the lowest in the world
World Bank

Life expectancy
85.4 years (2024), among the highest in the world
World Bank

GDP per person
about $57,000 (2025)
World Bank

Hong Kong's GDP as a share of mainland China's
about 18 percent in 1997; about 2 percent in 2025
World Bank (computed)

Financial centre ranking
3rd in the world (Global Financial Centres Index, March 2026)
Z/Yen, as cited by the UK government

BN(O) visas granted
187,552 out-of-country, plus 54,284 in-country extensions (to June 2026)
UK Home Office

The economy, battered by the protests, the pandemic and high interest rates, recovered unevenly. The stock exchange revived on a wave of mainland technology listings; in the first half of 2026 it was second in the world for money raised by new listings. Property prices fell from their peaks, retail and tourism changed as mainland visitors spent less on luxury goods, and the government ran large budget deficits. Beijing's plans tie the city ever more closely into the "Greater Bay Area" of nine Guangdong cities; the government is planning a "Northern Metropolis" on the border with Shenzhen, and in 2026 consulted on Hong Kong's first-ever Five-Year Plan, aligned with the mainland's.
The common-law courts still sit, with English in use alongside Chinese; Hong Kong keeps its own currency, customs territory, passport, Olympic team and a border with the mainland. Foreign judges have continued to sit on the Court of Final Appeal, though several resigned after 2020, some saying the political environment had made it impossible to serve. In September 2025 the Legislative Council rejected the government's own bill to recognise same-sex partnerships, which the Court of Final Appeal had required in 2023. Elections for the Election Committee, which will choose the next Chief Executive in 2027, were scheduled for 22 November 2026.

Part 10 — How to understand Hong Kong today
Key dates

Year
Event

214 BC
Qin conquest brings the area into the Chinese state

1279
Last Song court destroyed at Yamen

1839
Lin Zexu destroys British opium; First Opium War begins

1841
British flag raised on Hong Kong Island

1842
Treaty of Nanking cedes the island

1860
Convention of Peking cedes Kowloon

1898
New Territories leased for 99 years

1941–45
Japanese occupation

1949
Communist victory on the mainland; refugee influx

1953
Shek Kip Mei fire; public housing begins

1967
Leftist riots

1974
ICAC founded

1984
Sino-British Joint Declaration

1989
Tiananmen; mass marches in Hong Kong

1990
Basic Law adopted

1997
Handover, 1 July

2003
SARS; 1 July march; Article 23 bill shelved

2014
Umbrella Movement

2019
Anti-extradition protests; District Council landslide

2020
National Security Law, 30 June

2021
Electoral overhaul; Apple Daily closes; BN(O) visa route opens

2024
Safeguarding National Security Ordinance; the 47 sentenced

2025
Wang Fuk Court fire; all-establishment Legislative Council; Jimmy Lai convicted

2026
Lai sentenced to 20 years; Alliance leaders sentenced; fire inquiry reports

Who's who

Person
Dates
Why they matter

Lin Zexu
1785–1850
Qing commissioner whose destruction of opium triggered the First Opium War; a national hero in China

Sun Yat-sen
1866–1925
Studied in Hong Kong; founding father of the Republic of China

Murray MacLehose
1917–2000
Governor 1971–82; housing, schools, the ICAC

Deng Xiaoping
1904–1997
Chinese leader; author of "one country, two systems"

Margaret Thatcher
1925–2013
Signed the Joint Declaration

Martin Lee
b. 1938
Barrister; founding chairman of the Democratic Party; "father of democracy" to supporters

Chris Patten
b. 1944
Last governor, 1992–97

Tung Chee-hwa
b. 1937
First Chief Executive, 1997–2005

Benny Tai
b. 1964
Legal scholar behind Occupy Central and the 2020 primary; sentenced to ten years

Jimmy Lai
b. 1947
Refugee turned clothing tycoon and founder of Apple Daily; sentenced to 20 years in 2026

Joshua Wong
b. 1996
Student leader of 2012 and 2014; imprisoned since 2020

Carrie Lam
b. 1957
Chief Executive 2017–22, through 2019 and the National Security Law

John Lee
b. 1957
Former police officer and security secretary; Chief Executive since 2022

Chow Hang-tung
b. 1985
Barrister and vigil organiser; sentenced in 2026

Five ideas that unlock Hong Kong
1. Hong Kong was made by people escaping China, and by China. Most Hong Kong families arrived in the 20th century, fleeing war, revolution, famine and political campaigns on the mainland. That gave the city its restlessness, its work ethic and its deep suspicion of the Communist Party. But Hong Kong's prosperity also always depended on the mainland: its water, its food, its trade, its markets and, after 1978, its factories and money. Both truths are needed to understand why so many Hong Kongers have been proud to be Chinese and wary of Beijing at once.
2. The deal of 1984 promised two different things to two different audiences. For Beijing, "one country, two systems" meant sovereignty first: Hong Kong could keep its way of life as long as it posed no threat to the nation and accepted Beijing's final authority. For many Hong Kongers, it meant a high degree of autonomy and, in time, democracy, as the Basic Law's "ultimate aim" seemed to say. The words could hold both meanings until 2014. Since 2020, Beijing's meaning has prevailed, and Beijing argues that this is what the formula always meant.
3. The colonial past is not the democratic past. Britain ruled Hong Kong for 150 years without elections worthy of the name, kept the Chinese majority out of power for most of that time and introduced democracy only in its final decade. Pro-democracy Hong Kongers did not want British rule back; most wanted the freedoms and rule of law they associated with late colonial Hong Kong, under Chinese sovereignty and with the vote.
4. The rule of law, as Hong Kongers understood it, is the real fault line. The ICAC, independent courts, a free press and the right to protest were what made the "second system" feel real. Supporters of the post-2020 order argue that the courts are still independent, that national security laws are normal everywhere and that the city is safer and more stable. Critics argue that a system in which peaceful opposition, journalism and remembrance can be prosecuted as subversion has changed in kind. The answer depends heavily on what one thinks law is for.
5. Hong Kong is now also a diaspora. Hundreds of thousands of Hong Kongers have left since 2020, for Britain, Canada, Australia, Taiwan and elsewhere, and have built communities that keep Cantonese culture, protest songs and the memory of 4 June alive abroad. At the same time, mainland migrants and talent-scheme arrivals are reshaping the city at home. Two Hong Kongs are being built at once, one inside the city and one outside it.

"Hong Kong is dead" and "Hong Kong is reborn" are both slogans you can hear in 2026. The city is neither: it is a Chinese city with its own legal system, language and memory, governed on terms many of its people have accepted and many others left rather than accept.

The takeaway
Hong Kong was a fishing and salt-making coast of the Chinese empire for two thousand years until Britain took it in three steps between 1841 and 1898, through two wars over Britain's right to sell opium. Under British rule it grew from a few thousand people into a city of millions, mostly refugees from the mainland, and from a trading post into a factory, then a financial capital. Britain handed it back in 1997 under a treaty promising fifty years of a "high degree of autonomy." The meaning of that promise was contested from the start, and in the protests of 2014 and 2019 it broke into open conflict. Since 2020 national security laws have reshaped its politics, media and civil society, and Beijing and the Hong Kong government describe the result as order restored, while the opposition, many emigrants and foreign governments describe it as the end of the freedoms the treaty guaranteed. Both describe the same city, which in 2026 is still one of the world's great financial centres.
Try this: find one thing in your life that came through Hong Kong: a film by Wong Kar-wai or Jackie Chan, a bowl of wonton noodles, a product "made in China" that was shipped through its port, or a neighbour who arrived on a BN(O) visa. Ask what it would have looked like in 1841, 1949, 1997 and 2026. You will find most of this history in it.

Sources & Further Reading
Sources
- Hong Kong Census and Statistics Department web tables (accessed 31 October 2026): 110-01001 (population by sex and age, 1961–mid-2026), 110-01003 (population growth by component, births and net movement), 130-06603 (domestic households by type of housing).
- HKSAR Government press releases (info.gov.hk), 2019–2026: District Council and Legislative Council turnout (2019, 2021, 2023, 2025); NPCSC decision on legislators' qualification (11 November 2020); Stand News arrests (29 December 2021); the Chief Executive's statement on the electoral overhaul (11 March 2021); the 47 case verdict and sentences (2024); the Chief Executive's address on the Safeguarding National Security Ordinance (19 March 2024) and the government's response to criticism (20 March 2024); the fifth-anniversary statement on the National Security Law (30 June 2025); the Jimmy Lai verdict and sentence (15 December 2025; 9 February 2026); the Hong Kong Alliance verdict and sentences (21 August; 11 September 2026); Wang Fuk Court fire updates and the Independent Committee report (December 2025; 29 October 2026); final death toll of 168, Hong Kong Police via news.gov.hk, "Tai Po fire forensics work complete" (15 January 2026).
- UK Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office, Six-monthly report on Hong Kong: 1 January to 30 June 2026 (22 October 2026), and the response to the Hong Kong Alliance verdict (21 August 2026); UK Home Office, Immigration system statistics, year ending June 2026 (BN(O) route); Historic Hansard, House of Commons, 8–9 April 1840.
- Texts of the Sino-British Joint Declaration (Constitutional and Mainland Affairs Bureau) and the Basic Law (basiclaw.gov.hk); ICAC, history of the Commission; World Health Organization, summary of probable SARS cases (2003); World Bank, World Development Indicators (GDP, fertility, life expectancy).
- Earlier history, the 1967 riots, the occupation, the 2014 and 2019 protests and protest crowd figures follow standard accounts as summarised in Wikipedia and its cited sources; crowd sizes are given as organisers' and police estimates, which differ widely.
Go deeper
- 📘 A Modern History of Hong Kong — Steve Tsang (the standard single-volume history, from the Opium War to the handover)
- 📘 Indelible City: Dispossession and Defiance in Hong Kong — Louisa Lim (a Hong Kong-raised journalist's history of who gets to tell the city's story)
- 📘 The Last Governor — Jonathan Dimbleby (an inside account of the Patten years and the handover)
- 📘 Hong Kong: China's New Colony — Stephen Vines (a long-time resident's critical account of the post-handover decades)
- 🌐 The Basic Law full text (read Articles 5, 23, 45 and 68 for yourself)
- 🌐 Related pieces in this library: China: A Condensed History; A Brief History of the United Kingdom (this series); World Cinema: A Starter Map


A Brief History of Japan: Islands, Swords, Empire, and Reinvention
------------------------------------------------------------------
How an island people borrowed a civilisation from China, ruled itself through warriors for seven centuries, remade itself twice in a hundred years, and is now the first rich country to grow old and small.

Follows: Japan: A Condensed History of Isolation, Innovation, and Identity
Companion piece: If I Was Born in Japan: Harmony, Randoseru, and the Art of Ikigai (what daily life feels like now; this is how it got that way).
On 1 October 2025, Japan counted itself. When the census results came out a year later, they showed 122,972,528 people, 3.2 million fewer than five years before. Forty-six of the country's forty-seven prefectures had shrunk; only Tokyo had grown. The number of Japanese nationals fell by more than four million, while foreign residents reached a record 3.8 million. By September 2026, nearly three in ten people in Japan were 65 or older, the highest share of any large country on Earth.
A few months earlier, the country's parliament had changed the law on who may become emperor, to keep alive a male line of succession that tradition traces back more than 2,600 years. It allowed princesses to keep their royal status after marriage and let the imperial family adopt male relatives from long-separated branches. It did not allow a woman to reign.
Those two facts, a society shrinking faster than any rich country before it and an institution that claims to be the oldest hereditary monarchy in the world, sum up modern Japan's double life. The condensed piece in this library gives the outline. This is the full version, from the first potters to the snap election of February 2026. Some of this history, above all the war of 1931–1945, is argued over fiercely inside Japan and between Japan and its neighbours. Where it is, this piece names who says what, and gives the evidence.
In this history

From the first potters to Nara (to 794)
Courtiers and warriors (794–1600)
The Tokugawa peace and the Meiji revolution (1600–1912)
Empire (1895–1937)
War, atrocity and defeat (1937–1945)
Occupation, miracle and bubble (1945–1991)
Lost decades, Fukushima and Japan in 2026 (1991–2026)
How to understand Japan today

Part 1 — From the first potters to Nara (to 794)
A chain of islands
Japan is an arc of volcanic islands, four large ones (Hokkaido, Honshu, Shikoku, Kyushu) and thousands of small ones, stretching from the cold seas near Russia to the subtropics near Taiwan. Most of it is mountain and forest; people have always crowded onto narrow coastal plains. It sits where four tectonic plates meet, which is why earthquakes, tsunamis and eruptions run through its whole history. And it lies close enough to the Asian mainland, across the strait from Korea, to receive people and ideas, but far enough that invasion was hard. That combination, near but apart, is the first key to the story.
The Jōmon: hunters who made pottery
The first people to reach the islands crossed during the last Ice Age, when sea levels were lower. Around 14,500 BCE, by radiocarbon dates from a site called Odai Yamamoto I in northern Honshu, people there were already making clay pots, among the oldest known anywhere. The archaeological culture that followed, lasting until roughly 300 BCE, is named Jōmon ("cord-marked"), after the patterns potters pressed into wet clay with twisted cords. The name was coined by the American zoologist Edward S. Morse in the 1870s.
The Jōmon were not farmers in the usual sense. They fished, gathered shellfish, hunted deer and boar, and harvested nuts and plants so reliably that some lived in large, long-lasting villages. At Sannai-Maruyama, in Aomori, archaeologists have reconstructed pit houses and huge timber structures. They made extraordinary pottery with flame-like rims, and clay figurines called dogū, some with goggle eyes, whose purpose is still debated.

The Jōmon lasted more than ten thousand years: longer than all of Japanese history since. For most of the time people have lived in Japan, they lived like this.

Genetic studies find that the Jōmon were most closely related to two peoples who still live at the edges of Japan: the Ainu of Hokkaido and the Ryukyuans of Okinawa. Their ancestry survives, in smaller proportions, in most modern Japanese people too.
The Yayoi: rice, bronze and iron
Then came rice. From around 300 BCE on the traditional dating (and perhaps several centuries earlier, according to radiocarbon studies whose results are still contested), irrigated wet-rice farming arrived in northern Kyushu, brought by migrants from the Korean peninsula. The period is named Yayoi after a district of Tokyo where its pottery was first identified.
Rice changed everything. Paddy farming demands cooperation, irrigation, stored surplus and therefore organisation: villages, chiefs, and wars over land and water. The newcomers brought bronze, used for mirrors, weapons and large ceremonial bells called dōtaku, and by the 1st century CE iron tools and weapons. Moated, fortified settlements appear, like Yoshinogari in Kyushu, where archaeologists found skeletons without heads.
Japan in Chinese records
Japan enters written history through Chinese eyes. Chinese chronicles called the islands' people the Wa. In 57 CE, the Book of the Later Han records, a ruler of the "Na" state of Wa sent an embassy to the Han emperor and received a gold seal. Astonishingly, a solid-gold seal with that inscription turned up in 1784 on Shikanoshima island in Fukuoka; it is now a National Treasure.
In the 3rd century, the Chinese chronicle of the Wei kingdom described a queen named Himiko who ruled a land called Yamatai after a long civil war: a spiritual ruler, while her younger brother handled the affairs of state. Where Yamatai was (northern Kyushu or the Nara basin) is one of the oldest and most passionate arguments in Japanese archaeology, and still unresolved.

Era
Roughly when
What changed

Palaeolithic
before c. 14,500 BCE
First people arrive across Ice Age land bridges and short sea crossings

Jōmon
c. 14,500–300 BCE
Pottery, settled foragers, dogū figurines

Yayoi
c. 300 BCE–250 CE (start possibly earlier)
Wet rice, bronze, iron, chiefdoms, wars

57 CE

Ruler of Na receives a gold seal from the Han court

3rd century

Queen Himiko of Yamatai in Chinese records

The keyhole tombs
From around 250–300 CE the islands' rulers began building enormous burial mounds, giving the Kofun ("old tomb") period its name. The most distinctive are keyhole-shaped, square at the front and round at the back, found only in Japan. The largest, the Daisen Kofun in Sakai near Osaka, built in the mid-5th century and commonly (though not provably) attributed to an emperor called Nintoku, is the biggest tomb in Japan. Around them stood haniwa: unglazed clay figures of warriors, horses, houses and dancers.
The tombs spread outward from the Yamato region (around modern Nara and Osaka) through the 5th century, tracing the growing power of a confederation of clans led by the Yamato kings. Society was organised into uji, clans with hereditary roles and ranks, each worshipping its own kami (spirits or gods). Immigrants from Korea and China, called toraijin, brought writing, silk-making, weaving and metalwork; an early 9th-century register listed more than a quarter of the aristocratic clans around the capital as of foreign descent, though historians doubt how accurate it is.
Buddhism and the Soga
According to the Nihon Shoki, Japan's first official history, Buddhism arrived in 538, when a king of Baekje in Korea sent a statue and scriptures to the Yamato court. Whether to accept the foreign god split the court. The Soga clan championed Buddhism; the Mononobe opposed it; the Soga won.
The towering figure of the next generation is Prince Shōtoku (574–622), regent for Empress Suiko. Later tradition credits him with almost everything: founding temples, promoting Buddhism, sending envoys to China, and writing a "Seventeen-Article Constitution" of moral principles for officials. Modern historians treat him as semi-legendary, a real prince around whom a cult grew.
Copying China
In 645 a palace coup destroyed the Soga, and the new leaders, Prince Naka no Ōe (later Emperor Tenji) and Nakatomi no Kamatari (founder of the Fujiwara clan), launched the Taika ("Great Change") reforms. The model was Tang China. All land would belong to the ruler and be allotted to farmers; taxes would be paid in rice, cloth and labour; a centralised bureaucracy would replace hereditary clan power. Over the following decades, law codes on the Chinese model were written, and the ruler took the title tennō, "heavenly sovereign", the word for "emperor" still used today.
Nara
In 710 the court settled in its first permanent capital, Heijō-kyō (Nara), laid out on a grid copied from the Tang capital Chang'an (this series' A Brief History of China describes the original). The Nara period (710–794) produced Japan's founding texts:

Text
Date
What it is

Kojiki ("Record of Ancient Matters")
712
Myths of creation and of the imperial line's descent from the sun goddess Amaterasu

Nihon Shoki ("Chronicles of Japan")
720
An official history in Chinese style

Man'yōshū
poems mostly 600–759
The first great anthology of Japanese poetry, from emperors to frontier guards

Emperor Shōmu ordered the building of a giant bronze Buddha at the Tōdai-ji temple in 743; it was completed in 752. Its scale was a statement: Buddhism as protector of the state, the emperor as its patron. It was also a response to catastrophe. A smallpox epidemic in 735–737, which spread from Kyushu, killed about a third of the population in the areas it struck.

In two centuries Japan imported a writing system, a religion, a legal code, a city plan and a theory of monarchy from China and Korea, and made them its own. It would do the same with the West twelve hundred years later.

How people lived
For the farming majority, the Chinese-style state meant registration, land allotments, taxes in rice and cloth, and labour service on roads, temples and the capital itself. Many fled their allotments to escape the burden, a recurring problem for the court. Most people lived in pit dwellings and worshipped local kami at simple shrines; Buddhism was at first a religion of the court and aristocracy, and spread among ordinary people only over centuries.

Part 2 — Courtiers and warriors (794–1600)
A capital of peace
In 794 Emperor Kanmu moved the capital to Heian-kyō, "capital of peace and tranquillity", modern Kyoto. It would remain the imperial city for more than a thousand years. The Heian period (794–1185) is remembered as the classical age of Japanese culture.
Contact with China thinned. Official embassies to the Tang ended in the 9th century; the last major mission sailed in 838, and the scholar-statesman Sugawara no Michizane recommended halting them in the 890s as the Tang declined. In the space left by Chinese influence, a distinctly Japanese court culture matured, called kokufū, "national style".
Kana and the women writers
The most consequential invention of the age was a script. Chinese characters, used for prestige writing, fit Japanese grammar badly. From them, Japanese writers developed two syllabaries, hiragana and katakana (together called kana), in which each sign stands for a sound. Educated men were expected to write in Chinese; writing in kana was associated with women. As a result, some of the greatest works of Heian literature were written by women.
The Tale of Genji
The Tale of Genji was written in the early 11th century by Murasaki Shikibu, a noblewoman serving at court; the earliest reference to it is in her own diary, in an entry dated 1 November 1008. Its 54 chapters follow the loves, griefs and political fortunes of the "Shining Prince" Genji and then his descendants. It is often called the world's first novel. That claim is debated (earlier prose fiction exists in Greek, Latin and Sanskrit), but its psychological depth and its sense of time passing are unlike anything before it.
Its world was tiny: a few thousand aristocrats in one city, obsessed with rank, poetry, calligraphy, the colour combinations of layered robes, and the Buddhist sense of mono no aware, the poignancy of things passing. Her contemporary Sei Shōnagon wrote The Pillow Book, a collection of lists, sharp observations and opinions that still reads like a modern blog.
The Fujiwara and the retired emperors
Politically, the Heian emperors reigned but rarely ruled. The Fujiwara clan married its daughters to emperors and governed as regents for their grandsons. Around the year 1000, Fujiwara no Michinaga (on whom Murasaki may partly have modelled Genji) could make and unmake emperors. From 1086, emperors who abdicated began to rule from "retirement" as cloistered emperors, competing with the Fujiwara for real power.

Who really ruled
When
How

Emperors directly
7th–9th centuries
Chinese-style bureaucracy

Fujiwara regents
height c. 10th–11th centuries
Marrying into the imperial family

Retired ("cloistered") emperors
1086–1156 at their height
Ruling from monastic retirement

Taira warlords
1160s–1185
Military force at court

Shoguns
1185/1192–1868
Military government

The rise of the samurai
While the court refined its poetry, the provinces armed. The land-allotment system broke down into private estates, exempt from tax and defended by their own mounted warriors. Two warrior clans descended from imperial princes, the Taira and the Minamoto, rose by fighting for court factions. In the Hōgen disturbance of 1156, warriors decided a succession dispute in the capital. Taira no Kiyomori then dominated the court, until the Minamoto rose against him.
The Genpei War (1180–1185) ended at the naval battle of Dan-no-ura in 1185, where the Taira were destroyed and, in the story told by the Tale of the Heike, their child emperor drowned in his grandmother's arms. The Heike's opening line, about the bells of a temple ringing out the impermanence of all things, is one of the most famous in Japanese literature.

The court never lost its legitimacy. It lost its power. For the next seven centuries, Japan would be ruled by men who claimed to act in the emperor's name.

Kamakura: the first shogunate
The victorious Minamoto leader, Minamoto no Yoritomo, did not move to Kyoto. He built a military government at Kamakura, near modern Tokyo, and in 1192 received the title shōgun, short for "barbarian-subduing generalissimo". Historians date the Kamakura shogunate from 1185 or 1192.
This was the start of a dual system that lasted until 1868: the emperor in Kyoto, sacred and powerless; the shogun, holding real power in his name. After Yoritomo's death, real power passed again, this time to the Hōjō family, who ruled as regents for puppet shoguns from 1203. A retired emperor's attempt to take power back failed in 1221.
The Mongols
In 1274 and again in 1281, the Mongol emperor of China, Kublai Khan, sent invasion fleets against Kyushu. Japanese warriors fought them on the beaches; both times storms wrecked much of the invading fleet. The storms were called kamikaze, "divine winds", proof that the gods protected Japan. The word would be borrowed again in 1944–45 for suicide pilots.
The invasions were won, but they bankrupted the Kamakura regime, which had no conquered land with which to reward its warriors. In 1333 Emperor Go-Daigo rebelled, and Kamakura fell. His attempt to restore direct imperial rule collapsed within three years, when the general Ashikaga Takauji turned against him and in 1336 founded a new shogunate in Kyoto.
Muromachi: culture amid disorder
The Ashikaga (or Muromachi) shogunate was weaker than Kamakura, but its rulers were great patrons of culture. Under them Zen Buddhism, which had arrived from China, shaped art and taste; ink painting, rock gardens and the tea ceremony took form; and the actor-playwright Zeami (c. 1363–1443), patronised by the shogun Ashikaga Yoshimitsu, created the masked, slow, ghost-haunted drama of Noh. (This library's Bodhidharma: Pointing Directly to the Mind and the Birth of Zen traces where Zen came from.)
The Warring States
In 1467 a succession dispute in the shogun's house became the Ōnin War, a decade of fighting that burned much of Kyoto. Central authority collapsed. For roughly the next century, the Sengoku ("Warring States") period, Japan was a patchwork of domains ruled by warlords (daimyō), many of them upstarts who had overthrown their own lords. The Japanese had a word for it: gekokujō, "the low overthrowing the high".
In 1543 a Chinese ship carrying Portuguese traders drifted to the island of Tanegashima, and the Portuguese sold the local lord two matchlock guns. Within decades Japanese smiths were making firearms in large numbers. Christian missionaries followed; several daimyō converted, and by the late 16th century there were many thousands of Japanese Christians, especially in Kyushu.
The three unifiers
Three men ended the wars, remembered as the three "Great Unifiers".

Unifier
Lived
What he did

Oda Nobunaga
1534–1582
Won at Okehazama (1560) against a far larger army; used massed muskets at Nagashino (1575); betrayed by his general Akechi Mitsuhide and died at Honnō-ji in Kyoto (1582)

Toyotomi Hideyoshi
1537–1598
A commoner who rose to rule all Japan by 1590 and became imperial regent; disarmed the peasantry in the "sword hunt" of 1588; invaded Korea in 1592 and 1597, aiming at Ming China, and failed

Tokugawa Ieyasu
1543–1616
Won the Battle of Sekigahara in 1600; became shogun in 1603; destroyed the last Toyotomi resistance at Osaka in 1615

Hideyoshi's invasions of Korea are remembered very differently in the two countries. In Korea they are a national catastrophe, the Imjin War, in which Korea's navy and Ming Chinese armies eventually forced the Japanese out after devastating fighting; the war ended with Hideyoshi's death in 1598. Hideyoshi's soldiers took noses from the Korean and Chinese dead as trophies; a mound in Kyoto, the Mimizuka, holds the noses of at least 38,000 Koreans and more than 30,000 Chinese.
The same ruler patronised Sen no Rikyū (1522–1591), the tea master who perfected wabi-cha, the tea ceremony of rustic simplicity. Beauty and violence lived side by side in the age of the samurai.

Part 3 — The Tokugawa peace and the Meiji revolution (1600–1912)
Building a peace
The Tokugawa shogunate, founded in 1603 and ruled from Edo (modern Tokyo), gave Japan more than two and a half centuries without major war, one of the longest periods of peace any society has known. Its methods were control and balance.
The shogun ruled his own vast lands directly and left about 260 daimyō to govern their domains, but watched them closely. From 1635, under the third shogun, Iemitsu, the system of "alternate attendance" (sankin-kōtai) required every lord to spend alternate years in Edo and to leave his wife and heir there as hostages when he went home. The lords' great processions along the highways, and their spending in the capital, drained their wealth and built a national road network and economy.
Society was described in a Confucian scheme of four ranked orders: samurai, farmers, artisans and merchants. Historians writing since the 1990s, followed by Japanese textbooks, see it less as a strict ladder than as a set of legal categories. The samurai, about 6 percent of the population, became salaried administrators who still wore two swords but no longer fought. Peasants, about 80 percent, paid most of the taxes in rice.
Sakoku: closed, but not shut
Between 1633 and 1639 the shogunate issued a series of edicts that sharply restricted contact with the outside world. In 1637–38 a rising of some 40,000 mostly Christian peasants at Shimabara in Kyushu was crushed, and Christianity, already suspect as a foothold for European power, was banned under penalty of death. The Portuguese were expelled.
The policy is usually called sakoku, "closed country", but that word was coined only in 1801, by a translator of a European book about Japan. Historians such as Ronald Toby have shown that Japan was never sealed. It traded through four "gateways":

Gateway
Partner

Nagasaki
Chinese merchants, and the Dutch East India Company on the small artificial island of Dejima

Tsushima
Korea

Satsuma (southern Kyushu)
The Ryukyu Kingdom (Okinawa), and through it China

Matsumae (Hokkaido)
The Ainu

Through Dejima came books on medicine, astronomy and anatomy, studied by a growing circle of scholars of "Dutch learning" (rangaku). What the shogunate controlled was not knowledge but who could come and go.
The floating world
Peace made Japan urban and commercial. By the mid-18th century Edo had over a million people, probably the largest city in the world; Osaka and Kyoto each had over 400,000. Around 1700 Japan may have been the most urbanised country on Earth. Osaka's merchants traded rice futures, and its brokers became richer than many samurai.
Townspeople made their own culture: the ukiyo, the "floating world" of theatres, teahouses and pleasure quarters. Kabuki theatre, puppet drama and the woodblock prints called ukiyo-e catered to them. Matsuo Bashō (1644–1694) turned the light verse form that became haiku into high art. Late in the period, Katsushika Hokusai published The Great Wave off Kanagawa (late 1831), whose imported Prussian-blue ink and dramatic composition made it perhaps the most famous image in Asian art.
How people lived
The national population, about 30 million around 1721, barely grew for a century, and was about 32 million by the 1860s. Historians debate why: late marriage, deliberate family limitation (including infanticide, which some historians emphasise), and repeated famines such as the Tenmei famine of 1782–1788. Village life was hard but organised: villages paid their taxes collectively, managed irrigation and forests together, and settled disputes internally. Temple schools taught many children, especially boys, to read and count, though how widespread literacy was is uncertain (the condensed piece gives the main estimates).

Tokugawa Japan was not frozen. It was a complex, commercial, literate society that had chosen, for political reasons, to control its contact with the outside world. That is why it could change so fast when it had to.

Perry
On 8 July 1853, four American warships, the "black ships", anchored at Uraga at the mouth of Edo Bay. Their commander, Commodore Matthew Perry, carried a letter from President Millard Fillmore demanding that Japan open its ports. He left, promising to return for an answer, and came back on 13 February 1854 with eight ships. On 31 March 1854 the shogunate signed the Convention of Kanagawa, opening two ports, Shimoda and Hakodate, to American ships.
More treaties followed with the US and the European powers. Like China's, they were "unequal": foreigners in Japan were tried by their own consuls, not Japanese courts, and Japan could not set its own tariffs. Everyone in Japan had heard what had happened to China in the Opium Wars.
The fall of the shogunate
The treaties discredited the shogunate, which had failed in its basic duty of keeping the "barbarians" out. Young samurai, especially from the southwestern domains of Satsuma and Chōshū, rallied to the slogan "revere the emperor, expel the barbarians". After clashes with Western warships taught them that expulsion was impossible, they turned their anger on the shogun instead. In 1866 Satsuma and Chōshū, long rivals, formed an alliance. On 3 January 1868 they and their allies seized the palace in Kyoto and proclaimed that power had been restored to the emperor, a boy of fifteen, who took the reign name Meiji ("enlightened rule"). The shogun's supporters fought on in the Boshin War until 1869, and lost.
Revolution from above
What followed was one of the most radical transformations any country has undergone, carried out not by a popular revolution but by a small group of young former samurai acting in the emperor's name. On 6 April 1868 the young emperor swore a Charter Oath of five articles, the last of which set the course of the age:

"Knowledge shall be sought throughout the world so as to strengthen the foundation of imperial rule." — Charter Oath, article 5 (1868)

In a few decades the new government:

Year
Reform

1871
Domains abolished and replaced by prefectures; the yen created

1871–1873
The Iwakura Mission: about 50 officials tour the US and Europe to study them

1872
Railway from Tokyo (Shimbashi) to Yokohama; national school system begins

1873
Conscription: a national army of commoners replaces the samurai

1877
Satsuma Rebellion: stripped of stipends and privileges, samurai under Saigō Takamori rise; Saigō dies at Shiroyama

1889
Meiji Constitution promulgated (11 February), on the Prussian model; an elected lower house from 1890

The slogan was fukoku kyōhei, "rich country, strong army". The state built model factories, railways and telegraphs, then sold many to private entrepreneurs, some of whose firms grew into the zaibatsu conglomerates (Mitsui, Mitsubishi, Sumitomo). Silk, much of it reeled by young farm women working long hours in mills, paid for imported machinery.
The tragic figure of the age is Saigō Takamori, a giant of a man who had helped make the Restoration, broke with his colleagues, and died leading the samurai revolt of 1877 against the modern conscript army he had helped create.
The cost
Modernisation had losers. Peasants paid the new taxes in cash and often protested. The Ainu of Hokkaido, colonised from 1869 by a government development agency, lost their land to Japanese settlers; an 1899 law labelling them "former aborigines" aimed to assimilate them. The Ryukyu Kingdom, which had paid tribute to both China and Japan, was annexed outright in 1879 as Okinawa Prefecture. The new Japan was being built as a nation-state, and its edges were being made Japanese.

Part 4 — Empire (1895–1937)
Learning the imperial game
Meiji's leaders drew a lesson from the world of the 1870s and 1880s: in the age of empires, a country either took colonies or became one. Japan's first target was Korea.
In 1894–95 Japan fought Qing China over influence in Korea and won decisively. By the Treaty of Shimonoseki (17 April 1895), China recognised Korea's "independence" (from China), ceded Taiwan and the Penghu Islands to Japan, and paid an indemnity of 200 million taels of silver. Russia, Germany and France then forced Japan to give back the Liaodong Peninsula it had also won, a humiliation Japan did not forget, especially when Russia took the same peninsula for itself.
In 1904–05 Japan fought Russia for Manchuria and Korea. It won on land, at enormous cost, and at sea, destroying the Russian fleet. It was the first time in modern history that an Asian power had defeated a European one in a major war, and it electrified nationalists across Asia. The peace treaty, signed on 5 September 1905, gave Japan control over Korea and a foothold in southern Manchuria.
Taiwan, the first colony
Taiwan was Japan's first colony, and it did not come quietly. When Japanese troops landed near Keelung on 29 May 1895, local leaders proclaimed a short-lived "Republic of Formosa"; it took a five-month campaign, slowed by guerrilla resistance, to reach Tainan in the south. Japan then ruled Taiwan for fifty years from Taihoku (Taipei), aiming to make it a "model colony": railways, harbours, public health, rice and sugar for the Japanese market, and schools that taught in Japanese.
Resistance continued, especially among the island's Indigenous peoples. In October 1930, at Musha in the central mountains, Seediq fighters attacked a gathering at a school and killed 134 Japanese; the colonial army's retaliation killed several hundred Seediq. Taiwan's memory of Japanese rule today is mixed, shaped partly by comparison with the Nationalist rule that followed in 1945.
Korea
Japan made Korea a protectorate in 1905 and annexed it outright by a treaty signed on 22 August 1910, which took effect on 29 August. Korea's last emperor had refused to sign it; it was signed by a Korean minister and the Japanese resident-general. Japan and South Korea have disagreed ever since about whether the treaty was legal: their 1965 normalisation treaty fudged the question by declaring the old treaties "already null and void", which Seoul reads as void from the start and Tokyo as void from 1945 or 1965.
Colonial rule built railways, ports, factories and schools, and Korea's economy grew. It also suppressed Korean political life, imposed Japanese language in schools and, later, pressure to adopt Japanese names, and in the war years mobilised Koreans as labourers, soldiers and "comfort women". Those who argue colonialism "modernised" Korea and those who stress its brutality are arguing about the same decades, and the argument is still politically live in both countries.
Taishō democracy
At home, the 1910s and 1920s brought a flowering of party politics, a lively press, labour unions and mass culture, often called "Taishō democracy" after the reign of the Taishō emperor (1912–1926). Japan fought on the Allied side in the First World War and in 1915 presented China with the "Twenty-One Demands" for special rights, fuelling Chinese nationalism. In 1925 the vote was extended to all men aged 25 and over, quadrupling the electorate to 12.5 million; the same year a Peace Preservation Law criminalised organising to change the "national polity" (kokutai), and more than 70,000 people were eventually arrested under it.
The earthquake
At 11:58 a.m. on 1 September 1923, just before lunchtime, an earthquake of magnitude around 8 struck the Kantō plain. Fires swept through Tokyo and Yokohama; modern research counts 105,385 dead or missing. In the chaos, rumours spread that Koreans were poisoning wells and setting fires. Vigilantes, sometimes with police and soldiers, massacred Koreans, and also Chinese workers and Japanese mistaken for Koreans. Estimates of the Koreans killed range from 248 (the police count at the time) and 832 (an investigation by the colonial government) to 2,613 (an investigation by Korean students) and, in some modern estimates, as many as 6,000. Military police also murdered the anarchist Ōsugi Sakae, his partner Itō Noe and his six-year-old nephew.
The army takes over
The Great Depression hit Japan's silk-exporting countryside hard, and discredited the parties and big business in many eyes. On 18 September 1931 Japanese officers in Manchuria set off a small explosion beside a Japanese-owned railway near Mukden, blamed Chinese saboteurs, and used it as a pretext to conquer all of Manchuria. In 1932 they created the puppet state of Manchukuo, headed by the last Qing emperor, Puyi. When the League of Nations adopted a report refusing to recognise Manchukuo, Japan quit the League.
At home, young officers and nationalists assassinated politicians and businessmen; in the "2-26 incident" of 26 February 1936, rebel officers killed leading officials, including two former prime ministers, and occupied central Tokyo before the coup collapsed. Party government gave way to cabinets dominated by the military. In 1940 the parties dissolved themselves into a single "Imperial Rule Assistance Association".

Japan's empire
Acquired

Hokkaido (Ainu lands)
Colonised from 1869

Ryukyu / Okinawa
Annexed 1879

Taiwan and Penghu
1895 (from China)

Southern Sakhalin, Liaodong lease
1905 (from Russia)

Korea
Protectorate 1905, annexed 1910

Manchuria (Manchukuo)
1931–1932

Peak extent, 1942
About 7.4 million km², including occupied China and Southeast Asia

Part 5 — War, atrocity and defeat (1937–1945)
The war with China
On 7 July 1937 a skirmish between Japanese and Chinese troops at the Marco Polo Bridge near Beijing escalated into full-scale war. Japanese armies took Shanghai after months of fighting and advanced on the Chinese capital, Nanjing.
Nanjing
Japanese troops entered Nanjing on 13 December 1937. Over the following six weeks or so, and in the surrounding countryside, they killed prisoners of war and civilians on a vast scale, and raped tens of thousands of women. Westerners who stayed in the city, among them the German businessman John Rabe, set up a "safety zone" that sheltered many thousands and recorded what they saw.
That the massacre happened is established by contemporary diaries, Japanese soldiers' own accounts, foreign eyewitnesses and the post-war tribunals. How many died is disputed, and the number has become a symbol in itself.

Estimates of the dead at Nanjing
Figure
Who

Postwar international tribunal (Tokyo, IMTFE)
more than 200,000
Allied judges, 1948

Nanjing War Crimes Tribunal; PRC official figure
300,000 or more
Chinese tribunal, 1947; Chinese government

Kasahara Tokushi (Japanese historian)
"more than 100,000 and close to 200,000, or maybe more"
Academic study

Hata Ikuhiko (Japanese historian)
around 40,000 at the low end of mainstream estimates; calls 300,000 a "symbolic figure"
Academic study

Early counts
50,000–60,000 civilians inside the walls (Rabe); 12,000 inside plus 26,780 in surrounding counties (Smythe survey, which Kasahara argues undercounted)
Contemporary Western residents

Rapes
commonly about 20,000; estimates range up to 80,000
Various

Inside Japan, the debate is often described in terms of schools. Historians of the "affirmation" school, including Kasahara and Hata despite their very different numbers, agree that a large-scale massacre took place. A minority "illusion" school (maboroshi-ha) has argued that the massacre was invented or vastly exaggerated by "victor's justice"; its claims are rejected by mainstream historians, and one of its prominent authors was discredited for academic misconduct. The Japanese government's position is that the killing of a large number of non-combatants and looting by the Japanese army "cannot be denied", while the true number of victims is "difficult to determine". Japanese textbooks mention the massacre, some only briefly; how they treat it has been argued over at home and protested abroad for decades. Since 2014, China has marked 13 December as a national memorial day.
The comfort women
From 1932, and on a large scale after Nanjing, the Japanese military set up "comfort stations", brothels for soldiers, across its empire and occupied territories. The women in them, euphemistically called "comfort women", came above all from Korea, China and the Philippines, and also from Taiwan, Indonesia, Burma, Malaya, Timor and elsewhere, including Japanese women and some Dutch women in the Dutch East Indies.
How many there were, and how they were recruited, is the heart of a long dispute.

Question
The range of positions

How many women?
Japanese historians' estimates run from about 20,000 (Hata Ikuhiko) to about 200,000 (Yoshimi Yoshiaki, who documented some 2,000 comfort stations); Chinese scholar Su Zhiliang estimates 360,000–410,000

How were they recruited?
Survivor testimony and documents show deception, debt, coercion and abduction, often through private recruiters working for the military; Japanese conservatives argue there is no official document ordering abduction by the army itself ("coercion in the narrow sense")

Who was responsible?
The 1993 Kono Statement accepted that the military was involved in establishing and managing the stations

Key moments in Japan's own handling of the issue:

4 August 1993: Chief Cabinet Secretary Kōno Yōhei's statement acknowledged that the military was involved in establishing and managing the comfort stations, that women were in many cases recruited "against their own will, through coaxing, coercion, etc.", lived "under a coercive atmosphere", and offered apologies. A government review ordered under Prime Minister Abe in 2014 led to no revision.
1995: the Asian Women's Fund, financed by citizens' donations, was set up to support survivors; critics wanted official state compensation instead.
August 2014: the Asahi Shimbun retracted articles based on the testimony of Yoshida Seiji, a Japanese man who had claimed to have rounded up Korean women by force and whose account proved false. Japanese conservatives presented this as discrediting the whole issue; historians replied that the documentary evidence of military involvement never depended on him.
28 December 2015: Japan and South Korea agreed that Japan would pay ¥1 billion into a Korean foundation for survivors and that the issue was resolved "finally and irreversibly". South Korea's next government shut the foundation in November 2018. South Korean courts in 2021 and 2023 ordered Japan to compensate survivors; Japan does not accept the rulings, citing state immunity.

The Pacific War
The war in China bogged down. Japan moved into French Indochina, the United States cut off oil exports, and Japan's leaders decided to seize the oil and resources of Southeast Asia. On 7 December 1941 (8 December in Asia) Japan attacked the US fleet at Pearl Harbor and, within hours, British and American territories across Asia. For six months it conquered almost everything it attacked, under the banner of a "Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere" that promised to free Asia from Western colonialism. In practice, occupation meant forced labour, requisitioned food and brutal military rule, along with real encouragement of some independence movements.
The tide turned at the Battle of Midway in June 1942. From 1944 American bombers burned Japan's cities; the firebombing of Tokyo on the night of 9–10 March 1945 killed about 100,000 people. The battle for Okinawa, from 1 April to 22 June 1945, killed somewhere between 40,000 and 150,000 civilians; Okinawan authorities count at least 149,425 Okinawans killed, missing or driven to "coerced suicide", some at the urging of Japanese soldiers.
Japan's Unit 731 in Manchuria conducted lethal human experiments and biological warfare in China; its attacks are estimated to have killed around 200,000 people. Prisoners of war, Asian labourers and occupied populations died in huge numbers. In the Dutch East Indies alone, wartime famine and occupation killed an estimated 3 to 4 million people.
Hiroshima and Nagasaki
On 6 August 1945 the United States dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima, and on 9 August a second on Nagasaki. By the end of 1945 the bombs had killed an estimated 90,000–166,000 people in Hiroshima and 60,000–80,000 in Nagasaki, most of them civilians, about half on the first day, the rest from burns, injuries and radiation sickness. On 8 August the Soviet Union declared war and invaded Manchuria.
On 15 August the emperor's recorded voice told his people, on the radio, that the war had to end. The surrender was signed on 2 September 1945.
Whether the bombings were necessary is still argued. Their defenders, starting with President Truman, say they ended the war quickly and saved the far larger number of lives, Japanese and Allied, that an invasion would have cost. Critics argue Japan was already close to surrender, that the Soviet entry was decisive, and that deliberately killing civilians on that scale was a crime. In Japan, the bombings are remembered above all through the testimony of survivors (hibakusha) and a deep public commitment to nuclear disarmament.

Human cost of the war
Estimate
Source

Japanese dead, all causes
about 3.1 million (government figure); 2.5–3.1 million in scholarly ranges
Japanese government; casualty compilations

of whom military
2.1–2.3 million

of whom civilians
550,000–800,000

Chinese dead, 1937–45
14–22 million
Rana Mitter and others (see A Brief History of China)

Korea
about 480,000–530,000
Casualty compilations

Philippines
about 0.56–1.4 million
Casualty compilations

Dutch East Indies (Indonesia)
3–4 million, mostly famine
Casualty compilations

Part 6 — Occupation, miracle and bubble (1945–1991)
MacArthur's Japan
From the surrender on 2 September 1945 until 28 April 1952, Japan was occupied by the Allied powers, in practice by the United States, under General Douglas MacArthur as Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers (SCAP). It is one of the few military occupations in history remembered, by many of the occupied, with something like gratitude, and also one of the most thorough attempts to remake a society from outside.
The reforms came quickly:

Women voted for the first time in the general election of 10 April 1946.
Unions were legalised by a trade union law of December 1945.
Land reform between 1947 and 1949 bought about 38 percent of cultivated land from landlords and sold it cheaply to the tenants who farmed it, creating a nation of small owner-farmers who became the bedrock of conservative politics.
The zaibatsu were to be broken up; in the end only the largest few were dissolved.
The emperor, Hirohito, was kept on the throne and not put on trial, a decision MacArthur judged necessary for a peaceful occupation and his critics have never forgiven. In a New Year message in 1946 he renounced the idea that he was a living god.
War crimes trials in Tokyo convicted Japan's wartime leaders and sentenced several to death.

The constitution
In February 1946, frustrated by Japanese drafts that changed little, MacArthur ordered his own staff to write a constitution. They did it in under a week, handing it to Japanese officials on 13 February. After revision by the Diet, it was adopted on 3 November 1946 and took effect on 3 May 1947. It made the emperor "the symbol of the State and of the unity of the people", with no political power; guaranteed civil rights and equality of the sexes; and included Article 9:

"Aspiring sincerely to an international peace based on justice and order, the Japanese people forever renounce war as a sovereign right of the nation and the threat or use of force as means of settling international disputes. … land, sea, and air forces, as well as other war potential, will never be maintained." — Constitution of Japan, Article 9

The constitution has never been amended, making it the world's oldest unamended national constitution. Article 9 has been reinterpreted instead. During the Cold War, Japan built "Self-Defence Forces", justified as the minimum needed for defence. On 1 July 2014 the cabinet reinterpreted the article again to allow "collective self-defence", fighting alongside an ally under attack. Amending it needs a two-thirds vote in both houses of the Diet and a majority in a referendum.
The reverse course
As the Cold War began, American priorities shifted, from about 1947, from punishing Japan to rebuilding it as an ally: the "reverse course". Purged conservatives returned, left-wing unions were curbed, and the Korean War (from 1950) brought a flood of American military orders that jump-started industry. The San Francisco Peace Treaty, signed on 8 September 1951, restored Japan's sovereignty from 28 April 1952, along with a security treaty that kept American bases. Okinawa remained under US control until 1972, and still hosts a heavy concentration of American bases.

Japan's postwar order was a bargain: American protection, a pacifist constitution, and a nation free to concentrate everything on rebuilding its economy.

The miracle
From about 1955, when incomes per person recovered to their prewar peak, until the oil shock of 1973, Japan's economy grew at around 10 percent a year. Nothing like it had been seen in a large economy.
The causes are debated. The developmental-state view, associated with the political scientist Chalmers Johnson, credits the Ministry of International Trade and Industry (MITI), founded in 1949, for steering credit and protection toward chosen industries. Others stress high savings, a well-educated workforce, cheap energy, an undervalued yen, open American markets, technology licensed from abroad, and fierce competition between firms. Companies organised into keiretsu, groups linked by cross-shareholdings and a main bank. Large firms offered core male workers employment for life and pay rising with seniority; their wives were expected to stay home.
In 1960, after huge street protests against the renewal of the US–Japan security treaty, Prime Minister Ikeda Hayato turned national attention to economics with an Income Doubling Plan, promising to double the economy in ten years. It doubled in under seven. In 1964 Tokyo hosted the Olympics; the new shinkansen bullet train opened between Tokyo and Osaka for the occasion; and Japan joined the OECD, the club of rich countries.

Japan's economy through time
GDP per person (current US$)
Population

1960
$519
93 million

1970
$2,145
103 million

1980
$9,872
117 million

1990
$26,345
123 million

1995
$44,947
125 million

2010
$45,378
128 million

2025
$35,951
123 million

Source: World Bank, World Development Indicators (October 2026). Dollar figures swing with the exchange rate; the yen's strength in 1995 and weakness in 2025 explain much of the difference between those years.
How people lived
Within a generation, most Japanese moved from farms to cities and from poverty to comfort. Families crowded into new apartment blocks, bought televisions, washing machines and refrigerators, then cars. The salaryman commuting on packed trains and drinking with colleagues after work, and the "education mother" managing her children's exam preparation, became national figures. Life expectancy rose from about 68 in 1960 to 79 in 1990, among the highest in the world.
The miracle had costs: severe industrial pollution, cramped housing, long hours, and a politics dominated by a single party. The Liberal Democratic Party, formed in 1955 by a merger of two conservative parties, governed without interruption until 1993.
The bubble
In September 1985 the Plaza Accord between the major economies drove the dollar down and the yen sharply up. To cushion exporters, the Bank of Japan cut its discount rate from 5 percent to 2.5 percent by early 1987. Cheap money poured into land and shares. Commercial land prices in the six biggest cities rose about 300 percent between 1985 and 1991; at the peak, the grounds of the Imperial Palace in Tokyo were reportedly valued at more than all the real estate in California. On 29 December 1989 the Nikkei stock index closed at 38,915.87.
Between May 1989 and August 1990 the central bank raised its rate in steps from 2.5 to 6 percent. The Nikkei lost more than 40 percent in 1990; land prices began to fall in 1991 and kept falling for years. The bubble left banks holding vast bad loans secured on land now worth a fraction of its price.

At the end of the 1980s many Americans feared Japan would overtake them. A generation later, Japan's own economists were asking how a country so rich and so capable could stand still for thirty years.

Part 7 — Lost decades, Fukushima and Japan in 2026 (1991–2026)
The lost decades
What followed is known as the "lost decade", later the lost twenty and thirty years. Growth averaged around 1 percent a year from 1991 into the 2010s. Banks and regulators, rather than writing off bad loans, kept insolvent "zombie" firms alive; in November 1997 the major bank Hokkaido Takushoku and the brokerage Yamaichi Securities collapsed. Prices drifted down, so people and firms held cash, which deepened the stagnation. The Nikkei hit a post-bubble low of 7,862 in March 2003.
Economists argue about the causes: a "liquidity trap" in which interest rates could go no lower (Paul Krugman), a "balance-sheet recession" in which firms used their income to pay off debt rather than invest (Richard Koo), monetary policy that was too tight, or simply slowing productivity growth (Fumio Hayashi and Edward Prescott). Some point out that, measured per working-age person, Japan's performance looked much less dismal than the headlines, because its workforce was shrinking.
1995 was a year of shocks. On 17 January the Kobe earthquake killed more than 5,000 people and exposed slow government response. On 20 March the Aum Shinrikyo cult released sarin gas on the Tokyo subway, killing 14 and injuring many more. The certainties of the postwar order seemed to be breaking.
In politics, the LDP lost power briefly in 1993–94 and again from 2009 to 2012. On 15 August 1995, the fiftieth anniversary of the surrender, Prime Minister Murayama Tomiichi issued a formal statement on Japan's colonial rule and aggression that became the reference point for later governments' expressions of remorse and apology.
Shinzo Abe, returning as prime minister in December 2012, launched "Abenomics": massive monetary easing by the Bank of Japan from 2013 (and negative interest rates from 2016), fiscal stimulus and promises of structural reform. Abe was also a nationalist who visited the Yasukuni Shrine, where Japan's war dead (including 14 men judged or charged as Class A war criminals, enshrined secretly in 1978) are honoured, in December 2013, drawing protests from China and South Korea and disappointment from Washington. In 2024 the Nikkei finally rose above its 1989 peak, and Japan emerged from decades of falling prices.
11 March 2011
At 2:46 p.m. on 11 March 2011 a magnitude 9.0–9.1 earthquake struck under the sea off northeastern Honshu. The tsunami that followed reached as high as 40.5 metres at Miyako and swept away whole towns. Official figures count 19,759 deaths, including later disaster-related deaths, and 2,553 people still missing.
At the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant, the tsunami knocked out the backup power that cooled the reactors. Three reactors melted down and hydrogen explosions blew apart reactor buildings; residents within 20 kilometres were evacuated, and in 2015 more than 228,000 people affected by the disaster were still living away from home. Total damage was estimated at about US$360 billion. The disaster shook public faith in the authorities and in nuclear power, and whether to restart the country's reactors is still argued over.
The population turns
Japan's population peaked at about 128 million around 2008 and has fallen every year since. Births tell the story: about 2.7 million in 1949, at the peak of the postwar baby boom; 2.09 million in 1973; 686,061 in 2024, with preliminary counts showing another fall in 2025. The fertility rate in 2024 was 1.15 children per woman. In 2024 Japan recorded about 1.6 million deaths, more than twice as many as births.

Japan's demographic turn
Figure
Source

Census population, 1 Oct 2025
122,972,528 (down 3.2 million, or 2.5%, since 2020)
National census (reported Oct 2026)

Foreign residents
3,840,039, a record 3.1%
National census

Aged 65+ (15 Sept 2026)
36.2 million, 29.6%
Ministry of Internal Affairs

Aged 75+
17.7%
Ministry of Internal Affairs

Employed people aged 65+ (2025)
9.4 million, about 1 in 7 workers
Ministry of Internal Affairs

Fertility rate (2024)
1.15
World Bank

Life expectancy (2024)
84 years
World Bank

The causes are argued about: long working hours, expensive housing and education, job insecurity for young men, a workplace culture hard on mothers, and changing ideas of marriage. Governments have tried childcare subsidies and cash for families with little effect so far. Immigration, long resisted, has quietly grown, with foreign residents reaching a record 3.8 million in 2025; it has also become politically contested, with anti-foreigner rhetoric gaining ground.
The imperial family
Emperor Akihito, who had reigned since January 1989, abdicated on 30 April 2019, and his son Naruhito succeeded him. Japan has had eight reigning empresses in its history, the last in the 18th century, but modern law allows only men in the male line to reign, and the only such man of the younger generation is the emperor's nephew, Prince Hisahito (born 2006). The line's survival has become a political question. On 17 July 2026 the Diet passed a revision of the Imperial House Law: princesses who marry commoners may now keep their status and duties (though not pass it to their husbands or children), and men in the male line of long-separated branches may be adopted into the family. It kept the ban on a reigning empress, despite polls showing broad public support for allowing one, so Princess Aiko, the emperor's only child, cannot succeed.
Takaichi's Japan
On 4 October 2025 the LDP elected Sanae Takaichi, a hardline conservative and protégé of Shinzo Abe, as its leader. Days later its coalition partner of 26 years, Komeito, walked out; the LDP formed a new coalition with the Japan Innovation Party (Ishin), and on 21 October 2025 Takaichi became Japan's first woman prime minister.
In early November 2025 she told the Diet that a Chinese attack on Taiwan could constitute an "existential crisis situation" in which Japan might use force in self-defence. Beijing reacted furiously: it warned Chinese citizens against travelling to Japan, cancelled flights and concerts, halted imports of Japanese seafood, and in January 2026 banned exports of dual-use goods to Japan. The pandas lent to Japan went home.
Riding high approval ratings, Takaichi dissolved the lower house on 23 January 2026. In the election on 8 February the LDP won about 316 of 465 seats, the first time any party had passed the two-thirds mark of 310 seats on its own. Stocks hit records. Her government has since loosened Japan's long-standing restrictions on exporting lethal weapons and pushed to revise the constitution, alarming pacifists. By September 2026, after months of decline, her cabinet's approval ranged between 44 and 62 percent across the main polls.
Her supporters see a leader finally restoring national confidence, strengthening defence against a more assertive China and a nuclear-armed North Korea, and reviving the economy. Her critics see a revisionist who has criticised the Kono and Murayama statements, who risks dragging Japan into a war over Taiwan, and whose majority could weaken the postwar constitution's guarantees.

Japan, autumn 2026
Figure
Source (date)

GDP
about US$4.44 trillion (2025), fourth in the world behind the US, China and Germany
World Bank (Oct 2026)

GDP per person
about US$35,950 (2025)
World Bank (Oct 2026)

Prime minister
Sanae Takaichi (LDP), since 21 Oct 2025

Lower house
LDP about 316 of 465 seats; coalition partner Ishin
Election of 8 Feb 2026

Cabinet approval
44–62% across eight polls
Nippon.com summary, 9 Oct 2026

The 2026 facts in this part come from France 24, Nippon.com and the World Bank, dated as given. Japan's story is moving fast; check the latest before quoting any of it.

Part 8 — How to understand Japan today
Key dates

Year
Event

c. 14,500 BCE
Jōmon pottery, among the world's oldest

c. 300 BCE (or earlier)
Wet-rice farming arrives: the Yayoi period

57 CE
Ruler of Na receives a gold seal from Han China

3rd century
Queen Himiko of Yamatai in Chinese records

538
Buddhism arrives from Baekje (traditional date)

645
Taika reforms on the Chinese model

710
Capital at Nara

794
Capital at Heian-kyō (Kyoto)

c. 1008
The Tale of Genji

1185/1192
Kamakura shogunate

1274, 1281
Mongol invasions repelled

1467–1477
Ōnin War; the Warring States begin

1543
Portuguese guns at Tanegashima

1592–1598
Invasions of Korea

1600
Battle of Sekigahara

1603
Tokugawa shogunate

1633–1639
Seclusion edicts

1853
Perry's "black ships"

1868
Meiji Restoration

1889
Meiji Constitution

1894–1895
War with China; Taiwan taken

1904–1905
War with Russia

1910
Korea annexed

1923
Great Kantō earthquake

1931
Seizure of Manchuria

1937
Full war with China; Nanjing massacre

7/8 December 1941
Pearl Harbor

6 and 9 August 1945
Hiroshima and Nagasaki

2 September 1945
Surrender

3 May 1947
Postwar constitution takes effect

28 April 1952
Occupation ends

1955
LDP founded

1964
Tokyo Olympics; bullet train

1972
Okinawa returned

29 December 1989
Nikkei peak; the bubble bursts in 1990–91

1995
Kobe earthquake; sarin attack; Murayama statement

11 March 2011
Tōhoku earthquake, tsunami and Fukushima

8 July 2022
Shinzo Abe assassinated

21 October 2025
Sanae Takaichi becomes first woman prime minister

8 February 2026
LDP wins a two-thirds majority

17 July 2026
Imperial House Law revised

Who's who

Person
Lived
Why they matter

Himiko
3rd century
Shaman queen of Yamatai in Chinese records

Prince Shōtoku
574–622
Semi-legendary regent and patron of Buddhism

Emperor Shōmu
8th century
Built the Great Buddha of Tōdai-ji

Murasaki Shikibu
c. 1000
Author of The Tale of Genji

Minamoto no Yoritomo
1147–1199
First Kamakura shogun

Zeami
c. 1363–1443
Created Noh drama

Oda Nobunaga
1534–1582
First of the three unifiers

Toyotomi Hideyoshi
1537–1598
Unified Japan; invaded Korea

Tokugawa Ieyasu
1543–1616
Founded the Tokugawa shogunate

Matsuo Bashō
1644–1694
Master of haiku

Katsushika Hokusai
1760–1849
The Great Wave

Matthew Perry
1794–1858
Forced Japan's opening

Emperor Meiji
1852–1912
Symbol of the modernising state

Saigō Takamori
1828–1877
Hero of the Restoration; died rebelling against it

Hirohito (Emperor Shōwa)
1901–1989
Emperor through war, defeat and recovery

Douglas MacArthur
1880–1964
Ran the occupation

Shinzo Abe
1954–2022
Longest-serving prime minister; Abenomics

Sanae Takaichi
b. 1961
First woman prime minister

Five ideas that unlock the country
1. Borrow, then make it your own. Japan took writing, Buddhism and statecraft from China and Korea, guns and Christianity from Portugal, science from the Dutch, a constitution from Prussia and another from the Americans, and baseball from the United States. Each time the borrowed thing became distinctively Japanese. That is less "imitation" than a deliberate national habit of learning.
2. Authority and power are often separate. For most of its history Japan's emperor reigned while others ruled: regents, retired emperors, shoguns, oligarchs, generals, bureaucrats and the LDP's factions. This helped the monarchy survive. It also made it hard to say who was responsible, a question that haunted the debate over the emperor's role in the war.
3. The war is not settled. Inside Japan there is no single memory of 1931–45. One strand, voiced by many historians, teachers, survivors and by the Kono and Murayama statements, emphasises aggression, atrocity and remorse. Another, voiced by nationalists and part of the LDP, emphasises Japanese suffering, the Allied firebombing and atomic bombs, and the injustice of "victor's justice", and resents what it sees as endless demands for apology. China and South Korea read every Yasukuni visit and textbook revision through that lens. Relations with both neighbours rise and fall with how Japanese leaders speak about the past.
4. Pacifism and its limits. Article 9 and the memory of Hiroshima made pacifism part of national identity. But Japan also hosts major US bases, maintains large, modern armed forces under another name, and now sits beside a much stronger China and a nuclear-armed North Korea. Whether to rewrite Article 9 is the defining constitutional argument of the age.
5. The first country to grow old. Japan is living through what most rich countries, and China, will face: a shrinking workforce, more deaths than births, empty houses in emptying villages, and the question of whether to rely on robots, on women and older people working longer, or on immigrants. The rest of the world is watching how it copes.

Japan has reinvented itself twice in modern times: in 1868 and in 1945, both times after a shock from outside. The question its history poses now is whether it can reinvent itself a third time without one.

The takeaway
Japan's history is a story of selective borrowing and fierce independence. Its people adopted rice, writing, Buddhism and a state from the mainland, then were ruled for seven centuries by warrior governments in the emperor's name, then spent two and a half centuries at peace under the Tokugawa while controlling their contact with the world. Forced open in 1853, Japan modernised in a generation and became an empire that conquered much of Asia, committed mass atrocities and was destroyed in 1945. Rebuilt under occupation as a pacifist democracy, it became the world's great economic miracle, then stalled for three decades. Today it is rich, safe and ageing fast, governed by a newly dominant conservative party, and still arguing, with itself and its neighbours, about how to remember the war.
Try this: pick one Japanese thing in your life, a bowl of ramen, a Nintendo game, a Toyota, a haiku, a manga. Trace it back through this history: when did that thing, or the skills behind it, enter Japan, and from where? Then find one place in the story where Japan chose not to borrow, and ask why.

Sources & Further Reading
Sources
- World Bank, World Development Indicators (updated 8 October 2026): population, GDP, GDP per person, life expectancy, fertility, age structure.
- Nippon.com: "Japan Census Highlights Accelerating Population Decline" (13 October 2026); "Japan's Senior Cohort Approaches 30% of Total Population" (7 October 2026, from Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications data); Takaichi cabinet approval polls (9 October 2026).
- France 24 reporting: Takaichi's election as LDP leader and prime minister (4 and 21 October 2025); China's response to her Taiwan remarks (21 November 2025); the dissolution (23 January 2026) and election result (8 February 2026); the Imperial House Law revision (17 July 2026).
- Kono Statement (4 August 1993) and Murayama Statement (15 August 1995), as summarised and quoted in the scholarly literature; Japan's Ministry of Foreign Affairs site could not be reached for this piece.
- Nanjing and comfort-women estimates: Kasahara Tokushi, Hata Ikuhiko, Yoshimi Yoshiaki, Su Zhiliang, and the International Military Tribunal for the Far East, as cited in the scholarly literature on the war.
- Vital statistics (births 1949, 1973, 2024; deaths 2024; population peak) from the Statistics Bureau of Japan and the National Institute of Population and Social Security Research, as tabulated in standard references.
- Dates of the premodern and modern periods cross-checked against the scholarly works cited in the relevant encyclopaedia articles; each claim is logged with its source.
Go deeper
- 📘 The Making of Modern Japan — Marius B. Jansen (the authoritative history from the Tokugawa to the postwar era)
- 📘 Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II — John W. Dower (the Pulitzer-winning account of the occupation, seen from the Japanese side)
- 📘 A Modern History of Japan — Andrew Gordon (a clear, balanced textbook from 1800 to the present, strong on ordinary people's lives)
- 📘 The Tale of Genji — Murasaki Shikibu, translated by Royall Tyler (read the original long read of Japanese literature)
- 📘 Bending Adversity: Japan and the Art of Survival — David Pilling (modern Japan, the lost decades and 2011, by a journalist who lived there)
- 🌐 Related pieces in this library: Japan: A Condensed History of Isolation, Innovation, and Identity; If I Was Born in Japan; A Brief History of China (this series); Bodhidharma: Pointing Directly to the Mind and the Birth of Zen


A Brief History of Russia: Forest, Steppe, Empire, and the Long Argument with Itself
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
How a cluster of river principalities became the largest country on Earth, survived invasion, serfdom, revolution and terror, and why it is again at war over the meaning of its own past.

Follows: Russia: A Condensed History of Tsars, Revolution, and Empire
On 18–20 September 2026, Russians voted for a new State Duma. According to the final results announced by the head of the Central Election Commission, Ella Pamfilova, on 25 September, the ruling United Russia party won 349 of the 450 seats (preliminary figures had given it 355), the largest majority in its history, on a turnout of 59.8 percent. Yabloko, the only party on the original ballot that called for a quick end to the war in Ukraine, had been removed from the national race by the Supreme Court five weeks earlier. The Kremlin's spokesman called the result proof of society's "consolidation" around the head of state. Five Western governments and Ukraine condemned the voting held in occupied Ukrainian territory as illegal.
That one week holds most of the questions this history tries to answer. Why has power in Russia so often gathered in one pair of hands? Why do so many Russians, including many who distrust their government, accept that a strong state is the price of survival? Why does the country's leadership speak of Ukraine as part of its own story, and why do Ukrainians reject that? And what happened to the other Russia, the one of the 1860s reformers, the 1905 Duma, the 1980s glasnost and the 1990s free press, which has always existed beside the autocratic one?
This is a long answer. It tries to tell the story the way a fair-minded Russian historian, a Russian liberal in exile, and a historian from one of Russia's neighbours could each read without feeling cheated, and it says plainly where they disagree.
In this history

Forest, steppe and Rus' (to 1240)
The Mongol centuries and the rise of Moscow (1237–1533)
Ivan the Terrible, the Troubles and the first Romanovs (1533–1689)
Peter, Catherine and the making of an empire (1689–1801)
1812, serfdom and the Great Reforms (1801–1881)
Revolution (1881–1921)
Stalin's revolution from above (1921–1941)
The Great Patriotic War (1941–1945)
Superpower: Khrushchev, Brezhnev, Gorbachev (1945–1991)
The 1990s: freedom and freefall (1991–1999)
Putin's Russia (1999–2021)
The full-scale war and Russia in 2026 (2022–2026)
How to understand Russia today

Part 1 — Forest, steppe and Rus' (to 1240)
A country shaped by its plain
Russia today covers about one-eighth of the Earth's inhabited land, spread across eleven time zones. Most of its people, though, live in the western part, on the great East European Plain: a flat, wide land of forest in the north, mixed woodland in the middle, and open grassland (the steppe) in the south. There are few mountains to block an invader and few natural borders to stop expansion. Rivers, not roads, were the highways: the Volga flowing south to the Caspian, the Dnieper to the Black Sea, the Western Dvina and the Neva toward the Baltic.
Two facts about this landscape run through all of Russian history. First, the forest zone had poor soils and a short growing season, so farming families produced little surplus, and the state that later grew up there had to squeeze hard to feed armies. Second, the steppe to the south was a corridor for horse-riding nomads (Scythians, then Huns, Avars, Khazars, Pechenegs, Polovtsians and finally Mongols) who could raid deep into the forest. Many Russian historians have drawn from this a lesson about the need for a strong, centralised state that can defend an open frontier. Others reply that geography explains pressures, not choices, and that other open-plain peoples built different kinds of states.
Who lived here
By the second half of the first millennium AD, East Slavic tribes had spread across the forest and forest-steppe, living alongside Finno-Ugric peoples in the north and east (ancestors of today's Mari, Mordvins and others) and Baltic peoples in the west. To the south-east, the Khazar khanate, whose ruling elite adopted Judaism, controlled much of the steppe trade. The Slavs farmed, hunted, kept bees, and traded furs, honey, wax and slaves along the rivers.
Rurik and the Varangians
The oldest East Slavic chronicle, the Tale of Bygone Years (often called the Primary Chronicle), was written down by monks in Kyiv in the early twelfth century. It says that around 860 the quarrelling tribes of the north invited a Scandinavian prince, Rurik, to come and rule them, and that he settled at Novgorod. Around 880 his successor Oleg took Kyiv on the Dnieper and made it the centre of a loose federation of towns and tribes that came to be called Rus'.
Who the "Rus'" were has been argued about for 250 years. The "Normanist" view holds that they were Scandinavian traders and warriors (Varangians, or Vikings) who founded the state and were soon absorbed into the Slavic majority. "Anti-Normanists", especially in Russian and Soviet scholarship, played down the Scandinavian role and stressed native Slavic state-building. Most historians today accept a Scandinavian ruling elite that quickly became Slavic in language and culture, ruling over a mainly Slavic population.
Kyiv, Byzantium and 988
Kyivan Rus' grew rich by sitting on the trade route "from the Varangians to the Greeks", from the Baltic down the Dnieper to Constantinople, the capital of the Byzantine Empire. Princess Olga, regent in the mid-tenth century, became a Christian. Her grandson Volodymyr (Vladimir in Russian) went further: in 988 he accepted Orthodox Christianity from Byzantium and had the people of Kyiv baptised. That choice tied Rus' to the Greek Christian world rather than to Latin Rome, gave it an alphabet (Cyrillic, created for Slavs a century earlier) and a church language, and set it on a cultural path distinct from Poland or Hungary. Under Yaroslav the Wise (who ruled Kyiv from 1019 to 1054) the city built its Cathedral of St Sophia, a law code was compiled, and Yaroslav's daughters married into the royal houses of France, Norway and Hungary.
After Yaroslav, Rus' broke into rival principalities ruled by his descendants. Novgorod in the north became a merchant republic with an elected assembly. In the north-east, the principality of Vladimir-Suzdal grew strong; a small fort there called Moscow is first mentioned in a chronicle in 1147. In the south-west, Galicia–Volhynia became a rich kingdom in its own right.
One origin, two readings
Here the first great historical argument begins, and it is not only academic.

The Russian imperial and Kremlin reading
The Ukrainian reading

What Kyivan Rus' was
The first Russian state; the cradle of a single "all-Russian" people of Great Russians, Little Russians (Ukrainians) and Belarusians
A state of the ancestors of Ukrainians (and Belarusians), centred on Kyiv

Where its heritage went
Passed north-east to Vladimir-Suzdal, then to Moscow, which "gathered the Russian lands"
Passed to Galicia–Volhynia, then to the Lithuanian-Ruthenian lands and the Cossacks, while Moscow was a separate, later state

What follows today
Russians and Ukrainians are, in Vladimir Putin's words of July 2021, "one people – a single whole"
Ukraine is an old nation with its own continuous history; shared origins do not make shared statehood

Key historian
Nikolai Karamzin, Sergei Solovyov, Vasily Klyuchevsky
Mykhailo Hrushevsky

Most historians outside both countries describe Kyivan Rus' as the common medieval ancestor of three modern nations (Russian, Ukrainian and Belarusian), none of which existed in its modern form in the year 1000. Medieval people thought of themselves as subjects of a prince and members of a church, not as citizens of a nation. Reading modern borders back into the eleventh century is something nationalists on every side have done; it is not something the evidence supports.
A note on names: English writers traditionally used Russian spellings (Kiev, Kievan Rus'). Since Ukraine's independence, and especially since 2022, most English-language institutions use the Ukrainian forms (Kyiv, Kyivan Rus'). This history follows that usage, with the Russian forms given where they matter.

Part 2 — The Mongol centuries and the rise of Moscow (1237–1533)
The invasion
In 1223 a Mongol scouting army crushed the princes of Rus' and their Polovtsian allies on the Kalka River, then vanished. It returned in 1237 under Batu, a grandson of Genghis Khan. Over the next three years the Mongols destroyed Ryazan, Vladimir and dozens of other towns, and in 1240 they sacked Kyiv. Novgorod, protected by marshes and by paying tribute, was spared. In the same years its prince, Alexander Nevsky, defeated a Swedish force on the Neva (1240) and the German crusading knights of the Livonian Order on frozen Lake Peipus (1242); he is still one of Russia's national heroes.
The Mongols did not occupy the forest lands. They ruled from the Golden Horde, their state on the lower Volga, and demanded tribute, soldiers and obedience. Russian princes had to travel to the Horde (and sometimes all the way to Mongolia) to receive a yarlyk, a patent to rule. The church was left alone and exempted from taxes, and it grew rich and influential.
What the "Mongol yoke" did
Russian writers since the nineteenth century have called this period the "Tatar-Mongol yoke" and blamed it for cutting Russia off from Europe during the Renaissance. Historians have long debated how deep its effect was. Some argue that Muscovy borrowed Mongol methods (census-taking, a postal relay system, tribute collection and an absolute ruler) and that Russian autocracy has Mongol roots. Others argue the Byzantine church and the needs of a frontier state mattered more. A twentieth-century school called the Eurasianists went further and celebrated the Mongol inheritance as proof that Russia is neither European nor Asian but a civilisation of its own. That idea has had a revival in Russian politics since the 1990s.
Moscow gathers the lands
Moscow's rise was not inevitable. It was a minor town, but its princes were clever and lucky. In the 1320s Prince Ivan I, nicknamed Kalita ("Moneybag"), won the Horde's trust and the right to collect tribute from other princes, which made him rich. The head of the Russian church moved to Moscow in the same decade, giving the city spiritual prestige. In 1380 Grand Prince Dmitry Donskoy defeated a Horde army at Kulikovo Field on the Don. It was not the end of Mongol rule (a Horde army burned Moscow two years later) but it showed the Horde could be beaten.

Moscow's rise

1147
Moscow first mentioned in a chronicle

1320s
Ivan I Kalita collects the Horde's tribute; church leadership settles in Moscow

1380
Battle of Kulikovo: Dmitry Donskoy defeats a Horde army

1453
Constantinople falls to the Ottomans

1462–1505
Ivan III rules; absorbs Novgorod (1478)

1480
Stand-off on the Ugra River; Moscow stops paying tribute

1510
Pskov annexed by Vasily III

Two heirs of Rus'
Moscow was not the only power gathering the old lands of Rus'. To the west, the Grand Duchy of Lithuania expanded through the fourteenth century over most of today's Belarus and Ukraine, including Kyiv, and in 1385 entered a dynastic union with Poland. Its chancery wrote in a Ruthenian (East Slavic) language and most of its subjects were Orthodox. For two centuries there were thus two rival states claiming the Rus' inheritance: a Catholic-led, increasingly Polish-influenced commonwealth in the west, where the ancestors of Ukrainians and Belarusians lived, and Orthodox Muscovy in the north-east. This split, more than any medieval ethnic difference, is why Russian, Ukrainian and Belarusian identities developed apart.
Life under the Horde
For ordinary people these centuries meant tribute, raids, and the forest. Most lived in small villages of log houses, growing rye, oats and flax on cleared land, and moving on when the soil was exhausted. Monasteries pushed into the northern wilderness and became centres of farming, learning and pilgrimage; the Trinity monastery founded by St Sergius of Radonezh north of Moscow became the spiritual heart of Muscovy. In the early fifteenth century the monk Andrei Rublev painted icons, including his Trinity, that are still counted among the greatest works of Russian art. In Novgorod, archaeologists have dug up more than a thousand letters scratched on birch bark from these centuries: shopping lists, love notes, debt reminders and a boy's school exercises, proof that literacy reached well beyond the clergy.
Ivan III and the Third Rome
Ivan III, who ruled from 1462 to 1505, is the real founder of the Muscovite state. He annexed Novgorod in 1478, deporting its leading families and carrying off the bell that summoned its assembly. He married Sophia Palaiologina, niece of the last Byzantine emperor, adopted the double-headed eagle, and began to call himself "tsar" (from "caesar") in dealings with smaller powers. In 1480 a Horde army and Ivan's army faced each other across the Ugra River and both withdrew without battle; Russian history dates the end of the "yoke" from that stand-off.
After Constantinople fell to the Ottoman Turks in 1453, a Russian monk wrote to Ivan's son Vasily III that Moscow was now the "Third Rome": the first Rome had fallen into heresy, the second (Constantinople) to the infidel, and Moscow alone remained as the centre of true Christianity. "Two Romes have fallen, the third stands, and a fourth there shall not be." The idea was a monk's, not a state doctrine, but it resonated through later Russian thinking about the country's special mission.

Part 3 — Ivan the Terrible, the Troubles and the first Romanovs (1533–1689)
The first tsar
Ivan IV came to the throne at the age of three, grew up amid the feuds of the great noble families (the boyars), and in 1547 was crowned as the first formal "tsar of all Rus'". His early reign brought reforms: a new law code, a standing infantry (the streltsy), and the first assemblies of the land. Then came conquest. In 1552 Ivan took Kazan, the capital of a Tatar khanate on the middle Volga, and in 1556 Astrakhan, where the Volga meets the Caspian. Muscovy now controlled the whole length of the river and, for the first time, ruled large Muslim and Turkic populations. St Basil's Cathedral in Red Square was built to celebrate Kazan.
In 1581 the Stroganov merchant family, who wanted furs, hired a Cossack leader named Yermak to lead an expedition across the Urals. He defeated the khanate of Sibir, and within seventy years Russian traders, soldiers and trappers had crossed Siberia to the Pacific. The Indigenous peoples of Siberia were made to pay a fur tribute (yasak), and many were devastated by violence and disease. The Treaty of Nerchinsk with China in 1689 fixed a border in the Far East.
The oprichnina
Ivan's long Livonian War (1558–83) for access to the Baltic ended in defeat. At home, after the death of his first wife, he turned on his own elite. In 1565 he split the country, taking a large part of it as his personal domain, the oprichnina, policed by black-clad horsemen, the oprichniki. They killed boyars, merchants and peasants, confiscated land, and in 1570 massacred the people of Novgorod. In 1572 Ivan abandoned the policy. Trade fell, peasants fled the violence and taxes, and the state began restricting their right to move. According to contemporary accounts he also struck and killed his own eldest son in a rage in 1581. Russians call him Grozny, usually translated "the Terrible" but closer to "the Fearsome" or "the Formidable", and they argue about him still: a builder of state and empire, or a tyrant whose terror wrecked his country? Under Stalin, Ivan was praised in films and textbooks as a model ruler; in recent years statues of him have gone up in several Russian cities.
The Time of Troubles
Ivan's surviving son Fedor was the last of the Rurik line. When he died in 1598 the regent Boris Godunov became tsar, and the country fell into the Smuta, the Time of Troubles. A famine in 1601–03 killed vast numbers. Pretenders claiming to be Ivan's dead son Dmitry raised armies; Polish and Swedish troops intervened; Polish forces occupied Moscow from 1610 to 1612. The country was rescued not by a prince but by a coalition: a butcher from Nizhny Novgorod, Kuzma Minin, and a prince, Dmitry Pozharsky, raised a volunteer army that drove the Poles out of the Kremlin in 1612. In 1613 an assembly of the land elected sixteen-year-old Mikhail Romanov as tsar. His family would rule until 1917. Since 2005, 4 November, the date associated with the liberation of Moscow, has been a national holiday, Unity Day.

The Troubles left a lesson that Russian rulers have repeated ever since: when the centre weakens, the country falls apart and foreigners walk in. Russian liberals reply that the Troubles were ended by citizens acting together, and that an elected assembly chose the new dynasty.

Serfdom becomes law
The early Romanovs rebuilt the state on the backs of the peasants. The Law Code of 1649 bound peasants permanently to the land and to their lords: they could no longer leave, and runaways could be hunted down without time limit. Serfdom in Russia was not a medieval leftover, as in much of western Europe, but a new institution of the seventeenth century, created to guarantee the gentry who served in the tsar's army a workforce. It would last until 1861.
Revolts followed. The Don Cossack Stepan (Stenka) Razin led a huge rebellion along the Volga in 1670–71 before being captured and executed in Moscow. The church split too: Patriarch Nikon's reforms to bring Russian ritual into line with Greek practice (making the sign of the cross with three fingers instead of two, for example) were rejected by millions of "Old Believers", who were persecuted, and some of whom burned themselves alive rather than submit. A church council condemned them in 1666–67.
The Cossack Hetmanate joins Muscovy
In 1648 the Cossacks of the Dnieper, under Bohdan Khmelnytsky, rose against Polish rule (the uprising and its massacres of Jews and Poles are told in A Brief History of Ukraine in this series). In 1654 at Pereiaslav, Khmelnytsky's Cossacks took an oath to the tsar. Russian imperial and Soviet histories called this the "reunion" of Ukraine with Russia; many Ukrainian historians read it as a military alliance or protectorate that Moscow later turned into annexation. The Treaty of Andrusovo with Poland in 1667 left Muscovy with Kyiv and the lands east of the Dnieper.

Part 4 — Peter, Catherine and the making of an empire (1689–1801)
Peter the Great
Peter I took power in 1689 (his half-brother Ivan V remained co-tsar until 1696), a giant of a man (over two metres tall) with endless energy and a fascination with ships, guns and Western technology. In 1697–98 he travelled incognito through the Dutch Republic and England, working in shipyards. When he returned he ordered his nobles to shave their beards and wear Western clothes, and he set about remaking the state.
His central project was war with Sweden, then the dominant power of the Baltic. In the Great Northern War (1700–21) he lost badly at Narva in 1700, rebuilt his army, and in 1709 destroyed the army of Charles XII of Sweden at Poltava, in Ukraine, where Charles had marched after campaigning through Poland. The Cossack hetman Ivan Mazepa, who had switched to the Swedish side, fled with Charles. The Treaty of Nystad in 1721 gave Russia the Baltic coast from Vyborg to Riga, and Peter took the title of emperor: Muscovy became the Russian Empire.
In 1703, on marshland newly taken from Sweden at the mouth of the Neva, Peter founded St Petersburg, and in 1713 made it the capital. Tens of thousands of conscripted peasants and prisoners built it, at great cost in lives. It was meant to be a "window on Europe", and for two centuries it was the seat of Russian power.

Peter's reforms
What they did

Army and navy
Conscription of peasants for life; a modern army and a Baltic fleet

Table of Ranks (1722)
Fourteen grades of state service; rank by service, not only birth

The church
Patriarchate abolished; church run by a state committee, the Holy Synod

Taxes
A poll tax on every male peasant, which tightened serfdom

Culture
First Russian newspaper; reformed alphabet; Academy of Sciences planned

Peter's methods were brutal. He had his own son Alexei tortured and condemned for opposing him; Alexei died in prison in 1718. His reforms made the nobility more European and the peasantry more enslaved. Ever since, Russians have argued whether Peter showed that their country belongs in Europe (the view of the nineteenth-century "Westernisers") or that he broke a native Russian path (the view of the "Slavophiles").
What the empire cost its people
For most Russians the eighteenth century meant heavier burdens. The poll tax fell on every male peasant; recruits were taken from villages for what was effectively life service, and villages held farewell laments for them as if for the dead. Serfs could be bought and sold, sometimes separately from their families, and lords could have them flogged or exiled to Siberia. At the same time a small, French-speaking nobility built palaces and estates, and a Westernised high culture took root: Moscow University was founded in 1755, and the scientist and poet Mikhail Lomonosov, a fisherman's son from the White Sea coast, became Russia's first great scholar.
The age of empresses
For most of the eighteenth century Russia was ruled by women: Catherine I, Anna, Elizabeth and, from 1762, Catherine II, a German princess who came to power in a coup against her husband Peter III, who was killed soon after. Catherine the Great corresponded with Voltaire and Diderot, wrote a long "Instruction" for a law-code commission drawing on Montesquieu, and collected the art that became the Hermitage. Her Charter to the Nobility of 1785 freed nobles from compulsory service and confirmed their privileges. For serfs it was the opposite: their condition worsened, and Catherine gave away hundreds of thousands of state peasants to favourites.
In 1773 a Don Cossack, Yemelyan Pugachev, announced that he was the murdered Peter III and raised the largest peasant war in Russian history, joined by Cossacks, Bashkirs and other Turkic peoples, Ural factory workers and serfs. It was crushed in 1774 and Pugachev was executed in Moscow. The poet Alexander Pushkin later wrote of the "senseless and merciless" Russian revolt.
Expansion
Catherine's armies took the north coast of the Black Sea from the Ottoman Empire and in 1783 annexed the Crimean Khanate, home of the Crimean Tatars. Under Prince Grigory Potemkin new towns such as Kherson and Sevastopol were founded in the territory called "New Russia", followed in 1794 by Odesa. In the three partitions of Poland–Lithuania (1772, 1793 and 1795), Russia, Prussia and Austria divided a state that had once ruled Moscow; Russia took most of today's Belarus, Lithuania and right-bank Ukraine. With those lands came most of the world's Jews. In the 1790s Catherine's government confined Jewish residence to the western provinces, the Pale of Settlement, which lasted until 1917.
By 1800 the Russian Empire stretched from the Baltic to Alaska. It was already multinational: by the census of 1897, fewer than half of its subjects were Russians. Whether to call this growth "expansion", "the gathering of lands", "colonisation" or "conquest" depends heavily on whose history is being told. To Russian imperial historians it was a civilising mission into empty or lawless lands; to Poles, Crimean Tatars, Kazakhs, Circassians and many others, it was conquest.

Part 5 — 1812, serfdom and the Great Reforms (1801–1881)
Napoleon and 1812
Alexander I, who came to the throne in 1801 after a palace plot killed his father Paul, at first allied with and then fought against Napoleon. In June 1812 Napoleon invaded with the largest army Europe had seen. The Russians retreated, fought a bloody draw at Borodino in September, and abandoned Moscow, which was occupied and burned. With no peace offer from the tsar and winter coming, Napoleon retreated; cold, hunger, disease and Cossack and partisan raids destroyed most of his army. In 1814 Russian troops entered Paris.
1812 became the founding myth of Russian patriotism, the "Patriotic War", told in Leo Tolstoy's War and Peace (published in the 1860s) and in Tchaikovsky's 1812 Overture. When the Soviet Union fought Germany after 1941 it called that struggle the "Great Patriotic War" to make the echo unmistakable.
Decembrists and the iron tsar
Young officers who had seen Europe came home with ideas. When Alexander died in December 1825, a group of them refused to swear allegiance to his brother Nicholas and demanded a constitution. The "Decembrist" revolt was put down within a day; five leaders were hanged and over a hundred exiled to Siberia, where some of their wives followed them. They became martyrs for later generations of Russian liberals and revolutionaries.
Nicholas I (1825–55) ruled through censorship and a political police, the Third Section, under the official motto "Orthodoxy, Autocracy, Nationality". He crushed a Polish uprising in 1830–31 and helped Austria crush the Hungarian revolution in 1849. Yet his reign was also the golden age of Russian literature: Pushkin (killed in a duel in 1837), Lermontov and Gogol wrote under his censors, and the great debate between Westernisers and Slavophiles began in the salons of Moscow.
Conquering the Caucasus
From 1801, when it annexed eastern Georgia, Russia fought for decades to subdue the North Caucasus. The Avar imam Shamil led Chechen and Dagestani resistance until his surrender in 1859. In the north-west Caucasus, the campaign that ended in 1864 killed or drove out most of the Circassian people, hundreds of thousands of whom were expelled to the Ottoman Empire; Circassian organisations and a number of historians call this a genocide; the Russian government rejects the term. In the same decades Russia conquered Central Asia: Tashkent fell in 1865, and Bukhara and Khiva became protectorates.
Defeat in Crimea and the Great Reforms
The Crimean War of 1853–56, in which Britain, France, the Ottoman Empire and Sardinia defeated Russia on its own soil at Sevastopol, exposed how far serf Russia had fallen behind industrial Europe. Nicholas died during the war. His son Alexander II concluded that the old order could not survive. "It is better to abolish serfdom from above," he told Moscow nobles, "than to wait until it begins to abolish itself from below."
On 19 February 1861 (old calendar; 3 March in the modern one) he signed the emancipation of about 20 million privately owned serfs, two years before Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation. Former serfs became legally free, but the land deal was harsh: they received less land than they had farmed, had to pay for it through decades of "redemption payments", and the land usually went not to individuals but to the village commune, the mir, which redistributed strips and was collectively responsible for taxes.

The Great Reforms of Alexander II

1861
Emancipation of the serfs

1864
Elected local councils (zemstva) for roads, schools and clinics; jury trials and independent courts

1870
Elected town councils

1874
Universal military service, cut from 25 years to six

1860s
Looser censorship: Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment (1866) and Tolstoy's War and Peace appear

The village after freedom
Emancipation changed less in the village than the reformers had hoped. Former serfs had to make redemption payments to the state for almost fifty years; the commune still decided who farmed which strip, and peasants needed its permission to leave for the city. Population grew fast, holdings shrank, and land hunger became the great grievance of the peasantry until 1917. But the reforms opened other doors: zemstvo schools and clinics spread into the countryside, staffed by teachers, doctors and agronomists who formed a new, idealistic professional class. Railways linked the grain lands of the south to the Black Sea ports, and Russia became one of the world's great wheat exporters.
This was also the age of Russia's greatest literature and music. Ivan Turgenev, Dostoevsky and Tolstoy wrote novels that asked what a person owes to God, to the peasant, and to their own conscience; the composers of the "Mighty Handful" (Mussorgsky, Borodin, Rimsky-Korsakov and others) built a national school on folk melodies, while Tchaikovsky wrote symphonies and ballets that the whole world came to know.
The revolutionaries
The reforms did not satisfy everyone. In 1874 thousands of students "went to the people" to educate and rouse the peasants, who often handed them to the police. Some radicals turned to terror. On 1 March 1881 members of the group People's Will killed Alexander II with a bomb in St Petersburg, on the day he had approved a plan for a limited consultative assembly. His son Alexander III reversed course: tighter censorship, more police power, Russification of non-Russian peoples, and new restrictions on Jews after a wave of pogroms swept the south-west of the empire in 1881–82.

Part 6 — Revolution (1881–1921)
An empire racing to industrialise
Under Finance Minister Sergei Witte in the 1890s, the state borrowed from France, built the Trans-Siberian Railway, and pushed industry hard. Factories in St Petersburg, Moscow, the Urals and the Donbas filled with peasant workers living in crowded barracks. Yet most Russians still lived in villages, where a famine in 1891–92 killed around half a million. Radical parties formed: the Marxist Social Democrats (who split in 1903 into Vladimir Lenin's Bolsheviks and the more moderate Mensheviks), the peasant-oriented Socialist Revolutionaries, and the liberal Constitutional Democrats ("Kadets").
Culture flourished in the last decades of the empire: Anton Chekhov's plays The Seagull and The Cherry Orchard caught a gentry world in decline; the "Silver Age" poets and the painters of the avant-garde, from Kandinsky to Malevich, made Russia a centre of modern art. Russian Jews, confined to the Pale and subject to quotas in universities, emigrated in their hundreds of thousands, many to the United States, while others joined the socialist parties or the Jewish Labour Bund, founded in 1897.
1905
War with Japan (1904–05) went disastrously; the Baltic fleet sailed round the world to be sunk at Tsushima. On Sunday 9 January 1905 a priest, Georgy Gapon, led a peaceful march of workers carrying icons and a petition to the Winter Palace. Troops fired, killing several hundred. "Bloody Sunday" set off a year of strikes, mutinies (including on the battleship Potemkin) and peasant risings. In October Nicholas II issued a manifesto promising civil liberties and an elected parliament, the Duma, which first met in 1906.
The tsar never accepted that he was a constitutional monarch. He dissolved the first two Dumas and rigged the electoral law. His prime minister Pyotr Stolypin combined harsh repression (the hangman's noose was nicknamed "Stolypin's necktie") with a serious land reform that let peasants leave the commune and own private farms. Stolypin was assassinated in 1911.
War and the fall of the monarchy
In 1914 Russia went to war with Germany and Austria-Hungary. Millions of men were mobilised; the army suffered huge losses; inflation and food shortages hit the cities. Nicholas took personal command at the front, leaving government to the empress Alexandra, who was under the influence of the faith healer Grigory Rasputin until aristocrats murdered him in December 1916.
In February 1917 (March in the Western calendar), bread queues and strikes in Petrograd (as St Petersburg had been renamed) turned into revolution when soldiers refused to fire on the crowds. Nicholas abdicated. Power was split between a Provisional Government of liberals and moderate socialists and the Petrograd Soviet (council) of workers' and soldiers' deputies.
The Provisional Government kept fighting the war and postponed land reform until a Constituent Assembly could meet. Lenin, returned from Swiss exile with German help, promised "peace, land and bread" and "all power to the soviets". On 25 October 1917 (7 November) the Bolsheviks seized power in Petrograd. Elections for the Constituent Assembly, held soon afterward, gave the Socialist Revolutionaries the largest share; when the Assembly met in January 1918 the Bolsheviks dispersed it after a single day.

Was October a popular revolution or a coup? Soviet history called it the Great October Socialist Revolution, the will of the working class. Most Western and many Russian historians see a seizure of power by a disciplined minority party, carried by real popular anger at the war and the landlords. Both can be true at once.

Civil war
In March 1918 the Bolsheviks signed the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk with Germany, giving up Poland, the Baltic lands, Finland and Ukraine. They moved the capital to Moscow. In July 1918, in Yekaterinburg, they shot Nicholas II, his wife, their five children and their servants.
The civil war of 1918–21 pitted the Bolshevik Reds against a mixed array of Whites (monarchist and nationalist officers), with British, French, American and Japanese intervention forces at the edges, peasant "Green" armies, anarchists in Ukraine, and national movements in Ukraine, the Caucasus and Central Asia that tried to form their own states. Both sides used terror; the Bolsheviks' political police, the Cheka, took hostages and shot "class enemies" in large numbers. Jewish communities in Ukraine and Belarus suffered massacres at the hands of several armies. Under "War Communism" the Bolsheviks seized grain from peasants by force.
The Reds won, because they held the central industrial heartland and railways, because they were united and the Whites were not, and because many peasants feared the return of the landlords more than they hated the Bolsheviks. A war with Poland ended in 1921 with the Treaty of Riga. But the country was ruined. In March 1921 the sailors of Kronstadt, once heroes of the revolution, rebelled demanding free soviets; Trotsky's Red Army crushed them. The same year a famine broke out in the Volga region. Lenin retreated to the New Economic Policy (NEP), allowing peasants to sell their surplus and small private trade to resume. In December 1922 the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics was formed, a federation of Russia, Ukraine, Belorussia and the Transcaucasian republic.

Part 7 — Stalin's revolution from above (1921–1941)
Lenin's heir
Lenin suffered a series of strokes and died in January 1924. His last notes warned against Joseph Stalin, a Georgian Bolshevik who as the party's general secretary controlled appointments. Stalin outmanoeuvred his rivals one by one: Leon Trotsky (expelled in 1929, murdered in Mexico by a Soviet agent in 1940), then Zinoviev and Kamenev, then Bukharin.
The Soviet Union of the 1920s was a strange mix: a one-party dictatorship with a free-ish peasant economy, a burst of avant-garde art and film (Eisenstein's Battleship Potemkin came out in 1925), a campaign against religion, and a policy of korenizatsiya ("rooting") that promoted local languages and cadres in the non-Russian republics.
Collectivisation and famine
In 1928–29 Stalin ended NEP. The first Five-Year Plan set wild targets for heavy industry, and the countryside was forced into collective farms (kolkhozy). Peasants labelled kulaks, supposedly rich farmers, but in practice anyone who resisted, were shot, sent to camps or deported. In 1930–31 alone about 1.8 million people were deported as "kulaks" to Siberia, the Urals and Kazakhstan, according to the historian Nicolas Werth. Peasants slaughtered their animals rather than hand them over.
Grain was taken from the villages to feed the cities and sell abroad. In 1932–33 famine struck the main grain regions: Ukraine, the North Caucasus (including the Kuban, with its large Ukrainian population), the Volga and Kazakhstan.

The famine of 1932–33: who estimates what
Estimate

R. W. Davies and Stephen Wheatcroft, The Years of Hunger (2004): whole USSR
5.5–6.5 million deaths

Ukrainian Institute of Demography team (cited by the Encyclopedia of Ukraine): Ukraine, 1932–34
just under 4 million excess deaths

Nicolas Werth (Sciences Po Mass Violence encyclopedia): Kazakhstan, 1931–33
1.1–1.4 million, about a third of all Kazakhs

The famine in Ukraine, which Ukrainians call the Holodomor ("death by hunger"), was made worse by measures aimed specifically at Ukraine and the Kuban: villages were blacklisted, and in January 1933 a directive barred starving peasants from leaving Ukraine and the North Caucasus to look for food. Whether it was a genocide is debated. Ukraine's parliament declared it one in 2006, and many other parliaments have since agreed; historians such as Davies and Wheatcroft argue that Stalin's policies killed millions through brutal priorities rather than an intent to destroy Ukrainians as such. The Russian government recognises the famine as a tragedy shared by many Soviet peoples and rejects the genocide label. The debate is told in full in A Brief History of Ukraine in this series.
The Great Terror
In 1934 the Leningrad party chief Sergei Kirov was murdered, probably with Stalin's knowledge, though this has never been proved; the killing became the pretext for purges. In three Moscow show trials (1936–38), old Bolsheviks confessed to absurd charges of spying and sabotage. The Red Army's officer corps was decimated. But most victims were ordinary people caught up in "mass operations" with quotas for each region.
According to Werth's account, drawn from the opened Soviet archives, between August 1937 and November 1938 more than 1.5 million people were arrested by the NKVD (the political police) and about 800,000 were executed. Under NKVD Order No. 00447, aimed at former kulaks, criminals and "anti-Soviet elements", about 767,000 people were sentenced, of whom about 387,000 were shot. The "national operations" targeted diaspora peoples: the Polish operation alone took some 111,000 lives.
The Gulag, the network of labour camps and colonies, held about 1.9 million prisoners in 1941 and peaked at about 2.5 million in the early 1950s, according to figures summarised by the economist Paul Gregory. Prisoners dug canals, felled forests and mined gold in the Arctic. Millions more lived in "special settlements" of deportees. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's The Gulag Archipelago (published abroad in 1973) and Varlam Shalamov's Kolyma Tales are the great literary testimonies.

How many people did Stalin's regime kill? There is no single number. Executions, famine deaths, deaths in camps and in deportation are counted differently by different scholars, and the totals depend on what is included. The documented executions of 1937–38 alone were around 800,000.

Building, and believing
The same years saw real change. Industrial output soared, new cities like Magnitogorsk rose from the steppe, literacy spread, millions of peasants moved into cities and education, and women entered factories and universities. Many Soviet citizens believed sincerely that they were building socialism, even as neighbours vanished at night. That double memory, of genuine achievement and of terror, is the root of Russia's still-divided view of Stalin.
The pact
In August 1939 Stalin's foreign minister Vyacheslav Molotov and Hitler's Joachim von Ribbentrop signed a non-aggression pact with a secret protocol dividing eastern Europe. Germany invaded Poland from the west on 1 September; the Red Army invaded from the east on 17 September. The USSR then annexed eastern Poland (today's western Ukraine and western Belarus), attacked Finland in the Winter War of 1939–40, and in 1940 annexed Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and part of Romania (today's Moldova). In April and May 1940 the NKVD shot about 25,700 Polish officers, officials, police and others at Katyn forest and other sites, according to the Soviet documents published by Russian archivists in 1997. The Soviet Union blamed the Germans until 1990, when Gorbachev's government admitted the truth.

Part 8 — The Great Patriotic War (1941–1945)
Barbarossa
On 22 June 1941 Germany and its allies invaded the Soviet Union with about three million soldiers. Stalin had ignored repeated warnings. In the first months the Red Army lost millions of men killed or captured; German forces reached the outskirts of Leningrad and Moscow. The Nazis' plans for the East included starving tens of millions of Slavs and replacing them with German settlers. Of some 5.7 million Soviet soldiers captured by the Germans, about 3.3 million (57 percent) were dead by the end of the war, according to the US Holocaust Memorial Museum, many from deliberate starvation. Behind the front, German killing units and their local collaborators murdered Soviet Jews by shooting, village by village.
Moscow, Leningrad, Stalingrad
The Red Army halted the Germans before Moscow in December 1941. Leningrad was besieged for about 870 days, from September 1941 to January 1944; hundreds of thousands of its civilians died, most from starvation in the first winter. At Stalingrad on the Volga, after months of street fighting, Soviet forces encircled the German Sixth Army; it surrendered in early 1943, and some 91,000 German soldiers were taken prisoner. At Kursk in July 1943 the Red Army won the largest tank battle of the war, and from then on it advanced west. In April–May 1945 it took Berlin; Germany surrendered on 8 May, and Russia celebrates Victory Day on 9 May, because it was already the next day in Moscow.
Factories were evacuated east of the Urals in the first months of the war and kept producing tanks and aircraft; American Lend-Lease supplied trucks, food, aluminium and much else.
A people's war
The war was fought by the whole society. Hundreds of thousands of Soviet women served in the armed forces, as nurses and signallers but also as snipers, tank drivers and the night-bomber pilots the Germans called "night witches". Partisan bands operated behind German lines in Belarus and Ukraine. In the rear, women, teenagers and pensioners worked twelve-hour shifts in the factories that had been moved east of the Urals in 1941, while Lend-Lease supplies from the United States and Britain (trucks, food, boots, aluminium) helped keep the army moving. Discipline was savage: in July 1942 Stalin's Order No. 227, "Not a step back!", set up blocking detachments behind the front and penal battalions for those who retreated.
The Holocaust also took place on Soviet soil. According to the US Holocaust Memorial Museum, at least 1.5 million and possibly more than 2 million Jews were murdered in mass shootings and gas vans on Soviet territory, most of them near their own homes in 1941–42, as at Babyn Yar outside Kyiv, where about 34,000 were shot in two days. Soviet official memory long folded them into the general category of "peaceful Soviet citizens", and the specifically Jewish character of the killing was rarely acknowledged until the late 1980s.
The cost
No country lost more people in the Second World War.

Soviet war dead: who estimates what
Estimate

Library of Congress, Russia: A Country Study (1998)
about 20 million soldiers and civilians

National WWII Museum (New Orleans), drawing on several studies
military 8.8–10.7 million; about 24 million total

Russian official figure, based on the Krivosheev military study and later demographic work
about 26.6 million total, of whom about 8.7 million military

These figures cover the whole USSR, not only Russia: Ukraine and Belarus, which were fully occupied, lost a larger share of their populations than Russia did.
War within the war
Stalin's regime did not pause its repression. In 1943–44 whole peoples accused of collaboration were deported to Central Asia and Siberia: Karachays, Kalmyks, Balkars, Meskhetian Turks, the Volga Germans (already in 1941), and in February 1944 about 521,000 Chechens and Ingush, and in May 1944 about 180,000 Crimean Tatars, according to NKVD figures cited by Werth. Many died in transit and in the first years of exile. Returning Soviet prisoners of war were screened, and many sent to the Gulag. In the Baltic states and western Ukraine, armed nationalist resistance to the returning Soviet power lasted into the early 1950s.

In Russia today the Great Patriotic War is the closest thing to a sacred national story: almost every family lost someone, and the "Immortal Regiment" marches, where people carry portraits of relatives who fought, drew millions. Historians in Poland and the Baltic states add that for them 1944–45 brought not only liberation from Nazism but a new occupation, and that the war began for them in 1939, when the USSR was Hitler's partner.

Part 9 — Superpower: Khrushchev, Brezhnev, Gorbachev (1945–1991)
Victory and a new empire
The war left the Soviet Army in the heart of Europe. In the following years communist regimes were installed across eastern Europe. The wartime alliance with the United States and Britain gave way to the Cold War. The USSR tested an atomic bomb in 1949 and a hydrogen bomb in 1953. At home a famine in 1946–47 killed many more, and in Stalin's last years a campaign against "rootless cosmopolitans" targeted Jews, culminating in the fabricated "Doctors' Plot" of 1953. Stalin died in March 1953.
Khrushchev's thaw
Nikita Khrushchev emerged as leader. In February 1956, in a closed session of the Twentieth Party Congress, he gave his "secret speech" denouncing Stalin's cult of personality and some of his crimes. Millions of Gulag prisoners were released and "rehabilitated". The same year Soviet tanks crushed the Hungarian revolution.
These were the years of Soviet triumph in space: Sputnik, the first artificial satellite, in 1957, and Yuri Gagarin, the first human in orbit, in 1961. Solzhenitsyn's One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, a novella about a Gulag prisoner, was published in a Soviet journal in 1962. But in the same year troops fired on striking workers in Novocherkassk, and the Cuban missile crisis brought the world close to nuclear war. Khrushchev's colleagues removed him in October 1964, and he was allowed to retire, itself a sign of change: no fallen Soviet leader before him had died in his bed.
The Brezhnev years
Under Leonid Brezhnev (1964–82) the Soviet Union reached military parity with the United States and settled into stability. For many older Russians the 1970s are remembered fondly: secure jobs, cheap flats, holidays in Crimea, no war at home. Oil exports after 1973 paid for grain imports. But growth slowed, shortages were constant, corruption spread, and alcohol consumption and male mortality rose. In 1968 Warsaw Pact forces crushed the "Prague Spring" reforms in Czechoslovakia. Dissidents such as the physicist Andrei Sakharov and the writer Solzhenitsyn (expelled in 1974) were persecuted; some were held in psychiatric hospitals. In December 1979 Soviet troops invaded Afghanistan, beginning a decade-long war that killed about 15,000 Soviet soldiers and a far larger number of Afghans.
Everyday Soviet life
From the late 1950s millions of families moved out of crowded communal apartments, where several families shared a kitchen and bathroom, into the five-storey prefabricated blocks nicknamed khrushchevki. Education and health care were free, rents were tiny, and unemployment officially did not exist. But almost everything was in short supply: people queued for sausage, waited years for a car or a flat, and relied on blat, the network of favours and connections, to get anything done. A favourite joke ran: "They pretend to pay us, and we pretend to work." Television, the dacha (a country cottage with a vegetable plot), summer pioneer camps and the bard songs of Vladimir Vysotsky and Bulat Okudzhava were the textures of late Soviet life.
Gorbachev
After two elderly successors (Andropov and Chernenko) died in quick succession, Mikhail Gorbachev became general secretary in March 1985. At 54 he was young by Politburo standards. He wanted to save socialism by reforming it: perestroika (restructuring) of the economy, glasnost (openness) in public life, and "new thinking" in foreign policy.
The explosion at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant in Soviet Ukraine on 26 April 1986 (Chornobyl in Ukrainian), and the government's initial silence, convinced Gorbachev that secrecy was strangling the country. Glasnost took off: Stalin's crimes were debated openly, banned books were published, and the Memorial society began documenting the victims of repression. Gorbachev and Ronald Reagan signed the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty in 1987; Soviet troops left Afghanistan by February 1989. When eastern Europeans overthrew their communist governments in 1989, Gorbachev did not send in the tanks. The Berlin Wall fell in November 1989.

The end of the USSR

1989
Semi-free elections to a new Soviet parliament; Soviet troops out of Afghanistan; Berlin Wall falls

1990
Communist Party's guaranteed "leading role" removed from the constitution; Baltic republics declare independence

June 1991
Boris Yeltsin elected president of the Russian republic

19–21 August 1991
Hardline coup against Gorbachev fails; Yeltsin stands on a tank outside the Russian parliament

24 August 1991
Ukraine declares independence

8 December 1991
Leaders of Russia, Ukraine and Belarus declare the USSR at an end

25 December 1991
Gorbachev resigns; the red flag comes down over the Kremlin

Perestroika failed economically: half-reforms broke the old planned system without creating markets, and shortages grew worse. Meanwhile national movements in the Baltics, the Caucasus, Ukraine and elsewhere demanded sovereignty, and in some places ethnic violence broke out. In August 1991 hardliners placed Gorbachev under house arrest in Crimea and declared a state of emergency. Crowds in Moscow defended the Russian parliament, troops refused to fire, and the coup collapsed in three days. It destroyed what authority the Soviet centre had left.
The end is remembered in two ways. For many in the West, in the Baltics and among Russian liberals, it was a liberation, and peaceful. In 2005 Putin called the collapse of the Soviet Union "a major geopolitical disaster of the century", and many Russians who lived through the 1990s would agree with him.

Part 10 — The 1990s: freedom and freefall (1991–1999)
Shock
Boris Yeltsin's government freed most prices in January 1992. Consumer prices rose by roughly 875 percent in 1993 alone, by the World Bank's measure, after even steeper rises in 1992. Savings were wiped out. Between 1991 and 1998 Russia's economic output fell by about 43 percent, a collapse deeper than America's Great Depression. Workers went months without pay; pensioners sold their possessions on the streets. Male life expectancy fell to about 57 in 1994.
Privatisation, first through vouchers handed to every citizen and then, in 1995, through the "loans-for-shares" auctions in which a few well-connected bankers acquired oil, nickel and other giant companies cheaply in exchange for loans to the government, created a class of billionaires known as the oligarchs. To liberals, the reforms were the painful but necessary price of escaping a dead system; to their critics, including many former supporters, it was theft dressed as reform.
Tanks against parliament
Yeltsin clashed with the Supreme Soviet, the parliament elected in Soviet times. In September 1993 he dissolved it, unconstitutionally; deputies barricaded themselves inside the parliament building, and after armed supporters tried to storm the Moscow television centre, Yeltsin ordered tanks to fire on the building in early October. Many people were killed in the street fighting. A new constitution, approved by referendum in December 1993, gave the presidency sweeping powers that later presidents would use.
Chechnya
In December 1994 Russian forces invaded Chechnya, which had declared independence. The war was a catastrophe: Grozny was flattened, and Chechen fighters retook it in 1996. Estimates of the dead in the first war vary widely, from about 35,000 to about 120,000, mostly civilians, according to a survey of estimates by the demographic journal Demoscope Weekly. A ceasefire in 1996 left Chechnya de facto independent and lawless.
Surviving the decade
Ordinary Russians improvised. By the mid-1990s an estimated five to ten million "shuttle traders" were travelling to China, Turkey and the Emirates with empty bags and coming home with clothes and electronics to sell at open-air markets. Families lived on what they grew at the dacha. Scientists, engineers and doctors emigrated or drove taxis. Crime and contract killings flourished, and private security firms became a major industry. Russia also became federal in practice: regions such as Tatarstan negotiated power-sharing treaties with Moscow (Tatarstan's came in 1994), and governors built local fiefdoms.
The death rate soared, especially among working-age men, driven by alcohol, heart disease, violence and stress; the population began to shrink in 1992 and has done so in most years since. Churches, mosques and synagogues reopened, and the Orthodox Church, persecuted for most of the Soviet period, became one of the most trusted institutions in the country.
Free and fragile
The 1990s were also years of real freedom: a raucous independent press, the NTV television channel that showed the horrors of Chechnya, open elections, religious revival, open borders and new businesses. Yeltsin, ill and drinking, won re-election in 1996 against the Communist Gennady Zyuganov with heavy oligarch backing and favourable media coverage. In August 1998 Russia defaulted on its debt and the rouble collapsed; the economy shrank by about 5 percent that year. On 31 December 1999 Yeltsin resigned and handed power to his prime minister, a former KGB officer and head of the FSB security service, Vladimir Putin.
Russia and the West in the 1990s
Yeltsin's Russia wanted to be part of the West. It joined the International Monetary Fund in 1992, received Western loans, and in 1997 took part in the G-8 summit in Denver as a full member for the first time. American advisers helped design the privatisation programme, which later made "Western advice" a dirty phrase for many Russians. Two issues soured the relationship. The first was NATO's decision to take in former Warsaw Pact countries (Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic joined in 1999), which almost the whole Russian political class opposed and which the central European states, remembering 1956, 1968 and 1939, had demanded. The second was NATO's bombing of Yugoslavia over Kosovo in March–June 1999, without UN Security Council approval, which Russians across the spectrum saw as proof that the West would use force against a Slavic, Orthodox state whenever it chose.

For many Russians the word for the 1990s is likhiye, "wild" or "dashing" in a dangerous sense. Putin's government has made that memory central to its legitimacy: whatever else, it says, there will be no return to the chaos. Russian liberals answer that the chaos was the price of the Soviet collapse, not of freedom itself, and that the 1990s planted every free institution that has since been dismantled.

Part 11 — Putin's Russia (1999–2021)
The rise
In September 1999 huge bombs destroyed four apartment blocks in Moscow, Buynaksk and Volgodonsk, killing nearly 300 people. The government blamed Chechen terrorists and launched a second Chechen war; Putin, prime minister since August, promised to pursue terrorists everywhere and became wildly popular. A suspicious incident in Ryazan, where FSB officers were caught planting what locals thought was a bomb (the FSB said it was a training exercise with sugar), fuelled claims that the security services were behind the bombings. Those claims, made most fully by the former FSB officer Alexander Litvinenko and the historian Yuri Felshtinsky in their book Blowing Up Russia, have never been tested in a Russian court, and Russia denies them. The British public inquiry into Litvinenko's later murder called the book "more than a political tract" and "the product of careful research", without making its own finding on who was responsible.
The second war (1999–2009) reconquered Chechnya at enormous cost and installed a loyal local ruler, first Akhmad Kadyrov and later his son Ramzan. Chechen separatists, increasingly Islamist, carried out terrorist attacks including the Moscow theatre siege of 2002 and the Beslan school siege of 2004, in which hundreds of hostages died, many of them children.
Order and oil
Putin's first two terms (2000–08) coincided with rising oil prices. The economy grew by about 7 percent a year from 1999 to 2007, by World Bank figures; wages and pensions were paid on time; a middle class grew in the big cities. At the same time Putin brought independent television under state control, tamed the regional governors, and broke oligarchs who challenged him: Mikhail Khodorkovsky, Russia's richest man and a funder of opposition parties, was arrested in 2003 and spent ten years in prison, and his Yukos oil company was taken over by the state. The tacit deal was described as prosperity in exchange for staying out of politics.
Journalists who investigated the war or corruption were in danger. Anna Politkovskaya of Novaya Gazeta, who reported on abuses in Chechnya, was shot dead in her Moscow apartment building in 2006. The same year Litvinenko died in London of polonium-210 poisoning. In 2016 a British public inquiry concluded that the FSB operation to kill him "was probably approved" by the FSB director Nikolai Patrushev "and also by President Putin". Russia denied involvement.
Turning point: 2008–2014
Barred from a third consecutive term, Putin became prime minister in 2008 while Dmitry Medvedev served as president. In August 2008, after a Georgian artillery attack on Tskhinvali in breakaway South Ossetia, Russia fought a five-day war with Georgia and then recognised South Ossetia and Abkhazia as independent states. The EU-commissioned Tagliavini report (2009) found that Georgia had started the large-scale fighting without legal justification, but that "much of the Russian military action went far beyond the reasonable limits of defence".
When Putin announced in 2011 that he would return to the presidency, and parliamentary elections that December were widely seen as rigged, the largest protests since the 1990s filled Moscow's Bolotnaya Square and Sakharov Avenue. After his return in 2012, new laws labelled NGOs with foreign funding "foreign agents", restricted protest, and banned "propaganda of non-traditional sexual relations" to minors.
In February 2014, after months of protest in Kyiv, Ukraine's pro-Russian president Viktor Yanukovych fled. Within days, Russian soldiers without insignia seized Crimea's parliament and key sites; a hastily organised referendum on 16 March was followed by Russia's annexation of the peninsula. On 27 March the UN General Assembly, by 100 votes to 11 with 58 abstentions, affirmed Ukraine's territorial integrity and declared that the referendum had "no validity". In the Donbas, armed separatists, backed by Russian weapons, money and, at decisive moments, regular troops, seized parts of Donetsk and Luhansk regions. On 17 July 2014 Malaysia Airlines flight MH17 was shot down over separatist-held territory, killing all 298 on board; a Dutch court in 2022 convicted two Russians and a Ukrainian separatist of murder in their absence, and in July 2025 the European Court of Human Rights held Russia responsible. Western sanctions followed; most Russians, polls showed, greeted Crimea's annexation with enthusiasm.
In 2015 Russia intervened in Syria's civil war to save Bashar al-Assad.
Navalny
The most effective opposition figure of these years was Alexei Navalny, a lawyer whose Anti-Corruption Foundation published investigations of officials' wealth that were viewed tens of millions of times. On 20 August 2020 he collapsed on a flight from Tomsk; he was flown to Berlin, and the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons later confirmed that he had been poisoned with a nerve agent of the Novichok type. He returned to Russia in January 2021, was arrested at the airport, and spent the rest of his life in prison. His movement was declared "extremist". In 2020 constitutional amendments, approved in a nationwide vote, reset Putin's term count, allowing him to run again in 2024 and 2030.

Repression of dissent: some milestones

2003
Khodorkovsky arrested

2006
Anna Politkovskaya murdered; Alexander Litvinenko poisoned in London

2012
"Foreign agent" law for NGOs

2015
Opposition politician Boris Nemtsov shot dead near the Kremlin

2020
Navalny poisoned with a Novichok-type agent

2021
Navalny jailed; his organisations banned as "extremist"; the courts order Memorial closed

2022
Memorial shares the Nobel Peace Prize; new laws punish "discrediting" the army

2024
Navalny dies in an Arctic prison colony

How the Kremlin explained itself
In a famous speech in Munich in 2007, Putin denounced a "unipolar" world dominated by the United States and NATO's expansion toward Russia's borders. The Kremlin's grievances, repeated ever since, are that the West promised in 1990 that NATO would not move east and broke that promise (a claim historians still argue about: no such promise was ever written into a treaty, though Western leaders made oral assurances during German reunification talks); that Western-backed "colour revolutions" in Georgia (2003), Ukraine (2004 and 2014) and elsewhere were plots against Russia; and that Russia has the right to a sphere of influence in its "near abroad". In July 2021 Putin published a long essay, "On the Historical Unity of Russians and Ukrainians", arguing that the two were "one people" and that modern Ukraine was in large part an artificial creation of Soviet policy.

Part 12 — The full-scale war and Russia in 2026 (2022–2026)
24 February 2022
Early on 24 February 2022 Putin announced a "special military operation" whose purpose, he said, was to "protect people" who had for eight years been "facing humiliation and genocide perpetrated by the Kiev regime", and to "demilitarise and denazify Ukraine". Russian forces then invaded Ukraine from the north, east and south. Russian columns tried to take Kyiv and were driven back by the end of March; the retreat revealed mass killings of civilians in towns such as Bucha.
International bodies described the invasion in plain terms:

Body and date
What it said

UN General Assembly, resolution ES-11/1, 2 March 2022 (141 for, 5 against, 35 abstentions)
"Deplores in the strongest terms the aggression by the Russian Federation against Ukraine" and demands that Russia withdraw "immediately, completely and unconditionally"

International Court of Justice, provisional order, 16 March 2022 (13 votes to 2)
"The Russian Federation shall immediately suspend the military operations" it began on 24 February

UN General Assembly, ES-11/4, 12 October 2022 (143–5–35)
Condemns Russia's "illegal so-called referendums" and "attempted illegal annexation" of Donetsk, Luhansk, Zaporizhzhia and Kherson regions

International Criminal Court, 17 March 2023
Arrest warrants for Vladimir Putin and the children's rights commissioner Maria Lvova-Belova over the unlawful deportation and transfer of Ukrainian children

The Russian government rejects all of these. Its position is that it acted in self-defence against NATO's advance and to protect Russian speakers in Ukraine, and it does not recognise the ICC's jurisdiction.
The war at home
In September 2022, after Ukrainian counter-offensives near Kharkiv, Putin ordered a "partial mobilisation"; hundreds of thousands of men left the country rather than be called up. Prisoners were recruited from jails by the Wagner mercenary group, whose leader Yevgeny Prigozhin staged an armed mutiny in June 2023, marching toward Moscow before turning back; two months later he died when his plane crashed. Criticism of the war became a crime: thousands were prosecuted under laws against "discrediting" or spreading "false information" about the army. Independent media, including Novaya Gazeta, whose editor Dmitry Muratov had shared the 2021 Nobel Peace Prize, were forced to close or move abroad.
On 16 February 2024 Navalny died at the "Polar Wolf" penal colony in Kharp, beyond the Arctic Circle, where he was serving a 19-year sentence. The prison service said he had collapsed after a walk. On 14 February 2026 the governments of the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Sweden and the Netherlands said that laboratory analysis showed he had been killed with the toxin epibatidine, and that "only the Russian state had the means, motive and opportunity". The Kremlin called accusations of its involvement unfounded. A month after Navalny's death, in March 2024, Putin was re-elected for a fifth term in a vote to which the OSCE, the European election-monitoring body, was not invited.
Sanctions cut Russia off from Western finance and technology, but the economy adapted: oil and gas were redirected to China, India and Turkey; military spending surged; the economy shrank only 1.4 percent in 2022 and grew 4.1 and 4.9 percent in 2023 and 2024, by World Bank figures, before slowing to 1.0 percent in 2025, with inflation near 9 percent. Finland (2023) and Sweden (2024) joined NATO, the opposite of what the Kremlin had wanted.
For many Russians, the war's effects were indirect. Large cash bonuses paid to men who signed army contracts brought unprecedented money to poorer regions; defence factories ran round the clock and wages rose amid labour shortages. Western brands left and were replaced by local copies or imports through third countries. Hundreds of thousands of people, many of them young and educated, emigrated to Georgia, Armenia, Kazakhstan, Serbia, Israel and the European Union. Inside Russia, the state expanded patriotic education in schools, and new history textbooks presented the "special military operation" as a defensive necessity. Ukrainian drones increasingly struck Russian refineries, airfields and cities; on the last day of the September 2026 Duma elections a drone strike on Moscow killed two people.
Where things stand in 2026
As of late October 2026 the war continues. The UN human rights chief, Volker Türk, said on 2 October that "frontlines barely move" while attacks on civilians and energy infrastructure intensify; the UN monitoring mission counted 2,570 civilians killed in Ukraine in the first nine months of 2026, 59 percent more than in the same period of 2025. In 2026 American, Ukrainian and Russian negotiators held direct talks, in Abu Dhabi in January and Geneva in February, without an agreement. Russia's stated terms, set out by Putin in June 2024, include the withdrawal of Ukrainian troops from the whole of the four Ukrainian regions it claims, and a commitment that Ukraine will never join NATO.
Inside Russia, the independent Levada Center (itself labelled a "foreign agent") reported in January 2026 that support for the army remained high and that three-quarters of respondents expected a Russian victory, while a majority preferred peace talks to continued fighting. In the September 2026 Duma elections, as described at the start of this history, United Russia won a record majority with every anti-war party excluded. In the Novgorod region, where Yabloko was allowed to run for the regional assembly, it won just over 6 percent.
Russia's population was about 143.5 million in 2025 (World Bank), shrinking from its post-Soviet peak, with large losses of young men to the war and to emigration. Life expectancy had recovered from about 65 in the mid-1990s to about 73 in 2024.

Part 13 — How to understand Russia today
Three ways Russians and their neighbours tell this story
The Kremlin's narrative. Russia is a distinct civilisation, the heir of Kyivan Rus', Byzantium and the Orthodox faith, which has repeatedly saved itself and Europe from invaders: the Mongols, the Poles in 1612, Napoleon, Hitler. Its strength has always depended on a strong central state, and its moments of weakness (the Troubles, 1917, the 1990s) brought chaos and foreign humiliation. The collapse of the USSR left millions of Russians outside Russia's borders; the West exploited Russia's weakness, expanded NATO despite promises, and backed coups on its borders. Russians, Ukrainians and Belarusians are one people, and the war in Ukraine is a defensive struggle against the West, fought on Russia's historical lands. Officially, the Soviet past is honoured for victory in 1945 and great-power status; Stalin's repressions are acknowledged as a tragedy but not allowed to overshadow the victory.
The Russian liberal and opposition view. Russia's tragedy is not the outside world but the repeated triumph of the state over society: serfdom, the autocracy that crushed 1825 and dissolved the Dumas, Bolshevik terror, the Gulag, and now a security-service regime that has jailed or killed its critics and launched a ruinous war. Russia is a European country, and its best traditions (the Great Reforms, the zemstvos, the 1905 constitution, the dissidents, Memorial, the free press of the 1990s, the protests of 2011–12) show that it could be a democracy. Imperial nostalgia, in this view, is the disease, and the war in Ukraine is a crime committed in Russia's name. Many who hold this view now live abroad; inside Russia, saying so can lead to prison.
The neighbours' view. For Ukrainians, Poles, Balts, Georgians, Chechens, Crimean Tatars, Kazakhs and others, Russian history is in large part the story of an empire that conquered them, tried to erase their languages and identities, deported or starved their peoples, and, after 1991, has tried again to control them. They point to the Molotov–Ribbentrop pact, Katyn, the 1944 deportations, the Holodomor, 1956 and 1968, Chechnya, Georgia, Crimea and the war since 2022. Many Russians are startled to hear their liberation story of 1945 described as occupation. Many of Russia's neighbours are startled that Russians find this hard to hear.
Each of these accounts captures something real. The facts in this history are not in dispute among serious historians; their meaning is.
Key dates

Year
Event

c. 860–880
Rurik at Novgorod; Oleg takes Kyiv; Kyivan Rus' forms

988
Volodymyr (Vladimir) of Kyiv adopts Orthodox Christianity

1147
Moscow first mentioned

1237–1240
Mongol invasion; Kyiv sacked in 1240

1380
Battle of Kulikovo

1480
Stand on the Ugra; Mongol overlordship ends

1547
Ivan IV crowned first tsar

1552
Conquest of Kazan

1598–1613
Time of Troubles; Mikhail Romanov elected tsar in 1613

1649
Law code makes serfdom permanent

1654
Pereiaslav: Cossack Hetmanate swears allegiance to the tsar

1703
St Petersburg founded

1709
Battle of Poltava

1721
Russian Empire proclaimed

1773–74
Pugachev's rebellion

1783
Annexation of Crimea

1812
Napoleon's invasion; Moscow burns

1825
Decembrist revolt

1853–56
Crimean War

1861
Emancipation of the serfs

1881
Alexander II assassinated

1905
Bloody Sunday; revolution; October Manifesto

1917
February Revolution; Bolshevik seizure of power in October

1918–21
Civil war; tsar's family shot (1918)

1922
USSR founded

1929–33
Collectivisation; famine of 1932–33

1937–38
Great Terror

1939
Molotov–Ribbentrop pact

1941–45
Great Patriotic War

1953
Stalin dies

1956
Khrushchev's secret speech

1957, 1961
Sputnik; Gagarin

1979–89
War in Afghanistan

1986
Chernobyl (Chornobyl) disaster

1991
August coup fails; USSR dissolved in December

1993
Parliament shelled; new constitution

1994–96
First Chechen war

1998
Financial crash and default

1999
Apartment bombings; second Chechen war; Putin becomes acting president

2008
War with Georgia

2014
Annexation of Crimea; war in the Donbas

2020
Navalny poisoned; constitutional amendments

2022
Full-scale invasion of Ukraine (24 February)

2024
Navalny dies in prison

2026
Duma elections; war continues

Who's who

Person
Lived
Why they matter

Volodymyr (Vladimir) the Great
c. 958–1015
Prince of Kyiv who adopted Orthodox Christianity in 988

Alexander Nevsky
1221–1263
Prince who beat Swedes and Teutonic knights; saint and national hero

Ivan III
1440–1505
Ended Mongol overlordship; founder of the Muscovite state

Ivan IV "the Terrible"
1530–1584
First crowned tsar; conqueror of Kazan; author of the oprichnina

Peter I "the Great"
1672–1725
Westernising reformer; founded St Petersburg and the Empire

Catherine II "the Great"
1729–1796
Enlightened despot; annexed Crimea; partitioned Poland

Alexander Pushkin
1799–1837
The founding poet of modern Russian literature

Alexander II
1818–1881
Freed the serfs; assassinated by revolutionaries

Leo Tolstoy and Fyodor Dostoevsky
1828–1910; 1821–1881
The great novelists of Russian conscience

Nicholas II
1868–1918
Last tsar; abdicated 1917; shot with his family

Vladimir Lenin
1870–1924
Bolshevik leader; founder of the Soviet state

Joseph Stalin
1878–1953
Dictator of collectivisation, the Terror and victory in 1945

Nikita Khrushchev
1894–1971
Denounced Stalin; led the thaw

Andrei Sakharov
1921–1989
H-bomb physicist turned dissident; 1975 Nobel Peace Prize

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
1918–2008
Gulag survivor; author of The Gulag Archipelago

Mikhail Gorbachev
1931–2022
Last Soviet leader; glasnost and perestroika

Boris Yeltsin
1931–2007
First president of Russia (1991–99)

Vladimir Putin
b. 1952
President since 2000 (prime minister 2008–12)

Alexei Navalny
1976–2024
Anti-corruption campaigner and opposition leader; died in prison

Five ideas that unlock the country
1. The state came first, and the people paid for it. From the Mongol tribute to Peter's poll tax to Stalin's grain requisitions, Russian states have extracted resources from a poor, vast, cold country to sustain armies and expansion. Serfdom was created by the state, for the state. This is why "the state" (gosudarstvo) and "the people" (narod) are often spoken of in Russian as separate things.
2. Empire before nation. Russia became an empire before it became a nation-state, and it has never been one without the other. Russian speakers live across the former Soviet space; dozens of other nations live inside Russia. The question "where does Russia end?" has never been settled in Russian minds, and the war in Ukraine is, among other things, a war about the answer.
3. Reform comes from above, and then stalls. Peter, Alexander II, Stolypin, Khrushchev, Gorbachev: each tried to modernise from the top, each opened space for society, and each period was followed by reaction. Russian liberals hope the cycle can be broken; their opponents argue that reform without a strong hand always ends in chaos.
4. Memory is politics. The Great Patriotic War, the 1990s, Stalin, Kyivan Rus': in Russia, history is not background but an active argument, taught in state textbooks and fought over in courts. Memorial, which documented Soviet repression, was closed by court order; the official memory of 1945 is protected by law.
5. There has always been another Russia. The Decembrists, the zemstvo doctors, the 1905 deputies, Sakharov and the dissidents, the journalists of Novaya Gazeta, the crowds of August 1991 and of 2011–12, and those who took flowers to Navalny's memorials in 2024 are as much a part of Russian history as the tsars and the commissars. Every authoritarian period in Russian history has eventually ended. What comes after has not been predetermined.

"Russia cannot be understood with the mind," wrote the poet Fyodor Tyutchev in 1866; "in Russia one can only believe." Russians quote it fondly. Historians would gently disagree: Russia can be understood with the mind, as long as one listens to all of its voices.

The takeaway
Russia grew from the river principalities of Kyivan Rus', through two centuries of Mongol overlordship, into a Muscovite autocracy that conquered Siberia, the steppe, the Caucasus and Central Asia. Its empire was built on serfdom, which lasted until 1861; its revolution of 1917 promised liberation and produced Stalin's famines, terror and Gulag, and then victory over Nazism at the cost of perhaps 20 to 27 million Soviet lives. The Soviet Union ended peacefully in 1991; the 1990s brought freedom and economic collapse; Vladimir Putin's long rule brought stability, then repression, the annexation of Crimea in 2014 and, from 2022, a full-scale invasion of Ukraine that the UN General Assembly deplored as aggression. In 2026 the war continues, the opposition is in prison, exile or dead, and the country's argument with itself about empire, the state and freedom is unresolved.
Try this: pick one date from the Key dates table (1612, 1812, 1861, 1941 or 1991 work well) and find out how it is described in three places: an official Russian source (the Kremlin website or a state museum), a Russian independent outlet in exile such as Meduza, and a source from one of Russia's neighbours. Notice what each one chooses to emphasise, and what each leaves out.

Sources & Further Reading
Sources
- Glenn E. Curtis (ed.), Russia: A Country Study (Federal Research Division, Library of Congress, 1998): chronology and historical chapters from Kyivan Rus' to 1997, including serf emancipation, Bloody Sunday, the civil war, the Second World War and the 1990s.
- Nicolas Werth, articles on dekulakisation, the Great Terror, the Kazakh famine and the wartime deportations, Mass Violence and Resistance research network, Sciences Po (online encyclopedia).
- Mark Harrison (University of Warwick), review of R. W. Davies and S. G. Wheatcroft, The Years of Hunger: Soviet Agriculture, 1931–1933 (2004); Paul R. Gregory, Terror by Quota and Gulag statistics (Hoover Institution); Encyclopedia of Ukraine (Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies), "Famine-Genocide of 1932–3".
- National WWII Museum, "Research Starters: Worldwide Deaths in World War II"; Demoscope Weekly (Higher School of Economics, Moscow), estimates of losses in the Chechen wars.
- UN General Assembly resolutions 68/262 (27 March 2014), ES-11/1 (2 March 2022) and ES-11/4 (12 October 2022); International Court of Justice, order of 16 March 2022 in Ukraine v. Russian Federation; International Criminal Court press releases (17 March 2023 and later).
- President of Russia website (en.kremlin.ru): Putin's article "On the Historical Unity of Russians and Ukrainians" (12 July 2021), address of 24 February 2022, and speech of 14 June 2024.
- UK Litvinenko Inquiry report (HC 695, January 2016); EU Independent International Fact-Finding Mission on the Conflict in Georgia (Tagliavini report, 2009); OPCW technical assistance report on Navalny (October 2020); statement by five European governments on Navalny's death (14 February 2026), as reported by the Guardian.
- UN Human Rights Monitoring Mission in Ukraine, protection of civilians update to 30 September 2026 (published 16 October 2026); UN News reports of September–October 2026.
- Levada Center, survey report on attitudes to the war (January 2026); Euronews/AFP on the preliminary September 2026 Duma results (21 September 2026); Meduza on the Central Election Commission's final results (25 September 2026); Meduza on Yabloko's removal from the ballot (10 August 2026); OSCE/ODIHR statement on the 2024 presidential election.
- World Bank, World Development Indicators (updated October 2026): GDP growth, inflation, population and life expectancy.
Go deeper
- 📘 Russia and the Russians: A History — Geoffrey Hosking (the best single-volume history, with a clear thread about state and people)
- 📘 Natasha's Dance: A Cultural History of Russia — Orlando Figes (Russian identity told through its writers, painters and composers)
- 📘 A People's Tragedy: The Russian Revolution 1891–1924 — Orlando Figes (the revolution from the streets and villages)
- 📘 The Gulag Archipelago — Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (the survivor's history that changed how the world saw the USSR; read the abridged edition)
- 📘 Secondhand Time: The Last of the Soviets — Svetlana Alexievich (Nobel laureate's oral history of ordinary people living through 1991 and after)
- 🌐 Mass Violence & Resistance, Sciences Po (scholarly articles on Soviet repression, by Werth and others)
- 🌐 Related pieces in this library: Russia: A Condensed History of Tsars, Revolution, and Empire; A Brief History of Ukraine (this series); Leaders of the 1930s; Propaganda, Misinformation & How to Resist It


A Brief History of Ukraine: Borderland, Cossack Freedom, and the Fight to Exist
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How the steppe and forest-steppe north of the Black Sea, ruled in turn from Kyiv, Vilnius, Kraków, Warsaw, Vienna, St Petersburg and Moscow, became a nation that has twice in a century had to fight for the right to be one.

On 30 September 2026 the UN Human Rights Monitoring Mission in Ukraine closed its books on another month of war. In September alone it had recorded 328 civilians killed and 2,105 injured, the worst September since Russia's full-scale invasion began. Since 24 February 2022 the mission had verified 17,605 civilian deaths, and it warned that the true number was likely considerably higher, because places like occupied Mariupol could not be counted. A few weeks later, UN investigators concluded that Russia's attacks on Ukraine's power grid amounted to war crimes and crimes against humanity. Ukrainians spent another autumn charging phones in the hours the electricity was on, and sending sons, husbands and, increasingly, daughters to a front that, in the words of the UN human rights chief, "barely moves".
To understand why this is happening, and why Ukrainians have kept fighting, you have to go back a very long way: to Greek colonies and Scythian gold, to the baptism of Kyiv in 988, to Cossacks who elected their own leaders, to poets who wrote in a language the tsars banned, to a famine engineered in a Soviet office, to the killing fields of 1941, and to the day in December 1991 when more than 90 percent of voters chose independence. Much of that history is shared with Russians, Poles, Jews, Crimean Tatars and others, and much of it is fiercely contested. This long read tries to tell it so that each of those communities would recognise its own account as fairly stated, and says plainly where the facts end and the arguments begin.
In this history

The land, the first farmers, Scythians and Greeks (to the 9th century)
Kyivan Rus' and Galicia–Volhynia (880–1349)
Lithuanian and Polish rule, and the rise of the Cossacks (1349–1647)
Khmelnytsky, Pereiaslav and the Hetmanate (1648–1764)
Between two empires (1764–1914)
Revolution and the fight for a state (1917–1921)
Soviet Ukraine and the Holodomor (1921–1939)
The Second World War and the Holocaust (1939–1945)
From the ruins to Chornobyl (1945–1991)
Independence: the hard years and the Orange Revolution (1991–2013)
Euromaidan, Crimea and the Donbas (2013–2021)
The full-scale invasion and Ukraine in 2026 (2022–2026)
How to understand Ukraine today

A note on names: this history uses Ukrainian forms (Kyiv, Kharkiv, Dnipro, Chornobyl, Volodymyr), which most English-language institutions have adopted since independence. Older English books use Russian forms (Kiev, Kharkov, Dnieper, Chernobyl, Vladimir). The word Ukraina first appears in a chronicle of 1187 and originally meant "borderland" or "land", a meaning Ukrainians and Russians interpret differently.

Part 1 — The land, the first farmers, Scythians and Greeks (to the 9th century)
Black earth
Ukraine is the largest country entirely within Europe, and the second-largest in Europe after Russia. Its heart is the chornozem, the "black earth": some of the most fertile soil in the world, a deep, dark loam laid down over millennia under steppe grass. In the north lie the forests and marshes of Polissia; in the west, the Carpathian Mountains; across the middle, the forest-steppe; in the south, the open steppe running to the Black Sea and the Sea of Azov, with the mountainous Crimean peninsula hanging below. The great river Dnipro cuts the country in two, giving Ukrainians the old terms "Right-Bank" (west) and "Left-Bank" (east) Ukraine.
That land shaped everything. Its grain fed empires, from ancient Athens to the Soviet Union, and it was coveted by every neighbour. Its open steppe let nomads and armies move freely. And its position, between the forest north and the Black Sea, between Catholic central Europe and Orthodox Muscovy, between Christian Europe and the Muslim Ottoman world, made it a borderland in every sense.
The Trypillians
From around 5000 BC, farmers of what archaeologists call the Cucuteni–Trypillia culture spread across the forest-steppe between the Carpathians and the Dnipro. They grew wheat and barley, kept cattle, made beautiful painted pottery and clay figurines, and built some of the largest settlements in the world at the time: sites near Uman covered hundreds of hectares and may have housed more than ten thousand people, centuries before the first cities of Mesopotamia. Every few generations, for reasons still debated, they burned their own villages and moved on. Modern Ukrainians are fond of the Trypillians, whose spiral patterns appear on souvenirs and coins; archaeologists caution that there is no direct line from them to any modern people.
The steppe peoples
Later, waves of pastoral peoples crossed the steppe. Linguists and geneticists think the Pontic–Caspian steppe, including today's southern Ukraine, was the likely homeland of the first speakers of Indo-European languages in the fourth and third millennia BC; their descendants carried those languages from Ireland to India. Cimmerians were followed, from about the eighth century BC, by the Scythians, Iranian-speaking horse warriors who ruled the steppe until the second century BC. The Greek historian Herodotus, writing in the fifth century BC, described their customs: drinking from the skulls of enemies, burying kings with horses and servants under great mounds (kurhany). Those mounds have yielded some of the finest goldwork of the ancient world, like the pectoral found at Tovsta Mohyla in 1971.
Greeks on the coast
From the seventh century BC Greek cities planted colonies on the northern Black Sea coast: Olbia near the mouth of the Southern Buh, Tyras on the Dniester, Chersonesus (near modern Sevastopol), Theodosia and Panticapaeum (modern Kerch) in Crimea. Several of the Crimean and Kerch cities later united as the Bosporan Kingdom, which later became a Roman client state. Grain from the Ukrainian steppe, traded through these ports, helped feed classical Athens.

Peoples of the land before Rus'
Approximate dates

Cucuteni–Trypillia farmers
c. 5000–2750 BC

Early Indo-European pastoralists (Yamnaya culture)
c. 3300–2600 BC

Cimmerians
early 1st millennium BC

Scythians
8th–2nd centuries BC

Greek colonies; Bosporan Kingdom
from 7th century BC; Bosporus c. 480 BC–4th century AD

Sarmatians
3rd century BC–3rd century AD

Goths; Huns; Antes (early Slavic tribal union)
3rd–7th centuries AD

Khazar khanate
7th–10th centuries

The Slavs arrive
Most scholars place the homeland of the early Slavs in the region between the middle Dnipro, the Prypiat marshes, the Carpathians and the Vistula. By the fourth century AD an early Slavic tribal union, the Antes, stretched across the forest-steppe from the Dniester to the Don. By the ninth century, East Slavic tribes (the Polianians around Kyiv, the Derevlianians in the forests, the Siverianians to the east and others) were paying tribute to the Khazars, a Turkic khanate on the lower Volga whose ruling elite had converted to Judaism. A Polianian town on the hills above the Dnipro, Kyiv, was beginning to grow rich from river trade. Legend says it was founded by three brothers, Kyi, Shchek and Khoryv, and their sister Lybid.

Part 2 — Kyivan Rus' and Galicia–Volhynia (880–1349)
The state of Rus'
The Tale of Bygone Years, written in Kyiv in the early twelfth century, tells how a Varangian (Scandinavian) prince, Rurik, came to rule Novgorod in the north around 860, and how his successor Oleh (Oleg) seized Kyiv in 882, killing its rulers Askold and Dyr, and made it the "mother of the cities of Rus'". From Kyiv, Oleh and his successors imposed tribute on the East Slavic tribes and sailed down the Dnipro to trade, and sometimes fight, with the Byzantine Empire. Historians still argue about how Scandinavian the first rulers were (the "Normanist" debate); most accept a Norse-origin dynasty that quickly became Slavic.
Princess Olha (Olga), who ruled as regent after the Derevlianians killed her husband Ihor, had converted to Christianity by 957. Her son Sviatoslav was a warrior who destroyed the Khazar khanate. Her grandson Volodymyr the Great, who ruled from 980 to 1015, made the decisive choice.
988
In 988 Volodymyr accepted Christianity from Constantinople, married the Byzantine emperor's sister, and had the people of Kyiv baptised in the Dnipro. The chronicle's story that he chose among Islam, Judaism, Latin Christianity and Greek Orthodoxy (rejecting Islam because "drinking is the joy of the Rus'") is a later legend, but the choice was real and lasting. It bound Rus' to the Byzantine world, its church, its art and its Slavonic liturgy. Ukraine's, Russia's and Belarus's Orthodox churches all trace themselves to this baptism, and Ukraine celebrates it as a state holiday.
Under Yaroslav the Wise (1019–54), Kyiv reached its height. He built the Cathedral of St Sophia, with its mosaics and frescoes that still stand, founded schools and a library, issued the first written law code (Ruska Pravda), and married his children into royal houses across Europe: his daughter Anna became queen of France.

Kyivan Rus': a short chronology

882
Oleh takes Kyiv

957
Olha baptised (by this date)

988
Volodymyr's baptism of Kyiv

1019–54
Yaroslav the Wise; St Sophia Cathedral

1113
Tale of Bygone Years compiled in Kyiv

1169
Andrei Bogoliubsky of Vladimir-Suzdal sacks Kyiv

1223
Mongols defeat Rus' princes on the Kalka River

1240
Mongols sack Kyiv

1253
Danylo of Galicia crowned king by a papal legate

Fragmentation
After Yaroslav, Rus' broke into rival principalities ruled by his descendants. In 1169 Prince Andrei Bogoliubsky of Vladimir-Suzdal, in the north-east, sacked Kyiv and chose to stay in his own capital rather than rule from it. Ukrainian historians often point to this as a sign that the north-east was already a separate centre; Russian historians see it as a shift of the capital within one Rus'.
The Mongols arrived in 1223, defeating the princes of Rus' on the Kalka River, and returned under Batu in 1237. On 6 December 1240, after a siege, they took and sacked Kyiv. A papal envoy who passed through a few years later counted barely two hundred houses standing.
Galicia–Volhynia
The south-western principalities, Galicia and Volhynia, survived and became a strong state under Prince Danylo Romanovych, who ruled from 1238 to 1264. Danylo submitted to the Mongols but looked west: in 1253 he accepted a crown from Pope Innocent IV, becoming "King of Rus'". He founded the city of Lviv, named after his son Lev. For Ukrainian historians, Galicia–Volhynia is the direct heir of Kyivan Rus', proof that Kyiv's legacy passed west and south as well as north-east to Moscow.
Whose Rus'?
This is the root of the most politically charged argument in Ukrainian history.

In July 2021 Vladimir Putin wrote that Russians and Ukrainians were "one people – a single whole", descended from "Ancient Rus", with Kyiv as the "mother of all Russian cities". Ukrainian historians, following Mykhailo Hrushevsky (1866–1934), argue that Kyivan Rus' was the first state of the Ukrainian people, whose history continued through Galicia–Volhynia, the Lithuanian-Ruthenian lands and the Cossacks, while Muscovy was a later and separate state that claimed Kyiv's inheritance.

Most historians outside both countries describe Kyivan Rus' as the shared medieval ancestor of three modern peoples (Ukrainian, Belarusian and Russian), none of which existed in its modern national form in the eleventh century. Shared ancestry, they add, is no more an argument for shared statehood than the Roman Empire is an argument for joining Italy and France.

Part 3 — Lithuanian and Polish rule, and the rise of the Cossacks (1349–1647)
Under Lithuania
After the Mongols weakened the old principalities, the pagan Grand Duchy of Lithuania expanded south through the fourteenth century. Gediminas took the title "Grand Duke of the Lithuanians and Rus'" in 1323; by the 1360s Lithuania ruled Kyiv, Volhynia and much of today's Ukraine and Belarus. It was a light rule: the Lithuanian elite adopted the Ruthenian (old Ukrainian-Belarusian) language for government, and many converted to Orthodoxy. Poland, meanwhile, occupied Galicia in 1349, and in 1385 Poland and Lithuania joined in a dynastic union.
The Union of Lublin
On 1 July 1569, the Union of Lublin turned Poland and Lithuania into a single Commonwealth and transferred most Ukrainian lands (Volhynia, Kyiv, Podillia) from the Lithuanian to the Polish crown. This mattered enormously. Polish nobles (the szlachta) acquired vast estates in Ukraine; the local Ruthenian nobility gradually adopted Polish language and Catholicism; and peasants were pushed into ever-harsher serfdom on great grain-exporting estates. Jewish merchants and leaseholders, invited by the magnates, managed estates, mills, taverns and tolls, which put them between lords and peasants, a position that would prove deadly.
In 1596, the Union of Brest brought part of the Orthodox hierarchy into union with Rome, creating the Uniate (later Ukrainian Greek Catholic) Church, which kept the Byzantine rite but accepted the Pope's authority. Most Orthodox clergy and laity rejected it, and religious conflict deepened. In response, Orthodox brotherhoods founded schools, and in 1632 Metropolitan Petro Mohyla set up a college in Kyiv, later the Kyiv-Mohyla Academy, which became the leading centre of learning in the Orthodox Slavic world.
Life in the Commonwealth
The sixteenth century was a boom time for some. Western European demand for grain made Ukrainian estates rich, and towns grew in size and number. Many received self-government under Magdeburg law, but its benefits went almost entirely to Catholic German and Polish burghers; Orthodox Ukrainian townspeople faced discrimination and responded by forming religious brotherhoods that ran schools, printing presses and charities. In 1581 the Orthodox magnate Prince Kostiantyn Ostrozky sponsored the Ostroh Bible, the first complete printed Bible in Church Slavonic. Jewish communities grew fast too, with their own self-government, the Council of Four Lands, and a flourishing religious scholarship. For peasants, though, the boom meant more days of forced labour on the lord's fields each week, and the open steppe to the south, dangerous as it was, became a magnet.
The Cossacks
On the open steppe south of the Commonwealth's settled lands lay the "Wild Fields", raided by the Crimean Tatars, whose khanate (from 1475 a vassal of the Ottoman Empire) took tens of thousands of captives from Ukrainian and Polish lands for the slave markets of Kaffa and Istanbul. Into this frontier fled runaway serfs, adventurers and outlaws. They became the Cossacks (from a Turkic word for free men), who lived by fishing, hunting, raiding and fighting.
Around 1552–54 Prince Dmytro Vyshnevetsky built a fortress on an island below the Dnipro rapids, the first Sich. The Zaporozhian Sich ("beyond the rapids") became a self-governing military community: Cossacks elected their officers and their hetman (commander) in a general assembly, and could depose them. They raided Ottoman and Tatar ports, sometimes sailing their long boats across the Black Sea to attack Istanbul itself. The Commonwealth hired some Cossacks as "registered" soldiers but never accepted them as equals; risings in the 1590s, 1620s and 1630s were crushed.

Who ruled Ukrainian lands, 1349–1648

Galicia
Poland, from 1349

Volhynia, Kyiv, Podillia
Lithuania until 1569, then Poland

Southern steppe, Crimea
Crimean Khanate, Ottoman vassal from 1475

Transcarpathia
Hungary

Bukovyna
Moldavia (Ottoman vassal)

Lower Dnipro
Zaporozhian Cossacks (autonomous)

For Ukrainians, the Cossacks are the heart of the national story: a free people who elected their leaders, defended Christendom against the Tatars and Turks, and stood up to Polish lords. The national anthem ends with the line "we are of Cossack kin". Polish and Jewish memory, as the next part shows, remembers them very differently.

Part 4 — Khmelnytsky, Pereiaslav and the Hetmanate (1648–1764)
The great uprising
In 1648 Bohdan Khmelnytsky, a registered Cossack officer whose estate had been seized by a Polish official, fled to the Sich, allied with the Crimean Tatars, and raised a rebellion. On 16 May 1648 his forces destroyed a Polish army at Zhovti Vody, and then another at Korsun. The uprising spread across all of Dnipro Ukraine as peasants rose against their lords. Within months, the Commonwealth's power in central Ukraine had collapsed, and Khmelnytsky entered Kyiv in triumph in December 1648.
The massacres
The uprising also brought terrible violence against civilians. Polish nobles, Catholic clergy, Uniates and, above all, Jews were massacred. Jews, concentrated in the towns and acting as agents of the magnates, were seen by the rebels as instruments of Polish oppression. At Nemyriv on 10 June 1648 Cossacks massacred the town's Jews; at Tulchyn, Polonne and elsewhere, thousands more were killed. Polish forces under Prince Jeremi Wiśniowiecki answered with their own atrocities against Ukrainian peasants.
How many Jews died has been argued about for centuries. The Jewish chronicler Nathan Hannover, writing in 1653, described the slaughter of hundreds of thousands; modern historians consider those figures highly exaggerated. The Encyclopedia of Ukraine puts Jewish losses at over 50,000 across the decade-long war. The historian Shaul Stampfer, writing in the YIVO Encyclopedia of Jews in Eastern Europe, estimates that about 40,000 Jews lived in the affected regions, and that fewer than 20,000 died, "very possibly much less than half". Whatever the number, in Jewish memory the year Tah (1648) became a byword for catastrophe, mourned in prayers for centuries, and Khmelnytsky as a figure of horror.

Bohdan Khmelnytsky: three memories

Ukrainian national memory
Founder of the Cossack state; liberator from Polish rule; statue in Kyiv's St Sophia Square since 1888

Jewish memory
Leader of the worst massacres of Jews before the twentieth century

Russian imperial and Soviet memory
The hetman who "reunited" Ukraine with Russia

Pereiaslav, 1654
Unable to defeat Poland alone and let down by his Tatar allies, Khmelnytsky sought a protector. In January 1654 at Pereiaslav, Cossack officers took an oath to Tsar Alexei of Muscovy; the agreed terms (the "March Articles", eleven in number, confirmed by the tsar in March and April) left the Hetmanate its own elected hetman, courts, army and foreign relations. The original documents are lost, and the treaty's meaning is one of the most argued questions in East European history.
Russian imperial historians saw it as the incorporation of Ukraine into Russia; Soviet historians, in 1954, celebrated the tercentenary of the "reunion" of two "fraternal peoples" (and that year Crimea was transferred to Soviet Ukraine as a gift for the anniversary). Ukrainian historians have read it variously as a personal union under the tsar, a protectorate in which Muscovy was the stronger partner (Hrushevsky's view), or a temporary military alliance (the view of Viacheslav Lypynsky). What is not in dispute is that over the next century Moscow steadily whittled away the Hetmanate's autonomy.
The Ruin
Khmelnytsky died in 1657. His successors split, turning to Poland, Muscovy or the Ottomans; the period of civil war and invasion that followed is called "the Ruin". In 1658 Hetman Ivan Vyhovsky signed the Treaty of Hadiach with Poland, which would have made Ukraine a third partner in the Commonwealth, and in 1659 his Cossacks, Poles and Tatars crushed a Muscovite army at Konotop; but the treaty was never carried out. The Truce of Andrusovo in 1667 divided Ukraine along the Dnipro: the Left Bank and Kyiv to Muscovy, the Right Bank to Poland.
Mazepa
Ivan Mazepa, hetman from 1687 to 1709, was a cultivated nobleman who built churches and patronised the Kyiv Academy. For twenty years he served Peter the Great loyally. When Peter's war with Sweden brought Cossack levies, heavy demands and threats to Cossack autonomy, Mazepa secretly allied with Charles XII of Sweden. In November 1708 Peter's commander Menshikov stormed Mazepa's capital, Baturyn, and massacred its defenders and many of its inhabitants. In July 1709 Peter defeated Charles and Mazepa at Poltava. Mazepa fled to Ottoman Bendery and died there.
The Russian Orthodox Church anathematised Mazepa as a traitor, and "Mazepist" became a Russian insult for Ukrainian patriots. To Ukrainians he is a statesman who tried to save his country's freedom. In exile in 1710 his successor, Pylyp Orlyk, drafted the Constitution of Bendery, which proposed separating powers between the hetman and an elected council; Ukrainians cite it as one of Europe's early constitutional texts.
The end of the Hetmanate
After Poltava, Peter and his successors tightened their grip: Cossacks were sent north to dig canals and build St Petersburg, Russian officials supervised the hetmans, and Ukrainian trade was redirected through Russian ports. Catherine II abolished the office of hetman in 1764, had the Zaporozhian Sich destroyed in 1775, and in 1783 extended serfdom to Left-Bank Ukraine. On the Polish-ruled Right Bank, peasants rose repeatedly against their lords: the haidamaka revolt of 1768, the Koliivshchyna, massacred thousands of Polish nobles, Jews and Catholic clergy, notably at Uman, before Russian troops helped crush it.

Part 5 — Between two empires (1764–1914)
Partition
The three partitions of Poland–Lithuania (1772, 1793 and 1795) completed the division of Ukrainian lands. By 1795 the Russian Empire held about 80 percent of them; the Habsburg (Austrian) Empire held Galicia and, from 1775, Bukovyna; Hungary, part of the Habsburg lands, held Transcarpathia. Catherine's armies had also taken the southern steppe and, in 1783, annexed the Crimean Khanate. The new province of "New Russia" was settled by Ukrainians, Russians, Germans, Greeks, Serbs, Bulgarians and Jews; Odesa, founded in 1794, became a cosmopolitan port. Many Crimean Tatars emigrated to the Ottoman Empire.
Little Russia
In the Russian Empire, Ukrainians were officially "Little Russians", a branch of a single Russian people. Their language was treated as a peasant dialect. Many members of the Ukrainian elite made careers in imperial service, and some of the empire's leading figures, from the writer Nikolai Gogol to the composers and scholars of St Petersburg, came from Ukraine.
Yet a national revival began. In 1798 Ivan Kotliarevsky published Eneida, a comic retelling of Virgil's Aeneid with Cossacks as heroes, the first major work of literature in vernacular Ukrainian. Kharkiv University (1805) and then Kyiv University (1834) became centres of a new Ukrainian intelligentsia that collected folk songs, studied Cossack history and asked what made Ukraine distinct.
Shevchenko
The revival found its prophet in Taras Shevchenko (1814–1861). Born a serf in the Kyiv region, he was taken to St Petersburg as a servant, where artists who recognised his talent bought his freedom on 5 May 1838. He studied at the Imperial Academy of Arts and in 1840 published Kobzar, a collection of poems in Ukrainian. His verse mourned the lost Cossack freedom, condemned serfdom and the tsars, and called on Ukrainians to "rise up and break your chains". In 1847 he was arrested as a member of the secret Brotherhood of Saints Cyril and Methodius, which dreamed of a free federation of Slavic peoples, and he was sentenced to serve as a private soldier in Central Asia, with the tsar's personal order that he be forbidden to write or paint. He died in St Petersburg in 1861, days before the emancipation of the serfs was proclaimed. Every Ukrainian town has a Shevchenko street or statue; for Ukrainians he is what Shakespeare and Burns combined would be for Britain.
Banning a language
The imperial government came to see the Ukrainian movement as a threat. In July 1863 Interior Minister Pyotr Valuev issued a circular banning religious and educational publications in Ukrainian, declaring that "there never was, is not, and cannot be" a separate Little Russian language. The Ems Decree of 1876 went further, banning the import of Ukrainian books, Ukrainian stage performances and song texts. Restrictions were eased only after the 1905 revolution, when the number of Ukrainian-language periodicals in the empire rose from two to eighteen by 1906.

The Russian Empire's language bans

1720
Peter I restricts printing in Ukraine to texts identical to Russian editions

1863
Valuev circular bans Ukrainian educational and religious publications

1876
Ems Decree bans Ukrainian books from abroad, plays and song lyrics

1905–06
Restrictions relaxed; Ukrainian press appears

1914
Ukrainian organisations in Galicia closed by occupying Russian forces

Galicia: the Ukrainian Piedmont
Under Habsburg rule, Galicia's Ukrainians (then called Ruthenians) had more room. Serfdom was abolished in the Habsburg lands in 1848, and Galicia elected deputies to a provincial diet and, later, the parliament in Vienna. Ukrainians there built reading rooms (the Prosvita society, founded in 1868), co-operatives, newspapers, schools and a scholarly society. In 1894 Mykhailo Hrushevsky, a historian from Russian-ruled Ukraine, took up a chair at Lviv University and began his ten-volume History of Ukraine-Rus'. The writer Ivan Franko, a socialist and poet, became Galicia's great literary figure. Galicia's Ukrainians competed, often bitterly, with the dominant Poles, and the province became the "Piedmont" of the Ukrainian movement, as Piedmont had been for Italian unity.
Industry, emigration and the village
In the Russian-ruled east, the late nineteenth century brought coal and steel. In 1872 the Welsh industrialist John Hughes built a steel plant at Yuzivka (later Stalino, now Donetsk), and by 1900 the Donbas outproduced the Urals as the empire's main metallurgical base. Its miners and workers came from all over the empire, many of them Russians, which is one reason the Donbas became the most Russian-speaking part of Ukraine. Ukrainian cities grew fast: between 1860 and 1897, Kyiv grew from 55,000 to 248,000 people. Yet in 1897 only 13 percent of Ukraine's people lived in towns, and only 13 percent of Ukrainians could read.
Land hunger drove migration. Hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians moved east to the Kuban, Siberia and the Russian Far East; from Galicia and Bukovyna, hundreds of thousands crossed the Atlantic to the prairies of Canada and the mines and mills of the United States, founding the diaspora that would keep Ukrainian culture alive through the Soviet years. Ukraine was also the heart of the Pale of Settlement, and the waves of pogroms of 1881–82 and 1903–06 hit its Jewish communities hard, driving mass Jewish emigration too.

Part 6 — Revolution and the fight for a state (1917–1921)
The Central Rada
When the tsar fell in March 1917, Ukrainian activists in Kyiv formed the Central Rada (council) on 17 March, with Hrushevsky as its head. At first it asked only for autonomy within a democratic Russian federation. As the Provisional Government in Petrograd hesitated and then collapsed, the Rada went further. After the Bolsheviks seized power in Petrograd in November, its Third Universal (proclamation) declared the Ukrainian People's Republic (UNR) within a federal Russia. As a Bolshevik army invaded from the east, the Rada issued its Fourth Universal, dated 22 January 1918, declaring full independence; days later, on 29 January, young volunteers were killed trying to hold the approaches to Kyiv at Kruty.
On 9 February 1918 the UNR signed a separate peace with Germany and Austria-Hungary at Brest-Litovsk, and German and Austrian troops drove out the Bolsheviks. But in April 1918 the Germans replaced the socialist Rada with a conservative regime under Hetman Pavlo Skoropadsky. When Germany lost the war in November 1918, a new Directory under Volodymyr Vynnychenko and Symon Petliura overthrew the hetman.
Amid the chaos, Ukrainian cultural life exploded. Ukrainian-language schools, newspapers, theatres and publishing houses opened by the hundred. Under Skoropadsky's Hetmanate in 1918 the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences was founded, along with Ukrainian universities in Kyiv and Kamianets-Podilskyi. In the villages, peasants took matters into their own hands: they seized landlords' estates, divided the land and formed militias to defend it against whichever army came next. For most of them the question of which state they belonged to mattered less than who would own the land.
Two Ukrainian republics, one war of all against all
In November 1918, as the Habsburg Empire collapsed, Ukrainians in Lviv proclaimed the West Ukrainian People's Republic (ZUNR), and immediately found themselves at war with Poland over Galicia. On 22 January 1919 the two Ukrainian republics proclaimed their union in Kyiv's St Sophia Square; Ukraine marks the date as its Day of Unity. In practice they were overwhelmed.
Between 1917 and 1921 Ukraine was fought over by the UNR, the West Ukrainian army, the Bolshevik Red Army, the anti-Bolshevik White armies of General Denikin, the Polish army, the Romanians, French intervention forces in Odesa, and peasant warlords, including the anarchist Nestor Makhno, whose movement held much of the south-east. Kyiv changed hands repeatedly, by some counts more than a dozen times.
The pogroms
The civil war brought the worst massacres of Jews before the Holocaust. Units of the UNR's army and allied warlords, the White armies, Red Army units and independent peasant bands all carried out pogroms; historians estimate that tens of thousands of Jews were killed (some estimates run far higher), and studies of the pogroms attribute the largest shares of them to forces nominally under the UNR and to the Whites. In 1926 Petliura, in exile in Paris, was shot dead by Sholem Schwartzbard, a Jewish anarchist who said he was avenging the pogroms; a French jury acquitted him. Ukrainian historians argue that Petliura himself opposed the pogroms and issued orders against them but could not control his forces; Jewish historians stress his responsibility as commander. The argument continues.

The fate of Ukrainian lands after 1921

Central and eastern Ukraine
Soviet Ukraine (Ukrainian SSR), founding member of the USSR in 1922

Galicia and western Volhynia
Poland, confirmed by the Treaty of Riga (1921)

Bukovyna and southern Bessarabia
Romania

Transcarpathia
Czechoslovakia

Why the first independence failed
Ukrainian historians list many reasons: a mainly peasant nation with a small educated elite; Russian-speaking cities with little sympathy for Ukrainian statehood; divisions between socialists and conservatives; no reliable foreign ally; and enemies on every side. But the attempt mattered. It created the symbols (the blue-and-yellow flag, the trident, the anthem "Ukraine has not yet perished") that independent Ukraine adopted after 1991, and it forced the Bolsheviks to create a Ukrainian Soviet republic rather than simply absorbing Ukraine into Russia.

Part 7 — Soviet Ukraine and the Holodomor (1921–1939)
Ukrainization
In the 1920s the Soviet government, seeking legitimacy in the non-Russian republics, launched "indigenisation" (korenizatsiia). In Ukraine from 1923 this meant Ukrainization: schools, newspapers, government offices and the party itself were to work in Ukrainian; by the end of the decade most schoolchildren were taught in Ukrainian. Literature, theatre and art flourished. Writers like Mykola Khvylovy, who urged Ukrainian culture to turn "away from Moscow" toward Europe, the theatre director Les Kurbas, and the film-maker Oleksandr Dovzhenko made Kharkiv, then the Soviet Ukrainian capital, a centre of modernism.
Collectivisation and the famine
From 1929 Stalin forced the peasants of the USSR into collective farms and deported hundreds of thousands of families as "kulaks". In Ukraine, the most important grain republic, resistance was strong and the grain quotas brutal. By 1932 harvests were falling, and the quotas were not cut. What followed is called in Ukrainian the Holodomor, "killing by hunger".

Measures that turned hunger into mass death in Ukraine, 1932–33

7 August 1932
Law on the protection of socialist property: up to death for stealing grain from collective fields, even a handful of ears

November 1932
Villages that failed quotas "blacklisted": deliveries of manufactured goods stopped, all food could be seized

Late 1932
Search brigades confiscate not only grain but other food from households

22 January 1933
Directive signed by Stalin and Molotov bars peasants of Ukraine and the Kuban from leaving to seek food

1932–33
Grain exports continue

Villages emptied. People ate grass, bark and pets; there were cases of cannibalism. Peasants who fled to cities were turned back. In the spring of 1933, at the famine's peak, many thousands were dying every day.
How many died

Estimates of famine deaths: who estimates what

Ukrainian Institute of Demography and Social Studies team (cited by the Encyclopedia of Ukraine), Ukraine, 1932–34
just under 4 million excess deaths

R. W. Davies and Stephen Wheatcroft, The Years of Hunger (2004), whole USSR, 1932–33
5.5–6.5 million

Nicolas Werth, Kazakhstan, 1931–33
1.1–1.4 million

Earlier estimates, made before the Soviet archives opened, ran from about 3 million to 7 million or more for Ukraine; the demographic work of the 2000s narrowed the range.
Was it genocide?
This is the central argument, and it is both scholarly and political.
The case for genocide. The lawyer Raphael Lemkin, who coined the word "genocide", described the destruction of the Ukrainian nation in 1953 as "the classic example of Soviet genocide". Scholars who agree, and the Holodomor Research and Education Consortium in Canada, point to the measures above, aimed specifically at Ukraine and the ethnically Ukrainian Kuban, and to the simultaneous assault on Ukrainian culture (below). They argue this fits the Genocide Convention's definition, including "deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part". Ukraine's parliament declared the Holodomor a genocide in November 2006, and many other parliaments and governments have since done the same, especially after 2022.
The case against, or for a different label. Historians such as Davies and Wheatcroft agree that Stalin's policies caused the famine and that he chose to let millions die rather than cut exports or quotas, but they argue the evidence shows a brutal policy aimed at extracting grain and breaking peasant resistance across the USSR, not an intention to destroy Ukrainians as a nation. Some use terms like "man-made famine" or "crime against humanity" instead. The Russian government acknowledges the famine as a tragedy shared by many Soviet peoples, including Russians and Kazakhs, and rejects the genocide label.
Both sides agree on the essentials: the famine was caused by Soviet policy, the regime knew people were dying in vast numbers, it kept taking food and sealed the borders, and Ukraine suffered more deaths than any other Soviet republic.
The Executed Renaissance
The famine coincided with a purge of Ukrainian culture. Ukrainization was reversed from 1933; leading figures were arrested as "nationalists". Khvylovy and the senior communist Mykola Skrypnyk, who had led Ukrainization, killed themselves in 1933. In the Great Terror of 1937–38, much of the generation of the 1920s was shot; in November 1937 the theatre director Les Kurbas and scores of other Ukrainian writers and scholars were shot at Sandarmokh forest in Karelia, and thousands of Kyiv's victims lie in the mass graves of Bykivnia forest. The Encyclopedia of Ukraine estimates that four-fifths of the Ukrainian cultural elite perished in the decade. Ukrainians call this generation the "Executed Renaissance".
Western Ukraine under Poland
In interwar Poland, about five million Ukrainians lived in Galicia and Volhynia. Polish governments restricted Ukrainian schools and settled Polish veterans on Ukrainian lands; a brutal "pacification" campaign in 1930 followed a wave of Ukrainian sabotage. Legal Ukrainian parties and a vigorous co-operative movement coexisted with an underground: the Organisation of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN), founded in Vienna in 1929, which embraced an authoritarian, integral nationalism and assassinated Polish officials. In March 1939 Ukrainians of Czechoslovak Transcarpathia declared an independent Carpatho-Ukraine, which Hungary overran within days.

Part 8 — The Second World War and the Holocaust (1939–1945)
1939–41: the first Soviet occupation
Under the secret protocol of the Molotov–Ribbentrop pact, the Red Army invaded eastern Poland on 17 September 1939 and annexed Galicia and western Volhynia to Soviet Ukraine; in 1940 it took northern Bukovyna and southern Bessarabia from Romania. Soviet rule brought the "unification of Ukrainian lands" that Soviet propaganda celebrated, and also mass arrests and deportations of Poles, Ukrainians and Jews deemed hostile. As the Germans invaded in June 1941, the NKVD massacred thousands of political prisoners in the jails of Lviv and other western Ukrainian towns.
Occupation
Germany and its allies attacked on 22 June 1941 and overran all of Ukraine by mid-1942. Some Ukrainians, especially in the west, at first greeted the Germans as liberators from Soviet rule; the illusion did not last. Nazi plans saw Ukraine as "living space" and its people as a source of food and labour. More than 2 million people were deported from Ukraine to Germany as Ostarbeiter (eastern workers), most of them young and treated as slaves. Cities were starved, villages burned in reprisal for partisan attacks, and millions of Soviet prisoners of war died in German camps.
The Holocaust in Ukraine
About 2.3 million Jews lived within Ukraine's present borders on the eve of the war. Of them, about 1.4 to 1.5 million were murdered, most not in death camps but shot close to their homes by German SS and police units, the Einsatzgruppen, with the help of local auxiliary police. This has been called "the Holocaust by bullets".
At Babyn Yar, a ravine on the edge of Kyiv, German units shot 33,771 Jews on 29–30 September 1941, one of the largest single massacres of the Holocaust. Over the following two years tens of thousands more were murdered there: Jews, Roma, Soviet prisoners of war, psychiatric patients and Ukrainian nationalists. The Soviet authorities later tried to erase the site, and a memorial to Jewish victims was not built until after independence.
The Holocaust was organised and carried out by Nazi Germany. But, as the Encyclopedia of Ukraine states, the Germans relied on local helpers: more than 120,000 Ukrainian auxiliary policemen served the occupiers, and many took part in the round-ups and shootings. In the first days after the German invasion of western Ukraine, some OUN groups staged or incited pogroms, most notoriously in Lviv in late June and July 1941, after the discovery of the NKVD's murdered prisoners. At the same time, many Ukrainians risked their lives to hide Jews: by 2003, 1,984 people from Ukraine had been recognised by Yad Vashem as Righteous Among the Nations; the number has risen since. The Greek Catholic Metropolitan Andrei Sheptytsky organised the hiding of well over a hundred Jews, many of them children, in his church's monasteries and convents.
The OUN and the UPA
No part of Ukrainian history is more contested than the record of the nationalist underground.
In 1940 the OUN split into a younger, more radical faction led by Stepan Bandera, the OUN(B), and an older one led by Andrii Melnyk, the OUN(M). On 30 June 1941, in German-occupied Lviv, the OUN(B) proclaimed a Ukrainian state, pledging to work with Nazi Germany. The Germans refused to accept it, arrested Bandera and kept him in the Sachsenhausen concentration camp until 1944. In 1942–43 nationalist partisans in Volhynia formed the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA), which the OUN(B) came to dominate under Roman Shukhevych. The UPA fought the Germans, Soviet partisans, the Polish Home Army and, after 1944, the returning Soviet forces.
In 1943–44 UPA units carried out the mass killing of Polish civilians in Volhynia and then in eastern Galicia, burning villages and murdering men, women and children, in what Poles call the Volhynia massacre or genocide. Polish reprisals killed thousands of Ukrainian civilians.

The Volhynia massacres: who estimates what

Study presented in the Polish Institute of National Remembrance (IPN) conference volume Wołyń 1943
about 60,000 Poles killed in Volhynia (about 38,600 documented by name or place, about 21,400 estimated)

Catholic church records cited in the same volume
about 100,000 Poles killed in Volhynia

Other estimates for Eastern Galicia
about 20,000–25,000 Poles

Ukrainian victims of Polish reprisals (Polish historian Grzegorz Motyka and others)
roughly 10,000–15,000

After the war, the UPA fought a long guerrilla war against Soviet rule in western Ukraine. According to Soviet interior ministry figures reported to Beria, between 1944 and 1952 about 153,000 people were killed, 134,000 arrested and 203,000 deported from western Ukraine in the campaign against the nationalist underground. Bandera, living in Munich, was assassinated by a KGB agent in 1959.
How these men are remembered divides Ukrainians, Poles, Jews and Russians:

In western Ukraine and in much of Ukraine since 2014, the OUN and UPA are remembered first as fighters for independence against both Hitler and Stalin, who held out against the Soviet state into the 1950s. In 2015 Ukraine's parliament passed a law honouring them as "fighters for Ukraine's independence". Since 2022 the red-and-black UPA flag has been flown by some army units.
In Poland, the UPA is remembered for the Volhynia massacres. In 2016 Poland's parliament declared 11 July a national day of remembrance for the victims of the "genocide" committed by Ukrainian nationalists. In 2026 the issue flared again: after President Zelensky named a special-forces unit "Heroes of the UPA" in May, Polish President Karol Nawrocki in June revoked the Order of the White Eagle that Poland had awarded Zelensky.
In Jewish memory and Holocaust scholarship, the OUN's antisemitic ideology, the 1941 pogroms and the participation of nationalists in the auxiliary police are central, and the honouring of Bandera and Shukhevych is deeply offensive.
In Soviet and Russian state propaganda, "Banderites" became a label for all Ukrainian nationalists, and later for Ukrainians who reject Moscow's authority; the Kremlin's 2022 claim to be "denazifying" Ukraine draws on that tradition.

Most historians would say that the OUN and UPA were authoritarian nationalists who fought for independence, committed mass atrocities against Poles and took part in violence against Jews, and were in turn the victims of brutal Soviet repression. Holding all of that at once is uncomfortable for every side.
Liberation, deportation and the toll
The Red Army retook Kyiv in November 1943 and all of Ukraine by late 1944. In May 1944 the NKVD deported the entire Crimean Tatar people, about 180,000 people, to Central Asia, accusing them of collaboration; the Encyclopedia of Ukraine says 20 to 25 percent died in transit or soon after. Crimean Tatars call it the Sürgün (exile).
By the Encyclopedia of Ukraine's count, 6.8 million people were killed in Ukraine during the German occupation, including about 1.4 million Jews and 1.4 million Soviet military personnel, and some 4.5 million Ukrainians fought in the Red Army. Ukraine, with Belarus and Poland, was at the centre of what the historian Timothy Snyder called the "bloodlands".

Part 9 — From the ruins to Chornobyl (1945–1991)
A new Soviet Ukraine
The war's end redrew the map. In 1945 Czechoslovakia ceded Transcarpathia to the USSR, and the new Polish–Soviet border left Galicia and Volhynia in Soviet Ukraine. Population exchanges sent hundreds of thousands of Poles west and Ukrainians east; in 1947 Poland's communist government deported the remaining Ukrainians of its south-east to its new western territories in "Operation Vistula". For the first time, almost all Ukrainian-majority lands were in one state, the Ukrainian SSR, which in 1945 became a founding member of the United Nations, with its own seat, although Moscow made all real decisions. In 1946 the Soviet authorities forcibly dissolved the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church into the Russian Orthodox Church; it survived underground for more than forty years.
A famine in 1946–47, caused by drought and continued grain procurement, killed hundreds of thousands more. Reconstruction was rapid, and Ukraine became the industrial and agricultural powerhouse of the USSR: its steel, coal, rockets, ships, tanks, grain and sugar.
Crimea, 1954
In February 1954 the Soviet leadership transferred the Crimean region from the Russian republic to the Ukrainian one, formally to mark the 300th anniversary of Pereiaslav and citing Crimea's economic ties to the mainland. At the time it seemed an administrative change inside one country. After 1991 it became the legal basis for Crimea being part of Ukraine, and Russian nationalists have since called it Khrushchev's mistake.
Thaw, Sixtiers and repression
After Stalin's death, Ukrainians rose high in the Soviet system: Khrushchev had run Ukraine's party for years, and Leonid Brezhnev was born and made his career there. The Thaw produced a new generation of Ukrainian writers and artists, the shistdesiatnyky (Sixtiers), including the poets Lina Kostenko and Vasyl Symonenko and the critic Ivan Dziuba, whose 1965 essay Internationalism or Russification? documented the decline of the Ukrainian language. Arrests in 1965 and a larger wave in 1972 sent many to the camps. The poet Vasyl Stus died in a labour camp in 1985. Under Petro Shelest (party leader 1963–72), Ukrainian culture got some protection; under his successor Volodymyr Shcherbytsky (1972–89), Russification accelerated. By the 1980s Russian dominated Ukraine's cities, higher education and official life; Ukrainian was widely seen as the language of villages.

Daily life in Soviet Ukraine, 1960s–1980s

Housing
Families moving from villages and communal flats into prefabricated tower blocks

Work
Heavy industry in the Donbas, Dnipropetrovsk, Kharkiv; collective farms in the countryside

Language
Ukrainian in schools in villages and the west; Russian the path to careers in cities

Religion
Churches closed or controlled; Greek Catholics underground

Leisure
Black Sea holidays in Crimea and Odesa; dachas; Soviet television and football (Dynamo Kyiv)

Chornobyl
At 1:23 a.m. on 26 April 1986, during a safety test, reactor No. 4 of the Chornobyl nuclear power plant, about 100 kilometres north of Kyiv, exploded and burned, spreading radioactive fallout over Ukraine, Belarus, Russia and much of Europe. The nearby city of Pripyat, home to about 50,000 people, was evacuated only after a day and a half; the town of Chornobyl itself, and a 30-kilometre zone around the plant, were later emptied. In Kyiv, the May Day parade went ahead under the radioactive cloud while the authorities stayed silent. Dozens of firefighters and plant workers died of acute radiation sickness within weeks; the long-term death toll from cancers among the most exposed is still debated, with estimates differing by orders of magnitude depending on the method used.
For Ukrainians, Chornobyl became a symbol of Moscow's indifference to their lives and a turning point in public opinion. Environmental groups became one of the first channels of open protest under glasnost.
Toward independence
In 1989 Ukrainian writers and dissidents founded Rukh (the People's Movement of Ukraine for Perestroika). Hundreds of thousands formed a human chain from Lviv to Kyiv on 22 January 1990, the anniversary of the 1919 union. On 16 July 1990 the Ukrainian parliament declared state sovereignty. In October 1990 a student hunger strike on Kyiv's central square, the "Revolution on Granite", forced the prime minister to resign.
After the failed coup in Moscow in August 1991, Ukraine's parliament, including many communists led by its chairman Leonid Kravchuk, declared independence on 24 August 1991. On 1 December 1991 more than 90 percent of voters confirmed it in a referendum, with majorities in every region: 83.9 percent in Donetsk region, 83.9 percent in Luhansk, and 54.2 percent in Crimea. Kravchuk was elected president the same day. A week later, on 8 December, the leaders of Russia, Ukraine and Belarus declared that the USSR had ceased to exist.

Part 10 — Independence: the hard years and the Orange Revolution (1991–2013)
Building a state
Independent Ukraine inherited a large industrial economy tied to Russia, a huge army, the Black Sea Fleet, and the world's third-largest nuclear arsenal. It had no tradition of independent statehood since 1921, no currency, and a divided society: Ukrainian-speaking west and centre, Russian-speaking east and south, Crimea with an ethnic Russian majority.
The economy collapsed. By World Bank figures, consumer prices rose by about 4,700 percent in 1993, and output fell almost every year from 1990 to 1999, shrinking by about three-fifths in total, a deeper collapse than Russia's. Factories paid wages in kind or not at all; savings vanished; millions went abroad to work. Leonid Kuchma, elected president in 1994, stabilised the economy; a new constitution was adopted in 1996, and the hryvnia was introduced as the national currency in September 1996. Growth returned in 2000.
Nuclear weapons and the Budapest Memorandum
Ukraine had about 1,900 strategic nuclear warheads on its soil, controlled operationally from Moscow. Under pressure from both the United States and Russia, and in exchange for compensation and security assurances, it agreed to give them up and join the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. On 5 December 1994 in Budapest, Russia, the United States and the United Kingdom signed a memorandum in which they undertook to respect Ukraine's independence, sovereignty and existing borders, to refrain from the threat or use of force against it, to refrain from economic coercion, and to seek Security Council action if Ukraine became the victim of nuclear aggression.
The memorandum contained assurances, not a defence guarantee, and it created no mechanism to enforce them. After 2014 Ukrainians came to see it as a lesson that giving up nuclear weapons had left them defenceless; Russia argues that its obligations were not breached, or did not apply, after what it calls an unconstitutional change of government in Kyiv in 2014. Most international lawyers and the other two signatories say Russia violated it.
Crimea and Russia in the 1990s
Crimea, with its ethnic Russian majority and the Black Sea Fleet at Sevastopol, was the most dangerous fault line. In January 1994 Crimeans elected a pro-Russian president, Yurii Meshkov, who pushed for a referendum and a separatist constitution; Kyiv suspended it and in 1995 abolished the Crimean presidency, leaving the peninsula as an autonomous republic within Ukraine. Crimean Tatars had been returning from Central Asian exile since the late 1980s, about 250,000 of them by January 1994; denied their old homes, many built shanties on vacant land. In 1997 Russia and Ukraine divided the Soviet Black Sea Fleet, with Ukraine leasing the main facilities at Sevastopol to Russia, and signed a Treaty of Friendship in which each recognised the other's borders.
Kuchma's Ukraine
Kuchma's Ukraine was more stable but deeply corrupt: privatisation created a class of oligarchs with regional power bases (Donetsk, Dnipropetrovsk, Kyiv), and the presidency dominated through patronage. In September 2000 the investigative journalist Heorhii Gongadze disappeared; his headless body was found weeks later, and secretly recorded tapes appeared to have Kuchma ordering action against him. The "Ukraine without Kuchma" protests that followed were the first mass rallies of the new era.
The Orange Revolution
In the 2004 presidential election, Prime Minister Viktor Yanukovych, Kuchma's chosen successor from Donetsk, openly backed by Putin, faced the opposition leader Viktor Yushchenko, a former central bank governor. During the campaign Yushchenko was poisoned with dioxin, which disfigured his face. The first round was almost a tie (39.9 percent to 39.3 percent). When official results of the runoff gave victory to Yanukovych amid evidence of massive fraud, hundreds of thousands of people in orange scarves filled Kyiv's Independence Square (the Maidan) in freezing weather for weeks. On 3 December the Supreme Court annulled the runoff and ordered a re-run, which Yushchenko won on 26 December.
The Kremlin saw the Orange Revolution as a Western-engineered plot; its supporters saw it as a peaceful democratic uprising against a stolen election. Its hopes faded quickly. Yushchenko and his ally, the charismatic Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko, fell out; the economy was battered by the 2008 financial crisis (output fell 15 percent in 2009); and gas disputes with Russia cut supplies to Europe in 2006 and 2009.
Yanukovych
Yanukovych won the presidency fairly in 2010. He restored the strong presidential powers of the pre-2004 constitution, jailed Tymoshenko in 2011 in a case the EU condemned as selective justice, and presided over corruption on a new scale. He also negotiated an Association Agreement with the European Union, popular with most Ukrainians.

Ukraine's presidents
In office

Leonid Kravchuk
1991–1994

Leonid Kuchma
1994–2005

Viktor Yushchenko
2005–2010

Viktor Yanukovych
2010–2014

Petro Poroshenko
2014–2019

Volodymyr Zelensky
2019–

Part 11 — Euromaidan, Crimea and the Donbas (2013–2021)
The Revolution of Dignity
On 21 November 2013, under heavy pressure from Moscow, which had imposed trade restrictions that summer (and in December would offer a $15 billion loan), Yanukovych's government suspended preparations to sign the EU Association Agreement. That evening a few hundred students and journalists gathered on the Maidan. On the night of 30 November riot police beat the young protesters; the next day hundreds of thousands came out. The movement, known as the Euromaidan, became a protest against Yanukovych's whole system of rule.
On 16 January 2014 parliament passed, by a show of hands, a set of laws sharply restricting protest. Clashes followed. Between 18 and 20 February, as police and protesters fought in central Kyiv, more than 100 people were killed, most of them protesters, many shot by snipers; protesters remember them as the "Heavenly Hundred". On 21 February, Yanukovych and opposition leaders signed an agreement brokered by the foreign ministers of Germany, France and Poland, with a Russian envoy present but not signing, to restore the 2004 constitution and hold early elections. That night Yanukovych fled Kyiv, eventually to Russia. Parliament voted to remove him and scheduled elections.
How the two sides name it. Ukrainians call these events the Revolution of Dignity: a popular uprising against a corrupt, violent government that had abandoned its post. The Kremlin calls them a Western-backed "coup" that brought "nationalists" and "neo-Nazis" to power, and has used that description to justify everything that followed. Independent observers note that far-right groups were a visible part of the Maidan's street-fighting units, and that the parliament's removal of Yanukovych did not follow the constitution's impeachment procedure; they also note that Yanukovych had fled, that parliament (including much of his own party) voted to replace him, and that in the elections of 2014 far-right parties won only a few percent of the vote.
Crimea
Within days, Russian special forces without insignia (the "little green men") seized Crimea's parliament, airports and government buildings, and blockaded Ukrainian bases. Putin at first denied they were Russian soldiers, and later admitted it. A referendum held on 16 March 2014, under occupation and without independent observers, reported overwhelming support for joining Russia; Russia annexed the peninsula two days later. On 27 March 2014 the UN General Assembly, by 100 votes to 11 with 58 abstentions, affirmed Ukraine's territorial integrity and declared that the referendum, "having no validity, cannot form the basis for any alteration of the status" of Crimea. Most Crimean Tatars, whose national assembly, the Mejlis, Russia later banned, boycotted the vote. Ukraine and almost all other UN members still regard Crimea as Ukrainian territory under Russian occupation.
The Donbas
In April 2014 armed groups, led in key places by Russian citizens such as the former FSB officer Igor Girkin, seized government buildings in Donetsk and Luhansk regions and proclaimed "people's republics" (7 and 27 April). Ukraine sent its army; when its forces were on the verge of winning in August 2014, and again in February 2015 at Debaltseve, Russian regular troops intervened in force. Russia denied that its army was fighting in Ukraine. On 17 July 2014 Malaysia Airlines flight MH17 was shot down over separatist-held territory with a Russian Buk missile, killing all 298 people on board; a Dutch court in 2022 convicted Girkin and two others of murder in absentia, and in July 2025 the European Court of Human Rights found Russia responsible.
The Minsk agreements of September 2014 and February 2015, brokered by France and Germany, froze the front line but never brought peace. By the end of 2021, according to the UN, the war in the Donbas had killed 14,200–14,400 people, including at least 3,404 civilians (counting the 298 on MH17), about 4,400 Ukrainian soldiers and about 6,500 members of the armed groups. More than a million people were displaced.
A different country
The years after 2014 changed Ukraine. A new army was built, much of it from volunteers. The EU Association Agreement came into force; visa-free travel to the EU began in 2017. Laws in 2015 banned communist and Nazi symbols and removed thousands of Lenin statues; the same package honoured the OUN and UPA, as described above. In January 2019 the Ecumenical Patriarch of Constantinople granted independence (a tomos of autocephaly) to a new Orthodox Church of Ukraine, separate from the Moscow Patriarchate. More and more Ukrainians, including many native Russian speakers, began to use Ukrainian in public life.
In 2019 Volodymyr Zelensky, a Russian-speaking Jewish comedian from the industrial city of Kryvyi Rih, best known for playing a schoolteacher who accidentally becomes president in a TV series, defeated President Petro Poroshenko with 73.2 percent of the vote in the runoff, promising to end corruption and bring peace to the Donbas. His attempts at a deal with Moscow, including prisoner exchanges and troop disengagements, stalled. In July 2021 Putin published his essay arguing that Russians and Ukrainians are "one people". By the end of the year more than 100,000 Russian troops had massed on Ukraine's borders.

Part 12 — The full-scale invasion and Ukraine in 2026 (2022–2026)
24 February 2022
Before dawn on 24 February 2022, Putin announced a "special military operation" to "demilitarise and denazify Ukraine" and protect people he said faced "genocide perpetrated by the Kiev regime". Russian forces invaded from Belarus in the north, from Russia in the east and from Crimea in the south, and missiles struck cities across the country. Many governments expected Kyiv to fall within days. Instead, Ukrainians fought back. Zelensky stayed in Kyiv, filming himself in the streets with his ministers: "We are all here." Russian columns were stopped on the approaches to the capital and withdrew from the north by early April, leaving behind evidence of mass killings of civilians in Bucha and other towns. In the south-east, Russia captured Mariupol in May after a siege that reduced much of the city to ruins.

How international bodies described it

UN General Assembly, ES-11/1, 2 March 2022 (141–5–35)
"Deplores in the strongest terms the aggression by the Russian Federation against Ukraine"; demands immediate, complete and unconditional withdrawal

International Court of Justice, 16 March 2022 (13–2)
Orders Russia to "immediately suspend the military operations"

UN General Assembly, ES-11/4, 12 October 2022 (143–5–35)
Condemns the "illegal so-called referendums" and "attempted illegal annexation" of Donetsk, Luhansk, Zaporizhzhia and Kherson regions

International Criminal Court, 17 March 2023
Arrest warrants for Vladimir Putin and Maria Lvova-Belova for the unlawful deportation and transfer of Ukrainian children; later warrants (2024) for senior Russian commanders and for former defence minister Sergei Shoigu and chief of the general staff Valery Gerasimov

UN General Assembly, ES-11/7, 24 February 2025 (93–18–65)
Notes that "the full-scale invasion of Ukraine by the Russian Federation has persisted for three years"; reaffirms Ukraine's territorial integrity and calls for a "comprehensive, just and lasting peace"

Russia rejects these rulings and resolutions. Its government says it is fighting a defensive war against NATO's expansion and the "Kiev regime". On 24 February 2025, the UN Security Council adopted its first substantive resolution on the war, drafted by the United States, which called for a swift end to "the Russian Federation-Ukraine conflict" without naming an aggressor; it passed 10–0 with five abstentions.
The course of the war
In autumn 2022 Ukrainian counter-offensives liberated most of Kharkiv region in September and the city of Kherson in November. Russia declared the annexation of four Ukrainian regions (none of which it fully controlled), mobilised hundreds of thousands of men, and began a campaign of missile and drone strikes on Ukraine's power stations. In June 2023 the Kakhovka dam on the Dnipro, under Russian control, was destroyed, flooding towns and farmland downstream; Ukraine's 2023 counter-offensive in the south failed to break through Russia's fortified lines. In August 2024 Ukrainian forces crossed into Russia's Kursk region; North Korean soldiers were later sent to help Russia push them out. Through 2024–26 Russian forces advanced slowly in the east at great cost, while Ukraine increasingly struck Russian refineries, airfields and ships with its own long-range drones. A UN- and Turkish-brokered deal let Ukraine export grain through the Black Sea from July 2022 to July 2023; after Russia left it, Ukraine pushed Russia's fleet back from the western Black Sea and reopened its own sea corridor.
The human cost

The war in numbers (UN figures, dated)

Civilians killed, 24 Feb 2022–30 Sep 2026 (UN Human Rights Monitoring Mission)
17,605 verified; 55,846 injured; actual numbers "likely considerably higher"

Civilians killed, January–September 2026
2,570, up 59% on the same period of 2025

Refugees from Ukraine worldwide (UNHCR, end of year)
5.68 million (2022); 5.96 million (2023); 5.12 million (2024); 5.22 million (2025)

Internally displaced (UNHCR, end 2025)
3.71 million

Recovery and reconstruction needs (fifth Rapid Damage and Needs Assessment, World Bank, EU, UN and Ukrainian government, February 2026)
$588 billion; direct damage over $195 billion

Military casualties on both sides are not published by either government and are not verified by the UN; independent estimates run into the hundreds of thousands killed and wounded. Ukraine's economy shrank by almost 29 percent in 2022, by the World Bank's measure, and has grown modestly since (1.8 percent in 2025). Its population, about 52 million in 1990 and 44 million in 2021, was estimated by the World Bank at about 39 million in 2025, including people in occupied territories, with millions abroad.
UN investigators have documented torture and sexual violence against detainees, summary executions, and the deportation of children. The UN human rights chief reported in October 2026 that of more than a thousand documented cases of conflict-related sexual violence, 89 percent were attributed to Russian forces and 11 percent to Ukrainian forces. In October 2026 the UN Commission of Inquiry concluded that Russia's systematic attacks on Ukraine's energy infrastructure amounted to war crimes and crimes against humanity.
Life and politics in wartime
Under martial law, in force since 24 February 2022, Ukraine's constitution does not allow national elections. Parliamentary elections due in 2023 and the presidential election due in March 2024 were not held, and Zelensky's five-year term, which would otherwise have ended in May 2024, continues. Ukrainian constitutional lawyers and most of the opposition accept this; the Kremlin uses it to call Zelensky "illegitimate". Men aged 18 to 60 may not leave the country, and mobilisation has been a constant source of strain.
Corruption remained a battlefield too. In July 2025 a law curbing the independence of Ukraine's anti-corruption agencies brought thousands of young protesters onto the streets, and was reversed. In November 2025 the National Anti-Corruption Bureau (NABU) exposed what it called a high-level criminal organisation extracting kickbacks in the state nuclear company Energoatom ("Operation Midas"); two ministers were dismissed and, on 28 November, Zelensky's powerful chief of staff Andriy Yermak resigned after his home was searched. In January 2026 Zelensky appointed the military intelligence chief Kyrylo Budanov in his place.
Ukraine applied to join the European Union days after the invasion and was granted candidate status in June 2022. It ratified the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court in 2024, becoming a member on 1 January 2025.
Where things stand in late 2026
As of the end of October 2026, the war continues. Russian forces occupy Crimea and large parts of the Donetsk, Luhansk, Zaporizhzhia and Kherson regions. Direct talks between American, Ukrainian and Russian delegations were held in Abu Dhabi in January 2026 and in Geneva in February, without agreement; Russia still demands, as set out by Putin in June 2024, the withdrawal of Ukrainian forces from the whole of the four regions it claims and a commitment that Ukraine will never join NATO, terms Ukraine rejects. Localised arrangements have been tried: in October 2026 a local ceasefire around the occupied town of Oleshky in Kherson region, announced on 23 October to run until 1 November, was welcomed by UN officials as offering "hope" for civilians there. Attacks continue: on 29 October 2026 a Russian drone strike on the railway station in Dnipro killed 13 people. Ukraine's relations with Poland, its most important neighbour and supply route, have been strained in 2026 by the dispute over the memory of the UPA.

Part 13 — How to understand Ukraine today
Four ways the story is told
The Ukrainian national account. Ukraine is an old European nation with its own continuous history from Kyivan Rus' through Galicia–Volhynia, the Cossacks and the Hetmanate. For centuries it was divided and ruled by others, its language banned, its peasants enserfed, its elites absorbed, and in the twentieth century its people starved in the Holodomor and slaughtered in a world war. Each time it tried to build its own state (1648, 1918, 1991) it was attacked. Independence in 1991 was a democratic choice by every region, and the Revolution of Dignity and the defence of 2022 are proof that Ukrainians are a political nation, defined not by ethnicity or language but by the choice to be free. Many Ukrainians who see themselves this way also accept that dark chapters, like 1648 and Volhynia, must be faced honestly.
The Russian state's account. Russians, Ukrainians and Belarusians are one people with a common origin in Rus' and a common faith; "Little Russia" was always part of the Russian world; modern Ukraine's borders were drawn by Lenin and Stalin and include "historically Russian" lands in the east and south and Crimea, given away by Khrushchev. Ukrainian nationalism is in this view a creation of Austrian and Polish intrigues and Western hostility, and the 2014 change of government in Kyiv was an illegal coup that unleashed neo-Nazis against Russian speakers. This is the account set out in Putin's essay of July 2021 and his address of 24 February 2022, and it is rejected by the Ukrainian government, by most historians outside Russia, and by the UN General Assembly's resolutions.
The Polish and Jewish perspectives. Poles remember Ukraine as a land once part of their Commonwealth, the site of the Khmelnytsky and haidamaka risings, and of the Volhynia massacres of 1943, and many are angered when Ukraine honours the UPA, even as Poland has been Ukraine's strongest supporter since 2022. Jewish memory holds Ukraine as both a cradle of East European Jewish life (Hasidism was born there, in Podillia, in the eighteenth century) and the scene of 1648, the pogroms of 1881–1921, and the Holocaust by bullets. That a Jewish president leads Ukraine in a war in which Russia claims to be fighting "Nazis" is one of the bitter ironies of this history.
The Crimean Tatar perspective. For Crimean Tatars, the Indigenous people of Crimea, Russian rule has meant annexation in 1783, emigration, the deportation of 1944, a return only after 1989, and since 2014 renewed repression. They are among the most determined supporters of Ukrainian sovereignty over Crimea.
Key dates

Year
Event

c. 5000 BC
Trypillian farming culture spreads across the forest-steppe

7th century BC
Greek colonies founded on the Black Sea coast

8th–2nd centuries BC
Scythians rule the steppe

882
Oleh takes Kyiv; Kyivan Rus' forms

988
Volodymyr's baptism of Kyiv

1240
Mongols sack Kyiv

1253
Danylo of Galicia crowned king

1569
Union of Lublin: most Ukrainian lands pass to Poland

c. 1552–54
First Zaporozhian Sich

1596
Union of Brest: Greek Catholic Church formed

1648
Khmelnytsky uprising; massacres of Jews and Poles

1654
Pereiaslav agreement with Muscovy

1667
Andrusovo divides Ukraine along the Dnipro

1709
Battle of Poltava; Mazepa defeated

1764, 1775
Hetmanate abolished; Sich destroyed

1783
Serfdom in Left-Bank Ukraine; Russia annexes Crimea

1795
Partitions of Poland completed

1840
Shevchenko's Kobzar

1863, 1876
Valuev circular and Ems Decree ban Ukrainian publishing

1917–21
Central Rada; Ukrainian People's Republic; war and pogroms

1918
Independence declared (Fourth Universal, dated 22 January)

1922
Soviet Ukraine joins the USSR

1932–33
Holodomor

1937–38
Great Terror; the Executed Renaissance

1939
Soviet annexation of western Ukraine

1941
German invasion; Babyn Yar (29–30 September)

1943–44
Volhynia massacres of Poles

1944
Deportation of the Crimean Tatars

1954
Crimea transferred to Soviet Ukraine

1986
Chornobyl disaster (26 April)

1991
Independence (24 August); referendum (1 December)

1994
Budapest Memorandum

1996
Constitution; hryvnia

2004
Orange Revolution

2013–14
Euromaidan; Yanukovych flees

2014
Russia annexes Crimea; war in the Donbas; MH17

2015
Minsk II agreement

2019
Orthodox Church of Ukraine; Zelensky elected

2022
Full-scale Russian invasion (24 February)

2025
Operation Midas corruption scandal; Yermak resigns

2026
War continues; US-brokered talks without agreement

Who's who

Person
Lived
Why they matter

Volodymyr the Great
c. 958–1015
Prince of Kyiv who adopted Christianity in 988

Yaroslav the Wise
c. 978–1054
Kyiv's golden age; St Sophia; first law code

Danylo of Galicia
1201–1264
King of Rus'; founder of Lviv

Bohdan Khmelnytsky
c. 1595–1657
Cossack hetman; leader of the 1648 uprising; Pereiaslav

Ivan Mazepa
1639–1709
Hetman who broke with Peter I; defeated at Poltava

Taras Shevchenko
1814–1861
Former serf; national poet

Mykhailo Hrushevsky
1866–1934
Historian of Ukraine; head of the Central Rada

Ivan Franko
1856–1916
Writer and thinker of Galicia

Symon Petliura
1879–1926
Leader of the Ukrainian People's Republic; contested over pogroms

Andrei Sheptytsky
1865–1944
Greek Catholic metropolitan; sheltered Jews in the Holocaust

Stepan Bandera
1909–1959
OUN(B) leader; hero to some, symbol of atrocity to others

Vasyl Stus
1938–1985
Poet and dissident; died in a Soviet camp

Leonid Kravchuk
1934–2022
First president of independent Ukraine

Viktor Yushchenko
b. 1954
President after the Orange Revolution

Mustafa Dzhemilev
b. 1943
Crimean Tatar leader, longtime Soviet political prisoner

Volodymyr Zelensky
b. 1978
President since 2019; wartime leader

Five ideas that unlock the country
1. A borderland that became a nation. For most of its history Ukraine was divided among empires, and its people were peasants ruled by foreign or assimilated elites. Its national identity was built in the nineteenth century by poets and scholars, and made political by the wars of the twentieth. That is a common European story (think of Finland, Czechia or Ireland), not proof, as the Kremlin argues, that Ukraine is artificial.
2. Language matters, but it is not the whole story. Centuries of bans and Russification made Russian the language of Ukraine's cities. Yet millions of Russian-speaking Ukrainians, Zelensky among them, fought for Ukraine in 2014 and 2022. Since 2014, and especially since 2022, many have switched to Ukrainian by choice. Ukrainian identity today is civic more than ethnic.
3. Freedom from below. The Cossack assemblies that elected and deposed their hetmans, the Orlyk constitution, the Rada of 1917, the Maidans of 2004 and 2014: Ukrainians tell their history as one of a society that does not easily accept an all-powerful ruler. Unlike Russia, Ukraine since 1991 has had six presidents, and incumbents have repeatedly lost elections.
4. Memory wars are real wars. The Holodomor, Pereiaslav, Mazepa, the OUN and UPA, 1945, the Maidan: each is fought over in textbooks, parliaments and, now, on the battlefield. A history that leaves out 1648 or Volhynia is as incomplete as one that leaves out the Holodomor or Babyn Yar.
5. Corruption and courage at the same time. Independent Ukraine has been plagued by oligarchs and graft, and still is, as the scandals of 2025 showed. It has also produced a civil society that keeps forcing change from below, from the Revolution on Granite in 1990 to the young people who took to the streets in July 2025 to defend the anti-corruption bureau in the middle of a war.

"Fight, and you will win," wrote Shevchenko in 1845; "God is helping you." The line, from his poem The Caucasus, about a people under Russian conquest, is painted on walls across Ukraine today.

The takeaway
Ukraine's lands were home to the Trypillian farmers, the Scythians and the Greek cities of the Black Sea, and then to Kyivan Rus', the medieval state from which Ukrainians, Belarusians and Russians all descend. For six centuries after the Mongol sack of Kyiv in 1240, its people were ruled by Lithuania, Poland, the Ottomans, Austria and Russia; the Cossacks of the seventeenth century built a state of their own, whose meaning, and whose massacres, are still argued over. The national revival of the nineteenth century survived language bans; the independence of 1917–21 was crushed; Soviet rule brought the Holodomor, the Terror and Russification; the Second World War killed some 6.8 million people in Ukraine, including about 1.4 million Jews. In 1991 more than 90 percent of voters chose independence. Since 2014 Russia has annexed Crimea and, from 2022, waged a full-scale invasion that the UN General Assembly deplored as aggression. In 2026 Ukraine is still fighting for its survival, and still arguing, openly, about its own past.
Try this: find a recording of a Ukrainian folk song, like Shchedryk (which became the Christmas carol Carol of the Bells in English), or read a short poem by Shevchenko in translation. Then look up when and where it was written and who was ruling that part of Ukraine at the time. You will find that most of Ukraine's best-loved culture was made under someone else's flag.

Sources & Further Reading
Sources
- Encyclopedia of Ukraine (Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies), entries including "History of Ukraine", "Famine-Genocide of 1932–3", "Khmelnytsky, Bohdan", "Pereiaslav Treaty of 1654", "Mazepa, Ivan", "Shevchenko, Taras", "Central Rada", "Holocaust", "Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists", "Ukrainian Insurgent Army", "Crimean Tatars", "Budapest Memorandum", "Orange Revolution", "Revolution of Dignity" and "Donets Basin".
- Shaul Stampfer, "Khmelnytskyi, Bohdan", YIVO Encyclopedia of Jews in Eastern Europe; US Holocaust Memorial Museum, "Kiev and Babi Yar" and "Mobile Killing Squads".
- Instytut Pamięci Narodowej (Poland), conference volume Wołyń 1943 – rozliczenie (Volhynia massacre estimates); Nicolas Werth, Mass Violence and Resistance network, Sciences Po (famine, Terror, deportations and the 1944–52 campaign in western Ukraine).
- Mark Harrison's review of R. W. Davies and S. G. Wheatcroft, The Years of Hunger (University of Warwick); Holodomor Research and Education Consortium (Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies), on Lemkin and the genocide debate.
- UN General Assembly resolutions 68/262, ES-11/1, ES-11/4 and ES-11/7; Security Council resolution 2774 (2025); UN document A/49/765 (Budapest Memorandum, 1994); ICJ order of 16 March 2022; International Criminal Court press releases (2023–25).
- UN Human Rights Monitoring Mission in Ukraine: conflict-related civilian casualties to 31 December 2021 (published 27 January 2022) and to 30 September 2026 (published 16 October 2026); UN News, September–October 2026; UNHCR refugee population statistics.
- World Bank, World Development Indicators (updated October 2026); World Bank, EU, UN and Government of Ukraine, Fifth Rapid Damage and Needs Assessment (February 2026).
- President of Russia website: Putin's article of 12 July 2021, address of 24 February 2022 and speech of 14 June 2024.
- Kyiv Independent on Zelensky's term (May 2024) and the 2026 talks; BBC News on Yermak's resignation (November 2025) and Budanov's appointment (2 January 2026); NABU on Operation Midas (11 November 2025); DW on the 2026 Poland–Ukraine dispute over the UPA; Government of the Netherlands on the ECtHR's MH17 ruling (July 2025).
Go deeper
- 📘 The Gates of Europe: A History of Ukraine — Serhii Plokhy (the best single-volume history, from Herodotus to the present; updated editions cover the war)
- 📘 Ukraine: A History — Orest Subtelny (the classic textbook, strong on the Cossacks and the national revival)
- 📘 Red Famine: Stalin's War on Ukraine — Anne Applebaum (a narrative history of the Holodomor; read alongside Davies and Wheatcroft for the opposing interpretation)
- 📘 Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin — Timothy Snyder (Ukraine at the centre of the mass killing of 1932–45)
- 📘 Voices of Chernobyl — Svetlana Alexievich (oral history of the disaster and its survivors)
- 🌐 Encyclopedia of Ukraine (the free scholarly encyclopedia used throughout this history)
- 🌐 Holodomor Research and Education Consortium (documents, survivor testimony and teaching materials)
- 🌐 Related pieces in this library: A Brief History of Russia (this series); Russia: A Condensed History of Tsars, Revolution, and Empire; Leaders of the 1930s; The International Institutions: What They Can and Can't Do


A Brief History of Argentina: Silver, Beef, Perón and the Long Search for Stability
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How a backwater of the Spanish empire became one of the richest countries on earth, then spent a century arguing about why it stopped, and what that argument has done to its politics.

Follows: Argentina: Historia Condensada de Abundancia, Pasión y Contradicción (Spanish track, Condensed History of Nations 6). Companion piece: Si Hubiera Nacido en Argentina (Spanish track).
Every Argentine adult has a currency story. A grandmother who kept her savings in dollar bills under the mattress because she had seen the bank freeze them. A father who was paid on Friday and spent everything by Saturday because prices would be higher on Monday. A cousin who bought a car not because she needed one but because a car held its value and pesos did not. In 2023, prices rose 211 percent in a year. In September 2026 they were rising about 2 percent a month, and the president who brought them down was locked in a dead heat with the movement he had sworn to destroy.
That is modern Argentina in a paragraph: a country of enormous natural wealth, a highly educated people and a sophisticated culture, which has defaulted on its debts again and again, once in 2001 on a scale the world had never seen, lived through six successful military coups in the 20th century, and still argues every day about one man who died in 1974. This history tries to explain how all of those things can be true at once.
In this history

Before Argentina, and the edge of an empire (to 1806)
Revolution, independence and Rosas (1806–1852)
Building the nation, and the Conquest of the Desert (1852–1885)
The granary of the world (1880–1930)
The Infamous Decade, Perón and Evita (1930–1955)
The impossible game (1955–1976)
The dictatorship, the disappeared and the Malvinas (1976–1983)
Democracy, hyperinflation and the peso-dollar (1983–2001)
Collapse, the Kirchners and Macri (2001–2023)
Milei and Argentina in 2026 (2023–2026)
How to understand Argentina today

Part 1 — Before Argentina, and the edge of an empire (to 1806)
The first peoples
People reached the far south of the Americas remarkably early. Cueva de las Manos in Santa Cruz province, with its walls of stencilled hands, holds art that many generations added to over thousands of years, beginning more than 9,000 years ago, and the Piedra Museo site nearby has traces of people from around 13,000 years ago. By the time Europeans arrived, the land that is now Argentina held a patchwork of peoples living in very different ways:

Region
Peoples (examples)
Way of life on the eve of conquest

Andean northwest
Diaguita, Calchaquí, Omaguaca
Irrigated terraces, maize and potatoes, stone villages; part of the Inca empire's southern edge from the late 1400s

Northeast (Litoral, Chaco)
Guaraní, Qom (Toba), Wichí
Farming in the river forests; hunting, fishing and gathering in the Chaco

Pampas
Querandí, later Ranquel and others
Hunting guanaco and rhea on the grasslands

Patagonia and the far south
Tehuelche (Aónikenk), Selk'nam, Yagán
Mobile hunters on the steppe; canoe peoples of the channels of Tierra del Fuego

South-centre, from the 1700s
Mapuche
Increasingly present east of the Andes, raising and trading horses and cattle

Two things about this table matter later. First, the Inca empire reached into the northwest, so the oldest "Argentine" towns were tied to the Andes, not the Atlantic. Second, the Mapuche presence on the pampas is old, but it grew in the 18th and 19th centuries; Argentine nationalists later used that to call them "Chilean invaders", a claim that historians reject and that Mapuche communities find deeply offensive.
The 2022 census found that about 1.3 million people, just under 3 percent of the population, identified as Indigenous or as descendants of Indigenous peoples. That is far more than earlier censuses recorded, and far more than the old national story, in which Argentina had "no Indians", allowed.
Silver and smuggling
The Spanish arrived from two directions. From the Atlantic, Juan Díaz de Solís entered the Río de la Plata ("River of Silver", named in hope rather than fact) in 1516 and was killed by people on its shore. Pedro de Mendoza founded a first Buenos Aires in 1536; it was abandoned after hunger and attacks. Juan de Garay founded it again, for good, in 1580. From the Andes, conquistadors coming down from Peru founded Santiago del Estero (1553), Tucumán, Córdoba (1573) and Salta, so for two centuries the real heart of the territory was the northwest, linked to the silver mines of Potosí in today's Bolivia.
Buenos Aires was a muddy port at the edge of the empire. Spain's trade rules required goods to travel the long way, via Panama and Lima, which made them absurdly expensive at the far end. So the port lived on smuggling: Potosí silver went out, European goods and enslaved Africans came in, often through Portuguese Colonia across the river. That habit, of a port city prospering by working round the rules of a distant capital, is one of the oldest threads in Argentine history.
Meanwhile, in the northeast, Jesuits gathered tens of thousands of Guaraní people into mission towns between the Paraná and Uruguay rivers, where they farmed, built baroque churches and armed themselves against Portuguese slave raiders. When Spain expelled the Jesuits in 1767, the missions decayed. Their red-sandstone ruins at San Ignacio Miní are now a World Heritage Site.
The viceroyalty
In 1776 Spain, worried about Portuguese and British ambitions, created the Viceroyalty of the Río de la Plata with Buenos Aires as its capital, covering today's Argentina, Uruguay, Paraguay and Bolivia. Two years later, in 1778, Charles III's free-trade regulations let Buenos Aires trade legally with Spain; in the following decade commerce between Spain and its American colonies rose by nearly 700 percent. The port boomed. Hides, salted beef and silver flowed out; a merchant class grew rich and confident.

For most of its colonial history, Argentina was not the centre of anything. Buenos Aires became important only in the last few decades of Spanish rule, and then very fast.

The British invasions
The confidence was tested in June 1806, when a British expedition planned by Commodore Home Popham and led by William Carr Beresford took Buenos Aires without orders from London and decreed free trade with Britain. The viceroy fled to Córdoba with the treasury. A French-born officer in Spanish service, Santiago de Liniers, gathered forces across the river in Montevideo and, with the city's own volunteers, drove the British out. A larger British army came back in 1807 and was beaten in the streets, with residents firing from rooftops and pouring boiling water from balconies. The lesson the porteños (people of the port) drew was that they had defended themselves while Spain's officials ran. The militias, organised by birthplace and led by local men, became a political force. Four years later, they would use it.

Part 2 — Revolution, independence and Rosas (1806–1852)
May 1810
In 1808 Napoleon invaded Spain and imprisoned its king. Across Spanish America, local elites had to decide in whose name they were governed. In Buenos Aires the answer came in a week of meetings in May 1810. On 25 May, an open town council replaced the viceroy with a governing junta, still nominally loyal to the captive King Ferdinand VII. Argentines celebrate 25 May as the birth of the nation, and the colonial town hall (Cabildo) and the square in front of it, Plaza de Mayo, became the stage on which much of the country's later history was performed.
The junta's leaders disagreed from the start, between radicals like Mariano Moreno who wanted a clean break and social reform and moderates who wanted to go slowly. They also faced a fact that would define the next half-century: the interior provinces and the other parts of the viceroyalty did not accept Buenos Aires's right to speak for them. Paraguay went its own way almost at once; Upper Peru (Bolivia) was reconquered by royalist armies from Lima; the Banda Oriental (Uruguay) became a battlefield.
Independence and San Martín
Independence was formally declared by a congress meeting in Tucumán on 9 July 1816, in the name of the "United Provinces of South America". By then the war was going badly; Spain had restored its king and was reconquering much of the continent.
The man who turned it round was José de San Martín, a career officer born in Yapeyú, a former Jesuit mission town on the Uruguay River, who had fought for Spain against Napoleon before returning to join the revolution. His plan was to strike the royalist heartland in Peru not through the Bolivian highlands, where Argentine armies kept being beaten, but over the Andes through Chile. In 1817 his Army of the Andes, estimated at between 3,500 and 6,000 men, a large share of them Black soldiers, many of them freedmen, crossed the high passes of the cordillera and defeated the royalists at Chacabuco. He went on by sea to Lima, declaring Peru's independence in July 1821, then, after a private meeting with Simón Bolívar at Guayaquil in 1822, withdrew from public life. He died in exile in France in 1850. He is Argentina's Libertador, revered in a way no later politician is.
The other founding hero is Manuel Belgrano, who designed the light-blue-and-white flag in 1812. The colours are said, among other stories, to come from the sky; historians dispute the details.
Unitarians and Federalists
Freed from Spain, the provinces could not agree on how to live together. The basic split, between Unitarians and Federalists, lasted until 1880.

Unitarians (unitarios)
Federalists (federales)

Base
Educated Buenos Aires elites, merchants, liberals
Provincial strongmen (caudillos), rural people, and later the Buenos Aires ranchers

Wanted
A centralised republic run from Buenos Aires
Provincial autonomy, protection for local industries

Model
Europe and the United States
Local tradition and Catholic order

The catch
Buenos Aires kept the customs revenue of the only big port
"Federalism" in Buenos Aires often meant the province keeping that revenue for itself

After a disastrous "Year Twenty" (1820) in which central authority collapsed, a Unitarian president, Bernardino Rivadavia, tried to impose a centralised constitution in 1826. The provinces rejected it, and the civil wars resumed.
Rosas
Out of the chaos came Juan Manuel de Rosas, a rancher and militia commander who governed Buenos Aires province from 1829 to 1832 and again from 1835 to 1852, with "the sum of public power". As governor of the largest province he also handled the confederation's foreign affairs, making him in practice the ruler of the country.
Rosas is the first great test of whether you can tell Argentine history fairly, because Argentines still disagree about him.
His critics' case, set down most famously by Domingo Faustino Sarmiento in Facundo: Civilisation and Barbarism (1845), written in exile in Chile: Rosas was a tyrant who imposed a personality cult, made the Federalist red ribbon compulsory, used a political police (the Mazorca) to murder opponents, and kept the country backward and closed. "Civilisation" meant the city, Europe, education; "barbarism" meant the gaucho, the caudillo and Rosas.
His defenders' case, revived by nationalist historians in the 20th century (the "revisionists"): Rosas held a fragmented country together, kept order after decades of anarchy, and defended Argentine sovereignty against Anglo-French naval blockades in the 1840s. The battle of Vuelta de Obligado (1845), in which his forces chained boats across the Paraná to stop an Anglo-French fleet, is commemorated as the Day of National Sovereignty.
Both cases describe things that happened. Rosas was eventually overthrown by a former ally, the governor of Entre Ríos, Justo José de Urquiza, with Brazilian and Uruguayan help, at the battle of Caseros on 3 February 1852. He spent the last 25 years of his life as a farmer near Southampton, England. His remains were brought home in 1989 by a Peronist president trying to heal old divisions.

Part 3 — Building the nation, and the Conquest of the Desert (1852–1885)
The 1853 Constitution
After Caseros, a congress in Santa Fe adopted a constitution on 1 May 1853, drawing heavily on the US model and on a short, influential book by the lawyer Juan Bautista Alberdi. It created a federal republic with a strong president, guaranteed civil liberties to "all the men of the world who wish to dwell on Argentine soil", in the words of its preamble, and committed the government to encourage European immigration. Alberdi's slogan summed up the project:

"To govern is to populate." (Gobernar es poblar) — Juan Bautista Alberdi, Bases (1852)

The constitution, amended several times, most extensively in 1994, is still in force.
Buenos Aires province refused to join, and for almost a decade there were two Argentinas: a Confederation led by Urquiza from Paraná, and the State of Buenos Aires. Buenos Aires won the decisive battle of Pavón in 1861, and its governor, Bartolomé Mitre, became president of a united country in 1862. The city of Buenos Aires itself was only made the federal capital in 1880, after one more short civil war.
Mitre, Sarmiento and the liberal state
The "national organisation" presidencies of Mitre (1862–68), Sarmiento (1868–74) and Nicolás Avellaneda (1874–80) built the institutions of a modern state: a national army, courts, a postal service, railways, and above all schools. Sarmiento, who had admired the public schools of Horace Mann's Massachusetts, brought American teachers to train Argentine ones and treated education as the cure for "barbarism". The 1869 census, the first, counted about 1.8 million people, most of them illiterate. Within two generations Argentina had one of the highest literacy rates in Latin America.
The same governments also fought the Paraguayan War (1864–70) as Brazil's ally, and crushed the last provincial caudillos, such as "El Chacho" Peñaloza in La Rioja, whose gaucho followers were treated as bandits.
The "Conquest of the Desert"
The Argentine state of 1870 controlled much less than today's territory. South of a line of forts across the pampas, and in the Chaco to the north, lived Indigenous peoples who were independent. They traded with the frontier towns, made treaties with the government, and raided ranches for cattle, sometimes taking captives, which they sold across the Andes. The government in turn made war on them, paid some groups to keep the peace, and coveted their land.
In 1878–79 the war minister, General Julio Argentino Roca, led a campaign into the pampas and northern Patagonia that the state called the Conquista del Desierto, the "Conquest of the Desert". The word "desert" did ideological work: it presented a land that people had lived on for millennia as empty. Further campaigns to 1885 completed the conquest of Patagonia, and campaigns in the Chaco went on into the 20th century. West of the Andes, Chile was conquering Mapuche lands at the same time, in what it called the Occupation of Araucanía; the two states were closing a vise on the free peoples of the south.
How to describe what happened is one of the most contested questions in Argentine history.
The traditional national account, taught for a century: the campaigns secured the national territory against both Indigenous raids and Chilean ambitions, opened the fertile pampas and Patagonia to settlement and agriculture, and made modern Argentina possible. Roca became president twice (1880–86 and 1898–1904), and his face was on the 100-peso note for decades.
Indigenous communities' and many historians' account: the campaigns were a war of extermination and dispossession. Thousands of people were killed; many more, including women and children, were taken prisoner and marched to Buenos Aires, where families were broken up and people were handed out as domestic servants or forced labourers, or confined on the island of Martín García. Many died of disease. Indigenous leaders such as the Tehuelche chief Inacayal were held at the La Plata Museum, where after his death in 1888 his skeleton and brain were put on display; his bones were returned to his people only in 1994, and his brain, scalp and other remains in 2014. Some scholars and Indigenous organisations call it genocide.
The army's own figures for the 1878–79 campaign alone recorded more than a thousand Indigenous people killed and well over ten thousand captured or driven from their lands; modern estimates of deaths across the whole conquest, from violence, forced marches, disease and confinement, are higher and vary widely. The conquered land, tens of millions of hectares, was mostly distributed in huge estates to investors, officers and well-connected families, rather than to the small farmers Alberdi had imagined.
Since the 1990s the official story has shifted. The 1994 constitution recognised "the ethnic and cultural pre-existence of the Indigenous peoples of Argentina" and their communal land rights. Statues of Roca have been contested and some moved; the 100-peso note was redesigned. Land disputes in Patagonia, between Mapuche communities, ranchers and the state, remain active and sometimes violent.

Part 4 — The granary of the world (1880–1930)
The boom
What happened next is one of the most spectacular economic booms in history. Three things came together: the newly conquered pampas, some of the most fertile land on earth; British capital, which built one of the world's largest railway networks fanning out from Buenos Aires; and refrigerated ships, which from the late 1870s let Argentine beef reach European tables. Argentina became one of the world's great exporters of wheat, maize, linseed, wool and chilled beef.
And it filled with people.

Argentina's population (national censuses)
People
Immigrants

1869
1.8 million
About 11% of the country, and half of Buenos Aires, recently arrived

1895
4.0 million
Immigrants 52% of the capital's population

1914
7.9 million
Almost 30% born abroad, the all-time peak

1947
15.9 million
Mass immigration over; internal migration takes its place

2022
46.0 million
Newer arrivals mostly from neighbouring countries and Peru

Sources: INDEC national censuses, population figures as in this library's Spanish condensed history; immigrant shares from published census summaries, rounded.
Between the 1850s and 1930 several million Europeans arrived. Italians came first in number and Spaniards second: one widely cited count puts arrivals between 1861 and 1920 at 3.8 million Italians and 1.5 million Spaniards, though many went home again. With them came Russian and Polish Jews, Syrian-Lebanese, Germans, Welsh (in Patagonia), French and many more. Many came seasonally to harvest and went home; many stayed. In 1914, nearly three in ten people in Argentina had been born abroad, and in Buenos Aires the share was far higher. It was a larger immigrant share than the United States ever had.
Buenos Aires grew into the largest city in Latin America, with wide boulevards, an underground railway (its first line opened in 1913, the first in Latin America, the southern hemisphere and the Spanish-speaking world), the Teatro Colón opera house (opened 1908) and some of the finest newspapers in the Spanish-speaking world. In the crowded tenements (conventillos) where immigrants lived several to a room, in the bars and dance halls at the city's edges, a new music took shape from African-Argentine candombe, Cuban habanera, Spanish and Italian songs and the milonga of the countryside. It was called tango. The rich at first despised it; it became respectable only after it conquered Paris around 1913.
How rich was Argentina, really?
You will often read that Argentina around 1910 was "one of the ten richest countries in the world". That claim comes from long-run estimates of GDP per person, mainly the Maddison Project, and it is broadly supported by them, with important caveats.

GDP per person (Maddison Project, 2011 dollars)
Argentina
Rank among countries with data

1870
$2,340
16th of 70

1895
$5,384
7th of 41

1913
$6,052
10th of 75

1929
$6,961
11th of 70

1950
$7,949
19th of 146

1980
$13,080
36th of 167

2022
$18,292
67th of 169

Source: Maddison Project Database 2023 (University of Groningen); ranks computed for this piece. In 1913 the US was at $10,108, Germany $5,815, France $5,555.
The caveats are the interesting part. The number of countries with data in 1900 is small, so "top ten" means top ten of a club of mostly European and settler countries. Argentina's figures are reconstructions, and a bumper harvest year such as 1895 can flatter it. GDP per person also hides how the wealth was shared: the pampas were owned by a small landed elite, many immigrants could not buy land and rented it or worked as day labourers, and the economy depended on a few exports and on foreign capital. Economic historians argue about whether Argentina was "rich" in the way Australia or Canada were, with broad prosperity and strong institutions, or a booming commodity economy with a narrow political base. That argument, about what Argentina lost and when, is called the "Argentine paradox", and Part 11 returns to it.
Democracy arrives, and is tested
Politics, meanwhile, belonged to the landed and commercial elite of the "Generation of '80" and their National Autonomist Party, which won elections by fraud and patronage. The excluded middle classes, many of them children of immigrants, rallied to the Radical Civic Union (UCR), which staged armed revolts in 1890, 1893 and 1905. In 1912 a reforming conservative president, Roque Sáenz Peña, passed a law making voting secret, universal for adult male citizens and compulsory. In the first presidential election under it, in 1916, the Radical leader Hipólito Yrigoyen won.
Yrigoyen, austere and secretive, was the first mass-politics leader in Argentina, adored by his followers. His governments expanded the middle class's access to state jobs and education, backed the University Reform of 1918, which began in Córdoba and gave students and graduates a share in governing universities (a model copied across Latin America), and kept Argentina neutral in the First World War. They also presided over two massacres of workers: the "Tragic Week" of January 1919 in Buenos Aires, when a metalworkers' strike was crushed by the army, police and vigilante groups who also attacked Jewish neighbourhoods, with estimates of the dead ranging from under a hundred to 700; and the repression of striking rural workers in Santa Cruz, Patagonia, in 1920–22, in which an army cavalry regiment shot somewhere between 300 and 1,500 of them.
Yrigoyen was succeeded by another Radical, Marcelo T. de Alvear, and re-elected in 1928, at 76. Then the world economy collapsed.

Part 5 — The Infamous Decade, Perón and Evita (1930–1955)
The first coup
On 6 September 1930, General José Félix Uriburu led a few military cadets and troops into Buenos Aires and removed Yrigoyen with hardly any resistance and much applause from the conservative press. It was the first successful military coup of Argentina's constitutional era, and the Supreme Court soon issued a ruling recognising the de facto government, a precedent that would be used again and again.

Military coups that overthrew Argentine governments
President removed

6 September 1930
Hipólito Yrigoyen

4 June 1943
Ramón Castillo

16–23 September 1955
Juan Domingo Perón

29 March 1962
Arturo Frondizi

28 June 1966
Arturo Illia

24 March 1976
María Estela "Isabel" Martínez de Perón

Uriburu wanted a corporatist regime on Italian lines but lacked support. Instead, from 1932 a conservative coalition (the Concordancia) ran the country through elections rigged openly enough that the period's own politicians called it "patriotic fraud". Argentines remember it as the Década Infame, the Infamous Decade.
Its economic record is more mixed than its name. In the Depression, the government created a central bank (1935), exchange controls and grain and meat boards, and Argentina recovered faster than many countries; industry grew to replace imports that could no longer be afforded. But the deal that came to symbolise the decade was the Roca–Runciman Treaty of 1933, in which Argentina secured a quota for its beef in the British market in exchange for concessions to British companies, especially in transport. To nationalists, it showed an elite that preferred to be an informal British colony. A senator investigating the meat trade, Lisandro de la Torre, exposed favouritism and fraud in it; in 1935, in the middle of the investigation, his ally, senator-elect Enzo Bordabehere, was shot dead in the Senate chamber.
Meanwhile, millions of migrants from the poor provinces of the interior moved to the factories around Buenos Aires. Darker-skinned, often of mixed Indigenous descent, they were sneered at by the city's middle classes as cabecitas negras ("little black heads"). They had no party that spoke for them. That was about to change.
The Second World War split the elite between pro-Allied and neutralist, and parts of the army admired the Axis. On 4 June 1943, a secret lodge of army officers, the GOU, overthrew President Castillo. One of its colonels took a post nobody else wanted: head of the National Labour Department.
Perón and Evita
No figure divides Argentina like Juan Domingo Perón, and nothing in Argentine politics since 1945 makes sense without him. The Peronist movement he founded has won most of the free presidential elections held since. To tell his story fairly you have to hold two accounts in your head at the same time, because millions of Argentines hold one of them with total conviction.
The rise
From the labour department, which he turned into a Secretariat of Labour and Welfare, Colonel Perón did what no Argentine official had done. He settled strikes in workers' favour, extended pensions, paid holidays and job security, created labour courts and a statute for rural labourers, and brought trade unions into an alliance with the state. By 1945 he was also war minister and vice-president, and the most popular man in the country, which alarmed the rest of the military regime. On 9 October 1945 they forced him to resign and imprisoned him on Martín García island.
On 17 October 1945, tens of thousands of workers marched from the industrial suburbs into Plaza de Mayo and stayed until the government released him. That night he spoke to them from the balcony of the Casa Rosada. Peronists celebrate 17 October as Loyalty Day; to them it is the day the working class entered Argentine history. Perón won the presidential election of February 1946 against a coalition backed by most other parties and openly supported by the US ambassador, Spruille Braden; Perón's campaign slogan was "Braden or Perón".
Evita
His second wife, Eva Duarte, was a radio and film actress born poor and illegitimate in a small town of the pampas. As Eva Perón, "Evita", she became the most powerful woman in Argentine history without ever holding elected office. Her foundation distributed food, clothes, sewing machines, houses and scholarships, built hospitals and schools, and received letters from the poor by the thousand. She campaigned for women's suffrage, which was enacted in 1947; women first voted in a national election in 1951, when Perón was re-elected and the Peronist Women's Party sent women to Congress. The working class's enemies were her enemies: she called them the "oligarchy" and spoke of her descamisados, "shirtless ones".
In 1951 the unions demanded she run as vice-president. Opposition in the army and her own illness forced her to decline. She died of cancer on 26 July 1952, aged 33. Hundreds of thousands filed past her coffin. After the 1955 coup, the military removed her embalmed body from display, and its whereabouts were kept secret for sixteen years, until 1971.
Two accounts

The Peronist account
The anti-Peronist account

What Perón did
Gave workers dignity, rights and a share of national income; made women citizens; nationalised railways and utilities; paid off foreign debt
Built a personality cult and a party-state; spent the post-war surplus and left the economy stagnant

How he governed
With huge electoral majorities and the support of the people
Censored and closed newspapers, jailed opponents, purged universities and courts, made Peronist doctrine compulsory in schools

Evita
A saint of the poor; the "standard-bearer of the humble"
A demagogue whose charity was patronage and whose foundation answered to no one

The 1949 constitution
Enshrined workers' and social rights
Allowed Perón's indefinite re-election

His legacy
Social justice, economic independence, political sovereignty
Authoritarianism, economic decline and a polarisation that never healed

Both columns are supported by evidence. Workers' share of national income rose sharply in the late 1940s; so did censorship, the jailing of opposition politicians and the use of torture by the police against opponents. Perón's admiration for Mussolini's Italy, where he had served as a military attaché in 1939–41, and the fact that Argentina became a refuge for Nazi war criminals such as Adolf Eichmann and Josef Mengele after 1945 (along with many ordinary Germans and other European refugees), are part of the record; so is the fact that his political base was organised labour, not a fascist party. Historians generally call Peronism a form of populism without an exact European equivalent.
The fall
The economy that had boomed on post-war food prices hit trouble from 1949: inflation, falling exports, drought. Perón's second term turned more authoritarian and, in 1954–55, he clashed with the Catholic Church, legalising divorce and expelling bishops. On 16 June 1955, navy aircraft bombed and strafed Plaza de Mayo, trying to kill Perón, in the middle of a working day. More than 300 people were killed (308 bodies were identified, including six children; some counts are higher), most of them civilians. That night Peronist crowds burned churches in Buenos Aires.
In September 1955 a military uprising beginning in Córdoba, calling itself the "Liberating Revolution", forced Perón into exile. He would not return for 18 years.

Part 6 — The impossible game (1955–1976)
Peronism without Perón
The new regime banned Peronism. It became illegal even to say Perón's or Evita's names in public. Unions were purged; in 1956 a Peronist military uprising was crushed and its leaders, along with civilians rounded up in a dump at José León Suárez, were shot, an episode the writer Rodolfo Walsh later reconstructed in Operación Masacre, a pioneering work of investigative journalism.
The political scientist Guillermo O'Donnell called the next two decades an "impossible game". Peronism could not be allowed to win elections, because the military would not accept it; but no government could rule without Peronist workers, because the unions could paralyse the country. Every elected president who tried to square that circle fell.

Arturo Frondizi (1958–62), a Radical elected with Perón's support from exile, under a pact whose terms remain unclear, launched an ambitious "developmentalist" programme that drew foreign investment into oil, steel and cars. When he let Peronist candidates run in provincial elections in 1962 and they won, the military removed him.
Arturo Illia (1963–66), a modest country doctor elected in 1963 while Peronism was banned, is now remembered as honest and moderate (his government gave education 23 percent of the national budget); at the time the press that prepared his overthrow drew him as a slow, ineffective turtle. The army removed him too.
General Juan Carlos Onganía (1966–70) closed Congress, banned parties, and promised to rule for decades. A month after the coup, police stormed university faculties in Buenos Aires and beat professors and students, the "Night of the Long Batons". Some 400 people were detained, and 301 university professors, 215 of them scientists, left the country.

Who governed Argentina, 1955–1976
How they came to power

Eduardo Lonardi, then Pedro Aramburu (1955–58)
Military coup ("Liberating Revolution")

Arturo Frondizi (1958–62)
Election, Peronism banned

José María Guido (1962–63)
Installed by the military after Frondizi's overthrow

Arturo Illia (1963–66)
Election, Peronism banned

Juan Carlos Onganía, Roberto Levingston, Alejandro Lanusse (1966–73)
Military coup ("Argentine Revolution") and internal coups

Héctor Cámpora, then Juan Perón (1973–74)
Elections, Peronism legal again

Isabel Perón (1974–76)
Succeeded on Perón's death as vice-president

The Cordobazo and the guerrillas
In May 1969, workers and students in the industrial city of Córdoba rose against the regime in the Cordobazo, holding parts of the city for a day before the army took it back. It marked the start of a period of political violence. Armed groups formed: the Montoneros, who came from Catholic and nationalist youth and declared themselves Peronist, and the Marxist People's Revolutionary Army (ERP). In 1970 the Montoneros kidnapped and executed former president Pedro Aramburu, a leader of the 1955 coup. Kidnappings, bombings and assassinations by the left, and by right-wing groups and the security forces, became part of daily news.
The generals replaced one another. Onganía was pushed out in 1970, and his successor in March 1971 by General Alejandro Lanusse, the regime's strongman. Facing mounting opposition, Lanusse called elections under a "Great National Agreement" meant to bring the parties back on the military's terms and keep Peronism at arm's length; Perón himself was kept out of the race. It failed in its main aim: Peronism could be kept off the top of the ballot, but not out of power.
The return
With the country ungovernable, the military allowed elections in 1973. A Peronist stand-in, Héctor Cámpora, won; Perón came home on 20 June 1973. At Ezeiza airport, a crowd that police put at three and a half million people (other estimates are much lower) came to greet him, and right-wing Peronist gunmen opened fire on left-wing Peronist columns; at least 13 people were identified among the dead and 365 were wounded, though some accounts put the toll higher. Cámpora resigned, and Perón won a new election in September 1973 with 62 percent, his third wife, María Estela Martínez, known as Isabel, as vice-president.
The old man could not hold his movement together. On 1 May 1974 he denounced the Montoneros from the Casa Rosada balcony and they walked out of the square. On 1 July 1974, aged 78, he died.
Isabel Perón, a former nightclub dancer with no political experience, became president. Power passed to her adviser José López Rega, the welfare minister, who organised the Argentine Anticommunist Alliance, the "Triple A", a death squad that killed hundreds of leftists, lawyers, artists and union activists in 1974–75. The economy fell apart: a devaluation and price shock in June 1975, the Rodrigazo, set off a general strike. In February 1975 a decree of Isabel's government (signed by the acting president, Ítalo Luder) ordered the army to "annihilate" the ERP guerrillas in Tucumán province; the army began to make prisoners disappear.
By early 1976 many Argentines, including much of the press and business, wanted the military to step in. Few imagined what it would do.

Part 7 — The dictatorship, the disappeared and the Malvinas (1976–1983)
The coup
On 24 March 1976 the armed forces removed Isabel Perón and installed a junta of the three service commanders, led by General Jorge Rafael Videla. They called their regime the "Process of National Reorganisation" (Proceso). Its stated aim was to destroy "subversion" and remake Argentine society. Congress was closed, parties and unions suspended, and the courts purged.
Within months the guerrilla organisations were effectively defeated. The repression did not stop. It targeted not only armed militants, but union delegates, students, lawyers, journalists, psychologists, priests and nuns working in poor neighbourhoods, and the families and friends of anyone on a list. Words attributed to General Ibérico Saint-Jean, the military governor of Buenos Aires province, in 1977, captured the logic: first the subversives would be killed, then their collaborators, then their sympathisers, then the indifferent.
The method
The method was disappearance. People were kidnapped, usually at night, by unidentified men in unmarked Ford Falcon cars, taken to secret detention centres, tortured and, in most cases, killed without any record. Officially, they did not exist. CONADEP later found about 340 clandestine detention centres across the country, many in police stations and military bases, the largest at the Navy Mechanics School (ESMA) in Buenos Aires. Thousands of prisoners were drugged and thrown alive from aircraft into the Río de la Plata and the Atlantic, the "death flights", as one navy officer, Adolfo Scilingo, publicly confessed in 1995. Pregnant prisoners were kept alive until they gave birth; their babies were handed to military or allied families and raised under false identities.
The junta was supported, at least at first, by much of the business community and the Church hierarchy, with notable exceptions, and its economic programme under Finance Minister José Alfredo Martínez de Hoz opened the economy, borrowed heavily abroad and undermined much of domestic industry. In 1978 Argentina hosted and won the football World Cup; the final was played at the River Plate stadium, a short drive from the ESMA.
How many? Two numbers, both explained
The figure Argentines argue about most is the number of the disappeared. There are two main numbers, and they do not contradict each other as much as they first seem to.

Figure
Who
What it counts

8,961
CONADEP, the National Commission on the Disappearance of Persons (Nunca Más, 1984)
Individually named people reported to the commission as disappeared and not found; the commission called it "inevitably an open list"

22,000
Argentine military intelligence (Battalion 601), in a 1978 report relayed by Chile's secret police and declassified in 2006
The military's own internal count of "dead and disappeared" from 1975 to mid-1978

8,571
Argentina's Unified Registry of Victims of State Terrorism (RUVTE), figures released by the Human Rights Secretariat in November 2016
7,010 victims of forced disappearance and 1,561 of murder, documented by name; the registry says its figures "can in no way be considered definitive"

30,000
Human-rights organisations (Madres and Abuelas de Plaza de Mayo, others) since the late 1970s
An estimate of the total, including the many cases never reported, and a political symbol

The commission itself explained why its list was incomplete: many families never reported a disappearance, through fear, distance from any city, or because whole families had been taken. The military destroyed its records. The 30,000 figure was an estimate made during and just after the dictatorship and became a slogan ("30,000 compañeros detenidos-desaparecidos, ¡presentes!"). Some on the right, including people in President Milei's government, have attacked it as inflated; human-rights groups answer that the burden of proof lies with the perpetrators, who kept the records and destroyed them. The established facts are that thousands of people were murdered by the state in secret, that the true total is unknown and higher than the named list, and that the military's own count in 1978 was already 22,000.

"The armed forces responded to the crimes of the terrorists with a terrorism infinitely worse than the one they were fighting." — CONADEP, Nunca Más, prologue (1984)

The mothers in the square
The first public resistance came from women. On 30 April 1977, a group of mothers of disappeared people began walking in Plaza de Mayo, in front of the Casa Rosada, to demand to know where their children were. Because gatherings were banned, police told them to keep moving; so they walked in circles, every Thursday, wearing white headscarves embroidered with their children's names. Three of the founders, including Azucena Villaflor, were themselves kidnapped in December 1977, along with two French nuns, and murdered; their remains were identified in 2005. The Madres kept walking.
The Grandmothers of Plaza de Mayo (Abuelas) searched for the stolen babies, pioneering the use of genetic testing to prove identity. As of 2026 they have identified 140 grandchildren; they estimate that more than 300 remain to be found. Fifty years after the coup, on 24 March 2026, a huge crowd filled Plaza de Mayo and the avenues around it under the slogan Nunca más, "Never again".
The Malvinas/Falklands War (1982)
By 1981 the dictatorship was failing. The economy was in crisis, the debt enormous, and the unions had begun to strike again. In December 1981 General Leopoldo Galtieri took over the junta. On 2 April 1982 Argentine forces landed on the Falkland Islands, which Argentines call the Malvinas, a British territory in the South Atlantic about 500 kilometres off the Argentine coast.
The dispute
The claim is old, and each side's case is held sincerely.

Argentina's case: the islands were part of Spain's empire and passed to the United Provinces on independence; Buenos Aires appointed a governor in the 1820s; Britain seized them by force in 1833 and expelled the Argentine authorities. Argentina has claimed them ever since, and the claim is written into its constitution. The UN General Assembly has since 1965 called on both countries to negotiate.
Britain's and the islanders' case: Britain had an earlier claim, the islands have been continuously British-administered since 1833, and the islanders (3,662 residents at the 2021 census, about 30 percent of them temporary), most of British descent and many with families there for generations, have the right to self-determination. In a 2013 referendum, 99.8 percent of voters chose to remain a British Overseas Territory, on a turnout of over 90 percent.

The war
Galtieri expected Britain not to fight for a remote colony and the United States to stay neutral. Both bets failed. Margaret Thatcher's government sent a naval task force 13,000 kilometres south. The US, after failed mediation, backed Britain. On 2 May a British submarine sank the Argentine cruiser General Belgrano, which was outside the exclusion zone Britain had declared, killing 323 people, just under half of all Argentina's dead in the war; the sinking is still bitterly disputed. Argentine aircraft sank several British ships. British troops landed in May and took the capital, Stanley, on 14 June 1982, when the Argentine garrison surrendered.

The war in numbers

Duration
74 days (2 April – 14 June 1982)

Argentine military dead
649

British military dead
255

Falkland Islanders killed
3

Many of the Argentine dead were young conscripts, ill-equipped and badly fed, sent to the islands in the southern winter; some veterans later accused their own officers of abuse. In the years after the war, more veterans died by suicide than had died in the fighting, according to some veterans' organisations, a figure that is hard to verify but widely believed.
Defeat finished the dictatorship. Galtieri was replaced; the regime negotiated its exit and called elections for October 1983. The war left a paradox: Argentines overwhelmingly reject the junta that launched it and honour the soldiers who fought it. Every 2 April is a national day of remembrance for the veterans and the fallen.

Part 8 — Democracy, hyperinflation and the peso-dollar (1983–2001)
Alfonsín and the trial of the juntas
On 30 October 1983, the Radical Raúl Alfonsín won the presidential election with 51.7 percent, beating the Peronists for the first time in a free contest. He took office on 10 December, International Human Rights Day, and spoke to the crowd from the old Cabildo. Within days he created CONADEP, chaired by the novelist Ernesto Sabato, and ordered the trial of the juntas' members.
From 22 April 1985, a civilian federal court in Buenos Aires tried nine former commanders in proceedings broadcast, without sound, on television. Hundreds of witnesses testified. Prosecutor Julio Strassera ended his closing argument with the words "Never again". Five were convicted: Videla and Admiral Emilio Massera were sentenced to life imprisonment and three others to prison terms; four, including Galtieri, were acquitted. It was one of the first times since Nuremberg that a country's own courts had tried the leaders of a recent dictatorship for mass crimes, and the first in Latin America. (Greece had tried its junta in 1975.)
Then the pressure came. Military uprisings by mid-ranking officers known as carapintadas ("painted faces") forced Congress to pass the Full Stop Law (1986), setting a deadline for new prosecutions, and the Due Obedience Law (1987), exempting most officers who had followed orders. Alfonsín's defenders say he saved democracy by giving ground; his critics say he gave impunity.
Hyperinflation
The economy defeated him. A new currency, the austral, launched in 1985 with a price freeze, briefly worked and then failed. Debt and deficits drove inflation higher, and in 1989 it became hyperinflation: prices rose by more than 3,000 percent in the year (and by another 2,300 percent in 1990), supermarkets were looted, and Alfonsín handed power to his elected successor five months early.

Argentina's currencies since 1970
Introduced
Worth in the previous currency

Peso ley
1970
100 old pesos (moneda nacional)

Peso argentino
1 June 1983
10,000 pesos ley

Austral
June 1985
1,000 pesos argentinos

Peso (convertible)
1992
10,000 australes

One 1992 peso was worth ten trillion of the pesos in use until 1970. Source: the official conversion rates set at each change of currency.
Menem and convertibility
The successor was Carlos Menem, a flamboyant Peronist governor from La Rioja who had campaigned with sideburns modelled on a 19th-century caudillo and promised a "productive revolution" and wage rises. In office he did nearly the opposite of what Peronism had stood for. He privatised the state oil company YPF, the national airline, telephones, railways, electricity, water and pensions, deregulated the economy and aligned with the United States. Many Peronists felt betrayed; many voters who had never voted Peronist supported him.
His finance minister, Domingo Cavallo, ended inflation with the Convertibility Law of April 1991. The peso (which replaced the austral in 1992) was fixed by law at one to one with the US dollar, and the central bank could issue pesos only if they were backed by dollar reserves. It worked spectacularly at first: inflation fell to almost nothing, credit returned, the economy grew fast and Argentines could travel and buy imported goods as never before. A 1994 constitutional reform allowed Menem a second term, which he won in 1995. The same reform recognised Indigenous rights and gave international human-rights treaties constitutional rank.
The 1990s also brought two terrorist attacks: the bombing of the Israeli embassy in 1992, and the bombing of the AMIA Jewish community centre in Buenos Aires on 18 July 1994, which killed 85 people. Argentine prosecutors and courts have attributed the AMIA attack to Iran and Hezbollah, which deny it; no one has been convicted of carrying it out, and the investigation was itself marked by cover-ups.
Menem pardoned the convicted junta leaders in 1989–90. He left office in 1999 accused of corruption, and with the economy in a recession that began in 1998.
The trap
Convertibility had a flaw that became fatal. With the peso fixed to the dollar, Argentina could not devalue when its competitors did, so when the dollar rose, Brazil devalued in 1999 and capital fled emerging markets, Argentine exports became uncompetitive. The government covered deficits by borrowing in dollars. Unemployment rose. The new president, the Radical Fernando de la Rúa, elected in 1999 with a centre-left alliance, kept the peg because leaving it would bankrupt everyone with dollar debts, which was nearly everyone. He brought Cavallo back.
In December 2001, as savers raced to withdraw dollars, the government limited cash withdrawals to 250 pesos a week, the corralito ("little corral"). On 19 and 20 December, with looting in the suburbs and middle-class protesters banging pots in the streets (cacerolazo) under the slogan ¡Que se vayan todos! ("Out with all of them!"), police repression left dozens dead across the country. De la Rúa resigned on 20 December and left the Casa Rosada by helicopter.

Part 9 — Collapse, the Kirchners and Macri (2001–2023)
Five presidents in two weeks
In the following days Argentina had five presidents. One of them, Adolfo Rodríguez Saá, announced a default on about $93 billion of external debt, including some $82 billion in bonds, at the time the largest sovereign default in history, to cheers in Congress; he lasted a week. In January 2002 Congress chose the Peronist Eduardo Duhalde, who ended convertibility. The peso lost a large part of its value within days. Dollar bank deposits were forcibly converted to pesos at 1.40 to the dollar, far below the market rate, while dollar debts were converted one to one, wiping out much of the middle class's savings.
2002 was the worst year in modern Argentine history. The economy had shrunk by more than a quarter since 1998. More than half of Argentines were poor. People traded goods in barter clubs and used provincial IOUs as currency; the unemployed blocked roads (piqueteros); in the suburbs, children went hungry in one of the world's great food exporters.

In 2001 Argentines learned that a law could promise one peso for one dollar, and a bank could still refuse to hand over either.

Néstor Kirchner
Then the economy rebounded, helped by a cheap peso, idle capacity and a boom in the price of soya. In the 2003 election Néstor Kirchner, governor of the Patagonian province of Santa Cruz, won after Menem withdrew from the runoff. Kirchner restructured the defaulted debt in 2005, persuading most creditors to accept large losses; paid off the entire IMF debt, about $9.8 billion, in one payment in January 2006; and governed during growth of around 8 percent a year, helped greatly by high prices for soya and other exports. Poverty fell steeply.
He also reopened the past. In 2003 Congress annulled the Full Stop and Due Obedience laws, and in 2005 the Supreme Court declared them unconstitutional. Trials for crimes against humanity resumed; according to the federal prosecutors' office, courts across the country have since 2006 handed down 376 judgments and convicted 1,254 people, one of the largest sets of such prosecutions anywhere. To human-rights groups, this is the Kirchners' greatest legacy. To their opponents, it was selective: they note that the trials covered state crimes and not guerrilla violence, and that the Kirchners turned human-rights organisations into political allies.
Cristina Fernández de Kirchner
In 2007 Néstor's wife, Senator Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, succeeded him; she was re-elected in 2011 with 54 percent, a year after Néstor's sudden death. Her governments nationalised the private pension funds (2008) and the oil company YPF (2012), expanded social programmes such as a universal child allowance (2009), legalised same-sex marriage in 2010, the first country in Latin America to do so, and confronted the farm sector over export taxes in a long conflict in 2008, which the government lost when the vice-president cast the deciding Senate vote against it.
They also intervened in the national statistics institute, INDEC, from 2007; for years its official inflation figures were far below private and provincial estimates, a manipulation the IMF formally censured in 2013. Currency controls (the cepo) from 2011 created a black-market "blue dollar". Inflation returned to 25 percent or more. And in 2015 the prosecutor Alberto Nisman, who had accused the president of covering up Iran's role in the AMIA bombing, was found shot dead in his apartment the day before he was due to testify to Congress. Whether it was suicide or murder is still disputed in the courts and in public opinion.
Two Argentinas
This is the period in which Argentines began to speak of la grieta, "the crack", the polarisation between Kirchnerism and its opponents. Each side has its strongest case:

Kirchnerism's case: it rescued the country from the 2001 collapse, rebuilt employment and wages, cut poverty, gave Argentina back its sovereignty from the IMF, delivered justice for the dictatorship's crimes and expanded rights.
Its opponents' case: it squandered a commodity boom, lied with official statistics, built a corrupt network of public works contracts, captured the state for a political faction, and left high inflation, currency controls and a stagnant economy.

In December 2022 a federal court convicted Cristina Fernández de Kirchner of fraudulent administration in the "Vialidad" case over road contracts in Santa Cruz, sentencing her to six years and a lifetime ban from public office. The Supreme Court upheld it in June 2025, and she began serving the sentence under house arrest. She calls it "lawfare", political persecution by the judiciary; her opponents call it the first time a powerful Argentine politician has been made to answer for corruption. Her lawyers have taken the case to a UN human-rights committee, which said in 2026 that a decision was not imminent.
Macri and Fernández
In 2015 the centre-right former Buenos Aires mayor Mauricio Macri, founder of the PRO party and once president of the Boca Juniors football club, beat the Peronist candidate in a runoff. He is usually described as the first freely elected president since 1916 to come from outside both the Radical and the Peronist traditions. He lifted currency controls, settled with the "holdout" creditors from the 2001 default, and returned Argentina to international markets. He chose gradual reform over shock. In 2018, as investors fled, the peso collapsed and Macri turned to the IMF for what became the largest loan in the Fund's history, a programme of about $57 billion. Inflation and poverty rose. He lost in 2019 to a Peronist ticket of Alberto Fernández, with Cristina Fernández de Kirchner as his vice-president.
Alberto Fernández's term was dominated by one of the world's longest COVID lockdowns, a scandal over a birthday party at the presidential residence during that lockdown, a 2022 debt deal with the IMF that split his own coalition, and inflation that accelerated to over 200 percent a year. His government also legalised abortion in December 2020. In December 2022 Argentina won the football World Cup in Qatar, led by Lionel Messi, and millions poured into the streets of Buenos Aires in the largest celebration anyone could remember. For a few days, the country forgot the grieta.

Part 10 — Milei and Argentina in 2026 (2023–2026)
The chainsaw
Javier Milei, an economist and television pundit who called himself an "anarcho-capitalist", had been in Congress for two years when he ran for president in 2023, waving a chainsaw at rallies to show what he would do to the state. He called the political class a "caste", promised to abolish the central bank and dollarise the economy, and attracted the votes of young men in particular. In the runoff on 19 November 2023 he beat the Peronist economy minister, Sergio Massa, with almost 56 percent.
He took office on 10 December 2023 and did, in substance, what he had said. He devalued the peso by more than half, cut the number of ministries from 19 to 9, froze public works, cut transfers to the provinces and subsidies for energy and transport, and issued a sweeping decree deregulating rents, labour and many markets. Congress passed a reduced version of his main reform package, the "Bases Law", in June 2024. Abroad, he aligned closely with the United States and Israel.
What happened to prices and poverty
The results, measured by INDEC, the statistics institute, were dramatic in both directions.

Argentina under Milei
Figure

Monthly inflation, December 2023
25.5%

Annual inflation, 2023
211.4%

Annual inflation, 2024
117.8%

Annual inflation, 2025
31.5%, lowest since 2017

Monthly inflation, September 2026
1.9% (33.4% over 12 months)

Poverty, first half of 2024
52.9% of people, highest in more than two decades

Poverty, second half of 2024
38.1%

Poverty, first half of 2025
31.6%, lowest since 2018

Poverty, second half of 2025
28.2%, down more than 10 points in a year

Poverty, first half of 2026
32.3%

Unemployment, second quarter 2026
7.9%

Federal budget
First surplus in more than a decade in 2024; primary surplus target of 1.4% of GDP for 2026 and 2027

Sources: INDEC releases as reported by the Buenos Aires Times, March 2025 – October 2026; IMF third-review statement, 27 October 2026. Poverty figures cover urban areas.
Milei's supporters' case: he did what every previous government had been afraid to do. He ended the deficit that had driven inflation for decades, brought monthly inflation down from 25 percent to around 2 percent without a hyperinflationary collapse, and by doing so cut poverty, because the poor suffer most from inflation. The IMF, which lent Argentina a new $20 billion in April 2025, called the programme's results "impressive" in October 2026. Argentina was buying dollars, building reserves and approving large investments in mining and energy under a new incentive regime, including the giant Vaca Muerta shale field in Neuquén.
His critics' case: the stabilisation was paid for by pensioners, public workers, universities and the poor. Some 77,500 jobs in the national public sector had gone by October 2026, with a new scheme to cut 20,000 more; as many as 241,000 private-sector payroll jobs had been lost since December 2023, and the number of private employers had fallen to 482,000, the lowest since 2007, according to the Fundar think tank. Economic activity fell sharply in July 2026 and was 1.7 percent lower in August than a year earlier, the steepest annual fall in two years, and the IMF cut its growth forecast for 2026 to 2.1 percent. Poverty rose again in the first half of 2026. Critics also question the measurement: the Catholic University's social-debt observatory accepted that poverty had fallen but argued it was less dramatic than the official numbers showed, and the head of INDEC resigned in February 2026 when the government blocked an updated inflation basket that would have given more weight to services.
Both cases rest on real data. Which one you find more persuasive depends a great deal on whether you think the question is "compared with 2023" or "compared with what Argentines need".
Rescue and the midterms
The programme nearly broke in September 2025, when, after a heavy defeat in the Buenos Aires provincial election, there was a run on the peso. The United States Treasury stepped in, announcing support and later a $20 billion currency swap; President Trump said American generosity depended on Milei's party winning the coming election. On 26 October 2025, Milei's La Libertad Avanza won the national midterms decisively, taking 64 of the 127 seats in play and lifting its bloc in the Chamber of Deputies to 95, though turnout, at 67 percent, was a modern record low for a country where voting is compulsory.
The memory war
Milei's vice-president, Victoria Villarruel, is a veterans' advocate who has campaigned for years for the victims of guerrilla violence, and has been accused of historical revisionism about the dictatorship. The government calls for a "complete" history and memory, stressing the crimes of the guerrillas of the 1970s alongside those of the dictatorship, and has questioned the figure of 30,000 disappeared. On the 50th anniversary of the coup, 24 March 2026, the Casa Rosada released a 75-minute video in that vein, hours before one of the largest human-rights marches in years. Human-rights organisations say the government is reviving the "theory of the two demons" that the courts rejected; the government says it is restoring a balance that the human-rights narrative suppressed.
Where things stand
At the end of October 2026, a year before the next presidential election, polls averaged about 32 percent for Milei's coalition and 31 percent for a united Peronist front (most likely led by the Buenos Aires province governor, Axel Kicillof), with a significant group of undecided voters and an appetite for a "third way" candidate. Milei's approval was just under 40 percent. The IMF had agreed its third review of the programme, and a weak August had analysts warning of a technical recession. Across the border, Brazil had summoned an Argentine diplomat and an Argentine judge had ordered the government to disclose details after Flávio Bolsonaro, the defeated rival of Brazil's re-elected president Lula, fled to the United States and thanked Milei and Trump for their support; the private jet firm he used had already been at the centre of an earlier scandal for Milei (see A Brief History of Brazil in this series).
All 2026 facts in this part are from the Buenos Aires Times and the INDEC and IMF figures it reports, dated 10 February – 29 October 2026. Argentine numbers move monthly; check the latest before quoting them.

Part 11 — How to understand Argentina today
Argentina in numbers

Measure (World Bank)
Argentina
For comparison: Brazil

Population, 2025
45.9 million
212.8 million

GDP, 2025
$683 billion
$2.28 trillion

GDP per person, 2025
$14,898
$10,713

Life expectancy at birth, 2024
77.5 years
76.0 years

Income inequality (Gini, 2024; higher is more unequal)
42.4
50.3

Source: World Bank, World Development Indicators, updated 8 October 2026; current US dollars.
Key dates

Year
Event

c. 9,000 years ago
Earliest hand stencils at Cueva de las Manos

1536 / 1580
Buenos Aires founded, abandoned, refounded

1776
Viceroyalty of the Río de la Plata created

1806–1807
British invasions defeated

25 May 1810
May Revolution

9 July 1816
Independence declared at Tucumán

1817
San Martín crosses the Andes

1829–1852
Rosas dominates the country

1 May 1853
Constitution adopted

1862
Mitre president of a united country

1878–1885
Conquest of the Desert

1880–1930
Export boom and mass immigration

1912
Sáenz Peña Law: secret, compulsory male suffrage

1916
Yrigoyen elected

1930
First military coup

17 October 1945
Workers' march frees Perón

1947
Women's suffrage

1952
Death of Evita

1955
Plaza de Mayo bombed; Perón overthrown

1969
Cordobazo

1973–1974
Perón returns, is elected, dies

24 March 1976
Coup; start of the last dictatorship

1977
Mothers of Plaza de Mayo begin their marches

1982
Malvinas/Falklands War

1983
Democracy restored; CONADEP

1985
Trial of the Juntas

1989
Hyperinflation

1991
Convertibility: one peso, one dollar

1994
AMIA bombing; constitutional reform

December 2001
Corralito, riots, default, five presidents

2003
Néstor Kirchner president; amnesty laws annulled

2010
Same-sex marriage legalised

2018
Record IMF loan

2022
World Cup won in Qatar

2023
Milei elected

2025
Inflation falls to 31.5%; Milei wins midterms

24 March 2026
50th anniversary of the coup

Who's who

Person
Lived
Why they matter

José de San Martín
1778–1850
Liberator of Argentina, Chile and Peru

Manuel Belgrano
1770–1820
Revolutionary, general, creator of the flag

Juan Manuel de Rosas
1793–1877
Federalist strongman, 1829–52

Domingo F. Sarmiento
1811–1888
Author of Facundo; president; builder of schools

Juan Bautista Alberdi
1810–1884
Intellectual father of the 1853 Constitution

Julio Argentino Roca
1843–1914
Led the Conquest of the Desert; president twice

Hipólito Yrigoyen
1852–1933
First president elected under universal male suffrage

Juan Domingo Perón
1895–1974
Founder of Peronism; president three times

Eva Perón
1919–1952
Champion of workers and women's suffrage

Jorge Rafael Videla
1925–2013
Head of the 1976 junta; convicted

Raúl Alfonsín
1927–2009
Restored democracy; tried the juntas

Carlos Menem
1930–2021
Privatisation and convertibility

Néstor Kirchner / Cristina Fernández de Kirchner
1950–2010 / b. 1953
Presidents 2003–15; dominant political force of the 21st century

Mauricio Macri
b. 1959
President 2015–19

Javier Milei
b. 1970
President from 2023

Jorge Mario Bergoglio (Pope Francis)
1936–2025
First pope from the Americas

Five ideas that unlock the country
1. The "Argentine paradox" is real, but it is a question, not an answer. Argentina was among the world's richest countries per person around 1913 and is now in the middle of the table. Explanations come from every school: dependence on a few exports and on British capital; the landed elite's refusal to share land and power; the coup of 1930 and the end of the rule of law; Peronism's closed economy and wage-led spending; the military's violence and debt; the habit of financing the state by printing money. Economists such as Gerchunoff and Llach, and Della Paolera and Taylor, argue about which mattered most. What almost all agree on is that the decline was relative, not absolute (Argentines are much richer than in 1913), and that instability itself, coups, defaults and inflation, was both a cause and a consequence.
2. Inflation is a national memory. Argentines have lived through hyperinflation, a currency peg, a freeze on their deposits and repeated devaluations, and replaced their currency four times between 1970 and 1992. That is why so many save in dollars, quote house prices in dollars and follow the exchange rate as others follow the weather. It is also why Milei's promise to end inflation was so powerful, and why his success on that one measure matters so much politically.
3. Peronism is not an ideology, it is a family. It has contained the left-wing Montoneros and the right-wing Triple A, Menem's privatisations and the Kirchners' nationalisations. What unites it is loyalty to Perón and Evita's memory, the unions, the idea of "social justice" and, its critics say, a talent for power. Anti-Peronism is a family too, of liberals, Radicals, conservatives and now libertarians. Most of Argentine politics since 1945 is the history of those two families.
4. Buenos Aires and the rest. About a third of Argentines live in Greater Buenos Aires. The tension between the port and the provinces, which began with smuggled silver, runs through Rosas, the 1853 Constitution, Perón's internal migrants and today's fights over how federal taxes are shared out. Visitors who see only Buenos Aires's European façades miss the Andean northwest, the Guaraní northeast and Patagonia, where the country's Indigenous and mestizo history is most visible.
5. Human rights are part of the national identity, and still contested. Argentina tried its junta in its own civilian courts, created a model truth commission, pioneered genetic identification of stolen children, and has convicted more than 1,250 people for crimes against humanity. The Madres' white headscarf is a national symbol painted on Plaza de Mayo's paving stones. Yet the meaning of the 1970s is fought over in every election, and the gap between "Nunca más" and the government's call for a "complete" memory is now part of the grieta.

"Argentines descend from the ships," goes the well-worn joke (it is attributed to several writers, and to none convincingly). The full truth is wider: Argentines also descend from the people who were there before the ships, and from the Africans the ships brought.

The takeaway
Argentina began as a smugglers' port on the edge of the Spanish empire, fought for decades over whether Buenos Aires or the provinces would rule, conquered the Indigenous south and filled the pampas with European immigrants, and by 1913 was among the world's richest countries per person. From 1930, coups, Perón's revolution and the long war over his legacy, the terror of 1976–83, hyperinflation, the peso-dollar and the 2001 collapse made instability itself the national story. Since 1983 democracy has survived every crisis, and the country has tried its dictators; its economy is still searching for the stability that its politics found. Milei's experiment in 2023–26 is the latest attempt, and Argentines will judge it in 2027.
Try this: next time you see a headline about Argentina's inflation or a new IMF deal, look for the date and the measure (monthly or yearly), then place it on this timeline: 1989, 1991, 2001, 2023. You will read the news the way Argentines do, as the latest chapter of a very old argument.

Sources & Further Reading
Sources
- CONADEP, Nunca Más (1984), online at desaparecidos.org: the prologue, chapter II (the open list of 8,961 disappeared) and chapter I (about 340 clandestine detention centres).
- National Security Archive, On 30th Anniversary of Argentine Coup: New Declassified Details on Repression (Electronic Briefing Book 185, 2006): the 1978 Battalion 601 count of 22,000 dead and disappeared.
- Maddison Project Database 2023 (University of Groningen): Argentina's GDP per person and ranking, 1870–2022.
- World Bank, World Development Indicators (updated October 2026).
- Procuraduría de Crímenes contra la Humanidad (Argentine federal prosecutors' office), fiscales.gob.ar: 376 judgments and 1,254 people convicted since 2006 (consulted 31 October 2026).
- Buenos Aires Times reporting of INDEC inflation and poverty releases (March 2025 – October 2026), the IMF's October 2026 World Economic Outlook and third-review agreement, the 50th-anniversary commemoration of the coup, the Abuelas' 140th grandchild and polling for 2027.
- The RUVTE figures (8,571 victims: 7,010 forced disappearances and 1,561 murders) follow the Secretaría de Derechos Humanos report as reported by La Nación, "Avruj dijo que hubo 7010 desaparecidos" (8 November 2016).
- Inacayal's remains at the La Plata Museum and their return (bones 1994, other remains 2014): University of Geneva ArThemis case note "Inakayal Human Remains – Argentina, Museo de La Plata and Tehuelche People" and Diario Jornada, "Inacayal está en casa".
- Census population figures (1869–2022) follow INDEC as cited in the Spanish condensed history; casualty figures for the 1982 war follow the standard British and Argentine official totals.
Go deeper
- 📘 A History of Argentina in the Twentieth Century — Luis Alberto Romero (the standard short history, translated from his Breve historia contemporánea de la Argentina; balanced and clear)
- 📘 Facundo: Civilization and Barbarism — Domingo F. Sarmiento (the 1845 book that framed the country's arguments about itself; read it as a primary source, prejudices included)
- 📘 Nunca Más: The Report of the Argentine National Commission on the Disappeared — CONADEP (the founding document of Argentina's democracy)
- 📘 Argentina, 1516–1987: From Spanish Colonization to Alfonsín — David Rock (detailed and authoritative on the long sweep, especially the economy)
- ▶️ Argentina, 1985 (2022), directed by Santiago Mitre (a dramatisation of the Trial of the Juntas, nominated for the Oscar for best international film)
- 🌐 Nunca Más online (the full CONADEP report in Spanish, chapter by chapter)
- 🌐 Abuelas de Plaza de Mayo (the Grandmothers' own site, with the stories of the recovered grandchildren)
- 🌐 Related pieces in this library: Argentina: Historia Condensada de Abundancia, Pasión y Contradicción; Si Hubiera Nacido en Argentina; A Brief History of Brazil (this series)


A Brief History of Saudi Arabia: Incense Roads, the Prophet's Cities, a Desert Dynasty and the Oil Age
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Caravan kingdoms and Nabataean tombs, the birthplace of Islam, three Saudi states built on an alliance between a preacher and a prince, the oil that changed everything, and a crown prince trying to remake the country in a single generation.

Companion pieces: If I Was Born in Saudi Arabia (what daily life feels like now; this is how it got that way), Islam: From Mecca to Two Billion People (the religion itself, in depth) and A Brief History of Iran (the rival across the Gulf).
On 21 March 2026, Saudi Arabia gave Iran's military attaché and four of his colleagues 24 hours to leave the country. For three weeks the kingdom had been under fire. After the United States and Israel attacked Iran on 28 February, Iran answered with hundreds of missiles and drones aimed at its Gulf neighbours. Most were shot down, but two drones hit the US embassy in Riyadh, energy facilities in the east were repeatedly targeted, and with the Strait of Hormuz blocked, the Red Sea port of Yanbu became the kingdom's only way to ship its crude to the world. By October the war had a second front: Houthi missiles were falling on the airports of Riyadh and Abha, fired from Yemen, where Saudi Arabia has been fighting since 2015.
It was not the year the planners of Vision 2030 had in mind. Ten years earlier, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman had promised to wean the country off oil, open it to tourists and turn the desert into a showcase of the future. By 2026 women were driving, cinemas had reopened after a 35-year ban, and the kingdom was preparing to host the 2034 World Cup. But the most famous megaprojects were being cut back, executions were at record levels, and the state that had built itself on oil money and religious legitimacy was being tested from every direction at once.
To understand how a kingdom only declared in 1932 came to hold Islam's two holiest cities, the world's second-largest proven oil reserves and one of the most closely watched rulers on Earth, you have to go back a long way: to the incense caravans, to a merchant in Mecca who said he heard the word of God, and to a pact sworn in an oasis town in the 1740s. This is that history, told at length.
In this history

Before the kingdom: incense roads and caravan cities (to c. 570 CE)
The Prophet and the first caliphs: two ways of telling it (c. 570–750)
Holy cities on the edge of empires (750–1700s)
The preacher and the prince: the first and second Saudi states (1727–c. 1891)
Ibn Saud and the making of the kingdom (1902–1932)
Oil, Aramco and the boom (1932–1979)
1979: the siege of Mecca and the turn to piety (1979–1990)
The Gulf War, al-Qaeda and 9/11 (1990–2015)
The Mohammed bin Salman era (2015–2025)
Saudi Arabia in 2026
How to understand Saudi Arabia today

Part 1 — Before the kingdom: incense roads and caravan cities (to c. 570 CE)
Saudi Arabia covers about four-fifths of the Arabian Peninsula. Much of it is desert: the Rub' al-Khali, the "Empty Quarter", which dominates the south, is the largest sand area in the world, and smaller sand seas, the Nafud and the Dahna, arc across the north and centre. There are no permanent rivers. People survived where water could be found: in oases fed by underground aquifers, in the wadis that flood after rare rains, and on the coasts.
That geography produced three very different regions, and they still matter:

Region
Where
Character

Hejaz
Western highlands and Red Sea coast (Mecca, Medina, Jeddah)
Pilgrims, ports and trade; cosmopolitan, connected to Egypt, Syria and the Indian Ocean

Najd
The central plateau (Riyadh, Diriyah, Ha'il, Qassim)
Oasis towns and Bedouin tribes; isolated, conservative, the heartland of the Al Saud

Eastern Arabia (al-Hasa)
The Gulf coast and its great oases
Date palms, pearling, Shi'a communities; and, since 1938, the oil fields

The Asir mountains in the south-west, green and terraced, form a fourth world closer to Yemen.
People of the peninsula
Arabia has been inhabited for a very long time. In the south-west, the Ḥimā Cultural Area, inscribed on UNESCO's World Heritage List in 2021, holds rock carvings of hunting scenes, animals and daily life spanning some 7,000 years, along with inscriptions in half a dozen scripts left by travellers and armies who camped at its wells. UNESCO describes it as the oldest known toll station on an important desert caravan route; its wells have been in use for at least 3,000 years.
On the Gulf coast, the ancient kingdom that Sumerian texts call Dilmun was centred on the island of Bahrain but left related sites on the nearby Arabian mainland. Around 2000 BCE it was a trading hub between Mesopotamia and the Indus Valley, shipping copper, pearls, dates and stone beads. Even then, the eastern coast of Arabia lived by the sea.
In the north-west, the oasis of Tayma was important enough in the 6th century BCE that the kings of Babylon used it as a summer capital. Further south, around AlUla, older local inscriptions in a script scholars call Lihyanite still mark the sandstone.
The incense road
What linked these places was trade, above all in frankincense and myrrh, aromatic resins harvested from trees that grow in what are now southern Oman, Yemen's Hadhramaut and the Horn of Africa. The ancient world burned them in worship, used them as medicine, and paid handsomely. Caravans of camels carried them north along the western side of the peninsula towards the Mediterranean world. Oasis towns along the route grew rich by supplying water, protection and markets, and by charging tolls.
Two sites show what that wealth could build:

Qaryat al-Faw, on the edge of the Empty Quarter, sat at a strategic junction of the trade routes. UNESCO, which inscribed the Al-Faw archaeological area in 2024, counts nearly 12,000 archaeological remains there, from Stone Age tools to the ruins of the city itself, which was abandoned around the 5th century CE.
Hegra (also called al-Hijr or Mada'in Salih), near AlUla, was the southern city of the Nabataeans, the Arab people whose capital was Petra in Jordan. Between the 1st century BCE and the 1st century CE they carved 111 monumental tombs into its sandstone outcrops, 94 of them with decorated façades, and dug wells into the rock to farm the desert. It became Saudi Arabia's first World Heritage site in 2008, and UNESCO notes that it bears inscriptions in Lihyanite, Thamudic, Nabataean, Greek and Latin: a crossroads in stone.

UNESCO describes Hegra's tombs as a meeting of Assyrian, Egyptian, Phoenician and Hellenistic influences, cut into the same rock. Long before Islam, Arabia was not isolated. It was where the ancient world's trade routes met.

Nabataean power in the Hejaz lasted from about 100 BCE to 200 CE. In the centuries that followed, the old caravan cities faded, and al-Faw was abandoned around the 5th century.
Arabia on the eve of Islam
By the 6th century CE, Arabia sat between two great rival empires, the Byzantine (Eastern Roman) in the north-west and the Sasanian Persian in the north-east. Most Arabians were organised into tribes and clans. Some were Bedouin herders moving between pastures with camels and goats; others were farmers in oases, or merchants and craftsmen in towns.
Religion was varied. Many tribes honoured local gods and goddesses, often at sacred stones and shrines. Jewish and Christian communities lived in parts of the peninsula. In Mecca, a dry valley town, stood a shrine, the Kaaba, that drew pilgrims from across the region; the town's leading tribe, according to tradition, was the Quraysh, merchants who ran caravans to Syria and Yemen. Islamic tradition calls this era the jahiliyya, "the age of ignorance", a term that expresses a believer's judgement rather than a historian's description; archaeologists, studying the same centuries, find literate, connected and religiously diverse societies.

Part 2 — The Prophet and the first caliphs: two ways of telling it (c. 570–750)
Everything about Saudi Arabia, from its flag to its legitimacy, rests on what happened in Mecca and Medina in the early 7th century. There are two ways to tell the story: as Muslims receive it through their tradition, and as historians reconstruct it from surviving evidence. Both deserve respect, and they should not be blurred together.
The account of the Islamic tradition
According to Islamic tradition, Muhammad was born in Mecca around 570 CE into the Hashim clan of the Quraysh. His father died before he was born and his mother when he was a small child. He became a merchant and, around 595, married a wealthy widow and merchant, Khadija.
In 610, while he was meditating in a cave on a mountain outside Mecca, the archangel Gabriel appeared to him with the first words of the Qur'an, which Muslims understand as the literal speech of God. Revelations continued for the rest of his life. Muhammad began to preach that there is one God (Allah), that idols must be abandoned, that the rich must care for the poor, and that every person will face judgement. His preaching threatened the Meccan elite, whose wealth was tied to the shrine and its gods, and his followers were persecuted.
In 622, after his clan withdrew its protection, Muhammad and his followers emigrated to Yathrib, an oasis to the north that became known as Madinat al-Nabi, "the city of the Prophet", or simply Medina. This emigration, the hijra, is so central that the Islamic calendar counts its years from it. In Medina, Muhammad was both prophet and leader of a community. He repulsed Meccan attacks in 625 and 627, made a truce with Mecca in 628, and later brought the city under his rule, clearing the Kaaba of idols and rededicating it to the one God. In 632 he led the "Farewell Pilgrimage" to Mecca, the model for every hajj since, and died in Medina that June.
What historians say
Historians face a sources problem. The Qur'an, which most scholars agree took shape very early, contains little concrete biography. Most details of Muhammad's life come from the sira, the biographical literature, written down mainly in the 8th and 9th centuries. The single most important early work, by Ibn Ishaq (died 767–68), survives only in later reworkings, the best known by Ibn Hisham (died 833–34). These accounts do not always agree, and some contain miracles or episodes that resemble Biblical stories.
By comparing them carefully, scholars have identified common elements already in circulation by the late 7th century, and a few basic details are confirmed by non-Muslim sources, a Syriac chronicle and an Armenian history, written within a few decades of his death. Physical evidence also helps: in 2015, radiocarbon testing at Oxford dated the parchment of two Qur'an leaves held by the University of Birmingham to between 568 and 645 CE, with 95.4% probability, placing the manuscript close to the lifetime the tradition gives Muhammad.

Question
The tradition says
Historians say

When did Muhammad live?
c. 570–632
The dates are broadly accepted; early non-Muslim sources confirm his existence and the rise of his movement

How was the Qur'an revealed?
Directly from God through Gabriel, 610–632
A text that took shape early; the oldest manuscripts are close to the traditional dates, though scholars debate how it was compiled

How reliable is the biography?
Transmitted faithfully by chains of witnesses
Written down 100–200 years later; a core can be recovered, much detail cannot be checked

Why did Islam spread so fast?
Divine guidance and the truth of the message
Faith and conviction, plus the exhaustion of the Byzantine and Persian empires, tribal unity and the energy of conquest

Most historians hold that the core of the traditional story, a prophet in Mecca, an emigration to Medina, a new community that united much of Arabia within his lifetime, is sound, while individual episodes are harder to verify. Believers and historians are asking different questions: one about meaning and revelation, the other about evidence. Neither can settle the other's question.
The caliphs, and the move away from Arabia
Muhammad left no undisputed successor. His close companion Abu Bakr became the first caliph ("successor"), followed by Umar, Uthman and Ali: the four whom Sunni Muslims call the Rashidun, the "rightly guided" caliphs (632–661). Under them, Arab armies took Iraq, Syria, Palestine, Egypt, Iran and Armenia. They also adopted the Islamic calendar and established an authoritative reading of the Qur'an. A dispute over Ali's succession, and the civil wars around it, split the community into the Sunni majority and the Shi'a, who believe leadership should have passed through Ali and the Prophet's family. That division still shapes Saudi politics, from the kingdom's own Shi'a minority in the east to its rivalry with Iran.
In 661 Mu'awiya, himself a native of Mecca, founded the Umayyad dynasty and ruled from Damascus. In 750 the Abbasids overthrew the Umayyads and moved the centre of power to Iraq, where they built Baghdad. This was the great paradox of Arabian history: the peninsula gave the world a religion and an empire, and then the empire moved away. For the next twelve centuries Mecca and Medina were the spiritual centre of Islam but almost never the political one.

Part 3 — Holy cities on the edge of empires (750–1700s)
For a thousand years after the Abbasids, the history of what is now Saudi Arabia splits into separate stories that rarely touched.
The Hejaz: pilgrims and protectors
The Hejaz was ruled from far away: by Baghdad, then by dynasties based in Egypt, and from 1517 by the Ottoman Turks. Day-to-day authority, though, stayed with the sharifs of Mecca, local nobles who claimed descent from the Prophet and governed the holy cities in the empire's name.
The economy of the Hejaz was the pilgrimage. Every year pilgrims arrived overland in great caravans, and they also came by sea through Jeddah, which UNESCO describes as a major port for Indian Ocean trade from the 7th century and the gateway for those arriving by ship. UNESCO calls the city a thriving multicultural centre; its tower houses, built by merchant families in the late 19th century in the Red Sea coral-stone tradition, are now a World Heritage site.

For most of history, the Hejaz looked outward: to the Red Sea, to the Indian Ocean and to the millions of pilgrims who arrived from every corner of the Muslim world. Najd, a few hundred kilometres inland, looked inward.

Najd: oasis towns and tribes
Central Arabia was left to itself. No empire thought it worth conquering. Its people lived in walled oasis towns, growing dates, wheat and vegetables with water drawn from deep wells, or as Bedouin moving their herds between seasonal pastures. Towns were ruled by local emirs from leading families; tribes were led by sheikhs whose authority depended on generosity, skill in war and consent.
Life was hard and politics local. Raiding between tribes, and protection payments from towns to tribes, were normal. Drought could ruin a town. Literacy was limited, but poetry was prized, and in some towns families of religious scholars, the ulama, served as judges and teachers.
The east: dates, pearls and the Gulf
The great oasis of al-Hasa was among the most productive farmland in Arabia. UNESCO, which lists it as a World Heritage cultural landscape, counts 2.5 million date palms and calls it the largest oasis in the world. Along the coast, men dived for pearls in the summer months. The region's population included a large Shi'a community, and it was usually tied to powers in Iraq or the Gulf rather than to Najd.
How ordinary people lived
Across the peninsula, life before oil was organised around family and tribe. Most people never travelled further than the next market town or, once in a lifetime, to Mecca. Houses in Najd were built of mud brick; Hejazi houses used coral stone. Coffee, dates and bread were staples; meat was for feasts. Hospitality was a duty and a matter of honour, a value that the If I Was Born in Saudi Arabia piece describes in today's terms. Disease, famine and infant death were common: as late as 1960, the World Bank estimates, life expectancy at birth in Saudi Arabia was about 45 years.

Part 4 — The preacher and the prince: the first and second Saudi states (1727–c. 1891)
The modern kingdom traces its origins to an oasis town on the edge of Wadi Hanifa, near today's Riyadh: Diriyah. Founded in the 15th century, it was ruled in the early 18th century by the Al Saud family. And here the story already divides into two accounts, an official one and one told by many historians, which differ in emphasis rather than facts.
The founding date: 1727 or 1744?
In January 2022 a royal order declared that Saudi Arabia would mark 22 February every year as Founding Day, commemorating February 1727, when Imam Muhammad bin Saud began his reign in Diriyah. The official account presents that date as the founding of the first Saudi state.
For most of the 20th century, by contrast, most accounts dated the state's real beginning to an alliance struck around 1744 (some sources say 1745) between Muhammad bin Saud and a religious reformer, Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab. The new emphasis on 1727 places the dynasty, rather than the religious movement, at the centre of the national story. The official explanation is that 1727 is simply when the state began. Many observers have read the change as part of the crown prince's wider effort to loosen the clerics' hold on national identity. Both dates are real events. The disagreement is about which one made the state.
The reformer
Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab was born in Uyaynah in 1703 into a family of judges and scholars and travelled widely as a young man. When he came home he preached a return to what he considered the pure monotheism of early Islam. Influenced by the 14th-century scholar Ibn Taymiyya, he condemned practices he saw as innovations that compromised the oneness of God: the veneration of saints and their tombs, the seeking of intercession from holy men, and much of the Sufi tradition.
His preaching made enemies. The powerful chief of al-Hasa threatened Uyaynah's ruler, who in the end expelled the preacher rather than kill him. Ibn Abd al-Wahhab went to Diriyah, where Muhammad bin Saud took him in. The two men swore oaths of mutual support: the emir would defend and spread the reformer's teaching; the reformer would give religious legitimacy to the emir's rule. That bargain, between the House of Saud and the religious establishment led for generations by Ibn Abd al-Wahhab's descendants, lasted, in one form or another, for nearly three centuries.
What to call it, and how to judge it
Outsiders call the movement Wahhabism, a name its followers have generally disliked. They describe themselves simply as Muslims following the call to pure monotheism (tawhid), or as Salafis, followers of the "pious forebears". UNESCO's description of Diriyah calls it "the Salafiyya reform" and describes the citadel of at-Turaif as the centre of both Saudi power and the reform's spread.

Its defenders say
Its critics say

A reform that restored Islam's core belief in one God, cleansed of superstition
A narrow, rigid reading that treated other Muslims as unbelievers and justified war against them

It united warring tribes under law and faith and brought order to central Arabia
It destroyed shrines and tombs of great historical value and persecuted Shi'a and Sufis

Its scholars stressed learning, the Qur'an and the Prophet's example
In the 20th century, Saudi-funded preaching spread its ideas worldwide, which critics link to later militancy; defenders reply that jihadist groups are a modern rebellion against the state's scholars

Expansion
The alliance proved formidable. The Saudi-Wahhabi forces took Uyaynah and parts of al-Hasa; Riyadh resisted for 27 years before falling. When Muhammad bin Saud died in 1765, his son Abdulaziz carried the campaigns further; Ibn Abd al-Wahhab lived on in Diriyah until his death in 1792.
The movement then burst out of Najd. In 1801 or 1802 (accounts differ) Saudi forces sacked the Shi'a holy city of Karbala in Ottoman Iraq, plundering and damaging its shrines. In 1803 they took Mecca. That same year Abdulaziz was assassinated in the mosque at Diriyah by a Shi'a man, in revenge for Karbala. His son Saud took Medina in 1804–05 and, year after year, presided over the hajj. By then the Saudi realm stretched from the Gulf to the Red Sea and from Iraq's desert edge to the borders of Yemen and Oman.
The Ottoman answer
The Ottoman sultan could not accept a rival controlling the holy cities and turning back pilgrim caravans. He handed the task to Muhammad Ali, his powerful governor of Egypt. Egyptian forces landed in the Hejaz and, after early defeats, retook Mecca and Medina in 1812. In 1816 another of Muhammad Ali's sons, Ibrahim Pasha, took command and pushed into Najd, winning over the tribes along his route. He reached Diriyah in April 1818. After a siege of several months the Saudi ruler, Abdullah ibn Saud, surrendered in September. He was sent to Istanbul and beheaded; local religious leaders were executed; and Diriyah was razed. Its ruins, the citadel of at-Turaif, were inscribed by UNESCO in 2010.
Restoration and collapse: the second Saudi state (1824–c. 1891)
The first state was destroyed, but the faith and the family survived. In 1824 Turki, a grandson of Muhammad bin Saud, drove the Egyptian garrison out of Riyadh, which has been the Saudi capital ever since. This second Saudi state was smaller and more cautious. Turki accepted nominal Ottoman sovereignty, kept on friendly terms with the British in the Gulf, and recovered al-Hasa.
Its history was a cycle of murder, exile and return. Turki was killed by a cousin in 1834. His son Faisal, who had been carried off to Egypt as a prisoner in 1818 and escaped in 1828, avenged him and ruled, lost his throne to another Egyptian expedition in 1837–38, was taken back to Cairo, and returned in 1843 to rule until 1865. Under Faisal, the state was simply run: judges and governors sent out from Riyadh, taxes collected even from the tribes, and poetry and history writing flourishing. He extended Saudi influence as far as the Buraimi oasis and the Omani hinterland, and only British intervention stopped direct Saudi rule over the Gulf's western shore.
After Faisal died, his sons fought each other for the throne. Their civil war gave an opening to a rival dynasty in the north: the Al Rashid of Ha'il, who controlled the main pilgrim route from the east and had close ties with the Ottoman government. By the 1890s Ha'il was, in Britannica's phrase, "the undisputed capital of all desert Arabia". By the early 1890s the Rashidis had taken Riyadh, and the head of the Saud family, Abd al-Rahman, fled with his household into exile in Kuwait. Among his children was a boy of about ten, Abdulaziz, who would become known to the world as Ibn Saud.

First Saudi state
Second Saudi state
Third Saudi state (today's kingdom)

Capital
Diriyah
Riyadh
Riyadh

Dates
1727 (official) or 1744 to 1818
1824 to c. 1891
1902 to today (kingdom declared 1932)

Ended by
Ottoman-Egyptian invasion
Family civil war and the Rashidis of Ha'il
—

Furthest reach
Gulf to Red Sea, Iraq's edge to Yemen
Najd, al-Hasa, influence to Oman
About four-fifths of the peninsula

The Saudi state was destroyed twice and rebuilt twice. The family learned two lessons that still guide it: stay united, and never let an outside power, or a rival at home, catch you divided.

Part 5 — Ibn Saud and the making of the kingdom (1902–1932)
The night raid on Riyadh
In 1901 Ibn Saud, then somewhere between 22 and 26 years old, rode out of Kuwait with about 40 followers. On 15 January 1902, with a picked group of 15, he scaled the walls of Riyadh, surprised the Rashidi governor and his escort before the gate of the Masmak fort and defeated them. The townspeople hailed him as their ruler. The raid became the founding legend of the modern state.
Thirty years of conquest
Holding Riyadh was only the start. The Rashidis, with substantial Ottoman help in men and supplies, fought back, and the struggle swung back and forth through 1904. In 1906 his rival Ibn Rashid was killed in battle, Ibn Saud secured the withdrawal of Ottoman troops from Qassim, and he became master of central Arabia. In 1913 he took al-Hasa from the Ottomans, gaining the Gulf coast.
His most original creation was the Ikhwan ("Brethren"). From 1912 he encouraged Bedouin to give up wandering and settle in agricultural colonies called hijras, the first at al-Artawiyyah. There, religious teachers instructed them in Ibn Abd al-Wahhab's teachings, and by the end of the decade nearly 100 such settlements had produced a fervent army bound by faith rather than tribe.
During the First World War, Britain courted him. A treaty in December 1915 recognised his rule under British protection and paid him a subsidy of £5,000 a month. Britain also backed his rival in the west, Sharif Hussein of Mecca, who launched the Arab Revolt against the Ottomans in 1916 and proclaimed himself king of the Hejaz. After the war Hussein's sons became kings of Iraq and Transjordan, leaving Ibn Saud surrounded by British-protected Hashemite thrones.

Year
Step

1902
Riyadh retaken

1906
Ibn Rashid killed; Qassim secured

1913
Al-Hasa taken from the Ottomans

1915
Treaty with Britain

1919
Ikhwan destroy Hussein's army

1921
Ha'il falls; the Rashidi dynasty ends; Ibn Saud takes the title Sultan of Najd

1924
Taif and Mecca taken

1925
Medina and Jeddah surrender

8 January 1926
Proclaimed king of the Hejaz in Mecca's Great Mosque

1927
Treaty of Jeddah: Britain recognises full independence

1929
Ikhwan rebels defeated

23 September 1932
Kingdom of Saudi Arabia proclaimed

The conquest of the Hejaz
In 1921 Ibn Saud defeated the last Rashidi emir and annexed the north. In 1924 Hussein was proclaimed caliph in Mecca, which the Ikhwan called heresy, and in September they attacked the Hejaz. They took Taif, where they massacred male civilians, and then Mecca, which they entered unopposed. Medina and Jeddah surrendered by the end of 1925. Hussein abdicated; his son Ali left the country. On 8 January 1926 Ibn Saud was proclaimed king of the Hejaz in the Great Mosque of Mecca. He now held the holy cities, the pilgrim revenues and the port of Jeddah.
Turning on the Ikhwan
The Ikhwan wanted to keep going, into Iraq, Transjordan and Kuwait, all under British protection. Ibn Saud knew that would bring war with Britain. The zealots accused him of betraying their cause, resented his taxes, and attacked him for innovations such as telephones, automobiles and the telegraph, and for sending a son to Egypt, a land of "unbelievers". In 1928–29 their leaders rose against him. With the support of the townspeople and the Najdi scholars, he crushed them at the battle of al-Sabalah (Sibilla) in March 1929; in 1930 the British rounded up the last rebels in Kuwaiti territory and handed their leaders over. Power passed decisively from the tribes to the king and the towns.
On 23 September 1932, by royal decree, his dual kingdom of the Hejaz and Najd became the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, named after the family. The date is still celebrated as National Day.

Ibn Saud built his kingdom with the Ikhwan and then destroyed them to keep it. The pattern, using religious fervour to win power and then curbing it to keep power, recurs throughout Saudi history, most dramatically in 1979.

Part 6 — Oil, Aramco and the boom (1932–1979)
A poor kingdom
The new kingdom was poor. Its revenue came mainly from the dues of the holy cities, customs at Jeddah and taxes. In May 1933 Ibn Saud signed an oil concession with an American firm, the Standard Oil Company of California (today's Chevron). For five years its geologists drilled dry or disappointing wells in the Dammam dome near the Gulf coast. In 1937 the company's executives asked their chief geologist, Max Steineke, for advice; he told them to keep drilling. In March 1938, Dammam Well No. 7, later nicknamed the "Prosperity Well", struck oil in commercial quantities. The first tanker was loaded in 1939.
On 14 February 1945, returning from the Yalta conference, President Franklin Roosevelt met Ibn Saud aboard the USS Quincy in the Suez Canal. That meeting is often seen as the symbolic start of the relationship that has defined Saudi foreign policy ever since: American security for the kingdom, Saudi oil for the West. Saudi Arabia declared war on Germany in 1945 and became a founding member of the United Nations.
In 1944 the operating company took the name Aramco, the Arabian American Oil Company. That year it paid more in taxes to the US government than it paid Saudi Arabia in royalties; by 1950 Ibn Saud had received, by Britannica's account, a total of only about $200,000. A new agreement in 1950 required Aramco to pay the kingdom an income tax of 50% of its net operating income. By the time Ibn Saud died, on 9 November 1953, he was receiving some $2.5 million a week.
Saud and Faisal
Ibn Saud had dozens of sons. Succession passed among them, brother to brother, for more than sixty years. Under the first, Saud (king 1953–64), government became increasingly wasteful and lavish, and extravagant spending led to deficits and foreign borrowing despite the new revenue. In 1958, in an economic crisis, Saud handed full executive powers to his half-brother Faisal, the crown prince. Their rivalry ended on 2 November 1964, when the royal family, backed by the National Guard and the ulama, deposed Saud and proclaimed Faisal king. As Britannica puts it, Faisal was simply more competent.
Faisal (king 1964–75) was far more active in economic and educational development. Saudi Arabia had helped found OPEC at the Baghdad conference in September 1960, alongside Iran, Iraq, Kuwait and Venezuela. Abroad, the kingdom's great rival was the pan-Arab nationalism of Egypt's Gamal Abdel Nasser, whose propaganda attacked the Saudi monarchy and whose troops, from 1962, backed Yemen's new republic against royalists supported by Riyadh.
How life changed
For ordinary people, the change between the 1930s and the 1970s was enormous. Oil money paid for roads, schools, hospitals and airports. Riyadh and Jeddah swelled as people moved to the cities, and most of the Bedouin settled in towns or farming communities. Foreign workers arrived in large numbers to build and run the new economy.

Saudi Arabia
1960
1970
1980
2000
2025

Population
2.4 million
3.6 million
6.0 million
16.2 million
37.0 million

GDP per person (current US$)
718
1,509
27,206
11,715
34,537

Life expectancy (years)
45
53
62
73
79 (2024)

Children per woman
7.6
7.6
7.1
4.2
2.3 (2024)

Source: World Bank, World Development Indicators (data updated October 2026). GDP per person in current dollars swings with oil prices: note the rise after 1973 and the fall in the 1980s.
Boom, embargo and the welfare kingdom (1973–1979)
The oil weapon
In October 1973, Egypt and Syria attacked Israel. When the United States resupplied Israel, Arab oil producers led by Saudi Arabia cut production and embargoed shipments to the United States and other supporters of Israel. The US State Department's historians describe what followed: the price of oil per barrel "first doubled, then quadrupled", imposing huge costs on consumers and shaking whole economies. The embargo was lifted in March 1974, after American diplomacy produced disengagement agreements between Israel and its neighbours.
For Saudi Arabia, the embargo was a demonstration of power and the start of an avalanche of money. The same year the government bought a 25% stake in Aramco, raising it to 60% in 1974 and to 100% in 1980. In 1988 the company became the Saudi Arabian Oil Company, Saudi Aramco, wholly owned by the state. In the 1970s and 1980s the kingdom was the world's largest oil producer and played a leading role in setting OPEC's production and prices.

In 1970 the average Saudi produced about $1,500 of output a year. By 1980 the figure was over $27,000. Few societies have ever been flooded with so much money so quickly.

The rentier bargain
Political scientists call states like Saudi Arabia rentier states: governments that live on income from a natural resource rather than taxes on their citizens. The money flowed to the state, and the state distributed it: free schooling and health care, cheap fuel and power, housing help and secure government jobs for citizens. In return, citizens were expected to accept the rule of the royal family without elected representation. "No taxation without representation" worked in reverse: no taxation, and no representation.
The bargain delivered real gains. Life expectancy rose by almost ten years between 1970 and 1980 alone, and schools and universities multiplied. It also created lasting problems: an economy dependent on one commodity, a private sector run largely by foreign labour, and citizens accustomed to public employment.
Faisal's death
On 25 March 1975, King Faisal was shot dead by his nephew, Prince Faisal ibn Musaid. He was succeeded by his half-brother Khalid (1975–82), with Fahd as crown prince and, in practice, the man running the government. Development continued at breakneck speed, and so did the tensions it created: between the new consumer society and the religious conservatives who saw it as a betrayal of the faith.

Part 7 — 1979: the siege of Mecca and the turn to piety (1979–1990)
Four shocks in one year
1979 transformed the Middle East, and Saudi Arabia was at the centre of it.

In February, the Islamic Revolution in Iran replaced the Shah with a Shi'a theocracy that challenged the legitimacy of monarchies and claimed to speak for all Muslims.
In March, Egypt signed a peace treaty with Israel; Saudi Arabia joined most Arab states in breaking relations with Cairo.
In November and December, the Grand Mosque in Mecca was seized by Saudi militants, and Shi'a protests broke out in the Eastern Province in sympathy with Iran's revolution.
In late December, the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan.

The seizure of the Grand Mosque
At dawn prayers on 20 November 1979, about 200 armed men took over the Grand Mosque, the holiest site in Islam, while worshippers from all over the world were gathered in its courtyard. Their weapons had been hidden in closed coffins placed in the courtyard, as if for funeral prayers. Their leader, Juhayman al-Otaybi, a 40-year-old preacher who had served as a soldier in the National Guard, had written pamphlets condemning the royal family's decadence and accusing the clerics of colluding with it. A speaker announced that the Mahdi, the redeemer whom some hadith predict at the end of time, had arrived in the person of Juhayman's brother-in-law, Muhammad al-Qahtani.
The siege lasted about two weeks. A fatwa from the kingdom's senior clerics first had to clear the army to use force inside the sanctuary. Saudi forces, advised by French special-operations officers, eventually used gas to drive the rebels out of the rooms beneath the mosque, and Juhayman surrendered. Casualties ran into the hundreds. Just over a month later, 63 rebels were publicly executed in eight cities across the kingdom; Juhayman was the first to die.
The aftermath
The rebels lost, but in a sense their ideas won. The royal family concluded that its legitimacy depended on being seen as more devout, not less. In the BBC's summary, hardline clerics gained the upper hand over the royal family, and the kingdom stayed on an ultra-conservative path for most of the next four decades. One of Juhayman's demands had been the removal of women presenters from television; a former follower later told the BBC that after the siege "no female presenter appeared on TV again". When the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan in December 1979, one young Saudi, Osama bin Laden, son of the founder of one of the Middle East's largest construction firms, began raising money for the Afghan resistance.

In March 2018, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman told an interviewer that before 1979, "We were living a normal life like the rest of the Gulf countries, women were driving cars, there were movie theatres in Saudi Arabia." The claim simplifies a long history: the kingdom was deeply conservative before 1979 too. But it shows how 1979 has become the reference point in the official story: the moment the country took a wrong turn that the crown prince says he is reversing.

Fahd's kingdom
King Khalid died on 13 June 1982, and Fahd became king, ruling until 2005, longer than any king since his father. He bought sophisticated American and British weapons and kept close ties with Washington. Kings since his time have used the title "Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques". The 1980s oil glut cut prices and revenue sharply: GDP per person fell from more than $27,000 in 1980 to about $11,000 in 1990. The welfare state, the jobs and the subsidies had to be paid for with less, and the young population kept growing.

Part 8 — The Gulf War, al-Qaeda and 9/11 (1990–2015)
Iraq invades Kuwait
On 2 August 1990, about 100,000 Iraqi troops overran Kuwait in a matter of hours. Fearing that Saddam Hussein would invade Saudi Arabia next, King Fahd, breaking with tradition and with the approval of the kingdom's highest religious official, invited the United States and other countries to send troops to protect the kingdom. The US-led coalition air war began on 16–17 January 1991 and ended with Iraq's defeat and retreat from Kuwait on 28 February.
The war saved the kingdom but unsettled its society. Many Saudis asked how a government that had spent so much on defence still needed non-Muslim outsiders to protect it. Two opposition currents emerged, one Islamist and one liberal and modernist. Islamist dissidents condemned the presence of American troops so close to the holy cities. In November 1995 a bomb at a US-run National Guard training centre in Riyadh killed five Americans and two Indians; in June 1996 a huge explosion at a housing complex for US Air Force personnel killed 19 American servicemen. Osama bin Laden, now openly hostile to the royal family, was stripped of his Saudi citizenship in 1994 and in 1996 moved to Afghanistan under Taliban protection.
Fahd responded with limited institutional change. On 1 March 1992 Fahd issued a Basic Law of Government, which opened the succession to Ibn Saud's grandsons as well as his sons, and a statute creating an appointed Consultative Council (Majlis al-Shura). He was careful to say the laws confirmed existing practice: the government had long held that the Qur'an and the Prophet's example were the country's constitution. No national elections were introduced, and political parties remain illegal.
11 September 2001
Fifteen of the nineteen hijackers who attacked the United States on 11 September 2001 were Saudi citizens, according to the 9/11 Commission's account of who they were; two more were from the UAE. Bin Laden himself was born in Riyadh. The attacks threw a harsh light on the kingdom: on its religious education, its charities and the ideas it had exported. Many Americans came to see the alliance as morally compromised. Saudi officials replied that al-Qaeda's chief target was the Saudi state itself, which the bombings of the 1990s had already shown.
The kingdom refused to join the 2003 invasion of Iraq, and that year the two governments agreed to withdraw US forces from Saudi soil. The removal of Saddam Hussein, though, strengthened Iran, and rivalry with Tehran became the organising principle of Saudi foreign policy.
Abdullah's cautious reforms
Fahd suffered a stroke in 1995, and his half-brother Abdullah ran the government until he became king on 1 August 2005. Abdullah was a reformer by Saudi standards. He held the country's first municipal elections in 2005 (for men only), created an Allegiance Commission of princes in 2006 to help choose crown princes, made broad changes to the judiciary, armed forces and ministries in February 2009, and appointed the first woman deputy minister. In 2011 he announced that women would be appointed to the Consultative Council and could vote and stand in the 2015 municipal elections. The kingdom joined the World Trade Organization in December 2005.
When the Arab uprisings of 2011 shook the region, Saudi Arabia used its wealth and influence to hold back revolutionary change. Saudi-led Gulf troops went into Bahrain to help its monarchy put down mass protests. Riyadh financed friendly monarchies in Jordan, Morocco and Oman and supported rebels against the hostile regimes in Syria and Libya.

Part 9 — The Mohammed bin Salman era (2015–2025)
A generational leap
King Abdullah died in January 2015. His half-brother Salman became king and immediately made his son Mohammed bin Salman, then 29, defence minister and head of the Council of Economic and Development Affairs, the main body for economic policy. For the first time, power began to pass from Ibn Saud's sons to a grandson. In June 2017 the king removed his nephew Mohammed bin Nayef and named Mohammed bin Salman crown prince; in 2022 he also became prime minister. Born on 31 August 1985, he is widely known by his initials, MBS, and is the kingdom's de facto ruler on behalf of his elderly father.
Vision 2030
On 25 April 2016, MBS launched Vision 2030, a plan to diversify the economy away from oil, grow the private sector, attract tourists and foreign investment, and get more Saudis, especially women, into work. It came with giant projects funded by the Public Investment Fund, the sovereign wealth fund, which grew to close to $1 trillion: the Red Sea resorts, the Qiddiya entertainment city, and NEOM, a $500 billion zone in the north-west whose centrepiece, "The Line", was to be a city 170 kilometres long. In 2019 a small slice of Saudi Aramco was listed on the Riyadh stock exchange.
The social opening
The most visible changes came in daily life, and they were real.

Year
Change

December 2017
Government announces the end of a 35-year ban on cinemas

2018
Women allowed to attend sporting events in stadiums

24 June 2018
The ban on women driving officially ends; Saudi Arabia had been the only country where women could not drive

2019
A small share of Saudi Aramco listed on the Riyadh stock exchange

2022
22 February declared Founding Day

2024
FIFA confirms Saudi Arabia as host of the 2034 World Cup

Women entered the workforce in large numbers. The World Bank's modelled estimates put the share of Saudi women in the labour force at about 20% in 2017 and about 34% by 2021, a level maintained since. Unemployment fell. For young Saudis, the country of the 2020s is far more open in daily life than the one their parents knew, and that change is the heart of the crown prince's appeal at home.
The crackdown
At the same time, MBS concentrated power in his own hands to a degree no Saudi ruler had held since the founder. In November 2017 dozens of princes, business leaders and officials were detained in what was billed as an anti-corruption campaign; critics saw it as a way to sideline rivals and seize assets. Even as it gave women new rights, the government cracked down on women activists who kept pressing for more.
The killing of Jamal Khashoggi
On 2 October 2018, Jamal Khashoggi, a Saudi journalist aged 59, who had gone into self-imposed exile in the United States in 2017 and become a critic of the crown prince, entered the Saudi consulate in Istanbul to obtain papers he needed to marry. He never came out. After weeks of denials, the Saudi government admitted that he had been killed inside the building and called it a "rogue operation".
Three bodies have examined the killing, and their findings differ:

Who
When
What they found

UN Special Rapporteur on extrajudicial executions, Agnès Callamard
19 June 2019
Khashoggi "was the victim of a premeditated extrajudicial execution, for which the State of Saudi Arabia is responsible"; 15 Saudi state agents carried it out; there was "credible evidence, warranting further investigation of high-level Saudi officials' individual liability, including that of the Crown Prince"

Saudi courts
December 2019; final verdict 7 September 2020
Five people sentenced to death and three others jailed in 2019; the death sentences commuted to 20 years after Khashoggi's family pardoned them; prosecutors said the killing was not premeditated. Callamard called the trial "the antithesis of justice"

US Office of the Director of National Intelligence
Released 26 February 2021
"We assess that Saudi Arabia's Crown Prince Muhammad bin Salman approved an operation in Istanbul, Turkey to capture or kill Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi"

The Saudi foreign ministry rejected the American assessment, saying those responsible had been tried and that the kingdom rejected "any measure that infringes upon its leadership, sovereignty, and the independence of its judicial system". Western leaders kept dealing with him; in November 2025 he was received at the White House by President Donald Trump.
The war in Yemen
In 2014 the Houthis, a rebel movement from northern Yemen that Riyadh regards as an Iranian proxy, seized much of the north of the country, including the capital, Sanaa, and the government fled. In March 2015 a coalition led by Saudi Arabia, with the UAE as its main partner, intervened to restore the government of President Abd Rabbuh Mansur Hadi, in what was named Operation Decisive Storm. Saudi planners seem to have expected a campaign of a few months; it became a multiyear stalemate.
The human cost was terrible. Coalition air strikes often killed civilians and disrupted vital services; in 2016 a UN panel of experts reported to the Security Council that some coalition actions may have amounted to war crimes. The Houthis shelled cities, laid mines and fired missiles and drones into Saudi Arabia. In November 2021 the UN Development Programme projected that the war would have caused 377,000 deaths by the end of 2021, about 60% of them from indirect causes such as hunger and preventable disease, and estimated that 70% of those killed were children under five.
On 2 April 2022 a UN-brokered truce took hold. No peace deal followed, but a relative calm lasted for more than three years. Saudi officials argue that they intervened to stop an Iranian-backed militia seizing a neighbouring state and firing missiles at Saudi cities. Critics, including many UN officials and human rights groups, argue that the coalition's way of fighting caused one of the world's worst humanitarian crises.
Foreign policy and the Qatar blockade
Days after becoming crown prince in 2017, MBS led Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Bahrain and Egypt into a blockade of Qatar, accusing it of supporting terrorism and being too close to Iran; Qatar denied the charges. The embargo ended with a declaration signed at AlUla in January 2021. Since then the kingdom has bid for ever larger sporting events, culminating in the 2034 World Cup.
Human rights, at their strongest and weakest
The government points to the social reforms, to women's employment and to the release of some prominent prisoners as proof that the kingdom is modernising. Human Rights Watch, in its World Report 2026, acknowledged that at least 44 people jailed for peaceful expression were released between December 2024 and February 2025, but reported that Saudi Arabia carried out at least 322 executions by early December 2025, more than in any previous year, many for nonviolent drug offences, including the journalist Turki al-Jasser in June 2025. It also argued that male guardianship survives in the 2022 Personal Status Law and that migrant workers still face wage theft and deadly conditions.

Part 10 — Saudi Arabia in 2026
The people
The 2022 census found 32,175,224 people living in the kingdom: 18.8 million Saudis (58.4%) and 13.4 million foreign residents (41.6%). The country is young: the median age is 29, and 63% of Saudi citizens are under 30. The World Bank estimates the population had grown to about 37 million by 2025.

Saudi Arabia, latest figures

Source

Population
32.2 million (2022 census); about 37.0 million (2025 estimate)
GASTAT; World Bank

Share who are not citizens
41.6% (2022)
GASTAT census

GDP
About US$1.28 trillion (2025); real growth 4.5% in 2025
World Bank

GDP per person
About US$34,500 (2025)
World Bank

Women in the labour force
About 34% of women 15+ (2025), up from 20% in 2017
World Bank (ILO modelled)

Unemployment, all residents
About 3% (2025), down from 7.7% in 2020
World Bank (ILO modelled)

Life expectancy
79.0 years (2024)
World Bank

Executions
At least 322 in 2025 (to early December), a record
Human Rights Watch

A kingdom under fire
The year began with Saudi Arabia trying to stay out of a war between the United States, Israel and Iran. It could not. From the first days after 28 February, Iranian missiles and drones targeted the kingdom's air bases, oil and gas plants and cities. Saudi authorities say the vast majority were intercepted, but energy facilities in the east were hit repeatedly, two drones struck the US embassy, and with Iran blocking the Strait of Hormuz, the Red Sea port of Yanbu became the only export outlet, until a drone fell on a refinery near it too. By March the foreign minister, Prince Faisal bin Farhan, said trust in Iran had been "shattered", and the kingdom expelled Iran's military attaché and four embassy staff.
Yemen, again
The second front opened in Yemen. In December 2025 the Southern Transitional Council, a southern separatist force backed by the UAE, seized much of Hadramawt and al-Mahra. On 30 December Saudi Arabia accused the UAE of pressing the separatists to attack and bombed what it said was a weapons shipment at the port of Mukalla; the UAE denied the shipment held weapons and announced that it would withdraw its remaining forces from Yemen. In January 2026 Saudi-backed government forces retook the south and moved into Aden, and the STC's leader fled. The public quarrel between Riyadh and Abu Dhabi, partners since 2015, became one of the year's defining facts of Gulf politics. In April the UAE also announced that it was leaving OPEC, the cartel Saudi Arabia has long led.
Then, in September, the Houthis launched an offensive that, as the UN Security Council heard on 9 October, sharply escalated what it called the 12-year-long war. Houthi missiles and drones struck Saudi airports and energy facilities; three people were killed in attacks on the airports of Abha and Riyadh over two days in early October. Inside Yemen, Houthi forces encircled the city of Taiz. By 30 October the UN refugee agency reported that more than 280,000 people had been displaced by the renewed fighting, and the World Food Programme said 800,000 people in Taiz had been cut off from aid.
Vision 2030, revised
The war came on top of an economic squeeze. A fall in oil prices before the conflict had already forced the government to rethink its spending. In May 2026 the BBC reported that some of the most striking Vision 2030 projects were being "watered down, put on hold or even abandoned". The Line was being reduced from 170 kilometres to a first phase of a few kilometres; Britannica now describes a projected length of about 2.4 kilometres by the early 2030s. The winter resort of Trojena was reined in and the 2029 Asian Winter Games it was to host moved to Kazakhstan, and the Cube, a building big enough to hold the Empire State Building twenty times over, was dropped. Supporters of the programme say retrenchment is normal for a plan of this size and that its real achievements, women's work, tourism, a non-oil private sector, are intact. Sceptics, such as Ellen R. Wald, author of Saudi, Inc., see a familiar pattern of splashy announcements followed by downsizing, one she traces back to King Abdullah's "economic cities".
Workers and the World Cup
Saudi Arabia's reliance on foreign labour remains its most debated social fact. Since March 2021, according to the International Labour Organization, most private-sector migrant workers can change employers after a year without their employer's permission. Critics say the kafala sponsorship system that ties workers to employers still gives employers too much power. In late 2025 the ILO's Governing Body accepted for examination a complaint alleging that Saudi Arabia was failing to observe its conventions on forced labour, wage protection and discrimination, and asked the government to respond by January 2026. The scrutiny will intensify as the kingdom builds stadiums for the 2034 World Cup.

Part 11 — How to understand Saudi Arabia today
Key dates

Date
Event

c. 2000 BCE
Dilmun trades between Mesopotamia and the Indus via the Gulf coast

1st c. BCE–1st c. CE
Nabataeans carve the tombs of Hegra

c. 570
Traditional date of Muhammad's birth in Mecca

610
First revelation (tradition)

622
Hijra to Medina; year 1 of the Islamic calendar

632
Death of Muhammad in Medina

632–661
The Rashidun caliphs

661 / 750
Umayyads rule from Damascus; Abbasids from Iraq

1517
Ottoman rule in the Hejaz begins

1727
Muhammad bin Saud becomes ruler of Diriyah (Founding Day)

c. 1744
Pact between Muhammad bin Saud and Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab

1803
Saudi forces take Mecca

1818
Diriyah destroyed by Ibrahim Pasha

1824
Second Saudi state, capital Riyadh

c. 1891
Rashidis take Riyadh; Al Saud exiled to Kuwait

15 January 1902
Ibn Saud retakes Riyadh

1924–25
Conquest of the Hejaz

29 March 1929
Ikhwan rebels defeated

23 September 1932
Kingdom of Saudi Arabia proclaimed

March 1938
Commercial oil at Dammam No. 7

14 February 1945
Roosevelt meets Ibn Saud aboard USS Quincy

1960
OPEC founded

1964
Saud deposed; Faisal king

October 1973
Oil embargo

25 March 1975
Faisal assassinated

20 November 1979
Seizure of the Grand Mosque

1980
State completes purchase of Aramco

2 August 1990
Iraq invades Kuwait; US troops deploy

11 September 2001
9/11 attacks; 15 of 19 hijackers Saudi

2005
Abdullah king; first municipal elections

January 2015
Salman king; MBS defence minister

March 2015
Saudi-led intervention in Yemen

25 April 2016
Vision 2030 launched

June 2017
MBS crown prince; Qatar blockade

24 June 2018
Women's driving ban ends

2 October 2018
Jamal Khashoggi killed in Istanbul

April 2022
UN truce in Yemen

2022
Census: 32.2 million residents, 41.6% foreign

28 February 2026
US–Israeli war on Iran begins; Iranian strikes on the kingdom follow

September–October 2026
Houthi offensive; attacks on Saudi airports

Who's who

Person
Dates
Why they matter

Muhammad
c. 570–632
Prophet of Islam; founded the community at Medina

Abu Bakr, Umar, Uthman, Ali
ruled 632–661
The first four caliphs; Ali's succession split Sunni and Shi'a

Muhammad bin Saud
ruled 1727–1765
Emir of Diriyah; founder of the dynasty

Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab
1703–1792
Religious reformer allied with the Al Saud

Ibrahim Pasha
1789–1848
Egyptian commander who destroyed the first Saudi state

Turki
ruled 1824–1834
Founder of the second Saudi state at Riyadh

Abdulaziz (Ibn Saud)
c. 1880–1953
Founder of the modern kingdom

Sharif Hussein
king 1916–1924
Sharif of Mecca, leader of the 1916 Arab Revolt, king of the Hejaz until his abdication

Max Steineke
1930s
SOCAL's chief geologist, who insisted on drilling on to the 1938 discovery

Faisal
c. 1906–1975
King 1964–75; modernising bureaucrat and leader of the 1973 embargo

Juhayman al-Otaybi
c. 1939–1980
Leader of the 1979 Grand Mosque seizure

Fahd
1923–2005
King 1982–2005; invited US troops in 1990

Osama bin Laden
1957–2011
Saudi-born founder of al-Qaeda

Abdullah
died 2015
Ran the government from 1995; king 2005–15; cautious reformer

Salman
king since 2015
Ibn Saud's son; elevated his own son to crown prince

Mohammed bin Salman
b. 1985
Crown prince and prime minister; architect of Vision 2030

Jamal Khashoggi
c. 1959–2018
Journalist killed in the Istanbul consulate

Five ideas that unlock the country
1. The pact between palace and pulpit is changing, not ending. From 1744 to the 2010s, the Al Saud ruled with the religious establishment as junior but indispensable partners. Mohammed bin Salman has sharply curtailed the clerics' power over daily life, but the state's legitimacy still rests on Islam: the king is Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques, the Qur'an is the constitution, and the government now defines what "moderate Islam" means. The ulama have not been dismissed; they have been made to follow the palace's lead.
2. Oil made the modern state, and the state has never escaped it. Every era since 1938 has been shaped by the oil price: the 1950s debts, the 1970s boom, the 1980s bust, the 2010s squeeze that produced Vision 2030, and the 2026 war that sent prices up while making exports dangerous. Diversification is the official goal of every Saudi plan, and oil still pays most of the bills.
3. The social contract is being rewritten. The old bargain offered citizens jobs, subsidies and stability without taxes or political voice. The new one adds entertainment, personal freedoms and economic opportunity, especially for women, while tolerating even less political dissent. Whether young Saudis will accept more freedom in daily life in exchange for less freedom of speech is the central political question of the 2020s.
4. Security has always come from outside. From the British subsidy of 1915 to the USS Quincy in 1945, the American troops of 1990 and the US military presence that drew Iranian fire in 2026, the kingdom has relied on foreign protectors while building up its own forces. The tension between needing the United States and resenting dependence on it runs through the whole story.
5. Saudi Arabia is three countries in one. The cosmopolitan Hejaz, with its pilgrims and ports; the Najdi heartland, conservative and loyal to the dynasty; and the oil-rich east, with its large Shi'a population, have never been identical. Add the millions of foreign workers who make up two in five residents, and the kingdom looks less like a single society than a carefully managed coalition.

Saudi Arabia is a country where the past is literally underfoot, Nabataean tombs, the Prophet's mosque, the ruins of Diriyah, and also a country being rebuilt so fast that its rulers sometimes seem to want to start history again. Both impulses are part of the same story.

The takeaway
The Arabian Peninsula was a crossroads of incense trade and caravan kingdoms long before it became the birthplace of Islam in the 7th century, after which the empire it launched moved its capitals away. In the 18th century an alliance between the Al Saud of Diriyah and the reformer Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab created a state that was destroyed in 1818, revived and lost again, and rebuilt by Ibn Saud between 1902 and 1932. Oil, found in 1938, turned a poor desert kingdom into a wealthy rentier state allied with the United States and guarded by a conservative religious establishment that grew even stronger after the shock of 1979. Since 2015 Mohammed bin Salman has opened Saudi social life, concentrated power and tried to diversify the economy, while the Khashoggi killing, the Yemen war and record executions have defined his critics' view of him. In 2026 the kingdom faces Iranian and Houthi attacks, a rift with the UAE and a scaled-back Vision 2030, still balancing faith, oil and foreign protection, as it has for a century.
Try this: look at the Saudi flag. The words on it are the Islamic declaration of faith, "There is no god but God, and Muhammad is the messenger of God", and beneath them is a sword. Using this piece, write one sentence on what each element says about how the kingdom understands itself, and then one sentence on what a critic might say about the same symbols. If you can write both fairly, you have understood the central argument about Saudi Arabia.

Sources & Further Reading
Sources
- Encyclopaedia Britannica, "Saudi Arabia" (history sections: "The Wahhabi movement", "Ibn Saud and the third Saudi state", "The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia", "Foreign affairs", "Reign of King Abd Allah", "Foreign policy since the end of the Persian Gulf War", "Political process", "The Persian Gulf War and its aftermath"), and articles "Ibn Saud", "Faisal", "Fahd", "Osama bin Laden", "Ibrahim Pasha", "Muhammad" (by Nicolai Sinai), "Mohammed bin Salman" (updated January 2026), "Hejaz", "Ha'il", "Ikhwan", "Dilmun", "Rashidun", "Umayyad dynasty", "Abbasid caliphate", accessed via the Internet Archive, October 2026.
- UNESCO World Heritage Centre listings: Hegra (1293), At-Turaif District in ad-Dir'iyah (1329), Historic Jeddah (1361), Al-Ahsa Oasis (1563), Ḥimā Cultural Area (1619), Al-Faw Archaeological Area (1712), Land of Frankincense, Oman (1010).
- University of Birmingham, "Birmingham Qur'an manuscript dated among the oldest in the world" (22 July 2015).
- Saudi Aramco, "Our history" (company timeline, archived 2019–20): 1933 concession, 1938 discovery, 1973–80 state purchase, 1988 Saudi Aramco, 2019 listing.
- US Department of State, Office of the Historian: "Oil Embargo, 1973–1974" and "The Gulf War, 1991"; OPEC, "Brief History".
- BBC News, "Mecca 1979: The mosque siege that changed the course of Saudi history" (2019) and On This Day, 21 November 1979.
- The 9/11 Commission Report (2004), chapters 5 and 7 (nationalities of the hijackers).
- Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, "Khashoggi killing: UN human rights expert says Saudi Arabia is responsible" (19 June 2019); US Office of the Director of National Intelligence, Assessing the Saudi Government's Role in the Killing of Jamal Khashoggi (released 26 February 2021); BBC News reports of 7 September 2020 and 26 February 2021 (Saudi verdict and Saudi response).
- UNDP projection of Yemen war deaths (23 November 2021), as reported by Al Jazeera; Al Jazeera on the 2022 truce; UN News, Yemen coverage of 9–30 October 2026; BBC News, 30 December 2025 and 8 October 2026; Al Jazeera, 7 January and 21 March 2026; BBC News, 7 January 2021 (Qatar embargo ends).
- General Authority for Statistics (GASTAT), first results of the 2022 census, as reported by Saudi Gazette (31 May 2023); World Bank, World Development Indicators (data updated 8 October 2026).
- Reuters, 24 April 2016 (Vision 2030 launch); BBC News, 24 June 2018 (driving ban ends) and 25 May 2026 ("How Saudi Arabia's spending spree reached the end of the line"); The Hindu, 13 December 2017 (cinema ban lifted); Al Arabiya, 27 January 2022 (Founding Day); The Guardian, 11 December 2024 (2034 World Cup).
- International Labour Organization, Saudi Arabia: Regulatory framework governing migrant workers (updated December 2023) and Governing Body decision on the article 26 complaint (355th session, 2025); Human Rights Watch, World Report 2026, Saudi Arabia chapter.
Go deeper
- 📘 A History of Saudi Arabia — Madawi Al-Rasheed (Cambridge, 2nd ed. 2010; the standard scholarly history, by a Saudi-born critic of the monarchy)
- 📘 The Kingdom (1981) and Inside the Kingdom (2009) — Robert Lacey (lively, well-sourced narrative histories of the dynasty, from Ibn Saud to King Abdullah)
- 📘 The Siege of Mecca — Yaroslav Trofimov (2007; the gripping reconstruction of 1979 and why it mattered)
- 📘 MBS: The Rise to Power of Mohammed bin Salman — Ben Hubbard (2020; a New York Times correspondent's portrait of the crown prince and his reforms)
- 🌐 UNESCO: Hegra Archaeological Site and At-Turaif District in ad-Dir'iyah (the Nabataean tombs and the first Saudi capital)
- 🌐 UN human rights expert's findings on the Khashoggi killing (the primary document, in the rapporteur's words)
- 🌐 Related pieces in this library: If I Was Born in Saudi Arabia; Islam: From Mecca to Two Billion People; Pilgrimage: Why Humans Walk to Holy Places; A Brief History of Iran and A Brief History of the United Arab Emirates (this series)


A Brief History of the United Arab Emirates: Copper, Pearls, Treaties and the Fastest Transformation on Earth
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Bronze Age tombs and desert oases, a coast the British called "piratical", seven sheikhdoms bound by treaties, a pearl economy that collapsed, oil that arrived just as the empire left, and a federation of a million citizens that now hosts ten million foreigners and wants to run the future.

Companion pieces: A Brief History of Saudi Arabia (the giant next door, ally and rival), A Brief History of Iran (the neighbour across the water) and Islam: From Mecca to Two Billion People (the faith of the country and of most of its residents).
On 28 April 2026, the United Arab Emirates announced that it was leaving OPEC. The country had belonged to the oil producers' cartel since 1967, when it was not yet a country at all, just the sheikhdom of Abu Dhabi under British protection. Now, in the middle of a war, with Iranian missiles and drones falling on the Gulf and an aluminium plant in Abu Dhabi badly damaged, the Emirates decided that the quotas holding it to roughly 3 to 3.5 million barrels a day no longer suited it. It had the second-largest spare production capacity in OPEC, after Saudi Arabia, and it wanted to use it.
That decision says a great deal about the UAE. It is small, rich and very sure of itself. It acts alone when its interests demand it, even against its closest partners. It has fought in Yemen, recognised Israel, built the world's tallest building, sent a probe to Mars, and gathered some of the largest concentrations of migrant workers on Earth. And all of this has happened within a single lifetime. In 1960 the territory that became the UAE had about 130,000 inhabitants, most of them living by fishing, herding, date farming and diving for pearls. In 2025 it had more than 11.5 million.
How did seven small sheikhdoms on a hot, harbourless-looking coast become one of the most ambitious states in the world? The answer runs through Bronze Age copper, British gunboats, the collapse of the pearl trade, a lucky timing of oil and independence, and the choices of a handful of ruling families. This is that history.
In this history

Before the Emirates: tombs, copper and oases (to c. 600 CE)
Ports, tribes and the "pirate coast" (c. 600–1820)
The Trucial Coast under British protection (1820–1945)
Oil, Zayed and the end of empire (1945–1971)
Founding a federation (1971–1990)
Dubai's wager, and the crash (1960s–2010)
Citizens and newcomers: the people of the Emirates
Security first: the Arab uprisings and a more assertive state (2011–2019)
The Abraham Accords, Mars and a new president (2020–2025)
The UAE in 2026
How to understand the UAE today

Part 1 — Before the Emirates: tombs, copper and oases (to c. 600 CE)
The UAE occupies the south-eastern corner of the Arabian Peninsula, where the coast of the Gulf curves north towards the Strait of Hormuz. Abu Dhabi alone covers more than three-quarters of its area, mostly desert, salt flats and dunes, with the great oasis of Liwa in the south. In the east, the rocky Hajar mountains, shared with Oman, rise behind a second coastline on the Gulf of Oman. Between desert and mountains lies the oasis of Al Ain, with its groundwater and palm groves.
The country is made up of seven emirates, each ruled by its own family:

Emirate
Ruling family
Character

Abu Dhabi
Al Nahyan
The largest by far; the capital; most of the oil

Dubai
Al Maktoum
The trading city; second most populous; little oil

Sharjah
Al Qasimi
Third emirate; with Dubai, outpaced Abu Dhabi as a trading town in the early 20th century

Ajman
Al Nuaimi
A small coastal emirate next to Sharjah

Umm al-Quwain
Al Mualla
A small coastal emirate

Ras al-Khaimah
Al Qasimi
Northern, mountainous, agricultural; seat of the old Qasimi power

Fujairah
Al Sharqi
On the Gulf of Oman coast; a separate Trucial State only from 1952

Very early humans
People have lived here for a very long time. At Faya, in the desert interior of Sharjah, archaeologists have found evidence of human occupation stretching from the Middle Palaeolithic to the Neolithic, from about 210,000 to about 6,000 years ago. UNESCO inscribed the Faya Palaeolandscape on the World Heritage List in 2025.
The Bronze Age: Hafit, Umm an-Nar and Magan
In the Bronze Age, people around Al Ain built circular stone tombs; archaeologists name the cultures of the period after the sites of Hafit, Hili and Umm an-Nar. UNESCO's listing of the Cultural Sites of Al Ain (2011) dates the circular tombs to around 2500 BCE and describes wells and mud-brick houses, towers, palaces and administrative buildings: evidence of settled life in a desert since the Neolithic.
These communities were not isolated. Mesopotamian texts of the third millennium BCE describe trade with a land called Magan, which supplied copper. Most archaeologists place Magan in what is now the UAE and northern Oman, where the Hajar mountains hold copper ores; Mesopotamian sources also show that the Akkadian king Sargon's realm traded with the coast of Oman. Further up the Gulf, Dilmun, centred on Bahrain, acted as a middleman for this traffic between Mesopotamia and the Indus Valley. The south-east corner of Arabia was a supplier to the first cities in history.
Falaj: water from the mountains
In the Iron Age, people around Al Ain began to dig aflaj (singular falaj): gently sloping channels that carry water from underground sources to fields and villages. UNESCO describes the aflaj of Hili as one of the oldest examples of the technique. The falaj turned the oases into farmland and let date palms flourish, and sharing its water became one of the organising facts of village life.

The aflaj show something that runs through the whole history of this country: in an environment that seems impossible, people survived by organisation, engineering and trade.

Before Islam
In the centuries before Islam, the region was part of the wider world of south-eastern Arabia that it shares with today's Oman. Its people were Arab tribes, some settled in the oases, others moving with herds in the desert, others fishing on the coast. In 2026 UNESCO added a natural site, the mountain valley of Wadi Wurayah in Fujairah, home to more than a thousand species, to the country's World Heritage list: a reminder that the land is not only sand.

Part 2 — Ports, tribes and the "pirate coast" (c. 600–1820)
In the 7th century, the peoples of south-eastern Arabia became Muslim, and the region was drawn into the world of the caliphates described in A Brief History of Saudi Arabia. For the next thousand years, little in the written record focuses specifically on the coast that is now the UAE. Its history was part of the history of Oman, of the Gulf, and of the trade between the Middle East and India.
The most important town was Julfar, a port near today's Ras al-Khaimah. Britannica describes it as an ancient port, ruled at one time by Oman's Ya'rubid dynasty. The great prize of the region in these centuries was not the coast itself but the passage it guarded: the Strait of Hormuz, through which the trade of Iraq, Iran and Arabia passed to the Indian Ocean. Persian and Omani rulers and, from the 16th century, the Portuguese competed for control of it.
Life before oil
For most people, life was shaped by three economies:

The sea. Fishing fed the coast, and every summer the men went out to the pearl banks of the Gulf.
The oases. In Liwa and Al Ain, families grew dates and other crops with water from wells and aflaj.
The desert. Bedouin herded camels and goats, traded with the towns, and provided the fighting men on whom sheikhs depended.

Society was organised by tribe and family. Rulers were the leading sheikhs of the dominant tribes, and their authority depended on wealth, generosity, skill in alliance and the willingness of the tribes to follow them.
The rise of the coastal powers (1700s–1820)
In the 18th century, as Persian and Omani power in the Gulf weakened, local tribes on the coast gained more freedom and competed for control of ports and trade. Two groups came to dominate what would become the UAE.
The Qawasim of Ras al-Khaimah and Sharjah
The Qasimi family (plural Qawasim) established themselves at Ras al-Khaimah, on or near the site of old Julfar, by the early 18th century. Their prosperity depended on control of maritime commerce, and by the late 18th century, according to Britannica, they had emerged as the dominant force on the coast.
The Banu Yas and the Al Nahyan
Inland, a different power was growing: the Banu Yas, a confederation of tribes centred on the oases of Liwa and Al Ain. Their leading family, the Al Nahyan of the Al Bu Falah clan, had their earliest seat in Liwa. In 1761 members of the tribe found wells of drinkable water on a small island on the coast; they settled there and moved their headquarters to it in 1795. The island was called Abu Dhabi. In 1833 another clan of the Banu Yas, the Al Bu Falasah, mostly pearl fishers, broke away from Abu Dhabi after a rivalry and took over the small settlement of Dubai, known since 1799, without resistance. The Al Maktoum, who still rule Dubai, descend from them.
Piracy or resistance? A contested history
As the Qawasim expanded, their ships clashed with British and Indian vessels trading under the protection of the British East India Company. The British described the attacks as piracy, and in 1809 a British expedition razed Ras al-Khaimah. The town was rebuilt, and in 1819 the British returned, besieged Ras al-Khaimah and defeated the Qasimi forces. Qasimi power on the sea was broken.
How to describe what happened has been argued over ever since:

The British account
The Qasimi and Emirati account

Qasimi ships raided merchant shipping; the attacks were piracy, and suppressing them made the seas safe for trade
The Qawasim were a maritime power at war with a rival, competing for trade; "piracy" was a label that justified British intervention

The 1819 expedition and the treaties that followed brought peace to the Gulf
The campaign destroyed the leading Arab naval power and placed the coast under British control for 150 years

Source: British official and naval accounts of the time
Source: most fully argued by Sultan bin Muhammad Al-Qasimi in The Myth of Arab Piracy in the Gulf (1980s)

Both accounts can contain truth at once: there were attacks on shipping, and there was also an imperial power with strong commercial reasons to describe a rival as criminals. It is a good example of how the same documents can tell two stories.

Part 3 — The Trucial Coast under British protection (1820–1945)
The treaties
After its victory, Britain imposed a series of agreements on the sheikhs of the coast:

Year
Agreement
What it did

1820
General Treaty of Peace
Signed by the coastal sheikhs, including the Qasimi sheikh Sultan bin Saqr, under British pressure; outlawed "piracy" and maritime raiding

1835
Maritime truce
A truce at sea among the coastal sheikhs

1853
Perpetual Maritime Truce
Made the truce permanent; gave the Trucial Coast its name

1892
Exclusive Agreements
Placed the sheikhs' foreign relations under British control

The result was an unusual kind of empire. Britain did not govern the sheikhdoms or tax them. It controlled their foreign relations and kept the peace at sea, leaving the rulers in charge of their own affairs on land. The coast became known as the Trucial States or Trucial Oman. The British cared above all about the sea route to India; the interior barely interested them.
Inside that framework, the sheikhdoms competed. Under Zayed bin Khalifa (ruled 1855–1908), Abu Dhabi was the leading power of the Trucial Coast, though in the early 20th century it was overtaken by Sharjah and Dubai as centres of trade. Ras al-Khaimah broke away from Sharjah as a separate state between 1869 and 1900, rejoined it, and was finally recognised by Britain as a separate Trucial State in 1921.
Pearling: the economy of the sea
Before oil, fishing and pearling were the coast's most lucrative industries, and goods arrived by sea from along the Gulf and across the Indian Ocean. Every summer, fleets of wooden boats sailed to the pearl banks, and divers worked through the season gathering oysters on a single breath. It was hard, dangerous work, and most of the profit went to merchants and financiers rather than the men who dived. At the start of the 20th century Abu Dhabi town had perhaps 6,000 people, living on pearl diving and on local trade largely in the hands of Persian and Indian merchants.

Pearling made the coast part of a global luxury trade long before oil. It also made it dependent on a single fragile product, a lesson the region's rulers remember.

The collapse
In the 1920s and 1930s the pearl trade collapsed, killed by two blows at once: the development of cultured pearls in Japan, which could be produced cheaply and reliably, and the world economic Depression after 1929, which destroyed demand for luxuries. The coast fell into deep poverty, and as Britannica notes of Ras al-Khaimah, the decline of pearling emptied much of the shoreline of its people.
Dubai's difference
One sheikhdom handled the crisis better than the rest. Dubai's Maktoum rulers, unlike most of their neighbours, had long encouraged trade and commerce. By the beginning of the 20th century Dubai was an important port, and many foreign merchants, chiefly Indians, had settled there. Until the 1930s it was known for its pearl exports. Later it became the region's chief port for importing Western manufactured goods, and Britannica notes a brisk trade in gold to India, where gold imports were restricted. Dubai's habit of making money from moving other people's goods began early.

Part 4 — Oil, Zayed and the end of empire (1945–1971)
A council and a seventh state
After the Second World War, Britain began to take a more active role on land. From 1952 a council of the Trucial rulers met twice a year to discuss shared administration. In the same year Britain recognised Fujairah, under the Sharqi family, as the seventh Trucial State; it had previously been considered part of Sharjah. Borders mattered more now, because companies were looking for oil. In 1952 Saudi forces occupied part of the Buraimi oasis, near Al Ain, which Abu Dhabi and Oman also claimed; international arbitration collapsed in 1955 and the dispute dragged on for years.
Oil
In 1958 oil was discovered under the sea at Umm al-Shaif, off Abu Dhabi, and exports began in 1962 from Das Island, where a terminal was built to receive it. Onshore fields followed, notably at Murban and Bu Hasa. Abu Dhabi's reserves are among the largest in the world; Britannica estimates them at about a tenth of the world's total. Britain, recognising the change, opened a separate Political Agency in Abu Dhabi in 1961, ending its dependence on the British agent at Dubai. In 1966 Dubai found its own offshore field, Fateh, though its reserves were less than a twentieth of Abu Dhabi's.
Shakhbut and Zayed
The ruler of Abu Dhabi, Sheikh Shakhbut bin Sultan Al Nahyan (ruled 1928–66), followed what Britannica calls "extremely conservative policies", so the town modernised slowly despite its oil. In 1966 he was deposed in favour of his younger brother, Zayed bin Sultan Al Nahyan, who had governed the Abu Dhabi-controlled part of the Buraimi oasis at Al Ain for years.
Zayed was the opposite of his brother. He launched an ambitious five-year plan in 1968; within a few years Abu Dhabi town had electricity, running water, sewers, roads, a seawall, government buildings, housing and a new port. Abu Dhabi also lent its wealth to the poorer sheikhdoms and to other Arab and developing countries, and Zayed is widely credited with the patience and generosity that held the federation together.

Year
Population of today's UAE

1960
About 131,000

1970
About 287,000

1975
About 543,000

1980
About 1.02 million

Source: World Bank estimates. The population doubled in the 1960s, then almost quadrupled in the 1970s as oil money drew workers from abroad.
Britain leaves
In January 1968 the British government announced that it would withdraw its forces from the Gulf by late 1971. The Trucial States, together with Qatar and Bahrain, began talks on a nine-member federation. After three years of negotiation, Qatar and Bahrain decided to become separate independent states.
On 2 December 1971, six of the Trucial States, Abu Dhabi, Dubai, Sharjah, Ajman, Umm al-Quwain and Fujairah, formed the United Arab Emirates. Zayed became its president, and Sheikh Rashid bin Saeed Al Maktoum of Dubai its vice president. The UAE marks 2 December as National Day; the official portal describes it as the date of the first meeting of the federation's "founding fathers". Abu Dhabi became the provisional capital, a compromise that was extended several times until it was made permanent in the early 1990s.
The islands
Ras al-Khaimah, like Qatar and Bahrain, at first stayed out. Then, on 30 November 1971, two days before the federation was declared, Iranian troops landed on the islands of Greater and Lesser Tunb, which Ras al-Khaimah claimed; they met armed resistance from Ras al-Khaimah's police but took the islands. Iran also landed troops on Abu Musa, which belonged to Sharjah; there, an agreement between Iran and Sharjah let both flags fly over the island. The shock convinced Ras al-Khaimah's leaders that they needed the protection of unity, and in February 1972 it joined the UAE as the seventh emirate.
The islands dispute has never been resolved. Iran regards the islands as its own; the UAE, backed by its Gulf partners, regards them as Emirati land under occupation. In 1992 Iran tightened its control of the islands, and in 1996 it established an airport on Abu Musa and a power station on Greater Tunb.

Part 5 — Founding a federation (1971–1990)
Seven rulers, one state?
The new state was a federation of monarchies, each with its own ruling family, its own territory and, at first, its own security forces and finances. The constitution created a Federal Supreme Council of the rulers, which elects the president, a cabinet, and an advisory body, the Federal National Council. In practice, power has always been weighted towards Abu Dhabi, which has most of the oil and holds the presidency, and Dubai, which holds the vice presidency and premiership.
Building a real state took years of bargaining. In December 1973 Abu Dhabi began to centralise, moving several of its own ministers into federal posts. In May 1976 the seven emirates agreed to merge their armed forces. But in 1978 Dubai and Ras al-Khaimah refused to put their forces under federal command, and Dubai rejected a plan for a federal budget and the end of internal borders. The crisis eased when Rashid of Dubai was offered the post of federal prime minister, which he took in July 1979. The pattern was set: the UAE would hold together by consensus between Abu Dhabi and Dubai, with each emirate keeping wide autonomy.

Office
Holder
Since

President
Ruler of Abu Dhabi (Zayed 1971–2004; Khalifa 2004–22; Mohamed bin Zayed since 2022)
1971

Vice president and prime minister
Ruler of Dubai (Rashid; Maktoum 1990–2006; Mohammed bin Rashid since 2006)
1971 / 1979

Federal Supreme Council
The seven rulers
1971

Federal National Council
Advisory; half its members chosen by a limited electoral college since 2006
1972 (first session, February)

Money and a currency
The oil boom of the 1970s changed everything. After the Gulf rupee, the currency then used on the coast, was devalued in 1966, Dubai joined Qatar in creating a riyal; in 1973 the emirates adopted their own national currency, the dirham. According to the World Bank, the UAE's output per person leapt from about $2,400 in 1970 to more than $27,000 by 1975 and almost $43,000 by 1980. Abu Dhabi opened its first oil refinery on Umm an-Nar island in 1976.
A dangerous neighbourhood
In 1979 the Islamic Revolution in Iran and, from 1980, the Iran–Iraq War brought danger close. Britannica notes that the revolution unsettled the UAE's large Iranian Shi'a community and inspired a growing number of young Sunni activists who felt the existing order did not uphold Islamic values. When Iran and Iraq began attacking tankers in the Gulf, fighting broke out within a few miles of the Emirati coast. In 1981 the UAE joined Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar and Oman in founding the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC), a regional body for security and economic cooperation.
When Iraq invaded Kuwait in August 1990, the UAE condemned the invasion, provided facilities for Western forces and contributed troops to the liberation of Kuwait in early 1991. The lesson the leadership drew was that the UAE needed both powerful friends and, eventually, a capable military of its own.

Part 6 — Dubai's wager, and the crash (1960s–2010)
A city that decided to be a hub
Dubai's oil was never going to last, and its rulers knew it. Under Rashid bin Saeed (who ruled until his death in 1990) and his sons, the emirate bet on becoming the place where the world met to trade. It built infrastructure ahead of demand, again and again:

Year
Project

1972
Port Rashid, a deepwater harbour

1979
A dry dock for supertankers

Early 1980s
Jebel Ali port and industrial area declared a free-trade zone

Mid-1980s
Emirates airline founded by the Dubai government

Early 1990s
Dubai Ports Authority set up to run the ports

September 2009
The first stretch of a driverless metro, the first in the Gulf

4 January 2010
Burj Khalifa, the world's tallest building, opened

The free zone was the key idea: a special area where foreign companies could set up under business-friendly rules. Britannica judges the move largely successful; numerous international companies opened facilities at Jebel Ali. Dubai International Airport and Emirates turned the city into a stopover between continents. Hotels, malls, artificial islands such as the Palm Jumeirah and a stream of record-breaking projects followed, and tourism became a pillar of the economy.
Abu Dhabi's different path
Abu Dhabi, with its oil and its huge sovereign investment funds, developed more cautiously. It built its own airline, Etihad, and from the early 21st century invested heavily in culture to attract visitors and keep residents. A controversial deal with the French government lent the Louvre's name and works to a new museum for 30 years; after almost a decade of delays, Louvre Abu Dhabi, designed by Jean Nouvel, opened in 2017. Abu Dhabi has also spread its wealth: to its sister emirates, to other Arab countries and to development projects abroad.
What kind of place Dubai became
Britannica's account of Dubai catches both sides of its success. It describes a city often compared to Singapore and Hong Kong, the Middle East's leading trading hub, where a huge expatriate population makes it feel like a "melting pot" and the atmosphere is generally tolerant: churches and Hindu temples stand alongside mosques. It also notes that criticism of the government and ruling elite "is not tolerated". The deal that made Dubai, openness to money and people combined with tight political control, has defined the whole country.

Dubai did not have much oil, so it sold something else: location, efficiency, stability and the promise that business could be done quickly, safely and with few questions. The rest of the Gulf has spent twenty years trying to copy it.

Going global
By the 2000s Emirati state companies were buying assets around the world. In 2006 a storm broke in Washington when state-owned DP World bought a British firm that managed several American ports. Members of Congress, citing security fears after 9/11 (two of the nineteen hijackers had been Emirati citizens), threatened to block the deal; DP World agreed to sell the American operations. The episode showed both how far the UAE's reach had grown and how much suspicion it still faced.
Crash and rescue (2008–2010)
The boom of the 2000s ended abruptly with the world financial crisis of 2007–08. The impact fell hardest on Dubai, where the economy had come to depend on property and construction. Big projects were suspended, and real-estate values fell by about 50% in a single year. World Bank figures show the UAE's output per person dropping from about $50,000 in 2008 to under $38,000 in 2009.
In late 2009 Dubai World, the emirate's government-run investment company, announced that it would not be able to repay its debts on time. Dubai's solution came from its richer neighbour: at the end of the year Abu Dhabi provided a $10 billion loan that helped Dubai avoid defaulting.
The symbolism was not lost on anyone. Three weeks later, on 4 January 2010, Dubai opened the world's tallest building, 828 metres high with 163 floors. It had been built as Burj Dubai. At the opening it was renamed Burj Khalifa, in honour of Sheikh Khalifa bin Zayed, the ruler of Abu Dhabi and president of the UAE.

The crisis settled an old question about the federation. Dubai had been the dynamic one, Abu Dhabi the rich, quiet one. After 2009, there was no doubt where ultimate power lay.

Dubai's luxury property market soon recovered, though doubts lingered about its debts. The episode left a lasting lesson about the risks of growth built on debt, and a lasting shift in the balance between the two leading emirates.

Part 7 — Citizens and newcomers: the people of the Emirates
A country of migrants
No country's population has changed faster. The World Bank estimates that the UAE had about 131,000 people in 1960, about 3.5 million in 2000, nearly 6.9 million in 2010 and about 11.5 million in 2025. Almost all of that growth came from migration.

UAE
1970
1980
2000
2010
2024/25

Population
0.29 million
1.02 million
3.49 million
6.87 million
11.51 million (2025)

GDP per person (current US$)
2,394
42,925
29,866
44,795
50,274 (2024)

Life expectancy (years)
61
68
76
82
83 (2024)

Children per woman
6.5
6.0
2.7
1.6
1.2 (2024)

Source: World Bank, World Development Indicators (data updated October 2026).
The UAE's official government portal reported that the population grew from about 4.1 million in 2005 to about 10 million by the end of 2021, of whom UAE citizens numbered "around 1 million": roughly one in ten. It notes that more than 200 nationalities live in the country, and that 69% of the population was male, the result of a workforce dominated by men who came without their families. The International Labour Organization estimates that the UAE hosts about 8.7 million migrant workers, more than 80% of the resident population.
The migrants are not one group. Britannica notes that Dubai's construction boom brought a huge increase in South Asian labourers alongside skilled expatriates from all over the world; Human Rights Watch names Pakistan, Bangladesh and Nepal among the countries to which workers send their wages. They build the towers, staff the shops, drive the taxis and work in homes; others run banks and companies. Residence, however long, is not a path to citizenship for most of them.
The kafala debate
For decades, foreign workers in the UAE, as across the Gulf, were governed by the kafala (sponsorship) system: a worker's legal residence was tied to a particular employer, who could prevent him or her from changing jobs or leaving the country. Critics argued that this gave employers enormous power and allowed abuses: confiscated passports, unpaid wages, illegal recruitment fees and, in the worst cases, forced labour.
The government has reformed the rules repeatedly, and the two sides of the argument now look like this:

What the reforms changed (ILO, December 2023)
What critics say remains (Human Rights Watch, World Report 2026)

A new Labour Law (Federal Decree-Law 33 of 2021) and a 2022 law for domestic workers
Employers still hold "disproportionate control" over workers under kafala

Workers may change employer without the employer's permission at any time, with a legitimate reason and written notice of 30 to 90 days
Workers still struggle to change jobs; employers can file false "absconding" charges against those who leave, risking detention and deportation

Confiscating a worker's passport is illegal
Wage theft, recruitment fees and passport confiscation remain widespread

On 15 January 2026, the UAE ratified the ILO's 2014 Protocol to the Forced Labour Convention, the second GCC state to do so
No non-discriminatory minimum wage; trade unions are banned; the summer midday work ban is the only heat protection

Britannica records that under international pressure the UAE met the ILO's minimum requirements on migrant protections in 2017. The government stresses the scale of what has changed, and many migrants earn more than they could at home and send money back to their families. Critics stress how much power still lies with employers and how little the workers can do collectively. Both accounts describe the same country.
Emiratis
For citizens, the oil era brought a degree of prosperity that few societies have known, with generous state support. Life expectancy at birth rose from about 51 years in 1960 to 83 in 2024, and the average number of children per woman fell from 6.5 to 1.2 over the same period. The government treats preserving Emirati national identity as a national goal, in a society where citizens are a small minority; it even tracks a "National Identity index" of citizens' sense of belonging, which it put at 97.8% in 2021.

Part 8 — Security first: the Arab uprisings and a more assertive state (2011–2019)
At home: no Arab Spring
When popular uprisings swept the Arab world in 2011, the UAE moved early to make sure nothing similar happened at home. In April 2011 five activists who had signed an online petition calling for an elected parliament were arrested; they were convicted of insulting the country's leaders and then pardoned and released in November. In 2012 new measures banned public and online criticism of the government, and dozens of democracy activists and members of the Islamist opposition were detained. In 2013, in the mass trial known as the "UAE94", dozens were convicted. In 2014 the government banned several Islamist groups, including the influential Islah association, saying they had ties to terrorism.
The government argues that it acted to protect a tolerant, stable, prosperous society from extremist movements, above all the Muslim Brotherhood, which it regards as a threat to the region's states, and points to the chaos that followed the uprisings in Libya, Syria and Yemen. Human rights groups argue that peaceful critics have been jailed alongside genuine extremists. In March 2025, according to Human Rights Watch, a court upheld the convictions of 53 human rights defenders and dissidents, 43 of them sentenced to life in prison, many of them already jailed since the 2013 trial; among them was Ahmed Mansoor, winner of the Martin Ennals Award for human rights defenders, serving a 15-year sentence.
The state also tried to widen participation in limited ways. From 2006 an electoral college chose half the members of the advisory Federal National Council; by 2015 it had been expanded to about a third of citizens of voting age. The council remains advisory.
Abroad: from cautious to forceful
The UAE's foreign policy was transformed in these years, driven largely by Mohamed bin Zayed (MBZ), crown prince of Abu Dhabi and, after his half-brother Khalifa suffered a stroke in 2014, the country's de facto ruler. According to a former US envoy quoted by Al Jazeera, MBZ was driven by the belief that the Gulf monarchies could no longer simply rely on the United States, especially after Washington abandoned Egypt's Hosni Mubarak in 2011. He built the armed forces into a high-tech military and used it.

Year
Action

2011
Joins Saudi-led GCC deployment to Bahrain to suppress mass protests; aid to Bahrain and Oman

2013
Backs the Egyptian army's overthrow of the elected Muslim Brotherhood president Mohamed Morsi

2014
Joins the US-led air campaign against the Islamic State; conducts air strikes in Libya

March 2015
Becomes Saudi Arabia's main partner in the war against the Houthis in Yemen

2017
Joins the blockade of Qatar (ended January 2021)

June 2018
Leads the coalition offensive on Yemen's port of Hodeidah; ceasefire in December

2018
Helps bring the United States and the Taliban together for talks in Abu Dhabi

June 2019
Begins withdrawing most of its forces from Yemen

Yemen
The UAE's role in Yemen was large and costly. Emirati forces backed local fighters in the south, and Emirati commandos fought al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula on the southern coast. More than 100 Emiratis were killed. In 2019 the UAE pulled most of its forces out, a sign of a growing gap with Saudi Arabia. That summer, the southern separatists the UAE had backed, the strongest force in the coalition's camp, turned on the Saudi-backed government and drove it out of Aden. The UAE argued that the separatists were the most effective force against the Houthis; Saudi Arabia wanted a united government. The quarrel would return in 2025.
In 2016 a UN panel reported that some actions of the coalition, of which the UAE was the second member, may have amounted to war crimes. The UAE says it fought to stop an Iran-aligned militia from seizing Yemen and to defeat al-Qaeda.

Part 9 — The Abraham Accords, Mars and a new president (2020–2025)
Recognising Israel
On 13 August 2020, the UAE and Israel announced that they would establish full diplomatic relations, in a deal brokered by the administration of US President Donald Trump. Israel agreed to suspend its plans to annex parts of the occupied West Bank. The UAE became the first Gulf Arab state to normalise relations with Israel, and only the third Arab state after Egypt and Jordan. The treaty, together with a similar deal with Bahrain and a general declaration known as the Abraham Accords, was signed at the White House on 15 September 2020; Morocco and Sudan joined later.
Views divided sharply:

Supporters said
Critics said

Peace and trade between two of the region's most advanced economies; shared concern over Iran
The deal abandoned the long Arab position that there would be no normalisation without a Palestinian state

The annexation of West Bank land was halted
Annexation was only suspended; occupation continued

A shift towards pragmatism, driven by shared concerns over Iran and, one diplomat quoted by Al Jazeera, fatigue with a Palestinian leadership "that doesn't listen"
A Palestinian spokesman called it "treason"; it upended decades of Arab consensus and drew Palestinian anger

The UAE's ties with Israel were still in place in 2026.
Hope, Expo and the future
The UAE also set out to be a country of the future. On 9 February 2021 its Hope probe entered orbit around Mars, making the UAE the fifth entity to reach Mars orbit after the United States, the Soviet Union, Europe and India. In October 2019 Abu Dhabi founded the Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence, a graduate research university devoted to AI, and the federal government's AI strategy aims to make the UAE a world leader in artificial intelligence by 2031.
Expo 2020 Dubai, delayed a year by the Covid-19 pandemic, opened on 30 September 2021 with more than 190 participating countries on a 438-hectare site. By its close at the end of March 2022, it had recorded 24,102,967 visits, just short of its goal of 25 million. The World Bank shows how the pandemic hit and the recovery followed: the economy shrank by 8.7% in 2020, grew by 7.5% in 2022 and by 4.0% in 2024, when output reached about $552 billion, or roughly $50,000 per person.
Missiles over Abu Dhabi
On 17 January 2022, the Houthis claimed a drone and missile attack on Abu Dhabi that killed at least three people, a reminder that the Yemen war could reach the UAE itself.
A new president
Sheikh Khalifa bin Zayed died on 13 May 2022, aged 73. The next day the Federal Supreme Council elected Mohamed bin Zayed, then 61 and long the real power in the country, as president. MBZ had backed Saudi Arabia's Mohammed bin Salman during his rise to power, and the two men led the Gulf's most activist foreign policies. But he also showed he would act independently: the UAE abstained from a UN Security Council vote condemning Russia's invasion of Ukraine, and declined Western calls to pump more oil.
Sudan
The most damaging accusations against the UAE in these years concerned Sudan, where the army has been at war since 2023 with the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF). Human Rights Watch reported "a growing body of evidence" that the UAE had supported the RSF, which it accused of war crimes and crimes against humanity: investigations by HRW and France 24 found the RSF using munitions previously acquired by the UAE military, and Reuters and the New York Times reported that an airbase in eastern Chad was being used to funnel weapons to the RSF. The UAE has rejected the accusations. Sudan took the UAE to the International Court of Justice under the Genocide Convention; on 5 May 2025 the Court rejected Sudan's request for emergency measures and ordered the case removed from its list.

Part 10 — The UAE in 2026
War in the Gulf
The year began with the UAE's long rivalry with Iran turning into direct attack. After the United States and Israel launched strikes on Iran on 28 February 2026, Iran retaliated with missiles and drones against Gulf states that host American forces. On 29 March Iran's Revolutionary Guard claimed attacks on aluminium plants in Bahrain and the UAE; Emirates Global Aluminium said one of its sites in Abu Dhabi had suffered significant damage and six people were injured. The Strait of Hormuz, the narrow passage off the UAE's northern coast, was effectively blocked to tankers.
The break with Saudi Arabia
The partnership with Saudi Arabia, already strained, broke into the open. In December 2025 the UAE-backed Southern Transitional Council seized much of Hadramawt and al-Mahra in eastern Yemen. On 30 December the Saudi-led coalition struck what it said was a UAE weapons shipment at the port of Mukalla; Saudi Arabia accused the UAE of pressing the separatists to attack, which the UAE denied. The UAE then announced that it would withdraw its remaining forces from Yemen. In January 2026 Saudi-backed forces took Aden and the STC's leader fled. In January 2026 Somalia cancelled all its agreements with the UAE, including port, security and defence deals, accusing it of undermining its unity, amid reports that the UAE had helped bring about Israel's recognition of the breakaway region of Somaliland, where the Emirati company DP World runs the port of Berbera.
Leaving OPEC
Then came the OPEC decision. The UAE had long resented quotas that limited it to 3 to 3.5 million barrels a day while it invested heavily in extra capacity. Wanting to use the capacity it had built, it announced on 28 April 2026 that it would leave. For the first time since 1967, Abu Dhabi will decide alone how much oil to pump.
Still building
Through all of this, the UAE pressed on with the projects that define its self-image: artificial intelligence, space, tourism, finance and culture. In January 2026 it ratified the ILO's Forced Labour Protocol; later that year UNESCO inscribed Wadi Wurayah as a natural World Heritage site, a year after Faya. The country's leaders present it as an island of stability and tolerance in a dangerous region; its critics see a skilful authoritarian state whose influence abroad, from Yemen to Sudan, has made the region more dangerous. In 2026 both views were being tested at once.

UAE, latest figures

Source

Population
About 11.5 million (2025)
World Bank

Citizens
About 1 million (end-2021)
UAE government portal

Migrant workers
About 8.7 million; over 80% of residents
ILO

GDP
About US$552 billion (2024)
World Bank

GDP per person
About US$50,300 (2024)
World Bank

Life expectancy
83.1 years (2024)
World Bank

Children per woman
1.2 (2024)
World Bank

Part 11 — How to understand the UAE today
Key dates

Date
Event

c. 210,000–6,000 years ago
Human occupation at Faya, Sharjah

c. 2500 BCE
Umm an-Nar tombs; trade with Mesopotamia (probably the land of Magan)

1st millennium BCE
Aflaj irrigation at Hili, Al Ain

7th century CE
The region becomes Muslim

Early 1700s
Qasimi power established at Ras al-Khaimah

1761 / 1795
Banu Yas find water at Abu Dhabi; Al Nahyan move their seat there

1809, 1819
British expeditions against Ras al-Khaimah

1820
General Treaty of Peace

1833
Al Bu Falasah take over Dubai

1853
Perpetual Maritime Truce; the "Trucial Coast"

1892
Exclusive Agreements with Britain

1920s–30s
Pearl trade collapses

1952
Trucial council; Fujairah becomes the seventh Trucial State

1958 / 1962
Oil found off Abu Dhabi; exports begin

1966
Zayed becomes ruler of Abu Dhabi

January 1968
Britain announces withdrawal from the Gulf

30 November 1971
Iran takes the Tunbs; Abu Musa agreement

2 December 1971
United Arab Emirates founded

February 1972
Ras al-Khaimah joins

1973
The dirham introduced

1981
Gulf Cooperation Council founded

Early 1980s
Jebel Ali free zone

2004
Zayed dies; Khalifa president

2006
First limited Federal National Council elections; Mohammed bin Rashid ruler of Dubai

2009
Dubai World debt crisis; $10 billion from Abu Dhabi

4 January 2010
Burj Khalifa opens

2011–14
Crackdown on dissent; Islah banned

March 2015
UAE joins the war in Yemen

13 August / 15 September 2020
Abraham Accords announced and signed

9 February 2021
Hope probe reaches Mars orbit

30 September 2021
Expo 2020 Dubai opens

14 May 2022
Mohamed bin Zayed elected president

30 December 2025
Saudi strike at Mukalla; UAE announces Yemen withdrawal

29 March 2026
Iranian strike on Emirates Global Aluminium

28 April 2026
UAE announces exit from OPEC

Who's who

Person
Dates
Why they matter

Sultan bin Saqr Al Qasimi
signed 1820
Qasimi ruler who signed the General Treaty of Peace

Zayed bin Khalifa Al Nahyan
ruled 1855–1908
Made Abu Dhabi the leading power of the Trucial Coast

Shakhbut bin Sultan Al Nahyan
ruled 1928–66
Cautious ruler of Abu Dhabi in the first oil years; deposed

Zayed bin Sultan Al Nahyan
president 1971–2004
Founding president; modernised Abu Dhabi and held the federation together

Rashid bin Saeed Al Maktoum
died 1990
Ruler of Dubai; architect of its trade strategy; prime minister from 1979

Khalifa bin Zayed Al Nahyan
c. 1948–2022
President 2004–22; Burj Khalifa named after him

Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum
ruler since 2006
Ruler of Dubai, vice president and prime minister

Mohamed bin Zayed Al Nahyan
b. c. 1961
De facto ruler from 2014, president since 2022; architect of the assertive foreign policy

Sultan bin Muhammad Al-Qasimi
20th–21st c.
Author of The Myth of Arab Piracy in the Gulf

Ahmed Mansoor
serving 15 years
Human rights defender, Martin Ennals Award 2015; symbol of the cost of dissent

Five ideas that unlock the country
1. It is a federation of families. The UAE is seven monarchies that agreed to share a flag, an army and a foreign policy while keeping their own rulers and much of their own law. Abu Dhabi's oil and Dubai's commerce are the two pillars; the smaller emirates depend on both. To understand any Emirati decision, ask what Abu Dhabi wants and whether Dubai agrees.
2. Luck and timing made the state, and planning kept it. Oil arrived just a few years before Britain left. If the British had stayed, or the oil had come later, there might be no UAE, or a much poorer one. What the rulers did with the luck, Zayed's spending on the smaller emirates, Dubai's ports and airline, Abu Dhabi's investment funds, explains why it lasted.
3. The country is a hub by design. From the pearl merchants who sold to Bombay to the free zones, airlines, ports and AI campuses of today, the Emirates have made their living by being the place where other people's trade, money and talent meet. That requires openness to the world, and it explains both the country's tolerance of foreigners' private lives and its intolerance of anything that might threaten stability.
4. Citizens are a minority in their own country. Around one resident in ten is a citizen. This shapes everything: the generous welfare state for Emiratis, the strict separation between citizenship and residence, the kafala debate, the investment in national identity, and the government's insistence that political dissent is a danger the country cannot afford.
5. A small state with big ambitions has to choose its fights. Since 2011 the UAE has acted more boldly than any other small state in the region: Bahrain, Egypt, Libya, Yemen, Qatar, Israel, Sudan, Somalia. Its leaders see a hard-headed strategy to contain Islamists and Iran and to protect a fragile neighbourhood. Its critics see a country that exports the instability it says it fears. 2026, with Iranian missiles overhead and a rupture with Saudi Arabia, is the most serious test yet of which view is closer to the truth.

In 1960 the people of this coast lived much as their ancestors had for centuries. Two generations later their country sits at the junction of the world's flight paths, data cables and oil routes. Few places on Earth have travelled so far so quickly.

The takeaway
The coast that is now the UAE was settled for many thousands of years; in the Bronze Age it was most likely part of Magan, the copper land of Mesopotamian texts, and Iron Age farmers built some of the oldest known falaj water channels. In the 18th century the maritime Qawasim and the inland Banu Yas, with the Al Nahyan at Abu Dhabi and later the Al Maktoum at Dubai, became the region's leading powers. After defeating the Qawasim in 1819, Britain bound the sheikhdoms by treaties from 1820 to 1892, creating the Trucial States, whose pearl economy collapsed in the 1920s and 1930s. Oil, found off Abu Dhabi in 1958, and Britain's departure in 1971 led Zayed bin Sultan and Rashid bin Saeed to found the UAE on 2 December 1971, with Ras al-Khaimah joining in 1972. Since then the federation has grown from fewer than 300,000 people to more than 11 million, most of them migrant workers, has turned Dubai into a global hub, survived the 2009 debt crisis, cracked down on dissent, intervened across the region, normalised relations with Israel and, in 2026, faced Iranian attacks, a break with Saudi Arabia and its own exit from OPEC.
Try this: pick one ordinary object in your home that was probably shipped from abroad: a phone, a shirt, a bag of rice. Find out (from the label or a quick search) where it was made, and sketch the likely route it took to reach you. There is a good chance that route passed through the Gulf, by sea past the Strait of Hormuz or through a port such as Jebel Ali, or by air through Dubai or Abu Dhabi. Then write two sentences: one on why a small desert country chose to make its living this way, and one on who does the work that keeps those routes running.

Sources & Further Reading
Sources
- Encyclopaedia Britannica, "United Arab Emirates" (history and foreign affairs sections by Jill Ann Crystal and J.E. Peterson, updated December 2025 and January 2026), and articles "Abu Dhabi (emirate)", "Abu Dhabi (city)", "Dubai (emirate)", "Dubai (city)" by Christopher Davidson, "Ras al-Khaimah", "Abu Musa", "Burj Khalifa", "Dilmun", "Sargon of Akkad", accessed via the Internet Archive, October 2026.
- UNESCO World Heritage Centre listings: Cultural Sites of Al Ain (1343), Faya Palaeolandscape (1735), Wadi Wurayah National Park (1724).
- UAE Government Portal (u.ae): "Population and demographic mix" (updated October 2022); "Public holidays" (National Day, 2024); "Artificial intelligence in government policies" (2025). Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence, "About" (2024).
- International Labour Organization: country page for the United Arab Emirates; United Arab Emirates: Regulatory framework governing migrant workers (updated December 2023); news release on the UAE's ratification of the Protocol to Convention No. 29 (January 2026).
- Human Rights Watch, World Report 2026, United Arab Emirates chapter.
- World Bank, World Development Indicators (data updated 8 October 2026); OPEC, "Brief History".
- BBC News: Israel–UAE deal (13 August 2020); Hope probe (9 February 2021); Expo 2020 opening (30 September 2021); Qatar embargo ends (7 January 2021); Mukalla strike and UAE withdrawal (30 December 2025); UAE leaves OPEC (Faisal Islam, April 2026). The National, Expo 2020 visitor total (2 April 2022).
- Al Jazeera: Houthi attack on Abu Dhabi (17 January 2022); profile of Mohamed bin Zayed (14 May 2022); STC leader flees Aden (7 January 2026); Somalia–Saudi defence agreement and Somalia's cancellation of UAE agreements (10 February 2026); IRGC attacks on aluminium plants (29 March 2026).
- US Department of State, "The Abraham Accords" (texts signed 15 September 2020); International Court of Justice, Sudan v. United Arab Emirates, order of 5 May 2025.
Go deeper
- 📘 From Trucial States to United Arab Emirates — Frauke Heard-Bey (1982, later editions; the classic history of the coast's society and politics before and after federation)
- 📘 City of Gold: Dubai and the Dream of Capitalism — Jim Krane (2009; a journalist's lively account of how Dubai was built, and at what cost)
- 📘 The Myth of Arab Piracy in the Gulf — Sultan bin Muhammad Al-Qasimi (the Emirati counter-history of the British "pirate coast")
- 🌐 UNESCO: Cultural Sites of Al Ain (Hafit, Hili and Bida Bint Saud: tombs, towers and aflaj)
- 🌐 ILO: the United Arab Emirates (the labour organisation's country page, with its briefs on migrant-worker law)
- 🌐 Human Rights Watch: United Arab Emirates, World Report 2026 (the critics' case, dated and sourced)
- 🌐 Related pieces in this library: A Brief History of Saudi Arabia and A Brief History of Iran (this series); Islam: From Mecca to Two Billion People; If I Was Born in Saudi Arabia (daily life next door)


A Brief History of Palestine: Olive Trees, Exile, and a Nation Still Waiting for Its State
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How the Arab villagers, townspeople and refugees of a small land between the river and the sea became a nation, lost most of their country in 1948, scattered across the world, and have spent the decades since trying to turn a people into a state.

Companion: A Brief History of Israel: Israelis, Palestinians, and the Land Both Call Home (this series). That piece tells the land's ancient history, Zionism, the State of Israel and the wars between them in depth. This one tells the same century from the side of Palestinian society, and points back to it rather than repeating it.
A note on words: every term in this history is contested. Where the UN, the International Court of Justice (ICJ) or other bodies have made findings, they are quoted, dated and set next to the replies of those who reject them. The UN, the ICJ and most governments call the West Bank, East Jerusalem and Gaza the "Occupied Palestinian Territory", and this piece uses "occupation" in that sense; Israel's government disputes the word for the West Bank, which it calls "disputed" territory or Judea and Samaria. Words such as "martyr", "resistance", "terrorism", "apartheid" and "genocide" are attributed to whoever uses them. Casualty figures say whose count they are.
Every October, when the first rains are close, Palestinian families in the West Bank go out to their olive groves with ladders, tarpaulins and thermoses of sweet tea. Grandparents who can no longer climb sit on mats sorting the fruit; children are let off school to help. The trees, some of them centuries old, are the closest thing Palestinians have to a national symbol that every village shares, and the harvest is as much a family reunion as it is work.
In October 2026 the harvest took place under the worst conditions on record. The UN's humanitarian office, OCHA, reported that between 1 and 26 October there had been 397 settler attacks causing casualties or property damage across the West Bank, "the highest monthly number ... since documentation began in 2006". In one week alone it counted 38 attacks linked to the olive harvest. In Hebron, after two Palestinian gunmen killed two Israeli soldiers at a checkpoint on 23 October, the Israeli army closed the city and ordered families out of two neighbourhoods; the municipality said about 3,000 people had been displaced. Israeli police and the Shin Bet security service, for their part, arrested ten Israelis over settler assaults on a foreign photojournalist and a group of diplomats. In Gaza, a year after a ceasefire, families who had lost their homes were preparing for a third winter in tents.
To understand why, and to understand a people who have kept their identity through all of it, you have to go back a long way: to the villages of Ottoman Palestine, to the newspapers and congresses where a national movement took shape, to 1948, which Israelis remember as their War of Independence and Palestinians as the Nakba, "the catastrophe", and to the camps, the diaspora, the uprisings and the poems that followed.
In this history

The land and its peoples (to 1516)
Ottoman Palestine: villages, towns and families (1516–1917)
A nation takes shape: from the Ottomans to the Mandate (1899–1947)
1948: the Nakba (1947–1949)
Refugees, UNRWA, and Jordanian and Egyptian rule (1948–1967)
The PLO, Fatah and the diaspora (1959–1993)
Palestinian citizens of Israel (1948–2026)
Occupation as daily life (1967–2026)
Intifadas, Oslo and the Palestinian Authority (1987–2006)
Hamas, the 2006 election and the split (1987–2023)
7 October and the Gaza war, from Palestinian society's side (2023–2026)
Statehood, the economy and the present (1974–2026)
Culture: poems, stitches, songs and food
How to understand Palestine today

Part 1 — The land and its peoples (to 1516)
A land of many layers
The land the Palestinians call Filastin runs from the Mediterranean coast to the Jordan River, and from the hills of Galilee to the Negev desert. The companion piece on Israel describes its geography, its names and its ancient history: the Canaanites, the Philistines on the southern coast who gave the land its later name, the Israelite kingdoms, the Jewish revolts against Rome and the Roman decision, after 135 CE, to call the province Syria Palaestina. This part does not retell that story. It asks a different question: who were the ancestors of the people who call themselves Palestinians today?
The honest answer is: almost everyone who ever lived here. Empires came and went, but most of the farmers who worked the land did not leave with them. Over the centuries the villagers of the hills and plains spoke Aramaic, then Greek in the towns, then Arabic; they were pagans, Jews and Samaritans, then mostly Christians under Byzantium, and then, gradually, mostly Muslims. Arab tribes and soldiers, Egyptian peasants, Crusader-era Europeans, Kurds, Turks, Circassians and Bosnians all settled at different times and married in. Palestinian historians and many others stress this continuity: the people did not arrive in the seventh century with the Arab armies, they were Arabised and largely Islamised in place.
Jewish tradition and Zionism stress a different continuity: the bond of the Jewish people, in exile and in the land, with the same hills. The Israel piece is right that both continuities are real. Genetic studies suggest that Palestinians, Jews and other peoples of the Levant share deep common ancestry, though how such studies should be read is itself debated; this history does not rest any argument on them.

Period
Rulers
What it left in Palestinian society

Byzantine (4th–7th c.)
Christian Roman Empire
Churches, monasteries, Palestinian Christian communities still among the oldest in the world

Early Islamic (from 630s)
Rashidun, Umayyad, Abbasid caliphs
Arabic, Islam, the Dome of the Rock and al-Aqsa, the district of Jund Filastin

Fatimid, Seljuk, Crusader (10th–13th c.)
Cairo, Turkish emirs, Latin kings
Wars, fortresses, a mixed population

Ayyubid and Mamluk (1187–1516)
Saladin's heirs, then slave-soldier sultans in Cairo
Jerusalem's madrasas and endowments; the village society that lasted into modern times

Jund Filastin and Ramla
The name Palestine survived in Arabic. After the Arab conquest of the 630s, the caliphs divided Syria into military districts, and one of them was Jund Filastin, "the military district of Palestine". Around the beginning of the eighth century the Umayyad prince Sulayman ibn Abd al-Malik, who governed it before becoming caliph in 715, founded a new capital for the district at Ramla, near the old town of Lydda. Ramla grew into a market town for the grain and fruit of the coastal plain and a centre of weaving, dyeing and pottery, while Jerusalem, al-Quds, "the Holy", remained the religious heart of the land.
For Muslims, Jerusalem is the third holiest city, tied to the Prophet Muhammad's night journey, with the Dome of the Rock and the al-Aqsa Mosque on the platform Muslims call al-Haram al-Sharif and Jews the Temple Mount (see the Israel piece). Christians, and later Muslims, made pilgrimages to the land's holy places, and the towns of Bethlehem, Nazareth and Hebron (al-Khalil, named for Abraham, the "Friend" of God) grew around shrines.
The village world
By the end of the Mamluk period the society that would later call itself Palestinian had taken a recognisable shape: hundreds of hill villages of stone houses, terraced fields of olives, figs, grapes and wheat; market towns where peasants sold their crops; Bedouin tribes in the Negev and the Jordan Valley; scholarly and religious families in Jerusalem, Hebron and Nablus who administered the endowments of the holy places; and small Christian, Jewish and Samaritan communities living alongside the Muslim majority. The Samaritans, who descend from an ancient Israelite people and still keep their own Torah, live today on Mount Gerizim above Nablus, a reminder of how many layers the land holds.

Most of the families who lived in Palestine in 1900 had been there, in one form or another, for as long as anyone could remember. That is the root of the Palestinian claim to the land: not a date of arrival, but the absence of one.

Part 2 — Ottoman Palestine: villages, towns and families (1516–1917)
Four centuries of the sultans
The Ottoman Turks took the land from the Mamluks in 1516–17 and ruled it for four hundred years. "Palestine" was not one Ottoman province. Its districts, sanjaks, of Jerusalem, Nablus, Gaza, Acre and Safed answered at different times to governors in Damascus, Sidon or Beirut, and from the 1870s Jerusalem became a special district answering directly to Istanbul. Yet people in the region, and the Ottoman courts themselves, spoke of Filastin or the Holy Land as a place with a recognisable shape.
How the villages lived
Most Palestinians were fellahin, peasant farmers, who lived in villages led by a headman, the mukhtar, and organised by extended families or clans, the hamula. Land around many villages was held in common and periodically redistributed among families, a system called musha'a. Families married within the village or the clan; land and honour were passed down; feuds and alliances could last generations. Villages and clans across the hill country were loosely divided into two rival factional networks, Qays and Yaman, which had nothing to do with their names' origins in ancient Arabian tribes and everything to do with local power.
The Palestinian historian Beshara Doumani, in Rediscovering Palestine (1995), reconstructed the world of Jabal Nablus, the hill country around Nablus, from 1700 to 1900 through court records and merchants' papers. He found not a stagnant backwater but a busy regional economy: peasants growing olives, cotton and grain; merchants lending money against future harvests; and urban families investing in soap factories.

Town
Known for

Nablus
Olive-oil soap: by 1907 its 30 soap factories supplied half the soap in Palestine

Jaffa
The port; from the mid-1800s, the sweet, nearly seedless Jaffa (Shamouti) orange, developed by Palestinian growers and exported to Europe

Hebron
Glass-blowing, pottery, grapes and the shrine of Abraham

Bethlehem
Mother-of-pearl and olive-wood carving for pilgrims

Majdal (near today's Ashkelon)
Weaving

Jerusalem
Religious offices, schools, pilgrims, the notable families

Strongmen and revolts
Ottoman rule was often indirect. In the eighteenth century a Galilee sheikh, Zahir al-Umar, built what was in effect his own state in northern Palestine. From the 1730s he took Tiberias, then Safed and Nazareth; in 1750 he made the port of Acre his capital, growing rich on cotton sold to French merchants. He was killed in August 1775 when the Ottomans moved against him, and Acre passed to the governor Ahmad Pasha al-Jazzar, who in 1799 held the city against Napoleon. Many Palestinians later looked back on Zahir as a forerunner of local self-rule.
In 1831 the army of Muhammad Ali, the ruler of Egypt, conquered Syria and Palestine under his son Ibrahim Pasha. When Ibrahim ordered the conscription of one in five Muslim men of fighting age in April 1834, the notables of Nablus, Hebron and Jerusalem refused, and from May to August 1834 peasants, townspeople and Bedouin rose in the peasants' revolt, briefly taking Jerusalem before Ibrahim crushed them. The Ottomans returned in 1840.
Reform, land and the world market
The nineteenth century brought the Ottoman reforms called the Tanzimat, consulates, missionary schools, steamships, a railway from Jaffa to Jerusalem (1892) and pilgrims by the thousand. The Land Code of 1858 required land to be registered in individual names. Fearing taxes and conscription, many villagers registered their land in the names of urban notables or merchants, or not at all. The consequence would be felt in the twentieth century, when absentee owners, some of them living in Beirut, could sell land out from under the families who had farmed it for generations.
The largest example was the sale by the Sursock family, Greek Orthodox bankers in Beirut, of much of the fertile Jezreel Valley (Marj Ibn Amer) and land around Haifa Bay to Zionist purchasers, mainly between 1901 and 1925. By one count, 1,746 tenant families, about 8,730 people, were evicted, receiving small compensation. For Zionists, these were legal purchases from willing sellers; for Palestinians, they became the archetype of a peasantry dispossessed by transactions it had no part in.
Christians, Muslims and Jews
Late-Ottoman Palestine was overwhelmingly Arab and Muslim, with a large Christian minority (by the British census of 1922, Christians were about one in ten people) concentrated in Jerusalem, Bethlehem, Nazareth, Ramallah and Jaffa. Christian Palestinians, Orthodox, Catholic and later Protestant, were prominent in trade, education and the press. The old Jewish communities of Jerusalem, Hebron, Safed and Tiberias were joined from 1882 by Zionist immigrants (see the Israel piece). Relations between the long-settled communities were generally peaceful, with the inequalities of Ottoman rule; relations with the new colonies, which bought land and sometimes refused to employ Arab labour, quickly became tense.

In 1900 a Palestinian peasant might have told you that he was a Muslim, from such-and-such a village, of such-and-such a clan, a subject of the sultan and an Arab. Within a generation, many of those same people were calling themselves Palestinians first.

Part 3 — A nation takes shape: from the Ottomans to the Mandate (1899–1947)
"Let Palestine be left alone"
On 1 March 1899 Yusuf Diya al-Khalidi, a former mayor of Jerusalem and a member of the first Ottoman parliament, wrote in French to Zadoc Kahn, the chief rabbi of France, asking that his letter reach Theodor Herzl. He respected the Jews and their history, he wrote, and understood the persecution behind Zionism, but Palestine was already inhabited, and a Jewish state there would provoke resistance. It closes with the plea that Palestinians still quote: "in the name of God, let Palestine be left alone". Herzl replied on 19 March, arguing that Jewish immigration would benefit everyone and asking, "who would think of sending them away?" The exchange is often read today as the conflict's first correspondence.
Newspapers, deputies and identity
After the Young Turk revolution of 1908 restored the Ottoman constitution, Jerusalem elected deputies to the new parliament, among them Yusuf Diya's nephew Ruhi al-Khalidi, who became deputy speaker and in 1911 raised Zionism in a parliamentary debate, arguing against Jewish immigration to Palestine while insisting he was not arguing against Palestine's own Jews. A press flourished. In Haifa, Najib Nassar, a Christian, founded al-Karmil in December 1908 with the stated purpose of "opposing Zionist colonization"; in Jaffa in 1911 the cousins Issa and Yousef El-Issa founded Filastin, whose very name made the argument (see the Israel piece).
The historian Rashid Khalidi, in Palestinian Identity (1997), argues that Palestinians held several overlapping loyalties at once: to their town or village, to Islam or Christianity, to the Ottoman state, to the Arab nation, and increasingly to Palestine as a land with Jerusalem at its centre. Critics of Palestinian nationalism argue that a separate Palestinian national identity emerged mainly in reaction to Zionism and later, after 1948 or 1967. Khalidi and others reply that most national identities, including many in Europe, crystallised in the same decades and against some rival; that reaction does not make an identity less real.
The Mandate from the Palestinian side
When the British took Jerusalem in December 1917 and, in 1922, received a League of Nations Mandate that incorporated the Balfour Declaration (see the Israel piece for its text), Palestinians made up about nine in ten of the population. Most saw the Mandate as a betrayal of wartime promises of Arab independence, and of the principle of self-determination.
They organised quickly. The first Muslim-Christian Association was founded in Jaffa on 8 May 1918, and the associations soon spread to every town: the very name was a statement that Palestinian nationalism included both faiths. From January 1919 to 1928 they convened seven Palestine Arab Congresses, which elected an Arab Executive led for most of the period by the former mayor of Jerusalem, Musa Kazim al-Husseini. Their demands were consistent: independence, a government elected by the majority, an end to the Balfour policy and to mass Jewish immigration.
The British appointed Haj Amin al-Husseini Mufti of Jerusalem in 1921 and head of a new Supreme Muslim Council. Palestinian politics became a rivalry between notable families, above all the Husseinis and the Nashashibis, and between those who sought to work with the British and those who refused. A younger generation founded the pan-Arab Istiqlal (Independence) party in August 1932. Women organised too: in 1929 about 200 women met in Jerusalem for the first Arab Women's Congress.

Year
Palestinian population (approx.)
Jewish share of total
Source

1922
about 660,000 Muslims and Christians of about 750,000
about 11%
British census, as summarised

1946
about 1.24 million Arabs of about 1.85 million
about one third
UN figures cited in the Israel piece

Society and economy
The Mandate decades transformed Palestinian society. Jaffa and Haifa grew into busy modern cities with cinemas, cafés, sports clubs and dozens of newspapers; citrus exports boomed; a professional middle class of teachers, lawyers, clerks and doctors emerged. Rural poverty, debt and land loss continued, and many villagers moved to the cities to work in construction, the ports and British army camps. The Jewish community, the Yishuv, meanwhile built a separate economy, and its labour federation campaigned for "Hebrew labour" in Jewish enterprises, which shut many Arab workers out. Palestinians lacked anything like the Jewish Agency: their leaders refused British offers of a legislative council that would have accepted the Mandate's terms, a choice still debated by Palestinian historians as principled, a mistake, or both.
Al-Qassam and the great revolt
In the early 1930s a Syrian-born preacher in Haifa, Izz ad-Din al-Qassam, organised armed cells among the poor workers and displaced peasants of the city. On 20 November 1935 British police cornered him in the hills near Ya'bad, near Jenin, and killed him and three of his men. His death electrified a younger generation. (Hamas would later name its armed wing after him.)
In April 1936 a general strike began. Shops closed, workers walked out, and for six months, from April to October 1936, Palestinian towns tried to bring the Mandate to a halt; a newly formed Arab Higher Committee under Haj Amin took charge of it. After a British commission under Lord Peel proposed partition in 1937, the revolt resumed as a rural guerrilla war, and in some months rebels controlled much of the hill country.
The British crushed it. They imposed collective fines and curfews, demolished houses, detained thousands in camps, executed rebels and deported five leaders to the Seychelles; Haj Amin fled. In 1945 Britain consolidated its emergency laws into the Defence (Emergency) Regulations, which permitted military courts, house demolitions and detention without trial; Israel later incorporated them into its own law, and amended versions remain part of the legal system in the West Bank.
By one estimate, about one in ten adult Palestinian men aged 20 to 60 was killed, wounded, imprisoned or exiled during the revolt (the Israel piece gives the death tolls). The revolt also turned on itself, with killings of Palestinians accused of collaboration and feuds between rebel bands and the Nashashibi camp. When the revolt ended in 1939, Palestinian society had been disarmed, its leaders scattered and its politics divided, less than a decade before the war that would decide its fate.

Palestinian historians call the revolt of 1936–39 the first intifada before the word existed. It won a British promise, the White Paper of 1939, and lost almost everything else.

Two episodes of these years weigh heavily in Israeli memory and must be named in a Palestinian history too: the killing of 67 Jews in Hebron by Arab rioters in August 1929 (some of the survivors were hidden by Arab neighbours, though how many is debated), and Haj Amin al-Husseini's wartime collaboration with Nazi Germany after he fled to Berlin. Israelis cite both as evidence of an Arab hostility that preceded any Palestinian loss; Palestinians reply that the Mufti did not speak for all Palestinians, and that a people resisting the loss of its country cannot be defined by its worst leaders. Both arguments are taken up in the Israel piece.

Part 4 — 1948: the Nakba (1947–1949)
The partition vote
On 29 November 1947 the UN General Assembly voted to partition Palestine into a Jewish state and an Arab state, with Jerusalem under international rule (the figures and the vote are in the Israel piece). The Arab Higher Committee and the Arab states rejected it. Palestinians saw a plan that gave more than half the land to a third of the population, who then owned a small fraction of it, and that placed some 400,000 Arabs inside the proposed Jewish state. Israelis, and the Zionist leaders who accepted the plan, see the rejection as the moment Palestinians chose war over a state of their own. Both arguments are still made, almost word for word, in 2026.
The war of the villages
Fighting began the next day. From December 1947 to May 1948 a civil war raged between Jewish and Palestinian Arab forces. On the Palestinian side, irregulars were organised in local bands, in the Army of the Holy War led by Abd al-Qadir al-Husseini, and in the Arab League's volunteer Arab Liberation Army. They besieged Jewish Jerusalem and ambushed convoys. But Palestinian society had never recovered from the defeat of 1939. Its forces were poorly armed and uncoordinated, and many of its political leaders were abroad.
On 8 April 1948 Abd al-Qadir was killed in the battle for al-Qastal, a village commanding the road to Jerusalem. The next day came the killing of villagers at Deir Yassin by Irgun and Lehi fighters (see the Israel piece). News of the massacre spread fear across the country. In April and May the mixed cities fell: Tiberias, Haifa, Jaffa, Safed. In Haifa and Jaffa, tens of thousands of Arabs fled by land and sea under attack, many expecting to return when the fighting ended.
On 13 May 1948, the day before Israel's declaration of independence, Arab Legion soldiers and local villagers overran the Jewish settlement bloc of Gush Etzion south of Bethlehem; at Kfar Etzion, of 127 defenders who died, some fifteen were killed after surrendering, by one historian's count. Two weeks later the Jewish Quarter of Jerusalem's Old City surrendered to the Arab Legion; its residents were taken prisoner or evacuated, and the quarter was pillaged and razed. Israelis remember these events as part of the price of 1948, as Palestinians remember Deir Yassin.
15 May and after
On 14 May 1948 Israel declared independence, and the next day the armies of neighbouring Arab states entered. Israelis call what followed the War of Independence: a war of survival against invading armies. Palestinians call the whole of 1947–49 the Nakba, "the catastrophe". Both names describe something that happened.
In the summer and autumn of 1948 the expulsions and flight continued. In July, Israeli forces captured Lydda and Ramle and expelled tens of thousands of inhabitants on foot towards the Arab Legion lines in the heat (the Israel piece gives the figures). In October, during Operation Yoav in the south, soldiers killed villagers at al-Dawayima, near Hebron; the death toll is disputed, from about 30 women and children in a figure the Arab Legion's British commander attributed to a UN report, to "hundreds" in the estimate of the Israeli historian Benny Morris; Israeli commanders at the time ordered the reports of killings checked. At Tantura on the coast, on 22–23 May, the killings of men after the village surrendered were denied for decades, until Israeli veterans described them in a 2022 documentary; how many died is still unknown, with estimates from "dozens" to more than 200.
By the end of the war more than 700,000 Palestinians, about half the Arab population of Mandate Palestine, had become refugees. Between about 400 and 600 villages were emptied, most of them later destroyed. The Palestinian historian Walid Khalidi, in All That Remains (1992), documented 418 of them, with photographs, maps and the names of the families who had lived there.
The historians' argument, from the Palestinian side
Why did they leave? For decades the Israeli official account said that Arab leaders told them to. Palestinian historians, Walid Khalidi first among them in 1959, argued that they were driven out, and Israeli "new historians" working in Israeli archives from the late 1980s found no evidence of a general Arab order to flee and much evidence of expulsions, massacres and fear. They still disagree about whether there was a master plan (the Israel piece sets out the positions of Benny Morris, Ilan Pappé, Nur Masalha, Efraim Karsh and others). For Palestinians, the debate about intentions matters less than one fact on which almost all historians agree: when the war ended, Israel did not let the refugees come back, and their villages were levelled or settled by Jewish immigrants.
The ones who stayed and the ones who governed
About 156,000 Arabs remained inside Israel and became citizens (Part 7). Of the rest of Mandate Palestine, Egypt held the Gaza Strip and Transjordan the West Bank and East Jerusalem. On 22 September 1948 an All-Palestine Government was proclaimed in Egyptian-held Gaza, under the nominal presidency of Haj Amin and with Ahmed Hilmi Pasha as prime minister; recognised by most Arab League members but not by Transjordan, it had no real power and faded away, until Nasser formally dissolved it in 1959. On 1 December 1948, at a conference in Jericho, West Bank notables called for union with Transjordan under King Abdullah. No Palestinian Arab state was created.

Palestinian society, before and after 1948

Arab population of Mandate Palestine, 1946
about 1.2–1.3 million

Became refugees, 1947–49
more than 700,000 (UN at the time: about 726,000)

Villages depopulated
about 400–600 (Khalidi documents 418)

Remained in Israel
about 156,000, of whom about 46,000 were internally displaced

Now under Jordan (West Bank)
about 420,000 residents plus 280,000 refugees

Now under Egypt (Gaza)
Gaza's residents plus about 200,000 refugees

Figures as summarised in the Israel piece and in standard scholarly sources; the Gaza refugee figure is approximate.

In thousands of Palestinian homes from Shatila to Santiago, a large iron key hangs on the wall: the key to a house in a village that no longer exists. It is the Nakba's most common heirloom, and its most stubborn argument.

Part 5 — Refugees, UNRWA, and Jordanian and Egyptian rule (1948–1967)
Tents, then concrete
The refugees of 1948 went wherever the war pushed them: across the hills to the West Bank, down the coast to Gaza, north into Lebanon and Syria, east across the river to Transjordan. At first they lived in tents, caves, mosques, schools and orange-packing sheds. Over the 1950s the tents of the camps were replaced with concrete-block rooms, and the camps became neighbourhoods, crowded, poor and political, with names that every Palestinian knows: Jabalia and Shati in Gaza, Balata near Nablus, Dheisheh near Bethlehem, Ein al-Hilweh and Shatila in Lebanon, Yarmouk in Damascus.
Families often rebuilt their villages inside the camps, settling street by street with former neighbours, and children learned to answer the question "where are you from?" with the name of a village they had never seen.
UNRWA
In December 1949 the UN General Assembly created the UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA), which began work in 1950 with about 750,000 refugees on its books. It was meant to be temporary. It became, in effect, the welfare state of a stateless people: its schools educated generations of refugee children, its clinics vaccinated them, its ration cards fed them. Its definition of a refugee, someone whose normal residence was Palestine between 1 June 1946 and 15 May 1948 and who lost home and livelihood in the conflict, passes to descendants through the male line (see the Israel piece).
By its own figures, some 5.9 million Palestine refugees are now eligible for its services; nearly one-third, more than 1.5 million people, live in 58 recognised camps in Jordan, Lebanon, Syria, Gaza and the West Bank, including East Jerusalem.
UNRWA is one of the most fought-over institutions in the conflict:

Palestinians and its defenders see it as the guarantee of the refugees' status and of their claim to return, and as an essential provider of services that host states and the Palestinian Authority could not replace.
Israel and its critics argue that by registering descendants as refugees, it perpetuates the conflict rather than resettling people, that its textbooks and staff have spread hostility to Israel, and that some of its staff have been members of armed groups. In January 2024 Israel accused a dozen UNRWA employees of taking part in the 7 October attack. A UN internal investigation reported in August 2024 that, for nine staff members, the evidence could indicate they "may have been involved", and UNRWA ended their contracts. An independent review led by the former French foreign minister Catherine Colonna (April 2024) found that UNRWA had "robust" procedures to protect its neutrality but gaps in applying them, and that Israel had not yet provided evidence for its wider claims about staff membership of armed groups.

In October 2024 the Knesset passed laws, by large majorities, barring UNRWA from operating in Israel and banning official contact with it; they took effect in early 2025. On 22 October 2025, in an advisory opinion requested by the General Assembly, the International Court of Justice found by ten votes to one that Israel, as an occupying power, had an obligation to "agree to and facilitate by all means at its disposal relief schemes" for the population, "including relief provided by the United Nations and its entities, in particular" UNRWA, "and not to impede such relief". Israel's Foreign Ministry called the opinion "entirely predictable" and "another political attempt to impose political measures" against Israel "under the guise of 'International Law'", saying that UNRWA "still employs more than 1,400 Hamas operatives". On 5 December 2025 the General Assembly extended UNRWA's mandate to 30 June 2029, by 151 votes to 10, with 14 abstentions, and condemned "the killing and injury of its personnel, including over 300 staff members".
Three host countries, three different lives
Where a refugee family landed decided much of what followed.

Host
Status of Palestinian refugees

Jordan
Given Jordanian citizenship on the same basis as other residents (1949 amendment, 1954 nationality law): the only Arab state to do so broadly. Today a large share of Jordanians are of Palestinian origin; exact figures are politically sensitive and disputed.

Lebanon
Not naturalised. Barred from owning property by a 2001 law and, for decades, from many professions; a 2017 Lebanese census counted about 174,000 Palestinians, far fewer than the number registered with UNRWA.

Syria
Refugees who arrived before 1956 were treated much like Syrians in work, education and health, but not given citizenship. In the civil war after 2011, Yarmouk camp was besieged (Amnesty documented deaths from starvation in 2013–14) and largely destroyed; an estimated 160,000 Palestinians fled it.

Egypt (Gaza)
Gazans, refugees and natives alike, were not given Egyptian citizenship and lived under Egyptian military administration.

The Jordanian West Bank (1948–1967)
On 24 April 1950 Jordan formally annexed the West Bank and East Jerusalem. Almost no state recognised it (Britain and Iraq did, and possibly Pakistan; the Arab League treated Jordan as a temporary trustee). The annexation, with the refugees who crossed the river, roughly tripled Jordan's population, and West Bank Palestinians received half the seats in its parliament.
For many Palestinians, Jordanian rule meant citizenship, passports and a stake in a state; for others, it meant the absorption of the Palestinian cause into the Hashemite monarchy, which suppressed independent Palestinian organisations. On 20 July 1951 King Abdullah was shot dead at the entrance to the al-Aqsa Mosque by a Palestinian gunman, at a time when many Palestinians resented the annexation and rumours of his contacts with Israel. In the 1950s and 1960s many West Bankers moved to Amman and to the oil states of the Gulf. Jordan would finally renounce its claim to the West Bank on 31 July 1988.
Egyptian Gaza (1948–1967)
The Gaza Strip, a coastal sliver about 40 kilometres long, took in over 200,000 refugees, roughly a quarter of all who fled, on top of its own population. Egypt administered it through a military governor and kept the All-Palestine Government as a symbol until 1959. Gaza became the seedbed of Palestinian activism: young refugees joined the Muslim Brotherhood, communist cells and Nasserist groups, and from the early 1950s armed infiltrators, the fedayeen, crossed into Israel, provoking heavy Israeli reprisal raids.
In November 1956, during the Suez war, Israel occupied Gaza for four months. In Khan Younis on 3 November 1956, Israeli soldiers searching for fedayeen killed large numbers of men; a special report by the director of UNRWA cited lists of 275 people "allegedly killed", and a further 111 were reported killed in Rafah days later. Israeli authorities said their troops had met armed resistance. Most Israelis have never heard of these killings; most Gazans have never forgotten them.

For nineteen years, from 1948 to 1967, the West Bank and Gaza were ruled by Arab states, not by Israel, and no Palestinian state was created on them. Israelis often point this out. Palestinians reply that they were never asked.

Part 6 — The PLO, Fatah and the diaspora (1959–1993)
"Palestinians must free themselves"
In the late 1950s a group of young refugees who had studied in Cairo or Beirut and were working as engineers and teachers in Kuwait, among them Yasser Arafat, Khalil al-Wazir (Abu Jihad) and Salah Khalaf (Abu Iyad), founded Fatah, the Palestinian National Liberation Movement, in about 1959. Its idea was simple and new: Palestinians should not wait for Arab armies to liberate their country, but take up the struggle themselves. Fatah marks the start of its armed struggle on 1 January 1965, when its armed wing tried to sabotage Israel's National Water Carrier.
Meanwhile, at a congress in East Jerusalem in May and June 1964, the Arab League sponsored the founding of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), under Ahmad Shukeiri, a lawyer and diplomat. Its Palestinian National Charter, revised in 1968, declared that "Armed struggle is the only way to liberate Palestine" (Article 9), and that "The partition of Palestine in 1947 and the establishment of the state of Israel are entirely illegal" (Article 19). Palestinians saw these as statements of a people's refusal to accept dispossession; Israelis saw a charter for the destruction of their state. In April 1996, after Oslo, the Palestinian National Council voted by 504 to 54 to cancel the articles contrary to the PLO's recognition of Israel, though exactly which articles were cancelled remained disputed until 1998.
Karameh and the rise of the fedayeen
The defeat of the Arab armies in June 1967, which Palestinians call the Naksa, "the setback", discredited the Arab regimes and opened the way for the guerrilla groups. On 21 March 1968 Israeli forces raided the Fatah base at Karameh in Jordan. Fatah fighters and the Jordanian army resisted; the Israelis inflicted far heavier losses than they suffered (estimates of Palestinian dead range from about 100 to 200, against about 30 Israeli soldiers) but withdrew, leaving behind damaged vehicles and tanks that Jordan paraded through Amman. Karameh means "dignity" in Arabic, and Palestinians celebrated it as the first victory over the Israeli army. Thousands of volunteers joined the groups. In February 1969 Arafat was elected chairman of the PLO, which became an umbrella for the factions:

Faction
Founded
Character

Fatah
c. 1959
Nationalist, non-ideological; the PLO's largest faction, led by Arafat and later Abbas

PFLP (Popular Front)
1967
Marxist, led by George Habash; airline hijackings from 1968

DFLP (Democratic Front)
1969
Marxist split from the PFLP, led by Nayef Hawatmeh

Palestinian Islamic Jihad
1980s
Islamist, armed; backed by Iran

The 1970s were the decade in which the world met the Palestinians through hijacked airliners and attacks on civilians, from the PFLP's hijackings to Dawson's Field in Jordan in September 1970 to the killing of Israeli athletes at Munich in 1972 (see the Israel piece). Israel, the United States and many others called the PLO a terrorist organisation; Palestinians called its fighters fedayeen, "those who sacrifice themselves", and its dead shuhada, martyrs. Both labels have stuck to the same people ever since.
Jordan, Lebanon, Tunis
The fedayeen's armed presence turned Jordan into a state within a state. In September 1970, Black September, King Hussein's army attacked the guerrillas and drove them from the kingdom by mid-1971. The PLO moved to Lebanon, where a 1969 Cairo Agreement had already given it control of the refugee camps and the right to operate from the south. In Lebanon it built hospitals, a research centre, newspapers and militias, and was drawn into the country's civil war from 1975. In August 1976, Christian militias overran the besieged Tel al-Zaatar camp in Beirut and killed many of its inhabitants. In 1982 Israel invaded, besieged West Beirut, and some 8,000 PLO fighters were evacuated to Tunisia and elsewhere; weeks later came the massacre at Sabra and Shatila (see the Israel piece). In Tunis, the PLO was far from Palestine. In October 1985 Israeli jets bombed its headquarters there, and on 16 April 1988 Israeli commandos killed Abu Jihad at his home in Tunis.
From the gun to the olive branch
The PLO's diplomatic rise was as striking as its military failures. In October 1974 an Arab League summit in Rabat proclaimed it "the sole legitimate representative of the Palestinian people". On 13 November 1974 Arafat addressed the UN General Assembly, saying, in a widely quoted translation: "Today I have come bearing an olive branch in one hand and a freedom fighter's rifle in another. Do not let the green branch fall from my hand." On 22 November the Assembly recognised the Palestinian people's right to self-determination and gave the PLO observer status (Resolutions 3236 and 3237).
Slowly, through the 1970s and 1980s, the mainstream of the PLO moved from the goal of liberating all of Palestine towards a state in the West Bank and Gaza. On 15 November 1988, in Algiers, the Palestinian National Council proclaimed the State of Palestine, in a declaration written by Mahmoud Darwish, and accepted UN resolutions that implied recognition of Israel. Israelis were sceptical then and many remain so: they note that the PLO's armed factions kept attacking, and argue that the phased approach was a tactic, not a change of heart.
The diaspora
Today, by the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics (PCBS), there are about 15.5 million Palestinians in the world (end of 2025): about 5.56 million in the West Bank and Gaza, about 1.86 million inside Israel, and the rest, roughly 8 million, in exile, about 6.8 million of them in Arab countries. (The PCBS's own release gives a slightly higher diaspora total than its components add up to.)

Where
The story

Jordan
The largest community; citizens, deeply woven into the kingdom's economy and politics

Kuwait and the Gulf
From the 1950s, Palestinian teachers, engineers, doctors and civil servants helped build the oil states. About 350,000–400,000 Palestinians lived in Kuwait before Iraq invaded in August 1990; after the PLO was seen to side with Saddam Hussein, most left or were forced out in 1991. Mahmoud Abbas formally apologised to Kuwait in December 2004.

Lebanon and Syria
Refugee camps, militias, war and repeated displacement

Chile
Probably the largest community outside the Arab world, estimated at 500,000 or more people of Palestinian descent, mostly from Christian families of Bethlehem, Beit Jala and Beit Sahour who emigrated from the late Ottoman years. The football club Palestino, founded in 1920, plays in the Chilean first division in red, green and white.

Central America
Large communities in Honduras and El Salvador; El Salvador's president Nayib Bukele's paternal grandparents were Palestinian Christians from Jerusalem and Bethlehem.

United States and Europe
Scholars, doctors, artists and activists, from the critic Edward Said to Rashida Tlaib, the first Palestinian American woman in Congress (2019)

A Palestinian in Santiago, a Palestinian in Kuwait in 1985 and a Palestinian in Shatila share a name, a cuisine and a memory. They have almost never shared a government.

Part 7 — Palestinian citizens of Israel (1948–2026)
The ones who stayed
The roughly 156,000 Arabs who remained inside Israel in 1949 became its citizens, voters and, from the first Knesset, members of parliament. They were also a defeated and frightened minority. About 46,000 of them, by a UNRWA estimate of 1950, had themselves been displaced from their villages and were not allowed back, even though they now lived a few kilometres away; Israeli law classed them as "present absentees" and their property passed to the state. Until 1966 most Arab citizens lived under military rule, needing permits to travel, while much of their land was expropriated. At Kafr Qasim, on 29 October 1956, Border Police killed 48 villagers returning from the fields (see the Israel piece).
Names and identity
What to call them is itself contested. The Israeli state and many Israeli Jews say "Arab citizens of Israel" or "Israeli Arabs"; many of the people themselves say "Palestinian citizens of Israel", or "the Arabs of '48". Most identify as Arab or Palestinian by nationality and Israeli by citizenship, in varying mixes. One survey in November 2023 asked which component of identity mattered most: 33 per cent said Israeli citizenship, 32 per cent Arab identity, 23 per cent religion and 8 per cent Palestinian identity, though focus groups in the same study suggested Palestinian identity was central. The Druze, whose men are conscripted into the army, and many Bedouin have historically identified more closely with the state.
They number about 2.1 million, about one in five Israelis, according to Israel's Central Bureau of Statistics (2023). Most are Muslim, with Christian and Druze minorities. They live mainly in Galilee (Nazareth is their largest city), the "Triangle" of towns near the Green Line such as Umm al-Fahm, the mixed cities of Haifa, Jaffa, Lod, Ramle and Acre, and the Negev, where an estimated 90,000 Bedouin live in villages the state does not recognise and which often lack connections to water and electricity.
Land Day and October 2000
On 30 March 1976, Arab citizens held a general strike against a government plan to expropriate about 20,000 dunams (20 square kilometres) of land in Galilee, around Sakhnin and Arraba. Police and soldiers killed six Arab protesters. Land Day is marked every year by Palestinians everywhere.
In October 2000, at the start of the second intifada, demonstrations inside Israel turned into riots and clashes, and police killed 13 Arab protesters (12 citizens and one Gazan); one Israeli Jew was also killed. A state commission of inquiry, the Or Commission, found a pattern of government "prejudice and neglect" towards Arab citizens. No police officer was prosecuted.
Between two worlds
Arab citizens have made striking gains, as doctors and pharmacists (a large share of the country's), judges, academics, footballers and entrepreneurs. In 2021 the Islamist party Ra'am joined a governing coalition, a first for an independent Arab party. Yet they also describe discrimination in land, planning, housing and budgets; the 2018 Nation-State Law declared national self-determination in Israel "unique to the Jewish people" (see the Israel piece).
In recent years the greatest killer in Arab communities has been crime. By the count of the Abraham Initiatives, an Arab-Jewish civil society group, 244 Arab citizens were killed in 2023, 230 in 2024 and a record 252 in 2025; police figures for 2025 were slightly lower. Arab leaders blame police neglect and under-policing; the police and government blame criminal organisations.
After 7 October 2023, many Arab citizens were arrested or disciplined for social media posts, and many felt suspected from both sides: by Jewish Israelis, as a potential fifth column; by Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank, as too comfortable. In the general election of 27 October 2026, partial results put Arab-led parties on about 19 of the Knesset's 120 seats, a record, and Likud figures accused them of having "stolen" the election, a claim the Central Elections Committee rejected (see the Israel piece).

Arab citizens of Israel carry Israeli passports and Palestinian memories. In every war between Israel and the Palestinians since 1948, they have had relatives on the other side.

Part 8 — Occupation as daily life (1967–2026)
Under military government
In June 1967 Israel captured the West Bank, East Jerusalem and Gaza (see the Israel piece). About 280,000 to 325,000 Palestinians fled or were displaced, many of them refugees for the second time. Israel annexed East Jerusalem and its surroundings, giving Palestinian Jerusalemites permanent residency, not citizenship (they could apply for citizenship, and few did). The rest of the territory was placed under a military government, which from 1981 ran civilian matters through a Civil Administration. For people in the West Bank, the rules of daily life came from military orders, enforced by military courts.
What this has meant for ordinary Palestinians is described below with sources. Israel's position is that these measures are security responses to terrorism and lawful administration of territory whose final status has not been agreed; Palestinians and most international bodies regard them as the machinery of a prolonged occupation that the ICJ found unlawful in July 2024 (see the Israel piece).
Permits, IDs and checkpoints
Palestinians in the West Bank carry ID cards issued through the Israeli system, and travel to Jerusalem, Israel or abroad requires permits that can be refused or revoked, often on unstated security grounds. Before October 2023, well over 100,000 West Bank Palestinians held permits to work in Israel or in settlements; most of these permits were suspended after 7 October, a large blow to the West Bank economy.
Movement inside the West Bank is shaped by checkpoints, road gates, earth mounds and roadblocks. OCHA documented 925 movement obstacles across the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, as of December 2025 (fact sheet published April 2026, as reported). A journey from a village to the nearest city that takes twenty minutes on an open road can take hours when a gate is closed. Israel says the checkpoints stop attackers and weapons, and that many were introduced in response to waves of attacks.
The separation barrier, begun in 2002 during the second intifada, will be about 708 kilometres long when complete. About 85 per cent of its route runs inside the West Bank rather than on the Green Line, leaving about 9 per cent of West Bank land, and some 25,000 Palestinians, on the Israeli side. Israel credits it with ending suicide bombings; Palestinians call it the "apartheid wall". In 2004 the ICJ found its construction in occupied territory contrary to international law (see the Israel piece).
Land, building and demolitions
Under the Oslo II agreement of 1995, about 60 per cent of the West Bank, Area C, remained under full Israeli control, including most farmland, grazing land and land reserves. Palestinians in Area C and East Jerusalem must obtain Israeli building permits, which are rarely granted; homes, animal shelters, schools and water tanks built without them are demolished. In a single week in October 2026, OCHA reported that Israeli authorities demolished or forced Palestinians to demolish 22 structures "for lack of Israeli-issued building permits", displacing 37 people. Israel says it enforces planning law against illegal construction, as any state would.
Settlements and settlers
By the mid-2020s more than 500,000 Israelis lived in West Bank settlements outside East Jerusalem, and about 246,000 in East Jerusalem (see the Israel piece). In August 2025 Israel approved the long-frozen E1 plan of about 3,400 homes east of Jerusalem, which critics say would cut the West Bank in two; Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich said it "buries the idea of a Palestinian state". The settlements are regarded as illegal under international law by the UN Security Council, the ICJ and most governments; Israel disputes this and says Jews have a right to live in Judea and Samaria, the heartland of their history.
Settler violence has become, for many Palestinian villages, the defining fear. OCHA counted a weekly average of 53 settler attacks causing casualties or property damage in 2026, and then, in October alone, 397 such incidents by the 26th of the month, the most in any month since its records began in 2006. Herding communities in the Jordan Valley and the hills south of Hebron have been emptied: a UN trade and development (UNCTAD) report in September 2026 counted 38 communities emptied of Palestinians since 2023. Israeli governments have condemned specific attacks and police have made arrests; Palestinians and Israeli rights groups say few attackers are ever charged, and that soldiers often stand by or join in.
Detention
Since 1967, by Palestinian estimates, hundreds of thousands of Palestinians have passed through Israeli detention; in many families, every adult man has been arrested at some point. Military courts try West Bank Palestinians, while Israeli settlers living alongside them are tried in civilian courts. Thousands are held at any time in administrative detention, without charge or trial, on evidence they cannot see, which Israel says is necessary when sources cannot be revealed in court. Palestinians call those held asra, prisoners, and regard them as political prisoners; Israel calls them security prisoners, many of them convicted of violent attacks.
Apartheid?
Since 2021, the Israeli group B'Tselem, Human Rights Watch and, in 2022, Amnesty International have described Israel's rule over Palestinians as apartheid. In its July 2024 advisory opinion, the ICJ found that Israel's measures maintaining separation between settlers and Palestinians in the West Bank and East Jerusalem breach Article 3 of the UN convention against racial discrimination, which prohibits "racial segregation and apartheid", without saying which of the two; individual judges read the finding differently. Israel rejects the apartheid charge as a defamation, pointing to the equal citizenship of Arab Israelis and arguing that the West Bank's status results from an unresolved war, not from racial ideology.

"Occupation" in this history is not a slogan. It is a permit office, a closed gate, a demolition order on a goat shed, and a son who has been in detention for a year without being told why. For Israelis, it is also the checkpoint that stopped the bomber. Both are true at the same gate.

Part 9 — Intifadas, Oslo and the Palestinian Authority (1987–2006)
The first intifada, from below
The first intifada, "shaking off", broke out in December 1987 (see the Israel piece for its course and toll). What made it different from anything before was that it came from the society itself, not from the PLO in Tunis. Within weeks a Unified National Leadership of the Uprising, linking Fatah, the left and local activists, began issuing numbered leaflets (the first on 8 January 1988) that set strike days and boycotts. Neighbourhood committees organised food, medical care and underground classes when Israel closed the schools; women's committees, trade unions and student groups ran much of it. Palestinians boycotted Israeli goods, refused to pay taxes and resigned from posts in the Civil Administration. In the Christian town of Beit Sahour, near Bethlehem, residents' refusal to pay taxes in 1989 led the army to seize goods from homes and shops.
The image the world remembers is of boys throwing stones at soldiers; the image many Palestinians remember is of whole towns, for a few years, governing themselves. Israel deployed some 80,000 soldiers and answered with live fire, beatings, mass arrests and curfews. The uprising also turned on itself: an estimated 822 Palestinians were killed by other Palestinians as alleged collaborators between 1988 and April 1994.
Oslo, as Palestinians lived it
At the Madrid conference of 1991, Palestinians from the occupied territories, among them the Gaza doctor Haidar Abdel-Shafi and the academic Hanan Ashrawi, spoke for their people to the world. Then came the secret talks in Norway and the handshake on the White House lawn on 13 September 1993 (see the Israel piece). In July 1994 Arafat returned from exile to Gaza to crowds in the streets. For a few years Palestinians had something they had never had: their own police, ministries, passports, a flag, stamps, and in January 1996 elections, in which Arafat won 88 per cent of the vote for president and Fatah dominated the 88-seat Legislative Council; Hamas boycotted.
But the promised state did not come. The interim period stretched on; settlements kept growing; Israel's closure of the territories after suicide bombings cut workers off from jobs; the West Bank was divided into Areas A, B and C, with Palestinian cities as islands in Israeli-controlled land. Arafat's Palestinian Authority (PA) became known for corruption, patronage and a dozen overlapping security services; critics in Palestinian society, from human rights groups to students, were arrested. Many Palestinians concluded that Oslo had given them responsibility without sovereignty. Israelis, for their part, concluded that land handed to the PA had become a base for the bombers who blew up buses in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv, and that Arafat had never truly abandoned violence.

Oslo gave Palestinians a flag, a police force and an elected president. It did not give them a border, a capital or an end to settlement building, and for most Palestinians that became the measure of it.

The second intifada
After the Camp David summit failed in July 2000 and Ariel Sharon visited the Haram al-Sharif in September, the second, al-Aqsa intifada began (see the Israel piece). It was a war, not a civil uprising. Palestinian groups, among them Hamas, Islamic Jihad and Fatah's own al-Aqsa Martyrs' Brigades, carried out suicide bombings and shootings that killed about 1,000 Israelis, most of them civilians; on 27 March 2002 a Hamas bomber killed 30 people at a Passover meal at the Park Hotel in Netanya. Israel reoccupied the West Bank cities in Operation Defensive Shield from 29 March 2002. In the battle for Jenin refugee camp in April, 52 Palestinians were killed (Israel said most were militants; Human Rights Watch counted 22 civilians) and 23 Israeli soldiers. Between about 3,200 and 3,350 Palestinians were killed in the intifada as a whole.
Palestinian society paid in curfews, sieges, demolished homes, thousands of prisoners, and economic collapse. Many Palestinians, including some of the uprising's own leaders, later called the militarisation of the intifada a catastrophic mistake, one that destroyed the Israeli peace camp and the Palestinian economy without bringing a state any closer. Others still see the armed struggle as legitimate resistance to an occupation that negotiations had failed to end.
Arafat spent his last years besieged by the Israeli army in his compound, the Muqata, in Ramallah. He died in a French military hospital near Paris on 11 November 2004, and was buried in Ramallah. Mahmoud Abbas, a long-time critic of the armed intifada, won the presidential election of January 2005 with 62.5 per cent of all votes cast (67.4 per cent of valid votes). The most popular Fatah leader of the younger generation, Marwan Barghouti, was in an Israeli prison: arrested in April 2002, he was convicted in 2004 on five counts of murder and sentenced to five life terms plus 40 years; he refused to recognise the court and denied the charges. He has been there ever since.

Part 10 — Hamas, the 2006 election and the split (1987–2023)
From charity to movement
Hamas, the Arabic acronym of the Islamic Resistance Movement (the word also means "zeal"), grew out of the Muslim Brotherhood in Gaza. In 1973 the wheelchair-bound preacher Sheikh Ahmed Yassin founded an Islamic charity, the Mujama al-Islami, which ran mosques, clinics, kindergartens and sports clubs; several former Israeli officials later said Israel tolerated or even helped fund it as a counterweight to the secular PLO. In December 1987, days into the first intifada, the Brotherhood in Gaza took the name Hamas and joined the uprising. Unlike Fatah, it never joined the PLO.
Its founding charter, signed on 18 August 1988, is quoted here because it matters to how Israelis see the movement. It describes Palestine as "an Islamic Waqf consecrated for future Moslem generations until Judgement Day" (Article 11), says that "There is no solution for the Palestinian question except through Jihad" (Article 13), quotes a hadith saying the Day of Judgement will not come "until Moslems fight the Jews (killing the Jews)" (Article 7), and cites the forged Protocols of the Elders of Zion (Article 32).
In 2017 Hamas issued a Document of General Principles and Policies. It states that "its conflict is with the Zionist project not with the Jews because of their religion" (paragraph 16), that "There shall be no recognition of the legitimacy of the Zionist entity" (19), and that while it "rejects any alternative to the full and complete liberation of Palestine, from the river to the sea", it considers a "fully sovereign and independent Palestinian state, with Jerusalem as its capital along the lines of the 4th of June 1967", with the return of the refugees, "to be a formula of national consensus" (20). It calls armed resistance "the strategic choice" (25). Hamas leaders described the 1988 charter as a historical document but did not formally revoke it.

Reading
What they emphasise

Hamas and its supporters
A national liberation movement, Islamic in character, resisting occupation; the 2017 document shows pragmatism

Israel, the US, the EU, the UK and others
A terrorist organisation (their designation), committed to Israel's destruction; the 2017 document changed words, not aims, as 7 October showed

Many Palestinian critics
A movement that won support through charity and its reputation for honesty, then ruled Gaza by force and led it into catastrophe

Through the 1990s and 2000s Hamas's suicide bombings did more than anything else to turn Israelis against Oslo. Israel killed its leaders in turn: Yassin was killed by a helicopter missile in Gaza on 22 March 2004.
The election of 2006
On 25 January 2006, in elections for the Palestinian Legislative Council, Hamas's Change and Reform list won 44.45 per cent of the national list vote and 74 of the 132 seats; Fatah won 41.43 per cent and 45 seats. Turnout was about three-quarters. European Union observers found "nothing which would indicate that the final result was not the outcome chosen by the voters". Many Palestinians had voted against Fatah's corruption and failure as much as for Hamas's programme.
Ismail Haniyeh of Hamas became prime minister. Israel, the United States and the EU declared they would not deal with a Hamas government unless it recognised Israel, renounced violence and accepted past agreements; aid was suspended and Israel withheld the tax revenues it collected for the PA (see the Israel piece). Fighting between Hamas and Fatah grew. A unity government formed after the Mecca Agreement of 8 February 2007 lasted three months.
The split
In the battle of Gaza, 7–15 June 2007, Hamas fighters overran the Fatah-dominated security forces; the Palestinian Centre for Human Rights counted at least 161 people killed. Abbas dismissed the Hamas government and appointed the economist Salam Fayyad prime minister in Ramallah. Since then there have been, in effect, two Palestinian administrations: Fatah and the PA in the West Bank cities, Hamas in Gaza. No national election has been held since 2006: elections called for 2021 were postponed on 29 April 2021, with Abbas citing Israel's refusal to allow voting in East Jerusalem. Reconciliation deals, the most recent signed by 14 factions in Beijing on 23 July 2024, have not been carried out.
Hamas in Gaza, 2007–2023
Hamas built a government in Gaza with ministries, police and courts, paid for by taxes, by smuggling through tunnels under the Egyptian border, and later by Qatari-funded payments. Under the Israeli and Egyptian blockade (see the Israel piece), Gaza's economy shrank, electricity ran for a few hours a day, and most young people could not leave. Four wars, in 2008–09, 2012, 2014 and 2021, killed thousands of Gazans and about a hundred people in Israel (see the Israel piece).
Under both governments, dissent was dangerous. In a 2018 report, Two Authorities, One Way, Zero Dissent, Human Rights Watch documented arbitrary arrests and torture of critics by the PA in the West Bank and by Hamas in Gaza; both rejected its findings. In 2019 Gazans protesting tax increases under the slogan "We want to live" were beaten and arrested by Hamas security forces.
The Great March of Return, from 30 March 2018 to the end of 2019, brought tens of thousands of Gazans to the border fence each Friday to demand the right of return and an end to the blockade. Israeli fire killed at least 189 people by the end of 2018, by the count of a UN commission of inquiry, which found that at least 29 of them were members of armed groups and that the shootings "may have constituted war crimes and crimes against humanity". Israel said Hamas used the protests as cover for attacks and attempts to breach the fence, and rejected the report.

By 2023, a Palestinian of thirty in Gaza had never voted, had probably never left the Strip, and had lived through four wars. A Palestinian of thirty in Ramallah had never voted either.

Part 11 — 7 October and the Gaza war, from Palestinian society's side (2023–2026)
The attack
The Israel piece describes the attack of 7 October 2023 in detail: about 1,200 people killed in Israel, most of them civilians, killings of families in their homes and at the Nova festival, and 251 people taken into Gaza as hostages. For Israelis it was the worst massacre of Jews since the Holocaust; Israel, the US, the EU, the UK and many other governments call it terrorism. Hamas called it a response to the occupation, the blockade and threats to al-Aqsa.
How Palestinians saw the attack, in the weeks that followed, was measured by the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research (PCPSR) in Ramallah. In its poll of 22 November to 2 December 2023, 72 per cent of respondents said Hamas's decision to launch the attack was "correct" (82 per cent in the West Bank, 57 per cent in Gaza). More than 90 per cent said they believed Hamas fighters had not committed the atrocities shown in videos, which most had not seen, and a majority said that attacking civilians in their homes was not permissible. The pollsters read the result as support for a blow against occupation rather than for killing civilians; many Israelis read it as support for the massacre itself. By August 2026, PCPSR found satisfaction with Hamas's conduct of the war down to 42 per cent, from 60 per cent in an earlier poll.
The war, as Gazans lived it
The war that followed was the most destructive in Palestinian history (the Israel piece gives the figures, sources and court cases). For Gaza's 2.1 million people it meant:

Measure
Figure
Whose count

Killed in Gaza
more than 70,000, including about 20,000 children
UN agencies, citing the Gaza Ministry of Health, 5 October 2026

Children killed
18,592
Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics, end of 2025

Hospitals damaged
94%; 19 of 36 partially functioning
WHO, as cited by PCBS, end of 2025

Population change
down about 254,000 (10.6%); about 100,000 left the Strip
PCBS, end of 2025

Killed since the October 2025 ceasefire
1,559 (to 26 October 2026)
Gaza Ministry of Health, via OCHA

The Gaza ministry, which operates under the Hamas-run authorities, does not distinguish civilians from fighters; Israel says it has killed many thousands of Hamas fighters and that Hamas fought from tunnels, homes, schools and hospitals and used civilians as shields. Hamas and Palestinian survivors describe a population with nowhere safe to go, ordered repeatedly from north to south and back.
Almost everyone was displaced, many families again and again, into tents and classrooms. In May 2025 an Israeli- and American-backed private group, the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, began distributing food from a few fortified sites; the UN human rights office counted at least 1,373 Palestinians killed while seeking food between 27 May and 31 July, 859 of them near the foundation's sites. The foundation denied that its operations caused the deaths. In August 2025 the UN-backed IPC declared famine in Gaza Governorate, which Israel disputed (see the Israel piece).
The words for all this are themselves contested. Palestinians, South Africa in its case at the ICJ, and a UN Commission of Inquiry (September 2025) have called Israel's conduct genocide; Israel "categorically rejected" the commission's report as "distorted and false", and the ICJ case has not been decided (see the Israel piece). Gazans call their dead shuhada, martyrs, a word used in Arabic for anyone killed in war or by an enemy, not only fighters.
Gaza's writers and journalists became its chroniclers, and many were killed. The Committee to Protect Journalists counted roughly 250 journalists and media workers killed in the region by mid-2026, after removing from its list a number who it found had taken part in combat. The poet and teacher Refaat Alareer was killed in an airstrike on 6 December 2023; his poem "If I Must Die" was read around the world. The poet Mosab Abu Toha, who was detained by Israeli soldiers while fleeing with his family in 2023, won the 2025 Pulitzer Prize for commentary for his essays in The New Yorker. The Voice of Hind Rajab, a film about a six-year-old girl killed in Gaza in January 2024, won the Silver Lion at Venice in 2025.
Ceasefire without peace
Under the US plan, a ceasefire took effect on 10 October 2025, and the last living hostages were exchanged for about 1,968 Palestinian prisoners and detainees (see the Israel piece). Families in the West Bank and Gaza celebrated the return of sons and fathers; Israelis noted that some of those released had been convicted of murder. In the days after the ceasefire, Hamas gunmen publicly executed men they accused of collaborating with Israel; the PA called the killings "heinous", and the Gaza rights group Al Mezan called them extrajudicial executions.
A year later, Israeli forces held a large part of Gaza behind the "yellow line"; Hamas had announced on 6 July 2026 that its civilian administration would resign in favour of a technocratic National Committee for the Administration of Gaza endorsed by the UN Security Council, but it had not disarmed. OCHA reported in late October 2026 that respiratory infections accounted for 60 per cent of medical consultations as families faced another winter under plastic sheeting.

In Gaza in 2026 the question is no longer who rules. It is where to sleep, how to find clean water, and whether the rubble will ever be cleared.

Part 12 — Statehood, the economy and the present (1974–2026)
The long road at the UN

Date
Step

22 November 1974
PLO granted observer status at the UN (Resolution 3237)

15 November 1988
Declaration of the State of Palestine in Algiers; 78 states had recognised it by the end of 1988

October 2011
Palestine admitted to UNESCO

29 November 2012
UN General Assembly makes Palestine a "non-member observer State" (Resolution 67/19)

December 2014
Palestine moves to accept the jurisdiction of the International Criminal Court

April 2024
The US vetoes full UN membership in the Security Council

10 May 2024
General Assembly resolution ES-10/23 finds Palestine qualified for membership and grants it extra rights, including a seat among members

May 2024
Ireland, Norway and Spain recognise Palestine together

21–22 September 2025
The UK, Canada, Australia and Portugal, then France and others, recognise Palestine

5 January 2026
Palestine's embassy opens in London

By September 2025, 157 of the 193 UN member states recognised the State of Palestine (Wikipedia's tally, matched by Full Fact's tracker updated 28 May 2026). This history found no further recognitions in 2026 up to the end of October; Japan and Italy have indicated that they would recognise once conditions are met. The United States, Germany and Israel's other close allies do not. Recognition gave Palestinians embassies, symbolism and legal standing; it did not move a single checkpoint.
The economy
Palestinian economic life has always depended on Israel: the 1994 Paris Protocol put the territories in a customs union with Israel, which collects import duties and taxes on the PA's behalf and transfers them monthly as "clearance revenues", more than two-thirds of the PA's income. Israel has repeatedly withheld these funds, partly in response to the PA's payments to prisoners and families of those killed, which Israel calls "pay-for-slay" and Palestinians call social support for families. UNCTAD counted $3.67 billion withheld or deducted between January 2019 and March 2026, and reported that transfers were stopped entirely from May 2025 into 2026, leaving the PA unable to pay full salaries.

Measure
Figure
Source

GDP per capita, West Bank and Gaza
$3,800 (2022); $3,028 (2024); $3,171 (2025)
World Bank, data updated October 2026

Economic growth
−22.9% (2024); +4.3% (2025)
World Bank

Gaza GDP per capita
$212 (2025)
UNCTAD, September 2026

Gaza unemployment
78%
UNCTAD, September 2026

Estimated reconstruction needs
$71.5 billion
UNCTAD, September 2026

PA public debt
$4.8 billion
UNCTAD, September 2026

In February 2025 Abbas issued a decree moving prisoner payments to a needs-based welfare system. The US State Department called the change a "deception" and reported in April 2026 that the payments continued "under a different name"; Israel says the policy is unchanged.
Politics in late 2026
Mahmoud Abbas, born in 1935, has been president since 2005; his elected term expired in 2009. In April 2025 he appointed Hussein al-Sheikh, who for eighteen years had headed the PA's civil affairs authority, which deals with Israel over permits, as the State of Palestine's first vice-president; many Palestinians see him as too close to Israel. On 9 July 2026 he set elections for an enlarged, 200-seat Legislative Council for 28 November 2026; on 9 October he postponed them to 11 September 2027, alongside a presidential vote, with the PLO leadership saying that conditions were "not conducive" because Israel had not allowed election materials or observers into Gaza. Israel's foreign minister, Gideon Sa'ar, called this "yet another ridiculous lie"; Hamas called the postponement "a step in the right direction".
PCPSR's poll of 5–8 August 2026 (1,270 respondents, margin of error 3.5 points) caught the mood:

Question
Result

Support for Hamas / Fatah
24% / 24% (Hamas down from 35%)

Neither deserves to lead
44%

Want Abbas to resign
79%

Preferred successor
Marwan Barghouti 39%, Khalil al-Hayya (Hamas) 16%, Mohammed Dahlan 15%

Oppose Hamas disarming before a full Israeli withdrawal
72%

Support a two-state solution
44% for, 50% against

At Fatah's congress in May 2026 Barghouti, still in prison, was re-elected to the movement's Central Committee with the most votes of any candidate. Israel refused to release him in the 2011 and 2025 exchanges, and regards him as a convicted murderer; some of his supporters call him the Palestinian Mandela.

Part 13 — Culture: poems, stitches, songs and food
The poets
No people has leaned on poetry quite as Palestinians have. Mahmoud Darwish (1941–2008) was born in al-Birwa in Galilee, a village destroyed in 1948; his family fled to Lebanon and came back as "present absentees". In 1964 he wrote "Identity Card", with its refrain "Write down: I am an Arab", addressed to an Israeli official; he read it to a crowd in Nazareth in 1965. He went into exile, joined the PLO, wrote the 1988 Declaration of Independence, and resigned from the PLO executive over Oslo. Late in life he called the fighting between Fatah and Hamas "a suicide attempt in the streets". He died in Houston on 9 August 2008 and is buried in Ramallah.
Fadwa Tuqan of Nablus, "the poet of Palestine", wrote of women's lives and occupation. Ghassan Kanafani (1936–1972), born in Acre, wrote the novella Men in the Sun (1962), in which three refugees try to cross the desert to Kuwait hidden in an empty water tank, and die there without anyone hearing them; it became the parable of a people dying quietly. Kanafani was also the spokesman of the PFLP. He was killed with his teenage niece, Lamees, by a car bomb in Beirut on 8 July 1972, which is widely attributed to Israel's Mossad.
Pictures and ideas
The cartoonist Naji al-Ali drew Handala, a barefoot ten-year-old refugee boy who first appeared in 1969, turned his back to the viewer from 1973, and became the most recognised image of Palestinian refugeehood. Al-Ali was shot in London on 22 July 1987 and died five weeks later. Edward Said (1935–2003), born in Jerusalem and a professor at Columbia, wrote Orientalism (1978), one of the most influential books of modern scholarship, and The Question of Palestine. The painter Sliman Mansour (1947–2026), who died in August 2026, painted women in village dress and tree-filled landscapes, and became the artist of sumud, steadfastness. The Palestinian Museum in Birzeit, opened in 2016, holds the national story in a hillside building among terraces.
Stitches, songs and screens

Art
Highlights

Embroidery (tatreez)
Cross-stitched dresses whose colours and motifs once told which village a woman came from; inscribed by UNESCO on its list of intangible heritage in 2021

Music
Le Trio Joubran, three oud-playing brothers from Nazareth; the hip-hop group DAM, founded in Lod in 1999; Mohammed Assaf, a wedding singer from Khan Younis camp who won Arab Idol in 2013

Dance
The dabke, a line dance at every wedding

Film
Elia Suleiman's Divine Intervention (Cannes Jury Prize, 2002); No Other Land (2024), made by a Palestinian-Israeli collective, which won the Academy Award for best documentary

Sport
Club Deportivo Palestino of Santiago, Chile

Food
Palestinian cooking is the food of the olive and the wheat field: musakhan, taboon bread soaked in olive oil and covered with onions, sumac and roast chicken, traditionally made when the new oil is pressed; maqluba, "upside down", rice, meat and fried vegetables turned out of the pot at the table; knafeh from Nablus; za'atar and oil for breakfast. Israelis and Palestinians also argue over who owns hummus and falafel, dishes shared across the Levant.

A Palestinian grandmother who cannot return to her village can still embroider its pattern on a dress and cook its dish on a feast day. Culture has been the one homeland nobody could take away.

Part 14 — How to understand Palestine today
Voices
A refugee in Lebanon. My grandfather came from a village near Acre in 1948. We still live in the camp, we cannot own property, and we are barred from many jobs. The world talks about a state in the West Bank, but what about us?
A farmer near Nablus. The olive trees are my family's. I need permission to reach some of them, and settlers have burned others. The Palestinian Authority does not protect me, and Israel does not want me here. I am staying.
A woman in Gaza. I have lost my home, my brothers and my children's school. I did not choose 7 October or Hamas's government, and I did not choose the bombs. I want my children to live.
A Palestinian citizen of Israel. I am a doctor in an Israeli hospital. I treat Jewish and Arab patients. My cousins are refugees in Syria. I am trusted at work and suspected at the airport.
An Israeli reading this history. I see the suffering, but this account must also remember the suicide bombings, the rockets, the charter, and 7 October. Every time we left land, from southern Lebanon to Gaza, it was used to attack us. I want to know who will guarantee that a Palestinian state is not a base for the next war.
Five ideas to keep in mind

A people before a state. Palestinians have a national identity without ever having had full sovereignty; their history is one of institutions in exile.
1948 is not the past. For most Palestinians the refugee question, the keys and the villages are present-day facts, not history.
Divided geography, divided politics. Gaza, the West Bank, East Jerusalem, Israel and the diaspora have lived under different rulers since 1948, and since 2007 under rival Palestinian governments.
Two traumas, one land. Israelis' fear and Palestinians' dispossession feed each other; each side's security measures are the other's grievance.
Words are positions. Occupation, disputed, terrorism, resistance, martyr, apartheid, genocide: each word carries a judgment, and people of good faith use different ones.

Key dates

Date
Event

1516
Ottoman conquest

1911
Filastin newspaper founded in Jaffa

2 November 1917
Balfour Declaration

1936–1939
Great Arab Revolt

29 November 1947
UN partition plan

1947–1949
The Nakba; Israel's War of Independence

24 April 1950
Jordan annexes the West Bank

1959
Fatah founded

1964
PLO founded

June 1967
The Naksa; occupation of West Bank, East Jerusalem and Gaza

September 1970
Black September in Jordan

30 March 1976
Land Day

1982
PLO leaves Beirut; Sabra and Shatila

December 1987
First intifada begins; Hamas founded

15 November 1988
Declaration of the State of Palestine

13 September 1993
Oslo Accords signed

September 2000
Second intifada begins

25 January 2006
Hamas wins legislative elections

June 2007
Hamas takes Gaza; the split

29 November 2012
Palestine becomes a UN non-member observer state

7 October 2023
Hamas-led attack on Israel; Gaza war begins

September 2025
UK, France, Canada, Australia and others recognise Palestine

10 October 2025
Gaza ceasefire takes effect

9 October 2026
Palestinian elections postponed to September 2027

Who's who

Person
Lived
Why they matter

Haj Amin al-Husseini
c. 1897–1974
Grand Mufti, Mandate-era leader; collaborated with Nazi Germany

Yasser Arafat
1929–2004
Founder of Fatah, PLO chairman, first PA president

Khalil al-Wazir (Abu Jihad)
1935–1988
Fatah co-founder; killed in Tunis

George Habash
1926–2008
Founder of the PFLP

Ahmed Yassin
c. 1936–2004
Founder of Hamas

Mahmoud Abbas
b. 1935
PA president since 2005

Marwan Barghouti
b. 1959
Fatah leader serving life sentences in Israel; most popular successor in polls

Ismail Haniyeh
1962–2024
Hamas prime minister and leader; killed in Tehran in July 2024

Yahya Sinwar
1962–2024
Hamas leader in Gaza; architect of 7 October

Mahmoud Darwish
1941–2008
National poet

Ghassan Kanafani
1936–1972
Novelist and PFLP spokesman

Edward Said
1935–2003
Critic and scholar

Palestinians have spent more than seventy-five years being told to wait: for the Arab armies, for the UN, for Oslo, for the next election. The olive trees, at least, keep their own calendar.

The takeaway
Palestinian history is the story of an Arab people of farmers, merchants and townspeople who became a nation in the same decades that another people built a state on the same land. In 1948 most of them lost their homes; since then they have lived as refugees, as citizens of Israel, under Jordanian, Egyptian and Israeli rule, and in a diaspora that reaches from Kuwait to Chile. They built a national movement in exile, fought, negotiated, won recognition from most of the world, and divided against themselves. Israelis remember the same century through the Holocaust, the wars and the terror attacks, and both memories are real. In late 2026 Palestinians have a flag, embassies and 157 recognitions, but no sovereignty, no elected leadership, and, in Gaza, barely a roof.
Try this: Read the Israel piece and this one side by side, and pick a single year, 1948, 1967, 1993, 2000 or 2023. Write one paragraph describing it as an Israeli family would and one as a Palestinian family would, without using any of the contested words in Part 14's fifth idea. Then decide which words you need to add back, and notice what each one changes.
Sources & Further Reading
Sources

Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics, Palestinians at the End of 2025 (press release, December 2025).
UN OCHA occupied Palestinian territory: Humanitarian Situation Reports (22 and 29 October 2026); West Bank monthly snapshot (September 2026); Gaza reported impact snapshot (28 October 2026).
UNRWA, "Palestine refugees" and camp profiles (2026); UN General Assembly, press summary of 5 December 2025.
International Court of Justice, advisory opinions of 19 July 2024 and 22 October 2025; Israel Ministry of Foreign Affairs response, 22 October 2025.
UN OHCHR, statement on killings of people seeking aid in Gaza (1 August 2025).
UNCTAD, report on assistance to the Palestinian people, press release of 24 September 2026; World Bank, World Development Indicators (West Bank and Gaza), updated October 2026.
Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research, Public Opinion Polls No. 90 (December 2023) and No. 97 (August 2026).
Hamas Covenant (1988), Avalon Project, Yale Law School; Hamas, A Document of General Principles and Policies (2017), full text as published by Middle East Eye; Palestinian National Charter (1968), Avalon Project.
Human Rights Watch, Two Authorities, One Way, Zero Dissent (2018) and A Threshold Crossed (2021); Amnesty International (2022); B'Tselem (2021).
UN Commission of Inquiry on the 2018 Gaza protests (2019).
AP and WAFA (10 October 2026), The National (July 2026), Al Jazeera (20 October 2026), and Times of Israel/TPS reporting as cited in the text.
Wikipedia articles on the people, places and events named, used for background and cross-checking.

Go deeper

📘 Rashid Khalidi, The Hundred Years' War on Palestine (2020). A Palestinian historian's account of the conflict as settler colonialism, drawing on his own family's papers; Israeli critics dispute its framing.
📘 Rashid Khalidi, Palestinian Identity: The Construction of Modern National Consciousness (1997). The classic study of how a national identity formed before 1948.
📘 Beshara Doumani, Rediscovering Palestine: Merchants and Peasants in Jabal Nablus, 1700–1900 (1995). Ottoman Palestine from its own archives.
📘 Walid Khalidi (ed.), All That Remains (1992). The villages depopulated in 1948, one by one.
📘 Benny Morris, The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem Revisited (2004). The Israeli historian's documentary study of 1948.
📘 Sandy Tolan, The Lemon Tree (2006). One house in Ramla, one Palestinian family and one Israeli family.
📘 Mahmoud Darwish, Unfortunately, It Was Paradise: Selected Poems; Ghassan Kanafani, Men in the Sun and Other Palestinian Stories.
🌐 UN OCHA, occupied Palestinian territory: weekly figures on Gaza and the West Bank.
🌐 Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research: the longest-running Palestinian opinion polls.
🌐 Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics: population and economic data.
🌐 UNRWA: the refugee agency's figures and camp profiles.
🌐 The Avalon Project, Yale Law School: full texts of the PLO and Hamas charters and other founding documents.
🎧 The oud recordings of Le Trio Joubran; the hip-hop of DAM; Mohammed Assaf's Arab Idol performances (2013).
▶️ No Other Land (2024, documentary); Elia Suleiman, Divine Intervention (2002); Kaouther Ben Hania, The Voice of Hind Rajab (2025).

Related pieces in this library: A Brief History of Israel: Israelis, Palestinians, and the Land Both Call Home; Islam: From Mecca to Two Billion People; Judaism: A People, a Covenant and a Conversation Across 3,000 Years; Christianity: From a Galilean Teacher to More Than Two Billion People; A Brief History of Saudi Arabia: Incense Roads, the Prophet's Cities, a Desert Dynasty and the Oil Age; A Brief History of Iran: Empire, Faith, Revolution, and the Long Argument over Who Rules.


A Brief History of Korea: One People, Two States, and the Line Between Them
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
How one people built kingdoms that lasted a thousand years, invented their own alphabet, lost their country to Japan, and were cut in two by foreign powers in 1945; and how the two states born from that cut, one among the world's richest democracies and one among its most closed dictatorships, have grown apart ever since.

Follows: South Korea: A Condensed History of Division, Speed, and Reinvention
Companion piece: If I Was Born in South Korea: Tech, Hagwons, and the Bond of Jeong (what daily life in the South feels like now; this is how it got that way, and what happened on the other side of the line).
Some time between 19 and 23 January 2024, North Korea tore down one of its best-known monuments. The Arch of Reunification, about 30 metres tall, spanned the highway heading south out of Pyongyang towards Kaesong: two giant women in traditional dress, leaning towards each other and holding up between them a map of a single Korea. It had been completed in 2001. A few days earlier, the North's leader, Kim Jong Un, had told his parliament that South Korea was no longer a lost half of the nation waiting to be reunited, but the North's "primary foe and invariable principal enemy." He called the arch an eyesore. Satellite images soon showed it gone.
Less than a year later, on the night of 3 December 2024, the president of South Korea went on television and declared martial law. Soldiers in helicopters landed outside the National Assembly in Seoul. Thousands of citizens ran there to stop them, and lawmakers climbed the fences to get inside and vote. Within about six hours the order had been voted down and withdrawn. Within four months the president had been removed from office, and in February 2026 a court sentenced him to life in prison.
Those two scenes, a dictatorship erasing the idea of one Korea and a democracy defending itself in the street, are as far apart as two countries can be. Yet for more than a thousand years before 1945 they were one country, with one language and one royal court, and for the last five centuries of it, one border along the Yalu and Tumen rivers. This history tells that shared story first, then the moment the line was drawn, and then each state on its own terms. Because Korea is now two nations, it is longer than most pieces in this series.
Much of this history is argued over: between Korea and Japan, between Korea and China, between North and South, and inside South Korea between its two political camps. Where it is, this piece says who holds which view, and what the evidence shows.
In this history

The land, the legend and Gojoseon (to 108 BCE)
Three kingdoms, Unified Silla and Balhae (57 BCE–935)
Goryeo, the Mongols and the printed word (918–1392)
Joseon I: the Confucian kingdom and the alphabet (1392–1592)
Joseon II: invasions, the Manchus and the closed door (1592–1876)
The opening and the Korean Empire (1876–1910)
Colony: the first decades of Japanese rule (1910–1937)
Total war: mobilisation, forced labour and the "comfort women" (1937–1945)
Liberation and division (1945–1948)
The Korean War (1950–1953)
South Korea: from Rhee to Park (1948–1979)
South Korea: Gwangju and the road to democracy (1979–1997)
South Korea: crash, Sunshine and the Korean wave (1997–2022)
South Korea: martial law and after (2022–2026)
North Korea: Kim Il Sung's state (1945–1994)
North Korea: famine, military first and the bomb (1994–2011)
North Korea: Kim Jong Un and the "two hostile states" (2011–2026)
Inside North Korea: rights, markets and daily life
Two Koreas side by side
How to understand Korea today

Part 1 — The land, the legend and Gojoseon (to 108 BCE)
A peninsula between giants
Korea is a mountainous peninsula on the north-eastern edge of Asia. To the north, the Yalu and Tumen rivers separate it from China, and for a short stretch near the mouth of the Tumen, from Russia. To the west lies the Yellow Sea, and across it, China's coast. To the east is the sea that Koreans call the East Sea and Japanese call the Sea of Japan. To the south, a narrow strait separates it from the Japanese islands.
That position explains much of what follows. Korea has been a bridge, carrying rice farming, bronze, writing, Buddhism and Confucian ideas from the mainland and passing many on to Japan. It has also been a corridor for armies: Chinese, Mongols, Manchus, Japanese, and in the twentieth century Soviets and Americans. A Korean proverb compares the country to a shrimp crushed in a fight between whales. Much of its history is the story of a people trying to stay whole between larger powers, and often succeeding for centuries at a time.
The founding story
Every Korean child learns the story of Dangun. In its oldest surviving version, written down in the thirteenth century by the monk Iryeon in the Samguk yusa (Memorabilia of the Three Kingdoms), Hwanung, son of the Lord of Heaven, came down to a mountain to rule. A tiger and a bear begged to become human. Only the bear endured the trial, living in a cave on garlic and mugwort, and became a woman. She bore Hwanung a son, Dangun, who founded the first Korean kingdom, Joseon.
A precise date came later. A fifteenth-century chronicle, the Tongguk t'onggam of 1485, fixed the founding at what we would call 2333 BCE. South Korea still marks 3 October as National Foundation Day (Gaecheonjeol, "the day the heavens opened"), and until 1961 the South officially counted its years from Dangun's founding.
North Korea took the legend further. In the early 1990s its archaeologists announced that they had found Dangun's tomb and bones near Pyongyang, and Kim Il Sung insisted that Dangun had been a real person. A large stepped mausoleum was completed in 1994. North Korean histories now place the founding of the first state in the early thirtieth century BCE, centred on Pyongyang. Archaeologists outside the North do not accept the claim; there is no independent dating of the remains.
What archaeology shows
People have lived on the peninsula since the Old Stone Age. The evidence for organised societies grows thick in the Bronze Age, which in Korea began around 1000 BCE (estimates range from the thirteenth to the eighth century BCE). Its signature object is a bronze dagger with a bulging blade, called "mandolin-shaped" or Liaoning-type after the region of north-east China where many have also been found, a sign of a culture spanning southern Manchuria and the peninsula.
The other signature is the dolmen, a tomb made of a huge flat capstone set on upright stones. Dolmens were built in Korea from roughly 2000 to 400 BCE, and the peninsula has more of them than anywhere else in East Asia. Building one took organised labour, which tells archaeologists that chiefdoms with real power over people had appeared.
Gojoseon in the written record
Chinese records describe a state called Joseon in the region of southern Manchuria and north-western Korea. Historians call it Gojoseon, "Old Joseon," to distinguish it from the dynasty of the same name founded in 1392. Old Chinese texts claimed a Chinese sage named Jizi (Gija in Korean) had come to rule it; most modern scholars reject that story as a later invention.
Firmer ground arrives around 194 BCE, when Wiman, a refugee from the north-eastern Chinese borderlands, seized the throne. His capital, Wanggeom-seong, is usually placed at or near modern Pyongyang, though the site is debated. In 108 BCE armies of the Han dynasty of China conquered the kingdom and set up four commanderies to govern the region. The most important, Lelang, near Pyongyang, lasted until the Korean kingdom of Goguryeo destroyed it in 313 CE.

Question
The traditional account
What archaeology and outside sources show
North Korea's official account

When did the first state begin?
2333 BCE (date fixed in 1485)
Chiefdoms in the Bronze Age, from c. 1000 BCE; a state recorded by Chinese writers by about the 4th–3rd century BCE
Early 30th century BCE

Who founded it?
Dangun, grandson of Heaven
Unknown; Wiman took power c. 194 BCE
Dangun, a historical person whose tomb was found near Pyongyang

Where was its centre?
Not fixed
Southern Manchuria and north-west Korea; debated
Pyongyang

How did it end?
—
Conquered by the Han in 108 BCE
Conquered by the Han in 108 BCE

The Dangun story is a myth, but it does real work: it tells Koreans, North and South, that they are one people with one origin, older than any of the empires around them.

Part 2 — Three kingdoms, Unified Silla and Balhae (57 BCE–935)
Three rivals
After the fall of Gojoseon, the peninsula and southern Manchuria filled with smaller peoples and confederacies. Out of them, over several centuries, grew three kingdoms that Koreans still treat as the foundation of their history.
The traditional founding dates come from the Samguk sagi (History of the Three Kingdoms), compiled in the twelfth century: Silla in 57 BCE, Goguryeo in 37 BCE and Baekje in 18 BCE. Historians treat those dates as legend. Silla, given the oldest date by a chronicler working in a kingdom that descended from it, was probably the last of the three to become a true state.
Goguryeo, in the north, straddled what is now north-east China and northern Korea. It was a hard, horse-riding warrior state, constantly at war with Chinese dynasties and steppe peoples. Its greatest king, Gwanggaeto ("Broad Expander of Territory"), who came to the throne in 391 and died around 412, is remembered by a huge stone stele that his son raised in 414 near the old capital on the Yalu, today in China's Jilin province. That son, King Jangsu, moved the capital south to Pyongyang in 427.
Baekje, in the south-west, was a sophisticated, sea-facing kingdom, closely tied to southern China and to the islands of Japan, where it sent scholars, craftsmen and Buddhist texts.
Silla, in the south-east, centred on the city of Gyeongju, began as the most remote and least developed. It was organised by a rigid hereditary "bone-rank" system that set out what office, house and even clothing each family could have.
Between Baekje and Silla lay Gaya, a confederation of small states famed for its iron, until Silla absorbed the last of it in 562.
Buddhism arrived from China in stages: in Goguryeo in 372, in Baekje in 384, and in Silla, after resistance from its aristocrats, as late as 527 or 528. With it came Chinese characters, which Korean scholars used for writing for more than a thousand years.
Silla wins
In 612 the Sui dynasty of China sent an enormous army against Goguryeo. At the Salsu River, the Goguryeo general Eulji Mundeok trapped the invaders as they retreated; Chinese records say that only 2,700 of the 305,000 soldiers sent across the river made it home. The defeat helped bring down the Sui. Its successor, the Tang, kept attacking.
Silla's kings saw an opening. They allied with the Tang, and together they destroyed Baekje in 660 and Goguryeo in 668. The Tang then tried to rule the whole peninsula itself. Silla fought its former ally for nearly a decade and drove the Tang out, keeping a kingdom that reached roughly as far north as Pyongyang. The result, called Unified Silla, ruled most of the peninsula for more than two centuries from Gyeongju, until its last king surrendered in 935.
Unified Silla was a high point of Buddhist art. Its stone temples, pagodas and the cave shrine of Seokguram, with its great granite Buddha, are among the treasures of Korean civilisation. Silla never conquered the far north, however. Much of Goguryeo's old land stayed outside it.
Balhae: whose kingdom?
In 698, in what is now north-east China and the far north of Korea, a former Goguryeo general named Dae Joyeong founded a kingdom that came to be called Balhae (Bohai in Chinese). Its population mixed people of Goguryeo descent with the Mohe, a Tungusic people of Manchuria. It lasted until 926, when the Khitan Liao dynasty destroyed it. Many of its people, including members of its royal family, fled south to the new Korean kingdom of Goryeo.
Balhae's identity is one of the sharpest history disputes in East Asia, and it involves its predecessor, Goguryeo, too.

View
Who holds it
Main arguments

Balhae and Goguryeo were Korean states
Historians in both Koreas
Balhae's rulers presented themselves as heirs of Goguryeo; letters its envoys took to Japan in 727–728 spoke of recovering Goguryeo's land; refugees went to Goryeo. Many Korean scholars call the period the "North–South States" (Balhae and Silla).

Goguryeo and Balhae were regional regimes within Chinese history
China's official historiography; many Chinese scholars
Their territory lay largely within today's China; they accepted titles from Chinese dynasties; much of Balhae's population was Mohe. Russian scholars, too, have treated Balhae as a state of Manchuria's peoples rather than a Korean one.

The dispute is not only academic. From 2002 to 2007, the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences ran a state-funded research programme on China's north-eastern borderlands, known as the Northeast Project, whose publications described Goguryeo as a Chinese local ethnic regime. When this became public, it caused a diplomatic row with Seoul in 2004. In Korea, the claim was read as an attempt to take away a piece of the national past; in China it was presented as ordinary scholarship about the history of Chinese territory. Both Koreas reject it.

The kingdoms of 1,500 years ago are still argued over because they answer a modern question: where does Korea end?

Part 3 — Goryeo, the Mongols and the printed word (918–1392)
A new dynasty and a name
As Silla weakened in the ninth century, rebels carved out rival states in the old lands of Baekje and Goguryeo. One of their commanders, Wang Geon, took power in the northern one in 918 and named his kingdom Goryeo, a shortened form of Goguryeo, to claim its legacy. Silla's last king surrendered to him in 935, and Wang Geon defeated the rival "Later Baekje" kingdom in 936. Korea was united again, now from the city of Gaegyeong (today's Kaesong, just north of the border in North Korea).
Goryeo gave the world the name it still uses. Its trade reached far: the dynasty's official history records merchants arriving from Arabia in 1024, 1025 and 1040, and hundreds of traders from Song China each year from the 1030s. Foreign traders knew the country by its dynasty, and "Goryeo" became "Corea" and then "Korea." (Koreans in the South call their country Hanguk; in the North it is Chosŏn. The two names come from different eras of the same past, and that difference is itself a small sign of the division.)
Goryeo was an aristocratic, deeply Buddhist kingdom. In 958 King Gwangjong, advised by a Chinese official who had settled at his court, introduced Chinese-style civil service examinations in the classics, to build a corps of officials loyal to the throne rather than to the great clans. Power nonetheless stayed with a small number of great families, who intermarried with the royal house. Its potters made celadon, a jade-green glazed stoneware still counted among the finest ceramics of its age, and its temples held enormous wealth.
Generals and Mongols
In 1170 a group of military officers, angry at being treated as inferiors by civilian aristocrats, overthrew the court's officials and took power, keeping the kings as figureheads. From the late twelfth century one family, the Ch'oe, ran the country as military dictators for four generations, until 1258.
Then came the Mongols. From 1231 to 1270 the armies of the Mongol Empire invaded Korea again and again. In 1232 the Ch'oe moved the court to Ganghwa Island, near the mouth of the Han River, betting correctly that the Mongols could not cross the narrow, tidal strait. The court held out there for decades while the mainland was ravaged. After the Ch'oe fell, the court made peace and in 1270 returned to the mainland; rebel soldiers, the Sambyeolcho, fought on from southern islands until 1273.
For about eighty years Goryeo was a client of the Mongols' Yuan dynasty in China. Its crown princes were raised at the Mongol court and married Mongol princesses, and Korea was made to supply ships and soldiers for the failed Mongol invasions of Japan in 1274 and 1281. As the Yuan weakened, King Gongmin broke away in 1356, attacking pro-Mongol families and recovering northern territory.
Carved and cast
Two of Goryeo's achievements in printing survive and are now listed by UNESCO in its Memory of the World register.
The first is the Tripitaka Koreana, the complete Buddhist scriptures carved onto more than 81,000 wooden printing blocks. An earlier set had been burned by the Mongols; this one was carved from 1237 over about twelve years, as a prayer for the country's protection. Since 1398 the blocks have been kept at Haeinsa temple in the south-east, in storage halls designed to keep them dry and ventilated.
The second is the Jikji, a Buddhist text printed with movable metal type at Heungdeok Temple in Cheongju in July 1377. It is the oldest surviving book printed with movable metal type, about 78 years before Gutenberg's Bible. The only known copy of its second volume is in the National Library of France in Paris, where it arrived through a French diplomat in the late nineteenth century. Korea would like it back; France says it was acquired legally.
The end of Goryeo
By the 1380s Goryeo was squeezed between the rising Ming dynasty in China and coastal raids by Japanese pirates. In 1388 the court sent an army north to attack the Ming. Its general, Yi Seong-gye, a commander who had made his name fighting pirates and northern raiders, thought the plan was madness. At Wihwa Island in the Yalu River he turned his army around, marched on the capital and took control. Four years later, in 1392, he took the throne himself.

Goryeo at a glance

Founded
918, by Wang Geon; unified the peninsula 935–936

Capital
Gaegyeong (Kaesong)

Religion
Buddhism, with Confucian learning for officials

Military rule
From 1170; the Ch'oe family until 1258

Mongol invasions
1231–1270; court on Ganghwa Island from 1232

Treasures
Celadon; Tripitaka Koreana (from 1237); Jikji (1377)

End
1392, Yi Seong-gye founds Joseon

Part 4 — Joseon I: the Confucian kingdom and the alphabet (1392–1592)
A state built on a philosophy
Yi Seong-gye named his new dynasty Joseon, after the ancient kingdom, and moved the capital to Hanyang, the city we call Seoul. His family, the Yi, would rule for more than five hundred years, from 1392 to 1910 (from 1897 as the Korean Empire). That makes Joseon one of the longest-lasting dynasties in world history.
Its founders were backed by Neo-Confucian scholars who blamed Goryeo's decline on corrupt monasteries and greedy aristocrats. They set out to build a state on Confucian principles: rule by educated officials, loyalty to the king, duty to parents, strict hierarchy between ranks and between men and women. Buddhist temples were pushed out of the cities and their lands taken. Over two centuries, Confucian rules reshaped family life, especially for women, who lost much of the inheritance and freedom they had had under Goryeo.
Joseon accepted a place in China's tributary order: it sent missions to the Ming emperors and received recognition in return. Koreans of the time saw this less as submission than as membership of a civilised world centred on China, a relationship they called "serving the great." In practice, Joseon ran its own affairs.
Sejong and the alphabet
The fourth king, Sejong, who reigned from 1418 to 1450, is the one South Koreans put on the 10,000-won note. He founded a royal research institute, the Hall of Worthies, in 1420, and sponsored work on astronomy, rain gauges, water clocks, farming manuals and medicine.
His most famous achievement is the Korean alphabet. Educated Koreans wrote in Chinese characters, which took years to learn and did not fit the Korean language well; most people could not read at all. At the end of 1443 Sejong presented a new script of 28 letters, and in 1446 published it under the title Hunminjeongeum, "The Correct Sounds for the Instruction of the People." Its preface gives his reason: ordinary people had things they wished to say but could not write them down, so the king had "newly designed twenty-eight letters, which I wish to have everyone practice at their ease," in one widely used translation.
The letters are a feat of design. The basic consonants are drawn to suggest the shape of the mouth, tongue and throat when making the sound, and the vowels are built from three elements standing for heaven, earth and humankind. Letters are grouped into syllable blocks, so written Korean looks somewhat like Chinese while working like an alphabet.
Many scholars at court opposed it, arguing that only Chinese writing was civilised. For centuries the script was looked down on as fit for women, children and commoners, and one later king, Yeonsangun, banned its use in 1504. It survived anyway, in letters, poetry and popular fiction. Only in 1894 did the government make it the preferred script for official documents. Today it is called Hangul in the South, where 24 of the original letters are in use and 9 October is Hangul Day, and Chosŏn'gŭl in the North.

Sejong's preface says the king had "newly designed twenty-eight letters, which I wish to have everyone practice at their ease." Six centuries later, both Koreas write with his letters, and the South keeps a national holiday for them.

Yangban and slaves
Joseon society was steeply ranked. At the top were the yangban, the "two orders" of civil and military officials and the families entitled to hold office. In principle, office came through the civil service examinations (gwageo) in the Confucian classics, and in principle commoners could sit them. In practice, years of study were needed and the yangban dominated the exams and the government for five centuries. Below them were a small class of technical specialists and clerks, then the mass of commoners, mostly farmers, who paid taxes and did military and labour service.
At the bottom were the nobi, slaves or hereditary bondspeople, owned by the state or by private households, who could be bought, sold and inherited. Historians estimate that at the peak, in the middle centuries of the dynasty, they made up more than 30 percent of the population, one of the largest shares of any pre-modern society. Eighteenth-century reforms and an edict of 1801 freeing government-owned slaves shrank their numbers sharply. Hereditary slavery was abolished in the Gabo reforms of 1894, though its traces lingered.

Joseon social order
Who they were
What it meant

Yangban
Families of civil and military officials
Office, land, examination success, exemption from many duties

Jungin ("middle people")
Interpreters, doctors, clerks, technical officials
Skilled and often wealthy, but barred from top office

Sangmin (commoners)
Farmers, artisans, merchants
Taxes, labour and military service

Cheonmin (lowborn)
Nobi (slaves), butchers, entertainers, shamans
Heaviest stigma; nobi were property

For all its rigidity, the system produced long stability. Joseon's first two centuries saw few wars. That ended in 1592.

Part 5 — Joseon II: invasions, the Manchus and the closed door (1592–1876)
The Imjin War
In 1592 Toyotomi Hideyoshi, who had just finished unifying Japan after a century of civil war, demanded passage through Korea to conquer Ming China. Joseon refused. On 23 May 1592 (the date in the modern calendar) a Japanese army landed at Busan. Armed with muskets and hardened by decades of fighting, it took Seoul within weeks. The king fled north towards the Chinese border. Koreans call the war the Imjin War, after the name of that year in the traditional calendar.
Three things saved Korea. The first was the Ming: China sent large armies, a total of about 166,700 troops over the course of the war, and pushed the Japanese back from Pyongyang. The second was the "righteous armies," local militias of scholars, farmers and Buddhist monks who harassed Japanese supply lines. The third was the navy under Admiral Yi Sun-sin.
Yi's fleet, including a few covered warships known as turtle ships, cut the sea lanes the Japanese needed. At Hansan Island in 1592 it sank or captured 59 Japanese ships. When Japan invaded again in 1597, Yi, who had been jailed through court intrigue and then reinstated, faced a far larger fleet at the Myeongnyang Strait with just 13 ships against at least 133, and won. He was killed at the Battle of Noryang on 16 December 1598, as the Japanese withdrew after Hideyoshi's death. His statue stands in central Seoul.
The cost was immense. Farmland was ruined, palaces burned, and tens of thousands of Koreans taken to Japan as captives, among them skilled potters who founded famous Japanese ceramic traditions. The Mimizuka, a mound in Kyoto, holds the noses, cut off as war trophies, of at least 38,000 Koreans.
The Manchus
Korea had barely recovered when a new power rose to the north. The Manchus, uniting the Jurchen peoples, invaded in 1627 and again in the winter of 1636–37. The king, besieged in a mountain fortress south of Seoul, had to surrender and bow before the Manchu ruler, and two of his sons were taken as hostages. Joseon was forced to switch its loyalty from the Ming to the Manchus' new Qing dynasty, which conquered China in 1644.
Korean scholars privately despised the Qing as barbarians and began to see their own kingdom as the last true home of Confucian civilisation, a "little China" more faithful than China itself. That pride shaped Joseon's suspicion of everything new from outside.
The seventeenth century also brought disaster at home. A great famine in 1695–96, with epidemics, may have killed between a quarter and a third of the population, according to some historians' estimates.
Recovery and reform
The eighteenth century was calmer. Two long-reigning kings, Yeongjo (1724–1776) and Jeongjo (1776–1800), tried to calm factional fighting at court with a "policy of impartiality" (tangpyeong) and reduced the number of slaves. Scholars of Silhak ("practical learning") urged officials to study farming, trade, technology and Korea's own geography rather than only the classics. Markets spread, and with them novels, mask dances and genre painting.
In the nineteenth century the court fell under the control of in-law families who looted it, while the countryside suffered revolts, famines and cholera. In the early 1860s a scholar named Choe Je-u founded Donghak ("Eastern Learning"), a new religion that blended Confucian, Buddhist and folk beliefs and preached the equality of all people. The government executed him in 1864, but his movement spread.
The closed door
In 1864 a boy became king as Gojong, and his father, known by his title as the Daewongun ("Prince of the Great Court"), ruled in his name for a decade. The Daewongun rebuilt the royal palace, curbed the in-law clans and set out to keep Korea closed against the West, which had just humiliated China in the Opium Wars. The historian Bruce Cumings summarises his policy as "no treaties, no trade, no Catholics, no West, and no Japan."
In 1866 his government launched the largest of Joseon's persecutions of Korean Catholics, which went on until 1872; French missionary priests were among those executed, and a French punitive expedition withdrew. The same year, an armed American merchant ship, the General Sherman, sailed up the Taedong River towards Pyongyang and was burned, its crew killed. In 1871 an American expedition of about 650 men attacked forts on Ganghwa Island, killing 243 Koreans for the loss of three Americans, then sailed away without a treaty.
Westerners came to call Korea the "Hermit Kingdom." The name stuck, and is now applied, unfairly to the old kingdom and in a different sense, to North Korea.

Invasions of Joseon
Invader
Outcome

1592–1598 Imjin War
Japan (Hideyoshi)
Repelled with Ming help and Yi Sun-sin's navy; vast destruction

1627
Manchus (Later Jin)
Joseon forced into a "brotherly" treaty

1636–1637
Manchus (Qing)
King surrenders; Joseon becomes a Qing tributary

1866
France
Punitive raid on Ganghwa; withdrew

1871
United States
Ganghwa forts captured; withdrew without a treaty

Part 6 — The opening and the Korean Empire (1876–1910)
Forced open
Japan, which had itself been forced open by American warships in 1853 and had modernised at speed since 1868, broke Korea's isolation. In September 1875 a Japanese warship, the Un'yō, drew fire from the forts on Ganghwa Island and shelled them in return; Japan then demanded a treaty. The Treaty of Ganghwa, signed on 26 February 1876, declared Korea an "independent state," prying it loose from China, opened Busan and later Incheon and Wonsan to Japanese trade, and gave Japanese residents extraterritoriality. It was an unequal treaty of the kind the Western powers had imposed on China and Japan. A treaty with the United States followed in 1882.
The next two decades were a struggle among rival factions, each with a foreign patron: conservatives looked to China, young reformers to Meiji Japan, and the court, increasingly led by King Gojong's queen, Queen Min, played the powers against one another. After a soldiers' riot in 1882, China sent troops and tightened its grip; in 1884 Chinese troops crushed a coup by pro-Japanese reformers within days.
Donghak and the war over Korea
In 1894 the farmers of the south-west rose in revolt. Led by Jeon Bong-jun, a local Donghak leader, they demanded an end to corrupt officials and unfair taxes, the freeing of slaves and, increasingly, the expulsion of foreigners. When their army captured the fortress city of Jeonju, the court asked China for troops. China sent about 3,000; Japan, claiming the right to protect its interests, sent about 8,000, seized the royal palace in Seoul and installed a pro-Japanese government. The First Sino-Japanese War followed, fought largely on Korean soil. Japan won decisively.
The rebels rose again, this time against the Japanese. At the Battle of Ugeumchi, near Gongju, in November 1894, Japanese and government troops with modern rifles destroyed the peasant army. Jeon Bong-jun was captured and executed in 1895. In South Korea today, the Donghak movement is remembered as a revolution of ordinary people for equality and independence; North Korea, too, honours it as an anti-feudal, anti-foreign uprising.
Under Japanese pressure the government carried out the Gabo reforms of 1894–95, which abolished the legal class order, slavery and the old civil service examinations. Many Koreans welcomed the reforms but resented who was imposing them.
The murder of a queen
Queen Min resisted Japan by turning to Russia. At about six in the morning of 8 October 1895, a band of Japanese agents and soldiers, acting under the Japanese minister in Seoul, Miura Gorō, broke into Gyeongbokgung Palace and killed her; her body was burned. A Japanese court tried Miura and others and acquitted them for lack of evidence. In February 1896, Gojong and the crown prince fled to the Russian legation in Seoul and ruled from there for about a year. The queen, posthumously named Empress Myeongseong, became a national martyr.
The Korean Empire
In October 1897, back in his own palace, Gojong proclaimed the Korean Empire and took the title of emperor, to stand equal with the emperors of China and Japan. His government built telegraph lines, electric streetcars and modern schools. A reform movement, the Independence Club, founded in 1896, published a newspaper in Hangul and held mass public debates calling for constitutional government; Gojong suppressed it in 1898. Among its young members was Syngman Rhee.
Independence depended on a balance of powers that collapsed in 1904, when Japan went to war with Russia and won. In July 1905 a memorandum of talks between the American secretary of war, William Howard Taft, and Japan's prime minister, Katsura Tarō, recorded that the United States would not oppose Japanese control of Korea, while Japan accepted American rule in the Philippines. The peace treaty with Russia that September left Japan free in Korea.
Protectorate and annexation
In November 1905, with Japanese troops surrounding the palace, Itō Hirobumi, Japan's elder statesman, pressed the Korean cabinet to sign a treaty making Korea a protectorate (the Eulsa Treaty). Japan took over Korea's foreign relations, with Itō as resident-general. Gojong refused to put his seal on it. In 1907 he secretly sent three envoys to the peace conference at The Hague to protest; they were refused a hearing. Japan forced him to abdicate in favour of his son, Sunjong, and disbanded the Korean army, many of whose soldiers joined guerrilla "righteous armies."
In October 1909, at the railway station in Harbin, in Manchuria, a Korean independence fighter named An Jung-geun shot Itō dead. He was hanged by the Japanese at Lüshun on 26 March 1910. In both Koreas he is a national hero; in Japan, Itō is honoured as a founder of the modern state, and An has long been called a terrorist. When China opened a memorial hall to An at Harbin station in 2014, Tokyo protested.
Annexation came in August 1910. The treaty was signed on 22 August by Korea's prime minister, Yi Wan-yong, and the new resident-general, Terauchi Masatake, and took effect on 29 August. Sunjong did not sign it.

The legal argument about 1905–1910

Korea's view (both Koreas)
The 1905 and 1910 treaties were imposed by force and threats on a government that never freely consented; the emperor never ratified them. They were void from the beginning.

Japan's view
The treaties were concluded under the international law of the time, whatever one thinks of them morally.

The 1965 compromise
The South Korea–Japan treaty declared all earlier treaties "already null and void," wording each side reads its own way: void from the start (Seoul) or void from 1945 or 1965 (Tokyo).

A rock in the sea
One more act of 1905 still matters. On 28 January 1905, Japan's cabinet decided to incorporate a pair of rocky islets in the sea between Korea and Japan into Shimane Prefecture, treating them as land that belonged to no one. Koreans call them Dokdo, Japanese Takeshima; some Western maps use the neutral name Liancourt Rocks. Korea points to old records of an island called Usan-do and to an imperial decree of 25 October 1900 placing an island called "Seokdo" under a Korean county, which it identifies with Dokdo; Japan disputes both identifications and says its title was established by the seventeenth century and confirmed lawfully in 1905. South Korea has held the islets, with a coast guard garrison, since the early 1950s. Japan has proposed going to the International Court of Justice; Korea refuses, saying there is no dispute to settle.

In thirty-five years, Korea went from a kingdom that refused to sign treaties with anyone to a country that no longer existed on the map.

Part 7 — Colony: the first decades of Japanese rule (1910–1937)
The Government-General
From 1910 Korea, renamed Chōsen, was ruled by a Japanese governor-general, always a senior army or navy officer, answerable to the emperor in Tokyo. The first was Terauchi Masatake. In its first decade, often called the period of "military rule," Japanese military police kept order, Korean political organisations and newspapers were shut down, and nationalists were jailed.
The colonial state carried out a vast land survey from 1910 to 1918, registering ownership on the basis of written proof. Korean nationalist historians long described it as a mass seizure. Later research, including by Korean scholars, found that most land stayed in Korean hands, but that the survey favoured those with documents and connections, enriched Japanese companies and settlers, and helped push many farmers into tenancy. As more rice was shipped to Japan, the amount each Korean ate fell in the early 1930s. By 1939 about 981,000 Koreans lived in Japan; by 1934 about 561,000 Japanese lived in Korea, among more than 21 million people.
1 March 1919
The turning point came in 1919. The former emperor Gojong died in January, amid rumours that he had been poisoned. Korean students in Tokyo and religious leaders in Korea, inspired by President Woodrow Wilson's call for the self-determination of nations at the end of the First World War, planned a protest to coincide with his funeral.
On 1 March 1919, thirty-three religious and civic leaders, Cheondoist (the renamed Donghak), Christian and Buddhist, signed a Declaration of Independence written by the scholar Choe Nam-seon. Twenty-nine of them gathered at a restaurant in Seoul called Taehwagwan, read the declaration and then called the police to arrest them. At nearby Tapgol Park, a student read it aloud to a crowd, which marched through the city shouting "Manse!" ("Long live [Korean independence]!").
The protests spread across the country for months: historians count roughly 1,500 to 1,800 demonstrations, with between 800,000 and 2 million participants out of a population of about 16 to 17 million. They were overwhelmingly peaceful. The response was not. Japanese figures to 11 April counted 553 killed and more than 12,000 arrested; the independence activist and historian Park Eun-sik, writing in exile in 1920, counted 7,509 dead and 46,948 arrested. On 15 April, at Jeam-ni, south of Seoul, soldiers locked villagers in a church and set it on fire. A sixteen-year-old student, Yu Gwan-sun, whose parents were shot dead at a protest she helped organise, died of her injuries in Seodaemun Prison in September 1920; she is now the movement's best-known face.

The March First Movement failed to free Korea, but it created something the colonisers could not take away: a nation that had spoken with one voice.

In April 1919, exiled nationalists founded a Provisional Government of the Republic of Korea in Shanghai. It was weak and divided; its first president, Syngman Rhee, who lobbied from the United States, was impeached by its assembly in 1925, and Kim Ku later became its leading figure. It moved with the Chinese Nationalist government into China's interior during the war, ending up in Chongqing. South Korea's constitution today names the Provisional Government, and the March First Movement, as the foundation of the republic, and 1 March is a national holiday in the South.
"Cultural rule"
Shaken by 1919, Tokyo sent a new governor-general, Saitō Makoto, who announced a softer "cultural rule." The military police were replaced by an ordinary police force, and Korean-language newspapers were allowed again; Chosun Ilbo and Dong-a Ilbo, both founded in 1920, are still among South Korea's biggest papers. Korean writers, artists, filmmakers, nationalists and communists organised. Industrial growth picked up, especially from the 1930s, when Japan turned northern Korea into a base for mines, dams, chemical plants and steel to support its expansion into Manchuria.
Whether that growth benefited Koreans is one of the most charged arguments in Korean history. One school, sometimes called "colonial modernisation," points to railways, factories, rising output and the first generation of Korean industrialists, some of whose firms grew into later conglomerates. Its critics answer that the economy was built to serve Japan, that Koreans were kept out of senior and skilled posts, and that the gains went mainly to Japanese firms and a small Korean elite. In South Korea the argument tracks politics: conservatives are readier to see colonial development as part of the country's later rise, progressives to stress exploitation and collaboration.
The colonial years were also violent beyond Korea. After the Great Kantō earthquake of 1 September 1923, rumours that Koreans were poisoning wells led vigilantes, sometimes with police and soldiers, to massacre Koreans in the Tokyo area; estimates range from a few hundred in official counts at the time to several thousand. In Manchuria, Korean guerrillas, nationalist and communist, fought on; among the communist partisans was a young man who called himself Kim Il Sung.

Colonial Korea in numbers

Annexation
Signed 22 August, in force 29 August 1910

March First Movement
1,500–1,800 protests; 0.8–2 million participants (1919)

Deaths in 1919
553 (Japanese count to 11 April) to 7,509 (Park Eun-sik, 1920)

Japanese residents in Korea
About 561,000 of more than 21 million people (1934)

Koreans in Japan
About 981,000 (1939)

Part 8 — Total war: mobilisation, forced labour and the "comfort women" (1937–1945)
Making Koreans into Japanese
When Japan went to full-scale war with China in 1937, colonial policy hardened into an attempt to erase Korean identity. Under the slogan naisen ittai, "Japan and Korea as one body," Koreans had to recite oaths of loyalty to the emperor and worship at Shinto shrines, and Christians who refused were arrested. By 1943 Korean-language courses had been phased out of the schools; in 1940 the remaining Korean-language newspapers were shut. From 1940, under ordinances issued the year before, Koreans were pressed to adopt Japanese-style names, and most families did. In 1942 the police arrested the scholars compiling a Korean dictionary.
Labour and soldiers
From 1939 the colonial government mobilised Koreans for labour: first through company "recruitment," then official "mediation," and from 1944 outright conscription. By one widely cited count, about 5.4 million Koreans were mobilised, most within Korea, with about 670,000 sent to Japan itself, to mines, factories and construction sites, often in dangerous conditions for little or no pay. From 1944 about 200,000 Korean men were also conscripted into the Japanese army. Some Korean guards at prisoner-of-war camps were later tried as war criminals.
Forced labour remains a live legal fight. On 30 October 2018 South Korea's Supreme Court ordered Nippon Steel to pay 100 million won to each Korean plaintiff forced to work for its predecessor. Japan's government says all such claims were "settled completely and finally" by the 1965 agreement, under which Japan provided $300 million in grants and $200 million in loans, and called the ruling a violation of international law; relations collapsed into a trade dispute in 2019. In March 2023 President Yoon Suk Yeol's government had a Korean state-backed foundation pay the compensation instead, a step its supporters called bold and its critics, including some victims, a humiliating surrender. Most of the winning plaintiffs or their families eventually accepted.
The "comfort women"
From the early 1930s, and on a large scale after 1937, the Japanese military set up "comfort stations," military brothels, across its empire and the territories it occupied. The women held in them were called "comfort women," a euphemism. Many came from Korea, which was then part of Japan's empire, and many others from China, the Philippines, Taiwan, Indonesia and elsewhere. There is no agreed count. Historians' estimates range from about 20,000 (the Japanese historian Hata Ikuhiko) to about 200,000 (the Japanese historian Yoshimi Yoshiaki), and some Chinese scholars put the total far higher.
In August 1991 a Korean woman, Kim Hak-sun, became the first survivor to tell her story in public: that she had been taken to a comfort station at seventeen and repeatedly raped. In January 1992 Yoshimi found wartime military documents in Japan's own archives showing the army's role in setting up and running the stations. Others came forward across Asia.
What Japan's government says. In 1993 the Kono Statement, issued by Japan's chief cabinet secretary, acknowledged that the military was directly or indirectly involved in setting up and managing the stations and in transferring the women, that recruitment was often against the women's will, and offered "sincere apologies and remorse." Japan later created a fund, financed largely by private donations, to compensate survivors; many Korean survivors refused its money as not coming from the state. Japan's later governments have maintained the Kono Statement while contesting other parts of the story. In a statement to a UN committee in February 2016, its deputy foreign minister, Sugiyama Shinsuke, said that "'forceful taking away' of comfort women by the military and government authorities could not be confirmed" in any of the documents the government had found, that the figure of "200,000 persons" "lacks concrete evidence," and that "the expression 'sex slaves' contradicts the facts." He noted that a widely cited story by a Japanese man, Yoshida Seiji, of rounding up women by force on Jeju Island had been shown to be "fabricated."
What South Korea and the survivors say. Survivors and their advocates in Korea say that whether women were seized by soldiers or tricked by recruiters working for the army, the result was the same: they were held and raped under military control, a system of sexual slavery, and Japan's state bears legal responsibility. They regard Tokyo's apologies as hedged and its later statements as backsliding.
The two governments tried to close the matter on 28 December 2015. Japan's foreign minister, Kishida Fumio, said the issue, "with an involvement of the Japanese military authorities at that time, was a grave affront to the honor and dignity of large numbers of women," that Japan was "painfully aware of responsibilities," and Japan paid ¥1 billion into a Korean foundation for the survivors. Both sides declared the issue resolved "finally and irreversibly." Many survivors rejected the deal, made without consulting them. The next South Korean government shut the foundation down in November 2018.
The courts have gone further. On 23 November 2023 the Seoul High Court ordered Japan to pay 200 million won to each of 16 plaintiffs, among them the survivor Lee Yong-soo, rejecting Japan's claim of sovereign immunity. Japan refused to take part in the case, did not appeal and does not accept the ruling, which its foreign minister, Kamikawa Yōko, called "extremely regrettable and absolutely unacceptable." Of the 240 women registered as survivors with the South Korean government, only seven were still alive in February 2025.

The wartime disputes
Japan's government
South Korea's government and courts

Legal claims
Settled "completely and finally" by the 1965 agreement
Individual claims for illegal colonial acts were never settled (Supreme Court, 2018)

"Comfort women": coercion
Military involvement admitted (1993); forcible taking by authorities "could not be confirmed" in documents (2016)
Women were held against their will in a state-run system; whether seized or deceived is secondary

"Comfort women": the term "sex slaves"
"Contradicts the facts" (2016)
Used by survivors, advocates and UN bodies

Settlement
2015 agreement resolved it "finally and irreversibly"
Foundation closed 2018; courts ordered compensation 2021 and 2023

On these questions the two governments are not arguing about whether something terrible happened. They are arguing about how it happened, what to call it, and who owes what to whom.

Part 9 — Liberation and division (1945–1948)
A line on a map
Japan surrendered on 15 August 1945. Koreans call it Gwangbokjeol, "the day the light returned," and both Koreas still mark it. But the country's fate had been decided days before, in Washington, by men who knew little about it.
On 8 August 1945 the Soviet Union declared war on Japan, and its troops poured into Manchuria and, within days, northern Korea. American forces were far away, in Okinawa. On the night of 10–11 August, two American colonels, Charles Bonesteel and Dean Rusk, working at short notice and without consulting any Korea experts, were asked to propose where American and Soviet forces should accept Japan's surrender. Using a National Geographic map, they picked the 38th parallel, which put Seoul in the American zone. Rusk later said that had he known more, he "almost surely" would have chosen differently. Stalin accepted the line. About 16 million Koreans lived south of it and 9 million north.
The line was meant only for accepting a surrender. It became a border because each occupier built a Korea in its own image on its side.
Two occupations
As Japanese rule collapsed, a respected moderate leftist, Lyuh Woon-hyung, organised a Committee for the Preparation of Korean Independence, and local "people's committees" sprang up across the country. On 6 September 1945 a gathering in Seoul proclaimed a Korean People's Republic.
In the north, Soviet troops entered Pyongyang on 24 August and steered power to Korean communists they trusted. Their choice was Kim Il Sung, then 33, the former guerrilla, who had spent the war years as a captain in a Soviet unit of Korean and Chinese exiles and landed at Wonsan on 19 September 1945. In February 1946 a Provisional People's Committee for North Korea was set up with Kim as chairman; in March it confiscated land from Japanese owners, "collaborators" and large landlords and gave it to those who farmed it. Industry was nationalised. Landlords, Christians and many of the middle class fled south.
In the south, American troops under General John Hodge landed at Incheon on 8 September and took the Japanese surrender in Seoul the next day. The United States Army Military Government in Korea refused to recognise the People's Republic, which it regarded as communist-led, and declared it illegitimate in December 1945. For a time it kept Japanese officials in their posts and relied heavily on Korean police and officials who had served the colonial regime, which outraged many Koreans. It favoured conservative and anti-communist Koreans, among them Syngman Rhee, who returned from decades in the United States in October 1945.
The trusteeship fight
In December 1945 the foreign ministers of the United States, the Soviet Union and Britain, meeting in Moscow, agreed on a plan: a joint commission of the two occupiers would help form a provisional Korean government, and Korea might be placed under a four-power trusteeship for up to five years before full independence. News reached Korea at the end of December, garbled at first by reports that the Americans had wanted immediate independence and the Soviets trusteeship.
Almost every Korean opposed trusteeship at first, as a humiliating return to foreign tutelage. Then, on Soviet instructions, the communists switched to supporting the Moscow plan, while the right made opposition to trusteeship its rallying cry. The issue split Korean politics into two camps and destroyed the middle ground. The joint commission met, deadlocked over which Korean groups to consult, and collapsed in 1947. Moderates who tried to bridge the camps were squeezed out, and some were murdered: Lyuh Woon-hyung was assassinated in Seoul on 19 July 1947.
Two states
In 1947 the United States took the question to the United Nations, which voted for elections across Korea under a UN commission. The Soviet Union kept the commission out of the north. Elections went ahead in the south alone on 10 May 1948, boycotted by the left and by Kim Ku, who opposed any vote that would make division permanent. The new assembly elected Syngman Rhee president, and the Republic of Korea was proclaimed on 15 August 1948. The Democratic People's Republic of Korea followed in the north on 9 September, with Kim Il Sung as premier. Each claimed to be the only legitimate government of all Korea.
On 12 December 1948 the UN General Assembly, in Resolution 195, declared that there had been established "a lawful government" with "effective control and jurisdiction over that part of Korea where the Temporary Commission was able to observe," and that "this is the only such Government in Korea." Seoul has always read that as recognition of the Republic as the only lawful government in Korea; others read "only such Government" as limited to the south. The ambiguity was deliberate.
Blood before the war
The south was already at war with itself. On 3 April 1948, on Jeju Island, communist-led rebels attacked police stations, protesting against the separate election and brutal policing. Government forces and right-wing youth groups crushed the uprising with extreme violence against villagers. A government truth commission reported in 2003 that it had received reports of 14,373 victims, about 86 percent of them killed by security forces, and estimated the total dead at up to 30,000. President Roh Moo-hyun apologised on behalf of the state that year. In October 1948 soldiers in Yeosu mutinied rather than be sent to Jeju; the revolt and its suppression killed hundreds, perhaps thousands, of civilians. Kim Ku was assassinated by a South Korean army officer on 26 June 1949, and through 1949 the two armies fought hundreds of skirmishes along the 38th parallel.

1945–1948: how two states were made
North
South

Occupier
Soviet Union (troops in Pyongyang 24 Aug 1945)
United States (landed 8 Sept 1945)

Leader installed or favoured
Kim Il Sung (arrived 19 Sept 1945)
Syngman Rhee (returned Oct 1945)

Land
Confiscated and redistributed, March 1946
Reform delayed until 1949–50

Colonial-era officials
Many purged
Many kept, especially police

State founded
DPRK, 9 September 1948
ROK, 15 August 1948

Nobody in Korea chose the 38th parallel. But Koreans on both sides chose, and fought over, what to build on either side of it.

Part 10 — The Korean War (1950–1953)
Who started it
At 4:40 in the morning of 25 June 1950, North Korean artillery opened fire along the 38th parallel, and the Korean People's Army crossed it in force, with Soviet-made tanks.
How the war began was once fiercely argued. It no longer is about the basic facts. Soviet documents opened in the 1990s show that Kim Il Sung had been asking Stalin for permission to invade for more than a year; that Stalin agreed during Kim's visit to Moscow from 30 March to 25 April 1950, on condition that Mao Zedong in China also approved; and that Kim then won Mao's backing in May. Soviet officers helped plan the attack.
North Korea's official account is different. It calls the conflict the Fatherland Liberation War and says the South, egged on by the United States, attacked first near the western town of Haeju, and the People's Army counter-attacked. Outside historians reject that account. Some, notably Bruce Cumings, argue that the war is best understood as a civil war rooted in 1945, in the division, the land question and the guerrilla war and border clashes already under way. Most historians accept both points: the North planned and launched the invasion, with Soviet approval, in a conflict that was already a civil war.
Down, up, down
The invasion nearly succeeded. Seoul fell on 28 June; South Korean engineers blew the Han River bridge while it was crowded with refugees and soldiers. The UN Security Council, which the Soviet Union was boycotting, passed Resolution 82 on 25 June calling the attack a breach of the peace and Resolution 83 on 27 June recommending that members help the South repel it. American forces, soon joined by contingents from 15 other countries under the UN flag, were driven back with the South Korean army into a pocket around Busan, the Pusan Perimeter.
On 15 September General Douglas MacArthur landed troops at Incheon, behind the North Korean lines, and the People's Army collapsed. UN forces retook Seoul, crossed the 38th parallel to unify Korea by force, and drove towards the Chinese border. On 19 October 1950, Chinese "People's Volunteer Army" troops began crossing the Yalu in secret. Their winter offensive pushed UN forces back south of Seoul, which changed hands for the fourth time when UN forces recaptured it on 14 March 1951. A city of 1.5 million before the war had about 200,000 people left.
From mid-1951 the front stabilised near the 38th parallel. Armistice talks began in July 1951 and dragged on for two years, mainly over prisoners of war: many Chinese and North Korean prisoners did not want to go home, and the UN side refused to force them. Meanwhile, the fighting for hills along the front went on, and American bombing destroyed most of the North's cities and towns.
The armistice
At 10 a.m. on 27 July 1953, at Panmunjom, the American general William Harrison and the North Korean general Nam Il signed the armistice. It was then countersigned by the UN commander, General Mark Clark, and by Kim Il Sung and the Chinese commander, Peng Dehuai. South Korea's president, Syngman Rhee, who wanted to keep fighting to unify the country, refused, and the Republic of Korea never signed.
The armistice was only a ceasefire between armies. It created a Demilitarised Zone along the front line, about 4 kilometres wide and 250 kilometres long, and called for a political conference to settle the war. That conference, at Geneva in 1954, failed. No peace treaty has ever been signed. Technically, the Korean War has never ended.
The dead
No one knows how many died. Estimates of the total, soldiers and civilians of every nation, are usually around 3 million, most of them Korean civilians. The North suffered worst: the historian Charles Armstrong estimates that 12 to 15 percent of its people died.

Deaths in the Korean War
Estimate
Source

All deaths, military and civilian
About 3 million (central estimate)
Peace Research Institute Oslo battle-death datasets and historians' compilations

Korean civilians
About 2 million (Cumings); 2–3 million (Guenter Lewy)
Historians' estimates

Korean civilians (South Korean count)
More than 750,000 confirmed violent deaths, plus about 1 million missing
South Korea's Ministry of National Defense

South Korean military
137,899 dead (original report); 184,573 killed or missing (later official tally)
South Korean government

North Korean military
294,151 dead (South Korean estimate); about 215,000 killed (US estimate)
ROK Ministry of National Defense; US Department of Defense

Chinese military
183,108 (China's official figure, 2010) to 197,653 (Chinese figure, 2020); about 400,000 (US estimate)
Chinese government; US Department of Defense

United States
33,739 battle deaths and 2,835 other deaths in theatre
US Department of Defense

Civilians were killed deliberately by both sides. In the summer of 1950, as the North advanced, South Korean police and soldiers executed political prisoners and members of the Bodo League, a "re-education" organisation for suspected leftists; estimates of the dead run from 60,000 to 200,000. In late July 1950, at No Gun Ri, American troops fired on refugees under a railway bridge; a South Korean government committee in 2005 certified 163 dead or missing, and survivors' groups say 250 to 300. After an Associated Press investigation in 1999, President Bill Clinton expressed regret in 2001. North Korean forces killed "reactionaries" in the territories they held; South Korea's Truth and Reconciliation Commission counted at least 129,000 South Korean civilians killed by them. North Korea teaches that American troops massacred about 35,000 people at Sinchon in 1950; outside historians agree that mass killings took place there but dispute who carried them out and how many died.

The war killed perhaps one Korean in ten, destroyed most of both halves of the country, and changed the border only slightly. Then it stopped, without ending.

Part 11 — South Korea: from Rhee to Park (1948–1979)
The old man
Syngman Rhee was 73 when he became president. Born in 1875, he had been jailed as a young reformer under the Korean Empire, taken a doctorate at Princeton and spent most of the colonial era in the United States, lobbying for Korean independence. He was a fierce anti-communist and a skilled operator, and he governed as an autocrat. A National Security Law passed in 1948 gave the state wide power to jail suspected leftists, and versions of it remain in force. In 1952, in the middle of the war, when the National Assembly would not amend the constitution to let the people elect the president directly (and so let Rhee bypass a hostile assembly), he had opposition legislators arrested until it did. In 1954 another amendment exempted him from the limit of two terms.
The South after the war was among the poorest countries in the world, heavily dependent on American aid. Rhee did accomplish a land reform, under a law of 1949 put into effect from 1950, that broke the power of the old landlord class and created a nation of small farmers. Schooling spread fast. But the economy stagnated and corruption was everywhere.
The April Revolution
On 15 March 1960 Rhee's government rigged the presidential and vice-presidential elections so crudely that protests broke out at once. In the southern port of Masan, police fired on demonstrators. On 11 April the body of a high-school student, Kim Ju-yul, who had disappeared during the protests, was found floating in Masan harbour with a tear-gas canister lodged in his eye. Fury spread to Seoul. On 19 April tens of thousands of students marched on the presidential residence, and police opened fire. In all, 186 people were killed in the uprising. When university professors marched too, and the army declined to suppress the crowds, Rhee resigned on 26 April and left for exile in Hawaii, where he died in 1965.
The parliamentary Second Republic that followed, under Prime Minister Chang Myon, was South Korea's first real democracy. It was chaotic, and lasted barely a year.
The general
On 16 May 1961, a group of army officers led by Major General Park Chung Hee seized power in a nearly bloodless coup. Park, born in 1917 to a poor farming family in Gumi, had been a village schoolteacher. In 1939 a Manchurian newspaper reported that he had applied to Japan's puppet state of Manchukuo for officer training with an oath written in his own blood; he trained there under the Japanese name Takagi Masao and served as an officer in its army. After 1945 he joined the South Korean army. In 1948 a military court sentenced him to death for alleged membership of a communist cell; senior officers persuaded Rhee to spare him, and he rose again during the war. He would rule for eighteen years.
Park put the economy at the centre. From 1962 the government launched five-year plans and directed cheap credit to firms that met export targets, turning a handful of family-owned groups, the chaebol (Samsung, Hyundai, LG and others), into giant conglomerates. The state created a steel company at Pohang, opened a Seoul–Busan expressway in 1970, and pushed into shipbuilding, chemicals and cars. The New Village Movement (Saemaul Undong), launched in 1970, brought electricity and roads to villages.
Two decisions of the 1960s, both deeply unpopular at the time, brought money. In 1965 Park normalised relations with Japan, despite mass student protests, in exchange for $300 million in grants and $200 million in government loans that helped fund industrialisation. And from the mid-1960s he sent troops to fight alongside the Americans in Vietnam, about 320,000 over the course of the war, more than any other ally, in return for American aid, military contracts and access to markets.
The results were extraordinary. South Korea's economy grew by an average of about 9.9 percent a year from 1962 to 1991, according to the World Bank. In constant 2015 dollars, its income per person rose from about $1,040 in 1960, slightly less than that of the Philippines, to about $4,140 by 1980. The cost was paid by workers, many of them young women in textile and electronics factories working very long hours for low pay; in 1970 a young garment worker, Jeon Tae-il, set himself on fire in Seoul in protest at sweatshop conditions, and his death made him a lasting symbol of the labour movement.
Yushin
Park won the 1971 presidential election only narrowly against an opposition politician from the south-west, Kim Dae-jung. In October 1972 he staged a coup against his own constitution, declaring martial law, dissolving the National Assembly and imposing the Yushin ("revitalising reform") Constitution, approved in a referendum under martial law on 21 November. It let him be re-elected indefinitely by an electoral college he controlled and rule by decree. Critics were jailed and tortured. In August 1973 agents of the Korean Central Intelligence Agency (KCIA) kidnapped Kim Dae-jung from a Tokyo hotel; a government panel concluded in 2007 that Park had probably given the operation implicit approval. On 15 August 1974 a North Korean sympathiser fired at Park during a speech; a bullet killed his wife, Yuk Young-soo.
In October 1979, protests broke out in Busan and Masan. On the evening of 26 October 1979, at a dinner in a KCIA safe house near the presidential residence, the director of the KCIA, Kim Jae-gyu, shot Park dead.

Park Chung Hee: two memories

As his admirers, mostly conservatives, remember him
The leader who lifted South Korea out of poverty in a generation: honest by the standards of his time, disciplined, focused on national strength, who built the industrial base of a modern economy.

As his critics, mostly progressives, remember him
A former officer of Japan's puppet army who seized power by force, tortured and jailed opponents, crushed unions and abolished democracy; the growth came from the work and sacrifice of ordinary people, and could have come without dictatorship.

What both agree on
He changed the country more than anyone else in its modern history. His daughter, Park Geun-hye, became president in 2013.

South Korea's economy was built by a dictator, and its democracy was built by the people who fought him. Both halves of that sentence are true, and South Koreans still argue about which matters more.

Part 12 — South Korea: Gwangju and the road to democracy (1979–1997)
The Seoul spring and the coup
Park's death opened a brief "Seoul spring" of hope for democracy. It lasted a few months. On 12 December 1979, Major General Chun Doo-hwan, head of the military's Security Command, which was investigating Park's assassination, arrested the army chief of staff, General Jeong Seung-hwa, and seized control of the military in a mutiny within the army. When students and workers demonstrated for democracy in the spring of 1980, Chun's group extended martial law across the country on 17 May 1980, closed the universities and the National Assembly, and arrested opposition leaders, among them Kim Dae-jung.
Gwangju, May 1980
Kim Dae-jung's home region was the south-west, and its largest city, Gwangju, rose. On 18 May students protesting against martial law were attacked by paratroopers of the army's special forces, who beat, bayoneted and shot not only demonstrators but bystanders. Citizens joined in their tens of thousands, seized weapons from police stations and armouries, and drove the troops out of the city. For several days Gwangju governed itself through citizens' councils, with remarkable order. On 27 May the army retook it in a dawn assault.
How many died is still disputed. Official counts recognised about 165 civilians killed and dozens missing; some estimates run to about 600. The government's May 18 truth commission, reporting in 2023, confirmed 135 people shot dead by troops, part of a larger toll it was still investigating. The military regime branded the uprising a communist-inspired riot; in 1997 South Korea made 18 May a national day of commemoration. A fringe on the far right still repeats the claim that North Korean agents were behind it; declassified American intelligence cables and later South Korean investigations found no evidence of that.
Many South Koreans also blamed the United States, which held wartime operational control of South Korea's forces and was seen to have approved the movement of troops to Gwangju. Anti-Americanism among students grew from Gwangju onwards.
Kim Dae-jung was sentenced to death for sedition. Under pressure from the incoming Reagan administration, Chun commuted the sentence in January 1981.
Chun's Fifth Republic
Chun made himself president in 1980 and ruled under a new constitution that limited the president to a single seven-year term. He purged the press, and in 1980–81 about 42,000 people were sent to brutal military "purification" camps, known as the Samchung camps. The economy boomed. Seoul won the right to host the 1988 Olympic Games.
The North, meanwhile, turned to terrorism. On 9 October 1983, North Korean agents set off a bomb at a mausoleum in Rangoon, Burma, during a visit by Chun; he escaped, but the blast killed 21 people, among them four South Korean cabinet ministers, including the deputy prime minister and the foreign minister. On 29 November 1987, Korean Air Flight 858 exploded over the Andaman Sea, killing all 115 aboard; a North Korean agent arrested in Bahrain, Kim Hyon-hui, confessed that she and a colleague had planted the bomb on orders from Pyongyang. North Korea denies both attacks.
June 1987
In January 1987 a Seoul National University student, Park Jong-chul, died under police torture, and the police tried to cover it up. On 13 April Chun suspended debate on constitutional reform until after the Olympics, which meant his successor would be chosen indirectly, in effect by Chun himself. On 9 June a Yonsei University student, Lee Han-yeol, was struck in the head by a tear-gas canister and later died. From 10 June, hundreds of thousands, then millions, of students and office workers filled the streets for nearly three weeks: the June Democratic Struggle.
On 29 June 1987, Chun's chosen successor, Roh Tae-woo, a fellow general from the 1979 coup, gave way. His "June 29 Declaration" promised direct presidential elections, an amnesty for Kim Dae-jung and freedom of the press. A new constitution, still in force today, was approved that autumn.
In the election of December 1987 the two great opposition leaders, Kim Young-sam and Kim Dae-jung, both ran, splitting the vote, 28 percent and 27 percent. Roh won with 36.6 percent. The Olympics went ahead in Seoul in 1988. Under Roh's "Nordpolitik," South Korea opened relations with the Soviet Union in 1990 and China in 1992, and in 1991 both Koreas joined the United Nations as separate members.
In 1990 Kim Young-sam merged his party with Roh's, and in December 1992 he won the presidency, the first civilian elected to it since 1960. He had his predecessors arrested. In 1996 Chun and Roh were convicted of mutiny, treason and corruption over the 1979 coup and the Gwangju killings. Chun was sentenced to death, commuted on appeal to life imprisonment; Roh received a long prison term. Both were pardoned in December 1997.

The road to democracy

1960
April Revolution topples Rhee (186 killed)

1961
Park Chung Hee's coup

1972
Yushin constitution

1979
Park killed (26 Oct); Chun's coup within the army (12 Dec)

1980
Gwangju Uprising crushed (18–27 May)

1987
June Democratic Struggle; direct elections restored

1993
Kim Young-sam, first civilian president elected since 1960

1996
Chun and Roh convicted

1997
Kim Dae-jung elected, the first peaceful transfer of power to the opposition

Democracy did not come to South Korea as a gift. It came, in 1960 and again in 1987, because students and then ordinary citizens kept coming back into the streets after being shot at.

Part 13 — South Korea: crash, Sunshine and the Korean wave (1997–2022)
The IMF crisis
By 1996 South Korea had joined the OECD, the club of rich countries. Its chaebol had borrowed heavily, often short-term and in foreign currency. When the Asian financial crisis broke in 1997, the debts came due: the steel group Hanbo collapsed early in the year, the carmaker Kia sought emergency loans in July, and foreign lenders pulled out. By late 1997 the central bank had almost run out of foreign currency.
On 4 December 1997 the International Monetary Fund approved a $21 billion loan, the core of a rescue package of about $55 billion including money from the World Bank, the Asian Development Bank and individual countries. In return, South Korea had to cut spending, raise interest rates, open its markets and restructure its banks and conglomerates. Of the 30 largest chaebol, 11 collapsed; Daewoo went under in mid-1999 with about $80 billion in debts. The economy shrank by 4.9 percent in 1998, by the World Bank's figures. Koreans call it simply "the IMF crisis."
What people remember most is the gold-collecting campaign of early 1998, when about 3.5 million citizens donated wedding rings, medals and jewellery, about 227 tonnes of gold in all, to help repay the debts. The economy bounced back with 11.6 percent growth in 1999, but the old promise of a job for life was gone, and insecure temporary work spread.
Kim Dae-jung and the Sunshine Policy
In the middle of the crisis, in December 1997, Kim Dae-jung, the long-persecuted opposition leader, won the presidency. It was the first time in South Korean history that power had passed peacefully to the opposition.
Kim's North Korea policy, named after Aesop's fable in which the sun, not the wind, persuades a traveller to take off his coat, was the Sunshine Policy: aid, trade, tourism and family reunions, in the hope of changing the North gradually. From 13 to 15 June 2000 Kim flew to Pyongyang for the first-ever summit with Kim Jong Il, and that year won the Nobel Peace Prize. Hyundai ran tourist trips to Mount Kumgang in the North, and from 2004 South Korean firms employed North Korean workers at the Kaesong Industrial Region, just north of the border. Kim's successor, Roh Moo-hyun, held a second summit in Pyongyang on 2–4 October 2007.
Sunshine still divides South Koreans. Its supporters say it lowered tension, reunited families and showed North Koreans the South's prosperity. Its critics say it sent cash to a regime that used the breathing space to build nuclear weapons; in 2003 it emerged that Hyundai had secretly paid the North hundreds of millions of dollars before the 2000 summit.
The conservative presidents who followed, Lee Myung-bak (2008–2013) and Park Geun-hye (2013–2017), tied aid to nuclear disarmament. The Kumgang tours ended in 2008 after a North Korean soldier shot a South Korean tourist. On 26 March 2010 the navy corvette Cheonan sank in the Yellow Sea, killing 46 sailors; an international investigation led by South Korea concluded that a North Korean torpedo had sunk it, which the North denies. In November 2010 the North shelled Yeonpyeong Island, killing four people. The Kaesong complex closed in 2016.
Tragedy and impeachment
On 16 April 2014 the ferry Sewol capsized off the south-west coast, and 304 people died, most of them high-school students on a school trip who had been told by the crew to stay in their cabins. The disaster, and the government's slow and confused response, became a national trauma.
Park Geun-hye, daughter of Park Chung Hee and South Korea's first woman president, was brought down in 2016 by a scandal over her confidante, Choi Soon-sil, who held no office but edited the president's speeches and extracted money from chaebol for foundations she controlled. Millions joined weekly candlelight protests. On 9 December 2016 the National Assembly impeached Park by 234 votes to 56, and on 10 March 2017 the Constitutional Court removed her unanimously. She was sentenced to a long prison term and pardoned in December 2021.
The progressive Moon Jae-in, elected in May 2017, revived engagement with the North (Part 17). He left office in 2022, succeeded by a conservative former prosecutor, Yoon Suk Yeol, who beat Lee Jae-myung by less than one percentage point, the narrowest margin since direct elections returned in 1987.
The Korean wave
Over these same years, South Korea became a cultural superpower. Chinese journalists coined the term Hallyu, the "Korean wave," in 1999 for the spreading popularity of Korean dramas and pop music. The romance drama Winter Sonata became a phenomenon in Japan in 2003–04; K-pop groups, trained for years by entertainment companies, followed, and Psy's "Gangnam Style" in 2012 and BTS from the late 2010s took the wave worldwide.
Bong Joon-ho's Parasite won the Palme d'Or in 2019 and, in February 2020, the Academy Award for Best Picture, the first film not in English to do so. Netflix's Squid Game, a bleak drama about debt, became the platform's most-watched series after its release in September 2021. In 2024 the novelist Han Kang, born in Gwangju in 1970, won the Nobel Prize in Literature, the first Asian woman to do so, for what the Swedish Academy called her "intense poetic prose that confronts historical traumas and exposes the fragility of human life." Her novel Human Acts is about Gwangju in 1980.
The disappearing children
The same society produces fewer children than any other on Earth. South Korea's total fertility rate, the average number of children a woman has in her lifetime, fell to 0.72 in 2023, according to official statistics, and stood at 0.75 in 2024, the lowest of any country in the World Bank's data (only the Chinese territory of Macao reported lower). It rose to about 0.80 in 2025, with 254,300 births, a 6.7 percent increase, according to South Korea's national statistics agency, the second rise in a row after years of decline. A replacement-level rate is about 2.1. Already more than a fifth of South Koreans are 65 or older.
The reasons people give are the ones the companion piece in this library describes: Seoul's housing costs, the expense and intensity of schooling, long working hours, and a culture in which women who have children pay a heavy career price.

South Korea's economy and society (World Bank unless noted)
1960
1980
2000
Latest

GDP per person, constant 2015 US$
About 1,040
About 4,140
About 17,760
About 37,470 (2025)

Life expectancy at birth (years)
53.8
66.0
75.9
83.6 (2024)

Total fertility rate
6.0
2.8
1.5
0.75 (2024); 0.80 (2025, official)

Share of people 65 and over
—
—
—
20.3% (2025)

The country that grew rich fastest is also the country that is shrinking fastest. South Korea's success and its demographic crisis come from the same place: a society that asks almost everything of its young.

Part 14 — South Korea: martial law and after (2022–2026)
The night of 3 December 2024
Yoon Suk Yeol's presidency was troubled from the start. The opposition Democratic Party, which controlled the National Assembly, blocked his budgets and impeached a series of his officials; his wife, Kim Keon-hee, was dogged by scandals; and his party lost the parliamentary election of April 2024 heavily. A crowd crush during Halloween in Seoul's Itaewon district on 29 October 2022, which killed more than 150 young people, had left another lasting grievance.
At 10:27 p.m. on 3 December 2024, Yoon appeared on television and declared emergency martial law, saying he needed to protect the country from "anti-state" forces and to root out what he called pro-North Korean elements in the opposition. A martial law decree banned all political activity, including by the National Assembly, and put the press under military control. Special forces troops arrived at the National Assembly by helicopter and tried to enter the building.
What happened next became one of the defining images of South Korean democracy. Thousands of citizens rushed to the Assembly and confronted the soldiers. Opposition leader Lee Jae-myung live-streamed himself climbing over the fence. Aides barricaded doors with furniture. At about 1 a.m. on 4 December, all 190 lawmakers who had made it inside, including members of Yoon's own party, voted to lift martial law. Yoon withdrew it at about 4:30 a.m.
On 14 December the National Assembly impeached him, with 204 of its 300 members voting in favour, including 12 from his own People Power Party. On 15 January 2025, after weeks in which his security service blocked arrest attempts at his residence, investigators detained him, the first time a sitting South Korean president had been arrested. He was indicted on charges of leading an insurrection on 26 January, released on procedural grounds on 8 March, and on 4 April 2025 the Constitutional Court removed him from office by a unanimous 8–0 vote.

How the two camps saw martial law

Yoon and his supporters
The president used a lawful emergency power to warn the nation about an opposition that was paralysing government through impeachments and budget cuts and, in their view, was sympathetic to the North. Some supporters also repeated unproven claims of election fraud. Large pro-Yoon rallies, waving South Korean and American flags, continued for months.

The opposition, the courts and most of the public
The declaration was an unconstitutional attempt to shut down the legislature by force, which, the court ruled, gravely betrayed the people's trust. Polls showed large majorities supported his removal.

President Lee Jae-myung
The snap election of 3 June 2025 was won by the Democratic Party's Lee Jae-myung with 49.42 percent of the vote, against 41.15 percent for the conservative Kim Moon-soo and 8.34 percent for Lee Jun-seok, on a turnout of 79.38 percent. Lee took office the next day. Born into poverty near Andong, he had worked in factories as a child, where an accident left him with a permanently injured arm, before becoming a human-rights lawyer, mayor of Seongnam and governor of Gyeonggi province. His supporters see a self-made outsider who defends ordinary people; his critics, a populist who faced several criminal trials of his own, which the courts postponed once he became president.
Lee set out to calm relations with Japan and the United States and to reopen contact with the North, which rebuffed him. A trade deal with the Trump administration, agreed in October 2025 and set out in a joint fact sheet on 14 November, capped American tariffs on most South Korean goods at 15 percent in exchange for $350 billion in South Korean investment in the United States, $200 billion of it in cash at no more than $20 billion a year and $150 billion in shipbuilding. Washington also agreed to support South Korea's plans for nuclear-powered submarines.
The trials
Special prosecutors pursued Yoon, his wife and his former officials. On 16 January 2026 a court sentenced Yoon to five years for obstructing his arrest and abusing his power. On 21 January his former prime minister, Han Duck-soo, received 23 years. On 19 February 2026, the Seoul Central District Court found Yoon guilty of leading an insurrection and sentenced him to life imprisonment; prosecutors had sought the death penalty. His former defence minister, Kim Yong-hyun, received 30 years. As of late October 2026 Yoon's appeal was still before the Seoul High Court, where the special counsel again asked for death; a ruling was expected around the end of the year. (South Korea has not carried out an execution since 1997.)
The country in late 2026
In local elections on 3 June 2026, Lee's Democratic Party won most of the races for provincial governors and big-city mayors, though the conservative mayor of Seoul, Oh Se-hoon, held on with 49.15 percent to 48.13 percent. The vote was marred by a shortage of ballot papers at some polling stations, which forced the head of the National Election Commission to resign and led to a joint parliamentary investigation.
By late October 2026, Lee's approval rating in Gallup Korea's weekly poll was around 40 percent, with half the public disapproving; housing prices were the top complaint. The Democratic Party led the People Power Party in party support by 37 percent to 28.

On the night of 3 December 2024, a South Korean president tried to use the army against the parliament, and citizens, legislators and in the end the courts stopped him. Few events say more about how far the country has come since 1980.

Part 15 — North Korea: Kim Il Sung's state (1945–1994)
The founder
North Korea is the creation of one man and the family that succeeded him. Kim Il Sung was born Kim Song-ju near Pyongyang on 15 April 1912, a date the North celebrates as the Day of the Sun. His family moved to Manchuria, where in the 1930s he became a guerrilla commander in a Chinese Communist–led army fighting the Japanese. His best-known exploit was a raid on the town of Pochonbo, on the Korean side of the border, on 4 June 1937. In October 1940, hunted by the Japanese, he fled across the Amur into the Soviet Union, where he served as a captain in a Soviet brigade of Korean and Chinese exiles. He returned to Korea in a Soviet uniform in September 1945.
North Korea's official histories tell a different story: that Kim led a great Korean People's Revolutionary Army that fought the Japanese for fifteen years and liberated the country in 1945, with the Soviet Army in a supporting role. Outside historians agree that Kim was a genuine, brave and relatively successful guerrilla leader, but say his units were small, part of a Chinese-led force, and that Korea was liberated by Japan's defeat in the Pacific and the Soviet invasion, not by Korean partisans.
Building a one-man state
After the war, Kim removed every rival. Pak Hon-yong, leader of the southern communists who had come north, was blamed for the war's failure and executed in the mid-1950s. In August 1956, while Kim was abroad, officials from pro-Chinese and pro-Soviet factions planned to criticise his personality cult at a party meeting. Kim outmanoeuvred them; when a joint Chinese–Soviet delegation, led by Peng Dehuai and Anastas Mikoyan, came to force him to restore those he had purged, he gave way briefly and then completed the purge. By the end of the 1950s no faction remained but his own.
In December 1955 Kim gave a speech calling for juche in ideological work, a word usually translated as "self-reliance" or "subjecthood": Korea should do things in its own way, not copy the Soviet Union or China. Over the next two decades, Juche was elaborated, largely by the party theorist Hwang Jang-yop (who defected to the South in 1997), into an all-embracing state ideology centred on the leader. In 1972 a new constitution made Kim president.
Economic mobilisation followed the Soviet model: collective farms, state industry and mass campaigns. The Chollima Movement, launched in the late 1950s and named after a mythical winged horse that could gallop a thousand li a day, urged workers to superhuman effort. For a time it worked. Rebuilding from the war's ruins, with Soviet, Chinese and East European aid, the North grew fast, and most economists believe it was richer per person than the South until at some point in the 1970s.
The state also sorted every citizen by family background. The system called songbun, set up by the late 1960s, divides the population into three broad classes, "core," "wavering" and "hostile," with about 50 subcategories. Descendants of anti-Japanese fighters and war dead sit at the top; descendants of landlords, Christians, collaborators and people who went south sit at the bottom. Songbun decides where people may live, what schooling and jobs they get, and whether they may join the party.
Between two patrons
North Korea depended on the Soviet Union and China but played them against each other, especially after their split in the early 1960s. In July 1961 it signed mutual defence treaties with both; the one with China, signed in Beijing on 11 July 1961, is still in force. Kim tilted towards one patron or the other as it suited him, and Juche's stress on independence was partly a way to keep both at arm's length.
He never gave up on taking the South. On 21 January 1968, 31 North Korean commandos got within a few hundred metres of the Blue House, the South Korean presidential residence, in an attempt to kill Park Chung Hee. Two days later, the North seized the American intelligence ship Pueblo and held its crew for eleven months. On 18 August 1976, at Panmunjom, North Korean soldiers killed two American officers with axes during a dispute over trimming a tree. From 1977 to 1983 North Korean agents abducted Japanese citizens, which the North admitted only in 2002; Japan recognises 17 victims.
There were moments of contact. On 4 July 1972, after secret visits by envoys, the two Koreas issued a joint statement committing to unification "independently," "peacefully" and through "great national unity." Little came of it.
The cult and the succession
Kim Il Sung's personality cult grew to a scale unmatched in the modern world. His portrait hung in every home and workplace; children were taught to thank him for their food. From the 1970s he groomed his eldest son, Kim Jong Il, to succeed him, the first hereditary succession in a communist state. Kim Il Sung died of a heart attack on 8 July 1994, at 82. A 1998 revision of the constitution named him the "eternal President of the Republic," and the North counts its years in a Juche calendar beginning with his birth in 1912.

Kim Il Sung's North Korea

Born
15 April 1912

Soviet captain
1940s, in a brigade of Korean and Chinese exiles

Leader
From 1945–46 (premier 1948, president 1972)

Ideology
Juche (from a 1955 speech)

Purges
Pak Hon-yong (mid-1950s); August Faction (1956)

Patrons
Soviet Union and China; treaties with both, 1961

Attacks on the South
Blue House raid (1968); Rangoon bombing (1983)

Died
8 July 1994

North Korea's founding myth says Kim Il Sung liberated Korea. The truth, that the Soviet army did, is the first thing the state had to hide, and the habit of hiding has never stopped.

Part 16 — North Korea: famine, military first and the bomb (1994–2011)
The collapse of the patrons
By the time Kim Il Sung died, the world that had sustained his state was gone. The Soviet Union, which for decades had supplied oil, machinery and fertiliser on easy terms, began demanding payment at world prices in hard currency at the start of the 1990s, and then dissolved in 1991. China normalised relations with South Korea in 1992. North Korea's collective farms depended on fertiliser, fuel and electric pumps it could no longer get, and its factories stalled for lack of energy and parts. The economy shrank year after year in the early 1990s.
The Arduous March
Then came the floods of 1995, which destroyed crops and grain stores, followed by more floods and drought. The state's Public Distribution System, which had fed most of the population with rations, broke down; by 1997 it was supplying only a small fraction of the people, about 6 percent by one estimate. Millions survived by foraging, bartering, crossing into China or trading in illegal markets. The regime called the period the "Arduous March," after a legendary winter retreat by Kim Il Sung's guerrillas in the 1930s, and urged endurance.
How many died is not known and may never be.

Deaths in the North Korean famine (mid-to-late 1990s)
Estimate
Source

North Korean officials (1995–98), as disclosed in 1999
About 220,000
North Korean figures, cited by aid agencies

Independent researchers
600,000 to 1 million
Demographic studies published in 2001 and 2007

US Census Bureau (1993–2000)
500,000 to 600,000 excess deaths
Study published in 2011

Andrew Natsios, former US aid official
2 to 3 million
Estimate from refugee interviews

Full range in published estimates
240,000 to 3.5 million
Scholarly surveys of the estimates

The World Bank's modelled figures for life expectancy show the scale of the shock: from 70.5 years in 1990 to 60.9 in 2000. International agencies, led by the UN's World Food Programme, delivered large amounts of food aid from 1995, though the regime controlled where it went and restricted monitoring.
The famine changed North Korea permanently, in a way the regime never intended. When the state stopped feeding people, they began to feed themselves through private trade, and the markets (Part 18) never went away.
Kim Jong Il
Kim Jong Il was born on 16 February 1941, most likely in a Soviet army camp in the Russian Far East, where his father was then based. His official biography says he was born a year later, in 1942, in a secret guerrilla camp on Mount Paektu, Korea's sacred mountain, under a double rainbow. He had been groomed as heir since the 1970s and ran much of the state, including its film industry, before his father died. He let three years of mourning pass before taking the top party post of general secretary on 8 October 1997.
His signature policy was songun, "military first," proclaimed from 1995: the army, and its needs, came before everything else, including the party. In practice it gave the military first claim on food and resources during the famine, and justified the nuclear and missile programmes as the guarantee of the state's survival.
The nuclear road
North Korea's nuclear work went back to a Soviet-supplied research reactor at Yongbyon in the 1960s. In 1993, in a dispute over international inspections, the North announced that it would withdraw from the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT). The Agreed Framework of October 1994 defused the crisis: the North froze its plutonium programme in exchange for fuel oil and two light-water reactors to be built by an international consortium. In 2002 the United States accused the North of a secret uranium enrichment programme; the deal collapsed, and in January 2003 the North left the NPT for good.
From 2003, six-party talks (the two Koreas, the United States, China, Japan and Russia) produced statements of principle, including one in September 2005 in which the North committed to abandon "all nuclear weapons and existing nuclear programs," but never a lasting deal. On 9 October 2006 North Korea conducted its first nuclear test. A second followed on 25 May 2009. The six-party talks last met in December 2008, and North Korea quit them in April 2009.
The missiles went on alongside. In August 1998 the North launched a Taepodong-1 rocket over Japan, which it said carried a satellite.
The 2000 summit and its limits
Kim Jong Il was also the leader who embraced Kim Dae-jung at Pyongyang airport in June 2000, took South Korean aid and investment, and admitted to Japan in 2002 that the North had abducted Japanese citizens. Supporters of engagement saw an opening; sceptics saw a leader who took the money and kept building weapons. Both may have been right.
In August 2008 Kim suffered a stroke. He began preparing his youngest son for power. On 17 December 2011 he died of a heart attack, aged 70, while travelling on his train.

North Korea's nuclear tests
Date
Notes

1st
9 October 2006
Under Kim Jong Il

2nd
25 May 2009
Under Kim Jong Il

3rd
12 February 2013
Kim Jong Un's first

4th
6 January 2016
North claimed a hydrogen bomb

5th
9 September 2016

6th
3 September 2017
Largest; the North claimed a hydrogen bomb for missiles

The famine and the bomb belong to the same years. While hundreds of thousands, perhaps more, were dying of hunger, the state chose to put what it had into the army and the weapons it believed would keep the regime alive.

Part 17 — North Korea: Kim Jong Un and the "two hostile states" (2011–2026)
The third Kim
Kim Jong Un was born in 1982, 1983 or 1984; the date is uncertain. He spent several years of his childhood at schools in Switzerland under an assumed name, then studied in Pyongyang. Almost unknown outside the country when his father died, he took over in December 2011, in his late twenties.
He moved fast to secure his position. Many senior officials and generals were replaced. In December 2013 his uncle, Jang Song Thaek, long seen as the second most powerful man in the country, was arrested at a party meeting and executed for treason. On 13 February 2017, his elder half-brother, Kim Jong Nam, who lived in exile, was killed at Kuala Lumpur airport in Malaysia when two women smeared his face with VX nerve agent; Malaysian authorities identified several North Korean suspects, who had flown home. North Korea denies involvement.
At home Kim at first allowed farms and factories more say over what they produced and sold, tolerated the markets, and gave Pyongyang new apartment towers and a ski resort. He also restored the party's central place, quietly downgrading songun.
The race to an ICBM
Above all, Kim made the nuclear programme the centre of state policy. Four of the North's six nuclear tests came in his first six years. In 2017 the North tested its first intercontinental ballistic missiles, the Hwasong-14 on 4 July and the larger Hwasong-15 on 28–29 November, which analysts calculated could reach the whole of the United States. President Donald Trump threatened "fire and fury like the world has never seen." The UN Security Council imposed its toughest sanctions yet, restricting the North's exports of coal, textiles and seafood and its imports of oil.
Summits
Then Kim changed course. His sister, Kim Yo Jong, attended the opening of the Winter Olympics in Pyeongchang, South Korea, in February 2018. On 27 April 2018 Kim met President Moon Jae-in at Panmunjom, stepping briefly into the South, and the two promised to work towards "complete denuclearization" of the peninsula. On 12 June 2018, in Singapore, Kim met Trump, the first meeting between a sitting American president and a North Korean leader. They signed a short statement of principles, and Moon visited Pyongyang in September.
At a second summit in Hanoi on 27–28 February 2019, the deal collapsed. North Korea offered to dismantle its main nuclear complex at Yongbyon in exchange for lifting the UN sanctions imposed in 2016–17, the ones that hit hardest; the Americans wanted more, and walked away. A brief meeting at Panmunjom on 30 June 2019, when Trump stepped into the North, produced nothing. In January 2020 the North sealed its borders against COVID-19, and on 16 June 2020 it blew up the inter-Korean liaison office in Kaesong, opened under the 2018 agreements.
"Two hostile states"
At a party meeting in December 2023, Kim declared that relations between North and South were no longer those of one nation temporarily divided, but of "states hostile to each other" and "two belligerent states." On 15 January 2024, he told the Supreme People's Assembly that the constitution should define South Korea as the "primary foe and invariable principal enemy." The bodies that had handled relations with the South for decades, including a committee for peaceful reunification that dated back to 1961, were abolished. The Arch of Reunification was torn down within days. On 15 October 2024 the North blew up the roads and railway lines that had connected it to the South across the border.
The constitution has been revised several times since. Its March 2026 version, as analysed by the North Korea specialist Rachel Minyoung Lee for the website 38 North, deleted language about unification and about a single Korean nation, and added a clause defining the country's territory by its borders with China and Russia to the north and the Republic of Korea to the south, without mentioning the disputed sea border. The text does not, however, codify the phrase "hostile state" that North Korean state media had used. At the party's Ninth Congress in February 2026, Kim called the South the North's "most hostile state," said the North would never treat South Koreans as "fellow countrymen," and said Pyongyang could get along with the United States if Washington accepted its nuclear status.
Why the turn? Pyongyang's own explanation is that the South, allied with the United States, wants to absorb the North, so talk of unification was pointless. Outside analysts add that the regime fears its people's exposure to South Korean culture and wants to cut the idea of a shared nation at the root, and that with nuclear weapons and a Russian partner, Kim no longer needs the South. The South's progressive government under Lee Jae-myung responded with conciliation, halting some propaganda broadcasts, and in March 2026 its unification minister for the first time referred to the North by its official name. Pyongyang brushed the overtures aside.
Russia
The biggest change in North Korea's position came from the war in Ukraine. From 2023 the North supplied Russia with artillery shells, millions of them by most estimates, and ballistic missiles. On 19 June 2024 Vladimir Putin visited Pyongyang and signed a Treaty on Comprehensive Strategic Partnership, which promises mutual military assistance if either is attacked. From October 2024 North Korean troops were sent to Russia's Kursk region against a Ukrainian incursion. Russia's chief of staff, Valery Gerasimov, acknowledged their role on 26 April 2025, and North Korea two days later. South Korea's National Intelligence Service estimated in February 2026 that about 11,000 had been sent and about 6,000 killed or wounded. In return, the North is believed to receive oil, food, money and military technology.
The nuclear arsenal has kept growing. North Korea wrote its status as a nuclear weapons state into its constitution in September 2023. On 31 October 2024 it tested the Hwasong-19, a solid-fuel ICBM that flew for about 86 minutes, its longest flight yet. The Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) estimated in its 2026 yearbook that the North had about 60 assembled nuclear warheads and enough fissile material for up to 90.

Kim Jong Un's North Korea

Leader since
December 2011

Nuclear tests
2013, 2016 (two), 2017

First ICBM tests
2017 (Hwasong-14, Hwasong-15)

Summits
Moon (April, May, September 2018); Trump (Singapore 2018, Hanoi 2019, Panmunjom 2019)

"Two hostile states"
Declared December 2023; unification bodies abolished January 2024

Russia
Treaty June 2024; troops to Kursk from October 2024

Arsenal
About 60 assembled warheads (SIPRI, 2026)

Kim Il Sung said Korea was one nation and must be united on his terms. His grandson has decided it is two states, and that his half needs only the bomb and the friends it can buy.

Part 18 — Inside North Korea: rights, markets and daily life
What the UN found
In 2013 the UN Human Rights Council set up a Commission of Inquiry on human rights in North Korea, led by the Australian judge Michael Kirby, with Marzuki Darusman of Indonesia and Sonja Biserko of Serbia. North Korea refused to let it in. More than 80 witnesses and experts testified at its public hearings in Seoul, Tokyo, London and Washington, and it conducted more than 240 confidential interviews, mostly with people who had escaped. Its report, dated 7 February 2014 and released on 17 February, concluded:

"Systematic, widespread and gross human rights violations have been and are being committed by the Democratic People's Republic of Korea, its institutions and officials. In many instances, the violations of human rights found by the commission constitute crimes against humanity. ... The gravity, scale and nature of these violations reveal a State that does not have any parallel in the contemporary world."

It estimated that "between 80,000 and 120,000 political prisoners are currently detained in four large political prison camps," where the inmate population had been "gradually eliminated through deliberate starvation, forced labour, executions, torture, rape" and other abuses, and hundreds of thousands had died over five decades. It described songbun discrimination, the near-total denial of freedom of thought, expression and religion, the punishment of whole families for one member's offence, and the abduction of foreigners, and found that North Koreans forcibly returned from China were systematically tortured and imprisoned.
What Pyongyang says
North Korea rejected the report "categorically and totally." Its officials called the evidence "fabricated and invented," described the inquiry as a political conspiracy by the United States and "hostile forces" and an "instrument of political plot" aimed at overthrowing its system, and dismissed the witnesses as criminals and "human scum." North Korea denies that political prison camps exist. It says its constitution guarantees the rights of its citizens, who enjoy free housing, education and health care, and that it is the victim of a hostile United States that has kept it under sanctions and nuclear threat since 1950.
Outside researchers weigh the evidence this way: the commission could not visit, and individual testimonies can be wrong, but the accounts of hundreds of witnesses, from different places and years, are consistent with each other and with satellite images of the camps. Most independent experts accept the commission's central findings.
The markets
The single biggest change in ordinary life since the 1990s is the jangmadang, the market. When rations stopped during the famine, people started selling whatever they could: vegetables from private plots, goods smuggled from China, home-made food. The state first tried to stamp out the trade, then tolerated it, and then licensed and taxed it. A study by the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) in Washington counted 436 official markets visible in satellite images in 2018.
Women run most of the trading. Men are tied to their official jobs, which pay almost nothing but must be attended; married women were freer to trade, and in many families they became the main earners. A generation that grew up after the famine, sometimes called the "jangmadang generation," learned to rely on the market rather than the state.
The regime has swung between tolerance and crackdown. In 2009 it suddenly revalued the currency, wiping out many traders' cash savings, and backed down after protests and inflation. Since the early 2020s it has again tightened control; according to reports from informants inside the country collected by outlets such as Daily NK and Asia Press, private sales of rice and corn were banned in 2023 in favour of state grain shops. Such reports are hard to confirm independently, and should be read with that in mind.
Daily life
North Korea is two countries itself. Pyongyang, where the most loyal families are allowed to live, has the most reliable electricity, new towers, restaurants and shops for those with money. The countryside is far poorer; the World Bank estimates that only about 61 percent of North Koreans had access to electricity in 2024, and that close to half the population was undernourished in the late 2010s.
Every adult belongs to an organisation, a party cell, a youth league, a women's union, and attends weekly sessions of self-criticism. Neighbourhood units of a few dozen households watch each other. Radios and televisions are fixed to state channels. Military service for men has long been among the longest in the world, by most accounts close to a decade. Travel within the country needs a permit, and travel abroad is forbidden without state approval.
Information is the regime's greatest fear. South Korean dramas and K-pop, smuggled in on USB sticks and memory cards from China, became widespread in the 2000s and 2010s. A 2020 law, the Law on Rejecting Reactionary Ideology and Culture, set punishments ranging from forced labour to death for distributing South Korean material. Defectors report that teenagers have been punished for using South Korean slang.

What we know, and how
Source
How reliable

Political prison camps, 80,000–120,000 prisoners
UN Commission of Inquiry (2014), from testimony and satellite imagery
Strong on existence; numbers are estimates

Economy and incomes
Bank of Korea (Seoul) estimates; North Korea publishes almost nothing
Best available; uncertain

Markets
Satellite images (CSIS); defector and informant reports
Good for counts; less for prices and rules

Health and population
UN agencies and World Bank, from limited North Korean data
Modelled; approximate

Daily life
Defector interviews; journalists' informant networks
Rich but hard to verify; skewed towards the border regions most defectors come from

North Korea's people have not stopped living their lives because their state is cruel. They trade, watch forbidden dramas, raise children and look after one another, in a system that treats most of what they do as a crime.

Part 19 — Two Koreas side by side
One people, two outcomes
In 1945 the two halves of Korea had the same language, the same history and broadly the same culture. The north had more of the colonial-era industry and the south more of the farmland. Eighty years later, the gap between them is one of the widest between any two neighbouring countries on Earth.

South Korea
North Korea
Source

Population (2025)
51.7 million
26.6 million
World Bank

Life expectancy at birth (2024)
83.6 years
73.7 years
World Bank (modelled for the North)

Deaths before age five, per 1,000 births (2024)
2.8
16.7
World Bank

Total fertility rate (2024)
0.75
1.78
World Bank

Share of people in cities (2024)
81%
64%
World Bank

Access to electricity (2024)
100%
61%
World Bank

Gross national income per person (2025)
52.57 million won
1.87 million won (about 3.6% of the South's)
Bank of Korea estimate

Total economy (2025)
—
About 1.8% of the South's
Bank of Korea estimate

Economic growth (2025)
—
3.5%
Bank of Korea estimate

Armed forces
About 450,000 (2025)
About 1.2 million (2022 estimate)
South Korea's Ministry of National Defense

Nuclear weapons
None; under the US "nuclear umbrella"
About 60 assembled warheads
SIPRI (2026)

Political system
Democracy; free elections since 1987
One-party state; one family since 1948
—

The Bank of Korea's estimates for the North are the most widely cited, but they rest on limited information and are converted using South Korean prices, so they are best read as a rough guide.
People who crossed
Since the 1990s, more than 34,000 North Koreans have reached South Korea, most through China and then South-East Asia, a dangerous journey usually arranged by brokers. Arrivals peaked at 2,914 in 2009, fell after Kim Jong Un tightened the border, and collapsed when the North sealed it in 2020: 236 arrived in 2024 and 224 in 2025. More than seven in ten are women, many of whom spent years in China, some sold into forced marriages. In the South they are citizens on arrival and go through a three-month resettlement programme at a centre called Hanawon. Many struggle with discrimination and a school system nothing prepared them for; a few have become well-known politicians and writers.
Families that never met again
The division separated hundreds of thousands of families, many of whom fled south during the war expecting to return within weeks. Since 1988, 134,516 South Koreans have registered with their government hoping to find relatives in the North. By the end of 2025 more than 100,000 of them had died, and about 34,600 were still alive, most of them very old. Government-organised reunions, a few hundred people at a time meeting for a few hours under official watch, became regular after the 2000 summit; the last took place in August 2018. For most of the living, there will be no more.
A language drifting apart
Korean is still one language, but eighty years apart have pulled it in two directions. The South absorbed thousands of English loanwords; the North replaced many foreign and Chinese-derived words with native coinages and bases its standard on the speech of Pyongyang. The South teaches 24 basic letters, the North a list of 40 that includes double and compound letters. Defectors say they understand South Koreans, but are instantly identified by their accent and vocabulary.
What unification would mean
Both Koreas spent decades saying they wanted unification, but the meaning always differed. For Pyongyang it meant a confederation on its terms or unification under its system; for Seoul, in practice, the North joining the democratic South, though progressive governments put reconciliation and coexistence first. The South still has a Ministry of Unification; the North has abolished its counterparts. President Lee Jae-myung said in March 2026 that the South "respects North Korea's system" and would not pursue "unification by absorption."
The costs would be enormous: rebuilding the North's infrastructure, integrating two populations with very different skills and expectations, and dealing with an army of over a million, a nuclear arsenal and the legacy of the camps. Germany's experience after 1990, when the gap between east and west was far smaller, is the usual comparison, and the usual warning.

The line of 1945 was drawn in one night by two officers with a small map. Eighty years later, it divides two populations that differ in health, wealth and freedom more than almost any other neighbours on Earth.

Part 20 — How to understand Korea today
Key dates

Date
Event

2333 BCE
Traditional date of Dangun's founding (fixed in 1485)

108 BCE
Han China conquers Gojoseon

668
Silla and Tang destroy Goguryeo; Unified Silla follows

698–926
Balhae in the north

918
Wang Geon founds Goryeo

1231–1270
Mongol invasions

1377
Jikji printed with metal type

1392
Joseon founded

1443–1446
King Sejong creates the Korean alphabet

1592–1598
Imjin War with Japan

1876
Treaty of Ganghwa opens Korea

1894–1895
Donghak revolution; Sino-Japanese War

1905
Japanese protectorate; Japan incorporates Dokdo/Takeshima

1910
Japan annexes Korea

1919
March First Movement

1945
Liberation; division at the 38th parallel

1948
ROK (15 Aug) and DPRK (9 Sept) founded

1950–1953
Korean War; armistice 27 July 1953

1960
April Revolution topples Rhee

1961
Park Chung Hee's coup

1980
Gwangju Uprising

1987
June Democratic Struggle

1994
Kim Il Sung dies; the 1995 floods then tip food shortages into famine

1997
Asian financial crisis; Kim Dae-jung elected

2000
First inter-Korean summit

2006
North's first nuclear test

2011
Kim Jong Un succeeds

2014
UN Commission of Inquiry report

2017
Park Geun-hye removed; North tests ICBMs

2018–2019
Moon–Kim and Trump–Kim summits

2023–2024
"Two hostile states"; Russia treaty; Yoon's martial law (3 Dec 2024)

2025
Yoon removed; Lee Jae-myung elected

2026
Yoon sentenced to life; North's new constitution

Who's who

Name
Dates
Why they matter

Sejong
1397–1450
King who created the Korean alphabet

Yi Sun-sin
1545–1598
Admiral who defeated Japan's navy

Gojong
1852–1919
Last Joseon king, first Korean emperor

An Jung-geun
1879–1910
Killed Itō Hirobumi; hero in both Koreas

Kim Ku
1876–1949
Provisional Government leader; opposed division

Syngman Rhee
1875–1965
South's first president, 1948–1960

Kim Il Sung
1912–1994
Founder of North Korea

Park Chung Hee
1917–1979
Military ruler of the South, 1961–1979

Chun Doo-hwan
1931–2021
Military ruler, 1980–1988; Gwangju

Kim Dae-jung
1924–2009
Dissident, then president; Sunshine Policy

Kim Jong Il
1941–2011
Second Northern leader; famine and the bomb

Kim Jong Un
Born 1982–84
Third leader; ICBMs and "two hostile states"

Yoon Suk Yeol
Born 1960
President 2022–2025; declared martial law

Lee Jae-myung
Born 1963
President since June 2025

Han Kang
Born 1970
Novelist; Nobel Prize in Literature 2024

Five ideas that unlock the peninsula
1. One nation, very old; two states, very new. Korea had a single, mostly stable kingdom on roughly the same territory from the tenth century to 1910. That long unity is why both Koreas long insisted that division was temporary, and why North Korea's decision to call the South a separate, hostile state is such a break with the past.
2. Between whales. Korea's location has always meant pressure from bigger neighbours. China was the centre of its world for two thousand years; Japan conquered it; the United States and the Soviet Union divided it. Today the South relies on the American alliance while trading heavily with China, and the North relies on China and now Russia. Much of each state's behaviour makes sense as an answer to that old problem.
3. The colonial past is not past. Japan's rule from 1910 to 1945 shaped Korean nationalism, the economy, the division and the political divide inside South Korea. The questions of forced labour and the "comfort women" are still argued in courts and cabinets in both countries.
4. Two models, one test. From the same starting point, one half became a rich, open democracy and the other a poor, closed dictatorship with nuclear weapons. That is the clearest natural experiment of the twentieth century in what institutions do to people's lives. It is also a reminder that the South's success was not inevitable: it came out of dictatorship, massacre, crisis and protest.
5. South Korea argues with itself. The South's conservatives and progressives disagree about almost every chapter of this history: Park Chung Hee, Japan, the North, the United States, China, even Gwangju for a fringe. Each camp has its own memory of the past, and each election is partly a vote on which memory wins.

For a thousand years, the question in Korea was how one people could stay free between empires. Since 1945, it has also been what that people does with two states, one line and a war that never formally ended.

The takeaway
Korea's history is the story of one people who built a lasting civilisation between larger powers: ancient kingdoms, a Buddhist Goryeo that printed with metal type before Europe, and a Confucian Joseon that invented its own alphabet and lasted five centuries. Forced open in 1876 and annexed by Japan in 1910, Koreans endured thirty-five years of colonial rule, including wartime forced labour and the "comfort women" system that the two countries still argue over. In 1945 two American officers drew a line at the 38th parallel; by 1948 two hostile states stood on either side of it, and the war of 1950–53 killed perhaps three million people without ending. The South went from poverty and dictatorship to wealth, democracy and global cultural influence, and in 2024–25 showed that its democracy could stop a president who turned the army against parliament. The North became a hereditary dictatorship that survived famine, built nuclear weapons, allied itself with Russia and now says the South is a foreign enemy. Both still carry the same past.
Try this: find a map of the Korean peninsula and trace the 38th parallel and the Demilitarised Zone. Then pick one family story from this history (a divided family, the Jeju villagers of 1948, a defector) and ask: if the line had been drawn fifty kilometres further north or south, how would that person's life have been different? Then read the first chapter of Han Kang's Human Acts or Barbara Demick's Nothing to Envy, and notice how much of each country's present is still about what happened to ordinary people in its past.

Sources & Further Reading
Sources
- World Bank, World Development Indicators (accessed October 2026): population, GDP per person, life expectancy, child mortality, fertility, urbanisation, electricity access, undernourishment and age structure for both Koreas.
- Bank of Korea, North Korean GDP estimates for 2025 (31 July 2026).
- United Nations: General Assembly Resolution 195 (III) (1948); Security Council Resolutions 82 and 83 (1950); Commission of Inquiry report A/HRC/25/63 (7 February 2014), quoted directly; North Korea's response as reported by Reuters and Al Jazeera (17 February 2014).
- "Comfort women" and forced labour: statement by Japan's Deputy Foreign Minister Sugiyama Shinsuke to the UN women's-rights committee (16 February 2016, archived Ministry of Foreign Affairs text); the Kono Statement (1993) and the 2015 agreement as quoted in the scholarly literature; South Korean court rulings of 30 October 2018 and 23 November 2023 as reported by Yonhap, The Korea Herald and The Korea Times.
- War deaths: Peace Research Institute Oslo; Bruce Cumings; Guenter Lewy; South Korea's Ministry of National Defense; US Department of Defense; Chinese official figures (2010, 2020). Famine: North Korean figures (1999); US Census Bureau (2011); Andrew Natsios; Stephan Haggard and Marcus Noland, Famine in North Korea (2007).
- North Korea since 2023: KCNA via Yonhap and NK News; Rachel Minyoung Lee, 38 North (21 May 2026); Korea Economic Institute of America (27 February 2026); National Intelligence Service briefings via Yonhap; SIPRI Yearbook 2026.
- South Korea 2024–26: Constitutional Court ruling (4 April 2025); National Election Commission results (2025, 2026); court rulings of January–February 2026 via Yonhap and The Korea Herald; US–ROK joint fact sheet (14 November 2025); Gallup Korea (October 2026); official birth and fertility statistics.
- Earlier periods cross-checked against the scholarly works cited in standard reference articles; each claim is logged with its source.
Go deeper
- 📘 Korea's Place in the Sun: A Modern History — Bruce Cumings (a vivid, opinionated history from Joseon to the present, strongest on 1945–53 and the American role)
- 📘 A Concise History of Korea — Michael J. Seth (a clear, balanced survey from the beginnings to the present, good for every part of this piece)
- 📘 The Real North Korea — Andrei Lankov (a Russian scholar who studied in Pyongyang explains how the North's system actually works)
- 📘 Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea — Barbara Demick (six people from one northern city live through the famine; reported from defector interviews)
- 📘 Human Acts — Han Kang (the Nobel laureate's novel of the Gwangju Uprising and its aftermath)
- 🌐 Columbia University, Asia for Educators (http://afe.easia.columbia.edu/): free primary sources and short essays on Korean history
- 🌐 Related pieces in this library: South Korea: A Condensed History of Division, Speed, and Reinvention; If I Was Born in South Korea; A Brief History of Japan and A Brief History of China (this series)