Histories of Nations
20 pieces · 17 hours of reading
A Brief History of the United States: Promise, Conquest, and the Argument That Never Ends
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.
Long read51 min02A Brief History of Mexico: Corn, Conquest, Revolution, and the Long Road to Democracy
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.
Long read50 min03A Brief History of Canada: Peoples, Empires, and the Art of Staying Together
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.
Long read55 min04A 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.
Long read44 min05A 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.
Long read51 min06A Brief History of Spain: Caves, Caliphs, Empire, and the Long Road to Democracy
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.
Long read54 min07A Brief History of France: Caves, Kings, Revolutions, and the Republic That Keeps Arguing
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.
Long read59 min08A Brief History of the United Kingdom: Four Nations, One Crown, and the Long Argument About Who Rules
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.
Long read59 min09A Brief History of Iran: Empire, Faith, Revolution, and the Long Argument over Who Rules
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.
Long read51 min10A Brief History of Israel: Israelis, Palestinians, and the Land Both Call Home
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.
Long read48 min11A 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.
Long read51 min12A Brief History of Hong Kong: Fishing Villages, Opium Wars, Refugees, and Two Systems Under One Flag
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.
Long read50 min13A 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.
Long read43 min14A 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.
Long read54 min15A Brief History of Ukraine: Borderland, Cossack Freedom, and the Fight to Exist
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.
Long read53 min16A Brief History of Argentina: Silver, Beef, Perón and the Long Search for Stability
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.
Long read48 min17A Brief History of Saudi Arabia: Incense Roads, the Prophet's Cities, a Desert Dynasty and the Oil Age
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.
Long read45 min18A Brief History of the United Arab Emirates: Copper, Pearls, Treaties and the Fastest Transformation on Earth
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.
Long read35 min19A Brief History of Palestine: Olive Trees, Exile, and a Nation Still Waiting for Its State
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.
Long read58 min20A 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.
Long read84 min