Capitalism: A Global History by Sven Beckert looks beyond the cities to the coffee and cotton that fuelled a global market.

On May 31st, 1902, the Peace of Vereeniging was signed, ending the Second Boer War between Britain and the two Afrikaner republics of Transvaal and the Orange Free State. The Second Boer War between ...

On 1 July 1903 a publicity stunt for a sporting paper cycled into history as the first Tour de France. Cycle racing was all the rage. The Paris-Brest-Paris race was launched in 1891. (Its inaugural ...

Robert Peel was 62 when he died. He had sat in the Commons for more than 40 years and had held high office many times. As Home Secretary in 1829 he had created the ‘Peelers’ or ‘Bobbies’, the ...

Bede wrote that the Angles, Saxons, and Jutes invaded Britain en masse in the fifth century. Does the evidence agree?

Chaucer’s meadows are romantic landscapes of leisurely frolicking. But for medieval haymakers July meant a month of hard graft. For the past few years the first Saturday in July has been marked by ...

In 1811 skilled textile workers in Britain attacked factories and factory owners to defend their livelihoods. By the time the Luddite cause hit Yorkshire in 1812, it had become a genuine mass movement ...

The Battle Creek Toasted Corn Flake Company, later to be known as Kellogg's, was founded on February 19th, 1906. John Harvey Kellogg and Will Keith Kellogg were brothers from a Seventh-day Adventist ...

The English reporter who posed as a man to become a soldier during the First World War was born on 4 October 1896. Dorothy Lawrence was 18 when she made her way by bicycle to the front lines on the ...

Hoping to weaken the rebels’ cause, Britain offered freedom to enslaved people who joined the British army. At the end of the American Revolutionary War that promised freedom had to be honoured – but ...