Empire: World History

Robert Louis Stevenson, a sickly boy with a vivid imagination, grew up along Scotland’s rugged coast, where tales of shipwrecks and buried gold stirred dreams of pirates and treasure. Out of this coas...

For many years, commemorations of the two World Wars excluded the memorialisation of soldiers from the British Empire. But campaigners have gradually turned the spotlight on their experiences. In th...

After robbing the fleet in a brutal, barbaric fashion, Henry Avery caused a diplomatic incident of global proportions. The Mughals were furious and the East India Company, which at this very moment wa...

One of the most notable pirates of his day, Henry Avery would go on to make potentially the most lucrative heist ever on the high seas. Originally a navy man, Avery then took the well-trodden path of ...

William Kidd, a respectable Scottish privateer during the late 17th century, tasked with hunting down pirates on the orders of a murky cabal of British aristocrats, but with the crown’s blessing, find...

Alongside legends like Blackbeard and Calico Jack, William Kidd is one of the most famous pirates to have entered the public consciousness, thanks to Hollywood, sea shanties and literary mythologizati...

“At our first salutation he drank damnation to me and my men who styled cowardly puppies saying he would neither give nor take quarter…” By the end of November 1717 Blackbeard had become one of the m...

The history of pirates is a thrilling kaleidoscope of adventure, devastation, violence and political intrigue, and never more so than during the 17th and 18th centuries: the golden age of piracy. This...

When King Alfonso VI of León took Toledo from the Arabs in 1085, the history of western christendom changed forever. Within the city existed a number of texts full of the ideas that we would call Arab...

Often called Arabic numerals, the modern number system we use today actually originates in India. Whilst in the west they were using Roman numerals, in India they were using numbers 1-9. Then, the gre...