Pillar route
Military and security
How armies, police, intelligence services, militias, assassinations, and organized violence are used to hold territory, silence opposition, and manage fear.
Military and security
Standing forces, intelligence, police, paramilitaries, covert action, and the permanent security state.
- conflict
Northern Frontier: closed district, Shifta War, Wagalla and the security state
Northern Kenya was built as a security frontier: Cushitic pastoralism, Somali and Oromo border worlds, closed districts, pass laws, non-development, the NFD vote, Shifta counterinsurgency, massacres...
politicssocietywareconomy - politics
1947: the postwar order is built
The year the Cold War order was constructed and the empires began to fall: containment and the CIA, the Marshall Plan and Mont Pelerin, India’s partition and Britain’s retreat, as the postwar world took shape.
politicswareconomyculture - conflict
The murdered liberators: Africa's reformers removed
How Africa's pan-Africanists and reformers were killed or overthrown, from Lumumba to Sankara. The foreign hands are proven in some cases and only alleged in others.
politicswardiplomacysociety - conflict
The political assassinations: silencing Kenya's reformers
The murders that narrowed Kenya's politics: Pinto, Mboya, Kariuki, Ouko. The killings are documented; who ordered them was never established, so each culprit is left contested.
politicssocietydiplomacyeconomy - conflict
Kenyan Somalis: the closed north, the Shifta War, and Wagalla
The untold history of Kenya's Somalis: the closed-off north, the 1962 vote to join Somalia that Britain overrode, the Shifta War, the Wagalla massacre, and the screening cards.
politicssocietywardiplomacy - conflict
The conquest of central Kenya: the punitive expeditions
How the British subdued central Kenya: the Kikuyu frontier, Meinertzhagen's atrocities (his diaries a discredited source), and the turn on the Embu and Meru who refused to submit.
warpoliticseconomysociety - politics
Pax Britannica and the primacy of the Royal Navy
The century of British naval and financial supremacy after 1815, and its handover to America. The peace held among the great powers; the periphery was another matter.
politicswareconomydiplomacy - politics
The Project for a New American Century
The neoconservative think tank (1997-2006) that urged regime change in Iraq, then saw its signatories staff the Bush administration that invaded...
politicswardiplomacysociety - politics
The cultural Cold War: the CIA and the Congress for Cultural Freedom
How the CIA fought the Cold War with culture: the Congress for Cultural Freedom, Encounter and its magazines, Radio Free Europe, and the covert funding through the Farfield Foundation, exposed in 1966-67.
politicsculturediplomacysociety - politics
Tribalism as a colonial tool: how colonial rule hardened Kenya's divisions
How colonial rule used tribe as an administrative tool: appointed chiefs, native reserves, censuses, customary law, missions and ethnic districts hardened fluid identities into governable boxes...
politicssocietyeconomyculture - politics
The coast and the Sultan: how Britain leased Kenya's shore from Zanzibar
How Britain took the Kenyan coast without conquering it: the Omani sultanate of Zanzibar that ruled the Swahili shore, the ten-mile strip Britain leased from the Sultan and ran through a protectorate and a...
politicsdiplomacysocietyeconomy - politics
British troops never left: garrisons, bases, and the leash after empire
Independence did not end the foreign army. Weeks after the 1964 flag-raisings, Kenyatta, Nyerere, and Obote each called back British troops to put down army mutinies...
politicswardiplomacysociety - nation
Nkrumah and Ghana: the first colony to fall
Ghana was the first sub-Saharan colony to fall, and Nkrumah its founder and warning: the Pan-African visionary who turned to one-party rule and was overthrown in a 1966 coup the United States welcomed.
politicssocietydiplomacyeconomy - movement
The Mau Mau oath: how a sacred rite bound a movement
How Kikuyu oath traditions became the engine of a rebellion, from the mass unity oath to the fighters' batuni oath, and the colonial state's brutal de-oathing and detention response...
politicssocietywarreligion - nation
Ethiopia: the empire that was never colonized
The one African state that beat a European empire and kept its independence, from Aksum's early Christianity and Adwa in 1896 to Selassie, the Italian invasion, the Derg, and the Tigray war.
politicswarreligiondiplomacy - technology
DARPA, Silicon Valley, and the security state
The military and intelligence roots of everyday tech: DARPA, born after Sputnik, seeding the ARPANET and internet, GPS, the mouse, stealth, drones, and Siri; the Cold War spending that built Silicon Valley...
technologywarscienceeconomy - movement
The militarization of the police
How the American police came to look like an army: Daryl Gates and the first SWAT team at the LAPD in 1967 and the spread of SWAT; the war on drugs making the no-knock raid routine...
societypoliticswarscience - movement
The Home Guard: citizen defence then and now
The volunteer or loyalist citizen force raised for home defence and internal control: the British Home Guard of 1940 and its 'Dad's Army' image; the colonial loyalist guards, the B-Specials and the Kikuyu Home Guard...
politicswarsocietytechnology - politics
Official secrecy: the classification of state knowledge
How states decide what their citizens may not know: the old arcana imperii, Britain's Official Secrets Acts and the D-Notice system; the classification ladder, security clearances, and the atomic 'born secret' doctrine...
politicssocietywartechnology - nation
The Holy Roman Empire: neither holy, nor Roman, nor an empire
The thousand-year patchwork at the heart of Europe: Charlemagne crowned by the Pope in 800 and the revival under Otto I; the long struggle between emperor and pope, the Investiture Controversy and Canossa...
politicsreligiondiplomacywar - nation
Armenia: the first Christian nation
A people at the crossroads of empires: the first nation to adopt Christianity as a state religion around 301, Mesrop Mashtots's alphabet, the long centuries divided between Byzantium, Persia, and the Ottomans...
politicswarreligionsociety - politics
NGOs, foundations, and soft power
The aid and philanthropy world and its ties to state power: the International Rescue Committee, chaired by William Casey before he ran the CIA...
politicssocietyeconomydiplomacy - nation
The Congo: from Leopold to the resource wars
The full arc of the Congo: the Kingdom of Kongo and the slave trade, Leopold II's Congo Free State and the rubber terror that Morel and Casement exposed, the Belgian colony whose uranium armed the first atomic bombs...
politicswareconomysociety - movement
Paramilitaries: the armed force between soldier and police
The armed force between army and police, used for internal control: the gendarmerie tradition from the Carabinieri to the Guardia Civil...
politicssocietywardiplomacy - politics
The other badges: private police and federal agencies
The forces beyond the local cop: the Pinkertons and Baldwin-Felts armies that broke strikes at Homestead, Ludlow, and Matewan; the US Marshals, Secret Service, the FBN and Anslinger, ATF, DEA, and Border Patrol...
politicseconomysocietywar - politics
The National Guard: militia, statehood, and the streets
America's citizen-soldiers from the colonial militia to today: the minutemen, the Second Amendment and the Militia Acts, the Dick Act and the National Defense Act that federalized the Guard...
politicswarsocietyeconomy - politics
Special Branch and colonial political policing
The political police of the empire: the Special Branch born against the Fenians, its export across the colonies to break independence movements from Kenya and Malaya to Palestine and India...
politicswar - politics
MI5, MI6, and British intelligence
The British secret state: the 1909 Secret Service Bureau splitting into MI5 and MI6, the Double-Cross and Bletchley in the world wars, the forged Zinoviev Letter, the Cambridge Five's betrayal...
politicswartechnologydiplomacy - conflict
Northern Ireland: the Troubles and collusion
Three decades of conflict and the state's hidden hand: partition and the civil-rights spark, internment, Bloody Sunday and the Saville findings, the hunger strikes and the bombings...
politicswarsocietydiplomacy - conflict
Agent provocateurs and false flags
Staged pretexts and planted men: the false flags from the Mukden and Gleiwitz incidents to the Lavon Affair and the rejected Operation Northwoods plan, the stay-behind Gladio networks and the 'strategy of tension'...
politicswarsocietydiplomacy - politics
The Texas Rangers: legend and dark history
America's most mythologized lawmen and their documented record: the frontier origins under Austin and the Republic, the Comanche and Mexican-American wars and the Walker Colt, the famous manhunts...
politicssocietywarculture - politics
Tammany Hall: the machine, the police, and corruption
How a political machine captured a city and its police: the Society of St. Tammany turned into New York's Democratic machine, Boss Tweed and the Tweed Ring exposed by Nast and the Times...
politicseconomyreligionsociety - movement
Colonial concentration camps and atrocities across the empires
The concentration camp and colonial mass violence as an empire-wide practice: Spain's reconcentracion in Cuba, Britain's Boer War camps and Kenya's Mau Mau detention Pipeline, Belgium's Congo terror...
warpoliticssocietydiplomacy - nation
The Herero and Nama genocide
Germany's extermination war in South-West Africa: the 1904 Herero and Nama uprisings, von Trotha's extermination order and the death-march into the Omaheke, the Shark Island death camp...
politicswardiplomacyscience - politics
The police and the lodge: Freemasonry in the Met
The tie between British policing and Freemasonry: the prevalence of Masons in the Metropolitan Police, the 1970s corruption scandals and Robert Mark's clean-up...
politicssocietyculturediplomacy - movement
The military as an idea: violence, the state, and society
The military not as battles but as an institution: Weber's monopoly on legitimate violence, Tilly's insight that war made the state...
warpoliticssocietyreligion - movement
Parliament: its rise and how it gets hijacked
The long history of representative government and its capture: from the witan and Magna Carta through the Model Parliament, the Civil War, and the Bill of Rights to universal suffrage...
politicssocietyeconomywar - economic system
The Russian oligarchs and the rise of Putin
How the Soviet collapse became a fire sale: the 1995 loans-for-shares scheme that created the oligarchs under Yeltsin, then Putin's rise and his breaking of those who crossed him, from Berezovsky to Khodorkovsky...
politicseconomysocietywar - society
The Crown at the head of things
The reach of the British monarchy as head and patron: Grand Masters of English Freemasonry from the Prince of Wales to the Duke of Kent, Supreme Governor of the Church of England, Head of the Commonwealth...
societypoliticsdiplomacyreligion - movement
Air forces, marines, and the palace guards
The newer arms and the oldest: the birth of military aviation and the independent air forces, the amphibious marine corps, and the royal and palace guards...
warpoliticstechnologydiplomacy - movement
The secret agencies: CIA, FBI, and NSA
The founding and documented history of America's intelligence and security state: the FBI under Hoover, the CIA's coups and covert wars, the NSA's global surveillance, and the scandals that exposed them...
politicstechnologydiplomacywar - movement
The history of policing and the police state
From medieval night watches and the Bow Street Runners to Peel's Metropolitan Police and the modern force: the rise of organized policing, its turn into the secret political police of the Okhrana, Gestapo, Stasi...
politicstechnologyeconomy - conflict
The space race: rivalry, rendezvous, and spying
The two-sided contest that opened the space age: the Soviet firsts, Sputnik, Gagarin, the first spacewalk and space station, that shocked America into founding NASA and racing to the Moon...
sciencetechnologypoliticswar - conflict
The Cold War
The forty-year contest between the United States and the Soviet Union that divided the world after 1945: the Iron Curtain and containment, the Berlin crises, NATO and the Warsaw Pact...
politicswardiplomacysociety - religion
Zoroastrianism: heaven, hell, and the first cosmic battle
The faith of the Persian empires and the hidden ancestor of much of Western religion: Zarathustra's vision of a good god at war with a devil gave the world cosmic dualism, angels and demons, heaven and hell...
religionculturepoliticswar - politics
JFK: the presidency and the assassination
John F. Kennedy's three years against the Cold War security state: the Bay of Pigs break with the CIA, the Cuban Missile Crisis, and the turn to peace, ending in his murder in Dallas...
politicssocietywardiplomacy - movement
The military-industrial complex and Pax Americana
The permanent alliance of the armed forces, the arms industry, and their patrons in Congress that Eisenhower named and warned against, and the American-led order it underwrites...
warpoliticseconomydiplomacy - movement
Forms of government: how societies rule themselves
The systems by which humans have organized power: monarchy and empire, the republic and democracy, oligarchy and tyranny, theocracy, the one-party and totalitarian states, military dictatorship, and federalism...
politicssocietywarculture - conflict
Covert operations, coups, and blowback
The documented covert history that shaped the modern world: the Cold War coups, the paramilitary training and arming of proxies, Iran-Contra, Operation Condor...
politicssocietywareconomy - pillar
The pillars of modern power
The load-bearing power blocks of modern society, read off the data itself: money and finance; state, law, and coercion; military and security; production and labor; land and resources; infrastructure and logistics...
pillarpoliticseconomysociety - conflict
The Napoleonic Wars
The two decades of war that convulsed Europe and remade the world: the French Revolutionary wars, the rise of Napoleon, the great campaigns and coalitions, the invasion of Russia, Waterloo...
warpoliticssocietydiplomacy - conflict
The age of terror
The major terrorist attacks of modern history, worldwide, and the world they made.
religionpoliticswarsociety - movement
Arms control: caging the weapons
The attempts to limit war by treaty: The Hague, Geneva, the naval treaties, and the long nuclear bargain.
diplomacywarpoliticsscience - conflict
Alliances and battle lines
The pacts that drew the lines wars were later fought along: from the old dynastic alliances to NATO and the Warsaw Pact.
politicsdiplomacywarreligion - conflict
How the Second World War unfolded
The peace of 1919 carried the seeds of the next war: how resentment, appeasement, and ambition burned the world a second time.
warpoliticsscience - conflict
How the First World War unfolded
From a wrong turn in Sarajevo to the hall of mirrors at Versailles: how one assassination consumed a continent.
warpolitics