Sublime

Nathaniel Courthope,

tetchy

Commençons par énoncer avec clarté et brièveté les raisons qui nous font aimer aujourd'hui encore, aujourd'hui surtout, Érasme de Rotterdam, ce grand oublié : il a été en effet, de tous les écrivains et auteurs occidentaux, le premier Européen conscient, le premier « combattant pacifiste », le défenseur le plus éloquent de l'idéal humanitaire, soci

Sulla and Spartacus

By the sixteenth century it was clear enough that Europe’s comparative advantage over other Eurasian civilizations lay in its precocious development of marine activity. The simultaneous growth of long-distance trade with the Americas and India was one sign of this. Another was the rise of the huge cod fishery in the North Atlantic,

the search for the Spice Islands threw up the discovery of America, of the Pacific archipelagos, of sub-Saharan Africa, and of the Indian and south-east Asian coastlines. Knowledge of, and eventually dominion over these ‘new worlds’ would follow.

Above all, there can be no doubt that imperial Russia played a crucial role alongside the Western maritime states in securing the European domination of Eurasia in the nineteenth century: helping to encircle the Islamic realm, sapping the political fabric of the main Islamic states, and assisting in the demolition of the old China-centred world ord