Peter Furtado

When the great Muslim traveller Ibn Battuta visited Damascus in 1348 it was in the throes of a great plague which killed half of the population. Even so, he reported ‘God lightened their affliction; for the number of deaths in a single day at Damascus did not attain 2,000, while in Cairo it reached the […]

National history is a vital part of national self-definition. Most books on the history of the world try to impose a uniform narrative, written usually from a single writer’s point of view. Histories of Nations is different: it presents 28 essays written by a leading historian as a ‘self-portrait’ of his or her native country, […]