March 2020 – Manchester Historian

This article will feature in Issue 35: Fractured Nations (March 2020) Zadie Smith has said that the writer’s job is not ‘to tell us how somebody felt about something, it’s to tell us how the world works.’ Her 2000 novel White Teeth takes three cultures and three families and shows us how they experience the Continue Reading

By the 7th century, Islam had emerged as a prominent force in the Middle East. With the former great empires of Byzantium and Sassanid Persia in disarray after a period of long and costly conflict, the Islamic prophet Muhammad was able to unite the tribes of Arabia under a Muslim banner.

After the East Indian Company was established, it gradually gained full control over large parts of the Indian subcontinent. Revolts against the imperialist rule reached its peak in 1857, when the Indian sepoys posed a considerable threat to the British rule

In 2017, then-Kazakh president of nearly three decades, Nursultan Nazarbayev, officially announced the beginning of his country’s Latinization journey.

In most European countries there is a standardised tongue, a language for all, that citizens can speak in both social and administrative capacities, which is often taken for granted. However, what happens when cultural and linguistic divides run so deep that a nation cannot identify its own national language?