“In the 19th century China was defeated in two wars against Britain that were caused by British sales of contraband opium produced from Indian-grown poppies.” (The Economist, 2018, p.41). The Opium Wars were two armed conflicts in China in the mid-19th century between the forces of Western countries and of the Qing dynasty, which ruled… Read More
“Fewer than one in 100,000 people have died in combat per year since 2000 – one-sixth the rate between 1950 and 2000, and one-fiftieth of that between 1900 and 1950.” (The Economist, 2018, p.89). Research by the Economist suggests there is a strong correlation between democracy and peace. A stark exception to this was the… Read More
“That remembrance is an important counterpoint to the complacency that set in after the end of the cold war. “The people I know have forgotten to be afraid of the arms race,” says O’Brian. It is vital to remember other kinds of military legacies, too, as David Havlick’s book, Bombs Away, powerfully demonstrates. Havlick, a… Read More
Between 1945 and 2018, there have been “2450 nuclear detonations” (Holmes, 2018, p.46). “…the origins of Greenpeace, which started life in Vancouver as a protest against the US nuclear test on Amchitka Island, Alaska, in 1971.” (Holmes, 2018, p.46). Reference Holmes, B. (2018) The Art of Remembering. New Scientist. 05 May 2018, p.46.
“Team sports have long been known to bring out our tribal instincts. But did they first emerge to train us for warfare? That’s the hypothesis of Michelle Scalise Sugiyama at the University of Oregon. She scoured the ethnographic record for information about the physical strategies used by traditional societies during their typical battles, such as… Read More
“When general william sherman was ordered to strike at the heart of the Confederacy during America’s civil war, he first asked for a map of Georgia and Alabama. The document he received, coloured like a patchwork quilt, was like none produced before it. Officials had annotated it county by county with data from the 1860… Read More
The Armed Forces Memorial (AFM) database, owned by the tri-Service Joint Casualty and Compassionate Centre (JCCC), was created in order to identify Service personnel whose names were to be, and continue to be, engraved on the AFM at the National Arboretum in Staffordshire. The AFM database records the deaths of all personnel who had died… Read More
