A personal blog of long-form musings and reviews on economic and social history, centred on historian Chris Wickham and technology history. The excerpts offer a reader substantive engagement with historiography and the economics of technical change, though the writing is informal and self-described as semi-coherent.
Website: https://unevenandcombinedthoughts.substack.com
Long-form essays on the history of innovation and the causes of the British Industrial Revolution, drawing on archival research. Recent issues cover the salt trade, Scotland's outsized role in invention, and Tudor labour laws and trade.
An economic historian writes essays on South Africa's economic past, present and future, drawing on his own archival research on the Cape Colony. Recent issues examine the role of academic conferences, AI in research and universities, and a language model's critique of one of his own published tables.
Long-form essays on pre-colonial African history, drawing on primary sources such as scribal colophons and explorers' accounts. Readers get evidence-based arguments that challenge common assumptions about African economies, religion and global connections, with deeper parts behind a Patreon paywall.
Long Arc News is a reader-supported geopolitical newsletter that uses historical episodes, such as Iraqi oil pipeline disputes between Turkey, Syria and Iraq, to examine how physical energy constraints translate into political bargains and financial consequences. Readers get long, footnoted narrative analysis built on archival documents and primary sources.
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