The role of the historian is to break with received modes of understanding the world, whereby ‘the materialist presentation of history leads to the past to bring the present into a critical state.’ To do so is to challenge the nation-state, the empty time of capitalism and the politics of the future.

The history of the world is surely the story of dispossession and displacement. The two foundational moments of our economic system are rooted in dispossession, with the colonial expropriation of South American riches by the Spanish conquistadors and the enclosure of British common land at the behest of the landed gentry.

As I travelled across London on the District Line, there was a snippet of text running through my mind: ‘The primary question ecology faces today is whether an ecologically oriented society can be created out of the present anti-ecological one.’

Another year gone, another Tropfest to take in. Another of Sydney’s ubiquitous summer ‘events’ designed to key its citizens into the pulsating heart of this global city of ours. But after returning home to Sydney after some time away, it’s becoming increasingly apparent that these ‘events’ underwrite a sanitising of the city and a privileging of access based on a growing spatial inequality.