1930s: High-water mark of the British Empire. Burma is one of the Empire's most productive colonies. Also an important decade for incipient independence movements, like those of Nehru's Congress Party in India and the various anti-British movements in Burma itself.

1990s: Burma achieved independence in 1948 and almost immediately fell into a succession of internal rebellions. In the 1990s the Socialist Republic of the Union of Burma is ruled by a repressive military dictatorship.

1930s: Spain breaks out in civil war in 1936 (Orwell fights); Germany and Austria very nearly go to war in the same year. Japan continues its campaign in China, where it invaded, with the aim of establishing colonies, in 1931. Show-trials begin in the Soviet Union.

1990s: The disappearance of European empires, all of them dissolved in the decade after World War Two, neither leads to prosperity in former colonies nor insures against...