Rearview Mirror Chronicles
Keith Hockton, FRAS, is a writer, publisher, and award-winning podcaster based in Penang, Malaysia, with a deep passion for uncovering the stories that shaped our world. As the Southeast Asia Editor for International Living magazine, Keith explores the intersections of history, culture, and modern life across the region. A dynamic lecturer and storyteller, he speaks internationally on Southeast Asian politics, economics, and history—bringing the past to life with clarity, wit, and insight. Keith is also a proud Fellow of The Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland and is on a mission to make history not only accessible but genuinely entertaining for everyone. His published books include: • Atlas of Australian Dive Sites - Travellers Edition (Harper Collins Australia, 2003). • Penang - An inside guide to its historic homes, buildings, monuments and parks (MPH Publishing, 2012; 2nd Edition 2014; 3rd Edition 2017). • Festivals of Malaysia (Trafalgar Publishing, 2015). • The Habitat Penang Hill: A pocket history (Entrepot Publishing, 2018) • Alana and the Secret Life of Trees at Night (Entrepot Publishing, 2018) • Penang Then & Now: A Century of Change in Pictures (Entrepot Publishing, 2019; 2nd Edition 2021 • Bersama Lima - Five Together (Entrepot Publishing, 2022) www.entrepotpublishing.com
Episodes
In 1911, the British Crown knighted Roger Casement for exposing colonial atrocities in the Congo and the Amazon. Five years later, the same government hanged him for treason. Ever since, people have said he was "hanged on a comma", that a single mark of punctuation in a 565-year-old medieval statute sent a knight of the British Empire to the gallows.
It's one of the most famous stories in legal history. And it'...
George Town, 1867.
Beneath the British flag, another power ruled the streets.
Secret societies commanded thousands of men. Money flowed through opium, gambling and the revenue farms. Loyalties ran deeper than the law, and behind the respectable façade of colonial Penang was a world of violence, fear and sworn brotherhoods.
Then, one afternoon, a man looked over a fence. Someone accused him of being a thief. Someone thr...
Genghis Khan didn't want the war that would become the most devastating campaign of his life.
It began with a trade caravan, the murder of hundreds of merchants, and one spectacularly arrogant decision by a ruler who had no idea who he was dealing with.
In Part Two of The Wrath of Khan, we follow the Mongol war machine as it tears through the wealthy Khwarazmian Empire, destroys some of the greatest cities of the medi...
A boy abandoned on the frozen Mongolian steppe should have died there. Instead, he survived to become Genghis Khan, the ruler who would unleash the most formidable war machine the medieval world had ever seen.
In Part One of The Wrath of Khan, we follow the extraordinary rise of Temüjin from a childhood of starvation, betrayal and slavery to his unification of the Mongol tribes. Then we look inside the military syste...
Paris, 1900. The city glows with electric light. Jazz drips from gramophones. The Moulin Rouge spins like a carousel possessed. In the cafés of Montmartre, Picasso sketches with fevered hands. Toulouse-Lautrec drinks, draws, and watches the night unravel.
It is an age of opulence and illusion. Gilded carriages and motorcars jostle on cobbled streets. Art Nouveau winds its way through every iron gate, every whispered ...
For nearly three thousand years, Homer's Odyssey has captivated audiences with its unforgettable monsters, legendary heroes, and epic adventures. But beneath the Cyclops, the Sirens, and the wrath of the gods lies a far deeper story—one about family, loyalty, temptation, pride, and the universal longing to return home.
In this episode of Rearview Mirror Chronicles, Keith Hockton takes you on an extraordinary jo...
Welcome to the Madman’s Library—a place not of learning, but of unraveling.
Here, books do not enlighten. They whisper. They bleed. They rot.
Grimoires etched in rust-black ink speak in tongues never meant for human mouths. Manuscripts stitched from flayed skin stare back with hollowed faces.
Blood-written ravings of prophets long dead pulse with delusion, disease, and dread.
This is a collection s...
What if one of history's greatest painters wasn't simply creating beautiful pictures, but quietly capturing the birth of the modern world?
In this episode of Rearview Mirror Chronicles, Keith explores the extraordinary life of Johannes Vermeer, the elusive Dutch master who painted fewer than forty works before dying in debt. Journey from the luminous mystery of Girl with a Pearl Earring to the quiet dignity of The Mi...
For more than a century, one of the world's most admired democracies carried out a policy that sought to erase Indigenous cultures by removing their children. More than 150,000 First Nations, Métis and Inuit boys and girls were taken from their families, stripped of their language, traditions and identity, and sent to residential schools where many endured hunger, abuse, neglect and unimaginable loneliness.
In this d...
There are books that shape our childhood, and then there are books that quietly shape the way we see the world.
In this fascinating episode of Rearview Mirror Chronicles, Keith Hockton takes a fresh look at some of the most beloved children's classics ever written. From the tragic bedside story that gave the world Babar the Elephant, to the immigrant creators who invented France's greatest comic hero, Asterix, this i...
What if the person who caused the greatest environmental damage in human history wasn't a dictator, a conqueror, or a ruthless industrialist... but a brilliant engineer trying to make the world a better place?
In this episode of History's Strangest Questions, we uncover the extraordinary and deeply ironic story the man whose inventions transformed modern life while unintentionally poisoning millions of people and the...
The American Revolution had been won. The Constitution had been written. But for millions of Americans, one vital question remained unanswered: who would protect the people from their own government?
In this concluding chapter of our three part series on America's founding documents, we explore the remarkable story behind the Bill of Rights, ten amendments born not from certainty, but from fear, compromise, and polit...
The Declaration of Independence gave America its ideals. The Constitution gave it something just as important: a way to survive.
In Part Two of this special series, Keith explores the remarkable story behind the world's oldest written national constitution still in force. Why did the Articles of Confederation fail? How did fifty-five delegates in a sweltering Philadelphia summer create a system of government that has...
For nearly 250 years, the Declaration of Independence has inspired revolutions, shaped constitutions, and become one of the most influential political documents ever written. But how did thirteen reluctant colonies reach the point of declaring independence? Why did the famous words "all men are created equal" outlive the men who wrote them? And how did a document born in war become a universal call for liberty acros...
The fleet has arrived. Now two empires that barely understand each other are about to find out just how differently they've spent the last fifty years.
In this episode: the strange iron ship that broke the rules of naval warfare, a Chinese defence built on assumptions the Industrial Revolution simply erased, and the palace complex so beautiful it took a century to build — and a single order to destroy. We follo...
Walk into a chemist's shop in Victorian Britain and you could buy opium over the counter, no questions asked. It was in the medicine cabinet, the nursery, the labourer's cottage, as ordinary as tea or gin. So how did a drug Britain barely thought twice about at home become the trigger for one of the most consequential wars of the nineteenth century?
In this first episode, we trace opium's journey from the "joy plant"...
Everyone knows America was named after Amerigo Vespucci. The Italian explorer. The New World. The map. Case closed.
Except it isn't.
Current research points to someone else entirely. Someone hiding in plain sight for five hundred years. Someone the history books never mention.
The answer, when it comes, is not what you'd expect. And once you hear it — you won't easily unhear it.
For books written a...
The VOC was dissolved on the thirty-first of December, 1799. But empires don't simply end. They leave things behind.
In the third and final part of this series, we sail into the aftermath. The ports your ship is passing through, Semarang, Bali, Lombok, Malacca were not merely trading posts. They were the architecture of a system. A system designed to extract, to control, and to profit at any human cost necessary.
What...
What if the most valuable commodity on earth — more precious than gold, more coveted than silk — grew in just one place? Six tiny volcanic islands in the middle of the Indonesian sea, surrounded by reefs, monsoons, and men willing to kill to keep it that way.
This is the story of nutmeg. The spice in your kitchen cupboard that once drove empires to war, sent Samuel Pepys to the docks at midnight to buy fr...
One man. A stolen map. The birth of modern capitalism.
In 1583, a young Dutchman talked his way into the heart of Portugal's Asian empire — and spent six years quietly copying its most jealously guarded secrets. Routes. Charts. The knowledge that underpinned a century of Portuguese dominance over the world's most lucrative trade.
When he sailed home, everything changed.
Within two decades, the Dutch had smashed t...
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