Innholdsfortegnelse for Issue 1 i BBC World Histories Magazine

As the bestselling historian Peter Frankopan writes in his column for this launch issue of BBC World Histories: “The world is changing; understanding how and why is the greatest challenge for those who believe that knowing about the past is the key to making sense of the present.” That’s one of the inspirations behind this new magazine, from the team that produces BBC History Magazine: to understand how we got to where we are by exploring the stories of the past. Each issue, we will draw on the expertise of leading writers and historians from around the world to help tackle some of the defining issues of the 21st century. So, in the following pages, you’ll find University of Oxford professor Yasmin Khan leading a special package of India features…

One striking feature of populists is their use of new means of direct communication. In some respects, says Matthew Feldman, this echoes trends seen centuries ago. In the 17th century, new printed material and woodcut images were delivered by a network of propagandists: this kind of communication “allowed for a real expansion of conspiracy theories, ‘Us versus Them’ ideas”. By the 20th century, populists could exploit other new technologies. Nazi propaganda supremo Joseph Goebbels was quick to recognise and use the potential of radio, with its capacity to convey the drama and intimacy of the rallies at which Hitler and others addressed audiences around Germany. “It would not have been possible” claimed Goebbels, “for us to take power… without the radio and the airplane.” In recent times, populists have used…

125 YEARS AGO 15 December 1891 Basketball is invented Tasked with keeping his athletes fit during the cold winter months, James Naismith (right), a Canadian-born sports coach, devised an energetic new indoor game he called ‘basketball’. He nailed baskets (originally used for storing peaches) to the walls of his gym in Springfield, Massachusetts, divided his 18 students into two teams of nine, and drew up 13 basic rules. Naismith’s new game became an integral part of American culture and, in 1936, an Olympic medal event. 90 YEARS AGO 17 January 1927 Eartha Ki? is born Born on a cotton plantation in South Carolina to an unknown white father and a mixed-race black and Cherokee mother, Kitt overcame her difficult childhood to become an international star of stage and screen –…

1947 India is partitioned to create Pakistan As the day ended on 14 August 1947, the new states of India and Pakistan achieved freedom from British rule. Yet this was also one of the darkest moments in the subcontinent’s history. Partition drove at least 12 million refugees – Muslims, Sikhs, Hindus – across the new boundaries of divided Punjab. The exact numbers of men, women and children who were killed in violent massacres is not known, but certainly hundreds of thousands died. 1948 Gandhi is assassinated Less than six months after India achieved independence, Gandhi was shot dead while en route to a prayer meeting in Delhi on 30 January 1948. The killing of the Mahatma (‘Great Soul’) stunned the nation. The assassin was linked to an extremist Hindu group…

INDIA’S UNTOUCHABLE HERO Imagine a young boy, the youngest of 14 children, woken at 2am each day to study for his exams. School was not a comfortable experience: he was barred from dining with his school-mates of higher castes, had to drink water from a separate source and was not permitted to study Sanskrit. Bhim Rao Ambedkar was born in 1891 into a caste designated as ‘untouchable’ – the Mahars, carrion carriers and removers of food waste. His parents had been given an education by the British, and served the imperial army. The family were members of a relatively small group, perhaps one per cent of India’s ‘untouchables’, who could get an education – albeit one with degrading restrictions. Today, images and statues of the man that boy grew up…

Books, exhibitions, films and more “Istanbul is a character in and of itself – almost bigger than its rulers” “Istanbul is a special city partly because of the notion that it’s a place of security and sanctuary” Peter Frankopan: Of all of the cities in the world, why write about Istanbul? Bettany Hughes: There were two reasons. The first was that the infrastructure system in Istanbul is currently being expanded massively, with tunnels being dug under the Bosphorus strait. This has resulted in a whole load of new archaeological work that I knew hadn’t been published, and which needs to be shared. So I’ve been gathering research for the past decade, and in terms of fresh evidence it felt like the right time to cover the city. And, as you…

AUSTRALIA British historians Simon Sebag Montefiore, Peter Frankopan and Mary Beard have been recent top sellers for Sydney independent booksellers Pages & Pages. But Ghost Empire, reprinted for the third time after just six weeks, is currently making the most waves Down Under. This chronicle of the rise and fall of Constantinople, by Australian broadcaster Richard Fidler, alternates with conversations between the author and his 14-yearold son Joe on a month-long trip to Italy and Istanbul – a fascinating history lesson for both Joe and the reader. “Talking about it to Joe was actually a way of explaining it to myself,” Fidler told me. Stephen Dando-Collins’ new book The Big Break: The Greatest American WWII POW Escape Story Never Told (St Martin’s Press) is published in February 2017 UNITED STATES Currently high…

Joanna Bourke is professor of history at Birkbeck, University of London. Her books include The Story of Pain (Oxford University Press, 2014) It is impossible not to be charmed by Athens. At night, bouzouki music wells up from basements; tables spill out of ouzeris (taverns) where friends and strangers quarrel about politics. The air is filled with the perfume of wild basil, bitter orange, jasmine. Vociferous graffiti on crumbling walls cohabits with freshly painted Minoan ochres on neoclassical buildings. Visitors are welcomed with a hearty “geia-sou!” (or yassou – hello). Strangers to the city should start with the classics: if Athens is anything, it is the Parthenon 1 , built on the rock of the Acropolis, the location of the first settlement of Athens in 3000 BC. The Parthenon was…

William Dalrymple Author of books including Return of a King: The Battle for Afghanistan and The Last Mughal: The Fall of Delhi, 1857, Dalrymple tells the remarkable story of the Koh-i-Noor diamond in our feature starting on page 74. As he points out, it’s a tale that raises important questions about the legacy of imperialism in today’s world. Yasmin Khan Leading this issue’s package of features on India’s dynamic past, Yasmin Khan explores the hardships and legacy of the nation’s Second World War home front in our cover feature on page 22. “My focus in on total mobilisation and the way in which society is deeply affected by war at every level,” she explains. Rana Mi?er Professor of the history and politics of modern China at the University of Oxford,…

Arne Westad “Europe has always been culturally, religiously, and – most importantly – politically diverse” For most of the time since the dawn of human civilisation, Asia has been in the lead, economically and technologically. Exactly when the ascent of Europe and its cultural offshoots began is hotly debated. Some see its roots in antiquity (highly contestable) or the Renaissance (more plausible, but doubtful – a comparison between Ming China and Tudor Britain is not necessarily to the latter’s advantage). It is more likely that western predominance started with the industrial revolution, and may be ending with the information revolution. If one accepts this timeline, the rise of Europe was based on access to resources (especially energy) and technologies. The former advantage was to some extent a fluke – the…

Lenin on the Train by Catherine Merridale Allen Lane, 368 pages, £25 Some 75 years ago, the American writer and literary critic Edmund Wilson wrote a classic history of revolutionary thought. He entitled it To the Finland Station: A Study in the Writing and Acting of History. Essentially, Wilson’s book described the intellectual baggage that Vladimir Ilich Lenin took with him when, in April 1917, he made a train journey that has since become famous. Along with other radical émigrés, the Russian leader travelled out of exile in Switzerland on board a so-called ‘sealed train’ that did not officially enter the lands it passed along the way, including Germany and Scandinavia. Upon arrival at his final destination, the Finland Station in Petrograd (now St Petersburg), Lenin took control of the Bolshevik…

Gordon Corera is the BBC’s security correspondent and author of Intercept: The Secret History of Computers and Spies (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2015) DISCOVER MORE From Our Own Correspondent is broadcast every Saturday at 11.30am on BBC Radio 4 High-tech tension in China Shenzhen is a city that has come from nowhere to be everywhere. Just a few decades ago it was merely a fishing village; today it is a city of 10 million, a high-tech hub whose products are part of everyday life around the globe. Its designation as a ‘Special Economic Zone’ and its position abutting Hong Kong have led to spectacular growth: sleek skyscrapers and huge tower blocks are everywhere. Its bustling streets have the feel of a boomtown – a place people come because there is money…

ONE MOMENT, TWO VIEWPOINTS “If that double-bolted land, Japan, is ever to become hospitable, it is the whale-ship alone to whom the credit will be due; for already she is on the threshold.” Herman Melville, Moby Dick (1851) By the 1850s Japan had been closed to the west for more than two centuries, since the Portuguese Jesuit missionaries who had incited insurrection were expelled in 1639. Christianity was banned and Japanese converts executed. The Japanese also banned guns. Thereafter they lived in peace under the rule of the shoguns, and developed a unique and glittering culture. Chinese and Koreans came to trade, but the only westerners allowed in were the Dutch, who argued that they were a mercantile nation and not Catholic. A trading colony of 20 Dutch merchants was…

What inspired you to write this book? I have always been struck by the way that Russian history is kept outside the European mainstream, and wanted to bring it back in. When you read about the First World War, for instance, the eastern front is seldom more than a footnote, while the Russian Revolution is treated as an entirely separate subject. But Russia was an ally of Britain and France, and the ideas and characters involved were formed in Europe’s very heart. A train ride, crossing a continent at war and quite literally connecting Zurich, Berlin and Stockholm to Russia, seemed an ideal way to explore the connections and bring us closer to this chapter from our past. What new view of Lenin did you gain? I’ve been travelling to…

American Revolutions: A Continental History, 1750–1804 by Alan Taylor WW Norton, 704 pages, £30 There is nothing new in rich men posing as friends of the poor, nor in wealthy elites building popular support by alleging conspiracies against ‘the people’. Nor would our ancestors be unfamiliar with a politics in which economic grievance became overlain with racial prejudice and resentment at the often-imagined preferential treatment given to ‘alien’ groups. Alan Taylor’s new take on the American revolutionary era shows how a faction of the colonial elite in 13 of Britain’s most populous North American colonies harnessed populism in almost proto-Trumpian terms. It is a story that begins, as great political upheavals in history often do, with a pyrrhic victory – in this case, in the war against the French and their…

From the crusades to the Cold War, our second issue explores more vital stories from across global history ON SALE 25 JANUARY 2017 116 pages £6.99 Free P&P for BBC History Magazine subscribers* Prices incl P&P: UK £8.49 Europe £9.49 World £9.99 WorldHistories Enjoyed what you’ve read? Why not pre-order issue two and get the world direct to your mailbox PRE-ORDER ONLINE buysubscriptions.com/worldhistories2 or call us on 0844 844 0250+ and quote WORLHA17 Calls will cost 7p per minute plus your telephone company’s access charge. Lines are open 8am–8pm weekdays & 9am–1pm Saturday Subscribers to BBC History Magazine pay only £6.99 (newsstand price plus FREE UK P&P). Prices including postage are: £8.49 for UK residents, £9.49 for Europe and £9.99 for Rest of World. All orders subject to availability. Please…

John Franklin (1786–1847) was born at Spilsby, Lincolnshire. He joined the Royal Navy in 1800 and served at the battle of Copenhagen the following year. In 1802 he joined his cousin Matthew Flinders on a circumnavigation of the southern continent that Flinders named Australia, and began his life’s work: mastering terrestrial magnetism for navigation. In 1805 Franklin fought at Trafalgar, where he was deafened by a gun blast, and later at New Orleans in 1815. To secure his promotion, in 1818 he travelled north to Svalbard on the first Arctic expeditions following the Napoleonic Wars, then commanded the famously punishing overland mission to the north coast of Canada (1819–22) – facing starvation, the crew resorted to eating lichen and even their own boots, with at least one accused of cannibalism.…

“Sicily is an incredible melting pot of ideas, beliefs and peoples – which is why it is such a key focus for thought in 2016” Sicily has been big in 2016. The British Museum in London, the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford and Amsterdam’s Allard Pierson Museum all hosted special exhibitions of artefacts from Sicily. And I’ve recently completed the filming of a two-part series on the history of Sicily, to be broadcast on BBC Two early in 2017. So why is Sicily’s history so popular right now? In part, it’s because Sicily is in the news as a destination for thousands of people rescued from unseaworthy craft attempting the crossing to Europe from north Africa. Sicily – like Greece – is on the front line of the biggest migration movement…