Innholdsfortegnelse for Issue 3 i BBC World Histories Magazine

This extraordinary event, held in the Rajasthani city each January, is awash with noise, colour and crowds. Many thousands of people gather to absorb talks and debates featuring leading experts in fields including literature, politics and history. This year we caught up with some of those speakers to ask them about the challenges that face the study of world history in 2017. You can read their thoughts on page 72. India, of course, is a land irrevocably transformed – for better and, many would say, much worse – by its experience of a lengthy period of British imperial rule. Empires are among the most seismic forces in human history, reshaping the political, economic and social orders of countless populations across the course of centuries. Our Big Question this issue explores…

JAN 2017 MAR 2017 TOKYO JAPAN 1 Shining a spotlight on secret assassins Plans to open a ninja museum in Tokyo have been announced. Celebrating the stealthy spies that originated in Japan’s feudal period (12th–16th centuries), the museum is the initiative of the government-funded Japan Ninja Council, a group of scholars, experts and organisations dedicated to preserving and promoting the discipline. A ninja-training academy will also be established to school people in the traditional art of ninjutsu. The museum is set to open in 2018. 2 COLIMA MEXICO Grave guardian unearthed A statue of an ancient shaman has been found in a 1,700-year-old burial chamber in the western Mexican state of Colima. Sporting a horned headdress and wielding an axe, the 39cm-tall, ochre-tinted shaman was interred to guard the dead,…

The genre of travel dubbed ‘dark tourism’ has boomed in recent years. Visitor numbers at Auschwitz, for instance, have more than quadrupled since 2000. Chernobyl, long off-limits, now welcomes 10,000 visitors each year. This July I’ll be leading a tour group exploring Poland's grim fate during the Second World War, visiting numerous museums and historical sites including concentration and Nazi death camps. Other popular ‘dark’ destinations include Ground Zero in New York, Robben Island in South Africa and Cambodia's Killing Fields. The recent growth has been spurred by globalisation, and perhaps a growing popular awareness of wider histories. But though it sounds edgy and postmodern, dark tourism has a long pedigree. In the years after the American Civil War, travel firm Thomas Cook offered its customers tours of newly cleared…

How did a Chinese general end up in a Hollywood movie studio in 1936 – and what was he doing there? For several weeks at the beginning of that year, Major General Tu Tinghsiu was a regular feature in the film industry gossip columns of the California press as he observed the shooting of MGM’s The Good Earth, the film of Pearl Buck’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel of Chinese rural life. In on-set photographs Tu, described as the film’s ‘technical advisor’, can be seen chatting with one of its lead actors, Luise Rainer. The visitor from China probably knew very little about the harsh struggle for existence in his nation’s countryside that was portrayed in the film. Tu, who had adopted the English name Theodore, was an American-educated singer, a baritone…

Aspects of independence Soon after dawn on 5 November 1956, British paratroopers drifted down on the El Gamil airfield near Port Said in northern Egypt. Simultaneously, French troops landed at Raswa and Port Fuad just to the south and east. The invasion of Port Said, and the operation to capture the Suez Canal, was launched. The following day, a huge sea and air assault, supporting landings of British tanks and marines, succeeded in taking the port. By midnight, British and French troops had secured the canal zone – and sparked fury from the United States and the Soviet Union. Both superpowers had been wooing Egyptian president Gamal Abdel Nasser – first the US, which offered then withdrew financial support for the construction of an Aswan dam, then the Soviet Union,…

“To teach students about the range of global attitudes and values, we need a wide-reaching programme of learning” Im a first-time father. My little one is now 10 months old. Like so many new parents, I’m pondering how I might prepare my daughter to meet the challenges of the 21st century. Of course, parents are not the only ones thinking about such things. In the UK it’s the job of the education ministry and parliament, alongside the exam boards and curriculum advisory committees and a whole host of subject groups, to keep an eye on what and how schools teach our children. But a more international ‘eye in the sky’ group is also looking at the issue. The Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), a triennial survey by the Organisation…

C ivil war is now humanity’s most characteristic form of organised, large-scale violence. In the decades since the Second World War, fighting within states has almost entirely replaced that between states. From Afghanistan to Yemen, all of the world’s 40 or so ongoing conflicts are now civil wars, except for the struggle for Kashmir between India and Pakistan. For the moment, at least, intrastate war has almost entirely replaced interstate war across the world. How are we to make sense of this mayhem? “Comparatively,” political scientists would answer. “Take a broad sample of civil wars since 1989, or maybe 1945, and analyse their motivations, life cycles and aftermaths.” Most historians, on the other hand, would advocate: “Individually – look at each conflict in context, and recover its specificity.” To both groups…

“It takes two to tango. And it takes two to control arms, to reduce and eliminate nuclear weapons... I invite you to a male tango, Mr President.” Mikhail Gorbachev to Ronald Reagan, 11 October 1986 On the evening of 12 October 1986, a dramatic image was beamed around the world: two grim-faced men trudging down the steps of Höf_i House in Reykjavík. Drained and dejected, Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev were unable even to look each other in the eye as they said farewell. The summit in Iceland went down in history as a huge missed opportunity – a total failure. The summit, arranged by the two great powers to discuss nuclear arms reductions, had collapsed – not over specific details of their arsenals but over Reagan’s grand, futuristic plan…

“The process of modernisation is something that clearly had universal appeal” Christopher de Bellaigue talks about his new book, The Islamic Enlightenment, with journalist and broadcaster Yasmin Alibhai-Brown “Ideas of ‘usness’ in the west are being answered in the Islamic world. It’s a spreading reaction to globalisation” In his new book The Islamic Enlightenment: The Modern Struggle Between Faith and Reason, Christopher de Bellaigue explores how modern ideas transformed the Muslim world from the 19th century to the present day – contradicting perceptions that the Muslim milieu is static or regressive. Focusing on Cairo, Istanbul and Tehran, and highlighting key individuals in this transformation, he explores the ways in which their legacy is threatened in the 21st century. The history of the Middle East is a common thread throughout the…

The Wars of the Roosevelts: The Ruthless Rise of America’s Greatest Political Family by William J Mann Harper, 624 pages, £25 US presidents Theodore Roosevelt and his distant cousin Franklin D Roosevelt shaped their nation, and the world, during the first half of the 20th century. William Mann’s book shines a light not on the politics and policies of both formative presidencies but, rather, on the dysfunctional family dynamic driving their achievements, and the string of casualties littering their journey to national power and influence. Mann uses a series of detailed snapshots to tell his fascinating story of the personalities and rivalries driving the Roosevelt clan – which makes for compulsive reading. Theodore and ‘FDR’ are the two main anchors for Mann’s tale, but he clearly also has sympathy for…

I just wanted to congratulate you on this exquisite world history magazine. It’s a breath of fresh air to have neutral, academic and nuanced analyses, especially in this world of information overload! A special thanks to Tanya Harmer for her expert Viewpoint piece on Fidel Castro. Her refreshing analysis shows that history is not black and white, and can definitely not be summarised in a 140-character tweet. Clementine Bulso, by email As an Australian primary-school student we were taught social studies, which just skirted around history. In secondary years, history remained ‘shallow’. It was a pity that we only got to know limited Australian history. But being a teacher myself for 43 years and now living in England, I have come to love history – especially when we learn that…

Yasmin Khan “The British empire transformed trade and drove the growth of cities. In short, it made the modern world” Historians are pretty squeamish about the idea of empires as a force for good. That’s because we prefer hard facts that we can find in archives to thrashing out counterfactuals. What would the world have been like without the British empire? It’s an interesting question but not one historians can easily answer. We can say, though, that the British empire stood against a lot of the things that we now cherish. Take the rule of law, liberal democracy or the education of young children, for example. The ‘rule of law’ was patchy across the empire, and there were different rights for jury trial depending on whether you were white or…

SCOURGE OF LYNCH MOBS In May 1892, an angry mob descended on the offices of the Memphis newspaper Free Speech and Headlight. The paper had been running a series of antilynching editorials written by Ida Bell Wells, its young editor and part-owner, and her most recent instalment was particularly forthright in attacking the argument generally used to justify the mob killing of black men. “Nobody in this section of the country believes the old threadbare lie that Negro men rape white women,” she wrote. “If southern white men are not careful, they will overreach themselves.” The reaction was swift and brutal. The editor of another Memphis newspaper wrote that the author of the editorial (whom he assumed was a man) should be branded with a hot iron and castrated. Though…

The ZEE Jaipur Literature Festival is a celebration of writing and thinking that brings together more than 1,800 speakers – historians, politicians, business leaders, sportspeople, journalists and more – to discuss global issues in a free and open environment. The tenth festival, a five-day event attracting crowds of hundreds of thousands of people, featured the likes of broadcaster and writer Anita Anand, poet Ruth Padel, playwright David Hare, politician and author Shashi Tharoor, and writer and festival director William Dalrymple. The speakers also included a strong roster of Indian and international historians. Giles Milton CV: Author of books including Nathaniel’s Nutmeg: How One Man’s Courage Changed the Course of History (Hodder and Stoughton, 1999). Speaking at Jaipur about: The history of nutmeg and the East India Company “The East India…

Inglorious Empire: What the British Did to India by Shashi Tharoor Hurst, 296 pages, £20 In the middle of the 18th century, the Indian subcontinent produced roughly a quarter of the world’s goods. By 1947, when the British left India, south Asia contributed less than 5% of global output. The century and a half during which the British ruled India saw famine and (relative) poverty on an unprecedented scale. Former diplomat Shashi Tharoor’s eloquent book reminds us that facts such as these should be indisputable. This is a well-written riposte to those texts that celebrate empire as a supposed ‘force for good’, Niall Ferguson’s 2003 Empire being the most famous. Tharoor’s case is strongest when he emphasises the role of British power in corroding effective pre-imperial institutions in India. Relying…

Night Trains: The Rise and Fall of the Sleeper by Andrew Martin Profile, 256 pages, £14.99 This book is a love letter from journalist and television presenter Andrew Martin to the sleeper trains that once traversed the railway networks of Europe. Passage on these night trains was usually the preserve of the rich, the profligate or – as in Martin’s case – the families of British Railways employees with a privilege pass. Despite this limited access, the prominence of such services in popular novels and films – from 1932 thriller Rome Express to James Bond spy stories and, of course, Agatha Christie novels – firmly fixed the European night train in the modern British imagination. The first European night trains were introduced in 1880 by Compagnie Internationale des Wagons-Lits (International…

Clare Hargreaves is a journalist who worked on The Lima Times in Peru. She is the author of Snowfields: The War on Cocaine in the Andes (Zed Books, 1992) La Paz is a city that literally takes your breath away. Lying at an average altitude of around 3,650 metres – making it the highest national capital in the world – Bolivia’s seat of government sprawls across a bowl-like canyon in which the air is so thin it leaves you gasping. It’s not just the atmosphere that’s stupefying: the magnificent, snow-capped Mount Illimani towers over the city, which is a heady melting pot of colonial palaces, modern skyscrapers and markets thronged by indigenous Aymara women in vibrant shawls and bowler hats. Given the altitude and tumbling terrain, this is an unlikely…