BBC World Histories Magazine Issue 5

Terrorism has blighted societies throughout the world for decades – but recent events in the UK have again brought its ongoing significance into sharp focus. We began work on this issue at the start of May, before the bombing, at a concert in Manchester, that killed 22 people and injured more than 100. That tragedy was followed in June by attacks in London. These terrorist incidents, the deadliest in Britain for more than ten years, came in the wake of attacks in Belgium, France and Germany earlier this decade. In other areas of the world, efforts to kill, injure and disrupt everyday life continue to be depressingly commonplace: bombings and shootings in Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Iran and elsewhere have killed thousands this year alone. To put such occurrences into their…

Zeinab Badawi The producer and presenter of a major new BBC World News TV series explores why ancient African history is largely forgotten. “I’m not suggesting there was a conspiracy, of course – just that there wasn’t enough emphasis placed on African history by either African or non-African leaders,” she says on page 64. Margaret Conrad As Canada marks the 150th anniversary of confederation – an event that’s not been met with universal celebration – Margaret Conrad, professor emerita at the University of New Brunswick, investigates why “tensions frustrate any attempt to present Canada’s history as only a story of triumphal progress” (page 32). Jacob Dlamini How can South Africa escape the scandals and corruption that have dogged its past few decades? That’s the question explored in this issue’s Back…

Viewpoints Expert opinions on the historical issues behind today’s news FRENCH POLITICS Upheaval in the Elysée? Emmanuel Macron’s meteoric rise to the French presidency has been hailed as auguring a revolution in Paris politics – but to what extent does it represent a genuine break from the past? Emmanuel Macron’s election to the French presidency in May 2017 has highlighted France’s enduring attachment to the radical ideal of ‘rupture’. In a conscious nod to the historic landmark of 1789, Macron’s campaign pamphlet was entitled Révolution, and he ran a successful campaign to sweep away France’s discredited political establishment. Indeed, Macron is the epitome of the political outsider. He did not rise through the ranks of the main parties of government. Unlike predecessors such as Mitterrand, Chirac and Sarkozy, Macron had…

The terrible recent terrorist attacks in the UK – on concert-goers in Manchester in May, and on people in Borough Market in London the following month – have revived a debate about an assumed clash of civilisations. Is this the ‘Jihad vs McWorld’ conflict, first prophesied by the late political scientist Benjamin Barber 25 years ago? Barber posited a struggle between, on one hand, globalisation and corporate control and, on the other, a bid to retain traditional values through extreme religious theocracy or nationalism. Is religion, as that argument would appear to suggest, incompatible with consumer culture? Since the Enlightenment spread through Europe in the 18th century, it has been tempting to associate religion with ‘tradition’ and imagine that it would be swept aside by ‘modern’ science and commerce. Once…

When the WannaCry cyberattack raced round the world at the start of May – hitting Britain’s NHS, German railways and Spanish telecommunications – the public was shocked. Was it really possible that the systems on which we depend were so vulnerable? And what kind of ingenious new technology had wreaked such havoc? The buzzword ‘cybersecurity’ seems quintessentially modern, but the reality is that an understanding of our vulnerability dates back at least half a century. And even some of the specific techniques used in this latest attack were a good quarter of a century old. The first people to worry about what was called ‘computer security’ were in the US Air Force. In the early 1960s, the biggest threat for the US was the bomb – specifically, Soviet bombers dropping…

The real crisis of our times – of my generation – is not that we don’t have it good, or even that we might be worse off later on. No: the real crisis is that we can’t come up with anything better. Remember: every milestone of civilisation – the end of slavery, democracy, equal rights for men and women – was once a utopian fantasy. “Progress is the realisation of Utopias,” Oscar Wilde once wrote. The problem today is that we have no vision of where to go next. We need a new Utopia for the 21st century. I was born in 1988, a year before the fall of the Berlin Wall. I grew up in the nineties, in an era in which people around the world started to believe…