Innholdsfortegnelse for Issue 5 i BBC World Histories Magazine

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…

1 ALASKA UNITED STATES Ice-bound artefacts More than 50,000 artefacts, dating back more than 400 years and including wooden masks and ivory tattoo needles, will be displayed in a new cultural centre in Alaska after preservation and study work at the University of Aberdeen in Scotland. Excavated over a period of seven years from ice in Nunalleq on Alaska’s south-western coast, the collection will be housed in the new Nunalleq Culture and Archaeology Research Center, due to open later this year. 2 MINNEAPOLIS UNITED STATES Art controversy A controversial sculpture may be ceremonially burned after being criticised as culturally insensitive. Sam Durant’s Scaffold, installed at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, alludes to the hanging of 38 Dakota Native American men by the US army in 1862. Dakota activists have…

To Spain’s Habsburg rulers and the anti-Morisco lobbyists who had for many years called for the Moriscos to be driven from Spain, the expulsion was a glorious and divinely ordained act of religious purging. In their eyes it removed a seditious and heretical enemy from Spanish soil, and cleansed Spain of the last remnants of its despised Islamic past. During the tumultuous autumn of 1609 in Valencia, supporters of the expulsion – such as the archbishop of Valencia Juan de Ribera and the Dominican monk Jaime Bleda – praised the king for having finally taken action against an inveterate Muslim “enemy within” that had stubbornly continued to worship “the sect of Muhammad” ever since the initial conversions of the Moriscos around a century before. Bleda witnessed the expulsion in Valencia,…

Scars of Independence: America’s Violent Birth by Holger Hoock Crown Publishing, 576 pages, £25 In this sanguinary take on the war for American independence (1775–83), Holger Hoock hopes to skewer the somehow enduring myth that the origin of the United States was a relatively sedate affair. In contrast, he portrays the conflict as a violent rebellion and a messy, brutal civil war. The British high command debated whether to treat the rebellious Americans humanely, and the rebels themselves were quick to complain about harsh treatment. Some of the stories that made their way into the historical record were all too real: soldiers really did burn towns and commit atrocities, and prisons of the 18th century really were nightmarish. Other stories were invented or exaggerated, and American leaders did their best to…

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…

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…

Rosemary O’Kane “Terrorist groups – most strikingly those concerned with ‘global jihad’ – often lack clear political goals” Terrorism is a chosen strategy in which the deliberate targeting of innocents as victims is of its essence. In modern times, the choice of terrorism as strategy was first made by the delegates of the Italian Federation at the Anarchist International in 1876. ‘Propaganda by the deed’ was advocated as the means to destabilise the government and rally support for the overthrow of the existing bourgeois system, the Federation’s objective being to replace that system with its interpretation of socialism. Thereafter, the 1890s became known as ‘the decade of the bomb’; infamously, in 1894 a French anarchist, Émile Henry, bombed a crowded Paris café. Two of the aims of such a shocking…

The hagiographic accounts of the expulsion written in the early 17th century tend to ignore the complexities of the Morisco predicament that might have allowed for less radical ‘solutions’. They also ignored the extent to which Christian Spain itself had helped create the problem the expulsion was intended to solve. There is no doubt that some Moriscos saw their expulsion as a form of liberation and deliverance, and relished the opportunity to return to a land of Islam where they could worship openly as Muslims. Certainly, many Moriscos had little reason to feel any affection towards the Catholic church or the Spanish state. This antipathy was partly due to the Inquisition. For the best part of a century, the institution that many Moriscos regarded as the ‘devil’s tribunal’ had tormented…

St Helena, a remote, rugged speck in the south Atlantic, found international infamy as the island on which Napoleon Bonaparte was imprisoned following his exile from Europe by the British in 1815. Yet though it had been little known in the wider world before then, the French emperor was not the first resident. Three centuries earlier, a Portuguese soldier chose to be cast away here, staying for some three decades – an episode that echoes, and reputedly inspired, Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe. Little is known about the early life of Fernão Lopes. A minor noble born in Lisbon around 1480, he grew up during Portugal’s golden age of discovery, when its explorers rounded the Cape of Good Hope and ventured to India, Brazil and Japan. In 1506, just eight years…

Visions of Empire: How Five Imperial Regimes Shaped the World by Krishan Kumar Princeton, 576 pages, £32.95 The history of the world, as Krishan Kumar observes in this expansive, prodigiously researched book, is effectively the study of empires. The nation is just a blip in world history when measured against the longevity of empires. Today, though, empires seem to be a thing of the past, with the passing of the great 19th-century European empires of the Habsburgs, the Ottomans, Russia, Britain and France. And yet, as Kumar argues, they might still have much to tell us about how we live in a globalised, transnational and cosmopolitan world where nation states continue to struggle with sectarian and religious conflict. Kumar’s approach is a refreshing riposte to postcolonial critics eager to simply bury…

The Fear and the Freedom: How the Second World War Changed Us Keith Lowe Viking, 576 pages, £25 As we try to make sense of the world’s fractious, fissiparous turn, readers might find solace in Keith Lowe’s new book. Using an imaginative approach, weaving interviews and memoirs into his account, he charts the myriad ways in which, he claims, the Second World War has – for good or ill – exerted its influence over the decades that have followed. The book does not want for ambition, ranging across the globe, and from Le Corbusier’s brutalist architecture to Brexit and beyond, in seeking the war’s looming shadow. Ingeniously, each of its 24 thematic chapters is introduced and bookended with a contemporary ‘voice’ – an eyewitness to or participant in events. It is…

“The resting place of Hirst’s imagined ship rings true with what we know about connectivity between ancient cultures” Recently when in Venice I visited the Damien Hirst exhibition Treasures from the Wreck of the Unbelievable. It’s a polarising affair – people either love it or hate it. Most focus on whether any of it is ‘true’. The conceit is that a sunken vessel from the first century AD found on the Indian Ocean seabed has been brought to the surface by Hirst, its amazingly varied contents exhibited for all to see once more. It’s a good yarn, with clues to the contrary littered throughout (‘Made in China’ stamps on the back of some of the artwork, the occasional Mickey Mouse and Transformers sculpture, even the artist’s self-portrait). This is art…

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 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…

Following the defeat of the Boers (descendants of Dutch settlers in southern Africa) in 1902, the British merged several colonies to create the Union of South Africa. Various tribal groups had previously fought wars of resistance against the Boers and British, and after the union, repression of indigenous groups continued as discriminatory laws were enacted by the Afrikaner-dominated government. On 8 January 1912 tribal chiefs, church organisations and other representatives of African peoples gathered in Bloemfontein, the country’s judicial capital, to form the African National Congress, dedicated to defending their rights and freedom. During its first decades the ANC’s tactics included support of strikes and protests, as well as other non-violent mass actions, and in the 1940s it began to work with South African Indian organisations. But as the Afrikaner-led…

On the morning of 7 November 1885, in an isolated spot in the western foothills of the Rockies, an elderly, white-bearded man drove an iron spike into the ground. In wielding the hammer, Scottish-born businessman Donald Alexander Smith bent the spike badly; it had to be removed and replaced with another, which he finally managed to knock in straight. If the event seems trivial or even comical, it was also significant: with that spike in place, the two sections of the Canadian Pacific Railway were joined, completing what was at the time the world’s longest line, and linking the east and west of this vast land – a symbolic moment in the history of Canada as a transcontinental nation in North America. It was just one moment of many in…

On 4 April 1609, the Habsburg king Philip III of Spain and his corrupt, all-powerful first minister, the Duke of Lerma, authorised the phased expulsion of the entire population of the people known as Moriscos (‘Little Moors’) from Iberian soil. These were all nominal Catholics, their ancestors having been forcibly converted to Christianity in the late 15th and early 16th centuries. The king’s order was not made public, in order to preclude flight or rebellion, and stipulated that the expulsion should begin that autumn in the kingdom of Valencia – home to the largest Morisco population in Spain. Throughout the spring and summer, Spanish officials worked in total secrecy to prepare for the expulsion of the Valencian Moriscos. Spanish naval ships and specially commissioned foreign ships from across Europe were…

Kelvin Day is manager of Puke Ariki, an innovative museum, library, heritage and information centre in New Plymouth, Taranaki pukeariki.com DISCOVER MORE Maori: Art and Culture edited by Dorota Starzecka (British Museum Press, 1996)…

Rogue Empires: Contracts and Conmen in Europe’s Scramble for Africa by Steven Press Harvard, 384 pages, £31.95 After completing an epic journey down the Congo river, the Welsh-born adventurer Henry Morton Stanley returned to London in 1878 seeking support for a scheme to use the river as “a great highway of commerce” into the African interior. His plan aroused little interest in London, but Leopold II of Belgium – an ambitious and devious king who had long dreamed of establishing colonies abroad, enriching himself in the process – relished the idea, and hired Stanley to construct a private empire in the Congo basin. Over a period of five years, Stanley and his agents signed some 400 ‘treaties’ with local chiefs, according Leopold ‘sovereignty’ over their territory in exchange for items such…

Paul Bloomfield is a travel and heritage writer, co-author of Where to Go When (Lonely Planet, 2016) Sofia’s is a history of many layers,its strata showing through in individual gems that stud the city. For a spin through its story, start at the western end of Nezavisimost Square, focal point of the Bulgarian capital. From here you’ll glimpse Roman remains, an Ottoman mosque, Communist monoliths and, atop a lofty column, Sofia herself – bronze symbol of 21st-century Bulgaria. The earliest known settlers, around the eighth century BC, were the Thracian Serdi tribe. Admire gilt Thracian masks at the Archaeological Museum 1 in the nine-domed former Buyuk Djami (Grand Mosque) where collections also include Macedonian treasures – Philip II, father of Alexander the Great, occupied the area in the fourth century…