BBC World Histories Magazine Issue 6

The world’s nuclear arsenal is today estimated to number between 10,000 and 15,000 weapons – a huge figure, but far lower than the 60,000 stockpiled during the 1980s. Yet the threat of nuclear war has returned to the forefront of global politics in recent months, most notably since North Korea claimed to have finally achieved its ambition of producing a weapon that would fit on an intercontinental missile – accompanied by an escalation in the nation’s bellicose rhetoric. This was matched by the pronouncements of US president Donald Trump. (“My first order as president was to renovate and modernise our nuclear arsenal,” he tweeted in August. “It is now far stronger and more powerful than ever before.”) Despite these and other tensions, no major international conflict has been fought since…

Anne Applebaum The journalist and historian discusses why the devastating famine in Ukraine in 1932–33 has had a lasting impact on relations in the region. “The famine continues to shape the thinking of Ukrainians and Russians, both about themselves and about one another, in ways both obvious and subtle,” she says on page 8. Shrabani Basu Queen Victoria’s friendship with Abdul Karim, her young Indian attendant, is a little-known episode. On page 28 Shrabani Basu reveals how their relationship influenced the empress. “At the heart of this story is a young Muslim man holding a key position at the height of [the British] empire – and that’s fascinating,” she says. Davide Bonazzi Born in Bologna, Bonazzi illustrated this issue’s cover (and accompanying feature on page 38). “The most stimulating part…

Viewpoints Expert opinions on the historical issues behind today’s news In 2018, Ukraine will mark the 85th anniversary of the tragic famine that reached its peak in the spring of 1933; recent demographic research used archive data to produce an estimate of 3.9 million people killed during the famine. Although food shortages across the USSR began with the chaos of collectivisation, they were exacerbated in Ukraine by Stalin’s decision to seal the republic’s borders and confiscate not just grain but, in many communities, all available food. Starvation set in rapidly. People ate anything: grass, tree bark, dogs, corpses. In some cases, they killed one another for food. Along with a mass purge of intellectuals and of the Ukrainian communist party, carried out at the same time and by the same…

Writing in the late 20th century, the renowned Kuwaiti scholar Hassan Ali Al-Ebraheem counselled his fellow citizens of the Arabian Gulf to remember that they live in a dangerous neighbourhood. This summer’s beleaguerment of the Gulf kingdom of Qatar by Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and Bahrain – states which, backed up by Egypt and a group of smaller Arab and Muslim states, accused Qatar of supporting terrorism – is a stark reminder of how dangerous the region can be. Much of the commentary on this stand-off has focused on the rise of a new generation of leaders in Saudi Arabia and the UAE who view Qatar’s independent foreign policy as an obstacle to their own domestic and regional ambitions. Although recent events illuminate very different visions for…

The whole point of a pedestal is to elevate whatever’s on it. That’s the thing about statues: they demand not just attention but reverence. And because they’re sited in prominent public places, the intention is always to make a statement. That statement is not always the same to all viewers, of course. Most people probably don’t give them a second thought. But sometimes they do – and then there’s a fight. From the ancient Romans on, for as long as people have set up effigies to themselves, the fall of regimes has always been symbolically marked by the fall of statues. It happened in New York in 1776. Having heard a reading of the Declaration of Independence, a mob in Bowling Green toppled a statue of the British king. Years…

Calling experts from across the humanities: you are invited to collaborate in a scientific project revisiting some of the big questions about the past. What caused the rise and fall of sophisticated societies such as the Maya or the Roman empire? What role did agriculture play in shaping their fortunes? Or military prowess? Or religion? Plenty of theories speak to such questions, but there is currently no satisfactory way of choosing between them. A basic axiom of the scientific method is that a theory must make a testable prediction, but the body of available historical and archaeological information is now so large that testing a prediction against all of it is beyond the capacities of the human brain. The temptation to cherry-pick the evidence that supports a pet theory is…