Innholdsfortegnelse for Issue 8 i BBC World Histories Magazine

The Taj Mahal has long been India’s architectural pride. It was erected on the orders of Shah Jahan, a 17thcentury Indo-Muslim emperor, to house the body of his wife of nearly two decades, Mumtaz Mahal, who died from complications after the birth of the couple’s 14th child in 1631. Shah Jahan envisioned the monument as “a masterpiece for ages to come, increasing the amazement of all humanity”. Over subsequent centuries, many have marvelled at the beauty of the Taj, lauding its detailed stone inlay work, its elegant domes, and the magical way the building appears to change colours with the rising and setting sun. It remains the most visited and well-known of India’s many tourist attractions today. In recent years, however, the Taj has been a source of growing anxiety…

“In the Australian school history curriculum of the 1950s and 1960s, Aboriginal peoples – if mentioned at all – were portrayed as belonging to the Stone Age, and as a dying race” Why has Australia’s history proved so sensitive in recent decades? John Maynard: This sensitivity reflects the global trend to defend fiercely long-held nationalistic beliefs and constructed myths of the past. When I grew up and went to school, during the 1950s and 1960s, the school curriculum contained nothing about Indigenous history or culture. Australian history celebrated discoverers, explorers and settlers. Aboriginal peoples, if mentioned at all, were portrayed as belonging to the Stone Age, and as a dying race. With his lecture The Great Australian Silence in e 1968, the anthropologist WEH Stanner introduced for public debate the…

Ian Mortimer“Although life is more complex than it was, complexity itself is not change” We must start with another question: what do we mean by ‘the world’? Some regions saw their most rapid development in the distant past – Mexico on the arrival of Cortés in 1519, for example. Local political events could also trigger a short period of extremely rapid change. Did life alter in France faster in the period 1789– 94 than it has done in the past five years? You bet it did. Likewise across Europe in the years 1347–51, as plague ravaged the continent. And just consider how people’s lives changed during the war years 1914–18 or 1939–45. Today, technology is developing rapidly. But technology isn’t everything. Language is arguably more important, and that is comparatively…

When Franklin D Roosevelt was inaugurated as 32nd president of the United States in 1933, his country was in the throes of one of the worst economic crises in its history – the Great Depression. The 1920s had seen rapid economic growth, with huge numbers of Americans migrating to cities to seek industrial work, but also agricultural overproduction and plummeting food prices. These factors, together with a surge in financial speculation and unregulated banking, sparked a stock market crash on ‘Black Tuesday’, 29 October 1929. Banks failed, speculators lost all of their money, and the national economy was devastated. It’s been estimated that, by 1932, 25% of the American workforce was unemployed. The hands-off approach of Herbert Hoover, FDR’s predecessor, had little effect on the economic situation, and in 1932…

SEEING RED Charting an extraordinary 50-year period that spanned revolutions, the fall of an empire and the creation of the USSR, an exhibition at Tate Modern explores how visual culture influenced Russia between 1905 and 1955 – and how it was, in turn, shaped by the wider forces of the period. How did people deal with seismic changes, and how did popular art help them make sense of the new world order? Featuring posters, photographs and murals – such as this 1937 example, celebrating workers and created for an international exposition in Paris – the curators also explore how the Soviet state attempted to control its citizens through the manipulation of images. Red Star Over Russia: A Revolution in Visual Culture, 1905–55 until 18 February at Tate Modern, London tate.org.uk…

Paul Bloomfield is a travel and heritage writer and photographer, co-author of Where to Go When (Lonely Planet, 2016)…

The 70th anniversary of Indian independence has triggered a remarkable outpouring of post-colonial guilt in Britain. For a younger generation with no first-hand experience of it, empire is now a dirty word – an evil occupation of other people’s countries in order to plunder their wealth. The idea that imperialism could be a benevolent, modernising force, involving collaboration and exchange between rulers and ruled, is now deeply unfashionable. And yet the survival of the British Raj in India for almost two centuries is impossible to explain without understanding such dialogue and partnership. Far from wanting to colonise the minds of their new subjects, most founders of British rule were fascinated by India’s traditional arts and crafts, and keen to explore the wonders of its classical past. The tone was set…

1881 marked the early stages of a period of global expansion by European powers that continued unchecked for decades. In the rush for commerce, influence and territory, diverse cultures – many with ancient histories – were bulldozed. The so-called ‘Scramble for Africa’, triggered by agreements signed between the powers at Berlin in 1878, was in truth a grab for any remaining parts of the globe that had not hitherto been subjected to imperial rule. Some targets of colonisation fought back – for example, in Senegal, where French dominion became fact in 1881; in Indonesia, resisting Dutch expansion; and from Sudan to southern Africa, where Britain, France, Germany, Belgium, Italy and Portugal claimed territories. European incursions were often impossible to stop, but there were instances of successful resistance: in southern Africa,…

In 1948, the British physicist Fred Hoyle wrote that “once a photograph of the Earth, taken from the outside, is available… a new idea as powerful as any in history will be let loose”. For millennia, human beings could only imagine what the Earth might look like seen from the viewpoint of the heavens. Some ancient Greek philosophers had suspected that the Earth was probably a sphere. Plato even thought that the Earth might be a brightly coloured sphere – but, being Plato, he had in mind a Platonic ideal of the Earth rather than the Earth itself. By the second century AD, the astronomer Ptolemy knew from scientific considerations – by observation and measurement – that the Earth is, indeed, round. But knowing is not the same as seeing.…

Raised from mud at the eastern edge of the Baltic in 1703 by Tsar Peter the Great (reigned 1682–1725), St Petersburg reinvented itself again and again. After 100 years of energetic construction, its writers and thinkers led the new Russian capital towards revolution in the Decembrist revolt of 1825, and again nearly a century later in the revolutions of 1917. Subsequently, the population endured Stalin’s terror, a gruelling 900-day siege by Hitler’s Wehrmacht, three name changes and the collapse of communism. Yet during its 315-year history, St Petersburg has made a phenomenal contribution to world culture and politics. The Peter and Paul Fortress 1, the city’s original centre, was initially constructed in earth and wood by more than 20,000 serfs before being rebuilt in stone, with bastion walls 20 metres…

The centenary of the October 1917 revolution was for the most part greeted with an awkward silence in Russia. In the face of popular protests at official corruption and levels of wealth inequality that resemble tsarist society on the eve of the First World War, the government is reluctant to lend any official endorsement to revolution as a positive force in Russian history. Since Putin’s return to the Kremlin in 2012, the government has turned to repression as a surrogate for political debate and reform. Independent media are either taken over or closed down; opposition leaders are repeatedly jailed to hamper their activities and prevent them from standing in elections; activists find themselves dragged off to court for staging unsanctioned demonstrations. In its crackdown on opposition at home, the Kremlin…

1 ASIA Off-course watercourse The Indus (or Harappan) civilisation – one of the world’s earliest urban societies, which thrived in what’s now Pakistan and north-west India between c3300 and 1900 BC – may not have burgeoned along a permanent river, as previously thought. Research by the Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur and Imperial College London suggests the Sutlej river changed path long before settlements were established along its former course; these may instead have relied on monsoon rains flooding the dry beds. 2 NORTH CAROLINA UNITED STATES The Kid stays in the picture A photo bought at a flea market in North Carolina shows the infamous outlaw Billy the Kid. The picture, dated 2 August 1880, features a group of men including the gunfighter also known as William Bonney (second…

ACCOMPANIES THE BBC WORLD SERVICE DOCUMENTARY ART FOR THE MILLIONS - STAGING THE NEW DEAL Pinocchio wasn’t the only casualty that day. At midnight on 30 June 1939, the curtain came down on the entire US Federal Theatre Project (FTP). Over the four preceding years, this extraordinary venture had become a lightning rod for enemies of Franklin D Roosevelt’s progressive ideas. It had been spied on, lied about and railed against, accused of “sowing the seeds of communism”. It had helped publicise the president’s New Deal, and now it was being buried along with the promise of America’s first truly national theatre. Though that Broadway cast was ostensibly performing the last rites for a groundbreaking staging of Pinocchio, what had really been killed was an innovative nationwide and regional theatre…

“It’s the interaction between oceans that is fascinating, rather than the ocean as an entity” The ocean covers over 70% of the surface of the Earth – so it’s unsurprising that it has had a huge influence on civilisations and cultures throughout human history. But in what ways has it shaped these societies? Has it brought people together or divided them? And to what extent are the experiences of people living around and navigating the Atlantic similar to those of people around the Mediterranean? These are among the questions explored by archaeologist Barry Cunliffe in his new book On the Ocean: The Mediterranean and the Atlantic from Prehistory to AD 1500. Cunliffe is emeritus professor of European archaeology at Oxford, and his previous books include By Steppe, Desert, and Ocean:…

“The travellers represented a postcolonial generation, largely able to put aside the distorting lens of the imperial legacy to look afresh at the east” Between the mid-1950s and late 1970s, many thousands of travellers followed the ‘hippy trail’. For some, it was a ‘happening’ – an expression of 1960s counterculture – and for many of those the use of drugs including opium or hash was a key part of the experience. For others, it was just a great adventure: a chance to travel cheaply and encounter unfamiliar cultures. Young people from Europe and the US headed east, usually overland, turning their backs on tourist itineraries, passenger jets and package tours to engage with other cultures on their own terms. They took their own cars and vans, or used local public…