Innholdsfortegnelse for Issue 9 i BBC World Histories Magazine

Human survival has always relied on natural resources. Our lives, increasingly played out on the screens of phones and tablets, may seem more and more divorced from the natural world, yet the land’s resources remain crucial. Indeed, that technological shift isn’t without its physical impact: the batteries that power smartphones are made with cobalt, a scarce metal found in some of the world’s poorest nations, where it’s often mined by young children in dangerous conditions. Global politics are being shaped – for better and worse – by the materials of the physical world. This is nothing new, of course: resources and commodities have been coveted, treasured, traded and fought over for centuries. This issue, experts in key fields explore how substances such as oil, gold, water and coffee have shaped…

In February, the Polish president Andrzej Duda signed an immensely controversial new law that makes it illegal to refer to Nazi extermination centres in Poland as ‘Polish death camps’, or to blame the ‘Polish nation’ for the crimes of the Holocaust. Other nations have been queuing up to criticise the Poles. Rex Tillerson, US secretary of state, declared that the new legislation “adversely affects freedom of speech and academic inquiry”. Yet I have an element of sympathy with some of the motives behind this draconian new statute. The fact is that the role of the Poles during the Holocaust has often been cruelly misrepresented. Imagine, for instance, how Poles felt in 2012 when US President Barack Obama casually referred to “Polish death camps”. There were, of course, no ‘Polish death…

First broadcast on BBC Two in the UK in February 1969, Civilisation was one of the first programmes to take advantage of the then-new medium of colour television. Presented by Kenneth Clark, an art historian who held key positions at museums including Oxford’s Ashmolean and the National Gallery in London, the 13-episode series ranged from Norway to New York, and from the collapse of the Roman empire to the 20th century. It attracted millions of viewers in both the UK and the United States. Though it embraced art, architecture, literature and philosophy, its focus remained on western culture. The series’ subtitle, A Personal View by Kenneth Clark, aimed to reflect its non-comprehensive scope, but some critics pointed out its focus on male artists and creators. The new series, Civilisations, first…

Perhaps no other substance holds sway over the human experience like coffee. “If it is not indispensable to man’s happiness,” wrote a mid-20th-century researcher, “it certainly contributes a good deal to it.” Few would argue. The drink we call coffee is produced from the beans of the Coffea genus of the large Rubiaceae family. Of the 124 known species of Coffea, just two are widely cultivated: Arabica (Coffea arabica) and Robusta (Coffea canephora). Arabica accounts for the majority of – and certainly the finest – coffee. Milder and offering better flavour than Robusta, it commands commensurately higher prices on the global marketplace. Arabica coffee does not come from Arabia, as the name – bestowed by taxonomist Carl Linnaeus in 1753 – might suggest. Rather, its centre of origin and diversity…

Henry and Francis, two of Europe’s most powerful and ambitious rulers, had never met before. However, a formal encounter between the two had been planned since at least 1518, when Cardinal Thomas Wolsey, Henry’s Lord Chancellor, had contrived a peace treaty between the pair (shortly after the pan-European Treaty of London), hoping that an Anglo-French alliance would result in a powerful entente between their countries. With the ascendancy of a new and forceful king of Spain, Charles I, it seemed politic to create a militarily dynamic union that might, if necessary, tip the balance of power within Europe. When the Spanish ruler was also elected Holy Roman Emperor (as Charles V) in 1519 – a position that Francis had sought for himself, launching a campaign on which he had spent…

Emma Dabiri: What inspired you to write a book about Africa with the provocative title Neither Devil nor Child? Tom Young: The direction of the public and academic debates on Africa has been, I think, rather simplistic and binary: ‘empire is good or bad’, ‘aid is good or bad’, that sort of stuff. I thought it was time to argue something different: that the problems facing Africa are essentially to do with production and productivity. That’s where I part company from the rather silly Afro-optimism that currently prevails in certain circles. I don’t think it’s Eurocentric or nasty to argue that Africa has a big fundamental problem, which is weak levels of production and productivity. From that, of course, follow questions of how to make sense of it, and what anyone…

Born in lakeside Como in northern Italy, Gaius Plinius Secundus (AD 61 or 62 – c113) was probably tutored at home before being taken under the wing of his uncle, Pliny the Elder. This would be the defining relationship of the younger man’s life. The elder Pliny instilled in him a deep respect for hard work and intellectual endeavour. A commander in the army and the navy, Pliny the Elder also found time to write numerous books on natural history. He was relentlessly active. “The only time he took from his work was for his bath,” wrote Pliny the Younger later, “and by bath I mean actual immersion, for while he was being rubbed down and dried he had a book read to him or dictated notes”. Pliny the Elder…

Emma Dabiri In our Conversation feature starting on page 72, historian and presenter Dabiri talks to Tom Young about his new book on the ways in which the west’s relationship with Africa shaped the continent’s past. “It seems that, since the imposition of European models, the continent is becoming increasingly unequal,” she argues. Theresa Grieben Berlin-based illustrator Theresa creates maps for the historical journeys explored in our Footsteps articles – this issue, Pliny the Younger’s odyssey, on page 84. “His words stuck with me: ‘Since we are denied a long life, let us leave something to bear witness that at least we have lived’. I guess every artist can identify with that,” she says. Graciela Iglesias-Rogers What impacts did the Age of Exploration have on the discoverers – and the…

Turn to page 20 to explore the impact of European explorers on Australia and Tahiti Margaret Small For the indigenous inhabitants of the Americas, the potential benefits of contact with other peoples were far outweighed by the brutality of European conquest and colonisation, and the ravages of European diseases that cut a swathe through the populations. The experiences of the Taino of Hispaniola and the Beothuk of Newfoundland painfully demonstrate the harm brought about by the Age of Exploration: both were among the peoples the Europeans first encountered in the Americas, and both are now extinct. We have yet to even fully understand what was lost in this devastation. This era also saw large-scale European involvement in the slave trade. By 1820, it’s thought that more than 10 million west…

The contemporary status of sugar is very confusing indeed. On the one hand, more sugar is produced than ever before – some 120 countries process around 180 million tonnes of it each year. It seems we can’t get enough of it. We add it to our hot drinks and food (‘sweeten to taste’), and huge quantities of it to sweeten mass-produced food and drink. Yet there is a growing sense of unease about the damage it causes. For centuries, honey was mankind’s main sweetener until, from the start of the 17th century, cane sugar came to dominate. It was joined in the 19th century by beet sugar and then, in the 20th century, by chemical and corn sweeteners. In the process, the world’s population acquired a taste for sweetness in…

In June 1667, Samuel Pepys arrived home to find his wife preparing a hot drink, made with the dried leaves of the plant Camellia sinensis, on the advice of her apothecary. Tea had only recently been introduced to Europe by East India Company merchants, who had discovered the pleasures of imbibing the herbal infusion while trading for spices in the far east. The new ‘China drink’ was regarded by the Pepys as a cold remedy, and never became a favourite beverage in their household; they preferred to drink coffee or chocolate for breakfast. But among the rest of the population, tea was to become the most popular of the colonial drinks. The rise in the popularity of tea in Britain was probably because drinking it was seen as a restrained,…

As tensions rose once more in Europe, the forward-thinking Wolsey pressed Henry to keep his diplomatic options open. To that end, the cardinal arranged a meeting in Kent between the English monarch and Charles V. The contrast between the boisterous, pleasure-loving Henry and the more reserved Charles was marked, but nonetheless the two men found common cause during several days of banqueting and dancing. They spent Whitsun together at Thomas Becket’s shrine in Canterbury Cathedral, and signed a non-aggression pact on 29 May, before agreeing that they would meet upon Henry’s return from France. Having thus pledged friendship with one great monarch, Henry – together with his wife Catherine, Wolsey and 5,000 of the leading lights of the English court – sailed from Dover to France to treat with another.…

This May marks the 200th anniversary of the birth of Karl Marx. The face of the founder of a political philosophy that, at least in name, became the ruling ideology of a third of the world’s population remains as recognisable today as ever. But the stern Soviet-era statues are no more, destroyed or transformed into monuments of communist kitsch. Recent biographies, films and plays about Marx’s life place him in a 19th-century context and stress his relevance to 21st-century concerns, glossing over his influence on the 20th century. Yet it’s possible to both acknowledge the complex, often tragic past of 20thcentury Marxism and assert that Marx’s work still has relevance for us today. Marx died in 1883, but Marxism as we know it is largely a product of the following…

ACCOMPANIES THE BBC TWO TV SERIES CIVILISATIONS In the new series, presenters Mary Beard, David Olusoga and Simon Schama cast their gaze over more than 500 works of art from 31 nations, using these examples to discuss how cultures evolved and interacted across the millennia. Here, Denys Blakeway talks us through the making of the series – and how he hopes it will change our view of world history. Civilisations was inspired by Kenneth Clark’s original 1969 series Civilisation. We all owe an enormous debt to Clark – his documentary changed television and brought art to millions. But, given changing times and the interconnected world in which we now live, we are approaching the history of art from a broader, more global perspective. Alongside great western art, we are looking at…

In ancient times people encountered a black, bituminous substance that seeped out of the ground and caused fires that could not be extinguished. But it wasn’t till 1859 that the first modern commercial crude-oil well was drilled, in Titusville, Pennsylvania. Entrepreneurs and inventors struggled to find commercial uses for this liquid, which was primarily refined into kerosene (paraffin) for lamps. A waxy substance produced during drilling was also utilised, refined into the lubricant called petroleum jelly (widely sold as Vaseline). However, with mass production of the internal combustion engine in the early 20th century, crude oil began to transform society and the global economy. This engine burned refined crude oil, and its application in the car and aeroplane revolutionised travel. The mainstream switch to petroleumpowered transportation in industrialised, western nations…

From inspiring ancient cultures to playing a key role in the development of the global economy, gold has been a major factor in human civilisation across the course of centuries. The first coins, minted in the seventh century BC in present-day Turkey, were made with gold. And, as a new exhibition at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art (see our Agenda section on page 81 of this issue) demonstrates, the people of the ancient Americas used the metal in artworks from as early as 1000 BC. The sun god Inti was the Inca civilisation’s patron deity, and gold manifested his strength and power. The discovery by the Spanish of the New World was a key moment in global history. Conquistadors came from Spain to seek wealth and power in the…

All ancient cultures, from the Ainu in Japan to the Yoruba of Nigeria, had water gods. Like a deity, water provided and punished. Our water high priests of today – meteorologists, climatologists, urban planners – similarly wrestle with dual challenges presented by water: excess and absence. Water can submerge an entire nation, as it is doing on the island of Kiribati, or leave millions thirsty in Mumbai or Mexico City. Water has proved a major source of conflict and struggle, illustrated most vividly by the human history of the world’s longest river. In ancient Egypt, the river stood above any worldly power. Kings and queens rose and fell based on the rise and fall of the Nile’s annual inundation. As Egyptians intoned every flood season in a song known as…

Francis perhaps arrived at the summit with a sense of vague disappointment. After a spectacular victory in battle at Marignano near Milan in 1515, which promised to open the door to a conquest of Italy, he had failed to achieve any similar success. Nonetheless, the young king was an impressive and vital figure. Despite his nickname of ‘François du Grand Nez’ (Francis with the big nose), he was charismatic and charming, and keen to showcase his own glory as well as that of his country. His retinue’s 300 tents were clad in gold cloth that shimmered in sunlight, lending the event and the venue its lustrous name. The royal pavilion was enormous – according to one observer, soaring over 36 metres (120 feet) high. One onlooker described the spectacle as…