Innholdsfortegnelse for Issue 15 i BBC World Histories Magazine

There are few more striking examples of history becoming political than the story of Rutger Bregman, the Dutch author at the centre of a media storm earlier this year. His 2017 book Utopia for Realists explores how historical political ideas could rejuvenate today’s divided world. As such, he might seem the perfect guest for the annual meeting of the World Economic Forum, which brings together politicians, business moguls and thought-leaders in an idyllic Swiss Alpine town. Yet his contribution was not met with universal approval. The fallout made headlines around the world, led to a memorably testy exchange between Bregman and a US TV news anchor, and catapulted the idea of the ‘public historian’ back into the limelight. Bregman shares his take on the experience, and his arguments for why…

The arrival of Christopher Columbus in the Americas in 1492 had huge and irreversible consequences. History is full of ‘what if ’ moments, but the navigator’s first sight of the Bahamas was perhaps one of the most significant turning points. Yet one impact of his ‘discovery’ that hasn’t been explored before was a prolonged period of global cooling in the 16th and 17th centuries. Though not a true ice age, the so-called Little Ice Age was a significant chill that began in the northern hemisphere by around 1400 and turned global in roughly 1600, gripping the world for more than a century and suppressing average temperatures by around 0.5°C. In the Swiss Alps, farms and villages were swallowed by swelling glaciers. Further afield, the Little Ice Age is associated with…

1 NEW YORK CITY UNITED STATES All that glitters The Metropolitan Museum of Art has confirmed that it will return an ancient gilded coffin to Egypt, after investigations revealed that it had been looted from that country in 2011. Made in the first century BC for the high-ranking priest Nedjemankh, the coffin was acquired by the Met in 2017 for almost $4 million. A spokesperson revealed that the museum had been provided with forged provenance documents stating that the coffin was exported legitimately in 1971. 2 LONDON UNITED KINGDOM Curating controversy The director of the British Museum has caused controversy by describing the removal of the Parthenon marbles (pictured below) from Greece in the 19th century as a “creative act”. Speaking to the Greek newspaper Ta Nea, Hartwig Fischer stated…

Lata Brandisová grew up near Prague in the dying years of the Habsburg Austro-Hungarian empire, which at the time encompassed Bohemia. Born Marie Immaculata, the fifth child of an impoverished count, her assumed destiny was to marry a nobleman and bear his children. Instead she became a figurehead – for her gender and her people. The Brandis family lost its title, along with much of its property, when the democratic First Czechoslovak Republic was declared in 1918. In the aftermath of the First World War, potential husbands were scarce, but Brandisová hadn’t been keen on that plan anyway: she was more at ease among horses. Her rapport with the species seemed miraculous. She was also tough, athletic and brave. In short, she had everything it took to be a topclass…

1 Dr Juan Negrín Prime minister from May 1937, Negrín attempted but failed to obtain international mediation to halt the war. His plans to negotiate a peace deal with Franco also failed. 2 Professor Julián Besteiro Socialist politician who, hoping to bring peace, allied with Casado to bring down Negrín’s government. 3 Colonel Segismundo Casado López Having launched a coup to depose Negrín in March 1939, Casado tried to negotiate a peace settlement with Franco; when that failed, his junta fled to London. 4 Wenceslao Carrillo Socialist trade-union leader who supported Casado in forming the anti-Negrín National Defence Council, sparking a government rift. 5 General José Miaja Commander of the Republican Army in the central zone towards the end of the war, Miaja supported Casado’s coup and became president of…

Originally, Britain’s key concern in Southern Africa was safeguarding the sea route to India, having decisively seized the Cape Colony in 1806. Over the following decades, though, it expanded its territory, annexing Natal in 1843, the diamond fields in Griqualand West in 1871 and the Transvaal in 1877. In 1879, though, it looked as if it had overstretched itself by invading Zululand – an act of aggression that was met with calamitous defeat in the first battle. By the late 1870s, Benjamin Disraeli’s Conservative British government was pursuing confederation in South Africa, aiming to bring together British colonies and Boer states. Success in this aim depended upon resolving the ‘native question’ – the existence of independent black states such as that of the Zulu. Reducing the Zulu to wage labour…

On 17 June 1971, Richard Nixon, the president of the United States, gathered a press conference to present his new strategies for combatting drug addiction. Some of his policies were relatively far-sighted: the launch of prevention and rehabilitation campaigns, and the establishment of hundreds of methadone clinics for heroin addicts. But these were ignored by the gathered journalists. Instead, newspapers focused on Nixon’s headline claim that drug abuse was “public enemy number one”. An enemy needs confronting, and within days the same newspapers were announcing that the Nixon administration was fighting a “war on drugs”. America’s – and, by extension, the world’s – longest-running unwinnable conflict had begun. For nearly five decades, US politicians have repeated Nixon’s combative refrain. Ronald Reagan claimed that drug abuse was a “repudiation of everything…

Rutger Bregman “I think history is one of the most subversive sciences: it shows us that things can be different – that there’s nothing inevitable about the way things are right now,” says the historian and writer. On page 11 he discusses how he ruffled feathers at the World Economics Forum, and why historians should speak truth to power. Daniel Immerwahr On page 26, the associate professor of history at Northwestern University, Illinois explores the United States’ now largely forgotten imperial ambitions, which resulted in a scattering of overseas territories. “Some four million people live in them,” he says, “four million people who can’t vote in presidential elections.” Tiffany Jenkins Arguments rage about the ‘return’ of museum treasures such as the Elgin Marbles – but do such artefacts really belong…

“The best way to respect people who came before us is to research history without judging it through the eyes of the present”Tiffany Jenkins In the early eighth century, monks at Wearmouth-Jarrow Abbey produced three enormous bibles. Two remained in Northumbria, but only fragments of one survive. The third travelled with the abbot as he set out to Rome, intending to present it as a gift to the shrine of Peter the Apostle. Known as the Codex Amiatinus, it is in astonishing condition – and is the oldest surviving complete Latin Bible in the world. This monumental text, one of the greatest works of Anglo-Saxon England, is now kept in the Laurentian Library in Florence, beyond Britain’s borders – and a good thing, too. Culture doesn’t have a fixed nationality.…

COMPLEMENTS THE BBC RADIO 4 DOCUMENTARY SPAIN’S LOST GENERATIONS In the last days of January 1939, a shivering column of people tramped north through Catalonia towards the French border, some clutching a few possessions, some carrying infants. The weather was bitterly cold, with sleet and snow falling on the fearful throngs. But waiting for better conditions was not an option: the Nationalist forces of General Francisco Franco were bearing down on Barcelona – and 450,000 terrified women, children, old men and defeated soldiers fled, in anticipation of the horrors he would surely visit on them. Those who could find transport squeezed into any kind of vehicle imaginable, though many were forced to walk 100 miles or more to the border. Franco’s forces took the Catalan capital on 26 January, two…

Which groups of people does this series deal with, and what happened to them? Our series deals with people killed or otherwise disappeared during the Spanish Civil War and the subsequent dictatorship. More than 100,000 men and women are still missing. One episode focuses on people executed by Franco’s regime, and on the families who are only in the past decade or so recovering those remains from mass graves. The other is about people affected by the state-initiated theft of babies, which started during the war and continued through the early years of democracy. In some cases these people are now beginning to recover their identities and their families. How did you find out about their stories? Thanks to a growing civil society movement that began in the early 2000s,…

Chelmsford was supremely confident that British firepower would easily prevail. By sending columns east into Zululand towards Cetshwayo’s main homestead at Ulundi, he intended to entice the Zulu into attacking in the open. He assumed that the Zulu impi (army) could not be kept together for long, so Cetshwayo must throw it at the advancing columns to end the war quickly. On 20 January, Chelmsford’s force, which comprised British regular soldiers as well as native and colonial troops, encamped at Isandlwana. There he ignored his own field regulations by not preparing a defensive position – there was no entrenchment, nor was a laager (defensive circling of wagons) organised. On 22 January, a scouting party discovered the large Zulu army sent by Cetshwayo – but Chelmsford, confident in his British troops,…

Humans are pretty good at killing. From sharp rocks and blunt clubs to longdistance bombers and remote-controlled robots, the quest to kill in new and ‘improved’ ways has long captivated humanity’s creative capacity. Yet at the heart of these developments is something revealing and rather disturbing. With each new epoch of weaponry and warfare has come a separation of the human from the visceral heat of battle, from face-toface fighting, and from the very act of killing. There are exceptions, of course: in any era of conflict, humans might still find themselves in hand-to-hand combat, but this is most certainly not the norm. Instead, over the longue durée of human history, countless attempts have been made to produce weapons that allow us to become more detached from those we kill.…

Paul Bloomfield is a travel and heritage writer It’s a story that’s all too familiar: Muslims, suffering the brutal aftermath of rebellion, flee around and across the Mediterranean to seek a new life. Such is the tale of Fès’s early years, and here these refugees provided the bedrock of Islamic learning, architecture, commerce and community. To see how these factions slotted together, climb to a viewpoint north of the medina (walled city) at dusk, as the muezzins’ calls drift from hundreds of mosques. From among the Merenid tombs scattered like broken teeth across the hillside, gaze into the valley to Fès el-Bali, the oldest part of the city. The village of Medinat Fès was founded here by Moulay Idriss, a descendant of the Prophet Muhammad and founder of the Arab…

Historian and author Rutger Bregman made headlines earlier this year when a speech he gave at a World Economic Forum meeting went viral. He spoke to Matt Elton about the experience, and why historians must speak out on current affairs Talk me through how you went from writing your book, 2017’s Utopia for Realists , to appearing at the Davos conference that gained so much media attention. Rutger Bregman: Yeah, that’s a good question, and I’ve sometimes wondered that myself! My book is about all sorts of ideas that may seem bizarre right now but may become reality in the future – just as we have a lot of ideas that are very normal right now but were completely bizarre just a couple of decades or a century or so ago. Think…

In April 1931, following the end a period of nationalist dictatorship, elections brought widespread urban power to Republicans, King Alfonso XIII left Spain and the Spanish Second Republic was established. With a host of republican, socialist, conservative Christian and, increasingly, fascist factions vying for power, fragile alliances formed a series of governments. A significant element within the rightwing movement was the Falange, an extreme nationalist political group calling for military rule and imperial expansion, founded in 1933. On 17 July 1936, a military uprising against the Republican government was launched by a group of Nationalist officers including General Francisco Franco. The Nationalist military forces enjoyed initial successes in the Spanish protectorate of Morocco, Galicia, Old Castile, Navarra and parts of Andalucia. However, large areas remained loyal to the Republican government,…

The Zulu, according to Frere, represented a “frightfully efficient man-slaying machine”. Originally a subdivision of the Bantu Nguni tribes, between 1817 and 1828 the Zulu were made into a formidable military force by their chief, Shaka. This transformation coincided with large-scale tribal movements over much of central, eastern and southern Africa caused by prolonged drought and overpopulation. Between the ages of 14 and 18, Zulu youths would serve for two or three years herding cattle, working fields and being trained for war. At 18 they would form a new regiment and build a homestead. Regiments served as army, police and (mostly) labour force until marriage at the age of 35 or 40, when allegiance reverted to clans. Having established their kingdom, the Zulu clashed with the Boers in the 1830s…