Innholdsfortegnelse for Issue 17 i BBC World Histories Magazine

Expert opinions on historical issues that touch today’s world For nearly 100 years, from the mid-19th to the mid-20th centuries, China was not free to trade. In 1839, the first war with the British began over opium sales (for more, see page 20). China lost and, in 1842, had to sign the first of a century of ‘unequal treaties’ by which favourable territorial and trading rights were given to the British, the French, the Americans and, eventually, the Japanese, who became Asia’s most powerful imperialists. In 1854, the British established the Maritime Customs Service, an unusual hybrid organisation that provided tariff revenue for the Chinese government, but was run at the top level by foreign, mostly British, officials. For nearly half a century, till 1911, its most prominent figure was…

Thirty years ago, prodemocracy protests in Beijing were suppressed with lethal force – yet are barely mentioned in China today. BBC correspondent Robin Brant asks why 1989’s Tiananmen Square demonstrations have been erased from its memory “China’s Communist Party leaders want their people to help build a “beautiful, democratic” society. I know, because I’ve seen the propaganda slogan, by the side of a road in Beijing, exhorting passing drivers to do their bit. This mantra was announced on two prominent red statues standing at an intersection a couple of miles from Tiananmen Square. The day I saw it was exactly 30 years after the vast protest in the square was crushed by the army on 4 June 1989. The democracy that China’s leaders talk of now is very, very different…

Meena couldn’t believe her luck when, as a teenager, she got hold of a ticket to an Ahmad Zahir concert. She dressed in her best orange bell-bottom flares and a red flowery blouse, and squeezed into a minibus with 20 or so sisters and cousins. “We were clapping and dancing,” she recalled. “It was just amazing.” Girls threw handkerchiefs on stage, hoping he’d sign them, and drank from a glass he’d put down. The concert was in Kabul, around 1976. At that time, many singing stars were performing in Afghanistan, but only one who moved with the music on stage and got the room screaming – who mixed Afghan instruments such as rubab and harmonium with saxophone and electronic keyboards, trumpet with bongo drums. Afghanistan’s first and biggest pop superstar…

“A lot of early western observers in Africa were struck by the diversity and creativity of hairstyles” Matt Elton: Your new book covers a fascinating range of subjects. How would you describe it? Emma Dabiri: Ostensibly, it’s about black, Afro-textured hair and its history, politics and significance – but really it’s about a lot more than that. One of my friends described it as a kind of Trojan horse: something that presents itself as being about one thing, but which also kind of smuggles in a lot of other ideas. What’s interesting about your book is that it considers hair as an artefact. You talk about societies in Africa, for instance, that use complex non-verbal languages including hairstyling. In what ways is it useful to view hair through this lens?…

David Eimer is an author and former foreign correspondent. His latest book is A Savage Dreamland: Journeys in Burma (Bloomsbury, 2019) Yangon’s beating heart is the Shwedagon Pagoda, the holiest temple in all Myanmar (Burma), one of the most fervently Buddhist countries in the world. While new buildings zoom up in Yangon (formerly Rangoon), the Shwedagon’s golden zedi (stupa), some 100 metres high, remains visible from many of the city’s 33 neighbourhoods. The Shwedagon is one of the liveliest places in Yangon, busy from before dawn till late at night. People come to pray, to promenade around the base, or just to sit and talk in its shadow. Legend has it that the Shwedagon is over 2,500 years old, and houses hairs of the Buddha brought to Myanmar from India;…

“The new pattern-block method enabled the use of di"erent combinations of highly elaborate surface decorations” Cull hu (bronze flask) Created by: unknown craftsman of the Eastern Zhou dynasty, Houma, Shanxi, China, c482 BC Now at: British Museum, London Chosen by: Yi Chen This magnificent bronze hu flask is one of a pair known as the Cull hu, after the surname of the donor. An identical inscription around the outer rim of the lid of each vessel records a historic meeting between warlords in fifth-century-BC China, while the elaborate decorative belts on their bodies demonstrate the most advanced bronze-casting technologies of the time. The Zhou dynasty (1045–221 BC) is widely regarded as a moral and political golden age, a time when great thinkers such as Confucius (551–479 BC) and Laozi (flourished sixth century BC)…

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Turn to page 20 to explore the causes and consequences of the First Opium War Zheng Yangwen “Trade made China rich, particularly from the 17th century as it absorbed much of the world’s silver” In 1600, China was “the largest and most sophisticated of all unified realms on earth”. So wrote Sinologist Jonathan Spence, reflecting the achievements of the Ming dynasty (1368–1644), when China wielded huge influence internationally, in part because of the boom in global trade. But do cultural influence, trade and wealth equate to ‘superpower’? Historians have used the term ‘dynastic cycle’ to characterise the waxing and waning of China’s fortunes. This framework may help us probe whether China has always (or ever) been the greatest global superpower. Various dynasties have been lauded by different historians. Mark Edward…

Emma Dabiri “Because the power dynamic was so balanced in favour of white European norms, the idea developed that Afro-textured hair was inadequate, inferior, and associated with a kind of non-humanity,” comments Emma Dabiri, who discusses her new book on the political and social history of such hair on page 72. Lewis Dartnell Professor at the University of Westminster, Dartnell reveals on page 28 why geography was a major factor in the ambitious expansion of European empires. “The leap forward in long-distance exploration was possible because mariners came to understand patterns of reliable winds and ocean currents,” he writes. Chi-kwan Mark “With the world’s second-largest economy and a permanent seat in the UN Security Council, China has the potential to replace the US as the greatest superpower,” Chi-kwan Mark writes…

1 EDINBURGH SCOTLAND Missing piece of history A chess piece tucked away for years in a drawer in an Edinburgh home has been identified as one of the ‘Lewis Chessmen’. After that collection of figures, dating from the 12th or 13th century, were found on the Isle of Lewis in 1831, five pieces remained missing – including this ‘warder’, the medieval equivalent of a modern rook. Its owner, whose grandfather bought the walrusivory figure for £5 in 1964, had no idea of its historical significance or value: Sotheby’s, which auctioned the piece, sold it for £735,000 at the start of July. 2 QUEBEC CANADA Last of the code talkers The last Mohawk ‘code talker’ of the Second World War has died, aged 94. Louis Levi Oakes, from the Mohawk nation…

By the 1830s, opium was causing severe social and economic problems in China – but when the emperor targeted the trade in 1838, the British responded in a surprising way. Stephen Platt traces the events that led to the First Opium War and the beginning of the end of imperial China By the 19th century, opium smoking had become a major problem in China. Use – and, correspondingly, supply – of the drug had expanded rapidly over the previous century, despite efforts by various rulers to quash the trade. From 1773, most opium in China was imported by British traders, and by 1838 some 40,000 chests – around 2,500 tonnes – were arriving in Chinese ports each year. The Daoguang Emperor decided it was time to act. The opium trade…

It was a warm afternoon in early autumn 1940 when Walter Benjamin arrived in the seaside town of Port-Vendres, on the French Mediterranean coast near the Catalan border. There, the middleaged German writer, accompanied by a photographer named Henny Gurland and her son Joseph, tapped on the door of Lisa Fittko, a German anti-fascist living in France with false papers. Fittko, along with her journalist husband Hans, had taken on the dangerous task of guiding Jewish refugees and other escapees out of Vichy and Nazi-occupied France across the Pyrenees into neutral Spain. Benjamin and his companions were in urgent need of her assistance: along with many other foreign and French Jews, they had joined the chaotic flight southward following the Nazi invasion in June 1940. Benjamin had left Germany years…