Innholdsfortegnelse for Issue 18 i BBC World Histories Magazine

Eric Arthur Blair was born in Motihari, north-east India on 25 June 1903, and grew up in England. After graduating from Eton College, he spent five years in the Imperial Police in Burma (now Myanmar), which left him with a keen sense of political outrage and personal guilt. He drifted between journalism, tramping and menial jobs, which informed his first book Down and Out in Paris and London (1933), published under the pseudonym George Orwell. During the 1930s, he published four novels and two more works of nonfiction. The Road to Wigan Pier (1937) examined working-class life in the north of England, while Homage to Catalonia (1938) described his experiences in the Spanish Civil War. Classified unfit for military service in the Second World War, Or well worked for the…

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INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS “Today, the Second World War is a series of myths and memories that entrench old ideas and old power structures”Keith Lowe In 1944, the renowned British economist John Maynard Keynes gave a landmark speech at the famous Bretton Woods conference. The Allies, he said, had proven that they could fight together; now it was time to show they could also live together. If they could achieve this, a genuine “brotherhood of man” was within their grasp. The Second World War was such a vast catastrophe that by 1944 the need for global change was obvious to everyone. At Bretton Woods, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and an element of the World Bank were created to promote peace and prosperity, and to prevent the kind of economic shocks that…

The tragic and brutal slave trade is a well-known facet of African history. But many other stories of Africans outside that continent are known by few today: tales of royal dynasties in India; of knights, bishops, and teachers in Portugal; of interpreters in China; and of the first foreign-born samurai in 16th-century Japan. This man known to history as Yasuke (possibly a Japanese corruption of Isaac) was most likely a member of the Jaang (Dinka) people, of what’s now South Sudan, who had been trafficked to India as a boy. There he entered the service of the chief Jesuit in Asia, Alessandro Valignano, who was on an inspection tour of the Indies. Valignano’s ultimate destination was Japan, home of the most successful mission in Asia, where he arrived in 1579…

We Yevgeny Zamyatin Russian author Yevgeny Zamyatin became involved in politics at an early age, joining the Bolsheviks in his twenties. Although he initially supported the revolutions that forged the Soviet Union, he grew increasingly critical of the Communist Party, particularly its use of censorship. That censorship made his literary career difficult and inspired his most famous work, We – finished in 1921 and first published in English in a 1924 New York edition. Zamyatin’s warning against totalitarianism is set 1,000 years after the One State has conquered the world. His protagonist is D-503, an engineer living in a society ruled by a dictator and built, panoptican-like, almost entirely of glass. Several of the concerns and concepts that would later appear in Orwell’s 1949 novel are also present here, including…

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Carrie Gibson The story of Hispanic settlement in North America provides key insights into contemporary issues of migration. As the historian and author explains on page 14, there is a “long, intertwined history between Spain, the United States and its southern neighbour republics, much of which has faded from public memory”. Karen R Jones “The history of ‘how the West was won’ (or lost) was much more variegated than the vision presented in traditional historical readings and countless Hollywood westerns,” the University of Kent historian explains on page 56, exploring a less well-known narrative of 19th-century pioneer women on the US frontier. Dorian Lynskey On page 66 the Guardian writer reveals the events that influenced George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949). “[He] learned about many of the features of Stalinism that…

On 5 August, the newly re-elected Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) government in India announced that a presidential order had repealed Article 370 of the Indian constitution, which had given special status to the northern state of Jammu and Kashmir (J&K). The government also pushed though, with overwhelming majorities in both houses of parliament, a bill that stripped J&K of its status as a state, partitioning it into two union territories – Jammu & Kashmir and Ladakh – to be ruled directly by the central government. Article 370 had been enshrined into the Indian constitution in 1949 as a means of defining J&K’s relationship with the Indian Union, and reflected the federal, plural and secular character of the Indian polity. India had claimed J&K precisely because the latter was a Muslim-majority…

Recent years have witnessed a noticeable growth in the use of camps of all sorts across the world. There are refugee camps in the Democratic Republic of Congo and in nations bordering Syria; in the UK there are Immigration Removal Centres in places such as Harmondsworth. At the other end of the scale, there is a large camp system in North Korea about which we know very little. There has also been much recent concern that so-called ‘re-education camps’ in China holding people of the Uighur ethnic group are being used to separate families. Following a fact-finding mission to Myanmar, international human rights lawyer Chris Sidoti has said that Rohingya Muslims are being held in concentration camps. The camp phenomenon is increasing, but what specifically denotes a concentration camp? These…

In early February 1945, the Soviet, UK and US leaders – the ‘Big Three’, as the press had dubbed them – arrived at the seaside resort of Yalta in the war-ravaged Crimea peninsula in Ukraine (at that time, a Soviet republic). Over eight days of bargaining, bombast and intermittent bonhomie in the hastily restored Livadia Palace, built by the last tsar of Russia, these three heads of government decided the future of Europe. Josef Stalin had led the Soviet Union from the mid-1920s, first as general secretary of the Communist Party and then, from 1941, as premier. Winston Churchill had replaced Neville Chamberlain as prime minister in 1940, and had been the UK’s wartime leader. Franklin D Roosevelt was serving his fourth term as US president, having first taken office…

On 21 August 1936, a minor Bolshevik official named ES Holtzman told a Russian court that he had been involved in a Trotskyist plot against Stalin. Holtzman was a defendant in the first major show trial of the period known as the Great Purge, during which hundreds of thousands of Soviet citizens were consigned to prisons, labour camps and execution chambers. Holtzman testified that in 1932 he had travelled to Copenhagen to rendezvous with Trotsky’s son, Lev Sedov, at the Hotel Bristol. His evidence helped to convict himself and the other alleged plotters, all of whom were promptly shot. A few days after the trial, however, a Danish newspaper pointed out the significant fact that the Hotel Bristol had been demolished in 1917. Evidence later emerged that Lev Sedov had…

“So much British political rhetoric is about Britain at war, and particularly the Second World War” Matt Elton: For people who missed the first season of As Others See Us, can you explain what the series sets out to do, and what it covers this time around? Neil MacGregor: It seemed a good juncture, as Britain sets to leave the European Union – following the Brexit referendum of 2016 – and operate alone on the world stage, to get a sense of how other nations view us. Britain is going to have to renegotiate its position with a whole range of countries around the world and, as we undertake those negotiations for future relationships, it’s going to be important to understand a little better what they think about us. The first…

Learning from the Germans by Susan Neiman Allen Lane, August Wrestling with the ways in which thorny legacies of the past – racism, fascism, colonialism – intrude upon the present, this is a philosophical and personal study of how to tackle historical responsibility and guilt. Ranging from Nazi Germany to the American South, it expertly walks the line between history and current affairs. Great State: China and the World by Timothy Brook Profile, September The author of the award-winning Vermeer’s Hat (2007) charts the history of China’s international relationships in an epic tale featuring emperors, traders, imperialists and invaders. It’s a timely tome, in light of current western concerns about the Asian nation’s continuing rise. Leadership in War by Andrew Roberts Viking, October What links Nelson, Stalin, Hitler and Thatcher?…

“Manuscripts such as this transported their readers to distant lands” Barlaam and Josaphat manuscript Created by: A follower of Hans Schilling, 1469 Now at: The Getty Museum, Los Angeles Chosen by: Bryan C Keene This illustrated manuscript is one of more than 50 German and Latin texts produced in the 15th century by a thriving workshop in the Hagenau commune, now in eastern France. It depicts the tale of Barlaam and Josaphat as told by Rudolf von Ems (1200–54). We are told that prince Josaphat lived in isolation for many years in a royal palace in India; then, one day, he witnessed illness, old age and death for the first time. Distraught, he meditated under a tree until he met Barlaam, a Christian monk and, renouncing worldly pleasures, converted to Christianity.…