BBC World Histories Magazine Issue 22

Reading about seismic events of the past is one thing; living through them turns out to be quite another. As I write this at the end of March, nations around the globe are struggling to cope with the consequences – social, economic, political and, most of all, medical – of the coronavirus outbreak. Given the exponential spread and severity of the pandemic, it’s hard to predict the situation you’ll be experiencing when you read this a month from now. We’ve always endeavoured to place the headlines within their historical context, so I spoke to Laura Spinney, author of a major history of the 1918 flu pandemic, about what that contagion can teach us today. You can read her thoughts on page 12, and hear the full interview on our podcast at…

MORE FROM US historyextra.com The website of BBC World Histories and our sister magazines, BBC History Magazine and BBC History Revealed, is packed with thought-provoking world history content. The History Extra podcast We’ll be continuing to produce multiple new episodes of our podcast, featuring historians including Laura Spinney and James Shapiro, each week throughout the current crisis. All will be available free via iTunes and other providers, or at historyextra.com/podcasts. Digital editions BBC World Histories is available for the Kindle, Kindle Fire, iPad/iPhone, Google Play and Zinio. You can find us in your app store. BBC History Magazine Britain’s bestselling history magazine is available around the world, and is published 13 times a year in print and a wide range of digital editions. Turn to page 54 for our latest…

Davide Bonazzi Born in Bologna, Bonazzi has provided the cover illustration for BBC World Histories since its launch in 2016. His brief this issue – to depict today’s world growing from ancient Roman civilisation – accompanies our Big Question feature on page 28, and comes as Italy tackles the coronavirus pandemic’s devastating impact. Toby Green “The idea that Africa was somehow cut away from global processes is an enduring one,” says Green, the author of A Fistful of Shells, a critically acclaimed history of west Africa. On page 72, he discusses the enduring legacy of global trade with the African continent, and explains why we need to shift our view of its role in world history. Valerie Hansen We often think of globalisation as a modern phenomenon, but the world…

“In many ways Shakespeare speaks more clearly and directly to American preoccupations than to English ones” Shakespeare’s work spoke to Elizabethan preoccupations – but in many ways he speaks more clearly and directly to American preoccupations than to English ones. America embraced Shakespeare as its national poet even after the US broke with England in 1776, and he’s never really had a rival as the writer that everyone in the nation reads. One of the things I learned while writing my new book Shakespeare in a Divided America is that America’s Shakespeare is not England’s or Britain’s Shakespeare. Certain plays, such as Othello, take on a distinctive political and social meaning here that they don’t in England, and works such as Twelfth Night matter in terms of class in the…

1 NUNAVUT CANADA Brush with the past Recovered artefacts including a brush retaining strands of human hair may shed light on the last days of an ill-fated mission through the Northwest Passage. HMS Erebus and HMS Terror became icebound in Arctic Canada in 1846; two years later, all 128 members of the expedition led by Sir John Franklin were dead. More than 350 objects retrieved from the sunken Erebus by underwater archaeologists are now yielding clues about life on board. Among the objects being studied are a lieutenant’s epaulettes and a lump of sealing wax bearing a sailor’s fingerprint. 2 PARIS FRANCE Imperial return requested French historians have requested the return of the remains of Napoleon III, last emperor of France, as part of a post-Brexit deal. Exiled in England…

At the time of writing, the coronavirus COVID-19 continues to dominate headlines worldwide. Why are we so afraid of pandemics? I think it’s something very primitive in us. We’ve had to deal with epidemics of infectious disease – plagues, to use a more ancient and Biblical kind of term – since we settled down in semipermanent settlements and started farming, about 10,000 or 12,000 years ago. Infections that adapted to big groups of densely living people, known as crowd diseases, evolved in parallel with us as we adopted those new, more sedentary lifestyles. So a kind of arms race between these microorganisms and humans has been ongoing for a very long time. They know us very well and unfortunately, because they’re small and they reproduce much faster, they tend to…