BBC World Histories Magazine Issue 23

Welcome to this special issue of BBC World Histories magazine, looking back at some of the best features from the past four years. Originally published between 2016 and 2019, the articles collected here explore the history behind some of the most important current-affairs stories of the 21st century. Largely taken from our regular series of Big Question features, they ask individual historians or panels of experts to tackle issues as diverse as the lingering effects of the Cold War, the ways in which migration shapes today’s world, and whether museums should return treasures taken from other parts of the globe. Written by leading figures including Deborah Lipstadt, David Abulafia, Catherine Merridale and Gus Casely-Hayford, they offer thought-provoking takes on the past inside the present. Indeed, some continue to make headlines:…

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 New episodes of our award-winning podcast are published each week, and feature discussions on everything from African visual culture to the American civil rights movement. Every episode is 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. For information about how to subscribe, see…

Arne Westad “Europe has always been culturally, religiously, and – most importantly – politically diverse” For most of the time since the dawn of human civilisation, Asia has been in the lead, economically and technologically. Exactly when the ascent of Europe and its cultural offshoots began is hotly debated. Some see its roots in antiquity (highly contestable) or the Renaissance (more plausible, but doubtful – a comparison between Ming China and Tudor Britain is not necessarily to the latter’s advantage). It is more likely that western predominance started with the industrial revolution, and may be ending with the information revolution. If one accepts this timeline, the rise of Europe was based on access to resources (especially energy) and technologies. The former advantage was to some extent a fluke – the…

Evan Mawdsley “The Cold War was a product of the 1917 revolution and the Second World War” Relations between the US and Russian Federation have been cool over the past 10 years, and were chilled further by the 2014 annexation of the Crimea. But those developments are part of a new era. The Cold War meant more than tension between two major states. It evolved over time, but had three essential features. One, a consequence of the Second World War, was global bipolarity. Many major states had been defeated or weakened, leaving the two ‘super powers’. Washington and Moscow assembled alliance systems, especially Nato and the Warsaw Pact. The second feature was ideology, Marxism-Leninism versus liberal-capitalism (or anti-communism). These idea systems bound each bloc together and impeded good inter-bloc relations.…

Yasmin Khan “The British empire transformed trade and drove the growth of cities. In short, it made the modern world” Historians are pretty squeamish about the idea of empires as a force for good. That’s because we prefer hard facts that we can find in archives to thrashing out counterfactuals. What would the world have been like without the British empire? It’s an interesting question but not one historians can easily answer. We can say, though, that the British empire stood against a lot of the things that we now cherish. Take the rule of law, liberal democracy or the education of young children, for example. The ‘rule of law’ was patchy across the empire, and there were different rights for jury trial depending on whether you were white or…

Margaret Small “The Age of Exploration paved the way for the globalised economies we see today” 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 Africans…