Innholdsfortegnelse for Issue 23 i BBC World Histories Magazine

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:…

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.…

Humans are pretty good at killing. From sharp rocks and blunt clubs to long-distance 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-to-face 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.…

Janet Hartley “The common perception in western and central Europe was that Russia was not ‘one of us’” “Russia is a European state.” Catherine the Great, Empress of Russia, made this statement in 1767 in her Instruction – a document presented as a guide, at home and abroad, to the fundamentally ‘European’ forms of government shared by Russia with other ‘civilised’ states of central and western Europe. Catherine was a German princess, but her assumptions were shared by her predecessor, Peter the Great, who attempted to modernise Russian society and institutions along western European lines, as well as her grandson Alexander I, who saved ‘Europe’ from the tyranny of Napoleon, and all of the tsars up to 1917. Imperial Russia was part of Europe, and therefore followed European rules. How…

Andrew Roberts “If we topple Nelson, what do we do about the pyramids, built at least in part by slave labour?” Although it is completely illogical, ahistorical and unfair to natural justice to judge the people of the past by today’s morals, it is also very hard not to. If we merely judge them by the morals of their own times, that doesn’t tell us very much. If we don’t judge them morally at all, we let off the likes of Hitler and Stalin in a welter of moral relativism. Yet because Oliver Cromwell might not have believed in socialised medicine, say, but did believe in slaughtering Roman Catholics in Drogheda at a time when that religion was widely thought to pose an existential threat to Britain, what does that…

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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…

Malcolm Craig is senior lecturer in American history at Liverpool John Moores University, specialising in post-1945 US and UK foreign policy Michael Goodman is professor of intelligence and international affairs in the department of war studies at King’s College London Simon J Moody is lecturer in defence studies at King’s College London, specialising in the history of strategic thought Benoît Pelopidas is professor, junior chair of excellence in security studies, and scientific director of the masters programme in international security at Sciences Po (Paris)…

Charles Townshend “Revolutions have far-reaching, complex and maybe contradictory effects that work out over very long periods of time” Revolution has meant many things – except perhaps its literal meaning: a full-circle return to a previous state. In the modern world it has meant change, usually dramatic and rapid, often accelerated by violence. It has been applied to sudden seizures of power, but also to vast processes such as industrialisation and technological development. (The United States even called its development of so-called ‘smart weapons’ the Revolution in Military Affairs.) Variations in meaning bear directly on the issue of success or failure. In ‘palace revolutions’ (sometimes mistakenly labelled coups d’état), in which one general might seize power from another, the issue has been resolved after a short military clash. But such…

Recently, a well-educated man – the CEO of a Fortune 500 company, one of America’s most successful corporate entities – attended a seminar I gave on antisemitism. After my presentation, he asked in a perplexed tone: “Jews are so smart… How is it that they have not been able to solve this problem of antisemitism?” I told him that his question was aimed in the wrong direction. He should not be asking the victim of prejudice to solve the problem – he should be asking the perpetrator. The purveyors of this hate and hostility should be the ones who bear the onus of having to resolve the issue. Of course, the perpetrators would have a ready answer: they would fall back on the stereotypes they use to justify their prejudices.…

Tiffany Jenkins “The best way to respect people who came before us is to research history without judging it through the eyes of the present” 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…

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…

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…

Following the failed CIA-backed Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba in 1961, Fidel Castro made a secret agreement with Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev to install strategic nuclear weapons on the island. Much of the US would then be within effective range of Soviet nuclear missiles. On 14 October 1962, an American U-2 spyplane captured photos indicating the presence of ballistic missiles in western Cuba – in contravention of promises made by Khrushchev to US president John F Kennedy. The US responded by establishing a naval ‘quarantine’, blocking the delivery of further offensive weapons. Khrushchev called this action “outright piracy”, warning that it could lead to war. Tensions rose over the following two weeks. Both US and Soviet nuclear forces were readied, and Castro’s communications with Khrushchev seemed to urge a…

Emma Dabiri “It is far easier to continue the centuries-old trope of African barbarity, or at best incompetence” During an appearance on Irish television, controversy ensued after I suggested that we don’t need any more “white saviours” in Africa. To my great surprise, I was immediately met with a comment about “darkest Africa” from a fellow panellist. Though this is a phrase with which I am all too familiar, I have not heard it employed with any degree of seriousness in years. Nonetheless, it was a stark reminder that many continue to perceive the continent thus. As Hugh Trevor-Roper, the eminent Oxford professor of history, declared in 1962: “Perhaps in the future there will be some African history to teach. But at the present there is none – there is…

Robert Garland “Migration was central to growth and sustainability for both ancient Greek and Roman civilisations” According to United Nations Refugee Agency (UNHCR) figures, as of June 2018 there were 68.5 million forcibly displaced people worldwide. An unprecedented crisis? Hardly. Though the scale was much smaller in antiquity, proportionately the suffering was just as great. Before the Persian invasion of Greece in 480 BC, the Athenians evacuated some 100,000 women, children, elderly and slaves to the Peloponnese and islands off the coast of Attica. When the Athenians finally arrived at their destinations, there were no medical services, no reception centres, no aid workers, no supplies of clothing, bedding or clean water to greet them. The evacuees returned to their homes to find them burned down – not once but twice.…