NEW FROM THE MAKERS OF BBC HISTORY MAGAZINE
WorldHistories FRESH PERSPECTIVES ON OUR GLOBAL PAST
Has the tide of history turned against the west?
Donald Trump and the origins of populism
William Dalrymple on the Koh-i-Noor scandal “ALIENS ATTACK!” Japan’s American nightmare DEVILS AND DICTATORS The Beatles tour that shocked the world “ISTANBUL IS A CITY OF PROTEST” Bettany Hughes talks to Peter Frankopan “Man took a swipe at all living things” Witness to the Chernobyl disaster
INDIA’S FIGHT FOR FREEDOM From WW2 to partition ISSUE 1 DEC 2016/JAN 2017 £6.99
Street spirit A 19th-century map of the Indian city of Puri, showing the Jagannath Temple at its centre. This issue, we explore some of the stories, events and people who have shaped India’s history – and continue to influence its future
WELCOME
The past 12 months have been among the most tumultuous in recent memory, with wars, referendums and the resurgence of populist politics all reshaping the established global order. As the bestselling historian Peter Frankopan writes in his column for this launch issue of BBC World Histories: “The world is changing; understanding how and why is the greatest challenge for those who believe that knowing about the past is the key to making sense of the present.” That’s one of the inspirations behind this new magazine, from the team that produces BBC History Magazine: to understand how we got to where we are by exploring the stories of the past. Each issue, we will draw on the expertise of leading writers and historians from around the world to help tackle some of the defining issues of the 21st century. So, in the following pages, you’ll find University of Oxford professor Yasmin Khan leading a special package of India features with her exploration of how the nation’s Second World War experiences shaped its future for decades to come (page 22); leading author William Dalrymple charting the extraordinary
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story of the Koh-i-Noor diamond, and what its fate tells us about the legacy of colonialism (page 74); and Nobel-prize winning journalist Svetlana Alexievich recounting her experiences on the ground in the months after 1986’s devastating nuclear disaster at Chernobyl (page 70). But it’s not just about viewing the past through the eyes of the present. We also aim to bring you lesser-known stories from throughout the expanse of world history: the artwork of South Africa’s distant past, for instance, or the chain of events that led to the Beatles incurring the wrath of Imelda Marcos in the late 1960s. From doomed Arctic voyages to a historian’s guide to Athens, a new museum devoted to African-American culture to what Donald Trump’s coming presidency tells us about the resurgence of political populism around the world, there’s hopefully plenty here to pique your interest. Spanning all of time and space is, of course, a fairly ambitious project, and we’re not attempting to offer a comprehensive overview of the entirety of the human experience. We have plenty lined up for 2017, however, and in issue two we’ll be marking the centenary of the Russian Revolution and asking: did the Cold War ever really end? That’ll be on sale from 25 January. In the meantime, if you have any comments, suggestions or queries about BBC World Histories, please do let us know: you can email us at
[email protected] Enjoy the issue. Mat Elton Editor, BBC World Histories
COVER ILLUSTRATION: DAVIDE BONAZZI (ALTERNATIVE COVER: GETTY/DREAMSTIME). INSIDE COVERS: GETTY. BACK COVER: THE TRUSTEES OF THE BRITISH MUSEUM. THIS PAGE: STEVE SAYERS–THE SECRET STUDIO
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CONTENTS Features
Women train as stretcher-bearers in Bombay (now Mumbai) in 1942. Discover how the Second World War impacted on the lives of ordinary Indians on page 22
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Famine and freedom: how war ignited India
1966 and the three crises of the Beatles
BY YASMIN KHAN
BY CLIFFORD WILLIAMSON
How hardships endured by Indians on the home front during the Second World War shaped the face of modern India
Why, on the Fab Four’s final world tour, global politics was as important as music
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Art of Africa
THE BIG QUESTION
The curator of a new exhibition of South African art guides us through his highlights
Why did the west dominate for so long? GETTY IMAGES
ISSUE 1
A panel of leading experts debates the reasons why – and if – Europe and North America held sway over global power for centuries
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74 The Koh-i-Noor controversy BY WILLIAM DALRYMPLE
The story of the world’s most famous diamond, still contested after eight centuries
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CONTENTS Regulars REGULARS 102
40 Year in pictures: 1905 – Espionage,
Einstein, rubies and revolution by Richard Overy 50 Extraordinary People: BR Ambedkar
by Sunil Khilnani 58 Perspectives: US commodore Perry
sails into Tokyo Bay by Lesley Downer 70 Eyewitness: The Chernobyl Disaster
1986 by Svetlana Alexievich 114 Column: Global Connections
by Michael Scott
THE BRIEFING 8
Back Story: Is the new wave of populist politics history repeating? by Chris Bowlby
14 History Headlines: Global discoveries
and developments in the world of history 16 Inside Story: How historical fears
about intellectual property theft inform 21st-century politics by Gordon Corera
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This issue we’ve been asking … What factors lie behind the resurgence of populist politics? 8 Which band did Imelda Marcos prefer: the Beatles or the Stones? 52 How did the United States prise Japan open in the 19th century?
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What is “the most important surviving character” in Istanbul’s history? 82 What history books are currently topping the charts in Australia? 90 What happened to Franklin’s lost Arctic expedition? 102
18 Milestones: Births, battles and big
developments in years past by Nigel Jones 21 Viewpoint: It’s time for a revolution in
historical thought by Peter Frankopan
CULTURE
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talks to Bettany Hughes about her book exploring the rich history of Istanbul 90 Book reviews: New releases assessed 96 Agenda: Exhibitions, films and TV
JOURNEYS 102 In the footsteps of… John Franklin’s
last Arctic expedition by Andrew Lambert 108 Global City: Athens by Joanna Bourke 110 Wonders of the World: Colombia’s lost
city, Ciudad Perdida by Paul Bloomfield ISSUE 1 COVER ILLUSTRATION BY DAVIDE BONAZZI
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100 Next issue preview and pre-order
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DREAMSTIME/GETTY/THERESA GRIEBEN
Pre-order the next issue of World Histories
82 In Conversation: Peter Frankopan
CONTRIBUTORS Expert voices from the world of history William Dalrymple Author of books including Return of a King: The Battle for Afghanistan and The Last Mughal: The Fall of Delhi, 1857, Dalrymple tells the remarkable story of the Koh-i-Noor diamond in our feature starting on page 74. As he points out, it’s a tale that raises important questions about the legacy of imperialism in today’s world.
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Yasmin Khan Leading this issue’s package of features on India’s dynamic past, Yasmin Khan explores the hardships and legacy of the nation’s Second World War home front in our cover feature on page 22. “My focus in on total mobilisation and the way in which society is deeply affected by war at every level,” she explains.
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Rana Miter
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Professor of the history and politics of modern China at the University of Oxford, Mitter is one of the experts debating why the west dominated world history for so long in our feature starting on page 34. “Linguistic domination remains one of the west’s most powerful legacies to the rest of the world,” he writes.
Peter Frankopan Since its publication in 2015, Frankopan’s The Silk Roads: A New History of the World has topped bestseller lists around the world. As well as talking to Bettany Hughes about her new book on Istanbul (page 82), the author shares his thoughts on the importance of global history in the 21st century on page 21.
GETTY IMAGES/ALAMY/REX FEATURES/FRAN MONKS/BBC PICTURES/PA IMAGES
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Sunil Khilnani
90 CONTACT US Website historyextra.com/worldhistories Twitter twitter.com/historyextra Facebook facebook.com/historyextra Email
[email protected] Post BBC World Histories, Immediate Media Company Bristol Limited, Tower House, Fairfax Street, Bristol BS1 3BN, UK Phone +44 117 314 7377
Presenter of the BBC Radio 4 series Incarnations: India in 50 Lives (and author of the book that accompanies the project), Khilnani was well-placed to write a profile of Indian social reformer BR Ambedkar, on page 50 of this issue. “Today, Ambedkar’s stature as man and thinker has been domesticated and sanitised,” he argues.
Svetlana Alexievich Belarusian investigative journalist and writer Alexievich was awarded the 2015 Nobel Prize in Literature, the judges praising her writings as “a monument to suffering and courage in our time”. She describes her experiences in the aftermath of the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear disaster in our Eyewitness feature on page 70.
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Roaring to the right Supporters of the far-right Golden Dawn party in Greece raise torches and flags bearing a symbol resembling the Nazi swastika at a rally in January 2016
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BACK STORY A new heyday for populist politics?
AP–PRESS ASSOCIATION IMAGES
A new wave of populism and demagoguery is gathering momentum, with Trump securing a shock presidential victory, and anti-immigration rhetoric sweeping Europe. Chris Bowlby asks whether current trends echo populist movements of the past – and what we can learn from them
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THE BRIEFING Back Story: Populism
“Trump, the businessman and erstwhile reality TV star, used his celebrity and ‘straight-talking’ populist style to woo voters”
hether you laud or lament the political rise of Donald Trump, he has certainly grabbed public attention. The businessman and erstwhile reality TV star used his celebrity and ‘straight-talking’ populist style to woo voters in a way very different from his opponents and peers. Whether that approach is positive is another question. Meanwhile, when Jean-Claude Juncker, president of the European Commission, warned in September of the fundamental threats facing the European Union, he notably drew attention to one factor. Splits within the EU, he said, were leaving scope for “galloping populism”. That image – of a movement heading at destructive speed towards mainstream politics – captures the angst with which many, not only in Europe but around the world, view the rapid growth of populism.
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On the side of the people
This can be a tricky trend to define, but certainly groups or movements proclaiming themselves to be on the side of ‘the ordinary citizen’, threatened by globalisation, immigration or fear of terrorism, are becoming increasingly prominent. Whether in the context of the US presidential election, European debates about migration and austerity, or UK’s Brexit (the referendum in June in which the UK voted to leave the EU), those claiming to speak for the people against the elite seem to have the initiative, while mainstream politicians look vulnerable.
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Donald Trump campaigns for the US presidency in Jackson, Mississippi, August 2016. The candidate’s approach was a “potent example of populist success”
“Fears of terrorism linked to migration were exploited by populist leaders over a century ago, much as they are today” Campaigners for the UK to leave the EU before the ‘Brexit’ referendum in June 2016
REX FEATURES/AKG IMAGES
“Our last hope: Hitler” proclaims a poster of 1932 printed during the Great Depression, a time of mass unemployment in Germany. Periods of austerity have previously fuelled populist movements
Have we seen comparable populist surges in the past? And what are the roots of this situation? Some historians, such as Niall Ferguson at Harvard, have found revealing parallels in the 19th century, when “a motley crew of xenophobes, nationalists and cranks” emerged. The first group to be labelled ‘populist’ comprised 19th-century Russian revolutionaries who claimed to stand up for toiling peasants ignored by their rulers (but who were themselves criticised for being out of touch with peasant life). For all that there was relatively little conflict between states during the 19th century, it was for many a time of insecurity, when the masses wanted to assert themselves against ruling elites. Prolonged economic downturns in Europe were prompted partly by the beginnings of a kind of globalisation brought about by railways, mass migration and the emergence of new economic powers such as Germany and the US. This could alienate both agricultural workers and new graduates struggling to find jobs – just like the unemployed graduates who fuel populist challenges in southern Europe today. Angst about immigration and urbanisation helped inspire conspiracy theories. And labour movements began to flex their muscles against what they saw as elites representing the interests of a privileged few, while suffragists in the early 20th century campaigned against women’s complete exclusion from political power. Fears of terrorism linked to migration
were exploited by populist leaders over a century ago, much as they are today. The 1870s saw the start of decades of anarchist terrorism, including the assassination of political leaders and bombing of public buildings and events throughout Europe. Many point to the 1920s and 1930s, following the Great Depression, as the heyday of populist politics, when fascist and communist movements exploited economic misery and weakened political systems. However, Daphne Halikiopoulou, a University of Reading specialist on the far right, cautions against proposing easy equations linking economic distress and the rise of movements such as Nazism. “The US had an economic crash but no fascist movement that won,” Halikiopoulou points out. And today, while a prolonged economic crisis afflicts southern Europe, only Greece has experienced a populist challenge from the far right (the Golden Dawn party) as well as the left (Syriza). Moreover, factors fuelling populism vary across time. “Let’s not forget the migration crisis,” she adds; though this is a major populist theme today, migration on such a scale was not so prominent in the 1930s. Fear of populism certainly motivated European politicians after the Second World War. Revolutionary challenges from the far left had solidified into the Soviet bloc of eastern Europe, whose leaders were fearful of their power being undermined by people’s movements. Western Europe, meanwhile, was
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THE BRIEFING Back Story: Populism
determined to immunise itself against challenges from below, and mainstream parties backed generous welfare states. Cas Mudde, expert on populism at the University of Georgia, has written that (western) Europe “saw very little populism until the 1980s”. Anti-tax parties then began to emerge in Scandinavia, and far-right populists in France and the Netherlands. Claiming to be ‘the voice of the people’, they were forerunners of more successful movements now disturbing the status quo in most European countries. Decline of the mainstream
Trends that might be seen as populist come from the political left as well as the right. Mass protest movements against nuclear weapons blossomed in the 1980s, and Matthew Feldman, professor in contemporary history at Teesside University, points to later protests in Britain against the Iraq War: “Getting 2 million people out for a single issue about which ‘the elite’ is not listening – for me, that was a good expression of populism.” It’s also important, argues Halikiopoulou, to recognise that established parties and governments have sometimes resorted to what could be seen as a populist style in an attempt to sustain support: “In Greece in the 1980s, the PASOK [Panhellenic Socialist Movement] party gained power and stayed in power with a very populist rhetoric – anti-Nato, anti-west.” And those who remember mass resistance on the streets against Portuguese dictators or Greek colonels in the 1970s, or Soviet-backed
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communist rulers in the late 1980s, may have a much more positive view of what a kind of populism can achieve. Another significant factor is the vacuum left by the steady decline of mainstream parties such as social democrats that once could rely on the tribal loyalty of millions. New populist movements have eaten into their support. Where a successful challenge has come from the right, says Matthew Feldman, it was often after such movements jettisoned toxic, alienating views such as antiSemitism – a great taboo in Europe after the horrors of the Holocaust. Today, he argues, “nobody who wants to break into the mainstream talks about biological anti-Semitism or Jewish conspiracy”. Instead, such movements and parties have found fertile political ground in training hostility toward Islam. “And that,” adds Feldman, “ties in – often unfairly – with acts of terrorism we’ve seen since 9/11.” Sometimes this focus on Islam echoes very old historical moments. The Freedom Party in Austria, for example, which has come close to winning the country’s presidency (and may have done so in the re-run election in December by the time you read this) uses modern means of communication to re-work old Austrian angst about invasion by ‘the Turk’ that recalls the 17th-century siege of Vienna. Similarly, politicians and campaigners in central and eastern Europe, hostile to the idea of receiving more refugees from the Middle East, have spoken of themselves, says Feldman, as “the bastion of a supposedly homogeneous Christianised
How populist movements exploit new mass media One striking feature of populists is their use of new means of direct communication. In some respects, says Matthew Feldman, this echoes trends seen centuries ago. In the 17th century, new printed material and woodcut images were delivered by a network of propagandists: this kind of communication “allowed for a real expansion of conspiracy theories, ‘Us versus Them’ ideas”. By the 20th century, populists could exploit other new technologies. Nazi propaganda supremo Joseph Goebbels was quick to recognise and use the potential of radio, with its capacity to convey the drama and intimacy of the rallies at which Hitler and others addressed audiences around Germany. “It would not have been possible” claimed Goebbels, “for us to take power… without the radio and the airplane.” In recent times, populists have used the internet and social media to bypass what they see as mainstream media allied to their enemies among the elite – what Donald Trump has called (in a tweet) the “dishonest and disgusting media”. Social media, says Daphne Halikiopoulou, offers populists “a big difference to how many people they can reach”. Studying the rise of the Front National in France, she observed how their publicity effort has moved since the 1980s from “one bulletin that came out every few months – short, directed only at staunch FN supporters” to a website updated daily. The speed and efficiency of such communication, argues Feldman, boosts the influence of the ‘galloping populism’ feared by mainstream politicians. “Historians of the 19th and 20th centuries will say that this kind of thing – populism – has been around for a long time. But I feel that the rate at which it can translate into political power – through social media and so on – has speeded up.” Far-right Dutch politician Geert Wilders takes a selfie with French Front National leader Marine Le Pen
GETTY IMAGES/REX/ALAMY
“The Brexit campaign echoed familiar populist themes: challenging the elite, giving control to ‘ordinary people’, resisting immigration”
Supporters of the populist right-wing Alternative for Germany (AfD) party protest against Germany’s asylum policy in 2015. By September 2016 AfD had representation in 10 of Germany’s 16 state parliaments
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Per cent of votes won by far-right candidate Norbert Hofer in the first round of Austria’s presidential elections in April
Anti-nuclear demonstrators march in the UK in 1983. Populist movements are not solely the preserve of rightwing politics
west as opposed to an Islamised east”. What has also proved effective for such campaigners is suggesting links between migration and the future of welfare spending. Such welfare was developed originally as insurance against political instability caused by economic insecurity. Now, populist challengers – warning that immigration threatens to overburden welfare systems – poach voters from mainstream parties of the left as well as the right. It should be emphasised that these trends vary from country to country. One major exception to the populist surge has until recently been Germany, where recall of its dark 20th-century history acted as a barrier against such movements. The AfD party (Alternative für Deutschland), however, achieved regional electoral success by switching emphasis, replacing opposition to the euro with hostility to Muslim immigration. If the AfD enters parliament in the 2017 federal election, it would mark a highly significant historical shift in Germany’s postwar politics. Britain provided this year’s most striking case study: the Brexit vote. Though the campaign to leave the EU was broadbased, it echoed familiar populist themes: challenging the elite, giving control back to ‘ordinary people’, resisting large-scale immigration. Britain’s rightwing Eurosceptic UK Independence Party may have only one member of parliament but, says Feldman, Brexit “shows that populism can be successful and when harnessed can be a major political force”. In the US, of course, many have seen
Donald Trump’s presidential campaign as a potent example of populist success. Trump echoes earlier US political figures such as William Jennings Bryan in championing ‘the people’ against the Washington elite – though some point out that the billionaire businessman is hardly an ‘ordinary American’. But what seems distinctive is that Trump captured the Republicans as an outsider. It will be fascinating to see whether Trump can maintain the image and language of an outsider once occupying the White House. The transition from challenging power to wielding it can prove especially hazardous for populist movements, which tend to rise and fall rapidly. The “big dilemma” for such movements, says Halikiopoulou, is “how to retain legitimacy, to claim that their hands are still clean, that they have never been part of the mainstream”. Such movements, says Feldman, may “lose some of their populist appeal as a tradeoff for political influence” as they aim to appeal to a broader base. Their leaders tend to be “good at leading a movement, less good at securing political change”. Even so, mainstream politicians looking nervously over their shoulders in many countries now seem less and less assured that history is on their side.
Chris Bowlby is a BBC journalist specialising in history DISCOVER MORE See BBC coverage of the US election online at bbc.co.uk/news/election/us2016 (UK only)
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THE BRIEFING History Headlines
FES MOROCCO A new look at the books 1
History Headlines SEP 2016 NOV 2016
The world’s oldest library, the al-Qarawiyyin in Morocco, is set to reopen to the public following extensive renovations. The complex, which first opened in AD 859, houses 4,000 rare books and manuscripts, and now features innovations including a canal system to remove moisture. The reopening is viewed as particularly important in a time of instability in the Arab world during which libraries and ancient sites in the region have been damaged.
2 SKAFTÁRHREPPUR ICELAND The sharp end of archaeology
Hunters stalking geese in southern Iceland failed to catch any fowl – but instead bagged a rather more valuable haul: a Viking sword believed to be more than 1,000 years old. “It was obvious and just lying there on the ground,” one of the group, Runar Stanley Sighvatsson, told local media. The relic, which is thought to have been exposed from its resting place by local flooding, is extremely rare: only 20 swords of a similar age have been discovered in the country to date. It is now being stored by Iceland’s Cultural Heritage Agency, which is investigating the surrounding area in the hope of locating further treasures.
ASTANA KAZAKHSTAN Putin’s movie myth 3
4 LEGON GHANA Challenging Gandhi’s legacy
Professors at the University of Ghana have launched a petition to remove a statue of Mahatma Gandhi from campus in protest against his “racist identity”. They point to writings in which the Indian independence leader described Africans as “savages”, labelling them with the offensive term ‘kaffirs’. Yet his grandson and biographer Rajmohan Gandhi, while accepting that his grandfather was “at times ignorant”, argued that he was “more radical and progressive” than many contemporaries.
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5 CHICAMA VALLEY PERU Original jean genius?
Experts in Peru have discovered scraps of indigo-dyed fabric at the Huaca Prieta site in Chicama Valley in the north of the country. They are almost 2,000 years older than dyed cloth found in Egypt that till now had been the earliest-known use of the pigment. And time has taken its toll on the colour: “You know how your blue jeans fade over time? Well, these were like 6,000-yearold blue jeans,” anthropologist Jeffrey Splitstoser told National Geographic.
KAREEM SHAHEEN/LYBIAN PALETTE STUDIOS/ LAUREN BADAMS
We all love a good film. And if a recent report on Russian state TV is accurate, the movie of choice at a recent screening held in Kazakhstan for Russian and Kazakh presidents Vladimir Putin and Nursultan Nazarbayev is new Second World War military epic Panfilov’s 28 Men. There’s just one problem: the movie is based on a myth. It recounts A scene from a 1941 episode in which soldiers of Panfilov’s 28 Men, the Red Army’s 316th Rifle Division, recently screened led by Ivan Panfilov, reportedly for Vladimir Putin sacrificed their lives defending Moscow against Nazi forces, destroying 18 German tanks in the process. Yet recently declassified papers confirm that the incident was vastly exaggerated or even invented entirely for propaganda purposes.
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NARA JAPAN When east met Middle East A wooden sign bearing a teacher’s name may not seem remarkable – yet experts think it indicates that Japan was already a cosmopolitan nation 1,000 years ago. Recent analysis of the wood revealed the name of a Persian lecturer who worked in the former Japanese capital, Nara – the first evidence of an official from the Middle East living in the country at that time. It suggests that, in at least some parts of ancient Japanese society, foreigners were afforded equal respect.
Infrared analysis of carvings on this wood revealed the name of a Persian working at a Japanese academy in Nara before AD 1,000
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TURPAN CHINA Historic hemp
GETTY IMAGES/ NARA/ DREAMSTIME
Aboriginal artwork, such as this example from the Kimberley region, is being charted in a major new project
A body wrapped in a cannabis-plant ’shroud’ found in north-west China may indicate that the plant had ritualistic importance for the people of prehistoric Eurasia. The remains of the man, thought to have been about 35 years old when he died, were wrapped in 13 cannabis plants and placed in a tomb in the Jiayi cemetery in Turpan. Radiocarbon dating suggests that the grave was dug between 2,400 and 2,800 years ago.
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8 KIMBERLEY AUSTRALIA Mapping Australia’s earliest art
A pioneering survey of rock art in Western Australia is documenting thousands of images created by Aboriginal peoples over many millennia. The project aims to create a record of art found at more than 250 sites in the Kimberley region, some of which has never been comprehensively chronicled before. It’s hoped that the survey will help map the spread of human settlement across Australia.
WORDS MATT ELTON
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THE BRIEFING Inside Story
Inside Story
Each issue our expert correspondents provide historic insights into global issues. Reporting from the high-tech boomtown of Shenzhen, Gordon Corera explores how historical fears of intellectual property theft continue to shape modern international relations
Gordon Corera is the BBC’s security correspondent and author of Intercept: The Secret History of Computers and Spiess (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2015) DISCOVER MORE From Our Own Correspondent is broadcast every Saturday at 11.30am on BBC Radio 4
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High-tech tension in China Shenzhen is a city that has come from nowhere to be everywhere. Just a few decades ago it was merely a fishing village; today it is a city of 10 million, a high-tech hub whose products are part of everyday life around the globe. Its designation as a ‘Special Economic Zone’ and its position abutting Hong Kong have led to spectacular growth: sleek skyscrapers and huge tower blocks are everywhere. Its bustling streets have the feel of a boomtown – a place people come because there is money to be made. The city is emblematic of China’s push for growth and modernisation. Companies that were start-ups a decade or two ago now export their technology to the west. That has led to suspicion in some quarters. Where has that new technology come from, and can it be trusted? Investment in Chinese high-tech in the west has proved controversial. The US and Australia have excluded Chinese telecoms from their infrastructure, and the UK government seemed to blow hot and cold over Chinese involvement in building new nuclear reactors. One of the reasons for the caution is the fear that Chinese technology uses intellectual property stolen from the west. The US in particular has been vocal about alleged commercial espionage. “For too long, the Chinese government has blatantly sought to use cyberespionage to obtain economic advantage for its state-owned industries,” FBI director James B Comey said in 2014 when launching an indictment
against a number of Chinese military hackers alleged to have stolen research from American companies. Designs in high-tech fields ranging from telecoms to clean energy are said to have been stolen and passed on to Chinese companies. A bit of historical perspective on intellectual property theft is, though, revealing. In 1789, an ambitious textile worker called Samuel Slater left England for a new life in the US. He had been a superintendent at a mill at which British inventor Richard Arkwright was developing water-power technology for driving machines. Slater memorised Arkwright’s latest design and helped set up the first American water-powered cotton mill. In the US he became known as the ‘father of the American industrial revolution’, whereas in Britain he was known as ‘Slater the Traitor’, especially among workers squeezed by new competition from a rising power. Britain, too, does not have a spotless record in respecting intellectual property. In the 19th century Robert Fortune trekked deep into China. He was a botanist and gardener – but also an industrial spy, on a mission to steal China’s most valuable property: its tea. Employed by the British East India Company, he smuggled out to Darjeeling thousands of tea plants and seeds, as well as details of how to grow them. Such events may seem like ancient history in the west but remain fresh in Chinese memories. Officials deny any role in intellectual property theft – but off the record some will suggest that,
GETTY IMAGES
The glittering new headquarters of Chinese internet giant Tencent loom above Shenzhen, where much of the technology used in international communications infrastructure is produced
after centuries of exploitation by the west, some ‘rebalancing’ is merited. British and American hawks also fear that China could use the presence of its firms in national infrastructure for espionage, or even – if relations deteriorate – sabotage. In Britain some of those concerns have focused on the telecoms giant Huawei which, from its vast campus headquarters in Shenzhen, has grown to be perhaps the world’s largest telecoms firm, playing a key role in Britain’s infrastructure (though no evidence has been found to support fears of espionage). Some feared that it could be used to intercept communications – as Britain historically did in China. A century ago, British telegraph firms had a grip on global communications infrastructure. And when the First World War started, they made the most of it. In August 1914 a Chinese-speaking British censor and his team were working in a Hong Kong building through which passed the telegraph line handling Chinese government traffic. The wires of local Chinese telegraph companies in other cities were cut, to force traffic through partners with relationships with Britain. A staff of 27 in Hong Kong then processed 33,000 intercepted messages every week. Today, supply chains are globalised: technology for American companies such as Apple and telecoms supplier Cisco is assembled in Shenzhen. Being able to close off one country from another country’s equipment is almost impossible and would be very costly.
Chinese officials deny any role in intellectual property theft – but some suggest that, after centuries of exploitation by the west, some ‘rebalancing’ is merited
Such globalisation poses risks for rising and established powers alike. When Edward Snowden revealed the US government’s secret demands that tech companies provide access to private communications, those companies attempted to distance themselves from such demands (leading to a row between Apple and the FBI when the latter demanded the unlocking of iPhones). Though these companies are rooted in the US, their customers are now worldwide. Being seen doing your government’s bidding can be bad for business. The same would be true of Chinese firms if they were caught out. Shenzhen’s future as a global hub depends on maintaining international trust in its products. History shows that the rise of a power causes tensions. The question is whether the realities of globalisation will quell those tensions or make them more acute. To find out, keep an eye on Shenzhen.
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THE BRIEFING Milestones
Milestones
Nigel Jones highlights the births, deaths, inventions, battles and political turning points that made world history
125 YEARS 15 December 1891 AGO
Basketball is invented
Tasked with keeping his athletes fit during the cold winter months, James Naismith (right), a Canadian-born sports coach, devised an energetic new indoor game he called ‘basketball’. He nailed baskets (originally used for storing peaches) to the walls of his gym in Springfield, Massachusetts, divided his 18 students into two teams of nine, and drew up 13 basic rules. Naismith’s new game became an integral part of American culture and, in 1936, an Olympic medal event.
26 December 1991
The Soviet Union is dissolved socialist dream ended on Boxing Day 1991 when the world’s first communist state, the mighty Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR), was officially dissolved by its last leader, Mikhail Gorbachev. The end of the Soviet system had been foreshadowed over the previous decade in questions about the most hated symbol of a world divided between western capitalism and Soviet communism – the Berlin Wall. In June 1982 US president Ronald Reagan had questioned why the wall still existed, and five years later had called on the Soviet Union’s ‘liberal’ leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, to “tear down this wall”. The series of summits that followed paved the way for the dismantling of the increasingly ossified Eastern Bloc, and in 1990 the wall fell. One by one, the eastern European communist governments crumbled as their populations realised that Gorbachev would not follow the example of his iron-fisted predecessors and send in tanks to crush anti-Communist uprisings. By 1991, after a series of ‘velvet revolutions’, only the Soviet Union was left. In August 1991 a group of hardliners in the ruling Soviet Politburo took advantage of Gorbachev’s absence (he was on holiday in the Crimea) to mount a coup. However, the takeover attempt was foiled – not by Gorbachev but by the popular politician Boris Yeltsin, who climbed on a tank in Moscow to denounce the insurrection. During 1991 most republics of the USSR declared independence. On Christmas Day, Gorbachev resigned, declared the office of president of the Soviet Union extinct, and handed over power to Yeltsin. On the next day the Cold War, and 70 years of communist rule, was finally – and largely peacefully – over.
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Boris Yeltsin (left) calls for resistance to communist hardliners during a speech made atop a tank in Moscow on 19 August 1991. Just over four months later the Soviet Union had been dissolved and Yeltsin was president of Russia
Reagan called on the ‘liberal’ Soviet leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, to “tear down this wall”
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90 17 January 1927
YEARS AGO
Eartha Kitt was an ardent social activist as well as a successful singer and actor
Eartha Kit is born
Born on a cotton plantation in South Carolina to an unknown white father and a mixed-race black and Cherokee mother, Kitt overcame her difficult childhood to become an international star of stage and screen – a renowned singer, actor and social activist. Mentored by Orson Welles, she sang on Broadway and triumphed in Hollywood, using her fame to promote various social causes.
60 10 January 1957
YEARS AGO
Poet Gabriela Mistral dies
Chilean poet and diplomat Lucila Godoy y Alcayaga (below), who used the pen name Gabriela Mistral, was born into poverty and deserted by her father at a young age. She explored her harsh early experiences in lyrical verse, and in 1945 was the first Latin-American writer to be awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. Mistral was Chilean consul in various European cities, and died in New York.
7 December 1941
The Japanese navy atacks Pearl Harbor
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hey came screaming out of the sky in two successive waves: 353 carrier-based fighter and dive-bomber aircraft of the Japanese Imperial Navy. Their target was Pearl Harbor in Hawaii, the main Pacific base of the US navy. This pre-emptive strike, made without a formal declaration of war, was devastating. Five American battleships lay at the bottom of the shallow harbour; three more were seriously damaged and 11 other warships, including cruisers and destroyers, were sunk or wrecked. Some 283 US aircraft, still on the ground at the time of the attack, were destroyed or crippled – and all for the loss of just 29 Japanese planes. In all, 2,403 Americans were killed. The Japanese government – sticklers for protocol – had broken off diplomatic relations with Washington earlier that day, but the vital message had been delayed, enabling US president Franklin D Roosevelt to denounce the raid as “a day which will live in infamy” as he asked a previously reluctant but now enraged Congress to declare war on Japan. The attack on Pearl Harbor was the brainchild of Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto, commander of Japan’s navy, who had ploughed resources into the long-range aircraft that had carried out the raid. Despite this, Yamamoto was reluctant to stir what he called “the sleeping giant” of American military power, and had warned Tokyo’s militarist rulers that they were unlikely to win a prolonged war. The consequences of the attack were profound, turning what had been a
predominantly European conflict into a global war. Adolf Hitler, supporting his Axis ally Japan, unwisely declared war on the US. America’s vast human and industrial resources were now brought to bear on Nazi Germany, turning the tide of the war. Though Japan initially swept across the Pacific and the Asian mainland, American superiority in manpower and materiel eventually told. US naval victories at Midway and the Coral Sea brought a bloody reckoning for Pearl Harbor, and the raid was avenged in 1943 when Yamamoto, his flight plans hacked by US codebreakers, was shot down and killed over New Guinea.
President Franklin D Roosevelt denounced “a day which will live in infamy” The wreck of a B-17D Flying Fortress bomber sits on the tarmac at Pearl Harbor after the Japanese raid – one of 283 US aircraft destroyed or crippled
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THE BRIEFING Milestones
60 2 December 1956
YEARS AGO
Fidel Castro and Che Guevara land on Cuba After a stormy voyage from Mexico, a leaking and overloaded old tub called Granma deposited 82 exhausted and seasick revolutionaries, led by brothers Fidel and Raúl Castro and Che Guevara, at Playa las Colorados in south Cuba. Their mission was the overthrow of Cuba’s US-backed A composite picture, featuring Fidel dictator, Fulgencio Batista, Castro and activist Camilo Cienfuegos, achieved in January 1959 after three years of guerrilla war. commemorates the 1956 landing
20 10 December 1996
YEARS AGO
Nelson Mandela signs the new South African constitution When President Nelson Mandela, who had been imprisoned for decades under apartheid, signed his country’s new constitution into law, both date and place were significant. The document, replacing the discarded apartheid constitution, was signed on World Human Rights Day in Sharpeville – the town where, in 1960, scores of demonstrators had been shot by police.
19 January 1817
Argentina’s liberator sets out across the Andes to Chile
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hough often at odds today, in the early 19th century Argentina and Chile – the two southern Latin American states divided by the long mountain chain of the Andes – united to throw off the shackles of Spanish colonial domination. General José de San Martín was born around 1778 in the United Provinces of the Río de la Plata – the region that later became Argentina. Having fought for Spain in the Peninsular War against Napoleon, in 1812 he returned to his homeland to lead its struggle for independence from the remote rule of Spain’s Bourbon monarchs. Thanks in no small part to San Martín’s efforts, Argentina was freed from Madrid’s grip and declared independence in 1816. San Martín then led a combined army of Argentine auxiliaries and Chilean exiles across the
high wall of the Andes to continue his revolutionary programme. They marched from their base camp at El Plumerillo near Mendoza on 19 January 1817, sustained by a diet of maize cakes, meat, garlic, onion and cheese, with rum and brandy to ward off the night-time cold. One-third of the 4,000-strong army was lost to exposure, starvation and accidents on the gruelling 500km trek. To confuse and evade the Spanish, San Martín split his force into separate columns, leading one himself and assigning another to his Chilean counterpart, General Bernardo O’Higgins. The Spanish scattered in disarray and, a month after setting out, San Martín stormed the Chilean capital, Santiago, going on to defeat the surviving Spanish army at the battle of Chacabuco, effectively ending Spain’s long hegemony over the continent.
Nigel Jones is a historian and writer, author of Peace and War: Britain in 1914 4 (Head of Zeus, 2014)
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Frans van Riel’s 1910 artwork of General San Martín’s Andes crossing evokes the harsh conditions faced by his troops en route to liberating Chile from Spain
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THE BRIEFING Viewpoint
Viewpoint Peter Frankopan
“It is time to discard boundaries, time to embrace continuities and connections. It is time for a revolution” earning should be about broadening the mind. Its or about Christianity that do not mention Asia, where it caught purpose, after all, is to expand horizons, to chalhold more quickly and strongly than in the Mediterranean. lenge assumptions and to encourage new ideas to The insistence that what matters is what happened in our blossom. In practice, we divide the world into own backyard, rather than elsewhere on the globe, is hopelessly apparently standalone subjects: mathematics; science (physics, misconceived. Exchanges of goods, ideas, faith and disease are chemistry and biology); languages; literature; philosophy; and intensely interesting and rewarding to study – partly because of course history. From kindergarten to school, from underthe interactions between Europe, Asia and Africa, and with the graduate studies to libraries or high street bookshops, divisions Americas and Oceania, are intensive and date back millennia. are created and perpetuated that are entirely artificial. Continents, regions and peoples were not sealed off from each We compartmentalise because we believe that boundaries other but closely linked. It is just that we have chosen to cut are useful and, by natural extension, that it is better to specialise these links off because it has suited us to do so. than to generalise. Moving a subject forward is done by drilling The third shortcoming of traditional approaches to history is ever deeper into more and more obtuse topics, by gnawing at the that the split with other disciplines has become ever wider. Hisedges and pushing at the fringes. That is what scholarship looks, tory iss science, languages and literature, and philosophy. There sounds and feels like. Standing back to look at the big picture are no gaps other than those we choose to create ourselves. makes people deeply uncomfortable, because it involves doing Understanding the past requires us to use all the skills we can. something different. The time has come to reconsider how we look at the past as a Historians in particular are familiar with this pattern of whole, and to think again about what tools we use to do so. It is narrowing. We focus on shorter and shorter periods and look at time for a revolution. It is time to discard boundaries and to tighter and tighter topics. Dissertations are written about a parembrace continuities and connections. It is time to be brave and ticular tank battle during the Second World War, or about a to leave the comfort of the subjects that we know and love from cluster of documents exchanged by monks in central school and to think about the world more broadly. France in the 11th century. When I give talks about my own work, I often ask Traditional approaches to history have done three the audience if they can name a single Chinese things poorly, in each case because of the erection of emperor, or a current Russian pop singer, or a great boundaries that are as unhelpful and unnecessary as Persian artist. More than 99 times out of 100, they they are intellectually vacuous. First is the division of cannot. That suggests a dangerous imbalance in the the past into periods. Headings such as ‘the Middle way we understand the world around us because it Ages’ or even ‘the 20th century’ suggest patterns and shows that our eyes, ears and minds are closed. homogeneity that at best are misleading and at worse I therefore welcome this new magazine wholedid not exist at all. The word ‘medieval’ has no resoheartedly. There is no better time to be pulling down nance whatsoever anywhere beyond Europe – and Peter Frankopan the barriers of chronology, geography and methodeven there, the term is highly problematic. Time is senior research ology. As a Chinese ruler put it more than 2,300 does not divide neatly into blocks. There was fellow at Worcester years ago, “a talent for following the ways of yesterno world of ‘classical antiquity’ nor an ‘age of the College, Oxford. day is not sufficient to improve the world of today”. His latest book is crusades’, despite what we might like to believe. The world is changing; understanding how and why Second is the division of the past into regions. the acclaimed is the greatest challenge for those who believe that Even now books are written about the history of The Silk Roads knowing about the past is the key to making sense Europe which do not mention the Byzantine empire, (Bloomsbury, 2015) of the present.
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ILLUSTRATION BY ANNA WRAY
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Millions of Indian soldiers served during the Second World War, with almost 90,000 losing their lives. Yet as Yasmin Khan explains, the huge efforts of Indians toiling on the home front, and the extreme hardships they suffered, had an even more empire-shaking impact 22
ALAMY
Famine and freedom: how war ignited India
New possibilities Young women work in a busy textile mill in Bombay (now Mumbai) in 1943. The war created opportunities as well as challenges for industrialists and women in Indian cities
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India in the Second World War
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t the outbreak of the Second World War in 1939, the Indian army numbered around 200,000 soldiers. By the end of the war in 1945, that figure had soared to 2.5 million. During the conflict, Indian troops fought at major battles across various theatres, from Monte Cassino in Italy to Kohima in north-eastern India. They served in the deserts of north and east Africa, and around the Mediterranean in Greece and Italy, rolling into Rome as it was recaptured from the Germans. They were the backbone of Allied forces in the grisly battles for Burma. Indians were evacuated at Dunkirk, and Indian fighter pilots in the RAF flew deadly sorties during the Battle of Britain. We know more about these soldiers than ever before. Some 86,000 of them died, while others were captured and held as prisoners of war; many experienced brutal treatment in the Pacific. Some 30 Indian soldiers were awarded Victoria Crosses for valour during the Second World War. There is hardly a Commonwealth War Memorial that doesn’t include at least a few south Asian names; rather than headstones marked with crosses, memorials mark the sites of ghats (cremation pyres) for Hindus or Sikhs, while the graves of Muslim soldiers face towards Mecca. South Asian casualties (including men from regions now in India, Pakistan, Nepal, Sri Lanka and Bangladesh) from both world wars are commemorated in 50 countries. Enlisting was voluntary – the Indian army was not raised by conscription – but for many men, joining the forces was a longstanding traditional family occupation. For others, the chance to earn regular meals and a decent salary was too good to refuse. But what about south Asians at home – how did ordinary people experience the war on India’s ‘home front’? This part of India’s war story is strangely obscure, yet the global war that wrenched apart societies across the world was a powerful force shaping India’s development during the 1940s. Epicentre of conflict
In February 1942, George Orwell wrote: “With the Japanese army in the Indian Ocean and the German armies in the Middle East, India becomes the centre of the war.” India was the pivot of the British empire, and in 1942 the Japanese seized the entire flank of the empire east of India. This was a decisive moment: Britain’s jewel in the crown had to be held at almost any price. In fact, mainland India was never occupied by the Japanese (though the Andaman and Nicobar Islands in the Bay of Bengal were captured), but from that point the war reverberated through villages and towns across the subcontinent. The war also set the stage for the traumatic division of the country – the partition of 1947. As the historian Srinath Raghavan put it, millions of Indians were “pulled into the vortex” of the Second World War. India experienced its own total war.
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MILLIONS OF INDIANS WERE “PULLED INTO THE VORTEX” OF THE SECOND WORLD WAR – INDIA EXPERIENCED ITS OWN TOTAL WAR
In India, the tremors of war were felt first in the towns and cities. Pre-partition India, a patchwork society of regional provinces and princely states, had a population of approximately 350 million. It stretched across desert, forest and mega-cities; then, as now, it was a deeply divided society with great extremes of rich and poor, of caste and class inequalities. The majority of people lived on the margins. At the outbreak of the war, there was a sense that the depression years had ended in India. Cities such as Bombay (today called Mumbai) and Calcutta (Kolkata) boomed. Industrialists, spying the chance to get rich quick, scrambled to produce the vast quantities of supplies required by armies overseas: 7 million garments and 3 million pairs of boots rolled out of Indian factories each month. Jobs were plentiful and wages increased. Within three years, India would be producing as much for war supply as Australia, New Zealand and South Africa combined. Factories and small workshops sprang up everywhere. Barracks, airbases and installations spread across the land. The expansion of military forces in India – where troops from Britain, America, Africa and the Dominions were stationed – led to demand for land, new roads and the expansion of ports, and property was extensively requisitioned. “Bengal is as flat as a billiard table and, given the requirements of the air force, it is a simple matter to construct hard earth runways to meet the present emergency,” wrote the governor of that province. Indeed, at least 215 new airfields were constructed in India during the 1940s. Whole paddy fields and villages were cleared overnight. This war effort, then, created a vast, invisible army of military and contracted workers: labourers and tea-plantation workers who hacked out roads in the north-east to advance the recapture of Burma; dock workers who sweated it out in ports along the coast. Thousands of cooks, washermen and other
Flyboys of the eastern world
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The first group of Indian pilots arrives in London in 1940 to join the British RAF. Indian soldiers and airmen fought in major clashes across Europe, Asia and north Africa
Dig for victory Indian workers on a road at a US airbase at Dinjan in Assam, north-east India, in 1943. Civilian workers had a huge impact on the war effort
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Changing roles Women work as stretcher bearers during an ARP (Air Raid Precaution) training session in Bombay (Mumbai) in 1942. Many Indian women experienced new freedoms and liberties during the war
People scan notices at the Amritsar Refugee Centre in August 1947, hoping to find news of lost relatives. In the run up to and after partition, many millions of Sikhs, Hindus and Muslims crossed the Punjab in a mass migration marked by violence
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Hunting for hope
servants – not to mention prostitutes – serviced the needs of the armies. This supply line stretched right into the Indian hinterland. In contrast to comic depictions of Indian workers such as the punkah-wallah (fan-puller) in the British TV sitcom It Ain’t Half Hot Mum, the reality was more gruelling. Hundreds of anonymous road-builders died from diseases including malaria in the swampy jungles of the north-east. War graves also commemorate bootmakers, water-carriers and water-bearers.
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Women at war
WITH SO MANY MEN AWAY FROM HOME, IT WAS THE WOMEN WHO PICKED UP THE PIECES, WORKING LONGER IN THE FIELDS AND RUNNING HOUSEHOLDS
These changes affected women just as much as men. In India, as elsewhere, the war created opportunities for women. Many experienced new freedoms and liberties, especially middle-class women living in cities. In Delhi, Bombay and Calcutta, increasing numbers of women wore trousers, haircuts became shorter and the divorce rate rose. The Women’s Auxiliary Corps (India), a force of 11,500 women, recruited without attention to race; white, Anglo-Indian, Anglo-Burmese and Indian women served alongside each other. They worked in anti-aircraft direction-finding and plotting, in parachute inspection and packing, was inflation. Prices soared – sometimes trebling in a couple of as cipher clerks and operators, and in more traditional roles such years – putting many ordinary household essentials out of the as catering. reach of agriculturalists. Most people purchased only a small Some Indian women lived exceptional lives because of the number of goods for their daily needs – matches, kerosene, cloth. war. Noor Inayat Khan is a well-known example: born to an But as the war continued the costs of these things spiralled along Indian father and American mother, she was recruited as a Spewith the price of food, while wages did not rise at the same rate. cial Operations Executive agent and worked as a wireless operator City-dwellers, dependent on buying food from markets or shops, with the French resistance in 1943 before being captured by the could not predict how far their salary would stretch each month. Nazis and executed at Dachau concentration camp. As the hospiFor people already living on the margins, the situation became tals swelled with the bloody traumas of the Burma front, racial perilous. So many complained about the cost of matches to civil distinctions started to fall away. Nurses of many different nationservant Malcolm Darling as he toured the north-western provalities treated the wounded and sick from Burma. ince of Punjab at the end of the war that he described it as almost Wives and mothers waited for news of loved ones serving a battle cry between the competing political parties. In their letabroad. Postal services were unreliable, with letters difficult to ters from home to soldiers serving away, many families comwrite and expensive to send, especially for the illiterate and very plained about the rising cost of living. Hunger and food deprivapoor. “The postman’s statement that I am dead is baseless,” wrote tion were widespread, and reached critical levels in Bengal. an infantryman in the Middle East to his family in the northern industrial city of Kanpur. “I am quite well here by the grace of Famine in Bengal God.” Mothers, torn between the appeal of a reliable In 1943, the terrible spectre of famine descended soldier’s wage and the risk of losing a son, often on Bengal. Some 3 million Bengalis died of starresisted the enticements of recruiters or pleaded vation and famine-related diseases. Historians with their sons not to join the army. With so have emphasised different factors as the major many men away from home, in peasant sociecauses of the famine: loss of rice stocks from ties it was the women who picked up the pieces, Burma, administrative and political failure working longer hours in the fields and running and callousness, a cyclone and flooding that households. Remittances sent home from destroyed vital crops. But the war effort and the troops were the norm everywhere in Asia, and famine were definitely closely connected. an Indian soldier might routinely send home Bengal was the province most directly affected 15 rupees of his 18-rupee monthly wage. Women on a daily basis by the war, because of its proximiworried that the remittance would stop, or that it Noor Inayat Khan, a British ty to Burma and because Bengal’s major city, still didn’t stretch far enough to feed the family. Special Operations Calcutta, was the centre of military operations in By far the greatest impact of the war, and the one Executive agent who was executed by the Nazis India. It is no coincidence that the terrible famine that affected the most lives across the subcontinent,
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India in the Second World War
happened here. In his 2015 book Hungry Bengal, l Janam Mukherjee contends that the famine was a product of the wartime state in which defeating the Japanese was the most important objective and feeding civilians remained a low priority. And in Churchill’s Secret War, r published in 2010, Madhusree Mukerjee provides evidence suggesting that the British leader and the War Office repeatedly ignored news of the famine and blocked the viceroy’s urgent pleas for grain imports that could have prevented more deaths. Photographers, crusading journalists and activists strove to bring the terrible famine to the world’s attention, and their images of dying men, women and children remain chilling to this day. The famine was a powerful spur for decolonisation, and marked a turning point for the Raj – the end of the prestige of the British empire in India. As Viceroy Archibald Wavell wrote to Churchill, the famine was “one of the greatest disasters that has befallen any people under British rule and damage to our reputation both among Indians and foreigners in India is incalculable”. Though Wavell personally worked hard to bring relief to the region, when relief came it was too little, too late. The shame of the famine coloured Indian attitudes towards the war and hardened Gandhi’s resolve to win independence for India. Fuelling nationalism
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Victims of starvation Hindus cremate their dead at Calcutta’s Myrone Memorial during the Bengal famine of 1943. At the peak of the deprivation perhaps 1,000 people died each week in Calcutta, and around 3 million perished across Bengal during the famine, victims of starvation, disease and malnutrition
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Loyalties wavered throughout the war, and south Asians certainly felt no simple, straightforward desire to defeat fascists or help the British state. Many of those who served in the army were motivated by bread-and-butter politics rather than by ideology. But this was a deeply complex matter, shaped by social and economic traumas caused by both imperial rule and wartime. Minds became confused: which side to back? Jawaharlal Nehru, who would later become the first prime minister of independent India – and anti-fascist to his marrow – was torn about whether nationalist protests should continue in wartime. Indians often felt exploited and exposed by imperial rule, and looked for alternative answers about how to achieve freedom; many were, understandably, distrustful of Churchill’s intentions towards Gandhi. After the launch of the Quit India movement in 1942, when nationalists tried to sabotage the war effort by targeting imperial installations and railway lines, the stability of northern India was in the balance. Churchill admitted that 500 protesters had been killed, though official British statistics recorded 1,060 deaths and nationalists pegged the figure much higher. During the autumn and winter of 1942 there were between 60,000 and 100,000 detentions of Indian nationalists. Japanese, nationalist and British propaganda flooded the radio airwaves. Subhas Chandra Bose, leader of the pro-Japanese Indian National Army, looked superficially like an alternative hero; however, when Indians did encounter the Japanese – as in the Andamans – there was no panAsian solidarity, and even nationalists were treated pitilessly. The political repercussions of these wartime experiences were staggering. Without the war, I would argue, independence could
THE FAMINE WAS “ONE OF THE GREATEST DISASTERS THAT HAS BEFALLEN ANY PEOPLE UNDER BRITISH RULE” Æ 29
India in the Second World War
INDIA IN 1945 AND 2016
The changing face of India
THE WAR DELIVERED INDEPENDENCE TO INDIA, BUT IT ALSO INCREASED DEEPROOTED DIVISION 30
At the outbreak of the Second World War, the British Raj administered a patchwork of regional provinces and princely states with their own internal governments. The hardships endured during the war increased support for home rule and, among many Muslims, calls for partition into separate states – both of which were enacted on 14-15 August 1947, when the sovereign states of India and Pakistan (later to split, creating Bangladesh) were established. On our map, the British India of 1945 is superimposed on modern international borders.
MAP BY BATTLEFIELD DESIGN
have been held at bay until the 1950s or even later, but it might also have been less bloody when it finally arrived. The war delivered independence, but it also increased deep-rooted division. The British, rightly determined to win the war and to defend India against the fascist threat, lost control of the political game that they had been playing with Gandhi and the Congress party since the 1920s. Serious anti-British protests could not, Churchill argued, be countenanced in wartime. During the war, the British imprisoned Gandhi for long periods and locked up the leading lights of Congress for years, during which time the All-India Muslim League (which campaigned for the creation of a separate Muslim state, Pakistan) increased in strength and stature. Britain prioritised whatever was necessary to win the war – at the cost of famine, scorched-earth policies and social division. Its worst fear was that the Indian army would not hold, though in the event the majority of the army stayed loyal to the anti-fascist cause. Aftermath of the war
Agitating for independence Flag-carrying demonstrators march through the streets of Madras (now called Chennai) in 1945, campaigning for home rule for India
Pandit’s plans
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‘Pandit’ Jawaharlal Nehru – later India’s first prime minister – and Mahatma Gandhi in discussion during the All-India Conference of 1942, when the Quit India movement was launched
Wartime events in India left deep and bitter legacies. In 1945, prison doors were flung open and Congress leaders who had been behind bars since 1942, including Jawaharlal Nehru, were released. More than a million men had to be demobilised, and it had become clear that a new constitutional settlement had to be agreed. India had been shaken to its core. Young men and women were stirred up with nationalist and anti-British passion, publicly shouting support for the Indian National Army. Strikes and protests broke out everywhere, including in the army and navy. Demobilised soldiers – often still with their weapons and uniforms – returned to Punjab determined to defend their homesteads against any threat. Differences between Hindus, Muslims and Sikhs had become wildly inflamed. In the face of food and cloth shortages, supplies often became channelled along religious lines as local committees started to favour their own ethnic groups. The partition of 1947 was a postscript of the empire’s total war. British soldiers waited to be shipped home and imperial administrators felt weary and frustrated after long years without leave. British coffers stood empty and the Indian empire was now a drag on resources. The final severance between Britain and its Indian empire came in the shape of new viceroy Louis Mountbatten’s quick and decisive plan, agreed in June 1947, to settle the constitutional dispute by partitioning the country into Yasmin Khan is associate India and Pakistan. The plan professor in British history was carried out in just six fren- at Kellogg College, University zied weeks, and in August both of Oxford, specialising in the independence and partition ar- history of the British in India rived. The result: millions of displaced refugees and up to a mil- DISCOVER MORE Raj at War: A People’s lion more dead – a high cost, The History of India’s Second even by the terrible standards of World War by Yasmin Khan (Bodley Head, 2015) the Second World War.
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Post-independence India
10 turning points for modern India Yasmin Khan explores the milestones that defined the post-independence state
1947 India is p partitioned to create Pakistan
1948 Gandhi is assassinated Less than six months after India achieved independence, Gandhi was shot dead while en route to a prayer meeting in Delhi on 30 January 1948. The killing of the Mahatma (‘Great Soul’) stunned the nation. The assassin was linked to an extremist Hindu group angry at Gandhi’s conciliatory approach to Pakistan and Indian Muslims in the aftermath of partition. Jawaharlal Nehru, the first prime minister of India, was to become even more determined to make India a secular state.
1950 India adopts p its first constitution
A Sikh man carries his wife during the arduous and risky migration from west Punjab to the new state of India around the time of Partition in 1947
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The written constitution, agreed by leading politicians in a constituent assembly in the years following independence, was adopted on 26 January 1950, when India was declared a sovereign democratic republic. The day remains a public holiday, marked with military parades in New Delhi. It is the longest national constitution in the world, amended many times over the years and subject to countless debates over its meanings. The constitution remains a blueprint for upholding India’s secular and democratic basis.
Refugees in India’s far north-east flee the border war with China in 1962
1962 India and China clash at the borders A dangerous high-altitude border war between India and China was fought in the mountains that formed the border between the countries. The clash was partly a legacy of historic territorial disputes but also stemmed from other tensions including India’s role in sheltering Tibetans exiled after the Tibetan uprising against Chinese occupation in 1959. India was rapidly defeated as Chinese troops entered Indian territory, though a ceasefire was agreed after a month and the Chinese withdrew (albeit retaining more territory than before the war). India’s defeat was a blow to those seeking regional co-operation, and encouraged more military spending and realpolitik in foreign policy.
1975 Sholay redefines Bollywood cinema The best Bollywood film of all time – or so many would argue – Sholayy is a classic story of two angry young men who struggle against a corrupt state. It stars Amitabh Bachhan, India’s greatest leading man, who has dominated Bollywood for over four decades, appearing in more than 185 films. Sholay mixes themes from cowboy westerns, catchy tunes and witty Hindi-dialogue into a definitive ‘masala’ mix.
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As the day ended on 14 August 1947, the new states of India and Pakistan achieved freedom from British rule. Yet this was also one of the darkest moments in the subcontinent’s history. Partition drove at least 12 million refugees – Muslims, Sikhs, Hindus – across the new boundaries of divided Punjab. The exact numbers of men, women and children who were killed in violent massacres is not known, but certainly hundreds of thousands died.
Maruti 800 hatchback cars are inspected in a factory lot – the first mass-market vehicles in India, launched in 1983
1991 India’s economy opens up 1983 Maruti launches mass-market cars Since independence, India’s car industry had been dominated by the stately but expensive Hindustan Ambassador, based on the Morris Oxford. But in 1983 Maruti, a subsidiary of the Japanese company Suzuki, began producing the Maruti 800 hatchback – India’s first mass-market car. Over the following decade, India welcomed a million new Maruti cars and vans – smaller, cheaper and more modern than ever before. Now, many middle-class people could afford a car for work, travel and leisure.
GETTY IMAGES/RAGHU RAI–MAGNUM PHOTOS
A poster displays the faces of the missing in the days after the gas leak that engulfed Bhopal in December 1984, killing and disabling thousands
1984 Toxic gas engulfs the city of Bhopal During the night of 2/3 December 1984, toxic gases leaked from a pesticide factory in Bhopal, Madhya Pradesh – the worst industrial accident in history. More than 2,000 people were killed immediately, mainly in the surrounding shanty towns. Many thousands more died or were affected by illness and disablement over the following years. Though the majority owner of the factory, the American company Union Carbide, made a compensation payment in 1989, activists continue to campaign for adequate compensation and for Union Carbide’s owners to take responsibility.
1984 Indira Gandhi is shot by her guards Prime Minister Indira Gandhi was shot dead by two of her own bodyguards on 31 October 1984 – just one of several tragic deaths in the NehruGandhi family. The assassination was linked to Indira Gandhi’s attempts to quell Sikh separatism in Punjab, a situation that claimed many lives in the 1980s. She had recently sent troops into the Golden Temple (the most sacred site of Sikhism) to kill militants sheltering inside.
After years of a closed, protected economy, from 1991 India started to open up to global investment and trade. Cities boomed and India’s own silicon valley in Bangalore took off. Critics, though, decry vast inequalities of wealth and the failure of the state to provide a safety net for its very poorest, especially in the rural villages of the north and east.
With the birth of baby Astha Arora on 11 May 2000, India’s population officially topped 1 billion
2000 India’s population tops 1 billion India’s population has tripled since independence to more than 1.2 billion, and is projected to surpass China’s during the next decade, making it the most populous state in the world. Unlike China, India has never seriously attempted to control its population. Census statistics demonstrate a continued bias towards male children; the phenomenon of ‘India’s missing daughters’ is a controversial issue, claimed to be caused by selective terminations of female foetuses and better treatment of boys.
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ILLUSTRATION BY DAVIDE BONAZZI
THE BIG QUESTION
Why did the west dominate for so long? For centuries ‘the west’ exercised global dominance without parallel in history – but what were the conditions that allowed a small cluster of nations to control swathes of the world for so long? Seven historians offer their expert opinions Æ 35
The Big Question: Western dominance
Arne Westad
Kathleen Burk
“Europe has always been culturally, religiously, and – most importantly – politically diverse”
“Imposing political control requires military and sometimes naval power”
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 fact that coal could be found reasonably close to the surface in parts of Europe has little to do with the Europeans – but the development of technology was not. It is quite possible that a system of contending states, and weakening religious governance, was a factor in creating space for innovation and markets. Spin-offs from military technologies and organisation also furthered research and state development. This form of modernity was found only in Europe (or, rather, in parts of it), and goes a long way towards explaining European predominance since the 18th century. The concept of ‘the west’, though, is problematic. Talking about ‘north Atlantic societies’ makes more sense. Large areas of Europe were not particularly advanced, at least compared with parts of Asia or Latin America, until the middle of the 20th century. In contrast, some parts of Asia had markets and infrastructure that competed quite well with those of the Europeans until at least 1900 (and, in the case of Japan, long after that). If ‘the west’ is taken to mean Europe and its offshoots in the Americas and Oceania, it has always been culturally, religiously, and – most importantly – politically diverse. The Soviet Union was in this sense part of the west, though many non-Europeans were quicker in adapting to US-led globalisation than the Russians remain to this day.
Arne Westad is ST Lee professor of US-Asia relations at Harvard University, and an expert on contemporary international history and the eastern Asian region
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When considering this subject it’s worth thinking about what’s required to rule. Governing foreign lands requires a plenitude of money and a sustained will to wield power. The weapons required are military and economic power, and the ability to project them, supported by the control of communications. The power of political and economic ideas are much less important. ‘Rule’ comes in many guises. Conquering and imposing political control requires military and, sometimes, naval power. Overwhelming economic dominance requires financial and commercial power plus possibly military backup. However, economic control is stronger over the medium to long term if the use of force is restrained. For centuries, western powers had the predominant ability to project power by land, sea and, later, air. From the early 18th century, Russia conquered a land empire and maintained control through overwhelming military power and the use of railways. By the 17th century, the Dutch, the Portuguese, the British, the French and the Spaniards all possessed the necessary experience and resources for oceanic conquest. Such strength normally trumps a huge population: consider the British in India, the Belgians in the Congo, and several western powers in China. Having achieved political power, military and police power can be used to maintain it, especially if combined with divideand-rule tactics – supporting elites against the rest, always the British preference, or backing one side in internal conflicts. Weapons wielded in maintaining economic power include the ability to mobilise and control finance – buying allies and paying bribes – and, with the modern international finance system, the power to choke off access to funds. Vital to both is the control of communications, an example being the British dominance of international cable traffic for a number of years. Japan was the one country in either Asia or Africa that had, at least in part, the requisite strengths to wield power: military and naval power, including fully trained and equipped military forces able to defeat a western army (in the case of Japan, that of Russia); control over sustainable sources of finance; possession of rapid communications, internal or external; and internal cohesion. Japan remained independent. Hatred of the foreigner was not enough to save the other countries of Asia and Africa from western domination.
Kathleen Burk k is emeritus professor of modern and contemporary history at University College London, specialising in Anglo-American relations and 20th-century history
GETTY IMAGES/IAN FARRELL
Felipe Fernández-Armesto
Ian Morris
“The basis of western dominance was technological, and technological gaps are traversable”
“Applying both science and enlightenment to their economies, Europeans – not the Chinese – had an industrial revolution”
It depends what we mean by ‘dominate’ and ‘the west’, but for most of the past what we usually call the west was a remote and contemptible corner of Eurasia, while richer economies, more powerful polities and bigger, denser populations were concentrated in south-west, south, and east Asia. The incorporation of the Americas changed the global balance of wealth, power and demographic potential, but the effects took a long time to register. The Renaissance was, perhaps, the first global movement – it reached parts of the Americas, Africa and Asia – but its impact was patchy and largely confined to elites. Christianity is the most culturally adaptable religion in the world, but it is doubtful whether we should class as western this oriental mystery-faith that started as a Jewish heresy. In the 17th century, Chinese respect for Jesuit astronomy and chronometry was a sign that western science and technology were in the ascendant, but China influenced the west in the 17th and 18th centuries at least as much as the other way round. It took the Opium Wars to reverse China’s balance of trade in western favour. Meanwhile, industrialised and post-industrial economies began to spread from the west, along with concomitant politics and aesthetics, supplementing but not displacing rival ways of life. Even when western advantages – steam power, Maxim guns, tropical kit – were at their peak in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, they alone could not guarantee domination: by the British, for instance, over Boers and Maoris; by Italians in Ethiopia; or by any foreigners in Japan. If we generously allow western ‘domination’, in general, a term of perhaps about 200 years so far, the period seems a blip in the 200,000 years or so of the existence of Homo sapiens. Its basis has been technological, and technological gaps are traversable. With the recovery of China, the emergence of India as a potential superpower, and the rise of other challengers in a plural and interdependent world, it looks as if we are reverting to normalcy: influence exchanged among equipollent civilisations – of which the west is just one.
Felipe Fernández-Armesto holds the William P Reynolds chair for mission in arts and letters at the University of Notre Dame, Indiana
The answer has little to do with western culture, brilliance or hard work – westerners (by which I mean west Europeans and their overseas colonists) were just in the right place at the right time. In the 12th and 13th centuries Chinese mariners were building ships that could cross oceans. But because China was the richest place on earth, sailing all the way from Nanjing to India or Arabia turned out not to generate enough profits to be worthwhile. For Europeans who picked up versions of this technology and built their own ocean-going vessels in the 15th century, though, things looked very different. Sailing toward China around the bottom of Africa was definitely profitable. Columbus proposed that sailing west across the Atlantic would get to China faster, and be more profitable still. He was mistaken, of course, but bumping into America turned out to be even more important. Because the Atlantic is so much smaller than the Pacific – sailing 3,000 miles gets you from Spain to Mexico, whereas China to California is 5,000 miles – by 1600, Europeans had turned the Atlantic into a highway, which the Chinese could not possibly do with the Pacific. The Atlantic trading system became the greatest wealth-generating machine the planet had ever seen, and by 1750 Britain and Holland – the countries that dominated it – were richer even than China. From there, everything else followed. Applying their best minds to figuring out how the tides and stars moved, Europeans – not the Chinese – had a scientific revolution. Applying scientific thought to their own societies, Europeans – not the Chinese – had an Enlightenment. And applying both science and enlightenment to their economies, Europeans – not the Chinese – had an industrial revolution. That is why the west has dominated the world for 200 years. But it is also why western domination is now approaching its end. In the 20th century, as technologies shrank the Pacific Ocean just as 17th-century ones once shrank the Atlantic, east Asia began its own industrial revolution. The west is still on top – for now – but nothing lasts forever.
Ian Morris is Jean and Rebecca Willard professor of classics and a fellow of the Archaeology Center at Stanford University, and author of Why the West Rules — For Now (Profile Books, 2010)
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Hakim Adi
Rana Mitter
“What might be referred to as the domination of Europe might more properly be seen as the rise to dominance of the capitalist economic system”
“A powerful factor was a vocabulary that came from the western political repertoire”
The question assumes that ‘the west’ has dominated for an incredibly long time – but of course it hasn’t. Even if the start of western – that is to say, European – dominance can be dated from Europe’s simultaneous maritime connections with Africa, Asia, and America in the 16th century, that is no more than 500 years. Indeed, it is doubtful if the countries of western Europe could be said to have dominated any other continent by the end of the 17th century, except perhaps for America where it is estimated that Europeans (and the diseases they brought with them) accounted for the deaths of up to 90% of the indigenous American population. Whatever the case, 500 years cannot be considered a very long time in human history; to give one obvious example, the history of pharaonic Egypt was at least five times as long. Of course, we live in a particular era, and the Eurocentric arrogance of that era might suggest a certain permanence. What might be referred to as the domination of Europe and its diaspora might more properly be seen as the rise to dominance of the new capitalist economic system. This emerged first in western Europe, and unleashed tremendous productive forces on the world, but it was based on the global exploitation of the majority of the world’s people by a few. However, compared with other preceding economic and political systems it cannot be said to have lasted very long, either. The future of capitalism also appears uncertain. If its dominance continues, it looks likely to pass to China and the ‘east.’ It’s also the case that history has already witnessed the first stages of the emergence of a new economic and political system, which its advocates refer to as socialism. That new system first appeared a century ago but its emergence suggests that both western dominance and the exploitation of the many by the few might soon become history. In short, domination by the few in the west has not lasted so very long – but long enough.
Hakim Adi is professor of the history of Africa and the African diaspora at the University of Chichester
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Language matters. And the domination of the way in which people in the ‘rest of the world’ use political language is one legacy of western expansion that remains relevant in the 21st century. Even today, when China has become the world’s second-biggest economy, and the expansion of India and Brazil is a story of global significance, discourse is still dominated by political language that spread in the 18th and 19th centuries. As late as the mid-19th century, China could still lay claim to dominance across much of east Asia. This was not necessarily imperial control; Japan, for example, was never under Chinese rule. But much of the region – China, Korea, Japan, Vietnam – operated using language and norms that came from China’s long history of Confucian bureaucratic thinking. The system of ‘tribute’ (actually a form of ritual relationship in which the peoples paying ‘tribute’ to China gained rather than lost financially) was one part of this. Ethnic groups who occupied China, such as the Manchus who established the Qing dynasty (1644–1911), adapted themselves to Chinese court and bureaucratic systems, even as they promoted their own ethnic customs. The world dominated by Confucian norms came to an abrupt end in the mid-19th century with the arrival of western gunboats and opium. But more powerful still was a vocabulary that came from the western political repertoire. In fact, much of this vocabulary came through Japan during the Meiji period when Japan eagerly embraced many aspects of westernisation. So terms such as kokkaa (country) came into Chinese, rendered as guojia, while kempoo (constitution) became xianfa, both terms being written with the same characters in both languages. For much of the century that followed, China has had to fit its political destiny into a vocabulary defined by terms that originated elsewhere: a republic run according to a political system largely drawn from Marxism. Despite recent attempts to insert ‘Confucian’ norms into today’s China, there is little doubt that its system of government will not become a traditional tianxiaa (‘all under heaven’) anytime soon. And China is not alone in this: ‘linguistic domination’ remains one of the west’s most powerful legacies to the rest of the world.
Rana Mitterr is professor of the history and politics of modern China at the University of Oxford
REX FEATURES/ UNIVERSITY OF CHICHESTER
The Big Question: Western dominance
Margaret MacMillan
“The dramatic effects of the industrial, scientific and technological revolutions meant that western nations were stronger”
GETTY IMAGES/BRIDGEMAN ART LIBRARY/JENI NOTT
Tea is weighed and sold in this 19th-century depiction. Rana Mitter suggests that the west’s linguistic dominance had an impact on China
Local resources and technological advances (here, at a Krupp factory in Germany) fuelled western dominance – but other regions are catching up
The truth is that, in terms of world history, western dominance has been relatively short – and now looks to be coming to an end. Until the end of the 18th century it was not even possible to talk of one part of the world dominating the other. There were important regional powers – France in Europe, China in Asia – but none that could plausibly claim hegemony over the world. Communications were too slow and technology too imperfect for any nation, no matter how powerful, to project its power around the world in any sustained fashion. True, some European powers had far-off colonies, but they had to rely on local forces and alliances with local rulers to maintain them. Even 200 years ago, the west – if by that we mean the powers of western Europe and then the US – was not significantly richer nor more advanced than the rest of the world: think of the Ottomans, Qing China, the Mughals. Much of North America and sub-Saharan Africa remained beyond the control of western powers. In Asia, Japan and Thailand remained independent. In the 19th century the west won the edge that it is now losing again. The dramatic effects of the industrial, scientific and technological revolutions meant that, until the rest of the world caught up, western nations had better guns, more productive economies and superior medicine. The first sign that the tide was turning came in 1904–05 when Japan, which had met the western challenge by reforming its society and economy, defeated Russia. Nationalist movements worldwide took heart. Two great wars exhausted the European powers and, in the aftermath of 1945, the empires vanished. True, the US was a superpower, and remains strong, but its margin over the rest of the world – especially in economics – is no longer as great. So, in terms of human history, the west hasn’t dominated for very long. The Roman empire lasted much longer. And in recent decades ideas, techniques, even fashions have been flowing into the west as much as they have the other way. Next time you eat Thai food, listen to music from Africa, use a phone designed in Japan or drive a car made in Korea, ask yourself: who is dominating whom?
Margaret MacMillan is a professor of international history at the University of Oxford. Her latest book is History’s People: Personalities and the Past (Profile Books, 2016)
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The year in pictures: 1905
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Russia’s ‘Bloody Sunday’ The Russian revolution of 1905 began in front of the tsar’s Winter Palace in St Petersburg. On 22 January, a march by thousands of striking workers and their families – led by a priest, Father Gapon – was confronted by soldiers of the Imperial Guard, who opened fire. What followed was a massacre: perhaps 1,000 of the demonstrators were killed or injured. ‘Bloody Sunday’ was the trigger for a revolution that began the unravelling of imperial rule and paved the way for the tumultuous events of 1917. This image is a still from a Russian film of 1925, Devyatoe Yanvara, that re-enacted the events.
GETTY IMAGES
THE YEAR IN PICTURES
1905
Espionage, Einstein, rubies and revolution The early 20th century was an era of widespread political, scientific, social and artistic upheaval. In the first in our series of pictorial digests of pivotal years in history, Richard Overy outlines the key events and personalities of 1905
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The year in pictures: 1905
As 1905 dawned, the world was on the cusp of a new age. The machinery of the industrial revolution – made with iron and driven by coal and steam – was being transformed by a cluster of recent inventions: radio, the motor car, the aeroplane. At the same time, the Newtonian world of physics was about to be overturned by a young scientific genius, Albert Einstein, whose first thoughts about relativity would be published that year. The overseas empires of European powers, which reached their greatest extent in the early 20th century, would be challenged by the rise of popular anti-colonialism and undermined by competition for the few remaining areas of the world, such as Morocco, not yet absorbed into the European sphere. Rapid social change brought on by industrialisation and urbanisation prompted the growth of mass politics and social protest. This was the year of the first Russian revolution, paving the way for the rise of radical politics in Russia that eventually resulted in Lenin’s Bolshevik revolution a dozen years later. The early years of the 20th century also witnessed a revolution in western culture, featuring the emergence of new forms of art, music and literature. Vienna was the epicentre of this dizzy transformation, with Gustav Klimt among a handful of pioneers of the ‘new art’. Traditionalists deplored the change, but the style that became known as art nouveau matched the wider sense of fin de siècle provoked by fundamental political, social and scientific changes.
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Gems from the grime Workers toil at a ruby mine in Tachileik, far east Burma (today known as Myanmar). The British province was, and still is, the location of the world’s most abundant supply of rubies, mined by workers who, as in most areas of the empire early in the century, laboured in atrocious conditions for scant reward.
Golden girls of the ‘new art’ Austrian painter Gustav Klimt’s The Three Ages of Woman, completed in 1905, is one of the most famous examples of the ‘new art’ – art nouveau or Jugendstil – that took Vienna by storm in the early 20th century. The Austrian capital was at the heart of a revolution in modern culture, in art, music, medicine and literature.
Einstein’s amazing year
AKG IMAGES/GETTY IMAGES
This photograph of theoretical physicist Albert Einstein (1879–1955) was taken in 1905, around the time he shook the world of physics with the publication of his Special Theory of Relativity about the relationship between space and time. The theory made him a household name – though few people understood it.
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BRIDGEMAN
The year in pictures: 1905
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Japan’s triumph At the battle of Tsushima on 27-28 May 1905, Japan inflicted a catastrophic defeat on the Russian navy. Almost the entire Russian fleet had sailed thousands of miles from the Baltic Sea via the Cape of Good Hope to the Sea of Japan, only to be outgunned and outsmarted. Most Russian ships were sunk or captured, presaging the end of the Russo-Japanese War and the start of Japan’s ascent as a great power.
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The year in pictures: 1905
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AKG IMAGES
Vying for a slice of Morocco A cartoon from the satirical German magazine Der Wahre Jacob (The True Jacob) imagines leaders of Europe’s great powers arguing over their future stakes in Morocco at the forthcoming Algeciras Conference in Spain. In 1905, tensions between Germany and France regarding influence in Morocco had come to a head, a conflict that the conference was intended to defuse. “The Sand Cake or More Sand than Cake” was the apt caption for this imperial quarrel.
Viva Las Vegas When it was founded on 15 May 1905, around the time this photo was taken, the city of Las Vegas was almost literally a ‘one-horse town’ – mostly empty plots alongside a new railroad. Today’s metropolis of glitzy casinos symbolises the transformation of the western world over the next century. Then, the norm was rural isolation; today, more than half of the world’s population is concentrated in urban centres.
Gandhi before Mahatma
GETTY IMAGES/AKG IMAGES
A 1905 photograph shows Indian lawyer Mohandas K Gandhi (1869–1948) sitting in front of his Johannesburg chambers, 12 years after he arrived in South Africa. During this year Gandhi defended the interests of Indians in imperial South Africa, as well as the civil rights of natives in his homeland.
The seductive spy No 20th-century spy captured the popular imagination more than the Dutch exotic dancer born Margaretha Geertruida Zelle (1876–1917). Her seductive beauty won liaisons with powerful men – particularly after 1905, when she introduced her ‘Oriental’ alter ego Mata Hari. Recruited as a German spy (and, possibly, a French doubleagent), she was executed by the French in 1917.
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Trunk road In 1905, when this stagecoach trundled through, the giant sequoia called Wawona in California’s Yosemite National Park was already well over 2,000 years old. The tunnel was bored in 1881 as a tourist attraction: wide enough for stagecoaches but also for the first American automobiles. By the time the tree collapsed in 1969, the motor car had long triumphed over the horse.
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GETTY IMAGES
The year in pictures: 1905
Into the heart of Russia
GETTY IMAGES/BRIDGEMAN/REX FEATURES
A passenger enjoys the view of Russian wilderness from his carriage on the Trans-Siberian Railway in 1905, the last section of which was completed the previous year. The line – which traversed Manchuria and now stretches 5,772 miles (9,289 km) from Moscow to Vladivostok – transformed communication across the Russian empire, linking Europe with the Pacific. The British geographer Halford Mackinder claimed that it marked the dawn of a new age in which technology would conquer inhospitable space, creating a Russian ‘heartland’ of a new global order.
Celebrating Trafalgar Crowds gather around Nelson’s Column in central London on 21 October 1905, the centenary of the British victory at the battle of Trafalgar, in the square named for that clash. At that time, such celebrations of past victories were important ways of underlining Britain’s contemporary status as the world’s global superpower.
Richard Overy is professor of history at the University of Exeter, and editor of The Times Complete History of the World (William Collins, 2015)
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EXTRAORDINARY Y PEOPLE
Bhim Rao Ambedkar (1891–1956) INDIA’S UNTOUCHABLE HERO In the first of our series celebrating key figures in global history, Sunil Khilnani considers the legacy of one of the architects of India’s constitution
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magine a young boy, the youngest of 14 children, woken at 2am each day to study for his exams. School was not a comfortable experience: he was barred from dining with his school-mates of higher castes, had to drink water from a separate source and was not permitted to study Sanskrit. Bhim Rao Ambedkar was born in 1891 into a caste designated as ‘untouchable’ – the Mahars, carrion carriers and removers of food waste. His parents had been given an education by the British, and served the imperial army. The family were members of a relatively small group, perhaps one per cent of India’s ‘untouchables’, who could get an education – albeit one with degrading restrictions. Today, images and statues of the man that boy grew up to become can be found all over India, in public spaces and in the homes of Dalits (as people of the lowest castes formerly labelled as ‘untouchables’ are now known). Every child is taught that Ambedkar authored the Constitution of India, which came into effect in 1950. Every political leader bends over backwards to pay respect to Ambedkar – mindful that they need the votes of more than 200 million Dalits and many more lower castes. And the nation as a whole venerates him as a symbol of progress in addressing the blight of caste. And yet, even as he is honoured as a demigod, canonised as the leader of India’s Dalits, Ambedkar’s stature as man and thinker has been domesticated and sanitised. In life he was a prickly character, fearlessly picking fights with nationalist greats such as Mahatma Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru. He was also a thinker of subtlety and sophistica-
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tion, one who produced the most searing analysis of caste and the most perceptive understanding of India’s democratic experiment. Ambedkar brought to his study of caste great intellectual skills, honed by years of study, as well as his own raw personal experience of humiliation. He puzzled over why the oppressiveness of the caste order did not incite people to turn against it in violent revolt. How, he wondered, was it self-enforced with minimal physical coercion? The answer lay in the profound insight he identified as the caste system’s operating principle: that it dissipated any common fellow-feeling and blocked incentives to collective action. This was not because, as is often conventionally thought, the system promises a better future life, but because it offers small advantages in the present life. Ambedkar’s ideas stand as one of the most consequential pieces of polemical scholarship of his times. Publications such as his 1936 Annihilation of Castee deserve recognition as being among the primary documents of human rights, anywhere in the world. In his younger days, Ambedkar believed he could defeat the caste order by radical activism and street protests: he once burned a copy of the Laws of Manu, the rules that undergirded the caste system, and led marches against the exclusion of Dalits from water wells reserved for upper castes. Yet his strengths were legal and analytic, not agitational. One of his greatest legacies was his inscription in the Indian Constitution of the most wide-ranging provisions of affirmative action seen anywhere in the world. This gave rise to legislation and policies, known in India as ‘reservations’,
that have been vital in removing stigma attached to Dalits and lower castes, and in bringing India’s most oppressed citizens into political and public domains. With a measure of political realism and judgement greater than many of his present-day acolytes, Ambedkar foresaw that transforming something as deeprooted as caste was not going to happen overnight, nor purely through legislation. Like the reunification achieved as a result of the American Civil War, the Constitution Ambedkar helped to write signalled not the end of a story but the inauguration of a history – a history in pursuit of a democratic equality that is still to be achieved. In May 2015, a young lower-caste man visiting a town in Ambedkar’s home state of Maharashtra was beaten to death when people around him heard his phone ringtone: a song praising Ambedkar. Thousands of such stories blighted the decades after Ambedkar’s death in 1956. He would have been dismayed, though hardly surprised. It’s telling that, in the last year of his life, Ambedkar repudiated his Hindu origins and converted to Buddhism, finding it more egalitarian and respecting of the individual. Restored to its human reality from its mythic transfigurations, Ambedkar’s life is a reminder of the challenges facing India’s path towards a more democratic, equal and fraternal society. Sunil Khilnani is author off Incarnations: India in 50 Livess (Allen Lane, 2016) DISCOVER MORE Sunil Khilnani discusses the life of Bhim Rao Ambedkar on the BBC Radio 4 Incarnations podcast: bbc.co.uk/programmes/b0736s58
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Social champion Born in 1891, Bhim Rao Ambedkar drew on his formidable intellect and his own experience of social humiliation to develop a “profound insight” into the workings of India’s caste system. “All have a grievance against the highest and would like to bring about their downfall. But they will not combine,” he wrote
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The Beatles and world politics
1966 and the three crises of the Beatles The famous pop band’s world tour should have been straightforward – but a mix of bad luck and naivety saw them offend audiences in three nations. Clifford Williamson looks at what the group’s misadventures reveal about the political and cultural complexities of an era of change 52
Happi arrival in Japan The Beatles leave the plane wearing traditional happi coats given to them by the airline. Unfortunately their visit fell foul of cultural sensitivities, and political interests almost prevented their performances from going ahead
Building bridges in the US John Lennon’s remark that “we’re more popular than Jesus” enraged Christians in the US. The band, seen here at a press conference in Memphis, were forced to apologise and even considered cutting the tour short
Hasty exit from Manila
GETTY IMAGES/TOPFOTO
Paul McCartney at the airport, where the Beatles were intimidated on departure from the Philippines. The band left under a cloud after their failure to turn up for a party was seen as a snub to President Marcos and his wife, Imelda
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here was a sound like a shot being fired. Each member of the Beatles looked at each other, wondering which of them had been hit. It was August 1966, and a wave of protests had erupted in response to an interview in which the group’s singer and guitarist, John Lennon, had claimed they were “bigger than Jesus”. The comment had not gone down at all well in the Bible belt, comprising much of the southern US, in which conservative evangelical Protestantism plays a strong role. There had been warnings and threats from groups including the Ku Klux Klan. Now, on stage at the Memphis Coliseum, in the heart of the southern states, it seemed that their worst nightmare had come true. But the sound was only from a firecracker and, as it turned out, was far from the most dangerous thing to happen to the band on what would be their final tour of the US: they narrowly avoided being electrocuted in Cincinnati when a thunderstorm threatened to strike the open-air baseball stadium while they were performing. Every night was a battle to get to and from each venue, pursued by legions of fans – Beatlemaniacs. On the way to the final gig at San Francisco’s Candlestick Park, the band’s members – Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison and Ringo Starr – resolved it was time to stop touring. Key among the factors that led to the decision were the three crises that hit the Beatles in 1966, of which the ‘bigger than Jesus’ controversy was one. For the Fab Four (as they were nicknamed), already jaded by almost constant touring since the late 1950s, these events were the last straw.
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‘The long and winding road’
It should have been a straightforward world tour, another chance to showcase to the world the greatest pop music act on the planet. It was to start in Germany, then on to Japan; after three days in Tokyo, the band would head to Manila in the Philippines. Rest in India and England would follow, before the group headed to North America for a two-week tour culminating in the concert at Candlestick Park on 29 August 1966. Yet almost immediately the far eastern leg of the tour began to look troublesome. July is one of the rainiest months of the year in Japan, and the tour promoter had to find an indoor venue that was large enough for the estimated demand of 150,000 tickets. The only venue that could support such requirements was the Nippon Budokan, built for the 1964 Olympic games in Tokyo to house the judo competition. More than just a martial art, judo is a sacred activity in Japan. Its practices and rituals are enmeshed in the tradition of Shinto, the country’s dominant religion. And that’s not all: the Budokan is situated at the heart of imperial and religious Tokyo, next to the emperor’s palace and the Shinto Yasukuni shrine. The ground on which the hall rests was the former site of the plaza where Japanese soldiers swore allegiance to the emperor before leaving to fight in the Second World War.
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All of this meant that the decision to hire the venue for a Beatles concert created a major backlash. There was disquiet at such a sacred venue being used by a lowly pop group; no less a figure than the Japanese prime minister Eisaku Sat¯o expressed discomfort. He was joined by Hosokawa Ryugen, a journalist for the national newspaper Asahi Shimbun; Matastaro Shoriki, founder of the influential Yomiuri Shimbun newspaper; and Tatsuji Nagashima, erstwhile promoter of the concerts. Four pillars of the Japanese establishment – or, as the Japan Times dubbed them, the ‘drab four’ – found themselves united by their opposition to the plan. Such responses are, perhaps, unsurprising. In 1966 Japan was only a decade and a half removed from recovering its sovereignty (after the Allied occupation that had followed the Second World War) through the 1951 Peace Treaty and the US-Japan Security Treaty, known as Anpo. Politically, the country had effectively been a one-party state since 1955, with the Liberal Democratic Party unchallenged in power. During this period, Japan’s population grew rapidly, from 89 million in 1955 to 98 million in 1965. These rapid changes took place in the midst of seeming political and social continuity. Yet powerful forces on the left and right of the Japanese political spectrum had the potential to cause serious disruption. In 1960, the disorder caused by a radical leftist student group had managed to stop a planned visit of US president Eisenhower to sign a revised version of the Anpo treaty. That same year, an ultra-nationalist assassinated the leader of the Japanese Socialist Party, Inejir¯o Asanuma. Such powerful political and media interests, and the fraught political environment, seriously threatened the concerts. However, when it was pointed out to the Japanese government that the Beatles had recently been awarded MBEs (an honour granted by the British monarch) the ‘drab four’ acquiesced in deference to this royal seal of approval. The concerts had the go-ahead. But that wasn’t the end of the controversy. Extremists from the Greater Japanese Patriotic Party threatened to “give the Beatles proper haircuts”; the Tokyo education authority banned students from attending the gigs; and police remained worried about the potential for disorder having heard all about the wild scenes of Beatlemania. The draconian organisation extended to the Beatles’ schedule. Everything was timed to the second, from the time it took for the lift to descend to the ground floor of their hotel to their arrival and departure on stage. Despite the concerns, the concerts passed off without incident. Fans’ reception was polite; George Harrison would describe it as a bit too clinical. Yet the Beatles would be instrumental in inspiring a new generation of Japanese musicians. Japan itself would be further rehabilitated in the eyes of its former enemies: in 1967, that other global symbol of British pop culture, James Bond, would further the interest in all things Japanese when the character visited the country in the film You Only Live Twice.
TOPFOTO/GETTY IMAGES
The Beatles and world politics
Unlike in Japan, there was no anticipation of the trouble that would greet the Beatles in the Philippines. Yet “from the moment, we landed it was bad news”, as Harrison would later recall. The band members were hustled off their plane by president Ferdinand Marcos’s men and driven to a yacht in the harbour at Manila, the capital city. Their personal belongings, including four diplomatic bags that contained their marijuana, were dumped on the tarmac at the airport. Harrison feared they were about to be busted for possession. They managed to escape this jam, but that was only the start of their ordeal. ‘Crying, waiting, hoping’
Japan’s holy ground Overcoming powerful opposition from the establishment, the Beatles perform at Tokyo’s Budokan hall in early July 1966
As in Japan, the Philippines, a country comprising thousands of islands, was undergoing considerable change in 1966. It had gained its full independence in 1946, ending 50 years of a pseudo-colonial domination by the US. By the mid-1960s, it was the second-fastest growing economy in south Asia. Yet considerable problems remained, notably poverty and the enormous sway that foreign companies exerted over the country’s wealth and resources. The political system was also notoriously corrupt, with the previous president emptying the national treasury to pay for his failed election campaign. President Marcos had come to power pledging to modernise the nation and, at least initially, he and his wife, Imelda, were regarded favourably by the US and other western powers. During the build-up to the visit by the Beatles, Imelda had given manager Brian Epstein an invitation for the group to attend a party at the presidential palace. From the early days of global fame, the band had been wary of diplomatic events. This was the result of a row at the British embassy in Washington in 1964 when a member of the diplomatic staff had cut off some of Ringo Starr’s hair with scissors. Epstein’s naivety about diplomacy was much in evidence in Manila: he sent a telegram refusing the offer. He did not realise that it was, in effect, a summons. The Beatles found out about the diplomatic slight while, when watching TV in their hotel rooms, they saw the main Philippine broadcaster showing the Fab Four’s non-appearance. After a number of hours showing empty tables and crying children, Imelda flounced off – declaring that, in any case, her children preferred the Rolling Stones. Almost immediately, the group faced a backlash. Attempts to order room service were ignored; when they were served, they were given sour milk. The scheduled gigs went ahead in front of around 100,000 fans, but this only served to emphasise an odd aspect of the experience: on the one hand, it was classic Beatlemania, but on the other, a growing campaign of intimidation. Events reached a peak as they tried to leave the country. No one came to collect them; no one helped them pack up their gear. Authorities even shut down airport escalators, forcing the
There was disquiet at such a sacred venue being used for a concert by a lowly pop group
Philippines fiasco As the Beatles were departing Manila, the airport’s escalators were turned off – so the band’s team had to carry their kit, pictured, up the stairs
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Æ
The Beatles and world politics
“More popular than Jesus” John Lennon’s claim, made in this article in March 1966, came back to bite the band when they toured America’s conservative South a few months later
Beatlemania on the US tour
Power pose
GETTY IMAGES/ALAMY/EVENING STANDARD – JOHN FROST
The Philippines’ first couple pictured with Lyndon Johnson and his wife, ‘Lady Bird’, during a visit to the US in September 1966
Fans in New York: their frenzied behaviour made it difficult for the Beatles to get from venue to venue. Some US critics linked the band with Communism, or feared its influence would lead young people to riot
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Marcos’s men began to push the band around. John and Ringo tried to find protection behind some nuns band and their small entourage to carry their equipment up flights of stairs. In the departure lounge, President Marcos’s men arrived and began to push members of the band around. John Lennon and Ringo Starr tried to find protection behind some nuns, figuring that, because the Philippines was Catholic, they might be considered inappropriate targets. Even when they got to the sanctuary of their flight, the ordeal was not over. Philippine government officials boarded and demanded the Beatles pay a ‘departure tax’ of $17,000 – coincidently, exactly how much they had earned from the gigs. Although it was unlikely that band members would have come to any real harm, the incident was an early indicator of the character of Ferdinand and Imelda’s conjugal dictatorship. In inadvertently snubbing the party at the presidential palace, the band highlighted the regime’s capricious, sensitive and violent nature. Even a modest slight was to be punished, as the people of the Philippines were to discover over the next 20 years. ‘I should have known better’
In March 1966, the Evening Standard conducted interviews with each of the band for a series. The interview with John Lennon was, in the main, a portrait of a bored, directionless artist. Yet it did contain one rather profound statement: “Christianity will go, it will vanish and shrink. We’re more popular than Jesus now.” A few weeks after publication, Epstein wrote to the newspaper to thank it for the articles. At this point, there had not been a single word of protest about Lennon’s statement. All of this changed when the US teen magazine Datebook reproduced the interview in early August 1966, just before the group was due to arrive in the country. Starting in Mississippi, then across the American South, opportunistic DJs, clergy and others began organising boycotts of Beatles music and events for locals to burn “Beatle trash”. Epstein initially considered postponing parts of the tour in places such as Memphis and St Louis, but the band eventually agreed to aim for damage limitation. Epstein flew to New York to try and row back on what Lennon said. When the band arrived in the US in mid-August, two press conferences were arranged for apologies by Lennon. Lennon said that he was “sorry for the mess that he had made” and that he was “not anti-God, anti-Christ or antireligion”. He concluded that he had forgotten the influence that came with being a Beatle, and that his words would resonate in ways other people’s would not. This appeased some critics, but
there was still some hostility and the band were constantly on edge – as the Memphis firecracker incident demonstrated. Some elements of the Christian fundamentalist community had been gunning for the Beatles even before the ‘bigger than Jesus’ outburst. Perhaps most famous among these figures was David Noebel, dean of the Christian Crusade Anti-Communist Youth University in Colorado, who had been warning of the dangers of the group since early 1965. Noebel’s concern was that the band’s mesmeric effect on young people could pave the way for “riot and revolt”. He extrapolated on this theory in two antiBeatles treatises, Communism, Hypnotism and the Beatles (1965) and The Beatles: A Study in Drugs, Sex and Revolution (1969). It is possible to see the controversy as simply a manifestation of Bible-belt reactionary attitudes. Yet, as with Japan and the Philippines, it is also important to consider the larger context, and 1966 was a crucial moment in the developing relationship between faith and politics in the US. Since the end of the reconstruction that had followed the American Civil War (1861–65), the American South had solidly supported the Democrats, and an important element of this was provided by the support of southern white churches. This relationship started to fragment with the advent of the civil rights movement, and the growing influence of African Americans in the north of the country as they became more and more empowered. This meant that, for the first time in a century, the American South was politically up for grabs. Republicans had started to make overtures in 1964, when its presidential candidate sought to make an electoral virtue out of his opposition to the Civil Rights Act. Republicans knew they could not make an overt appeal based on segregation or race, so instead chose to identify with southern churches over issues of modernity, sexuality and traditional patriotism. At the same time, in places such as California, conservative Republicans including Ronald Reagan were helping to rebrand the party with an explicit appeal to Christian activists. The growing culture wars of the 1960s over gender, sexuality, drugs and Vietnam would empower Christian conservatives, making their states – including many that took part in the Beatles boycotts – enormously influential in shaping American politics. The three crises of the band Dr Clifford Williamson is in 1966 were part of the dramatic senior lecturer in contemporary story of the most important pop- British and American history at ular music group in history. Yet Bath Spa University they also give insight into some of the most important global DISCOVER MORE economic, political and social Beatles ‘66: The Revolutionary changes of an extraordinary peri- Year by Steve Turner (Ecco Publishing, 2016) od in world history.
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PERSPECTIVES SEVITCEPSREP ONE MOMENT, TWO VIEWPOINTS
US Commodore Perry sails into Tokyo Bay
“If that double-bolted land, Japan, is ever to become hospitable, it is the whale-ship alone to whom the credit will be due; for already she is on the threshold.” Herman Melville, Moby Dick (1851)
By the 1850s Japan had been closed to the west for more than two centuries, since the Portuguese Jesuit missionaries who had incited insurrection were expelled in 1639. Christianity was banned and Japanese converts executed. The Japanese also banned guns. Thereafter they lived in peace under the rule of the shoguns, and developed a unique and glittering culture. Chinese and Koreans came to trade, but the only westerners allowed in were the Dutch, who argued that they were a mercantile nation and not Catholic. A trading colony of 20 Dutch merchants was based on the artificial island Dejima off Nagasaki. Dutch ships arrived annually – most years, anyway – with goods to sell, leaving laden with Japanese wares. Thus the Japanese were able to buy western technology – telescopes, even a daguerreotype camera – and established schools of ‘Dutch learning’ in which scholars spoke and read Dutch, and pursued western knowledge.
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No other foreigners – and certainly no westerners – were allowed to approach the country; those who sailed close were driven away, and Japanese people who were shipwrecked abroad were not allowed to return on pain of death (though over time these strictures were relaxed a little). The end of isolation
The Japanese were not to be left in peace for much longer: Britain, France and other European nations were empirebuilding, spreading their tentacles across the globe. In 1808, after France had captured the Batavian Republic (as the Netherlands was, briefly, known) during the Napoleonic Wars, the British ship Phaeton sailed into Nagasaki harbour under the Dutch flag, thinking that the Japanese could be fooled. The shogun’s government responded with a ‘no second thoughts’ edict: all foreign ships that approached Japanese shores would be destroyed. After the First Opium War (1839–42), Japan was aware of British incursions into neighbouring China, and feared a similar attack. But the Crimean War was looming, setting Britain and France against Russia. That left the way open
for the relatively young United States of America to get involved. In the US, the California Gold Rush was reaching its peak. The whaling industry was booming. Americans lit their homes with whale-oil lamps, used baleen whale bones to stiffen crinolines in women’s dresses, and lubricated industrial machinery with whale oil. For several decades, whaling ships from New England had plied the rich waters around the northern Japanese island of Hokkaido but were prohibited from putting in for supplies, and sailors shipwrecked in Japan were imprisoned. In November 1851, US president Millard Fillmore instructed Commodore Matthew Perry to deliver a letter to the Japanese emperor demanding that American vessels be allowed access to ports of call to take on coal and water, and that castaways be treated humanely. The Dutch king Willem III wrote to the shogun Tokugawa Ieyoshi, warning that an American expedition was on its way. However, the shogun’s ministers decided to play down such news in order to avoid provoking panic. On the following pages we compare the Japanese and American viewpoints of the ensuing encounter…
BRITISH MUSEUM IMAGES/MAP: BATTLEFIELD DESIGN
On 8 July 1853 a formidable fleet of American warships arrived at the Japanese capital. Lesley Downer explores both sides of the incident that opened up Japan to the wider world after centuries of isolation
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A painted handscroll depicts American commodore Matthew Perry’s second mission to Japan in March 1854, during which he obtained a treaty opening several ports to American ships
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Perspectives: Unlocking Japan, 1853
THE JAPANESE EXPERIENCE
“The broad streets of the shogun’s capital are packed with people running about in panic”
O
n the third day of the sixth month in the Year Kaei 6, fishermen plying their nets in the Uraga Channel saw four huge ships, looming “large as mountains” and travelling “swiftly as birds”, speeding into the channel leading to Edo (now called Tokyo), the shogun’s capital. Terrified, they sculled off to raise the alarm. Guard boats swarmed out to confront the ships, but the intruders drove them off with pikes. Kayama Eizaemon, police magistrate in the port of Uraga, shouted up that the ships must go to Nagasaki, the only place foreign ships were allowed. Through interpreters the American commander replied that he would do no such thing. He had a letter to deliver to the emperor, and gave the Japanese three days to arrange for its reception by an official of appropriately high rank. Kayama noted the huge Paixhans gun (the first naval weapon to fire explosive shells) aimed at Uraga, and counted 70 large-calibre cannons. Of 100 cannons defending Edo Bay, the shogunate had only 11 of comparable calibre. State of emergency
When the shogun’s ministers received the news, they declared a state of emergency and mobilised troops to protect Edo Castle. The Japanese were dismayed to see small boats being lowered from the American ships and nosing towards Edo, a huge steamer surging along behind them. Panic seized the city. “Smiths busy themselves making armour, helmets, swords and spears,” wrote a local reporter. “Men and women who live
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near the sea coast, both samurai and commoners, have begun to evacuate with their young and old. The broad streets of the shogun’s capital are packed with people running about in panic as they carry furniture and possessions.” Anguished discussions took place in Edo Castle. Should attempts be made to expel the intruders? Was such action even feasible? No one wanted to accept the American letter under duress. And who should they send to receive it? It was clear that the Americans knew nothing about Japan, and certainly not that the emperor was an irrelevance – a pope-like figure living in seclusion in Kyoto. The Japanese could play on that ignorance. Just in time to meet the American ultimatum, Kayama took a message to the ships saying that Toda Izu, prince of Sagami and an official of “very high rank equal to that of the Lord Admiral”, would receive the president’s letter. Perry was satisfied, and Toda – actually the governor of the very small town of Uraga – was highly amused at his promotion. By now the roads south of Edo were packed with gun carriages, carts carrying arms and provisions, and packhorses led by porters. The price of rice and armour had gone through the roof. There had been no fresh fish for three days. “It is as if the whole town was to be burnt to ashes this very moment,” the court doctor noted in his diary. Six days after the arrival of the ships, Kayama delivered a letter “from the emperor” (written by chief minister Abe Masahiro), authorising Toda Izu to receive the president’s letter the next day. Carpenters worked through the night to build reception halls hung with
colourful flags and banners. Next morning the Americans moved their ships menacingly close to the beach. More than 5,000 samurai stood to arms. A thunderous salute erupted from the ships as Perry, showing his face for the first time and accompanied by two enormous black bodyguards, stepped ashore between lines of soldiers, while the American band played ear-splitting music. In the pavilion Perry handed two letters to Toda, telling him he would return next spring for an answer. The government assumed that the crisis had passed. But next day the ships steamed to within seven miles of Edo Castle, sounding their foghorns. Japanese ministers met, dressed in battle gear, and mobilised troops, while spectators gathered to gaze at the monstrous ships, offering fruit to the men on board. The end of the beginning
Finally, the American ships prepared to leave. Kayama delivered presents – rolls of silk, fans painted with erotica – though he noticed that the Americans turned up their noses at these works of art. The Americans gave presents in return and Kayama, who had enjoyed his period in the limelight, pantomimed how much he’d miss them. Huge crowds gathered to watch the American ships sail away after their 10-day sojourn. After they’d gone the Japanese burnt the American presents on the beach at Uraga. Perhaps they would not return; after all, previous foreign intruders had never reappeared. Just 10 days after the fleet left, the shogun died suddenly. Natural or not, his death seemed a bad omen.
BRIDGEMAN
Black shadows of black ships A painting of the arrival of Commodore Matthew Perry’s vessels betrays the fear they struck into Japanese hearts. Abe Masahiro, the shogun’s chief minister, wrote: “Day in and day out I am full of anxiety over the black shadow which the black ships cast on our country’s future”
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Perspectives: Unlocking Japan, 1853
THE AMERICAN EXPERIENCE
The visitors were enchanted by the civility of the Japanese and the beautiful countryside
A
s Commodore Matthew Perry’s two heavily armed steamships and two sloops steamed into Uraga Bay, fishermen fled for shore “like wild birds at a sudden intruder”. The ships dropped anchor and levelled their huge Paixhans gun at Uraga. Boats rowed by “tall, athletic men, naked save a cloth around the loins” surrounded the ships but were driven away; only one two-sworded official and his interpreter were allowed aboard. The main go-between was Kayama whom, with his elaborate silk garments embroidered with gold and silver peacock feathers, the Americans took to be the governor of Uraga. Even so, Perry stayed out of sight, asserting that he would speak only with a man of the highest rank. Every day thereafter except the sabbath Perry sent survey boats sculling towards Edo with the heavily armed Mississippi steaming behind. Japanese defences were not as formidable as Perry had feared, reinforcing his plan to force them to bend to his will by threatening their capital. Perry warned that if the Japanese refused to receive the American president’s letter, he would “not hold himself responsible for the consequences”. Finally Kayama replied that “the emperor had appointed one of the chief counsellors of the empire” to receive the letter at Uraga. As morning dawned, the Americans saw newly built pavilions decorated with flags and banners, and soldiers in lacquered hats, short skirts and sleeveless frocks. Japanese officials wore brocaded silk overgarments trimmed with yellow velvet and embroidered with gold, as splendid as “at some joust or tourney”.
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At 10 o’clock, heralded by a 13-gun salute, Perry stepped into a white barge accompanied by 250 marines. He marched ashore between two huge black sailors to a roll of drums, followed by two cabin boys carrying rosewood boxes wrapped in scarlet cloth holding the letters. While the band played ‘Hail Columbia’ the procession followed Kayama up to the reception hall where an armchair was ready for Perry. Toda received the letters, one from President Fillmore pledging friendship and requesting the opening of relations, the other Perry’s instructions to open negotiations on a treaty of amity. Perry told the Japanese that he would return in April or May with more ships, “as these are only a portion of the squadron”. The Americans collected shells from the beach and compared swords with the Japanese soldiers (though garnering hostile looks from some spectators) before marching back to their ships to the strain of ‘Yankee Doodle’. Cultural exchange
The following day, Perry ordered the ships closer to Edo, and despatched the survey boats. Crowds gathered along the shore, offering water and peaches while the Americans shared tobacco. The visitors were enchanted by the civility of the Japanese and the beautiful countryside, with its thatch-roofed villages, extensive cultivation and intensely green groves of trees. They steamed to within seven miles of Edo, where they could see crowds of junks and low buildings. Next day the squadron returned to its earlier anchorage. Kayama delivered gifts to the Americans including fans painted
with “hideously distorted and lackadaisical pictures of Japanese ladies”, which the Americans found distasteful. They selected gifts of higher value to return. At daybreak on 17 July, 10 days after the arrival of the American fleet, people gathered to watch the parade of ships off Cape Sagami, with a thousand boats gathered to bid the Americans farewell. Aftermath of the encounter
Perry returned in March 1854 with nine ships, and forced the Japanese to sign a treaty opening the ports. Other nations rapidly demanded similar concessions. In 1856, Townsend Harris arrived at Shimoda, declaring himself the first American consul general to Japan. For two years he negotiated, wheedled and threatened until the Japanese allowed him to meet the young shogun in Edo. There he forced a trade treaty on Japan – the first of many. James Bruce, 8th Earl of Elgin, arrived shortly afterwards to sign a similar treaty for Britain. The arrival of the newcomers had created upheaval in Japan. Chief minister Abe had needed to consult with the 260 daimyo (warlord princes) on the critical issue of how to deal with the intruders – which fatally undermined his authority. The result was a breakdown of order in Japan and the overthrow of the shogunate. In 1868, a mere 15 years after Perry’s first visit, the teenage emperor Meiji became the figurehead of a new government – and modern Japan was born. Lesley Downer is the author of many books on Japan. Her new novel The Shogun’s Queen (Bantam, 2016) begins when Perry’s ‘black ships’ are sighted off the coast of Japan
TOPFOTO
East meets west A contemporary American lithograph shows US commodore Matthew Perry being received at Uraga in July 1853. “I was well aware that the more exclusive I should make myself and the more exacting I might be, the more respect these people of forms and ceremonies would be disposed to award me,” he wrote shortly afterwards
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South African art
Gold rhinoceros, c1220–90 This glittering gold-foil figurine was created in Mapungubwe, the earliest-known kingdom of southern Africa. It’s one of a number of gold artefacts discovered in the 1930s during the excavation of three royal graves on Mapungubwe Hill, where it’s thought the elite lived apart from the masses below. We don’t understand exactly the symbolic significance of this object but of course the rhino is one of the most powerful animals in southern Africa. It’s also noteworthy that the figurine is made of gold, a very powerful material – and one of the reasons why Mapungubwe rose to prominence. The kingdom, in what’s now far northern South Africa near the borders with Zimbabwe and Botswana, became wealthy thanks to trade in gold and ivory.
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ART OF AFRICA
UNIVERSITY OF PRETORIA
The diverse art of southern Africa boasts a heritage stretching back hundreds of centuries, from ancient rock paintings, sculpture and jewellery to interpretations of recent conflicts. John Giblin, lead curator of South Africa: The Art of a Nation, a new exhibition at the British Museum in London, presents his highlights from the varied collection
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Bowl or crown, c1220–90 This object, also excavated at Mapungubwe Hill, is either a bowl or a crown, depending on your interpretation – and which way up you show it! If it is a crown, there is clear symbolism about power – but even if it’s a bowl, it would still have been a highly important symbol. It would probably have been based on a ceramic bowl used for carrying water and food, and for boiling and stewing different foods.
Coldstream Stone, c7,000 BC This decorated stone, excavated from a burial site near Lottering river in the Western Cape, is believed to be 9,000 years old – one of the earliest examples of rock art from southern Africa. Painted on the surface are what look like three people, perhaps part of a hunting party. Very faint red lines stream from their noses, representing nasal haemorrhaging – a phenomenon that also features in more recent depictions of San Bushmen entering a trance state, moving between the worlds of the living and the dead. So we think that the people represented in this painting are not only hunters but also shamans.
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UNIVERSITY OF PRETORIA/ IZIKO MUSEUMS OF SOUTH AFRICA, SOCIAL HISTORY COLLECTIONS, CAPE TOWN
South African art
Blombos beads, c75,000 BC These shell beads came from some of the world’s oldest necklaces, found in Blombos Cave east of Cape Town – a site that, along with a number of other locations in South Africa, preserves some of the earliest evidence of symbolic cultures. Blombos Cave is particularly important because, in much of the 20th century, it was argued that abstract thinking and the production of symbolic art – a key indicator of modern human behaviour – first developed in Europe, possibly 30,000 years ago. But material from the cave and other sites in southern Africa confirms that this kind of behaviour evolved a lot earlier in Africa.
Xhosa ox snuffbox, late 19th century
IZIKO MUSEUMS/ THE TRUSTEES OF THE BRITISH MUSEUM
This is one of my favourite objects from the exhibition, and it’s powerful for three reasons. First, the ox is a dominant animal within south African societies – a sign of wealth. Second, this object is made with sinew, hair, earth and blood, possibly from a sacrificial animal, so it’s a strong statement about attachment to the land. And finally, it would have held a powerful substance – snuff – used both for pleasure and in ritual practices for connecting the living and the dead.
Necklace, late 19th or early 20th century This beautiful bead collar necklace, called an ingqosha, is associated with Xhosa identity, but we’ve used it in the exhibition to tell the story of how late 19th- and early 20th-century cultural identities were employed under apartheid. So we’re showing it alongside an image of anti-apartheid activist (and, later, president) Nelson Mandela wearing a similar necklace around 1962, when he was being persecuted by the apartheid government. He also reportedly wore one during his trial, before he was imprisoned. In both cases it made a strong statement about his Xhosa identity. Æ
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South African art
Sotho gun cartridge dolls, late 19th or early 20th century
Zulu claw necklace, 19th century Necklaces such as this, made from either lion or leopard claws, would have been symbols of very high status, probably worn only by Zulu chiefs or kings. This example was made of leopard claws and string in the region that is now KwaZulu-Natal. It was donated to the British Museum in the 1860s, from the collection of the famous collector Henry Christy, but probably dates from much earlier in the 19th century.
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THE TRUSTEES OF THE BRITISH MUSEUM
These Sotho dolls are actually gun cartridges decorated with beads, probably made to sell to tourists. When we see them enlarged like this, it’s easy to forget how tiny they are – only about 7.5cm high. With their hair tied together and the right-hand doll’s skirt seemingly in motion, I like to imagine that they’re dancing.
JOHN MUAFANGEJO, UNIVERSITY OF WITWATERSRAND ART MUSEUM/ THE TRUSTEES OF THE BRITISH MUSEUM
Batle of Rorke’s Drift, 1981 This piece was created by John Muafangejo (1943–87), an artist of Angolan and Namibian heritage who spent a lot of his life making lino prints in South Africa. He studied at an arts centre at Rorke’s Drift, site of one of the most famous battles of the Anglo-Zulu war of 1879. The clash was made famous by the 1964 film Zulu, in which it’s celebrated as a British victory against the odds, in the face of hundreds of Zulu soldiers. In fact, the story could be told – as it is here – with the British soldiers holed up in a small house, overwhelmed by the power of the imposing black Zulu surrounding them. This picture very much inverts the power narrative told in the film into a southern African narrative.
Zulu beaded girl’s belt, late 19th century This is a very beautiful example of beadwork from part of the exhibition that tells the story of rural artistic production. We have a whole range of such objects, but we often don’t know the stories behind them because the names of the artists were not recorded when Europeans collected them. That’s one of the things this exhibition discusses: these are wonderful artworks about which we have only an incomplete narrative.
John Giblin is curator, Head of Africa at the British Museum in London
DISCOVER MORE South Africa: The Art of a Nation with Logistics partner IAG Cargo runs until 26 February 2017. +44 (0)20 7323 8299, britishmuseum.org/whats_ on/exhibitions/south_africa.aspx
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Eyewitness: Chernobyl
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EYEWITNESS On the front line of history The Chernobyl disaster, Ukraine, 1986 Journalist Svetlana Alexievich visited the region affected by the Chernobyl disaster, considered the worst nuclear accident in history, shortly after the catastrophe. On 26 April 1986, an experiment on the cooling pump system at Chernobyl power station, in the then-Soviet city of Pripyat, Ukraine, went badly wrong. The nuclear reactor exploded, causing a fire that raged for nine days and emitting large quantities of radioactive debris; fallout settled largely in nearby Belarus, Ukraine and Russia, but the radioactive cloud covered much of Europe. At least 30 people died during or shortly after the incident, with many thousands of cancer cases since linked to radiation exposure.
GETTY IMAGES/PA IMAGES/MAP: BATTLEFIELD DESIGN
“The look of deep shock on people’s faces made it clear that we had been catapulted into a new reality”
Confusion after catastrophe Bemused families in Narodychi, Ukraine watch neighbours preparing to leave home shortly after the nuclear accident at Chernobyl, just 50 miles (80km) to the east. The Soviet state proposed to re-house rural inhabitants in badly affected districts, but many preferred to stay despite (or perhaps unaware of the danger of) the high radiation levels detected by Geiger counters
At the time that the Chernobyl incident happened my sister was in hospital in Minsk, so I was spending almost all of my time with her there. It just so happened that on one of those days a Swedish friend of mine called me and told me about a serious accident at a nuclear power station. We hadn’t been told anything about it. In the first days, no one imagined the danger of what had happened, even the scientists who were flown into the area around Chernobyl. They went there without so much as a shaving kit. They had been told that there had been an accident at the nuclear power station, so they decided to go
Æ TRANSLATED BY BRYAN KARETNYK
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Eyewitness: Chernobyl
and see, give their opinion, and quickly fly out again. We were utterly naive. People were sunbathing, fishing. Human life is cheap here. Around three months after the incident I met with the writ-
L In the wake of the
p ‘Liquidators’ – workers engaged in cleaning radioactive material from the roof of the damaged reactor – don protective suits before beginning a shift. More than 500,000 recovery workers were involved in the operation
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power station fire in April 1986, campaigners took to the streets in the Ukrainian capital, Kiev, protesting government secrecy surrounding the events and implications of the disaster
er and academic Ales Adamovich, who knew all about it. After that I travelled to the zone. I planned to write a book about Chernobyl almost immediately after the catastrophe, but I gave up. I saw that I had no way of dealing with the subject: there was something missing in my world outlook, in my culture, to grasp what was going on. I saw that a nuclear physicist, an old woman from the countryside, a soldier – all of them were equally powerless. To use old concepts or an old frame of reference to describe it would be impossible. What war? We were sitting in Minsk, peacefully sipping coffee while World War Three – Chernobyl – had already begun. The radiation hovered over us. It was killing us all, but we couldn’t see or hear it. I remember how the people were evacuated. I saw old women with icons, kneeling, begging not to be taken away. The sun was shining, gardens growing – why should they leave? Trees continued to blossom, everything grew, the birds flew, but people felt the presence of death everywhere. Unseen, unheard. Death in a new guise.
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When I first visited the zone, everyone had bewildered, almost crazed faces. They looked on while they sheared the
upper, infected layer of earth and buried it in special pits. They buried earth in earth. They buried eggs and milk, and infected animals they had shot. They just kept burying and burying. The information about Chernobyl in the papers was straight out of a military report: an explosion, an evacuation, heroes, soldiers… The system was reacting as usual when faced with extreme conditions, but a soldier with an assault rifle in this new world cut a tragic figure. All he could do was amass an enormous dose of radiation and then die when he returned home. It was enough to see the look of deep shock on the people’s faces for it to become immediately clear that we had been catapulted into a new reality. But the protective cultural layer that usually helped us had been reduced to nothing in the blink of an eye. We were naked people on the naked earth, forced to start from scratch. And so I set out on a quest; this is what was expected of me. I tried to comprehend what had happened, but it was beyond the limits of our comprehension and imagination. The past was powerless to help us in any way. A problem we encountered straight away was that there was no sense of scale of the incident. The first feeling you
have out there, in the zone of death, is that our biological mechanism is ill equipped. Our eyes can’t see the radiation, our nose can’t smell it, our hands can’t feel it. Our biological mechanism can’t meet these needs. Our vocabulary is just as ill-equipped as our senses and our ability to comprehend it. You go into the infected zone and meet the people who remained there, people who refused to be evacuated. They cut the grass with a scythe, plough the land, fell trees with an axe, spend evenings by the light of a kerosene lamp. And all the while physicists are trying to solve unfathomable problems of incredible complexity that Chernobyl has set them. Chernobyl is a totally new reality, commensurable not with us ourselves, nor with our culture, nor with our biological capacity.
ward so that she could be near him. And this man lived longest of all. The remaining 16 liquidators in that hospital had already died, but he, although far from the strongest among them, survived them by several days thanks to the love of his wife. I saw a terrible sight that I’ll never forget when they evacu-
ated people from the infected villages. All around the buses gathered the pet cats and dogs that had been left behind. People were afraid to look them in the eye, and turned away; only the children cried. Soldiers went into the villages and shot the animals... Man saved only himself. An old bee-keeper told me that his bees refused to leave their hives for a week. Fishermen recalled that they couldn’t dig up a single worm – they had gone deep into the earth. The bees, the worms and the beetles knew something that people didn’t. The government did everything in its power to keep the people as ignorant as possible. That’s because, if the people
had known more, they would have demanded checks on food products, dosimeters [radiation detectors], and medicines to cleanse the body – and the government had no intention of providing these things. That’s why they lied. At one point they promised to give everyone dosimeters; they did give them to some, but people began to panic so they quickly changed tack. The state couldn’t permit itself to bury meat that was infected but also in short supply, so they added it to expensive sausage meat, surmising that people wouldn’t buy a lot of expensive sausage. Even now, in times of ‘little radiation’ – when in little doses we drink the radiation, eat it, breathe it – the government has stopped mentioning it altogether. So there’s the official version, and then there are people’s memories, their stories. I think that if we understood Chernobyl there would be a lot more written about it. The knowledge of our ignorance paralyses us.
Chernobyl altered our conception of time. Many radioactive particles will live on for 100, 200, 1,000 years. After a few days the radioactive clouds were already over Africa. themselves on the roof of the reactor and were exposed Concepts such as ‘our’ and ‘other’ became null and void. Radito radiation 1,000 times exceeding a lethal dose. When they ation knows no borders. were taken to the hospital, even the doctors, auxiliary medical Chernobyl wasn’t just a catastrophe – it was a border staff and their relatives had to wear protective between one world and another: a new philosoclothing just to be around them. They were no phy, a new orientation. A new knowledge. The longer human beings, but objects to be decon- Svetlana Alexievich plague killed perhaps half of Europe, but not taminated. Scientists, doctors, family and loved is a journalist and author everyone. With Chernobyl, man took a swipe at ones – all were afraid of them, of going near who won the 2015 Nobel all living things. If he doesn’t give up ruling over them. The irradiated lay on the other side of Prize in Literature. Her nature, warring with it, looking down on insects, books include Chernobyl a boundary, posing us new moral questions. he is doomed. But then, for the first time, I understood that Prayer: A Chronicle of the DISCOVER MORE love was the only thing that could save us. One Future (first published Listen again to BBC Radio 4’s programme Burying woman had been forbidden to see her husband. 1997; updated version Chernobyl at bbc.co.uk/programmes/b06c9tq2 Despite this she climbed the fire escape into his Penguin Classics, 2016) (UK only)
Among the stories that stand out for me are those of the firemen who, on the night after the explosion, found
IN THE NEXT EYEWITNESS: DAVID RENDER ON THE NORMANDY LANDINGS
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DESIRED, STOLEN, KILLED FOR, CURSED: THE STORY OF THE KOH-I-NOOR 74
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Ace of diamonds
The Koh-i-Noor is a gem of international renown, as divisive as it is beautiful. William Dalrymple explores its murky history and asks: to whom should it belong now?
The Koh-i-Noor usually resides in the Tower of London – but ownership of the diamond is fiercely contested. This image shows a replica, displayed in Bangalore in 2002
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The Koh-i-Noor story
O
n 29 March 1849, the young maharajah of the Punjab, Dulip Singh, was ushered into the magnificent Mirrored Hall at the centre of the great fort in Lahore. There, in a public ceremony, the frightened but dignified child finally yielded to months of British pressure and signed a formal Act of Submission. This document, later known as the Treaty of Lahore, handed over to the British East India Company great swathes of the richest land in India – land that, until that moment, had formed the independent Sikh kingdom of the Punjab, a northern region of south Asia. At the same time, Dulip (sometimes spelled Duleep) was induced to hand over to Queen Victoria arguably the single most valuable object in not just the Punjab but the entire subcontinent: the celebrated Koh-i-Noor diamond, the ‘Mountain of Light’. Article III of the treaty read simply: “The gem called the Koh-iNoor, which was taken from Shah Sooja ool-Moolk [Shah Shuja Durrani] by Maharajah Runjeet [or Ranjit] Singh, shall be surrendered by the Maharajah of Lahore to the Queen of England.” The East India Company, the world’s first multinational, had grown over the course of a century from an operation employing only 35 permanent staff, headquartered in one small office in the City of London, into the most powerful and heavily militarised corporation in history. Its eyes had been fixed on the Punjab and the diamond for many years, and the chance to acquire both finally arose in 1839, at the death of Dulip Singh’s father, Maharajah Ranjit Singh, when the Punjab had descended into anarchy. A violent power struggle, a suspected poisoning, several assassinations, a civil war and two British invasions later, the company’s army finally defeated the khalsaa (the body of devout Sikhs) at the bloody battle of Chillianwala, on 13 January 1849. At the end of that year, on a cold, bleak day in December, the governor-general of India, Lord Dalhousie, arrived in Lahore to take formal delivery of his prize from the hands of Dulip Singh. Soon afterwards, the Koh-i-Noor was despatched to England, where Queen Victoria promptly lent it to the Great Exhibition of 1851. Long queues snaked through the Crystal Palace, in London’s Hyde Park, as the public thronged to see this celebrated imperial trophy. The diamond was locked away in its specially commissioned Chubb high-security glass safe, itself contained within a metal cage. In this way, trumpeted by the British press and besieged by the British public, the Koh-i-Noor quickly became not only the most famous diamond in the world, but also the single most famous object of loot from India. It was a symbol of Victorian Britain’s imperial domination of the world and its ability, for better or worse, to take from around the globe the most desirable objects, and to display them in triumph, much
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TRUMPETED BY THE BRITISH PRESS, THE KOH-I-NOOR QUICKLY BECAME THE MOST FAMOUS OBJECT OF LOOT FROM INDIA
as the Romans had once done with curiosities from their conquests 2,000 years earlier. As the fame of this diamond grew, the many other large Mughal diamonds that once rivalled the Koh-i-Noor came to be almost forgotten, and the ‘Mountain of Light’ achieved a singular status as the greatest gem in the world. Only a few historians remembered that the Koh-i-Noor, which weighed 190.3 metric carats when it arrived in Britain, had had at least two comparable sisters: the Darya-i-Noor (‘Sea of Light’), now in Tehran and today estimated at 175–195 metric carats, and the Great Mughal Diamond, believed by most modern gemologists to be the 189.6-carat Orlov diamond, now set in Catherine the Great’s imperial Russian sceptre in the Kremlin. A singular status
In reality it was only in the early 19th century, when the Koh-i-Noor reached the Punjab and the hands of Ranjit Singh, that the diamond had begun to achieve its pre-eminent celebrity. This was partly the result of Ranjit Singh’s preference for diamonds over rubies – a taste Sikhs tended to share with most Hindus but not with the Mughals or Persians, who preferred large, uncut, brightly coloured stones. Indeed, in the Mughal treasury the Koh-i-Noor seems to have been only one among a number of extraordinary highlights in the greatest gem collection ever assembled, the most treasured items of which were not diamonds but the Mughals’ beloved red rubies and spinel gemstones from Badakhshan in north-eastern Afghanistan. The growing status of the Koh-i-Noor was also partly a consequence of the rapidly growing price of diamonds worldwide in the early and mid-19th century. This followed the invention of the ‘brilliant cut’, which fully released the ‘fire’ inherent within every diamond, and which led in turn to the fashion in middle-class Europe and America for diamond engagement rings.
Rock legends
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An engraving of the world’s great diamonds, with the Koh-i-Noor pictured at figure six. “The Koh-i-Noor finally achieved in European exile a singular, almost mythic global status that it had never achieved before leaving its Indian homeland,” writes William Dalrymple
The final act in the Koh-i-Noor’s rise to global stardom took place in the aftermath of the Great Exhibition and the massive press coverage it had engendered. Before long huge, often cursed, Indian diamonds began to make regular appearances in popular Victorian novels such as Wilkie Collins’s 1868 The Moonstone. So it was that the Koh-i-Noor finally achieved in European exile a singular, almost mythic global status that it had never achieved before leaving its Indian homeland. And because the other great Mughal diamonds have come to be forgotten by all except specialists, all mentions of extraordinary Indian diamonds in sources such as the Memoirs of the 16th-century Mughal emperor Babur or the Travels in India of the 17th-century French jeweller Jean-Baptiste Tavernier have retrospectively been assumed to be references to the Koh-i-Noor. At each stage its mythology has grown ever more remarkable, ever more mythic – and ever more shakily fictitious.
Today, tourists who see the diamond in the Tower of London are often surprised by its small size, especially in comparison with the two much larger Cullinan diamonds displayed alongside it: in fact, at present the Koh-i-Noor is only the 90th-largest diamond in the world. A murky history
Small as it is, the Koh-i-Noor retains enormous fame and status, and is once again at the centre of international dissension as the Indian government – among others – calls for the gem’s return. Even now, Indian officials cannot seem to make up their mind about the Koh-i-Noor’s perennially foggy history. On 16 April 2016, the Indian solicitor general, Ranjit Kumar, told the Indian supreme court that the Koh-i-Noor had been given freely to the British in the mid-19th century by Maharajah Ranjit Singh, and was “neither stolen nor forcibly taken by British rulers”. This was, by any standards, a strikingly unhistorical statement – all the more odd given that the facts
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Blood diamond Shah Shuja Durrani as shown in a 19th-century illustration. The shah was one of the people who paid a heavy price for his ownership of the diamond
Jewel in the crown
The sword and the stone Maharajah Ranjit Singh is shown meeting two Europeans in 1822. Singh, founder of the Sikh empire, forcibly acquired the Koh-i-Noor from Shah Shuja Durrani
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The Koh-i-Noor diamond was transferred to the front cross of the crown of Queen Mary, wife of British king George V, for the coronation in 1911
of its surrender to Lord Dalhousie in 1849 are about the only aspect of the story not in dispute. Anyone who today tries to establish the hard facts of the gem’s history will find that unambiguous references to this most celebrated of jewels are still almost suspiciously thin on the ground. The Koh-i-Noor may be made of the Earth’s hardest substance, but it has always attracted around it an airily insubstantial fog of mythology. Indeed there is simply no 100% certain reference to the Koh-i-Noor in any Sultanate or Mughal source, despite many textual references to large and valuable diamonds appearing throughout Indian history, particularly towards the climax of Mughal rule. Some of these may well refer to the Koh-i-Noor but, lacking sufficiently detailed descriptions, it is impossible to be certain.
THE MANY OWNERS OF THE KOH-I-NOOR HAVE SUFFERED IN THE MOST APPALLING WAYS: BLINDED, TORTURED, BURNED
Conflicting claims over the jewel
In fact, there are no definitive mentions of the Koh-i-Noor in any document before the Persian historian Mohammad Kazem Marvi made what seems to be the first extant, solid, named reference in his history of the Persian Nader Shah’s invasion of India. This was written as late as the mid-1740s – a decade or so after Nader Shah had carried off the gem from India to Persia. And that was not the only time it travelled between countries. The case is often made in India that, as the Koh-iNoor was taken by the British at the point of a bayonet, the British must therefore give it back. Yet while the Koh-i-Noor certainly originated in south India – probably in the Kollur mines of Golconda in what’s now Telangana state – Persia, Afghanistan and Pakistan also have good claims to the jewel. It was owned at different times by Nader Shah, in the mid-18th century by Ahmed Shah Durrani (c1722–72) of Afghanistan, and of course by Ranjit Singh of Lahore, now in Pakistan. All three countries have at different times declared ownership and issued legal action to try to get it back; even the Taliban registered its claim to the stone. Moreover, Ranjit Singh took the jewel by force, just as the British did. In the same way that British sources tend to gloss over the violence inherent in their seizure of the stone, Sikh ones do likewise. Yet the autobiography of its previous owner Shah Shuja Durrani (c1785–1842), which I found in Kabul when I was working on my book Return of a King, is explicit about what happened. After being deposed as emir of Afghanistan in 1809, Shah Shuja Durrani went into exile in India. On arrival in Lahore, to which he had been invited by Ranjit Singh in 1813, Shuja was separated from his harem, put under house arrest and told to hand over the diamond. “The ladies of our harem were accommodated in another mansion, to which we had, most vexatiously, no access,” wrote Shuja in his Memoirs. “Food and water rations were reduced or arbitrarily cut off.” Shuja regarded this as an ill-mannered breach of the laws of hospitality. “It was a display of oafish bad manners,” he wrote, with all the hauteur he could muster, dismissing his captor as
“both vulgar and tyrannical, as well as ugly and low-natured.” Gradually, Ranjit increased the pressure. At the lowest ebb of his fortunes, Shuja was put in a cage; according to one account, his eldest son was tortured in front of him until he agreed to part with his most valuable possession. “Ranjit Singh coveted the Koh-i-Noor diamond beyond anything else in this world,” wrote the chronicler Mirza ‘Ata Mohammad, “and broke all the laws of hospitality in order to get possession of it. The king [Shah Shuja] was imprisoned for a long time, and his guards left him out in the burning sun, but to no effect as he would not confess where the jewel was hidden. At length they took his young son, Prince Muhammad Timur, and made him run up and down ladders on the bare roof of the palace in the burning sun, with no shoes or head-covering; the child had been gently brought up and had a delicate physique which could not stand this burning torture, so he cried out aloud and seemed about to pass away. The king could not bear to see his beloved child suffer so.” Finally, on 1 June 1813, Ranjit Singh arrived in person and waited upon Shah Shuja with a few attendants. He was received by Shuja “with much dignity and, both being seated, a pause and solemn silence ensued, which continued for nearly an hour. Ranjit then, getting impatient, whispered to one of his attendants to remind the Shah of the object of his coming. No answer was returned, but the Shah with his eyes made a signal to a eunuch, who retired, and brought in a small roll, which he set down on the carpet at an equal distance between the chiefs. Ranjit desired his eunuch to unfold the roll, and when the diamond was exhibited and recognised, the Sikh immediately retired with his prize in his hand.” The question of whether or not the Koh-i-Noor was cursed greatly exercised the proudly rational Victorians. Lord Dalhousie was firmly of the belief that the great diamond was not cursed; he quoted Shah Shuja Durrani, who told Ranjit Singh that it brought only good fortune, “as those who possess it have
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it in their power to subdue their enemies”. Lord Dalhousie pointed out that the diamond had belonged to some of the luckiest, richest and most powerful monarchs of history, and scoffed at the notion that a curse was even possible. Yet, as my years of research into the Koh-i-Noor have confirmed, many of the diamond’s owners – Shah Shuja among them – have indeed suffered in the most appalling ways, and its history is littered with owners who have been blinded, slow-poisoned, tortured to death, burned in oil, threatened with drowning, crowned with molten lead and assassinated by their own family and closest bodyguards. Even the passengers and crew of HMS Medeaa were scythed down by a cholera epidemic and storms as the vessel carried the Koh-i-Noor across the seas from India to England in 1850. Star exhibit So what should happen now to this allegedly cursed An illustrated guide to the 1851 Great Exhibition. “Long queues diamond? Some have suggested that a museum should be built snaked through the Crystal Palace, as the public thronged to see for the stone at Wagah, on the border between India and Pakithis celebrated imperial trophy,” writes William Dalrymple stan – a unique institution accessible from both sides. Others have mooted that the stone should be cut up once again, and rod for attitudes towards colonialism, posing the question: what a piece be given to each of those countries that make a credible is the proper response to imperial looting? Do we simply shrug argument for its return, including Iran and Afghanistan. it off as part of the rough-and-tumble of history, or should we However, it is most unlikely that such Solomonic wisdom attempt to right the wrongs of the past? would ever be entertained by the British; nor, indeed, would it What is certain is that the immediate future is not likely satisfy any of the various parties involved. to see this diamond prised from its display case in the Tower The Koh-i-Noor was not the largest diamond in Mughal of London. Last seen in public on the coffin of the British hands – and it later lost much of its weight Queen Mother in 2002, it awaits a new queen during the cutting ordered by Queen Victoria’s consort. Given the diamond’s violent and often husband, Prince Albert, in 1852 – yet it retains a William Dalrymple is a tragic history, this may not be good news for the celebrity unmatched by any of its larger or more historian and writer. His new future of the monarchy, nor the next couple to sit perfect rivals. This, more than anything else, book, Koh-i-Noor: The History on the throne. has made it the focus of demands for compensa- of the World’s Most Famous For nearly 300 years after Nader Shah carried d co-authored with tion for colonial looting, and set in motion Diamond, away the great diamond from Delhi, fracturthe repeated attempts that have been made Anita Anand, will be published ing the Mughal empire as he did so, and to have it returned to its various different by Bloomsbury in June 170 years after it first came into British hands, the former homes. Koh-i-Noor has apparently lost none of its power DISCOVER MORE This story still raises not only important The Koh-i-Noor diamond is on to create division and dissension. At very best it historical issues but contemporary ones, too. display at the Tower of London: seems to bring mixed fortunes to whoever wears In many ways it is a touchstone and lightning hrp.org.uk/tower-of-london it, wherever it goes.
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THE CONVERSATION Bettany Hughes & Peter Frankopan
“Istanbul is a character in and of itself – almost bigger than its rulers” Historian and broadcaster Bettany Hughes talks to fellow author Peter Frankopan about her new book Istanbul: A Tale of Three Cities
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PORTRAITS BY FRAN MONKS WITH THANKS TO THE BRITISH ACADEMY
Bettany Hughes and Peter Frankopan discuss the history of Istanbul. “The open-mindedness of these civilisations, in all their iterations, explains why they lasted so long,” says Hughes
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CULTURE The Conversation
“Istanbul is a special city partly because of the notion that it’s a place of security and sanctuary” Peter Frankopan: Of all of the cities in the world, why write about Istanbul? Bettany Hughes: There were two reasons. The first was
that the infrastructure system in Istanbul is currently being expanded massively, with tunnels being dug under the Bosphorus strait. This has resulted in a whole load of new archaeological work that I knew hadn’t been published, and which needs to be shared. So I’ve been gathering research for the past decade, and in terms of fresh evidence it felt like the right time to cover the city. And, as you know, every time we open a newspaper we’re being asked to have an opinion on Turkey and what’s happening in Istanbul, so I felt that we had to dig deeper down into that history in order to have an informed view. As a classicist, what did it mean to you to explore the early days of the city?
Prehistory has shown us that the city was always a bit different. I start the book with the fact that one of the digs unearthed the world’s oldest wooden coffin, and that a healthy little community was managing to make a life for itself there even 9,000 years ago. Byzantium was one of those interesting places that, even if it didn’t appear to be driving ancient history, was quietly doing so. It turns up on a lot of carvings on stele [monumental slabs], for instance, and we know that it was a place that was being thought about in political and economic terms elsewhere. It was almost a kind of sleeper state by which people were fascinated, but which hadn’t yet made its mark as an independent civilisation in the classical period. The geography of the city is very important. Is seeing it as the point between east and west useful, or do we impose on it an artificial geography?
I think that’s very astute, and absolutely right. Words such as ‘Asia’ and ‘Europe’ weren’t
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understood by hundreds of thousands of people who lived in the place that we now call Istanbul. But not only are there fake divisions in time and space when you look at the history of a city such as Istanbul, we also have a tendency to look at it from completely the wrong side of the compass. Firstly, this is a city that also connects north and south. We also talk about it as being the gateway to the east but, for the bulk of human experience, most of the exciting history in the story of the world happened in the east. So this city was instead a strange place right on the very western edge of the world. It’s absolutely critical to completely reset your mindscape when you’re thinking about this landscape.
ISTANBUL: A BRIEF HISTORY The peninsula west of the Bosphorus strait has been inhabited since at least the 7th millennium BC. Around 660 BC it was colonised by Greeks, who renamed it Byzantium, and then in AD 73 by Romans. In AD 330 it was refounded as Constantinople by the emperor Constantine. Over the centuries following the split of the Roman empire, the city was capital of the Byzantine empire; it declined in the Middle Ages and was captured by Ottoman sultan Mehmed II in 1453. After the foundation of the Republic of Turkey under Mustafa Kemal Atatürk in 1923, it was renamed Istanbul in 1930.
How can we do that? How can we expand our horizons so that we avoid these distinctions, and instead see Byzantium and Constantinople as a pivot from which the world fans out in 360 degrees?
We have to make a bit of an effort. That is obviously something that you’ve done, Peter, in your book The Silk Roads, which I found immensely refreshing. I remember you telling the story, in your introduction to that book, of lying on your bed as a teenager and looking at a map with all of this space about which you knew nothing – and having a sense that it really mattered. And it does all matter. Because although we continue to discuss the need to be ‘citizens of the world’ in philosophical terms, we are global citizens, both physically and physiologically. So we are doing ourselves the most enormous disservice if we don’t understand the need to look at the world from different angles. It’s our failing as a civilisation, and it’s critical that this is an issue that we now address, because there are acutely relevant histories here that have an impact on how we go about our day-to-day lives.
Bettany Hughes and Peter Frankopan in conversation.”Istanbul was a strange place right on the very western edge of the world,” says Hughes
When you’re writing a big history of a massively cosmopolitan city such as Istanbul, how do you explain the moments at which it turned inwards? Can you get a sense of ideas opening up and closing again?
I think that you can. There’s something very particular about the topography of Istanbul that allows it to remain cosmopolitan, even if it has had those moments of closing down. It was a walled city from very early on – we now think from its ancient Greek iteration onwards. This means that there was always the danger that a siege mentality might set in, but the city never quite embraced it. I think that’s because of the way in which Istanbul is set up geographically. It has always had satellite settlements – which are now part of greater Istanbul – and it’s almost as if that little central historical hub was never allowed to forget them at any point during its history. So even though there were moments when it closed off, when there were tensions, it was never allowed to become parochial. It’s like a magnet, bringing people in from everywhere.
Yes – and what’s very interesting is that it’s always been a city that’s hosted refugees. From the fourth century AD up until the 12th, arguably, it became the refugee city. And that tradition carried right on until modern history: in the Second World War, for instance, it took in a huge number of Jewish people from Paris. This is another reason why Istanbul is a special city: because of the notion that it’s a place of security and sanctuary. It’s very interesting that today there are more refugees in Istanbul than in any other city in the world.
Your book sparkles with anecdotes throughout. Which characters particularly stood out for you?
It might not be an answer that surprises you, but I love Theodora, the sixth-century empress of the Byzantine empire. We’re told that she was a very poor girl whose father was a bear tamer and trainer. She worked in and around the centre of Constantinople, particularly around the hippodrome, which was a very exciting place at the time. This was ‘the new Rome’, and because they were ‘new Romans’ they loved chariot racing. It was a high-octane, incredibly competitive culture, and chariot racing was the ultimate sport. A bit like Formula 1...
It was like every competitive sport you can imagine, combined. I’m sure you’ve been to Istanbul when there was a big football match on – well, the intensity and passion of those crowds are nothing in comparison. The entertainments that happened around the chariot racing were critical, and some were quite titillating. We’re told that young Theodora was one of the girls who entertained the crowds as an erotic dancer. What’s amazing is that she then apparently went on a journey around the eastern Mediterranean, becoming a Christian along the way. She slept her way up the ranks of officials and came back to the city before finally catching the eye of the emperor Justinian, who changed the law so that he could marry her. Suddenly, an erotic dancer was the empress of the civilisation of Byzantium at its greatest. This is what we’re told, anyway. And I wonder if it may just be true, because what’s very interesting about Theodora and Justinian – and it seems that the couple really did have
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The current Hagia Sophia, completed in AD 537. “People talked about it constantly glittering with light: all of the surfaces on the inside were reflective,” says Bettany Hughes
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CULTURE The Conversation
“Hagia Sophia is what led me to write this book. I’d argue that it’s the world’s most beautiful building” a passionate, close relationship – is that they worked together to reform law. They did a lot of work cleaning up and gathering together all of the Roman law that had been around up until that point, and we know that Theodora set up a safe house for women working in prostitution and made the penalties for rape and pimping more harsh. This seems to me to be a girl with some experience of the rough side of life – either that or she just had a great imagination and was some kind of proto-feminist, which seems more unlikely. So I wonder if, by her deeds, we do get a hint of her early life. In any case, it’s remarkable that Theodora ended up being the most powerful woman in the known world, with reforming, socially driven principles that she enacted and incarnated in the buildings around Constantinople – as with that safe house for women working in prostitution. This was also the period in which one of the city’s greatest buildings was constructed. Tell us about Hagia Sophia, because the built environment is fundamental to understanding this city – it’s about prestige, power, and self-consciously showing that this is a settlement that means business.
Yes – and what it also says is that this is the earthly home of the one true God. Constantinople was founded as the capital of Christendom, and it would have been very clear to inhabitants that this was where the centre of God’s power lay. Hagia Sophia [built as a church, later used as a mosque and now a museum] is an extraordinary building, even today. Even though it’s quite dark, its darkness almost sucks you in. But what’s remarkable is that it is almost the opposite of how it would have appeared in the medieval world, when people talked about it constantly glittering with light. It was filled with light on the inside and the outside, and would have been a pulsing beacon for those who passed along the Bosphorus. All of the surfaces on the inside were reflective: silver, polished marble, gold, mosaic. It had a luminous iridescence. That’s the reason that I’ve written this book, actually: like you, I went to Istanbul when I was quite young. I walked up to Hagia Sophia and went into the doors and thought: “This,
right here, is the story of the world. This is something that I have to understand.” You asked about the key characters in the city’s history – in a way, Hagia Sophia is its most important surviving character. I would argue that it’s the most beautiful building on Earth. You can imagine its effect 1,000 years ago. In a city that was this imperial in its projection, and in its certainty about being the home of God, how easy was it to be tolerant of new ideas and people?
It was an imperial and religious city, but it was also a trading city. If you are a port city, you have to get on with other people: if you’re a sailor, wherever you come from, you’re forced to have a cosmopolitan outlook in order to trade your goods. We now know, for instance, that Elizabeth I had such terrible teeth because of all the lovely sweet things that came to England from the Ottoman world. The concept of a lingua franca, or ‘bridge language’, emerged from Ottoman territories, too. So I think it does force an open-mindedness, which explains to me why these civilisations – in all of their iterations – lasted so long. The ‘new Rome’ lasted almost longer than the old Rome because you had this invigorating outside influence. In the Islamic world, Constantinople was a magnet that drew in everybody. How did the transition from the Greek, Christian city to the Turkish, Muslim one occur?
Constantinople/Istanbul was always as important as an idea as it was a place. It had a special place in Islamic literature and the Islamic mind. There’s a notion of it as a great city that the greatest Muslim armies had to take – and they tried, fairly quickly. Throughout the second half of the seventh century and first quarter of the eighth, Arab sieges and Muslim armies came pretty close to taking Constantinople. Because they didn’t, it became a prize that seemed ever more important to win. And it was also an intellectual and spiritual prize: throughout the story of Islam, there are lots of images of Constantinople as a place that needed to be captured. And then, of course, the Ottoman Turks – who came from a very different part of the world, as semi-nomadic tribes from
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A mosaic of the sixth-century empress Theodora, one of Bettany Hughes’ stand-out characters from Istanbul’s history. “This seems to me to be a girl with some experience of the rough side of life,” says Hughes
Hughes and Frankopan met at the British Academy in London late in 2016, just weeks after Hughes returned from a trip to Istanbul
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CULTURE The Conversation
“Things move very fast in Istanbul, and always have done. It has always been a protean city politically” central Asia – were slowly heading farther and farther west from the end of the 13th century onwards. We tend to think of the events of 1453 as coming out of nowhere – that suddenly the Ottoman Turks arrived and Istanbul fell and it was a newly Islamic city. But, of course, the Ottomans had already been nibbling away at the territories around it. And, as I say, it was very important for the Ottomans to take the city because of what was said about it in Islamic literature beforehand. From 1517 it was where the caliph sat – the centre of the caliphate that lasted until the 1920s. You mentioned the recent archaeological discoveries made in Istanbul. How did you find out about the latest developments, and what’s the mood like on the ground after the attempted coup this summer?
It seems to me you didn’t want to write too much about the 20th century. Tell us about the change from Constantinople to Istanbul, and how you decided to end the book.
I end the book in 1924 – just after Istanbul officially ceased to be the capital of the Ottoman empire, and when Ankara became the capital of the Turkish republic. There was no longer a sultanate, or a caliphate based in Istanbul, so all of those long-running continuities stopped then. That moment, both in practical and psychological terms, was the point at which there were huge changes – and I think there could be a whole second volume about the story of Istanbul beyond it. What parallels do you see with the situation today?
It’s a fascinating trope of Istanbul that it seems to be a city in which the people on the street have always felt they have I was there in the middle of October, and I can say that a voice, and where they could express that voice – often to no the mood is quite fragile and anxious. Things move very effect, but they would still try. I think this is partly due to fast in Istanbul, and always have done. Istanbul’s urban design: it was founded It has always been a very protean city in the classical era but has a medieval politically, so it would be specious for me landscape, so it has big gathering spaces ABOUT THE AUTHORS to try to predict what’s going to happen and medieval streets into which because it’s changing weekly. But, boy, protesters can melt away if things start Bettany Hughes is an should we care about the feeling on the to go wrong. author and broadcaster who ground and in government buildings. But I wonder if it’s also partly because has presented several highThis book is a prime example of how Istanbul is such a character in and of profile radio and television I won’t write history without going to itself. It’s almost bigger than its rulers, series. Her latest book is the place in which it happened. I think and the people who live there have a Istanbul: A Tale of Three it’s completely disrespectful not to get up sense of that: I know this from experiCities (Weidenfeld and out of your chair and spend time there. ence, having been inadvertently caught Nicolson, 2017) In some ways, this book is a biography of up in the Taksim Square protests in a city, and I’d hate it if somebody wrote 2013. They’re somehow empowered by my biography and didn’t want to spend a the place in which they live, and have a Peter Frankopan bit of time in my company. sense of a power to speak that lasts is the director of the Oxford So this book has been quite longer than a single reign. It’s very much Centre for Byzantine demanding to write because I try to a city of protest. Research and the author be rigorous and go to every place that PODCAST of the bestselling The Silk I talk about – as well as those which Listen to Bettany Hughes and Peter Frankopan Roads: A New History of the impacted upon the city and those upon on the December edition of the World Histories podcast: historyextra.com/podcasts World (Bloomsbury, 2015) which the city had an impact.
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CULTURE Book Reviews
Book Reviews Train of thought Evan Mawdsley commends an elegantly written exploration of how Lenin’s railway journey out of exile forever changed 20th-century politics Lenin on the Train by Catherine Merridale Allen Lane, 368 pages, £25
Some 75 years ago,
the American writer and literary critic Edmund Wilson wrote a classic history of revolutionary thought. He entitled it To the Finland Station: A Study in the Writing and Acting of History. Essentially, Wilson’s book described the intellectual baggage that Vladimir Ilich Lenin took with him when, in April 1917, he made a train journey that has since become famous. Along with other radical émigrés, the Russian leader travelled out of exile in Switzerland on board a so-called ‘sealed train’ that did not officially enter the lands it passed along the way, including Germany and Scandinavia. Upon arrival at his final destination, the Finland Station in Petrograd (now St Petersburg), Lenin took control of the Bolshevik faction of the Marxist Russian Social Democratic Labour Party, leading them in the October Revolution of 1917. Catherine Merridale has undertaken a fresh history of that journey. Her
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account is less ambitious than Edmund Wilson’s, yet it still combines a technical description of the eight-day journey, a well-informed discussion of the international context, and more besides. Despite all of this, the trip is mainly used to provide a structure around which to base the story of Lenin’s actions in the first months of 1917. Merridale’s narrative artfully cuts back and forth from Lenin in Switzerland and in transit, to events taking place in his absence in Petrograd. Then, after describing Lenin’s arrival home, she outlines his successful assertion of leadership over the Bolshevik party in the spring of 1917. Merridale has previously written powerful books on a number of important aspects of 20th-century Russian history. In this volume, too, she combines historical professionalism and imagination with impressive literary ability. One important passage – alluding to John Buchan – refers to the perception (by others) of Lenin as “the bleak Greenmantle of the north, the prophet with his baleful sack of German gold”. She also has a sharp eye for physical surroundings, having explored the locations of Lenin’s exile in Switzerland,
Merridale mixes historical professionalism and imagination with impressive literary ability
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Lenin returns from exile in Switzerland in 1917. More than just a description of the journey, Catherine Merridale’s account is “a well-informed discussion of the international context”, says Evan Mawdsley
his route home, and the places in which he lived and worked in Petrograd. For instance, Merridale remarks wittily that the Swedish-Finnish border town of Tornio, where the Bolshevik leader re-entered the Russian empire in 1917, is now the site of the most northerly IKEA in the world, attracting custom from, among other places, citizens of the present-day Russian Federation. Though there is nothing wholly new in her interpretation, Lenin on the Train remains an extremely readable and thought-provoking account. The chapter on German financial support for Lenin’s activities in Petrograd in 1917 after his return is a little less clear, but the author makes the judgment – surely a correct one – that imperial Germany did more than facilitate Lenin’s return. Perhaps more than Merridale’s earlier work, this is a top-down history. Her Lenin actually has much in common with Wilson’s: both writers see him as an
individual thinker attempting no less a task than to remake the social institutions of humanity. Although she fully acknowledges the formidable strength of pressure from the Russian masses, her account essentially describes Lenin’s successful takeover of that movement, thanks to his “dynamic energy” and successful reading of the popular mood. Merridale is certainly not uncritical of Lenin, and the ‘real’ Vladimir Ilich that Merridale presents is markedly different from the turgid character of Stalinist accounts. But characterising him as belonging to “the springtime of hope”, as Merridale does, seems rather strong for a politician whose hope was, above all, to ignite a European civil war. Unlike Wilson’s To the Finland Station, this book has a fair amount to say about the consequences of Lenin’s actions. It ends with a chapter on the memorialisation of his trip combined with a description of the tragic eventual fate, at the hands of the later Stalinist regime, of passengers on Lenin’s train, and of some of those cited as key witnesses in Petrograd: doomed revolutionaries such as Alexander Shliapnikov and Nikolai Sukhanov. And Merridale’s parallels continue to the present day, too: in a stunning, if revolting, metaphor, she potently compares the state of Lenin’s embalmed but rotting corpse with that of Vladimir Putin’s Russia in the 21st century. Evan Mawdsley is honorary professorial research fellow at the University of Glasgow
Five minutes with... Catherine Merridale
What inspired you to write this book? I have always been struck by the way that Russian history is kept outside the European mainstream, and wanted to bring it back in. When you read about the First World War, for instance, the eastern front is seldom more than a footnote, while the Russian Revolution is treated as an entirely separate subject. But Russia was an ally of Britain and France, and the ideas and characters involved were formed in Europe’s very heart. A train ride, crossing a continent at war and quite literally connecting Zurich, Berlin and Stockholm to Russia, seemed an ideal way to explore the connections and bring us closer to this chapter from our past. What new view of Lenin did you gain? I’ve been travelling to Russia for 30 years, so I am used to the idea of a dead Lenin. As I researched this book he came alive in all the vigour of his prime: overbearing, brilliant, terrifying. What most surprised me was the fact that he was a good listener. He could sit with a factory worker for hours, patiently drawing him out on the details of his job and working conditions. The ability to listen was invaluable to any revolutionary leader, but it’s not the first thing we associate with Lenin. You recreated Lenin’s journey. Which places did you find most interesting? It’s hard to single out individual places but Berlin, Haparanda and St Petersburg were special. Berlin fascinated me because I saw almost no trace of its former division; the capitalism that Lenin deplored has really won. By contrast, I had the privilege of following Lenin around St Petersburg in the company of people who grew up in the old Soviet world. They still admired him because he represented saccharine security, a repressive decency, and the preservation of the past. Haparanda, the Swedish frontier town from which Lenin crossed into Finland, remains a charismatic, wild place. In Lenin’s time it was a European transport hub, but these days it feels like the edge of the world.
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CULTURE Book Reviews
What the world is reading right now AUSTRALIA Motorcyclists from the German army on the streets of Warsaw, 1939. Norman Ohler’s new book describes them as “Teutonic Easy Riders”
Buzz kill Roger Moorhouse is unconvinced by an account of Nazi drug use that’s generated plenty of publicity Blitzed: Drugs in Nazi Germany by Norman Ohler Allen Lane, 368 pages, £20
There has been much
UNITED STATES Currently high on the New York Times bestsellers list is Candice Millard’s Hero of the Empire: The Boer War, a Daring Escape and the Making of Winston Churchill. This is familiar territory for Millard, whose three books have all been bestsellers in the US. Her first, The River of Doubt: Theodore Roosevelt’s Darkest Journey, published in 2005, recounted the harrowing story of the former president’s trip down a tributary of the Amazon. She followed this in 2011 with Destiny of the Republic: A Tale of Madness, Medicine and the Murder of a President. The president in question was James Garfield, assassinated in 1881 after four months in office. A former writer for National Geographic, Millard has a gift for creating dramatic tension that history buffs in the US can’t seem to get enough of. Douglas Smith is a historian and author whose latest book is Rasputin (Macmillan, 2016)
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clamour about Norman Ohler’s book in recent months, but it seems no one has checked if any of what he reveals is actually new. His claims are certainly sensational. He argues not only that Hitler was addicted to a cocktail of drugs, administered by his unscrupulous doctor, but also that the entire Third Reich was permeated with drug use – particularly of Pervitin, a form of methamphetamine. Such contentions might shock those unfamiliar with the detail of Nazi history, but they are scarcely novel: Hitler’s drug use has featured in all of his biographies. The extent and effect of that use has also been examined, with most sober commentators concluding that Hitler, a hypochondriac, was most likely not addicted to the various drugs administered to him – Pervitin, cocaine and the morphine derivative Eukodal. Where Ohler is on sturdier ground is with his ‘revelations’ about Pervitin use within Germany’s wider population,
particularly its armed forces. Again, this story may surprise casual readers but, though Ohler adds welcome detail, little of substance is actually new. His suggestion that Blitzkrieg was driven by Pervitin, meanwhile, is interesting, but cannot be allowed to go uncontested. A former novelist, Ohler is stylistically strong but rather ill-suited to serious non-fiction. He is not helped by his use of curious first-person excursions and unverifiable novelistic flourishes. Most grievously, perhaps, he peppers his book with incongruous drug slang – “junkies”, “fixes”, “hopped up” – even referring to the Wehrmacht’s motorcycle troops, ludicrously, as “Teutonic Easy Riders”. This would be an interesting subject for a serious historical treatment, but sadly Blitzedd does not deliver that. Some of its conclusions are seductive, even plausible, but are not presented with enough evidence to be wholly convincing. At best, this is a popular synthesis of existing studies; at worst, it is a collection of assumptions, allusions and half-truths. Roger Moorhouse is the author of The Devils’ Alliance: Hitler’s Pact with Stalin, 1939–1941 (The Bodley Head, 2014)
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British historians Simon Sebag Montefiore, Peter Frankopan and Mary Beard have been recent top sellers for Sydney independent booksellers Pages & Pages. But Ghost Empire, reprinted for the third time after just six weeks, is currently making the most waves Down Under. This chronicle of the rise and fall of Constantinople, by Australian broadcaster Richard Fidler, alternates with conversations between the author and his 14-yearold son Joe on a month-long trip to Italy and Istanbul – a fascinating history lesson for both Joe and the reader. “Talking about it to Joe was actually a way of explaining it to myself,” Fidler told me. Stephen Dando-Collins’ new book The Big Break: The Greatest American WWII POW Escape Story Never Told (St Martin’s Press) is published in February 2017
People power?
American patriots pull down a statue of George III in New York in 1776 during the revolutionary era, when “colonial leaders chose not to play ball” says Adam Smith
Adam IP Smith praises a history of the United States’ revolutionary era that has potent parallels with today’s world American Revolutions: A Continental History, 1750–1804 by Alan Taylor WW Norton, 704 pages, £30
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There is nothing new
in rich men posing as friends of the poor, nor in wealthy elites building popular support by alleging conspiracies against ‘the people’. Nor would our ancestors be unfamiliar with a politics in which economic grievance became overlain with racial prejudice and resentment at the often-imagined preferential treatment given to ‘alien’ groups. Alan Taylor’s new take on the American revolutionary era shows how a faction of the colonial elite in 13 of Britain’s most populous North American colonies harnessed populism in almost proto-Trumpian terms. It is a story that begins, as great political upheavals in history often do, with a pyrrhic victory – in this case, in the war against the French and their Native American allies that ended in 1763. Without the French presence to rally against, and with new expenditures to meet, the colonies fractured. Contrary to romantic foundation myths, the problem with the British government was, in some respects, that it was too weak rather than too strong. It wanted to stop white Americans dispossessing Native Americans of their lands west of the Appalachians, but lacked the means or money to do so. This, predictably, frustrated all sides. And when the king’s
ministers sought to raise at least some revenue in the colonies to help support defence, they found that they lacked the infrastructure to cope with opposition. The issue was that the newly enlarged empire had an inefficient and overly decentralised structure. Perhaps it could have been reformed in a consensual, incremental way, but enough colonial leaders chose not to play ball. After all, running their own affairs in their own way was the essence of their rights as Englishmen – and these colonies were becoming more, not less, British in their economic ties and cultural identity. When political resolution of the tension between London and colonial elites broke down, the result was violence. The ensuing revolution was, in Taylor’s telling, at least as much about people desperately trying to protect their privilege in the old order as it was about turning the page on the new. The war pitted factions of Americans against one another and, with huge consequence, revived Anglo-French military conflict. It also destabilised relations with Native
Americans and the power structure that ensured dominance over enslaved Africans. This messy civil war led to a result hardly anyone sought at the outset: the creation of what seemed the most notoriously unstable of all governmental forms – a republic. Taylor has no illusions about how politics in the new republic worked. It didn’t matter to Thomas Jefferson’s supporters that their hero was a Frenchspeaking, concubine-keeping, aristocratic slave-holder; his election as US president in 1800 was still said to have returned the revolution to its democratic roots. Ever since his triumph, Taylor writes, “Americans accepted government by wealthy men so long as they pretended to have common manners”. This is a tale grounded in the avarice, confusion and prejudice of real people. If it becomes the standard history of the revolution, as it deserves to, it will do great service in desacralising the world-changing events it describes. Adam IP Smith is an author and senior lecturer in history at University College London
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CULTURE Book Reviews Evening. Melancholy I, an 1896 work by Norwegian painter Edvard Munch. Robert Ferguson’s book “imaginatively explores the reasons for our fascination with all things Scandinavian”
Northern soul
Scandinavians: In Search of the Soul of the North by Robert Ferguson Head of Zeus, 384 pages, £19.99
Scandinavia has been much in vogue of late, whether in the proliferation of Nordic noir, awe at how the Finnish education system seems to deliver so effortlessly or a sense that somehow – perhaps in the peculiarly Danish sense of hyggee or ‘well-being’ – its inhabitants have discovered the secret of civilised living. Robert Ferguson’s book imaginatively and entertainingly explores the reasons for our fascination with all things Scandinavian. His self-imposed task is to understand the roots of just one
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element of the Nordic character – melancholy – but he soon broadens out his quest into a personal and historical odyssey through more than 1,000 years of Scandinavian history from Vikings to the European Union, including his own decades of residence in Scandinavia. Ferguson’s canvas is enormous. Characters range from the sixth-century historian Jordanes, who first referred to Scandinavia by name and called it the “womb of nations”, to terrorist Anders Breivik, whom the author saw by chance on an Oslo train several years before Breivik perpetrated his infamous massacre in 2011. Geographically, his account spans Norway, Sweden and Denmark, with detours as far as Iceland. Yet he handles his material adeptly, playing the role of engaged observer and weaving in his own personal story of discovering Scandinavia after an unfortunate initial six-month sojourn in a Copenhagen squat. Ferguson’s writing is evocative and studded with delightful vignettes. We are introduced to the stint undertaken by the 17th-century philosopher René Descartes as personal tutor to Queen Kristina of Sweden, whose insistence that he attend her to discuss the finer
points of ethics in the small hours in a freezing Stockholm winter led to severe pneumonia and his premature death. Johann Heinrich Struensee, meanwhile, was a physician who became proxy king of Denmark almost by accident during the madness of Christian VII. Plentiful anecdotes also illuminate the careers of illustrious Scandinavians such as the playwright and poet Henrik Ibsen and the painter Edvard Munch, often as the author enjoys the company of their modern counterparts. Many of the Norwegian, Danish and Swedish people whom Ferguson encounters reject the entire notion of Scandinavian melancholy as a foreign stereotype unfairly imposed on them, but the author persists right to the end. As with so many quests, though, the journey is far more revealing and absorbing than the final destination. Ultimately we learn that, while the soul of the north cannot quite be grasped, it can be experienced. For this, Ferguson is the perfect companion. Philip Parkerr is the author of The Northmen’s Fury: A History of the Viking Worldd (Jonathan Cape, 2014)
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Philip Parker enjoys a literary quest to uncover the real Scandinavian spirit – from the Viking era to the current wave of ‘Scandi’ drama
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Issue 1 – December 2016 BBC World Histories is published by Immediate Media Company Bristol Limited under licence from BBC Worldwide who help fund new BBC programmes. EDITORIAL Editor Matt Elton Group editor Rob Attar Art editor Susanne Frank Designer Paul Jarrold Production editor Paul Bloomfield Group production editor Spencer Mizen Editorial production Sue Wingrove Picture editor Samantha Nott Picture researcher Katherine Hallett Digital editor Emma Mason Website assistant Ellie Cawthorne CONTRIBUTORS Hakim Adi, Svetlana Alexievich, Paul Bloomfield, Davide Bonazzi, Joanna Bourke, Chris Bowlby, Kat, Gordon Corera, William Dalrymple, Lesley Downer, Felipe Fernández-Armesto, Peter Frankopan, Theresa Grieben, Paul Hewitt/Battlefield Design, Bettany Hughes, Nigel Jones, Tonwen Jones, Bryan Karatnyk, Yasmin Khan, Sunil Khilnani, Andrew Lambert, Margaret MacMillan, Evan Mawdsley, Rana Mitter, Fran Monks, Ian Morris, Roger Moorhouse, Richard Overy, Philip Parker, Michael Scott, Eleanor Shakespeare, Adam IP Smith, Arne Westad, Clifford Williamson, Anna Wray THANKS TO Rob Blackmore, The British Academy, Michael Cocks, Rachel Dickens, Tom Hercock, Charlotte Hodgman, Mary Hough, Sarah Lambert, Josette Reeves, Everett Sharp, Rosemary Smith, Anne Van Der Sanden ADVERTISING & MARKETING Advertising manager Sam Jones
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CULTURE Agenda
Agenda
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COLLECTION OF THE SMITHSONIAN NATIONAL MUSEUM OF AFRICAN AMERICAN HISTORY AND CULTURE, © 1965 SPIDER MARTIN
OUT OF THE PAST, INTO THE FUTURE Opened in September by United States president Barack Obama, the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture is housed in an impressive building in Washington DC. It tells, in chronological order, the stories of the US’s black people through 40,000 artefacts and images, including this 1965 photo of Martin Luther King and the activist Coretta Scott King, his wife. Inaugural exhibitions include an exploration of how black people’s struggle for freedom shaped the nation, and a history of efforts to establish the museum itself – spanning more than a century since the idea was first proposed in 1915. The Smithsonian National Museum of African American History & Culture nmaahc.si.edu
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CULTURE Agenda
SYRIA: BEYOND THE CIVIL WAR Syria may frequently be in the world’s headlines for its ongoing civil war, which has caused more than a quarter of a million deaths since it began in 2011. However, as a new exhibition at Toronto’s Aga Khan Museum emphatically reminds us, it’s also a nation with a rich cultural history. Beyond conflict and division, the artefacts here reveal tales of continuity and diversity. Syria: A Living Historyy until 26 February 2017 at the Aga Khan Museum, Toronto, Canada agakhanmuseum.org/syria
Tom Hardy, “bedecked in tattoos and beset by strange visions” as the lead character in the upcoming series Taboo
CLASH OF EMPIRES At its height in the 18th century, the East India Company traded commodities as diverse as tea, cotton and opium to nations around the globe (and, as we explore in our feature on page 76, was a key player in the complex history of the Koh-i-Noor diamond). Yet its success belied darker stories of corruption, conflict and exploitation – an interpretation amplified by the makers of new TV drama Taboo, who describe it as the historical equivalent of “the CIA, the NSA and the biggest, baddest multinational corporation on Earth”. It’s against this vision of the company that the series’ lead character, James Keziah Delaney, finds himself clashing upon his return to London in 1813 after a decade-long stay in Africa. Played by
Tom Hardy, Delaney is bedecked in tattoos and beset by strange visions – and, in a bid to unravel his father’s mysterious legacy and establish his own shipping empire, finds himself caught up in conflict between Britain and the nascent United States. Co-written by Hardy along with Steven Knight, creator of the hugely successful historical crime drama Peaky Blinders, the eight-part miniseries looks set to combine dark historical drama with a fantastical edge. Perfect fare, perhaps, for those Game of Thrones fans who are missing their dose of historical-tinged fantasy while it’s away from our screens. Taboo is set to air early in 2017 on FX in the United States and BBC One in the UK
MAKING SENSE OF COLONIALISM
“Our new countrymen,” proclaims a poster for a Samoan ethnological display, c1900
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Eclipsed by the larger empires of other European nations, the history of German colonialism has often been overlooked – an oversight that a new Berlin exhibition aims to correct. Telling the stories of both the colonisers and colonised, it also explores the ways in which ideas of superiority still linger into the 21st century. German Colonialism, Fragments Past and Present, until 14 May 2017 Deutsches Historisches Museum, Berlin dhm.de
STIFTUNG STADTMUSEUM BERLIN/STAATLICHE MUSEEN ZU BERLIN–MUSEUM FÜR ISLAMISCHE KUNST
A 13th-century incense burner from Syria, whose vibrant history is charted in a new exhibition
Sebastian Münster’s 16th-century Tabula Novarum Insularum, showing North and South America as continents, features in a new look at curious cartography
DENYING THE DENIERS Historical debate is a subject rarely explored in the world’s cinema multiplexes, yet that’s set to change when Denial, starring Rachel Weisz, makes its way to Europe following its release in the US late in 2016. Based on historian Deborah E Lipstadt’s book History on Trial, it follows her real-life legal battle with David Irving, who brought a libel action against her for suggesting that he had denied that the Second World War Holocaust took place. Denial, from 27 January 2017 (UK), 13 April (Germany) denialthemovie.com
BARRY LAWRENCE RUDERMAN ANTIQUE MAPS INC./REX FEATURES
MAPS AND LEGENDS Pirates, ghosts and monsters: we might now relegate them to children’s stories or amusement-park rides, but all were phenomena that our forebears believed were lurking on the edge of the known world, waiting to devour unwary travellers. Such fears are vividly depicted in The Phantom Atlas, a new book exploring some of the more outlandish maps drawn up across human history. Among the book’s 200 examples is a document produced to accompany the 15th-century Nuremberg Chronicle, a world history that followed the Bible story but still managed to include such additions as Sciapodes, a race that used their one giant foot to shade themselves from the sun. Others were drawn up
to support particular points of view: American real-estate developer Orlando Ferguson’s 1893 Map of the Square and Stationary Earth, for instance, depicts a world that, despite all evidence to the contrary, remains resolutely flat. “Fearful imagination, rumours, mythology and religious dogma were all principal resources called upon in the composition of historical cartography,” says the book’s author, Edward Brooke-Hitching. “I wanted to collect the strangest of these – both early manifestations and later examples, when we really should have known better.” The Phantom Atlas: The Greatest Lies, Myths and Blunders on Maps by Edward BrookeHitching (Simon & Schuster, 256 pages, £25)
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ISSUE 2 PREVIEW
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The Normandy landings A first-hand take on one of the Second World War’s defining moments
Russian Revolution A century on, experts tackle the big questions of the 1917 rebellions
The age of anger Pankaj Mishra talks to Tom Holland about his new book exploring the roots of 21st-century rage
From Britain to Botswana The extraordinary life of Ruth Khama, subject of a major new film
Across the Himalayas Robert Twigger follows in the footsteps of an epic historical journey
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Journeys Stories and sights from global history
In the footsteps of…
Franklin’s last expedition In 1845, a British expedition sailed into the harsh Canadian Arctic, seeking scientific knowledge and the fabled North-West Passage. Andrew Lambert traces the ill-fated final voyage of Captain Sir John Franklin
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GETTY IMAGES
“Franklin remains a hero of travel – a man who created paths for others to follow”
Rocky cliffs loom above the fjords of Baffin Island in the Canadian Arctic. Sir John Franklin’s expedition faced harsh conditions in summer – and life-threatening cold and hunger in winter
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JOURNEYS In the footsteps of Franklin’s last expedition
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and darkness, where signs of life were limited to seals, whales and the occasional bear. Franklin’s route bypassed the game-rich areas where Inuit peoples hunted, and even in high summer the landscapes of Beechey Island and Victory Point were merely ice and rock – stark, glittering and grim. Life in the high Arctic
Conditions on board were also grim. Locked in multi-year ice, the ships drifted slowly south to a soundtrack of creaking and grinding of stressed hulls and moving ice, pierced by the occasional crack of broken timber. In the winter, three months of permanent darkness, the men built deep banks of snow around the ships for insulation, only venturing outside to conduct key scientific work or to recover stores cached ashore. Days and nights did not vary, and neither did the diet: tinned and salt meat, lemon juice, dried vegetables, rum and sugar. Even once the sun rose, the ships were so far away from any known settlement that there was little encouragement to explore. Reading, writing and the occasional amateur dramatic production helped pass the time. Men familiar with the routine were inured to the tedium; others learned to wait. Franklin’s leadership and experience were key to sustaining the crew’s morale. He had been here before, and survived. Over the preceding 30 years the Royal Navy had made a series of voyages into the Canadian Arctic, often described as attempts to navigate the North-West
These blue-tinted snow spectacles, relics of Sir John Franklin’s expedition, were found on King William Island in 1859 – 12 years after Franklin himself had died
Such costly expeditions had far more ambitious objectives than merely satisfying geographical curiosity 104
Sir John Franklin: a life dedicated to science and the service of the state John Franklin (1786–1847) was born at Spilsby, Lincolnshire. He joined the Royal Navy in 1800 and served at the battle of Copenhagen the following year. In 1802 he joined his cousin Matthew Flinders on a circumnavigation of the southern continent that Flinders named Australia, and began his life’s work: mastering terrestrial magnetism for navigation. In 1805 Franklin fought at Trafalgar, where he was deafened by a gun blast, and later at New Orleans in 1815. To secure his promotion, in 1818 he travelled north to Svalbard on the first Arctic expeditions following the Napoleonic Wars, then commanded the famously punishing overland mission to the north coast of Canada (1819–22) – facing starvation, the crew resorted to eating lichen and even their own boots, with at least one accused of cannibalism. Franklin’s book about his experiences was a bestseller and, after completing a second expedition (1825–27), he was knighted in 1829 to become Captain Sir John Franklin, Fellow of the Royal Society, and a major celebrity. Franklin commanded a frigate in the Greek War of Independence (1821–32). In 1837 he took up the post of lieutenantgovernor of Van Diemen’s Land (Tasmania), where he worked to civilise the penal colony, bringing his scientific interests to the antipodes. The government wasn’t pleased with his tenure, and he may have accepted his final Arctic mission to restore his reputation. Franklin remains a hero of travel by land, sea and ice – a man who created paths for others to follow, in a life dedicated to science and the service of the state.
AKG IMAGES/NATIONAL MARITIME MUSEUM
n May 1845, two British warships carrying more than 130 men set off from London for the Canadian Arctic, where they entered the fabled North-West Passage. Neither ship returned; nor did any of the men. The fate of the expedition became the greatest maritime mystery of the 19th century, sparking many search-andrescue missions and inspiring a library of theories about what had happened to the ships and their crews. A highly effective public-relations exercise preserved the heroic reputation of expedition leader Captain Sir John Franklin, modifying the stated purpose of the voyage: rather than cutting-edge scientific research, it was redefined as geographical curiosity. Yet Franklin was 59 and obese; he had been selected to lead the expedition as a navigator and a scientist, not an explorer. A veteran of Arctic navigation, geomagnetic research and colonial government, he was a celebrity: a Fellow of the Royal Society and a bestselling travel writer. Franklin’s ships, the 350-ton former bomb vessels HMS Erebus and HMS Terror, were wooden sailing ships designed to carry mortars, reinforced to work in the ice, and equipped with second-hand steam engines driving screw propellers. Each carried a crew of nearly 70 men and food for three years; it was assumed that Franklin would complete his mission in that time. Once the ships left Greenland they passed from the human realm into a world of sea ice, white mountains, storms
Franklin’s ships meet the whalers Prince of Wales and Enterprise in Melville Bay
Supplies are loaded onto the Erebus and Terror
The expedition overwinters on Beechey Island
Erebus and Terror become locked in ice west of King William Island; the ships are abandoned in April 1848
Wreck of HMS Terror is found in Terror Bay, King William Island Wreck of HMS Erebus is discovered
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JOURNEYS In the footsteps of Franklin’s last expedition The remains of the storehouse built on Beechey Island in 1854 by the crew of HMS North Star in case Franklin’s expedition returned
The memorial to John Torrington – one of three of Franklin’s men who died on Beechey Island during the winter of 1845/46
GETTY IMAGES/NATIONAL MARITIME MUSEUM
François-Etienne Musin’s painting shows HMS Erebus in the ice during Franklin’s fateful expedition
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Passage between the Atlantic and the Pacific. In reality, these costly expeditions had far more ambitious objectives than merely satisfying geographical curiosity, or establishing passages through a deadly, ice-choked labyrinth that would be of no commercial value. Initially, these missions sought an explanation for the catastrophic weather patterns of 1816–17, which we now know were the results of the volcanic explosion of Mount Tambora on Sumbawa (now part of Indonesia). Scientists were also tasked with recording terrestrial magnetic data, to help determine whether a better understanding could aid navigation. In addition, their charts would set the Alaskan border with Russia as far west as possible, securing the fur-trade interests of the Hudson’s Bay Company. Those were the key agendas; the British government would not pay simply to locate a North-West Passage. Magnetic research
Franklin’s task in 1845 was to reach magnetic north and conduct a ninemonth series of observations of magnetic effects. The expedition was pushed by the Royal Society and the British Association for the Advancement of Science, which brought political pressure to bear on the government. If Franklin traversed the North-West Passage in the process, so much the better – but it was not essential. Retracing Franklin’s journey is not easy. The written record stops in Baffin Bay, with the last official reports and private letters carried home by his supply ship, Barretto Junior. Thereafter all we have to work with is archaeology, a small scrap of paper and Inuit testimony. Having paused in Disko Bay on the west coast of Greenland to take on supplies, in July 1845 Franklin’s ships sailed across Baffin Bay – where two whaling ships made the last reported sighting – and west into Lancaster Sound. Between here and the Beaufort Sea remained 200 miles of unknown territory: possibly sea, possibly land, but
The last survivors met Inuits, who ended the parley when they observed the white men eating human flesh certainly covered in ice. Amid that unknown lay magnetic north, first located in 1831. Franklin probed possible routes to the north before overwintering at Beechey Island, where three sailors died from an aggressive strain of tuberculosis. The remaining 126 men had also been exposed to the bacteria, as well as possible lead poisoning from faulty food cans. In the spring of 1846 Franklin headed south into Peel Sound. Here, on 12 September, his ships became stuck in dynamic multi-year ice floes west of King William Island. This much we know from a handwritten note found in 1859 by a later expedition. That note stated that Franklin died on 11 June 1847 – the cause remains unknown – along with several officers and men. With the ships locked in ice and slowly drifting south, by April 1848 food and lemon juice were running low and the crew were badly affected by scurvy (and probably tuberculosis). Second-in-command Francis Rawdon Crozier decided to abandon ship and march south to the nearest trading post – 1,200 miles away. Crozier must have known it would be physically impossible to cover that distance with only the food they could pull on their sledges, and there is no game in the desolate heart of the Arctic. When food began to run out, sickly men were left behind at what became known as Erebus Bay and then Terror Bay; the skeletal record indicates large-scale cannibalism. The last survivors met an Inuit hunting party, who ended the parley when they observed that the white men were eating human flesh. There were no survivors. In 1854, after 13 search missions had failed to locate the expedition, news of the
cannibalism reported by the Inuit reached Britain. Franklin’s widow refused to believe it, and sent her own ship to investigate. It found enough material to write a new narrative shorn of both cannibalism and magnetic science, focusing instead on heroic men who had laid down their lives to complete the North-West Passage. This version of the story, rendered in bronze and granite on the memorial to Franklin erected at Waterloo Place in London in 1866, became the official one. It is dishonest and demeaning to Franklin and his men: they sailed for a higher purpose than mere geographical curiosity. Historians of science have forgotten them, because the science they served proved to be a dead end: the Earth’s magnetic core moves irregularly, and cannot be used as a navigational tool. Far from being the bumbling old duffer of popular memory, John Franklin was a great scientist, navigator and naval officer. He reached places hitherto unseen by Europeans, and conducted cutting-edge research at the icy extremities of the Earth, part of the largest international science project of the age. He escaped the bounds of the known world, and the search for his expedition charted the Canadian Arctic. For more than a century, the ultimate fate of Franklin’s expedition remained a mystery. Then, on 3 September 2016, the sunken remains of HMS Terror were located in Terror Bay off King William Island, two years after the Erebus was found a little to the south. The rediscovery of the Franklin ships is just the latest episode in the extraordinary story of these doomed voyagers.
Andrew Lambert is Laughton professor of naval history at King’s College London, and author of Franklin: Tragic Hero of Polar Navigation (Faber, 2010)
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JOURNEYS
Global City Athens Greece
With sites as diverse as classical icons and reminders of recent upheavals, Athens is one of Europe’s most vibrant capitals. Here, historian Joanna Bourke explores the city she calls home
Joanna Bourke is professor of history at Birkbeck, University of London. Her books include The Story of Pain (Oxford University Press, 2014)
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The new Acropolis Museum is a celebrated modernist vision built, quite literally, on the capital’s classical past
t is impossible not to be charmed by Athens. At night, bouzouki music wells up from basements; tables spill out of ouzeris (taverns) where friends and strangers quarrel about politics. The air is filled with the perfume of wild basil, bitter orange, jasmine. Vociferous graffiti on crumbling walls cohabits with freshly painted Minoan ochres on neoclassical buildings. Visitors are welcomed with a hearty “geia-sou!” (or yassou – hello). Strangers to the city should start with the classics: if Athens is anything, it is the Parthenon 1 , built on the rock of the Acropolis, the location of the first settlement of Athens in 3000 BC. The Parthenon was constructed during the golden age of the statesman Pericles, in the fifth century BC. It dominates not only the city, but the Greek imagination. I encourage visitors arriving from the airport to take the ultra-modern metro to the Acropolis station. Outside the station is a tree-lined pedestrian street. I steer guests past tavernas offering vine leaves stuffed with rice, crispy calamari, smooth and sweet fava (a traditional split pea puree), horiatiki (Greek salad) and spicy loukaniko (village sausage), in order to enter the Acropolis Museum 2 .
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The entrance has a plexiglass floor through which ancient ruins can be viewed. The museum is a modernist temple in steel and glass to the ancient Greek world. Since opening in 2009, it has become acknowledged as one of the world’s great museums. The lights are on until late and through them you can see the relief sculptures of the Parthenon frieze, showing a procession celebrating the goddess Athena’s birthday. Less than half of the 160-metre frieze includes the original golden-marble reliefs; the rest are replicas, a reminder of Lord Elgin’s actions in removing part of the piece to Britain in the early 19th century. Outside the museum is the pedestrianised Dionysiou Areopagitou Street 3 , which skirts the Acropolis hill. This is the route to the Parthenon, the Theatre of Herodes Atticus, the Theatre of Dionysius and the rock of Areopagos (where Saint Paul preached in AD 51). It also leads to Philopappos Hill, whose quiet chapel of Agios Dimitrios 4 is well worth a visit, and to a famous yet timeworn outdoor cinema, Thission. Along with the cinematique that holds the Greek Film Archive (at the intersection of Megalou Alexandrou Street and Iera Odos), this cinema regularly premieres
ALAMY
City of ancient sites and modern visions
international films and champions daring Greek directors, such as Yorgos Lanthimos, of the Greek ‘weird wave’. At the end of Apostolou Pavlou, the continuation of Areopagitou, turn right into Adrianou towards Monastiraki and a maze of alleys packed with flea-market and antique stalls. At the metro station, turn left to reach Athinas Street and the sprawling food market 5 in streets near Omonia Square. It is home to Greek rembetika music, which probably originated in the Ottoman era in prisons, hashish dens and whorehouses. From there, it is only a short walk to the bohemian area Exarcheia, the heart of radical Athens and anarchism. This is an edgy, inner-city neighbourhood, teeming with tavernas, used vinyl stores and ultra-cool music clubs. Politics is imprinted on every pavement. Nearby is the Athens Polytechnic 6 , the site of the bloody student uprising of November 1973 that led to the end of the dictatorship that had imprisoned, tortured and exiled so many Greeks. On the corner of Mesologgiou and Tzavella there is a memorial to 15-year-old Alexandros
If Athens is anything, it is the Parthenon. It dominates not only the city, but the Greek imagination Grigoropoulos, killed by a policeman in 2008. The subsequent riots still resonate today among young people hurt by unemployment and austerity. Finally, I take visitors up Ermou Street (the Greek Oxford Street), past the 11th-century Church of Panagia Kapnikarea 7 to Syntagma Square, the beating heart of the city. This square, in front of the Greek parliament, is surrounded by museums, the best of which is the Benaki 8 on Koumbari Street. Since 2011, this square has been the site of demonstrations against austerity. Today, as in ancient times, Athens remains a bustling, enchanting cosmopolitan city.
ATHENS IN EIGHT SITES 1 The Parthenon The largest temple on the Acropolis odysseus.culture.gr 2 Acropolis Museum Finds from the Acropolis site 15 Dionysiou Areopagitou Street, Athens theacropolismuseum.gr 3 Dionysiou Areopagitou Street Car-free route to the top historical sites visitgreece.gr 4 Agios Dimitrios and Philopappos Hill 16th-century chapel and superb views Off Dionysiou Areopagitou Street 5 Central market area (Varvakios) Food market and rembetika music Athinas Street and surrounding roads 6 Athens Polytechnic Site of uprising against military junta 42 Patission (28 Oktovriou) Street, Athens 7 Panagia Kapnikarea Church 11th-century church Ermou Street, Athens 8 Benaki Museum Works of art from prehistoric to modern 1 Koumbari Street, Athens benaki.gr
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ILLUSTRATION BY TONWEN JONES
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JOURNEYS Wonders of the World
Wonders of the World Ciudad Perdida Colombia
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\ Emerald city in the clouds Groves of 30 metre-high tagua palms loom over the site of an ancient city in the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta mountains in northern Colombia. Known to indigenous peoples as Teyuna (‘Origin of the peoples of the Earth’) but more popularly called Ciudad Perdida – the Lost City – what remains was largely built by the civilisation now known as Tairona from around AD 1100. Covering more than 162 hectares, this is the most striking of 250 Tairona settlements that once studded the region.
THINKSTOCK/MAP: BATTLEFIELD DESIGN
The lost city of Colombia Hidden high on a remote, jungleclad ridge, a city that lay forgotten for almost four centuries till the 1970s is today revealing secrets about the pre-Columbian Tairona people. Paul Bloomfield explores the ruins of Ciudad Perdida
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JOURNEYS Wonders of the World
Intricate goldwork, such as this piece held at the Gold Museum in nearby Santa Marta, was produced by Tairona artisans renowned also for ceramics, featherwork and textiles described by early conquistadors as fabulously ornate. Guaqueros (looters) searching for such treasures stumbled on Ciudad Perdida in the mid-1970s, and in 1976 archaeologists began excavating the site.
p Made of stone This carefully cut and dressed stone may have been used for grinding corn; the Tairona also cultivated manioc, yams, beans, sweet potato and fruit on terraced slopes, while coastal communities fished.
L Social climbers Ciudad Perdida can be reached only on a challenging four- to six-day, 32-mile return trek from the nearest roadhead, through humid jungle. The hike culminates in a tough climb up some 1,200 stone steps from the Buritaca river to the city, at an altitude of around 1,100 metres. Isolation didn’t protect Teyuna from Spanish conquistadors, who arrived in the region in the early 16th century. After the Tairona revolted against the Spanish in 1599, continued conflict, introduced diseases such as smallpox and forced relocation saw most Tairona settlements abandoned by the turn of the 17th century.
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5 Urban network A stone slab engraved with interconnecting lines may map Tairona sites in the Buritaca valley. The remains of 26 other villages and towns in the surrounding area were discovered in the early 1980s, with scores more in the wider region. These traded extensively with coastal settlements.
ALAMY/GETTY/STAN JAMES AND YAEL ZWIGHAFT
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L Heirs to the city Little is known about the fate of the Tairona, believed to have been a complex society with polygamous families, after Teyuna and other settlements were abandoned. It’s believed that the Kogi people – the current inhabitants of the area – are descendants of the Tairona; they have constructed ceremonial houses at the site, where they periodically conduct traditional rituals today.
\ A round town
EYEVINE/DREAMSTIME
Tairona architecture was characterised by curves and rings, with many open spaces and freedom of movement. Ciudad Perdida consisted of more than 200 round plazas and terraces (here, the Great Ceremonial Terrace) plus dwellings, storehouses and water channels, linked by stone-built roads up to 4 metres wide. At its peak the city may have been home to more than 3,000 people, and was probably the political capital of a society that had evolved over perhaps 10 centuries since the site was first settled around AD 650.
Paul Bloomfield is a travel and heritage writer and photographer, co-author of several Lonely Planet books about adventure travel DISCOVER MORE The official guidebook to Ciudad Perdida is available online at: https://issuu.com/graparte/ docs/guidebook_ciudad_perdida
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Column
Michael Scott’s Global Connections
“Sicily is an incredible melting pot of ideas, beliefs and peoples – which is why it is such a key focus for thought in 2016” icily has been big in 2016. The British Museum in London, the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford and Amsterdam’s Allard Pierson Museum all hosted special exhibitions of artefacts from Sicily. And I’ve recently completed the filming of a two-part series on the history of Sicily, to be broadcast on BBC Two early in 2017. So why is Sicily’s history so popular right now? In part, it’s because Sicily is in the news as a destination for thousands of people rescued from unseaworthy craft attempting the crossing to Europe from north Africa. Sicily – like Greece – is on the front line of the biggest migration movement since the Second World War. When I spent a day this summer with the coastguard at Lampedusa, a small Italian island between Libya and Sicily, the sheer scale and highly emotional nature of this migration really hit home. The waters had been calm that week, and huge numbers of migrants were trying their luck on the seas: 7,000 had been saved on the Monday and 2,000 on Tuesday before I arrived on Wednesday. To the coastguards, each migrant is a life to be saved without question; I could see in their eyes the pain of each life lost. Occasionally, they are called on to do more: a week earlier, a mother had given birth just after being pulled from a sinking inflatable, her baby delivered by one of the coastguard team, after whom the infant was subsequently named. That day cemented my belief that the most critical law of the sea – save everyone you can, whatever the financial cost – should never be broken, and that any solution to the migration crisis must be sought before or after the crossing.
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Sicily’s history has always been marked by new arrivals, being a stepping stone between Europe and Africa (the southern tip of Sicily is actually south of Tunis) and a gateway between the eastern and western Mediterranean. Over the past 2,800 years it has been claimed by Phoenicians, Greeks, Romans, Vandals, Byzantines, Arabs, Normans, the French, the Spanish and, finally, Italians. Every one of those cultures left its mark on Sicily’s traditions, infrastructure, architecture, art, politics and society, making the island an incredible melting pot of ideas, beliefs and peoples. This is why Sicily is such a key focus for thought in 2016: it is a symbol of the difficulties, benefits and possibilities of the engagement between cultures that will no doubt define the 21st century. Of course, Sicily and the Sicilians have faced many challenges from the constant comings and goings over the centuries. But Sicilians are also incredibly proud of their international heritage. One particular example stands out for me. In the 1060s, the same decade in
which England was conquered, Normans arrived to oust the Islamic rulers of Sicily. But they did not erase their predecessors’ culture: in fact, they kept in place many of the Arabic administrative systems across the island, respected mosques (except those that had been built in former churches, which were converted back) and proceeded, over the next 70 years, to establish a cosmopolitan and international trading scene that embraced both Christian and Arab worlds. One structure that encapsulates this is the Cappella Palatina (Palatine Chapel), built by the Norman king Roger II in his Palazzo Reale (Royal Palace) in Palermo in the early 12th century. It has a western Christian floor plan, Byzantine gold mosaics and a beautiful Arabic sculptured wood ceiling. At that time, the Christian church was still reeling from the great schism of the eastern and western churches, and the crusaders were waging war on Islam – so this building stood as a shining beacon of inclusivity, multiculturalism and internationalism in Europe. While filming the BBC series, we learned that, curiously, the Sicilian dialect (really a language in its own right) has no future tense – Sicilians talk about everything in the present. But though its people think in the moment, there are many lessons from Sicily’s past to learn for our increasingly globalised future. Michael Scott is an author, broadcaster and associate professor at the University of Warwick. See details of his books and TV work: michaelscottweb.com DISCOVER MORE Michael Scott’s Sicilyy is due to air on BBC Two early in 2017 in the UK
ILLUSTRATION BY ELEANOR SHAKESPEARE
