IS THE ANGLO-AMERICAN ‘SPECIAL RELATIONSHIP’ OVER?

WorldHistories
FRESH PERSPECTIVES ON OUR GLOBAL PAST

How has migration Plus

The murder

changed the world?

that reshaped
the American
civil rights
movement

Islam’s struggle
with modernity
How the faith adapted
to a new global order

Brazil: a nation
moulded by slavery

Israel and the Palestinians:

a history of conflict
On the trail of a fatal trek
into the heart of Australia
A VIDEOGAME HISTORY
OF THE UNITED STATES
Digital depictions that play with
our understanding of the past
Death on the Delta
A ring, found on the body of murdered
black teenager Emmett Till following his
lynching in Mississippi in 1955, etched
with his father’s initials. On page 62, we
chart how the case galvanised the US
civil rights movement for many decades
WELCOME ISSUE 11

Any attempt to explore the

breadth of global history –
its cultures, its stories, its
people – in 100 pages will
inevitably lead to unlikely
juxtapositions and fusions.
So it is this issue that one of history’s most intractable
conflicts, between Israelis and Palestinians, rubs
shoulders with a look at how global Islam has adapted
to the 21st century, along with the heartrending story
of a mother’s grief for her murdered son and that
incident’s impact on civil rights movements worldwide.
These are complex, weighty issues, so we have
dedicated large sections of this issue to exploring them
in depth. From page 44, Matthew Hughes focuses on
eight key periods and turning points in the conflict
in the Middle East, a struggle that has scarred life for
many of the region’s people across generations. This is
not a definitive history – with fiercely contested inter-
pretations, it’s impossible to reduce events to a sim-
plistic narrative – but an effort to place a story that is
clouded by controversy into a longer historical context.
Another subject that regularly makes headlines is
the rise of violent extremist groups claiming to act
in the name of Islam. The reasons for this trend, and
how the faith should evolve within a 21st century west
that can seem at best indifferent to religious belief, are
among the subjects explored in the latest book from
writer and historian Ed Husain. He met fellow expert
Tom Holland for a frank and fascinating discussion on
these and other questions, which starts on page 72.
The lynching of Emmett Till in Mississippi in 1955,
meanwhile, was both a human tragedy and an event
around which the global civil rights movement
coalesced and gained momentum. From page 62,
BBC presenter Maria Margaronis investigates what
happened and why it continues to resonate in 2018.
If the past is rich in such diverse stories, the same
is certainly also true of the present. This issue’s cover
feature explores what happens when these stories run
alongside each other, creating new frictions, and asks:
how has migration changed the world? A panel of
leading experts tackles that topic from page 16.
There’s much else to discover in the issue, too, from
the feats of a female Viking
voyager (page 42), to what
videogames can tell us
about the past (page 54).
We will be back from
5 September; for now,
enjoy the issue.

Matt Elton
Editor, BBC World Histories

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5PAGE 24
COVER ILLUSTRATION: DAVIDE BONAZZI–SALZMANART. INSIDE FRONT COVER: ALAMY.
INSIDE BACK COVER: GETTY IMAGES. THIS PAGE: STEVE SAYERS–THE SECRET STUDIO 3
CONTENTS Features

A painting from
c1822 shows a pair
of black men
practising the
martial-art-cum-
dance capoeira in
Brazil. This issue we
explore how slavery
and a unique blend of
cultures shaped this
South American land

16 44
THE BIG QUESTION Israel & the Palestinians:
How has migration A history of conflict ✪
BY MATTHEW HUGHES
changed the world? ✪ Explore eight key periods in the ongoing
Eight experts debate how the movement of
hostilities in the Middle East
people has influenced societies throughout
history – from ancient Phoenicians crossing 54
the Mediterranean to Caribbean colonies
Playing with history ✪ ✪ On the
and 20th-century independence movements cover
BY JOHN WILLS
26 Switch on to the videogames that recreate
Brazil: a society shaped or reimagine important episodes and eras
by slavery ✪ 62
BY LILIA M SCHWARCZ
The legacy of Emmett Till ✪
How a South American land viewed as an
PUBLIC DOMAIN

BY MARIA MARGARONIS
earthly paradise by its Portuguese colonisers
Why a teenager’s brutal murder proved a key
was transformed by the migration of enslaved
moment for the US civil rights movement COVER ILLUSTRATION
labourers from Africa BY DAVIDE BONAZZI

4

REGULARS
34 A Year in Pictures: 1894
by Richard Overy
42 Extraordinary People: Gudrid
Thorbjarnardóttir by Eleanor
Rosamund Barraclough
98 Museum of the World: Swahili ngoma
kuu (drum) by Gus Casely-Hayford
THE BRIEFING
6 Viewpoints: Elizabeth Gillespie McRae
on US white supremacy, Kathleen Burk on
the ‘special relationship’ ✪, Hazel Smith
on North Korean diplomacy, and Robert
Bickers on China’s ‘anti-history charter’
14 History Headlines: Discoveries and
developments in the world of history
CULTURE
72 The Conversation: Ed Husain and
Tom Holland discuss the former’s book
on the history of Islam ✪
80 Agenda: The latest events and exhibitions
JOURNEYS
84 In the footsteps of… a fateful expedition
across Australia by Peter FitzSimons ✪
92 Global City: Arles, France
by Bijan Omrani
94 Wonders of the World: Bagan,
Myanmar by Paul Bloomfield
24 Subscribe to
BBC World Histories
– enjoy the latest issue
FREE with a
14-day trial digital
subscription
FRAN MONKS
Free
issue
CONTRIBUTORS
Expert voices from the world of history
Gus Casely-Hayford
The broadcaster, author and director of
Washington DC’s Smithsonian National
Museum of African Art introduces a powerful
symbol of Swahili independence on page 98 –
a 17th-century ngoma kuu (big drum). “These
drums embody Swahili concepts of statehood
and sovereignty,” he explains.
Peter FitzSimons
The historian and writer traces the 19th-century
trans-Australia expedition of Robert O’Hara
Burke and William Wills on page 84. “Their
wagons were laden with 600lb of salt pork,
400lb of bacon, 60lb of potted mutton, 150lb of
sperm-whale-wax candles, a dining-room table,
oak chairs and a Chinese gong,” he reveals.
Ed Husain
“What does being modern and Muslim mean
today?” That key question is addressed by the
author of The House of Islam in our interview on
page 72. “Within Muslim tradition is a strong
precedent for empiricist thought, for being
critical of history, and of looking to the future
and not necessarily imagining a perfect past.”
Maria Margaronis
On page 62, the writer and presenter of a new
BBC Radio documentary explains why the bru-
tal lynching of a 14-year-old boy in Mississippi
proved so pivotal. “Through that charmed coin-
cidence of history, politics and brave personali-
ties, Emmett Till became the protomartyr of the
civil rights movement,” she says.
Marlou Schrover
Migration has impacted on societies through
human history – but so has the movement of
ideas, says the professor of migration history at
Leiden University on page 23 : “Dutch students
organise American-style baby showers, but this
is less to do with American migration and more
with watching American sitcoms.”
CONTACT US
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Post BBC World Histories, Immediate Media Company
Bristol Limited, Tower House, Fairfax Street, Bristol BS1 3BN, UK
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Website historyextra.com/worldhistories
Twitter twitter.com/historyextra
5
The Briefing
The history behind today’s news
UNITED STATES
View- Gender politics
points Debates about white supremacy in the United
States have focused on the role of men – yet
women have also championed the cause
BY ELIZABETH GILLESPIE MCRAE
Expert opinions on
the historical issues
ecent incidents in the US
behind today’s news
R – including the murderous
rampage of white suprema-
cist Dylann Roof in a
church in Charleston, South Carolina in
2015, and the fatal violence at the ‘Unite
the Right’ march in Charlottesville,
Virginia last year – point to a disturbing
political reality. Indeed, the 2017 report
by the Anti-Defamation League’s Center
on Extremism noted a startling increase
in domestic extremist murders in the US
committed by white supremacists.
As a result, the violent and masculine
nature of white supremacist politics has
come to dominate the public narrative. It
is easy to draw parallels between, on the
one hand, southern lynch mobs and the
incendiary speeches of cigar-smoking
segregationists and, on the other, the
white nationalist violence and rhetoric
of the alt-right today.
This focus, however, obfuscates
the deep and widespread American
6
investment in white supremacist
politics. If we shift away from the
male-dominated, the dramatic and
the violent, and instead examine
women’s participation, the mundane
and the grassroots, an equally instruc-
tive story emerges.
For decades, groups of white women
have crafted multi-layered efforts to
shape and sustain white supremacist
politics in the United States. They were
racial segregation’s constant gardeners.
In 1920, as the woman suffrage
amendment wove its way through the
states, many southern white women
promised that their votes would uphold,
not weaken, racial segregation.
To make good on that promise,
the members of Georgia’s United
Daughters of the Confederacy banned
textbooks that painted slavery as the
cause of the Civil War. A (largely
female) legion of social workers, school
teachers and public-health officials
 Have your say Share your thoughts
on this issue’s columns by emailing us
at worldhistories@historyextra.com
implemented Virginia’s 1924 Racial
Integrity Act that instituted the
‘one-drop rule’ (legislating that anyone
with a single black ancestor should be
classified as ‘black’, and also included
in that category anyone previously
labelled Indian or ‘mulatto’).
Many white women involved in
such movements reported neighbours,
patients and pupils for ‘passing’ as white,
and made sure that racially ‘suspect’
individuals did not marry across
the colour line, did not attend white
schools, and were not admitted to white
hospitals. By 1940, South Carolina’s
Cornelia Dabney Tucker had orchestrat-
ed a takeover of the state’s Republican
party, transforming it from a multi-
racial party to a lily-white one.
By the time black southerners boy-
cotted buses and achieved the integra-
tion of lunch counters in the 1950s,
white women had decades of experience
in securing segregation in education,
Groups of white
women crated
multi-layered
efforts to shape
and sustain white
supremacist
politics in the US
ILLUSTRATION BY KATE HAZELL
transport and other public facilities,
legislated in so-called ‘Jim Crow’ laws
enacted in the late 19th century. In addi-
tion to shouting at black schoolchildren
integrating formerly white-only schools,
in 1959 white Mississippi women award-
ed $500 to two high-school students
who wrote the best essays on the benefits
of racial segregation.
Networks of white women
from South Carolina to California
condemned the United Nations for
supporting African and Asian nations,
protested against raising money for
Unicef through Halloween trick-or-
treating, and ousted school officials
who adopted multicultural curriculum
materials. By the 1970s, some white
women in the urban north and west
took to the streets to protest bussing
(the practice of transporting black and
white students to previously segregated
schools) as a method of tackling
educational segregation.
As mothers, educators, voters and
storytellers, white women with similar
concerns had shaped a Jim Crow nation
through public welfare, public schools,
and electoral and cultural politics.
Reflecting the broad and multilayered
nature of their work, the collapse of legal
segregation did not end their efforts.
They had already schooled generations
in the lessons of Jim Crow citizenship,
ensuring that the advocates of white
supremacy would continue to animate
the American political landscape.
When we confront these stories,
it becomes hard to imagine how this
strand of American politics could
emerge without the work of white wom-
en. They kept the ground well-fertilised
and productive, allowing white suprem-
acist politics to grow and bear fruit
decade after decade. Their work also
reminds us that the narratives of white
supremacist politics, past and present,
must not ignore the mundane but Æ
7
THE BRIEFING
G Viewpoints
significant work done by activists
who might decry the violence of white
nationalism but still embrace policies
that sustain racial inequities.
If we are to understand the persis-
tence of white supremacist politics, a
new narrative must emerge that recog-
nises how increased violence, national
rhetoric and partisan leadership have
coincided with periods of activism by
women-led grassroots organisations. For
example, it’s telling to recall the actions
of such organisations as the women of
Restore Our Alienated Rights in Boston
who in the mid 1970s took to the streets
to prevent their children from being
bussed to different schools in order to
achieve ‘racial balance’.
We must also confront the conse-
quences of seemingly small-scale
incidents, such as that reported by
investigative journalist Nikole Hannah-
Jones in 2014, in which parents at a
school meeting in a majority white,
relatively affluent St Louis district
painted the influx of black students
from a nearby school as a catalyst for
an educational, criminal and public-
health crisis.
When we look at how systematically
and widely political messages about
white supremacy have been reinforced
at the local level by seemingly sensible,
trusted civil servants and propagated
by widely accepted cultural messages,
we should begin to reframe how we
go about dismantling such systems
of inequity. Voting out the loudest
and most ham-fisted demagogues
might feel good, but it falls well short
of addressing the systems, institutions
and individuals (many of them women)
that gave them power.
Elizabeth Gillespie
McRae is Sossomon
Associate Professor at
Western Carolina
University, and author
of Mothers of Massive
Resistancee (OUP, 2018)
8 ILLUSTRATION BY KATE HAZELL
GLOBAL POLITICS
End of an affair?
The long-standing ‘special relationship’ between the
US and UK may seem at risk – but it has endured
many shaky periods over the past 75 years
BY KATHLEEN BURK
his is undeniably an
T awkward period for
Anglo-American relations.
Whether one looks at
discussions between the leaders, probable
future trade negotiations, Nato, White
House tweets or British public opinion,
the relationship has not been this cool
for some years. President Donald Trump
appears to prefer authoritarian leaders –
men who appear strong, who can walk
confidently and authoritatively across
their own countries and into others – to
‘weak’ liberal democracies. In his mind
the Germans and most other European
states don’t fulfil financial obligations to
Nato, Canada’s leader Justin Trudeau is
“dishonest and weak”, the Mexicans are
sending rapists across the border, the Brit-
ish are at the mercy of terrorists – the list
could go on. But this matters most to the
UK, which for a century has seen itself as
America’s closest – almost indispensable
– ally: it has the furthest to fall. The ques-
tion is: has this happened before? And,
given the precedents, is there any chance
of a recovery to the former position?
The relationship between the prime
minister and president is what the public
notices the most. It might be a surprise
to learn that the Churchill-Roosevelt
relationship began to break down in
1943. Roosevelt perceived the USSR as,
like the US, a socially reforming nation;
conversely, he saw the UK as the control-
ler of a huge empire, antipathetic to
American values. He also looked at the
USSR as a rising power and at the UK as
a declining one. He therefore decided
that the US and the USSR should work
together after the war, and that the UK
should be left out of the equation.
But how to convince Stalin of this
profound change of mind and policy?
At the Teheran Conference between
the three in 1943, Roosevelt set out to
humiliate Churchill repeatedly in front
of Stalin, causing Churchill to stalk out
of the room during one dinner. This
change in the US-Soviet relationship
did not ultimately happen, but that was
not because Roosevelt had changed his
mind – it was because he died. President
Harry Truman had a much less rosy
view of the USSR than had his predeces-
sor, as did his most important advisors.
With the rise of the USSR as a hostile
power, the change in perception and
policy seemed permanent.
As a consequence, the UK assumed its
place as the US’s closest ally. It was even
referred to as such in a US State Depart-
ment policy paper in 1950, just before the
outbreak of the Korean War: “No other
Roosevelt decided
that the US and
USSR should work
together, and set
out to humiliate
Churchill in front
of Stalin
country has the same qualifications for
being our principal ally and partner as
the UK… Most important, the British
share our fundamental objectives and
standards of conduct… To achieve our
foreign policy objectives we must have
the cooperation of our allies and friends.
The British and with them the rest of the
Commonwealth… are our most reliable
and useful allies, with whom a special re-
lationship should exist.” This is followed
by a warning sentence: “The relationship
is not an end in itself but must be used
as an instrument of achieving common
objectives.” But the succeeding sentence
might have provided some reassurance
to the British, saying that “We cannot
permit a deterioration in our relationship
with the British.”
Nevertheless, when the nations’
objectives were diametrically opposed
during the Suez Crisis in 1956, many in
the US government lost faith in the UK
and the link was temporarily broken.
Yet though the relations between the
leaders were crucial, the power of senior
members of the administration and the
associated bureaucracy were also of great
importance. This was evident again in
the early 1970s, when Edward Heath was
UK prime minister and Richard Nixon
US president. Nixon had distrusted
Heath’s predecessor, Harold Wilson, and
was prepared to welcome Heath with
open arms as a fellow conservative when
he won the general election in 1970. It
was not to work out. Nixon wanted to re-
pair the special relationship, which Heath
persisted in calling the natural relation-
ship. Heath also wanted to make it clear
to the Americans that the UK’s future lay
with Europe, not with the US.
During the 1973 Yom Kippur War,
the British refused to let American planes
stationed in the UK be used to re-supply
the Israelis, and refused to allow US
planes stationed elsewhere to refuel at
Cyprus. The Americans were outraged:
did not the allies understand that at stake
was preventing the Soviets from estab-
lishing a central position in the Middle
East? After President Sadat of Egypt
called for Soviet and American troops to
separate the two sides, the USSR invited
joint US-USSR military intervention to
shore up the ceasefire and appeared to
threaten the unilateral despatch of Soviet
troops if the US declined. The US viewed
this as an ultimatum and, in the early
hours of 25 October, moved military
forces worldwide to DefCon 3, the alert
preliminary to war. The UK received one
hour’s advance notice of this, at 1.15am;
the other Nato allies received none. There
were other conflicts, and by the end of
their respective terms Nixon and Heath Æ
9
THE BRIEFING
G Viewpoints
detested each other, barely able to be
in the same room. On the other hand,
Henry Kissinger and the US State
Department certainly continued to
work with the British Foreign Office.
This disenchantment continued dur-
ing the 1970s, not because of personal
animus but because the UK was increas-
ingly of less use to the US, largely because
it appeared to the Americans to be falling
apart both politically and economically.
Yet the Americans were worried because
the two had important military links,
through the nuclear and intelligence
relationship and through Nato.
The election of Thatcher in 1979
and Reagan the following year was very
important to the resumption of the
relationship, partly for the same reason
that Nixon initially welcomed Heath
– they were two conservatives – but in
this instance they liked each other and
largely shared political philosophies.
Under Thatcher and Reagan, a close re-
lationship flourished, which was crucial
for the UK during the Falklands War in
1982 when military supplies from the
US were vital. The UK’s performance
during the war convinced the Ameri-
cans that the British could once again
be vital military allies – a situation that
has continued, though with lessening
importance given the sharp decline in
British military strength.
Nevertheless, the UK’s close rela-
tionship with the US was replicated
during the leaderships of Bill Clinton
and Tony Blair, George W Bush and
Blair, and Barack Obama and David
Cameron. When Clinton was leaving
office, he warned Blair that he should
not distance himself from the new
president and his administration in
10
spite of their differences in politics and
policies, but that Blair should “hug them
close”. This Blair clearly did. There was
a hiatus during the leadership overlap of
Brown and Obama, whose policies and
personalities apparently did not mesh,
but the expectations of both the British
and Americans were high when it was
thought that Hilary Clinton would be
elected president.
When the British government
learned they would need to deal with
Trump, they did what British politicians
and officials tend to do: picked them-
selves up, dusted themselves down, and
set out to preserve the relationship they
considered vital to their security.
President Trump appears not to
view the United Kingdom as anything
special, in spite of the intelligence and
nuclear links. From his public activities
and comments, and his ignoring of Brit-
ish interests and sensibilities, it could be
assumed that he has lumped the British
into the European pot. He respects
strength, power and authority in a leader
of a strong country. Neither Theresa
May nor the UK fit his template.
Can the relationship be saved? It
is important to remember that leaders
Trump appears not
to view the UK as
anything special,
in spite of the
intelligence and
nuclear links with
the United States
Have your say Share your thoughts
on this issue’s columns by emailing us
at worldhistories@historyextra.com
come and go but bureaucracies remain,
and are settled into habits of working
with each other. Foreign and some
economic interests are shared. The US
and UK are each other’s most important
investors and trading partners. Also,
public opinion can change. British
public opinion swung from approval
of Obama to acute dislike of Trump; it
could change again. American public
opinion is less volatile, primarily because
most Americans are uninterested in the
UK (except for the royals), or indeed
in many other countries save, perhaps,
their two neighbours. Fundamental
interests are slow to change, and the
pendulum will swing back.
Nevertheless, the world will have
changed. In his first 500 days as
president, Trump has – in my view –
managed to destroy any trust other
countries had in the veracity of the
president’s word and the stability of
American solidarity with her allies.
The United Kingdom is apprehensive
because it has few alternatives but to try
to maintain the ‘special relationship’.
Yet the United States will also suffer,
because the president will ineluctably
find that, when faced by his favourite
type of authoritarian leaders, being
Kipling’s “cat that walked by himself”
can be a dangerous position.
Kathleen Burk k is a
historian and writer. Her
new book is The Lion and
the Eagle: The Interaction
of the British and Ameri-
can Empires, 1783–1972
(Bloomsbury, 2018)
 NORTH KOREA
Peace (and poverty)
The summit between US president Trump and
North Korea’s leader King Jong-un ended with
promises of peace – but didn’t address the spectre
of famine in the northern half of the peninsula
BY HAZEL SMITH
t’s easy to see why the
I summit in Singapore this
June between US president
Donald Trump and Kim
Jong-un, state leader of the Democratic
People’s Republic of Korea (more widely
known as North Korea), received
massive global media coverage. The two
chief protagonists made for mesmerising
clickbait. Just days before the summit,
Trump dismissed and insulted demo-
cratic allies, going so far as to call
Canadian prime minister Justin
Trudeau “dishonest”. In contrast,
Trump subsequently argued that he has
“developed a very special bond” with
Kim Jong-un, the dynastic head of
a brutal, anachronistic political system,
who in 2013 authorised the execution
of his uncle and former mentor Jang
Song-thaek, and who reputedly oversaw
the 2017 murder of his half-brother Kim
Jong-nam in Kuala Lumpur airport.
Yet it would be a mistake to dismiss
the strategic significance of the summit,
which symbolised the end of the threat
of a potentially global war in Korea and
the realignment of political relations
between the United States and North
Korea. The end-of-summit statement
committed these two nuclear states,
which have been in a highly conflictual
relationship for 70 years, to building
“a lasting and stable peace regime” on
the Korean peninsula. North Korea also
agreed “to work toward complete denu-
clearisation of the Korean Peninsula”.
The Trump-Kim meeting was not
merely an idiosyncratic exception to
North Korea can
no longer feed its
people from its
own resources, and
has insufficient
funds to buy food
post-Second-World-War American
foreign policy practice. A number of
Republican presidents, who could never
be accused of being soft on communism,
have made strategic, dramatic and un-
expected realignments towards former
ideological enemies.
Then-president Richard Nixon’s
meeting with Chairman Mao in Beijing
in 1972 reversed the policy of total
isolation of China – a policy enforced
to the extent that the United States had
refused to allow the communist People’s
Republic of China, established in 1949,
to take its seat in the United Nations
Security Council until 1971.
The 1987 Reagan-Gorbachev
Summit in Washington DC, along with
the 1989 George HW Bush-Gorbachev
Summit held at sea off Malta, presaged an
even bolder change in policy. The United
States committed publicly to end the
political, economic and military (through
proxy wars in Latin America and Africa)
conflict that had existed between the two
superpowers for much of the period since
the 1917 Bolshevik revolution in Russia.
But the global media coverage, with
its excessive concentration on the two
personalities, has obscured the immedi-
ate threats facing North Korea’s popula-
tion of over 25 million people.
Right now, in 2018, North Korea
can no longer feed its people from its
own resources. With sanctions biting,
agricultural production has fallen by
nearly a million tonnes – about enough
to feed one-fifth of the population for
one year. Neither are there sufficient
funds to import food, energy or the
agricultural products necessary to pre-
vent the reoccurrence of the widespread
hunger and starvation of the mid-1990s,
which killed between half a million and
three-quarters of a million people.
The CIA ranks North Korea’s
economic health (in terms of GDP per
capita) at 214 out of 228 countries.
Assessments of GDP per capita range
between US$600 and US$1700; by
contrast, the latest figure for China is
US$16,600, while South Korea has a
per-capita GDP of US$39,400. South
Korea’s Bank of Korea estimates that
North Korea’s entire Gross National In-
come (GNI) stood at US$32.4 billion in
2016; to put this figures in perspective,
the annual budget of the UK’s National
Health Service is five times that figure,
at around US$160 billion.
Of course, as state leader Kim Jong-
un is responsible both for the welfare of
the population of North Korea and for
the illegal nuclear programme current-
ly sanctioned by the United Nations
Security Council. Yet in the euphoria
surrounding the summit, it would have
been good to see someone asking the
question: “We’ve had the circus… now,
where’s the bread, when’s it coming, and
who’s going to pay for it?”
Hazel Smith is profes-
sorial research associate
at the Centre of Korean
Studies, SOAS Uni-
versity of London, and
author of North Korea
(Cambridge UP, 2015) Æ
11
THE BRIEFING
G Viewpoints
CHINA
Anti-history charter?
A new law in China forbids defamation of the
nation’s ‘martyrs’ – and serves as a reminder that
the critical appraisal of our global past remains key
BY ROBERT BICKERS
his May, it became a civil
T offence in China to insult,
defame or otherwise
infringe “on the names,
likenesses, reputations, or honour of
heroes and martyrs”. This was part of
a package of measures in a wide-ranging
Law on Protection of Heroes and
Martyrs that also instructed government
departments, among other directives, to
mark an annual Martyrs’ Remembrance
Day with appropriate ceremonial, to
protect and enhance sites associated with
martyrs, assist their families, and ‘guide’
public remembrance of their ‘spirit’.
“Society shall honour, study and
champion the heroes and martyrs,” it
demanded, their “deeds and spirit… an
important manifestation of the common
historical memory and core socialist
values of the Chinese ethnicity” (an
English translation of the law is available
to read at chinalawtranslate.com).
The catch is that at no point in the
legislation’s 30 articles is any definition
of a hero or martyr provided. Not only
does China’s modern history show us
that the fortunes of the dead can wax
and wane quite dramatically, but this
deliberate ambiguity essentially means
that any historical figure might fall
within the reach of the law, should the
state decide it. Any historian or novelist
(or anybody else) might therefore find
themselves liable to a legal challenge.
Not only that, but one of the modern
state’s most famous ‘heroes’ probably
did not exist in the first place. This was
Lei Feng, a “cog in the machine” of
12
socialism (as he put it in his diary) –
a young soldier who died in 1962 when
a telephone pole fell on him, and who
became the focus of repeated propagan-
da campaigns using his diary and photos
– which are now widely believed to have
been partially or completed fabricated.
The new law does not protect the past;
it is instead a charter against history.
In 2003, the UK’s then secretary
of state for education, Charles Clarke,
remarked that he did not “mind there
being some medievalists around for
ornamental purposes” but that there was
“no reason for the state to pay for them”.
More recently, the then vice-chancellor
of Queen’s University Belfast thought
fit to argue that “society does not need
a 21-year-old that’s a sixth-century
historian”. These were high-profile, but
not unusual, dismissals of the utility of
teaching and studying history – which
stood also as a proxy more widely for
the arts and humanities – in a university
“Things that
should not be
discussed” include
“historical mistakes
by the Party” such
as the violence
of the Cultural
Revolution
system in which the language of employ-
ability and skills has become pervasive.
Arts and humanities scholars have
robustly defended themselves against
such philistinism, but we might also
learn from China’s example to identify
other reasons for defending history as
a discipline and a practice.
It is precisely because illiberal states
accord great importance to history that
they prioritise and control its teaching,
guard access to its records, censor and
monitor its dissemination, and enact
legislation to protect historical figures.
For example, from the mid-1990s
onwards, Chinese archives began to
open up access to their holdings. On my
first foray into Shanghai’s Municipal
Archives in 1991, I was given a reader’s
ticket and a cup of tea, and told that
everything I wanted to see was closed.
In 1995, the first of some 20,000 files
relating to the foreign-run Shanghai
Municipal Council were opened up.
From 2000 onwards, the Second
Historical Archives of China (part of the
state national archives) opened almost
60,000 files of the foreign-staffed
Chinese Customs Service. In 2004, the
Chinese Foreign Ministry opened an
archive of almost 80,000 files. Just about
all of this material is no longer accessi-
ble. I can now get a nice cup of coffee in
the archives in Shanghai, but I can get
very few files.
The closure of archives has out-
raged China’s own historians, who find
themselves having to try to find funds
to consult records overseas. Meanwhile,
ILLUSTRATION BY KATE HAZELL
 Have your say Share your thoughts
on this issue’s columns by emailing us
at worldhistories@historyextra.com
the new legislation “encourages and sup-
ports research on the deeds and spirit of
heroes and martyrs”, and “efforts to re-
search, compile and publicise historical
materials” about them. This builds on
well-funded initiatives to scour archives
internationally for materials to secure
evidence of Japanese wartime atrocities,
for example. Archives and historical
research are of vital importance – but
not if that scholarship does not serve the
interests of the ruling party.
The political context for this law is
the tightening of Communist Party
control under its leader, Xi Jinping.
BHAGESH SACHANIA
Concern about the potential under-
mining of the state by the growth of
a more independent-minded civil
society has seen crackdowns on any
public discussion of ‘universal values’,
‘civil rights’, press freedom and other
“things that should not be discussed”,
as a directive in 2013 put it, which
included “historical mistakes by the
Party.” This last includes those
‘mistakes’ that the Party itself has in
the past acknowledged, such as the
policies that prompted the 20th
century’s worst famine, and the
violence of the Cultural Revolution,
during which many of those previously
and now again regarded as revolution-
ary heroes were attacked, jailed and, in
many cases, lost their lives as a result.
The German playwright Bertolt
Brecht missed a thought in the famous
exchange in his 1943 play Life of Galileo.
“Unhappy the land that has no heroes,”
ventures one character. “Pity the land,”
retorts Galileo, “that needs a hero.”
More pity is merited, perhaps, for those
who ‘protect’ their heroes.
But pity, too, those societies that
think history serves an ornamental
purpose. Open societies should learn
one thing from China’s example: history
is important. We should support its
teaching and discussion in universities
and schools, and we should spare no
‘heroes’ the sceptical analysis that the
practice of history demands.
Robert Bickers is
professor of history at
the University of Bristol.
His latest book is
Out of China: How the
Chinese Ended the Era of
Western Domination
(Allen Lane, 2017)
13
THE BRIEFING History Headlines

1 GREENLAND
Frozen assets
Analysis of lead pollution trapped in layers of Arctic

History ice has revealed details of the changing economic

landscape of ancient Europe. The pollution is thought
to have been generated during the smelting of lead ore
Headlines to produce coins, providing economic context for some
of the key moments during the Roman empire. The
highest levels of pollution from coin production were
found to have occurred during the Pax Romana –
an era of relative peace from 27 BC to AD 180. The Greenland ice sheet was
polluted with lead emitted
by smelting for Roman coin 1
production, providing clues
to ancient economic activity
2 FRANCE
Heritage lottery
French president Emmanuel Macron has announced
plans for a national lottery to raise funds for the resto-
ration of historic art and buildings. Sites set to receive
funding from the €15m scratchcard scheme – which will
launch in September
– include an 18th-
century island
fortress off the coast
of Brittany, a Roman
aqueduct, and the
historic homes of
writer Pierre Loti and
Martinican intellectual
Aimé Césaire.

The historic home of

French naval officer and
novelist Pierre Loti will
receive funding from
a new French lottery

4
3 POMPEII ITALY 4PACHACAMAC PERU
Deadly debris Rare relic
The headless skeleton of a man crushed to death by a A large funerary bundle containing
falling rock while running away from the eruption of a 1,000-year-old mummy has been
Mount Vesuvius has been discovered near Pompeii. discovered at the pre-Colombian site
Experts believe that the man may have escaped the of Pachacamac near Lima by archae-
initial stage of the volcanic eruption in AD 79, only ologists from the Université libre de
to be hit soon afterwards by a stone sent flying by Bruxelles. This relic is an extremely rare
the eruption along with the resulting ash cloud. find because most burial chambers in the GETTY IMAGES/UNIVERSITY LIBRE DE BRUXELLES/
The man’s head has not yet been unearthed. area – later home to a 15th-century Incan
healing temple
– were looted
FUSCO-EPG-EFE-REX-SHUTTERSTOCK

during the Span-

ish conquest.
Experts will A funerary
use X-ray and bundle
3D imaging containing a
mummy dating
tools to study
from about
the mummy 1,000 years ago,
The recently discovered without un- discovered at the
skeleton of a man crushed wrapping it. pre-Colombian site
by a falling rock during the
of Pachacamac in Peru
eruption of Vesuvius in AD 79

14
 5 URALS RUSSIA
Ice Age idol
New analysis shows that a carved wooden idol found in the Ural
Mountains was made 11,600 years ago, making it one of the
world’s oldest pieces of symbolic art. The Shigir Idol, thought
to have been created during the last major glacial period, was
The Shigir Idol,
discovered in a peat bog in 1894. Professor Thomas Terberger discovered by gold
of Göttingen University stated that pushing back the idol’s date prospectors in the
of creation, previously estimated at c7600 BC, by 2,000 years Ural Mountains in
“dramatically changes our views about the birth of ritual art”. 1894, may be 2,000
years older than
previously thought

6 GISBORNE NEW ZEALAND

Subterranean settlement
The remains of a 14th-century Maori
village have been discovered 2.5 metres
underground in the city of Gisborne, on the
east coast of New Zealand’s North Island.
Discoveries at the riverside site include
obsidian tools and fish hooks made from the
bones of the now-extinct moa bird. The rare
find is expected to help archaeologists to
piece together a picture of Maori settlement
in the area before the arrival of Europeans.

7 ABEL BETH MAACAH ISRAEL

Mysterious monarch
Experts have been baffled by a 3,000-year-old
sculpture unearthed in northern Israel. The 5cm-
high bearded head wears a crown, and is therefore
ALAMY/ILAN BEN ZION-AP

believed to portray a royal figure, though his identity A 5cm-high sculpture

remains a mystery. According to dig archaeologist carved from a glass-like
Naama Yahalom-Mack, a clue to the figurine’s material in the ninth
identity could be his “very interesting hairdo”, century BC, discovered
at Abel Beth Maacah, an
similar to the way in which ancient Egyptians
archaeological site in
depicted people in the Near East; it may indicate northern Israel
that it represents a monarch from the region.

WORDS ELLIE CAWTHORNE 15

16 ILLUSTRATION BY DAVIDE BONAZZI
 THE BIG
QUESTION

How has
migration
changed
the world?
Throughout human history, men and women have travelled
across continents and oceans, in search of opportunities,
seeking refuge from war or persecution, or transported as
slaves. Eight experts discuss the impacts these people had
on the places they settled – and the lands they left behind

Æ
17
The Big Question: How has migration changed the world?
Robert Garland
“Migration was central to
growth and sustainability
for both ancient Greek
and Roman civilisations”
According to United Nations Refugee
Agency (UNHCR) figures, as of June
2018 there are 68.5 million forcibly
displaced people worldwide.
An unprecedented crisis? Hardly.
Though the scale was much smaller in
antiquity, proportionately the suffering
was just as great. Before the Persian inva-
sion of Greece in 480 BC, the Athenians
evacuated some 100,000 women, children, elderly and slaves
to the Peloponnese and islands off the coast of Attica. When
the Athenians finally arrived at their destinations, there were
no medical services, no reception centres, no aid workers, no
supplies of clothing, bedding or clean water to greet them. The
evacuees returned to their homes to find them burned down –
not once but twice. Had the Persian invasion been successful,
they would have been either enslaved or massacred.
Both Greek and Roman civilisations were dependent
upon the movement of displaced persons, though they rarely
feature in ancient accounts, largely because no one much
cared. The Greeks exported their surplus population around
the Mediterranean. When the island of Thera (now called
Santorini) experienced a severe famine, it sent an expedition
to Libya. The enterprise failed, and the would-be settlers
sailed home. However, on their return their compatriots
pelted them with rocks and ordered them not to land – such
was the extremity of their hunger. Sending out boatloads of
refugees has always been a hazardous enterprise and then as
now, no doubt, many thousands perished at sea.
By contrast, Rome’s rapid demographic growth depended
on an influx of foreigners, many of them refugees. Romulus,
its first king, established an asylum on the Capitoline Hill “to
which a mixed rabble, some free – others servile – fled from
the neighbouring communities eager for new opportunities,”
as the historian Livy put it.
Greek civilisation spread because of the willingness of
its population to be displaced, whereas Roman civilisation
grew because of the willingness of its population to accept
outsiders. Migration was thus central to the growth and
sustainability of both civilisations – a readiness to migrate
and a readiness to host. That is no less true for the growth
and sustainability of modern societies.
Robert Garland is the Roy D and Margaret B Wooster Professor
of the Classics at Colgate University, New York
18
Jessica Gibbs
“Migration has had an
enormous impact on the
US – its economic and
political development,
culture and demography”
Since its founding as an independent
nation in the late 18th century, the United
States has been home to many millions of
migrants and the dream destination of
millions more. Migration has had an
enormous impact on the United States –
its economic and political development,
culture and demography. It has also
shaped its foreign policy in important
and enduring ways. The lively US interest in the Northern
Ireland peace process under President Bill Clinton related to
Irish-American identity, as did Fenian American advocacy
for Irish independence in the 19th century.
During the Cold War, the openness of the US political
system and the enormous power the United States wielded in
the world, together with the refugee origins of much migration,
encouraged the development of organised diasporic foreign
policy lobbies. One prominent example were Cubans,
welcomed as refugees from the 1959 revolution and initially
pawns of the CIA in the disastrous Bay of Pigs invasion of
1961. However, as the Reagan administration came to office,
his first national security advisor, Richard Allen, urged a small
group of Cuban-American conservatives to create an American-
style lobby. The Cuban American National Foundation
(CANF) became privileged participants in policymaking.
They championed Reagan initiatives in Cuba, Central
America and Angola, and received government funding for
pet Cuba projects while contributing to politicians’ election
campaigns. In the post-Cold War period, as old reasons for
economic warfare against Cuba disappeared, Cuban-Americans
and their congressional allies intensified sanctions in the 1992
Cuban Democracy Act and the 1996 Helms-Burton Act.
Whether this impact of migration is viewed as positive
or negative depends partly on an evaluation of the objectives
themselves. In contrast to CANF’s punitive approach, other
groups lobbied Washington for more economic assistance or
trading opportunities for their home country. Diasporic
lobbies may provide a corrective in an environment otherwise
dominated by economic or security interests, but they can also
remove policy areas from debate by a wider public as politicians
pander to a mobilised but unrepresentative section.
Jessica Gibbs is a lecturer at Aberystwyth University

Cubans demonstrate against Fidel Castro in Florida in 1994. Cuban
conservatives who fled to the US during the revolution or after the
communist regime took power became influential in US foreign policy
GETTY IMAGES
Kwame Nkrumah, first president of independent Ghana, dances with
Queen Elizabeth II in 1961. Nkrumah’s time studying in the US and UK
informed his later efforts to win independence for his country
Sumita Mukherjee
“Anti-colonial struggles and
fights for universal human
rights in the 20th century
were shaped by migration”
Enforced migration underpinned much
change. Transatlantic slavery involved the
enforced displacement of African men, women
and children. In addition, after the abolition of
slavery an estimated 3.5 million Indians were
forced into indentured bondage and displaced
to colonial plantations in the Caribbean,
Africa and parts of the Pacific. The labour
of African slaves, indentured Indians and
Chinese workers shaped the infrastructures and economies of so
much of the world, through the building of railways and roads,
and through the wealth generated through their plantation labour.
But how do we measure change? The original question implies
that change is easy to measure and easy to notice. Change does not
just take place because ‘great individuals’ shape history. How do
we measure the stealth of migration – the long-term changes that
migrant communities have influenced, shaping language, food,
music and other forms of culture? How do we measure shifts in
social attitudes over time?
Migration shaped European empires and the nature of imperial
conquest in the 18th and 19th centuries. Colonial officials,
military officials, merchants, missionaries and labourers from
Europe were involved in migrations to colonise various parts of the
world, through trade, conquest or settlement. Communities were
changed in many ways through contact with these European
migrants, not least through decimation or subjection.
But imperial migration was not one-way. Migration also helped
to eventually dismantle empires. Anti-colonial struggles and fights
for universal human rights in the 20th century have been shaped
by migration. Many leaders of anti-colonial movements in Asia
and Africa started their political careers as students in European
or American universities. Feminist struggles were similarly shaped
by migrants.
Kwame Nkrumah, Jomo Kenyatta and Jawaharlal Nehru had
formative student experiences in Britain that they brought to the
nationalist struggles in Ghana, Kenya and India, respectively.
Migration has been hugely beneficial for aspiring political leaders
through the centuries – in meeting new people, in learning about
different societies and cultures, in communicating important
messages, and in realising how connected we are as human beings,
whatever our background.
Sumita Mukherjee is senior lecturer in history at the University of Bristol,
and author of Indian Suffragettes: Female Identities and Transnational Networks
(Oxford University Press, 2018) Æ
19
The Big Question: How has migration changed the world?
David Abulafia
“The greater the mix of
peoples, the more cities
have flourished culturally
and economically”
We are all migrants, at least by descent.
The ‘racial purity’ preached by the
Nazis has no biological foundation
whatsoever. Studies of the human
genome reveal that every population
consists of a mixture – even, beyond
sub-Saharan Africa, a mixture with our
Neanderthal cousins.
Two groups of migrants can be
distinguished. On the one hand, we have peoples who have
moved en masse, such as the Germanic peoples who invaded
the Roman empire (and were themselves a great ethnic mix),
or the enormous wave of European settlers in the Americas,
or the vast numbers of African slaves transported to the
Americas over several centuries in vile conditions.
The arrival of the Germanic invaders caused the
breakdown of the old political, social and economic order as
these newcomers established their own kingdoms from the
fifth century AD onwards. These became the basis for
several of the states we recognise today: the Franks in France,
the Angles and Saxons in England. Yet this was a complex
legacy – the marriage of Roman and Germanic cultures –
as is revealed by the survival in Spain, Italy and France of
languages based on Latin, not German.
The second group of migrants consists of small groups
of merchants who transformed the economy of places they
settled. Beginning with the ancient Phoenicians around
900 BC, the Mediterranean – from Lebanon to beyond
the Strait of Gibraltar – became an integrated trading zone.
The Phoenicians shipped silver and copper from Spain and
elsewhere to the Middle East, and they also transformed
north Africa by founding a flourishing and famous city at
Carthage, near modern Tunis. These exploits were repeated
across the millennia by others who brought their business
skills to every city in the Mediterranean: Genoese, Venetians,
Portuguese Jews, Armenians, and so on.
The greater the mix of peoples, the more the world’s cities
have flourished culturally and economically. The simple
answer to the question ‘how have migrants changed the
world?’ is that migrants have madee the world.
David Abulafia is emeritus professor of Mediterranean history at
Cambridge University. His books include The Great Sea: A Human
History of the Mediterranean (Allen Lane, 2011)
20
Meleisa Ono-George
“Enslaved people, working
under brutal conditions,
helped generate individual
wealth and fuel Britain’s
national industrialisation”
When people consider the Anglo-
Caribbean region and migration, they
may think only of postwar migration
of Caribbean people to Britain – the
Windrush generation. However, from the
first English settlement in the region, the
Caribbean has been both the destination
for and source of migrant labour from
across the British empire and the world.
English colonial involvement in the region from the 1620s
ensured a steady flow of migrants to the Caribbean in search of
opportunity and a better life for themselves and their families.
With few such opportunities at home, indentured labourers
from the British Isles moved to the region to work on tobacco
plantations in hopes of achieving some wealth after a short con-
tract. As sugar plantations developed in the mid-17th century,
opportunities for indentured European labourers declined as
they were replaced by forced migrants – enslaved people from
the African continent.
Enslaved people worked under brutal conditions but, by
their labour, helped generate incredible wealth for individuals
and fuelled national industrialisation in Britain. The introduc-
tion of enslaved labour did not stop British migration to the
region. Many men (and rather fewer women) migrated to the
Caribbean with the intention of exploiting the opportunities
that developed throughout the 18th century around sugar
production, hoping to make their own fortunes.
But migration to and from the Anglo-Caribbean was not
just from Europe or Africa. Following the abolition of slavery
in the British Caribbean in 1834, planters sought workers
from Asia. Indentured labourers from India and, to a lesser
extent, China migrated to the region to work plantations
throughout the 19th century and into the early 20th century.
While many returned at the end of their contracts, many
more remained.
Migration, whether forced or free, created large-scale shifts
in demographics and the establishment of diaspora communi-
ties. These communities have contributed to the culture, ideas
and wealth of the countries in which they settled, creating the
globalised world that is so familiar to us today.
FRAN MONKS
Meleisa Ono-George is senior teaching fellow in Caribbean history at
the University of Warwick
BRIDGEMAN

Slaves in a Cuban sugar-cane field, depicted in a painting of 1874. Millions of enslaved Africans were transported to work
plantations in the Americas, later joined by indentured labourers from Asia. “Migration, whether forced or free, created
large-scale shifts in demographics and the establishment of diaspora communities,” says Meleisa Ono-George Æ
21
The Big Question: How has migration changed the world?

Martin Pitts

“The real global migrants

with lasting impacts
were oten the objects
that travelled with people
in the Roman empire”
Migrants had a huge impact on the
success and longevity of the Roman
empire. The urbanisation of a peripheral
province such as Britannia would have
been impossible without high levels of
human mobility. Migrant communities
settled several of Britain’s first cities, no-
tably London, Colchester and York. The
Roman system depended on soldiers,
colonists and their families from the breadth of the empire,
living in new settlements on confiscated land – as illustrated
by the tombstone of centurion Marcus Favonius Facilis, one
of the first Romans of Italian descent who we know died near
the new veteran colony of Colonia Claudia Victricensis (Col-
chester) shortly after the invasion of AD 43. He had gone to
the trouble of importing his tombstone all the way from the
Rhineland, where his legion was previously based.
Roman soldiers set up camp, as depicted in a scene from Trajan’s column
However, the real global migrants with lasting impacts (completed AD 113). “The Roman system depended on soldiers, colonists
were often the objects that travelled with people, illustrated by and their families from the breadth of the empire,” explains Martin Pitts
three cremations excavated at Roman Exeter, which was estab-
lished in AD 55 as a legionary fortress and initially inhabited
by men of largely Italian origin. The first grave (AD 55–70)
contained objects typical of cemeteries at legionary bases
across Europe, such as red-gloss terra sigillata pottery and
glass vessels. The cups and plates in such graves were at the
forefront of a Roman consumer revolution, and were essential
in the spread of new dining practices throughout Britannia.
Another grave of the same period contained an unusual
decorated beaker but no sigillata, instead resembling the graves
of local communities some 200 miles away in Essex and even
farther afield in northern Gaul. These selections highlight the
culturally diverse customs of the Roman military, and may
indicate that the grave belonged to a Gallic auxiliary soldier.
A third grave dates from AD 70–90, after the Roman
army had left. Revealing the influx of local people in the
city’s population, the grave includes a locally made Durotri-
gan-style bowl but also lots of terra sigillata plates and cups,
GETTY IMAGES

illustrating the uptake of globalised practices and the influ-

ence of migration even after the military had moved on.

Martin Pitts is associate professor in Roman archaeology at the

Vincent van Gogh’s The Potato Eaterss (1885). “Dutch peasants stopped
University of Exeter, and author of Globalisation and the Roman World: eating potatoes for breakfast because they no longer had to, not because
World History, Connectivity and Material Culturee (Cambridge, 2015) the arrival of migrants changed their world,” says Marlou Schrover

22
Marlou Schrover
“Migrants changed the
world when colonising
European empires began
to enslave, educate, rule
and kill others”
Migration history did not start when
Syrians left refugee camps after April
2015. Nor did it start with the migra-
tions from the former European colonies
to Europe in the postwar decades.
Migrants certainly did change the
world when European empires embarked
on their colonial projects, and in tandem
developed pseudoscientific racist
theories on which the colonisers based the right to enslave,
educate, rule and kill others.
So when, then, did migration history start? With the
arrival of modern humans in Europe 40,000 years ago,
replacing and interbreeding with the Neanderthals? That
might be too much ground to cover. The truth is that people
have always migrated, either to find work, fortune, love or
freedom, or because somebody forced them onto a boat, train
or plane, or drove them out on foot. There are few people
on this planet today who can trace their family tree for three
generations without encountering a migrant of sorts.
Migration is as much part of life as marriage, birth and death.
Some of my students in the Netherlands organise US-
style baby or bridal showers, but this has nothing to do with
large-scale American migration to Europe, and more with
growing up watching American sitcoms. Similarly, the
popularity of Italian food in north-western Europe since the
1960s was partly connected with the migration of Italian
guest-workers – but much more a result of new opportuni-
ties for holidays in Italy. For several years the September
issue of the glossy monthly magazine Allerhande, one of the
most popular titles in the Netherlands, presented Italian
recipes under headlines such as ‘What shall we eat after our
holiday?’, not ‘What our new migrants have to teach us’.
Societies change for a large number of reasons. Dutch
peasants stopped eating potatoes with vinegar and coffee for
breakfast – immortalised in van Gogh’s painting – because
they no longer had to, not because the arrival of migrants
changed their world.
Did migration change the world? Of course it did. But
technological and economic changes were far more important.
Marlou Schrover is professor in economic and social history with
a special interest in migration at Leiden University
James Evans
“The arrival in North
America of England’s more
‘vivid people’ was a positive
thing for the world”
Otto von Bismarck and Winston Church-
ill – two figures with very different views
on many things – did at least agree on one
point in particular: the most important
fact in world history is that North America
speaks English. From a less lofty vantage
point, I think that they were right.
Additionally, the fact that the United
States speaks English – a fact that also
stands proxy for the defining role of English law and culture –
is the single most powerful example of a way in which migrants
(the hundreds of thousands of English men, women and
children who travelled across the North Atlantic during the
17th century) have changed the world.
Funnily enough, the position of English today as a global lan-
guage owes little to England but everything to the fact that the
US – the world’s most powerful country – speaks it. In a census
conducted more than 30 years ago, some 40 million US citizens
claimed descent from an English migrant. Today, the total is
much larger – and that’s not even considering Canadians. His-
torians have talked of a “swarming” of the English (the image of
bees in a hive has been common in discussions of population),
impressed by what they have called a “huge flow of people”. It’s
interesting that in the ‘New World’, many words that today seem
distinctively American – for example, the use of the word ‘fall’
for the autumn season – were in fact commonly used in 1600s
England before falling into disuse in the mother country.
Of course, migrants have not improved things for everyone:
the arriving multitudes of Europeans certainly didn’t improve
things for the Native American populations they encountered
– just as they didn’t for subject populations on numerous other
occasions and in many other destinations in colonial history.
They did change things, though, and on balance the arrival
in North America of those described as being England’s more
“vivid people” – younger, more energetic and determined to
improve things for themselves – is a positive thing for the
world. I would also argue that, for all the uncertainty that
rapid immigration might bring, in postwar England as a whole
it has been a positive thing – diversifying its culture, and
adding dynamism and a willingness to take on different work
in a job market that might otherwise have struggled to adapt to
a world that has changed very fast.
James Evans is a historian, broadcaster and author of Emigrants:
Why the English Sailed to the New World (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2017)
23
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 Brazil:
Early European visitors to eastern South America
described an earthly paradise inhabited by naked
cannibals – one soon inundated with African slaves.
Lilia M Schwarcz explores the modern legacy of
past colonisation and exploitation in Brazil
TRANSLATED BY RAHUL BERY

ttRags and riches

Enslaved people wash diamonds
in Brazil, guarded by armed
overseers, in a German
engraving of 1828. Diamonds
were discovered in Minas Gerais
state in the late 17th century

26
 a society
shaped by
slavery
ALAMY

Æ
27
Brazil’s troubled history

I
deas of ‘nature’ and of ‘natives’ have played a major
part in the way Europeans have portrayed Brazil
throughout the country’s history – or, rather, ever
since Portuguese colonisers landed in a territory
that was already densely populated by Amerindian
people. On the one hand, the natural environment
was portrayed as a paradise: an amenable climate,
the absence of extreme weather, crystalline rivers,
waterfalls set in verdant surroundings, fruit falling
from the trees and dolphins leaping from the seas. Because of
this, Portuguese America was considered to be an example of
the ‘placid tropics’, with only insects interrupting the natural
harmony of the landscape.
But if ‘nature’ was seen through an Edenic lens, the ‘natives’
of this land were viewed with suspicion from the very start. In
his letter to King Manuel I of Portugal dated 1 May 1500,
explorer Pêro Vaz de Caminha – a knight serving in the first
European fleet to land in what’s now Brazil on 22 April 1500
– described how the indigenous people “went about naked…
with their private parts on display”, and noted that the ‘natives’
also engaged in polygamy, a habit he judged to be decadent.
However, what most struck the first travellers was the
practice of ‘cannibalism’: this was a people who “ate their
peers” in order to sate their hunger. Without ever so much as
stepping foot in Brazil, in the late 16th century the engraver
Theodor de Bry made a fortune from his images of the
country’s natives greedily gnawing on the legs and arms of
their enemies. Today we know that this was not ‘cannibalism’
but ‘anthropophagy’ – the people were practising a ritual
whereby enemy tribes ate only the prisoners they considered to
be worthy and strong. These were people who communicated
through war, forming vast networks that quite clearly did not
respect the boundaries created by Europeans.
Both Europeans and the indigenous population found
the other equally strange. The Portuguese traveller
Pêro de Magalhães Gândavo was certain of his
claim, made in the 1570s, that the native
peoples had “no F, L or R”: no faith, no laws,
no king (in Portuguese, Rei). Understood
only in terms of what they ‘lacked’, in the
majority of cases the Brazilians were
thought of as groups of children. In the
most negative of visions they were consid-
ered ‘degenerates’, and thus the war against
them was seen as being a ‘just’ one, as if
spreading the Christian faith was something
absolutely ‘necessary’.
Such attitudes had consequences on an Fall from heaven?
immense scale. Estimates of the population Iguaçu Falls, on the Brazil-
the historians are in agreement, although its extent is debated:
some claim that between 1493 and 1650 the Americas lost a
quarter of their population; others suggest that the population
decline was in the order of 95% or 96%. There were a number
of factors responsible for this terrible loss of life, including war
and unfamiliar diseases such as the common cold, but slavery
was also a major cause of death.
Negotiating a name
The name of the new Portuguese colony generated much
debate, a discussion also influenced by the question of ‘nature’
and ‘natives’. The church wanted to name its dominion Terra
de Santa Cruz (Land of the Holy Cross) in tribute to the place
where the first outdoor mass had been held. Merchants argued
for Brazil, the name of a tree that grew widely in coastal areas
(and which ended up being totally decimated); its wood was
used for making furniture, and its red sap was used for dyeing
clothes. The market claimed victory in this initial battle just
a dozen years after the Portuguese first arrived, and this corner
of the New World came to be associated with the colour red –
the red of the dye from the Brazilwood tree, but also the
infernal red of hell, which was how indigenous people and
their anthropophagy were represented.
The fact is that these different portrayals became jumbled
together, with Brazil sometimes viewed as a place of biblical
promise, at other times as ‘the land of the devil’. For many
people this vision would become all too real – above all for
the enslaved natives, as well as those enslaved people who
were beginning to arrive from different parts of the European
continent. The language of slavery entered the country
and took its time in leaving. The arrival of the first African
slaves, who were shipped mostly from Angola and west Africa
between Benin and Nigeria, was recorded towards the end
of the 16th century, when the cultivation of sugar cane
was introduced.
As nature adapted to the whims of the
market, the soil experienced great cycles
of monocultural production. Brazil’s
north-eastern region, especially Bahia and
Pernambuco, was the first area to prosper
thanks to the sugar planted there, which
guaranteed a steady supply of money until
the end of the 18th century. From the
late 17th century, news of the discovery of
gold and diamonds in the region of Minas
Gerais sparked a gold rush. This arid, flat
shrubland, so unlike the fertile tropics, was given
the designation cerrado, denoting a closed or
fenced-off zone. Finally, in the 19th century, it
GETTY IMAGES

Argentina border. Such

of the South American lowlands at the time the
first Europeans arrived range between 1 and 8.5
million. As to the magnitude of the catastrophe,
28
cascades contributed to
was the turn of coffee, referred to as ‘black gold’,
Portuguese views of Brazil that shifted the economic axis to the south-east-
as an earthly paradise ern region: first to Rio de Janeiro, then to São
 Eating the enemy
Indigenous people eat the
flesh of enemies in a late-
16th-century engraving
by Theodor de Bry. Witnessing
such ‘cannibalism’, actually
ritualised anthropophagy,
reinforced Portuguese beliefs
that the ‘natives’ they
encountered were savages
ALAMY

Æ
29
Brazil’s troubled history

Fight club
Capoeira performers in
Salvador, Bahia, eastern
Brazil. Originally a fight
disguised as a dance,
capoeira evolved from
practices and rhythms
that arrived in Brazil
with slaves from Africa

Black gold
A c1900 advertisement for Brazilian coffee.
During the previous century the expanding coffee
industry demanded huge amounts of manual
labour, fuelling the transatlantic slave trade

Paulo. It was assumed that the soil had no limits, but

that human arms were needed to extract its resources.
This is why, in Brazil, the idea of manual labour was
intimately linked to the African worker. Portugal controlled
some trading posts on the African coast, notably Luanda (now
capital city of Angola), and soon realised that the ‘trafficking of
souls’ could be as lucrative a trade as the commercialisation of
agricultural products. Brazil become the most frequent
destination for slaves: according to some estimates, between
38% and 43% of all the Africans forced to leave their conti-
nent were received there. In addition, Brazil sent slaves across
the whole territory, from north to south, and was the last place
in the Americas to abolish the practice of slavery in 1888.
But the tumbeiross – slave ships – transported more than just
captives. These vessels, the Portuguese name of which literally
means ‘coffin bearers’, also brought the religions, rituals,
rhythms, visual cultures, languages and symbols of the people
they transported. This process led to Brazil’s Africanisation, as
it became populated by various groups of people who made
indelible marks on the territory’s social and cultural landscape.
The forced coexistence of indigenous people, Europeans
and Africans quickly resulted in a mestiço, or mixed, society,
albeit one characterised by the inequality in the different
groups’ relationships with one another. Mestiçagem means
‘mixture’, but also ‘separation’ – that is, cultural inclusion
accompanied by a great deal of social exclusion.
Slavery, because it was so widespread, ceased to be the
exclusive privilege of the great landowners; priests, soldiers,
functionaries, craftsmen, merchants, small farmers and even
freed slaves possessed slaves. Therefore it was much more than
Slave ships transported
more than just captives.
They brought religions,
rhythms, languages
and symbols to Brazil
structured the etiquettes of obedience, and created a society
conditioned by paternalism and strict hierarchy. It was a means
of social communication – one that had grave consequences.
Fighting back
Slaves in Brazil fought back in many ways: they killed their
masters and plantation owners, fled into the forests, and
mounted revolts. Right from the start, they never ceased to
negotiate their conditions, fighting for leisure time, the means
to support their families, and the right to practise their customs
and worship their deities. They also tried to adapt their
cultural practices, putting them in mestiço form.
A good example is capoeira. The name comes from
vegetation born after virgin forest is destroyed, but it took on
other meanings as well. Originally a kind of fight, the practice
often became described as a dance – quite the apt metaphor:
a fighting style disguised as a dance, thus hiding its true
intentions. But not every reaction was this subtle, and
GETTY IMAGES

a mere economic system: it shaped the way people behaved, many were violent.
defined social inequalities, turned race and colour into the Of course, a system based around the idea that one person
traits of fundamental differences between groups of people, can possess another can sustain itself only through violence.
30
 Stolen cargo
An English engraving of 1830
shows the layout of a slave ship
bound for Brazil, which was
the final destination for an
estimated 5 million Africans
before slavery was finally
abolished there in 1888

Slave masters would consult manuals, which circulated the state of Pernambuco in 1597. They ascended the Barriga
back and forth across the Atlantic, that offered advice about mountain range, in the present-day state of Alagoas south-east
how to punish and control slaves. In response, many slaves of Pernambuco, arriving at an uninhabited place where the
escaped, had abortions, murdered and poisoned their mountains acted as ramparts. The region’s palm trees provided
masters, or killed themselves. a living and sustenance: their leaves were woven together to
There were also examples of organised insurrections in create animal traps, items of clothing and roofs for rudimenta-
which the slaves’ resistance led to the creation of quilombos, ry dwellings, and they also gave the settlement its name.
places where those who had escaped would come together. Palmares was not just a refuge for the enslaved, but also
The term originated on the African continent, specifically in an extensive confederation of different communities capable
Angola, where it designated a kind of military encampment in of conducting their own business and of choosing their own
which warriors would undergo rites of initiation and embrace leaders. At its peak, 20,000 people found shelter there –
military discipline. The proliferation of quilombos across the a population far bigger than that of Rio de Janeiro at the time,
American landscape between the 16th and 19th centuries was which had only 7,000 inhabitants in 1600.
the result of a complex variety of political situations. They were
not just transitory, isolated places. They represented an alterna- A new religion
tive way of life while at the same time forming a part of the The slaves also bargained with their masters for the right to
slaveholding society that surrounded them, with which they play music, dance and sing, in accordance with their rituals.
were intimately linked in a variety of ways. This gave birth to candomblé, a name given to a set of recon-
In the mid-18th century Buraco do Tatu, a quilombo structed religious practices that, from the 19th century
located not far from Salvador, was kept financially onwards, took the traditions of Africa’s Yoruba
afloat through robbery, which it achieved by Out of Africa people, together with some other west African
maintaining a complicit relationship with the A carved wooden relief influences, as its base. In this new environment,
depicting the candomblé
community of slaves and freemen in the city. orisha (deity) Oxalufan.
candomblé was responsible for mediating the
In the lower Amazon region, in the far north The religious practices of differing realities of the Africans, mestiços and
of the country, slave refuges were established candomblé evolved from indigenous peoples. It’s no coincidence that, to
on the ‘white water’ of the river in a densely forested African Yoruba beliefs this day, the version in Bahia – the state most
BRIDGEMAN/GETTY IMAGES

area near the border with Suriname. strongly identified with Afro-Brazilians – called
The biggest community of escaped candomblé de caboclo venerates the spirits of
slaves, however – and possibly the one that indigenous ancestors.
survived the longest in Portuguese Over time, quilombos and differing cultural
America – was Palmares. This quilombo’s traditions blended together. Brazil today is still
original nucleus comprised around marked by this unequal, hierarchical mixing
40 slaves who had escaped from a mill in of so many African and Amerindian Æ
31
Brazil’s troubled history

An American Eden
A coloured engraving from
Historia naturalis palmarum,
a book based on the 1817–20
travels of German botanist Carl
Friedrich Philipp von Martius.
The fertility of Brazilian soil was
believed to have no limits – but
needed human labour to work it

GETTY IMAGES

32
 Harsh reality
Children pictured in a favela (slum) in Rio de Janeiro in 2014.
Widespread poverty and social inequality plague Brazil
Brazil today is still
marked by the unequal,
hierarchical mixing
of many African and
Amerindian nations
nations, and of the European and East Asian immigrants
who arrived at the end of the 19th century.
The country still suffers from a democratic deficit.
Patrimonial and clientelistic practices, inherited from the
era of slavery and recreated in the present, cling on in the
political system and in public institutions. The electoral base
may have been expanded, but an ethical agenda capable of
transforming the electoral system and the behaviour of the
political parties has been found lacking; there is a serious risk
of corruption, associated as much with the mistreatment of
public funds as with the lack of control over governmental
politics, becoming endemic.
The challenges continue
Many problems that characterised the past have persisted to
the present day. Poverty continues to ravage a significant chunk
of the population, and various indicators place the country
among the global champions of social inequality. In many
places, women earn less than their male counterparts despite
carrying out exactly the same tasks, and ‘crimes of passion’ –
a euphemism used to define the violent practices that charac-
terise gender differences in the country – are still common-
place. While newer familial arrangements based around sexual
and gender diversity are defended in public, many Brazilian
citizens continue to be victims of sexist practices rooted in an
GETTY IMAGES
intolerance towards difference.
Despite the politics of affirmative action, descendants of
African slaves still inhabit the reality of a well-documented
Rainbow nation
A Brazilian woman of African descent in Rio de Janeiro during Carnaval,
a Catholic festival celebrated with African-influenced samba music
system of racial discrimination that affects how they enter
the job market, their birth rates, rates of criminalisation and
even how they spend their free time. There is still inequality of
opportunity, along with daily displays of racism in both private
and public. And, though torture has not been state policy since
the 1980s, it continues to be widespread, used in a concealed
way by police officers in some poor neighbourhoods where
rampant violence primarily affects young black men.
Problems are environmental as well as social. Abundant
cultivation without crop rotation has led to the deterioration
of once-productive areas such as the old sugar-growing region
of the Bahian Recôncavo, and the Paraíba Valley in Rio and
São Paulo states. Both have been victims of the frenzy for
immediate profit – as, too, has the Amazon, where rivers are
still being polluted and the misdeeds of humans have created
veritable deserts.
These problems indicate the extent to which Brazil’s
present rings with echoes from its past. Brazil today is in
crisis. But every crisis has its positive side: on the one hand it
is exposing the fallacies of Brazilian democracy and the way
in which the nation uses its
natural resources; in another
sense, it invites the country’s Lilia M Schwarcz is
citizens to respond and react. professor of anthropology at
It’s possible, indeed, that
the University of São Paulo,
such challenges represent the and co-author (with Heloisa
beginning of a new chapter M Starling) of Brazil (Allen
in Brazilian history. Lane, 2018)
33
A year in pictures: 1894

AKG-IMAGES

34
 Pole position
Norwegian botanist and expedition
doctor Henrik Greve Blessing fishes for
algae alongside the icebound schooner
Fram in July 1894. Norwegian explorer
Fridtjof Nansen and his hand-picked
crew had set out a year earlier on the
purpose-built ship to try to reach the
uncharted North Pole. He planned to
sail to a northerly latitude where the
ship would become icebound and drift
with currents across the Arctic. After
nearly 18 months locked in ice, Nansen
realised the ship would not drift far
enough north, so he set off on dog sleds
towards the pole. He failed to reach
90° north, but returned to Norway
a hero, having collected a wealth of
new scientific information.

A YEAR
IN PICTURES

1894
Exploration and
engineering, riots
and Russian rulers

As the 19th century drew to a close,

innovations in technology, art and
entertainment reflected the sense
of fin de siècle. Richard Overy
introduces the characters and
key events of a year in which
change was in the air Æ
35
A year in pictures: 1894

The 1890s was

a decade of inventions, scientific
breakthroughs and cultural innova-
tions. In hindsight, it seems as if the
fin-de-siècle era was imbued with
a sense of ending; it’s remembered (in
Europe, at least) for both cultural dec-
adence and ideas of new beginnings.
In 1894, precocious young Italian
engineer Guglielmo Marconi devel-
oped the radio transmitter; Karl Benz
patented the first petrol-driven large-
scale-production automobile; moving
pictures were presented commercially
for the first time through the new
Kinetoscope; John Harvey Kellogg
produced his first flaked cereals; and
Coca-Cola was sold in bottles for the
first time. The art world, meanwhile,
was challenged by the avant-garde
style of French artist Paul Gauguin
and the Norwegian Edvard Munch,
and by the emergence of the art
nouveau movement.
In international politics, imperial
expansion continued without serious
friction, radical nationalism not
yet posing a threat to the dominant
global position enjoyed by the major
European empires. The French and
Russian governments signed an
alliance, ostensibly to counterbalance
the alliance between Germany and
the Austro-Hungarian empire – an
event that had a delayed but dramatic
impact 20 years later as a major factor Clash in the east
in the start of the First World War. Japanese troops defeat Chinese forces at the
For most governments in the west- battle of Seonghwan on 29 July 1894, the first
ern world, the chief threat was internal major land clash of the First Sino-Japanese
political conflict, notably with the rise War. This Japanese print also shows war
of organised labour movements. In reporters and artists observing from a nearby
the summer, the United States rail- tree. Over the previous two decades the newly
modernised Japan had begun to extend its
road system was almost brought to a
influence in Korea, a Chinese protectorate.
halt by a nationwide strike. In Europe, In June 1894, China had sent troops into
socialist parties played an increasingly Korea to help suppress the peasant Donghak
important part in national politics, rebellion; Japan responded by sending forces
challenging the existing liberal and to protect its interests on the peninsula.
monarchical orders. Late in the year, According to the treaty that confirmed
Nicholas II acceded to the throne of Japanese victory the following April, Korea
the Russian empire, determined that became nominally independent, but in reality
was dominated by the Japanese presence. In
radical political change should be kept 1910, Japan annexed Korea as a colony.
firmly at bay. This year marked the
TOPFOTO

start of tsardom’s own fin de siècle.

36
 Justice perverted
French army captain Alfred Dreyfus defends himself
against charges of treason at a military court in
December 1894, as depicted in an illustration in
Le Petit Journal.On 22 December he was found guilty
of passing secrets to the Germans, and was sentenced
to life imprisonment on Devil’s Island off French
Guiana. However, the evidence against Dreyfus had
been fabricated, and the head of French counter-
espionage soon discovered that the true culprit was
another French officer, Ferdinand Walsin-Esterhazy.
The ‘Dreyfus Affair’ divided French public opinion,
exposing widespread anti-Semitism, particularly in
the military and in sections of the media. The debate
TOPFOTO

about the case continued for a dozen years until 1906,

when Dreyfus was fully exonerated. Æ
37
A year in pictures: 1894

Icon of engineering
Traffic crosses London’s Tower
Bridge shortly after its official
opening by the Prince of Wales
(later King Edward VII) on
30 June 1894. First planned
in the late 1870s, work began
in 1886 but construction of
such a complex design – two
suspension bridges flanking a
central roadway that lifted to
allow ships to pass through –
took eight years to complete.
It soon became a London icon,
akin to the Eiffel Tower in
Paris, and remains so today.

Rail riots
Firemen tackle a blaze engulfing 600
Pullman freight cars in Chicago started
by rioters on 6 July during the national
railroad strike in the United States, and
depicted in a contemporary illustration.
The strike, which ran May–July 1894, was
called in protest against wage cuts imposed
by the Pullman Company. It was supported
by the American Railway Union, formed
the year before by Eugene Debs to give a
voice to workers. Railway traffic was halted
or disrupted across the western and central
states, and strikers were responsible for
widespread violence and arson. President
Grover Cleveland ordered the army to
break the strike, and by July it had petered
out – but not before the railroads had
suffered $80 million of damage and
30 people had died.
ALAMY

38
 Tropical trinity
Day of the God, painted by Paul Gauguin
(1848–1903) in 1894 after his return to
France from Tahiti. The painting, notable
for Gauguin’s hallmark use of contrasting
colour, flat surfaces and semi-abstract images,
possibly depicts Ta’aroa, supreme deity in
the pantheon of gods in French Polynesia,
who created the Earth. The three naked
figures symbolise birth, life and death.
Gauguin’s work had an immense impact on
the modernist art movements of the following
decades, particularly influencing the fin-de-
siècle symbolism and escapism that permeated
much of the culture of the 1890s.

Personal picture palace

A row of machines in a Kinetoscope parlour
in San Francisco, opened in 1894. The
Kinetoscope, patented by the Thomas Edison
laboratory, played the first motion pictures,
albeit without sound. Each contained a
celluloid roll printed with images passed
rapidly across a lightbulb and viewed through a
peephole at the top of the apparatus; the viewer
paid 25 cents to watch ten short movies. The
machines became an instant hit, helping to
ALAMY

launch the age of the movies that dominated

American culture in the century that followed. Æ
39
A year in pictures: 1894

Strong showing
A poster advertises the
German strongman Eugen
Sandow (born Friedrich
Wilhelm Müller, 1867–
1925), who wowed American
audiences in 1894 during
a nationwide tour staged
by the impresario Florenz
Ziegfeld. Sandow pioneered
the idea of what he called
‘bodybuilding’, employing
weight training and a proper
diet to develop a strong,
healthy body. He organised
the first bodybuilding
competition at the Royal
Albert Hall in London,
and later founded the first
fitness centres, forerunners of
modern gyms.
BRIDGEMAN

40
 Rising tsar
Russian tsar Nicholas II is crowned
in the splendour of the Uspensky
(Dormition or Assumption) Cathedral
in Moscow’s Kremlin, as painted by
French artist Henri Gervex. Nicholas
acceded to the throne on 1 November
1894 following the death of his
father, Alexander III. He was little
prepared for his new responsibilities,
but stated from the outset that he
believed profoundly in the necessity
of autocratic rule and would not yield
to popular demands for constitutional
reform. His unbending attitude
contributed to the revolt against the
monarchy and the revolution that
ended his reign 23 years later.

Queen of the court

Blanche Bingley Hillyard (1863–1946),
pictured in 1894 – the year she won the third
of her six Wimbledon ladies’ singles titles,
beating Edith Austin (later Greville) in
straight sets 6–1, 6–1. Among the most
successful British tennis players of all time,
she also played in seven other Wimbledon
finals, a record that still stands today.
Hillyard won her final title in 1900, aged 36,
playing in the customary long, awkward
tennis dress reaching down to the ankle.

Radio age
A replica of the first radio transmitter built
by Guglielmo Marconi – then just 20 years Richard Overy
GETTY IMAGES/BRIDGEMAN

old – in 1894 in his attic room near Bologna. is professor of history

He was the first to recognise the possibilities of at the University
wireless telegraphy using recent discoveries in of Exeter, and
the detection and transmission of radio waves,
editor of The Times
initially demonstrating his transmitter to his
mother. He later developed intercontinental Complete History of
wireless telegraphy and founded a successful the World (William
telecommunications and engineering company. Collins, 2015)

41
 EXTRAORDINARY
Gudrid Thorbjarnardóttir (born c980)
‘FAR-
R-TRAVELLED’ ICELANDIC PIONEER TO AMERICA
Old Norse sagas laud the exploits of Erik the Red and Leif Eriksson, but their real hero
is female. Eleanor Rosamund Barraclough introduces the first lady of Viking Vinland
T
he cartoon stereotype of
the Viking age is decidedly
male: bearded blond men in
boats raiding the coast-
lines of western Europe,
discovering and settling new lands. Yet
from the Valkyries of Norse mythology
to female prime ministers and presidents,
and from legendary shieldmaidens to
other trailblazers of socially progressive
gender politics, the Nordic world has a
long history of extraordinary women.
No one epitomises this heritage better
than Gudrid Thorbjarnardóttir, a Norse
explorer known as the ‘far-traveller’, born
on Iceland’s Snæfellsnes peninsula in the
latter part of the 10th century. What
we know of her life story is derived from
two Old Norse sagas, The Saga of Erik
the Redd and The Saga of the Greenlanders.
Together they are known as the ‘Vinland
sagas’, because they describe voyages
sailing to the fringes of North America
around the year 1000. The Norse named
these lands ‘Vinland’, apparently because
of the wild grapes that grew there.
The sagas were first recorded in
13th-century Iceland over two centuries
after the events they describe took place,
their tales having been transmitted
down the years in oral form, retold and
reshaped as the stories passed from gen-
eration to generation. They contain ele-
ments we might expect to see in fantasy
films – dragons, trolls, zombies – but they
are our main textual sources for Norse
activities at the far-western margins of
the medieval world. It was thanks to the
sagas that archaeologists began to search
for material evidence of these journeys
– for example, at L’Anse aux Meadows
at the tip of Newfoundland, where the
42
Y PEOPLE
remains of several Norse buildings were
discovered in the 1960s.
Gudrid is described in The Saga of the
Greenlanders as “a woman of striking
appearance, and wise”. In both texts, her
dramatic story began when she and her
father sailed west from Iceland to join
Erik the Red’s new colony in Greenland.
That sea journey was notoriously
dangerous and, according to The Saga of
the Greenlanders, Gudrid, her husband
and several others were shipwrecked, then
rescued by Leif the Lucky, son of Erik the
Red. Sickness afflicted the colony that
winter, and Gudrid’s husband died, but
Gudrid lived to fight another day.
The Saga of Erik the Redd tells of no
shipwreck and no husband. In it, instead,
when Gudrid arrived Greenland was in
the grip of a famine. Though a Christian,
she took part in a pagan ritual, helping a
seeress called Thorbjorg to chant songs to
charm the spirits and end the famine.
Both sagas tell us that Gudrid married
Thorstein, son of Erik the Red and
younger brother of Leif the Lucky
(Eriksson), then spent a dark, terrifying
winter at the farmstead of a pagan farmer,
which was struck by a deadly plague.
The tale cites supernatural forces: at one
point, the farmer’s wife looked out into
the yard to see the figures of those who
have died, waiting menacingly for her –
and among them saw herself and
Gudrid’s husband, Thorstein Eriksson.
By the morning she was dead. Thorstein
died a few hours later, but – true to form
– Gudrid survived another deadly winter.
Gudrid’s next husband was an
Icelander, Thorstein Karlsefni, with
whom she travelled to Vinland – indeed,
The Saga of the Greenlanderss tells us that
Gudrid urged Karlsefni to make the
journey. Once in Vinland, Gudrid gave
birth to a son, Snorri – the first baby born
to a European on the North American
continent, if the account is true.
Gudrid is the real hero of the Vinland
sagas – such an important character in
The Saga of Erik the Red that it’s been
suggested the story would be more aptly
named Gudrid’s Saga. In her older years,
she continued her travels, undertaking
a pilgrimage to Rome. She became a
formidable matriarch, ancestor to many
illustrious Icelanders – it is her line listed
at the end of The Saga of the Greenlanders,
not that of Erik the Red. As the pagan
seeress in The Saga of Erik the Redd told
her: “from you will be descended a long
and worthy line, and over all the branches
of that family a bright ray will shine”.
A modern sculpture of Gudrid at her
birthplace, Laugarbrekka in western
Iceland, depicts her standing on a ship,
one hand resting on the square, toothy
dragon’s head that forms the bow. On her
shoulder she balances her little son Snorri,
his face lifted upwards, arm raised to the
sky. Gudrid’s eyes, though, are fixed firm-
ly ahead, on the long sea road before her.
True, the sagas are by no means
straightforward historical records. But
they are our main source of information
about the remarkable people who un-
dertook long and dangerous sea voyages,
building new lives far from home and
discovering new lands – and Gudrid was
perhaps the most extraordinary of all.
Eleanor Rosamund Barraclough is
associate professor of medieval history and
literature at Durham University, and author
of Beyond the Northlandss (OUP, 2016)
 Vinland bound
Old Norse sagas describe Gudrid Thorbjarnardóttir as “the loveliest of women and
noble in every trait”. But this far-travelled Icelandic woman was eulogised largely not
for her beauty and charm but as a strong-willed survivor who married three times and
bore a son, Snorri, in Vinland (North America) during one of her intrepid voyages

ILLUSTRATION BY LYNN HATZIUS 43

Israel &
the Palestinians:
A HISTORY
OF CONFLICT
in eight key episodes
As violent protests following the move
of the US embassy to Jerusalem
attest, the prospect of lasting peace
between Israel and the Palestinians
seems as remote now as ever. Seventy
years after the founding of the modern
state of Israel, Matthew Hughes
charts eight key moments in the
history of the hostilities
44
CLOCKWISE FROM TOP LEFT:
An Israeli soldier aboard an
armoured personnel carrier
waves his national flag as Israeli
troops advance into Syria in
October 1973 during the
Yom Kippur War
The last British soldiers
board a ship sailing from the
Mediterranean port of Haifa in
June 1948, six weeks after the
state of Israel was declared
Demonstrators wave a flag
showing Palestine Liberation
Organization leader Yasser
Arafat in the West Bank in 1988
during the first intifada (uprising)
against Israeli expansion
A Palestinian village is
destroyed by British forces in
1938 during the Arab Revolt
GETTY IMAGES
(1936–39), a conflict fuelled
by the proliferation of Jewish
settlements on land previously
owned by Palestinians
 GETTY IMAGES

45
Æ
Israel and the Palestinians
Men from Bethlehem in Jerusalem in 1894, when the territory identified as Palestine was part of the Ottoman empire. At the start of the 19th century
Palestine’s population was mostly Arab, with a small Jewish minority, but from the 1880s waves of settlers rapidly augmented the Jewish population
1 Early Jewish
settlement
19th century
Palestine did not formally exist as
a country before the First World War,
when the British fixed Palestine’s
borders after their conquest of what
would become Iraq, Palestine, Jordan,
Lebanon and Syria. For hundreds of
A view of Jerusalem from the north in about
1870, when it lay within the Ottoman empire
46
years before the British took control,
Palestine had been divided into
provinces of the Ottoman empire, and
had very few Jewish inhabitants.
Indeed, at the start of the 19th centu-
ry the Jewish population of the territory
soon to be defined as Palestine was small
– only about 3%. The majority of the
region’s inhabitants were Arabs, mostly
Sunni Muslim, who had occupied the
region since the seventh-century Arab
conquest; there was also a sizeable Chris-
tian minority. Together, these formed the
population that would be considered –
despite the lack of a formally recognised
country – as Palestinians.
The Jewish people of Palestine in
1800 were not farmers or settlers but
instead lived in towns and worked as
merchants or religious teachers. As the
19th century progressed, European Jews
– influenced by the rise of nationalism in
Europe – began to look to Palestine as
the place for a possible Jewish homeland.
A wave of Jewish people came to the
country in an Aliyahh (‘ascent’) starting
in the 1880s, making their homes on
land bought from Palestinians.
This brought a new type of Jew to
Palestine, there to settle the land; these
adopted tough new names such as Oz
(‘strength’). More settlers followed as
Jewish people fled anti-Semitic pogroms
in Europe, a situation exacerbated by the
rise of rightwing sentiment that presaged
Nazi rule of Germany from 1933.
Settlement was core to Zionism –
a Jewish nationalist movement – because
it demanded land for a Jewish state.
Zionists based their national claim to
Palestine on ancient Jewish settlement
of the area before the Romans expelled
Jews from the region in the second
century AD following two major Jewish
revolts against their rule. Zionism and
Jewish settlement were seen as a return
to an ancient Jewish Palestine. “A land
without a people for a people without
a land” ran a pithy Zionist slogan –
GETTY IMAGES
yet this was not accurate: the land was
already occupied by predominantly
Muslim communities.
 2 The seeds 3 Riots and revolt significant Jewish population) and
providing for British control of
of conflict 1917–20 Palestine. The Jewish settlers depended
1896–1917 on Britain for their survival and, until
the Second World War, worked with the
In 1917, during the First World War, British authorities to maintain security
British-led troops conquered southern in Palestine. Jewish settlement was met
Palestine and took Jerusalem. In the with local resistance: in 1920, for
same year, the British foreign secretary, instance, rioting broke out as Palestini-
AJ Balfour, issued the so-called Balfour ans opposed British-facilitated Jewish
Theodor Herzl’s Declaration. Sent as a letter to the immigration. More violence was to
pamphlet Der
Judenstaat (1896),
Jewish (and Zionist) Lord Rothschild erupt throughout the next two decades.
proposing a on 2 November, and published a week Jewish-European settlers in this
Jewish country later in The Times, it was a deliberately period recorded the mood of colonial-
ambiguous statement of British intent ism. “We must not forget that we
In 1896, an Austro-Hungarian Jewish towards Palestine. It did not promise are dealing here with a semi-savage
intellectual, Theodor Herzl, published the Jewish people a state in the country; people, which has extremely primitive
Der Judenstaat (The Jewish State), instead, it vaguely expressed the concepts,” one wrote at the time.
a pamphlet outlining the intellectual sentiment that “His Majesty’s Govern- “And this is his nature: if he senses
basis for the idea of a Jewish country. ment view with favour” the establish- in you power, he will submit and will
There was initially much discussion ment of a Jewish “national home” hide his hatred for you. And if he
among Zionists about whether such in Palestine, while also recognising senses weakness, he will dominate you.”
a place was to be in Palestine or that the region had an existing, non- Amid such colonial views, the British
elsewhere. Early schemes proposed Jewish, population. veered between support for Jewish
such disparate locations as Canada, The declaration helped Britain’s war settlers and for the Palestinians. Their
parts of South America, and British- effort in various ways, boosting support goals were diverging and becoming
run East Africa around what is now in the United States (which had a seemingly irreconcilable.
Uganda and Kenya. European Zionist
Jews were looking for a place to make
real the Jewish state, and the debate
fell between two major camps. The
first was willing to accept a Jewish
state anywhere, while the other
was determined to forge a state in
historic Palestine.
In 1905, at the Seventh Zionist
Congress in Basel, the dispute was
settled in favour of a Jewish state in
Palestine rather than some part of the
world with no religious or historical
connection for Jewish people. Many
Palestinians resisted this move to
settle in the territory, and expressed
their own national identity through
channels such as Falastin, a newspaper
founded in Jaffa in 1911 and named
for their homeland. Other responses
were more direct, with Palestinians
aggressively targeting landowners who
sold land to Jewish settlers.
Jewish immigration and settlement
set the two communities on the road to
war. It would be a struggle in which the
GETTY IMAGES

Zionists, armed with modern European General Edmund Allenby enters Jerusalem on foot on 11 December 1917 during
nationalist ideas, organisation and the British campaign in Palestine against Ottoman forces in the First World War Æ
technologies, had the edge.
47
Israel and the Palestinians
4 Full-scale
conflict
1929–47
As violence erupted between the two
communities, Jews and Palestinians
divided, and people had to take sides.
Early Jewish inhabitants in Palestine,
and Mizrahi (‘oriental’ or ‘eastern’)
Jews who came to Palestine from Arab
countries and who spoke Arabic, were
now confronted by politically mobilised
European Jews arriving to settle the land
and build a Jewish state. Many of these
long-time Jewish occupants of Palestine
and the Middle East cut their ties to
their Arab neighbours.
An outbreak of extreme violence in
1929 dashed any faint hopes of Jews and
Palestinians combining, and revisionist
rightwing Zionist organisations grew.
Palestinians and Jews prepared for a
full-scale conflict. Militant Muslim
preachers such as Shaykh ‘Izz al-Din
al-Qassam mobilised Palestinians, prim-
ing them for jihad. The Jewish popula-
tion prepared much more thoroughly,
building a proto-state alongside nascent
48
political and economic structures,
having already established a defence
organisation, Haganah.
The Jewish community pushed into
new land with numerous settlements,
and set up a Jewish presence across
Palestine. By this point, the Palestinians
were in conflict with both the Jews and
the British authorities in Palestine,
reaching a crescendo in a mass revolt in
1936. The British army crushed the
revolt by 1939, but resistance and
preparation for further attacks by both
communities remained the pattern for
the rest of the 1930s and throughout the
Second World War.
By the time of the Second World
War, the British had shifted their policy
from support for Zionism to blocking
Jewish immigration to Palestine. They
did this, again, to bolster support for
their war effort, this time from Arab
allies. In the face of Jewish people escap-
ing the unfolding Holocaust in Europe,
this caused growing resentment and
conflict with Zionists who were trying
to save European Jews by helping them
get to Palestine.
After the war ended in 1945, the
Jewish population of Palestine had
Jewish families evacuate
Jerusalem’s Old City in 1936,
during the Arab Revolt – an
uprising that followed several
years of violence between
Palestinians and Jewish settlers
become sufficiently powerful and
mobilised to fight Britain, and good
Jewish preparation won the day.
Jewish terror attacks against British
targets helped to force Britain to
reconsider its geopolitical priorities.
In one of the most infamous attacks,
in 1946 the wing of the King David
Hotel in Jerusalem that housed a British
headquarters was blown up, killing
almost 100 people. In 1947, Britain
decided to leave Palestine. Meanwhile,
survivors of the Holocaust who
emigrated to Palestine further boosted
the territory’s Jewish population.
In the November of the same year,
the United Nations General Assembly
passed a resolution that proposed the
partition of Palestine into Jewish and
Arab states. Under the plan, Jerusalem
would be an internationalised city.
The suggestion was accepted, albeit
reluctantly, by Jewish representatives
in the region, because it offered some
international acceptance of their aims
GETTY IMAGES/ALAMY
of establishing a state. Palestinian and
Arab groups rejected it, however,
arguing that it ignored the rights
of most of the population of Palestine
to decide their own destiny.
British servicemen search the wreckage of the King David Hotel in Jerusalem in 1946 after it was bombed by the Zionist Jewish organisation Irgun.
The hotel had housed a British headquarters, and became a target after the British blocked Jewish immigration during the Second World War Æ
49
Israel and the Palestinians

GETTY IMAGES/MAP: BATTLEFIELD DESIGNS

5 The birth
of modern Israel
1948–49
The First Arab-Israeli War of 1948–49
followed on from the violence between
Jews and Palestinians as neighbouring
Arab states – for their own political
motives as well as to help their Pales-
tinian Arab brethren – intervened in
the hostilities. In May 1948, as British
troops left Palestine, Zionist leader
(soon to become the first Israeli prime
minister) David Ben-Gurion declared
the formation of the state of Israel, at
which point Egypt, Iraq, Transjordan,
Lebanon and Syria attacked Israel in
support of the Palestinians.
Israel was born from war, both the
legacy of the Holocaust and more
immediate conflict when the Arab
armies attacked in May 1948. Fighting
against the new Israeli army continued
until early 1949. Local Palestinian
militia units supported the war effort,
but were poorly organised and had
little military power. In general,
though the Arab forces looked
impressive on paper, the military
quality of their fighting power and the
political unity of their command across
different national forces were poor and,
as a result, they lost.
Israel’s success allowed it to expand
its territory to include all of British-run
Palestine, with the exception of the
hilly West Bank next to Jordan, east

Palestinian refugees
pictured during the first
Arab-Israeli War in 1948.
At the conclusion of the
war the following year,
some 700,000 Palestinians
had fled or been expelled
from the new state of
Israel and were refugees
in neighbouring territories

50
Jerusalem (including the Old City), and
the territory known as the Gaza Strip,
running along the Mediterranean Sea
just northeast of the Sinai Peninsula.
The result of this expansion was that Is-
rael controlled more than 75% of what
had formerly been British-run Palestine
– or, in other words, the Palestinians
now held less than 25% of Palestine.
What happened next has informed
a great deal of how we now understand
Israel and neighbouring territories, 2018
Note: this map is for illustrative and location purposes only
the Arab-Israeli conflict. For the
Palestinians this was the nakba
(catastrophe) that turned hundreds of
thousands of them into refugees; for
Israel, it was triumph in a war of
independence in the face of a full-scale
assault against its Jewish people.
Both communities saw the events in
very different ways. From an Israeli
perspective, the Arabs were hell-bent
on destroying Israel in 1948, and the
war they provoked ended up making
thousands of Palestinian people
refugees. From a Palestinian view-
point, the Israelis were acting on a plan
to expel them and thus ethnically
cleanse the country.
Israel did expel Palestinians, but
others simply left as their society
collapsed under the pressure of war;
even so, more than 100,000 Palestini-
ans remained inside Israel after 1949.
Massacre was followed by counter-
massacre: Jewish forces killed around
100 Palestinian villagers at Deir
Yassin, just west of Jerusalem, in April
1948; shortly afterwards, Arab fighters
killed some 80 Jewish medical staff
near Jerusalem.
These massacres reveal how both
sides emphasise different historical
events, and in different ways. Indeed,
histories of this period quickly reveal
how divisive this time remains, with
accounts often skewed significantly
toward one side or another.
The conclusion of the First
Arab-Israeli War left two significant
political problems, both of which
remain largely unresolved today.
First, more than 700,000 Palestinians
now lived in refugee camps in the
Egyptian-run Gaza Strip, throughout
neighbouring Arab nations, and in the
Jordanian-controlled West Bank.
Stateless, without passports and
dispossessed, theirs was a squalid
existence, and no one addressed their
lack of political rights.
Meanwhile, Israel built a function-
ing Jewish state, drawing in more
Mizrahi Jews who had lived for
centuries in Arab countries but who
were no longer welcome there. But
though the Zionists had realised their
ambition of a Jewish state, no Arab
states recognised it, meaning that Israel
was flanked by hostile neighbours.
The consequences of the failure to
settle the political needs of both
communities were to feed directly
into the wars that were to come.
Æ
51
Israel and the Palestinians

6 Further Arab- fighting, Israeli forces destroyed the

Israeli wars
1956–73
Depending on your viewpoint, the
causes of the Arab-Israeli wars that
followed Israel’s formation lie either with
an aggressive expansionist Israeli state
that preferred war to diplomacy, or with
an intransigent Arab front that refused
to talk to Israel, wanting instead to
eliminate the Jewish state. The Palestini-
an people were caught in the middle.
Israel escalated border tensions in the
early 1950s. This led in 1956 to what
became known as the Suez Crisis – an
invasion by Israeli, British and French
forces of Egypt under its dynamic new
pan-Arab leader, Gamal Abdel Nasser.
Israelis considered that Nasser started
the war by launching attacks into Israel
and blockading the port of Eilat, but the
war’s origins are contested. Israel won
the conflict militarily but there was no
political resolution, and another war
followed little more than a decade later.
The conflagration of June 1967 had
major consequences. Across six days of
armies of Egypt, Jordan and Syria, and
occupied vast new tracts of land in the
Sinai Peninsula, Gaza Strip, West Bank
and Golan Heights. Israeli paratroopers
also took east Jerusalem, which included
the Old City, home to holy sites such as
the Jewish Western Wall and the area
known to Muslims as al-Haram al-Sharif
and to Jews as the Temple Mount.
This was a stunning military success
for Israel, but the 1967 war also led to
political change. A messianic, less
secular, settler-based Zionism grew in
the recently conquered West Bank, Gaza
Strip and Golan. These settlers formed
Gush Emunim (‘Bloc of the Faithful’)
in 1974 as an orthodox activist organisa-
tion to reflect the new mood in Zionism,
while Israel’s Jews divided into the more 7 Stalemate
secular versus the more religious.
Meanwhile, humiliated, the Arabs and resolution
refused to accept their defeat. The result
was yet another conflict: the Yom Kippur
1987–96
War in 1973, named for the Jewish holy
day of atonement, on which Egyptian The lack of any wider political progress
and Syrian forces attacked. Though this had provoked simmering anger among
war proved more successful for the Arabs Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza
in its initial phases, the Israelis successful- territory occupied by Israel in 1967. In
ly counter-attacked. The conflict led 1987, this finally erupted into a full-scale
Israel and Egypt to sign a peace uprising in Gaza – the intifada – which
treaty in 1979. Despite a historic soon spread to the West Bank. Mass
visit to Israel by the Egyptian riots saw people, including children,
leader, Anwar Sadat, the issues throwing stones at Israeli troops and
underpinning the conflict had tanks. Soldiers responded with physical
still not been fundamentally violence, some aimed at the children,
resolved. The Palestinians and with lethal force. The resulting
remained without a state, and images, beamed around the world, were
their war went on. terrible PR for the Israelis.
Indeed, after the peace Israel’s military power was not so
with Egypt, Israel invaded effective against unarmed demonstrators
Lebanon in 1982 to attack as it was against conventional armies.
Palestinian fighters based there. The asymmetric battle between hi-tech
They remained in southern weapons and stone-throwers revealed
Lebanon, finally pulling out that the side that seemingly holds more
in 2000 when faced with a new power does not always get what it wants.
foe in the shape of Lebanese This helped to push the two sides to
Muslim Shia militia forces talk, and Yasser Arafat for the Palestini-
such as Hezbollah. ans and Israeli prime minister Yitzhak
Rabin eventually forged a deal – of sorts.
US president Jimmy Carter In 1993, the two sides signed a deal
witnesses an Arab-Israeli peace that was marked, historically, by Arafat
GETTY IMAGES

treaty in March 1979, flanked by

the signatories, Egypt’s president
Anwar Sadat (left) and Israeli
prime minister Menachem Begin
52
shaking hands with Rabin on the lawn
of the White House in Washington DC
in front of the US president. It was a

Young Palestinians flee
Israeli soldiers during riots in
Gaza City in 1993. The violence
of the Palestinian intifada
(uprising) eased briefly when
the Oslo Peace Accords were
signed in September 1993
significant moment for Rabin who, for
many years, had seen Arafat as an
implacable terrorist foe.
The window of peace opened briefly,
and then closed. One view of why talks
failed is that the Israelis were unwilling
to trade land for peace; another is that
the Palestinians, preferring war to peace,
were unwilling to accept any realistic
deal offered to them. Whichever
perspective is correct, the inchoate
negotiations shuddered to a halt in 1995
when a religious Israeli extremist, angry
at Rabin’s peace moves, shot him dead
in Tel Aviv.
Chaos followed. Extremists on both
sides, opposed to any peace deal that
would involve some degree of compro-
mise, took charge. Palestinian suicide
bombers blew up Israelis on buses and in
marketplaces. In 1996, a rightwing
government led by Benjamin Netanyahu
came to power in Israel, aiming to block
the political changes made by Rabin.
Critics argue that Netanyahu, who
is in power again today, has worked
assiduously to smash any political
dialogue that would lead to Israel giving
up land for a lasting political settlement,
preferring instead stagnant talks and the
offer of patchy autonomous areas of
ALAMY/GETTY IMAGES
8 The continuing
conundrum A Palestinian prepares to
hurl a rock at Israeli forces
at the Gaza-Israel border
1996–present in spring 2018. Protesters
demanded that Israel allow
the return of Palestinian
The lack of political dialogue has led to refugees. More than 100
further conflict. Palestinian attacks on Palestinians were killed
during the campaign
Israeli civilians after 1996, and the
launch of a second intifada in 2000, led
to Israel retaliating with the construc-
tion of a huge ‘separation’ wall to stop
suicide bombers and blockade the West
Bank, while simultaneously building
new settlements on land taken in 1967.
A withdrawal of Israeli settlements
from Gaza in 2005 came shortly before
a split within the Palestinians between
the Islamist Hamas movement based in
Gaza and, on the West Bank, Palestine
Liberation Organization-led secular
political groups centred around the
nationalist party Fatah. The internal
divisions within the Palestinian camp
that caused this split made it hard to
present a unified front in any negotia-
tions with Israel. This made a peace
Ivanka Trump, daughter
deal problematic because there were and senior advisor of US
now two Palestinian camps – one of president Donald Trump, at
which, Hamas, had Israel’s destruction the opening of the new US
embassy in Jerusalem on
explicitly written into its charter. 14 May 2018. The relocation
Many Israelis were convinced that of the US embassy from Tel
the Palestinians were not serious about Aviv angered Palestinians
peace. Israeli invasions of Lebanon
provoked another conflict with
Lebanon’s Hezbollah (backed by Iran),
which attacked Israel in 2006. In 2014,
Israel launched large-scale attacks into
Gaza in response to rocket fire from
Hamas militants; more recently,
Israeli soldiers have shot protesters
from Gaza who have moved against
Israel’s border fence.
The conflict rumbles on. Despite
ongoing efforts to find a resolution, it
still takes a determined optimist to see Matthew Hughes is professor of military
much future for a two-state solution in history at Brunel University London. His latest

control to the Palestinians. Netanyahu’s
supporters see his policies as the natural
result of Palestinian unwillingness to
forge a compromise deal and accept
Israel’s right to exist.
which the Israeli and Palestinian states
coexist alongside each other. Similarly,
a binational solution resulting in a single
Israeli-Palestinian state as a home for all
communities also seems unlikely.
book, Britain’s Pacification of Palestine, will be
published later this year by CUP
DISCOVER MORE
Follow events in the Middle East
online via BBC News at bbc.co.uk

53
History in videogames

54
PLAYING
WITH

From simulations of Cold War catastrophe to seemingly

realistic evocations of life in the Wild West, many
videogames have explored episodes and characters from
across history. John Wills explores the titles that reveal
how digital worlds have represented our global past
ILLUSTRATION BY MICHAEL KIRKHAM

55
History in videogames

Point and shoot

In recent first-person shooter
Call of Duty: WWII, players make
their way through the war-torn
Europe of 1944. It features several
real-life military campaigns

n April 2018, Grand Theft Auto V, a mature-rated

videogame depicting criminal life in Los Santos –
a fictionalised version of Los Angeles – became
the most successful entertainment product ever
released. Having moved more than 95 million
units and amassed over US$6 billion in sales, it
surpassed even the biggest Hollywood movies in
terms of revenue. Once dismissed as novelty items
that led kids astray, videogames now represent an
established and highly successful entertainment medium. In
the UK alone, an estimated 32.4 million people play videog-
ames. Globally, the figure exceeds two billion.
The cultural impact of videogames continues to grow.
A number of movies inspired by videogames have been
produced over the years – from Tron (1982) and WarGames
(1983) to this year’s Ready Player One – as well as film versions
of titles such as Tomb Raider (1996). Games have been used as
recruitment tools for the United States military, as apps to
entertain voters during recent US elections, and as ‘brain-train-
ing’ mental-health tools for seniors. The front line of digital
culture, videogames have trained us to interact and communi-
cate online and to embrace virtual reality.
Over the years videogames have tackled all manner of
SOPHISTICATED 3D
GAMES TRANSPORT
PLAYERS TO THE
BEACHES OF D-DAY
AND THE REALMS
OF ANCIENT EGYPT
and 1980s, titles set in the past took players on the most basic
of journeys, depicting events in a rudimentary, pixellated
fashion. Interaction was limited to simple action sequences
or textual commands. More recently, sophisticated three-
dimensional games have transported players to the beaches
of the Second World War D-Day landings in Call of Duty:
World War II, and to the realms of ancient Egypt in Assassin’s
ACTIVISION

subjects, from delivering newspapers in Paperboy (1985) to Creed: Origins. Ubisoft’s Assassin’s Creed even sports a combat-
saving Earth from alien attack in titles such as Space Invaders free ‘discovery’ mode, transforming the game into a virtual
(1978). Games have also explored world history. In the 1970s museum of historical artefacts. Videogame companies such
56
 Alternative Egypt
Cleopatra, as depicted in the 2017
action-adventure game Assassin's
Creed: Origins. Set near the end of
the Ptolemaic era, the title offers a
fictionalised account of real events
as Ubisoft and Rockstar Games conduct significant historical
research for their titles, visiting archives and speaking
to experts.
Given the increasing sway of videogames over popular
culture, it is natural to assume they now exercise some level
of influence over how we negotiate the world. For decades,
popular literature, film, radio and television have had a
powerful impact on mass understandings of history. From
Shakespearean plays to Vietnam War movies, fiction has
framed the past. As Adam Chapman, a leading scholar in
digital history, argues: “for most of us imagery and under-
standings drawn from popular media probably construct the
past as much, if not more, than the books of professional
historians”. Videogames help shape the historical imagination.
Digital pioneers
In 1903, American film projectionist Edwin S Porter produced
The Great Train Robbery, a 12-minute black-and-white silent
movie. Constructed as a series of action-packed set pieces,
Porter’s film helped establish the Western genre. In the final
scene of the movie, an outlaw played by Justus D Barnes looks
directly at the camera, lifts his revolver and fires. Immersed
in the moment, feeling helpless and dumbfounded, audiences
reeled in shock.
UBISOFT
Yet videogames go one step further. Unlike in Porter’s
movie, they actively involve players in the unfolding storyline
– they get to shoot back. In historical games, players contribute
to the unfolding narrative: they ‘play’ history. Gameworlds
therefore intimately involve players in all kinds of recreations
of historical moments. They, in turn, have the ability to
‘reshape’ those moments, raising all kinds of dilemmas over
counterfactual history and authenticity.
In autumn 1971, three trainee teachers huddled in a
janitor’s closet at a Minnesota college to work on a prototype
educational computer game. Don Rawitsch, Bill Heinemann,
and Paul Dillenberger were creating The Oregon Trail (1971),
a text-based adventure designed to teach students the history
of westward migration in the United States. The game asked
students to budget for a journey by wagon to Oregon in the
1840s. Along the route they would need to negotiate rivers,
hunt wild animals, barter with Native Americans and
sometimes catch diseases such as dysentery. Pupils loved it,
and the Minnesota Education Computing Consortium soon
rolled out the game across the state.
By the late 1970s, The Oregon Trail was being played across
the US. This education title portrayed the American frontier
as an exercise in linear progress, with players guiding their
wagons on a simple, set route toward success. The computer
game reflected a traditional historical interpretation of frontier
progress, and celebrated the journey of the white settler, but
lacked an understanding of multiple borders and the true
complexities of migration. However, it excelled at capturing Æ
57
History in videogames

1 2

3 4

© THE OREGON TRAIL USED COURTESY OF HOUGHTON MIFFLIN HARCOURT/ALAMY/UBISOFT/GETTY/FIREAXIS GAMES-2K

5 VIRTUAL LANDMARKS

1 The Oregon Trail, created by trainee teachers at Carleton College,

Minnesota. Players of the pioneering educational game, reworked in
various formats since its first release in 1971, experience life on the 19th-
century migration route, facing afflictions such as measles and dysentery

2 The idea for Atari’s Missile Command came from a magazine story
about satellites and radars. The game proved a phenomenal arcade hit,
and a 1981 conversion for the Atari VCS console sold 2.5 million copies

3 In strategy game Civilization, players build an empire, choosing from

a range of cultures including the Aztecs and the Mongols. A sixth version,
pictured here, was released in 2016; series sales have passed 40 million

4 Computer-based military simulations offer new ways to explore

military conflict. The 1992 title History Line: 1914-1918 is significant in
its attempt to represent the First World War as realistically as possible

5 Players of British-made ‘historical simulation’ JFK Reloaded take

Lee Harvey Oswald’s role in the shooting of John F Kennedy. On its
release in 2004 it proved highly controversial; its publisher defended
the game, claiming that its aim was to “bring history to life”

58
CIVILIZATION TAPPED
INTO A DESIRE TO
PLAY GOD – AND
ALSO GLORIFIED
WESTERN SCIENCE
AND TECHNOLOGY
the feel of the trail – the personal hardships, the dangers, the
daily grind. The game highlighted the potential of the entire
medium to educate and inform – to teach history. Games
became part of the teacher’s toolbox in the United States and
around the world, introducing pupils to both new technology
and new historical ideas.
War games
As with all media, videogames reflect the historic moments of
their production. In 1979, the Soviet Union invaded Afghani-
stan and Margaret Thatcher assumed power in the United
Kingdom; the following year, former Hollywood actor
Ronald Reagan was elected US president. With a new vitriol
to superpower sparring, Cold War tensions escalated.
Media culture of that era reflected the sudden rise in public
anxiety about the possibility of nuclear exchange – and this
included videogames. In 1980, Atari released the arcade
machine Missile Command. This cast the player in the role of
a defence co-ordinator tasked with protecting six cities from
nuclear attack by shooting down incoming missiles. The game
proved a phenomenal success. It also presaged Reagan’s
Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI, dubbed ‘Star Wars’ by the
popular press), a proposed programme that would use
satellites, lasers and missiles to defend the US against attack.
However, in contrast to Reagan’s promise of a nation protected
from fallout, Atari’s title painted only a bleak picture of
conflict. The cities in Missile Command could never be saved –
their destruction was merely delayed. The game, and with it
nuclear war, proved practically unwinnable. Missile Command
captured the historical moment and gamified nuclear fear.
As videogame technology advanced in the late 1980s,
the potential for games to present more complex simulations
increased. In 1991, MicroProse released Civilization, an
advanced strategy title designed by Canadian-American
Sid Meier. The game required the player to create an empire
and manage its development across time.
Meier’s title was ingenious. It offered a technology tree to
master, and competing empires to negotiate with or conquer.
Meier tapped into a desire to play god with history. The game
actively indulged the egos of its players: those who performed
admirably were lauded by a digital populace who raised palaces
in their honour. While offering the player a multitude of
options, Meier’s Civilization nonetheless sanctified very
particular notions about progress. The game glorified western
science and technology, while indigenous groups in the game
were forced to ‘become civilised’ or face extinction. Five
subsequent sequels, and numerous ‘expansion packs’, have
modified which civilisations players can control, while
maintaining the same underlying gameplay mechanics.
Titles such as Civilization pandered to grand concepts
of history and empire, but other videogames tackled specific
events and incidents. For example, the strategy game History
Line: 1914-1918, released by German company Blue Byte in
1992, recreated military campaigns of the First World War
with distinct educational overtures. The turn-based wargame
began with a realistic depiction of the assassination of
Archduke Franz Ferdinand before launching the player into
a series of challenging tactical scenarios, requiring them to
move military units across a hexagon-based map. Intriguingly,
History Line didn’t allow players to deviate too much from the
historical record. It also forged a sense of atmosphere by
regularly feeding the player contemporary newspaper stories
and facts about wartime conditions.
Occasionally, games provoked controversy with their
colourful takes on history. In 2004, Scottish-based Traffic
Software released the ‘historical simulation’ title JFK Reloaded.
Exploring the assassination of President John F Kennedy on
22 November 1963, the game puts the player in the position of
Lee Harvey Oswald, replaying his actions on that fateful day in
Dallas, Texas, by shooting at the presidential motorcade. The
aim was to test the official report of the Warren Commission
(and the broader historical record); in a sense the game
encouraged the player to solve a lingering historical conspiracy.
Unsurprisingly, the choice of topic offended many. Despite
numerous freely accessible documentaries on the shooting
of the president, as well as the footage captured by amateur
cameraman Abraham Zapruder, who filmed the Kennedy’s mo-
torcade as it drove through Dallas, ‘playing’ through the event
itself appeared quantifiably more offensive. It was an example
of a game pushing the boundaries of acceptable behaviour.
Living in the past
One of the most consistent aims in videogame design over
the past four decades has been the emulation of real life.
Throughout the 2010s, the quest for realism has edged closer
and closer to perfection. With the advent of photorealistic
graphics and virtual-reality headsets, the gap between the real
and the imagined has reduced significantly. These heightened Æ
59
History in videogames
A brief history of videogames
Key moments in half a century of digital gaming
The first videogames were developed
in the United States in places where com-
puters were available to workers, often
in military installations and on university
campuses. In 1962, Massachusetts Insti-
tute of Technology students Steve Rus-
sell, Martin Graetz and Wayne Wiitanen
programmed Spacewar! Inspired by the
Cold War, the combat game reimagined
the space race between Russia and the
US as a battle between two tiny space-
ships. Wiitanen departed the project
before completion, being called up for
military service in Berlin.
Ten years later, electronics engineer
Nolan Bushnell released Pong, a basic
simulation of table tennis. It was a huge
commercial hit, and traditional amuse-
ment companies soon jumped on the
videogame bandwagon. Chicago-based
Midway released a range of arcade titles
including Gun Fight (1975), an action
game based on the historical US frontier,
in which two cowboys face off on screen.
Still one of the most instantly rec-
ognisable titles in videogame history,
1978’s Space Invaders pits players
against wave after wave of pixellated
alien attackers. An arcade sensation,
it made a profit of some $450m.
While many arcade titles navigated
similar themes of interstellar con-
flict, 1980’s Pac-Man strayed into very
different territory, creating a new genre.
60
Its risk-and-reward format – evade
the ghosts, chomp the pellets – proved
hugely compelling, and even today Pac-
Man remains one of the most recognisa-
ble symbols of western 1980s culture.
Another game that remains instantly
identifiable thanks to its bizarre set-up,
Donkey Kong (1981) sees Mario, the lead
character, jumping across platforms
in a bid to save a damsel in distress from
the clutches of an angry, barrel-hurling
gorilla. By far the most successful of
Japanese company Nintendo’s early
attempts to tap into the US market, by
June 1982 it had made around $180m.
Pixel progression
A 1977 iteration of Pong, a very basic
simulation of table tennis. The initial
version, released in 1972, was one of
the earliest arcade games
Simulacrum city
The virtual cityscape of 2013’s
Grand Theft Auto V, based on LA
and other places in California.
This game is the fastest-selling
entertainment product in history
While Nintendo was influencing the
west from Japan, 1984’s Tetris was the
first piece of entertainment software
to head from the Soviet Union to the US.
Programmed by Russian game designer
Alexey Pajitnov, it requires players to
tessellate a never-ending onslaught
of brightly coloured geometric shapes.
A handheld version released for Ninten-
do’s Game Boy console five years later
secured its lasting global popularity.
Not all videogames rely solely on
reflexes. Will Wright’s SimCity (1989) is
rather more considered, tasking players
with transforming a barren plot of land
into a bustling metropolis. Providing
options to manage everything from road
networks to waste disposal, its open-
ended, world-building structure
launched an entire genre of games.
Though many games had experiment-
ed with three dimensions, Doom (1993)
was the first really successful effort.
Its demons-in-space plot may be dispos-
able (and sparked tabloid ire thanks to
its mix of violence and satanic imagery),
but the influence of its 3D gameworld
ALAMY/ROCKSTAR GAMES
can be traced through scores of titles
released in subsequent decades.
From cowboys and archaeologists to
the criminal fraternity of 2013’s Grand
Theft Auto V, videogames now offer an
increasingly diverse range of settings,
characters and player experiences.
New frontiers
Western-themed action adventure
Red Dead Redemption, set on the
US-Mexico border in 1911, has
sold more than 15 million copies
since its release in 2010

from taming wild stallions to stealing a supply train from the

LIKE A HOLLYWOOD- Mexican army.
The attention to historical detail was striking and, indeed,
STYLE GUNSLINGER, Rockstar promoted its title as an authentic historical product.
Players live and breathe Rockstar’s Wild West. The game offers
PLAYERS ARE ABLE an unrivalled sense of immersion, along with the opportunity
to revisit a rare historical moment: the demise of the Wild West
TO CONSISTENTLY at the dawn of a new century.
Yet Red Dead Redemption clearly takes its inspiration from
SHOOT THEIR WAY the Hollywood Western, itself a fictional, largely mythic and
decidedly visual interpretation of events. It enforces common
OUT OF TROUBLE misunderstandings about history by presenting the gun,
rather than the plough or the dollar, as maker of the frontier.
Much like a Hollywood-style gunslinger, Marston consistently
shoots his way out of trouble.
Popular gaming has thus
levels of realism, immersion and complexity also apply to reproduced some of the errors John Wills is reader in
videogames exploring historical topics. and omissions of popular American history and culture at
In 2010, Rockstar Games released Red Dead Redemption, history. Indeed, though many the University of Kent. His recent
an open-world adventure set in the American West of the modern videogames may have project ‘Playing Cowboys and
early 20th century. Demonstrating the leap forward from the perfected the look of history, Criminals: Videogame Depictions
simple pixellated cowboys seen in early games such as the programmers and players alike of the Frontier and Urban West’
ROCKSTAR GAMES

hugely popular 1975 arcade shooter Gun Fight – the first video- have more work to do before was exhibited at the British
game to depict two humans fighting – the game brims with games truly offer balanced, Academy Summer Showcase.
frontier atmosphere. Assuming the role of retired outlaw rounded accounts of global For more details, see britac.ac.uk/
John Marston, the player tackles a diverse variety of challenges, historical realities. events/summershowcase/2018

61
The murder of Emmett Till

Emmett Till pictured with his mother, Mamie Till Bradley, in the early 1950s

ALAMY

62
Emmett Till was a happy, confident
teenager. In August 1955 he travelled
south to visit relatives in Mississippi.
Eight days later he was dead,
killed by two men who accused
him of whistling at a white woman.
His brutal murder was just one
of thousands of racially motivated
lynchings in the American South –
but it proved to be a pivotal moment
in the civil rights revolution.

By Maria Margaronis

ACCOMPANIES MARIA’S BBC RADIO 4 DOCUMENTARY

ARCHIVE ON FOUR: THE BALLADS OF EMMETT TILL

Æ
63
The murder of Emmett Till

O
n 20 August 1955, Mamie Till
Bradley reluctantly put her 14-
year-old son Emmett – ‘Bo’, to his
family – on the train from Chicago
to Mississippi with his great-uncle
Moses Wright, who had come up to
Chicago for a family funeral. Bo’s
favourite cousin, Wheeler Parker,
was going down south with Uncle
Mose for a summer holiday, and Bo didn’t want to miss out on
the swimming and the fishing, the food from the gardens, the
adventures and the starry nights. He was a confident, cheerful,
kid, big for his age, a joker with a playful swagger in spite of the
stutter left by a bout of polio.
Mamie worried that Bo’s confident Chicago manners
would get him into trouble in the small community of Money,
deep in the American South, where black subjugation was
policed by a rigid code of behaviour and enforced by murder-
ous terror. She had prepared him carefully for his trip to the
place her parents had left three decades before in search of
work and safety: don’t speak to white folks unless you’re spoken
to, step off the sidewalk when they pass, never look them in the eye.
She had packed some fried chicken and cake for him in a
shoebox, because she knew he wouldn’t be allowed to use the
dining car. At Cairo, Illinois, he and his cousins would have
to move to the crowded ‘colored’ car behind the locomotive –
the noisiest and smokiest on the train.
Emmett came back to Mamie two weeks later in a pine box
packed with lime, his face mutilated and swollen beyond rec-
ognition, one eye missing and the other hanging halfway down
his cheek, his skull split and pierced by a bullet hole. At 2am
on the morning of Sunday 28 August, he’d been taken from
his great-uncle’s house by two white men, Roy Bryant and
JW Milam, who claimed he’d flirted with Bryant’s young
wife, Carolyn, as she minded the couple’s general
store. Bo had gone in to buy bubblegum the pre-
vious Wednesday evening; his cousins recalled
that he’d whistled when Carolyn came out.
They whisked him away from the store,
but the white men came for him anyway,
bundled him into the back of a pickup
truck with a couple of Milam’s black hired
hands, drove him around half the night,
then tortured him in a barn before shooting
and killing him. A black teenager called Willie
Reed who happened to pass by heard the terrible
screaming; later he saw something wrapped in
a tarp loaded onto the truck. Emmett’s bloated
Mamie Till Bradley
insisted on an open
coffin so the world
could see what had
been done to her son
to Chicago, told the undertaker not to clean up his pulped
head, and insisted on an open coffin so that the world could
see what had been done to her son.
The funeral service was held on 3 September at Chicago’s
Roberts Temple Church of God in Christ. Tens of thousands
of people filed past Emmett as he lay in state for four days
afterwards, dignified in a dark suit in defiance of the white
men’s violence. Some fainted at the sight. The horrifying pho-
tograph of his disfigured face was published in Jett magazine
and reprinted everywhere, passed round, cut out and shown to
African-American children for years afterwards as a warning.
The image was a deliberate reversal of the white supremacist
tradition of lynching photographs – gruesome images of black
men hanging from trees while white families looked on –
printed and sold as postcards in the segregation-era South.
When an all-white Mississippi jury acquitted Milam
and Bryant in a brief trial in the town of Sumner, near Money,
that September, news of the verdict travelled round the world.
The dancer Josephine Baker led a protest in Paris, and letters
demanding justice for Till arrived at the White House from as
far away as Norway and the Kremlin. Rallies were held across
the American Midwest; in Harlem, Mamie addressed
a huge crowd alongside leaders of the National
Association for the Advancement of Coloured
People (the NAACP), the Abyssinian Baptist
Church, and black unions.
In November, Mississippi civil rights
activist TRM Howard spoke about Till
at the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in
Montgomery, Alabama. The pastor of the
church was the 26-year-old Martin Luther
King Jr, and among the congregation was
the seamstress Rosa Parks. Four days later she
refused to give up her seat on the bus for a white
The accused man, sparking the Montgomery bus boycott.
GETTY IMAGES

body was found in the Tallahatchie River by
a fisherman three days later.
Mamie refused to bury her boy in the Delta
mud. She made sure that his body was sent back
64
Roy Bryant and JW Milam during Many years afterwards she said: “I thought of
their trial in September 1955.
The all-white jury acquitted both
Emmett Till and I couldn’t go back.”
defendants after deliberating Thousands of black men and boys had been
for just over an hour lynched on lesser pretexts, their killers never
 Final rites
Mamie Till Bradley is
comforted as her son’s coffin
GETTY IMAGES

is lowered into its grave in

Alsip, Illinois, on 6 September
1955. The funeral followed
four days in which Emmett
Till’s body lay in state Æ
65
 The murder of Emmett Till

American race relations

Ten key moments in the history of the
black experience in the United States Designs for flags used in
the Confederate States
of America 1861–65

1861
The Confederate States
of America is formed
after slave-holding
states in the south
declare secession
from the United States
over disagreements
about the expansion
of slavery
1861–65
The American Civil
War is fought between
the United States and
the Confederate States
of America. By its end,
at least 750,000
people have been
killed and the
Escaped slaves, pictured in 1861. The secession of southern Confederacy collapses
states, in part due to disputes over slavery, sparked civil war

1941 1896 Late 19th century

The US joins the Second In a landmark case, So-called ‘Jim Crow’
World War following the US supreme court laws are enacted locally,
the bombing of upholds the constitu- enforcing racial
Pearl Harbor. The tionality of racial segregation in public
nation’s military segregation of public facilities in the South
remains segregated facilities as long as they and reversing the
throughout the conflict are ‘equal in quality’ gains made by African-
Americans after the war
A sign for the ‘colored’ waiting
room at Memphis bus station, 1943

1948
Executive Order 9981 is
passed, proscribing
racial discrimination in
the US armed forces. It
marks the first step in the
eventual desegregation
of the military
An African-American army
corporal, c1953. The last all-
black unit was disbanded in 1954
1954
State school segregation
is ruled unconstitutional.
This landmark victory
for the civil rights
movement is met with
resistance, and further
legislation is required
for it to be fully enacted
Black students arrive at a Tennessee school in
1956, shortly after desegregation was ordered

1964 1963 1955

The Civil Rights Act is passed, Martin Luther King begins Emmett Till is murdered.
prohibiting discrimination in a campaign against racial Activist Rosa Parks
GETTY IMAGES/ALAMY

employment based on “race, segregation in Birming- hears a speech about his

color, religion, sex, or
national origin”. Further
legislation a year later
revokes other ‘Jim Crow’
laws restricting voting rights
66
ham, Alabama. Later that death; on 1 December, she
year, the Ku Klux Klan refuses to give up her bus
bombs the city’s 16th seat to a white passenger
Street Baptist Church, Protesters march in the wake in Montgomery, Alabama,
killing four children of the 1963 Alabama bombing
sparking a bus boycott
that killed four black children
 arrested, let alone brought to trial. But it was Emmett Till’s
murder that galvanised the burgeoning civil rights movement
and broke through white America’s silence about racist killings.
Mamie’s courage in displaying her son’s body was essential to
its impact; so, too, was the historical and political context of
the time at which it happened.
T
ill’s lynching united in grief, solidarity and anger
the black communities of Mississippi and Chi-
cago, which had been separated but not severed
by the ‘great migration’ that began around 1915
and, over the next five decades, saw six million
African-Americans move from the rural south of the US to
the cities of the north-east, west and midwest. In some ways, it
began to crystallise a national black consciousness. The hugely
popular TV show I Love Lucy was interrupted to announce the
discovery of Till’s body; the trial was international news, with
TV cameramen crowding the square outside Sumner’s court-
house. White liberal reporters from the north saw Southern
racism up close for the first time; black Chicago’s confident
publications, especially Jet magazine, understood and framed
the story in the context of the civil rights movement gathering
strength in the South, and the white backlash against it.
The year before Emmett was killed, a unanimous decision
by the Supreme Court in the case of Brown vs Board of
Education had declared unconstitutional the state laws
establishing separate schools for black and white students.
It was a landmark ruling that opened the first real crack in
the legal structures of white supremacy, and set the Federal
government on a collision course with Southern racism.
That victory had given a new impetus to the black freedom
movement, but also to white supremacists, who joined White
Citizens’ Councils (a sanitised retooling of the Ku Klux Klan)
in droves to protect their ‘way of life’. The thought of their
daughters sharing classrooms with black teenage boys was
anathema to those people. Racist fantasies about black
sexuality and horror at the notion of ‘miscegenation’, or ‘racial
mixing’, were driving forces behind Emmett’s murder,
as they were behind so many previous lynchings.
Between 1877 and 1950, more than 4,000 African-
Americans were lynched in Southern states – that is, whipped,
castrated, tortured, burned alive or strung from the trees
by white mobs – a form of terrorism meant to enforce the
subjugation of the entire community. Nearly 200 anti-
lynching bills were introduced to Congress between 1882 and
1962, but this seemingly obvious measure was blocked every
time by Southern Democrats. (In 2005, the Senate finally
issued a formal apology for its failure to act.) The NAACP had
made the passage of anti-lynching legislation a primary goal
GETTY IMAGES
since 1912; now, with the victory of Brown vs Board and the
backlash against it, America’s oldest grassroots civil rights
organisation was determined to redouble its efforts.
White defiance
Members of the White
Citizens’ Council of Greater
New Orleans at a meeting
in 1960. Such groups used
intimidation and violence
to oppose racial integration
A few months before Till’s kidnapping, on 7 May 1955,
minister and voting rights activist George Lee was shot dead in
Belzoni, Mississippi. Police claimed he had died in a traffic
accident, and that the shot found in his mouth was loosened
dental fillings. Reverend Lee was given an open-casket funeral;
his photographs, in life and in death, appeared on the cover of
Jet. But the far more shocking images of the cheeky Chicago
boy who’d gone South to visit family and been slaughtered for
nothing more than teenage high spirits, mourned by a young
mother who was also light-skinned enough to please the
warped ‘colorist’ prejudices of the time, gave the NAACP
a much better vehicle for its anti-lynching campaign. As Till
scholar and film-maker Keith Beauchamp puts it, Till’s murder
was “the perfect storm”. It was through that coincidence of
history, politics and brave personalities that Emmett Till
became the protomartyr of the civil rights movement, and his
mother its grief-stricken but determined Madonna, a model for
countless others deprived of their sons and daughters.
E
mmett Till’s story lives on in literature, music,
art and film, in commemorations and museums,
in activism and the unfinished search for justice.
Those streams converge and cross like the rivers
of the Mississippi Delta, so that it’s hard to say
where one ends and another begins; the waters began to flow
at once, and still flow on today. Despite confessions by Milam
and Bryant soon after the trial, no one has ever been convicted
of Till’s murder. The FBI reopened the case in 2004 after
Keith Beauchamp, working closely with Emmett’s mother,
discovered new evidence. No one was indicted then but,
since Carolyn Bryant confessed that she lied at the trial in
an interview with historian Timothy Tyson for his 2017 book
The Blood of Emmett Till, there’s been pressure to reopen the
case again.
The first blues for Emmett Till was written by Harlem
Renaissance poet Langston Hughes almost immediately;
during the first weeks after Emmett’s murder, the leftwing
Daily Worker and Chicago Defender carried an outpouring of
elegies. In 1960, the great Chicago poet Gwendolyn Brooks Æ
67
The murder of Emmett Till

Freedom of movement
Members of the Freedom
Riders pictured in New York
City, 1961. This organisation
travelled in multi-ethnic
groups to protest against
laws enforcing the racial
segregation of public
transport in the US South

Empty places
The creeper-shrouded
store in the Mississippi
town of Money, 60 years
after the encounter
there that led to
Emmett Till’s death

Class unity
Pupils in Washington
DC shortly after the
1954 legal decision to
integrate US schools.
The move “opened
the first real crack in
the legal structures
of white supremacy”

68
 Today, as the Black
Lives Matter movement
takes Till as an ancestor,
rappers pepper songs
with his name

published a pair of poems that put Carolyn Bryant and Mamie

Till Bradley at the heart of the story. The first is a free-verse
exploration of Carolyn’s imagined thoughts, incisively honest
and bravely empathic: Brooks’ Carolyn is both complicit and
a victim of the men around her. The second gives us Mamie’s
Modern tensions unspeakable grief from a respectful distance, in the restrained
Crowds gather in the third person. Together, the poems map the two women’s roles
California city of Santa in the system that both holds them and keeps them separate,
Barbara in August 2013 putting gendered power at the core of white supremacy.
for a rally and march for
In the early 1960s, when young Freedom Riders (northern
Trayvon Martin, a black
teenager shot dead in civil rights activists, both white and black) went south to
Florida the year before support black activists who were putting their lives on the line,
Bob Dylan, Joan Baez and Emmylou Harris all sang about
Emmett Till. James Baldwin wrote a play, Blues for Mister
Charlie, based on the murder and the trial. Memoirs by Anne
Moody, Muhammad Ali, Miles Davis and John Edgar Wide-
man all mark Till’s death as a moment of awakening. Today,
as the Black Lives Matter movement takes Till as an ancestor,
rappers pepper songs with his name. As many as three films on
the subject are currently in development, including one co-pro-
duced by actor and presenter Whoopi Goldberg. A new wave of
writers are mining the connections, such as the playwright Ifa
Bayeza, whose Ballad of Emmett Till was revived in Washing-
ton this June, and Chicago-born poets Nate Marshall, Eve
Ewing and Patricia Smith, whose fiery collection Incendiary
Art weaves sonnets about Till with poems about more recent
killings of young black men. The controversy over a painting
of Till by (white) artist Dana Schutz in last year’s Whitney
Biennial made it painfully clear that the past is still present.

A
nd yet it took 50 years for Till’s death to
be commemorated in Mississippi. This summer
I drove the Emmett Till Memorial Highway
through the Delta, under a sky heaped with tall
clouds that burst one afternoon in sluicing,
An artistic legacy thunderous rain. The wide, flat fields are empty, straddled by
US singer Emmylou long sprinklers like giant insects, haunted by the thousands of
Harris pictured in the souls who worked and suffered there or tried to run away, with
1960s. She is one of no place to hide but muddy ditches and thin bands of trees.
many artists, musicians
and authors to refer to
The towns, too, are half empty. Absentee agribusiness firms
Emmett Till’s life and now run the big plantations; the Delta ekes out a living from
death in their work casinos, prisons, and tourism based on its rich blues heritage. Æ
69
The murder of Emmett Till

Symbol of resistance
A demonstrator in Ferguson,
Missouri wearing a shirt
depicting Emmett Till, August
2014. Some of the protests
that followed the shooting
of black teenager Michael
Brown here turned violent

the general store is empty except for a cooler and bags of chips.
Till’s story echoes every Men without work sit outside in the middle of the afternoon.
Meanwhile, in the spectacular new National Museum
time that the killing of African-American History and Culture in Washington,
DC, Till’s real restored casket, white and lined with silk,
of an African-American lies in state in a room that is more shrine than museum
display. Photographs cover the walls; gospel legend Mahalia
person by a white man Jackson sings over the loudspeakers. Visitors file out in tears,
sometimes too overwhelmed to speak. “Your heart just drops,”
goes unpunished one woman said. “So much sacrifice, so much blood, and it’s
not over yet.”
In a way, Till’s funeral never ended. His story echoes every
time the killing of an African-American person by a white man
Till is making his own small contribution to local regenera- goes unpunished – especially
tion. The restored Sumner courthouse where his murderers when the victim is young, as
were acquitted is now a centre for projects aimed at truth and Trayvon Martin was when he Maria Margaronis is a writer
reconciliation. Sites related to his kidnapping and death form was shot by a neighbourhood and broadcaster. She is London
part of a national Civil Rights Trail. A small museum in the watch volunteer in 2012 at the correspondent for The Nation,
hamlet of Glendora, former home of JW Milam, includes an age of 17, or when the body is the oldest political weekly
effigy of Till in his coffin, the head made from clay and the left in public view like that of a magazine in the United States
body stuffed with straw by the local undertaker. lynching victim, as 18-year-old
DISCOVER MORE
But while black America remembers, much of white Michael Brown’s was in Missouri
Archive on Four:
America still wants to forget. The sign by the Tallahatchie in 2014. The wound is raw, The Ballads of
River where Till’s body was found was shot full of holes two and regularly reopened. As Till’s Emmett Till,
years ago; the one by Bryant’s store has twice been vandalised. mother used to say, “You must presented by Maria Margaronis,
The store has almost vanished, pulled down by a tangle of continuously tell Emmett’s story is scheduled to be broadcast
GETTY IMAGES

on BBC Radio 4 in August.

creepers. Nothing remains of Milam’s house but its concrete until man’s consciousness is After that transmission it
foundation. Glendora itself has also been forgotten. Rickety risen. Only then will there be will be available online at
houses straggle along a dirt road by an unfenced railway line; justice for Emmett Till.” bbc.co.uk/radio4

70
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71
Culture
Books, exhibitions, films and more

“I’m arguing that we need

to bring back a spirit of
critical thought to Islam”
Ed Husain’s new book, The House of Islam, explores the history behind
the challenges faced by Muslims around the world in the 21st century.
He met historian and broadcaster Tom Hollandto discuss his thoughts

72 PORTRAITS BY FRAN MONKS

 The
Conver-
sation

73
CULTURE The Conversation

“Muslims were the global

superpower, and they were
suddenly reduced to losing
imperial territory” ED HUSAIN

Tom Holland: Rather than begin at the beginning of your and chemistry sets, and the Islamic world had to wake up
fascinating new book, I want to start at the end, with its final to what was going on in Europe. To what extent do you
paragraph: “The House of Islam is on fire”. That’s a very think the need to integrate western ideas and technology
dramatic image. Why is the House of Islam on fire? helped or hindered the formation of the kind of Islam
that you favour?
Ed Husain: The main reason – to continue the metaphor –
is because there are ‘arsonists’ within the house, who have The battle of ideas is key. The Ottomans tried to emulate
the shelter and protection of parts of the global Muslim everything western, from military attire to the latest guns,
community. They are adherents to a form of thinking but they couldn’t understand what was driving that innova-
expressed in bodies such as the government of Iran and tion, nor the wider European thought process. And behind
extreme Islamist organisations such as the Muslim Brother- that thought process were two or three big ideas that are still
hood, Hamas and Hezbollah. An entire category of people has with us, and which still haven’t had the necessary impact on
reduced Islam to a political, confrontational ideology. the Muslim world today.
The first is the pursuit of complete individualism.
Why do you think they are doing it? What is feeding Napoleon’s invasion wasn’t the first time the Muslim
these flames? world encountered the west: they’d had a sustained two-way
conversation with the crusaders, for instance, for at least
In the book, I explain the 120-year humiliation that most 200 years. But the crusaders weren’t able to leave behind
Muslims experienced stretching from Napoleon’s invasion of a legacy that troubled the Muslim world because they did
Egypt in 1798 through to the First World War. That period not bring a world view that stood in complete contradistinc-
was very painful for Muslims, because it didn’t reflect their tion to the way in which the Muslims lived.
history, and it didn’t chime with who they felt they were
supposed to be: a warrior people with an upper A 14th-century illustration shows Because they were Christians...
hand globally. For 1,000 years Muslims were a Mongol prince studying the
the global superpower, and they were suddenly Qur’an. Muslims believe this Yes. The crusaders, too, had a holy book, their
central religious text of Islam was
reduced to losing imperial territory and the revealed to the Prophet Muhammed
fight was over a holy land, and both Muslims
technological race. That loss of empire and the and Christians broadly agreed on the place of
Ottoman decline led to the formation of the man in the spiritual universe. Napoleon and
Muslim Brotherhood and a whole range of the French Revolution had a very different idea
extreme and sometimes violent organisations. of man’s place, and of individualism, which remains
a shock to the Muslim mind to this day.
I absolutely agree with you that Napoleon’s invasion Another key idea was the pursuit of rational
of Egypt was a key event, even if symbolically, thought – wherever that thought process led –
because up until that point Islamic civilisation independent of religion or tradition. That, too,
had been a world unto itself. It hadn’t really had was hard to absorb, because in most Muslim
any need to take much interest in, say, what the communities ideas such as tradition and family
BRIDGEMAN

Franks in the barbaric reaches of western were much more important than they were for,
Europe were up to. And then suddenly say, Enlightenment thinkers such as Jean-Jacques
Napoleon crashed in with his hot-air balloons Rousseau or Voltaire.

74
 Napoleon leads his
army at the battle of
the pyramids
(21 July 1798) in
a 19th-century
painting. French
post-revolutionary
ideas of individualism
and rational thought
were a shock to
Muslims who first
encountered them
when Napoleon
invaded Egypt
The third key idea for the French revolutionaries, and for
those who aspired to be more like France and Europe, was
that history was a burden that had to be forcefully removed.
Yet for most Muslims, history was sacred and ought to be
revived. Indeed, unlike followers of the French Revolution
or the Enlightenment, who believed the best days were yet to
come, many Muslims saw their best days as being in the past.
All of this, sadly, meant that many Muslims started to
define themselves against the west. If the west was going to be
individualistic, they were going to be collectivist. If the west
was going to be logical, they were going to become excessively
emotional and angry. If the west was going to disregard history,
Muslims would reimagine a perfect form of history.
What was lost was an understanding that, even within
Muslim tradition, there is a strong precedent for empiricist
thought, for being critical of history, and of looking to the
future and not necessarily imagining a perfect past. Take,
for example, the decriminalisation of homosexuality in the
Ottoman empire in 1858: the Ottomans, supported by
prominent Muslim thought-leaders, were at least a century
ahead of the west. Homosexual acts were was seen as a matter
between individuals and God, not something the state should
be involved in. That was revolutionary – but, rather than build
on that thought process, what followed was a conscious
rejection of everything the west stood for.
BRIDGEMAN
The struggle to cope with being religious in the modern
world is, of course, not exclusive to Islam. It’s a challenge that
Christians had to face when, for instance, Notre-Dame de
Paris was converted from a Catholic cathedral into a Temple
of Reason during the French Revolution, before Muslims
had to put up with Napoleon turning up in Cairo.
And so, as a result, there is a sense in which if you are
a believer – whether a Muslim, a Christian or a Hindu –
faced with the manifold challenges that modernity repre-
sents to traditional paradigms of faith, you have, to be
very reductive, two choices. One is to go with the grain
of modernity, which is what you, Ed, are doing, and what
liberals in Christian churches and Reform Judaism and so
on do. The other is to take the fundamentalist option.
Essentially, the problem for Muslims – as for everyone else
– is that although you may have a sense of what your faith
was in the past, when it wasn’t challenged by modernity, we
can’t ever get back to it. Whether we’re fundamentalist or
liberal believers, in other words, the past is still gone.
But the past also lives on. It lives on in my recital of the Qur’an,
for instance, and in my upholding of the teachings of the great
philosophers, prophets and poets of the past.
Yes, I was very struck by your book’s beautiful articulation
of your love of poetry and of the great poets of Persia and
Al-Andalus. It seems to me that it’s a hymn of love to
a great civilisation, not just to what we’d now call a religion.
It’s about this extraordinary civilisation that simply didn’t
have to cope with anything that lay outside it. In a sense, Æ
75
CULTURE The Conversation

Muslim scholars in the

library at Basra, depicted
in a 13th-century painting.
Islamic thinkers have long
welcomed ideas from outside
traditions, says Ed Husain:
“I don’t think most Muslim
scholars ever thought that
every answer to every
question was in the Qur’an”

Ed Husain and Tom Holland

in London. “[Islamic
scripture] is probably more
living and meaningful
history to a believer than
the past is to someone
who approaches it simply
as stones, pottery and
manuscripts,” says Husain

76
 “You begin with Muhammed’s
life and the revelation to him
of the Qur’an – but that isn’t
really history, is it?”
isn’t it a bit like me wistfully citing [17th-century English
poets] John Milton or John Donne in memoriam of a
vanished Christian faith? Aren’t you mourning a civilisation,
rather than a religion?
Well, firstly, hats off to you for encapsulating the essence
of the book. You’re absolutely right: it is a hymn of love.
But I don’t think I am mourning Islam as a civilisation; if
anything, I’m genuinely resuscitating its spirit. This religion
doesn’t have to take the form of the Alhambra, of the Blue
Mosque or of the Taj Mahal, because those are all external
manifestations. Inner comfort, serenity, beauty and meaning
in the modern world must take different manifestations –
the big question is what those are today.
We haven’t found answers yet. What does being modern
and Muslim mean today? Where are the great artistic
achievements of the modern Muslim world? To my eyes,
there’s too much mimicking going on and not enough native
expression of beauty in Jakarta or Dubai, Delhi or Lahore –
nor, indeed, in the west. And that’s what worries me: that
we’re losing the spirit that inspires that beauty.
You begin your book with the life of Muhammed and the
revelation to him of the Qur’an. You know what I’m going
to say: this book is subtitled ‘A Global History’, but this isn’t
really history, is it? You are giving the received account of the
traditional Muslim understanding of Muhammed’s life…
And you’re Tom Holland, famous for refuting it! You’re more
than welcome to refute it, too – indeed, you should, and you
should bring the rigour of the modern historical methodology
to it. But while I respect that historical criticism, academic
history is a relatively modern innovation…
BRIDGEMAN/FRAN MONKS
But isn’t it part of why modernity is so threatening to belief?
I think that history is just as much received wisdom, though.
History is what Muhammed and his companions said he said,
as well as how that’s been passed down through the generations
TOM HOLLAND
to us. I think that’s also valid and is also important. I’m not
saying that there weren’t excesses in some of the layering of his-
tory, and that’s where I think that the academic rigour is useful
to us, but at the same time it is history. It’s probably more living
and meaningful history to a believer than the past is to some-
one who approaches it simply as pottery and manuscripts.
You have a really intriguing line about the Hadith – the
sayings of Muhammad that provide the fabric of traditional
Islamic understandings of God. You write that “very little
thought is given to the fact that the Hadiths were written
so long after the Prophet’s passing” – which, of course, is
something that I’d absolutely agree with, although my take
would be is that they’re most unlikely to have come from
the mouth of the Prophet himself. To be rude, it seems to me
that you’re saying that any Hadith with which you personally
disagree is unreliable and not to be trusted. Is that unfair?
It is somewhat unfair! I’ve struggled with Hadith over the
years, because the Qur’an describes a prophet as a mercy unto
mankind or to the universe – and then you come across claims
of Hadith in which the Prophet was allegedly violent. Early
Muslims had deep reservations about Hadith, too, and there
was a famous incident in which a caliph forbade many of the
companions of the Prophet from even attempting to write
down Hadith. My issue is that, among Muslims today, we’ve
lost a critical approach to Hadith literature. It was written at
least 120 years after the Prophet, after all.
But my understanding is that, while scholars in Islam’s
early centuries appreciated that there was the risk of fakes
and fabrications, there was also a science for evaluating
authenticity and authoritative collections that were, essen-
tially, to be relied upon. So doesn’t taking the approach of
saying that any Hadith you dislike are unreliable risk tug-
ging on a thread that might pull the entire tapestry apart?
I’m not saying for a moment that if one doesn’t like a particular
Hadith then it’s not reliable. I’m arguing that we need to bring Æ
77
CULTURE The Conversation

“Whether it’s gender equality or

gay marriage, these are ‘tier two’
issues – the existence of God is
what matters most” ED HUSAIN

back a spirit of critical thought, the spirit of a Prophet who is
kind, logical and thoughtful. So I think that Hadith have to be
in keeping with the spirit of the Qur’an.
So do you think that you can apply that same critical spirit
to the Qur’an, or is everything in it true?
really only in Europe in the 18th and 19th centuries that
people started arguing that the whole institution should be
abolished. I suppose that, as a result, an Isis ideologue would
argue that the notion of slavery as an evil institution is
a western idea that has infected Islam, and that nobody in
the faith’s classical period had such an idea.

For me, as a Muslim, everything in the Qur’an is true.
But it’s important to say that the biggest reservations and
areas of contention between Islam and modernity aren’t in
the Qur’an at all. Most of them, whether they concern suicide
bombings or apostasy [the abandonment
of religious belief], are in the claims of
Hadith literature.
Yet there are also verses within the
Qur’an which have been used to justify
war, violence and, indeed, slavery – a fact
that groups such as Isis have notoriously
pointed to in support of the idea it should
be reintroduced.
But the vast majority of the world’s
Muslims have rejected that. There’s “You can find plenty
a well-established principle, born in of evidence and
the very early days of Islam and carried thought in early
throughout history, of a consensus of
the mainstream. What’s interesting is that Islam to support
the early Muslim scholars always looked the development of
to what the Prophet tried to do, and to his a fully modernised,
attitudes to injustice such as slavery. secularised state
You’re right – that’s exactly what they’d say. That’s why groups
such as Isis are so dangerous: because they are literalists who
want to go back to an imagined ‘year zero’. That’s why most
Muslims, and indeed most other people, disagree with them.
The implication of this is, actually, rather
hopeful. If the vast majority of Muslims
accept that the institution of slavery
is evil, yet also acknowledge that’s an
idea derived from European tradition,
then there is scope for a kind of Islam
that welcomes ideas and thoughts from
outside traditions.
It’s revealing to me that you think that’s
a big moment, because Islam has always
been exactly that. It has absorbed from
other cultures, including Byzantine, the…
…but my understanding is that Muslims
have classically understood Islam as the
final, perfect revelation, as humanity’s
last chance, and that it is therefore in
a sense complete.

But, as in Christianity, with very few

exceptions there doesn’t seem to have
been the mental leap to criticise the
institution of slavery. It was treated in
a similar way to forces such as hunger
or disease: it was seen as an ill, but
just something that was there. It was
today without
compromising an
individual’s piety”
Hear more of Husain and Holland’s
discussion on our biweekly podcast
historyextra.com/podcasts
It’s ‘complete’ in the sense that there’s
a verse in the Qur’an in which God says
“today I have completed your faith”, but
I don’t think that most Muslim scholars
ever thought that every answer to every
question was in the Qur’an. If that were
indeed the case, we would not have

78
 A 15th-century decorated
book of Islamic law,
traditions and obligations.
Islamic societies developed
diverse schools of thought
on jurisprudence and
practice, says Ed Husain

developed such diverse schools of thought on jurisprudence
and practice.
What you have in the Qur’an are broad base principles.
One of the greatest beauties of Islamic history and its legacy
is a continued focus, from the 10th and 11th centuries onward,
on the same overarching objectives: preservation of life, family,
religious worship, intellect and private property. Those are the
five fundamentals we all have to preserve. Everything else is
open to debate and discussion.
By that measure, what we’re seeing is that living in the west
is fully in keeping with what it means to be a Muslim. Nobody
in the west is persecuted for being a Muslim, unlike in China,
where you cannot observe religious freedom.
Is the fact that you and other believers can look back to the
example of the Prophet’s life, and the revelations given to
him from God, a help in negotiating modernity – or is it
a hindrance? Essentially, do you not
have to continually adjust your inher-
itance of scripture and tradition to your ABOUT THE AUTHORS
gut instincts as a liberal living in the
21st century, and to issues such as
slavery or gay marriage?
I’m not saying that this is exclusive
to Islam, by the way – it could apply Ed Husain
just as much to any religion. Believers is the author of The House
gain immense sustenance from their of Islam: A Global History
faith, but at the same time there is a (Bloomsbury, 2018) and
sense it prompts them to recalibrate The Islamist (Penguin, 2007)
elements within that tradition that are
problematic to the way in which they
see the 21st-century liberal order. Tom Holland
is a historian, broadcaster
Inherent in your question is an emphasis and author of books
on what I call ‘tier two’ issues as including In the Shadow
being completely primary and of vital of The Sword: The Battle
BRIDGEMAN
two’ issues as opposed to the ‘tier one’ issue – the existence
of God. That’s what matters.
If the thrust of modernity were to force me to say that there
was no divine existence, no way to communicate with God,
and no divine accountability for my actions, that would be
a problem. For Muslims, what matters are the wonders of God,
communication through the Prophet Muhammed, and the
idea of an afterlife. Everything else is detail, which has always
been contested. The problem with modernity is that the ‘tier
two’ issues are seen as primary.
A slightly more depressing take on the prospects for Islam,
and for faith generally, is that there are people who feel
that liberal manifestations of those faiths are slightly pallid.
You see that in the Islamists but also in new, militant strands
of Hinduism, for instance, as well as in the Orthodox Chris-
tianity of Putin’s Russia. Is there perhaps a sense that, rather
than what we might call the ‘Thought
for the Day’ approach to religion in
which an imam or a priest says totally
inoffensive things on the radio, there’s
now a global phenomenon of people
wanting a bit more ‘red meat’?
I think here we can apply a political
maxim often cited in the United States:
‘if you’re in your 20s and not a socialist
you have no heart, and if you’re in your
40s and not a conservative you have
no brain’. I think there’s some of that
at play for the younger rebels: a desire
to change the world.
But as long as those on the more
modernised, thoughtful and pluralist
arm of civilisation continue to assert
our values, continue to refuse to say

importance to a believer. Whether it’s for Global Empire and the that the Islamists and extremists are
homosexuality, gay marriage, gender End of the Ancient World somehow right, and continue to not
equality or apostasy, these are all ‘tier (Little, Brown, 2012) give up, I remain optimistic.

79
CULTURE Agenda

Agenda
EXHIBITIONS, TV,
FILMS AND
MORE

80
 GOLDEN GIFTS
There’s colour and gold galore
in a new exhibition of artefacts
presented to the Prince of Wales
– later Edward VII – as he toured
the Indian subcontinent in 1875
and 1876. Aiming to bolster ties
between the British crown and local
leaders in anticipation of Victoria
being named Empress of India, the
prince’s itinerary traversed areas of
what are now Nepal, India and
Pakistan. This lavish barge-shaped
ROYAL COLLECTION TRUST-© HER MAJESTY QUEEN ELIZABETH II 2018
inkstand is one of the collection’s
highlights. Crafted from gold,
enamel and a multitude of precious
stones, its prow adorned with a
peacock, it was given to the prince
by the maharaja of the sacred city
of Benares (now Varanasi).
Splendours of the Subcontinent:
A Prince’s Tour of India 1875-6
until 14 October at The Queen’s Gallery,
Buckingham Palace
royalcollection.org.uk/whatson
81
CULTURE
E Agenda

An early 20th-century
necklace, in a style
worn in Oman, east
Africa and south Asia,
features in the new
exhibition

PAST MASTERS
Leading global historians, many of
them contributors to this magazine,
will be sharing their expertise at
two BBC History Magazine History
Weekends in October. Speakers at the
events in Winchester and York include
Michael Wood on the Trojan War,
Sarah Churchwell on the evolution
of America First, and former British
Museum director Neil MacGregor
on the role of gods in diverse human
cultures. If you’re going to be in the
UK this autumn, this is a great chance
to hear the latest thinking first-hand
– and to explore two historic British
cities at the same time.
History Weekends,
5–7 October (Winchester), 19–21 October (York)
historyweekend.com
OCEAN CURRENTS
Africa’s Swahili coast, spanning parts
of Kenya, Tanzania, Mozambique and
nearby Indian Ocean islands, is rich
in natural resources that have long
attracted diverse cultures to the region’s
shores and ports such as Mombasa,
Zanzibar and Dar es Salaam.
A new travelling exhibition, calling
at the National Museum of African
Art in Washington DC this summer,
celebrates the dynamic artistic traditions
that emerged along the Swahili coast, the
name of which derives from the Arabic
word for ‘edge’ or ‘coast’. Reflecting the
cosmopolitan heritage of the region,
the collection features more than 150
artefacts – from jewellery and clothing
CHRIS BROWN-KRANNERT ART MUSEUM AT THE UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS /THESECRETSTUDIO.NET/©THE BRITISH LIBRARY BOARD
to photographs and books – with origins
in cultures from Asia, Africa, the Middle
East and Europe. It’s also a story that
reveals wider influences such as migra-
tion and the blending of cultures.
The exhibition moves to the Fowler
Museum at the University of California
in Los Angeles from 21 October 2018
to 10 February 2019. And as an enticing
taster, historian Gus Casely-Hayford
highlights one of the artefacts from the
exhibition in our Museum of the World
feature on page 98 of this issue.
World on the Horizon: Swahili Arts Across
the Indian Ocean, until 3 September at the
National Museum of African Art, Washington DC
https://africa.si.edu

The Windrush as pictured on

a postcard sold on board the ship
during its 1948 voyage to Britain
MEMORIES OF MIGRATION
Seventy years ago, the Empire Windrush arrived in the UK,
carrying migrants invited from the Caribbean – a milestone
moment that hit recent headlines when some of those passengers’
descendants were threatened with deportation. A new British
Library exhibition explores the human story behind the politics
– why these voyagers made the trip, what they left behind, and
the ways in which their migration forever changed life in Britain.
Windrush: Songs in a Strange Land, until 21 October at the British Library, London
bl.uk/events/windrush-songs-in-a-strange-land

82

DAIRY TALES
A new book from American writer
Mark Kurlansky explores the history of
milk, from its significance in the ancient
world to current debates about genetic
modification and animal rights. Here,
Mark skims through the ways in which
the liquid has shaped our past.
Many cultures have creation myths
about milk. It’s how the Milky Way
got its name, for instance: the stars
were thought to resemble spilled milk.
Hindu mythology, as well as a number
of African cultures, also features
milk-based creation stories. It’s not too
surprising, because milk gives life – it’s
what newborn babies need, after all.
It’s not known which animal was
first milked for human consumption,
though because the practice seems to
have started in the Middle East it was
probably either a goat or a camel. Cows
came to be favoured because they’re the
most efficient: you have to feed a cow
a lot, but you get a lot of milk in return
– far more than from a sheep or a goat.
The first people to milk animals
BRIDGEMAN
probably lived in hot regions including
the Mediterranean and the Middle East.
They didn’t drink milk much, however,
WORDS MATT ELTON
in part because it spoiled so quickly;
instead they used it to make cheese and
yogurt. In ancient Rome, for instance,
it was mostly farmers who drank milk,
which is why the Romans were so con-
temptuous when they went to northern
Europe and saw so many people drinking
it. They thought that Europeans were
backwards, barbaric people because they
acted like a bunch of farmers!
Observing Tibetan dairy farming
today is like looking back into medieval
times. I studied the history of medieval
dairies in Europe, then watched
Tibetans milking their yaks – and they
were doing exactly the same things.
They don’t have milking parlours, for
instance, so just milk out in the fields.
Only about 40% of humans worldwide
today are not lactose intolerant – in
other words, more people are than
aren’t. A large proportion of people in
Africa are lactose intolerant, for instance
– apart from groups such as the Maasai,
who are cattle herders. It testifies to the
dominance of white European culture
that, because most Europeans are able to
drink milk, it’s come to be accepted as
the norm – even though so much of the
world is lactose intolerant.
A young boy milks a cow in the US state of
Massachusetts in 1913, and (above) a 1941
poster extolling the virtues of drinking milk
Milk consumption became fashionable
from the 18th century, partly because of
the popularisation of ice cream but also
because women began to turn against
breastfeeding and nursemaids, and
towards ‘artificial feeding’ – giving chil-
dren milk from animals. It was also part-
ly because of a change in fashion among
the wealthy: women’s clothes were not
what we could call ‘breast-friendly’!
The transition from breastfeeding
babies to using animal milk proved
fairly disastrous. Animal milk can kill
if it’s not clean, and at that time nothing
was known about hygiene or germs.
Pasteurisation, developed in the 1860s,
was a big step in reducing fatalities,
particularly from tuberculosis. Interest-
ingly, it wasn’t originally associated with
milk; Pasteur developed it for use with
wine – much more French! In the process
of his work he discovered microorgan-
isms that cause disease, and that they can
be eliminated with heat. Though that
had obvious implications for milk,
it wasn’t developed for the reasons we
often think – and it was the British and
Americans who applied the process to
milk from the late 19th century.
Milk!: A 10,000-Year Food Fracas is out in
August, published by Bloomsbury
83
 Journeys
Stories and sights from global history

In the footsteps of…

a 19th-century
expedition across
Australia’s wild heart
In 1860, a band of intrepid explorers set out from
Melbourne on a mission to cross Australia from south
to north, traversing lands known only to Indigenous
peoples. Peter FitzSimons follows the travails of the
ill-fated expedition led by Robert O’Hara Burke
GETTY IMAGES

84
 The raw red earth, scrub and ridges
of the Selwyn Range in western
Queensland stood between Burke
and Wills’ expedition and their goal:
the north coast of Australia
GETTY

85
JOURNEYS In the footsteps of a 19th-century expedition across Australia
ust over a century and a
J half ago, two-thirds of Aus-
tralia remained a mystery
to its European inhabitants.
Though by the 1850s Australia had been
colonised for a good six decades, Euro-
pean settlement was mostly clinging to
the edges of the continent like cats on a
curtain. The interior was almost entirely
unexplored by the colonists.
What lay in the heart? Was there an
inland sea? Perhaps rich grazing lands,
where the first to arrive could grow rich
off the fat of the land, as they had done
in Victoria from the 1830s? Or maybe
they would find another Ballarat, with
alluvial gold lying around to the point
that “a poor man can go down a hole,
and come out a rich man”?
Among those asking these questions
in the late 1850s were members of the
recently established Philosophical
Society of Victoria (renamed the Royal
Society of Victoria in 1859). On 21
October 1857 these men discussed a
proposal to mount an expedition right
across the heart of the continent, from
Melbourne in the south all the way to
the Gulf of Carpentaria in the north and
back. If done properly, Melbourne’s
Argus enthused on 1 September
1858: “A ghastly blank will no
longer stare us in the face when
we bend our eyes upon the
map of this continent, and
the track of the explorers
winding over that white plain,
may become one of the
highways of commerce,
dotted with centres of
Robert O’Hara Burke,
(1821–61), expedition
leader, had been
known “to lose himself
even on a blazed track”
Burke was charming and well connected
– though not a great bushman. It was said
he was not able to tell north from south
86
population, and vital with the ebb and
flow of a periodical tide of travellers.”
Things did not, though, move quick-
ly. It wasn’t till June 1860 that funds
were raised for the Victorian Exploring
Expedition and a leader appointed:
a charismatic Irish police inspector,
Robert O’Hara Burke. Charming and
well-connected, Burke was also known
for gambling, drinking and a quick
temper – though not for bushcraft. It
was said that he was not able to tell the
difference between north and south, and
one colleague later recalled that: “Burke
was the worst bushman I ever met, and I
have known him to lose himself even on
a blazed track.” Still, he would be joined
by other, perhaps more capable men: the
initial party of 19 included a medical
officer, a surveyor, a naturalist, an
English camel importer and four camel
handlers from the Indian subcontinent.
Weight of expectations
When they set off from Melbourne’s
Royal Park on 20 August 1860, before a
crowd of 15,000, the expedition’s wagons
were laden down with food to last
18 months: 600lb (270kg) of salt pork,
400lb (180kg) of bacon and 60lb (27kg)
of potted mutton, plus a dining-room
table and oak chairs, 150lb (70kg)
of sperm-whale-wax candles and
a Chinese gong to summon the
men to their meals. Together
the supplies weighed 20 tonnes,
hauled or carried by 24 camels,
26 horses and six wagons, one
of which was amphibious
(in case the fabled inland
sea was discovered).
So heavily
overladen were the
wagons that one
broke down just Æ Ludwig Becker
The Victorian
Exploring Expedition:
Key characters
Robert O’Hara Burke
Born in County Galway in 1821, Burke
served in the Austrian army then as a
police superintendent in rural Victoria.
His appointment to lead the expedition
was controversial: many doubted his
character and experience.
George James Landells
Born in Barbados in 1825, Landells moved
to India around 1842 and began importing
horses and then camels to Australia.
Originally Burke’s second-in-command,
the men soon fell out and Landells left the
expedition on 16 October 1860.
William John Wills
Born in Devon in 1834, Wills worked at his
father’s medical practice in the Ballarat
goldfields in the 1850s. The expedition’s
surveyor and astronomer, he became
second-in-command after Landells left.
John King
An Irishman born in 1838, King served
with the British army in India, where he
met Landells, later sailing to Australia
with the camels. Sole survivor of Burke’s
forward party, he never fully recovered,
dying of tuberculosis in 1872.
Charles Gray
A Scotsman of unknown age, Gray sailed
to Australia and worked the Bendigo
goldfields. He met and was recruited by
Burke at Swan Hill just a few weeks into
the expedition; he caught dysentery, and
died on 17 April 1861.
William Brahe
Born in Germany, in 1835, Brahe arrived
in Victoria in 1852 and worked the
goldfields. Charged with manning the
depot camp on Cooper’s Creek, he left
the morning before Burke, Wills and King
returned. He survived the expedition,
dying in Melbourne in 1912.
Another German, Becker was 52 when
he joined the expedition as artist and
naturalist. A member of Wright’s relief
party that headed to Cooper’s Creek from
Menindee in January 1861, he painted a
ALAMY
number of new species before dying of
malnutrition and dysentery in April.
 Burke and Wills turn back
before reaching open sea,
defeated by boggy ground
and dense mangroves

Rations run shor t and

the men
grow weaker. At Camp
42R
they kill a camel, Boocha, ,
dry its meat for food and

Burke, Wills, King and Charles

Gray head north for the coast,
instructing the remaining men
to wait three months for them
Four days after Gray dies,
Burke, Wills and King reach the
depot – hours after the depot party
left, leaving supplies buried under
a tree. They are too weak to follow

Burke’s advance party arrives

at Cooper’s Creek, roughly
Burke and Wills die separately on the
halfway between Melbourne
creek. King is rescued by Aboriginal
and the north coast at the
Yandruwandha people and found
Gulf of Carpentaria
by a relief party in September

Burke’s party arrives at

Menindee. Second-in-
command George Landells
resigns and is replaced by
William Wills. Burke heads
north with seven men
The expedition crosses the
Murray River at Swan Hill into
New South Wales, and starts the
slog through dense mallee scrub

The Victorian Exploring Expedition,

led by Robert O’Hara Burke, leaves
Melbourne with camels and carts
carrying 20 tonnes of supplies

Æ
ILLUSTRATION BY THERESA GRIEBEN 87
JOURNEYS In the footsteps of a 19th-century expedition across Australia
200 metres after departure. And that was
just the start of the expedition’s travails.
Burke slowly led his cavalcade north from
settled districts through muddy swamps,
taking three weeks to reach Swan Hill,
where he recruited new members
including Scotsman Charles Gray.
Tensions soon grew within the party,
not least because of Burke’s high-handed
attitude and resistance to the methods of
his second-in-command, the camel
importer George James Landells, who
– along with medical officer Hermann
Beckler – resigned on 16 October at
Menindee on the Darling River, the last
spot offering any chance of picking up
significant supplies. Here Burke
promoted expedition surveyor and
astronomer William John Wills to
replace Landells, and split the men,
leading a forward party on a quick march
to Cooper’s Creek while leaving most
of the equipment to follow later with
a newly appointed local, William
Wright, who would await funding for
more supplies from Melbourne.
Three months after setting out from
Victoria, on 20 November Burke’s party
reached Cooper’s Creek, a green streak
straddling the border of New South
Wales and Queensland. There, Burke
took stock. The only way to proceed, he
decided, was to leave five men and most
of their supplies here by a coolabah tree,
with a depot party under the command
of a young German, William Brahe.
Meanwhile, Burke and three others –
Wills, Gray and a young Irishman, John
King – along with six camels and his
beloved horse, Billy, would race for the
Gulf of Carpentaria. Burke, always
bullish, told Brahe to wait three months
at the depot for their return; Wills took
Brahe aside and quietly instructed him
to stay for at least four months.
On 16 December, the four men
headed off on an odyssey that took them
through Sturt’s Stony Desert (named for
an earlier explorer who’d traversed this
inhospitable region in 1844), up and over
mountain ranges, through scrub and
88
As the sun set, Burke
and his companions
arrived back at the
depot camp – to find
only the remains of a
fire, ashes still warm
right to the boggy ground and mangrove
swamps lining the Gulf of Carpentaria
on Australia’s north coast.
The conditions Burke and his men
encountered were nothing if not varied:
arid deserts, swamps and mountain
ranges, freezing nights and searing days.
Fifteen decades later, when I followed
their route, I was stunned by the terrible
beauty of the landscape, the shocking
barrenness of some stretches, the sheer
distance – and the heat! I was exhausted
after an air-conditioned fortnight, and so
was my 4WD, which suffered hundreds
of dollars’ worth of wear and tear.
So near, so far
On 11 February 1861 – nearly six
months and some 2,000 miles after their
triumphal departure from Melbourne –
Burke and Wills, having left Gray and
King at the edges of the mangroves, were
forced to admit defeat. Though they
knew the sea was almost within sight
– they could see the water in the muddy
flats rising and falling with the tides –
the two men could not find a route to
the coast itself, nor the energy to keep
searching for one.
Shattered, they turned back, picking
up King and Gray en route. They had
used two-thirds of their supplies on the
trek north, and on the return leg, with
little food and having endured the
harshest of conditions, things fell apart.
By now on starvation rations, the men
killed and ate a python – after which
both Burke and Gray contracted
dysentery. Caught by Wills surreptitious-
ly eating food pilfered from the depleted
supplies, Gray was given “a good
thrashing” by Burke. The camel Boocha
and Burke’s horse Billy, starved and
exhausted by the long journey over
rapidly changing terrain – from bog to
the orange rock ridges of the Selwyn
Range, and back again, then that arid
Stony Desert once more – were butch-
ered, their flesh dried for meat. Despite
that extra protein, the men were fading
fast, and on 17 April 1861 Gray died, just
a short distance from the depot camp.
On 21 April, four months and five
days after Burke’s forward party had left
Cooper’s Creek, Brahe and his men –
having used up almost all of their own
supplies – had to make the tough
decision to break camp. Brahe buried
a small cache of supplies beneath a
coolabah tree, and at 10am reluctantly
headed south towards the Darling River.
The timing couldn’t have been more
heartbreaking. As sun set that evening,
after a long, hot, exhausting day, Burke
and his two human companions, along
with two surviving camels, arrived at the
depot camp. They found not friendly
faces and food but the remains of a fire,
its ashes still warm. Dazed and uncom-
prehending, Burke wandered around in
a state of “bewildered astonishment”. In
contrast, the effect of the situation was
“to excite a feeling of merriment in the
mind of Mr Wills”, King later recounted.
The situation was dire. Their only
remaining supplies were “a pound and
a-half of dried meat” – the last of poor
Billy the horse. With relief they spotted
the word Brahe had carved into the bark
of a nearby coolabah tree: “DIG”. Doing
so, they discovered the cache – not much,
but enough to keep them alive for a few
weeks. For some days they rested at the
camp, too weak to try to catch up with
Brahe’s party, and discussed their next
steps: should they retrace their steps to
Menindee, or push south-west to the
closer police outpost at Mount Hopeless?
They decided on the latter – but their
strength was ebbing.
Taking pity on them, the local
Yandruwandha people offered help,
 A contemporary painting
reflects public enthusiasm
for the expedition. On
20 August 1860, some
15,000 people crowded into
Royal Park to cheer off the
party, which numbered 19
men, 24 camels, 26 horses
and six wagons laden with
20 tonnes of supplies

William John Wills

(1834–61), the
expedition’s surveyor
and astronomer, who
was made second-in-
command part-way
through the journey

A memorial at the
‘Dig Tree’ at Cooper’s
Creek, in remote
south-west
Queensland, under
which supplies were
cached by William
Brahe for Burke and his
forward party on their
return from the coast
BRIDGEMAN/ALAMY/GETTY IMAGES

Mangroves on the Gulf of

Carpentaria in far northern
Queensland, near where
Burke and Wills tried to
reach the coast but were
stymied by the boggy terrain
of the mangrove swamps
Æ
89
JOURNEYS In the footsteps of a 19th-century expedition across Australia
An 1880 engraving
depicts John King,
sole survivor of the
expedition’s forward
party, mourning the
death of Robert O’Hara
Burke in late June 1861
“a whole tribe coming down, all painted,
and with fish in small nets carried by two
men”, and also handed over food made
with nardoo (a kind of fern). But Burke
misinterpreted the intentions of the
Aboriginal people and, becoming
enraged by them, ordered King to fire
his pistol over their heads.
Final mistake
That was a fatal error of judgement.
Without the help of those locals, the
Europeans were left to starve – and did
just that. They gathered and ate nardoo
but, without using the correct method of
preparation known to the Yandruwand-
ha, it merely weakened them further.
And despite the abundance of edible fish
in nearby billabongs and creeks, they
were unable – or not skilled or aware
enough – to catch the ready food that
could have sustained them.
Wills, insisting that the others leave
him behind when he became too frail to
walk, perished around 30 June; Burke,
Burke ordered King to fire his pistol above the
heads of the Aboriginal people who’d offered
food to the starving explorers – a fatal error
90
too, died around that date at another
spot on Cooper’s Creek. The Yandru-
wandha then took pity on King, feeding
and caring for him for many weeks until
the arrival on 15 September of a rescue
party led by English bushman Alfred
Howitt. The only man who survived,
King, was the one who respected the
Aboriginal way of life, and had been
looked after accordingly.
When news of the expedition’s fate
reached Melbourne, it caused an outcry.
A government enquiry largely blamed
Wright, the man whose relief expedition
from Menindee had been delayed by
bad conditions, and Brahe, for leaving
the camp. Burke and Wills themselves
were feted, thousands paying respects to
their recovered bodies as they lay in
state in Melbourne.
On 21 January 1863, Burke and
Wills were given Victoria’s first state
funeral. On the same day, explorer John
McDouall Stuart was received in
Adelaide, having completed a successful
TOPFOTO
two-way traverse of Australia, returning
from the north coast with no loss of life
– in stark contrast to the catastrophic
expedition led by Burke.
In 1860, before setting out on his epic
but ill-fated journey, Burke proclaimed
that: “I have only one ambition, which is
to do some deed before I die, that shall
entitle me to have my name honourably
inscribed on the page of history. If
I succeed in that I care not what death,
or when I die.”
His expedition – and, particularly, his
leadership – may today be judged as an
honourable failure. And with monu-
ments, memorials and statues erected
across Victoria, the page of history
certainly bears his name.
Peter FitzSimons
is a former Australian
international rugby
union player, journalist,
broadcaster and
biographer
DISCOVER MORE
Burke & Wills: The Triumph and Tragedy
of Australia’s Most Famous Explorers by
Peter FitzSimons (Constable, 2018)
 MAGAZINE
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JOURNEYS
Global City Arles France
‘Little
Rome’ of
Provence
Throughout the past
26 centuries, Arles
has been a key trading
post, a major Roman
regional hub, and muse
to 19th-century artists.
Bijan Omrani explores
the Provençal city at
the mouth of the Rhône
Bijan Omrani
is a historian and author
of Caesar’s Footprints:
Journeys to Roman Gaul
(Head of Zeus, 2017)
92
The picturesque streets, squares
and ancient sites of Arles inspired
19th-century painters including
Vincent van Gogh
et at the apex of the Rhône
S delta in Provence, Arles has
long been a crucial gateway
between the Mediterranean
and the heartlands of western Europe. By
the 6th century BC it was a busy Phoeni-
cian trading port, and over the centuries
it drew Greeks, Romans, Visigoths,
Franks and Saracens. To explore its early
history, visit the Musée Départemental
Arles Antique. Among its treasures are a
magnificent 31-metre-long Roman barge
raised from the bed of the Rhône, and
statues and inscriptions of eastern cults –
Cybele, Mithras, Isis – imported from the
farthest reaches of Roman territory.
Signs of 500 years of Roman rule,
beginning in the first century BC, are
everywhere. Most impressive is the
amphitheatre; like Rome’s Colosseum,
it was built around AD 70, but is better
preserved. After the empire collapsed,
Arles suffered frequent raids; the amphi-
theatre became a fortified mini-town,
with four defensive towers built into its
walls, probably in the eighth century. You
can see marks on its stonework made by
the beams of hundreds of dwellings built
inside, removed in the early 19th century.
In Roman times, the amphitheatre
staged gladiator fights and animal
combat; bullfights have been held here
since its 19th-century restoration. The
Roman Theatre nearby is more refined,
though much less well preserved: after
the Roman period it was used as a stone
quarry and its stage became a nunnery’s
garden. Two giant columns of exotic
stone still stand, reminders of its original
grandeur and the arrival of Roman high
culture in this provincial city.
The forum was the heart of Roman
Arles. Today, only fragments of its struc-
tures still stand, built into the walls of the
Place du Forum. However, you can grasp
its original scale at the Cryptoporticus, a
c90-metre-long, three-sided subterranean
stone arcade on which the forum’s portico
was built – a breathtaking testament to
Roman engineering.
Arles became an important adminis-
trative centre later in the Roman period
when the frontiers were under pressure,
and the Baths of Constantine signal its
continuing prosperity into the fourth
century. In medieval times this com-
plex was converted into a palace for the
counts of Provence, but you can still see
the remains of a pool and hypocausts.
GETTY IMAGES
Elsewhere, a section of the Roman
walls still stands, and on Boulevard Émile
Combes you can see where the aqueduct
brought water into the city. Follow the
aqueduct’s route a few kilometres east to
Barbegal to see the remains of the com-
plex of 16 Roman watermills, built in the
second or third century AD, that could
grind enough wheat to feed more than
10,000 people daily.
Arles has long been famous for its
Roman cemetery, the Alyscamps, estab-
lished outside the city walls alongside the
Aurelian Way. It became sought after for
Christian burials in the fourth century
after Christ reputedly appeared here,
an incident marked by the Chapelle de
la Genouillade. Though fractured by
railways built in the 19th century, an
atmospheric avenue lined with late
Roman tombs was preserved, inspiring
paintings by Vincent van Gogh.
By the 12th century Arles was the
second-largest city in Provence, and in
1178 Holy Roman Emperor Frederick
Barbarossa was crowned King of Bur-
gundy at the Church of St Trophime; its
12th century west door and cloister are
masterpieces of Romanesque art.
Arles’s political significance declined
in the Middle Ages. The mouth of the
ILLUSTRATION BY TONWEN JONES
Arles’s backstreets
are lined with grand
medieval houses in
a state of elegant
and evocative decay
Rhône silted up, trade and commerce
moved elsewhere, and Arles became a
backwater and fell into decline. In the
19th century, the sense that Arles was
untouched by the modern age appealed
to poets and artists. Wandering the back-
streets, lined with grand medieval houses
in a state of elegant and evocative decay,
it is not difficult to see the attraction.
Discover Arles’s later cultural and artistic
heritage at Musée Réattu, housed in an
old priory of the Knights of Malta with
a wonderful late-medieval facade, and
Museon Arlaten (due to reopen in 2019),
founded by the poet Frédéric Mistral
(1830–1914) to preserve Provençal life-
style, folk art and costumes.
4 7
ARLES IN NINE SITES
1 Musée Départemental Arles Antique
Fascinating archaeological museum
housing a 31-metre Roman barge
2 Roman Amphitheatre
First-century-AD venue for gladiatorial
fights and animal combats
3 Roman Theatre
Home of Roman high culture
4 Cryptoporticus
Vast array of subterranean arches built
to support the portico of the Roman forum
5 Baths of Constantine
Fourth-century Roman baths complex
with remains of a pool and hypocaust
6 Alyscamps
Atmospheric Roman necropolis that
inspired Vincent van Gogh
7 Church of St Trophime
Imposing 12th-century Romanesque
church with exquisitely carved west door
8 Musée Réattu
Art by Arles-born Jacques Réattu,
Picasso and others in a historic priory
9 Museon Arlaten
Treasury of Provençal cultures
3
93
 JOURNEYS Wonders of the World

Wonders of the World

Bagan Myanmar

94
 Forest of temples
More than 2,200 pahto (temples or
shrines) and zedi (stupas or pagodas)
stud a vast plain on the left bank of the
Irrawaddy River, 100 miles south-west
of Mandalay. Although once a thriving
city home to perhaps 200,000 people, the
buildings in which its inhabitants lived
and worked were made with wood – and
only brick and stone-built religious
structures survive today. It’s believed
that more than 10,000 Buddhist temples,
pagodas and monasteries were con-
structed during the Bagan kingdom’s
heyday from the 11th to 13th centuries.
Known as Arimaddanapura (City of the
Enemy Crusher), Bagan was the foremost
ancient empire in what’s now Myanmar.

Plain of 1,000
pagodas
On a bend in the Irrawaddy River
GETTY IMAGES/MAP: BATTLEFIELD DESIGNS

in central Myanmar lies a vast plain

studded with thousands of temples
and stupas – relics of a mighty city
that burgeoned a millennium ago.
Paul Bloomfield explores the
myriad monuments of Bagan Æ
95
JOURNEYS Wonders of the World

First foundations
The Tharaba Gate is the oldest
part of the city walls, believed to
date from the 10th or 11th century
when Bagan was first fortified.
The city was founded around 849
by Bamar people (from whose
name ‘Burma’, the country’s
alternative title, is derived)
who arrived here in the eighth
or ninth century, possibly
from the eastern Himalaya,
and successfully battled the
Mon for control of the region.

Golden age
The gilded Shwezigon pagoda was begun during
the reign of Anawrahta, whose accession to the
throne in 1044 marked the start of Bagan’s golden
age. Anawrahta consolidated and expanded the
empire, centralised government and converted
to Theravada Buddhism. He established Bagan as
a major religious and cultural centre, building
many of its most impressive monuments.

Art imitates life

This colourful mural in Ananda Ok Kyaung,
ALAMY/BRIDGEMAN

a brick-built monastic sanctuary dating

from the 11th century, is one of several
depicting everyday life in Bagan. Scenes
of markets, bathing, cooking, musicians
and even Arab traders paint a vivid picture
of a bustling, cosmopolitan city.

96
 Pinnacle achievement
Ananda Pahto, a soaring temple
built around 1105 by King
Kyanzittha, marks a transition
in architectural styles. One of
the largest and most beautifully
proportioned of Bagan’s
temples, soaring to 51 metres
high, it was – like most of the
monuments at the site – dam-
aged by a powerful earthquake
that struck in 1975. Since
rebuilt, its spires were gilded to
mark its 900th anniversary.

Height of sophistication
Sulamani Pahto (known as the
‘Crowning Jewel’), built c1181–83
and decorated with elaborately
carved stucco, is the epitome of
the sophisticated temple styles
that evolved later in Bagan’s golden
era. This temple was once the focal
point of a busy complex of Buddhist
learning and devotion, its enclosing
wall lined with 100 monastic cells.

L Final flourish
This decorative tile adorns Mingalazedi
(‘Blessing Stupa’), Bagan’s last great
monument. Built by Narathihapati around
1277, its ornate decoration reflected
royal extravagance that may have over-
stretched the city’s finances. Bagan was
probably already in decline when Kublai
Khan’s Mongol army invaded the region
in 1287, and over the following centuries
this once-thriving city became a largely
deserted badland, its magnificent monu-
GETTY IMAGES/ALAMY

ments falling into ruins.

Paul Bloomfield is a travel and heritage writer

and photographer, co-author of Lonely Planet’s
Where to Go When (Lonely Planet, 2016)

97
MUSEUM OF THE WORLD
“It exudes an aura
of age, power and
that quality of great
drums – of aching
to be played”
4 Ngoma kuu (big drum)
Created by: Unknown Swahili
artist, Wasini Island, Kenya,
c17th century
Now at: Smithsonian Museum of
African Art, Washington DC
Chosen by: Gus Casely-Hayford
One of my most abiding African
memories is of standing on the dockside
in Stone Town, Zanzibar, watching an
endless procession of vast tankers and
cargo ships sail along one of world’s
great trade routes.
If I had stood on that spot just over a
century ago, in September 1914, I could
have witnessed the German battle cruiser
Königsberg opening fire and sinking HMS
Pegasus as she was anchored in the
entrance to Zanzibar harbour. The First
World War was barely a month old and
scarcely a shot had been fired, but one
of the first naval battles in the first truly
global conflict had begun.
There is a reason the war flared into
action here. The Swahili Coast of what’s
now Kenya, Tanzania and northern
Mozambique has always been a place of
exchange, of diffusion and hybridity, an
interface between strategically impor-
tant worlds that has been contested and
competed over for millennia. In this place
that straddles faultlines, where cultures
meet and exchange, a particular trans-
cultural way of being was created.
The Swahili Coast was important not
just for trade but also for music, for craft
and for ideas. And it wears that heritage of
98
Global history’s finest objects, curated by experts
cosmopolitanism invention proudly: you
can hear it in the language, and it is writ
large in the culture and politics. Perhaps
the perfect encapsulation of that history is
this Swahili drum.
This ngoma kuu (big drum) is one of the
most important objects in the National
Museums of Kenya collection. It is cur-
rently on loan to the Smithsonian Nation-
al Museum of African Art in Washington
DC, where it is the one of the star objects
in World on the Horizon, an exhibition
that celebrates the arts of east Africa’s
Swahili Coast.
This ngoma kuu was made by a Swahili
artist on Wasini Island off the coast of
Kenya at some point in the 17th century.
Carved from a single piece of wood and
finished with what appear to be cow-
hide membranes, it is one of the most
important cultural-heritage objects of
Kenya, and is very rare – fewer than a
dozen such monumental drums exist
today. It is connected to an ancient city-
state, the Diwanate of Vumba Kuu (an
area of what’s now south-eastern Kenya
that encompassed Wasini Island), and
would have been used and displayed
during musical and dance performances
sponsored by the ruling oligarchy for cel-
ebrations that marked enthronements,
births, funerals and religious holidays.
Kings and queens also used such drums
as symbols of their independence.
Because these drums embody Swahili
concepts of statehood and sovereignty,
the sultans of Oman’s Busaidi dynasty,
which claimed control over the Swahili
Coast in the 19th century, confiscated and
CHRIS BROWN-© 2017 UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS
destroyed such regalia, fearful that their
continued presence in local communities
would inspire rebellion against Busaidi
rule. Today it is an object that exudes an
aura of age, power and that quality of
great drums – of aching to be played.
Gus Casely-Hayford is director of the
Smithsonian National Museum of African
Art in Washington DC, where the exhibition
World on the Horizon: Swahili Arts Across the
Indian Ocean is open until 3 September 2018
Living colour
The hillside settlement of Rocinha in the
Brazilian city of Rio de Janeiro. Although
officially a municipal subdistrict, many
still regard it as a favela, or urban slum.
We explore how Brazil has been shaped
by poverty and slavery from page 26