World Histories Issue 05 2017-08-09

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COULD HISTORY RESTORE OUR GLOBAL OPTIMISM?

WorldHistories FRESH PERSPECTIVES ON OUR GLOBAL PAST

Has terrorism ever achieved its aims? From the IRA to Al-Qaeda, the impact of decades of terror across the globe

AFRICA’S ANCIENT HISTORY A new view on forgotten civilisations

CANADA

150 years of union and division

The real Amazons How the legendary warrior women inspired fighters and feminists “The fittest of the fit went down quickly. You could just give up” The ordeals of a Burma railway PoW

From WW2 to Korea: the wars that made modern China

The new French revolution Why Macron’s election is a break from the past

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Faces from a First Nation A decorative pattern adorns a longhouse at Ksan Historical Village, British Columbia, Canada. As that country marks the 150th anniversary of Confederation, this issue explores the forces and figures that have shaped its development

WELCOME Terrorism has blighted societies throughout the world for decades – but recent events in the UK have again brought its ongoing significance into sharp focus. We began work on this issue at the start of May, before the bombing, at a concert in Manchester, that killed 22 people and injured more than 100. That tragedy was followed in June by attacks in London. These terrorist incidents, the deadliest in Britain for more than ten years, came in the wake of attacks in Belgium, France and Germany earlier this decade. In other areas of the world, efforts to kill, injure and disrupt everyday life continue to be depressingly commonplace: bombings and shootings in Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Iran and elsewhere have killed thousands this year alone. To put such occurrences into their wider global and historical context does not diminish their significance; indeed, it is through continued, unexpected disruption of public life that terrorists aim to promote their diverse agendas. This issue we explore the ways in which terrorism has shaped the course of the 20th and 21st centuries, both socially and politically. To what extent have the acts of terrorist groups ranging

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from the IRA to the so-called Islamic State achieved their aims? In our Big Question feature, starting on page 24, seven leading experts debate the subject. All of which, necessarily, makes for sobering reading. Elsewhere, we strike a more optimistic note. In our Viewpoints section, on page 12, journalist and author Rutger Bregman considers whether looking to the past may restore utopian ideals that, he argues, are sadly absent from modern thinking. And, as Canada marks the 150th anniversary of confederation, we explore the forces and figures that have shaped

its surprisingly divisive history. That’s on page 32. There’s much else besides, from the reasons that much of Africa’s ancient history has been forgotten (page 64) to the Amazons – warrior women who, though mythical, inspired cultures across the world (page 70). And we’d love to know what you think: please send your comments and suggestions to world [email protected]. We’re back on 13 September, when our writers will be considering whether nuclear weapons have secured world peace, and much else besides. Until then, enjoy the issue. Matt Elton Editor, BBC World Histories

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CONTENTS Features

A group of First Nation people meet in Moosomin, Saskatchewan, in 1889. This issue, we explore how tensions within Canada shaped the country’s identity

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THE BIG QUESTION

Africa – the secret history ✪

Has terrorism ever achieved its aims? ✪

BY ZEINAB BADAWI

With recent attacks providing a sobering reminder of the impact of global terror, seven experts explore its historical legacy

32 Canada: strong and free? ✪

GETTY IMAGES

BY MARGARET CONRAD

On the 150th anniversary of confederation, we look at the factors behind the success of the vast former British colony – and the conflicts and controversies of its history ✪ On the cover

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The producer of a new BBC series on why the continent’s ancient past was forgotten

70 The Amazon effect: from myth to movie ✪ BY JOHN MAN

How a band of legendary warrior women inspired generations of fighters and feminists

78 Maori art: Designs for life BY KELVIN DAY

The history and culture of New Zealand’s indigenous Polynesian people, in ten objects Æ 5

CONTENTS Regulars ✪ On the cover

REGULARS 44 Eyewitness: A prisoner of war in

Thailand, 1942 by Leopold Manning ✪

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48 A Year in Pictures: 1958 – Chess

players, communists and chorus lines by Richard Overy 58 Perspectives: The Moriscos are

expelled from Spain by Matt Carr 76 Extraordinary People: Fernão Lopes

by AR Azzam 114 Column: Global Connections

by Michael Scott

THE BRIEFING 8

Viewpoints: Sudhir Hazareesingh on the French election ✪, Frank Trentmann on religion and consumerism, Gordon Corera on cybersecurity, Rutger Bregman on visions of utopia ✪, and Adam IP Smith on political labels

16 Back Story: South Africa: Can the

This issue we’ve been asking … How far does Macron’s victory in France represent a break from the past? 8 Why is Canada so different from the US?

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Why was a 16th-century Portuguese nobleman voluntarily exiled on St Helena? 76 Which Maori object was found by a young boy when he set free his school’s pet frog? 78 What inspired the Chinese people to keep fighting during the Second World War? 84 Why was one of Khiva’s largest jade-andturquoise-tiled minarets left unfinished? 110

rainbow nation find a brighter future? by Chris Bowlby

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22 History Headlines: Global discoveries

and developments in the world of history

CULTURE 84 In Conversation: Hans van de Ven and

Rana Mitter discuss the former’s book on China’s 20th-century wars ✪ 92 Book reviews: New releases assessed 98 Agenda: Exhibitions, films and TV

JOURNEYS

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1824 expedition to Timbuktu by Charlie English 108 Global City: Sofia by Paul Bloomfield 110 Wonders of the World: Khiva, ISSUE 5 COVER ILLUSTRATION BY JOEY GUIDONE

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Uzbekistan by Paul Bloomfield 91 Next issue preview and pre-order

KATE HAZELL/REUTERS

102 In the footsteps of… An ill-fated

CONTRIBUTORS Expert voices from the world of history Zeinab Badawi 8

The producer and presenter of a major new BBC World News TV series explores why ancient African history is largely forgotten. “I’m not suggesting there was a conspiracy, of course – just that there wasn’t enough emphasis placed on African history by either African or non-African leaders,” she says on page 64.

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Margaret Conrad

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As Canada marks the 150th anniversary of confederation – an event that’s not been met with universal celebration – Margaret Conrad, professor emerita at the University of New Brunswick, investigates why “tensions frustrate any attempt to present Canada’s history as only a story of triumphal progress” (page 32).

Jacob Dlamini

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How can South Africa escape the scandals and corruption that have dogged its past few decades? That’s the question explored in this issue’s Back Story feature, starting on page 16. Jacob Dlamini, associate professor of history at Princeton University, shares his thoughts on how the nation could reshape its future.

Charlie English

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COLLECTION OF PUKE ARIKI, NEW PLYMOUTH/JENI NOTT/S C SEKHAR/ FRAN MONKS/AKG IMAGES/AWL IMAGES

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On page 102 the former head of international news at the Guardian traces an ambitious but ill-fated 19th-century expedition across the Sahara to a near-legendary city in Mali. “Timbuktu dominated the west’s ideas about Africa much as El Dorado had once coloured European concepts of the Americas,” he says.

Rosemary O’Kane Professor emeritus of comparative political theory at the University of Keele, O’Kane is among our panel of experts discussing whether terrorism has ever met its objectives (page 24). “In the 21st century, terrorist groups – most strikingly those concerned with ‘global jihad’ – often lack clear political goals,” she argues.

CONTACT US Website historyextra.com/worldhistories Twitter twitter.com/historyextra Facebook facebook.com/historyextra Email [email protected] Post BBC World Histories, Immediate Media Company Bristol Limited, Tower House, Fairfax Street, Bristol BS1 3BN, UK Phone +44 117 314 7377

Hans van de Ven China’s experience of the Second World War remains little understood in the west, suggests van de Ven on page 84. He met up with fellow expert Rana Mitter to discuss why Eurocentric views of the conflict remain so prevalent – and how widening it may offer us new perspectives about China’s importance.

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The Briefing The history behind today’s news

FRENCH POLITICS

Viewpoints Expert opinions on the historical issues behind today’s news

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Upheaval in the Elysée? Emmanuel Macron’s meteoric rise to the French presidency has been hailed as auguring a revolution in Paris politics – but to what extent does it represent a genuine break from the past? BY SUDHIR HAZAREESINGH

mmanuel Macron’s election to the French presidency in May 2017 has highlighted France’s enduring attachment to the radical ideal of ‘rupture’. In a conscious nod to the historic landmark of 1789, Macron’s campaign pamphlet was entitled Révolution, and he ran a successful campaign to sweep away France’s discredited political establishment. Indeed, Macron is the epitome of the political outsider. He did not rise through the ranks of the main parties of government. Unlike predecessors such as Mitterrand, Chirac and Sarkozy, Macron had never stood for any election before the 2017 campaign. To find a precedent for a political earthquake of such magnitude we must go back to 1958’s founding of the Fifth Republic, when the return of Charles de Gaulle led to a similarly comprehensive overhaul of the party system. Macron has already started to act on his promise of political renewal.

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His La République en Marche! (Republic Onwards! or ...on the Move!) movement secured an absolute majority of seats in the parliamentary elections of June 2017. He has formed a government that successfully straddles France’s classic division between left and right. Led by former Le Havre mayor Édouard Philippe, his administration includes members of his own movement but also centrists and former socialists as well as members of the conservative Republicans. There have been such composite governments before, but they were imposed upon presidents who lacked a majority in parliament. Moreover, half of Macron’s cabinet consists of highly respected men and women from civil society, including Nicolas Hulot, the popular environmental activist, who has become his minister of ecology. Even more spectacular is Macron’s renewal of parliamentary elites: more than half of his candidates for the June legislative

Have your say Share your thoughts on this issue’s columns by emailing us at [email protected]

elections had never held any elected national or local mandate before. In the same spirit, one of the first measures to be voted by the new assembly will be an ethics law to tighten rules on parliamentary expenses. This should reduce the possibility of conflicts of interest (notably by banning parliamentarians from hiring family members – a controversial practice that destroyed the presidential candidacy of François Fillon). Yet the extent of the transformation heralded by Macron must be relativised. Both the new president and his prime minister hail from the École Nationale d’Administration, the higher-education establishment that is a cocoon for French elites. Such énarques, as they are dubbed, are also strongly embedded in his senior staff and those of government departments; in this important respect, there is much continuity between Macron and his predecessors. Likewise, white-collar professionals are over-rep-

To find a precedent for a political earthquake of such magnitude we must go back to the founding of the Fifth Republic ILLUSTRATION BY KATE HAZELL

resented among Macron’s new parliamentarians (a third have their own business), and few come from the world of manual labour; here, too, there is little change. One of Macron’s flagship policies, the reform of France’s labour laws, is very much an extension of the technocratic economic liberalisation pursued (somewhat timidly) by Sarkozy and Hollande. Ultimately, in ideological terms, Macron represents a centre-left republican political tradition that has a distinguished historical pedigree in France, notably with such reformist figures as former prime ministers Pierre Mendès-France and Michel Rocard. And for all the talk of “new politics”, Macron’s methods and communication techniques come straight out of the conventional political playbook. His management of his image is extraordinarily meticulous, and his movement is run along highly centralised lines. Macron has promised to dispense with the more informal approach of his recent

predecessors, and has adopted a more lofty presidential demeanour. Hence the ultimate paradox of this leader who has promised innovation: with his concentration of power in the Elysée palace, his implacable domination of the French party system, and symbolism consciously borrowed from Mitterrand and de Gaulle, Macron is very much a classic republican monarch.

Sudhir Hazareesingh is fellow and tutor in politics at Balliol College, University of Oxford, and author of How the French Think (Allen Lane, 2015)

DISCOVER MORE Hear Sudhir Hazareesingh discuss his history of how the French think in an episode of Free Thinking on BBC Radio 3 at bbc.co.uk/programmes/b060zryk

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THE BRIEFING G Viewpoints

RELIGION

Faith vs consumerism? Terror attacks on shops and pop concerts have led to talk of a clash between consumerism and religious fundamentalism. Yet such fears ignore a wealth of historical evidence BY FRANK TRENTMANN

he terrible recent terrorist attacks in the UK – on concert-goers in Manchester in May, and on people in Borough Market in London the following month – have revived a debate about an assumed clash of civilisations. Is this the ‘Jihad vs McWorld’ conflict, first prophesied by the late political scientist Benjamin Barber 25 years ago? Barber posited a struggle between, on one hand, globalisation and corporate control and, on the other, a bid to retain traditional values through extreme religious theocracy or nationalism. Is religion, as that argument would appear to suggest, incompatible with consumer culture? Since the Enlightenment spread through Europe in the 18th century, it has been tempting to associate religion with ‘tradition’ and imagine that it would be swept aside by ‘modern’ science and commerce. Once we look

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Fundamentalism is a threat to civilised life and should be opposed. But it is not typical of how religions have responded to consumer culture 10

at the global history of consumer culture, we can see how misleading this view is. Of course, some religious fundamentalists have been violently opposed to Coca-Cola, shopping malls and pop music. In 2015, the all-female Al-Khanssaa Brigade, part of the so-called Islamic State, stated in its manifesto that “material societies today are built upon the ideology of an atheist.” But attacks have not been the preserve of ‘traditional’ Islamists. Not so long ago, from the late 1960s, the atheist Red Army Faction bombed department stores in West Germany. Nor is opposition to consumerism representative of the Islamic world. As an indication, Dubai has one of the largest shopping malls on the planet (by total area). From Saudi Arabia to Turkey, Ramadan in recent years has become, for some, something of a consumer holiday, not dissimilar to what happened to Christmas and Chanukah at the start of the 20th century. Daily prayers and fasting may be followed by a trip to the mall for some shopping and night-time entertainment. In many places, the Islamic revival has not been the enemy but, instead, the beneficiary of an expanding world of goods. New Islamic products, fashion and media have helped spread Muslim lifestyle and identity. Audio cassettes have been crucial in popularising Islam since the 1970s. Iran got its own Zamzam cola. After the American Barbie doll was outlawed in Saudi Arabia, it was quickly replaced, in 2003,

by the Syrian Fulla doll, wearing lipstick and high heels as well as a hijab. Meanwhile, fashion shows are booming in Turkey. In Malaysia and the Middle East, women now put on Halal cosmetics. Western brands are courting the booming market for ‘modest’ fashion. None of this is anti-consumerist; it is, instead, about enjoying ‘acceptable’ and ‘virtuous’ forms of consumption. The idea that religion must be the enemy of consumption is just as wrong when considering Christianity. In the 1950s, when Americans took their shining Cadillacs to the drive-through to pick up hamburgers and sodas, they also went to church far more often than did their patriotic forebears in 1776. For sects such as the Mormons in the 1870s, a ‘good’ Christian was someone who cultivated style and fashion. Beautiful objects expressed God’s design, after all. Nineteenth-century evangelists Dwight L Moody and Ira D Sankey and later ‘megachurches’ – officially those with an average attendance of 2,000 or more – have co-opted commercial culture for the faithful at least as successfully as pop bands and movie stars. More recently, Pentecostalism, a Protestant Christian faith, has swept the global south. In 2010, every second Christian in Nigeria was a Pentecostalist. ILLUSTRATION BY KATE HAZELL

Have your say Share your thoughts on this issue’s columns by emailing us at [email protected]

CYBERSECURITY

A digital wake-up call Computer viruses and cyberattacks are making headlines today – but such security vulnerabilities are almost as old as computers themselves BY GORDON CORERA

The movement’s churches promise their followers self-help and self-dependence. They call on them to break with old elites, focus on the nuclear family and education, and be rewarded with material riches. “God is the God of the rich,” Nigerian pastor Enoch Adeboye has preached since the 1980s. He wants people to have “cars, houses, clothes, land, anything money can buy”. It is difficult to think of a more consumerist philosophy of life. Fundamentalism, in whatever form, is a threat to civilised life and should be opposed. But it is not typical of how religions have responded to consumer culture. In the course of modern history, religions have drawn strength from the new products, fashions and technologies spreading through the market place. Religions today exist because they have made alliances with consumer culture, not by fighting it.

Frank Trentmann is professor of history at Birkbeck College and author of Empire of Things: How We Became a World of Consumers, from the Fifteenth Century to the Twenty-First (Allen Lane, 2016) DISCOVER MORE Hear Frank Trentmann talk about global consumption in the BBC World Service programme The Forum at bbc.co.uk/programmes/p03f3wfp

hen the WannaCry cyberattack raced round the world at the start of May – hitting Britain’s NHS, German railways and Spanish telecommunications – the public was shocked. Was it really possible that the systems on which we depend were so vulnerable? And what kind of ingenious new technology had wreaked such havoc? The buzzword ‘cybersecurity’ seems quintessentially modern, but the reality is that an understanding of our vulnerability dates back at least half a century. And even some of the specific techniques used in this latest attack were a good quarter of a century old. The first people to worry about what was called ‘computer security’ were in the US Air Force. In the early 1960s, the biggest threat for the US was the bomb – specifically, Soviet bombers dropping nuclear weapons – and a sophisticated radar system had been created to spot such planes and scramble defences. This system was controlled by early computers weighing in at about 250 tonnes. A young Air Force captain called Roger Schell posed the question: is there a danger in computers rather than people controlling the system that fired missiles? Could the missiles be directed back at America, or sabotaged? You’re crazy, he was told – but he realised that someone might be able to get into the systems and reprogram the computers. Out of Schell’s insight came a series of groundbreaking reports into computer security, produced in the late

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1960s and early 1970s. They make sobering reading today. Almost every trick used by modern hackers was predicted in the 1972 Anderson report. The lesson was that computers were inherently vulnerable: you could program them to do one thing, but someone else could give them instructions to do something different. A later lesson highlighted the vulnerability of the internet and connected computers. The rapid spread of the May 2017 attack was due to the use of a ‘worm’ – a programme that moves from host to host, computer to computer, trying to replicate itself. The internet was first developed by American academics to share information – not to secure it. They never predicted that their creation would be the basis for a global communications system on which we all depend; if they had, they might have thought a little bit more about security. The risks first became clear with the release of the first worm in November

Some of the techniques used in the latest ransomware attack are a good quarter of a century old

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THE BRIEFING G Viewpoints

VISIONS OF UTOPIA

Gordon Corera is the BBC’s security correspondent and author of Intercept: The Secret History of Computers and Spies (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2015)

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Finding hope in history We may have lost our dreams of utopia – but the past continues to off offer ideas for positive change BY RUTGER BREGMAN

he real crisis of our times – of my generation – is not that we don’t have it good, or even that we might be worse off later on. No: the real crisis is that we can’t come up with anything better. Remember: every milestone of civilisation – the end of slavery, democracy, equal rights for men and women – was once a utopian fantasy. “Progress is the realisation of Utopias,” Oscar Wilde once wrote. The problem today is that we have no vision of where to go next. We need a new Utopia for the 21st century. I was born in 1988, a year before the fall of the Berlin Wall. I grew up in the nineties, in an era in which people around the world started to believe that history had come to an end – that the age of grand narratives was over. All that was left to worry about was the state of the economy, and when the next iPhone would arrive. Most intellectuals came to think that utopian visions are dangerous – just look at the history of communism and fascism, they said. But I always had the nagging sense that we had lost something. Today, the west is suffering from a crisis of imagination. People on the left, for example, know only what they’re against: against austerity, against growth, against the establishment. I’m not saying I’m not against those things. But you also need to be for something. Martin Luther King didn’t say: “I have a nightmare.”

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History is, of course, not a science that serves up handy, bite-sized lessons for daily life. Sure, reflecting on the past can help to put our trials and tribulations into perspective, from leaky taps to national debts. But the past seems more remote from us, too. There’s a growing gulf between us and that alien world – a world we can barely comprehend. “The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there,” novelist LP Hartley once wrote. Even so, I think historians have more to offer than perspective on our present woes. The foreign country we call the past also lets us look beyond the horizons of what is, to see what could be. Why speculate about the possibility

The past teaches us a simple but crucial lesson: things could be different. The way our world is organised is not the result of some axiomatic evolution

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1988. It was unleashed by Robert Morris Jr, a young computer scientist whose aim, he later said, was to see how far it would spread. But he got his calculations wrong. It spread so fast that it clogged up a large chunk of the early internet. Computers across America simply collapsed under the weight of spreading worms. About one-tenth of all computers stopped working – another wake-up call. The WannaCry attack was spread via a worm, but the damage was done by ransomware, which encrypts or encodes files. To decrypt them, you need a password – for which payment is demanded. Data is effectively held to ransom. Again, this is not a new phenomenon. In the first documented case, in 1989, computer users were sent a disk that promised to tell them how likely it was they would succumb to Aids. On the disk was a computer virus that encrypted information; to release the information, victims were told, they must transfer US$189 into a bank account in Panama. Scotland Yard detectives discovered that the virus’s creator was a Harvardtrained biologist, Dr Joseph Popp, who claimed he was trying to raise money for Aids research. Arrested and extradited to Britain, he was declared unfit for trial. Our dependence on computers, and the techniques used to attack them, are not new. For many years experts have pointed at “wake-up calls”, highlighting the need to increase vigilance and defences. Perhaps now everyone else is waking up to a fact that computer security experts have long known: computers are inherently insecure – and the more dependent on them we become, the more vulnerable we are.

MAARTJE TER HORST

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of a radically different world when you can find it in the archives? Take the working week. Since the 1980s we’ve been working more and more, resulting in an epidemic of stress and burnouts. It doesn’t have to be this way. On 1 December 1930, as the Great Depression was raging, the cornflake magnate WK Kellogg decided to introduce a six-hour workday at his factory in Battle Creek, Michigan. It was an unmitigated success: Kellogg was able to hire an additional 300 employees, and slashed the accident rate by 41%. Moreover, his employees became noticeably more productive. For Kellogg, a shorter working week was simply a matter of good business. But for the residents of Battle Creek, it was much more than that. For the first time ever, a local paper reported, they had “real leisure”. Parents had time to spare for their children. They had more time to read, garden, and play sports. What about poverty? In 1974, the Canadian town of Dauphin trialled a universal basic income; due to lack of funding, though, they were unable to analyse the results. Thirty years later, a professor found the records of the ILLUSTRATION BY KATE HAZELL

experiment, and discovered that it had been a huge success: healthcare costs went down, crime went down, kids performed better in school, and people didn’t work any less. Whether we’re searching for new dreams or rediscovering old ones, we can’t move forward without looking to the past. It’s the only place where the abstract becomes concrete. The past teaches us a simple but crucial lesson: things could be different. The way our world is organised is not the result of some axiomatic evolution. Historians don’t believe in hard-andfast laws of progress or economics. The

world is not governed by abstract forces, but by people who plot their own course. Consequently, the past not only puts things into perspective – it can also galvanise our imaginations. The historian is not an optimist nor a pessimist. She’s a possibilist.

Rutger Bregman is a writer specialising in history, philosophy and economics, author of Utopia for Realists (Bloomsbury, 2017)

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POLITICAL LABELS

An ‘open’ p and ‘closed’ case? History shows that using reductive labels for rival political brands can help explain views simply – but can also be misleading BY ADAM IP SMITH he aim of historical writing is to convey complexity with clarity – isn’t it? We know that the world is a varied and confusing place. Yet we also know that if we don’t try to impose some kind of schema, all we’re left with is anecdote. It can be hard enough to uncover the dots, but historians then need to join them up – knowing that this will necessitate some flattening out of the idiosyncrasies and particularities of lived experience. Finding the right balance – acknowledging complexity while also writing with enough clarity to be comprehensible – can be especially challenging when it comes to politics. In part, that’s because we know that political labels – conservative, liberal or progressive, for example – are rarely adequate to reflect real people’s political understanding. Most people have views that are inconsistent. Sometimes that’s because most people think only in a shallow or reflexive way about policy

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questions. But it’s also because people – all of us, I suspect – want to preserve some things and change others, and we all constantly make multiple trade-offs between different objectives. We may hold to a consistent partisan affiliation, but that’s at best a proxy for our political values, not a true representation of them. And of course political categories are historically contingent. To generalise, ‘liberals’ in the United States over the past 80 years have been those who are more likely to want to preserve and defend things (welfare, public education or abortion rights, for example), whereas self-defined ‘conservatives’, confusingly, have often been the radicals. Back in the 19th century, conservatism in the United States was entirely compatible with liberalism. After all, in a post-revolutionary society, conservatism often meant preserving and defending a social and political order that, everywhere else in the world, represented a radical ideal. We can’t even take refuge in the old standby generalisations of ‘left’ and ‘right’ anymore. It has become modish to declare that those old labels, with their origins in seating positions of parties in the French Revolutionary assembly, have given way to a new divide between ‘open’ and ‘closed’. Tony Blair, predictably enough, is often quoted in support of this analysis. Left and right, Blair claimed in 2007, was the “traditional” way of thinking, whereas “open versus closed” is “what I would call the modern choice”.

In a world in which protectionism, nationalism and wall-building has proven a winning election formula for populists who eschew the labels left or right, there seems to be some truth to this analysis. Although of course no one – not even Donald Trump, so far as I know – is likely to accept the label ‘closed’. If there is ever to be a self-proclaimed ‘closed’ party it will be an example of a term of abuse transformed into a badge of pride. But that’s happened before: ‘Tory’ was originally a term of abuse (and often still is – even if ‘Tories’ don’t see it that way). The way through this, perhaps, is to remember that political labels are not immutable; they are just another form of generalisation, and at best they work only in a specific context. They should really always include ‘scare quotes’. An old witticism says that there are two kinds of people in the world: those who divide the world into two kinds of people, and those who don’t. Temperamentally, historians are in the second camp, even if to be understood they sometimes borrow from the first. Of course, that’s a generalisation… Adam IP Smith is senior lecturer at University College London, specialising in American history. He also writes and presents programmes for BBC Radio

ILLUSTRATION BY KATE HAZELL

THE BRIEFING G Feedback

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It is a delight to find that you have been producing this excellent magazine with a much broader focus than simply the Tudors and the Second World War. The quality of the articles has been first-rate, and the presentation is attractive, too. Could you send some copies to some of our rather inwardlooking world leaders, do you think? Alan Jacques, by email

Last issue, we asked a panel of experts whether Africa is a prisoner of its past. Readers shared their thoughts: The colonialist countries never wished to develop Africa, but simply to use it. Independence forced these countries into a ‘reset’, meaning that they started out with decades lost. Sandra Egypte, on Facebook

I’m a faithful reader of BBC History Magazine, but have always wished that there was something similar with a more global coverage. I was therefore really excited by the launch of BBC World Histories magazine. It’s taken three weeks for copies to get to our shores, but I’m so glad they’re finally here in our bookstores! missdi0nnereads, via Instagram

Africa is not a prisoner of its past, though it may be argued that the past played a significant role in shaping its present situation. Colonialism and slavery have greatly affected modern Africa physically, socially and psychologically. Yet Africa is not the only place where those institutions had an impact, and therefore this should not be used to explain the failure of African states.

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A 19th-century illustration of African slaves. Last issue, experts debated the legacy in Africa of slavery and colonialism

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Back Story

South Africa: can the ‘Rainbow Nation’ find a brighter future?

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In the 23 years since Nelson Mandela was elected South Africa’s first black president, the country has confronted major challenges including corruption, crime, poverty and racial reconciliation. As president Jacob Zuma faces the latest in a series of scandals, Chris Bowlby discusses its progress and future with Jacob Dlamini and Matt Graham

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Fighting racism ANC members march in Pretoria in February 2016 to protest against racism in South Africa. After more than two decades of ANC (majority black) rule, incidents of both violent and casual racism remain common

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THE BRIEFING Back Story: South Africa

“Tribal tensions within the ANC were tempered by the moral force, personal charisma and political authority of Nelson Mandela – but they never disappeared”

How easy has it been for the African National Congress (ANC) to make the transition from opposition movement to governing political party?

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On 16 June 1976 students in Soweto march against the imposition of Afrikaans in black schools. The brutal police response killed at least 176 protesters

Since its ban was lifted in 1990, the ANC has never conceptually or ideologically made the shift to a political party, still referring to itself as a “national liberation movement”, which reflects its long struggle against apartheid. As such, many traits from the exile struggle are still evident within the movement, such as a closed, top-down leadership and intolerance towards internal and public dissent. These do little to foster democratic tendencies in the political sphere, but serve the interests of the ANC elite. Did the authority of Nelson Mandela as leader mask tribal and other divisions that always existed within the ANC, and which have since reasserted themselves?

MG: The ANC has historically been an umbrella organisation, providing a home to a diverse range of ethnic and ideological outlooks. Any divisions before 1990 were largely checked by the overarching priority of overthrowing the apartheid state. Yet once negotiations with the white minority began, the contradictions and competing interests within the ANC allowed internal schisms between rival factions to emerge. To some extent these tensions were tempered by the moral force, personal charisma and political authority of Nelson Mandela as he sought to forge the ‘new’ South Africa, but they never disappeared. His successor, Thabo Mbeki, maintained this public veneer of ANC unity, using his ruthless

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Jacob Dlamini: There is a story told about how, in his first day as president in May 1994, Nelson Mandela found himself in an office so bare it did not even have pens. This story may or may not be true, but it does point to the challenges that faced the ANC as it made the switch from being a liberation movement to being a governing party. That switch was uneven because, though some ANC people were well equipped to lead complicated bureaucracies and to provide the kind of visionary leadership needed to give public servants direction, many others were hopelessly out of their depth. On the whole, though, the ANC made a competent adjustment because first, the organisation was largely united, and second, its leaders were smart enough to bring in technocratic talent from the anti-apartheid movement and to use this talent alongside the public servants inherited from the old order to steer the ship of state. Matt Graham: It has been an extremely difficult process, and one I’d argue that the ANC has not yet achieved. Like many movements around the world that make the transition from opposition to political power, the outcome is fraught with difficulties and contradictions. The ANC is therefore no different in struggling to adapt and reform from an exiled liberation movement into a party of governance.

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African National Congress: a brief history Following the defeat of the Boers (descendants of Dutch settlers in southern Africa) in 1902, the British merged several colonies to create the Union of South Africa. Various tribal groups had previously fought wars of resistance against the Boers and British, and after the union, repression of indigenous groups continued as discriminatory laws were enacted by the Afrikaner-dominated government. On 8 January 1912 tribal chiefs, church organisations and other representatives of African peoples gathered in Bloemfontein, the country’s judicial capital, to form the African National Congress, dedicated to defending their rights and freedom. During its first decades the ANC’s tactics included support of strikes and protests, as well as other non-violent mass actions, and in the 1940s it began to work with South African Indian organisations. But as the Afrikaner-led government implemented increasingly harsh discriminatory policies, culminating in the apartheid system of racial segregation formally introduced in 1948, responses to ANC protests became more brutal. On 21 March 1960, 69 protesters were massacred by police at Sharpville. Ten days later the government banned the ANC. From 1961, a militant section of the ANC took up arms to launch a sabotage campaign, led by Nelson Mandela. In 1962 Mandela was arrested, and in 1964 sentenced to life imprisonment, initially being held on Robben Island; he was incarcerated for a total of 27 years. By the late 1980s, after decades of often violent resistance and repression, the government opened negotiations with opposition representatives. In February 1990, formerly banned political parties including the ANC were legalised, and Mandela was released. South Africa’s first fully democratic election on 27 April 1994, though marred by allegations of electoral fraud, violence and sabotage, was won convincingly by the ANC. Mandela served as the country’s first black president until 1999. The ANC has continued to govern since then, though three subsequent presidents have faced crises of high crime, economic woes, social inequality and allegations of widespread corruption.

ANC leader Nelson Mandela, President FW de Klerk and Zulu king Goodwill Zwelithini meet in an attempt to resolve tribal tensions in Natal province in the run-up to South Africa’s first post-apartheid elections in April 1994

political ambition and the purging of factions (real and imagined) mutinous to his leadership. However, the perceived domination of the ANC by the Xhosa people, and the sidelining of ‘leftist’ interests within the movement, provided the impetus for simmering resentment and internal turmoil to contribute to the overthrow of Mbeki in 2008. The subsequent rise to power of Jacob Zuma publicly laid bare the divisions within the ANC. His presidency has overseen the rise of Zulus to prominent positions of power, and tensions are clearly apparent over ideological coherence, patronage opportunities and the levers of economic power. JD: To the ANC’s credit, it has never shied away from dealing with the demon of tribalism. From the very first public call for the meeting that led to the ANC’s formation in January 1912, the ANC has always spoken out against the dangers of tribalism. You hear the warning sounded in every major speech throughout the decades. You hear it, too, in the speeches Mandela gave as ANC president in the 1990s. He and his comrades understood how dangerous tribalism could become, if not confronted head on. However, this is not to say that talking about the danger of tribalism is the same thing as rooting it out. In fact, one reason for Jacob Zuma’s rise was his and his supporters’ cynical but skilful use of the tribalist claim that the ANC and the country’s leadership was dominated by Xhosa-speakers. Not true – the ANC has, in fact, had more Zulu-speaking

presidents than it has had Xhosaspeaking ones. Zuma’s rise has let the demon loose, and now the big challenge facing the ANC and South Africa is this: how to deal with Zuma supporters who would see his removal as nothing more than a conspiracy against South Africa’s first Zulu-speaking president. How far has the white population in South Africa shown itself to be ready for genuine reconciliation?

JD: I am not sure that one can give a quantifiable answer to this question. South Africa remains a profoundly dangerous place for people of colour, and anti-black racism (not just crime and structural poverty) is a big part of the reason for that. There is also the spectacular violence directed at (mostly poor) black people around the country by white folks, and the casual anti-black racism that has found a foetid home in social media. But – and this is a big but – there are scores of white South Africans who have committed themselves in ways big and small to the betterment of the country. Many are using the expertise they were able to gain under apartheid to improve the lives of those less fortunate than themselves. They are there – but I would not say they are in the majority. MG: After 23 years of democracy, the compromises and efforts at reconciliation made during the Mandela era are beginning to fray, with issues of race firmly entrenched in South Africa’s political and public conversation. For many within the white population, the

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THE BRIEFING Back Story: South Africa

“White privilege has been preserved and entrenched in the ‘new’ South Africa, and the country remains highly stratified by race”

end of apartheid, the dismantling of legalised segregation, the transfer of power to the black majority, and the work of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission were enough to absolve white consciences. There have certainly been plenty of moments that have helped unite the nation (the 2010 FIFA World Cup and the death of Mandela being two such instances), and genuine attempts at racial reconciliation have been prompted by them. However, what this ignores is that white privilege has been preserved and entrenched in the ‘new’ South Africa, and that the country remains highly stratified by race.

MG: The economic challenge for the incoming ANC was truly enormous. Apartheid was designed specifically to benefit a small minority, and purposely excluded millions of others from the modern economic process through migratory labour practices, poorly paid jobs or a lack of adequate skills. It didn’t help the incoming ANC government that in 1994 South Africa was bankrupt, through a combination of international sanctions and massive state expenditure, while negotiations to end apartheid had in effect seen the white minority cede political power in favour of retaining economic control. Confronted by equally pressing issues, the ANC was forced to try to rebuild the economy, avoid capital and skills flight, attract international

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A poster urges voters to back the ANC and its leader, Nelson Mandela, in South Africa’s 1994 election Builders in Johannesburg in 1999. After being elected, the ANC launched a mass house-building scheme

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Economically, what was the scale of the challenge left by apartheid?

“The ANC has, through the welfare system, done a commendable job in reducing poverty. But it has failed to reduce inequality” Young South African fans pose in Johannesburg before a warm-up football match preceding the 2010 FIFA World Cup – an event that briefly united the nation

investment and create jobs. The South African economy did make small improvements, yet not nearly enough to create the transformation required to lift the majority out of poverty.

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Were expectations of rapid improvement for all always likely to be disappointed, given the scale of the inequality and poverty?

ANC president Jacob Zuma dons Zulu dress in 2008, as the ousting of his rival Thabo Mbeki paves the way for his succession as president the next year

MG: On the surface South Africa was a rich nation, with all the overt trappings of wealth and development in terms of cityscape, suburbs and modern infrastructure. For the majority excluded from this world through apartheid, the demise of white minority rule was expected to bring about rapid opportunities – which only heightened citizens’ expectations. They saw a world very different from their own conditions, and wanted access to it. Under Mandela’s presidency some policies were implemented to meet some of these expectations, such as a mass house-building scheme, efforts at improving services such as electricity and water, and investments in health, education and skills. However, the sheer scale of the challenge was vast. JD: South Africa is one of the most unequal societies in the world. What the average middle-class person (black and white) spends on drinks during a night out is more than many poor people spend on food in a month. This is obscene. The ANC has, through the extension of the welfare system, done a commendable job in reducing poverty. But it has failed to reduce inequality. So

we have fewer poor people than we did under apartheid, but the gap between the rich (white and black) and the poor is wider than it has ever been. The ANC did not promise rapid improvement, but we must wonder whether the organisation could have made different choices. We must wonder also whether the ANC can hold on to the gains made via the extension of the welfare system, given that the rot in the ANC and the corruption engulfing the state have become so extensive that we cannot say for certain that people’s pensions and welfare cheques are safe. South Africa is in a terrible mess. Jacob Zuma and his cronies have systematically undermined state institutions. Our police service (in a country that desperately needs a police service) is even more of a joke than it was under apartheid; women and children continue to be murdered, with little or no chance of capture and conviction of the perpetrators. Racism and sexism are as bad as they have ever been. Even our vaunted game reserves and national parks are under threat. It will take a heroic national effort to save us. Chris Bowlby is a BBC journalist specialising in history. He was speaking to South African writer and historian Jacob Dlamini, assistant professor of history at Princeton University, and Matthew Graham, lecturer in history at the University of Dundee HAVE YOUR SAY Let us know about your views on this piece by emailing [email protected]

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THE BRIEFING History Headlines

ALASKA UNITED STATES Ice-bound artefacts 1

MAY 2017 JUNE 2017

More than 50,000 artefacts, dating back more than 400 years and including wooden masks and ivory tattoo needles, will be displayed in a new cultural centre in Alaska after preservation and study work at the University of Aberdeen in Scotland. Excavated over a period of seven years from ice in Nunalleq on Alaska’s south-western coast, the collection will be housed in the new Nunalleq Culture and Archaeology Research Center, due to open later this year.

2 MINNEAPOLIS UNITED STATES Art controversy

A controversial sculpture may be ceremonially burned after being criticised as culturally insensitive. Sam Durant’s Scaffold, installed at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, alludes to the hanging of 38 Dakota Native American men by the US army in 1862. Dakota activists have condemned the artwork (left), decrying its “cultural appropriation and insensitivity” – particularly because it was installed in an outdoor city park on land that once belonged to the Dakota people. Following discussions, Durant and the Walker Art Center have dismantled the artwork. At the time of writing, the fate of its component pieces was yet to be confirmed.

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4 READING UNITED KINGDOM ‘Lost’ prints recovered

3 HASANKEYF TURKEY Moving monument

A 15th-century tomb has been carefully transported along the roads of south-east Turkey to rescue it from inundation. In May the Zeynel Bey mausoleum was removed from its original site – which will be flooded after construction of a hydro-electric dam on the Tigris river – and relocated to higher ground. Officials loaded the entire 1,100-tonne tomb, built in 1475, on to a wheeled concrete platform, which was driven for over a mile to its new location. Though eight more historical structures will also be moved, the future of many other sites in the area looks less promising.

A huge concrete platform carries a Turkish tomb to its new home – but other sites in the area may not be saved

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A set of wooden masks, among the artefacts set to go on display at a new cultural centre in Alaska

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History Headlines

A rare example of early English printing has been discovered in a university archive. The two pages, from a priests’ handbook thought to date from 1476 or 1477, are among the earliest created by William Caxton, who established England’s first printing press only a year or so earlier. The leaves had been pasted into a book to reinforce its spine, and were ‘lost’ in a large collection of manuscripts acquired by the University of Reading 20 years ago. “It’s astonishing that it has been under our noses for so long,” said Erika Delbecque, the librarian who made the discovery.

University of Reading librarian Erika Delbecque with one of the newly rediscovered pages, which date from around 1476

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ITALY Historic house bonanza Italy is giving away 103 historic properties – for free. If that sounds too good to be true, there is a caveat: the dilapidated buildings will be given only to renovators who have concrete plans to turn them into tourist draws. The government is hoping that the scheme will help revitalise tourism in quieter areas. Most of the properties, including monasteries and castles, are located on pilgrimage routes or trails for walkers and cyclists. Other historic buildings up for grabs include inns, farmhouses and railway stations. This historic Italian property could be yours – but only if you can transform it into a tourist attraction

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6 GYEONGJU SOUTH KOREA Structural sacrifice

The remains of a ritual bath in Mohenjo Daro. The ancient city may be reburied to protect it from further damage

Two fifth-century AD skeletons found in South Korea may provide evidence of human sacrifice. The remains were discovered under the Wolseong (or Moon Castle) in Gyeongju, the former capital of the ancient Silla Kingdom (57 BC–AD 935). Some experts suggest that the find could constitute the first archaeological evidence of Inju, a human sacrifice ritual depicted in Korean folklore in which victims were buried under a structure’s foundations to ensure its stability. 7 PAKISTAN Going underground (again)

One of the most important cities of the Indus Valley’s ancient Harappan civilisation may be reburied to protect it. The extensive remains of Mohenjo Daro, a metropolis built in around 2,500 BC with a clear street grid and drainage system, were discovered and first excavated in the 1920s. However, the site is suffering from decades of damage caused by rising temperatures and tourist activity. Archaeologists have warned that excavation must stop, and that the city should be reburied to minimise further damage.

WORDS ELLIE CAWTHORNE

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ILLUSTRATION BY JOEY GUIDONE

THE BIG QUESTION

Has terrorism ever achieved its aims? Since terrorism evolved in the 19th century, professed political and religious groups have targeted global locations from Nepal to New York, Paris to Peru and, recently, Manchester, Melbourne, Tehran and London. But have such tactics ever met their objectives? Seven historians assess the aims and aftermaths of terrorist campaigns Æ 25

The Big Question: Has terrorism ever achieved its aims?

Rosemary O’Kane

Adrian Guelke

“Terrorist groups – most strikingly those concerned with ‘global jihad’ – often lack clear political goals”

“Attitudes towards lethal political violence are affected by whether it achieves its objectives”

Terrorism is a chosen strategy in which the deliberate targeting of innocents as victims is of its essence. In modern times, the choice of terrorism as strategy was first made by the delegates of the Italian Federation at the Anarchist International in 1876. ‘Propaganda by the deed’ was advocated as the means to destabilise the government and rally support for the overthrow of the existing bourgeois system, the Federation’s objective being to replace that system with its interpretation of socialism. Thereafter, the 1890s became known as ‘the decade of the bomb’; infamously, in 1894 a French anarchist, Émile Henry, bombed a crowded Paris café. Two of the aims of such a shocking act – propaganda and the rallying of support – reached their apogee on 11 September 2001, when members of al-Qaeda hijacked planes to attack targets including the World Trade Center in New York City. The high drama of the act and its toll of innocent victims – nearly 3,000 died – achieved worldwide publicity and stimulated not only recruitment but also emulation. In terms of these aims, terrorism succeeds when an act attracts publicity and recruits. But, as the 19th-century anarchist position made clear, terrorism as a strategy has political ends: first, the destabilisation of government; second, the replacement of that order. For the Provisional Irish Republican Army (PIRA), that meant a united Ireland; for the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, a Tamil state in Sri Lanka; according to Hamas’s 1988 charter, the rejection and replacement of the state of Israel. Has terrorism achieved the political ends of its perpetrators? A while ago, I would have answered “no”. Terrorist groups had always fallen short of achieving their stated political goals, whether because of defeat (as in Sri Lanka), agreement (as in Northern Ireland) or collapse in recruitment. Now, I am not so sure. In the 21st century, terrorist groups – most strikingly those concerned with ‘global jihad’ – often lack clear political goals, some not even claiming responsibility for their acts. Now, the means – the sacrifice of the perpetrators’ lives – seems to be the end in itself: martyrdom and the passage to (and rewards in) heaven that it claims to bring. Rosemary O’Kane is emeritus professor of comparative political theory at Keele University, and author of Terrorism m (Pearson, 2012)

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There are clear examples of terrorism achieving tactical successes. One of the most well-known is the simultaneous twin truck-bomb attacks on barracks in Beirut on 23 October 1983, which killed 241 American and 58 French troops. These attacks prompted the rapid withdrawal of both American and French peacekeeping forces from Lebanon. A legacy of this episode is that the method used – closely co-ordinated suicide missions designed to cause a maximum number of casualties – continues to be copied. At the same time, it can confidently be stated that terrorists rarely achieve their ultimate strategic goals. But the reason for that is less reassuring than it appears. Terrorism is a bit like treason. A consequence of the (rare) success of treason is that the actors are no longer viewed as traitors. Our attitude towards lethal political violence is profoundly affected by whether it achieves its objectives. Generally speaking, violence is instrumental – a means to an end. That is true of political violence, almost by definition. We may repudiate violence even if we agree with the end andd believe that the violence in question is an effective means to that end. However, we may stop short of calling the individuals involved in such violence terrorists. The likelihood is that, in such circumstances, we are more likely to focus on the aims of the violence and the context in which it occurred than on what it entailed for its victims. Some scholars in the field of terrorism studies insist, controversially, on putting members of the French Resistance during the Second World War into the category of terrorists. And there are any number of other examples of groups who fought for the independence of a region or colony in which the appropriateness of the label of terrorism is hotly disputed in the literature. It is obvious that wider opinion is strongly influenced by outcomes. Success of any reasonably acceptable objective excuses almost everything – though one way we may seek to qualify such a conclusion is by stressing other factors that played a role in bringing about the change. Major historical developments rarely have single causes – and that, at least, provides a legitimate reason for resisting the uncomfortable conclusion that what we may previously have called terrorism sometimes works. Adrian Guelke is professor emeritus in the School of History, Anthropology, Philosophy and Politics at Queen’s University Belfast, and author of Terrorism and Global Disorderr (IB Tauris, 2006)

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Wreckage litters barracks in Beirut after twin truck-bomb attacks on 23 October 1983 killed 299 US and French troops as well as civilians. Within a year, international peacekeeping forces had withdrawn from Lebanon

Members of the French Resistance aim at German snipers during the Second World War. The distinction between freedom fighters or guerrillas and terrorists can be contentious: some scholars have labelled Resistance fighters as terrorists

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The Big Question: Has terrorism ever achieved its aims?

Charles Townshend

“There is a spectrum of outcomes on which failures vastly outnumber even partial successes”

Charles Townshend is professor emeritus of international history at Keele University, and author of Terrorism: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford University Press, second edition 2011)

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Black-clad militants abseil in front of a giant Hezbollah banner in Beirut in 1999. This Islamist organisation – which has participated in numerous terrorist acts, particularly fighting Israeli occupation in Lebanon – has become a significant political power with quasi-international status

A fighter of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (‘Tamil Tigers’) in Jaffna during the 26-year civil war. Their insurgency campaign, aiming to secure an independent Tamil state in Sri Lanka, was ultimately unsuccessful

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The repeated use of terrorism over the past two centuries shows that – at some level – it works. Perhaps not one in 20 terrorist groups ‘succeeds’ in obtaining its ultimate objective; most such objectives are highly ambitious. But a range of less-ambitious objectives have been achieved – some quite easily. One of the most elementary terrorist motivations is the simple need to take action in an intolerable situation. As the Russian populist Alexander Ulyanov (older brother of Vladimir Lenin) asked: “What can I do if there is no other way?” For Gudrun Ensslin of the far-left Red Army Faction (the 1970s German terrorist gang also known as the Baader-Meinhof Group), “words are useless without action”. Terrorist action is inherently outrageous – its intent is to shock – and, like any outrageous violence, it invariably commands public attention. At the political level, there is a spectrum of outcomes on which failures vastly outnumber even partial successes. For instance, the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE, or Tamil Tigers), elements of which used terror attacks on a huge scale in Sri Lanka, were destroyed after a long, semi-conventional war. Terrorists of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) have conducted a 40-year campaign in Turkey without significantly improving the prospect of Kurdish autonomy, let alone independence. By contrast, the Islamist movements of Hezbollah (in Lebanon) and Hamas (Palestinian territories) have become real powers in their lands, with a quasi-international status. More successful still was the ‘Jewish revolt’, a campaign launched in the wake of the Second World War that made Palestine ungovernable and led the British government to abandon the country. The prime targets of the Irgun (Zionist paramilitary organisation) in 1946–7 were British security forces, but more indiscriminate attacks on Arabs had begun in the late 1930s, escalating into a campaign of ethnic cleansing after the British withdrawal. The Palestinian Arabs who fled then have never been able to return. Israel was not wholly secure, but it had the power to proclaim itself a Jewish state.

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Marianne Elliott

Richard English

“The IRA set back its political goals of getting Britain to withdraw”

“The majority of terrorist groups end their violence without securing their central strategic aims”

Modern terrorism may have political ends, but it draws its emotional appeal from origin stories and stereotypes refined over centuries. Challenging such stories is crucial to combating terrorism. Stereotypes, of course, have some foundation in fact. However, in Ireland they were simplified and perpetuated over centuries by religious and political elites, and the resulting simplified national story forms the basis of the Republican terrorist (IRA) message. This narrative usually takes the form of oppression of Catholic Irish/Gaelic victims by the colonial victimiser; in this, ‘our’ nation – that of the victims – is the only legitimate one. This origin story is retold in the murals of nationalist and republican Belfast. You are not allowed to forget. This makes it difficult to envisage Protestants as part of the republican vision of Ireland, because they are deemed the perpetrators of past persecution and dispossession. Loyalist (Protestant) terrorism is less understood, but is based on a counter-narrative, equally refined over centuries, and equally exclusive of the other. Regardless of widespread UK secularism, British identity in Northern Ireland is rooted in a perceived common Protestantism with the British mainland. Loyalists also have a origin story of past persecution, taking its cue from actual events when Catholics killed – even massacred – Protestants. Loyalist newssheets in the 1970s, the worst decade of the Troubles, were full of reminders of such events, and the analogy drawn with contemporary IRA atrocities. There are still Protestants and Catholics who subscribe to these origin stories. Such stories may be stronger when societies feel threatened, but they do not disappear when the threat diminishes. Modern peace processes ignore them at their peril. Commentators are right to be concerned about republicans’ further refinement of such stories in the portrayal of the IRA as the ‘ordinary, decent’ terrorist/freedom-fighter of the past, distinct from the savagery of today’s Islamic terrorists. Did terrorism work in Ireland? No. The IRA set back its political goals of getting Britain to withdraw and re-unifying Ireland, while Sinn Féin participation in government could have been won by other means. Elsewhere, one needs to ask: what are the aims of terrorism? If to cause division or to make governments over-react, then it does work. However, there are few cases where political aims cannot ultimately be won by political methods, as has happened in Ireland. Marianne Elliott is professor emeritus, University of Liverpool, and author of When God Took Sides: Religion and Identity in Ireland (OUP, 2009)

Terrorists have achieved many things, of course. Publicity for a cause has been repeatedly secured through bloody acts of violence, from the hijackings of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) to the bombings of the Provisional Irish Republican Army (PIRA) to al-Qaeda’s still-shocking 9/11 atrocity. In each of these cases, and in many more throughout history, it is hard to imagine that the respective grievances behind the violence would have become as globally or dramatically conspicuous had terrorism not been pursued in their name. At a similarly tactical level, terrorists have frequently achieved operational success. Outrageously daring killings of prominent politicians have been carried out by groups such as the Basque separatist organisation ETA and the Italian leftists of the Red Brigades. More recently, suicide terrorism has represented an ingenious means of targeting opponents with repeatedly lethal, operational effectiveness. These are emphatically tactical successes, yet major terrorist groups have presented such tactics as a necessary means towards the achievement of strategic aims. How have terrorists fared in regard to this more demanding test of strategic efficacy? Not well, for the most part. The vast majority of terrorist groups end their violence without securing their central, primary, strategic aims. There have been exceptions (the Jewish terrorism that helped produce the state of Israel in the 1940s, for example), but these are very much the minority. More common is what might be termed partial strategic victory, in which a diluted form of a group’s main aims can be claimed to have been furthered by terrorism, or in which secondary goals (revenge against an enemy, the sustenance of resistance into future generations) have been secured. Revenge has, perhaps, been one of the main arenas for terrorist effectiveness, though hardly the most appealing – especially since the majority of those targeted have been defenceless at the time. In addition to strategic or tactical aims, there can be inherent rewards in terrorism (adventure, comradeship, fame, financial gain, local power). But, important though these are in sustaining involvement, the ultimate test of efficacy surely lies in the strategic realm – and here it is the extent of human suffering rather than the frequency of terrorist victory that is most striking. Richard English is professor of politics at Queen’s University Belfast, and author of Does Terrorism Work? A History (Oxford University Press, 2016)

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A mural in Belfast commemorates dead fighters of the Ulster Volunteer Force, a loyalist paramilitary organisation classed as terrorist by the UK, Irish and US governments. The UVF was responsible for hundreds of civilian deaths

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ALAMY

The Big Question: Has terrorism ever achieved its aims?

Bruce Hoffman

Diarmaid Ferriter

“So-called Islamic State has certainly achieved its short-term objectives of generating attention, fear and publicity”

“Republican terrorism achieved a free state in southern Ireland earlier than otherwise would have been the case”

The premier example of terrorism’s power to rocket a cause from obscurity to renown was the murder of 11 Israeli athletes seized by Palestinian terrorists at the 1972 Munich Olympic Games. Despite condemnation of the terrorist operation, just over two years later the leader of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), Yasser Arafat, was invited to address the United Nations General Assembly, and shortly afterwards the PLO was granted special observer status in that international body. Indeed, by 1979 the PLO had formal diplomatic relations with more countries (86) than the established nation-state of Israel (72). It is doubtful whether the PLO could ever have achieved this success had it not resorted to international terrorism. It had achieved what diplomats and statesmen, lobbyists and humanitarian workers had persistently tried and failed to do: focus world attention on the Palestinian people and their plight. It had also provided a powerful example to similarly frustrated peoples elsewhere. Within the decade, the number of terrorist groups either operating internationally or committing attacks against foreign targets in their own country had more than quadrupled. Today, attention has been attracted to the so-called Islamic State and its aims through tragedies such as 2017 attacks in Manchester, London and Tehran. Though it has certainly achieved its short-term objectives of generating attention, fear, and publicity, it is unlikely to gain any of its long-term aims. Nonetheless, these terrorists – like others throughout history – soldier on, their gaze fixed on a distant horizon that paradoxically always seems within reach: an imperceptible point in time when they will triumph over their enemies and attain the ultimate realisation of their dreams and destiny. For them, this future is divinely decreed, and they are specifically anointed to achieve it. This transcendental dimension not only underpins their struggle but assures them success – if only in serving their deity faithfully and unswervingly. For them, that is arguably all that matters.

An estimated 7,500 people were killed or injured in Ireland as a result of political violence between 1916 and 1923. A further 3,500 were killed from the outbreak of the Troubles in Northern Ireland in 1969 to the Belfast Agreement in 1998. The extent to which the violence and loss of life were necessary or justified remains one of the most contentious debates in modern Irish history. Defining the ‘terrorist’ in history is, of course, always problematic. In Ireland, one person’s terrorist was another’s freedom fighter or defender. What did it all achieve? In Ireland a century ago, political moderation had gone out of fashion. Paramilitary organisations made ‘parliamentarianism’ a term of abuse, and the pursuit of independence sparked a guerrilla war that the Irish Republican Army (IRA) could not win outright, but which could not be won by British troops either. The ultimate result in the early 1920s was the partition of Ireland and the establishment of southern Ireland as a self-governing dominion within the empire. Did Irish republican terrorism work? Yes, to the extent that it trumped constitutional politics and achieved a free state in southern Ireland earlier than would have been the case without terrorism. Neither would the state of Northern Ireland have come into existence without the threat of force. What the IRA did not achieve was its stated aim of a united Irish republic. The same was true of the more recent conflict, ending with the Belfast Agreement of 1998. The IRA’s opponents got more, by securing continued membership of the UK, the principle of consent for any constitutional change, and the eradication of the republic’s territorial claim over Northern Ireland. Republicans got a share of power and an almost invisible border between northern and southern Ireland, as well as acceptance that they had fought a war, so that prisoners could be released. A century of violence has not produced a united Ireland; that fact alone has led many to conclude that Irish terrorism did not work. But terrorism did succeed in untangling southern Ireland from the British empire at an early stage, achieving an autonomy that would not have occurred without violence. It also, as a result of the more recent conflict, forced Britain to accept that the Irish people have a right to self-determination.

Bruce Hoffman is professor and director at the Center for Security Studies, Georgetown University, Washington DC, and author of Inside Terrorism (Columbia University Press, revised edition September 2017)

Diarmaid Ferriter is professor of modern Irish history at University College Dublin, author of The Transformation of Ireland 1900-2000 (Profile, 2004)

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This year’s 150th anniversary of the confederation of Canada is being celebrated with gusto – but not by all of its citizens. Margaret Conrad explores the sometimes turbulent history of the vast former British colony 32

GETTY IMAGES

CANADA: STRONG AND FREE?

The next generation Three generations of Cree First Nations in 1916, with the grandsons dressed in First World War uniforms. Canada’s relationship with its diverse people, and with the rest of the world, has shifted multiple times since confederation

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Canada’s history

O

n the morning of 7 November 1885, in an isolated spot in the western foothills of the Rockies, an elderly, white-bearded man drove an iron spike into the ground. In wielding the hammer, Scottish-born businessman Donald Alexander Smith bent the spike badly; it had to be removed and replaced with another, which he finally managed to knock in straight. If the event seems trivial or even comical, it was also significant: with that spike in place, the two sections of the Canadian Pacific Railway were joined, completing what was at the time the world’s longest line, and linking the east and west of this vast land – a symbolic moment in the history of Canada as a transcontinental nation in North America. It was just one moment of many in the evolution of Canada, which this year is celebrating the 150th anniversary of confederation in 1867. On 1 July of that year, four British North American provinces – New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, Ontario, and Quebec – entered a confederation to create the Dominion of Canada. A sesquicentennial offers an opportunity to reflect on this and other milestones en route to the birth of a complicated nation and the ongoing debates about their significance. Confederation was undertaken in the context of the aftermath of the American Civil War, pressure from financial and political interests in Great Britain, and enthusiasm for industrial development throughout the western world. With a triumphant post-Civil-War United States eager to exert its (self-proclaimed) manifest destiny to control the entire continent, British suzerainty over its North American territories seemed in immediate peril. This was no idle speculation. In 1867, the US purchased Alaska from Russia, and had its sights set on the vast North-Western Territories, hitherto the domain of indigenous peoples and the Hudson’s Bay Company. A union of the British North American colonies – an administrative dream advanced since the 1780s – was an idea whose time had come. Confederation initially inspired little national enthusiasm among the provinces’ citizens, but it quickly achieved one of the major goals of its promoters: to serve as a convenient holding company for the British empire in North America. In 1869, the North-Western Territories were annexed to Canada, and in 1870 the province of Manitoba was carved out of it (followed, in 1905, by Alberta and Saskatchewan). The land was rounded out from sea to sea when British Columbia and Prince Edward Island embraced a continental destiny in 1871 and 1873, respectively. The Arctic Archipelago was added to Canadian jurisdiction through a British order-in-council in 1880. By 1885, when the Canadian Pacific Railway tied together the unwieldy polity with a ribbon of steel, a national policy of high tariffs was nurturing a robust manufacturing sector;

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As federations go, Canada is spectacularly successful, and its people are among the world’s most prosperous

generous land grants were attracting immigrants to the prairies; and armed indigenous resistance to federal policies in the western territories had been brutally crushed. This drive across the northern half of North America must be judged in retrospect as an impressive feat of empire-building, mimicking the westward expansion of the United States to California and the Oregon Territory in the 1840s. Only Newfoundland (officially named Newfoundland and Labrador in 2001) remained aloof until 1949. As federations go, Canada is a spectacularly successful one and its people, at least on average, are among the most prosperous on the planet. Anniversary… of what?

Not surprisingly, Canada’s Liberal prime minister, Justin Trudeau, has been keen to celebrate 150 years of confederation – but there is disagreement about what the anniversary signifies. The second-largest country in the world geographically, Canada is difficult to grasp as a whole. Some peoples and provinces are nations unto themselves, and in outlying regions resentment against the dominant centre runs deep. Even agreeing on a founding moment can be a challenge. Confederation is only one milestone – admittedly an important one – in a much longer documented history stretching back millennia. For some observers, the conquest of Québec by a British army led by Major-General James Wolfe in 1759 serves as a pivotal point for understanding a country that was officially proclaimed bilingual – English and French – in 1969. Many people living in the Atlantic and Western provinces, with their own distinct historical narratives, beg to differ on the special significance of 1759, as would the more than 600 First Nations (as indigenous peoples are known), and people living in Canada’s three northern territories. But so dominant is the province of Québec on the political landscape that the ‘rest of Canada’ is now understood by its initials – ROC. Québec’s decision to

Staking a claim Scottish businessman Donald Alexander Smith drives in the iron spike joining the two parts of the Canadian Pacific Railway in 1885 – and symbolically unifies the nation

Island life

GETTY IMAGES/BRIDGEMAN ART LIBRARY

The village of Xwamdasbe on Hope Island, off the coast of Vancouver Island, in 1881. The houses feature painted family crests of their Nahwitti inhabitants

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Canada’s history

Symbols of peace

[Marks and signatures and who they represent] 1 Wader: Onondagas ● 2 Turtle: Senecas ● 3 Standing ● 4 Great Pipe: Cayugas stone between a fork: Oneidas ● 5 Rat: Huron-Wyandot ● 6 Bear: Sable Odawas ● 7 Unknown: Abenaki of Acadia ● 8 Bear: Sinagos ● 9 Deer: Sault (Kahnawake) ● 10 Deer: Odawas ● 11 Fish: Kiskakons ● 12 Fork: Iroquois de la Montagne ● 13 Thunderbird: Nassawaketons (Odawas of the Fork) ● 14 Beaver: Amikwa ● 15 Crane: Ojibwe Mississaugas ●

A step forward Delegates to the Charlottetown Conference pose outside Government House on Prince Edward Island, 1864. The meeting set the ball rolling for the founding of the Dominion of Canada in 1867

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16 Crane: Algonquian ● 17 Scalp on a pole: Piankeshaw ● 18 Crane: Miami ● 19 Chief: Cree ● 20 Bow and arrow: ● 21 Turtle: Peoria ● 22 Unknown: Kouera Koultanon ● 23 Unknown: Moingona ● 24 Frog: Maroa Tapouara ● 25 Tree and roots: Potawatomi ● 26 Notched feather: ● 27 Quarry or furrow: Wea ● 28 Sturgeon: Kaskaskia ● 29 Fox: Meskwaki ● 30 Thunderbird: Ho-Chunk Sauk ● 31 Thunderbird holding wild oat: Menominee ● 32 Louis-Hector de Callière signed for France ●

LIBRARY AND ARCHIVES CANADA

This remarkable document, La Grande Paix de Montréal (The Great Peace of Montreal), was completed in August 1701 and represents a peace treaty between New France and 40 First Nations of North America. It features pictorial signatures of representatives of indigenous peoples from across the region

hold two referenda on independence (in 1980 and 1995, in the latter of which independence was rejected by the smallest of margins) has concentrated political minds wonderfully on how to address the province’s grievances. Other interests also have a stake in the confederation story. Two years after the federal government embraced bilingualism, Canada adopted a policy of multiculturalism to acknowledge the impact of non-British and non-French immigration on the country’s identity. Successive waves of newcomers from all over the world, most recently more than 40,000 Syrian refugees, have made Canada what it is today. With 20% of the current population born elsewhere, the voices of new Canadians factor into how the country is perceived internationally, and bring even more complexity to the question of whose history really matters. As a result, not all Canadians feel inclined to celebrate or even acknowledge the country’s sesquicentennial. First Nations have served notice that they find little to celebrate in 150 years of Ottawa’s heavy-handed rule. In Québec, the 375th anniversary of the founding of Montréal takes pride of place in 2017, and the Parti Québécois (a political party established in 1968 to seek independence for Québec) has made plans to counter Ottawa’s programme of “comfort history” with a series of events showcasing “the Other 150”. When the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation launched an anniversary television series on the nation’s history, it brought howls of protest from the Atlantic Provinces. They had been on the front lines of European expansion – but were entirely ignored in the first episode. As is customary in most ‘national’ narratives, Canada: The Story of Us started with France, Cartier, Champlain at Québec, and the St Lawrence fur trade, rather than with England, Cabot, Champlain at Port-Royal, and the cod fisheries off the Atlantic coast. (In 1997, cheeky folks in Newfoundland and Labrador, always sceptical of lopsided power arrangements that marginalise their interests, chose the ironic title East of Canada for a film series on their province’s past.) Complicated status

Although history inevitably complicates anniversary celebrations, it also offers valuable insights into a question that I am frequently asked when travelling abroad: why is Canada so different from the United States? Key to the answer is the American Revolutionary War (1775–83). The North American colonies that remained under British control after the Treaty of Paris ended the conflict, ever mindful of the freedoms experienced by citizens in the US, pioneered an evolutionary approach to self-government within the British empire. They adopted a constitutional monarchy and parliamentary democracy rather than republicanism as their preferred route to liberal political institutions. No full-scale wars were fought to arrive at this destination. After rebellions in Lower and Upper Canada (1837–38), and shabby political manoeuvrings in every colony, British North Americans achieved

Ambiguity, caution and compromise are not bad foundations on which to build a nation-state this big and diverse

‘responsible government’, a term used to describe the transfer of power for internal affairs to local elites, beginning in 1848. Cautious Canadians have developed a whole new vocabulary to describe their complicated status in the British empire, speaking of ‘autonomy’ rather than ‘independence’, ‘confederation’ rather than ‘federation’, ‘dominion’ rather than ‘kingdom’, and emphasising ‘evolution’ rather than ‘revolution’. Ambiguity, caution, compromise and flexibility are not bad foundations on which to build a nation-state as big and diverse as Canada, but they rarely evoke the jingoistic patriotism that violent conflicts seem to inspire. A common misconception even among Canadians is that ‘independence’ was achieved in 1867. Nothing could be further from the truth. One goal of confederation was to keep Canada securely in the British orbit. As the first self-governing ‘dominion’ in the British empire, Canada still depended on Britain for trade and capital investment; it appealed legal decisions to the judicial committee of the privy council in London; it relied on British military might for defence; it lacked the constitutional capacity to engage directly in foreign affairs; and its globetrotting citizens travelled with British passports. This colonial position ultimately became contentious, especially with respect to involvement in imperial wars. From 1905, after tensions erupted around Canada’s participation in the South African War (or Boer War, 1899–1902), British troops were withdrawn from Esquimalt (on Vancouver Island) and Halifax, Nova Scotia, but the apron strings remained firmly tied. In August 1914 Canadians found themselves automatically at war with Germany and its allies. Though Canada could have refused to contribute to the war effort, participation was never seriously in doubt. Lingering loyalty to the empire ensured active collaboration, especially among British immigrants who made up more than 60% of the First Canadian Expeditionary Force sent overseas to fight in the First World War. When French-speaking Québecers responded negatively to conscription in 1917, and self-determination of nations

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Æ

Canada’s history

Canada: from Ice Age to independence Key moments that defined Canada Before c14,000 BC

c1000 AD

Paleo-Indians move across a land bridge from eastern Siberia to north-western America, eventually spreading south and east

Vikings sailing from Greenland settle at the site known as L’Anse aux Meadows in northern Newfoundland

1 July 1867

1776

10 February 1763

The British North America Act, 1867 establishes the provinces of Ontario and Québec, and joins them with New Brunswick and Nova Scotia to create the confederated Dominion of Canada

Refugees from the American Revolutionary War begin to move to the Britishheld colonies in North America. By the end of the war they receive more than 45,000 Loyalists

At the end of the Seven Years’ War, France cedes most of New France to Britain

12 May 1870 Following a protest instigated by the Métis and led by Louis Riel, the province of Manitoba is carved out of the NorthWest Territories (its capital, Winnipeg, is pictured c1870s)

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MAP: BATTLEFIELD DESIGN

4 November 2015

1 April 1999

Liberal politician Justin Trudeau is sworn in as prime minister

The Territory of Nunavut is formed – the first with a majority indigenous population, largely Inuit peoples

GETTY IMAGES/QUEEN’S UNIVERSITY, CANADA/ LIBRARY AND ARCHIVES CANADA

Spear points made by the Paleo-Indian people of the Eastern Woodlands of North America

GETTY IMAGES/ALAMY

© CANADA POST CORPORATION, 1965 - LAC

BRIDGEMAN ART LIBRARY/MARY EVANS

… and beyond 24 June 1497

24 July 1534

3 July 1608

Venetian navigator John Cabot reaches Newfoundland in his ship the Matthew (this replica is pictured in Bonavista, Canada) and claims it for England

Having explored the Gulf of St Lawrence, Breton explorer Jacques Cartier (above) claims the Gaspé Peninsula, in the far east of what’s now Québec province, for France

French colonisers establish a base on the St Lawrence River at Québec (shown in a mid-18th-century engraving), which becomes the capital of New France

13 September 1759

11 April 1713

4 August 1701

2 May 1670

Québec is conquered by a British army led by Major-General James Wolfe, shown here in a c1760 portrait

At the end of the War of the Spanish Succession, France cedes Acadia, Rupert’s Land and Newfoundland to Britain

The Great Peace of Montreal between France and 40 First Nations is finalised (see page 36)

Hudson’s Bay Company is founded, establishing rights for Rupert’s Land (a swathe around Hudson’s Bay), where trade with indigenous peoples for beaver pelts and other furs flourished

20 July 1871

7 November 1885

13 June 1898

11 December 1931

31 March 1949

British Columbia enters confederation, followed by Prince Edward Island (1873), Alberta and Saskatchewan (1905)

The eastern and western lines of the Canadian Pacific Railway (the world’s longest at that time) are joined at Craigellachie, British Columbia

Yukon, in the northwest of Canada, is given separate territorial status during the Klondike gold rush

Statute of Westminster recognises the independence of Canada, but the British parliament retains the power to pass laws at Canada’s request

Newfoundland becomes a province of Canada

30 October 1995

17 April 1982

15 February 1965

In a referendum, Québec votes by a narrow margin against independence. Canadians from across the country converge in Montréal in an effort to save the union

The Canada Act is passed by the UK parliament, marking the end of British power to pass laws extending to Canada

Canada replaces a flag that incorporates the British flag with one bearing the familiar maple-leaf design seen in this commemorative stamp (above)

Æ 39

Canada’s history

Ready and able

became the goal of postwar peace agreements, the path to the future seemed clear. The Statute of Westminster in 1931 granted autonomy in the British Commonwealth to the dominions controlled by white populations, but action on this milestone legislation came slowly and in a piecemeal way. In September 1939, Canada declared war against Germany in its own right, and in 1947 began issuing its own passports. Appeals to the privy council were abandoned in 1949, but approval of the British parliament was required to amend Canada’s constitution until 1982. The queen of the United Kingdom is still Canada’s head of state, and her face graces Canadian currency. Messy decolonisation

Internal divisions account for the prolonged and sometimes messy process of decolonisation. When Canada finally replaced the Red Ensign (which featured the Union Flag) with a distinctive maple leaf design in 1965, the move generated noisy controversy. Even more fundamentally, Québec refused to sign the constitution agreement that extinguished the role of the British parliament in Canada’s affairs. Two subsequent efforts to accommodate the province’s objections to its provisions have failed. Critics, past and present, have decried the colonial mentality that made Canada a laggard among Commonwealth countries in cutting imperial ties, but thoughtful scholars have noted that association with the world’s most powerful empire had its benefits. The US may well have gobbled up the colonies had Britain not weighed so heavily internationally in the 19th century, and privy council decisions helped to ease internal tensions by supporting stronger provincial rights than many of the fathers of confederation had envisioned. When Canada’s Supreme Court decided negatively on female equality under the law, the privy council rejected this retrograde decision in the Persons Case (1929), a ruling with significance throughout the empire. Despite foot-dragging on constitutional matters, Canadians managed to reinvent themselves with the onset of the Second World War. The federal government triumphed over defenders of provincial rights to pass legislation implementing a series of social programmes – among them unemployment insurance, family allowances, old-age pensions and a national healthcare system – which gave Canadians a sense of personal security that is the envy of much of the world. In the 1960s, racist immigration policies were swept away, opening the door to ‘qualified’ immigrants of all cultural back-

Æ A 1907 illustration of a Canadian flag – a British red ensign featuring the royal crown. The nation’s modern maple-leaf flag was introduced in 1965

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Toronto residents respond to a First World War recruitment drive in 1915. Despite this zeal, the negative reaction of many Québecers to conscription later in the war was to have lasting consequences

MARY EVANS/GETTY IMAGES

Canada could have refused to contribute to the war, but its participation was never in doubt 41

Canada’s history

The charter of rights and freedoms has expanded the rights of first nations and the LGBTQ community

Equal rights?

National pride Justin Trudeau pictured at the Vancouver Pride Parade in 2015. On becoming prime minister later that year, Trudeau was “determined to restore a more progressive tone to Canadian liberalism”

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LIBRARY AND ARCHIVES CANADA/REUTERS

Women and children from the Brunswick House First Nation, pictured in Ontario in 1906. Indigenous treaty rights were recognised in the Constitution in 1982, but the equality of indigenous women who lost their inheritance rights under the provisions of the Indian Act is still the subject of legal battles

GETTY IMAGES

grounds, and providing essential labour in a American terms, continued unabated. From country where the birth rate was falling pre1988, the old national policy of protectioncipitously even before laws banning contraism – which had been called into question by ception and abortion were removed from the prevailing neo-liberal orthodoxies – was Criminal Code. swept away by the adoption of a comprehenThe Charter of Rights and Freedoms – sive Free Trade Agreement with the US which, which, after protracted negotiation, was ata few years later, was extended to Mexico. Intertached to the Constitution Act in 1982 – stands as national developments that followed the 9/11 ata significant outcome of 150 years of struggle tacks further tightened the continental embrace. Canadian diplomat around indi-vidual and collective rights in this Under Conservative prime minister Stephen Lester Pearson at the UN, where he proposed a complicated country. Since its enactment, the Harper (2006–15), Canada emerged as a chamsolution to the Suez crisis charter has inspired a legal and social revolution pion of tax-cutting and climate-change sceptiin Canada. It expanded the rights of First Nations, the cism. In November 2015, Justin Trudeau came to office LGBTQ community and other minorities; it transformed determined to restore a more progressive tone to Canadian libthe processes of criminal investigations; it subjected legiseralism. “Canada is back,” he crowed at the Paris Climate latures at all levels to judicial scrutiny; and it promised a Change Summit in November 2015. degree of regional and social equality. The charter is popular Tensions and progress across the country, even among Québecers who are obliged Deep-rooted tensions – between First Nations and settlers, nato submit to its provisions notwithstanding their stance on tion and province, centre and periphery, English and French, the constitution. poor and rich, black and white, men and women – frustrate any By the mid-20th century the United States, always the attempt to present Canada’s history as only a story of triumphal elephant in the room for Canadians, loomed large globally. progress. In recent years governments have apologised for, Canada positioned itself in the Cold War as a ‘middle power’, among other things, the head tax imposed on Chinese immiparticipating actively in the creation of the United Nations, the grants in 1885, the internment during the First and Second North Atlantic Treaty Organization and the General AgreeWorld Wars of Canadians born in enemy countries, and the ment on Tariffs and Trade, and emphasising peaceful negotiatreatment of indigenous children in residential schools, the last tion as an alternative to military approaches to conflict. of which closed in 1996. Presenting themselves as helpful fixers in the competition The Indian Residential Schools Settlement Agreement between capitalism and communism, Canadian diplomats also (2007), the largest class-action settlement in Canadian history, worked behind the scenes to encourage their powerful allies called for the establishment of a Truth and Reconciliation Comto play nice in the sandbox. In 1957, External Affairs Minister mission designed to address the abuses inflicted on First Nations Lester Pearson won the Nobel Peace Prize for proposing a by these educational institutions and to inform all Canadians peaceful solution to the Suez crisis, which had set Britain and about how they contributed to what was essentially an exercise in the United States at odds. Thereafter, ‘peacekeeping’ served as cultural genocide. The Commission’s Report, submitted in 2015, the brand of the Canadian military until the collapse of the offers plenty of evidence of the Soviet Union and the ‘war on terror’ exposed the inconsistendark side of Canada’s persona. cies in what had become an elaborate fiction. Welsh travel writer Jan Morris Margaret Conrad is professor Sceptics had long pointed out that, in most foreign policy has accused Canadians of being emerita at the University of New initiatives, Canada had become the handmaiden to the “almost incoherently polite,” but Brunswick. Her books include United States. Indeed, so prevalent were Americans in CanadiCanada is more than the sum A Concise History of Canada an affairs that political economist Harold Innis proclaimed as of its mistakes and a veneer of (Cambridge UP, 2012) early as 1948 that Canada had moved “from colony to civility. Despite unconscionable nation to colony”. Efforts to define a Canadian identity blots on the historical record, DISCOVER MORE separate from that of the US became a major goal of successive people from all over the world A History of Canadian governments in the postwar years. With the help of content by Jonathan F Vance have found freedom, opportuni- Culture regulations and generous subsidies, Canadians indulged (OUP Canada, 2009) ty, and peaceful conditions in in an outpouring of artistic and cultural expression that this continuously contested, everBBC Radio 3 has brought international recognition and evoked a higher level of produced a series of evolving political experiment in national pride. Union with the United States, an idea that had programmes the northern half of North Amer- Canada-themed surfaced from time to time since 1867, finally began to recede celebrating the 150th ica. Would that all nations strug- anniversary at bbc.co.uk/ as an alternative to staying the course. programmes/b08x04rw gled so hard to get it right. Nevertheless, globalising tendencies, defined largely in

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Starvation rations Allied prisoners of war, labourers on the Thai–Burma railway (known as the ‘Death Railway’), at Shimo Songkurai camp in 1943. Conditions in Japanese-run camps were atrocious. The men’s prominent ribs are clear signs of malnutrition, while the swollen legs of the central soldier and distended belly of the man on the right are symptoms of beriberi (a disease caused by vitamin B1 deficiency)

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AUSTRALIAN WAR MEMORIAL P02569.192/ MAP: BATTLEFIELD DESIGN

Eyewitness: Prisoners of war in the Far East

EYEWITNESS Leopold Manning recalls his experiences as a British prisoner of war in the Far East during the Second World War Now aged 98, Leopold Manning is one of the last living British veterans of captivity in the Far East during the Second World War. Captured by the Japanese after the fall of Singapore in February 1942, he survived battle, horrific conditions as a prisoner of war – including infection by life-threatening tropical diseases while working on the infamous Thai–Burma railway – and the sinking of the boat carrying him to Japan, where on 9 August 1945 he witnessed the explosion of the atomic bomb over Nagasaki.

“I had scabies; we’d sink into the water, to let the fish bite the bad out of our skin. The conditions were shocking”

As a sapper in the Royal Engineers, I was drafted to Singapore, arriving in January 1940. There I worked on

searchlights and, later, in a newly formed bomb-disposal unit. Captured by the Japanese after the Allied defeat at the battle of Singapore (8–15 February 1942), I was transported with other Royal Engineers to Changi barracks, to get the place ready for the arrival of other prisoners of war (PoWs). But before we could, the rest of them turned up: more than 60,000 captured Allied PoWs. European rations quickly ran out, and we soon moved on to rice.

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Eyewitness: Prisoners of war in the Far East

We were then sent to Thailand, a five-day journey. There

were 25 to 30 men packed into each goods wagon, with little food and no toilets, just a rope across the front of the open doorway. When we arrived at Ban Pong, some men marched up to their camps; I was fortunate, and travelled upriver by boat to a camp called Kanyu 1. Later, another camp – Kanyu 2 – was established farther up the mountain. The Japanese left a few of us down at Kanyu 1 to unload and distribute the materials and food that came upriver. We had to carry it up to Kanyu 2 – over a mile uphill. I eventually went to Kanyu 2 camp to work.

Leopold Manning pictured as a young soldier in the Royal Engineers before his capture at Singapore. He was just 20 when deployed in the Far East in 1940

Allied prisoners of war labour in south-east Asia during the construction of the Thai-Burma railway. Nearly 13,000 Allied PoWs (and many times more Asian labourers forcibly conscripted by the Japanese) died during its construction

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At this time cholera broke out. Nasty thing, cholera. When they took [dead bodies] away, the Japanese just cut their section out of the hut. The bed platforms were two feet six [75cm] high, made from split bamboo flattened out. I was also sick one night, and thought I’d got cholera, but it wasn’t; I just vomited because I’d had some bad meat. Each toilet in the camp was just a 6-foot [180cm]-deep trench, 20 feet long by 2 feet wide [6 metres by 60cm], with strips across; no soap, no washing. There was just one so-called hospital hut. The medical people in there – three orderlies and a medical officer – had nothing to work with. If you got beriberi [a disease caused by vitamin B1 deficiency] you were given ground-up charcoal and that was it. In the river camp I had scabies on my arms and

IWM MH_028352/LEOPOLD MANNING/TOPFOTO

Allied prisoners of war in a crowded hut in Singapore. Some 250 men were crammed into each hut, sleeping on raised bed platforms. Unsurprisingly in these conditions, diseases such as cholera spread rapidly

legs; we’d sink down as far as we could in the water, and the fish would bite the bad out of our skin. We knew the orderlies’ work was overpowering, so if we got time we’d go across to help empty the buckets or whatever, and have a chat with the lads. People with jungle ulcers were sent down for amputations at the base hospital camp at Tarsao. The conditions were shocking: an arm or a leg would be taken off, all because of ulcers. A sergeant major had one on his hand as big as a shilling. A week later it was all over his hand. If they’d only fed us properly, we’d have got the railway completed a lot quicker. But they didn’t. Our job was clearing a path for the railway through raw jungle. Different sections got different jobs; where I was, we

were blowing up because it was a rocky area. You’d go out in the morning about six o’clock. In the evening, coming back to camp, you had two jobs: you either gathered dead bamboo off the jungle floor for fires, or collected leaves for the toilets. We had people in camp that were very good at making things, such as an old-fashioned mangle to grind rice into flour.

The ‘Fat Man’ atomic bomb dropped by the US Air Force on 9 August 1945 detonates over the Japanese city of Nagasaki, a major centre for the armament industry. Allied prisoners of war working nearby witnessed the blast

Any friendship, any help you could get, was a real boost.

You couldn’t do much for yourself. I had beriberi and malaria – you took it for granted that you’d get malaria – but I was very fortunate. The fittest of the fit – rugby players, footballers – went down quickly. You could just give up. The weakly ones that had never been strong, they seemed to take it, somehow. And in June 1944, I was moved back to Singapore, to River Valley Road Camp, to work on the docks.

Nagasaki. The work was hard, but the food wasn’t too bad. On 9 August [1945] we were at work when the alarm went. I thought: “Why aren’t there any planes about?” And then this blinking great flash came in the distance, like the sun caught on a windscreen. We saw this big mushroom cloud, and thought they must have damaged factories.

On 6 September 1944 about 900 of us sailed for Japan on

GETTY IMAGES

the Kachidoki Maru, in the holds. There were four places The guards fled the camp. After they left there were food where you could go to the toilet, tied to the side of the boat. drops, and on 16 September we boarded an [American] Many men had dysentery, but all had to take their turn. Our aircraft carrier, the USS Cape Gloucester, at Nagasaki. We crossed the Pacific, travelled across Canada, and then at New biggest problem was drinking water. Conditions weren’t good at all: no ventilation or fans. On 11 September, the convoy York we boarded the Queen Mary and sailed to Southampton. was attacked. Next night, around midnight, I was up on deck Can you imagine the pride and joy I felt, getting on the when a chap said: “‘I think we’ve been hit”. [The ship had Queen Mary? It was a beautiful ship. We left New York on been torpedoed by United States submarines.] Next minute, 13 November, arrived in Southampton on 18 November, and I was soon back in Stoke. it’s going up. I’d got my lifejacket with me, so I jumped in – it must have been about Leopold Manning was interLooking back, I just can’t believe it. I can’t 20 foot [6 metres]. Then a raft came to viewed for the Liverpool School of remember having a shave. I never turned me with about ten blokes, who pulled me Tropical Medicine’s Far East PoW a tap on for three and a half years. When on. We sat there, floating all night. Next (FEPOW) Oral History project by morning there was an upturned lifeboat, Meg Parkes and emeritus professor you’re free, you can’t imagine not being able to turn on a tap. Not having a proper and bodies everywhere. A whaler picked of medicine Geoff Gill, co-authors wash. Never had any soap. Never had a toilet us up. We had sunk not far off Hainan of Burma Railway Medicine: Disease, roll. Never. Island, and they took 400 of us there. We Death and Survival on the Thai-Burma Railway 1942-1945 (Palantine lost about 500 men. We arrived in Japan on 29 September 1944. We went to Omuta, and worked at

a chemical factory across the bay from

Books, 2017). Read more about the project and hear extracts from interviews with prisoners of war at captivememories.org.uk

DISCOVER MORE

Listen to another first-person account of life as a prisoner of war after the fall of Singapore in an episode of BBC World Service series Witness bbc.co.uk/programmes/p0146gh4 (UK only)

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BRIDGEMAN ART LIBRARY

A year in pictures: 1958

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Collective memory Chinese labourers toil in a stone quarry in driving rain at the start of the ‘Great Leap Forward’. This radical economic and social campaign, launched in 1958 and orchestrated by communist leader Mao Zedong, was intended to modernise China’s backward economy through enforced agricultural collectivisation and mass rapid industrialisation. However, the strategy was pursued too quickly and with too much social dislocation. Tens of millions perished in the widespread famine that followed the land programme, and by 1960 Mao was under pressure to step down.

A YEAR IN PICTURES

1958

Communists, chess-players and chorus lines As postwar recovery gathered momentum, so did calls for independence in former colonial states. Richard Overy introduces the key events and characters of 1958, a time of technological, social and cultural revolutions

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A year in pictures: 1958

By the late 1950s the shadow of the Second World War was rapidly fading. Sustained economic growth and reconstruction across the globe repaired the damage and prompted growing optimism. In Europe and America, a new generation was emerging, anxious to enjoy the fruits of the modern age of consumerism – cheap cars, television, and the revolutionary music of rock and roll. Cheaper air travel made possible a package-holiday boom. At the San Remo music festival in 1958 the song ‘Volare’ [‘to fly’] was first performed, and was soon to be heard across the beaches of the Mediterranean. An atmosphere of indulgence and liberation surrounded the new concept of the ‘teenager’, whose vision was forward-looking and irreverent. Outside the privileged world of the west, though, change had a different meaning. In 1958 Mao Zedong launched the ‘Great Leap Forward’, an economic and social revolution designed to help communist China catch up with the developed world – but which had disastrous results. Parts of the old European empires were convulsed with protests against continued colonial rule. Algeria was rocked by a savage conflict in which both pieds-noirs (French settlers) and Arab insurgents threatened the French army. Anti-colonialism was fuelled by the Cold War, with Soviet support for independence movements part of the proxy conflict between the United States and the Soviet Union in Africa, Asia and Latin America. Covert struggles between communist and capitalist interests raged in Iraq (where the king was overthrown in 1958), the Belgian Congo and Vietnam. Behind the proxy war lurked the hard reality of nuclear weapons. In 1958 the British Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament began a series of protests and marches, fearful that such weapons might derail the fragile revival of the world order after 40 years of war and crisis.

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The general motors General Charles de Gaulle visits the southern French port of Toulon in July 1958. Just weeks earlier he had been recalled to the French leadership and granted emergency powers to try to solve the crisis surrounding the independence war in Algeria. Head of the Free French during the Second World War and then the subsequent provisional government till 1946, in 1958 de Gaulle organised the drafting of a new constitution and in December was elected the first president of the Fifth Republic – a position he held for more than a decade.

Electronic inspiration The notebook of American electrical engineer Jack Kilby contains sketches and notes detailing his ideas for an integrated micro-circuit for conducting electronic information – an invention he presented to his employer, Texas Instruments, in the last months of 1958. The patent for “miniaturized electronic circuits”, his revolutionary technology that made possible modern consumer electronics, was filed in February 1959. By 2000, when Kilby was awarded the Nobel Prize for Physics, the microchip had underpinned the foundation of the digital age.

A chequered career

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American chess prodigy Bobby Fischer plays Soviet Tigran Petrosian at Moscow Central Chess Club in June 1958. Fischer had won the United States championship in January, and that year became the youngest international grandmaster, aged just 15. In 1972 he defeated Boris Spassky to become World Chess Champion, and is widely regarded as one of the greatest players of all time.

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A year in pictures: 1958

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AKG IMAGES

Papal portrait Italian cardinal Angelo Roncalli is pictured on 4 November 1958, the day of his elevation to the papacy as Pope John XXIII. Then aged 76, it was expected that he would be a ‘stop-gap’ pope while the church searched for a more significant candidate after his expected death. Instead, Pope John proved to be a reformer and moderniser: in 1962 he summoned the Second Vatican Council, at which many of his initiatives were debated, though he died in 1963 before it closed. He was canonised on 27 April 2014 for his services to Catholic Christianity.

Guerrilla in the midst

GETTY IMAGES/TOPFOTO/ROYAL GEOGRAPHICAL SOCIETY

Cuban revolutionary Fidel Castro is pictured in 1958 among his guerrilla staff, including Ernesto ‘Che’ Guevara (second from left). By this time, Castro’s ‘26 July Movement’, fighting the dictatorship of Fulgencio Batista, had claimed large swathes of the Cuban countryside. Though vastly outnumbered and outgunned, by the end of 1958 the guerrillas had succeeded in defeating the demoralised Cuban army, and on 1 January Batista fled into exile. A week later, Castro entered Havana. He was named prime minister, then president, and led Cuba for nearly 50 years.

Pole position New Zealand explorer and conqueror of Everest Sir Edmund Hillary (centre) shakes hands with Vivian Fuchs, British leader of the Commonwealth TransAntarctic Expedition, at the South Pole on 20 January 1958. Hillary’s role was to lay supply depots for Fuchs’ crosscontinental attempt; having done so, he continued on to the pole, arriving before Fuchs to become the first to reach the pole overland since Robert Scott’s ill-fated expedition in 1912.

High flyer Ruth Carol Taylor is pictured in 1958, the year she became the first African-American flight attendant in the United States. When she was rostered on Mohawk Airlines’ flight from Ithaca to New York City on 11 February 1958, it was a radical departure in a country where prejudice and segregation were still widespread. Six months later she was removed from her post – not because she was black but because she married, victim of another form of discrimination.

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A year in pictures: 1958

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REX–SHUTTERSTOCK

Demonstrating for disarmament Protesters stream from Trafalgar Square in London towards the Atomic Weapons Research Establishment at Aldermaston, near Reading, on 6 April 1958, during the first march organised by the British Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. The campaign was launched in February 1958 under the presidency of veteran philosopher Bertrand Russell who, together with other leading intellectuals, called on the British government to abandon its nuclear weapons programme – so far, without success.

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A year in pictures: 1958

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TOPFOTO

A dynasty curtailed An Iraqi soldier holds a portrait of the deposed King Faisal II in the looted palace of crown prince Abd al-Ilah on 23 July 1958. A military coup on 14 July, led by the Iraqi army brigadier Abd al-Karim Qasim, had overthrown the Hashemite royal regime established in 1921 by the British. The rebels resented the treatment of Iraq as a kind of imperial outpost by the western powers, particularly Britain. After this coup the monarchy was replaced by a Sunni-dominated republic that remained in place until the fall of Saddam Hussein’s regime in 2003.

Crucifixion in Cookham Stanley Spencer’s violent painting The Crucifixion is commissioned by Aldenham School in 1958. The artist defended its depiction of extreme cruelty, arguing that recent history had shown the potential for all humans to become cruel. It was also a reminder that, beneath the postwar veneer of stability, there still lingered the threat of violence. Spencer emphasised this point by clearly locating the action in his home village, the Thamesside settlement of Cookham in Berkshire, where he had set many of his earlier paintings.

BRIDGEMAN ART LIBRARY/ALAMY/REX- SHUTTERSTOCK

Chorus of approval Actor Mitzi Gaynor (second from right) performs the song ‘I’m Gonna Wash That Man Right Out-A My Hair’ in the film of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Broadway musical South Pacific, released in 1958. The film, set on fictional islands loosely based on Vanuatu, took a romantic and sentimental slant on life in the South Pacific theatre of the Second World War. It was a box-office smash, and the original soundtrack album topped the British charts for a record 115 weeks. Richard Overy is professor of history at the University of Exeter, and editor of The Times Complete History of the World (William Collins, 2015)

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PERSPECTIVES SEVITCEPSREP ONE MOMENT, TWO VIEWPOINTS

The Moriscos are expelled from Spain In 1609, Spain initiated the expulsion of 300,000 ‘Moriscos’ – descendants of Muslims converted to Christianity – in what was then among the largest forced depopulations in history. Matt Carr explores divergent experiences of an early exercise in ‘ethnic cleansing’

On 4 April 1609, the Habsburg king Philip III of Spain and his corrupt, all-powerful first minister, the Duke of Lerma, authorised the phased expulsion of the entire population of the people known as Moriscos (‘Little Moors’) from Iberian soil. These were all nominal Catholics, their ancestors having been forcibly converted to Christianity in the late 15th and early 16th centuries. The king’s order was not made public, in order to preclude flight or rebellion, and stipulated that the expulsion should begin that autumn in the kingdom of Valencia – home to the largest Morisco population in Spain.

Throughout the spring and summer, Spanish officials worked in total secrecy to prepare for the expulsion of the Valencian Moriscos. Spanish naval ships and specially commissioned foreign ships from across Europe were brought to designated ports on the Valencian coast. Soldiers and militia forces stockpiled weapons throughout Valencia and also inland in Castile to

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prevent the Moriscos from retreating into the interior. On 24 September, town criers in the city of Valencia accused the kingdom’s entire Morisco population of apostasy, heresy and “divine and human lesemajesty”, and announced the king’s intention to expel them to Barbary (as the north African coast was then known) to ensure the “conservation and security” of his realms. Perilous journeys

Over the following three days, Morisco families and communities across the kingdom frantically attempted to gather their possessions and sell them to their Christian neighbours before they were escorted by the king’s officers to their designated ports. Not all acquiesced quietly: in October, thousands of Moriscos in the Valencian interior launched a doomed rebellion that was quickly and brutally suppressed. At the coast, some were taken immediately on board the waiting ships and shipped across the Mediterranean to Barbary. Others waited for days and even weeks before their transportation. Many

were robbed and even murdered by their escorts or by Christian bandits before they could reach the Spanish coast. Hundreds and perhaps even thousands of Moriscos were attacked by Muslim pirates on the high seas, were killed by their own crews, or were robbed and murdered in north Africa by nomadic Muslim tribesmen who took them for Spaniards and Christians. By the end of 1609, some 130,000 Valencian Moriscos had been expelled. A jubilant Philip and his ministers extended the expulsion to Castile, Andalusia and Aragon. Over the next four years, Moriscos across Spain were escorted to the Mediterranean coast or driven overland across the Pyrenees. By the time the expulsion was called to a halt in August 1614, Spain had sent some 300,000 men, women and children – about 4% of its population – to exile and death, almost eradicating from the Iberian peninsula the last traces of the old Moorish emirate of al-Andalus. On the following pages we compare the Spanish Christian and Morisco experiences of the expulsion…

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A painting of 1616 depicts the Moriscos boarding ships to sail from the port of Valencia. Many of those forced into exile were robbed en route to the port, or attacked by pirates on the Mediterranean crossing or once they arrived in north Africa

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Perspectives: Morisco expulsion, 1609

THE CHRISTIAN PERSPECTIVE

“Morisco children carried in their blood the ‘bad seed’ of Islamic faith”

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o Spain’s Habsburg rulers and the anti-Morisco lobbyists who had for many years called for the Moriscos to be driven from Spain, the expulsion was a glorious and divinely ordained act of religious purging. In their eyes it removed a seditious and heretical enemy from Spanish soil, and cleansed Spain of the last remnants of its despised Islamic past. During the tumultuous autumn of 1609 in Valencia, supporters of the expulsion – such as the archbishop of Valencia Juan de Ribera and the Dominican monk Jaime Bleda – praised the king for having finally taken action against an inveterate Muslim “enemy within” that had stubbornly continued to worship “the sect of Muhammad” ever since the initial conversions of the Moriscos around a century before. Bleda witnessed the expulsion in Valencia, and found confirmation of this treachery and dishonesty in the Moriscos who arrived in Valencia singing and dancing, or who waded into the sea to praise Allah for their deliverance. Philip III and his ministers saw the Moriscos in very similar terms. In the many ministerial discussions on the ‘Morisco question’ that had preceded the expulsion, clerics and ministers argued that the Moriscos had been given ample time to become “good and faithful Christians” and had collectively refused to embrace their new faith. Some noted how the Moriscos had failed to take advantage of the periods of grace that had been granted to them at various times since their conversions, and had continued to worship as Muslims despite the attentions of the Spanish Inquisition.

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Others described the Moriscos as a fifth column whose members were secretly colluding with Spain’s Muslim and Protestant enemies and with Muslim corsairs operating from north Africa. Some cited Inquisition reports of real or imagined Morisco plots. Some expressed fears of another rebellion, like the savage War of the Alpujarras (1568–71) during which the Moriscos of Granada had risen up against Philip II’s decrees prohibiting their language and customs, and committed vicious atrocities against the Christian population in the mountains south and east of Granada with the support of Turkish and north African volunteers. Turkish threat

These security fears were exacerbated by the ongoing Turkish threat – Ottoman forces having fought Habsburg empires, including Spain, since 1526 – and also by reports of Morisco banditry emanating from various parts of the country. Proponents of expulsion argued that the Moriscos were religiously incompatible with Christian Spain, and that they were also culturally inferior. Some pointed to the Morisco birth rate, claiming that the ‘New Christian’ Morisco population was inexorably increasing while the ‘Old Christian’ population was decreasing, and that this would result in the collapse of Christian Spain. Philip III, in common with many of his Christian subjects, regarded the descendants of Spain’s former Islamic occupiers as an unwanted aberration and a threat to its religious identity. He also saw Catholic Spain’s recent military reverses in its wars against ‘heretics’ (Calvinist Lutheran rebels in Flanders, the English in various naval encounters) as evidence

of divine disapproval for having allowed the Moriscos to ‘defile’ the country. During the reign of his father, Philip II, clerics and ministers had considered radical and even genocidal ‘solutions’ to the ‘Morisco question’ that included castration of all Morisco males, or even wholesale massacre. Eventually, Philip II settled on expulsion as the most humane ‘Christian’ option, but the ‘prudent king’ did not implement his own decision. Instead, it was left to his famously lazy son to carry out what the Portuguese Dominican monk Damián Fonseca called “the agreeable holocaust” and settle the ‘Morisco question’ once and for all. By the time Philip decided to implement his father’s expulsion order, the anti-Morisco consensus in the upper echelons of church and state was no longer prepared to listen to Christian landowners who regarded Moriscos as an essential component of their labour force. Nor would it heed the more moderate clerics who insisted that it was un-Christian to expel baptised Morisco children. To the king and his ministers, these children carried in their blood the ‘bad seed’ of their parents’ Islamic faith that would continue to grow if they were not expelled. Faced with criticism from European diplomats and the pope himself regarding the inhumanity of the expulsion, Philip insisted that it had been carried out humanely. He hailed the destruction of Spanish Islam as a great victory for Spain and Christendom that restored Spain to its rightful destiny as a Catholic state. These assumptions continued to echo down through the work of historians of the 19th and 20th centuries who hailed the expulsion of the Moriscos as a painful but essential milestone in Spanish and European history.

BRIDGEMAN ART LIBRARY

“The agreeable holocaust” Philip III of Spain expels a group of people, likely Moriscos, from Spain in this 19th-century painting. By the time the king implemented the order, which had previously been planned by his father, anti-Morisco sentiment was running high in some sections of society

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Perspectives: Morisco expulsion, 1609

THE MORISCO PERSPECTIVE

“An expelled Morisco wrote that the exiles were ‘crying tears of blood’ ”

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he hagiographic accounts of the expulsion written in the early 17th century tend to ignore the complexities of the Morisco predicament that might have allowed for less radical ‘solutions’. They also ignored the extent to which Christian Spain itself had helped create the problem the expulsion was intended to solve. There is no doubt that some Moriscos saw their expulsion as a form of liberation and deliverance, and relished the opportunity to return to a land of Islam where they could worship openly as Muslims. Certainly, many Moriscos had little reason to feel any affection towards the Catholic church or the Spanish state. This antipathy was partly due to the Inquisition. For the best part of a century, the institution that many Moriscos regarded as the ‘devil’s tribunal’ had tormented and punished them for a range of transgressions that included actual Islamic religious worship as well as ‘Moorish’ cultural practices such as eating couscous, bathing or refusing to eat pork. Exploited by priests

Such repression did not endear many Moriscos to Christianity, yet even the most embittered were not allowed to leave Spain but were forced to remain in ‘Morisco lands’ where their parish priests despised and exploited them. Some Morisco parishes rarely saw a priest at all, and had no idea what their new faith even expected of them. As a result, the intermittent ‘periods of grace’ granted to the Moriscos were often fruitless – and, too often, punctuated by repression. When Philip II introduced his draconian prohibitions in Granada in

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1566, leading Moriscos and Christians warned the king that they would provoke rebellion. These protestations were ignored, and the result was a bloody rebellion in the Alpujarras. The expulsion and dispersion of the entire Morisco population of Granada across Castile that followed the suppression of the rebellion only added to the bitterness and alienation felt by many Moriscos. Some Moriscos undoubtedly colluded with Spain’s Muslim and Lutheran enemies abroad, and dreamed of an Islamic restoration. Others took to the roads and became bandits in order to take revenge on Christian society. Moriscos near the Mediterranean coast sometimes facilitated the slave-hunting expeditions of the Barbary corsairs – some even became corsairs themselves. But many, perhaps the majority, had no such ambitions – and even fewer opportunities to realise them. Most Moriscos occupied humble positions as artisans, muleteers, labourers, entertainers and shopkeepers, living on the fringes of a Spanish society that feared and despised them – yet which still insisted that they become ‘good and faithful Christians’. Though it was true that some Moriscos never accepted their conversion to Christianity, others eventually came to sincerely embrace their new faith. Philip III discovered this himself, to his astonishment, when he extended the expulsion to Castile and Andalusia, where he found many local bishops and priests who testified to the ardent piety of their Morisco parishioners. Even then, the king and his ministers insisted that both ‘good’ and ‘bad’ Moriscos were to be expelled. Spain’s rulers also failed to appreciate that most

Moriscos, whatever their religious convictions, regarded Spain as their homeland. Most of them spoke Spanish, not Arabic, and knew little of the world beyond the estates and villages in which they lived. In Valencia in 1609, rebel Morisco women threw themselves and their children off cliffs rather than allow themselves to be escorted to the coast. Aftermath of the expulsion

Many expelled Moriscos experienced a profound culture shock on their forced arrival in North Africa. One of the reasons why the expulsion lasted as long as it did was because many Moriscos, like the character Ricote in Don Quixote, returned to their towns and villages after their expulsion. Some expelled Moriscos languished in France, from where they petitioned the king to allow them to return to Spain. Many shared the sentiments of the expelled Morisco Diego Luis Morlem, who wrote to his former lord in Castile that he and his fellow exiles were “crying tears of blood” for their lost country, and were determined to return to it “even if they hang us”. Many returned to Spain, where they were flogged and expelled again, but some succeeded in remaining in their homes after the expulsion process was stopped, and continued to live in Spain. Others found new homes in Algiers, Tunis and Morocco, and eventually managed to integrate and form the distinctively ‘Andalusi’ communities whose traces can still be found across North Africa. Matt Carrr is a journalist and writer, author of Blood and Faith: The Purging of Muslim Spain, 4 (Hurst, new edition 2017) 1492–1614

ALAMY

Religious tensions Morisco people are baptised in Granada in this 16th-century depiction from the cathedral in the region’s capital city. The ways in which those who were expelled viewed Catholicism varied considerably: “Though it was true that some Moriscos never accepted their conversion to Christianity, others eventually came to sincerely embrace their new faith”

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AFRIC ALAMY

THE SECRET HISTORY 64

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As the BBC launches a major new TV series on the history of Africa, the programme’s producer and presenter Zeinab Badawi explains why such an undertaking is important in reshaping our view of the continent’s history INTERVIEW BY MATT ELTON

ACCOMPANIES THE BBC WORLD NEWS TV SERIES THE HISTORY OF AFRICA

Statues of pharaohs from the Nubia region (in what’s now Egypt and Sudan), home to one of Africa’s earliest civilisations. A new BBC TV series explores the continent’s ancient history, often obscured in recent retellings by later crises and conflicts

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Africa’s history Pyramids in a necropolis in the ancient Kushitic city of Meroë, now in Sudan. Africa’s earliest history has often been obscured by its more recent upheavals, argues Zeinab Badawi

The History of Africa is a project that came about by a process of osmosis.

I’ve always had a passion for history, and have always loved looking at monuments, stones and bones – as well as the people who create history. I’m very people-orientated. What got me particularly interested in the ancient history of Africa was a moment that came back to me when, sadly, my father died last year at the age of 91. Both of my parents were highly educated, and both had been through the British colonial school system in Sudan, where I was born (I left Africa when I was two years old). Some time ago, after returning home to the UK after visiting the pyramids and temples of Sudan, I asked my parents what they knew of their country’s historic sites. They couldn’t really tell me very much, and I thought something wasn’t right with that – particularly because both of them could tell you a lot about Henry VIII and key points in British history. If my parents didn’t know enough about their own history,

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I thought, surely the same is likely to be true of African people of all generations. And, as I talked to various people over the years, I discovered that was the case. A few years later I was at Unesco’s headquarters in Paris, in the office of the deputy director-general, Getachew Engida. Spotting a collection

of volumes on his bookshelves, I asked what it was; he told me that it was the General History of Africa. The books were the result of a project conceived in the early 1960s, during the period of rapid decolonisation in Africa. Some of the newly independent African leaders got together and decided that, now they had decolonised their countries, they also wanted to decolonise their history. Unesco helped them put together the project, recruiting 350 experts, mostly from across Africa and from a range of disciplines, to compile eight volumes, starting from prehistory and continuing to the modern era. The eighth volume was completed in 1990, and they’re now working on the ninth.

I suggested to Getachew that it would be amazing to produce a TV series based on the information in these volumes. It took me a while to negotiate with Unesco, but that link is important because this is a unique project – African history written by Africans. Although you can’t film a TV series based entirely on scholarly volumes, I have used them as inspiration, incorporating experts and citizens speaking about their histories and how their lives in the present day tie in with the past. I interviewed a number of contributors to the volumes, too. It’s something of a novelty to hear a Tunisian talking in her own language about her own history, and so on. This history is little known, both in Africa and elsewhere, because a lot of academics and teachers in African countries were and are a product of colonial education themselves.

As I say, my parents were fluent in English, and highly educated, but by and large were taught western curricula. So even when they looked at their own

GETTY IMAGES/ALAMY

Children at school in Botswana in 1950. Even after African countries gained independence, the influence of colonial curricula often remained strong in their education systems

Soldiers detain rebels during civil unrest in the Republic of the Congo, c1964. Such conflicts have, for many western observers, come to define Africa’s history and identity

“Africa has been infantilised to a degree that we haven’t seen in any other region of the world”

history, it would have been through the perspectives of western scholars. It’s interesting that all of the academics I interviewed for this series had degrees or PhDs from western universities. They are obviously able to transcend the western perspective to a large extent, but not completely. It takes a while to decolonise curricula designed in the colonial era. The fact that very few people know about the volumes also tells you something. Even I didn’t know about them until a few years ago – the General History of Africa was Unesco’s best-kept secret. You wonder why leaders didn’t want to shine more light on it. I’m not suggesting there was a conspiracy, of course – just that there wasn’t enough emphasis placed on African history by either African or non-African leaders. This series is particularly important now, in 2017, because we have become much more accustomed to having a global conversation. This is reflected

in the media, in social media, in the

fact that travel has made the world a lot smaller. I think that people are starting to see that, for so many years, the western view has been the view of the world. But in the 21st century that has been challenged by the emergence of the internet, which has awakened an interest in gaining knowledge and improving understanding by using first-hand sources from other countries. This is of particular interest for Africa, though, because it has been infantilised to a degree that we haven’t seen in any other region of the world. This is partly because there has been a way of seeing Africa in terms of poverty and conflict – the coup, the war, the famine, the corruption – which has become a kind of shorthand for the continent that still persists today. Development issues in Africa still, to a large extent, emphasise charitable aspects and aid. Although this is done with the best will in the world, and with charitable intentions, it has fed into an infantilisation of Africa whereby it’s assumed that, in order for its people to

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Africa’s history

While making the series, Badawi spoke to people in Africa about how they viewed their past. “Most people engage with history through characters and people,” she argues

Columns in the temple of the god Amun-Re at Karnak near Luxor, Egypt. Badawi suggests that many African people have a knowledge of the key figures of British history but are less aware of the histories of their own nations

develop, and for them to have enough to eat, they have to rely on outsiders. Although these kneejerk stereotypes are being broken down, it doesn’t take much for them to reemerge. When the

Ebola crisis broke out earlier this decade, for instance, thinking quickly turned to what people from outside the continent could do. Yet, though of course wonderful nurses and medical staff came from Europe and North America, Ebola-stricken countries were largely helped by local people. That kind of thing is easily overlooked, and it doesn’t take long for us to fall back into the comfortable, familiar way of looking at Africa. As someone who was born in Africa, and who came to the UK as an infant, I have the benefit of understanding both cultures. When African people find out that I work for the BBC, they often complain they are fed up of how the media treats Africa: that as soon as something happens, some non-African person is sent in to sum up the situation

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for western audiences. I would say that Africans have to seize control of their narrative in the present – but to do that, they also have to gain control of the narrative of their history that they have been denied in the past. It’s also important to consider how the African diaspora considers its history. As part of my agreement with Unesco, these programmes will be made available free of charge to all state TV stations in Africa, Brazil and the Caribbean, because this story is important for their identities, too. One of the other reasons that Africa’s early history has been overlooked is that the world’s most powerful African diaspora is the AfricanAmerican diaspora. Its members,

understandably, have been preoccupied with slavery, its legacy, and the civil rights movement. It’s obviously very important to understand that these are of critical significance for AfricanAmericans. However, I think that perhaps it’s meant that the history

“Slavery and the civil rights movement are important topics, but Africa’s story started thousands of years BC”

ALAMY/KUSH COMMUNICATIONS

The remains of an ancient settlement in Kerma, Sudan. The kingdom of which it was a part predates the cultures of Babylon and Rome

of Africa before slavery has not received enough attention. For instance, when discussions take place about introducing Africa to the history curriculum at the University of Oxford, there’s talk about covering Martin Luther King, Rosa Parks and the civil rights movement. These are important topics, and relevant to 20th-century African history, but the continent’s story started thousands of years BC. I would argue, therefore, that we shouldn’t just look at Africa’s history during the time of slavery and the colonial era. The popular focus on that era may also be partly because mainstream Hollywood or European films [about Africa and African-Americans and their experiences] tend to be anchored in stories of slavery or civil rights. I would love to make an epic movie based on the kingdom of Kush in ancient Sudan for instance – or about the kingdom of Kerma [in present-day Sudan], which predates Rome and Babylon. Virtually nobody has heard of either, of course!

There are many challenges inherent in telling a history of the entirety of Africa. It’s difficult to condense things

into TV documentaries, bearing in mind that each volume of the General History contains tens of thousands of words. The challenge is to work out what is of most interest to both the African and non-African viewer. In television terms, it’s about visualising key events of which no images may be available, and looking at monuments and artefacts in a way that tells you about the people behind them. Most people engage with history not through stones and bones but through characters and people; for that reason, the challenge was to bring to life the historical figures. I did that principally through interacting with people from the continent today, and allowing them to bring to life their own history. Another problem is that today we think of history in terms of nation states, but of course I’m looking back into the far reaches of time, when there were no countries. So I have taken a regional,

chronological approach to a large part of the series. The other challenge is that, sadly, in some parts of Africa there is conflict, and it wasn’t always safe for me to film everywhere. I can’t do everything in a TV series, of course. I’m really hoping for three things from the series: to teach people a bit about Africa’s history; to excite them and leave them wanting to know more; and, where I can, to entertain them. Of course, my overall objective is to develop a more holistic look at Africa’s history – and to change the way that Africa is seen.

Zeinab Badawi is a journalist, presenter and chair of the Royal African Society DISCOVER MORE The History of Africa will be broadcast on BBC World News TV channel in July. Hear more from this interview on the World Histories podcast: historyextra.com/podcasts

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TOPFOTO

The AMAZON

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EFFECT FROM MYTH TO MOVIE

The warrior women who battled Hercules and courted Alexander the Great were the stuff of legend – yet, as John Man reveals, the myth’s artistic and social impact is still palpable today

An engraving from 1599 shows Amazon women wielding bows and arrows to shoot male captives. Many centuries after the early Greek legends were told, the concept of ‘Amazons’ influenced how Spanish conquistadors viewed the New World

The ancient Greeks absolutely knew that the Amazons were real – or, at least, that they had been. Heroes of old had encountered Amazons in the martial women’s kingdom, Themiscyra, on the southern shores of the Black Sea. Amazons had invaded Greece, their advance halted in a great battle. Herodotus related how they had been captured, carried away in Greek ships and escaped to the banks of the river Don, where they intermarried with Scythian tribesmen. No one knew where the name ‘Amazon’ came from, so the Greeks made up an etymology, claiming it derived from a-mazdos – without a breast: these fearsome women cut off their right breasts to remove an obstruction to the bowstring, it was claimed. How could all this not be true? Well, most of it – including the supposed etymology – wasn’t. It was folklore. There was no kingdom of Amazons. But there was a kernel of truth. In the grasslands of inner Asia, from the Black Sea to western China, Scythian women had the same skills as their men: wielding bows, riding and herding animals, fighting – and dying from their injuries. Their remains have been found in tomb-mounds from the Crimea to western China. Meanwhile, the Greek myth planted itself in the European imagination, finding expression in novels, plays and art. It was transported to the New World by Spaniards who, while exploring a great river, heard vague reports of female warriors, and named the mighty waterway after them. In due course, the world’s greatest river gave its name to the world’s most dominant online sales machine. For centuries, women warriors en masse have been dubbed ‘Amazons’. Regiments of such women existed in Dahomey (in what’s now Benin) and in the Soviet air force, and the female fighters of Kurdistan have a formidable reputation. This article introduces some of the major ‘Amazons’ in myth, art and history, along with the truth behind the legends and their impact on the real world.

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Amazons

1 Hippolyte:

bested by Hercules

A third-century AD Roman mosaic depicts Hercules vanquishing Hippolyte, queen of the Amazons

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Alexander the Great meets the Amazon queen Thalestris – who, according to legend, propositioned him – in a 17th-century French painting

2 Thalestris: the sex-hungry Scythian Is there evidence that Greeks actually met any ‘Amazons’? One story about Alexander the Great suggests that they did. In 330 BC, the ambitious Macedonian warrior had conquered Persia and was advancing eastward along the shores of the Caspian Sea (in present-day Iran). In a first-century-BC version of the story, an Amazonian queen named Thalestris marched out from her homeland and demanded to meet the great Alexander. Attended by 300 women, she made an extraordinary request: she wanted “to share children with the king, being worthy that he should beget from her heirs to his kingdom”. Alexander was – according to Plutarch’s pen-portrait – quite small, not athletic and not much interested in sex. But Thalestris persisted – and prevailed. “Thirteen days were spent in satisfying her desire. Then she went to her kingdom,” never to be heard of again.

The early form of the story was written by one of Alexander’s aides, Onesicritus, as an eyewitness account. So could there be any truth in it? Not much. For one thing, the episode’s purported location on the Caspian is 1,500km from the Amazons’ legendary Black Sea base; to make that meeting, the Amazons would have needed to set off long before Alexander reached the Caspian. In addition, the main source, Onesicritus, was a notorious self-promoter who had good reason to tell a tale that flattered his boss. If there is any truth to the story, it could be this: Alexander was approached by a group of Scythians who included women, one of whom was their leader. The Greeks ‘knew’ from ancient stories that Amazons were real, so naturally saw the Scythians as Amazons. There was no common language. The ‘Amazons’ were not hostile. The Greeks were hospitable. The Amazon ‘queen’ spent time in Alexander’s tent. The group then vanished back into the heart of inner Asia, leaving the way open for the creation of a dramatic tale that provided a Greek name for a sex-hungry Scythian queen.

BRIDGEMAN/ALAMY

It all began with Hercules (or Heracles, as the Greeks called him), in the legendary dream-time before the Greeks learned to write. To expiate the crime of killing his own children, the story went, Hercules was challenged by Eurysthenes, king of Argos, to complete 12 tasks. One of his labours was to steal a golden girdle owned by Hippolyte – queen of the Amazons and daughter of Ares, god of war – that was coveted by the king’s daughter, Admete. These warrior women, it was reputed, lived on the river Thermedon (today’s Terme), on the southern shores of the Black Sea. In legend they captured men whom they used as studs, rearing only female children and killing the males. Despite the prevalence of the a-mazdos etymology myth, in truth the Greeks must have known this to be nonsense – their artists always depicted the Amazons as intact. According to the legend, Hercules met Hippolyte, seized her girdle (with or without a fight – versions vary), perhaps or perhaps not killing her, and escaped back to Greece. Was there any truth behind such legends? Not much. The Amazon nation was the ultimate imagined threat to Greek machismo. By conquering the Amazons (in myth, at least), Greek heroes were made to seem more heroic. There was, though, a kernel of fact. The Greeks of the early first millennium BC had explored the shores of the Black Sea, and knew of the horse-riding Scythians; indeed, Herodotus described them in the fifth century BC. Their women shared the skills of the men: they were supreme horsewomen, mistresses of the bow, fighters and victims of conflict, as recent archaeological finds testify. Writers gave the mythical Amazons suitable names. Hippolyte, for example, derives from the Greek for ‘releases the horses’ – a hint of a truth hidden behind the layers of legend.

4 The golden (wo-)man

of Kazakhstan The title page of the 1533 edition of Garci Rodríguez de Montalvo’s Amadís de Gaula. A later book in the series inspired Spanish explorers to name California

3 Queen Califia:

ALAMY/DREAMSTIME

naming the New World Belief in Amazons lingered into the Middle Ages, and they remained a favourite topic in medieval Europe – with consequences that extend across hemispheres to the present day. Around 1500, a Spaniard named Garci Rodríguez de Montalvo wrote or adapted a series of novels about Amadís, a knight-errant from the fairytale country of Gaula (unconnected with Gaul or Wales). The fifth book of the Amadís de Gaula series, The Exploits of Esplandián, is about Amadís’s son. The latter became involved with a race of Amazonian warrior women and their queen Califia (or Calafia or Califre – spellings vary). Her name was possibly derived from caliph, Spain having recently been conquered by Christians after lengthy Islamic rule. In the stories, Califia was a formidable warrior, with a menagerie of 500 griffins that were fed on human flesh. She lived in a realm called California or Califerne, an island-state near the lands newly discovered by Christopher Columbus. Since Columbus at first believed he had landed in the Indies, in the Amadís tales California is also located near Constantinople, or – in Montalvo’s totally mythical geography – “on the right hand of the Indies”. The Amadís books, especially Esplandián, were bestsellers, followed by numerous sequels by other writers in Spanish, Italian, German, French and English. It was a fad that inspired Cervantes’ Don Quixote, a pastiche of Rodríguez de Montalvo’s vainglorious knight-errantry. In the early 16th century these stories were carried to the Americas as intellectual baggage by the Spanish conquistadors, who believed the fictions to be based on ancient truth. Somewhere, just over the horizon, the Spaniards thought they would find an island of Amazons, “rich in pearls and gold”, as Hernán Cortés wrote to Charles V of Spain. So when, in 1542, Juan Rodríguez Cabrillo sailed up the west coast of North America and charted a prominent peninsula, he believed it to be the island realm of Queen Califia and named it California – now the Baja California peninsula in Mexico.

Archaeological finds have raised intriguing questions about the status of Scythian women, likely inspiration for the Greeks’ ‘Amazons’. In the summer of 1969, near a little lake to the east of Almaty, Kazakhstan’s largest city, a farmer noticed something glinting in newly ploughed earth near a 6-metre-high burial mound: a small piece of patterned gold. Renowned Soviet archaeologist Kemal Akishev came to investigate and, excavating the burial mound, discovered that it contained a small skeleton surrounded by treasures. The burial, known as Issyk kurgan and possibly dating from the fifth century BC, was Saka – the Kazakh name for the wide-ranging Scythian culture. It included a jacket decorated with 2,400 golden plaques, a belt bearing 13 golden deer heads, a golden neck decoration, an embossed sword, earrings, beads and a towering headdress. The skull was too badly damaged for its sex to be determined, but Akishev fitted a reconstruction with leather trousers and displayed it as the ‘Golden Man’. Reproduced in posters, postcards and books, this long-dead ‘man’ became the symbol of the nation when Kazakhstan emerged after the collapse of the Soviet Union. However, Jeannine DavisKimball, an American archaeologist who worked with Akishev in the early 1970s, began to doubt the presumed man’s masculinity. The headdress was similar to others from SakaScythian female burials, and also to the formal headdresses worn by Mongolian women today. Many women had been found buried with weapons elsewhere. And the height of the skeleton indicated that it was female. Davis-Kimball became convinced that the remains were in fact those of a ‘Golden Woman’ – “a high-ranking warrior princess”, as she wrote in Archaeology magazine in 1997. Who is right? We shall never know. It would now be possible to analyse the bones to determine the sex – but, mysteriously, the bones have vanished. After almost 50 years, it would be hard for Kazakhs to see their national symbol turn from male to female. Chances are ‘she’ will continue to be represented as a flat-chested, trousered youth. A replica of the armour of the fifth-century-BC Saka warrior known as the ‘Golden Man’ – but who may have been a woman

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Amazons

5 The Ice Maiden

of Siberia In 1993, Russian archaeologist Natalia Polosmak was working at a burial mound on the Ukok Plateau in the semi-autonomous Altai Republic in southern Siberia, near the Chinese border, when she made another discovery that added to knowledge of Scythian women. Today this is a remote, harsh land, but 2,500 years ago it was fine pasture for seminomadic Scythians of the Iron-Age Pazyryk culture. Good finds had been made at the site over the previous two years, and in May, as spring thawed the ground, Polosmak and her team unearthed deepfrozen harnesses, parts of saddles, six horses and, finally, a larchwood coffin. Inside was a block of ice, created when water had leaked in and frozen. After days carefully melting the ice with heated water, skin emerged, tattooed with a griffin-like design. The body slowly appeared, embalmed with a mix of herbs, grasses and wool, along with a tall headdress, revealing that the body was that of a woman. Dressed in a fur robe and woollen skirt, “she was tall – about 5 feet 6 inches [around 170cm],” Polosmak wrote in a National Geographicc article. “She had doubtless been a good rider, and the horses in her grave were her own,” the archaeologist asserted. The gorgeous tattoos – distorted and mixed-up animal images in the style typical of Scythian designs – have since been widely reproduced. The mummy became known as the ‘Ice Maiden’ or the ‘Ukok Princess’. She was taken to Novosibirsk for further study, and then on tour internationally. The tour was dogged by controversy. The Altaians were angry: she’s our ancestor, they said, and moving her is an offence against the land. What rubbish, replied academics: there is no connection between ancient Scythians and modern Altaians. In the battle between science and emotion, emotion won. The Ukok Plateau was closed to archaeologists, and the ‘Ice Maiden’ rests in air-conditioned peace in a museum in the Altai Republic’s capital, Gorno-Altaysk.

Marina Raskova (far right), pictured with her crew in 1938 before setting out on their 3,700-mile non-stop flight from Moscow to the Russian Far East. Later founding a night-bomber unit in 1942, Rastova was an inspiration for other ‘Amazon’ flyers

6 Marina Raskova:

Russian ‘night witch’

BRIDGEMAN

The ‘Ice Maiden’, discovered in a larchwood coffin in a chamber tomb on the Ukok Plateau in 1993, is adorned with elaborate tattoos of fantastical creatures

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Though the kingdom of the Amazons was a mere legend, the name has been applied to several all-female fighting groups. Among them was a regiment of female Soviet bomber pilots who fought in the Second World War, the most famous of whom was their founder, Marina Raskova. In the 1930s, the Soviet Union was recovering from years of war, revolution and famine. But for women, the 1917 revolution had brought opportunities – in aviation, for example, with the new government seeing this as an opportunity to unite and defend this vast nation. And in 1933 Marina Raskova, aged just 21, became the first female Soviet navigator. Good-looking, bright and strong-willed, she was an ideal poster child for Soviet propaganda. In September 1938, she served as navigator on a much-publicised world-record, non-stop flight from Moscow to the Far East. At the end of the 3,700-mile journey the plane ran low on fuel and crash-landed in the Siberian forests; Rastova bailed out before the crash and, in an epic tale of

7 Wonder Woman:

endurance, survived for over a week with no water and almost no food. Finally, she found the wrecked plane and, together with her two female crew, made her way to safety, to personal acclaim from Stalin. Three years later, Germany invaded the Soviet Union. Raskova, using her high-level contacts, formed a volunteer unit of some 400 women fliers in three regiments: fighters, heavy bombers and night bombers. Based in Engels, 700km south-east of Moscow, they trained under their adored Raskova and, early in June 1942, went into action. The fighter and heavy bomber regiments included male ground staff, but the night bombers were staffed only by women. In flimsy, open-cockpit biplanes they flew in low out of the dark, sometimes gliding in ghostly silence, to drop their bombs on German supplies. Flying up to 100 missions per night each – some 24,000 between them in their three years of operation – they proved so devastatingly effective that the Germans nicknamed them Nachthexen: ‘night witches’. Raskova died in January 1943 when, trying to fly beneath fog, she crashed into the banks of the Volga river. She was given the first state funeral of the war, and the whole nation mourned.

REX–SHUTTERSTOCK/ADVERTISING ARCHIVES

feminist superhero

Sensation Comics issue 1, published in January 1942, featured an early adventure of Wonder Woman. Her most recent outing was in the big-budget Hollywood movie, released in May

This year, Hollywood has remade the myth in a new film with the tagline: “Before she was Wonder Woman, she was Diana, Princess of the Amazons.” The link between the two legends makes a convoluted story, its origins stretching back a century to the struggle for women’s rights. In the years before the First World War, Elizabeth Holloway, a so-called ‘New Woman’ at the radical Mount Holyoke College in Massachusetts, began a relationship with William Moulton Marston – clever, handsome, ambitious – who was researching psychology at Harvard. They married in 1915, and their lives soon became intertwined with many others, all linked by radical interests pursued in secret: votes for women, contraception, lesbianism, experimental psychology, bondage, sexual liberation. The 1930s saw the birth of a new phenomenon: superhero comic books – the first starring Superman appeared in 1938. They sold by the million, but some educationalists deplored them. Publisher Max Gaines approached Marston for advice. Marston, inspired and influenced by Holloway, suggested that the problem lay with the superheroes’ “bloodcurdling masculinity”. The obvious solution was to create “a feminist character with all the strength of a Superman plus all the allure of a good and beautiful woman”. Men, said Marston, love to submit to a woman stronger than themselves. Wonder Woman made her debut in All Star Comics in December 1941. Introduced with a semi-Greek backstory as the Amazonian princess of Paradise Island (later Themiscyra), numerous elements of Wonder Woman’s tale were derived from Moulton’s past – a mistress’s love of Greek, the Eden-like perfection of an all-female society, a love of secrecy, a friend’s habit of wearing protective armbands. In the first episode, Wonder Woman finds an American pilot crashed on Paradise Island and takes him back to the United States to help in the war effort and save democracy. She became a hit as a comicbook superhero and, more recently, as a feminist icon, in a 1970s TV series, and now on film. John Man writes on Inner Asia. His books include Saladin: The Life, the Legend and the Islamic Empire (Bantam, 2015) DISCOVER MORE Amazons: The Real Warrior Women of the Ancient World by John Man (Bantam, 2017)

IN THE NEXT ISSUE A British Museum curator discusses the new exhibition Scythians: Warriors of Ancient Siberia

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EXTRAORDINARY Y PEOPLE

Fernão Lopes (c1480–1546) THE PORTUGUESE ROBINSON CRUSOE Three centuries before Napoleon’s exile on a remote south Atlantic isle, a Portuguese renegade sought sanctuary here. AR Azzam introduces the hermit of St Helena

S

t Helena, a remote, rugged speck in the south Atlantic, found international infamy as the island on which Napoleon Bonaparte was imprisoned following his exile from Europe by the British in 1815. Yet though it had been little known in the wider world before then, the French emperor was not the first resident. Three centuries earlier, a Portuguese soldier chose to be cast away here, staying for some three decades – an episode that echoes, and reputedly inspired, Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe. Little is known about the early life of Fernão Lopes. A minor noble born in Lisbon around 1480, he grew up during Portugal’s golden age of discovery, when its explorers rounded the Cape of Good Hope and ventured to India, Brazil and Japan. In 1506, just eight years after Vasco da Gama became the first European to reach India by sea on his pioneering voyage around the Cape, Lopes set sail to India, where he sought to make his fortune. This was an extremely hazardous journey; mortality rates on the overcrowded ships, where disease was rife, were horrendous. Nevertheless, Lopes dreamed of the wealth to be found in India, along with a lifestyle to which he could never aspire in Portugal. In 1510, having arrived in India and joined the Portuguese campaign on its south-western coast, Lopes’s life took a dramatic turn. At that time, the largely Hindu region of Goa was under the control of Muslim rulers of the Bijapur sultanate, based 150 miles to the north-east. That year, Afonso Albuquerque, governor of Portuguese India, captured Goa and, early the following

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year, sailed south to target Malacca (now Melaka, in Malaysia). After his departure, though, he received shocking news: Lopes, one of his aides, had converted to Islam and defected to Bijapur. The story of Portuguese converts to Islam in India is largely forgotten today, but in 16th-century Lisbon it was the cause of much alarm. Many Portuguese arriving in India abandoned their posts and fled to the interior, where their knowledge of weapons and firearms made them attractive to the Muslim rulers; many assumed positions of great authority under their new employers. In Portuguese sources, such apostates were named renegadoess – renegades. In 1512 Albuquerque returned to Goa, where he defeated the Bijapuri commander Rasul Khan and captured Lopes, who was cruelly punished for his act of betrayal. His nose and ears were cut off, his right hand and left thumb were amputated, then he was released – a broken man. That should have been the end of the story – but instead it was just the start of a truly extraordinary tale. Around 1515, King Manuel I of Portugal issued Lopes a royal pardon, and he boarded a ship bound for Lisbon. On the long voyage back to Europe, the ship stopped at the isolated and uninhabited island of St Helena, which had been discovered by the Portuguese in 1502 and was then used as a watering station. Reluctant to return to Portugal in his disfigured state, Lopes jumped ship. The crew searched for him, but to no avail; before departing they left him a barrel filled with biscuits, slices of meat and dried fish, along with some clothes. Then

the ship set sail, stranding Lopes thousands of miles from any other soul. Astonishingly, he survived. When a second Portuguese ship approached, he once again hid; this crew, too, left him food and biscuits, and a letter urging him to show himself. As the years passed, ships that docked on the island left him more clothing and fruit seeds, geese, ducks, pigs and goats. Eventually, Lopes emerged from hiding but, despite assurances and appeals, refused to leave the island. A contemporary writer who visited St Helena remarked on the figs, lemons, oranges, radishes, mustard and parsley that this ‘hermit’ had planted. Eventually, Lopes’s story spread through Portugal until the whole country was talking about the strange man of St Helena, and the tale reached the ears of the king. Around 1530, some 14 or so years after he first set foot on the island, Lopes was summoned by royal decree to return to Lisbon. There, the king was struck by Lopes’s eloquence, and arranged for him to meet Pope Clement VII. The pontiff was also impressed, and told Lopes he would grant him a request. Lopes replied simply that he wished to return to St Helena, and was returned to his self-imposed exile. For another dozen years or so, until his death in 1546, Lopes remained on the island, planting his seeds, cultivating the land and greeting ships that landed – a real-life Portuguese Robinson Crusoe. Abdul Rahman Azzam is the author of The Other Exile: The Remarkable Story of Fernão Lopes, the Island of Saint Helena, and a Paradise Lost (Icon Books, 2017)

A fruitful exile When Fernão Lopes slipped away from the ship carrying him back to Lisbon in 1516, he was a man in ruins – disgraced, disfigured and handicapped, with just one hand. Yet in the decades after his self-imposed exile on St Helena, he carved a solitary life for himself on this remote speck, cultivating a range of fruit trees and transforming the island into a service station for passing Portuguese ships

ILLUSTRATION BY LYNN HATZIUS

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Ma ¯ori art

DESIGNS FOR LIFE The forebears of today’s M¯aori arrived in New Zealand from their Polynesian homeland around the mid-13th century, bringing with them ornate styles of carving used in both ceremonial and practical items. Kelvin Day, manager of Puke Ariki Museum in New Plymouth, explains the cultural and aesthetic significance of 10 historic and beautiful M¯aori objects

BRIDGEMAN ART LIBRARY

Pare (detail), c19th century A pare lintel placed above the entrance doorway of a meeting house or storehouse usually consists of a central figure flanked on either side by other figures; some of these replicate the central figure, while others are depicted in side profile, facing outwards, and are known as manaia. This is the centre of a finely carved pare from the Poverty Bay area of New Zealand’s North Island, possibly carved in the early 19th century. The female figure has eyes of p¯aua (New Zealand abalone) shell, and is carved with plain spirals and unaunahi (repeated curved ridges). Meeting houses symbolically represent the body of an ancestor (whare tipuna), so people entering are transitioning into the world of the ancestor. Pare therefore act as a threshold between the worlds.

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Ma ¯ori art

Tekoteko, early 19th century Carved figures called tekoteko were placed at the apex of gables on the front of important houses and storehouses. This beautiful example, probably carved on the east coast of North Island in the early 19th century, represents an important (but unknown) female ancestor. It is particularly naturalistic: whereas others often have carved elements on the face, arms and legs, this has no surface decoration. The hair is depicted in a traditional topknot style, and the face, hands and genitalia are clearly shown. The figure stands on a koruru (ancestral mask), facing downwards.

Hei tiki Among the most recognisable symbols of M¯aori culture, hei tiki are made from pounamu (nephrite). Most have a tilted head, arms resting on the knees and legs drawn up underneath. Sometimes, as here, the sex is also indicted, and is always female. Originally the hard nephrite was ground using sandstone files and water, by the 19th century European lapidaries used diamond saws and drills. Pounamu adze blades, redundant after the introduction of metal tools, were often converted into hei tiki for M¯aori or European collectors. Their exact significance is unclear, and they seem to have been worn more by women than men. Many were named and handed down from generation to generation, or gifted to cement a family or tribal relationship.

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BRIDGEMAN ART LIBRARY/ALAMY

Rock art, South Canterbury, c1400 Rock drawings, such as this example, can be found in many limestone shelters in the central South Island, several dating from before 1500. Using charcoal or soot and red ochre (ko¯ko¯wai) mixed with oil, designs were applied to the walls and roofs. These often depicted birds and dogs, as well as mythological and abstract forms; this image shows a fish and ‘bird-men’. These shelters were probably temporary camping places, used during the seasonal hunting round as resources within the wider area became available. Unfortunately, over the past couple of centuries the drawings have deteriorated due to weather damage and animals using the shelters.

COLLECTION OF PUKE ARIKI, NEW PLYMOUTH/BRIDGEMAN ART LIBRARY

Tauihu, c1820–30s M¯aori had a number of types of canoe (waka), ranging from ocean-going vessels to small craft for lakes and rivers. More important canoes were adorned with intricately carved tauihu (prows) and sterns. This one provides an example of the importance of genealogical relationships in the manufacture of tauihu. In the early 19th century several M¯aori groups relocated to new areas. One, Ng¯ati Toa, migrated with other related groups to the west of the lower North Island. To extend their territory into the South Island they required more canoes, and invited a related tribe who were renowned carving experts to help with the work, including carving this tauihu. Later the tauihu, if not the complete canoe, was passed to another related tribal group – demonstrating how such objects are used to reinforce genealogical ties.

Toki poutangata, 19th century This is a fine example of a toki poutangata, a prestigious weapon. The name means ‘the adze that establishes the man in authority’. Only the finest nephrite was chosen for the blade, and the handle was carefully shaped and carved. Sometimes further adornment was applied in the form of feathers or dog hair. They are thought to have been largely used for ceremonial purposes, such as cutting the first chips from a tree to be felled for making a waka (canoe) or for a carving for a house. They were also carried in oratory by highranking chiefs, indicating their status.

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Matau, c1850 Fish formed an important part of the M¯aori diet. The waters around New Zealand host a wide range of species, including shark – which not only provided food but also oil for adorning carvings and other treasures. Before the arrival of Europeans shark hooks (matau) were made from wood, with bone points and a fibre line. Following European contact in 1769, metal started to become available and was quickly adopted for making tools. This hook shows how a new material, in this case a metal pony shoe, has been repurposed for a new role, replacing the traditional wooden form. These new hooks were probably stronger than the traditional ones and, as such, would have been valued and sought after.

Tiheru, probably mid-19th century Large waka (canoes) were made by joining together various wooden components. Though the waka was caulked with fibre, continual bailing of water from the hull was necessary. The scoopshaped bailing tool, known as a tiheru, was carved from a single piece of wood. The more important of these, often associated with prestigious war canoes, were ornately carved and often named after important ancestors. This tiheru, from the Te Wh¯anau-a-Apanui tribal area on the east coast of North Island, is now held at Te Papa Tongarewa (National Museum of New Zealand) in Wellington.

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COLLECTION OF PUKE ARIKI, NEW PLYMOUTH/BRIDGEMAN ART LIBRARY

Ma ¯ori art

Paepae, c1820s This paepae, which formed the threshold for a raised storehouse, is an important example of the carving style of north Taranaki (in west-central North Island), with serpentine figures and distinctive design elements. The symbolism of such paepae is still debated, but the central female figure is thought to represent Hine-nui-te-p¯o, the goddess of death. Before the arrival of Europeans, intertribal warfare among M¯aori was common. So that important tribal carvings were not desecrated during conflicts, they were often hidden in wetlands – M¯aori were well aware of the preservative qualities of such places – with the intention of retrieving them at a later date. However, this did not always occur and, when wetlands began to be drained over 100 years later, masterpieces such as this were rediscovered. This paepae was found by a 12-year-old boy in 1959; he was climbing out of a drain when he realised that he was stepping on something carved.

COLLECTION OF PUKE ARIKI, NEW PLYMOUTH

Patu par¯aoa, c1830 This short weapon is a similar shape to the stone cosh called patu o¯newa but is made from whalebone (patu means ‘to strike or hit’, while par¯aoa means ‘whalebone’). When a whale washed ashore it was seen as a gift from Tangaroa, god of the sea. Among the riches such a stranding offered was bone, which could be used for a variety of purposes. Like the patu o¯newa this weapon was used in a striking action, not as a club. In the period before the arrival of Europeans, once a suitable section of bone was selected, it was then cut to shape using stone tools and polished smooth. The ends of the handles of many patu also carried carved designs. Weapons such as this were often named, and handed down from generation to generation.

Kelvin Day is manager of Puke Ariki, an innovative museum, library, heritage and information centre in New Plymouth, Taranaki pukeariki.com DISCOVER MORE Maori: Art and Culture edited by Dorota Starzecka (British Museum Press, 1996)

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Culture Books, exhibitions, films and more

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The Conversation

“The China theatre was as important as what happened in Europe” Hans van de Ven (left) discusses his new book on China’s experiences in the Second World War – and how they shaped a new global order – with historian Rana Mitter PORTRAITS BY FRAN MONKS

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CULTURE The Conversation

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In China at War: Triumph and Tragedy in the Birth of the New China, 1937–1952, Hans van de Ven explores three interconnected wars that shaped much of the nation’s 20th century: the Second World War, in which China faced a strong and persistent Japanese threat; the Chinese civil war between Nationalist and Communist forces; and the Korean war, in which China supported North Korea, in opposition to the UN and the US. Van de Ven, professor of modern Chinese history at the University of Cambridge, met with historian and broadcaster Rana Mitter to discuss the themes and arguments of his new book. Professor of the history and politics of modern China at the University of Oxford, Mitter’s books include China’s War with Japan, 1937-1945: The Struggle for Survival (Allen Lane, 2013). Rana Mitter: People in the west tend to associate the Second World War with Europe and, eventually, the attack on Pearl Harbor and its aftermath. People argue – sometimes jokingly, sometimes not – that, until Pearl Harbor and the intervention of the US, it wasn’t really a world war. But you make a powerful case that we have to take the role of China much more seriously. Why? Hans van de Ven: The truth is that, during the Second World

War, there was an enormous amount of fighting and violence

in east and south-east Asia. It’s simply a reality we have to take account of. The emphasis on the role of Britain and the US – and, to a lesser extent, that of the Soviet Union, which in fact did much of the fighting against Germany – speaks to an essentially Eurocentric narrative. That is understandable in many ways, because the first generation of scholars had family members who were closely affected by the war, but it’s something we need to be aware of. When we talk about the characters from China who stand out in this story, one whom readers may remember is the Nationalist Chinese leader Chiang Kai-shek, particularly if they know mid-20th-century history. Even so, his name has faded and become forgotten. Why does he matter for the story of the Second World War in China?

He matters enormously because, though by 1945 he was no longer militarily strong, he was still the leader of China and was politically important to the Americans, British and Japanese. Chiang Kai-shek believed that he had a great mission to achieve the Nationalist vision for China. He did have some military training, but was dealing with a very difficult situation – there were warring armies all around China. He was not a man of great international experience but, strangely enough, his international diplomacy was actually very effective. You can put it like this: Chiang Kai-shek lost his armies during the Second World War, but he did gain acceptance for China

TIMELINE CHINA’S ROAD TO WAR

1911–12 Republic of China is established

1915 Yuan Shikai becomes emperor

China’s final imperial dynasty is overthrown. Sun Yat-sen (pictured) of the Nationalist Kuomintang (KMT) party becomes the first provisional president of the Republic of China, encompassing mainland China and Taiwan

Sun’s successor, Yuan Shikai, declares himself emperor. This move is met by strong opposition, leading to his abdication a year later, after which time China is largely governed by local warlords

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19211 The Communist Party of China holds its first congress Inspired by revolutionary activity in Russia, the Communist Party of China (CPC) is founded. Initially very small, the party grows rapidly; by the middle of the decade, it has tens of thousands of followers

1926 The KMT reunifies China

1927 7 The Chinese civil war begins

The Kuomintang, under its military (and, from 1926, political) leader Chiang Kai-shek (pictured), wages campaigns against the warlords and unites China

The Nationalist KMT government clashes with CPC troops in a civil war that, in its first stage, lasts for almost a decade

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An American propaganda poster from c1942 portrays brave Chinese resisting Japanese invaders. Even before the attack on Pearl Harbor, the US provided diplomatic and financial support for China’s war against Japan – a strategic relationship nurtured by President Franklin D Roosevelt

as an independent, sovereign, equal country that deserved to be taken seriously by the international community. Chiang Kai-shek and the Nationalists played a weak military hand with great intelligence and effectiveness. In some ways that was in stark contrast with the British, who gained a lot militarily from the US and the other Allies but lost a lot in terms of their empire. And it’s important to remember that the Chinese Nationalists were very important to US president Franklin D Roosevelt in beginning to undermine the empires that had till then made up the world order. But, if I may, I’d introduce another character who I discovered was hugely important in this story, but about whom we rarely talk: the early 20th-century Chinese Nationalist leader Sun Yat-sen, regarded as the founding father of the republic.

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Of course. Sun Yat-sen put together a new political idea for China: the concept that it should become a nation state, with its own destiny in a world of nation states. His legacy inspired thinkers including Chiang Kai-shek.

Indeed. Chiang Kai-shek acted in the name of Sun Yat-sen. That was a source of legitimacy for Chiang: by his thinking, it was Sun Yat-sen’s will that was going to be realised through Chiang’s actions. In China at the time, the Second World War was called “The War of Resistance against Japan and National Reconstruction”. It was about resisting Japanese aggression and sparking the construction of the Chinese nation state.

Turning to the impact of the war in China, conventional wisdom is that between 500,000 and 600,000 Japanese forces became bogged down in what the Japanese refer to as the ‘China trap’. Is it fair to say that this was China’s major contribution to the fight against the Japanese?

Yes, I think it is. Chinese troops may not have been first-rate forces, but by resisting Japan they prevented it from being able to combine its resources with those of the nations around it – China, Korea and Taiwan. Japan could have done things with those resources, especially against the Soviet Union, that really would have mattered in the outcome of the war. But China also mattered to the geopolitics of the time. To put it bluntly, the participation of China allowed the Allies to argue that they were not fighting a race war. Symbolically, that was hugely important, especially to the US and to the UK, which faced that challenge in India. Are there any specific examples of the effect of that? How did it play out in terms of relations between the US, Britain and China?

This is an aspect I find fascinating. On the one hand there is the British version of events, in which Winston Churchill went to Washington, made his speeches, rallied the US and was great mates with President Roosevelt. And yes, that story is important. But Roosevelt also invited Soong Mei-ling, Madame Chiang Kai-shek, to come to the United States,

1937 Japanese forces invade China

1945 China’s civil war resumes

1948 Korea is divided

Tensions caused by Japan’s incursions into China escalate into war, which unifies once more to resist the threat. The conflict merges with the wider Second World War after Japan attacks Pearl Harbor in 1941

Following Japan’s surrender to Allied forces, the KMT-CPC alliance breaks down. Communist forces, led by Mao Zedong (left), take control of much of mainland China to establish, in 1949, the People’s Republic of China

Having endured Japanese colonial rule (till 1945) then occupation by the Soviet Union and the US, in 1948 Korea is split. The south is named the Republic of Korea; the north becomes the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea

1950 The Korean War erupts North Korea invades South Korea, sparking the Korean War. The UN, led by the US, supports South Korea; China and the Soviet Union back communist North Korea, ruled by Kim Il-sung (right). Open fighting ends in 1953, though peace has never been formally declared

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CULTURE The Conversation

Hans van de Ven and Rana Mitter in conversation. “The UK and US perspective of the war is one held by victors who were never occupied, who never had to deal with the realities of occupation,” van de Ven suggests

Now hang on. There’s a whole generation of colonels in small seaside towns around Britain who are convinced that the US was basically responsible for the fall of the British empire. You’re giving them ammunition, right?

I guess so. Roosevelt was working towards a world order that no longer consisted of the highly militarised empire trading blocs, as had been the case before the war. He believed that system made for a very unstable situation – one that was unsustainable given the kinds of nationalism that were clearly emerging all across the world. For him, Chiang Kai-shek provided a foil to help make that happen, in a very indirect way. Then, at the great conference in Cairo in November 1943, Roosevelt really did begin to create an alternative form of east Asia in which China was the regional power. Churchill was very unhappy during the Cairo conference, because it was the only one of the great Second World War conferences in which Chiang Kai-shek, leader of an Asian

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country, sat in equal standing with the leaders of the US and the UK. Churchill famously asked if there was a way to get Chiang Kai-shek and his wife to visit the pyramids, leaving him and Roosevelt to get on with the real work. Clearly, Churchill did not take this situation at all well.

Churchill tried very hard to make an argument about the superiority of English-speaking countries. Roosevelt would have nothing of it, and spent time with Chiang Kai-shek to try to settle the question of east Asia. He wanted the Chinese to run the occupation of Japan, which didn’t happen in the end. In the Cairo communiqué at the end of the conference, the independence of Korea was underwritten; that, and the abolition of treaty ports in China, put decolonisation firmly on the agenda. That went against Churchill’s wishes, because he well understood the implications – people in Whitehall asking: “if that’s going to happen in Korea, then what will happen elsewhere?” Which was, of course, absolutely what happened. Roosevelt was trying to engineer his version of the world order. Though parts of China were occupied, two large Chinese groups – the Nationalists and the Communists – were at one point the only people in Asia fighting the Japanese. Today’s Communist party propaganda inevitably presents a heroic story of resistance – but you and I know that’s not how wars work. In reality, people are scared, and think

FRAN MONKS

where she made radio speeches and was a huge hit. Roosevelt and the Americans, in their clever way, were balancing Europe at the same time as creating a positive Asian ‘other’. Less well-known, because it was less publicised, is the fact that Roosevelt also used Chiang Kai-shek to undermine British control of India and the British empire.

“Roosevelt was aiming for a world order no longer made up of highly militarised empire trading blocs” about their families and the people around them. Yet the Chinese people did keep fighting. Why?

patriot, and is entirely sincere in his self-belief. That reveals mindsets quite different from what we’d expect.

They did fight – though initially reluctantly. In the first year of the war, some sort of settlement with the Japanese would have had support among the population, but by 1939 there was a general will to continue to fight and to not let the Japanese win. That was informed in part by China’s deep history, and its historical consciousness of itself as a civilisation that had done this kind of thing before: it had fought the Mongols, and endured civil war during the Taiping rebellion (1850–64). It had dealt with these kinds of upheavals before. The sacrifices that both the Nationalist and the Communist governments demanded of the Chinese people were so severe that there was no turning back. One aspect that people have talked very little about is the Nationalists’ ‘scorched earth’ policy: entire cites and provinces were burned to hinder invasion. In part it echoed the Russian approach to Napoleon’s advance into Russia: in order to resist invaders, the population was made to sacrifice so much that there was no turning back. But it was also part of traditional Chinese wartime strategy of clearing everything from the countryside that the enemy could use. There was a toughness to conducting this campaign: it was an all-out war. Once people had made that kind of sacrifice, they might be critical of their government but they were not going to give in to the Japanese.

That’s absolutely right, and is one of the things I’m trying to drive home. People in China were living in a society that was under great stress, and their story isn’t about heroes and victims, or good and evil. It’s about people trying not just to get through it, but also to maintain some kind of humanity. That is a vital story to tell, and what makes the China theatre as important as, and comparable to, what was happening in Europe. So how did (and do) Chinese views of the Second World War different from western perspectives?

The UK and US perspective of the Second World War is one held by victors who were never occupied, who never had to deal with the realities of occupation. Here, my background is important. I’m from the Netherlands. Coming from a country that was occupied means that you have to deal with the realities of living through that occupation. That inevitably informs your perspective, and the same must be true for China. It means that you begin to get away from a heroic perspective – of victors against losers, heroes against enemies, good against evil. As a second-generation historian of the Second World War, I think we should be moving towards a less black-andwhite version of history.

Yes, it is, because this was a tough time during which many people suffered very grievously. War is very serious and callous, and that’s one reason why I’m emphasising this kind of narrative. Today’s Communist Party propaganda, in which China was the hero that could only win, and everyone came happily together to achieve that victory, doesn’t deal with the reality.

If there is one generally accepted view of the impact of the Second World War in China, it’s that it led to the communist revolution. We’ve talked about the Nationalists, and how they should perhaps be reassessed in a more positive way. Yet there’s still an overarching narrative that a failed Nationalist government, worn out by the war, eventually gave way to a resurgent Communist party. In what way was the war against Japan important for the ultimate Communist victory?

Memoirs by Chinese people reveal a deep ambiguity in attitudes to the war. One of the most interesting is the diary of Zhou Fohai, a Chinese collaborator who worked with the Japanese. Throughout, he paints himself as the purest

Much later, when Chairman Mao received visitors from Japan – including, in 1972, its prime minister, who tried to apologise endlessly for having invaded China – he thanked them for having invaded. Without that invasion, he said, he would still be in the hills. And it’s true that the conditions for the rise of the

You’re painting a very bleak picture of China in wartime. Is that the right way to think about it?

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CULTURE The Conversation

“It is very important that we have a global perspective in mind when we talk about the Second World War” Communist party were clearly created by the Japanese invasion. Before 1937, the Nationalists were well on their way to eradicating the Communists. The Japanese invasion created the political and economic opportunities for the Communists to establish their bases, to create armies, to make propaganda, and so on. A frequently asked question is whether the victory won by the Communists in 1949 was a military triumph or a political or social one. What’s your take on that?

In many ways, that’s a meaningless question. One of the things we have to realise is that waging a war is a complex business. Obviously, there are military and logistic issues, but social, economic and education policy is part of it, too. There seems to be a hesitancy in academic circles to see how comprehensive war is, particularly in that period. You wage war in many different ways. I sometimes say that this period of war is history in Europe, whereas in Asia it is still basically current affairs. What do the these wars mean to the Chinese people today?

Well, ‘the Chinese people’ is something of a misnomer, and certainly too big a chunk for me to tackle all in one go. It depends on which aspect of society you’re talking about. The Chinese government, for instance, today uses the war in much the same way as the British, Russian and American governments do: to create a national story with the aim of binding people together. It’s a feel-good narrative, and I think that’s fair enough. I also think, though, that there’s still much about the war and its legacy that the Chinese people are still thinking about. You can see that, for instance, in the way in which people are beginning to talk about the role and impact of collaborators.

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It’s very interesting that, when I teach this subject to Chinese people, they are very suspicious of the central narrative, and often happy to take the mickey out of it. And when I make comparisons between war commemorations in China and Europe, there’s a longing for local commemorations, to tell individual stories of each city. The point is that this story is still alive. It remains something that is in the process of being discovered at deeper levels. But something that is not yet deep, I think, is the western understanding of these conflicts – the Second World War in China, the civil war and the Korean War – and their significance. What new understanding would you want readers to gain from your book?

First, that when we talk about the Second World War it is very important that we have in mind a global perspective – that we see it in all of its diversity. We need to be much more aware of regional differences. China is a very good example of that. The other aspect is that war was allABOUT THE AUTHORS encompassing: we have to have an eye for the human stories and the humanity Hans van de Ven is that is always at the bottom of it. It won’t professor of modern Chinese do to have merely a simplified heroic history at the University of narrative. The human story behind it Cambridge. China at War: all is very important. Triumph and Tragedy in the Birth of the New China, 1937–1952 is published by Profile Books

Rana Mitter is professor of the history and politics of modern China at the University of Oxford, and author of Modern China: A Very Short Introduction (2nd edition, OUP, 2016)

Is there any sense that the west should be a little more grateful that China decided that it would fight Japan in the dark days of 1937-39?

Yes. It is part of our story, not merely their story. The Second World War is a global story, and it is so important that we recognise that complexity. PODCAST

Listen to Hans van de Ven and Rana Mitter on the History Extra podcast: historyextra.com/podcasts

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CULTURE E Book Reviews

Book Reviews Empire strikes back Jerry Brotton on a book that argues empires may have something to teach nation states in facing the challenges of the 21st century Visions of Empire: How Five Imperial Regimes Shaped the World by Krishan Kumar Princeton, 576 pages, £32.95

The history of the world, as Krishan

Kumar observes in this expansive, prodigiously researched book, is effectively the study of empires. The nation is just a blip in world history when measured against the longevity of empires. Today, though, empires seem to be a thing of the past, with the passing of the great 19th-century European empires of the Habsburgs, the Ottomans, Russia, Britain and France. And yet, as Kumar argues, they might still have much to tell us about how we live in a globalised, transnational and cosmopolitan world where nation states continue to struggle with sectarian and religious conflict. Kumar’s approach is a refreshing riposte to postcolonial critics eager to simply bury the concept of empire, arguing instead that the erosion of the nation state must lead us to rethink modern conceptions of empire. Is the

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US an empire, for instance – or even the European Union? Kumar suggests that their history of assimilating different cultures, languages and religions with such apparent ease might offer useful answers to managing multiculturalism – answers that the nation today seems unable (or unwilling) to provide. With such a revisionist approach comes a shift in focus; instead of analysing the subjects of empire, Kumar turns “the spotlight on the ruling people themselves, their self-conceptions and justifications of empire”. He also stresses the enduring power of a civilising ‘mission’ that originates in Rome; it is the ‘glue’ that sustains all his empires, and is one that we ignore at our peril. His opening chapter on the historical idea of empire is a tour de force, full of striking conceptual and historical insights. ‘Imperial nationalism’ is not for him an oxymoron, but a sign that many nations “are empires in miniature”. The chapter also stresses some clever comparative historical points: the Holy Roman Empire was abolished (by Napoleon) only in 1806, and the Roman empire in the east ended only with the fall of the Ottoman Caliphate in 1924.

Kumar argues that the erosion of the nation state must lead us to rethink conceptions of empire

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Ottoman Sultan Mehmed II conquers Constantinople in 1453, depicted in a 19th-century painting. Krishan Kumar suggests that his conquest “was the consequence of a Greco-Roman heritage as much as (if not more than) any messianic Islamic plan for global domination”, says Jerry Brotton

Including the Ottomans in his five empires allows Kumar to give his discussion a powerful global resonance. He argues that Mehmed the Conqueror’s capture of Constantinople in 1453 was the consequence of a Greco-Roman heritage as much as (if not more than) any messianic Islamic plan for global domination. Here and throughout the book he is full of fascinating insights. Rome did not fall, he observes – it just moved eastwards, influencing empires such as the Ottomans. The Habsburgs collapsed not because of nationalism but under pressure from other empires. Russia rose and fell due to the effects of ‘internal colonialism’ – like so many other empires, colonising internally before expanding outwards. The French empire was the most obvious example of a nation writ large, obsessed with spreading civilisation but whose people refused to settle in its colonies. Kumar’s range and research is deeply impressive, as is his ability to roam from imperial Rome to French colonial Algeria in the 1960s. However, with

such a range come understandable gaps and questions. Kumar is a sociologist and, though his conceptual understanding of empire is profound, his historical narrative is not quite as assured. On occasions each study drifts into a retelling of key moments from each respective empire, losing the critical bite of his opening chapter. Although he cites a vast amount of secondary literature on empire, he delivers very little on promises of insights into the mentality of the empire’s rulers, and how imperial ideology was implemented in practice by its bureaucratic foot-soldiers. Perhaps understandably, being someone more focused on the modern world, Kumar’s interest in the early modern period of each empire (aside from Rome) is sketchy, often relying on somewhat older historical studies. Although he acknowledges the selectiveness of his approach, it is a pity that the Portuguese empire is omitted. With a subtitle that promises to explain how “imperial regimes shaped the world”, I wanted much more on that idea. I also hoped to read about the struggles and opportunities created by the imperial legacy in places such as Latin America and the Indian subcontinent. Perhaps there was just too much for Kumar to take on here. Even so, the vision and scope of his endeavour are signs that we are far from done with empires. Jerry Brotton is author of This Orient Isle: Elizabethan England and the Islamic World (Allen Lane, 2016)

Five minutes with... Krishan Kumar What links the diverse empires that you explore in your book? The European empires shared many features, mostly connected with the management of racially and ethnically diverse populations. They elaborated a ‘mission’ that justified their rule, usually couched as spreading civilisation through the diffusion of one of the great religions – Islam, various forms of Christianity – or, in more secular terms, bringing progress and enlightenment through the ‘civilising mission’. Another feature was that the ruling peoples were forced, in the interests of more efficient management, to suppress strong expressions of their own superiority as a national or ethnic group. Nationalism, whether of the ruling people or their subjects, was always the enemy of empire – a problem that became more acute as it grew in the late 19th and 20th centuries. What can exploring this subject teach us about life in the 21st century? Everyone agrees, I think, that the nation state is in crisis – battered by globalisation, incapable of managing many of its own internal affairs, and in response desperately tightening border controls, getting into periodic bouts of panic about immigration, and so on. There is in many places a search for an alternative order that often suspiciously mirrors the empires of old, though of course no one would call it such. The EU is in many ways a substitute for European empires: many of its founders were very conscious of this, and its birth coincided with the era in which Europeans were divesting themselves of empire. So empires remain with us – partly in their legacies, in the former colonies as well as the metropoles, but also in the search for new supranational forms that can resolve the problems of the nation state. No one wants to, or can, recreate the old empires. But their study has a lot to teach us about how to manage our own globalised, multicultural world.

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CULTURE E Book Reviews A cartoon printed in Punch in 1906 shows a constrictor snake with the face of Belgium’s King Leopold II – “an ambitious and devious king who had long dreamed of establishing colonies abroad, enriching himself in the process,” says Martin Meredith

Martin Meredith considers an important, if too tightly focused, look at the role of companies and contractors in seizing control of 19th-century Africa Rogue Empires: Contracts and Conmen in Europe’s Scramble for Africa by Steven Press Harvard, 384 pages, £31.95

After completing an epic journey

down the Congo river, the Welsh-born adventurer Henry Morton Stanley returned to London in 1878 seeking support for a scheme to use the river as “a great highway of commerce” into the African interior. His plan aroused little interest in London, but Leopold II of Belgium – an ambitious and devious king who had long dreamed of establishing colonies abroad, enriching himself

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in the process – relished the idea, and hired Stanley to construct a private empire in the Congo basin. Over a period of five years, Stanley and his agents signed some 400 ‘treaties’ with local chiefs, according Leopold ‘sovereignty’ over their territory in exchange for items such as tinsel-braided uniforms, pieces of cloth, coloured beads and bottles of gin. “The treaties must be as brief as possible,” Leopold instructed, “and in a few articles must grant us everything.” Leopold’s private empire eventually covered nearly a million square miles of the Congo basin. In Rogue Empires, Steven Press examines the role played by freelance entrepreneurs such as Stanley and by private companies during Europe’s scramble for

Martin Meredith is the author of books including The Fortunes of Africa (Simon and Schuster, 2014)

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From cons to colonies

African territory in the 19th century. In another example from 1883, a Bremen merchant, Adolf Lüderitz, gained cession of a small harbour called Angra Pequena on the barren coastline of south-west Africa. German chancellor Otto von Bismarck then used it to claim sovereignty over a huge semi-desert colony – today known as Namibia. In Nigeria, the dominant player was George Goldie and his United African Company. Press’s main focus is the endless machinations of European politicians and officials as they sought to thwart each other’s ambitions, and the legal implications of their activities. There are, though, gaps. Cecil Rhodes and his company were, of course, rapacious in southern Africa. “Take all you can get and ask me afterwards,” Rhodes told one of his agents. Indeed, the cover of Press’s book shows a famous Punchh cartoon of Rhodes that depicts him bestriding Africa from Cape Town to Cairo – yet Rhodes makes only a fleeting appearance in just two paragraphs. Nor is any mention made of one of Rhodes’ most notorious acquisitions. The Rudd Concession was obtained fraudulently from the Ndebele king Lobengula, and was used by Rhodes to procure a royal charter from Queen Victoria enabling him to set up his own territorial state, which became known as Rhodesia. In a book about conmen and contracts, it’s a curious omission.

Loyalist troops and Iroquois men slaughter Patriots at the 1778 battle of Wyoming in Pennsylvania, at which the Iroquois reputedly took more than 200 scalps. Hoock’s book tends towards “spattering the reader with detailed accounts of particularly lurid incidents”, says Benjamin L Carp

Birthing pains Benjamin L Carp on a graphic exploration of the most brutal and bloody episodes in the fight for American independence

Scars of Independence: America’s Violent Birth by Holger Hoock Crown Publishing, 576 pages, £25

BRIDGEMAN ART LIBRARY

In this sanguinary take on the war

for American independence (1775–83), Holger Hoock hopes to skewer the somehow enduring myth that the origin of the United States was a relatively sedate affair. In contrast, he portrays the conflict as a violent rebellion and a messy, brutal civil war. The British high command debated whether to treat the rebellious Americans humanely, and the rebels themselves were quick to complain about

harsh treatment. Some of the stories that made their way into the historical record were all too real: soldiers really did burn towns and commit atrocities, and prisons of the 18th century really were nightmarish. Other stories were invented or exaggerated, and American leaders did their best to fire off inquiries and polemics that would cast the British in the worst possible light. As for the revolutionary Americans themselves, though they generally seem to have treated their prisoners somewhat better and restrained themselves from pillaging their neighbours, they gave almost as good as they got: torturing Loyalists; burning Norfolk, Virginia (their sixth-largest city); and destroying an entire harvest’s worth of Iroquois crops. Hoock is in some ways a fine writer, and the book is a product of broadranging research in far-flung archives and in the preceding body of scholarly literature. The illustrations also enliven the text. Yet Hoock crafts an odd-shaped narrative, spattering the reader with

detailed accounts of particularly lurid incidents, while rushing through the broader context that might have helped us to understand the wider 18th-century history of corporal punishment, or sexual assault, or extirpative warfare. If Hoock’s is not the first book to explore the violence of the American Revolution, he does amass a variety of disparate local histories in one place. What is the reader meant to take from this? Yes, war is hell, particularly for the victims of rape, butchery, confinement, enslavement, exile and genocide. It’s not at all clear that this war was worse than the French revolutionary wars. Perhaps, though, Americans have so bowdlerised their own war of origins that we can never have too many correctives. Certainly, Hoock’s work compels us to take a more honest look at just how bad things became. Benjamin L Carp is a historian of American Revolution at Brooklyn College, City University of New York

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CULTURE E Book Reviews Modern tower blocks crowd Berlin’s Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church, blasted during an air raid in 1943 and left in partial ruins as a reminder of the conflict

War’s long shadow

The Fear and the Freedom: How the Second World War Changed Us Keith Lowe Viking, 576 pages, £25

As we try to make sense of the world’s

fractious, fissiparous turn, readers might find solace in Keith Lowe’s new book. Using an imaginative approach, weaving interviews and memoirs into his account, he charts the myriad ways in which, he claims, the Second World War has – for good or ill – exerted its influence over the decades that have followed. The book does not want for ambition, ranging across the globe, and from Le Corbusier’s brutalist architecture to Brexit and beyond, in seeking the war’s looming shadow. Ingeniously, each of its 24 thematic chapters is introduced and

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bookended with a contemporary ‘voice’ – an eyewitness to or participant in events. It is certainly an eclectic cast, including Soviet scientist and dissident Andrei Sakharov, peace activist and ‘world citizen’ Garry Davis, and the Italian Euro-federalist Altiero Spinelli. The thematic approach is intriguing, and allows the author the space to digress at will. However, it also produces a rather fractured narrative that is less than perfectly suited to the task of conveying the broad outline of events. What emerges might be imagined as a kaleidoscope of glittering fragments that – for all their individual worth – nonetheless struggle to coalesce into a coherent whole. This is also an unashamedly personal book. As well as the voices that he employs, Lowe eschews the historian’s conventional objectivity and distance in favour of frequent use of the first person. This might appeal to some, but it does have the effect of diminishing the sense of the author as a dispassionate observer and, in places, makes the book feel some-

thing like an extended think-piece. The temptation at play here, one feels, is to view the Second World War as a sort of ambivalent Pandora’s box: the defining moment of the contemporary world, the root of so many modern triumphs and evils. That conflict’s influence has certainly been substantial, but in exaggerating it there is a risk of airbrushing or diminishing the agency of later generations and of rival causes. In this regard, the author certainly treads a fine line, but he nonetheless produces a book that is thought-provoking, engaging and well written. Roger Moorhouse is the author of books including The Devils’ Alliance: Hitler’s Pact with Stalin, 1939–1941 (The Bodley Head, 2014)

DISCOVER MORE Read Keith Lowe’s History Essay: “Was 1945 the world’s year zero?” in the August issue of BBC History Magazine In October he will be speaking at BBC History Magazine’s History Weekends in York and Winchester (historyweekend.com)

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Roger Moorhouse is intrigued by a novel and personal examination of the a aftermath and lasting impact of the Second World War

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MAGAZINE BBC HISTORY MAGAZINE ADVISORY PANEL Dr Padma Anagol Cardiff University Prof Joanna Bourke Birkbeck College, London Prof Richard Carwardine Oxford University Prof Clive Emsley Open University Prof Richard Evans Cambridge University Prof Sarah Foot Oxford University Prof Rab Houston St Andrews University Prof John Hudson St Andrews University Dr Peter Jones formerly Newcastle University Prof Denis Judd London Metropolitan University Prof Sir Ian Kershaw formerly Sheffield University Robert Ketteridge Head of Documentaries, Factual, BBC* Christopher Lee formerly Cambridge University Prof John Morrill Cambridge University Greg Neale Founding editor, BBC History Magazine Prof Kenneth O Morgan Oxford University Prof Cormac ó Gráda University College, Dublin Prof Martin Pugh formerly Newcastle University Julian Richards archaeologist and broadcaster Prof Simon Schama Columbia University Prof Mark Stoyle University of Southampton Dr Amanda Goodrich The Open University* Dr Simon Thurley formerly chief executive, English Heritage Prof Helen Weinstein Director of IPUP, Institute for the Public Understanding of the Past* Michael Wood historian and broadcaster *member of BBC Editorial Advisory Board

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Issue 5 – August/September 2017 BBC World Histories is published by Immediate Media Company Bristol Limited under licence from BBC Worldwide who help fund new BBC programmes. EDITORIAL Editor Matt Elton Group editor Rob Attar Deputy editor, BBC History Magazine Charlotte Hodgman Art editor Susanne Frank Senior deputy art editor Rachel Dickens Deputy art editors Rosemary Smith, Sarah Lambert Production editor Paul Bloomfield Group production editor Spencer Mizen Staff writer Ellie Cawthorne Picture editor Samantha Nott Deputy picture editor Katherine Hallett Digital editor Emma Mason Acting digital editor Elinor Evans CONTRIBUTORS AR Azzam, Zeinab Badawi, Chris Bowlby, Rutger Bregman, Jerry Brotton, Benjamin L Carp, Matt Carr, Margaret Conrad, Gordon Corera, Kelvin Day, Jacob Dlamini, Marianne Elliott, Charlie English, Richard English, Diarmaid Ferriter, Geoff Gill, Matt Graham, Theresa Grieben, Adrian Guelke, Joey Guidone, Sudhir Hazareesingh, Kate Hazell, Paul Hewitt/Battlefield Design, Bruce Hoffman, Tonwen Jones, Krishan Kumar, John Man, Leopold Manning, Martin Meredith, Rana Mitter, Roger Moorhouse, Rosemary O’Kane, Richard Overy, Meg Parkes, Katya Rogatchevskaia, Michael Scott, Eleanor Shakespeare, Adam IP Smith, Charles Townshend, Frank Trentmann, Hans van de Ven THANKS TO Hilary Clothier, Lucy Doggett, Paul Jarrold, Everett Sharp, Sue Wingrove ADVERTISING & MARKETING Advertising manager Sam Jones [email protected] +44 117 3008 145 Subscriptions director Jacky Perales-Morris Subscriptions marketing manager Natalie Lawrence US representative Kate Buckley [email protected] PRODUCTION Production co-ordinator Emily Mounter Reprographics Tony Hunt and Chris Sutch SYNDICATION Director of licensing & syndication Tim Hudson International partners’ manager Anna Brown IMMEDIATE MEDIA COMPANY Publisher David Musgrove Publishing director Andy Healy Managing director Andy Marshall CEO Tom Bureau BBC WORLDWIDE Director of editorial governance Nicholas Brett Director of consumer products and publishing Andrew Moultrie Head of UK publishing Chris Kerwin Publisher Mandy Thwaites Publishing co-ordinator Eva Abramik [email protected] bbcworldwide.com/uk--anz/ukpublishing.aspx

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CULTURE Agenda

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BEYOND THE SEA

Agenda EXHIBITIONS, TV, FILMS AND MORE

He is most famous for this dramatic woodblock print, The Great Wave off Kanagawa, probably created c1831. Yet the Japanese artist Katsushika Hokusai produced a diverse range of work in a career that spanned nearly seven decades. A new exhibition at the British Museum in London explores the output of the last 30 years of his life, with pieces drawn from collections in Japan, the US and Europe. This extraordinary body of work includes portraits, close-ups of natural scenes and sweeping landscapes – many featuring Japan’s highest mountain, Mount Fuji, which was a recurring subject throughout Hokusai’s career.

BRITISH MUSEUM

Hokusai: Beyond the Great Wave until 13 August at The British Museum, London britishmuseum.org/hokusai

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CULTURE E Agenda

Leading experts, many of them contributors to BBC World Histories – including Pankaj Mishra, John Romer, James Holland, Tom Holland and Shrabani Basu – will be speaking at this year’s BBC History Magazine History Weekends. Held at Winchester in October and in York the following month, the diverse events span a huge range of continents and time periods, from ancient Egypt to medieval England. If you’re in the UK in the autumn, it’s a great chance to discover the latest thinking from leading historians in various fields. History Weekends, 6–8 Oct (Winchester), 24–26 Nov (York) historyweekend.com

Sarah Gadon (right) plays Grace Marks, a maid accused of killing her employer. The question of her guilt is the subject of a new drama based on real events

MADNESS AND MURDER Following Hulu’s successful adaptation of Margaret Atwood’s dystopian novel The Handmaid’s Tale, rival streaming service Netflix is producing a series based on another of the author’s books. Yet rather than being a work of ‘speculative fiction’, 1996’s Alias Gracee is rooted firmly in historical fact – a murder case that captivated 19th-century Canada. The deaths of Thomas Kinnear and his housekeeper in 1843 were attributed to the household’s maid, Grace Marks, and stablehand James McDermott. Yet Marks’ conviction was controversial, and doubts persisted about the role – if any – that she played in events. Incarcerated for 30 years, many of them in a lunatic

asylum, Marks was eventually pardoned and resettled in New York, though little is known about her later life. Atwood’s novel uses these events as the foundation for a fictional investigation into the case, as a doctor becomes increasingly involved with Marks and her story. The six-part adaptation, which features Canadian actor Sarah Gadon and Wolf Hall’s Edward Holcroft, looks set to echo the book’s themes of gender relationships, class identity and the often highly problematic treatment of the mental health of women throughout history. Alias Grace, from 25 September on CBC Television (Canada) and Netflix (autumn)

TWIN PEAKS Offering an intriguing parallel look at the powerful ancient civilisations of China and Egypt, an exhibition at Berlin’s Neues Museum features 250 objects charting the ways in which the two cultures dominated wider history. Some of the Chinese artefacts have never before been displayed in Europe; by juxtaposing them with their Egyptian counterparts, surprising links across the continents are revealed. China and Egypt: Cradles of the World until 3 December at Neues Museum, Berlin museumsportal-berlin.de/en/museums/neues-museum/

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JENI NOTT/NETFLIX/SHANGHAI MUSEUM/SMB–EGYPTIAN MUSEUM–SANDRA STEISS

PAST MASTERS

A Soviet worker sweeps away criminals in this propaganda poster from c1917–22. The way in which art shaped the Russian Revolution is explored in a new exhibition

DETROIT BURNING The 1967 Detroit riot was one of the worst civil disturbances in US history: clashes between civilians and police led to 43 deaths, more than 7,000 arrests and widespread destruction of buildings. A new film from director Kathryn Bigelow (The Hurt Locker, Zero Dark Thirty), based on a book by Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist John Hersey, focuses on the so-called Algiers Motel Incident of 25–26 July, in which three black men were killed and nine other civilians beaten by police and National Guardsmen. John Boyega, star of the Star Wars franchise, is among the cast. Detroit, from 4 August (US), 25 August (UK) detroit.movie

BRITISH LIBRARY

IN THE TIME OF REVOLUTION Nelly Ptashkina began writing her diary in 1918, describing life as a teenager in Moscow. Alongside her hopes and fears, she recorded the civil war and revolution erupting around her. Her middle-class family were forced to flee from Bolshevik forces, first to Kiev then, in 1919, to Paris. Ptashkina’s is one of the stories told in a new exhibition at the British Library in London. “We consider the Russian Revolution as part of world history,” says Katya Rogatchevskaia, one of its curators. “As well as key figures such as Tsar Nicholas II, Lenin and Trotsky, we also focus on how ordinary people lived through this extraordinary time.” Displays include rarely seen propaganda from anti-Communist forces, and WORDS MATT ELTON

photos from refugee camps. Propaganda is key, as it both shaped public opinion and influenced later Soviet campaigns, while the refugee crises of a century ago affected many people, just as they do today, says Rogatchevskaia. “Ptashkina’s story resonates a lot with the current situation, when thousands of people need to leave their homes to seek asylum,” she says. “And fundamental questions such as relations between the masses and the elites, and the vulnerability of democratic procedures when faced with organised violence, are still being discussed with the revolution in mind.” Russian Revolution: Hope, Tragedy, Myths, until 29 August at the British Library, London bl.uk/whats-on

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Journeys Stories and sights from global history

In the footsteps of…

An ill-fated mission across the Sahara to Timbuktu In 1825 a Scottish soldier embarked on an expedition to cross Africa’s mightiest desert to the near-legendary storied city in what’s now Mali. Charlie English traces the blood-soaked journey of Alexander Gordon Laing 102

ROBERT HARDING

A Tuareg caravan traverses the sandy Sahara in Algeria. A group of these nomadic Berber people, famed for their blue robes, attacked Laing during his journey across the desert

“The wealth of Timbuktu had been trumpeted since at least the 14th century, its houses reportedly roofed with gold” Æ 103

JOURNEYS Alexander Gordon Laing’s trans-Sahara expedition to Timbuktu

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Leone, Laing was appointed by the secretary of state for war and the colonies, Lord Bathurst, to lead a new mission to locate the “farfamed Capital of Central Africa”, as he described Timbuktu. This, he wrote, was his destiny: “Tis that which bids my bosom glow, To climb the stiff ascent of fame, To share the praise the just bestow And give myself a deathless name.” Laing arrived in Tripoli in May 1825, where he was met by the British consul, a hard-drinking patriot named Hanmer Warrington. Laing embarked on a whirlwind romance with Warrington’s daughter, Emma, marrying her on 14 July. Four days later, on 18 July, he rode out of Tripoli and into the searing heat of the Sahara. Across the burning sands

Laing had engaged as guide a merchant, Sheikh Babani, agreeing a sizeable fee for the sheikh to lead the Scotsman to Timbuktu, a journey that would – the sheikh promised – be completed in two and a half months. First Babani’s caravan set out for the ancient oasis town of Ghadames, today on the Libya-Algeria border south-west of Tripoli. It is a distance of less than 300 miles as the crow flies, yet Sheikh Babani took a roundabout 1,000-milelong route. By the time the caravan reached Ghadames on 13 September, the camels were skeletal – several were lame – and the men had run out of food. Laing stayed in Ghadames for six weeks, pining for Emma; in a letter to Warrington, he even threatened to abandon his mission in order to return to his young bride. But his sense of destiny prevailed, and on 27 October the party set out Æ

Scores of travellers had been dispatched to find the city of Timbuktu, but every attempt had ended in failure – or death 104

An engraving of Alexander Gordon Laing by Samuel Freeman

Alexander Gordon Laing: explorer, soldier, glory-hunter Alexander Gordon Laing (1794–1826) was born in Edinburgh, the son of a schoolmaster. He worked briefly as a teacher himself before escaping into the army, with early postings to the exotic territories of Barbados, Jamaica and, in 1819 or 1820, Sierra Leone. In west Africa, Laing led a number of missions into the interior, demonstrating the courage, physical robustness and talent for self-promotion that would be essential to the attempt on Timbuktu that was taking shape in his head. In 1824, in poor health, he was sent home to report on a disastrous British defeat by the Ashanti empire (in what’s now Ghana) to the secretary of state for war and the colonies, Lord Bathurst. To the irritation of his commanding officer in Sierra Leone, who complained that Laing was “unwize, unofficerlike, and unmanly”, and that his “military exploits were [even] worse than his poetry”, the 29-year-old major ingratiated himself with Bathurst and was appointed to lead a Timbuktu mission. In May 1825 Laing arrived in Tripoli (now capital of Libya), where he was greeted by the British consul, Hanmer Warrington. He immediately embarked on a whirlwind romance with Warrington’s daughter, Emma. She and Laing were married on 14 July 1825, four days before the groom set out on his ill-fated expedition to Timbuktu. Laing was murdered, probably on 26 September 1826, shortly after leaving Timbuktu in the company of a Barabish Arab described as “the enemy of God and his prophet”, who ordered the killing.

AKG IMAGES

imbuktu: even today, the name of this ancient city in Mali conjures up exotic images, evoking the heady romance of the Sahara. But in the early 19th century, it was the stuff of legend. Timbuktu dominated the west’s ideas about Africa much as El Dorado had once coloured European concepts of the Americas. It was believed to govern a rich sub-Saharan region called the Sudan, from the Arabic Bilad al-Sudan: “land of the blacks”. Rumours of its existence had circulated in Europe for centuries, and its wealth had been trumpeted since at least the 14th century, its houses reportedly roofed with gold. Scores of travellers had been dispatched, but every attempt had ended in failure – or death. In 1824 a more concrete incentive appeared: the French Société de Géographie offered a prize for the first explorer to attain and document Timbuktu – a reward that quickly reached the substantial sum of 10,000 francs, accompanied by a Great Gold Medal of Exploration and Journeys of Discovery. As word of the prize spread, the quest took on a more competitive edge. However, the man fated to become the first modern European to reach this elusive city was motivated not by the prize but by a more personal impulse – or so he claimed. Alexander Gordon Laing, a goodlooking, self-absorbed army major from Edinburgh, was desperate to avoid the “middle station” of British life. “I shall do more than has ever been done before,” he once wrote, “and shall show myself to be what I have ever considered myself, a man of enterprise and genius.” In 1824, at the age of 29 and having served in the Caribbean and Sierra

Laing departs Tripoli in the caravan of Sheikh Babani, which takes a circuitous route towards Ghadames through searing heat

Laing’s party arrives in the oasis town of Ghadames, where they stay for six weeks The caravan arrives in the ancient trading post of In Salah

Laing and Babani set out across the arid Tanezrouft region

Laing is attacked by Tuareg. Left for dead, he rides a camel 400 miles to a Kunta Arab camp at “Azoad”

Laing departs Timbuktu on the advice of a treacherous Barabish Arab sheikh, and is murdered a few days later While Laing recuperates at “Azoad”, disease ravages the Kunta Arab camp, killing Babani and their host

After a journey of nearly six weeks from “Azoad”, Laing reaches Timbuktu

Æ ILLUSTRATION BY THERESA GRIEBEN

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JOURNEYS Alexander Gordon Laing’s trans-Sahara expedition to Timbuktu Ghadames, the ancient Berber oasis caravan town near the Libya-Algeria border in which Laing and his party recovered after their circuitous, 1,000-mile journey from Tripoli. It is now a Unesco World Heritage site An engraving of Timbuktu from Travels Through Central Africa to Timbuctoo by René Caillié – the French explorer who returned to Europe in 1828 with details of the city

The house in Timbuktu in which Laing wrote his final letter, saying: “I have no time to give you my account of Tinbuctu, but shall briefly state that in every respect except in size … it has completely met my expectations”

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ALAMY/GETTY IMAGES

The famed mud-built Djinguereber Mosque of Timbuktu, first constructed in the 14th century and long an important centre of Islamic learning

again. A month later, on 2 December, they reached In Salah, an important pit stop on trans-Saharan caravan routes, in the district of Tuat. The farther south they travelled, though, the more difficult Sheikh Babani became. In January 1826 Laing’s expedition rode into the Tanezrouft, a burning plain the size of California, where it was joined by an unwelcome escort – a heavily armed party of Tuareg (blue-robed nomadic Berber people of the Sahara). At this point, it seems, Babani betrayed Laing. In the early hours of 2 or 3 February, the Tuareg surrounded the explorer’s tent, shooting and hacking at him before leaving him for dead. Miraculously, Laing managed to climb on a camel and, over the next 19 days, travelled a further 400 miles to the camp of Sidi Muhammad, a powerful sheikh of the Kunta Arabs, at a place he spelled “Azoad”, probably around 200 miles north-east of Timbuktu. There, on 10 May 1826, he described his injuries in a letter to Warrington. “To begin from the top, I have five sabre cuts on the crown of the head & three on the left temple, all fractures from which much bone has come away, one on my left cheek which fractured the Jaw bone & has divided the ear, forming a very unsightly wound, one over the right temple, and a dreadful gash on the back of the neck, which slightly scratched the windpipe.” He also had a musket ball in the hip, which made its way through his body, grazing his backbone, and five sabre wounds to his right arm and hand, which is “cut three fourths across”, the wrist bones hacked through. He sustained three cuts on his left arm, which was broken; one slight wound on the right leg; and two, including “one dreadful gash”, on the left, to say nothing of the blow to the fingers of the hand he used to write. Laing had not been long with the Kunta Arabs when a new disaster struck: “something similar to yellow fever” swept through the camp. Many died,

Laing rode into the Tanezrouft, a burning plain the size of California, where he was joined by heavily armed Tuareg including Sidi Muhammad, Babani and Laing’s remaining servants, and the explorer himself was infected. Yet Laing would not consider retreating to Tripoli. He was now too close to Timbuktu, and the pull of the city was too strong. He was “doing well”, he wrote to the consul. As he had written in his earlier missive in May, he hoped yet to return to England with “much important Geographical information”. He had discovered many things that must be corrected on the map of Africa, and he beseeched God to allow him time to finish the job. Arrival and assassination

On 13 August Laing was escorted into Timbuktu under the protection of the new Kunta Sheikh al-Mukhtar al-Saghir. Then he went quiet. For five weeks he sent no word to the consul. It was 21 September before he wrote again, and then the letter was barely 500 words long, written in a cramped, tense hand. His life was threatened, he said, and he was in a hurry to leave: “I have no time to give you my account of Tinbuctu, but shall briefly state that in every respect except in size (which does not exceed four miles in circumference) it has completely met my expectations.” The day after composing this letter, Laing left Timbuktu – and was never heard from again. Warrington forwarded his last dispatch to London with a covering note claiming that it was the “first letter ever written from that place by any Christian” – but in terms of delivering information about the great object of European geographical curiosity, the expedition was a flop. Where were the details about Timbuktu?

Laing’s father-in-law applied pressure on the powerful pasha of Tripoli, Yusuf Karamanli, to deliver news. Months later, in the spring of 1827, the pasha handed over a copy of a report sent from Sheikh al-Mukhtar. The authorities of Timbuktu had wanted to look after their guest, al-Mukhtar wrote, but faced contrary demands from Ahmad Lobbo, who had lately taken control of the city. “In order to reconcile the two interests, they permitted [Laing] to remain at Timbuctoo about a month,” the sheikh explained, “until he met with the enemy of God and his prophet, Hamed Ben Abayd Ben Rachal El Barbuchy, who persuaded him that he was able to conduct him to Arawan, from thence in order to embark at Sansandyng, and thence to continue his road to the great ocean.” This “enemy of God”, a leader of the Barabish Arabs, left Timbuktu with Laing. On the third night, some 30 miles from Timbuktu, he ordered his servants to seize and kill Laing. They then searched his baggage, whereupon “every thing of a useless nature, [such] as papers, letters, and books, were torn and thrown to the wind, for fear they should contain some magic, and the articles of value were retained.” In his grief, Hanmer Warrington blamed Laing’s death on a plot by the French, Karamanli and the pasha’s foreign minister. This conspiracy theory sparked a diplomatic incident between London and Paris, and contributed to the downfall of the Karamanli dynasty. The fury directed across the English Channel reached its zenith late in 1828, when explorer René Caillié returned alive from Timbuktu. It was doubly bad news for the British: Caillié was French. Charlie English is the former head of international news at the Guardian, and author of The Book Smugglers of Timbuktu (William Collins, 2017)

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JOURNEYS

Global City Sofia Bulgaria

Positioned at a strategic crossroads in the Balkans, Sofia has been coveted by Macedonians, Romans, Bulgars and Turks. Paul Bloomfield strolls through 28 centuries in the Bulgarian capital

Paul Bloomfield is a travel and heritage writer, co-author of Where to Go When (Lonely Planet, 2016)

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The Roman-era church of Sveti Georgi (St George), dating from the fourth century, is Sofia’s oldest preserved building

ofia’s is a history of many layers,its strata showing through in individual gems that stud the city. For a spin through its story, start at the western end of Nezavisimost Square, focal point of the Bulgarian capital. From here you’ll glimpse Roman remains, an Ottoman mosque, Communist monoliths and, atop a lofty column, Sofia herself – bronze symbol of 21st-century Bulgaria. The earliest known settlers, around the eighth century BC, were the Thracian Serdi tribe. Admire gilt Thracian masks at the Archaeological Museum 1 in the nine-domed former Buyuk Djami (Grand Mosque) where collections also include Macedonian treasures – Philip II, father of Alexander the Great, occupied the area in the fourth century BC – and relics of Roman occupation, from around the turn of the first millennium AD. Remains of the Roman town, named Ulpia Serdica, were unearthed during construction of Serdika metro station at Nezavisimost and restored as an open-air museum. The city flourished under the Romans; in the early fourth century Constantine the Great lovingly dubbed it “My Rome” and considered it for his imperial capital. Hidden in a courtyard is

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a relic from that era: the Rotunda of Sveti Georgi (St George) 2 , a Roman basilica still adorned with medieval frescos. More significant is the church of Sveti Sofia 3 , a little to the east. Though the current red-brick basilica is a plain reconstruction based on a sixth-century edifice, the first church on the site hosted a great bishop’s council in 343. Beneath lies a fascinating necropolis from early Roman days, now a small but immersive museum. In 1376 the city itself was renamed Sofia in honour of this church of ‘holy wisdom’. In the intervening ten centuries it was destroyed by the Huns in 447, later rebuilt by Byzantine emperor Justinian and renamed again as Triaditsa (‘between the mountains’). It remained a Byzantine possession intermittently for over 350 more years; there’s a nod to that era’s style in the neo-Byzantine Halite 4 , the early-20th-century central market hall, beneath which excavations suggest evidence of a millennia-old market place. It’s a great place to pick up tomatoes, cucumbers and sirene cheese for shopska salad, Bulgaria’s ubiquitous national dish. Khan Krum incorporated the city into his First Bulgar Empire in 809, renaming it Sredets and fortifying it

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An emperor’s home from Rome

heavily – which didn’t stop it from being re-snatched by the Byzantines. In the 12th century the Bulgars retook and held it for two centuries until the Ottomans swept through in 1385. Only one working mosque survives from the Ottoman era: Banya Bashi 5 , built in 1576 by renowned architect Kodja Mimar Sinan (author of Istanbul’s vast Süleymaniye Mosque). The gardens behind the mosque lead to the Turkish Mineral Baths, built in 1913 and now home to Sofia’s new history museum 6 . After years of surging nationalism, in 1878 the Ottomans were driven from Bulgaria by Russian troops; the following year, Sofia was named capital of the newly independent country. As a thank-you to the liberators – 200,000 of whom died in the fighting – the magnificent Alexandr Nevski Memorial Church 7 was built between 1882 and 1912. Topped with gilt and verdigris-turquoise domes, the interior of the colossal Eastern Orthodox cathedral is sombre with icons, more of which can be admired in the crypt. Skirt the adjacent square – where sprout stalls laden with painted icons and

SOFIA IN NINE SITES

The colossal Alexandr Nevski Memorial Church is topped with gilt and turquoise domes

1 Archaeological Museum Beautiful Thracian and Roman artefacts in the former Great Mosque of 1496 2 Rotunda of Sveti Georgi Church dating from the fourth century 3 Church of Sveti Sofia Sixth-century Roman basilica over older necropolis, after which city was renamed

Soviet-era souvenirs – to reach the monstrous Monument to the Soviet Army 8 . This propagandist edifice commemorates the city’s ‘liberation’ by the Red Army in 1944, after Bulgaria sided with Axis powers. Its cast-iron figures of soldiers and workers have frequently been daubed by political artists since the fall of communism. Finally, return to Nezavisimost, where a trio of deliberately intimidating Socialist Classical buildings known as the Largo 9 – Party House, President’s Office and TSUM state department store, icons of half a century of communist rule – loom over the remains of Constantine’s beloved Ulpia Serdica.

4 Halite Neo-Byzantine central market 5 Banya Bashi Mosque Most significant relic of five centuries of Ottoman rule, dating from 1576 6 Sofia History Museum In 1913 Turkish Mineral Baths 7 Alexandr Nevski Memorial Church Glorious domed orthodox cathedral with mesmerising icons within and beneath 8 Monument to the Soviet Army Typically chest-thumping memorial to 1944 ‘liberation’ by the Soviets 9 Largo Trio of Socialist Classical monoliths: Communist Party House, President’s Office and TSUM (state department store)

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JOURNEYS Wonders of the World

Wonders of the World Khiva Uzbekistan

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The Ark and after Gazing across Khiva’s historic Ichon Qala (old city) from atop the fortified palace known as the Kunya Ark gives a sense of the grandeur of the city in its 17th-century pomp, graced with turquoise-tiled minarets and madrassas (Islamic colleges). Reputedly founded by Shem, son of biblical patriarch Noah, the site was first inhabited at least 2,500 years ago. Its location, in the oasis region of Khorezm on the Amu Darya (Oxus) river delta, a trade crossroads between the Far and Middle East, led to centuries of tussles for dominance. Achaemenid Persians, Islamic Arabs, Genghis Khan and Timur (Tamerlane) all came, saw and conquered. Then, in the early 16th century, the Uzbek Shaybanids founded the khanate of Khorezm and, in 1592, made Khiva the capital.

GETTY IMAGES/MAP: BATTLEFIELD DESIGN

Jewel of the Silk Road The ancient trade routes through Central Asia are studded with treasures of Islamic architecture – the most immaculate of which is Khiva. Paul Bloomfield explores the minarets, mosques and palaces of Uzbekistan’s pristine Silk Road city

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JOURNEYS Wonders of the World

Pillars of wisdom A forest of 213 karagacha (elmwood pillars) – each carved with a different design – supports the ceiling of the Juma (Friday) Mosque, Khiva’s oldest, dating in part from the 10th century. A handful of the pillars are older still, though most have been replaced over the centuries, particularly during a major 1788 reconstruction. An important centre of Islam, Khiva once boasted nearly 100 mosques; still today it contains a cluster of centres for Islamic worship and study.

Towering achievement Khiva’s tallest structure is the Islam Khoja Minaret, built in 1910 by the khan’s grand vizier alongside the namesake madrassa. Rising 57 metres and striped in green and blue, it echoes the elegant medieval minarets of rival cities such as Bukhara. By the time the minaret was built, Khiva had been overwhelmed by the Russian empire in 1873 and became a protectorate.

Imposing crenellated walls up to 10 metres high and 8 metres thick stretch 1.4 miles around the Ichon Qala. The oldest sections, built with adobe mud bricks, date from the fifth century AD, though the wall was breached on several occasions – notably by Genghis Khan’s Mongol hordes in 1221 and Timur in the late 14th century. Much of the present structure dates from the late 17th century – but failed to keep out the Persian Nader Shah, who ruled for a few years in the 1740s.

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ALAMY/GETTY IMAGES/AWL IMAGES

L Across the barricades

L A tower truncated The stump of the Kalta Minor (minaret) guards the Mohammad Amin Khan Madrassa, the city’s largest. Construction was begun in 1851 by the eponymous khan, one of the city’s most powerful; he intended the jade-and-turquoisetiled minaret to soar to over 70 metres, which would have made it the tallest in the Islamic world. However, he was beheaded by a Turkmen horseman in 1855 before it was completed, and it remains stunted at a mere 26 metres.

Grand design

SHUTTERSTOCK/ALAMY/ROBERT HARDING

A ceiling in the 163-room Tash Khauli Palace, built for Allah Kuli Khan from 1830 to replace the old Kunya Ark of 1686, is lavishly decorated with mesmerising geometric and organic designs carved in wood and stone, and painted in vivid hues. Construction, which took the efforts of more than 1,000 slaves, lasted for eight years; the original architect was impaled for daring to warn that it would take longer than the three years demanded by the khan.

L Silk and servitude Ornately patterned socks are sold in Khiva’s old city, where a traditional silk carpetweaving workshop also continues to operate. But though silk was among the goods that flowed through Khiva, enriching the city, until well into the mid-19th century, much of its wealth rested on slaves. (Interestingly, the term ‘Silk Road’ was coined as recently as 1877 by German geographer Ferdinand von Richthofen.) In part in response to the abduction of large numbers of Russians, as well as political rivalry in the region with Britain (the so-called ‘Great Game’), from the 18th century Russia began to make inroads into the region – eventually leading to its incorporation into the Soviet Union in 1924.

Paul Bloomfield is a travel and heritage writer and photographer, co-author of Where to Go When (Lonely Planet, 2016)

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Column

Michael Scott’s Global Connections

“The resting place of Hirst’s imagined ship rings true with what we know about connectivity between ancient cultures” ecently when in Venice I visited the Damien Hirst exhibition Treasures from the Wreck of the Unbelievable. It’s a polarising affair – people either love it or hate it. Most focus on whether any of it is ‘true’. The conceit is that a sunken vessel from the first century AD found on the Indian Ocean seabed has been brought to the surface by Hirst, its amazingly varied contents exhibited for all to see once more. It’s a good yarn, with clues to the contrary littered throughout (‘Made in China’ stamps on the back of some of the artwork, the occasional Mickey Mouse and Transformers sculpture, even the artist’s self-portrait). This is art for a ‘post-truth’ – or perhaps ‘return to ancient myth’ – world. The putative ship was called Apistoss (‘untrustworthy/ unbelievable’). Of course it was. What struck me, though, were the insistent themes of globality. Hirst’s story about the ship’s resting place rings true with what we know about connectivity between ancient cultures in the early first centuries AD. The Red Sea and Indian Ocean were busy with ships plying back and forth, conducting trade – in silk, pepper and other spices, for example – between the ancient Roman, Indian and Chinese worlds. Hirst’s collection of ‘artefacts’ spans a variety of ancient cultures, from Greek to Roman to Egyptian to Indian and beyond, all of which were in deep and constant contact and exchange. In fact, ancient global exchange dates much further back in time than the first century AD. The Uluburun shipwreck – dating back to the 14th century BC (1,400 years before Hirst’s supposed find) and found

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off the coast of Turkey in 1982 – was laden with more than 18,000 luxury objects from a myriad of different Mediterranean and Asian societies. But Hirst also extends the theme of globality forward through time. His ‘trove’ includes an Aztec calendar stone – even though that would date from around 1,400 years after his supposed shipwreck – linking the New World into his ancient global maze. He also creates connections between eras and worlds through the very fabric and style of his work. His man on horseback assailed by serpents is sculpted in Michelangelo’s favourite Carrara marble but evokes the famed Laocoön sculpture of Roman antiquity. This is not random: it was Michelangelo who was called on in 1506 to authenticate the Laocoön statue when it was found in Rome (conspiracy stories suggest he faked the work himself). Real-world connections across time are immortalised in these new creations. But so are connections that never existed. His sculpture of the mythological Andromeda and the sea monster features a shark popping up ready for the

kill. It shouts Jaws, and reminds us of Hirst’s own pickled-shark creations – from ancient myth to the 21st century, connecting time and space in one object. The exhibition is spread across two spaces: the Punta della Dogana and the Palazzo Grassi. The Dogana is the site of the customs house that received tax from all trade goods from the 15th century on – a time when Venice, end point of the Silk Roads from China, ruled the waves of the eastern Mediterranean. The Palazzo Grassi, meanwhile, was the last palace to be built on the Grand Canal before the Venetian republic fell, and is therefore the final emblem of a glorious period of Venice’s internationality and global power. The objects on display – created, forged (and faked) as they are, creating connections between cultures and times near and far – find a comfortable, apt home and context within these most connected of buildings within this most connected of cities. Of course, we can’t forget the people who throng to see it. On my visit I was surrounded by a cacophony of voices speaking many different tongues: a global community looking at objects that speak to a connected ancient past, and create real and imagined links between global spaces and times. I don’t think I have ever seen a better metaphor for today’s world. Post-truth or myth? That misses the point. What you experience here is the overwhelming, sometimes frightening and illusory, but always exhilarating connected reality of our humanity. Michael Scott is an author, broadcaster and associate professor at the University of Warwick. His latest book is Ancient Worlds: An Epic History of East and West (Windmill Books, 2017)

ILLUSTRATION BY ELEANOR SHAKESPEARE

This ornate hei tiki, one of the most recognisable symbols of Ma¯ori culture, may have been passed down from generation to generation. Read more about the cultural and historical significance of 10 Ma¯ori objects in our feature starting on page 78 of this issue

ISSUE 5 AUG/SEPT 2017