The Big Questions

Have empires ever been a positive force?

Did the Age of Exploration do more
harm than good? This issue, our experts
tackle the biggest historical questions
shaping the world of the 21st century
Global thinking
The world in two hemispheres, depicted
on a 17th-century map. This issue, our
experts debate the historical issues
that shape the 21st century, from conflict
and colonialism to politics and prejudice
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CONTENTS

30 52

THE GLOBAL PAST WARFARE AND CONFLICT

6 Why did the west 30 Have nuclear weapons helped
dominate for so long? to maintain global peace?
A panel of leading authorities debates the reasons Security experts explore the role that nuclear
why – and if – Europe and North America held arsenals have played in averting large-scale conflict
sway over global power for centuries
39 From daggers to drones
12 Did the Cold War James Rogers charts the development of
ever really end? remote warfare – and reveals what it tells us
The period of simmering global tension is generally about humanity
considered to have finished after the Soviet Union
fell in 1991. But was its demise exaggerated? 46 Are revolutions doomed
Experts explore the evidence to failure?
Experts debate the outcome and long-term success
18 Have empires ever been – or otherwise – of historical rebellions
a force for good?
Seven historians compare the impacts – positive
and negative – of different colonising powers NATIONS IN FOCUS
around the globe
52 Is Africa a prisoner of its past?
24 Did the Age of Exploration Historians discuss the legacy of colonisation
DAVIDE BONAZZI – SALZMAN ART

do more harm than good? and slavery in Africa

Should we celebrate or condemn the maritime
pioneers who set sail in search of new frontiers, 58 Has Russia always played
seeking trade and exploitation? by its own rules?
Our panel assesses how Russia’s historical relations
with the rest of the world manifest in the present
COVER ILLUSTRATION
BY DAVIDE BONAZZI

4
 ISSUE 23

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It often seems that the pace of change is accelerating

– but is that true? Experts explore this conundrum

5
6 ILLUSTRATION BY DAVIDE BONAZZI
 THE GLOBAL
PAST

Why did
the west
dominate
for so long?
For centuries ‘the west’ exercised global dominance without
parallel in history – but what were the conditions that allowed
a small cluster of nations to control swathes of the world for
so long? Seven historians offer their expert opinions

Æ
7
Arne Westad Kathleen Burk

“Europe has always been “Imposing political control

culturally, religiously, requires military and
and – most importantly sometimes naval power”
– politically diverse” When considering this subject it’s worth thinking about what’s
required to rule. Governing foreign lands requires a plenitude
For most of the time since the dawn of human civilisation, of money and a sustained will to wield power. The weapons
Asia has been in the lead, economically and technologically. required are military and economic power, and the ability to
Exactly when the ascent of Europe and its cultural offshoots project them, supported by the control of communications.
began is hotly debated. Some see its roots in antiquity (highly The power of political and economic ideas are much less
contestable) or the Renaissance (more plausible, but doubtful important. ‘Rule’ comes in many guises. Conquering and
– a comparison between Ming China and Tudor Britain is imposing political control requires military and, sometimes,
not necessarily to the latter’s advantage). It is more likely that naval power. Overwhelming economic dominance requires
western predominance started with the industrial revolution, financial and commercial power plus possibly military backup.
and may be ending with the information revolution. However, economic control is stronger over the medium to
If one accepts this timeline, the rise of Europe was based long term if the use of force is restrained.
on access to resources (especially energy) and technologies. For centuries, western powers had the predominant ability to
The former advantage was to some extent a fluke – the fact project power by land, sea and, later, air. From the early 18th
that coal could be found reasonably close to the surface in century, Russia conquered a land empire and maintained control
parts of Europe has little to do with the Europeans – but the through overwhelming military power and the use of railways.
development of technology was not. It is quite possible that By the 17th century, the Dutch, the Portuguese, the British, the
a system of contending states, and weakening religious French and the Spaniards all possessed the necessary experience
governance, was a factor in creating space for innovation and and resources for oceanic conquest. Such strength normally
markets. Spin-offs from military technologies and organisa- trumps a huge population: consider the British in India, the
tion also furthered research and state development. This Belgians in the Congo, and several western powers in China.
form of modernity was found only in Europe (or, rather, Having achieved political power, military and police power
in parts of it), and goes a long way towards explaining can be used to maintain it, especially if combined with divide-
European predominance since the 18th century. and-rule tactics – supporting elites against the rest, always the
The concept of ‘the west’, though, is problematic. Talking British preference, or backing one side in internal conflicts.
about ‘north Atlantic societies’ makes more sense. Large Weapons wielded in maintaining economic power include the
areas of Europe were not particularly advanced, at least ability to mobilise and control finance – buying allies and
compared with parts of Asia or Latin America, until the paying bribes – and, with the modern international finance
middle of the 20th century. In contrast, some parts of Asia system, the power to choke off access to funds. Vital to both is
had markets and infrastructure that competed quite well the control of communications, an example being the British
with those of the Europeans until at least 1900 (and, in the dominance of international cable traffic for a number of years.
case of Japan, long after that). Japan was the one country in either Asia or Africa that had,
If ‘the west’ is taken to mean Europe and its offshoots in at least in part, the requisite strengths to wield power: military
the Americas and Oceania, it has always been culturally, and naval power, including fully trained and equipped military
religiously, and – most importantly – politically diverse. forces able to defeat a western army (in the case of Japan,
The Soviet Union was in this sense part of the west, though that of Russia); control over sustainable sources of finance;
many non-Europeans were quicker in adapting to US-led possession of rapid communications, internal or external;
globalisation than the Russians remain to this day. and internal cohesion. Japan remained independent. Hatred of
the foreigner was not enough to save the
other countries of Asia and Africa
from western domination.

Arne Westad is Elihu Professor of History Kathleen Burk is emeritus professor of modern
and Global Affairs at Yale University, and and contemporary history at University College
an expert on contemporary international London, specialising in Anglo-American relations
history and the eastern Asian region and 20th-century history

8
 Felipe Fernández-Armesto Ian Morris

“The basis of western “Applying both science

dominance was techno- and enlightenment to
logical, and technological their economies, Europe-
gaps are traversable” ans – not the Chinese – had
an industrial revolution”
It depends what we mean by ‘dominate’ and ‘the west’, but for
most of the past what we usually call the west was a remote
and contemptible corner of Eurasia, while richer economies, The answer has little to do with western culture, brilliance
more powerful polities and bigger, denser populations were or hard work – westerners (by which I mean west Europeans
concentrated in south-west, south, and east Asia. and their overseas colonists) were just in the right place at the
The incorporation of the Americas changed the global right time. In the 12th and 13th centuries Chinese mariners
balance of wealth, power and demographic potential, but the were building ships that could cross oceans. But because
effects took a long time to register. The Renaissance was, China was the richest place on earth, sailing all the way from
perhaps, the first global movement – it reached parts of the Nanjing to India or Arabia turned out not to generate enough
Americas, Africa and Asia – but its impact was patchy and profits to be worthwhile.
largely confined to elites. Christianity is the most culturally For Europeans who picked up versions of this technology and
adaptable religion in the world, but it is doubtful whether we built their own ocean-going vessels in the 15th century, though,
should class as western this oriental mystery-faith that started things looked very different. Sailing toward China around the
as a Jewish heresy. In the 17th century, Chinese respect for bottom of Africa was definitely profitable. Columbus proposed
Jesuit astronomy and chronometry was a sign that western that sailing west across the Atlantic would get to China faster,
science and technology were in the ascendant, but China and be more profitable still. He was mistaken, of course, but
influenced the west in the 17th and 18th centuries at least as bumping into America turned out to be even more important.
much as the other way round. Because the Atlantic is so much smaller than the Pacific
It took the Opium Wars to reverse China’s balance of – sailing 3,000 miles gets you from Spain to Mexico, whereas
trade in western favour. Meanwhile, industrialised and China to California is 5,000 miles – by 1600, Europeans had
post-industrial economies began to spread from the west, turned the Atlantic into a highway, which the Chinese could
along with concomitant politics and aesthetics, supplement- not possibly do with the Pacific. The Atlantic trading system
ing but not displacing rival ways of life. Even when western became the greatest wealth-generating machine the planet had
advantages – steam power, Maxim guns, tropical kit – were ever seen, and by 1750 Britain and Holland – the countries
at their peak in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, they that dominated it – were richer even than China.
alone could not guarantee domination: by the British, for From there, everything else followed. Applying their best
instance, over Boers and Maoris; by Italians in Ethiopia; or minds to figuring out how the tides and stars moved, Europe-
by any foreigners in Japan. ans – not the Chinese – had a scientific revolution. Applying
If we generously allow western ‘domination’, in general, scientific thought to their own societies, Europeans – not the
a term of perhaps about 200 years so far, the period seems Chinese – had an Enlightenment. And applying both science
a blip in the 200,000 years or so of the existence of Homo and enlightenment to their economies, Europeans – not the
sapiens. Its basis has been technological, and technological Chinese – had an industrial revolution. That is why the west
gaps are traversable. With the recovery of China, the has dominated the world for 200 years.
emergence of India as a potential superpower, and the rise of But it is also why western domination is now approaching
other challengers in a plural and interdependent world, it its end. In the 20th century, as technologies shrank the Pacific
looks as if we are reverting to normalcy: influence exchanged Ocean just as 17th-century ones once shrank the Atlantic, east
among equipollent civilisations – of Asia began its own industrial revolution.
which the west is just one. The west is still on top – for now – but
GETTY IMAGES/IAN FARRELL

nothing lasts forever.

Felipe Fernández-Armesto holds the Ian Morris is Jean and Rebecca Willard professor
William P Reynolds chair for mission of classics and a fellow of the Archaeology Center at
in arts and letters at the University of Stanford University, and author of Why the West
Notre Dame, Indiana Rules — For Now (Profile Books, 2010) Æ
9
 Hakim Adi Rana Mitter

“What might be referred “A powerful factor was

to as the domination of a vocabulary that came
Europe might more prop- from the western political
erly be seen as the rise to repertoire”
dominance of the capital-
Language matters. And the domination of the way in which
ist economic system” people in the ‘rest of the world’ use political language is one
legacy of western expansion that remains relevant in the
21st century. Even today, when China has become the world’s
The question assumes that ‘the west’ has dominated for an second-biggest economy, and the expansion of India and Brazil
incredibly long time – but of course it hasn’t. Even if the start is a story of global significance, discourse is still dominated by
of western – that is to say, European – dominance can be political language that spread in the 18th and 19th centuries.
dated from Europe’s simultaneous maritime connections As late as the mid-19th century, China could still lay claim
with Africa, Asia, and America in the 16th century, that is no to dominance across much of east Asia. This was not necessari-
more than 500 years. Indeed, it is doubtful if the countries of ly imperial control; Japan, for example, was never under
western Europe could be said to have dominated any other Chinese rule. But much of the region – China, Korea, Japan,
continent by the end of the 17th century, except perhaps for Vietnam – operated using language and norms that came
America where it is estimated that Europeans (and the from China’s long history of Confucian bureaucratic thinking.
diseases they brought with them) accounted for the deaths The system of ‘tribute’ (actually a form of ritual relationship
of up to 90% of the indigenous American population. in which the peoples paying ‘tribute’ to China gained rather
Whatever the case, 500 years cannot be considered a very than lost financially) was one part of this. Ethnic groups
long time in human history; to give one obvious example, who occupied China, such as the Manchus who established
the history of pharaonic Egypt was at least five times as long. the Qing dynasty (1644–1911), adapted themselves to Chinese
Of course, we live in a particular era, and the Eurocentric court and bureaucratic systems, even as they promoted their
arrogance of that era might suggest a certain permanence. own ethnic customs.
What might be referred to as the domination of Europe The world dominated by Confucian norms came to an
and its diaspora might more properly be seen as the rise to abrupt end in the mid-19th century with the arrival of western
dominance of the new capitalist economic system. This gunboats and opium. But more powerful still was a vocabulary
emerged first in western Europe, and unleashed tremendous that came from the western political repertoire. In fact, much of
productive forces on the world, but it was based on the this vocabulary came through Japan during the Meiji period
global exploitation of the majority of the world’s people when Japan eagerly embraced many aspects of westernisation.
by a few. However, compared with other preceding economic So terms such as kokka (country) came into Chinese, rendered
and political systems it cannot be said to have lasted very as guojia, while kempo- (constitution) became xianfa, both terms
long, either. The future of capitalism also appears uncertain. being written with the same characters in both languages.
If its dominance continues, it looks likely to pass to China For much of the century that followed, China has had to
and the ‘east.’ fit its political destiny into a vocabulary defined by terms that
It’s also the case that history has already witnessed the first originated elsewhere: a republic run according to a political
stages of the emergence of a new economic and political system largely drawn from Marxism. Despite recent attempts
system, which its advocates refer to as socialism. That new to insert ‘Confucian’ norms into today’s China, there is
REX FEATURES/ UNIVERSITY OF CHICHESTER

system first appeared a century ago but its emergence suggests little doubt that its system of government will not become
that both western dominance and the exploitation of the a traditional tianxia (‘all under heaven’) anytime soon.
many by the few might soon become And China is not alone in this: ‘linguistic
history. In short, domination by the few domination’ remains one of the west’s most
in the west has not lasted so very long powerful legacies to the rest of the world.
– but long enough.

Hakim Adi is professor of the history of Rana Mitter is professor of the history
Africa and the African diaspora at the and politics of modern China at the
University of Chichester University of Oxford

10
 Margaret MacMillan

“The dramatic effects of

the industrial, scientific
and technological revolu-
tions meant that western
nations were stronger”
The truth is that, in terms of world history, western dominance
has been relatively short – and now looks to be coming to an
end. Until the end of the 18th century it was not even possible
to talk of one part of the world dominating the other. There
were important regional powers – France in Europe, China in
Asia – but none that could plausibly claim hegemony over the
world. Communications were too slow and technology too
imperfect for any nation, no matter how powerful, to project its
Tea is weighed and sold in this 19th-century depiction. Rana Mitter power around the world in any sustained fashion. True, some
suggests that the west’s linguistic dominance had an impact on China European powers had far-off colonies, but they had to rely on
local forces and alliances with local rulers to maintain them.
Even 200 years ago, the west – if by that we mean the powers
of western Europe and then the US – was not significantly richer
nor more advanced than the rest of the world: think of the
Ottomans, Qing China, the Mughals. Much of North America
and sub-Saharan Africa remained beyond the control of western
powers. In Asia, Japan and Thailand remained independent.
In the 19th century the west won the edge that it is now
losing again. The dramatic effects of the industrial, scientific
and technological revolutions meant that, until the rest of the
world caught up, western nations had better guns, more
productive economies and superior medicine. The first sign that
the tide was turning came in 1904–05 when Japan, which had
met the western challenge by reforming its society and economy,
defeated Russia. Nationalist movements worldwide took heart.
Two great wars exhausted the European powers and, in the
aftermath of 1945, the empires vanished. True, the US was a
superpower, and remains strong, but its margin over the rest of
the world – especially in economics – is no longer as great.
So, in terms of human history, the west hasn’t dominated
GETTY IMAGES/BRIDGEMAN ART LIBRARY/JENI NOTT

for very long. The Roman empire lasted much longer. And in
recent decades ideas, techniques, even fashions have been
flowing into the west as much as they have the other way. Next
time you eat Thai food, listen to music from Africa, use a
phone designed in Japan or drive a car
made in Korea, ask yourself: who is
dominating whom?

Margaret MacMillan is a professor of

international history at the University of Oxford.
Local resources and technological advances (here, at a Krupp factory in Her books include History’s People: Personalities
Germany) fuelled western dominance – but other regions are catching up and the Past (Profile Books, 2016)

11
12 ILLUSTRATION BY DAVIDE BONAZZI
 THE GLOBAL
PAST

Did the
Cold War
ever really
end?
The Cold War is often thought to have died after the fall of
the Soviet Union in 1991. But with relations between Russia and some
western nations becoming increasingly frosty, have reports of its
demise been exaggerated? Seven historians offer their opinions

Æ
13
 Evan Mawdsley Kathleen Burk

“The Cold War was a “What was notable was

product of the 1917 that in the 20th century
revolution and the the superpowers forebore
Second World War” actually coming to blows”
Relations between the US and Russian Cold War is a term denoting the period
Federation have been cool over the past between 1945, when the US and UK
10 years, and were chilled further by governments decided that the hostility of
the 2014 annexation of the Crimea. the USSR to ‘the west’ was the fundamen-
But those developments are part of a tal factor in international affairs, and 1991,
new era. The Cold War meant more when the end of the USSR signified the
than tension between two major states. victory of the US and its allies.
It evolved over time, but had three During this period, the US government
essential features. One, a consequence frequently saw the hand of the Soviets
of the Second World War, was global bipolarity. Many major in any disturbance in any country on the planet, although
states had been defeated or weakened, leaving the two ‘super others were sometimes less convinced, and presumably the
powers’. Washington and Moscow assembled alliance USSR assumed the same of the US. The response by both
systems, especially Nato and the Warsaw Pact. The second sides was to build alliances all over the world in order to
feature was ideology, Marxism-Leninism versus liberal- ‘contain’ the enemy, excepting the countries that preferred not
capitalism (or anti-communism). These idea systems bound to be a member of either, invoking the ‘plague on both your
each bloc together and impeded good inter-bloc relations. houses’ principle.
Soviet leaders took socialism seriously: it was a buttress of What stabilised this period was the atomic standoff, and the
their bloc, especially in eastern Europe, and it won the USSR eventual acceptance by the leaders of both sides that neither
significant support among leftist political groups, in Europe could win a nuclear war, because the only possible outcome for
and then in the anti-colonial movement. The third feature any ‘winner’ was to be less damaged than the other. Public
was massive arms procurement, especially nuclear. Such opinion supported this conclusion, and there was no support to
weapons made military conflict on the scale of the Second utilise these weapons.
World War unthinkable. The ‘war’ was therefore a cold one, Yet how did this Cold War differ from the classical Balance
carried out through ideology rather than fighting. of Power as evidenced throughout humanity’s long history?
The world changed profoundly in all three areas, as a There were the coalitions of the Peloponnesian War of the
result of the collapse of the USSR. First, the blocs were fifth century BC; those of virtually every European war,
no more, especially the eastern European alliance system. most famously the wars for and against the France of Louis
The Russian Federation now lacks close allies or clients. XIV and of Napoleon; the alliance systems of the later
Similarly, with no serious external threat, the US receives 19th century; and those for and against Germany in the
only limited support from its own friends. Meanwhile, 20th century. What was notable in the second half of the
Marxism-Leninism ceased to be a powerful ideology. 20th century was that the two superpowers forebore actually
The Russian Federation from time to time puts forward an coming to blows. Those countries that endured proxy wars
anti-liberal ideology or talks about ‘Eurasianism’, but neither were apparently of less account.
provides the basis for an international movement. Nuclear The question is whether the conflict between the US-led
weapons still exist; the US and the Russian Federation have coalition and the Soviet Union/Russia has, since 1991, merely
far more than other states. But those play little role in their been in abeyance. My own answer is that the Cold War never
relationship, and the Russian Federation, with a population ended because it was a part of a continuum since the dawn of
now half that of the US, can deploy only weak conventional history. Relative power may differ, but not the diplomatic
forces. Major states will disagree and compete. But the Cold quadrille, as great and less great powers try to secure safety, and
War was a product of the 1917 Russian Revolution and the advantage, in the international jungle. Only the name expired.
Second World War. It is over, and it will not return.

Kathleen Burk is emeritus professor of modern and contemporary

Evan Mawdsley was professor of international history at the University history at University College London, specialising in Anglo-American
of Glasgow. His books include World War II: A New History (CUP, 2009) relations and 20th-century history

14
Piers Ludlow Vladislav Zubok

“It was a competition “Ironically, populists in

between two universalist the west now tend to see
models: each claimed to Russia as a potential ally
represent the future” against other challenges”
The Cold War was always much more There have always been those who believed
than just a military stand-off or armed that the Cold War did not really end in
confrontation between the western and 1991. Those people could be met in three
eastern blocs. Instead it was at root the key areas: post-Soviet elites in Moscow, in
competition between two fundamen- smaller countries along the borders of the
tally different visions of modernity – of Russian Federation, and in Washington,
how the world should and would be DC. In Moscow, these people were initially
organised in the future. It was this on the margins: the military, ex-KGB
latter competition that came to a deci- officials and ideologues of Russian national-
sive end in the period between 1989 and 1991 when the ism. They were inspired by anti-Americanism and a belief that
Soviet bloc collapsed. the US would not tolerate a strong, independent Russia.
This does not of course mean that all that has followed In the countries bordering the Russian Federation, national-
has been about peace and goodwill. There is still plenty of ists who came to power after 1991 believed that Russia would
conflict, plenty of division in today’s world. Nor is it to deny never become a stable liberal democracy. The leaders of those
that a state like Putin’s Russia poses a genuine security threat countries opted for a preventive strategy: to join Nato and
to Europe, especially to neighbouring nations like the Baltic thereby prevent a possibility of Russia’s geopolitical comeback.
States or the Ukraine. It does. Nor even is it to deny the Finally, in Washington, Yeltsin’s regime of the 1990s was
ongoing competition between western liberal democracy and seen by diehard ‘Cold Warriors’ as a fleeting aberration from
alternative world views, whether those of Islamic extremists or the ‘eternal Russia’: authoritarian, and bent on dominance in
that of an autocratic and still nominally communist country Eurasia. Once it regained strength, they argued, it would be
like China. These do represent very different ways of again an adversary of the US. These people viewed liberals
organising politics, society and economics. History did not who argued for the enlargement of Nato as a “zone of peace
come to an end in 1989, as some suggested. and democracy” as useful fools who served the right cause.
But the Cold War, as I understand it, was a very specific It was not preordained that these viewpoints would coalesce
competition between two universalist models, each of which and become a self-fulfilling prophecy. After Russia annexed
claimed to represent the future for all mankind. I’m not at Crimea in 2014, commentators claimed that the ‘Russian Bear’
all sure by contrast that such universalism lies at the heart was back. Reusing mothballed Cold War slogans, they presented
of Putin’s thought or that of China. The Soviet Union and it as a threat to the ‘free world’, with Ukraine the first falling
the US both believed the world should and would move domino paving the way for Russian domination in Eurasia.
decisively in the direction of its economic system, its society, Yet it would be a travesty of history to regard Putin’s Russia
and its political system. And each poured huge energies into – a regional, authoritarian and corrupt power – as waging the
the task of trying to ensure this outcome, using every tactic same battles as the Soviet Union. In the new situation, when
in the book from propaganda and bribery to outright use global liberalism in the US and Europe is checked by internal
of military force. contradictions, a major realignment may be afoot. Attempts by
It was this that drove the Cold War and turned it from liberal-centrist media to portray Russia as the main enemy of
a traditional great power rivalry into a defining feature of the international community have failed to ignite a new Cold
the period between around 1947 and 1991. And it was this War because they stretch reality too far. Ironically, rightwing
competition that ended, decisively, with the victory of the populists in the west now tend to see Russia as a potential ally
western model. So the Cold War has ended, however divided, against other challenges, from radical Islamism to powerful
insecure and unpredictable our current world remains. China. This is a totally new ballgame. The Cold War did end
in 1989–91 after all. We live in a new, messy world.

Piers Ludlow is associate professor at the London School of

Economics and joint editor of Visions of the End of the Cold War in Vladislav Zubok is professor of international history at LSE. He is writing
Europe, 1945–1990 (Berghahn, 2012) a book about the collapse of the Soviet Union and the ‘eternal Cold War’ Æ
15
 Hakim Adi Robert Service

“The bipolar division of “The US and Russia are

the world no longer exists some way short of being
but contention between locked in a struggle for
the big powers continues” world supremacy”
The Cold War might be said to have The Cold War that lasted from the late
commenced with Churchill’s 1946 1940s until the late 1980s is dead and
Iron Curtain speech, which referred gone. At several moments, such as
to postwar geopolitical developments the 1962 Cuban missile crisis, a single
in Europe. However, the Anglo- misjudged step taken by one side or
American assault on the Soviet Union the other could have resulted in nuclear
and communism, as well as the bipolar armageddon. For four decades, while
division of the world that ensued, had the Third World War was avoided,
a profound and lasting global impact. America and the Soviet Union competed
The Cold War had a major impact on Africa and the in offering a model of the way in which a ‘good society’
African diaspora, from the persecution of African-American should be organised. Capitalism and individual civil rights
activist WEB Du Bois to the deportation from the US of were contrasted with communism and collective welfare.
communist Claudia Jones. In Africa it was used as justification Each superpower strove to bind ‘third world’ countries into
for the existence of apartheid and the banning of the ANC and an alliance with it.
other liberal organisations, as well as for Nato’s support for the When the USSR fell apart in 1991, Russian president
continuation of Portugal’s colonial rule. The Cold War created Boris Yeltsin strove for his country to become accepted as
not just conditions for the continued intervention of big powers embracing the values of democracy, economic liberalism
in Africa but also justifications for such intervention. From the and social pluralism. No longer did it offer itself as a model
1940s, major colonial powers demanded that formal political for emulation. Through most of the 1990s Yeltsin battled
independence could be granted only to ‘responsible’ leaders – with the problems of a severe economic depression and a
those who would be responsible to the big powers, and opposed plummeting standard of living for most Russian citizens.
to the Soviet Union and communism or to the empowerment The situation changed when Vladimir Putin succeeded
of Africa’s people. Leaders who didn’t meet such requirements to the presidency in 2000. He announced the launch of a
were removed: such was the fate of Prime Minister Lumumba campaign for a strong state and an orderly society. At first
of what’s now the Democratic Republic of the Congo, replaced he chose friendship with US president George W Bush and
by one deemed more suitable – Mobutu Sese Seko. helped to enable the America-led invasion of Afghanistan,
The bipolar division of the world no longer exists but the but when he failed to secure endorsement of his military
contention between the big powers continues in new forms. severity in Chechnya he became sharply hostile to the west.
In Africa a new scramble for geopolitical and economic The boost in world market oil and gas prices gave Putin the
advantage means intervention is as rife as ever, provided with revenues he needed. He opposed US policy in the Middle
new justifications. Libyan independence was ended under Nato East, annexed Crimea and militarily intervened elsewhere in
bombardment, justified on the dubious basis of the ‘right to Ukraine. He modernised Russian armaments and thumbed
protect’. The status quo is maintained by the diktat of the his nose at American presidents.
IMF/World Bank and the African Union’s NEPAD (New At this point, there are concerns about the possible renewal
UNIVERSITY OF CHICHESTER/ALASTAIR LEVY

Partnership for Africa’s Development) but challenged by of a Cold War. Although Russia is wedded to the capitalist
BRIC countries (Brazil, Russia, India and China) as well as by system, it claims to have a better idea than America about how
Africa’s long-suffering people. Perhaps the most damaging to organise a democracy. Yet Russia and America are some way
impact has been ideological, the attempt to deny that there is short of being locked in a comprehensive struggle for world
any alternative. Fortunately history and experience show supremacy, and the recent dip in prices for oil and gas makes
otherwise – that change is inevitable, and that the people are Russia a less than impressive contender. Not yet a Cold War,
their own liberators. then, but a situation of acute danger. Fingers crossed...

Hakim Adi is a professor of history at the University of Chichester and Robert Service is the author of several major books on Russian history,
author of Pan-Africanism and Communism: The Communist Internation- including The Last of the Tsars (Macmillan, 2017) and Kremlin Winter:
al, Africa and the Diaspora, 1919–1939 (Africa World Press, 2013) Russia and the Second Coming of Vladimir Putin (Picador, 2019)

16
 Catherine Merridale

“From military over-

flights to the snatching
of Crimea, Russia once
again shows no respect
at all for global rules”
The Cold War ended finally in December
1991. As the Soviet flag was lowered
forever, Mikhail Gorbachev closed the
door on his Kremlin office, ceding power
to Boris Yeltsin. What Ronald Reagan had
once called the “evil empire” was dead.
Shorn of its loyal satellites, Russia was
to face a decade of political and economic
Russian president Vladimir Putin orders military drills in March 2014, strife, at times relying on the goodwill of
shortly after parliament approved the use of Russian troops in Ukraine the IMF. Life was almost impossibly difficult for most citizens,
but the leaders and the rich did well. A new class of global
Russians emerged, acquiring a taste for luxury and turning
up in Cyprus, Paris, Kensington and Brooklyn. They stuck
together, but their talk was all about interior design and
private schools; spies were for fiction and the cinema. Even
the Berlin Wall was soon to disappear. That master of the Cold
War spy plot, John le Carré, began to set his novels in Kenya
and Panama.
More than two decades on, the atmosphere has clearly
changed again. From cyber-attacks to polonium poisoning,
from military over-flights to the snatching of Crimea, Russia
once again shows no respect at all for global rules. Echoes of
the past grow louder all the time.
Vladimir Putin was a product of the Cold War KGB, the
main security agency for the Soviet Union from 1954 until its
break-up in 1991. He remains an advocate of its successor,
whose specialities include a range of secret foreign operations
(blatant ones are also fine). Meanwhile, like the old Soviet
military, Putin’s generals are moving troops around in massive
numbers, building bases in the Middle East and arming the
old Prussian fortress at Kaliningrad.
It is hard to avoid the terminology of the Cold War, for here is
yet another confrontation that includes a direct challenge to
FRANK MONKS/GETTY IMAGES/TOPFOTO

democracy. But history is full of examples of doomed generals

who could only ever fight the campaigns of their previous wars.
We have to see that this is not a rerun of some conflict from the
recent past. Politics is not that simple or predictable. Instead, we
need to recognise exactly what is going on in our own time. It is
the only hope we have of working out what to do next.

Catherine Merridale is a historian specialising in Russia and has

French troops during a Nato exercise in Germany in 1961. Nato forces held a series of posts at British universities. Her books include Lenin on
were deemed necessary to deter a perceived communist threat the Train (Allen Lane, 2016)

17
18 ILLUSTRATION BY DAVIDE BONAZZI
 THE GLOBAL
PAST

Have
empires
ever been
a force for
good?
Throughout the course of history, numerous peoples have expanded
their territories by subjugating others, creating vassal states or settled
colonies. But have any of these empires benefited the inhabitants of
the lands they conquered? Seven historians compare the impacts –
positive and negative – of different colonising powers around the globe

Æ
19
 Yasmin Khan Peter Jones

“The British empire “Those who benefited

transformed trade most from the Athenian
and drove the growth of ‘empire’ were, Aristotle
cities. In short, it made said, the Athenian poor”
the modern world”
If ‘good’ is defined as ‘material benefits’,
perhaps we should ask: “Who benefits?”
Historians are pretty squeamish about The Athenian ‘empire’ of the fifth
the idea of empires as a force for good. century BC arose out of fear that the
That’s because we prefer hard facts that Persians, driven out of Greece in 479 BC,
we can find in archives to thrashing out would return. Athens, with its superior
counterfactuals. What would the world navy, was invited to head a Greek coalition
have been like without the British that would gather tribute and build
empire? It’s an interesting question but triremes (war galleys) to protect the
not one historians can easily answer. Aegean from incursions. Over time, Athens turned this
We can say, though, that the British alliance into an autocratic ‘empire’ that came to an end
empire stood against a lot of the things that we now cherish. when it was comprehensively defeated by Sparta in 404 BC.
Take the rule of law, liberal democracy or the education of Those who most benefited from the ‘empire’ were, Aristotle
young children, for example. The ‘rule of law’ was patchy said, the Athenian poor. Why? Because Athens was a direct
across the empire, and there were different rights for jury democracy: the poor dominated the Assembly and made sure
trial depending on whether you were white or black. that it worked in their interests. So it was they who were granted
Censorship was rife. Nowhere in Asia or Africa had full the land that Athens confiscated from rebellious states or took
democracy under empire until independence, and the over in their ‘colonies’ around the Aegean; they who were paid
money spent on primary education and literacy was pitiful. for public service, for example on juries (a radical innovation);
If you are in favour of racial equality or democracy today, it’s they who held down the jobs working in Athens’ navy and
hard to think of the empire as a golden age. Fundamentally, dockyards, which kept the ‘empire’ going. Furthermore, Athens’
the British empire rested on the idea that some groups of political, cultural and intellectual innovations at this time were
people are simply better than others. to imprint themselves across western history. How the rich – the
That’s not to say that there weren’t extraordinary people only people who paid taxes – took advantage is less clear, except
who believed in imperial expansion, or that the imperialists perhaps in general terms of ‘prestige’.
themselves were immoral. There was an astonishing Rome, by contrast, was an oligarchy, and its leading men
outpouring of creativity in the Victorian age. Like interna- kept it that way. They gorged themselves on the profits to be
tional development projects today (which often do good, made from the Roman empire throughout the course of its
but can also backfire and have unintended consequences), 500-year existence. But those profits could not be made if the
imperialists often wanted to do the best for colonised empire were permanently in conflict, because armies were
people. The forces driving change – the rise of global expensive. Since experience from their earlier conquest of Italy
industry and capitalism – were bigger than any individual (in the third century BC) had taught Romans how to bring
or any one country. defeated people on board, much of the empire enjoyed
Ultimately, it’s just better history to think in terms of prolonged periods of peace and, therefore, safe internal travel.
specifics: there were dark moments and there were brighter The result, intentional or not, was flourishing trade
times. For good or bad, the British empire brought people throughout this ‘global’ world, bringing with it wide-ranging
into contact across the globe, transformed trade and drove economic benefits and a rise in general, especially urban, living
forward the growth of cities. In short, it made the modern standards. The empire became the go-to location. But in the
world – whatever you think of that. fifth century AD, Germanic invasions broke up its western
half. The ensuing collapse of living standards there testified
eloquently to the empire’s powerful economic benefits.
FRAN MONKS

Yasmin Khan is associate professor of history at Kellogg College,

University of Oxford, and author of The Raj at War: A People’s History Peter Jones is the author of Vox Populi: Everything You Ever Wanted
of India’s Second World War (Bodley Head, 2015) to Know about the Classical World but Were Afraid to Ask (Atlantic, 2019)

20
Elizabeth Graham Joachim Whaley

“Maya and Aztec rules “The subjects of the Holy

of engagement in warfare Roman Empire had more
resulted in far fewer legal rights than those of
deaths than was the case any other European polity”
in European warfare”
“Neither holy, nor Roman, nor an empire”
– Voltaire’s description of the Holy Roman
Empires have never been a force for Empire of the German Nation has often
good. They are built on competition for been cited to underline the worthlessness
resources among elites and the exploita- of this polity that Napoleon destroyed in
tion of an underclass. Not only are ‘ends’ 1806. Since 1945, though, scholars have
said to justify the means, empires also ra- been more positive. Some even viewed it as
tionalise their actions by claiming access a precursor of the European Union.
either to supernatural sanctioning or to Pope Leo III crowned the Frankish king
some higher morality. We are, however, Charlemagne emperor in 800, but the empire’s continuous
stuck with empires, because societies history began only in 962, when the German kings assumed the
with effective curbs against the accumulation of power, and imperial crown. Thereafter the empire, under various dynasties
which prohibit the use of violence to safeguard power, cannot – notably, from 1438, the Habsburgs – was essentially German.
survive alongside those that sanction power and aggression. The Holy Roman Empire was not expansionist. Indeed, it
The pre-Columbian Maya city-states or kingdoms (at their largely contracted from the late Middle Ages. The Swiss cantons
height around AD 250–830) did not form an empire, though and the northern Netherlands seceded in the 16th century, and
their historical trajectory suggests that empire might have re- France acquired Metz, Toul, Verdun and Alsace in 1648.
sulted had the political power of particular cities and dynasties Critical accounts of the empire in the 19th and early 20th
not been undermined by more ‘global’ regional forces. In that centuries cited these losses as signs of its inadequacy. They rarely
respect, the Maya were not alone in Mesoamerica. Centres conceded that it had made significant contributions to the
of power in different regions waxed and waned, while ruling development of west-central and central Europe, notably the
families maintained trans-regional ties. In the 16th century creation of an enduring system of public order and of law.
the Spanish were faced with an Aztec empire that, like the em- Successive medieval emperors experimented with internal peace
pires in Europe, reflected supra-regional historical trajectories. decrees. And around 1500 the empire developed a legal system
Were Maya kingdoms or the Aztec empire any ‘better’ than that pacified the territories and cities of German-speaking
those of the Old World? There were democratic traditions, as Europe. By 1519 it had a supreme court and a regional enforce-
in the city-state of Tlaxcala, and councils always had some say ment system that ended feuding for good. That year Charles V
in who would rule the Aztecs; the Maya, however, followed was obliged to sign an electoral capitulation before his corona-
dynastic rule. Contrary to popular belief, Mesoamerican rules tion, which explicitly guaranteed the rights of all Germans.
of engagement in warfare resulted in far fewer deaths than was These rights were extended by subsequent imperial electoral
the case in European warfare. There were no grazing animals, capitulations and by major peace agreements designed to prevent
so disease rates were lower than in the Old World, as well as the outbreak of religious wars. These treaties also secured and
economic benefits in maintaining forests and trees. Social extended the rights of individuals, including rights over property
mobility was limited, but there was a good deal of locomo- as well as provisions designed to ensure that Germans could not
tion. Having no beasts of burden, the upper classes could not suffer discrimination on grounds of their religion. By the 18th
monopolise travel, and people walked everywhere. century the subjects of the empire had more rights enforceable
Commerce was lively, and markets offered an astounding by courts than those of any other European polity.
range of goods. Taxes and tribute reflected long-term alle- Relentless French military campaigns beginning in 1792
giances to lords rather than territorial boundaries; this, and the led to the dissolution of the empire in 1806. But the sense of
fact that kinship ties stretched over long distances, encouraged a common history over 1,000 years, and the legal traditions
travel. As empires go, one could do worse. established by the empire, have shaped the history of German-
speaking Europe ever since.

Elizabeth Graham is professor of Mesoamerican archaeology at Joachim Whaley is professor of German history and thought at the
University College London Institute of Archaeology University of Cambridge Æ
21
 Chandrika Kaul Jon Wilson

“Imperialism is freighted “The British ‘empire’ was

with negative connota- so disparate, so sprawling,
tions. Yet this is too that it has never been
reductive an approach” possible to think about
the whole coherently”
Few major empires in modern history can
be said to have been unmitigated disas-
ters. This is no more than stating that any Was empire a force for good or bad?
large-scale organisation of control needs Have empires really any kind of force
to ensure there are winners – at least, for at all? Take the British empire. Despite
some of the people, for some of the time. the claims of a few self-appointed
Imperialism is freighted with negative ideologues, it was never anything other
connotations of intrinsic and systemic than a sprawling collection of different
inequality and exploitation. Yet this is too territories, each connected to Britain in
reductive an approach, especially when examining the track a different way. There was no imperial
record of the British in India. Instead, we must consider the system, no single imperial regime.
political culture of imperialism, both subversive and support- The British presence meant different things for different
ive, evaluate relative gain and loss, and assert the significance people because it worked in different ways. In India, Britain
of context as key to assessing intention and impact. governed despotically from the late 1700s to 1947. British
After independence Indians borrowed 250 articles from the rule impoverished a subcontinent, turning one of the most
Government of India Act (1935) for their new constitution, prosperous societies on the globe into one of the world’s
and chose to run their army, railways, press, broadcasting, poorest. In Canada – to take another example – life for native
judiciary and parliamentary system substantively on British Americans became harder. But a massive, underpopulated
lines. Prominent nationalist leaders extolled the virtues of Brit- expanse of territory became breadbasket to the world, as British
ish imperialism. Such sentiments affirming the apparent Brit- rule created vibrant self-governing institutions. European
ish ‘genius for colonisation’ do not marginalise the economic migrants attracted to British territories in North America
exploitation, racism and violence that resulted from British built one of the richest societies in the world.
rule, but they do underline the need for a nuanced approach. ‘The empire’ was so disparate, so sprawling, that it has never
The British claimed they were committed to inculcating been possible to think about the whole coherently. Britons have
representative institutions and a liberal culture, making emphasised the importance of different parts of it at different
colonial rule synonymous with modernisation and progress. points in time. Today, we tend to think of India, Africa and
This implies a clear-sighted policy, implemented in a system- the Caribbean. But in British school textbooks of the 1950s,
atic fashion by absolute rulers. In fact, imperial ideology was ‘empire’ mainly meant Canada, Australia and New Zealand,
ambiguous and policy inconsistent. Indian princes controlled the ex-colonies that were then Britain’s greatest export market.
40% of the subcontinent, and even within British India their Of course, there have been many imperial ideologues trying
rule was characterised by ‘dominance without hegemony’. to persuade us their vision of empire is a ‘good thing’; people
The spread of new technology to India, and its impact, was always try to create coherent stories. But every vision of empire
often more complex than we might think. Traditional boatmen that presents it as a united force leaves out some parts. JR Seeley,
survived and flourished, despite British efforts to champion author of the most famous defence of empire, The Expansion
steamboats. Railways served imperial economic and strategic of England (1883), went so far as to declare that India couldn’t
imperatives, but their proliferation also benefited Indians. really be considered part of the empire at all. Seeley argued
The Raj exploited traditional fissures between castes and that empire needed to be celebrated as a force of liberalism
religions. Yet other, arguably more profound chasms that and progress – but that argument was based on his exclusion
bedevilled India, such as ‘untouchability’, were of indigenous of Britain’s largest possession. In reality, the history of empire
origin. The British introduced cricket, hoping that matches is far more chaotic and messy than its defenders like to think.
between the races would consolidate the empire – but almost
from the outset they were to be defeated at their own game.
Jon Wilson is professor of modern history at King’s College London
Chandrika Kaul is reader in modern history at the University of and the author of India Conquered: Britain’s Raj and the Chaos of Empire
St Andrews and a contributor to BBC Radio 4’s In Our Time (Simon and Schuster, 2016)

22
 Francois Soyer

“The Spanish brutally

subjugated the indigenous
peoples of the Americas”
The Spanish empire, which was estab-
lished in the decades following 1492 and
lasted until the 19th century, has become
infamous for its negative impact on con-
quered populations. Acting in the name
of the Spanish crown, ruthless adventurers
exploited their military advantages (horses,
steel weapons and guns) and indigenous
divisions to brutally usurp and subjugate
Cuauhtémoc, the last Aztec emperor, is captured by conquistador Hernán
Cortés in 1521. The Spanish later launched “forceful campaigns of evange- the populations of Mesoamerica and South America.
lisation aiming to eliminate native religions”, says Francois Soyer Post-conquest, the Spanish crown established the encomienda
(‘trusteeship’) system, by which it kept control of the land but
granted Spanish settlers the right to exploit indigenous labour
along with the duty to oversee the Christianisation of their na-
tive charges. This was a system open to egregious abuse – settlers
focused on their personal enrichment through the forced labour
of natives – and it was controversial even among contemporaries.
The crown later instituted a repartimento (‘partition’) system
that essentially took over the management of the indigenous
workforce, ensuring a ready supply of conscripted native labour
for the empire’s silver mines and large agricultural estates.
Europeans unwittingly introduced virulent diseases such as
smallpox that killed millions, devastating native populations in
the Caribbean and on the continents. To replace the declining
indigenous peoples, disease-resistant African slaves were
imported, thus initiating the horrific Atlantic slave trade.
Finally, the gradual establishment of the Catholic church led
to forceful campaigns of evangelisation aiming to eliminate na-
tive religions and acculturate indigenous peoples. In the Yucatán
region of Central America, the process was particularly brutal,
amounting to a co-ordinated attempt to wipe out Maya culture.
Like all colonial empires, the primary purpose of the Spanish
MARY EVANS/BRIDGEMAN

empire was to enrich the mother state in Europe. Overall, there

can be no doubt that the rise of the Spanish empire had a
dramatically negative impact on the indigenous peoples of the
Americas, though it has also thereby decisively shaped the culture
and faith of most modern-day Latin Americans. Its notoriety was
widely decried by early modern Protestant propagandists who
had an anti-Spanish and anti-Catholic agenda. Furthermore,
apologists of later northern European colonial powers, notably
An advert promoting the Bengal Nagpur railway, 1935. “The railways
served imperial economic and strategic imperatives, but their Britain and France, also sought to whitewash the excesses of their
proliferation also benefited Indians,” suggests Chandrika Kaul own colonial endeavours by contrasting Spanish colonialism
with their own ‘enlightened’ colonialism.

Francois Soyer is a senior lecturer in late medieval and early modern

history at the University of New England in Armidale, Australia

23
24 ILLUSTRATION BY DAVIDE BONAZZI
 THE GLOBAL
PAST

Did the
Age of
Exploration
bring more
harm than
good?
From the 15th century, European navigators sailed in search
of new routes, lands and opportunities for trade and exploitation,
spreading and gaining knowledge, and transforming the lives
of peoples they encountered. Here, six historians debate whether
we should celebrate or condemn these trailblazers Æ
25
 Margaret Small François Soyer

“The Age of Exploration “The Portuguese took

paved the way for the the decisive first steps in
globalised economies the creation of a lasting
we see today” European stranglehold
on world trade”
For the indigenous inhabitants of the
Americas, the potential benefits of
contact with other peoples were far As the first monarchy to send explorers
outweighed by the brutality of European beyond the geographical limits of Europe,
conquest and colonisation, and the ravag- Portugal can claim the title of initiator of
es of European diseases that cut a swathe the so-called Age of Exploration. From
through the populations. The experiences 1415, Portuguese merchants and mariners
of the Taino of Hispaniola and the Beo- explored the coasts of western Africa,
thuk of Newfoundland painfully demon- reaching the Cape of Good Hope in the
strate the harm brought about by the Age of Exploration: both 1480s. Seeking to establish direct trade
were among the peoples the Europeans first encountered in the links with Asia, in 1497 a fleet under
Americas, and both are now extinct. We have yet to even fully the command of Vasco da Gama sailed around the Cape to
understand what was lost in this devastation. This era also India, followed by yearly expeditions. From 1497 to 1510, the
saw large-scale European involvement in the slave trade. By Portuguese established supremacy in the Indian Ocean, in
1820, it’s thought that more than 10 million west Africans had the face of stiff opposition from Muslim and Hindu rivals. In
found themselves unwilling slaves in the Americas. Their own 1500, the expedition of Pedro Álvares Cabral was blown off
societies were destabilised and depopulated. For them, the Age course on its way to India and reached the shores of Brazil.
of Exploration undoubtedly brought more harm than good. The impact of the Portuguese Age of Discovery on modern
For many Europeans, the answer was more often world history cannot be overstated. On an economic level, it
favourable. Europe was able to establish vast trading initiated a revolution in world trade. Spices and other Asian
companies that frequently tapped into local trade systems goods that had previously transited to Europe via the Islamic
and created a global commodities network. Conquest and world were now directly imported by Portuguese (and later by
colonisation drew wealth and power into the European Dutch and British) ships. To this was later added the lucrative
sphere, allowing that region to assume a position of global flow of sugar and diamonds from Brazil.
dominance. In the process, Europe became richer than it The Portuguese thus took the decisive first steps in the
had ever been before. Even some of the flora and fauna creation of a lasting European stranglehold on world trade. In
exchanged proved hugely profitable for Europe. Though the turn, this ensured European economic prosperity and global
potato later became associated with the catastrophic Irish political hegemony until the 20th century. But the human toll
famine in the 1840s, the introduction of that one crop alone was very heavy. The Portuguese position in Asia was precarious
helped Europe sustain a huge labour force in the face of a and dependent upon the calculated use of military force and
massive population growth in the 18th century. violence against competitors – for example, the slaughter of the
Considering the issue from a global perspective rather Muslim population of Goa. Most importantly, the Portuguese
than a regional one, it becomes more of a philosophical initiated the transatlantic slave trade. The Portuguese and other
question. The Age of Exploration provided opportunities for Europeans oversaw the forced removal of millions of west
societies and cultures to interact; it brought all parts of the Africans, and their dispatch to the mines and fields of the
world into contact with each other, paving the way for the Americas – men and women whose blood, sweat and lives
globalised economies we see today; it enabled a knowledge contributed to the enrichment of European empires.
network to extend across the whole globe. In a sense, our In the end, the answer to the question of whether the era
modern world is built on the back of the changes introduced brought more harm than good depends on whether we
by the European Age of Exploration – so it becomes a approach it from the perspective of the self-proclaimed
question of judgement on the modern world. European explorers or the peoples (Asian, African and
American) with whom they came into contact.
Margaret Small is lecturer in Europe and the wider world at the
University of Birmingham, with a focus on European exploration François Soyer is senior lecturer in history at the University of
and colonisation in the 16th century New England at Armidale, New South Wales, Australia

26
 Graciela Iglesias-Rogers

“Exploring entails entan-

glements of all sorts; some
are desirable, others not”

In early February this year, scientists

announced the discovery of a vast hidden
network of towns, farms and highways
beneath the trees of a remote Guatemalan
jungle. The finding suggests that about
1,200 years ago the region supported
a Maya population of up to 20 million
people – roughly equivalent to half of
Europe’s population at the time. A game-
changer for archaeologists, this breakthrough highlights
a weakness in the set question: there is no such thing as an ‘Age
of Exploration’. It is inherent in human nature to look out into
the unknown. This discovery underlines the fact that we have
been exploring since time began: the earliest inhabitants of the
Americas did it, expanding their territories; the Spanish
Conquistadors and later adventurers did it; and humans will
continue doing it in the future.
Archaeologists had assumed that Maya cities were isolated
and self-sufficient; now it seems that a far more complex,
interconnected society flourished. Yet this discovery owes
much to the pioneering scientific expeditions of Ramón
Ordóñez (1773), José Antonio Calderón (1784), Antonio
del Río (1786), Alexander von Humboldt (1803–04), José
A portrait of Portuguese navigator Vasco da Gama, who in 1497 pioneered
a maritime route from Europe to India. “The impact of the Portuguese Age Luciano Castañeda (1805–07) and, crucially, Juan Galindo
of Discovery on world history cannot be overstated,” says François Soyer (1831–34). Galindo was no great scientist; the Dublin-born
son of an English actor, he set off for the Americas to volunteer
in the Latin American wars of independence, and became
governor of the Guatemalan department of Petén. Uniquely
positioned to navigate through the Hispanic-Anglosphere, his
greatest contribution consisted of vivid accounts of Maya ruins,
published in London and New York. His reports captured the
imaginations of many people, including John Lloyd Stephens
and Frederick Catherwood who, between 1839 and 1842,
followed his trail to become founders of Classic Maya studies.
Exploring entails entanglements of all sorts; some are
desirable, others not. The latest discovery adds credibility to
the theory that societal dynamics linked to the depletion of
natural resources explain the collapse of the Classic Maya
around AD 900. Laser pulse technology, instead of machetes,
allowed the stripping away of tree canopy from aerial images to
reveal the ancient civilisation underneath, thus proving that
exploration and natural and heritage preservation can be
compatible activities.
A 17th-century illustration shows European sailors trading with Beothuk
ALAMY

men in the region that became Newfoundland. The Beothuk, among the Graciela Iglesias-Rogers is senior lecturer in modern European
first peoples of the Americas encountered by Europeans, no longer exist and global Hispanic history at the University of Winchester Æ
27
 Emma Reisz Glyn Williams

“Disease was largely “Pacific islanders adopted

an accidental means new ideas and techniques
of conquest – but was from European explorers”
devastating in its effects”
The second Age of Exploration, extending
over the long 18th century, was most
During the Age of Exploration, Europe- notable for Europe’s expansion into the
ans connected the world into a single Pacific – or, as Alan Moorehead saw it in
navigational system, triggering an era of his influential 1967 book The Fatal
imperial competition as European states Impact, Europe’s ‘invasion’ of the vast
expanded across the globe through ocean and its 25,000 islands.
trade, colonisation and coercion. This Following the voyages of Cook and his
produced many of the global intercon- contemporaries in the second half of the
nections that underpin the modern 18th century, Tahiti became the geographical and emotional
world – but these were established at a centre of Polynesia, praised by the French explorer Louis-
vast human cost, paid by some populations and not others. Antoine de Bougainville as “the happy island of Cythera...
Benefits such as access to new foods and luxuries, and to the true Utopia”. In time, these idyllic impressions were
new scientific knowledge, accrued disproportionately (but modified as evidence was found throughout the Pacific of
not exclusively) to Europeans. Conversely, the harms were human sacrifice, infanticide and cannibalism, and by the
mostly experienced by the rest of the world. The slave trade end of the century few argued that the islands should be left
was the most egregious example, enriching Europe and its untouched by European contact. This came at a cost: the lives
colonists through the suffering of Africans. Disease was of the inhabitants of the Pacific, from Hawaii in the north to
largely an accidental means of conquest but was devastating New Zealand in the south, were disrupted by the uncontrolled
in its effects, as infections endemic to the Old World activities of whalers, traders and beachcombers, themselves
ravaged populations in the Americas and Australasia. often the rejects of society. They used the islands for victual-
It was not certain at the start of the 15th century that ling and refitting, using as payment the lethal combination
Europeans would dominate global maritime networks. The of firearms and liquor. The only protective influence came
expeditions of Chinese admiral Zheng He along the rim of from missionaries – but their presence, too, had a profound
the Indian Ocean (1405–33) had much in common with effect on the islands’ traditional societies.
those of Henry the Navigator on the other side of Afro- This ‘fatal impact’ thesis has remained compelling, but in
Eurasia. When Vasco da Gama arrived in east Africa in recent decades its conclusions have been challenged by scholars
1498, his sailors were mistaken by the locals for Chinese. – anthropologists as well as historians – working with local
By the mid-15th century, though, the Ming court had aban- rather than European sources. Islanders gradually came to be
doned maritime expansion, and Chinese proto-colonialism seen not as helpless victims of technologically superior newcom-
around the Indian Ocean ended. Zheng He’s expeditions ers but as participants in a process of mutual exploitation. This
had comparatively little impact on world history, whereas collaboration was seen most clearly in the emergence of three
the maritime route from Europe to India that da Gama island kingdoms: Tahiti (ruled by Pomare), Hawaii (ruled by
established transformed global trade. Kamehameha) and Tonga (ruled by Taufa‘ahau). The details
Had early globalisation been Sino-European rather than of how these centralised kingdoms emerged differ, but each of
solely European, the ratio of harms to benefits might have these rulers used European alliances to strengthen his position.
been no more equitable for the rest of the world, however. More generally, islanders adopted new ideas and techniques; in
In 1411, Ming forces overthrew the Kotte king in Sri renowned New Zealand historian Kerry Howe’s words, they
Lanka, and in a c1431–33 inscription Zheng He boasted “proved adaptable, resourceful, and resilient”. The arrival of
that “the countries beyond the horizon and from the ends Europeans marked a turning point in Pacific history but,
of the earth have all become [Chinese] subjects”. Europeans despite population losses from disease and warfare, it did not
were not unique in seeking to profit from maritime have in the long term the catastrophic impact once suggested.
expansion – though in the early modern world they were
uniquely successful in doing so. Glyn Williams is emeritus professor of history at the University of London,
and author of books including Naturalists at Sea: Scientific Travellers from
Emma Reisz is lecturer in history at Queen’s University Belfast Dampier to Darwin (Yale, 2013)

28
 Julia McClure

“The idea of the ‘Age of

Exploration’ whitewashes
history, giving a more noble
and scholarly appearance
to an age of imperialism”
This is a trick question. It embeds
European explorers between the 15th and
17th centuries in a noble narrative of
discovery, giving the false impression that
they travelled beyond their localities for
A painting of whalers in the South Seas, c1825. After the arrival of
the expansion of human knowledge.
Europeans, “the lives of the inhabitants of the Pacific were disrupted by Columbus’s ‘discovery’ of America in
the activities of whalers, traders and beachcombers,” says Glyn Williams 1492 is often taken as the starting point for
the so-called ‘Age of Exploration’ – a point
of departure that signposts four ideological problems. First,
taking 1492 as a threshold contributes to the Eurocentric project
of modernity that, among other things, overlooks the intellectu-
al vibrancy and transcultural exchanges of the global Middle
Ages, from the technological advances of Song-dynasty China to
the golden age of Islamic science. Second, the Columbus
expedition was not motivated by the expansion of knowledge
but by the acquisition of resources – and when the hoped-for
riches did not materialise, Conquistadors looked to the people
and the natural resources of the Americas as a source of wealth.
Third, the ‘discovery’ of the ‘New World’ did not mark an
epistemological rupture; Columbus went to his grave quite
unaware that he had stumbled upon a new continent. Many of
the ‘explorers’ who followed in his footsteps did not discover
something new but, rather, encountered fragmented versions of
themselves, their desires and ambitions. The nomenclature of
the Americas betrays how late-medieval imaginations ordered
the New World: for example, the Amazon took its name from
Greek mythology. Finally, the ‘Age of Exploration’ construct
has prioritised European perspectives and knowledge. What of
the Amerindians looking back at the Europeans exploring their
world? Many aspects of their histories have yet to be told.
The idea of the ‘Age of Exploration’ does more harm than
good, because it whitewashes history, giving a more noble and
scholarly appearance to what was actually an age of imperial-
ism. Europeans may have increased their knowledge of the
flora, fauna, and topographies of the world in this period, but
SHUTTERSTOCK/BRIDGEMAN

they often did so at the expense of indigenous knowledge and

value systems. Whatever the orientations of new histories of
global knowledge, we must never overlook the critical
relationship between knowledge and power.
A Chinese woman spins silk in a Song-dynasty painting. That nation’s
technological advances that predate Columbus tend to be ignored by Julia McClure is lecturer in history at the University of Glasgow, and
historical narratives highlighting the European ‘Age of Exploration’ author of The Franciscan Invention of the New World (Palgrave, 2016)

29
 WAR AND CONFLICT EXPERT DEBATE

Have nuclear
weapons
helped to
maintain
global peace?

Though national and regional conflicts and international terrorism

remain rife, since 1945 the world has not been subjected to truly
pan-regional or trans-continental war. Over the following pages
four experts in international security debate the role nuclear
arsenals may have played in curbing large-scale conflict

30 ILLUSTRATION BY DAVIDE BONAZZI

 Æ
31
THE PANEL

Malcolm Craig Michael Goodman Simon J Moody Benoît Pelopidas

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

When have nuclear weapons come closest to provoked international fears about perceived
destabilising world peace – and how close to American willingness to use atomic weapons.
the brink of nuclear war did the world come? Perhaps the most interesting example was
the November 1983 Able Archer incident 1 ,
Benoît Pelopidas: “How close was it?” is in which a Nato communications exercise was
a misleading question if asked alone. One also perceived by some in Moscow as preparation for
needs to ask: how controllable was it? Indeed, an actual offensive. In this case, nuclear weapons,
1 Able Archer 83 some proponents of nuclear deterrence claim paranoia and faulty intelligence-gathering could
incident that you need to get close enough to the ‘nuclear have (a big ‘could have’) led to nuclear war.
A Nato exercise abyss’ for the deterrent effect to kick in. But is
simulating a conflict that true? And can we control how close we get? Simon J Moody: In my judgement, the closest
escalation, codenamed A critical moment commonly cited in this nuclear weapons have come to destabilising
Able Archer, was
regard was the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962 world peace was during the first decade of the
conducted in western
[see box, opposite]. And that was not fully Cold War, from the late 1940s, when the United
Europe in November
1983. Fearing that the
controllable: the caution of Soviet premier States had nuclear superiority. If decision-makers
exercise might be a Khrushchev and US president Kennedy alone had heeded the arguments for nuclear release –
ruse to mask an actual cannot explain its peaceful outcome, given the to support outnumbered UN forces during the
nuclear strike, the limits of their control over their nuclear arsenals, Korean War, or to help relieve the beleaguered
Soviet Union readied its the limits of safety of the weapons, and other French garrison at Dien Bien Phu 2 in Vietnam
forces in preparation factors. The evidence shows we have been lucky. in 1954 – then today’s situation, in which the
for retaliatory nuclear Though the scholarly and policy worlds pay lip non-use of nuclear weapons is seen as normal,
action – a very real service to this finding, they still do not act and might never have been established. It is the taboo
threat that, thankfully, plan as if they take it seriously. nature of nuclear weapons use that helps to
receded at the end of Secrecy means that we know very little about stabilise weapons of such appalling power within
the exercise.
cases of near use of nuclear weapons. It’s very an anarchic international system.
likely we overestimate how safe we have been.
Conversely, how important a factor have
Malcolm Craig: There are a number of other nuclear weapons been in preserving world
examples of times when this has happened. For peace, and how have they done so?
example, during the first year of the Korean War
(1950–53), President Harry Truman’s bluster BP: If you mean how important a factor have
and outbursts from General Douglas MacArthur nuclear weapons been in preventing a great power
32
 IN CONTEXT
The Cuban Missile Crisis
conflict or nuclear war, deterrence theory claims
that the destructive capability of nuclear weapons
triggers fear, which in turn makes leaders
cautious. However, recent scholarship shows that
this relationship is far from automatic; classic
works have also shown that threats intended to
deter may have adverse effects, as can any other
public policy. If one needs to constantly establish
the credibility of a deterrent threat based on
nuclear weapons, this will obviously lead to more
risk-taking. The question then is: what are the
other effects of nuclear weapons in the world
Aerial photography taken beyond security issues? How do nuclear weapons
on 14 October 1962 revealed programmes affect the governments and states
a medium-range ballistic that build them?
missile launch site in Cuba

MC: Returning to the Cuban Missile Crisis,

Following the failed CIA-backed Bay of Pigs though nuclear weapons were a fundamental
invasion of Cuba in 1961, Fidel Castro made part of why it occurred, they also played a major
a secret agreement with Soviet premier
role in bringing it to a peaceful conclusion.
Nikita Khrushchev to install strategic
The thought of global nuclear war caused both
nuclear weapons on the island. Much of
the US would then be within effective range
leaders to pull back from the brink and achieve
of Soviet nuclear missiles. a negotiated solution.
On 14 October 1962, an American U-2
spyplane captured photos indicating the Michael Goodman: A certain view of
presence of ballistic missiles in western proliferation holds that peace is best achieved
Cuba – in contravention of promises made through a parity in weapons – in other words,
by Khrushchev to US president John the best means of ensuring peace has been
F Kennedy. The US responded by establishing for both sides of a conflict to have a nuclear
a naval ‘quarantine’, blocking the delivery of capability. There is certainly some credence
further offensive weapons. Khrushchev to this: just consider two big nuclear-tipped
called this action “outright piracy”, warning conflicts or confrontations – the Cold War
that it could lead to war.
and India-Pakistan tensions. Arguably, the fear
Tensions rose over the following two
of either a nuclear pre-emptive strike, or the 2 Dien Bien Phu
weeks. Both US and Soviet nuclear forces
were readied, and Castro’s communications
guarantee of Mutually Assured Destruction Site of the decisive
with Khrushchev seemed to urge a Soviet (MAD), has been enough to ensure that in those battle in the First
nuclear strike on the US in the event of scenarios (relative) peace has been preserved. Indochina War. Defeat
another invasion of Cuba. A number of of French forces by
incidents could have sparked the launch of What other factors have been more nationalist-communist
nuclear weapons – most notably when the important in maintaining peace? Viet Minh troops on
US Navy dropped depth charges on Soviet 7 May 1954 augured the
submarine B-59 near Cuba; a retaliatory BP: Given that nuclear war or nuclear weapons end of nearly a century
strike with nuclear torpedoes was vetoed by use would be unacceptable by most constituen- of colonial rule in
only one submarine officer, Vasili Arkhipov. Vietnam. The US had
cies, factors that have been necessary to prevent
Secret exchanges between Kennedy and supplied materiel to the
nuclear weapons use even once are crucial. We
Khrushchev finally resulted in an agreement French, but plans to
now know that in 1961, two 4-megaton thermo- deploy US nuclear
on 28 October: the US would remove its
nuclear weapons fell from a US B-52 plane over
ALAMY/GETTY IMAGES

Jupiter missiles from Italy and Turkey (from weapons against

where the Soviet Union was in range), and Goldsboro, North Carolina; the only thing that the Viet Minh were
in return the Soviets would remove their prevented one of these weapons from exploding not enacted.
offensive weapons from Cuba. Nuclear war was a safety switch that remained in the safe posi-
– which seemed possible or even likely – tion. However, that switch malfunctioned several
had been averted. times in other instances. So the only thing that Æ
33
Warfare and Conflict: Nuclear weapons

prevented a 4-megaton nuclear detonation on the effectiveness of bodies such as the Security
that day was the random non-simultaneity of the Council to enforce its resolutions, in lieu of a
failure of the plane and that of the switch. There world policeman the UN continues to legitimise
is no other name for this than luck. Beyond that, the actions of its members and is probably the best
the notion of deterrence, which describes the structure we have for maintaining basic human
intended effect of a policy, gives the impression rights. In addition, most forms of political,
that this intended effect is an actual effect. And economic and cultural integration help to
nuclear weapons discourse has created the im- maintain the international order. The EU,
pression that deterrence in terms of war preven- for example, emerged out of various postwar
tion can be achieved only with nuclear weapons. experiments to regulate the industrial economies
Once those discursive effects are undone, the of western Europe, and has thus rendered the
other factors in maintaining peace reappear, prospect of war between European nations
including the absence of desire to attack, and economically illogical and politically absurd.
sensitivity to the security dilemma of the other.
How important is the balance of nuclear
MC: Two factors (there are many others) are weapons between different powers?
the destructiveness of major 20th-century wars,
and luck. Even before the atomic age, there was BP: The two major military powers of the Cold
considerable international concern that major War (the US and Soviet Union) were the first two
interstate wars were becoming so destructive as to to develop nuclear weapons, building 70,000 of
be untenable. The First and, most significantly, them. That suggests that, at least for a time,
Second World Wars proved this point. possession of nuclear weapons in large numbers
Returning to Cuba, luck – in the sense of was a crucial feature of world power. However,
the right person making the right decision at the those two countries possessed many other
right time – played a significant role in global features of power. Also, Japan, Germany, South
nuclear war being averted. Soviet submarine Korea and South Africa have explicitly built their
officer Vasili Arkhipov could have agreed to the strategy of emergence on the international stage
firing of a nuclear torpedo at US warships. US on renunciation of nuclear weapons.
fighter pilots could have launched nuclear-tipped Members of groups such as the G7 to G20
rockets at their Soviet counterparts. Sometimes, [representatives from the banks and governments
luck really is a factor. of the world’s leading economic nations] have
increasingly included non-nuclear-armed states,
MG: One of the great Cold War lessons was and emerging states have rarely sought to acquire
that it was not enough to have a nuclear capabili- those weapons. It’s notable that India failed to
ty – it was just as important to have knowledge acquire the status of permanent member of the
and understanding of your adversary’s arsenal. UN Security Council after its nuclear weapons
The key lay with intelligence: gauging your oppo- tests. Nuclear-weapon states have been attacked
nent’s political intentions and military capabili- and lost wars against non-nuclear-weapon states
3 Sputnik ties was tremendously important. With the (the US in Vietnam, for example, and the Soviet
The launch of the first exception of the Cuban Missile and Able Archer Union in Afghanistan). So nuclear superiority
artificial satellite, crises, at no point did the intelligence service of has not been sufficient to guarantee either victory
Sputnik 1, by the Soviet one side predict the other was about to launch or war prevention. The record of coercion based
Union on 4 October a pre-emptive nuclear strike – and even in these on nuclear superiority is very limited. During the
1957 signalled the start
two cases it was a political concern rather than Cuban Missile Crisis, nuclear weapons use was
of the ‘space race’
an intelligence one that led to the worry. In other avoided through luck. In that crucial case,
between the US and
USSR. The R-7 rocket
words, maintaining a nuclear arsenal to react, nuclear balance was simply irrelevant.
and an offensive intelligence agency to monitor,
REX-SHUTTERSTOCK

that took Sputnik into

orbit was originally were part and parcel of maintaining peace. MC: As with any historical issue, contingency and
developed to carry context are all. Up to the launch of Sputnik 3
a nuclear warhead. SJM: International organisations such as the UN in 1957, the Soviet Union could not – in any
have played an important role in the maintenance meaningful sense – wage nuclear warfare against
of world peace. Although critics have questioned the US. In that case, the number of weapons
34
 “In the Cuban Missile
Crisis, nuclear weapons
use was avoided
through luck. Nuclear
balance was irrelevant”
BENOÎT PELOPIDAS

Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev (left) and US president John

F Kennedy discuss nuclear proliferation in Vienna in June 1961

A Titan II intercontinental missile

– the largest US nuclear missile
– in a silo in Arizona. At the height
of the Cold War, between 1963
and 1987, 54 such missiles were
on alert across the United States

“Do nuclear weapons

deter potential enemies?
Britain’s nuclear status
ALAMY/GETTY IMAGES

did little to deter West German foreign minister

Willy Brandt proposes a global

Argentina in 1982” treaty banning aggression using

nuclear or other weapons at a
conference in September 1968
MALCOLM CRAIG Æ
35
 mattered less than the ability to deliver them. Has the aspiration of non-nuclear powers to
By the 1970s, both sides had massive arsenals gain nuclear weapons been a destabilising
based on missile technologies that could target factor around the world?
anywhere in the world. At that point, the
number and sophistication of weapons mattered, BP: The spread of nuclear weapons is dangerous.
in a very general sense. It increases the risk of nuclear detonations, either
But in some cases, nuclear capability matters deliberate or accidental, by state and possibly
not a jot. British governments have been heavily non-state actors. But, once again, to fully answer
invested in the idea of a nuclear weapon state, your question one would need to know what the
but do those weapons deter potential enemies? development of nuclear weapons programmes
Britain’s nuclear status did little to deter does to the governance of a polity. A research
Argentina in 1982. Likewise, Al-Qaeda wasn’t programme addressing this very issue is starting.
deterred by the vast US nuclear arsenal. This The assumption of the inevitability of a desire
leads to another question: what purpose do to acquire nuclear weapons has also been very
nuclear weapons serve in the 21st century? destabilising. It has justified non-proliferation
policies, including violent ones, neglecting the
MG: The science and technology of nuclear fact that most states never had any interest in
weapons is such that a vast array of constructions developing such weapons, and that, among the
is possible. These range from early atomic few who did, most gave up before crossing the
devices tested in the 1940s and 1950s (and nuclear threshold.
replicated to an extent by the early devices In other words, giving up nuclear weapons
of most nuclear states), to the advanced and ambitions is not only the result of an absence of
fantastically destructive thermonuclear weapons capabilities (think Sweden), the presence of the
of the 1950s and onwards. Yet as the explosive weapons of a protector (think South Africa) or the
yield has varied, so too has the means of delivery: success of the use of force (think Iraq in the 1980s
4 Suitcase bomb the early devices were dropped from planes, or Libya after 1986). Ignoring or denying the clear
Prototype nuclear with delivery then progressing to missiles and reasoning for such non-nuclear security strategies
weapons of portable the miniaturisation of the so-called suitcase may embolden those who argue nuclear weapons
size and weight were bomb 4 . Accompanying this technological are necessary or helpful for maintaining security.
designed by both the change is the sheer scale of nuclear arsenals –
United States and
yet there comes a point, defined as ‘nuclear MC: One of the remarkable things about nuclear
Soviet Union during
sufficiency’ by the British Ministry of Defence proliferation is that, despite consistently alarmist
the 1950s and 1960s.
However, it is still
in the 1950s, when your opponent has enough assessments of ‘tipping points’ and ‘cascades’,
uncertain whether weapons to produce any variable of these. few countries have chosen to attain full nuclear
actual production of At that point, size no longer matters because capability. Nations such as Argentina, Sweden
effective suitcase your destruction is guaranteed. and South Korea all had at least partial nuclear
bombs (light enough programmes at some point since the 1950s, but
to carry but with SJM: The relative balance of nuclear power chose to abandon their ambitions. There were
sufficient destructive is essential to the logic of strategic nuclear many reasons: internal politics, outside influence,
yield) was successful. deterrence. The security paradigm of the Cold leaders’ psychology, and so on. In some ways this
War remained so stable because of the paradox tells us that the reasons not to go for full nucleari-
of Mutually Assured Destruction – the state sation are more popular than the reasons to do so.
whereby opposing nuclear powers each possess However, nuclear weapons are an issue in the
the means to launch a decisive nuclear attack tension between India and Pakistan. Pakistan has
against the other, even after absorbing a first ‘the bomb’ as a fundamental part of its strategy in
nuclear strike itself. By threatening to unleash the event of major war with India. Any potential
on a decisive scale the very process it seeks battlefield use of tactical nuclear weapons could
to avoid – war – MAD ensures that the escalate a conflict to the strategic nuclear scale,
consequences of a strategic nuclear exchange with horrific regional and global consequences.
are sufficiently terrifying to convince a would-
be aggressor that the costs of war outweigh SJM: Nuclear proliferation is not inherently
the benefits. destabilising, and there is a logical argument,
36
 Pakistan’s Shaheen II medium-range
ballistic missile blasts off on a test
launch in March 2004. The missile’s
2,000km range meant that Pakistan
would be able to deliver nuclear
warheads to almost any target
in mainland India

“Nuclear weapons are not

a panacea for ensuring
GETTY IMAGES

world peace”
SIMON J MOODY Æ
37
Warfare and Conflict: Nuclear weapons

rooted in deterrence theory, that the emergence peace. They are a tactic of last resort, but peace
of more nuclear states might in fact bring greater will be pursued separate to nuclear weapons.
stability to certain regions. India and Pakistan That said, they are an important and valuable
are both new nuclear states and, though some commodity to any defensive arsenal, so will
form of limited military conflict between the remain a significant factor in world politics for
two rivals is a distinct possibility, the risks of the foreseeable future.
a costly and unrestricted conventional conflict
has largely been nullified by the presence of SJM: As a historian, I would naturally be
nuclear armouries. reluctant to peer too deep into the future.
Likewise, Israel is another example: though What the historical record tells us, however, is
its status as a nuclear power has not been officially that the security framework within which nuclear
declared, the possibility of such states acquiring weapons have become so ingrained is remarkably
nuclear weapons might have reduced the stable, and that total war (as our grandfathers’ and
existential threat of invasion by one or more of its great-grandfathers’ generations twice knew it),
openly hostile neighbours. really does seem to be a relic of the industrial
age. Yet nuclear weapons are not a panacea for
MG: Nuclear weapons are essentially an ensuring world peace, as demonstrated by the
asymmetric tactic of choice: a single bomb proliferation of conventional conflicts since 1945.
offers a means of offsetting the balance of Real world peace rests on the ability of humans to
power. For large powers this is arguably less solve their political differences through under-
of an issue; for smaller powers it allows them standing, compassion and co-operation.
to punch above their weight and compete
with larger powers whose conventional armies BP: Since the beginning of the nuclear age,
dwarf their own. For this reason, a nuclear nuclear weapons were not designed to prevent
capability, regardless of its inherent difficulties all forms of violence, and have not done so.
and associated costs, is an attractive option The extent to which they have been central to
for medium and small-sized powers. the prevention of war between major powers
In these sorts of scenarios, just one power in since 1945 is also contested. They primarily
a region or conflict is likely to have a nuclear generated a vulnerability, from the moment
device, so the possibility of destabilisation is far when undetectable submarine-launched ballistic
greater. For this reason the proliferation activities missiles made it impossible to defend against
of the Pakistani nuclear scientist AQ Khan 5 a nuclear attack. Nuclear-weapon states have
took on a great significance, because he sold been attacked and lost wars against non-nuclear-
blueprints and technical equipment to aspiring weapon states, and actors willing to give their
5 AQ Khan states including Iran, North Korea and Libya life for a cause may not fear nuclear retaliation.
Abdul Qadeer Khan – with very real and frightening consequences. This is as true as it ever was.
is a Pakistani nuclear As scholars and citizens, we have a responsi-
physicist who in the Do you think that nuclear weapons will bility in building the future. Perpetuating
1970s headed a
ensure world peace in the future? overconfidence in the controllability and safety
uranium enrichment
of nuclear weapons allows for complacency. It
programme for his
country’s atomic bomb
MG: In a word: no. The deterrent effect of neglects the role of luck and failures in avoiding
project. In 2004 it was possession of a nuclear weapon is obvious and nuclear weapons use in the past. Beyond the
revealed that Khan had with historical precedent, but that does not mean security dimension, the question of the future
sold nuclear technology that irrational leaders won’t consider using them of nuclear weapons raises ethical and political
to states including Iran, either pre-emptively or for a specific purpose. issues about what kind of political communities
North Korea and Libya. While warfare increasingly moves towards we want to be in the eyes of future generations
the cyber domain and non-kinetic [electronic – and what we want to leave them.
or other remote technological] means, nuclear DISCOVER MORE
GETTY IMAGES

weapons remain the diametric opposite. They are

The BBC World Service series Witness includes
the red line that no state has crossed since August
several episodes featuring first-person
1945, but this lack of use is not enough of an accounts of the Cuban Missile Crisis. All episodes are
argument to say that they have ensured world available online at bbc.co.uk/programmes/p02fj9yq

38
 WARFARE AND CONFLICT
THE LONG READ

A short history
of long-distance
warfare
Dealing death from a safe distance has been
the aim of fighters since the earliest times
BY JAMES ROGERS

European melee weapons from the

15th to 17th centuries. By that time,
these close-combat arms were being
usurped by crossbows and firearms
AKG IMAGES

Æ
39
 H umans are pretty good at killing. From
sharp rocks and blunt clubs to long-
distance bombers and remote-controlled
robots, the quest to kill in new and
‘improved’ ways has long captivated
humanity’s creative capacity. Yet at the
heart of these developments is something
revealing and rather disturbing. With
each new epoch of weaponry and warfare
has come a separation of the human from the visceral heat of battle, from face-to-
face fighting, and from the very act of killing. There are exceptions, of course: in
any era of conflict, humans might still find themselves in hand-to-hand combat,
but this is most certainly not the norm. Instead, over the longue durée of human
history, countless attempts have been made to produce weapons that allow us to
become more detached from those we kill.
There is a very prosaic reason for this. We distance ourselves from killing so that
we do not incur the risk of being killed ourselves. Some may call this cowardly,
yet it is no secret that societies and states have sought to save blood and treasure by
protecting their fittest, fastest, most highly trained and brightest young fighters. If
you can kill from a distance, with superior weapons, it negates the need to risk the
sacrifice of life. This has been key to survival throughout history.
Still, is this the only reason we seek weapons that distance us from
the practice of killing? Or is there something less instinctive and
more cognitively driven that explains why we choose to develop
and then hide behind ever more advanced weapons?

L
et’s step back 10,000 years or so, to a time
around the end of the last ice age. By the fertile
and frequented shores of a lagoon in Kenya,
21 miles west of Lake Turkana, early peoples
fished, drank fresh water and, as indicated by
fragments of pottery from the area, foraged
and stored food. This was a seemingly serene
AKG IMAGES

place, but don’t be fooled: according to researchers from the

University of Cambridge, this was also the site of the world’s
earliest recorded mass killings. Down by the banks of the lagoon,
27 foragers were brutally murdered by a rival group in an attack A late Bronze/early Iron Age statue of the
dubbed the ‘Nataruk Massacre’. The history of this incident tells god Reshef bearing a mace and shield,
us a lot about the early human experience with weaponry. found at Shomron, West Bank

40
 The crossbow was a great leveller:
cheap, easy to use, powerful, accurate

The Cambridge archaeologists found the re-

mains of pregnant women with their hands bound
behind their backs, and of children whose bodies
were peppered with arrowheads made from jet-
black obsidian. They also found evidence of sharp-
force trauma caused by spear-like weapons, and
male skulls that had been smashed by blunt force,
possibly using clubs or rocks. This was the earliest
documented evidence of humanity’s dark side in
A 10,000-year-old
brutal action. A whole clan of people – a small society, with myths and customs now skull excavated at
lost – was annihilated by a ‘superior’ group, certainly one with superior weapons. Nataruk, north-
But why? It appears that the indiscriminate killing of rivals was an important west Kenya, showing
survival strategy during this period, pitting one clan against the other. Perhaps there evidence of attack
with a rock or club
was rivalry over land, food or culture. This does not sound unfamiliar to modern during the mass
ears: wars have been fought over less. And early weapons – spears, arrows and clubs slaughter of a clan
– allowed our human ancestors to commit these ‘crimes against humanity’. Those by a rival group
who had the more advanced weapons, and the preponderance of force, were able to
kill off rivals and survive. This lesson was not lost throughout human ‘progression’.

N
ow let’s jump forward to medieval Europe. Picture noble,
chivalrous knights high on horseback, decked in chain mail
and brandishing swords. Charging valiantly into chaotic,
bloody battles, safe from the brutal melee below they thrust
down and impale enemy footsoldiers. The training of
knights began young. A teenage squire would accompany a
knight into battle as a flag bearer or to hold a shield. As the
boy got older and was strong enough to hold a heavy, full-length metal sword, he
would be given the chance to prove his worth in battle. If he survived, he would be
made a knight in his own right.
During the era of the crusades, though, a new threat to this noble (often
wealthy, and usually Christian) system emerged. The crossbow had been around in
China since at least the fifth-century, when Sun Tzu’s The Art of War touched upon
the energy bound up in bow and trigger. But in the 12th century the crossbow
began to cause concern in Europe. It was likely brought to Britain during the
Norman conquest, quickly spreading across Europe to become the weapon of
choice for continental armies. The crossbow was a great leveller: it was cheap, easy
to produce, even easier to use and, most importantly, deadly powerful and accurate.
This meant that any society, even those outside Europe and deemed uncivilised,
could build large armies of crossbow-wielding ‘heathens’ and – for the first time, it
seemed – challenge the dominance of highly trained, wealthy (and expensive to
replace) elite knights in shining armour. This brought fear to those in power. Such
a weapon could not be left unregulated.
As historian Ralph Payne-Gallwey explained, the crossbow was “considered so
AFP

barbarous” that it was banned by Pope Urban II in 1096 and again by Pope

Æ
41
 Innocent II during the Catholic Church’s second Lateran
Council in 1139. The punishment for using such a weapon
“hateful to God and unfit for Christians” was anathema –
excommunication by the pope. There is a key, telling caveat
here, however: it was acceptable, and even encouraged, for
Europeans to deploy the crossbow against those who weren’t
European elites (and usually not Christian).
The crossbow would be the ideal weapon for the ‘civilised’
to kill the ‘uncivilised’ at distance. Richard the Lionheart
was, for instance, an expert with the weapon, and would take
potshots at the ‘ungodly’ for sport. In 1189–91, during the
siege of Acre (on the northern Mediterranean coast of what’s
now Israel) and while suffering from a fever, the king would
“enjoy the pleasure of shooting bolts” at Turks and infidels to
cheer him up. His action were sanctioned by the pope and by
God because of the race and religion of his targets.
Perhaps, then, Europeans were not so civilised or
A 15th-century
illustration of the chivalrous. Indeed, as European nations grew stronger from the 15th century and
siege of Damascus established themselves at the centre of the self-proclaimed civilised world, it became
(1148) depicts common for distancing weapons to be used unsparingly against ‘others’, even if
a soldier using
those ‘others’ refused to take part in this sanitised, detached form of war. The rise
a crossbow – a
weapon that both of the modern gun is one example of this.
alarmed and

W
appealed to
12th-century
European armies
hen describing guns in the late 16th century,
a French solider remarked that they were deployed
by those “who would not dare look in the face of
those whom they lay low with their wretched bul-
lets”. If we explore the history of firearms – from
early handguns to cannons and machine guns – it’s
clear that these weapons allowed humans to kill
with ever-greater ease and without human-to-human contact. Perhaps this is part
of the allure. Gunpowder and ‘fire lances’ (spears with pyrotechnics attached) have
caused fear in battle since their first use in China in the 10th century, allowing
armies to terrorise their enemies from distance. These warriors would even tie
fireworks and spears to animals – usually oxen – sending them in a panicked flurry
towards the enemy in an attempt to strike fear. In the 13th century, trade with
Asia along the Silk Roads brought gunpowder into European and Ottoman ranks.
Though early weapons using gunpowder were inefficient, dangerous and cum-
bersome, by the 16th century more-powerful guns were being produced, and they
replaced the bow as the most effective distance weapon.
Not everyone took kindly to such ‘advances’, however. Societies in Persia and
across Islamic north Africa did not welcome the modern guns that came flooding
in from the European continent. An example was the Mamluk sultanate, ruling
from Cairo from the 13th century. This ancient Islamic society considered guns
to be out of step with traditional ideas of a warrior’s honour. Furusiyya was the
Mamluk equivalent of the chivalry and, as historian Shihab Al-Sarraf has written,
BRIDGEMAN

it put an onus on nobility and skilled training for “close combat” and “the art of war
itself”. Killing, if necessary, was to be done face to face and as a last resort. That’s
not to say that they didn’t own both guns and cannons, but the Mamluks refrained

42
 from using them in battle. According to historian Alexander DeConde, the Mam-
luks believed the gun to be unfit for use because of the “unchivalrous and immoral
character of the weapon”.
There are those who dispute this – who claim that the Mamluks were unpre-
pared and untrained for modern war – but the fact is that in 1517 the Mamluks
placed guns and cannons on the battlefield against an invading Ottoman force, yet
still did not use them against their foes. There is a lesson here, one that we have seen
before. In time, the inability or moral refusal of the Mamluks to harness superior
weapons ultimately led to their downfall. The society that did not use the gun
would be annihilated, from distance, by stronger Ottoman forces that did. The
victors were those who embraced the disturbingly distant and easy method of
killing. Indeed, the Mamluks were just one of many states to suffer defeat during
the 16th and 17th century, in part because of their rejection of firearms. The
Iranian Safavid dynasty was reluctant to use such weapons, and were defeated in
battle by the Ottomans in the 16th century – until they themselves adopted these
weapons. And the British and French colonial campaigns in Africa – such as the
Anglo-Zulu War of 1879, in which the British used the Gatling gun (a proto
machine gun) – provide reminders of how guns have been used to wipe out foes en
masse and at distance. Yet, when it comes to weaponry, what goes around comes
around, and it was not long before the world’s victorious empires would be turning
these weapons on each other.

A
mid the trenches of the First World War, ‘no man’s land’ was
a space between opposing enemies where all humans feared
An inlaid bronze
to tread. Some chose to face execution rather than raise their
14th-century basin
shows Mamluk heads above the parapets. ‘Cowardice’ was punishable by
soldiers. The firing squad. But what made these armies stop in their tracks
Mamluks’ refusal to and dig into the earth for safety? What made soldiers lose
fire guns exposed
them to defeat by
their minds, refuse to fight, and flee the field of battle – even
enemies who did though that act would also mean death for the men involved?
use such weapons The answers were perched on the lips of trenches, surrounded by sandbags:
machine guns. Fast, accurate, and powerful, these
were ideal weapons when facing lesser and weaker
armed forces. One of the first, invented around
1884, was the Maxim gun, named for its Ameri-
can-British inventor Hiram Stevens Maxim. With
a rate of fire surpassing 500 rounds per minute, it
was used to annihilate whole armies during the
British and German colonial campaigns. Yet
when these empires ultimately met each other on
the battlefields of Europe, the machine gun would
not be their saviour. Instead, it would cause the

By the 16th century, more-powerful

BRIDGEMAN

guns replaced the bow as the

most effective distance weapons
Æ
43
 deaths of millions of their youngest, fittest and brightest. More than 41 million
were killed and wounded in the First World War, including more than 300,000
Americans. And in the postwar era, other rising world powers – especially the US
– looked to make war more ‘civilised’, turning to new weapons of ‘morality’,
‘distance’, and ‘sterile precision’ to help make war safer, winnable, ‘better’.

I
ntroduced in 1918, the first pilotless aerial attack weapon was developed
by the United States to mitigate the need to put its young soldiers at risk
on the battlefield. Often called an early drone or cruise missile, the
creators of the Kettering Bug referred to it as an ‘aerial torpedo’. The
intention was to provide the US military with a weapon to comply with
the ‘Over, not through’ principle that emerged after the First World War.
The idea was to bomb enemy factories with pinpoint precision, the hope
being that an enemy’s war-making capacity could be destroyed from the air without
any human having to face that foe (or its machine guns) on the battlefield.
The ‘Bug’, as it came to be known, was one part of the project to remove the
human from war. It was an unmanned device, set on rails, that would speed up
along and take off from a ramp. When its engine had gone through a pre-set number
of revolutions, the wings would detach and the Bug would plunge to earth “like a
bird of prey”. In reality, the short range and unreliability of this futuristic machine
made it of very little strategic use, but it marked the start of a search for high-tech
solutions to the risks and dilemmas of ground warfare that had been triggered by the
destructiveness of the machine gun. Such ambitions continue today within
American warfare. The modern robotic drone is simply the latest manifestation of
this drive to remove the human from harm’s way and to ‘perfect’ or sanitise warfare.
So, how does this ambition manifest itself in modern warfare? Today, when
looking to recruit new drone pilots and sensor operators, the United States Air Force
focuses on the perceived virtues and high-tech capabilities of the drone to draw in
British soldiers aim new blood. Recruits can be as young as 17 years old. Being part of the team that
a Maxim gun during
controls a state-of-the-art flying robot is badged as an exciting opportunity, but also
the First World War.
The large-scale a worthy one. The argument is that drones are ‘better’ than conventional weapons.
carnage wreaked Not only are they high-tech, futuristic and powerful but – thanks to their pin-point
by machine guns in precision missiles, ability to loiter for long periods, and sophisticated video equip-
this conflict caused
world powers to
ment – they can also distinguish between friend and foe on the ground, purportedly
seek more ‘civilised’ killing the ‘bad guys’ and saving the good.
ways of waging war What is important about the drone, of course, is that the pilot and operator are
not physically near the conflict they are involved in. They are vital to success, and
the drone itself is in the region of combat, yet it does not have a pilot inside. Instead,
the drone’s controllers are usually thousands of miles
ALAMY

away from the actual ‘battlefield’. At the end of the day

they commute home. So they are able to deploy deadly

In 1918, the first pilotless aerial attack

weapon was developed by the US to reduce
the need to risk soldiers on the battlefield

44
 force globally without risking their own lives – one of the unique selling points of
the drone. US political and military elites can choose to confront perceived threats
around the world without directly risking the lives of young Americans. Neverthe-
less, not everyone agrees that this form of warfare is of benefit to humanity.
Those of conscience, such as Desmond Tutu, Archbishop Emeritus of Cape
Town, argue that armed drones undermine the moral standards and humanity
that American society holds dear. In 2013, Tutu stated in an open letter to the
editor of the New York Times that such policies are equivalent to apartheid,
emphasising the dehumanising characteristics of the weapons that kill at such
distance. Yet the robot campaigns continue apace, allowing one side in a conflict
to kill another without any risk or fear of death. Like the arrow and spear or the
crossbow and gun, they allow a dominant force to prevail and a weaker enemy to
be extinguished – all without having to uncomfortably look an adversary in the eye.
In recent years, at least 542 lethal drone strikes were launched during the
leadership of US president Barack Obama, and drone strikes are continuing under
President Trump, while also being used in new and ever-more-indiscriminate ways.
The death toll of non-combatants from US drone strikes is uncertain: official
estimates number in the hundreds, and unofficial estimates in the thousands.
But this is the point. The aim is to kill at such a distance that we cannot count
the number of those we kill, let alone know their names, their beliefs, their intent.
A worrying trend to note about the future of war is that the United States is no
longer alone in this practice of remote killing. Not only have at least 18 state actors
acquired armed drones, but the use of a drone is now open to anyone with the
ability to turn an off-the-shelf quadcopter into an airborne improvised explosive
device. As a result, we have entered a new, long-desired epoch of warfare – one in
which distancing weapons can take lives without risking that of the aggressor. Boys inspect the
wreckage of a car
Think back to the machine gun, though – surely the question we must ask is: will hit by a drone strike
such ‘advances’ come back to haunt those who first promoted their use? in Yemen, 2017. At
least 18 state actors

W
have now acquired
armed drones

hat does all this tell us

about humanity, and
about war? It is the future
that the human race has
long been building
towards: to kill, yet to
never really feel what it
is like to take a life. To remove the need for face-to-face
combat, the risk of visceral battle, from the killing loop.
Throughout history our developments in weapons
technologies have allowed us to carry out the exercise of
killing in an increasingly detached, sterile and disconnected manner.
This is not to say that killing is ever ‘clean’. For those on the receiving end, it
is always heinous and horrific. But it is easier to carry out the act at a distance as
we are disconnected from the process. With our enemy at a distance, it also makes
it easier for us to dehumanise our foe,
to believe racially inspired myths. James Rogers is assistant professor in war
And it becomes easier to conduct studies at the University of Southern Denmark
REUTERS

killings that were once only carried and a fellow at LSE. He is on Twitter:
out as a last resort and for survival. @DrJamesRogers

45
 ALAMY

A 1927 Chinese propaganda poster depicting, top centre, the country’s nationalist leader Sun Yat-sen,
who had died two years earlier. The poster exhorts people to continue his revolutionary work

46
 WARFARE AND
CONFLICT

Are
revolutions
doomed
to failure?
After the end of communist rule in eastern Europe and the break-up
of the Soviet Union, many observers suggested that revolutions never
really achieve their objectives. But how do we judge the long-term
outcome of such endeavours – and have any been truly successful?
Six historians debate the legacies of major revolts and uprisings

Æ
47
 Charles Townshend Evan Mawdsley

“Revolutions have “Whether Russia’s 1917

far-reaching, complex October Revolution failed
and maybe contradictory in an Animal Farm sense
effects that work out over is open to dispute”
very long periods of time”
The Russian Revolution might seem to be
a classic case of failure. The autocracy of
Revolution has meant many things – Emperor Nicholas II was overthrown in
except perhaps its literal meaning: a February 1917, only to be replaced by
full-circle return to a previous state. In Lenin’s ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’ in
the modern world it has meant change, October 1917 and by Stalin’s even worse
usually dramatic and rapid, often rule of terror in the 1920s and 1930s. The
accelerated by violence. It has been events and outcome were caricatured in
applied to sudden seizures of power, but George Orwell’s allegorical Animal Farm,
also to vast processes such as industriali- which ends with the revolutionary pigs turning into humans,
sation and technological development. and the restoration of ‘Manor Farm’ – the old order.
(The United States even called its development of so-called In truth, things were more complicated than that precis
‘smart weapons’ the Revolution in Military Affairs.) suggests. Revolutions can fail or succeed in different ways.
Variations in meaning bear directly on the issue of success The earlier revolution of 1905 failed because the Tsar made
or failure. In ‘palace revolutions’ (sometimes mistakenly concessions to the liberals, and because the forces of order
labelled coups d’état), in which one general might seize remained intact. The Russian Revolution of February 1917
power from another, the issue has been resolved after a short failed within eight months because the centrist (Duma)
military clash. But such revolutions cause little change, politicians who overthrew the Tsar did not satisfy popular
beyond that of the Swiss bank account into which the economic demands, especially land reform, and did not bring
proceeds of political power are transferred. Revolutions that an end to an unpopular war. The Russian Revolution of
have attempted to transform whole societies – the great October 1917 surely did not fail, at least politically, in the sense
French, Russian and Chinese uprisings – have far-reaching, that the radical group that brought it about remained in power
complex and maybe contradictory effects that work until 1991. The Bolsheviks (later Communists) avoided
themselves out over very long periods of time. failure, in the short term at least, by addressing the issues
Because of this, success and failure can be hard to of land hunger and war-weariness. At the same time, they
calibrate. Did the French Revolution fail? That’s certainly ruthlessly dealt with the forces of counter-revolution and
what Beethoven thought when he struck out the dedication disorder in the subsequent civil war.
of his Eroica symphony to Napoleon Bonaparte – but Revolutions sometimes fail because they are attacked by
Bonaparte was a child of the revolution, and his dictatorship counter-revolutionaries from beyond national borders.
was a world away from the Bourbon monarchy. After the Revolutionary ‘Soviet’ Russia benefited from the impact of
revolution, power derived from the nation, not God; the First World War and its aftermath, which made effective
democracy was built into it. Though many French people foreign intervention impractical. Having said that, Lenin’s
today see the revolution as a bloodstained disaster, they still revolution was a failure, at least in its own ‘internationalist’
hold to the ‘republican values’ it established. terms, because it could not immediately trigger similar uprisings
A century ago, the Irish revolution promised not just to free in other countries (although it did do so in the late 1940s).
Ireland from British rule, but to remake it as a new Gaelic Whether the October Revolution failed in an Animal Farm
society. This carried a price: partition, confining independence sense – by merely replacing the old ruling class with another
to 26 out of 32 Irish counties. Yet its centrepiece, the revival of oppressive and corrupt one – is more open to dispute. The
the language, was never achieved, even if it still complicates Communists did not create a truly egalitarian polity, but they
the politics of Northern Ireland. Failure is relative; revolutions did bring about remarkable upward social mobility and mass
may not fail entirely, but most end in disillusionment. education. The fact that this was implemented alongside Stalin’s
cruel repression does not necessarily make it less revolutionary.
Charles Townshend is professor emeritus of international history
at Keele University, and author of The Republic: The Fight for Irish Evan Mawdsley was professor of international history at the University of
Independence (Allen Lane, 2013) Glasgow. His books include World War II: A New History (CUP, 2009)

48
 Marisa Linton

“When the French

revolutionaries chose war,
they risked the revolution
coming under the control
of the army’s leaders”
History is littered with instances of revolts
that never became revolutions. Most
uprisings of the oppressed are ruthlessly
crushed by the ruling group. So what does
it take for a revolt to become a revolution
An 18th-century cartoon satirises reactions to Louis XVI’s attempt
– if we define ‘revolution’ as a political
to flee France. “The French Revolution shows what can happen when regime change accompanied by social
the state fails on a catastrophic scale,” argues Marisa Linton transformation that empowers the poor?
If the ruling group remains united, decisive
and, above all, retains control of the army, then internal revolt
is unlikely to succeed, at least without foreign intervention.
The French Revolution of 1789 shows what can happen
when the state fails on a catastrophic scale. Financial crisis and
the collapse of the old regime paved the way for the most
shattering revolution the world had yet seen. It became, for
many observers, the archetypal revolution. “Bliss was it in that
dawn to be alive,” wrote Wordsworth. Liberty and equality
became the watchwords, along with ‘fraternity’ – love of one’s
fellow man. So how did this idealism collapse within four years
into war, civil war and terror?
This scenario was not inevitable, though made more likely
by the reluctance of the king to co-operate with the new
regime. His attempt to flee France, along with the revolution-
aries’ reckless decision to export the revolution abroad in a
foreign war, fatally undermined the constitutional monarchy,
leading to renewed revolution – and the terror that made a
mockery of the revolutionaries’ humanitarian aims.
Revolutions are overwhelming experiences for the people
who live through them, including their leaders. By 1795,
many of the leaders in France were either dead, in exile or
exhausted – cynical and disillusioned with idealism. As one
leader wrote: “We have lived six centuries in six years”.
Revolutions are, by their nature, politically destabilising.
When the revolutionaries chose war, they risked the revolution
coming under the control of the army’s leaders. Ultimately, the
revolution was destroyed by an opportunistic and unscrupu-
lous general who seized his chance to become a military
dictator. Many more people would die in Napoleon’s wars
than died under the revolutionary terror.
GETTY IMAGES

Marisa Linton is associate professor in history at Kingston University,

Workers and soldiers’ deputies meet in the former duma (state assembly)
building in Petrograd (St Petersburg) in 1917. Evan Mawdsley disputes the and author of Choosing Terror: Virtue, Friendship and Authenticity in the
idea that “Communists merely replaced the old ruling class with another” French Revolution (Oxford University Press, 2013) Æ
49
 Michael A McDonnell Robert Bickers

“Even many patriots “The preservation of

were disappointed with China’s territorial integrity
the revolution’s outcome” triumphed over the
The American Revolution is often rightly
aspirations of its people”
seen as an example of a ‘successful’ rev-
olution. A colonial resistance movement The 1911 revolution in China began with a
against imperial taxes snowballed into farce and ended in tragedy. Launched
a successful war for independence that when a cigarette-smoking bomb-maker
resulted in the creation of a union of blew himself and his comrades to smither-
states, in the federal constitution – and eens, it finished when the first man
in the founding of a nation. democratically elected to be prime minister
But we need to think carefully about was assassinated by the president’s secret
how we define ‘success’, and from whose perspective we do service at a railway station in Shanghai.
so. Few patriots who protested against the Stamp Act in 1765 The bombing unleashed the fury of
envisioned independence. Most were proud Britons at the 20 years of ethno-nationalist propaganda that saw thousands
time. And the myriad forces that led to that break also drove slaughtered in pogroms, as the uprising advanced across the
many to stay loyal to the British empire. Few remember the sprawling Qing empire ruled by the Manchu dynasty. As chaos
revolution as a civil war, but fighting among colonists across spread, a great fear grew that foreign powers – which, barely
the new states was endemic, and some 70,000 colonists and 11 years earlier, had sent troops into northern China to suppress
enslaved people fled during the conflict. the anti-colonial Boxer uprising (1899–1901)– would seize the
African-Americans and Native Americans would also moment to carve up the country. Like so many other revolu-
contest the success of the revolution. Many enslaved Ameri- tions, this one ended in uneasy compromise. The Manchu rulers
cans already embraced patriot rhetoric that stressed liberty abdicated and a new strongman, Yuan Shikai – once head of
over tyranny, but were deeply disappointed that the revolu- an important Qing army – became president of a new republic.
tionary settlement did not include wholesale abolition, despite China was saved from extinction, and the republic incorporated
the fact that many enslaved people fought for their masters all of the lands ruled by the Manchus (except Tibet and Mongo-
against the British during the war. Thousands of others lia, which broke free). The former emperor was even allowed to
instead fought for and tried to escape to British lines where at keep the ‘Forbidden City’, his palace at the heart of the capital.
least some found freedom in far-flung places including But Yuan Shikai was no republican. Between December
Australia. Native Americans fought for their own independ- 1912 and January 1913, millions of voters selected an electoral
ence against founding fathers who coveted their land and college that chose a new national assembly – the first and only
waged a war of conquest in the west. It was only the constitu- time that mainland China has held anything approaching a
tion of 1789 that gave the newly united states sufficient force to free, democratic election. The revolutionaries won the vote, but
overcome the still powerful native nations on their borders. in March 1913 their prime minister designate was assassinated.
Finally, even many patriots were disappointed with the The murder sparked a ‘Second Revolution’, pitching the
outcome. Radicals who embraced abolition, a broader suffrage nationalist revolutionaries against Yuan Shikai. They were
and more representative assemblies were often defeated by con- defeated, the revolution failed, and 40 years of political
servative forces in the individual states when new governments disintegration and vicious strife followed.
were formed. And though the federal constitution is often seen The preservation of China’s territorial integrity triumphed
as a revolution in politics and political thinking, its creators over the aspirations of its people. But the incomplete revolution
deliberately set out to curb the more democratic tendencies of prompted a far darker turn. It seemed to many that it was
the state governments in the name of stability. China’s culture itself – not Yuan, nor foreign influences – that
Americans still wrestle with the revolution’s ambiguous obstructed all hope of progress. To remove that obstruction,
legacy: the vagaries of the electoral college, state versus federal the revolutions that unfolded during the years in which Mao
rights, and the inequalities perpetuated by the creation of a Zedong controlled the country aimed to destroy every last
nation rhetorically dedicated to freedom, but built by enslaved vestige of the old order. Decades of agony would ensue.
African-American labourers on Native American lands.
Robert Bickers is professor of history at the University of Bristol,
Michael A McDonnell is associate professor in history at the and author of Out of China: How the Chinese Ended the Era of Western
University of Sydney Domination (Allen Lane, 2017)

50
 Charles Forsdick

“A revolt of the enslaved

turned into a disciplined
revolutionary movement”
Although the Haitian Revolution has been
described as the “only successful slave
revolt in history”, it is equally associated
with the inevitability of revolutionary
failure. Western media often perpetuate
an account of Haitian history that implies
a teleology of decline. An extreme version
of this was evoked following the January
2010 earthquake, which the US funda-
A teapot protests the 1765 Stamp Act – one of several
taxation measures imposed on American colonies by mentalist preacher Pat Robertson blamed on a “pact with the
the British that sparked unrest and fuelled activities devil” (an allusion to the August 1791 vodou ceremony seen as
that evolved into the American Revolution the trigger for the revolution). According to such a narrative,
the revolution represents a tipping point in the passage from
colonial abundance to postcolonial impoverishment.
Such an account downplays the extent to which – by most
criteria – the Haitian Revolution was, in fact, a major success.
The wealth of the ‘pearl of the Antilles’ depended on a brutal
system of plantation slavery that denied the freedom and human-
ity of the enslaved. The revolution represented an extension of
the French revolutionary spirit of 1789 but was, more important-
ly, the culmination of resistance evident throughout Atlantic
slavery. Under the leadership of Toussaint Louverture, a revolt of
the enslaved turned into a disciplined revolutionary movement
that defeated French, British and Spanish forces, delivering
universal emancipation from slavery (decades before French
abolition in 1848) and liberation from colonial France.
In the revolution itself were, nevertheless, seeds of the failures
that followed in its wake. Central to these were decisions
regarding the systems required to replace plantation slavery.
Afro-Trinidadian historian CLR James saw Louverture’s tragic
flaw as his inability to communicate this to the people. Inde-
pendence was followed by civil war associated with government
based on skin tone, by diplomatic ostracisation as world powers
sought to quarantine the impact of Haiti’s revolution, by the
crippling debt imposed by France in return for recognition
of independence in 1825. Despite attempts to ‘silence’ its
importance, the impact of the revolution is, nevertheless, evident
BRIDGEMAN ART LIBRARY/GETTY IMAGES

in abolitionism, anti-slavery revolts and other political radical-

ism throughout the 19th century. The limitations of the Haitian
Revolution are primarily associated with its failure to defend the
gains achieved. It has, though, continued to shape and inspire
political movements today, suggesting that, far from having
failed, the Haitian Revolution remains still unfinished.

Charles Forsdick is James Barrow Professor of French at the

An engraving of Toussaint Louverture, leader of the Haitian Revolution
that began as a slave revolt in 1791 but became a long-running and University of Liverpool, and co-author of Toussaint Louverture:
eventually successful battle for independence from the French A Black Jacobin in the Age of Revolutions (Pluto, 2017)

51
52 ILLUSTRATION BY DAVIDE BONAZZI
 NATIONS
IN FOCUS

Is Africa
a prisoner
of its
past?
The transatlantic slave trade, colonial domination and the ‘scramble
for Africa’ all had a profound impact on the continent’s economic,
political, social and cultural structures. But what is their legacy today?
Six historians share their opinions on how Africa’s past has
shaped what are often arbitrarily designated modern nations

Æ
53
 Emma Dabiri

“It is far easier to continue

the centuries-old trope
of African barbarity, or
at best incompetence”
During an appearance on Irish television,
controversy ensued after I suggested that
we don’t need any more “white saviours”
in Africa. To my great surprise, I was
immediately met with a comment about
“darkest Africa” from a fellow panellist.
Though this is a phrase with which
I am all too familiar, I have not heard it A cyclist passes a wall painted with the Coca-Cola logo in Uganda.
employed with any degree of seriousness in “Africans have survived the modernisation project; now they can
claim to be the first to experience the full destructive force of western
years. Nonetheless, it was a stark reminder that many continue neo-liberalist capitalism,” argues Alfred Zack-Williams
to perceive the continent thus.
As Hugh Trevor-Roper, the eminent Oxford professor of
history, declared in 1962: “Perhaps in the future there will be
some African history to teach. But at the present there is none –
there is only the history of the Europeans in Africa. The rest is
darkness… and darkness is not a subject of history.”
The fact remains that Africa’s past has been almost entirely
obscured by an infrastructure that sought to – that seeks to –
legitimise the damage that Europe did to it, and to its people:
devastation that the forces of global capital continue to perpetu-
ate through various means of exploitation and extraction.
Africa remains a prisoner of the lies told about its pre-
colonial past, and of the legacy of its colonial history. The
kidnapping of millions of able-bodied young people in their
prime, the destruction of complex societal organisation, the
decimation of often egalitarian and socially just spiritual belief
systems and philosophies – all these paved the way for the
creation of fictitious states. They allowed the engineering of
narrow, fixed, nationalistic ethnic identities to replace the far
more fluid affiliations that existed previously, as well as the
installation of despotic leaders supporting the interests of
political and economic elites in the global north.
Any meaningful acknowledgement of this remains a long
way off. Instead it is far easier to continue the centuries-old
trope of African barbarity, or at best incompetence, and the
myth of ‘well-intentioned’ intervention (though Africans,
mysteriously, rarely seem to benefit from these interventions).
When you next hear the phrase “darkest Africa”, or any of
its multiple iterations, reflect on the words of Nigeria’s first
Nobel Laureate, Wole Soyinka: “The darkness so readily
GETTY IMAGES/ALAMY

attributed to the ‘Dark Continent’ may yet prove to be nothing

but the wilful cataract in the eye of the beholder.”
A wooden headdress featuring a representation of a slave trader
(with European-style hat) and an enslaved female figure. “Africa
Emma Dabiri is a social historian, writer, broadcaster, and the author remains a prisoner of the lies told about its pre-colonial past, and
of Don’t Touch My Hair (Allen Lane, 2019) of the legacy of its colonial history,” says Emma Dabiri

54
Alfred Zack-Williams Martin Meredith

“From the slave trade to “The new states of Africa

the colonial project, Afri- possessed no ethnic, class
cans have been impelled or ideological cement to
to adapt to new situations bind disparate peoples”
and political economies”
Sixty years after the dawn of Africa’s era of
independence, the colonial past continues
I have often contemplated this question: to have a profound impact on much of the
what would have been Africa’s destiny continent. Almost all of the modern states
had Christopher Columbus’s 1492 of Africa are artificial entities constructed
project not materialised? Columbus’s by European powers during their scramble
arrival in the Americas gave a fillip to for territory at the end of the 19th century.
‘early globalisation’, yet for Africans it By the time the scramble was over, 10,000
marked the beginning of global humilia- African polities had been merged into
tion and the loss of political autonomy. 40 European colonies or protectorates.
The ensuing Atlantic slave trade caused The maps used to carve up the African continent were
millions of Africa’s most able people to be carted away from mostly inaccurate; large areas were described simply as terra
their homelands. The result was economic, political and incognita. When drawing up the boundaries of new territories,
social disruption from which Africa is yet to fully recover, as officials frequently resorted to drawing straight lines on the
witnessed by internecine conflicts impacting on Africa’s social, map, paying scant attention to the myriad monarchies,
political and economic development. Furthermore, the chiefdoms and other societies on the ground. Most colonies
upheaval accompanying the slave trade reduced the ability of encompassed scores of diverse groups that shared no common
the pre-existing formations to resist colonial infiltration. history, culture, language or religion. Some spanned the great
Though the slave trade set in train material and moral divide between the desert regions of the Sahara and the belt of
devastation, as the noted historian of Africa JD Fage pointed tropical forests to the south, throwing together Muslim and
out, the rise of states such as Benin, Ashanti and Dahomey non-Muslim in latent hostility.
is closely connected with demand for slaves by Europeans. Colonial rule, imposed with authoritarian vigour, held
Dahomey made a quick transition from a slave port to together the new territories effectively enough. But after little
a major palm-oil market when slavery became illegal. more than 70 years, faced with a rising tide of anti-colonial
Equally, the Gold Coast was transmogrified into a major protest and insurrection, European governments handed over
cocoa exporter with the same enthusiasm with which to independence movements.
Africans appropriated western education. The new states of Africa, however, were not ‘nations’. They
These are examples of how Africans have confirmed the possessed no ethnic, class or ideological cement to help bind
edict of Heraclitus of Ephesus: “You cannot step twice into their disparate peoples, no strong historical and social identities
the same river.” Far from being a prisoner of its past, Africa upon which to build. For a relatively brief period, the anti-
has been all too ready to try new ideas, commodities and colonial cause provided a unity of purpose. But once the mo-
forms of governance, as well as to accommodate ‘strangers’, mentum to oust colonial rule had subsided, so other loyalties and
some of whom have surreptitiously transformed themselves ambitions came thrusting to the fore, precipitating ethnic rivalry
into their oppressors. and tension, often exploited by politicians for their own ends.
These references to Africa’s early encounters with Europe From the outset, African leaders became preoccupied with
point to the fact that, though its past has not been all auspi- the problems of political control, of holding the state together,
cious, Africans have not been contemptuous of new ideas. of simply staying in power. Decades have been lost in internal
From the slave trade to the colonial project, Africans have been conflict and instability. Whatever challenges they have faced,
impelled to adapt to new situations and political economies. though, African governments have remained adamant that the
They have survived the modernisation project. Now they can boundaries they inherited from colonial rulers should remain
claim to be the first to experience the full destructive force of in place. The past thus continues to cast its shadow.
western neo-liberalist capitalism, thanks to neo-colonialism.
Martin Meredith is a historian, journalist and writer. His books include
Alfred Zack-Williams is emeritus professor of sociology at the Fortunes of Africa: A 5,000 Year History of Wealth, Greed and Endeavour
University of Central Lancashire (Simon & Schuster, 2014) Æ
55
 Gus Casely-Hayford Marika Sherwood

“Colonialism was under- “Lines were drawn on

written by bad history. the map to define colonies.
We should set right those Histories of warfare
appalling histories with and historical boundaries
a new body of thinking” were ignored”
Africa is as much a victim of a construct- Africa has four ‘pasts’: the period before
ed past as it is a casualty of its actual the trade in enslaved Africans, the trade
history – and we have a responsibility itself, colonial rule, and ‘independence’.
to set right both of those. Before the 16th century, Africa was
Much of our understanding of divided into what were effectively
Africa’s past – and, indeed, its present – nations. Some had hierarchical govern-
was confected during the Enlighten- ments under chiefs or kings; others were
ment. During the 18th and 19th what we might call socialist, with
centuries, philosophers and intellectuals decisions made by elders. Some
skewed and tainted our perception of Africa and its cultures. ambitious kings enlarged kingdoms by conquest. Trade
The words of men such as Locke served to justify slavery, the between nations was common.
thinking of men such as Hegel and Kant intellectually In medieval times, slavery was as common in Africa as
underwrote colonialism, and the theories of men such as in Europe. In Africa the enslaved usually worked in their
Hume were used to justify racism. Hume famously observed masters’ fields, and in many cultures were absorbed into their
of people of African descent that “not a single one was ever owners’ families. Presumably, when the Europeans began
found who presented greatness in art or science or any other trading in humans in Africa in the early to mid-16th century,
praiseworthy quality”, pointing out that “so fundamental is those selling slaves to them imagined that the people they
the difference between these two races of man, and it appears exchanged for European goods (often guns) would receive
to be as great in regard to mental capacities as in colour”. the same treatment.
Africa and peoples of African descent have struggled to As Europe’s empires grew, more enslaved Africans were
break free from these appalling perspectives. The intellectu- required. Trading stations were set up along the African
al underpinnings of this thinking continue to cloud so coast, and deals concluded with local kings and chiefs. Slaves
much of our current educational approach. You see the were the prisoners of war resulting from conflicts now fought
legacies of these terribly jaundiced views in the way that only for their acquisition. So there were many wars, and
Africa is still framed in museums, the way it is reflected in kidnapping raids deep into the interior. It is estimated that
the media and taught in our schools. 12.5 million Africans were exported, and that around four
Simultaneously, it must not be forgotten that running million died in the process of enslavement.
alongside these unfortunate phenomena are the actual With the arrival of machinery and the emigration of
profound legacies of slavery, colonialism, post-independence millions from Europe, the need for slaves in the Americas
wars and political mismanagement. Thankfully, these are ceased. What Europe then wanted from Africa was its raw
issues that are increasingly written about, and huge energy materials. So in 1884 the great European powers met in
is quite rightly deployed in addressing them. But the west Berlin to divide Africa among themselves. Lines were
owes Africa another debt. Colonialism was underwritten drawn on the map to define colonies. Histories of warfare
by bad history – and we should now work to set right and historical boundaries were ignored. The British
those appalling histories with a new body of thinking that imposed ‘indirect rule’: kings and chiefs were ‘persuaded’
better addresses the indigenous pre-colonial stories and to keep the peace and supply labourers. In many instances
traditional African cultures. these wars flared up after independence; for example,
the vicious Nigerian civil war (or Biafran War) of the late
1960s was fought to prevent the secession of the Igbo
Gus Casely-Hayford is the inaugural director of V&A East, set peoples from Nigeria.
to open in 2023. He’s also and the writer and presenter of two series
of Lost Kingdoms of Africa on BBC Four, and Tate Britain’s Great Marika Sherwood is a historian and author specialising in issues
British Walks, which aired on Sky Arts of slavery and colonial Africa

56
 Hakim Adi

“Military intervention
is just one characteristic
of the ‘new scramble
for Africa’”
In 1945, Kwame Nkrumah, Jomo
Kenyatta and other key figures in African
independence movements gathered at the
famous Manchester Pan-African Con-
gress. They demanded an end to Africa’s
colonial and arbitrarily imposed borders,
condemned the alien political institutions
imposed on the continent by Europe’s
colonial rulers, and demanded an end to
an economic system that they referred to as the “monopoly of
capital”. Nearly 75 years later, millions of Africans still have no
power to determine the borders, political institutions and eco-
nomic system that hold the continent in their grip. In this sense,
Africa is still struggling against the legacy of its colonial past.
However, today Africa has additional problems. There’s the
military intervention of the US Africa Command (Africom),
a key weapon in the United States’ intense economic and
military rivalry with China and other emerging powers
in a new scramble for Africa’s resources and increasingly
important markets. Then there is Nato’s military intervention,
which has resulted in regime change and total destabilisation
Agoli-agbo, the last king of Dahomey (now Benin), greets his subjects
in 1894, flanked by Frenchmen. His predecessor, Béhanzin, went into
in Libya but also evident in many other African countries.
exile after defeat by the French, who incorporated Dahomey into the Such intervention has been used in former French colonies
vast colonial territory of French West Africa Mali and Côte d’Ivoire, and increasingly in the ‘war on terror’
in other parts of west Africa.
Military intervention is just one characteristic of the ‘new
scramble for Africa’, however. The impact of neo-liberal
globalisation is also evident in the many examples of neo-
colonial economic intervention and domination. Enslaving
economic ‘aid’ from powerful nations is used as subsidy for
multinational companies, and to force African countries to
privatise their utilities, or to purchase products or services
abroad at the expense of their citizens. There are also the many
unequal ‘partnership’ agreements – for example, the Cotonou
Agreement signed with the EU in 2000, includes an economic
dimension but also demands that African countries submit
themselves to the International Criminal Court, which appears
to try predominantly Africans and has no interest in the crimes
committed during the colonial era.
The anti-colonial struggles of millions of Africans have led to
much progress since 1945 – yet the struggle continues.
GETTY IMAGES

Hakim Adi is professor of the history of Africa and the African diaspora
Biafran demonstrators call for secession in July 1968 during the Nigerian
civil war. ‘Nations’ created by colonial powers forced together disparate at the University of Chichester, and co-author of Pan-African History
ethnic groups, leading to numerous conflicts after independence (Routledge, 2003)

57
58 ILLUSTRATION BY DAVIDE BONAZZI
 NATIONS
IN FOCUS

Has Russia
always
played by
its own
rules?
Following Russia’s purported interference in the 2016 US
presidential election and suspected role in the poisoning
of an intelligence officer in Salisbury in 2018, nine historians
offer their opinions on whether such actions reflect Russia’s
historical attitude to internationally accepted conventions

Æ
59
 Janet Hartley Helen Rappaport

“The common perception “Russia’s isolation remains

in western and central largely self-imposed – a
Europe was that Russia reaction to a sense of being
was not ‘one of us’” encircled by enemies”
“Russia is a European state.” Catherine Queen Victoria had trouble making sense
the Great, Empress of Russia, made this of Russia. In 1838, her prime minister
statement in 1767 in her Instruction – Viscount Melbourne defined its fortress
a document presented as a guide, at mentality. Russia, he explained, “retires
home and abroad, to the fundamentally into inaccessibility, into her snows and
‘European’ forms of government shared frosts”. Appalled at Russia’s “total want of
by Russia with other ‘civilised’ states of principle”, Victoria saw it as a threat.
central and western Europe. Catherine Russians were “so unscrupulous” and
was a German princess, but her “totally antagonistic to England”.
assumptions were shared by her predecessor, Peter the Great, Aspirations had been different when Peter the Great, looking
who attempted to modernise Russian society and institutions westward in the early 18th century, had sought to modernise the
along western European lines, as well as her grandson backward Russian state. But his was an empire that remained
Alexander I, who saved ‘Europe’ from the tyranny of stubbornly different: strange, semi-Asiatic and, quite simply, not
Napoleon, and all of the tsars up to 1917. Imperial Russia was like us. Seeing off the Swedes and the French, Russia resisted
part of Europe, and therefore followed European rules. encroachments by the west and its rule of law. Tsaritsa Alexandra
How did this Europeanness manifest itself? Russia shared summed it up during the 1900s, saying that the Russians didn’t
European Christian traditions and participated in all forms understand democracy – they understood only autocratic rule.
of European culture. European ideas and philosophy – on The Soviet imposition of the Warsaw Pact, the comprehen-
forms of government, society, crime and punishment – were sive defence treaty between most eastern European communist
considered relevant to Russia. Russia followed the norms of states, in the post Second-World-War years underlined a
European diplomacy and was an accepted member of the determination to resist the encroachment of Nato and its liberal
European states system. Russian armies fought in the same values. Despite brief periods of rapprochement during the
manner as European armies. Furthermore, the tsars conscious- glasnost era under Gorbachev, and after the 1991 fall of com-
ly copied European institutions, laws and noble titles. They munism, its continuing isolation remained largely self-imposed
deliberately moulded noble and urban society so that their – a reaction to a sense of being encircled by enemies.
subjects behaved, and even looked, like west Europeans. A recent manifestation of Russia’s attitude to rules has been
There were, however, two problems. First, implementation in sport doping scandals. Rules are there to be flouted, and
of European-style institutions was always limited by distinc- – with an unerring conviction of its inviolability to punish-
tive Russian features: the sheer size of the empire, which made ment (beyond economic sanctions) – Russia has continued to
implementation of change difficult; the existence of serfdom act in breach of international law and human rights: annexing
until 1861, which restricted social and economic development; Crimea, the support of Ukrainian separatist forces and of Assad
the unwillingness of the tsars to limit their own powers until in Syria. The world has protested – to no avail. Russia continues
forced to do so in 1906 after the previous year’s revolution; the to play only to its old, entrenched Soviet rules of engagement.
slow evolution of a legal consciousness and professional civil Recent events in Salisbury have prompted talk of a renewal of
service. Second, a common perception in western and central the old enmities of the Cold War. But in truth they never went
Europe was that Russia was not ‘one of us’; it was backward away. The old nationalism of the tsars has been resurrected with
and not to be trusted. However much it tried to follow, or con- the inexorable rise of Vladimir Putin – a man bent on consoli-
sidered it was following, European rules it was never accepted dating the regime entirely to his own agenda, as manifested in
as a fully European state. This uneasy relationship continued the antidemocratic Soviet tactics of murder, provocation and
until Soviet Russia broke the accepted rules of diplomacy in intimidation. As a Russian once observed to the 19th-century
1918, threatened world revolution and went its own way. German diplomat Count Münster: “Every country has its own
constitution. Ours is absolutism moderated by assassination”.
Janet Hartley is professor of international history at the London
School of Economics and Political Science. Her books include Helen Rappaport is a writer and historian, author of books including
Siberia: A History of the People (Yale University Press, 2014) The Race to Save the Romanovs (Hutchinson, 2018)

60
 David V Gioe and Michael S Goodman

“From the Russian perspec-

tive, there is no statute of
limitations on betrayal”
On 4 March 2018, former Soviet military
intelligence officer Sergei Skripal and his
daughter Yulia were found unresponsive in
Salisbury, southern England, most likely
poisoned with Novichok, a nerve agent
known to be in the Russian inventory.
According to press accounts, Skripal
served British intelligence for at least a
decade, handing over information that was
damaging to Russia. Skripal was arrested and in 2006 convicted of
treason in Russia, but in 2010 was exchanged in a spy swap between
Russia, the UK and the United States. He was resettled in the south
of England and kept a relatively low profile, but was not in hiding.
Moscow has a long history of murdering perceived enemies of the
state in faraway places. Those cooperating with the west, especially
in intelligence, have been targeted for assassination in particular. In
1937, recently defected Soviet intelligence officer Ignace Reiss was
executed in Switzerland; his friend and former colleague Walter
Krivitsky defected a month later and was killed in Washington DC
in 1941. Domestically, Russian assassinations have taken various
forms that are intended as gruesome political theatre as well.
Perceived enemies of the Russian state, as during the Soviet era
before it, have met their ends in many ways. Though being pushed
out of windows, hung or bludgeoned are terrifying ways to die, the
Russian Empress Catherine II (The Great), painted by Johann Baptist
Lampi the Elder c1793. She continued efforts by her predecessor, Russian fascination with assassination by poison endures. Poison is
Peter the Great, to modernise Russia along European lines appealing for a few reasons. First, it is quiet and can be administered
in the open; second, the victim suffers, often publicly.
After the Skripal poisoning, UK foreign secretary Boris Johnson
stated that the “use of this nerve agent would represent the first use
of nerve agents on the continent of Europe since the Second World
War”. This ignores the 1978 murder by ricin of Bulgarian dissident
Georgi Markov on Waterloo Bridge. Although ricin may not
technically be a nerve agent, Johnson’s statement about changing
norms is a distinction without a difference given the various ways
Russians have been poisoned in Britain since Markov’s murder.
The Russian message to intelligence defectors, critical journalists
and oligarch rivals is clear – choose your team carefully and ask
yourself: can they protect you in perpetuity? From the Russian
perspective, there is no statute of limitations on betrayal. Simply
ALAMY/GETTY IMAGES

because one was traded to the west in a spy swap, as Skripal was,
does not mean forgiveness – nor that the betrayal was forgotten.

David V Gioe is history fellow at the Army Cyber Institute at the

US Military Academy at West Point, and a former CIA operations officer
Michael S Goodman is professor of intelligence and international affairs
A soldier waves a Russian flag from his tank on 21 August 1991 after
the failure of a military coup against Mikhail Gorbachev. His rule saw at the Department of War Studies, KCL. This analysis is theirs alone and does
the beginning of brief periods of rapprochement with the west not represent the position of their employers Æ
61
 Dina Gusejnova Geoffrey Roberts

“Russian foreign policy is “The Bolsheviks aimed to

no longer internationalist overthrow capitalism, but
but retaliatory” chose to use traditional
diplomacy and its rules”
Does the word ‘Russia’ describe the mod-
ern Russian Federation, the Soviet Union
and the Russian empire interchangeably? After the Bolsheviks seized power in Russia
Using such a shorthand highlights that in 1917 they aimed to break all the rules
these very different regimes maintained of international relations by promoting a
supreme authority over an overlapping global revolution to destroy capitalism and
geographical and cultural territory. But establish a worldwide socialist federation
when it comes to their global orientation, based on class solidarity.
the differences can be more significant. Bolshevik efforts to spread revolution
Under the imperial and Soviet regimes, the idea of were spearheaded by the Communist
a special destiny, associated with autocracy and Orthodoxy International (Comintern), and supported
as well as Soviet party doctrine, went hand in hand with actively by Soviet diplomats, who conducted themselves more
international engagement. Soft power was used extensively, like agitators than ambassadors. This coalescence of revolu-
from the Holy Alliance formed in 1815 by Russia, Austria and tion and diplomacy was reinforced by massive foreign power
Prussia, to the institutionalisation of international arbitration intervention in the Russian Civil War. An apocalyptic vision
at The Hague in the late 1890s, where Russian lawyers played of Soviet Russia grappling in a life-and-death struggle with
a central role, to the Soviet policies of cultural international- international capitalism became central to the Bolsheviks’
ism under the Commmunist International (Comintern). post-revolutionary identity.
The Russian Federation today has no such ideological Soviet diplomacy reverted to a more traditional role after
capacity. What is left are fragments of older ideological the civil war, when diplomatic recognition, trade deals and
frontiers: the notion of an Orthodox world, set against the peaceful coexistence were top priorities. Though the Bolsheviks
Ottoman, Catholic and Protestant spheres of domination, still aimed to overthrow world capitalism, they also chose to
or the Bolsheviks’ dismissive attitudes towards ‘western’ make use of traditional diplomacy and its rules. Indeed, by the
legal systems. Soviet practices of lending support to specific 1930s, when the Soviet Union joined the League of Nations,
political stakeholders in unstable regions through targeted Moscow was the foremost champion of state sovereignty and
secret intelligence interventions, established during the of the principle of non-interference in other states’ domestic
Spanish Civil War, continue to set precedents, though such affairs. Moscow continued to interfere in the internal affairs of
forms of conducting military affairs are not unique to Russia. other countries through the Comintern but Soviet diplomats
Like the FSB (successor of the KGB/NKVD), MI6 and the insisted that was purely a communist party matter. A century
FBI celebrated centenaries in the decade from 2008 to 2018. later the Putin regime remains committed to the principles
Imperial and Soviet Russia were internationalist in outlook enunciated by Soviet diplomacy in the 1920s. But there is no
even when they endorsed special paths; by contrast, today, equivalent of the Comintern, nor any discernible ambition to
Russian foreign policy takes the form of a retaliatory interven- universalise the politics and culture of contemporary Russia.
tionism. As the smaller states of the Warsaw Pact sought Like all great powers Russia pays lip service to state sovereign-
protection from the EU and Nato, post-Soviet Russia was left ty but defends its interests by every means, including meddling
with an uncertain patchwork of alliance-building reacting in other states’ internal affairs. Soviet Russia aspired to subvert
against both. There is no alternative ideological structure western liberal democracy, but Putin’s aims are much more
such as the Comintern, nor is Russia willing to shape existing limited and defensive: secure borders, friendly neighbours, and
institutions of international law to its own liking. Instead, recognition for Russia as a respected global political player.
its key political leaders, including the president, the banking In only one detail is Putin truly an ideological child of the
sector and the church, have developed personal stakes in the Bolshevik Revolution – in his determination to insulate Russia
global economy. As Russia is adapting to a changing world, from western-inspired machinations for regime change.
these Russians are truly playing by their own rules.
Geoffrey Roberts is emeritus professor of history at University College
Dina Gusejnova is assistant professor at the University of Sheffield and Cork. His books include The Soviet Union in World Politics: Coexistence,
author of European Elites and Ideas of Empire, 1917–1957 (CUP, 2016) Revolution and Cold War, 1945–1991 (Routledge, 1999)

62
ALAMY

“Capitalists of the world, unite!” – a satirical Russian poster from c1920 , reflecting Bolshevik attitudes towards
western nations. “An apocalyptic vision of Soviet Russia grappling in a life-and-death struggle with
international capitalism became central to the Bolsheviks’ post-revolutionary identity,” says Geoffrey Roberts Æ
63
 Catherine Danks

“Putin advocates a ‘man-

aged democracy’, stressing
patriotism and traditional
Russian values”

In the 1920s, Russian émigrés developed

a concept of Eurasianism as an ideological
alternative to Bolshevism. They believed
Russia was a unique civilisation, and that
it should neither adopt western liberalism
and democracy nor entirely reject it. By
drawing on Eurasia’s rich diversity and
incorporating the best from both the west
and east, they believed that Russia could
forge a third way best suited to its culture and traditions.
In the 1990s, post-communist Russia set out to become
a western-style, liberal, democratic, capitalist economy with
an Atlanticist foreign policy. This was a time of turmoil,
instability and very real economic hardship for most Russians.
According to one 1997 public opinion survey, 60% of
Russians rejected the Washington-inspired capitalist model
and believed that Russia was on the wrong path. A new form
of Eurasianism, which accused the west of deliberately foisting
Maxim Litvinov, People’s Commissar of Foreign Affairs for the Soviet
an alien reform package designed to fatally weaken Russia, Union, leaves a meeting in 1934 having secured admission to the League of
gained support amongst both communists and nationalists. Nations – from which the USSR was expelled in 1939 for invading Finland
Putin did not embrace this Neo-Eurasianism on becom-
ing president in 2000. He sought a constructive relationship
with the United States, began strengthening the state and
consolidated power in the Kremlin. However, by the time he
returned to office in 2012, Putin increasingly used Eura-
sianist ideas to provide a historical and cultural explanation
of why and how the US (the west) was seeking to weaken
Russia. In 2014, he even advised civil servants and politicians
to read Eurasianist writers who stressed Russia’s messianic role
in world history and the importance of the preservation and
restoration of Russia’s historical borders and of the Russian
Orthodox Church. Putin also advocates a “managed democ-
racy”, with a stress on patriotism and traditional Russian val-
ues. This resulted in a crackdown on foreign-funded NGOs,
legislation against “non-traditional” sexual practices and the
prohibition of “gay propaganda”.
Time will tell whether Putin has an enduring commitment
to Eurasianism, or whether he just recognises the usefulness of
GETTY IMAGES

a ready-made ideology that provides a handy rationale for his

main policy concerns. Putin is pragmatic and understands
power; while Eurasianism is useful, he will not abandon it.
A 19th-century painting of an orthodox church service. In 2014, Vladimir
Catherine Danks is a senior lecturer at Manchester Metropolitan Putin advised civil servants and politicians to read writings that stressed
University, specialising in Russian history and politics the importance of the preservation of the Russian Orthodox Church

64
Charlotte Alston Evan Mawdsley

“Soviet leaders engaged in “Those in charge of the

traditional diplomacy but Russian state have felt
also acted outside it” insecure in a way that
the leaders of ‘normal’
The question of whether Russia does, governments have not”
or should, conform to standards set by
western Europe has a long history. In
the 19th century, Russian statesmen and The question assumes that there are rules,
thinkers articulated competing visions and that some states are ‘normal’ and
of what Russia and its empire ought to others are not; both assumptions are
be. Should it aim to emulate western questionable. What follows, however,
‘civilisation’? Or should it embrace its accepts that Russia has behaved in
own traditions, and be a leader in its a fundamentally dissimilar way from
own sphere? At key moments in Russia’s history – in the other major European countries and the
revolutionary year of 1917, and after the collapse of the United States, and suggests some reasons
Soviet Union in 1991 – western observers expected Russia why this has been the case.
to follow a path towards westernisation and democratisation. The issue of ‘playing by the rules’ arose immediately after
On both occasions they were disappointed. 1945, when western governments struggled to explain Soviet
Even when Russia took its own path, as the leading Slavic/ Russia’s abrupt reversal of its wartime re-integration into the
orthodox power in the 19th century or as the world’s first international system. Without following too closely the 1946
socialist state in the 20th, it did so with one eye on the west. analysis of the “sources of Soviet conduct” by US diplomat
Industrial development under Stalin was accompanied by George Kennan, several related factors can be identified that
rhetoric about keeping up with, and overtaking, established have kept it acting as an outsider for nearly 75 years, including
industrial powers. The same was true of scientific and cultural over 25 years of the post-Soviet Russian Federation (RF).
achievements during the Cold War. Throughout the life of the First of all, Russia was for much of its history cut off from
Soviet Union, its leaders both engaged in traditional diploma- the outside world, and when the state did modernise (under the
cy (through alliances in wartime, or the League of Nations in communists) the new state made every effort to control and
peacetime) and acted outside it (through revolutionary limit contact. This is an area where the RF differs considerably
diplomacy and support for communist parties abroad). from the USSR, but Vladimir Putin and the current generation
Another long-standing feature of the relationship of leaders were brought up within the Soviet mindset.
between Russia and western Europe was the presence across In addition, those in charge of the Russian state have,
the 19th and 20th centuries of a Russian political emigration. throughout this period, felt insecure in a way that the leaders of
In the late 19th century, Russian revolutionaries organised ‘normal’ governments have not. The catastrophe of German
and campaigned abroad against the tsarist regime. In the invasion and occupation in 1941–45, and the existential crisis
1920s, opponents of the early Soviet regime campaigned in that came with the collapse of the USSR in 1991, have no
foreign capitals. In the later 20th century, dissident literature parallel. The ongoing sources of insecurity include popular
shaped western understandings of the Soviet system. Such dissatisfaction with economic conditions, and ethnic conflict
networks were closely monitored by the Russian government. in a geographical space with many conflicting identities.
In the late 19th century, the Okhrana (tsarist secret police) Contemporary Russia is probably weaker in geographical,
office in Paris kept an eye on revolutionaries in London; demographic, economic, military and diplomatic terms than
in the 1920s, the GPU (Soviet secret police)-sponsored at any time in the past century. In dealing with this fearful
‘Trust’ manipulated opponents abroad. Evidently, there are situation, the government in Moscow has had the advantage
stark economic and political differences between today’s over its international rivals of its institutional strength relative
Russian émigré oligarchs and the revolutionary or counter- to Russian civil society. Both under the communists and under
revolutionary emigrations of earlier decades, just as there their successors, there were few checks on what the Russian
are between Vladimir Putin’s Russia and earlier regimes. But state could do – it has made up its own rules.
the question of how Russia relates to its western counterparts
is an enduring one. Evan Mawdsley was professor of international history at the University
of Glasgow. His books include World War II: A New History (Cambridge
Charlotte Alston is professor of history at Northumbria University University Press, 2009)

65
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 BEHIND THE NEWS
THE LONG READ

The ancient
template of
antisemitism
The historical roots of this prejudice are as
enduring and pervasive as they are irrational
BY DEBORAH LIPSTADT

A yellow star badge, which Jews were

forced to wear in most of Nazi-occupied
Europe during the Second World War
GETTY IMAGES

Æ
67
 R ecently, a well-educated man – the CEO
of a Fortune 500 company, one of Amer-
ica’s most successful corporate entities
– attended a seminar I gave on antisemi-
tism. After my presentation, he asked in
a perplexed tone: “Jews are so smart…
How is it that they have not been able to
solve this problem of antisemitism?”
I told him that his question was aimed
in the wrong direction. He should not be asking the victim of prejudice to solve the
problem – he should be asking the perpetrator. The purveyors of this hate and hos-
tility should be the ones who bear the onus of having to resolve the issue. Of course,
the perpetrators would have a ready answer: they would fall back on the stereotypes
they use to justify their prejudices. Ultimately, they would blame the victim.
But that was not the only thing wrong with his query. There is no easy solution
to prejudice because it is an irrational sentiment. The etymology of the word itself
is testimony to its irrationality: to pre-judge, to decide what a person’s qualities
are long before meeting the person themself. The purveyor of prejudice encoun-
ters the stereotype even when the actual person is not present. Stereotypes exist
independently of an individual’s actions. That does not mean that a member of the
group in question is immune from possessing the negative char-
acteristics ascribed to the entire group. But when an individual’s
wrongdoings are seen as characteristic of an entire group, because
‘that is how they are,’ we have entered the realm of prejudice.

T
he futility of trying to debunk prejudicial
claims with rational explanations was illustrat-
ed for me when I was co-teaching a course on
the Holocaust. I was enumerating for the class
the various claims made by Nazis about Jews,
among which was that Jews use their nefarious
skills to control world economies. According to
Nazis, the Jews were responsible for Germany’s financial woes.
AKG IMAGES

During my lecture, a student raised her hand and said: “But

all the German bankers and lawyers were Jews, weren’t they?”
I intuited from her tone that she was suggesting that maybe the
Nazis were justified in their claim – that maybe Jews did wreak A stereotype of a wealthy,
havoc with the German economy, and that they used the law to ‘untrustworthy’ Jew in an antisemitic
shield themselves from the consequences. In an almost breathless German picture book of 1936

68
 Antisemitism has characteristics
that set it apart from other hatreds

rush, I began to flood her with details and statistics

chosen to demonstrate that the answer was an em-
phatic ‘no’. I pointed out that many leading banks
in Germany were owned by non-Jews. I cited the
wide range of other professions practised by Jews
(cattle dealers, teachers, artisans and so on). I point-
ed out that there were fewer than 600,000 German
Jews in a population of 60 million. I continued to
pile statistic on top of statistic, fact upon fact.
Survivors at
In the midst of my response, my co-instructor approached the lectern. I was a bit Auschwitz
taken aback, because we had agreed that we would not interrupt one another during concentration
the lectures. Turning to the student, she quietly but emphatically said: “So what?” camp, pictured on
Then, after a long pause, she continued: “So what if the banking or legal systems 27 January 1945
during the arrival
were controlled by people who were Jews [which they weren’t]? Would that have of the Red Army. Six
been a legitimate reason to hate all Jews, assume mendacious goals on their part and, million Jews were
ultimately, to attempt to annihilate an entire people? And what about those Jews killed by the Nazis
– the majority of German Jewry – who had nothing to do with financial or legal
institutions? Why should they be held responsible? Should non-Jewish bankers and
lawyers also be held collectively responsible for Germany’s economic woes?”

R
ather than my fact-laden jumble, her “so what?” was the correct
response. The student had asked a question that was rooted in a
false premise: that Jews, as a people, aim to control the world’s
economies – and, ipso facto, any Jew involved in banking or
any other financial activity is part of this conspiratorial effort
and must have diabolical aims. By citing facts and figures, I
had responded to an irrational proposition in a rational fashion,
thereby giving the assertion on which her question was founded the gravitas it did
not deserve. It would be akin to responding to the racist’s charge that “black people
are intellectually inferior” with a list of black people who had attended the best
universities. The answer from my colleague (who happened to be a non-Jew, a
former nun) revealed antisemitism’s fundamental irrationality.
The fact that the question was asked by a Jewish student, who had told me how
much she abhorred antisemitism, exposed its ubiquitous character and long reach.
In fact, one of the most deleterious effects of prejudice is revealed when the member
of the group being stereotyped believes that the stereotypes are true.
Antisemitism is a prejudice, and shares many of the characteristics of prejudice in
general, particularly in the realm of stereotyping, but has certain characteristics that
set it apart from other hatreds. First, it is a conspiracy theory. Conspiracy theorists
find ‘culprits’ to blame for something they oppose or find threatening. Those who
subscribe to these theories tend to rely on familiar ‘enemies’ – for example, Jews, not
BRIDGEMAN

bicycle riders or left-handed people – to give an intentional explanation for events

that may seem inexplicable. By picking a familiar or common enemy, their claims
seem rational to the person who has heard these charges before.

Æ
69
 Conspiracy theorists reflexively reject facts that contradict
their narrative. These theories have an internal coherence –
what researchers have described as a “self-sealing quality” –
that makes them “particularly immune to challenge”. Logic
falls by the wayside and exaggerations, suspicions and
stereotypes predominate. Unlike my student in that lecture,
the committed antisemite will not be dissuaded by a demon-
stration that they are subscribing to something irrational.
Antisemitism is delusional, ascribing to Jews contradicto-
ry qualities. For example, according to antisemites Jew are
both capitalists and communists. Antisemites accuse Jews of
being clannish and sticking together and, at the same time,
charge them with being pushy and wanting to be accepted in
circles that have no desire to accept them. It is impossible to
simultaneously be a communist and a capitalist, pushy and
clannish. But that is logic. And prejudice defies logic.
Antisemitism is not random. It is not disliking a Jew. It
The Descent from the
Cross, by Peter Paul
is disliking someone because they are a Jew. It has a structure and it is persistent. It
Rubens, c1617. The is with good reason that it has been called the ‘longest’ or ‘oldest’ hatred. Its roots
New Testament can be found in the New Testament and the story of the crucifixion of Jesus, but
account of the hostility towards Jews did not begin with the rise of Christianity. During the
crucifixion of Jesus
formed one of the
Hellenistic period, Jews were often persecuted in places such as Alexandria, Egypt.
building blocks of Jews’ disdain for the multiple pagan gods and insistence on separate dietary and so-
antisemitism cial customs did not win them favour in the eyes of their Hellenistic contemporar-
ies. That hostility, however, was more akin to the natural resentment people often
feel towards a group that refuses to accept the dominant practices of the times.

E
arly church fathers, though probably influenced by Hellenistic
attitudes, put their own enduring stamp on this hatred. They
elevated their antipathy towards Jews to a fundamental aspect
of Christian tradition. It is in the New Testament’s depictions of
the death of Jesus that we find the building blocks of millennia
of antisemitism. Irrespective of the fact that everyone involved in
the story was Jewish – except for the Romans who did the actual
crucifixion – the way the story has been told by generations of church leaders is
that ‘the Jews’ are responsible for the death of Jesus, having demanded that the
Romans crucify him. In so doing, they deprived humanity of his wisdom, goodness
and glory. The Jews, the New Testament tells us, wanted Jesus killed because he
had evicted the money changers from the Temple in Jerusalem, charging that they
were demeaning the holiness of the Temple and cheating the poor. Evicting them
threatened the income of the Temple hierarchy, and they demanded that the Jews’
legislative body, the Sanhedrin, condemn Jesus to death. The Roman ruler, Pontius
Pilate, did not wish to carry out the sentence but the Jews insisted that he do so –
crying, according to the New Testament: “Crucify him! Crucify him!”
Herein lies the essential elements of the antisemitic template: finances (the
money changers), power (getting the Roman authorities to change their mind), in-
BRIDGEMAN

tellect (the ability to engineer the death of the son of God). Any antisemitic charge
will include one or more of these elements, and will suggest that Jews continue to
use their finances, power and intellect in a nefarious and mendacious way.

70
 The church had both a theological and an institutional motivation in turning
the Jews into not just a competitor to the new faith, but also an eternal and dan-
gerous enemy. Christianity and Judaism initially were ‘sister’ religions. Eventually,
Christianity considered itself to have superseded or replaced Judaism as a superior
religion. Much to the surprise, disappointment and anger of Church fathers, the
Jews did not accept this revelatory new religion, despite the fact that it freed its
adherent from a life consumed by the observance of many rules and regulations.
Paul, contrasting Judaism with the enlightened new faith, declared that a “man is
justified by faith without the deeds of the law” and that for Jesus “neither circumci-
sion nor uncircumcision accomplishes anything”. Pauline doctrine stipulated that
Christianity was now the only true faith. Jews were not just marginalised but seen
as wilfully blind to the truth of the new faith.
By the Middle Ages, Judaism had been rendered no longer just a competing
religion but a font of evil and a danger to Christians. Christian anti-Judaism of the
medieval period added a litany of additional accusations. Jews were charged with
committing ritual murder, poisoning the wells to spread the Black Death, profan-
ing the ‘host’ (consecrated bread used in mass), engaging in sorcery and magic, and
an array of other evil acts, all of which had the objective of harming non-Jews.

T
he striking aspect of antisemitism is the way it migrated out of
the confines of the church and was adopted and adapted by those
who were not only not affiliated with the church but were op-
posed to it. In the 17th century, Voltaire, an arch-opponent of the
church, said of the Jews that “You have surpassed all nations in
impertinent fables, in bad conduct and in barbarism. You deserve
to be punished, for this is your destiny.” Karl Marx, a critic of all
religions, echoed those same accusations. Adolf Hitler and the National Socialists
propagated the same hatred. The source of the hatred may have changed but the
Jews burned alive in
Bavaria, depicted
nature of the charges remained the same.
in a 15th-century One of the most enduring and widely circulated antisemitic texts is The Protocol
illustration. During of the Elders of Zion, which has been greatly responsible for reinforcing the notion
the Middle Ages of a Jewish conspiracy. Purportedly the record of late-19th century deliberations of
Jews were accused
of spreading an unnamed group of Jewish ‘elders’, the Protocols ‘documents’ their intentions to
diseases including control the world, its economies and its political systems. In fact it began life as a
the Black Death mid-19th-century tract that had nothing to do with Jews. Significant portions of the
Protocols were draw from Maurice Joly’s 1864
Dialogue aux enfers entre Machiavel et Mon-
tesquieu (Dialogue in Hell between Machiavelli
and Montesquieu). Joly’s work was written as a
political satire, attacking Napoleon III as some-
one who planned to rule the world. Jews were
nowhere to be found in it. When self-described

By the Middle Ages, Judaism

was no longer just a competing
ALAMY

religion but a font of evil

Æ
71
 Holocaust deniers have no evidence,
no witnesses, no narrative and no
facts to support their claims

mystic Russian Sergei Nilus published the first

full version early in the 20th century (he subse-
quently reissued many other editions), the central
characters had become Jews who were determined
not only to dominate non-Jews but also to corrupt
their morals. Car magnate Henry Ford later pub-
Graffiti on a poster lished half a million copies in English, and distributed them widely in the early 1920s.
in London, 2015.
Holocaust deniers In 1921 The Times of London exposed the Protocols as an anachronistic forgery,
believe that “Jews yet the publication continued – and still continues – to have a life of its own. Over
used their power to the course of the 20th century, this forgery has been republished in German,
compel Germany to French, Arabic and an array of other languages. It was used by Nazis to justify their
accept responsibility
for this massive antisemitic campaign. Teachers in the Third Reich used it as a historical document.
crime,” says Today, in addition to becoming an element in anti-Israel attacks, it is broadly avail-
Deborah Lipstadt able throughout the world, including on Amazon. It reinforces all the conspiracy
theories that have been the fulcrum upon which antisemitic hatred pivots.

A
more recent iteration of antisemitism is Holocaust denial.
Though deniers have no evidence, no witnesses, no narrative
and no facts to support their claims, they assert that Jews
were able to plant evidence, doctor documents, arrange for
‘survivors’ to give false testimony, and convince the Allies to
hold war crimes trials that falsely charged defendants with
having committed genocide.
According to the deniers’ scenario, Jews used their power to compel Germany to
accept responsibility for this massive crime, to bear a moral and financial burden, to
pay billions in reparations to these ‘non-existent’ victims, their families and Jewish
organisations. In addition, they have compelled the world to give them a state. In
this ‘explanation’ of why the Jews have created this myth, once again the antisemitic
template emerges: money (reparations), power (forcing the world to give Jews a state)
and nefarious intellect (being able to pull off such a massive hoax). The Germans
and Palestinians – if not the entire world – were the victims of this putative hoax.
Today we see antisemitism emerging from both the political right and the left.
On the left, the UK Labour Party has faced accusations of overt antisemitism
within its ranks and of discounting the complaints from their Jewish members
regarding the situation.
Many progressives consider prejudice to be a function of power – that those who
possess power cannot possibly be victims. This view of prejudice is refracted
through a prism that has two facets: class and race. Someone who is wealthy or
from a group that is considered wealthy, and someone who is white or from a
group that is considered white, cannot be a victim. When Jews claim to be
ALAMY

victims, these progressives dismiss their claims as invalid and as a means of

subterfuge designed to deflect attention from other issues – for example, Israel.

72
 Once again, it’s implied, Jews have engaged in their devious ways, using trickery
and false accusations to accomplish their goals.
On the right, antisemitism comes from extremists and populists who, in
contrast to those on the progressive left described here, do not consider Jews to be
white. These white supremacists believe that they are being subjected to a genocide
of white Christians. Refugees, people of colour and others who are less talented
and accomplished are pushing them out of their jobs and their positions. The only
rational way they have of explaining this development is that someone is engineer-
ing their ‘replacement’. They find that culprit in ‘the Jew’ – who, as usual, acts in
subterfuge, pulling the strings behind the scene.
This is what the marchers in the Charlottesville white supremacist rally in
2017 meant when they chanted: “Jews will not replace us.” It is why the shooter
in Pittsburgh, who killed 11 at a synagogue in October 2018, said that he wanted
all Jews to die: because they were committing genocide against his (white) people.
When Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán, a rightwing nationalist, wanted
to win political support, he launched an attack on George Soros, a billionaire
Hungarian-American Jew and Holocaust survivor who has funded pro-democracy
and human rights groups in many former Soviet-bloc countries, including
Hungary. Orbán’s campaign included billboards erected throughout Hungary
bearing a picture of a smiling Soros and the caption: “Let’s not allow George Soros
to have the last laugh.” US president Donald Trump also cast Soros as the enemy
when he accused him of facilitating the “swarm” of migrants trying to cross Ameri-
ca’s southern border.
Whether such charges come from right or left, they rely on the same themes: the Protesters gather in
Parliament Square,
nefarious Jew, manipulating matters behind the scene, acting to his own advantage London on 26 March
and to the detriment of the non-Jew, particularly the white Christian. 2018, amid
accusations of

U
antisemitism within
the Labour party

ltimately, the hatred that is anti-

semitism can best be compared to a
herpes virus – a disease that cannot
be cured. Just like this virus, it mu-
tates and presents in different ways
and in different parts of the body.
Medication may ease the symptoms;
however, in its essence it remains the same, always lurking
beneath the surface, ready to emerge at a time of stress. So,
too, with antisemitism. It has taken vastly different forms.
And it persists.
What, then, can we do about it? If it is irrational, must we simply throw up our
hands in defeat? I think not. We must expose its conspiratorial, irrational and
delusional nature. We must challenge others who engage in it. We must familiarise
ourselves with its history and understand the terrible consequences of ignoring it.
There are no easy correctives, no magic pills, no silver bullets. This fight might be
one that can never result in total victory.
The roots of this hatred may be too deeply Deborah Lipstadt is Dorot Professor
GETTY IMAGES

embedded to ever be fully eradicated. of modern Jewish history and Holocaust

However, we must act as if we will be able Studies at Emory University, Georgia.
to achieve that victory. The costs of not Her books include Antisemitism Here
doing so are too great. and Now (Scribe, 2019)

73
74 ILLUSTRATION BY DAVIDE BONAZZI
 BEHIND
THE NEWS

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

Æ
75
 Robert Garland Martin Pitts

“Migration was central to “The real global migrants

growth and sustainability with lasting impacts
for both ancient Greek were often the objects
and Roman civilisations” that travelled with people
in the Roman empire”
According to United Nations Refugee
Agency (UNHCR) figures, as of June
2018 there were 68.5 million forcibly Migrants had a huge impact on the
displaced people worldwide. success and longevity of the Roman
An unprecedented crisis? Hardly. empire. The urbanisation of a peripheral
Though the scale was much smaller in province such as Britannia would have
antiquity, proportionately the suffering been impossible without high levels of
was just as great. Before the Persian inva- human mobility. Migrant communities
sion of Greece in 480 BC, the Athenians settled several of Britain’s first cities, no-
evacuated some 100,000 women, children, elderly and slaves tably London, Colchester and York. The
to the Peloponnese and islands off the coast of Attica. When Roman system depended on soldiers,
the Athenians finally arrived at their destinations, there were colonists and their families from the breadth of the empire,
no medical services, no reception centres, no aid workers, no living in new settlements on confiscated land – as illustrated
supplies of clothing, bedding or clean water to greet them. The by the tombstone of centurion Marcus Favonius Facilis, one
evacuees returned to their homes to find them burned down – of the first Romans of Italian descent who we know died near
not once but twice. Had the Persian invasion been successful, the new veteran colony of Colonia Claudia Victricensis (Col-
they would have been either enslaved or massacred. chester) shortly after the invasion of AD 43. He had gone to
Both Greek and Roman civilisations were dependent the trouble of importing his tombstone all the way from the
upon the movement of displaced persons, though they rarely Rhineland, where his legion was previously based.
feature in ancient accounts, largely because no one much However, the real global migrants with lasting impacts
cared. The Greeks exported their surplus population around were often the objects that travelled with people, illustrated by
the Mediterranean. When the island of Thera (now called three cremations excavated at Roman Exeter, which was estab-
Santorini) experienced a severe famine, it sent an expedition lished in AD 55 as a legionary fortress and initially inhabited
to Libya. The enterprise failed, and the would-be settlers by men of largely Italian origin. The first grave (AD 55–70)
sailed home. However, on their return their compatriots contained objects typical of cemeteries at legionary bases
pelted them with rocks and ordered them not to land – such across Europe, such as red-gloss terra sigillata pottery and
was the extremity of their hunger. Sending out boatloads of glass vessels. The cups and plates in such graves were at the
refugees has always been a hazardous enterprise and then as forefront of a Roman consumer revolution, and were essential
now, no doubt, many thousands perished at sea. in the spread of new dining practices throughout Britannia.
By contrast, Rome’s rapid demographic growth depended Another grave of the same period contained an unusual
on an influx of foreigners, many of them refugees. Romulus, decorated beaker but no sigillata, instead resembling the graves
its first king, established an asylum on the Capitoline Hill “to of local communities some 200 miles away in Essex and even
which a mixed rabble, some free – others servile – fled from farther afield in northern Gaul. These selections highlight the
the neighbouring communities eager for new opportunities,” culturally diverse customs of the Roman military, and may
as the historian Livy put it. indicate that the grave belonged to a Gallic auxiliary soldier.
Greek civilisation spread because of the willingness of A third grave dates from AD 70–90, after the Roman
its population to be displaced, whereas Roman civilisation army had left. Revealing the influx of local people in the
grew because of the willingness of its population to accept city’s population, the grave includes a locally made Durotri-
outsiders. Migration was thus central to the growth and gan-style bowl but also lots of terra sigillata plates and cups,
sustainability of both civilisations – a readiness to migrate illustrating the uptake of globalised practices and the influ-
and a readiness to host. That is no less true for the growth ence of migration even after the military had moved on.
and sustainability of modern societies.
Martin Pitts is associate professor in Roman archaeology at the
Robert Garland is the Roy D and Margaret B Wooster Professor University of Exeter, and author of Globalisation and the Roman World:
of the Classics at Colgate University, New York World History, Connectivity and Material Culture (Cambridge, 2015)

76
 Sumita Mukherjee
“Anti-colonial struggles and
fights for universal human
rights in the 20th century
were shaped by migration”
Enforced migration underpinned much
change. Transatlantic slavery involved the
enforced displacement of African men, women
and children. In addition, after the abolition of
slavery an estimated 3.5 million Indians were
forced into indentured bondage and displaced
to colonial plantations in the Caribbean,
Africa and parts of the Pacific. The labour
of African slaves, indentured Indians and
Chinese workers shaped the infrastructures and economies of so
much of the world, through the building of railways and roads,
and through the wealth generated through their plantation labour.
But how do we measure change? The original question implies
that change is easy to measure and easy to notice. Change does not
just take place because ‘great individuals’ shape history. How do
we measure the stealth of migration – the long-term changes that
migrant communities have influenced, shaping language, food,
music and other forms of culture? How do we measure shifts in
social attitudes over time?
Roman soldiers set up camp, as depicted in a scene from Trajan’s
column. “The Roman system depended on soldiers, colonists and Migration shaped European empires and the nature of imperial
their families from the breadth of the empire,” explains Martin Pitts conquest in the 18th and 19th centuries. Colonial officials,
military officials, merchants, missionaries and labourers from
Europe were involved in migrations to colonise various parts of the
world, through trade, conquest or settlement. Communities were
changed in many ways through contact with these European
migrants, not least through decimation or subjection.
But imperial migration was not one-way. Migration also helped
to eventually dismantle empires. Anti-colonial struggles and fights
for universal human rights in the 20th century have been shaped
by migration. Many leaders of anti-colonial movements in Asia
and Africa started their political careers as students in European
or American universities. Feminist struggles were similarly shaped
by migrants.
Kwame Nkrumah, Jomo Kenyatta and Jawaharlal Nehru had
formative student experiences in Britain that they brought to the
nationalist struggles in Ghana, Kenya and India, respectively.
Migration has been hugely beneficial for aspiring political leaders
through the centuries – in meeting new people, in learning about
different societies and cultures, in communicating important
GETTY IMAGES

messages, and in realising how connected we are as human beings,

whatever our background.

Sumita Mukherjee is senior lecturer in history at the University of Bristol,

Kwame Nkrumah, first president of independent Ghana, dances with
Queen Elizabeth II in 1961. Nkrumah’s time studying in the US and UK and author of Indian Suffragettes: Female Identities and Transnational Networks
informed his later efforts to win independence for his country (Oxford University Press, 2018) Æ
77
 David Abulafia Meleisa Ono-George

“The greater the mix of “Enslaved people, working

peoples, the more cities under brutal conditions,
have flourished culturally helped generate individual
and economically” wealth and fuel Britain’s
national industrialisation”
We are all migrants, at least by descent.
The ‘racial purity’ preached by the When people consider the Anglo-
Nazis has no biological foundation Caribbean region and migration, they
whatsoever. Studies of the human may think only of postwar migration
genome reveal that every population of Caribbean people to Britain – the
consists of a mixture – even, beyond Windrush generation. However, from the
sub-Saharan Africa, a mixture with our first English settlement in the region, the
Neanderthal cousins. Caribbean has been both the destination
Two groups of migrants can be for and source of migrant labour from
distinguished. On the one hand, we have peoples who have across the British empire and the world.
moved en masse, such as the Germanic peoples who invaded English colonial involvement in the region from the 1620s
the Roman empire (and were themselves a great ethnic mix), ensured a steady flow of migrants to the Caribbean in search of
or the enormous wave of European settlers in the Americas, opportunity and a better life for themselves and their families.
or the vast numbers of African slaves transported to the With few such opportunities at home, indentured labourers
Americas over several centuries in vile conditions. from the British Isles moved to the region to work on tobacco
The arrival of the Germanic invaders caused the plantations in hopes of achieving some wealth after a short con-
breakdown of the old political, social and economic order as tract. As sugar plantations developed in the mid-17th century,
these newcomers established their own kingdoms from the opportunities for indentured European labourers declined as
fifth century AD onwards. These became the basis for they were replaced by forced migrants – enslaved people from
several of the states we recognise today: the Franks in France, the African continent.
the Angles and Saxons in England. Yet this was a complex Enslaved people worked under brutal conditions but, by
legacy – the marriage of Roman and Germanic cultures – their labour, helped generate incredible wealth for individuals
as is revealed by the survival in Spain, Italy and France of and fuelled national industrialisation in Britain. The introduc-
languages based on Latin, not German. tion of enslaved labour did not stop British migration to the
The second group of migrants consists of small groups region. Many men (and rather fewer women) migrated to the
of merchants who transformed the economy of places they Caribbean with the intention of exploiting the opportunities
settled. Beginning with the ancient Phoenicians around that developed throughout the 18th century around sugar
900 BC, the Mediterranean – from Lebanon to beyond production, hoping to make their own fortunes.
the Strait of Gibraltar – became an integrated trading zone. But migration to and from the Anglo-Caribbean was not
The Phoenicians shipped silver and copper from Spain and just from Europe or Africa. Following the abolition of slavery
elsewhere to the Middle East, and they also transformed in the British Caribbean in 1834, planters sought workers
north Africa by founding a flourishing and famous city at from Asia. Indentured labourers from India and, to a lesser
Carthage, near modern Tunis. These exploits were repeated extent, China migrated to the region to work plantations
across the millennia by others who brought their business throughout the 19th century and into the early 20th century.
skills to every city in the Mediterranean: Genoese, Venetians, While many returned at the end of their contracts, many
Portuguese Jews, Armenians, and so on. more remained.
The greater the mix of peoples, the more the world’s cities Migration, whether forced or free, created large-scale shifts
have flourished culturally and economically. The simple in demographics and the establishment of diaspora communi-
answer to the question ‘how have migrants changed the ties. These communities have contributed to the culture, ideas
world?’ is that migrants have made the world. and wealth of the countries in which they settled, creating the
globalised world that is so familiar to us today.
FRAN MONKS

David Abulafia is emeritus professor of Mediterranean history at

Cambridge University. His book The Boundless Sea: A Human History Meleisa Ono-George is associate professor in Caribbean history at
of the Oceans (Allen Lane, 2019) won the 2020 Wolfson History Prize the University of Warwick

78
Marlou Schrover James Evans

“Migrants changed the “The arrival in North

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

Marlou Schrover is professor in economic and social history with James Evans is a historian, broadcaster and author of Emigrants:
a special interest in migration at Leiden University Why the English Sailed to the New World (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2017)

79
 ALAMY

Admiral Horatio Nelson peers across the London skyline from his perch in Trafalgar Square. Activists have
called for the statue’s removal from its famous column, citing the naval hero’s pro-slavery advocacy

80
 BEHIND
THE NEWS

Should
we judge
historical
figures by
the morals
of today?
The removal of monuments to controversial figures has sparked heated
debates between politicians and activists. But should we use common
moral standards of today as benchmarks by which to judge past behaviour?
Six historians explore this contentious topic in this feature from 2017

Æ
81
 Andrew Roberts Charlotte Riley

“If we topple Nelson, “It is completely

what do we do about the appropriate to critique
pyramids, built at least in those figures from the
part by slave labour?” past whose morals fall
short of our own values”
Although it is completely illogical,
ahistorical and unfair to natural justice
to judge the people of the past by
today’s morals, it is also very hard not On one hand, it is true that a historian’s
to. If we merely judge them by the primary aim is rarely to make a moral
morals of their own times, that doesn’t balance sheet of the past. Our work is
tell us very much. If we don’t judge about interpreting primary sources,
them morally at all, we let off the likes thinking about how people behaved and
of Hitler and Stalin in a welter of moral why they acted the way that they did.
relativism. Yet because Oliver Cromwell might not have We do not often set out to write a list of
believed in socialised medicine, say, but did believe in history’s biggest villains, judged by our
slaughtering Roman Catholics in Drogheda at a time own standards. And it can sometimes feel
when that religion was widely thought to pose an existential reductive to point out, for example, every instance of sexism in
threat to Britain, what does that really tell us about him – the past; it shouldn’t be a startling revelation that historical
or them, or us? figures held values that were different from our own.
The way to approach this minefield is not to assume that Despite this, however, I am wary of the idea that people
our morals are superior to those of the people of the past, from the past should escape our moral judgement. Historians
because we will indubitably be judged in our turn by our can never approach the past as neutral observers – we all, as
descendants – who will think it truly abhorrent that we historian EH Carr wrote over half a century ago, have a bee in
allowed children to have mobile phones, or opposed our bonnet about certain issues, and readers of history need to
multi-sex lavatories, or appeased Kim Jong-Un when he was listen for the buzzing. Part of what we bring to our study of
so clearly about to incinerate Chicago. Just as we cannot the past is our moral framework and, though it is important
know what we will be indicted for, so Nelson could hardly for us to try to understand figures from the past on their own
have known that, two centuries after Trafalgar, there would terms, it is impossible to avoid thinking about them in the
be calls for him to be toppled from his column because of context of our values.
his (supposed) support for the then-perfectly legal and This approach is particularly important when we think
ancient institution of slavery. about figures that might still be celebrated today for their
If in our smug, virtue-signalling world we topple Nelson, achievements, despite their dodgy moral record. As a
what do we do about the pyramids, the Parthenon and historian of the British empire, I feel that it is highly
Rome’s Forum, all of which were built at least in part by inappropriate for universities with diverse student bodies to
slave labour? Should Thutmose, Pericles and the Caesars have lecture theatres named after Francis Galton, a eugeni-
have somehow anticipated that the morals espoused by the cist with deeply racist views, or to display statues commemo-
likes of the ‘Rhodes Must Fall’ movement are ultimately rating and celebrating men such as Cecil Rhodes, who
more important than their own desires to enter heaven subjugated and oppressed African people as part of British
gloriously, laud the goddess Athena and house the Roman imperial expansion. British imperialism was based on
senate? Should Winston Churchill be knocked off his plinth racism, greed and callous violence; and though many
in Parliament Square because he was a racist, at a time when profited from imperialism, many also rejected imperial
almost everybody else – on the left as well as the right – also values or resisted imperial subjugation.
was? I believe not – and I couldn’t care less what my It is completely appropriate to critique those figures from
descendants might one day make of it. the past whose morals fall short of our own values, as well as
celebrating those who questioned, critiqued or resisted the
NANCY ELLISON

Andrew Roberts is visiting professor at the War Studies Department systems and beliefs of their time.
at King’s College, London and the Lehrman Institute Lecturer
at the New-York Historical Society. His books include Churchill: Charlotte Riley is lecturer in 20th-century British history at the
Walking with Destiny (Allen Lane, 2018) University of Southampton

82
 Olivette Otele

“We have created grey

areas that allow us
to ignore sinister sides
of human nature”

When asked if people learn from

history, humanities experts and scientists
acknowledge that studying the past has
enhanced our understanding of societies
and the motives of people in given
situations. The past has taught us, for
Imperialist politician Cecil Rhodes. Charlotte Riley says: “I feel that it
example, that if a third world war breaks
is highly inappropriate for universities with diverse student bodies... out, there will never be a clear winner.
to display statues commemorating and celebrating such men” Medical discoveries of the past continue
to save lives to the present day.
We have also learned that, despite the uniqueness of each
context, the predictability of our behaviour in given situations
implies that we have been conditioned to abide by a set of
societal rules. These rules have become our principles. These
morals do not obey the confines of time and places. They have
become acceptable learned behaviours transmitted from
generation to generation. They have even been tested by
examples of the past.
Yet asking whether we should judge people of the past
by today’s morality implies that morals are like the tides,
forever changing, prisoners of the whims of human aspira-
tions. Let us consider two paradoxical examples. A Nazi
soldier who participated in the killing of millions of Jews is
abhorrent to 21st-century men and women to the extent that,
72 years after the end of the Second World War, Nazi officials
are still being brought to justice. Yet many people are
reluctant to acknowledge that transatlantic slavery, another
deplorable episode in human history, was a failure of morals
and a triumph of greed.
We pick and choose who should be held accountable.
We have created grey areas that allow us to ignore sinister
sides of human nature. “Man is a wolf to man”, as the old
Latin proverb has it: a manipulative beast capable of bending
his or her own rules and ruthlessly redefining morals to reach
his or her goals. In that sense, the present with its imperfec-
tions takes precedent over alleged humanist values inherited
from centuries of social interaction. Taking the roles of victim
and perpetrator, judge and executioner, we have finally
granted ourselves the right to question the relevance of
MARY EVANS/GETTY

our own morals.

Olivette Otele is professor in the history of slavery at the University

The Great Pyramid and Sphinx at Giza, Egypt. “If in our smug, virtue-
signalling world we topple Nelson, what do we do about the pyramids... of Bristol. Her new book Afro-Europeans: An Untold History is set
which were built at least in part by slave labour?” asks Andrew Roberts to be published in October 2020 Æ
83
 Robert Cook David Abulafia

“In general terms today’s “Historians are engaged in

morals are not as differ- a sort of battle, trying to
ent from those of the past rein in the tendency to
as some commentators approve or disapprove of
profess to believe” what they see in the past”
The question seems to assume that Historians like to say that they are
today’s moral code is significantly impartial, objective, dispassionate. That,
different from that of previous genera- of course, is impossible: however hard one
tions. This is certainly the assumption of tries, all of those writing about the past are
people who argue that we shouldn’t influenced by their political outlook, or by
judge the British empire or pro-slavery current issues such as climate change. This
Confederates by ‘today’s morals’. means that historians are engaged in a sort
Leaving aside the thorny issue of of battle as they tap away at the keys of
defining what these morals are, the chief their laptops, constantly trying to rein in
problem with this line of reasoning is that it lacks a probing the tendency to approve or disapprove of what they see in the
historical sensibility and is likely, perhaps wittingly in some past. Yet this does not mean that one cannot pass comment on
cases, to sustain racial oppression in the present. acts or events that defy the values of our own time. What is
For the truth, as I see it, is that in general terms today’s important is that the writer makes a distinction, clearly
morals are not as different from those of the past as some declaring his or her voice before returning to the attempt to
commentators profess to believe. In the 19th century, for stand back from events in a non-judgemental way.
example, significant numbers of Britons thought that Two examples of subjects about which it is perfectly
empire-building was wrong and that slavery was a sin that acceptable to express horror in print are the Holocaust and
had to be eradicated. the slave trade. Those who perpetrated the Holocaust cannot
The controversy over the future of Confederate statues hide behind the argument that they operated according to the
in the United States prompted the defenders of those statues moral standards of the regime under which they lived, which
to assert that their removal would mean judging the past by imagined that it was ‘purifying’ Germany and the world by
modern standards. In reasoning thus, they ignore the fact annihilating Jews and others. In my history of the Mediterra-
that the South’s ‘Lost Cause’ and its associated rituals, nean, The Great Sea, I found myself describing the deportation
symbols and statues have always been controversial and and slaughter of about 43,000 Jews from Salonika in 1943.
contested in the United States. When Confederate president First, of course, one relates the facts, which are horrifying
Jefferson Davis wrote a history of the Confederacy that simply in their narration. But at the end I quoted the poignant
downplayed the role of slavery in causing the civil war, one words of the Biblical Apocrypha: “some there are who have no
Northern reviewer denounced it as “factitious history”. memorial,” bearing in mind also that the vast, vanished Jewish
When Southerners raised a huge statue to Robert E Lee in cemetery of Salonika now lies underneath the broad campus of
Richmond in 1890, several Republican newspapers the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki.
denounced the general as a pro-slavery traitor. Writing about the slave trade for the book I am currently
As the Lost Cause concept took root during the era of completing, I do not think I should hold back from describing
segregation, African-Americans became the strongest as deeply repugnant the trade itself, and the conditions under
opponents of racist statuary. As long ago as the 1920s their which slaves were transported across the Atlantic. To be sure,
opposition played a key role in the decision by congress not to those who sold, transported and bought slaves were practising
erect a stone tribute to the ‘black mammy’ in Washington DC. the moral code of their time, and that has to be explained in a
Protesting white supremacism posing as history and matter-of-fact way. But I hope I do so in a way that separates
heritage is nothing new. We should be wary of its defenders the plain description of those awful conditions from what are
conjuring false dichotomies between past and present morals. clearly my views, which I invite the reader to share.

Robert Cook is professor of American history at the University of David Abulafia is professor of Mediterranean history at Cambridge
Sussex, and author of Civil War Memories: Contesting the Past in the University. His books include The Great Sea: A Human History of the
United States Since 1865 (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2017) Mediterranean (Allen Lane, 2011)

84
 Jonathan Clark

“Many authors think it

sufficient to record their
moral disapproval of anti-
Semitism without explain-
ing how Hitler adopted it”
Historians should do their utmost to
encourage people to judge the past by
today’s morals – but only on the sound
Leninist principle that things must get
much worse before they get better.
Present-centred judgement (let’s call
it presentism for short) is so widespread
that it can easily be made to look
respectable. Polite dissent from this new
orthodoxy is convincingly depicted by presentists as moral
partisanship on the wrong side. So presentism must be pushed
to its logical conclusion before derision can open the way for
A statue of Confederate General Robert E Lee is removed from its plinth
historical research.
in New Orleans, May 2017. The action sparked a backlash from many What is that logical conclusion? Nothing less than that
Americans who felt that their country’s history was being erased historical enquiry is unnecessary, since presentists already
have all the authority they need to hand out moral judgments.
But, once satire has highlighted this premise, historians can
ask their unwelcome questions: how do the presentists come
to have the morals that they do? How do things come to be
as they are? Presentism actually prevents answers, even among
historians. There are many biographies of Adolf Hitler, for
example, some of which reveal that before 1914 his loathing
was focused on Jesuits, not Jews. How did he transfer his
antipathies to the second? We are not told, because many
authors think it sufficient to record their moral disapproval
of anti-Semitism without explaining how Hitler adopted it.
We need, instead, more contemporary history, focused
on the presentists themselves. How did they become activists?
How did they come to think that demolishing statues, or
banning books, or persecuting politically incorrect speech,
is justified? How did they come to believe that their personal
moral values stand for the moral values of their societies?
How did they adopt the parochial assumption that their
society, even if it has a single morality, can impose it on others
around the world? All these are important questions, but
they are historical ones. And they show that historians –
real ones, that is – are the subversives in the new era of
electronic collectivism and anonymous denigration. In
a contest between history and moralising, history wins.
BUNDESARCHIV

Jews are rounded up in Thessaloniki, Greece, during the Second World War.
The majority died in concentration camps – an example of a subject “about Jonathan Clark is a historian of the long 18th century, and Hall
which it is perfectly acceptable to express horror,” says David Abulafia Distinguished Professor of British History at the University of Kansas

85
86 ILLUSTRATION BY DAVIDE BONAZZI
 BEHIND
THE NEWS

Should
museums
return
their
treasures?
Amid calls for the ‘return’ of artefacts such as the
Benin Bronzes and art looted by the Nazis during the
Second World War, now held in museums far from their
places of origin, nine experts discuss the ethical and
historical aspects of the ‘restitution’ of such treasures

Æ
87
 Tiffany Jenkins Lissant Bolton

“The best way to respect “Objects help relationships

people who came before between museums and
us is to research history communities worldwide to
without judging it through be created and sustained”
the eyes of the present”
Museums should be (and are being) more
transparent about collecting histories.
In the early eighth century, monks at However, discussions about where objects
Wearmouth-Jarrow Abbey produced should be situated tend to skirt over the
three enormous bibles. Two remained complexity of shared histories and to
in Northumbria, but only fragments of ignore long-standing effective relationships
one survive. The third travelled with the between curators and heritage profession-
abbot as he set out to Rome, intending als working in partnership with museums
to present it as a gift to the shrine of and communities internationally.
Peter the Apostle. Known as the Codex The British Museum is constantly engaged in collabora-
Amiatinus, it is in astonishing condi- tions with communities who want to document, revive and
tion – and is the oldest surviving complete Latin Bible in the restore their distinct cultural heritage. Objects provide a point
world. This monumental text, one of the greatest works of of connection and opportunity that enable those relationships
Anglo-Saxon England, is now kept in the Laurentian Library to be created and sustained over time. Those relationships are
in Florence, beyond Britain’s borders – and a good thing, often also personal: they are not only about connections
too. Culture doesn’t have a fixed nationality. It’s not like a between institutions but also about connections between
person who needs a passport. Though a product of particular curators and community members at different levels. In my
time and place, as they move to new locations such artefacts own case I have worked for more than 30 years with, and at
spread knowledge about their origins, the different lives they the invitation of, the Vanuatu Cultural Centre in the South
have touched and meanings they have held. Pacific, supporting the work of women who want to sustain
It’s true that some artefacts were taken in circumstances we and develop their cultural knowledge and practice.
now find unpalatable. But history is long and complicated; the Some of our most important recent collaborations have
situation is always more tangled than ‘baddies’ versus ‘goodies’. developed around our collections from the African continent.
Consider the Parthenon of ancient Athens. Many elements For many years our staff have worked with a number of
were removed from that monument in modern times, and some African museums, focusing on exhibition and research
(known as the Elgin Marbles) are now displayed in the British collaboration, collection care, infrastructure development
Museum, others in Paris and Copenhagen; activists would have and capacity building.
them returned to Greece. Yet the Parthenon itself was a display of As part of this collaboration, in 2018 our director, Hartwig
power, built mostly by slaves. Likewise, though the way British Fischer, visited both Ghana and Nigeria to meet and support
acquired the Benin Bronzes is ugly, the story of their creation, our colleagues there. In particular, he visited Benin City, the
seen through the eyes of the present, isn’t without taint. The centre of the historic Benin empire that is strongly represented
glory of Benin was built on the slave trade: the contested Bronzes in the British Museum collections. During this visit, the Oba
in European museums were crafted from manillas (metal [ruler] of Benin talked about the value of having historic
bracelets used as currency in west Africa) brought by the collections both in Benin City and across the world
Portuguese to trade for slaves. It is not possible to repair that to act as ‘cultural ambassadors’ of Benin culture; he also
past. Nor will judging it through the eyes of the present aid an expressed his desire to have some of those collections returned
understanding of ancient Athens or the court of Benin. The to Benin City (on loan and permanent return).
best way to respect the lives of the people who came before us Working as a member of the Benin Dialogue Group –
is to research and understand history without such an agenda. along with Nigerian and other European museums – the
We should aim to live in a world where artefacts from other British Museum is supporting the development of the new
times and places are shared. We should aim to unlock the Benin Royal Museum and has confirmed that it will lend
past, not overturn it. That is what museums are for, and what objects to the new museum.
they do best. That is why they should keep their treasures.
Lissant Bolton is Keeper of the Department of Africa, Oceania and
Tiffany Jenkins is the author of Keeping Their Marbles (OUP, 2016) the Americas at The British Museum

88
 Marie Rodet

“In exhibitions that pop

up in local museums, the
history of the artefacts –
particularly their looting –
is generally invisible”
In November 2018, an influential report
was published on the restitution of African
cultural heritage in France. A number of
experts and museum directors opposed
such restitution, in part because they
claimed it would empty French museums
of collections. The controversy is not new,
especially in the UK, where such debates
often make headlines.
British soldiers with looted artefacts during the punitive expedition Much less known are the African and Asian artefacts held by
to Benin City (now in southern Nigeria) of 1897. Many of these pieces, smaller provincial museums across Europe, many of which were
known as the Benin Bronzes, are held in European museums
donated by semi-public figures or private collectors who took
part in the European colonial projects in Africa and Asia in the
19th and 20th centuries. Local museums often lack the exper-
tise or even interest to deal with and preserve these collections.
Such artefacts are rarely exhibited and, if they are, their origins,
descriptions and history are often displayed inaccurately.
An interesting example of this happened couple of years ago.
The local museum in Le Havre displayed a number of artefacts
looted by the French General Louis Archinard during the
conquest of what later became the colony of French Sudan (now
Mali), and which formed part of his private collection donated
to the museum nearly a century ago. The exhibition, called
Le Havre-Dakar, was a collaboration with Senegalese muse-
ums, which lent some pieces. The focus was on the historical
and contemporary cultural relationship between France and
Senegal, but most of the African pieces exhibited were actually
from what is today Mali. Captions provided few details of their
origin, and no indication of the context of their acquisition,
except for the note ‘collection Archinard’. The exhibition as
a whole made little sense for the wider public, because the
museum lacked expertise in African studies.
Generally, in such exhibitions that pop up once in a while in
local museums, the history of the artefacts (and particularly
their looting) is invisible. In this context, the case for their
return appears even stronger, enabling appreciation by an
audience avid to learn more about their past. Those artefacts
that, in a provincial European context, may appear of little
BRIDGEMAN

value, should be returned to their countries of origin where they

can be fully appreciated as real treasures and valuable heritage.
A bronze figure of an Edo king of the Benin empire, which flourished in
what’s now Nigeria from the 15th century. Several such pieces are being Marie Rodet is senior lecturer in the history of Africa at SOAS
loaned to Nigeria by the British Museum and Paris’s Musée du Quai Branly University of London Æ
89
 Felipe Fernández-Armesto Bryony Onciul

“The heritage of human- “Arguing that repatriation

kind can’t be divvied will ruin museums
up like a lottery jackpot. obscures the fact that
Museums are among the the opposite can be true”
best places to share it”
Museums play an important role in society.
They authorise the way we understand
Call it appropriation, if you like, and ourselves in the world based on our shared
rage at it in your folly: cultural exchange histories, founding cultural concepts
is the starting point of progress. As people, and imagined futures. Museums also
objects, ideas, products and habits get reframe and challenge our assumptions by
swapped across the world, they inspire revealing hidden histories and illuminat-
new departures, launch new thoughts ing different ways of knowing and being.
and create new ways of life. Without However, many museums can also be
Renaissance Wunderkammern there would criticised as institutions built on colonial foundations.
have been no Scientific Revolution. Calls to return objects to source communities may appear to
Without museums of colonial artefacts, Picasso and Brancusi threaten collections; however, repatriation can actually create
would have gone on seeing with old-world eyes. No one opportunities to innovate, decolonise and strengthen museums.
should be ashamed of having items from elsewhere at home. Repatriation claims are not wholesale demands to empty stores
Museums are essential for research – to understand objects of treasures; rather, each is a very specific, carefully considered
and texts, you have to be able to compare and contextualise case-by-case request for a particular item that holds significance
them. Equality in education demands museums; without to a community. Though some requests come from govern-
them, only Grand Tourers would see worldwide wonders. ments, many come from indigenous peoples whose material
If you start returning works that communities claim on culture and ancestral remains were sold, taken or traded during
grounds of ethnic or national emotional investment, you can’t colonisation. The argument that repatriation will ruin muse-
fairly deny any request for repatriation. You condemn museums ums has not only been disproven, it obscures the fact that the
to pillage more destructive than anything their endowers very opposite can be true.
ever did. Pieces belong wherever they have long resided: they When culturally significant materials are returned in a
become part of the history of the British Museum, say, as sensitive, responsible manner, new relations can be forged that
much as of ancient Egypt or 19th-century Nigeria. enhance museums, collections and public understanding. For
The heritage of humankind can’t be divvied up like a lottery example, Glenbow Museum in Alberta, Canada repatriated
jackpot. Museums are among the best places for it to be widely sacred bundles to the Blackfoot First Nations. This created a
shared. International conventions, subject to a reasonable reciprocal relationship that led to the co-creation of a perma-
statute of limitations, rightly forbid museums from garnering nent museum gallery, new acquisitions donated by community
the proceeds of filching and looting. But think of Sweden members, and innovative curatorial practice.
without Christina’s dodgily gotten gains, or Constantinople Returning artefacts to source communities helps to maintain
without the goodies Constantine planted in the Hippodrome, tangible and intangible connections to ancestors and home-
or Venice without the Horses of San Marco. lands, while also potentially rebuilding cultural pride and
Spoils of long-ago wars, the cut-price acquisitions of pluto- autonomy after periods of cultural suppression. Repatriation
cratic treasure-hunters and the injudicious gifts of bygone inspires the creation of new items for public display and events
diplomatic exchange can stay where they are – where they that celebrate museum–community relationships.
have come to be part of the history not just of their places Hoarding treasures is not enriching. Responding to access
of origin, but of the world. Do you miss your marbles or and repatriation requests acknowledges our globally inter-
pine for your scrolls? Go to where they are gathered and twined histories, and creates mutually beneficial relations that
revel in the breadth of admiration on which your supposed can revitalise museums, and can deepen our understanding and
ancestors’ skills can draw. appreciation of our collective past and future.

Felipe Fernández-Armesto is the author of books including Bryony Onciul is associate professor of museology and heritage
Out of Our Minds: A History of What We Think and How We studies at the University of Exeter, and author of Museums, Heritage
Think It (OneWorld, 2019) and Indigenous Voice: Decolonising Engagement (Routledge, 2015)

90
 Kehinde Andrews

“This is not a
complicated issue:
the only ‘right’ to hold
these artefacts was the
dominion of empire”
The empire may have crumbled, but
British colonial arrogance towards the
former colonies certainly has not. While
colonising a quarter of the globe, Britain
stole treasures and artefacts for the British
public to marvel at in museums. There
simply is no justification for holding on
to these stolen goods.
GETTY IMAGES

Nigeria has been struggling for decades

to get Britain to return the Benin Bronzes, a collection of
sculptures and plaques that decorated the palace of the
Kingdom of Benin as early as the 15th century. British forces
A member of the Blackfoot community in Alberta. The repatriation of
looted the bronzes during an expedition in 1897, and British
sacred bundles by the Glenbow Museum, in the Canadian province of museums seem to think this gives them a divine right to keep
Alberta, to the Blackfoot First Nations created a reciprocal relationship hold of them. Nigeria’s National Commission for Museums
and Monuments has become so frustrated that they are now
resorting to asking to borrow their own property back.
This is not the only example of the idea of loaning back
stolen goods. The Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A) is
proposing to loan back the Maqdala treasures to Ethiopia,
which were ‘acquired’ when British troops plundered the
kingdom of Emperor Tewodros II in 1868. So great was the
theft that it took 15 elephants and 200 mules to move the
loot. After refusing Ethiopia’s demands to return the items,
including a crown and a wedding dress, the V&A put them
on display in 2018 and offered the loan as a ‘compromise’.
In reality this is not a complicated issue. Britain, and other
European nations, stole treasures from across the world to
display in their museums. Their only ‘right’ to hold these arte-
facts was the dominion of empire. As much as many people
may yearn for an ‘Empire 2.0’, those days are long gone.
The continued sense of entitlement is now just a delusion,
and Britain and its European neighbours owe restitution to
their former colonies in a myriad of ways. Returning some
of the proceeds of their crimes to their rightful owners would
be a step in the right direction.

The Horses of San Marco, looted from Constantinople, at that time capital
Kehinde Andrews is professor of black studies at Birmingham City
of the Byzantine empire, in 1204. “Museums are among the best places
for heritage to be widely shared – think of Venice without the Horses of University and the author of books including Back to Black: Retelling
San Marco [for example],” writes Felipe Fernández-Armesto Black Radicalism for the 21st Century (Zed Books, 2018) Æ
91
 Olivette Otele

“Many countries in
west Africa do not have
the facilities to preserve
valuable artefacts”
In 2017, French president Emmanuel
Macron promised that African artefacts
would be returned to the continent. The
economic and political dimensions of the
decision didn’t escape observers. Europe’s
hold on Africa’s natural resources had
been under threat for decades, but the
focus on culture and art raised eyebrows.
In that context, Macron commissioned
historian Bénédicte Savoy and Senegalese economist Felwine
Sarr to produce a report on restitution. It recommended that
a portion of the 90,000 objects originating from Sub-Saharan
Works of art stolen from Jews by the Nazis, stored in Mauerbach
Africa currently held in French public collections should be re- Charterhouse, Austria, 1971. The Austrian government made very limited
turned to the nations from which they originated – including efforts to alert the pre-Third-Reich owners or their families to possible
in the Musée du quai Branly-Jacques Chirac in Paris. When it claims to these works, and by 1972 very few had been returned
opened in 2006, this museum caused a storm of controversy
because its presentation of objects from African, American,
Asian and Oceanian civilisations omitted any mention of colo-
nial conquests or the way those artefacts had been acquired.
The debate did not, therefore, start with Macron. Yet
Macron’s initiative has plunged museums into difficult but
necessary discussions about the past, and about the histor-
ical roles of museums as vehicles of dominant Eurocentric
narratives. In Britain, the debate has led to other responses.
Lending objects to nations from where they originated was
seen as a way forward, but that sparked controversy when the
objects in question were obtained through looting, provok-
ing an image of a thief lending his prizes to the owner.
British museums have a staggering number of objects that
are not displayed and are unlikely to be seen by museum-
goers. Having been evaluated, these objects are now British
assets sitting in storage. On the other hand, the Savoy-Sarr
report recommended that nations ask for restitution. Many
countries in west Africa have not come forward to do so be-
cause they do not have the facilities to preserve those valuable
artefacts and protect them from theft; new funding would
need to be provided to museums already suffering from a
lack of government funding.
Nonetheless, in principle, as far as France is concerned
AKG IMAGES

these countries are entitled to restitution. In Britain, restitu-

tion is still met with resistance. It seems the debate in the UK
about decolonising museums is only about diversifying the
narrative, not the restitution of artefacts. An illustrated ‘carpet page’ from the Lindisfarne Gospels, a manuscript
produced around 700 AD and currently held in the British Library. Should
Olivette Otele, professor in the history of slavery at Bristol University it be returned to Northumberland?

92
 Simon Jenkins Astrid Swenson

“Most of the old imperial “Despite a language of

museums are overstocked, ‘return’, restitution is
hoarding material in often about negotiating
storerooms, never to the future, not the past”
see the light of day”
There is no one-size-fits-all answer to this
complex question. The vast majority of
This is not going to go away. When objects moved from their original location
someone else has something you think is to a museum have no claimants. Some,
yours, you want it back. If it was stolen though, are in museums as a result of
or otherwise illegally obtained, there is looting and other forms of violence and
no question. It is yours. coercion. The international principles that
The problem with so much museum have made wartime looting illegal and led
treasure is that its acquisition was often to the return of objects since the end of
dubious, and its emotional content often the Napoleonic wars, and following the Nazi confiscations of
significant. Over time, as countries grow art, have in the past rarely been applied to contexts of colonial
stronger and prouder, this will become ever more political. conquest and subjugation. It is high time to address this.
Newly confident nations will want to recover symbols of Historical research is a necessary part of this process, to
their past, whatever their status. determine how objects were acquired. Moreover, it can help
It is no answer for museum directors to plead rules and us comprehend and question why legal and moral ideas about
protocols. They are there to be changed. Great works of restitution have become connected to arguments about preser-
world art and archaeology belong to peoples, not to muse- vation, access, use, successorship, nationalism and universalism.
ums. That they are incarcerated, often out of context and far The history of restitution since the 19th century can also help
from ‘home’, in vast and sombre mausoleums is itself a sad- us understand that, despite a language of ‘return’, restitution is
ness. That their seclusion can only be justified by references often overwhelmingly about negotiating the future rather than
to visitor numbers or the divine right of scholarship is sadder. the past. It has often been used to rebuild communities, and
There is an increasing acceptance of the desirability of offers a way for dialogue and reconciliation.
repatriating ‘crown jewels’ and other works with a peculiar Sometimes a straightforward ‘return’ is neither possible nor
bond to their country of origin, be the artefact in question a desirable – either because an object is ‘orphaned’, as is the case
skull, a statue, a boat or a dress. It seems absurd to deny East- with some objects that belonged to Jews murdered during
er Island its evocative moai statues, which should be gazing the Holocaust, or with objects whose provenance cannot be
out over the Pacific, or Gibraltar its Neanderthal head. Why established. Sometimes there could be more than one ‘rightful
in principle should the Lindisfarne Gospels not be in Lindis- owner’. Should the sword of Grand Master Jean de Valette,
farne and the Lewis Chessmen not (all) in Lewis? acquired by Napoleon when the Knights of Malta surrendered
If international standards of conservation are agreed, there the island in 1798, belong to the Louvre, the Order of St John
is no intellectual case for these objects being held abroad, (now in Rome), or a Maltese institution?
particularly in these days of mass travel and online accessi- Recent routes to resolution show the way, through loans,
bility. Most of the old imperial museums are overstocked, co-curation, and narrative panels that make changes in context
hoarding material in basements and storerooms, never to visible, emphasising the trajectories and transculturality of
see the light of day. There is no conceivable reason for not objects and people. Solutions can allow for multiple uses – for
dispersing these collections. example, a 2000 agreement between the American Museum
The objects bequeathed us by the past belong to humanity. of Natural History and the Confederated Tribes of the Grand
At very least they belong to the people whose ancestors creat- Ronde Community of Oregon enables both scientific study and
ed them and understandably want them back. Locking them spiritual gatherings. The display of an object’s history can help
away in London, New York or Paris is no longer defensible. reveal the emotions that have become attached to objects in
Throw open the doors, and the salerooms. transit, and create dialogue about underlying losses and hopes in
DAVID HAMPTON

the search for just and fair solutions.

Simon Jenkins is a journalist and author. His books include A Short Astrid Swenson is professor of history at Bath Spa University, and
History of London: The Creation of a World Capital (Viking, 2019) co-editor of From Plunder to Preservation (OUP, 2013)

93
94
 BEHIND
THE NEWS

Is the
world
changing
faster
than ever?
In an age when technology advances at
exponential rates and social media allows
communication of news and ideas at the
click of a button, it can seem that the pace of
change is accelerating. But is that really true?
Seven historians explore this conundrum
in this feature first published in 2018 Æ
ILLUSTRATION BY DAVIDE BONAZZI 95
 Ian Mortimer Jane Winters

“Although life is more “A yearning for stability

complex than it was, and familiarity is, and
complexity itself is always has been, part of
not change” what makes us human”
We must start with another question: It feels as though we are living in a time
what do we mean by ‘the world’? Some of rapid, unsettling change. The political
regions saw their most rapid development landscape is being transformed; global
in the distant past – Mexico on the arrival economic forecasts are uncertain; technol-
of Cortés in 1519, for example. Local ogy is developing at a faster rate than most
political events could also trigger a short of us can even comprehend; standards in
period of extremely rapid change. Did life public life seem to have degenerated almost
alter in France faster in the period 1789– overnight. The list goes on.
94 than it has done in the past five years? But is this really new? Throughout
You bet it did. Likewise across Europe in the years 1347–51, as history, societies have experienced seismic change. Empires that
plague ravaged the continent. And just consider how people’s seemed unassailable fell, leaving behind only traces of their
lives changed during the war years 1914–18 or 1939–45. culture. Transformative technologies fundamentally altered the
Today, technology is developing rapidly. But technology lived experience of millions, from the 15th-century invention of
isn’t everything. Language is arguably more important, the printing press to the development of the atomic bomb five
and that is comparatively static. We understand the language centuries later. Conflict and disease devastated countries and
of Shakespeare, whereas he would not have understood continents: the Black Death may have wiped out up to 60%
more than a few words of 13th-century English. Printing of the population of Europe in under a decade in the mid-14th
standardised the language, and standardisation stops change. century. Certainties about life (and the afterlife) were overturned
Many things now don’t alter at all – property ownership, by the Reformation sparked in 1517. This list also goes on.
driving on the left, limited liability, pasteurisation, musical Nostalgia for a lost ‘golden age’ is threaded through human
notation, you name it. Even technology becomes standard- history. This might be an imagined pre-industrial pastoral, an
ised: viz, units of measurement, the ohm, ampere and volt. idyllic pre-war decade, or simply a time when ‘we’ were younger
Most aspects of our lives are not open to yearly fluctuation – and everything was comprehensible. Anxiety about the rapidity
unlike in the Middle Ages, when a failed harvest or invasion of change and a yearning for stability and familiarity are, and
might suddenly obliterate your village. always have been, part of what makes us human.
The real question is, therefore, whether technological So the world may not be changing faster than ever, but I
change is so penetrating that it is changing the whole world do think our experience of that change is new. The speed with
at the same pace. If ‘now’ is the past quarter of a century, which information spreads today is unprecedented, and it can
then no, I don’t think so. Although life is more complex than take a huge effort of will to disengage from the platforms that
it was, complexity itself is not change – and much of that place it in front of us. Concerns about information overload are
complexity has developed slowly, over years. Though mobile also not novel, but the ease and rapidity with which we can learn
phones and the internet have changed most people’s lives, about a terrorist attack or political upheaval, speculate wildly
they have done so over the course of a quarter of a century. In about what caused it, and move on to the next bad news story is
the 25 years 1835–60, railways, the telegraph, postage and bewildering. And this cycle of catastrophe is a global one – the
photography altered the world to a much greater extent. world does not sleep while we do, but is busy generating break-
If, however, ‘now’ means the past 80 years, then I think ing news to greet us when we wake. We access this constant
‘the world’ is changing faster than ever. To be born in the west stream of information using technologies that we do not fully
these days is to be given a chance to make what you can of life. understand, and some of the news itself is only very indirectly
You have choice. Further back in time, you were required to fill generated by humans. Most of us will never grasp the complexi-
an allotted role. So you could say the world is changing faster ties of the algorithms that are influencing our view of the world,
– because everyone is independently changing his or her own and this too is a growing source of anxiety. Is it any wonder that
MICK KAVANAGH

world, and thus changing everyone else’s at the same time. it sometimes seems that things are spinning out of control?

Ian Mortimer is a historian and novelist, and the author of Jane Winters is professor of digital humanities at the School
three Time Traveller’s Guides to historic periods of England of Advanced Study, University of London

96
 Ian Morris

“Catapult a peasant from

1750 BC to this age of cars,
computers, TV, sexual
freedom – they would have
a nervous breakdown”
The world is changing faster than ever
before – much faster. Just look at the most
basic facts. During the so-called Ice Age
(the most recent glacial period, c110,000–
12,000 years ago), the global human popu-
lation is estimated to have doubled roughly
A 16th-century illustration of Spanish Conquistador Hernán Cortés and
every 10,000 years. By the time of the
his troops during their campaign against the Aztecs in 1519 – among a Roman empire, it was doubling every 1,000
sequence of events that triggered rapid changes across Latin America years; in the 20th century, every 50 years.
Between the Ice Age and Rome, life expectancy barely budged:
the typical mother lost half her offspring as children, while the
other half rarely made it through their forties. Globally, this was
still true in 1900, with average life expectancy at birth around 31
years – but by 2000, the average person lived 71.5 years.
Alternatively, take annual income: standards of living
barely budged between 5000 BC and AD 1500. Most people
made the equivalent of £800 in today’s money, insofar as such
conversions make sense. By 1800, the average had crept up to
£1,000, but in the 19th century it doubled, and in the 20th
more than quadrupled, to about £9,000.
I could go on and on, but let’s look instead at what change
meant. Take England: if we picked up a peasant from 1750 BC
and dropped him or her down in AD 1750, just before the
industrial revolution, he or she would have quickly adjusted.
Some things had certainly changed: people had switched from
round houses to rectangular ones, from farmsteads to (mostly)
villages, from bronze to iron, from a sun god to Jesus. The rich
now wore powdered wigs and corsets. A few could now read and
write, some had eyeglasses, and, in 1784, a Scotsman would even
fly in a balloon.
Yet so much had not changed. The basic patterns of life and
death, taxes and rent, sowing and ploughing, deference to lords
and ladies – the visitor from 1750 BC would recognise them
all. But put that peasant back in the Tardis and catapult him or
her to this age of cars, computers, TV, literacy, skyscrapers,
gender reassignment, sexual freedom, democracy, nuclear
weapons… our peasant would have a nervous breakdown.
Make no mistake. The world has changed more in the past
100 years than in the previous 100,000.

Ian Morris is Jean and Rebecca Willard Professor of Classics and

professor of history at Stanford University, and author of Why the
Enrico Fermi, the Italian-American physicist known as the ‘architect of
ALAMY

the nuclear age’ who created the first nuclear reactors in the 1940s. The West Rules – For Now: The Patterns of History, and What They Reveal
20th century saw what seemed to be an unprecedented rate of change About the Future (Profile Books, 2010) Æ
97
 Rana Mitter Keith Lowe

“Over the past half- “The Second World

century China may have War and its aftermath
changed faster than any caused huge geopolitical
other society on earth” changes that are almost
unimaginable today”
China may have changed faster over the
past century than any other society on
earth – certainly, faster than any society Every generation likes to believe it is
of its astonishing size and population. unique. I like to remind my 14-year-old son
Suppose you were Chinese, and you were that when I was his age there was no such
born in 1940. (Perhaps you were.) You thing as the mobile phone, nor the internet.
were born into a society fighting for its It was my generation that created these
life in the face of an invasion by Japan. A things he now takes for granted.
decade later, you were a schoolgirl being However, when we recently sat down
corralled into huge parades in praise of Mao Zedong’s new with my grandmother, who is nearly
socialist China. By 1970, you were a young schoolteacher 100 years old, she reminded us both that
persecuted during the Cultural Revolution, forced to declare she grew up in an age before computers, before television, even
yourself a “stinking” intellectual. Ten years later, you decided before commercial radio. When she was a girl, there were no jets,
to abandon teaching, following new leader Deng Xiaoping’s or rockets, or nuclear power. There were no microwave ovens or
exhortation to “jump into the sea” of business. Since then, electric dishwashers. Antibiotics had yet to be discovered. Most
you’ve seen China shift from a poor, agrarian country to be- of these things were a product of the 1930s, 40s and 50s, and
come the second-biggest economy in the world, with a highly their development was massively accelerated by the major event
authoritarian government whose policies combine urbanisa- of her lifetime – the Second World War.
tion, economic growth and high-technology surveillance. The war and its aftermath also caused huge geopolitical
What has enabled China to change so fast? A key factor changes that are almost unimaginable today. When my
has been control. The authoritarian rule under which China grandmother got married in 1938, much of the world was still
has existed since the victory of the Communists has enabled coloured pink, denoting the vast reach of the British empire,
top-down decisions to be made, often at great speed, which became the Commonwealth. By the time my father got
without the deliberation needed in a democracy. This has married, 30 years later, the age of European empires was
led to disaster, as in the Great Leap Forward of 1958–62, already long over. My father’s generation witnessed the United
when top-down orders demanding unfeasible levels of grain Nations grow from 51 member states to 193 today, an increase
production in China’s countryside led to mass famine. It has largely due to the collapse of empires during that generation’s
also unleashed major social change, such as the turn from teenage years.
top-down socialism to capitalism (tactfully called “socialism We might marvel at how fast the world is changing, but
with Chinese characteristics” by the Chinese Communist are today’s social upheavals really any greater than those
Party) that created the economic miracle after 1978. of the 1950s, when car use and consumer culture boomed, or
Speed of change has undoubtedly been faster in China the 1960s, when teenagers sought to change the world, or the
because of the system of government. However, there has been 1970s, when mass tourism became possible? Momentous
frequent resistance. Today, environmental protests provide events are indeed taking place today, but they build on equally
one example of how people are pushing back against rapid, momentous events that were brought about by previous
often destructive change. The protests are also a warning to generations – and they in turn provide a platform for changes
those who argue that swift decision-making is valuable in yet to come.
itself. Rather, it depends on the results. A China that had made My son is already looking towards a future of driverless
decisions more deliberatively might be a little poorer, but it cars, artificial intelligence, post-Brexit Britain and Chinese
might also have more of its forests and cultural heritage – both dominance in world affairs. Will he too, I wonder, believe that
victims of the swift changes of the past half-century. these changes are greater, deeper and faster than those that we
marvel at today?
Rana Mitter is professor of the history and politics of modern China
at Oxford University and author of China’s Good War: How World War II Keith Lowe is a historian and writer, author of Prisoners of History: What
is Shaping a New Nationalism, set to be published later this year Monuments Tell Us about Our History and Ourselves (William Collins, 2020)

98
Michael Scott Felipe Fernández-Armesto

“In the distant past change “Consumption increased

came very fast indeed – for twentyfold per capita
example, the birth of the worldwide on average
pyramid tombs of Egypt” in the course of the
20th century”
It can so often seem as if life is speeding up
– especially when we think back to ancient
civilisations. Their surviving monuments Even a century ago, measurable change
seem frozen in time; it’s anathema to im- leapt off the graph paper. Theorists groped
agine their world changing faster than ours. for explanations. The German-American
But that does not mean there were not anthropologist Franz Boas thought the
moments in the distant past when change change was inherently “ever-increasing”.
came very fast indeed. The birth of the In 1917, his near-contemporary Robert
pyramid tomb of Egypt is one example. Lowie postulated a threshold beyond
Rulers, like other elites in ancient Egyptian society, had most which culture “gathers momentum”.
often been buried in mastabas – rectangular, single-storey mud- The biggest – but barely noticed –
brick tombs. But then, in the third dynasty of the Old Kingdom indicator of accelerating change has been consumption, which
(c2649–2575 BC), the pharaoh Djoser, with his architect Imho- increased twentyfold per capita worldwide over the 20th
tep, broke with tradition and created the first pyramid tomb at century. World population – an area of growth that excited
Saqqara, the necropolis linked to the capital at Memphis. Malthusian fears (of an imminent crash in a population that
Scholars disagree about the source of their inspiration. outstrips production) and ignited population controls – quad-
Theories include that the stepped pyramid emerged from the rupled. Madcap consumption contributed to growing global
idea of building one mastaba on top of another; that the shape environmental stresses. Because people used far more goods
reflected the primordial mound in Egyptian myth from which in industrialised, urbanised communities, especially in the
all life emerged; that it represented a stairway to heaven for the United States, than anywhere else, the spread of industriali-
pharaoh – or that it was simply a tall structure that would sation and urbanisation guaranteed that consumption would
dominate the skyline and be seen from the capital. continue to hurtle out of control to what are now – or soon will
Whatever the motivation, Djoser’s example was followed by be – probably unsustainable levels.
his successors, who developed the smooth-sided pyramid. The Production rose inescapably with consumer demand, while
rulers of the fourth dynasty (2575–2465 BC) took this technolo- the range of products multiplied bewilderingly, especially in
gy and supersized it, creating the pyramids at Giza, the only sur- pursuit of techno-gadgetry, medical services and remedies,
viving wonders of the ancient world. The Great Pyramid at Giza, and of money-making financial and commercial instruments.
constructed for the pharaoh Khufu, incorporates 2.3 million The world became rapidly unrecognisable to the ageing, whose
cut stones, each of enormous proportions. But though pharaohs lives were unprecedentedly prolonged wherever death-defying
continued building pyramids into the mid-second millennium medical technologies were available.
BC, they never again reached those proportions. The accelerations of change jar security, well-being and
The time between the birth of the pyramid at Saqqara and confidence in the future, and induce spectral fears. When
its most impressive incarnation at Giza was less than 100 years, people feel the threat of change, they reach for ‘order’. Hence
and from Djoser’s pyramid to the time of construction of the the triumphs of noisy little men who promise simple solutions.
entire Giza Pyramid complex less than 200 years. What’s so The herd turns on suspected agents of change: immigrants, for
fascinating about this example is not only the speed with which instance, or international institutions. Because reactionaries
the birth of an idea (a pyramid) could morph into the most thrive amid fears of instability, the most effective revolutionar-
magnificent symbol of a civilisation (the Great Pyramid), but ies of recent times have called for religious fundamentalism, or
also how such an innovation has also become an eternal icon for primitive communism or anarchism, or the apple-cheeked in-
mankind’s creativity, ingenuity and determination. Sometimes nocence of an era before the industrial revolution. Intellectuals
very rapid changes in our world have eternal impacts. flee to anomie, moral relativism, and indeterminacy. Change
may be good. It is always dangerous.
Michael Scott is an author, broadcaster and associate professor at the
University of Warwick. His books include Ancient Worlds: An Epic History Felipe Fernández-Armesto is William P Reynolds Professor
of East and West (Windmill Books, 2017) of History at the University of Notre Dame, Indiana

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