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"Today, the defenders of the Enlightenment are in retreat"
Michael Wood on the evolution and erosion of universal human rights
I’ve just returned from a trip to Versailles. On a bitterly cold, end-of-winter afternoon, the great symbol of French monarchy, gilded anew for the 2024 Olympics, gleamed against a steel-blue sky. The crowds were huge: it’s one of the biggest tourist draws in France after Disneyland – which is somehow fitting, for Versailles is a fairytale palace, too. I walked the gardens, browsed the bookshop (stacked with books on Marie Antoinette, of course) and then strolled back through the town to the station. On the way, there was a surprise. In a side street, display boards along an old wall told the story of the National Assembly of the summer of 1789 – the very moment of revolution. Down a lane, a faded wooden sign over a crumbling gateway marked the site of the Hôtel des Menus-Plaisirs du Roi, where the scenery, costumes, instruments and props used in royal entertainments were stored; it’s now a centre of baroque music. Inside was a tree-lined courtyard and a rain-filled hollow marking the oval outline of the temporary auditorium where the National Assembly met. Here, affronted by the concentration of wealth in the hands of the rich and powerful, the representatives of the people voted to “abolish privilege” and create a Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen. Read more | How Napoleon (almost) destroyed the French Revolution The Rights of Man! Such were the ideals of the Enlightenment, the great 18th-century movement towards rational thought, equality before the law, freedom of conscience, human autonomy, secularism and democracy. That declaration in 1789 came hot on the heels of the American Revolution, whose 250th anniversary we celebrate this year. That, in turn, was inspired by English precedent: Magna Carta and the Bill of Rights 1689. These ideals have been upheld by western thinkers ever since, despite the horrendous deeds of imperialists across the world in the intervening time, colonising and enslaving other cultures, and fighting catastrophic internecine wars. It was the horrors of the Second World War that inspired the United Nations’ Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948, signed by all except Saudi Arabia, apartheid South Africa and the Soviet Bloc. Today, the defenders of the Enlightenment are in retreat. Liberal humanism, we are told, has had its day. In international affairs the rules-based order is gone. From Greenland to Iran there are no constraints on state action save self-interest. The same goes for internal governance. In the US, we’re seeing the tearing-up of the assumptions of American democracy, cherished since 1776. Hillary Clinton has said of President Trump: “He has betrayed the west, he’s betrayed human values… [and] the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.” Read more | Your guide to the 1776 American Declaration of Independence Universal? Given the deeds of western colonialism over the past couple of centuries, it is not surprising that some have denied that they are. China, for example, now rejects Enlightenment ideas as non-Chinese. Yet many European observers in the 18th century saw the Qing state as a kind of Enlightenment society, with an (admittedly harsh) legal code, charitable institutions, scientific and literary clubs, poetry circles and even a measure of public opinion. Common human values in the Confucian and European traditions are evident in, for example, the beginnings of a human rights discourse in 17th and 18th-century China, and even discussion of the principle of the rule of law. As Huang Zongxi wrote in 1661, “You cannot have the rule of man without the rule of law.” Those 18th-century French intellectuals would have agreed. (China, incidentally, was one of the original signatories to the UN Declaration, and its constitution guarantees human rights, including of speech and religion – but only so far as they do not endanger the state. In China, the state has always come first.) But the ideals of the Enlightenment were European. Of course, they weren’t all created in the 18th century. Some go back to classical Greece and Rome, and some to the early medieval world of the great Carolingian thinkers; all three European renaissances played their part. The debate on universal human rights began in earnest in Europe in the mid-16th century. So these ideas are part of the European way of seeing the world – but they are surely also universal. On the train back into Paris, thinking on our troubled times, I was struck by the contrasts of Versailles. We walk the gilded halls of the king-emperor, but in the rain-filled hollow on the way to the station, history is still readable – the struggles of real people to make the real world a better place. This article was first published in the April 2026 issue of HistoryExtra Magazine
Want to understand modern Britain? Look towards its villages
This year we celebrate 75 years of The Archers. Now, I confess I haven’t listened to the series for a while – not since the riveting plot 10 years back about coercive control, with Rob Titchener and Helen Archer. But, if any show on radio or TV is iconic, it’s The Archers, the story of an English village over time, “an everyday story of country folk”, (though now billed as “a contemporary drama in a rural setting”). The characters – the Grundys, the Archers, the Pargetters – and the places – Grey Gables, Brookfield Farm, the Bull, St Stephen’s church – have become so real that in 1981 their history was published in Ambridge: An English Village Through the Ages, with photos, maps, court rolls, Tudor wills, even an Æthelstan charter! All fiction, of course, but perfectly realised. The world’s longest-running radio serial was born out of the Second World War. Its first pilot episodes were broadcast in May 1950 and the series started properly on New Year’s Day 1951, in a snowbound world of austerity and rationing. It was originally created by a veteran of the wartime Ministry of Information, Godfrey Baseley. Based on Cutnall Green and Inkberrow in Worcestershire, the series was driven by the Reithian ideal of ‘inform, educate and entertain’. But it was also designed to reflect reality, conceived as a means of disseminating information to farmers and smallholders to help increase productivity in the era of rationing and food shortages. Originally produced with collaborative input from the Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food, it has had a farming consultant ever since. Read more | The radio revolution: how Britain found its frequency It was an instant hit. Its regular 9 million listeners peaked in 1955 at 20 million, when Grace Archer died in a barn fire. At its heart was a simple idea: that the village is the quintessential microcosm of English life, the imagined community to which we all dream of belonging. England is a village! We’ve had villages since the Roman period. There were free communities, but most were of dependent peasants. Life was hard, even when not in the grip of plague and famine. The bulk of England’s population was rural; only in the 18th century did the massive shift begin towards towns and cities. By the 19th century we start to view the village with nostalgia – Victorian records like the famous Warwickshire Photographic Survey chronicled an already disappearing way of life. Since 1945, the past has accelerated away from us at an ever faster rate. In 1969, in his landmark Akenfield: Portrait of an English Village, Ronald Blythe offered an uncompromisingly realistic portrait detailing the end of the old English village, with interviews that are already records for the historian. But the idea was still potent; in 2010 we made our TV series (Michael Wood’s Story of England) on Kibworth, Leicestershire, inspired by the great WG Hoskins who suggested that the whole history of the country could be told through one village. Kibworth was that for our time. And now time has moved on again. In Ambridge, big farms have replaced smallholders; Grey Gables is a spa hotel. But the myth still endures. And maybe not just a myth. What The Archers shows is that the village still stands for the idea of community, a word more and more in use now as we search for our commonality. A place of 500 or a thousand people, where everyone knows each other, and each other’s business, but who always help out in an emergency; a place where we can still feel connected and hold that dream of a harmonious vision of society. Read more | Michael Wood on the struggle of memory against forgetting | "Place names are signposts to the past" In reality, of course, the English village has always been shaped by inequality and class conflict. Still today less than 1 per cent of the population owns half the land; a third is still owned by the aristocracy and gentry. Some of us may fret about migrants, but the village always had its newcomers – Frisians, Saxons, Angles, Jutes, Danes, Normans, Huguenots, Africans, West Indians, Bangladeshis, Pakistanis. That is who we are. And today that changing sense of community is being augmented by a huge wave of local historians researching families, farms and places, injecting new energy into the historiography of the village – even though, as is the case for most of us these days, our village is now inside the city. Hoskins is still right: the whole story can be told in any one place. And now in 2025 if we were to look for a real Ambridge, why not choose somewhere like Handsworth, near Birmingham, home of the Lunar Society of Matthew Boulton and the scientific and social revolutionaries of the 18th century; of Lord Bill Morris of the TUC; of Stevie Winwood, Benjamin Zephaniah and Joan Armatrading. Now wouldn’t that be fun? And how revealing about us, at this new moment in our ever-changing story. This article was first published in the March 2026 issue of HistoryExtra Magazine
"Forget AI – never has the role of the historian been more urgent"
"Great histories have been written under the intense pressure of events", writes Michael Wood
Recently, I read a news item about the jobs most likely to disappear because of the impact of artificial intelligence (AI). And first among them, along with translators, are historians! Now I’m biased of course, but in times like these, when the president of the United States himself can tell the world that Ukraine started the war with Russia, it seems to me we need historians more than ever. In the face of spreading authoritarian rule and growing rightwing populism, good history is a refuge and a beacon. Complicating matters further, it often seems as if the owners of the mass media, billionaires who wish to shape debates, don’t want historians any more than they want independent journalists. It seems that from their perspective, the less historically literate the people are, the better. But in an open democratic society, we need informed historical perspectives, the painstaking interrogation of sources, and public explanation and interpretation. History is not only entertainment. In an age of lies and disinformation, history acts as our reality check. Read more | Artificial intelligence: a modern advance or an ancient nightmare? And history, don’t forget, is not a fireside job. Great histories have been written under the intense pressure of events, in the moment. Think of Thucydides writing as the Peloponnesian War raged, or Ibn Khaldun, lowered down a wall in a basket to parley with the monstrous Timur (Tamerlane) at the siege of Damascus. Or what about the heroic Emanuel Ringelblum? Samuel D Kassow’s account of Ringelblum’s efforts to record the experiences of those trapped in the Warsaw ghetto – Who Will Write Our History? – is surely one of the most staggering books about why we write. To be a true historian is to make a kind of pact with the living and the dead – and with future generations. We have a duty to tell the truth. A new book brings all this into sharp relief. Jean-Pierre Filiu is a distinguished French historian, the author of The Middle East: A Political History from 395 to the Present and Gaza: A History. He has made many visits to Gaza since 1980. But now, one of the big problems for our understanding of the Gazan catastrophe is the Israeli government’s refusal to allow independent journalists – even Israeli ones – into Gaza after war broke out in 2023. Since then, we have depended on the endeavours of incredibly brave Palestinian journalists to tell us what is happening – and Gaza is the most dangerous place in the world to be a journalist. As a historian, Filiu decided he couldn’t write about the present crisis without being there and talking to the people on the ground. No naïve youngster, on the night of his 63rd birthday, he entered Gaza with a humanitarian group, Médecins Sans Frontières, and as a fluent Arabic speaker he was an active member of their team. He spent 33 days and 34 nights “to see and experience for myself, to retrieve not only the meaning of words in Gaza, but also the simple values of our shared humanity”. Read more | Nineteen Eighty-Four: to the future or to the past? His book is called A Historian in Gaza. It should be read by all who aspire to be historians. In its pages, we read of things we never hear in our news broadcasts. For example, it illuminates the complex conflicts within Gaza between feuding clan groups. These disputes have roots in the client system introduced by the Ottomans and continued by the British, a kind of divide-and-rule approach where competing groups were largely allowed to get on with running the territory on a day-to-day basis. Here we see the desperate Palestinian people suffering under multiple burdens: bombed and shelled by Israeli forces and pushed towards starvation, but also brutalised by competing Islamist groups and extorted by rival militias. Most of all, though, it provides the material for us to judge for ourselves the real meaning of the contested words and ideas we see on our TV screens: war crimes, crimes against humanity, genocide. What does the historian do? At root, the craft is about judgment. What does this source say? Is it true? What is the writer’s bias? Can I prove it? Am I accepting an account because it conforms with how I see the world? More than a book about the Israel-Palestine conflict, A Historian in Gaza is about the nature of power in our time. Because of the hugely expanding reach of social media and its growing influence on the practice of democracy itself, George Orwell’s famous warning in Nineteen Eighty-Four is truer now than ever before. To control the past is to control the future; control the present and you control the past. Forget AI: never has the role of the historian been more urgent. This article was first published in the February 2026 issue of HistoryExtra Magazine
Was Homer a real person? Michael Wood on the surprising origins of The Iliad
" Scholars have applied models used in genetic research to Homer’s Iliad", writes Michael Wood
Proust’s famous novel is called In Search of Lost Time, and isn’t that the key to why we love history? It’s the urge to recover the lost past. Can we get beyond the mysterious veil to real events and people? Can we even feel how they felt? And as historians, we always hope to find new sources and new ways of seeing. In our time, many new paths have been opened up by science. For example, scientists have adopted techniques used for decoding the genetic history of humans, not only through their genes, but by tracking transformations in language. This form of historical linguistics, known as time depth linguistics, has helped establish the family tree of languages. One branch, the Indo-European languages, has been known since the 18th century, connecting Greek, Latin, Persian and Sanskrit in the east, and English, Welsh and Old Irish in the west. Now we can see when and where the branches on the family tree diverged. It’s been proved, for example, that, as tradition had always said, Sanskrit-speaking migrants – so called ‘Aryans’ – migrated from Afghanistan into north-west India in the late Bronze Age, the period of the earliest Sanskrit texts in the Rig Veda. Scholars have applied the same models used in genetic research to one of the most celebrated texts in western culture, Homer’s Iliad. As a tool kit, they used word lists invented by the linguist Morris Swadesh (1909–67) and other scholars. In this case the focus was key words shared among the Indo-European languages. With the Iliad, science came up with a likely date of composition: 762 BC (plus or minus 50 years). The exactness is perhaps illusory: but it corroborates the older ideas of Homeric scholars that the poem dates from the eighth century BC. Read more | National English: the language that would save England It has long been known that the Iliad is the product of oral composition, a tissue of repeat phrases that allowed the poet to improvise his story. In fact, the Homeric epics came out of centuries of oral transmission. The heroes’ weapons are of bronze, though Homer lived in the Iron Age; Ajax’s tower shield comes from the middle Bronze Age, Odysseus’s “silver studded sword” is of the late Bronze Age. Conversely, you could argue that the story of the wooden horse comes not from the likely time of the Trojan War (just after 1300 BC?) but from the eighth century BC, when the new technology of siege warfare included wheeled engines shaped like a giant bull, inside which men worked a battering ram. Was this a brilliant invention by the poet, introducing a piece of modern technology as a plot device and a metaphor? It all emphasises how the poem came at the end of a long process of invention and performance. Another aspect of Homer that has come to the fore in the last few years is his debt to near eastern storytelling, borrowing stories and motifs from the Epic of Gilgamesh and other myths from Mesopotamia. These came from versions in Hurrian, Ugaritic and Hittite, transmitted by travelling bards and minstrels at local courts, religious fairs and festivals. Read more | He tried to conquer knowledge itself – instead this ancient Mesopotamian king resorted to rule with terror That’s where Homer comes in. It is now thought Homer was a single person, an itinerant bard composing and singing his stories towards 700 BC, perhaps as tradition said, in Smyrna, or on the nearby island of Chios. Whether blind or not in old age, he must have seen some of the local scenes he so minutely describes, like the flocks of geese and cranes, and long-necked swans “rising and circling noisily, rejoicing in their wings by the streams of the Cayster in the meadow of Asia”. The text we have was first written down a century or so after his death, perhaps towards 600 BC, and from then on it was performed annually at festivals in Athens. In the tones and accents, it retained the tell-tale signs of the generations of sung oral performance that lay behind it. Homer’s text reached the form in which we know it in around 200 BC, though marginal notes in later manuscripts preserve alternative readings, some of which, like shards of memory, pass down no-longer-understood words of Bronze Age origin, or reflect ancient variants in the long storytelling tradition. That, of course, continues, giving birth to countless new tellings, in books, poems, films and video games, as the tale continues to spread and multiply across the world. And now, like tree-ring dating, we have another window on the first work of European literature. This article was first published in the January 2026 issue of HistoryExtra magazine
Uncontacted peoples: why do nearly 200 groups choose to live outside 'civilisation'?
"These are the last humans who have stayed outside 'civilisation'", writes Michael Wood
A new report by Survival International, Uncontacted Peoples: At the Edge of Survival, is the latest accounting of the human story – and it is a historical document of unparalleled power. It reveals that at least 196 groups in the world are still uncontacted, most of them gravely threatened by logging, mining and drilling for oil. These are the last human beings who have stayed outside ‘civilisation’ since the violence of the West reached across the globe after 1492. The report cast my mind back 25 years to when we made a series of four films telling the story of the Spanish conquest of the Americas. Cortés, Pizarro, Orellana, Cabeza de Vaca: these were men who experienced some of the most incredible adventures in human history. We tracked them on the ground, following in their footsteps over the Andes, up Inca trails to lost cities, and rafting down the Amazon. The third film was especially powerful in its implications for the here and now, as well as the events of the 16th century. It told the story of the expedition led out of Quito in 1541 by Gonzalo Pizarro (younger half-brother of Francisco, who spearheaded the conquest of the Inca empire). Its goal was to find the fabled El Dorado – ‘the Golden Man’ – a mythical city of gold believed to exist somewhere in the jungles beyond the Andes. The city was, in fact, unfindable – because it never existed. In trackless terrain, the expedition ran into disaster: soaked by incessant rains, running out of food, the men were reduced to eating their horses and cooking their boot leather. Francisco Orellana pushed onward in a home-made boat to scout what lay ahead, but such was the speed of the river that he couldn’t make his way back to the rest of the men. Read more | “Indigenous Americans who travelled across the Atlantic were horrified by inequalities in European society” After untold sufferings, the survivors of the main army made it back to Quito nearly a year and a half later. Meanwhile, after many adventures, Orellana sailed eastward, navigating the entire length of the Amazon. He was the first European to see the interior of Amazonia at a time when the middle reaches of the river supported huge settlements. Then, from the mouth of the great river, he sailed back north to Trinidad, completing one of the most astounding stories of human endurance. On our journey, a parallel narrative unfolded. Down the main course of the Amazon, everyone told us that the water levels were fast receding. Climate researchers had just announced that, at the rate of climate change then observed, the Amazon forest would start to transform into savannah in 2042 – coincidentally, the 500th anniversary of the Orellana expedition. If that happened, the climate cycle would be broken, the weight of history literally tipping the balance. Along the route, we heard stories of indigenous peoples in the depths of the forest. In the river town of Coca in Ecuador, a man told us how, as a youngster, he had lived with the Waorani tribe before he moved to the town and learned Spanish. He told of the struggles of those who chose to stay out of the modern world. One group steadfastly refused all contact; another had killed US missionaries who had not respected their wishes to be left alone. For them, he said, the price of receiving the white man’s god was degradation, alcoholism, and the loss of their own language, culture and identity. Read more | Did Aztec civilisation really ‘collapse’? The reality isn’t as simple as you might think The Survival International report features the story of one such people, the Mashco Piro in the Madre de Dios region of Peru – perhaps the single largest remaining uncontacted group. Not long after our journeys for the Conquistadors films, haunted by the beauty and tragedy of Peru, I went back with my family. We stayed in the Manu region with local people who lived off the forests and drew sustenance from the river. Beyond them was a checkpoint and a protected region extending 100 miles to the Madre de Dios river where outsiders may not go – and where the Survival report shows the Mashco Piro still live. So I read the report, with its haunting photos, feeling a sense of profound sadness. The holocaust of indigenous peoples is almost complete. The pattern is the same across the world over the past 500 years: the taking of the land, the extermination of native people and the plundering of the environment, fuelled by white supremacy, evangelical religion, western diseases and sheer greed. And now, five centuries on from the conquest of the Americas, across the entire planet only a few thousand of our ancient brothers and sisters hang on – people who simply do not wish to be contacted. What does that say about us? This column was first published in the Christmas 2025 issue of BBC History Magazine
The Book of Kells: "a masterpiece of medieval calligraphy and painting"
"The Book of Kells is a masterwork of medieval calligraphy and painting", writes Michael Wood
The Book of Kells, one of the greatest pieces of medieval art, is today displayed in the library of Trinity College Dublin. This illuminated gospel book is named after the monastery in County Meath where it was kept in the Middle Ages. It’s a masterwork of medieval calligraphy and painting, with its Celtic knot patterns, scintillating colour, and the staggering intricacies of the display pages and canon tables – all smoky golden magnificence. An Irish annalist called the book “the great Gospel of Columcille [Columba], the chief relic of the western world”. It may be the work described by the historian Gerald of Wales in the 1180s, in his book on Ireland. “Look more keenly at it and you will penetrate to the very shrine of art,” he wrote. “You will make out intricacies so delicate and so subtle… that you might say that all this were the work of an angel, and not of a man.” The book survived war, plunder and the English – Cromwell’s troops were once billeted in Kells. In the 19th century, it was a huge influence on the Celtic revival movement in the arts, and today is seen as the pinnacle of the western tradition of illuminated manuscripts. Read more | Michael Wood on amazing insights into medieval daily life The book was produced around the end of the eighth century, just at the moment Britain and Ireland were about to be changed forever by the arrival of the Vikings. It was long believed to have been created on Iona. But in The Book of Kells: Unlocking the Enigma, published in October, Victoria Whitworth suggests that it was actually written at the Pictish monastery of Portmahomack on the Moray Firth in north-east Scotland. This is one of the least known areas of the medieval British Isles. The Pictish monasteries were destroyed in the Viking age, and with them virtually all written records. The kingdom of the Picts became part of the Scottish kingdom of Alba in the ninth century, and gradually the memory of the Picts faded, leaving many unsolved mysteries. One key survival is their stone carving, of which there are brilliant examples in the National Museum of Scotland in Edinburgh. Some, such as the huge memorial slab from Hilton of Cadboll etched with horsemen and hunting dogs, are absolutely stunning. You can still see these wonderful works of art on the ground when you head up the coast of north-east Scotland. At Aberlemno is a magnificent carving perhaps commemorating the battle of Nechtansmere in 685 at which the Pictish king Bridei defeated and killed the Northumbrian invader King Ecgfrith. And by St Vigeans Church on the outskirts of Arbroath there’s a fascinating museum holding more than 30 pieces of Pictish sculpture. This Pictish trail leads to Portmahomack, a beautiful spot on the Tarbat peninsula looking across to the distant hills of Sutherland. The origins of Christianity here are still obscure. Bede mentions a saint whom we know as Ninnian, who evangelised in the fifth century. In the sixth century came St Columba, who reached as far north as Moray. Read more | Medieval miracle worker: how St Columba transformed Christianity in Britain But it was only in the 1990s that the first excavation of a Pictish monastery took place at Portmahomack. Its construction began around 550 – which might fit with a foundation by St Columba – and was probably destroyed in a Viking attack in the early ninth century, though some kind of community hung on after that. It was later dedicated to St Colman of Lindisfarne, who played a famous role in the Synod of Whitby in 664 – the great debate over Celtic and Roman traditions of Easter. Colman then returned to Iona and died in Ireland, but he was still celebrated in later times at Portmahomack. When excavating the levels burned during the Viking raid, the archaeologist found over 200 fragments of Pictish stone carving in a style very similar to the Book of Kells. This led Dr Whitworth to propose that the most famous of all Irish manuscripts was actually made here. Indeed, finds from the dig included workshops and a room where vellum was prepared, interpreted as a scriptorium – perhaps the very place where the Book of Kells was written? All of this only underlines how much we still don’t know about the early Middle Ages in the outer reaches of Britain. We don’t even know the site’s original name. As for the Picts themselves – still known today by the name that the late Romans gave them, meaning the ‘painted people’ – their identity eventually merged with the Scots, and their language (probably pre-Indo-European?) became extinct. But recent DNA studies suggest that their legacy endures in the genetic inheritance of people across Scotland. And of course in Trinity College Dublin you can still glimpse the unique, dazzling, colourful vision that infused the astonishing art of the Picti. This column was first published in the December 2025 issue of BBC History Magazine
Michael Wood on the rise and fall of Asian empires
"Emperor Jahangir and Shah Abbas literally bestride the world like colossi", writes Michael Wood
Watching the recent spectacle of those latter-day emperors President Xi of China and India’s Narendra Modi hugging each other at the summit in Tianjin, my mind cast back to an earlier image of a pan-Asian summit. There’s a wonderful painting from 1618 of the Mughal emperor Jahangir embracing Shah Abbas of Iran – one of several such pictures painted for the Indian ruler. These heads of two superpowers were in fact not bosom buddies but intense geopolitical rivals, especially in the Kandahar region of south-west Afghanistan, then under Mughal control. Framed by a huge golden halo, in an image of peace, one stands on a lamb, the other on a lion, both on a globe whose surface extends from the strait of Gibraltar to the South China Sea: they literally bestride the world like colossi. In the foreground of the map, a product of the new science of cartography, are shown north Africa, India and south-east Asia, with the Nile, the Ganges and the Yangtze accurately depicted. The painting is allegorical; the hoped-for meeting never actually took place. But the timing, and the details, have much to tell us. In the painting, western Europe lies, unseen, over the horizon. Yet at that moment the small, aggressive maritime powers on the edge of the Eurasian landmass were already extending their influence and carving up the New World – and were now threatening the old powers in the Asiatic heartland of civilisation. The Spanish had begun colonisation of the Philippines in 1565, the Portuguese leased Macao in 1557, the English East India Company was founded in 1600, and the Dutch East India Company was established two years later. Elizabeth I had earlier sent an ambassador to Jahangir’s father, Akbar, to negotiate trade links. In another painting, Jahangir greets a Sufi mystic in the presence of the Ottoman Sultan and King James VI & I – not an imaginary likeness but one taken from a portrait brought to India by the ambassador Thomas Roe in 1616. In an uncanny touch by the painter, James stares coolly out of the picture, straight at the viewer, as if to say: “Our time has come.” And it had. Read more | Gulbadan Begum: the Mughal Jane Austen The Mughal artist Abu al-Hasan, who painted that magnificent picture of Jahangir and Abbas, cannot have imagined that his world – the world stretching from the Mediterranean to the Yellow Sea, created by the great Asiatic civilisations – was about to be shaken to its core by the violent energies, the inventiveness and the sheer ambition of the Europeans. Jahangir never got his summit with Shah Abbas. Nor did he meet the ailing Wanli Emperor, who was destined to die a couple of years later in Beijing. Since then, the turning of the wheel of history has been astounding: empires, world wars, the colonisation of entire continents, the triumph of capitalism – changes so huge that it is hardly possible to take them all in. The world has been remade in our likeness. And now, in 2025, President Xi hosts a summit calling for an alternative world order – “a more just and equitable global governance system”. We may not like President Xi’s choice of friends, but such is the realpolitik of our age. And to be sure, some would say that the American empire has accumulated enough misdeeds of its own to merit a reaction. Xi, in particular – an avid reader of history books (the Chinese translation of Peter Frankopan’s The Silk Roads reportedly among them) believes in the destiny of China. He thinks that China’s time has come, after the ‘Century of Humiliation’ at the hands of western powers. Eighty years on from the Second World War, Xi now says that China’s rise to global leadership is “unstoppable”. So back to these images of empire: Jahangir and Abbas, Modi and Xi. Some would say that they represent wish fulfilment: a rebuke to what President Xi’s baleful friend Putin calls “outdated Eurocentric and Euro-Atlantic models”. But behind the hugs and the photo ops, behind that amazing piece of diplomatic grandstanding in the giant military parade in Beijing celebrating China’s role in the Second World War, perhaps there is more than that: a vision of the future, uncomfortable though it may be to us in the west. As for Jahangir’s globe, the painting was a dream. But there are few images from the past that more powerfully distil what might have been. And now, as Shakespeare put it, “the whirligig of time brings in his revenges”. This column was first published in the November 2025 issue of BBC History Magazine
Michael Wood on China's immense suffering in the Second World War
"China suffered horrendous losses, second only to the Soviet Union", writes Michael Wood
The Second World War still plays a massive role in our national mythology in Britain. But if I were to ask you: “Who was the fourth ally?” I imagine that most readers would have to think twice. The answer is China. China fought the entire war – and longer – and suffered horrendous losses, second only to the Soviet Union. Frank Capra’s Why We Fight documentaries, which included a 1944 film called The Battle of China, saw the war with Japan as part of “the struggle of freedom against slavery, civilisation against barbarism”. Films in the series close with the hope that a victory for the democracies – Republican China in the 1930s, don’t forget, had been a fledgling democracy – will bring about “the utter defeat of the war machines of Germany and Japan”. Today, history is a big deal in China. Since 1949, the Chinese view of modern history has centred on the ‘century of humiliation’ following the First Opium War (1839–42), when foreign powers carved up the country. But more recently, the Second World War has assumed a powerful new role in Chinese nationalism. There’s a museum to the war in Beijing, the Museum of the War of Chinese People’s Resistance Against Japanese Aggression, and a harrowing memorial to the 1937–38 Nanjing Massacre. At the China Modern History Museum in Nanjing, you can dress up in nationalist Kuomintang or communist uniforms and have your photo taken in wartime dioramas. The Chinese view of the conflict has shifted towards showing the country as a heroic participant in a war that was moral and just. The Chinese had been engaged in hostilities with Japan since 1931, when the Japanese invaded Manchuria. The conflict proper lasted from July 1937 until 2 September 1945 – the 80th anniversary of the conflict’s end is being marked this year. So the Second World War effectively started earlier, and lasted longer, here than in Europe. And without China, the course of the wider war might have been very different. Read more | Michael Wood on amazing insights into medieval daily life The Chinese lost a million soldiers, but civilian deaths numbered somewhere between 10 and 15 million, maybe more. Hitherto enemies, the Kuomintang and the communists both resisted the invader, but afterwards fought a deadly civil war that was won by the communists, whom the war had turned into a national liberation movement. (Mao later claimed that the communists might never have won victory without the Japanese.) So China played a leading role in the creation of our postwar world. As one of the four victorious powers, they should have been able to articulate their own vision of east Asia. The problem, of course, was that in 1949 China became a communist country – and in the Cold War, communism was an enemy of the so-called ‘Free World’. The Chinese Communist Party was not formally recognised as the country’s government by the US till 1979. Read more | Why were these British Second World War burials draped with Nazi flags? There are many incredible stories of wartime China. One involves a young British hero, who is also being celebrated on the 80th anniversary this year. George Hogg was an adventurer who, in January 1938 – shortly after the Nanjing Massacre began – travelled to Shanghai. He helped a New Zealand nurse, Kathleen Hall, smuggle medicine and food to the communist resistance. Witnessing first-hand the brutality of the Japanese imperial army towards the Chinese people, on impulse he decided to stay and help – a story he told in his book I See a New China, published in 1944 and adapted into the film The Children of Huang Shi in 2008, starring Jonathan Rhys Meyers. In Hogg’s most famous adventure, he saved 60 Chinese boys orphaned during the war and led them west to Gansu, mostly on foot – 700 miles through dangerous passes, on snow-covered mountain roads. In the end he commandeered six trucks to complete the journey to Shandan county where he created a safe haven for war orphans, founding a school that still exists. Hogg died in Gansu on 22 July 1945 after contracting tetanus. His tomb in Shandan has a traditional Chinese grave stele with four lines of a poem Hogg loved: Into Battle, by the First World War poet Julian Grenfell, who was killed on the western front in 1915, the year of Hogg’s birth. Recently there has been huge interest in China about the Briton who selflessly gave his life for the Chinese people. Just one story – but what a story. So, as China commemorates the anniversary of the end of the Second World War in September, should we not invite our Chinese friends to join us in the rituals at the Cenotaph, to lay a wreath on behalf of our forgotten ally? It would be high time. This article was first published in the October 2025 issue of BBC History Magazine
Michael Wood on women's contributions to the Bayeux Tapestry
"We should remember the unknown women who made the Tapestry", writes Michael Wood
Like all readers, I am sure, I was thrilled to hear the news that the Bayeux Tapestry is coming to England next year. 1066 is the most important date in British history, and the Tapestry is the greatest single source, taking the tale from the last days of Edward the Confessor through the drama of Harold and William, the Norman invasion, and the defeat and death of Harold at Hastings. The Tapestry has been in Bayeux since the Middle Ages and has never left, save briefly during the Franco-German War and under Napoleon and the Nazis, who both sought to weaponise it prior to their own invasion attempts. But it was made in England in the aftermath of the Conquest, probably at Canterbury by English needlewomen. Scholars think that it was commissioned by the Conqueror’s brother Odo, bishop of Bayeux, who features prominently on the Tapestry along with his followers. One of those, Vitalis, is singled out and named, shown mounted and in full armour, reporting to William the whereabouts of the English army. Perhaps he was the leader of a scouting detachment who had gone ahead of the Norman army. Read more | The Bayeux Tapestry is finally coming home to Britain – and you can see it next year The artistic inspiration was the English school of manuscript painting in Canterbury, but there may have been Roman models, too. Trajan’s Column, in particular, depicts the emperor’s Dacian campaigns in a similar manner – like a strip cartoon. Odo himself had been to Rome; so, too, had Scolland, abbot of St Augustine’s Abbey, who may have designed the Tapestry – perhaps using a sketch book from his travels? It’s a huge artwork, some 68.3 metres long, but damaged at the end: perhaps as much as 3 metres is missing. It is generally agreed that the Tapestry originally finished with William’s crowning at Westminster at Christmas 1066 – a mirror image to the opening panel of the enthroned Edward the Confessor. Based on that assumption, a brilliant full-scale reconstruction has been completed by embroiderers on Alderney (alderneybayeuxtapestry.com). It’s thought that the Tapestry was commissioned for the consecration of Bayeux Cathedral in 1077. Art historian Christopher Norton suggests that its original length would perfectly fit the nave of Odo’s new church, along three walls of a rectangular space 31 metres long and 9 metres wide, taking account of doorways and architectural supports. Possibly the first record of the embroidery tells us that, in the 15th century, it was hung in the nave at Bayeux on the feast of the cathedral’s relics, 1 July, and for the following week. By the 18th century, that period stretched from the Feast of John the Baptist on 24 June till the end of July. This gives us a key clue to its original purpose: perhaps it was made specifically to be shown in the cathedral on the relic feast. On the Tapestry, Harold has a bigger role than William, and his story unfolds as a tragedy. Harold’s fate is sealed when he breaks his oath to support William’s claim to the English throne. Before then, he was a great and successful warrior. So he’s portrayed not as a Judas but as a Macbeth – a brave man led by his ambition into disloyalty. It is possible that his fateful oath was actually sworn on the cathedral’s relics at Bayeux. If the Tapestry was dedicated by Odo to his cathedral, then the part of the relics in the story is central. Read more | “I counted the penises in the Bayeux Tapestry and I have no regrets”: what one Oxford professor found when he studied the rudest bits of the embroidery We know nothing of the women who made it. Yet we do know that the work of Old English needlewomen was later prized abroad as opus Anglicanum, ‘English work’. We know that Earl Byrhtnoth, the hero of the battle of Maldon in 991, was depicted on a tapestry hung in Ely Abbey (now Ely Cathedral) that perhaps also commemorated the faithful retainers named in the famous Old English poem. And even middling people had embroideries in their houses depicting heroic or biblical scenes, which provided richly coloured decoration and acted as draught-proofing. In her will from the 940s, a woman called Wynflaed gives her friend her “long hall tapestry”, which must have been a fine heirloom. So much bigger in scale, the Bayeux Tapestry was commissioned by a rich and powerful person at the top of society. As for its actual makers, it is only later in the Middle Ages that we start to learn the names of some of the women who created such wonderful works of art that were prized across Europe. So when we stand in front of the Tapestry next year, and take in the immense drama of the Conquest, we should also remember the unknown women who made it: the likes (let’s imagine) of Eadgyth of Sittingbourne and Ælfflæd of Whitstable. Now, they would have a story to tell. This column was first published in the September 2025 issue of BBC History Magazine
Michael Wood on lessons on good government from medieval Siena
"When justice is sovereign, the wicked are stripped of all power", writes Michael Wood
Siena is one of the great historic cities – a living vision of the medieval world found now in very few places. Here is the architecture and street plan of a medieval city-state, the oldest bank in the world, and one of the oldest universities. Siena was even the first place to ban the car, in 1966! In its centre, the great square called the Campo hosts the famous Palio horse race twice a year. It’s a place to relish the continuance of the past into the present. In the Middle Ages, Siena was run by the Nine, who rotated every two months as a bulwark against tyranny. They met in the council hall in the Palazzo Pubblico (Public Palace) on the Campo. On the first floor is a room adorned with some of the most extraordinary paintings in western art. Three fresco panels, painted by Ambrogio Lorenzetti in 1338, offer a vibrant vision of life in town and country on the eve of the Black Death. This huge work, known as The Allegory of Good and Bad Government, covers three walls. In the dim light, the eyes need a moment to take in the scale and the colour – the deep, luminous ultramarine skies created with a paint made from ground lapis lazuli. It’s the last great creation of the school of painting in Siena that came to an abrupt end when the plague struck Italy in 1348, killing half the city’s population – including Lorenzetti and his elder brother, Pietro. These extraordinary frescoes came to mind while visiting the National Gallery’s fabulous Siena exhibition this summer. The focus there was on four painters: Duccio, Simone Martini and the Lorenzettis. It encapsulated an exquisite, idiosyncratic moment, with none of the advances of Renaissance art: perspective, anatomy, realism. Instead, as the cultural historian Erin Maglaque eloquently remarks, we saw “silk, gold, and suspended emotion – an embrace of mystery that feels archaic and alien”. Read more | Michael Wood on amazing insights into medieval daily life Florence lies close by, but the Sienese were seduced by the solemn power of Byzantine art. (“It was certainly mean-spirited of the Sienese to persist in being purely medieval right through the Renaissance,” wrote one Victorian critic!) The effect is spine-tingling, dominated not by the ideal landscapes of Florentine or Venetian art but by gold – crusted, layered, stamped; gold revealed by scraping away paint so it seems to flicker below the surface. It’s a secret, enclosed world of ornate chapels and churches in towering streets heavy with sun, the burnt red-earth colour of the landscape. Which brings me back to 1338 and Ambrogio Lorenzetti, executing his stupendous frescoes. That year was fraught, the city in a state of emergency. The threat of authoritarian rule by one man was rising, undermining the idea of the common good. The painting, remember, enfolds the room in which the Nine met to run the city: Lorenzetti was reminding them of just how much was at stake. What constitutes good governance? And its opposite? In The Allegory of Good Government – one of six scenes in Lorenzetti’s frescoes – we see the commune of Siena, magistrates and officers linked by the woven cords of community and justice that bind them. Above them is the guiding figure of Wisdom, with the virtues of good government personified: Peace, Fortitude, Prudence, Magnanimity and Temperance. We see the city at peace: tradesmen, shopkeepers, wedding processions, music and dancing – all the good things that civilisation brings. Another section provides a bird’s-eye view of the fecund Tuscan countryside, with an inscription: “When justice is sovereign, the wicked are stripped of all power.” Read more | Michael Wood on the New Angel | "Few works of 20th-century art have such a distinguished list of past owners" There is also The Effects of Bad Government, dominated by a horned demon who embodies Tyranny. Below him, the figure of Justice lies bound with allegorical figures of Cruelty, Deceit, Fraud, Fury, Division and War. Above Tyranny float Avarice and Pride, enemies of humanity. Once humming with life, in this scene the town lies in ruins, houses demolished, shops and workshops closed except for armourers, the arms dealers of their day. Armies advance on each other: we see looting, murder, rape, abuse of women – a Guernica of the 14th century. Thinking of these images, I was reminded of our own era of disasters and injustice, and of the challenges to the rule of law in the US. In Siena, Lorenzetti asked the council to “Turn your eyes to behold her, you who are governing, who is portrayed here: Justice, crowned on account of her excellence, who always renders to everyone his due. Look how many goods derive from her, and how sweet and peaceful is that life of the city where is preserved this virtue who outshines any other.” This article was first published in the August 2025 issue of BBC History Magazine