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Michael Wood: "Why Elon Musk should take a lesson from Confucius"
In his latest column, historian Michael Wood looks back on epic medieval Chinese voyages of discovery
Watching the news on Elon Musk's SpaceX project to make humanity a “multi-planetary species” beginning with a colony on Mars, I found myself reflecting on an earlier moment in history. Between 1405 and 1433, the Chinese sent seven great missions to south-east Asia and across the Indian Ocean, visiting the Persian Gulf, India and east Africa. The first fleet alone comprised many dozens of ships and more than 27,000 men. Admiral Zheng He’s fleets included the biggest wooden vessels yet built, dwarfing the tiny ships that later carried Columbus and Magellan. Modern theories that such Ming ‘treasure ships’ could have exceeded 400 feet (122 metres) in length, however, are now rejected by experts; the size of wooden ships was always limited by the length of trees available for the keel. Read more | Dire straits: the story of Ferdinand Magellan's fatal voyage of discovery For sailing in heavy seas, a single, strongly protected, scarf-jointed keel is the most that shipwrights judge acceptable for safety. According to today’s traditional ship- builders in Fujian, this would allow a boat in Chinese junk style to be at most 200–240 feet (61–73 metres) long. These vessels were highly seaworthy: between 1846 and 1848, a traditional Chinese junk, the Keying, sailed to the US and Britain, where it was visited by Queen Victoria. Why Emperor Yongle commanded this enormous expenditure of resources is still the subject of much controversy. Today in China, these journeys are characterised as peaceable missions to display the flag, encourage trade and wield Chinese soft power. But the idea that Zheng He’s expeditions were done for no real political, economic or practical gain seems, on the face of it, unlikely. These routes had long been travelled by Arab navigators, and the Chinese had first visited east Africa as early as the Tang dynasty (AD 618–907). In some places, such as the Strait of Malacca, there was a deliberate effort to develop commercial entrepots. For example, Palembang, in south Sumatra, became an important Chinese trading post and a base for journeys into the Indian Ocean. Zheng He’s voyages, then, were to advertise Chinese power, exact tribute, open up new trade routes and, in particular, to get the states of south-east Asia to acknowledge the power and majesty of the Ming. When they had to, they engaged in warfare, destroying pirate fleets near Palembang and intervening in civil wars to establish friendly regimes in Sumatra and what’s now Sri Lanka. So though they were not trying to colonise or conquer, their goal was to establish a network of control between China and the Indian Ocean over peoples who, in Zheng He’s words, “resisted the transforming influence of Chinese culture”. To create trading relations mutually beneficial to China and its various tributary states and kingdoms, “the sea routes were cleaned up and made peaceful so the natives were able to pursue their vocations in peace”. At that moment, with its technological lead over Europe, China seemed poised to dominate much of the world. In 1433, however, the voyages were abruptly stopped and the fleets broken up. In a memorable advert for the aerospace company Lockheed in the 1980s, that decision was compared to giving up the moon programme after Apollo 8. Though the greatest scientific inventors of the pre-modern world, the Chinese were dismissed as lacking the desire to push the bounds of knowledge. But that is to misunderstand the concerns of traditional Chinese civilisation. There were two key reasons for stopping the voyages. First was the enormous expense, including inevitable losses at sea. But there was something else. The ruling Confucian ethic was the cultivation of the Middle Kingdom, not the conquest or domination of other peoples. As Matteo Ricci – a Jesuit in the Ming court – observed, it was the Europeans, not the Chinese, who were “consumed with the idea of supreme domination... always covetous of what others enjoy”. So when I hear the SpaceX plans, I think of Zheng He. Curiosity and scientific interest no doubt will drive human beings to the uninhabitable wastes of Mars, if only to harvest its rare earth metals. But beyond? Is Musk right to think that humanity can become a multi-world species? The facts, as I understand them, are completely against it. The distances are too vast for humanity to travel to other habitable systems, even if they exist. Our fate is on our planet – and here our efforts should be redoubled in this time of crisis. Confucius, I’m sure, would agree. This column was first published in the April 2025 issue of BBC History Magazine
Do The Travels of Marco Polo belong in the non-fiction section, or fantasy?
Marco Polo’s adventures in Asia in the 13th century earned him everlasting fame, with his very name now synonymous with the excitement of exploration. But are his accounts of his travels essentially works of fiction? Peter Jackson asks if we can trust this medieval travel-writing superstar
Life had taken a turn for the worse for Rustichello of Pisa. In the dying days of the 13th century, the Italian romance writer found himself locked up as a prisoner of war. Over the previous years, Rustichello had made something of a name for himself as the first author to pen an Arthurian romance in Italian. Yet he had got himself captured while fighting for his native city in the Genoese-Pisan War. And so here he was, denied his freedom, languishing in a Genoese jail. Yet if Rustichello was searching for some sort of salvation, he didn’t have to look far. It lay in the identity of the curious individual with whom he shared his cell. That man began telling Rustichello an extraordinary story. It was a tale of an epic journey to China – of encounters with unimaginably rich and powerful rulers, of strange and exotic lands, of brushes with creatures that would make your heart race and skin crawl. And it triggered in Rustichello an idea. The Italian writer soon saw the potential of turning the memoirs of his well-travelled cellmate into a book. And so he set about writing them up in the default language of medieval romance: Old French, but with a smattering of Italian. The result – The Travels of Marco Polo, or Le Divisament du Monde (‘The Diverse Parts of the World’), as it was originally known – was Rustichello’s crowning achievement. And it would turn his cellmate, Marco Polo, into one of the most famous figures of the entire Middle Ages. Can we trust The Travels of Marco Polo? Le Divisament transformed perceptions of the far east across medieval Europe, introducing generations of readers to a world that they could barely conceive of, let alone visit. But look beyond its remarkable impact, and how much credence should we give to the text that Rustichello committed to paper following his incarceration with Polo? How useful is the book in understanding life in Asia – especially China – in the Middle Ages? In short, can we really trust Marco Polo’s word? Read more | Why are Marco Polo's travels so famous? To answer this question, we first need to untangle what kind of book Le Divisament was, and what it aimed to do. At its heart is the tale of how – in the early 1270s, at the age of just 17 – Marco embarked on an extraordinary journey to China with two other Polos: his father, Niccolò, and his uncle Maffeo. The trio, so Le Divisament tells us, travelled to the far east at the end of a superlative period of imperial expansion triggered by the rise of the great Mongol leader Genghis Khan (c1162–1227). So formidable was Genghis as both a warlord and a conqueror that the empire he established would, at its peak, extend all the way from eastern Europe to the Sea of Japan. However, by the time Marco and his companions arrived on the scene, the Mongol empire had split into a number of virtually autonomous states – and the age of rapid expansion was all but over. Only to the east – in the dominion of Genghis’s grandson, Kublai Khan – were major wars of conquest being fought, notably when, in 1279, Kublai extinguished the rule of southern China’s indigenous Song dynasty emperors Sadly, the original text of Le Divisament, describing the world that greeted Marco and his companions on their arrival in China, is lost. But there’s enough consistency between the various manuscripts to indicate that what we’re reading is essentially the same book. However, this is not necessarily the book you might expect. For all that its English title talks of Polo’s travels, Le Divisament is emphatically not a travelogue. Rather, it is a description of the known world, based loosely around Marco’s experiences. As descriptions go, it’s often an unsatisfactory one. The text is rambling and discursive. It is also given to maddeningly artificial changes of direction, such as when it embarks on a description of the Black Sea, before – having recalled that Marco has already given an account of this – heading off abruptly in another direction. There are other irritations. Despite repeatedly promising to confine himself to describing lands he had seen – and to distinguish personal observation from hearsay – the book includes regions, such as the coast of east Africa, that it’s highly unlikely Marco ever visited. For the most part, there is little sense of an itinerary. And yet, despite these limitations, there are extraordinary details to be found. What do we learn about the Mongols in the book? Le Divisament states that, having arrived at the court of Kublai Khan, Marco swiftly made a favourable impression on the Mongol ruler, who recruited him into his service. The Great Khan apparently despatched Marco as his representative on missions within China – and, in a number of cases, around the South China Sea and the Indian Ocean. The Venetian was often charged with securing exotica for Kublai’s collection, such as the alms-bowl of the Buddha, and drafting interesting reports on these journeys. Marco’s accounts of his interactions with the Great Khan are remarkable. Read more | What was life like under the Mongol empire? Yet arguably more astonishing to his contemporaries were his descriptions of the marvels he had witnessed on his travels. Some of these are undoubtedly in the tradition of the fantastic – take, for example, the giant bird called the ruc, which could drop elephants from a great height. Many others, however, use exaggeration – and explore the remarkable within nature – rather than employ pure fabrication. So we read of a king of Champa (the southern part of present-day Vietnam) who has 326 children, and of a giant ruby in the possession of the king of Ceylon, a jewel Marco allegedly saw at first hand. Marco also describes huge Chinese ships, and invites us to marvel at the enormous populations of Chinese cities – not to mention the vast number of islands to be found in the Indian Ocean and the China Sea. The book sings the praises of a great island lying due east of China, named Cipingu, which abounds in gold and pearls. That island is now known as Japan – and Marco’s book was the earliest western source to mention it. Marco (or Rustichello) seems to take a positive pleasure in demolishing common misconceptions about the east back in western Europe. The mythical salamander is not a living creature but asbestos, an incombustible substance mined from earth. The corpses sold in India as dead pygmies are, in fact, dried monkeys. The unicorn is identified as a rhinoceros – not at all the kind of creature, the book assures us, that allows itself to be ensnared by virgins. Timeline: the life and travels of Marco Polo c1254 Marco Polo is born in Venice to a wealthy merchant. His mother dies when he is young and he is raised by extended family 1269 Marco’s father, Niccolò, and uncle Maffeo – both merchants – return to Venice after having visited the court of the Mongol leader Kublai Khan 1271 Niccolò, Maffeo and Marco set out on a new expedition. It’s believed that their journey east takes them through Iran, Afghanistan and on to China c1275 According to Marco’s account of his travels, the Polos arrive at Kublai Khan’s summer capital of Shangdu in modern-day north-eastern China c1275–c1292 In Marco’s words, he is appointed to serve as Kublai’s foreign emissary and spends the next 17 years travelling extensively across China c1292 The Polos escort a Mongol princess to Persia, visiting modern-day Vietnam and Sri Lanka en route. They eventually return to Venice c1298 Marco is captured by Venice’s enemies the Genoese. His cellmate in Genoa – an author called Rustichello – begins writing up (and embellishing) Marco’s memoirs c1300 Copies of Rustichello’s book The Travels of Marco Polo proliferate. It will help make Marco arguably the most celebrated explorer of the Middle Ages 8 January 1324 After living out the final years of his life in his native Venice, Marco Polo dies Did Marco Polo make up details in his Travels? So Marco witnessed some extraordinary sights on his travels – and he was all too happy to share them with his readership. Yet, to return to the question posed earlier: can we trust Marco’s word? When he lectured his fellow Europeans on the intricacies of life in the far east, how far was he dipping into the well of lived experience, and how much was make-believe? Certain details in the Le Divisament are undeniably questionable on historical grounds. Prominent among these is the claim that the Polos rendered invaluable assistance to Kublai’s forces in the capture of the city of Xiangyang. This is known to have occurred in 1273, a year or two prior to the Venetians’ arrival in China. In fact, Chinese sources give Muslim siege experts the credit for assisting Kublai’s assault on the city. This is not the only passage that stretches credulity. Niccolò and Maffeo had already travelled to China (in the early 1260s), and Le Divisament tells us that, during this first visit, they had been commissioned by Kublai to bring back to China 100 Christian missionaries together with some holy oil from Jerusalem. Read more | Your guide to the Silk Roads The book also claims that Pope Gregory X appointed the Polos as his ambassadors to the Mongol Ilkhan in Iran following a meeting in Acre. Both are great stories; neither is likely to be true. Many historians have also questioned the credibility of Marco’s co-author. Rustichello was known from his other writing to have been a habitual name-dropper – once claiming, for example, that the Lord Edward (the future Edward I of England) had lent him a book of Arthurian romance. Were Marco Polo's Travels believed at the time? Such scepticism has a long history. Le Divisament started making waves across western Europe from as early as the second decade of the 14th century – and it wasn’t long before rave reviews were being counter-balanced by the voicing of doubts. In particular, Marco’s contemporaries struggled with the contrast between the received image of the Mongols – a people customarily portrayed in 13th-century Europe as nomadic barbarians – and the book’s depiction of the wealth and impressive organisation of Kublai’s empire. In short, while Europeans could accept the existence of a sophisticated polity in the east, the idea it was presided over by the Mongols was far more difficult to swallow. Europeans were all too willing to lap up the fictional story of the Christian king Prester John, who, according to the traditional legend, ruled over a kingdom in the east. However, the version of Prester John’s life in Le Divisament – which described him as a minor prince overthrown, paradoxically, by Genghis Khan with the help of astrologers – was much less to their liking. What is the modern assessment of The Travels of Marco Polo? Modern critics are more troubled by what seem like glaring omissions from the Venetian’s text than his depiction of the Mongols. Marco’s failure to mention the Great Wall of China shouldn’t be held against him because, contrary to popular belief, the continuous structure that exists today had not yet been built. But it is more difficult to account for his silence regarding tea-drinking, the use of fingerprinting for authentication of documents, or the way Chinese women bound their feet. Other critics have pointed to the fact that, although Marco is at great pains to depict himself as a highly valued agent of the Great Khan, no reference to him has been found in Chinese sources. In the eyes of some modern academics, such omissions fundamentally undermine Marco’s entire story. One has even gone as far as to claim that he never made it further east than the Black Sea. Do I agree with this assessment? No. In my opinion, there is nothing intrinsically improbable about a Venetian finding employment in China under the Great Khan. Kublai is known to have recruited men of diverse talents to serve him. In fact, this seems to have been a trait of Mongol rulers: by 1289, the Ilkhans were employing Italians as envoys, interpreters and mercenaries. Marco’s maritime voyages on the Great Khan’s behalf fit easily within the burst of diplomatic activity that took Kublai’s representatives to Ceylon (Sri Lanka) and peninsular India between 1278 and 1294. One explanation for the Polos’ absence from Chinese sources is that they would simply have been classed in the same category as all the many other foreign agents drawn from lands to the west of China. So numerous were these visitors that the Chinese had two terms for them: xiyu (‘westerners’) or semu (‘people of various nations’). What of the accusation that Marco grossly inflated the role he played in Kublai’s court and exaggerated his adventures? Even his most vigorous of defenders would have to concede that it’s highly likely that he did both. Yet he’d hardly be the first traveller to be guilty of such a ‘crime’. This doesn’t mean that he didn’t have any adventures at all. Read more | A knight's (tall) tale: why medieval traveller Sir John Mandeville was more popular than Marco Polo Maybe the best way to make any significant headway in the quest to determine the veracity of Marco’s writings is to locate documentary evidence to support his presence in the Mongol world. Unfortunately, this is in vanishingly short supply. Marco’s later life, in which he became a successful merchant, is comparatively well documented. But firm proof of his travels remains elusive. In fact, the nearest we get to documentary evidence is his uncle Maffeo’s will. This refers to “the three tablets of gold that were from the magnificent Chan of the Tartars”, a term that could mean either the Great Khan or one of his relatives. It is presumably one of these tablets that is mentioned in an inventory of Marco’s property drawn up decades after his death, during a dispute among his notoriously litigious kinsfolk. Why were Marco Polo's travels so significant? Ultimately, given the difficulties of the sources, and the doubts swirling around Marco’s account, perhaps we have to make an admission – that the most remarkable thing about the Polos’ travels is not so much that they happened, but when they happened. Their long journey to China fell several years before an Italian presence in Asia is even documented. It would be up to 30 years before the great age of Italian settlement in China’s coastal cities would get under way. That makes the Polos true pioneers. In the 13th century, Venetian and Genoese traders established footholds in Crimea and the chief camp-cities of Mongol princes in Iran and in the western steppes. Yet no one ventured nearly as far east as Marco and his two relatives. Is it any wonder, then, that generations of western Europeans read his accounts of his travels with slack-jawed wonder? As the 14th century went on, European voyages to China began to decline. Then, in 1368, a native Ming dynasty less ready to welcome foreign merchants kicked out the Mongol rulers from China. But the western imagination never lost sight of the image of a fabulously wealthy empire lying to the east. When Christopher Columbus embarked on his transatlantic journeys in the 1490s, which led to the ‘discovery’ of the New World, he was seeking an alternative route to ‘Cathay’. Before he boarded his ship on one of his famous voyages, Columbus packed an indispensable guide. It was a copy of Marco Polo’s book. Peter Jackson is emeritus professor of medieval history at Keele University. His books include The Mongols and the West (Routledge, 2018) This article was first published in the January 2025 issue of BBC History Magazine
Jack Weatherford explains how the Mongol leader became the emperor of China – and dominated the sea in the process
Genghis Khan may have built a formidable land empire, but his grandson Kublai Khan mastered the seas. So how did a nomadic leader come to have such a formidable navy – and conquer China in the process? Emily Briffett spoke to Jack Weatherford about his new book on the subject, Emperor of the Seas, to find out more. Jack Weatherford is the author of Emperor of the Seas: Kublai Khan and the Making of China (Bloomsbury Continuum, 2024) Buy now on Bookshop.org Buy now on Amazon Buy now on Waterstones
Michael Wood on the rise of a new world order
"The making of our new world began in China just over 40 years ago," writes historian Michael Wood
I’m looking out over the Eastern Mediterranean amid heat waves, migrant crises and the atrocious wars in Gaza and Ukraine. One hundred years ago the British empire was at its height. Fifty years ago we were living under the American hegemony. Now the world order that emerged after the Second World War – economic, political and cultural – is shifting, dissolving like a giant kaleidoscope, and a new picture is taking shape. It’s ‘the great global rebalancing’, as diplomat and think-tanker Samir Puri calls it in his new book, Westlessness. It’s a good pun. The truth is the world has been getting increasingly ‘Westless’ for the last decade or two. The talk now is that although the US is still number one, a new order is arising, with a split between the Global North and Global South where the South no longer believes in the West’s hegemonial narrative and all that goes with it. In Beijing, smart thinkers now speak of US decline and China’s inexorable rise. President Xi Jinping says China’s new strength comes from the inherent greatness of Chinese civilisation, freed now from the Century of Humiliation, which stretched from the Opium Wars to 1949. Even in the movies, China bids to take over the world: no Hollywood film was in the box office top 10 in China in 2023. Read more | Has China always been the world’s greatest superpower? There are, of course, those in Britain who cling to the idea that the old narrative of Western imperialism still has credibility, and even moral force, but it seems to me they have lost the argument now. All empires deploy violence, all are extractive, all endorse cultural and racial supremacy. History has moved on. Till the 18th century the powerhouses of human history were the populous heartlands of humanity: China, India, Persia, Byzantium, Rome and the Muslim world. The rise of our modern world has its roots in what my old tutor Michael Wallace-Hadrill called the ‘Barbarian West’, when successive enlightenments, beginning with Charlemagne, shaped Western culture. After 1492 the balance of power tipped decisively with the discovery and conquest of the New World by small aggressive maritime powers on the western seaboard of Europe. Never before in history had an entire continent been taken over, its peoples killed or enslaved, its natural resources plundered. Since then we have seen what the historian John Roberts termed ‘the triumph of the West’, and new ways of seeing human society. Only 30 years ago Francis Fukuyama even argued we’d reached the ‘end of history’ – that is, the end point of mankind’s ideological evolution and the universalisation of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government. I daresay Fukuyama is less idealistic now, given the challenges democracies face. The making of our new world began in China just over 40 years ago with Deng Xiaoping’s economic reform and opening up, which now looks like one of the greatest events in history. China then was still an agricultural civilisation; now, on some readings, it has overtaken the US and is the largest economy with a fifth of the world’s GDP. Read more | Trading blows: Rana Mitter on the US-China Trade War But, to return to Westlessness, Puri’s argument is that in the next era we will no longer see one power dominating; we are seeing now the rise of a multi-polar world. Not that the US is going to fall away any time soon, but the world is becoming multi-centred. Power is moving to China, India, South Africa and Brazil – all members of the BRICS alliance of major developing countries. It was Jim O’Neill, then at the investment bank Goldman Sachs, who came up with the BRICS idea. I remember in 2007 asking him about the rise of India. It was inevitable, he said, that with their huge populations, India and China would rise to the top once they had acquired the technology that the West had once monopolised. The US will remain a great military and economic power for the foreseeable future, but the tectonic plates of history are rumbling. But of course the future pattern of history is conditioned now by the giant elephant in the room, climate change. Every week brings us new evidence that many scientific predictions have underestimated the speed of breakdown and its unforeseen effects. Still nothing really consequential is being done in terms of global action. We are now well into a time of disasters, burning forests and melting glaciers: societal breakdown and species extinction are already upon us. So what the next ‘triumph’ in the history of nation states and civilisations will look like, in the light of this stark existential threat, is a very big question indeed. This article was first published in the November 2024 issue of BBC History Magazine
North, south, east and west: how ancient civilisations found their bearings before the compass
Why did the ancient Chinese associate north with power? What led early Muslims to pray to the south? And what role did winds have to play in our understanding of directions? Jerry Brotton takes us on a journey through the history of the four points of the compass
Writing in his philosophical work the New Organon in 1620, the English scientist and philosopher Sir Francis Bacon famously identified China’s three great inventions, “which were unknown to the ancients, and of which the origin, though recent, is obscure and inglorious; namely printing, gunpowder and the magnet. For these three have changed the whole face and state of things throughout the world.” Much has been written about the historical impact of printing and gunpowder. But there’s been far less emphasis on the magnet, and how (using lodestones to magnetise iron needles) it enabled the ‘obscure’ invention of the magnetic compass during the Han dynasty in the third century BC. This technology enabled China and, subsequently, other societies to navigate and orientate themselves according to the four points of the compass: north, east, south and west. We tend to think about these directions and the art of navigation as a consequence of the invention of the compass, but this is not in fact the case. The ancient history of direction and its relationship to the magnetic compass is altogether more surprising. How ancient civilisations understood east and west Thousands of years before the discovery of the compass, early human societies observed the sun rising in the direction we now call ‘east’ and watched it setting in the direction now known as ‘west’. East to west was probably the earliest prime axis that people understood by simply watching the sun’s path across the sky. The worship of the sun, or heliolatry, characterised ancient Egyptian worship of solar gods: Horus (the rising sun), Ra (the noon sun) and Osiris (the dying or setting sun). Read more | Sun gods and goddesses: 16 solar deities from world history This initial east-west solar axis was gradually followed by the understanding of another axis. This one ran vertically from north to south, and could be identified by observing the sun and stars. At noon the sun is always due south in the northern hemisphere and due north in the southern hemisphere. Living in the northern hemisphere, you can also look up at the stars and find north according to Polaris, the North or Pole Star. If you live in the southern hemisphere, that direction is identified by Polaris Australis, the South Star. The four cardinal directions By combining the two axes – east-west horizontally and north-south vertically – ancient societies created the basic framework for what we now call the four cardinal directions. The word ‘cardinal’ comes from the Latin cardinalis, which can mean something (or someone) of fundamental importance. That’s why, in the Roman Catholic church, it refers to a priest ranking beneath only the pope. The names for these four directions were inspired by the human body: our front and back, left and right, even top and bottom. In many ancient languages, ‘front’ and ‘back’ are synonymous with east and west. In Hebrew, east – qedem or mizrach – also means ‘forward’ or ‘front’, while ‘west’ – achor – is a synonym for ‘behind’. In ancient Chinese, the pictograph for north, bĕi, represents two people back to back. The dark and cold north is synonymous with the ‘back’ of the body, while the ‘front’ looks southwards (nán), in the direction of light and warmth. The earliest surviving record that we know of that names the four cardinal directions was inscribed on a clay tablet during the first great Mesopotamian empire, the Akkadian dynasty (c2350–2150 BC). It is a rudimentary topographical map known as the ‘Gasur map’, showing an agricultural estate. At the top left is IM-kur, ‘east’; at the bottom left is IM-mar-tu, ‘west’; and to the centre left IM-mir, ‘north’. The prefix ‘IM’ refers to winds, not astronomical observations. Other Mesopotamian texts describe four principal winds forming a diagonal cross, equivalent to the modern directions of north-west, north-east, south-east and south-west. When the cuneiform text on the map is read from top to bottom, IM-mir, the direction from which the regular north-western winds blow, is the prime orientation. What this shows is that the farmers cultivating the land more than 4,000 years ago understood the four cardinal directions in terms of wind direction and changeable climatic conditions. Why? Because they were crucial for the cultivation of crops and could mean the difference between feast and famine. The importance of the winds Ancient Greek philosophy and science inherited the Mesopotamian preoccupation with winds. Mythical personifications of the four directions as gods first appear in the ancient works of Homer (c800 BC). His celebrated epic poems, the Iliad and Odyssey, both mention four deities representing cardinal winds. Boreas, the north wind, is possibly an archaic variant of ‘mountains’ or ‘roaring’. Notos, the south wind, derives from ‘moist’. Eurus, the east wind, comes from the ‘brightness’ of sunrise. The western wind of Zephyrus stems from the ‘gloom’ of sunset. Later Greek philosophers offered a more naturalistic account of direction. Aristotle’s Meteorology (c350 BC) includes the earliest known geometrical diagram of cardinal directions according to wind systems, depicting eight principal winds in his conception of the Earth. Listen | Roderick Beaton picks out the key moments in 4,000 years to explore how the Greeks changed the world The Romans adopted many of the Greek terms for directions based on winds, and introduced some new Latin words. North came first, named borealis or septentriones, a reference to the ‘seven stars’ of Ursa Major (which appears to rotate around the northern star, Polaris). South was given several new terms, including australis (‘harsh’ or ‘sharp’ – thanks to the harsh heat and hot, sharp winds) or meridionalis (from ‘midday’). West was occidentalis (‘falling’ or ‘passing away’) and east was orientalis (‘rising’ or ‘originating’, as in the sun). So, when we speak of being ‘disoriented’, we are literally saying we are unable to find the east. The role of Judaism and Christianity These ideas and terms were accepted until the ninth century, when a radical change took place that changed the names of the cardinal directions. This happened under Charlemagne (748–814), emperor of much of the northern part of Europe. In attempting to unify the continent, Charlemagne initiated many political, economic and educational reforms. This included abandoning winds as a means of classifying directions and renaming the four directions using proto-Germanic words, derived from Indo-European roots. Nord (north) came from the proto-Indo-European term, nórto-s – ‘lower’, or to the ‘left’ (of the rising sun looking east). Est (east) drew on the Indo-European austo-s – ‘light’ or ‘shine’ (as in the morning). Sund (south) derived from an archaic term for the sun, sú-n-to-s, referring to the south as the direction of the midday sun. Oëst (west) took its name from the proto-Indo-European uestos with its many meanings of the evening, including red (as in the setting sun). Versions of these words are now recognisable in most modern European vernacular languages. The impact of these evolving ideas of the cardinal directions underpinned early theological belief across various cultures. Jewish and Christian theology revered the east as the prime cardinal direction of worship and celebration. The story begins in Genesis: God “planted a garden eastward in Eden” (Genesis 2:8). The messiah’s second coming is predicted as arriving from the east, “For as the lightning cometh out of the east, and shineth even unto the west; so shall also the coming of the Son of Man be” (Matthew 24:27). Mizrach, or east, thus became the Jewish direction of prayer. Early Christianity expanded the Jewish mizrach by developing the Latin term Ad orientem – ‘to the east’ – to understand east as its sacred direction. The idea can be seen on medieval Christian maps, such as the mappa mundi housed in Hereford Cathedral. Here the cardinal directions are represented on its outer ring from the top, moving clockwise, from oriens (east), meridiens (south), occidens (west) to septentrio (north). The Garden of Eden is shown at the top, then time flows downwards through images of Old Testament empires, the birth of Christ and the rise of Rome, with Jerusalem at the centre. It ends at the westernmost point of Gibraltar at the bottom of the map. The differences of early Islamic maps Where east sat at the top of early Christian maps for theological reasons, on many early Islamic maps south was the prime direction. This was because most of the societies that first converted to Islam lived directly north of Mecca. As a result, believers prayed due south, a practice that oriented their world maps accordingly. On a map dated 1297 (copied from the 10th-century geographer Muhammad al-Istakhri), the world is oriented with south at the top. Africa is a claw extending deep into the Indian Ocean, and the vertical bar running from top right downwards is the Nile, flowing into the Mediterranean with three islands: Cyprus, Crete and Sicily. Europe is shown below, including Muslim Spain (al-Andalus). The map’s finest detail lies at the heart of the Muslim empire, whose various administrative districts are demarcated in red. Arabia sits in the centre of the map with the holy sites of Mecca and Medina. Why China put north at the top While east and south defined the theological directions of Judaism, Christianity and Islam, in China north sat at the top of their world maps, hundreds of years before Europe adopted such a convention. In Chinese belief, the emperor was the ‘Son of Heaven’, the earthly manifestation of the supreme deity inhabiting the Pole Star. The emperor looked ‘down’ south on his subjects from an elevated position on high in the north, while they looked ‘up’ northwards to him. ‘South’ (nan) was expressed in its pictograph as a liana plant, evoking the luxuriant vegetation of the south as viewed from the drier, colder northern latitudes. But north remained the direction from which imperial power and authority emanated. Read more | Has China always been the world’s greatest superpower? For centuries, China was a global leader in the technology of navigation – and it was only in the 12th century that the magnetic compass started to appear in the Mediterranean for use in navigation. How these compasses moved west is still unclear. But they were decisive in enabling Christian navigators to develop sailing charts known as ‘portolans’ to navigate across, first, the Mediterranean, and then the Atlantic and Indian oceans. Maps of European exploration Yet though their explorations were facilitated by a Chinese technology, Europe an explorers didn’t initially follow the Chinese convention of placing north at the top of their maps. Eight years after Christopher Columbus’s momentous voyage to the Americas in 1492–93, Juan de la Cosa, owner of Columbus’s flagship, La Santa María, drew a map showing the new ‘discoveries’ in the west. The writing on the map suggests that it should be oriented with west at the top – one of the few world maps to ever privilege ‘west’ as its cardinal direction. The west briefly became the cardinal direction – until European scholars, who tended to revere the classics, chose to mimic the ancient Greek practice of placing north at the top. Juan de la Cosa’s map also features a ‘compass rose’ in the middle of the Atlantic, a symbol of the key role that the instrument was to play in the coming centuries. Soon, with the European age of discovery gathering momentum, the magnetic compass would well and truly triumph. Many of us may have naturally assumed that the compass gave us the words we use for the cardinal directions – north and south, east and west. Yet, as the long and colourful history of our relationship with orientation and navigation proves, it was the other way round. This article was first published in the October 2024 issue of BBC History Magazine
Eastern promises: the long and troubled history of Britain's relations with China
Lured by rich trading prospects, Britain attempted numerous times to cultivate relations with China from the 17th to the 19th centuries. Sometimes, they were successful; often, the attempts ended disastrously. Kerry Brown explores the difficult but ultimately vital links between two ambitious realms
China may feel like an exotic destination to many Britons – far distant and undeniably other, culturally and politically. Yet China’s influence permeates our daily lives. It was where we originally sourced tea, the first advert for which appeared in London as early as 1658. It was where the technology for making porcelain came from, inspiring the likes of Josiah Wedgwood and Josiah Spode. It was where a huge number of flowers now flourishing in our gardens were first found, collected by botanists and explorers from the 18th century onwards. And it has, of course, produced so much of the technology that today fills and powers our homes. Often unappreciated and sometimes tucked out of sight, China’s contributions to British life today are nonetheless tangible – and largely positive. As these examples show, links between the two nations go back centuries. And, despite the fractious tone of the political relationship today, coloured by arguments about Hong Kong, human rights and espionage, much of that history involved people from both places discovering, appreciating and learning from each other. When did the English first make contact with China? The first English efforts to make formal contact with China came during the reign of Elizabeth I, who sent letters to the Chinese imperial court proposing trade. “We are borne and made to have need one of another, and that we are bound to aide one another,” the queen wrote in one missive. None of her letters ever arrived, but China remained on the minds of English traders and merchants. And the East India Company, established in 1599–1600, made launching trade with the far east a key priority. Read more | The voices of China: 5 perspectives on an extraordinary past One of the earliest recorded incidents between the nations relates to an argument in Bantam, west of what’s now Jakarta on the island of Java. A disgruntled trader, Edmund Scott, blamed his Chinese neighbour for a fire that blazed in his warehouse in May 1604. In a horrific description, he recounts how he took hot irons and pincers to the accused man, who nonetheless refused to confess – and was executed. “Between our men and the Hollanders, they shot him almost all to pieces before they left him,” Scott declared. Unfortunately, such violence was the norm in that early era of contact. Britain, seeking new sources of wealth in the 17th and early 18th centuries, was eager to muscle in on the eastern markets and mysterious ancient lands of the Ming and, from 1644, Qing empires. These great realms were known to be places where spices, silk and other great riches might be found. However, China was largely closed to outsiders. Who was allowed to work in China? The only Europeans permitted to work there were Jesuits, and even they were ordered to leave in the 1720s. Most who engaged with China were not scholars or statespeople but sailors, traders and adventurers who had little time for the niceties of cultural empathy or building trust. In 1637, English captain John Weddell sailed to the south China coast, where he was met with resistance, which turned violent. Eventually, local officials ordered Weddell and his ships to leave and never return. Peter Mundy, a trader and diarist on that voyage, left accounts of people using chopsticks and drinking a strange infusion he called ‘chaa’ (tea); he also wrote that “there are more people on the water than in the land”. In 1720, Scottish surgeon and diplomat John Bell tagged along with a Russian delegation to “the celestial empire” of Qing. There he encountered a stretch of the Great Wall of China, reporting that: “Running from one high rock to another, with square towers at certain intervals, even at this distance, [it] is most magnificent.” After an audience with the Kangxi Emperor – who had been on the Chinese throne for almost six decades since 1661, when he was just six years old – Bell commented on “the good nature and affability of this ancient monarch”. How much business did the Chinese permit? In the mid-18th century, East India Company merchants were finally allowed to conduct business in China, but in only one place: the port of Canton, today’s Guangzhou, on the Pearl river delta in the far south near Hong Kong. The British were frustrated by this restriction, because the goods they felt would be most worthwhile trading in China – woollen garments – were more suitable to the distant northern regions, and not so readily saleable in the balmy south. In 1759, James Flint was sent on an illegal mission to Qing authorities in Tianjin, aiming to get restrictions lifted to allow British merchants to trade in other locations in China. He delivered a translation of his request to government offices – an act that was viewed dimly by Chinese authorities. Flint was arrested, sent back to Canton, imprisoned in Macau for three years and then ordered to leave the country, never to return. It could have been worse; the Chinese man who translated his request was executed. Clearly, dialogue in those early decades of contact and trade was not always straightforward. But the enquiring nature of some Britons drove them to seek pathways into even the most remote areas. Read more | What was traded on the Silk Road? Having heard reports of trade possibilities with Tibet, then essentially under the control of Qing China, in 1774 Warren Hastings, governor-general of Bengal, despatched a young Scottish official, George Bogle, to investigate. Bogle’s wonderful account provides a superb example of benevolent curiosity, cultural understanding and empathy. He wondered, for example, at the system of polyandry – in which a woman may have several husbands – practised by the Tibetans: men, he commented, “club together in matrimony as merchants do in trade”. He also built a warm relationship with the Panchen Lama – the second most senior religious leader in Tibet, after the Dalai Lama – who promised to intercede for the British on an imminent visit to Beijing. The mission achieved some limited and temporary commercial gains, but it was another century and a quarter before Britain finally gained trading access to Tibet – using force, not diplomacy, during the British expedition of 1903/04. How important was tea to British and Chinese relations? By the end of the 18th century, Britain was importing vast quantities of tea from China. At first, most was sourced from secondary markets; it was heavily taxed, and smuggling was rife, so more formal connections were needed. In the 1780s, prime minister Pitt the Younger asked his chief confidant, Henry Dundas, to arrange the first-ever government-led mission to China. An initial attempt in 1788 under Charles Allan Cathcart ended prematurely when he died soon after his ship left Britain. Then, in 1792, George Macartney – formerly an ambassador to the Russian court of Catherine the Great and a colonial governor in India – was selected to lead another delegation. He set off with a fleet of ships, one of them laden with gifts to impress the Chinese. Read more | The Great Tea Race of 1866 Macartney’s mission marked one of the great moments of modern history. Described by some as a clash of civilisations, it brought the world’s fastest-industrialising and modernising country face to face with one of the oldest continuous cultures. Macartney was joined by William Alexander, an artist from Kent who produced beautiful sketches of the Chinese coast, and George Staunton, whose young son learned Chinese over the course of the mission and charmed the Qianlong Emperor with a few words in Mandarin. Botanists and scientists were also on board. Macartney’s venture failed in its main aim – opening up trade across China. But it did accrue a vast amount of knowledge about a realm the British had been trying to penetrate for almost two centuries, but about which they understood little. Macartney was just one of several men who wrote accounts about the trip. Another complained bitterly about the food, much like grumbling tourists today do worldwide. Some were amazed by Chinese architecture: the account of the overland journey back from Beijing to Canton by John Barrow, Macartney’s secretary, includes descriptions of the Porcelain Tower of Nanjing and the old bridges of Suzhou. Indeed, the antiquity of China impressed many. What attempts were made to understand the Chinese language? The language and writing, so different from European scripts, represented another source of fascination. Members of the Royal Society tasked the Macartney delegation with trying to establish whether Chinese was similar to Egyptian hieroglyphics – an idea that had first surfaced in a 1660s work claiming Noah’s Ark had landed in China after the biblical floods. British understanding of Chinese languages was improved hugely thanks to the work of the greatest sinologist Britain has ever produced. Robert Morrison was a Protestant missionary sent to China in 1807 to convert the so-called ‘heathens’ to Christianity, but he proved more successful in linguistics. He compiled the first Chinese-to-English dictionary, published from 1815, then translated the Bible into Chinese. These extraordinary achievements were, of course, possibly only in collaboration with Chinese people who helped him despite stern edicts forbidding such cooperation. Morrison’s work demonstrated the potential for a deeper kind of understanding and appreciation of China. Yet the century that followed reinforced the old adage: familiarity tended to breed contempt rather than deeper affinity. How did the British react to Chinese culture? In the second half of the 18th century, Britain had been in the thrall of all things Chinese, from wallpaper to building design; a new word, ‘chinoiserie’, was even coined to describe such fashions. That fascination was then replaced by a view of China as a backward country – buried in tradition, isolated from the wider world and unwilling to engage. This perception of a fading empire was reinforced by the writing of John Barrow, who had been attached to the first British embassy to China. He suggested sourly in his 1804 account that it was a nation “worn out with old age and disease”. Read more | When pirates ruled Asia's waves Still, Britain made efforts to grow closer to China, in 1834 sending its first formal representative, the unfortunate Lord Napier, appointed chief superintendent of trade at Canton. At the time, the relationship between China and Britain was largely dominated by traders such as Scotsmen William Jardine and James Matheson, who gleefully set out to exploit the opportunity that opened up when the East India Company’s monopoly on British-Chinese trade was ended in 1833. Napier proved unpopular with the British residents in China, who felt that he was too soft on the locals, but also the Chinese, who resolutely opposed his attempts to speak not just to the designated traders but also to officials directly. His situation was typical of those experienced by many emissaries and diplomats since then. Napier was turfed out of Canton only a few months after his arrival, and died soon afterwards. Did Britain and China go to war? It wasn’t long before Sino-British relations deteriorated into full-scale conflict. Known to the Chinese as the Opium Wars, these were in fact not primarily about the drug, though vast quantities were being imported into China from India by the British with the aim of correcting the trade imbalance created by the export of tea and other goods. The first war, fought 1839–42, was sparked by the arrival in Canton of an assertive official, Lin Zexu, sent from Beijing – to the horror of Napier’s successor, Charles Elliot. Lin’s mandate was to stop the contraband trade in opium, and he proceeded to impound goods, imprison foreign merchants associated with the trade, and generally rid the country of what was regarded as a debilitating scourge. Plenty of people in Britain were sympathetic to this Chinese response to the trade. These included William Gladstone, who made a rousing speech in the House of Commons defending the Chinese for their actions. Read more | What caused the First Opium War? Elliot himself was dismissed for what was perceived as a lack of aggression and decisiveness. His dispatches from the final weeks of his time in post often acknowledged that, in some respects at least, the Chinese may have had the right to take the actions they did. However, Britain had the will – and the means – to gain what it wanted. That, in the end, dictated everything else. This war – really a series of skirmishes that ended in total victory for Britain, thanks to the superiority of its military technology and navy – left a searing mark on the Chinese. It is remembered in China today as the start of the so-called ‘century of humiliation’. The Treaty of Nanjing that ended the war achieved the real aims of figures such as the British foreign secretary, Viscount Palmerston. Their concerns were not so much about the drug trade per se, but the general lack of access for British business in China; barriers preventing foreign officials from speaking directly to the Chinese government; and, primarily, the sense that Britain’s status as a great power was not being recognised by China. As well as addressing these issues, the treaty ceded Hong Kong to the British. Who were key figures in Sino-British relations in the 19th century? British involvement in China reached its peak in the mid-19th century, an era encapsulated in the actions of three figures. The first was maverick botanist Robert Fortune, who was involved in perhaps the most audacious act of intellectual property theft ever committed. Masquerading as a Chinese traveller, in the 1850s he stole tea plants and devised a way to grow them in British-run India – which is why so much tea drunk in Britain today originates from India. The second key character at that time was the strange mystic Charles Gordon, who had participated in the looting of the Summer Palace by British and French forces in 1860, during the Second Opium War. He turned up again in 1863 to lead a group of foreign mercenaries, nicknamed the Ever Victorious Army, during the so-called Taiping Rebellion, a civil war that had been convulsing the country for 13 years. The third of these influential British figures, Robert Hart, achieved a different kind of fame. From 1863, he ran the Imperial Maritime Customs – a unique system responsible not just for collecting import duties for the Chinese government, but also for establishing infrastructure such as lighthouses and for collecting statistics. Hart, the highest-ranking British person to serve as a Chinese official, maintained that position till 1911, by which time he was responsible for close to a third of the Qing’s revenue. Read more | Has China always been the world’s greatest superpower? Just as Britain has been influenced by these interactions, so too was China. It was introduced to key technologies, belief systems and processes of modernity, from railways to ideas around administration and finance, largely through British companies, officials or individuals. Neither country would be the kind of place it is today without these three centuries of early engagement. That needs to be more wider recognised today, particularly in a time when there are such sharp disagreements between the two over values, rights and ideas of global order. The situation changed as China became open on the world stage throughout the 20th century. The US, Japan and other powers grew more influential, and Britain’s role slowly receded. Hong Kong became the key focus, with colonial rule there maintained till 1997. Yet even today, in the 21st century, China ranks as among Britain’s largest and most important trading and economic partners. As we’ve seen, links between the two go back centuries – and their impacts on one another have been profound. Kerry Brown is professor of Chinese studies at King’s College London, and author of The Great Reversal: Britain, China and the 400-Year Contest for Power (Yale University Press, 2024) This article was first published in the September 2024 issue of BBC History Magazine
Historians debate: how do intractable conflicts come to an end?
History is replete with examples of intractable conflicts – and not just history, as the Israel-Gaza war continues to dominate the headlines. Matt Elton has assembled a panel of historians to discuss the factors that lead to entrenched warfare and what might help resolve them
With the end of the Israel-Gaza war no closer, I wanted to discuss examples of seemingly intractable conflicts and how they come to an end. What examples from your research would you like to highlight? Rana Mitter: Firstly, we would all hope for a resolution of these conflicts, in the Middle East and elsewhere. What history allows us to do is to look at the longer perspective and understand that sometimes conflicts that have gone on for years or even decades can eventually be resolved, and that sometimes it’s external factors and sometimes it’s internal factors that enable that to happen. As a historian of modern China, I can offer two examples that provide a contrast. One is the relationship between India and China ever since the former gained independence in 1947 and the latter saw the establishment of Chairman Mao’s regime in 1949. Growing tensions between the two came to a head in 1962 with a small but very vicious war, and there have been border disputes ever since. This territorial dispute between the two Asian giants has never actually been resolved because of an issue of geography: there is an area of the Himalayas which is essentially most of the Indian state of Arunachal Pradesh, but which China argues should be Chinese territory. The two sides have never managed to resolve that dispute. Read more | Has China always been the world’s greatest superpower? That’s in contrast with another example in which a seemingly endless conflict did come to an end: China’s war with Vietnam. In February 1979, China and Vietnam went into a short but very bloody war in which tens of thousands were killed on both sides. Across the following decade there were continuing border battles. Eventually, in 1990, a secret conference held in the Chinese city of Chengdu brought a resolution and in 1991, China and Vietnam signed a lasting border agreement. It’s an example of the way in which a resolution can sometimes be found to seemingly intractable conflict. Hannah Skoda: I focus on the Middle Ages, and obviously the conflicts of that era had a different nature, so it’s important to be careful with comparisons. I was thinking, however, about the Hundred Years’ War, fought between England and France from 1337 to 1453. The problem is that, as soon as we say ‘between England and France’, we’ve already hit a problem, because it’s too simplistic to say it was fought by those entities. The conflict was produced by a really complex set of circumstances, rather than a sense of ‘Englishness’ versus ‘Frenchness’. But, across the course of the conflict, we can see a hardening of those identities and a much stronger sense emerging of what it meant to be ‘English’ and ‘French’. Indeed, the whole notion of an ancient enemy arose out of a conflict that began thanks to a very specific set of causes. Another intractable conflict medieval historians are fascinated by is the crusades. Again, I don’t want to draw direct comparisons, but we can also see there a conflict sparked by a complex set of circumstances which gradually led to a hardening of identities and attitudes. Over the course of centuries, it really did begin to look like an intractable conflict between two sides. Rana Mitter: Identity is so often an ideological factor that sparks conflict. Thinking about my example of the Chinese and the Vietnamese, however, one of the things that ultimately brought that conflict to a close was the end of the Cold War. Vietnam had been an ally of the Soviet Union, and once the Soviet Union disappeared, part of China’s reason for wanting to oppose them ideologically also disappeared. Tom, you have great expertise in the 18th and 19th centuries: does the idea of war as ideological and intractable apply to that era, or was it more about realpolitik and people seeking to maximise their power? Thomas Otte: I think ideology did play a role, but the question speaks to a much bigger issue, which is that every war is different. There’s no iron law of wars, what causes them, how they’re conducted, and how they’re brought to an end. Eras have different, very specific, types of wars, and historians should be careful about formulating any grand insights that could be applied to contemporary conflicts. Of course, any kind of decision making in war is about the people who made those decisions, so we can look at how individuals perceive a given problem, how they rationalise it, and the factors that lead them to a particular decision. That perhaps opens our minds to some of the vagaries of the political process by which decisions are arrived at. One factor we should talk about is religion. Hannah, presumably it was central to conflict in Europe in the medieval era? Hannah Skoda: I think it always underpinned the way people thought about things. The Hundred Years’ War was not about religion in any clear way, but a key part of it was a sense that everybody should be ‘going off on crusade’ – and that they couldn’t do that until they had set their house in order in Europe. So there was always a sense that religion was an underlying motivating factor. Thinking about religion in Europe in the Middle Ages brings to mind the fact that the pope was often called upon to mediate between warring sides – more or less successfully. Rana and Thomas, how did external actors play a mediating role in conflicts in eras you focus on? Thomas Otte: As the centuries went on, external factors increasingly came into play in long-running conflicts in the sense that there was perhaps a greater understanding of the existence of a kind of system: that there were certain norms international actors had to abide by, and certain conditions under which they could go to war. That led to a highly developed sense of what did and didn’t qualify as a ‘just’ war. Of course, governments lie and manipulate and pretend to act for reasons of justice when they really have much baser motivations, so there were always exceptions. But the sense that they couldn’t just go to war entirely of their own volition gradually became stronger and more institutionalised through the 19th and 20th century. Rana Mitter: You’ve both flagged up something important, which is the move in Europe from a religious-based system of arbitration to a post-Enlightenment process of secularisation in which institutions such as the League of Nations and the UN emerge. The element I’d add, however, is that in the 20th century, a large part of the world outside western Europe began to enter the system and often felt very mistrustful of the external authorities that were put forward. They saw them as agencies of empires: the League of Nations, for instance, was also a league of empires, including the French empire and the Japanese empire. That made nations such as China, which found themselves on the sharp end of the other stick, so to speak, rather nervous about entrusting their fate to such agencies. That means that today’s era of a rule based international order is in many cases fraying at the edges. We can just about still say that today, in 2023, we’re 78 years without a great-power-on-great-power conflict. We do have conflict again in Europe, and, of course, in the Middle East, but we’re still a little way from a great power fighting another great power. Yet there is a feeling that the assumptions behind who actually gets to define the rules, norms and methods are no longer simply being accepted by many of the world’s powerful players. We need to think about whether we should see our current order as just another historically defined era which has lasted a long time, but may well have its own end point – just as the era of the papacy did, and just as the long era of relative peace in Europe between 1856 and 1914 did. Maybe we’ll talk about the United Nations era that began to fade out at some point in the mid-21st century. I hope not, but it’s certainly possible. Thomas Otte: I agree that institutions do have a certain lifespan. They need to justify their continued existence, and the perception of justice with which they discharge their functions is clearly part of that process. We’re currently going through a process in which economic power is shifting, and military power to some extent is beginning to shift as well. When you look at GDP outputs, the Nato nations account for just under 50 per cent of global GDP. That figure was much higher as recently as the 1980s and 90s. That shift will eventually be reflected in structures of international governance. How the process is going to play out, I don’t know – I’m a historian, not a prophet – but these changes usually come after great, sometimes even seismic, shocks. I’m rather hoping that we will be able to manage this process of transition to a new structure without having to go through those profound shocks. We should end by talking about how historians should engage with present-day conflicts. What do you need to bear in mind when thinking about such situations? Thomas Otte: History is not a cookbook. It doesn’t offer recipes we can simply apply to contemporary problems. But I do think our expertise gives us a degree of responsibility. I’m reminded of something [historian] Geoffrey Elton said in the 1960s: historians should be like a good glove turned inside out. By that he meant we should be humble on the outside and proud on the inside. We bring to the debate a certain sense of scepticism and we can point out parallels – and that is vital in terms of informing the public and in the process of political decision-making. Hannah Skoda: As a historian, the idea of thinking about the past and juxtaposing it with the present makes me extremely nervous, because we are never comparing like with like and there is such a danger of oversimplifying things. Nevertheless, I think it’s a very important thing to do for two reasons. Firstly, we so often see the weaponisation of particular versions of history, particularly in intractable conflicts, and even in the medieval conflicts I was talking about earlier. And secondly, I think history offers us the possibility of bringing critical doubt to lots of the assumptions we may all carry, and we should apply some of that doubt to the idea that things are inevitable. They never are. Listen to the full conversation in the second episode of our new monthly podcast series Behind the Headlines, in which Hannah Skoda, Rana Mitter and an array of expert guests discuss the history behind the news. Listen at historyextra.com/ headlines-pod Rana Mitter is professor of the history and politics of modern China at the University of Oxford Thomas Otte is professor of diplomatic, international and military history at the University of East Anglia Hannah Skoda is associate professor of medieval history at the University of Oxford This article was first published in the Christmas 2023 issue of BBC History Magazine
Kavita Puri's hidden histories: "We mustn’t overlook the toll of surfacing traumatic histories"
Kavita Puri explores lesser-known stories from our past. This month she considers the emotional trauma that historians can endure while researching the most horrific events of the past, and talk about the unspeakable
I’ve been researching a new project and have just finished one of the most harrowing books I have ever read: Iris Chang’s The Rape of Nanking: The Forgotten Holocaust of World War II. Written in 1997, and drawing on interviews with survivors and newly discovered documents, Chang chronicled the devastating weeks during the Second Sino-Japanese War in December 1937 when the Imperial Japanese army swept into the ancient Chinese city of Nanking (now called Nanjing). What followed was the systematic rape and torture of tens of thousands of Chinese civilians. What is so disturbing about the book is the excruciating detail Chang goes into of the crimes inflicted. I imagine she didn’t shirk from including the specificity of what the victims endured because she wanted to document the horror in its totality, and leave it for the public record. But there were points at which I could not continue reading. The book was a sensation. It made me think of the toll that researching, interviewing survivors, documenting, editing and promoting the book must have had on Chang, as well as the responsibility to do justice to the victims. Years later, in 2004, Chang was working on another book about another Japanese war crime, featuring the stories of Filipinos and Americans forced to travel across the Philippines on the 1942 Bataan Death March. One morning, Chang took her own life at the age of 36, after experiencing depression. It’s impossible to know what connection, if any, there was to her work. Read more | From the Napoleonic Wars to Vietnam and Iraq: a history of war trauma The author and journalist Sathnam Sanghera, in his 2024 book Empireworld, considers the impact that reading about colonial violence has on historians who analyse such accounts on an almost daily basis. He quotes James Robins, author of 2020’s When We Dead Awaken: Australia, New Zealand, and the Armenian Genocide, who lost the ability to fall comfortably asleep during the five years he spent studying that subject and had uncovered “a reservoir of pain” among scholars of such events. Writing in the The New Republic, Robins documents the symptoms experienced by historians involved in traumatic research, including “insomnia, rapid weight gain or loss, abuse of booze or pills, unexplainable anger or fear, paralysing anxieties”. “Some reactions,” he continues, “are more subtle: the sudden unwillingness to watch a particular film or read graphic news reports, claustrophobia in a crowd. Traditionally, we’ve supposed that these kinds of reactions would afflict only first-hand witnesses to violence: the victims, the bystanders, maybe the journalists… Historians, by contrast, have neither seen nor heard the catastrophes they study – they’ve reached them through imagination and immersion.” Robins is not alone in hearing these kinds of stories. I’ve spoken to fellow oral historians about the heaviness that comes from collecting traumatic testimonies, and from sifting through archival accounts of the worst of crimes. It doesn’t make for great small talk when you’re asked what you do for a living. I remember, at one of the first events that were held to publicise my book based on recordings of first-hand partition testimonies, being asked by an audience member about the impact of hearing so many harrowing accounts. I was completely floored. What my interviewees had gone through was far, far worse than listening to them. Although I still believe that, I am now less dismissive of the emotional effect of documenting such stories and events. Many factors shape which histories are remembered and recorded. One reason some histories remain hidden for as long as they do is that testimonies recounting horrific crimes are too awful: too awful to research, to say out loud, to hear or to collectively acknowledge. This is all the more true when they bring up questions of shame, guilt or justice. Historians can take some solace in the redemptive nature of surfacing these histories, but we mustn’t overlook the toll it takes on the bearer. This article was first published in the July 2024 issue of BBC History Magazine
Nicholas Morton explores the life of a mighty Mongol emperor who left an indelible mark on 13th-century China
Kublai Khan will go down in history as the man who cemented the Mongol empire's status as the one of the mightiest powers in the world – and changed the course of Chinese history in the process. In our latest Life of the Week episode, Nicholas Morton tells Spencer Mizen how this hugely capable leader built on the achievements of his grandfather Genghis.
It should go without saying that silk was traded along the Silk Road, but this ancient web of routes between China and the West brought plenty of other commodities too – not to mention new ideas. Rebecca Franks finds out more from Dr Sam Willis about the key goods traded on the famed 'road'…
One of the key goods traded along the Silk Road, a network of interconnected trade routes that ran for some 4,000 miles from China to Europe, was silk. That might sound glaringly obvious, but the Silk Road – which was established in 130 BC by the Chinese Han Dynasty and active until the 15th century – did not go by that name at the time. It was only centuries later when, in 1877, the term was coined by German geographer, traveller and scientist Ferdinand von Richthofen. And despite its famed moniker, silk was far from the only valuable resource to be transported on the long journey from east to west. “It’s more a kind of an inspirational clue to make you think about all the other things that could be traded,” says historian Dr Sam Willis. On the podcast | The Silk Road: everything you wanted to know Why was silk so important to the Silk Road? Silk farming, or sericulture, was an ancient skill perfected by the Chinese, the only people in the world who knew how to produce this remarkable material for thousands of years. “Legend has it that [the secret] was discovered by a princess who was sitting under a mulberry tree when a silkworm cocoon fell into her tea and began to unravel,” according to Willis, who was speaking on the HistoryExtra podcast. “And from that, she realised that there was this incredible strand of material which could be woven.” The industry involved growing silkworms, keeping them fed with mulberry leaves, and then cultivating the raw silk, which could then be worked into strong, beautiful textiles. “The Chinese were the only people who knew how to farm it, they knew how to weave it and how to work it,” Willis explains. Among the fine finished products were silk coats and silk dresses, sold by Chinese merchants to the West, and in increasing numbers as demand rose. The First Crusade Member exclusive | Walk in the footsteps of the first crusaders, witnessing the hardships they faced, meeting the people they came across and seeing the landscapes they traversed through their eyes. Listen to all episodes now What else was traded on the Silk Road? More than silk was traded on the Silk Road. Spices, precious metals, handicrafts, clothing, furs, weapons and horses all got sent along the routes bound for foreign markets. Humans also became commodities, with enslaved labour a thriving business. Depending on demand, goods could be transported along the entire length of the Silk Road, from eastern China to the Mediterranean Sea. Not many of the traders themselves, however, made the full journey. Video lecture | Cat Jarman on the Vikings from Scandinavia to the Silk Road Merchants would go backwards and forwards on short stretches, before handing over their cargo to the next link in the chain. “Very few merchants travelled the entire length of the Silk Road,” says Willis. “The majority of the merchants travelled short distances to and fro, and became experts on particular legs of the journey.” Knowledge was also traded on the Silk Road With all this movement of people and goods over many centuries came an inevitable exchange of ideas. “That’s the most important takeaway about the Silk Road,” asserts Willis. “Goods are going from left to right and right to left, but it’s the ideas that are important. Religion, science, maths and art. “The single easiest way of demonstrating the power of the Silk Road is to go to Xi’an [in central China] where there is an enormous, eighth-century mosque,” he says. Xi’an was one of the major ancient Silk Road cities, and the first city in China to encounter Islam. “Or if you want a more modern version, you can go to see the Catholic Cathedral in Guangzhou. Or the giant Buddhas in Dunhuang.” What ideas were traded on the Silk Road? This rich and world-changing cultural exchange flowed in both directions. From the east, knowledge of mathematics, astronomy and the Chinese invention of paper and gunpowder travelled west. Going the other way, western knowledge of clockmaking and automata spread eastwards. “It’s all made possible by this great connection of people which happens on the Silk Road,” explains Willis. Dr Sam Willis has made more than ten major TV series for the BBC and National Geographic including The Silk Road, Invasion! and Castles, and written history books including the Penguin Ladybird Expert Series: The Spanish Armada, The Battle of the Nile and The Battle of Trafalgar (2018). He was talking to Rebecca Franks on the HistoryExtra podcast episode: The Silk Road: everything you wanted to know