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“We analysed Hitler’s DNA – and what we discovered made us gasp”
Turi King and Alex J Kay have married genetics with history to study a sample of DNA from Adolf Hitler – and, as they reveal, their research has thrown up some extraordinary insights into the Nazi dictator’s private life
Few historical figures have been discussed and debated as much as Adolf Hitler. We have a wealth of primary source material available to us about his life, including his autobiographical manifesto Mein Kampf, personal correspondence, political directives and military orders, recordings and transcripts of his countless speeches, eyewitness accounts, photographs and film footage. Now, 80 years after his death, Hitler's DNA: Blueprint of a Dictator, a groundbreaking documentary produced by Blink Films and currently airing on Channel 4, has unlocked a new source by presenting the results of a world-first analysis of a sample of Hitler’s DNA. The DNA was taken from the blood on a small piece of fabric cut from the sofa on which Hitler died after shooting himself in his Berlin bunker on 30 April 1945 We have the privilege of being part of this documentary – both as lead investigators and in our separate roles as senior historical consultant (Alex) and the person leading the genetic analysis (Turi). The background to the documentary was a multi-stage process, each step a powerful marrying of genetics with history. It probably goes without saying that the first step was to confirm that the blood sample was actually that of Hitler. With this in mind, it’s important to remember that, as in any forensic case, DNA evidence cannot be taken in isolation. It has to be combined with other types of evidence, in this case reaching back into the past for information first about Hitler’s suicide and then about how the piece of fabric came to be available for DNA testing. The Führer’s family tree So, what does the history tell us? With the Red Army closing in, Hitler killed himself in his Berlin bunker on the afternoon of 30 April 1945. In the days following his death, the Soviets controlled access, and few people were allowed in. Among those who were permitted to enter was Lieutenant Colonel Roswell P Rosengren, public information officer for General Dwight D Eisenhower, the supreme Allied commander in Europe. While taking various souvenirs, Rosengren cut out a swatch of the fabric on the sofa on which Hitler had shot himself – and which, crucially, was stained with blood. He took it home to the United States and kept it under lock and key, before passing it down to his son. It was later acquired by the Gettysburg Museum of History in Pennsylvania, which in turn offered it for DNA analysis to anyone who was interested. Accompanying the swatch was a signed affidavit from Rosengren’s son confirming its provenance. Certainly, the fabric looked like it matched photographs of the sofa. So far so good. Next came the genetic analysis for the identification. It is standard in cases such as this to analyse the DNA from the sample and compare it either with a previous authenticated sample from the individual in question or with the DNA of a close relative. Yet there were no such close relatives available to carry this out: Hitler had no children. However, as part of a previous study, more than a decade ago, a journalist called Jean-Paul Mulders and a genealogist named Marc Vermeeren had traced distant male-line members of Hitler’s family tree living in Europe and had obtained DNA from one of them. Mulders had been particularly interested in tracing male-line members of Hitler’s family tree because there is a segment of DNA that is passed down through the male line: the Y-chromosome. Y-chromosome types differ between individuals, but male-line members of the same family tree should carry identical, or near-identical, Y-chromosome types. Analysing the Y-chromosome type from a male-line relative gives you, essentially, Hitler’s Y-chromosome type. All these years later, if the blood on the piece of fabric was from Hitler, the Y-chromosome from it should match that from the relative whose DNA had already been tested. This was a huge moment in the project. So you can imagine our relief when we established that there was a DNA match – and, what’s more, it was a rare Y-chromosome type. Still, here historical context is, again, important. What were the chances of a male-line relative having access to the bunker and, crucially, also bleeding on the sofa? Given the rarity of the Y-chromosome type and what we know about the whereabouts of Hitler’s few male-line relatives at the time, the chances of this happening were vanishingly small. The blood sample, and thus the DNA in it, belonged to Hitler. We had his DNA. Sequencing the genome The match led to another of the study’s major discoveries: an answer to the question of whether Hitler had Jewish heritage through his paternal grandfather. In view of Hitler’s virulent antisemitism and his pivotal role in the extermination of 6 million European Jews, it is understandable that this particular rumour has triggered a great deal of speculation among both scholars and the general public alike. Well, the rigorous scientific testing carried out for the documentary has now confirmed beyond doubt what serious historians had long believed: namely that there is no truth in a rumour that has circulated since the early 1920s. The DNA match firmly debunks the Jewish ancestry myth. The next step was to sequence the entire genome. Hitler now joins thousands of historical individuals – often nameless but including among their number the famous German composer Ludwig van Beethoven – whose genomes have been sequenced. We approached the task with an open mind. But given how many medical biographers have tried to diagnose Hitler from a distance, we were naturally interested in what the former German leader’s DNA could tell us about his health. But first, let us be clear about what Hitler’s DNA can tell us – and, more importantly, what it cannot. This calls for a quick genetics lesson. For some diseases and conditions, the process is straightforward. Known as monogenic in origin, the development of a given condition can be traced back to a single gene or genetic variant that affects how the gene is working or, in this case, not working. A common example of a single gene disorder is cystic fibrosis. However, for other conditions and diseases, it is a far more complex picture, because they are both polygenic and multifactorial. This means that many – often hundreds – of genetic variants are involved, each incrementally increasing or decreasing a person’s risk of developing the condition. What’s more, the risk of developing the condition is also influenced by environmental factors ranging from chemical exposure (such as smoking) to lifestyle (such as diet). A common example of one of these conditions is coronary artery disease. A shock revelation We analysed the DNA in two ways: by sending the genetic results to experts in different fields so that they could identify any medical conditions of interest; and also by running it through the standard medical pipelines for known genetic variants associated with various conditions. The results were striking. First, thanks to the work of colleagues at the Pasteur Institute in Paris, we found that Hitler had a well-known deletion in a gene that is associated with Kallmann syndrome and the elaborately named Congenital hypogonadotropic hypogonadism. While the severity can vary from person to person, this mutation can result, among other things, in an impaired testosterone production, low libido, abnormalities in the development of sexual organs, and, by extension, a disrupted reproductive function. This was a gasp moment in the study, and of particular interest to historians. The revelation that Hitler had some form of Kallmann syndrome is intriguing because of the implications for his private life. The finding suggests there could have been a causal relationship between Hitler’s genetic make-up and particular facets of his behaviour. It complements what we already knew about this part of Hitler’s biography, and it sheds light on aspects of his life that we could previously only speculate about. A physical examination of Hitler, conducted during his incarceration in Landsberg prison in 1923 following the failed Munich putsch – but only known about since the rediscovery of the medical file in 2010 – revealed that he had “right-sided cryptorchidism”. That is, an undescended testicle. (It turns out that the British satirical song ‘Hitler Has Only Got One Ball’, the origins of which remain unknown, was close to the mark after all.) “Some sense of shame” This physical abnormality might help to explain an account given by August Kubizek, Hitler’s closest (and perhaps only) friend during his adolescence. Hitler and Kubizek shared a room in Vienna from February to July 1908. Noting Hitler’s “obvious indifference to the opposite sex”, his “strict monk-like asceticism” and the fact that he “refrained from masturbation”, Kubizek observed: “My friend undoubtedly found favour with the opposite sex although, to my amazement, he never took advantage of it.” Commenting on the entirety of their friendship from the autumn of 1905, when they met at the opera in Linz, to the summer of 1908, when their time together in Vienna came to an end, Kubizek concluded: “I think I can say with certainty: Adolf never met a girl, either in Linz or Vienna, who actually gave herself to him.” Tellingly, Ernst Hanfstaengl, one of Hitler’s closest confidants during the 1920s and 1930s, later wrote: “I can never recall having seen him in a bathing costume, nor had anyone else. A story, probably authentic, was frequently told that Hitler’s old army comrades, who had seen him in the wash-house, had noted that his genital organs were almost freakishly underdeveloped, and he doubtless had some sense of shame about displaying himself. It seemed to me that this must all be part of the underlying complex in his physical relations, which was compensated for by the terrifying urge for domination expressed in the field of politics.” According to the historian Ian Kershaw, author of the definitive biography of Hitler, “Kubizek’s account, together with the language Hitler himself used in Mein Kampf, does point at the least to an acutely disturbed and repressed sexual development.” Rumours that Hitler had been infected with syphilis by a Jewish prostitute were without foundation: medical tests in 1940 showed that Hitler had not suffered from syphilis. The discovery that Hitler had Kallmann syndrome might thus be the key to explaining his seemingly “disturbed and repressed sexual development”. Looking for patterns Hitler may well have been extremely self-conscious about his body and, for this reason, reluctant to engage in relations of an intimate or sexual nature – and perhaps even uninterested in that side of life. This fact would help to explain his absolute devotion to politics to the almost complete exclusion of any kind of private life. Such devotion was exceptional among Nazi leaders. All other senior Nazis – Hermann Göring, Heinrich Himmler, Joseph Goebbels, Martin Bormann, Rudolf Hess, Albert Speer, and so on – had wives and children. Some even had extramarital affairs. Ian Kershaw also wrote: “There was no ‘private life’ for Hitler. Of course, he could enjoy his escapist films, his daily walk to the Tea-House at the Berghof, his time in his alpine idyll far from government ministries in Berlin. But these were empty routines. There was no retreat to a sphere outside the political, to a deeper existence that conditioned his public reflexes.” Read more | Did Eva Braun love Adolf Hitler? The discovery and testing of Hitler’s DNA, combined with the historical facts already available to us, may explain why. When testing the DNA sample, experts at Aarhus University in Denmark looked at more complex conditions such as neurodevelopmental and psychiatric disorders. When scientists are interested in a condition that is polygenic, they determine which genetic variants might predispose someone to the condition by looking, in a large population, at the patterns of DNA in people who have that particular condition compared to those who do not. One can then take an individual’s DNA and place them, based on the genetic variants they carry, on the bell-curve distribution to see how they compare to others in that population. Do they have a lot of the genetic variants that seem to predispose someone to the condition, or very few? This is known as a polygenic score. Hitler’s results were, again, striking. His polygenic score placed him in the top 1 per cent for schizophrenia, for autism and for bipolar disorder. However, we have to be really clear here: Hitler’s polygenic score being high is not diagnostic. We cannot, from his DNA, say that he would have been diagnosed with any of these conditions. Even people with the highest scores aren’t diagnosed with the disorder 95 per cent of the time. What makes Hitler so unusual is not the possibility that he might have had any one of these disorders on its own, but rather the fact that his placement in the top 1 per cent for the polygenic scores of all three of these conditions is exceptional: none of the other individuals in the population analysis had the same result. Still, we know that numerous environmental factors, such as adverse life events, would have had a big influence on his likelihood of developing them. What’s more, it is important not to stigmatise people with these conditions. It is rare for anyone with any of these conditions to go on to commit violent acts, let alone genocide. Indeed, they are more likely to be on the receiving end of violence. Genetics is only one part of the puzzle in determining who someone will become. Nature vs nurture No attempt to explain the man Hitler became and the extreme inhumanity he exhibited can, therefore, be reduced to a question of genetics. But it is interesting to view these scores in light of what we already knew about him. Environmental and social factors played a central role in moulding Hitler. Born in provincial Austria in 1889, he had a traumatic childhood, experiencing abuse at the hands of his father and losing four out of five siblings as well as both parents by the age of 19. He later wrote in Mein Kampf that the death of his mother, Klara, had been “a dreadful blow”. These events would have gone a long way toward shaping Hitler’s character, regardless of his genetic makeup. Similarly important for the bigger picture is the fact that Adolf Hitler was only one man. He was the undisputed dictator of Germany for 12 years. He devised and ordered the genocide of Europe’s Jews, as well as countless other atrocities. But he did not act alone. There were hundreds of thousands of perpetrators, each with their own genetic makeup and life experiences. Millions more eagerly followed him and profited from his policies. Genetics does not bring us any closer to understanding and explaining how the Holocaust could have happened. At the same time, it is undeniable that certain people have a huge and lasting impact on the course of historical events. Hitler is one of those people. Ian Kershaw once wrote of the dictator: “He is one of the few individuals of whom it can be said with absolute certainty: without him, the course of history would have been different.” Being able to analyse Hitler’s DNA thus offers us a remarkable opportunity to add another layer of information in the quest to understand more about the man regarded as “the embodiment of modern political evil” (Kershaw). However, we want to emphasise that it is not possible to see evil in someone’s DNA. A new piece of the puzzle It can be argued that only under Hitler could the Nazis have come to power, consolidated that power, waged a European war and committed the most terrible crimes in modern history. One reason for this is Hitler’s single-mindedness in the pursuit of power, which was unmatched by any other senior Nazi. That he had some form of Kallmann syndrome could well have been a factor in his renunciation of any kind of private life or intimate relationships. All available evidence suggests that he did not even have sex with his long-term companion, Eva Braun. Hitler always claimed that his life was devoted to Germany, so that there was no room in it for a wife. It seems this claim might, at least in part, have been a way of covering up his aversion to intimate relationships, and that his genes could have played a more significant role in his decision not to marry (until the day before his death) and not to have children than he was willing to admit. No single piece of evidence explains everything. We cannot take the genetic information about Hitler in isolation. It needs to be couched within our knowledge of what DNA can and cannot tell us, but crucially also within what we know about Hitler, and the time in which he lived. A rare constellation of factors – genetic, environmental and societal – all contributed to the emergence of Hitler. The discovery of his DNA – and the findings that have emerged from its analysis and are now presented in this cutting-edge documentary – provide historians with a rare and extremely significant new piece of the jigsaw puzzle in their attempts to understand and explain the most notorious figure of the 20th century. Turi King is the lead geneticist on the research into Hitler’s DNA. Alex J Kay is a historian specialising in Nazi Germany. Their groundbreaking work is covered in the two-part Channel 4 and Blink Films documentary Hitler’s DNA: Blueprint of a Dictator
When was the White House built – and why is it white?
How much do you know about the history of the White House in Washington, DC, which has been home to all US presidents since John Adams in 1800?
Inscribed on the stone fireplace of the State Dining Room of the White House are the words: “I pray to Heaven bestow the best of blessings on this house and all that shall hereafter inhabit it. May none but honest and wise men ever rule under this roof.” The blessing, which was engraved there in 1945, came from a letter written by John Adams to his wife Abigail in 1800. He was the second man to be president of the United States, but the first to reside in the world-famous home of the presidency at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue NW, in Washington, DC. A decade earlier, there had been no such place as Washington, DC, on the Potomac River. Founded by the Residence Act of 1790, the new capital would be a modern metropolis laid out in a grid system and with grand boulevards and public spaces everywhere. In the short term, though, it was not a promising place to live: if not hectic with the constant building works, there was nothing around but forests and some wetlands, where sanitation was poor and conditions were cold to freezing. Still, this would be the home of the president. George Washington, the first man elected to the office, personally chose the site for what would be the White House along with city planner Pierre Charles L’Enfant, and launched a competition for the building’s design. When was the White House built? Construction of the White House got underway with the laying of the cornerstone on 13 October 1792. But the the so-called ‘Presidential Palace' would not be finished until after Washington had left office. Even by 1800, when Adams moved in, the building was far from complete. It would be added to, repaired and extended many times throughout the years, not least when it had to be reconstructed following the War of 1812. The photogenic South Portico was added in 1824, followed by the North Portico, completed in 1830. The West Wing was added in 1902 and within, in 1909, the first iteration of the Oval Office. The East Wing was developed in 1942 – it is the focus of a sweeping renovation by President Trump that will see a 90,000-square-foot ballroom added to the building. The White House currently boasts a total of 132 rooms. White House facts: seven things you need to know Here, White House historian Lindsay M Chervinsky explains everything you need to know about the home of the US president… Why is the White House called the White House? The home of the President of the United States is called the White House in reference to its covering with lime-based whitewash to protect the porous sandstone it is built from. By President Jimmy Carter’s administration (1977–81), the paint was so thick that visitors couldn’t see the carving details above the windows and doors, or any of the beautiful molding. The White House underwent a significant external renovation to strip the many layers of paint, which took 20 years and wasn’t completed until President Bill Clinton’s administration (1993–2001). When finished, over 45 coats of paint had been removed from the exterior walls. Read more: American history myths: 7 things people get wrong Who built the White House? The White House was designed by Irish-born architect, James Hoban – whose vision of a neoclassical mansion in the Palladian style won him Washington's competition – but it was built by hundreds of workers, including enslaved people. Over the next eight years, a mix of free African-American and white wage labourers, enslaved workers, and skilled craftsmen built the White House. They worked in a variety of positions, including basic labourers, overseers, sawyers, carpenters, stone workers, and bricklayers. Some of the enslaved workers were owned by the city commissioners charged with overseeing the project, or by Hoban himself. The vast majority, however, were hired out from their owners in Washington, DC, as well as Virginia, and Maryland, who then pocketed the enslaved peoples’ wages. The construction crews were often shuttled back and forth between the White House and the Capitol building sites (which were also built using enslaved labour), depending on which location needed labour or had available materials at any given moment. Was the White House set on fire by the British? Yes. In August 1814, British forces marched into Washington, DC and burned all public buildings in retaliation for the destruction of York [now Toronto, Canada], the year prior. After enjoying a lavish meal laid out by First Lady Dolley Madison, the British forces set fire to the White House. Urban legend suggests that a rain storm arrived and saved the White House. The truth, however, is that the rain actually made the damage worse. While the wet weather saved the surrounding buildings from catching fire, it nearly destroyed the walls of the White House. The stone walls were incredibly hot from the fire and the cold rain caused them to shrink rapidly and crack. Congress quickly appointed a commission to investigate the damage and rebuild the White House. The investigators discovered that almost everything inside had been destroyed except for a few pots and pans in the basement kitchens, but their report concealed the extent of the damage to get the rebuilding process started immediately. Read more: Why does the United States of America celebrate Independence Day on 4 July? Some officials wanted to move the capital to a more developed city – like Philadelphia, New York, or Charleston – because lodging, food, and entertainment options were still quite limited in DC. Furthermore, representatives from states far away from DC, like New Hampshire or Georgia, wanted to shorten their travelling time. They saw the destruction of the White House as an opportunity to move the capital. Eager to maintain a historic link with the earlier presidents, Presidents James Madison and James Monroe rushed to rebuild the White House exactly as before. They even hired the same architect, James Hoban, to complete the renovation. Boston Tea Party: Igniting a Revolution Member exclusive | Discover the causes, tensions, and violent origins of the Boston Tea Party. Join leading experts as they explain the key players involved in the plan – and why tea was so important to the story. Listen to all episodes now Many animals have lived at the White House Most people are familiar with the dogs that have lived in the White House – such as Bo and Sunny Obama, or President George W Bush and First Lady Laura Bush’s Scottish terriers, Barney and Miss Beazley. But there have been a menagerie of animals that have called the grounds home. President Woodrow Wilson welcomed a herd of sheep to the South Lawn and they donated their wool to the Red Cross to create uniforms for soldiers during the First World War. One particularly adventuresome ram named Hi caused a bit of trouble when he repeatedly broke into the Oval Office. John F Kennedy’s daughter, Caroline, had a pet pony named Macaroni; First Lady Grace Coolidge had a raccoon named Rebecca; and President William H Taft had a cow, Pauline Wayne, which roamed in front of the Old Executive Office Building. Perhaps best of all, Alice Roosevelt (Theodore Roosevelt’s daughter) had a garter snake named Emily Spinach that she carried around in her purse and pulled out as a conversation piece at parties. Anne Boleyn’s lapdog and John Quincy Adams’s alligator: 10 famous people in history and their bizarre pets The White House is bigger than you might think it is While the building appears to be two stories from the street, there are actually six floors. There are three floors above ground (the State Floor and two floors for the residence), and three floors below ground. While much of the State Floor and residence layout has remained the same since its construction, many other areas of the White House have changed dramatically. When you enter the White House today, you would probably enter on the Ground Floor, or the first of the basement floors. Until 1901, this floor was primarily a work space. Instead of the China Room, the Vermeil Room, the Library, and the Diplomatic Reception Room, there would have been a kitchen, a laundry room, a storage space for food and dishware, and sleeping spaces for the enslaved or free servants. The basement was notoriously damp and frequently infested with vermin and rodents. Read more: Life after the White House: what the US presidents did next There are other spaces that have been lost to history as well. The White House had a series of stables to house the president’s horses, carriages, coachmen, and grooms. The final and most elaborate stable was converted into a garage in 1909. The attic has also undergone many renovations. In its early years, it was used for storage, sleeping quarters for free or enslaved servants, and a hiding place for the presidents’ children. In 1913 First Lady Ellen Wilson added guestrooms and a painting studio for her own private use. During the Coolidge administration, engineers discovered problems with the roof structure. They installed a sunroom (now the solarium), larger guest and service rooms, and a new steel and concrete roof. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2019/11/WhiteHouseFloorPlanGettyImages-640477071-b94d8bf-e1761584579153.jpg" width="1500" height="1002" alt="Floor Plan of the second storey of the White House" title="A 1901 drawing by FD Owen of the floor plan of the second story in the White House, which was originally deisgned by architect James Hoban in 1792 (Photo by Library of Congress/Corbis/VCG via Getty Images)" /> The White House grounds were once open to anyone When President John Adams moved into the White House on 1 November 1800, there was no fence or gate, and the grounds were open to pedestrians. President Thomas Jefferson added a fence that enclosed the grounds, but they remained open for common use. In 1873, President Ulysses S Grant began closing the grounds at sunset for additional security and in 1893, President Grover Cleveland closed the South Grounds, typically the first family’s garden, after strangers tried to take a picture of his young daughter, Esther. The North and South Grounds were closed permanently during Calvin Coolidge’s presidency at the recommendation of the United States Secret Service. The president’s cabinet hasn’t always had a home at the White House Every president has consulted a cabinet since President George Washington convened the first full cabinet meeting on 26 November 1791. While President John Adams was the first to live in the White House, President Thomas Jefferson was the first to meet with his cabinet in the White House and gathered the department secretaries in his private study on the first floor (now the State Dining Room). By the time of the Civil War, the president’s study had moved to the second floor and Abraham Lincoln met with the secretaries in his office in the south-east corner of the second floor (now the Lincoln Bedroom). Read more: American presidents: 9 things you (probably) didn’t know Theodore Roosevelt built the West Wing to provide more work space for his staff, and to give his large family more room on the second floor of the original building. In 1909, President Taft expanded the West Wing, added the Oval Office, and an official Cabinet room. The Oval Office was moved to its present location during President Franklin D Roosevelt’s presidency. Since then, most cabinets have used the Cabinet room for official cabinet meetings and elected to meet with individual department secretaries in the Oval Office. Lindsay M Chervinsky, PhD is White House Historian at the White House Historical Association, a non-profit dedicated to preserving and sharing the history of the White House. She is the author of The Cabinet: George Washington and the Creation of an American Institution
“A tidal wave of digital material will overwhelm recordkeeping institutions”: the future of history
If you’ve ever posted a comment on social media, you’ve created a potential source for future historians. But what problems does this mass of new material pose? Matt Elton asked historians Jane Winters and John Wills about how recent archives differ from those of the past – and how experts might make sense of them
Matt Elton: How do the kinds of records created now and in the recent past differ from those left in previous centuries? Jane Winters: Records and sources now come in a whole range of formats. In some cases, they are very familiar analogue sources that have become digital, whereas in others they are in a completely new format. Newspapers offer a great example of how this has changed: we used to read them only in physical form. Then those physical newspapers were digitised, keeping essentially the same structure. We now have both physical and digital newspapers, which differ in both form and content. An issue of The Guardian published in print today will not contain the same information as the online version: there will also be multimedia material and lots of online comments and conversations, whereas in the past you would have had only letters to the editor, for instance. And to take the example of people’s reflective writing, that’s a type of source that has also moved into new formats. A diary is not exactly the same as a blog entry or a post on social media, for instance. John Wills: One example that offers an interesting way of thinking about some of these issues is the ‘Barbenheimer’ phenomenon – the point in 2023 when the movies Barbie and Oppenheimer were released at the same time. That’s a very recent instance of the kind of cultural moment that’s really interesting to research – but doing so is not easy, because you’re dealing not just with the films themselves but also the digital content produced by the films’ fandoms, the actors’ response to that content, and the wider public responses to those two movies, in a way that we’ve never been able to do before. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/10/2RKFGYE-8d3d650.jpg" width="4475" height="2983" alt="A movie poster shows characters from the films Oppenheimer and Barbie, creating a layered montage to promote "Barbenheimer". That word is written in pink across the bottom" title="A poster by graphic designer Sean Longmore celebrating the simultaneous release of Barbie and Oppenheimer in 2023. Today’s wealth of online content is a boon and a challenge for historians (Image by Alamy)" /> Jane Winters: An important characteristic of a digital archive that doesn’t have an analogue or print equivalent is the mixture of formats it contains. It’s not just text, images and moving images, but also all the other novel elements and forms of communication – memes, gifs, emojis – and they’re not all always available in an easy-to-search format. The Wayback Machine (web.archive.org) is one of the major online archives, and it contains a huge amount of this kind of material – but in a very unstructured form. Focusing on the new kinds of sources that emerged in the late 20th and 21st centuries, are there particular examples that reveal new things about society? John Wills: One of the areas I explore is the history of video games, which we still tend to see as a recent phenomenon despite it dating back at least 50 years. It’s a medium in which the huge volume of material can be both a great opportunity and faintly overwhelming. There are a few ways in which video games can be useful historical sources. First, a game set in the past can reflect cultural views about that period of history at the time the game was made. Read more | Artificial intelligence: a modern advance or an ancient nightmare? Second, they can also provide ways for the public to get into history: the Red Dead Redemption game series [set on the US frontier in the late 19th and early 20th century], for example, has proved to be an entry point to ideas about and narratives of the American West for many people in the same way that TV or film can. And finally, you can sometimes go into the online world of a game itself and talk to its players about their memories and experiences of that game. That’s so different from how we would have worked on the history of memory in previous decades! These kinds of unique opportunities are why we’ve started to build video games into our understanding of history over the past few decades. Jane Winters: Another recent source of data that’s particularly exciting for historians is social media, because the voices and stories of people who would never have previously ended up in archives – unless they encountered the state at some point –are now doing so. It’s easy for anybody with access to the internet to create all kinds of content, and there are chances that at least some of it will end up in a national archive. That brings its own problems, because people aren’t always considering this when posting an angry Instagram comment! But that really rich conversation is something we haven’t had before, and has huge potential. There are substantial social media archives already, and they are going to grow. This presents a few challenges. One is an issue of preservation and storage: how much do we want to keep, particularly given the environmental impact of digital archiving? We often think of digital records as existing in the ‘cloud’, but that’s in many ways a very unhelpful term, because of course they exist in physical infrastructure. Another key issue is that this is often not a truly global record: there is inequity in terms of who has access to the internet, and therefore who is able to have their voices recorded in this way. As a concrete example, an exercise led by the International Internet Preservation Consortium collected the websites and other digital media produced in response to the Covid pandemic. It’s a pretty diverse collection, but there’s almost nothing from Africa and very little from China. So it skews in its story about that pandemic – which was, of course, a global phenomenon. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/10/GettyImages-2666817webready-aee0983.jpg" width="3458" height="2305" alt="A black and white photograph shows four men huddled around a newspaper" title="Men read a newspaper during the UK general strike, 1926. Historian Jane Winters highlights print media as a particularly revealing example of how online records have changed across recent decades (Image by Getty Images)" /> Despite these limitations, is the depth and extent of this inclusion in the historical record unprecedented? Jane Winters: I think so, and certainly in the sense that people are now creating the material themselves rather than being described by someone else, such as a state body. That ability to tell your own story, and the fact that different kinds of people will routinely end up in archives, is exciting. John Wills: I agree – particularly about the issues of inclusivity and diversity. Historians have always been making those kinds of choices about how to process that historical record, so in some ways that’s nothing new. What potential issues face historians using records created with, or stored on, more recent forms of technology? Jane Winters: A key issue is that digital records are often embedded in systems and structures, and we need to navigate those in order to replay them. Indeed, it’s very striking that the word ‘replay’ is used a lot in relation to web archives – it’s less about accessing material, and more about replaying content. I think this is only going to increase as we move as a culture towards using more and more multimedia platforms, so we need to collect the information that lets us understand the structures and systems used to store this content. One really useful way of framing this is the idea of the ‘material culture’ of these records. We need to preserve the original form of these digital records so we understand how to work with them and how to reuse them. Memory institutions – places such as the British Library and the National Archives – are making sure they have rooms with equipment and versions of particular computers to replay floppy disks, for example. Things like digital forensics come into play, too, to make sure that you are not altering a file when you open it. Read more | "Museums are magical places": Kavita Puri on a new initiative encouraging close encounters with history John Wills: Video game consoles, for example, have very short lifespans. Even one that sells well might be publicly available for only 10 years, and will then degrade. An emulator can show what a game was like, and you can watch people playing it on YouTube, but that will give you only one view of that game world – what one player did, rather than a wider sense of what the game’s about. Institutions have been set up to preserve video games and their history – for example, Sheffield’s National Videogame Museum. But this is a vast history – one console might play a few thousand games – and there are questions about who’s responsible for preserving the technology, and how. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/10/ACNSCREENSHOT141206230815PMCESTcmykwebready-6b6395b.jpg" width="1924" height="1283" alt="A soldier wearing gold and red armour and mask and a red and black headdress holds a sword up, fighting an unseen opponent" title="A scene from 2023 video game Assassin’s Creed Nexus VR. Such electronic forms of entertainment can prove to be useful historical sources, argues John Wills (Image by Games Press)" /> So for these sources to be as useful as possible, we need to preserve and understand the context in which they were made and used? Jane Winters: Yes – and there’s a concern that context disappears very easily from digital records. ‘Context collapse’ is something that gets talked about in relation to social media – the idea that it doesn’t take long before something is completely decontextualised and reused. It can become hard to trace where a digital record started, particularly if a crucial piece of information has gone – for example, if the original account was closed, it might exist in a very different context from that in which it was created. Because so much of this is happening in commercial platforms, there isn’t the attention to public documentation that you would get in a library or an archive. Talking about commercial platforms, there’s been a recent phenomenon of TV and film companies deleting material from their archives – or, in some cases, not releasing films at all. Does this point to any specifically 21st-century issues? John Wills: This is something you could call ‘digital demolition’, because it can be very conscious and deliberate. It’s sometimes the result of restricting access to archive material in order to create a paywall and charge for access. The online archive of MTV News, which is an incredible resource for people trying to understand the entertainment of the 1980s and 90s, was removed from the internet last year, for example. But it’s important to remember that this isn’t new, and that TV and film records have often been lost. We’ve got very few of the silent movies of the early 20th century, and Charlie Chaplin destroyed one of his own movies [as a tax write-off], for instance. One of the dangers is that we often don’t see TV or film productions as useful or valuable. A classic example is the tranche of Doctor Who episodes that went missing in the late 1960s and early 70s. Jane Winters: We also have a tendency to think about online platforms and content-creation companies as archives. They’re not, and they don’t have an archival remit or responsibility – they think of that data in very different ways from historians. In 2019 [social media site] Myspace lost years of photos, video and music because of a faulty server migration, for example. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/10/B261CNwebready-e53ca76.jpg" width="5102" height="3401" alt="Social network Myspace hit headlines in 2019 for losing 12 years’ worth of user content. Such platforms should not be seen as archives, says Jane Winters (Image by Alamy)" title="Social network Myspace hit headlines in 2019 for losing 12 years’ worth of user content. Such platforms should not be seen as archives, says Jane Winters (Image by Alamy)" /> Another issue is the vast volume of records. How will experts make sense of all of the data being created and stored? Jane Winters: The National Archives described this volume as a “tidal wave of digital material… which in its scale, diversity of format, and complexity of structure will overwhelm many existing recordkeeping institutions and practices”. And the scale is mind-boggling: The Wayback Machine has more than 946 billion web pages, largely accessed through keyword searching. You can find what you’re looking for, but you may have no sense of how vital or representative it is because there’s so much material. We will have to develop strategies to find out what’s in some of these digital archives before we can start to dig into them and do the kind of research we want to. We talk about ‘web archives’, but they’re not archives in a traditional sense, and that creates interesting challenges for researchers, both now and in the future. Read more | Eastern promises: the long and troubled history of Britain's relations with China Can we identify a moment when this avalanche of records began? Jane Winters: It’s not been the same in different sectors: the British Library was collecting millions of websites as early as 2013, so that’s already a huge collection. But I think the anticipated digital deluge of government records hasn’t really happened yet, though it is coming. John Wills: It does depend on the area. If you’re working on events in the 1980s or 90s, which saw the advent of 24-hour news coverage, the volume of visual culture can sometimes seem overwhelming. And that information may be supplied in an unreliable way. One of the big new challenges facing historians and other experts is the way that platforms and algorithms work, because they can potentially mislead us as scholars by pushing the most common citation or the view that’s been promoted hardest. We’re not necessarily getting an open, full picture of the past – we are getting a version shaped by artificial intelligence (AI) and other forms of machine learning. The data has already gone through a level of selection and adaptation – and that’s a real issue for us. Is AI going to become a growing problem for historians? Jane Winters: It will be a huge issue. That’s not to say there isn’t already misinformation in archives – we need only think about fraudulent medieval charters, for instance! But the scale is different, as is the entanglement between trustworthy information and misinformation. It’s not the role of archives to say if material can be trusted, but as historians we need enough information to make judgments for ourselves. We have the skills – we spend our time assessing information – but we need to have enough contextual material to judge its validity. Finally, considering all these challenges, how might historians in the future make sense of the late 20th and early 21st centuries? John Wills: It’s interesting to think about the image we have of future historians. An episode of recent Star Trek series Discovery features an ‘eternal gallery and archive’: a beautiful repository of items and books from around the universe, all presented uncritically as completely reliable information. It’s an example of the idea that we’ll have access to sources in a utopian way, whereas the reality looks like being one in which, as Jane says, things are complex and entangled, and historians have to negotiate increasingly problematic routes to access material. Jane Winters: Historians thrive on challenges: having to put together evidence and perhaps take it in a different direction because you found a new piece of information. We’ve only ever been able to tell partial stories; the challenge for us now is to think about how partial those histories might be. That’s why discussions like this are so important – to think about how we can ensure that as much of the material as possible is preserved, where the conversations around that need to happen, which organisations should be involved, and really work together. So many communities of practice are developing around this, and I have confidence that the work happening in our national libraries, archives and other places will ensure that historians of the future will have enough material to work with. Jane Winters is professor of digital humanities at the School of Advanced Study at the University of London John Wills is professor of American media and culture at the University of Kent This article was first published in the October 2025 issue of BBC History Magazine
The spy next door: Moscow's century-long plot to infiltrate the west
Shaun Walker casts light on Moscow's shocking 'illegals' programme - a daring feat of espionage that saw Russian spies going deep undercover
In 2010, the world was stunned when the United States exposed a covert Russian spy network operating on its soil. Seemingly all-American families living in white-picket-fenced suburbia were in fact deep undercover Russian agents. Many had been living under assumed identities for decades, lying even to their own children. In this episode, journalist Shaun Walker speaks to Danny Bird about Moscow’s longlasting ‘illegals’ programme – perhaps the most audacious chapter in the history of espionage. He reveals how the roots of the operation reached back more than a century to before the Bolshevik Revolution; how the Soviet Union deployed it against supposedly ‘friendly’ states; and how today’s Russia reveres these spies as patriotic heroes. Shaun Walker is the author of The Illegals: Russia's Most Audacious Spies and the Plot to Infiltrate the West (Profile Books, 2025). Buy it now from Waterstones
Reshaping narratives, repatriation and Richard III : 25 lessons we've learnt from history in the last 25 years
To celebrate a quarter-century of BBC History Magazine, we asked 25 expert contributors to nominate the most important historical discoveries and revelations since the publication launched in 2000
1. Women played major roles in the Viking Age Just 25 years ago, there seemed to be little new to say about the Vikings – and that was particularly the case for Viking women. The centuries-old consensus was that Viking wives and daughters stayed at home, passively watching as the Viking Age unfolded around them. New technologies have forced a rethink, though, completely revolutionising what we know about Viking women. The first significant discovery came from a systematic survey of a nationwide database of metal-detected female dress jewellery. This demonstrated for the first time that Scandinavian women migrated to England in substantial numbers. Next, isotope analysis of teeth from the graves of Viking women showed that they had formed a key part of the migration process elsewhere, too, moving across the Viking world alongside their families. The most dramatic and most debated discovery, however, came through analysis of ancient DNA. In Birka, Sweden, an individual buried in a high-status warrior grave turned out to be biologically female. This led to a worldwide discussion of the roles of Viking women: we now agree that, though many certainly did stay at home, some played active roles in trade, craft and manufacturing processes, and even held military positions. Cat Jarman is an archaeologist, author and TV presenter. Her books include The Bone Chests: Unlocking the Secrets of the Anglo-Saxons (William Collins, 2023) 2. Britain has been culturally diverse for far longer than most believed The murder of George Floyd by white police officer Derek Chauvin in 2020 signalled a turning point in the way the histories of people of African descent were taught and perceived across Europe. From that moment, the British press and institutions felt that they had to engage better with narratives about minority ethnic communities. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/06/GettyImages-1292414316-CMYK-6ff23f7.jpg" width="1451" height="967" alt="A black and white photograph of a man sitting in a chair, leaning on one arm. He is wearing a suit." title="Walter Tull, an English footballer of Caribbean heritage, c1908–11 and (below) with the FA Amateur Cup-winning Clapton FC team of 1908–09. Commissioned as a second lieutenant in the British Army, he was killed in action in France in March 1918" /> A renewed interest in personal histories and trajectories of people of African descent in Britain showcased stories about their links to major events – from the celebrated story of the British-Jamaican nurse Mary Seacole during the Crimean War to the experiences of black British football player Walter Tull and other soldiers of Caribbean and African descent who fought for Britain during the world wars. We also saw a number of new black history courses launched in UK universities, and school classes featuring black, Asian and minority ethnic histories. Uncovering these multiple trajectories further highlights how culturally diverse Britain has been over many centuries, and why sharing stories about a common past can bring communities together. Olivette Otele is a distinguished research professor at SOAS University of London. Her books include African Europeans: An Untold History (Hurst, 2020) 3. The Tudors got Richard III wrong We learned many things from the discovery of Richard III’s skeleton beneath a Leicester car park 13 years ago. We learned about the king’s physique, his diet and the injuries he sustained while fighting for crown and country at Bosworth against a foreign-backed invader. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/06/BAL1066157-CMYK-2-7311920.jpg" width="2889" height="1925" alt="A painted portrait of Richard III. He is wearing a red top with a gold cape around his shoulders, with a black cap that includes a gold jewel on the front" title="Richard III, portrayed after 1510 – long after his death at Bosworth. “History can make no progress unless it’s ready to test and deconstruct generally held assumptions,” says Philippa Langley (Image by Bridgeman Images)" /> But, for me, two lessons in particular stand out from the discovery. The first is that history can make no progress unless it’s ready to test and deconstruct generally held traditions and assumptions – even those held by historians and archaeologists. Those of us working on the Looking for Richard Project trusted only our own painstaking, personal research in primary sources. Second, we learned that Shakespeare’s hunchback and withered arm never existed. Analysis of Richard’s skeleton – which had lain underfoot and peacefully undisturbed for 500 years – revealed that his limbs were sound, and that his spine showed a scoliosis that was invisible to onlookers. Richard’s makeshift burial in the wake of his defeat at Bosworth, in a grave cut too short, was hugely revealing. It speaks across the centuries of a victor’s disrespect for a fallen king. Philippa Langley is a historian, author and producer. Her latest book is The Princes in the Tower: Solving History’s Greatest Cold Case (The History Press, 2023) Read more | The final mystery of Richard III: how 21st-century science cracked a 500-year-old cold case 4. Magna Carta was only part of a truly revolutionary settlement King John’s Magna Carta is perhaps the best-known document in world history, generally regarded as the first attempt to place kingship itself under the rule of law. Not surprisingly, it has been much studied. Yet a torrent of new evidence has been brought to light over the past 20 years, transforming understanding of both the document and its wider context. We now know of many more ‘original’ Magna Cartas (from its subsequent reissues) than were previously dreamed of. And incidental discoveries in archives from Paris to New England have reshaped our appreciation of what actually happened in 1215. A fortuitous discovery in Lambeth Palace Library, for example, reveals that the charter was part of a truly revolutionary settlement, with the barons briefly permitted dual control of local government in tandem with the king. We know, too, that John himself made no attempt to publish the charter. On the contrary, it was the bishops who ensured its distribution, preservation and even, in some cases, its physical copying. The archbishop of Canterbury, Stephen Langton, is unmasked not so much as an honest broker between king and barons but as an ideologically committed adherent of the anti-royal party. By such means can new evidence help us rewrite the past – even for the oldest and best-known stories. Nicholas Vincent is professor of medieval history at the University of East Anglia. His books include John (Allen Lane, 2020) 5. We ignore the past at our peril Most compellingly, the past 25 years have reminded us that history matters. Every life-sapping conflict since the millennium – Iraq, Syria, Sudan, Libya, Ukraine, Gaza – has its roots deep in the past. Of course, the past does not determine the future, but the future is shaped by the past. Merely railing against adversaries or shouting ‘victory’ from the rooftops may make for good headlines but, in the absence of some understanding of ‘how we got from there to here’, such indulgence is vacuous grandstanding. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/06/GettyImages-2198688988-CMYK-2766b77.jpg" width="3500" height="2331" alt="A group of Sudanese women and children dressed in bright clothing sit on the ground together. They all look serious." title="Women and children displaced by the civil war in Sudan, February 2025. The roots of such conflicts lie deep in the past, says Jonathan Dimbleby (Image by Getty Images)" /> The past has never been ‘another country’. This is especially true of Europe, where the tectonic plates did not stop shifting with the end of the Second World War in 1945 or the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. The events of the past 25 years have demonstrated only too cruelly that our continent is inherently, and sometimes alarmingly, unstable. All leaders claim to act in what they believe to be the national interest. The. less they make ill-judged declaratory statements of intent and the more they demonstrate a realistic vision of the future, based on a clear awareness of the past, the better it will be for all of us. History is a great mentor. Jonathan Dimbleby is a historian, biographer and broadcaster. His latest book is Endgame 1944: How Stalin Won the War (Viking, 2024) 6. Hitler tapped into hard-wired emotions to stir up hatred For my new book, I found it tremendously helpful to talk to academic psychologists and neuroscientists about the insights we can gain, in general terms, from their disciplines. For instance, I learned how Hitler – without knowing the science behind his actions – tapped into a profound truth about the way the brain works. In stirring up hatred against Jews and Bolsheviks, Hitler targeted the amygdala – the part of the brain that immediately processes feelings of anxiety, fear and anger. These powerful emotions are produced almost instantly, because it’s the amygdala that helps us avoid sudden danger. It’s a survival mechanism that, as the neuroscientist Professor Robert Sapolsky explained to me, is “hard-wired into us… and we’ll never get rid of it”. Hitler capitalised on this neurobiological tendency, and in the process did his best to subdue the parts of the brain that offer a more logical analysis. Indeed, he seemed to confirm that he was well aware of the immense power of this approach when he remarked, during a private speech to the Hamburger Nationalklub in 1926, that “the only stable emotion is hate”. Laurence Rees is a historian, author and documentary film-maker. His new book is The Nazi Mind: Twelve Warnings From History (Viking, 2025) 7. Hunter-gatherers and farmers joined in wild rituals 12,000 years ago Around the turn of this millennium, in a remote south-eastern corner of Turkey, an astonishing discovery was being made – one that stretched the story of humanity back more than 12,000 years. Still today, only about 5 per cent of the archaeological site known as Karahantepe has been excavated – but even that tiny fraction is changing our understanding of the beginning of society as we know it. Emerging from the earth is a giant chamber with 11 huge stone phallus columns, overlooked by the face of a man with a splendid handlebar moustache and the body of a snake. The head of a big cat is visible in the centre, and carvings on 250 obelisks in the area could be mistaken for gargoyles on any medieval cathedral.We expect the female equivalent of the chamber to be unearthed soon. Karahantepe, it turns out, is just one site in a constellation of a hundred or so – the Taş Tepeler – which together are rewriting the story of human collaboration. The orthodoxy used to be that hunter-gatherers invented farming, then settled down, then manifested religion to establish common mores to live by. But the discoveries seem to show that hunter-gatherers and the very first farmers gathered together in huge, collective spaces for wild ritual parties to share know-how and ideas. This is one of the joys of history: it is constantly protean. Every year, new finds reveal earlier and earlier evidence of human achievement and sophistication. Bettany Hughes is a historian, author and broadcaster. Her latest book is The Seven Wonders of the Ancient World (W&N, 2024) 8. Returning stolen artefacts to Africa is no longer a naive dream Some 25 years ago, when I was starting my career in museums, a sense of optimism and renewal imbued the sector – yet the restitution of stolen African objects did not seem a realistic possibility. Today, the culture has changed profoundly. My old employer, the Smithsonian National Museum of African Art in Washington, DC, has returned its contested Benin plaques; the Dutch, Germans and French have either begun programmes of return or discussed the possibility. In Britain, the Horniman has returned ownership of its Benin plaques, and the V&A and the British Museum (both restricted by law from giving collections permanently) have entered into long-term loan agreements with the Asante royal family in Ghana. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/06/GettyImages-1432612271-CMYK-85c7997.jpg" width="2806" height="1869" alt="A collection of Benin Bronzes – objects stolen by British troops in 1897 – displayed in the Smithsonian National Museum of African Art in Washington, DC in 2022 before repatriation to Nigeria (Image by Getty Images)" title="A collection of Benin Bronzes – objects stolen by British troops in 1897 – displayed in the Smithsonian National Museum of African Art in Washington, DC in 2022 before repatriation to Nigeria" /> Conversations that were inconceivable a generation ago – about ethics, about custodianship, about narrative, about ghosts – have begun to happen. We have to find ways to tell complex stories of empire, enslavement and colonialism more effectively and inclusively. It’s important that museums can craft their curatorial narratives with moral confidence, and the resolution of such thorny, long-term issues is vital. There is still much to do. Our museums must go further in building partnerships and programmes with museums across the African continent. We need to learn from African expertise – and in turn we must share our resources and expertise to improve the telling of these rich and amazing histories everywhere. Gus Casely-Hayford is a curator, historian and broadcaster. His books include The Lost Kingdoms of Africa (Bantam, 2012) 9. Anne Boleyn was a proto-feminist heroine Anne Boleyn is unique among English queens, and her story is remarkable, but much of the modern fascination with that tale lies in perceptions of her fuelled by films and novels. She is now revered as a feminist heroine – a concept I would once have dismissed as anachronistic. When I said as much to the historian Sarah Gristwood, she replied: “Well, actually…” and very generously allowed me a preview of her research for her marvellous book Game of Queens (Oneworld, 2016), which inspired me to find out more. Feminism was unknown in Tudor England. But in early 16th-century Europe, where Anne spent her formative years, there was an intellectual debate that questioned traditional attitudes to women, and looked forward to an era – the ‘reign of virtue’ – in which they would enjoy more power and equality. In this age of female rulers, Anne had two shining examples to study: Margaret of Austria and Marguerite of Valois, both of whom she served or knew. We have to study her in this European context in order to understand the cultural influences to which she was exposed, giving her the confidence to pursue her brilliant career. Alison Weir is an author and historian. Her latest book is The Cardinal: The Secret Life of Thomas Wolsey (Headline, 2025) 10. Mary Seacole was a true heroine of the Crimean War One of the most significant changes over the past 25 years is the extent to which researching and writing black history has opened up. This is partly down to the dedication of historians determined to extend knowledge of the black experience by digging deeply and stubbornly into little-consulted sources. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/06/2PJ0WEX-CMYK-06a24e3.jpg" width="2422" height="1614" alt="British-Jamaican nurse Mary Seacole, who cared for sick and wounded troops in Crimea. Digitisation of sources helped Helen Rappaport paint a more rounded portrait of her (Image by Alamy)" title="British-Jamaican nurse Mary Seacole, who cared for sick and wounded troops in Crimea. Digitisation of sources helped Helen Rappaport paint a more rounded portrait of her (Image by Alamy)" /> In my own case, 20 years of concerted searching across digitised newspapers and in genealogical archives gave the lie to the till-then widely perpetuated view that Mary Seacole had been wildly overrated and undeserving of the ‘Greatest Black Briton’ sobriquet awarded her in 2004. For decades, detractors dismissed her as a colourful but largely irrelevant presence who had done little more than ‘sell tea and buns’ to the soldiers in Crimea. But my searches, enabled by digitisation of sources, brought me to a more complete view of a woman who deserves to be viewed as a heroine. She journeyed 1,600 miles to Crimea under her own steam and at her own expense to set up shop in the middle of a war zone – a lone black woman facing prejudice and risking her own safety to help the wounded, sick and dying. Delving into previously unseen sources over an extended period enabled me to challenge the conventional sanctification of ‘the black Florence Nightingale’ and present a fully rounded personality. Helen Rappaport is an author and historian. Her latest book is The Rebel Romanov (Simon & Schuster, 2025) 11. Public history can play a major role in understanding the past One great change over the last 25 years has been the huge growth in public history – not just as an academic discipline, though of course it rests on the work of professional historians, archivists and museum workers. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/06/GettyImages-473083908-CMYK-5eef700.jpg" width="5184" height="3454" alt="A woman wearing plain clothing and with her hair in a bun sits at a spinning wheel" title="A re-enactor at a recreation of a medieval German monastery village. Such projects contribute to public – and academic – understanding of the past (Image by Getty Images)" /> Public history is the product of us all. It is about public interaction with the past, its interpretation and popularisation – changing our understanding not only of the past but also of our own times. It’s about the link between historians and the general public. Films, podcasts, radio, heritage societies, living archaeologists, local history and re-enactment groups – even readers of this magazine – are all part of it. Good popularisation is the necessary link between professionals and the population at large, without which history becomes a closed debate between historians. And in a democracy, that link is vital: it’s part of a healthy information ecosystem, our reality check in the face of the tide of fake history on social media. Perhaps not surprisingly, in Trump’s America the US National Council on Public History is becoming more important in keeping minds open. When I hear people argue that you can’t rewrite history – though that is our actual collective job as makers of history! – it makes me think that perhaps we should have one here, too. Michael Wood is professor of public history at the University of Manchester. Read his column from the May 2025 issue of BBC History Magazine here 12. Charles I wasn’t so very chaste Traditional accounts of Charles I, the so-called ‘martyr king’, have always presented him as a grave, austere and chaste figure – the very opposite of his indecorous, bawdy father, James VI & I, and his dissipated, promiscuous son, Charles II. Charles’s marriage to his wife, Henrietta Maria, was undoubtedly a happy one and, until the royal couple were torn apart during the Civil War, he does indeed appear to have remained true to her alone. However, in an article published in 2006, the historian Sarah Poynting revisited a series of encrypted letters written by Charles in late 1647 and 1648, while he was imprisoned in Carisbrooke Castle on the Isle of Wight after his defeat by the parliamentarians. Previous attempts to decipher these letters had not been entirely accurate, Poynting showed, and in fact one of them revealed that Charles had been attempting to inveigle the royalist agent Jane Whorwood into his bed. Using the frankest language, Charles went so far as to suggest to Jane that she should secretly conceal herself in the ‘stool-room’ adjoining his chamber while he was out on his daily walk so that, after his return, he could dally with her at length. It was a remarkable discovery – and one that suggested previous characterisations of the king as “blamelessly uxorious” may well have been a little wide of the mark. Mark Stoyle is professor of history at the University of Southampton. His latest book is A Murderous Midsummer: The Western Rising of 1549 (Yale University Press, 2022) Read more | "Tyrant, traitor, murderer and public enemy": was Charles I really that bad? 13. Mesolithic Europeans had dark skin and blue eyes One of the major scientific advances in archaeology over the past 25 years has been the ability to extract and analyse DNA from the remains of long-dead people from the distant past. Such ancient DNA can shed light on how people were related to one another, on a family or population scale, and provide insights into the migration and movement of people over time. It can also tell us what diseases they had and – perhaps most compelling – what they looked like. In 2018, researchers at the Natural History Museum revealed that one of the inhabitants of Mesolithic Britain, a man who lived around 10,000 years ago, had dark skin and blue eyes. This individual – known as ‘Cheddar Man’, because his remains were discovered in a cave in Cheddar Gorge in Somerset – is represented by one of the oldest complete skeletons ever identified in Britain. Earlier results from remains found from Spain, Luxembourg and Hungary confirm that most hunter-gatherers in Mesolithic Europe looked this way. The genes for lighter skin pigmentation arrived thousands of years later, in waves of migration from the east during the Neolithic and Bronze Age. In addition, natural selection over time favoured lighter tones that allow more Vitamin D synthesis in the skin, essential in northerly climes. Susan Greaney is a lecturer in archaeology at the University of Exeter 14. Premodern Japan was surprisingly progressive One of the most fascinating and dynamic periods of Japanese history was the Meiji Restoration, which began with the overthrow of the Tokugawa shogunate in 1868 and ended with the death of the Meiji Emperor in 1912. Japan opened up as never before to diplomatic and trading relationships with the west and, over little more than four decades, modernised its economy and society at an astonishing rate. By 1912, it had become one of the world’s great powers. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/06/GettyImages-566421965-CMYK-53c95d9.jpg" width="2704" height="1802" alt="A print showing a large blue river with little boats on it. A large arched bridge crosses the river. In the background, a volcano can be seen" title="An 1856 print of rural Japan by Hiroshige. Under the Tokugawa shogunate that preceded the 1868 Meiji Restoration, Japan enjoyed an artistic and intellectual flourishing (Image by Getty Images)" /> For a long time, this explosion of activity was contrasted with the preceding 250 years of the Tokugawa shogunate. That system was regarded as feudal, backward and badly out of date, requiring rescue at the hands of modernising and westernising reformers. Much though this view of history suited western historians across the 20th century, and flattering as it was to western modernity, since 2000 historians have increasingly been exploring the myriad achievements of the shogunate. Across two and a half centuries of peace, Japanese commerce, intellectual life and the arts enjoyed extraordinary growth and creativity, from theatre through to a tourism industry and a publishing boom. Without the commercial and technical expertise, high literacy rates and great bustling cities that developed under the shogunate, the Meiji Restoration could not have happened in the way that it did. Christopher Harding is senior lecturer in Asian history at the University of Edinburgh and creator of the IlluminAsia newsletter and podcast (illuminasia.org). His latest book is The Light of Asia: A History of Western Fascination with the East (Allen Lane, 2024) 15. Egypt’s great pyramids at Giza weren’t built by foreign slaves Dominating the Giza Plateau for almost five millennia, the great pyramids still capture imaginations around the world. For centuries, archaeologists and historians have tried to determine how these magnificent monuments, including the only surviving Wonder of the Ancient World, were created – and now we know who built them. Contrary to popular depictions, construction wasn’t completed by foreign slaves but by Egyptian employees. Excavations of a workers’ village over the past couple of decades, and the discovery of builders’ tombs in 2009, have transformed the narrative. The village, dating from the Fourth Dynasty (starting c4,600 years ago), boasted bakeries, breweries, butchers and a hospital. In the burial sites, skeletons show signs of hard labour, as one might expect, but they’re also accompanied by jars of bread and beer, ready for the afterlife. There are female skeletons, too, confirming that women played roles in building the pyramids. Hieroglyphs suggest a system of skilled labourers and artisans, from “overseer of the side of the pyramid” to “inspector of the craftsmen”. It’s also clear that villagers from surrounding areas came here to work in construction, usually in three-month stints. Their graffiti indicates that each cadre might associate themselves with one particular pharaoh or pyramid: the “friends of Khufu”, for example, or “drunkards of Menkaure”. The inscriptions confirm that the pyramid builders were Egyptian. And the manner and location of the burials, in the shadow of the great pharaohs, puts the slave myth to bed. Islam Issa is professor of literature and history at Birmingham City University. His latest book is Alexandria: The City that Changed the World (Sceptre, 2023) 16. Personal links to empire can reshape old narratives Astonishingly, I completed my entire education without learning about the British empire. I don’t even have a recollection of hearing the world ‘empire’ mentioned at school – and I studied History A-level! I now know that my experience is not unique. In the past 10 years or so, though, I have gained a growing understanding of not only what happened and how it shaped Britain today, but also of my own personal connection to empire and its tumultuous end. I feel lucky to be making programmes and writing books at a time when there is a greater interest in knowing about Britain’s imperial past – not that it is without complications or controversies. And things continue changing: a new generation of historians is exploring archives and asking different questions. Teachers are choosing to explore empire in all its complexity, and conversations are being had between people in the diaspora and their family members about a time when they were subjects of empire. I am learning that, just because an area of history is overlooked or not spoken of, it doesn’t always have to be that way. Kavita Puri is a journalist and broadcaster for BBC Radio 4. Read her Hidden Histories column from the May 2025 issue of BBC History Magazine here 17. Stonehenge was built in an already sacred area The past two and a half decades have seen a transformation in our understanding of one of the most iconic ancient monuments in Britain and, indeed, the world: Stonehenge. Archaeological research has revealed that the 4,500-year-old prehistoric ‘temple’ stood at the heart of a sacred landscape infinitely richer than previously thought. Scores of ritual monuments have been discovered in a vast halo scattered across the countryside around the monument. Even more extraordinarily, tests have revealed that one of Stonehenge’s most important stones was transported all the way from what’s now northern Scotland – and that a large number of the smaller stones had probably originally formed part of another stone circle in south-west Wales before being brought here. And research shows that some of the Neolithic people buried at Stonehenge did not come from the area but from western Britain, possibly from modern-day Wales – significant, given the origins of many of its smaller stones. We now know, too, that Mesolithic hunter-gatherers were active in the Stonehenge area some 5,000 years before the monument existed. This remarkable new information, together with earlier evidence that a series of Mesolithic wooden obelisks may have stood adjacent to the site of Stonehenge, suggests that the area had been sacred for millennia. David Keys is the archaeological correspondent for The Independent 18. The tide seems to have turned against the British empire By the year 2000, the British empire – formerly a global superpower – had been transformed into an organisation with entirely voluntary membership, the Commonwealth. At the time, academic assessment of this extraordinary transformation resulted in a number of books – including my own – which concluded that British imperialism had been overall, and in a remarkable variety of ways, both a blessing and a curse. In the 25 years since that relatively benign consensus, however, there has been a profound anti-imperial swing resulting in a wholesale condemnation of British imperial history – shifting the dial remarkably. It is, however, vital to understand that, even at its Victorian zenith, the empire faced trenchant criticism from within. Anti-imperial attitudes were commonplace on the left wing of the Liberal Party, the infant Labour Party and the generally hostile Irish Nationalist Party. Nonconformist churches – Methodists, Congregationalists and, above all, Quakers – voiced criticisms of imperial aims and methods. Internal opposition, from resentful Afrikaners, French Canadians and diverse displaced and conquered Indigenous peoples, also inevitably arose. To cope with such internal opposition, and to prolong its existence, the imperial system undertook much self-correction – a process that led to mass devolution, the end of empire and the birth of today’s Commonwealth. In short, we are now keenly aware that there is no neat and fireproof analysis of the nature, governance and purpose of the British empire. It was such a huge, complex and long-lived organisation that almost every criticism, as well as almost every justification, has some validity somewhere and at some time. Denis Judd is professor emeritus of imperial and Commonwealth history at London Metropolitan University, and author of Empire (IB Tauris revised paperback edition, 2012) 19. The world is in danger of reverting to its darkest days After the collapse of Soviet-style communism in Russia and eastern Europe in 1989–91, the American political scientist Francis Fukuyama wrote a book called The End of History and the Last Man. In it, he predicted optimistically that the demise of the Soviet system meant that western liberalism would roll out across the world, and that the future belonged to progressive democracy, with no rivals to challenge it. In fact, since the first issue of BBC History Magazine was published in 2000, history has evolved along a drastically different path to the one that Fukuyama predicted. So far, the 21st century has belonged to resurgent strongmen. In country after country, authoritarian regimes led by dictatorial rulers have come to power – and stayed there, with scant regard for democracy. Putin’s Russia, Xi’s China, Erdogan’s Turkey, Kim’s North Korea and Sisi’s Egypt are leading examples of a worldwide trend that shows no sign of ending. So what we have learned from history in this century is a rather troubling lesson. After the terrors of the 20th century, the world is not moving into broad, sunlit uplands but is in danger of reverting to the darkest days of the past. Nigel Jones is a historian, journalist and former reviews editor of BBC History Magazine. His latest book is Kitty’s Salon: Sex, Spying and Surveillance in the Third Reich (John Blake, 2023) 20. Technology enables deep-sea shipwreck discoveries – but we should beware hubris In recent years, sophisticated modern technologies have allowed humans to dive deeper, explore the seabed autonomously, and locate shipwrecks. Lost in 1915 in the Weddell Sea, Sir Ernest Shackleton’s polar vessel Endurance made headlines when its wreck was rediscovered in 2022. Recovering or even visiting the wreck, which lies at a depth of 3,000 metres, are major challenges. But submersible robots were able to photograph the Endurance from every angle, enabling scientists to create a digital model of the whole vessel as well as many artefacts preserved just as they were when the crew abandoned ship. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/06/GettyImages-1137373443cmyk-1b64874.jpg" width="5248" height="3496" alt="Ernest Shackleton’s polar vessel Endurance clamped in a fatal ice embrace in 1915. The discovery of its wreck on the Antarctic seabed in 2022 made headlines (Image by Getty Images)" title="Ernest Shackleton’s polar vessel Endurance clamped in a fatal ice embrace in 1915. The discovery of its wreck on the Antarctic seabed in 2022 made headlines (Image by Getty Images)" /> The wreck of the Gloucester, lost in 1682 after hitting a sandbank while transporting James, Duke of York and his court, was discovered in 2007. Future excavation of the site could provide an unprecedented opportunity to explore a Restoration royal court frozen in time. Just as the Mary Rose Museum has captured the public imagination, making Henry VIII’s warship part of British national conversations, telling the Gloucester’s stories could transform public understanding of a historical period that laid the constitutional foundations of modern Britain. In 2025, mid-point in the United Nations ‘Ocean Decade’, a key task is to meaningfully integrate Britain’s remarkable maritime cultural heritage into ocean governance to help create a sustainable blue economy. Nonetheless, humanity should remain humble in the face of the ocean’s uncontrollable forces. The implosion in 2023 of the submersible Titan on its expedition to the wreck of the Titanic – resulting in the death of all on board – is a cautionary tale. Some 3 million shipwrecks around the world prove that the sea – so elemental, so powerful – shouldn’t be disrespected. Claire Jowitt is professor of Renaissance studies at the University of East Anglia 21. We now know how many enslaved African people were trafficked across the Atlantic The transatlantic slave trade was one of the largest forced movements of people in world history – yet for decades it was difficult to quantify. Then, in the early 1990s, an international team came together to solve this problem. The result was the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database, which showed that 12.5 million people were transported. Of those, 10.7 million survived the journey and arrived in the Americas. Many people, particularly in the US and the UK, assumed that most enslaved people were trafficked to the United States. In fact, the database showed that fewer than 400,000 Africans were forcibly taken directly to mainland North America; about 4.8 million arrived in South America and 4.7 million in the Caribbean. First published as a CD-ROM in 1999, the database was greatly expanded in the early 2000s to include the Portuguese trade in the South Atlantic. Re-released as an open-access website in 2008, including details of an additional 7,000 journeys, it has been described as one of the greatest historical achievements of the 21st century. Though the database does not give us a rich picture of the experiences of enslaved peoples, it has been critical to understanding the scale of one of the world’s worst human-rights violations. Hannah Cusworth is a historian, curator and history education consultant Read more | The history of Africa: why we need to look much deeper than slavery and colonisation 22. Richard III was behind the disappearance of the princes in the Tower… probably It’s history’s most compelling missing persons case: what happened to Edward V and his younger brother, Richard, after they were placed in the Tower in 1483 on the orders of their uncle, who soon afterwards seized the throne as Richard III? The mystery has been the subject of intense debate ever since. Some three decades later, Thomas More had established the narrative that Richard had his nephews murdered with the help of his henchman, James Tyrell. There was no shortage of other suspects but, though every scrap of evidence has been pored over by generations of historians since, the trail was already cold. Recently, Tim Thornton, professor of history at the University of Huddersfield, took a novel approach. Rather than researching the events leading up to the princes’ disappearance, he traced the lives of those involved in the years that followed – and found links between Thomas More and the two men he claimed had carried out the murder for Tyrell. Then, last year, Thornton came across a book of wills in the National Archives that included one made in 1516 by a wealthy London widow, Margaret Capel, half sister-in-law of Sir James Tyrell. Among her chattels listed in the will was “the chain of Edward V” – the only one of the boys’ possessions referenced in sources after their disappearance. The fact that it turned up in the family of the prime suspect makes it close to a ‘smoking gun’. Tracy Borman is a historian, author and broadcaster. Her documentary The Princes in the Tower: A Damning Discovery is on My5 23. History can help veterans cope with PTSD A remarkable discovery made this century is that history can be hugely therapeutic for veterans suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). It might seem deeply counterintuitive but when veterans undertake top-level archaeological research on battlefields, rather than re-igniting their traumas it often tends to work in positive ways for them psychologically, and can be a useful step on their road to recovery. The work done by the organisation Waterloo Uncovered, founded in 2015 by former Coldstream Guards captain (and PTSD sufferer) Mark Evans, has been instrumental in this regard. Its mental-health experts found that, after helping to discover facts that are useful to military historians – the musket-ball scatter-pattern outside the orchard at the Hougoumont farmhouse in a key sector of the Waterloo battlefield, for example – veterans often saw improvements in their mental conditions. There are various theories about the mechanisms of this effect. Perhaps such work reminds veterans that their predecessors two centuries ago encountered much the same kind of perils they did themselves in war zones such as Iraq and Afghanistan. Evans also noted that the project provided a safe and structured environment in which veterans with shared experiences could start to open up to one another about the challenges they faced. Whatever the reason, history is helping in a tangible way today. Andrew Roberts’ latest book, with General David Petraeus, is Conflict: The Evolution of War-fare from 1945 to Gaza (William Collins, 2024) 24. Technology has revolutionised how historians work and collaborate One of the great things about historical research is that it keeps on moving. When I was a young historian, looking back in time required me to handle complex written materials and work out how to supplement them with reference material culture, to archaeology or to finds such as coins and lead seals. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/06/GettyImages-3433569-CMYK-2f40b22.jpg" width="2726" height="1815" alt="A sketch shows a massive explosion with black smoke billowing into the air" title="The catastrophic 1883 eruption of Krakatoa, depicted in a contemporary lithograph. Technological advances enable historians to better understand the impacts of such events (Image by Getty Images)" /> The past quarter-century has revolutionised the tools available to historians. Huge advances in the sciences, combined with plunging costs, mean that we now have access to data sources that don’t just provide new insights into topics such as human migration or the spread and lethality of pandemic diseases, but also enable us to do so with increasing accuracy. These are tools we must learn to rely on. Many of these new materials are related to climate archives, enabling historians to reconstruct past periods of environmental change – or even, in some cases, to better understand the effects of single, one-off extreme events such as floods, storms or volcanic eruptions. That, in turn, has changed how historians work, not least in the ways we can collaborate more often and more meaningfully with colleagues across research groups. It’s an incredibly exciting time to be a historian – to be part of the community of people interested in the past. Peter Frankopan is professor of global history at Oxford University. His latest book is The Earth Transformed: An Untold History (Bloomsbury, 2023) 25. Powerful female leaders weren’t the sex-crazed failures of (manmade) myth Our understanding of queenship has, thankfully, moved forward in the past 25 years – just as women’s history has also moved forward. Female rulers such as Cleopatra and Mary, Queen of Scots have all too frequently been cited as cautionary tales about what follows when you give women power: sex and death. But in recent years, revisionist historians such as Kara Cooney, Joyce Tyldesley and Joann Fletcher have written brilliant accounts of Cleopatra, challenging the perception of her as a sex-mad failure. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/06/GettyImages-544268988-CMYK-27bfceb.jpg" width="3025" height="2016" alt="A woman with red hair tied back into a bun, wearing a brocaded red dress with a high white collar, and a lot of jewellery" title="Mary, Queen of Scots, painted c1558–60. Historical female rulers must be seen in context, says Kate Williams (Image by Getty Images)" /> Mary, Queen of Scots was surrounded by men attempting to seize her power – and, when she had a son, she was set on a course that led to her being deposed in favour of him. Lord Bothwell made her go back to his castle, where he assaulted her in an attempt to force her to marry. Past historians framed her for setting up this event. Today, though, we understand that a woman who had been seized and sexually assaulted was expected to agree to marry the man who attacked her. In Mary’s case, all of the lords were in agreement with that course of action – so what choice did Mary have? As we are increasingly coming to understand, female rulers need to be seen in context. If they lost to the powerful men of the time or, indeed, the Roman empire, we need to grasp why that happened. Such insights can shape perceptions of the past – and a future with women in power. Kate Williams is professor of public engagement with history at the University of Reading. Her latest book is The Royal Palaces: Secrets and Scandals (Frances Lincoln, 2024) This article was first published in the June 2025 issue of BBC History Magazine
"If you represent Pinochet in this case, I will divorce you”: the sensational trial of the Chilean dictator
Philippe Sands tells Rob Attar about his involvement in the sensational trial of the Chilean dictator, and how it connects to a Nazi on the run
Rob Attar: In 1998, the former dictator of Chile, Augusto Pinochet, was arrested in London. How seismic a moment was this? Philippe Sands: I remember the moment of learning of Pinochet’s arrest. It was a Saturday afternoon. It happened to be my birthday, and I was settling down to watch the football results at five o’clock when the news came on and they announced that Augusto Pinochet had been arrested for murder and crimes against humanity. It was huge. It was the first time that a former head of state, while travelling abroad, had been arrested on international crimes. Someone not familiar with the story might wonder why this was happening in London, not Santiago. What can you tell us about the geography of these events? By way of background, in September 1973 Augusto Pinochet, head of the Chilean military, seized power in a coup d’etat and remained there for 17 years. Over that period, hundreds of thousands were arrested, tens of thousands were tortured and ‘disappeared’, and many remain so to this day. There are about 1,300 people unaccounted for. This had attracted considerable interest around the world, because these are actions that would be characterised as international crimes within the meaning of the 1945 Nuremberg trials and definitions. And that is coupled with a principle known as universal jurisdiction, where when certain crimes take place, the courts of any country in the world may exercise jurisdiction. In October 1998 a Spanish judge named Baltasar Garzón decided to issue an arrest warrant for Senator Pinochet, while he was in London receiving medical treatment, for international crimes. That was the start of this part of the story. The connection with Spain is interesting because Pinochet’s relationship with the west was quite complex. He had a lot of friends in western countries, particularly America and Britain, for example. Pinochet did indeed have friends, on the political right, in the United States and in Britain. He was a good friend of Margaret Thatcher, and, in fact, shortly before he was arrested, they spent time together. Spain had also long had an interest in him, because many Chilean refugees who had fled his regime ended up in Spain, and indeed it was the relations and descendants of some of his victims in Spain who went to the legal authorities and got the proceedings up and running. To put this in its broader context, for people in Spain who had been opposed to General Franco, there was a connection between Franco and Pinochet. And, in fact, Pinochet was one of the very few international leaders to attend Franco’s funeral. For many people in Spain, if you were for or against Franco, you were also for or against Pinochet. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/05/GettyImages-524132324-a0cf772.jpg" width="2717" height="1809" alt="3 men in uniforms, two wearing sunglasses. They are all saluting. Alongside them, a soldier plays a large drum" title="Pinochet (centre) pictured in Santiago in September 1973 shortly after seizing power in a military coup. Over the following 17 years, his regime would torture and ‘disappear’ tens of thousands of Chileans" /> How did you become involved in this case? After Pinochet was arrested, I did what everyone else did, which was to follow the news with great interest. I am a teacher of international law, so this was fascinating for me. I did a few newspaper interviews and a couple for the BBC, and then I went off to Paris for a day to attend a ceremony at the grave of my grandfather, who had recently died. As I was leaving my hotel, I received a phone call from my barristers’ chambers saying that Senator Pinochet’s lawyers had been in touch, and that they would like to instruct me to be part of the team arguing that, as a former head of state, he had complete immunity from the jurisdiction of the English courts – including in relation to international crime. Because I was off to the cemetery, I said: “I need to call you back tomorrow once I’m back in London.” I got to the cemetery and there met my wife who had come in separately. She has a Spanish mother and is descended from refugees from the civil war in Spain. So these issues are pertinent in her family. I explained to her what had happened. To be honest, I told her with some excitement that Pinochet’s lawyers had been in touch and that I might be involved in the case. This was the biggest international criminal case since Nuremberg and that really was rather exciting. And she asked me: “Will you do it?” Read more | How Italian dictator Benito Mussolini became the first face of fascism I said: “Well, you know the cab rank principle: the rule that requires barristers to take on every case that comes in, just as though you’re a taxi driver. You can’t say no to someone because you don’t like the cut of their jib or their politics. So, yes, I am going to do it.” And she looked at me again and said: “So will you do it?” And I said: “Yes, I’ve got no option but to do it.” She said: “Okay, well, you can if you want to. But if you do it, I will divorce you.” And that, of course, was because of her own family background. This was 25 years ago, and we are still very happily married. So I opted against divorce and against acting for Pinochet, and thought that that was the end of the matter. But then, about four days later, the other side came along, Human Rights Watch, and said we would like to instruct you, and I acted for them as counsel. How were you able to avoid representing Pinochet, considering that cab rank principle? The beauty of the English Bar is that for every rule there are at least 37 exceptions. And one of them is known as the professional embarrassment exception. About five days before my trip to Paris I was asked to give an interview to Zeinab Badawi for the BBC World Service, and she asked me a series of very well-prepared questions. One of them was: has he got a right to immunity? And I said: “We don’t know because this has never happened before. We’ve never had a case in which a former head of state has turned up in another country and been subjected to the jurisdiction of that country’s courts. Frankly I don’t know what the English courts will do.” But she pushed and asked me: “What do you think ought to happen?” And I said: “I can quite see why you would have immunity for a serving head of state, but I can’t really see the logic for a former head of state. So, no, in my view, there should not be an entitlement to immunity.” Those words, publicly stated, meant that I would effectively have been arguing for Senator Pinochet in the context of having made a public statement that he should not have immunity. And on that basis, I was able to decline to accept instructions. So, was the key issue here not so much whether Pinochet was responsible for these crimes, but whether as a former head of state he was immune from prosecution? In the English proceedings, which lasted for about 18 months, there was no question of making a determination as to whether he was responsible for any of the alleged acts or crimes. That was always going to be a matter for the courts of Spain, if he was extradited. The only issue for the English courts was whether, as a former head of state, he could claim immunity. And that was a completely new situation. We were in untried and untested waters. What were your experiences of being in court for this case? How different was it from other trials you’ve witnessed? I was there every day; I didn’t miss a single moment. It ended up being very complex, with three separate proceedings before the House of Lords. And it was like nothing I’ve ever experienced before, and nothing I have experienced since. Everyone who was in the room – which was packed with lawyers, observers, journalists and interested bystanders – understood that this was something of huge significance because it would set a precedent at a time when the world was changing and the rules of law were changing. Each day was electric, even though much of the legal procedure was quite mundane, dull and technical. The fact that people were so divided in the room, the fact that the stakes were so high, and the fact that the arguments were so novel made it unique in my professional experience. Read more | What the OJ Simpson trial revealed about modern America The second key character in your book is Walter Rauff, an important figure in the Nazi state who later ended up in Chile. What can you tell us about him? 38 Londres Street tells two stories in parallel. I’d been involved in the Pinochet case from 1998 to 2000, and about 15 years later I started working on a book called The Ratline, where the main protagonist is a man called Otto Wächter, a senior Nazi who was responsible for mass murder in occupied Poland, including the city of Lviv, where my grandfather was from. He’d had a role in the elimination of my grandfather’s entire family. I was doing some archival research and came across a letter written in May 1949 to Wächter from someone living in Damascus, Syria. And the writer of the letter was Walter Rauff, whose name was vaguely familiar to me, but I wasn’t sure why. I started doing some research and quickly learned that Walter Rauff was the man who operated, invented and ran the mobile gas vans that were used in 1941 and 1942 in Nazi-occupied Europe to eliminate groups of up to 50 people at a time, by locking them in the back of a van and gassing them to death. He had been hunted after the war for mass murder, but had escaped and disappeared. I carried on reading and learned that Rauff had ended up in Chile, living in one of the most southerly towns in the world: Punta Arenas. And the idea arrived in the back of my head: could there be a connection between Walter Rauff and Augusto Pinochet? That became the seed of this book. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/05/2HTD2JP-e5b6549.jpg" width="3267" height="2176" alt="A black and white image of two men in military uniform. The person in the foreground where's a cap with two cords across the front" title="Walter Rauff pictured during his arrest in 1945. He later escaped from Allied custody and was living in Chile when Pinochet came to power" /> It wasn’t a secret that Rauff had moved to Chile after the war, so why was he never brought to justice for his role in the Holocaust? Rauff ended up in Punta Arenas in about 1958, and became the manager of a king crab cannery, processing crab meat for export to Europeans. Then, in December 1962, the West Germans finally caught up with him and they issued an arrest warrant, indicting him for mass murder and sending a request for his extradition from Chile. He was arrested and taken to Santiago where he was subjected to legal proceedings. The issue in his case was not immunity from jurisdiction of the Chilean courts, but whether the Chilean courts had the right to extradite him to West Germany. In Chile there was a 15-year statute of limitations. In other words, you can’t extradite or prosecute someone if more than 15 years has passed since the alleged crime was committed. In this case, more than 15 years had passed, and the Chilean Supreme Court ruled by six votes to one in 1963 that he could not be extradited. So Rauff went back to Punta Arenas and resumed his life as the manager of a king crab cannery. And all this time he remained unrepentant? He was an unrepentant, racist, homophobic antisemite throughout his entire life. To the end of his days, he celebrated the birthday of Adolf Hitler and longed for a return to the good old days. So I think we can conclude he was not a delightful individual with the kind of values and views we can celebrate. On the other hand, I’ve come to know his grandchildren, who describe a decent and loving grandfather. He was the most famous Nazi living in Chile, and after the proceedings in Santiago, when he returned to Punta Arenas, everyone knew who he was, and that did not stop many of them from taking him to their breasts and showing friendship. I’ve met some of the people he employed in that period. They describe a stern, unbending individual who treated his workers well and with respect, but was prone to rages and fury and had strongly held political views. A central question of your book is whether Rauff became involved in the repressive apparatus of the Pinochet regime. I won’t ask you to give away your conclusion, but could you tell us about the kinds of things that took place at the time? The year after Pinochet took power, he created a secret intelligence service called the Dirección de Inteligencia Nacional (DINA). And the DINA was authorised to do anything necessary to take out opponents of the regime, including to kill or to disappear them. The DINA established a series of detention centres and torture centres and places of disappearance. These were not only in obscure places; many of them were in downtown Santiago. And in fact, the one that gives the book its title is in a small street in central Santiago. Number 38 was the former headquarters of the Socialist Party. It is a central place in relation to Pinochet’s apparatus, and, without giving too much away, the events there and what certain detainees saw or heard became an absolutely crucial part of the story in relation to whether Walter Rauff had any role in all of this. Why was it so important for you to establish whether Rauff was involved in Pinochet’s repressions? Maybe because I’m an obsessive. In my own household, years ago, people wanted me to stop talking about Rauff because they were sick to death of it. But I think it’s that litigator’s instinct: you have a sort of sixth sense that there is something there and you can’t let go. You leave no stone unturned in wanting to get to the truth. There’s the expression ‘there’s no smoke without fire’, and there was too much smoke. There were too many people who said to me: “I saw him”, or “I heard him”, or “I heard word of him”, and I needed to get to the heart of those claims. In the end I did, but it was immensely time-consuming. Read more | The "outwardly respectable" man who had a body in his basement: how the Dr Crippen case shocked Britain My first interview for the book, which was with Baltasar Garzón, the Spanish judge, was in 2015. We’re now in 2025 and the book is just about to come out. So it was a 10-year investigation. And it was a double investigation. I was looking not only at the question of whether there had been a connection between Rauff and Pinochet, but also looking for the answer to another question: how did Pinochet end up back in Chile? Because, coming back to the earlier part of our conversation, the Pinochet case lasted a very long time before the English courts. And in the end, things took a strange turn. There were allegations that the old man had fallen ill. He couldn’t face trial and he must go home. My instinct was that some sort of a deal had been done to get him back, but there was no evidence of any deal. And so essentially I went on a double investigative path. Was there a deal to get Pinochet home? Did Pinochet work with Rauff? And that double story reaches a climax only right at the end of the book. There are two words that come through a lot in your book: ‘immunity’ and ‘impunity’. How far do the stories of Pinochet and Rauff illuminate those concepts? The concepts of immunity and impunity are very significant for our times. Immunity connotes a sort of freedom from being subjected to criminal or legal process or prosecution. And impunity connotes a total absence of justice. And I think in the case of Walter Rauff, who was involved in mass murder and never held to account, the case of impunity reigns absolutely. The case of Augusto Pinochet is more complex. He did not succeed in his claim to immunity and so the proceedings went on. But, for reasons I describe in the book, he was eventually allowed to leave the United Kingdom and go back to Santiago early. He never was sent to Spain, though the idea was that he would face justice in Chile, and to a certain extent he did. At the time of his death in 2006 he was indicted, he was under house arrest, his reputation was in tatters. So that is not an example of total impunity. But he was never convicted of a crime – and, for many, that still remains a very painful fact. This article was first published in the May 2025 issue of BBC History Magazine
Papal elections and tariff troubles: history behind the headlines
Hannah Skoda and Rana Mitter discuss the historical context behind recent news stories
In the latest episode of our monthly podcast series, regular panellists Hannah Skoda and Rana Mitter are joined by Frank Trentmann to discuss the historical parallels behind recent developments in the global trade war – plus the tumultuous history of papal elections, and the surprising connection between Katy Perry and Alexander the Great.
2024 in review: history behind the headlines
Hannah Skoda and Rana Mitter look back at the history behind some of the year's biggest news stories in this special episode of our monthly series
From the rise of AI to a plethora of elections and life-saving vaccines, it's been a busy 12 months. Hannah Skoda and Rana Mitter look back at the history behind some of the biggest stories of the year – and pick their favourite books of 2024, in this special episode of our monthly series.
From Mosley to the summer riots of 2024: the opportunistic evolution of Britain’s far right
In the summer of 2024, racist violence broke out in towns and cities across the UK, sparked by the deaths of three children in Southport and a lot of misinformation and lies online. A number of groups were involved in the rioting. Graham Macklin charts the postwar history of British far-right movements which have emerged, grown and diminished over the last few decades
By the 1950s, Sir Oswald Mosley’s political career seemed in irreparable tatters. Fronting the antisemitic British Union of Fascists (BUF), and backed by quasi-paramilitary Blackshirt thugs, during the 1930s he had enjoyed a degree of public support. After the outbreak of the Second World War, however, that support turned to widespread hostility. Interned in 1940, for fear he and his followers would form a ‘fifth column’ should Hitler invade Britain, in 1951 he emigrated and left national politics. When race riots broke out in west London’s Notting Hill district in 1958, he thought again. Gangs of young white ‘Teddy Boys’ attacked members of the Afro-Caribbean community, sparking three days of violence. And fascists saw an opportunity to exploit the simmering tensions. The Union Movement – Mosley’s postwar political vehicle – had long been active in that part of London, as had other, smaller racist sects. His party quickly mobilised to take advantage of the situation, holding dozens of provocative meetings. Read more | Who were the young people drawn to Oswald Mosley’s British Union of Fascists? Now viewing the area as fertile ground for the resurrection of his career, Mosley returned to England and stood for election in Kensington North in the 1959 general election. His party saturated the constituency with racist propaganda. He styled himself as the redoubtable defender of a white working class ignored by the Labour Party that favoured migrants over the indigenous white residents – a familiar narrative for today’s far right. His dominant message was that the area’s very real deprivation could be solved only through the repatriation of the ‘coloured’ community. In the event, Mosley polled only 8.1 per cent of the vote. His supporters openly wept, and he refused to accept the result; claiming it was rigged, he petitioned the High Court, unsuccessfully. This episode tells us a good deal about both the British far right and its relationship to racist mob violence, which in turn can inform our understanding of the violence that played out across British cities in the summer of 2024. It also prompts us to reflect on the historical development of Britain’s far right since 1945. Emergence of the British National Party (BNP) Organised anti-black politics had begun in south London in the early 1950s when a small cadre of activists campaigned to ‘Keep Brixton White’. Mosley was not initially persuaded that this ‘burning local issue’ had national relevance, but as we’ve seen, despite his reservations, he soon leapt on the bandwagon. Though antisemitism was never far from the surface, racism more broadly became the defining feature of far-right campaigns. Mosley retired from active politics in 1966, by which time he had become irrelevant to a younger generation of far-right militants who embraced biological racism, antisemitism and national socialist politics. Read more | When Mosley's fascists took on East End London and lost: the Battle of Cable Street explained Initially, the most infamous of these activists was Colin Jordan, a disciple of the interwar Nazi polemicist Arnold Leese. Jordan operated his White Defence League from a property in Notting Hill that had been lent to him by Leese’s widow. He subsequently merged his venture with others to form the British National Party (BNP) which, during the early 1960s, highlighted the electoral promise of racial politics. In the 1964 election, BNP leader John Bean polled 9.3 per cent of the vote in Southall – the highest percentage then achieved by a far-right candidate. Much of Bean’s work to revitalise the far right was overshadowed, however, by Jordan’s antics. Jordan split from the BNP in 1962, together with a young activist called John Tyndall, to form the National Socialist Movement (NSM). “Hitler was right,” Jordan declared shortly afterwards. He and several colleagues were jailed for offences including seeking to form a paramilitary group. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2024/11/GettyImages-1365866801-7e772eb-e1730718438641.jpg" width="620" height="413" alt="Colin Jordan, leader of the National Socialist Movement, is released from prison in 1963. He holds a copy of the National Socialist, bearing a photo of Adolf Hitler and the headline "His spirit lives on!" Photo by Evening Standard/Hulton Archive/Getty Images)" title="Colin Jordan, leader of the National Socialist Movement, is released from prison in 1963. He holds a copy of the National Socialist, bearing a photo of Adolf Hitler and the headline "His spirit lives on!" Photo by Evening Standard/Hulton Archive/Getty Images)" /> From 1965, NSM activists engaged in cross burnings in the Midlands and an arson campaign against synagogues. Such Nazi histrionics, and the headlines they generated, obscured a broader realignment then taking place on the far right – one that in 1967 led to the formation of the National Front (NF) under the chairmanship of British activist and journalist AK Chesterton. The following year, on 20 April 1968, Conservative ex-minister Enoch Powell delivered his infamous ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech, which brought his career in the shadow cabinet to a grinding halt – but which attracted widespread public support and delivered a notable fillip to the fledging NF. Read more | Enoch Powell’s ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech: Britain and race in the mid 20th-century Idi Amin’s expulsion of Asians from Uganda from August 1972 – 38,500 arrived in Britain over the next 12 months – helped the NF garner mass support. Membership is thought to have peaked at 17,500 that year, though thousands more passed through its ranks during its existence. In May 1973, an NF candidate polled 16 per cent of the vote in West Bromwich. Despite his overtly neo-Nazi background – a source of tension for many leading members, who desired to dissociate the NF’s racist programme from fascism – Tyndall succeeded in becoming party chairman in July 1972. He focused on controlling the streets rather than building an effective electoral machine, and was at the helm when the organisation imploded in 1979 following a disastrous general election performance. Skinheads and ‘Rights for Whites’ If Powell opened the door to the NF’s expansion in 1968, another Conservative politician, Margaret Thatcher, slammed it shut a decade later by co-opting the NF’s core issue: immigration. Once one of Europe’s largest far-right parties and a model for Jean-Marie Le Pen’s Front National, the NF splintered. Tyndall formed another British National Party in 1982, but failed to move the dial. The far right became synonymous with racist skinhead violence and football hooliganism, and languished in the political doldrums for the next 30 years. In 1999, Nick Griffin, a University of Cambridge graduate who had joined the NF as a teenager, ousted Tyndall from the BNP with a mandate to modernise it. This train was already in motion: a sustained ‘Rights for Whites’ campaign and a string of promising election results had culminated in 1993 when the BNP won a solitary council seat in London’s East End. BNP leaders began to take seriously the idea that if they overhauled the party and distanced themselves from disorder, they might build a successful electoral machine. While this process took time, the BNP benefited immeasurably from two events in 2001, both beyond its control. First, riots broke out in Oldham that May, then in Burnley in June, and Bradford in July. The BNP, previously active in all three cities, ramped up its campaign. Griffin stood in Oldham West and Royton during the 2001 general election, polling 16.4 per cent of the vote; another BNP candidate polled 11 per cent in the neighbouring constituency of Oldham East and Saddleworth. The party made its local election breakthrough in Burnley, Lancashire, the following year. The second pivotal event was 9/11, and the subsequent ‘war on terror’ that hardwired anti-Muslim politics into the rhetoric of the far right. Until this point, Asians had been targeted largely for their skin colour, not their religious identity. Griffin, previously one of Britain’s most ardent Holocaust deniers, intuitively understood that anti-Muslim politicking, based on ‘culture’ rather than biological racism, could propel the BNP into mainstream British politics. Read more | 9/11: the legacy of the September 11 attacks He was not wrong. The BNP subsequently became the most electorally successful far-right party in British history and, though parliamentary representation proved elusive, in 2009 the party gained two MEPs, including Griffin. The BNP went on to poll 564,321 votes (1.9 per cent) in the 2010 general election, a significant increase on the 192,745 (0.7 per cent) it had gained in 2005. Ironically, the best results recorded by a far-right party in a general election proved a mortal blow to the BNP’s fortunes. The party imploded amid infighting, and today is moribund. Much of its electoral base subsequently shifted to an ascendant UKIP. The brief history of the English Defence League (EDL) Britain’s far right took nearly three decades to recover from the collapse of the NF in 1979; 15 years on from its own implosion, the downfall of the BNP can be viewed as no less profound. Even before this, however, the BNP was facing a new challenge to its hegemony in the shape of the English Defence League (EDL), which focused on the notion that Islam is culturally incompatible with a ‘British’ way of life. Led by Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, going by the name Tommy Robinson, at its peak thousands of people joined EDL demonstrations. With no real political strategy, though, the EDL marched itself into a political cul-de-sac, and Robinson resigned in 2013. Without him at the helm, the group quickly dissipated. The EDL remnants were subsumed into a burgeoning constellation of disparate anti-Muslim groups and individuals who occasionally came together for larger mobilisations. The ‘Free Tommy’ demonstrations of 2018, for example, were attended by an estimated 10,000 people – activism on a scale unseen since the 1970s. Far-right terrorism One cluster of youthful militants now chose another path. Their group, a small neo-Nazi sect called National Action (NA), was banned in 2016 for being “concerned with terrorism” after its members glorified the murder of Jo Cox MP by a white supremacist. NA became the first far-right group to be banned since Mosley’s BUF in 1940, and the first in British history to be banned for terrorism. Proscription did little to combat solo terrorists, however, particularly those targeting Muslims and migrants. In 2017, Darren Osborne drove a van into worshippers outside Finsbury Park Mosque, killing one person and injuring 11. While far-right terrorism remains rare, anti-migrant protest is an alarmingly common occurrence, whether in the form of public demonstrations, blockades of proposed accommodation sites, or the actions of self-styled ‘migrant hunters’ filming and harassing asylum seekers and staff at premises providing accommodation. The 2024 riots remind us that the violence of racist mobs physically attacking asylum hotels is a more extreme manifestation of the same politics. The EDL did not organise these riots; some activists align themselves with the brand, but the organisation is essentially defunct. In truth, the precise role far right groups played in this summer’s riots is yet unknown. Though a handful of known far-right activists were observed during the disorder, it is most likely that the involvement of such people was following a recurring historical pattern. As Mosley’s example illustrates, far-right groups have been caught on the back foot by the explosion of violence that follows a catalytic event – in the most recent case, the horrific murder of three young girls attending a dance class in Southport. This was certainly the case during the antisemitic riots of 1947, the Notting Hill riots in 1958, the Cannon Street riots in Middlesbrough in 1961 and those in Oldham in 2001. Once these riots were under way, though, far-right agitators either stoked the embers or made political capital from them afterwards. Far-right groups today: the role of social media The recent riots also highlight how the contemporary far right, as currently configured, has evolved from recognisable political entities into what most researchers would agree is a ‘post-organisational’ form. People no longer ‘join’ far-right groups. Indeed, individual interaction with this milieu is often entirely mediated through digital media; few ever physically attend a political meeting. The rioters chanting Robinson’s name were not members of his group, but identified with the politics he represents. Rotherham in South Yorkshire saw some of the most shocking violence this summer. A mob, several hundred strong, battled with police while others forced their way inside a hotel and attempted to burn it down, with several hundred asylum seekers inside. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2024/11/GettyImages-2164603999-d61d4d8-e1730718493719.jpg" width="620" height="413" alt="Anti-fascist protesters marching in Nottingham on 3 August 2024. Thousands took to the streets across the UK to demonstrate against the violence that erupted this summer (Photo by Darren Staples / AFP) (Photo by DARREN STAPLES/AFP via Getty Images)" title="Anti-fascist protesters marching in Nottingham on 3 August 2024. Thousands took to the streets across the UK to demonstrate against the violence that erupted this summer (Photo by Darren Staples / AFP) (Photo by DARREN STAPLES/AFP via Getty Images)" /> This attack invites comparison with events in Germany three decades ago: in Hoyerswerda (1991), Rostock, Mölln (both 1992) and Solingen (1993), skinheads and neo-Nazis attacked migrant communities and asylum seekers in perhaps the worst orgy of racist violence that nation had witnessed since 1945. The riots also remind us that racist violence does not take place in a vacuum. In Rostock, grainy footage of the attacks captured the presence of a large crowd of onlookers cheering on those who would have incinerated the building’s inhabitants. Crowds legitimating and egging on violence featured in Rotherham, too: laughing, cheering, filming. In one clip, a man with a child on his shoulders stood only yards away from gangs of men attacking police. Participants in this summer’s riots live-streamed them. Documenting and revelling in such violence is hardly a new phenomenon: history reminds us of those older accoutrements – photos and postcards – sold as mementos to celebrate and remember the actions of the racist mob. Social media plays an outsized role in fuelling anger and outrage, but this is simply the modern medium for a very old message. The dissemination of disinformation this summer has been framed as something new, but racist rumour has always fuelled racist violence. The antisemitic canard of the ‘blood libel’ contributed to the massacre of Jews in York in 1190, for example. What is new is the speed at which such rumours and lies spread online, as well as their scope and source. Hours after the murders in Southport, social media accounts spread the lie that the perpetrator was an asylum seeker recently arrived in England on a small boat. This claim online stoked much of the initial unrest. Impact of the 2024 riots Historians are not oracles. It is, of course, far too early to understand the lasting impacts of this summer’s racist rioting on British society or, indeed, the political fortunes of the far right. Though the far right’s electoral, street and terrorist strategies have been all but nullified in the past decade, it has not gone away. Far-right groups remain marginal, yet many of their ideas have been co-opted and absorbed into mainstream politics. It is perhaps here, in the reinforcement of a political narrative that multicultural society has failed and that civil war is imminent, that the far right can be seen to have left its mark. Graham Macklin is assistant professor at the Center for Research on Extremism (C-REX) at the University of Oslo, Norway and author of Failed Führers: A History of Britain’s Extreme Right (Routledge, 2020) This article was first published in the November 2024 issue of BBC History Magazine
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