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The Book of Kells: "a masterpiece of medieval calligraphy and painting"
"The Book of Kells is a masterwork of medieval calligraphy and painting", writes Michael Wood
The Book of Kells, one of the greatest pieces of medieval art, is today displayed in the library of Trinity College Dublin. This illuminated gospel book is named after the monastery in County Meath where it was kept in the Middle Ages. It’s a masterwork of medieval calligraphy and painting, with its Celtic knot patterns, scintillating colour, and the staggering intricacies of the display pages and canon tables – all smoky golden magnificence. An Irish annalist called the book “the great Gospel of Columcille [Columba], the chief relic of the western world”. It may be the work described by the historian Gerald of Wales in the 1180s, in his book on Ireland. “Look more keenly at it and you will penetrate to the very shrine of art,” he wrote. “You will make out intricacies so delicate and so subtle… that you might say that all this were the work of an angel, and not of a man.” The book survived war, plunder and the English – Cromwell’s troops were once billeted in Kells. In the 19th century, it was a huge influence on the Celtic revival movement in the arts, and today is seen as the pinnacle of the western tradition of illuminated manuscripts. Read more | Michael Wood on amazing insights into medieval daily life The book was produced around the end of the eighth century, just at the moment Britain and Ireland were about to be changed forever by the arrival of the Vikings. It was long believed to have been created on Iona. But in The Book of Kells: Unlocking the Enigma, published in October, Victoria Whitworth suggests that it was actually written at the Pictish monastery of Portmahomack on the Moray Firth in north-east Scotland. This is one of the least known areas of the medieval British Isles. The Pictish monasteries were destroyed in the Viking age, and with them virtually all written records. The kingdom of the Picts became part of the Scottish kingdom of Alba in the ninth century, and gradually the memory of the Picts faded, leaving many unsolved mysteries. One key survival is their stone carving, of which there are brilliant examples in the National Museum of Scotland in Edinburgh. Some, such as the huge memorial slab from Hilton of Cadboll etched with horsemen and hunting dogs, are absolutely stunning. You can still see these wonderful works of art on the ground when you head up the coast of north-east Scotland. At Aberlemno is a magnificent carving perhaps commemorating the battle of Nechtansmere in 685 at which the Pictish king Bridei defeated and killed the Northumbrian invader King Ecgfrith. And by St Vigeans Church on the outskirts of Arbroath there’s a fascinating museum holding more than 30 pieces of Pictish sculpture. This Pictish trail leads to Portmahomack, a beautiful spot on the Tarbat peninsula looking across to the distant hills of Sutherland. The origins of Christianity here are still obscure. Bede mentions a saint whom we know as Ninnian, who evangelised in the fifth century. In the sixth century came St Columba, who reached as far north as Moray. Read more | Medieval miracle worker: how St Columba transformed Christianity in Britain But it was only in the 1990s that the first excavation of a Pictish monastery took place at Portmahomack. Its construction began around 550 – which might fit with a foundation by St Columba – and was probably destroyed in a Viking attack in the early ninth century, though some kind of community hung on after that. It was later dedicated to St Colman of Lindisfarne, who played a famous role in the Synod of Whitby in 664 – the great debate over Celtic and Roman traditions of Easter. Colman then returned to Iona and died in Ireland, but he was still celebrated in later times at Portmahomack. When excavating the levels burned during the Viking raid, the archaeologist found over 200 fragments of Pictish stone carving in a style very similar to the Book of Kells. This led Dr Whitworth to propose that the most famous of all Irish manuscripts was actually made here. Indeed, finds from the dig included workshops and a room where vellum was prepared, interpreted as a scriptorium – perhaps the very place where the Book of Kells was written? All of this only underlines how much we still don’t know about the early Middle Ages in the outer reaches of Britain. We don’t even know the site’s original name. As for the Picts themselves – still known today by the name that the late Romans gave them, meaning the ‘painted people’ – their identity eventually merged with the Scots, and their language (probably pre-Indo-European?) became extinct. But recent DNA studies suggest that their legacy endures in the genetic inheritance of people across Scotland. And of course in Trinity College Dublin you can still glimpse the unique, dazzling, colourful vision that infused the astonishing art of the Picti. This column was first published in the December 2025 issue of BBC History Magazine
AI: good or bad for history? Our experts weigh in
As artificial intelligence penetrates almost every aspect of our lives, six historians debate whether the opportunities it offers to the discipline outweigh the threats
“We must experiment thoughtfully, push back critically, and make the case that slow, humanistic thinking still matters” Artificial intelligence isn’t inherently good or bad. Like the printing press or the written word itself, AI is a force – and whether it enhances or undermines historical practice will depend on who uses it, how, and why. AI’s most obvious advantage is that it can process vast amounts of data much faster than your regular historian, which turns it into an incredible asset. The trick here is to use it as it was originally meant to be used – not to replace human interpretation but to identify patterns that humans might not notice and, thus, to enable us to come up with better, more nuanced questions. But it goes beyond that. AI is forcing historians to rethink what constitutes evidence, authorship and interpretation. In doing so, it is not just supporting existing historical methods, it’s helping evolve them. Though I am not worried that historians will be replaced by AI any time soon, there is a risk that indiscriminate use might flatten out the practice. Good history requires doubt, contradiction, ambivalence, even uncertainty, but AI models are designed to produce smooth answers even when the data is messy or the past is unknowable. Moreover, history isn’t just knowledge – it’s a method of knowing. If AI shortcuts the method, it threatens the discipline’s integrity. There is little doubt that AI will be part of historical research, but it is crucial that historians shape its use to enhance rather than undermine our craft. We should resist the urge to scale for scale’s sake, and instead use AI to deepen, not dilute, historical understanding. If we do that, and embed AI within the discipline’s values – critical thinking, reflexivity, contextual awareness – then historians will become central in answering the question of whether AI is good or bad for history. We must experiment thoughtfully, push back critically, and make the case that slow, humanistic thinking still matters, even in an age of rapid computation. I am confident that the tables will turn, and we’ll soon talk about the ways in which history is good for AI. Delfi Nieto-Isabel is a lecturer in medieval and digital history, and co-director of the Digital Lives Programme at Queen Mary University of London “The best results come when humans work alongside machine-generated intuitions” In his classic Foundation series, sci-fi author Isaac Asimov explored the idea of statistically based ‘psycho-history’, by which the future could be predicted through the mathematical analysis of data on the past and present. With the rise of generative AI, it may feel as if a dystopian version of Asimov’s future is edging towards reality, but there are grounds to be a little more positive. A great deal of what historians do is attempting to understand past societies by observing patterns in the evidence they left behind. Machines are spectacularly good at this, and the large language models of contemporary AI take this to a new level. To take an example from my own area of work, texts inscribed on stone in a variety of ancient languages survive from the Roman world in their hundreds of thousands. These are often fragmentary and difficult to interpret. To make sense of them, both individually and en masse, as evidence for ancient societies and languages, historians need to compare these texts with one another. But to do so requires familiarity with them all, and the ability to find and compare parallels or identify patterns. Large language models specially trained on this material can now offer suggestions for missing words, dates and origins of this material, precisely because they see patterns across the material that a solitary human might find only after days or weeks of library work – or not at all. Read more | Be wary of technology’s big promises, but roll with the changes The crucial point, however, is that these are suggestions – and the models can offer multiple suggestions, ranked by probability and exposing some of the underlying reasoning. The best results come when humans work alongside machine-generated intuitions. Correlation is not the same as causation, and history is a fundamentally human ‘science’. Nuance, context and, above all, humanity is fundamental to understanding our past, present and future. If that is surrendered to a machine then all of it is lost, and we are no longer writing our own history. Every generation writes its own history, it’s said. Powerful AI can stimulate that process – but it certainly cannot write it for us. Jonathan Prag is professor of ancient history at the University of Oxford, and a co-author of the Aeneas AI model for contextualising ancient inscriptions (predictingthepast.com) “Fake ‘historical’ images and texts are already circulating and, with ever-greater sophistication, they will become harder to spot” Historians have been using AI for many years as an important tool for exploring and analysing the vast digitised and born-digital materials that increasingly constitute our primary sources. For instance, using AI it becomes possible to extract the names of all members of parliament mentioned in historical Hansard, identify the themes and topics on which they have spoken, and trace changes of emphasis over time. Handwritten text recognition technologies enable the accurate transcription of manuscript collections at scale. There are many other examples. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/12/EMBCXW-e6484e8-e1765189009771.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A line of light blue book spines with gold words on them, each with a year and volume number on them" title="Hansard, the official record of British parliamentary debates compiled by reporters is another vast repository of information that AI can help interrogate (Image by Alamy)" /> This has been unhelpfully elided by the use of ‘AI’ as synonymous with generative AI. Machine learning, however, has not captured the public imagination in the same way as GenAI, with its easy-to-use chatbot interfaces. The speed with which GenAI has become near-ubiquitous, allowing no time to consider all of the ramifications, seems bewildering. Familiar software packages and media platforms are increasingly cluttered with invitations to ask an AI assistant for help. The AI-generated is entangled with the human-created in ways that undoubtedly pose real difficulties for the integrity of the historical record. Fake ‘historical’ images and texts are already circulating and, with ever-greater sophistication, they will become harder to spot. This is a huge challenge, but it is also an opportunity for historians to apply their knowledge and expertise to a problem that requires particular critical skills. A 2025 study sponsored by Microsoft sought to identify those occupations most at risk from GenAI. Historians came second, behind interpreters and translators. Dredge operators, last on the list, can apparently be more confident about their future role. But historians can help navigate this new knowledge landscape. Insightful source criticism, deep understanding of context, awareness of archival absence and loss, and a commitment to centring the human experience in the technological are key elements of historical research and practice. Arguably, they have never been more useful. Jane Winters is professor of digital humanities at the School of Advanced Study, University of London “Reading is thinking. Writing is thinking. These core skills cannot be outsourced without losing something fundamental” We seek to understand ourselves by exploring our pasts – and AI will not change this fundamental urge. The digital revolution has already transformed the historian’s work considerably, without fundamentally altering our purpose. Much change has been positive. Barriers of geography, cost and materiality have collapsed, broadening access to history as never before. Less profitably, instant access and keyword searching deprive us of context, and we are less likely to understand the systems that sort, sift and deliver our sources. Always, we shape and are shaped by our tools in a relationship that must be carefully negotiated. Read more | Artificial intelligence: a modern advance or an ancient nightmare? Utopians and naysayers are united in their confidence that AI will change everything. We must recognise such predictions as products of a moment of frenzied development and investment. Once the hype has died down, historians will adapt – just as we did to that other over-hyped but transformational technology, the internet. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/12/GettyImages-1081366104-f6643cf-e1765189043171.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="The Maughan Library, King’s College London: “Students learn that critical reading and precision writing are the essential tools for engaging with the complex human past,” says Chris Sparks (Image by Getty Images)" title="The Maughan Library, King’s College London: “Students learn that critical reading and precision writing are the essential tools for engaging with the complex human past,” says Chris Sparks (Image by Getty Images)" /> We will use AI where it can help us – to automate repetitive tasks, to ‘distantly read’ sources identifying areas for closer inspection, or to hone our prose. But we will remain wary of its dangers – not least its tendency to hide its sources and make things up. Hopefully, new tools will become available that reduce our dependence on centrally controlled systems, allowing more thoughtful, bespoke and informed use. We must think carefully about how we use AI in the classroom, too. Students learn that critical reading and precision writing are the essential tools for engaging with the complex human past. Reading is thinking. Writing is thinking. These core skills cannot be outsourced without losing something fundamental. They can be honed only with practice, and we must protect space for that in our teaching. Yet we cannot simply ignore AI, because we have begun to encounter its output routinely in our daily lives. History is a project, not a product. If AI ushers in an era of fast, cheap, mass-produced text, then the skills that history teaches will only become more valuable. Chris Sparks is a senior lecturer in digital history at Queen Mary University of London “AI offers the chance to explore archives at scale, ask new questions and uncover new patterns" There are plenty of anxieties about AI. This should not surprise us: in the past, new technologies such as the railway resulted in moral panics. Rather than a threat, AI can be used – just as other technologies have been. It is important to draw a distinction between functions sometimes described as ‘generative’ and ‘hermeneutic’. The former is what first comes to mind: it can be used to write text, including historical arguments. The latter is using AI to ‘distant read’ large bodies of texts, including archives. Much criticism levelled at AI tends to focus on generative AI – for example, teachers’ fears that students will ‘cheat’ on essays, simply entering the assigned title and word length as a prompt, then leaving AI to produce a passable composition within seconds. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/12/GettyImages-569178239-233888a-e1765189068133.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A woman holds up an old passport in front of her face. On the left page there is a black and white photo of a young girl" title="A Jewish woman holds a copy of fake papers enabling her to flee the Netherlands after the Nazi invasion: AI helps researchers search huge archives of testimonies by Holocaust survivors (Image by Getty Images)" /> Where AI has greater value for historians is as a hermeneutic tool. It is helpful to remember a point that Todd Presner makes to scholars in his 2024 book Ethics of the Algorithm: Digital Humanities and Holocaust Memory – that computers ‘read’ differently from humans, but neither better nor worse than us. The challenge facing historians is how to use this technology to ask new questions, particularly to interrogate vast archives that cannot be comprehensively searched through more traditional methods. One area in which I, and other interdisciplinary teams, have been experimenting is using digital methods to access stories of Holocaust survivors in oral history collections. These are typically too large for any one person to watch in their life. The USC Shoah Foundation Visual History Archive, for example, contains more than 55,000 interviews, each 2–3 hours long. Read more | "A tidal wave of digital material will overwhelm recordkeeping institutions": the future of history Rather than replacing close reading – or watching and listening – of these interviews, AI offers the chance to explore archives at scale, ask new questions and uncover new patterns that invite close reading. For example, what pronouns – I or we – do men and women use to tell what is variously a solo or shared story? Where and why do silences occur in oral history archives as the past becomes too hard to retell? Critical use offers opportunities to do history differently. Tim Cole is professor of social history at the University of Bristol “AI promises to make history faster, but also shallower” AI is often hailed as the next great tool for historians. It can scan entire archives in seconds, collate references across databases, and generate polished prose at the click of a button. On the surface, this seems like liberation from drudgery. But, in speeding up our work, AI also risks hollowing it out. History is not simply a matter of data extraction. The working historian does more than harvest facts: we interrogate silences in sources, wrestle with contradictions in established narratives, and read against the grain of the archive. AI machine tools excel at spotting patterns but fail at understanding nuance. They can tell you how often a phrase appears in a colonial newspaper, but not why irony mattered to the writer, nor how absence itself can be evidence. Outsourcing too much to algorithms risks confusing fluency with insight. The bigger danger, however, lies in how AI will shape the dissemination of history. Museums, publishers and even classrooms may come to rely on AI-generated summaries to teach the past. This could democratise access, but it could also flatten differences and sanitise conflict. History risks being repackaged into uniform, bite-sized ‘lessons’ optimised for clarity rather than complexity. That should alarm any historian who believes that the discipline’s value lies in argument and debate. AI will certainly change the rhythms of our work. It helps me, as a historian of modern subcontinental Buddhism, to map far-flung connections between texts in English, Hindi and Sinhalese. But if I do not remain critical, it is all too easy to mistake the machine’s quick outputs for deeper interpretation. And if the wider public comes to accept AI’s versions of the past as authoritative, the historian’s role as interpreter and critic could be diminished. The challenge for us is clear. AI will not replace historians, but it could deskill us if we let it. Indeed, it promises to make history faster, but also shallower. Our task is to ensure that the speed it offers does not come at the cost of depth – because history done fast is rarely history done well. Bhadrajee Hewage recently completed a DPhil in history from Trinity College Oxford, researching trends in subcontinental Buddhism during the late colonial and early postcolonial periods This article was first published in the December 2025 issue of BBC History Magazine
Michael Wood on the rise and fall of Asian empires
"Emperor Jahangir and Shah Abbas literally bestride the world like colossi", writes Michael Wood
Watching the recent spectacle of those latter-day emperors President Xi of China and India’s Narendra Modi hugging each other at the summit in Tianjin, my mind cast back to an earlier image of a pan-Asian summit. There’s a wonderful painting from 1618 of the Mughal emperor Jahangir embracing Shah Abbas of Iran – one of several such pictures painted for the Indian ruler. These heads of two superpowers were in fact not bosom buddies but intense geopolitical rivals, especially in the Kandahar region of south-west Afghanistan, then under Mughal control. Framed by a huge golden halo, in an image of peace, one stands on a lamb, the other on a lion, both on a globe whose surface extends from the strait of Gibraltar to the South China Sea: they literally bestride the world like colossi. In the foreground of the map, a product of the new science of cartography, are shown north Africa, India and south-east Asia, with the Nile, the Ganges and the Yangtze accurately depicted. The painting is allegorical; the hoped-for meeting never actually took place. But the timing, and the details, have much to tell us. In the painting, western Europe lies, unseen, over the horizon. Yet at that moment the small, aggressive maritime powers on the edge of the Eurasian landmass were already extending their influence and carving up the New World – and were now threatening the old powers in the Asiatic heartland of civilisation. The Spanish had begun colonisation of the Philippines in 1565, the Portuguese leased Macao in 1557, the English East India Company was founded in 1600, and the Dutch East India Company was established two years later. Elizabeth I had earlier sent an ambassador to Jahangir’s father, Akbar, to negotiate trade links. In another painting, Jahangir greets a Sufi mystic in the presence of the Ottoman Sultan and King James VI & I – not an imaginary likeness but one taken from a portrait brought to India by the ambassador Thomas Roe in 1616. In an uncanny touch by the painter, James stares coolly out of the picture, straight at the viewer, as if to say: “Our time has come.” And it had. Read more | Gulbadan Begum: the Mughal Jane Austen The Mughal artist Abu al-Hasan, who painted that magnificent picture of Jahangir and Abbas, cannot have imagined that his world – the world stretching from the Mediterranean to the Yellow Sea, created by the great Asiatic civilisations – was about to be shaken to its core by the violent energies, the inventiveness and the sheer ambition of the Europeans. Jahangir never got his summit with Shah Abbas. Nor did he meet the ailing Wanli Emperor, who was destined to die a couple of years later in Beijing. Since then, the turning of the wheel of history has been astounding: empires, world wars, the colonisation of entire continents, the triumph of capitalism – changes so huge that it is hardly possible to take them all in. The world has been remade in our likeness. And now, in 2025, President Xi hosts a summit calling for an alternative world order – “a more just and equitable global governance system”. We may not like President Xi’s choice of friends, but such is the realpolitik of our age. And to be sure, some would say that the American empire has accumulated enough misdeeds of its own to merit a reaction. Xi, in particular – an avid reader of history books (the Chinese translation of Peter Frankopan’s The Silk Roads reportedly among them) believes in the destiny of China. He thinks that China’s time has come, after the ‘Century of Humiliation’ at the hands of western powers. Eighty years on from the Second World War, Xi now says that China’s rise to global leadership is “unstoppable”. So back to these images of empire: Jahangir and Abbas, Modi and Xi. Some would say that they represent wish fulfilment: a rebuke to what President Xi’s baleful friend Putin calls “outdated Eurocentric and Euro-Atlantic models”. But behind the hugs and the photo ops, behind that amazing piece of diplomatic grandstanding in the giant military parade in Beijing celebrating China’s role in the Second World War, perhaps there is more than that: a vision of the future, uncomfortable though it may be to us in the west. As for Jahangir’s globe, the painting was a dream. But there are few images from the past that more powerfully distil what might have been. And now, as Shakespeare put it, “the whirligig of time brings in his revenges”. This column was first published in the November 2025 issue of BBC History Magazine
"Imagine starting a life with so little": the stories of South Asians in Britain
Kavita Puri on the importance of the stories of South Asians in Britain
I remember looking in the BBC archives for stories of the first arrivals of South Asians in the postwar years, and being surprised at how little programming had been made documenting the experiences of my parents’ generation. That was well over 10 years ago now. From then on, I began to record testimonies of people who came to the UK from South Asia after the Second World War for my Radio 4 series Three Pounds in My Pocket. The title of that programme was inspired by the fact that, for years after the war, strict currency controls dictated that those arriving from India could not bring more than £3 into the UK. Imagine starting a new life in a new country with so little. Over time, I went on to record accounts from the descendants of that three-pound generation, hearing about their struggles and achievements. Many of the people I first interviewed – including my father – are no longer with us. I feel so grateful that I was able to capture their stories: memories of what these former subjects of the Raj had imagined Britain to be, what it was actually like when they arrived, how they were received and, so many decades on, where they now felt ‘home’ was. Read more | “The nation is a very novel idea, and imposing it on millions of people is hard work” | Joya Chatterji on south Asia in the 20th century Asians comprise the largest minority ethnic group in Britain today, yet it’s always struck me how little the history of South Asians in Britain is known – among South Asians themselves as well as across the country as a whole. It’s noticeable that in 2025 there is still no central British South Asian cultural archive, and that South Asian Heritage Month is only in its sixth year. South Asians have had a presence in Britain for centuries, as Rozina Visram’s seminal 2002 book Asians in Britain: 400 Years of History discusses. The first such settlers came as sailors and servants, brought by the East India Company. In time, students, ayahs (nursemaids), princes and professionals arrived. In 1892, Dadabhai Naoroji was elected as Liberal member of parliament for Finsbury Central, becoming the first MP of South Asian heritage. He supported free education, votes for women and home rule for Ireland, and campaigned for representation for Indians in the government of India. Large-scale immigration from the subcontinent started after the 1948 Nationality Act was passed. It conferred on subjects of British colonies and the Commonwealth the right to settle in the UK. But the South Asian experience has not been as well documented as that of those coming from the Caribbean. Dr Florian Stadtler, co-author of Asian Britain: A Photographic History (2013), believes one of the reasons is because “there was no Windrush moment”. But it could also be because the term ‘South Asian’ encompasses so many people from different places on the Indian subcontinent, with their own distinct regional histories, languages, cultures. Read more | Kavita Puri's hidden histories: "Many south Asian diasporic families don’t know of their First World War links" An important new digital hub has just launched. South Asian Britain: Connecting Histories (southasianbritain.org) aims to explore the complexity of this longer story. It discusses themes ranging from family and politics to multiple migrations and resistance, as well as education and intellectual life. There are some wonderful oral testimonies. Bari Chohan, for example, explains how some of his family came to Britain in the 1870s, setting up homeopathic clinics across the country. His great-uncle married a nurse, and they were one of the first mixed-race couples in north-east England. His father, who was in England at the outbreak of the Second World War, fought with the British Army. There’s so much history in that one family’s story. Understanding and acknowledging this long presence of South Asians in Britain is important. As identity in politics comes to the fore once again, and questions are asked about who is British and who belongs here, these stories take on a greater significance. South Asians have lived in, contributed to, fought and died for Britain. It’s time this is more widely recognised. This column was first published in the October 2025 issue of BBC History Magazine
Michael Wood on the struggle of memory against forgetting | "Place names are signposts to the past"
"Place names are signposts to the past. And how revealing they are", writes Michael Wood
I was recently back in Devon. Long ago, on childhood holidays from the industrial north, this seemed to me the ‘real’ England. Still today, a rusting cast-iron signpost peeping through the foliage in a sunken lane gives me an inexplicable thrill. It’s the idea that the deep past might still be touched, just around the corner. Place names are signposts to the past. Chulmleigh, Woolfardisworthy, Nymet Rowland… what names! And how revealing they are. Take Ipplepen, a village with Roman and Iron Age roots in the hills near Torquay. A recent dig here turned up a small post-Roman cemetery, in use till the eighth century, and a Roman butchers shop, with coins and broken amphorae that once held olive oil, wine and fish sauce imported from the Mediterranean. The name Ipplepen was first recorded in the 10th century, and contains a personal name that appears to be Roman-British or Celtic: Epilus or Ipela. In a region where the Celtic (pre-Welsh) language may have died out only after 1066, the name of the pre-English landowner was, incredibly, passed down. Read more | The Romans were blamed for massacring these Iron Age warriors. But did they actually murder themselves? In the Home Counties, ancient British (or Welsh) place names are mainly gone – except for river names. Here they linger, from the Thames to smaller watercourses such as the wonderfully named Rib, Beane and Maran (or Mimram) in Hertfordshire. Sometimes English newcomers didn’t understand these words. Avon, of course, has the same derivation as afon, Welsh for river. Bredon Hill includes no fewer than three words with the same meaning: bre is Welsh and dun is Old English, both translating as ‘hill’. So: Hill-hill Hill! Some place names tell of events. You can track the first phase of Viking settlement in hybrid names such as Grimston, denoting an English settlement (or village) taken by Grim, a leading member of the Great Army that invaded Britain from 865. Then, with the second wave of migration, came the names ending in ‘by’, meaning farm – Grimsby, for example. Finally, there are the ‘thorp’ names, meaning homestead, as in Scunthorpe. These names were left by third-wave immigrants who were forced to open up poorer land on the fringes. Place names show how the dominant language takes over, in whichever way it happens. Across the world, the pattern was the same – especially in the age of imperialism. Think of the overlay of English names in Ireland, Australia, New Zealand or the US. There the indigenous inhabitants were wiped out or pushed into corners, yet place names associated with them still populate the landscape, from Alabama to Wyoming. Take Michigan, which is ‘big lake’ in the speech of the Ottawa tribe; or Mississippi, ‘Big River’ in Algonquin. From Malibu to the Napa Valley, telltale signposts remain, despite ethnic cleansing by European settlers and colonialists. In Ireland as recently as 2005, the Placenames Commission issued a list of 2,000 Gaelic equivalents to English place names. And, of course, people in power are still at it – witness Donald Trump’s renaming of the Gulf of Mexico. Read more | The real Viking Age: when did the era of Norse expansion start and end? A revealing example is told in Sacred Landscape (2002), a remarkable book by the Israeli writer, historian and political scientist Meron Benvenisti. His father was an Israeli geographer on the Government Names Commission tasked after 1948 with giving Palestinian villages and landscapes names linked to Israel’s biblical homeland. New Hebrew place names, resonating with the biblical story of the Holy Land, replaced the Arabic names of more than 9,000 natural features, villages and even ruins in the new Israel. Benvenisti’s story shows first-hand how place names were used to help change an earlier Arab landscape into the modern Israeli state. Of course, such things have happened throughout history. Centuries after the Moors were expelled from Spain, today’s tourists can still detect the contours of Muslim Spain, from the Alhambra to Granada’s Zacatín (clothes-sellers) Street – still a clothes market. Yet a Palestinian returning now to his ancestral landscape after seven decades away would often be hard pushed to identify the sites of his erstwhile home. The signposts are gone. The story Benvenisti tells is about a battle over the “signposts of memory” that are essential to all human beings. As the novelist Milan Kundera said, “the struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.” Often slowly, imperceptibly, over time – but sometimes at a stroke – history is erased. But sometimes it still magically endures, even over millennia. People have long memories. Ask the folk in Ipplepen. This column was first published in the July 2025 issue of BBC History Magazine
Michael Wood on the New Angel | "Few works of 20th-century art have such a distinguished list of past owners"
"It’s an iconic image for the 20th century, certainly, but for our own century, too", writes historian Michael Wood
A postwar baby boomer and a late sixties student, in my adult life I naturally grew up optimistic. I believed in progress. I witnessed the civil rights movement, feminism, decolonisation, the beginning of ‘Reform and Opening Up’ in China at the end of the seventies, and the break-up of the communist tyranny in Europe a decade later. Not that there weren’t bad things in the world: horrific wars in Vietnam and Biafra (Nigeria), the ravages of international capitalism, the first manifest intimations of climate disaster. But, despite terrors in far-off places, it seemed that – to paraphrase Martin Luther King – the long arc of the moral universe was indeed bending to justice. But now? On the wall in my student room I had a black-and-white copy of a monoprint by the artist Paul Klee. He served as a soldier in the German army in the First World War – a conflict in which a number of his friends, including fellow artists such as August Macke and Franz Marc, were killed. When the war was over, Klee returned to his art, and in 1920 created the picture that I put on my wall. Read more | Michael Wood on amazing insights into medieval daily life He called it Angelus Novus – New Angel – and it is now the subject of a compelling new exhibition at the Bode-Museum in Berlin, displayed alongside images and sculptures of angels from Berlin museums that were smashed by bombing in the Second World War. There are excerpts, too, from Wim Wenders’ famous film Wings of Desire (1987), in which two mournful angels stand watch over the people of a divided Berlin, and in which Klee’s picture is namechecked. More than 100 years on from its creation, Angelus Novus is now seen as one of the seminal artworks of the 20th century. It shows a strange, deformed creature – a weird, scrawny, transparent homunculus, wings raised, hair like parchment scrolls, cloven bird feet, opaque eyes looking sideways at something that causes distress (or is it wonder?). Behind him are eddying clouds of chaos. The title suggests the beginning of a new order. Perhaps we might better translate it as ‘Angel of the New Age’. At least, that implicitly was the haunting interpretation by the great cultural critic and essayist Walter Benjamin who, like so many, saw the First World War as a shattering blow to the idea of European civilisation. A friend of Klee, Benjamin was possessed by the image, and bought the monoprint in 1921; he hung it in his office in Berlin, and took it with him wherever he moved, carrying it on his exile from Germany in 1933. For Benjamin, the figure was the Angel of History – “a melancholy view of historical process as an unceasing cycle of despair”. Read more | Hakim Adi | “Racism in Britain has a long history – but so does anti-racism” In 1940, trapped on the Spanish border after the Nazi invasion of France, Benjamin – a Jew – killed himself. Before he died, he gave the picture to a friend, the novelist and poet Georges Bataille. He kept the Angel safe during the remainder of the war, then passed it on to the German philosopher, musicologist and cultural theorist Theodor Adorno. As Benjamin had asked, Adorno sent it to his old friend Gershom Scholem, the great historian and scholar of Jewish mysticism. (Surely few works of 20th-century art have such a distinguished list of previous owners!). Scholem’s widow, Fania Freud, eventually gave the picture to the Israel Museum in Jerusalem, where it remains today – still dangerous, crackling (as it were) with a mysterious spiritual radioactivity. It’s an iconic image for the 20th century, certainly, but for our own century, too. That’s a heavy weight to bear for a small picture, but on it our view of history is inscribed: a warning from the past. Here’s what Benjamin wrote about the picture in his 1940 essay Theses on the Philosophy of History: “His eyes are staring, his mouth open, his wings spread. This is how one pictures the Angel of History. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. “The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole again what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. The storm is irresistibly propelling him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.” This column was first published in the June 2025 issue of BBC History Magazine
Kavita Puri's hidden histories: "Social taboos are violated: a parent must decide which child to feed"
Kavita Puri on the urgent need to commemorate historical famines
During the Second World War, Deaths related to hunger matched or outnumbered military losses. Famines afflicted regions including the Soviet Union, China, India, Vietnam and Greece. Yet those who perished are rarely remembered in the same way as fallen soldiers. Starvation is not relegated to the past. The latest UN Hunger Hotspots report identifies places of highest concern as Haiti, Mali, Sudan, South Sudan and Palestine. Sadly, the list of countries where hunger persists is much longer, with violence and conflict the key drivers. Professor Alex de Waal, research professor at Tufts University and a leading expert on famine, explains that part of the reason famines are not remembered and memorialised is that the experience is so painful to recount, and so full of shame, that people want to forget it. In extremis, social taboos are violated: a parent must decide which child to feed; a neighbour refuses to give food to a neighbour; forbidden foods are eaten; people sell their bodies to survive; some profit from scarcity. The authorities who engineered a famine, or who neglected the population, have no reason to remember it, either. Read more | Kavita Puri's hidden histories: "We mustn’t overlook the toll of surfacing traumatic histories" In Ireland, it wasn’t until some 150 years after the start of the Great Famine, which began with an outbreak of potato blight in 1845, that victims were widely memorialised. Around a million people died – from a population of fewer than 9 million – and close to 2 million emigrated in a bid to survive. An expression of remorse by the British government of its role in the famine came only as recently as 1997, though there is still debate about whether the statement issued on behalf of then prime minister Tony Blair constituted an apology. Monuments to the victims and those who fled the country are now dotted around Ireland, Northern Ireland and Britain – though none are in London. There are also significant memorials in places to which Irish people emigrated, mostly the US, Canada and Australia. In Ukraine, many millions died during the 1932–33 famine known as the Holodomor (literally ‘death by hunger’), the result of Stalin’s policy of forced agricultural collectivisation. Under the Soviet regime, the subject was taboo; after independence in 1991, though, the famine became central to Ukraine’s nation-building project. There are now Holodomor memorials across Ukraine as well as in the countries in which its diaspora settled, including the US and Canada. Starvation as a weapon of war was not criminalised in the Geneva Conventions of 1949, which governed the treatment of combatants and civilians during conflicts. The first step to revise that was an additional protocol introduced in 1977 stating that “starvation of civilians as a method of warfare is prohibited”. Just over two decades later, an article in the Rome Statute of the International Court proscribed “intentionally using starvation of civilians as a method of warfare by depriving them of objects indispensable to their survival”, making it a war crime. To date, there have been no successful prosecutions for such acts. Read more | Kavita Puri's hidden histories: "Many are turning against prejudice. But we cannot be complacent" The Integrated Food Security Phase Classification, developed in 2004, identifies five phases of deprivation, with 5 being the most extreme, designated ‘Famine/Humanitarian Catastrophe’. The UN has voted that action is mandated only at Phase 5 – when families are at or beyond breaking point, when taboos have already been violated to find food, when widespread malnutrition has set in and mortality rates are high. Critics say that point is far too late. Memorials to famines are, de Waal says, exceptions to the rule, yet he believes that there is a connection between remembering famines and preventing them. In this 80th anniversary year of the end of the Second World War, as we commemorate those who fought and died in the conflict, we could start by remembering those millions who also perished through starvation. This column was first published in the May 2025 issue of BBC History Magazine
Was there a best time to be alive? The pitfalls of looking back for a nostalgic 'golden age'
It has always been human nature to look at the civilisations of the past through rose-tinted glasses, driven by nostalgia and a need to impose a sense of order to the complexity of history. But, asks Robert Blackmore, can any age truly be considered golden?
In the beginning, life was perfect. That, at least, was what our ancient antecedents believed. In c700 BC, mirroring the biblical Eden, the Greek poet Hesiod told how people “lived like gods without sorrow of heart, remote from toil and grief”. Some seven centuries later, Hesiod’s Roman successor Ovid recounted in his Metamorphoses how “the formation of man is followed by a succession of the four ages of the world. The first is the golden age, during which innocence and justice alone govern.” Were Hesiod and Ovid on to something? Was the dawn of humanity the best time to be alive? Historians rarely agree on anything, least of all whether things were going well for people in a past society. Were they good or bad times? Were they getting better or worse? Politicians and journalists frame the present in these terms. We, too, sense the ups and downs of our own lives. But can this apply to history? Should historians assess an age in the same way? Comparing past societies Some might flat-out reject value judgments and insist we only appraise a time by its own standards. Culturally at least, this works. Yet the increase of interest in social and economic history since the mid-20th century has made discussion of the relative prosperity of past societies more relevant than it had been with, for example, constitutional history. Furthermore, such questions seem especially crucial to public history. We want to understand the differences and similarities between our lives and those who came before. History is, more than anything, about understanding change. Read more | How Europe won the race to prosperity Then there’s the problem of what we mean by ‘good’ or ‘bad’ times. How do we define ‘prosperity’? This depends on your priorities, but little could be more important than basic material living standards. How well were people fed, clothed and housed? How robust was their health and security? Of course, beyond modest survival, quality of life is a far harder thing to articulate, both in a material and immaterial sense. In history, as today, little is so hard to measure as happiness. But, from the start – even in elementary terms – our estimations of good or bad times are frustratingly at odds. The Neolithic Revolution (beginning c10,000 BC), the gradual adoption of sedentary agriculture by formerly hunter-gatherer societies, was once presented as a positive step forward. In the long run, it was what allowed humanity to create ‘civilisation’ – that is to say, complex, densely populated societies with cities, governments, bureaucracies and armies supposedly representing shelter, safety and comfort. This was, surely, an improvement on what came before, if life had previously been, as the 17th-century English philosopher Thomas Hobbes thought, “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short”. In the next century, however, another thinker, the Swiss-born Jean-Jacques Rousseau, famously considered such a “state of nature” superior. Akin to Hesiod and Ovid, Rousseau saw the deep past as a golden age corrupted by all that came after it. This was a view significantly advanced in the 1960s by American anthropologist Marshall Sahlins, whose ‘Original Affluent Society’ of hunter-gatherers ate better and had more leisure time than we do today. Yet many researchers have since confirmed that many such societies could also be extraordinarily violent ‒ both between and within groups ‒ with the killing of children and the elderly widely practised. “Perpetual oscillation between happiness and misery” In 1798, the English scholar and Anglican cleric Thomas Malthus presented a stark vision of life that seemed to explain this conflict. In his view, the production of resources was limited by the availability of land, so could only increase incrementally. But population sizes tend to rise exponentially, meaning societies would always experience poverty and are “condemned to a perpetual oscillation between happiness and misery” as they repeatedly reached the carrying capacity of their environments. A Malthusian interpretation of the past requires acceptance of uncomfortable ideas. Not least, that events that lowered the population – such as disease and violence – might have been good in history, that the pain and suffering we seek to avoid, might have been necessary. When the dust settled, it is argued, the survivors ended up with more resources per person. But is this really the whole story? Aside from the obvious advantages to those concerned of not being dead, surely there are broader benefits to having more people. A larger group might compete more successfully against smaller ones for resources. It might win wars and expand further. But, most importantly, it might not all be a zero-sum game. More people generally meant more collective intelligence, and so more creativity, innovation and, eventually, technological breakthroughs. Some argue that the very size of the human population is itself directly linked to the complexity of human societies. The problem of the subjectivity of historians Time and again, we find differing perspectives. The subjectivity of historians themselves is problematic, and we European historians often tend to offer an overly Eurocentric perspective. Our predecessors during the colonial era used to admire classical civilisations such as the Roman empire as model societies to be emulated. In the late 18th century, the British historian Edward Gibbon considered the years AD 96‒180 to have been ancient Rome’s golden age. It was there and then, he said, that “the condition of the human race was most happy and prosperous”. Some of Rome’s achievements are manifest in its surviving art, architecture and literature ‒ if those are your measures. Read more | What can the streets of Pompeii reveal about daily life in ancient Rome? Yet, archaeological evidence from skeletal remains suggests the average standard of living in the empire was lowest precisely when it was most successful, during the Pax Romana, the ‘Roman Peace’. Life was probably far better in the empire’s western half after its ‘fall’ in the fifth century AD, during the so-called ‘Dark Ages’. One 2021 study showed that people in Roman Gaul were shorter, and their bones presented more signs of physiological stress, than in the post-Roman period ‒ the result of more exposure to disease in childhood and overcrowded urban living. The impact of inequality At issue here is clearly also inequality: it mattered who you were. In complex hierarchical societies, elites could dominate resource extraction and distribution and so raise their level of prosperity well above non-elites, whose material existence remained barely above subsistence. In Europe, for example, you nearly always did better if you were rich, white, free and a man ‒ as Gibbon was. Almost all surviving Roman archaeological sites, from Pompeii to Palmyra, provide ample evidence of how well the empire’s aristocracy and provincial elites lived. But for many, not least Rome’s vast enslaved workforce, life would hardly have been so “happy and prosperous”. Read more | Ancient Roman slavery: what was life like as an enslaved person? Yet with inequality arose cycles in the relative prosperity of different groups when populations rose and fell. Perhaps the most famous example of this was the so-called ‘crisis’ of the late Middle Ages in Europe, roughly 1300 to 1500. The preceding centuries saw considerable economic growth, an expansion in population, and, with it, spectacular architecture ‒ such as Romanesque and Gothic cathedrals ‒ as well as a great revival of art, philosophy and literature. Subsequently, in the 14th century, came a series of disasters. First there was the Great Famine of 1315–17/22; then, from the 1347–51 Black Death pandemic, repeated waves of plague. These struck alongside near constant warfare, not least the Hundred Years’ War (1337–1453) between England and France. A Distant Mirror, American historian Barbara Tuchman’s 1978 account of this period, is famously subtitled ‘the Calamitous 14th Century’. This leaves little doubt as to her assessment. Nevertheless, some historians have recast the late Middle Ages as almost a golden age. Those who survived the wars, plagues and famines appear to have become more prosperous on average – materially at least – than their forebears. Read more | Post pandemic: how the years after the Black Death briefly became a ‘golden age’ for medieval women The European population halved and, as such, there was more land to go around: and thus, more abundant resources per head. With fewer workers, those who remained were able to attain higher wages and lower rents. Demand for meat and finer clothing increased among the general population. In some places, there was a decline in serfdom. Do higher mortality rates reduce inequality? In 2017, Austrian historian Walter Scheidel took perhaps the most pessimistic view of this. He surveyed much of history: from the collapse of late Bronze Age societies of the Middle East and southern Europe in the 12th century BC right through to the revolutions and ‘total war’ of the 20th century. And the thoroughly disheartening conclusion he reached was that mortality from pandemic disease, violent revolutions and the collapse of states were the only truly effective ways that inequality reduced historically. But, again, is prosperity amid mass death how we’d genuinely define a ‘good time’? Is it right to attribute a high standard of ‘living’ to a period when half of all people, your loved ones included, are dead? If truth be told, the main problem with our interpretation of good and bad times is our inability to absorb the full complexity of any historical period. The past involved a mass of individual and collective human experiences, which only survive in fragments. We struggle to make sense of this confusion until we conjure it into orderly narratives of rises and falls. This is how we humans deal with a complicated, changing world: by ordering our memories into stories. We write history the same way: mirroring the same ups and downs in our own lives. There is no reason to assume these necessarily render an accurate interpretation of the past as a whole. As William Shakespeare had Hamlet tell Rosencrantz and Guildenstern in c1600, “there is nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so”. Going back to Elizabethan England Indeed, our view of Shakespeare’s own times contains especially glaring incongruities. He was born in 1564, during a century in which the late medieval trend of population decline in Europe reversed, and its explorers, traders and conquerors spread around the globe. This time saw a surge in economic growth, with an increase in the scale and complexity of societies. But prosperity was very unevenly distributed. In England, the reign of Elizabeth I (1558‒1603) is exceptionally revered. A 2007 film was even titled Elizabeth: The Golden Age. Developments in theatre and poetry, and even the greater use of domestic comforts like chimneys, may have been significant. Read more | Hold your noses: the smells, sounds and sights of Elizabethan England Yet, average real income dropped by almost all measures. Poverty and destitution reached a level not seen in the Middle Ages. What’s more, plague never went away, and struck repeatedly, as in London in 1592–93. There were also food shortages, with harvest failures for four years running from 1594 to 1598. The later propaganda value of Elizabethan England’s resistance to foreign aggression during the 1585‒1604 Anglo-Spanish War ‒ particularly the famous Spanish Armada of 1588 ‒ may have clouded our view. So has the perceived glamour of the Tudor court. However, even here, you were in danger of meeting a sticky end on an executioner’s block. “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times” These were both good and bad times then, we think. But by Shakespeare’s own death, in 1616, much had certainly changed ‒ and was continuing to do so. The 17th century, it is now argued, laid the groundwork for the rise of capitalism and the industrial revolution in the 18th and 19th centuries, as agriculture commercialised, and manufacturing jobs began to proliferate. Yet the move from a largely agrarian to an industrial society is as controversial as that of the hunter-gatherer to sedentary agriculturalist many millennia earlier. As Charles Dickens famously began A Tale of Two Cities, published in 1859: “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.” Rapid technological innovation combined with massive new energy inputs – the burning of fossil fuels – to spectacularly increase the efficiency of the economies of first Britain, then Europe, America and the world. Human societies were able ‒ at least for a time ‒ to escape the growth and population limits envisaged by Malthus. Vastly more material wealth was generated than ever before. Simultaneously, whole communities and ways of life were torn apart as former agricultural workers moved into towns and cities in search of jobs in industry. While advantageous for some, working conditions, diet and housing for many was sufficiently appalling to inspire countless activists to action, not least Dickens himself, and the German philosopher Karl Marx. Ideologies like socialism and nationalism grew in response to the uncertainties that arose from such rapid change. Meanwhile, industrialised militaries permitted European empires to further dominate and exploit the rest of the world. Conflict, particularly into the 20th century, was waged on an unparalleled scale. Read more | What drives our addiction to war? Yet strangely, this may have been both the most and least bloody century in history. In absolute terms, the greatest number of people met violent deaths. But such was the increase in world population, in relative terms, the fewest did. What’s more, as French economist Thomas Piketty pointed out in 2013, these wars themselves went a long way towards eliminating the massive economic inequality of the industrial age. Though admittedly as much a levelling down as a levelling up, nothing is more efficient at destroying factories, railways and fortunes than mechanised warfare and taxes to pay for it. But can we really present horrendous events, such as the Second World War, with its associated atrocities, positively? To do so would appear an affront to the many millions who died: sacrificed at the altar of nations. Societies in the 21st century By almost all measures, human societies are now ‒ in the 21st century ‒ richer, more complex, more interconnected and more technologically advanced than at any other time in history. Yet immense inequality has also returned, both within and between societies. And while our total population is predicted to peak, the effects of modern economies on the environment, not least greenhouse gas emissions and resultant runaway climate change, are immense. The interaction between humans and their surroundings is complicated. Much of history has now had some long-term climactic change associated with it. We have arguably always shaped our planet, as we ourselves are in turn shaped by it ‒ but no more so than now. So, this is no golden age either. It is nostalgia for a lost time that leads us, like Hesiod and Ovid, to see earlier periods of history, where we perceive our beginnings ‒ like our youth ‒ as ‘golden’. In reality, there are few entirely good or bad times: most are a fusion of both. The modern world is neither better nor worse. There’s just more of everything. We struggle with this idea because we cannot think outside of our own storytelling nature. It is possible that, in a future with powerful artificial intelligence-driven tools, we may be able to escape these limits to our imagination and see past societies as closer to what they really were. But, with the ecological overreach and consequent threat of our extinction involved in reaching that technological complexity, it may well be that we will experience one perfect sunrise, before we finally sink back into the darkness. Dr Robert Blackmore is a historian and a visiting fellow at the University of Southampton This article was first published in the January 2025 issue of BBC History Magazine
Michael Wood on crafting a new national narrative
“We need a meaningful story for the new generation – our composite union,” writes historian Michael Wood
What a summer we have had in 2024, with an astonishing election result. There has been much talk of national renewal, and in due course we’ll see what that means. But it felt like a watershed. The new prime minister Keir Starmer’s dad was a toolmaker, his mum a nurse; the cabinet is majority comprehensive-educated, with more alumni of Parrs Wood High School than of Eton. Among commentators – not just on the left – there’s been a growing feeling that 14 years of Tory rule, compounded by Brexit, have undermined what the great medieval historian Ibn Khaldun called asabiyyah: group feeling – the glue that makes societies work. And watching TV on election night, I found myself wondering whether, like sediment settling in a glass, the time has finally arrived for a new national narrative. Read more | Opinion: “History is currently being used for political purposes that have very little to do with the past” One hundred years ago, the British empire reached its apogee. It was a world, as depicted in popular culture, orchestrated by Elgar and redolent with the scent of saddle soap and railway smoke. As Jan Morris memorably put it in the Pax Britannica trilogy: a world of P&O liners rolling down to Rio, of “dominion over palm and pine”, of an empire on which the sun never set. It is amazing to think that our oldest fellow citizens today were alive then. What changes they have seen over the span of a single lifetime. World war, imperial decline, the election of ’45 and the birth of the welfare state. Wilson’s recovery in the Swinging Sixties, then the Thatcher era that saw Britain’s de-industrialisation. Blair’s Cool Britannia orchestrated by cocky Oasis optimism – till, fatefully, Iraq ushered us into the past quarter century to Brexit and beyond, with its starkly divided narratives of Britain. Read more | Clement Attlee: Labour's postwar leader That’s a very simplistic sketch, I know. But it seems to me that certain ideas of national identity continue to have a massive influence on us: on our vocabularies of nationhood, our understanding of the world and our place in it. It’s nearly 30 years since the British flags were lowered in Hong Kong, signalling the end of the empire. Yet the narrative still grips us. Look at the plethora of Winston Churchill films released around the time of Brexit: Darkest Hour, Churchill, Dunkirk. To be sure, these were great and often heroic events. My dad, injured on D-Day, was treated at Haslar Naval Hospital in Portsmouth; Uncle Syd was torpedoed and sunk off Tobruk; Uncle Bill saw Dunkirk, D-Day and the march to Berlin. My postwar generation grew up with all that, and also with the idea that we were good and right – that we were different. Read more | Did Churchill’s postwar speeches save the world? My parents, aunts and uncles were good folk – hard-working, deferential little people who believed in that story. But they served a vast imperial project whose lineaments and oppressions are being laid out now by a new generation of historians and writers. All empires are based on exploitation and violence: we waged war in every corner of the Earth. It is staggering to think, for example, that the enormous financial compensation for slavery fixed in 1837 was not paid off till 2015 – paid to the descendants of the owners, not those of the enslaved. Of course, there are still those willing to prop up people’s sense of themselves with a tissue of myth and racial prejudice. But the time is surely now finally up for the old narrative. We need a meaningful story for the new generation – for our composite union in which all Britons, of whatever origin, recognise themselves. Fundamental to this is the meaning of history: how it sustains and defines us, and how to build that sense in a fragmenting world for a new, inclusive vision of our history. What should sit at the heart of a new narrative? The British empire has been the greatest influence on our history over the past three centuries. It shaped us all, whether our ancestors came from Govan, St Kitts or Bangladesh, from Bodmin, Halesowen, Cardiff or Belfast, our identities remade as Britons to go out to the world. Now, for the first time, arguably, we have a government that reflects British society: 92 per cent comprehensive-educated, close to gender-equal, with a black foreign secretary and a female chancellor. It has taken 200 years since a demonstration for reform was crushed at Peterloo, almost 100 since the expansion of the franchise to include all women, and 80 since that transformative election of 1945. Not long, then. Democracy, as we are often reminded, depends on the informed consent of the governed. In that, history has a crucial role to play. And history, after all, is written by us. All of us. This column first appeared in the September 2024 issue of BBC History Magazine
Kavita Puri's hidden histories: "I wish that there was no need for specialist history months"
Kavita Puri explores lesser-known stories from our past. This month she questions why we celebrate diverse histories only at particular times in the UK – like Black History Month in October and South Asian Heritage Month in July and August – rather than all year round
South Asian Heritage Month (SAHM) is celebrated each year from 18 July to 17 August, although it is still a relatively new addition to the calendar. Incredibly, 2024 marked only its fourth edition. I well remember its inception. In 2017, the TV documentary My Family, Partition and Me aired on BBC One. One of its strands followed SAHM co-founder Binita Kane as she retraced the journey taken by her father, Bim Bhowmick, from East Pakistan – now Bangladesh – to India in 1947. It was a deeply affecting programme, and a transformative moment for her. Binita had grown up in Wales and had previously known little of her father’s history – the story of his migration across a border, but also of the devastating loss of family members during the partition of British India. After participating in that programme, she made it her mission (alongside her day job as a doctor) to make sure that no one else ever felt cheated of their history. I’ve watched how, in a short space of time since its launch, SAHM has gained momentum, its reach expanding from museums to blue-chip companies and media organisations as staff hold sessions on British south Asian history and culture. It is long overdue. First marked in 1987, UK Black History Month is now well established, particularly in schools. That is not the case for SAHM. It’s not helped by the fact that the designated month runs from mid-July to mid-August – timed to coincide with the anniversary of India’s independence from British colonial rule on 15 August 1947, and the creation of India and Pakistan, but outside the school term. The 2021 census revealed that British Asians are the largest ethnic minority group in Britain. Yet we are only now starting to understand British south Asian history more widely, let alone its complex nature. Rather than one homogeneous subject, it encompasses various south Asian countries, regional histories and socio-economic factors affecting different populations in Britain in different ways over the years. South Asians have had a presence in the UK since as early as 1600. Rozina Visram’s seminal 2002 book Asians in Britain: 400 Years of History tells this longer history, beginning with the early settlers brought to Britain as employees of the East India Company, which was granted a royal charter by Elizabeth I. The first arrivals were mostly servants but also lascars – seamen who came to ports such as Cardiff, Glasgow, Liverpool and London. Exploring these histories is important. I wish, though, that there were no need for ‘months’. It would be better if British black and south Asian history simply became part of talking about British history. So, when learning about the Suffragette movement, we would hear about the significant contribution of Sophia Duleep Singh (1876–1948). When teaching working-class history, we would share the story of Shapurji Saklatvala, MP for Battersea, who spoke out passionately on behalf of those living in poverty in the interwar years. And when exploring Second World War history we would encounter the story of Noor Inayat Khan, who was sent from London to work as a secret agent with the French resistance before being captured by the Gestapo and executed in September 1944. These are part of wider British history, not only British south Asian history. On her mantlepiece in Manchester, Binita Kane keeps a vial containing soil from east Bengal, where her father was born as a subject of the Raj. He later migrated to Britain, where he worked for many decades as a doctor in the NHS. His story embodies the point that the history of Britain and south Asia is long and intertwined. It is time we better understood this shared history, not least because it helps us comprehend contemporary Britain. And it would be nice if this focus wasn’t limited to just one month each year. This article was first published in the September 2024 issue of BBC History Magazine