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"It was the greatest act of violence for 66 million years": why the modern world was born of bloodshed
In the 18th century, developments in finance, weapons and industry converged to create a modern economy born of bloodshed. Clifton Crais explores how killing powered the industrial age
Imagine you’re in Nebraska, standing on North America’s Great Plains, where the broad Platte and Missouri rivers join on their way to the mighty Mississippi. It’s 1804, and in the blistering 36°C heat of summer you’re accompanying Captain Meriwether Lewis and Second Lieutenant William Clark as they head west towards the Pacific Ocean, exploring the commercial possibilities of this vast new country. Stretching away in front of you is a sea of chocolate-brown: thousands of animals, each standing as high as a man and weighing upwards of 900kg. Now picture putrefying carcasses and heaps of bleached bones extending as far as the eye can see. “The bones were everywhere,” homesteaders complained, “as thick as cones under a big fir tree”, and so numerous that it was impossible to plough the land. That was mere decades after Lewis and Clark’s fabled expedition. By the end of the 19th century, America’s population of bison had been reduced from tens of millions to around 350. Much of this killing unfolded over the course of just a few years – one of the most concentrated acts of ecological destruction in history. The usual explanation for the slaughter of the American bison ties it to the government’s decision to solve its ‘Indian problem’ – kill the bison and you destroy the Indigenous peoples’ food supply. “Every buffalo dead is an Indian gone,” wrote Colonel Richard Irving Dodge, who had fought in the Civil War before heading west to subdue the Native American population. But politics didn’t kill the bison. Economics did. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/02/GettyImages-515301392webready-0494d00-e1771951017974.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A black and white photograph showing large piles of bison hides piled up after many animals have been killed for their skins" title="Thousands of bison hides lie in huge piles in Dodge City, Kansas, 1878. Advances in chemistry enabled hides to be processed and used in belts in industrial machinery (Image by Getty Images)" /> General Philip Sheridan, another Civil War veteran who led the Indian Campaign across the Great Plains, knew as much. These hunters “have done more in the last two years… to settle the vexed Indian question than the entire regular army has done in the last 30 years”, he said. “Send them powder and lead, let them kill, skin and sell until the buffaloes are exterminated.” A combination of guns, finance and industry made the near extinction of the bison possible. New advances in firearms made the act of slaughtering bison faster and achievable from a far greater distance. Banks rushed across the Mississippi, lending money to hunters and turning them into “businessmen with rifles”. Advances in chemistry transformed the animals’ body parts into saleable commodities, especially their notoriously difficult-to-process hides. Many of these hides ended up in factories – somewhere between 2 and 6 million in England in the 1870s and 1880s alone. Skins became drive belts that were integral to the machinery of mass production in the industrial revolution. Until the advent of rubber, industrial belting was made from hides, including those of the American bison. Meanwhile, American settlers gathered millions of tonnes of bison bones. Railway companies laid down branch lines for the sole purpose of collecting the bones and shipping them east, where they were processed in places such as the Michigan Carbon Works in Detroit – that state’s largest factory before the automobile revolution. Bones were turned into fertiliser, carbon filters and inks. For a time, bison bone could be found in ‘fine bone’ china and even in mascara. Back on the Great Plains, wealth accrued by killing and bone harvesting supported the rise of farming and ranching. Read more | These three unsuspecting inventions won the American Wild West – but did they destroy it too? What unfolded on the killing fields of the US was part of a global phenomenon. Industrial capitalism’s ‘big bang’ and our current age of global warming emerged out of the greatest act of violence the planet had seen since the Cretaceous–Paleogene extinction event 66 million years ago, when a meteor crashed into the Yucatán, killing off the dinosaurs and enabling the rise of mammals. The development of modern finance and the mass production of guns, bullets and gunpowder made killing for capitalism possible. This also helps explain the rapid rise to global economic dominance of the UK and the US: two countries that were adept at extracting wealth from destruction. By the first decade of the 19th century, the US’s GDP per capita was on a par with the UK’s. The economic historians Peter Lindert and Jeffrey Williamson have written that the US became “one of the first, if not the first, [countries] to join the modern economic growth club” pioneered by the UK. The two would soon account for a large percentage of global wealth and until 1900 were responsible for most global industrial CO₂ emissions. Firearms have a long history – almost 1,000 years – but in the 18th century the flintlock musket became the ubiquitous weapon of choice. A dramatic improvement on earlier guns that used matchlocks, it was versatile and cheap to produce – the Ford Fiesta of firearms. An experienced marksman could get off three shots in a minute. Workshops and factories across the western world scrambled to meet the insatiable global demand for the new weapon. England became the world leader in musket manufacture and distribution, beginning in London’s East End before spreading to Birmingham and Liverpool. Muskets were useless without gunpowder and lead, and England had plentiful supplies of the latter. Mines in Northumberland and Derbyshire yielded thousands of tonnes of the metal each year. When it came to gunpowder, the British East India Company’s exploitation of the subcontinent’s resources proved vital, especially the principal chemical, saltpetre. The monopolistic East India Company considered its control over the saltpetre trade to be “combined and interwoven with the welfare and even with the existence of the empire in India”. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/02/BAL44583webready-ef1bf1a-e1771951145854.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="Workers inside a brick‑walled workshop tend large heated pans built into furnaces while others handle tall conical molds set over containers, with steam rising from the equipment. Metal vessels filled with processed gunpowder materials are scattered across the floor, showing multiple stages of early gunpowder production." title="Gunpowder is made at the Woolwich Arsenal, c1750. Controlling large reserves of Indian saltpetre, an ingredient of gunpowder, Britain became a major player in arms manufacture (Image by Bridgeman Images)" /> Thanks to the research of Dr Nicholas Radburn at Lancaster University, we have quite precise figures for the millions of pounds of saltpetre imported into the UK, and the overall production of British gunpowder, across the entire 18th century. Between 1698 and 1808, Britain produced more than 522 million pounds of gunpowder. Much went to its military, especially the navy, where a single shot from a 16-pound cannon used 8 pounds of powder. But more than 78 million pounds were exported to Africa, the Caribbean and what would become the United States and Canada. These are just the official numbers, though; the real totals are probably higher. In any case, that was enough powder for more than 1.25 billion musket shots – a number greater than the entire global population in 1750. Other nations got in on the action, too, especially the French and the Dutch. Americans weren’t far behind, and by the 1820s US-made weapons were being sold far and wide, especially across the Pacific Ocean and into China, where American Colt pistols were used in the 1850–64 Taiping Rebellion – one of the most catastrophic wars in human history. Plying the world with weapons was a volatile business – literally. Stores of gunpowder and saltpetre frequently exploded. The 1794 Ratcliffe Fire in London, sparked when a barge loaded with saltpetre caught fire, was the worst conflagration in the capital since 1666. It was described by The Times as “a striking and awful spectacle” – devastation on a scale not matched in London until the Blitz of 1940–41. On the other side of the Atlantic, throughout the 19th century there were almost yearly accidents at the huge DuPont explosives factory in Delaware, where a local cemetery was filled with the victims. Murder and pillage are nothing new. In fact, both are as old as our species. However, with the widespread proliferation of weapons in the 18th century, killing became infinitely easier. Read more | Did Aztec civilisation really ‘collapse’? The reality isn’t as simple as you might think This is where modern finance enters the picture. In the 15th and 16th centuries, the Spanish were outstanding at pillaging, producing men such as Hernán Cortés who rampaged across Mexico. The Conquistadors ransacked from the Americas the equivalent of billions of dollars in today’s money, much of it in precious metals. But Spain struggled to convert wealth produced by violence into capital for investment and production – and capital is what capitalism is all about. Instead, it spent its fortunes on religious and dynastic wars, churches, art, buildings and other forms of conspicuous consumption. England’s financial transformation was a game changer, building on innovations pioneered by the Dutch in the 17th century. In the 18th century, there was a revolution in English banking, along with a tranche of developments including insurance, bonds, stock markets, patent law and an increasingly standardised currency. In the first quarter of the 19th century, the number of banks outside London increased 30-fold, and doubled in that city. London became the “capital of capital”, as the economic historian Youssef Cassis termed it, led by the Bank of England, which was established in the closing years of the 17th century. “The multiplication of banking companies,” Adam Smith wrote in The Wealth of Nations (1776), was a great example of the virtues of competition and increased public confidence in the economy. Wealth – including that generated by violence – was free to become capital. By 1820, the US had just over 300 banks. Forty years later, that number had grown to more than 1,500 – a five-fold increase, and many more than in the UK. With banking came an array of financial innovations, from insurance to stocks and bonds. Like that of its former imperial master, the US legal system protected wealth – whether it was land, money or, across the South, human beings – which meant that it was easy to transform wealth into investable capital. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/02/BAL87937webready-7efb6df-e1771951291786.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A busy 19th‑century city street where a crowd of men in top hats gathers in animated discussion, while two barefoot newsboys hold up papers in the foreground. Behind them, tall commercial buildings with large signs and a horse‑drawn streetcar marked “Broadway” frame the bustling urban setting." title="Crowds throng Wall Street, New York City’s banking hub, during a financial panic in 1857. The United States’ rise as an economic heavyweight was boosted by its ability to convert the wealth it accrued from the killing of bison, beaver and whales into capital for investment (Image by Bridgeman Images)" /> This is how bison hides ended up in factories, and their bones in your ancestor’s teacup, connecting Manchester with Wyoming, halfway around the world. The connections to killing don’t stop there, though. Those factories required lighting. Sunlight alone was unacceptable to factory owners, who wanted their workers to be labouring as long as humanly (or inhumanly) possible, sometimes from five in the morning until well into the night. Until the advent of hydrocarbons such as paraffin and natural gas, it was whale oil that kept these places lit. England was soon consuming at least 50,000 barrels of the stuff each year, generating more than 3 billion lumen-hours of illumination. By the 1830s, most of the whale oil entering England ended up in its factories for lighting and lubrication. Meanwhile, across the Atlantic, anywhere between a quarter and a third of sperm-whale oil (which produced the best light) harvested by American whalers made its way into factories. Whale oil was also used for lighting in Caribbean mills, where enslaved people were forced to work continuously to process the sugar-cane juice that helped provide cheap energy for the industrial working classes. Demand for lubrication and lighting in both factories and cities resulted in the mass slaughter of whales, from Greenland to the Indian Ocean. Though it is impossible to determine the exact scale of the killing, we do know that about 2 million whales were slaughtered between 1750 and 1900. Whaling produced huge profits until the number of those marine mammals dwindled, and whalers were forced to spend more time at sea, often returning home with empty casks. In the case of New England’s whale industry, profits were reinvested in a variety of businesses, from cotton mills to railways and the transition to fossil fuels in the US. One of the world’s largest textile factories – the Wamsutta Mills in New Bedford, Massachusetts – was funded by the harvesting of whales. And some of the early investors in what became John D Rockefeller’s powerful and notorious Standard Oil Company amassed their capital from hunting whales. People found many ways of turning into capital the natural resources in their surroundings. England’s land-enclosure movement was one of them, and has commonly been offered as an explanation for the development of capitalism, going back to the works of the classical political economists in the 18th and 19th centuries. But using violence to generate capital was a global process, and an ongoing one. It proved possible to turn just about anything into profit, from whales and bison to deer, beaver and African elephants – plus another mammal: Homo sapiens. The spread of guns led to a global increase in enslavement, most infamously across Africa. Beginning in the early 16th century and continuing for over 350 years, more than 12.5 million enslaved people were trafficked from Africa’s shores – by far the largest forced migration in human history. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/02/GettyImages-517213402webready-820476d-e1771951455442.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A painting depicting a slave auction. A man in a blue suit and grey top hat stands on top of a large box, talking to a crowd of gentleman, pointing towards a group of people of colour sitting on the floor, looking sad" title="Enslaved African people are sold at auction in the US, c1852. Vast numbers perished as a result of the transatlantic slave trade (Image by Getty Images)" /> However, nearly 7.9 million people – 63 per cent of the total Atlantic trade in human beings – were moved in just 60 years from the mid-18th century, during the industrial revolution and just as weapons began flooding the continent. This rapid expansion of the slave trade precisely tracks the import of gunpowder into Africa, as Nicholas Radburn has demonstrated definitively. The UK alone exported more than 26 million kg of explosives to Africa in the 18th century, most of it after 1750. Weapons yielded the greatest gains. One result, as the tyrannical King Adandozan of Dahomey (reigned 1797–1818) bragged, was a kingdom where his people “cultivated not with hoes, but with guns”. People hunting people is part of the nasty and brutish reality of enslavement. But how many people lost their lives to produce the 7.9 million people shipped across the Atlantic, where nearly 10 per cent died along the way to the Americas? I have estimated upwards of 2–3 people died to yield a single enslaved person. In other words, perhaps as many as 24 million humans perished in the flood of weapons and enslavement. Similar ratios unfolded elsewhere in the world, where guns were used to hunt people. In the south-east US – where Indigenous people were employed to hunt and enslave other Native Americans – the hunters killed three Native Americans for every one they captured. We know that profits from the transatlantic trade increased dramatically in this period, as work by Nobel-Prize-winning economists Daron Acemoglu, Simon Johnson and James Robinson has demonstrated. The Caribbean sugar and American cotton that made its way into workers’ cups of tea and into the English textile mills – which were releasing CO₂ and beginning to warm the Earth’s atmosphere – were tied to Africa’s killing fields. The industrial revolution and our own age of global warming are inextricably tied not just to the institution of slavery – a continuing subject of debate across the world – but also to the mass destruction of people, animals and the environment that guns and finance made possible. Read more | The profits of slavery: the dire impact of empire on Britain's countryside This is the dark reality of capitalism’s creation myth – one that historians and climate scientists are now beginning to understand. The industrial revolution and the global warming that now threatens our very existence emerged from the globalisation of killing for profit. The deaths of millions of Africans that underpinned the entire Atlantic slavery complex is only the most obvious connection. While there were other factors at play here, the wealth generated by the system of slavery “contributed causally to Britain’s industrial revolution”, according to a 2022 study. This recognition underpins many ongoing and fraught discussions, especially in the UK – most recently the February 2025 parliamentary debates on reparations, and the July 2025 University of Edinburgh report on donor links to slavery. These conversations, however, miss something very basic. History’s horrors go deeper into the totality of destruction that made our world economy – one that entangles the deaths of Africans with the slaughter of bison and whales in addition to a vast number of other species. This is one reason why the popular term ‘Anthropocene’ may not suffice, and why I have suggested a different word to describe the epoch that created our contemporary planetary peril: the ‘Mortecene’ – the Age of Killing and Death. Clifton Crais is a professor of history at Emory University. His new book is The Killing Age: How Violence Made the Modern World (Picador, 2026) This article was first published in the February 2026 issue of HistoryExtra Magazine
The Zong massacre | A murderous insurance scam that exposed slavery’s horrors
In the 1780s, an extraordinary insurance claim made its way through Britain’s courts – against the lives of more than 130 enslaved people who had been intentionally thrown overboard a slaving ship in the Caribbean
In the 1780s, an extraordinary insurance claim made its way through Britain’s courts – against the lives of more than 130 enslaved people who had been intentionally thrown overboard a slaving ship in the Caribbean. In this episode of History’s Greatest Scandals, Professor Hannah Greig and Ellie Cawthorne revisit the notorious Zong massacre, and explore how it exposes the horrors of the transatlantic slave trade. Watch the full episode, or listen ad-free at the link below: View Green Video on the source website
The US 'voodoo' scare: why 19th-century racists spread fake news about Haiti
From sexual orgies to Satan incarnated as a snake, lurid depictions of ‘voodoo’ in North America long titillated and shocked readers. As David G Cox explains, they were also wielded as justifications for racist oppression during the social and political upheavals of the 19th-century US
On 2 January 1893, the black American abolitionist and reformer Frederick Douglass delivered a lecture on Haiti to an audience in Chicago. It was widely alleged, he reflected, that the Caribbean republic was riddled with “voodooism, fetishism, serpent worship and cannibalism”, and that “little children are fatted for slaughter and offered as sacrifices to their voodoo deities”. Such claims, Douglass declared, were false. He told his listeners that, while serving as US minister (effectively, ambassador) to Haiti between 1889 and 1891, he found no evidence of ritual sacrifice, despite diligent investigation. By the time Douglass spoke in Chicago, the idea of Haitian ‘voodoo’ as a murderous cult was lodged in the American public consciousness. As he noted, the features of this myth would have been familiar to many. According to scores of white writers at the turn of the 20th century, ‘voodoo’ was an imported African religion devoted to the worship of Satan incarnated as a snake. ‘Voodoo’ ceremonies, it was claimed, consisted of frenzied dances, sexual orgies and the ritual sacrifice of animals or humans followed by the consumption of their bodies or blood. The priests and priestesses of this imaginary faith were said to be the real rulers of Haiti, holding all its citizens – from presidents to peasants – in the grip of terror. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/12/GettyImages-556636225webready-f31fffd-e1765183494712.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A painting of a black man dressed in a suit with a small bow tie. He has short hair and a thick moustache" title="Ebenezer Bassett denounced claims that the black-led Caribbean nation was a hotbed of ‘voodoo’ cannibalism and human sacrifice (Image by Getty Images)" /> In 1901, claims about Haitian ‘voodoo’ coalesced in a widely reprinted newspaper report on the “demoniacal orgies” of this purported “devil’s cult”. Supposedly reproducing the findings of the famous American geologist and traveller Robert Hill, the author of the piece claimed not only that “large numbers of young children are offered up annually in Haiti as sacrifices to the Great Yellow Snake” but also that “mothers frequently dedicate their infants at birth to this purpose”. The article provoked an incredulous response from Ebenezer Bassett who, as US minister to Haiti between 1869 and 1877, was the first black American diplomat. Having lived there for more than a decade, and speaking fluent French, Bassett – like Douglass – could claim authority on the question of Haitian religion. As Bassett knew, “the whole story about cannibalism in Haiti is no more than a myth which, like other myths, has gained credence by persistent repetition”. Casting doubt on the veracity of the report, he noted that Robert Hill had refuted the existence of Haitian cannibalism in his recent Caribbean travel narrative, and that the claims of the article were “in full accord with – it is better not to say that they are probably based upon – Sir Spenser St John’s book”. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/12/GettyImages-152197629webready-4da9320-e1765183520674.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="Two stone figures, tied together by a metal chain around their necks" title="Chained bocio (protective figures) of the Vodun religion of the Fon people of southern Benin. The chains are symbolic both of slavery and of Gu, the vodu (spirit) of iron and war (Image by Getty Images)" /> Lurid inventions Spenser St John was a British diplomat and former chargé d’affaires in Haiti, and the book in question was Hayti, or, The Black Republic. First published in 1884, it made a deep impression on US journalism, providing the blueprint for a plethora of articles that, though claiming originality, did little more than summarise, in increasingly lurid terms, its lengthy chapter on “Vaudoux Worship and Cannibalism”. Up to this point, I have placed ‘voodoo’ in quotation marks, not only to suggest that it was a figment of white imaginations but also to differentiate it from Vodou, the African-derived religion genuinely practised by Haitians. Much of this religion can be traced to west and west-central Africa. It contains elements of the religions practised during the era of slavery by the Aja and Fon peoples of the Bight of Benin (vodu is the Fon word for spirit), as well as of others from the kingdom of Kongo. Read more | Frederick Douglass escaped enslavement in 1838 – but here's why he was still far from true freedom However, Vodou was not, as 19th-century white commentators claimed, a direct African import. It was a product of the New World melting pot – a dynamic blend of the religions of enslaved Africans and the Christianity of their European enslavers. In this respect, Vodou has much in common with other black diasporic religions including Cuban Santería, Brazilian Candomblé and Jamaican Obeah. Like those, Vodou helped people of African origin survive the brutality of Atlantic slavery. In the Victorian age, white people on both sides of the Atlantic ignored the vibrant realities of Vodou, dwelling instead on its demonic imagined double: ‘voodoo’. Why were they so keen to defame Haitian religion? Frederick Douglass had the answer. “Haiti is black,” he declared in Chicago, “and we [Americans] have not yet forgiven Haiti for being black.” Between 1791 and 1804, enslaved and free people of colour rose against the French colonial government of Saint-Domingue. The revolution resulted in the abolition of slavery and independence for the colony. Renamed Haiti, it became the world’s only black republic. Desperate to demonstrate that people of African descent were incapable of self-government, white supremacists spent the next century defaming Haiti, presenting it – in the words of Douglass – as a “very hell of horrors”. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/12/webready-9c7ef73-e1765183675345.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="The 1791 uprising in the French colony of Saint-Domingue that ended with the founding of the black-led republic of Haiti in 1804, shown in a later engraving amplifying fears of black violence (Image by Getty Images)" title="The 1791 uprising in the French colony of Saint-Domingue that ended with the founding of the black-led republic of Haiti in 1804, shown in a later engraving amplifying fears of black violence (Image by Getty Images)" /> As the 20th century approached, the idea that the world could be divided into races whose members shared the same essential traits was widely accepted. Thus, to opponents of black freedom in the US, Haitian ‘voodoo’ became proof that, without white control, black Americans would degenerate to savagery. As Douglass reflected, the black American could “never part with his identity and race”, meaning that the denial of Haitian civilisation was a denial of the “possibilities of the negro race generally”. This backlash against black freedom explains why ‘voodoo’ first entered the American popular consciousness during the 1860s and 1870s, just as a series of constitutional amendments secured the abolition of slavery, along with the establishment of black citizenship and the enfranchisement of black men. As the author of an 1866 article in the Memphis Appeal proclaimed, ‘voodoo’ was “beginning to take hold among the negroes. Free them from the check which was once held over them, they have unlimited control over their baser passions, and now and then it bursts out, and proves that the worship of their barbaric fathers still runs in the blood of the Americanised negro.” Deluge of discourse Initially, Americans writing about ‘voodoo’ focused on Louisiana and, particularly, New Orleans. A former French colony, Louisiana had a sizeable French-speaking population well into the 19th century. In the 1790s and early 19th century, this population had been bolstered by the arrival of up to 25,000 refugees from the Haitian Revolution, well over half of whom were enslaved. It is thus unsurprising that a reference to “an African deity called Vaudoo” appeared in a New Orleans newspaper as early as 1820. However, from the 1880s onwards, thanks to Spenser St John, attention turned to ‘voodoo’ in Haiti. The press was swiftly saturated with reports depicting the Caribbean republic as a “land of blood” – with articles bearing headlines such as: “Haiti, a Brooding Nightmare of Savagery, Bloodshed, Cannibalism”. It is tempting to see this deluge of discourse as a reflection of US imperial designs on Haiti, which it occupied between 1915 and 1934. However, at the turn of the 20th century, Haitian ‘voodoo’ was most often invoked by white-supremacist Democrats who argued that Jim Crow laws and regulations – which, enacted from the late 19th century, disenfranchised black Americans and enforced their segregation from white people – were necessary to prevent similar savagery at home. The peak of interest in Haitian ‘voodoo’ coincided with legal efforts to destroy the black vote in the South. Beginning with Mississippi in 1890, and ending with Georgia in 1906, southern legislatures drew up new state constitutions containing a plethora of voting restrictions. These were intended to disenfranchise black Americans without contravening the 15th Amendment of 1870, which made it unconstitutional to deprive the vote on the basis of race. In the halls of Congress, Democrats, including the Mississippi senator Hernando Money, cited the work of St John as supposed proof that the black American was no more than a “veneered savage”. To the architects of Jim Crow, ‘voodoo’ was an ideological weapon. Depictions of Haitian ‘voodoo’ worship, a potent brew of sex and violence, helped to sell newspapers in an age of sensationalist journalism. At the same time, they reinforced racist notions that everybody of African descent was inherently bestial, criminal and hypersexual. Depictions of orgiastic worship chimed with the myth that white women were in constant danger of the black ‘beast rapist’, which was used to justify Jim Crow and fuel violence against black Americans. Read more | The Haitian Revolution: the enslaved Africans who rose up against France In a 1914 speech to Congress, the notoriously racist Mississippi senator James Vardaman made the connection explicit. St John, he claimed, had presented a “disgusting story of the worship of the voodoo and cannibalism, which he says is as common as [black] sexual crimes in the southern states of this republic”. Frequently portraying black worshippers as beasts and demons, the language used in depictions of Haitian ‘voodoo’ was dehumanising in the extreme. Written portrayals were sometimes accompanied by lurid illustrations, such as A Voodoo Sacrifice, published in the Los Angeles Herald in 1905. A depiction of child sacrifice, the illustration included a worshipper with grotesquely ape-like features as well as a reptilian figure fixing the newspaper reader with an accusatory gaze, suggesting that she or he was an unwelcome witness to secret black rites. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/12/GettyImages-1426141403webready-352c952-e1765183778614.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A black and white photograph of a white man, wearing a white shirt and black cowboy hat, looking towards the right" title="Mississippi senator James Vardaman, who in 1914 told Congress that in Haiti “cannibalism… is as common as [black] sexual crimes in the southern states of this republic” (Image by Getty Images)" /> Fears of black resistance While ostensibly justifying Jim Crow, American depictions of Haitian Vodou betrayed acute white fears of black resistance. African-derived spiritual beliefs and practices played a part in almost every slave uprising in North America and the Caribbean. In 1822, protective charms were allegedly distributed among those involved in South Carolina’s Denmark Vesey conspiracy, named after a free black man convicted of planning a major uprising of enslaved people. In Jamaica a little over 60 years earlier, the use of similar charms during the massive slave insurrection known as Tacky’s Revolt prompted a British crackdown on Obeah. For late 19th-century white Europeans and Americans, however, the dangerous character of black religion was most associated with the Haitian Revolution. By the end of the century, the idea had been enshrined in Haitian mythology that the revolution began with a Vodou ceremony in a forest named Bois-Caïman, during which a pig was sacrificed and a blood oath sworn. Though Vodou certainly galvanised the Haitian Revolution, the reality of the Bois-Caïman ceremony has been debated by scholars, some of whom question the sources upon which the story is based. White supremacists, however, had no interest in questions of historical accuracy, instead portraying Vodou as a death cult bent upon the annihilation of the white race. This accusation chimed with the widespread view that political equality in the US would lead to race war. In 1908, the San Antonio Light published what it claimed was a genuine Vodou chant invoking racial extermination, but which was almost certainly the product of a journalist’s fevered imagination. O-he! Papa Damba! Down with whites and with mulattoes! Burn them, shoot them, drown their women! Help your blacks, your poor black children Circulated by those seeking to justify Jim Crow, tales of ‘voodoo’ sacrifice and cannibalism were shot through with white anxiety. These sanguinary stories may have facilitated a kind of psychological displacement. In other words, real white violence against African Americans was projected as imaginary black murder in the service of Satan. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/12/AKG9430442webready-9ba2b82-e1765183804180.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A painting of a group of people seated on the ground of a cemetery, with large black and red trees arching over the top of them" title="A Vodou scene in Haiti, by renowned artist Hector Hyppolite. Lurid reports in US newspapers of ‘voodoo’ ceremonies were cited as proof that white control was necessary to prevent black Americans from degenerating into savagery (Image by AKG)" /> In the turn-of-the-20th-century South, racial violence assumed unimaginable dimensions in the form of spectacle lynching: black Americans were tortured and murdered before white crowds that could number in the thousands. According to statistics compiled by the NAACP (the civil rights organisation founded in 1909 as the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People), at least 1,902 black Americans were lynched between 1890 and 1910. The affinities between these all-too-real rituals and fictional ‘voodoo’ ceremonies seem more than superficial, especially if we note – as many historians have – the religious symbolism and sacrificial dimensions of spectacle lynching. Read more | Suing for equality: how Sarah Mae Flemming began the legal fight against segregation This reign of racial terror troubled many white people, undermining their sense that they stood at the summit of human civilisation. Condemning the 1904 lynching of Luther Holbert of Mississippi, one newspaper editor wrote that “[t]he negroes, in their most bestial state of voodooism, could be guilty of nothing more savage and brutal.” The editor’s conclusion deliberately inverted the racist language of Democratic politicians such as Hernando Money. “The white man is given to much boasting,” that journalist reflected, “but in many instances he is but a thinly veneered savage.” ‘Voodoo’ gripped the public imagination because, while fuelling the violence upon which Jim Crow was built, it allowed many white Americans to imagine that it was not themselves but others who lived in a “land of blood”. David G Cox is a lecturer in modern American history at the University of Southampton. His research for this article was supported by a British Academy Mid-Career Fellowship This article was first published in the December 2025 issue of BBC History Magazine
"There's little understanding of the shared history of Britain and the subcontinent" | South Asian Heritage Month
As Britain celebrates South Asian Heritage Month, Shalina Patel, Sumita Mukherjee and Shrabani Basu talk to Matt Elton about how histories of the subcontinent can be better shared and explored
Matt Elton: What do you see as the value of South Asian Heritage Month? And do you think this kind of specific history month is generally a good thing? Shalina Patel: Black History Month was first marked in the UK in 1987, at a time when there was a huge absence of understanding about black history. Fast forward 30-plus years, and there are groups now advocating for black history 365 days a year. They feel that it shouldn’t be relegated to a specific month, but should be integrated [into conversations] all year. So if we think about the journey, I’d say that South Asian Heritage Month [SAHM, first held in 2020] is really important as a starting point, because there is currently an absence of understanding of the diversity within South Asian culture, communities and history. True, there’s a risk that this is the only time of year when people will talk about this topic, but we’re starting from a place where so few conversations are taking place on a public scale. So marking SAHM is really important now – and I hope that we will get to a point where we won’t need it anymore, because [South Asian stories] will be really integrated into people’s understanding. Sumita Mukherjee: I agree that it’s really important to increase the diversity of history that is being told. SAHM gives us the opportunity to have this conversation – it encourages the media and other forums to showcase stories and histories around South Asia. I would say that there’s an issue, though, with the timing as it stands, because most schools and universities are closed in late July and August, and lots of people are on holiday. Shrabani Basu: I think the important thing is to make it inclusive – it shouldn’t just be South Asians eating curries and watching dances. The point is to make it a national festival that everybody looks forward to. It’s the holiday season, so go for that – make it something that excites people. The danger with all these things is that they lose momentum. To keep it fresh and popular we need to raise the bar, make it exciting, make people want to see what’s on the agenda, and take it forward that way. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/07/shutterstockeditorial12129324a-1e62406.jpg" width="1772" height="1181" alt="A family gather together. They are dressed in white robes and the woman is balancing a jug on her head. She is carrying a child. A man next to her is carrying a child on his shoulders" title="A family undertakes a lengthy migration following the partition of India in 1947. Millions of Muslims left India for Pakistan, with Hindus and Sikhs trekking in the opposite direction; perhaps 1 million died (Image by Shutterstock)" /> So it has a value as a springboard for these kinds of conversations, but also as a way of connecting South Asian history to wider society? SB: Absolutely. Far too little is known about South Asian history – which is the history of undivided India to some extent, and our cultures from all these countries that make up the region. Even many South Asians don’t know much about it. SP: I agree. SAHM is also a really important opportunity to unlock those conversations within the community itself. I think that we as a community are not necessarily great at talking about our history, partly because of things that happened within the memory of our grandparents and great-grandparents. SAHM is about having those internal family conversations as well as having conversations on a public scale. Read more | Kavita Puri's hidden histories: "Many south Asian diasporic families don’t know of their First World War links" SM: This idea of inclusion and celebration is a great thing, but sometimes – and we see this with Black History Month – there’s a focus on celebrating certain figures and palatable histories without looking at the dark side of history. There’s a tendency to celebrate South Asians and not criticise their roles in history. Also, a lot of the focus is on India, Pakistan and Bangladesh – places that were part of the British empire. But South Asia is a much broader region than just those places, and that inclusiveness has not yet come through in the events and celebratory elements I’ve seen so far. SB: Absolutely. Very few people in north India know anything about Sri Lanka, for example. The whole region is so vast and so varied that we ourselves don’t know everything about it. As Sumita said, we have a very dark history, too: partition, riots, wars within the region – there are a lot of dark, dark patches for which our own countries are to blame, not just outside forces. SP: This month provides a really good opportunity to celebrate that diversity and to push the idea that the South Asian community is not some kind of monolith. Sometimes I put myself in a category – as ‘British South Asian’ – but what does that mean? There are so many different types of people and different experiences within that. We need to engage with all of those differences, even within the communities. SAHM is still relatively new, so I hope we will see more and more of that kind of diversity and those different types of stories coming through. How can this process work better, to foster research across communities – particularly on migration and movement, a major theme of this year’s SAHM? SP: I’ve been a teacher for 15 years now, and I’ve been very lucky to work in a secondary school in north-west London that is very diverse. My school is so positive about making sure that we share histories that are relevant to our students, so there is a huge amount of South Asian history explored. But that’s been a real journey. Ten years ago, it was just me and my department researching these things on our own, because there weren’t the resources out there. Now I’m really proud to say that I’ve helped write material about a lot of these issues. Just a couple of months ago, a textbook called Asian Empires in the Silk Roads was published [by Oxford University Press], for which I wrote the chapter on Mughal India. I’ve also helped write a textbook about the British empire. So things are definitely changing, and many more resources are available. The problem is that it’s up to individual schools whether they teach the British empire at all, and whether India is part of that story. It’s so important that we don’t teach only the British Raj as South Asian history. Students also love learning about the Mughals, because they are fascinating and dramatic – much more interesting than the Tudors. But I also teach my students about South Asian migration, as well as stories of more modern South Asian people – [Second World War spy] Noor Inayat Khan, for example, and [Sikh princess, suffragette and Queen Victoria’s god-daughter] Sophia Duleep Singh. The big problem is that there’s still little understanding of how much shared history there is between Britain and the subcontinent. If kids are learning about the First and Second World Wars but not hearing about the contributions of Indian soldiers, then that is not telling the full story. Read more | Hakim Adi | “Racism in Britain has a long history – but so does anti-racism” SB: I feel that there is still little knowledge about that topic. During the recent VE Day celebrations, there was only a little mention of how many Indian soldiers played a part. I do understand that time is very limited in a commentary but a few more lines, a little more emphasis, would’ve been great. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/07/GettyImages-1278032407-1db2f2d.jpg" width="1772" height="1181" alt="A group of British Indian soldiers stand and sit around a single chair with a draughts board on it. Two men are playing draughts" title="British Indian Army troops play draughts following evacuation from Dunkirk in 1940. The role of the 2.5 million Indian troops who served in the Second World War is sometimes overlooked (Image by Getty Images)" /> At the front of the procession were the FANYs [First Aid Nursing Yeomanry] – women who also served as secret agents in the Second World War. I would’ve loved to hear that these secret agents came from all parts of the world: Noor Inayat Khan was half Indian, and Krystyna Skarbek was from Poland. The war was fought on the shoulders of the people of the empire, and I think that point should have been raised. More than 2.5 million Indian troops served in the Second World War – the biggest volunteer army in the conflict – and they didn’t merit a single mention at the VE Day concert. So this narrative is still not there – and it needs to be told, to be taught in schools. That is the only way forward. SM: British history itself is South Asian history. It’s not just about the history of the empire, because South Asians have been in Britain since the 17th century. Migration is not just a contemporary phenomenon: in the 19th century, South Asians of all ilks were influencing culture in Britain and working in its port cities. South Asians also went to Mauritius, to Malaysia, to Uganda, to South Africa, to Guyana, to Jamaica, and to other places – the South Asian diaspora has such a vibrant, interesting history. When discussing migration, I’d return to the problem of centrism around India, Bangladesh and Pakistan – there’s so much to say about other parts of the region such as Myanmar (Burma), Sri Lanka, Afghanistan and Nepal. SP: When I teach the transatlantic slave trade, I also speak about indentured labour. Because the root cause of more than a million Indians going to places such as Mauritius was the abolition of slavery. So the histories of the Caribbean, South Asia and Britain all intersect. SM: And of course the history of Windrush, which is relatively well known and taught in schools, is also about Indo-Caribbean people who came over with that generation. Do tensions, such those that arose between India and Pakistan in May, make researching the region’s histories harder? SB: Oh, absolutely. Because the first thing when you have a situation of conflict is that visas get cancelled. So researchers can’t go, academics can’t travel. India cancelled visas for people of Pakistani origin, and the same probably happened for British Indians wanting to travel to Pakistan. So British Asians of Indian or Pakistani origin who want to study [on the subcontinent] will find it difficult to access archives or do any sort of research. That’s the first practical block. Then it spreads to filmmaking and cultural life as well. The minute you have conflict, these barriers go up – filmmakers can’t travel, musicians can’t travel. It doesn’t help anybody. SM: It’s been very difficult over the past few years anyway, with geopolitical tensions in the region, for people with Indian passports to research in Pakistan and vice versa. So the current conflict has only escalated things. It’s important to note that, though these recent conflicts are rooted in present-day issues, they also have longstanding historical reasons. So there’s an opportunity to reiterate and understand the history behind these troubles, especially in Kashmir. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/07/GettyImages-2215785244-c282475.jpg" width="1772" height="1181" alt="An Indian soldier is in the centre of the image, wearing a black mask and green helmet. Behind him, there is a crowd and two Indian flags" title="An Indian soldier stands on alert in Srinagar, Indian-administered Jammu and Kashmir, following the terrorist attack that killed 26 people in Pahalgam in April 2025 (Image by Getty Images)" /> SB: I don’t think people know the real story of what happened in Kashmir – how this line of control was drawn, how the Hindu maharaja went over to India, how the invasion happened, why this conflict started. SM: It’s also coupled with geographical literacy – understanding the geography of the region, Kashmir’s location, the environmental reasons, the water lines and so on. SP: There’s a real absence of understanding of the partition story, of how these borders were drawn. Again, this is a shared history with Britain – the story of partition is a British story as well as a South Asian story. It was framed as a peaceful takeover, which we all know was absolutely not the case. This history shouldn’t be contentious, but it is, because Britain portrayed partition as a peaceful handover, which undermined the reality of the violence and bloodshed that engulfed these new nations in 1947. There’s also been an absence of personal stories about this history because of the horrific things that happened at that time. The personal, the political, the geographical – so many factors involved, which is why this is such a misunderstood history. SB: When the conflict broke out in May, there were ugly scenes outside the Indian High Commission and the Pakistan High Commission. It’s something we absolutely do not need. The South Asian community here should be united rather than divided, when it becomes a law and order problem. Read more | The untold story of India’s WW2 prisoners of war What areas of historical research would you highlight as important today? SM: I’m working on the history of South Asian children and their migration to Britain. This is part of a growing field looking at children in history not just as distant people in the background but as historical actors themselves. I’m exploring the role that young people played, changing society, changing politics. Colleagues are also working on the informal labour of women in housework and homeworking – sewing, childminding, the things that women often do at home that isn’t recorded within formal economic histories – to understand the contribution that South Asian women have made to the economy in Britain, especially women of Pakistani origin in northern England. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/07/GettyImages-2155867340-6eda065.jpg" width="1772" height="1181" alt="A row of South Asian women sit at tables in a factory, using sewing machines. Some of them are looking at their work, while others are looking at the camera" title="Women of South Asian heritage work at a clothing factory in Newcastle, 1968. The contribution of South Asian women to the British economy, particularly those involved in homeworking such as sewing, is now being researched for the first time, reveals Sumita Mukherjee (Image by Getty Images)" /> SB: I would love to see oral histories from earlier generations being recorded. Not enough of this has been done. There was a little documentary recording people who migrated to Britain in the sixties. It was so interesting seeing their lifestyles, how they were so formally dressed at all times; compare it with today, when everyone is so casual, even the new immigrants. These stories tell us so much about how these people came here. I feel more and more that, as we lose that generation, we need to save their stories. I wish they would be recorded on film and audio as much as possible. SP: Oral histories, real personal stories, are so important. I always encourage young people and others to record their family histories – to talk to their grandparents, if they still have them, to record those migration stories. I did that with my granddad: there are so many things I didn’t know about his migration story. A friend of mine, jeweller Anisha Parmar, invites South Asian women to come together and use family jewellery as a way to explore their heritage and their history. It’s been incredible to see young South Asian people delve into their identity and heritage through the medium of gold jewellery in particular. When we think about South Asian items in museums, often we are thinking about beautiful, ornate pieces of jewellery worn by maharajas and royalty. But she’s made more personal connections. We’ve all got such items – I’m wearing my grandma’s bangles right now. SB: The Commonwealth War Graves Commission ordered a report looking at the names of soldiers from India and Africa who, despite a pledge that every soldier who died in the world wars would be commemorated with a headstone, were not recorded in that way. To address that, fantastic work has been done by Greenwich University and the UK Punjab Heritage Association to find the names of soldiers from the Punjab in the First World War, as well as details of regiments, when they joined, if they died. I find that quite exciting: a way of making right something that was wrong – to commemorate some 50,000 Indians whose names were lost. Shalina Patel is a historian, teacher and author. Her first book is The History Lessons (Icon, 2024) Sumita Mukherjee is professor of modern history at the University of Bristol. Her books include Indian Suffragettes (Oxford University Press India, 2018) Shrabani Basu is a historian, journalist and author. Her latest book is The Mystery of the Parsee Lawyer (Bloomsbury, 2021) This article was first published in the August 2025 issue of BBC History Magazine
Suing for equality: how Sarah Mae Flemming began the legal fight against segregation
The year before the arrest of Rosa Parks sparked the Montgomery bus boycott, another black American woman started a legal fight against segregation on public transport. Clive Webb and Tom Adam Davies highlight her role in the civil rights battle
On 2 November 2005, thousands of mourners crowded into the Greater Grace Temple in Detroit to attend the funeral of black American civil rights icon Rosa Parks. Former US president Bill Clinton led the tributes before a congregation that held hands and sang the protest anthem ‘We Shall Overcome’. The story of Rosa Parks and the Montgomery bus boycott in Alabama is familiar yet sometimes misunderstood. Her arrest for refusing to surrender a bus seat in December 1955 followed not the spontaneous action of an apolitical seamstress but a calculated decision by a lifelong activist who, along with other members of the black community, had put increasing pressure on white city leaders to end the daily indignities of segregated bus journeys. Her detention may have been the catalyst for the desegregation of public transport in the South, but other black women before her had also braved similar hurt, humiliation and intimidation. Among them was a woman called Sarah Mae Flemming. In June 1954, Flemming was involved in an incident that is far less celebrated than the Montgomery bus boycott. Yet it was an incident that truly laid the foundation for the eventual overturning of Jim Crow laws as applied to public transport. Flemming was a child of the Great Depression, one of seven children raised by a farming couple whose own parents had been enslaved. Born on 28 June 1933, she grew up alongside her siblings in a busy household near Eastover, South Carolina, a small community some 20 miles south-east of the state capital, Columbia. After graduating from high school, Flemming worked briefly for a relative in Ohio before returning to South Carolina to help support her family, taking a position as a maid for white residents in one of Columbia’s affluent suburbs. Read more | Emmett Till: the murder that reshaped the American civil rights movement The day that changed her life, 22 June 1954, started much as any other: she boarded a bus to work. At first there was standing room only, until a seat was vacated by a departing white passenger. When Flemming took the seat, however, the driver shouted at her to move. According to contentious evidence he gave later in court, she had breached the ‘colour line’ – the long-standing system of racial segregation enforced by so-called Jim Crow laws – by sitting in front of two white women. Embarrassed, Flemming decided that she would walk the remaining 2 miles to work, and pulled the cord for the next stop. At that time, black Americans were required to enter and leave buses by the rear door – but the aisle was too crowded, so she tried to follow white passengers through the front exit. The driver stood in her way, then struck her in the stomach. Flemming was forced to shuffle through the rear door, and from there to a hospital. Worse than the pain from the punch was the wound to her dignity. From insult, opportunity The hurt and humiliation of one young woman did, though, present an opportunity to the broader black community. Just a month earlier, the United States Supreme Court had reached a landmark decision in the case of Brown v Board of Education of Topeka, outlawing school segregation. To Modjeska Monteith Simkins, the secretary of the South Carolina branch of the NAACP – the national organisation founded in 1909 to fight for civil rights for people of colour – Flemming’s mistreatment presented a chance to test whether that ruling also applied to public transport. Flemming agreed to help, resolving to challenge Jim Crow laws despite the risks to which she would be exposed. Simkins hired white lawyer Philip Wittenberg, who filed a suit accusing the bus company of having violated Flemming’s right to the full protection of the law under the Fourteenth Amendment to the US Constitution. He sought $25,000 in damages. The legal process in Flemming v South Carolina Electric and Gas Company (who operated the bus) was convoluted and slow. District Court Judge George Bell Timmerman, a staunch segregationist, dismissed the case on the grounds that the Brown decision applied only to schools and not to public transport. The NAACP assisted with an appeal to the US Fourth Circuit Court, which deemed that the Brown decision applied to all aspects of public life – and that the Flemming case must proceed to trial. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/07/GettyImages-838649138-ac65a26.jpg" width="620" height="413" alt="Four men stand in a line, holding up a poster that reads "Stamp out Mississippi-ism! Join NAACP"" title="NAACP leaders hold a poster against racial bias in Mississippi at the peak of the civil rights struggle in the mid-1950s – a battle involving countless ordinary black people (Image by Getty Images)" /> Civil rights activists sensed that they were on the verge of a breakthrough – a perception sharpened when, in April 1956, the Supreme Court refused to hear an appeal from the bus company. NAACP executive secretary Roy Wilkins saw the decision as the end of bus segregation, telling reporters: “Now that the Supreme Court has spoken with clarity, we are hopeful that the majority of communities throughout the South will fall in line.” There seemed good reason for such optimism. Within a day, transit companies in 13 cities across the region had announced the desegregation of their buses. That included Montgomery City Lines, which instructed its drivers not to enforce segregated seating, an action blocked when city officials secured a court injunction. Read more | How did the US civil rights movement influence Britain? Yet the Flemming case did not win the fight against the colour line in Montgomery – where the boycott was ongoing, and would continue for over a year – or elsewhere. Both sides in the civil rights struggle soon realised that the Supreme Court had not actually determined whether segregated busing was unconstitutional, only that it would not consider an appeal until the lower court had actually heard the case. Battle lines in Montgomery remained drawn: white city leaders secured an injunction that stopped the bus company desegregating, while black activists persevered with their boycott. “Jim Crow Dies Hard,” affirmed a headline in the Washington Post. Proving the point, when the Flemming case returned to the district court in June 1956, Judge Timmerman dismissed it a second time. Not until June 1957, following a successful appeal by Flemming’s lawyers, did the case finally convene. It was not worth the wait. An entirely white male jury took only 30 minutes to decide against the plaintiff. Serving a greater good Flemming had lost the will to fight. Rather than remain involved in the escalating civil rights struggle, she retreated into the privacy of family life, raising three children with her husband, whom she married while the case was ongoing. “As for myself,” she informed the press, “I never rode a city bus since they put me off and I never will again.” Her own battle had ended in defeat, but Flemming had contributed to the broader triumph of civil rights activists. In February 1956, lawyers filed suit on behalf of four black female plaintiffs who had been mistreated on Montgomery buses. Four months later, a district court ruled in their favour, striking down bus segregation. In November, the US Supreme Court affirmed the decision in the case of Browder v Gayle. A year after it had begun, the organisers of the Montgomery bus boycott had won a decisive victory. It is not known whether Flemming was even aware of the fact, but the judges who ruled that segregated busing was unconstitutional cited as precedent the appeal court ruling in her case that ‘separate but equal’ no longer had any basis in law. Flemming did not receive justice, but her fight through the courts had served an even greater good. Sarah Mae Flemming lived the rest of her life, away from the spotlight, in Eastover with her husband and their three children until her untimely death on 16 June 1993, aged just 59. By then, Rosa Parks had long overshadowed her – a situation compounded by the fact that Flemming never spoke publicly about her contribution to the civil rights cause. Barely a footnote in histories of the movement written during her lifetime, her story has belatedly been rediscovered. Today, locals and visitors to downtown Columbia can stroll along Sarah Mae Flemming Way to see the impressive mural that honours her memory. It is a reminder that, though charismatic civil rights leaders such as Martin Luther King Jr and Malcolm X became the focus of most attention, the fight for racial equality was as much – if not more – about ordinary people such as Flemming performing extraordinary acts of courage. Clive Webb and Tom Adam Davies are, respectively, professor and associate professor of American history at the University of Sussex This article was first published in the July 2025 issue of BBC History Magazine
Kavita Puri's hidden histories: "Samba schools used the carnival to foreground overlooked histories"
Kavita Puri on the important role of carnivals in remembering neglected histories
I was recently in Rio de Janeiro, in a warehouse on the outskirts of the city, admiring some of the brightly coloured floats that had featured in this year’s world-famous carnival. Each spring, just before the start of Lent, hundreds of thousands of people attend the parades in the city’s Sambadrome stadium and enjoy watching the floats. Like pieces of art many metres high, they are designed and intricately handmade in Rio’s numerous escolas de samba (samba schools), each strongly identified with a local neighbourhood. The schools are organised into leagues for the carnival, during which they compete for the prestigious design award. Pre-Lenten festivities in Brazil began in the early 18th century, during the Portuguese colonial era. The Catholic influence is evident in the name of the event, which is believed to derive from the Latin carnem vale (farewell to meat) or carnem levare (remove meat), referring to the 40-day period of abstinence leading up to Easter. It’s said that the earliest form of the festivities in Brazil evolved from the pre-Lenten Entrudo, celebrated by immigrants from other Portuguese colonies on the Azores, Madeira and Cabo Verde. During that festival, people soaked each other with buckets of water and hurled mud and food, wreaking cheery mayhem that often degenerated into street brawls. Read more | Brazil: a society shaped by slavery In the 19th century, more organised parades attracted elite participants: even the Portuguese emperor joined in the celebrations, together with aristocrats wearing masks and extravagant costumes. Carnival balls were arranged, with music from Europe such as polkas and waltzes becoming popular. By the middle of that century, street parades with horse-drawn floats and military bands had become the focal points. It wasn’t until the early 20th century that samba – the music and dance style most strongly associated with carnival today – was developed by Afro-Brazilians whose ancestors had been transported to South America, many of them enslaved, over the preceding centuries. Brazil declared independence from Portugal in 1822, but slavery was not abolished there until 1888 – more than 65 years later. One of the first escolas de samba was established in 1928 in the barrio (district) of Mangueira, a little west of the city’s historic centre. More soon sprang up, enjoying strong community links – particularly in the poorer favelas (shanty towns), where they offered people a way to come together and organise themselves while avoiding police oppression. The schools’ theme songs and floats became outlets for political expression, voicing concerns about dictatorship, hunger, the environment, education – and, perhaps most tellingly, the Afro-Brazilian experience, social inequalities and indigenous rights. The schools have also used appearances in the competition – now held in the Sambadrome stadium built for the purpose in 1984 – to foreground overlooked histories. Last year, the Portela school highlighted the extraordinary story of Luíz Gama. Born in 1830 to a trafficked African woman, he escaped enslavement and went on to become a lawyer (in fact, he is considered by many to be Brazil’s first black lawyer) and a leading abolitionist. His story was retold through four incarnations of his figure on a float. Watched live by tens of thousands of spectators in the Sambadrome and broadcast around the country, it introduced him to a vast new audience. Read more | Kavita Puri's hidden histories: "We mustn’t overlook the toll of surfacing traumatic histories" The music, dance, costumes and extraordinary floats of carnival represent a huge source of local pride. The schools spend much of each year raising money, working in the communities, and planning and preparing for the next competition. Though a joyous and hugely fun event for all, Rio’s carnival plays an important role in highlighting long-neglected stories, histories and issues. This column was first published in the June 2025 issue of BBC History Magazine
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
My history hero: Pauline Black chooses Billie Holiday (1915–59)
Singer, actor, author and filmmaker Pauline Black chooses Billie Holiday as a history hero
In profile Billie Holiday, born into poverty in Philadelphia as Eleanora Fagan, was an American jazz and swing singer. In 1939, she recorded the famous protest song ‘Strange Fruit’, lamenting black lynchings. In 1999, Time magazine named the song – also performed by luminaries ranging from Nina Simone to Jeff Buckley – as ‘Best Song of the Century’. After becoming dependent on drugs and alcohol, her health deteriorated. She died from pulmonary oedema and heart failure caused by cirrhosis of the liver aged just 44. When did you first hear about Holiday? I was studying to be a radiographer in my twenties when a fellow student mentioned Billie. I bought a Billie Holiday record that same day, and I’ve been a fan ever since. What kind of woman was she? Some people see her as a victim, hounded by the FBI over her drug use; others prefer to see her as a political activist who sang one of the first songs about a lynching. You have to view her drug and alcohol use in the context of her turbulent childhood. Her mother was just a teenager when she gave birth to Billie, who was raped as a child, sent to a Catholic reform school for girls and subsequently became a sex worker. What made her a hero? Despite her hellish childhood, she had huge strength of character, and went on to achieve great success and critical acclaim. Her voice is a bit Marmite: you either like it or you don’t. I loved it from the start – it pushed all my buttons – and I wasn’t the only one who was smitten. Frank Sinatra used to go to listen to her sing – and his whole phrasing, which lagged behind the beat, owed a great debt to her melancholic, jazzy vocal style. What was her finest hour? Performing ‘Strange Fruit’ – a riposte to racist America that would ring down the years – for the first time at Café Society, New York City’s first integrated nightclub, in 1939. She ended her set with that song and, when she’d finished and everybody began clapping, she just walked off stage. There was no coming back for an encore. On the podcast | Black history episodes Sadly, she was persecuted by the FBI for the rest of her life – the Bureau even tried to arrest her on her deathbed! Following her 1947 arrest and imprisonment for possession of narcotics, her New York ‘Cabaret Card’ was taken away, preventing her from working anywhere in the city that sold alcohol. Is there anything that you don’t particularly admire about her? Her choice of men sucked. She was quite emotionally needy, and most of the men in her life abused her physically, bled her dry financially or were ‘pushers’, keeping her drugged up. Can you see any parallels between her life and your own? We were both female singers of colour in times of racial prejudice – Britain in the late 1970s, in my case. I once played her on stage at the Tricycle Theatre, and she also influenced me in wanting to make anti-racist music, albeit in the ska/2-tone style. What would you ask Holiday if you could meet her? To sing the jazz classic ‘Fine and Mellow’, lamenting her treatment at the hands of her ‘man’, just for me. Pauline Black OBE is the singer of ska band The Selecter, who are playing at Glastonbury on 29 June. Her documentary Pauline Black: A 2-Tone Story is streaming on Sky Arts, Freeview and NOW. This article was first published in the July 2025 issue of BBC History Magazine
"These women transformed his understanding of the world": making Malcolm X
Malcolm X became one of the most influential leaders in the US civil rights movement – thanks largely, explains Ashley D Farmer, to the women who shaped his life and ideas
On a balmy spring evening in Omaha, Nebraska, Louise Little answered a knock at the door. She must have been terrified when she opened it and saw several knights of the Ku Klux Klan on horseback, demanding that she produce her husband at once. Louise knew she was in trouble. She was all alone save her three children – Wilfred, Hilda, and Philbert – and pregnant with her fourth child, Malcolm. But as the Klansmen brandished their guns, Louise stood her ground. She refused to let them see fear in her eyes or tell them her husband’s whereabouts. In the end, the men left with a threat on their lips as they rode off into the night. Such moments were par for the course for Louise Little, the first of many black women who taught, mentored and shaped the man now known as Malcolm X. Malcolm was born 100 years ago – on 19 May 1925, in Omaha. He was Grenadian-born Louise and Georgia-born Earl Little’s fourth child together. It is easy to see why Earl was smitten with Malcolm’s mother: Louise had travelled extensively, she spoke multiple languages and she was politically engaged. Malcolm’s parents met in Montreal, Canada at a gathering of Marcus Garvey’s Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA). A black nationalist from Jamaica, Garvey captured the black masses with his calls for race pride, and the right for black people all over the world to control their communities and determine their futures. The pair married in 1919, relocated briefly to Philadelphia and then moved to Omaha. By the time Malcolm was born, the Littles were well-known nationalist organisers in the area. Earl was the president of the local chapter of the UNIA, while Louise served as its secretary, managing memberships and writing for the UNIA’s newspaper, The Negro World. Childhood tragedies The couple worked hard to survive during Jim Crow – the state-sponsored racial caste system that deployed disenfranchisement, racial violence and segregation laws to make black people second-class citizens in almost every walk of life. Louise and Earl raised their children as Garveyites, eventually moving to Lansing, Michigan in search of a better life and a bigger black nationalist community. Life came to a screeching halt for six-year-old Malcolm when his father, Earl, announced he was going into town on 29 September 1931. It wasn’t uncommon for Earl to go out like this, but this time Louise had a gnawing feeling that white supremacists were gunning for her husband more than usual. She begged him not to go. But Earl wouldn’t listen. Later that night, Lansing police confirmed her fears. Earl was dead. The officers claimed that Earl had slipped and fallen on the tracks and a streetcar had run him over. But Malcolm claimed the KKK was at fault. They had long wanted his nationalist father dead. Whatever the cause of Earl’s death, Louise was now left to raise their seven children alone. She got by, at first, by following Garvey’s ideals. Grieving as she was, Malcolm’s mother read to him from The Negro World, modelled black economic independence by shopping at black-owned businesses, and fostered his interest in the global black diaspora. Louise Little was Malcolm’s earliest teacher and laid the foundation for him to become one of the greatest black nationalist leaders of the 20th century. But Louise’s life lessons were cut short. Years into the Great Depression, and with too many children to feed, Malcolm’s mother started to fall apart. In December 1939, doctors declared Louise insane and sent her to a mental hospital in Kalamazoo. The state placed the Little children in foster care and sent Malcolm to a juvenile home in the mostly white town of Mason, Michigan. By his own account, Malcolm thrived there, earning good grades and integrating into his school community. But a chance encounter with his half-sister, Ella Collins, changed the trajectory of his life. Inspirational sister Ella, who was one of Earl’s children from his first marriage, visited Malcolm and her other half-siblings when he was a young teen. Malcolm was impressed. “[Ella was] the first really proud black woman I had ever seen,” he recalled in his autobiography. “Ella wasn’t just black, but like our father she was jet black. The way she sat, moved, talked, did everything, bespoke of somebody who did and got exactly what she wanted.” Ella and her husband, Kenneth Collins, adopted Malcolm when he was 15 years old, and welcomed him into their home in Roxbury, the black part of Boston. “No physical move in my life,” Malcolm noted of his relocation in 1941, was “more pivotal or profound in its repercussions. All praise is due to Allah that I went to Boston when I did.” For better or worse, the move opened up a whole new world for Malcolm. Ella did her best to keep Malcolm on the straight and narrow, but the city life was too much of a draw. It didn’t take long for him to join up with the wrong crowd. Malcolm, or ‘Detroit Red’ as he was known on Roxbury’s streets, became part of a five-person larceny ring that plundered its way through jewellery stores and pawn shops across the city. After several close calls, the police finally nabbed the quartet. Read more | How did the US civil rights movement influence Britain? His sisters were Malcolm’s steadying force while he was behind bars. Ella was one of Malcolm’s first and only visitors at the Charlestown State Prison in 1946, where the 20-year-old started his 10-year sentence for burglary. But it was his older sister, Hilda, who prompted the despondent Malcolm to change course. Frustrated, if not embarrassed, by his turn toward crime, Hilda suggested that Malcolm clean up his act while behind bars. He could start by improving his grammar and reading comprehension, she suggested, since letter writing was his only real connection with the outside world. “I did begin a correspondence course in English,” Malcolm recalled after Hilda admonished him. This became the gateway to the world of books. Soon Malcolm started devouring any publication he could get his hands on behind bars, everything from Shakespeare to Asian history. Because of his sister’s prompting, Malcolm Little was on his way to becoming one of the foremost thinkers of the 20th century. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/06/GettyImages-517350846-CMYK-26622e8.jpg" width="4271" height="2845" alt="A mugshot of Malcolm X as a young man. He wears a trilby hat and looks directly into the camera with a serious expression on his face" title="Mugshots of Malcolm, 1944. On this occasion, he was sentenced to four months in jail following a charge of larceny" /> Perusing books on all sorts of subjects helped open Malcolm’s mind to the Nation of Islam (NOI). While Malcolm was in prison, Ella, along with his older brothers, Wilfred and Philbert, joined the religious organisation that Wallace Fard Muhammad had started in 1930 in Detroit. By the time they joined the Nation, it had a new leader: Elijah Muhammad. Nevertheless, its goals were the same: to “teach the downtrodden and defenceless black people a thorough knowledge of God and of themselves”, worship Allah, and support black nationalist principles such as black political and economic independence. The NOI made sense to Malcolm – who recognised the echoes of Garveyism in the group’s message. By the time he got out of prison in August 1952, he had joined the NOI and changed his name to Malcolm X. Marriage and family Four years later, Malcolm found a life companion in another Nation follower. Betty Dean Sanders grew up in Detroit and attended the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama before relocating to New York to study nursing at Brooklyn State College. At the urging of other nursing students, Betty began attending NOI meetings. She was hesitant at first. Betty had grown up in a loving household that valued women’s independence and the Christian faith. How could she convert to Islam and live by its mandates – everything from its strict dietary restrictions to its conservative gender roles? Yet Nation leaders’ analysis of race relations resonated with the 22-year-old girl who had been to the Deep South and witnessed Jim Crow first-hand. Betty converted in 1956 and married Malcolm X on 14 January 1958, the same day that she received her nursing licence. Betty X, as she was now known, had more formal education than most in her NOI circles. She wanted to work, but Malcolm, who at the time mostly thought of women as helpmates to men, forbade it. So Betty asserted her know-how in other ways. To be sure, she worked hard to raise their six daughters, but she also helped to facilitate Malcolm’s career. When she wasn’t answering phones and managing his schedule, Betty hosted movement luminaries at the couple’s home and offered her opinion on everything from US race relations to world events. After their guests left and Malcolm laid his head down at night, he discussed the movement and his role in it with her. She offered insights and softly steered him as he navigated the turbulent waters of the early 1960s. With Betty by his side, Malcolm became one of the most influential people in the country. He kept up a gruelling schedule, speaking on college campuses and at mosques across the country, sparring with white leaders and journalists, and mobilising Nation members whenever police or politicians attacked one of their own. No matter their political affiliation, activists across the black freedom movement had to concede that Malcolm was one of their biggest and brightest stars. But many wanted to see him stretch politically, to move beyond the Nation of Islam. Movement leaders such as Audley Moore said as much. Moore met Malcolm at an open-air meeting in Harlem in the 1950s. He immediately captivated her with his ability to rouse crowds to black nationalist action, something she hadn’t seen since she had come face-to-face with Garvey in the 1920s. Captivated by Garvey’s message, a 25-year-old Moore had joined the UNIA then and there, and spent the next seven decades building the black nationalist movement in America. So influential was she in shaping modern black nationalism that Moore became known as the “Queen Mother” of the movement and activists came to her house to learn at her feet. Malcolm was one of them. In the early 1960s, Moore’s West Philadelphia home served as a nationalist training ground of sorts – a place where young and old organisers alike came to seek her counsel. Malcolm stopped in when he was in town and Moore jumped at the chance to shape his thinking. She wanted him to embrace the movement for reparations for black Americans that she began in the 1950s and to adopt a more global approach to black liberation – one that included the struggles that African countries were waging against their colonial oppressors. It didn’t take long for Moore to see her influence in his public remarks. “If I take the wages of everyone here, individually it means nothing,” Malcolm told an audience at Michigan State University in 1963. “But collectively all of the earning power or wages that you earned in one week would make me wealthy. And if I could collect it for a year, I’d be rich beyond dreams.” Magnify that by the millions of black people whose wealth and wages had been stolen for centuries, and “You’ll see how this country got so rich so fast,” he continued, laying the groundwork for his audience to understand the argument for reparations. Still, Malcolm tried to remain a dutiful follower of Elijah Muhammad and the Nation. But he couldn’t ignore the rumours. Word on the street was that the NOI leader had fathered several children out of wedlock – a sin in the eyes of the Nation. Malcolm felt betrayed by his mentor. If this were not enough, after Malcolm brazenly remarked that John F Kennedy’s November 1963 assassination was a case of “the chickens coming home to roost”, Muhammad silenced him. By early 1964, it was time for Malcolm to part ways both with his beloved leader and the organisation that shaped him. Black women stepped in to fill the void. In April 1964, Malcolm left for a five-week trip that his sister Ella funded, during which he visited Africa and the Middle East, and made the pilgrimage to Mecca. It transformed Malcolm’s life. He gained a new understanding of Islam outside of the Nation and a new sense of self. He changed his name to El-Hajj Malik El Shabazz. Read more | Emmett Till: the murder that reshaped the American civil rights movement Globetrotting exchanges While abroad, Malcolm stopped in Ghana. The west African country had gained its independence from Britain in 1957 and its president, Kwame Nkrumah, welcomed black Americans to the country. Several black women – including writer Maya Angelou, long-time labour organiser Vicki Garvin, and WEB Du Bois’ wife, Shirley Graham – who were temporarily residing there formed the ‘Malcolm X Committee’ to welcome the activist. Committee members planned dinners to discuss foreign policy, introduced Malcolm to Nkrumah, and facilitated conversations between Malcolm and diplomats from around the world. These women transformed his understanding of the world and their place in it. When he proclaimed that “the most disrespected person in America is the black woman” that same year, he based these claims not only on his time with Betty but also on his conversations with these women. These black female activists also helped Malcolm conclude that the “single worst mistake of the American black organisations and their leaders” was that they “failed to establish direct brotherhood lines of communication” with independent black nations. Malcolm vowed to right this wrong when he returned to the US by creating the Organization of Afro-American Unity (OAAU). <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/06/2AW1FX0-b098ca4.jpg" width="2556" height="1703" alt="The jazz singer and songwriter Abbey Lincoln, pictured here in concert in 1966, was a key figure in the Organization of Afro-American Unity" title="The jazz singer and songwriter Abbey Lincoln, pictured here in concert in 1966, was a key figure in the Organization of Afro-American Unity" /> Malcolm, as most still knew him, modelled the OAAU after the Organisation of African Unity, a conglomeration of African nations founded in 1963 to develop a unified voice and agenda for the continent. His version would align the millions of black Americans with African nations to foster global black liberation. However, he had trouble getting the OAAU off the ground. Days before he was set to debut the organisation, Malcolm wrote to Sara Mitchell, a young woman he had met amid his Harlem organising. He asked her to come to the meeting and offer her “objective analysis of [her] impressions of what we are trying to do, including [her] suggestions as to how we can do better”. Mitchell obliged, offering such trenchant analysis that Malcolm invited her to help write the aims and objectives of the organisation and develop its inner workings. Read more | From Rosa Parks to Martin Luther King: the boycott that inspired the dream Mitchell shaped the scope and substance of the group, calling on Malcolm to abandon the tagline “By any means necessary” and instead to adopt a broader one, “Independence, Justice, and Prosperity”, in order to bring more people into the group. Other capable women, such as longtime organiser Lynne Shifflett, served as the OAAU’s executive secretary. Jazz singer Abbey Lincoln joined as the provisional director of the organisation. Public assassination After some organisational retooling, Malcolm planned to address these women and other members of the OAAU on 21 February 1965 in Harlem’s Audubon Ballroom. Yet no sooner had he stepped onto the stage than NOI members gunned him down in front of a pregnant Betty and three of his four daughters. Betty and Ella tried to carry on the organisation in the aftermath, with an office filled with women running its daily operations. But it floundered without its leader. Though short-lived, the OAAU exemplified Malcolm’s political values on all fronts. His undying pursuit of black freedom; his ability to evolve in his thinking about how to achieve this; and his understanding that black women were vital to the cause. Yet this is not the Malcolm most remember. Most conjure up soundbites of him throwing the second punch as it were: his labelling of the white man as “the devil” and his support of “violence in self-defence”. Further juxtaposed to Dr Martin Luther King Jr, these and other quips helped the press and popular culture frame Malcolm as a radical and hateful man. Malcolm also said: “Dr King wants the same thing I want. Freedom.” Despite this, even today, many see him as King’s and the civil rights movement’s ‘evil twin’. Lost in this legacy is the fact that white supremacists threw the first punch. Throughout his short life, Malcolm witnessed the black folks around him endure extreme vigilante violence, irrepressible racism and seemingly endless sexism. His goal was to try to offer them another viable path to freedom beyond integration. On the 100th anniversary of his birth and the 60th anniversary of his death, it is just as important to remember that this is the true legacy of Malcolm X – as well as the many female teachers, mentors, lovers and friends who helped make it possible. Timeline: Becoming X 10 key milestones in the life of the influential US black nationalist 19 May 1925 Malcolm Little is born in Omaha, Nebraska, the fourth child of Grenada-born Louise and Georgia-born Earl 29 September 1931 Malcolm‘s father, Earl, dies after being hit by a streetcar in Lansing, Michigan. Malcolm comes to believe that white supremacists were responsible December 1939 After years of hardship raising seven children alone, Malcolm‘s mother, Louise, is sent to a psychiatric hospital. The children are placed in foster care 1941 Malcolm is adopted by his half-sister Ella Collins, and moves to Roxbury, a black neighbourhood in Boston, to live with her family 1946 Malcolm begins a 10-year sentence for burglary at Charlestown State Prison in Boston. There, he resumes his education and devours a range of books, opening his mind to ideas of black nationalism August 1952 Malcolm is released from prison. Having joined the Nation of Islam, the 27-year-old changes his name to Malcolm X 14 January 1958 Malcolm marries 22-year-old nurse Betty Dean Sanders. Alongside raising their six daughters, she nurtures and shapes her husband‘s career: speaking, writing and advocating for black nationalism April 1964 After becoming disillusioned with the Nation of Islam‘s leader, Malcolm travels to Africa and the Middle East, completing his Hajj (pilgrimage to Mecca) and taking the name El-Hajj Malik El Shabazz 28 June 1964 Having met Ghana‘s first postcolonial leader, Kwame Nkrumah, Malcolm founds the secular Organization of Afro-American Unity (OAAU). He aims to attract more members, including women, by adopting a broader approach 21 February 1965 Preparing to address OAAU members at the Audubon Ballroom in Washington Heights, New York City, Malcolm X is shot dead by an assassin angry at his criticism of the Nation of Islam and its leader Ashley D Farmer is an associate professor in the Departments of History & African and African Diaspora Studies at the University of Texas at Austin
Robert Wedderburn: the ‘notorious firebrand’ who campaigned against slavery
While most British radicals fought for the rights of the exploited white working class, one man saw such rights as entwined with those of enslaved black workers. Ryan Hanley tells the story of the ‘notorious firebrand’ who campaigned against slavery
One October evening in 1809, Robert Wedderburn was walking through London, one child asleep in his arms and his daughter beside him, when he saw a gang of about 20 drunks encircling a young man near his home on Peter Street, St Giles. Things were getting hairy; it was clear the man was in danger. Wedderburn tried to pull him away from the gang peacefully, but it was no good. If he wanted to help, he’d have to get his hands dirty. He handed the sleeping child to his daughter, took off his coat and “said he would fight one or two of them at a time”. Alas, they all set upon him at once and beat him with thick walking sticks. He might have died then and there outside his house, in front of his children, if a soldier had not happened by. But that was Wedderburn: he never could walk away from a fight – all the more so when the odds were stacked against him. When the gang members were rounded up and brought before the magistrates, Wedderburn was the chief witness for the prosecution. A journalist for The Star, hanging around the courts looking for a story, noted that “the witness having betrayed much violence of temper, during his cross-examination, was reprimanded by the court”. That, too, was typical of the man who became a leader in London’s working-class radical underworld. Read more | Are black histories still being overlooked? It is easy to see why Wedderburn had a problem with authority. Born in Jamaica in the early 1760s, he gained his most important life lessons from the rebellious black women in his life, notably his mother, Rosanna, and grandmother, Amy. His mother had been a ladies’ maid until his father, the Scottish planter James Wedderburn, had purchased her, as Robert later put it, “for purposes of lust”. James abused his legal status as the ‘owner’ of this beautiful and accomplished woman to try to compel her into a consensual relationship. She did bear at least two of his children but loathed her captor, and was not shy about showing it. Rosanna made James’s life such a misery that he eventually sold her on; he also signed manumission papers granting freedom to their sons, Robert and James Jr. That was lesson one: by being obstinate and difficult, and not shying away from confrontation, even apparently powerless people could negotiate a change in their circumstances and secure a better life for their children. Robert was sent to Kingston to be raised by his maternal grandmother, Amy. She was reputed to be an Obeah woman – a healer and spiritual guide with the power to communicate with spirits, hence her nickname, ‘Talkee Amy’. Wedderburn himself had no time for mysticism, leaving superstition to “silly Europeans”. But he always remembered that Amy’s ‘owner’, a man she had cared for when he was a child, whipped her mercilessly under suspicion of bewitching his father’s smuggling ship and causing him to be captured by the Spanish. That scene – a young man brutally beating a defenceless old woman accused of witchcraft and facing no repercussions – was seared into the young Wedderburn’s memory. Here was lesson two: he would never accede to the ‘legitimate authority’ of either religion or law – two means used by the powerful to justify trampling on the powerless. Listen | Gretchen Gerzina discovers the story of a forgotten revolutionary, Robert Wedderburn, in BBC Radio 4's Britain's Black Past Working-class insurrectionary Wedderburn worked as a millwright, a sailor and a soldier before crossing the Atlantic and forging a career as a tailor in England. In 1813, he was implicated in a scam involving pilfering excess fabric from the production of military uniforms. He escaped conviction partly because tailors were a notoriously tight-knit group, and prosecutors could find no one willing to inform on their brother tradesmen. It was probably through his trade club that Wedderburn first got into radical politics. Mentored by the renowned radical polymath Thomas Spence, he surged to the forefront of London’s militant political scene, rabble-rousing in smoky pub back rooms and setting the world to rights. By the end of the 1810s, Wedderburn was publishing pamphlets and running his own debate club, the infamous ‘Temple of Sedition’ at a chapel in Hopkins Street, Soho. Listen | Black British history: everything you wanted to know One of the most distinctive things about Wedderburn’s politics was his ability to see the working-class struggle in global perspective. Most radicals of his generation were fixated on Britain: how to improve conditions for British workers, how to reform the British parliament, how to save the children of the British poor from the factories. Wedderburn addressed all of these issues, but also saw the cause of exploited white workers in Britain as inextricably entwined with that of enslaved black workers in the Caribbean and Africa. As he asked his predominately white readership in 1816, “should the receivers and stealers of Africans become rich, and buy one of those seats in the House of Commons, which is sold at noon-day, ought they to be called the representative of a free people? Ought they to be obeyed, when there is an opportunity to oppose with success?” Read more | Abolition in Britain: the link between slavery and the British national identity He even went so far as to encourage enslaved people to rise up and kill their ‘masters’, calling to mind the successful insurrection that led to the establishment of the free black nation of Haiti in the former French colony of Saint Domingue: “Prepare for flight, ye planters, for the fate of St Domingo awaits you,” he wrote. “O ye planters, you know this has been done; the cause which produced former bloodshed still remains – of necessity similar effects must take place.” No other British abolitionist had previously been so bold as to suggest that the enslaved should take their freedom for themselves. Such hot rhetoric about rebellion in the empire was alarming for the Home Office, increasingly paranoid about the rise of all forms of radicalism during the bitter recession that followed the Napoleonic Wars. But Wedderburn’s domestic politics were what really landed him in hot water. At a debate in 1819, he proclaimed that the Prince Regent deserved to die for failing to protect his subjects, shouting: “My motto is assassinate stab in the dark.” He had already made a name for himself and, his actions reported by several government spies, came under the unforgiving scrutiny of the very highest ranks of the British establishment. In August 1819, the home secretary, Lord Sidmouth, personally wrote to the Prince Regent about “a man of the name of Wedderburne, a notorious firebrand”, reassuring the future George IV that the troublemaker would soon be arrested. In February 1820, Wedderburn was convicted of seditious blasphemy for one of his Hopkins Street speeches, and served two years in Dorchester Jail. Listen | The children who fought for the abolition of slavery Radical abolitionist Prison proved extremely hard for Wedderburn. His hypervisibility as a black man, as well as his notoriety as an enemy of the state, meant that he was singled out for especially harsh treatment by the guards at Dorchester. After his release, Wedderburn’s life was marked by a steady decline into destitution and vice, including multiple convictions related to running brothels. Yet Wedderburn remained committed to the abolition of slavery. In 1824, he wrote his most famous text, The Horrors of Slavery, in which he described the injustices faced by his mother and grandmother. He wrote another anti-slavery tract, An Address to Lord Brougham and Vaux, from a jail cell in 1831. When he died in the winter of 1834–35, Wedderburn left behind some of the most uncompromising anti-slavery and anti-racist writing of the 19th century. Despite every conceivable disadvantage in life, he led the vanguard of the struggle for workers’ rights across the empire, regardless of colour or creed. At its most utopian, his work dared readers to imagine a world in which solidarity, not profit or self-interest, could determine the course of history. Read more | David Olusoga: "Thousands of Britons opposed abolition – because they owned slaves" Wedderburn’s final descent into criminality and vice forms a bitter coda to a grittily inspiring story, but in his final year he did at least get to see one of his cherished dreams become a reality. On 1 August 1834, after years of uprisings in the Caribbean and activism in Britain, the enslaved celebrated the first day of their legal freedom. Among them were several members of Wedderburn’s immediate family. He might have derived some satisfaction from knowing that – though he also would have understood that legal emancipation was only the first step. The fight for equality was just beginning. Read more | Black Victorians: the hidden Britons who helped shape the 19th century Ryan Hanley is a senior lecturer at the University of Exeter, and author of Robert Wedderburn: British Insurrectionary, Jamaican Abolitionist (Yale University Press, 2025). This article was first published in the April 2025 issue of BBC History Magazine