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The SAS played a vital role in defeating Hitler – so why did Britain disband them?
Britain’s War Office thanked the SAS for its remarkable efforts in WW2 by abolishing it – yet soon realised the error of its ways. Gavin Mortimer tells the story of how the elite unit reinvented itself to confront the challenges of the postwar world
“Light-hearted banditry”, “ruthless pirating”, a “phantom army” – it’s fair to say that the Special Air Service (SAS) didn’t always attract the most complimentary headlines. In the white heat of the Second World War, when this and other British special forces achieved unlikely successes through a series of daring raids, disparaging press reports could be discarded as merely tomorrow’s chip paper. Nonetheless, they fuelled the impression that the SAS operated outside the rules of the regular British army, and were used as ammunition by some who aimed to whip special forces into line – or even shut them down altogether. That threat became a reality after the conflict ended. David Stirling, the founder of the SAS, coined a description – “freemasons of mediocrity” – for a certain kind of staff officer who looked upon his men with suspicion and, in some cases, hostility. These ‘freemasons’ regarded the SAS and other irregular outfits – the Long Range Desert Group and the Chindits – at best as private armies, at worst “café gangsters”. This view extended to the Special Boat Squadron (SBS), which spent the spring of 1944 waging a bloody guerrilla campaign in the Aegean to tie down German troops ahead of the invasion of France. Its actions prompted a sharp exchange between Winston Churchill and Simon Wingfield Digby, the Conservative MP for West Dorset. “Is it true, Mr prime minister,” enquired Wingfield Digby, “that there is a body of men out in the Aegean Islands, fighting under the Union Flag, that are nothing short of being a band of murderous, renegade cut-throats?” “If you do not take your seat and keep quiet, I will send you out to join them,” retorted Churchill. One could argue that Churchill was the founding father of Britain’s special forces. It was he, shortly after coming to office in May 1940, who instructed the formation of a commando force to launch a “vigorous, enterprising and ceaseless offensive” against the Axis. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/01/GettyImages-106756195webready-3acc480-e1769169656193.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="Winston Churchill with wife, Clementine, and their son Randolph, in 1940. Randolph served briefly in the SAS in 1942, accounts of which made his father “terribly proud” (Image by Getty Images)" title="Winston Churchill with wife, Clementine, and their son Randolph, in 1940. Randolph served briefly in the SAS in 1942, accounts of which made his father “terribly proud” (Image by Getty Images)" /> Men such as Stirling, Paddy Mayne (Stirling’s second-in command) and George Jellicoe (the commanding officer of the SBS) first learned the art of guerrilla warfare with the commandos. Churchill’s son Randolph served briefly in the SAS in 1942, and wrote to his father describing how they were destroying dozens of enemy aircraft in daring raids – accounts that made the PM “terribly proud”. When Churchill visited Cairo in August 1942 to discuss the next phase of the north African campaign with his generals, he found time to lunch with his son and Stirling. Churchill dined with Stirling again at the end of May 1945, following the latter’s release from Colditz, having been captured in January 1943. Stirling had plans to re-deploy the SAS Brigade to the far east, and he wanted to sound out their principal benefactor. But within weeks Churchill was gone, voted out of office by a British public who believed a new leader was required to rebuild the country. The SAS would soon follow the wartime leader into temporary retirement. Read more | The real SAS Rogue Heroes: the true stories behind the WW2 drama Uncertain future Even if Clement Attlee hadn’t been elected prime minister in July 1945, the SAS and Britain’s special forces might still have faced an uncertain future. The country was practically bankrupt, having spent almost £7bn (a quarter of the national wealth) on the war effort. Defence spending would obviously be slashed, and those ‘private armies’ were an obvious place to start. After all, what was the point in maintaining a guerrilla force now that the war was over? The SAS paraded for the final time at their Essex HQ on 8 October 1945. Four days later, Brigadier Michael Calvert, commanding officer of the SAS Brigade, sent a memo to 12 of the most senior officers of the SAS, SBS and Long Range Desert Group entitled ‘Future of SAS Troops’. He explained that the War Office had asked for his “recommendations for the future of SAS in the next war and its composition in the peace-time army” as part of its review into Britain’s military capabilities. Calvert feared that the bureaucrats within the War Office – those “freemasons of mediocrity” – were determined to disband the SAS. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/01/GettyImages-154417103webready-51d1025-e1769169399236.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="Members of the Long Range Desert Group in 1942. By the end of the Second World War, their new brand of warfare was attracting hostility from some elements of Britain’s military (Image by Getty Images)" title="Members of the Long Range Desert Group in 1942. By the end of the Second World War, their new brand of warfare was attracting hostility from some elements of Britain’s military (Image by Getty Images)" /> One of the most forceful and erudite replies came from Major Roy Farran, DSO and MC, a senior SAS officer who had served in north Africa, Italy and France. He began by stating that, though special forces warfare was still in its infancy, its potential was enormous – particularly because it could exploit the rapid recent developments in air power, communications and motorised transport. “Since it is now so easy to place troops across the enemy lines of communication, I feel that it is important to have a unit of the Special Air Service-type trained to operate individually with the minimum support and with the maximum amount of improvisation,” he wrote. Farran had already identified Britain’s likely next foe and envisaged how special forces could be used in the event of a conflict. “I believe there will be great opportunities for guerrilla troops in the event of a war against the Soviet Union, which I suppose is the only possibility at the moment,” he told Calvert. Such a war would be either a defensive or offensive one. “In the former case a unit like the Special Air Service could inflict damage on the enemy and slow up his advance out of all proportion to its size… In an offensive war the SAS would increase the speed of our advance by spreading panic and confusion in the enemy’s rear.” But the prescient Farran also envisaged that, before a large-scale war with the Soviets, Britain could well find itself entangled in insurgencies as its empire began to break up. Counter-insurgency, he declared, was a role to which the SAS and SBS were ideally suited, adding: “If the principle of the SAS does not continue, I cannot believe that the army is thinking along progressive lines.” Another important figure contacted by the War Office was Lieutenant Colonel Tony Simonds, the commander of MI9’s A Force, who had worked with the SAS in Italy in the autumn of 1943. The main task of MI9 – a secret department within the War Office – was to assist Allied military personnel in enemy territory to evade and escape. Simonds recommended the establishment of three SAS regiments: one for Europe, based in Britain; a second for the Middle East, based in Cyprus; and a third for the far east, based in Singapore. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/01/standard-3Michael-Calvert-cmykwebready-6c7040b-e1769169955638.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="Michael Calvert (left) gives orders after the capture of Mogaung in Burma, June 1944. The following year, as commanding officer of the SAS Brigade, Calvert fought for the unit’s survival (Image supplied by Gavin Mortimer)" title="Michael Calvert (left) gives orders after the capture of Mogaung in Burma, June 1944. The following year, as commanding officer of the SAS Brigade, Calvert fought for the unit’s survival (Image supplied by Gavin Mortimer)" /> Simonds wrote that “the role of guerrilla forces in any future war is to defeat the enemy, behind his defended front lines, while the orthodox forces prevent the enemy from advancing”. However, he also suggested that the SAS should “familiarise themselves topographically, militarily, socially and politically with the area. To know and to study the various factions and elements of their area… and to know which personalities should be eliminated should it become necessary in British interest.” That latter role had been the modus operandi of the Special Operations Executive during the Second World War – acting more like secret agents than special forces. Read more | “They changed the way war is run”: Ben Macintyre on the early SAS Ultimately, however, the arguments put forward by Calvert and other senior special forces officers fell on deaf ears, and their regiment and units were disbanded. End of an error It didn’t take long before the War Office realised its mistake. In January 1946, Jewish paramilitaries in Mandatory Palestine derailed a British train – the first serious guerrilla act in an insurgency that grew increasingly violent as the fight for the establishment of a Jewish state intensified. It was the first of many such insurgencies as Britain’s empire began to fracture. In 1947, Major Pat Hart, a staff officer in the SAS during the war, learned that the SAS was going to be revived as a territorial regiment under the command of Colonel Brian Franks. Hart was appointed Franks’ second-in-command of 21 SAS – a designation that merged the 1st and 2nd Regiments of wartime fame. According to Hart’s recollection, a War Office study group had been formed in 1946 to re-examine the future of Britain’s special forces. “The result of the study was the recommendation there should be a continuing presence in the army, so the knowledge gained should not be lost, and whilst it could be called anything, probably the best thing was to call it SAS,” he said. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/01/GettyImages-79043094webready-e676d4c-e1769170186832.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="At the end of the Second World War, Britain was facing bankruptcy and defence spending needed to be cut. ‘Private armies’ were an obvious place to start (Image by Getty Images)" title="At the end of the Second World War, Britain was facing bankruptcy and defence spending needed to be cut. ‘Private armies’ were an obvious place to start (Image by Getty Images)" /> Recruitment began in September 1947. Of the first 200 soldiers signed up, 59 had served with the SAS during the war. One of those was Pat Duggan. “While the majority in the forces were pleased to return to their former lifestyles [in 1945], many of us, hemmed in by the norms of a peaceful civilisation, felt only frustration and spent our time dreaming of, or searching for, something that resembled our wartime role,” he reflected. “When the SAS was reformed as part of the TA [Territorial Army], we homed in like pigeons – a roll-call of the dispossessed.” Having so many experienced soldiers in their ranks made it easier to train the new recruits in their unorthodox methods. “We were creating an SAS unit that would be available to do any sort of SAS job once it was trained,” explained Hart. “We went off on Nato exercises, as part of the training, and it was very helpful for Nato command to have an SAS unit there.” The first active deployment of 21 SAS was to Malaya (then a British colony, today peninsular Malaysia) to help quell a two-year-long communist insurgency. The uprising – which the British knew as the Malayan Emergency – threatened colonial rubber plantations and tin mines, so the government called on the talents of men skilled in guerrilla fighting. “There were a few contacts,” recalled John Gardner of the SAS. “A few seconds, perhaps minutes, of intense shooting, then silence. Blood trails were followed, and some CT [insurgent] bodies were found and brought in, but many blood trails led to nothing… during these weeks we lived in a general state of alertness, even at night half awake, of dirt and sweat, our blood sucked by the many leeches.” <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/01/1.47-CMYKwebready-f500202-e1769170640593.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="Rhodesian troops served in the Long Range Desert Group in WW2 and went on to form their own SAS squadron, some of whom are seen here in the 1950s. C (Rhodesia) Squadron operated with the SAS from 1951–53, largely in Malaya (Image supplied by Gavin Mortimer)" title="Rhodesian troops served in the Long Range Desert Group in WW2 and went on to form their own SAS squadron, some of whom are seen here in the 1950s. C (Rhodesia) Squadron operated with the SAS from 1951–53, largely in Malaya (Image supplied by Gavin Mortimer)" /> The SAS remained in Malaya throughout the 1950s – years that proved a crucial learning curve for a regiment that was intent on mastering all environments, whether desert, jungle or Arctic. Johnny Cooper, one of the original 66 recruits to the SAS when the unit was formed by Stirling in 1941, was a squadron commander in Malaya. “We were carrying out trials to develop a two-week ration that was possible for a man to carry,” he recalled. “The object was to avoid the weekly air drops which were a complete give-away and lost us the vital element of surprise.” As a result, the SAS produced a ‘starvation ration’ consisting of dehydrated rice-based food carried in a four-gallon petrol tin. Read more | He shot down 3 planes in 4 minutes: meet the WW2 pilot you won't have heard about A global audience It was no coincidence that in 1952 – shortly after Winston Churchill had been returned to Downing Street – it was decided to raise a regular-army SAS regiment: 22 SAS. Over the following decades, the SAS was sent to fight insurgencies in other remote corners of the British empire and spheres of influence – Aden, Borneo, Oman – before being deployed to Northern Ireland in the 1970s. But perhaps the most high-profile of all its operations occurred in the spring of 1980 when it ended the Iranian embassy siege in London in dramatic style, watched by a global television audience. It was a feat that underlined the regiment’s reputation as the world’s pre-eminent special force. Throughout these operations, one aspect of the SAS was immutable, and that was the temperament of each recruit. In 1956, Dare Newell, the SAS regimental headquarters major, wrote to several wartime special forces officers to ask what characteristics they thought essential for an SAS soldier. From their answers he compiled the selection criteria. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/01/GettyImages-1241653502webready-85c1750-e1769170516483.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="Members of the SAS on a training exercise in Hereford, c1970. By now, the regiment was intent on mastering all environments, whether desert, jungle or Arctic (Image by Getty Images)" title="Members of the SAS on a training exercise in Hereford, c1970. By now, the regiment was intent on mastering all environments, whether desert, jungle or Arctic (Image by Getty Images)" /> “A man’s personal qualities and make-up count more than technical efficiency in his own arm of the service. Technical efficiency can be taught; the personal qualities required for long-range, long-term operations in enemy territory, however, are part of a man’s character and, although they may be developed over a period, they must be learnt in childhood.” The qualities deemed essential were initiative, self-discipline, independence of mind, ability to work without supervision, stamina, patience, and a sense of humour. These characteristics continue to underpin the SAS ethos today. Warfare and weaponry evolve, but not human nature. One of the 12 recipients of Mike Calvert’s worried memo in October 1945 was Major John Verney of the SBS. “We came to know one another’s physical and mental capacities, and with them our own,” he said of his wartime service. “Strength and skill were respected, and a fair degree of both were essential, but there were other qualities, such as a cool head, or a good temper, that might well prove more valuable.” CLONE WARS Countries worldwide have established forces based on the British SAS template The reputation of the SAS, encapsulated by its ‘Who Dares Wins’ motto, is global. Its influence is evident in France’s 1er Régiment de Parachutiste d’Infanterie de Marine (1erRPIMa), the US Delta Force and Germany’s GSG 9. New Zealand and Australia have their own SAS regiments, both raised in the 1950s and using the same motto as their British counterpart. It is also alleged that the SAS has trained Ukrainian special forces for many years. The wartime SAS included two regiments of French troops who fought under British command. In June 2024, to mark the 80th anniversary of the Normandy landings, President Emmanuel Macron visited the French SAS memorial in Plumelec in Brittany. According to France’s Ministry of Defence, the 1erRPIMa “has its roots in the SAS of World War II, [and] is based on daring, determination and endurance”; its motto is Qui ose gagne – a direct translation of that of the British SAS. The founder of Delta Force, Charles Beckwith, was one of America’s most innovative military thinkers in the late 1950s. A member of the 7th Special Forces Group (Airborne), Beckwith was posted to 22 SAS as part of an exchange in 1962. During that time, he conceived the idea of an American equivalent. On his return to the US, Beckwith received encouragement from General Sam Wilson, a Second World War veteran who had been trained by the British Chindits in south-east Asia. In a 2016 interview, Wilson explained that he had met David Stirling in the course of helping to establish Delta Force. Like Delta Force, Germany’s counter-terrorism unit GSG 9 was formed in the 1970s in response to a series of high-profile terrorist atrocities. When GSG 9 rescued all hostages from a hijacking at Mogadishu airport in Somalia in 1977, it was assisted by two SAS soldiers. Over the course of three decades, David Stirling’s band of “renegade cut-throats” had become a blueprint for special forces units across the globe. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/01/NZ-females-CMYKwebready-cdfea04-e1769170865434.jpg" width="620" height="413" alt="Members of New Zealand’s SAS female engagement team. Along with Australia’s SAS, they use the same motto – ‘Who Dares Wins’ – as their British counterpart (Image by New Zealand Special Air Service)" title="Members of New Zealand’s SAS female engagement team. Along with Australia’s SAS, they use the same motto – ‘Who Dares Wins’ – as their British counterpart (Image by New Zealand Special Air Service)" /> This article was first published in the January 2026 issue of HistoryExtra magazine
History’s 8 biggest land deals: how the US more than doubled in size – and why it agreed to leave Greenland alone
From the Louisiana Purchase to the sale of Manhattan Island, Piers Mucklejohn explores eight moments in history when vast swathes of land changed hands for money
The Alaska Purchase (1867) When the US banked an unexpectedly amazing bargain from Russia In 1867, the Russian empire made the US an offer that it could hardly refuse. Still reeling from crushing defeat in the Crimean War in 1856 and fearing that the British might seize Alaska to extend their power in the Pacific, it was desperate to offload that territory. At the end of March, less than a month after Russian envoy Eduard de Stoeckl began negotiations with US secretary of state William Seward, the sale was made. Seward’s expansionist desire to extend US territory, especially in the Pacific, spurred him on to negotiate all night. The transfer of Alaska was agreed at 4am on 30 March – 586,000 square miles sold for just 2 cents per acre, a total of $7.2m (equivalent to around $155m today). Contrary to popular belief, the purchase was generally supported by the public, though scornful commentary in some newspapers heaped criticism on “Seward’s Folly”. “We simply obtain by the treaty the nominal possession of impassable deserts of snow,” the New York Daily Tribune complained of the territory, much of which lies within the Arctic Circle. “We may make a treaty with Russia but we can not make a treaty with the North Wind, or the Snow King.” Beneath the snow, though, gold was discovered in the 1890s. There was oil, too – all in all, a hidden treasure trove of natural resources. The Alaska Purchase proved to be one of history’s most serendipitous land deals. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/01/2Danish-West-Indies-purchase-61b4fd3-e1769012728283.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A black and white photograph of a group of five men standing around a long, rectangular table" title="The purchase of the Danish West Indies is completed in 1917 with the transfer of payment. The US deemed these Caribbean islands vital to its natural security in the face of German U-boat threats" /> The US purchases the Danish West Indies (1917) This Caribbean deal took 50 years to finalise – and involved the US leaving Greenland to Denmark Before the US Virgin Islands took that name, they were owned by Denmark, which governed them from 4,500 miles away across the Atlantic – more than four times farther than the US. The Caribbean island of Saint Thomas was claimed in 1672 by the Danish West India-Guinea Company, which annexed Saint John in 1718, then bought Saint Croix from France in 1733. They were all taken over by the Danish crown two decades later. In the aftermath of the American Civil War, President Andrew Johnson came close to securing two of the islands, aiming to establish a refuelling and repair station for the US navy and bolster American dominance in the region. When the treaty was put before the US senate in 1868, though, it was never voted on. Read more | “The motors of the wagon train”: meet the forgotten women who upended gender norms to win the Wild West Come the First World War, the strategic importance of the islands to US national security was thrust into the spotlight. There were fears that Germany might use the Danish West Indies as a base from which to launch U-boats. Washington believed that possessing these islands was necessary to secure the Caribbean and protect the newly opened Panama Canal. And Secretary of state Robert Lansing made it clear to Denmark that the US might seize the islands by force. So in 1917, Denmark ceded the three islands to the US for $25m in gold (equivalent to around $630m today). Notably, as part of the treaty, the US declared that it would “not object to the Danish Government extending their political and economic interests to the whole of Greenland”. Four years later, Denmark formally declared their sovereignty over it. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/01/1Louisiana-Purchase-2GettyImages-3089766-d52cabc-e1769013870763.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A black and white illustration showing three men, two standing and one sat around a square table, looking at a large map" title="US envoys James Monroe and Robert R Livingston negotiate the 1803 purchase of the Louisiana Territory from France with Charles Maurice de Talleyrand. With France desperate for funds, the Americans were able to broker a bargain price (Image by Getty Images)" /> The Louisiana Purchase (1803) The deal that nearly doubled the size of the United States When the US bought the territory of Louisiana from France in 1803, acquiring some 828,000 square miles of land, the fledgling nation almost doubled in size overnight. President Thomas Jefferson had tasked fellow Founding Fathers Robert R Livingston and James Monroe – himself later president – with convincing French leader Napoleon Bonaparte to part peacefully with New Orleans, a major port on the Mississippi River, which was surrounded by that territory. French control of Louisiana from 1801 threatened access to New Orleans, which had become so crucial to US commerce as it expanded westwards, and the presence of French troops risked the outbreak of hostilities between the two nations. The rising tension sparked talk of war and secession among the president’s enemies in the opposition Federalist Party. It was, Jefferson related to a French ally, “the embryo of a tornado which will burst on the countries on both sides of the Atlantic”. But tensions dissipated quickly once Monroe arrived in Paris for negotiations in 1803. Napoleon instructed his ministers to sell the entirety of Louisiana for $15m – equivalent to around $430m today. Why so easy? The French leader desperately needed money to fund impending wars in Europe. Losing control of Saint-Domingue (now Haiti) to revolution by enslaved people, he was convinced to abandon his hopes in the New World. At about $18 per square mile, the US acquired that vast swathe of land for much less than its market value. Westward expansion across the continent soon surged as successive missions, most famously the Lewis and Clark Expedition of 1804–06, set out to chart the new territory. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/01/4Manhattan-PurchaseGettyImages-57068421-6dbb88d-e1769013946556.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A black and white drawing of a large group of Native Americans sitting around, facing a white man in a hat and cape, having a conversation over a box of goods" title="Peter Minuit, director-general of the Dutch colony of New Netherland, offers Native American Lenape people trinkets and clothes in 1626, negotiating the sale of what became known as Manhattan Island (Image by Getty Images)" /> The ‘sale’ of Manhattan Island (1626) New York’s earliest real estate deal – and its most misunderstood Today, New York City is notorious for extravagantly expensive property prices. So it’s ironic that, back in 1626, the 23-square-mile island known today as Manhattan was reputedly bought from Native American inhabitants by European settlers for beads and trinkets worth just a few dollars. After English explorer Henry Hudson, sailing under the flag of the Dutch Republic, came across what’s now called Manhattan Island in 1609, his employers set their sights on owning it. Manhattan lies on one of the world’s largest natural harbours. With easy access to the Atlantic Ocean and a large population of beavers, it seemed the perfect site for a permanent settlement from which Dutch merchants could cash in on the booming and lucrative North American fur trade. Read more | What was the global impact of the Napoleonic Wars? A few years later, the colony of New Netherland was established on North America’s eastern seaboard. By 1624, Dutch people were living in the lower part of Manhattan Island, establishing a settlement called New Amsterdam. To deter the British or French from making a claim to the land, in 1626 the colony’s director-general, Peter Minuit, officially purchased it from the Lenape people for a reported 60 guilders (the equivalent of $24). Despite the popular tale – that the island was sold for a small stash of trinkets – no official deed of the transfer is known to survive. Modern historians think that the Native Americans involved received clothing, weapons and metal tools from the colonists. They may also have assumed that the exchange was only temporary, or that it would allow joint use of the land. Those Dutch colonists didn’t hold onto Manhattan Island for long. In 1664, English forces captured New Amsterdam in a bloodless takeover, and gave the city a fresh name: New York. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/01/5RupertsLandMetis-peopleMixedbloodFurtrader1870-d7ac9f8-e1769014157808.jpg" width="317" height="413" alt="A photograph of a man in a furry black coat and a large black hat" title="A Métis fur trader – a man of mixed European and Indigenous ancestry – pictured in 1870. Many Métis and First Nations people rebelled when their Red River Colony was sold to the expanding dominion of Canada that year" /> Sale of Rupert’s Land (1869) The gigantic Canadian land grab that sparked conflict with Indigenous inhabitants One of history’s biggest land deals wasn’t between two sovereign nations but between a fur-trading company and the newly confederated country of Canada. The royal charter granted to the Hudson’s Bay Company by King Charles II of England in 1670 gave it a monopoly over Rupert’s Land, a vast territory spanning 1.5m square miles of North America. By the 19th century, the HBC was also the de facto administrator of the neighbouring North-Western Territory, which was only a little smaller. And when Canada – initially comprising Ontario, Quebec, Nova Scotia and New Brunswick – determined to expand westward in 1868, these lands stood in the way. So in 1870, the British government permitted the transfer of Rupert’s Land and the North-Western Territory to Canada at a cost of £300,000 (equivalent to around £45m today). But in Rupert’s Land, some 12,000 people living in the Red River Colony – most of them First Nations or Métis, of mixed European and Indigenous ancestry – were shocked to learn that, without any warning or consultation, their home was set to become Canadian territory. Many of them mobilised under the 24-year-old Métis leader Louis Riel, and drove away land surveyors sent by the Canadian government. These rebels then blocked the new lieutenant-governor, William McDougall, at the border, hoping to get assurances that their language, culture and land ownership would be protected. They later declared a provisional government presided over by Riel. Though the uprising was ultimately quelled, the rebels scored a political victory. Their colony joined Canada as the Province of Manitoba – having shown the authorities just how energetically local people might respond to land transfers. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/01/6AdamsOnis-Treaty--87c75ee-e1769014357899.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A large map, with yellow, green and pink colouring, with the words Treaty of Spain in the bottom left corner" title="A map shows the territory of Florida sold to the US by Spain in 1819. Conflict with native Seminole people in the region continued for nearly four decades. (Image by Albert Bushnell Hart, LL.D., The American Nation Vol. 14 (New York, NY: Harper and Brothers, 1906) - University of South Florida)" /> The Adams–Onís Treaty (1819) The deal that brought Florida into the US Floridians can thank this treaty, named after US secretary of state John Quincy Adams – a man with decidedly expansionist political leanings – and Spanish ambassador Luis de Onís, for their star on the American flag. With this agreement, inked in Washington, DC in 1819, the US acquired from the Spanish territory spanning some 60,000 square miles in the south-east of the continent. (Florida became a state in 1845.) In exchange, the US agreed to assume liability for $5 million worth of damage done by American citizens against Spain. It also renounced its claim to Texas, settling the western borders of the US, which had until then been vague and contentious. The US had already taken control of parts of Florida during a series of military clashes with the Seminole, a Native American people who regularly crossed the border to raid settlements in the neighbouring US state of Georgia. These US incursions hadn’t been made with the intention of capturing land, only to suppress that Indigenous people, whose willingness to welcome escaped enslaved people also irritated the US. Adams described Spanish Florida as “serving no other earthly purpose than as a post of annoyance” to the US. The acquisition of Florida, made effective in 1821, was only the beginning of US conflict with the Seminole, however. The heavily outnumbered Native Americans, who employed guerilla tactics, gave up fighting only in 1858. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/01/7Danish-Gold-CoastGettyImages-113631823-4378893-e1769014782870.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="An engraving showing a group of buildings, with a large flag with a cross on it standing in the middle of the buildings" title="Fort Christiansborg on the Danish Gold Coast, as it was in 1760. Now called Osu Castle, this bastion was first built in 1661 and used to hold enslaved people, but was sold to Britain in 1850 (Image by Getty Images)" /> Purchase of the Danish Gold Coast (1850) When Denmark ceded defunct slave-trading forts to Britain In March 1850, the UK bought the last forts and settlements in west Africa held by Denmark for £10,000 (equivalent to around £1.2m today). Denmark had annexed the area from the Swedish in early 1663, and the Danish Gold Coast occupied about 4,000 square miles in what’s now part of Ghana. That coastline came to be dotted with forts, most of them built in the 18th century. Read more | These three unsuspecting inventions won the American Wild West – but did they destroy it too? Known as ‘slave forts’, these bastions were commercial hubs used to hold enslaved people before they were loaded onto ships and transported away from Africa. After Denmark became the first nation in Europe to abolish that brutal trade in 1792 – though in practice, its abolition only came into effect from 1803 – the Gold Coast became increasingly unprofitable. Attempts to establish cotton, sugar and coffee plantations foundered, and all but one of the forts were abandoned in 1817. So why did Britain, which had abolished slavery in its own empire in 1834, choose to buy the colony and its forts in 1850? Partly, to expand its own influence in west Africa at the expense of France and Belgium, but also to tackle the illegal trade in enslaved people that persisted in the region. Between 1820 and 1870, British Royal Navy patrols seized more than 1,500 slave ships, freeing the 150,000 people held captive on board. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/01/8Gadsden-Purchase-GettyImages-484802529-b9ccc39-e1769014876920.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A painting showing three men overlooking a rocky landscape, with horses. The one closest to us is pointing towards the left" title="Surveyors map Mexican territory in what’s now Arizona and Mexico – land that will be transferred to the US with the Gadsden Purchase of 1853 (Image by Getty Images)" /> The Gadsden Purchase (1853) The deal that made a southern US railroad possible After nearly two years of conflict, in 1848 Mexico was forced to admit defeat and recognise US sovereignty over Texas, which that northern neighbour had annexed a year before the fighting began. It also ceded huge swathes of territory – totalling 529,000 square miles – across California, New Mexico, Utah and six other present-day states. But if Mexico thought that the US appetite for expansion had been sated, it was sorely mistaken. The US still didn’t possess the territory it needed to construct a southern transcontinental railroad route – it needed a little more in Arizona and New Mexico. Charged with obtaining land required, former army officer and railroad executive James Gadsden signed a first draft of the Treaty of Mesilla with the Mexican president in December 1853. Mexico was in financially dire straits and, some historians think, may have feared that refusing to sell up would have prompted the US to invade. By the next year, the US had acquired about 30,000 square miles of land for $10m (equivalent to around $380m today). Construction of the Southern Pacific Railroad began the following decade, though it was only completed in 1883. Piers Mucklejohn is a freelance journalist
Meet the incredible woman who saved Portugal's Jews
With the Inquisition active throughout much of Europe, the first half of the 16th century was a perilous time for Jewish people. Andreé Aelion Brooks explores how the fabulously wealthy Doña Gracia worked tirelessly to protect her community
Still in her 20s, Gracia Mendes Nasi (Nacy), better known as Doña Gracia, was recently widowed and fabulously rich. She should have been able to live in comfort for the rest of her life. Her husband, Francisco Mendes, a spice dealer and banker, had divided his wealth in his will between Gracia and his brother, Diogo. Yet without her husband’s protection, even her money could not shield her from a looming crisis. Indeed, being in possession of such a fortune in patriarchal and Catholic Lisbon in the middle of the 1530s was inherently dangerous for someone of Doña Gracia’s background. She was a converso, a term for a person forced to convert from Judaism. When the papal nuncio, an ecclesiastical diplomat, paid a visit to her palatial home in the old Jewish quarter of Lisbon, he demanded yet another bribe to keep the Inquisition from beginning work in Portugal. The Inquisition, Gracia knew, rounded up conversos, who were then charged with being insincere Catholics and imprisoned. Whether this was true or not, their assets were confiscated. Furthermore, Doña Gracia certainly wasn’t sincere in her public faith. While she had married Francisco, who was also her maternal uncle, at Lisbon Cathedral, the ceremony had been preceded by a secret Jewish wedding. Compounding Doña Gracia’s problems, representatives of the Portuguese king, John III, had also visited her. They told her they wanted to take her young daughter, Ana, to the palace to live as an adopted child of the royal family. According to local laws, the king could thus gain the use of any portion of the Mendes fortune that belonged to Ana. It was clear Doña Gracia needed to make a new start elsewhere in Europe, but there was another problem: converso families were forbidden to leave Portugal. Demonstrating the skill that would make her an outstanding leader, she set two plans running simultaneously, an approach she would follow for the rest of her life. Read more | Your guide to the Spanish Inquisition Firstly, she sent a message to the king explaining that most of the fortune he sought was with her brother-in-law, Diogo, in Antwerp. To retrieve the fortune, she needed the king’s exemption to leave the country. And, of course, she could not leave her baby daughter behind. Nor her two nephews, who were registered to begin studies at university in Louvain. Nor her younger sister, Brianda, who was betrothed to Diogo. She also contacted Diogo to bring one of his spice ships, pick up the family from Lisbon and take them to Antwerp. The greedy king, hoping to maximise the amount of money he could seize, agreed to let her travel. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/01/GettyImages-173449744-8114cab-e1768985633175.jpg" width="620" height="413" alt="An illustration of a man in a white and red apron, a tall white coned hat, and holding a stick in one hand. Behind him, there is a large building with many windows" title="A depiction of a man condemned to be burned on the orders of the Inquisition (Image by Getty Images)" /> But Doña Gracia had no intention of giving up her fortune so easily. Before departing for Antwerp, she had also set the second part of her plan in action. She had applied to the Vatican for a ‘Safe Conduct’, a super-passport valid throughout Christian Europe and which overrode any local laws preventing someone from travelling abroad. Throughout her life, Doña Gracia believed in doing what she could to maximise her chances of success. Her skills went beyond protecting her own family. Not only did she take the helm of her late husband’s business, an unusual enough development in itself in the late Renaissance era, but she assumed a leadership role within the converso community. With the threat of the Inquisition looming, Doña Gracia began to expand a nascent escape network that spirited members of the community out of danger and helped them travel to the Ottoman empire, which offered a haven for Europe’s Jewish community. In 1536, with the formal establishment of the Portuguese Inquisition, the situation for conversos in the country grew even more perilous. Read more | Byzantium, Constantinople, Istanbul: the history of a city of many names Speaking truth to power In 1553, Doña Gracia too would relocate to Constantinople (modern-day Istanbul), but in the latter half of the 1530s her focus was on building a new life in Antwerp. Yet here, she encountered many of the same problems she had faced in Portugal. The rulers, Holy Roman Emperor Charles V, and his sister, Mary of Austria, who acted as governor of the Habsburg Netherlands, were quick to pick up where the Portuguese king had left off. The royal duo tried to pledge young Ana to a marriage that would be advantageous to them. Summoned to Mary’s palace to approve the match with Don Francisco D’Aragon – an illegitimate Spanish nobleman and descendant of the royal house of Aragon – Doña Gracia played for time, repeatedly implying she was sick. But she was so opposed to the union that she was reported as saying she would rather see her daughter drown – an audacious and insulting remark. Doña Gracia didn’t back down. She told Mary that she was furious about how Ana’s selected suitor had blamed the continuing persecution of conversos on Doña Gracia’s own obstinacy. Doña Gracia’s confrontational manner shocked Mary, a blue blood who had been queen consort of Hungary and Bohemia before she was widowed and became governor. Once again, Doña Gracia was forced to leave, fleeing to the Republic of Venice in 1544. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/01/GettyImages-463914533-e7876ff-e1768986146801.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A painting showing a large snaked line of people processing through a town square, surrounded by white building with blue and orange roofs. A crowd watches on as hundreds of men in black cloaks walk behind one another" title="An 18th century depiction of the procession of criminals sentenced by the Inquisition of Lisbon. As the persecution intensified, Doña Gracia helped many to flee to Constantinople (Image by Getty Images)" /> Compounding her difficulties, Doña Gracia did not even have the support of her own family. While in Antwerp, Diogo had died and named Doña Gracia as the guardian of his infant daughter rather than the child’s own mother – his wife and Doña Gracia’s sister, Brianda, who was talked of as untrustworthy. This so angered Brianda that, when both were living in Venice, she betrayed Doña Gracia as a secret Jew. In 1549, Doña Gracia again had to flee, this time to Ferrara, a tolerant duchy in northern Italy. Throughout, Doña Gracia continued to be a leader among her people, despite facing many setbacks. At one point, she helped lead a boycott of the Italian port of Ancona in retaliation for the burning of more than 20 conversos by the Italian Inquisition – an outrageous act even by the standards of the era. But the boycott was not a success in the long run because the Jewish merchants in the Ottoman empire who used the port could not agree on a combined strategy. Doña Gracia also failed in efforts to persuade the Venetians to give the conversos one of their lagoon islands as a place to settle. Read more | “Some say that the first Jews sailed here on King Solomon’s ships”: Kavita Puri on India's long Jewish history Life in the open But Doña Gracia’s sheer persistence also paid off. In 1553, she settled in Constantinople with her entourage. Here, she could live publicly as a Jew. Moreover, she persuaded Suleiman the Magnificent, sultan of the Ottoman empire, to grant her a long-term lease on Tiberias (in present-day Israel). She helped finance the rebuilding of a city that nestles on the western shore of the Sea of Galilee, and it became a refuge for those conversos wishing to live in their own semi-autonomous area. Doña Gracia thus headed one of the earliest attempts to found a modern Jewish state in the Middle East. Her efforts here likely saved a significant portion of the ethnic Jewish world at a critical juncture in its history. She planned to settle in the region herself and built a mansion in Tiberias, but she died in Constantinople in 1569. In the years since, knowledge of Doña Gracia’s remarkable life has gradually faded, but that may be changing. Four years ago – during a period when the State Archives in Modena, northern Italy were closed because of the pandemic – archivist Alberto Palladini took advantage of the peace and quiet to clean out a box of old letters. It included two from Doña Gracia. These showed she spelled her last name as Nacy, not Nasi as the historical record currently suggests. It’s a small detail, but significant, if only because it hints at the possibility of further revelations should researchers go looking, which seems likely given the current interest in the lives of powerful women whose place in history has been under-appreciated. As for Doña Gracia herself, she certainly never sold herself short. As the seal for her correspondence, she used the Lion of Judah. This suggests she saw herself not just as a rich and successful businesswoman and philanthropist, but as someone descended from the House of David, a Jewish royal. Andrée Aelion Brooks is a journalist and lecturer. Her books include Russian Dance: A True Story of Intrigue and Passion in Stalinist Moscow (John Wiley & Sons, 2004) This article was first published in the January 2026 issue of HistoryExtra magazine
The Bengal Famine was one of the 20th century's greatest tragedies – so why is there no memorial to it?
Kavita Puri on the first event commemorating the 1943 Bengal Famine
In a museum in Manchester, on an autumn evening just a few weeks ago, history was made. I joined a group of people who had gathered to pay their respects to casualties of a long-overlooked episode of the Second World War. Curators, students, interested locals and descendants of those involved milled around, drinking chai, looking at pictures in a temporary exhibition. Organisers believe this was the first event to commemorate the estimated 3 million victims of the 1943 Bengal Famine. Those who died were Indians, but they were also British subjects. It’s one of the largest losses of civilian life among the Allies – yet there isn’t a memorial, a museum or even a plaque to them anywhere in the world. So that night – organised by the University of Manchester, Manchester Museum and the Imperial War Museum North, and inspired by my BBC podcast Three Million – marked a very special moment. Read more | The 1943 Bengal famine: "People began collapsing in the streets and dying on the pavements" The exhibition featured portraits of some of the survivors I had interviewed in the Bengal countryside. There was Jamuna Purkayeth, who had travelled to Calcutta (now Kolkata) as a little girl with her father in search of charity. When I spoke to her, she told me that she believed that if she had stayed in her village she would have died of hunger. Also on display were extracts of letters to and from Indian soldiers stationed in the Middle East, censored by colonial authorities for mentioning the extent of the food crisis. Now those letters – uncensored – were presented in a public space. There were also Japanese propaganda pamphlets encouraging the Indian population to rise up against the British. In one cartoon, the wartime prime minister, Winston Churchill, is pictured feasting on a sumptuous roast chicken, while underneath the dining table are emaciated, dead Bengalis. The message is clear: Japan will feed you, but the British won’t. Also on display were evocative photographs of Sunil Janah, who documented the human cost of the famine in the communist newspaper People’s War. Among the speakers that evening was the narrative director from the Imperial War Museum, who talked of the silences in that museum’s war archive, and discussed what can be done to remedy the situation. Another was an eyewitness to the famine, Partha Mitter. He told how, as a little boy, he would look through the iron gates of his grand house and see starving mothers clutching their babies, begging for phan dao, water in which rice had been cooked. They never asked for the rice – Bengal’s staple food – because that would be too much to hope for. Read more | Who was to blame for the Irish famine? Eighty years since the end of the Second World War, it’s about time that these 3 million lives are remembered. They cannot be a mere footnote in history. They are part of Britain’s wartime story, and its colonial legacy, that has become contentious – but this night showed that it need not be so. History is never static. Time allows people to speak, and ask, and collectively to acknowledge and remember. Forgetting need not be permanent. There will be a time to ask some difficult questions – about how this was allowed to happen, and who was responsible – but this night was dedicated to those who died. There is a dignity in remembering them – a dignity they were not afforded in life. Who knows whether this will become an annual event, or if a more permanent memorial to the victims will be established. But something is changing – and I learned this night that history can be redemptive. Everyone who gathered felt it, and it was an unexpectedly uplifting experience. This column was first published in the Christmas 2025 issue of BBC History Magazine
From Churchill to Vietnam: protests that changed the world
With the police about to be given broader powers to tackle disruptive events, the right to protest is in the spotlight. Timothy Garton Ash and Katrina Navickas join Danny Bird to discuss the history of popular demonstrations
Danny Bird: What is a protest? What distinguishes it from a riot or a revolution? Katrina Navickas: A protest is often defined by law, making it a fluid and changeable term. In England and Wales, its meaning has evolved over time. The earliest legal definition dates to the 1714 Riot Act, which distinguished a riot from other forms of protest. The modern idea of a demonstration emerged in the 19th century alongside the rise of democratic movements. Protest came to mean people gathering publicly to make collective claims – a reflection of the growing concept of ‘the people’ and their role in politics. However, what counts as a protest still depends on context: the country, the circumstances and the legal boundaries of what is permitted in public spaces. Timothy Garton Ash: Historically, revolution was associated with violence, but modern protest is defined by nonviolent action. Think of Gandhi in India, the Civil Rights movement in the US, or People Power in the Philippines [in 1986, resulting in the overthrow of the Marcos regime]. The revolutionary events of 1989 in eastern Europe were particularly notable because they brought together nonviolence and revolution for the first time. In essence, protest is about people power – collective, peaceful demonstration as a means of change. What makes a protest ultimately successful? Is it timing, tactics, leadership or something peculiar to a moment in history? TGA: In the book I co-edited with Adam Roberts, Civil Resistance and Power Politics (OUP, 2009), we examined 18 cases over a century, from Gandhi to the more recent ‘colour revolutions’ in former Soviet and Yugoslav republics. One point is clear: protest alone is never enough. It requires favourable internal and external conditions to succeed. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/01/WHA0173278webready-6200492-e1767782763339.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A black and white photograph of a large crowd of people, standing together in white robes" title="Mahātmā Gandhi – shown on a peace march in 1947 during the partition of India – used nonviolent resistance to campaign for Indian independence and the end of British rule (Image by Topfoto)" /> For example, the 1989 revolutions succeeded where many Arab Spring protests did not because their surrounding circumstances were vastly different. Successful movements also have a clear strategy and they’re not merely expressions of anger or moral outrage. Effective protest involves understanding how to influence and divide those in power. Read more | The violent history of student protest KN: I often refer to the idea of critical mass, which is the point a movement gains enough public support to create real momentum. That usually depends on an ideological or belief shift, as well as favourable conditions. Successful protests often arise when the state is weakened – for instance, after wars or during major economic crises – creating opportunities to mobilise support. At such times, the forces of law and order may also be less capable of suppressing dissent. Even the strongest movement needs both structural openings and a sense among people that success is possible. Why does protest continue to make societies uneasy even in countries that pride themselves on free expression? KN: In Britain’s case, particularly in England and Wales, there was no statutory right to assembly or free speech until the Human Rights Act of 1998. Until then, the right to protest was effectively permissive rather than guaranteed. Throughout the 20th century, much of the legislation was designed to manage the far right and other regressive forces, which created tensions around freedom of speech and assembly. A key example came in 1936, with debates over whether Oswald Mosley’s British Union of Fascists should be allowed to march. Questions arose over who could prevent such meetings, particularly those held in private venues, and whether police had the authority to intervene based on what was said. These tensions persist today: the balance between protecting free expression and preventing disorder remains delicate. TGA: Even in the freest societies, freedom is never unlimited. The freedoms of speech and assembly are constrained; if they were not, we would encounter philosopher Karl Popper’s paradox of tolerance, where unlimited tolerance can ultimately destroy tolerance itself by empowering the enemies of democracy. In authoritarian regimes, the issue is simpler: governments fear protest because it allows people to speak and find their voice. The pivotal moment is breaking that barrier of fear. For instance, in autumn 1989 in Leipzig, two friends attended a demonstration against the East German regime. As they walked, more people joined at each street corner… 10, 12, 200, then 1,000. This ‘cascade effect’ demonstrates how critical mass can overcome fear, a prospect that terrifies authoritarian rulers: consider Romanian president Nicolae Ceaușescu’s facial expression when he realised that the crowd was openly booing him on 21 December 1989. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/01/GettyImages-2220408825webready-194c494-e1767783458422.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A photograph showing a group of people leaning over a large number of lit candles on the floor" title="A candlelit mass protest in Leipzig in November 1989. The Monday Demonstrations, as these nonviolent gatherings were known, played a crucial role in ending the rule of communism in East Germany (Image by Getty Images)" /> How fair is it to say Britain’s history is one of evolution rather than revolution? KN: I often blame the Victorians for the myth of steady, moderate progress. The story of peaceful reform in Britain ignored harsh realities faced elsewhere. For a long time, for instance, Ireland was treated as a testing ground for extreme policing, public order measures and restrictions on constitutional rights. Even within Britain itself, progress was rarely smooth. TGA: Protest always involves risk – putting your body in situations where you might be attacked or, in extreme cases, killed. Sometimes, violence from the state backfires, galvanising wider support. The Tolpuddle Martyrs and, in Ireland, the Bloody Sunday massacres both illustrate this. How has protest been legislated and policed throughout history? KN: In Britain, general public order legislation arrived relatively late. Historically, most laws targeted specific political or social movements rather than applying broadly. In the 19th century, measures focused on the Chartists, trade unions or suffragettes. Even in the 20th century, legislation was often aimed at particular crises: the 1936 laws addressed fascist and communist unrest in the East End of London, while measures in 1986 targeted striking miners or football hooligans. Recent legislation, including that of 2022–23, is broader in scope, but it still arises in reaction to specific groups dominating public attention – for example environmental and black rights movements. This reactive approach represents a continuity throughout British history. TGA: Authoritarian governments can invent almost any justification to suppress protest. In democracies, the situation depends on whether constitutional protections exist. In the US, the First Amendment protects free speech; in Germany, experience with two dictatorships has led to clear constitutional guarantees of assembly. The UK has no written constitution. Over the past 30 years, piecemeal legislation, often poorly drafted and confusing, has slowly restricted protest. How do the spaces in which protest occurs help to shape it? KN: All protest is, at its core, a claim to public space. Demonstrations are associated with squares, streets and civic areas – town halls, county halls and other symbolic sites. Protesters assert their presence as ‘the public’ within these spaces, often choosing locations of national significance such as Trafalgar Square, built between the 1820s and 1840s and long regarded as Britain’s foremost public space. Throughout history, protesters have deliberately occupied symbolic sites to challenge authority or reshape public narratives. In London, battles over access to Hyde Park were especially significant. Although political gatherings were banned there because it was a royal park, the Reform League’s demonstrations of the 1860s, in which supporters tore down fences to enter, forced change. Speaker’s Corner emerged from this as a legal compromise established by the 1872 Parks Regulation Act, designating a specific area where people could speak freely without permission. Even modern tactics, such as ‘locking on’, have historical roots: suffragettes chained themselves to the gates of Downing Street to demand visibility and access. From the 18th century to the present day, controlling the geography of protest has remained central to how the state manages dissent. Read more | Female activism: 10 remarkable protests from around the world TGA: Protests are also a form of political theatre, and public squares are their grand stages. Consider Tiananmen Square, the focal point of the Chinese protests in 1989. Or Wenceslas Square in Prague during the Velvet Revolution that same year, where 300,000 people gathered under the direction of Václav Havel – an actual dramatist turned leader – shaking their keys in unison to create an unforgettable sound. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/01/GettyImages-2186457134webready-3fb663a-e1767783864589.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A photograph showing very large crowds, holding up orange flags outside a large stone building with many windows and arches" title="Supporters of the opposition presidential candidate Viktor Yushchenko rally at the Maidan Nezalezhnosti in Kyiv in November 2004, after the election run-off was thought to be rigged against him (Image by Getty Images)" /> Similarly, Ukraine’s great protests have centred on the Maidan, Kyiv’s central square, during the Orange Revolution of 2004–05 and again in the Revolution of Dignity in 2014–15, when it became known as the Euromaidan. In each case, the physical setting of the central square of the capital has been vital to the drama and symbolism of protest. The suffragettes, who used violent tactics, are often lauded for having been on the ‘right side’ of history. What does this say about the way historical protests are perceived by posterity? KN: Groups such as the East London Federation of Suffragettes carried out more spectacular actions when moderate, peaceful wings were failing to make progress. This tactical shift in the early 1900s was also highly media-savvy. The suffragettes understood early mass media, staging stunts designed to capture newspaper front pages. Other actions targeted politicians or property: Winston Churchill, post boxes, shops. Because the suffragettes ultimately succeeded, their militancy is incorporated into the national narrative as justified. Movements using similar tactics that fail rarely achieve such recognition; the losers are often excluded from stories of national progress. History can move backwards as well as forwards, but there is a tendency to view the British story as progressive, where ‘winners’ are celebrated and ‘losers’ forgotten. This explains why suffragette militancy is accepted, while comparable violence – for example, during Irish campaigns for independence – is not seen as necessary. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/01/GettyImages-591947902webready-78185f2-e1767783995489.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A black and white photograph of a woman shouting amongst a crowd. A man dressed in a dark suit and hat stands next to her" title="Sylvia Pankhurst addresses a meeting of suffragettes in July 1913. The group made smart use of the mass media (Image by Getty Images)" /> TGA: So-called ‘freedom fighters’ who take up arms for independence are often celebrated as heroes if they succeed. History tends to memorialise those who eventually win, often decades after the events. An example is Oxford’s Martyrs’ Memorial, commemorating Protestant bishops who paid the ultimate price during the reign of ‘Bloody’ Mary and were celebrated only once their cause prevailed. In Czechoslovakia, the brave student Jan Palach set himself on fire in 1969 to protest the Soviet invasion. Today, Jan Palach Square commemorates his sacrifice – a recognition that would not have been possible if the country had remained under Soviet control. There is a particular category of hero here: the martyr, someone who literally gives their life for a cause. Such figures occupy a special place in these narratives, because their extraordinary courage and ultimate sacrifice have universal resonance. How important has social class been in the history of protest? KN: When asked about the most successful protests or campaigns, examples often include the abolition of slavery and the repeal of the Corn Laws in the 19th century. These movements were largely led by well-connected, relatively wealthy men and women who could exert influence in parliament. Their campaigns were single-issue, respectable, and financially supported, which allowed them to achieve legislative change. By contrast, working-class movements faced a far longer struggle to have their voices heard. Strict class hierarchies and limited resources made it harder to fund campaigns, influence policymakers, or sustain pressure. Yet, despite these constraints, working-class activists often achieved remarkable results with far fewer means than their wealthier counterparts, making their accomplishments all the more significant. TGA: Some protest movements are class-based, with the labour movement being the clearest example. However, protests tend to succeed most when they cross class boundaries and unite different parts of society, because rulers often employ a divide-and-rule strategy. A striking example is the Solidarity movement in Poland during the 1980s. This decade-long mass popular movement succeeded precisely because it united intelligentsia, workers and peasants. KN: This also marks a key difference in 20th century protests. In Britain and Ireland prior to the 1960s, movements were largely class-based, with the labour movement being the strongest. But protests then increasingly took the form of amorphous social movements, not tied to traditional party or trade union structures. These movements sought to connect local struggles with global causes such as environmental campaigns, the anti-Vietnam War movement, peace initiatives and anti-nuclear activism. They were typically more cross-class, framed as part of a wider global struggle rather than a narrow class-based conflict. TGA: One additional factor we haven’t discussed is age. There are striking examples of generational protest movements such as the one that swept across Europe in 1968, including Britain. Climate change activism has emerged as another. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/01/GettyImages-591947902webready-78185f2-e1767783995489.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A black and white photograph of a woman shouting amongst a crowd. A man dressed in a dark suit and hat stands next to her" title="Sylvia Pankhurst addresses a meeting of suffragettes in July 1913. The group made smart use of the mass media (Image by Getty Images)" /> What can today’s protesters learn from their predecessors? KN: That raises a central question: how do you organise against repressive regimes? One key factor is achieving a critical mass – breaking out of silos of class or generation and creating a large, united group capable of overcoming fear. This remains a core goal of any successful protest movement. TGA: It is vital to learn from history. For example, the Hungarian Revolution of 1956 was violently suppressed, and the Czechoslovak attempt to leave the Warsaw Pact in 1968 was met with Soviet invasion. By 1980–81, activists in Poland were far more cautious, learning from these experiences. There are several key lessons. First, maintain nonviolence. As the Polish dissident Adam Michnik warned: “Those who start by storming the Bastille may end up building their own Bastilles.” Nonviolence achieves more enduring results. Read more | Boston Tea Party: your guide to the protest that ignited a revolution Second, achieve a critical mass. Cascade effects and political theatre are essential, especially in the age of social media. A flash mob may appear impactful but, without sustained engagement, it disappears as quickly as it appeared. Third, develop a strategy. Clearly identify what you aim to change and how protest can effect that change. Non-violent movements succeed by targeting potential defectors within existing power structures – those who may be persuaded to switch allegiance. Protest has a promising future, but its lessons are best understood by studying the past. Timothy Garton Ash is Isaiah Berlin professorial fellow and professor of European studies at St Antony’s College, University of Oxford. His latest book is Homelands: A Personal History of Europe (Bodley Head, 2023) Katrina Navickas is professor of history at the University of Hertfordshire. Her books include Contested Commons: A History of Protest and Public Space in England (Reaktion, 2025) This article was first published in the Christmas 2025 issue of BBC History Magazine
George Washington is an American hero – so why was he the pride of Victorian England?
He may be a symbol of US independence, but George Washington’s family tree is firmly rooted on the opposite side of the Atlantic. Sam Edwards visits the English towns and villages that the president’s ancestors once called home
In 1886 a remarkable discovery in Lancashire, England, shed important new light on what one newspaper called the “vexed question of the ancestry of George Washington”. The discovery came during restoration work at St Oswald’s Church in Warton, a small village in the north of the county overlooked by a rocky crag and an Iron Age hill fort. As workmen chipped away at some of the old plaster on the church tower’s exterior, they were amazed to uncover “the coat of arms and name of the Washington family”. The news was received in Lancashire and beyond with delight. Indeed, despite his central role in leading the American Revolution, George Washington had long been a popular figure in Britain. He was often praised by the British press for his citizen virtue and skills as a military leader, and his death in December 1799 was mourned on both sides of the Atlantic. On learning of his passing, some of the ships of the Royal Navy’s fleet even lowered their flags to half-mast as a mark of respect. Little wonder that the discovery of Washington’s family crest at Warton was greeted with such enthusiasm. Here at last, after many years of detailed genealogical research, was something definitive, something literally carved in stone. The coat of arms at St Oswald’s provided clear proof that the Washington family tree had roots in the Lancashire loam. The timing could not have been more perfect. The relationship between the US and UK governments was just then becoming increasingly friendly – a development the historian Bradford Perkins later termed the ‘Great Rapprochement’. This was a good time, in short, to discover (and proclaim) Washington’s ‘Englishness’, particularly because his stock in the United States was riding especially high. Only a couple of years earlier, a huge obelisk in his memory had been dedicated in the nation’s capital, which still dominates the city skyline even now. British enthusiasm for Washington persisted over the subsequent decades. In the early 20th century, correspondents to The Times could still be found regularly (and excitedly) debating the first president’s English lineage, and by the 1920s there was a veritable ‘cult’ of Washington on this side of the pond. Today, five places in England can claim a close tie to Washington, as we reveal below… <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/12/1C5FTDE-8166170-e1766161751458.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A photograph of a white village pub with a red and gold sign saying George Washington. To the left, there is a large church tower" title="The George Washington pub in Warton is only a short distance from the church where the first president’s distant relatives, Elizabeth and Thomas Washington, are buried (Image by Alamy)" /> 1. Warton, Lancashire Where you can sup a pint in a pub named for George It’s fair to say that although George Washington was aware of a family connection to “one of the northern counties of England” he knew very little beyond that. The discovery of the family crest on the church tower in Warton therefore revealed that Washington’s instincts were correct. His family was indeed from a northern county – Lancashire – and it was quickly apparent that the ties to Warton went very deep. By 1888, one local historian, Henry Whitman, had even documented these ties in a special volume titled The Washingtons and their Connection with Warton. Among the local details Whitman recounted were a Washington grave (of Elizabeth, died in 1751, and of Thomas Washington, died in 1823) and a Washington House (dated 1612, and located on the village’s main street). Both the grave site and the house duly became key destinations for Washington pilgrims. In 1932, a large group of Americans visited the village to mark the bicentennial of Washington’s birth and, before departing, took time to lay a wreath at the grave of Elizabeth and Thomas. They were followed a decade later by groups of Lancashire-based American troops who left behind a Stars and Stripes flag that was subsequently flown from the tower of St Oswald’s every 4th July. Read more | George Washington: your guide to the war hero, founding father, first US president and slave owner And then, in 1976, the bicentennial of the American Revolution was celebrated in Warton with 10 days of festivities. The carefully planned events unfolded during a now-legendary summer heatwave and the partygoers became so parched that they literally drank the local bar dry! In 1998, the pub in question – The Black Bull – changed its name to The George Washington. Today, you can sup a pint under an American flag and just a short walk from where Washington’s distant relatives, Elizabeth and Thomas, are buried. 2. Whitehaven, Cumbria The burial place of George’s grandmother – and the only place in England invaded by the US Navy Lancashire isn’t the only northern county to claim a connection to the first president. In Whitehaven in Cumbria (historic Cumberland) there’s a Washington link that is even closer. The town, once heavily involved in the trade with the American colonies, is the final resting place of Mildred Gale, George Washington’s paternal grandmother, who died here in 1701. Born and raised in Virginia, Mildred was married to a Lawrence Washington (one of many in the Washington clan – see below for more details) and it was one of their children – Augustine – who became the father of George. Following Lawrence’s untimely death (in 1698), Mildred married George Gale of Whitehaven, hence why she was in town in 1701. The exact cause of her own death is unclear, though it was most probably some sort of disease as her infant child and maid also perished. The latter, a young woman by the name of ‘Jane’, was likely enslaved, though she was referred to in the parish burial register as a “negro servant”. Notably, Jane seems to have been buried in the same grave as Mildred. It was many years later, in 1876 – the 100th anniversary of the American Revolution – that the town’s Washington link was properly rediscovered. The link drew still more attention in the 20th century and a plaque commemorating the connection was unveiled in the church in 1955. Sadly, the church was severely damaged by fire in 1971, but a new memorial tablet was erected in 2006. Interestingly, this is not the town’s only link to the events of the American Revolution. In April 1778 a contemporary of George Washington – John Paul Jones – led a naval raid on Whitehaven. Jones’s plan was to disable the town’s guns and then set the ships in the harbour alight. The attack was only a partial success, however, because soon after their landing several of Jones’s men proceeded to the first pub they could find where they duly got drunk! Today, Whitehaven is proud of its connection to John Paul Jones. In 1999, the town even issued a declaration allowing one US Navy man o’ war per year to enter the harbour without charge. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/12/32JTB0N8-6fc0297-e1766162039230.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="Despite its connection to George Washington’s medieval ancestors, Washington Old Hall was nearly demolished in the 1930s. It is now under the care of the National Trust (Image by Alamy)" title="Despite its connection to George Washington’s medieval ancestors, Washington Old Hall was nearly demolished in the 1930s. It is now under the care of the National Trust (Image by Alamy)" /> 3. Washington Old Hall, Tyne and Wear Visited in 1977 by another president with local roots The Washington family seems to have first arrived in the Warton area as far back as the late 13th century, when a Robert Washington married into the Strickland family at nearby Sizergh Castle. Robert’s name – Washington – was derived from the village in County Durham where he lived, and he took it with him when he headed west. However, a branch of the family remained in County Durham until the end of the 14th century, and their impressive home still stands today: Washington Old Hall. Parts of the building likely go back to the age of the very first Washington – William (great-great grandfather of Robert) – and in the centuries that followed it had a remarkable life, going from a medieval manor house to a Victorian tenement. By the 1930s the house had fallen into disrepair and so an organisation was formed to purchase and restore it. In 1956, the National Trust assumed responsibility for its care and maintenance. The hall’s moment in the limelight came in May 1977 when huge crowds gathered there to welcome President Jimmy Carter. Carter was on an official tour of the northeast, and the hall was his second stop. The first was at Newcastle Civic Centre where he gave a speech which began with the now-famous words (delivered in almost passable Geordie) “Howay the lads”! 4. Sulgrave Manor, Northamptonshire A ‘shrine’ to George, deep in the English countryside If the Old Hall in Washington has the earliest English connection to the first president, it’s nonetheless another rural country seat that claims the title of being his ancestral home: Sulgrave Manor in deepest Northamptonshire. Tudor in origin, the house was built by Lawrence Washington (the first of several ‘Lawrences’ in the Washington genealogy) and it remained in the family until the mid-17th century. After the Washingtons’ departure it was occupied by various tenant farmers, and by the 20th century it had fallen into disrepair. The manor was subsequently saved thanks to the intervention of several high-profile figures, including Theodore Roosevelt, president of the United States from 1901–09. ‘Teddy’, as he was known, was keen to mark the centennial of the Treaty of Ghent, the agreement that had ended the War of 1812 (which had seen British troops march on Washington and burn down the White House). Read more | Pardon me, are you Aaron Burr, sir? The real story of the maligned Founding Father and 'villain' of Hamilton By 1914, fundraising in both countries had enabled the purchase of the house, but the outbreak of the First World War then delayed the plans for its repair and reconstruction. The restored manor was finally unveiled as a ‘shrine’ to the Anglo-American relationship in June 1921. Interestingly, this was not the only celebration of George Washington’s English connections that summer. Just a week after the events at Sulgrave, a statue of the first president was unveiled in London overlooking Trafalgar Square. The two projects were in fact closely connected and so the statue’s dedication similarly involved various influential figures. One of these was Lord Curzon, the British foreign secretary, whose unveiling speech went so far as to claim Washington as a “Great Englishman”. In the years afterwards a popular myth developed around the statue: to honour Washington’s vow never to set foot on English soil, it was said that the statue was purposefully placed on earth imported from his home state of Virginia. Unfortunately, nothing in the archival record suggests that this is true. But the myth has been so powerful that following the recent re-dedication of the statue, in June 2025, some soil from Washington’s Mount Vernon home was indeed placed beneath the pedestal. 5. Purleigh and Maldon, Essex The key link to the very first Washingtons of Virginia By the time the Washingtons sold Sulgrave in the mid-17th century, one branch of the family had settled at Purleigh in Essex, 10 miles to the east of Chelmsford. This was where clergyman Reverend Lawrence Washington – the great-grandson of the Lawrence who had built the manor at Sulgrave – had been given the wealthy parish of All Saints. However, the good reverend’s commitment to the Crown during the Civil War led him to fall out of favour with the Puritan authorities and he later died in poverty in 1652. Perhaps this was why his son John opted to find a future in the North American colonies, landing in Virginia in 1657. John’s son – yet another Lawrence – was born in the colony in 1659, and it was he who married Mildred (later buried at Whitehaven). Of their three surviving children, one – Augustine – was to be the father of George Washington. Read more | Is this the secret to understanding US foreign policy? How a powerful doctrine from 1823 reshaped America When Reverend Lawrence Washington died, he was buried not in his old parish at Purleigh, but in nearby Maldon, and in 1928 a memorial window was dedicated there to commemorate this fact. The window was a gift from the citizens of the similarly named Malden in Massachusetts and was unveiled, very deliberately, on 5th July (just a day after Independence Day). The keen-eyed will see that towards the top of the window’s central panel is an image of the Washington coat of arms: three stars in red, above four bars in red and white. This is the very same heraldic sign that had been uncovered by workmen in Warton all those years before, and a long-running (though unproven) myth holds that it was in fact the inspiration for the Stars and Stripes of the American flag. Dr Sam Edwards is a reader in modern political history at Loughborough University
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
Michael Wood on the rise and fall of Asian empires
"Emperor Jahangir and Shah Abbas literally bestride the world like colossi", writes Michael Wood
Watching the recent spectacle of those latter-day emperors President Xi of China and India’s Narendra Modi hugging each other at the summit in Tianjin, my mind cast back to an earlier image of a pan-Asian summit. There’s a wonderful painting from 1618 of the Mughal emperor Jahangir embracing Shah Abbas of Iran – one of several such pictures painted for the Indian ruler. These heads of two superpowers were in fact not bosom buddies but intense geopolitical rivals, especially in the Kandahar region of south-west Afghanistan, then under Mughal control. Framed by a huge golden halo, in an image of peace, one stands on a lamb, the other on a lion, both on a globe whose surface extends from the strait of Gibraltar to the South China Sea: they literally bestride the world like colossi. In the foreground of the map, a product of the new science of cartography, are shown north Africa, India and south-east Asia, with the Nile, the Ganges and the Yangtze accurately depicted. The painting is allegorical; the hoped-for meeting never actually took place. But the timing, and the details, have much to tell us. In the painting, western Europe lies, unseen, over the horizon. Yet at that moment the small, aggressive maritime powers on the edge of the Eurasian landmass were already extending their influence and carving up the New World – and were now threatening the old powers in the Asiatic heartland of civilisation. The Spanish had begun colonisation of the Philippines in 1565, the Portuguese leased Macao in 1557, the English East India Company was founded in 1600, and the Dutch East India Company was established two years later. Elizabeth I had earlier sent an ambassador to Jahangir’s father, Akbar, to negotiate trade links. In another painting, Jahangir greets a Sufi mystic in the presence of the Ottoman Sultan and King James VI & I – not an imaginary likeness but one taken from a portrait brought to India by the ambassador Thomas Roe in 1616. In an uncanny touch by the painter, James stares coolly out of the picture, straight at the viewer, as if to say: “Our time has come.” And it had. Read more | Gulbadan Begum: the Mughal Jane Austen The Mughal artist Abu al-Hasan, who painted that magnificent picture of Jahangir and Abbas, cannot have imagined that his world – the world stretching from the Mediterranean to the Yellow Sea, created by the great Asiatic civilisations – was about to be shaken to its core by the violent energies, the inventiveness and the sheer ambition of the Europeans. Jahangir never got his summit with Shah Abbas. Nor did he meet the ailing Wanli Emperor, who was destined to die a couple of years later in Beijing. Since then, the turning of the wheel of history has been astounding: empires, world wars, the colonisation of entire continents, the triumph of capitalism – changes so huge that it is hardly possible to take them all in. The world has been remade in our likeness. And now, in 2025, President Xi hosts a summit calling for an alternative world order – “a more just and equitable global governance system”. We may not like President Xi’s choice of friends, but such is the realpolitik of our age. And to be sure, some would say that the American empire has accumulated enough misdeeds of its own to merit a reaction. Xi, in particular – an avid reader of history books (the Chinese translation of Peter Frankopan’s The Silk Roads reportedly among them) believes in the destiny of China. He thinks that China’s time has come, after the ‘Century of Humiliation’ at the hands of western powers. Eighty years on from the Second World War, Xi now says that China’s rise to global leadership is “unstoppable”. So back to these images of empire: Jahangir and Abbas, Modi and Xi. Some would say that they represent wish fulfilment: a rebuke to what President Xi’s baleful friend Putin calls “outdated Eurocentric and Euro-Atlantic models”. But behind the hugs and the photo ops, behind that amazing piece of diplomatic grandstanding in the giant military parade in Beijing celebrating China’s role in the Second World War, perhaps there is more than that: a vision of the future, uncomfortable though it may be to us in the west. As for Jahangir’s globe, the painting was a dream. But there are few images from the past that more powerfully distil what might have been. And now, as Shakespeare put it, “the whirligig of time brings in his revenges”. This column was first published in the November 2025 issue of BBC History Magazine
Fake news and the Dreyfus affair: the media-fuelled scandal that divided France
The wrongful conviction for treason of a Jewish army captain in France in the late 19th century exposed antisemitism and virulent nationalism – but also, as Mike Rapport reveals, sparked a flood of ‘fake news’ that presaged the worst of the modern media landscape
In the oppressive heat of his cell in the Mont-Valérien military prison west of Paris on 31 August 1898, Lieutenant-Colonel Hubert-Joseph Henry wrote a despairing letter to his wife, drank half a bottle of rum, and killed himself. This desperate act was a pivotal moment in one of the best-known causes celebres in modern history: the Dreyfus Affair. The story of Henry’s suicide, following his arrest for forging a document in the controversial case, was co-opted by the nationalist rightwing media as part of a tidal wave of coverage that threatened to destabilise French democracy and public trust in the Republic. The background is well known today. In September 1894, Henry, a counter-espionage officer, had uncovered evidence of a mole within French military intelligence. A cleaner working in the German embassy (and in Henry’s pay) had found a memorandum, since dubbed the ‘bordereau’, written by an officer in the French General Staff revealing military secrets. The handwriting was identified as that of Alfred Dreyfus, an army captain then working in the War Ministry, who was arrested, court-martialled, publicly degraded and hauled off to solitary confinement on the notoriously harsh penal colony of Devil’s Island, off French Guiana. But the army had the wrong man. Contradictions and irregularities in the case soon began to appear. In August 1896, the new head of military intelligence, Lieutenant-Colonel Georges Picquart, was examining more papers stolen from the German embassy. The handwriting on one was identical to that in the bordereau used to convict Dreyfus – but the signature was that of Ferdinand Walsin Esterhazy, a dissipated, debt-ridden, disreputable officer who had been selling secrets to the Germans for two years. Dreyfus, Picquart realised, was innocent. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/11/BAL1756949-CMYKWeb-Ready-2c9d689.jpg" width="3683" height="2456" alt="An engraving shows a man lying dead on the floor, while a police officer kneels over him. Another police officer stands by his head, and two more officers are entering the room in the background" title="An engraving depicts the discovery of the suicide of Lieutenant-Colonel Hubert-Joseph Henry following his arrest for forging a letter incriminating Dreyfus. Some thought his crime justifiable (Image by Bridgeman Images)" /> Ignoring the errors Even after this discovery, Dreyfus remained incarcerated for years longer because government officials, the army and large segments of public opinion refused to accept that a terrible error had been made. In part this was a result of the desire to maintain national security by authorities who were keen to avoid demoralising the army just as France secured a military alliance with the Russian empire, and amid heightened tensions with Germany following its annexation of the Alsace-Lorraine region from France in 1871. But it was also due to the fact that Dreyfus was from Alsace, and Jewish – at a time when a virulent strain of antisemitism based on ‘scientific’ racism had emerged, and as antisemites of different political persuasions associated Jews with either socialism or capitalism. Read more | Fake news and Nazis: Richard J Evans on the spectre of conspiracies These motives also played on a deeper division that had riven French society since 1789. There were those who, like Dreyfus himself, embraced the principles of the Revolution and its legacy as embodied in the Third Republic, founded in 1870. These included secularism, parliamentary democracy, civil equality and a world view exulting in science and human reason. Adherents of this strong current within French political culture generally became ‘Dreyfusards’ who supported the officer’s innocence. Their opponents saw 1789 as a fatal breach with France’s true historical destiny: Catholic, hierarchical and monarchical. More recently, this traditional conservatism had been joined by a new form of rightwing ideology promising social reform but which was also nationalist, authoritarian, antisemitic. Many of those with such views became ‘anti-Dreyfusard’, opposed to revisiting the case. These flames were stoked by a virulently partisan newspaper press that played a pivotal role in the battle for public opinion. Print media had experienced a boom stimulated by more rapid communications, the introduction of photographs into newspapers, an expansion in advertising, and new forms of printing technology that made periodicals quicker and cheaper to produce and more widely available. At that time, France had a particularly vibrant press. Free, compulsory and universal primary education for boys and girls from the early 1880s encouraged literacy, and a press law enacted in 1881 lifted almost all restrictions on what could be published, although this was rolled back in 1893 and 1894 after a spate of anarchist bombings. Journalists and publishers could be sued for slander, but cases were rarely successful. Between 1881 and the outbreak of the First World War in 1914, the number of periodical titles mushroomed by 250 per cent. These publications included broadsheets and tabloid newspapers representing the whole range of political opinions from the radical left to the extreme right. Yet within this vibrant ecosystem of print lurked a danger that remains familiar in our age of social media, online news and artificial intelligence. It was all too easy to spread what we now call ‘fake news’ – misinformation (falsehoods spread unintentionally), disinformation (fabrications aimed at manipulating readers politically and socially) and malinformation (deception based on some truth, but twisted in such a way as to deceive). <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/11/GettyImages-1404448124cmykWeb-Ready-a0c4306.jpg" width="2374" height="1582" alt="A black and white photograph of a man wearing military uniform, including a hat with "74" written on the front. He has a large, heavy moustache" title="Ferdinand Walsin Esterhazy, the officer who really wrote the treasonous memorandum attributed to Dreyfus. He was acquitted by a tribunal in 1898 (Image by Getty Images)" /> Fake news During the Dreyfus Affair, the newspaper press was infused with ‘fake news’. Not for the last time, the episode exposed the friction between free speech on the one hand and, on the other hand, the challenges that arise when people of bad faith abuse that freedom, spreading falsehoods to manipulate public opinion, demonise certain groups of people, or undermine faith in the rule of law and democratic government. The Dreyfus case sparked a truly explosive public controversy after Walsin Esterhazy was finally tried – and acquitted with unseemly haste – by a military court in January 1898. On 13 January, novelist Émile Zola published J’Accuse…!, an open letter to the president of the Republic, in L’Aurore newspaper. He accused the government and army of committing a gross injustice and of conspiring to cover up the truth. He specifically highlighted and decried the antisemitism, militarism and authoritarianism behind the falsehoods: “It is a crime to lead public opinion astray,” Zola wrote, “to manipulate it for a death-dealing purpose and pervert it to the point of delirium. It is a crime to poison the minds of the humble, ordinary people, to whip reactionary and intolerant passions into a frenzy while sheltering behind the odious bastion of antisemitism… It is a crime to play on patriotism to further the aims of hatred.” <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/11/GettyImages-90758187cmykWeb-Ready-51ffbc8.jpg" width="2642" height="1761" alt="A yellow newspaper page with the headline "J'accuse!" written across the top" title="Émile Zola’s open letter to the president of the Republic, accusing the army and government of a cover-up in the Dreyfus Affair, exposed deep rifts in French society (Image by Getty Images)" /> Following Zola’s outburst, the Dreyfus Affair erupted into a full-scale public storm. Except on rare occasions, newspapers tended to reinforce the beliefs of their readership rather than challenge them with facts. Giving readers what they wanted to hear was partly driven by economics: the conservative Le Figaro, for example, had stopped publishing Zola’s articles towards the end of 1897 after he openly embraced the Dreyfusard cause, which hurt sales of the newspaper. Yet much of the fake news had an even more insidious purpose. Anti-Dreyfusard papers fuelled nationalist prejudices by targeting Jews; claimed to be defending the ‘honour’ of the army; and railed against the ‘unpatriotic’ manoeuvres of the Dreyfusards – all as a means of galvanising support for the assorted authoritarians, monarchists, nationalists and antisemites who loathed the Republic. It was not that the Dreyfusards were innocent of spreading fake news. Although much of what Zola wrote in J’Accuse…! turned out to be accurate, he did not get everything right, as he himself appeared to admit when he finished by saying that he would willingly submit to prosecution for defamation under the 1881 Press Law. Zola did, in fact, face prosecution in 1898, avoiding imprisonment only by slipping away in June to England and living there in exile for a year. Read more | “A tidal wave of digital material will overwhelm recordkeeping institutions”: the future of history Even some leftwing Dreyfusard newspapers tended to casually use the antisemitic trope of the Jew as capitalist to explain popular hostility against Jews. Anti-Dreyfusard publications saw Jews, socialists and leftwing republicans as a ‘Syndicate of Treason’ (as the vitriolic journalist Henri Rochefort put it). However, the Dreyfusard press was prone to sharing conspiracy theories of its own, seeing its opponents as part of an interwoven plot involving the Catholic church and the nationalists, aiming to destroy the Republic and the inheritance of 1789. Yet the anti-Dreyfusard press had most of the running: of the 55 dailies published at the time, only eight came out as Dreyfusard from February 1898, almost all of them with relatively low circulation numbers. The media was dominated by anti-Dreyfusard titles, which had an almost open field in which to bombard readers with a swirl of half-truths and outright lies, stoking prejudices and stirring up fears. Forgiveable forgery One of the most egregious moments came in the wake of Lieutenant-Colonel Henry’s death. After his colleague, Picquart, had exposed Esterhazy as the real traitor in 1896, Henry had tried to bolster the case against Dreyfus by forging a letter that ‘proved’ his guilt, introducing it into the dossier of evidence. The ruse was successful until, as the pressure mounted over the course of 1898, the government investigated and discovered that forgery, leading to Henry’s arrest and suicide. For anti-Dreyfusard journalists, Henry’s crime was forgiveable: it was ‘patriotic’ because it served a higher cause – the security of the nation. Dreyfus was guilty anyway, they claimed; and even if he were innocent, those who sought to clear his name were traitors working for Germany. The virulently nationalist La Patrie accused Zola of doing untold harm to the army: “And since that day, the damage has surged in like a torrent, roared like a tempest. Who has not recognised in this tactic the workings of Bismarckian [ie German] politics?” The idea that Henry was a martyr to the cause of patriotism gained traction when the explicitly and graphically antisemitic La Libre Parole opened a subscription for the Lieutenant-Colonel’s widow, Berthe, which received no fewer than 25,000 donations. The newspaper published the many antisemitic and anti-republican messages sent along with the money. La Libre Parole means ‘Free Speech’, making it a case study for how prejudice and anti-democratic forces cloak themselves in the very freedoms that they seek to destroy or to deny to others. The Dreyfus case was – rightly or wrongly – seen as connected with both national security and the country’s future, so both sides entrenched themselves deeply within their positions. The more that the problems with Dreyfus’s conviction trickled out, the more the anti-Dreyfusards reinvigorated strategies that rested less on facts than on what is today called ‘gaslighting’ and on deflection, both of which involved stoking prejudices and demeaning opponents. Gaslighting, by which the perpetrator seeks to cast doubt on the truth, was deployed by Édouard Drumont, editor of La Libre Parole, who in June 1898 assured his readers that Dreyfusards were merely “a clutch of cosmopolitans who always talk of pieces of paper and documents but never prove anything” – the term ‘cosmopolitan’ being a dog-whistle term denoting unpatriotic or Jewish people. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/11/RV185-14cmykWeb-Ready-bfe91fd.jpg" width="2464" height="1643" alt="The top image shows a man in a suit with a moustache sitting at a desk and looking to the right. The bottom image shows a bearded man wearing glasses attached to a string, looking directly into the camera" title="Nationalist writer Maurice Barrès (top) entreated readers to consider national security above the facts of the miscarriage of justice, in contrast with the moral arguments of Dreyfusard Émile Zola (Images by TopFoto and Getty Images)" /> Nationalist writer Maurice Barrès made a more sophisticated use of gaslighting. Nothing in the Dreyfus Affair was demonstrably true, he argued in Le Journal in February 1898, so “how do you intend… to undertake to solve the problem when you do not have all the data?” he demanded of the Dreyfusards. Barrès’ purpose was to cast doubt on the significance of the few facts that were, at that point, already public knowledge. He took this further by suggesting that there are some truths that are “foreign to individual reason”, and that national circumstances and interests were the true barometer of what was just and true. “It is necessary to judge things in the relative,” Barrès argued, opening the way for his readership to be secure in their prejudices – because for them the army’s honour and national security were more important than the facts of any miscarriage of justice. Anti-Dreyfusard newspapers tried in various ways to deflect their readers’ attention away from the question of the convicted man’s innocence and onto other targets. This was a strategy behind the argument that Henry’s forgery was ‘patriotic’: his crime was minor compared to the real danger, which would be the victory of the Dreyfusards, who were no better than traitors. La Patrie proclaimed in September 1898: “Let us leave those cosmopolitans from Frankfurt to howl with joy over the tomb of that modest child of French soil [Henry]… Let us turn away with disgust from the spectacle of the odious triumph of the worst enemies of the army and of the country.” In that one sentence, the newspaper connected the Dreyfusards with treason, with Germany and Jews (‘cosmopolitans’), and with the ignominy of defeat – ‘Frankfurt’ being a reference to the humiliating peace treaty with Germany at the end of the Franco-Prussian War in 1871. Demeaning caricatures At the same time, the anti-Dreyfusard press demeaned their opponents, caricaturing them as effeminate wimps, sexually sterile and highly strung, and contrasted them with the muscular, virile masculinity of the army officers whom they were accused of attacking. Zola was frequently depicted with simian characteristics: hairy, fat, thick-lipped. Dreyfus and other Jewish figures were ascribed the whole range of antisemitic tropes. La Libre Parole compared the ‘French’ femininity of Henry’s widow, Berthe, with the Jewish Dreyfusard Joseph Reinach, who was “puffy, swarthy, sweaty, stomach bulging”. For some, it did not even matter that Dreyfus was innocent: he was Jewish, so for the nationalists the greater ‘truth’ was that he could never be French. The process of gaslighting and deflection combined to stoke prejudices and popular fears, fogging out the original question of Dreyfus’s innocence. Read more | How Napoleon (almost) destroyed the French Revolution Yet a denouement was eventually reached. In February 1899, President Félix Faure – who opposed reopening Dreyfus’s case – died of a brain haemorrhage. He was succeeded by a Dreyfusard, Émile Loubet, whose election by parliament prompted an unsuccessful coup attempt by the Ligue des Patriotes and the Ligue antisémitique, who provided the street muscle of the anti-Dreyfusard movement. In June, the appeals court quashed Dreyfus’s conviction and ordered a retrial, which took place in August and September 1899 in Rennes – Paris being deemed too dangerous. Shockingly, the military tribunal again found the captain guilty. President Loubet issued a formal pardon, but Dreyfus was not officially cleared until 1906. He returned to the army, serving with merit in the First World War. The Dreyfus Affair showed how, when the stakes were high and when divisions ran deep, a torrent of half-truths, lies, deflection, the stoking of fear and prejudices, and appeals to ‘patriotism’ made it difficult for citizens to make informed decisions. It also demonstrated that many citizens were content to have their prejudices reaffirmed rather than critically examined. This is why Barrès’ argument that the nation had needs that were above reason and truth was so corrosive to democratic politics. The principle that truth, justice and legality could be judged only according to national interests allowed readers to indulge in a kind of relativism that justified falsehoods and injustice in pursuit of a conception of France that excluded groups who were the bogeymen of the nationalist right: Jews, foreigners, Protestants, Freemasons, socialists and others. It also exposed the spiky question that every democracy faces when freedom of expression becomes a means of undermining confidence and trust in its institutions: how to defend itself without infringing the very liberties that are its essence. Ultimately, the lesson of the Dreyfus Affair is that, in an age of mass media, citizens not only need to be equipped to make the honest effort to assess critically their sources of information and to examine their positions with verifiable evidence: they have to be willing to do so. In December 1898, L’Aurore understood that this was essential to the survival of democracy: “It is for citizens to inform themselves, to think, to use their will; it is for them to reform their morals, to no longer let themselves be taken for fools or as things to be juggled with and to emancipate themselves, not by force, but by ideas.” We need, the newspaper concluded, to “enlighten [our] brains, not slice them open!” Mike Rapport is reader in modern European history at the University of Glasgow This article was first published in the November 2025 issue of BBC History Magazine
After Franco: Spain's miraculous transition to democracy
The nation’s transition from dictatorship to democracy in the late 1970s surely counts as one of modern Europe’s most remarkable stories. On the 50th anniversary of General Franco’s death, Paul Preston explores how pluralism arose from the ashes of tyranny
When General Francisco Franco died on 20 November 1975 – 39 years after the start of the brutal civil war that brought him to power – the prospect of a bloodless transition to democracy in Spain appeared vanishingly small. Franco had prepared a rigid framework to guarantee the permanence of the dictatorship over which he had ruled with an iron fist for almost four decades. Spain teetered on the edge of bloodshed and chaos, with powerful groups at the political extremes ferociously opposed to compromise. And so, as El Caudillo (‘The Leader’) was buried in the vast Valley of the Fallen memorial just outside Madrid – acclaimed by tens of thousands of blue-shirted supporters – few commentators would have predicted a future of pluralism and relative peace. Yet that’s exactly what was achieved. That the Spanish people were, over the next 10 years, able to negotiate a perilous path towards democracy through the minefields laid by Franco himself – and the ambushes set by terrorists of both right and left – counts as an extraordinary achievement. Even from a distance of 50 years, it surely ranks among modern Europe’s most remarkable stories. So how did it happen? Blurring the past To answer that question we must rewind to the end of the Second World War. Terror had underpinned Franco’s regime from the moment he was propelled to power at the end of the 1930s. But defeat for the Axis powers in 1945 shattered his initial plans for a fascist future – one in which Europe was dominated by authoritarian regimes. Franco realised that he needed to end Spain’s international ostracism in the postwar period and be incorporated into the western community. To achieve that, a new approach was required. And so, to blur the Spanish dictator’s Axis past, a scheme was devised by his crony, naval captain Luis Carrero Blanco, to perpetuate the regime behind a monarchist facade. The Law of Succession of 26 July 1947 established Spain as a kingdom with Franco as its head of state. Franco would govern as regent until prevented by death or incapacity – and he had the right to nominate his own royal successor. The dictator didn’t name that successor immediately. In fact, it wasn’t until July 1969 that Franco announced to the world the identity of the man who would become head of state following his death. That man was Juan Carlos – grandson of Alfonso XIII, king of Spain from 1886 to 1931. This would not be a restoration of the legitimate royal family but the installation of a monarchy created by the Falangists – the far-right nationalist political group fronted by Franco. Juan Carlos would be compelled to uphold the fundamental laws of the regime, and could be removed if he strayed from them. As such, he was very much at the regime’s mercy. And yet, though no one knew it at the time, he would show the courage and vision to lead Spain’s transition to a democratic future. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/11/GettyImages-515401714webready-f4ef08c.jpg" width="3891" height="2594" alt="General Franco (right) in Madrid with Juan Carlos. The dictator’s nominated successor “would show the courage and vision to lead Spain’s transition to a democratic future“ (Image by Getty Images)" title="General Franco (right) in Madrid with Juan Carlos. The dictator’s nominated successor “would show the courage and vision to lead Spain’s transition to a democratic future“ (Image by Getty Images)" /> In the late 1960s, that future lay some way off. Franco was still very much alive. By now, the dictator had delegated day-to-day administration of the regime to Carrero Blanco, an appointment that, rather than consolidate the regime, merely accelerated its disintegration. Facing an inexorable rise in working-class and student dissent and the armed opposition of the Basque separatist terrorist organisation, ETA, Carrero intensified repression, employing neo-Nazi organisations, off-duty policemen and civil guards to do his dirty work. It was a strategy that poisoned relations with the Basques, the clergy and workers, and fomented disquiet among the most perceptive elements of the regime. Read more | "If you represent Pinochet in this case, I will divorce you”: the sensational trial of the Chilean dictator It also made him a target for assassination. On 20 December 1973, Carrero was blown up in Madrid by a bomb planted by four ETA operatives. Things got little better under his successor, Carlos Arias Navarro. In fact, an early trickle of defections under Carrero turned into a flood from 1974. With their country blighted by military interventionism, the virulence of the extreme right, violence in the Basque Country, obsolete industries and uneven development, moderates among the ranks of both the regime and the opposition were rapidly reaching the conclusion that only negotiation could prevent a bloodbath. Franco’s invading army Yet those seeking compromise in the wake of Franco’s death in November 1975 were confronted with seemingly insuperable obstacles – chief among them that, under Franco, Spain was governed as if it were a territory conquered by an invading army. The civil war had been provoked and fought by a coalition of rightwing forces to defend their sectoral interests against the reforming ambitions of the democratic Second Republic. Landowners, industrialists and bankers wanted to safeguard their economic privileges; the army to defend the centralised organisation of the Spanish state; and the church to retain its cultural hegemony. Each contributed to Franco’s war effort, financially, militarily or ideologically. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/11/GettyImages-463210205webready-2e54d5b.jpg" width="2772" height="1848" alt="A black and white photograph showing men in suits sitting around a long table. In front of each man is a folder of papers" title="Juan Carlos presides at the first cabinet meeting after Franco’s death, December 1975. His inbox would soon include terrorism, industrial unrest, and an army that simmered with discontent (Image by Getty Images)" /> The regime’s long-term survival was facilitated by total control of the media and of what passed for an education system to implement a national brainwashing that fomented fear of the return of the ‘reds’. After the civil war, these diverse forces of Francoism remained united by fear and by networks of corruption. Hardline Francoism was entrenched in the army, the police and the Civil Guard. However, for those such as Juan Carlos seeking an alternative future for Spain, there were glimmers of opportunity. Mass demonstrations revealed an overwhelming popular urge for democracy. Juan Carlos knew that important sectors of Spanish capitalism saw the political apparatus of Francoism as an obstacle to growth. In opting boldly for progress, he would be following the advice of British, European and American leaders. Read more | How Italian dictator Benito Mussolini became the first face of fascism While Juan Carlos may have been the most high-profile figure in Spain’s post-Franco reform project, he was far from the only politician seeking to transform the nation. In fact, the brains behind the operation can be said to be Juan Carlos’s one-time tutor, Torcuato Fernández-Miranda, an expert in Francoist constitutional law. As president of the Cortes (Spain’s parliament, which would have to ratify any reform scheme) and of the Council of the Kingdom (which had to endorse prime ministers), Fernández-Miranda would facilitate the ‘legal’ reform that was to be the real basis of the transition. Fernández-Miranda also played a key role in the elevation, in the summer of 1976, to prime minister of the young liberal Falangist Adolfo Suárez. Albeit impelled down the road to democratisation by popular pressure (1976 saw violence, enormous demonstrations and industrial strikes sweep the country) Suárez would be the perfect man for the historic task of steering democratic reform through the Francoist institutions. It was he, more than any other figure, who convinced other politicians that the reform project was serious. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/11/2TCY57Wwebready-04bbc53.jpg" width="5751" height="3834" alt="A black and white photograph showing two men with slicked back hair standing on either side of a microphone" title="Juan Carlos’s one-time tutor, Torcuato Fernández-Miranda (right, in 1969), introduced the legal reforms that facilitated Spain’s move to democracy (Image by Alamy)" /> As for Juan Carlos, his contribution lay firstly in persuading major figures to join Suárez’s cabinet. Secondly, by dint of constant journeys throughout Spain he generated support for reform and rode out the storm of opprobrium provoked by his nomination of Falangists like Suárez. Above all, by appearing in the uniform of commander-in-chief, and through his private meetings with officers, he neutralised the high command of the army and restrained military hostility to the democratic process. In the autumn of 1976, with great skill, Suárez managed to steer Fernández-Miranda’s astute reform project through the Francoist institutions. In mid-November, it was approved in the Cortes by a huge majority of its members, the largely unelected procuradores. Suárez later called it a collective suicide by the “procuradores del harakiri”. Juan Carlos made a considerable effort to make contact with members of the opposition to convince them of the need for moderation. This was rewarded on 15 December when the referendum on political reform saw the project approved by a majority of more than 90 per cent. The opposition’s calls for abstention were ignored by the leftwing rank-and-file – a telling manifestation of popular readiness to make sacrifices to secure the basic framework of democracy. The referendum was a victory for Suárez but also for the mass pressure throughout 1976 that had pushed the government towards democratisation. A SYMBOL OF RECONCILIATION How an amnesty helped Spain confront its past, and its future On 15 June 1977 something remarkable occurred across Spain: people went to the polls in free elections for the first time since 1936. With Adolfo Suárez’s UCD party securing victory, the complex process of building a democracy could now begin. Yet how was this to be achieved without plunging Spain back into dictatorship or the horrors of another civil war? The widespread consensus was that sacrifices would have to be made – and that meant an amnesty. On 14 October, that amnesty passed through Spain’s parliament, the Cortes, into law. This hugely consequential piece of legislation effectively stated that acts of terrorism in opposition to the Franco dictatorship – which meant the sporadic guerrilla warfare of the 1940s and ETA terrorism – and the crimes against human rights in its defence, could not be subject to judicial proceedings. As such, it wiped the slate clean and rested on a tacit, collective agreement of the great majority of the Spanish people to renounce any settling of accounts with Franco’s regime. The public pressure for such an amnesty had been building for months – the previous year, 80,000 people had taken to the streets of Barcelona on successive Sundays to call for one. Yet the passing of the legislation was not without controversy. In early October, Suárez had met with representatives of all parties and warned them that the army, the banks and, to a lesser extent, the church had voiced their objections to an amnesty for political prisoners. That’s why the law that passed through parliament excluded both army officers who had fought for the Republic during the civil war and those involved in the Unión Militar Democrática, a pressure group of liberal officers punished for trying to ensure that the army would not block democratic transformation. Given the numerical discrepancy between the relatively few people involved in acts of violence against the regime and the many involved in its brutal imposition, the law required democratic forces to make a major sacrifice. It was also accompanied by the systematic destruction of the archives of the Franco regime’s repressive apparatus. Yet despite these issues, the amnesty – backed by a near-unanimous vote – seemed to symbolise reconciliation in a country that had been plagued by violence, bitterness and bloodshed for decades. As the basis of the ‘pact of oblivion’ (pacto del olvido) instituted across the political spectrum following Franco’s death, it would be one of the pillars of the transition to democracy. The trump card With elections scheduled for June, Suárez needed to create a party. Convinced that his best chance of success lay with a centre party, Suárez cobbled together the Unión de Centro Democrático by exploiting the need of many small centre right parties for alliances. His trump card was government control of Radio-Television Española and of local administrative machinery. UCD fused five main groups, each in turn composed of several others, all desperate to be part of an electorally viable movement. Ideological and ethical considerations took a back seat. Suárez’s skilful use of the media was rewarded with victory. UCD won 165 seats in the new Cortes, followed by the Socialist PSOE (who enjoyed considerable international support) with 118. The Communist Party of Spain and rightwing Alianza Popular trailed way behind with 20 and 16 seats respectively. But an essential part of the progress towards the elections also posed the greatest obstacle to the long-term consolidation of democracy. The legalisation of the Communist Party on 9 April confirmed the military’s conviction that its job was less to defend Spain from external enemies and more to safeguard Franco’s civil war victory. This wasn’t the only threat to the nascent democracy. From 1977 until 1982, on a monthly basis, Juan Carlos had to impose his authority as commander-in-chief of the armed forces on officers outraged because Suárez’s minister of defence, General Manuel Gutiérrez Mellado, manoeuvred liberal officers into, and reactionaries out of, key positions. The situation was worsened by the relentless provocation of ETA’s attacks on officers. The response of the ultras within the army was golpismo – conspiracy to restore the dictatorship. At frequent receptions for senior officers at his Zarzuela Palace and on tense visits to garrisons, Juan Carlos argued powerfully for unity and discipline. Nevertheless, the crisis intensified and in late 1980 a plot was hatched to launch a military coup. The ex-secretary general of the royal household, General Alfonso Armada, persuaded other generals, most notably the Captain-General of Valencia, the ultra Jaime Milans del Bosch, that he had royal approval to instigate regime change. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/11/GettyImages-515557430webready-e05d150.jpg" width="3356" height="2237" alt="A black and white photograph showing a man in military uniform standing at a pulpit in parliament, holding one arm in the air and a gun in the other hand" title="Antonio Tejero draws his pistol inside the Spanish parliament. The attempted coup of February 1981 constituted the greatest threat to Spain’s nascent democracy (Image by Getty Images)" /> At the end of January 1981, facing a revolt from within his own party as his popularity crumbled, Suárez resigned as prime minister. This left the king as the most visible guarantor of democracy but his meetings with Armada enabled the latter to give the impression of royal collusion in what was being plotted – and on 23 February, the plotters struck. Lieutenant-Colonel Antonio Tejero seized the entire Spanish political elite as they attended the Cortes investiture of a new cabinet under Leopoldo Calvo Sotelo, while Milans del Bosch ordered tanks into the streets of Valencia. Read more | The bombing of Guernica: who was responsible? Alone with his immediate staff, the king courageously headed the operation to dismantle the coup. In the course of a tense night, he appeared on television insisting that he would uphold the constitution. He telephoned Milans, effectively informing him that he would have to kill him in order to succeed: “I swear to you that I will neither abdicate nor leave Spain.” His intervention effectively ended the putsch. By the end of the month, the conspirators were in prison. Plots to kill a king In October 1982, the Socialists won a substantial victory in a new round of elections. From this moment forward, Juan Carlos no longer had to be called out as a ‘fireman’, and could act more as a constitutional head of state. The twin problems of Basque terrorism and military subversion remained, and there were ETA plots to assassinate Juan Carlos in 1985, 1986, 1995 and 1997. What’s more, the king still had to walk the tightrope of keeping both left and right onside – persuading the opposition that he would play a role in democratisation, while maintaining the support of Francoists by seeming to respect the constitutional laws on which, until 1977, his ‘legitimacy’ rested. In this, it certainly helped that the king was a naturally affable type. A telling example derives from the period in 1978 when the new democratic constitution was being elaborated by a parliamentary commission, or Ponencia. There was a reception for the haughty French president Giscard d’Estaing, who was visiting Madrid. At one point, Juan Carlos sidled over to Miquel Roca i Junyent, a member of the Ponencia, and whispered: “Don’t you think he looks more like a king than I do?” Looks can be deceptive, of course. And from the nightmare that threatened to envelop Spain following Franco’s death, the self-deprecating monarch and his colleagues had achieved something remarkable: they had successfully harnessed a people’s collective determination never to face civil war and dictatorship again. SURVIVING FRANCO A timeline of the 40-year battle for the soul of Spain 1936–39 Nationalist forces headed by General Franco overthrow the Second Republic in the Spanish Civil War. Franco establishes a dictatorship that will endure until the 1970s. 26 July 1947 The Law of Succession establishes Spain as a kingdom with Franco as head of state. Franco has the right to nominate his successor. July 1969 Franco announces the identity of his successor: Juan Carlos, grandson of King Alfonso XIII. 20 December 1973 Franco’s prime minister Luis Carrero Blanco is assassinated by ETA. 20 November 1975 Franco dies. Juan Carlos becomes king and head of state. 5 July 1976 Adolfo Suárez becomes prime minister. Later that year, the Spanish parliament overwhelmingly approves his reform project. 15 June 1977 Suárez’s UCD party secures victory in Spain’s first free elections since 1936. 14 October 1977 An amnesty passes into law effectively stating that crimes committed in support of, or opposition to, Franco’s regime could not be subject to judicial proceedings. 23 February 1981 Rightwing army officers attempt a coup. After Juan Carlos tells them that he will neither abdicate nor leave Spain, the perpetrators are placed behind bars. Paul Preston is a historian of the Spanish Civil War. His most recent book is Perfidious Albion: Britain and the Spanish Civil War (Clapton, 2024) This article was first published in the December 2025 issue of BBC History Magazine