Surviving Hitler and Stalin | HistoryExtra - "‘The Molotov-Ribbentrop pact divides Poland in two. The Germans come from one end when the Russians invade from the other end. The first reaction of some Poles was they'd come to save us from the Nazis, in fact they were in alliance with the Nazis and they had come to take their part of the deal, their end of the deal and they then set about trying to destroy the elite of Poland and when I say Elite, what the the Nazis meant by Elite, uh everybody who was Jewish, some of whom happened to be shopkeepers, and the Soviets meant by that people who happened to be shopkeepers, some of whom happened to be Jews. And they mean by Elite everybody who was a teacher. Everybody who'd been in the Army. Anybody who had religious practice. Anybody who was in touch with a philatelist or or spoke spoke Esperanto. Anyone with any international connection at all. And all of those people they regarded as an elite and they began to arrest them... No one ever asked my father to tell his story. I'm sure he'd have happily done so. But no one was interested in knowing about Stalin's crimes and the Katyn massacres and um the deportation he faced, so he never was asked um to do any of these things… because the Soviets were on the winning side and nobody was interested in what they'd done… had it not been for the fact that the association of Jewish refugees has a project of taking the testimony of refugees, it might have been much more difficult for me to turn that childhood knowledge into a book’"
Secrets of ancient Chinese tombs | HistoryExtra - "‘Horses can't be easily bred in China, they have to be brought in from the far north, towards Mongolia where the conditions are better for breeding horses. China's really too hot, too humid and lacks certain nutrition in the soil’...
‘Some tombs are deliberately looted, and some are looted in ancient times. So the royal tombs of the Shang Kings buried before 1000 BC, those have all been looted, and they were probably looted immediately by their successors who are called the Zhou, because we can see that there are enormous pits dug down, straight down in the middle of the tombs. They must have been easily located, they perhaps had small buildings on top of them, and it's very important for the succeeding Dynasty to do away with the power of the ancestors of the preceding Dynasty. So, it's a confirmation to us, telling us that the Zhou leaders feared the ancestors of the Shang Kings… quite a lot of trouble is taken to hide Royal tombs and in some areas they were successful probably, because we've never found them. What later happens is they put great mounds on them. That makes it harder to dig in’"
How did empire shape modern Britain? | HistoryExtra - "‘During the 1950s British people are kind of going to these places to make new lives but white British people, Australia in particular has a very kind of string migration policy called the white Australia policy which means it's white British people are particularly welcome to go to Australia. White British people seem to talk about immigration during the 1950s without ever really acknowledging that they are also a nation of migrants. There's this huge outflow as well as a huge inflow that that never really comes up right when people talk about Imperial immigration...People who migrated to Britain across the 20th century, did these people view themselves in general as as Imperial subjects? Did they view themselves as British citizens? How did they conceptualize the idea of Britishness and the idea of Empire and how did those kind of things intertwine?’ ‘You often when you read, reading the accounts of people who are coming to Britain, you often see this huge moment of disillusionment, because they had been you know put through school systems, in the colonies where they had been told, you know, you're part of the British Empire, they learned about, you know, what they often refer to as the mother country. They often talk about England as the mother country or Britain, you know you see lots of accounts of people saying, oh you know, I could name all of the lakes in the Lake District. In my Village School in Kenya I could, I could tell you the name of every river in England. You know this is what, but that their kind of education was totally framed about learning around England and Britain but actually predominantly England, and they had this real sense of you know, you're part of kind of particularly into the sort of mid 20th century, you're part of this Imperial Community, and then they come to Britain and they find themselves unwelcome and they find themselves a target of of real explicit racism, and so for a lot of people there's this real moment of kind of psychic crisis I think. The writer Donald Hines who wrote a memoir about his migration called Journey to an Illusion which which is a title which gives you a kind of sense of his feelings about this. He's part loosely, kind of part of the Windrush generation, and he interviewed lots of his friends about migration and one of the accounts in the book is about coming to Britain and seeing white British street sweepers. It's like white men cleaning the streets in London. And and the narrative is like you know this person's heart just sinks because he says if this is the kind of jobs that white people are doing in the UK what, you know what jobs are there? They're not going to give us jobs, right. They're not going to be happy with us being their bosses and if if these jobs are being done by white people, we're not going to be included in this, we're going to be completely excluded... This country that's like poor, it's it's gray. You know there's no food in the shops. There's, you know, what this like this is what we were being told was this wonderful beacon of civilization'"
I like how she admits that she says that she refuses to change her mind to consider that Empire might have been a good thing
Did our ancestors really think the world was flat? | HistoryExtra - "‘When Aristotle first suggested it this was a really radical idea, and some of his contemporaries must have thought it was completely bonkers. And some really quite big name Greek philosophers like Epicurus didn't believe it. The Roman epicurian Lucius for instance who is often held up as almost being a kind of protoo scientist, but he was convinced that the Earth was flat and and in his book On the Nature of Things he mocks people who think it might be a sphere saying well obviously anything on the other side of the world would indeed just fall off. It spread relatively slowly over the next few centuries but I think in the Roman world it was really helped because of the cachet of Greek thought. And if you were an up and coming Roman you sent your children off to Athens to be educated and you wanted to show that you were you know totally on top of all the trendy thinking coming out of ancient Greece. And one of those things was that the Earth was spherical. So in a way you could feel smugly superior to ordinary people because you were aware of this and you knew your Greek philosophy but gradually it became better known in the Roman world. For example Roman emperors started putting globes onto their coins as sort of to represent their power over the world’...
‘After around about 700, 750 AD, we don't find any sign of anybody who was vaguely literate believing that the Earth was anything other than a sphere, it becomes very much a commonplace. And it's also a common place in medieval art and even medieval poetry for instance. The troubadors of France, they seem to be aware that the Earth was a sphere. So probably common people may well have known it, as well. In one poem, Alexander the Great is presented with an apple, and he takes this as as a symbol of the world that he's about to conquer. So obviously he was aware that the Earth was round. And of course kings and queens, they were presented with an orb when they were crowned, there there's a picture of it happening in the Bayeux Tapestry, and that orb represents the Earth, it represents the secular power of the king under God, because it has a cross on top of it. And presumably if people in the Middle Ages had believed that the Earth was flat they would have presented their king with a dinner plate rather than with an orb... I think it's very clear that the people who wrote the Bible or the Vedas or, or the Quran, they assumed that the Earth resembled traditional cosmology, they assumed it was flat...
I went into [writing the book] very much of the view that the globe is counter intuitive and if I had been born in China 500 years ago I would have been a convinced flat earther because that's what I would have learned at school and I therefore was quite surprised at how defensive a lot of people are about the idea that people in the past in one culture or another believed in traditional cosmologies. Of course they did but I've read entire books on Chinese science which don't mention the Chinese picture of the Earth at all. Or try to gloss over it or try to suggest that actually it wasn't what they really thought, or it didn't matter, or something along those lines. And similarly in the Roman world there just seem to be an assumption that as soon as one person was able to articulate Aristotle's theory, everyone would immediately accept it. But that's not how things work out at all’"
Tokyo’s devastating 1923 earthquake | HistoryExtra - "'People in Tokyo, A, they have grown up being taught that people in Korea, people in China are backward in terms of, relative level of civilization Japan sees itself as being the great modernizer, and modernized nation in Asia. Also there's a a heavy racial tinge to that. These people are lesser in all sorts of ways, and the expectation is that Koreans who live in Japan will feel not terribly good about their colonization and might take the opportunity of chaos like an earthquake and a fire to resist, to rise up against the authorities. And so a rumor starts to go around that Koreans in Tokyo are setting fires of their own, so they're making these fires much much worse, that they are maybe even plotting bombs, that they're doing all sorts of things to try and, at last, get some kind of payback for what the Japanese authorities have been doing on the Korean Peninsula. And it's really difficult now to know how exactly this happened, people think that it was some combination of thugs and opportunists. People who were seeking to raid Koreans’ homes and get something. Others who were, yeah, simply awful people looking for a fight. The result we think was about, and it's an incredible number, about 6,000 Korean people were killed, over the course of these few days after the earthquake. And they were killed you know in the most brut, brutal of ways. Thrown down wells, they were sort of chopped up with whatever blades people had in their houses, they were physically beaten up. And one extra element which seems to made it worse is that parts of the Japanese Armed Forces who were sent in quite quickly under martial law after the earthquake and parts of the Tokyo Police Force, some of the men who serve in those two institutions have not long come back from service on the Korean Peninsula. And to put it mildly they don't feel particularly warmly about Koreans. So far from trying to quell this violence, which is hard anyway, you know in a period of such chaos, they seem actually to be getting involved. Egging people on, helping them out and making it possible for this you know extraordinary slaughter to go ahead...
In 1945 it was roughly a quarter of the city destroyed. So not quite as devastating as 1923, but that's a a weird thing to say when you got 100,000 people losing their lives. And interestingly I think it was in the early 1960s or so the Japanese emperor emperor Hirohito made this comment… had they rebuilt Tokyo properly, done the more expensive job in 1923, those fires that killed so many tens of thousands of people in 1945 just wouldn't have been possible'"
Big questions of the Crimean War: the build up | HistoryExtra - "The crisis begins not in the Crimea or indeed in Turkey. It begins in the holy places in Palestine with a dispute between Roman Catholic and Orthodox Greek monks about who should place their emblems in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. There is then a serious riot on the streets of Bethlehem and men of faith are killed by other men of faith using religious instruments as their weapons. The Turks think this is absurd but the Russians then demand a protectorate, the French demand a protectorate over these places, and so the Protectors of Catholicism and Orthodox Christianity are on the verge of war over who should bully the Turks most, about something the Turks care very little about. The British are involved not because of the religious issue but because if this issue of the future of Turkey is opened it will have implications for the British. The British want this to go away, they want the Russians and the French to stop bullying the Ottoman Empire and they want to negotiate a settlement. This doesn't happen, the Russians refuse to back down. They seize Ottoman territory essentially what is now modern day Romania and they demand that the Turks make major concessions which would have undermined the integrity of the Ottoman Empire. Eventually the Ottomans get bored waiting for something to happen so they start the war. In October 1853 they crossed the Danube and attack the Russians"
Big questions of the Crimean War: into the Valley of Death | HistoryExtra - "Britain is the dominant Marine engineering and shipbuilding power. So the British have the latest weapons, the latest engines and the most number of powerful warships. They have the largest navy by manpower as well. But what happens at a cusp in technology? So while, if you look at the pictures it looks remarkably like the Battle of Waterloo. They're all dressed up in very colorful uniforms, marching in very tight formations. Most of the British and French troops are armed with rifles, not with muskets. Musket is accurate to about 50 Paces. A rifle is accurate to about 300. And this is a transformational moment on the battlefield. The Russians don't have rifles. Or very very few of them. So in any kind of infantry firefight the Russians are going to lose. And they're going to lose a lot of men in the process. And that happens in all of the Infantry fighting in the Crimea. It's why the Russians fight behind walls. It's the only way they can avoid getting slaughtered in the open field by superior technology. The Allies are even using rifled canon in the siege of Sebastopol as well, although not very many. Russia doesn't have access to high technology. It can't manufacture rifles. It can't import them because of the British blockade. And so it's condemned to fight this war with the weapons of Borodino, whereas the British and French are using the latest high technology rifles. That is a major transformation. Even more significant, everybody will be familiar with the famous Charge of the Light Brigade. And the most scientific thing the British took to the Crimea was horsepower. The British breeding program had produced some amazing horses. Big powerful fast horses that could cover long distances with fully equipped troopers on board. They absolutely transformed the nature of the cavalry charge from a short dash to a very long sustained gallop. It meant that when the British collided with the Russians on horseback the Russians were simply knocked out of the way by these much bigger stronger faster horses. And after the Charge of the Light Brigade the Russians never again came out on horseback to engage with the British... but even things like mass-produced rations, the British are using machine made products where the Russians are using things that are handmade. And the supply lines are different. British logistics into the Crimea are better than Russian ,logistics because the British have 3,000 miles to cover with a steamship. The Russians are having to drag their stores over the steppe in winter and they're losing a lot of men and draft animals and a lot of supplies. So the Russians are actually out supplied in their own country... Napoleon always said this. He would rather fight two brilliant generals on the other side than one ordinary one, because the two brilliant men would disagree and nothing much would happen. Whereas one ordinary general could at least make a decision'...
‘The Charge of the Light Brigade’...
‘Lord Tennyson's great poem, the problem of of which is it's wholly inaccurate. He wrote it having read an initial report of the battle which suggested that the Light Brigade had been pretty much wiped out. He'd finished it when he found out that that wasn't the case but it was so good he published it anyway. So it's a piece of fiction... The first thing that turns up is the Times report from William Howard Russell who's on the spot. And he generates this idea that these men were massacred in almost entirely due to the incompetence of their aristocratic officers, so there's a class war element in the initial report. These posh guys have led these working-class fellows to their deaths and isn't that terrible? And Russell got it wrong, he had the numbers of men who mustered at the end of the charge. That's only the men who were able to ride back up the valley on unwounded and horses that were still fit enough to ride. Rost of the horses were either blown or wounded and were not able to get back to the muster line in time to be mustered. So, the real figures is 120 who didn't come back rather than 120 was all that came back. He later corrected himself, but by that time Tennyson had written the poem and expressed the sentiments which are in the poem. The battle becomes such a cause celebre that there's a court of inquiry held on the conduct of Lord Lucan who ordered the charge and Lord Cardigan who presided over it... Neither Lucan nor Cardigan are particularly admirable human beings so it's very easy to throw a lot of blame on them. Then Lord Raglan's life is written up in a grand style to exculpate him from being, from responsibility. So it's, it's serving a lot of agendas. A lot of people have a stake in this battle being something other than what it really was’"
Big questions of the Crimean War: aftermath and legacy | HistoryExtra - "Florence Nightingale is is a very interesting phenomenon. The one thing that the press wants in this war is a middle-class hero. And of course British wars are fought by aristocratic officers and working-class soldiers. The middle classes stay at home, make money and read the newspapers. So the nearest thing they find to a middle class hero is a heroine, using the old vernacular, who’s only just middle class. Florence is very posh, you know. She's not called Florence for fun, she was born in Florence. Her sister is called Parthenope, she was born in Naples. You know there, and she knows most of the Cabinet quite well, some of them very well. So she's very posh, very well connected and her job is not the nursing thing, it's the management. She's the hospital manager who turns a ramshackle effort to support the wounded into something that actually delivers. So she's taking control of organizations that are trying to help but don't really know how. She has the experience both of practical and a managerial level to create an organization that can deliver more effect. It's not entirely clear that what she did in the war saved that many lives. Some of the statistics which she collected suggested that her hospital at scutari wasn't particularly successful in in saving men's lives. But it was successful in improving the conditions in which they were operating, so in that sense it may have worked. The Russians have ladies doing the same job in Sevastopol, so it's it's a kind of universal thing. The French already did. The French army always had taken um women with them who worked in essentially doing, delivering that effect. The British army had not. And so for the British army it was a bit of a shock. But the latest research makes it quite clear the the medical problems in the Crimea were solved by the Army's own doctors in the Crimea, not by Florence Nightingale down on the, near Istanbul. She was dealing with evacuated casualties, but the Crimean disease problems were solved in the Crimea by pretty straightforward contemporary medical knowledge... Florence nightingale's obsession wasn't with nursing as with sanitation. She was obsessed with, with cleanliness… that's her main contribution. The clean thing is is is where she's coming from. Hospitals were filthy and she understood that filth and disease went together... the heart of the war is a struggle for global strategic and economic dominance between Britain and Russia, and the British don't lose this war. The grand old late Victorian version of the war leaves you with the impression that somehow the British didn't really win. They did. Um, Russia was shattered as a pre-industrial state. It was forced to rebuild itself to, with revolutionary consequences. This war opened up the Russian population's access to great cities and great cities are where great revolutions come from. Without this war you don't get a Russian Revolution, you don't get transformational change in Russia. It makes France briefly once again the dominant military power in Western Europe, but that's only briefly. As then knocked over by by revived Germany in 1871. So for 1871 onwards Britain is actually in a very strong position because the Germans are not a threat to British interests, the French are now worried about the Germans, and the Russians are not in a position to operate either. The last 30 years of the 19th century are a great period for Britain because it doesn't face a major strategic threat. So this war has finished the Russians, the Franco-Prussian wars finished the French, and the new German Empire until 1900 isn't looking at being a challenge to Britain’...
‘Putin does idolize Tsar Nicholas the First. The state portrait of Tsar Nicholas hangs in his, the anteroom of his office, I'm informed. And when the guardsman opens the door to let Putin through for his audience, that's a Romanov Double Eagle on the door and the guardsman is wearing the uniform of a mid-19th century Russian guards regiment. Putin is a Russian imperial revivalist. He's not post-Soviet, he's not a Communist, he's a Russian imperialist. And we have to understand that what we're dealing with in 2023 is a Russian Empire that wants to extend its control over territories that in the 1850s were part of Russia. So if you read the book that, that Putin reads, it's perfectly natural the Crimea should be part of Russia’
‘So this modern war has very much its roots firmly back in the 19th century and before, before then’
‘Really the thing everybody forgets is that Russia is different to most of the rest of Europe because it was occupied for 200 years by the Mongols. The Mongols created modern Russia. It's an administrative element of the Golden Horde’s Empire. And they created a regime in which nobody had any personal rights or any property rights, that political power was unaccountable and everything within the Empire belonged to the autocrat. Nothing has changed. So we're looking at a massive cultural division between Western Europe and the Russian lands. Everywhere where the Mongols operated is a different part of the world to the Western Europeans who avoided that'"
Tom Holland on Rome’s golden age | HistoryExtra - "‘The emperor Trajan and he presides over the Roman Empire at its height. Do you think there's a case to be made that he was Rome's greatest Emperor?’
‘Well he was called by the Romans the Optimus Princeps, so the best of Emperors and and that is how he is commemorated. Not just by the Romans but intriguingly right the way into the Christian period, so Christians when they look back at Trajan couldn't bear the thought that this great emperor um because he hadn't been converted to Christianity might have ended up in hell. And so they um they they came up with all kinds of um stories to uh suggest that perhaps he'd got a pass uniquely and had made it into heaven. My personal take is actually that Trajan is vastly overrated. He wins this great victory in in Dacia but he is essentially encouraged by that to aim at um conquests that over stretch Roman resources. Um and he does what has been disastrous to so many subsequent Western leaders - he invades Iraq. So the only real rival, geopolitical rival that the Romans take seriously on their own borders is the Parthian Empire... He sees a ship sailing away and he asks where is that ship sailing and he's told oh it's off to India and he kind of um he expresses an Alexander the Great type lament that he you know that he he can't follow in Alexander's footsteps and conquer Indiahimself but the truth is that even conquering Mesopotamia has overstretched his resources and he essentially dies amid the implosion of those conquests. Um and it's left to Hadrian his successor basically to clear up the mess. There's a point when Trajan is dying. Not only are his recent conquests in Mesopotamia are imploding but there's a massive uh Judean revolt that is kind of general across much of the Mediterranean. There seems to have been massive turbulence in Britain, in Mauritania, across the Empire and um I think when Trajan dies there's a very real chance that the whole fabric of the Empire is on the point of implosion. I think an emperor has to be judged by his legacy and I think actually Trajan's legacy is not nearly what it seems to be. The reason that a veil is cast over that by subsequent historians is that Hadrian does his job very well. Hadrian very very discreetly clears up the mess and because Hadrian is Trajan's heir, Hadrian has no, no stake in blaming Trajan'...
‘The year of the four Emperors was something of an aberration’
‘It's expressive I think of something that is a problem for Roman statecraft right the way up to the very end of the Empire. Which is that although the Roman Empire has become a monarchy, it hasn't become a kingship. Rome was originally ruled by Kings and the Kings got thrown out Rome, became a Republic. And the memory of that doesn't never entirely goes. The word King remains a dirty one for the Romans. And so therefore the question of how an emperor is to be succeeded is always a live one...
He comes to be seen as a very kind of brutal tyrant by the senatorial elites, but Domitian abs-, of course doesn't see himself as a tyrant. He sees himself as instituting policies that are designed to appease the gods. To restore the Roman world to the equilibrium that it previously enjoyed. And in the long run I mean who's to say that he, he wasn't right? Because it's under Domitian essentially that the Roman Empire does get put back on an even keel’"
Ancient Egyptian religion: everything you wanted to know | HistoryExtra - "'The King… the only Egyptian technically who can communicate between the gods and the people and he worships them. If you might have noticed, if you look at pictures of Egyptian temples, that the pictures on the walls all show the King making the offerings because technically that's what happened. Actually in in real life of course the King couldn't make every offering in in every temple in Egypt because there were way too many of them and some of these Gods needed offerings every hour. So he had priests who helped him'...
‘How many gods and goddesses were there, and who are some of the more significant ones?’
‘I would say well over a thousand, but it is difficult. Because sometimes a God can have several names. And sometimes Gods come together to form a sort of compound God. And sometimes very odd things like inanimate objects can be treated as a God so for example a birthing brick. Birthing bricks are what women squatted on when they're in labor. But there is a deity that actually looks like a birthing brick. So it seems that almost anything in ancient Egypt could be worshipped... Although the these are Gods who are parents to other gods, they don't look like each other. So Osiris looks like a mummy. Isis looks like a woman. But Horus is a hawk... I don't imagine that the Egyptians themselves imagined the gods looking like a man with a crocodile head or looking in the case of Hathor like a woman with a cow head. I think this is how the artist depicted the gods. That they wanted to show the nature of the Gods. So they would show a human body which was capable of sitting on a throne or holding offerings or presenting things. And then they would put an animal head on which would show the nature of the person... Classical people back home tended to see Egyptian religion as being very basic. Basically they worshiped animals and actually it's far more subtle and complex than that. They're not just worshiping animals, they're worshiping maybe a co-like essence in the form of a woman. It's far more complicated. It's very difficult for us to understand it because we don't have it explained to us. We, we're picking it up from archaeology and um from writings and and it's difficult for us. But I think we have consistently underestimated how complex this, this situation is'"
New Zealand: everything you wanted to know | HistoryExtra - "‘The Scots were very important for New Zealand, they're actually, New Zealand's one of the most Scottish places on Earth outside Scotland. Um Nova Scotia and Ontario and Canada may be competitors. But especially southern New Zealand was largely settled by Presbyterian Scots. Not just in the 1840s when the foundational, 1848 I think, was the foundational settlement. But that Scots attracted Scots and they became an important part of the population, I think about 24% of the population, so they played the role in New Zealand of Catholic Irish in Australia, they're about the same proportion. So New Zealand was less Catholic Irish, although they were also quite significant and important. And more Scottish than Australia. And this had all sorts of effects on Pākehā culture which is more Scottish than Australian culture, arguably to this day...
This is one of the things that bewilders the history of the uh the historians of the, all the British dominions. You know you cannot put your finger on when Canada, Australia or New Zealand became independent. There are various dates for New Zealand. One is 1856 when a colonial government was set up with its own Premier. The central government on top of that of the provinces. And you could say that was a date for Independence. There were, there was de-, when New Zealand became a Dominion in, um was it 1908. And then uh when New Zealand um sort of belatedly adopted the notion of independent but associated nations that was the kind of formula for the British dominions which was, I think 1949. And then you could argue that it was as late as uh 1973 when uh Britain ran off with the Frenchmen and joined the European Economic Community. Or, or alternatively joined the Franco German commune, as New Zealanders used to say at the time. Because even at that late date New Zealand did a, did a lot of its trade with Britain. In fact 1966 was I think… the last date in which more than half of New Zealand's exports went to Britain, 12,000 miles away. So there was an intimate economic and cultural relationship between Britain and New Zealand, such that New Zealanders actually saw themselves as Britons, but not in a colonially cringy way. They thought themselves as better Britons, you know as demonstrated on the battlefield, on the rugby field and in the climbing of mountains. And to a surprising extent they're accepted not as better Britons but as kind of near enough to British. You know they might be the odd sneer, but no more than towards a Scott or a Yorkshireman...
New Zealand was one of the big three of the Tasman world, and its interaction with Australia was, was pretty strong. Uh then when the Depression hit in 1890, if the Australians had federated then, New Zealand probably would have joined. But the nature of these federations, in Canada, in Australasia, in Southern Africa, was essentially that they were attempts to restore credit when the colonizing crusade had stalled. You know, there was a bust and no one would lend to these, um, these bankrupt colonial governments anymore, or near bankrupt. And so they federated to sort of renew the brand and uh that's what happened in Canada in 1867, or whatever it was. That's what happened in uh in Australia around about 1900 where the bust lasted longer than in New Zealand uh and because of that, New Zealand didn't join. But the notion of it being entirely separate from Australia in the 19th century is a bit of a myth, because at the time the Tasman Sea was more of a bridge than a barrier.'"
