Michael Wood on the magazine’s 20th birthday
Strange days. I’m writing this still under lockdown, looking out over eerily empty London streets, as I was for my last column. A suspended state, which I am sure has prompted for all of us many thoughts about life, time and history. It is an unprecedented moment for almost everyone on the planet; through phones, emails, TV, radio and internet, we are all participating in the same story in real time. When has that happened before in human history? Quite a moment, then, to celebrate the 20th anniversary of BBC History Magazine.
It has been an extraordinary 20 years, in which the world has changed dramatically. I daresay future historians will look back on it as a key period as we enter the make-or-break decade for the planet. Of course, we often look to history for explanations in times of crisis. Sometimes this makes us realise that we should not try to ‘get back to normal’, because ‘normal’ was part of the problem – and that’s when we realise that we need new histories!
Now we have a global virus, which the historian can already see as part of a longer pattern of transmission of such infections (Sars, Ebola, Marburg, Mers) from animals to humans as human pressure on natural habitats grows more intense. Just as historians peer back into the 14th century to see where the Black Death originated, and how it spread, we can see this as the key link. With too many people, and the gap growing between rich and poor, the desperate poor are pushed to despoil nature.
History, then, is still the great explainer. This magazine has always tried to not only look at what happened in the past, but also for clues in the past that help us understand the present. The key is to see history not as something fixed but, instead, as changing over time as our knowledge expands and our understanding of ourselves evolves.
After all, history is always the product of the here and now, and looking back at early issues of the magazine offers a sense of how far we have come. The intervening 20 years have seen a broadening and enriching of our ways of understanding and telling history in public culture. Twenty years ago, despite the great gains of the feminist movement since the 1970s, history was still largely male, white and middle class. Nowadays the magazine – and indeed my own columns – feature a real diversity of narratives: women’s history, black history, and others. And a diverse range of voices have been writing in these pages: Nathen Amin, Olivette Otele, Yasmin Khan, Janina Ramirez, Rana Mitter and David Olusoga, to name but a few. We should soon achieve the goal of gender equality of contributors; alternative histories are now foregrounded. Without that, history today is meaningless.
All this is reshaping in fascinating ways the new narratives that we create. It’s been a boomtime for social history: tales of communities, streets, and even houses. Whether Africans in Roman Britain, black Tudors, or Kibworth framework knitters, history is no longer told only from the top down, but from the bottom up; from the provinces not the centre; from the people not the rulers. And with so much young, diverse talent working in the field, we are getting new takes on old stories.
Take, for example, that massive and continuing fact in all of our lives: imperial history. Whether our roots are in Africa, the Indian subcontinent or the Caribbean; whether our ancestors were Irish soldiers, Welsh steelmen, Scottish engineers or English sailors, the empire shaped us all. As the common experience of the British people over the past two centuries, it should be at centre of the school curriculum, encompassing narratives of colonialism, race and slavery too. It should also incorporate the view of the colonised – as, for example, in Priyamvada Gopal’s recent book, Insurgent Empire, which shows how British attitudes to empire were changed by resistance movements abroad.
Of course, the wartime narratives of Dunkirk and D-Day still hold powerful sway in the popular imagination, but let’s see them in the bigger perspective that history offers. And aren’t narratives richer and more fascinating the more they embrace complex human reality – which always has more than one explanation? So here’s to the next 20 years of stories and expert analysis. As the saying goes, may you live in interesting times!