Do you think we’re now far enough removed to be able to view the Iraq War as a historical event?

It’s a good question, because there’s an ongoing debate about when you can start looking at an event with a historical eye: is it five years afterwards, 10 years, 20 years? When does it stop being news or current affairs?

The impacts of the 2003 Iraq War are still rippling out to this day, and some of its legacies – including the way Iraq is run – are still unresolved. So it would be wrong to say that we can treat it purely as history. But we can now ask people who were involved to reflect and to analyse the events in a historical context.

That includes the significance of the 9/11 attacks on the US, but also later events, too: developments in the Middle East, or even the resurgence of state-on-state conflict in Ukraine after years in which the global focus had shifted to a concern about terrorism.

What were your experiences of the conflict at the time?

I started as a reporter and producer on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme in 2001. I went to the US within days of 9/11 and, in the following weeks, heard the first talk about attacking Iraq. It seemed extraordinary, but I watched first-hand as developments drove the US and UK closer and closer to war.

One of the aims of this new BBC Radio 4 series, Shock and War: Iraq 20 Years On, is to understand why those decisions were taken: why claims were made about the existence of weapons of mass destruction, for instance, or why Tony Blair made the commitments he made. I’ve had the chance to ask those questions of some of the well-known central figures in London and Washington, as well as people in Iraq who experienced things at the sharp end.

At the time, did this feel like a moment that would have such a seismic effect?

I think the world changed on 9/11 – and then the year and a half leading up to the Iraq War was just relentless. Looking back at archive material from the time, it’s clear just how fast events moved during that period: the terrorist attacks in Bali and elsewhere in Indonesia, attempts to bring down aeroplanes with shoe bombs, and the fear of further attacks.

It was a very strange era of fear and terror – and the seemingly relentless drive towards conflict in Iraq was very much a part of that.

Do you think the pace of events was a factor in decision-making and, arguably, in mistakes that may have been made?

Absolutely. If you talk to top British officials, including Blair, you sense that there was so much focus on day-to-day decisions, and on procedural concerns such as getting resolutions passed at the United Nations, that not enough thought was put into plausible post-war scenarios.

• Read more | The (forgotten) Iraq war

It’s self-evident that was not done properly, and there are a lot of reasons for that – some of them related to the dysfunctional internal politics of Washington DC at the time. But it’s astonishing to think that the war plans were all about removing Saddam, not about what would come afterwards. That, clearly, was one of the greatest failures.

Another important thread in the story is the influence of Iraqi exiles on debates about the kind of government that should run Iraq after the war. So little preparation went into that aspect. We spoke to people who were basically deposited in Iraq and told they were running a province – people who had no experience running anything, let alone a province of a country that had just been invaded and was effectively occupied.

How is the war now viewed in Iraq?

There’s no simple answer to that, and you will get different views from different people. We have spoken to a lot of Iraqis and, especially, set out to talk to young Iraqis about their views. Some are happy that Saddam Hussein is gone, but very few are happy with what came afterwards.

Some of the most powerful voices are those who feel that, even though Saddam was a tyrant, they were promised something that was never delivered after 2003: a more open and democratic Iraq.

Many people suffered greatly, too. Making the series, I was reminded just how terrible the spasms of violence were in Iraq after 2003, and how many people lost their lives or paid a terrible price over the years.

How does the Iraq conflict compare to other 20th-century wars?

The war itself was relatively short: it took just weeks for the US and its allies to depose Saddam Hussein. The problematic issues were the politics and ideologies that drove the war, which were also used to explain why the war fell apart and what went wrong afterwards.

The 1956 Suez Crisis [in which a coalition of Israel, the UK and France launched an ill-fated invasion of Egypt in a bid to topple its president] is an interesting reference point for the UK. That failure did great damage to Britain’s standing and reputation, and changed its relationship with the US.

The Iraq War had similarly profound historical consequences for the UK – and the US – in terms of how it was seen by the world and, later, in its unwillingness to intervene in future crises, including those in Syria, Libya and elsewhere.

What are the most important misunderstandings about the conflict?

The idea that the war was simply about weapons of mass destruction isn’t true, but it is true that the intelligence was wrong. In the series, we try to unpick why. Is it as simple as people being deliberately misled, or was there something else going on – and why did the intelligence turn out to be so wrong?

I hope that our series will reveal new details, particularly about what was really going on with those weapons of mass destruction, about Blair’s decision to join the US – and why, frankly, that decision was based on a truly historic intelligence failure.

Listen to more of this conversation on the HistoryExtra podcast

BBC security correspondent Gordon Corera tells Matt Elton about his new BBC Radio 4 series considering the causes and consequences of the Iraq War – and discusses whether now is the right time to view the conflict as history.

Gordon Corera is the BBC’s security correspondent, author and journalist. His new series Shock and War: Iraq 20 Years On airs on BBC Radio 4, and is available as a podcast on BBC Sounds

From the Turkey trot to the scandalously intimate moves of the Parisian tango, the 20th century saw Britain gripped by dance craze after dance craze. Performed in public halls up and down the country, ballroom took the nation by storm as people from all walks of life sashayed to the dancefloor with their partners. Hilary French tells Emily Briffett about ballroom’s dramatic surge in popularity, its decline in the 1960s and its recent resurgence with Strictly Come Dancing.

• Read more about the history of dancing

Hilary French is the author of Ballroom: A People’s History of Dancing (Reaktion Books, 2022)

• Buy now on Amazon
• Buy now on Waterstones

History, subverted by Putin, could help free Russia from its flawed mindset | Simon Sebag Montefiore

If ever there was a moment that revealed that you can have too much history, it is this one. When Vladimir Putin wrote his 2021 essay on the relationship between Russia and Ukraine, based on his distorted version of history, and then deployed it to justify his invasion of sovereign Ukraine, it demonstrated how often history is used to control the present.

Putin’s “history” was soon backed up by bombing, bullets and barbarism. But what is more important is how people wish to live now. And the Ukrainians have demonstrated their own wishes with incredible courage.

That is one lesson for history-lovers this year. Another is that history is powerful, but it has to be accurate: the historian’s mission must be to fight for that. Putin’s version is so selective and narrow as to be meaningless – but that mistake can also apply to other histories. History must always be a quest for truth without the diktats of ideology. Without perspective, it can be futile. We rightly study the imperialism of European empires, yet few scholars of imperialism were studying a ferocious dictator about to launch an imperialist war in Europe today.

• Read more | Has Russia always played by its own rules?

The 2022 invasion shows how the Russians themselves are prisoners of their history and of their imperial self-image and armed mission. The Russian empire was created by Peter the Great and, whether ruled by tsars, general-secretaries or presidents, it has yet to find another identity and narrative. The study of Russian history can help set Russians free, too. Historians have risked their lives in their quest to record true accounts of the past that often clashed with the political orders of the present. In Putin’s Russia, historians have been denounced – or accused of false crimes, or gone silent, or been forced into exile. Many of the historians who helped me write my Stalin biographies are no longer working in Russia.

A real account of the country’s history is a prerequisite for any development of Russian democracy. This is just one example of why history matters: we in the democracies are lucky to be able to write and read it freely and argue about it. But whether here or in the cruel dictatorships of, say, Russia or Iran, free history is a characteristic of a free nation. Writing it is a noble mission.

More than that, the Russian invasion marks the end of the exceptional and unique 77 years of relative peace that followed the Second World War. Democracy is being challenged by a different vision of values and geopolitics. The values hard won in 1945, consolidated in the great liberal reformation of the 1960s, are no longer taken for granted: they have to be fought for all over again. Normal disorder has been resumed – but this time with the new perils of climate change and nuclear war.

Simon Sebag Montefiore’s latest book is The World: A Family History (W&N, 2022)

Last year’s political chaos in Britain isn’t unprecedented – remember the 1920s | Richard Toye

The rise and rapid fall of Liz Truss as prime minister made it feel as though the rollercoaster of British politics was out of control. But although the political instability of the past year may seem unprecedented, history provides a useful (though inexact) parallel. A century ago, the decision of Conservative MPs to withdraw support from the governing coalition led by a Liberal, David Lloyd George, led to the installation of a new Tory premier in Downing Street. He was Andrew Bonar Law, who quickly won a big general election victory. Within months, though, he was forced to retire by the cancer that would quickly kill him. His surprise replacement was the little-known Stanley Baldwin, whose relative inexperience contributed to the mistake that put an end to his first spell in Downing Street.

In late 1923, having decided that unemployment could be cured only by protectionist tariffs (which Bonar Law had pledged would not be introduced in the current parliament), Baldwin called a snap election to gain the mandate he needed – but instead lost his majority. This set the stage for the first (minority) Labour government, which took office under Ramsay MacDonald in January 1924. In the autumn, Baldwin returned to power on the back of an electoral landslide. He then served virtually a full term; some form of calm seemed to have settled (though 1926 brought the turbulence of the General Strike). These events show that rapid changes of government and prime minister are not unprecedented. Arguably, in the aftermath of the First World War and the Bolshevik revolution, the stakes were higher even than they are today. And in fact, with the rise of Labour to become a party of government, and the ongoing decline of the Liberals, the 1922–24 period saw a more profound reorientation of the political system than seems to be occurring now. But the final lesson of historical crisis may be that the consequences of defining events are not always foreseeable at the moment they happen.

Richard Toye is professor of history at the University of Exeter

National debt can be better managed – we can learn from the South Sea Bubble | Anne Murphy

The events of 2022 have provided a stark reminder of the extent to which “the markets” affect public finances. As we saw in the autumn – particularly following the then-chancellor Kwasi Kwarteng’s mini-budget, proposing large-scale and unfunded tax cuts – losing the confidence of the City raises the cost of borrowing for governments, and higher interest rates have a negative effect on other aspects of the economy. This tension between the financial needs of the state and the nature of the market has been played out before. The modern national debt is rooted in the 1690s when, following the Glorious Revolution that brought him to power, William III had taken his newly acquired nation to war against France.

From that time until the defeat of Napoleon in 1815, Britain regularly needed to raise funds to fight wars that became global and increasingly expensive. In the battle to manage costs and build a reputation for probity, there were inevitable errors – with the South Sea Bubble of 1720 the one that springs most often to mind. To reduce the costs of public finance, the South Sea Company proposed an innovative scheme to convert government debt into company stock. But inducements to convert created a bubble that collapsed as quickly as it had inflated, leaving many investors out of pocket. Thus a bold attempt to reorganise public finance misfired because of overreaching ambition and poor management. The result was a collapse in share prices and a consequent public outcry. It took nearly 30 years of rebuilding trust to bring down interest rates after the Bubble burst.

Governments were then able to establish a better reputation for accountability in the management of the nation’s finances – a process assisted by the Bank of England, established in 1694. It was the Bank that managed the nation’s debt, and stood as the mediator between the state and its creditors. It did the mundane but essential work of providing a secure, regular service for the issuance and exchange of debt and the collection of dividends – and, it was generally accepted, did that work better than the exchequer. In doing so, it established its own reputation as the guardian of public credit, and created the foundations of trust between the government and the City. Some might say that a knowledge of early modern finance has not served us well so far this year. Yet, by the later 19th century, Britain had a financial system that was the envy of its European neighbours. Those seeking to understand how prolonged and deep national indebtedness can be managed could do worse than revisit that period.

Anne Murphy is professor of history at the University of Portsmouth

The accession of a new monarch sparks uncertainty – for crown and state alike | Tracy Borman

For some time, it was predicted that 2022 would be a significant year for the British monarchy. Having already beaten Queen Victoria’s record to become Britain’s longest-reigning monarch, Elizabeth II would mark an extraordinary 70 years on the throne. The platinum jubilee celebrations took place over a four-day bank holiday weekend in June, with a series of spectacular events staged in central London. But, just two months later, it was completely overshadowed by something far more profound. In the early evening of 8 September, the flag at Buckingham Palace was raised to half-mast and a framed notice was attached to the front gates by the household staff. The brief announcement read: “The Queen died peacefully at Balmoral this afternoon. The King and the Queen Consort will remain at Balmoral this evening and will return to London tomorrow.”

Even though Elizabeth II was 96 years old at the time of her passing, there was an overwhelming sense of shock. In the days and weeks that followed, her former subjects grappled with the novelty of hearing “God Save the King”, of seeing King Charles III’s face on newly minted coins, bank notes and stamps, and the initials “CR” on official uniforms, and of anticipating the King’s Christmas speech. So often in the long history of the British monarchy, the lack of heirs has proved problematic. Not so for the House of Windsor. Ironically, given that the late queen initiated the Succession to the Crown Act of 2013, ending centuries of male primogeniture, there are at least two kings in prospect after Charles III. Yet though the House of Windsor looks to be set fair for the future – at least in terms of its progeny and the succession – Elizabeth II’s death still felt like the end of an era. Not for the first time in the crown’s history, the culmination of such a long reign was a destabilising time.

The same was true when the first Elizabeth died in 1603 – particularly because she was not only the longest-reigning Tudor but also the last monarch of that dynasty. Centuries of often hard-won experience have, though, equipped the institution of the monarchy for the uncertainty that inevitably follows the death of a sovereign. The extraordinary pomp and ceremony of the Queen’s lying in state and funeral was a testament to the deep affection and respect in which she was held across the world. But there was another purpose to the centuries-old pageantry that accompanied her final journey: it symbolised the continuity that lies at the heart of the British monarchy. As Lord Lyndhurst, who served as Lord High Chancellor during the reigns of three 19th-century monarchs, observed: “The sovereign always exists. The person only is changed.”

Tracy Borman is the author of Crown & Sceptre: A New History of the British Monarchy from William the Conqueror to Charles III (Hodder, 2022)

Why China views Taiwan as the last unfinished business of the Cold War | Rana Mitter

In August 2022 Nancy Pelosi, Speaker of the US House of Representatives, visited the island of Taiwan, prompting Chinese commentators to condemn her visit as provocation by the US. This heated 21st-century spat, though, has its origins in the history of the mid-20th. In 1949, the Chinese communists led by Mao Zedong won a civil war and quickly conquered the mainland. But their opponents, the Nationalists (or Kuomintang), under the former Chinese leader Chiang Kai-shek, retreated in their millions to an island off the coast of China. Taiwan had only recently returned to a unified China; in 1895 it had become a Japanese colony, before being liberated in 1945. Now it became the last redoubt of the Nationalists. In early 1950, it seemed likely that the communists would take the island, too.

Then, that same year, China joined North Korea and the USSR to attack South Korea. Anti-communism in Asia became a US priority, and Taiwan was thrown a lifeline as a Cold War stronghold for Washington. After US recognition of the communist People’s Republic of China (PRC) in 1979, the US no longer recognised Taiwan as the rightful seat of Chinese government – but it did continue to provide the island with arms. This angered Beijing, and still does. The PRC regards Taiwan as the last unfinished business of the Cold War. Xi Jinping, now in his third term as Chinese leader, says that the incorporation of Taiwan into the PRC is a task that “cannot be left to future generations”. The Russian invasion of Ukraine has stimulated comparisons in China and the west. Beijing would argue that – unlike Ukraine – Taiwan is not a recognised state, so action against it would not violate international norms. But China has seen – and perhaps been surprised by – the strong western defence of Ukraine’s democracy. It will bear that in mind as it decides what to do about a unification that it regards as Mao’s last uncompleted task.

Rana Mitter is professor of the history and politics of modern China at the University of Oxford

This article first appeared in the January 2023 issue of BBC History Magazine

The North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD) has been giving updates on the progress of Santa’s sleigh since the 1950s. It’s now followed worldwide each Christmas (via noradsanta.org/en).

The official version is that in 1955 an advert for an American department store Santa phone line misprinted the phone number, sending callers to NORAD’s predecessor, the Continental Air Defense Command (CONAD) instead. Colonel Harry Shoup, in charge that night, assigned an officer to give other callers a “location” for Santa and his sleigh, and so the tradition was born. There are variations on this foundation story, but basically it happened by accident.

Perhaps the US military saw a public relations opportunity, or a Cold War message about how the free world has Santa and those communists do not. But the best answer really seems to be that Americans love Christmas, and that modern “radar tracking” Santa just added to the magic.

Eugene Byrne is a visiting research fellow at the University of the West of England

This article first appeared in the Christmas 2021 issue of  BBC History Magazine

Some excellent books have hit the shelves this year. Which popular history book would you put forward as the best of 2022?

Michael Wood: I think the best that I’ve come across is Winters in the World by Eleanor Parker. Some people might think that it’s a rather niche subject: it covers the year in Anglo-Saxon England, taking you through the months and the festivals. But when we study history, we really hope to hear the voices of the people of the past. And Parker gives us those voices here – providing a very moving projection into their world. It’s also a very ecological book, in some ways, because of course it’s about the seasons and those people’s conviction that things would never change – that this is the unchanging rhythm of life on Earth. As a portrait of the psychology of our ancestors 1,000 years ago, I found it really touching.

• Read more | 21 best books for history lovers: BBC History Magazine’s Books of the Year 2022

Rana Mitter: I’ve been really impressed by Horizons: A Global History of Science by James Poskett, who’s an associate professor at Warwick University. The book is exactly what it says on the cover: it’s a way of looking at the world of science and the development of technology from a genuinely global perspective. The narrative starts with the Aztec capital of Tenochtitlan [on the site of modern-day Mexico City] and the engineering marvels that were present there, built long before the Spanish turned up during their conquest in the early modern era. Poskett also discusses Arab science, Chinese science and the story of science in the west, which is better known. So it’s a truly global and really well-written and engaging account.

Catherine Nixey: I’d put forward Magnificent Rebels by Andrea Wulf. It’s about a small German town called Jena, which became the intellectual heart of Enlightenment Europe when large numbers of German intellectuals turned up there. They started making friends with each other and having affairs; falling out with each other catastrophically and at length; and, above all, furiously writing to each other. There are figures such as the scientist and explorer Alexander von Humboldt, who was electrocuting frogs’ legs, and Goethe, who was writing plays.

At the same time, the French Revolution was lapping at the edges of the town, creating this enormous tension. It reminds you of the way that intellectual movements arise and develop. You typically think of a single person beavering away in their study, but in fact it’s a group effort – various people coming together and sparking off each other.

Are there any books in your specialist areas that you’d highlight as being particularly impressive?

RM: I’m going to nominate a book in my field – Chinese history – by a very brilliant young historian called Julian Gewirtz. His new book, Never Turn Back, is about the era of Zhao Ziyang – a name that used to be at the centre of what you might call the contemporary era of Chinese history, the 1980s. When leader of China, he stood with the students in Tiananmen Square, Beijing in 1989, and he gave them a rather bleak message: “I’ve come too late.” He was then whisked off and kept under house arrest for the rest of his life. He died in 2005.

Gewirtz has taken a whole variety of materials – which were shared through “underground sources”, you might say, and then made public – that look at the contribution of Zhao Ziyang to the creation of China’s market economy in the 1980s.

This might sound like a dry subject but, first of all, Gewirtz really brings to life the intellectual atmosphere of China in the 1980s. This was a time when the free-market economist Milton Friedman visited China; he was literally barricaded into his hotel room because so many communists were outraged by what he was trying to do. Zhao Ziyang walked a path between being a very dedicated member of the Communist Party and also seeing how markets could be brought back into the way that China operated.

These days, people say that Deng Xiaoping – perhaps one of the most famous names of modern China – was the person who brought market economics back to China after the era of Mao’s Cultural Revolution, and there’s some truth to that. But the name that everyone’s forgetting, because he was purged, is Zhao Ziyang. Gewirtz’s book brings him back to proper historical prominence.

MW: It’s a really fantastic story, isn’t it? It does make you wonder whether there were other paths possible for China at that point – and whether there still are other paths possible.

RM: Certainly, Zhao Ziyang himself – though not someone who believed in a multi-party type of liberal democracy – was absolutely an advocate of a more open China in which anything could be debated, including democratic systems. Today’s China has provided a much narrower space for that kind of intellectual debate.

On the podcast | Rhiannon Davies is joined by historians Michael Wood, Rana Mitter and Catherine Nixey to discuss some of their top picks:

Listen to an ad-free version

We’ve witnessed some huge news events during 2022: Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the death of Queen Elizabeth II and the ongoing climate emergency, to give just a few examples. How can this year’s history books help us make sense of our modern world?

CN: I write about the royals for The Economist, and one book I’m interested to read is Valentine Low’s Courtiers. It’s about one central question: who is behind this family? Around the royal carriage there are fleets of people trying to guide everything, which actually makes the mistakes that get made all the more surprising.

RM: Catherine’s mention of the royals reminds me of emperors. I think that Dominic Lieven’s In the Shadow of the Gods is a really interesting way into some of those questions about Russia, Ukraine and China. Lieven is a specialist on Russia, based at the London School of Economics, but his book has a wider sweep. It looks at Russian tsars, Chinese emperors and the wider imperial mindset.

In the wake of 24 February 2022 [the day when Russia invaded Ukraine], understanding that imperial mindset has become much more important. One of the things that empires do is find ways to incorporate land, and to legitimise and justify themselves in that incorporation in a way that is different from the world of nation states.

We’ve got used to the idea that you have bounded territories – you have essentially republican forms or constitutional monarchies. But it’s notable that in attempting to justify the invasion of Ukraine, one of the arguments that Russia has used very strongly is the idea that, culturally, people in eastern Ukraine, who speak Russian, should be considered part of a Russian empire – even though, in national terms, recognised boundaries mean that they’re not in Russia. Lieven’s book gives a fantastic historical perspective on why emperors have been so important in the context of broader Eurasia.

Continuing to think about empires, ahead of this conversation both Rana and Michael nominated Caroline Elkins’ Legacy of Violence: A History of the British Empire. What was it that drew you both to this book?

MW: There’s a huge debate over the British empire, slavery and the violence of the empire, into which Elkins’ book taps. I’m one of many people who, for more than 20 years, have been arguing that the British empire should be put at the heart of the curriculum in schools, because it is the thing that unifies us. Whatever your background, wherever your ancestors came from – that’s the thing that binds us together. And, as a society, we have really failed to acknowledge what the empire did.

Everywhere the empire went, violence determined the nature of things. Indian historians are now looking seriously at this, and many British historians are, too. People are starting to face up to the fact that the British empire was, like all empires, essentially violent. We have lived for so long with the idea that, although things sometimes went wrong – such as in the case of the Amritsar massacre [when troops under British command opened fire on a crowd of unarmed Indian people in 1919, killing several hundred and wounding hundreds more] – essentially, the British empire was benign. We haven’t faced up to its reality, and that’s now what people such as Elkins are looking at. It’s proving a very difficult conversation, isn’t it?

RM: Legacy of Violence is a pretty comprehensive history – it goes all the way back to the 18th century, although it mostly concentrates on the 20th century. But it should be considered as part of a spectrum of reading that looks at the centrality of violence and coercion in understanding how the empire worked. So I’d add another book that is not so much a history book as a book of historical significance.

This title, which provides an interesting contrast and which perhaps shows another side of the story, is   The Hong Kong Diaries by Chris Patten, the last colonial governor of that territory. His diaries make for a wickedly witty read, because he seems not to have censored himself too much in terms of what he thinks of both the Chinese – with whom he was interacting during negotiations about the future of Hong Kong at the time he wrote them – and also his own British parliamentary colleagues.

Another clear part of that legacy is the very difficult interaction between the reality of being a colonial governor and recognising the need for things such as free media and holding debates in schools about the legacy of colonialism. Patten is absolutely clear that the violence through which Hong Kong was obtained in 1842 is not something that should be forgiven or forgotten. In the end, Patten’s central point is that the freedoms that were evident in Hong Kong for about 20 years before the handover and 20 years afterwards were the products of Chinese people’s interactions – they were not just a gift from the British.

These books might all be considered examples of the genre of hidden histories. As well as stories connected to colonialism, we’ve also seen books highlighting the lives of women lost in the historical record. What books on this theme would you recommend?

CN: I’d say Selby Wynn Schwartz’s novel After Sappho. I love Sappho [an ancient Greek poet from the island of Lesbos, who had female lovers]. Reading her poetry is like walking past a door that’s just slightly ajar. Most of Sappho’s work has been lost – it was considered pretty racy by centuries of people, and generally wasn’t copied out with the care that it deserved. So if you look at a Sappho poem, it mainly looks like a page sprinkled with pepper: it’s dot, dot, dot, dot, dot, word, dot, dot, dot.

Her poetry makes for a very fast read, but it’s incredibly beautiful – the bits that are there, at least. You can see why everybody loved Sappho, and why [the Roman poet] Catullus imitated her, taking her poems and working them into his. For centuries, she was respected in a way that was quite unusual for a woman from the ancient Greek world.

After Sappho looks at the lives of various women, particularly writers and artists. It starts in Italy in the late 19th century, then moves into the 20th century, when it touches on Virginia Woolf. It shares these women’s stories in a sapphic way – in both senses. Lots of them had relationships with women, but it’s also sapphic in the sense that it shows snippets of these women’s lives, just as we only have fragments of Sappho’s poetry today.

It’s a fractured history: you get a shaft of light illuminating one bit of someone’s life, then it’s gone; there’s another, then that, too, is gone. The writing is just wonderful – it has these heavenly, soaring moments when you think: “That’s an absolutely lovely phrase.”

MW: I wrote a book 40 years ago called In Search of the Dark Ages, which was a series of biographies from the Anglo-Saxon past – and I confess guiltily that it featured only one woman, I think. I published a new version this year, including five more chapters that are about women. I saw it as a challenge, because a recent bestseller on the Anglo-Saxons said that it’s not possible to write the biographies of women in the Dark Ages. But it is. It requires a lot of effort, and a lot of scrutiny of the sources in different ways, but you can do it.

What are some of the other big trends you’ve noticed in publishing?

CN: One of the things I’ve noticed is a trend for books that concentrate on groups. I mentioned Magnificent Rebels, looking at a group of people in Germany. But there are lots of other books diving into a world that was exciting at the time. Daisy Dunn – another classicist – has written one, Not Far From Brideshead: Oxford Between the Wars. It looks at the period when Evelyn Waugh [the author of the 1945 novel Brideshead Revisited] was in the city, as well as lots of the great classical scholars. You can pick out characters who then turn up in Brideshead – there’s somebody who carries a teddy bear, rampant misbehaviour, the drinking societies. In historical periods, there are moments when you get this flowering of really interesting people all in one place. You wonder: was that just chance, or were they stimulating other people to think better, write better, do more?

RM: There are always books of this sort, but in 2022 I’ve seen a bit of a trend for people writing big-scale re-examinations of topics that perhaps we thought we knew. Remember 1066 and All That, the parody of British history by WC Sellar and RJ Yeatman, published in 1930? Well, this year I really enjoyed Judith A Green’s The Normans, which also looks at “1066 and all that”. Her book explains it to people like me who could recite the year but, if pressed, would have to admit that perhaps their knowledge of the details of what happened were rather limited.

One of the interesting things is that Green places the Normans in a huge European context. In particular, she writes about the Normans in Sicily, which doesn’t necessarily link in the popular mind to that very
English story.

MW: I think people are taking a lot of different perspectives at the moment. The big trends are, as we’ve mentioned, the hidden histories – the people who never spoke. And a whole new historiography is erupting now. Take something like the history of Jamaica, and the rebellions of enslaved people there. For years our representation of these events has been conditioned by the victors telling us what happened, so it’s not the real story. But now the real voices are starting to come out, with different sources such as the amazing slave archive at UCL [the online Encyclopaedia of British Slave-ownership], which is a really brilliant resource.

Is there still an appetite for traditional blockbusters looking at topics such as the Second World War?

CN: Most definitely. Books on the Second World War still shoot right to the top of the bestseller lists. One of the titles I enjoyed this year was Ben Macintyre’s Colditz. It’s great fun – Macintyre’s books about the Second World War are always romps: they’re always entertaining, and he always describes the characters very deftly. Colditz is full of French prisoners spring-boarding over the castle walls and then walking for hundreds of miles.

But there’s also a much more sinister side to it. One of the things that you don’t hear about so much is the relationships between the prisoners, which could be pretty shocking. Many French prisoners said that they didn’t want to be billeted with the Jewish French prisoners. So even when revisiting these well-known tales, there’s a less-well-known tale underneath.

MW: There’s no end to Second World War books, is there? Friends of mine write them, and they’re incredibly successful. But there is this almost unhealthy obsession, I think, with the Second World War, and it seems like we lap it up because we can’t shake it off. Even at the Queen’s funeral, militarism and empire still shadowed that event. But maybe it’s true of all societies – maybe you need these stories to create cohesion and allegiance.

RM: It’s clear that the Second World War holds an extraordinarily dominant position. Having said that, I’m also guilty of having written the odd book on it myself, at least in the Asian context. But I was thinking of a recent book, Richard Overy’s Blood and Ruins [published in 2021], which does tie together some of the themes we’re talking about today, in that it looks at the Second World War as a war of empire and of empires. It looks at the Japanese empire in comparison with the European empires such as the British and French, which is one of the things that tends not to happen with the big overview books. So, though I think it’s becoming harder to do, even now blockbusters can offer new viewpoints.

So far, we’ve discussed books that you’ve admired. On the flip side, what topics or themes did you feel were under-represented this year?

CN: Something I’d love to see more of – and this is pure selfishness – are nitty-gritty books about engineering and other practical aspects of the ancient world. For instance, I was trying to research Roman roads – and that’s one thing we all know about the Romans: that they had those long, straight roads. But actually finding good books on Roman roads, detailing how much they sped up the empire and how they facilitated travel – how the volumes of people and trade increased – is quite difficult.

I would love to see somebody quantitatively approach empires. You get so much from a numerical approach that just telling the stories doesn’t give you. For instance, somebody did a study on Roman emperors, and found that their life expectancy was quite a lot shorter than your average Roman, which was quite short anyway. These things can illuminate a period in a way that narrative history can’t.

MW: If I were thinking about my own interests, in the past 20 years there have been disappointingly few English-language titles on pre-Mughal India. Yet India is among the biggest countries in the world, and the region hosted probably the oldest civilisation, if you count back to the ancient towns in Balochistan. We get a lot of great stuff on the Mughals – on the art, the culture, the administration. But if I wanted to read a book about the Guptas or the Cholans, or even going right back to the Indus Valley, I’d struggle.

RM: It’s worth reflecting for a moment on the conditions needed for these books to exist. Outside the commercial aspect, you also need to be working in a culture that respects learning foreign languages, respects the academic craft of writing history, and then has enough people to pull the threads together to tell a bigger story. When we call for people to write more accessible history, having a bit of appreciation of the bits that have to come together to make that work is worth bearing in mind.

We’ve discussed books that have impressed you in 2022, but which history titles, that you’ve not yet read, will be on your Christmas lists?

CN: I’d like to get a copy of Ian Kershaw’s Personality and Power, which asks whether the “Great Man” view of history is accurate. How much is somebody just riding the wave of history, and then saying that they created it? How much are they actually shaping the world? It’s something you always wonder, particularly because our historical tradition has so often taken the “Great Man” view. From what I understand about the book, I don’t think that Kershaw comes down definitively on one side or the other, but I’m excited to read it.

MW: A book that I really want to read but haven’t yet bought – so I hope it goes into my Christmas stocking – is  Otherlands: A World in the Making by Thomas Halliday. It sounds so amazing – a history of the world before history, before people. He’s trying to write the history of the organisms and the plants and the creatures and everything else as the world grows from protozoic slime or whatever we emerged from. It sounds like an absolutely incredible effort of imagination. I think that Christmas presents should be books that you can curl up with and get engrossed in and transported by – and Otherlands sounds like exactly that.

We’re now leaving 2022 behind and looking to the future. Which 2023 books are you most excited about?

CN: Again, mine’s a classical one. Emily Wilson is releasing a new translation of The Iliad, which I would love to read. She translated the Odyssey before, and it’s a real skill. You want to keep the sense that this is an old language, because the Iliad was probably written down in 800 BC, but the story dates back to maybe 400 years earlier than that. So it would have felt archaic even in its early days of being written down. To get that feeling of it being other but without feeling “ye olde” is something I think that Wilson does very well. She seasons the old with the modern.

RM: There are a couple of books I’m looking forward to, which I believe are forthcoming nearer the end of 2023. One is going to look in a big-scale way at modern Chinese history. It’s written by two really major historians of modern and contemporary China, Odd Arne Westad and Chen Jian. They’re going to examine the period from the 1960s and the Cultural Revolution all the way up to the late 1980s. They’ve had access to all sorts of material that other people haven’t had before, and it’s going to be a really big-think reassessment – not just of changes in China during that pivotal time, but also how that story fits into what we know about the Cold War world.

That puts in mind a second book, written by Sergey Radchenko, a brilliant historian of Russia, the Soviet Union and China, and Eurasia more broadly. His new book, which I think is going to be called The First Fiddle, is a really comprehensive history of the Soviet Union during the Cold War, drawn from Moscow archives that he knows like the back of his hand. There is a huge volume of material there that just hasn’t been seen before.

I, for one, can’t wait to see that in print, because I think it’s going to transform the way that we understand the Soviet Union and the centrality of its history in that period. Those of us who remember the Soviet Union remember what a big deal it was in the world. If you speak to people like my teenage daughter, though, it’s a historical phenomenon they’re aware of, but it’s a bit like the Babylonian empire – it’s something that existed a very long time ago. For those of us for whom it was a day-to-day reality – at least in the sense of the wider world – seeing it as a historical object is going to be fascinating.

This interview first appeared in the Christmas 2022 issue of BBC History Magazine

A history of an enslaved mother and her daughter has been announced as the winner of the 2022 Cundill History Prize.

All That She Carried: The Journey of Ashley’s Sack, a Black Family Keepsake by Tiya Miles was revealed as the winner of the US$75,000 prize in a Montreal ceremony on 1 December 2022. The decision of the judges was unanimous in awarding the prize to Miles, who is Radcliffe Alumnae Professor at the Harvard-Radcliffe Institute, and director of the Charles Warren Center for Studies in American History at Harvard University. The judges praised Miles’ work for its “imaginative research” and having “the narrative propulsion of a novel”.

The winning history book covers the story of an enslaved woman named Rose in 1850s South Carolina, who packed a sack containing a few precious items for her nine-year-old daughter Ashley. Ashley was then separated from her mother and sold, and it’s likely the two never saw each other again. This heart-wrenching story is embroidered on a tattered cotton sack now held in the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture.

On the podcast | 2022 Cundill Prize Winner Tiya Miles explores what an embroidered sack bearing a heart-wrenching inscription can reveal about women’s experiences of slavery in South Carolina:

The two fellow finalists – Ada Ferrer’s Cuba and Vladislav M Zubok ‘s Collapse – each received US$10,000.

Previous winners of the main prize include Marjoleine Kars (2021), Camilla Townsend (2020), and Julia Lovell (2019).

Kars, who won the 2021 Prize for Blood on the River: A Chronicle of Mutiny and Freedom on the Wild Coast (The New Press), will be delivering the 2022 Cundill Lecture on the 1763 rebellion of enslaved people in the Dutch colony of Berbice. The talk will be available to stream on-demand on HistoryExtra between Monday 5 December and Sunday 11 December.

Register here

What is the Cundill History Prize?

The Cundill History Prize, awarded annually since 2008, is an international prize of US$75,000, that rewards the best history writing in English. Books awarded the annual prize embody “historical scholarship, originality, literary quality and broad appeal”. Any historical period or subject is eligible, and translations into English are welcomed. Two runners up receive $10,000 each.

Cundill History Prize 2022 shortlist

Eight titles have been shortlisted for the 2022 Cundill History Prize. They are:

All That She Carried

By Tiya Miles (Random House)

Aftermath: Life in the Fallout of the Third Reich

By Harald Jähner (Ebury, PRH)

Collapse: The Fall of the Soviet Union

By Vladislav M Zubok (Yale University Press)

Cuba: An American History

By Ada Ferrer (Scribner)

In The Forest of No Joy: The Congo-Océan Railroad and the Tragedy of French Colonialism

By JP Daughton (WW Norton & Company)

Not One Inch: America, Russia, and the Making of Post-Cold War Stalemate

By ME Sarotte (Yale University Press)

The Chinese Question: The Gold Rushes and Global Politics

By Mae Ngai (WW Norton & Company)

The Perils of Interpreting

By Henrietta Harrison (Princeton University Press)

The Cundill History Prize 2022 chair and jurors

The jurors will be reading the 2022 submissions over the summer months, before meeting in a series of video conference calls to deliberate on the longlist, the shortlist of eight, the three finalists and, ultimately, the one winner of the US$75,000 prize, administered by McGill University.

The 2022 prize is chaired by JR McNeill, a historian, author and professor at Georgetown University in Washington, DC. Joining McNeill on this year’s panel is Misha Glenny, Rector at the Institute for Human Sciences; Martha S Jones, Professor of History at The John Hopkins University; Yasmin Khan, Associate Professor of British History at the University of Oxford; and Kenda Mutongi, Professor of History at MIT

Who won the Cundill History Prize in previous years?

Marjoleine Kars was named winner of the 2021 Cundill History Prize for Blood on the River: a Chronicle of Mutiny and Freedom on the Wild Coast (The New Press).

The US-based Dutch historian accessed a previously untapped Dutch archive to reveal the little-known story of a 1763 slave rebellion in Berbice, a Dutch colony in present-day Guyana. The event, Kars showed, revises our understanding of the actions of enslaved people at the dawn of the age of revolution.

“It transforms our understanding of two vitally important subjects – slavery and empire – and it tells a story so dramatic, so compelling that no reader will be able to put the book down,” said Michael Ignatieff, 2021 Chair of the Jury. “It was the unanimous choice of our jury.”

The two runners up were Rebecca Clifford for Survivors: Children’s Lives after the Holocaust (Yale University Press) and Marie Favereau for The Horde: How the Mongols Changed the World, (Belknap Press of Harvard), and each receive a Recognition of Excellence Award of US$10,000.

Listen: Marjoleine Kars tells the HistoryExtra podcast about a little-known 1763 rebellion by enslaved people in Berbice, in present-day Guyana:

• Buy now on Bookshop.org
• Buy now on Amazon
• Buy now on Waterstones

The winner of the 2020 Cundill History Prize was Camilla Townsend’s Fifth Sun: A New History of the Aztecs, a new look at the lives of the Aztecs in their own words, and 2019’s winner was Maoism: A Global History by Julia Lovell. Lovell followed Harvard Professor Maya Jasanoff (2018), and British historian Daniel Beer (2017). Find out more about the previous winners.

Find out more at www.cundillprize.com, or on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram

As the countdown to Christmas continues, we’ve picked out 20 delightful presents that we think history lovers would love. Designed to suit a range of historical interests and budgets, there’s something for everyone on the nice list here.

And if you’d like to stow a history book or two under the tree, read our roundup of 2022’s best history books here.

Et tu, Biro? This is a pen holder with a difference, as ancient history lovers can take a leaf out of Brutus’ book and stab this 3D-printed bust of Julius Caesar in the back with their pens and pencils – repeatedly.

• Buy now on Amazon
• Buy now on Etsy

Perfect for fans of Wolf Hall or The Tudors, this reproduction of Anne Boleyn’s iconic “B” pendant necklace will be a welcome addition to any Tudor enthusiast’s jewellery box.

• Buy now from Historic Royal Palaces
• Buy now on Amazon
• Buy now on Etsy

Want to relax like an ancient Egyptian? We’d recommend senet – a boardgame beloved by pharaohs that sees players move their pieces across the board, mimicking the soul’s journey through the underworld to reach the afterlife.

• Read more | 8 of the best historical board games for history lovers

This handcrafted set makes the game accessible for modern players, coming with detailed instructions on how to play.

• Buy now on Etsy

For those with a bigger budget, a set of historic coins from the Royal Mint is a standout gift. These nine coins – which were in circulation during the final year of the Second World War – are presented in bespoke packaging that details some of the milestone events that led to Britain’s victory.

• Buy now from the Royal Mint

Modelled on a suit of armour made for Henry VIII in 1540, this printed apron will transport bakers from their 21st-century kitchens to the majesty of the Field of the Cloth of Gold – although this cloth is 100 per cent cotton.

• Buy now from Historic Royal Palaces

Are you not entertained? Any recipient of this majestic 3D Roman Colosseum jigsaw certainly will be. The puzzle set also includes an LED light, to illuminate the thrills and spills of the ring.

• Buy now on Amazon

Set a stormy atmosphere with these unique tealight holders. Inspired by Viking drinking horns, these décor pieces carved from ox horn will be sure to get guests talking – and maybe even toasting.

• Buy now on Amazon
• Buy now from Viking Culture

This mug brings the famous phrase “Divorced, beheaded, died, divorced, beheaded, survived” to life in a whole new way. Simply add a hot beverage and watch as portraits of the queens disappear, and their various fates are revealed.

• Buy now from BBC shop
• Buy now on eBay

Move over, bullet journals. This hieroglyphic journal contains 200 pages designed to help the owner draw out hieroglyphs on graphed paper and then translate them into English. An excellent addition to the stocking of anyone who’s interested in ancient Egyptian culture and language.

• Buy now on Amazon

The HMS Victory was the jewel in the royal navy’s crown, serving as Lord Nelson’s flagship when he stormed to victory during the battle of Trafalgar. Rather than travelling to Portsmouth to see the Georgian ship in all its glory, bring a piece of naval history home with this mini-Victory in a lightbulb-shaped bottle.

• Buy now on Etsy
• Buy now on Amazon

Set a challenge for history explorers with this gorgeous scratch-off poster from English Heritage. It includes 292 historical properties and gardens to visit across England, from famous locations like Hadrian’s Wall to fascinating areas of interest off the beaten track.

• Buy now on Etsy
• Buy now from notonthehighstreet
• Buy now on Amazon

For history that hits closer to home, try an AncestryDNA kit. These tests shed fascinating light on people’s heritage, from the ethnicity of their ancestors to uncovering new family connections.

• Buy now from AncestryDNA

If you don’t want to be accused of being a mad-headed ape this Christmas, make sure you add this to your shopping basket. With a colourful insult from the bard himself for all 365 days of 2023, it’ll bring a smile – or a scowl – to its recipient’s face every day.

• Buy now from the Calendar Club

Taking inspiration from the landscape of Stonehenge, this chess set combines the beauty of the game with the majesty of the stone circle. The board is emblazoned with a stunning birds-eye view of the neolithic standing stones, and the pieces are reimagined as objects connected to Stonehenge, from the stones themselves to spear heads.

• Buy now from English Heritage

Do you know your dots from your dashes? This clever kit from Imperial War Museums is designed to put your morse code skills to the test, as you can build your own morse machine and learn more about the history of the language.

• Buy now from Imperial War Museums Shop

If you had to picture medieval illustrations, it’s fair to say your mind wouldn’t immediately leap to cats wearing crowns or walking on their hind legs. But both feature on this quirky coaster set, which showcases four eye-catching medieval cat illustrations. A purr-fect present for any history geeks with feline friends.

• Buy now on Etsy

If you know someone who still has the Hamilton soundtrack on repeat, they can belt out the tunes in comfort while wearing this historical hoodie mimicking Alexander Hamilton’s costume.

For the less musically minded, LightInTheBox has a range of other historical hoodies on offer, from medieval knights to Second World War military designs.

• Buy now from LightInTheBox

Bring your beard or braid game to a new level with these hand-crafted alphabet rune beads. Based on the Norse Futhark rune alphabet, this set of 24 silver hair beads mixes fashion and Viking history.

• Buy now on Etsy
• Buy now on eBay

Swap mindless scrolling on Twitter for turning tweets into a piece of history. Dumb Cuneiform will transcribe any 140-character message of your choosing into cuneiform – a writing system popular in the ancient Middle East – and imprint it on a clay tablet for you, so your inside jokes will last forever.

• Buy now from Dumb Cuneiform

 A digital subscription to  HistoryExtra

What do you get the history lover who has everything? A subscription to us can’t go wrong (at least in our humble opinion!). They’ll unlock access to 2,500 articles, 1,000 award-winning podcast episodes and numerous video lectures – all for £34.99 a year.

• Subscribe now at HistoryExtra

Throughout its 92-year existence, the FIFA Men’s World Cup has delivered its fair share of iconic moments – and controversies. But how did the competition originally begin? Who were its first heavyweights? And what does a dog named Pickles have to do with it? On the eve of the 2022 tournament in Qatar, Jon Bauckham caught up with Professor Matthew Taylor to answer your questions about the history of the football competition and how it has impacted on the “beautiful game” overall.

It is a truism that sport moves from a newspaper’s back pages to the front pages in the case of either triumph or disaster. This year, a story that has made the leap has been, if not quite a disaster, then certainly a major controversy affecting the exclusive world of professional golf.

“Golf in the Gutter”, the Daily Mail thundered in June in response to the launch of a breakaway professional competition. With direct funding from the Saudi Arabian government through its Public Investment Fund, the LIV Invitational Series attracted a number of the top male golfers with its massive appearance and prize fees. Under the strapline “golf, but louder”, the tour teed off at Hemel Hempstead’s Centurion Club, but all events and media coverage so far have been accompanied by contractual battles between the players and their established body, the PGA Tour.

• Read more | 21 key moments in the history of the modern Olympics

At one level, the LIV event is part of a long history of sports splintering into groups, which we can trace as far back as 1895, at least, when a group of rugby clubs in the north of England broke away from the Rugby Football Union (RFU) over the thorny issue of amateurism and professionalism. The southern-based RFU saw payment for play as anathema, while clubs based in northern industrial towns wanted to compensate their players for lost working hours. A breakdown was inevitable, and the schism resulted in the birth of a new code, rugby league.

The LIV story also resonates with the World Series Cricket competition of 1977 to 1979, organised by Australian media tycoon Kerry Packer, which offered players financial incentives to leave the existing system and therefore forsake their international careers. And in 1992, the biggest English football clubs left the Football League to form the Premier League in the chase for higher broadcasting fees; a move echoed – so far unsuccessfully – by the recent European Super League project. So, there is nothing new in breakaway competitions with deep pockets.

But the LIV Golf controversy is as much about politics as the money. Alongside Saudi Arabia’s 2021 investment in Newcastle United FC in a takeover worth approximately £300 million, it’s an example of a trend known as ‘sportswashing’.

What is ‘sportswashing’?

Sportswashing is where a person, group or even a state gets involved in sport, predominantly by hosting events or sponsoring teams, to create a more positive public image that directs attention from divisive issues. In the case of Saudi Arabia, the accusation is that they are using golf and football – as well as having eyes on hosting a future Olympics – to improve their international reputation, distracting from its poor human rights records (including the 2018 assassination of journalist Jamal Khashoggi) and structural discrimination.

• Read more | A history of unsporting conduct at the Olympics

Saudi Arabia and other oil states are taking the practice of sportswashing to new heights, particularly through their investment in famous clubs in other countries, exemplified by Abu Dhabi’s $212 million takeover of Manchester City in 2008, and the Qatari state’s 2011-12 purchase of Paris Saint-Germain in a deal worth approximately €1 billion over five seasons. At the end of 2022, in another headline example, Qatar is set to host the men’s football world cup.

History has some salutary lessons here. The two biggest sporting mega-events on the planet are the Olympics and the FIFA World Cup, and both have long records of sportswashing. Many authoritarian governments have hosted these events, and used them to promote images of stability, normality and order. For the international sporting establishment, this trend has been acceptable as long as the events have gone well.

For the Olympics, this trend was pioneered by Nazi Germany in 1936, when Garmisch-Partenkirchen and Berlin hosted the winter and summer games respectively. Further examples then came in Mexico City in 1968, Moscow (1980), and Beijing (2008) with the summer games; and Sochi (2014); and Beijing again in 2022 with the winter.

As for the FIFA World Cup, the classic examples have been the tournaments hosted by fascist Italy in 1934 and Argentina’s military junta in 1978. While there are many contextual and ideological differences between these events, some key themes are visible when they are examined through the lens of sportswashing.

• Read more | The 1971 Women’s World Cup: game changers?

The first feature is for the host government to convince the sporting world that the event will be a success, and will not be disrupted by political problems. Nazi Germany did this best. The International Olympic Committee (IOC) had awarded the 1936 Summer games to Berlin in 1931 when the Weimar government was in place, so the arrival of Hitler’s regime in 1933 proved a challenge.

Many opponents of the Nazis, particularly trade union and Jewish groups in France, Britain, the US and elsewhere, objected to the Olympics becoming a Nazi propaganda piece. The German government responded by inviting key stakeholders, notably American athletics administrator Avery Brundage, on fact-finding visits. In 1934, Brundage’s trip was designed to look for evidence of anti-Jewish discrimination in sport, but his Nazi hosts tightly controlled every moment to ensure their preferred outcome.

Brundage was given high-level state hospitality, while prevented from meeting any Jewish athletes privately. With all of the conversations going through government interpreters, there was never any doubt about the superficiality of the trip, especially when we note Brundage’s personal record of anti-Semitism as well as his membership, at the time, of a Chicago sports club that barred Jews from joining.

As historian Allen Guttmann noted, “Brundage believed what he was predisposed to believe”, and he returned to the US convinced that the Olympics were safe in Nazi hands. The Nuremberg Laws of 1935, which made structural discrimination against Jews central to all aspects of German public and private life, obviously showed up Brundage’s claims as risible. The Nazis then introduced the infamous ‘Olympic Pause’, a reduction of anti-Jewish propaganda to cover the winter games in February and summer games in August.

Similar trends were evident in Argentina in 1978, when former US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, who still wielded great influence in American diplomacy, visited the country during the World Cup. His trip came at a time when the Argentine military government was pursuing a brutal policy of crushing dissent through arbitrary arrests, torture, and the disappearances of people who spoke out. China also managed this well for Beijing’s two Olympics, in 2008 and 2022, with clear assurances to the IOC that neither would be upset by any political concerns.

The second sportswashing feature that these historical examples have in common is the spectacle itself. No expense would be spared in building impressive sporting and, in some cases, public infrastructure in order to be the best possible showcase for the sport.

Berlin’s Olympic Stadium, designed by Werner March, was the most ambitious Olympic project to date and it remains in use today; a vivid legacy of Nazi architecture. For Argentina in 1978, alongside existing stadiums in Buenos Aires and Rosario, three brand new stadiums hosted matches in Cordoba, Mar del Plata, and Mendoza. The construction on another new venue in Horco Molle shut down in the face of fighting between the army and anti-government forces in the region.

Beijing’s Bird’s Nest Stadium by Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron became an icon of the 2008 Olympics; and Russia’s venues for the 2018 World Cup included nine new stadiums. Qatar’s showcase stadiums, built by workers, according to Amnesty International, in conditions of “forced labour”, fit this same trend of authoritarian sportswashing: make the tournament or competition look as spectacular, modern, and dynamic as possible.

These venues provide plenty of opportunities for the authoritarian leaders to be seen on public display, and to enjoy the sport. Yet the beauty of sport’s unpredictable nature does create a level of risk for these leaders. Russia’s president Vladimir Putin was not banking on his country’s team getting knocked out in the quarter finals in 2018, just as Adolf Hitler cannot have been pleased with an African-American athlete, Jesse Owens, winning four gold medals in Berlin.

And while nothing has been formally proved about Argentina’s highly convenient 6-0 defeat of Peru, which secured the home team’s place in the World Cup final, stories of Argentine officials visiting the Peru players before the match suggest that the junta found a way around the unpredictability of sport.

Of course, there have been protests about these events. As more news spread from German exiles about how the Nazis were treating Jews, trade unionists, and opponents from the left, some governments considered boycotting the 1936 Olympics. Only Republican Spain saw this through, even going so far as to plan a counter People’s Olympiad in Barcelona that year (although this was derailed by Franco’s nationalist coup).

Groups advocating a range of causes, from environmental concerns to LGBT+ rights, lobbied against the Sochi 2014 Olympics, while the Beijing 2022 Olympics provided the perfect setting for campaigning groups to publicise widely-shared reports from governments and NGOs about China’s treatment of its Uyghur Muslims. Credible reports of forced labour camps, mass sterilisations for women, and arbitrary executions led to critics labelling the policy as genocidal, and human rights groups have asked how such policies are compatible with the IOC’s brand.

Similarly, in 1978, left-wing groups in Europe ran a high-profile campaign against the World Cup in light of the Argentine government’s disappearances, torture, and extra-judicial killings of its political opponents, including activists and journalists.

The governments involved typically brush these criticisms off, and appeal to the unifying nature of sport. The Mexican government’s treatment of protesters before the 1968 Olympics, however, showed what dictatorships put in this position are capable of. When students and workers gathered in Tlatelolco days before the opening ceremony to protest about a range of social and political issues, and to call for the money being spent on the games to go instead into social projects, the response was a massacre.

• Read more | When I met Mandela: 1995 Rugby World Cup final

Armed troops and police, including members of the special paramilitary Olimpia Battalion that the government had formed to infiltrate and destroy opposition groups, fired on the crowd. While the final death toll is still debated, it was somewhere between 300 and 400. Ultimately, none of these protests stopped the events from going ahead.

The golfers playing in the LIV Invitational Series at the Centurion Club may seem to be a long way from this tragedy, but they are the latest sportspeople to be part of a long trend of sportswashing. From Berlin to Qatar via the golf courses of Hertfordshire, authoritarian states have long used sport as a way of trying to show that they can be trusted. Investing in sport events, whether that has been buying clubs and competitions or hosting mega-events, is the perfect way for such states to promote an image of reliability, respectability, and internationalism. But the realities for their home populations will never match the supposed values of equality, friendliness, and fair play that sport is supposed to embody.

Martin Polley is a professor of history and director of the International Centre for Sports History and Culture at De Montfort University. His books include Moving the Goalposts: a History of Sport and Society Since 1945 (Routledge, 1998) and The British Olympics: Britain’s Olympic Heritage, 1612­-2012 (English Heritage, 2011)

The playwright David Hare wrote recently that, alongside the NHS and the welfare state, the BBC represents “the finest expression of mid-20th-century public idealism”. Yet, from our vantage point in the third decade of the 21st century, such praise can be a dangerous thing. It associates the BBC with past glories: the analogue era, “old media”, the world of radio and television. This raises a profound existential question for an organisation marking its 100th birthday. Having emerged in the first wireless age, can it survive in anything like its current form in the era of internet, mobile social media and high-spending multinational streaming giants?

Before reaching for the most pessimistic answer, it’s worth remembering that the BBC kick-started Britain’s own media revolution in the first place. In the early 1980s, the corporation’s education department, alert to warnings of a shortage in computing skills, began working with colleagues in research and development, and with scientists employed by Acorn, to develop what became the BBC Micro. A personal computer designed to be both cheap and easy to use, the Micro – with its distinctive chunky keyboard and orange function keys – became a fixture in homes and classrooms.

It enabled tens of thousands of adults and children with no previous computing experience to learn the so-called Basic programming language. And it was just one part of a wider computer literacy project built around TV programmes, instructional books and a support network for teachers.

This multi-pronged approach provided the template for another BBC project launched a decade later, focused this time on introducing the British public to the then-unfamiliar joys of the internet. The Net was a TV series that created “live” dialogue with its audience by setting up online bulletin boards and an email address.

A “BBC Networking Club” also sprang up to help viewers get online. By this stage, the corporation’s own programme-makers were also starting to connect to the world wide web. In large part this was thanks to one of its engineers, Brandon Butterworth, who had created an internal network of desktop computers and secured a website domain: bbc.co.uk.

A thousand initiatives bloomed in the mid-1990s as staff throughout the corporation began to explore the internet and create web pages of their own. In one corner, the Hungarian Service created its own pages to accompany programmes; in another, “Trumptonshire Web” sprang up to celebrate the children’s TV series, Trumpton. Radio 1 created a live chat facility, and the recently launched news-and-sport network Five Live turned its 606 phone-in for football fans into one of the busiest messageboards in the country. Then, for the May 1997 general election, journalists came up with an 8,000-page site to provide up-to-date details of the results as they came in.

Blazing a trail

Initially this digital evolution was all rather organic and spontaneous, but in 1997 there was a decisive intervention from the top. The BBC’s director general, John Birt, had been talking to Nicholas Negroponte, author of Being Digital. This book had set out a striking techno-utopian vision of the future in which an “information superhighway” would deliver entirely virtual newspapers and personalised forms of entertainment to millions of private computers. After flying to the US to visit companies engaged with this new technology, including Netscape and Microsoft, Birt returned a fully fledged convert. He was, he said, convinced that the internet “was a Very Big Thing that was going to change the world, and that the BBC had to be at the centre of it”.

Over the next six months, all of the experimental work which had been simmering away was pulled together into a slicker, more-coherent offering. The first tangible outcome of this concerted effort was supposed to be the autumn launch of an online news service. The sudden death of Princess Diana at the end of August forced the pace: this was the kind of dramatic, fast-moving and increasingly complicated story that required web pages to be constantly updated. Presented with an unending supply of fresh interviews on radio and TV, BBC journalists began experimenting with embedding short “grabs” of audio and video. They created a tribute site, and arranged a live “webcast” for the princess’s funeral. The success of that coverage prompted an injection of extra cash for new servers and, when BBC News Online was launched formally later in the autumn, it had the capacity to stream the day’s main television news bulletins on a regular basis. The BBC’s other online services quickly adopted a similar multimedia style.

Birt subsequently claimed that producing video-on-demand had been his “obsession” all along. If so, the launch of the BBC iPlayer 10 years later marked the first real step towards what he’d seen as the ultimate destination of the digital revolution: the merging of TV, radio and the internet into a single platform.

The evolutionary origins of the BBC iPlayer can perhaps be discerned in a development of 1996, when programme-makers at Radio 1 created a virtual mixing desk that allowed anyone anywhere in the world to “listen again” to an archive of recent broadcasts. Six years later, a group of technologically adventurous BBC staff came up with the idea of creating something similar for TV. Ben Lavender, a young engineer in the BBC’s New Media Technology department, took up the challenge of turning what he called an “internet personal video recorder” into what became iPlayer.

The technological obstacles proved more straightforward to overcome than the political ones. Senior staff at the BBC needed lots of convincing: many of them refused to believe that anyone would ever want to watch TV on a computer screen or mobile phone. Once they were satisfied, regulators then demanded a “public value test”. This was the opportunity for commercial rivals to argue that the proposed new BBC service would damage their own interests. When it was finally launched to the public at Christmas 2007, the BBC’s original ambitions for iPlayer – which included sharing the platform with ITV, Channel 4 and Channel 5, as well as including whole “box sets” of past TV series – had been drastically trimmed back.

Nevertheless, iPlayer brought the concept of catch-up TV to the British public. Here was something stable, easily navigated and gloriously free from advertising. By 2012, it was voted the UK’s number-one brand. As the chief executive of the streaming giant Netflix later admitted, if anything had “blazed the trail” for his own company’s success it was iPlayer. And together with BBC Online, iPlayer showed that – even in a media future dominated by the internet, always-on mobile phones and new social platforms – the BBC might retain a centre-stage role.

Alchemical advances

There was rarely a single “eureka” moment in this story of invention. Rather, a complex, almost alchemical mix of factors enabled the BBC to take its leading role: a depth and range of skill and experience on its payroll that allowed for what one insider called “nippy, smart people working around the edges trying things out”; the spending power that came with a licence fee still keeping pace with inflation; and, above all, a capacity for long-term thinking – and a tolerance of failure as a vital component of innovation – that contrasted with the private sector’s nervousness over untested, potentially unprofitable investments.

In this sense, the part played by the BBC in the digital revolution merely reflects its wider role over the past century. This is a role nurtured by those founding figures – John Reith and his lieutenants – who first set it on its path in 1922. For them, the BBC was never about creating a nation of radio listeners or, later, TV viewers. It was about helping to spread ‘“the best that has been thought and known in the world” to as many people as possible. Radio or television were merely the means of delivering this larger ethical vision. The goal ever since has been to employ whichever medium seems most effective for this purpose at any given moment. It was also crucial to use the corporation’s privileged position as a publicly funded body, beyond direct state control or the pressures wrought by ratings-driven advertising, to provide that famous triumvirate of “information, education and entertainment”.

Future challenges

Whether the BBC will retain this capacity in years to come is less clear. There’s no intrinsic reason why it shouldn’t be capable of continued technological agility. The success of Radio 1 in becoming “the most subscribed-to radio station on YouTube” is a reminder that the BBC is by no means wedded to the old FM dial – or, indeed, the terrestrial TV signal – in its efforts to reach large and youthful audiences. Economists even suggest that, as an “investor of first resort”, the BBC stimulates a virtuous circle from which the whole media sector benefits.

Yet the outsourcing of so much of its work now threatens the reservoir of know-how that enabled it to be a creative powerhouse in the first place. The freezing of the licence fee for most of the period since 2010 is also having a devastating effect on its ability to invest for the future. And new technology brings its own dangers. The much-touted switch from a universal funding mechanism to a subscription service would restrict the BBC’s riches to those who could afford to pay. It would be the one technological innovation that might end for good what David Hare saw as the BBC’s extraordinary aim of shaping for the better the life not just of individuals but of an entire nation.

David Hendy is emeritus professor at the University of Sussex. His latest book is The BBC: A People’s History (Profile, 2022)

This article was first published in the Christmas 2022 issue of BBC History Magazine