Read A History of the World in 100 Objects Online
Authors: Neil MacGregor
A History of the World in 100 Objects (2 page)
PART SEVENTEEN
Tolerance and Intolerance
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1550–1700
PART EIGHTEEN
Exploration, Exploitation and Enlightenment
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1680–1820
PART NINETEEN
Mass Production, Mass Persuasion
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1780–1914
PART TWENTY
The World of our Making
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1914–2010
Preface:To all my colleagues at the British Museum
Mission Impossible
Telling history through things is what museums are for. And because the British Museum has for over 250 years been collecting things from all round the globe, it is not a bad place to start if you want to use objects to tell a history of the world. Indeed you could say it is what the Museum has been attempting to do ever since Parliament set it up in 1753 and directed that it should be ‘aimed at universality’ and free to all. This book is the record of a series of programmes on BBC Radio 4, broadcast in 2010, but it is also in fact simply the latest iteration of what the Museum has been doing, or attempting to do, since its foundation.
The rules of the game for
A History of the World in 100 Objects
were set by Mark Damazer, Controller of Radio 4, and they were simple. Colleagues from the Museum and the BBC would choose from the collection of the British Museum 100 objects that had to range in date from the beginning of human history around two million years ago and come right up to the present day. The objects had to cover the whole world, as far as possible equally. They would try to address as many aspects of human experience as proved practicable, and to tell us about whole societies, not just the rich and powerful within them. The objects would therefore necessarily include the humble things of everyday life as well as great works of art. As five programmes would be broadcast each week, we would group the objects in clusters of five, spinning the globe at various points in time and looking at five snapshots of the world through objects at that particular date. And because the Museum’s collection embraces the whole world and the BBC broadcasts to every part of it, we would invite experts and commentators from all over the world to join in. Of course it could only ever be ‘a’ history of the world, but it would still try to be a history to which the world had in some measure contributed. (Partly for reasons of copyright, the contributors’ words have been left here essentially as they were spoken.)
The project was clearly in many respects impossible, but one particular aspect of it caused an especially lively debate. All these objects would be presented not on television but on radio. They would have to be imagined by the listener, not seen. At first I think the Museum team, used to the close examination of things, was daunted by this, but our BBC colleagues were confident. They knew that to imagine a thing is to appropriate it in a very particular way, that every listener would make the object under discussion their own and in consequence make their own history. For those who simply had to see them, and who couldn’t visit the Museum in person, pictures of all the objects have been available on the ‘A History of the World in 100 Objects’ website throughout 2010, and are now reproduced in this beautifully illustrated book.
Neil MacGregor
September 2010
Signals from the Past
In this book we travel back in time and across the globe, to see how we humans have shaped our world and been shaped by it over the past two million years. The book tries to tell a history of the world in a way which has not been attempted before, by deciphering the messages which objects communicate across time – messages about peoples and places, environments and interactions, about different moments in history and about our own time as we reflect upon it. These signals from the past – some reliable, some conjectural, many still to be retrieved – are unlike other evidence we are likely to encounter. They speak of whole societies and complex processes rather than individual events, and tell of the world for which they were made, as well as of the later periods which reshaped or relocated them, sometimes having meanings far beyond the intention of their original makers. It is the things humanity has made, these meticulously shaped sources of history and their often curious journeys across centuries and millennia, which
A History of the World in 100 Objects
tries to bring to life. The book includes all sorts of objects, carefully designed and then either admired and preserved or used, broken and thrown away. They range from a cooking pot to a golden galleon, from a Stone Age tool to a credit card, and all of them come from the collection of the British Museum.
The history that emerges from these objects will seem unfamiliar to many. There are few well-known dates, famous battles or celebrated incidents. Canonical events – the making of the Roman Empire, the Mongol destruction of Baghdad, the European Renaissance, the Napoleonic wars, the bombing of Hiroshima – are not centre stage. They are, however, present, refracted through individual objects. The politics of 1939, for example, determined both how Sutton Hoo was excavated and how it was understood (
Chapter 47
). The Rosetta Stone is (as well as everything else) a document of the struggle between Britain and Napoleonic France (
Chapter 33
). The American War of Independence is seen here from the unusual perspective of a native American buckskin map (
Chapter 88
). Throughout, I have chosen objects that tell many stories rather than bear witness to one single event.
If you want to tell the history of the whole world, a history that does not unduly privilege one part of humanity, you cannot do it through texts alone, because only some of the world has ever had texts, while most of the world, for most of the time, has not. Writing is one of humanity’s later achievements, and until fairly recently even many literate societies recorded their concerns and aspirations not only in writing but in things.
Ideally a history would bring together texts and objects, and some chapters of this book are able to do just that, but in many cases we simply can’t. The clearest example of this asymmetry between literate and non-literate history is perhaps the first encounter, at Botany Bay, between Captain Cook’s expedition and the Australian Aboriginals (
Chapter 89
). From the English side, we have scientific reports and the captain’s log of that fateful day. From the Australian side, we have only a wooden shield dropped by a man in flight after his first experience of gunshot. If we want to reconstruct what was actually going on that day, the shield must be interrogated and interpreted as deeply and rigorously as the written reports.
In addition to the problem of mutual miscomprehension there are the accidental or deliberate distortions of victory. It is, as we know, the victors who write the history, especially when only the victors know how to write. Those who are on the losing side, those whose societies are conquered or destroyed, often have only their things to tell their stories. The Caribbean Taino, the Australian Aboriginals, the African people of Benin and the Incas, all of whom appear in this book, can speak to us now of their past achievements most powerfully through the objects they made: a history told through things gives them back a voice. When we consider contact between literate and non-literate societies such as these, all our first-hand accounts are necessarily skewed, only one half of a dialogue. If we are to find the other half of that conversation, we have to read not just the texts, but the objects.
All so much easier said than done. Writing history from the study of texts is a familiar process, and we have centuries of critical apparatus to assist our assessment of written records. We have learnt how to judge their frankness, their distortions, their ploys. With objects, we do of course have structures of expertise – archaeological, scientific, anthropological – which allow us to ask critical questions. But we have to add to that a considerable leap of imagination, returning the artefact to its former life, engaging with it as generously, as poetically, as we can in the hope of winning the insights it may deliver.
For many cultures, if we are to know anything about them at all, this is the only way forward. The Moche culture of Peru, for example, now survives solely through the archaeological record. A Moche pot in the shape of a warrior (
Chapter 48
) is one of our few starting points for recovering who these people were and understanding how they lived, how they saw themselves and their world. It is a complex and uncertain process in which objects now reachable only through layers of cultural translation have to be rigorously scrutinized and then reimagined. The Spanish conquest of the Aztecs, for instance, has masked for us the Aztec conquest of the Huastec people: because of these revolutions of history the voice of the Huastec is now recoverable only at two removes, through a Spanish version of what the Aztecs told them. What did the Huastec themselves think? They left no textual record to tell us, but the material culture of the Huastec does survive in figures such as a five-foot-high stone goddess (
Chapter 69
), whose identity was roughly equated first with the Aztec mother goddess Tlazolteotl and later with the Virgin Mary. These sculptures are the primary documents of Huastec religious thought, and while their precise meaning remains opaque, their numinous presence sends us back to the second-hand accounts of the Aztecs and Spaniards with new perceptions and sharper questions – but still ultimately reliant on our own intuitions about what is at issue in this dialogue with the gods.
Such acts of imaginative interpretation and appropriation are essential in any history told through things. These were methods of understanding familiar to the founders of the British Museum, who saw the recuperation of past cultures as an essential foundation for understanding our common humanity. The collectors and scholars of the Enlightenment brought to the task both a scientific ordering of facts, and a rare capacity for poetic reconstruction. It was an enterprise being pursued simultaneously on the other side of the world. The Qianlong emperor in China, an almost exact contemporary of George III, in the middle of the eighteenth century was also engaged in gathering, collecting, classifying, categorizing, exploring the past, making dictionaries, compiling encyclopaedias and writing about what he had discovered, on the surface just like an eighteenth-century European gentleman scholar. One of the many things he collected was a jade ring or
bi
(
Chapter 90
), very like jade rings found in the tombs of the Zhang Dynasty about 1500 BC. Their use is still unknown today, but they are certainly objects of high status and very beautifully made. The Qianlong emperor admired the strange elegance of the jade
bi
he found and began to speculate what it was for. His approach was as much imaginative as scholarly: he could see it was very old, and he reviewed all the broadly comparable objects he knew about, but beyond that he was baffled. So, characteristically for him, he wrote a poem about his attempt to make sense of it. And then, perhaps rather shockingly to us, he had his poem inscribed on the prized object itself – a poem in which he concludes that the beautiful
bi
was meant to be a bowl stand, so he’ll put a bowl on it.