A History of the World in 100 Objects
Have you ever received a book, thanked the person, and only much later realised what a very special gift it was? Perhaps you’ve experienced serendipity in a library, picking a volume off the shelf out of curiosity. On some occasions the book in your hand, however it got there, is a gift because it introduced you to a new author, a striking novelist or the writer of a great new detective series. Some books offer a new perspective on an issue, widen your understanding, helping you rethink, just as when I borrowed a book about the ‘world of oceans’. However, on a few truly magical occasions, you find a book that’s quite simply extra-ordinary, the result of the combination of the author’s skills, the idea behind the book, and the way it has been put together. I found The History of the World in 100 Objects to be a book like that.
Perhaps I should start with the author. Neil MacGregor first became well known as a museum man. He was editor of the Burlington Magazine in the 1980s, before being Director of the UK’s National Gallery from 1987 to 2002, and finally Director of the British Museum from 2003 to 2015. He was well qualified for these roles. After reading modern languages at Oxford University’s New College (yes, I know, nobody’s perfect!), he went on to study philosophy in Paris, law at Edinburgh University, and finally art history. He taught History of Art and Architecture at the University of Reading. However, and quite apart from all this, he has turned out to be an outstanding communicator, presenting three BBC television series on art: Painting the World in 1995, Making Masterpieces, a behind-the-scenes tour of the National Gallery, in 1997 and Seeing Salvation, on the representation of Jesus in western art, in 2000. Later he was to make various series for BBC Radio 4.
However, the roles a person has filled are not necessarily a guide to the quality of what that person might write. There’s more to literary success than a position. In his case, MacGregor has written several outstanding books: Images of Christ in Art, Shakespeare, Germany, and Living with the Gods: On Beliefs and Peoples. As I’ve already admitted, the one I love most all is his A History of the World in 100 Objects. It’s a book that has sparked all sorts of similar overviews (even I started working on A History of Science in 100 Objects, but never finished it!). What makes it so good is the whole package. The history is fascinating, in many ways, and the writing is inviting, entrancing and revealing. To put it simply, it’s a book that I’ve read, read again, and every so often will pick off the shelf and once more read a few pages. The only, tiny, thing missing is ‘more’: couldn’t he have picked 200 objects?
As it happens, there was also a radio series and its description suits the book: the project is described as “a history of humanity” told through a hundred objects from all over the world in the British Museum’s collection”. MacGregor explains his approach:
“In these programmes, I’m travelling back in time, and across the globe, to see how we humans over 2 million years have shaped our world and been shaped by it, and I’m going to tell this story exclusively through the things that humans have made: all sorts of things, carefully designed, and then either admired and preserved, or used, broken and thrown away. I’ve chosen just a hundred objects from different points on our journey, from a cooking pot to a golden galleon, from a Stone Age tool to a credit card.”
He goes on to add:
“Telling history through things, whether it’s an Egyptian mummy or a credit card, is what museums are for, and because the British Museum has collected things from all over the globe, it’s not a bad place to try to tell a world history. Of course, it can only be ‘a’ history of the world, not ‘the’ history. When people come to the museum they choose their own objects and make their own journey round the world and through time, but I think what they will find is that their own histories quickly intersect with everybody else’s, and when that happens, you no longer have a history of a particular people or nation, but a story of endless connections.”
His ’History’ series was a phenomenon. On checking just before the start of the last week of the series in 2010, a survey found the radio broadcasts regularly had up to four million listeners, while the podcast downloads had totalled over 10 million, of which just over half, 5.7 million, were from the UK. Writing in The Independent, one journalist described the series as ‘perfect radio’, commenting “Has there ever been a more exciting, more unfailingly interesting radio series than the Radio 4/British Museum venture, A History of the World in 100 Objects? It is such a beautifully simple idea, to trace human civilisations through the objects that happen to have survived. Each programme, just 15 minutes long, focuses on just one thing, quite patiently, without dawdling. At the end, you feel that you have learnt something, and learnt it with pleasure and interest. For years to come, the BBC will be able to point to this wonderful series as an example of the things that it does best”.
Perhaps I’d better get back to the book! The first thing I want to mention is that Neil MacGregor is a writer who understands my foibles. There are 100 short chapters, organised into 20 sections, five in each, a level of organisational symmetry that delighted me, and still does. A history book organised along neat mathematical lines! He’s not totally obsessive, however. Most chapters are five pages long, one page comprising a photograph of the object, while the remaining pages are text. Some entries are slightly longer, some have more than one photograph: in total, some 658 pages, followed by a final section containing maps, a summary listing of the objects, a bibliography, references and acknowledgements.
In order to give some sense of what the book covers, I used a random number generator to select five numbers. It generated 21, 24, 41, 62, and 99 (not in that order), giving five examples to illustrate the book’s approach.
Item 21 is in Part Five of the book, covering Old World, New Powers. It describes the Lachish Reliefs, stone panels found at the Palace of King Sennacharib Nineveh, located near Mosul in Norther Iraq, dating to 700 BCE. Lachish was a major fortified hill town in the Assyrian Empire, and it contained a frieze some eight feet high running all around a room in Sennacharib’s palace, celebrating the crushing of the army of Hezekiah, King of Judah, a key battle in the Assyrian War. As MacGregor tells us “the sculptor has shown us the Lachish campaign as a perfectly executed military exercise”. It’s a propaganda exercise, of course, and one that should make us reflect on similar propaganda posing as ‘history’ in wars at every stage – right up to the 21st Century.
Item 24 is the Paracas Textile, cloth fragments from the Paracas Peninsula, Peru. Remarkably, given textiles would seem so ephemeral, these fragments date to 330-200 BCE. They are only small items, but they have been preserved because they had been buried in the dry desert conditions of the Peninsula. They are the remains of mummy bundles and are in vivid colours. “Perhaps the most striking about them, though, is the intricacy of the sewing and the surviving brilliance of the colours, with their blues and pinks, yellows and greens, all sitting carefully judged next to one another” , colours which McGregor notes make an extraordinary contrast to the dull browns of the environment in which they are found. Now considered among the greatest early textiles found in the world, they have recently sparked an effort in Peru to revitalise traditional weaving and sewing practices.
My next choice came from Pakistan. It is Item 41, a Seated Buddha from Gandhara. It is dated 100-330 AD. Gandhara is in north-eastern Pakistan, in the foothills of the Himalayas, and it has been a major source of Buddhist sculpture and architecture. This life-size figure, MacGregor tells us “must have been a startling sight for any Buddhist 1,800 years ago. Until shortly before then the Buddha had been represented by only sets of symbols – the tree under which he achieved enlightenment, a pair of footprints, and so on. To give him human form was new.” Well, now we know Buddha was a real historical character, and over time four typical poses have been shown, with Buddha lying, sitting, standing or walking. This image with him sitting represents him in his enlightened state. Moreover, his hand is in a gesture of preaching, the hand turning the prayer wheel, the Wheel of Law, a step towards renouncing the material world.
My next selection, 62, comes from a far more recent time, 1345-1355, and is known as the Hebrew Astrolabe, a brass model of the heavens, probably from Spain. I’ve always been fascinated by astrolabes (so serendipity worked well with this choice), which were able to help their owners tell the time, undertake surveys, identify the position of the Earth among the stars of the zodiac, and even help a user cast a horoscope. At the same time, this particular example is evidence of the ways in which Jewish and Islamic scholars made use of ancient Greek and Roman science to develop the basis of astronomy. As MacDonald reminds us, this was from a time when, by and large, Christianity, Judaism and Islam managed to co-exist reasonably peacefully. To own an astrolabe like this one, a little larger than a pocket watch, was limited to the wealthy, and the writing on the brass face tells us it’s owner was Jewish, probably someone who travelled between Spain, North Africa and France. I find it tantalising and would love to have one like it, and know how to be able to use it.
Finally, Item 99 is a Credit Card, issued by HSBC in the UAE: a truly international object (incidentally Item 100 is a solar powered light). MacDonald was writing back in 2010 when he was wondering what twentieth century item had the most impact on lives today: the mobile phone, the PC? He felt the credit card had become part of the fabric of modern life, an essential element of modern capitalism. I wonder if he would feel the same way today. The credit card is a modern invention. The first ‘charge card’ was the Diners Club card, introduced in 1950, in the US. Just eight years later the BankAmericard was launched, which was the forerunner of the Visa card. However, the credit card took off quickly, and by the 1990s they were everywhere. Credit cards are fascinating. They aren’t money, merely a means of moving money form one place (a bank account, say) to another (a store from which you’ve made a purchase). The transactions can be immediate, or a promise, but, most important, they are a guarantee. The example used has one further element. The decoration in the centre of the card is there to provide evidence from HSBC Amanah, an Islamic banking wing of the company, that this card is compliant with Sharia law.
There are ninety-five other objects in this book, the background of each described in fascinating detail. Indeed, there’s far more on each of the five listed here than this brief overview conveys. It’s a contemporary testimony to history, which takes a variety of objects and reveals the complex links between each object and its context: there are technological, historical, social and ideological aspects, each itself part of a complicated story. Each item could have been chosen as the basis for a book, or even several books, and all MacGregor sets out to do is offer some hints as to what this particular object relates, a small but evocative part of a series of stories that begin before the object existed and which have repercussions right up to the present. My random selection of five items takes us towards warfare, domestic practices, religion, science and financial systems. The remaining 95 are just as rich and rewarding as the five I chose: if only history had been like this when I was at school.
There are two ways to respond to a book like this, or to be more accurate, two interesting ways to think about the many different reactions that have been documented as MacGregor’s book has been read and critiqued. The first comprises praise of the book as a way to open a window to history and to an appreciation of cultures and practices that extend beyond the range usually covered in a high school history course. The other is to seize on omissions and alternatives, and of course, since 2010 there have been several controversies, including some not about the selection of the pieces, but over the fact they were in the British Museum. The Museum’s ownership claims over some of the objects in its collection are highly contested, in particular in relation to the Benin Bronzes and the Elgin Marbles.
The British Museum appears to lag behind other institutions when it comes to returning looted items. It is constrained by the British Museum Act of 1963, which prevents it from permanently returning most objects (long loans are allowed). It is ultimately up to the UK Parliament to change the law. It’s not just law, of course. There are many arguments, including the view returning the objects doesn’t necessarily mean losing them altogether.
In relation to the Benin Bronzes, Barnaby Phillips, in his book Loot: Britain and the Benin Bronzes, has suggested sone Nigerians, “want ultimate ownership to be theirs, but they also want their culture to be displayed around the world – so they would be the ones sending them out on loans.” There have been discussions of the past three years over the fate of the Elgin Marbles (which are really friezes removed from the Parthenon in Athens). It seems some kind of compromise will be reached, perhaps not returning them all, or agreeing to create some kind of loan/swap arrangements in relation to other treasures.
If these are the two high profile artefacts, there are many other complications over the British Museum’s collection. In 2019 a response project sought instead to democratize curatorial narratives with input from source and diaspora communities who hold long-standing relationships with objects now held in museums, especially focussing on voices from the “Global South” that the original series had omitted, with an editorial board with members from India, Namibia, Thailand, Ghana, Nigeria, Torres Strait Islands, Aotearoa, Jamaica, USA, Mexico and the United Kingdom. Others have adopted the same approach.
In an additional ‘special programme’ broadcast on 25 December 2020, Neil MacGregor and a roundtable of guests, discussed adding a 101st object to represent how the world has changed in the past decade since the original series had been assembled. The eventual choice was the British Museum’s collection of ‘Dark Water, Burning World’ sculptures by Syrian-British artist Issam Kourbaj. They depict small, fragile boats filled with matchsticks – representing the plight of Syrian Civil War refugees in particular and migrants in general.
To me, these controversies and additions are testimony to the success of the original idea. No one book can do more than hint at the increasingly complex subject of ‘history’. Our choices are often influenced by school (what we learnt as young students), location (where we lived and what we saw) and the topics we have found to be intriguing (like science, in my case). A History of the World in 100 Objects achieves something particularly valuable: it helps remind the reader that there are so many ‘histories’ to be examined, and to offer some gentle nudging: if you found that item interesting, go to the library, the museum or the gallery and pursue it further. There’s more than enough to keep you busy for a lifetime.
