HistoryExtrahttps://www.historyextra.comHome of Britain’s bestselling history magazine and award-winning podcast2026-10-07T15:01:06.000Zhourly12000-01-01T12:00+00:00These are history's greatest unsung heroes. How many have you heard of?https://www.historyextra.com/membership/these-are-historys-greatest-unsung-heroes-how-many-have-you-heard-of/2026-10-07T15:00:22.000ZNordic women...

…or, more explicitly, all the women denied their place in history

Excuse the shouty capitals for a moment, but my answer is MOST WOMEN. Take, for example, the women of the early Nordic world, who spent so much of their lives making the cloth for the sails and clothing that would power the whole of the Viking Age. After all, if you’re trying to settle the islands of the North Atlantic and even reach the edge of North America, you can’t sail across an ocean without a sail. Or without tough waterproof clothing. Or, in fact, without any clothing at all.

Nor could your society have survived without the food that the women cooked, preserved and stored, the farmsteads they ran, the children they birthed and/or cared for, and so on.

But did the deeds and talents of these women make it into Old Norse poetry? Not unless they were being praised for their beauty. Are there any sagas named for their female protagonists? Not really: it’s the Saga of Erik the Red (even though he falls off a horse and drops out of the narrative after the first few chapters), not the Saga of Gudrid the Far-Traveller. Did the names of all of those influential Norse women echo down the ages, immortalised in chronicles and annals? I think we all know the answer to that.

Eleanor Barraclough, historian and author of Embers of the Hands (Profile, 2024)

Lady Mary Wortley Montagu

The Georgian socialite who transformed Britain’s fight against smallpox

Lady Mary Wortley Montagu is best known – if she is known at all – as a writer and socialite. She graced the most fashionable drawing rooms and assemblies that Georgian society had to offer. By the age of 16, she had taught herself Latin and written two volumes of poetry and a short novel. In 1712, she married Edward Wortley Montagu who became British ambassador to the Ottoman empire, and wrote extensively of her experiences as a woman in Constantinople (now Istanbul).

Her views were shockingly unconventional and way ahead of her time: “Turkish ladies don’t commit one sin the less for not being Christians,” she wrote in one letter. “’Tis very easy to see they have more liberty than we have.” She became a leading light of the so-called ‘Bluestockings’ who, often hailed as England’s earliest feminists, hosted salons to promote literature, conversation and female education.

But Lady Mary’s achievements went further still. Smallpox was one of the greatest scourges of the age, and had afflicted her own family. During her time in the Ottoman empire she encountered variolation – inoculation using material from a smallpox sufferer – and asked the British Embassy’s surgeon to inoculate her young son.

After returning home, in 1721 she had her daughter inoculated, too, and campaigned tirelessly to encourage others to do the same. Her efforts were met with bitter hostility, even physical violence, and dismissed as the fad of ignorant women. Undaunted, Lady Mary continued to pioneer inoculation, thereby saving countless lives across Britain and western Europe well before Edward Jenner introduced his more famous vaccination.

Tracy Borman, author, historian and broadcaster

• Read more | "An enlightened turn": how medicine (and the vaccination) developed in Victorian Britain

Pliny the Elder

The Roman encyclopaedist whose pursuit of knowledge ended in heroic sacrifice

Gaius Plinius Secundus, aka Pliny the Elder, is best known for his extraordinary dedication to the encyclopaedia known as the Natural History, composed of 37 books. Completing the work around AD 77, Pliny documented a vast range of topics, from plants and zoology to art and geography. Though his investigations are at times astoundingly accurate, his descriptions sometimes veer into wildly speculative ground, giving us a fascinating insight into the ancient Romans’ understanding of the natural world.

Yet this was not Pliny’s only achievement. He was also the praefectus classis (admiral) of the Roman navy stationed at Misenum on the Bay of Naples. In AD 79, on the day Vesuvius erupted, Pliny was at his villa across the bay. At first, he seems to have treated the phenomenon with curiosity rather than alarm. His nephew, Pliny the Younger, who was with him watching the events unfold, later records that he exercised, dined and bathed before receiving word that those nearer the volcano were in urgent need of help.

Pliny immediately ordered his fleet to set sail, both to assist those in danger and, characteristically, to observe the eruption at closer range, perhaps intending to record it.

He never returned. Most likely overcome by respiratory distress, he was found two days later on the shore, his body lying as though at rest. In more ways than one, Pliny gave himself not only to those he sought to rescue, but to those who came after him, preserving knowledge that has endured for nearly 2,000 years.

Jess Venner, ancient historian and author of The Lost Voices of Pompeii (Mudlark, 2026)

Megasthenes

The Greek ambassador who helped connect the ancient world

In the aftermath of Alexander the Great’s reign, his vast empire split into several parts, each ruled by one of his generals, who in turn made themselves head of a ruling dynasty. The Seleucid empire, established by the general Seleucus, governed a large part of what had been the Persian empire. And in the last years of the fourth century BC, Seleucus sent a formal ambassador from his court to the court of King Chandragupta Maurya, in Pataliputra (modern Patna), India.

The ambassador’s name was Megasthenes, a man rarely credited with establishing a permanent link between the Hellenistic world and the world of the Mauryan empire. And for me, he is the unsung hero from history. Megasthenes wrote a whole book, Indica, about his experiences of the Mauryan empire, the incredible nature of the king’s capital at Pataliputra, the wondrous geography of the Indian landscape, and of the comparative workings of Indian society and the king’s court. Indica also articulated a number of ways in which the worlds of Greece and India could have been connected in the mythical past, positioning an opportunity for dialogue and collaboration between the two.

His was the first word in the connections between cultures that would become essential to the functioning of the wider world, as routes for trade, people and ideas began to open up, not just between the Greek world and India, but also between India and central Asia and central Asia and ancient China, which would eventually become the Silk Roads. As such, Megasthenes became a first-hand witness to a new world of connection.

Michael Scott, professor in classics and ancient history at the University of Warwick

• Read more | Alexander the Great died aged just 32 – but where had he been planning to conquer next?

Antoine Simon

The enslaved man who crossed the Pyrenees in search of freedom

In 1446, a black man enslaved in Barcelona made an extraordinary escape across the Pyrenees: his name was Antoine Simon. Somehow he had heard that Pamiers, in the south-west of France, outlawed slavery and that he might live as a free man there. The punishment for escaped slaves was utterly brutal yet he took the courageous step of running away.

There is so much we don’t know: how did he navigate this dangerous terrain? What did he eat? How did he find shelter? One possibility is that he’d gathered information from merchants who came into contact with his enslaver’s household. Another is that freed black slaves offered advice to those who were not yet free. Historian Debra Blumenthal has uncovered evidence of a black confraternity in late medieval Valencia, which offered this kind of support.

When, against all the odds, Simon reached Pamiers his travails were not over. His former enslaver pursued him and took out a case against him – for theft of himself. This was heard in the court of Pamiers and it was gruelling. Simon was supported by a local notable called Pierre Toc, who had employed him on his arrival in Pamiers; the local count supported Simon’s former owner. The municipality, however, was clear: slavery had no place in the civilised society of Pamiers.

The more I delve into this story, the more I am struck by Antoine Simon’s extraordinary determination and courage, and by how that courage was sustained by the support he received.

Hannah Skoda, associate professor of medieval history at the University of Oxford

Sir Hugh Dowding

The uncharismatic genius who built Britain’s winning air-defence system

“The bomber will always get through.” This was Stanley Baldwin’s famous summary of what the future of air war looked like in the 1930s. But the head of RAF Fighter Command, Sir Hugh Dowding, refused to give in to such pessimism. It is largely down to this remarkable man that British air defences did not completely collapse during the Battle of Britain.

At first sight, Dowding was a stereotypical middle-class Scot: dour, stubborn, with a moustachioed stiff upper lip. His contemporaries made fun of his puritanical nature: his nickname was ‘Stuffy’. But when it came to air defence he was a true revolutionary.

In the late 1930s, it was Dowding who pushed through the development of the Spitfire, and who championed the rapid construction of radar stations all across southern and eastern England. He then created a whole system of aerial defence which rapidly channelled information about incoming German bombers through to fighter pilots via a network of central control rooms. His incredibly efficient system undoubtedly saved Britain in the darkest days of 1940.

Dowding’s fatal flaw was his lack of personal charisma. His rivals in the RAF included the fighter ace Douglas Bader and Trafford Leigh-Mallory, the hugely ambitious commander of 12 Fighter Group. These men criticised him incessantly and wanted to try an alternative system of defence – the ‘Big Wing’ strategy (which actually turned out to be far less efficient than Dowding’s system).

When the Germans switched to bombing by night, and Dowding struggled to answer this new threat, they finally succeeded in ousting ‘Stuffy’ from both his post and the public imagination. It was a painful lesson in the art of leadership: sometimes charm is more important than being brilliant at your job.

Keith Lowe, author of The Fear and the Freedom: How the Second World War Changed Us (Viking, 2017)

• Read more | Did the Spitfire really save Britain in WW2?

Isabelle Émilie de Tessier

The pioneering female cartoonist whose contribution was erased

I suspect that most readers won’t recognise the face of the cartoon character who appears on this page, but his bulbous nose, gangly frame and battered top hat were beloved by millions of Victorians. His name was Ally Sloper, and he is widely regarded as the first superstar of British comics. His misadventures were chronicled in one of the country’s bestselling papers, legions of loyal readers joined his fan club, and his face appeared on merchandise from doorstops to tobacco pipes.

However, Ally himself isn’t my choice for the great unsung hero of history. Instead, I want to champion the artist who made him such a success. Sloper was technically invented by Charles Ross, editor of the satirical magazine Judy, a rival to the better-known Punch. But Ross was a clumsy artist, and the true creative force behind Ally Sloper was his wife. Isabelle Émilie de Tessier, who worked under the penname Marie Duval, was an actress-turned-artist. Her work had a loose, surrealist and occasionally grotesque quality that perfectly suited the slapstick adventures of Sloper and his pals. By the mid-1870s, Duval was contributing more than a hundred new cartoons to Judy each year. It was her humour and talent that made Sloper such a star.

Ross was quick to credit his wife but, in the decades after their deaths, her contribution was gradually erased. Accounts of Sloper’s origins relegated her to a mere ‘assistant’ or ‘helper’, and her true contribution only came to light fairly recently. It’s a familiar story. Duval stands for all the brilliant Victorian women whose pioneering work was credited to their husbands.

Bob Nicholson, writer, broadcaster and historian at Edge Hill University

Ida B Wells

The activist who challenged segregation and fought lynching

Some people have heard of journalist and NAACP co-founder Ida B Wells, but her badassery still outmatches her level of fame. Born enslaved in 1862, Wells started battling injustice in the US while still only a young woman. In 1884, she successfully sued a railway company after a conductor dragged her from the train for refusing to trade her ticketed seat for the Jim Crow car.

That was not the only time she bodily defied segregation: in the 1913 national women’s suffrage parade, Wells rejected orders for black women to walk at the back. Instead, she waited in the crowd until she could slip into the parade and join the white women of her state’s delegation.

The fight against lynching was the defining endeavour of Wells’s life. Defenders of the gruesome practice claimed that it was merely a response to black crime. Wells knew better – especially after a number of black men in Tennessee were killed by white storeowners. She combated misinformation with data, revealing through statistics that lynchings arose most often from economic rivalries and political terror. She published horrifying accounts in exposés such as A Red Record and launched an international campaign, lecturing in Great Britain about American ‘barbarism’ and spurring the founding of the London Anti-Lynching Committee.

For decades, Wells waged war with facts and pen, even as she founded numerous organisations for women’s and civil rights. A “sword among lions”, as historian Paula Giddings dubbed her, Wells spent her life causing what later activists would call “good trouble”.

Adriane Lentz-Smith, associate professor of history at Duke University

This article was first published in the October 2026 issue of HistoryExtra Magazine

]]>She was hunted by the FBI and transformed British culture – so why haven't you heard of this black activist?https://www.historyextra.com/membership/she-was-hunted-by-the-fbi-and-transformed-british-culture-so-why-havent-you-heard-of-this-black-activist/2026-09-01T13:00:20.000ZAt the end of August 1958, the streets of Notting Hill in west London became an acrid, smoke-fogged battleground. For months tensions had been building between the white population and migrants from the Caribbean. That evening, hundred-strong white mobs armed with improvised weapons – cudgels, iron bars, butchers’ knives and leather belts studded with nuts and bolts – marched through the streets, chanting: “Keep Britain white!” PC Richard Bedford, on duty that night, recalled hearing shouts of: “We will kill all black bastards!”

The violence, which was indiscriminate and shocking, continued until 5 September. Terrified residents of colour barricaded themselves in their homes as milk bottles and rocks were hurled at their doors, and young black men similarly armed themselves with makeshift weapons.

After those turbulent days of rioting, 108 people were charged, 72 of them white and 36 described as “coloured”. Even after the violence petered out, residents of colour reported a lingering sense of racial hatred and prejudice – “an atmosphere you could slice like a knife”.

Voice of a community

Five months before the Notting Hill race riots, Trinidad-born journalist Claudia Jones had launched a publication for her community in London. “There are at least 80,000 good reasons why we believe a West Indian newspaper is necessary,” she proclaimed in her first editorial for the West Indian Gazette and Afro-Asian Caribbean News in March 1958. “They are the 80,000 West Indians now resident here… we form a community with its own wants and problems.”

A decade earlier, the ‘open-door’ policy of the 1948 British Nationality Act had augured the arrival of HMT Empire Windrush and a wave of migration from Britain’s Caribbean colonies. As numbers arriving from the West Indies grew, the rhetoric turned hostile: some of the media described a flood of migrants living in slum housing, spreading disease and undercutting wages. The situation was exploited by Oswald Mosley’s far-right Union Movement, which agitated in areas such as Notting Hill where Caribbean communities were established.

In this fractious atmosphere, Jones’s Gazette spoke out. “People without a voice were lambs to the slaughter,” Jones declared following the riots. Inevitably, it attracted foes. The Daily Worker’s front page of 28 August 1958 carried a report that the Ku Klux Klan of Britain had trashed the Gazette’s offices, smashing equipment and daubing graffiti on walls. That month, racist correspondence sent to the Gazette by the KKK addressed the editor as “Mr B. Ape”, and far-right movements targeted the paper.

• Read more | The forgotten history of Windrush

Jones wasn’t deterred, having already worked for many years to improve conditions and rights for black people in the US. Born in Port of Spain on 21 February 1915, she’d moved to the US in 1924 with her parents, emigrating in search of the American dream. This “dream was soon disabused”, recalled Jones: the family were forced to reside in overcrowded and unsanitary living conditions, and her mother died of spinal meningitis when the young Claudia was only 13. She stated in a later speech that, whenever injustice came to mind, “I would think of my mother”.

At the age of 21, Jones joined the Communist Party USA, impressed by its commitment to the rights of workers, women and people of colour. A distinguished career in US newspapers followed. Friends recalled her electrifying presence and flair for poetry. “She could command a rapt audience,” recalled one who had seen her speak at New York’s Madison Square Garden.

Jones’s charisma and star quality made her a target for J Edgar Hoover during the Cold War ‘Red Scare’. Having already served time in prison, and been threatened with deportation, in 1955 she began a year-long sentence at Alderson Women’s Penitentiary in West Virginia. After her release later that year, the 40-year-old Jones found herself on a ship sailing to the UK – a country where she had few friends or family.

• Read more | Are black histories still being overlooked?

Through party contacts, Jones managed to find rented accommodation in London, but poverty bedevilled her time in the capital. The damp, smoggy climate exacerbated her health conditions; she had never fully recovered from tuberculosis contracted as a child, and she’d also been diagnosed with hypertensive cardio-vascular disease.

In London, she became active in the many labour organisations supporting the expanding Caribbean community. A newspaper was mooted, and Jones, with her distinguished career in black American newspapers, was chosen as launch editor. This humble “one-leaf flyer”, as she initially described it, evolved to became a monthly paper with a substantial newsstand presence, and the likes of Malcolm X, WEB Du Bois and Norman Manley, the first premier of Jamaica, graced its offices above Theo’s Record Store in Brixton.

Those offices were also the first port of call for many people who faced racial discrimination, and Jones mobilised her contacts in local government, social services and the police to help them. “What they needed was a godmother,” recalled Gazette reporter Donald Hinds. “That was the role Claudia Jones played best.” Within its tabloid-format pages, the Gazette – cover price sixpence – carried news and analysis, arts reviews and sport, with a focus on the black community. It was run by a team of volunteers: Hinds also worked as a full-time bus conductor, while Jones’s sometime partner Abhimanyu Manchanda (‘Manu’) was managing editor and dealt with advertising, and Theo Campbell, who ran the record store below the offices, contributed the sports section.

The paper thrived in the months following the riots, its circulation reaching 30,000 during the winter of 1958. “As we went into 1959, politicians from what was referred to as the British Caribbean were seen going up those stairs to talk to Claudia,” said Hinds. “The British media also sought Claudia’s opinions… [she] was the one with the finger on the pulse of British society.”

The Gazette served as an information repository for the black world at a critical juncture, following closely the horrors of South Africa’s apartheid regime and keeping readers abreast of decolonisation movements. “I don’t think I really grasped the true fact that I was in the presence of history,” Hinds said later.

• Read more | Hakim Adi | “Racism in Britain has a long history – but so does anti-racism”

Restoring pride

Jones’s greatest legacy was the establishment of Carnival in the UK, restoring the pride in West Indian culture that had been battered by the events of August 1958 when “everyone wanted to run away and leave”, as Jones’s friend Pearl Connor said.

In November 1958, the Gazette established a Caribbean Carnival committee, and the first event was held in London’s St Pancras Town Hall on 30 January 1959. Timed to coincide with the festivities in Trinidad, it was televised by the BBC and featured ‘mas’ (short for ‘masquerade’) bands and artists such as jazz singer Cleo Laine and calypsonian Mighty Terror. A huge success, it became an annual event sponsored by the Gazette.

The Gazette, though, was unable to turn a profit. Circulation flatlined by late 1959, and advertisers often paid late. “Looking back, it seems preposterous that the only coherent voice from the black community in Britain was a monthly paper that was so strapped for cash, it often could not find the £100 to pay the printers,” noted Hinds.

Though the stress affected Jones’s health, she refused to slow down. Then, on Christmas Eve 1964, she suffered a fatal heart attack at the age of just 49. “When Claudia died, a great hole was ripped in the fabric of our society,” said Hinds. “The black community was widowed.”

Grief-stricken after Jones’s death, Manu couldn’t continue with the Gazette, and the April–May 1965 issue was its last. By then, it had proved to be a rich incubator of talent. Civil rights, black power and decolonisation movements gained traction, and Gazette writers were among the founders of the influential Caribbean Artists Movement. Even today, the revolutionary spirit Jones kindled in the offices above a Brixton record store continues to inspire an extraordinary and enduring legacy.

Yvonne Singh is the author of INK! From the Age of Empire to Black Power, the Journalists who Transformed Britain (The History Press, 2025)

This article was first published in the September 2026 issue of HistoryExtra Magazine

]]>I was so inspired by Harriet Jacobs that I wrote a song about her: Corinne Bailey Rae on her history herohttps://www.historyextra.com/membership/i-was-so-inspired-by-harriet-jacobs-that-i-wrote-a-song-about-her-corinne-bailey-rae-on-her-history-hero/2026-08-14T15:00:44.000ZIn profile

Harriet Jacobs was an African-American abolitionist who was best known for her memoir, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861), originally published under a pseudonym. Forced to go into hiding after being sexually harassed when she was enslaved, she fled North Carolina for the ‘free North’ and founded two schools for other escapees from the South. A mother-of-two, she died aged around 84.

When did you first hear about Jacobs?

When I was 14 my aunt sent me an anthology of Afro-American classics, one of which was written by Harriet – it really struck a chord with me.

What kind of woman was she?

Harriet was born into slavery in Edenton, North Carolina. When her original owner died, she was bequeathed to the woman’s three-year-old niece, Mary Matilda Norcom. However, Mary’s physician father, Dr James Norcom, became her de facto owner and she constantly had to fight off his sexual advances. I’m sure many women in her shoes would have felt their situation was hopeless. But she went on to have children of her own with another white man, who later became a politician, out of wedlock. She was a determined woman, with a powerful sense of right and wrong, and ultimately managed to become a free woman.

• Read more | I visited one of America's "most haunted" historical sites. What I found there astonished me

What made Jacobs a hero?

Her refusal to succumb to Norcom’s vile sexual advances. When this ogre threatened to sell her children into slavery unless she bent to his will, she fled and spent the next seven years hiding in a 3ft-high garret under a storeroom roof adjacent to her grandmother’s house. She arranged for her children to live with their great-grandmother, but could only glimpse them through a crack in the roof of her garret ‘prison’. It was only after escaping to the north in 1842, with the help of anti-slavery activists, that she was reunited with her children.

She experienced so much tragedy in her life. For instance, she fell in love with a free black man who wanted to buy her freedom and marry her, but Norcom forbade her continuing the relationship.

What was Jacobs’ finest hour?

First, showing such strength, bravery and self-belief while being cooped up in this ‘crawl space’ for all those years – being unable to exercise for so long left her with health problems and afterwards she walked with a limp. I was so moved by her plight that I visited Edenton and wrote a song, ‘Peach Velvet Sky’, about her. Second, writing her powerful memoir – she learned to read and write as a child but kept it secret.

• Read more | Robert Wedderburn: the ‘notorious firebrand’ who campaigned against slavery

Is there anything that you don’t particularly admire about her?

No. I think she was a wholly admirable woman!

Can you see any parallels between Jacobs’ life and your own?

Her story helped give me an insight into the lives of the ancestors on my father’s side. They were also enslaved people, most likely working on sugar plantations in St Kitts.

What would you ask Jacobs if you could meet her?

I’d like to know what being denied the chance to marry the free African-American man she loved did to her as a person, and how she survived being separated from her children for so long.

Corinne Bailey Rae is a British singer-songwriter. She topped the charts with her self-titled debut album, which she will be performing at the Royal Albert Hall on 27 October. Her first children’s book, Put Your Records On, is out now

This article was first published in the August 2026 issue of HistoryExtra Magazine

]]>Frederick Douglass changed America forever. Here's howhttps://www.historyextra.com/membership/frederick-douglass-changed-america-forever-heres-how/2026-05-27T15:30:14.000ZEvery 4 July since 1897, The New York Times publishes the Declaration of Independence in full. This year will be the 250th anniversary of when 13 American colonies formally declared their severance from Great Britain. The Declaration asserted they were free and independent states, no longer subject to British rule. It began: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.” (If you know the musical Hamilton, it’s hard to say these words without singing.)

Yet we know that at the time this text was written, all men were not created equal. The Declaration of Independence goes on to say there were “certain unalienable Rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness”. But for around one fifth of the American population, who were enslaved, these lofty words were meaningless.

President Thomas Jefferson, who himself was a slave-owner in his lifetime, had included a clause condemning slavery in an initial draft. But that was excluded after other states, particularly the southern states of Georgia and South Carolina who wished to continue
the practice, agreed it should be omitted.

• Read more | A “desperate leap for liberty”: how Ellen and William Craft made a daring escape from slavery

More than 40 years after the Declaration of Independence, Frederick Douglass was born into slavery on a plantation on the Eastern Shore of the Chesapeake Bay in Maryland. He taught himself to read and write from a young age and, when he was 20, in 1838, he disguised himself as a sailor and managed to escape. He became part of the abolitionist movement in Massachusetts and New York, gaining fame for his oratory and writings. He also supported female suffrage.

He wrote his autobiography to much acclaim in 1845, but to avoid recapture by his slave-owner he took a boat to Liverpool and spent two years touring around England, Ireland, Scotland and Wales. The slave trade had been abolished in Britain in 1807 and in the colonies in 1833. Douglass gave speeches in churches and chapels to huge crowds making the case for abolition in America. He remarked that in Ireland he felt that he was not treated “as a colour but as a man”. During this trip he became legally free, as British supporters raised funds to buy his freedom from his American owner. The price was $711.66.

He returned to the United States in 1847 as a free man, able to be with his family and with funds to start a newspaper and continue the fight for abolition. On 5 July 1852 in New York he delivered one of his most memorable speeches, at a meeting organised by the Rochester Ladies’ Anti-Slavery Society. Entitled “What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?”, it’s an extraordinarily powerful oration:

“What, to the American slave, is your fourth of July? I answer: a day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim. To him, your celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty, an unholy license; your national greatness, swelling vanity; your sounds of rejoicing are empty and heartless; your denunciations of tyrants, brass fronted impudence; your shouts of liberty and equality, hollow mockery; your prayers and hymns, your sermons and thanksgivings, with all your religious parade, and solemnity, are, to him, mere bombast, fraud, deception, impiety, and hypocrisy – a thin veil to cover up crimes which would disgrace a nation of savages.”

• Read more | Your guide to the 1776 American Declaration of Independence

Frederick Douglass is regarded as the most important leader of the movement for African-American rights in the 19th century. In 1899, not long after he died, a statue (the first of many) of him was unveiled in Rochester, New York. In fact, he was the first African-American to be memorialised with a statue in America.

This remarkable man born into enslavement rose to the upper echelons of American society, meeting with President Abraham Lincoln and campaigning for social justice for all. Today he is renowned across America for demanding an end to slavery and his determination to uphold the declaration that all men are created equal.

This article was first published in the May 2026 issue of HistoryExtra Magazine

]]>Blood and plunder: the looted African gold – and the fight to get it backhttps://www.historyextra.com/membership/blood-and-plunder-the-looted-african-gold-and-the-fight-to-get-it-back/2026-04-24T14:30:43.000ZIn a poorly lit cabinet in the Oriental Armoury of London’s Wallace Collection, there is a near-life size gold cast head, weighing nearly 1.5kg. It is perhaps the largest gold object to have come from Africa outside of ancient Egypt. When this head arrived in England in 1874, part of the haul of treasure brought back by Sir Garnet Wolseley’s army from the kingdom of Asante in west Africa, it attracted widespread comment, not all favourable. The Times said: it “seems to represent the head of a victim gagged for sacrifice”, and pronounced it “ghastly”. The Illustrated London News said it was “hideous and horrible”. But Richard Wallace, the wealthy aristocrat whose collection was later bequeathed to the nation, may have disagreed, because he paid £500 for it (about £62,000 today). In 1974, William Fagg, a curator at the British Museum, said the ‘Wallace Head’ was “a masterpiece… a technically excellent piece of lost-wax craftsmanship” that impacted like “a bomb” on the complacent artistic sensibilities of Victorian London.

What was the African civilisation that had produced this golden head? And how did it, and other Asante pieces, end up in British museums and private collections? The Asante kingdom traces its origins to the late 17th century, when smaller kingdoms inland in the Gold Coast (modern-day Ghana) amalgamated under the control of a ruler based in the emerging city of Kumasi.

Europeans were familiar with the Gold Coast, having traded there for gold, as the name suggests, but also enslaved people, ever since the 15th century. In the 18th century, Asante profited handsomely through both these trades, typically selling gold and human captives through Fante middlemen to the British, Portuguese, Dutch and other Europeans in their castles on the coast. But it wasn’t until 1817 that a British delegation travelled some 125 miles inland to Kumasi, and paid its respects to the Asante king, known as the Asantehene. One of the envoys, a young man from Bristol called Thomas Bowdich, wrote that Kumasi was a wealthy city with elegant architecture and sophisticated public hygiene. The Asantehene and his courtiers, he wrote, wore “massy gold ornaments, which glistened in every direction”.

Bowdich’s descriptions caused incredulity and excitement in Britain. But his delegation failed to build a lasting friendship with Asante. By the early 19th century, Britain, hitherto an enthusiastic slave trading nation, had embraced abolitionism. The Asantehene, Osei Bonsu, worried about this threat to his wealth, and asked Bowdich whether the British king could “renew the slave trade, which will be good for me”.

Over the following 50 years, as Britain tightened its control of the Gold Coast at the expense of European rivals, and as Asante maintained supremacy of the interior, there were sporadic tensions – notably in 1824 when a British invasion of Asante ended in defeat and the death and decapitation of the commanding officer, Sir Charles MacCarthy – but also decades of uneasy Anglo-Asante coexistence. This all changed in 1871, when Britain purchased Elmina, the largest trading castle on the coast, from the Dutch, despite Asante insistence it belonged to them. In January 1873, an Asante army swept south and invaded the British coastal protectorate, to the surprise of William Gladstone’s government in London.

In May 1873, Earl Kimberley, the colonial secretary, said that any attempt to conquer Asante would be “mad”. But the ambitious officer appointed to lead the British response, Sir Garnet Wolseley, had other ideas. Wolseley, just 40 but already a veteran of wars in Burma, Crimea, India, China and Canada, was determined the British would march to Kumasi. If the Asantehene, Kofi Karikari, would not make peace, he would “destroy his palaces, burn his capital, and lay waste his country as well as I could”. While politicians prevaricated, Wolseley shaped events on the ground. By January 1874, he was leading three battalions of British soldiers, plus many African allies and carriers, into the Asante forest.

• Read more | Politics and the Bayeux Tapestry: the inside story of the blockbuster loan to the British Museum

The Asante army – armed with muskets – fought bravely, but was outgunned by the British, equipped with new Snider rifles. At the battle of Amoafo, many hundreds or even thousands of Asante soldiers, but only four British, were killed. One British sailor wrote that it was “murder, not a fair fight”. On 4 February, the British entered Kumasi, only to find that Karikari had fled. Wolseley, concerned about disease and encroaching rains, decided not to linger. Instead, he would leave the Asante with “a wholesome fear of the British power”. He ordered his soldiers to take treasure from the unguarded palace, and then blow it up, and to set fire to Kumasi to ensure “its total destruction”. Then he abandoned the burning city.

Wolseley wrote that Karikari was “a brutal and deceitful monarch”. The British sense of racial superiority – Wolseley wrote that black people were suited only for slavery – had been reinforced by the apparent discovery in Kumasi of evidence of mass human sacrifice by the Asante.

Gold is always pretty

On 13 February, the Asantehene’s envoys caught up with Wolseley on his march back to the coast, and agreed to a humiliating surrender. They handed over 1,000 ounces of gold objects, a tiny fraction of the 50,000-ounce “indemnity” demanded by Wolseley, but which included a significant part of the Asantehene’s regalia, essential to his political and spiritual authority. A history of Asante, written by one of Karikari’s successors, laments that the British were so impatient “that it was not even possible to call any of the provincial chiefs into Kumasi to contribute what they could. So King Kofi Karikari was obliged to bear the brunt of this payment alone.”

Wolseley, who had already witnessed notorious plunders by British soldiers of palaces in India and China, drew a distinction between disorganised looting, which undermined military discipline and was therefore undesirable, and the acceptable collection of ‘prize’, to be auctioned off with the income shared among the troops. In accordance with this philosophy, when the British reached their headquarters at Cape Coast they held an auction of treasure from the Asantehene’s palace. The Daily Telegraph wrote: “The long centre table was covered as thickly as it could bear with jewellery and gold. The prize agent… had shown considerable taste in the arrangements of their stores… and gold is always pretty.” The auction was enthusiastically attended by many of the Cape Coast elite, delighted by the defeat of the feared Asante.

Many of the most valuable items, however, were sold in London in the spring of 1874 at Garrard, the crown jewellers in the West End, which had paid £11,000 (about £1.4m today) for the collection. Wolseley returned to Britain a hero – cheered by crowds, feted by Queen Victoria and the new prime minister, Benjamin Disraeli, parodied on stage as ‘The Very Model of a Modern Major General’ – and so the sale of “the golden spoil from Ashantee” attracted considerable excitement. Queen Victoria took some pieces of treasure – presented to her by the soldiers – and this added to its prestige.

For most of the aristocrats and others who crowded Garrard’s rooms, Asante objects were exotic souvenirs of a British victory, “treasured… as memorials of the recent struggle”, as The Times put it. William Cecil, the Marquess of Exeter, for example, bought two gold badges and mounted them on gilt-silver trays with his family crest and an inscription. In this way, what had been sacred objects in Asante – the badges, known as akrafokonmu, were worn by officials responsible for the purification of the Asantehene’s soul – became trophies. (One of Cecil’s mounted badges was bought by the British Museum in the 1970s, after passing through various wealthy owners).

Hints of humility

Amid the general triumphalism, there were some doubts. The Welsh nonconformist MP Henry Richard observed that “scarcely any Englishman could look back with pride” on what happened in Asante and other recent campaigns in Asia and Africa. “Those were not triumphs of Christian civilisation but of barbarism and brute force.”

Newspaper reviews of the Garrard sale also contain hints of humility. Asante, and Africa more generally, was perceived in Britain as a place without culture. And yet, The Times wrote, the gold badges were “wonderful… it would be difficult for any skilled goldsmith in western Europe not so much to surpass, but even to equal them”.

• Read more | The history of Africa: why we need to look much deeper than slavery and colonisation

Inevitably, Britain’s museums took an interest. It was the South Kensington Museum (today the V&A) that reacted first. The keeper of its Art Library, Robert Soden Smith, recognised Asante goldwork as “the most striking illustration… of the art of an ancient race hitherto imperfectly known to us”, and bought an elegant gold pipe, several badges and pieces of decorated sheet gold.

The British Museum curator, Augustus Wollaston Franks, bought 10 objects initially, but grumbled that “some of the more dramatic specimens have been secured by private individuals”. He was probably thinking of Richard Wallace, who bought not only the gold head but also 15 other Asante objects, including swords and a pair of cast eagles, for a total of £1,256 (about £155,000 today), making him the largest purchaser. His biographer Suzanne Higgott says that Wallace craved recognition, and the Asante objects, “exceptional, high status and intriguingly ‘Oriental’”, therefore had obvious appeal. All of Wallace’s Asante purchases are still in the Wallace Collection today.

The British Museum was able to enlarge its collection of Asante gold regalia over subsequent decades. This was in part because the British government gradually released more pieces which had been taken by Wolseley’s soldiers, but also because in 1896 another British army ransacked the rebuilt palace in Kumasi, and again carried off as much treasure as it could find. Today the British Museum has about 550 objects taken in the Anglo-Asante wars, of which some 220 are made of gold.

Some of the most important pieces of Asante loot, however, remain in private hands or are otherwise hidden from public view. The Royal Artillery officer’s mess, in Larkhill near Salisbury, has an exquisite golden ram’s-head mask – 19cm in width and weighing 1.2kg – which William Fagg described as “a marvel of ethereal eggshell thin-lightness…among the most striking examples of west African metallurgy”.

It was taken from the Asantehene’s palace by officers who were close to Sir Garnet Wolseley. Rather than being auctioned off, he allowed them to buy it directly for £135 (about £17,000 today). When the officers returned to England, newspapers reported they had “the best trophy… very valuable”. In 1875, the Royal Artillery sealed the ram’s head in a glass dome and mounted it on a stand which is carried on the backs of three bowed African figures, dressed in loincloths. Once again, Asante regalia was transformed into a British military souvenir. Today the ram’s head is only accessible to officers and their invited guests. The Royal Artillery declined my requests to see it.

Decades of campaigning

The Asante people still refer to the 1874 war as ‘the Sagrenti War’, from the local pronunciation of ‘Sir Garnet’. It was a seminal moment in their kingdom’s decline. By the 1880s, according to their own histories, “Kumasi was losing its power and… falling into a ruinous state”. In 1901 the British formally annexed Asante territory. They sent the then Asantehene, Agyeman Prempeh, into exile on the Seychelles Islands in the Indian Ocean, where he spent more than two decades.

• Read more | Who should decide the stories museums tell?

In 1957 the Gold Coast became the independent nation of Ghana, but the Asante people still revere their king and retain a strong attachment to their traditions. They have campaigned for decades for the return of the regalia. In 1974 the Asantehene, Opoku Ware II, wrote that the centenary of Wolseley’s expedition marked an “auspicious occasion on which to press for the return of objects of the deepest significance” to the Asante. This set off a flurry of diplomacy. Some British diplomats argued in favour of returning regalia, and the British Museum’s director, John Pope-Hennessey, told his trustees “there is widely conceded to be some moral weight behind the Asantehene’s request”. But the negotiations floundered, in part because even British officials who favoured flexibility could see no way round the 1963 British Museum Act, which makes it almost impossible for that institution to permanently return, or ‘deaccession’, items in its collection.

In 2023 the current Asantehene, Osei Tutu II, raised the matter again, when he visited London to attend the coronation of his friend, Charles III. This time, his appeal fell on fertile ground. Museums in the west were under pressure to address the legacies of the colonial period and, in particular, to return objects taken by force. In 2024 the British Museum and the V&A (also constrained by national legislation from making permanent returns) announced they would return on long-term loan (for probably six or nine years) 32 pieces of Asante regalia. The Fowler Museum in Los Angeles announced that it was permanently returning seven objects looted by Wolseley’s army.

In response to these developments, Ivor Agyeman-Duah, the director of the Asantehene’s museum in Kumasi, said: “We want to get back as many objects as is humanly possible… We just want people to see what our civilisation was, and how it can inspire the present.” How many treasures the Asante people do get back – and for how long they get to keep them – is bound to remain the subject of intense debate for years.

“What we have here embodies the soul of Asante”

The return of 32 pieces of gold regalia in 2024 sparked joy – and anger – among the Asante people, writes Barnaby Phillips

On 1 May 2024, I waited in the sweltering heat outside the Manhyia Palace Museum, in Kumasi, Ghana, alongside local chiefs, foreign diplomats and museum officials. The banners on the museum’s walls proclaimed: “Homecoming; Adversity and Commemoration”. This was the ceremony to mark the return of 32 pieces of Asante gold regalia – among them, sacred badges, a helmet, a ceremonial sword and bracelets – that had been looted by British soldiers in 1874 and 1896.  The Asantehene, Osei Tutu II, dressed in green robes and a golden headdress, arrived to the shouts of praise singers and the beating of drums, protected from the sun by a huge tasselled umbrella carried by his entourage. The director of the V&A, Tristram Hunt, bowed low before the Asantehene and addressed the crowd: “We acknowledge the very painful history surrounding the acquisition of these objects, a history tainted by the scars of imperial conquest and colonialism.” It would have been difficult to imagine the director of a major British museum using these words anywhere, let alone in this context, just a few years ago.  The Asantehene, for his part, said the British had returned a small part of what they had taken. “But what we have here embodies the soul of Asante. Today is a happy day for Asante, for the black African continent.” People cheered and filed excitedly into the museum, where they admired the glittering gold treasure, beautifully displayed on green cloth in glass display cases. Not everybody in Ghana felt so positive. Many were upset that the British were only returning objects on loan. Nii Kwate Owoo, a Ghanaian filmmaker who attended the ‘Homecoming’ ceremony, told me: “It turns my stomach, to be quite frank. An armed robber comes into your house, mows down your family and grabs your valuables, and comes back later and says: ‘Okay, you’re making noises, I’ll give this back as a loan!’”  Inside the museum, I encountered more nuanced reactions. A museum guide, Sammy Amoah, said the return of the regalia was “important because it confirms history. That what we’ve been taught in books about our own past is true.”

Barnaby Phillips is a historian and conservationist. His new book, The African Kingdom of Gold: Britain and the Asante Treasure, was published by Oneworld in March

This article was first published in the April 2026 issue of HistoryExtra Magazine

]]>“It was the greatest act of violence for 66 million years”: why the modern world was born of bloodshedhttps://www.historyextra.com/membership/it-was-the-greatest-act-of-violence-for-66-million-years-why-the-modern-world-was-born-of-bloodshed/2026-02-25T15:30:07.000ZImagine you’re in Nebraska, standing on North America’s Great Plains, where the broad Platte and Missouri rivers join on their way to the mighty Mississippi. It’s 1804, and in the blistering 36°C heat of summer you’re accompanying Captain Meriwether Lewis and Second Lieutenant William Clark as they head west towards the Pacific Ocean, exploring the commercial possibilities of this vast new country. Stretching away in front of you is a sea of chocolate-brown: thousands of animals, each standing as high as a man and weighing upwards of 900kg.

Now picture putrefying carcasses and heaps of bleached bones extending as far as the eye can see. “The bones were everywhere,” homesteaders complained, “as thick as cones under a big fir tree”, and so numerous that it was impossible to plough the land. That was mere decades after Lewis and Clark’s fabled expedition.

By the end of the 19th century, America’s population of bison had been reduced from tens of millions to around 350. Much of this killing unfolded over the course of just a few years – one of the most concentrated acts of ecological destruction in history.

The usual explanation for the slaughter of the American bison ties it to the government’s decision to solve its ‘Indian problem’ – kill the bison and you destroy the Indigenous peoples’ food supply. “Every buffalo dead is an Indian gone,” wrote Colonel Richard Irving Dodge, who had fought in the Civil War before heading west to subdue the Native American population. But politics didn’t kill the bison. Economics did.

General Philip Sheridan, another Civil War veteran who led the Indian Campaign across the Great Plains, knew as much. These hunters “have done more in the last two years… to settle the vexed Indian question than the entire regular army has done in the last 30 years”, he said. “Send them powder and lead, let them kill, skin and sell until the buffaloes are exterminated.”

A combination of guns, finance and industry made the near extinction of the bison possible. New advances in firearms made the act of slaughtering bison faster and achievable from a far greater distance. Banks rushed across the Mississippi, lending money to hunters and turning them into “businessmen with rifles”. Advances in chemistry transformed the animals’ body parts into saleable commodities, especially their notoriously difficult-to-process hides.

Many of these hides ended up in factories – somewhere between 2 and 6 million in England in the 1870s and 1880s alone. Skins became drive belts that were integral to the machinery of mass production in the industrial revolution. Until the advent of rubber, industrial belting was made from hides, including those of the American bison. Meanwhile, American settlers gathered millions of tonnes of bison bones. Railway companies laid down branch lines for the sole purpose of collecting the bones and shipping them east, where they were processed in places such as the Michigan Carbon Works in Detroit – that state’s largest factory before the automobile revolution. Bones were turned into fertiliser, carbon filters and inks. For a time, bison bone could be found in ‘fine bone’ china and even in mascara. Back on the Great Plains, wealth accrued by killing and bone harvesting supported the rise of farming and ranching.

• Read more | These three unsuspecting inventions won the American Wild West – but did they destroy it too?

What unfolded on the killing fields of the US was part of a global phenomenon. Industrial capitalism’s ‘big bang’ and our current age of global warming emerged out of the greatest act of violence the planet had seen since the Cretaceous–Paleogene extinction event 66 million years ago, when a meteor crashed into the Yucatán, killing off the dinosaurs and enabling the rise of mammals.

The development of modern finance and the mass production of guns, bullets and gunpowder made killing for capitalism possible. This also helps explain the rapid rise to global economic dominance of the UK and the US: two countries that were adept at extracting wealth from destruction. By the first decade of the 19th century, the US’s GDP per capita was on a par with the UK’s. The economic historians Peter Lindert and Jeffrey Williamson have written that the US became “one of the first, if not the first, [countries] to join the modern economic growth club” pioneered by the UK. The two would soon account for a large percentage of global wealth and until 1900 were responsible for most global industrial CO₂ emissions.

Firearms have a long history – almost 1,000 years – but in the 18th century the flintlock musket became the ubiquitous weapon of choice. A dramatic improvement on earlier guns that used matchlocks, it was versatile and cheap to produce – the Ford Fiesta of firearms. An experienced marksman could get off three shots in a minute. Workshops and factories across the western world scrambled to meet the insatiable global demand for the new weapon. England became the world leader in musket manufacture and distribution, beginning in London’s East End before spreading to Birmingham and Liverpool.

Muskets were useless without gunpowder and lead, and England had plentiful supplies of the latter. Mines in Northumberland and Derbyshire yielded thousands of tonnes of the metal each year. When it came to gunpowder, the British East India Company’s exploitation of the subcontinent’s resources proved vital, especially the principal chemical, saltpetre. The monopolistic East India Company considered its control over the saltpetre trade to be “combined and interwoven with the welfare and even with the existence of the empire in India”.

Thanks to the research of Dr Nicholas Radburn at Lancaster University, we have quite precise figures for the millions of pounds of saltpetre imported into the UK, and the overall production of British gunpowder, across the entire 18th century. Between 1698 and 1808, Britain produced more than 522 million pounds of gunpowder. Much went to its military, especially the navy, where a single shot from a 16-pound cannon used 8 pounds of powder. But more than 78 million pounds were exported to Africa, the Caribbean and what would become the United States and Canada. These are just the official numbers, though; the real totals are probably higher. In any case, that was enough powder for more than 1.25 billion musket shots – a number greater than the entire global population in 1750.

Other nations got in on the action, too, especially the French and the Dutch. Americans weren’t far behind, and by the 1820s US-made weapons were being sold far and wide, especially across the Pacific Ocean and into China, where American Colt pistols were used in the 1850–64 Taiping Rebellion – one of the most catastrophic wars in human history.

Plying the world with weapons was a volatile business – literally. Stores of gunpowder and saltpetre frequently exploded. The 1794 Ratcliffe Fire in London, sparked when a barge loaded with saltpetre caught fire, was the worst conflagration in the capital since 1666. It was described by The Times as “a striking and awful spectacle” – devastation on a scale not matched in London until the Blitz of 1940–41. On the other side of the Atlantic, throughout the 19th century there were almost yearly accidents at the huge DuPont explosives factory in Delaware, where a local cemetery was filled with the victims.

Murder and pillage are nothing new. In fact, both are as old as our species. However, with the widespread proliferation of weapons in the 18th century, killing became infinitely easier.

• Read more | Did Aztec civilisation really ‘collapse’? The reality isn’t as simple as you might think

This is where modern finance enters the picture. In the 15th and 16th centuries, the Spanish were outstanding at pillaging, producing men such as Hernán Cortés who rampaged across Mexico. The Conquistadors ransacked from the Americas the equivalent of billions of dollars in today’s money, much of it in precious metals. But Spain struggled to convert wealth produced by violence into capital for investment and production – and capital is what capitalism is all about. Instead, it spent its fortunes on religious and dynastic wars, churches, art, buildings and other forms of conspicuous consumption.

England’s financial transformation was a game changer, building on innovations pioneered by the Dutch in the 17th century. In the 18th century, there was a revolution in English banking, along with a tranche of developments including insurance, bonds, stock markets, patent law and an increasingly standardised currency. In the first quarter of the 19th century, the number of banks outside London increased 30-fold, and doubled in that city.

London became the “capital of capital”, as the economic historian Youssef Cassis termed it, led by the Bank of England, which was established in the closing years of the 17th century. “The multiplication of banking companies,” Adam Smith wrote in The Wealth of Nations (1776), was a great example of the virtues of competition and increased public confidence in the economy. Wealth – including that generated by violence – was free to become capital.

By 1820, the US had just over 300 banks. Forty years later, that number had grown to more than 1,500 – a five-fold increase, and many more than in the UK. With banking came an array of financial innovations, from insurance to stocks and bonds. Like that of its former imperial master, the US legal system protected wealth – whether it was land, money or, across the South, human beings – which meant that it was easy to transform wealth into investable capital.

This is how bison hides ended up in factories, and their bones in your ancestor’s teacup, connecting Manchester with Wyoming, halfway around the world. The connections to killing don’t stop there, though. Those factories required lighting. Sunlight alone was unacceptable to factory owners, who wanted their workers to be labouring as long as humanly (or inhumanly) possible, sometimes from five in the morning until well into the night. Until the advent of hydrocarbons such as paraffin and natural gas, it was whale oil that kept these places lit.

England was soon consuming at least 50,000 barrels of the stuff each year, generating more than 3 billion lumen-hours of illumination. By the 1830s, most of the whale oil entering England ended up in its factories for lighting and lubrication. Meanwhile, across the Atlantic, anywhere between a quarter and a third of sperm-whale oil (which produced the best light) harvested by American whalers made its way into factories. Whale oil was also used for lighting in Caribbean mills, where enslaved people were forced to work continuously to process the sugar-cane juice that helped provide cheap energy for the industrial working classes.

Demand for lubrication and lighting in both factories and cities resulted in the mass slaughter of whales, from Greenland to the Indian Ocean. Though it is impossible to determine the exact scale of the killing, we do know that about 2 million whales were slaughtered between 1750 and 1900.

Whaling produced huge profits until the number of those marine mammals dwindled, and whalers were forced to spend more time at sea, often returning home with empty casks. In the case of New England’s whale industry, profits were reinvested in a variety of businesses, from cotton mills to railways and the transition to fossil fuels in the US. One of the world’s largest textile factories – the Wamsutta Mills in New Bedford, Massachusetts – was funded by the harvesting of whales. And some of the early investors in what became John D Rockefeller’s powerful and notorious Standard Oil Company amassed their capital from hunting whales.

People found many ways of turning into capital the natural resources in their surroundings. England’s land-enclosure movement was one of them, and has commonly been offered as an explanation for the development of capitalism, going back to the works of the classical political economists in the 18th and 19th centuries.

But using violence to generate capital was a global process, and an ongoing one. It proved possible to turn just about anything into profit, from whales and bison to deer, beaver and African elephants – plus another mammal: Homo sapiens. The spread of guns led to a global increase in enslavement, most infamously across Africa. Beginning in the early 16th century and continuing for over 350 years, more than 12.5 million enslaved people were trafficked from Africa’s shores – by far the largest forced migration in human history.

However, nearly 7.9 million people – 63 per cent of the total Atlantic trade in human beings – were moved in just 60 years from the mid-18th century, during the industrial revolution and just as weapons began flooding the continent. This rapid expansion of the slave trade precisely tracks the import of gunpowder into Africa, as Nicholas Radburn has demonstrated definitively. The UK alone exported more than 26 million kg of explosives to Africa in the 18th century, most of it after 1750. Weapons yielded the greatest gains. One result, as the tyrannical King Adandozan of Dahomey (reigned 1797–1818) bragged, was a kingdom where his people “cultivated not with hoes, but with guns”.

People hunting people is part of the nasty and brutish reality of enslavement. But how many people lost their lives to produce the 7.9 million people shipped across the Atlantic, where nearly 10 per cent died along the way to the Americas? I have estimated upwards of 2–3 people died to yield a single enslaved person. In other words, perhaps as many as 24 million humans perished in the flood of weapons and enslavement.

Similar ratios unfolded elsewhere in the world, where guns were used to hunt people. In the south-east US – where Indigenous people were employed to hunt and enslave other Native Americans – the hunters killed three Native Americans for every one they captured.

We know that profits from the transatlantic trade increased dramatically in this period, as work by Nobel-Prize-winning economists Daron Acemoglu, Simon Johnson and James Robinson has demonstrated. The Caribbean sugar and American cotton that made its way into workers’ cups of tea and into the English textile mills – which were releasing CO₂ and beginning to warm the Earth’s atmosphere – were tied to Africa’s killing fields. The industrial revolution and our own age of global warming are inextricably tied not just to the institution of slavery – a continuing subject of debate across the world – but also to the mass destruction of people, animals and the environment that guns and finance made possible.

• Read more | The profits of slavery: the dire impact of empire on Britain’s countryside

This is the dark reality of capitalism’s creation myth – one that historians and climate scientists are now beginning to understand. The industrial revolution and the global warming that now threatens our very existence emerged from the globalisation of killing for profit. The deaths of millions of Africans that underpinned the entire Atlantic slavery complex is only the most obvious connection. While there were other factors at play here, the wealth generated by the system of slavery “contributed causally to Britain’s industrial revolution”, according to a 2022 study. This recognition underpins many ongoing and fraught discussions, especially in the UK – most recently the February 2025 parliamentary debates on reparations, and the July 2025 University of Edinburgh report on donor links to slavery.

These conversations, however, miss something very basic. History’s horrors go deeper into the totality of destruction that made our world economy – one that entangles the deaths of Africans with the slaughter of bison and whales in addition to a vast number of other species. This is one reason why the popular term ‘Anthropocene’ may not suffice, and why I have suggested a different word to describe the epoch that created our contemporary planetary peril: the ‘Mortecene’ – the Age of Killing and Death.

Clifton Crais is a professor of history at Emory University. His new book is The Killing Age: How Violence Made the Modern World (Picador, 2026)

This article was first published in the February 2026 issue of HistoryExtra Magazine

]]>The Zong massacre | A murderous insurance scam that exposed slavery’s horrorshttps://www.historyextra.com/membership/zong-massacre-georgian-scandals-4/2026-02-17T09:45:08.000ZIn the 1780s, an extraordinary insurance claim made its way through Britain’s courts – against the lives of more than 130 enslaved people who had been intentionally thrown overboard a slaving ship in the Caribbean.

In this episode of History’s Greatest Scandals, Professor Hannah Greig and Ellie Cawthorne revisit the notorious Zong massacre, and explore how it exposes the horrors of the transatlantic slave trade.

Watch the full episode, or listen ad-free at the link below:

View Green Video on the source website ]]>The US 'voodoo' scare: why 19th-century racists spread fake news about Haitihttps://www.historyextra.com/membership/the-us-voodoo-scare-why-19th-century-racists-spread-fake-news-about-haiti/2025-12-08T09:00:17.000ZOn 2 January 1893, the black American abolitionist and reformer Frederick Douglass delivered a lecture on Haiti to an audience in Chicago. It was widely alleged, he reflected, that the Caribbean republic was riddled with “voodooism, fetishism, serpent worship and cannibalism”, and that “little children are fatted for slaughter and offered as sacrifices to their voodoo deities”. Such claims, Douglass declared, were false. He told his listeners that, while serving as US minister (effectively, ambassador) to Haiti between 1889 and 1891, he found no evidence of ritual sacrifice, despite diligent investigation.

By the time Douglass spoke in Chicago, the idea of Haitian ‘voodoo’ as a murderous cult was lodged in the American public consciousness. As he noted, the features of this myth would have been familiar to many. According to scores of white writers at the turn of the 20th century, ‘voodoo’ was an imported African religion devoted to the worship of Satan incarnated as a snake. ‘Voodoo’ ceremonies, it was claimed, consisted of frenzied dances, sexual orgies and the ritual sacrifice of animals or humans followed by the consumption of their bodies or blood. The priests and priestesses of this imaginary faith were said to be the real rulers of Haiti, holding all its citizens – from presidents to peasants – in the grip of terror.

In 1901, claims about Haitian ‘voodoo’ coalesced in a widely reprinted newspaper report on the “demoniacal orgies” of this purported “devil’s cult”. Supposedly reproducing the findings of the famous American geologist and traveller Robert Hill, the author of the piece claimed not only that “large numbers of young children are offered up annually in Haiti as sacrifices to the Great Yellow Snake” but also that “mothers frequently dedicate their infants at birth to this purpose”.

The article provoked an incredulous response from Ebenezer Bassett who, as US minister to Haiti between 1869 and 1877, was the first black American diplomat. Having lived there for more than a decade, and speaking fluent French, Bassett – like Douglass – could claim authority on the question of Haitian religion.

As Bassett knew, “the whole story about cannibalism in Haiti is no more than a myth which, like other myths, has gained credence by persistent repetition”. Casting doubt on the veracity of the report, he noted that Robert Hill had refuted the existence of Haitian cannibalism in his recent Caribbean travel narrative, and that the claims of the article were “in full accord with – it is better not to say that they are probably based upon – Sir Spenser St John’s book”.

Lurid inventions

Spenser St John was a British diplomat and former chargé d’affaires in Haiti, and the book in question was Hayti, or, The Black Republic. First published in 1884, it made a deep impression on US journalism, providing the blueprint for a plethora of articles that, though claiming originality, did little more than summarise, in increasingly lurid terms, its lengthy chapter on “Vaudoux Worship and Cannibalism”.

Up to this point, I have placed ‘voodoo’ in quotation marks, not only to suggest that it was a figment of white imaginations but also to differentiate it from Vodou, the African-derived religion genuinely practised by Haitians. Much of this religion can be traced to west and west-central Africa. It contains elements of the religions practised during the era of slavery by the Aja and Fon peoples of the Bight of Benin (vodu is the Fon word for spirit), as well as of others from the kingdom of Kongo.

• Read more | Frederick Douglass escaped enslavement in 1838 – but here's why he was still far from true freedom

However, Vodou was not, as 19th-century white commentators claimed, a direct African import. It was a product of the New World melting pot – a dynamic blend of the religions of enslaved Africans and the Christianity of their European enslavers. In this respect, Vodou has much in common with other black diasporic religions including Cuban Santería, Brazilian Candomblé and Jamaican Obeah. Like those, Vodou helped people of African origin survive the brutality of Atlantic slavery.

In the Victorian age, white people on both sides of the Atlantic ignored the vibrant realities of Vodou, dwelling instead on its demonic imagined double: ‘voodoo’. Why were they so keen to defame Haitian religion? Frederick Douglass had the answer. “Haiti is black,” he declared in Chicago, “and we [Americans] have not yet forgiven Haiti for being black.”

Between 1791 and 1804, enslaved and free people of colour rose against the French colonial government of Saint-Domingue. The revolution resulted in the abolition of slavery and independence for the colony. Renamed Haiti, it became the world’s only black republic. Desperate to demonstrate that people of African descent were incapable of self-government, white supremacists spent the next century defaming Haiti, presenting it – in the words of Douglass – as a “very hell of horrors”.

As the 20th century approached, the idea that the world could be divided into races whose members shared the same essential traits was widely accepted. Thus, to opponents of black freedom in the US, Haitian ‘voodoo’ became proof that, without white control, black Americans would degenerate to savagery. As Douglass reflected, the black American could “never part with his identity and race”, meaning that the denial of Haitian civilisation was a denial of the “possibilities of the negro race generally”.

This backlash against black freedom explains why ‘voodoo’ first entered the American popular consciousness during the 1860s and 1870s, just as a series of constitutional amendments secured the abolition of slavery, along with the establishment of black citizenship and the enfranchisement of black men. As the author of an 1866 article in the Memphis Appeal proclaimed, ‘voodoo’ was “beginning to take hold among the negroes. Free them from the check which was once held over them, they have unlimited control over their baser passions, and now and then it bursts out, and proves that the worship of their barbaric fathers still runs in the blood of the Americanised negro.”

Deluge of discourse

Initially, Americans writing about ‘voodoo’ focused on Louisiana and, particularly, New Orleans. A former French colony, Louisiana had a sizeable French-speaking population well into the 19th century. In the 1790s and early 19th century, this population had been bolstered by the arrival of up to 25,000 refugees from the Haitian Revolution, well over half of whom were enslaved. It is thus unsurprising that a reference to “an African deity called Vaudoo” appeared in a New Orleans newspaper as early as 1820.

However, from the 1880s onwards, thanks to Spenser St John, attention turned to ‘voodoo’ in Haiti. The press was swiftly saturated with reports depicting the Caribbean republic as a “land of blood” – with articles bearing headlines such as: “Haiti, a Brooding Nightmare of Savagery, Bloodshed, Cannibalism”.

It is tempting to see this deluge of discourse as a reflection of US imperial designs on Haiti, which it occupied between 1915 and 1934. However, at the turn of the 20th century, Haitian ‘voodoo’ was most often invoked by white-supremacist Democrats who argued that Jim Crow laws and regulations – which, enacted from the late 19th century, disenfranchised black Americans and enforced their segregation from white people – were necessary to prevent similar savagery at home.

The peak of interest in Haitian ‘voodoo’ coincided with legal efforts to destroy the black vote in the South. Beginning with Mississippi in 1890, and ending with Georgia in 1906, southern legislatures drew up new state constitutions containing a plethora of voting restrictions. These were intended to disenfranchise black Americans without contravening the 15th Amendment of 1870, which made it unconstitutional to deprive the vote on the basis of race. In the halls of Congress, Democrats, including the Mississippi senator Hernando Money, cited the work of St John as supposed proof that the black American was no more than a “veneered savage”. To the architects of Jim Crow, ‘voodoo’ was an ideological weapon.

Depictions of Haitian ‘voodoo’ worship, a potent brew of sex and violence, helped to sell newspapers in an age of sensationalist journalism. At the same time, they reinforced racist notions that everybody of African descent was inherently bestial, criminal and hypersexual. Depictions of orgiastic worship chimed with the myth that white women were in constant danger of the black ‘beast rapist’, which was used to justify Jim Crow and fuel violence against black Americans.

• Read more | The Haitian Revolution: the enslaved Africans who rose up against France

In a 1914 speech to Congress, the notoriously racist Mississippi senator James Vardaman made the connection explicit. St John, he claimed, had presented a “disgusting story of the worship of the voodoo and cannibalism, which he says is as common as [black] sexual crimes in the southern states of this republic”.

Frequently portraying black worshippers as beasts and demons, the language used in depictions of Haitian ‘voodoo’ was dehumanising in the extreme. Written portrayals were sometimes accompanied by lurid illustrations, such as A Voodoo Sacrifice, published in the Los Angeles Herald in 1905. A depiction of child sacrifice, the illustration included a worshipper with grotesquely ape-like features as well as a reptilian figure fixing the newspaper reader with an accusatory gaze, suggesting that she or he was an unwelcome witness to secret black rites.

Fears of black resistance

While ostensibly justifying Jim Crow, American depictions of Haitian Vodou betrayed acute white fears of black resistance. African-derived spiritual beliefs and practices played a part in almost every slave uprising in North America and the Caribbean. In 1822, protective charms were allegedly distributed among those involved in South Carolina’s Denmark Vesey conspiracy, named after a free black man convicted of planning a major uprising of enslaved people. In Jamaica a little over 60 years earlier, the use of similar charms during the massive slave insurrection known as Tacky’s Revolt prompted a British crackdown on Obeah.

For late 19th-century white Europeans and Americans, however, the dangerous character of black religion was most associated with the Haitian Revolution. By the end of the century, the idea had been enshrined in Haitian mythology that the revolution began with a Vodou ceremony in a forest named Bois-Caïman, during which a pig was sacrificed and a blood oath sworn.

Though Vodou certainly galvanised the Haitian Revolution, the reality of the Bois-Caïman ceremony has been debated by scholars, some of whom question the sources upon which the story is based.

White supremacists, however, had no interest in questions of historical accuracy, instead portraying Vodou as a death cult bent upon the annihilation of the white race. This accusation chimed with the widespread view that political equality in the US would lead to race war. In 1908, the San Antonio Light published what it claimed was a genuine Vodou chant invoking racial extermination, but which was almost certainly the product of a journalist’s fevered imagination.

O-he! Papa Damba!

Down with whites and with mulattoes!

Burn them, shoot them, drown their women!

Help your blacks, your poor black children

Circulated by those seeking to justify Jim Crow, tales of ‘voodoo’ sacrifice and cannibalism were shot through with white anxiety. These sanguinary stories may have facilitated a kind of psychological displacement. In other words, real white violence against African Americans was projected as imaginary black murder in the service of Satan.

In the turn-of-the-20th-century South, racial violence assumed unimaginable dimensions in the form of spectacle lynching: black Americans were tortured and murdered before white crowds that could number in the thousands. According to statistics compiled by the NAACP (the civil rights organisation founded in 1909 as the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People), at least 1,902 black Americans were lynched between 1890 and 1910. The affinities between these all-too-real rituals and fictional ‘voodoo’ ceremonies seem more than superficial, especially if we note – as many historians have – the religious symbolism and sacrificial dimensions of spectacle lynching.

• Read more | Suing for equality: how Sarah Mae Flemming began the legal fight against segregation

This reign of racial terror troubled many white people, undermining their sense that they stood at the summit of human civilisation. Condemning the 1904 lynching of Luther Holbert of Mississippi, one newspaper editor wrote that “[t]he negroes, in their most bestial state of voodooism, could be guilty of nothing more savage and brutal.” The editor’s conclusion deliberately inverted the racist language of Democratic politicians such as Hernando Money. “The white man is given to much boasting,” that journalist reflected, “but in many instances he is but a thinly veneered savage.”

‘Voodoo’ gripped the public imagination because, while fuelling the violence upon which Jim Crow was built, it allowed many white Americans to imagine that it was not themselves but others who lived in a “land of blood”.

David G Cox is a lecturer in modern American history at the University of Southampton. His research for this article was supported by a British Academy Mid-Career Fellowship

This article was first published in the December 2025 issue of BBC History Magazine

]]>"There's little understanding of the shared history of Britain and the subcontinent" | South Asian Heritage Monthhttps://www.historyextra.com/membership/theres-little-understanding-of-the-shared-history-of-britain-and-the-subcontinent-south-asian-heritage-month/2025-08-04T08:00:12.000ZMatt Elton: What do you see as the value of South Asian Heritage Month? And do you think this kind of specific history month is generally a good thing?

Shalina Patel: Black History Month was first marked in the UK in 1987, at a time when there was a huge absence of understanding about black history. Fast forward 30-plus years, and there are groups now advocating for black history 365 days a year. They feel that it shouldn’t be relegated to a specific month, but should be integrated [into conversations] all year.

So if we think about the journey, I’d say that South Asian Heritage Month [SAHM, first held in 2020] is really important as a starting point, because there is currently an absence of understanding of the diversity within South Asian culture, communities and history. True, there’s a risk that this is the only time of year when people will talk about this topic, but we’re starting from a place where so few conversations are taking place on a public scale. So marking SAHM is really important now – and I hope that we will get to a point where we won’t need it anymore, because [South Asian stories] will be really integrated into people’s understanding.

Sumita Mukherjee: I agree that it’s really important to increase the diversity of history that is being told. SAHM gives us the opportunity to have this conversation – it encourages the media and other forums to showcase stories and histories around South Asia. I would say that there’s an issue, though, with the timing as it stands, because most schools and universities are closed in late July and August, and lots of people are on holiday.

Shrabani Basu: I think the important thing is to make it inclusive – it shouldn’t just be South Asians eating curries and watching dances. The point is to make it a national festival that everybody looks forward to. It’s the holiday season, so go for that – make it something that excites people. The danger with all these things is that they lose momentum. To keep it fresh and popular we need to raise the bar, make it exciting, make people want to see what’s on the agenda, and take it forward that way.

So it has a value as a springboard for these kinds of conversations, but also as a way of connecting South Asian history to wider society?

SB: Absolutely. Far too little is known about South Asian history – which is the history of undivided India to some extent, and our cultures from all these countries that make up the region. Even many South Asians don’t know much about it.

SP: I agree. SAHM is also a really important opportunity to unlock those conversations within the community itself. I think that we as a community are not necessarily great at talking about our history, partly because of things that happened within the memory of our grandparents and great-grandparents. SAHM is about having those internal family conversations as well as having conversations on a public scale.

• Read more | Kavita Puri's hidden histories: "Many south Asian diasporic families don’t know of their First World War links"

SM: This idea of inclusion and celebration is a great thing, but sometimes – and we see this with Black History Month – there’s a focus on celebrating certain figures and palatable histories without looking at the dark side of history. There’s a tendency to celebrate South Asians and not criticise their roles in history.

Also, a lot of the focus is on India, Pakistan and Bangladesh – places that were part of the British empire. But South Asia is a much broader region than just those places, and that inclusiveness has not yet come through in the events and celebratory elements I’ve seen so far.

SB: Absolutely. Very few people in north India know anything about Sri Lanka, for example. The whole region is so vast and so varied that we ourselves don’t know everything about it.

As Sumita said, we have a very dark history, too: partition, riots, wars within the region – there are a lot of dark, dark patches for which our own countries are to blame, not just outside forces.

SP: This month provides a really good opportunity to celebrate that diversity and to push the idea that the South Asian community is not some kind of monolith. Sometimes I put myself in a category – as ‘British South Asian’ – but what does that mean? There are so many different types of people and different experiences within that. We need to engage with all of those differences, even within the communities.

SAHM is still relatively new, so I hope we will see more and more of that kind of diversity and those different types of stories coming through.

How can this process work better, to foster research across communities – particularly on migration and movement, a major theme of this year’s SAHM?

SP: I’ve been a teacher for 15 years now, and I’ve been very lucky to work in a secondary school in north-west London that is very diverse. My school is so positive about making sure that we share histories that are relevant to our students, so there is a huge amount of South Asian history explored. But that’s been a real journey. Ten years ago, it was just me and my department researching these things on our own, because there weren’t the resources out there. Now I’m really proud to say that I’ve helped write material about a lot of these issues.

Just a couple of months ago, a textbook called Asian Empires in the Silk Roads was published [by Oxford University Press], for which I wrote the chapter on Mughal India. I’ve also helped write a textbook about the British empire. So things are definitely changing, and many more resources are available. The problem is that it’s up to individual schools whether they teach the British empire at all, and whether India is part of that story.

It’s so important that we don’t teach only the British Raj as South Asian history. Students also love learning about the Mughals, because they are fascinating and dramatic – much more interesting than the Tudors. But I also teach my students about South Asian migration, as well as stories of more modern South Asian people – [Second World War spy] Noor Inayat Khan, for example, and [Sikh princess, suffragette and Queen Victoria’s god-daughter] Sophia Duleep Singh. The big problem is that there’s still little understanding of how much shared history there is between Britain and the subcontinent. If kids are learning about the First and Second World Wars but not hearing about the contributions of Indian soldiers, then that is not telling the full story.

• Read more | Hakim Adi | “Racism in Britain has a long history – but so does anti-racism”

SB: I feel that there is still little knowledge about that topic. During the recent VE Day celebrations, there was only a little mention of how many Indian soldiers played a part. I do understand that time is very limited in a commentary but a few more lines, a little more emphasis, would’ve been great.

At the front of the procession were the FANYs [First Aid Nursing Yeomanry] – women who also served as secret agents in the Second World War. I would’ve loved to hear that these secret agents came from all parts of the world: Noor Inayat Khan was half Indian, and Krystyna Skarbek was from Poland. The war was fought on the shoulders of the people of the empire, and I think that point should have been raised.

More than 2.5 million Indian troops served in the Second World War – the biggest volunteer army in the conflict – and they didn’t merit a single mention at the VE Day concert. So this narrative is still not there – and it needs to be told, to be taught in schools. That is the only way forward.

SM: British history itself is South Asian history. It’s not just about the history of the empire, because South Asians have been in Britain since the 17th century. Migration is not just a contemporary phenomenon: in the 19th century, South Asians of all ilks were influencing culture in Britain and working in its port cities. South Asians also went to Mauritius, to Malaysia, to Uganda, to South Africa, to Guyana, to Jamaica, and to other places – the South Asian diaspora has such a vibrant, interesting history.

When discussing migration, I’d return to the problem of centrism around India, Bangladesh and Pakistan – there’s so much to say about other parts of the region such as Myanmar (Burma), Sri Lanka, Afghanistan and Nepal.

SP: When I teach the transatlantic slave trade, I also speak about indentured labour. Because the root cause of more than a million Indians going to places such as Mauritius was the abolition of slavery. So the histories of the Caribbean, South Asia and Britain all intersect.

SM: And of course the history of Windrush, which is relatively well known and taught in schools, is also about Indo-Caribbean people who came over with that generation.

Do tensions, such those that arose between India and Pakistan in May, make researching the region’s histories harder?

SB: Oh, absolutely. Because the first thing when you have a situation of conflict is that visas get cancelled. So researchers can’t go, academics can’t travel. India cancelled visas for people of Pakistani origin, and the same probably happened for British Indians wanting to travel to Pakistan. So British Asians of Indian or Pakistani origin who want to study [on the subcontinent] will find it difficult to access archives or do any sort of research. That’s the first practical block.

Then it spreads to filmmaking and cultural life as well. The minute you have conflict, these barriers go up – filmmakers can’t travel, musicians can’t travel. It doesn’t help anybody.

SM: It’s been very difficult over the past few years anyway, with geopolitical tensions in the region, for people with Indian passports to research in Pakistan and vice versa. So the current conflict has only escalated things.

It’s important to note that, though these recent conflicts are rooted in present-day issues, they also have longstanding historical reasons. So there’s an opportunity to reiterate and understand the history behind these troubles, especially in Kashmir.

SB: I don’t think people know the real story of what happened in Kashmir – how this line of control was drawn, how the Hindu maharaja went over to India, how the invasion happened, why this conflict started.

SM: It’s also coupled with geographical literacy – understanding the geography of the region, Kashmir’s location, the environmental reasons, the water lines and so on.

SP: There’s a real absence of understanding of the partition story, of how these borders were drawn. Again, this is a shared history with Britain – the story of partition is a British story as well as a South Asian story. It was framed as a peaceful takeover, which we all know was absolutely not the case.

This history shouldn’t be contentious, but it is, because Britain portrayed partition as a peaceful handover, which undermined the reality of the violence and bloodshed that engulfed these new nations in 1947. There’s also been an absence of personal stories about this history because of the horrific things that happened at that time. The personal, the political, the geographical – so many factors involved, which is why this is such a misunderstood history.

SB: When the conflict broke out in May, there were ugly scenes outside the Indian High Commission and the Pakistan High Commission. It’s something we absolutely do not need. The South Asian community here should be united rather than divided, when it becomes a law and order problem.

• Read more | The untold story of India’s WW2 prisoners of war

What areas of historical research would you highlight as important today?

SM: I’m working on the history of South Asian children and their migration to Britain. This is part of a growing field looking at children in history not just as distant people in the background but as historical actors themselves. I’m exploring the role that young people played, changing society, changing politics.

Colleagues are also working on the informal labour of women in housework and homeworking – sewing, childminding, the things that women often do at home that isn’t recorded within formal economic histories – to understand the contribution that South Asian women have made to the economy in Britain, especially women of Pakistani origin in northern England.

SB: I would love to see oral histories from earlier generations being recorded. Not enough of this has been done. There was a little documentary recording people who migrated to Britain in the sixties. It was so interesting seeing their lifestyles, how they were so formally dressed at all times; compare it with today, when everyone is so casual, even the new immigrants. These stories tell us so much about how these people came here. I feel more and more that, as we lose that generation, we need to save their stories. I wish they would be recorded on film and audio as much as possible.

SP: Oral histories, real personal stories, are so important. I always encourage young people and others to record their family histories – to talk to their grandparents, if they still have them, to record those migration stories. I did that with my granddad: there are so many things I didn’t know about his migration story.

A friend of mine, jeweller Anisha Parmar, invites South Asian women to come together and use family jewellery as a way to explore their heritage and their history. It’s been incredible to see young South Asian people delve into their identity and heritage through the medium of gold jewellery in particular.

When we think about South Asian items in museums, often we are thinking about beautiful, ornate pieces of jewellery worn by maharajas and royalty. But she’s made more personal connections. We’ve all got such items – I’m wearing my grandma’s bangles right now.

SB: The Commonwealth War Graves Commission ordered a report looking at the names of soldiers from India and Africa who, despite a pledge that every soldier who died in the world wars would be commemorated with a headstone, were not recorded in that way. To address that, fantastic work has been done by Greenwich University and the UK Punjab Heritage Association to find the names of soldiers from the Punjab in the First World War, as well as details of regiments, when they joined, if they died. I find that quite exciting: a way of making right something that was wrong – to commemorate some 50,000 Indians whose names were lost. 

Shalina Patel is a historian, teacher and author. Her first book is The History Lessons (Icon, 2024)

Sumita Mukherjee is professor of modern history at the University of Bristol. Her books include Indian Suffragettes (Oxford University Press India, 2018)

Shrabani Basu is a historian, journalist and author. Her latest book is The Mystery of the Parsee Lawyer (Bloomsbury, 2021)

This article was first published in the August 2025 issue of BBC History Magazine

]]>Suing for equality: how Sarah Mae Flemming began the legal fight against segregationhttps://www.historyextra.com/membership/suing-for-equality-how-sarah-mae-flemming-began-the-legal-fight-against-segregation/2025-07-08T08:00:22.000ZOn 2 November 2005, thousands of mourners crowded into the Greater Grace Temple in Detroit to attend the funeral of black American civil rights icon Rosa Parks. Former US president Bill Clinton led the tributes before a congregation that held hands and sang the protest anthem ‘We Shall Overcome’.

The story of Rosa Parks and the Montgomery bus boycott in Alabama is familiar yet sometimes misunderstood. Her arrest for refusing to surrender a bus seat in December 1955 followed not the spontaneous action of an apolitical seamstress but a calculated decision by a lifelong activist who, along with other members of the black community, had put increasing pressure on white city leaders to end the daily indignities of segregated bus journeys. Her detention may have been the catalyst for the desegregation of public transport in the South, but other black women before her had also braved similar hurt, humiliation and intimidation.

Among them was a woman called Sarah Mae Flemming. In June 1954, Flemming was involved in an incident that is far less celebrated than the Montgomery bus boycott. Yet it was an incident that truly laid the foundation for the eventual overturning of Jim Crow laws as applied to public transport.

Flemming was a child of the Great Depression, one of seven children raised by a farming couple whose own parents had been enslaved. Born on 28 June 1933, she grew up alongside her siblings in a busy household near Eastover, South Carolina, a small community some 20 miles south-east of the state capital, Columbia.

After graduating from high school, Flemming worked briefly for a relative in Ohio before returning to South Carolina to help support her family, taking a position as a maid for white residents in one of Columbia’s affluent suburbs.

• Read more | Emmett Till: the murder that reshaped the American civil rights movement

The day that changed her life, 22 June 1954, started much as any other: she boarded a bus to work. At first there was standing room only, until a seat was vacated by a departing white passenger. When Flemming took the seat, however, the driver shouted at her to move. According to contentious evidence he gave later in court, she had breached the ‘colour line’ – the long-standing system of racial segregation enforced by so-called Jim Crow laws – by sitting in front of two white women.

Embarrassed, Flemming decided that she would walk the remaining 2 miles to work, and pulled the cord for the next stop. At that time, black Americans were required to enter and leave buses by the rear door – but the aisle was too crowded, so she tried to follow white passengers through the front exit. The driver stood in her way, then struck her in the stomach. Flemming was forced to shuffle through the rear door, and from there to a hospital. Worse than the pain from the punch was the wound to her dignity.

From insult, opportunity

The hurt and humiliation of one young woman did, though, present an opportunity to the broader black community. Just a month earlier, the United States Supreme Court had reached a landmark decision in the case of Brown v Board of Education of Topeka, outlawing school segregation. To Modjeska Monteith Simkins, the secretary of the South Carolina branch of the NAACP – the national organisation founded in 1909 to fight for civil rights for people of colour – Flemming’s mistreatment presented a chance to test whether that ruling also applied to public transport. Flemming agreed to help, resolving to challenge Jim Crow laws despite the risks to which she would be exposed.

Simkins hired white lawyer Philip Wittenberg, who filed a suit accusing the bus company of having violated Flemming’s right to the full protection of the law under the Fourteenth Amendment to the US Constitution. He sought $25,000 in damages.

The legal process in Flemming v South Carolina Electric and Gas Company (who operated the bus) was convoluted and slow. District Court Judge George Bell Timmerman, a staunch segregationist, dismissed the case on the grounds that the Brown decision applied only to schools and not to public transport. The NAACP assisted with an appeal to the US Fourth Circuit Court, which deemed that the Brown decision applied to all aspects of public life – and that the Flemming case must proceed to trial.

Civil rights activists sensed that they were on the verge of a breakthrough – a perception sharpened when, in April 1956, the Supreme Court refused to hear an appeal from the bus company. NAACP executive secretary Roy Wilkins saw the decision as the end of bus segregation, telling reporters: “Now that the Supreme Court has spoken with clarity, we are hopeful that the majority of communities throughout the South will fall in line.”

There seemed good reason for such optimism. Within a day, transit companies in 13 cities across the region had announced the desegregation of their buses. That included Montgomery City Lines, which instructed its drivers not to enforce segregated seating, an action blocked when city officials secured a court injunction.

• Read more | How did the US civil rights movement influence Britain?

Yet the Flemming case did not win the fight against the colour line in Montgomery – where the boycott was ongoing, and would continue for over a year – or elsewhere. Both sides in the civil rights struggle soon realised that the Supreme Court had not actually determined whether segregated busing was unconstitutional, only that it would not consider an appeal until the lower court had actually heard the case.

Battle lines in Montgomery remained drawn: white city leaders secured an injunction that stopped the bus company desegregating, while black activists persevered with their boycott. “Jim Crow Dies Hard,” affirmed a headline in the Washington Post. Proving the point, when the Flemming case returned to the district court in June 1956, Judge Timmerman dismissed it a second time. Not until June 1957, following a successful appeal by Flemming’s lawyers, did the case finally convene. It was not worth the wait. An entirely white male jury took only 30 minutes to decide against the plaintiff.

Serving a greater good

Flemming had lost the will to fight. Rather than remain involved in the escalating civil rights struggle, she retreated into the privacy of family life, raising three children with her husband, whom she married while the case was ongoing. “As for myself,” she informed the press, “I never rode a city bus since they put me off and I never will again.” Her own battle had ended in defeat, but Flemming had contributed to the broader triumph of civil rights activists.

In February 1956, lawyers filed suit on behalf of four black female plaintiffs who had been mistreated on Montgomery buses. Four months later, a district court ruled in their favour, striking down bus segregation. In November, the US Supreme Court affirmed the decision in the case of Browder v Gayle. A year after it had begun, the organisers of the Montgomery bus boycott had won a decisive victory.

It is not known whether Flemming was even aware of the fact, but the judges who ruled that segregated busing was unconstitutional cited as precedent the appeal court ruling in her case that ‘separate but equal’ no longer had any basis in law. Flemming did not receive justice, but her fight through the courts had served an even greater good.

Sarah Mae Flemming lived the rest of her life, away from the spotlight, in Eastover with her husband and their three children until her untimely death on 16 June 1993, aged just 59. By then, Rosa Parks had long overshadowed her – a situation compounded by the fact that Flemming never spoke publicly about her contribution to the civil rights cause.

Barely a footnote in histories of the movement written during her lifetime, her story has belatedly been rediscovered. Today, locals and visitors to downtown Columbia can stroll along Sarah Mae Flemming Way to see the impressive mural that honours her memory. It is a reminder that, though charismatic civil rights leaders such as Martin Luther King Jr and Malcolm X became the focus of most attention, the fight for racial equality was as much – if not more – about ordinary people such as Flemming performing extraordinary acts of courage. 

Clive Webb and Tom Adam Davies are, respectively, professor and associate professor of American history at the University of Sussex

This article was first published in the July 2025 issue of BBC History Magazine

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