Influencing History

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Hello, my name's Matthew Sweet and you're listening to the Arts and Ideas podcast. Who makes history? A couple of weeks ago on Freethinking, we asked you to consider that its turns might be shaped less by human decisions and more by climate and geology.

Well, tonight, inspired by this year's Wreath lecturer, the Dutch historian Rutger Bregman, we're going to twist the dial the other way, back, you might think, to a rather 19th century view of history, as something determined by the actions... of human individuals, people we might actually name.

The first lecture described how electorates across the world are turning to populists and authoritarians, how trust in institutions is low, and it argued that moral cowardice has paralysed many of those institutions. in a new world where strong men, and they are all men, seem more powerful actors than national or international bodies.

The second lecture, which went out this week, laid out a programme for what Bregman calls a moral revolution and argued that sometimes the actions of relatively small groups, abolitionists, suffragists and suffragettes, Lenin and his mates in 1917 can shunt the world from one epoch to another for good or ill. So Freethinking tonight tests these assertions and the mechanics of cause and effect that they imply.

Who pulls, who can pull, the levers of history? Individuals, groups, electorates, populations? Or does that question make some generous presumptions about human agency? Well, let me introduce you to our relatively small group. Two professors of history are here at the table in Broadcasting House. Selina Todd is professor of modern history at Oxford, and Claire Jackson is professor of...

modern history at Cambridge, an author of The Mirror of Great Britain, A Life of James VI and First. And if you know your British monarchs, you'll know that's the same person. So welcome both, Selina and Clare, not James and James. Lena, if I wanted to find the levers of history, where would I look? Oh, I think they're many and varied, but some of those that interest me are definitely collectives from the bottom.

And I think you also have to look for hope. I think people often act out of desperation or a sense of injustice, but they have to believe that they can make things better. And that hope often comes from collectives. Claire Jackson, where can you point me? In my period, male monarchs who've got heirs or religious radicals. That's a nice short list, then.

Jake Sobrian Richards is also here. He's a historian at the London School of Economics, but he's also a new generation thinker. Welcome, Jacob. You study... global history and you've just published a book called bonds of freedom the long fight beyond abolition so i'm wondering what are the chances of you saying at some point in this conversation to me well i think it's a bit more complicated than that

I think it's a bit more complicated than that. Ah, it's happened already. Rupert Reid is here too, environmental activist, philosopher, director of the Climate Majority Project and former spokesman for Extinction Rebellion. You're our practitioner here. tonight. Rupert, if you had the levers in your hands what would you do with them?

Well, first we've got to get the levers. What we always look for in the Climate Majority Project is where are the leverage points? For example, the power of insurance or the power of farmers. Those are the kinds of things we're working on. OK. And Anne Applebaum is Zooming with us from Washington. Historian, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, staff writer for The Atlantic. One of those people to whom many turn to find the answer to those big questions like, what's happening?

happening and will it get better or worse and i want to use your work to to start us off in our conversation. Many listeners will have read your book, Autocracy Incorporated, the dictators who want to run the world. Dictators and their close cousins, the authoritarians. do seem like good examples of individuals who can shape history.

They are individuals who can shape history, although, of course, all of them are enabled by other individuals. You know, nothing about history is ever inevitable. Nothing ever happens because there's some law of history. it happen, it's always people making choices, whether it's one man making a choice or whether lots of people making a choice to agree with him and go along with him or to disagree with him.

So what makes a dictator in the modern world? What are the criteria? So a modern autocrat is someone who seeks to rule... without checks and balances without opposition without criticism without transparency and accountability without the rule of law modern autocrats believe in rule by law meaning that the law is what the

person in power says it is. And they seek to rule in a way that doesn't acknowledge rights. So not human rights, not women's rights, not political rights of any kind. And so they seek to control. I mean, if you're talking about levers of power. as many levers of power as possible and to allow as little opposition as possible. Does that definition ring true for those in the studio here? Selina, I saw you nodding your head at that.

Yeah, I think it really does. And I think one of the things that Anne's recent book really brings out on the autocrats is how much these men who can look superficially very different from each other have in common. Of course, the other really worrying thing about...

where one has a number of autocrats like this, it sends me back to the 19th century, is that in the end, although they do have all those things in common, they also have a craving for power in common. And that makes the world a very unstable place. Rupert?

I think it's worth us remembering that even the seemingly most impregnable dictators also depend upon the power of their populations. So think of the Arab Spring, for example. It was widely said in 2010, well, there'll never be any kind of democracy or any kind of revolution.

in the Arab world, and then that was shown to be completely wrong. Or even think of China. The Chinese government is... scared of its own people how do we know we know because they banned avatar we know because they gave into covid protests we know because they pursue an economic growth agenda which is damaging because they're afraid they think they have to because otherwise their people will rise up against them

Anne, you published your book in 2024. Since you first published it, are your autocrats any closer to achieving their desire to run the world? Some aren't, since I wrote the book The Syrian Dictatorship Fell.

almost exactly a year ago. And one of the reasons it fell was because its allies in the autocratic world, mostly Russia and Iran, were no longer able to support it. So the phenomenon I describe in my book of dictators of many ideologies and many geographies in many different cultures working together with common interests can fail and does fail.

you know, one of the reasons they work together and one of the reasons they have become so unified in their opposition to the language of liberal democracy and the language of freedom and the language of rights is because Almost everybody in the world intuitively understands that language. And so they are forced constantly to think of new ways to push back against it. It's this element of cooperation that's important that you identify, this idea of a network.

autocrats. What's your sense of how that functions and what it is that they do have in common apart from an opposition to liberalism? So I think they have two or three things in common. I think one is a, you know, as I said, a common desire to share power in a similar way. They also have one thing in common that makes them different from the dictators of the...

the past, or at least of the 20th century, is that they are very, very, very rich. Most of them are billionaires or 100 millionaires, and they seek to keep their wealth secret and to hide it and to use it in clandestine ways. And so they all make use of the international offshore world, the world of hedge funds and the world of anonymous companies.

And they all seek to keep and hide money and they share what methods of doing that. They also share a common interest, as I said, in defeating the language of liberal democracy. But that means that they work together on building. an authoritarian narrative. And they don't do this by all sitting around in a room like in a James Bond movie and deciding things together. They do it through copying and experimenting. So one of them finds a line.

that works. They start talking about autocracy being stable and safe and democracy being divided and degenerate. And then they copy one another. They use the same memes. They use the same arguments. But they have collectively built a set of arguments that all of them now use. So this is a shared discourse then, and one that travels along the routes, I suppose, that we associate with globalisation, really, and the spread of some things we might consider. benign as well.

No, it's true. Many people assumed that globalization would automatically entail the spread of democratic ideas. And then I think about a decade ago, many people in the autocratic world realized that globalization was also... So I think you're I think you're right. You know, globalization itself is a neutral phenomenon. It just meant that everybody could hear each other. How convinced are you by the agency that they?

How strong really is a figure like Vladimir Putin? He's only as strong as... his society allows him to be so um he is he is very good at creating a system both of mutual dependency and fear so he's surrounded by people who are rich because he is in power and who are who are secure because he is in power. And then he's surrounded on an outer level by many people who are afraid of him. Once people in his inner circle

feel that he's no longer making them secure. And this is what happened to Assad in Syria. And once people in the outer circle are no longer afraid of him, then he will be much less secure. And that is actually something that could happen at almost any moment. great phenomenon, repeated phenomenon of Russian history is that everything seems stable and unchangeable and eternal until suddenly it's not.

And that's what happened at the time of the Russian Revolution. It's what time happened when the Soviet Union collapsed. I mean, literally months before that. People still thought it would last forever. And so you have a system in which the leader is extraordinarily strong. in that he controls many levers, as you were just used to use the word you were just using, and at the same time is weak because he's dependent on...

the agreement of everybody else and not on a system or a set of institutions. Could we talk about that idea of repeat? Anne's describing something that seems kind of ancestral in Russian history. But perhaps we're also talking about the return of other... sorts of ideas? You know, perhaps the great man theory of history, Claire. So it's a paradox, because I've just published a biography of James VI and I, who's often seen as the preeminent exponent of the divine right of kings. He talks a lot.

about absolutism. It's often seen for those who want to kind of construct some Whiggish narrative as the high road to civil war. And yet he is exactly the reverse of what Anne has just been describing. He is certainly not very, very, very rich. He's very poor. He does not have a standing army. He has none of the techniques of surveillance. He's at the infrastructure of the early modern English state and he was even more so in Scotland where he was king for...

more than three decades before coming to England in 1603, the infrastructure of an early modern state is incredibly weak. So it depends very much on consent and an enormous cadre and swathe of unsalaried... office holders and people who have a stake in society. So for all the rhetoric of divine right and absolutism...

He was in practice much weaker. On the other hand, the rhetoric became very important. The majesty, the ceremony, the ritual. That's the sort of projection of power that people look to. It wasn't a contradiction in terms of people to think of themselves as being subjects of some divinely ordained absolute monarch, but also a self-governing citizen who held lots of offices at local level. Are you describing something about his particular case, or could we say that all...

Absolute monarchies aren't that absolute. I think we could say they're all monarchies. well, also called absolute monarchies aren't that absolute. For James, the key distinction, and he made this point often, James never said once, he said everything several times, was the distinction between absolute and arbitrary. He always said, you know what good kingship is by always holding it. in tension with tyranny. So rule of law was phenomenally important to...

an early modern monarch like James. It's why he felt that the justice that was being dispensed by judges was being dispensed in his name. And he always said to his son, you need to keep those two ideas of a tyrant and a good king in your head.

Unfortunately, when he was then succeeded by Charles I, a lot of parliamentarians kept repeating his father's works back to him, saying your father understood the difference between absolute and arbitrary monarchy, between a good king and a tyrant, and you don't. Selina, what do you think of this idea about the return of old forms of power or certainly old ways of viewing power, this idea of the great man that we associate with the 19th century essayist?

Thomas Carlyle, great fan of Napoleon, wasn't he? These heroic men who pushed history in one direction or another. Yeah, absolutely. And I guess there are two things that struck me. One is the fact that they're all men. I think is really telling, you know, the...

Reith lectures have started and I noticed that the first Reith lecture, the lecturer giving them was talking about toxic masculinity. And he said, well, the opposite of toxic masculinity is heroic masculinity. And his example was not Napoleon, it was Luke Scott.

Skywalker. And I found myself shouting at the radio, no, the opposite of toxic masculinity is no masculinity. Because the whole point of why we talk about men and women as separate from masculinity and femininity is masculinity is and I think always has.

been throughout history. It's one of the few things that is continuous throughout history. It's about domination. It's about exploitation in the way that femininity is about being oppressed, is about subordination. So that's one thing that strikes me. But the other thing is... I think that we have to be really careful.

Almost not to draw too many lessons from history, because what that often means is looking at the present and then trying to go back and find parallels. And I think Claire's done a good job of saying, well, there are some parallels, but not entirely. And one of the things that struck me reading Anne... book and listening to what she has to say tonight is yes these autocrats are doing something very different from the democrats but actually

The erosion of democracy happened way before them. You know, I found myself thinking about the International Monetary Fund and other transnational organisations which have ridden roughshod over national democracies. I found myself... thinking about in the British context, a lot of my work has been on modern Britain.

The power of local government in the first half of the 20th century to do things, to make a real difference, not just for local, for ordinary people, but done by those people in and around local government. That was where ideas like the... NHS were first tried out. And that's just been eroded.

Both because of the idea that capitalism now happens at national level at best, but probably at multinational level. But also because when there have been crises, you know, I go back to the, you know, the desire to have a war on terror. in the early 21st century. It wasn't autocrats who were waging that. It was supposed Democrats like George Bush and Tony Blair. But they clamped down on democratic rights because they said, in a crisis, some rights have to be compromised.

That's dangerous. And that's set a precedent for what we're seeing today. Could we find anything more than rhymes with our present times in the early modern period, though, Claire? I'm just wondering about, like...

Take diplomacy, for instance. Can we draw a line between the diplomacy of the early modern period and what may go on in, I don't know, phone calls between President Trump and... and Putin, which seem, you know, they seem to be, they seem to work free of those international structures, those post-war international structures that were so familiar with and kind of relied upon.

So there's a difference in the early modern period that most rulers would never dream of leaving their territory. So I don't often use the word literally, but ambassadors were the literal embodiment of their monarchs. So everything was always done through one remove. So I think that probably did create... more of an international language of diplomacy, it also meant for most monarchs that the only other subject, if they considered themselves to be an absolute ruler...

The only other subject with whom they might or they weren't their subjects, but the only other person with whom they might consider themselves of parallel status would be someone's ambassador. So you often get much more revealing conversations between a monarch and someone's ambassador because to them they are having that conversation.

directly with the ruler of France through the ambassador and it's why you also get this what seems like incredibly petty squabbles over precedents or invitations to particular parties, but because everything is constantly being calibrated by these ambassadors as how their state is being treated relative to others.

But this idea of the kind of summit, all that performativity, I think, was definitely there, but you didn't ever see. For someone to have left their territory would almost be a sign of weakness. So you didn't have that. Yeah, I just wanted to make a point about the great man theory of history, which is, again, leaders are nothing without followers. I think of someone like Cicero at different moments in his career or Napoleon.

or Gorbachev, or Margaret Thatcher. The times when they had people behind them and the times when they didn't. Totally different access to power. Anne, what do you make of what Claire was saying there about diplomacy in the early modern period? Do you hear any echoes of that time in the contemporary world that you look at?

I mean, it's hard to make a comparison between the early modern period and now, unless you can point me to an era, and you're the expert, maybe not me, when... you had not diplomats representing the monarch or the leader, but you had business people representing them, talking to other business people, because the emerging phenomenon that we're seeing now certainly...

this is true in the negotiations over Ukraine, is that the United States is now represented by a business, former business partner of Donald Trump and his son-in-law. And they're negotiating with the

the chairman of the Russian Sovereign Wealth Fund, whom the son-in-law, Jared Kushner, seems to have met when they were both doing business in Saudi Arabia, probably or possibly. And so... you know diplomacy is now it's it's almost as if it's it goes through the same channels that the money goes um or at least that's what's that's what's beginning to happen uh now that the united states is has adopt is adopting that model maybe there's a maybe there's

a precedent. Claire? I think there is a precedent. I wouldn't push this too far, but something like the East India Company, they're the ones who fund James the Sixth and First to send his ambassador, Sir Thomas Rowe, to to the Mukhal Emperor. And then, of course, all the conflicts of interest come to light because what the ambassador thinks he's supposed to be doing in terms of promoting English interest turns out to be at odds with the commercial imperatives of the East India Company.

Jake, what do you make of that? Because, I mean, the empire is to some extent a private enterprise, isn't it, even in the 19th century? Sure. Well, I think those companies like the East India Company and the Royal Africa Company are public-private hybrids. So they have private shareholders, but the monarchy is a huge investor in them. Members of Parliament are huge investors in them, and their wealth is fundamental, really.

to the growth of major institutions in the early modern period in Britain. So there is this public-private partnership that runs through those corporations. But I actually wanted to link back to a point about democratic renewal, which I think is underlying some of the comments that Anne was making.

looking at new democracies in the global south as some of the places which have the strongest constitutional checks and the strongest democratic cultures against autocrats. Like where? Well, like Brazil. Bolsonaro is the Trump of the tropics. And what happened with Bolsonaro is he was pushed out in a democratic election. Lula comes to power and the Supreme Court, crucially, the Supreme Court then launches an investigation and holds him accountable.

So there is a way in which, you know, there is a broad section of the Brazilian public which buys into having proper democratic checks and balances and rule of law, crucially in democratic transitions and who gets into power and how they leave power, crucially as well. And you're nodding at that.

I'm nodding because Brazil is such an extraordinary story where you have a, it's not an exact parallel to what happened in the United States, but you did have after Bolsonaro lost an election, he did, or his followers staged a kind of attempt to. take over, an attempt to take over their parliament and put him back in power. And not only did it fail and they all went to go to jail, but Bolsonaro himself was indicted and is treated as a criminal. Whereas in the United States...

which has been a democracy for a lot longer. And it's been a flawed democracy and so on. And we can argue about when it was a real democracy, but anyway, longer than Brazil. And the United States failed to do that. We also had a president who lost an election. election, sought to change the result, attacked the capital or organized the attack or inspired the attack on the capital, and nevertheless escaped punishment and is now president again. And that's a pretty stark contrast with Brazil.

We've talked mainly about top down power so far. What about power moving in the opposite direction? Claire, in the early modern world, at what point does this become a possibility, the idea that there could be some sort of resistance, some sort of meaningful opposition? I think the idea of resistance has always been there in everybody's mind. But it's at which point, you know, those sorts of for whatever particular reasons, those forces come together.

I am talking about James XVI, but I've been marinated in him for a couple of years. But I mean, he owes his position to forces coming together. He comes to the throne in Scotland when he's only 13 months because his mother, Mary, Queen of Scots, is deposed. And he is raised on a diet of popular resistance taught by George Buchanan, whose biggest inspiration is Cicero. So James is acutely aware of the potential for popular resistance. It's therefore unsurprising, perhaps, that as...

an ideologue and he is probably Britain's most intellectual monarch and that may not be a grand claim, but he writes and publishes a huge amount and his adult project is to try and rehabilitate royal power so that that can be inconceivable. But throughout his life, I mean, he... He's abducted. He skypes numerous assassination attempts. Every year, more than 400 years later, we still celebrate.

Gunpowder Night on the 5th of November. I mean, that would have been a pretty enormous, catastrophic explosion. It is the case that we sort of celebrate a great counterterrorism success. And then his own son is put on trial and convicted of treason.

the parliament and executed publicly so you know i don't i don't think we should think this is a modern phenomenon where are the people here where are the people in these stories you're telling us the people i say are doing uh running this country i mean it's a bewildering array of unsalaried posts that, I mean, that any male, it is largely male, but any male of, not of pauper status, but really quite middling, not necessarily literate, but there are a host of...

offices that anyone in England or Scotland would expect to fulfil at some point in their life and maybe we've kind of lost that. I think we've lost that close engagement. The only shred left often is jury trial and I mean that's very topical at the moment but that idea that you could... be summoned at any point to serve on a jury and to test your peers. That would be very sort of familiar to anyone in the early modern period who is responsible for ensuring poor relief or...

acting as a JP. And in some ways, early modern people were freer in terms of ruling themselves than we are, where we think we've got universal franchise and it's all about what you do every five years in ticking a box. Selina Todd, what's your sense of the development of that idea? Yeah, I just wanted to pick up on something that I thought was really interesting in what Claire said there about you said the ideas are there, but...

But there are moments in history where the forces come together and somebody can exchange. And I was really thinking about that actually in relation to Rupert's work, because one of the fantastic thing I think a lot of early modern historians have done in the last few years is to show how even in period...

of great repression, memory was a way of keeping common rights or perceived common rights alive generation on generation. And that then continues into the area where the nobility, the ruling class are engaged. closing land and so on and so forth. And Rupert, when I was reading your work, I was really struck that in a way, that same sense of entitlement really is there through the centuries. And that really interests me that those ideas continue.

And sure, we're often dealing then with moments of defeat. But then when there's a particular opportunity, as you were saying earlier, Rupert, where some of the levers become uncovered and people realise that they can pull them. ideas of entitlement, of rights are there and I was very struck by that. Rights seem to me to be something that come up again and again with what we might call the common people or in my period the working class. I've got a very interesting example.

Right now with the right to a jury trial and the rights of juries to make determinations on law, both being thrown into doubt, which I think is really quite a historic moment. But to generalise the point, I guess what I was... say is we've been talking a bit about the great man theory of history which I think also Rutger Bregman seems to be quite

keen on and then there's the traditional sort of counterpoint to that which is no it's about peoples it's about citizens etc which of course it is and i've been saying that so far here this evening but what we actually think in the climate majority project is that if we're going to accomplish the enormous

transformation that we need to accomplish now if we're going to have any kind of future it's going to require both it's going to require everyone what we actually need now is some kind of grand coalition of forward-looking elites and angry and concerned citizens to say, we've got to do this together, like in a wartime mobilisation. You know, you don't have a successful wartime mobilisation without basically getting the vast majority on side.

Could you just sketch in who the climate majority are? Who are you, Rupert? Who do you represent? What is the organisation? Yeah, so we run a thing called the Climate Majority Project, me and my colleagues, and the project bit is very important. I'll explain that. There is a climate majority, right? There is a majority of people who already...

are self-identified as people who are deeply concerned about the situation. Polls are very clear about that. But these people are not networked. They're not self-aware. They haven't in many cases succeeded in... processing the difficult truth fully and moving into action on the basis of it. So what we exist to do in the Climate Majority Project is to try to help that to become a reality, for the climate majority to become self-aware and to become powerful in the land.

and for action on climate and other existential threats to become mainstream. So Anne talked earlier about networks of authoritarians. What does your network, what does that mean? Can we kind of define what the network is in this context? Because it seems quite an important idea, one that links lots of the things we're talking about tonight. Yeah, so I'll give some examples. And the point is...

examples need to be kind of joined up and understood as part of the same broad phenomenon so we work with insurers as i mentioned earlier we work more generally with business people who are interested in making change we work also with people who are trying to create local adaptation, climate adaptation, meaning building resilience where they live, food growing, getting ready for the floods that are coming, etc. We work in some parts of the country with farmers and smallholders and so forth.

I think, you know, what do insurers and smallholders and people engaged in... building adaptation in their local community? What do they all have in common? And what they all have in common is that they're all concerned that we're moving into a future which is out of control and dangerous. And really, we're going to really get somewhere when people start to understand all of these things need to be kind of joined up and networked.

in this country and then of course ultimately abroad as well. Could I ask you to relate that to your... former life as a spokesperson for Extinction Rebellion, the history of that movement too. Is that rooted in any way in the historical examples we've heard about? I mean, perhaps not the gunpowder plotters, but that history of kind of...

radicalism and revolt that we've got in this country. Well, Extinction Rebellion, of course, looked back to John Locke and it looked back to the idea of rebellion as a phenomenon which has occurred in these isles on a number of occasions and said we need a new version of that. What we're trying to do in the Client Majority Project, one way of understanding it is...

It's that but kind of radically mainstreamed and done in legal ways, done in ways that can be open to most people. Because this is one of the problems with the image of activism, right? Most people think that activists are some other people over there who are very... very, very concerned and perhaps very, very angry. What we actually need is for the vast majority of people to start to step together into their power. That's what we're trying to...

co-create the possibility of. So it's about taking the kind of germ of the idea that was there in Extinction Rebellion of serious action based on the difficult truth and democratising that radically and making it...

something which is open and welcoming to, well, basically everybody. This is Freethinking on BBC Radio 4 and BBC Sounds with me, Matthew Sweet. Through frontline reporting, global stories and local insights, we bring you closer to the world's news as it happens. And it starts with a subscription to bbc.com.

giving you unlimited articles and videos, ad-free podcasts, the BBC News Channel streaming live 24-7, plus hundreds of acclaimed documentaries. Subscribe to trusted, independent journalism and storytelling from the BBC. Find out more at BBC. Thank you. And our thoughts this week follow the ideas raised by this year's Reith lecturer, Rutger Bregman, who's arguing for a moral revolution against dictators, authoritarians, unserious elites, and who, in his second lecture,

that such a change might be affected, as older ones have, by relatively small groups of people. Now, I want to explore the mechanical principles of this. I asked at the beginning, who makes... history happen? Is it groups? Is it individuals? Who is it? And I wonder whether a few kind of counterfactual examples might help here. These are parlour games, really, and maybe you'll think them

a bit vulgar, but they do ask us to think about the relationship between historical circumstances and the acts of individuals. So things like, you know, if Hitler gets into art college, does the Second World War happen? Or might the circumstances... of Versailles have nominated some other candidate for his role in history. Or if President Kennedy dodges that bullet, is the war in Vietnam...

any different? I mean, possibly not. It may have ground on for just as long. But I wonder, you know, whether maybe you even have your own examples like this. Yeah, Rupert. Well, yeah, so it's a little known fact that I write a blog called The Past That Wasn't.

which is about counterfactual history. And I'm trying to kind of rehabilitate the concept. I think it's really important. Here's one reason why it's important. When people are actually engaged in historical action, what they're always doing is asking themselves, shall we try and do this?

we try and do that if you don't have the sense of people being able to make choices in history then you've kind of lost the whole point so yeah we should absolutely look at the serious determinative power for example of climatic factors in history but we should absolutely be open also to the the way in which groups of people can make a difference and determine together whether we start to move one way or another. Anne Applebaum, do thought experiments like that help us decide how events occur?

I think they're tremendously important and they're tremendously helpful in reminding us that history is not inevitable. And I mean, even in that list, you can clearly find a few moments. Probably had Hitler got into art college and spent his life painting watercolors, we would have a very different kind of history. His particular combination of resentment, his ability to translate it into popular anger was... Maybe unique.

to him. And there are several other examples like that, too. You know, had Lenin not been sent across Germany in a closed car train, had he not arrived in time for the Russian Revolution, which, by the way, he didn't start. But had he not radicalized it and created the Bolshevik Revolution, maybe we wouldn't have had that either. And that's that's useful to remember, because then it reminds us that it was not necessary to have Nazi Germany and even Soviet history was not.

inevitable. And that, as we've just been saying, that gives people the sense that history doesn't have to end badly. You know, you can do something. You can make a difference. Delina? Yeah, I mean, I'd... I'm not a big fan of counterfactual history, if I'm honest. But I do think one of the things we can do, because we can keep in mind that what happens isn't inevitable is...

One of the things that I really like to do is play around with how do we judge success when we look at historical movements? Because when Rupert's talking, I'm thinking about some of the movements for environmental change earlier in history, the levellers, the diggers, the allotments movement. All of these that are very much grassroots, although, as you were saying, very often a broad church. I'm also thinking an area that's central to my scholarship.

feminist movements, which very often include transnational networks, very often include both those who might be called the elite and those that lower down the social scale coming together in interesting ways. And very few of those kinds of movements, I think, ever achieve all of their aims, certainly not in the space of a lifetime.

But the point is that we as historians can look and say, but they did achieve a great deal. Sometimes in an era of oppression, that's simply keeping ideas like democracy going. At other points, it's perhaps not getting the vote for everybody, but it's getting partial enfranchisement. to door for us to argue for universal suffrage and so on. I think some of it is which end of the telescope you're looking down. So I work on King's, so I'm at one end of the telescope.

If you work on dynastic history, you can't help do counterfactual history because, you know, people die unexpectedly. If Prince Henry hadn't developed a taste for swimming in the Thames early in the morning, he might have got a typhoid. He might have died at the age 18 and we wouldn't have had Charles I. And if we hadn't had Charles I, we might not have had the civil wars and we might not have had the levellers. And I think exactly the levellers and the diggers...

a really interesting moment because I think for too many years, people sort of wanted to see them as modern. And actually, the challenge is to see them as products, unsurprisingly, of their time. And even if... And much of what they were proposing was very aspirational. Much of it is still, if you like, yet to be achieved. And I think the skill that people like the Levellers had was to always...

frame their sort of demands on behalf of others, to talk as though they really were speaking on behalf of thousands or tens of thousands. What were their arguments? Oh, things about sort of universal suffrage, electing people in any position of authority.

concern about detention without trial, an obsession about jury trial. Actually, a real concern about welfare as well and poor law provision. So, you know, a raft of what we would... They weren't speaking for the majority. They were still radicals.

They're very aspirational. And without Charles I, that might never have happened. Absolutely. And I think just going on your point about the fact that they're a minority, I completely agree. And I think so often, you know, one of the things that's really struck me about what's happened to history over the last 50 years is...

we've somehow got away from thinking about the relationship between, for want of a better phrase, the top and the bottom. And in the end, I think for me, the lasting legacy of Marxism in history is that, that we've now have historians who look at the bottom or historians who... look at the top, but actually it's the relationship between the dialectic there.

That changes things. And as you say, some of those ideas that are so aspirational, they often come out of minorities who then over time begin to influence history in interesting ways. It's not always the case. It's the majority who are doing that. Well, you've introduced another idea.

ideas here, Selina, that we need to attend to. We've talked about individuals, we've talked about groups, but there are also these broader historical forces, aren't there? These more deterministic views of history, which Marxism is a good example of. You know, when you talk about And I don't know whether you would consider yourself to be a Marxist historian.

I'm definitely influenced by Marx. Yeah, absolutely. So what's your relationship with those forces then? How can we describe them? What are they? So I think that an earlier generation, some of an earlier generation of Marxist...

It took what we might call a very structural view of history, the idea that the economic state of things determines everything. You know, we could have a big philosophical discussion about whether that's what Marx intended. I thought it was rather good on the environment in many ways. But nevertheless, that's how it influenced historical writing to some extent.

Over the last 50 years or so, people have shifted. And I would say that although I'm influenced by Marx, one of the things that I'm particularly influenced by is what I just talked about, the idea that we need to look at relationships between those different groups to actually... power is never completely absolute and that it's the tension between those different interest groups that is interesting. But I do think there's...

Marxism does not speak to, for example, very easily autocracy. How do we deal with the fact that Nazism happened? How do we deal with autocrats and so on? So it can't enable us to answer everything. But I think that one of the things that it... And, you know, we've been having a sort of quite hopeful discussion in the last few minutes. But going back to Anne's work on autocrats, one of the interesting questions that Marks imposes for me is...

Why is it that sometimes these kind of autocrats do get that kind of popular... popular consent. You know, how do we explain what might look unreasonable and why it has some kind of attraction to people? Claire wants to come in, but I just want to ask you one thing, Selina. The network has come back in your conversation there. You know, one might... imagine that marxist historians talk about class not about networks that it might involve

people from more than one of those classes. Yeah, absolutely. Because I think that, you know, central to the idea of class is the idea of relationships. So classes are not, one is, you know, not born and inevitably a member of a working class.

class or a middle class or a ruling class. The fact is that classes exist only in relation to each other and they're fundamentally about power. And I do worry that we've got away from that in recent years and kind of, you know, we tend to treat class as an identity.

rather than what it is, which is a symbol of some people being exploited by others. And at certain moments in history, some of those people deciding that they're going to try to overcome that. And if I can just give one example of where I think that, say, structuralism can be a real problem.

One of the things that frustrated me for many years is that many Marxist historians who talked about class had a very, very particular idea of the working class. And when that group disappeared, more or less, because they looked like white men who were miners or steel workers.

in the global north, there began this great furore about, oh, well, there's no class anymore, you know, and how can we look at class? But actually, one of the things that my work's shown and that the historians of the global south have shown as well is that the...

The largest group of what we might call working class people, people who have to labour in order to live in the world, have been women, many of them migrants, and many of them domestic workers. So not fitting... at all, that kind of earlier heroic model of what working class might look like.

But actually, in many times and in many places, rebelling against their conditions, using economic change to get something better for themselves, their families, their communities, and questioning their exploitation.

I do think that class is still something that is really valuable for historians to look at, but we have to think about it as a relationship and we have to be open to thinking about it appearing in different times and different places. And I was just thinking of your mention of Marx as well.

enemies of all of this that have come up in the Reith Lectures or in Anne's work is apathy, disengagement, people being distracted. Yes. And how do we engage and sort of recover a sense of people no longer feeling alienated and having no agency. One of the points that was made in the Reith Lectures was related to the Atlantic slave trade.

And this is maybe a moment to talk about the influence of individuals. Jake, we heard about William Wilberforce and Thomas Clarkson in those lectures. Would the trade have been abolished without those two men? That's your count of actual. Like Selina, I'm not a huge fan of counterfactuals. I think that there is always choice and contingency in history, but actually one of the lessons we need to take forward is that once history has happened, that we learn from it and we...

We remember the horrors of it. If Hitler didn't go to, went to art college, I think we'd end up still with Nazis and Second World War and just a lot more bad watercolours, if I'm honest with you. And I think actually the power of something like the memorial to the Holocaust in the Bundestag with the dome, the...

transparent dome above German parliament, is that that is a monument to democratic, how a democratic culture should emerge and remember the horrors which would have happened anyway, you know, it would have happened anyway without Hitler. And German culture needs to learn to... deal with that in terms of moving forward I think that's a really important part of history and historical learning to turn to the slave trade I mean

Of course, Wilberforce and Clarkson led what was a huge modern political movement. I mean, it was multi-class, multi-racial. It was radical in late 18th century Britain. It involved petitioning, going door to door. There's new modern technology.

of political action in the late 18th century. But there were also forms of radicalism that existed beyond Wilberforce and Clarkson, not least the Haitian Revolution, where enslaved people themselves rose up and claimed freedom. And so one of the things I did in my book was to think about 1807 and abolition of the slave trade, not as the end point for William Wilberforce and Thomas Clarkson, but as a starting point.

It's a starting point for enslaved people who were swept up then by what abolition meant. And I took a dialectic approach to power, just the kind of one that Selina outlined. So looking at how empires try to administer abolition laws.

a new form of authoritarianism, trying to control shipboard captive people who were rescued from those ships and then forced to work for up to 14 years to repay the debt of rescue by all empires, by the British, the Spanish, the Portuguese. And yet at the same time, these... captive people use the law to make claims to freedom.

And crucially, some of the earliest groups to make those claims to freedom were women forced into domestic service because it was enslaved women who had been forced to repay the debt of rescue by working in domestic service who first of all realised that they needed to... ways out of that horrific work

Crucially, that they needed to get ways to generate legal paperwork that could protect not just themselves, but also their children, who were always at risk of being re-enslaved. So that's a way in which a dialectic approach to history really uncovers the agency of... in this case Afro-Brazilian women, in fighting for freedom.

I mean, your book really conveys the complexity, the messiness and the sort of elongated nature of all of this. I think many people imagine that somehow there's a moment of emancipation and then, you know, kind of everything's fine, but...

But it takes 70 years. I mean, a quarter of the entire transatlantic slave trade happens after 1807. And that's mainly an illegal trade to Brazil and Cuba to work in the coffee and sugar plantation industries that are supplying those goods to world markets, the industrial. lies in Global North, the US and Britain.

And so this process takes 70 years. It goes through the 1807 Abolition Act. It goes through the first steps in modern international law with treaties between big empires. All these laws apply the same kind of governing techniques of authoritarianism to the... So who's making it happen? Who makes this history happen, Jake?

Well, a dialectic, a combination of people. I mean, the naval patrols and imperial officers of the British Empire are involved in administering these people as labourers, as debt labourers. You know, they build the first public prison in Brazil. They're recruited. to the army and navy in the british caribbean so the the forms of new states are not early modern small states but really modern 19th century states with

growing institutions and prisons and garrisons are being built by these forced labourers. And yet those forced labourers are resisting those conditions, partly through the law and partly beyond them. They're launching insurgencies, they're petitioning for freedom. This is so interesting because there were so many rebellions, weren't there?

I mean, I think 8% to 10% of ships had rebellions on them? Absolutely. 8% to 10% of slaving ships suffered rebellions. One of the earliest stories I tell in the book is a rebellion aboard the slaving ship Amelia, which leaves Cabinda in Angola. in January 1811 and 19 days into the crossing, there's an uprising aboard that ship.

And the captive people who take over that ship managed to navigate it back to West Africa, to Sierra Leone, to freedom, where they eventually managed to buy a plot of land called Congo Town that represents their community. And Congo Town still exists today as a suburb. of Freetown. So 200 years later, people's collective resistance leads to real change for that community. And are these what we might call networks? I mean, you're talking about...

Captives responding to their confinement by, you say, forming kin bonds with fellow captives and engaging in insurgent protest and cultural creation. Yes, I mean, I asked this research question really at the beginning, which is how do you build a life out of nothing? So if you're displaced to a new place, you know, you don't speak the local language, you're not given any resources, no welfare existed for these liberated Africans.

have no income, what do they do and who can they rely on? And the one... group of people they can rely on as each other so people freed from the same slaving ship stay together stay in touch for many years throughout forced labor um to build lives that are independent so to give you an example in in sierra leone

people as shipmates, as people from the same slaving ship, pool credit. They form their own little micro credit for organisations to do things like buy farms for one another to set up sustainable forms of self-employment. So this is something that you can get in through the archives in place.

This is like Sierra Leone. And it's one of the wonderful aspects of the book. Selina and Rupert want to come here. You first, Selina. Yeah, I just, one of the things I found really inspiring about your work, Jack, is that you show, you know, like this thing, you know. class isn't just something and community isn't just something that you know we we just might make up as a category that people do it because

They want to because they have to, because it's a way of surviving. But also it's more than that. It's a way of creating a meaningful life going beyond survival. But the other thing that I think is really significant about your work, and you touched on it just earlier, is... implementation and I think one of the things that we really have to think about as historians and also as citizens of a democracy is yes we can pass laws but then

Who actually implements them? You know, they may be passed from above, although that pressure may well come from below. It may come out of the tension of a dialectical relationship. But the implementation, I've been thinking a lot about that recently in terms of the Sex Discrimination Act in the UK.

1975, there were trade unionists who were spending the next 15 years trying to get that implemented. But you make that point even more with slavery, that it just takes decades. And that pressure often has to come from below. So I want to say a word in favour of counterfactual history, which both Selina and Jake have dissed. Well, I like it and likes it. I like it. Good, good. When I write my counterfactual histories, I often write about movies.

movements or organizations or groups doing something different. And thinking about these slave ships, you know, brave, desperate people decided to rebel on some and... not on others. And some they succeeded and not in others. And, you know, we might think of that as a precedent now, frankly. Our situation can seem much less desperate than...

People on a slave ship. But as my friend Bayo Komalafi says, there's a sense in which we're all still on a slave ship. And actually, when you look, when you actually look into the jaws of climate breakdown and of the terrifying rise of AI and of the world. geopolitical situation and its deterioration, our situation is actually very desperate. And it's up to us to seek to decide to do one thing rather than another in that situation. And that's the kind of real meaning it seems to me now.

of thinking in a counterfactual way. Will I do this or will I do that or will I do nothing? And I would say to every single listener, and here I'm right with Rutger Bregman, decide to do something and try to make it the thing which is most effective. We need, we desperately need.

collective moral ambition at this moment in history. Can I just say, I really agree with that, but we are not on a slow ship, Richard. And I think that's really important to say, Rupert, because one of the things about the kind of people that Jake's talking about... He's a descendant of slaves.

Is that actually, you know, slavery was seen as very different at a point when there were lots and lots of forms of labour which were unfree in various ways, but there was something very particular about slavery and I don't think that should be forgotten. I started by talking about...

Who makes history? That's the question we began with. We talked about individuals from above and also great men, great leaders, not so great men. We talked about networks of those individuals, individual rather heroic. working from below or above, popular movements from below and the forces that lie beyond all of these, these more deterministic structures that we've mentioned. All these phenomena seem observable.

But which do you think are the most powerful and the most useful, Anne Applebaum? I think decisions made by individuals. Whether they are powerful or not powerful is the thing that matters the most. I mean, literally what happens tomorrow depends on... what people decide today and i genuinely i don't believe in any form of historical determinism i don't think any culture is is somehow destined to do one thing or another any country has a fate

that's written for it before everybody is born everyone who's alive has the power to make choices and also at any given moment there are a lot of different ideas kicking around i mean there have been autocratic instincts inside And just as when people have the opportunity to. protest in Iran. They do it. You know, so each each, you know, there's a war of ideas that goes on all the time. And it's up to.

both leaders and everybody else to make a decision that will push a society in one direction or the other. Jake? I completely agree about the importance of choice. And I think choice really matters. I do think that often... resistance is most effective when it is radical. I think it's often the radical forms of resistance that are the call to arms that move the centre ground.

So, you know, I think that's true with the Haitian Revolution. I think that's true with the civil rights movement. I'd be interested to know whether Rupert thinks that might also be true with environmental justice. So that's what we were trying to do with Extinction Rebellion in 2019. And it kind of worked. It's the thing I've been involved with in my life so far which has worked the most and where I felt most like, a little bit like a kind of historical actor along with others.

What we're trying to do in the climate majority project... Were you right to think that, do you think? I think it did work at the time, yeah. I mean, I think what's happened since has set the clock massively back. But the national conversation, to some extent, the international conversation was changed. a decisive...

amazing maneuver, frankly. With the Climate Majority Project, what we're trying to do is have not a radical flank effect, but a moderate flank effect. We think that there are times when what you need, and especially with a challenge like climate, which saturates by and is saturated by... I...

everything pretty much that we do, you're not going to get anywhere unless you have the vast majority of people at the very least giving some kind of active consent and actually arguably doing something more than that. So that's what we call a moderate flank effect rather than a radical flank effect. Celina Todd. Yeah, I think, you know, I do think that in the end, we have to think about history as multifaceted. And I don't mean that as a cop out, but I think we have to look at each period.

In its own way, I think there have been periods of history, for example, where, say, climate has not been such a decisive factor as I suspect it's going to be today. On the other hand, you know, I was reading recently about the Aztecs. And it turns out that there, lots of what was going on seems to have been provoked by a very uncertain climate, an acknowledgement of those kinds of climactic uncertainties. And also a kind of understanding...

that humans are sometimes on the periphery of those kinds of changes when they're environmental. So it's a very different kind of thing. I think what we have to do as historians is really look at periods and think, what...

Who are the people, but also what's the context, what are the circumstances in that particular case which is shaping the sphere of action in which people can make their decisions? Claire Jackson, what's your sense of this? Are we perhaps at a moment when individuals... individuals seem to have more power because institutions are weak it could be seen that way i mean i think just as children are born with an inbuilt sense of it's fair and it's not fair i think for

For generations, centuries, people have known what looks like legitimate power and what looks like illegitimate power. And one of the most powerful things in Anne's book, I think, is the systematic way in which... resistance attempts are often discredited. They're seen as being foreign or treasonous. And I was really struck when you were talking about opposition camps in the Maiden Square in Ukraine, not being taken seriously as...

as a self-propelling movement. And it was very similar in the 17th century. Nobody could believe that the gunpowder plotters would do this without some big noble patron. So I think people do need to be very articulate about the movements that they are joining and their aspirations.

Because it is actually only, and I suppose this has been a theme of the Reef lectures sometimes too, that by seeing something and being invited to join something very much as Rupert's doing, that people can begin to make these alignments across class, across gender, across race, and actually towards shared goals.

In small groups, perhaps, too. Starting in small groups, but then sometimes networks can grow across. There's no shortage of media or social media to make these things happen now. Well, thank you for being part of our... And thank you for mapping the way for us. And Applebaum, Claire Jackson, Jake Sobrian Richards, Rupert Reid and Selina Todd. And we're all grateful to the producer, Eliane Glazer. Monday start the week. We'll hear from the winners of some of the big. At the BBC, we go further.

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