2020 THE HISTORIANS’ VERDICT
Matt Elton: The past year has been extraordinary. Which news stories have stood out for you as historians?
Michael Wood: There’s an apocryphal Chinese saying – “may you live in interesting times” – and it’s been a fascinating year if you’re interested in history. Coronavirus has, of course, been huge news. And the Black Lives Matter movement is vitally important, not only in its own right but as part of a wider revolt against the political and intellectual establishment encoded in the 19th century and the view of history that underwrote it.
Of course, the biggest history story is climate change, which is rapidly becoming a catastrophe. It affects everything, and no event is more serious, but it’s been masked this year by other, utterly remarkable stories.
Tom Holland: Environmental degradation clearly remains a huge story – and not just climate change, either, but also the ongoing process of mass extinction, and the encroachment of humans on to reaches of the world previously immune to such encroachment. Of course, that’s partly what led to the pandemic, and the onset of zoonotic viruses and pandemics is part of a trend that we can expect to recur in the future.
Another story is the ongoing rise of China and, more generally, the rise of a multi-polar world. The pandemic has brought home to us the way in which, as the west’s economic, military and political power retreats, so too does its cultural power. This year has demonstrated to us that the assumption the west has been able to enjoy for at least 200 years – that what it thinks and argues, and its values, problems and issues, will have an impact on the rest of the world – is no longer the case. Indeed, I have a rather different perspective on Black Lives Matter which is how specific to the west, and Anglo-America, it is. It makes no sense at all to other parts of the world.
On the contrary, I think that the events of 2020 have demonstrated the need, at this moment in world history, to recognise that movements around the world, such as Black Lives Matter’s stand against racial capitalism, are not localised. They are global. Even though they are led by particular groups of people – specifically African-descended and African-American people in the Movement for Black
