Telling a history of the world with objects

This past week I’ve been tak­ing A His­tory of the World in 100 Objects for a spin in my mp3 player. It is an extra­or­di­nary, inspir­ing, and slightly crazy British Muse­umm/BBC co-production based on the belief that objects can open up news ways of under­stand­ing two mil­lion years of human his­tory. It revolves around a series of 15 minute radio spots that take one arte­fact, tell its story about the peo­ple who made it, and tell new sto­ries rein­ter­preted by sub­se­quent gen­er­a­tions. I’m at episode four, and the nar­ra­tives are grip­ping. The plot emerg­ing is not the his­tory of any one nation or peo­ple, but rather of the inter­con­nec­tions and com­mon ground they all share. Amartya Sen explains this in the first episode:

I think what is really very impor­tant to rec­og­nize is that, when we look at the his­tory of the world, we’re not look­ing at the his­tory of dif­fer­ent civ­i­liza­tions trun­cated and sep­a­rated from each other. They’ve a huge amount of con­tact with each other, there is a kind of inter-connectedness. So I’ve always felt, not to think of the his­tory of the world as a his­tory of civ­i­liza­tions, but as a his­tory of world civ­i­liza­tions evolv­ing in often sim­i­lar, often diverse ways, always inter­act­ing with each other. And this is a very dif­fer­ent view from the clash of civ­i­liza­tions to which we were exposed some years ago, as a way to under­stand enmity in the world. Enmity has not been the gen­eral con­di­tion of the rela­tion­ship between peo­ple across the world in history.

The pro­gramme is fully socially medi­ated, both online and offline with regional museum pro­grams; it will be inter­est­ing to see if the sto­ries sus­tain the momen­tum gen­er­ated in these first episodes.