Historically, performances in the Theatre of Shadows lasted throughout the night. Light from an oil lamp behind the puppeteer's head cast the shadows from the puppets on to a white sheet. Some members of the audience usually the women and children sat on the shadow side of the screen, while the men would sit on the favoured other side. The puppeteer, known as a dalang, would not only control the puppets but also conduct the accompanying music performed by a Gamelan orchestra.

Sumarsam, a leading dalang in the Theatre of Shadows today, gives us an idea of how complicated it is to pull off a smooth shadow-puppet performance: You need to control the puppets themselves, sometimes two, three or sometimes up to six puppets at one time, and the puppet master will have to know when to give a signal to the musicians to play. And of course the puppet master also gives voices to the puppets in different dialogues, and sometimes also he sings mood songs to set up the atmosphere of different scenes. He will have to use his arms and legs all of this to be done while he is sitting down cross-legged. It's fun to do it, but also a fairly challenging task. The stories can be updated, but the structure of the plot is always the same.

The stories told in the Theatre of Shadows are drawn largely from two great Hindu Indian epics the Mahabharata and the Ramayana, both written well over 2,000 years ago. They have always been widely known in Java, for Hinduism, with Buddhism, had been the main religion there before Islam became the dominant faith.

Like the Buddhism that inspired Borobudur around 800 (see Chapter 59) and the Hinduism that created the Mahabharata, Islam came to Java through the maritime trading routes that linked Indonesia to India and the Middle East. Local Javanese rulers quickly saw advantages in becoming Muslim: besides any spiritual attraction, it facilitated both their trade with the existing Muslim world and their diplomatic relations with the great Islamic powers of Ottoman Turkey and Mughal India. The new religion brought major changes in many aspects of life, but on the whole local Javanese culture and belief absorbed Islam, rather than being totally replaced by it.

The newly Islamic rulers seem to have gone along with this they actively patronized the Theatre of Shadows and its Hindu stories, which remained as popular as ever. The audience, then as now, would immediately recognize the Bima puppet. In the Mahabharata, Bima is one of five heroic brothers (you can follow their exploits today in animations on the internet) and the great warrior among them noble, plain-speaking and superhumanly strong, equal to 10,000 elephants, but also with a very good line in banter and something of a celebrity cook. One touch of his claw-like nails means death to his enemies.

The Bima puppet's black face expresses inner calm and serenity, unlike depictions of the 'bad guys' in the Theatre of Shadows, who are often coloured red for vindictiveness and cruelty. But his shape also tells us that an Islamic influence has found its way into this traditional Hindu art. This becomes obvious if we compare our Javanese puppet of Bima, with its caricature nose and claw hands, and another puppet of Bima made on the nearby island of Bali, which remained Hindu. The figure from Bali has rounded, more natural facial features, and his arms and legs are in more normal proportions to his body. Many in Java today would argue that these differences are explained by religion; and that the traditional Hindu puppets were deliberately reshaped by their Javanese Muslim makers in order to avoid the Islamic prohibition on creating images of humans and gods. Stories are told of attempts in the sixteenth or seventeenth century to ban the Theatre of Shadows; others tell of Sunan Giri, a noted Muslim saint, who ingeniously came up with the idea of distorting the features of the puppets in order to get around the prohibition a happy compromise that may explain our Bima's odd appearance.

A puppet of Bima from Bali shows more naturalistic features Today Indonesia, with 245 million inhabitants, is the world's most populous Islamic nation, and the Theatre of Shadows is still very much alive. The Malaysian-born author Tash Aw describes the continuing role of shadow theatre: Even today there is a great consciousness of what goes on in the realms of shadow theatre. It's an art form that is constantly being refreshed, that's constantly being put to new and very exciting use. And, although the body of the works are drawn largely still from the Ramayana and the Mahabharata, younger puppeteers are constantly using the shadow theatre to inject life and humour and a sort of bawdy commentary on Indonesian politics, which is difficult to replicate elsewhere. Just after the financial crisis in 1997, I remember a virtuoso monologue in Jakarta which roughly translates as 'The tongue is still comatose' or 'The tongue is still mute', in which the current President Habibie was cast as a ridiculous character called Gareng, who is short with beady eyes, incredibly earnest, but very inefficient. So, in many ways shadow theatre has become a source of social and political satire in a way that is difficult for TV, radio and newspapers to do, because those are much more easily censored; the shadow theatre is much more malleable, much more in touch with the grass roots and therefore much more difficult to control.

But it's not just the opposition who make use of the Theatre of Shadows. The former president Sukarno, the first president after Indonesia gained independence from the Dutch following the Second World War, liked to identify himself with shadow-puppet characters, and especially with Bima a righteous, mighty fighter, speaking like the common man rather than in elite language. Sukarno was often referred to as the dalang, the puppet master, of the Indonesian people the one to give them voice and direct them in their new state, leading them in their national epic, as indeed he did for twenty years before being ousted in 1967.

But why is this Bima now in the British Museum? The answer, as so often, lies in European politics. For five years between 1811 and 1816, as part of the worldwide struggle against Napoleonic France, Britain occupied Java. The new British governor, Thomas Stamford Raffles, who would later found Singapore (see Chapter 59), was a serious scholar and a great admirer of Javanese culture of every period and, like all rulers of Java, he patronized the Theatre of Shadows and collected puppets. Our Bima comes from him. That short period of British rule explains something else why the car from which the young Barack Obama saw a Hindu god in the streets of Muslim Jakarta was driving on the left-hand side of the road.

84.

Mexican Codex Map.

Map painted on bark, made in Tlaxcala, Mexico.

AD 15501600.

The Shi'a 'alam, Mughal miniature and Javanese shadow puppet represent cultures in which different faiths have managed to find reasonably positive ways of living together in India, Iran and Indonesia in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries religious tolerance was a hallmark of effective statecraft. But in Mexico around that time Christianity came as an instrument of conquest and was only slowly absorbed by the indigenous population. Now, 500 years later, more than 80 per cent of the population of Mexico is Catholic. In the process the physical landscape changed too: the invaders crushed temples and raised churches all over the Aztec Empire. It looks today like the most brutal and most complete replacement imaginable of one culture by another.

In the Zocalo, the main square of Mexico City, the palace of the Spanish viceroy stands on the very site of the demolished palace of Moctezuma. Nearby are the ruins of what was once the Aztec temple, whose sacred precinct is now largely taken up by the huge Spanish Baroque cathedral dedicated to the Virgin Mary. From the Zocalo, it looks as if the Spanish conquest of Mexico in 1521 was in every way cataclysmic for indigenous traditions, and that is how the story has generally been told. The reality, however, was more gradual and perhaps more interesting. The local people kept their own languages and, for the most part, their own land, although the fatal diseases which the Spanish had unwittingly brought with them meant that much land was freed up for the new settlers from Spain. The object in this chapter shows us something of how the complex amalgamation of faiths took place, and in it we can see both Spanish imperial methods and the resilience of local traditions.

It is an annotated map about 75 centimetres (30 inches) wide and 50 centimetres (20 inches) tall, painted on very rough paper, in fact Mexican bark that has been beaten into a sheet. On the map are geometrically drawn lines indicating, presumably, divisions of fields, with names written into them to show the owners, a small blue river with wavy lines, and a forking road, with feet on it showing that it is a thoroughfare. Then on top of this diagram are painted images in the middle a tree, and under it three figures wearing European dress, and then two large churches with bell towers, painted in bright colours of blue, pink and yellow, the principal features of the map. One of them is named Santa Barbara, the other Santa Ana.

The map represents an area in the province of Tlaxcala, to the east of Mexico City, a region whose people had bitterly resented Aztec rule and who had enthusiastically joined the Spaniards in defeating them (see Chapter 78). This may explain why so many of the names of land holders on the map show marriages between Spanish settlers and native Indian aristocrats, evidence of a remarkable fusion between the two peoples and the emergence of a new, mixed, ruling class. More surprisingly, a similar fusion took place in the church. For example, many communities in the Tlaxcala area had been protected by the indigenous Toci, grandmother of the Mexican gods, who after the conquest was replaced as local patroness by St Anne (Santa Ana), in Catholic tradition the grandmother of Christ. The grandmother may have changed her name, but it is unlikely that for the local worshippers she had in any serious way changed her nature.

Apart from disease, religion was the most significant new aspect of Mexican life under the Spanish. Catholic missionaries came with the conquerors in the 1520s and transformed the spiritual landscape. While in many places the conquest was violent, the conversion of local people to Catholicism was not usually forced: the missionaries were genuinely intent on instilling the true faith, so regarded compulsory conversion as worthless. Even if many Indians willingly converted, it is hard to believe they would have welcomed the destruction of their previous places of worship, yet this was a key part of Spanish policy. A Franciscan friar writing ten years after the conquest boasts of the achievements of this new, Mexican, church triumphant: More than 250,000 men have been baptized, 500 temples have been destroyed and more than 26,000 figures of demons, which the Indians worshipped, have been demolished and burned.

The churches of Santa Barbara and Santa Ana dominate the landscape on our map; one has clearly been built on top of a destroyed native temple. The art historian Samuel Edgerton describes the technique: Many of these Mexican churches are built on the platforms of old pagan temples. It's a very clever ruse to help the Indians feel comfortable in the new churches, which were literally on top of the old church or temples. The central church has in front of it a large courtyard, what is today called an atrio or a patio. This was an innovation that the friars introduced to the buildings of these churches in Mexico because in the beginning the churches were often small, and you could not crowd in all the Indians who were being brought in here to be converted. So you had them stand in this large courtyard, and there they were preached to from an open chapel it was easier for the church then to work as a 'theatre for conversion'.

The churches on our map these theatres of conversion were built within an existing landscape of roads, watercourses and houses. Names and places are given in a mixture of Spanish and the local Nahuatl language: for example, the church of Santa Barbara is in a village called Santa Barbara Tamasolco. Tamasolco means place of the toad, which almost certainly had a pre-Christian religious significance, now lost. The artist has painted a toad on the map, and the two religious traditions live on in the eccentric place-name 'Santa Barbara at the Place of the Toad'.

They also clearly lived on in the minds of the converted. An inscription on the map tells us: 'Juan Bernabe said to his wife: "Sister of mine, let us give soul to our offspring, let us plant the willows that shall be our memory." ' In this lyrical glimpse of private faith, Juan Bernabe, despite bearing two Christian saints' names, obviously still believes that his children's salvation will be achieved in communion with the natural world of native tradition, rather than, or at least as well as, inside the Catholic church down the road.

The babies of this 'New Spain', as the invaders called it, were, like Juan Bernabe, given new Christian names at baptism, but, again like Juan Bernabe, this didn't necessarily make them good Catholics. Later reformers would crack down on continuing pre-Christian practices and old rituals incantations, divination and mask-wearing were punished as sorcery or idolatry. But many ceremonies survived through the sheer tenacity of the indigenous people. The most striking modern example is perhaps the way pre-Christian ancestor veneration has merged with the Christian All Souls' Day to create the Day of the Dead, an entirely Mexican celebration, still vigorously alive, in which on 2 November every year the living remember their dead, with skulls and skeletons in colourful costumes, festive music, special offerings and food a celebration that owes as much or more to native Indian religious practices as to Catholic piety.

The Nahuatl language that appears on our map has just about survived. A census carried out in 2000 revealed that only 1.49 per cent of the population could still speak it. Recently, however, the mayor of Mexico City has said he wants all city employees to learn Nahuatl, in an effort to revive the ancient tongue. Quite a few Nahuatl words do in fact survive today although probably few of us realize we are using Nahuatl when we talk about tomato, chocolate or avocado. Significantly, but not surprisingly, no religious Nahuatl words have stayed with us the missionaries' teaching saw to that.

Five centuries after the conquest, the Mexican people today are increasingly eager to revive their pre-Hispanic past as a defining element of their national identity. But in the realm of faith, the legacy of the Christian conversion is still overwhelming. In spite of the great communist anti-clerical revolutions of the twentieth century, as the Mexican-born historian Dr Fernando Cervantes emphasizes, Mexico remains inextricably linked to the Catholic faith: There is a very strong anti-religious, anti-clerical nationalist ideology in Mexico, but it's very ambivalent because even the most atheistic Mexicans will never deny that they are devoted to the Virgin of Guadalupe, for instance. This is where the Catholic substratum comes through very strongly. You can't really square the circle of being Mexican and not being in some senses Catholic. So I think that this is where you can see how strong the early evangelization was and how alive it still is.

Crowds flood to the shrine of the Virgin of Guadalupe Everything that Dr Cervantes is talking about, indeed everything that our little map reveals about the Christianization of Mexico, is summed up on a colossal scale at the shrine of Guadalupe in the suburbs of Mexico City. After the Vatican, it is now the most visited Catholic shrine in the world. It was there, on the site of an Aztec shrine, that in December 1531, just ten years after the conquest, the Virgin Mary appeared to a young Aztec man whom the Spaniards called Juan Diego. She asked him to trust in her and she miraculously imprinted her image on his cloak. A church was built on the site of Juan Diego's vision, the image on the cloak produced miracles, and conversions followed in huge numbers. The crowds flooded into Guadalupe. For a long time the Catholic clergy were worried that this was in fact the worship of an Aztec goddess being continued where there had once been an Aztec shrine; but the combined forces of the two religious traditions have over the centuries proved irresistible. There are now so many visitors to Guadalupe that you have to move in front of the miraculous image on a conveyer belt. In 1737 the Virgin of Guadalupe was declared patroness of Mexico, and in 2002 Pope John-Paul II declared Juan Diego, the young Aztec born under Moctezuma, a saint of the universal Catholic Church.

85.

Reformation Centenary Broadsheet.

Woodblock print, from Leipzig, Germany.

AD 1617.

You can hardly turn on the radio or open a newspaper these days without being bombarded by yet another anniversary a hundred years since this, two hundred years since that. Our popular history seems to be written increasingly in centenaries, all generating books and exhibitions, T-shirts and special souvenir issues, in a frenzy of commemoration. Where did this habit of anniversary festivities begin? The answer takes us to the great struggle for religious freedoms played out across northern Europe in the seventeenth century. The first of all these modern centenary celebrations seems to have been organized in Germany, in Saxony in 1617; the event it was commemorating had taken place a hundred years earlier. In 1517, the story goes, Martin Luther picked up a hammer and nailed what was effectively his religious manifesto his ninety-five theses to a church door; in doing so he triggered the religious turmoil that would become the Protestant Reformation. The object in this chapter is a souvenir poster showing Luther's famous act, on a large single sheet of paper called a broadsheet, made for the centenary. And it isn't just a celebration, it's about getting ready for war.

In 1617, when this broadsheet was made, European Protestants were facing an uncertain and dangerous future. The New Year had opened with public prayers by the Pope in Rome calling for the reunion of Christendom and the eradication of heresy. He was effectively calling the Catholic Church to arms against the Reformation. It was clear to many that a terrible religious war was about to break out. In response the Protestants tried to find a way of rallying their supporters for the fight, but unlike the Catholic Church they had no central authority to issue directions to the faithful. Protestants had to find other ways of insisting that the Reformation had been part of God's plan for the world, that individuals had no need of priests to gain access to God's mercy, that the Roman church was corrupt, and that Luther's Reformation was essential to the salvation of every living soul. Above all, they needed a view of their past that would give all Protestants strength to face the terrifying future.

Before this point, no particular day or moment had been identified as the beginning of the Reformation. But leading Protestants in Saxony realized that it was now a hundred years since the heroic moment when, on 31 October 1517, Luther had first publicly challenged the authority of the Pope, so it was said, by nailing his ninety-five theses on to the door of the Castle Church at Wittenberg in Saxony. So, with a masterly sense of media management, they launched the first centenary celebration in the modern sense. All the familiar razzmatazz was there: ceremonies and processions, souvenirs, medals, paintings, printed sermons, and the broadsheet a woodblock print which illustrates the critical day that Protestants now saw as the beginning of the first step on their radical religious journey.

The broadsheet is a crowded composition, but the message is quite clear: in a dream, God is revealing to the elector of Saxony the historic role of Martin Luther. We see the elector asleep. Below him, Luther reads the Bible in a great shaft of light coming down from heaven, where the Trinity is blessing him. As Luther looks up, light pours down on to the page in front of him: here, scripture is the word of God, and to read the scripture is to encounter God and this is not happening inside a church. You could not have a simpler statement that for Protestants, Bible-reading is the foundation of faith, a foundation which, thanks to the new technology of printing, was now available to all believers in their own homes.

This broadsheet was produced in Leipzig, which in 1617 was a centre of the European printing trade. As the religious historian Karen Armstrong describes, by then the whole pattern of religion in northern Europe had been changed by this new emphasis on reading the word of God: It is very noticeable in this picture, the emphasis on the written word. Up until this point religion had been precisely about listening for what lay beyond language. People had thought not so much in terms of words or concepts or arguments but in terms of images, of icons, in terms of music, of action. Now, because of the invention of printing, which helped Luther disseminate his ideas, everything is going to become much more wordy. That has been rather the plague of Western religion ever since, because we are endlessly now stuck in words. Printing enabled people for the first time to own their own Bibles, and this meant that they read them in an entirely different way.

Without printing, the Reformation might well not have survived, and the broadsheet's combination of text and illustration shows that along with words the image was still very much alive. Seventeenth-century Europe was still largely illiterate even in the cities no more than a third of people could read so prints with images and just a few key words were the most effective means of mass communication. Even today we all know a well-crafted cartoon can be lethal in public debate.

The front of the print shows Luther writing on the church door, with the world's biggest quill pen, the words Vom Ablass 'About Indulgence' the title of his virulent attack on the Catholic sale of indulgences, the system by which souls spent less time in purgatory in return for cash paid to the church during their lifetime. The selling of indulgences had fuelled anti-papal feeling in Germany. Luther's quill stretches half way across the print to a walled city, helpfully labelled Rome, and straight through the head of a lion labelled Pope Leo X, who squats on top of it. As if that wasn't enough, the quill then knocks the papal crown off the head of the Pope shown in human form. Never was a pen mightier than this one. The message is coarse but clear Luther, inspired by reading the scriptures, has destroyed papal authority by the power of his pen.

Woodblocks like this were the first mass medium with print runs in the tens of thousands, allowing each single copy to cost just a few pfennigs the price of a pair of sausages or a couple of pints of ale. Satirical prints were pinned up in inns and market places and then widely discussed. This is in every sense popular art, the equivalent of the tabloid press or a satirical magazine, like Private Eye. We asked Private Eye's editor, Ian Hislop, to comment: The editor of this broadsheet has done exactly what you'd expect. He's cracked his hero up, he's demonized the enemy, turned him into an animal, and then into a ludicrous figure, a sort of blank-looking rather stupid person, who has his hat knocked off. All around the pen there are bits of it fallen off, so that everyone else has got a pen as well this is about writing, about the word and, even more, about printing, because now the Bible can be printed, and we see that we're up in heaven here and the word of God comes down from heaven straight on to the page.

So no priests in the way, no Pope, no nothing, to get between you and the word of God. The thing I love about it is that it's like reading a magazine, there are big pictures with obviously cartoony jokes, and then there are captions everywhere to make sure that you don't miss anything. My German isn't really good enough to get a lot of the jokes, but looking at it, I just put my own in. I imagine someone here saying, 'Abandon Pope all ye who enter here,' or Luther with the pen is saying 'It's the quill of God,' or a lot of very strict Catholics saying, 'Yes, but your interpretation is much Luther.' In fact I hope the jokes are better than that, but it's pretty clear what's going on in this picture, and I think it's terrific.

The broadsheet was obviously aimed at a very wide public, but it has one particular viewer in mind: the elector of Saxony. If religious differences were going to come to open warfare, Protestantism would survive only if its princely champions fought to defend it. The elector of Saxony in 1617 would have to be just as resolute as his predecessor in 1517 and so would all the other Protestant rulers in Germany.

War came the very next year, 1618, and for thirty years devastated central Europe. By 1648 the two exhausted sides recognized that this was not a winnable contest. The bloodshed of the Thirty Years War forced the reluctant combatants to recognize that the only basis for lasting peace would be pragmatic tolerance and legal equality between Catholic and Protestant states.

In this part of the book, I have been looking at how very different societies across the seventeenth-century world addressed the political consequences of religious diversity Protestant and Catholic, Sunni and Shi'a, Hindu and Muslim. Safavid Iran and Mughal India contrived more-or-less peaceful accommodations. Christian Europe foundered in war. But in the 1680s the English philosopher John Locke, in his Letter Concerning Toleration, held out the possibility of an ultimate happy outcome even in Europe: The toleration of those who hold different opinions on matters of religion is so agreeable to the Gospel and to reason, that it seems monstrous for men to be blind in so clear a light.

This conviction, dearly and bloodily bought, that there are many ways to truth, changed the intellectual and political life of Europe, so that in 1717, when the bicentenary of Luther nailing his theses to the church door came round and new broadsheets were produced, the whole continent was well on the way to a revolution just as profound as the Reformation and, in many ways, a consequence of it the Enlightenment.

PART EIGHTEEN.

Exploration, Exploitation and Enlightenment.

AD 16801820.

The European Enlightenment (16801820) was an age in which scientific learning and philosophy flourished. Although often rightly associated with reason, liberty and progress, the Enlightenment was also a period of European imperial expansion, when the transatlantic slave trade was at its height. Important advances in navigation allowed European sailors to explore the Pacific more thoroughly, and for the first time the indigenous cultures of Hawaii and Australia were connected to the rest of the world. The dialogues and exchanges, the difficult transactions and misunderstandings, the straightforward clashes which resulted from encounters between Europeans and non-Europeans all over the world created an often deeply troubling history, since much of it resulted in the suppression of peoples and the fracturing of societies. Europe, however, was not the world's only successful growing economy: China under the Qing Dynasty was regarded by many Europeans as the best-governed empire in history, and was enjoying its own version of the Enlightenment.

86.

Akan Drum.

Drum, made in West Africa, found in Virginia, USA.

AD 17001750.

The true spirit of jazz is a joyous revolt from convention, custom, authority, boredom, even sorrow from everything that would confine the soul of man and hinder its riding free on the air.

These are the words of the black American historian J. A. Rogers, writing in the 1920s about the nature of jazz a music of freedom and rebellion that can trace its roots back to the terrible days of the slave trade between Africa and America in the eighteenth century, when drums were brought over from Africa to America along with the slaves, and music gave the enslaved and displaced a voice, connected their communities, and provided a language that would ultimately cross continents. Drums like this one stand at the head of that whole African-American musical tradition which dominated the twentieth century. Blues and jazz are just two of the great musical genres which begin here music of poignant regret, or exuberance and rebellion the music of liberty.

This is the earliest African-American object in the British Museum. From this drum made in Africa, taken to America, sent on to England and others like it, we can recover some of the story of one of the biggest forced migrations in history. These utterly dispossessed people were allowed to bring nothing with them but they brought the music in their heads, and one or two instruments were carried on the ships. With them came the very beginnings of African-American music. Kwame Anthony Appiah, who teaches at Princeton University, comments: These drums are important to life, and if you could take one with you to the New World, it would have been a kind of source of memory that you could take with you, and that's one of the things that people taken into slavery tried to hold on to.

When the British Museum opened its doors for the first time, in 1753, Europe's engagement with the rest of the world the Enlightenment enterprise of gathering together all the world's knowledge was in full swing. The founding collection was mostly the legacy of Sir Hans Sloane, an Irish physician with wide-ranging interests, and consisted of scientific instruments, plants and materials, stuffed animals and wildly various and intriguing human-made objects from around the globe. Part of the collection was this drum, acquired in Virginia around 1730 and in the eighteenth century thought to be an American Indian drum. It retained that identification until 1906, when a curator in the Museum guessed that it could not be any such thing: it looked more like drums from West Africa. Much later, his hunch was confirmed through scientific examination by colleagues at Kew Gardens and at the Museum. We now know that the main body of the drum is made of wood from the tree Cordia africana, which is prevalent in West Africa, and other parts of the drum pegs and cords derive from wood and plants from the same region. This is unquestionably a West African drum, which by 1730 had travelled from West Africa to Virginia.

The first African slaves arrived in British North America in 1619, brought to the American colonies on European-owned ships to provide labour for the ever-expanding plantations. At first they were put to work cultivating sugar and rice, later tobacco, and then, finally and most famously, cotton. By the early 1700s the trade in enslaved people had become the most lucrative business between the European maritime powers and West African rulers. Overall, around 12 million Africans were transported to America from Africa, and both sides European and African were profitably involved. Kwame Anthony Appiah has heritage from both sides.

I always like to tell people I have slave traders on both sides of my family: some of both my English ancestors and my Ghanaian ancestors were involved in the slave trade. You have to understand that it was a trading relationship as the trade developed, by the eighteenth century in a place like Asante where I grew up, and where the drum comes from, they had become very dependent on the slave trade. They were going out in warfare, capturing large numbers of people, and sending them down to the coast, exchanging them for the goods they were getting from Europe, which would have included guns that made it possible for them to proceed with more warfare.

The drum comes from the Akan people, a group which includes the Asante and Fante kingdoms, and was possibly used at court, probably as part of a drum orchestra music and dance were fundamental ingredients of ceremonial and social life.

We assume the drum was taken on a slave ship but not by a slave. Slaves took nothing. It may have been a gift to the captain, or taken by a chief's son we know they sometimes sailed with the slavers to America as part of their education. On board, the drum had little to do with the joy of communal music-making. Drums like this were used for what was grotesquely called 'dancing the slaves': As soon as the Ship has its Complement [of slaves], it immediately makes off; the poor Wretches, while yet in sight of their Country, fall into Sickness and die ... The only sure means to preserve 'em, is to have some Musical Instrument play to 'em, be it ever so mean.

Slaves were taken on to the decks and forced to dance to the rhythms of the drum to keep them healthy and to combat depression, which the slave captains knew could lead to suicide or mass revolt. Once on the plantations in America, the slaves were allowed to drum and make music for themselves, but it was not long before slave owners grew anxious that drumming, used once again for communal communication, would not prevent rebellion but incite it, and indeed in South Carolina in 1739 drums were used as a call to arms at the outbreak of a violent slave rebellion. It prompted the colony to prohibit drums by law and classify them as weapons.

Hans Sloane, who had the drum brought to London, was himself a slave owner in Jamaica and published one of the very first transcriptions of slave music. Sloane also described the slaves' instruments and explained why the authorities in Jamaica ultimately banned them: Slaves formerly on their Festivals were allowed the use of Trumpets after their fashion and Drums made of a piece of a hollow Tree ... But making use of these in their Wars at home in Africa, it was thought too much inciting them to Rebellion, and so they were prohibited by the Customs of the Island.

This Akan drum, collected for Sloane in the early 1700s, might have been confiscated in one of the drum bans on the plantations. It is just over 40 centimetres (16 inches) high and carved into patterns around the wooden body, which sits on a narrow foot. Intriguingly, the material stretched over the drum is deerskin, almost certainly North American, which could well have been acquired in trade with a local Native American. The complicated relationships between African Americans and Native Americans in the eighteenth century are often overlooked, but there was a good deal of contact, including intermarriage. Some Native Americans had their own slaves both Native American and African. This is a history that is not often mentioned, but it adds another resonance to the identification of the object itself in the eighteenth century as an 'Indian drum'.

The story of the drum is a story of global displacement: enslaved Africans transported to the Americas; Native Americans forced westward by encroaching slave plantations; the drum itself taken from Africa to Virginia and, in the latest phase of its life, to London. And here the most extraordinary thing has happened like the drum, the children of slaves have now also come to England. Many descendants of all those once involved in the slave trade British, West African and Afro-Caribbean now live together in the same cosmopolitan city. The Akan drum has become a typical twenty-first-century Londoner. Bonnie Greer, an African-American playwright and Trustee of the British Museum who now lives in London, explains: The drum itself represents to me the idea of voyage, and crossing. I crossed the Atlantic to be here, and the drum did too. And so it represents for me that passage of my ancestors. And the ancestors of a good number of black British citizens as well.

As a person of African descent and also having Native American ancestry as well ... it represents those two strands of myself, and of many African Americans, and of many people from the Caribbean as well ... and I always say that the thing that's remarkable about these objects for us who were taken forcibly, from our environment, is that these objects have travelled with us. And they've actually become what we have become, and they have accompanied us here to live in this place and to thrive in this place. And because we are part of that object, and it's part of us, it's quite right that it is here.

The drum is a record of many dialogues. The next object is a record of no dialogue, just misunderstanding. It is from the other side of the world, and it was collected by Captain James Cook. It makes no sound, but it too is eloquent testimony to the clash of cultures.

87.

Hawaiian Feather Helmet.

Feather helmet, from Hawaii, USA.

AD 17001800.

In 1778 the explorer Captain James Cook was in the Pacific, on board HMS Resolution, looking for the North-West Passage, hoping to find a sea route north of Canada that would connect the Atlantic and Pacific oceans. He didn't find the North-West Passage, but he did redraw the map of the Pacific. He was charting coastlines and islands, collecting specimens of plants and animals. At the end of 1778 he and his crew landed in Hawaii, returning again in early 1779. It is impossible to imagine what the islanders made of these European sailors, the first outsiders to visit Hawaii for more than 500 years. Whoever or whatever the Hawaiians thought Cook was, their king presented him with magnificent gifts, among them chieftains' helmets rare and precious objects made of yellow and red feathers. Cook recognized these as an acknowledgement by one ruler of another, a clear sign of honour. But a few weeks later, Cook was dead, killed by the same people who gave him the helmets. Something had gone drastically wrong.

This is one of the feathered helmets given to Cook and his crew, and it stands now as a vivid emblem of the kind of fatal misunderstandings that have run through European contacts with people across the globe. I began this history of the world by saying that objects connect us in our common humanity more often than they separate us, but looking at some of the objects I'm not quite so sure. Can we ever really grasp how a very different society imagines the world and orders itself? And can we find words for concepts that we have never known?

In the eighteenth century European explorers, Cook above all, set about accurately mapping and charting the oceans especially the huge and unknown Pacific. Before the great Egyptian collections arrived at the British Museum (see Chapter 1), it was the objects from Cook's voyages in the South Sea that everybody wanted to see glimpses of a new and other world. The Hawaiian feathered helmet, so delicate that the red, yellow and black feathers which cover it could come off at the slightest movement, was one of the prize exhibits. Like an ancient Greek helmet, it fits close to the head but has a thick, high crest running over the top from front to back like a Mohican haircut. The top of the crest has alternating rows of yellow and red, the sides and body of the helmet are scarlet, and the front edge has a thin black and yellow edging. The colouring is vivid and radiant, and the wearer would instantly have stood out from the crowd. The red feathers are from the i'iwi bird, a species of honeycreeper, the yellow ones from a honeyeater, which has mostly black plumage but also a few yellow feathers. These tiny birds were first caught, then plucked and finally released, or killed. The feathers were then painstakingly attached to fibre netting moulded to a wickerwork frame. Feathers were the most valuable raw material at the Hawaiians' disposal; their equivalent of turquoise in Mexico, jade in China or gold in Europe.

This is a helmet in every way worthy of a king, and it probably belonged to the overall chief of Hawaii Island, by far the largest of the Hawaiian archipelago, which lies around 3,600 kilometres (2,300 miles) from the American mainland. Polynesians had established settlements on the islands by about AD 800, part of that great ocean-going expansion which also settled Easter Island and New Zealand. It seems that from about 1200 to 1700 they were utterly isolated; Cook was the first stranger to visit for 500 years. But he was probably less surprised by them than they were by him. During their isolation the Hawaiians had developed social structures, customs, agriculture and craft skills that, although superficially alien and exotic, nonetheless seemed to make sense to the Europeans. The anthropologist and expert on Polynesian culture Nicholas Thomas explains: When Cook arrived in Polynesia, he encountered societies that struck Europeans as possessing their own sophistication ... In Hawaii in particular, extraordinary kingdoms had emerged that embraced whole islands and that were caught up in complex trading relationships among different islands. They were encountering complex and dynamic societies with aesthetics and cultural forms that impressed Europeans in all sorts of ways ... How could such cultural practices exist in places that were so remote from the great centres of Classical civilization?

In many ways, it seemed not unlike eighteenth-century Europe. A large population was ruled by an elite of chiefly families and priests. Under these families came the professionals craftsmen and builders, singers and dancers, genealogists and healers who in turn were supported by the main population, who farmed and fished. The maker of the feathered helmet would have been a professional craftsman. Kyle Nakanelua, from Maui, Hawaii, has examined the helmet: If you figure that only four of those feathers can be taken from one bird at a time, and that looks like about 10,000 feathers, you get how many birds you need. At one given time, this chief has a retinue of people with the occupation of collecting, storing and caring for these feathers, and then manufacturing them into these kinds of products. So you're talking about an industry of anywhere from 150 to 200 people just collecting and storing and manufacturing, and it could have been that they were collecting these feathers for generations before putting one of these articles together.

Chiefs donned feather helmets and capes to make contact with the gods when making offerings to ensure a successful harvest, for instance, to avert disasters such as famine or illness, or to propitiate the gods before a battle. The feather costumes were the equivalents of the great helmets and coats of arms of medieval chivalry highly visible ceremonial clothes worn by chiefs to lead their men into the fight. Above all, these costumes gave access to the gods. Made from the feathers of birds, themselves spiritual messengers and divine manifestations which moved between earth and heaven, they gave the person who wore them supernatural protection and sacred power. Here's Nicholas Thomas again Feathers were particularly sacred, and not just because they were pretty or attractive: they were associated with divinity. Legends often had it that gods were born as bloody babies covered with feathers, saturated, in a sense, with divine power and associations from the other world, particularly when they came in sacred colours of yellow and red.

These ideas were not so strange to Cook. Of course, English kings weren't born covered in feathers, but they were divinely anointed monarchs who carried out priestly functions in elaborate ceremonial robes in a cult where the Holy Spirit was represented by a bird. Cook seems to have 'read' this society as, at bottom, like his own. But he could not grasp the Hawaiians' very particular sense of the sacred, which is hedged around by terrifying prohibitions. The word taboo is Polynesian, its resonances both holy and lethal.