Learning Zone Andrew Marr's History of the World

In 356 BC, a legend was born

in a kingdom to the far north of Greece - Macedonia.

He would be a new kind of empire-builder

and he'd take Greek culture deep into Asia.

According to legend, when he was a boy,

a wild, unbroken horse was brought to his father's court in Macedonia.

The boy begged his father to let him try to tame the beast.

He had noticed that the horse was afraid of its own shadow.

The horse was called Bucephalus, and the boy would, of course,

grow up to be Alexander the Great.

Alexander was brought up on stories

of Homer's heroes from the Trojan Wars.

He was a true child of the Greek golden age.

His father hired the great philosopher, Aristotle,

and asked him to create a little school here

in a remote part of Macedonia, where he spent three years

intensively teaching the young Alexander

everything from history and geography

to mathematics and philosophy,

and one of the things that started to entrance Alexander -

the stories of the Persians.

His father said to him,

"My son, seek out a kingdom worthy of yourself.

"Macedonia's too small for you."

Alexander became king of Macedonia at the age of 20

after his father was assassinated.

His imperial ambition was said to be limitless.

After finishing off independent Greece,

he crashed through today's Turkey, marched into the Middle East

then into Egypt, before conquering the old enemy, Persia,

and carrying on towards Afghanistan and the borders of India.

Along with war and conquest,

Alexander founded 70 Greek-style towns

across North Africa and Asia.

And Greek became the new common language across his empire.

Alexander's Macedonian veterans

scattered his enemies wherever he led them.

But Alexander was fascinated by the people he conquered,

and he thought that knitting together their different traditions

could create a new kind of almost multicultural empire.

Alexander wanted to mingle

Macedonian and Greek customs with Persian customs.

So he started wearing Persian clothes and the Persian royal crown,

and even making people prostrate themselves in front of him in the Asian manner.

So it's not surprising that his plain-speaking Macedonian generals

became outraged at his decadent clothing

and his increasingly foreign habits.

Even Alexander's trusted friend, Cleitus,

thought he was going too far.

Cleitus was the leader of the Macedonian cavalry.

He'd once saved Alexander's life in battle.

Now he was taunting him for being more Persian than Greek.

The Macedonians were famous across Greece for being great drinkers,

and Alexander was no exception.

But this fight was just a bit worse than your average drunken brawl.

After the death of Cleitus,

Alexander is said to have wept and fasted for three days.

But he then briskly wiped the tears away and marched straight on,

until his empire was the biggest the world had ever known.

And to bond his peoples, he went far further

in trying to fuse the cultures of Greece and Asia.

He married, not one, but two Asian princesses himself

and he then applied the same logic to his troops.

Alexander organised a mass wedding of Macedonian soldiers

and Persian women, and gave them all generous golden dowries,

and the marriages were extended way down into the Macedonian army.

Alexander wanted the children of these hundreds of Greek

and Persian marriages to be the beginning of a new warrior people

who'd preserve his empire long into the future.

But within a year of the mass wedding, aged just 32,

Alexander was dead, some say poisoned.

It's more likely that he died - unheroically - of typhoid fever.

Alexander's gigantic empire

was divided up between feuding successors,

but the spread of the Greek language and culture continued

from Athens to Syria, North Africa, right the way to Afghanistan.

And the culture of ancient Greece,

its architecture and its legends, its poetry and its philosophy

would shape the classical world and then, later, all the West.

In the broad sweep of human history,

Alexander's empire was a heartbeat, a mere puff of smoke.

But he acted as a kind of giant, bloody cultural whisk...

..churning together the Greek and the Persian worlds.

And his story reminds us of the uncomfortable truth,

that war - however horrible -

is one of the great change-makers in human history.

In the late 1700s, the King of France, Louis XVI,

ruled with absolute power over his people.

This was a country in which the rich, powerful aristocracy

and the church enjoyed endless privileges,

while the poor worked to keep them in luxury.

Louis, like the monarchs before him,

had spent vast fortunes on foreign wars,

but he hadn't noticed the revolution brewing on his doorstep.

France was almost bankrupt,

but the people who mostly had the money -

the nobility and the church -

mostly didn't pay tax, and so, in desperation,

Louis summoned representatives

of the common people of France to help him.

Big mistake, because, for the first time,

the seething and put-upon majority had a voice.

In the summer of 1789, simmering anger and resentment

exploded into full-blown class war on the streets of Paris.

On the 14th July, hundreds marched on a hated symbol of royal power,

a fortress and prison called the Bastille.

The Bastille had just seven prisoners inside, none political.

The crowd really wanted its store of gunpowder.

The besiegers cut off the governor's head with a pocket knife,

and paraded it through the streets.

This was much more than simply a mob.

The French Revolution would be led by shopkeepers,

journalists and lawyers.

For the first time, the citizens took control

and formed their own government.

The king's powers were stripped away

and he was ordered not to leave Paris.

The leaders of this popular revolt had genuinely revolutionary ideas.

Very quickly they abolished all the privileges of the aristocracy.

They insisted on fair taxes

and they took on the incredibly wealthy and powerful Catholic church.

Above all, they declared the rights of man,

the equality of all citizens, their right to an elected government,

free speech and fair courts.

These were the ideals of the early French Revolution:

liberte,

egalite,

fraternite.

Louis XVI faced a clear choice.

Could he accept equality and liberty for all,

or would he fight to keep absolute power?

His position wasn't hopeless.

France was surrounded by other absolute rulers with armies

who might come to his rescue.

Louis decided to escape with his spectacularly unpopular queen,

Marie Antoinette.

On the night of 21st June, 1791,

the royal family sneaked away from Paris

disguised - not very well - as servants,

and they fled for the border.

It should have been easy.

This was a world where few faces were recognisable.

Vos papiers, monsieur?

Merci.

But, just 40 miles from the border, a local postmaster

who'd served in the royal cavalry recognised the queen.

Attendez un instant.

Mais c'est la Reine! C'est la Reine!

C'est la Reine! Et regardez, c'est le Roi!

He checked his money and there was the king's face, on a banknote.

C'est le Roi, c'est le Roi et la Reine!

The king and his family were taken back to Paris in disgrace.

The shift from absolute power to absolute irrelevance was complete.

From now on, the king was a pathetic figure.

In September, 1792, France declared herself a republic

and that winter Louis was put on trial for treason.

As to the result, there was never any doubt.

On January 21st, 1793, at 9 o'clock in the morning,

Louis XVI was driven through the streets of Paris

to meet his sharpest critic so far.

The guillotine had only been at work here for nine months.

It was itself a product of the ideals of the revolution -

humane, efficient, and fast.

It was promoted, not invented, by Dr Joseph Guillotine.

"Now with my machine," he said,

"I can cut off your head in the twinkling of an eye and you never feel it."

It was also supremely democratic,

killing both commoners and nobility in just the same way.

Now this democratic killing machine was about to slice away

a thousand years of French monarchy.

Louis may have been born to be a king

but he was about to die as a criminal.

He announced his innocence and he forgave his enemies.

Je meurs innocent de tous les crimes qu'on m'impute

et je pardonne les auteurs de ma mort

et je prie Dieu que le sang que vous allez verser

ne retombe pas sur la France!

But he could have saved his breath.

The execution of Louis XVI horrified the monarchies of Europe,

and soon France was encircled by hostile armies.

At home, food prices soared, the mob rioted,

and in the Assembly the factions fought each other.

The moderates sat on the right hand side of the chamber,

and the extremists on the left,

which is where today we get our words

for left and right from in politics.

Finally, in the summer of 1793,

the extreme Jacobin faction seized control.

The Revolution descended into terror.

It was driven by a naive idea that mankind could start again...

..and slice its way to a better world.

The extremists turned the high ideals of the Revolution

into a weapon to destroy their enemies.

One lot of revolutionaries denounced the next.

Instead of the reign of reason,

it felt like the reign of hysteria and paranoia.

All around Paris, people were waiting for the knock on the door

and the streets of the city ran with blood.

It's thought that 40,000 people died

in what became known simply as "the terror".

Finally, in 1799, the army seized control of the country.

The leader was an upstart general called Napoleon Bonaparte.

His ambition, limitless.

In 1804, he invited the Pope to anoint him Emperor of France

in an extravagant ceremony in Notre Dame cathedral.

Napoleon left the Pope waiting in the cold for several hours...

..before crowning himself.

He would bow to no one.

After all the high ideals, the message was clear.

Absolute power was back.

With the crowning of Napoleon, the Revolution was over.

The world has seen many revolutions since then,

and they've often followed just the same pattern -

idealism, then extremism,

the revolution starts to eat its own children until, finally,

in exhaustion, power lands in the hands of a military hard man.

And yet, despite that ghastly cycle, the revolutions keep coming,

often driven by just the same ideals as that first revolution,

made, and then killed by the people of Paris.

300 years ago,

something new appeared above the surface of the planet.

A thick oily spectre, hanging in the air,

for longer than the cooking smoke from any town or city

and larger than a forest fire or a volcano.

The Industrial Revolution was the biggest story to happen to mankind

since we invented farming,

and that dirty smear of smoke

spread across North America, much of Europe, China, Japan,

but it first billowed into the air over a modestly-sized little island,

which called itself, rather immodestly,

Great Britain.

The engine for all of this was the engine.

Steam engines burned up the buried energy of millennia

captured in coal, and used it to create immediate power.

What a moment!

Through all of history, one thing had never changed.

There was a fixed limit on the amount of power that humans could use.

Their own muscles, a few animals, the odd windmill and waterwheel...

..but soon steam engines would be doing as much work in Britain

as 40 million people flat out.

Why did this happen in Britain?

Was it because the British were uniquely clever?

No.

Was it because the country seemed to be half built on coal?

Not really.

It was because the British had developed a new political system

which limited monarchy, gave everybody legal rights,

allowed the free flow of ideas, and ensured that British geniuses

owned their ideas, so they could make a buck.

This new system provided the environment

for new men to create new wealth, and these new men emerged in places

far from London and the traditional forums of the rich and powerful.

Men like George Stephenson

who, in 1825, was busy connecting two towns in the north of England -

Stockton and Darlington.

A man who'd been illiterate until he was 18,

driving his own invention, an awkward looking mash-up

of pipes and fire he called simply "Locomotion".

STEAM HISSES

FRIGHTENED SQUEALING

Northern England had traditionally been

rather on the sidelines of major historical events

more likely to happen in London,

but now it was home to the biggest news of the age.

Locomotion had been built to carry coal,

but on its maiden voyage, people clambered into the coal carts.

There was even an experimental passenger carriage,

called "Experiment".

Never before had so many people been carried so far, so fast.

Now railways would start to knit together nations.

First Britain...

but soon the United States,

Germany, and the rest of Europe.

Restless change, restless revolution.

Like most revolutions,

the Industrial Revolution would have many casualties.

Men and women and children as young as eight or nine

worked 12-hour days in vast factories.

Many were maimed or even killed by the new machinery,

and they were working by artificial light and the factory clock,

not the rhythms of nature.

Protests were widespread and angry.

Every great new technology produces changes in society and politics,

and these new engines didn't just push pistons and locomotives.

They pushed ahead trade unionism, town planning,

political reform, new schools, democracy.

Quite powerful things, steam engines.

The Industrial Revolution triggered the fastest

social transformation in British history.

People flooded from the countryside to work in urban factories.

Within a century,

Britain went from a country

with just two cities with more than 50,000 people,

to a country with 29 cities of this size.

It's very similar to what's happening in China right now.

A world of peasant farmers becomes a world of factories,

villages empty, and tall, angular buildings spring up.

By 1860, Britain was tied together

by more than 10,000 miles of railways.

Production of coal and steel and iron skyrocketed.

The cities sprawled and new inventions, from steamships

and iron bridges to brilliantly-lit streets,

tumbled out of these damp and smoky islands.

And it was really this energy, this restless search for raw materials,

new markets and bigger profits that drove the British

as they threw together the biggest empire in the history of the world.

In the 19th century, Russia was a European power

but in many ways it was trapped in the past.

22 million Russians were serfs,

still owned by aristocratic landlords as they had been for centuries.

Like slaves, serfs were property, and could be ordered to do any kind of work.

Many suffered physical and sexual abuse.

This system created an economy almost entirely based

on agriculture - a medieval society.

In 1854, this huge, proud nation came up against industrialised

Britain and her ally, France, in the Crimean War.

And, fighting right on her doorstep, lost.

But change was in the air.

After the humiliating defeat of the Crimean War, the new Tsar,

the reforming Alexander II, realised that if Russia was going to compete

against the industrial powers in the west,

she'd have to sweep away the serf economy.

Easier said than done.

Russia's nobility and landowners were going to fight hard

to hang onto their power and their property.

In many ways, Russia's fate was now in the hands of its nobility...

..and in the spring of 1853, one young aristocratic landowner

was gambling with his fellow army officers.

The stakes were high.

The young count had already gambled away entire villages he owned

and the serfs who lived in them.

HE SPEAKS IN RUSSIAN

Now he'd lost the house where he'd been born.

His name was Leo Tolstoy.

He'd go on to become a titan of Russian literature,

the author of "War and Peace",

but he'd also become a key player in the political drama

gripping Russia - the fight to throw off serfdom.

Tolstoy was only 18 when he inherited the estate

of Yasnaya Polyana, which means "bright meadow".

It was vast and included 11 villages and 200 serfs.

This was a world in which entire villages and the people who lived in them

could be won or lost on the toss of a coin.

But Tolstoy was different.

The guilt so tore him apart that he came to believe

that not only HE had to change, so did Russia.

Was there a different path between brutal industrialisation

and rural tyranny?

Finding one became Tolstoy's mission.

He returned to what was left of his estate

and, dressed as a peasant, worked alongside his serfs.

HE SPEAKS IN RUSSIAN

In truth, he was a pretty rotten farmer

and to start with there must have been a bit of rural sniggering

behind his lordship's back.

But Tolstoy was a dedicated, even reckless, reformer.

Tolstoy decided to free his serfs,

which meant giving them or selling them land, as well,

because the land was worth nothing without the serfs

and the serfs would starve without the land.

So he offered them very generous terms -

12 acres apiece, some of it free, some of it very cheap.

Noble, generous Count Tolstoy.

The serfs didn't see it like that.

They'd already heard rumours that the Tsar

was going to give them their land and liberty for nothing.

The Count must be trying to swindle them.

So they looked at his offer and, to his amazement and horror, said,

"No, thanks."

But Tolstoy wasn't easily discouraged.

He believed that Russia was never going to move forward

while most of its people couldn't read or write.

So, in October, 1859,

he set up a school on his estate to educate young serfs.

Quite a few of whom, it has to be said,

were his own illegitimate children.

Within three years,

Tolstoy had opened 14 schools in the local area.

Tolstoy was shunned by infuriated local landowners.

All round the world it was the land-owning class,

with their privile½ges and traditions,

who'd be the most threatened by change.

And in Russia they fought a formidable rearguard action

against the Tsar's reforms.

It was one successful enough to sabotage them.

When, on the 3rd of March, 1861, the detailed plan was finally announced,

it turned out the serfs would be free in name,

but burdened by debts and many rules.

It was a tragic missed opportunity.

Had the Tsar pulled this off,

Russian history would have been very different.

And surely happier.

There was a great wave of anger and disappointment.

There were nearly 2,000 serf revolts,

some of which had to be put down by troops.

Tolstoy himself freed all his serfs and asked for no payment,

but across Russia most peasants, though now technically free,

still had to pay for their land,

they had to ask permission to travel and they could still be beaten.

Alexander's reforms had failed.

Eventually, many of the serfs drifted to the cities,

where they would eventually become the foot soldiers for a revolution

which would sweep away old Russia.

In the mid-19th century, in the United States of America,

a conflict was brewing between the modern, industrial North

and the more rural South.

SHE SCREAMS

The nation that had been the first to enshrine the ideals of liberty

and equality into its constitution was polluted by a system of slavery.

In the mid-1800s, there were around 4 million slaves

in the United States, almost all of them in the South

working on plantations like this,

growing cotton, tobacco, and much else.

Economically, slavery was a dynamic and efficient system,

and as America started to spread towards the west,

the southern states wanted to see slavery spreading too.

But in the North, where many states had banned slavery,

they thought very differently.

They were determined that slavery would not grow.

America was split down the middle.

Things came to a head in 1860, when the northerner,

Abraham Lincoln, became President.

But can we, while our votes will prevent it,

allow slavery to spread into the northern territories?

Lincoln believed that slavery was wrong,

but he also said that he had no intention of abolishing it,

hoping instead it would die out over time.

But southern politicians realised that Lincoln's arrival in the White House

meant slavery would not now spread further, as they'd hoped.

11 southern states decided to break away from the Union

and establish an independent and separate government -

the Confederacy.

Lincoln had no choice but to declare war on the South

to defend the Union.

This was a struggle between two different ways of life.

In the South, it was an agricultural society,

traditional, conservative, many people living on plantations

which were virtually self-sufficient,

cut off from the rest of the world.

"Yes," said the North, "but all your wealth depends on slavery."

In the North, urban, industrial America based on steel

and railroads, and a rising middle class.

"Ah, yes," said the South, "whose prosperity is based on wage slaves."

So, two Americas, now no longer able to properly speak to each other.

On April 12th, 1861, these two Americas duly went to war.

Lincoln mobilised the North's industrial might,

using railways to transport men and weapons.

But to start with, it went badly for him.

The South had better generals and a bolder fighting spirit.

After 18 months, Lincoln was desperate.

He decided to destroy the foundation on which the South was built.

He'd free the slaves.

"We must free the slaves," he said, "or be ourselves subdued."

He hoped this would destroy the southern economy

and demoralise the people.

And so, on New Year's Day 1863,

Lincoln announced his Emancipation Proclamation,

that all the slaves in the rebel states would immediately be free.

Liberated slaves flocked to fight with the northern forces...

..while the South struggled with shortages and inflation.

The tide of war turned in the North's favour.

On April 9th, 1865, after a devastating invasion,

the South surrendered.

620,000 soldiers had been killed...

..nearly as many as in every other war

the United States has fought put together.

In the final days of the war, Lincoln did something extraordinary.

He simply turned up at the Confederate rebel capital

of Richmond, Virginia, not very far from Washington.

His troops had just taken it. It was still burning.

No one had any idea what to expect when he arrived

here by boat at Rocketts Landing.

There was a huge crowd, entirely black.

Lincoln had the most recognisable face in America,

and he was spotted immediately

and there were cries of "our messiah" and "Jesus Christ".

One man knelt to him and Lincoln said,

"No, no, you only kneel to your god."

And then the group started to walk

the two miles into the centre of Richmond

and, gradually, there were more and more white faces in the crowd,

Sullen, silent, staring back from windows

and the tops of buildings, the people that he had just defeated.

And Lincoln's group were expecting shouts of abuse,

possibly even shots.

Nothing.

And at that moment it seemed as if Abraham Lincoln

had won all of America back.

Ten days after Richmond, Lincoln went to the theatre in Washington.

He hadn't been keen, but his wife had begged him to come.

A night off for the hero.

Did you see him?

No, but I see HIM!

CROWD GASPS AND APPLAUDS

But the defeated South would inflict one last act of bloodshed.

A second rate actor and southern Confederate supporter

called John Wilkes Booth saw Lincoln as a tyrant.

The actor Booth was about to make his final appearance,

and he knew the reviews would be mixed.

ACTOR ON STAGE: Well I know enough to turn you inside out.

You sockdologizing old man trap!

LAUGHTER

GASPS

CRUNCHING

Booth cried out the Latin motto of the State of Virginia...

Sic semper tyrannis!

.."Thus always to tyrants."

SCREAMING: Help me!

Help!

The north mourned an immortal political hero.

In the south, they celebrated.

One Texan newspaper professed itself,

"thrilled by the death of our oppressor."

The American Civil War left a bitter legacy.

In the South, burned and devastated,

the whites remained very angry about what had happened

and black Americans faced many, many decades of grinding rural poverty,

segregation laws and lynchings for those who stepped out of line.

But the Union was preserved,

and in the North this extraordinarily industrious,

vigorous economy, now linked together by railroads,

stormed ahead - the American colossus striding towards the 20th century.

November, 1918. The first global war had ended.

The emperors and the top-hatted politicians had failed.

They'd shattered the optimism of the modern world.

For many, especially on the losing side,

it seemed that a new order must rise from the ruins.

A new kind of politics, which needed a ruthlessness

the older generation had flinched from.

Among the soldiers straggling home

from the trenches of the Western Front was an angry and embittered

29-year-old corporal - Adolf Hitler.

Like many others,

Hitler was looking for someone to blame for Germany's humiliation.

HE SPEAKS IN GERMAN

"This is the story of the revenge of the nobody."

When Adolf Hitler arrived in Munich, he was a nothing.

He'd won a medal in the war, but his fellow soldiers described him

as a bit peculiar, a loner, and he'd never been promoted

because the German officers realised that he lacked leadership qualities.

Das wissen sie doch. Er kannte das!

This is also the most extreme example in human history

of how one individual can unlock hell.

ECHOING RECORDING OF HITLER SPEECH

RAPTUROUS CHEERING

But how did this chaotic loser harness a big idea - fascism -

and goose-step Germany into another world war?

In a single word, fear.

We're all of us vulnerable to being scared by events and then feeling anger,

so when people's savings and jobs are destroyed,

which happened in the early 1920s in Germany,

they panic and then they want revenge.

Hitler's great good luck was that he offered up

his recipe about who was to blame at just the moment

when sky-rocketing inflation had brought Germany to its knees.

A loaf of bread for a billion marks.

But there was also fear of a bloody communist revolution,

which, for many, seemed even more frightening than capitalism's collapse.

In southern Germany, Munich had been shaken by a communist uprising

put down by troops.

Into all of this stepped Adolf Hitler.

He joined, and took control of, a tiny right-wing party.

He even re-designed its curious emblem,

based on an ancient symbol for good fortune - the swastika.

In this grey, defeated city of small, angry parties

and big, angry meetings, Hitler stood out as a star speaker

because he simply went further.

He said the unsayable.

The Jewish problem would be solved with brute force.

Germany would carve a new empire for herself in Eastern Europe.

A greater Germany, rising to be a world power.

And the people listening to him were soon comparing him

to Martin Luther, Mussolini, even Napoleon.

Right at the beginning, there was this leader cult.

Yet Hitler came across as crazily optimistic.

He thought that, by pushing Munich right-wingers into revolt,

he could get them to march on Berlin

and seize control of all democratic Germany.

Die Roten gedeihen im Chaos.

On the night of November 8th, 1923,

a political meeting was being held in one of the city's beer halls.

Hitler hijacked the meeting,

declaring, "the national revolution has begun".

Die Reichsregierung wurde gebildet.

But few in the hall were impressed by the jumped-up extremist,

and the meeting ended in confusion.

The next morning, Hitler led armed supporters onto the streets.

But, when police fired on them,

this revolution by sheer bluff collapsed with embarrassing speed.

Two days later, Hitler was arrested.

The beer hall revolution was a political shambles,

it ended in humiliating failure.

But it made Adolf Hitler a hero far beyond Munich,

because he realised that he could use his trial

as a much bigger platform than any that he'd get in a beer hall.

He was defiant, completely unapologetic,

and he was heard all across Germany.

Sympathetic judges gave Hitler a soft sentence for treason.

He was imprisoned in the nearby town of Landsberg.

Hitler's rooms were soon crammed with unrestricted visitors

and parcels and messages.

One particularly gushing letter came from a student in Heidelberg

called Josef Goebbels.

And, as for the parcels, it was like a delicatessen.

One visitor said you could have opened up a flower, fruit,

and wine shop with all the stuff stacked up in there,

and Hitler began to become rather fat from all the chocolates and the cake.

Eventually, he had to usher the visitors out

so that he could settle down

and dictate his memoirs to a man called Rudolf Hess.

The Fuhrer was emerging.

Der Jude ist und bleibt.

But he had a truly terrible title for his book -

Four-and-a-half Years Of Struggle

Against Lies, Stupidity And Cowardice.

..Immer weit ausbreitet.

Shortened by his shrewder publisher into My Struggle, or Mein Kampf.

And in it he said exactly what he thought.

-TRANSLATION:

-The Jews are a pestilence,

worse than the Black Death.

The day will come when a nation will arise which will be welded together

but shall be invincible and indestructible for ever.

Mein Kampf argued that capitalism and communism were equally dangerous

and that Jews were behind both,

pulling the strings from Wall Street in New York to Moscow's Red Square.

In other times and places, few would have listened to such

a crackpot theory, but by the early 1930s, the Great Depression

starting in America had thrown people out of work across the world,

while the looming menace of Stalin's communist state haunted millions.

There are times when the politics of fear become irresistible

and nonsense seems common sense.

Eventually, the Nazi Party did very well in elections.

Hitler came to power, not as a tyrant, but entirely legally.

During the 1930s,

no other major political leader had his level of popular support.

It was support based on the violent creation

of a new German empire in Europe, the destruction of Europe's Jews,

which was all laid out in black and white.

History is full of nasty surprises.

Adolf Hitler did his very best not to be a surprise.

In the first half of the 20th century in America,

women fought to be recognised as equal to men

and for the freedom to control their own lives.

They'd won the vote in 1920,

and now a new form of politics had arrived - sexual politics.

Margaret Sanger was a tiny,

red-headed radical from the backstreets.

Her name isn't very well known,

but she did more to shape today's world than most politicians.

In the early 20th century, Manhattan was a divided island.

Uptown was swinging, brash and booming,

the most fashionable place on the planet.

Downtown was very different, a place of old-fashioned poverty.

In the overcrowded tenement blocks teeming with new immigrants,

women were desperate to avoid unwanted pregnancies.

These women were caught in a dilemma -

either dangerous, self-induced abortions

or the backstreet abortionist, who could be just as dangerous.

Margaret Sanger was a nurse.

She saw the worst, and she thought all women had the right

to safe contraception - birth control.

You're going to get through this.

"I shuddered with horror," said Margaret Sanger.'

"I resolved to do something to change the destiny of these mothers

"whose miseries were as vast as the sky."

But contraceptives were taboo,

unacceptable to most Americans.

Those who sold them were condemned as purveyors of vice and sin,

likely to corrupt society.

In 1916, Margaret Sanger opened America's first birth control clinic

here in a poor district of Brooklyn.

On the opening day,

more than 100 women queued up for help and advice.

(17.)

I haven't seen you before. What's your name?

But the pamphlets she was giving out were classed as obscene literature.

Get out of here! Now!

You're under arrest.

No, you listen to me, get these men out of here!

Get off of me! Will you get them off of me?

Sanger was charged under America's very strong anti-obscenity laws.

The clinic was shut down.

So much for women's rights.

But private individuals, if they had enough guts

and could lay hands on some money, could fight back.

Contraceptives couldn't be imported into America,

but Margaret Sanger had a friend, a friend who could help,

a friend with a picture-book chateau by Lake Geneva.

This was the summer home

of a rich American heiress, Katharine McCormick.

She was a glamorous society lady who liked the latest fashions,

but she was also a rarity -

she'd studied biology at university and campaigned for votes for women.

Once American women had the vote, like their Scandinavian

and British sisters, she was looking for a new cause

and she alighted on birth control, which is why an unlikely friendship

was formed between the heiress and the agitator.

In Europe, contraceptives were easy to get hold of.

Katharine McCormick went around buying up posh frocks

and then had hundreds of diaphragms sewn into the hems,

before boldly smuggling the clothing in trunks back to New York,

where Sanger had opened a new clinic, which flourished.

This was a great victory for private enterprise politics,

and the campaigner and wealthy rebel kept in touch.

Margaret Sanger always wanted an easier-to-use contraceptive,

a fail-safe one,

and when, decades on, scientists thought this might be possible,

she turned again to Katharine McCormick,

who bankrolled the research.

It had been a long road from those New York tenement blocks,

but in 1960, the pill went on the market.

It revolutionised birth control for women.

Half a century on, the pill has become the contraceptive of choice

for way over 100 million women all around the world.

Its social impact has been huge.

It's allowed women to make choices about education and their careers,

to delay having children, or to have no children at all.

Along with votes for women,

it has been one of the biggest social changes of the 20th century.

Indeed, many women would say the biggest change of all.

It's been said that in 1930

three people had achieved instant global recognition -

Charlie Chaplin...

..Adolf Hitler...

..and a skinny fellow who dressed to impress -

Mohandas Gandhi.

Gandhi was a child of the British Empire.

Born in India in 1869, he trained as a barrister in London

before moving to South Africa, where he successfully

fought against the appalling treatment of Indian immigrants.

20 years later, he returned to India,

which was then the jewel in the crown of the British Empire.

And here, he began to challenge the injustices that many Indians suffered under British rule.

The British liked to think that in India

they were the good imperialists - parents, really.

But, after famines and repression, many Indians didn't see it that way.

In March, 1930, Gandhi, leader of the Indian Independence Movement,

sent a letter to the headquarters of the British Raj in New Delhi.

It was a direct challenge posted through the front door.

-KNOCKING

-Come in!

The letter was addressed to Edward Frederick Lindley Wood,

the Lord Irwin, Viceroy and Governor General of India.

Gandhi explained, politely but firmly,

that he was intending to start a campaign of civil disobedience

through which he would win India's independence.

'I do not seek to harm your people.

'My ambition is no less than to convert the British through non-violence,

'and thus make them see the wrong they have done to India.'

Gandhi finished his letter by promising to call off his planned campaign

if the British would agree to talks about freedom for India.

In the 1920s, on the surface,

the British Empire seemed as self-confident as ever.

Some sense of its swagger is given by the Viceroy's new house in Delhi.

A British architect working on a Moghul scale,

it makes Buckingham Palace seem pokey.

But this was confronted by the determination

of the wiry little man from Gujarat,

who understood that the British weakness

was a determination to be thought decent rulers,

so his campaign of non-violent disobedience

was a kind of political torture.

Gandhi said, "There are many causes I'm prepared to die for,

"but none that I am prepared to kill for."

Answer that.

Hmm!

The Viceroy chose not to answer Gandhi's letter, so the troublemaker

embarked on his campaign of polite, smiling civil disobedience.

Gandhi set out to walk the 240 miles from his home to the coast

in a protest about salt.

Along the way, the crowds welcoming him grew day by day.

When he arrived at the seashore, 50,000 supporters -

newsmen among them - were waiting to greet him.

Gandhi walked down to the water's edge,

and he scooped up some salty mud.

With this handful of salt,

I am shaking the foundations of the British Empire.

Focusing on salt was a stroke of genius any spin doctor would envy.

Indian salt production was a British monopoly and it was taxed,

a huge source of income, controlled solely by Britain.

Gandhi encouraged all Indians to break the law

by panning their own salt and refusing to pay the salt tax.

It was an echo of the Boston Tea Party,

the trigger for the Americans to gain their independence from Britain.

Gandhi was engaged in a propaganda campaign,

and refusing to pay tax on salt would remind the Americans of their

refusal to pay tax on tea when they broke away from the British Empire.

So, by collecting the salt and refusing to pay tax on it,

Gandhi was challenging the British

to make themselves look both brutal and ridiculous.

As mass protests rippled across India, the British authorities

decided to arrest Gandhi and throw him into jail.

Perfect! Just what he wanted.

His arrest spurred even more people to come on to the streets.

Demonstrations were ruthlessly put down.

Britain was humiliated and condemned around the world.

By the end of 1930, 60,000 peaceful protesters had been imprisoned.

The agonised Viceroy gave in.

He had Gandhi released from prison and invited him in for talks.

-Mr Gandhi.

-Lord Irwin.

-Would you care for some tea?

-Tea would be perfect.

This meeting was the turning point.

They agreed a pact which would lead, in stages, to India's independence.

Sugar, Mr Gandhi?

No, thank you.

As the two men celebrated with a cup of tea,

Gandhi had one final surprise.

I am putting some salt into my tea...

..to remind us of the historic Boston Tea Party.

Very good, Mr Gandhi.

But in Britain, not everybody was impressed.

Back in London, Winston Churchill was appalled

to see Gandhi posing as a fakir,

striding half-naked up the steps of the Viceregal Palace

to parley on equal terms with the representative of the King Emperor.

This is just the beginning.

It took 16 years and a world war, but already the greatest empire

the world had ever seen was lying, rather grandly, on its death bed.

Gandhi's legacy has reached much further than independence for India.

His philosophy of non-violent resistance has been an inspiration

all around the world, from the American civil rights movement

to the unarmed students facing down tanks in China's Tiananmen Square.

GHANDI: 'Non-violence is the greatest force at the disposal of mankind.

'It is mightier than the mightiest weapon of destruction

'devised by the ingenuity of man.'

'Non-violence is a weapon for the brave.'

FANFARE AND CHEERING

The 8th of May, 1945 - Germany surrenders.

VE - Victory in Europe - was complete.

But the Second World War was still raging in the Pacific.

To end it, the most powerful weapon the world had ever seen

was about to be unleashed.

A watershed in world history...

..the atomic bomb.

The bomb's colossal destructive power comes from the vast

amounts of energy released when atoms are split.

The top secret project to create it was codenamed the Manhattan Project.

It was led by one of the most intriguing minds of the 20th century.

J Robert Oppenheimer was a curious mix of a man.

He was fascinated by other cultures and the religions of the East,

and in politics a man of the left.

In fact, he even flirted with communism before the War,

and so, you might think, a strange choice to head a project like this.

But he was a brilliant theoretical physicist and a charismatic leader.

By the summer of 1945, Oppenheimer's bomb,

codenamed Little Boy, was ready.

The target - Hiroshima.

After Germany's defeat, Japan had fought on.

Now Japanese civilians would pay for their leaders' refusal to surrender.

CHILDREN'S VOICES, OMINOUS TICKING

The strike was set for Monday, 6th of August.

There were American scientists

who didn't believe in deploying the bomb,

but Oppenheimer argued strongly that it had to be used.

There was a chance that the bomb would end all war,

but for that to happen,

the whole world had to see its full, horrific potential.

And so this man, with his cultured, sophisticated mind

and his humanitarian values, spent a great deal of time

calculating the exact height at which to detonate the bomb

so that it would kill the maximum number of people.

ENGINE DRONES

PHONE RINGS

Oppenheimer.

Thank you.

This morning, at 8.16 Japanese time,

a V-29 bomber was successfully deployed above Hiroshima.

CHEERING AND APPLAUSE

Hiroshima is a big word.

This is a big story.

Let's try and bring it down in scale a bit.

This is a woman's watch,

hands fused to the time of the blast.

Around 400 young children were here with their ten teachers

when the bomb went off, and all but one was burned to death immediately.

In a three-mile blast radius, almost everybody suffered fatal burns,

and beyond that, there were mass blindings from the flash,

and then of course came the radiation sickness,

killing many thousands in the days and weeks and years that followed.

Stubbornly, incomprehensibly,

Japan still refused to surrender.

So, three days later, a second atomic bomb was dropped,

this time on Nagasaki.

In the two attacks, up to a third of a million people died.

Now Japan finally admitted defeat.

On the evening of 14th August 1945, the Second World War came to an end.

There are plenty of places around the world

where terrible things happened.

What makes this one different is the thought that

what happened to Hiroshima could happen almost anywhere else.

I certainly grew up in the 1960s and '70s

thinking that my home town in Scotland and the people I loved

could be nuclear victims,

and people were thinking just the same all across America

and in Russia, and France, and Germany, and many other places.

"We shall not repeat this evil," says the monument behind me.

But was this the end of something,

or was it the beginning?

We still cannot be sure.

Dropping the atomic bomb changed the world for ever,

and nobody thought about the consequences more than its creator.

A few weeks afterwards,

Oppenheimer resigned his post on the nuclear programme.

Later, he reflected openly on his...achievement.

OPPENHEIMER: We have made a thing, a most terrible weapon,

that has altered abruptly and profoundly the nature of the world.

A thing that, by all standards of the world that we grew up in,

is an evil thing.

And so by doing, we have raised the question

of whether science is good for man.

In later life, Oppenheimer described on television how he was haunted

by a line he had once read in an ancient Hindu scripture.

"Now I am become death, the destroyer of worlds."

I suppose we all thought that, one way or another.

The nuclear arms race of the 1950s and '60s

between the communist and capitalist camps terrified the world.

It brought the threat of mutually assured destruction.

Using nuclear weapons would guarantee

the annihilation of both sides, and with them, human life on Earth.

But, this deadly threat did preserve a fragile peace

between the superpowers.

# Life could be a dream... #

It allowed the rival systems to test their own economic power,

and in the West,

the sheer energy of capitalism was unleashed as never before,

producing a gushing abundance of goods,

a colourful gloss of material plenty.

This is Apollo launch control. Five, four, three...

It was a time when everything seemed possible.

It's different, but it's very pretty out here.

But as the West went moony, on the other side of the world

daily life was descending into a political nightmare.

PRISONER PROTESTS IN CHINESE

The People's Republic of China. July 1967.

Fanatical gangs, known as the Red Guards,

were hunting down anyone suspected of betraying the ideas

of the Chinese communist leader, Chairman Mao Zedong.

GUARD SHOUTS IN CHINESE

The name of this victim - Deng Xiaoping.

GUARD EXCLAIMS VIA LOUD-HAILER

One day he'd become the most powerful man in China,

the leader who would turn the country

into the economic powerhouse that it is today.

Deng was one of the original Chinese communists.

He'd been a guerrilla fighter,

he'd led armies for Mao from the early days

right through to the final victory, and Mao liked him a lot.

He called him "the little man",

and he'd drawn Deng into the tight group of people who ran China.

But now, Deng was on his knees being screamed at by the Red Guards -

the fanatical foot soldiers of the wildest social experiment

ever to hit modern China - the Cultural Revolution.

CROWD CHANTS

The Cultural Revolution meant a vast purge of anyone thought to stand

in the way of Chairman Mao's long march towards a communist utopia.

Mao called for a war against the "four olds" -

old thinking, old culture, old customs, old habits.

It's estimated that millions of people died

in the Cultural Revolution.

The Chinese Government itself says that 100 million people suffered.

Mao had quite deliberately unleashed social anarchy -

a war against the past,

a war against moderation,

a war against common sense.

Mao's warped economic reforms had led to famines

in which up to 45 million people died.

Deng Xiaoping fell foul of Mao's Red Guards for daring to suggest

there might be a better way of running the economy.

At the 1961 party conference,

Deng argued that economic growth mattered more than communist theory,

and he quoted an old peasant saying -

"It doesn't matter if the cat is black or white.

"If it catches mice, it's a good cat."

Now, this was dangerous stuff.

It suggested that he thought there was an alternative way

for China to modernise, not necessarily Chairman Mao's way.

After his public denunciation,

Deng Xiaoping was exiled to work in a tractor factory.

In time, Mao relented,

and Deng was welcomed back to Beijing as if nothing had happened.

When Mao died in 1976,

the great survivor seized the chance of a political comeback.

Within two years, Deng was the most powerful man in China.

Deng's moment had come, and what a moment!

He took China right round

towards roaring, full-throttle capitalism.

Under Deng, China's repressive state continued,

but he began welding together the two big ideas

that had divided the world in the 20th century.

For him, capitalism in a communist country wasn't a contradiction.

It was a pragmatic solution.

Since Deng's reforms were introduced, China's economy

has been growing at an average of nearly 10% a year, every year.

It's on track to become the world's biggest economy by 2016.

Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd