David Abulafia

David Abulafia

David Abulafia is emeritus professor of Mediterranean history at the University of Cambridge.

Thursday

David Abulafia

Masters of the opium trade: the fabulous wealth of the Sassoons

From our UK edition

Just before I started to read this book I had been immersed in the letters written by Jewish merchants based in Cairo from the tenth to the 12th centuries describing the trade they conducted across the Indian Ocean all the way to the Malabar coast. These letters are written in a difficult cursive Hebrew script and in a Judaeo-Arabic dialect, so one needs greater expertise than I possess to read them in the original. It was therefore with what was almost a sense of dejà vu that I encountered Joseph Sassoon’s fascinating account of the rise and fall of the Sassoon family, from the beginning of the 19th century to the disappearance of their trading name in 1978.

Thursday

David Abulafia

Why does Priyamvada Gopal find ‘eloquence’ troubling?

From our UK edition

Why should anyone feel insulted when they are described as ‘eloquent’? Priyamvada Gopal, professor of post-colonial studies at Cambridge University, felt moved to speak on behalf of David Olusoga when I used that very compliment to describe him. In an article for the Daily Telegraph, I argued that Olusoga’s testimony in the trial of the ‘Colston Four’ was not relevant. After all, it was not a trial of the long-dead Edward Colston but one for criminal damage. Would Olusoga have been called as an expert witness were he not something of a celebrity whose TV appearances are often impressive? I'm not convinced. Yet in the eyes of my Cambridge colleague, my biggest error was to refer to Olusoga’s impressive way with words.

Sunday

David Abulafia

Rhodes, Columbus and the next heritage battle

From our UK edition

On 12 October this year, Columbus Day, a statue of the Italian in Belgrave Square was vandalised by activists from Extinction Rebellion who described Columbus as ‘father of the slave trade’. Entirely ignorant of his life and ambitions, Columbus’s critics frequently turn to the searing denunciations of Bartolomé de Las Casas who excoriated the Spanish policy towards the native peoples of America. They are unaware that Las Casas was a great admirer of Columbus, and that this friar, who felt such pity for the native Americans, actively recommended the mass importation of black African slaves as an alternative labour source. In the same week as the Extinction Rebellion stunt a new plaque was unveiled at Oriel College, below a statue of Cecil Rhodes.

Thursday

David Abulafia

What’s behind Cambridge’s anonymous reporting system?

From our UK edition

Here is a challenge. Cambridge University provides an electronic Daily News Digest to anyone who wants to see how the university is being reported in the press. Will the News Digest include this article? On past form, that seems unlikely. When arguments arose in the past few weeks about Cambridge’s Report + Support website, which offered the opportunity to make anonymous denunciations against individuals deemed to have committed ‘micro-aggressions’ (such as being critical of a student’s work, even if it is bad, or praising the English of a non-native speaker), the Digest went quiet. A few days after the Telegraph published a letter against the website signed by 25 senior academics, a cryptic link was provided to an out-of-date edition of the newspaper.

Thursday

David Abulafia

University challenge: conservatives are now the radicals on campus

From our UK edition

On the letters page of the Sunday Times last month, the presidents of the Royal Historical Society and the Historical Association were among the signatories to a letter boldly headlined ‘History must not be politicised’. They were incensed by a rumour that government funding might be cut for the Colonial Countryside project, which looks at possible connections between the British Empire, the slave trade and National Trust properties. Unable to recognise their own political bias, the letter-writers accused the government of ‘politicising’ history by trying to depoliticise it. This extraordinary self-belief, this insistence that academics occupy the high moral ground, reflects what is happening in British universities, not least among my fellow historians.

Thursday

David Abulafia

The many uses of frankincense and myrrh

From our UK edition

‘And when they were come into the house, they saw the young child with Mary his mother, and fell down, and worshipped him: and when they had opened their treasures, they presented unto him gifts; gold, and frankincense, and myrrh.’ About 15 years ago, a colleague at Cambridge was returning from a visit to Yemen. The British customs officers asked him what he had bought, and he declared that his luggage contained frankincense and myrrh. ‘And gold as well, I suppose!’ came the ironic reply, and he was let through without further ado. Later, he gave me a brown paper bag filled with nuggets of myrrh, which I used to hand round at my lectures when talking about the history of the trade in perfumes and spices, inviting my audience to chew a piece.

Wednesday

David Abulafia

No, racism isn’t a ‘creation of white people’

From our UK edition

I remember that, as a small child, I was told not to talk when my father took me inside the public library in Richmond. Now I find that the British Library has rendered me speechless. With the apparent approval of the chief librarian, Liz Jolly, a review of statues and artworks in the library is under way. Among those who are commemorated by statues in the library and who are being subjected to this inquisition are Beethoven and Mendelssohn, as protagonists of ‘western civilisational supremacy’. Setting aside for the moment the implication that many of the greatest composers, artists, writers and maybe scientists of the past should be shunned as ‘western’, we should stop short with alarm at the name of Mendelssohn.

Thursday

David Abulafia

We should build more memorials to controversial people

From our UK edition

I have been making the best of lockdown by reading properly, from start to finish, Edward Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, in a seven-volume edition that is less daunting than it sounds, when you consider how addictive his rolling prose is. I have just reached the point, near the end of the great work, where Gibbon describes the sack of Constantinople by the armies of the Fourth Crusade in 1204. The blind Doge of Venice had persuaded the crusaders to interrupt what was supposed to be an attack on Muslim Alexandria by diverting to the Byzantine capital, where Venetian merchants had a large number of grievances to settle. Gibbon lists the marvellous classical statues, many of bronze, that were melted down by the victors and turned into coins for everyday use.