The 2024 British Academy Book Prize for Global Cultural Understanding

To start, could you tell me about the prize and what kind of nonfiction books you’re looking for for the shortlist?

It’s called the ‘British Academy Prize for Global Cultural Understanding’ and people often ask me, ‘What does it mean?’ In many ways, it means something quite straightforward, which is books that help us to understand other places, other cultures, and possibly also what we might owe them. It’s an empathetic understanding of how people have thought and acted across time and across the globe.

Often, those encounters—which can be disastrous for some and very profitable for others—have been a key part of the ways in which we understand other cultures and other peoples. That already puts a bias in the way that we have understood them, so we’re looking for books that throw light on or make one think again about those encounters. They didn’t necessarily have to happen in the way they did, but they did happen that way because of other forces at work. That’s important. It helps in self-understanding as well: our place in the globe, as well as other people’s. It’s about realizing that there’s a lot more that links us and connects us, for good and ill, than we might have been aware of.

It’s taking different aspects of societies, different kinds of histories, and telling us things about them that we may not have known, and that may have been deliberately hidden. Good historians and social scientists will discover why certain narratives have dominated and others haven’t. Books that turn a narrative on its head are useful, interesting and provocative.

So that’s what global cultural understanding means. It doesn’t mean some sort of universal panacea that once we achieve it, enlightenment will dawn, or that we will be able to understand everyone across the globe: far from it. One of the things that comes out of many of these extraordinarily interesting books are the willful misunderstandings between different peoples, and why it profits people to misunderstand the other or to frame them in a particular way. Those are also the kinds of encounters that interest us.

This year, there were over 250 submissions, which is a lot of books on a huge range of topics. The bedrock of our judgment is that a book must contain really rigorous and high quality, original research. How it helps public understanding is a question we also have to ask of all these books. How accessible are they? Because you can have books of stupendous scholarship which are practically impenetrable for a lay reader to grapple with. We have to look at how it’s presented, how it’s communicated. How does it engage us? How does it provoke thought and start conversations about possibly quite difficult, extraordinary topics in one form or another? It’s about a book’s potential to speak to us.

Thank you for that intriguing introduction and let’s take a look at the shortlisted books. First up is Material World by Ed Conway, who is a TV journalist. This book definitely meets the readability criterion and it’s quite an eye-opener. Tell me what it’s about, and why you chose it.

Each chapter in the book deals with a different material—sand, iron etc. It looks at the ways in which it was originally discovered, how it was manipulated, how it became part of human technologies, and indeed the basis of certain aspects of human civilization.

He’s a very engaging writer who knows how to communicate and uses vivid imagery. It starts with a dramatic explosion in an opencast mine in Australia that he’s gone to see. It’s just inconceivable for an ordinary person to think of the volume of dirt that’s being blown up in order to get at the seams of the mineral they’re mining.

There are many things the book is trying to do and succeeds in doing very well. One is a sense of the scale of human excavation across the world and through history, and how it began to emerge. He has a strong sense of history: for example, how the Phoenicians came upon the secret of glass. As he says, a lot of that may be rather mythical: how these fishermen decided to light a fire on a beach and came out with glass. He covers that and takes it further.

The other aspect is that we just don’t know how much this material is part and parcel of everything we use all the time. It’s not just the age of iron or the age of steel or whatever. If we look around our room, our house, our lives, we realize how much it’s in everything we have and use.

That leads to an interesting and slightly depressing ending, which is that while all our attempts to create a greener technology for the exploitation of resources to lower carbon emissions are worthwhile, we should not ignore just how much material is used. To build a wind farm involves not just a lot of energy but also a lot of material—and that’s got to come from somewhere.

The reason the book seemed to fit so well into the way we’re thinking of the prize, is that for global cultural understanding one has ask, ‘What’s the impact on the environment and the people who live in the places where these materials are extracted?’ And that, as he makes clear, has been devastating, in many ways. The book is ostensibly organized by the materials, but it’s actually about the human beings who mine them, use them, exploit them, and exploit other human beings to try and get more of them.

It’s not a polemical book. It’s a book of power that makes you think about the materials we take for granted. Each one has a genealogy, if you like, it comes from a particular place, and we don’t always know about those places and the conditions under which it’s being extracted. There has been some very good journalism about how rare earths are mined, and what happens to the people who mine them. We get a strong sense of that from this book.

Let’s go on to the next book, Smoke and Ashes by Amitav Ghosh. This is about opium.

It’s wonderfully written, as you’d expect from a very accomplished novelist. The subtitle of the book is ‘opium’s hidden histories’ and there is an element of that. Opium lies at the base of so much that we take for granted in the world today. It’s an impassioned story, because he’s witnessed the effects of it on people in one form or another and he brings that out very well.

He was surprised to find his own family was deeply implicated. They became part of the opium economy of India under the British in the 19th century. They moved from Bengal westwards, to become lawyers, administrators, and accountants, in the vast opium-producing areas of India. So there’s an interesting personal story mingled in.

One of the things that surprised him was how much the growth, the cultivation, the refining, and then, frankly, the pushing in the most aggressive way possible of opium, became part of 19th-century colonial history and the foundation of empire in many areas—and also the foundation of capitalism. He writes about the New England companies that became deeply involved in it. A lot of the fortunes on the Atlantic seaboard are based upon the vast profits gained from opium, all under the auspices of states that were happy to push it.

Then there was the outrageous behavior of Great Britain towards China during the 19th century and the Opium Wars. If you look at the 19th-century British press, the Chinese were being accused of being opium addicts, because that’s part of their culture. Having pushed opium on them, it then became part of the prejudice against them! The story brings out some of the truly repulsive aspects of 19th-century colonialism.

There’s a lot of passion in this book. It’s the historical background to his extraordinary Ibis trilogy of novels. He refers quite often to the novels in the book, which is understandable, because he was writing as a novelist in those three books, but the history was solid. It wasn’t fantasy. This documents it. It’s all there.

Interestingly, there’s a coda towards the end of the book about the Oxycontin scandal. He says that we mustn’t think this is all in the past, in the 19th century. Yes, we got rid of one aspect of the opium trade. But the same logic and the same motives apply to opiates. Look at the people who covered up, who protected capital, who protected others, who ensured that their way of pushing drugs and opiates in one form on the population would be protected by law. It’s been very difficult to get at them. There’s an interesting resonance here with the contemporary.

Let’s talk about The Secret Lives of Numbers by Kate Kitagawa and Timothy Revell. This a history of mathematics, but very global in scope.

One of the things that appealed to us hugely about this book was the fact that they make it easy to understand. I must admit that I’m not very numerate but I surprised myself by really enjoying the book, and I think many of the others did as well. There are the extraordinary conundrums people began to grapple with, and they make it exciting and interesting. They range across time and across the globe. For example, there was the first use of zero, which was a phenomenal achievement in 7th century India. Somebody realized you can add it, subtract it, multiply by it, and treat it like another number, not just a placeholder.

Again, it’s written very accessibly. Reading the book was the first time I understood properly what calculus was about, by reading how it was developed, step by step. What they have managed to do is to give mathematics a narrative history that can be understood by non-mathematicians, and this requires a lot of skill. There’s a wonderful phrase they use at some point in the book: ‘Mathematics is a relay’. They bring out very fluently the ways in which the baton is passed on. Sometimes it’s dropped and a concept is forgotten for a while. Sometimes it is discovered in parallel—people in different parts of the world coming up with very similar solutions to mathematical conundrums.

The book is also about giving people their proper due. Women have been largely written out of the history of mathematics, but here you get accounts of women who advanced the subject in some form from 300 CE and even before that, in China. They tell a very human story. If you’re focusing on the women who were outstanding mathematicians, you cannot help but focus on the horrendous struggles they went through—by being unrecognized, by being persecuted, and then written out of history. There are also people of African American descent who were written out of the history but here get their proper due.

It’s about what mathematics has meant to people, not just to individual mathematicians, but to the society they live in. Mathematics is connected not just to physics and astronomy, but also to religion, to philosophy, to social relations, to politics. These are all part of it, and I think the authors bring that out with great skill across a huge span of time.

Let’s turn to Divided: Racism, Medicine and Why We Need to Decolonise Healthcare by Annabel Sowemimo, who’s a doctor but also an activist. Is this book focused globally, or more on Britain?

It’s global in the sense that it’s about racism and given what the Empire and slavery did, it was a transatlantic question and beyond. But the cases she looks at very often are contemporary cases within the British health service. What she’s looking at is the unacknowledged racism and racial pseudoscience that underpins quite a lot of modern medicine in terms of its histories, the categories used, and the horrific experiments that were performed on people of African descent in the Caribbean under conditions of slavery that then allowed various individuals to claim scientific discoveries. If people had known the bases of these, and how they treated the people that they were experimenting on, it would be as appalling as anything we heard from the 1940s in Europe.

There’s a sense in which this has been an unacknowledged history, and it’s entered into modern medicine in all sorts of disturbing ways. Bogus racial classifications still endure. For instance, she says more research needs to be done, but there is suggestive evidence from the United States that in A&E wards, children who come in who are African American will receive less powerful painkillers than white children, based upon a completely fallacious and prejudiced notion that people of African descent have a higher pain threshold. This has also applied to women in childbirth and elsewhere.

A powerful idea here is that just because the conditions of the worst racial discrimination and slavery have disappeared, it doesn’t mean their legacies don’t live on. They live on in some very surprising places in modern medicine. Another example she talks about is lung function. She couldn’t understand why, when people went into an NHS hospital, they had to fill in a grid with race classifications based upon racist pseudoscience of the 18th and 19th centuries. It made no allowance for people who were of mixed race and suggested a nonsensical relationship between skin color and the condition of your lungs. Because it’s there in the forms, it seems to have a reality. She wants to question that.

It’s a very impassioned book. She is trying to create an awareness of things we should not take for granted—like the shaping of medical instruments for the ideal white male body, rather than for female bodies, or for bodies of people who aren’t white males.

She isn’t trying to indict modern medicine. She is a doctor, and her parents were involved in medicine as well. But she says that one has to be very careful. One of the things that brought this out clearly was the COVID-19 pandemic, when the outcomes were different for different ethnic groups. Why was that? She says everyone was searching around for genetic reasons, but the genetic aspects were very, very suspect.

The book begins with an indictment of eugenics, whose practitioners had a respected place in British academia until remarkably recently,. So much so that there were institutions at her college named after famous eugenicists who were also racists. That’s beginning to disappear as people become more aware. So there’s a strong element in her book of alerting people, of awakening them.

The book is based on strong scholarship and original research. That’s one of the reasons we thought it was a good contender.

We’re at the fifth book on the shortlist now. This is Language City by Ross Perlin, who is the co-director of the Endangered Language Alliance. Tell me about the book and what he’s up to.

This book is very fluently written and very engaging. What he’s concerned about are minority or endangered languages. He says that there are around 7000 languages spoken across the world, but only 4% of the world’s population speaks 96% of those. So the languages spoken by most of the people in the world are very few in number. And yet there is this huge richness—of 6000+ languages—spoken by very small communities, often in very fragile, remote places, that are under threat.

What he focuses on is New York City because, as he says, one out of 10 of every language on the planet is being spoken at some time in the city, which is phenomenal. It’s probably true of London as well, as of any of these large, cosmopolitan cities that have drawn people in from across the globe.

He talks about the larger questions first, and then he follows six case studies of individuals. They’re very poignant because they tell you about displacement, about leaving the place where your language was your mother tongue, to come for employment or for all sorts of other reasons to New York City, and then the life you make there.

One of the very striking things he does is visit what he calls ‘vertical villages’ in Brooklyn. There’s one city block where practically everyone in it speaks Seke, a threatened Tibeto-Burman language from the Himalayas. It’s spoken in only two villages, which are under threat because they’re on the border. They’re always overwhelmed by either the Burmese, Chinese or Tibetan speakers, and they live a very precarious existence. And yet, in this apartment block in Brooklyn, these two villages somehow have a thriving village of Seke speakers.

He has lots of cases like that which are interesting and can be funny, because of the way he writes.  The way his informants respond to him can be very funny too. But it’s also sad. What will be lost with the losing of these languages is untold richness.

Just as with Annabel Sowemimo’s book about the health service, and Conway’s book too, there is a feeling that this is something we need to be alert to. He’s not trying to propose any great solution. Language strength is often determined by other things. It’s about politics. If there is war and peoples are shifted and scattered, or their whole way of life is under threat, languages are bound to disappear.

Also, for a language to survive in New York, it has to adapt, to find terms for things that if you’re up in a Himalayan village you never have to think about. Do you borrow words? Do you invent words? With European languages, anglophones often mock the French for developing really complicated words for things because they don’t want to adopt an English term. There’s a sense in which that also applies here. He’s not trying to fix languages as museum pieces. These are living languages. All languages change all the time, but they have their vulnerabilities. The trouble is that for many of these languages, the change will mean disappearance as the native speakers disappear.

Let’s turn to the final book on the shortlist, which is The Tame and the Wild: People and Animals After 1492 by historian Marcy Norton. What’s this one about? Why 1492?

1492 was the fateful encounter between the new world and the old with Columbus and those who followed him. This is an extraordinarily interesting book about what the indigenous Americans and the Europeans brought to that encounter in terms of thinking about animals. You wonder, ‘Why animals?’ And you realize that it opens out a wide terrain to think about the nature of the conquest of the Americas and their transformation.

One of the things that she fixes on is that in Western Europe there was a distinction between wild and domesticated animals. That simply didn’t exist in the regions of the Americas that she is studying. What did exist was the difference between the predatory and the familiar.

The basic misunderstanding was that for the indigenous Americans, if you feed an animal, it’s horrific to then kill it and eat it. It’s the worst thing you could do. Whereas for the Europeans, that’s what domestication is about. You feed animals, then you kill them and eat them. Because of the imbalance of power, when Columbus and the conquistadors came along, they looked at these regions and said, ‘This looks like a great place for sheep and cattle. Oh! They haven’t got any, we’ll bring them across.’ So they brought them across, and devastated whole swathes of the continent. That still goes on in Amazonia in Brazil. You bring down whole areas of rainforest in order to raise more and more cattle.

The other division she points out was that for the indigenous Americans at the time, the dividing line between the human and the non-human didn’t exist in the way that we think of it. For the Catholic conquistadors and Western Europeans generally, there’s a Genesis myth: God created man to have dominion over animals, making a clear dividing line between mankind and the non-human. That didn’t exist in the Americas. So some people thought they were descended from plants. Others thought that they would become plants, or that they were descended from birds, or that they would become birds. The fluidity of those divisions was really extraordinary and informed, to some extent, this notion of the predatory and the familiar.

The problem is that the Europeans arrived believing that a mark of civilization is the domestication of animals (which still endures). Europeans came with a strong sense of civilizational hierarchy and their first mission was to ‘civilize’ the people they found in the Americas, which meant, of course, enslaving them, often, because suddenly they were lesser people, regarded as ‘uncivilised’.

The other thing she brings out is that the conquistadors brought scholars with them, particularly priests and others who wanted to try to understand the flora and fauna of the new world. They had to enlist the help of indigenous scholars and, to some extent, they respected that indigenous scholarship. In the works that they began to publish and to present to Philip II of Spain, she can see very clearly the influence of local ways of thought on the ways in which animals and plants were being categorized. Local, indigenous scholarship was beginning to inform zoological categories in Western Europe. Yet it was completely without acknowledgement—instead it was seen as the work of some Spaniard, and the five or six indigenous scholars who had actually fed into the work were not given public recognition, although she discovers them in the archive of letters exchanged. Indeed, there’s collegial correspondence between them, but it disappears from the pages of history. Again, it reminds us that things that we think are the product of Western civilization may not be that Western after all, and not that civilized either. It’s a powerful book, of extraordinary scholarship and depth and richness. It makes you think otherwise about the things you’ve taken for granted.

What would be an example of a familiar animal?

It might be birds that you capture, and then feed. You can kill a bird in the wild, but if you start feeding it, you can’t kill it and eat it. What you can do is sacrifice it to the earth. So it doesn’t mean that those animals you feed have a charmed life. They might well be seen as a suitable kind of propitiation. And that, of course, applied to human beings too: as demonstrated in the grisly stories—which the conquistadors sometimes tended to exaggerate—about human sacrifice across the Americas. Part of that was due to the fact they were seen as part of the same continuum. They weren’t seen as different because they were human. The conquistadors found that really difficult to cope with. Human sacrifice was somehow far worse than bird or animal sacrifice—but for many of the indigenous cultures in Mesoamerica, particularly, there wasn’t that much difference. It depended on how you treated them before and after and what you were doing with them.

Thank you so much for talking through these books. It’s a great shortlist.

They are very strong, very powerful books—and varied, too, in terms of the topics, the approaches, the authors.