A History of the World in 100 Objects

Object 68, the Hindu deity couple Shiva and Parvati sculpture with radio series information panel.

The programme series, described as "a landmark project",[6] is billed as 'A history of humanity' told through a hundred objects from all over the world in the British Museum's collection.

In these programmes, I'm travelling back in time, and across the globe, to see how we humans over 2 million years have shaped our world and been shaped by it, and I'm going to tell this story exclusively through the things that humans have made: all sorts of things, carefully designed, and then either admired and preserved, or used, broken and thrown away. I've chosen just a hundred objects from different points on our journey, from a cooking pot to a golden galleon, from a Stone Age tool to a credit card.[7]

Telling history through things, whether it's an Egyptian mummy or a credit card, is what museums are for, and because the British Museum has collected things from all over the globe, it's not a bad place to try to tell a world history. Of course, it can only be "a" history of the world, not "the" history. When people come to the museum they choose their own objects and make their own journey round the world and through time, but I think what they will find is that their own histories quickly intersect with everybody else's, and when that happens, you no longer have a history of a particular people or nation, but a story of endless connections.[7]

Accompanying the series is a website, described by The Guardian as "even more ambitious [than the radio series itself] that encourages users to submit items of their own for a place in world history", along with much interactive content, detailed information on all the objects featured in the radio programmes and links to 350 other museum collections across the UK.[8] The radio programmes are available on the website permanently for listening or downloading.

The museum has adapted exhibitions for the series by including additional easily identifiable plaques for the 100 objects with text based on the programme and adding a section to the gallery maps showing the location and numbers of the 100 objects.

On 18 January 2010, an hour-long special of The Culture Show on BBC2 was dedicated to the launch of the project.[9]

The first part of the series was broadcast on weekdays over six weeks between 18 January and 26 February 2010. After a short break, the series returned with the seventh week being broadcast in the week beginning 17 May 2010.[10] It then took another break in the middle of July and returned on 13 September 2010, running until the 100th object was featured on Friday 22 October 2010.

Maev Kennedy of The Guardian described the programme as "a broadcasting phenomenon", while Tim Davie, head of music and audio at BBC radio, commented that "the results have been nothing short of stunning", exceeding the BBC's wildest hopes for the programme. At the time of the writing of Kennedy's article, just before the start of the last week of the series, the radio broadcasts regularly had up to four million listeners, while the podcast downloads had totalled 10,441,884. Of these, just over half, 5.7 million, were from the UK. In addition, members of the public had uploaded 3,240 objects with the largest single contribution coming from Glasgow historian Robert Pool who submitted 120 objects all relating to the City of Glasgow, and other museums a further 1,610, and 531 museums and heritage sites across the UK had been mounting linked events – an unprecedented partnership, MacGregor said. Museums all over the world are now copying the formula, as thousands of visitors every day set out to explore the British Museum galleries equipped with the leaflet mapping the objects.[11]

Writing in The Independent, Philip Hensher described the series as "perfect radio", saying "Has there ever been a more exciting, more unfailingly interesting radio series than the Radio 4/British Museum venture, A History of the World in 100 Objects? It is such a beautifully simple idea, to trace human civilisations through the objects that happen to have survived. Each programme, just 15 minutes long, focuses on just one thing, quite patiently, without dawdling. At the end, you feel that you have learnt something, and learnt it with pleasure and interest. For years to come, the BBC will be able to point to this wonderful series as an example of the things that it does best. It fulfils, to a degree that one thought hardly possible any more, the BBC's Reithian agenda of improvement and the propagation of learning and culture."[12]

Dominic Sandbrook in The Telegraph said that the "joyously highbrow" series "deserves to take its place alongside television classics such as Kenneth Clark's Civilisation and Jacob Bronowski's The Ascent of Man."[13]

A special radio programme on Radio 4, first broadcast on 18 May 2011, featured one of the many thousands of items nominated on the BBC website by members of the public as an object of special significance.[16] The object chosen to be featured on the programme was an oil painting depicting a young woman that was nominated by Peter Lewis. The painting, which belonged to Lewis' uncle, Bryn Roberts, was painted from a postcard photograph of Roberts' girlfriend (and later wife), Peggy Gullup, by an anonymous Jewish artist for Roberts whilst he was a prisoner of war at Auschwitz in Poland.[17][18]

Another special programme was broadcast on 25 December 2020. Neil MacGregor and a roundtable of guests discussed adding a 101st object to represent how the world has changed in the past decade since the end of the original series.[19] The objects ultimately chosen were the British Museum's collection of 'Dark Water, Burning World' sculptures by Syrian-British artist Issam Kourbaj. They depict small, fragile boats filled with matchsticks - representing the plight of refugees of the Syrian Civil War in particular and migrants in general.

The British Museum won the 2011 Art Fund Prize for museums and galleries for its part in the A History of the World in 100 Objects series. The prize, worth £100,000, was presented to the museum by Jeremy Hunt, Secretary of State for Culture, Olympics, Media and Sport, in a ceremony at London on 15 June 2011.[20]

The chairman of the panel of judges, Michael Portillo, noted that the judges were "particularly impressed by the truly global scope of the British Museum's project, which combined intellectual rigour and open heartedness, and went far beyond the boundaries of the museum's walls".[21] The judges were also very impressed by the way that the project used digital media in ground-breaking and novel ways to interact with audiences.[21]

During 2016 and 2017 a touring exhibition of many of the one hundred objects, also titled History of the World in 100 Objects, was held in a number of countries and territories, including Australia, Japan, the United Arab Emirates, Taiwan, and China (first at the National Museum of China in Beijing, and then at Shanghai Museum).[22][23] Due to the conditions encountered while touring different countries some exhibits had to be returned to the British Museum for maintenance during tour, and were replaced by other objects from the British Museum collections. Some controversial exhibits were excluded from the exhibition in some countries. Object 90 (Jade bi with poem) was not included in the exhibition held in China because it may have been looted from the Old Summer Palace in Beijing. In addition, a piece of Chinese brocade that had been included in the touring exhibition elsewhere was not included in the exhibition in China because it was collected from the Mogao Caves by Aurel Stein under controversial circumstances.[23]

• Relic: Guardians of the Museum - Children's tie in of the project.
• Our Top Ten Treasures
• Britain's Secret Treasures
• A History of Ireland in 100 Objects

Wikimedia Commons has media related to A History of the World in 100 Objects.

• A History of the World, BBC and The British Museum
• A History of the World in 100 Objects (BBC podcasts page)
• A History of the World in Five Minutes (5-minute video summary of the 100 objects)
• Review by Miranda Sawyer in The Observer