History

In Civilisations episode 9, Simon Schama begins Civilisations with this premise: that it is in art – the play of the creative imagination – that humanity expresses its most essential self: the power to break the tyranny of the humdrum, the grind of everyday. Art, then, makes life worth living; it is the great window into human potential. And societies become civilised to the extent that they take culture as seriously as the prosecution of power, or the accumulation of wealth.     But in the century of total war and industrial slaughter was (and is) that enough? The cause

If David Olusoga’s first film in Civilisations is about the art that followed and reflected early encounters between different cultures, his second explores the artistic reaction to imperialism in the 19th century. David shows the growing ambivalence with which artists reacted to the idea of progress – both intellectual and scientific – that underpinned the imperial mission and followed the Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution.     Advances in knowledge and technology imbued Europeans in the 19th century with a sense of their civilisation’s superiority. It justified their imperial ideology. But it created among artists a deep fascinations with other

Think Renaissance and you think Italy. But in the 15th and 16th centuries the great Islamic empires experienced their own extraordinary cultural flowering. The two phenomena did not unfold in separate artistic universes; they were acutely conscious of, and in competition with, each other and mutually open to influences flowing both ways.     The fifth film in Civilisations goes east and west with Simon Schama: to Papal Rome but also to Ottoman Istanbul and Mughal Lahore and Agra, exploring those connections and rivalries, and examining how the role of artists from the different traditions of West and East developed