History – David Griffiths

June 2, 2025June 5, 2025

The Art of the Kowtow – From Beijing to Washington

Browsing through photos of a 2007 visit to the vast “Forbidden City” in Beijing got me thinking about how, in imperial China, even the most distinguished foreign visitors to the Emperor were expected to prostrate themselves to acknowledge his supremacy. Imperial officials would ensure that this was done, after which the Emperor would condescend to accept tribute and grant gifts. That got me reflecting on an unrelated event in the US capital a few months ago.

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May 2, 2025May 3, 2025

¡No Pasarán! – La Rioja, Spain, 2016

On a hot mid-morning during a 6-week walk from France to Santiago de Compostela I was grateful to see an enterprising young man selling cold drinks, fruit and souvenirs to pilgrims in the middle of nowhere. His little dog bounded up, wagging its tail and barking so furiously that I couldn’t resist joking “¿No pasarán?” to its owner. He looked startled. “My God” he said, “Do you know what that means?” I did – but not the significance of the day on which I’d said it. Which led to a thought-provoking discussion about the Spanish Civil War, 80 years earlier.

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February 1, 2025

Rome on the Potomac? – Washington, 2015-2025

A lot has changed since I was last on business in Washington. Its imposing classic architecture and urban landscape had got me imagining what it must have been like to stroll through ancient Rome at the height of its imperial glory. Who would have thought then that the Western world’s mightiest economic and military power was on a path from great republic to imperial oligarchy, and ultimately to inglorious decline and fall? A decade later that’s not so hard to imagine.

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December 2, 2024February 3, 2025

An Environmental Morality Tale – Baku, 2007

Seen from the walls of a medieval castle the view couldn’t have been more dissonant. As far as the eye could see it was a dystopian, post-apocalyptic landscape of oil-soaked ponds and rusting Soviet-era oil pumps. A low plume of smoke drifting in front of the city skyline marked a huge landfill which had been burning for years. Many have criticized the choice of Azerbaijan as host for last month’s 29th Conference of Parties to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (COP29), especially as it was the second “petro-state” in a row to do so. Yet Baku is the birthplace of the modern petroleum industry and its history has environmental lessons to offer.

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October 1, 2023February 4, 2024

A Walk to the End of the Earth – Galicia, 2023

Somehow I had imagined Spain’s Cape Finisterre – “End of the Earth” – to be like a finger of Europe pointing westward toward the open sea. But it isn’t. It’s more like an appendix, hanging “down” from north to south. And that’s part of the magic. The pilgrim who augments their Camino de Santiago (the “Way of Saint James”) by walking an additional 90 kilometres westward eventually turns south toward the point, through the charming little town of Finisterre. To their left is the familiar land from which they have come. Over the hill to the right, the western cliffs plunge precipitously into open ocean and empty horizon. It’s not hard to see why, for millennia, Finisterre was a revered destination in its own right; a threshold between the known and unknown worlds.

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October 2, 2021January 23, 2023

Mi’kmaw Feasts at Kjipuktuk (Halifax)

On October 1st each year Nova Scotia celebrates Treaty Day, when nation-to-nation covenants between the indigenous Mi’kmaq and British Crown (now the Government of Canada) are reaffirmed in Halifax (Kjipuktuk in the Mi’kmaw language). Yesterday, to mark the occasion the Mi’kmaw Native Friendship Centre presented a program of dance, song, drumming and cultural teaching along with a free meal of Atlantic salmon to all comers as a gesture of the Peace and Friendship which the treaties were intended to nurture. The troubled three-century history of the treaties and subsequent colonial abuses is too complex to relate here, but is the reason why many people were wearing orange shirts of remembrance. But this was a day of celebration and reconciliation, which put me in mind of another, more ancient annual feast.

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