The World of Our Making.

AD 19142010.

The twentieth century and beginning of the twenty-first were an era of unprecedented conflict, social change and scientific development. Technological innovation enabled more objects to be produced and used by humankind than at any previous time in history, changing the way we relate to each other and to the material world. But many of these objects (particularly since the invention of plastic) have been ephemeral and disposable, which has given urgency to questions about the environment and global resources. As has been true for almost two million years, the objects we have produced over the last century convey our concerns, our creativity and our aspirations, and will continue to reveal them to future generations.

96.

Russian Revolutionary Plate.

Porcelain plate, from St Petersburg, Russia.

PAINTED AD 1921.

Arise, ye workers from your slumber, Arise, ye prisoners of want.

For reason in revolt now thunders, and at last ends the age of cant!

Away with all your superstitions, Servile masses, arise, arise!

We'll change henceforth the old tradition, And spurn the dust to win the prize!

Those are the words of 'The Internationale', the great socialist hymn written in France in 1871. In Russia in the 1920s, it was adopted by the Bolsheviks as the anthem of the Russian Revolution. The original words were about looking forward to a time of future revolution, but significantly the Bolsheviks changed the tense in the Russian translation, moving it from the future to the present the Revolution was now. The workers, at least in theory, had taken control.

Throughout this book we have seen images of individual rulers from Ramesses II and Alexander the Great, to the Oba of Benin and King Edward VII but here we have the image of a new kind of ruler, not an 'I' but a 'We', not an individual but a whole class, for in Soviet Russia we see the power of the people, or, rather, the dictatorship of the proletariat. The object in this chapter is a painted porcelain plate that celebrates the Russian Revolution and the new ruling class. In vivid orange, red, black and white, it shows a revolutionary factory glowing with energy and productivity, and, in the foreground, a symbolic member of the proletariat striding into the future. Seven decades of communism are about to begin.

The twentieth century was dominated by ideologies and war: two world wars; fights for independence from colonial powers, and post-colonial civil wars; fascism in Europe, military dictatorships across the world; and revolution in Russia. The great political contest, lasting for most of the century, was between liberal democracy on the one hand, and central state direction on the other. By 1921, the year in which the plate was painted, the Bolsheviks had imposed on Russia a new political system based on Marxist theories of class and economics, and were setting about building a new world. It was a Herculean task the country had been abjectly defeated in the First World War and the new regime was under threat from foreign invasion and civil war. The Bolsheviks needed to motivate and lead the Soviet workers with whatever means they had at their disposal. One of those means was art.

The designer has exploited the circular shape of the plate to intensify the image's symbolic power. At the centre, in the distance, is a factory painted in red this is clearly a factory that belongs to the workers puffing white smoke, evidence of healthy productivity, with a radiant sunburst of vivid yellow and orange driving away the dark forces of the repressive past. On a hill in the foreground, a man strides in from the left of the picture. He's aglow, like the factory, with a golden aura around him, painted in red silhouette without any detail, but we know he is young and that he is looking fervently ahead. He clearly represents not an individual but the entire proletariat, moving into the brighter future that they are going to create. At his foot is an industrial cogwheel and in his hand the hammer of the industrial workers. With his next stride he will trample over a barren piece of ground where the word KAPITAL lies broken, its letters scattered over the rocks. The plate had been made twenty years earlier, in 1901, and left blank. The artist who designed it, Mikhail Mikhailovich Adamovich, transformed a piece of imperial porcelain into lucid and effective Soviet propaganda. It is this re-purposing that fascinates the Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm: The most interesting thing about this is precisely that in one object you can see the old regime and the new regime, and the change from the one to the other. There are very few objects like this where historic change is so clearly present before you. Ideology is important as far as the artists were concerned. There was this enormous sense, among the people who felt themselves to have made the revolution, that we have done something that nobody in the world has done. We are creating a completely new world, which won't be complete until both Russia and the world are transformed, and we have the duty of showing it and pushing it forward that's the ideology.

Not long after the Bolshevik takeover, the Imperial Porcelain Factory was nationalized, renamed the State Porcelain Factory and placed under the authority of an official with the ringing utopian title of 'The People's Commissar of Enlightenment'. As the Commissar of the State Porcelain Factory wrote to the Commissar of Enlightenment: The Porcelain and Glass Factories ... cannot be just factory and industrial enterprises. They must be scientific and artistic centres. Their aim is to encourage the development of Russia's ceramic and glass industry, to seek and develop new paths in production ... to study and develop artistic form.

In the Russia of 1921, the year of our plate, there was an acute need for striking messages of unity and hope. The country was embroiled in civil war, deprivation, drought and famine: over four million Russians starved to death. The worker-owned factories like the one shown on our plate were producing a fraction of what they had done before the Revolution. Eric Hobsbawm sees the art typified by the plate as indicating the power of hope in a seemingly hopeless situation: It was made at a time when almost all the people engaged in it were hungry. There was famine in the Volga and people died of hunger and typhus. It was a time when you would say, 'This is a country lying flat on its back, how can it recover?' And what I think one has to re-create by imagination is the sheer impetus of people doing it, saying: in spite of everything we are still building this future, and we are looking forward to the future with enormous confidence.

The plate brings us what one of the ceramic artists called 'news from a radiant future'. Normally regimes will revisit and reorder the past, appropriating it to their current needs, as we have seen many times, but the Bolsheviks wanted people to believe that the past was over and that the new world was going to be built from scratch.

This image of the new egalitarian world of the proletariat is painted on porcelain the luxury material historically associated with aristocratic culture and privilege. Painted by hand over the glaze, it was for display, not for use. The plate is scallop-edged and very fine it was in fact a blank made before the Revolution that had been left over from the Porcelain Factory's imperial days. The Empress Elizabeth had set up the Imperial Porcelain Factory near St Petersburg in the eighteenth century, to produce porcelain which would rival the best that Europe could offer, for use at court and for official imperial gifts, as Mikhail Piotrovsky, Director of Russia's State Hermitage Museum, explains: Russian porcelain became an important part of Russian cultural production. Russian Imperial Porcelain became famous: beautiful dishes that are now extremely expensive at world auctions. It is a good example of art in connection with economy and politics, because it was always a kind of expression of Russian empire military pictures, military parades, the love of life of ordinary people, pictures from the Hermitage everything which Russia wanted to present to the world and to itself in a beautiful manner.

This plate is an example in microcosm of the way in which the Soviet rhetoric of total rupture could never match the reality: given the speed of the Revolution, the Bolsheviks had to take over existing structures where they could, so much of Soviet Russia continued to echo Tsarist patterns. They had to do it that way but in this case, they deliberately chose to do it. On the back of the plate are two factory marks. Underneath the glaze, applied when the blank plate was first made, is the Imperial Porcelain Factory mark of Tsar Nicholas II for the year 1901. Over the glaze is painted the hammer and sickle of the Soviet State Porcelain Factory and the date 1921. This painted plate was made in two stages, twenty years apart, and in astonishingly different political circumstances.

You would have expected the Tsar's monogram to have been painted over, blotting out the imperial connection, and it often was. But, as somebody at the factory realized, there was a great advantage in leaving both marks visible. It made what was already a collector's item even more desirable, so it could be sold abroad for a much higher price. The regime was desperate to raise foreign currency, and the sale of artistic and historic objects like this plate was one obvious part of the solution. The records of the new State Porcelain Factory report that, 'For foreign markets the presence of these marks alongside the Soviet marks is of great interest, and prices for the objects abroad shall doubtless be set higher if the earlier marks are not painted over.'

The imperial factory mark of Tsar Nicholas II and the hammer and sickle of the Soviet state So we have the surprising situation of a socialist revolutionary regime making luxury goods to sell to the capitalist world. And you could argue this was perfectly coherent: profits from the plate supported Soviet international action, designed to undermine the very capitalists they were selling to, while at the same time the porcelain propaganda promulgated the Soviet message to Russian enemies. 'Artistic industry,' wrote the critic Yakov Tugenkhold in 1923, 'is that happy battering ram which has already broken down the wall of international isolation.'

This conflicted, symbiotic relationship between the Soviet and the capitalist worlds initially seen as a transitional necessity until the West was won for workers and communism became the norm for the rest of the century. The front of the plate shows us the compelling clarity of the early Bolshevik dream. The back shows us pragmatic compromise negotiation with the imperial past and political realities, and a complex economic modus vivendi with the capitalist world. Broadly, this is the pattern that would be sustained for the next seventy years as the world settled into two huge, competing but in many ways interdependent ideological blocs. The front and back of this plate chart the path from worldwide revolution to the stability of the Cold War.

97.

Hockney's In the Dull Village.

Etching, from England.

AD 1966.

Sexual intercourse began In nineteen sixty-three (which was rather late for me) Between the end of the 'Chatterley' ban And The Beatles' first LP.

So wrote the poet Philip Larkin, master of the regretful lyric, in one of his jollier verses, pinpointing what were for him the key aspects of the Swinging Sixties sex, music and then more sex. All generations think they have invented sex, but none thought they had done it as thoroughly as the young people of the 1960s. Of course there was a great deal more to the sixties than that, but the decade has now taken on mythic status as a time of transforming freedom or destructive self-indulgence and the myths are not unjustified. All over the world established structures of authority and society were challenged, and in some cases brought down, by spontaneous mass activism in pursuit of political, social and sexual freedoms.

In the previous two chapters we examined big political issues the realization of rights for whole sections of society, whether votes for women or power (in theory) for the proletariat. In the 1960s the campaigns were more about ensuring that every individual citizen could exercise those rights, asserting that everybody should be free to play their full part in society and to live the way they wished, as long as they caused no harm. Some of these new freedoms were hard won, and people paid with their lives: this was the decade of Martin Luther King and black civil rights in the United States; of the Prague Spring, the heroic Czech rebellion against Soviet Communism; of the 1968 Paris student uprisings and waves of campus discontent across Europe and America; of the campaigns oppposing war in Vietnam and supporting Nuclear Disarmament.

It was also the decade of the psychedelic Summer of Love played out to the sounds of Woodstock and San Francisco, the Beatles and the Grateful Dead. In the private realm there was a sexual revolution Women's Liberation, the contraceptive pill and the legalization of homosexual relations. There is no earlier decade in which David Hockney's etching In the Dull Village could have been published. Hockney began his art studies in the 1950s, but it was the 1960s that formed him, and he in turn helped shape the decade. He was gay and prepared to be open about it, both in his life and his work, at a time when in the UK homosexual activity between men was criminal, and prosecutions were frequent. He divided his time between California, where he made his famous paintings of naked young men in deep blue swimming pools, and Britain, where he drew and painted his family and friends.

In this etching, two naked men, who could be in their 20s, lie side by side in bed, half covered by a blanket; we are looking down at them from its foot. One lies with his arms behind his head, his eyes closed as if dozing, while the other looks eagerly at him. We have no idea whether the relationship between the two men is recent or of long standing, but at first sight this looks like a calm, entirely satisfactory morning after.

It is one of a series of etchings inspired by the poems of the Greek poet Constantine Cavafy, on which Hockney began work in 1966, while the Home Secretary, Roy Jenkins, was drafting the legislation to decriminalize homosexuality in England and Wales ; and it was published in 1967, just as Parliament passed Jenkins's Sexual Offences Act. Hockney's image was shocking for many then, and for some is still shocking today, even though there is nothing at all explicit about it the blanket covers both men up to the waist. Yet it raises perplexing questions about what societies find acceptable or unacceptable, about the limits of tolerance and individual freedom, and about shifting moral structures over thousands of years of human history.

One of the constants of this history of the world, not surprisingly, has been sex or, more precisely, sexual attraction and love. Among our hundred examined objects, we have the oldest-known representation of a couple making love, a small stone carved 11,000 years ago near Jerusalem, we have harem women, voluptuous goddesses and gay sex on a Roman cup. Surprisingly, given this long tradition of representing human sexuality, David Hockney's relatively decorous print was nonetheless a courageous indeed provocative act in the Britain of his day.

The young men in Hockney's etching could be American or British; but they inhabit the place of the picture's title, which matches that of Cavafy's poem 'In the Dull Village'. The poem is about a young man trapped by his circumstances, who escapes his dreary surroundings by dreaming of the perfect love partner. So perhaps Hockney's dozing boy is gently fantasizing his ardent companion, who is imagined, rather than actually present in the longed-for flesh.

He lay in his bed tonight sick with what love meant, All his youth in desire of the flesh alight In a lovely tension all his lovely youth.

And in his sleep delight came to him; in his sleep He sees and holds the form and flesh he wanted ...

The cosmopolitan family of Constantine Cavafy (18631933) had moved between Turkey, Britain and Egypt and was part of the huge Greek diaspora that for 2,000 years had dominated the economic, intellectual and cultural life of the eastern Mediterranean. He lived in a broad, Greek-speaking world, which defined itself essentially less in terms of mainland Greece than in the twin centres of Constantinople and Alexandria. It was a world created by Alexander's conquest of Egypt in the fourth century BC and which ended only in the middle of the twentieth century a world we have encountered several times before in our history, notably in the Rosetta Stone, where the languages of Greece and Egypt appear side by side. Cavafy was very aware of this rich inheritance, and his Alexandrian poetry has a deep sense of ancient history, and of a Greek world in which love between males was an accepted part of life.

The world of Bradford as experienced by the young Hockney was a very different place. In Yorkshire in the 1950s, homosexuality was an unmentionable subject and for an artist a risky one. So the poems of Cavafy, which Hockney found in the Bradford library, were a revelation.

I read more of his poems and I was struck by their directness and simplicity; and then I found the John Mavrogordato translation in the library in Bradford in that summer of 1960, and I stole it. I've still got it, I'm sure. I don't feel bad now because it's been redone, but you couldn't buy it then, it was completely out of print. Mind you, in the library in Bradford you had to ask for that book, it was never on the shelves.

The fourteen poems that Hockney later chose for his series of etchings, poems of longing and loss, of the first meeting of future loves and intoxicating, passionate encounters, were both exciting material that he could use for his own art and an example of how an artist could make a public statement out of such private experience. Brought up by his enlightened parents to follow his own line and not worry about what neighbours thought, Hockney felt a responsibility to stand up, through his art, for his own rights and to join the growing campaign for the rights of others like him. Characteristically, he was determined that his approach would not be heavy handed. These etchings don't preach, they laugh and they sing: What one must remember about some of these pictures is that they were partly propaganda of something that hadn't been propagandized, especially among students, as a subject: homosexuality. I felt it should be done. It was part of me; it was a subject I could treat humorously.

Gay rights were of course only one of the many freedoms asserted and fought for during the sixties, but they were a particularly challenging issue in the context of universal human rights. Most of these concerned groups of people discriminated against on the grounds of gender, religion or race, and there was a wide consensus in the aftermath of the Second World War that such discrimination was wrong. Sexual orientation and behaviour, on the other hand, were seen as something quite different indeed they were not even mentioned in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights adopted by the United Nations in 1948. Hockney and campaigners like him eventually changed the terms of the debate, taking questions of sexuality firmly into the arena of human rights in Europe and America. In some countries, their campaigning changed the law, but in many parts of the world private sexual acts that deviate from an accepted norm are still considered religiously unacceptable or a threat to society, deemed criminal and punished in some cases by death.

In 2008 the United Nations General Assembly considered a statement condemning killings and executions, torture and arbitrary arrest based on sexual orientation or gender identity. The statement was endorsed by over fifty countries, but prompted a counter-statement opposing it and the matter remains unresolved.

Hockney's etching is arrestingly sparse. A few black lines suggest a wall here, a blanket there. There is nothing to tell us where this bed is. We do not even know whether both figures are really present or just dreamt of. This insistently unspecific image reminds us that sexual behaviour, although totally private, is also totally universal. Society's responses to it, on the other hand, are most definitely not. Forty years later, the frontier of human rights is still being bloodily negotiated: our world is less global than we like to think.

98.

Throne of Weapons.

Chair made of weapon parts, from Maputo, Mozambique.

AD 2001.

For the first time in this history we are examining an object that is a record of war but which does not glorify war or the ruler who waged it. The Throne of Weapons is a chair or throne constructed out of parts of guns that were made all over the world and exported to Africa. If a striking feature of the nineteenth century was the growth of mass markets and mass consumption, the twentieth century can be characterized by mass warfare and mass killing: the two world wars, Stalin's purges, the Holocaust, Hiroshima, Cambodia's killing fields, Rwanda the list goes on. If there is one small, positive side to all this devastation it is that the twentieth century has more than any previous one recorded and articulated the mass suffering of ordinary victims of war the soldiers and civilians who paid with their lives. Across the world there are Tombs of Unknown Soldiers; the Throne of Weapons is in this tradition. It is a monument to all the victims of the Mozambique civil war and a record of crimes against a whole country indeed a continent. It is also, most unusually for such a commemorative piece, a work of art that speaks to us of hope and resolution. The Throne of Weapons is about human tragedy and human triumph in equal measure.

These closing chapters of our history chart the fading of empires that flourished and grew throughout the nineteenth century and the rise of new global ideologies and national identities. Nowhere has this been played out so bloodily as in post-colonial Africa. The late nineteenth-century 'Scramble for Africa' resulted in the parcelling up of the continent among Britain, France and Portugal as the leading colonial powers, alongside Germany, Italy, Spain and Belgium. After the Second World War there were moves throughout the continent for independence, and from 1960 onwards it was gradually achieved. But this separation from European powers was usually bitterly fought over, and because independence was so often attained only after fighting, it frequently contributed to great internal problems for the new states, including civil war. The Ghanaian diplomat and former Secretary General of the United Nations, Kofi Annan, has had personal and professional experience of this: I think we have to start from the premise that most of these countries had not had experience of governing running a nation, managing issues and had to start almost from scratch. Given the history of their countries, there were civil servants, but very few of them had actually led and organized a country. And I think the skills that you need to fight for independence are not the same skills you require to govern, but there was an automatic assumption that those who fought for independence were prepared and ready to govern. So there was quite a bit of learning on the job, and also jealousies between groups and a feeling that one tribe, or one group, had more power or benefits than the other, and this often led to tensions and conflict over scarce resources tense and brutal at times.

These fragile, inexperienced governments could look for support to either communist East or capitalist West, and both those blocs were eager to enlist supporters. After the nineteenth-century territorial scrambles for Africa came the twentieth century's ideological ones. The consequence was a huge influx of arms to the continent and a series of bitter civil wars. The Mozambique civil war was among the bloodiest of them all.

Although it is entirely made from chopped-up guns, in its shape the Throne of Weapons looks like a conventional wooden armchair the homely sort you might find in a kitchen or at a dinner table. But that's the only conventional thing about it. The guns that make up this chair in fact track the twentieth-century history of Mozambique. The oldest, forming the back, are two antiquated Portuguese G3 rifles appropriately so, as Portugal was the country's colonial master for nearly 500 years until independence in 1975. That independence was won by a left-wing resistance movement, FRELIMO, which was supported by the Soviet Union and its allies. This explains why all the other elements of the chair are dismembered guns manufactured in the communist bloc: the arms of the chair are from Soviet AK47s, the seat is formed from Polish and Czechoslovakian rifles, and one of the front legs is the barrel of a North Korean AKM. This is the Cold War as furniture, the Eastern Bloc in action, fighting for communism in Africa and across the world.

When FRELIMO came to power in 1975, the new Mozambique became a Marxist-Leninist state with a declared hostility to the political regimes of its neighbours white-controlled Rhodesia, now Zimbabwe, and apartheid South Africa. In response, the Rhodesian and South African regimes created and backed an opposition group named RENAMO and attempted to destabilize the country; so the first decades of Mozambican independence were years of economic collapse and murderous civil war. The guns in the throne are the ones with which this civil war was fought. It left a million dead, millions of refugees and 300,000 war orphans in need of care. Peace came only after fifteen years, when in 1992 a settlement was brokered and the country's leaders began to rebuild their state. But although the war was over, the guns were still very much present. As Kofi Annan knows, it is notoriously difficult to re-educate a militarized generation to take their place in a peaceful civilian society, and in this case many of the soldiers had known nothing but war: It reminds me of the conflict in Sierra Leone, where lots of boy soldiers were involved. Soldiers as young as 8, 10, carrying Kalashnikovs, almost as tall as they were, trained to kill. I recall as Head of Peacekeeping Operations touring Sierra Leone with some of our peacekeepers and trying to see how we redeem these boys, and put them through training, prepare them for a life after this conflict.

There are a couple of things which are absolutely essential if a society is going to deal with the past. They need to be able to work on reconciliation. You also need to look at the society and ask the questions, 'What happened?', 'How did we get here?', 'What can we do to ensure that this horror is not repeated?'

The main challenge in Mozambique was to decommission the millions of surviving guns and to equip the former soldiers and their families to rebuild their lives. The Throne of Weapons became an inspirational element in this recovery process. It was made as part of a peace project called Transforming Arms into Tools, which is still going today, and in which weapons once used by combatants on both sides were voluntarily surrendered under amnesty, and in exchange the people who gave them up received practical and positive tools hoes, sewing machines, bicycles, roofing materials. Surrendering the guns was an act of real bravery on the part of these ex-soldiers and one of enormous significance for their families and the whole country. It helped break the addiction to the gun and to the culture of violence that had afflicted Mozambique for so many years. Since the beginning of the project more than 600,000 weapons have been relinquished and handed over to artists to be disabled and turned into sculpture. In the words of the project's patron, Graca Machel, widow of Mozambique's first independent ruler Samora Machel and now wife of Nelson Mandela, the aim was 'to take away instruments of death from the hands of young people and to give them an opportunity to develop a productive life'. The guns themselves were to be turned into works of art. The project was started in 1995 by the Anglican Bishop Dinis Sengulane, of the Christian Council of Mozambique, with the support of Christian Aid: The purpose of the project is to disarm the minds of people and to disarm the hands of people. Why should this world have hungry people? Why should this world have a shortage of medicines? And yet, the amount of money which can be made available almost instantly for armament purposes is just amazing, and I would say shocking.

I felt I should be part of shaping that peace. And of course we find the Book of Micah and the Book of Isaiah in the Bible, where it says they will turn their swords into ploughshares, and people will sit under their trees and nothing will frighten them.

We discovered that many monuments were a glorification of war, and we know that monuments are made by artists. So we invited artists and we said, 'What about using your skills to glorify peace? We have got these guns could you see whether you could convey a message of peace by using the bits and pieces of these guns?' It was in that context that artists began to make different works of art. And one of the items produced was the Throne of Weapons.

The throne was made by a Mozambican artist known as Kester. He chose to make a chair and call it a throne, which immediately makes a particular statement. Chairs, as distinct from stools, are rare in traditional African societies, reserved for tribal heads, princes and kings; they are 'thrones' in the truest sense of the word. But this is a throne on which no one is meant to sit; it is not for an individual ruler but is intended as an expression of the governing spirit of the new Mozambique peaceful reconciliation.

This piece seems to me to have a very special pathos, precisely because it has been made in the form of a chair. When we talk about chairs we always speak as though they were human beings we say they have arms, legs, backs. They are, after all, made to be an echo of the human form, and they become almost a metaphor for living people. So there is something particularly disturbing about a chair made out of weapons designed specifically to maim backs and arms, legs and feet.

Members of Kester's family were themselves maimed in the conflict: I wasn't affected directly by the civil war, but I have two relatives who lost their legs. One stepped into a minefield and she lost her leg, and the other, a cousin of mine, lost his leg because he was fighting with FRELIMO.

And yet Kester made this throne as a means of conveying hope. Two rifle butts form the back of the chair. If you look closely at them it seems as though they have faces two screw holes for eyes and a strap slot for the mouth. They almost seem to be smiling. It is a visual accident that Kester spotted and decided to exploit which denies the guns their central purpose and gives this work of art its fundamental meaning, as he himself explains: There is no conflict between us any more. I didn't carve the smile, it's part of the rifle butt. The screw holes and the mark left from where the strap was attached to the gun. So I chose the guns and the weapons that had the most expression. At the top you can see a smiling face. And there is another smiling face the other rifle butt. And they are smiling at each other as if to say, 'Now we are free.'

99.

Credit Card.

Issued in the United Arab Emirates.

AD 2009.

If you were to ask people which twentieth-century invention had most impact on their daily lives today, instant answers might be their mobile phone or their PC: not many people would think first of the little plastic rectangles that fill their wallets and purses. And yet, since they first emerged in the late 1950s, credit cards and their kin have become part of the fabric of modern life. Bank credit is, for the first time in history, no longer the prerogative of the elite, and maybe as a result long-dormant religious and ethical issues about the use and abuse of money have been reborn in the face of this ultimate symbol of economic freedom for millions, as some would see it, or, for others, of triumphant Anglo-American consumer culture.

In the last two chapters, we examined sex and war. Now it is the turn of that third great constant of human affairs, money. Money has featured throughout this history, from the gold coins of the legendarily rich King Croesus of Lydia (Chapter 25), and the paper money of the first Ming emperor (Chapter 72), to the first world currency, the king of Spain's silver pieces of eight (Chapter 80). Now it is the turn of the modern manifestation of money plastic.

The modern credit card is an American creation, the successor to retail credit schemes pioneered in the early twentieth century. After the end of the Second World War, wartime restrictions on lending were lifted and the credit boom began. The first general-purpose charge card was the Diners Club card, introduced in 1950. In 1958 the next step came with the appearance of the first real credit card, issued by a bank and generally accepted by large numbers of businesses. This was the BankAmericard, ancestor of Visa, and the first universal credit card to be made of plastic. But only in the 1990s did credit cards become truly global, widespread beyond North America and the UK.

Of course, a credit card isn't itself money it is a physical object that provides a way of spending money, moving it and promising it. Money is now more likely to be numbers and digits on statements and invoices than physical coins and notes. None of us is ever likely to see most of our savings turned into actual cash, even in a bank vault. Credit and debit cards bring home to us daily the fact that money has now lost its essential materiality; money spent through them is always new, fresh and unused. It can be called up virtually anywhere in the world instantaneously, regardless of national boundaries. Where as all the coins or banknotes we have looked at so far had king and country marked on them, our card acknowledges no ruler or nation in its design and no limit to its reach, other than an expiry date. This new money is supranational, and it seems to have conquered the world. And yet even on credit cards the echo of traditional money remains: the card that is telling our story is keen to present itself as a Gold Card.

What the card does of course is to guarantee payment. A complete stranger can be confident that he will ultimately be paid. For Mervyn King, Governor of the Bank of England, these cards are merely a new solution to an age-old problem: As in all types of money or cards used to finance transactions, the acceptability, the trust which the other side of the transaction puts in it, is paramount. I could give a different example, which I think illustrates the importance of trust here: when Argentina had its financial collapse, and reneged on its national debt, in the 1990s, its currency became worthless, and in some of the villages of Argentina the use of IOUs as a substitute for paper currency started to grow up. But the problem with the IOU is that the U has to trust the I, and that may not always be the case. So what happened was that in the villages some people would take the IOU to the local priest and ask him to endorse it. Now here we have an example in terms of the use of religion that was not fundamentally about religion as such, but which was about enhancing the trust that people had in the instrument that was being used.

In the absence of a village priest with global reach to endorse our IOUs, we use credit cards which span the world.

This credit card, issued in the UAE, has both English and Arabic writing on it This particular Gold Card is issued by the London-based bank called HSBC, the Hong Kong and Shanghai Banking Corporation. It functions through the backing of the US-based credit association, VISA, and has on it writing in Arabic it is in short connected to the whole world, part of a global financial system, backed by a complex electronic superstructure that many of us barely think about as we key in our PINs. All our credit-card transactions are tracked and recorded, building a huge dossier of our movements, writing our economic biographies on the other side of the world.

The scale of modern banks is far beyond anything previously known, and their global power now transcends national boundaries. As Mervyn King emphasizes: The spread of a wide range of financial transactions, whether using cards used by international banks or the other services that they offer, has created institutions which are trans-national, which are bigger than the ability of national regulators to control, and which, if they do get into financial difficulties fortunately not many have can cause enormous financial mayhem.

In the past rulers could walk away from their debt and leave banks to collapse, but today, it is apparently more difficult to allow a bank to fail than it is to see a government fall.

Some aspects of a credit card need no describing. Every credit card in the world is of the same internationally agreed size and shape, to fit in all the 'holes in the wall' that now puncture our urban world. In one respect, cards are like traditional coins and banknotes. They have two sides, each holding important information. If you turn this card over, the back shows us a magnetic strip, part of the electronic verification system that allows us to move money around the world relatively securely and permits instant communication, instant transactions and instant gratification. Many cards now incorporate an even more sophisticated piece of electronics, a microchip. It is this microtechnology, one of the great global achievements of the last generation, that has made the worldwide credit card possible and with it, the worldwide banks. This little black strip is the hero or villain of this chapter. All the rest is simply a consequence of it.

Credit cards do something which for most people was never possible before: they allow you to borrow while avoiding both the traditional pawnbroker and the loan-shark. Inevitably, opportunities bring risk. Easy credit undermines traditional values like thrift, because it sets you free from having to save before you spend. So it is not surprising that credit cards have drawn the attention of moralists and been categorized as dangerous, even sinful in their very nature. There is little doubt at all that paying by credit card does increase customers' willingness to spend often more than they can afford. So this is an area of banking that leads rapidly to debates about ethics and religion.

Perhaps surprisingly, religion is represented on our card itself. There is a decoration in the middle of it, a red fretwork, which looks like hollow stars, set in a rectangular strip. It is curiously reminiscent of an object we discussed earlier (Chapter 94): the Islamic patterning carved on the side of the Sudanese slit drum when it was taken to the Islamic north of Sudan, to proclaim the new world to which it belonged. Similar patterning makes the same point on our card, for this one is not just issued by HSBC but by HSBC Amanah, the Islamic banking wing of the corporation. This credit card is marketed as being compliant with Shariah law.