This morning, despite a colossal downpour in central London, I whistled my way into work following the announcement last night that the British Museum had won the Art Fund Prize for Museum of the Year 2011.

The reason was this project - A History of the World. A two-million-year history of humanity on air, online and on display in partnership with the BBC and over 500 museums, galleries and heritage sites across the UK.

The Art Fund judges made their choice (from hundreds of entries, a long-list of 10, and then a shortlist of four) – according to broadcaster and former MP, Michael Portillo – because of:

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.

Above all, we felt that this project, which showed a truly pioneering use of digital media, has led the way for museums to interact with their audiences in new and different ways. Without changing the core of the British Museum’s purpose, people have and are continuing to engage with objects in an innovative way as a consequence of this project.

His words are certainly very flattering and describe the broadness of this project: a 100-part radio series; physical displays, and of course this website where listeners could explore the British Museum objects, download podcasts of the series and discover the thousands of objects uploaded by museums, galleries, and individuals.

Speaking today, Neil MacGregor, the Museum Director, explained that the prize rewards the hard work of the entire Museum, but also the work of all those other museums who made the project what it is:

It is the first time a national museum has won the prize, and it is truly a prize for the whole Museum, as everybody contributed to making the project such a success.

The prize is £100,000. We shall use it for a series of Spotlight Tours, lending star British Museum objects around England, Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales. This seems appropriate as A History of the World involved 550 heritage partners, from Shetland to the Scilly Isles, who worked hand in hand with the BBC to explore global stories through museum collections of every complexion.

So, in truth, it’s not just the British Museum that can now proudly call itself Museum of the Year, it’s 550 museums, galleries and heritage sites – not to mention the many thousands of individuals who shared their objects and stories with us on this website.

So, this is it: after 10 months, 95 objects and 1,425 minutes of history on the radio, it’s the final week and our story has at last caught up with us.

But what a story… the past century has brought immense change - the way we live has been altered at an unprecedented speed in part due to new technologies, new materials, and consumption of material goods.

Over the last 100 years we’ve made more objects as a species than ever before - it has even been suggested that more objects have been made in the last 100 years, than in the preceding two million put together. For a vast archive of evidence just explore the objects you’ve uploaded to this site that were made in the last few decades.

For JD Hill, lead curator of the series, this has presented a great challenge:

Many listeners have asked how do we do justice to the last 100 years with five objects, especially, as this history is so well known to many. Should the objects be those associated with big events, or do you go for objects to do with underlying historical processes?

Although, in reality, choosing five objects to explore the last 100 years is not more difficult than choosing five to explore the second millennium BC. It has been about finding five objects that tell strong stories, unexpected stories and stories told through the things themselves.

So what objects have been chosen?

Our Russian plate explores how images and objects express the power of totalitarian regimes. In this case, the Bolshevik revolution in which propagandists painted over porcelain made by the previous imperial regime to make a statement about the communist future they were building towards.

A print by British artist David Hockney showing two men relaxing in bed together is used to discuss, sexuality and the rights of the individual to live as they choose.

In the Throne of Weapons we’re given an eloquent and poignant lesson in the horror of the wars played out in Africa, as Europe’s colonial empires came to an end. The cold war era weapons in the chair remind us that some of those African wars were in part fuelled, funded and facilitated by external forces. Many, many thousands have died, but another message in this seat is about reconciliation and the desire to begin building a future in peace.

Money has remained a constant through the series and a credit card speaks of our cashless world in which funds can change hands without being touched.

And, of course, our 100th and final object: the solar-powered lamp and charger. This object describes the challenges and ingenuity of today while also pointing to a possible future of renewable, non-polluting energy: kinder to our planet, and potentially liberating for the developing world.

So, without objects where would we be? Humans have always made, used and depended on things. They’ve been our ticket to the top of the food chain. They’ve enabled us to prosper in every single environment on the planet we occupy (even underwater!) not to mention beyond it.

So if there’s one message I’d like to sign-off with it’s that objects are powerful things - powerful because through them we can explore and understand ourselves.

• The photo of a junk shop in Kyoto is by Carol Green and is used under licence.

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... it’s a solar-powered lamp and charger. Like many of you – I’m sure – I was eagerly awaiting the unveiling of the artefact that would tell the final chapter in our history of the world in 100 objects.

We did our best to build the tension by revealing a shortlist of contenders. Through them we offered what Neil MacGregor and the rest of the team have identified as some of the key issues of the times in which we live.

The final object in many ways combines some of those key ideas: it’s a mass-produced item you could buy across the world; it uses technology to potentially change lives in the developing world; and it can provide a clean, independent and ultimately free source of power to make such transformative tools as mobile phones work.

But this one goes further. This one tells us not only about the current chapter in human history but also about the next one.

Unveiling his choice, Neil MacGregor described how the first stone tools made two million years ago by our earliest ancestors allowed us to gain control of our lives and our environment. Fast forward – a lot – and in the twenty-first century, that’s what this impressive, but simple, piece of kit has the potential to do: 

We felt that this was a kind of tool that – like the stone chopping tool – is really going to change lives, to change the way we think and the way we are.

And why? This clean source of renewable energy offers many parts of the developing world power – often for the first time:

You don’t need mains electricity. Everywhere that has sunshine has access to power. This means the poorest parts of the world now have a choice.

It can’t be cut off by local authorities. It allows a family to live in a certain way. The light doubles their day. It allows everyone to have the same access to light which until now has been available only to the urban elite.

That’s a powerful and transformative thing when you think about it. Being able to flick on a light means time to study, it means cooking without needing to use dangerous and expensive kerosene to light the kitchen.

Yet also by having the means to charge a mobile phone it connects you to the rest of the world. The potential for what that can do is enormous: connectivity through communication and access to knowledge on a previously unimaginable scale in many parts of the world.

That fact alone can change lives on a huge scale. It also, as Neil points out, connects us to our very oldest ancestors:

It’s of course about capturing the sun – that’s the oldest myth of every culture in the world. You can take the sun and use it whenever you want. The myths in Ancient Egypt, and every culture, are now reality.

This morning, looking back at the story he has been telling for the last 10 months, Neil recalled the words of Amartya Sen, professor of economics and philosophy, who spoke on the first programme in the series:

There is no sense in talking about world cultures or world histories. There is a world culture and a shared history. As we are going to have a shared future it’s worthwhile talking and thinking about that shared history.

For me, this object encapsulates much of what that statement is saying. It connects with our shared history, but also points to our future. And really, what better way is there to finish our story of humanity than that.

 

It’s the final day, and we come to the last of the contenders that may be the 100th object in the A History of the World series.

So far we’ve seen a lamp powered by renewable energy, a mobile phone from Africa, an Antarctic suit, and a football shirt.

What’s missing from that list? Yes, it’s food.

Looking back over the previous 99 objects, there are a surprisingly large number that relate to food. In the first 10 alone, we had a stone tool used to chop food, a spear point used to kill it, and a pot used to cook it.

This object is a stone pestle and it looks like it’s considerably older than the other objects on our shortlist. It’s not, but in many ways it is timeless. It’s the kind of object we could have featured in pretty much any one of the 19 weeks in which we’ve broadcast this series so far.

So, what’s it doing here?

Well, this pestle is from Bangladesh, but was given to the British Museum this year by someone living in London. It’s true that in 2010 we’re spoilt for choice when it comes to choosing what we fancy for our dinner. Among the reasons for that are scale and speed of migration in the twenty-first century.

More of us are moving from one part of the world to another than at any other time in history. Millions of us in fact. And as we move from one place to another – often for political or economic reasons – we tend to carry parts of the culture in which we were raised with us. A seriously important part of that is invariably food and the objects used to prepare it.

Across a global city like London there are utensils, bowls, pans and dishes being used right now that previously would only have been available in very specific parts of the world. And in the global city more and more of us explore and enjoy the food traditions of other cultures.

When the archaeologists of the future dig up what remains of such a global city, they’re going to find implements representing cultures from all over the planet.

The previous owner of this object was given it by her mother in Bangladesh when she came to London to get married in the 1970s. By using it to prepare the family’s meals, its owner was ensuring a taste of the homeland – many thousands of miles away – could be had in her new home.

It’s an interesting thought that although we experiment with food from other cultures, what we eat and the way we prepare it are often the slowest things to change. So the basic objects used to pound and grind food have often changed very little over thousands of years. 

The previous owner of this object was maintaining her contact with her cultural heritage, connecting with her past, even though she was geographically so very far removed from it.

This object is not just an object of our time, it’s an object of all time and it gets to the very essence of what it is to be human. We make things and we depend upon them. In some cases we take them with us wherever we go and they connect us to our past like little else can.

This object is both a part and evidence of humanity’s collective memory.

• Listen to Evan Davis discussing this final contender with curator JD Hill

• Find out about the other contenders: a football shirt, a mobile phone, Antarctic clothing and a solar-powered lamp.

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A few weeks ago, we asked you what object you think best represents the times in which we live. And – thank you – you’ve been answering us. Looking through your choices so far I see that, a little overwhelmingly, you’ve gone for items on a technological theme.

Today’s object makes use of the very latest technology. It’s a solar panel.

Without a doubt one of the greatest challenges we face as a species is that not only are the resources we’ve come to rely on limited in supply, but our climate and environment is changing in large part because of the way we use them. As a harnesser of renewable energy, this object offers a possible solution.

True, but aren’t solar-panels kind of common? Old hat? One of my neighbours has some on their roof. What makes them so important – so of our time that we’re considering having one as the 100th object?

This particular solar panel is small, portable and has been made using the kind of technology only available to us now. Those photovoltaic cells (that’ll be the things that convert sunlight into electricity) depend on silicon cells – developed to make mobile phones and computers work. It’s also got a rechargeable battery, and is attached to a lamp. What’s more you can plug your mobile phone into it and charge that.

It could only have been made in our world, in our times.

But there’s another side to the story. In parts of the developing world there are millions without access to mains electricity. For them, an independent supply provided by the sun is a pretty revolutionary thing.

Eight hours of sunshine will give this lamp 100 hours of bright, white light. So, with this kit you can cook or study at night without needing to resort to using such dangerous – and not to mention expensive – fuels as kerosene that not only risks burning you or your property, but also gives off harmful fumes.

Being able to charge your mobile phone means you can have contact with the wider world. You can trade, you can transfer money and soon enough you’ll be able to access the Internet.

For many in remote villages this little collection of plastic things represents the freedom to live beyond the confines of your circumstances.

The earth receives more solar energy in one hour than the world population consumes in one year. As renewable power goes the sun is not just the reason why we’re all here, it could be the reason why we get to stay here

As long as the sun shines, this object provides. It’s a life-changer and not just for a few of us. It could alter and secure the existence of billions.

• Listen to Evan Davis discussing the solar-powered lamp with curator Ben Roberts

• Find out about the other contenders: a football shirt, a mobile phone, Antarctic clothing and a pestle and mortar.

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This morning I got the 07.25 train into work. It left on time; it arrived on time. Not so unusual. But it got me thinking: accurate time-keeping is one of the fundamental aspects of the modern world – very little that we do would go half as well without it.

That’s why this week on A History of the World in 100 objects I’d like to focus on one object in particular: a nineteenth century marine chronometer.

This intricate combination of cogs, wheels, hands and numbers is perhaps one of the key inventions of the past 200 years. It allowed, for the first time, accurate time-keeping at sea. Sailors could now find their longitude by working out how far from the Greenwich-Meridian line in London they had travelled. This not only standardised time but was, quite literally, a life-saver.

In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries many of the countries of Europe and the USA were undergoing the transformation from agricultural to industrial economies (popularly known as the Industrial Revolution). This process could not have happened without accurate time-keeping, as lead curator JD Hill explains:

It’s about having established structure, having standardised time. People are turning up to work at a certain time and leaving work at a certain time – that’s the industrial revolution: Clocking on and off work.

Our chronometer though has another cog to its works. It kept time on board HMS Beagle as it carried a young Charles Darwin across the world gathering the knowledge and inspiration to develop the theory of evolution.

While time was changing the world around Darwin, he, for the first time, described how it changed the world before him. The nineteenth century brought a revolution in thought just as it did on the ground.

Mechanised and more efficient production would bring increased wealth to the powers of Europe. Our Sudanese slit drum sheds light on the expansion of colonial empire at this time and most critically the scramble for the resources and territory of Africa.

Expanding empire is also a key theme in another of our objects – a tea set. The story of tea-drinking is tied inextricably to British endeavours overseas at this time, but it also speaks very interestingly of a shift back at home where mass-production techniques would change the way we considered and consumed newly affordable objects just like these.

A simple British penny stamped with the slogan ‘Votes for women’, reveals the story of one of the many movements for social and political reform that was born out of this modern world:

What we are seeing is that along with mass-production came mass politics. One of the manifestations of this was in the extension of the franchise. In other words: enabling more citizens to vote. While initially this was done on the basis of owning large amounts of property, the movement to extend this, irrespective of gender, is a key factor in the nineteenth century.

Away from Europe, Japan was also successfully embracing modernisation and emerging as an imperial, industrial power in its own right. The instantly recognisable print by Hokusai, The Great Wave, offers a fascinating view of a country caught between its isolationist past and open future.

This week we’re hearing about the world on the brink of the twentieth century. This is the period when we invented and got used to the idea of mechanisation, of standardisation, of production and of organisation on a hitherto unimaginable scale.

 

I’d like to start today by going back to the very first episodes of A History of the World in 100 objects in which Neil MacGregor described a two million year-old stone chopping tool and an almost two million year-old stone handaxe.

Those series stalwarts who’ve tuned in since the very beginning will know that objects such as these formed the revolutionary technology that enabled our earliest ancestors to live in the changing environments in which they found themselves. Even two million years ago it was already becoming apparent that the things we make would allow us to adapt, explore and thrive pretty much anywhere on our planet.

Fast-forward a little and the next object (or objects) on our list of contenders for the 100th spot in our tale finds us – for the first time in human history – exploring, living and working in the last place on earth to be colonised by us.

It’s a set of clothing designed to be worn in Antarctica.

Clothing? A coat and some furry boots? The 100th object? Really? Well, I’m assured that if you tried to go for a walk on or around the South Pole without this lot you’d likely be dead within, say, one hour.

As anyone tuning into Radio 4 this morning will have heard, British Museum curator Barrie Cook explained how these clothes make it possible for humans to live in a place we simply couldn’t have covered at any other stage in the story Neil MacGregor has been telling.

But there are more reasons why these articles of clothing are appropriate representatives of our times. They’re almost exclusively put together using man-made materials that could only be produced using the technology of the twenty-first century.

They were also constructed in different places around the world (Colombia, Canada, France, and… er… Devon). This of course tells of the globalised world in which we now live – in some ways it’s a marvel that this united nations of outerware can be put together from shops right here in Britain – but it also tells of our own age of exploration.

We’re used to stories of Captain Cook, of Ernest Shackleton, whose daring deeds have grown into the stuff of legend, but these clothes represent the twenty-first century equivalent of what they – and our two million year-old ancestors – did. This is us reaching the frontier of our world and making things to help us live there. Indeed the only reason we can live there is because of the very human characteristic of making, using and depending on ‘things’.

But why would we want to live there?

Well, this is another part of the story. Antarctica is quite literally at the forefront of environmental and climate change. We need these clothes so we can study this place and come to understand the processes that will surely define humanity’s next chapter.

This object will help us write that.

• Listen to Evan Davis discussing the Antarctic clothing with curator Barrie Cook

• Find out about the other contenders: a football shirt, a mobile phone, a solar-powered lamp and a pestle and mortar.

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It’s day two of our series within a series and if, like me, you’re an early bird you may have just caught British Museum curator Ben Roberts talking to Evan Davis on Radio 4 about the second on our list of contenders for the 100th object spot.

It’s something that will perhaps not surprise many. Some of you may even be using one to read this post. In fact a lot of you have already told us that it would be your 100th object.

It’s a mobile phone.

There are around five billion (yes, five billion) mobile phones in use in the world today. That’s astonishing. At age 31 I don’t consider myself all that old, but I remember a time before we had them. We’ve effectively gone from 0 to 5 billion in one generation.

And in so many ways these little devices have changed our lives as they have become – more and more – vital pieces of our everyday puzzle. So far has this process gone that mobiles are now intrinsic elements of global culture, almost dictating our lives from how we communicate and organise ourselves, to the language we use (text-ing anyone?).

But from the image you see here you’ll be able to spot that the phone we’ve chosen is not exactly the latest model. There’s no camera, and not an app in sight.

This phone is at least second-hand and was bought for the British Museum in a market in Kampala, the capital city of Uganda. It's perhaps not a surprise it's a Nokia, as they are the largest single manufacturer of mobile phones in the world and this is one of the first models to be sold widely in Africa. The story it tells – and the principle reason why it’s on our list – is how mobiles are transforming the developing world.

 

In many parts of the world access to telephones was until recently restricted by the availability of fixed telephone lines. In the developing world, a lack of infrastructure has meant no access to the ease of communication afforded by phones. Mobiles have meant people can have that without the need for land lines (as our evolving language would put it).

So now fishermen in Kerala, India, can use mobiles to check out where the best prices might be paid for their catch; farmers in Tanzania can sign-up to a text-messaging service that’ll keep them updated on the weather forecast, and small businesses across Africa can transfer their money through the air.

In the developing world mobile phones mean connectivity, communication and economic development on an unprecedented scale.  

Like yesterday’s football shirt this is not an object of beauty. It’s not a special object and no-one will be filled with awe at the sight of it in a museum display case. But it’s very ubiquity is part of what makes it so important and so relevant.

Just as the stone tools featured in the first week of this series were among the objects that defined early humans, this is one of the objects that defines and expresses who we are and how we live today.

• Listen to Evan Davis discussing the mobile phone with curator Ben Roberts

• Find out about the other contenders: a football shirt, a Antarctic clothing, a solar-powered lamp and a pestle and mortar.

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As listeners to Radio 4, visitors to the British Museum and readers of this blog will not have been able to miss, we’ve chosen, but not yet revealed the star of the 100th chapter of our story.

Over the next week, we’ll be revealing five contenders for the final object that each tell of aspects of the world around us today – indeed the world that we’ve seen shaped through the previous 99 broadcasts.

If you tune into Radio 4’s Today programme each morning you’ll hear some of my colleagues – Ben, Barrie and JD – introducing the objects on-air. Here on the blog you’ll get to see them and I’ll do my best to tell you why these objects have been chosen and what they can tell us about the ingenuity and challenges shaping humanity in the twenty-first century.

Appropriately, therefore, we start with a football shirt.

Football – or association football to give it its proper title – may have evolved on the public school fields of nineteenth century Britain, but today it’s a global giant.

We live in a world more connected than at any other time in history and what else unites disparate, discrete and geographically remote parts of the world in the same way as football? Go anywhere and you could probably find someone who’ll discuss with you not just the game itself, but teams and people playing it on the other side of the world.

But this isn’t just any football shirt: it bears the name of Didier Drogba, an African who grew up in France and whose skills have led to his global fame. Through television, radio, magazines, billboard posters, the Internet, Drogba’s face and tremendously gifted feet are known the world over. And Didier plays for Chelsea, a team based in London and owned by a Russian.

The shirt was made by a German-owned company, in China, and bought in London. It’s covered in logos, names, motifs that are instantly recognisable. We know these as brands – another phenomenon of our age, protected by copyright but not exempt from being copied (underlined by the fact that the Museum has also acquired a companion object to this one, a probable fake bought in a market in Peru).

I can imagine the choice may surprise some – how could we include it in a list that features such one-off beauties as the double-headed serpent, the standard of Ur or Akan drum? Fairly mundane this shirt might be, but it tells a story every bit as potent and relevant as any great work of art.
We live in a world where we consume branded objects. The very fact that this is a mundane artefact demonstrates a distinctive new feature of our world of things: we see, own and use the same objects in many parts of the world. As JD puts it: ‘you could just as easily see people wearing this in London, Lisbon, Lima, Lagos….’

This is a potentially throw-away item – and I don’t just say that as a West Ham fan – next year it’ll likely be replaced by a new model and Didier himself may well have moved on too. The brands, the personalities and indeed the objects we consume can and do change rapidly. We all own a lot of things and we can usually replace them with ease.

This shirt is a mass-produced symbol of our globalised world – it’s got 2010 in every millimetre of its man-made fibre.

• Listen to Evan Davis discussing Drogba's Chelsea shirt with curator JD Hill

• Find out about the other contenders: a mobile phone, Antarctic clothing, a solar-powered lamp and a pestle and mortar.

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In 1759 a new kind of visitor attraction flung open its doors in London. It set out – as enshrined in its founding mission statement – to be a place for "all studious and curious persons".

The British Museum, as it’s still known, was a product of an extraordinary period in which European minds began to explore the world around them, not just physically but on a scientific and philosophical level too. This age is known as the Enlightenment and, as well as museums, it bequeathed us such ideas as archaeology, natural history, geology, and the scientific method as we know it.

This week on A History of the World we’ll hear about this period, but, as lead curator JD Hill explains, in typical style we’ll hear about it from some, perhaps, unexpected points of view.

This is the age of the Enlightenment in Europe: the age of rational, scientific enquiry of nature and humanity. But what we have chosen to do is look at the Enlightenment from a series of perspectives outside of Europe.

It would have been easy for us to fall into telling the well-known story of the Enlightenment from within Europe – especially at the British Museum, itself an Enlightenment institution – but we don’t want to do that!

By attempting to look in a different way, we can hope to understand how the age of rational enlightenment was also an age of exploitation of others; an age of exploration, and an age of colonial empire building.

Reason, liberty and progress may have been the watchwords of the day but, as we’ll hear through our objects this week, the Enlightenment project had a very mixed range of consequences.

The Akan drum is the oldest African-American object in the British Museum. It was probably made in what is now Ghana but found in Virginia, part of the new British colony in north America. There’s little doubt that it made the passage across the Atlantic on a ship engaged in the triangular trade that brought sugar and other products from the Americas to Britain, European products to Africa and African Slaves to the Americas. The Enlightenment was also the time when the Transatlantic slave trade was at its height.

A native-american made buckskin map tells another story of north America – one of colonial expansion, based on both trade and exploitation of the indigenous population.

Elsewhere, European sailors were venturing further into the Pacific, coming into contact with the inhabitants of the distant islands scattered across this vast ocean.

Two of our objects this week – the feather helmet and bark shield, from Hawaii and Australia respectively – are associated with the famous voyages of Captain James Cook, in many ways the poster boy of European Enlightenment exploration. His encounters with native populations would have profound and lasting consequences.

But this period wasn’t just about European endeavour. China, under the Qing dynasty, was growing in size and economic power, while making its own efforts to understand the world. Through a jade bi – a disc made from China’s most treasured material – we’ll hear about an empire considered by some to be the greatest the world had ever seen, but one of which many Western audiences may be less aware.

The Enlightenment period brought new ways of looking at the world as different ideas were explored and cultures came together – often for the first time – and, as a legacy of this age, it’s fitting that the British Museum, and the objects inside it, should provide a means through which we may continue to explore.

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One of the key qualities of being human is that we’re all of us capable of thinking for ourselves. On the one hand that’s a blessed freedom, on the other it has the potential to result in serious disagreement and tension.

This week in A History of the World in 100 objects you’ll hear about how tolerance, or intolerance of the beliefs and faith of others affected the world some 400 years ago.
 
British Museum curator Barrie Cook, one of the studious minds responsible for the series, sets the scene:

The early modern world, by and large, was not a tolerant place and little value was placed on the eccentric, the uncooperative, the misfit and the outcast. The rulers of the world - monarchs, aristocrats or patricians - generally had a straightforward view about conformity: my way or the highway.

From their perspective, division was a threat to the vital unity of the state; difference was disloyalty and thinking for yourself practically sedition. This is a bit of a caricature, but not much of one.

Yet it was also a world that tested the limits of intolerance and the objects this week all make this point in their different ways.

So what are these objects?

From Iran, the parade standard allows us to examine how the Safavid dynasty created the world’s first major Shi’i Islam state. A miniature painting of a Mughal prince paying a visit to a holy man in India, allows Neil MacGregor to tell the story of how the subcontinent’s largely non-Islamic population were allowed to worship as they pleased by its Islamic rulers.

This was also a period when Islam and Christianity were still spreading and winning new converts. Through two of our objects we’ll hear how this wasn’t always just a one-way deal as local, older beliefs persisted, in different ways, among the new.

A stunning shadow puppet shows how elements of Hindu stories continued to be told in Muslim Indonesia, and a codex map from newly-conquered Mexico shows how the Catholic faith met indigenous customs.

Yet, our final object tells of a less tolerant approach within Christianity. The mass-media of its day, our broadsheet was made to celebrate the rebellious acts of German monk Martin Luther that led to the Protestant Reformation and to the splitting of Christian Europe into two rival factions.

As Barrie explains, the divisions originally ignited by Luther’s ideas triggered Europe’s final major religious conflict: the Thirty Years War. But eventually, with no outright winner emerging, a greater willingness to accept diversity did so instead:

This war would demonstrate that reality has a habit of beating down the most fervent enthusiast and, after 30 years of devastation, Europe began to learn to live with religious diversity. The never wholly absent voices of toleration began to lay down the beginnings of a consensus that a variety of faiths is not necessarily a threat to the state and diversity can bring strength, rather than weakness. Sometimes.

Looking at the world around us now, I can see his point very clearly. Now, just as then, the line between tolerance and intolerance is a fine one, but the effects of either are always food for fascinating debate.

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Today it’s possible to go to most places on the planet and find common ground with the people you meet – cultural references that mean just as much in Lima as they do in London – or buy products you could also pick up in your local shop.

This week in A History of the World in 100 objects we’ll hear how the long process that led to the world becoming truly globalised started in the sixteenth century AD.

JD Hill, Lead curator of the series, explains how our five objects this week show the world coming together as the kingdoms of Europe set sail in search of trade:

The Portuguese reach South Africa in the 1480s and Columbus ‘found’ the Americas in 1492. Within a generation, in the 1520s, Magellan had sailed around the world.

Yet if you were looking at the world in around 1450-60 and you asked the question: in 100 year’s time where will the balance of power lie? The answer would probably not be Western Europe, and that’s why this is such a great turning point.

The world was quite quickly a smaller place, thanks in no small part to Europe’s enthusiasm for shipbuilding – a story told through our mechanical galleon.

The galleon is a symbol for Europe’s new found sense of itself – great princes built great ships and it was these ships that enabled maritime empires to be made.

This is the beginning of the modern world. It’s about Europe’s maritime adventure. All of the objects are, in one way or another, about the expansion of trade and, in some cases, conquest undertaken by small Western European countries in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

As these maritime connections brought continents such as Europe and the Americas together, different cultures encountered each other for the first time and the results were varied

The arrival of Spanish explorers in Mexico led to the destruction of the Aztec Empire, a story we explore through the Double-headed serpent.

In contrast, Portugal’s first encounters with the major West African kingdom of Benin would be of mutual benefit. The Europeans provided, among other things, the brass to craft the stunning plaques that decorated the oba’s – king’s – palace, and commodities such as ivory and palm oil went the other way.

Massive trade across vast distances, requires massive enterprise. So it’s no surprise that in this period we see the first multinational conglomerates emerge. Organisations like the Dutch East India Company, responsible for shipping goods, such as our porcelain elephants, from East Asia to the well-appointed homes of Europe’s elite.

And fuelling, or should I say funding, much of this global trade was silver; mined in the newly-conquered Spanish territories of South America and transported around the world in the form of the planet’s first global currency: pieces of eight.

These infamous coins have been popularised in tall tales of piracy, treasure and adventure but, in truth, their influence on the world at the time was much, much more significant than that.

In fact, they’re still with us in perhaps the most potent symbol of global economics and trade. Pieces of eight were the original silver dollar, which evolved into the American currency of the same name.

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• The photo of the girl looking at the globe is by Elsie esq. and it's used under licence.
 

The great powers shaping the world at this time are in some ways similar to the empires we saw in the previous 2,000 years; they're in China, South Asia and the Middle East, for example. But what's about to change is that western Europe - up to now basically an interesting place, but not a driver on the world stage - is going to become pivotal.

Imagine global history as a series of hotspots. These historical hotspots move around, but Western Europe hasn't been one yet. It's at this point that it becomes one.

In the first week back we start off in the fifteenth century, which is the last moment when the world is divided into regions, discreet areas like the Americas, Europe, Africa, where different great powers don't necessarily know about each other. By the second week everyone knows everyone else and it's chaos! Global money, trade, exploitation, and massive movement of people, populations and goods like tea, sugar and porcelain.

It's when we become global, and organised for global interaction on a massive scale, for the first time. Everything else comes from it. It describes the uncontrollable nature of money and what it can do to societies.

A lot of the stories we are telling are not finished. We are often providing a historical insight into something that is still being played out today.

We don't have to go into the basics as with the third millennium BC where so much of the history we were telling was unknown to most listeners. We can concentrate on offering different perspectives, and a lot of the stories we are telling are the unexpected ones.

• A History of the World in 100 Objects returns to Radio 4 at 9:45am Monday 13 September.
• The photo of the girl looking at the globe is by frenkieb and it's used under licence. 

The Vikings had been granted the county of Rouen in France in AD 911 which later became the Duchy of Normandy, so the Normans were a Scandinavian elite given control of a French county.

What we see really quickly is an impact on the landscape with castles appearing across the country and the building of churches in the stone, Romanesque Norman style.

The system of land-ownership also changes so that land essentially belonged to the king and queen in the so-called feudal system. But there is very considerable continuity with what came before, for example, in the coinage.