“With the heart of a serpent and the nature of a wolf, she gathered sycophants to her cause and brought destruction to the just. She slew her sister, butchered her brothers, killed her prince, and poisoned her mother. She is hated by men and gods alike.”

Jonathan Clements came back on to talk about his book on Wu Zetian (623–705), the only woman ever to rule China in her own name. Rising from lowly concubine/chambermaid to God-Emperor, she outmanoeuvred courtiers, generals, monks and poets alike - sometimes with charm, sometimes with a knife - and ruled over the empire at the height of the Silk Road.

Jonathan describes Wu’s ascent through the Tang court: a place of whispered plots, divine omens, and women struggling to survive. Along the way we encounter girls on top, a boob-shaped tomb, a harem of 120 pretty boys, dogs on sticks, a honey-trap gone wrong, and an inadvisable attempt to train a cat not to eat a parrot.

A story of power, paranoia, and the perilous art of surviving your own success.

If you find this journey into Tang politics, gender, and myth entertaining and informative then follow the show, share with a friend, and leave a review telling people what bit you liked best.

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As promised in part 1 we started the podcast by talking about some of Napoleon III’s many mistresses.  Women like Harriet Howard, the Brighton bootmaker’s daughter, Virginia de Castiglione, sent by the Italians to seduce and spy on him (and welcomed with open arms!), Marguerite Bellanger and Louise de Mercy-Argenteau. His wife hated his infidelities but at least in the case of Louise she took comfort that she was a proper aristocrat!

Moving on from the scandalous we talked about Napoleon III’s solid achievements. Not least his success in the Crimean War which led to an alliance with the British and bringing France in from the diplomatic cold. And domestically the economy thrived and Paris was rebuilt.

The great tragedy of Napoleon III’s reign was that he was up against Bismark. Suffering from various illnesses (bladder stones in particular) his judgement was possibly affected. And Bismark tricks him into declaring war - with predictable results. 

His son survived him and oddly ended up fighting with the British Army in South Africa. If you don’t know the story this alone makes the podcast more than worth the time.

If you enjoy this podcast on France’s second Empire - its scandals, triumphs, and collapses - then please follow Subject to Change, share it with a friend who loves history, and leave a review telling me what struck you most.

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From exiled prince to emperor, Napoleon III's rise to power reads like a political thriller too wild to be true. Edward Shawcross tells the story of Napoleon Bonaparte's nephew, a man who attempted not one but two comically failed coups before finally succeeding in becoming Emperor of France.

This episode explores Louis-Napoleon's bizarre childhood as the imperial nephew raised in Swiss exile, where his mother turned their home into a shrine to Napoleon while teaching him the arts of conspiracy and subterfuge. We cover his early revolutionary activities in Italy and his truly farcical coup attempts - including one featuring a live eagle purchased for a pound - that landed him in prison for life.

Rather than breaking him, prison became Louis-Napoleon's "university," where he turned from a figure of fun into a serious political thinker with a programme of social reform. His escape disguised as a working man complete with platform shoes to change his height reads like fiction, yet it set the stage for his triumphant return during the 1848 Revolution.

Ed explains how this seemingly delusional man understood mass politics better than any of his contemporaries, positioning himself as the people's champion against the political establishment. Through universal male suffrage, he won France's first direct presidential election before orchestrating a coup that established the Second Empire - proving that persistence, timing, and understanding the power of a name can overcome ridicule and failure.

This is part 1 of a two part series. Part 2 will deal with his time as emperor and will not shy away from the more, er, sensational aspects of his life. In particular his extraordinarily large number of mistresses!

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Fourteen centuries of enslavement, from the Prophet Muhammad's day to modern Mauritania. Justin Marozzi's fascinating book "Captives and Companions"  has as its subject the complex history of slavery across the Islamic world, challenging simplistic narratives and revealing uncomfortable truths about power, race, and religion.

Our conversation touched on how Islam didn't invent slavery but incorporated existing practices while encouraging manumission. We talked about the huge diversity of slavery - from the huge Zanj Rebellion when East African slaves revolted in Iraq, to the paradoxical power of Mamluk slave-soldiers who became sultans. I particularly liked how Justin managed to balance the brilliance and the cruelty of the life of the concubines at the court in Baghdad at the height of its power. 

We also spent a lot of time discussing eunuchs. What purpose they served, the way Islam got round the prohibition on the practice and how and why the use of eunuchs lasted so long.

The racial side of things was a surprise to me. Primary sources from Islam's greatest medieval intellectuals expose deeply racist attitudes toward black Africans, while white Circassian slaves commanded premium prices. And the Barbary Corsairs provided another surprise, with a large number of Europeans who "turned Turk" to join Muslim pirates enslaving fellow Christians across the Mediterranean.

When we reached abolition, Justin talked about how external Western pressure, not internal Islamic reform, primarily drove formal emancipation. And his interviews with people in Mali and Mauritania showed how hereditary slavery continues today, with miserable stories of people still fighting for freedom in the 21st century.

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This episode looks at the courtroom drama that helped to shape Asia after World War II with Princeton University's Gary Bass. Far more than a simple account of justice served, the Tokyo War Crimes Tribunal represents a fascinating intersection of international law, power politics, and competing visions of history that continues to reverberate through East Asian relations today.

The tribunal tried 28 Japanese leaders for crimes that began long before Pearl Harbor. Imperial Japan's expansionist wars stretched back decades, leaving a trail of atrocities including the Nanjing Massacre where approximately 200,000 civilians were killed. Yet political calculations ensured Emperor Hirohito remained untouched, creating an enduring contradiction where his closest advisor received a life sentence while the monarch himself watched from his palace.

Three defendants embody the trial's moral complexities: defiant Prime Minister Tojo Hideki who used his testimony to justify the war; the Emperor's advisor Kido Koichi who claimed to restrain militarists yet enabled their actions; and perhaps most poignantly, Foreign Minister Togo Shigenori who actively opposed the war, confronted military leadership, and later pushed for surrender—only to die in prison after conviction.

What distinguishes this tribunal from Nuremberg is its contested legacy. While Germany embraced denazification, some Japanese war criminals later returned triumphantly to politics- including Kishi Nobusuke who became Prime Minister in 1957. His grandson, former Prime Minister Abe Shinzo, continued questioning the tribunal's legitimacy decades later. Meanwhile, at the controversial Yasukuni Shrine, war criminals are venerated alongside fallen soldiers, revealing Japan's unresolved relationship with its imperial past.

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When 50,000 northerners marched under their banners in 1536, England witnessed its largest rebellion since the Peasants' Revolt. The Pilgrimage of Grace wasn't just a protest - it threatened to undo the English Reformation completely and return the kingdom to Rome.

Professor Peter Marshall, the renowned Tudor historian, tells the story of this extraordinary episode where religious devotion, political power, and regional identity collided with explosive results. 

Henry VIII's desperate quest for a male heir led him to break with Rome, setting off changes that  wentfar beyond the royal bedchamber. What began as a "change of the English Church's CEO" rapidly transformed into something more radical - monasteries dissolved, shrines dismantled, and traditions questioned. For northerners especially, these weren't abstract theological matters but direct attacks on community identity.

When the rebels and royal forces faced off across the River Don, England's religious future hung in the balance. A providential rainstorm, false royal promises, and factional divisions among the rebels ultimately preserved Henry's reformation. 

Peter is brilliant in explaining how the English reformation got started and how a rebellion came within a whisker of stopping it in its tracks and tumbling Henry from his throne.

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The ever excellent Professor David Parnell (of Belisarius and Antonina fame) came on to talk about the First Crusade. And given his interest in the Eastern Roman Empire we spent a lot of time talking about it from that angle.  When Emperor Alexius I found his thousand-year-old empire crumbling under Turkish advances in the late 11th century, he asked the West for help. He got more than he could have expected!

What followed was extraordinary. Pope Urban II's call at the Council of Clermont in 1095 unleashed an avalanche of armed pilgrims, knights, and nobles who descended upon Constantinople with a mixture of religious zeal and worldly ambition. From this magnificent but now vulnerable city Alexius faced the delicate task of channeling this unpredictable Western force toward his enemies while maintaining control over his own destiny.

We started by talking about the history written by Alexius's daughter Anna Komnene (the first long-form narrative by any European woman) who was at pains to show the brilliance of her father. We followed the crusade to Antioch and talked about Alexius's fateful decision not to come to the aid of the crusade when it most needed him. A decision that would eventually bear bitter fruit in the catastrophic Fourth Crusade a century later.

The Byzantine perspective on the First Crusade reveals a sophisticated diplomatic dance that initially saved the empire, restoring significant territories and ushering in a period of stability known as the Komnenian Restoration. Yet it also set in motion forces that would eventually contribute to Constantinople's downfall. 

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What makes a nation launch an attack it cannot hope to win? Admiral Yamamoto, who planned the Pearl Harbor attack, warned Japan's leadership they would have only six months before America would mobilize its entire continent to destroy them. He was right, but his warning was ignored.

The episode starts with a discussion about the controversial Yasukuni Shrine and museum, where we gain insight into how Japan's military establishment viewed their expansionist ambitions. This museum is not just a collection of artifacts, but a repository of the attitudes that drove a nation to catastrophe.

From the initial stunning successes across Asia to the turning point at Midway, we trace how Japan's military philosophy of "better to be a shattered jewel than an intact roof tile" led to extraordinary casualties. The Japanese leadership's desperate hope that inflicting maximum casualties would force America and its allies to accept a negotiated peace collapsed under the weight of industrial warfare and, ultimately, atomic devastation.

We asked when the bitter feelings resulting from the conflicts that made up Japan's wars in the Pacific might fade. Jonathan suggest the following might help in trying to answer this.  "Everyone periodizes history in their mind into three different categories: everything from Adam and Eve to my grandfather, what happened from my grandfather to me, and what happened in my own lifetime." 

Join us for this conversation about the decisions that led to war, the mindsets that prolonged it, and the complex legacy that continues to influence international relations in East Asia today.

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How did Japan become embroiled in one of history's deadliest conflicts? The answer lies not in December 1941, but decades earlier. Jonathan Clements returns to unravel the forces that propelled Japan down a path to war with the world's greatest industrial power.

Following Japan's victory in the First Sino-Japanese War, the country emerged with new confidence only to face the humiliation of the Triple Intervention, when European powers forced them to surrender their hard-won territories. This sparked a determination to secure Japan's place among world powers, leading to their stunning defeat of Russia in 1904-1905 – a conflict Clements describes as "World War Zero" for its preview of technologies that would dominate WWI battlefields. 

The narrative takes us through Japan's growing reliance on Manchuria, transformed into the puppet state of Manchukuo under the last Chinese emperor. Here we discover the industrial heartland that supported Japan's imperial ambitions while exploring the darker realities of colonial rule. Perhaps most fascinating is Jonathan's exploration of Japan's internal dissent, from brave parliamentarians like Saito Takao who questioned the endless China conflict to the telling detail of restaurants suddenly serving only squid – a sign the fishing fleet had been devastated by war.

As economic pressure mounted in 1941, we witness the fateful deliberations that led to Pearl Harbor, including Admiral Yamamoto's reluctant planning and prescient warning about "waking the American dragon." Through meticulous research and compelling storytelling, Jonathan shows how resource dependency and strategic miscalculations drove Japan toward a confrontation it couldn't win.

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The transformation of Japan from hermit kingdom to imperial power happened with breathtaking speed. When American Commodore Perry's "black ships" steamed into Tokyo Bay in the 1850s, they shattered Japan's 250-year isolation with technology that seemed to come "from 200 years in the future." This technological gap created a constitutional crisis that would ultimately topple the Tokugawa Shogunate and usher in the Meiji Restoration of 1868.

Jonathan Clements guides us through this pivotal period where Japan found itself facing what one historian calls "an invitation to an alien game" - forced to adopt international norms and institutions they never agreed to. Rather than becoming colonized like China or India, Japan's new leaders determined to become players in this global power game. They systematically studied Western nations, adopting what they perceived as the best elements of each: a German-style army, British naval technology, and aspects of French law.

This selective modernization happened against a backdrop of growing militarism and expansionism, particularly toward Korea - strategically described as "the dagger at the heart of Japan." The 1894-95 Sino-Japanese War demonstrated Japan's new capabilities, but the subsequent "Triple Intervention" by Russia, France and Germany (forcing Japan to abandon territorial gains) created a humiliation that would fuel future aggression.

Throughout this period, the Japanese government struggled with "gekokujō" - military insubordination where officers initiated "incidents" that expanded Japanese influence without authorization. The assassination of Korea's Queen Min by Japanese agents exemplifies this dangerous pattern where unauthorized actions expanded imperial control while undermining civilian government - creating precedents that would ultimately lead Japan toward its catastrophic Pacific War.

Whether you're interested in East Asian history, imperial expansion, or the roots of 20th century conflict, this exploration of Japan's rapid transformation reveals how quickly a nation can reinvent itself - for better or worse.

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