Caroline Dodds Pennock

The UK’s only Aztec historian Caroline Dodds Pennock turns our Eurocentric history on its head and describes how Indigenous Americans discovered Europe and the impact they had on our civilisation.

Tens of thousands of Indigenous people, Aztec, Maya, Totonac, Inuit and others, discovered Europe, as diplomats, explorers, servants, traders, translators and, sadly most often, when enslaved. Dodds Pennock says they found savage shores of wealth and marvels but also of brutality and inequality, where people had baffling beliefs. She describes the Brazilian king who met Henry VIII, the Inuk baby put on show in a London pub, and the Inuit who harpooned ducks on the River Avon. Dodds Pennock says they were put on show, demeaned and marginalised yet their worldviews and cultures had a profound impact on European civilisation.

Dodds Pennock is a senior lecturer in international history at the University of Sheffield and author of Bonds of Blood: Gender, Lifecycle and Sacrifice in Aztec Culture, winner of the Royal Historical Society’s Gladstone Prize.