Introducing Empire

Today's feed drop features historian and friend of the show William Dalrymple discussing our new sister podcast, Empire, which he hosts alongside broadcaster Anita Anand. How do empires rise? Why do they fall? And how have they shaped the world around us today? This new show explores the stories, personalities and events of empire over the course of history. The first series looks at the British in India, covering The East India Company, the Raj, Gandhi, Independence and Partition. In the opening episode, William and Anita discuss the rise of The East India Company, exploring how a small corporation with only a handful of employees came to rule India. The episode begins with the birth of the Company in Tudor England and culminates with Robert Clive and the Battle of Plassey. Listen to the second episode of Empire below: Apple - apple.co/3A0tEw9 Spotify - spoti.fi/3K4LZNk Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:04Rory Stewart?

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• 1:05Speaker 02

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• 1:43Rory Stewart?

  Hello, welcome to The Rest is Politics with me, Rory Stewart. Today, we're giving you the chance to hear the first episode of a new podcast called Empire. It's hosted by the extraordinary historian William Dalrymple, bestselling historian and actually a friend of mine, and the broadcaster Anita Anand. They're exploring empires throughout history. They start with the extraordinary story of the British and India, which both of them have done an enormous amount. About, take it right the way from the East India Company to the Raj, all the way through to Gandhi, independence and partition. Actually, it's amazing how much this fits in with everything that we've already been talking about this week, whether it's the endless wars in Afghanistan or the tragic attack on,

• 2:27Rory Stewart?

  in fact, William Darumpel's friend Salman Rushdie. Anyway, here's episode one, and I hope you really enjoy it as much as I do.

• 2:45Speaker 03

  Hello and welcome to a brand new podcast called Empire with me, Anita Anand.

• 2:49Speaker 04

  And me, William Darumpel.

• 2:51Speaker 03

  Now, in a funny way, we are both products of empire. I mean, you could say very simplistically, I'm the Indian in Britain, I mean, of Indian origin, born in Essex, but you know, nevertheless, you know what I mean?

• 3:02Speaker 04

  And I'm the Brit that's lived most of my adult life in India.

• 3:04Speaker 03

  And why are we doing this? Why are we actually doing this?

• 3:07Speaker 04

  Well, I think it's a very interesting moment to think about empire. It's particularly an interesting moment to think about the British Empire and the British Empire in India, because this is something which I certainly feel got sort of tucked in an attic in 1947. The British moved on, they joined the European Community, they liked to feel that they'd left their imperial past behind them, they turned into a different sort of nation, but they certainly forgot about the most important thing the Brits ever did in world history. And certainly my generation going to school would learn about the Roman Empire, we'd learn about all sorts of empires, but we wouldn't learn about the British Empire.

• 3:45Speaker 03

  Well, I mean, you know, I've been to school, dare I say it, a bit more recently than you, but we not a sniff of it. And it's really strange because, you know, we do the Second World War, we do the commemorations of the First World War. This is something that was as recent or more recent and was an enormous chapter in Britain's history, but is it because empire's a dirty word these days? Is that why?

• 4:05Speaker 04

  Well, I think empire is a very controversial word, and that's in a sense, another reason for doing the podcast, because for some people, particularly, I think, a generation of Indians and other, if you like, call them children of empire. Who whose parents came here in the post-war period, they're beginning to ask, why are we here? What's what's happened? And we've had, you know, people like Satam Sanghera writing Empireland, we had Indians like Shashi Tharoor writing major bestsellers called Inglorious Empire. And people are looking at this stuff again. This is this is a period that where what was, I think, looked at very romantically through rose-tinted spectacles, through merchant ivory films and so on, is coming up for critical evaluation. And there's a lot of pushback to that, too.

• 4:50Speaker 03

  I mean, it's fascinating because, you know, for a while, this was a vacuum that was only inhabited by films. So, you know, in the 70s, you had the glorification of empire and things like Zulu. You could not imagine Zulu being made today. And in the 80s, as you say, it was all crinoline and prettiness and sundowners and Maharajahs.

• 5:07Speaker 04

  Lovely ladies in under parasols, passing over the lawns of the Bangalore Club, or playing croquet on similar lawns with smiling Maharajas and elephants swishing their tails and lovely cut 1930s suits. The idea that empire was actually there, like all empires obviously are, for the benefit of the colonizer, to send money and raw materials back to the home country. It never came into the whole merchant ivory image, which was all puffing steam trains under under glorious night skies with the Taj Mahals profile rising out of the steam and all that sort of stuff.

• 5:41Speaker 03

  Yeah. Well, I mean, so in effect, what we're trying to do in this in this podcast is we're sort of setting fire to the celluloid and trying to bring in the facts of what happened through a number of podcasts of different periods. We are going to be talking a lot about, you know, the Raj and India, because that is our expertise, Willie and I myself. But eventually, we hope to cover all manner of empires.

• 6:01Speaker 04

  I'm very keen, quite quickly, to bring in stuff about slavery, about Africa, about scramble for Africa, but also older empires, the Assyrians, the Persians, the Roman empires, Byzantine empire, all this sort of stuff. Because it seems to me that it covers a great sway of world history.

• 6:16Speaker 03

  And explains a lot of politics today. I mean, that's the thing that I find really fascinating, that we don't know it more because it does. Look, we're going to start, though, with with Britain and India. We're going to start with the formation of the East India Company in the 16th century. All the way through the Raj, eventually, we're going to take you to independence and the partition of India, which happened 75 years ago this month. By the way, August twenty twenty two is the seventy fifth anniversary. And Willie, the East India Company, I know, has been one of the great themes of your career, hasn't it?

• 6:47Speaker 04

  I've actually been working on the East India Company for twenty years. And I started in nineteen ninety nine, then this book was, The Anarchy, was published two thousand and nineteen. And what's been fascinating for me is see how this subject, which was right at the edge twenty years ago, has moved into the centre of things now for two reasons. One is colonialism has moved to the centre of things. Suddenly, the British have woken up to the fact that they had an empire, that a lot of the world is not happy about this, that it isn't a wonderful commonwealth of nations willingly following the the lead of of our Queen and and our people, but people were conquered, looted, assets stripped, shipped across nations against their wills, that many terrible things happened.

• 7:31Speaker 04

  And the weird thing that the British simply don't know about this, it's not in our history curriculums, we're not taught it in school. The second thing that's happened, of course, is that in the same period, the last twenty years, we've suddenly been confronted by these massive corporations who now dominate our lives. Companies like Tesla, Google, Facebook, Exxon Mobil, other massive corporations that operate in all the countries of the world, Amazon, can cut around the tax laws and other laws of individual nation states and play one state off against each other. And suddenly, we're in a situation as we were with the East India Company two hundred years ago, where a corporation is calling the shots and the nation states are on the back foot.

• 8:13Speaker 04

  Now, as you said, in the story of the East India Company, ultimately, the state wins. And in eighteen fifty eight, the East India Company is nationalised and the British state takes over India and you get the Raj. But what is funny is that while the Raj has dominated British perceptions of their empire in India. It only actually lasts 90 years. It's a

• 8:35Speaker 03

  Flash in the pan.

• 8:36Speaker 04

  Flash in the pan of Indian history. It's also even a flash in the pan in the history of British imperialism.

• 8:41Speaker 03

  Right.

• 8:42Speaker 04

  It lasts from 1858 until 1947. And this year, we're celebrating the 75th anniversary of Indian independence. So it's almost as long now since

• 8:52Speaker 03

  We are in front of it as we were behind it.

• 8:54Speaker 04

  Exactly.

• 8:55Speaker 03

  Absolutely right.

• 8:56Speaker 04

  It's 75 years now. In 15 years, it'll be 90 years and it'll be the same time as Raj. But what is forgotten almost, and this was why for the last 20 years I've been working on this, is that like the bit of the iceberg you can't see beneath the water, there precedes the beginning of the Raj in 1858, no less than 250 years, when India is ruled from Britain, but not by the British government.

• 9:21Speaker 03

  So this, I mean, this whole landscape is so broad. And as you say, 250 years broad. But I would like us, if you don't mind, William, to start in Wales.

• 9:33Speaker 04

  Obviously.

• 9:33Speaker 03

  Obviously, in Wales. If you don't mind.

• 9:38Speaker 04

  That's not the, that's not the animal you're talking about.

• 9:41Speaker 03

  Not, not, not the mammal, no. I'm talking about a place in Wales, Powys Castle. So this is a fascinating place, Powys Castle. Just tell us, tell us why this is a really good place to start the story.

• 9:56Speaker 04

  So Powys Castle, from the outside, looks about as English as anywhere could possibly go. Though it's actually just over the border from England, within Wales. It has Tudor box hedges. It has wonderful sort of Renaissance doorway in marble. It has these lovely Elizabethan windows and it has on the top crenellations. And it'd be hard to think of anything more British than this sort of fantastic structure.

• 10:19Speaker 03

  It looks like every boy's idea of a fort.

• 10:21Speaker 04

  Exactly. It's a perfect sort of castle that children build in sand on the, on the, on the beach. But within the long gallery at Powys, you enter a completely different world because you walk under a painting into a gallery, a kazan, a treasury of what can only be described as Indian loot.

• 10:41Speaker 03

  Hmm.

• 10:42Speaker 04

  And loot, of course, is an Indian word. Lutna, to plunder, is a word that enters the Indian language at this period to describe exactly the sort of objects which are being filling this castle. And what you have is talwas, swords, shields.

• 10:57Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 10:57Speaker 04

  Indian gowns, little ivory chessmen, miniatures. And one or two quite big objects of imperial plunder of real international importance. There's Sir Rajarajna Daula's palanquin left on the battlefield of Plassey. Now, Plassey was the battle which is always said to begin the British conquest of India. It's the first moment that the Brits score a major victory over an Indian power and take over a great chunk of territory by force. At the other end of the gallery, you go through a little archway and you end up in Tipu Sultan's hunting tent. Why is that there? Because another member of the family bought this tent after the Tipu Sultan was conquered by the East India Company in 1799.

• 11:40Speaker 04

  His palace burnt, looted, and the actual loot is here in Powys. In actual fact, if you take the whole thing together, there is more Mughal loot, more Mughal artworks and objects in a private house in the Welsh countryside than exists in the National Museum in Delhi, or the National Museum in Pakistan, or the Great Lahore Museum, or the National Museum of Bangladesh, or the museums in Afghanistan and Iran. And what's it doing here in a private house? And although it's looked after by the National Trust, the objects in the museum are still the property of the family in Powys, what's it doing there?

• 12:23Speaker 03

  Okay, stop teasing us. You're asking the question, what is it doing there and who is the family?

• 12:29Speaker 04

  So I said that when you enter this gallery, you walk under a picture, and that picture... Is the crucial key to the whole story. And it has a very unhelpful caption beneath it. It says, the Shah Alam conveying the gift of the Dhawani to Lord Clive. Now, in Britain and in England, there are very few people that would understand what that means. The gift of the Dhawani, it sounds like a nice Dhawali present or sort of Christmas or a birthday. You know, and the picture shows a big court scene with lots of nobles. On the right are the Indians, the Mughals. On the left are the Brits and the gentlemen of the East India Company.

• 13:09Speaker 04

  In particular, there are two men at the front surrounding the Mughal emperor who's dressed in cloth.

• 13:15Speaker 03

  So cloth of gold and you've got all of his retinue behind him also very finely dressed, looking incredibly serious and grave, although it's notable that the man who is the most richly dressed of them all has his head bowed, almost it looks like in supplication. Everybody, the British side, their heads are up. So they're sort of the bewigged gentlemen in their crimson coats and their gold brocade. And they are very much looking up, straight backed, ramrodded. And the Indian, who is clearly in this picture, even if you didn't know the caption, is a potentate. His head is bowed.

• 13:54Speaker 04

  And well, it might be bowed because the potentate, who is Shah Alam, who is the Mughal emperor, whose ancestors ruled over not just all of India, but Pakistan, Bangladesh and Afghanistan. He has just been humbled in battle, defeated by the armies of the East India Company at the Battle of Buxa in 1765. And he has just been forced to hand over, and you can see in the picture, he's handing over a document to a man in a red coat. That coat is Robert Clive.

• 14:24Speaker 03

  Clive of India.

• 14:25Speaker 04

  Sometimes called Clive of India, who to this day stands outside the Foreign Office and behind Downing Street.

• 14:31Speaker 03

  By the way, really irritates Indian diplomats. I had no idea, but we know a few, do you remember? They have told us how disgusted they were to have to walk past Clive of India to get to their office.

• 14:40Speaker 04

  This is the, this picture is the reason that people are disgusted because Clive of India was not even the servant of the British government. And this is the crucial point, he was the servant of a company, a corporation, just like. You know, Elon Musk actually works for Tesla himself, his own company, not for Mr Biden. He's not, he's not a servant of the American state. He's, he has his own company. Now, this is exactly the situation of Robert Clive. Robert Clive is not appointed by the government. He's appointed by the East India Company, by the directors. And what he's doing in this picture is he's taking control after the battle of the three richest provinces of the Mughal Empire.

• 15:23Speaker 04

  Now, we should say immediately that the, A, the picture's not very good. It's by a guy called Benjamin West, who was not a great painter. The dome in the background, which is this sort of looming palace, actually looks, as, as, as one of the critics said when it was hung in the Royal Academy, more like the Dome of St Paul's than anything you'd like to find in India. And we learn, in fact, that Benjamin West had never been to India. And everything about this picture is actually a deception. Because not only had Benjamin West never been to India, but this scene never really took place, at least in the, in the way that it's shown here. It actually took place, the, the important document was transferred and signed in the private tent of Clive after the battle. He had basically put a gun against the defeated emperor's head and made him sign.

• 16:07Speaker 04

  And according to one Mughal historian who was there, he said the entire ceremony took place quicker than it would normally take to sell a jackass at a market.

• 16:16Speaker 03

  Hashtag fake news, as well as with that dome hashtag fake views. I mean, this is a scandal upon scandal.

• 16:23Speaker 04

  So it is. And so it's a completely deceptive image. And then, and then, you know, to, to add insult to injury, the caption, as we said, is conveying the gift of the Dhawan to Lord Clive.

• 16:34Speaker 03

  Now, what's, what's the Dhawan, first of all? We have to say, what is the Dhawan?

• 16:38Speaker 04

  So the Dhawan is, is, is basically the right to run the Dhawan, which is the treasury or the, or the administration. And what it means is that this private company, the East India Company, is being given the right to run the finances of three Indian provinces. Now, those provinces, Bengal, Bihar and Orissa, were in the 18th century, quite simply, the richest place on earth. The looms of those three provinces, of which there were about 1 million, were churning out a great deal of the revenue, which meant that Mogul India was creating

• 17:17Speaker 04

  very nearly a quarter of the world's GDP, while Britain is just creating 1.8%. This is because India had the great textile industry of its day. You know, what would move in the 19th century, partly because of the events kicked off at this moment by the gift of the Dhawanis, as it's called. Britain eventually gets control of India and the Indian industries eventually shut down and we get the great industries of all the textile manufacturing moves to Lancashire and the north of England in the 19th century.

• 17:53Speaker 03

  Yeah, Manchester gets called Cottonopolis, you know, it's the alternate name for, yeah.

• 17:56Speaker 04

  That's right. And but this is the moment, before that episode, this is the moment when an English company first gets its hands on this incredibly rich territory. And it's done it in two stages. First to be, and we'll deal with this over the course of the next hour of this podcast, but the first stage is the Battle of Placy, the second stage is the Battle of Buxteau, and this signing of this document takes place immediately after the Second Battle.

• 18:22Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 18:22Speaker 04

  When the East India Company has now basically subdued all opposition in North India.

• 18:26Speaker 03

  We're good. I think that's, can we circle back to that? Because I still want to know, and this is a question that Indians ask all the time. How is it that in numbers we outnumbered, in strength of arms we were more powerful together, and yet a group of adventurers managed to subdue and control a country as vast as India? So can we go right, right, right, right back to the first berth whales, the cradle whales of what would become the East India Company? And this really fascinating man, who I just love, historian William, called, if we are going to be called what we do, Customer Smythe. Can we start with him?

• 19:08Speaker 04

  Sure. So the East India Company is a company, a corporation. And like any company, it starts up as a startup effectively. And the guy who has the idea, the founder of this company is a man called Customer or Auditor Smythe. So called because he was an auditor, in other words, an accountant, who ended up running the customs and ran the customs in London. So he's a, he's a kind of Richard Branson of his day, or the Vijay Malia of his day. He's an entrepreneur, has made a lot of money. His dad was a big entrepreneur before him. He's inherited some money, but he's hugely enlarged that. And so when the news comes in the late 1590s during, now this is the year that Elizabeth, I suppose, is about 80 years old.

• 19:52Speaker 04

  An old woman now, everyone's slightly wondering what's going to happen when she dies. This is also the year, incidentally, that Shakespeare is writing both Hamlet and Julius Caesar, which I saw last night in The Globe. And if you had walked from The Globe in 1599 over Southbridge into what was then Morgate Fields, not a grotty tube station in those days, but Fields, as the name suggests. And in the middle is a gorgeous black and white Tudor building called the Founder's Hall. The customer Smythe hires that for the day. And he calls all the rich investors, the people who he think can invest in his venture. And he says, the Dutch have just gone to the East Indies.

• 20:37Speaker 04

  By the East Indies, he means what we now call Indonesia, not India initially. Right. And the, this, the early days of the company is aimed not at all at India, interestingly, but at Indonesia and even beyond the spice islands on the edge of Papua New Guinea. And he has the idea that if the Dutch can get there and buy spices, cutting out all the middlemen, cutting out the Arabs, cutting out the Venetians, cutting out the North Europeans. So can the English. And so he appeals to their Tudor patriotism. And he calls in a lot of people that we today were called pirates.

• 21:10Speaker 03

  Privateers. They were called privateers in those days, right?

• 21:13Speaker 04

  The privateers are people who have been licensed by the state to loot the treasure ships, moving gold, silver and other precious objects from South America to Spain and Portugal.

• 21:25Speaker 03

  Again, I mean, you're so familiar with this, but to somebody who is not, that is an astonishing thing that the state is giving full power to robbers, ostensibly to go and rob.

• 21:36Speaker 04

  Well, it's actually quite a familiar situation because in the immediate run up to this, England had just cut itself off from the continent. And in this case, not the, of course, the European community, which hasn't been founded yet, but the Reformation has cut it off from the whole of Southern Europe. And countries like Spain and Portugal regard England as a dangerous enemy state. And there's an awful lot of rivalry. This is just after the Spanish Armada. This is Philip the Second is just dead. And there's an awful lot of dislike of Catholic Spain and the popish continent, as they say it. But even the Protestants are not necessarily very friendly towards the English. And the Dutch, who are Protestant,

• 22:21Speaker 04

  who have just broken free from Spain, have made this pioneering visit to the spice islands and made a fortune.

• 22:26Speaker 03

  And the reason that the Dutch, again, the reason that Dutch are so very important is because they've discovered that route through the Cape of Good Hope, which makes their traffic and their trade so very lucrative.

• 22:36Speaker 04

  Well, that route had been open for a while. It had been found, first of all, by Vasco de Gama 50 years earlier. And the whole Portuguese Empire had come and gone. And the Dutch, by better sailing boats, better cannon and deeper pockets, frankly, overcome the Portuguese Empire and get to areas at the very edge of the Portuguese influence where the spices grow. And what sets off the whole thing is a visit of Dutch shippers to London to try and buy up some London shipping in order that they They can make more voyages and customer Smythe says, hang on guys.

• 23:15Speaker 03

  Not taking our ships.

• 23:16Speaker 04

  You can't not taking our British ships.

• 23:19Speaker 03

  Come over here and take our ships.

• 23:20Speaker 04

  Yeah, come over here, buy our ships. We can do this ourselves. So this meeting is called, the same year that Julius Caesar and Hamlet first performed in the Globe. This meeting is called In This Black and White Tudor Hall. And bizarrely, we have all the documents. Everything for the East India Company is kept right from this first meeting.

• 23:39Speaker 03

  Okay, and one of the most tantalising documents that is in this is the type of people who sort of sign in and sign up for this. I mean, privateers, as you say, but you know, what we would call M and S shareholders, you know, people from every walk of life.

• 23:54Speaker 04

  Correct. And so the document, which is in the British Library, which I have a picture of in my book, The Anarchy, shows the first people signing up are the grandees, the mayor of London, who puts in 300 quid, somebody else puts in a thousand. But on sort of page 20 of this document, you have the people, as you say, the ordinary.

• 24:12Speaker 03

  Oh, vintners, people who sell wine.

• 24:13Speaker 04

  Leather workers.

• 24:15Speaker 03

  Saddle makers.

• 24:16Speaker 04

  Saddle makers. And they're putting in 10 quid, 5 quid. And what has happened is that Elizabeth in England has invented this new mechanism for doing business.

• 24:25Speaker 03

  Stock shares, shareholders.

• 24:26Speaker 04

  Shareholders.

• 24:27Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 24:27Speaker 04

  This is an idea which, you know, is invented at this period. Before that, you had guilds. Now guilds were a bit like this in that, you know, all the wool makers of Suffolk get together, they pool their resources and they go off and cut a deal with the tapestry makers in Holland, for example, or Belgium. But to be a member of a guild, you had to be a wool worker and have something to do with the wool industry. And that gave you access to a beautiful hall in a town like Lavenham or Burford, or one of these lovely wool churches in England. And what's new about the joint stock company, which is an idea first invented in Elizabethan England in 1580 with the founding of the Muscovy Company.

• 25:11Speaker 04

  The Muscovy Company was aimed at trade with Moscow and Russia. It sold furs and this sort of stuff and goods from the forests of the steppe, frankly. When they found that, they had this new model and they say, you know, it's not just merchants that can join. Anyone that wants to put in some money can invest it and they will get a share, a percentage, depending on how much they put in. So if they're a huge investor, they get a huge share of profits. If they're a small investor, they'll get a tiny share. But this idea changes everything because suddenly you have the growth of companies. And these companies, if they're popular, can raise vast sums of money. And if they fail, they fail.

• 25:52Speaker 04

  And so what happens interestingly is that the Elizabethan state outsources a lot of its colonial activity to merchant companies, not to the state itself.

• 26:05Speaker 03

  Well, I mean, it cuts overheads. It sort of makes sense. If you're an exchequer and you've got other things on your mind, like wars, you know, or threatening borders, this is the last thing that you want to administer. Administration is expensive.

• 26:16Speaker 04

  So from this time, you get the Muscovy Company, you get the Royal Africa Company, which is a slaving company. You get the Hudson Bay Company, which still exists, which deals with all the furs coming in from the northern United States or Northern America, now in Canada. You get the Rhode Island Company, which controls Rhode Island. So you get the Virginia Company controlling. So you get all these different areas which are actually run by merchant corporations and investors. And so the East India Company is part of this, but it's not the first.

• 26:49Speaker 03

  Can I just ask, I mean, Custer Smythe, what was he like? I mean, you said he was like Branson. And sometimes these things rise and fall, particularly these days, corporations, on the charisma of the person leading it. What was he like? Do we know what he was like?

• 27:04Speaker 04

  Well, we have a picture of him, which which shows this sort of, you know, very Elizabethan guy with a a tall, like a stovepipe hat, a goatee beard. He's a, he's a well-to-do, new rich, one generation old fortune. And he's exactly the sort of man who is rising up at this period, full of entrepreneurial energy, quite ruthless.

• 27:30Speaker 03

  So nouveau riche. I mean, we're talking nouveau riche.

• 27:32Speaker 04

  So I mean, think of all those characters in Shakespeare plays from this period, who end up, you know, being cast away on islands in like the Tempest.

• 27:40Speaker 03

  Ah, interesting. Yeah.

• 27:41Speaker 04

  So he's, he's, he's, he's a London businessman. He's connected with the, with the privateers and he gathers these guys into this meeting and says, invest in my company, we'll get some spices. And they do that.

• 27:51Speaker 03

  So he says, come and invest in my company and, and they do.

• 27:53Speaker 04

  And they do. And as I say, we have this document which shows the large sum of money which, which is raised through this public meeting. And we even have the, a description of the meeting. The young Richard Hacklet, who, who will go on to write wonderful travellers' accounts and compile the accounts of other travellers, is hired to, to be the kind of notary, keeping the, the records and, and, and writing the history. They're aware that they're doing something very historic. So they employ a bestselling non-fiction writer to, to, to be their own biographer right from the beginning. And there's a great awareness that this is an important moment.

• 28:26Speaker 03

  But I mean, but it's not, it's not a guarantee that this is going to work.

• 28:29Speaker 04

  No, I mean, and in fact, you know, there are two very good reasons for, for, for wondering whether this is a, a, a good way to spend your money. First of all, the man they hired to sail the first voyage is a man called Sir James Lancaster. And he's just come back from a disastrous voyage in the same area. He's, he's employed because he's the only man that's actually sailed there, but he didn't sail back because he sank his ship and all his crew got eaten by cannibals.

• 28:53Speaker 03

  Okay, this is not a successful first choice applicant.

• 28:57Speaker 04

  You know, he's the only guy that does this. So his first thing, you know, in the, in the weeks after the meeting, they've got their cash, they gather it from their shareholders. We even have notes saying, you know, X and Y hasn't paid up yet. And, and they start getting kind of legal notices because they promised such and such money and they haven't delivered it. But they go out and they go to Deptford to look for a ship. And the first ship they find is a Creekeal hulk called the Mayflower.

• 29:20Speaker 03

  The Mayflower.

• 29:21Speaker 04

  The Mayflower.

• 29:21Speaker 03

  The Mayflower.

• 29:22Speaker 04

  The, the, the Mayflower. Which they reject because they think it's not seaworthy. And obviously that has its own history going in a different direction.

• 29:29Speaker 03

  Right. Nobody tells the pilgrims.

• 29:32Speaker 04

  Nobody tells the pilgrims.

• 29:33Speaker 03

  One presumes, uh huh.

• 29:34Speaker 04

  But instead they buy a pirate ship. And I'm not making this up. It's called the Scourge of Malice. It sounds like Johnny Depp's flagship from Pirates of the Caribbean.

• 29:44Speaker 03

  It does seem a little obvious for privateers or pirates to be on this. But they don't keep the name because the name is not a good name for a serious company, is it?

• 29:52Speaker 04

  Exactly. So being good again at PR, again, looking at posterity, they changed them immediately from the Scourge of Malice to the Red Dragon, as if it's a nice sort of country pub in the Welsh countryside next to Powys Castle.

• 30:04Speaker 03

  Right.

• 30:05Speaker 04

  And as you say, you know, there's no guarantee this will work. And initially it doesn't. They set sail and they get becalmed in the Channel by freak, freak heatwave. And there's no, there's no breeze. So they just sit in the Channel and people have picnics on the town.

• 30:19Speaker 03

  And why are they laughing at them? Are they literally pointing and laughing saying, ha ha?

• 30:23Speaker 04

  Look at you.

• 30:24Speaker 03

  Can't even get past the car park. That's very funny.

• 30:28Speaker 04

  But the breeze picks up eventually and off they sail. And to their own surprise, they round the Cape of Good Hope. They actually apparently perform a Shakespeare play on the, on the ship.

• 30:38Speaker 03

  That's marvelous.

• 30:39Speaker 04

  Which is wonderful.

• 30:39Speaker 03

  What are the Dutch doing as they're going through their, their sea lanes? I mean, are they just, do they know? Do they allow it? Or is it just they're lucky because Lancaster is just lucky this time?

• 30:47Speaker 04

  Well, I mean, I didn't have to ask permission from anyone. And this is armed, armed commerce from the very beginning. The charter that they ring out of the Elizabethan court allows them to wage war explicitly.

• 30:59Speaker 03

  That they'll fight their way through if they have to.

• 31:00Speaker 04

  And they employ people, you know, with cannon and they employ archers and they employ all sorts to, to protect them. So they realise that, you know, as, as all commerce is at this point, that it's a risk and they've got to take precautions. And they get eventually to the East Indies, by which we would say Java, Indonesia. And just as they're about to land, they see a Portuguese caravel coming in the opposite direction. And as they are literally a bunch of ex-pirates, they just land on the Portuguese ship and transfer its contents to their own hold and sail home again.

• 31:36Speaker 03

  Okay, so this is. So not only does this require no effort, but also no money. So they come back with the, you know, the ka-ching in their pockets, but also laden with goods.

• 31:47Speaker 04

  Laden with goods. They, they, they take an entire cargo of nutmeg and spices and they sell it for one million pounds.

• 31:55Speaker 03

  Let's take a break here and we'll be back after this break with what happens to the pirates. When they come back with their million pounds.

• 32:04Speaker 05

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• 32:34Speaker 06

  Mr. President, my company tore me of the explosion on our rig on October 2nd. Causing massive water displacement and triggering a tsunami. They all heap the blame on me.

• 32:43Speaker 07

  Tom Cruise is. Digger got us into this mess and Digger's gonna dig us up. From the director of Birdman and The Revenant.

• 32:50Speaker 08

  What would happen if I stopped drilling? You stop, you freeze to death, that's what.

• 32:55Speaker 07

  With great power comes great deniability.

• 32:58Speaker 08

  I'm not the first man.

• 32:59Speaker 07

  Digger, see the trailer online, only in theaters October 2nd. Rated R, under 17, not a minute without parent.

• 33:06Speaker 09

  It's me, the.

• 33:09Speaker 09

  We don't need the jingle twice.

• 33:12Speaker 09

  Stop it. This is about vacation inflation and how Priceline negotiates amazing deals on hotels, flights and rental cars.

• 33:21Speaker 09

  Yeah, but I didn't mention that you can save up to 60% off hotels in the Priceline app.

• 33:27Speaker 09

  Fine. No one deals more deals than. Please stop. Touche.

• 33:35Speaker 10

  This episode is brought to you by Tic Tac. Lace up and get your game on because the Tic Tac lineup just got a new teammate. Dr. Pepper Tic Tac. This new double threat puts two of your favorite flavors into one box of mints. And when two iconic flavors come together, the result can only be iconic. Score big. Try Dr. Pepper Tic Tac today.

• 34:03Speaker 03

  You're listening to Empire with me, Anita Arndt.

• 34:07Speaker 04

  And me, William Dalrymple.

• 34:08Speaker 03

  You always leave this very pregnant pause, as if you've forgotten what your name is. It is William Dalrymple.

• 34:15Speaker 03

  Who, me? Who, me? The world's authority on the East India Company? Yes, you. And we left this story with John Lancaster, who does not have the most...

• 34:25Speaker 04

  Sir James.

• 34:25Speaker 03

  Sir James Lancaster. John to his breath. No, it's not. Sir James Lancaster, who has not the most distinguished record at sea, who has lost a flotilla and many of his crew have been eaten on a previous voyage. But this time, luck's out royally, or bigly, as some may say in America. Because instead of having to spend the hard invested cash of all the shareholders in this nascent East India Company, has bumped into a Portuguese ship and said, "I will have that", takes everything and goes home.

• 34:56Speaker 04

  Yep. That is literally it. And that's very much the spirit of the time. After the Brits have fallen out with everybody in Europe again, they had to take what they can get. And so there begins a very tricky 30 years when they are competing against the Dutch. Now, the Dutch were the first in. The Dutch, a new nation, have fantastic financial instruments. They are brilliant financiers, which the Tudors are not yet.

• 35:26Speaker 03

  Right.

• 35:27Speaker 04

  They're beginners at this. And because the Dutch have got deeper pockets and because they've got better ships and better sea captains than Sir James Lancaster, by 1630, 30 years in, the Brits have basically lost the competition. The real success story in the spice trade is now the Dutch. And there's a series of disasters, the Ambuina massacre being one, when the whole of the Brits are captured and tortured by the Dutch. And eventually, a treaty is signed. And as a sop, as a sort of consolation prize to the English, they are given a muddy island in the Hudson River, the other side of the road, called Manhattan.

• 36:08Speaker 03

  Oh, I've heard of it.

• 36:10Speaker 04

  So that, of course, turns out to be a rather good investment in the long term. But in the short term, this is rather a humiliation. And rather like a startup which has gone awry. And, you know, investors haven't quite got their return, but they're not giving up yet because, you know, they can see there's still potential. The business model is basically rejigged in around sixteen thirty, sixteen forty. And what they decided to do is basically forget the spice trade, leave that to the Dutch. And I think already there are signs that the great days of the spice trade have passed, that the prices of spices are going. So the English are not completely heartbroken to.

• 36:50Speaker 03

  No, they're canny, they know that's not a thing to fight over.

• 36:54Speaker 04

  And what they realise is that the new trade, the really exciting trade is textiles.

• 37:00Speaker 03

  So when we're talking about textiles coming, you know, from Bengal and you say, you know, this was the majority of textiles were coming from Bengal at this time. What kind of textiles are we talking about?

• 37:11Speaker 04

  So initially, the big mogul port is Surat, which is in Gujarat and Gujarat is the centre of the cotton trade. By which, and cotton to us is very ordinary, I'm wearing a simple cotton white shirt at the moment and it's, you know, it's unremarkable and cheap. But at the time, it was considered a luxury product because it's very soft on the skin.

• 37:30Speaker 03

  You wear it well, darling.

• 37:30Speaker 04

  Thank you so much.

• 37:31Speaker 03

  All right.

• 37:33Speaker 04

  And this was an ancient export of India, it was something, at the time of the Romans, Gujarati cotton was as valuable as silk.

• 37:41Speaker 03

  Gosh.

• 37:42Speaker 04

  And, you know, as with spices, you know, you go to Waitrose or Sainsbury's or Tesco's or Lidl and buy pepper now without thinking about it. And it's not a luxury product because the sheer quantity, the supplies meant that the price has sunk right down. The same is slightly true of cotton, that what was a luxury is now something which is unremarkable.

• 38:07Speaker 03

  What were people wearing before cotton?

• 38:09Speaker 04

  Well, the Brits are wearing wool, which obviously is not suitable for the for the tropics. And so they buy the cotton from Gujarat and then they begin to get involved in all the incredibly more exotic and exciting textiles being produced in Bengal. Muslin, which is incredibly fine, often see-through, silks, wonderful embroideries, things called kalamkharis, which are painted, you hang them on your Tudor four-poster bed. And this is a very, very good moment to be in the textile trade. And it's also, I don't think this was particularly planned, because you know, there's no question that the East India Company just lost battles against the Dutch.

• 38:48Speaker 04

  But by moving from the spice trade to the textile trade and moving from a focus on Indonesia to India, both these decisions are very canny in the long run.

• 39:01Speaker 03

  I mean, it means you have the whole field to yourself.

• 39:03Speaker 04

  You have the whole field to yourself, well, not quite the whole field, because there are still a few Portuguese enclaves like Goa, and the East India Company has a few dust-offs with the Portuguese in Sohar. But nonetheless, they're in early. And the important point is that the Moghuls, who now run India, they've come down from what was Uzbekistan, they've taken over the north and the middle of India. And by 1640, Shah Jahan, who builds the Taj Mahal, is on the throne. And the Mughal Empire is incredibly rich and incredibly, incredibly willing to do trade. But as these guys are Central Asian, no matter, they're not interested particularly in the sea. And there's no, I mean, there's a small, there's a few ships, but there's no navy as such

• 39:48Speaker 04

  that the Moghuls control.

• 39:49Speaker 03

  Can I, can I just, I'm just draw your attention, everyone's attention to, you know, you just said, you know, actually, the Moghuls were so rich that it does not matter. The British are a kind of a blip. There is, I mean, later. Picture, which is really informative. This is Jahangir as the millennial Sultan preferring the company of Sufis. It's by Bichir, the painter.

• 40:13Speaker 04

  Bichta.

• 40:13Speaker 03

  Bichta. And it is, it's a remarkable thing. So you've got Jahangir sort of with a great golden disc behind him, looking resplendent and important.

• 40:23Speaker 04

  Patties floating above him.

• 40:24Speaker 03

  Yeah. And he's, he's, he's handing over a, one would presume a religious text to a Sufi scholar, I guess. But in the left hand corner is a teeny tiny James the First.

• 40:37Speaker 04

  James the First looking remarkably pissed off. And the fact that Jahangir prefers the Sufi to him. And he's got this sort of sour expression on his face and he's, he's very, really not very amused.

• 40:48Speaker 03

  But also not important. I mean, that's, so this is the scale of what, what India regarded Britain as at the time.

• 40:54Speaker 04

  And the person below him is, is the painter Bichta.

• 40:57Speaker 03

  Bichta.

• 40:57Speaker 04

  His own self portrait. And, and an artist in the Mughal court, while the, the Moghuls were obsessed with art, the status of artists was very low. So it's like putting a picture of, I don't know, President Macron next to a dustbin man.

• 41:11Speaker 03

  Right.

• 41:11Speaker 04

  Uh, I mean, he's, uh, it, it, this is not a, you know, he's not, he's been given the least honourable position.

• 41:16Speaker 03

  I mean, is it, is it designed to be a pictorial insult? Or is it, is it, is it just, this is just how they saw?

• 41:21Speaker 04

  That's just how they saw it. Uh, and, and what has happened is that there's a picture of James the First sitting there because it's been given by one of the ambassadors and it's, it's an exciting object and the Mughal artist has copied it and shoved it above his own picture in the corner.

• 41:33Speaker 03

  So it's a remarkable picture. So that's also in your book, yeah.

• 41:36Speaker 04

  But that again is very, that again is, is very telling because the Brits are from this, yeah, I mean, the Emperor Akbar talks about, uh, the, the northerners as being like animals. I mean, these people are regarded as semi savage.

• 41:48Speaker 03

  The Brits.

• 41:49Speaker 04

  The Brits and all the other North Europeans.

• 41:51Speaker 03

  Okay. So, right. Okay. So we've got the British, apart from the old skirmish around with the, the Portuguese.

• 41:58Speaker 04

  The English. Because we're pre-union, yeah.

• 42:00Speaker 03

  The English. But just the Portuguese snipping away at their heels. But otherwise, they've pretty much got a clear run.

• 42:07Speaker 04

  So from the 1630s on, the Brits have a very good chance of taking the Indian textile market and exporting it around the globe. And they do this very successfully. So that by the early 18th century, you have deindustrialisation as far as Mexico, because there's so much cheap Indian cotton of a high quality and very low cost being exported by the Brits to the new world.

• 42:35Speaker 03

  Are they exporting stuff that's already being made? Or are they causing more stuff to be made?

• 42:41Speaker 04

  They are buying piece cotton, as it's called, which are the words bolts, rolls of raw material. They're not, in most cases.

• 42:49Speaker 03

  Commissioning anything.

• 42:50Speaker 04

  Commissioning sort of nice clothes. No, it's the raw material. And they're shipping it not just to Britain, but all over the world. And, you know, when you go to, for example, lovely Renaissance palaces in Italy on your summer holidays, you often see on the walls Moghul kalamkharis, which are presumably got there by the East India Company.

• 43:10Speaker 03

  Beautiful decorative items. Okay, so this is lovely. I mean, you know, England gets its cotton and the weavers get their money and they all lived happily ever after.

• 43:19Speaker 04

  Well, for a long time they do. And both the Moghuls and the East India Company prosper spectacularly at this period. And everything goes quite well until Orangzeb, who is this Moghul emperor who messes everything up. He takes too much of the Deccan, he over expands too fast to the south. And also, he irritates all the Hindus by re-imposing the Jizya.

• 43:44Speaker 03

  A tax for non-believers. If you worship your own god and it's not an Islamic god, you pay a tax.

• 43:48Speaker 04

  And basically, since the time of Akbar, the Moghul Empire had been a very successful collaborative deal between the Rajput armies, who are Hindu, who are defeated in battle. But then, rather than being punished or being looted, they are brought into the Moghul fold and become the spearhead of Moghul armies. So for quite a lot of the next century, you find Hindu Moghul armies attacking minor Muslim sultans halfway down India in the Deccan. So Ahmed Naga, Bijapur, Golconda, all these little sultanates are attacked by Hindu armies working for the Moghuls. So it's the opposite in the sense of what you'd expect. Which is why today, when, for example, one goes to Rajasthan, if you go to the town

• 44:30Speaker 04

  of Bikaner, there's a wonderful library, where you find the best Deccanese manuscripts, which have been looted at this period from the middle of India.

• 44:36Speaker 03

  I'll come back to it. Orang Zeb is messing things up.

• 44:39Speaker 04

  Orang Zeb is messing things up, and when he dies in seventeen oh seven, the empire begins to fall. And this, again, was something we talked about in an earlier podcast. The Jats, the Sikhs, and the Marathas are rising up. Any of them could have taken the Moghuls out, but in the end, it's this odd character from out of town, Nader Shah, a Persian, comes in, comes to Delhi, loots everything, takes-

• 45:02Speaker 03

  Cartloads of loot-

• 45:04Speaker 04

  Takes the kono and among eight thousand wagons of other stuff. And once he's taken all the finance from the imperial treasury, the Moghul Empire disintegrates. Where previously you'd had a single unitary state, beautifully administered by local governors in every corner of the empire, over what's now four different countries. Suddenly, every town is semi-independent. Jhoppur, Jaipur, Udaipur, Tanjore, Hyderabad-

• 45:31Speaker 03

  You can't pay the soldiers, you can't pay the administrations, no one's going to work for you.

• 45:34Speaker 04

  The whole thing falls apart. And in that churning, if you like, in that extraordinary transformation of India from a massive empire to tiny self-governing states jostling up against each other, two European corporations make merry. One is the East India Company, based in Calcutta, Madras, and Bombay. But there's a rival French company called the Companie des Andes, which is based in Pondicherry and Chandanagar. And they have shadow factories opposite the English ones in almost every place.

• 46:08Speaker 03

  What's the relationship? I mean, competition is one thing, but did it get violent between the two?

• 46:13Speaker 04

  So it's very hostile. And the whole of the 18th century, there's a global conflict between France and England, which manifests itself in, first of all, the Austrian succession, then eventually the Seven Years' War. And these are global conflicts. The British fight the French in Lake Huron and in the northern United States, in Canada, remember that last Mahican stuff with Daniel de Lewis leaping over waterfalls and all that sort of stuff in the Caribbean, as far away as the Philippines. But also, you know, the Jacobite Rebellion, arming the Irish, all this sort of stuff is going on.

• 46:50Speaker 04

  In the middle of all this, the English and the French are fighting it out. And Robert Clive, as a young man, does a whole series of skirmishes called the Carnatic Wars.

• 46:59Speaker 03

  Wait, wait, wait. Before you go into the Carnatic Wars, let us first of all just explain who Robert Clive actually was. Because, you know, in my mind and in my schooling, we only heard Clive of India as if he was some noble who had sort of beamed down into the history book. But he was quite different, wasn't he?

• 47:17Speaker 04

  Sure. So Robert Clive is exactly the sort of guy who joins the East India Company at this period. He is from a sort of poshish background. He's a local squire's son. Social aspirations, but not much money. And a lot of these people are being signed up by the East India Company because it's not a bad way of making a living at this period. And if you are the sort of minor gentry that has high social aspirations, but simply doesn't have the money to support it anymore, to put one of your kids out to the East India Company is a good option.

• 47:48Speaker 03

  It's like, you know, like one son sometimes goes into the priesthood if you don't know what to do with it. But, okay, so Robert.

• 47:52Speaker 04

  But this is more like, I suppose, putting one son into Goldman Sachs.

• 47:55Speaker 03

  Okay, but but he is by nature a delinquent.

• 47:59Speaker 04

  He is indeed a delinquent. And there is a whole lot of letters from his uncle which survive, which have him being the village bully. He has protection rackets against village shopkeepers in Shropshire. He breaks the windows of shopkeepers who don't pay up. He even floods somebody's shop just out of spite. So he's this sort of unruly adolescent who is sent off by his uncle eventually to India, where he's signed up as an accountant. And of course, being an unruly delinquent, he hates it. And twice, he tries to shoot himself. And twice, for various reasons, he fails. But he regards this as sort of almost as a sort of divine mandate that he's clearly been spared for great things. And so when war breaks out between France and England.

• 48:43Speaker 04

  He signs up to become a soldier, and this tells that, unlike a candidacy, to be something that he's very, very good at.

• 48:49Speaker 03

  Right up his street.

• 48:49Speaker 04

  Right up his street. And he's not a professional soldier, he's not in the British Army, but he takes to it like a duck to water. And he's trained up by various veterans of Kaladan, who have now come out to South India. And together, Clive and some of his mates, basically outwit the French Company. French Company is hobbled because it's very much state-run, guys that can't quite make it at court in Versailles, slight losers sent out. And unlike the British Company, which is a sort of libertarian, thrusting.

• 49:19Speaker 03

  Well, they're the hungry ones.

• 49:20Speaker 04

  Hungry, ruthless, ambitious young men. You get a lot of sort of dim aristocrats in the French.

• 49:26Speaker 03

  Dilettantes, who nobody knows what to do with.

• 49:28Speaker 04

  And they also haven't got much freedom of movement. Everything has to go through Versailles, they don't get an answer from the king because he's busy doing, you know, busy with his mistresses and all that sort of stuff. So the arrival of Clive coincides with the moment that the English East India Company clearly gets an upper hand over the French. And Clive makes his first fortune at this point, comes back to England and goes into Parliament. And almost immediately, there's a scandal over the fact that he's bribed everyone. And quite soon, having given some money to his dad and bought some land, he finds his coffers, which he thought would be enough to retire on, in fact, are exhausted within three or four years. So he signs up at exactly the moment when England and France are heading to war again.

• 50:13Speaker 04

  And this is going to be the conflict that will finally break out in seventeen fifty-six to seven, that the Americans call the French and Indian Wars, which we in Britain call the Seven Years' War.

• 50:28Speaker 03

  Right.

• 50:29Speaker 04

  Again, a global conflict between Britain and France in all their different colonies and territories. And rather like the Iraq War a few years ago, everything is set off by a

• 50:41Speaker 04

  False piece of intelligence. A document is delivered to the East India Company saying that we've just seen that the French are loading up an enormous flotilla in their in their main base, Port Lorient, and it's clearly going off to Bengal and just set sail. And there's descriptions of the number of cannon, the number of warships that have gone. The document is not completely wrong in that there was a big French flotilla, but they've got the destination wrong. In fact, it's heading to Canada.

• 51:11Speaker 03

  Ah.

• 51:12Speaker 04

  And so when the Brits send off a rival fleet, they got the company goes to the British Navy and says, you know, you've got to protect our interests. We're about to be wiped off the face of Bengal. The Royal Navy produces some ships. Clive is recruited on the company side. And so you have a joint sort of Royal Navy and Marine and East India Company expedition. But they arrive in Madras to find there's no French.

• 51:35Speaker 03

  There's no opposition at all because they've all gone off to Canada.

• 51:38Speaker 04

  And they've sailed halfway around the world. They've taken six months and there's no one there. What the hell they do. Clive, you know.

• 51:43Speaker 03

  Might as well fire.

• 51:45Speaker 04

  Very nearly sort of, you know, career almost ended at this point, having pressed to this expedition, is saved by a complete fluke just at the same time as he's arriving to the north in Calcutta. A new governor of Bengal is called Sirajuddala, and he is another sort of angry punk. He's young, he's already fallen out with everybody. He's the beloved nephew of a man called Ali Verdi Khan, who'd governed Bengal for years very well. But he has none of Ali Verdi Khan's tact, diplomacy or sense of state. He's famous for sinking pleasure boats just to watch, have the fun of watching people drown.

• 52:28Speaker 04

  He's a serial seducer of women who takes women and walls them up if they.

• 52:32Speaker 03

  You sound like a total scumbag.

• 52:34Speaker 04

  He's a total scumbag. And he. Attacks Calcutta on the very justified grounds that the Brits have been rebuilding the fortifications of Calcutta without his permission. He's the governor, they have to ask if they're going to fortify that.

• 52:49Speaker 03

  Planning permission, if you will.

• 52:51Speaker 04

  Exactly, exactly. It's a planning permission dispute.

• 52:53Speaker 03

  Mm hmm.

• 52:54Speaker 04

  And if he thinks that they must be arming it against him, because a lot of bankers have recently arrived at Calcutta and the Brits are resisting them paying any taxes to Sirajuddal. In fact, of course, they are arming against the French because they've been given this intelligence and the documents survive in the Indian National Archives.

• 53:13Speaker 03

  There's an entire flotilla on their way.

• 53:14Speaker 04

  There's a flotilla on their way. So when news arrives that Sirajuddal has attacked Calcutta and put many people into a guardhouse where they died of heat and hysteria in something called the Black Hole of Calcutta in 1756, when news comes that the city has fallen and there's been this apparent abuse of the survivors, Clive suddenly has a job. He's sent north and he retakes Calcutta.

• 53:42Speaker 03

  Can we just, on the Black Hole of Calcutta, because I mean, that is something that did come up when I was at school. And it was hundreds of people were forced into this inhumane, oxygenless hole in the ground and left to die, men, women and children. It's a pretty pitiful story. Is that what happened? Is that the truth of it?

• 54:01Speaker 04

  Well, it's a hugely disputed bit of history. That many people died is clear, but the numbers seem to have been hugely exaggerated. What happened was that when the Brits lost Calcutta, a lot of them got very drunk and ran amok and the various people were shot guards. So again, Sirajuddal's troops, quite reasonably, said, we can't have this lot just running loose and taking potshots at us. So they locked them in a guardroom. But they lock probably about sixty people in this guardroom.

• 54:32Speaker 03

  It's a small space, isn't it?

• 54:33Speaker 04

  And about thirty people come out alive.

• 54:35Speaker 03

  Hmm.

• 54:36Speaker 04

  So, and the, my understanding, having looked at the documents and studied this, is that something happened? That there was definitely some extremely unfortunate and avoidable deaths. But it wasn't a sort of dastardly plot to kill them all. The Brits misbehaved and this was an attempt to keep unruly prisoners under lock and key until somewhere better was found for them.

• 54:58Speaker 03

  Hmm. I mean, Sir Rajad Allen is not somebody we want to stand up for either. I mean, you know, he's, he's quite capable of doing atrocities, but the Black Hole of Calcutta is, is not, not one such. Okay, all right, so there's.

• 55:11Speaker 04

  This, by the time it's arrived in Madras, this story is already.

• 55:13Speaker 03

  And it's given a mandate, isn't it? It gives a mandate and a reason and an honorability to what follows.

• 55:18Speaker 04

  So the idea is that Clive is going to liberate this captured city. He's going to vindicate British honour and he's going to teach these savages who've killed our poor women and children a lesson. And he's got a big Royal Navy together with some Marines. He's taken on the East India Company's own nascent mercenary army, who are the sepoys, who he's drained up a bit. And there's not many of them instead, the sepoys at this point, there's only a few thousand. And they're really just jumped up security guards, given a few muskets. And he arrives in Bengal and he recaptures Calcutta without really much opposition. It's not a, a very difficult task, given the armaments that he has.

• 56:01Speaker 04

  And he then gets the news that the French have declared war on England and the Seven Year War has begun. So he then takes a second town, which is Chandanagar, the French settlement. And that is much more of a conflict. There's a enormous sea battle, in fact, or using naval ships on the Hooghly River. And a lot of people are killed on both sides. And at this point, having taken not just Calcutta, but the French headquarters at Chandanagar, Clive writes to his dad that he's heading home and that his name is made and he should be now again.

• 56:33Speaker 03

  Set up for life.

• 56:34Speaker 04

  Set up for life.

• 56:35Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 56:35Speaker 04

  So just as Clive is heading back to Madras and planning to cash in his chips and another nice little victory, a letter arrives that changes everything. And the letter is from a man called the Jugger Set, the banker to the world. And the jugate sets are like the Rothschilds of 19th century Europe. They are these incredibly rich, very political bankers. They've invented a very clever system of transferring funds around India at a time of disruption. In the old days, the tax in Bengal, which kept the whole thing going, because this was the rich area of India, would be put onto a wagon.

• 57:17Speaker 04

  A troop of soldiers would go with it and it would literally march overland up the Ganges to Delhi. Now, with warbands roaming around, that's no longer a possibility. And the jugate sets come up with this credit idea that basically you pay the tax into our office in Calcutta and we will give you a chit and you can withdraw it in our office in Delhi.

• 57:41Speaker 03

  It's like, it's such a, it feels like such a modern concept, you know, sort of going into a Federal Express and saying, right, send it, send it over, money order.

• 57:49Speaker 04

  But they, it's exactly that, but they, they, they take 10 to 15% of the tax. And given that this is, you know, the main source of money for the Mughal Empire, they make a fortune very, very quickly, become the richest people in Asia. And, and according to one Mughal source, money flows into the coffers of the jugate sets like the Ganges flows into the sea.

• 58:11Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 58:12Speaker 04

  And so these guys reach out to Clive and say, we've seen that you've just defeated Sirajuddal and taken back Calcutta. We've got a proposal for you. We think Sirajuddal is a psycho. He has threatened us, he's forced us to give him loans, he's threatened to circumcise us and make us Muslims and we're not standing for this. What we propose is that you attack Sirajuddal at his capital in Rashidabad. We will pay off his generals so they don't fight. And for that service, sir, we will pay you personally one million pounds and we will pay the company another million pounds.

• 58:45Speaker 03

  What does, what does that mean in those days? What is one, I mean, it sounds like a one million pounds. What does it actually mean in those days?

• 58:52Speaker 04

  It means that Clive becomes the richest self-made man in Europe overnight. It's a colossal offer and he has no authority to do this. He's been sent to fight the French, which is done. But he takes this and, and no one is, is going to say no to this kind of money. It's outrageous sums of money. No one's ever been offered this. And the fact that the company's been offered a million too, means that Clive thinks that he can get away with it. So he goes north and for a week, there's a terrible silence and he wonders whether he's falling into a trap because there's no letters reaching him. But eventually he brazen's it out and they meet at the battlefield of Palashi, known in English textbooks as

• 59:33Speaker 03

  Plassey.

• 59:33Speaker 04

  Palashi is actually a type of tree. A palash tree is this gorgeous orange tree that produces these wonderful bright blossoms in April. But anyway, there's mango groves there, Clive camps the night. In the morning, he finds the Mughal army has encircled him. And there's a terrible moment when it looks like

• 59:50Speaker 03

  It's a trap.

• 59:51Speaker 04

  He's bitten off more. It's a trap. He's bitten off more than he can true.

• 59:54Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 59:55Speaker 04

  And then the fire from this army, supported by, incidentally, a French contingent that are very keen to wipe out the English, starts and Clive's army has to hide. They hide on the banks of the river, they hide in the mango groves, and it looks like they're going to have to leg it back to Calcutta at night as the only possible option. But at the vital moment, a monsoon storm breaks and there's a terrific dam pool. And while the British remember to cover their gunpowder with tarpaulins, the Mughals don't.

• 1:00:27Speaker 03

  You are joking.

• 1:00:29Speaker 04

  Literally, this crucial moment, this one accident, that basic thing.

• 1:00:33Speaker 03

  Could have turned history.

• 1:00:34Speaker 04

  Totally does turn history.

• 1:00:36Speaker 03

  Extraordinary.

• 1:00:37Speaker 04

  So when the Mughal cavalry think that the same must have happened to the English and the English cannon are out of commission, immediately the monsoon storm ends, the cavalry, the Mughal cavalry

• 1:00:48Speaker 03

  The Mughals come forward.

• 1:00:49Speaker 04

  Charge forward and they're met by a coruscating enormous volley from the English cannon, killing all the leaders of the cavalry. And that's it.

• 1:00:57Speaker 03

  And that's the end of Plassey. That is the Battle of Plassey.

• 1:00:59Speaker 04

  At that point, Mir Jaffa, who is the general in the pay of the jug at sets as well, takes his half of the army and marches off the battlefield. Sir Rajadawal realizes that he's been betrayed, leaves off. He is eventually captured, hacked to bits, and his mutilated body is paraded on the back of a donkey through Mashidabad. The next day, Clive walks into Mashidabad with the jug at sets and literally helps himself to everything in the treasury. He stuffs his pockets. And years later, when he's called before Parliament, rather like Boris Johnson, he brazenes it out and says, my lords, there was a prostrate city at my feet. The bankers waited on my pleasure.

• 1:01:42Speaker 04

  My lords, I was astonished at my own moderation.

• 1:01:45Speaker 03

  Oh, for heaven's sake.

• 1:01:45Speaker 04

  And everyone laughs and he's off the hook.

• 1:01:48Speaker 03

  And there's, oh, Clive.

• 1:01:49Speaker 04

  Oh, Clive.

• 1:01:50Speaker 03

  But that explains where we started. Powers Castle stuffed.

• 1:01:53Speaker 04

  Not quite, not quite.

• 1:01:54Speaker 03

  Oh, no?

• 1:01:54Speaker 04

  No, no, nearly. So what happens then is that Clive gets his million and eight years later, all the people that he has put into power as puppets again rise up against the English because the English have behaved so incredibly badly and basically killed the goose that was laying the golden egg. In just eight years, they lay waste to Bengal by asset stripping it. And there is another big act of resistance and not just the Nawab of Bengal this time, who's now called Mekasim, a man actually put in by Clive, but also the Nawab of Aavud, which is basically Uttar Pradesh, who's called Shudha Odaala, and the Mughal emperor

• 1:02:34Speaker 04

  himself, Shah Alam, all meet at the Battle of Buxa and they take on the East India Company. But again, the company has used the money that it's gathered to enormously increase the size of its sepoys army and it's bought an enormous number of sepoys. And there are now 40,000 trained up sepoys, trained in the latest European techniques of warfare, horse artillery, 18th century ballistics, muskets, bayonets. And it's a hard fought battle, but the East India Company's army defeats all three of these armies massed together. And this is the moment when Clive returns to India and makes Shah Alam sign the Duani.

• 1:03:17Speaker 04

  And suddenly you find that the richest provinces of India, three richest provinces, Bengal, Bihar and Arissa are signed over, not to the British government, not to the British army, but to a private corporation, the East India Company.

• 1:03:33Speaker 03

  And that, ladies and gentlemen, is how you tell a story. And it's not, it's not even the end, is it? It's just the end of the beginning.

• 1:03:40Speaker 04

  This is now the moment that the company moves from being a trading organisation. Suddenly it's an imperial territorial power.

• 1:03:47Speaker 03

  And if you want to know more about that, do listen to the next podcast. That's all from me, Anita Arndt.

• 1:03:52Speaker 04

  And me, William Darmpool.

• 1:03:57Rory Stewart?

  So if you enjoyed that, the second episode of Empire with Willie and Anita is out right now. You can find the link in the episode description or just search Empire Podcast wherever you get your podcasts. Thanks for listening.

• 1:04:10Speaker 06

  Mr. President, my company told me of the explosion on our rig on October 2nd. Causing massive water displacement and triggering a tsunami. If y'all keep the blame on me.

• 1:04:20Speaker 07

  Tom Cruise is. Digger got us into this mess and Digger's gonna dig us up. From the director of Birdman and The Revenant.

• 1:04:27Speaker 08

  What would happen if I stopped going? You stop, you freeze in there, that's what.

• 1:04:31Speaker 07

  With great power comes great deniability.

• 1:04:34Speaker 08

  I'm not the first then.

• 1:04:36Speaker 07

  Digger. See the trailer online. Only in theaters October 2nd. Rated R. Under 17.9 minutes without parent.

• 1:04:41Speaker 11

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• 1:05:05Speaker 07

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