Pod Insights Dan Snow's History Hit How Did the British Empire Build the Modern World? About this episode Tobacco, sugar, rum, cotton, rubber, tea, coffee, spices, industry, borders, slavery, war - all things spread across the globe thanks to the British Empire. At its height in 1922, it was the largest empire the world had ever seen, covering around a quarter of Earth's land surface and ruling over 458 million people - that's a lot of influence. Dan is joined by journalist and author Sathnam Sanghera to measure the impact the British Empire has had on our world, for better and worse.
Sathnam's new book for kids is called 'Journeys of Empire'.
Produced by James Hickmann, McKenna Fernandez and edited by Matthew Wilson and Dougal Patmore.
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2:03 Dan Snow? Hi folks, welcome to Down Snows History. For a long time, for centuries really, the reach, the scale of the British Empire, it was just, it was almost unfathomable. History's largest, probably its most powerful global empire, which at its peak governed over 400 million subjects. It covered a quarter of the Earth's landmass. In this episode, we're going to look into how this little island, smaller than Kansas, was able to exercise such extraordinary reach, such extraordinary control, how that empire didn't just rule the world, but just rewrote the course of history. How the British Empire triggered massive diasporas, re-engineered the global ecosystem,
2:48 Dan Snow? and how the impact, the power of that empire is still being felt so long after its collapse. Today, I'm really pleased to be welcoming back to the show Sathnam Sanghera, journalist, bestselling author of the award-winning books Empireland and Empireworld. His new book, Journeys of Empire, explores the voyages that changed the world forever. So we're going to talk all about the legacy of that empire. Let's get into it. Sathnam, good to see you.
3:17 Speaker 04 Good to see you. It's the first time I've seen you in person on a...
3:19 Dan Snow? Is this in the flesh?
3:20 Speaker 04 Yeah, so I've got to deal with the stress of having to summarize my views, but also deal with your handsomeness.
3:26 Dan Snow? Come on, that should be very straightforward. Also, this is not a small subject, talking about the British Empire. And you know, as I was thinking about it, I thought, there's two dudes in a room in London, speaking English. I've got Irish, Canadian, and English heritage. You've got...
3:43 Speaker 04 Punjabi.
3:44 Dan Snow? Punjabi.
3:45 Speaker 04 Wolverhampton.
3:46 Dan Snow? Wolverhampton, exactly. English, Punjabi heritage. Just this fact that this is happening is reflective of this massive impact that the British Empire's had.
3:53 Speaker 04 Yeah, and probably some of your plants in the background probably came from empire.
3:56 Dan Snow? Interesting, yeah.
3:57 Speaker 04 Fernmania in the Victorian Age, you know about fernmania?
3:59 Dan Snow? I don't.
4:00 Speaker 04 There was a craze to fill Victorian living rooms with ferns. They all came from places like Australia, causing massive environmental damage. But I could have been drinking a cup of tea, you could have been having a rum and coke, rum originally from Barbados, could have had a gin and tonic, quinine, invented because of empire. So yeah, I mean, I don't think you can understand modern Britain or the modern world without understanding the British Empire.
4:23 Dan Snow? That's extraordinary. Let's try and give people a little overview of that empire.
4:28 Speaker 04 Yes.
4:28 Dan Snow? We're going to gallop through, do a sort of survey of, I guess, the Crayla Gia Empire, and then we're going to look at some areas in which it has completely changed the modern world. We can start, I guess, with the late Tudors, a bit of Queen Elizabeth. I mean, Henry VII, sending people out and exploring the coast of Canada. But I mean, we're getting colonies, we're getting trade by the late Tudor period Elizabeth I.
4:46 Speaker 04 Yeah, but in that narrative, people forget Ireland.
4:48 Dan Snow? Oh, good point.
4:49 Speaker 04 Arguably, Ireland was the first colony, wasn't it?
4:51 Dan Snow? Totally. And my Welsh ancestors would say, don't forget the old Welsh here, lads. But yeah, the English, then the British pushing into Ireland, and then further afield.
4:59 Speaker 04 The textbooks, I guess, talk about it, starting in, what, 1600s, with the creation of the East India Company, chartered by Queen Elizabeth I, the hunt for spices, the trade textiles.
5:11 Dan Snow? So trying to take advantage of the huge rewards that come from trading around the world. But how does that interact with empire? Because that's trade. You're going out, you're sending merchants out to get money. Why do we get bits of the world painted in pink after that? What happens there?
5:24 Speaker 04 There's so many reasons. Partly just competition, because someone else was doing it. So the Dutch were doing it. So it became a kind of competition. You had to beat the Dutch to the Banda Islands and take control of the nutmeg trade.
5:38 Dan Snow? So you can't just turn up with money and buy nutmeg. You've actually got to own the plots that are being grown.
5:42 Speaker 04 Yeah, and actually, it was the hunt for nutmeg, which bizarrely ended up with us owning New York. Wasn't it Manhattan? You know the story, that story?
5:49 Dan Snow? But go on, tell everyone that story.
5:50 Speaker 04 I want to get it right. So basically, there was only one island in the world that grew nutmeg, Run Island, about four miles long. It was the Dutch and the British fought over it. It was very, very far away. And in the end, at the end of all this fighting, the Dutch, I think, swapped. Was it New Amsterdam?
6:08 Dan Snow? Yeah, a little place called New Amsterdam, which is today called?
6:11 Speaker 04 Manhattan?
6:12 Dan Snow? Yeah.
6:12 Speaker 04 Yeah. It's that crazy. And all because of nutmeg, which you could buy on Run Island for one pound, say, and sell in London for 600 pounds.
6:19 Dan Snow? Really?
6:20 Speaker 04 So. But also, I mean, you've got the factor of bad English food is such an important motivator of empire. Because not only is nutmeg, then there's sugar. Imagine if you'd never eaten sugar before and suddenly you have sugar. So that craze for British grown sugar in the Caribbean that transformed the world. And it's transformed Britain to such a degree that until recently, the richest MP in Parliament, apart from Rishi Sunak, was from a family who'd made a fortune from sugar trade in Barbados. There's so many different reasons why empire came about. And I think that's part of the reason why we struggle to talk about it. I mean, another reason it came about is Australia was a good place to send prisoners. I mean, that is completely disconnected from our desire for better food, you know?
7:03 Dan Snow? True.
7:04 Speaker 04 And then indentured labour. And there's so many different reasons and so many different factors.
7:09 Dan Snow? So, yes, you're right. So let's get back 1600, they're going out around the world, they're trying to trade. They're discovering they actually have to sort of send a few soldiers, send some officials own places. You see the growth of that empire. And then, as you say, the different kind of empire, you're totally right. Settlers, people go out to New England, they go out to Virginia and they go, actually, look, there's a bit of land here, we chased the indigenous people off the land and it's nice, I was penniless back home, but here I'm a prosperous farmer.
7:35 Speaker 04 Totally, yeah, religious persecution. So, I mean, that was a huge factor and the Puritans, quite a small number of people, but actually their influence over American culture remains. I mean, in terms of their ideas about property, law, politics are still influential now. And in terms of their descendants and their numbers, hugely influential. And then you have the indirect influences, like the Great Potato Famine in Ireland. A million people died, but also millions of people leave Ireland. The population of Ireland apparently still hasn't recovered from that calamity. But where do they go? They go to America. So arguably, the British Empire then populates America in another way, through imperial policies like that.
8:16 Dan Snow? So we've got settler colonies, the Americas, you've got Australia eventually, well, and settler colonies all over the world. And I guess the empire gets bigger and bigger.
8:26 Speaker 04 Commodities as well.
8:27 Dan Snow? Commodities, yeah.
8:28 Speaker 04 Palm oil in Nigeria, rubber in British Malaya, tea, tea is very big, isn't it? Leads to the Opium Wars and arguably also is involved in the, in the loss of Americas. So commodities are a big factor too.
8:42 Dan Snow? And then I suppose you get that interesting thing where you just get the friction on imperial frontiers, as you say, whether it's in India, the British and French competing and you start. Conquering great slabs of territory and the Brits conquer Canada.
8:55 Speaker 04 Yeah.
8:55 Dan Snow? The empires grow because they almost develop their own dynamic on the front. I think something, you're interesting about this, you've mentioned this before. Sometimes politicians in London are like, will you stop with this? Empire's quite expensive for a government, isn't it? You've got to send troops out there and build a few roads. But it's people on the frontier, like in Africa, Southern Africa, North America. The dynamic's coming from out there, isn't it?
9:16 Speaker 04 Yeah, making up the policies as they go along. Communication is a really important factor because it could take six to nine months to get to India or for a message to get back to London. So the man on the ground is making a lot of decisions. And it also shows you how empire changed because then you have the invention of the telegraph and undersea cables. And suddenly you can get messages very quickly to India. And suddenly Britain does have a bit more control over India. So the flavour of empire then is very different to the flavour of empire in the 17th century.
9:46 Dan Snow? Yeah, it's always changing. The American colonies break away. Yeah, it's fascinating. So we take that story all the way through, lots of land is conquered in the 19th. I mean, have you ever tried to take a note of how many wars there were in the 19th century? How many imperial wars? Has anyone ever tottered it up?
9:59 Speaker 04 Yes, I actually, I know how many people die. A million people died in imperial wars in the 19th century. Some academics did the numbers.
10:06 Dan Snow? Yeah, and that's.
10:07 Speaker 04 That's just war.
10:08 Dan Snow? Zulu War in Southern Africa, it's war in Afghanistan.
10:11 Speaker 04 The Indi mutiny.
10:12 Dan Snow? Indi mutiny, lots of wars in Punjab and yeah. Okay, so that means by what? Peak year, 1920, 20, after the First World War?
10:19 Speaker 04 1923.
10:19 Dan Snow? 1923.
10:20 Speaker 04 Yeah. So how big is it? That's a really.
10:22 Dan Snow? Go on then.
10:23 Speaker 04 Quarter of the world, like landmass, a fifth of the world's population. Seven times larger than the Roman Empire.
10:30 Dan Snow? Yeah.
10:31 Speaker 04 Twice the size of modern day Russia. Same surface area as the moon. I don't know why I know that.
10:36 Dan Snow? What?
10:37 Speaker 04 Yeah.
10:37 Dan Snow? The whole of the moon?
10:38 Speaker 04 The whole of the moon. But seven times the size of the Roman Empire. I felt like we talked a lot more about the Roman Empire School than the British Empire. And yet, I think arguably, it's the biggest thing we ever did, right, as a country?
10:50 Dan Snow? And I love the way, that strange thing, we were, the Romans conquered the known world. They just, they just didn't.
10:56 Speaker 04 Yeah.
10:56 Dan Snow? They knew that they had, they knew that Germany existed, bits and bits, they knew that unconquered stuff existed. It's very weird that.
11:02 Speaker 04 It's wild that this country, I mean, I think at one point, I've got the arrow written down here, the British Empire was 150 times the size of Great Britain. Isn't that wild? And the 1948 Nationality Act made every subject of the empire a citizen of Britain. So it made 600 million people citizens of Britain. Arguably, our immigration policy has been trying to undo that ever since, because they didn't expect anyone would come, but they did.
11:29 Dan Snow? Actually, in a way, that British imperial impact is bigger because it wasn't felt just within the empire. And I'm really interested in places like Argentina or even the USA, where British investment, British skills, talent, miners, railway engineers, you know, they had founding football clubs in Buenos Aires. So when we're talking about the British Empire's impact on the world, it actually is even bigger than the land that's formerly owned by Britain.
11:55 Speaker 04 Totally. So the majority of countries that play football, directly or indirectly on the British Empire, because British powers turned up, the global system of time. Why do we have the Greenwich Meridian? Why was it decided in a conference in 19th century that it should be in Greenwich? Think about it, it's because of the British Empire. And there was a master clock in Greenwich and the other clocks were called slave clocks. That's the mentality of empire, isn't it? But there's all sorts of things in the world that could be explained by the British Empire, I mean, English language.
12:23 Dan Snow? The English language is a big one.
12:25 Speaker 04 Tax avoidance.
12:26 Dan Snow? Tax avoidance, yeah.
12:28 Speaker 04 The existence of entire nations, Nigeria, Pakistan, just wouldn't exist.
12:33 Dan Snow? That's a good one. There's a sort of meme on, especially on US social media, isn't there? That the British Empire sort of made everything up with a pen. Jordan, Nigeria, India, Pakistan. I mean, the British Empire has its fingerprints on a lot of, this is the political geography of the world today.
12:48 Speaker 04 And the way people dress, diet, I mean, the reason Indians drink tea is because of the British. There's an idea that Indians have always drunk tea. In the early 20th century, almost no Indians drank tea. The British realised they could make a lot of money out of it. And sold it, marketed tea to Indians. So now that even Indians don't realise that. Take something like ganja, we associate with Jamaica, intrinsic to Jamaicans, it seems. No, it was introduced by Indian indentured labourers to Jamaica by the British. Because ganja is an Indian word, if you think about it, it's an Indian herb. And now it's so associated with Jamaica. When you start thinking about that, you're like, actually, there's a lot of Indian phenomena in Jamaica, like goat curry, rotis, and it's because of the British. And you just can't escape it.
13:32 Dan Snow? Okay, so modern countries that are sort of descended, well, so many of them, but from the USA, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Nigeria, Bangladesh.
13:40 Speaker 04 Sudan.
13:41 Dan Snow? Sudan.
13:41 Speaker 04 Myanmar.
13:42 Dan Snow? Yeah, Israel, Palestine, Jordan, you name it. So the world's map is just shaped by the British Empire and the decisions made in London elsewhere. But what about the people? I mean, what about this movement, this great global movement of people? People will be familiar with the trade in enslaved Africans that many Europeans are practising. But the British Empire became a particularly big player in the 18th century. And so the movement of Africans to places in the Caribbean, North and South America, that's a huge demographic change.
14:12 Speaker 04 Yeah, and the world would look entirely different if it wasn't for the British Empire. So you've got three million enslaved people being transported in British ships. Twelve million overall in the transatlantic slave trade. Three million is quite a lot, all their descendants. But before then, forget about indenture. Because when we abolished slavery, there was a mission to replace those enslaved people with Indians, indentured labourers.
14:33 Dan Snow? And the word indenture means what?
14:34 Speaker 04 Which means they were contracted for between three and five years and sent to places like Mauritius, Guyana, Trinidad, Jamaica. That's one million people and their descendants. And this is one of the main reasons why wherever you go in the world, there's Indians.
14:49 Dan Snow? Yeah.
14:50 Speaker 04 And I never understood that until I looked at it. And actually, even the people in places like Mauritius don't understand the history. They say things like, oh, when my grandfather came here as a slave. And it's like, no, he wasn't a slave, he was an indentured labourer. It's a different system. So you've got those million people and the millions of descendants. Then you've got things like partition, fifteen million people displaced.
15:11 Dan Snow? Extraordinary.
15:11 Speaker 04 Between, what, one and two million people killed. You've got the famine in Ireland, a million people die, then the millions of people who migrate. And then you've got something that British people never discuss is the number of British people who emigrated. And your family did, didn't they?
15:27 Dan Snow? Yeah, my Scottish family went to Canada.
15:29 Speaker 04 Yeah.
15:30 Dan Snow? And there are all these, we think of that migration, you know, think also all those white European people, they're not supposed to be in New Zealand and Australia and North America. That itself is a mind blowing distances to travel historically for those.
15:43 Speaker 04 And huge numbers, something like 5% of British people emigrated between 1900 and 1914.
15:48 Dan Snow? Really?
15:49 Speaker 04 It's that amazing number, 5%. Because we were obsessed with immigration, but British people are the biggest migrants in history almost.
15:56 Dan Snow? It's that amazing fact that Britain lost more people in emigrating than they did in the first world. We think the first world is massive tragedy with the loss, but actually more people just picked up sticks and migrated to colonies and elsewhere.
16:07 Speaker 04 And then you've got all the death. You've got the millions of people who died in 19th century imperial wars. You've got all the disease that we sent, the Puritans arrived and 90% of the indigenous people around them died within a few years. And they saw that as a gift from God, a sign from God that this was meant to be their land. But they were spreading disease and millions of indigenous people died across the British Empire just because white people arrived.
16:32 Dan Snow? Yeah, because they had resistance to things like smallpox and other disease that hadn't yet made their way to Australasia, to North America and South America.
16:42 Speaker 04 And vice versa.
16:43 Dan Snow? And vice versa, yeah. So you end up in a world where the populations are very distinctive, where the map of the world looks the way it does. A lot of that is down to the British Empire and decisions that are made. What about culture? Whether it's sport, food, dress, fashion, politics, law, religion, those areas are also transformed, presumably.
17:03 Speaker 04 Yeah, so many areas. It's a very banal example, but one of my favourite cultural legacies is place names. I mean, I was driving around Mauritius and I found myself driving through a village called Queen Victoria, not Victoria, Queen Victoria. And there are, I started counting the number of places in the world named after Queen Victoria. And I stopped at about a hundred and twenty. I mean, there's probably thousands, right? Then you've got Jamestown. How many Jamestown's? Georgetown's, Birmingham.
17:31 Dan Snow? Charlottes, a lot of Charlottes around, yeah.
17:33 Speaker 04 It upsets me that my hometown of Wolverhampton was never replicated.
17:36 Dan Snow? Was it not?
17:37 Speaker 04 It's because it's unique. That's what I'm telling myself.
17:39 Dan Snow? It's no one.
17:39 Speaker 04 But pretty much every other town in England has been replicated. My favourite fact is at one point, the planet Uranus discovered by William Herschel, he named that after King George. It was actually called Georgium Sidus, George's Star.
17:51 Dan Snow? Brilliant.
17:52 Speaker 04 Until the rest of the world were like, no thanks.
17:54 Dan Snow? Come on.
17:55 Speaker 04 We're going to name me after a Greek god instead. But it extended to space, this obsession with naming everything after small British towns, or big ones.
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21:38 Dan Snow? So we covered things like tea drinking, but there's the English language.
21:42 Speaker 04 All the corporations.
21:43 Dan Snow? Right.
21:44 Speaker 04 BP was originally Anglo Persian. Oil. Shell began as a company importing shells from the empire. Piano Ferris. What's it mean? Peninsula and Oriental. That goes back to empire. So many corporations, so many charities have there. Because a lot of British imperialists saw what they're doing as being intrinsically good. So Save the Children was set up by imperialists who were continuing the work of empire. The Tier Fund, Anti-Slavery International, grew out of the abolition campaign. And why is it that so many British charities do so much international work? It's because of the British Empire. It's because that's what the British have always done.
22:23 Dan Snow? You can help me answer the question. When I turn on the radio in the morning, I'm listening to the news and the Foreign Secretary is being asked to make a statement about something going on that I love this country, but the Brits have got absolutely no control over. Sudan, goodness knows what it might be. Venezuela. And here's the British Foreign Office going, you know, we're really monitoring this situation. Does that happen in Austria and Italy?
22:47 Speaker 04 That reflects comes from empire.
22:48 Dan Snow? Yeah, exactly. But they, do they do that?
22:50 Speaker 04 But also when they do that, there's almost never any reflection on how we created that situation.
22:54 Dan Snow? Well, of course not. I don't want to.
22:55 Speaker 04 In the first place. Like so many of the biggest problems in the world are British created. So Kashmir, basically we sold that part of the world to a tyrannical Hindu monarch. It was Muslim majority. That wasn't going to end well. Israel, Palestine, I recommend your incredible series on that. It's very complicated roots, but essentially the British promised that part of the world at the same time to the Zionist Jews and to the Arabs.
23:19 Dan Snow? Yeah.
23:19 Speaker 04 I mean, it got more complicated than that. But even at the time, people were saying this is going to end in war. Nigeria, even at the time, as we created Nigeria, the people who created it, people like Luguad, were saying, this is not going to end well because these are people who have nothing in common with each other. They're very different. You've got Islamic kingdoms, you've got Christians, it doesn't really make sense as a country. And guess what? Civil war. Sudan, civil war, because you're putting together groups of people who don't really belong together. And so these disputes, which continue to shape our news, often have British imperial roots.
23:54 Dan Snow? What about international trade, legal mechanisms, parliamentary democracy, those concepts?
24:02 Speaker 04 Yeah, this is wild because it's so abstract. People often don't register to them, but like a phenomenal number of countries have the Westminster Constitution as their constitution. So New Zealand, South Africa, India, Nepal, often one particular guy called Sir Iver Jennings was the consultant, encouraging them to take on the Westminster Constitution. Even today, I think 26 different countries have a British court as their final court of appeal. So it's called the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council. So lots of territories in the Caribbean and so on, they come to London as their kind of Supreme Court. But on top of that, you've got the legacy of homophobic legislation.
24:43 Speaker 04 The majority of countries that have anti-gay sex laws got them from the British.
24:48 Dan Snow? Is that right?
24:49 Speaker 04 Yeah.
24:49 Dan Snow? Because we got our knickers in a right twist about homosexuality in the 9th century.
24:54 Speaker 04 Often didn't understand what was happening on the ground, introduced these, but now you have this bizarre situation where the British are now liberal, they're going around the world telling countries like Uganda to get rid of their homophobic legislation. They're like, hold on, you gave us this legislation. And suddenly they're quite into it. So it's a real crazy paradox. And you've got this, another very strange legacy where the most vibrant churches in Britain today, in London, are Nigerian churches. They're trying to convert people who converted them, who now have no interest, because we're a secular country now, right? I find that wild.
25:29 Dan Snow? It's wild.
25:29 Speaker 04 Isn't it?
25:30 Dan Snow? You mentioned the plants earlier, I'm very interested in that. So I didn't really know enough about that. Hugh Gardens is a huge botanical gardens here in London. And it was founded really to showcase plants around the world and be an early, you might call it seed bank, I don't know.
25:44 Speaker 04 Yeah, yeah.
25:44 Dan Snow? But it was a way of bringing the world to Britain and showing off that. So was that something that was going on, whether it's different strains of cereal crops? Was there a big global movement in that as well, enabled by the empire?
25:54 Speaker 04 Absolutely, and we tend to think of Kew Gardens as this nice place to take your mother. But it wasn't that, it was a central part of colonialism and they changed the world. So plants changed the world. We've lost the idea that plants are technology. But say plant like cinchona, which is the bark that produces quinine, right? The British and the Dutch spent decades trying to work out how to produce quinine. Because that quinine allowed British European people to survive from malaria. When they mastered that, it meant that they could colonize Africa. Before that, you were dead within three months in Mali. After quinine, you could survive. So that plant changed the world. Rubber, I didn't realize came from a plant, but it does.
26:35 Speaker 04 But that also changed the world and led to the war in Malaya. The Malayan Emergency of 1948 was basically about Britain trying to hold on to this very valuable rubber colony and led to some of the worst violence in the history of the British Empire. Then you got tea, led to the open wars, led to the change of diet, led to the exploitation of labor around the world. It goes on, a lot of our garden plants, like rhododendrons, we kind of think of as intrinsically English, but they're not, they're from empire. So the botanical legacy is really profound. We've just lost that connection.
27:11 Dan Snow? So it's not just the people on our streets and many streets around the world, it's literally the surroundings, the plant, the trees around us, without us knowing we're walking through.
27:20 Speaker 04 Yeah, and it's more, even more intangible than that, it's also education. Because one of the great legacies of the British Empire is education. I mean, wherever you go, went to Lagos and found the most English school I've ever walked into.
27:34 Dan Snow? Really?
27:34 Speaker 04 You know, and that's why someone like Kimmy Badenoch, who grew up in Lagos, can come back here and then espouse quite imperialist views because she was educated in a system that is more colonial than our own. Even today, the majority of our world leaders are either educated in American schools or universities or British ones. And like someone like Modi weaponizes it in India. He calls himself the first truly Indian leader because all the ones before him were either educated at Oxbridge or went to British schools and so on. And so he calls them colonial.
28:07 Dan Snow? The nature of history is that time passes and there are changes and these legacies slowly fade. The world in 200 years' time, I suppose inevitably that the reach that empire will be less than it is now.
28:21 Speaker 04 Yes, but arguably there are new empires, aren't there? What are the Chinese doing? They're buying up large parts of Africa, echoing what the Europeans did. What is Trump doing? I mean, he wants to invade Greenland, Canada, he wants to deny indigenous Americans their rights. Also, the way he approaches tech companies, I would say there's a big parallel there with the Eastern India Company. Eastern India Company, the first really powerful corporation. What did it do? It bought up lobbying power, it behaved terribly, it became too big to fail. Arguably, a lot of our tech companies are like that. I mean, you saw them lined up, the leaders of Microsoft and X and so on lined up at the inauguration. I thought, oh, that's exactly what happened in Britain, where they became too powerful,
29:06 Speaker 04 they became part of the state.
29:07 Dan Snow? So for many people around the world, they owe their biological makeup, whatever the right word is, for our own selves, their language, the political system, the legal system, they live under the dominant religions in their country, the physical architecture of their capital cities, they owe that to the British Empire. Hundreds of millions, not billions of people around the world.
29:28 Speaker 04 Absolutely, yeah. And it's odd that the rest of the world understands this much more than we do. They have a reason to understand it because they have to, because they remember what happened when the British came in their ships. But we're an island, even during the empire, arguably the British were not very aware of what they were doing because we're an island. And it's quite easy for us to be oblivious.
29:50 Dan Snow? It's all a long way off.
29:51 Speaker 04 Yeah.
29:52 Dan Snow? There are studies, aren't there, 19th century families and how much empire comes up and just it was not important to...
29:58 Speaker 04 Well, it's a debate. Historians argue about this. There's a bunch of historians that argue that empire barely touched upon the average Britain. And there's other historians who argue that actually it was quite big. I think I'm with the latter group because even if they didn't know what's happening, their daily lives...
30:13 Dan Snow? Everything.
30:14 Speaker 04 Sugar. Tea, I mean arguably, sugar drove the industrial revolution. Where were the workers getting their calories from? Food and culture and Queen Victoria and as the emperors of India and so on.
30:27 Dan Snow? Relatives going and serving in the navy or the army on some distant frontier.
30:31 Speaker 04 And also the wealth that fueled the industrial revolution, the commodities, the cotton.
30:36 Dan Snow? Right, well, that's interesting. So that's one of those historical debates that I am way out of my depth, but I find fascinating.
30:41 Speaker 04 Yeah.
30:42 Dan Snow? You've got the British Empire in the 18th century. You've also got a British industrial revolution. Now, some historians say they are almost distinct. It just happens that a country that was busy conquering lots of chunks of the world also experienced a domestic industrial revolution.
30:57 Speaker 04 Yeah.
30:58 Dan Snow? Because of accessibility of coal, iron ore deposits. That feels unlikely to me. I've always thought instinctively, surely it's got to be joined up. There are people making money from the sugar plantation to then angel investors into railway projects. I mean, where are you on that? Because the industrial revolution changed the lives of every single person on this planet.
31:16 Speaker 04 We're in the realm of economic history.
31:19 Dan Snow? Yeah, that's what I'm looking at you.
31:21 Speaker 04 It's like trying to take an egg out of a baked cake and saying, there's the egg. It's impossible because it all gets mixed up together, isn't it? I mean, there's lots of interesting books being written on this. And there's a definitely a very interesting argument now that a lot of the industrial revolution and the angel investing, a lot of that money came from slavery. And you can trace it because the slave owners were compensated for losing their slaves. So you can follow the money. But that's work that's only really started in the last few years. It's incredible that no one really thought about it until now.
31:51 Dan Snow? So the argument is that in the 18th century, British people are getting very rich, making lots of money from this global, they're making money from slavery, sugar, other things, trade with India, all sorts of things. And therefore, there's money swirling about to build those factories, to tinker about with inventions. It's a place that's ripe for innovation.
32:07 Speaker 04 You need money to make money. I heard someone said once.
32:10 Dan Snow? Someone, exactly. God, that's amazing. So you must be cursed with just traveling through the world, seeing the hand of empire everywhere.
32:17 Speaker 04 Yeah, it's a bit tragic, really. I've become that guy who spoils every visit. Yeah, don't go around London with me. Yes, but also, you know, I mean, one of my main arguments is that it wasn't intrinsically good or intrinsically bad, it was complicated. It was slavery, it was abolition, it was the free press, it was press censorship, it was environmental destruction, it was the birth of environmentalism, it was. Opposite things can be true at the same time. And that is something the world struggles with, especially in the world with culture wars. People want to take sides, but actually I just see contradictions and ambiguity.
32:53 Dan Snow? Well, also, that's the nature of history. And if there had been a giant French empire, we'd be talking about other wars and other famines and other or a giant Inca empire. We're just saying what did happen and it's had a massive impact on our present. But we could be living in a very different present.
33:07 Speaker 04 Totally, and just look at all the imperial figures involved in the British Empire. Almost all of them were deeply contradictory. I mean, look at Gandhi, okay, and obviously an incredible guy. Even the British have a statue of him in Parliament Square. But equally, has some pretty racist, anti-black views when he was in South Africa. Winston Churchill, savior of liberal democracy, absolutely. Also a massive racist, even by the standards of his time. His own colleagues were frequently outraged by some of the stuff he said. Opposite things can be true, but you don't hear that being said. Or you do, I mean, someone could clip what I just said and make me sound like someone who hates Winston Churchill, right? That might well happen, but you just don't hear it and it makes me depressed.
33:50 Dan Snow? I guess let's finish up on why does it matter that people need to understand that they are the product of this empire? Like you're a product, I'm a product. Why our kids are, why does that matter?
34:03 Speaker 04 Well, it explains a very big thing about Britain, which we've always struggled with. The biggest thing there is, which is that we're a multicultural country, isn't it? And every day in the news, you see people struggling with that fact. Why are these people coming? Why did they come in 1948 or on the Windrush? Why did my parents come in the sixties? It's because we had a multicultural empire. And, you know, there were black people in Elizabeth the First court. She was complaining about there being too many black people in London in the 1600s. And there's a reason for that. There's a deep historical reason. And also our national narratives, World War One, World War Two, there's an imperial element to those. Millions of soldiers fought from empire.
34:46 Dan Snow? That's true.
34:47 Speaker 04 And it doesn't mean deleting those narratives. It actually makes them more interesting and explains a lot of things about ourselves now.
34:54 Dan Snow? That's true. Victory in First and Second World War, those wars would look very different if Britain hadn't had a gigantic empire at her back.
35:01 Speaker 04 Your resources as well and people.
35:04 Dan Snow? Resources and people. That's it. That's the message of this podcast. Resources and people. Sathnam, thank you very much for coming on. You've got a new book out. What's it called?
35:10 Speaker 04 It's called Journeys of Empire. It's for kids.
35:13 Dan Snow? Okay.
35:13 Speaker 04 And it's a kid's version of Empire World, which is about how Britain shaped the world.
35:18 Dan Snow? Thanks for coming on.
35:19 Speaker 04 Thanks for having me.
35:21 Dan Snow? Well, thank you so much, folks, as ever, for listening today. And if you want to hear more, please go and purchase Sathnam's new book, Journeys of Empire. See you next time.
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