TRIGGERnometry - How Britain Built the Greatest Empire In History - Dan Snow

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00:00:29 your next move tomorrow.

00:00:33 It's an extraordinary story.

00:00:35 It's a little island off the coast of Eurasia,

00:00:37 and then around about 1700, 1750,

00:00:40 it goes absolutely mental.

00:00:42 We are on the doorstep of the new world.

00:00:45 This is epic. 0.85

00:00:46 So you've got the British and Irish archipelago locked down.

00:00:49 You're not trying to conquer France.

00:00:50 So you're like, lads, all that energy, boom, to the West.

00:00:55 It will build the largest empire the world has ever seen.

00:00:57 In North America, the Brits wrecked shop. 0.93

00:01:00 They conquer Canada. 0.96

00:01:03 They conquer the whole of the USA east of the Mississippi.

00:01:06 They briefly conquer Cuba.

00:01:08 They conquer several islands in the Caribbean.

00:01:11 There were moments where it did go wrong.

00:01:13 Oh, that's, yeah.

00:01:14 Why did we lose the United States?

00:01:17 Why would you bring this up?

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00:01:44 video. Dan Snow, welcome back to Trigonometry. Good to be back, lads. Mate, the first interview

00:01:51 we did the history of england it did over a million downloads absolutely one no doubt what

00:01:56 hands down one of our favorite episodes we've ever recorded it's really kind of you but i think it's

00:02:00 not i think that's because people just love a good chunk of history right we learn it at school

00:02:03 we learn little bits of it here and there and it's nice to join all together sometimes well

00:02:07 we almost did that and what i was going to say is we did a whole two hours and at the hour 50 mark

00:02:12 you were like we're just getting to the best bit and i was like we've got 10 minutes left yeah you

00:02:16 guys look like you were about to have a stroke no no no no no we wanted to talk and you said

00:02:21 We're getting to the good bit, which is, of course, the Industrial Revolution.

00:02:24 This is the bit I know about.

00:02:25 And the British Empire.

00:02:26 Yeah.

00:02:26 So let's get into it, starting there.

00:02:29 All right, boys.

00:02:30 So, yeah, it's really one of the most exciting questions in the whole of human history.

00:02:34 I'm not saying that because I'm British.

00:02:36 I'm British-Canadian.

00:02:36 My mum's Canadian.

00:02:37 So I'm a product of this imperial system.

00:02:39 But it is one of the most extraordinary stories, right?

00:02:41 It's a little island off the coast of Eurasia.

00:02:44 For about 4,000 years, it doesn't really do very much.

00:02:47 It plays no hugely significant part in human affairs.

00:02:51 And then around about 1700, 1750, it goes absolutely mental

00:02:56 and will build an empire.

00:02:58 It will build the largest empire the world has ever seen,

00:03:00 which at its peak, about 200 years later,

00:03:03 quite a short-lived empire, we can talk about that as well.

00:03:06 But at its peak, 1922-ish, roughly a quarter of the world's population

00:03:11 and a quarter of the Earth's area.

00:03:13 And that's underplaying it, for a reason we can talk about.

00:03:15 But a quarter of the world's area,

00:03:16 formerly under the command of this funny old island in the North Sea.

00:03:20 It's an extraordinary story. Why? And with enormous implications. It's why the world speaks English

00:03:25 today. It's why many of the world's great cities exist in the form they do. Global capitalism,

00:03:30 ideas about democracy. It's why there's parliaments and speakers around the world.

00:03:37 Law, all of these ideas, universities, all that kind of stuff, very much stems from this bizarre

00:03:43 period of hegemony. Why did that happen? It's such an exciting question.

00:03:46 And what was it about this little island that meant that it could happen here before it happened anywhere else?

00:03:52 Obviously, it's peopled by heroes, and God was an Englishman.

00:03:57 Nice, good pod, lads.

00:03:59 So that was the argument given at the time.

00:04:01 But of course, the truth is much more interesting in a way,

00:04:05 because if you can work out, like any, the exciting thing about history is trying to work out

00:04:10 why you get these explosions of creativity,

00:04:12 and, you know, whether it's engineering

00:04:14 or naval might, whatever it might be,

00:04:17 why that happens and how do you kind of replicate that

00:04:20 is quite an interesting thing, right?

00:04:21 So there's, A, it's an interesting study,

00:04:23 but B, there are public policy implications in today

00:04:27 that how do you, is it luck?

00:04:30 Is it climate?

00:04:32 Is it that you jump through certain circumstances

00:04:34 that can't be repeated?

00:04:35 Or are there things that you can do

00:04:36 to sort of encourage those kind of flowerings?

00:04:40 And it doesn't just have to be a military mic

00:04:41 It can be in other areas as well, of course.

00:04:43 So, look, you can start, if you like, with geography.

00:04:49 Bear with me, folks.

00:04:51 Britain has quite interesting advantages.

00:04:54 There's a lot of coal in Britain.

00:04:55 It becomes actually the Saudi Arabia of coal, you might want to call it.

00:04:59 And so in the 19th century, that becomes important a bit later on

00:05:01 when the Industrial Revolution really gets going.

00:05:03 It sits upwind of Europe, guys.

00:05:05 This is important. 0.99

00:05:06 This is why people thought God was an Englishman. 0.74

00:05:08 The Protestant wind blew. 0.55

00:05:09 because Britain, if you're the Rhine estuary,

00:05:13 if you're North Germany, you're Holland, you're Belgium, you're France,

00:05:17 Britain is like a giant aircraft carrier sitting upwind of you.

00:05:21 In an age where everyone sails around,

00:05:24 being upwind is really important

00:05:25 because it's quite hard to go up towards it.

00:05:27 Upwind means towards the direction the wind's coming from.

00:05:31 So you have to sort of zigzag towards the wind.

00:05:32 Oh, no.

00:05:33 But Britain, British ships can leave Portsmouth,

00:05:36 leave Plymouth, leave Chatham,

00:05:38 and be on the Dutch coast, be on the French coast

00:05:41 within a few hours, right?

00:05:43 So that kind of matters as well.

00:05:45 So that wind is like, we have better deep water harbours

00:05:48 in Southern England than they do in France.

00:05:50 Very exciting news.

00:05:51 So we have Portsmouth, we've got Plymouth,

00:05:54 like I mentioned. 1.00

00:05:55 The French have got no deep water harbours

00:05:57 on that North Coast.

00:05:58 So people who go into Calais on your holidays,

00:06:00 go to the harbour, what do you notice?

00:06:01 They're all fake.

00:06:02 They're all built out massive concrete harbours.

00:06:04 You know, when you go in on the ferry,

00:06:06 they're lovely big harbours,

00:06:07 but they're all constructed in the 20th century. 1.00

00:06:09 So the French have got this permanent nightmarish problem 0.98

00:06:13 where they've got nowhere that you can put a navy

00:06:15 and an invasion fleet full of soldiers

00:06:18 and keep them there until the wind's good enough

00:06:20 to sail out and invade Britain. 0.62

00:06:21 So it's a nightmare for the French. 0.98

00:06:24 We can probably come back to that as well. 1.00

00:06:26 So there are quite a few advantages.

00:06:28 The big advantage, though, is that for most of recorded history,

00:06:31 you've got Eurasia, Silk Roads, Spice,

00:06:34 you know, wonderful trading networks, rich civilizations, Persians, Alexander Great, Greeks,

00:06:40 Romans in Mughal, India. And they're all sitting in the middle of this global sort of landmass,

00:06:45 which they think is the world, right? Stretches from Korea to Cornwall, to Ireland, okay?

00:06:51 Britain's on the edge of that. We're all, you know, Britain's Britain and Ireland trying to

00:06:54 get in on the action a little bit. And, you know, we go and fight in France and there's things that

00:06:57 happen. Suddenly, one of the greatest revolutions in the history of the world takes place.

00:07:02 Christopher Columbus, trying to get to Asia, trying to get to Korea and Indonesia, that bit

00:07:07 I talked about on the other side, he sails West and crashes into an entirely new world. What he

00:07:14 thinks is a new world. And then Britain looked at the map and it was really exciting. You go to a

00:07:19 medieval map of the world and Britain is like, Britain is like tiny, squeezed on the edge. You

00:07:23 can go to one in Hertford, like the map of Mundi in Hertford, looking on the wall. And then within

00:07:27 a generation, people start producing maps and you've got the map we recognize today, North and

00:07:32 south america you look at that map and think hold on a minute what's in the middle what's in the

00:07:37 middle of this map britain and ireland this archipelago so suddenly it's it's it's easier

00:07:42 to sail out of bristol liverpool cork to get to the new world like i talked about any european

00:07:48 traffic's got to kind of squeeze through the english channel up around the north of scotland

00:07:51 god forbid so you're you're sort of sitting your your throat your your heel is on the windpipe of

00:07:57 great european trading powers okay so your venices and your genoas and your constantinopels had been

00:08:03 like in the middle of the whole thing but suddenly they're like oh wait a minute we're nowhere now

00:08:07 because so so britain and ireland like wait a minute and that's why in in the 1400s it's mad

00:08:13 situation it's the historian says it's the peninsulas of the peninsula eurasia okay europe's

00:08:19 a little peninsula of eurasia it's the peninsulas of the peninsula right it is portugal northern

00:08:26 spain britney cornwall devon right those are the places that in the space of 100 years go from

00:08:32 being backwaters to being we are on the doorstep of the new world this is epic and it's the

00:08:39 portuguese and the spanish start it and they start sailing around so they do two things they

00:08:42 sail around africa and access the greatest we're always advertising on the podcast aren't we cut

00:08:47 out the middleman you know well so suddenly the whole of the silk road is getting absolutely

00:08:53 you're completely hijacking the Silk Road

00:08:58 because you're sailing around

00:08:59 into the Indian Ocean

00:09:00 picking up pepper and spices and silk

00:09:01 and everything you want to buy

00:09:02 in Asia

00:09:04 and just bringing it back to Europe 0.57

00:09:05 Western Europe

00:09:06 Lisbon

00:09:07 Bristol

00:09:09 Plymouth

00:09:10 right

00:09:10 and then all these merchants

00:09:12 sitting in Venice and Egypt

00:09:13 and Baghdad

00:09:14 like oh we you know

00:09:15 we have our camels

00:09:16 and we take our spices across

00:09:17 and we charge a nice little fee

00:09:19 on the way through

00:09:19 they've just been

00:09:20 they've just been completely

00:09:22 they've made redundant

00:09:23 right

00:09:24 Like the way that you're broadcasting this

00:09:25 straight to the audience on YouTube.

00:09:27 You're not going via, you know, a publishing thing.

00:09:30 You're not going via a TV channel.

00:09:31 No, no, no.

00:09:32 The good people of the world are watching this,

00:09:34 you know, as we produce it.

00:09:35 Same sort of thing. 1.00

00:09:36 So the Spanish start pushing West 0.92

00:09:38 to try and do the same sort of thing.

00:09:39 They discover gold and silver in the Americas.

00:09:42 The English, the French get involved.

00:09:44 The Swedes get involved.

00:09:45 The Dutch get involved. 1.00

00:09:46 They're all sort of piling out to West 1.00

00:09:47 trying to take advantage of this new world.

00:09:48 So Christopher Columbus, 1492. 0.84

00:09:51 Henry VII sends an Italian guy,

00:09:53 Giovanni Cabote, who we remember as John Cabot.

00:09:56 And he leaves Bristol and he goes and arrives at Newfoundland,

00:10:00 not the most exciting part of the New World, although I love it.

00:10:02 So that is sort of, they don't know about the Gulf Streams.

00:10:05 They go, why are we on the same latitude now?

00:10:06 Why is everything so barren and cold up here?

00:10:09 It's a nightmare.

00:10:11 Francis Drake goes round the world,

00:10:13 first English captain to go round the world.

00:10:16 He lands in California, claims California's new Albion.

00:10:19 Very sad that didn't sustain.

00:10:21 You know, that would have been great.

00:10:23 He claims a couple of islands off the south of Argentina,

00:10:25 off Cape Horn, weirdly as well.

00:10:28 We're not sure what islands those are.

00:10:30 So explorers are sort of landing in places.

00:10:33 They're claiming, it doesn't mean very much at this point,

00:10:35 but they're claiming them.

00:10:36 What we should also say is the key to the English

00:10:39 and the British Empire is Ireland as well.

00:10:41 So Ireland's the first colony. 0.98

00:10:42 So English people have been attacking into Ireland 0.96

00:10:44 since the 13th century.

00:10:46 That colonization process is really ramping up

00:10:48 in the 1500s, the plantations of Ulster.

00:10:51 lots of people, colonies, so people moving to, people being moved to, native population,

00:10:56 thrown off good farmland, Munster, Ulster, places like that. 0.80

00:11:00 So that's the key staging point for empire, learning how to do empire in Ireland, right?

00:11:06 And then you start to get the, they try and have a colony, you probably heard it in Roanoke,

00:11:11 the lost colony in the 1580, it doesn't work out, disappears, no one knows what happens to it.

00:11:16 So I mean, it's just littered with fails.

00:11:17 People compare this to the space race that we're in today, which is private companies, adventurers, individuals, they are trying things.

00:11:28 They're going bankrupt, they've got rockets exploding on the pad, they're asking, you know, the Roanoke goes bust, doesn't work, disappears.

00:11:35 But you get your first Jamestown in the early 1600s, so that's a settlement in Chesapeake that sort of just about works.

00:11:43 Bermuda

00:11:44 and then you go into the Caribbean

00:11:46 and in 1620 you get Massachusetts

00:11:49 famously the Pilgrim Fathers

00:11:51 and then you get

00:11:52 just late in the 1620s

00:11:54 Rhode Island, Connecticut

00:11:56 in the 1620s you get Barbados

00:11:59 now Barbados is good 0.84

00:12:00 because that's finally a place

00:12:02 that will pay for itself

00:12:03 because of sugar 0.98

00:12:04 because there's a revelry

00:12:05 you can grow sugar in Barbados 0.97

00:12:07 so you have indentured labourers

00:12:08 either the native population

00:12:10 or prisoners from England

00:12:12 Ireland, Scotland

00:12:13 and then eventually enslaved Africans 1.00

00:12:15 will grow a vast amount of sugar 0.72

00:12:16 and that is bananas.

00:12:18 That's a cash crop.

00:12:19 So that pays for the colony

00:12:21 because the government doesn't want these to be loss leaders.

00:12:24 That's why you establish colony

00:12:25 and it just goes bust

00:12:26 and the government's like,

00:12:27 I'm not bailing this out. 1.00

00:12:28 You're a bunch of crazy people 1.00

00:12:29 who wouldn't try and live on a rock in the New World. 1.00

00:12:30 Like, what do you want?

00:12:31 So that works.

00:12:32 St. Kitts, Nevis, 1620s.

00:12:35 Jamaica, 1650s.

00:12:37 Cromwell invades Hispaniola,

00:12:38 gets kicking and goes and takes Jamaica instead. 0.99

00:12:41 So that's all going on in the New World. 1.00

00:12:42 So little bits, little islands, some in terms of colonized, eccentric.

00:12:47 Protestantism important here because people thought they wanted to build a new world

00:12:50 driven by kind of evangelicalism.

00:12:54 They wanted to escape what they saw as brutal oppression back in England and Europe

00:12:59 because they were a different kind of Protestant to the English crown. 0.84

00:13:04 And then also Protestant mission, which is drive the hated Catholics out of the new world. 0.90

00:13:08 So you're doing God's... It looks like fortune and glory, boys. 0.99

00:13:10 it's great you're doing you're doing it's the old that that wonderful cocktail that drives all of us

00:13:15 humans you're making money you're building a reputation and you're doing god's work i mean 1.00

00:13:20 it's you know what's not to like so you are you are you're driving out the spanish who are diabolical 0.97

00:13:25 uh you're going to make a ton of cash and your name will be remembered so it's it's it's that's 0.57

00:13:31 all working and then just as that's happening actually funny thing is the first john d is one

00:13:37 of, he's Queen Elizabeth's astrologer, Elizabeth I Astrologer, he's the first man who comes

00:13:42 up with the idea of a British Empire, he coins the term British Empire, he realised, he's

00:13:47 pitching this idea, our destiny is to go west, Ireland and then the New World, let's do this.

00:13:53 Weirdly, the first, I think the first settlement in some ways, is in Baffin Island in the Arctic,

00:14:00 it's a mad story, and it's, I think to this day, the oldest English remains of building

00:14:05 work because a guy called Frobisher was sent by Queen Elizabeth to try and get to Asia through

00:14:09 the North West Passage, which they thought might be possible. You can do it now, but it was all

00:14:14 frozen out back then. Endless people go up there and freeze to death and die, miserable. But they

00:14:18 got to Baffin Island. So that's weirdly the sort of first and they discover some rocks and I think

00:14:22 it might be gold to now not to be gold. So there's just these eccentric attempts, these little pin

00:14:27 prints. East is different because in the Western Hemisphere, it's a matter of conquest, colonization,

00:14:32 move your own guys out, grow stuff. 1.00

00:14:34 The indigenous people sweep aside. 1.00

00:14:37 There's nothing very civilized going on there, right? 1.00

00:14:40 That was their view.

00:14:41 East is different, right?

00:14:42 You're arriving in places that you acknowledge

00:14:43 are pretty successful, coherent states, quite advanced.

00:14:47 So what you're asking for is factories.

00:14:49 Early 1600s, first decade.

00:14:51 The East India Company, this British private company,

00:14:54 that has the monopoly on trade.

00:14:55 It goes out and it establishes a factory there called,

00:14:58 sort of a warehouse, really, in Java, in Bantam,

00:15:01 in Java.

00:15:02 These are like

00:15:02 trading outposts.

00:15:03 Trading outposts.

00:15:04 Jakarta takes 0.68

00:15:04 just a little teeny piece.

00:15:06 The local guys,

00:15:07 oh, that's fine.

00:15:08 They give them

00:15:08 a little piece

00:15:09 of sovereign territory

00:15:10 which will prove

00:15:10 to be a mistake

00:15:11 for those Asian rulers. 1.00

00:15:12 So a little factory, 0.93

00:15:13 you can have a little factory

00:15:13 and then to guard it

00:15:15 you put some,

00:15:15 you know,

00:15:15 a little wall up

00:15:16 and then you can have

00:15:17 a few little soldiers

00:15:17 protecting it.

00:15:18 So it's a little,

00:15:18 the virus has been

00:15:21 injected into the world.

00:15:22 So that's near Jakarta.

00:15:23 That moves quite quickly

00:15:24 to a place called Surat

00:15:27 just north of Bombay

00:15:28 in India.

00:15:29 And then,

00:15:29 very weirdly,

00:15:30 the first,

00:15:30 I think the first sort of formal possession of the crown,

00:15:34 so in a way, the first piece, in some ways,

00:15:36 the first piece of the British Empire,

00:15:37 is rather unusually, is an undermalukas in Indonesia called Run,

00:15:42 which is very famous for getting particular spices and condiments from.

00:15:46 And they, English people arrive there, and they go, 1.00

00:15:49 we hate the Dutch. Do you know the Dutch? 1.00

00:15:50 We hate them so much as they're sort of genocidal maniacs. 1.00

00:15:53 Please, can we swear allegiance to King James? 0.97

00:15:55 In the hope that King James will then protect them,

00:15:58 which he is unable to.

00:15:59 So Run is weirdly the start of the British Empire,

00:16:03 this little tiny island that doesn't end up being British

00:16:05 for much English or British for much longer.

00:16:07 So that's the sort of, that's the beginning. 0.92

00:16:09 So we have a good setting for colonising the new world,

00:16:12 effectively, because of the position.

00:16:14 What about the technological side

00:16:16 and the Industrial Revolution itself?

00:16:18 Why do these inventions happen here?

00:16:22 And, you know, one of the things I've also read about

00:16:24 is how much the technology really just allowed people

00:16:27 to work harder as opposed to revolutionising the process, etc.

00:16:31 Familiar to all of us.

00:16:32 Why does it all happen here first?

00:16:35 Why does the Industrial Revolution happen here?

00:16:37 Well, this is such a huge question,

00:16:39 and it's one that historians really argue about,

00:16:42 whether empire is sort of separate.

00:16:44 Are there two things going on at the same time?

00:16:46 My guess is that they are linked

00:16:47 because they happen at the same time, in the same place.

00:16:50 So as England and Britain are sort of pushing ahead with its trade,

00:16:54 pushing ahead with overseas power projection.

00:16:59 Also, things in England start happening a bit later on.

00:17:03 England and Scotland particularly start happening a bit later on.

00:17:06 So it's certainly true that the desire to build better ships

00:17:10 and have better navigation equipment involves having to embrace science.

00:17:14 So you'll have heard of a longitude, latitude, things like that.

00:17:17 So in working out to get ships safely,

00:17:20 making these horrific journeys, both to the East Indies

00:17:24 and to the Americas, just nightmarish.

00:17:27 You're obviously constantly thinking

00:17:29 how to make the ships better.

00:17:30 And you're constantly thinking

00:17:31 how to navigate more effectively.

00:17:33 And so there's a bunch of breakthroughs.

00:17:36 The great advantage that Europe has,

00:17:38 people use China as a counterexample here,

00:17:42 is that Europe is incredibly competitive.

00:17:46 So you've got, if I have an invention in Europe,

00:17:48 and if I'm Portuguese,

00:17:50 and the Portuguese crown doesn't like it,

00:17:51 I'm like, I'm off to Madrid, mate.

00:17:53 And it's a few days I'm in Madrid.

00:17:54 If you have an invention in Nanking and the emperor doesn't like it,

00:17:58 then that's the end of you and your invention.

00:18:00 You're like, there's no other market, there's no other set,

00:18:02 there's no other buyer. Right?

00:18:05 So famously, Christopher Columbus goes to, ends up going with this, 0.68

00:18:10 it's funded by the Spanish. 0.83

00:18:12 He goes to Portuguese, he goes to another aristocrat

00:18:16 for a sort of privately funded expedition.

00:18:17 He annoyingly goes to the French and he goes to King Henry VII of England,

00:18:20 one of the great counterfactuals. 0.78

00:18:21 Imagine Henry VII had paid for that.

00:18:23 He goes around, shops around, and eventually finds a client, which is great, which is that's

00:18:28 the kind of Silicon Valley. There's lots and lots of venture capital around and lots of opportunities.

00:18:32 You're not just trying to go through one. So you get a situation where they're stealing

00:18:38 off each other constantly. The English will capture a big Spanish ship, it's a Portuguese 1.00

00:18:43 ship of the Azores, and the key thing is the documents on there, star charts, navigational

00:18:48 guys. Then you bring those back. You're using printing presses to try and pump those

00:18:53 out. So it's driving scientific and technological change. So ships are getting ever more effective.

00:19:02 And then so weapons, because you're not only fighting indigenous groups in these places, 0.98

00:19:06 you're arriving in a place like Run Island, and you have to fight the Dutch there. So Europe's 0.67

00:19:10 competition is now being exported globally. And the Caribbean is absolute shit show, right? It's 1.00

00:19:17 just islands everywhere. I mean, you go to St. Lucia, it changed its hands like seven times.

00:19:22 So British ships, again, you capture a French ship,

00:19:25 you go, no, they're making some quite nice 74-gun ships at the moment.

00:19:28 You just replicate it, copy it, and make it slightly better.

00:19:32 Canon, that's true of canon.

00:19:34 And so what's weird is initially, in the 1600s,

00:19:38 when Britain goes out and meets the other cultures,

00:19:41 they meet on quite an equal basis. 1.00

00:19:43 Even in the Americas, indigenous people are quite often able to push back,

00:19:47 and it's quite close in some ways. 0.93

00:19:48 Because Asian people certainly are, you know, the Mughal Emperor is mighty and it runs much

00:19:54 of what to say India.

00:19:55 And you arrive, you're like, OK, look, we're just here to trade, mate.

00:19:58 You know, you guys are magnificent.

00:19:59 But over the next 150 years, the kind of pace of change, the radical pace of change in North

00:20:05 Europe and England in particular will mean that by 1800, you're able to outgun, you're

00:20:11 able to just completely annihilate.

00:20:12 But I cannot say this strongly enough.

00:20:14 It's ship technology. 0.58

00:20:15 It's the Vikings of the modern world. 0.94

00:20:18 The Western Europeans, the Portuguese, Spanish, English, French, 0.95

00:20:21 together, and it's the Brits who will really take advantage of this,

00:20:24 they work out how to put ships on the water

00:20:28 that can go long distance, take heavy loads,

00:20:31 and are able to pack a bigger punch

00:20:32 than anything else anywhere in the world.

00:20:34 Even when they get to India, 1.00

00:20:35 on land you can't compete with the Mughals. 1.00

00:20:37 On sea, you absolutely trash them. 1.00

00:20:39 They don't have anything like it.

00:20:40 So we work out how to put heavy guns on ships

00:20:44 that can smash other ships to firewood,

00:20:46 and also go to ports.

00:20:49 Remember, this is before trains or cars or planes.

00:20:52 Everything goes by water, everything, right?

00:20:54 You want to move food, you want to move goods,

00:20:57 you want to move people. 0.99

00:20:58 So India is just, the coasts of India

00:21:01 are just alive with trade, all right?

00:21:03 It's easier to get from Newcastle to Dunkirk

00:21:08 than it is to take a wagon of stuff

00:21:10 over from Newcastle to Carlisle.

00:21:12 So that's why these,

00:21:14 Oh, yeah, you're like, well, British maritime, what's that mean?

00:21:17 What's it mean?

00:21:18 It's not about winning big battles against enemy.

00:21:20 It's about arriving at your enemy port and just going, right, lads,

00:21:23 we're turning off your trade to lead you to exactly what we want to do. 0.99

00:21:26 So even if you're the Mughal emperor, you're like, all right. 1.00

00:21:29 I mean, it's really annoying, but I mean, it's only, it's Goa. 1.00

00:21:32 It's one port and just pay them or give them trading terms that they need.

00:21:38 I'm running a continental sized empire.

00:21:41 I don't actually have ships that can compete with them,

00:21:43 but they're sort of, they're an annoyance.

00:21:44 But so you're able to start, so the early English Empire, Dutch Empire, it's just little key nodes.

00:21:51 And in a way, we could talk about as the empire develops and becomes big red blocks on the map,

00:21:56 actually, lots of politicians in London are like, oh, Jesus Christ, now I've got to run these places. 0.85

00:22:01 What am I going to do with Sudan? 1.00

00:22:03 It's total pay. 0.99

00:22:04 Everyone hates us. 1.00

00:22:06 You know, Christian missionaries just go and razz everyone up and then they get chopped up. 1.00

00:22:09 And I've got to send redcoats and deal with it. 1.00

00:22:10 If I'm the Chinese model today, the American model, is you control key ports. 1.00

00:22:16 You control little nodes. 0.95

00:22:17 You get your trade done, nice and cheap, small footprint, big outcome.

00:22:21 You get rich, and you haven't invested that much.

00:22:24 We'll talk about that, how the empire transforms from little factories and little nodes everywhere

00:22:28 to being big old Roman Empire style, big provinces and things like that.

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00:24:32 I think availability of venture capital.

00:24:34 I think patent laws are important.

00:24:36 So the inventors come to England because they're confident

00:24:38 that their inventions will be respected.

00:24:41 They will be able to keep the money that will accrue to them.

00:24:45 They'll be enjoying the profits of their invention. 0.63

00:24:47 So you get French people come over bringing steam technology. 0.99

00:24:49 They don't want to develop it in France. 0.96

00:24:51 They don't want to be in Britain.

00:24:52 So that's the law.

00:24:53 That's patents.

00:24:54 It's not very glamorous, but super important.

00:24:57 And to a certain extent, and it's the parliamentary system.

00:25:00 I mean, if you own a factory, the king can't just go, I want that.

00:25:03 You know, you're like, no, you need an act of parliament

00:25:05 if you're going to put a railway through my land

00:25:07 or you're going to do something.

00:25:08 So it's imperfect, but it's what we talk about today,

00:25:11 why liberal democracy tends to do quite well,

00:25:13 because people are confident investing their money.

00:25:15 They're confident building long...

00:25:17 It takes a long time to build a massive mill,

00:25:20 and it's a lot of capital.

00:25:22 You're not going to do that in Russia

00:25:23 because the czar's going to change his mind.

00:25:26 Or, you know, that's the problem

00:25:28 with capricious albatry monarchs, right?

00:25:29 so a lot of that is going on in britain and and and then that just you get this virtuous circle

00:25:34 the profits of the sugar trade the slave trade mean that you've got lots of very rich people

00:25:39 in britain are looking to invest their money they're they look at these northern industrialists

00:25:43 who are doing interesting things with textile you know bit making textiles they're investing in that

00:25:48 that's producing more and more money you know so you really it's starting to and then and then

00:25:52 that tips over into armaments the industry you start to be able to make better cannon

00:25:57 heavier cannon,

00:25:59 carronades that would smash French ships

00:26:01 to peace at Trafalgar.

00:26:02 And so things just,

00:26:04 then at some point,

00:26:05 around about sort of 1750s to 1800,

00:26:08 the Brits get qualitatively better

00:26:09 than other people as well,

00:26:10 which we'll talk about.

00:26:12 Now, some of our American friends

00:26:14 are going to be listening to this, Dan,

00:26:16 and they're going to be going,

00:26:17 so you've outlined it all beautifully.

00:26:20 There were moments where it did go wrong.

00:26:22 Oh, yeah.

00:26:24 So why did we lose the United States?

00:26:27 Why would you bring this up?

00:26:29 It's too painful to talk about.

00:26:32 So I think the thing about great empires

00:26:34 is that they lose a lot and they come back.

00:26:38 So like if you look at Rome, 0.99

00:26:40 Rome spends his whole time getting his ass handed to it. 0.99

00:26:42 And the Roman people just go, 0.99

00:26:44 another army, let's go. 1.00

00:26:47 People should know when they've been conquered,

00:26:48 to quote Maximus, right?

00:26:50 And the Romans don't know when they've been conquered. 0.78

00:26:51 The Brits are pretty good at just, 0.96

00:26:53 they get beaten and then they just, they keep going.

00:26:56 And in fact, the weird thing about the 1600s is Britain is an absolute basket case, right? 0.95

00:27:00 The English kill a king.

00:27:03 They have a Republican experiment that doesn't last.

00:27:06 So there's one of the bloodiest wars in British and Irish history, the civil wars.

00:27:11 They kill the king.

00:27:13 Oliver Cromwell tries a republic that collapses.

00:27:17 Charles II, James II, his son is expelled or is forced out, abdicated.

00:27:24 You know, it's a shambles.

00:27:25 it was known as the land of revolutions right so but what's going on on the surfaces the politics

00:27:29 is quite wild what's going on the surfaces and the other thing that this is the key point here

00:27:33 is you get you get a kind of government effectively it's england and then britain can borrow more

00:27:40 money at lower rates of interest the bond markets folks because as we know it will come down as

00:27:43 that so in the 1690s partly using kind of dutch techniques and some and some you know dutch

00:27:49 financial techniques they've pioneered over at amsterdam you get the mention of the other bank

00:27:54 of England. You get these financial and economic innovations like the stock exchange. It becomes

00:28:03 easy to swap stocking companies. It's a fungible market. And the British government is overseen

00:28:13 by Parliament. So when the British government says, right, this is what we're spending. The

00:28:18 French don't produce a budget. The king just kind of sells a bit of jewellery and pays for some shit. 1.00

00:28:22 The British government has to present a budget and backbenchers vote on it. 0.99

00:28:26 And so people are happy to lend the British government money.

00:28:29 It's backed up by Parliament.

00:28:31 They're saying, yes, we will pay land tax.

00:28:33 You can sell a government bond.

00:28:35 It's guaranteed by Parliament.

00:28:36 It's not guaranteed by the king.

00:28:38 Louis XV was like, yeah, I'm going to borrow a load of money.

00:28:40 And if I don't pay it back, too bad.

00:28:42 So your interest payments are brutal on that money.

00:28:45 So England and Britain are to borrow vast amounts of money at lower rates of interest

00:28:50 than anyone else in the world.

00:28:51 And that really is the end of the discussion

00:28:54 because England, it's a smaller economy than France,

00:28:57 can build much bigger navies

00:28:58 and spend more money on fighting

00:29:00 than the French, for example. 0.93

00:29:02 So it's just hugely effective. 1.00

00:29:04 The other problem with the French 1.00

00:29:05 is the French, tough neighbourhood, right? 1.00

00:29:08 The French have got a problem. 1.00

00:29:09 The Dutch to the north, the Germans. 0.80

00:29:13 Spanish to the south, Italy.

00:29:16 So the French are building fleets

00:29:17 to deal with the Brits. 0.52

00:29:19 They've got to have a fleet in the Mediterranean,

00:29:20 in different kinds of ships in the trade.

00:29:22 You can't get all the way around.

00:29:24 They've got to have massive land armies on the Rhine.

00:29:26 They can't decide what they are.

00:29:27 The French can't decide what they are. 1.00

00:29:28 Are we a land empire? 0.96

00:29:29 Are we trying to conquer Germany and northern Italy?

00:29:32 Or are we trying to colonize Canada?

00:29:34 You can't do both.

00:29:35 The Brits is great.

00:29:35 The best thing Henry VIII ever did was totally balls up.

00:29:38 He's the last king.

00:29:39 He's marching around France. 0.99

00:29:40 I'm going to be king of France like all his medieval forebads. 0.75

00:29:43 The best thing that ever happens to England and Britain 1.00

00:29:45 is that finally the stupid monarchs of this country 1.00

00:29:48 give up this mad idea of trying to conquer France, right? 1.00

00:29:52 They lose, Mary loses Calais, that's it.

00:29:55 Calais gone, 1550s.

00:29:57 And it's like, okay, we're not a European power anymore.

00:30:02 Ooh, what we could do is turn west.

00:30:05 So Britain's, England's able to focus

00:30:07 its entire military strategic focus

00:30:11 on the rest of the world.

00:30:15 It's got this, particularly when England and Scotland

00:30:18 are united. So you haven't got problems within the island anymore, invading the northern

00:30:22 neighbours. So suddenly that unity is quite helpful. You thoroughly conquer Ireland in

00:30:29 the late 1500s. So you've got the British and Irish archipelago locked down. You're

00:30:33 not trying to conquer France. So you're like, lads, all that energy, boom, to the west.

00:30:39 Now, America. So the American colonies extend along the eastern seaboard through the 1600s

00:30:46 and I saw the 1700s.

00:30:49 I could not mention the 70s war here.

00:30:50 It's the most important war in history, folks.

00:30:52 The most successful war in British history 0.79

00:30:53 when really Britain is transformed

00:30:56 into a massive global power.

00:30:58 A couple of things happened.

00:30:59 This is the 1750s.

00:31:00 Britain, for the first time, 1.00

00:31:02 it has these little toe holes in India, 1.00

00:31:04 but Indian Mughal power is collapsing in the centre. 0.99

00:31:08 The Afghans have invaded Delhi, 1.00

00:31:09 smashed the whole place to bits. 1.00

00:31:11 Mughal power is imploding. 1.00

00:31:12 So all of the provinces, 1.00

00:31:14 So now all these little English and British and the French and the Portuguese little ports, 0.98

00:31:19 and they realise in this kind of chaos that's enveloping India, they go, 0.99

00:31:23 well, now's our opportunity to smash our European neighbours. 0.96

00:31:28 But also, we need to sort of stabilise this region, because at the moment it's absolute chaos.

00:31:33 We can't make any money.

00:31:34 If there's a sort of civil war going on in Bengal between Indians,

00:31:38 so what the Europeans start doing is they get dragged into the interior, right?

00:31:43 And this is something that the Chinese may discover 0.81

00:31:44 with their kind of new policy of sort of pseudo-imperialism, 0.77

00:31:48 is that you can have a port on the coast somewhere.

00:31:50 What happens when the interior just collapsed,

00:31:53 the government collapses,

00:31:54 and suddenly, you know,

00:31:55 your port is threatened from instability or from, you know.

00:31:58 So the Brits end up kind of pushing inland effectively.

00:32:02 The French do the same. 0.97

00:32:02 So the French, the Brits go, 1.00

00:32:04 Brits are in Calcutta,

00:32:05 which was a village when the Brits arrived. 1.00

00:32:08 The French are just up the river in a place

00:32:09 no one's ever heard of called Chandler-Gore.

00:32:11 But if the French had won,

00:32:11 Chandanagor would be the Calcutta of the world, you know.

00:32:14 And the Brits push a little force in 1777 up the Hooghly River 0.81

00:32:18 and they smash this French fort to pieces

00:32:20 and drive the French out of Bengal.

00:32:23 And then install, then fight this great battle, 0.61

00:32:25 Plassey, people are familiar with,

00:32:27 which largely won through bribery and install.

00:32:29 And the British, for the first time,

00:32:30 become the actual rulers of Bengal.

00:32:32 They previously tried to sort of find a local ruler

00:32:35 they can rule through, a puppet, you know.

00:32:37 And now they're like, we're just going to do it ourselves. 0.70

00:32:39 So suddenly Britain is a land empire in Asia, 0.69

00:32:42 completely different setup,

00:32:44 and it will be quite a difficult transition.

00:32:47 At the same time, there's the most successful war in history.

00:32:49 That's going on in India. 0.68

00:32:51 In North America, the Brits wrecked shot. 1.00

00:32:54 They conquer Canada. 0.81

00:32:57 They conquer the whole of the USA east of the Mississippi.

00:33:01 They briefly conquer Cuba.

00:33:04 They conquer several islands in the Caribbean.

00:33:06 it's just

00:33:08 and by the way

00:33:09 in Far East

00:33:09 they conquer Manila

00:33:10 as well in the Philippines

00:33:11 it's unbelievable

00:33:12 like it's an astonishing war

00:33:13 and it was said at the time

00:33:16 the bells are worn

00:33:17 threadbare

00:33:18 for the ringing of victory

00:33:19 and while we're on the subject

00:33:22 it's the greatest name

00:33:24 of victory in British history

00:33:25 that no one's ever heard of

00:33:26 right

00:33:26 everyone's heard of Trafalgar

00:33:27 didn't change a thing

00:33:28 the Battle of Quiberon Bay

00:33:31 the French

00:33:32 at the end of this war 0.94

00:33:33 like we have

00:33:33 had an absolute shocker

00:33:35 and so we're going to

00:33:36 We're going to put it all on black.

00:33:38 We're going to gamble everything. 0.99

00:33:39 We're going to try and invade the British homeland.

00:33:41 We've lost Canada.

00:33:43 We have lost all of our forts in, you know, Fort Duquesne has now become Pittsburgh,

00:33:49 named after the British Prime Minister Pitts.

00:33:51 You know, this is through the American Midwest.

00:33:53 This is a catastrophe.

00:33:54 We've lost all our lovely, fantastic Guadeloupe, these fantastically wealthy Caribbean islands.

00:33:59 So we are going to gamble everything.

00:34:01 Late 1759, big problems.

00:34:04 as you know, as I've already said, the French fleet has to leave to go and pick up the army

00:34:08 in a different location because they can't all meet in one place. They sail around from Brest,

00:34:13 they try and pick up their invading army in southern Brittany, the British follow them,

00:34:17 and as night falls, they see the British coming in with a gale, it's November, and they go,

00:34:22 the British will never, we'll hide in the shallows here in Key Brom Bay, it's a nightmare of some

00:34:26 reef-strewn, rocky hellhole, crashing waves, big gale coming in from the west,

00:34:32 and it's night.

00:34:34 They will anchor in here.

00:34:35 We'll stay.

00:34:35 The Brits will be in big trouble.

00:34:37 And Admiral Hawke, the legend,

00:34:40 orders his fleet to put up more sails,

00:34:43 increase speed,

00:34:44 follow the French into this uncharted territory. 0.99

00:34:46 And they go in there.

00:34:47 They fire point blank broadsides at French ships.

00:34:50 They sink immediately.

00:34:51 Like it's an absolute catastrophe for the French.

00:34:55 Ships blasted to pieces.

00:34:58 Astonishing bravery and seamanship is the point.

00:35:00 So you're starting to see these ships are getting very, very better in terms of engineering.

00:35:05 The British introduce exams for officers, meritocracy to a certain extent.

00:35:10 Obviously patronage still matters.

00:35:12 But if you're going to be in command of one of the king's ships, you can't just be effectless toff.

00:35:16 You can do that in the army, because all you've got to do in the army is stand there while bullets whiz.

00:35:19 All you've got to do in the army is have a ramrod straight back and give an example to your men.

00:35:23 This is always said in the British army.

00:35:25 Officers teach their men how to die.

00:35:27 Sergeants teach their men how to fight.

00:35:28 So all you've got to do as a young officer,

00:35:30 if you come out of Eton and just go,

00:35:32 all right, lads, here we are.

00:35:33 Whereas if you're in command of one of the most expensive objects

00:35:36 ever created at that point of history, 0.98

00:35:37 you think, shit, you've got to know what you're doing. 0.99

00:35:39 So anyway, they're going in there, 1.00

00:35:40 actually annihilate this French force, 0.65

00:35:42 and that's at the end of this year of victory.

00:35:44 1759, when HMS Victory, Nelson's HMS Victory,

00:35:47 is laid down that year and called Victory

00:35:49 because of the year of victories.

00:35:51 So that gives, now I'll come back to your question.

00:35:53 That gives the North American empire

00:35:57 is now as big as the empire carved out

00:35:59 by Alexander the Great.

00:36:00 Very briefly, this one glorious moment

00:36:02 in British history, 0.89

00:36:03 Britain controls from the Arctic

00:36:05 to Louisiana, to New Orleans, okay?

00:36:10 A vast empire, the whole of Eastern Canada,

00:36:13 the whole of North America, Eastern Mississippi.

00:36:17 And what did the American colonists do?

00:36:18 Very cleverly, indeed.

00:36:20 They go,

00:36:23 you guys have defeated all of our enemies now. 1.00

00:36:26 The French are gone from North America. 1.00

00:36:29 So why do we need to, we don't need to, we don't need you around anymore. 1.00

00:36:32 Thank you very much. 0.98

00:36:33 And by the way, that huge new North American empire requires forts to protect it from the Spanish or particularly the indigenous people or the people who live in Ohio and down through the American Midwest. 0.78

00:36:45 They don't, all these indigenous people at the Choctaw, the Cherokee, they still need policing and they don't want the Brits down, they want the Americans. 0.98

00:36:51 This is a big, complicated, messy empire now, right? 1.00

00:36:54 And London's like, that's going to be quite expensive.

00:36:55 Do you want to pay some taxes for that?

00:36:57 And the Americans go, we're not paying any taxes

00:36:59 unless we can have our representatives in London,

00:37:01 which, by the way, is one of my great counterfactuals,

00:37:03 one of my great moments in history,

00:37:04 Benjamin Franklin said,

00:37:06 we'll just send MPs to an imperial parliament in London

00:37:10 from the American colonies.

00:37:12 It doesn't seem that unreasonable a request, to be fair.

00:37:15 I know, I agree.

00:37:16 And can you imagine what a wonderful country we'll be living today,

00:37:19 stretching from Kent to San Francisco.

00:37:22 We'll be so cool.

00:37:23 Anyway, it didn't happen.

00:37:24 Well, there's all sorts of interesting reasons why it didn't happen,

00:37:27 but it didn't happen.

00:37:28 So slowly, both sides escalates.

00:37:32 The British show a very, very clumsy statesmanship.

00:37:36 The Americans don't want to pay taxes.

00:37:38 They also realize strategically they don't really need to be part of this empire anymore.

00:37:41 There's going to be great opportunities now if they go off by themselves 0.77

00:37:44 because there's no kind of existential threat as there was when the French did. 1.00

00:37:48 And so they break away. 0.70

00:37:51 the Brits then attempt to fight, the Brits send the largest, as we are sitting here now 250 years

00:37:57 ago, the Brits send the largest European expeditionary force ever sent abroad to retake

00:38:03 New York in the summer of 1776. The Declaration of Independence takes place. The Brits can't defeat

00:38:08 the Americans. And all of the European enemies of Britain all jump in and turn it into a global war.

00:38:14 The Spanish threatened Gibraltar, which they are hopping mad, that the Brits owned. They've owned 0.62

00:38:18 They lived for about 70 years now.

00:38:19 I mean, they still are.

00:38:20 They still are.

00:38:21 And I understand.

00:38:22 I mean, in a way, I understand.

00:38:23 If you look at the map,

00:38:23 I must be really not.

00:38:25 My granddad was a fortress commander at Gibraltar.

00:38:28 That's very cool.

00:38:29 Anyway, so they are...

00:38:32 So they put a lot of pressure on that,

00:38:33 which for the Brits is sort of as important,

00:38:35 if not more important, than North America. 0.50

00:38:36 The French are just sailing around the Caribbean islands, 1.00

00:38:39 wrecking shock, 0.80

00:38:40 and the Brits are going to protect their sugar islands.

00:38:42 And in the end,

00:38:43 a kind of astonishing pincer move very effectively

00:38:47 between George Washington's American army

00:38:49 and the French fleet,

00:38:50 and the French army and French fleet

00:38:52 gather on the Chesapeake

00:38:53 and destroy and neutralize

00:38:56 a British army in Virginia.

00:38:58 Well, the great naval defeats

00:38:59 of British history, folks.

00:39:00 Very difficult to talk about.

00:39:02 The French defeat the British.

00:39:04 It's a draw, really, 0.67

00:39:06 but the British do not press the attack home

00:39:10 and are not able to rescue this force.

00:39:13 And the Brits go,

00:39:14 this is too expensive.

00:39:14 We can't cope with this.

00:39:16 Adam Smith, by the way,

00:39:17 so the Scottish man

00:39:19 who's sort of coming up with the ideas

00:39:20 of tenets of capitalism this time, 0.99

00:39:21 he goes, you're crazy. 0.96

00:39:22 You don't need them to be colonies. 0.98

00:39:24 Colonies are expensive.

00:39:25 For all the reasons I've said, 1.00

00:39:26 you'll pay for forts and roads and stupid things. 1.00

00:39:29 Just trade with them. 1.00

00:39:30 We'll all make much more money

00:39:30 if we just trade.

00:39:31 It's an interesting thing going on there.

00:39:33 And indeed, it's true.

00:39:34 American colonies break away,

00:39:36 but become an enormous market for British goods.

00:39:40 And obviously, the subsequent relationship

00:39:42 between Britain and America is well established.

00:39:43 is quite sort of beneficial to both.

00:39:46 And the Brits are able to go and sell railways

00:39:47 and enjoy access to the American market.

00:39:52 But yes, so those colonies break away,

00:39:54 but most of the North American colonies

00:39:55 did not break away, let's just remember.

00:39:56 So Canada, Nova Scotia,

00:39:58 and then the Caribbean colonies did not break away.

00:40:00 So these 13 colonies have gone.

00:40:03 And so that's disaster.

00:40:04 That's the really interesting, weird moment in this story.

00:40:06 In the 1780s, everyone's like, Britain's doomed.

00:40:08 It's not, but actually Britain had enormous...

00:40:10 France bankrupted itself. 1.00

00:40:12 French, you ought to feel sorry about the French. 1.00

00:40:13 They went all in helping the Americans.

00:40:16 The Americans went to the peace treaty

00:40:17 and the French and Americans were like, 0.73

00:40:19 we are going to make Britain pay, man.

00:40:21 And the Americans and Brits did a little side deal.

00:40:23 And actually, they were both cool with that.

00:40:24 And the Americans abandoned the French. 0.52

00:40:26 So the French got nothing for that war 0.90

00:40:27 other than embarrassing the Brits. 0.87

00:40:29 And the French Revolution happens less than 10 years later. 0.91

00:40:34 They absolutely bankrupt themselves, 0.82

00:40:37 going all in to try and get American defenders.

00:40:39 Achieve no concrete outcomes for them at all.

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00:41:14 uh but and and then and then you get the the great revolutionary you know what was called

00:41:21 the great war at the time so french revolution happens we were a couple years britain and france

00:41:24 were at war and at war for a generation until 1815 so from 1793 to 1815 and in that and that

00:41:32 And that is this, Britain turns itself into this astonishing military power.

00:41:40 It's able to access the trade of the world.

00:41:42 It's able to access capital.

00:41:44 It's able to borrow money from the rest of the world while blockading France, starving

00:41:49 France. 0.78

00:41:50 It gobbles up the colonies of everyone else. 0.95

00:41:53 It takes South Africa off the Dutch. 0.96

00:41:55 It helps to destroy Spanish power in North America. 0.86

00:41:59 At one point in that war, it's the forgotten moment in the British Empire.

00:42:02 the garrison of South Africa

00:42:05 took it upon itself

00:42:06 to invade Buenos Aires

00:42:07 the British 0.99

00:42:08 amazing

00:42:08 with no permission from London

00:42:10 that's the thing about empire

00:42:11 it's crumbling frontiers

00:42:13 we call it

00:42:13 so often it's not London going

00:42:14 next we will invade over here

00:42:16 it's often like you see 1.00

00:42:16 the Romulan

00:42:17 it's local commanders

00:42:18 local people going

00:42:18 right we're going over there

00:42:20 we're going to take that land

00:42:20 and London's often like

00:42:22 please stop doing that

00:42:23 because what happens

00:42:25 through the 18th and 19th century

00:42:27 is like George Washington

00:42:28 famously accidentally

00:42:29 started the French Indian War

00:42:30 is once British people

00:42:32 are killed, the government's like, we have to do something now. So often in Africa, it's like 0.99

00:42:37 missionaries going, we're going to convert Christianity. They get smashed to bits, chopped 0.97

00:42:41 to pieces, the locals. And then the newspapers go, British Christians murdered by barbarous 1.00

00:42:48 tribes. So the British go, right, can you please detach a column of infantry to go and 0.99

00:42:53 take this completely random bit of territory miles from anywhere. And we talk about it today,

00:43:00 don't we how the cost is often borne by the public and the profits so they're enjoyed by

00:43:05 the mine owners the loggers you know whatever it is these private interests quite interesting

00:43:10 so anyway so this the uh the garrison of south goes and invades buenos aires and enjoys some

00:43:17 initial sessions and for a very brief exciting period for the british they think well do we just

00:43:21 take over the spanish empire in south america like is this is this going to be you know is it

00:43:27 going to be, you know, Canada effectively in the north, and then Argentina, Chile, is this going

00:43:31 to be British? And then fascinatingly, the people of Buenos Aires fight a kind of guerrilla campaign

00:43:36 and kick the British out. And so that's a big, that's a reverse. So the British suffer defeats

00:43:42 all the time in this period, but their financial, their economic, and eventually their industrial

00:43:46 muscle ensures that they can kind of come back. And so yeah, South America, but South Africa,

00:43:51 at the start of things to Africa, and then the islands of the Indian Ocean.

00:43:54 Oh, the India, the various Indian confederations you might have heard of,

00:43:59 Tipu Sultan in Mysore, the Brits by four wars in Mysore against Tipu Sultan in the 1790s,

00:44:06 the Marathas in central India. 0.72

00:44:08 So slowly, the British are being, they control Bengal.

00:44:11 So to protect Bengal, you have to invade the next guy. 0.72

00:44:14 And then to do that, again, you're drawn into the interior. 0.96

00:44:18 And then we'll come back to that.

00:44:19 There's a great moment in this, the whole, some people say the whole of the British Empire in Africa

00:44:24 was acquired in a sort of absence of mind.

00:44:28 Like it was, you basically want to control Cape Town, and you want to control the Suez Canal.

00:44:33 But then to do that, there's trouble to just be on the frontier.

00:44:36 You end up controlling the largest empire the world's ever seen,

00:44:38 because you've got to come and go, well, you've got to control Suez Canal, you've got to control Egypt. 0.96

00:44:43 Problem with Egypt, you've got to control Sudan. 0.78

00:44:45 So then you're sucked in Sudan, you've got to pull into Central Africa. 0.72

00:44:48 So it's strange. 0.85

00:44:49 But yes, that's the American answer. 0.99

00:44:51 I think that's roughly speaking true.

00:44:53 But I should say that there were limits of British power.

00:44:55 The Brits could not send anything like enough troops

00:44:57 to conquer, reconquer the American colonies.

00:45:00 It was just way beyond the ability

00:45:02 of the British states at that point.

00:45:04 And it's simply because we just didn't have the manpower.

00:45:07 We just couldn't send the troops.

00:45:09 Yeah, yeah. 1.00

00:45:09 So the Brits are hiring Germans called Hessians. 1.00

00:45:12 We call them Hessians. 1.00

00:45:13 Tens of thousands of them to fight. 0.99

00:45:15 The Brits cannot, you know,

00:45:17 the Brits are not the Soviet Union in the 20th century.

00:45:19 The Brits just don't have, you can't,

00:45:22 remember what I said about the Brits.

00:45:23 The Brits have developed quite a nice model. 0.99

00:45:25 The poor old French is fighting the bloody Germans, 1.00

00:45:27 fighting the Dutch, fighting,

00:45:28 and trying to maintain the Navy. 0.81

00:45:30 The Brits can go all,

00:45:31 the Brits traditionally have a tiny army,

00:45:33 most of which are based in Ireland.

00:45:36 And that means you invest massively into the Navy,

00:45:38 which is really quite large.

00:45:41 And then the Army is almost a kind of Royal Marines force,

00:45:43 just goes ashore from the Navy

00:45:45 and just sort of secures these little forts around the world,

00:45:48 these places I've talked about.

00:45:49 Now, to conquer the Americas requires, you know,

00:45:54 armies on a kind of ancient scale.

00:45:57 You've got to march from New York

00:45:59 with a force of 100,000 men

00:46:01 through New Jersey to Pennsylvania and keep going.

00:46:05 The Brits cannot do that.

00:46:08 They don't have the manpower.

00:46:10 They don't have the money to that.

00:46:11 Because they're trying to maintain their empire

00:46:12 in all these other places.

00:46:13 Well, I was going to say,

00:46:14 I mean, one of the concerns during what the Americans called the Revolutionary War was

00:46:18 actually, because there was a war between Spain, France, and England, you're worried

00:46:23 about the homeland being invaded, and you've got all these other concerns.

00:46:26 That's true. 1.00

00:46:26 That's a good point.

00:46:27 So you fight some big naval battle in the homeland, really important naval battles there.

00:46:32 So it's a nightmare.

00:46:32 You're trying to maintain, you're trying to blockade the American colonies.

00:46:36 Can you imagine?

00:46:37 Newport, Rhode Island.

00:46:39 You're trying to blockade the Delaware, Pennsylvania.

00:46:41 you're trying to control the southern colonies, Savannah.

00:46:46 Vast numbers of ships required.

00:46:47 The Americans are phenomenal mariners. 1.00

00:46:49 Little ships going to gun running, taking cotton out, 0.94

00:46:52 trading with the Caribbean, trading with the French. 0.88

00:46:56 Nightmare.

00:46:57 Then you're trying to maintain naval supremacy in the Caribbean.

00:47:00 Then you're trying to do it in the Mediterranean 0.96

00:47:01 where the Spanish are hammering you in Gibraltar 0.96

00:47:03 and various other places. 0.91

00:47:04 And then you've got a problem in the Channel as well.

00:47:07 Nightmare. 1.00

00:47:07 And then God, Asia. 0.98

00:47:08 So this is, even we're saying the British Empire was like,

00:47:11 hegemonic time. I mean, this is, this is the kind of thing that even today, American carrier groups 0.95

00:47:15 are going to struggle to sort of fight simultaneously in all these regions. In India,

00:47:20 interestingly, they get over the problem by very, very few white British troops out there.

00:47:24 They raise Indian, they raise Indian troops. So there's these vast armies fighting kind of

00:47:29 continental, that kind of continental scale. You're invading central India, Maratha, 0.90

00:47:35 but you're using overwhelmingly majority locally conscripted or raised Indian troops. So

00:47:41 the British regime in India looks quite Indian. And there's the other side of the empire, which 0.96

00:47:50 has now become a talking point, a culture war talking point, which is the slave trade. So

00:47:56 let's talk about that. Let's talk about how it began through to the process, the process of

00:48:03 enrichment. Who was it who actually made the money? And then how it was disbanded and all the rest of

00:48:09 So, slavery, reasonably normal. 1.00

00:48:13 The North Africans have been taking European slaves 1.00

00:48:15 from Southern Europe and as far away as Iceland 0.95

00:48:18 for a long time.

00:48:19 In fact, there's a raid in Cornwall,

00:48:20 a raid in Ireland,

00:48:21 whole villages have been disappeared,

00:48:22 going back to what is today Algeria,

00:48:25 in particular, Tunisia places.

00:48:29 You know, this slavery is pretty widespread. 1.00

00:48:32 And the Portuguese start cruising down

00:48:35 the coast of West Africa in the 1400s,

00:48:36 and they discover gold.

00:48:38 So that's a huge boost to Portuguese. 0.99

00:48:39 and they also bring back enslaved people 1.00

00:48:41 that are buying off local African tribes

00:48:43 that are taking advantage of an existing slave market there. 0.98

00:48:46 And they are coming back to Lisbon 0.51

00:48:47 and they're working on Portuguese farms. 0.59

00:48:49 And then they are working in the Canary Islands.

00:48:52 And they are starting to try and grow sugar in the Canary Islands.

00:48:55 That doesn't go very well.

00:48:56 And then so when West Africa,

00:48:57 when the Western Hemisphere is discovered by Europeans, 0.87

00:49:00 the obvious thing is to take, you know, 0.95

00:49:02 indentured labor, so locals.

00:49:03 The locals die out in Astana.

00:49:05 I'm very few.

00:49:06 Can I just pause you there?

00:49:07 because there'll be people who don't know the difference

00:49:09 between a slave and indentured servant.

00:49:11 So these are people who almost sell themselves indentures.

00:49:15 You agree you're going to do 10 years hard labour,

00:49:17 and then you almost sell yourself to a company.

00:49:20 Or you're a convicted felon,

00:49:24 and you work for a sugar-growing company,

00:49:27 and you just go and labour in the fields,

00:49:28 and there may be a promise of get your independence back

00:49:31 or some land or something at the end of it.

00:49:33 So the population of the Caribbean, the indigenous population,

00:49:36 There are apparently some indigenous Caribs left today

00:49:40 in some places, but we're talking very few.

00:49:42 So it's full of indigenous Americans.

00:49:44 We might know them, referred to as Indians. 1.00

00:49:47 They die at appalling mortality through Western,

00:49:51 through Eurasian disease, 0.98

00:49:52 which they have no resistance to. 1.00

00:49:55 So typhus, smallpox, measles, no indigenous. 1.00

00:49:58 90% of indigenous Americans will die 1.00

00:50:01 within 200 years of Columbus arriving in the new world.

00:50:04 So it's astonishing mortality.

00:50:05 And overwhelmingly from disease.

00:50:07 The disease is traveling faster than the Europeans.

00:50:09 So we don't know.

00:50:10 So the disease will arrive in what is now Manitoba or Saskatchewan,

00:50:15 years before French trappers, 1.00

00:50:16 because the indigenous people are trading and moving around.

00:50:19 So there's an expression, which is the Europeans will arrive in a place

00:50:22 and go, well, it's a great virgin land.

00:50:25 There's a famous expression, it wasn't virgin, it was widowed. 0.99

00:50:28 So there had been Native Americans.

00:50:31 They existed in quite large cities at times in Alabama.

00:50:35 there was a city, fields, crops, settles, agriculture.

00:50:40 By the time Europeans arrive, 0.99

00:50:42 they go, oh, these people are hunter-gatherers 1.00

00:50:44 living in small little groups,

00:50:45 because actually there's been

00:50:45 sort of fundamental collapse of that system.

00:50:48 So anyway, so the characters...

00:50:49 Dan, sorry, I know we keep interrupting,

00:50:51 but these are just such interesting things to get into.

00:50:54 There have been throughout history

00:50:56 these mass movements of people,

00:50:58 different people from different parts of the world,

00:51:00 not quite the same distance, of course,

00:51:02 coming in contact.

00:51:03 Is this pretty standard, what happens when people encounter each other?

00:51:08 Or was this...

00:51:09 This was astonishing because of this weird fact

00:51:11 that the two giant continents on Earth have never had any contact

00:51:15 since the... since 15...

00:51:17 Well, I think it's about the latest thinking,

00:51:20 I think about 30,000 years ago. 0.64

00:51:21 The Americans are just cut off from Europeans.

00:51:24 So there's the famous Colombian food exchange, which I love.

00:51:26 So Julius Caesar, Charlemagne, Michelangelo

00:51:31 and never tasted potato, tomato, chocolate, tobacco,

00:51:36 turkey, never seen it, never heard of it.

00:51:39 Wow. 1.00

00:51:39 Italians, no tomatoes in Italian cooking. 1.00

00:51:42 Those come from the Americas.

00:51:45 Corn as well.

00:51:46 Corn.

00:51:47 Very good point.

00:51:49 In return, but there are no,

00:51:52 this is a whole separate fascinating issue,

00:51:54 but why do the Europeans conquer the Americas

00:51:55 not the way around?

00:51:56 Because the disease is part of it. 0.95

00:51:57 Also in the Americas,

00:51:58 there are no beasts of burden in the Americas.

00:51:59 Because there's a llama, which can carry a certain amount of weight, 0.99

00:52:01 but the llamas are a pain in the ass to farm and reproduce. 1.00

00:52:05 And they spit at you. 1.00

00:52:06 They spit. They're nasty. 0.95

00:52:07 They don't like being domesticated. 1.00

00:52:11 They're Latin in temperament. 1.00

00:52:12 Yeah, they are. Well, that's true. 1.00

00:52:13 I mean, what do you want? 0.57

00:52:14 I was about to say, they're really lazy.

00:52:16 You're allowed to say that.

00:52:17 Yeah, I am. I'm allowed to say, yeah.

00:52:19 They don't like working.

00:52:20 And so horses, cows, pigs, ox, all of these animals arrive in the Americas,

00:52:28 which weren't there for.

00:52:29 So by the way, that means that all of the great

00:52:31 some Aztec, Maya buildings,

00:52:32 no horses are being involved in those.

00:52:34 No wagons, axles, all that kind of stuff.

00:52:37 So they need a labour source

00:52:41 because they discovered these islands

00:52:42 are really good for growing sugar,

00:52:44 which is this wonder crop 0.91

00:52:45 because food sucks so bad.

00:52:46 I mean, we still are addicted to sugar, 0.97

00:52:48 but in the medieval world, trust me,

00:52:50 food was so awful that you want sugar. 1.00

00:52:52 And the easiest source of labour is from West Africa 1.00

00:52:55 because there's a wind that blows very usefully

00:52:58 directly from West Africa to the Caribbean.

00:53:01 You don't have to touch your sails.

00:53:03 It just goes like that on the great naval nautical highways,

00:53:06 maritime highways of the world.

00:53:07 Very easy to do.

00:53:09 So you buy upstairs.

00:53:10 Now, what happens here?

00:53:11 The reason is that it happens on just an astonishing scale.

00:53:15 So in the course of, from 1550 to 1807, 1.00

00:53:19 the Brits will take about three and a half million Africans

00:53:21 to the New World, about a third the overall total.

00:53:25 and so that's just it just it's just like everything else in this period everything

00:53:29 gets supersized so whether it's production of textiles whether it's production of guns whether

00:53:33 it's government debt this everything's becoming so much more sophisticated that the europeans 0.72

00:53:38 work out how to take vast numbers so it starts and you arrive and you buy enslaved people from 0.55

00:53:44 local african chiefs and then you take them across 100 200 and then you can start doing thousands

00:53:49 and, you know, thousands of millions.

00:53:50 So what that does, obviously, as we all know,

00:53:54 it's astonishing, inhumane, vast casualties, appalling.

00:53:57 It completely disrupts the economies 0.98

00:53:59 and the empires of West Africa

00:54:01 because suddenly these kind of slightly overlooked

00:54:04 coastal backwaters become incredibly rich and powerful.

00:54:08 So they then invade their neighbours and, like, the kingdom.

00:54:10 So there's, like, sort of, there's a knock-on effect.

00:54:13 And in turn, then, that conflict creates 0.69

00:54:15 vast numbers of enslaved people.

00:54:17 it is at this point too dangerous for Europeans 0.96

00:54:20 where you'd go inland into West Africa

00:54:22 because of malaria and other things.

00:54:25 So for a long time, 0.68

00:54:28 the Europeans have these forts on the coast. 0.78

00:54:30 Again, these little pinpricks,

00:54:31 these key forts along the coast,

00:54:33 some way she can still be able to take.

00:54:34 And they take part in these slaving experiences.

00:54:37 They will go as military advisors

00:54:38 with local chieftains and things,

00:54:39 but they will help. 1.00

00:54:41 But their voracious demand for enslaved people

00:54:44 then adds to the conflict and instability in West Africa. 0.63

00:54:47 right? So that's what's going on there. And then in North America and the West Indies,

00:54:53 then slave-grown agriculture is just phenomenally... Now again, Adam Smith goes,

00:54:57 actually, guys, if we use willing workers, it would be more efficient. Slavery is not economically

00:55:04 efficient. Apart from being monstrous, it's not economically efficient. So it's quite interesting.

00:55:07 Is that true?

00:55:08 Apparently so.

00:55:09 What I call it, yes.

00:55:10 Apparently is that the expense of the system

00:55:17 and the need to,

00:55:19 and the kind of extraordinary police state

00:55:21 you have to enforce would mean that, in fact,

00:55:26 they could have been economically productive

00:55:28 using another model.

00:55:28 But that would have involved having to, you know,

00:55:30 convince lots of other people to go there.

00:55:32 But that's what Adam Smith's argument was,

00:55:34 which is quite an attractive argument to us, obviously.

00:55:36 And so, and then, and then you, so yeah, so then 1807, the Brits have this kind of really

00:55:45 radical change of, there's a, there's a long campaign of, again, for abolition and ending

00:55:50 the slave trade. 1807, the Brits pass.

00:55:52 On what basis then? Why are, why are people saying we need to end slavery?

00:55:57 Influenced by Adam Smith, people saying, actually, I'm not sure this is like, this system's kind

00:55:59 of quite primitive, doesn't really work. So that's important. But also, I think we can't

00:56:03 ignore the fact that it's an amazing kind of cultural moral uprising in Britain and people

00:56:10 saying this is just in inhumane we shouldn't do it and and that's the public literacy or newspapers

00:56:16 uh it formally enslaved people coming to Britain and writing very eloquently about their experiences

00:56:23 it just it's you know why why do cultural moments happen and that and that's so again

00:56:28 Christianity Quakerism kind of forms of Protestantism that emphasize the light of God burning in

00:56:34 everybody. So there's just a really interesting sort of economic and yeah. And so 80s and they

00:56:44 banned the slave trade. They then banned slavery itself in the 1830s. And that's partly in response

00:56:48 to what we talked about. There's a massive slave uprising in Jamaica, which is very expensive to

00:56:52 put down, savage. And the Brits just start going, this doesn't actually, we don't think this makes, 0.99

00:56:57 It's not, it's amoral, but also it's costing us money having to run these vast police states.

00:57:04 And they, in some ways, sadly work out that you can still run these sugar plantations by transforming these enslaved people into workers on very unequal terms, but they are technically free.

00:57:17 So actually, the moral cost of slavery is enormous, but so are the real world political costs of it.

00:57:25 and so yeah so that's what goes on there and uh and i think the brits were kind of tickled by the

00:57:31 idea that it would also shaft their european that their the british economy was at this point less

00:57:37 dependent on slave-grown products than say like portuguese or the americans so they're like well 0.56

00:57:42 we're a lot of good guys and we're actually going to shaft the americans if we do this as well so 0.66

00:57:45 it's a as everything it's a combination of sort of politics and morality and lobbying and economics

00:57:51 ridge first sponsored this show nearly six years ago i've still got one of their wallets in my

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00:59:36 code trigonometry. After you check out, they'll ask you where you heard about them.

00:59:42 Tell them we sent you. As Francis mentioned, it's obviously a big part of the conversation

00:59:49 about our history, almost front and center. If you say empire, slavery is the second word that

00:59:55 follows that. How should we, understanding the full context of history, some of the things you've

01:00:02 talked about, the fact that slavery was basically the norm everywhere up until this point,

01:00:06 the fact that most people don't know, actually, that the Europeans turned up and bought slaves

01:00:11 that had been captured by Africans from Africans, et cetera, et cetera. But also reckoning on the

01:00:17 other side, the immense cruelty and the scale, the technology that enabled transporting people

01:00:22 across oceans, exploiting them in chattel slavery, et cetera. How should or can we reckon with all of

01:00:29 that in a sensible, balanced way, not going too far in either direction? What's the right way to

01:00:35 look at it well that's a great question and i the answer is i don't know it's an incredibly tricky

01:00:39 is that but it's great question about history generally isn't it like to what

01:00:43 the past was a monstrous place what do we do what do we practically do about that

01:00:50 um it it's i mean my my sense is uh i i the answer i don't know like our gigantic cash payments and

01:01:03 Who, like, I'll get gigantic cash payments to Barbados or to West Africa, the answer?

01:01:09 I don't know.

01:01:10 And I think it is, look, Britain benefits enormously from this,

01:01:14 because we talked about venture capital.

01:01:15 There's clearly lots of money.

01:01:17 You're creating capital, and that in turn benefits Britain,

01:01:21 benefits British industry.

01:01:22 These people are investing their money.

01:01:24 So there's no question that our wealth and power partly derived from, 1.00

01:01:31 the enslavement of Africans 1.00

01:01:34 and put them to work

01:01:35 in sugar plantations

01:01:37 in the New World.

01:01:38 But it also derived,

01:01:41 it was also derived

01:01:41 from the kind of annihilation

01:01:44 of indigenous tribes

01:01:45 in North America,

01:01:46 selling opium to the Chinese.

01:01:49 American, well, you know,

01:01:51 the American wealth,

01:01:52 America, which, by the way,

01:01:53 has done the best job ever

01:01:54 in disguising an empire

01:01:55 behind the name of a nation state. 0.96

01:01:56 Americans just conquer

01:01:57 an empire in North America 0.96

01:01:58 and call it the USA,

01:02:00 which is what happens,

01:02:01 that's fine.

01:02:01 the rebrand that's built off the back of conquest um you know argentina conquers southern what we

01:02:10 what is now southern argentina in the in the 19th century um russia's russia the european conquest

01:02:17 of people talk about european empires in asia come to it well russia is the a mighty european

01:02:23 empire in asia right the french still have a vast empire in the south pacific to this day

01:02:27 I don't know how we...

01:02:30 The past is a terrible, brutal place.

01:02:32 And my sense is it's trying to shape,

01:02:40 trying to acknowledge all that and going,

01:02:42 what we need to do is build a world.

01:02:44 We need to build a kind of different world,

01:02:46 which largely speaking we've been trying to do

01:02:47 since 1945 and onwards.

01:02:49 And that's what makes Putin's invasion of Ukraine,

01:02:51 I think, so scary.

01:02:52 It's like, we sort of want this neighbour's territory

01:02:55 and we're going to mass on the borders and invade it. 0.85

01:02:57 That's very normal throughout history.

01:03:00 Very, very dangerous because it means other people do the same. 0.50

01:03:03 And Putin may regret that when China decides to nibble

01:03:07 a bit of Russian territory in the Far East.

01:03:09 So my gut is acknowledging past monstrosities, 0.99

01:03:14 but the business of trying to kind of untangle it and go, 0.95

01:03:20 well, are we paying the Chinese for the opium?

01:03:22 Um, and I don't, I don't, I don't, I just kind of, I don't think it's practical.

01:03:29 I know that's not a really glamorous thing to say.

01:03:31 No, no, it makes perfect sense because it's such a difficult issue to address.

01:03:35 And I guess one of the things that I've always found, uh, you know, you get activists in,

01:03:40 in both directions who sort of tell one version of the story, which when you look at the narrow

01:03:44 set of facts that they present, it's true. 0.95

01:03:46 Like nobody could defend without today's morality, what happened during the slave trade.

01:03:52 Nobody.

01:03:53 And at the same time, you can't ignore the fact that literally every empire throughout history practiced slavery.

01:03:59 And Britain was the first empire in history to actually end it properly and force others to end it at great cost to itself, including through human lives, too.

01:04:09 And it's just one of those things about, like you say, the past was a terrible place.

01:04:13 And I think if you get a tiny sliver from here or from here presented to you,

01:04:18 you can really influence people's today's feelings and political leanings and so on

01:04:24 in a particular direction because people are so uneducated about the messiness of it all.

01:04:29 Yeah, and we talked about Ireland at the beginning.

01:04:32 I mean, the English conquest of Ireland in the 1500s was unimaginably brutal.

01:04:37 Shocking.

01:04:39 Now, what do you do about that today?

01:04:42 It's not your fault.

01:04:43 um it's it's it's it's i think it's looking i'm not a politician in pragmatic terms it's quite

01:04:50 hard quite hard to make people say we're gonna we're gonna send a lot of your tax payments to

01:04:55 like people in munster because because munster was the scene of almost genocide in in the 16th

01:05:02 century i don't know i don't know how you resolve that my my sense of it is you like like people

01:05:07 talk about like martin luther king barack obama this kind of strand of american thinking

01:05:10 and you go, monstrous things have happened in our past.

01:05:13 The key thing that we can do now

01:05:14 is shape a new and better way to organise society, right?

01:05:19 So we are going to try and ensure 1.00

01:05:22 that people of colour are absorbed into this American project

01:05:26 and have the opportunity to go to university

01:05:29 and whatever else in a way that they traditionally haven't done.

01:05:32 They have the vote and all this economic opportunities

01:05:34 to put a chance to create a generational wealth

01:05:36 that they've been denied in the past.

01:05:38 That, in one sense, we're going to kind of repudiate the idea that it's okay to invade

01:05:43 neighbours, we're going to repudiate the idea that it's okay to have slaves, you know, like

01:05:47 I, that feels, and that's totally, that's me talking from a position of great privilege.

01:05:51 Look, I'm someone who's almost certainly in my ancestry, I've benefited personally from

01:05:55 this.

01:05:56 The reason that I went to a nice school and speak nicely and went to nice universities

01:06:00 is of course because of my, the generational advantages that I've had.

01:06:03 I get that, but I don't know how you just practically arrange for the entire world

01:06:12 to have a massive reallocation of resources on the basis of historical, monstrous, historical

01:06:20 criminality.

01:06:20 How far back do you go?

01:06:22 This is the question.

01:06:23 I go way back.

01:06:25 No, but this is what I'm saying, though, right?

01:06:26 It was like...

01:06:27 Oh, I see what you mean.

01:06:28 How one does one... 0.99

01:06:29 Yes, I think in the Holocaust... 0.97

01:06:30 When do you start the clock?

01:06:31 There's living people who had their art collections

01:06:33 removed from them in Vienna.

01:06:35 Now, yeah, like, obviously.

01:06:37 But I think it's difficult.

01:06:40 And then you get into sort of really difficult territory.

01:06:43 Like, well, was it?

01:06:45 So what I'm saying is something else, Dan, 0.98

01:06:47 which is should the descendants of the Normans 0.70

01:06:49 pay a reparation to them? 0.62

01:06:50 No, you're absolutely right.

01:06:51 Well, this is why the island, yeah, exactly.

01:06:52 Or whoever, like, I think if you start to try

01:06:58 undo history then you've got to go all the way back to the beginning and now we're in the in

01:07:04 the savannas of africa etc key way to undo history is to try and make try and learn from the past

01:07:09 and make the world a better place again since 1945 we've been doing we have it like we hoped

01:07:13 there was a naive dream in the 90s i'm old enough to remember where we thought oh international

01:07:16 disputes will be resolved at the un we go and talk about it all and then we but that for me

01:07:20 that's the that's a really important plank of this it's about saying oh we've realized a common

01:07:26 humanity and that we're all like actually skin color doesn't determine your intelligence and

01:07:31 your chances of succeeding in life your ability to invent you know that those things really

01:07:36 embedding those things today feels to me like the most practical and achievable antidote right i mean

01:07:44 the thing i this is i think about is like well my you know there's millions of people in this

01:07:49 country who's who's grand who two generations ago they were conscripted to fight they're given no

01:07:54 They're conscripted by effect, you're going to make sure.

01:07:57 And we're just thrown into machine gun bullets on the Western Front.

01:07:59 That was an astonishing trauma that practically affected millions of families in this country.

01:08:10 That was monstrous in so many ways.

01:08:12 What do we do about...

01:08:13 So listen, that's history.

01:08:17 I wish I had simple answers to that.

01:08:19 because that's a problem isn't it with this entire conversation is that people want simple answers

01:08:26 people want it summed up in a tweet or a post and they go okay i know exactly what to think about

01:08:32 that this is what we do when the reality is it's far more complex which brings us nicely to the

01:08:37 topic of india because with india we have these similar conversations as well don't we about how

01:08:44 much of it was about wealth extraction what did we give to to the indians yeah where do you stand

01:08:50 so that's interesting so look at all different things different times bengal so the british

01:08:53 take over bengal in the 1750s and the result was an absolute catastrophe for the bengal is not

01:08:59 partly because so there's a series of natural so first of all the british turns out aren't very

01:09:06 good at running a large asian empire from from an office in london by letter using sailing ships i

01:09:12 I mean, obviously not, right? 1.00

01:09:13 So there is just catastrophic consequences

01:09:16 for the people of Bengal, 1.00

01:09:17 which I don't want to underage.

01:09:18 And for example, so there are famines.

01:09:21 So the Brits write back,

01:09:22 there's a really bad famine here.

01:09:24 Should we give them a tax break? 0.98

01:09:26 Which is what would traditionally happen in India. 1.00

01:09:29 Even under Mughals, they'd say, 0.87

01:09:30 look, clearly there's a famine.

01:09:32 You don't have to pay your taxes.

01:09:33 Don't worry about it.

01:09:34 That letter would take six months to get to London.

01:09:36 They'd never think about it.

01:09:37 It takes six months to get back.

01:09:38 Like, it's insane.

01:09:38 Like, monstrous, right? 0.83

01:09:40 and so people are turning their kids into slavery there's just appalling stories from bengal

01:09:46 so and then uh you know there's a big impact on the textile trade of bengal because of you know

01:09:53 the way the british choose to organize the kind of their input so yeah there's you know there's

01:09:57 massive negative consequences for you know bengal then you move forward 100 years and

01:10:03 and then india exists as part of a i mean the problem with all this you don't know what they

01:10:09 not what the other alternatives are.

01:10:11 So Winston Churchill argued that India should be British

01:10:14 because it stops, 0.67

01:10:15 otherwise it would just be the scene of lots of fighting

01:10:17 on the subcontinent.

01:10:19 And we don't know if he was right

01:10:19 because it didn't happen.

01:10:21 So, you know, in the 19th century,

01:10:23 Britain conquers India.

01:10:25 There's a massive Indian revolt in the 1850s.

01:10:28 And it's brutally put down. 0.78

01:10:30 So we've got the last 50 years, Britain.

01:10:34 India is reasonably stable. 0.54

01:10:35 But what's the counter?

01:10:36 I don't know what the counterfactual is. 1.00

01:10:37 you know what does what what what would the afghans have invaded again and and slaughtered so

01:10:42 all of these questions are sort of uh uh kind of they're things that politicians and people on

01:10:48 social media like to get really involved in but historians are sort of interested in what happens

01:10:52 right like i don't i mean i like is was the was the was the the prussian victory in silesia in

01:10:59 1740 good or bad i don't know what do you mean good or bad like what are we talking about here

01:11:03 this is a thing that happened

01:11:05 we're studying history as it happened

01:11:07 India may have gone on

01:11:11 if the Brits 1.00

01:11:13 hadn't invaded India, India may have 0.99

01:11:15 developed this phenomenal indigenous

01:11:17 culture that ruled the world and established

01:11:19 the biggest empire the world ever seen, or it might have been locked

01:11:21 in a series of violent civil wars

01:11:23 in the Indian subcontinent for 150 years

01:11:25 we don't know, so how

01:11:27 can you possibly say

01:11:28 what you can do is point, oh look

01:11:30 that the Brits massacred people there during the Anglo-Myssal War.

01:11:35 That's a thing that happened.

01:11:38 But you don't know whether, it's very difficult to kind of go,

01:11:42 would more or less people have lived longer, happier lives 0.95

01:11:47 if the Brits hadn't invaded? 0.91

01:11:49 It's sort of unanswerable, it's unknowable. 0.76

01:11:53 So what you can say is that India today,

01:11:57 there was a partition of Britain's Indian Empire,

01:12:00 obviously in the 1940s, with astonishing bloodshed and brutality, which was a tragedy.

01:12:06 Was that a release of the natural existing tensions within...

01:12:11 Lots of Indian scholars say, no, no, no, it was all caused by the British because the British

01:12:14 emphasised the Muslim-Hindu split in the 19th century so that they could divide and rule.

01:12:21 That's what people say. Other people say, yeah, that's what happens when empires fall apart,

01:12:26 is that everyone just goes after each other. That's what happens in Eastern Europe when

01:12:29 empires fall apart in the 20th century is what so yeah we yeah there's lengthy debate about that

01:12:36 uh is yeah is it what happens when you've kept a lid on everything for 100 years then you

01:12:41 suddenly take it off and just go sorry we're out you know well that's what an empire

01:12:44 is speaking as layman seems to have to do right like when the autumn empire collapses

01:12:49 gigantic massacres everywhere soviet union collapses there's ethnic conflict all over

01:12:54 the shop over the shop yeah so yeah was the was the defeat of the autumn empire good or bad thing 0.63

01:12:58 World War. This is a big question, right? Middle East has been unsettled for 100 years. But like,

01:13:04 was it better? Like, we have no idea what would happen if the Ottoman Empire had, 0.98

01:13:07 they could have launched a genocide of Arabs like they did in Armenians. Like, I don't know. 0.72

01:13:12 So all you can say is the Ottoman Empire collapses, and this is what happens in the

01:13:16 aftermath. I think, so in India, it's good example. But India is given a national coherence by 0.98

01:13:21 the British, in a way. And it's striking that the Indians, when they declared independence,

01:13:27 they were quite keen to hold, they were quite keen to, that generation of Indian leaders were

01:13:32 quite keen to hold on to India. They weren't that keen to divide up into the smaller states that

01:13:38 there had been in India in the 18th century. So you're like, let's keep the bureaucracy and the

01:13:43 military and the sort of territorial expanse of India whilst getting rid of the Brits like that. 1.00

01:13:48 And you see that in, you see that after the Roman Empire in places like France or in Italy or in 0.99

01:13:52 Spain. All these are like, yeah, we'll throw off the Roman yoke. But by the way, we're keeping hold

01:13:56 of all the things.

01:13:59 And so, yeah, that's, again, super tricky.

01:14:02 So Winston Churchill sat there and went and said,

01:14:04 I told you that would happen. 0.94

01:14:05 The minute you pull out of India, that's what's going to happen. 1.00

01:14:06 Everyone's going to go after each other.

01:14:08 And then lots of people said, no, it's because you pulled out. 0.99

01:14:10 So you mishandled the pulling out process, which is true. 0.74

01:14:12 Or it's what you'd stirred up by denying Indians autonomy for so long.

01:14:18 You know, these things are super tricky.

01:14:21 And it's the idea of better as well.

01:14:24 I think that's the number of it where they go,

01:14:25 it would be better like this.

01:14:27 What does better actually mean?

01:14:29 What does better mean, right?

01:14:30 So in the 19th century,

01:14:31 our old history books,

01:14:32 better just meant,

01:14:33 do you live in massive states

01:14:35 where rulers are in charge

01:14:36 and they can build huge buildings

01:14:38 and it's just awesome?

01:14:39 You know, what does better mean?

01:14:40 Or does it mean life expectancy?

01:14:42 Should we be measuring calorie intake?

01:14:44 So interesting,

01:14:45 after the Roman Empire in the West collapses,

01:14:47 we now think, amazingly,

01:14:49 calorie intake may have gone up

01:14:50 because there's fewer,

01:14:52 say in Britain,

01:14:53 there's fewer British people

01:14:54 working on industrialized farms.

01:14:57 The industrial farms have gone.

01:14:58 Villas smashed a bit.

01:14:59 So everyone's like, okay,

01:15:00 we've all gone a bit Mad Max.

01:15:01 But we've all got our own plots.

01:15:02 We're growing our own veg. 0.97

01:15:03 We've got like little pigs in the back.

01:15:05 We're all, if you can avoid getting smoked 1.00

01:15:06 by the German raiders, 0.99

01:15:08 we're all actually,

01:15:09 people are sort of eating a bit better.

01:15:10 So, you know, there's loads

01:15:12 of very complicated things going on here, right?

01:15:14 What does best, I mean, how should we,

01:15:16 we traditionally measured greatness and success

01:15:18 as sort of big, powerful empires.

01:15:22 How many soldiers you got?

01:15:23 How many ships have you got?

01:15:25 And by the way, are you sort of founding

01:15:26 few universities and better that kind of nice museums?

01:15:28 Well, maybe that's nonsense.

01:15:31 Maybe that's, I mean, look,

01:15:32 there's arguments, aren't there, in the States?

01:15:33 There's this great online meme,

01:15:35 Mississippi is richer than Britain, isn't it?

01:15:37 Per capita.

01:15:38 And everyone's like, what does that mean?

01:15:41 Is it better to be in Mississippi today

01:15:42 or to be in Bristol?

01:15:44 And what does, how should we be measuring these things?

01:15:47 And I think it's a huge issue for humanity, right?

01:15:50 Now, I think one thing about big empires,

01:15:52 They can bring internal stability and peace.

01:15:55 And I've got to say, we can all get a bit carried away

01:15:58 with living in uncertainty.

01:16:01 So the Iraqis have an expression, 1.00

01:16:03 better a thousand years of tyranny than one day of anarchy. 1.00

01:16:07 And I think we're sitting here in this nice studio,

01:16:09 everything's super chilled.

01:16:10 I personally, my family haven't had to, you know,

01:16:13 fight for their property, their food, their children's lives,

01:16:17 domestically here for several generations.

01:16:20 My Polish friends have said, we are the first generation that have not been involved in active conflict for 200 years.

01:16:27 So it's very, very difficult, isn't it?

01:16:30 Do we say, actually, you know, empire's terrible, goodness me.

01:16:35 It must have been quite nice not to have your village sacked by marauding coastal attackers quite regularly.

01:16:42 So that, again, huge problem when you're trying to judge in history what is good, what is bad.

01:16:46 Like, that's a huge problem.

01:16:48 I think that's where your point about just learning from history and trying to live in a better way today is really the only thing that is available to us, ultimately, at the end of the day.

01:16:59 I want to come back to the story of the British Empire.

01:17:03 And first of all, its peak and heyday and success.

01:17:07 You say 1922 in terms of territorially, but energetically, though, I imagine it's a bit before that.

01:17:15 big difference. Big difference. And there's partly a big difference because this is important for

01:17:19 people to think about empire. The empire, you know, think about the American empire today,

01:17:22 Chinese empire today. It's not about the red space on the map. That's really important to

01:17:26 think about. So Britain, the majority of Britain's trade is actually going on outside the empire.

01:17:31 So that wealth is being generated in the Ottoman, in the East, in the Ottoman Empire,

01:17:34 South America, huge. Argentina is almost, it's not a British colony. So again, the British

01:17:39 attempt to make a colony fails. What actually happens is Argentina becomes, you know, there's

01:17:43 British sailors founding Argentinian Buenos Aires football clubs, because you get an Argentinian

01:17:48 indigenous government who's sort of happy to go along with the British government, good trade,

01:17:52 you know, everything's, the Brits don't have to invade. You're like, this is working out very

01:17:56 nicely, thanks, right? Just in the, so Britain's trade with the USA are more important than this

01:18:02 trade with Canada, even though Canada's part of the British Empire, it's British North America,

01:18:06 right? So actually, in terms of energy and sort of global clout, it's far earlier than 1922,

01:18:12 It's absolutely the 1850s.

01:18:14 Why?

01:18:14 Germany doesn't really exist yet. 0.93

01:18:17 The USA is still expanding. 0.61

01:18:19 It's going through astonishing growing pains.

01:18:21 It's about to have a big civil war in the 1860s.

01:18:23 New technology is coming on stream.

01:18:25 They are building steamships.

01:18:27 HMS Warrior.

01:18:29 You can still go and see it in Portsmouth.

01:18:31 Greatest thing ever created by human beings.

01:18:33 Iron Ship. 0.96

01:18:34 Immediately that ship launches.

01:18:35 Every other ship in the world obsolete overnight

01:18:38 when that thing hits the water. 0.99

01:18:40 Iron Ship.

01:18:40 No other ship, every other ship in the world, 0.98

01:18:43 cannonballs is going to bounce off.

01:18:45 So this is a stop.

01:18:46 Now that ship can sail, it doesn't in the end do this,

01:18:49 but it can sail anywhere it wants in the world,

01:18:51 park itself and go, we need you to do this.

01:18:53 And the people will do that.

01:18:55 That's very straightforward.

01:18:57 Britain develops trains, canals and trains,

01:19:01 trades move around.

01:19:02 I should have said one other thing about Britain.

01:19:03 Because of its long coastline, fantastic interlinked.

01:19:08 It's very easy to move raw materials around.

01:19:10 Nightmares, Siberia, well, I'm 20-on.

01:19:13 Right, bringing it.

01:19:15 Newcastle coal, you literally chop it.

01:19:17 It rolls down the hill to the Tyne.

01:19:19 You put it on a boat.

01:19:20 It's in London a day and a half later.

01:19:22 Unbelievable.

01:19:23 So London has got unlimited energy supply

01:19:26 from a little bit further up the coast.

01:19:28 A little guy called Captain Cook

01:19:29 helped to sustain that trade.

01:19:31 So you've got that geography, as I said at the beginning.

01:19:35 So trains, though.

01:19:37 You're inventing telegraphs.

01:19:39 your extraordinary energy is going on.

01:19:44 And then you get a problem.

01:19:46 And actually trains, guys,

01:19:47 this is my hot take for the internet on this one.

01:19:50 Trains, the greatest British invention

01:19:52 that absolutely shaft the British.

01:19:54 And you wonder about AI in America,

01:19:55 they could be interestingly similar.

01:19:58 Trains overcome the tyranny of the oceans.

01:20:03 Okay, suddenly you can move things around your country.

01:20:06 You don't have to take them to ports.

01:20:07 You don't have to do coastal trade.

01:20:09 Suddenly, you're moving vast amounts of stuff

01:20:11 internally in your country.

01:20:13 And that makes continental-sized superpowers possible.

01:20:16 Trains, nothing else.

01:20:18 Previously, you want to get from Vladivostok

01:20:20 to St. Petersburg.

01:20:21 I mean, nightmare.

01:20:23 I'd sail all the way around.

01:20:24 How are you going to do that? 0.99

01:20:24 You've got to go for Africa, Suez. 0.95

01:20:27 Everyone can stop you. 0.99

01:20:28 There's choke points.

01:20:29 You've got to go out the North Sea.

01:20:31 Put a train in.

01:20:32 Now you've got a country.

01:20:33 Now you want empire.

01:20:34 So trains forge the following country.

01:20:37 The USA, suddenly, you can exploit that interior,

01:20:40 you can move people around, you can settle the interior,

01:20:41 you can move weapons, troops, raw materials,

01:20:44 or, you know, it's big time, trains.

01:20:47 Germany, which is a problem for the Brits.

01:20:50 Germany, very, very wealthy heart of Europe,

01:20:54 has never been, no, not for a thousand years or so,

01:20:57 has it been united, effectively united.

01:21:00 It's never been effectively united.

01:21:01 Suddenly, all the German lands can become a nation state.

01:21:05 So you've got Prussia, you've got Hanover,

01:21:08 you've got Bavaria, trains, trains.

01:21:10 You can't, no canals, tiny little coast.

01:21:13 Suddenly you can move goods and ideas

01:21:15 and people around that giant place. 0.87

01:21:17 And then you've got Russia.

01:21:19 Suddenly Russian troops can get from European Russia 0.55

01:21:22 to threaten Britain's Asian empire,

01:21:25 Afghanistan or East, Far East.

01:21:28 And it's trains, they proliferate.

01:21:29 Suddenly the Royal Navy is like,

01:21:31 oh, we can't interfere with this trade now.

01:21:33 We can't just bombard Bremen.

01:21:35 Because the trade's all going elsewhere in Germany, you know.

01:21:38 And they can create nation-states that ultimately dwarf Britain.

01:21:42 And you get land empires emerging, knitted together by trains,

01:21:47 suddenly makes Britain's maritime empire look a bit old-fashioned,

01:21:49 like the Venetians, like the Phoenicians. 0.51

01:21:52 It's like, yeah, no, no, it's fine.

01:21:53 We're linked by shipping channels.

01:21:55 Mate, we're linked by trains.

01:21:57 You don't have to go over the ocean.

01:21:59 The ocean becomes a sort of barrier rather than a bridge

01:22:01 in people's minds. That begins in 1830.

01:22:04 So towards the end of the 20th century,

01:22:06 obviously the USA starts to consolidate Russia, Germany,

01:22:08 and they overtake the British economy

01:22:11 at the end of the 19th century.

01:22:13 So while Britain's got this massive empire,

01:22:15 it's got a major problem.

01:22:17 And you've got policymakers in the 1890s

01:22:19 when the big map on the wall is,

01:22:21 oh, everything's British, mate.

01:22:22 Quarter of the world's population,

01:22:23 pretty much quarter of the world's surface.

01:22:24 But actually the show's over

01:22:26 because what's important is, you know, economics.

01:22:30 Where's the energy?

01:22:31 Where's the energy, right?

01:22:32 And the energy, the second industrial revolution

01:22:34 is in petrochemicals, it's in cars,

01:22:37 that goes on in Germany.

01:22:38 The Brits miss out on that.

01:22:39 The Brits do textiles and coal and iron,

01:22:41 then it goes elsewhere, the energy goes elsewhere.

01:22:44 America overtakes Britain in the late 19th century.

01:22:47 Just you can't compete with America, obviously,

01:22:49 just on every level. 0.96

01:22:50 Germany overtakes Britain. 0.94

01:22:52 And Britain, then Britain is smoked 0.85

01:22:54 by winning two world wars.

01:22:55 Very odd, it's on the winning side in both world wars

01:22:57 that absolutely shaft the British. 0.73

01:23:00 So they spend their entire money.

01:23:02 You can almost, the end of the British Empire, the effective end in terms of that energy is sort of pretty much 1942, 43.

01:23:08 It's completely overtaken by the Americans in terms of ships, in terms of, you know, in terms of investment is able to put into its militaries.

01:23:17 Was there a bit of, there's a lot of discussion I hear about that particular part of it, Dan, which is that the Americans, you know, they took their pound of flesh for the help that they gave during World War II.

01:23:27 And actually, the end of the British Empire was something they were pretty content with.

01:23:32 And in fact, they actively worked towards...

01:23:34 They actively worked towards...

01:23:36 So Churchill had this naive idea that the English-speaking people of the world were going to unite,

01:23:42 the British and the Americans could rule the world together and defeat fascism. 0.73

01:23:46 And he took this big gamble, and he rightly identified Hitler as one of history's worst individuals, 0.84

01:23:51 a monstrous regime. 0.88

01:23:53 And he said, actually, he hoped he could sustain the British Empire and beat Hitler. 0.78

01:23:56 But when the chips down, he really had to almost sacrifice the British Empire. 0.86

01:23:59 He had to become, he had to just get as close as possible to America

01:24:03 and agree to share things like nuclear research,

01:24:06 which the Americans then shut the door and off the wall,

01:24:08 reneging on those kind of deals.

01:24:09 So, yeah, the Americans took their pound of flesh.

01:24:11 The Americans saw the decline at the end of the British Empire

01:24:14 as a strategic win for the Americans.

01:24:17 Still bitter about 1770s.

01:24:20 I'm furious about it.

01:24:21 And, but no, I'm astounded. Of course they did.

01:24:23 And they, now, amazingly, they've had to step in

01:24:27 and sort out or deal with many of the messes

01:24:29 that the British were trying to deal with

01:24:31 as global hegemons. 1.00

01:24:32 They might wish that the Brits were still running Israel 0.64

01:24:34 to this day or, you know, or other parts of the world.

01:24:38 And, but yeah, so you get these superpowers emerge

01:24:42 and you get British, in the 1890s,

01:24:44 you get the Prime Minister Lord Spalsbury goes,

01:24:46 we should have, you know what,

01:24:47 we should have gone in, all in on the American Civil War

01:24:49 way of chance.

01:24:51 The Americans are shafting us.

01:24:52 We should have gone in on the Confederacy and broken up the U.S. project.

01:24:56 Missed the opportunity.

01:24:58 And so they couldn't because of slavery.

01:25:00 It was too, you know, it would have been, the Brits thought about it,

01:25:04 but just couldn't bring themselves to do it.

01:25:06 And so in the end, the emergence of these giant continental-sized,

01:25:15 China, USSR, America, meant that little old Britain couldn't compete with that.

01:25:20 And it comes down to something pretty basic, which is, you know, if you're joined by land, just sort of weirdly, the vibe is wrong.

01:25:28 If you're joined by land to somewhere, it looks like, sure, you can take them. 0.86

01:25:32 So no one questions the right of Russia now to be in the Far East.

01:25:36 That was an imperial project.

01:25:37 It was conquered in the 1600s, 1700s, as you well know. 0.97

01:25:39 But that's fine. 0.73

01:25:39 It's part of Russia. 0.96

01:25:41 The idea that Britain could hold on to Nigeria or India or even Canada and incorporate them into Britain. 0.99

01:25:47 Everyone just like, don't be serious. 1.00

01:25:49 That doesn't work.

01:25:50 You've got the sea in the way.

01:25:51 Like, what are you talking about?

01:25:52 And then you get politicians in the 20th century going,

01:25:54 why sea?

01:25:55 Like, what's the sea got to do with it?

01:25:57 How is it different?

01:25:58 Britain controlling, you know,

01:26:01 just because we're not next door to them.

01:26:04 But somehow it does.

01:26:05 And what's interesting about the British Empire for me

01:26:07 is it disintegrates just on the edge of the era

01:26:10 where, weirdly, air travel and communications

01:26:12 were arguably making a discontiguous empire

01:26:16 kind of feasibly possible.

01:26:18 You couldn't envisage a situation

01:26:19 where you had a parliament in Britain 1.00

01:26:20 with like Australians and New Zealanders

01:26:22 and Canadians kind of in it,

01:26:24 so Africans, Nigerians, whatever.

01:26:26 And you kind of,

01:26:28 Britain was unable to turn its empire into,

01:26:30 which lots of people have been talking about

01:26:31 in the 19th century.

01:26:32 All sorts of thinkers are going,

01:26:33 it's going to become a nation state like Russia.

01:26:35 It's like America.

01:26:37 They've got empires

01:26:37 and Prussia conquered an empire, 0.98

01:26:40 but they're just,

01:26:41 they're other German speaking people,

01:26:42 but they conquered an empire.

01:26:43 Of course they do.

01:26:44 We will do the same.

01:26:45 And they talked about how India 0.61

01:26:47 and these will just,

01:26:48 it will become like a nation state.

01:26:50 We'll have a wonderful, a global state.

01:26:53 And it didn't quite, it didn't happen.

01:26:55 But I struck by the fact that,

01:26:57 partly because obviously it was sort of bonkers,

01:26:59 but at the same time,

01:27:00 there were just pressing logistical reasons

01:27:02 why it just was pretty complicated.

01:27:04 You could be in California and get a train

01:27:07 to Washington, D.C.,

01:27:08 take part in the political process in a few days.

01:27:11 If you're an Australian museum, that's more difficult.

01:27:14 But weirdly, the British Empire,

01:27:15 so by 1940, 1950, by 1980,

01:27:18 2000s, actually there's a world in which, particularly now, you're all working remotely

01:27:23 and you have an imperial parliament. It doesn't matter where you are, right? So it's quite

01:27:27 interesting that. It's very interesting, but I imagine part of the reason for that is that

01:27:30 the core is too small. Like in Russia, the European part of Russia is by far the most

01:27:35 dominant. The Russian ethnic group is the biggest by far. In the United States, it's

01:27:41 very similar, right? Whereas if you had the British Empire today, the Brits would be a 0.95

01:27:46 tiny minority wouldn't they and territorially also and there was the issue of race and that

01:27:51 race is important so the so lots of thinkers are saying and indeed lots of black and brown

01:27:56 british imperial subjects are going to london thinking i'm going to take part in this empire

01:28:01 queen victoria had a west african godchild who she took great interest in and regarded as part of

01:28:06 wanted to come to court married off to a british naval officer wanted to create a wanted to create

01:28:12 kind of mixed race imperial elite. Fascinating. On the ground, that just effectively just can't 0.79

01:28:18 happen. You know, there's just, if you're a planter in what's now Zimbabwe or Northern India,

01:28:24 if you're a farmer, if you're in, if you're living next to Maori people in New Zealand,

01:28:29 they're just the kind of cultural demographic and sort of racist assumptions. Like it just was,

01:28:33 it was kind of too much. It just, it doesn't, it's hard. It was too difficult, I think,

01:28:38 or in practice on the ground,

01:28:40 but you get lots of scholars in the 80s and 80s

01:28:42 for Britain to survive.

01:28:43 They knew what was coming.

01:28:44 For Britain to survive an empire,

01:28:46 we are going to have to transition this

01:28:48 into something else, like a nation state,

01:28:50 which means we are going to have to accept 0.99

01:28:51 that there's going to be brown Englishmen. 0.99

01:28:54 And what you get is you get,

01:28:57 what's interesting,

01:28:58 you get people from Burma,

01:29:00 Aung San Suu Kyi's dad, 0.99

01:29:01 you get Gandhi, 1.00

01:29:02 other people coming to Britain

01:29:04 and being radicalized by the experience of Britain,

01:29:06 which is the government go,

01:29:07 welcome, welcome, your fellow, you know, you're all welcome here in the imperial capital. 0.90

01:29:10 But shopkeepers, like, you know, piss off.

01:29:13 And they're radicalized by it, go, hang on a minute, this isn't going to, this doesn't

01:29:15 work.

01:29:16 And so you're right, there's sort of just the tension, the idea that you can, from the

01:29:21 Maoris to, you know, the Assiniboine tribe in Western Canada, the idea that you're going

01:29:26 to try and somehow, that is a massive project that was beyond the sort of real practical

01:29:31 ability or in the imagination of most people in the 19th century to achieve.

01:29:36 and beyond the kind of technology, I think, as well.

01:29:39 And by the way, you have this extraordinary idea of nationalism

01:29:43 that's still afloat in the world at the moment

01:29:44 that just encouraged people to think of themselves

01:29:46 as peoples, and sovereign power should lie.

01:29:52 Power ought to be exercised by this people.

01:29:55 And peoples were defined by ethnicity and by language, 0.77

01:29:59 and people in the 19th century loved going around and going,

01:30:00 no, you're Ukrainian. 0.65

01:30:02 You're not Ruthenian. You're not Polish. 0.97

01:30:05 No, you are, you know, and this is what you, this is the language you speak, you know, as the Austrian Empire collapses in Eastern Europe, you know, the Czechs are told, no, you're now Czech.

01:30:14 You're not Bohemian, you're not German-speaking Bohemians, you are, you have to learn Czech, which is kind of language that we've, which poets have sort of revived from, from the distant part.

01:30:23 You know, so there's a process of encouraging people to think of themselves as separate entities. 0.55

01:30:27 And that was far too powerful for the British Empire.

01:30:30 The British Empire was like, yeah, we'll all just come on.

01:30:33 We'll all be great imperial subjects and just overlook this.

01:30:35 Everyone's like, no.

01:30:37 You know, I'm, I'm, I'm, I want to be my, I am from this group or that group.

01:30:42 And I'm, and I'm being, there's a, there's a, there's a, the philosophy, the fashion

01:30:47 that's in the world at the moment is this idea of sort of independence and autonomy.

01:30:53 And that tears apart the Austrian Empire, tears apart the Ottoman Empire,

01:30:58 It tears apart the Tsarist Russian Empire, and it's currently at work in the UK today.

01:31:05 So it's a very, very powerful force that was unleashed about 200 years ago 0.69

01:31:08 that ultimately has destroyed many of these big, sprawling empires.

01:31:13 And so one of the final questions I wanted to ask as we're coming towards the end of the interview,

01:31:18 which is legacy. What is the legacy of the British Empire?

01:31:22 Well, it's hard to underestimate the legacy of the British Empire in the world at the moment.

01:31:25 it's um astonishing the partly transmitted through americanness i mean this is why as it

01:31:32 the british empire had enormous impact on the world the fact that the hegemon that followed

01:31:36 the british turns out to be the americans in the same way that greek culture and ideas are

01:31:42 transmitted through rome to the modern world it's it's pretty useful parallel right so but

01:31:49 the english language i mean it's astonishing to me isn't it that we there's there's currently

01:31:54 commercial negotiations taking place in Sao Paulo between Chinese people and Brazilians that are

01:32:00 being conducted in English. It's extraordinary, right? And that's because of the scale of the

01:32:08 British Empire and then the fact that North America spoke English.

01:32:12 Do you know something else, Dan, just from a linguistic point of view? It's also because

01:32:15 English is a very hard language to master, but it's very easy to learn relatively.

01:32:21 I mean, I speak several languages. 0.73

01:32:24 If you learn Russian, it is a nightmare to learn at the basic level. 0.94

01:32:29 So English is very good to learn to beginner to intermediate level,

01:32:34 and it's just very easy, relatively speaking. 0.99

01:32:37 Like Russian and German and other languages just wouldn't work

01:32:41 because they're just too hard to learn. 0.65

01:32:42 Interesting.

01:32:43 Yeah. 1.00

01:32:43 Chinese probably as well, ironically, 0.56

01:32:46 because people go, what's the most common language?

01:32:48 It's Chinese, but that's only because there's a billion Chinese people.

01:32:51 but it's not a language that's really spread

01:32:53 because it's tonal.

01:32:54 You have to make different sounds.

01:32:56 It's all very difficult.

01:32:57 Yeah, that's true.

01:32:58 English is very simple.

01:33:00 I'm still trying to master it.

01:33:03 And then ideas around representative democracy.

01:33:08 Yeah.

01:33:09 Huge important.

01:33:11 And the idea of India, Australia, New Zealand,

01:33:13 the USA, Canada, these enormous countries.

01:33:16 uh you know the japanese system of sort of constitutional monarchy in some ways transmitted

01:33:23 via the u.s through to post-war thinking um it's just it's it's and then there's capitalism i mean

01:33:30 there's the british first factory of the modern world arguably sort of in in nottingham in the

01:33:35 1750s you know organizing labor um insurance patent protection all of these all of these

01:33:44 ideas the sort of foundational ways in which we conduct global trade a lot of that is forged yes

01:33:49 no in amsterdam and and it's a kind of milieu in those 16 1700s but it's it's britain it's that

01:33:55 british empire that's the vehicle for exporting that uh and then after anything else football

01:34:01 well come yeah it's entirely football is exported by the brits um it's you know all of these things

01:34:09 So Britain's fingerprints are on lots of the modern world.

01:34:14 And another thing, of course, is the geography of the world.

01:34:18 You know, Calcutta, Mumbai, Bombay, as it was,

01:34:23 British settlements, Hong Kong.

01:34:26 Madras as well.

01:34:26 Madras, of course, Chennai, yeah.

01:34:28 That was that fort built there.

01:34:30 It's one of those little forts I was talking about.

01:34:31 You're still going to visit the fort in Madras.

01:34:33 And Chennai built in the 1630s as a little pinprick of Britishness

01:34:37 from which the entire continent went. 0.91

01:34:39 I mean, no one could have guessed that, right?

01:34:41 And then Hong Kong, obviously Singapore.

01:34:45 These are places that existed as British trading posts

01:34:50 that helped to shape the modern world we live in today.

01:34:55 I think one of the last I'd say about the British Empire,

01:34:58 and I think this is about some of the tech giants as well,

01:35:00 is the British definitely jumped through a gap in the market.

01:35:04 So China was declining for a lot of internal reasons.

01:35:11 Britain defeated France.

01:35:14 The US was getting started. 0.54

01:35:16 It was just the plates of the world were aligned.

01:35:20 And you got this situation where briefly,

01:35:22 and it's quite brief, the British Empire, interestingly,

01:35:25 it just sort of rose, totally dominant.

01:35:28 And then other people just caught up.

01:35:30 And you think about that with a big company like Amazon today.

01:35:32 They just went, okay, we'll deliver stuff to your house.

01:35:34 You can book it on your phone.

01:35:35 You go, this is the cleverest thing I've ever seen.

01:35:37 Now, in the long term, does everyone else catch up

01:35:40 and nick those ideas and just do that?

01:35:42 And I think in some ways that's what happens in Britain.

01:35:44 It just kind of finds itself as the only guy left on the dance floor for a bit.

01:35:47 France just falls apart.

01:35:49 The Dutch have to fight the French and just get wiped out.

01:35:53 The Swedish collapse. 0.86

01:35:54 Delaware used to be New Sweden.

01:35:56 There are all sorts of other options of the world.

01:35:58 New York was famous in New Amsterdam.

01:36:00 There are all sorts of versions of the world.

01:36:01 But this is the version we've got, and it's, yeah, it's fascinating.

01:36:05 So, yeah, New York's another example of a place like Singapore,

01:36:08 which owes its importance to that British empire.

01:36:14 Do you subscribe to the view that no empire ever really dies?

01:36:17 They just kind of change form and then exist almost in the water?

01:36:25 I think there's some examples of empires that have been sort of eradicated.

01:36:29 but now i think yeah some well they exist in people's minds don't they exist in the culture

01:36:35 so you see that in ancient set in the ancient world babylon long after it exists independent

01:36:40 state people are still obsessed by babylon greece long after greece is conquered and it's still

01:36:46 greekness and ideas it kind of it rumbles along so i suppose the british empire at the moment

01:36:52 i mean it still exists in some weird ways first of all there are bits of it that's the weird thing

01:36:56 about one of the problems we're talking about is the street defense review at the moment and

01:36:59 one of the big problems of the british empire is still like bits of territory all over the place

01:37:03 that need defending or do they you know that that's a big problem for policymakers because

01:37:08 you need a different kind of armed forces to project power to the other side of the world

01:37:11 to protect you know whatever it might be cayman islands or the falcon islands uh and then the

01:37:17 other thing that's fascinating is you know the king is still head of state i'm half canadian he's

01:37:20 on the money in canada it's bizarre isn't it and and so and like the roman empire in the west

01:37:25 It just sort of collapses maybe slowly.

01:37:28 Like, what is the end of empire?

01:37:30 When my mum was a kid in Canada, and Canada was independent,

01:37:34 in geography lessons, she heard about the rivers of England,

01:37:36 not about the rivers of Canada. 0.99

01:37:37 That was shit to remember all the rivers of England 0.98

01:37:39 in her geography lessons in the 1950s and 60s in Canada. 1.00

01:37:42 It's like bonkers.

01:37:43 So empire endures a lot longer sometimes

01:37:46 than people give it credit for.

01:37:50 And if you were in charge of all the schools

01:37:53 and universities in the country,

01:37:54 unlikely to happen

01:37:55 what would we teach

01:37:58 what would be the story of the empire

01:38:00 that we tell people

01:38:01 why it happened

01:38:03 what that means

01:38:06 how on earth it happens

01:38:07 and what

01:38:09 what that tells us about

01:38:13 for me the history is all the same

01:38:15 you want to find

01:38:16 the future hasn't happened yet

01:38:18 the present is infinitesimally short

01:38:21 it's already in the

01:38:22 So if you want to study us, what makes us tick, what makes us fight, what makes us love, steal, share,

01:38:30 you've got to look at the past.

01:38:31 That's all we've got.

01:38:32 All we've got to go on.

01:38:34 And so whether it's the British Empire or anything, I'm like, what happened here?

01:38:39 Why did it happen?

01:38:40 It's bonkers.

01:38:40 And what were the consequences of it happening?

01:38:43 And so in that way, yeah, I'd like people to have a broad, because we tend to get super involved in a particular area,

01:38:48 which I totally understand.

01:38:49 I also like, it's fun to have, the joy of my job is I get to get, you know, to come on shows like this with you guys and do like a broad 300 year story, which is not what typically you do at university.

01:38:59 But yeah, I, I would, I just, I, luckily I don't need to be in charge of anything because it sort of already happens with you, but you're just looking, I want people to have a sense of that broader story.

01:39:10 and but i thought some of the takeaways from what you were saying about it why it happened

01:39:16 were really important as well because look the geographical piece we don't control

01:39:19 but you talked about patent law you talked about uh you know the representative democracy or at

01:39:26 least parliament having to answer to some extent to the people a ruler not being able to just on

01:39:32 a whim do certain things or die and leave the country as had happened in this country for

01:39:36 centuries prior to that. There were lots of things about it that seemed to be good ways of doing

01:39:42 things. And Britain bringing that into the world and birthing those ideas in many cases and

01:39:48 exporting them around the world, that seems to me like an important piece because it's a clue.

01:39:53 I think you rightly talk about how the best measure of what we can do and should do and 1.00

01:39:59 shouldn't do is looking at the past. Well, the British Empire is a fairly short period of time,

01:40:04 historically speaking in which so many of these great ideas get discovered and put into practice

01:40:09 and that seems to me important as well yeah i think it's i think it's what how do you how do

01:40:15 you generate wealth how do you allow humans to reach their potential i mean it's very strange

01:40:20 and in the north of england this revolution these people got no formal education captain cook who's

01:40:24 grew up semi-literate we think but many of these people grew up illiterate george stevenson's got

01:40:30 no formal training. He goes and invents modern railway system effectively. That says something

01:40:35 important, doesn't it? How do we, we should study that, think about that. It's fascinating.

01:40:40 And then, of course, you think to yourself, isn't that weird about human history that there are

01:40:43 George Stephenson's and James Cook's and Mary Wollstonecraft's and Shakespeare's just

01:40:49 all over the world. It's like wildflowers. You disturb the soil and suddenly, boom,

01:40:53 they all just come out. And the vast majority of us will never find out because we're just

01:40:58 yoked to the soil or we're just doing what we do podcasting and you know we might be absolute

01:41:03 geniuses we don't know but no and i think that is the that's very interesting important right

01:41:07 that's really and of course we have learned those lessons mass public education you know encouraging

01:41:12 trying to identify gifted students scholarship you know there are things that we continue to do

01:41:16 but i i find that fascinating on that totally you know that and and also promotion on merit

01:41:23 and again we have learned people who don't know anything from history we learn quite a lot we

01:41:27 promote on merit today there's no perfect way of promotion but on the whole if someone drives

01:41:32 a ship into a sandbank i mean their career it doesn't matter if they're the son of the duke

01:41:36 yeah so um and and those are sort of those are things and that's and by the way that's why our

01:41:42 world is astonishing at the moment we have absorbed lots of those lessons we continue to

01:41:47 that's why we encourage learning that's why we um invest in into medical science whatever it

01:41:55 whatever it might be.

01:41:56 And as a result, the world is just radically changed.

01:42:00 Now, there's also a lesson about doing so sustainably

01:42:02 and not causing climate change, all those sorts of things.

01:42:04 But we are absorbing those lessons.

01:42:07 I just think we need to kind of be mindful of what they are.

01:42:09 Right. And where they come from as well.

01:42:10 Where they come from, yeah, for sure.

01:42:12 And there's one other topic I want to address

01:42:14 in terms of something you said,

01:42:16 which was the rise of nationalism

01:42:18 is such a powerful transformative force.

01:42:20 It changes the world and ultimately, as you say,

01:42:23 contributes to the end of the British Empire. 0.71

01:42:27 If that's here to stay, 0.75

01:42:28 is Britain, the British Empire,

01:42:29 the last great empire in human history?

01:42:32 Oh, I see. Interesting.

01:42:35 Well, in some ways it is because, of course, 0.99

01:42:38 like I say, the Germans and the Russians

01:42:41 and the Chinese and the Americans

01:42:42 very carefully rebranded.

01:42:43 I mean, every state's empire.

01:42:44 England is the Empire of Wessex.

01:42:47 So, but, yes, in that form,

01:42:52 I think, in terms of the idea that you can sail across the seas and conquer.

01:42:56 I mean, that's what's very interesting about some of Trump's rhetoric.

01:42:57 I don't think he means it, but the idea that Gaza Strip becomes, in some form, American

01:43:01 or Venezuela, he's posted about Venezuela becoming American.

01:43:03 That's a very old-fashioned way of looking at it.

01:43:07 I sort of think that, if you look at the polling in America, it doesn't seem very popular.

01:43:11 Canada, Greenland, Venezuela.

01:43:14 There is no longer a kind of popular, which is very different to the past, a popular desire

01:43:20 to take over and own another place.

01:43:23 So in some ways, perhaps Britain is the last

01:43:25 of the great empires in that era.

01:43:27 It's the last of the great empires

01:43:28 that failed to make that jump, 0.85

01:43:31 like the Austrians failed, like the Turks failed,

01:43:34 like the Omanis failed in East Africa.

01:43:38 They failed to make that rebrand,

01:43:40 that jump of rebranding

01:43:41 and becoming a kind of nation state, right?

01:43:44 So now we all think it's completely,

01:43:45 of course, America's shown in California.

01:43:47 I mean, why would it not?

01:43:49 California was conquered, you know, and settled by the Americans.

01:43:53 And yet, it's fine, because it's been reasonably successfully incorporated

01:43:57 into the American project.

01:43:58 It's people feel American, they vote,

01:44:02 they are part of that American political system.

01:44:05 So, yeah, I think my one day, Britain in some ways is both the greatest,

01:44:09 but potentially, in some ways, I guess, I hope,

01:44:13 the last of those giant, far-flung global empires.

01:44:17 But again, we talk about this, France, France's longest land border today is with Brazil.

01:44:23 Because France owns a little portion of northern South America, which is part of France.

01:44:28 You spend euros there.

01:44:30 France attempted, by the way, different to British, Guadeloupe, Martinique, France incorporated

01:44:36 those into France.

01:44:37 They vote in the French elections.

01:44:39 They use euros.

01:44:39 It's the swathes of the Pacific, which are still part of France.

01:44:42 So is France no part?

01:44:43 I don't know.

01:44:44 But that's sort of somehow become a nation state.

01:44:47 but yeah interesting dan what an absolute pleasure fun guys oh it was more than fun it

01:44:53 was incredible before we move over maybe for dan it was just fun yeah i'm like that guy's like

01:45:00 this is the greatest time of my life and the woman's like yeah it was all right

01:45:02 anyway on that note uh what's the one thing dan that we're that we're meant to be talking about

01:45:12 but we're not being talked about oh geez i forgot this bit this is good this bit isn't it um could

01:45:16 be related to this conversation what you mentioned about the ai thing and i was just like oh that's

01:45:21 amazing like you were saying how there was some the technology that we were using here and then

01:45:27 it could be to yeah it may it may look the americans have meant all this ai and they're

01:45:31 thinking isn't this great but in that case are there ways in which other states or players will

01:45:35 harness that ai to absolutely undermine american interest in one i mean that's that's that's what

01:45:40 history like the train thing with the british like the train thing is a bit fascinating yeah

01:45:43 Or the armaments revolution, which in part is...

01:45:46 Anyway, we can get on to that.

01:45:48 Actually, okay, so I think one thing we're not talking about is

01:45:50 as we go into space, the lessons from the past go into it.

01:45:55 I don't think we're having many conversations about

01:45:56 what's going to be the politics of space?

01:45:59 Like, what are we doing?

01:46:01 When Elon Musk goes to Mars and puts a flag in the ground,

01:46:04 what flag is that?

01:46:06 And what does it mean?

01:46:09 And is it under the auspices of the UN or the US

01:46:11 or of his own private interest?

01:46:13 Is it as an individual?

01:46:15 Is it now it's a company that's partially floated?

01:46:18 So I think I'd like to know more about the plan

01:46:21 for moon, space, and Mars.

01:46:27 And I'd like to be inspired by what happened

01:46:30 in the 16th and 17th centuries around the world

01:46:33 and see if there's a really good way we can do this

01:46:35 in a way that does not...

01:46:38 Because looking at the history,

01:46:40 as a historian, you say what will probably happen

01:46:41 is competition and conflict will be exported to these new territories.

01:46:46 So how do we think about that as a species?

01:46:50 You get the Chinese portion of Mars and you get the American portion of Mars. 0.58

01:46:54 And then surprise, surprise.

01:46:56 The big bit of mineral wealth is sort of in the middle.

01:46:59 And you're drilling from...

01:47:01 So that's for sure a concern based on a knowledge of history.

01:47:06 And it may be fine, but it seems to me that we probably need to think about it

01:47:10 before it happens because that's the best way to solve all these problems isn't it when it's when

01:47:14 there's not you're not you haven't landed on mars and discovered a massive load of rare earth and

01:47:21 so that's when it becomes then that becomes quite intriguing dan before we head over to sub stack

01:47:26 where uh you get to answer questions from our supporters tell everybody about your hit podcast

01:47:31 i use that word advisedly hey man history history dance knows history available now on youtube

01:47:35 inspired by you guys on youtube very exciting to be recording them so please dance knows history

01:47:40 it, please go check that out. And they're just as good

01:47:42 as the conversations we've had here with you.

01:47:44 Impossible.

01:47:45 With you, I mean. With you specifically.

01:47:48 Head on over to triggerpod.co.uk

01:47:50 where Dan's going to answer

01:47:52 your questions.

01:47:54 What is your favourite what-if

01:47:56 moment of history?

01:47:58 It doesn't have to be about an important moment,

01:48:00 only that it might have led to

01:48:02 a different present.

01:48:10 We'll be right back.

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TRIGGERnometry - August 15, 2026

How Britain Built the Greatest Empire In History - Dan Snow

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