TRIGGERnometry - August 15, 2026


How Britain Built the Greatest Empire In History - Dan Snow


Episode Stats


Length

1 hour and 48 minutes

Words per minute

187.22

Word count

20,345

Sentence count

1,209

Harmful content

Misogyny

7

sentences flagged

Toxicity

45

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Hate speech

318

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Transcript

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00:00:33.160 It's an extraordinary story.
00:00:35.460 It's a little island off the coast of Eurasia,
00:00:37.480 and then around about 1700, 1750,
00:00:40.040 it goes absolutely mental.
00:00:42.620 We are on the doorstep of the new world.
00:00:45.420 This is epic. 0.85
00:00:46.180 So you've got the British and Irish archipelago locked down.
00:00:49.320 You're not trying to conquer France.
00:00:50.780 So you're like, lads, all that energy, boom, to the West.
00:00:55.040 It will build the largest empire the world has ever seen.
00:00:57.500 In North America, the Brits wrecked shop. 0.93
00:01:00.900 They conquer Canada. 0.96
00:01:03.040 They conquer the whole of the USA east of the Mississippi.
00:01:06.640 They briefly conquer Cuba.
00:01:08.420 They conquer several islands in the Caribbean.
00:01:11.420 There were moments where it did go wrong.
00:01:13.480 Oh, that's, yeah.
00:01:14.600 Why did we lose the United States?
00:01:17.320 Why would you bring this up?
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00:01:44.760 video. Dan Snow, welcome back to Trigonometry. Good to be back, lads. Mate, the first interview
00:01:51.400 we did the history of england it did over a million downloads absolutely one no doubt what
00:01:56.640 hands down one of our favorite episodes we've ever recorded it's really kind of you but i think it's
00:02:00.240 not i think that's because people just love a good chunk of history right we learn it at school
00:02:03.640 we learn little bits of it here and there and it's nice to join all together sometimes well
00:02:07.140 we almost did that and what i was going to say is we did a whole two hours and at the hour 50 mark
00:02:12.760 you were like we're just getting to the best bit and i was like we've got 10 minutes left yeah you
00:02:16.860 guys look like you were about to have a stroke no no no no no we wanted to talk and you said
00:02:21.160 We're getting to the good bit, which is, of course, the Industrial Revolution.
00:02:24.100 This is the bit I know about.
00:02:25.100 And the British Empire.
00:02:26.020 Yeah.
00:02:26.600 So let's get into it, starting there.
00:02:29.660 All right, boys.
00:02:30.620 So, yeah, it's really one of the most exciting questions in the whole of human history.
00:02:34.520 I'm not saying that because I'm British.
00:02:36.060 I'm British-Canadian.
00:02:36.940 My mum's Canadian.
00:02:37.720 So I'm a product of this imperial system.
00:02:39.580 But it is one of the most extraordinary stories, right?
00:02:41.220 It's a little island off the coast of Eurasia.
00:02:44.000 For about 4,000 years, it doesn't really do very much.
00:02:47.260 It plays no hugely significant part in human affairs.
00:02:51.160 And then around about 1700, 1750, it goes absolutely mental
00:02:56.260 and will build an empire.
00:02:58.260 It will build the largest empire the world has ever seen,
00:03:00.880 which at its peak, about 200 years later,
00:03:03.640 quite a short-lived empire, we can talk about that as well.
00:03:06.120 But at its peak, 1922-ish, roughly a quarter of the world's population
00:03:11.080 and a quarter of the Earth's area.
00:03:13.820 And that's underplaying it, for a reason we can talk about.
00:03:15.820 But a quarter of the world's area,
00:03:16.660 formerly under the command of this funny old island in the North Sea.
00:03:20.560 It's an extraordinary story. Why? And with enormous implications. It's why the world speaks English
00:03:25.760 today. It's why many of the world's great cities exist in the form they do. Global capitalism,
00:03:30.280 ideas about democracy. It's why there's parliaments and speakers around the world.
00:03:37.120 Law, all of these ideas, universities, all that kind of stuff, very much stems from this bizarre
00:03:43.560 period of hegemony. Why did that happen? It's such an exciting question.
00:03:46.640 And what was it about this little island that meant that it could happen here before it happened anywhere else?
00:03:52.500 Obviously, it's peopled by heroes, and God was an Englishman.
00:03:57.500 Nice, good pod, lads.
00:03:59.000 So that was the argument given at the time.
00:04:01.340 But of course, the truth is much more interesting in a way,
00:04:05.000 because if you can work out, like any, the exciting thing about history is trying to work out
00:04:10.100 why you get these explosions of creativity,
00:04:12.060 and, you know, whether it's engineering
00:04:14.800 or naval might, whatever it might be,
00:04:17.980 why that happens and how do you kind of replicate that
00:04:20.640 is quite an interesting thing, right?
00:04:21.900 So there's, A, it's an interesting study,
00:04:23.820 but B, there are public policy implications in today
00:04:27.660 that how do you, is it luck?
00:04:30.480 Is it climate?
00:04:32.260 Is it that you jump through certain circumstances
00:04:34.540 that can't be repeated?
00:04:35.780 Or are there things that you can do
00:04:36.860 to sort of encourage those kind of flowerings?
00:04:40.500 And it doesn't just have to be a military mic
00:04:41.980 It can be in other areas as well, of course.
00:04:43.920 So, look, you can start, if you like, with geography.
00:04:49.920 Bear with me, folks.
00:04:51.880 Britain has quite interesting advantages.
00:04:54.440 There's a lot of coal in Britain.
00:04:55.620 It becomes actually the Saudi Arabia of coal, you might want to call it.
00:04:59.220 And so in the 19th century, that becomes important a bit later on
00:05:01.340 when the Industrial Revolution really gets going.
00:05:03.800 It sits upwind of Europe, guys.
00:05:05.760 This is important. 0.99
00:05:06.620 This is why people thought God was an Englishman. 0.74
00:05:08.300 The Protestant wind blew. 0.55
00:05:09.260 because Britain, if you're the Rhine estuary,
00:05:13.260 if you're North Germany, you're Holland, you're Belgium, you're France,
00:05:17.740 Britain is like a giant aircraft carrier sitting upwind of you.
00:05:21.980 In an age where everyone sails around,
00:05:24.140 being upwind is really important
00:05:25.320 because it's quite hard to go up towards it.
00:05:27.980 Upwind means towards the direction the wind's coming from.
00:05:31.180 So you have to sort of zigzag towards the wind.
00:05:32.980 Oh, no.
00:05:33.340 But Britain, British ships can leave Portsmouth,
00:05:36.360 leave Plymouth, leave Chatham,
00:05:38.680 and be on the Dutch coast, be on the French coast
00:05:41.140 within a few hours, right?
00:05:43.060 So that kind of matters as well.
00:05:45.080 So that wind is like, we have better deep water harbours
00:05:48.400 in Southern England than they do in France.
00:05:50.380 Very exciting news.
00:05:51.700 So we have Portsmouth, we've got Plymouth,
00:05:54.300 like I mentioned. 1.00
00:05:55.380 The French have got no deep water harbours
00:05:57.640 on that North Coast.
00:05:58.360 So people who go into Calais on your holidays,
00:06:00.340 go to the harbour, what do you notice?
00:06:01.740 They're all fake.
00:06:02.840 They're all built out massive concrete harbours.
00:06:04.940 You know, when you go in on the ferry,
00:06:06.360 they're lovely big harbours,
00:06:07.280 but they're all constructed in the 20th century. 1.00
00:06:09.420 So the French have got this permanent nightmarish problem 0.98
00:06:13.160 where they've got nowhere that you can put a navy
00:06:15.300 and an invasion fleet full of soldiers
00:06:18.120 and keep them there until the wind's good enough
00:06:20.480 to sail out and invade Britain. 0.62
00:06:21.900 So it's a nightmare for the French. 0.98
00:06:24.320 We can probably come back to that as well. 1.00
00:06:26.500 So there are quite a few advantages.
00:06:28.380 The big advantage, though, is that for most of recorded history,
00:06:31.900 you've got Eurasia, Silk Roads, Spice,
00:06:34.840 you know, wonderful trading networks, rich civilizations, Persians, Alexander Great, Greeks,
00:06:40.640 Romans in Mughal, India. And they're all sitting in the middle of this global sort of landmass,
00:06:45.240 which they think is the world, right? Stretches from Korea to Cornwall, to Ireland, okay?
00:06:51.180 Britain's on the edge of that. We're all, you know, Britain's Britain and Ireland trying to
00:06:54.280 get in on the action a little bit. And, you know, we go and fight in France and there's things that
00:06:57.640 happen. Suddenly, one of the greatest revolutions in the history of the world takes place.
00:07:02.600 Christopher Columbus, trying to get to Asia, trying to get to Korea and Indonesia, that bit
00:07:07.240 I talked about on the other side, he sails West and crashes into an entirely new world. What he
00:07:14.600 thinks is a new world. And then Britain looked at the map and it was really exciting. You go to a
00:07:19.580 medieval map of the world and Britain is like, Britain is like tiny, squeezed on the edge. You
00:07:23.740 can go to one in Hertford, like the map of Mundi in Hertford, looking on the wall. And then within
00:07:27.720 a generation, people start producing maps and you've got the map we recognize today, North and
00:07:32.080 south america you look at that map and think hold on a minute what's in the middle what's in the
00:07:37.020 middle of this map britain and ireland this archipelago so suddenly it's it's it's easier
00:07:42.780 to sail out of bristol liverpool cork to get to the new world like i talked about any european
00:07:48.720 traffic's got to kind of squeeze through the english channel up around the north of scotland
00:07:51.700 god forbid so you're you're sort of sitting your your throat your your heel is on the windpipe of
00:07:57.380 great european trading powers okay so your venices and your genoas and your constantinopels had been
00:08:03.300 like in the middle of the whole thing but suddenly they're like oh wait a minute we're nowhere now
00:08:07.860 because so so britain and ireland like wait a minute and that's why in in the 1400s it's mad
00:08:13.940 situation it's the historian says it's the peninsulas of the peninsula eurasia okay europe's
00:08:19.780 a little peninsula of eurasia it's the peninsulas of the peninsula right it is portugal northern
00:08:26.180 spain britney cornwall devon right those are the places that in the space of 100 years go from
00:08:32.800 being backwaters to being we are on the doorstep of the new world this is epic and it's the
00:08:39.020 portuguese and the spanish start it and they start sailing around so they do two things they
00:08:42.360 sail around africa and access the greatest we're always advertising on the podcast aren't we cut
00:08:47.560 out the middleman you know well so suddenly the whole of the silk road is getting absolutely
00:08:53.760 you're completely hijacking the Silk Road
00:08:58.540 because you're sailing around
00:08:59.440 into the Indian Ocean
00:09:00.160 picking up pepper and spices and silk
00:09:01.940 and everything you want to buy
00:09:02.700 in Asia
00:09:04.220 and just bringing it back to Europe 0.57
00:09:05.900 Western Europe
00:09:06.780 Lisbon
00:09:07.820 Bristol
00:09:09.280 Plymouth
00:09:10.280 right
00:09:10.820 and then all these merchants
00:09:12.520 sitting in Venice and Egypt
00:09:13.820 and Baghdad
00:09:14.780 like oh we you know
00:09:15.560 we have our camels
00:09:16.480 and we take our spices across
00:09:17.560 and we charge a nice little fee
00:09:19.380 on the way through
00:09:19.900 they've just been
00:09:20.960 they've just been completely
00:09:22.120 they've made redundant
00:09:23.060 right
00:09:24.220 Like the way that you're broadcasting this
00:09:25.480 straight to the audience on YouTube.
00:09:27.440 You're not going via, you know, a publishing thing.
00:09:30.320 You're not going via a TV channel.
00:09:31.760 No, no, no.
00:09:32.380 The good people of the world are watching this,
00:09:34.160 you know, as we produce it.
00:09:35.300 Same sort of thing. 1.00
00:09:36.480 So the Spanish start pushing West 0.92
00:09:38.620 to try and do the same sort of thing.
00:09:39.940 They discover gold and silver in the Americas.
00:09:42.840 The English, the French get involved.
00:09:44.280 The Swedes get involved.
00:09:45.600 The Dutch get involved. 1.00
00:09:46.500 They're all sort of piling out to West 1.00
00:09:47.720 trying to take advantage of this new world.
00:09:48.820 So Christopher Columbus, 1492. 0.84
00:09:51.140 Henry VII sends an Italian guy,
00:09:53.420 Giovanni Cabote, who we remember as John Cabot.
00:09:56.000 And he leaves Bristol and he goes and arrives at Newfoundland,
00:10:00.100 not the most exciting part of the New World, although I love it.
00:10:02.440 So that is sort of, they don't know about the Gulf Streams.
00:10:05.160 They go, why are we on the same latitude now?
00:10:06.900 Why is everything so barren and cold up here?
00:10:09.480 It's a nightmare.
00:10:11.020 Francis Drake goes round the world,
00:10:13.140 first English captain to go round the world.
00:10:16.240 He lands in California, claims California's new Albion.
00:10:19.520 Very sad that didn't sustain.
00:10:21.300 You know, that would have been great.
00:10:23.020 He claims a couple of islands off the south of Argentina,
00:10:25.800 off Cape Horn, weirdly as well.
00:10:28.100 We're not sure what islands those are.
00:10:30.240 So explorers are sort of landing in places.
00:10:33.800 They're claiming, it doesn't mean very much at this point,
00:10:35.760 but they're claiming them.
00:10:36.780 What we should also say is the key to the English
00:10:39.400 and the British Empire is Ireland as well.
00:10:41.120 So Ireland's the first colony. 0.98
00:10:42.260 So English people have been attacking into Ireland 0.96
00:10:44.080 since the 13th century.
00:10:46.080 That colonization process is really ramping up
00:10:48.560 in the 1500s, the plantations of Ulster.
00:10:51.300 lots of people, colonies, so people moving to, people being moved to, native population,
00:10:56.560 thrown off good farmland, Munster, Ulster, places like that. 0.80
00:11:00.020 So that's the key staging point for empire, learning how to do empire in Ireland, right?
00:11:06.560 And then you start to get the, they try and have a colony, you probably heard it in Roanoke,
00:11:11.720 the lost colony in the 1580, it doesn't work out, disappears, no one knows what happens to it.
00:11:16.120 So I mean, it's just littered with fails.
00:11:17.660 People compare this to the space race that we're in today, which is private companies, adventurers, individuals, they are trying things.
00:11:28.200 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.
00:11:35.240 But you get your first Jamestown in the early 1600s, so that's a settlement in Chesapeake that sort of just about works.
00:11:43.660 Bermuda
00:11:44.820 and then you go into the Caribbean
00:11:46.840 and in 1620 you get Massachusetts
00:11:49.740 famously the Pilgrim Fathers
00:11:51.520 and then you get
00:11:52.200 just late in the 1620s
00:11:54.480 Rhode Island, Connecticut
00:11:56.280 in the 1620s you get Barbados
00:11:59.240 now Barbados is good 0.84
00:12:00.660 because that's finally a place
00:12:02.520 that will pay for itself
00:12:03.360 because of sugar 0.98
00:12:04.780 because there's a revelry
00:12:05.600 you can grow sugar in Barbados 0.97
00:12:07.200 so you have indentured labourers
00:12:08.940 either the native population
00:12:10.140 or prisoners from England
00:12:12.460 Ireland, Scotland
00:12:13.220 and then eventually enslaved Africans 1.00
00:12:15.400 will grow a vast amount of sugar 0.72
00:12:16.480 and that is bananas.
00:12:18.180 That's a cash crop.
00:12:19.640 So that pays for the colony
00:12:21.480 because the government doesn't want these to be loss leaders.
00:12:24.080 That's why you establish colony
00:12:25.880 and it just goes bust
00:12:26.720 and the government's like,
00:12:27.200 I'm not bailing this out. 1.00
00:12:28.140 You're a bunch of crazy people 1.00
00:12:29.040 who wouldn't try and live on a rock in the New World. 1.00
00:12:30.700 Like, what do you want?
00:12:31.520 So that works.
00:12:32.900 St. Kitts, Nevis, 1620s.
00:12:35.500 Jamaica, 1650s.
00:12:37.000 Cromwell invades Hispaniola,
00:12:38.560 gets kicking and goes and takes Jamaica instead. 0.99
00:12:41.340 So that's all going on in the New World. 1.00
00:12:42.460 So little bits, little islands, some in terms of colonized, eccentric.
00:12:47.300 Protestantism important here because people thought they wanted to build a new world
00:12:50.920 driven by kind of evangelicalism.
00:12:54.200 They wanted to escape what they saw as brutal oppression back in England and Europe
00:12:59.280 because they were a different kind of Protestant to the English crown. 0.84
00:13:04.260 And then also Protestant mission, which is drive the hated Catholics out of the new world. 0.90
00:13:08.760 So you're doing God's... It looks like fortune and glory, boys. 0.99
00:13:10.860 it's great you're doing you're doing it's the old that that wonderful cocktail that drives all of us
00:13:15.160 humans you're making money you're building a reputation and you're doing god's work i mean 1.00
00:13:20.960 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
00:13:25.600 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
00:13:31.760 all working and then just as that's happening actually funny thing is the first john d is one
00:13:37.920 of, he's Queen Elizabeth's astrologer, Elizabeth I Astrologer, he's the first man who comes
00:13:42.220 up with the idea of a British Empire, he coins the term British Empire, he realised, he's
00:13:47.040 pitching this idea, our destiny is to go west, Ireland and then the New World, let's do this.
00:13:53.700 Weirdly, the first, I think the first settlement in some ways, is in Baffin Island in the Arctic,
00:14:00.300 it's a mad story, and it's, I think to this day, the oldest English remains of building
00:14:05.680 work because a guy called Frobisher was sent by Queen Elizabeth to try and get to Asia through
00:14:09.900 the North West Passage, which they thought might be possible. You can do it now, but it was all
00:14:14.280 frozen out back then. Endless people go up there and freeze to death and die, miserable. But they
00:14:18.140 got to Baffin Island. So that's weirdly the sort of first and they discover some rocks and I think
00:14:22.440 it might be gold to now not to be gold. So there's just these eccentric attempts, these little pin
00:14:27.500 prints. East is different because in the Western Hemisphere, it's a matter of conquest, colonization,
00:14:32.080 move your own guys out, grow stuff. 1.00
00:14:34.880 The indigenous people sweep aside. 1.00
00:14:37.960 There's nothing very civilized going on there, right? 1.00
00:14:40.220 That was their view.
00:14:41.440 East is different, right?
00:14:42.300 You're arriving in places that you acknowledge
00:14:43.600 are pretty successful, coherent states, quite advanced.
00:14:47.160 So what you're asking for is factories.
00:14:49.160 Early 1600s, first decade.
00:14:51.480 The East India Company, this British private company,
00:14:54.640 that has the monopoly on trade.
00:14:55.920 It goes out and it establishes a factory there called,
00:14:58.260 sort of a warehouse, really, in Java, in Bantam,
00:15:01.660 in Java.
00:15:02.280 These are like
00:15:02.640 trading outposts.
00:15:03.460 Trading outposts.
00:15:04.380 Jakarta takes 0.68
00:15:04.960 just a little teeny piece.
00:15:06.340 The local guys,
00:15:07.360 oh, that's fine.
00:15:08.200 They give them
00:15:08.620 a little piece
00:15:09.120 of sovereign territory
00:15:10.020 which will prove
00:15:10.700 to be a mistake
00:15:11.340 for those Asian rulers. 1.00
00:15:12.580 So a little factory, 0.93
00:15:13.140 you can have a little factory
00:15:13.980 and then to guard it
00:15:15.180 you put some,
00:15:15.740 you know,
00:15:15.940 a little wall up
00:15:16.620 and then you can have
00:15:17.100 a few little soldiers
00:15:17.780 protecting it.
00:15:18.540 So it's a little,
00:15:18.960 the virus has been
00:15:21.460 injected into the world.
00:15:22.460 So that's near Jakarta.
00:15:23.540 That moves quite quickly
00:15:24.740 to a place called Surat
00:15:27.140 just north of Bombay
00:15:28.100 in India.
00:15:29.080 And then,
00:15:29.840 very weirdly,
00:15:30.640 the first,
00:15:30.960 I think the first sort of formal possession of the crown,
00:15:34.180 so in a way, the first piece, in some ways,
00:15:36.240 the first piece of the British Empire,
00:15:37.900 is rather unusually, is an undermalukas in Indonesia called Run,
00:15:42.460 which is very famous for getting particular spices and condiments from.
00:15:46.540 And they, English people arrive there, and they go, 1.00
00:15:49.520 we hate the Dutch. Do you know the Dutch? 1.00
00:15:50.960 We hate them so much as they're sort of genocidal maniacs. 1.00
00:15:53.840 Please, can we swear allegiance to King James? 0.97
00:15:55.640 In the hope that King James will then protect them,
00:15:58.300 which he is unable to.
00:15:59.560 So Run is weirdly the start of the British Empire,
00:16:03.020 this little tiny island that doesn't end up being British
00:16:05.900 for much English or British for much longer.
00:16:07.380 So that's the sort of, that's the beginning. 0.92
00:16:09.140 So we have a good setting for colonising the new world,
00:16:12.720 effectively, because of the position.
00:16:14.920 What about the technological side
00:16:16.480 and the Industrial Revolution itself?
00:16:18.640 Why do these inventions happen here?
00:16:22.800 And, you know, one of the things I've also read about
00:16:24.820 is how much the technology really just allowed people
00:16:27.840 to work harder as opposed to revolutionising the process, etc.
00:16:31.640 Familiar to all of us.
00:16:32.280 Why does it all happen here first?
00:16:35.760 Why does the Industrial Revolution happen here?
00:16:37.280 Well, this is such a huge question,
00:16:39.920 and it's one that historians really argue about,
00:16:42.660 whether empire is sort of separate.
00:16:44.960 Are there two things going on at the same time?
00:16:46.600 My guess is that they are linked
00:16:47.960 because they happen at the same time, in the same place.
00:16:50.340 So as England and Britain are sort of pushing ahead with its trade,
00:16:54.980 pushing ahead with overseas power projection.
00:16:59.720 Also, things in England start happening a bit later on.
00:17:03.820 England and Scotland particularly start happening a bit later on.
00:17:06.160 So it's certainly true that the desire to build better ships
00:17:10.540 and have better navigation equipment involves having to embrace science.
00:17:14.800 So you'll have heard of a longitude, latitude, things like that.
00:17:17.340 So in working out to get ships safely,
00:17:20.660 making these horrific journeys, both to the East Indies
00:17:24.440 and to the Americas, just nightmarish.
00:17:27.740 You're obviously constantly thinking
00:17:29.320 how to make the ships better.
00:17:30.980 And you're constantly thinking
00:17:31.860 how to navigate more effectively.
00:17:33.460 And so there's a bunch of breakthroughs.
00:17:36.700 The great advantage that Europe has,
00:17:38.560 people use China as a counterexample here,
00:17:42.820 is that Europe is incredibly competitive.
00:17:46.400 So you've got, if I have an invention in Europe,
00:17:48.880 and if I'm Portuguese,
00:17:50.040 and the Portuguese crown doesn't like it,
00:17:51.260 I'm like, I'm off to Madrid, mate.
00:17:53.000 And it's a few days I'm in Madrid.
00:17:54.440 If you have an invention in Nanking and the emperor doesn't like it,
00:17:58.600 then that's the end of you and your invention.
00:18:00.360 You're like, there's no other market, there's no other set,
00:18:02.760 there's no other buyer. Right?
00:18:05.160 So famously, Christopher Columbus goes to, ends up going with this, 0.68
00:18:10.040 it's funded by the Spanish. 0.83
00:18:12.360 He goes to Portuguese, he goes to another aristocrat
00:18:16.040 for a sort of privately funded expedition.
00:18:17.400 He annoyingly goes to the French and he goes to King Henry VII of England,
00:18:20.760 one of the great counterfactuals. 0.78
00:18:21.720 Imagine Henry VII had paid for that.
00:18:23.400 He goes around, shops around, and eventually finds a client, which is great, which is that's
00:18:28.520 the kind of Silicon Valley. There's lots and lots of venture capital around and lots of opportunities.
00:18:32.680 You're not just trying to go through one. So you get a situation where they're stealing
00:18:38.520 off each other constantly. The English will capture a big Spanish ship, it's a Portuguese 1.00
00:18:43.640 ship of the Azores, and the key thing is the documents on there, star charts, navigational
00:18:48.360 guys. Then you bring those back. You're using printing presses to try and pump those
00:18:53.240 out. So it's driving scientific and technological change. So ships are getting ever more effective.
00:19:02.120 And then so weapons, because you're not only fighting indigenous groups in these places, 0.98
00:19:06.420 you're arriving in a place like Run Island, and you have to fight the Dutch there. So Europe's 0.67
00:19:10.740 competition is now being exported globally. And the Caribbean is absolute shit show, right? It's 1.00
00:19:17.580 just islands everywhere. I mean, you go to St. Lucia, it changed its hands like seven times.
00:19:22.180 So British ships, again, you capture a French ship,
00:19:25.960 you go, no, they're making some quite nice 74-gun ships at the moment.
00:19:28.460 You just replicate it, copy it, and make it slightly better.
00:19:32.880 Canon, that's true of canon.
00:19:34.520 And so what's weird is initially, in the 1600s,
00:19:38.760 when Britain goes out and meets the other cultures,
00:19:41.940 they meet on quite an equal basis. 1.00
00:19:43.640 Even in the Americas, indigenous people are quite often able to push back,
00:19:47.280 and it's quite close in some ways. 0.93
00:19:48.880 Because Asian people certainly are, you know, the Mughal Emperor is mighty and it runs much
00:19:54.300 of what to say India.
00:19:55.600 And you arrive, you're like, OK, look, we're just here to trade, mate.
00:19:58.060 You know, you guys are magnificent.
00:19:59.880 But over the next 150 years, the kind of pace of change, the radical pace of change in North
00:20:05.920 Europe and England in particular will mean that by 1800, you're able to outgun, you're
00:20:11.040 able to just completely annihilate.
00:20:12.820 But I cannot say this strongly enough.
00:20:14.260 It's ship technology. 0.58
00:20:15.040 It's the Vikings of the modern world. 0.94
00:20:18.240 The Western Europeans, the Portuguese, Spanish, English, French, 0.95
00:20:21.600 together, and it's the Brits who will really take advantage of this,
00:20:24.980 they work out how to put ships on the water
00:20:28.500 that can go long distance, take heavy loads,
00:20:31.300 and are able to pack a bigger punch
00:20:32.700 than anything else anywhere in the world.
00:20:34.600 Even when they get to India, 1.00
00:20:35.880 on land you can't compete with the Mughals. 1.00
00:20:37.760 On sea, you absolutely trash them. 1.00
00:20:39.820 They don't have anything like it.
00:20:40.760 So we work out how to put heavy guns on ships
00:20:44.600 that can smash other ships to firewood,
00:20:46.740 and also go to ports.
00:20:49.300 Remember, this is before trains or cars or planes.
00:20:52.060 Everything goes by water, everything, right?
00:20:54.700 You want to move food, you want to move goods,
00:20:57.500 you want to move people. 0.99
00:20:58.900 So India is just, the coasts of India
00:21:01.120 are just alive with trade, all right?
00:21:03.620 It's easier to get from Newcastle to Dunkirk
00:21:08.040 than it is to take a wagon of stuff
00:21:10.320 over from Newcastle to Carlisle.
00:21:12.260 So that's why these,
00:21:14.580 Oh, yeah, you're like, well, British maritime, what's that mean?
00:21:17.420 What's it mean?
00:21:18.220 It's not about winning big battles against enemy.
00:21:20.020 It's about arriving at your enemy port and just going, right, lads,
00:21:23.300 we're turning off your trade to lead you to exactly what we want to do. 0.99
00:21:26.280 So even if you're the Mughal emperor, you're like, all right. 1.00
00:21:29.780 I mean, it's really annoying, but I mean, it's only, it's Goa. 1.00
00:21:32.540 It's one port and just pay them or give them trading terms that they need.
00:21:38.780 I'm running a continental sized empire.
00:21:41.200 I don't actually have ships that can compete with them,
00:21:43.100 but they're sort of, they're an annoyance.
00:21:44.360 But so you're able to start, so the early English Empire, Dutch Empire, it's just little key nodes.
00:21:51.680 And in a way, we could talk about as the empire develops and becomes big red blocks on the map,
00:21:56.000 actually, lots of politicians in London are like, oh, Jesus Christ, now I've got to run these places. 0.85
00:22:01.360 What am I going to do with Sudan? 1.00
00:22:03.840 It's total pay. 0.99
00:22:04.700 Everyone hates us. 1.00
00:22:06.280 You know, Christian missionaries just go and razz everyone up and then they get chopped up. 1.00
00:22:09.320 And I've got to send redcoats and deal with it. 1.00
00:22:10.820 If I'm the Chinese model today, the American model, is you control key ports. 1.00
00:22:16.420 You control little nodes. 0.95
00:22:17.400 You get your trade done, nice and cheap, small footprint, big outcome.
00:22:21.820 You get rich, and you haven't invested that much.
00:22:24.000 We'll talk about that, how the empire transforms from little factories and little nodes everywhere
00:22:28.960 to being big old Roman Empire style, big provinces and things like that.
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00:24:32.200 I think availability of venture capital.
00:24:34.240 I think patent laws are important.
00:24:36.040 So the inventors come to England because they're confident
00:24:38.440 that their inventions will be respected.
00:24:41.120 They will be able to keep the money that will accrue to them.
00:24:45.180 They'll be enjoying the profits of their invention. 0.63
00:24:47.380 So you get French people come over bringing steam technology. 0.99
00:24:49.920 They don't want to develop it in France. 0.96
00:24:51.000 They don't want to be in Britain.
00:24:52.040 So that's the law.
00:24:53.260 That's patents.
00:24:54.800 It's not very glamorous, but super important.
00:24:57.320 And to a certain extent, and it's the parliamentary system.
00:25:00.300 I mean, if you own a factory, the king can't just go, I want that.
00:25:03.520 You know, you're like, no, you need an act of parliament
00:25:05.320 if you're going to put a railway through my land
00:25:07.280 or you're going to do something.
00:25:08.480 So it's imperfect, but it's what we talk about today,
00:25:11.540 why liberal democracy tends to do quite well,
00:25:13.220 because people are confident investing their money.
00:25:15.660 They're confident building long...
00:25:17.600 It takes a long time to build a massive mill,
00:25:20.860 and it's a lot of capital.
00:25:22.980 You're not going to do that in Russia
00:25:23.820 because the czar's going to change his mind.
00:25:26.780 Or, you know, that's the problem
00:25:28.020 with capricious albatry monarchs, right?
00:25:29.780 so a lot of that is going on in britain and and and then that just you get this virtuous circle
00:25:34.940 the profits of the sugar trade the slave trade mean that you've got lots of very rich people
00:25:39.740 in britain are looking to invest their money they're they look at these northern industrialists
00:25:43.500 who are doing interesting things with textile you know bit making textiles they're investing in that
00:25:48.200 that's producing more and more money you know so you really it's starting to and then and then
00:25:52.720 that tips over into armaments the industry you start to be able to make better cannon
00:25:57.900 heavier cannon,
00:25:59.340 carronades that would smash French ships
00:26:01.320 to peace at Trafalgar.
00:26:02.520 And so things just,
00:26:04.380 then at some point,
00:26:05.300 around about sort of 1750s to 1800,
00:26:08.280 the Brits get qualitatively better
00:26:09.780 than other people as well,
00:26:10.800 which we'll talk about.
00:26:12.680 Now, some of our American friends
00:26:14.860 are going to be listening to this, Dan,
00:26:16.460 and they're going to be going,
00:26:17.620 so you've outlined it all beautifully.
00:26:20.600 There were moments where it did go wrong.
00:26:22.940 Oh, yeah.
00:26:24.040 So why did we lose the United States?
00:26:27.540 Why would you bring this up?
00:26:29.860 It's too painful to talk about.
00:26:32.020 So I think the thing about great empires
00:26:34.180 is that they lose a lot and they come back.
00:26:38.200 So like if you look at Rome, 0.99
00:26:40.360 Rome spends his whole time getting his ass handed to it. 0.99
00:26:42.840 And the Roman people just go, 0.99
00:26:44.800 another army, let's go. 1.00
00:26:47.400 People should know when they've been conquered,
00:26:48.900 to quote Maximus, right?
00:26:50.000 And the Romans don't know when they've been conquered. 0.78
00:26:51.400 The Brits are pretty good at just, 0.96
00:26:53.820 they get beaten and then they just, they keep going.
00:26:56.740 And in fact, the weird thing about the 1600s is Britain is an absolute basket case, right? 0.95
00:27:00.920 The English kill a king.
00:27:03.820 They have a Republican experiment that doesn't last.
00:27:06.960 So there's one of the bloodiest wars in British and Irish history, the civil wars.
00:27:11.760 They kill the king.
00:27:13.760 Oliver Cromwell tries a republic that collapses.
00:27:17.360 Charles II, James II, his son is expelled or is forced out, abdicated.
00:27:24.240 You know, it's a shambles.
00:27:25.260 it was known as the land of revolutions right so but what's going on on the surfaces the politics
00:27:29.580 is quite wild what's going on the surfaces and the other thing that this is the key point here
00:27:33.180 is you get you get a kind of government effectively it's england and then britain can borrow more
00:27:40.000 money at lower rates of interest the bond markets folks because as we know it will come down as
00:27:43.640 that so in the 1690s partly using kind of dutch techniques and some and some you know dutch
00:27:49.880 financial techniques they've pioneered over at amsterdam you get the mention of the other bank
00:27:54.500 of England. You get these financial and economic innovations like the stock exchange. It becomes
00:28:03.940 easy to swap stocking companies. It's a fungible market. And the British government is overseen
00:28:13.420 by Parliament. So when the British government says, right, this is what we're spending. The
00:28:18.120 French don't produce a budget. The king just kind of sells a bit of jewellery and pays for some shit. 1.00
00:28:22.240 The British government has to present a budget and backbenchers vote on it. 0.99
00:28:26.200 And so people are happy to lend the British government money.
00:28:29.820 It's backed up by Parliament.
00:28:31.300 They're saying, yes, we will pay land tax.
00:28:33.660 You can sell a government bond.
00:28:35.480 It's guaranteed by Parliament.
00:28:36.740 It's not guaranteed by the king.
00:28:38.600 Louis XV was like, yeah, I'm going to borrow a load of money.
00:28:40.800 And if I don't pay it back, too bad.
00:28:42.640 So your interest payments are brutal on that money.
00:28:45.980 So England and Britain are to borrow vast amounts of money at lower rates of interest
00:28:50.440 than anyone else in the world.
00:28:51.300 And that really is the end of the discussion
00:28:54.060 because England, it's a smaller economy than France,
00:28:57.200 can build much bigger navies
00:28:58.740 and spend more money on fighting
00:29:00.440 than the French, for example. 0.93
00:29:02.480 So it's just hugely effective. 1.00
00:29:04.460 The other problem with the French 1.00
00:29:05.780 is the French, tough neighbourhood, right? 1.00
00:29:08.700 The French have got a problem. 1.00
00:29:09.720 The Dutch to the north, the Germans. 0.80
00:29:13.820 Spanish to the south, Italy.
00:29:16.120 So the French are building fleets
00:29:17.580 to deal with the Brits. 0.52
00:29:19.380 They've got to have a fleet in the Mediterranean,
00:29:20.760 in different kinds of ships in the trade.
00:29:22.560 You can't get all the way around.
00:29:24.020 They've got to have massive land armies on the Rhine.
00:29:26.620 They can't decide what they are.
00:29:27.760 The French can't decide what they are. 1.00
00:29:28.880 Are we a land empire? 0.96
00:29:29.720 Are we trying to conquer Germany and northern Italy?
00:29:32.440 Or are we trying to colonize Canada?
00:29:34.280 You can't do both.
00:29:35.080 The Brits is great.
00:29:35.860 The best thing Henry VIII ever did was totally balls up.
00:29:38.700 He's the last king.
00:29:39.620 He's marching around France. 0.99
00:29:40.520 I'm going to be king of France like all his medieval forebads. 0.75
00:29:43.280 The best thing that ever happens to England and Britain 1.00
00:29:45.060 is that finally the stupid monarchs of this country 1.00
00:29:48.760 give up this mad idea of trying to conquer France, right? 1.00
00:29:52.800 They lose, Mary loses Calais, that's it.
00:29:55.420 Calais gone, 1550s.
00:29:57.960 And it's like, okay, we're not a European power anymore.
00:30:02.380 Ooh, what we could do is turn west.
00:30:05.220 So Britain's, England's able to focus
00:30:07.140 its entire military strategic focus
00:30:11.280 on the rest of the world.
00:30:15.700 It's got this, particularly when England and Scotland
00:30:18.420 are united. So you haven't got problems within the island anymore, invading the northern
00:30:22.960 neighbours. So suddenly that unity is quite helpful. You thoroughly conquer Ireland in
00:30:29.000 the late 1500s. So you've got the British and Irish archipelago locked down. You're
00:30:33.520 not trying to conquer France. So you're like, lads, all that energy, boom, to the west.
00:30:39.260 Now, America. So the American colonies extend along the eastern seaboard through the 1600s
00:30:46.560 and I saw the 1700s.
00:30:49.000 I could not mention the 70s war here.
00:30:50.880 It's the most important war in history, folks.
00:30:52.260 The most successful war in British history 0.79
00:30:53.440 when really Britain is transformed
00:30:56.260 into a massive global power.
00:30:58.240 A couple of things happened.
00:30:59.040 This is the 1750s.
00:31:00.980 Britain, for the first time, 1.00
00:31:02.140 it has these little toe holes in India, 1.00
00:31:04.840 but Indian Mughal power is collapsing in the centre. 0.99
00:31:08.260 The Afghans have invaded Delhi, 1.00
00:31:09.860 smashed the whole place to bits. 1.00
00:31:11.260 Mughal power is imploding. 1.00
00:31:12.900 So all of the provinces, 1.00
00:31:14.060 So now all these little English and British and the French and the Portuguese little ports, 0.98
00:31:19.780 and they realise in this kind of chaos that's enveloping India, they go, 0.99
00:31:23.920 well, now's our opportunity to smash our European neighbours. 0.96
00:31:28.580 But also, we need to sort of stabilise this region, because at the moment it's absolute chaos.
00:31:33.420 We can't make any money.
00:31:34.460 If there's a sort of civil war going on in Bengal between Indians,
00:31:38.780 so what the Europeans start doing is they get dragged into the interior, right?
00:31:43.140 And this is something that the Chinese may discover 0.81
00:31:44.940 with their kind of new policy of sort of pseudo-imperialism, 0.77
00:31:48.480 is that you can have a port on the coast somewhere.
00:31:50.920 What happens when the interior just collapsed,
00:31:53.160 the government collapses,
00:31:54.140 and suddenly, you know,
00:31:55.400 your port is threatened from instability or from, you know.
00:31:58.820 So the Brits end up kind of pushing inland effectively.
00:32:02.000 The French do the same. 0.97
00:32:02.640 So the French, the Brits go, 1.00
00:32:04.000 Brits are in Calcutta,
00:32:05.120 which was a village when the Brits arrived. 1.00
00:32:08.140 The French are just up the river in a place
00:32:09.600 no one's ever heard of called Chandler-Gore.
00:32:11.000 But if the French had won,
00:32:11.860 Chandanagor would be the Calcutta of the world, you know.
00:32:14.500 And the Brits push a little force in 1777 up the Hooghly River 0.81
00:32:18.180 and they smash this French fort to pieces
00:32:20.600 and drive the French out of Bengal.
00:32:23.320 And then install, then fight this great battle, 0.61
00:32:25.640 Plassey, people are familiar with,
00:32:27.020 which largely won through bribery and install.
00:32:29.620 And the British, for the first time,
00:32:30.680 become the actual rulers of Bengal.
00:32:32.700 They previously tried to sort of find a local ruler
00:32:35.360 they can rule through, a puppet, you know.
00:32:37.660 And now they're like, we're just going to do it ourselves. 0.70
00:32:39.320 So suddenly Britain is a land empire in Asia, 0.69
00:32:42.220 completely different setup,
00:32:44.560 and it will be quite a difficult transition.
00:32:47.560 At the same time, there's the most successful war in history.
00:32:49.760 That's going on in India. 0.68
00:32:51.440 In North America, the Brits wrecked shot. 1.00
00:32:54.620 They conquer Canada. 0.81
00:32:57.380 They conquer the whole of the USA east of the Mississippi.
00:33:01.540 They briefly conquer Cuba.
00:33:04.640 They conquer several islands in the Caribbean.
00:33:06.700 it's just
00:33:08.120 and by the way
00:33:09.040 in Far East
00:33:09.720 they conquer Manila
00:33:10.820 as well in the Philippines
00:33:11.640 it's unbelievable
00:33:12.240 like it's an astonishing war
00:33:13.620 and it was said at the time
00:33:16.340 the bells are worn
00:33:17.380 threadbare
00:33:18.080 for the ringing of victory
00:33:19.340 and while we're on the subject
00:33:22.980 it's the greatest name
00:33:24.800 of victory in British history
00:33:25.580 that no one's ever heard of
00:33:26.360 right
00:33:26.540 everyone's heard of Trafalgar
00:33:27.500 didn't change a thing
00:33:28.780 the Battle of Quiberon Bay
00:33:31.140 the French
00:33:32.360 at the end of this war 0.94
00:33:33.220 like we have
00:33:33.880 had an absolute shocker
00:33:35.880 and so we're going to
00:33:36.600 We're going to put it all on black.
00:33:38.260 We're going to gamble everything. 0.99
00:33:39.560 We're going to try and invade the British homeland.
00:33:41.400 We've lost Canada.
00:33:43.220 We have lost all of our forts in, you know, Fort Duquesne has now become Pittsburgh,
00:33:49.440 named after the British Prime Minister Pitts.
00:33:51.100 You know, this is through the American Midwest.
00:33:53.040 This is a catastrophe.
00:33:54.500 We've lost all our lovely, fantastic Guadeloupe, these fantastically wealthy Caribbean islands.
00:33:59.820 So we are going to gamble everything.
00:34:01.360 Late 1759, big problems.
00:34:04.000 as you know, as I've already said, the French fleet has to leave to go and pick up the army
00:34:08.220 in a different location because they can't all meet in one place. They sail around from Brest,
00:34:13.220 they try and pick up their invading army in southern Brittany, the British follow them,
00:34:17.820 and as night falls, they see the British coming in with a gale, it's November, and they go,
00:34:22.360 the British will never, we'll hide in the shallows here in Key Brom Bay, it's a nightmare of some
00:34:26.720 reef-strewn, rocky hellhole, crashing waves, big gale coming in from the west,
00:34:32.920 and it's night.
00:34:34.320 They will anchor in here.
00:34:35.320 We'll stay.
00:34:35.660 The Brits will be in big trouble.
00:34:37.400 And Admiral Hawke, the legend,
00:34:40.280 orders his fleet to put up more sails,
00:34:43.340 increase speed,
00:34:44.620 follow the French into this uncharted territory. 0.99
00:34:46.780 And they go in there.
00:34:47.700 They fire point blank broadsides at French ships.
00:34:50.440 They sink immediately.
00:34:51.680 Like it's an absolute catastrophe for the French.
00:34:55.120 Ships blasted to pieces.
00:34:58.000 Astonishing bravery and seamanship is the point.
00:35:00.440 So you're starting to see these ships are getting very, very better in terms of engineering.
00:35:05.600 The British introduce exams for officers, meritocracy to a certain extent.
00:35:10.940 Obviously patronage still matters.
00:35:12.360 But if you're going to be in command of one of the king's ships, you can't just be effectless toff.
00:35:16.500 You can do that in the army, because all you've got to do in the army is stand there while bullets whiz.
00:35:19.520 All you've got to do in the army is have a ramrod straight back and give an example to your men.
00:35:23.360 This is always said in the British army.
00:35:25.140 Officers teach their men how to die.
00:35:27.760 Sergeants teach their men how to fight.
00:35:28.920 So all you've got to do as a young officer,
00:35:30.460 if you come out of Eton and just go,
00:35:32.060 all right, lads, here we are.
00:35:33.620 Whereas if you're in command of one of the most expensive objects
00:35:36.100 ever created at that point of history, 0.98
00:35:37.540 you think, shit, you've got to know what you're doing. 0.99
00:35:39.560 So anyway, they're going in there, 1.00
00:35:40.780 actually annihilate this French force, 0.65
00:35:42.560 and that's at the end of this year of victory.
00:35:44.120 1759, when HMS Victory, Nelson's HMS Victory,
00:35:47.640 is laid down that year and called Victory
00:35:49.240 because of the year of victories.
00:35:51.200 So that gives, now I'll come back to your question.
00:35:53.020 That gives the North American empire
00:35:57.220 is now as big as the empire carved out
00:35:59.340 by Alexander the Great.
00:36:00.080 Very briefly, this one glorious moment
00:36:02.000 in British history, 0.89
00:36:03.260 Britain controls from the Arctic
00:36:05.060 to Louisiana, to New Orleans, okay?
00:36:10.400 A vast empire, the whole of Eastern Canada,
00:36:13.580 the whole of North America, Eastern Mississippi.
00:36:17.080 And what did the American colonists do?
00:36:18.700 Very cleverly, indeed.
00:36:20.360 They go,
00:36:23.160 you guys have defeated all of our enemies now. 1.00
00:36:26.180 The French are gone from North America. 1.00
00:36:29.760 So why do we need to, we don't need to, we don't need you around anymore. 1.00
00:36:32.900 Thank you very much. 0.98
00:36:33.900 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
00:36:45.740 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
00:36:51.440 This is a big, complicated, messy empire now, right? 1.00
00:36:54.300 And London's like, that's going to be quite expensive.
00:36:55.680 Do you want to pay some taxes for that?
00:36:57.340 And the Americans go, we're not paying any taxes
00:36:59.020 unless we can have our representatives in London,
00:37:01.400 which, by the way, is one of my great counterfactuals,
00:37:03.700 one of my great moments in history,
00:37:04.840 Benjamin Franklin said,
00:37:06.160 we'll just send MPs to an imperial parliament in London
00:37:10.700 from the American colonies.
00:37:12.660 It doesn't seem that unreasonable a request, to be fair.
00:37:15.000 I know, I agree.
00:37:16.580 And can you imagine what a wonderful country we'll be living today,
00:37:19.120 stretching from Kent to San Francisco.
00:37:22.060 We'll be so cool.
00:37:23.180 Anyway, it didn't happen.
00:37:24.860 Well, there's all sorts of interesting reasons why it didn't happen,
00:37:27.640 but it didn't happen.
00:37:28.040 So slowly, both sides escalates.
00:37:32.500 The British show a very, very clumsy statesmanship.
00:37:36.000 The Americans don't want to pay taxes.
00:37:38.400 They also realize strategically they don't really need to be part of this empire anymore.
00:37:41.760 There's going to be great opportunities now if they go off by themselves 0.77
00:37:44.080 because there's no kind of existential threat as there was when the French did. 1.00
00:37:48.780 And so they break away. 0.70
00:37:51.040 the Brits then attempt to fight, the Brits send the largest, as we are sitting here now 250 years
00:37:57.360 ago, the Brits send the largest European expeditionary force ever sent abroad to retake
00:38:03.100 New York in the summer of 1776. The Declaration of Independence takes place. The Brits can't defeat
00:38:08.020 the Americans. And all of the European enemies of Britain all jump in and turn it into a global war.
00:38:14.240 The Spanish threatened Gibraltar, which they are hopping mad, that the Brits owned. They've owned 0.62
00:38:18.900 They lived for about 70 years now.
00:38:19.940 I mean, they still are.
00:38:20.820 They still are.
00:38:21.540 And I understand.
00:38:22.240 I mean, in a way, I understand.
00:38:23.100 If you look at the map,
00:38:23.680 I must be really not.
00:38:25.600 My granddad was a fortress commander at Gibraltar.
00:38:28.200 That's very cool.
00:38:29.140 Anyway, so they are...
00:38:32.020 So they put a lot of pressure on that,
00:38:33.680 which for the Brits is sort of as important,
00:38:35.360 if not more important, than North America. 0.50
00:38:36.920 The French are just sailing around the Caribbean islands, 1.00
00:38:39.320 wrecking shock, 0.80
00:38:40.020 and the Brits are going to protect their sugar islands.
00:38:42.680 And in the end,
00:38:43.480 a kind of astonishing pincer move very effectively
00:38:47.280 between George Washington's American army
00:38:49.780 and the French fleet,
00:38:50.880 and the French army and French fleet
00:38:52.000 gather on the Chesapeake
00:38:53.420 and destroy and neutralize
00:38:56.020 a British army in Virginia.
00:38:58.500 Well, the great naval defeats
00:38:59.440 of British history, folks.
00:39:00.980 Very difficult to talk about.
00:39:02.600 The French defeat the British.
00:39:04.500 It's a draw, really, 0.67
00:39:06.000 but the British do not press the attack home
00:39:10.640 and are not able to rescue this force.
00:39:13.440 And the Brits go,
00:39:14.060 this is too expensive.
00:39:14.780 We can't cope with this.
00:39:16.240 Adam Smith, by the way,
00:39:17.420 so the Scottish man
00:39:19.100 who's sort of coming up with the ideas
00:39:20.240 of tenets of capitalism this time, 0.99
00:39:21.420 he goes, you're crazy. 0.96
00:39:22.700 You don't need them to be colonies. 0.98
00:39:24.840 Colonies are expensive.
00:39:25.820 For all the reasons I've said, 1.00
00:39:26.420 you'll pay for forts and roads and stupid things. 1.00
00:39:29.160 Just trade with them. 1.00
00:39:30.040 We'll all make much more money
00:39:30.900 if we just trade.
00:39:31.820 It's an interesting thing going on there.
00:39:33.720 And indeed, it's true.
00:39:34.620 American colonies break away,
00:39:36.000 but become an enormous market for British goods.
00:39:40.520 And obviously, the subsequent relationship
00:39:42.060 between Britain and America is well established.
00:39:43.960 is quite sort of beneficial to both.
00:39:46.060 And the Brits are able to go and sell railways
00:39:47.920 and enjoy access to the American market.
00:39:52.700 But yes, so those colonies break away,
00:39:54.320 but most of the North American colonies
00:39:55.600 did not break away, let's just remember.
00:39:56.940 So Canada, Nova Scotia,
00:39:58.900 and then the Caribbean colonies did not break away.
00:40:00.440 So these 13 colonies have gone.
00:40:03.120 And so that's disaster.
00:40:04.880 That's the really interesting, weird moment in this story.
00:40:06.900 In the 1780s, everyone's like, Britain's doomed.
00:40:08.700 It's not, but actually Britain had enormous...
00:40:10.700 France bankrupted itself. 1.00
00:40:12.580 French, you ought to feel sorry about the French. 1.00
00:40:13.960 They went all in helping the Americans.
00:40:16.200 The Americans went to the peace treaty
00:40:17.900 and the French and Americans were like, 0.73
00:40:19.080 we are going to make Britain pay, man.
00:40:21.240 And the Americans and Brits did a little side deal.
00:40:23.620 And actually, they were both cool with that.
00:40:24.760 And the Americans abandoned the French. 0.52
00:40:26.040 So the French got nothing for that war 0.90
00:40:27.580 other than embarrassing the Brits. 0.87
00:40:29.020 And the French Revolution happens less than 10 years later. 0.91
00:40:34.360 They absolutely bankrupt themselves, 0.82
00:40:37.020 going all in to try and get American defenders.
00:40:39.240 Achieve no concrete outcomes for them at all.
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00:40:56.360 If you want to start the same way, that's shopify.co.uk slash trigger. With Shopify,
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00:41:14.140 uh but and and then and then you get the the great revolutionary you know what was called
00:41:21.460 the great war at the time so french revolution happens we were a couple years britain and france
00:41:24.700 were at war and at war for a generation until 1815 so from 1793 to 1815 and in that and that
00:41:32.940 And that is this, Britain turns itself into this astonishing military power.
00:41:40.180 It's able to access the trade of the world.
00:41:42.720 It's able to access capital.
00:41:44.140 It's able to borrow money from the rest of the world while blockading France, starving
00:41:49.740 France. 0.78
00:41:50.740 It gobbles up the colonies of everyone else. 0.95
00:41:53.240 It takes South Africa off the Dutch. 0.96
00:41:55.800 It helps to destroy Spanish power in North America. 0.86
00:41:59.940 At one point in that war, it's the forgotten moment in the British Empire.
00:42:02.940 the garrison of South Africa
00:42:05.560 took it upon itself
00:42:06.520 to invade Buenos Aires
00:42:07.660 the British 0.99
00:42:08.140 amazing
00:42:08.660 with no permission from London
00:42:10.400 that's the thing about empire
00:42:11.840 it's crumbling frontiers
00:42:13.120 we call it
00:42:13.540 so often it's not London going
00:42:14.700 next we will invade over here
00:42:16.180 it's often like you see 1.00
00:42:16.920 the Romulan
00:42:17.180 it's local commanders
00:42:18.140 local people going
00:42:18.960 right we're going over there
00:42:20.040 we're going to take that land
00:42:20.840 and London's often like
00:42:22.120 please stop doing that
00:42:23.580 because what happens
00:42:25.900 through the 18th and 19th century
00:42:27.360 is like George Washington
00:42:28.280 famously accidentally
00:42:29.500 started the French Indian War
00:42:30.960 is once British people
00:42:32.900 are killed, the government's like, we have to do something now. So often in Africa, it's like 0.99
00:42:37.860 missionaries going, we're going to convert Christianity. They get smashed to bits, chopped 0.97
00:42:41.780 to pieces, the locals. And then the newspapers go, British Christians murdered by barbarous 1.00
00:42:48.700 tribes. So the British go, right, can you please detach a column of infantry to go and 0.99
00:42:53.280 take this completely random bit of territory miles from anywhere. And we talk about it today,
00:43:00.420 don't we how the cost is often borne by the public and the profits so they're enjoyed by
00:43:05.440 the mine owners the loggers you know whatever it is these private interests quite interesting
00:43:10.420 so anyway so this the uh the garrison of south goes and invades buenos aires and enjoys some
00:43:17.340 initial sessions and for a very brief exciting period for the british they think well do we just
00:43:21.960 take over the spanish empire in south america like is this is this going to be you know is it
00:43:27.000 going to be, you know, Canada effectively in the north, and then Argentina, Chile, is this going
00:43:31.160 to be British? And then fascinatingly, the people of Buenos Aires fight a kind of guerrilla campaign
00:43:36.360 and kick the British out. And so that's a big, that's a reverse. So the British suffer defeats
00:43:42.080 all the time in this period, but their financial, their economic, and eventually their industrial
00:43:46.080 muscle ensures that they can kind of come back. And so yeah, South America, but South Africa,
00:43:51.100 at the start of things to Africa, and then the islands of the Indian Ocean.
00:43:54.400 Oh, the India, the various Indian confederations you might have heard of,
00:43:59.820 Tipu Sultan in Mysore, the Brits by four wars in Mysore against Tipu Sultan in the 1790s,
00:44:06.260 the Marathas in central India. 0.72
00:44:08.660 So slowly, the British are being, they control Bengal.
00:44:11.940 So to protect Bengal, you have to invade the next guy. 0.72
00:44:14.180 And then to do that, again, you're drawn into the interior. 0.96
00:44:18.440 And then we'll come back to that.
00:44:19.540 There's a great moment in this, the whole, some people say the whole of the British Empire in Africa
00:44:24.340 was acquired in a sort of absence of mind.
00:44:28.040 Like it was, you basically want to control Cape Town, and you want to control the Suez Canal.
00:44:33.780 But then to do that, there's trouble to just be on the frontier.
00:44:36.760 You end up controlling the largest empire the world's ever seen,
00:44:38.940 because you've got to come and go, well, you've got to control Suez Canal, you've got to control Egypt. 0.96
00:44:43.420 Problem with Egypt, you've got to control Sudan. 0.78
00:44:45.280 So then you're sucked in Sudan, you've got to pull into Central Africa. 0.72
00:44:48.100 So it's strange. 0.85
00:44:49.760 But yes, that's the American answer. 0.99
00:44:51.840 I think that's roughly speaking true.
00:44:53.360 But I should say that there were limits of British power.
00:44:55.480 The Brits could not send anything like enough troops
00:44:57.900 to conquer, reconquer the American colonies.
00:45:00.600 It was just way beyond the ability
00:45:02.920 of the British states at that point.
00:45:04.580 And it's simply because we just didn't have the manpower.
00:45:07.280 We just couldn't send the troops.
00:45:09.260 Yeah, yeah. 1.00
00:45:09.780 So the Brits are hiring Germans called Hessians. 1.00
00:45:12.640 We call them Hessians. 1.00
00:45:13.520 Tens of thousands of them to fight. 0.99
00:45:15.440 The Brits cannot, you know,
00:45:17.260 the Brits are not the Soviet Union in the 20th century.
00:45:19.560 The Brits just don't have, you can't,
00:45:22.060 remember what I said about the Brits.
00:45:23.580 The Brits have developed quite a nice model. 0.99
00:45:25.040 The poor old French is fighting the bloody Germans, 1.00
00:45:27.240 fighting the Dutch, fighting,
00:45:28.940 and trying to maintain the Navy. 0.81
00:45:30.520 The Brits can go all,
00:45:31.600 the Brits traditionally have a tiny army,
00:45:33.960 most of which are based in Ireland.
00:45:36.060 And that means you invest massively into the Navy,
00:45:38.820 which is really quite large.
00:45:41.000 And then the Army is almost a kind of Royal Marines force,
00:45:43.780 just goes ashore from the Navy
00:45:45.140 and just sort of secures these little forts around the world,
00:45:48.260 these places I've talked about.
00:45:49.780 Now, to conquer the Americas requires, you know,
00:45:54.900 armies on a kind of ancient scale.
00:45:57.520 You've got to march from New York
00:45:59.420 with a force of 100,000 men
00:46:01.680 through New Jersey to Pennsylvania and keep going.
00:46:05.640 The Brits cannot do that.
00:46:08.740 They don't have the manpower.
00:46:10.620 They don't have the money to that.
00:46:11.500 Because they're trying to maintain their empire
00:46:12.900 in all these other places.
00:46:13.740 Well, I was going to say,
00:46:14.440 I mean, one of the concerns during what the Americans called the Revolutionary War was
00:46:18.240 actually, because there was a war between Spain, France, and England, you're worried
00:46:23.620 about the homeland being invaded, and you've got all these other concerns.
00:46:26.280 That's true. 1.00
00:46:26.640 That's a good point.
00:46:27.260 So you fight some big naval battle in the homeland, really important naval battles there.
00:46:32.080 So it's a nightmare.
00:46:32.640 You're trying to maintain, you're trying to blockade the American colonies.
00:46:36.920 Can you imagine?
00:46:37.360 Newport, Rhode Island.
00:46:39.720 You're trying to blockade the Delaware, Pennsylvania.
00:46:41.520 you're trying to control the southern colonies, Savannah.
00:46:46.160 Vast numbers of ships required.
00:46:47.420 The Americans are phenomenal mariners. 1.00
00:46:49.040 Little ships going to gun running, taking cotton out, 0.94
00:46:52.680 trading with the Caribbean, trading with the French. 0.88
00:46:56.000 Nightmare.
00:46:57.040 Then you're trying to maintain naval supremacy in the Caribbean.
00:47:00.020 Then you're trying to do it in the Mediterranean 0.96
00:47:01.580 where the Spanish are hammering you in Gibraltar 0.96
00:47:03.420 and various other places. 0.91
00:47:04.820 And then you've got a problem in the Channel as well.
00:47:07.060 Nightmare. 1.00
00:47:07.580 And then God, Asia. 0.98
00:47:08.840 So this is, even we're saying the British Empire was like,
00:47:11.520 hegemonic time. I mean, this is, this is the kind of thing that even today, American carrier groups 0.95
00:47:15.900 are going to struggle to sort of fight simultaneously in all these regions. In India,
00:47:20.020 interestingly, they get over the problem by very, very few white British troops out there.
00:47:24.120 They raise Indian, they raise Indian troops. So there's these vast armies fighting kind of
00:47:29.860 continental, that kind of continental scale. You're invading central India, Maratha, 0.90
00:47:35.760 but you're using overwhelmingly majority locally conscripted or raised Indian troops. So
00:47:41.440 the British regime in India looks quite Indian. And there's the other side of the empire, which 0.96
00:47:50.460 has now become a talking point, a culture war talking point, which is the slave trade. So
00:47:56.500 let's talk about that. Let's talk about how it began through to the process, the process of
00:48:03.700 enrichment. Who was it who actually made the money? And then how it was disbanded and all the rest of
00:48:09.600 So, slavery, reasonably normal. 1.00
00:48:13.020 The North Africans have been taking European slaves 1.00
00:48:15.960 from Southern Europe and as far away as Iceland 0.95
00:48:18.300 for a long time.
00:48:19.140 In fact, there's a raid in Cornwall,
00:48:20.520 a raid in Ireland,
00:48:21.160 whole villages have been disappeared,
00:48:22.980 going back to what is today Algeria,
00:48:25.780 in particular, Tunisia places.
00:48:29.220 You know, this slavery is pretty widespread. 1.00
00:48:32.560 And the Portuguese start cruising down
00:48:35.060 the coast of West Africa in the 1400s,
00:48:36.980 and they discover gold.
00:48:38.000 So that's a huge boost to Portuguese. 0.99
00:48:39.400 and they also bring back enslaved people 1.00
00:48:41.460 that are buying off local African tribes
00:48:43.640 that are taking advantage of an existing slave market there. 0.98
00:48:46.080 And they are coming back to Lisbon 0.51
00:48:47.460 and they're working on Portuguese farms. 0.59
00:48:49.700 And then they are working in the Canary Islands.
00:48:52.760 And they are starting to try and grow sugar in the Canary Islands.
00:48:55.120 That doesn't go very well.
00:48:56.200 And then so when West Africa,
00:48:57.560 when the Western Hemisphere is discovered by Europeans, 0.87
00:49:00.680 the obvious thing is to take, you know, 0.95
00:49:02.200 indentured labor, so locals.
00:49:03.840 The locals die out in Astana.
00:49:05.920 I'm very few.
00:49:06.820 Can I just pause you there?
00:49:07.720 because there'll be people who don't know the difference
00:49:09.520 between a slave and indentured servant.
00:49:11.920 So these are people who almost sell themselves indentures.
00:49:15.000 You agree you're going to do 10 years hard labour,
00:49:17.440 and then you almost sell yourself to a company.
00:49:20.440 Or you're a convicted felon,
00:49:24.880 and you work for a sugar-growing company,
00:49:27.120 and you just go and labour in the fields,
00:49:28.440 and there may be a promise of get your independence back
00:49:31.400 or some land or something at the end of it.
00:49:33.560 So the population of the Caribbean, the indigenous population,
00:49:36.560 There are apparently some indigenous Caribs left today
00:49:40.180 in some places, but we're talking very few.
00:49:42.500 So it's full of indigenous Americans.
00:49:44.260 We might know them, referred to as Indians. 1.00
00:49:47.540 They die at appalling mortality through Western,
00:49:51.180 through Eurasian disease, 0.98
00:49:52.900 which they have no resistance to. 1.00
00:49:55.360 So typhus, smallpox, measles, no indigenous. 1.00
00:49:58.820 90% of indigenous Americans will die 1.00
00:50:01.780 within 200 years of Columbus arriving in the new world.
00:50:04.220 So it's astonishing mortality.
00:50:05.660 And overwhelmingly from disease.
00:50:07.980 The disease is traveling faster than the Europeans.
00:50:09.920 So we don't know.
00:50:10.760 So the disease will arrive in what is now Manitoba or Saskatchewan,
00:50:15.020 years before French trappers, 1.00
00:50:16.600 because the indigenous people are trading and moving around.
00:50:19.420 So there's an expression, which is the Europeans will arrive in a place
00:50:22.840 and go, well, it's a great virgin land.
00:50:25.020 There's a famous expression, it wasn't virgin, it was widowed. 0.99
00:50:28.000 So there had been Native Americans.
00:50:31.100 They existed in quite large cities at times in Alabama.
00:50:35.280 there was a city, fields, crops, settles, agriculture.
00:50:40.540 By the time Europeans arrive, 0.99
00:50:42.560 they go, oh, these people are hunter-gatherers 1.00
00:50:44.000 living in small little groups,
00:50:45.120 because actually there's been
00:50:45.880 sort of fundamental collapse of that system.
00:50:48.660 So anyway, so the characters...
00:50:49.800 Dan, sorry, I know we keep interrupting,
00:50:51.500 but these are just such interesting things to get into.
00:50:54.820 There have been throughout history
00:50:56.460 these mass movements of people,
00:50:58.140 different people from different parts of the world,
00:51:00.000 not quite the same distance, of course,
00:51:02.120 coming in contact.
00:51:03.120 Is this pretty standard, what happens when people encounter each other?
00:51:08.260 Or was this...
00:51:09.020 This was astonishing because of this weird fact
00:51:11.880 that the two giant continents on Earth have never had any contact
00:51:15.220 since the... since 15...
00:51:17.280 Well, I think it's about the latest thinking,
00:51:20.000 I think about 30,000 years ago. 0.64
00:51:21.920 The Americans are just cut off from Europeans.
00:51:24.200 So there's the famous Colombian food exchange, which I love.
00:51:26.620 So Julius Caesar, Charlemagne, Michelangelo
00:51:31.740 and never tasted potato, tomato, chocolate, tobacco,
00:51:36.880 turkey, never seen it, never heard of it.
00:51:39.480 Wow. 1.00
00:51:39.960 Italians, no tomatoes in Italian cooking. 1.00
00:51:42.840 Those come from the Americas.
00:51:45.880 Corn as well.
00:51:46.840 Corn.
00:51:47.820 Very good point.
00:51:49.340 In return, but there are no,
00:51:52.180 this is a whole separate fascinating issue,
00:51:54.340 but why do the Europeans conquer the Americas
00:51:55.840 not the way around?
00:51:56.520 Because the disease is part of it. 0.95
00:51:57.440 Also in the Americas,
00:51:58.040 there are no beasts of burden in the Americas.
00:51:59.580 Because there's a llama, which can carry a certain amount of weight, 0.99
00:52:01.840 but the llamas are a pain in the ass to farm and reproduce. 1.00
00:52:05.240 And they spit at you. 1.00
00:52:06.120 They spit. They're nasty. 0.95
00:52:07.120 They don't like being domesticated. 1.00
00:52:11.000 They're Latin in temperament. 1.00
00:52:12.380 Yeah, they are. Well, that's true. 1.00
00:52:13.680 I mean, what do you want? 0.57
00:52:14.740 I was about to say, they're really lazy.
00:52:16.480 You're allowed to say that.
00:52:17.600 Yeah, I am. I'm allowed to say, yeah.
00:52:19.240 They don't like working.
00:52:20.600 And so horses, cows, pigs, ox, all of these animals arrive in the Americas,
00:52:28.200 which weren't there for.
00:52:29.660 So by the way, that means that all of the great
00:52:31.120 some Aztec, Maya buildings,
00:52:32.820 no horses are being involved in those.
00:52:34.920 No wagons, axles, all that kind of stuff.
00:52:37.960 So they need a labour source
00:52:41.200 because they discovered these islands
00:52:42.380 are really good for growing sugar,
00:52:44.080 which is this wonder crop 0.91
00:52:45.140 because food sucks so bad.
00:52:46.860 I mean, we still are addicted to sugar, 0.97
00:52:48.140 but in the medieval world, trust me,
00:52:50.120 food was so awful that you want sugar. 1.00
00:52:52.820 And the easiest source of labour is from West Africa 1.00
00:52:55.940 because there's a wind that blows very usefully
00:52:58.580 directly from West Africa to the Caribbean.
00:53:01.940 You don't have to touch your sails.
00:53:03.140 It just goes like that on the great naval nautical highways,
00:53:06.120 maritime highways of the world.
00:53:07.380 Very easy to do.
00:53:09.260 So you buy upstairs.
00:53:10.460 Now, what happens here?
00:53:11.600 The reason is that it happens on just an astonishing scale.
00:53:15.240 So in the course of, from 1550 to 1807, 1.00
00:53:19.520 the Brits will take about three and a half million Africans
00:53:21.880 to the New World, about a third the overall total.
00:53:25.120 and so that's just it just it's just like everything else in this period everything
00:53:29.700 gets supersized so whether it's production of textiles whether it's production of guns whether
00:53:33.860 it's government debt this everything's becoming so much more sophisticated that the europeans 0.72
00:53:38.600 work out how to take vast numbers so it starts and you arrive and you buy enslaved people from 0.55
00:53:44.120 local african chiefs and then you take them across 100 200 and then you can start doing thousands
00:53:49.420 and, you know, thousands of millions.
00:53:50.960 So what that does, obviously, as we all know,
00:53:54.200 it's astonishing, inhumane, vast casualties, appalling.
00:53:57.700 It completely disrupts the economies 0.98
00:53:59.980 and the empires of West Africa
00:54:01.700 because suddenly these kind of slightly overlooked
00:54:04.340 coastal backwaters become incredibly rich and powerful.
00:54:08.240 So they then invade their neighbours and, like, the kingdom.
00:54:10.920 So there's, like, sort of, there's a knock-on effect.
00:54:13.820 And in turn, then, that conflict creates 0.69
00:54:15.780 vast numbers of enslaved people.
00:54:17.440 it is at this point too dangerous for Europeans 0.96
00:54:20.740 where you'd go inland into West Africa
00:54:22.360 because of malaria and other things.
00:54:25.000 So for a long time, 0.68
00:54:28.280 the Europeans have these forts on the coast. 0.78
00:54:30.600 Again, these little pinpricks,
00:54:31.720 these key forts along the coast,
00:54:33.300 some way she can still be able to take.
00:54:34.660 And they take part in these slaving experiences.
00:54:37.120 They will go as military advisors
00:54:38.240 with local chieftains and things,
00:54:39.680 but they will help. 1.00
00:54:41.600 But their voracious demand for enslaved people
00:54:44.480 then adds to the conflict and instability in West Africa. 0.63
00:54:47.440 right? So that's what's going on there. And then in North America and the West Indies,
00:54:53.520 then slave-grown agriculture is just phenomenally... Now again, Adam Smith goes,
00:54:57.760 actually, guys, if we use willing workers, it would be more efficient. Slavery is not economically
00:55:04.400 efficient. Apart from being monstrous, it's not economically efficient. So it's quite interesting.
00:55:07.920 Is that true?
00:55:08.640 Apparently so.
00:55:09.560 What I call it, yes.
00:55:10.480 Apparently is that the expense of the system
00:55:17.860 and the need to,
00:55:19.740 and the kind of extraordinary police state
00:55:21.260 you have to enforce would mean that, in fact,
00:55:26.480 they could have been economically productive
00:55:28.120 using another model.
00:55:28.860 But that would have involved having to, you know,
00:55:30.860 convince lots of other people to go there.
00:55:32.480 But that's what Adam Smith's argument was,
00:55:34.320 which is quite an attractive argument to us, obviously.
00:55:36.040 And so, and then, and then you, so yeah, so then 1807, the Brits have this kind of really
00:55:45.120 radical change of, there's a, there's a long campaign of, again, for abolition and ending
00:55:50.860 the slave trade. 1807, the Brits pass.
00:55:52.360 On what basis then? Why are, why are people saying we need to end slavery?
00:55:57.160 Influenced by Adam Smith, people saying, actually, I'm not sure this is like, this system's kind
00:55:59.920 of quite primitive, doesn't really work. So that's important. But also, I think we can't
00:56:03.980 ignore the fact that it's an amazing kind of cultural moral uprising in Britain and people
00:56:10.180 saying this is just in inhumane we shouldn't do it and and that's the public literacy or newspapers
00:56:16.780 uh it formally enslaved people coming to Britain and writing very eloquently about their experiences
00:56:23.780 it just it's you know why why do cultural moments happen and that and that's so again
00:56:28.560 Christianity Quakerism kind of forms of Protestantism that emphasize the light of God burning in
00:56:34.220 everybody. So there's just a really interesting sort of economic and yeah. And so 80s and they
00:56:44.340 banned the slave trade. They then banned slavery itself in the 1830s. And that's partly in response
00:56:48.100 to what we talked about. There's a massive slave uprising in Jamaica, which is very expensive to
00:56:52.620 put down, savage. And the Brits just start going, this doesn't actually, we don't think this makes, 0.99
00:56:57.040 It's not, it's amoral, but also it's costing us money having to run these vast police states.
00:57:04.800 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.
00:57:17.260 So actually, the moral cost of slavery is enormous, but so are the real world political costs of it.
00:57:25.320 and so yeah so that's what goes on there and uh and i think the brits were kind of tickled by the
00:57:31.920 idea that it would also shaft their european that their the british economy was at this point less
00:57:37.220 dependent on slave-grown products than say like portuguese or the americans so they're like well 0.56
00:57:42.460 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
00:57:45.860 it's a as everything it's a combination of sort of politics and morality and lobbying and economics
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00:59:36.560 code trigonometry. After you check out, they'll ask you where you heard about them.
00:59:42.040 Tell them we sent you. As Francis mentioned, it's obviously a big part of the conversation
00:59:49.200 about our history, almost front and center. If you say empire, slavery is the second word that
00:59:55.760 follows that. How should we, understanding the full context of history, some of the things you've
01:00:02.180 talked about, the fact that slavery was basically the norm everywhere up until this point,
01:00:06.560 the fact that most people don't know, actually, that the Europeans turned up and bought slaves
01:00:11.900 that had been captured by Africans from Africans, et cetera, et cetera. But also reckoning on the
01:00:17.260 other side, the immense cruelty and the scale, the technology that enabled transporting people
01:00:22.340 across oceans, exploiting them in chattel slavery, et cetera. How should or can we reckon with all of
01:00:29.600 that in a sensible, balanced way, not going too far in either direction? What's the right way to
01:00:35.680 look at it well that's a great question and i the answer is i don't know it's an incredibly tricky
01:00:39.060 is that but it's great question about history generally isn't it like to what
01:00:43.180 the past was a monstrous place what do we do what do we practically do about that
01:00:50.900 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
01:01:03.140 Who, like, I'll get gigantic cash payments to Barbados or to West Africa, the answer?
01:01:09.620 I don't know.
01:01:10.840 And I think it is, look, Britain benefits enormously from this,
01:01:14.200 because we talked about venture capital.
01:01:15.480 There's clearly lots of money.
01:01:17.860 You're creating capital, and that in turn benefits Britain,
01:01:21.980 benefits British industry.
01:01:22.980 These people are investing their money.
01:01:24.180 So there's no question that our wealth and power partly derived from, 1.00
01:01:31.940 the enslavement of Africans 1.00
01:01:34.400 and put them to work
01:01:35.540 in sugar plantations
01:01:37.800 in the New World.
01:01:38.900 But it also derived,
01:01:41.080 it was also derived
01:01:41.920 from the kind of annihilation
01:01:44.020 of indigenous tribes
01:01:45.200 in North America,
01:01:46.300 selling opium to the Chinese.
01:01:49.380 American, well, you know,
01:01:51.000 the American wealth,
01:01:52.060 America, which, by the way,
01:01:53.280 has done the best job ever
01:01:54.180 in disguising an empire
01:01:55.420 behind the name of a nation state. 0.96
01:01:56.800 Americans just conquer
01:01:57.820 an empire in North America 0.96
01:01:58.820 and call it the USA,
01:02:00.060 which is what happens,
01:02:01.300 that's fine.
01:02:01.660 the rebrand that's built off the back of conquest um you know argentina conquers southern what we
01:02:10.600 what is now southern argentina in the in the 19th century um russia's russia the european conquest
01:02:17.200 of people talk about european empires in asia come to it well russia is the a mighty european
01:02:23.200 empire in asia right the french still have a vast empire in the south pacific to this day
01:02:27.780 I don't know how we...
01:02:30.400 The past is a terrible, brutal place.
01:02:32.860 And my sense is it's trying to shape,
01:02:40.360 trying to acknowledge all that and going,
01:02:42.440 what we need to do is build a world.
01:02:44.640 We need to build a kind of different world,
01:02:46.240 which largely speaking we've been trying to do
01:02:47.680 since 1945 and onwards.
01:02:49.240 And that's what makes Putin's invasion of Ukraine,
01:02:51.120 I think, so scary.
01:02:52.540 It's like, we sort of want this neighbour's territory
01:02:55.280 and we're going to mass on the borders and invade it. 0.85
01:02:57.120 That's very normal throughout history.
01:03:00.460 Very, very dangerous because it means other people do the same. 0.50
01:03:03.480 And Putin may regret that when China decides to nibble
01:03:07.200 a bit of Russian territory in the Far East.
01:03:09.240 So my gut is acknowledging past monstrosities, 0.99
01:03:14.480 but the business of trying to kind of untangle it and go, 0.95
01:03:20.860 well, are we paying the Chinese for the opium?
01:03:22.920 Um, and I don't, I don't, I don't, I just kind of, I don't think it's practical.
01:03:29.440 I know that's not a really glamorous thing to say.
01:03:31.740 No, no, it makes perfect sense because it's such a difficult issue to address.
01:03:35.340 And I guess one of the things that I've always found, uh, you know, you get activists in,
01:03:40.380 in both directions who sort of tell one version of the story, which when you look at the narrow
01:03:44.880 set of facts that they present, it's true. 0.95
01:03:46.920 Like nobody could defend without today's morality, what happened during the slave trade.
01:03:52.440 Nobody.
01:03:53.620 And at the same time, you can't ignore the fact that literally every empire throughout history practiced slavery.
01:03:59.380 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.
01:04:09.040 And it's just one of those things about, like you say, the past was a terrible place.
01:04:13.560 And I think if you get a tiny sliver from here or from here presented to you,
01:04:18.820 you can really influence people's today's feelings and political leanings and so on
01:04:24.820 in a particular direction because people are so uneducated about the messiness of it all.
01:04:29.680 Yeah, and we talked about Ireland at the beginning.
01:04:32.040 I mean, the English conquest of Ireland in the 1500s was unimaginably brutal.
01:04:37.680 Shocking.
01:04:39.520 Now, what do you do about that today?
01:04:42.120 It's not your fault.
01:04:43.560 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
01:04:50.620 hard quite hard to make people say we're gonna we're gonna send a lot of your tax payments to
01:04:55.600 like people in munster because because munster was the scene of almost genocide in in the 16th
01:05:02.620 century i don't know i don't know how you resolve that my my sense of it is you like like people
01:05:07.240 talk about like martin luther king barack obama this kind of strand of american thinking
01:05:10.400 and you go, monstrous things have happened in our past.
01:05:13.060 The key thing that we can do now
01:05:14.600 is shape a new and better way to organise society, right?
01:05:19.720 So we are going to try and ensure 1.00
01:05:22.300 that people of colour are absorbed into this American project
01:05:26.700 and have the opportunity to go to university
01:05:29.440 and whatever else in a way that they traditionally haven't done.
01:05:32.200 They have the vote and all this economic opportunities
01:05:34.300 to put a chance to create a generational wealth
01:05:36.760 that they've been denied in the past.
01:05:38.100 That, in one sense, we're going to kind of repudiate the idea that it's okay to invade
01:05:43.700 neighbours, we're going to repudiate the idea that it's okay to have slaves, you know, like
01:05:47.380 I, that feels, and that's totally, that's me talking from a position of great privilege.
01:05:51.900 Look, I'm someone who's almost certainly in my ancestry, I've benefited personally from
01:05:55.960 this.
01:05:56.200 The reason that I went to a nice school and speak nicely and went to nice universities
01:06:00.160 is of course because of my, the generational advantages that I've had.
01:06:03.920 I get that, but I don't know how you just practically arrange for the entire world
01:06:12.920 to have a massive reallocation of resources on the basis of historical, monstrous, historical
01:06:20.520 criminality.
01:06:20.900 How far back do you go?
01:06:22.540 This is the question.
01:06:23.260 I go way back.
01:06:25.120 No, but this is what I'm saying, though, right?
01:06:26.760 It was like...
01:06:27.920 Oh, I see what you mean.
01:06:28.620 How one does one... 0.99
01:06:29.260 Yes, I think in the Holocaust... 0.97
01:06:30.380 When do you start the clock?
01:06:31.280 There's living people who had their art collections
01:06:33.780 removed from them in Vienna.
01:06:35.040 Now, yeah, like, obviously.
01:06:37.760 But I think it's difficult.
01:06:40.500 And then you get into sort of really difficult territory.
01:06:43.300 Like, well, was it?
01:06:45.360 So what I'm saying is something else, Dan, 0.98
01:06:47.200 which is should the descendants of the Normans 0.70
01:06:49.320 pay a reparation to them? 0.62
01:06:50.760 No, you're absolutely right.
01:06:51.380 Well, this is why the island, yeah, exactly.
01:06:52.840 Or whoever, like, I think if you start to try
01:06:58.240 undo history then you've got to go all the way back to the beginning and now we're in the in
01:07:04.180 the savannas of africa etc key way to undo history is to try and make try and learn from the past
01:07:09.900 and make the world a better place again since 1945 we've been doing we have it like we hoped
01:07:13.920 there was a naive dream in the 90s i'm old enough to remember where we thought oh international
01:07:16.940 disputes will be resolved at the un we go and talk about it all and then we but that for me
01:07:20.980 that's the that's a really important plank of this it's about saying oh we've realized a common
01:07:26.580 humanity and that we're all like actually skin color doesn't determine your intelligence and
01:07:31.120 your chances of succeeding in life your ability to invent you know that those things really
01:07:36.140 embedding those things today feels to me like the most practical and achievable antidote right i mean
01:07:44.160 the thing i this is i think about is like well my you know there's millions of people in this
01:07:49.340 country who's who's grand who two generations ago they were conscripted to fight they're given no
01:07:54.620 They're conscripted by effect, you're going to make sure.
01:07:57.020 And we're just thrown into machine gun bullets on the Western Front.
01:07:59.900 That was an astonishing trauma that practically affected millions of families in this country.
01:08:10.140 That was monstrous in so many ways.
01:08:12.460 What do we do about...
01:08:13.420 So listen, that's history.
01:08:17.580 I wish I had simple answers to that.
01:08:19.580 because that's a problem isn't it with this entire conversation is that people want simple answers
01:08:26.220 people want it summed up in a tweet or a post and they go okay i know exactly what to think about
01:08:32.160 that this is what we do when the reality is it's far more complex which brings us nicely to the
01:08:37.620 topic of india because with india we have these similar conversations as well don't we about how
01:08:44.040 much of it was about wealth extraction what did we give to to the indians yeah where do you stand
01:08:50.380 so that's interesting so look at all different things different times bengal so the british
01:08:53.920 take over bengal in the 1750s and the result was an absolute catastrophe for the bengal is not
01:08:59.440 partly because so there's a series of natural so first of all the british turns out aren't very
01:09:06.140 good at running a large asian empire from from an office in london by letter using sailing ships i
01:09:12.580 I mean, obviously not, right? 1.00
01:09:13.380 So there is just catastrophic consequences
01:09:16.020 for the people of Bengal, 1.00
01:09:17.120 which I don't want to underage.
01:09:18.260 And for example, so there are famines.
01:09:21.300 So the Brits write back,
01:09:22.860 there's a really bad famine here.
01:09:24.580 Should we give them a tax break? 0.98
01:09:26.600 Which is what would traditionally happen in India. 1.00
01:09:29.040 Even under Mughals, they'd say, 0.87
01:09:30.540 look, clearly there's a famine.
01:09:32.360 You don't have to pay your taxes.
01:09:33.380 Don't worry about it.
01:09:34.260 That letter would take six months to get to London.
01:09:36.340 They'd never think about it.
01:09:37.000 It takes six months to get back.
01:09:38.020 Like, it's insane.
01:09:38.940 Like, monstrous, right? 0.83
01:09:40.120 and so people are turning their kids into slavery there's just appalling stories from bengal
01:09:46.260 so and then uh you know there's a big impact on the textile trade of bengal because of you know
01:09:53.340 the way the british choose to organize the kind of their input so yeah there's you know there's
01:09:57.660 massive negative consequences for you know bengal then you move forward 100 years and
01:10:03.980 and then india exists as part of a i mean the problem with all this you don't know what they
01:10:09.980 not what the other alternatives are.
01:10:11.740 So Winston Churchill argued that India should be British
01:10:14.160 because it stops, 0.67
01:10:15.980 otherwise it would just be the scene of lots of fighting
01:10:17.980 on the subcontinent.
01:10:19.140 And we don't know if he was right
01:10:19.940 because it didn't happen.
01:10:21.420 So, you know, in the 19th century,
01:10:23.960 Britain conquers India.
01:10:25.700 There's a massive Indian revolt in the 1850s.
01:10:28.680 And it's brutally put down. 0.78
01:10:30.400 So we've got the last 50 years, Britain.
01:10:34.680 India is reasonably stable. 0.54
01:10:35.960 But what's the counter?
01:10:36.820 I don't know what the counterfactual is. 1.00
01:10:37.940 you know what does what what what would the afghans have invaded again and and slaughtered so
01:10:42.880 all of these questions are sort of uh uh kind of they're things that politicians and people on
01:10:48.780 social media like to get really involved in but historians are sort of interested in what happens
01:10:52.080 right like i don't i mean i like is was the was the was the the prussian victory in silesia in
01:10:59.940 1740 good or bad i don't know what do you mean good or bad like what are we talking about here
01:11:03.460 this is a thing that happened
01:11:05.780 we're studying history as it happened
01:11:07.520 India may have gone on
01:11:11.400 if the Brits 1.00
01:11:13.540 hadn't invaded India, India may have 0.99
01:11:15.560 developed this phenomenal indigenous
01:11:17.360 culture that ruled the world and established
01:11:19.520 the biggest empire the world ever seen, or it might have been locked
01:11:21.400 in a series of violent civil wars
01:11:23.260 in the Indian subcontinent for 150 years
01:11:25.560 we don't know, so how
01:11:27.600 can you possibly say
01:11:28.620 what you can do is point, oh look
01:11:30.720 that the Brits massacred people there during the Anglo-Myssal War.
01:11:35.880 That's a thing that happened.
01:11:38.000 But you don't know whether, it's very difficult to kind of go,
01:11:42.040 would more or less people have lived longer, happier lives 0.95
01:11:47.560 if the Brits hadn't invaded? 0.91
01:11:49.680 It's sort of unanswerable, it's unknowable. 0.76
01:11:53.400 So what you can say is that India today,
01:11:57.380 there was a partition of Britain's Indian Empire,
01:12:00.060 obviously in the 1940s, with astonishing bloodshed and brutality, which was a tragedy.
01:12:06.880 Was that a release of the natural existing tensions within...
01:12:11.020 Lots of Indian scholars say, no, no, no, it was all caused by the British because the British
01:12:14.760 emphasised the Muslim-Hindu split in the 19th century so that they could divide and rule.
01:12:21.980 That's what people say. Other people say, yeah, that's what happens when empires fall apart,
01:12:26.200 is that everyone just goes after each other. That's what happens in Eastern Europe when
01:12:29.460 empires fall apart in the 20th century is what so yeah we yeah there's lengthy debate about that
01:12:36.020 uh is yeah is it what happens when you've kept a lid on everything for 100 years then you
01:12:41.320 suddenly take it off and just go sorry we're out you know well that's what an empire
01:12:44.560 is speaking as layman seems to have to do right like when the autumn empire collapses
01:12:49.900 gigantic massacres everywhere soviet union collapses there's ethnic conflict all over
01:12:54.520 the shop over the shop yeah so yeah was the was the defeat of the autumn empire good or bad thing 0.63
01:12:58.780 World War. This is a big question, right? Middle East has been unsettled for 100 years. But like,
01:13:04.580 was it better? Like, we have no idea what would happen if the Ottoman Empire had, 0.98
01:13:07.920 they could have launched a genocide of Arabs like they did in Armenians. Like, I don't know. 0.72
01:13:12.340 So all you can say is the Ottoman Empire collapses, and this is what happens in the
01:13:16.080 aftermath. I think, so in India, it's good example. But India is given a national coherence by 0.98
01:13:21.940 the British, in a way. And it's striking that the Indians, when they declared independence,
01:13:27.720 they were quite keen to hold, they were quite keen to, that generation of Indian leaders were
01:13:32.080 quite keen to hold on to India. They weren't that keen to divide up into the smaller states that
01:13:38.620 there had been in India in the 18th century. So you're like, let's keep the bureaucracy and the
01:13:43.620 military and the sort of territorial expanse of India whilst getting rid of the Brits like that. 1.00
01:13:48.360 And you see that in, you see that after the Roman Empire in places like France or in Italy or in 0.99
01:13:52.500 Spain. All these are like, yeah, we'll throw off the Roman yoke. But by the way, we're keeping hold
01:13:56.540 of all the things.
01:13:59.660 And so, yeah, that's, again, super tricky.
01:14:02.680 So Winston Churchill sat there and went and said,
01:14:04.120 I told you that would happen. 0.94
01:14:05.160 The minute you pull out of India, that's what's going to happen. 1.00
01:14:06.700 Everyone's going to go after each other.
01:14:08.260 And then lots of people said, no, it's because you pulled out. 0.99
01:14:10.060 So you mishandled the pulling out process, which is true. 0.74
01:14:12.840 Or it's what you'd stirred up by denying Indians autonomy for so long.
01:14:18.780 You know, these things are super tricky.
01:14:21.540 And it's the idea of better as well.
01:14:24.040 I think that's the number of it where they go,
01:14:25.800 it would be better like this.
01:14:27.600 What does better actually mean?
01:14:29.240 What does better mean, right?
01:14:30.420 So in the 19th century,
01:14:31.880 our old history books,
01:14:32.840 better just meant,
01:14:33.880 do you live in massive states
01:14:35.420 where rulers are in charge
01:14:36.980 and they can build huge buildings
01:14:38.820 and it's just awesome?
01:14:39.740 You know, what does better mean?
01:14:40.600 Or does it mean life expectancy?
01:14:42.120 Should we be measuring calorie intake?
01:14:44.720 So interesting,
01:14:45.580 after the Roman Empire in the West collapses,
01:14:47.540 we now think, amazingly,
01:14:49.640 calorie intake may have gone up
01:14:50.980 because there's fewer,
01:14:52.460 say in Britain,
01:14:53.440 there's fewer British people
01:14:54.740 working on industrialized farms.
01:14:57.160 The industrial farms have gone.
01:14:58.320 Villas smashed a bit.
01:14:59.420 So everyone's like, okay,
01:15:00.260 we've all gone a bit Mad Max.
01:15:01.420 But we've all got our own plots.
01:15:02.740 We're growing our own veg. 0.97
01:15:03.700 We've got like little pigs in the back.
01:15:05.020 We're all, if you can avoid getting smoked 1.00
01:15:06.960 by the German raiders, 0.99
01:15:08.380 we're all actually,
01:15:09.220 people are sort of eating a bit better.
01:15:10.860 So, you know, there's loads
01:15:12.100 of very complicated things going on here, right?
01:15:14.100 What does best, I mean, how should we,
01:15:16.040 we traditionally measured greatness and success
01:15:18.940 as sort of big, powerful empires.
01:15:22.080 How many soldiers you got?
01:15:23.420 How many ships have you got?
01:15:25.300 And by the way, are you sort of founding
01:15:26.400 few universities and better that kind of nice museums?
01:15:28.780 Well, maybe that's nonsense.
01:15:31.400 Maybe that's, I mean, look,
01:15:32.120 there's arguments, aren't there, in the States?
01:15:33.620 There's this great online meme,
01:15:35.480 Mississippi is richer than Britain, isn't it?
01:15:37.360 Per capita.
01:15:38.380 And everyone's like, what does that mean?
01:15:41.260 Is it better to be in Mississippi today
01:15:42.860 or to be in Bristol?
01:15:44.720 And what does, how should we be measuring these things?
01:15:47.660 And I think it's a huge issue for humanity, right?
01:15:50.600 Now, I think one thing about big empires,
01:15:52.300 They can bring internal stability and peace.
01:15:55.300 And I've got to say, we can all get a bit carried away
01:15:58.300 with living in uncertainty.
01:16:01.300 So the Iraqis have an expression, 1.00
01:16:03.300 better a thousand years of tyranny than one day of anarchy. 1.00
01:16:07.300 And I think we're sitting here in this nice studio,
01:16:09.300 everything's super chilled.
01:16:10.300 I personally, my family haven't had to, you know,
01:16:13.300 fight for their property, their food, their children's lives,
01:16:17.300 domestically here for several generations.
01:16:20.300 My Polish friends have said, we are the first generation that have not been involved in active conflict for 200 years.
01:16:27.300 So it's very, very difficult, isn't it?
01:16:30.300 Do we say, actually, you know, empire's terrible, goodness me.
01:16:35.300 It must have been quite nice not to have your village sacked by marauding coastal attackers quite regularly.
01:16:42.300 So that, again, huge problem when you're trying to judge in history what is good, what is bad.
01:16:46.300 Like, that's a huge problem.
01:16:48.300 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.
01:16:59.640 I want to come back to the story of the British Empire.
01:17:03.380 And first of all, its peak and heyday and success.
01:17:07.420 You say 1922 in terms of territorially, but energetically, though, I imagine it's a bit before that.
01:17:15.540 big difference. Big difference. And there's partly a big difference because this is important for
01:17:19.460 people to think about empire. The empire, you know, think about the American empire today,
01:17:22.600 Chinese empire today. It's not about the red space on the map. That's really important to
01:17:26.460 think about. So Britain, the majority of Britain's trade is actually going on outside the empire.
01:17:31.020 So that wealth is being generated in the Ottoman, in the East, in the Ottoman Empire,
01:17:34.920 South America, huge. Argentina is almost, it's not a British colony. So again, the British
01:17:39.420 attempt to make a colony fails. What actually happens is Argentina becomes, you know, there's
01:17:43.900 British sailors founding Argentinian Buenos Aires football clubs, because you get an Argentinian
01:17:48.980 indigenous government who's sort of happy to go along with the British government, good trade,
01:17:52.520 you know, everything's, the Brits don't have to invade. You're like, this is working out very
01:17:56.000 nicely, thanks, right? Just in the, so Britain's trade with the USA are more important than this
01:18:02.700 trade with Canada, even though Canada's part of the British Empire, it's British North America,
01:18:06.720 right? So actually, in terms of energy and sort of global clout, it's far earlier than 1922,
01:18:12.400 It's absolutely the 1850s.
01:18:14.240 Why?
01:18:14.860 Germany doesn't really exist yet. 0.93
01:18:17.020 The USA is still expanding. 0.61
01:18:19.400 It's going through astonishing growing pains.
01:18:21.460 It's about to have a big civil war in the 1860s.
01:18:23.720 New technology is coming on stream.
01:18:25.640 They are building steamships.
01:18:27.780 HMS Warrior.
01:18:29.880 You can still go and see it in Portsmouth.
01:18:31.440 Greatest thing ever created by human beings.
01:18:33.620 Iron Ship. 0.96
01:18:34.460 Immediately that ship launches.
01:18:35.660 Every other ship in the world obsolete overnight
01:18:38.460 when that thing hits the water. 0.99
01:18:40.200 Iron Ship.
01:18:40.680 No other ship, every other ship in the world, 0.98
01:18:43.500 cannonballs is going to bounce off.
01:18:45.820 So this is a stop.
01:18:46.960 Now that ship can sail, it doesn't in the end do this,
01:18:49.200 but it can sail anywhere it wants in the world,
01:18:51.100 park itself and go, we need you to do this.
01:18:53.980 And the people will do that.
01:18:55.320 That's very straightforward.
01:18:57.000 Britain develops trains, canals and trains,
01:19:01.220 trades move around.
01:19:02.060 I should have said one other thing about Britain.
01:19:03.880 Because of its long coastline, fantastic interlinked.
01:19:08.480 It's very easy to move raw materials around.
01:19:10.680 Nightmares, Siberia, well, I'm 20-on.
01:19:13.980 Right, bringing it.
01:19:15.440 Newcastle coal, you literally chop it.
01:19:17.720 It rolls down the hill to the Tyne.
01:19:19.820 You put it on a boat.
01:19:20.660 It's in London a day and a half later.
01:19:22.980 Unbelievable.
01:19:23.980 So London has got unlimited energy supply
01:19:26.360 from a little bit further up the coast.
01:19:28.380 A little guy called Captain Cook
01:19:29.400 helped to sustain that trade.
01:19:31.980 So you've got that geography, as I said at the beginning.
01:19:35.040 So trains, though.
01:19:37.640 You're inventing telegraphs.
01:19:39.220 your extraordinary energy is going on.
01:19:44.300 And then you get a problem.
01:19:46.160 And actually trains, guys,
01:19:47.400 this is my hot take for the internet on this one.
01:19:50.640 Trains, the greatest British invention
01:19:52.040 that absolutely shaft the British.
01:19:54.020 And you wonder about AI in America,
01:19:55.700 they could be interestingly similar.
01:19:58.660 Trains overcome the tyranny of the oceans.
01:20:03.460 Okay, suddenly you can move things around your country.
01:20:06.460 You don't have to take them to ports.
01:20:07.600 You don't have to do coastal trade.
01:20:09.600 Suddenly, you're moving vast amounts of stuff
01:20:11.540 internally in your country.
01:20:13.080 And that makes continental-sized superpowers possible.
01:20:16.540 Trains, nothing else.
01:20:18.220 Previously, you want to get from Vladivostok
01:20:20.160 to St. Petersburg.
01:20:21.560 I mean, nightmare.
01:20:23.500 I'd sail all the way around.
01:20:24.440 How are you going to do that? 0.99
01:20:24.860 You've got to go for Africa, Suez. 0.95
01:20:27.080 Everyone can stop you. 0.99
01:20:28.400 There's choke points.
01:20:29.460 You've got to go out the North Sea.
01:20:31.100 Put a train in.
01:20:32.120 Now you've got a country.
01:20:33.260 Now you want empire.
01:20:34.480 So trains forge the following country.
01:20:37.080 The USA, suddenly, you can exploit that interior,
01:20:40.000 you can move people around, you can settle the interior,
01:20:41.800 you can move weapons, troops, raw materials,
01:20:44.820 or, you know, it's big time, trains.
01:20:47.780 Germany, which is a problem for the Brits.
01:20:50.640 Germany, very, very wealthy heart of Europe,
01:20:54.060 has never been, no, not for a thousand years or so,
01:20:57.660 has it been united, effectively united.
01:21:00.180 It's never been effectively united.
01:21:01.920 Suddenly, all the German lands can become a nation state.
01:21:05.900 So you've got Prussia, you've got Hanover,
01:21:08.120 you've got Bavaria, trains, trains.
01:21:10.420 You can't, no canals, tiny little coast.
01:21:13.340 Suddenly you can move goods and ideas
01:21:15.160 and people around that giant place. 0.87
01:21:17.620 And then you've got Russia.
01:21:19.380 Suddenly Russian troops can get from European Russia 0.55
01:21:22.600 to threaten Britain's Asian empire,
01:21:25.240 Afghanistan or East, Far East.
01:21:28.040 And it's trains, they proliferate.
01:21:29.860 Suddenly the Royal Navy is like,
01:21:31.500 oh, we can't interfere with this trade now.
01:21:33.360 We can't just bombard Bremen.
01:21:35.420 Because the trade's all going elsewhere in Germany, you know.
01:21:38.800 And they can create nation-states that ultimately dwarf Britain.
01:21:42.820 And you get land empires emerging, knitted together by trains,
01:21:47.200 suddenly makes Britain's maritime empire look a bit old-fashioned,
01:21:49.780 like the Venetians, like the Phoenicians. 0.51
01:21:52.020 It's like, yeah, no, no, it's fine.
01:21:53.640 We're linked by shipping channels.
01:21:55.260 Mate, we're linked by trains.
01:21:57.580 You don't have to go over the ocean.
01:21:59.420 The ocean becomes a sort of barrier rather than a bridge
01:22:01.620 in people's minds. That begins in 1830.
01:22:04.040 So towards the end of the 20th century,
01:22:06.060 obviously the USA starts to consolidate Russia, Germany,
01:22:08.920 and they overtake the British economy
01:22:11.240 at the end of the 19th century.
01:22:13.480 So while Britain's got this massive empire,
01:22:15.860 it's got a major problem.
01:22:17.800 And you've got policymakers in the 1890s
01:22:19.520 when the big map on the wall is,
01:22:21.140 oh, everything's British, mate.
01:22:22.400 Quarter of the world's population,
01:22:23.460 pretty much quarter of the world's surface.
01:22:24.800 But actually the show's over
01:22:26.520 because what's important is, you know, economics.
01:22:30.320 Where's the energy?
01:22:31.360 Where's the energy, right?
01:22:32.200 And the energy, the second industrial revolution
01:22:34.120 is in petrochemicals, it's in cars,
01:22:37.000 that goes on in Germany.
01:22:38.080 The Brits miss out on that.
01:22:39.280 The Brits do textiles and coal and iron,
01:22:41.560 then it goes elsewhere, the energy goes elsewhere.
01:22:44.080 America overtakes Britain in the late 19th century.
01:22:47.220 Just you can't compete with America, obviously,
01:22:49.020 just on every level. 0.96
01:22:50.560 Germany overtakes Britain. 0.94
01:22:52.340 And Britain, then Britain is smoked 0.85
01:22:54.140 by winning two world wars.
01:22:55.580 Very odd, it's on the winning side in both world wars
01:22:57.580 that absolutely shaft the British. 0.73
01:23:00.600 So they spend their entire money.
01:23:02.080 You can almost, the end of the British Empire, the effective end in terms of that energy is sort of pretty much 1942, 43.
01:23:08.360 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.
01:23:17.260 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.
01:23:27.820 And actually, the end of the British Empire was something they were pretty content with.
01:23:32.240 And in fact, they actively worked towards...
01:23:34.680 They actively worked towards...
01:23:36.380 So Churchill had this naive idea that the English-speaking people of the world were going to unite,
01:23:42.580 the British and the Americans could rule the world together and defeat fascism. 0.73
01:23:46.480 And he took this big gamble, and he rightly identified Hitler as one of history's worst individuals, 0.84
01:23:51.640 a monstrous regime. 0.88
01:23:53.120 And he said, actually, he hoped he could sustain the British Empire and beat Hitler. 0.78
01:23:56.560 But when the chips down, he really had to almost sacrifice the British Empire. 0.86
01:23:59.780 He had to become, he had to just get as close as possible to America
01:24:03.820 and agree to share things like nuclear research,
01:24:06.340 which the Americans then shut the door and off the wall,
01:24:08.260 reneging on those kind of deals.
01:24:09.600 So, yeah, the Americans took their pound of flesh.
01:24:11.720 The Americans saw the decline at the end of the British Empire
01:24:14.200 as a strategic win for the Americans.
01:24:17.680 Still bitter about 1770s.
01:24:20.120 I'm furious about it.
01:24:21.900 And, but no, I'm astounded. Of course they did.
01:24:23.600 And they, now, amazingly, they've had to step in
01:24:27.800 and sort out or deal with many of the messes
01:24:29.980 that the British were trying to deal with
01:24:31.120 as global hegemons. 1.00
01:24:32.040 They might wish that the Brits were still running Israel 0.64
01:24:34.020 to this day or, you know, or other parts of the world.
01:24:38.220 And, but yeah, so you get these superpowers emerge
01:24:42.460 and you get British, in the 1890s,
01:24:44.400 you get the Prime Minister Lord Spalsbury goes,
01:24:46.040 we should have, you know what,
01:24:47.220 we should have gone in, all in on the American Civil War
01:24:49.780 way of chance.
01:24:51.060 The Americans are shafting us.
01:24:52.100 We should have gone in on the Confederacy and broken up the U.S. project.
01:24:56.960 Missed the opportunity.
01:24:58.880 And so they couldn't because of slavery.
01:25:00.780 It was too, you know, it would have been, the Brits thought about it,
01:25:04.820 but just couldn't bring themselves to do it.
01:25:06.920 And so in the end, the emergence of these giant continental-sized,
01:25:15.260 China, USSR, America, meant that little old Britain couldn't compete with that.
01:25:20.800 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.
01:25:28.720 If you're joined by land to somewhere, it looks like, sure, you can take them. 0.86
01:25:32.440 So no one questions the right of Russia now to be in the Far East.
01:25:36.220 That was an imperial project.
01:25:37.200 It was conquered in the 1600s, 1700s, as you well know. 0.97
01:25:39.440 But that's fine. 0.73
01:25:39.980 It's part of Russia. 0.96
01:25:41.240 The idea that Britain could hold on to Nigeria or India or even Canada and incorporate them into Britain. 0.99
01:25:47.900 Everyone just like, don't be serious. 1.00
01:25:49.380 That doesn't work.
01:25:50.800 You've got the sea in the way.
01:25:51.720 Like, what are you talking about?
01:25:52.420 And then you get politicians in the 20th century going,
01:25:54.260 why sea?
01:25:55.640 Like, what's the sea got to do with it?
01:25:57.220 How is it different?
01:25:58.460 Britain controlling, you know,
01:26:01.440 just because we're not next door to them.
01:26:04.400 But somehow it does.
01:26:05.480 And what's interesting about the British Empire for me
01:26:07.100 is it disintegrates just on the edge of the era
01:26:10.640 where, weirdly, air travel and communications
01:26:12.600 were arguably making a discontiguous empire
01:26:16.320 kind of feasibly possible.
01:26:18.000 You couldn't envisage a situation
01:26:19.920 where you had a parliament in Britain 1.00
01:26:20.980 with like Australians and New Zealanders
01:26:22.500 and Canadians kind of in it,
01:26:24.040 so Africans, Nigerians, whatever.
01:26:26.220 And you kind of,
01:26:28.080 Britain was unable to turn its empire into,
01:26:30.640 which lots of people have been talking about
01:26:31.640 in the 19th century.
01:26:32.340 All sorts of thinkers are going,
01:26:33.540 it's going to become a nation state like Russia.
01:26:35.640 It's like America.
01:26:37.000 They've got empires
01:26:37.960 and Prussia conquered an empire, 0.98
01:26:40.960 but they're just,
01:26:41.740 they're other German speaking people,
01:26:42.840 but they conquered an empire.
01:26:43.600 Of course they do.
01:26:44.540 We will do the same.
01:26:45.960 And they talked about how India 0.61
01:26:47.420 and these will just,
01:26:48.820 it will become like a nation state.
01:26:50.140 We'll have a wonderful, a global state.
01:26:53.240 And it didn't quite, it didn't happen.
01:26:55.060 But I struck by the fact that,
01:26:57.280 partly because obviously it was sort of bonkers,
01:26:59.560 but at the same time,
01:27:00.200 there were just pressing logistical reasons
01:27:02.320 why it just was pretty complicated.
01:27:04.760 You could be in California and get a train
01:27:07.600 to Washington, D.C.,
01:27:08.980 take part in the political process in a few days.
01:27:11.820 If you're an Australian museum, that's more difficult.
01:27:14.040 But weirdly, the British Empire,
01:27:15.240 so by 1940, 1950, by 1980,
01:27:18.340 2000s, actually there's a world in which, particularly now, you're all working remotely
01:27:23.800 and you have an imperial parliament. It doesn't matter where you are, right? So it's quite
01:27:27.320 interesting that. It's very interesting, but I imagine part of the reason for that is that
01:27:30.600 the core is too small. Like in Russia, the European part of Russia is by far the most
01:27:35.920 dominant. The Russian ethnic group is the biggest by far. In the United States, it's
01:27:41.160 very similar, right? Whereas if you had the British Empire today, the Brits would be a 0.95
01:27:46.760 tiny minority wouldn't they and territorially also and there was the issue of race and that
01:27:51.620 race is important so the so lots of thinkers are saying and indeed lots of black and brown
01:27:56.680 british imperial subjects are going to london thinking i'm going to take part in this empire
01:28:01.320 queen victoria had a west african godchild who she took great interest in and regarded as part of
01:28:06.500 wanted to come to court married off to a british naval officer wanted to create a wanted to create
01:28:12.660 kind of mixed race imperial elite. Fascinating. On the ground, that just effectively just can't 0.79
01:28:18.180 happen. You know, there's just, if you're a planter in what's now Zimbabwe or Northern India,
01:28:24.480 if you're a farmer, if you're in, if you're living next to Maori people in New Zealand,
01:28:29.140 they're just the kind of cultural demographic and sort of racist assumptions. Like it just was,
01:28:33.440 it was kind of too much. It just, it doesn't, it's hard. It was too difficult, I think,
01:28:38.640 or in practice on the ground,
01:28:40.120 but you get lots of scholars in the 80s and 80s
01:28:42.200 for Britain to survive.
01:28:43.500 They knew what was coming.
01:28:44.960 For Britain to survive an empire,
01:28:46.220 we are going to have to transition this
01:28:48.360 into something else, like a nation state,
01:28:50.080 which means we are going to have to accept 0.99
01:28:51.640 that there's going to be brown Englishmen. 0.99
01:28:54.560 And what you get is you get,
01:28:57.480 what's interesting,
01:28:58.280 you get people from Burma,
01:29:00.080 Aung San Suu Kyi's dad, 0.99
01:29:01.900 you get Gandhi, 1.00
01:29:02.920 other people coming to Britain
01:29:04.260 and being radicalized by the experience of Britain,
01:29:06.200 which is the government go,
01:29:07.020 welcome, welcome, your fellow, you know, you're all welcome here in the imperial capital. 0.90
01:29:10.560 But shopkeepers, like, you know, piss off.
01:29:13.000 And they're radicalized by it, go, hang on a minute, this isn't going to, this doesn't
01:29:15.600 work.
01:29:16.440 And so you're right, there's sort of just the tension, the idea that you can, from the
01:29:21.360 Maoris to, you know, the Assiniboine tribe in Western Canada, the idea that you're going
01:29:26.520 to try and somehow, that is a massive project that was beyond the sort of real practical
01:29:31.760 ability or in the imagination of most people in the 19th century to achieve.
01:29:36.640 and beyond the kind of technology, I think, as well.
01:29:39.620 And by the way, you have this extraordinary idea of nationalism
01:29:43.240 that's still afloat in the world at the moment
01:29:44.840 that just encouraged people to think of themselves
01:29:46.920 as peoples, and sovereign power should lie.
01:29:52.220 Power ought to be exercised by this people.
01:29:55.540 And peoples were defined by ethnicity and by language, 0.77
01:29:59.120 and people in the 19th century loved going around and going,
01:30:00.960 no, you're Ukrainian. 0.65
01:30:02.860 You're not Ruthenian. You're not Polish. 0.97
01:30:05.460 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.
01:30:14.200 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.
01:30:23.520 You know, so there's a process of encouraging people to think of themselves as separate entities. 0.55
01:30:27.960 And that was far too powerful for the British Empire.
01:30:30.600 The British Empire was like, yeah, we'll all just come on.
01:30:33.120 We'll all be great imperial subjects and just overlook this.
01:30:35.740 Everyone's like, no.
01:30:37.320 You know, I'm, I'm, I'm, I want to be my, I am from this group or that group.
01:30:42.880 And I'm, and I'm being, there's a, there's a, there's a, the philosophy, the fashion
01:30:47.780 that's in the world at the moment is this idea of sort of independence and autonomy.
01:30:53.060 And that tears apart the Austrian Empire, tears apart the Ottoman Empire,
01:30:58.340 It tears apart the Tsarist Russian Empire, and it's currently at work in the UK today.
01:31:05.180 So it's a very, very powerful force that was unleashed about 200 years ago 0.69
01:31:08.680 that ultimately has destroyed many of these big, sprawling empires.
01:31:13.360 And so one of the final questions I wanted to ask as we're coming towards the end of the interview,
01:31:18.800 which is legacy. What is the legacy of the British Empire?
01:31:22.320 Well, it's hard to underestimate the legacy of the British Empire in the world at the moment.
01:31:25.480 it's um astonishing the partly transmitted through americanness i mean this is why as it
01:31:32.140 the british empire had enormous impact on the world the fact that the hegemon that followed
01:31:36.980 the british turns out to be the americans in the same way that greek culture and ideas are
01:31:42.820 transmitted through rome to the modern world it's it's pretty useful parallel right so but
01:31:49.360 the english language i mean it's astonishing to me isn't it that we there's there's currently
01:31:54.520 commercial negotiations taking place in Sao Paulo between Chinese people and Brazilians that are
01:32:00.780 being conducted in English. It's extraordinary, right? And that's because of the scale of the
01:32:08.740 British Empire and then the fact that North America spoke English.
01:32:12.160 Do you know something else, Dan, just from a linguistic point of view? It's also because
01:32:15.100 English is a very hard language to master, but it's very easy to learn relatively.
01:32:21.060 I mean, I speak several languages. 0.73
01:32:24.280 If you learn Russian, it is a nightmare to learn at the basic level. 0.94
01:32:29.540 So English is very good to learn to beginner to intermediate level,
01:32:34.540 and it's just very easy, relatively speaking. 0.99
01:32:37.640 Like Russian and German and other languages just wouldn't work
01:32:41.000 because they're just too hard to learn. 0.65
01:32:42.480 Interesting.
01:32:43.060 Yeah. 1.00
01:32:43.840 Chinese probably as well, ironically, 0.56
01:32:46.020 because people go, what's the most common language?
01:32:48.100 It's Chinese, but that's only because there's a billion Chinese people.
01:32:51.060 but it's not a language that's really spread
01:32:53.540 because it's tonal.
01:32:54.780 You have to make different sounds.
01:32:56.620 It's all very difficult.
01:32:57.540 Yeah, that's true.
01:32:58.020 English is very simple.
01:33:00.420 I'm still trying to master it.
01:33:03.460 And then ideas around representative democracy.
01:33:08.640 Yeah.
01:33:09.660 Huge important.
01:33:11.620 And the idea of India, Australia, New Zealand,
01:33:13.880 the USA, Canada, these enormous countries.
01:33:16.920 uh you know the japanese system of sort of constitutional monarchy in some ways transmitted
01:33:23.140 via the u.s through to post-war thinking um it's just it's it's and then there's capitalism i mean
01:33:30.020 there's the british first factory of the modern world arguably sort of in in nottingham in the
01:33:35.860 1750s you know organizing labor um insurance patent protection all of these all of these
01:33:44.440 ideas the sort of foundational ways in which we conduct global trade a lot of that is forged yes
01:33:49.420 no in amsterdam and and it's a kind of milieu in those 16 1700s but it's it's britain it's that
01:33:55.440 british empire that's the vehicle for exporting that uh and then after anything else football
01:34:01.660 well come yeah it's entirely football is exported by the brits um it's you know all of these things
01:34:09.200 So Britain's fingerprints are on lots of the modern world.
01:34:14.060 And another thing, of course, is the geography of the world.
01:34:18.300 You know, Calcutta, Mumbai, Bombay, as it was,
01:34:23.580 British settlements, Hong Kong.
01:34:26.220 Madras as well.
01:34:26.820 Madras, of course, Chennai, yeah.
01:34:28.560 That was that fort built there.
01:34:30.400 It's one of those little forts I was talking about.
01:34:31.820 You're still going to visit the fort in Madras.
01:34:33.140 And Chennai built in the 1630s as a little pinprick of Britishness
01:34:37.660 from which the entire continent went. 0.91
01:34:39.160 I mean, no one could have guessed that, right?
01:34:41.580 And then Hong Kong, obviously Singapore.
01:34:45.800 These are places that existed as British trading posts
01:34:50.200 that helped to shape the modern world we live in today.
01:34:55.380 I think one of the last I'd say about the British Empire,
01:34:58.100 and I think this is about some of the tech giants as well,
01:35:00.300 is the British definitely jumped through a gap in the market.
01:35:04.080 So China was declining for a lot of internal reasons.
01:35:11.360 Britain defeated France.
01:35:14.720 The US was getting started. 0.54
01:35:16.440 It was just the plates of the world were aligned.
01:35:20.000 And you got this situation where briefly,
01:35:22.460 and it's quite brief, the British Empire, interestingly,
01:35:25.220 it just sort of rose, totally dominant.
01:35:28.560 And then other people just caught up.
01:35:30.260 And you think about that with a big company like Amazon today.
01:35:32.380 They just went, okay, we'll deliver stuff to your house.
01:35:34.920 You can book it on your phone.
01:35:35.840 You go, this is the cleverest thing I've ever seen.
01:35:37.540 Now, in the long term, does everyone else catch up
01:35:40.800 and nick those ideas and just do that?
01:35:42.880 And I think in some ways that's what happens in Britain.
01:35:44.480 It just kind of finds itself as the only guy left on the dance floor for a bit.
01:35:47.840 France just falls apart.
01:35:49.560 The Dutch have to fight the French and just get wiped out.
01:35:53.180 The Swedish collapse. 0.86
01:35:54.680 Delaware used to be New Sweden.
01:35:56.280 There are all sorts of other options of the world.
01:35:58.100 New York was famous in New Amsterdam.
01:36:00.140 There are all sorts of versions of the world.
01:36:01.400 But this is the version we've got, and it's, yeah, it's fascinating.
01:36:05.700 So, yeah, New York's another example of a place like Singapore,
01:36:08.700 which owes its importance to that British empire.
01:36:14.240 Do you subscribe to the view that no empire ever really dies?
01:36:17.720 They just kind of change form and then exist almost in the water?
01:36:25.280 I think there's some examples of empires that have been sort of eradicated.
01:36:29.440 but now i think yeah some well they exist in people's minds don't they exist in the culture
01:36:35.260 so you see that in ancient set in the ancient world babylon long after it exists independent
01:36:40.500 state people are still obsessed by babylon greece long after greece is conquered and it's still
01:36:46.040 greekness and ideas it kind of it rumbles along so i suppose the british empire at the moment
01:36:52.380 i mean it still exists in some weird ways first of all there are bits of it that's the weird thing
01:36:56.620 about one of the problems we're talking about is the street defense review at the moment and
01:36:59.740 one of the big problems of the british empire is still like bits of territory all over the place
01:37:03.460 that need defending or do they you know that that's a big problem for policymakers because
01:37:08.600 you need a different kind of armed forces to project power to the other side of the world
01:37:11.360 to protect you know whatever it might be cayman islands or the falcon islands uh and then the
01:37:17.480 other thing that's fascinating is you know the king is still head of state i'm half canadian he's
01:37:20.580 on the money in canada it's bizarre isn't it and and so and like the roman empire in the west
01:37:25.620 It just sort of collapses maybe slowly.
01:37:28.600 Like, what is the end of empire?
01:37:30.580 When my mum was a kid in Canada, and Canada was independent,
01:37:34.400 in geography lessons, she heard about the rivers of England,
01:37:36.700 not about the rivers of Canada. 0.99
01:37:37.960 That was shit to remember all the rivers of England 0.98
01:37:39.660 in her geography lessons in the 1950s and 60s in Canada. 1.00
01:37:42.700 It's like bonkers.
01:37:43.740 So empire endures a lot longer sometimes
01:37:46.260 than people give it credit for.
01:37:50.580 And if you were in charge of all the schools
01:37:53.040 and universities in the country,
01:37:54.440 unlikely to happen
01:37:55.800 what would we teach
01:37:58.560 what would be the story of the empire
01:38:00.200 that we tell people
01:38:01.160 why it happened
01:38:03.840 what that means
01:38:06.120 how on earth it happens
01:38:07.940 and what
01:38:09.820 what that tells us about
01:38:13.560 for me the history is all the same
01:38:15.240 you want to find
01:38:16.520 the future hasn't happened yet
01:38:18.280 the present is infinitesimally short
01:38:21.460 it's already in the
01:38:22.500 So if you want to study us, what makes us tick, what makes us fight, what makes us love, steal, share,
01:38:30.600 you've got to look at the past.
01:38:31.780 That's all we've got.
01:38:32.560 All we've got to go on.
01:38:34.280 And so whether it's the British Empire or anything, I'm like, what happened here?
01:38:39.000 Why did it happen?
01:38:40.000 It's bonkers.
01:38:40.380 And what were the consequences of it happening?
01:38:43.240 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,
01:38:48.440 which I totally understand.
01:38:49.340 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.
01:38:59.620 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.
01:39:10.640 and but i thought some of the takeaways from what you were saying about it why it happened
01:39:16.300 were really important as well because look the geographical piece we don't control
01:39:19.720 but you talked about patent law you talked about uh you know the representative democracy or at
01:39:26.540 least parliament having to answer to some extent to the people a ruler not being able to just on
01:39:32.880 a whim do certain things or die and leave the country as had happened in this country for
01:39:36.860 centuries prior to that. There were lots of things about it that seemed to be good ways of doing
01:39:42.680 things. And Britain bringing that into the world and birthing those ideas in many cases and
01:39:48.400 exporting them around the world, that seems to me like an important piece because it's a clue.
01:39:53.740 I think you rightly talk about how the best measure of what we can do and should do and 1.00
01:39:59.240 shouldn't do is looking at the past. Well, the British Empire is a fairly short period of time,
01:40:04.720 historically speaking in which so many of these great ideas get discovered and put into practice
01:40:09.880 and that seems to me important as well yeah i think it's i think it's what how do you how do
01:40:15.320 you generate wealth how do you allow humans to reach their potential i mean it's very strange
01:40:20.540 and in the north of england this revolution these people got no formal education captain cook who's
01:40:24.960 grew up semi-literate we think but many of these people grew up illiterate george stevenson's got
01:40:30.640 no formal training. He goes and invents modern railway system effectively. That says something
01:40:35.420 important, doesn't it? How do we, we should study that, think about that. It's fascinating.
01:40:40.520 And then, of course, you think to yourself, isn't that weird about human history that there are
01:40:43.760 George Stephenson's and James Cook's and Mary Wollstonecraft's and Shakespeare's just
01:40:49.600 all over the world. It's like wildflowers. You disturb the soil and suddenly, boom,
01:40:53.700 they all just come out. And the vast majority of us will never find out because we're just
01:40:58.000 yoked to the soil or we're just doing what we do podcasting and you know we might be absolute
01:41:03.460 geniuses we don't know but no and i think that is the that's very interesting important right
01:41:07.860 that's really and of course we have learned those lessons mass public education you know encouraging
01:41:12.320 trying to identify gifted students scholarship you know there are things that we continue to do
01:41:16.560 but i i find that fascinating on that totally you know that and and also promotion on merit
01:41:23.920 and again we have learned people who don't know anything from history we learn quite a lot we
01:41:27.440 promote on merit today there's no perfect way of promotion but on the whole if someone drives
01:41:32.180 a ship into a sandbank i mean their career it doesn't matter if they're the son of the duke
01:41:36.200 yeah so um and and those are sort of those are things and that's and by the way that's why our
01:41:42.580 world is astonishing at the moment we have absorbed lots of those lessons we continue to
01:41:47.200 that's why we encourage learning that's why we um invest in into medical science whatever it
01:41:55.880 whatever it might be.
01:41:56.680 And as a result, the world is just radically changed.
01:42:00.300 Now, there's also a lesson about doing so sustainably
01:42:02.200 and not causing climate change, all those sorts of things.
01:42:04.620 But we are absorbing those lessons.
01:42:07.520 I just think we need to kind of be mindful of what they are.
01:42:09.560 Right. And where they come from as well.
01:42:10.940 Where they come from, yeah, for sure.
01:42:12.200 And there's one other topic I want to address
01:42:14.720 in terms of something you said,
01:42:16.300 which was the rise of nationalism
01:42:18.260 is such a powerful transformative force.
01:42:20.760 It changes the world and ultimately, as you say,
01:42:23.480 contributes to the end of the British Empire. 0.71
01:42:27.100 If that's here to stay, 0.75
01:42:28.400 is Britain, the British Empire,
01:42:29.900 the last great empire in human history?
01:42:32.760 Oh, I see. Interesting.
01:42:35.260 Well, in some ways it is because, of course, 0.99
01:42:38.640 like I say, the Germans and the Russians
01:42:41.120 and the Chinese and the Americans
01:42:42.380 very carefully rebranded.
01:42:43.680 I mean, every state's empire.
01:42:44.920 England is the Empire of Wessex.
01:42:47.680 So, but, yes, in that form,
01:42:52.120 I think, in terms of the idea that you can sail across the seas and conquer.
01:42:56.080 I mean, that's what's very interesting about some of Trump's rhetoric.
01:42:57.840 I don't think he means it, but the idea that Gaza Strip becomes, in some form, American
01:43:01.120 or Venezuela, he's posted about Venezuela becoming American.
01:43:03.940 That's a very old-fashioned way of looking at it.
01:43:07.900 I sort of think that, if you look at the polling in America, it doesn't seem very popular.
01:43:11.820 Canada, Greenland, Venezuela.
01:43:14.240 There is no longer a kind of popular, which is very different to the past, a popular desire
01:43:20.200 to take over and own another place.
01:43:23.540 So in some ways, perhaps Britain is the last
01:43:25.760 of the great empires in that era.
01:43:27.460 It's the last of the great empires
01:43:28.660 that failed to make that jump, 0.85
01:43:31.000 like the Austrians failed, like the Turks failed,
01:43:34.960 like the Omanis failed in East Africa.
01:43:38.140 They failed to make that rebrand,
01:43:40.420 that jump of rebranding
01:43:41.800 and becoming a kind of nation state, right?
01:43:44.020 So now we all think it's completely,
01:43:45.660 of course, America's shown in California.
01:43:47.920 I mean, why would it not?
01:43:49.020 California was conquered, you know, and settled by the Americans.
01:43:53.440 And yet, it's fine, because it's been reasonably successfully incorporated
01:43:57.220 into the American project.
01:43:58.900 It's people feel American, they vote,
01:44:02.000 they are part of that American political system.
01:44:05.360 So, yeah, I think my one day, Britain in some ways is both the greatest,
01:44:09.440 but potentially, in some ways, I guess, I hope,
01:44:13.080 the last of those giant, far-flung global empires.
01:44:17.720 But again, we talk about this, France, France's longest land border today is with Brazil.
01:44:23.760 Because France owns a little portion of northern South America, which is part of France.
01:44:28.500 You spend euros there.
01:44:30.020 France attempted, by the way, different to British, Guadeloupe, Martinique, France incorporated
01:44:36.500 those into France.
01:44:37.720 They vote in the French elections.
01:44:39.020 They use euros.
01:44:39.900 It's the swathes of the Pacific, which are still part of France.
01:44:42.940 So is France no part?
01:44:43.620 I don't know.
01:44:44.020 But that's sort of somehow become a nation state.
01:44:47.320 but yeah interesting dan what an absolute pleasure fun guys oh it was more than fun it
01:44:53.980 was incredible before we move over maybe for dan it was just fun yeah i'm like that guy's like
01:45:00.320 this is the greatest time of my life and the woman's like yeah it was all right
01:45:02.720 anyway on that note uh what's the one thing dan that we're that we're meant to be talking about
01:45:12.180 but we're not being talked about oh geez i forgot this bit this is good this bit isn't it um could
01:45:16.960 be related to this conversation what you mentioned about the ai thing and i was just like oh that's
01:45:21.760 amazing like you were saying how there was some the technology that we were using here and then
01:45:27.320 it could be to yeah it may it may look the americans have meant all this ai and they're
01:45:31.240 thinking isn't this great but in that case are there ways in which other states or players will
01:45:35.800 harness that ai to absolutely undermine american interest in one i mean that's that's that's what
01:45:40.560 history like the train thing with the british like the train thing is a bit fascinating yeah
01:45:43.840 Or the armaments revolution, which in part is...
01:45:46.840 Anyway, we can get on to that.
01:45:48.560 Actually, okay, so I think one thing we're not talking about is
01:45:50.220 as we go into space, the lessons from the past go into it.
01:45:55.200 I don't think we're having many conversations about
01:45:56.940 what's going to be the politics of space?
01:45:59.240 Like, what are we doing?
01:46:01.380 When Elon Musk goes to Mars and puts a flag in the ground,
01:46:04.760 what flag is that?
01:46:06.500 And what does it mean?
01:46:09.000 And is it under the auspices of the UN or the US
01:46:11.780 or of his own private interest?
01:46:13.300 Is it as an individual?
01:46:15.360 Is it now it's a company that's partially floated?
01:46:18.120 So I think I'd like to know more about the plan
01:46:21.520 for moon, space, and Mars.
01:46:27.100 And I'd like to be inspired by what happened
01:46:30.420 in the 16th and 17th centuries around the world
01:46:33.240 and see if there's a really good way we can do this
01:46:35.600 in a way that does not...
01:46:38.020 Because looking at the history,
01:46:40.100 as a historian, you say what will probably happen
01:46:41.880 is competition and conflict will be exported to these new territories.
01:46:46.460 So how do we think about that as a species?
01:46:50.200 You get the Chinese portion of Mars and you get the American portion of Mars. 0.58
01:46:54.180 And then surprise, surprise.
01:46:56.440 The big bit of mineral wealth is sort of in the middle.
01:46:59.960 And you're drilling from...
01:47:01.360 So that's for sure a concern based on a knowledge of history.
01:47:06.260 And it may be fine, but it seems to me that we probably need to think about it
01:47:10.200 before it happens because that's the best way to solve all these problems isn't it when it's when
01:47:14.940 there's not you're not you haven't landed on mars and discovered a massive load of rare earth and
01:47:21.620 so that's when it becomes then that becomes quite intriguing dan before we head over to sub stack
01:47:26.420 where uh you get to answer questions from our supporters tell everybody about your hit podcast
01:47:31.200 i use that word advisedly hey man history history dance knows history available now on youtube
01:47:35.460 inspired by you guys on youtube very exciting to be recording them so please dance knows history
01:47:40.160 it, please go check that out. And they're just as good
01:47:42.140 as the conversations we've had here with you.
01:47:44.080 Impossible.
01:47:45.980 With you, I mean. With you specifically.
01:47:48.500 Head on over to triggerpod.co.uk
01:47:50.840 where Dan's going to answer
01:47:52.100 your questions.
01:47:54.380 What is your favourite what-if
01:47:56.300 moment of history?
01:47:58.100 It doesn't have to be about an important moment,
01:48:00.360 only that it might have led to
01:48:02.020 a different present.
01:48:10.160 We'll be right back.