TRIGGERnometry - The Historians Who've Had Enough of Woke History - Nigel Biggar and Robert Tombs

00:00:01.000 He wanted to look at some documents.

00:00:04.000 He was told that they were no longer available

00:00:07.000 because they concerned 19th century descriptions

00:00:10.000 of indigenous cultures,

00:00:12.000 which were not to be seen by the prying eyes

00:00:15.000 of 21st century Westerners.

00:00:17.000 This might upset the spirits of the ancestors.

00:00:21.000 My worry is that the currently fashionable story

00:00:25.000 about Britain's past as being a litany of racism

00:00:27.000 and oppression and exploitation

00:00:29.000 exploitation is being fed to kids. Why would you believe in the country? Would you fight for Britain?

00:00:34.020 No, I wouldn't fight for it. The story we tell ourselves about our past has really important

00:00:38.420 political implications. And that's why it's being done. Let's be honest.

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00:01:09.560 Robert Toombs, Nigel Bigger, what a pleasure to have you both on the show together, two of the

00:01:14.600 most eminent historians in this country. We wanted to talk about many different things,

00:01:19.920 but the first one is history itself

00:01:22.340 and the way it's being taught

00:01:24.920 is something you've covered in a recent book

00:01:26.820 remind everybody the title

00:01:28.420 colonialism and moral reckoning would be the earliest one

00:01:35.180 and then the latest one on the culture wars

00:01:37.260 is the new dark age

00:01:39.460 why liberals must win the culture wars

00:01:42.320 and then the next one with Robert

00:01:44.460 is our island story

00:01:47.700 a better story about Britain.

00:01:50.720 That's right.

00:01:51.180 And we will cover actually all of that.

00:01:53.320 We had you on to talk about the first of those books

00:01:55.900 a couple of years back now.

00:01:58.560 I keep forgetting which was my last book.

00:01:59.940 That's right.

00:02:00.640 That's why I was like,

00:02:01.640 why is he looking so puzzled about the title of his book?

00:02:04.600 But one of the things you talk about

00:02:06.460 is the way that history is being taught

00:02:08.680 and more importantly not taught.

00:02:10.360 And we wanted to hear both of your thoughts

00:02:12.420 about the way people now are taught to understand

00:02:16.660 the history of not just our society, not just of our country,

00:02:20.480 but actually of our species?

00:02:23.280 I think there are two problems, and Robert can contradict me if he wants.

00:02:28.500 One problem is when I went to school a long time ago in the 60s and 70s,

00:02:35.880 I came up with a sense of the development of Britain

00:02:40.820 from the Roman times to the present.

00:02:43.300 I had a sense of the whole and of how we got to where we are.

00:02:47.500 And it was a Wiggish story of development and increasing liberal politics,

00:02:53.560 but it was a good story.

00:02:56.420 My sense is now that kids in primary, secondary school,

00:03:00.860 they don't get the whole story.

00:03:02.880 They get blobs.

00:03:03.980 What was it like to be in the trenches in the First World War?

00:03:07.060 What was it like to be a slave?

00:03:10.460 Lots about the Nazis.

00:03:11.560 but no coherent sense of the whole story of the country.

00:03:15.920 So that 10 years ago, a young man who came from one of our best private schools

00:03:23.040 and was thinking about wanting to read history in Oxford,

00:03:27.980 we had a conversation until I heard the sound of my jaw hitting the floor

00:03:32.800 when I realized this intelligent, well-educated young man

00:03:36.380 did not know when the English Civil War happened

00:03:38.960 because he had no sense of the whole.

00:03:40.920 So that's one problem, I think. And that's one problem I want our book to address or remedy. And the other is my worry, and I'm sure it varies from school to school. My worry is that the currently fashionable story about Britain's past as being a litany of racism and oppression and exploitation is being fed to kids.

00:04:06.500 I'm sure it won't happen in every school, but I'm sure in some schools it will be the case.

00:04:10.200 So it's not just a matter of giving them the whole story of the development of the country,

00:04:16.600 but feeding them a particularly ideologically partisan story.

00:04:20.220 That really worries me.

00:04:22.300 And what's interesting is how accurate you are, because as somebody who used to teach,

00:04:27.220 that's essentially all we did.

00:04:28.900 We just jumped from period of time to period of time to period of time.

00:04:32.860 and they found out what happened but more importantly they didn't find out why it happened

00:04:39.820 and to me that's the more important aspect of the whole subject so i didn't know you taught

00:04:45.780 history no you're literally oh history yeah i was about to say you're literally the only person in

00:04:51.320 the world who doesn't know that francis used to be a teacher that is true no i taught history as

00:04:57.340 part of primary. Okay. So I taught in year four, year five, and year six. So I taught the history

00:05:03.360 of England, essentially, to children. But if you actually asked them why these things happen,

00:05:09.640 I don't think they'd be able to explain it. But Frances, when you were in secondary school,

00:05:14.140 did you grow up with a sense of the whole history of the country? No. The only reason why I understood

00:05:20.760 what happened in our country was because my grandfather, who was from South America, was a

00:05:25.400 historian so he actually explained to me you're right yeah exactly but if I had relied on what

00:05:32.940 I had been taught in school there's no way because what happens is and it's rather like watching the

00:05:38.040 news well they'll be like there's a war in Darfur and you go okay and it's between the x and y

00:05:43.120 but you just come away you go well I don't know why there was a war in Darfur it just

00:05:47.220 sort of happened yeah and that's kind of what we're left with really and what children are left

00:05:52.440 with. So I think for me, the worst effect of that is that kids now, they grow up in this

00:06:00.620 environment, which actually is highly privileged. I think people who live in this country are highly

00:06:07.100 privileged, certainly relative to our past, but also to lots of other people's presence.

00:06:12.240 But they have no idea of what it took to build this. It's as if it's just there. And if they

00:06:18.900 don't have a sense of the fragility and the cost of what it took to build, they won't care for it

00:06:24.600 in the way they should. That's my concern. And Robert, one of the things that I think comes out

00:06:28.700 of what Nigel is saying, you know, I remember reading A People's History of Britain, a really

00:06:34.300 good book. I really enjoyed it. I think I've told the story on the show before. And I was blown away

00:06:39.220 because it was really informative. And it gave me a sense of this country's history, someone who

00:06:43.100 comes from outside. It was very helpful to kind of ground myself and the country I was living in.

00:06:48.080 And then I went and I thought, well, there must be other books about other countries that I find fascinating.

00:06:52.940 So I went and I got A People's History of America, of the United States by Howard Zinn.

00:06:58.800 And I opened it and within about three pages, I was just like, what is this horrific?

00:07:04.480 Look, you give balance to history, but to present something as so one-sided and so decontextualized

00:07:11.080 and just to say all this society is is just evil, here's loads of examples of how evil it is.

00:07:16.500 But the impact that must have on people's view of themselves, of the society, and of history more broadly, has got to be terrible.

00:07:24.300 Yeah. Well, I think there have been a number of things.

00:07:27.980 When you say teaching history, of course, it depends on the level we're talking about.

00:07:31.560 So in school history, I think, first of all, we teach very little history in British schools compared with most other countries,

00:07:38.740 certainly compared with European countries.

00:07:40.460 In France, as I know, history is a compulsory subject at school right through, right to the end.

00:07:46.000 Here, it's actually very little.

00:07:47.340 So if the kids do half an hour a week, that's often as much as they will get.

00:07:51.780 And they will stop when they're in year nine.

00:07:54.860 So they'll stop before GCSE.

00:07:57.400 In France, you would carry on until you're going to A level.

00:08:00.620 So that's one thing.

00:08:01.560 We don't really care much about teaching history

00:08:03.740 because I think we thought it was never really necessary

00:08:06.440 because we knew who we were, we knew, you know, all these basics.

00:08:10.740 I think that's one thing.

00:08:12.220 Another thing is some years ago, many teachers, many educationalists decided that the only way you could justify the teaching of history was because it taught certain skills.

00:08:24.840 So it wasn't about learning about the history of Britain or indeed the history of Britain.

00:08:28.700 It was about learning how to criticize sources, deconstruct arguments and so on in a way that in a very crude way that, in fact, historians would never actually do.

00:08:41.220 You can't just do it without knowing what you're talking.

00:08:44.380 You know, without knowing the basics, you can't do anything like this.

00:08:47.240 But it was assumed that this was all about skills,

00:08:49.180 and therefore these would be the sort of skills you could then go and get a job with.

00:08:52.420 You know, I can write an essay, I can read a document, and therefore I can get a job.

00:08:57.940 And another damaging thing was, okay, the ideological use of history.

00:09:04.040 I think we can probably take for granted that that was undesirable.

00:09:07.600 Or, well, we might talk about that.

00:09:09.920 What do you mean by the ideological use of history?

00:09:11.860 Well, okay, deciding that the reason for teaching history

00:09:14.580 was to teach children certain messages

00:09:17.960 about things that were good, things that were bad,

00:09:21.600 maybe things that were bad in our own history,

00:09:23.860 but also in some ways avoiding things that were bad

00:09:26.700 if they were not part of the story that you preferred.

00:09:31.500 So I think, for example, most children in Britain

00:09:34.300 will learn something about the Nazis,

00:09:36.700 but they won't learn anything about Stalin.

00:09:39.520 So if you have no knowledge other than that, you will think, gosh, isn't fascism terrible?

00:09:44.660 But you won't think this was part of a whole totalitarian phenomenon in which socialism, communism, Marxism killed millions of people.

00:09:55.020 You'll never come across that. You'll only learn about Hitler.

00:09:58.640 And so you've got disjointed chunks of things.

00:10:02.900 I'll just pause you there. Sorry, Robert.

00:10:04.500 And this is a question that I really want answered.

00:10:07.740 Why don't we teach about communism?

00:10:10.100 I don't know.

00:10:11.160 Well, if you'll allow me to say something about it later.

00:10:14.140 Yeah, of course.

00:10:14.680 I'm actually working on a revised history curriculum for schools

00:10:18.620 in which there will be this.

00:10:22.220 Because I think it's terribly important that children should know this.

00:10:25.280 So if you're doing skills, you can do anything you like.

00:10:29.740 You can do the Wild West.

00:10:32.300 You can do Henry VIII.

00:10:35.220 You can do Hitler.

00:10:36.180 There's no reason to connect these things up.

00:10:39.280 Any bit can be used to teach a skill.

00:10:42.680 And also it was easier for the teachers, I think.

00:10:45.640 And they thought it would be more attractive to the kids.

00:10:47.880 You know, Henry VIII, Hitler, good stuff.

00:10:50.600 Gladstone's Irish policy, the Third Reform Act, perhaps not so immediately accessible.

00:10:57.460 So I think that was another thing.

00:10:59.280 And then, of course, if you like, sort of backing this up intellectually,

00:11:02.840 was the post-modernist view that there's nothing that's really true.

00:11:09.160 History is therefore just a lot of stories.

00:11:12.280 And so we're not really interested in telling people

00:11:15.460 how to understand the development of our country

00:11:18.700 because you might like that story, but I don't really like that story.

00:11:23.480 And a lot of the kids won't like that story.

00:11:25.460 Therefore, we'll do some other stories.

00:11:28.280 And if it means saying that, for example,

00:11:30.520 a lot of the soldiers on Hadrian's War were African, i.e. black, well, that's a nice story.

00:11:38.140 It makes some of the kids feel happy, and it may help to promote a sense of belonging. Therefore,

00:11:44.260 let's teach that. And if some boring pedant comes along and says, actually, soldiers on Hadrian's

00:11:50.160 War were all Greco-Romans, well, why do you want to upset people by saying that? You say it's true,

00:11:58.040 and that's what the evidence says.

00:11:59.220 But we all know that this is just a lot of stories anyway.

00:12:01.780 So let's tell the stories we like.

00:12:03.520 Well, just on that, let me pose this both to you.

00:12:06.280 Let me do my best impression of a deconstructionist

00:12:09.040 and say, hold on a second, and a relativist as well.

00:12:12.740 But isn't that true?

00:12:13.780 I mean, look at our own time, right?

00:12:15.640 You know, the history books will have a view on Brexit

00:12:18.740 and they will have a view on Trump

00:12:20.340 and they will have a view on COVID.

00:12:22.320 And we all who lived through that time

00:12:24.220 know that there was no one view on COVID,

00:12:27.100 with no one view. Some people hated Trump, and some people thought he was the best thing since

00:12:31.340 sliced bread, and some people thought that COVID came from a lab in China, and other people said

00:12:35.060 it didn't, and all these other things. But whoever ends up having the power to write the history

00:12:40.040 books will impose their political and ideological worldview on those events so that our descendants

00:12:46.820 are given a worldview that says X or says Y. Yes. What do you say to that? That's what Orwell

00:12:54.220 wrote, isn't it? Yes. He who controls the past controls the future. Isn't it true?

00:13:00.940 Well, if you can get away with it, if you have an intellectual authority that can impose a

00:13:07.840 certain view of the past, then, well, yes, you can do that. But many people would say the purpose

00:13:13.860 of studying history is precisely to be able to say that what you're saying is not right.

00:13:19.660 I mean, I think that's part of the answer.

00:13:22.380 I mean, another thing I would say, Nigel and I have talked about this.

00:13:26.120 A lot of what is history is perfectly well known.

00:13:32.020 It's not just a matter of opinion.

00:13:34.300 You can't deny that there was a Second World War.

00:13:36.880 You can't deny who fought in it or who won it.

00:13:39.820 You can't deny that there was a Holocaust.

00:13:41.880 And this is true of so much of history.

00:13:44.600 The idea that you can just pick the bits you like and ignore the bits you don't like

00:13:48.440 is simply not true.

00:13:50.180 And as I, I'm not sure if I say it in our book,

00:13:52.800 but we know much more about William Gladstone

00:13:55.900 than we know about Andy Burnham, for example.

00:13:59.000 And much of this is completely incontrovertible.

00:14:03.680 These are things that we know.

00:14:05.360 And the things that we don't know are often fairly trivial,

00:14:08.620 or at least are questions that we would,

00:14:11.160 you could say legitimate questions of doubt.

00:14:13.240 I mean, I sometimes feel this is a rather homespun example.

00:14:16.940 History is a bit like writing about a football match.

00:14:19.960 You might say, well, the important things are, where was it played?

00:14:22.860 When was it played? Who won? Who scored the goals?

00:14:26.540 Then you might say, well, yes, but why did Arsenal beat Aston Villa?

00:14:31.020 Then that's a matter of opinion.

00:14:32.820 You might say, well, that can never be proved.

00:14:35.400 But the fact is you can't just say, well, to say that Arsenal beat Aston Villa,

00:14:39.760 that's just your story.

00:14:41.300 I've got a different story, which is the other way around.

00:14:43.780 That just cannot be intellectually honest.

00:14:46.000 And yet that's what sometimes you get in quite serious historical debate.

00:14:51.340 Yes, so the issue of imposing a particular version of history

00:14:57.060 on the rest of us is one.

00:14:58.580 But the other issue about there being plural views,

00:15:01.340 I mean, there are always different views of the past,

00:15:04.840 always been controversy about how to interpret the past.

00:15:08.360 But I think whatever our view, if we're honest,

00:15:12.760 our view needs to be accountable to reason and evidence.

00:15:15.340 Yeah. Right. So the data might allow a variety of interpretations, some of which fit better than others.

00:15:21.600 But you've got to allow the data to control you. Otherwise, it's a completely free for all.

00:15:25.440 You believe whatever you want. And I think the problem with a lot of the ideological history is its refusal to take into account certain data.

00:15:35.440 So, for example, I referred earlier to my book on colonialism,

00:15:41.540 which an academic at Sussex University, Alan Lester,

00:15:45.980 spent 15,000 words taking down, right?

00:15:49.700 And in this 15,000 words, Alan Lester could find nothing,

00:15:54.080 absolutely nothing, good to say about the British Empire.

00:15:57.720 Now, whatever overall judgment we come to about whether the empire is good or bad,

00:16:02.860 No one can deny, it seems to me, that it was good that the British Empire abolished slavery and slave trading and suppressed it worldwide, nor that it was good that the British Empire decided to fight Hitler in 1939.

00:16:17.460 So in other words, no one, as it were, accountable to all the data can deny that the British Empire did some things good.

00:16:25.080 But there's Alan Lester in 15,000 words, cannot say single, cannot recognize a single positive facet.

00:16:32.780 And so that's the problem with ideological views of history.

00:16:38.000 It simply refuses to accept all the data

00:16:40.800 or to be challenged by data it hadn't taken into account.

00:16:44.580 What I suppose as a total layman and outsider I am seeing

00:16:49.260 is I think inevitably with all of this stuff that we've seen,

00:16:53.180 we all know it's representative of a much massive underlying iceberg.

00:16:57.080 This is the tip, right?

00:16:58.140 underneath this sits an entire remaking of what we think about when we think about the social

00:17:04.440 sciences and the way that they're taught and the way that they're practiced and the way the

00:17:07.220 research is done and what we are ultimately told about what the truth is about economics about

00:17:12.000 psychology about social psychology about anthropology you know we were talking over

00:17:16.940 lunch about you know anthropologists who look at bones now not allowed to to work on this because

00:17:23.180 it's insensitive to the feelings of the indigenous population of this and and all this stuff

00:17:29.980 and i imagine that you know you the two of you being historians is being affected by this your

00:17:35.580 fields being affected by this as well and people now questioning well are we being told the truth

00:17:41.100 when we're told history i can give you an example of this affecting history because a friend of mine

00:17:45.900 did this, Lawrence Goldman. He wanted to look at some documents held by the State Library of New

00:17:54.980 South Wales, which written by a chap called Eyre in the 1830s, who travelled a lot in Australia

00:18:03.140 and observed and wrote about indigenous culture, very sensitively, though he came to a sticky end

00:18:10.080 air later, but that's another matter. And he was told that they were no longer available online,

00:18:17.240 at least, because they concerned 19th century descriptions of indigenous cultures,

00:18:24.240 which were not to be seen by the prying eyes of 21st century Westerners.

00:18:30.260 So here are historical documents, which cannot be consulted by historians,

00:18:34.900 because long-dead people, there was no evidence that they disliked it

00:18:39.980 because, after all, he travelled among them and they allowed him to do so.

00:18:44.500 But this might upset the spirits of the ancestors.

00:18:48.000 Therefore, you cannot do historical research on this person.

00:18:51.880 Now, this, I think, would have been utterly unimaginable.

00:18:57.200 Unless, of course, you were talking about working on Stalinist Russia

00:19:01.560 and they wouldn't allow you into the archives

00:19:03.520 because it contained undesirable truths.

00:19:09.220 But that this should be true of a Western democracy,

00:19:12.760 a liberal Western democracy,

00:19:14.480 would until very recently have been quite unthinkable.

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00:20:50.440 Well, actually, you make the point about Russia under Stalin and now under Putin.

00:20:54.860 it's the same that a lot of stuff is kept from the public and kept from historians yes but i

00:20:59.980 that to me is far more understandable why a dictator may wish to prevent the crimes of him

00:21:05.740 and his predecessors being exposed i don't agree with it but i understand not offending the spirits

00:21:12.620 of people who lived 200 years ago that to me how did we get here oh because we white people

00:21:21.020 people are the oppressors, indigenous peoples are the victims, and whatever they want, we

00:21:28.840 must defer to them. We owe them. That's how it's the narrative that's played.

00:21:35.200 And their spirits too? We owe their spirits as well?

00:21:37.620 Well, apparently we do. Apparently we believe in their spirits. It's like when I quoted

00:21:44.780 this in my last book, the story of Frances Widowson, a political scientist in Canada

00:21:53.300 who got fired from her job, partly because she challenged an indigenous Native American

00:22:02.320 who was talking about traditional Native American views of the stars. And she said,

00:22:13.280 well, that's all very interesting, and it's interesting to know how they saw the world,

00:22:17.660 but you're not really telling us, are you?

00:22:19.280 This is equivalent to modern astronomical science, are you?

00:22:26.860 Well, that's what he was saying.

00:22:30.400 And partly as a result of that, she lost her job.

00:22:34.120 In other words, we're not allowed to say that indigenous ways of knowing

00:22:41.020 were not as good as modern ways of knowing.

00:22:47.300 And that's, sorry, you were going to say, what were you going to say?

00:22:49.660 Well, I was only going to say it's interesting in a way

00:22:51.780 because, of course, we're perfectly at liberty

00:22:54.220 to question the ways our ancestors saw the world.

00:22:57.240 Yeah, absolutely.

00:22:57.840 If you were to say, well, 17th century Welshman thought that,

00:23:01.760 you know, the earth, the sun went round the earth or something,

00:23:06.320 but we're not allowed to say, and we think,

00:23:08.040 well, that was an interesting view of things,

00:23:09.780 but we know this is now not true.

00:23:11.020 but we can't say that of other cultures

00:23:14.260 because we are their oppressors,

00:23:16.760 or at least that's what has been...

00:23:18.460 This is a colonialist view of...

00:23:20.900 So white guilt means that people of ethnic minorities

00:23:26.760 who wish to exploit white guilt, not all do,

00:23:30.580 can do so with impunity.

00:23:32.420 And that's a real issue because if you essentially tell

00:23:35.580 a whole country that their history is evil

00:23:38.780 and they are uniquely evil people, then why would you feel any pride?

00:23:44.880 Why would you feel that you want to belong to this society?

00:23:49.540 So glad you made that point, because I wanted to get back to that,

00:23:53.120 about why telling the whole truth about the story of Britain is important.

00:24:00.140 And the whole truth, yes, it involves moments and episodes of failure

00:24:07.760 and of injustice but it also involves stories of of heroic humanitarian and

00:24:15.740 liberal achievement so we want the whole truth that's really important because as

00:24:19.220 you say if if British kids are taught that the history Britain is nothing but

00:24:23.480 a litany of racism oppression and exploitation in which all our

00:24:28.640 institutions were involved why would you believe in the country why wouldn't you

00:24:32.960 vote when you're asked why wouldn't you tell a poster when he asks would you

00:24:37.320 fight for Britain? No, I wouldn't fight for it, as a very large number of youngsters have

00:24:42.300 recently done. Why wouldn't you, next time there's a referendum on Scottish independence,

00:24:48.720 which would lead to the disintegration of the UK, why wouldn't you vote to disintegrate

00:24:52.560 the UK, much to the glee of Russia? Because it would call into question our nuclear deterrent,

00:24:59.760 it would make patrolling the North Atlantic by the Royal Navy far harder. So in other

00:25:05.440 words, the story we tell ourselves about our past has really important political implications.

00:25:13.520 And that's why it's being done. Let's be honest, right? That's why it's being done.

00:25:18.340 I think it is. Let's be honest about that.

00:25:19.660 It's not why it's being done by some people. There's an oddity, isn't there? A pretty obvious

00:25:24.840 one. The left, if we can call it that, demands very high levels of solidarity. They want

00:25:30.680 to pay more and more taxes to help our fellow citizens who are unwilling or unable to work for

00:25:36.200 example and yet at the same time they tell us that our country as a community is is is worth

00:25:43.000 very little now why should i not say in that case well in that case why should i pay any taxes why

00:25:48.440 should i not cheat why should i not steal why should i do everything i can to exploit my

00:25:53.400 opportunities because after all i don't care about this country and therefore i don't care about the

00:25:58.360 people who claim to have some, that I owe them some moral obligation. I mean, I can't see, well,

00:26:04.860 I can't see how the left, if you like, can square the circle, how they can insist on our obligations

00:26:11.280 to our fellow citizens while trashing the whole history on which these obligations are based.

00:26:19.040 What I was going to ask is, the latest book is about this country's history, and I think it's

00:26:26.080 really important we tell the full story. But Nigel, you've obviously worked on empire a lot

00:26:31.460 and something you talked about. So before we talk collectively about the British empire,

00:26:35.940 can you just, when we had Dominic Sambric on recently, I think he talked about empires being

00:26:40.160 the natural unit of history, or maybe that was you. I can't remember. I could have said it. I'm

00:26:44.380 not sure I did, but I could have. Presumably you agree with it then. What is an empire?

00:26:50.120 Okay. I think an empire is a people that expanded. Lots of nations were empires. So think of England

00:27:02.140 in the Anglo-Saxon period. You've got little Wessex down there. You've got the Danes. You've

00:27:07.220 got different Anglo-Saxon kingdoms. Gradually, Wessex expands. And eventually, by the 10th

00:27:13.720 century 11th century you have you have something like the state of England now

00:27:20.380 but in a sense the formation of England as a state was through imperial

00:27:27.800 expansion of a particular part and lots lots of nations have begun that way so

00:27:31.640 really empire is is an expanding people and you know lots of peoples in the

00:27:38.420 world have done that not just Europeans the Zulus did it in 1820s the Iroquois

00:27:43.480 I did it in the 1640s in North America.

00:27:46.440 Empire is a very common political form.

00:27:50.500 Someone said, I don't know who said it,

00:27:53.080 that in most of history, people have lived under empires.

00:27:56.920 And would one defining difference between, say,

00:28:00.500 a nation state, as we think about today, and an empire,

00:28:03.240 be that an empire necessarily is a state that controls territory

00:28:09.080 that's inhabited by different groups of people?

00:28:11.460 Is that an important addition?

00:28:13.220 Yes, so presumably what became England started off with West Saxons dominating Mercians, whatever.

00:28:21.460 So the moment of dominance, but then eventually the peoples merged.

00:28:26.860 And so you will find empires where, you know, you have dominant people and they impose their ways on other people.

00:28:32.620 But over a long period of time, they merge so that we no longer distinguish among ourselves

00:28:41.720 between those who are Norman and those who are Anglo-Saxon.

00:28:43.940 We're a mixture now.

00:28:46.740 I suppose there's a paradox here too

00:28:49.660 in that an empire might begin, as let's say the Roman Empire did,

00:28:52.840 by one city conquering and imposing its power.

00:28:56.460 But what an empire does is, or rather the interests of the empire

00:29:00.900 then become more important often than the interests of its core component.

00:29:06.520 So if you're Roman, you are actually thinking an awful lot

00:29:09.920 about what is happening on the frontiers in Gaul or on the frontiers

00:29:14.040 of the Persian Empire or in North Africa, as is the case

00:29:17.520 of the British Empire, did England benefit very much

00:29:21.700 from having the British Empire?

00:29:24.160 It cost an awful lot of money.

00:29:25.920 It required a huge amount of effort to maintain it.

00:29:28.760 And what you end up having to do if you're a politician

00:29:31.380 in Westminster is thinking, we've really got to do something

00:29:35.840 about what's happening in North India, or we've got to do something

00:29:39.400 about what's happening in South Africa.

00:29:41.060 And it may not actually benefit the core country,

00:29:44.880 but the fact is that the empire imposes its own priorities

00:29:48.240 and you get absorbed into your empire.

00:29:51.160 I think that probably happens in all empires, doesn't it?

00:29:53.520 I think that's right.

00:29:55.320 But it occurs to me to just make clear,

00:29:59.440 empires don't always expand through conquest.

00:30:01.860 No, that's true.

00:30:03.800 Sometimes peoples join an empire,

00:30:06.480 perhaps because it offers them protection.

00:30:10.340 Can you give some examples?

00:30:12.400 Fiji, New Zealand, Mauta.

00:30:16.720 Tell me about Fiji. What was Fiji's?

00:30:18.700 Oh, well, they were being, and this was quite common in the South.

00:30:22.420 Actually, Hawaii wanted to join the British Empire, wasn't able to.

00:30:25.980 There were quite a few countries that wanted to join and couldn't.

00:30:28.420 But Fiji was the victim of predatory slave trading

00:30:35.080 and by people selling guns, selling alcohol and so on.

00:30:38.840 And they wanted to be protected against these unscrupulous people

00:30:42.420 who were coming in from the outside.

00:30:44.300 And they wanted the protection of a more powerful state,

00:30:47.700 which in this case was Britain.

00:30:51.060 And certainly not the...

00:30:53.220 New Zealand was very similar.

00:30:55.260 New Zealand was becoming the victim of unscrupulous business interests.

00:31:00.300 You can easily imagine how this happens.

00:31:02.580 So again, they're selling guns.

00:31:03.840 lots of Maoris getting killed in inter-tribal wars

00:31:08.080 with guns sold to them by Western gunrunners,

00:31:11.900 the ravages of alcohol and so on.

00:31:13.940 They want somebody who can control this.

00:31:17.140 They can't do it themselves,

00:31:18.380 and so they want the British government to do it,

00:31:21.680 which with more or less success it does.

00:31:27.140 And I think if I were to,

00:31:29.740 though you may have quite a different,

00:31:31.440 And if I were to say what was the British Empire in the 19th century, I would say something like it was an effort to manage the unprecedented contacts that were being made between developed Western states and undeveloped, what we would later call Third World, but African, Asian and Pacific states.

00:32:00.480 in order to try to prevent a chaotic and violent free-for-all.

00:32:06.720 And in many cases, as you well know,

00:32:11.120 there was very little desire in London to take over more territory.

00:32:15.680 There was pressure from missionaries, there was pressure from public opinion,

00:32:19.260 from the non-conformist conscious to say you have to do something

00:32:22.460 about the slave trade in East Africa or in Zanzibar.

00:32:27.340 And, you know, politicians in Westminster say,

00:32:29.660 well, we really have enough to do.

00:32:33.200 And they thought, this is your moral duty.

00:32:35.180 You have to do something, because you are a powerful state,

00:32:37.840 you have a big navy, you've got to do something to help these people.

00:32:41.900 Yes, I think your account covers a lot of the truth.

00:32:47.600 Of course, there were occasions when the British had strategic reasons

00:32:53.140 for acquiring bits of territory.

00:32:54.600 So end of the Napoleonic Wars, we acquired Simonstown in what became Cape Colony in South Africa for reasons of a naval base there.

00:33:06.960 Similarly, I think, on the east coast of Africa.

00:33:09.600 So there were strategic reasons.

00:33:11.240 On the other hand, you're quite right.

00:33:13.480 A lot of the time, empire began with traders.

00:33:16.720 East India Company going to India, getting involved in local politics, acquiring territory.

00:33:21.940 Initially, it failed to govern very well.

00:33:23.960 government has to intervene.

00:33:26.740 Similarly, in South Africa, the British South Africa company,

00:33:31.600 Rhodes' company, expands into Rhodesia,

00:33:34.640 and government reluctantly has to intervene.

00:33:40.260 So a lot of the time, London government, then as now the Treasury,

00:33:43.980 did not want to spend money on having to control overseas territories.

00:33:49.660 The case of North America, Canada and Australia was a bit different.

00:33:55.300 But the idea that empire is all about one people deciding they want to go and conquer another is far too simplistic.

00:34:02.600 I can't think of many instances in the British case when that was so.

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00:35:55.820 And one of the things you actually talk about in the book,

00:35:58.240 which I found very interesting,

00:35:59.600 is that a lot of people,

00:36:01.700 a lot of the subjects of the British Empire

00:36:03.580 were actually quite happy being part of the British Empire.

00:36:08.540 And when they were asked if, and there was a stat that you quoted

00:36:12.120 in the book about India, when they asked if they wanted to govern themselves,

00:36:15.840 quite a lot of people went, no, we prefer the Brits.

00:36:18.320 Yeah, one story I tell was published in the Tablet magazine,

00:36:25.100 I don't know, 20 plus years ago, a letter from an American,

00:36:29.440 an Irish American from Boston, right?

00:36:31.200 So Irish Americans are not famous for being Anglophiles.

00:36:36.020 So this guy had gone to Pakistan shortly after independence in the 1950s,

00:36:41.200 I think with the Peace Corps, and he was working in rural Pakistan.

00:36:46.080 And he asked the local people, you must be glad to see the back of the English.

00:36:50.180 They said, no, no, we're not.

00:36:52.840 And he says the moment he was proudest of in the time he spent in rural Pakistan

00:36:59.800 was when the locals referred to him as an ingresisab.

00:37:03.760 You're an English Saab.

00:37:07.460 So, no, it's quite clear that on many occasions,

00:37:12.020 you know, most people in the empire, like most people now,

00:37:17.400 they're interested in politics.

00:37:18.760 They're interested in getting on with their lives.

00:37:20.060 And if the reigning political system gives them stability

00:37:23.620 and peace to get on with their lives, uninterfered with,

00:37:27.000 they're happy with it.

00:37:27.840 So another case I mention is in the 1950s and 60s,

00:37:34.480 unknown millions of Chinese left war-torn communist China

00:37:42.200 and entered the non-democratic British colony of Hong Kong.

00:37:48.020 Why? Because Hong Kong offered them stability.

00:37:52.640 It offered them a stable environment in which they could build their lives

00:37:55.960 and get on with them.

00:37:57.640 And so relative to what was an offer outside the British Empire,

00:38:00.740 the Empire offered them something that was really attractive

00:38:03.060 and they volunteered to enter it.

00:38:04.980 So how do we balance the positives of the Empire,

00:38:08.340 which there were numerous, and we need to be honest about that,

00:38:11.240 and I think we can all agree that we're not being honest,

00:38:13.880 that the Empire had many positives,

00:38:16.100 with the things that went wrong, the undoubted negatives.

00:38:20.780 How do we have that conversation

00:38:22.540 and actually come to an answer that is balanced and fair?

00:38:26.440 I just think, you know, people seem shocked about British slavery, for example,

00:38:34.580 or shocked about the bad stuff that happened in the past.

00:38:37.420 I'm kind of bewildered as to why people are shocked.

00:38:39.500 I mean, don't they understand that the world was run in the past by human beings?

00:38:45.640 Some are bad, some are good, some try their best and fail.

00:38:50.320 I mean, failure and bad stuff and good stuff, that's what history is about.

00:38:53.920 I mean, are we really any different from that?

00:38:57.800 I think we think we are.

00:38:59.020 Yeah, I think we do.

00:38:59.580 I think we think we are.

00:39:00.540 Yeah, I think we do.

00:39:01.020 And I think that's why a lot of the,

00:39:02.500 we think we would never,

00:39:04.040 we'd never put down a rebellion brutally

00:39:06.120 or we'd never do this and we'd never do that.

00:39:08.740 And maybe it's because, I mean, we don't.

00:39:10.660 But we do it all the time, don't we?

00:39:13.600 We did it in Iraq.

00:39:16.420 We're quite happy for the Americans

00:39:18.060 and sometimes ourselves to go and bomb people.

00:39:20.700 And yet we get terribly upset,

00:39:22.200 which may be justified in certain cases.

00:39:25.840 Yet we get terribly upset when General Kitchener defeats the Mardis at Omdurman.

00:39:32.780 We think, gosh, this was terrible slaughter.

00:39:35.480 And yet we're happy to go and bomb.

00:39:37.540 We've bombed ISIS.

00:39:39.540 Is that any different?

00:39:40.700 I don't think it's any different at all.

00:39:42.600 So we excuse ourselves, but we like to pile guilt onto...

00:39:47.200 We do live by a slightly different moral standard today, don't we?

00:39:51.540 Yeah, but...

00:39:52.100 Is it a better one?

00:39:52.860 We do, but I think it's partly because we've forgotten history.

00:39:57.460 I mean, if we remember, even today's school kids should remember the Second World War,

00:40:05.620 most people, I think, even youngsters would think that beating the Nazis was a good thing, wouldn't they?

00:40:12.060 Do they not know what it cost?

00:40:14.160 Up to 80 million people killed, most of them civilians,

00:40:17.620 and the Allies, in the course of winning that war,

00:40:20.980 killing 70,000 French civilians,

00:40:23.760 hundreds of thousands of Italian civilians,

00:40:26.400 500,000 German civilians,

00:40:29.080 and do people not know a lot of that was unavoidable?

00:40:35.640 So I think it's partly because we've forgotten history.

00:40:39.880 We don't understand how privileged,

00:40:41.820 and I come back to the word privilege again,

00:40:43.120 right now, whatever our woe is in Britain,

00:40:46.420 and whatever the threats,

00:40:47.420 we now are the healthiest wealthiest on average most secure we've ever been in our history we

00:40:57.420 don't know how privileged we are i mean my father lived through two world wars thank god i've never

00:41:01.560 been asked to fight in one um but it's fragile and it's contingent i think we've lost that sense of

00:41:07.460 contingency so we just take it for granted that we you know people in the past did bad things

00:41:12.200 because they were bad not because they were being existentially threatened and because they had no

00:41:17.080 choice and i also think when we talk about empires we just see the british empire and that's pretty

00:41:23.840 much it we don't actually look at the ottomans for example we don't look at the saharan slave

00:41:29.620 yeah they were i mean but they were also brown so they were oppressed so we have to find the

00:41:34.520 russian empire the russian boys it was wonderful everybody very happy if not happy that but even

00:41:42.200 you know we're talking about the russians but even the spanish if the spanish occupation of south

00:41:47.080 America was objectively horrific. Yeah. Well, let's not forget the Aztecs with human sacrifices

00:41:54.540 and the Incas and the Iroquois who, when they expanded north of Great Lakes in the 1640s,

00:42:01.660 they absorbed the Huron by kidnapping their women and children, and the men, they ate.

00:42:11.100 And when the Maori invaded the Chatham Islands in 1835, what did they do?

00:42:19.260 They slaughtered 10% of the population and enslaved the rest.

00:42:23.180 So it's not just white people who do empire.

00:42:25.140 Well, my favorite meme on X that pops up every now and again,

00:42:29.240 it's basically a bunch of Aztecs cutting the heart out of a small child.

00:42:33.500 And then they look over at their rivals from Europe and they go,

00:42:37.060 look at these evil oppressors who have arrived now.

00:42:40.680 Yes, I see. That's great. That's fantastic.

00:42:42.980 Well, but I was going to say, I mean, I think it's super important

00:42:47.220 to address the one-sided teaching of this.

00:42:49.800 But nonetheless, you know, the reading of...

00:42:52.480 If you read a book about any empire, it's inevitably punctuated by...

00:42:58.400 And then we had to suppress the X-Y rebellion over there.

00:43:01.340 And then there was an uprising and blah, blah, blah.

00:43:03.700 And then we had to, you know, bomb the shit out of these people over here

00:43:07.060 because they were, the fact is that maintaining these large, stable entities requires force.

00:43:14.360 Now, you could say, well, any state requires force, which it does, factually correct, like it or not.

00:43:21.500 But in the maintenance of a large empire, even the Ottomans who, you know, we've just mentioned briefly,

00:43:29.320 some of what they did was because they could and because they could be cruel and because whatever,

00:43:33.800 but a lot of it they did because there was necessity to maintaining the stay and i suppose

00:43:38.200 every empire has to have a measure of force and sometimes cruelty in it yeah and i think i think

00:43:44.200 um two things about certainly european empires probably those two is colonial governments

00:43:54.440 had very few resources they were quite weak states um and secondly um you know if you have

00:44:03.000 if you have a rebellion a violent rebellion then what are you supposed to

00:44:08.880 do let it run and and you know violent rebellions are not always nice to people

00:44:16.760 and I think I'm thinking of sort of tribes and in Northwest India who from

00:44:26.820 time to time would come raiding down from the valleys and sack villages and

00:44:32.280 rape, rape women, whatever, you know, policing is a serious business.

00:44:37.460 And how do you stop them doing that?

00:44:40.500 Because they're not going to be persuaded not to do it.

00:44:43.320 You could pay them a lot of money. Sometimes they did.

00:44:46.160 But we live in a world where the use of force is very rare

00:44:49.900 because we have a strong state, because we're healthy and wealthy and secure.

00:44:54.820 I guess the counter argument might be, Robert, well, if we talked about Scottish independence

00:45:00.040 and, you know, whether it happens or not, whatever.

00:45:03.440 But we kind of all accept that ultimately

00:45:05.420 if the Scottish people wanted to leave,

00:45:09.260 they could.

00:45:10.860 They could vote for independence

00:45:13.100 through the democratic process.

00:45:15.000 And we wouldn't treat that as the Scottish uprising

00:45:17.760 and go and crush it as we might have done 200 years ago.

00:45:20.780 And I think that's what I meant earlier

00:45:22.620 when I said we do hold ourselves

00:45:24.440 to a somewhat higher moral standard.

00:45:26.200 And you said, do we?

00:45:27.960 Yes, do we.

00:45:29.480 Don't we?

00:45:30.640 Well, if we do, when does this begin?

00:45:33.600 I mean, I've been reading, perhaps we all have,

00:45:37.160 or watching the film at least, The Odyssey,

00:45:39.440 in which there is absolute glorification of violence.

00:45:44.720 And, you know, and Odysseus is called Raider of Cities.

00:45:49.760 Raiding cities, enslaving people, and killing their men

00:45:52.740 was not regarded as in any way wrong in that culture.

00:45:55.900 In fact, it was a sign that you were a great warrior.

00:45:57.800 I don't think the Romans had a great sense of conscience about this either. When is it that

00:46:06.320 people stop thinking that conquering other people and exploiting them is somehow bad,

00:46:11.020 or at least something that you should think of in moral terms? I doubt if it's before the 18th

00:46:17.760 century. But I think the British Empire in the 19th century, and not only the British,

00:46:22.120 British, some others too, did begin to think that they had obligations, that you could

00:46:27.200 not just say, we're going to conquer this people, enslave them, steal all their money.

00:46:34.460 And so what?

00:46:35.460 Because we can.

00:46:36.460 So we will.

00:46:37.460 They stopped doing that.

00:46:39.040 I think that's true.

00:46:40.040 Why did people stop doing that?

00:46:42.380 Well, in a way because, now this is going to sound a terribly colonialist way of thinking,

00:46:50.360 I think, but the Enlightenment evangelical Christianity did change the way people thought

00:47:00.480 about relations between human beings, Christianity certainly, and also the idea that human beings

00:47:07.040 were all basically equal, that you could not regard them as other people as inferior species.

00:47:14.200 It's often said that in slavery people regard as, and in some cases they were, you could

00:47:19.220 enslave other people because they were an inferior species.

00:47:23.380 That was not, from the 18th century certainly, and indeed if you were a Christian, you could

00:47:28.780 not really think that, a few Christians did, but I think fewer and fewer did, and therefore

00:47:33.780 you had to accept that whatever you were doing in the world, you were doing it to people

00:47:38.720 who essentially were of the same nature as yourself, and as I think was said by Sir Joseph

00:47:48.160 Banks to Captain Cook. He said, you're going to be meeting people whose right to their territory

00:47:54.980 is as good as ours, and who may be regarded by the Almighty as being morally superior to us.

00:48:02.960 Not quite in those words, but in 18th century language. And I think that probably could not

00:48:09.120 have been thought a couple of hundred years earlier. Is that right? Yes, I think you're

00:48:16.100 Right. The 18th century seems to have been a kind of pivot point.

00:48:19.180 And I do associate it, to a large extent,

00:48:22.900 with the growth of the movement for the abolition of slavery,

00:48:26.400 which was at the popular level,

00:48:29.600 and it was highly popular, this movement, in Britain,

00:48:34.180 entirely evangelical Christianity,

00:48:36.360 whether Quaker or Methodist or evangelical Anglican.

00:48:40.540 At the elite level, there was Montesquieu and Adam Smith,

00:48:44.280 the philosophers.

00:48:45.160 but the idea that all people are basically equal

00:48:50.940 and that race is literally skin deep

00:48:52.920 in other words it's no deeper than skin

00:48:54.860 was the premise of stopping the enslavement of Africans

00:49:01.100 and then when that was done

00:49:02.900 that movement achieved its success in 1933

00:49:07.420 with the abolition of slavery

00:49:08.800 shortly afterwards there was the foundation

00:49:11.360 of the Society for the Protection of Aboriginal Peoples

00:49:14.740 because humanitarian concern had moved on to

00:49:18.180 what was happening to Aborigines in Australia

00:49:21.120 under the impact of European settlement

00:49:23.380 and the sense that we need somehow to control this

00:49:27.220 or to ameliorate it

00:49:29.380 or at least to try and make up for its effects.

00:49:31.640 They recognised and were horrified actually

00:49:34.400 about the way in which native peoples were suffering.

00:49:37.080 I'm going to be honest with you.

00:49:38.520 I used to think grilling was simple.

00:49:41.080 Meat goes on, meat comes off.

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00:51:34.480 Would there also be some far more pragmatic reasons as well? I think often people think about culture being the sort of the driver of things, but I often think that technology creates culture, which then creates politics. It's that kind of trajectory.

00:51:51.560 And I imagine once territories to be colonized have run out, number one, and you have the Industrial Revolution and now it's, if you want to create wealth, you don't need to, you know, the easiest way to create wealth is no longer to go and conquer other people who have wealth and take their wealth, but it's now to build a factory and produce wealth.

00:52:14.160 Because if you look at the curve of wealth creation, it's sort of flat for about X thousand years and then it explodes in the 18th century.

00:52:22.420 You no longer need to conquer anywhere and you no longer can conquer anywhere because there's nowhere else to conquer.

00:52:27.840 At that point, these ideas, which were always there about people being equal and equal human dignity and so on,

00:52:35.880 then they can flourish because it's no longer economically necessary for you to have a kind of more warrior conquering mindset.

00:52:43.120 Am I just imagining?

00:52:44.120 Yes.

00:52:45.120 You're just being cynical.

00:52:46.120 You are.

00:52:47.120 I may be both.

00:52:48.120 I just thought it's worth exploring.

00:52:50.120 Yes, it is.

00:52:52.120 Debunk me, please, Robert.

00:52:54.120 Go ahead.

00:52:55.120 Initially, I mean, first of all, I think most things happen from a multiplicity of motives.

00:53:00.120 Of course.

00:53:01.120 Of course.

00:53:02.120 And if there was a kind of economic interest element, I wouldn't discount it.

00:53:07.120 But it doesn't mean there wasn't also a humanitarian interest.

00:53:09.120 I'm not disputing that part of it.

00:53:11.120 it's easier for ideas that are already there to become dominant

00:53:15.780 when the practical rationale for the ideas that are being replaced

00:53:19.920 is no longer there.

00:53:20.960 That's what I'm saying.

00:53:21.580 Well, in the case of the abolition of slavery,

00:53:24.540 what you've just said now could be an expression of the argument

00:53:28.780 that the British only abolished slavery because it was becoming uneconomic.

00:53:34.300 I'm not saying that.

00:53:35.060 No, you're not.

00:53:37.160 People make that argument.

00:53:38.640 To take that as an instance of what you're saying,

00:53:40.300 The data says not. In fact, there were genuine humanitarian reasons, and in fact, the abolition cost Britain, or at least cost some Britons.

00:53:52.320 And slavery was still very profitable, until the 1880s, after all, in Brazil and Cuba.

00:53:59.140 And indeed, one historian, distinguished historian of slavery says the British missed out on the great coffee boom.

00:54:05.700 They could have been selling slaves for the coffee plantations of Brazil, but they didn't.

00:54:12.340 But I think the thing is, if you build a factory, you want raw materials and you want markets.

00:54:19.840 So, in fact, this could have been, and indeed to some extent was, and particularly for some

00:54:24.020 countries, a motive for imperialism.

00:54:26.700 I mean, this is in a way the classic Marxist explanation.

00:54:30.040 Your imperialism is about securing raw materials.

00:54:34.480 It could be gold, it could be iron, it could be whatever.

00:54:37.520 And also protected markets and keeping others out.

00:54:41.120 And there was a thing called,

00:54:43.220 which used to be called the imperialism of free trade,

00:54:45.800 which is a sort of paradox.

00:54:47.360 But you need to occupy territories

00:54:50.980 because otherwise other countries will take them

00:54:54.120 and exclude your products.

00:54:56.000 So the sort of universality almost of empires in the late 19th century seems to be directly connected with the growth of industrial societies.

00:55:08.100 But just in terms of reasons of occupying territory, I'm thinking in the late 19th century, 1870s, 80s, that's when the so-called scramble for Africa happened.

00:55:20.140 and lots of territories, particularly in Africa,

00:55:26.740 were carved up between France and Britain and Italy and Belgium.

00:55:31.640 And the motive for that, I just finished reading a biography of Lord Salisbury

00:55:35.480 who dominated British government toward the end of the 1800s.

00:55:39.280 The motive for that wasn't economic.

00:55:41.640 The main concern, Salisbury's main concern,

00:55:45.680 was to prevent a clash between Britain, France and Germany

00:55:49.700 in the colonies that would result in continental war in Europe,

00:55:53.880 which, of course, happened in 1914.

00:55:55.840 But the motive wasn't economic at all.

00:55:58.100 It was actually just creating boundaries

00:56:00.120 so that the European powers are not going to clash.

00:56:03.260 So one of the topics that you address really eloquently in the book

00:56:06.980 is this idea that the British Empire was essentially

00:56:11.260 this kind of parasitic institution that drained resources and money

00:56:15.820 from its colonies, particularly India.

00:56:20.000 And what do you say to that?

00:56:22.080 So that's the extractive theory of colonialism,

00:56:26.780 and the word extraction is used a lot by people

00:56:29.460 who don't really explain what they mean by it.

00:56:32.460 In the case of India, I mean, the argument is, I think,

00:56:37.680 partly that British industry, particularly the textile industry,

00:56:43.320 was able to export cheap cloth to India and put all sorts of artisans out of business.

00:56:48.820 So Brits were extracting profits from India and putting poor Indians onto the unemployment market.

00:56:57.320 And then also partly that the Indian taxpayers paid for the Indian army,

00:57:06.860 which the British employed all around the world.

00:57:09.780 And again, this extracted wealth from India.

00:57:12.220 And so India was impoverished.

00:57:15.060 I mean, a popular claim made is that India in 1700 produced 25% of world GDP.

00:57:26.160 By 1900, it was about 4%.

00:57:28.200 Therefore, the British drained India.

00:57:31.180 So what's wrong with that story?

00:57:33.520 Well, take the last point first.

00:57:36.480 According to Tidanga Roy, and I quote him because he's an economic historian, which I'm not.

00:57:41.860 He's also Bengali-born. He's not a Brit, at least maybe now, but he was born in Bengal.

00:57:47.260 No, what happened was between 1700 and 1900 that Britain and Germany and other European countries,

00:57:56.840 their industrial economies expanded hugely, and therefore they acquired a larger proportion of world GDP.

00:58:04.320 India's declined relatively. And the same happened to China, which wasn't colonized.

00:58:09.060 So this wasn't a measure of the Brits draining wealth from India.

00:58:15.340 It was just a measure of the growth, the relative growth of the industrial economy.

00:58:19.760 So that was that.

00:58:20.420 In terms of, I mean, yes, Indian taxpayers may have paid something toward the cost of the Indian army.

00:58:31.720 On the other hand, the Royal Navy, which was paid for by the British,

00:58:36.200 which patrolled the seas, kept the seas free of pirates,

00:58:40.720 which enabled Indian merchants to trade from Hong Kong to East Africa and make profits.

00:58:48.000 What's more, by providing stable government in India,

00:58:52.640 India was able to attract British investment.

00:58:56.460 Yes, it made profits for British investors.

00:58:58.100 Investors make profits.

00:58:58.980 I mean, why would they invest otherwise?

00:59:00.780 But the investment also built railways and canals.

00:59:06.200 both of which helped to develop local agricultural economies,

00:59:11.400 both of which helped to relieve famine.

00:59:14.060 So they benefited Indians too.

00:59:17.760 So the idea that the colonial relationship with India

00:59:21.600 was a process of one-way extraction of profit,

00:59:25.680 it's a theory whose assumptions are widely accepted,

00:59:30.000 but it doesn't really add up when faced with the data.

00:59:33.440 I would add a couple of things to that too.

00:59:35.040 First of all, India did have to be defended. It had been repeatedly invaded from Afghanistan

00:59:40.180 in the 18th century. Indeed, one Mughal emperor was blinded and his court massacred by Afghan

00:59:49.800 invaders in the 18th century. So India had to be defended anyway, and it was defended by the

00:59:55.760 British Indian army, is it? And the other thing is, and I read this quite recently, it's been

01:00:01.200 calculated how much the Indian government, okay, the British Raj, but the British government of

01:00:07.860 India was paying for its loans. It was paying a much lower rate of interest on its loans than

01:00:15.440 the general world level of interest because it was regarded by investors as safer. And hence

01:00:22.620 the relative gain of paying much less for the money that you invest was equal to a very

01:00:34.020 major amount of money.

01:00:35.360 Now, if I'd known we're going to talk about this, I'd have checked.

01:00:38.320 But it meant that they were paying 3 or 4% lower interest on their loans than were independent

01:00:44.840 countries or other European countries.

01:00:48.340 And that was directly a consequence of being part of the British Empire and hence being regarded as international investors as a safe place to put your money.

01:00:59.500 Well, let me ask just one thing. I think it's worth when we talk about India, actually, you used the word colonization to describe what happened there.

01:01:07.860 And I think the ordinary person is very well acquainted with the story about the colonization of North America, maybe less so of South America.

01:01:17.540 But what happened in India was so different to what happened there,

01:01:21.520 and yet the same word is used,

01:01:22.860 and I think the average person has absolutely no idea

01:01:24.720 what happened to India.

01:01:25.840 It would be worth setting that out before we go any further.

01:01:27.580 Yeah, it goes back, Constantine, to the issue of what an empire is.

01:01:30.900 So, yeah, you do have parts of the British Empire,

01:01:36.120 North America and Australia,

01:01:38.260 where there is large-scale European settlement

01:01:40.760 and where European colonists did, in both places,

01:01:44.760 displace natives that didn't happen in in didn't have a large scale in Africa

01:01:51.560 public as Europeans tend to die there which is a bit discouraging but it

01:01:58.060 didn't happen really at all in India I mean in 1900 after 150 years of British

01:02:04.860 occupation of India there were about 300 million Indians how many Brits 164

01:02:11.940 4,000. The population of Oxford now, total. So, no, there wasn't widespread settlement.

01:02:20.500 And why not?

01:02:21.500 Hmm. Partly, I think, because the India Brits came across when they first landed

01:02:29.780 there in the late 1600s, 1700s. It was much more advanced civilization. There were states

01:02:37.740 and there were cities, whereas in Australia and North America

01:02:42.820 there were vast tracts of what appeared to be unoccupied territory.

01:02:46.580 That was a main reason.

01:02:50.340 Also, I think the British were aware that if you tried to introduce

01:02:55.380 British settlement in India into a densely populated,

01:03:00.460 already somewhat urbanised India, you're going to get trouble.

01:03:03.660 So there was some legal obstacle, wasn't there, for outsiders to buy land?

01:03:12.600 I think that's right.

01:03:13.600 I think actually outsiders were forbidden to buy land.

01:03:17.280 So the British presence there was political, it was commercial, and it was military, but

01:03:21.300 it wasn't actually a large-scale settlement.

01:03:23.700 And how did Britain come to control India, from the first boat arriving to Britain running

01:03:30.320 India?

01:03:31.320 So, I mean, a story told, it was by conquest.

01:03:36.580 That's more untrue than true.

01:03:39.340 So what happens is early 1600s, East India Company pitches up.

01:03:44.800 What does it want to do?

01:03:45.460 It wants to set up trading posts on the northwest coast of India.

01:03:51.040 It gets permission to do so.

01:03:52.320 It does so.

01:03:52.840 It trades.

01:03:53.640 What it discovers is that in land away from the coast, there's a collapse of imperial authority, lots of civil war, war is bad for trade.

01:04:10.640 The company builds up its own military force for defensive purposes.

01:04:17.640 forces, then along comes an Indian ruler and says, would you help us beat that lot?

01:04:24.280 And so the company, for whatever reason, says yes, and it succeeds.

01:04:29.060 And as a result, it is given territory, sometimes even ports.

01:04:33.720 So the acquisition of territory was, in the 1700s, not by conquest, except in alliance

01:04:46.320 with Indian rulers, and the territory was ceded as part of the reward. Later on in the

01:04:52.420 19th century, there were periods when the British conquered territories for various reasons.

01:04:58.160 But conquest wasn't the primary means by which the British came to occupy parts of India.

01:05:03.580 I think we can blame it on the French, too.

01:05:06.200 Excellent. What a relief.

01:05:09.240 Because the French, of course, were also a major presence in India, and they were the

01:05:13.200 ones who first started raising troops and getting involved in Indian politics with the intention of

01:05:19.880 kicking out the Brits. So the British responded by raising their own, the East India Company

01:05:25.460 responded by raising its own forces and in the end defeated the French simply because of its

01:05:31.420 superior British naval power, which meant that the French had far fewer resources. And in the

01:05:36.720 Seven Years' War, the French were finally excluded from India as a major power and only allowed to

01:05:42.780 keep a few enclaves such as famously Pondicherry as trading posts.

01:05:48.260 Isn't that...

01:05:48.940 I didn't know the French started it.

01:05:50.640 That's great.

01:05:51.120 Yeah, they started it.

01:05:52.980 How convenient.

01:05:55.340 But both countries, or at least their businessmen and their governments,

01:06:00.040 were very much against this.

01:06:01.380 It was the men on the spot, wasn't it, who were so keen?

01:06:04.140 And they said, you know, we want trade, we want profit,

01:06:07.860 we don't want to spend all this money on wars.

01:06:10.620 And in the end, the East India Company itself pretty well went bankrupt and needed bailing out by the...

01:06:16.360 But then the British government said, in that case, we're taking over.

01:06:19.220 We are going to appoint the governors.

01:06:21.320 And in effect, the East India Company became an arm of the British government

01:06:26.740 and lost its trading privileges, its monopoly privileges.

01:06:31.000 As for the French, their company did go bankrupt and simply withdrew.

01:06:38.080 It's a recurring theme with the French, Robert, I've noticed.

01:06:40.620 But the police in Pondicherry still wear kepis, which they don't do even in Paris now.

01:06:50.060 Just one more thing on India and territory.

01:06:56.380 So yeah, the East India Company did acquire territory in the later 1700s.

01:07:02.460 But in the 1820s, all three of the major trading ports of Madras,

01:07:11.920 Calcutta and Bombay were governed by Scotsmen.

01:07:17.140 Ah, yes.

01:07:18.240 And every one of them in the 1820s can be found to have written,

01:07:23.980 we Brits, we cannot expect to rule in India forever.

01:07:29.240 All we can hope to do is establish sufficient stability

01:07:33.460 and sufficiently decent government and then leave with grace.

01:07:37.680 Now, that was the 1820s.

01:07:39.480 It wasn't until 130 years later that that actually happened.

01:07:44.880 But there was a sense, even in the early period,

01:07:46.740 that the British rule over territory in that far-flung part of the world

01:07:52.140 was not forever.

01:07:53.420 And it's important that we raise this before we end the episode

01:07:56.900 because you talk about it in your book, which is, you know,

01:08:00.560 some of the more unfortunate incidents, shall we say, in India,

01:08:05.000 particularly, you know, the partition.

01:08:07.960 And we're talking about leaving with grace.

01:08:09.960 I think we can say that was not well executed.

01:08:12.980 When you look at the amount of people who died,

01:08:14.780 I think it was 1.5 million off the top of my head.

01:08:17.640 That could well be.

01:08:19.840 Yeah, yeah, that was tragic.

01:08:21.780 But I'm pretty defensive of the British there

01:08:27.420 because I make a couple of points, really.

01:08:30.180 One is, can we please remember,

01:08:32.760 the number of people killed was dreadful.

01:08:36.860 The people doing the killing were Indians, not Brits.

01:08:41.120 Secondly, the reason that the killing took place

01:08:46.000 was because Law and Order collapsed.

01:08:47.640 and that was partly because

01:08:50.840 Indian leaders couldn't agree

01:08:53.240 on how to divide India

01:08:54.900 and

01:08:57.460 yes, part of the problem was

01:09:01.100 the British had brought forward

01:09:02.680 the date for leaving

01:09:04.520 partly in order to concentrate mines

01:09:06.660 but I mean the responsibility

01:09:10.320 for the massacres

01:09:14.720 needs to be spread about there

01:09:17.240 not just British failure, the fact that Indians did the killing

01:09:20.460 and the difficulty Indian leaders had on coming to an agreement

01:09:23.720 as to how to carve up the country.

01:09:27.140 The only way you can sort of blame it on Britain is to say,

01:09:30.020 well, India should never have been united at all.

01:09:33.980 It was because the British created an India and it then split.

01:09:39.520 That was the cause of the killing.

01:09:42.000 But then the alternative would have been to have an India of many conflicting states,

01:09:47.620 as it was in the 18th century.

01:09:49.540 And it's hard to see that as being a basis for more peaceful existence than even the partition.

01:09:58.500 So I think the partition was, as you say, a tragedy, but one which the British did try to avoid.

01:10:04.620 It didn't help. There was a kind of transitional government responsible for managing partition,

01:10:15.340 and one of the two Congress members on that government was closely connected with Hindu

01:10:24.460 militia. In other words, closely connected with some of the people who did the killing.

01:10:30.620 so i i think some indians bear a high responsibility for what happened

01:10:37.540 gentlemen all right so it's to follow the french the scottish yeah and the indians yeah exactly

01:10:45.580 we've got a clean bill of health here lads time to end the episode yeah yeah they're gonna love

01:10:51.500 this i mean our audience will yeah some other people might not joke in the side

01:10:58.140 And what Salisbury said, no one ever believes in our good intentions.

01:11:02.340 No.

01:11:04.020 It's absolutely wonderful to have you both on.

01:11:07.200 It's a real treat for us to speak with you and people like you on our show.

01:11:11.460 So thank you so much for making time.

01:11:13.020 Not at all.

01:11:13.720 And Nigel, in your case, returning.

01:11:16.240 And Robert, we've recorded a separate episode with you

01:11:18.340 about the England and French rivalry and lots of other things.

01:11:22.580 Well, if you're ever interested, as I may have mentioned earlier,

01:11:26.160 I'm working on revising the school curriculum in history.

01:11:29.900 If you ever want to talk about that, it would be very helpful.

01:11:32.940 Fantastic.

01:11:33.300 When the time comes.

01:11:34.300 Fantastic, when the time comes.

01:11:36.000 Thank you both.

01:11:37.020 I hope everybody gets your new book.

01:11:38.660 Remind everybody again what it's called and when it's available.

01:11:41.760 It's called Our Island Story with the apostrophe after the S.

01:11:44.800 There was a book in the 1950s with that same title

01:11:47.960 with the apostrophe before the S,

01:11:49.040 but we wanted to make clear this is not just about England,

01:11:51.300 it's Scotland, Ireland and Wales as well.

01:11:53.680 and the subtitle is A Better Story About Britain.

01:11:56.620 And it comes out in October and Swift Press are publishing it.

01:12:01.320 Fantastic.

01:12:01.880 And actually, very quickly, as you know,

01:12:03.340 our last question is always the same.

01:12:05.120 Feel free, one of you can answer, both of you can answer, whatever.

01:12:08.080 What's the one thing we're not talking about that we should be?

01:12:11.260 Before Robert and Nigel answer the final question

01:12:13.760 at the end of the interview,

01:12:14.780 make sure to head over to our sub stack.

01:12:16.700 The link is in the description where you'll be able to see this.

01:12:20.180 Is peace among nations and neighbours historically normal

01:12:23.120 or is it exceptional?

01:12:25.040 Is the historian's job to provide a better national story

01:12:28.500 or to make national stories impossible?

01:12:31.420 What is the strongest argument you've heard

01:12:33.460 that does not invoke religion

01:12:35.400 in favour of human life having inherent value?

01:12:38.940 What's the one thing we're not talking about that we should be?

01:12:41.620 Patriotism.

01:12:42.840 We're not talking about why it is.

01:12:45.000 Correct me if I'm wrong, Robert.

01:12:46.160 When people like me now say I'm a British patriot,

01:12:50.060 all of my right-thinking, university-educated friends

01:12:52.760 suck their teeth as if I've just said I'm a fascist why is that in this country if you're

01:12:59.180 a Scottish nationalist Welsh nationalist or Irish national it's kind of cool if you're a British

01:13:04.360 patriot it's it's suspect why is that okay well in that case I would say we don't talk about

01:13:13.860 gratitude the benefits that we have very rarely due to our own efforts they're due to the efforts

01:13:21.620 of many generations before us, and we should be aware of this.

01:13:27.560 Absolutely.

01:13:28.380 Thank you both very much.

01:13:29.700 Head on over to triggerpod.co.uk where both Robert and Nigel are going to answer your questions.

01:13:36.400 When I was at school, I was taught that the morals or ethics of the past or the person

01:13:40.300 didn't matter.

01:13:41.060 Now it seems to be the only thing that matters.

01:13:42.880 How can this be changed to start looking back at the history and events rather than

01:13:47.140 trying to break everyone down?

01:13:51.620 We'll be right back.

TRIGGERnometry - August 29, 2026

The Historians Who've Had Enough of Woke History - Nigel Biggar and Robert Tombs

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