How Britain Built the Greatest Empire In History - Dan Snow

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24:58The link in the description, the code Trigonometry. That's it. So if you're already thinking about trying it, this is a sign. Go to buyoptimizers.com slash trigger or click the link in the description. Use code trigonometry and grab it before it's gone. I think availability of venture capital, I think patent laws are important. So inventors come to England because they're confident that their inventions will be respected. They will be able to keep the money that will accrue to them. They'll be enjoy the profits of their invention. So you get French people come over bringing steam technology. They don't want to develop it in France.

25:35They don't want to be in Britain. So that's the law. That's patents. It's not very glamorous, but super important. And to a certain extent, and it's the parliamentary system. You know, if you own a factory, the king can't just go, I want that. You know, you're like, no, you need an act of parliament if you're going to put a railway through my land or you're going to do something. So there is, it's imperfect. But it's what we talk about today, why liberal democracy tends to do quite well, because people are confident investing them. They're confident building long. It takes a long time to build a massive mill, and it's a lot of capital.

26:06You're not going to do that in Russia because the czar is going to change his mind. That's the problem with capricious albertary monarchs, right? So a lot of that is going on in Britain. And then you get this virtuous circle. The profits of the sugar trade, the slave trade, mean that you've got lots of very rich people in Britain who are looking to invest their money. They look at these northern industrialists who are doing interesting things with textile, making textiles. They're investing in that. That's producing more and more money. So it's starting to... And then that tips over into armaments.

26:39The industry starts to be able to make better cannon, heavier cannon, carronades that would smash French ships to peace at Trafalgar. And so things just... At some point, around about 1750s to 1800, the Brits get qualitatively better than other people as well, which we'll talk about. Now, some of our American friends are going to be listening to this, Dan, and they're going to be going. So you've outlined it all beautifully. There were moments where it did go wrong. Oh, yeah. So why did we lose the United States? Why would you bring this up? It's too painful to talk about. So I think the thing about great empires is that they lose a lot and they come back.

27:22So like if you look at Rome, Rome spent his whole time getting his ass handed to it. And the Roman people just go, another army, let's go. People should know when they've been conquered, to quote Maximus, right? And the Romans don't know when they've been conquered. The Brits are pretty good at just, they get beaten and then they just, they keep going. And in fact, the weird thing about the 1600s is Britain is an absolute basket case, right? The English kill a king. They have a Republican experiment that doesn't last. So there's one of the bloodiest wars in British and Irish history, the civil wars.

27:55They kill the king. uh this oliver cromwell tries a republic that comes that collapses charles ii uh james ii is his son is uh expelled or is forced out abdicated um you know it's a shambles it was known as the land of revolutions right so but what's going on the surfaces the politics is quite wild what's going on the surfaces and the other thing that this is the key point here folks is you get you get a kind of government effectively it's england and then britain can borrow more money at lower rates of interest in bond markets, folks, because as we know, it will come down to that. So in the 1690s, partly using kind of Dutch techniques and some, you know, Dutch financial techniques they've pioneered over at Amsterdam, you get the invention of the Bank of England, you get these kind of, these financial and economic innovations like the stock exchange, it becomes easy to swap stock in companies, you know, it's a fungible market, you get, and the British government is overseen by Parliament.

28:58So when the British government says, right, this is what we're spending. The French don't produce a budget. The king just kind of sells a bit of jewellery and pays for some shit. The British government has to present a budget and backbenchers vote on it. And so people are happy to lend the British government money because it's backed up by Parliament. They're saying, yes, we will pay land tax. You can sell a government bond. It's guaranteed by Parliament. It's not guaranteed by the king. Louis XV was like, yeah, I'm going to borrow a load of money and if I don't pay it back, too bad. So your interest payments are brutal on that money.

29:29So England and then Britain are to borrow vast amounts of money at lower rates of interest than anyone else in the world. And that really is the end of the discussion because England, which is a smaller economy than France, can build much bigger navies and spend more money on fighting than the French, for example. So it's just hugely effective. The other problem with the French is the French, tough neighbourhood, right? The French have got a problem. The Dutch to the north, the Germans, Spanish to the south, Italy. So the French are building fleets to deal with the Brits. They've got to have a fleet in the Mediterranean, different kinds of ships in the Mediterranean.

30:06They can't get away with it. They've got to have massive land armies on the Rhine. They can't decide what they are. The French can't decide what they are. Are we a land empire? Are we trying to conquer Germany and northern Italy? Or are we trying to colonise Canada? You can't do both. The Brits is great. The best thing Henry VIII ever did was totally balls up. He's the last king. He's marching around France. I'm going to be king of France like all his medieval forebads. The best thing that ever happens to England and Britain is that finally, the stupid monarchs of this country give up this mad idea of trying to conquer France, right?

30:36They lose. Mary loses Calais. That's it. Calais gone, 1550s. And it's like, okay, we're not a European power anymore. Ooh, what we could do is turn west. So Britain's, England's able to focus its entire military strategic focus on the rest of the world. It's got this, particularly when England and Scotland are united, so you haven't got problems within the island anymore, invading the northern neighbours. So suddenly that unity is quite helpful. You've thoroughly conquered Ireland in the late 1500s. So you've got the British and Irish archipelago locked down, you're not trying to conquer France.

31:18So you're like, lads, all that energy, boom, to the West. Now, America. So the American colonies extend along the eastern seaboard through the 1600s and the 1700s. I could not mention the Seven Years' War here, which is the most important war in history, folks, the most successful war in British history, when really Britain is transformed into a massive global power. A couple of things happened. This is the the 1750s, Britain, for the first time, it has these little toe holes in India, but Indian Mughal power is collapsing in the center. The Afghans have invaded Delhi, smashed the whole place to bits.

31:55Mughal power is imploding. So all of the provinces, so now all these little English and British and the French and the Portuguese little ports, and they realize in this kind of chaos that's enveloping India, they go, well, now's our opportunity to smash our European neighbours, but also we need to sort of stabilise this region, because at the moment it's absolute chaos. We can't make any money. If there's a sort of civil war going on in Bengal between Indians, so what the Europeans start doing is they get dragged into the interior, right? And this is something that the Chinese may discover with their kind of new policy of sort of pseudo-imperialism, is that you can have a port on the coast somewhere.

32:34What happens when the interior just the government collapses and suddenly, you know, your port is threatened from instability or from, you know. So the Brits end up kind of pushing inland effectively. The French do the same. So the French, the Brits go, Brits are in Calcutta, which was a village when the Brits arrived. The French are just up the river in a place no one's ever heard of called Chandler-Gore, but if the French had won Chandler-Gore would be the Calcutta of the world, you know. And the Brits push a little force in 1757 up the Hooghly River and they smash this French fort to pieces and drive the French out of Bengal and then install, then fight this great battle, Plassey, people are familiar with, which largely won through bribery and install.

33:13And the British, for the first time, become the actual rulers of Bengal. They previously tried to sort of find a local ruler they can rule through, a puppet, you know, and now they're like, we're just going to do it ourselves. So suddenly Britain is a land empire in Asia, completely different setup, and it will be quite a difficult transition. At the same time, it's the most successful war in history. That's going on in India. In North America, the Brits wrecked shot. They conquer Canada. They conquer the whole of the USA east of the Mississippi. They briefly conquer Cuba. They conquer several islands in the Caribbean.

33:51And by the way, in Far East, they conquer Manila as well in the Philippines. It's an astonishing war. And it was said at the time, the bells are worn threadbare for the ringing of victory. And while we're on the subject, it's the greatest name of victory in British history that no one's ever heard of, right? Everyone's heard of Trafalgar. Didn't change a thing. The Battle of Quiberon Bay. The French, at the end of this war, we have had an absolute shocker. And so we're going to put it all on black. We're going to gamble everything. We're going to try and invade the British homeland. We've lost Canada.

34:27We have lost all of our forts in, you know, Fort Duquesne has now become Pittsburgh, named after the British Prime Minister Pitts. You know, this is through the American Midwest. This is a catastrophe. We've lost all our lovely, fantastic Guadeloupe, these fantastically wealthy Caribbean islands. So we are going to gamble everything. Late 1759, big problems. As you know, as I've already said, the French fleet has to leave to go and pick up the army in a different location because they can't all meet in one place. They sail around from Brest. They try and pick up their invading army in southern Brittany.

35:00The British follow them. And as night falls, they see the British coming with a gale. It's November. And they go, the British will never. We'll hide in the shallows here in Key Brom Bay. It's a nightmare of reef-strewn, rocky hellhole, crashing waves, big gale coming in from the west. And it's night. They will anchor in here. We'll stay. The Brits will be in big trouble. And Admiral Hawke, the legend, orders his fleet to put up more sail. increase speed, follow the French into this uncharted territory. And they go in there, they fire point-blank broadsides at French ships. They sink immediately.

35:35Like, it's an absolute catastrophe for the French. Ships blasted to pieces. Astonishing bravery and seamanship is the point. So you're starting to see these ships are getting very, very better in terms of engineering. The British introduce exams for officers. Meritocracy, to a certain extent. Obviously, patronage still matters. but if you're going to be in command of one of the king's ships, you can't just be a feckless toff. You can do that in the army, because all you've got to do in the army is stand there while bullets whiz. All you've got to do in the army is have a ramrod straight back and give an example to your men.

36:07This is always said in the British army. Officers teach their men how to die. Sergeants teach their men how to fight. So all you've got to do as a young officer, if you come out of Eton and just go, all right, lads, here we are. Whereas if you're in command of one of the most expensive objects ever created at that point of history, king's ship, you've got to know what you're doing. So anyway, they're going in there, to actually annihilate this French force, and that's at the end of this year of victory. 1759, when HMS Victory, Nelson's HMS Victory, is laid down that year and called Victory because of the year of victories.

36:34So that gives, now I'll come back to your question. That gives the North American empire is now as big as the empire carved out by Alexander the Great. Very briefly, this one glorious moment in British history, Britain controls from the Arctic to Louisiana, to New Orleans. Okay? A vast empire, the whole of eastern Canada, the whole of North America, eastern Mississippi. And what did the American colonists do? Very cleverly indeed. They go, you guys have defeated all of our enemies now. The French are gone from North America. So why do we need to, we don't need to, we don't need you around anymore.

37:16Thank you very much. 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. They don't, all these indigenous people like the Choctaw, the Cherokee, they still need policing and they don't want the Brits down, they want the Americans. This is a big, complicated, messy empire now, right? And London's like, that's gonna be quite expensive. Do you wanna pay some taxes for that? And the Americans go, we're not paying any taxes unless we can have our representatives in London, which by the way is one of my great counterfactual, one of my great moments history, Benjamin Franklin said, we'll just send MPs to an imperial parliament in London from the American colonies.

37:56Doesn't seem that unreasonable a request, to be fair. I know. I agree. And can you imagine what a wonderful country we'll be living in today, stretching from Kent to San Francisco. It would be so cool. Anyway, it didn't happen. Well, there's all sorts of interesting reasons why it didn't happen, but it didn't happen. So slowly, both sides escalates. The British show a very, very clumsy statesmanship. The Americans don't want to pay taxes. They also realise strategically they don't really need to be part of this empire anymore. There's going to be great opportunities now if they go off by themselves because there's no immediate, there's no kind of existential threat as there was when the French did.

38:32And so they break away. The Brits then attempt to fight. The Brits send the largest, as we are sitting here now 250 years ago, the Brits send the largest European expeditionary force ever sent abroad to retake New York in the summer of 1776. Declaration of Independence takes place. The Brits can't defeat the Americans. And all of the European enemies of Britain all jump in and turn it into a global war. The Spanish threatened Gibraltar, which they are hopping mad at the Brits' own. They've owned it for about 70 years now. I mean, they still are. They still are. And I understand. I mean, in a way, I understand.

39:07If you look at the map, you think, I must be really not. My granddad was fortress commander at Gibraltar. That's very cool. Anyway, so they are... So they put a lot of pressure on that, which for the Brits is sort of as important, if not more important than North America. The French are just sailing around the Caribbean islands, wrecking shock, and the Brits are going to protect their sugar islands. And in the end, a kind of astonishing pincer move very effectively between George Washington's American army and the French fleet, and the French army and French fleet gather on the Chesapeake and destroy and neutralize a British army in Virginia.

39:42Well, the great naval defeats of British history, folks. Very difficult to talk about. The French defeat the British. It's a draw. really, but the British do not press the attack home and are not able to rescue this force. And the Brits go, this is too expensive. We can't cope with this. Adam Smith, by the way, so the Scottish man who's sort of coming up with the ideas, tenets of capitalism this time, he goes, you're crazy. You don't need them to be colonies. Colonies are expensive. For all the reasons I've said, you'll pay for forts and roads and stupid things. Just trade with them. We'll all make much more money if we just trade.

40:15It's a very interesting thing going on there. And indeed, it's true, American colonies break away, but become an enormous market for British goods. And obviously, the subsequent relationship between Britain and America is well established. It is quite sort of beneficial to both. And the Brits are able to go and sell railways and enjoy access to the American market. But yes, so those colonies break away. But most of the North American colonies do not break away, let's just remember. So Canada, Nova Scotia, and in the Caribbean, colonies not break away so these 13 colonies have gone and um so that's disaster that's a really interesting weird moment in this story in the 1780s everyone's like britain's doomed it's not but actually britain had enormous friends france bankrupted so french you'll feel sorry for the right they went all in helping the americans the americans went to the peace treaty and the french americans like we are gonna make britain pay man and the americans and brits did a little side deal and actually they were both cool with that and the americans abandoned the french so the french got nothing for that war other than embarrassing the Brits.

41:13And the French Revolution happens less than 10 years later. They absolutely bankrupt themselves, going all in to try and get American defenders. Achieve no concrete outcomes for them at all.

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42:06So French Revolution happens. Within a couple of years, Britain and France were at war. They're at war for a generation until 1815, so from 1793 to 1815. And that is this... Britain turns itself into this astonishing military power. It's able to access the trade of the world. It's able to access capital. It's able to borrow money from the rest of the world while blockading France, starving France. It gobbles up the colonies of everyone else. It takes South Africa off the Dutch. It helps to destroy Spanish power in North America. At one point in that war, as the forgotten moment in the British Empire, the garrison of South Africa took it upon itself to invade Buenos Aires, the British.

42:52Amazing, with no permission from London. That's the thing about empire. It's crumbling frontier, as we call it. So often it's not London going, next we will invade over here. It's often like you see the Roman Empire. It's local commanders, local people going, right, we're going over there and we're going to take that land. And London's often like, please stop doing that. Because what happens through the 18th and 19th century is like George Washington famously accidentally started the French-Indian War. Once British people are killed, the government's like, we have to do something now. So often in Africa, it's like missionaries going, we're going to convert them into Christianity.

43:23They get smashed to bits, chopped to pieces, the locals. And then the newspapers go, British Christians murdered by barbarous tribes. So the British go, right, can you please detach a column of infantry to go and take this completely random bit of territory miles from anywhere? And we talk about it today, don't we? How the cost is often borne by the public and the profits are enjoyed by the mine owners, the loggers, whatever it is. These private interests are quite interesting. So anyway, the garrison of South Africa goes and invades Buenos Aires and enjoys some initial sessions. And for a very brief and exciting period for the British, they think, well, do we just take over the Spanish Empire in South America?

44:08Like, is this going to be, you know, is it going to be Canada effectively in the north? And then Argentina, Chile, is this going to be British? And then fascinatingly, the people of Buenos Aires fight a kind of guerrilla campaign and kick the British out. And so that's a big, that's a reverse. So the British suffer defeats all the time in this period, but their financial, their economic, and eventually their industrial muscle ensures that they can kind of come back. So yeah, South America, but South Africa, start things South Africa, and then the islands in the Indian Ocean. Oh, the India, the various Indian confederations, you might have heard of Tipu Sultan in Mysore, the Brits by four wars in Mysore against Tipu Sultan in the 1790s, the Marathas in central India.

44:52So slowly the British are being, they control Bengal. So to protect Bengal, you have to invade the next guy. And then to do that, again, you're drawn into the interior. And then we'll come back to that. And there's a great moment in this, the whole, some people say the whole of the British Empire in Africa was acquired in a sort of absence of mind. Like it was, you basically want to control Cape Town and you want to control the Suez Canal. But then to do that, there's trouble to just be on the frontier. and you end up controlling the largest empire the world's ever seen. Because you've got to come and go, well, you've got to control Egypt.

45:25You've got to control Sudan. You've got to control Egypt. The problem with Egypt, you've got to control Sudan. So then you're sucked in Sudan, you've got to pull into Central Africa. So it's strange. But yes, that's the American answer. I think that's roughly speaking true. But I should say that there were limits of British power. The Brits could not send anything like enough troops to conquer, reconquer the American colonies. It was just way beyond the ability of the British state at that point. It is simply because we just didn't have the manpower. We just couldn't send the troops. Yeah, so the Brits are hiring Germans called Hessians.

45:56We call them Hessians. Tens of thousands of them to fight. The Brits cannot... The Brits are not the Soviet Union in the 20th century. The Brits just don't have... You can't... Remember what I said about the Brits. The Brits have developed quite a nice model. The poor old French is fighting the bloody Germans, fighting the Dutch, fighting, and trying to maintain the navy. The Brits can go all... The Brits traditionally have a tiny army. most of which is based in Ireland. And that means you invest massively into the Navy, which is really quite large. And then the army is almost a kind of Royal Marines force, just goes ashore from the Navy and just sort of secures these little forts around the world, these places I've talked about.

46:33Now, to conquer the Americas requires, you know, armies on a kind of ancient scale. You've got to march from New York with a force of 100 ,000 men through New Jersey to Pennsylvania and keep going. That's just never... The Brits cannot do that. They don't have the manpower. They don't have the money to that. Because they're trying to maintain their empire in all these other places.

46:57Francis Foster:Well, I was going to say, I mean, one of the concerns during what the Americans called the Revolutionary War was actually because there was a war between Spain, France and England. You're worried about the homeland being invaded and you've got all these other concerns. That's true. That's a good point. So you fight some big naval battle in the homeland, really important so it's a nightmare you're trying to maintain you're trying to you're trying to blockade the American colonies can you imagine Newport, Rhode Island you're trying to blockade the Delaware Pennsylvania you're trying to control the southern colonies Savannah vast numbers of ships the Americans are phenomenal mariners little ships going to gun running taking cotton out trading with the Caribbean trading with the French nightmare you can't then you're trying to maintain naval supremacy in the Caribbean.

47:43Then you're trying to do it in the Mediterranean where the Spanish are hammering you in Gibraltar and various other places. And then you've got a problem in the Channel as well. Nightmare. And then God, Asia. So this is even, we're saying the British Empire was like hegemonic time. I mean, this is the kind of thing that even today, American carrier groups are going to struggle to sort of fight simultaneously in all these regions. In India, interestingly, they get over the problem by very, very few white British troops out there. They raise Indian, they raise Indian troops. So there's these vast armies fighting kind of continental, that kind of continental scale.

48:17You're invading central India, Maratha, but you're using overwhelmingly majority locally conscripted or raised Indian troops. So the British regime in India looks quite Indian. And there's the other side of the empire, which has now become a talking point, a cultural talking point, which is the slave trade. So let's talk about that. Let's talk about how it began through to the process, the process of enrichment, who was it who actually made the money, and then how it was disbanded and all the rest of it. So slavery, reasonably normal. The North Africans have been taking European slaves from Southern Europe and as far away as Iceland for a long time.

49:03In fact, there's a raid in Cornwall, a raid in Ireland, whole villages have been disappeared, going back to what is today Algeria, in particular Tunisia places. This slavery is pretty widespread. And the Portuguese start cruising down the coast of West Africa in the 1400s, and they discover gold. So that's a huge boost to Portuguese. And they also bring back enslaved people that are buying off local African tribes that take advantage of an existing slave market there. And they're coming back to Lisbon, and they're working on Portuguese farms. And then they are working in the Canary Islands, and they are starting to try and grow sugar in the can.

49:39That doesn't go very well. And then so when West Africa, when Western Hemisphere is discovered by Europeans, the obvious thing is to take, you know, indentured labour, so locals, the locals die out in astonishment. I'm very few. Can I just pause you there? Because there'll be people who don't know the difference between a slave and indentured servant. So these are people who are almost sell themselves indentures. You agree you're going to do 10 years hard labour and then you'll sort of, you almost sell yourself to a company. or you're a convicted felon and you work for a sugar-growing company and you just go and labour in the fields and there may be a promise of get your independence back or some land or something at the end of it maybe.

50:17So the population of the Caribbean, the indigenous population, there are apparently some indigenous Caribbean, Caribs left today in some places, but we're talking very few. So it's full of indigenous Americans. We might know them, referred to as Indians. they die at appalling mortality through Western, through Eurasian disease, which they have no resistance to. So typhus, smallpox, measles, no indigenous. 90 % of indigenous Americans will die within 200 years of Columbus arriving in the New World. So it's astonishing mortality.

50:49Francis Foster:And overwhelmingly from disease. The disease is traveling faster than European. So we don't know that. So the disease will arrive in what is now Manitoba or Saskatchewan, years before French trappers, because the indigenous people are trading and moving around. And so there's an expression, which is the Europeans will arrive in a place, go, well, it's great, virgin land. There's a famous expression, it wasn't virgin, it was widowed. So there had been Native Americans, they existed in quite large cities at times. In Alabama, there was a city, fields, crops, settles, agriculture. By the time Europeans arrive, they go, oh, these people's hunter-gatherers living in small little groups.

51:29Because actually there's been sort of fundamental collapse of that system. So anyway, so the characters...

51:33Francis Foster:Dan, sorry, I know we keep interrupting, but these are just such interesting things to get into. There have been throughout history these mass movements of people, different people from different parts of the world, not quite the same distance, of course, coming in contact. Is this pretty standard, what happens when people encounter each other? Or was this... This was astonishing because of this weird fact that the two giant continents on earth have never had any contact since the since 15 if well i think it's about the latest thinking i think about 30 000 years ago the americans are just cut off from european so that so there's the famous colombian food exchange i love so julius caesar charlemagne michelangelo had never tasted potato tomato chocolate tobacco never turkey never seen it never heard of it.

52:23Wow. Italians, no tomatoes in Italian cooking. Those come from the Americas.

52:29Francis Foster:Corn as well. Corn. Very good point. In return, but there are no, this is a whole separate fascinating issue, but why do the Europeans conquer the Americas not the way around? Because the disease is part of it. Also in the Americas, there are no beasts of burden in the Americas. There's a llama which can carry a certain amount of weight, but the llamas are a pain in the ass to farm and reproduce. And they spit at you. They spit. They're nasty. They don't like being domesticated. They're Latin in temperament. Yeah, they are. Well, that's true. I mean, what do you want? I was about to say, they're really lazy.

53:00You're allowed to say that. Yeah, I am. I'm allowed to say, yeah. But I'm not working. And so horses, cows, pigs, ox, all of these animals arrive in the Americas, which weren't there for us. So by the way, that means that all of the great Zvezete, Maya buildings, no horses are being involved in those. No wagons, axles, all that kind of stuff. So, yes, they need a labour source because they discovered these islands are really good for growing sugar, which is this wonder crop because food sucks so bad. I mean, we still are addicted to sugar, but in the medieval world, trust me, food was so awful that you want sugar.

53:36And the easiest source of labour is from West Africa because there's a wind that blows very usefully directly from West Africa to the Caribbean. You don't have to touch your sails. It just goes like that. on the great naval nautical highways, maritime highways of the world. Very easy to do. So you buy up sales. Now, what happens here? The reason is that it happens on just an astonishing scale. So in the course of, from 1550 to 1807, the Brits will take about three and a half million Africans to the New World, about a third the overall total. And so that's just, it's just like everything else in this period.

54:13Everything gets supersized. So whether it's production of textiles, whether it's a function of guns, whether it's government debt. Everything's becoming so much more sophisticated that the Europeans work out how to take vast numbers. So it starts and you arrive and you buy enslaved people from local African chiefs, and then you take them across 100, 200, and then you can start doing thousands and thousands of millions. So what that does, obviously, as we all know, is astonishing, inhumane, vast casualties, appalling. It completely disrupts the economies and the empires of West Africa because suddenly these kind of slightly overlooked coastal backwaters become incredibly rich and powerful.

54:52So they then invade their neighbors and like the kingdom. So there's like sort of, there's a knock-on effect. And in turn, then that conflict creates vast numbers of enslaved people. It is at this point too dangerous for Europeans where you'd go inland into West Africa because of malaria and other things. So for a long time, the Europeans have these forts on the coast, again, these little pinpricks, these key forts along the coast, somebody who can still be able to take. And they take part in these slaving experiences. They all go as military advisors with local chieftains, things, but they will help.

55:25But their voracious demand for enslaved people then adds to conflict and stability in West Africa, right? So that's what's going on there. And then in North America and the West Indies, then slave-grown agriculture is just phenomenally... Now, again, Adam Smith goes, actually, guys, if we use willing workers, it would be more efficient. Slavery is not economically efficient. Apart from being monstrous, it's not economically efficient. So it's quite interesting. Is that true? Apparently so. Apparently, yes. Apparently, is that the expense of the system and the need to, and the kind of extraordinary police state they have to enforce would mean that, in fact, they could have been economically productive using another model.

56:12But that would have involved having to, you know, convince lots of other people to go there. But that's what Adam Smith's argument was, which is quite an attractive argument to us, obviously. And so, and then you... So, yeah, so then in 1807, the Brits have this kind of really radical change of... There's a long campaign for abolition and ending the slave trade. 1887, the Brits passed.

56:36Francis Foster:On what basis, then? Why are people saying we need to end slavery? Influenced by Adam Smith, people are saying, I'm not sure this system is quite primitive, doesn't really work. So that's important. But also, I think we can't ignore the fact that an amazing cultural, moral uprising in Britain and people saying this is just inhumane and we shouldn't do it. and that public literacy or newspapers formally enslaved people coming to Britain and writing very eloquently about their experiences. It just, it's, you know, why do cultural moments happen? So again, Christianity, Quakerism kind of forms of Protestantism that emphasize the light of God burning in everybody.

57:19So there's just a really interesting sort of economic

57:26and so 1807 they banned the slave trade. They then banned slavery itself in the 1830s and that's partly in response to what we talked about. There's a massive slave uprising in Jamaica which is very expensive to put down, savage. And the Brits just start going, this doesn't actually, we don't think this makes, it's not, it's amoral, but also it's costing us money having to run these vast police states. 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. So actually, the moral cost of slavery is enormous, but so are the real world political costs of it.

58:10So yeah, that's what goes on there. And I think the Brits were kind of tickled by the idea that it would also shaft their European... The British economy was at this point less dependent on slave-grown products than, say, Portuguese or the Americans. So they're like, well, we look a lot of good guys, and we're actually going to shut off the Americans if we do this as well. So it's everything. It's a combination of politics and morality and lobbying and economics. Ridge first sponsored this show nearly six years ago. I've still got one of their wallets in my pocket right now, and I promise nobody told me to say that.

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1:00:28Francis Foster:As Francis mentioned, it's obviously a big part of the conversation about our history. almost front and center. If you say empire, slavery is the second word that follows that. How should we, understanding the full context of history, some of the things you've talked about, the fact that slavery was basically the norm everywhere up until this point, the fact that most people don't know, actually, that the Europeans turned up and bought slaves that had been captured by Africans from Africans, etc., etc. But also reckoning on the other side, the men's cruelty and the scale, the technology that enabled transporting people across oceans, exploiting them in chattel slavery, etc.

1:01:09Francis Foster:How should or can we reckon with all of that in a sensible, balanced way? Not going too far in either direction. What's the right way to look at it? Well, that's a great question. And the answer is, I don't know. It's incredibly tricky. But it's a great question about history generally, isn't it? Like to what... The past was a monstrous place what do we do what do we practically do about that um it it's i mean my my sense is i i the answer i don't know like our gigantic cash payments and who like i'll get gigantic cash payments to barbados or to west africa the answer i i don't i don't know and i think it is look britain benefits enormously from this because we we talked about venture capital there's clearly lots of money.

1:02:01You're creating capital, and that in turn benefits Britain, benefits British industry. These people are investing their money. So there's no question that our wealth and power partly derived from the enslavement of Africans and putting them to work in sugar plantations in the New World. But it also derived from the kind of annihilation of Indigenous tribes in North America selling opium to the Chinese. American, well, you know, the American wealth, America, which, by the way, has done the best job ever in disguising an empire behind the name of a nation state. Americans just conquer an empire in North America and pull it the USA, which is what happens.

1:02:45That's fine. The rebrand. That's built off the back of conquest. You know, Argentina conquers southern, what is now southern Argentina in the 19th century. Russia's the European conquest of people talk about European empires in Asia Russia is a mighty European empire in Asia the French still have a vast empire in the South Pacific to this day I don't know how we the past is a terrible brutal place my sense is that it's trying to And I think that's what I'm trying to shape, trying to acknowledge all that and going, what we need to do is build a world. We need to build a kind of different world, which largely speaking we've been trying to do since 1945 and onwards.

1:03:33And that's what makes Putin's invasion of Ukraine, I think, so scary. It's like, we sort of want this neighbor's territory and we're going to mass on the borders and invade it. That's a very 19, that's very normal throughout history. Very, very dangerous because it means other people do the same. And Putin may regret that when China decides to nibble a bit of Russian territory in the Far East. So my gut is acknowledging past monstrosities, but the business of trying to kind of untangle it and go, well, are we paying the Chinese for the opium? And I don't, I don't, I just kind of, I don't think it's practical.

1:04:13I know that's not a very glamorous thing to say.

1:04:15Francis Foster:No, no, it makes perfect sense because it's such a difficult issue to address. And I guess one of the things that I've always found, you know, you get activists in both directions who sort of tell one version of the story, which when you look at the narrow set of facts that they present, it's true. Like, nobody could defend without today's morality what happened during the slave trade. Nobody. and at the same time you can't ignore the fact that literally every empire throughout history practiced slavery 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 um and it's it's just one of those things about like you say the past was a terrible place and i think what if you get a tiny sliver from here or from here presented to you you can really influence people's today's feelings and political leanings and so on in a particular direction because people are so uneducated about the messiness of it all yeah and and we met we talked about iron at the beginning i mean the english conquest of iron in the 1500s was unimaginable unimaginably brutal like shocking now what is the what do you do about that today It's not your fault.

1:05:30I think it's... Look, I'm not a politician. In pragmatic terms, it's quite hard to make people say, we're going to send a lot of your tax payments to people in Munster because Munster was the scene of almost genocide in the 16th century. I don't know how you resolved that. My sense of it is you... Like people talk about Martin Luther King, Barack Obama, this kind of strand of American thinking, you go, monstrous things have happened in our past. The key thing that we can do now is shape a new and better way to organise society, right? So we are going to try and ensure that people of colour are absorbed into this American project and have the opportunity to go to university and whatever else in a way that they traditionally haven't done.

1:06:16They have the vote, all this economic opportunity is the chance to create a generational wealth that they've been denied in the past. that in in one sense we're going to kind of repudiate the idea that it's okay to invade neighbors we're going to repudiate that it's okay to have slaves you know like i i that feels and that's totally that's me talking from a position of great privilege i'm look i'm someone who's almost certainly in my ancestry i've benefited personally from this the reason that i went to a nice school and speak nicely and went to nice universities is of course because of my the generational advantages that I've had.

1:06:48I get that. But I don't know how you just practically arrange for the entire world to have a massive reallocation of resources on the basis of historical, monstrous historical criminality.

1:07:04Francis Foster:How far back do you go? This is the question. I go way back. No, but this is what I'm saying though, right? It was like... Oh, I see what you mean. How one does one... Yes, I think in the Holocaust... When do you start the clock? There's living people who had their art collections removed from them in Vienna. Now, obviously. But I think it's difficult. And then you get into sort of really difficult territory. Like, what was it? What I'm saying is something else, Dan, which is should the descendants of the Normans pay reparations to the... No, you're absolutely right. Well, this is why the island...

1:07:36Yeah, exactly.

1:07:36Francis Foster:Or whoever. Like, I think if you start to try and undo history, then you've got to go all the way back to the beginning. And now we're in the savannas of Africa, etc. Key way to undo history is to try and learn from the past and make the world a better place. Again, since 1945, we've been doing it. We hoped there was a naive dream in the 90s, I'm old enough to remember, where we thought, oh, international disputes will be resolved at the UN. We go and talk about it all. For me, that's a really important plank of this. It's about saying, oh, we've realised a common humanity and that we're all, like, actually, skin color doesn't determine your intelligence and your chances of succeeding in life, your ability to invent, you know, that, those things really embedding those things today feels to me like the most practical and achievable antidote.

1:08:27Right. I mean, the thing I, this is, I think about is like, well, my, you know, there's millions of people in this country who's, who's grand, who, who two generations ago, they were conscripted to fight. So they're given no choice. They're were just thrown into machine gun bullets on the Western Front. That was an astonishing trauma that practically affected millions of families in this country. So that was monstrous in so many ways. What do we do about... So listen, that's history. I wish I had simple answers to that. Because that's a problem, isn't it, with this entire conversation, is that people want simple answers.

1:09:10People want it summed up in a tweet or a post, and they go, okay, I know exactly what to think about that. This is what we do. When the reality is, it's far more complex, which brings us nicely to the topic of India. Because with India, we have these similar conversations as well, don't we? About how much of it was about wealth extraction? What did we give to the Indians? Yeah. Where do you stand on that? So look at all different things, different times. Bengal, so the British take over Bengal in the 1750s, And the result was an absolute catastrophe for the Bengalis. And that's partly because...

1:09:44So there's a series of natural... So first of all, the Brits, it turns out, aren't very good at running a large Asian empire from an office in London by letter using sailing ships. I mean, obviously not, right? So there is just catastrophic consequences for the people of Bengal, which I don't want to under... And for example, so there are famines. But so the Brits write back, there's a really bad famine here. Should we give them a tax break? Which is what would traditionally happen in India. Even under Mughals, they'd say, look, clearly, there's a famine. You don't have to pay your taxes here.

1:10:17Don't worry about it. That letter would take six months to get to London. They'd never think about it. It takes six months to get back. Like, it's insane. Like, monstrous, right? And so people are turning their kids into slavery. There's just appalling stories from Bengal. So, and then, you know, there's a big impact on the textile trade of Bengal because of the way the British choose to organize their empire. So there's massive negative consequences for Bengal. Then you move forward 100 years, and then India exists as part of a... I mean, the problem with all this, you don't know what the other alternatives are.

1:10:55So Winston Churchill argued that India should be British because it stops. Otherwise, it would just be the scene of lots of fighting on the subcontinent. We don't know if he was right because it didn't happen. So, you know, in the 19th century, Britain conquers India. There's a massive Indian revolt in the 1850s. And it's brutally put down. So we've got to last 50 years, Britain. India's reasonably stable. But what's the counter? I don't know what the counterfactual is. You know, what does... What would the Afghans have invaded again and slaughtered? So all of these questions are sort of... They're things that politicians and people on social media like to get really involved in.

1:11:34but historians are sort of interested in what happens, right? Like, I don't, I mean, like, is, was the Prussian victory in Silesia in 1740 good or bad? I don't know, what do you mean good or bad? Like, what are we talking about here? Like, it's just, this is a thing that happened. We're studying history as it happened. India may have gone on. I mean, if the Brits had invaded India, India may have developed this phenomenal indigenous culture that ruled the world and established the biggest empire in the world I've ever seen, or it might have been locked in a series of violent civil wars in the Indian subcontinent for 150 years.

1:12:09We don't know. So how can you possibly say... What you can do is point... Oh, look, the Brits massacred people there during the Anglo-Myssal War. That's a thing that happened. But you don't know whether... It's very difficult to kind of go, would more or less people have... Would more or less people have lived longer, happier lives as if the Brits hadn't invaded. It's sort of unanswerable. It's unknowable. So what you can say is that India today, there was a partition of Britain's Indian empire, obviously in the 1940s, with astonishing bloodshed and brutality, which was a tragedy.

1:12:50Francis Foster:Was that a release of the natural existing tensions within... Lots of Indian scholars say, no, no, no, it was all caused by the British because the British emphasized the Muslim-Hindu split in the 19th century so that they could divide and rule. That's what people say. Other people say, yeah, that's what happens when empires fall apart, is that everyone just goes after each other. That's what happens in Eastern Europe when empires fall apart in the 20th century. So there's lengthy debate about that. Is it what happens when you've kept a lid on everything for 100 years and then you suddenly take it off and just go, sorry, we're out?

1:13:27Francis Foster:Well, that's what an empire, speaking as a layman, seems to have to do, right? Like when the Ottoman Empire collapses, gigantic massacres everywhere. Soviet Union collapses, there's ethnic conflict all over the shop. All over the shop. Yeah. So, yeah, was the defeat of the Ottoman Empire good or bad thing? Well, this is a big question, right? Whereas the Middle East has been unsettled for 100 years. But like, was it better? Like, we have no idea what would happen if the Ottoman Empire had... They could have launched a genocide of Arabs like they did in Armenians. Like, I don't know. So all you can say is the Ottoman Empire collapses, and this is what happens in the aftermath.

1:14:01I think, so in India, as good as an example, but India is given a national coherence by the British, in a way, and it's striking that the Indians, when they declared defenders, they were quite keen to hold, they were quite keen to, that generation of Indian leaders were quite keen to hold on to India. They weren't that keen to divide up into the smaller states that there had been in India in the 18th century. so you're like let's keep the bureaucracy and the military and the sort of territorial expanse of india whilst getting rid of the brits like that and you see that in you see that after roman empire in places like france or in italy or in spain or all that these are like yay we'll throw off the roman yoke but by the way we're keeping hold of all the things uh and so yeah that's a again super tricky so winston churchill sat there when she told you that would happen the minute you pull out of india that's what's going to happen everyone's going to go after each other and then And lots of people said, no, it's because you pulled out, you mishandled the pulling out process, which is true.

1:14:56Or it's what you'd stirred up by denying Indians autonomy for so long. These things are super tricky. And it's the idea of better as well. I think that's the number of it where they go, it would be better like this. What does better actually mean? What does better mean? So in the 19th century, old history books, better just meant, do you live in massive states where rulers are in charge and they can build huge buildings and it's just awesome. You know, what does better mean? Or does it mean life expectancy? Should we be measuring calorie intake? So interesting, after the Roman Empire in the West collapses, we now think, amazingly, calorie intake may have gone up.

1:15:35Because there's fewer, say in Britain, there's fewer British people working on industrialized farms. The industrial farms have gone. Villa's smashed a bit. So everyone's like, okay, we've all gone a bit Mad Max. But we've got our own plots. We're growing our own veg. We've got like little pigs in the back. Like, we're all, if you can avoid getting smoked by the German raiders, we're all actually, people are sort of eating a bit better. So, you know, there's loads of very complicated things going on here, right? What does best, I mean, how should we, we traditionally measured greatness and success as sort of big, powerful empires.

1:16:06How many soldiers you got? How many ships have you got? And by the way, are you sort of founding a few universities and a bit like nice museums, right? Well, maybe that's nonsense. Maybe that's, I mean, look, there's arguments, aren't there, in the States. There's this great online meme, Mississippi is richer than Britain, isn't it, per capita? And everyone's like, what does that mean? Is it better to be in Mississippi today or to be in Bristol? How should we be measuring these things? And I think it's a huge issue for humanity, right? Now, I think one thing about big empires, they can bring internal stability and peace.

1:16:39And I've got to say, we can all get a bit carried away with living in uncertainty. So the Iraqis have an expression, better a thousand years of touring than one day of anarchy. And I think we're sitting here in this nice studio, everything's super chilled. I personally, my family, haven't had to, you know, fight for their property, their food, their children's lives domestically here for several generations. My Polish friends have said, we are the first generation that have not been involved in active conflict for 200 years. So it's very, very difficult, isn't it? Do we say, actually, you know, empire's terrible, goodness me.

1:17:19It must have been quite nice not to have your village sacked by marauding coastal attackers quite regularly. So that, again, huge problem when you're trying to judge in history what is good, what is bad. Like, that's a huge problem.

1:17:31Francis Foster:I think this is 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. I want to come back to the story of the British Empire and first of all its peak and heyday and success you say 1922 in terms of territorially but energetically though I imagine it's a bit before that big difference and there's partly a big difference because this is important for people to think about empire the empire, think about the American empire today Chinese empire today, it's not about the red space on the map that's really important to think about So the majority of British trade is actually going on outside the empire.

1:18:15So that wealth is being generated in the East, in the Ottoman Empire. South America, huge. Argentina is almost, it's not a British colony. So again, the British attempt to make a colony fails. What actually happens is Argentina becomes, you know, there's British sailors founding Argentinian Buenos Aires football clubs because you get an Argentinian indigenous government who's sort of happy to go along with the British government, good trade. You know, everything's, the Brits don't have to invade. You're like, this is working out very nicely, thanks, right? Just in the... So Britain's trade with the USA are more important than this trade with Canada, even though Canada's part of the British Empire.

1:18:49It's British North America, right? So actually, in terms of energy and sort of global clout, it's far earlier than 1922. It's absolutely the 1850s. Why? Germany doesn't really exist yet. The USA is still expanding. It's going through astonishing growing pains. It's about to have a big civil war in the 1860s. New technology is coming on stream. They are building steamships. HMS Warrior. You can still go and see it in Portsmouth. Greatest thing ever created by human beings. Iron Ship. Immediately that ship launches. Every other ship in the world obsolete overnight when that thing hits the water.

1:19:24Iron Ship. No other ship. Every other ship in the world, cannonballs is going to bounce off. So this is a stop. Now that ship can sail. It doesn't in the end do this, but it can sail anywhere it wants in the world, park itself and go, we need you to do this and the people will do that that's very straightforward britain develops trains canals and trains trades move and i should have said one other thing about britain because of its long coastline fantastic interlinked you you it's very easy to move raw materials around nightmares move right siberia now 20 on right wing it newcastle coal you literally chop it it rolls down the hill to the tine you put it on a boat it's in london a day and a half later.

1:20:06Unbelievable. So London has got unlimited energy supply from a little bit further up the coast. A little guy called Captain Cook helped to sustain that trade. So you've got that geography, as I said at the beginning. So trains, though, you're inventing telegraphs. Your extraordinary energy is going on. And then you get a problem. And actually trains, guys, this is my hot take for the internet on this one. Trains, the greatest British invention that absolutely shaft the British. And you wonder about AI in America. They could be interestingly similar. Trains overcome the tyranny of the oceans. Okay, suddenly you can move things around your country.

1:20:50You don't have to take them to ports. You don't have to do coastal trade. Suddenly you're moving vast amounts of stuff internally in your country. And that makes continental-sized superpowers possible. Trains, nothing else. Previously, you want to get from Vladivostok to St. Petersburg. I mean, nightmare. I'd sail all the way around. How are you going to do that? You've got to go to Africa, Suez. Everyone can stop you. There's choke points. You've got to go out to the North Sea, put a train in. Now you've got a country. Now you've got an empire. So trains forge the following country. The USA. Suddenly, you can exploit that interior.

1:21:24You can move people around. You can settle the interior. You can move weapons, troops, raw materials. Or, you know, it's big time. Trains. Germany, which is a problem for the British. Germany, very, very wealthy heart of Europe, has never been, not for a thousand years or so, has it been united, effectively united. It's never been effectively united. Suddenly, all the German lands can become a nation state. So you've got Prussia, you've got Hanover, you've got Bavaria, trains, trains, no canals, tiny little coast. Suddenly, you can move goods and ideas and people around that giant place. And then you've got Russia.

1:22:03Suddenly, Russian troops can get from European Russia to threaten Britain's Asian empire, Afghanistan, or East, Far East. And it's trains, they proliferate. Suddenly, the Royal Navy is like, oh, we can't interfere with this trade now. We can't just bombard Bremen because the trade's all going elsewhere in Germany. And they can create nation states that ultimately dwarf Britain. and you get land empires emerging, knitted together by trains, suddenly makes the Britain's maritime empire look a bit old-fashioned, like the Venetians. Like the Phoenicians, it's like, yeah, no, no, it's fine. We're linked by shipping channels.

1:22:39Mate, we're linked by trains. You don't have to go over the ocean. The ocean becomes a sort of barrier rather than a bridge in people's minds. That begins in 1830. So towards the end of the 20th century, obviously the USA starts to consolidate Russia, Germany, and they overtake the British economy at the end of the 19th century. So while Britain's got this massive empire, it's got a major problem. And you've got policymakers in 1890s when the big map on the wall is, oh, everything's British, mate. Quarter of the world's population, pretty much quarter of the world's surface. But actually, the show's over because what's important is, you know, economics.

1:23:14Where's the energy? Where's the energy, right? And the energy, the second industrial revolution is in petrochemicals. It's in cars. That goes on in Germany. The Brits miss out on that. The Brits do textiles and coal and iron. Then it goes elsewhere. The energy goes elsewhere. America overtakes Britain in the late 19th century. Just you can't compete with America, obviously, just on every level. Germany overtakes Britain. And Britain is smoked by winning two world wars. Very odd. It's on the winning side in both world wars that absolutely shaft the British. So they spend their entire money. So you can almost...

1:23:46The end of the British Empire, the effective end of that energy is sort of pretty much 1942, 43. It's completely overtaken by the Americans. in terms of ships, in terms of investment he's able to put into his militaries.

1:24:02Francis Foster: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. And actually, the end of the British Empire was something they were pretty content with. And in fact, they actively worked towards... So Churchill had this naive idea that the English-speaking people of the world were going to unite, the British and the Americans could rule the world together and defeat fascism. And he took this big gamble, and he rightly identified Hitler as one of history's worst individuals, a monstrous regime.

1:24:36And he said, actually, even... He hoped he could sustain the British Empire and beat Hitler, but when the chips down, he really had to almost sacrifice the British Empire. He had to become... He had to just get as close as possible to America and agree to share things like nuclear research, which the Americans then shut the door and, after the war, reneging on those kind of deals. So, yeah, the Americans took their pound of flesh. The Americans saw the end of the British Empire as a strategic win for the Americans.

1:25:01Francis Foster:Still bitter about 1770s. I'm furious about it. But I'm not understanding. Of course they did. And they, now, amazingly, they've had to step in and sort out or deal with many of the messes that the British were trying to deal with as global hegemons. They might wish that the Brits were still running Israel to this day or, you know, all other parts of the world. and but yeah so you get these superpowers emerge and you get British in the 1890s you get the Prime Minister Lord Spalsbury he goes we should have you know what we should have we should have gone in all in on the American Civil War way of the chance the Americans are shafting us we should have gone in on the Confederacy and broken up the US project missed the opportunity and so they couldn't because of slavery it was too it would have been the Brits the Brits thought about it but just couldn't bring themselves to do it And so, in the end, the emergence of these giant continental-sized China, USSR, America, meant that little old Britain couldn't compete with that.

1:26:04And 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. If you're joined by land to somewhere, it looks like, sure, you can take that. So no one questions the right of Russia now to be in the Far East. That was an imperial project. It was conquered in the 1600s, 1700s, as you well know. But that's fine. It's part of Russia. The idea that Britain could hold on to Nigeria or India or even Canada and incorporate them into Britain. Everyone just like, don't be serious. It doesn't work. That doesn't work. You've got the sea in the way.

1:26:35Like, what are you talking about? And then you get politicians in the 20th century going, why sea? Like, what's the sea got to do with it? How is it different? Britain controlling, you know, just because we're not next door to them, but somehow it does. And what's interesting about the British Empire for me is it disintegrates just on the edge of the era where, weirdly, air travel and communications were arguably making a discontiguous empire kind of feasibly possible. You couldn't envisage a situation where you had a parliament in Britain with, like, Australians and New Zealanders and Canadians kind of in it, like Africans, Nigerians, whatever, and you kind of, Britain was unable to turn its empire into, which lots of people have been talking about in the 19th century, all sorts of thinkers are going, it's going to become a nation state, like Russia, it's like America.

1:27:20They've got empires and Prussia conquered an empire, but they're just, they're other German speaking people, but they conquered an empire, of course they do. We will do the same. And they talked about how India and these will just, it will become like a nation state, will have a wonderful, a global state. And it didn't quite, it didn't happen but i struck by the fact that partly because obviously it was sort of bonkers but at the same time there were just pressing logistical reasons why it just was pretty complicated you can you could be in california and get a train to washington dc take part in the political process in a few days you know if you're an australian museum that's more difficult but weirdly the british empire so by 1940 1950 by 1980 2000 actually there's a world in which particularly now.

1:28:06You're all working remotely and you have an imperial parliament. It doesn't matter where you are, right? So it's quite interesting that.

1:28:12Francis Foster:It's very interesting, but I imagine part of the reason for that is that the core is too small. Like in Russia, the European part of Russia is by far the most dominant. The Russian ethnic group is the biggest by far. In the United States, it's very similar, right? Whereas if you had the British Empire today, the Brits would be a tiny minority, wouldn't they? And territorially also. And there was the issue of race. and that race is important. So lots of thinkers are saying, and indeed lots of black and brown British imperial subjects are going to London thinking, I'm going to take part in this empire.

1:28:45Queen Victoria had a West African godchild who she took great interest in and regarded as part of, wanted to come to court, married off to a British naval officer, wanted to create a mixed race imperial elite. Fascinating. On the ground, that just effectively just can't happen. There's just, if you're a planter in what's now Zimbabwe or northern India, if you're a farmer, if you're living next to Maori people in New Zealand, they're just the kind of cultural demographic and sort of racist assumptions. It was kind of too much. It's hard. It was too difficult, I think, in practice on the ground.

1:29:24But you get lots of scholars in the 80s and 80s, for Britain to survive, they knew what was coming. For Britain to survive as an empire, we're going to have to transition this into something else. like a nation state, which means we are going to have to accept that there's going to be brown Englishmen. And what you get is you get, what's interesting, you get people from Burma, and thanks to his dad, you get Gandhi, other people coming to Britain and being radicalized by the experience of Britain, which is the government go, welcome, welcome, you're all welcome here in the imperial capital. But shopkeepers are like, you know, piss off.

1:29:56And they're radicalized by it, go, hang on a minute, this doesn't work. And so you're right, Just the tension, the idea that you can, from the Maoris to the Assiniboine tribe in Western Canada, the idea that you're going to try and somehow, that is a massive project that was beyond the real practical ability or in the imagination of most people in the 19th century to achieve, and beyond the kind of technology, I think, as well. And by the way, you have this extraordinary idea of nationalism that's still afloat in the world at the moment, that just encouraged people to think of themselves as peoples and sovereign power should lie, power ought to be exercised by this people.

1:30:39And peoples were defined by ethnicity and by language. And people in the 19th century loved going around and going, no, you're Ukrainian. You're not Ruthenian. You're not Polish. No, you are, and this is the language you speak. As the Austrian Empire collapses in Eastern Europe, the Czechs are told, no, you're now Czech. You're not German-speaking bohemians. You have to learn Czech, which is kind of language which poets have sort of revived from the distant part. So there's a process of encouraging people to think of themselves as separate entities. And that was far too powerful for the British Empire.

1:31:14The British Empire was like, yeah, we'll all just come on. We'll all be great imperial subjects and just overlook. Everyone's like, no. You know, I want to be... I am from this group or that group, and I'm being... The philosophy, the fashion in the world at the moment is this idea of independence and autonomy. And that tears apart the Austrian Empire, tears apart the Ottoman Empire, tears apart the Tsarist Russian Empire. And it's currently at work in the UK today. So it's a very, very powerful force that was unleashed about 200 years ago that ultimately has destroyed many of these big, sprawling empires.

1:31:57And so one of the final questions I wanted to ask as we're coming towards the end of the interview, which is legacy. What is the legacy of the British Empire? Well, it's hard to underestimate the legacy of the British Empire in the world at the moment. It's astonishing. Partly transmitted through American-ness. I mean, this is why the British Empire had enormous impact on the world. The fact that the hegemon that followed the British turns out to be the Americans, in the same way that Greek culture and ideas are transmitted through Rome to the modern world, it's pretty useful parallel, right? So, but the English language, I mean, it's astonishing to me, isn't it?

1:32:37There's currently commercial negotiations taking place in Sao Paulo between Chinese people and Brazilians that are being conducted in English. You know, it's extraordinary, right? And that's because of the scale of the British Empire and then the fact that North America spoke English.

1:32:55Francis Foster:Do you know something else, Dan, just from a linguistic point of view? It's also because English is a very hard language to master, but it's very easy to learn relatively. I mean, I speak several languages. If you learn Russian, it is a nightmare to learn at the basic level. So English is very good to learn to beginner to intermediate level. And it's just very easy, relatively speaking. Like Russian and German and other languages just wouldn't work because they're just too hard to learn. Interesting. Yeah. Chinese probably as well, ironically, because, you know, people go, what's the most common language?

1:33:32Francis Foster:It's Chinese. But that's only because there's a billion Chinese people. But it's not a language that's really spread because it's tonal. You have to make different sounds. It's all very difficult. Yeah, that's true. English is very simple. I'm still trying to master it. And then ideas around representative democracy. Huge important. And the idea of India, Australia, New Zealand, the USA, Canada, these enormous countries. The Japanese system of constitutional monarchy in some ways transmitted via the US through to post-war thinking. It's just And then there's capitalism. I mean, there's the British first factory of the modern world, arguably in Nottingham in the 1750s, organising labour, insurance, patent protection, all of these ideas, the sort of foundational ways in which we conduct global trade.

1:34:32A lot of that is forged, yes, in Amsterdam, and it's a kind of milieu in those 1600s, 1700s, but it's Britain, it's that British empire that's the vehicle for exporting that. And then, apart from anything else, football World Cup, it's entirely, football is exported by the Brits. It's, you know, all of these things. So Britain's fingerprints are on lots of the modern world. Another thing, of course, is the geography of the world. You know, Calcutta, Mumbai, Bombay, as it was, British settlements, Hong Kong. Madras as well? Madras, of course. Chennai, yeah. That fort built there. It's one of those little forts I was talking about.

1:35:15You're still going to visit the fort in Madras. And Chennai built in the 1630s as a little pinprick of Britishness from which the entire continent went. I mean, no one could have guessed that, right? And then Hong Kong, obviously Singapore. These are places that existed as British trading posts that helped to shape the modern world we live in today. I think one of the last I'd say about the British Empire, and I think this is about some of the tech giants as well, is the British definitely jumped through a gap in the market. So China was declining for a lot of internal reasons. Britain defeated France.

1:35:58The US was getting started. It was just the plates of the world were aligned, and you get the very, you got this situation where briefly, and it's quite brief, the British Empire, interestingly, it just sort of rose, totally dominant. And then other people just caught up. And you think about that with a big company like Amazon today, you know, they just went, okay, we'll deliver stuff to your house. You can book it on your phone. You go, this is the cleverest thing I've ever seen. Now, in the long term, does everyone else catch up and nick those ideas and just do that? And I think in some ways, that's what happens in Britain.

1:36:28It just kind of finds itself as the only guy left on the dance floor for a bit. France just falls apart. The Dutch have to fight the French and just get wiped out. The Swedish collapse. Delaware used to be New Sweden. There are all sorts of other options of the world. New York was famous in New Amsterdam. There are all sorts of versions of the world, but this is the version we've got. And it's fascinating. So yeah, New York's another example of a place like Singapore, which owes its importance to that British empire. Do you subscribe to the view that no empire ever really dies? They just kind of change form and then exist almost in the water.

1:37:08I think there's some examples of empires that have been sort of eradicated. But now I think, yeah, they exist in people's minds, don't they exist in the culture? So you see that in ancient, certainly in ancient world, Babylon, long after it exists in the independent state, people are sort of still obsessed by Babylon. Greece long after Greece is conquered and it's still greatness and ideas. It kind of rumbles along. So I suppose the British Empire at the moment, I mean, it still exists in some weird ways. First of all, there are bits of it. That's the weird thing about it. One of the problems we're talking about is the defense review at the moment.

1:37:43And one of the weird problems of the British Empire is there's still like bits of territory all over the place that need defending. Or do they? You know, that's a big problem for policymakers because you need a different kind of armed forces to project power to the other side of the world, to protect whatever it might be, the Cayman Islands or the Falcon Islands. And then the other thing that's fascinating is the king is still head of state. I'm half Canadian. He's on the money in Canada. It's just bizarre, isn't it? And so, unlike the Roman Empire in the West, it just collapses maybe slowly. Like, what is the end of empire?

1:38:14When my mom was a kid in Canada, and Canada was independent, in geography lessons, she talked about the rivers of England, not about the rivers of Canada. That was shipped through a number of the rivers of England in her geography lessons in the 1950s and 60s in Canada. It's like bonkers. So empire endures a lot longer sometimes than people give it credit for.

1:38:34Francis Foster:And if you were in charge of all the schools and universities in the country, unlikely to happen, what would we teach? What would be the story of the empire that we tell people? I think the story of the empire is why it happened, what that means like how on earth it happens and what what that tells us about for me the history is all the same you want to find the future hasn't happened yet the present is infinitesimally short it's already in the so if you want to study us what makes us tick what makes us fight what makes us love steal share you've got to look at the past that's all we've got all we've got to go on and so whether it's the British Empire or anything I'm like what what happened here why did it happen bonkers and what were the consequences of it happening um 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 which I totally understand I also like it's fun to have my job 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.

1:39:43But yeah, I would, I just, luckily I don't need to be in charge of anything because stuff already happens for you, but you're just looking, I want people to have a sense of that broader story.

1:39:56Francis Foster:But I thought some of the takeaways from what you were saying about it, why it happened were really important as well, because look, the geographical piece, we don't control. But you talked about patent law, you talked about, you know, the representative democracy or at least parliament having to answer to some extent to the people, a ruler not being able to just on a whim do certain things or die and leave the country as had happened in this country for centuries prior to that. There were lots of things about it that seemed to be good ways of doing things. And Britain bringing that into the world and birthing those ideas in many cases and exporting them around the world, that seems to me like an important piece because it's a clue.

1:40:37Francis Foster:You, I think, rightly talk about how the best measure of what we can do and should do and shouldn't do is looking at the past. Well, the British Empire is a fairly short period of time, historically speaking, in which so many of these great ideas get discovered and put into practice. And that seems to me important as well. Yeah, I think it's how do you generate wealth? How do you allow humans to reach their potential? I mean, it's very strange. In the north of England, in the U.S. Revolution, these people have got no formal education. Captain Cook, who grew up semi-literate, but many of these people grew up illiterate.

1:41:13George Stevenson's got no formal training. He goes and invents modern railway system effectively. That says something important, doesn't it? How do we... We should study that, think about that. It's fascinating. And then, of course, you think to yourself, isn't that weird about human history, that there are George Stevenson's and James Cook's and Mary Wollstonecraft's and Shakespeare's just all over the world. It's like wildflowers. You disturb the soil and suddenly, boom, they all just come out. And the vast majority of us will never find out because we're just yoked to the soil or we're just doing what we do, podcasting.

1:41:46And we might be absolute geniuses, we don't know. And I think that's very interesting and important. That's really... And of course, we have learned those lessons. Mass public education, encouraging, trying to identify gifted students, scholarship. There are things that we continue to do. but I find that fascinating I find that totally you know and also promotion on merit and again we have learned people who don't know anything from history we've learned quite a lot we promote on merit today there's no perfect way of promotion but on the whole if someone drives a ship into a sandbank I mean their career doesn't matter if they're the son of the Duke in Newcastle so and those are sort of those are things and that's and by the way that's why our world is astonishing at the moment we have absorbed blocks those lessons.

1:42:30We continue to absorb. That's why we encourage learning. That's why we invest into medical science, whatever it might be. And as a result, the world is just radically changed. Now, there's also a lesson about doing so sustainably and not causing climate change, all those sorts of things. But we are absorbing those lessons. I just think we need to kind of be mindful of what they are.

1:42:53Francis Foster:Right. And where they come from as well. Where they come from, yeah, for sure. And there's one other topic I want to address in terms of something you said, which was the rise of nationalism is such a powerful transformative force. It changes the world and ultimately, as you say, contributes to the end of the British Empire. If that's here to stay, is Britain, the British Empire, the last great empire in human history? Oh, I see. Interesting. Well, in some ways it is because, of course, like I say, the Germans and the Russians and the Chinese and the Americans very carefully rebranded. I mean, Every state's empire.

1:43:28England is the empire of Wessex.

1:43:33But yes, in that form, I think in terms of the idea that you can sail across the seas and conquer... I mean, that's what's very interesting about some of Trump's rhetoric. I don't think he means it, but the idea that Gaza's trip becomes in some form American or Venezuela. He's posted about Venezuela becoming American. That's a very old-fashioned way of looking at it. I sort of think that if you look at the polling in America, it doesn't seem very popular. Canada, Greenland, Venezuela. There is no longer a kind of popular, which is very different to the past, a popular desire to take over and own another place.

1:44:07So in some ways, perhaps Britain is the last of the great empires in that era. It's the last of the great empires that failed to make that jump, like the Austrians failed, like the Turks failed, like the Omanis failed in East Africa. They failed to make that rebrand, that jump of rebranding and becoming a kind of nation state. So now we all think it's completely, of course, America's shown California. I mean, why would it not? California was conquered, you know, and settled by the Americans. And yet, it's fine, because it's been reasonably successfully incorporated into the American project. It's people feel American, they vote, they are part of that American political system.

1:44:49So, yeah, I think my one day, Britain in some ways is both the greatest, but potentially, in some ways, I guess, I hope, the last of those giant, off-flung global empires. But again, we talk about this. France, France's longest land border today is with Brazil because France owns a little portion of northern South America, which is part of France. You spend euros there. France attempted, by the way, different to British, Guadeloupe, Martinique, France incorporated those into France. They vote in the French elections. They use euros. it's the sways of the Pacific which is still part of France so is France no part I don't know but they've but that's sort of somehow become you know a nation state but yeah interesting Dan what an absolute pleasure fun guys oh it was more than fun it was incredible before we move over maybe for Dan it was just fun yeah I'm like that guy it's like this is the greatest time of my life and the woman's like yeah it was alright we've all been there we've all been there anyway on that note what's one thing, Dan, that we're meant to be talking about, but we're not being talked about.

1:45:57Francis Foster:Oh, jeez, I forgot this bit. This is good, this bit, isn't it? Could be related to this conversation. You mentioned about the AI thing, and I was just like, oh, that's amazing. You were saying how there was some of the technology that we were using here, and then it could be to... Yeah, it may. Look, the Americans invent all this AI, and they're thinking, isn't this great? But in that case, are there ways in which other states or players will harness that AI to absolutely undermine American interest in the world. I mean, that's what history teaches us. Like the train thing with the British. Like the train thing with the British.

1:46:27Francis Foster:Fascinating, yeah. Or the armaments revolution, which in part is, you know, the British, anyway, we didn't get on to that. Actually, okay, so I think one thing we're not talking about is as we go into space, the lessons from the past go into it. I don't think we're having many conversations about what's going to be the politics of space. Like who's in, what are we doing? When Elon Musk goes to Mars and puts a flag in the ground, what flag is that? And what does it mean? and is it under the auspices of the UN or the US or of his own private interest? Is it under his individual? Is it now his company that's partially floated?

1:47:02So I think I'd like to know more about the plan for moon, space, and Mars, and I'd like to be inspired by what happened in the 16th and 17th centuries around the world and see if there's a really good way we can do this in a way that does not eventually... Because looking at the history, as a historian, you say what will probably happen is competition and conflict will be exported to these new territories. So how do we think about that as a species?

1:47:34Francis Foster:You get the Chinese portion of Mars and you get the American portion of Mars. And then surprise, surprise. The big bit of mineral wealth is sort of in the middle. And you're drilling from... So that's for sure a concern based on a knowledge of history. and it may be fine, but it seems to me that we probably need to think about it before it happens, because that's the best way to solve all these problems, isn't it? When there's not, you're not, you haven't landed on Mars and discovered a massive load of rare earth. So that's when it becomes, then that becomes quite intriguing. Dan, before we head over to Substack, where you get to answer questions from our supporters, tell everybody about your hit podcast.

1:48:15Francis Foster:I use that word advisedly. Hey, man, history, history, Dan says history at Babel. now on YouTube, inspired by you guys on YouTube. Very exciting to be recording them. So please, Dan Snow's History, please go and check that out. And they're just as good as the conversations we've had here with you. Impossible. With you, I mean, with you specifically. Head on over to triggerpod.co.uk where Dan's going to answer your questions. What is your favourite what-if moment of history? Doesn't have to be about an important moment, only that it might have led to a different present. We'll see you next time.