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002: The Rise & Fall Of The British Empire - What People Get Wrong · Prof James Ker-Lindsay

• 0:00
  SPEAKER_00: You're listening to James Ker Lindsay.
• 0:02
  SPEAKER_00: In each episode, my guest and I take a deep dive into the nuanced world of international relations and geopolitical analysis to bring you balanced yet essential commentary on our dynamic times.
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  SPEAKER_00: Britain once ruled an empire that covered roughly a quarter of the world's surface and governed hundreds of millions of people.
• 0:23
  SPEAKER_00: Yet few subjects in British history are now more contested.
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  SPEAKER_00: How did a relatively small European country acquire such an extraordinary global empire in the first place?
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  SPEAKER_00: And why did it eventually disappear?
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  SPEAKER_00: Was the British Empire fundamentally a system of exploitation, violence, and racial domination?
• 0:43
  SPEAKER_00: Or is the reality considerably more complicated?
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  SPEAKER_00: To discuss the rise, fall, and legacy of the British Empire, I'm joined by one of Britain's leading historians of Empire.
• 0:54
  SPEAKER_00: Professor Alan Lester is Professor of Historical Geography at the University of Sussex and editor of The Truth About Empire: Real Histories of British Colonialism.
• 1:05
  SPEAKER_00: So, hi, Alan.
• 1:07
  SPEAKER_00: Thanks so much for joining me on this discussion.
• 1:11
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, this is obviously a huge subject when we talk about the British Empire, but I think probably the the best place to start is to try and get a sense of what was the British Empire?
• 1:23
  SPEAKER_00: How did it, you know, how was it different from maybe empires that had gone before?
• 1:28
  SPEAKER_00: How would you tell people, as a starting point, before we go into the history of it, uh, how they should really perhaps think of it?
• 1:37
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, that's a great question, James.
• 1:38
  SPEAKER_01: Thank you.
• 1:39
  SPEAKER_01: And I spent really the first sort of five years or so of my academic career pondering exactly that question, how to think of an entity as enormous, as diverse, and as long-lasting as the British Empire holistically, and how to portray it in relatively few words.
• 1:54
  SPEAKER_01: So without wasting more words, I'll get on and say I think the best way of viewing it is a set of projects.
• 2:00
  SPEAKER_01: Set of projects pursued by initially English people, and then Scots as well as English, and then Irish and Welsh and Scots and English together, people from the British Isles, pursued abroad.
• 2:10
  SPEAKER_01: Now, some of those projects were complementary, they reinforced one another.
• 2:15
  SPEAKER_01: So at times, for instance, the projects of the monarchy, which were about gaining subjects, gaining stature, fighting wars with rivals in Europe, coincided and reinforced the projects of businessmen and businesswomen, but mainly businessmen in the period we're talking about.
• 2:30
  SPEAKER_01: Joint stock company investors and the monarchy sometimes converged in their colonizing projects.
• 2:36
  SPEAKER_01: But there were other projects that were often contradictory, uh, and the relationships could wax and wane through time.
• 2:42
  SPEAKER_01: So there were also missionary evangelical projects to harvest Christian souls and as they saw it, to provide salvation for heathens around the world.
• 2:52
  SPEAKER_01: And quite often they came into conflict with the projects being pursued by another set of um uh of colonists, settlers, colonial settlers, people who left the British Isles to find a better life and some land and some capital for themselves.
• 3:05
  SPEAKER_01: So that's another project in its own right, is settlement, colonial settlement.
• 3:10
  SPEAKER_01: So they're all to do with people from the British Isles pursuing various projects overseas, sometimes intention and sometimes complementary, um, which involved, and each of these projects involved then uh encounters with indigenous peoples, with colonized peoples.
• 3:26
  SPEAKER_01: So each project developed different sets of relations with colonized peoples.
• 3:31
  SPEAKER_01: They contested how Britons should relate to colonized peoples.
• 3:36
  SPEAKER_01: So, in the example I gave of missionaries, the purpose of empire for them was to Christianize and to, as they saw it, civilize Indigenous peoples.
• 3:45
  SPEAKER_01: That clash with the settler project of dispossessing Indigenous peoples and taking their land.
• 3:51
  SPEAKER_01: So you have these clashes in relationships with Indigenous peoples, and then you have different projects engaging with Indigenous peoples in different ways, uh, inculcating them as partners and collaborators, which many British business interests and the East India Company did in India, for instance, cultivating an elite class of Indians with whom they could do business and securing consent, right the way through to, I guess the other extreme would be settler colonists engaging in um indigenous people hunts to clear people from the land as they saw it, massacres, essentially.
• 4:25
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and everything in between those sets of relationships.
• 4:29
  SPEAKER_01: So it's a long-winded answer, but essentially I think the best way is to see it as a set of projects which were sometimes complementary and sometimes intention, and each of which had different relations cultivated with indigenous peoples.
• 4:42
  SPEAKER_00: So I I mean, I I think it it would be helpful to sort of try and trace out a history of the British Empire because um it didn't look terribly promising as an imperial power, you know, looked at and and when we think of the emergence of those first empires, I mean, we tend to look at Spain and Portugal and perhaps sort of give some sort of sense of how um Britain did emerge as the Empire, or how the Empire first sort of began to take off.
• 5:14
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, again, there's no consensus on this really, and and um any historian of Britain or of the British Empire uh might place a different sort of point of origin at the Empire.
• 5:24
  SPEAKER_01: Some would go back as far as Edward I'm conquests of Wales and the incorporation of Wales under the English crown.
• 5:30
  SPEAKER_01: Um from my own perspective, I would see that as not too dissimilar from uh other activities that were going on within Europe at the time, one kingdom absorbing uh another policy on its borders.
• 5:41
  SPEAKER_01: To me, what marks the beginnings of an empire uh as such really is the Tudor period.
• 5:47
  SPEAKER_01: And it is the moment when the crown, the monarchy, and business people in the City of London, um incipient joint stock companies that had emerged from the merchant guilds of London, both converged on the project of um establishing plantations, as they were called, in Ireland, um, particularly in Ulster.
• 6:10
  SPEAKER_01: Um, that moment uh of colonization across the Irish Sea was also running parallel with the project to uh merge the Crowns of England and Scotland.
• 6:21
  SPEAKER_01: So Henry VIII made an abortive attempt to unite the Crowns of England and Scotland, and his propagandists started to use the word uh Britain and Britons as the collective group as part of that propaganda campaign to argue that ordinary Scots and ordinary English people had certain things in common uh as Britons.
• 6:43
  SPEAKER_01: That uh campaign didn't come to fruition under Henry, it came to fruition under James VI or James I with the union of the crowns in 1707.
• 6:54
  SPEAKER_01: And immediately Britishness took more than just a kind of legal superficial form of union.
• 7:02
  SPEAKER_01: It took the form of Scots and English settlers, both combining forces to colonize parts of Ireland, and particularly Ulster.
• 7:09
  SPEAKER_01: So we can talk for the first time there about uh a British empire, a union of Scots and English and some Welsh as well, colonizing a foreign, Gaelic-speaking, religiously different Catholic um Ireland as Britons, considering themselves as Britons.
• 7:28
  SPEAKER_01: So to me, if you're going to pick any kind of point of origin, it would really be in that late Tudor and merging into the early 17th century period, uh in which Ireland is being colonized.
• 7:41
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and very swiftly and parallel to that, you have the colonization of Virginia through one of these joint stock companies on the other side of the Atlantic.
• 7:49
  SPEAKER_01: So when that kind of westward expansion, that Atlantic expansion of Britain occurs, it occurs quite quickly.
• 7:56
  SPEAKER_00: Of course, then that sort of brings us on to I guess what we would think of as the first British Empire.
• 8:04
  SPEAKER_00: Um I I you know we'll we'll talk a little bit later about how it sort of extended out eastwards, but it it was originally westwards, of course.
• 8:12
  SPEAKER_00: And how did Britain build up this colonial empire in the Caribbean and the Americas?
• 8:19
  SPEAKER_00: And we can talk about how it lost it, but of course, there's the vital element in all of this that I think, you know, we we have to acknowledge and is is so central to the story, which is, of course, slavery, uh, and how that entered into that story of, if you like, that first westwards British Empire.
• 8:35
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, well, first to make the point that one of the complexities of uh that imperial historians have to deal with is the simultaneity of expansions in in different parts of the world.
• 8:44
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and it's something that as an historical geographer I've been trying to grapple with, how to deal with everywhere all at once.
• 8:49
  SPEAKER_01: So that the first point to note is that there's no kind of neat succession between westward expansion and eastward expansion.
• 8:55
  SPEAKER_01: Because the East India Company is founded in 1600 at exactly the same time that these um movements towards the West are going on.
• 9:02
  SPEAKER_01: And of course, we'll come back to India later, so I won't go into it now.
• 9:05
  SPEAKER_01: But the Crown effectively franchises out the British Empire in the East to the East India Company.
• 9:11
  SPEAKER_01: Um, so what we'll come back to later is going on in parallel and simultaneously with what we're about to talk about now in the Western Hemisphere.
• 9:20
  SPEAKER_01: Um, but yeah, to come back to the Atlantic world, um again, it's a convergence of things, each of which is critical.
• 9:27
  SPEAKER_01: One is the series of wars in which Britain is engaged, England and then Britain, during the late 17th and 18th centuries, particularly with Spain and with France.
• 9:38
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and it's through, you know, the not by no means a complete slate of victories, but overall on balance aggregate victory to Britain that it gains more and more possessions in the Caribbean and in North America.
• 9:50
  SPEAKER_01: Seven Years' War, particularly, is critical in gaining what's now Canada, much of Canada for Britain.
• 9:56
  SPEAKER_01: You also have, apart from that, kind of monarchy-led and military-led projects, you have um settlers, uh emigrants from Britain, some of them religiously motivated.
• 10:06
  SPEAKER_01: You know, the role of the Puritans is generally the kind of stereotypical first settlers on the Atlantic seaboard of the USA, but they were actually outnumbered uh almost from the very beginning by um settlers who were not Puritan, who were just in search of better opportunities, a bit of land uh in a very hierarchical British society where access to land was becoming ever more concentrated.
• 10:27
  SPEAKER_01: So you have settlement on the eastern seaboard.
• 10:30
  SPEAKER_01: And the other part of the Atlantic complex that's being built during the 18th century is, as you mentioned, the plantation complex of the Caribbean, uh, which is fuelled by enslaved uh captive labor.
• 10:44
  SPEAKER_01: So again, we're talking about different parts of the world being put into connection with one another, mainly through the agency, again, of these joint stock companies, of these capitalist enterprises.
• 10:54
  SPEAKER_01: This is why historians so often link the rise of modern European colonialism with the rise of capitalism.
• 10:59
  SPEAKER_01: So you've got the East India Company, one joint stock company.
• 11:02
  SPEAKER_01: That's bringing, just to give you an example of these connections that are all emergent at the same time, the company is bringing textiles from India to Britain, but a third of those textiles in the 18th century are being re-exported to Africa on slave trading ships to exchange for captives from African policies that are supplying captives to European traders on the coast.
• 11:27
  SPEAKER_01: Those captives are then taken to the Caribbean.
• 11:30
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, they're put to work on sugar plantations mainly in the Caribbean, tobacco in the case of Virginia in the early days.
• 11:37
  SPEAKER_01: And then a kind of regional complex emerges where those Caribbean colonies are sustained through the imports of enslaved labor from Africa and through their exports of sugar, tobacco, cotton, and so on to Europe.
• 11:50
  SPEAKER_01: But they're sustained materially in terms of their supplies, um, both their infrastructural and food supplies and clothing from the American colonies.
• 11:58
  SPEAKER_01: So the American colonies and the Caribbean colonies develop reciprocal trade relationships too.
• 12:03
  SPEAKER_01: And this whole emergent complex has to be defended largely by the Royal Navy.
• 12:10
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and so an enormous maritime empire starts to emerge.
• 12:14
  SPEAKER_01: This is one of the characteristics that made the early European empires as a whole, but then particularly the British Empire, different from the land-based contiguous units of land empires of the past.
• 12:27
  SPEAKER_01: These modern European empires were maritime empires.
• 12:30
  SPEAKER_01: They relied on uh effective navies, and of course the Royal Navy became paramount to maintain the connections between all these different parts, all these different components, all of which were interdependent on one another, uh, in ways that I've just illustrated.
• 12:46
  SPEAKER_01: So Britain starts to invest more and more in the Navy in order to sustain this empire, and it's primarily the Navy that enables victories in these successive wars and enables consolidation of the North American colonies and of the Caribbean.
• 13:01
  SPEAKER_01: The other thing that I would just draw attention to, because it's so deeply connected with that practice of enslavement, that the use of captive African labour is race.
• 13:13
  SPEAKER_01: So many historians of the modern European empires distinguished them from these earlier, what tended to be contiguous land-based empires, because of the racist ideologies that emerged in tandem with these economic and these military practices.
• 13:30
  SPEAKER_01: So slavery, of course, had been endemic in human culture in every society.
• 13:35
  SPEAKER_01: Um, what distinguished the transatlantic slave trade uh and the plantation complex that it that it fueled was the uh explicitly racialized distinction between captive um and free people.
• 13:52
  SPEAKER_01: So the slave codes of the Atlantic world used the word Negro as synonymous with slave.
• 13:59
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, and it meant that there was a differentiation based on race right from the very beginning.
• 14:03
  SPEAKER_01: Now, some free black people could become slave owners in their own right, but even there there was a kind of colour hierarchy, colourism, um, which prevented their full access to the rights generally enjoyed by white subjects.
• 14:18
  SPEAKER_01: But the defining feature was that all captives were black.
• 14:22
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and so an apparatus justifying that begins to emerge during the 18th century much more coherently.
• 14:30
  SPEAKER_01: And it's different from the xenophobic, the kind of um ethnically um centered ideologies of previous empires.
• 14:39
  SPEAKER_01: They'd all had distinctions between savage and civilized, you know, citizen and barbarian and so on.
• 14:45
  SPEAKER_01: But this during the sort of 17th, 18th century onwards, you start to get a coherent ideology of race, which is quite different, codified uh and um doctrinaire that that emerges uh and that hasn't ever really disappeared or been completely overthrown since.
• 15:02
  SPEAKER_01: So, in those respects, the British Empire in particular um was different from previous empires, and the the way that it took over from its predecessors, its antecedents, the Portuguese and the Spanish empires, was largely through warfare.
• 15:17
  SPEAKER_01: But it was also through the really boring stuff, the fiscal stuff.
• 15:22
  SPEAKER_01: The fact that the British state managed to work out a system by which it could fight very expensive wars and take out long-term low-interest loans, effectively from the private sector, to do so.
• 15:36
  SPEAKER_01: And again, these joint stock companies are critical.
• 15:40
  SPEAKER_01: Um, companies like Bank of England and the South Sea Company, for instance, were established with the rationale that they would consolidate all sorts of different pieces of debt that the state owed, uh, mainly for fighting these wars.
• 15:54
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and that they would present to the government uh an option to pay back loans, but over a longer term period and at lower rates of interest.
• 16:03
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, and a lot of economic historians argue that this was the key actually to winning these wars.
• 16:08
  SPEAKER_01: It meant that the Navy could be financed, uh, and it meant that the empire as a whole could be sustained through through naval defense.
• 16:15
  SPEAKER_00: You know, we we were just talking about, you know, that that Western look.
• 16:19
  SPEAKER_00: And but of course, that came it didn't entirely come to an end uh with US independence, but it it did seem to radically transform uh the nature of the empire uh after that.
• 16:32
  SPEAKER_00: And and that seems to be certainly sort of looked at from outsiders, uh, that the moment that it started to shift towards Asia and then eventually Africa.
• 16:42
  SPEAKER_00: So it it'd be interesting to talk about maybe that process of uh by which the American colonies were lost and how that then sort of forced Britain to sort of rethink its empire uh and and move into those other areas of Asia and Africa.
• 16:59
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, yeah, absolutely.
• 17:00
  SPEAKER_01: And you are coming back to the point you made earlier that some historians draw a distinction between a first British Empire and a second British Empire.
• 17:07
  SPEAKER_01: And that distinction is that reorientation.
• 17:09
  SPEAKER_01: Uh so the very eminent uh former historian Christopher Bailey wrote about the origins of a second empire after the loss of the American colonies and a reorientation.
• 17:18
  SPEAKER_01: And that is true to a very great degree, although I I think it's possible to exaggerate that.
• 17:25
  SPEAKER_01: Um before we come to the loss of the American colonies, let's just deal quickly with what has been happening simultaneously elsewhere.
• 17:31
  SPEAKER_01: So it's not as if India has been dormant, you know, that the British interests in India have been dormant through this period of the 18th century leading up to the American Revolution.
• 17:41
  SPEAKER_01: It's it's during that period and particularly towards the end of that period that the East India Company is starting to devise a new business model that means that India is becoming more of a cash cow for this metropolitan British economy and effectively subsidising imperial uh activity elsewhere.
• 18:00
  SPEAKER_01: So that the company, after the battles of Plassi and Baksar, starts to transition from purely a merchant trading company, you know, offering returns to its shareholders in London through the profits on trade, to a governing entity that can extract rent from its subjects in India, initially in Bengal and then through a series of conquests elsewhere.
• 18:22
  SPEAKER_01: And it starts to use much of the money that it gets from rent, mainly in building its military capacity within India, um, employing sepoys, Indian soldiers, uh, in its armies, in order to continue this pattern of conquest or threat of conquest leading to acquiescence by independent princely states, and to build this other revenue stream and this other set of imperial activity.
• 18:46
  SPEAKER_01: So we can come back and talk more about that later, but but just to note that the loss of the American colonies occurs in a context where India is already being transformed.
• 18:55
  SPEAKER_01: It's not as if there's a sudden shift of interest from one to the other.
• 18:58
  SPEAKER_01: Going back to the Americas, much of what happens in the Americas in the late 18th century is the consequence of the Seven Years' War, one of these very, very costly wars.
• 19:07
  SPEAKER_01: As I said, through various fiscal measures, the British state was able to fight these wars, but it still had consequences.
• 19:13
  SPEAKER_01: Um what it meant was that the British government was no longer willing to commit military resources so that settlers in America could continue expanding west effectively.
• 19:25
  SPEAKER_01: So that they declared a boundary and said that colonists should not move any further west.
• 19:30
  SPEAKER_01: The Appalachians in one area of the USA.
• 19:34
  SPEAKER_01: Um and American settlers were alienated by that.
• 19:38
  SPEAKER_01: They were alienated by the accommodation of Catholic Quebeccois into the new Canadian states.
• 19:46
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, and above all, they were alienated by the attempts of the British Exchequer to extract more revenue from them to pay for imperial defence thereafter.
• 19:57
  SPEAKER_01: So this is where their opposition, no taxation without representation, where that phrase comes in, and where Axel, the Stamp Act designed to raise revenue from the American colonies, caused such alienation.
• 20:08
  SPEAKER_01: And one of the other things to note is that because they had insisted on a higher degree of self-governance anyway, or autonomy under governors in the Americas, they did have less representation in Parliament than the plantation owners, the slave owners of the Caribbean.
• 20:23
  SPEAKER_01: There was a very strong West Indian lobby in Parliament, a core constituent of MPs whose primary task, as they saw it, was to defend the interests of slave owners in the plantations.
• 20:35
  SPEAKER_01: And a fairly large proportion of the British aristocracy were invested in slave ownership as well.
• 20:42
  SPEAKER_01: So they did lack representation in Westminster of the kind that the Caribbean had.
• 20:46
  SPEAKER_01: And that's one of the reasons why the Caribbean colonies didn't follow the Americans into revolution, was that they felt that they were better off representing their interests at home in Parliament.
• 20:56
  SPEAKER_01: But anyway, the American Revolution obviously loses the 13 Atlantic Seaboard colonies from the British Empire.
• 21:04
  SPEAKER_01: They become independent as the USA.
• 21:07
  SPEAKER_01: What that did was it had repercussions throughout the Empire.
• 21:10
  SPEAKER_01: One repercussion was for slavery itself in the Caribbean.
• 21:14
  SPEAKER_01: There's an argument by Christopher Leslie Brown, an African-American historian, uh, who fairly persuasively argues that one of the reasons that the anti-slavery campaign in Britain gained momentum in the 1780s in particular, is that many evangelical Christian Britons felt that the loss of the American colonies was some kind of divine judgment, uh, and that that divine judgment probably had more to do with slavery than with anything else.
• 21:43
  SPEAKER_01: So you do see a swing of support for anti slavery, which is nothing new.
• 21:48
  SPEAKER_01: You know, there had been anti slavery protests in Britain since the 1760s.
• 21:52
  SPEAKER_01: The Quakers had had banned slave owners from membership and started to campaign against slavery in the 1760s.
• 21:58
  SPEAKER_01: But in the 1780s, it's after the loss of the American colonies, that this change of sentiment, and including within the Anglican Church more broadly, really kicks in.
• 22:07
  SPEAKER_01: So that's one potential repercussion, debatable, but there's a persuasive case from Brown.
• 22:15
  SPEAKER_01: The repercussions of the ending of slavery, of the slave trade in 1807, are even greater for the other parts of the empire.
• 22:23
  SPEAKER_01: Once Britain abolishes its slave trade as a result of that successful campaign in 1807, effectively the kind of writing is on the wall for slavery itself.
• 22:33
  SPEAKER_01: The anticipation of many anti-slavery campaigners was that if you cut off the supply of captives, slavery itself will wither away in the Caribbean.
• 22:42
  SPEAKER_01: The fact that that didn't happen led to ameliorative laws to make slavery slightly more palatable.
• 22:50
  SPEAKER_01: And the fact that even those laws weren't properly implemented led to a series of slave revolts across the Caribbean in the 1820s and 1830s.
• 22:58
  SPEAKER_01: So finally, slavery itself is abolished in 1833.
• 23:02
  SPEAKER_01: The repercussions of that are probably just as dramatic as the repercussions of the loss of the American colonies.
• 23:08
  SPEAKER_01: Because what it means is that capital that had been invested in the plantation complex, much of it was withdrawn and reinvested elsewhere in the run-up to abolition.
• 23:21
  SPEAKER_01: And then there's a second surge of capital being reorientated from the Atlantic world when the British slave owners were paid compensation for the loss of their human property.
• 23:33
  SPEAKER_01: So in 1833, 1834, they get 20 million pounds.
• 23:37
  SPEAKER_01: The equivalent of estimates vary according to interest rates and so on, but between two and five billion in today's money.
• 23:45
  SPEAKER_01: And much of that money is either reinvested here in Britain, some of it going into industrial revolution activities, railways, textiles, and so on.
• 23:56
  SPEAKER_01: But a lot of it is also reorientated to other colonies.
• 23:59
  SPEAKER_01: And it gives a kind of fuel of settler colonialism, the surge of settler colonialism in the Australian colonies in particular.
• 24:07
  SPEAKER_01: There's a really good project being done by colleagues, Jane Leiden and Zoe Ladelaw in Australia, about the sudden influx of both money and people and interest in colonization from the Caribbean, immediately a moment of emancipation and thereafter.
• 24:26
  SPEAKER_01: So Australian colonies, some of which have been just penal colonies before, suddenly receive an influx of free settlers from Britain.
• 24:34
  SPEAKER_01: And it's the moment when there's a rapid acceleration in Aboriginal dispossession and the creation of settler colonies across the continent there.
• 24:42
  SPEAKER_01: You also have more money being redirected into India with Indian shareholders in the East India Company, and the East India Company beginning to develop new activities, activities on a bigger scale, let's say, like cotton trading and opium trading into China.
• 25:00
  SPEAKER_01: So there's this large-scale reorientation of capital from the Atlantic world to other parts of the empire, and a surge in colonial expansion in other parts of the empire that comes with the dramatic changes in the Atlantic world.
• 25:15
  SPEAKER_01: Not just the loss of the American colonies, but the end of slavery and the threats to that plantation complex.
• 25:21
  SPEAKER_00: That casts a very, you know, a very interesting and different view on how that the British Empire expanded.
• 25:29
  SPEAKER_00: And I think that that was a fascinating point that, you know, unintended consequence in many ways of the end of slavery was that more parts of the world then suddenly found themselves under British colonialism and many other indigenous peoples suffered as a result of it.
• 25:46
  SPEAKER_00: But when we think of um uh British Empire, I mean obviously India, you know, the the oft-used term of jewel in the crown, but of course it Africa as well.
• 25:58
  SPEAKER_00: And this seemed to be a process of colonization which was a little bit later in many ways, but had dramatic effects as well.
• 26:07
  SPEAKER_00: Um perhaps talk a little bit about how that took place.
• 26:11
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, sure.
• 26:12
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, conventionally uh people think of the the colonization of Africa being tied up with the late 19th century scramble for Africa, um, which is normally dated around the sort of 1880s.
• 26:23
  SPEAKER_01: What I would argue is that we need to look much earlier.
• 26:27
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, and again, Afro the colonization of Africa is another spin-off of these 1820s, 1830s changes in the plantation complex.
• 26:38
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and it it's contradictory and complex.
• 26:42
  SPEAKER_01: The anti-slavery lobby was genuinely committed to the end of human enslavement, uh, driven by humanitarian ideals, but it was also easily co-opted by other interests in the empire.
• 26:56
  SPEAKER_01: And we see both the idealism of combating slavery and the co-optation of those ideas for other ends, right from the moment that slavery is ending in the Caribbean.
• 27:08
  SPEAKER_01: So the Royal Navy um sets up a West Africa squadron in order to suppress the slave trading of other countries, once Britain has declared abolition of its own slave trade, the year after Denmark did, by the way.
• 27:23
  SPEAKER_01: Um that Royal Navy squadron does really valuable work in the northern Atlantic, intercepting other countries' slave ships and taking the captives on board or taking control of those ships.
• 27:40
  SPEAKER_01: The captives are never actually freed.
• 27:42
  SPEAKER_01: That's a bit of a myth.
• 27:44
  SPEAKER_01: Um they are mostly taken to um to other British colonies where they are put to work as apprentices, unpaid apprentices, usually for 15 years.
• 27:54
  SPEAKER_01: They're called liberated Africans, but liberation is a qualified term there.
• 28:00
  SPEAKER_01: Those who fared best were taken to Sierra Leone and assigned as servants to free settlers, some of whom were black, black free settlers in Sierra Leone.
• 28:10
  SPEAKER_01: But anyway, you have the Royal Navy intercepting other countries' slave ships and genuinely trying to suppress the slave trade, not just in the Atlantic Ocean, but in the Indian Ocean too.
• 28:19
  SPEAKER_01: In the South Atlantic, things are different.
• 28:21
  SPEAKER_01: Mainly Brazilian and Portuguese and some Spanish ships are pretty easily able to evade the British patrols to the north.
• 28:28
  SPEAKER_01: So you actually have two or three more million captives taken from Africa to the Americas, mainly South America, after the British abolition of slavery and even after other European countries are effectively obliged by Britain to abolish their own slave trades.
• 28:44
  SPEAKER_01: So this massive illegal slave trade continues regardless in the Southern Hemisphere.
• 28:50
  SPEAKER_01: But at the same time that the Navy is intercepting these slave ships and there is a genuine moral repulsion in Britain against enslavement, the idea of being anti-slavery becomes a British patriotic virtue.
• 29:02
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, and that's you know sincerely ascribed to.
• 29:05
  SPEAKER_01: At the same time that that's happening, business interests are starting to see the opportunity of converting the former slave trade into other types of commercial dominance in Africa using anti-slavery.
• 29:20
  SPEAKER_01: Um, so some of the first to appreciate the opportunities that anti-slavery discourse offers them are the very same Liverpool traders who were engaged in the slave trade.
• 29:31
  SPEAKER_01: Right up until abolition of the slave trade in 1807, they were sending out their ships to West Africa and they were cramming the holes not just with captives but also with palm oil.
• 29:40
  SPEAKER_01: Um they see an opportunity to monopolize the palm oil industry and to cut out African middlemen who are supplying the palm oil to the coast on the precepts of anti-slavery.
• 29:53
  SPEAKER_01: So they continually lobby the British government, saying this African policy is engaging in the slave trade.
• 29:59
  SPEAKER_01: It needs to be conquered.
• 30:01
  SPEAKER_01: Um, this African policy further up the river is also engaging in the slave trade.
• 30:04
  SPEAKER_01: So you have this sort of convergence, this uneasy convergence of a humanitarian ideal and a business practice.
• 30:11
  SPEAKER_01: And there's no doubt that African kingdoms were engaged, both in domestic slavery and in the supply of captives for overseas transshipment.
• 30:20
  SPEAKER_01: And that's one thing to know, they're quite different things.
• 30:23
  SPEAKER_01: Um African policies had long practiced the retention of captives taken in war mainly as uh domestic slaves.
• 30:32
  SPEAKER_01: Um that was quite different from the plantation commercialised slavery that Europeans took the captives to, whom they sold to those Europeans.
• 30:41
  SPEAKER_01: So those practices were real, but the British were willing more or less to tolerate them.
• 30:47
  SPEAKER_01: As they colonized different parts of Africa, uh, they did very little to suppress domestic enslavement.
• 30:55
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, indeed, when that when there was a revolt in the Sokoto area in northern Nigeria against British rule a bit later on, Lord Lugard actually helped the slave owners suppress the revolt and maintain the institution of domestic slavery.
• 31:09
  SPEAKER_01: So there's hypocrisy as well as idealism, there's commercial opportunism.
• 31:14
  SPEAKER_01: And I would argue that the first scramble for Africa actually comes when British businesses successfully lobbied the government to displace African palm oil traders.
• 31:25
  SPEAKER_01: During the 1820s, 1830s, you do actually start to see the beginnings of a successful commercial adaptation.
• 31:32
  SPEAKER_01: So some of these African policies in West Africa had given up on supplying captives, but they were using their own domestic slaves more to grow palm oil.
• 31:41
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, and some of them were able to put them on British ships and send them to London and take a cut of their proceeds in their own right.
• 31:48
  SPEAKER_01: And you had some quite commercially successful individuals and policies emerging.
• 31:55
  SPEAKER_01: One African king in particular, Jar Jar of Apobo, um, was gaining tremendous wealth and power and influence based on palm oil trade, not on the supply of captives.
• 32:05
  SPEAKER_01: So the British invited him for negotiations about the practice of slavery and kidnapped him and took him to the Caribbean and never allowed him to go back home.
• 32:14
  SPEAKER_01: So you've got this really odd combination of utter idealism and anti-slavery virtue combined with these ruthless business practices and the seizure of African land and the coerced use of African labour, tantamount to slavery in the first place, all under the pretext of anti-slavery, all going on at once.
• 32:38
  SPEAKER_01: So by the 1880s, by the time we get there, the traditional start point for the scramble of Africa, British commercial interests under monopoly companies have already started to encroach into West Africa.
• 32:51
  SPEAKER_01: Um, Goldie was notorious for setting up what became the Niger Company later on through these sharp practices and the use of coerced unpaid labour uh on palm oil plantations.
• 33:03
  SPEAKER_01: In Southern Africa, you've already already had a series of wars for confederation to try and bring all of the disparate African polities and Boer republics in South Africa under united British control.
• 33:15
  SPEAKER_01: That begins with a spate of wars in the 1870s, 1878, 1879, where successively uh Tosa, Pedi, Swana, Zulu people are attacked uh in order to bring them under British control.
• 33:29
  SPEAKER_01: And that sets the prelude to the later South African war as well.
• 33:33
  SPEAKER_01: All of that is underway.
• 33:34
  SPEAKER_01: I would argue the scramble has already begun.
• 33:37
  SPEAKER_01: And those that British preemption uh of the colonization of Africa, largely on the pretext of anti-slavery, was what actually um prompted other European countries, um, particularly France and then Germany and then Belgium, Leopold wanting to get in on the act, that's what prompted them to rush to get the remaining pieces, uh, and the scramble for Africa ensued.
• 34:03
  SPEAKER_01: So that whole kind of pre-story of British preemption often gets left out of the story, I think.
• 34:10
  SPEAKER_00: It would be fascinating to get a sense of um Britain by this point had built up this massive empire overseas.
• 34:19
  SPEAKER_00: Um, but how exactly did it manage it?
• 34:22
  SPEAKER_00: How did it run it?
• 34:23
  SPEAKER_00: This is something that I I think you know often people sort of wonder how did this small island nation in sort of Northwest Europe um manage to control this?
• 34:32
  SPEAKER_00: You know, what what was it purely military?
• 34:36
  SPEAKER_00: There was clearly an economic empire uh impact and effect on all of this, but also how did it work with local leaders, for example?
• 34:46
  SPEAKER_00: Was there an effort to co-opt them?
• 34:48
  SPEAKER_00: Um how how did this all come together?
• 34:50
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I think this is probably the the question that leads itself most to oversimplification.
• 34:56
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and particularly, we'll come back to this later, but in the current sort of feebile atmosphere of debating how we should remember the empire.
• 35:03
  SPEAKER_01: This question gets massively oversimplified on both sides.
• 35:06
  SPEAKER_01: Um the empire was maintained neither solely by violence nor solely by consent.
• 35:14
  SPEAKER_01: Um, there was a spectrum of relationships, and that spectrum varied enormously from one part of the empire to another, and it varies through time as well.
• 35:23
  SPEAKER_01: So, you know, we can't cover the whole complexity, but let me just give a few examples from along that spectrum and from different places.
• 35:30
  SPEAKER_01: The place where co-optation and consent was probably most critical and the and the most valuable mechanism, if you like, of maintaining British rule was India.
• 35:40
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, and as I mentioned from the start, East India Company investors were doing deals all along.
• 35:47
  SPEAKER_01: You know, initially, when the company first arrived, they were subservient to the Mughal Empire.
• 35:52
  SPEAKER_01: They were businessmen hoping for an opportunity to do some trade on the edges of this very powerful empire.
• 35:58
  SPEAKER_01: And from then on, even as the won its battles at Plassi and Buxon, even as it started to become a governing entity, it certainly deployed considerable force whenever it was resisted.
• 36:10
  SPEAKER_01: But that force was often undertaken in conjunction with elite Indian representatives.
• 36:17
  SPEAKER_01: Um, in some ways, there was a kind of conspiracy to subordinate the Indian peasant class in a way from both British and Indian elites.
• 36:26
  SPEAKER_01: But it wasn't just kind of political elites, it was also business elites.
• 36:29
  SPEAKER_01: The British cultivated Indian business partners.
• 36:33
  SPEAKER_01: So I mentioned earlier that um the opium trade to China.
• 36:38
  SPEAKER_01: Um Parsi traders in opium were um working hand in hand with British trading companies to smuggle opium um produced through the coercion of Indian peasants um into China against China's wishes, you know, which provoked the two opium wars of the 19th century.
• 36:58
  SPEAKER_01: So that kind of cooptation between business extractive practices, if you want to put it that way, that were both British and Indian at the same time, was the kind of substructure on which company rule depended.
• 37:12
  SPEAKER_01: And that consent only really broke down in the 20th century, which we'll we'll come to later, when Indians wanted more of a share in governance uh as well as business practices, and they were denied that purely on the grounds of their race.
• 37:27
  SPEAKER_01: And this is where these racial ideologies became ultimately so counterproductive for the maintenance of the empire.
• 37:33
  SPEAKER_01: The nationalist movements that emerged in the 20th century initially only wanted a share in a partnership in governance, but they were denied.
• 37:42
  SPEAKER_01: But anyway, that coming back to the mechanisms of maintaining imperial rule, both consent then with elites and with business people, but also oppression.
• 37:51
  SPEAKER_01: Um, you know, the numerous military campaigns, numerous military interventions to put down resistance in India occurred at the same time.
• 37:59
  SPEAKER_01: If we go to the other extreme and another place, settler colonialism is probably where the absence of consent is most stark.
• 38:09
  SPEAKER_01: Um settler colonialism was was achieved through, as settlers put it themselves, clearing the land.
• 38:15
  SPEAKER_01: They didn't necessarily need to rely on indigenous peoples' labour.
• 38:19
  SPEAKER_01: Um most of the labour was working class Britons who emigrated.
• 38:24
  SPEAKER_01: And these were attempts to kind of replicate a British class hierarchy on the other side of the world.
• 38:29
  SPEAKER_01: There's all sorts of other things we could say about that.
• 38:31
  SPEAKER_01: But that the main point here is that indigenous peoples were seen simply as an encumbrance on the land, by and large, and they weren't useful to settlers.
• 38:42
  SPEAKER_01: So they had to be cleared away.
• 38:44
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and in in every British settler colony, there were a whole series of massacres.
• 38:48
  SPEAKER_01: Um, settler parties would form possies, they would hunt down men, women and children uh and drive them away from the land, um, killing them if necessary.
• 38:59
  SPEAKER_01: Um indigenous societies succumbed not just because of that violence, you know, they were decimated in population terms, um, but also through the new diseases that settlers introduced.
• 39:12
  SPEAKER_01: But the two went hand in hand.
• 39:13
  SPEAKER_01: When um when you're talking about largely hunter-gatherer, but also some cultivation communities, if you take out the men who go hunting in a raid, it means that the women and children have less nutrition, uh, nutritional resistance, resilience decreases, they become more susceptible to disease and so on.
• 39:32
  SPEAKER_01: So these things are uh are connected.
• 39:35
  SPEAKER_01: But there is certainly no consent whatsoever in the SETA um colonization process.
• 39:41
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, and indeed there isn't today.
• 39:43
  SPEAKER_01: You know, indigenous communities, First Nations in Canada, uh, and Native Americans, uh, Mali and Aboriginal people in Australia are all saying we never consented.
• 39:54
  SPEAKER_01: Um, Mali have the Treaty of Waitangi to resort back to, an actual written treaty, which they're trying to get the British to, or the Crown representatives to fulfil, um, having breached it.
• 40:06
  SPEAKER_01: Um, but elsewhere, you know, you know, in Australia there was never a validated treaty in the first place.
• 40:12
  SPEAKER_01: So there's there's that spectrum.
• 40:14
  SPEAKER_01: And in each colony in between Australia and India, you again you have both.
• 40:19
  SPEAKER_01: You have elements of consent.
• 40:21
  SPEAKER_01: Um, the recruitment of local troops is critical.
• 40:25
  SPEAKER_01: The British Empire, as I've mentioned, was a maritime empire with a very strong navy.
• 40:29
  SPEAKER_01: It never had a particularly large army, and we can come back to this in the 20th century as well.
• 40:34
  SPEAKER_01: It becomes critical how small the British Army is compared to the continental armies of of Europe.
• 40:39
  SPEAKER_01: What it relied on was the navy to transport certain British troops to certain places to put down resistance, but generally in collaboration with locally recruited troops or with Indian troops who were used across the whole eastern half of the empire, not just in India itself.
• 40:59
  SPEAKER_01: So many of the British imperial campaigns were actually fought mainly with Indian troops, supplemented by British troops under British officers.
• 41:07
  SPEAKER_01: And that mechanism of force, which again is ambivalent, it involves the consent of the sepoys who are recruited, but it involves the military suppression of dissent from others.
• 41:21
  SPEAKER_01: That is always the backstop to British colonial rule.
• 41:25
  SPEAKER_01: And it's one of the things that when historians try to draw attention to it, um, it cuts against popular mythology of empire and the a kind of fond belief in what empire was so much that the resistance to that kind of work is very fierce.
• 41:42
  SPEAKER_01: But it's inescapably um it's inescapable that during the second half of the 19th century, field manuals were written about how British soldiers should should suppress civil revolts, small wars, as they were called.
• 41:56
  SPEAKER_01: Colonel Corwell wrote a field guide and he himself named 65 small wars that Britain had engaged in just in the second half of the 19th century alone, uh, and was very blatant and explicit about distinguishing between what he called savage enemies and European or civilized enemies and the different techniques that could be used.
• 42:20
  SPEAKER_01: Essentially, um, scorched earth, slash and burn techniques were perfectly legitimate against so-called savage enemies.
• 42:27
  SPEAKER_01: So you could attack women, children, huts, crops, the means of subsistence, and that was all fine.
• 42:33
  SPEAKER_01: But you wouldn't do that kind of thing in Europe.
• 42:36
  SPEAKER_01: And that that was the underpinning of empire, regardless of how much consent there was uh as well.
• 42:44
  SPEAKER_01: But both, I think, were really necessary uh to varying degrees in different places over time.
• 42:49
  SPEAKER_00: You know, one thing that I remember sort of discovering a few years ago is sort of looking at maps of the greatest extent of the British Empire.
• 43:00
  SPEAKER_00: And I think like many others, uh, I'd always thought that that had been actually in the 19th century.
• 43:07
  SPEAKER_00: Um but if I'm right, it was it it reached, if you like, its its greatest extent in the 20th century.
• 43:15
  SPEAKER_00: It was it seemed to be around 1930 in actual fact.
• 43:18
  SPEAKER_00: If you look at the mapping, just sheer territory-wise, that seemed to be um, and if that was the case, that it was really in the 1930s, so rather later than we expected.
• 43:32
  SPEAKER_00: But then within 20 years, uh, Britain was was full scale into the process of decolonization.
• 43:38
  SPEAKER_00: And of course, you know, we have the Second World War and the part that plays into it.
• 43:43
  SPEAKER_00: But it would be interesting to know what what were the factors that led to the end of the British Empire uh and to that process of decolonization.
• 43:52
  SPEAKER_00: And perhaps also another thing that that often comes up, you know, so rather throwing a lot of questions in at once, was there's Often a sense that uh decolonization was a very violent process.
• 44:04
  SPEAKER_00: And it strikes me that that wasn't necessarily the case.
• 44:08
  SPEAKER_00: There were certain instances which were extremely violent, but in other places it was far less so, or it was a peaceful process.
• 44:18
  SPEAKER_00: And so comparing that, for example, with other processes of decolonization, we think of the Portuguese who really had to be led out of their colonies, kicking and fighting, and eventually it was internally in Portugal.
• 44:32
  SPEAKER_00: How did that process of decolonization emerge and and was conducted?
• 44:38
  SPEAKER_01: Okay, there's a lot to try and pack in there.
• 44:40
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, yeah, you're right.
• 44:41
  SPEAKER_01: The peak moment of empire in terms of territorial extent comes later.
• 44:46
  SPEAKER_01: Um, Matthew Parker has written a book about the moment at which the empire reached its greatest territorial extent.
• 44:52
  SPEAKER_01: It's 1923, is the date that he gives it.
• 44:54
  SPEAKER_01: But yeah, broadly you're right, 20s and 30s is when the empire is at its greatest extent.
• 44:59
  SPEAKER_01: And that is connected with the seeds of that very rapid decline that you spoke about earlier.
• 45:04
  SPEAKER_01: To me, one of the biggest turning points, one of the trigger, if you like, for both the expansion and the collapse is World War I.
• 45:12
  SPEAKER_01: Um, so going back to what I was saying earlier, that the British Empire maintained its strength partly through consent, but always with a backstop of violence where necessary.
• 45:22
  SPEAKER_01: But that violence was predicated on maritime capacity rather than land-based territorial capacity.
• 45:29
  SPEAKER_01: And when it did have to fight big land wars, it did so with local troops, or less in the case of the Opium Wars in China, it made sure it allied with France.
• 45:38
  SPEAKER_01: Um, it allied with France against Russia in the Crimea.
• 45:42
  SPEAKER_01: So when it knew that it was up against big land-based armies, it cultivated allies, essentially.
• 45:48
  SPEAKER_01: The First World War was a massive mistake in purely military terms, in terms of continuing that trajectory.
• 45:56
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and it was the reason that Palmerston had been a very effective foreign secretary and then prime minister in terms of the effectiveness of just maintaining the empire, was that he kept Britain out of continental conflicts in Europe, maintaining a balance of power between different alliances in Europe so that the British military forces could concentrate on empire.
• 46:17
  SPEAKER_01: In the First World War, though, you know, Britain gets inexorably sucked into a conflict that is going to destroy an enormous proportion of its military capacity and that is going to cause tremendous indebtedness.
• 46:32
  SPEAKER_01: So again, going back to what I was saying earlier, the fiscal situation had been important all the way through.
• 46:36
  SPEAKER_01: Britain comes out of World War I, having initially extended loans that it couldn't afford to its European allies, and then borrowed from the USA to cover those loans, and in the end it defaulted, or it was the debt was written off by the USA.
• 46:52
  SPEAKER_01: Um but Britain was was still far weakened, far more, far weaker than it had ever been, fiscally and militarily, after World War I.
• 47:01
  SPEAKER_01: And yet at the same time, there are still British uh imperial uh officials.
• 47:08
  SPEAKER_01: Um there's debates over this, there's no uniformity, but there are many British officials who are saying we need to capitalize on the collapse of the our enemy, the Ottoman Empire, and the collapse of the German Empire to seize more colonial territory, particularly the mandates that Britain agitated for and was granted by the League of Nations in the Middle East, in Iraq and in Palestine.
• 47:33
  SPEAKER_01: Um, there's various reasons for that.
• 47:35
  SPEAKER_01: Some of those officials are motivated purely by geostrategy.
• 47:38
  SPEAKER_01: They think that if we can get this band of Middle Eastern territory under British control, we can link up our Indian Empire with our African Empire and have more concerted kind of routes through.
• 47:49
  SPEAKER_01: So it's a geostrategic consideration.
• 47:52
  SPEAKER_01: But there's also certainly, at least in the background, if not in the forefront, of some people's minds, the presence of oil and the fact that the Middle East is increasing recognition from 1915 onwards as a Brunson Committee in Britain that considers this, that there is oil in Mesopotamia, what's now Iraq, that could be extracted through Palestine, through Haifa.
• 48:15
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and that this resource is already becoming the key fossil fuel for the next technological revolution.
• 48:24
  SPEAKER_01: So the Navy is converting to oil-powered ships, cars are beginning to develop, lorries, trucks, you know, the whole logistical framework of the globe is shifting towards oil.
• 48:36
  SPEAKER_01: So to my mind, at least that's an important consideration too.
• 48:38
  SPEAKER_01: And it certainly was in some officials' minds.
• 48:41
  SPEAKER_01: So in some causes, there's bel there's the belief that the end of World War I and the mandates give Britain an opportunity for a third empire, you know, uh an even bigger and more powerful empire with an effective monopoly or control over the world's most vital um resource, uh oil.
• 48:58
  SPEAKER_01: It's a huge miscalculation, though, um, because the degree of resistance to those mandates wasn't anticipated.
• 49:07
  SPEAKER_01: So very quickly in the 1920s, Britain is faced with uh a major revolt in Iraq.
• 49:13
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, it's faced with uh an Arab revolt in the 1930s in Palestine, uh, and it simply doesn't have the military capacity to put these down, which is one reason why it resorts actually to air control.
• 49:26
  SPEAKER_01: The RAF sees the post-First World War period as a threatening one to his existence.
• 49:31
  SPEAKER_01: There were cause actually to dismantle the RAF after World War I.
• 49:35
  SPEAKER_01: And it sees the aerial policing of empire as its major contribution, because you don't have to commit ground troops to put down peasants in revolt, you just bomb them from the air.
• 49:45
  SPEAKER_01: So during the 20s and 30s, the RAF was deployed increasingly in hundreds of missions in Iraq, in Palestine, and elsewhere around the empire, northwest frontier of India as well, to bomb villages and crops, to adopt these earlier scorched earth tactics and suppress rebellions against this extended British rule.
• 50:05
  SPEAKER_01: So Britain doesn't have the military resources effectively to hold on to its new enlarged empire and to crush the resistance.
• 50:12
  SPEAKER_01: And by this time, you know, we are talking about the era of nationalist movements.
• 50:16
  SPEAKER_01: Um, during the First World War and increasingly, especially in the Second World War, Britain claimed to be fighting for the principle of self-determination, for national self-determination.
• 50:25
  SPEAKER_01: And in all of these places, in Iraq, in Palestine, in India, in South Africa, you have nationalist movements saying, Well, let us govern ourselves then.
• 50:33
  SPEAKER_01: You know, we're ready.
• 50:35
  SPEAKER_01: Uh and in all of them, the British are saying, not yet.
• 50:37
  SPEAKER_01: You know, not yet.
• 50:38
  SPEAKER_01: You're you're not civilized enough yet.
• 50:40
  SPEAKER_01: You are childlike, you need further development.
• 50:42
  SPEAKER_01: So again, these racial discourses come in into play.
• 50:46
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, and they are the the reason for resistance, for continued British rule, for resistance to it, and for the inability to deal with that resistance.
• 50:54
  SPEAKER_01: So, to my mind, you know, Britain's already in trouble when the Second World War breaks out.
• 50:58
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, and it's the same story repeated, only even worse.
• 51:01
  SPEAKER_01: Britain emerges in in even further debt.
• 51:05
  SPEAKER_01: The really catastrophic thing, I think, for Britain after the Second World War was that it finally had to concede to Indian independence.
• 51:13
  SPEAKER_01: You know, the during the Second World War, it was able to recruit so many Indian soldiers, over a million Indian soldiers, to help the empire, based on the explicit promise, we'll let you govern yourselves afterwards.
• 51:25
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, you know, we will move rapidly towards independence.
• 51:28
  SPEAKER_01: And deferring and delaying that promise, rolling back on it, enacting emergency legislation to suppress dissent, all meant that Britain's position was unsustainable in India by 1947.
• 51:41
  SPEAKER_01: Having lost India, and this is something I think goes underappreciated by many people, the British Empire lost the Indian Army.
• 51:49
  SPEAKER_01: So this enormous army that had always been bigger than Britain's own army was broken up into the newly independent Indian Army or the Pakistan Army, and it meant that Britain couldn't deploy Indian troops in theaters like Palestine or wherever else dissent broke out in Malaya and Kenya as it would ordinarily have done in the past.
• 52:13
  SPEAKER_01: This is one of the reasons why national service was continued even after the occupation of Germany, um, after 1945.
• 52:21
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, so many national servicemen from Britain went out to fight these late colonial wars uh in Suez, in Aden, in Malaya, and Kenya.
• 52:30
  SPEAKER_01: So that brings me on to your other part of the question about decolonization and how peaceful was it.
• 52:36
  SPEAKER_01: You're absolutely right that one can contrast the British process of decolonization with Portuguese decolonization, which was very, very late, came about only as a result of the overthrow of a fascist dictatorship in Portugal.
• 52:49
  SPEAKER_01: Um the difference, I guess, is that Portugal we're only talking about a handful of colonies, mainly Angola and Mozambique, which is where most of the conflict was contained.
• 52:59
  SPEAKER_01: In Britain, there's a much wider array of empires with a much wider array of outcomes and of processes towards independence.
• 53:08
  SPEAKER_01: Um, another contrast would be France and Algeria, uh, again, extremely violent, um, horrible war, warfare before France finally withdrew.
• 53:18
  SPEAKER_01: But again, we don't have that kind of range, that panoply of different colonies with different outcomes to compare with Britain.
• 53:25
  SPEAKER_01: And in most colonies, the transition was relatively peaceful.
• 53:28
  SPEAKER_01: In all colonies, Britain tried to secure outcomes that were favourable to British interests thereafter.
• 53:36
  SPEAKER_01: So sometimes they would actually intervene and overthrow democratically elected governments.
• 53:42
  SPEAKER_01: They did that in Guyana, for instance.
• 53:44
  SPEAKER_01: So they conceded, okay, we'll allow self-governments, have a democratic election, a socialist gets elected, so the British overthrow him.
• 53:52
  SPEAKER_01: And these were some of these late military interventions.
• 53:54
  SPEAKER_01: In other cases, um, they were quite happy with the outcome, and there the outcome was entirely peaceful.
• 54:01
  SPEAKER_01: In some places they deployed military emergencies, as they call them, wars effectively, to secure favorable outcomes.
• 54:08
  SPEAKER_01: So to suppress communists in Malaya, um, to try to overthrow NASA's regime in Suez, um, uh, to try to secure the favorable outcome in Aden.
• 54:21
  SPEAKER_01: So it really depends on whether Britain thought that it could secure long-term interests through peaceful decolonisation or whether it had to commit the military.
• 54:32
  SPEAKER_01: A bit like what I was saying earlier about this as a sustenance of empire all along, that it was always a military backstop.
• 54:37
  SPEAKER_01: It wasn't necessarily deployed in every case, though.
• 54:39
  SPEAKER_01: So to my mind, that that's the best way of conceiving of decolonisation.
• 54:44
  SPEAKER_01: And what we've seen is at the time and since, those violent military interventions, those coups that Britain sponsored, being hidden, the tracks being hidden as much as possible.
• 54:55
  SPEAKER_01: So we had to have the Mom Mau High Court case bringing to attention the detention camps and the torture that was deployed against Mao Mau rebels in Kenya before the existence of this whole hidden archive was revealed.
• 55:10
  SPEAKER_01: And we now know about Operation Legacy, actually, you know, given that that name, which was to preserve the reputation of the British Empire uh after decolonisation, by destroying difficult documents, uncomfortable documents, or by removing them back and secreting them.
• 55:27
  SPEAKER_00: I I'm actually talking to you from Cyprus, which was another case where there was a military, there was uh an uprising against British rule, and it it ended up becoming a rather violent conflict.
• 55:40
  SPEAKER_00: Although it's a you know a small island.
• 55:42
  SPEAKER_00: This was one of those cases which I think was incredibly important.
• 55:46
  SPEAKER_00: And uh of course, the element that sort of emerged from that, a very contentious element, uh, was the continuation of British military bases on on the islands as a as a part of that process.
• 55:58
  SPEAKER_00: Um But Alan, I I'm aware of time, but and you know, and I I know I'm I'm just about to ask you um an incredibly difficult question, um, but a relatively simple question at the same time.
• 56:12
  SPEAKER_00: Um how, I mean, not simple in terms of its answer, but how should we regard the British Empire?
• 56:19
  SPEAKER_00: It is it is obviously extremely contentious.
• 56:23
  SPEAKER_00: There is uh uh like so much else that we're when we talk these days, it's incredibly polarized.
• 56:31
  SPEAKER_00: And it seems that there's uh it's it's very difficult to find a middle ground to discuss all of this.
• 56:39
  SPEAKER_00: But knowing how extensibly you've worked on this and and the way that you you have been so ready to acknowledge um the nature of this empire and the complexity behind it, how how do you respond to a question like that?
• 56:55
  SPEAKER_00: Again, realizing the complexity of what we're trying to deal with.
• 56:59
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I think unfortunately we've reached a position now where the stance is taken are so polarized that much of the nuance and much of the complexity gets erased.
• 57:09
  SPEAKER_01: And each side in a kind of culture war debate, I blame one side more than the other, we'll come on to that later.
• 57:15
  SPEAKER_01: But each side tends to create a straw man of the other side's arguments and to overstate the arguments of the other side.
• 57:22
  SPEAKER_01: So the way I would I would think about this is that um look at it chronologically, broadly in the historiography, in the work that colonial historians have done, um, they tend to have become more critical over the last 20 or 30 years of the narratives of empire that traditional British imperial historians generated, mainly for underplaying some of the things we've talked about, the the kind of violence as a backstop, the degree of violence that was entailed in maintaining colonial rule, and the racism, the the fact that in every colony there was a racial hierarchy.
• 57:57
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and the implications of those racial discourses, those racial ideologies continuing into the present.
• 58:05
  SPEAKER_01: So those aspects have gained more attention by academic historians.
• 58:09
  SPEAKER_01: They've also been more concerned to listen to other voices and to gain other perspectives than those of metropolitan Britons on the empire.
• 58:18
  SPEAKER_01: So there's been a lot more work attending to the voices of so-called subaltern subjects, colonized peoples themselves, of women, of black women, uh, and trying to denote the array of experiences that empire could create.
• 58:32
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and they are incredibly wide-ranging and complex.
• 58:36
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, they're not neat.
• 58:38
  SPEAKER_01: So, one example I gave for uh to Satan Sangero, who wrote about this in Empire World, was that you know, on any given day, if we take uh Tiny Wachebe wrote about um Nigeria's postal system and said, Well, at least you've got to give the British credit for a postal system.
• 58:52
  SPEAKER_01: But on any one day, you know, a Nigerian woman going into a British-run post office, wanting to post a letter, might be simultaneously grateful that there is the facility to post a letter, and resentful because every time she approaches the counter, another white customer comes in and jumps to the front of the queue.
• 59:09
  SPEAKER_01: And because she's black, she has to go to the back.
• 59:11
  SPEAKER_01: Both those things were daily realities of life for many colonised subjects.
• 59:16
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and drawing up a sort of simple balance sheet of pros and cons gets nowhere near that kind of complexity.
• 59:23
  SPEAKER_01: So coming back to my kind of um chronology, that historians began to pay more attention to these hidden, these more buried aspects of empire.
• 59:31
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and at the same time, Black Lives Matter in 2020, I think, was a crucial moment.
• 59:36
  SPEAKER_01: It meant that a lot of the hidden parts of empire came to light because the activists who toppled Edward Colson's statue into Bristol Harbour were choosing a symbol that really crystallized these continuities between past and present.
• 59:51
  SPEAKER_01: The fact that Colston was a slave trader who trafficked 30,000 people when he was deputy director of the Royal African Company, that he had been at least partly responsible for 19,000 deaths in the holds of those trafficking ships.
• 1:00:06
  SPEAKER_01: And yet he was still venerated, still on a statue in Bristol.
• 1:00:10
  SPEAKER_01: When I think to my mind, quite obviously, had he been any other white figure who had killed white people, 19,000 white people, they would have taken that statue down a long time ago.
• 1:00:22
  SPEAKER_01: So it brought to light these ongoing racial disparities.
• 1:00:25
  SPEAKER_01: They highlighted the racial disparities in education, in healthcare, in employment, um, in uh the criminal justice system.
• 1:00:34
  SPEAKER_01: All of these things are real.
• 1:00:35
  SPEAKER_01: The data shows that there is racial discrimination uh across the piece in Britain still, despite all of the legislation and all the campaigns against it.
• 1:00:45
  SPEAKER_01: And I think what happened after that moment of connecting past and present was that institutions, prominent institutions, started to actually acknowledge um the presence of racism, institutional racism, and they started to make moves at least, um, to to develop rhetoric, at least, and in some cases actual material movements towards restructuring and reparative uh justice as they saw it.
• 1:01:14
  SPEAKER_01: And that's when an almighty backlash kicked in.
• 1:01:17
  SPEAKER_01: And the culture war really launched itself then.
• 1:01:22
  SPEAKER_01: And we began to see the tying in of aspects of how we look at Britain's past and what we do about statues and the legacies of remnants of those past, tying into American-style culture war battles where it's all about binaries.
• 1:01:36
  SPEAKER_01: You're either woke or you're anti-woke.
• 1:01:39
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, you can't admit to the violence and the racism of empire without being anti-British, uh, without being woke.
• 1:01:46
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and you know, everything you say has to be dismissed.
• 1:01:49
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, and in fact, we need to go to the other extreme and rehabilitate the morality of the British Empire, re-legitimate European colonialism.
• 1:01:56
  SPEAKER_01: And you have these ideas floating around that the West is under assault from immigrants, from Russia, from China, and in order to preserve itself, it needs to defend its historical record as well, uh, and to re-emphasize that the empire was about civilization, enlightenment, bringing people to law, democracy, modernity, and so on.
• 1:02:16
  SPEAKER_01: And in that atmosphere, it's become very difficult to speak with nuance uh about this full range of experiences that that empire embodied.
• 1:02:26
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and to give you one particular instance, it took uh the High Court case by Mau Mau veterans um to uh take the British government to court for the torture that they'd been subjected to during the suppression of one of these late colonial wars in in Kenya to reveal the existence of an entire hidden archive and to reveal the existence of Operation Legacy.
• 1:02:51
  SPEAKER_01: This was actually an operation undertaken by the British state to wipe the slate clean at the end of Empire and to leave a legacy in which the empire was seen as legitimate.
• 1:03:03
  SPEAKER_01: So documents about the use of force, about the use of torture, the use of detention camps were either destroyed in situ or they were carried back to Britain and hidden away from public view at a facility in Hanslope uh Park.
• 1:03:16
  SPEAKER_01: And it was only because of the determined action of the historians behind the Mau Mau legal case that the existence of that archive and the existence of Operation Legacy became clear.
• 1:03:26
  SPEAKER_01: So historians object to that kind of thing.
• 1:03:30
  SPEAKER_01: You know, you you have some people on the right of the culture war talking about taking down a statue being cancelling history.
• 1:03:36
  SPEAKER_01: That's nonsense.
• 1:03:37
  SPEAKER_01: We don't learn history from looking at statues.
• 1:03:40
  SPEAKER_01: Cancelling history is destroying archives.
• 1:03:42
  SPEAKER_01: You know, we do learn history from looking at archival documents.
• 1:03:46
  SPEAKER_01: And when states try to hide them or destroy them, that's cancelling history.
• 1:03:51
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and when historians point out that we need to be able to speak about everything, we need to be able to speak about the humanitarianism and the idealism of anti-slavery.
• 1:04:01
  SPEAKER_01: And we need to be able to say that Britons really did convince themselves that they were an anti-slavery nation and they were very proud of that.
• 1:04:09
  SPEAKER_01: But we also need to be able to say that others use that anti-slavery as a pretext to colonize people and land and resources.
• 1:04:16
  SPEAKER_01: And we also need to be able to say that alongside anti-slavery, there was severe, constant repression based on violence, with numerous wars and interventions to maintain British rule against the consent of civilian populations, and that there were tactics deployed to suppress those revolts, which, you know, cut against our professed ideals and our professed values.
• 1:04:42
  SPEAKER_01: And if we can't say those things without being accused of being anti-British and without being subject to personal attack, and many historians I know have been subject to personal ad hominem attacks for saying these kinds of things, then I think we're really in a powerless state.
• 1:04:57
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, and I think it doesn't do our democratic um society any good to impose a form of censorship like that which is which Trump is imposing on American institutions uh at the moment.
• 1:05:11
  SPEAKER_01: That's the rewriting of history, uh, you know, not the interrogation of history in all its all its complexity.
• 1:05:17
  SPEAKER_00: Alan, I I can't thank you enough.
• 1:05:19
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, it's it's been absolutely fascinating talking to you.
• 1:05:23
  SPEAKER_00: Um I uh it's been a masterclass in in explaining how this complex you can't even call it an institution.
• 1:05:32
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, I think what comes out very strongly is is just what an unusual beast in many ways the British Empire was of all these different elements, these factions, uh, these interests that sort of came together to create it.
• 1:05:44
  SPEAKER_00: But I I think you've done a masterful job and and thank you so much for pulling this all together.
• 1:05:49
  SPEAKER_00: Um a heartfelt thank you.
• 1:05:51
  SPEAKER_01: Well, thank you very much for having me on James.
• 1:05:52
  SPEAKER_01: It's lovely to have an opportunity to talk about these things and to get into some of the complexities and some of the new ones, because so often you're denied that opportunity.
• 1:06:00
  SPEAKER_01: So good on you for presenting academics like myself with the chance to do that, to get to grips with our subjects.
• 1:06:05
  SPEAKER_01: Thank you.
• 1:06:06
  SPEAKER_00: Thanks so much for listening.
• 1:06:08
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• 1:06:16
  SPEAKER_00: It makes a real difference and helps me to grow and invite new experts.
• 1:06:21
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• 1:06:37
  SPEAKER_00: I'll put the links in the show notes below.
• 1:06:40
  SPEAKER_00: Many thanks again for joining me and catch you in the next episode.