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00:07More than a quarter of all the nations on Earth are former British colonies.
00:13And scattered across the world are the ruins of the British Empire.
00:18Statues to kings and viceroys.
00:21Slave fortresses, plantations, schools, railways, and prisons.
00:30At its height, the British Empire, the biggest there has ever been, ruled over a fifth of the world's land surface and almost a quarter of its people.
00:41But how did a tiny island off the coast of Europe claim power over so much of the world?
00:47And how did that vast empire, built over three centuries, collapse within the space of a single generation?
00:56These questions and that history are today in the 21st century becoming more urgent and more contested than perhaps ever before.
01:06Because the ghosts of the British Empire have been reawoken.
01:10This history is today being uncovered and debated because perhaps the greatest legacy of the British Empire is a living legacy.
01:22There are today literally billions of people whose ancestors in different ways were part of this story.
01:29And for this series, we invited people from across the world to take part.
01:35People for whom the history of the British Empire is also their family history.
01:42They'll share their personal views on the empire, how it shaped Britain, and how it shaped the world.
01:49Explaining how they try to make sense of this complex history and its legacy.
01:55Often people are trying to do a tally up. Here's what's happened on the good side. Here's what's happened on the bad side. Where have we landed up?
02:03It's an unhelpful way to look at it.
02:05Walk around many cities in the UK, there is a visible legacy of empire. The names of streets, the statues we put up, the buildings that we have.
02:13It's our shared past. You can't just cherry pick the good things out to fit your story. You have to pick out the good with the bad.
02:25Yes, the British Empire has shaped the world as we know it today. However, what was that really like for most of the people that lived under the British Empire?
02:35And if that means discomfort, if that means having to sit with what's happened in the past, I think that has to be how it is.
02:45In Britain and in nations that were once part of the empire, this is a history we are all struggling to come to terms with.
02:55There is no clear start date for the British Empire, but one key event took place here in the autumn of 1592.
03:20In the September of that year, a ship was being sailed up this river. Its name was the Madre de Dios, the Mother of God.
03:30And it might well have been the biggest ship then in existence anywhere in the world.
03:35And it was on this river and being sailed towards that port because it had just been captured in a battle fought out there in the Atlantic by English privateers, state sanctioned pirates.
03:49The Madre de Dios was a carac, a giant, heavily armed international trading ship, but it sailed under the flag of Portugal, which in 1592 was, for the English, an enemy nation.
04:04The sheer size of the Madre de Dios was astonishing to the English, but when it docked in Dartmouth Harbour, what truly astonished was the cargo discovered below deck.
04:19Amazingly, a list of that cargo, an inventory that was created at the time, has survived to the present day.
04:28The first item on the inventory is pepper, and there's a huge amount of it.
04:35In the 16th century, pepper came from Indonesia. And so, like many of the other items on the inventory, it's been shipped all the way across the Indian Ocean and then all the way around the coast of Africa.
04:48And that single commodity is here valued at 70,000 pounds.
04:55After pepper, there are cloves and there is cinnamon, then nutmeg and ginger.
05:00There are colors for dyers and then silks and calicos.
05:05In 1592, all of these items were extraordinarily expensive luxuries.
05:13And it's been estimated that, taken together, these spices and drugs and silks seized from the hold of a single Portuguese ship were worth the same as around half of the entire annual trade of England.
05:30And so, for some people, the capture of the Madrid de Deus was a moment when they came to realize that their enemies, the Portuguese and the Spanish, had pioneered a new form of global trade with the kingdoms and with the empires of Asia.
05:48A trade that was staggeringly profitable.
05:51And that they, the English, had been left disastrously behind.
05:56The biggest beneficiary of the auction of the treasures of the Madrid de Dios was the investor who had put the most money into the pirate expedition that had captured the Portuguese ship.
06:14That investor was Queen Elizabeth I.
06:18Her share of the auction was worth 80,000 pounds, around 28 million pounds in today's money.
06:26Yet despite all her wealth and grandeur, and despite the fact that Elizabeth's England had just defeated the Spanish Armada, England was still a relatively small, relatively poor nation.
06:41It was the merchants of the city of London, astonished by the riches of the Madrid de Dios, who began to lobby and campaign for England to establish the first beginnings of an empire.
06:55An empire of trade, but also an empire of settlement.
07:00So back in the last decades of the 16th century, just as it is now, this part of London, the old city, that's the centre of banking and finance and of merchants.
07:11But in those decades, the big question, the big challenge that those bankers are facing is how to break into this world of trade out in Asia.
07:19You've got a situation where the crown doesn't have very much money, but you've got a city which is starting to build up merchant communities.
07:26So these merchants decide that they can club together and create what are called joint stock companies.
07:31And they will each put together a stash of money, we'll split the profits, but also deal with the start-ups involved, so the ships involved, and we'll also take the losses.
07:40So we share the risk and the profits?
07:42You share the risk. So the crown sort of says, OK, we'll support it, but we don't bear any risk and there's no political issues.
07:49You know, if you get caught out here, it's not our problem. But we will take some of the profits in the end.
07:54These are some of the crests of those joint stock companies. So this is the merchants of East India.
08:01The creation of the East India Company in 1600 is, I think, a real game changer. This is about a really serious push to get to India, to go around the Cape, and to really sort of supercharge this city in terms of getting to Southeast Asia.
08:18This is a list of the merchants who put money into the East India Company, and it starts with who you'd expect. It's the elite. Here's Stephen Soames, the Lord Mayor of London.
08:29Then there's a load of aldermen, who are the people who run the city. But then when you go down this list, there are some men from more modest trades. This is Robert Cox, who's a grocer. This is an ironmonger.
08:42These are what we call the middling sort. So they're the prosperous merchants. They're the traders, drapers, they're tailors, they're grocers.
08:50We've got to remember that England is on the absolute margins of what we'd call, you know, the early modern world at this time in 1600.
08:57It's a speck. Places like the Ottomans and the Chinese don't even know who we are. So they have to fight harder. They have to be savvier.
09:05They don't have actually a big navy. They don't have huge amounts of money. They're blocked out pretty much still from the New World and the Americas and all the silver that's coming in.
09:14So this is such a smart way of doing it to say, we can compete with the big boys. And really, from the early 17th century, then that just explodes because they've got a model which is really succeeding.
09:26So this idea of the joint stock company, that's a financial revolution.
09:31It's a revolution. The money that is flowing back in here, you know, the city becomes awash with it by the end of Elizabeth's reign. And that's been a massive turnaround from 1558.
09:41These companies, they're all about trade with Asia. But there is another form of colonialism which has been taking place in the 16th century. And that's about settlement. It's about building colonies. And this company is England's answer to that. The merchants of Virginia.
09:59The model here is very different. When the English go west, it's very different to when they go east with the joint stock companies in the Mediterranean and trying to reach India and China.
10:08They know that those cultures are actually much more sophisticated and they have to negotiate with them. They don't believe that with the Americas. This is about sending out groups of people who will create plantations and colonies.
10:21So this revolution, this idea of the joint stock company, the English hope it's going to give them both trade with Asia that they've been lacking, that they've been pushed out of by the Portuguese and also colonies in the new world.
10:34Yeah. So it is the beginning of what I think we inherit, which is a global idea of empire, because you go west and you settle and colonise, you go east and you trade and you exchange. And both those things are at work.
10:46And I think that that is the legacy that is inherited and develops in this complex idea of what the British empire is.
10:53In the first years of the 17th century, the joint stock companies of London, with money raised from England's merchants and her pirates, dispatched their ships across the oceans.
11:07The ships of the East India Company headed east, around Africa and into the Indian Ocean.
11:14Their mission, to take on the Portuguese and the Dutch and break into the trade in pepper and spices.
11:21Heading in the opposite direction, crossing the 3,500 miles of the Atlantic, sailed the ships of the Virginia Company.
11:36Their journey took them here, Chesapeake Bay and the banks of the James River in Virginia.
11:42And in a colony named after the late Queen Elizabeth, they founded a new settlement, Jamestown.
11:50Jamestown, named after the new king.
11:54It was here, far to the north of the vast empires that Spain and Portugal had forged in Mexico, South America and the Caribbean, that the English established their tiny foothold in the New World.
12:07A mere 100 colonists, planted on the other side of the ocean, linked to England only by infrequent supply missions.
12:20This is a copy of the general history of Virginia, New England and the Summer Isles.
12:25And it's an account of the Jamestown colony written by John Smith, who was the colony's leader.
12:31It describes the first of many fleets of ships sent out from London to Virginia to try to keep the colony going and keep the colonists alive.
12:41It was sent in 1607 and arrived very early in 1608.
12:45And it lists the new colonists, the new settlers.
12:49By far the largest group are gentlemen.
12:52These are men who have bought shares in the Virginia Company.
12:57The next group are laborers.
12:59These are poor men who've been brought across the Atlantic to work for the gentlemen.
13:04And the first problem you can see is that there were a lot more gentlemen than there are laborers.
13:09But this third column are tradesmen.
13:12These are men who have skills.
13:14There's six tailors.
13:15There's a blacksmith.
13:17There's a cooper for making barrels.
13:19There's two apothecaries who are like pharmacists.
13:22And then there's two goldsmiths and two men who are listed as refiners.
13:28That means they're men who are skilled at taking gold in its natural form
13:33and refining it down and removing the impurities.
13:37Now, they have been sent to Virginia despite the fact that before these ships left,
13:43the first batch of what the settlers in Jamestown had thought was gold
13:48has already arrived in London and been shown to be pyrite, fool's gold.
13:54And yet, the men of the Virginia Company who've invested a lot of their own money
13:59in this whole scheme are still clinging to the hope that somewhere in the soil
14:05or the rivers of Virginia, they're going to strike gold.
14:08And these goldsmiths and these refiners are going to be the men to do it.
14:12And they will make everyone involved in this fabulously wealthy.
14:15And what will happen in Virginia will be a rerun of what happened in the Spanish colonies in South America.
14:22What had happened in the Spanish colonies in South America decades earlier was that the largest deposits of silver ever discovered,
14:34along with the vast gold wealth of the Aztec people, had been conquered by the Spanish.
14:41Spain had both founded an empire and grown incredibly rich on the wealth of the New World.
14:50The English, in the vast open spaces of North America, found not gold but starvation.
14:58The colonists had arrived in Jamestown too late to plant crops,
15:03and the gentlemen, unused to hard labour, were of little help.
15:08Disease cut through the settlers.
15:11Within a year of their arrival, the majority were dead.
15:16The years 1609 to 1610 were known in Jamestown as the starving time.
15:24And that era of starvation and suffering at Jamestown in the first years of the 17th century
15:30is one of the founding stories in the history of the British Empire,
15:35and in the history of what was to become the United States.
15:40The story of how the Jamestown settlement did, in the end, survive,
15:45is almost always told from the point of view of the English.
15:49But that is not the whole story.
15:53There is another way of thinking about all this,
15:56which is to try to imagine what England's attempt to plant a colony here,
16:01right on the edge of North America,
16:03what that must have looked like and felt like to the people
16:07for whom this land and these rivers was already home.
16:15Those people who knew these rivers were the Poetan,
16:19a confederacy of local ethnic groups named after their great leader,
16:25a man who ruled over an empire of his own.
16:31Among the tribes ruled by the great Poetan were the Appomatok,
16:35the Rappahannock and the Pamunki.
16:38And they have their own historical memory of Jamestown
16:42and the beginnings of English settlement.
16:47That story, and the archaeology it left behind,
16:50is the focus of the work of Dr Ashley Spivey.
16:55I'm a member of the Pamunki Indian tribe,
16:57which was the geographical and political core
17:00of the Poetan chiefdom that the English encountered
17:03when they first arrived in 1607.
17:05So that encounter, let's use the word encounter,
17:09between your ancestors and the English
17:11is something that means quite a lot to you?
17:13It means a lot to me because it set the stage
17:15for what was going to happen for the next 400 years
17:17when it came to Indigenous people.
17:20And one of the main points that our people like to make
17:22is how long we were here,
17:25how deep of a history that we have in the Chesapeake region
17:28of Virginia that goes back thousands and thousands
17:31and thousands of years.
17:32Do you have any artifacts from when the English arrived?
17:35Yes.
17:36This is a rolled copper bead.
17:38Copper was a very important prestige item
17:41that people of power and significance
17:43would wear on their bodies.
17:45And is this copper that the English brought, do we know?
17:47Most likely it is.
17:48And one of the main things that they were treating for
17:50were food in the beginning.
17:52That began to fall apart pretty early
17:54because they started to take foodstuffs
17:56from the Poetan by force.
17:58And the Poetan people, there are far more of them.
18:01I mean, they could have...
18:02Many, many more.
18:03Yeah.
18:04Why were the English allowed to stay, right?
18:06We believe that trade was the key
18:08to why the English were allowed to stay
18:10because a lot of the, especially the copper items
18:12that the Poetan people, the Poetan elite, wanted
18:16were coming from a middleman out west
18:19which were their enemies,
18:20and that would be the Monacan people.
18:22I think we often forget that when Europeans arrive
18:25in other parts of the world,
18:27they arrive in societies that have their own wars
18:30and disputes with other people.
18:31Exactly.
18:32And that they're viewed not as these great colonizers,
18:35but as people who might be useful against another people
18:38or who might make you less reliant upon the people
18:41down the road or over the mountains that you don't like.
18:43You do not get at the complexity of the people
18:46that were there before the Europeans arrived,
18:49and that, of course, includes the Poetan.
18:51And the other big myth about the British Empire
18:54and other colonial empires
18:55is that the indigenous people kind of die off.
18:58They no longer exist in the contemporary world,
19:00but we're still here today,
19:02and we still are able to make a living
19:05and live our lives as indigenous people.
19:10Through trade and through conquest,
19:13the colony at Jamestown survived the starving times,
19:17and the English were able to create other settlements,
19:20seizing land from indigenous peoples like the Poetan.
19:24But what made this possible was, in part,
19:27a discovery made by a man who arrived in 1610.
19:32One of the English settlers who risked everything
19:36and came here to Virginia
19:38was a young guy from Norfolk called John Rolfe.
19:40Now, he didn't come hoping to find gold.
19:43He got hold of some seeds of a Caribbean strain of tobacco
19:48and set out to discover if the soil of Virginia
19:51could grow a tobacco crop
19:53that he could sell for a profit back in England.
19:56Now, it has to be said that, on paper at least,
20:00John Rolfe's plans are no less unrealistic
20:04or over-optimistic than those of the men
20:07who thought they were going to strike gold
20:09or find a trading route to China.
20:11And yet, John Rolfe not only succeeded in growing tobacco,
20:15in doing so, he utterly transformed the fortunes
20:19of the Jamestown colony
20:21and transformed the economics of Britain's whole attempt
20:24to build a permanent colony in North America.
20:27Today, 400 years later, the fields of Virginia
20:32are still covered in neat rows of tobacco plants,
20:36something that would have astonished the settlers of 1607.
20:40Tobacco was the first cash crop
20:43that showed that the empire could be profitable
20:45not from piracy or the discovery of gold,
20:48but by acquiring land.
20:50Tobacco helped transform England's tiny foothold in North America
20:57into a string of colonies
20:59to which hundreds of thousands of English
21:03and then British people were to emigrate.
21:05The expansion of those British colonies
21:09and later the expansion of the United States
21:12involved a series of wars against the indigenous peoples
21:17that were to last for almost three centuries.
21:21It was a humiliation, it was a devastation,
21:37to say that your land is no longer yours.
21:40In our belief, we came out of the Earth
21:43not far from where we used to live geographically in the homelands.
21:47To be forced to leave that is just...
21:50How can you put that into words?
21:52It completely changed our societal, our social norms and mores.
21:59There was a lot that happened in a very short space of time.
22:03It has taken so much effort to rebuild and reconnect
22:08and relink our past into our present.
22:19In the same decades
22:21that tobacco was transforming the fortunes
22:23of England's North American colonies,
22:26English settlers secured another foothold
22:30in another part of the world.
22:32And there, they created even greater profits,
22:36growing another colonial cash crop.
22:42This is Barbados.
22:44And in the 1620s,
22:45this became one of the first English colonies in the Caribbean.
22:53Barbados is one of the smaller of the Caribbean islands.
22:57It's just 21 miles long and 14 wide.
23:00And it's on the fringes of the Caribbean.
23:02And what that meant was that when the English arrived here,
23:05it was on the edge of the area of Spanish control.
23:10And both the Spanish and the Portuguese
23:12had long known about this island.
23:14But Spain and Portugal had focused their attention
23:17on the Spanish main, on Brazil,
23:19and on the bigger Caribbean islands like Hispaniola and Cuba.
23:23To them, Barbados was just too small to bother with.
23:28And there was another reason for the indifference of the big players.
23:33This is one of the few places where you can get an idea
23:38of what Barbados must have looked like when the English first arrived here.
23:43Because this is one of the last surviving patches
23:46of the indigenous rainforest that used to cover much of this island.
23:50And what that meant was that before any crops could be planted on Barbados,
23:54and therefore, before any money could be made,
23:57the settlers here had to clear these forests.
24:01Colonial Barbados became a world of small farms
24:05between the patches of surviving rainforest.
24:09The settlers grew whatever crops they could,
24:12and the work was done by indentured labourers.
24:16Poor people from England, Scotland and Ireland
24:19who sold their labour in return for food,
24:21and the hope of one day getting land of their own.
24:26But right from the start,
24:27there were some among the planters who had other plans.
24:33Early on in the history of Barbados,
24:35a group of English settlers went on a fact-finding mission
24:39to Pernambuco, a Dutch colony on the coast of Brazil.
24:43And there they encountered a complicated semi-industrial agricultural process.
24:48that had been developed by the Spanish and the Portuguese on Madeira
24:52and in the Canary Islands,
24:54and then transplanted into South America.
24:57And the cash crop at the centre of all of this was cane sugar.
25:01This is a Dutch engraving from the 1620s
25:05that shows an idealised view of Pernambuco.
25:09And here in the corner is sugar cane being harvested by a man with a scythe,
25:15then the outer leaves are being stripped off,
25:17and then the canes themselves that hold the sugar juice
25:20are being taken into this mill where they're to be crushed.
25:24And then we can see the juice being heated up,
25:27and then the finished sugar being put into these storage jars.
25:32To the more ambitious and the more ruthless of the English settlers on Barbados,
25:37an image like this represented a vision.
25:40It was almost a blueprint of their possible futures.
25:46The story of how sugar transformed Barbados,
25:49and how the experiment carried out on this island
25:52was to transform the British Empire,
25:54can be told through any one of the hundreds of plantations
25:58that were carved out of the rainforest.
26:01Places like this, the Trent's plantation on the west coast.
26:07A map of Trent's reveals how the drive to produce sugar
26:11was stamped onto the landscape.
26:17We're standing in a part of Barbados that is shown on this map from 1646?
26:24Absolutely.
26:26Specifically, we're standing on the grounds of St. James' Church.
26:29A rare instance where you can look at the original map
26:32and then see a version of the original structure.
26:34What's so remarkable about this particular document,
26:36it captures a process that's unfolding not just here on the west coast,
26:40but across the island at a very rapid rate.
26:43So what you're looking at here is one of the first places
26:45that the English first arrived in 1625,
26:47and then officially as a calling in 1627.
26:50So we have the church right in the foreground, right on the coast,
26:53and then you see several other structures moving back upland
26:56towards the kind of hill region going further inland east.
27:00And it's hard to visualize now, but by the 1640s,
27:03a lot of this would have been completely deforested
27:05as they were making room for the emergence of the sugar industry.
27:08So we're seeing here the division of all this land
27:11being brought together under the ownership of a single owner
27:14who will then run a 300-acre estate for the next several decades.
27:18In the preceding years, sugar comes in on the late 1630s,
27:22but it doesn't take off immediately.
27:24But once some of the planters start to recognize
27:26just how much profit can be extracted,
27:28we see this process taking over not just on the west coast,
27:31but across the island very, very quickly.
27:33Because if you can see that this is the route to incredible profits,
27:38like a gold rush, you're very quickly going to abandon
27:42the cotton and tobacco and the old crops.
27:44You're going to rush in and embrace this new system.
27:47It's called a sugar revolution, and it does have the sort of pace
27:50and the speed and the violence of a revolution.
27:53Sure, and I think you also get a sense of how much sugar
27:56was actually prioritized on this landscape.
27:59It's really within a short period of time
28:00where just about all the natural vegetation
28:02had been completely denuded from the island,
28:04and we start to see kind of an almost momentary panic
28:08when they recognize that there's no timber left,
28:10there's no provisions left for the laborers to feed themselves.
28:13So it really is a monoculture.
28:14There's one crop, a cash crop, and that's all that's grown here.
28:18And if you take an acre of land and you aren't growing sugar on it,
28:21you're throwing money out the window.
28:23We see a complete prioritization of sugar production.
28:30The sugar revolution that allowed plantations
28:33like Trent's to expand and become enormously profitable
28:37was at first fueled by the work of indentured laborers
28:41shipped from England, Scotland and Ireland.
28:45But in the middle decades of the 17th century, that changed.
28:49And the moment of transition can, once again,
28:53be told through the history of the Trent's plantation
28:56and the documents left behind.
28:59These two documents between them show just how fast Barbados
29:05was changing in the 1640s.
29:07This is a mortgage agreement for one of the farms
29:11that went on to make up part of the Trent's plantation.
29:15It's from May 1641.
29:17And what it does is it lists all of the assets that are owned by this farm
29:23to allow for a valuation on the mortgage.
29:26And among those assets are the 14 indentured laborers.
29:32It gives their full names.
29:34And it also gives how many years they have left to serve on their contract
29:40because those years of labor are part of the valuation of the farm.
29:46So Thomas Walker has one whole year left to serve.
29:50Edward Hyde has three years.
29:52Jack Hendricks has four years.
29:56But then you move forward just two years
29:58and we have another mortgage agreement for the same farm,
30:02this time from December 1643.
30:06And what you see, again, is a listing of all of the assets associated with the farm.
30:12And again, there are indentured laborers, but this time only five of them.
30:17But there is a list of other names.
30:20Tony, Mingo, Grange, Mal, Butler, Maria, Judy and Nell.
30:27These eight people aren't indentured laborers.
30:31They're enslaved Africans.
30:33And they're listed just with a first name,
30:37not with a family name like the indentured laborers
30:40because these people have been stripped of their family names.
30:43And these names, Tony, Maria, Judy, they aren't their names.
30:46They're the names that have been imposed upon them by the slave owner.
30:51And they have been purchased and they've been brought onto this farm
30:55as it makes the transition away from indentured laborer and into enslavement.
31:05Plantation slavery, pioneered by the Spanish and Portuguese
31:09in their New World Empires,
31:12now replaced indentured labor on Barbados.
31:15And the island was consumed by sugar.
31:18Maps from the time show an island in which the last of the indigenous forest was being cleared.
31:25Across the now open fields are the hundreds of windmills
31:30that powered the factories in which the sugar cane was crushed and the raw sugar processed.
31:37And stamped onto the map are the names of the new planter class,
31:42the owners of the great sugar estates.
31:45By the 1660s there were over 800 estates,
31:49and on them 20,000 enslaved people labored and suffered.
31:56Barbados in those years became a social laboratory,
32:01from which a new sort of society emerged.
32:04And the owners of the estates drafted new laws to regulate that new society.
32:14This is a copy of a 17th century document known as the Barbados Slave Code.
32:19Its full title is An Act for the Better Ordering and Governing of Negroes.
32:25And this law uses the word negro and the word slave interchangeably.
32:31Because what this law says is that to be black is to be a slave,
32:36that they are the same thing.
32:38Now, the act dealing with white Christian indentured servants
32:44lays out what rights they have under the law in respect to their relationships with their masters.
32:50This law does something profoundly different.
32:53What it says is that as black people are property, they have no legal rights.
32:59And what that means is that they can be punished, they can be whipped,
33:03they can be mutilated, they can have their nostrils slit open,
33:07they can have their faces burned, they can be killed.
33:10And that those who carry out those actions face no legal consequences,
33:15because under this law they haven't killed another human being,
33:18they've destroyed property.
33:20This act is the legal foundation for the creation of a new type of society,
33:27a slave society, a racialised society.
33:31The slave code was enforced on plantations across Barbados.
33:44But as the British Empire grew, its influence spread.
33:48Year by year it was adopted by slave owners in other British colonies in the Caribbean.
33:54And parts of it were copied in Virginia,
33:57when the tobacco planters there abandoned indentured labour
34:00and turned to slavery to till the tobacco fields.
34:05And as British North America expanded and new colonies established,
34:10many of them adopted the Barbados slave code.
34:15The human cost of all of this can be seen back where it all began,
34:20in Barbados, at another sugar estate.
34:26This is what is left of the Newton Plantation.
34:30From the 1650s, in the early years of the sugar revolution,
34:34right through until the 1830s, when slavery was abolished,
34:38Africans were made to work these fields.
34:43And in one corner of one field is a patch of scrubland.
34:48Here, archaeologists have uncovered the remains of around 600 people,
34:53and their bones tell us something shocking about slavery on Barbados.
34:59So all of this was the estate.
35:02Yes.
35:03There's still sugarcane grown all around us.
35:05But this bit of land, which I would say is quite stony.
35:09It wasn't good for sugar.
35:11So they decided that they were going to situate
35:14the enslaved burial ground in this space.
35:17There are only a handful of these sites that we know of,
35:20particularly in the sugar plantation complex.
35:22So even in Barbados, this site is very, very special
35:25because it was very difficult to find.
35:27What do the human remains tell us anything about how they lived,
35:32the conditions that they endured?
35:34Life as an enslaved person in the sugar plantation complex
35:39was very, very difficult.
35:41You might have a life expectancy of up to 20 years, maybe 20, 20 years.
35:48Periods of malnutrition might have led to the kind of bone development,
35:54the dental development being halted.
35:59People are not getting all of the nutrients that they require,
36:02especially from the age of weaning.
36:04So about one year.
36:06Now this is an incredibly fertile island.
36:09That's one of the reasons why the sugar revolution took off here.
36:13So there's no difficulty growing food here.
36:15Right.
36:16But these enslaved people have signs of malnutrition in their birds.
36:20Yes.
36:21There are periods of time when people are starving.
36:24It could be that a period of distress might have been hurricane, for example,
36:29the devastation that causes.
36:31Ships can't come in with food.
36:33People can't grow, obviously, with their own food.
36:36Unlike Jamaica, Dominica, St. Lucia, even Trinidad later on, Guyana,
36:42where there's ample lands to go and farm your own food.
36:47That's virtually impossible in Barbados.
36:50So they're starving because the fertile land has been given over to sugar.
36:54Almost completely.
36:55And if there's a shortage of food, the last people that we're going to get the foods are the enslaved.
37:01Yes.
37:02So they're being allowed to starve.
37:04It's not just that they're starving.
37:06This monoculture, monocrop system almost builds malnutrition into it.
37:13Very much so.
37:14And that's one of the enduring tragedies of slavery in the Caribbean, but particularly slavery on Barbados.
37:22When I stand here and think about the bones of enslaved people who died young,
37:28died premature under my feet, I look at these fields.
37:31It's not just that they were buried here.
37:33It's that they were worked to death in these fields.
37:37Their time came too soon because of what happened with that crop in those fields.
37:42So this is like a killing zone.
37:44Yeah.
37:45And that's one of the reasons why this site, in my opinion, is so special.
37:51I find that when you work with Newton and the records and particularly the site, you hear them calling out to you.
38:00For two centuries, the Newton burial ground was just a forgotten patch of scrubland in the corner of a cane field.
38:09But now the government of Barbados have plans to transform it into a memorial where the millions of Africans whose lives were consumed by slavery can be remembered.
38:22And the discoveries made here are just one example of how the legacy of slavery lives on and continues to shape the lives of those descended from the enslaved.
38:34When we think about what happened in Barbados as almost a petri dish for colonial endeavour, black bodies and people were violated for the maintenance and the growth of that wealth to the Western world.
38:53There's so much wealth in this country from enslaved people. The fact that women would commit infanticide to not have children born into slavery. It's heartbreaking.
39:04To actually buy and sell people objects and then use them like animals, that requires the idea of race to make that all okay.
39:16Slavery has been a very heavy burden for us as a people because you are carrying that burden all the time.
39:27However, we are very positive people and we make sure that we achieve and we have achieved a lot in life.
39:42The profits from the sugar grown at the Newton plantation and the thousands of plantations across the Caribbean flowed back to the centre of the empire, Britain.
39:53Much of this wealth was concentrated in places like the city of Bath.
40:00Money from slavery helped finance Bath's boom years when it became a fashionable spa town.
40:08And among the grand homes built in those boom years were these luxurious townhouses here at the circus.
40:16This is a page from a document that was drafted in 1768, which was exactly at the time when the last of these buildings were being completed.
40:29So these were some of the newest, most expensive, most desirable homes in the whole country.
40:34What this is, is a page from the rate book. It tells us how much money the people living here were paying in local tax.
40:43But it also tells us something else. It shows how much money was pouring into this city from the British Empire.
40:51Because a number of the families living here had made their fortunes in the Caribbean.
40:55So living here at number four, the circus, we have a James Plunkett Esquire.
41:02His family had made their fortune owning enslaved people and plantations on the island of Jamaica.
41:09And his neighbour at number five was a Lawrence Dundas from another slave owning family with plantations in Grenada and Dominica.
41:18And four doors up from them, at number nine, was a man from a family that we've already met.
41:25Because that was the home of John Newton, the owner of the Newton Plantation.
41:31So, a century after the Newton family had purchased that land, those sugarcane fields and three generations of the forced labour of enslaved Africans
41:42had meant that John Newton was wealthy enough to afford one of these luxurious houses here in Bath.
41:53But when you investigate the backgrounds of the wealthy families who were buying or renting townhouses in the circus back in 1768,
42:02it reveals something else about the British Empire.
42:05Because there is another group in this list whose wealth had been drawn from the empire but not from the sugar islands of the Caribbean.
42:16And living in this house, number 11, the circus, and recorded here in the rate book, was a Robert Lord Clive.
42:26This is Clive of India, the man at the very centre of the expansion of British imperial power in India.
42:34And all of this Indian wealth is flowing into places like Bath in the 1760s because by then the British East India Company had become more profitable and more powerful than the Tudor merchants who'd established it a century and a half earlier could have possibly imagined.
42:52The company those Tudor merchants had established back in 1599, under the charter awarded to them by Queen Elizabeth, was in the decades that followed slowly drawn to what was then the most powerful state on earth.
43:11India.
43:12In the middle of the 17th century, India was ruled from this building, the Red Fort in Delhi.
43:24Back then, this was a new fortress, only just completed.
43:28And when the envoys from the East India Company arrived here, they found a fortified palace, almost ten times the size of Windsor Castle, and built at a cost of 6 million rupees.
43:43Then, around a quarter of the English government's entire annual income.
43:52And the residents of this fortress were the rulers of India, the Mughal emperors, the richest men on earth, with annual personal private incomes greater than the annual revenue of the whole English state.
44:07The wealth of the Mughals was in fact so legendary that even today it is imprinted onto the English language.
44:16Because when we use the word Mughal to describe somebody who is fabulously wealthy, that is an echo of the ways in which our 17th century ancestors marveled at the wealth of the men who ruled over the biggest economy on earth and their 150 million subjects from this fortress.
44:36It was the Mughals, not the English, who were the great imperialists of 17th century India.
44:46Originally from Central Asia, they had conquered India in the early 16th century, when England was ruled by Henry VIII.
44:55The India of the Mughals became an economic and a military superpower.
45:00When the early generations of officials from the East India Company arrived here in India, the sheer power of the Indian state, military and economic, meant that they just couldn't dream of seizing land or setting up plantations the way English settlers had done in places like Virginia and Barbados.
45:22The best they could hope for was that when they were brought before the Mughal emperors in places like this in the Red Fort, that they would be granted permission to set up trading posts on the coast and be allowed to buy Indian spices and Indian textiles to be shipped for sale back to Europe.
45:41The power imbalance between the East India Company and the Mughal Empire remained largely unchanged for 100 years.
45:51Through ups and downs, diplomatic successes and setbacks, the company slowly grew its trade in Indian cloth and spices, doing its best to stay on the right side of the Mughal emperors.
46:10But in the first decades of the 18th century, that balance of power was transformed when the Mughal empire fell into a rapid and disastrous decline.
46:23After the death of the Emperor Aurangzeb in 1707, the empire began to fall apart.
46:31Power moved to regional princes who constantly fought one another.
46:37In the chaos that consumed India in the middle decades of the 18th century, new powers were on the rise.
46:52But the most unexpected of them was the power that had transformed three villages here by the river in Bengal into a thriving commercial town.
47:03But that power wasn't one of the local Indian states.
47:07It was the British East India Company, which having hired its own army, was busy transforming itself from merely a company of merchants and into a player in Indian politics.
47:20In the same years that the Mughal empire was being torn apart, this city was becoming a booming company town.
47:34Although it was tiny compared to the giant city of today.
47:38But because the East India Company existed to make a profit, it is no surprise that much of its activity became centred here.
47:46Because Calcutta is in Bengal, which was then the richest province of India.
47:52In the countryside to the north of the city were the one million weavers of Bengal, who worked their looms in thousands of villages.
48:07The astonishing skills of Bengal's weavers produced the textiles for which the region was famous.
48:14And upon which the company's profits rested.
48:19But in 1756, the local leader, the Nawab of Bengal, attacked and captured Calcutta.
48:26Here in the grounds of one of the city's British churches stands a memorial to what happened after Calcutta fell.
48:34Although exaggerated and used as proof of supposed Indian despotism, the black hole of Calcutta, in which British prisoners died, became a powerful legend.
48:48It was at this moment that Robert Clive became a pivotal figure in the histories of both India and Britain.
48:55Clive had been an unexceptional company accountant, but he was a brilliant company soldier.
49:01And he brought an army of British officers and Indian sepoys to recapture this city and, so it was claimed, to avenge the victims of the black hole.
49:11But what followed was a period of brilliant and brutal calculation, in which Clive played the various Indian princes and the Mughal emperor off against one another.
49:23And the final transformation of the company was sealed in the year 1765, when a new and previously unimaginable phase in the history of the British Empire began.
49:37That moment was captured in a document, one that is hardly remembered in Britain today, but that remains deeply controversial and resented in modern India.
49:49This is arguably the foundation document of the British Empire in India.
49:55This is part of the treaty which is made at this moment of complete victory for these India companies.
50:02This stock company, based in a single office in London, five windows wide, finally conquers what had been the richest empire in the world.
50:14Half of it, this side is in English, this side is in Persian, the courtly language of the Mughal Empire.
50:21This is the seal of the 17th Mughal Empire, Shah Alam.
50:26And here is the name that we know.
50:29Robert Clive.
50:30What does this treaty empower the East India Company to now do in India?
50:36This particular page gives them the right to hand Uttar Pradesh, to hold the Gangetic plane, to a vassal of the company.
50:45The earlier part, which was made four days before, is the other crucial bid.
50:50And that bid talks about how Shah Alam is handing over Bengal, Bihar and Orissa.
50:57So this is the northeast of India, north of around Calcutta, parts of Watanab, Bangladesh.
51:03The gift of the duani is what the British call it in the school textbooks.
51:06In reality, it is handing over to a private company, the place that generates more revenue than anywhere else in the world at that time.
51:15And the British...
51:16Well...
51:17And the company now have the right...
51:18Not the British, that's the key part, yeah.
51:19The company, yeah.
51:20But it's so surreal that you keep...
51:23I keep making the same mistake too, because we think it's the British, but it's not.
51:26No.
51:27It's one corporation.
51:28It is a corporation.
51:29And that's different from what the British Empire and the heyday of the Raj under Curzon and everything.
51:35Because that at least had some pretense to civilize the natives, to bring education, all the talk of what empire was for.
51:43But in the company, there's no hypocrisy at all.
51:46This is a corporation and it's there to make a profit for its shareholders.
51:51This document gives the company the right not just to control that land, but, I mean, to intimately control.
51:57To control justice, to control administration, but most importantly, to control taxation.
52:02Yeah.
52:03And what you see immediately after this is British officials, and only a few of them sidling into the very most senior positions.
52:11At this moment, there are only 250 British civilians, if you like, in India.
52:17It's a tiny skeleton staff.
52:20They come out at 16.
52:21They want to be home by 30 with a large country estate, a rotten borough in their back pocket, and begin to live the life of country gentlemen.
52:27And this document sets them up to do that.
52:30And so by conquering India, you're making unbelievable sums of money.
52:36It's so astonishing.
52:37It's one of the fundamental pivot points of world history.
52:41It's literally that.
52:42You're moving from a world where England, a minor power at the beginning of the early modern period, suddenly, this is the moment.
52:50It sets itself up to become the supreme economy in the world for 150 years.
52:55Could this point have been reached without the man who signs his signature here, Clive?
53:02He created this world.
53:04He's a hugely unattractive character in all sorts of ways, but he's brilliant.
53:09He has that street fighter or mafiosi sense of how to outsmart an opponent.
53:16In 1767, Robert Clive, now vastly wealthy, left India for the last time.
53:27But Robert Clive's comfortable retirement was disrupted by events in the India he had left behind.
53:35Under company rule, the weavers of Bengal were subjected to appalling exploitation,
53:41at times being forced to sell their silks and textiles for less than the market rate.
53:47Nothing was allowed to stand in the way of company profits,
53:52even when the rains failed and there was hunger.
53:56Because famines were common in Indian history,
53:59the Mughal emperors, although themselves often repressive,
54:03at least had a tradition of buying and storing grain
54:07for when the crops failed and the people were hungry.
54:11The East India Company, motivated solely by the search for profits,
54:15not only failed to buy and store grain,
54:18the company continued to extract taxes, sometimes violently,
54:23from people who were literally starving.
54:26We will never know the numbers,
54:28but millions of Indian people died in the Great Bengal Famine.
54:33And yet, through it all, the business of making money continued.
54:38And ships loaded with Indian textiles and other commodities
54:42set sail down this river, the Hooghly in Calcutta bound for Britain.
54:51When news reached Britain that even famine had not been allowed
54:56to stand in the way of company profits, there was outrage.
55:00Robert Clive was condemned as a tyrant and compared to a vulture.
55:06He was hauled before Parliament.
55:09But that story of famine and outrage faded from memory.
55:14In its place, built through statues and heroic accounts,
55:19there emerged the legend of Clive of India.
55:23Today, the life of Robert Clive and the memory of what happened
55:29under company rule is better understood and more controversial
55:34than it has been for centuries.
55:36That statue tells us a lot about Britain's self-image in the 21st century,
55:41how it's still really closely tied with empire.
55:45And I find that very difficult.
55:48The way that we have sanitized history,
55:51that it's easier to turn everything inside out and put it on a plinth.
55:55I think in reality, Clive's legacy is one of destruction
56:00and pillaging the subcontinent.
56:02This is the full picture.
56:04I'm not asking you to be ashamed of it,
56:07but I am asking you to be aware of it.
56:09You do need to know it.
56:37You do need to know it.
56:40You do need to know it.
56:42You do need to know it.
56:43I'm all young.
56:45You do need to know it.
56:46I have shown up here on this
56:56and in this moment,
56:59you want to know,
57:01say it's your metres or proprietor.
57:03My friends are dressed nonetheless
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