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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, slave 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.
00:41And perhaps the greatest legacy of the British Empire is a living legacy.
00:47There are today literally billions of people whose ancestors, in different ways, were part of this story.
00:55For this series, we invited people from across the world to share their personal thoughts on how, for them, imperial history is family history.
01:07I describe myself as a mixed Indo-Caribbean and Egyptian woman, Muslim woman, from Wembley.
01:16The great migrations of empire were both voluntary and involuntary.
01:20My mum is of mixed heritage. She is Jamaican, Maroon, English and Irish on the other side.
01:27Her lineage links back to George Washington, who had 200 slaves.
01:32In Australia, millions are reclaiming ancestors who were transported as convicts.
01:39Oldest one would be George Mundy, and he was arrested for stealing liquor from a man called Edward Beer.
01:48And across the world, the forgotten history of Indian migration is re-emerging.
01:54My great-great-grandmother, her name was Alice, or at least that was the name that she was given.
01:59And she travelled to Trindad from India when she was under 12 years old.
02:04We don't know exactly how old she was.
02:06In this episode, we reveal how the empire transformed the demographics of the world.
02:13Every few years, a pilgrimage takes place.
02:39A group of African-Americans from the southern states travelled to Africa to visit one of the most shocking,
02:49and for them, one of the most painful places on earth.
03:04This is Bunce Island.
03:06It lies 20 miles up the Sierra Leone River.
03:11And here, under the trees and bushes, lies the remains of a slave fortress.
03:17A place in which tens of thousands of Africans were held captive before being sent in chains across the Atlantic.
03:26Bunce Island is a shocking relic of the Atlantic slave trade.
03:31But for these people, it has a deeper and more personal significance.
03:36Look at it. She found a link to a chain. These things are still here.
03:41Would someone have worn that?
03:43Around their necks, their feet, and their hands.
03:46It's heavy, too. It is.
03:48They are members of the Gullah Geechee community.
03:53African-Americans who, because of a unique set of records, are able to trace their family histories through the centuries of slavery in Georgia and South Carolina.
04:05All the way back to this part of Africa.
04:12That means that they know there is a high likelihood that their own ancestors were imprisoned and sold into slavery right here on this island.
04:24To come here for you and for other Gullah Geechee people is clearly painful.
04:31But the fact you're able to do that puts you in a tiny, tiny minority.
04:35Tiny, tiny, yeah.
04:36And what you're able to do here, millions of African-Americans would long to be able to do.
04:42I'm humbled. I feel special, but I don't feel a little big-headed about it.
04:47I'm just doing what I have to do.
04:49And I hear the moanings. I hear the groaning. I hear the crying. I see the tears.
04:55And, um, oh, wow. Here we go.
05:00That's what disturbs me. That's what disturbs me.
05:05I just want to walk through it and let them know that I came back.
05:08And that's the only thing I ever want to say about that.
05:15I'll be through.
05:19Slavery is a living trauma.
05:21An open wound for African-Americans even now in the 21st century.
05:27And the legacies of slavery also live on in Africa.
05:32But this fortress has other links.
05:35The story of this island is intimately interwoven into the history of another island.
05:423,000 miles to the north.
05:44Because the ships that anchored off Bunce Island were British ships.
05:48And they'd set sail from British ports, from Bristol, Liverpool, London.
05:53The bricks in the walls of the defences of Bunce Island were carried here in those ships.
05:58The guns that defended Bunce Island had been forged in Britain.
06:03They are still here stamped with the symbol, the cipher, of King George III.
06:10And the bones of the traders and the clerks up there through the hills in the cemetery are those of men from Britain or the British Empire.
06:19Even the pebbles on the beach are from Britain.
06:24Some of these pebbles were brought here as ballast in the slave ships.
06:28When their ships got here, they dumped that ballast because they needed to lighten their load because they had a new cargo.
06:34Men, women and children.
06:36These British stones and pebbles and rocks on an island in a river in Africa, they are pound for pound the human flesh that was taken out of that fortress and set sail down that river.
06:51In the archives in Freetown, the capital city of Sierra Leone, are a collection of documents.
07:07It was through these letters and ledgers that the Gullah Geechee people traced the forced migrations of their ancestors back to Bunce Island.
07:17These documents are a record of human suffering, but also of a business partnership.
07:26By the 1750s, the slave trading carried out on Bunce Island was built around a friendship between two men.
07:35Richard Oswald, the Scottish owner of Bunce Island, and his business partner, Henry Laurens,
07:43a slave owner and slave traders, a slave owner and slave trader who lived in the British colony of South Carolina.
07:50Isatou, good to see you again.
07:52Isatou Smith is a historian, an expert in the history of Bunce Island and in the business dealings of Oswald and Laurens.
08:04This is a letter that Henry Laurens sent to London to Richard Oswald in June 1756.
08:11It says, we must advise you that Captain Osborne on the ship, the Carlisle, arrived last night and that he has on board 141 slaves for the account of Grant and Oswald and co.
08:26120 of them were shipped at Bunce Island.
08:29We know Henry Laurens was Richard Oswald's major agent receiving cargoes of captives from Bunce Island.
08:40So this document is a testament to that relationship that transcended into friendship.
08:47It says here that five of them died in the passage.
08:52This was a really good voice for them. Only five dead people. Only five, you know.
08:57That speaks to the way in which they view these human captives.
09:02It's like transporting a dozen tomatoes and only five are bruised upon arrival.
09:08So that is a good number.
09:09There's a line here which I think summarises their relationship.
09:12It says, please be assured that we will study your interests as though they were our own.
09:18He's saying that I will throw myself into this business as if it was my own money.
09:25And Laurens was making 10% commission for each batch, parcel of captives that he sells for Oswald.
09:33So if it's a 10%, that means that 12 out of the 120 captives brought from Bunce Island, effectively he will profit.
09:41Yep. 12 captives out of that lot, it's a lot, it's a good deal of money.
09:46Just thinking about the fact that you'll be buying and selling fellow humans.
09:50So many died, oh well, the insurance will cover it.
09:54We know nothing about their state of mind, nothing about that experience that the captives have just endured.
10:00From the moment they were snatched from their village during slavery and taken to the place like Bunce Island,
10:05where they were then sold, we don't want to know about them.
10:08We just want to know that X number of captives arrived alive and we potentially stand to make X number of profits off of the sale of them.
10:17That was the primary concern.
10:21The business partnership of Oswald and Laurens was one of thousands that made the empire extraordinarily profitable.
10:29By the 1770s, Britain was transporting 45,000 Africans into slavery each year.
10:38The slave colony of Jamaica was one of the most profitable places on earth.
10:44And half a million enslaved Africans worked the tobacco fields and the sugar plantations of the North American colonies.
10:53But in 1776, Richard Oswald and Henry Laurens, the business partners of Bunce Island, became, in theory at least, enemies.
11:08That year, in this room, Independence Hall in Philadelphia, the Declaration of Independence was signed.
11:17And Oswald and Laurens stood on opposite sides of what became the American Revolution.
11:24We find them again eight years later, at the end of the revolution, not through their business records, but in a work of art.
11:36This painting is the Treaty of Paris.
11:39In the empty space, the half of the painting that was never completed was to be the British delegation sent to negotiate an end to the war.
11:49That delegation included Richard Oswald.
11:52Across from them sat the American delegates, and among them was Henry Laurens.
11:58One of the issues these former business partners debated was the fate of the black loyalists,
12:06the thousands of enslaved people who had been freed by the British during the revolution.
12:13This is Article 7 of the Treaty of Paris.
12:17And this article was inserted into the treaty at the suggestion of Henry Laurens.
12:22And what it demands is that the British withdraw all their forces from every part of the United States.
12:28But that they do so without causing any destruction or carrying away any Negroes or other property.
12:41Article 7, drafted by Henry Laurens, a man who had made his fortune as a slave trader, created the final dilemma for the British in their final moments in their lost American colonies.
12:55That dilemma played out here in New York City.
13:01What's the role of New York City in the Revolutionary War?
13:04New York City is the hub of British operations in the North.
13:08The British take it over from the Americans in 1776, and they stay here until what will end up being the very last day of British presence officially in the United States in 1783.
13:20And during that time, the city functions not only as a hub of British military operations,
13:26it also functions as a centre for loyalist civilians who come in by the thousands,
13:33from the countryside, from other cities in the Northeast, to feel safe under British protection.
13:41There were also what's known as black loyalists here in New York. Tell me where they'd come from.
13:48Some of the black loyalists, that is to say the former slaves who joined the British, ended up getting enlisted into British military service.
13:57And some of those British military personnel ended up coming to New York City.
14:04For some of those black loyalists, these final months of British occupation were particularly perilous and uncertain.
14:11They knew that in the peace treaty that was being negotiated with the Americans, the British had promised not to leave with property belonging to the Americans.
14:24And they knew that, at least according to their former owners, they were property.
14:29Right. And they had worries that they would be walking around the streets of New York City and their patriot owners would have come up from the South to come and reclaim them.
14:40And they're right to do so. They are right to think that this reclaiming of human property is on the minds of patriots coming into New York.
14:49There are examples of patriots coming to New York City and looking for their formerly enslaved property as they see them, free men as these people know themselves to be.
15:03And it's against this backdrop that the British commander in charge of the evacuation from the United States undertakes a really extraordinary project.
15:13He decides that the appropriate thing to do is to underscore the freedom of these black individuals and they will be evacuated with the British from New York City.
15:29The names of the thousands of black loyalists evacuated from New York Harbor were recorded in two registers.
15:38The one drafted by the Americans is today in Washington, D.C.
15:43The register the British forces drafted is here in London at the National Archives.
15:51The name that was given to this register was the Book of Negroes.
15:56And on these pages are the names of around 3,000 people,
16:03many of whom had escaped from slavery and come over to the British lines during the Revolutionary Wars.
16:11These pages give us their names, their ages, and there is a place for a brief physical description.
16:20On the opposite page, it says remarks.
16:23And here are listed the names of the slave owners, the people from whom these black people have escaped.
16:32And it tells us how many years since they made their escape.
16:37So here we have a Rachel Herbert.
16:40She's 24 years old, and Rachel is travelling with a child.
16:44She's travelling with her daughter, who is just three weeks old.
16:48And under remarks, it tells us that Rachel was formerly the property of Melsey Wilkinson of Virginia,
16:57and that she escaped from slavery four years earlier.
17:01Towards the bottom of this page is a remarkable entry.
17:07It is for a man called Harry Washington.
17:10Under remarks, it tells us that Harry Washington was formerly the property of General Washington.
17:19And that, of course, is George Washington, the future first president of the United States.
17:26And now, in 1783, Harry Washington is in New York.
17:32This is a man who we know had been born in Africa, who had been shipped across the Atlantic,
17:38chained to the decks of a slave ship, who had laboured on George Washington's Mount Vernon plantation,
17:44then escaped to the British, fought in the Revolutionary Wars,
17:48and is now heading to a life of freedom as a subject of the British Empire.
17:55What is astonishing about this book is that the British authorities in New York
18:01could have abandoned these people to the slave catchers and to their former owners.
18:07They chose not to do that because they came to the conclusion that the promises of freedom
18:14made to the people listed in these columns was more important than the terms of the peace treaty.
18:22They came to see this as a matter of honour, personal honour, but also national honour.
18:32But what we have to remember about this astonishing moment
18:35is that not all of the black people evacuated from New York and other harbours
18:40were heading to lives of freedom.
18:43Those whose owners had remained loyal to the British were being evacuated,
18:49but they were being sent back to slavery in other British colonies.
18:55And the British Empire that gathered these lists of names, that evacuated people,
19:00that was the same British Empire that in the exact same years
19:04was shipping thousands of Africans year by year across the Atlantic
19:09to slavery in Jamaica, Barbados and the other slave colonies.
19:14The 1780s were the peak years of the British slave trade.
19:19This is one of those moments in the story of the British Empire
19:24in which it's characterised by a sense of doublethink,
19:29that it is capable of remarkable acts like this,
19:33but it is also capable of horrific acts.
19:36The loyalists, black and white, who were evacuated from New York,
19:52were scattered across the world.
19:55Some headed home to Britain, but most settled in other British colonies.
20:01Thousands moved north to Canada.
20:06Others headed east to join the ranks of the East India Company.
20:11White loyalists, who were slave owners, sailed south to Jamaica
20:15and Britain's other Caribbean islands, taking their human property with them.
20:20For the first time since the founding of the charter companies
20:26of the late 16th century, the imperial project had gone into reverse.
20:32The loss of the American colonies meant that the empire shrank in size
20:36by almost half a million square miles.
20:39The catastrophe of the American Revolution was so great
20:44that there were some who feared that the rest of the empire
20:48might soon fall apart.
20:51But the immediate crisis facing the British in 1783
20:55was not the threat of other revolutions in her other colonies,
20:59but a crisis at home.
21:02The people who got on ships and crossed the Atlantic Ocean
21:08to populate the early British Empire,
21:11the colonies in North America and the Caribbean,
21:14not all of those people were free settlers.
21:18Some of them were convicts.
21:21Tens of thousands of people convicted of crimes here in Britain
21:26were shipped to the colonies and used as cheap labour.
21:30But the outbreak of revolution in North America
21:34meant that the British had suddenly lost access
21:37to colonies that they used as open-air prisons.
21:43Rather than starting to construct new and expensive prisons
21:47at home in Britain,
21:49the government adopted a temporary, short-term solution.
21:54The view in this painting is that view,
21:57the view across Portsmouth Harbour.
22:00This painting's from the early 19th century
22:02and it shows the harbour full of warships and merchant ships.
22:06But there's also this line of vessels here.
22:10They are ships that have been stripped of their masts,
22:13their sails and their rigging.
22:15These are the Hulks.
22:17They are old warships that have been converted into floating prisons.
22:22And it was on the Hulks that the convicts who would have been sent
22:26to the North American colonies,
22:28that's where they were imprisoned.
22:30And the idea was that the British forces would eventually,
22:33inevitably, defeat the American rebels
22:36and the flow of convicts to the colonies would resume.
22:40But victory for the United States meant that the Hulks
22:44were no longer a temporary solution to the convict crisis.
22:48They were a crisis in their own right.
22:53The end of the Revolutionary Wars
22:55and the independence of the United States
22:57meant that Britain had permanently lost its open-air prison.
23:03On board the Hulks, there were outbreaks of disease
23:07and outbreaks of rioting among the prisoners awaiting transportation.
23:12And the government launched a global search for a new prison colony.
23:18Which finally led a parliamentary committee
23:21to make one of the most astonishing decisions
23:24in the whole history of the British Empire.
23:29In 1787, 11 ships set sail from here, Portsmouth.
23:35They sailed past the hulks that crowded the harbour.
23:43That convoy, the First Fleet,
23:45took around 1,400 men, women and children 15,000 miles
23:50to a continent that no British ship had even visited for 15 years.
23:56The plan for Australia was something new in the British Empire.
24:08First and foremost, this was to be a prison colony.
24:12Although free settlers were to follow,
24:15the convicts were to build the new colony
24:17and make up the vast majority of its population.
24:21And over the next six decades,
24:26165,000 people were sent as convicts to Australia.
24:32Half of them arrived here,
24:35in what was to become one of the Empire's most feared
24:38and most infamous places.
24:40One of them arrived.
24:42One of them arrived.
24:46Van Diemen's Land, the island now known as Tasmania,
24:50became to the British Empire
24:52what Siberia was to the Russian Empire.
24:57And the relics of the convict system
25:00are today scattered across modern Tasmania.
25:04The roads and the bridges built by convict chain gangs
25:08and the cemeteries in which the criminal class
25:11of late Georgian Britain and Ireland were laid to rest.
25:17But the most remarkable relics of the convict system
25:20are the documents it left behind.
25:23The conduct records that reveal the fates
25:26of each of the prisoners sent to Tasmania.
25:31So this document is a conduct record for a Patrick Fagan
25:35who arrives in Van Diemen's Land in July 1826.
25:40He'd been stealing silver spoons,
25:42which is a pretty minor offence.
25:44He's 15, a child.
25:47What happens to him next?
25:49As you can see from the record,
25:51Fagan doesn't like the system,
25:54so he resists at every turn.
25:56He does the sort of things that any ordinary teenager
25:59from our perspective would do.
26:01The difference, of course, is that every time he gets punished.
26:05And we can see that, Patrick, it's 25 lashes here,
26:09another 25 lashes.
26:11This is a really serious punishment.
26:13This took the skin off men's backs.
26:16Patrick's record comes to an end.
26:18I mean, they literally sort of draw a line under his case.
26:22A group of convicts, including Patrick Fagan,
26:25did manage to escape.
26:26Only two come back to the settlement.
26:29These two men, Broughton and McAlbum,
26:31have murdered Fagan.
26:33So Patrick Fagan is a teenager,
26:36and not only does he end up being transported
26:39halfway around the world and being whipped,
26:41he ends up being murdered by other convicts?
26:44Yes.
26:47There's other records here.
26:48This is Janet Morrison,
26:50and she arrives three years after Patrick in 1829.
26:55She also has a very long convict career.
26:59From 1830 right to 1839,
27:03there is infraction after infraction.
27:05Now, it's important to think about Janet
27:08as a woman in a colony where men dominate.
27:11That means that household servants are in short supply,
27:15and that works to Janet's benefit.
27:18So what we see here is Janet being assigned
27:20to a master or mistress.
27:22Which is a free settler.
27:23A free settler.
27:24Who wants a domestic servant.
27:25Absolutely.
27:26She doesn't like, for whatever reason,
27:28the employment, and so she leaves.
27:30So she goes from settler household to household,
27:33is in trouble some of the time,
27:35and then gets reassigned to another settler
27:37if she doesn't like it there.
27:38Absolutely.
27:39It's a rather mysterious record because it just ends.
27:43She might have died.
27:45She might have left the colony.
27:46She might have married.
27:48We just don't know.
27:50These records show that this system could be absolutely brutal,
27:53but there were some convicts who came to Van Diemen's land
27:57and bettered their lives.
27:59This is a man called James Thompson.
28:02This is a rather short record.
28:05We can see here at the end he gets a free pardon in 1839.
28:10James Thompson does rather well for himself.
28:13He becomes an engineer and surveyor,
28:16and today is celebrated in the Australian Dictionary
28:19of National Biography as one of the pioneers
28:22of the built landscape of what's now Tasmania.
28:25Even though he arrived in 1824 as a convict?
28:28Yes.
28:29I think it's important to remember that for many convicts,
28:32transportation meant a life cut short,
28:35but for those who survived, there were opportunities,
28:38and if you could get some good quality terrain to farm,
28:43to raise livestock, et cetera,
28:45you really could make a good life for yourself.
28:47The convict system in Tasmania rewarded the hard-working
28:54and the fortunate,
28:56but it crushed those who refused to submit.
29:01And that system left behind a stigma within Australian culture.
29:06Through the 19th and into the 20th centuries,
29:09many Australians descended from convicts,
29:12concealed their family histories
29:14or were silent about their ancestors.
29:19The convict stigma passed down from generation to generation
29:23continued until the 1960s,
29:26when it finally began to break down.
29:29I'm really proud of them.
29:31They've overcome so much hard life.
29:34They've just been thrown onto ships.
29:36They would have gone through horrific storms.
29:38They would have gone through the tropical heat.
29:41If they survived all of that,
29:43they thrived once they got their ticket of leave
29:45and they had their freedom.
29:47It was a chance for them to reinvent themselves
29:50with my nan's Irish family.
29:52They got sent to Van Diemen's Land
29:54and then they started to want the rest of the family to come out.
29:58In the end, they had a whole heap of them migrate to Van Diemen's Land.
30:03One of my convict's family came from the 2nd Fleet.
30:08He became a mayor.
30:11So you work hard, you do well.
30:13You were able to create a life that you would never have
30:16back home in England.
30:18But it wasn't right.
30:21Exporting your problems to another country
30:24where there are Aboriginal people that live there,
30:26native people.
30:28The most infamous of the convict colonies was Tasmania,
30:36Van Diemen's Land.
30:38But in the first decades of the 19th century,
30:41another event took place on this island
30:44that even at the time was regarded as a stain
30:48on the reputation of the British Empire.
30:51They were not alone on Tasmania.
30:54Because the convicts and their jailers were not alone on Tasmania.
31:00For 40,000 years, this island had been home to another people
31:05who had stamped their presence onto the landscape.
31:10When the British came to Tasmania
31:13and they looked out at landscapes like this
31:15in the east of the island,
31:17they saw thousands and thousands of acres
31:19that they could profitably farm.
31:21And what they thought they were looking at
31:23was naturally occurring parkland.
31:26And so they presumed that the Tasmanian Aborigines
31:29had done nothing to this land.
31:31They hadn't farmed it, they hadn't enclosed it,
31:33and therefore they had no legitimate claim to it.
31:37But this land, in fact, isn't parkland
31:40and it isn't a wilderness.
31:42This is in fact a highly managed, highly artificial landscape
31:46because for thousands of years,
31:48the Tasmanians had built, they created this landscape
31:52using fire to control the growth of the trees and the bushes.
31:56And what they had created was their hunting grounds
31:59and across those hunting grounds
32:01were the pathways they used to travel
32:04from one source of seasonal food to another.
32:08This landscape was their creation
32:10and it was absolutely fundamental to their survival.
32:14And yet, all of that was just invisible to the British.
32:21The peoples of Tasmania had a folk memory
32:24that stretched back through 300 generations.
32:28But the generations we know best
32:31are those who were living when the British arrived.
32:36These portraits were painted by an English painter
32:39called Thomas Bock, who lived and worked in the Midlands
32:42right up until the year 1823
32:45when he was convicted of arranging an illegal abortion
32:49and transported for 14 years to Van Diemen's land.
32:53Thanks to Bock, we have these incredible images
32:57of the Aboriginal people of Tasmania,
33:00people whose names we know.
33:04This is a portrait of a woman called Laratong,
33:07who was from Cape Grim.
33:09This is Mana Lagana, who was a leader of his people
33:13and he's painted here with a fire stick
33:16that the Tasmanian Aborigines used to burn the vegetation
33:20and change the landscape.
33:23And this young woman is Truganini.
33:26We think she was born around the year 1812,
33:29which means she's in her early 20s in this portrait.
33:33And this is a woman whose story is critical
33:36to understand what happened here on this island
33:40to the indigenous people.
33:42There was violence against the Aboriginal peoples
33:46from the beginnings of British settlement.
33:49But in the 1820s,
33:51the population of convicts and settlers enormously increased,
33:55and thousands of sheep were imported into Tasmania.
33:59The lands best suited to sheep farming
34:03were the hunting lands that the Aboriginal peoples
34:06had cleared with fire for thousands of years.
34:09When they fought back against the loss of their land,
34:14the settlers began to call for them to be removed from the island
34:17or exterminated.
34:23The reality of what was happening in Tasmania
34:26in the late 1820s and early 1830s
34:30has been uncovered in official documents
34:33by the historian Nick Brodie.
34:36The documents show that settlers, convicts and the police
34:41were being sent out to clear Aboriginal people
34:45from the region of white settlement.
34:47The colonial authorities were not only aware of what was happening,
34:51they were rewarding it.
34:53This is a letter from one of the major settlers
34:58of the Northern Settled Districts, John Batman.
35:01He becomes quite famous as the founder of Melbourne,
35:04but at this time he's just a settler trying to make a name for himself.
35:07He's leading expeditions against Aboriginal people in his area.
35:11And this is September 1829?
35:13Yeah.
35:141829.
35:15It's a description of a letter to the local police magistrate
35:18explaining the latest expedition.
35:20They tracked down some Aboriginal people.
35:23They attack the camp.
35:24You can just see words like buckshot stick out as they attack.
35:28Describing what they take,
35:29a great number of spears, wadis, blankets, etc, etc.
35:33And then over here he talks about the return journey.
35:38He's taking with him two men, a woman and child,
35:42but found it impossible that the two men could walk.
35:46And after trying them by every means in my power for some time,
35:50I found I could not get them on.
35:52So in other words, they can't keep up.
35:53They're injured. They've been hurt in the attack.
35:55I was obliged, therefore, to shoot them.
35:59So he's effectively just executed prisoners in the field
36:04who are wounded and can't keep up with the journey home.
36:07And he writes this in an official correspondence.
36:10So he's open about this.
36:12Yeah, this is quite open.
36:13It's to the local police magistrate,
36:16who then forwards it to the colonial secretary.
36:18So it makes its way all the way
36:19to the highest level of government in Hobart.
36:22And is there a comeback when the colonial secretary reads this?
36:26Not really, no.
36:27The colonial secretary notices.
36:29He says shoots wounded natives because they could not keep up.
36:32He makes a little bit of an inquiry about what's going on.
36:35But at no point is anybody punished.
36:36Batman's not reprimanded.
36:38Batman's not stopped from going on further expeditions.
36:41In fact, by the time that limited inquiry has finished,
36:44he's already continued his course of campaigning
36:47up in that part of Tasmania.
36:48But the fact that he even admits to it in official correspondence
36:52means he must have presumed that there would not be any consequences.
36:56Yeah, exactly.
36:57He doesn't expect any comeback whatsoever.
36:59Because he doesn't need to admit to this.
37:00No.
37:01He could have just, as so many of them do,
37:03just leave a silent gap where they described a number of people killed.
37:06He could have simply talked about only capturing the woman and the child.
37:09So the fact that he mentions it means he's feeling quite brazen about it.
37:13It's just par for the cause of the war at this time.
37:16Because what that makes you think is that this is normalised.
37:20This is just one incident, one of many.
37:23And that it is now so normal to kill Aboriginals that no one is expecting
37:30comeback or consequences or retribution for doing so.
37:34And so you can be relatively open about it.
37:36Yep.
37:37That's exactly what's happening.
37:38I was obliged therefore to shoot them.
37:40I was obliged therefore to shoot them.
37:41I was obliged therefore to shoot them.
37:42As if it was almost their fault.
37:43Obliged.
37:44As well as sending out parties to capture and kill Aboriginal people,
38:01the governor also dispatched a missionary.
38:04George Augustus Robinson.
38:08Robinson and a group of Aboriginal people that included Truganini,
38:13set out on a series of expeditions to persuade the last survivors
38:19to abandon their homelands and come with them
38:23to what they were promised would be a place of sanctuary.
38:33That supposed sanctuary was Flinders Island,
38:36off the northern coast of Tasmania.
38:40And between 1830 and 1832, 220 Aboriginal people were brought here.
38:47Others were transported later.
38:49George Augustus Robinson came with them
38:52and was given the title Protector of Aborigines.
38:56And he was well paid for his work.
38:59Convicts were sent to build a new settlement for the Aboriginal people
39:04at a place called Weibelina.
39:07The remains of that settlement are still here, 200 years later.
39:13In the 1840s, an artist walked up this hill and painted this landscape
39:19of the settlement that had been built down there in the valley.
39:23It's almost two centuries since the settlement was built
39:26and the only building to have survived all of those years is the chapel.
39:31This painting shows us what the whole settlement must have looked like.
39:35But the most bizarre feature of Weibelina is that behind the chapel
39:40was built a row of British style terraced houses.
39:45It looks like something from industrial Manchester or Newcastle transplanted here
39:52with all of the houses and all of the people squashed together
39:55in the middle of all of this space, in this huge broad valley,
40:0014,000 miles away from Britain.
40:04And that terrace was built for the same reason that that chapel was built.
40:09Because this place, it's been called lots of things.
40:12It's been called a gulag, a prison, even a concentration camp.
40:17I think it's best understood as a type of reformatory.
40:21This was a place that was designed, built and ran
40:25in order to try to transform an ancient people who were hunter-gatherers,
40:30a people with their own complicated culture and spirituality,
40:35to transform them into sedentary, Christianised, obedient peasants.
40:43A people who had been promised sanctuary from a terrible war
40:46were instead subjected to the systematic destruction of their culture.
40:52But Flinders Island also destroyed their health.
40:56They began to die of pneumonia and influenza at a terrifying rate.
41:01Just along from the chapel, where they were to be converted to Christianity,
41:06George Augustus Robinson marked out their cemetery.
41:11In his notebook, he listed the names, one by one, of those who died
41:16and recorded where they were buried.
41:19By 1847, of the people exiled to Flinders Island,
41:24just 47 remained alive.
41:27Those last survivors, now no longer deemed a threat to the white settlers,
41:32were brought back to the mainland.
41:37And here, the first photographs of them were taken.
41:41Among the survivors was Troganini.
41:44By 1860, there were just a handful left.
41:51As they died, their bodies were seized by race scientists,
41:56who used them as the raw material from which they built the new racial
42:00and the new Darwinian sciences of the late 19th century.
42:05Those theories claimed that the aboriginal people of Tasmania,
42:10supposedly an inferior race,
42:13had inevitably and naturally died out when confronted by the British,
42:19a supposedly superior race.
42:22The search for human remains to prove those theories
42:26took the race scientists back to the cemetery on Flinders Island.
42:31These graves are believed to be empty,
42:35the bodies of the aboriginal people exhumed
42:38and then sold to museums and universities.
42:44Among the last of the survivors was Troganini.
42:48On her deathbed in 1876,
42:50she begged that her body not be handed over to the race scientists.
42:56What happened next still causes pain among aboriginal people in Australia today.
43:07I'm holding a photograph that was taken in the first half of the 20th century.
43:12And what it shows is an exhibit that was on public display in this museum
43:18right up until 1947.
43:21Now, I can tell you about this photograph,
43:24but what I can't do is show it to you.
43:27And that's because over the years,
43:29this image has caused so much pain and upset
43:33that there are people here in Tasmania
43:35who would be really offended if I did.
43:38And there is an argument that I shouldn't be looking at this image.
43:42But I think, and I hope that I'm right,
43:45that you need to at least know about this
43:48in order to fully appreciate what happened to Troganini and her people.
43:54What this shows is Troganini's skeleton.
43:57It's been wired together and hung from a stand,
44:02put in a glass case alongside artefacts from Tasmanian aboriginal history.
44:08Now, this was a woman who pleaded not to have her body handed over
44:15to the race scientists and the skull measurers.
44:18But she died in 1876,
44:21and the views of an old aboriginal woman didn't count for very much.
44:26And they certainly were not allowed to get in the way
44:30of the advance of those racial sciences.
44:36In the 1970s,
44:38the mixed heritage descendants of the Tasmanian aboriginal people
44:42demanded that Australia acknowledge the crimes committed
44:46against Troganini and against her people.
44:49And in 1976,
44:51her remains were taken out of the Hobart Museum,
44:55and after a service, cremated.
44:57Her ashes were scattered on waters off Tasmania.
45:03A woman who had died in 1876
45:07didn't get the funeral she had begged for until 1976.
45:12What was done to the people of Tasmania
45:25was regarded as a moral stain on the British Empire.
45:29And at a moment when the British increasingly saw themselves
45:33as a moral light in the world.
45:36Ever since Britain had abolished the slave trade in 1807,
45:40ships of the Royal Navy had patrolled the coast of Africa,
45:44intercepting slave-trading ships of other nations
45:47and freeing the African captives on board.
45:52And in 1838, slavery itself was ended,
45:56after rebellions by the enslaved
45:58and a long moral campaign by the abolitionists.
46:02But even before the final end of slavery,
46:07the man who had owned more enslaved people than any other
46:11set out to invest some of his wealth in a new system of labour.
46:19That slave owner was John Gladstone,
46:22the father of the future Prime Minister William Gladstone.
46:28And the new system of labour he pioneered
46:31ensured that his most valuable plantations
46:34here in the British colony of Guyana,
46:37on the Caribbean coast of South America,
46:40would remain profitable.
46:43John Gladstone had been warned
46:45that the former slaves had absolutely no intention
46:49of remaining on the plantations in the sugarcane fields,
46:53working for the sorts of pitiful wages
46:55that he was planning to offer them.
46:57And so, in January 1836,
47:01Gladstone wrote a letter
47:03to a company called Galander's and Arbuthnot and Co.
47:07in Calcutta.
47:09And what he asked them
47:10was whether it might be possible
47:12for them to recruit on his behalf
47:15a moderate number of Bengalis,
47:18of Indians.
47:20And he wanted them to be sent from Calcutta
47:22to Demerara, to Guyana,
47:25in order to allow him to be independent,
47:28he says, of our Negro population.
47:32Gladstone wrote,
47:33we should require to bind them
47:35for a period of not less than five years
47:38or more than seven years,
47:39and that they would be given a free passage
47:41to Demerara,
47:43and that there they would be divided
47:4420 to 30 placed on each plantation.
47:47Galander's and Arbuthnot
47:50recommended a particular,
47:52specific ethnic group in India
47:54known by the name of Dangurs,
47:57and they described them in these terms.
47:59They are looked down upon
48:00by the more cunning natives of the plains.
48:03They are always spoken of
48:04as more akin to the monkey than the man.
48:08So it seemed to Galander's and Arbuthnot
48:11and to John Gladstone
48:12that the poor people of the hills of India
48:15might be the solution to the labour crisis
48:18caused by the abolition of slavery
48:20in the West Indies.
48:24In 1838, a ship owned by Gladstone
48:28transported 160 Indian labourers
48:31from Calcutta,
48:33a city in which the company
48:35that Gladstone had written to,
48:37Galander's and Arbuthnot,
48:39now under new Indian owners,
48:42still have their offices.
48:43The people on board
48:45were some of the poorest in India.
48:48They had been recruited
48:50into a system
48:51that for the next 80 years
48:53would transport Indians
48:54all across the British Empire.
48:58It became known
48:59as the Indian indentured labour system.
49:04Professor David Dabedin
49:05is one of millions of people
49:07who are the descendants
49:08of indentured labourers.
49:10Gladstone made sure
49:14that he had his work force in place
49:17before slavery ended officially
49:19in August of that 1838.
49:22These people arrived in May
49:23and the abolitionists
49:25would have been horrified, really.
49:27Because they'd just won
49:27this great, epic,
49:29half-a-century-long crusade
49:30against the slave trade
49:31and then slavery
49:32and now the biggest slave owner
49:34in the British Empire
49:35is replaced by the enslaved.
49:36He's now back.
49:37He's now back.
49:37He's back.
49:38He's back.
49:38This is why they give them documents
49:40to make it legalistic
49:42so people can't say,
49:43well, this is slavery.
49:44No, you have a contract.
49:46How could you be a slave?
49:47And this is the sort of document
49:49produced by the British
49:51that's at the heart
49:52of this system of labour.
49:53That is the first encounter
49:55that an Indian peasant
49:57who was recruited
49:58from a little village
49:59would have had with paper
50:00and with officialdom.
50:02And so it would have been
50:03a moment of drama.
50:04Immediately,
50:05your name would be misspelt.
50:07When the Englishman
50:08or the official said,
50:09what is your name?
50:09And you said, Dabadin.
50:11He will spell it
50:12however he wants to spell it.
50:13And that's you, forever.
50:15Is your name Hindi
50:17or is it the name that a British...
50:19It's a bastardised form of Hindi.
50:22It was just written
50:22as it was written
50:23and you just had to accept it.
50:25So some British official
50:26wrote whatever he heard
50:28on a document
50:29and 100 and 200 years later,
50:32this is your name.
50:33It is our name, yes.
50:35What is the one?
50:36Your age.
50:36How would you know that?
50:38There is no birth certificate
50:39and so therefore
50:40the official will just make up
50:42your date of birth.
50:43So you became
50:44completely transformed.
50:45Your name,
50:47you were given a date of birth.
50:48But between you
50:49and this other life
50:51is a sea voyage.
50:53That must have been
50:54impossible for them
50:56to imagine
50:56the distances involved.
50:58You've never been
50:58on the season before.
51:00If you imagine
51:00in the storm,
51:01you'd be completely terrified,
51:03which is why
51:03they clung together
51:04and they supported each other,
51:06because they had
51:06to survive the journey.
51:08Sometimes 15%
51:09of the cargo
51:10of coolies would die.
51:12We know from
51:13oral histories
51:14of people
51:15whose parents
51:17or great-grandparents
51:18had been indentured labourers
51:19that that idea
51:20that it was for five years
51:21or seven years,
51:23that was quite big
51:24in the minds of people
51:24that put their thumbs
51:25on these documents.
51:26Very few people
51:27ever go back to India.
51:29As the plantation owner,
51:30I can say anything.
51:31I can say,
51:31I haven't got enough money
51:32at the moment,
51:33you just have to wait, right?
51:34And then I could say to you,
51:35why don't you re-indenture?
51:37My great-great-grandfather,
51:39he signed up
51:40for another five years.
51:41In Guyana?
51:42In Guyana,
51:43the same plantation,
51:44and he was given $50,
51:45which would be huge.
51:46It's almost like
51:47a year's wages.
51:49And this document
51:49is remarkable.
51:51He's only been in Guyana
51:52for 20 years,
51:54and he buys
51:55from an Englishman
51:56some land
51:56on the plantation.
51:58Dabodine,
51:59spelled differently
52:00from whatever other document
52:02he had to sign.
52:03So he's been renamed again?
52:04He's been renamed again.
52:05He's paying
52:06quite a lot of money,
52:08$575.
52:12$575.
52:13The Englishman
52:14signs his name
52:15with a flourish,
52:17and Dabodine
52:18puts his X.
52:19And this is the X
52:21of your...
52:22That's the X.
52:22This is your great-great-grandfather?
52:24My great-great-grandfather.
52:25This is a man
52:26born in India.
52:27Born in India.
52:28Now buying land
52:28on the Caribbean toast
52:30of South America.
52:31Owning land
52:31for the first time.
52:33He must have been
52:33a remarkably
52:35astute man.
52:37And to see
52:37his future
52:38is in land,
52:40and he will go
52:41and become a landowner.
52:42He must have been
52:43an amazingly ambitious
52:44young man.
52:45Today in Guyana,
52:51the descendants
52:51of the indentured
52:52labourers
52:53still work
52:54the sugarcane fields
52:56that were originally
52:57laid out
52:58by the slave owners
52:59of the 18th
53:00and 19th centuries.
53:04The sugar they cut
53:05is still transported
53:06through those fields
53:08along canals
53:09designed by the Dutch,
53:11the first colonisers
53:12of the region.
53:17And the cultures
53:18and religions
53:19that the indentured
53:21labourers carried
53:22with them
53:22across oceans
53:24have been transplanted
53:25here on the banks
53:27of a South American river.
53:30And Guyana
53:31was just one
53:32of the colonies
53:33to which Indians
53:34were sent
53:35in the 19th
53:36and 20th centuries.
53:39The Indian indentured
53:41labour system
53:42hardly even
53:43remembered today
53:44transformed
53:45the demographics
53:46of the world.
53:48A very distant relative
53:49was hired
53:51through the indentured
53:52servitude contracts
53:53to build
53:55the Kenyan railway.
53:57He then set up
53:57a series of shops
53:59along where he knew
54:01the stations
54:01would be built.
54:03My great-grandparents
54:05came to Trinidad
54:07from the state
54:08of Uttar Pradesh.
54:09My grandmother
54:11came from
54:12a place
54:13called
54:13Azamgar.
54:15My grandfather
54:16came from
54:16Gazipur.
54:18We managed to find
54:19this certificate
54:20with one of my ancestors.
54:22An Indian immigrant
54:23has completed
54:24a full term
54:25of service.
54:26His name is
54:26Fuji Rawudi
54:27and he was 28
54:29when he came
54:29and he served
54:31basically 22 years
54:32on a plantation.
54:33From the 1830s
54:37right up
54:38until 1917
54:39somewhere between
54:40one and two million
54:42Indians
54:42left their homeland
54:43to become
54:44indentured labourers
54:46and they took
54:46their final steps
54:48on Indian soil
54:49at the docks
54:49of Chennai
54:50and Mumbai
54:51and from
54:52right here
54:53from the banks
54:54of the Hooghly River
54:55in Calcutta.
54:56And after
54:58the Atlantic
54:59slave trade
55:00and the emigration
55:01of millions
55:02of British
55:03and Irish people
55:03in the 19th century
55:05this is one
55:06of the biggest
55:06movements of people
55:07in the whole
55:08story
55:09of the British Empire.
55:10These movements
55:13they were motivated
55:14by short-term
55:16economic decisions
55:17made by men
55:19who are now
55:19in their graves.
55:20The effects of that
55:22the communities
55:23the cultures
55:24brought into existence
55:25by those decisions
55:27they are
55:27they are the legacy
55:29of the British Empire.
55:30The backstories
55:31of millions of people
55:32in Africa
55:33in the Caribbean
55:34in Fiji
55:35and in Britain
55:35are all interwoven
55:37with those decisions
55:39made
55:40decades and decades ago
55:42that we've just
55:43totally forgotten about.
55:45It's become
55:46one of history's
55:47missing links
55:48a missing piece
55:49of the jigsaw
55:50without which
55:51it's not possible
55:52to make sense
55:53of the world
55:54as it is
55:54in the 21st century
55:56its demographics
55:57its culture
55:58and its politics.
56:10and it's not possible
56:11to make sense
56:12of the world
56:13as it is
56:14as it is
56:14as it is
56:15as it is
56:15as it is
56:16as it is
56:16as it is
56:17as it is
56:17as it is
56:18as it is
56:18as it is
56:19Transcription by CastingWords
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