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00:07More than a quarter of all the nations on earth
00:10are former British colonies.
00:13And scattered across the world
00:15are the ruins of the British Empire.
00:18Statues to kings and viceroys,
00:21slave fortresses, plantations,
00:25schools, railways and prisons.
00:30At its height, the British Empire,
00:32the biggest there has ever been,
00:34ruled over a fifth of the world's land surface
00:37and almost a quarter of its people.
00:41But how did a tiny island off the coast of Europe
00:44claim power over so much of the world?
00:47And how did that vast empire,
00:49built over three centuries,
00:51collapse within the space of a single generation?
00:56These questions and that history
00:58are today in the 21st century
01:01becoming more urgent and more contested
01:04than perhaps ever before,
01:06because the ghosts of the British Empire
01:09have been reawoken.
01:13This history is today being uncovered and debated
01:16because perhaps the greatest legacy
01:19of the British Empire is a living legacy.
01:22There are today literally billions of people
01:25whose ancestors, in different ways,
01:28were part of this story.
01:30And for this series,
01:32we invited people from across the world to take part,
01:35people for whom the history of the British Empire
01:38is also their family history.
01:41They'll share their personal views on the Empire,
01:46how it shaped Britain and how it shaped the world,
01:50explaining how they try to make sense
01:52of this complex history and its legacy.
01:56Often people are trying to do a tally-up.
01:58Here's what's happened on the good side,
02:00here's what's happened on the bad side,
02:01where have we landed up?
02:03It's an unhelpful way to look at it.
02:05Walk around many cities in the UK,
02:07there is a visible legacy of empire.
02:10The names of streets, the statues we put up,
02:12the buildings that we have.
02:14It's our shared past.
02:17You can't just cherry-pick the good things out
02:19to fit your story.
02:21You have to pick out the good with the bad.
02:26Yes, the British Empire has shaped the world
02:28as we know it today.
02:29However, what was that really like
02:32for most of the people that lived
02:34under the British Empire?
02:36And if that means discomfort,
02:38if that means having to sit with
02:41what's happened in the past,
02:43I think that has to be how it is.
02:46In Britain and in nations that were once
02:48part of the Empire,
02:49this is a history we are all struggling
02:52to come to terms with.
03:04There is no clear start date for the British Empire,
03:15but one key event took place here in the autumn of 1592.
03:22In the September of that year,
03:24a ship was being sailed up this river.
03:26Its name was the Madre de Dios, the Mother of God.
03:30And it might well have been the biggest ship then in existence
03:33anywhere in the world.
03:35And it was on this river and being sailed towards that port
03:39because it had just been captured in a battle fought out there
03:43in the Atlantic by English privateers,
03:47state-sanctioned pirates.
03:49The Madre de Dios was a carac,
03:52a giant, heavily armed international trading ship.
03:56But it sailed under the flag of Portugal,
03:59which in 1592 was, for the English, an enemy nation.
04:08The sheer size of the Madre de Dios was astonishing to the English.
04:13But when it docked in Dartmouth Harbour,
04:15what truly astonished was the cargo discovered below deck.
04:22Amazingly, a list of that cargo,
04:24an inventory that was created at the time,
04:27has survived to the present day.
04:31The first item on the inventory is pepper,
04:34and there's a huge amount of it.
04:36In the 16th century, pepper came from Indonesia,
04:40and so, like many of the other items on the inventory,
04:43it's been shipped all the way across the Indian Ocean
04:46and then all the way around the coast of Africa.
04:49And that single commodity is here valued at £70,000.
04:55After pepper, there are cloves and there is cinnamon,
04:58then nutmeg and ginger.
05:00There are colours for dyers and then silks and calicos.
05:04In 1592, all of these items were extraordinarily expensive luxuries.
05:13And it's been estimated that, taken together,
05:16these spices and drugs and silks,
05:19seized from the hold of a single Portuguese ship,
05:23were worth the same as around half of the entire annual trade of England.
05:29And so, for some people, the capture of the Madrid ideas
05:34was a moment when they came to realise that their enemies,
05:39the Portuguese and the Spanish,
05:41had pioneered a new form of global trade
05:45with 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 Madre de Dios
06:07was the investor who had put the most money into the pirate expedition
06:11that had captured the Portuguese ship.
06:14That investor was Queen Elizabeth I.
06:18Her share of the auction was worth £80,000,
06:22around £28 million in today's money.
06:27Yet, despite all her wealth and grandeur,
06:31and despite the fact that Elizabeth's England
06:33had just defeated the Spanish Armada,
06:36England was still a relatively small, relatively poor nation.
06:41It was the merchants of the city of London,
06:45astonished by the riches of the Madre de Dios,
06:48who began to lobby and campaign for England
06:51to 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,
07:05just as it is now, this part of London, the old city,
07:08that's the centre of banking and finance and of merchants.
07:12But in those decades, the big question,
07:14the big challenge that those bankers are facing
07:16is 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,
07:23but you've got a city which is starting to build up merchant communities.
07:26Is that these merchants decide that they can club together
07:29and create what are called joint stock companies.
07:32And they will each put together a stash of money,
07:34we'll split the profits, but also deal with the start-ups involved,
07:38so the ships involved, and we'll also take the losses.
07:41So we share the risk and the profits?
07:43You share the risk.
07:44So the crown sort of says, OK, we'll support it,
07:46but 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.
07:52But we will take some of the profits in the end.
07:54These are some of the crests of those joint stock companies.
07:58So this is the merchants of East India.
08:01The creation of the East India Company in 1600 is, I think, a real game changer.
08:06This is about a really serious push to get to India,
08:09to go around the Cape and to really sort of supercharge this city
08:15in terms of getting to Southeast Asia.
08:18This is a list of the merchants who put money into the East India Company,
08:23and it starts with who you'd expect.
08:25It's the elite.
08:26Here's Stephen Soames, the Lord Mayor of London.
08:29Then there's a load of aldermen who are the people who run the city.
08:33But then when you go down this list, there are some men from more modest trades.
08:37This is Robert Cox, he's a grocer.
08:41This is an ironmonger.
08:42These are what we call the middling sorts.
08:44Middling sorts.
08:45Yeah, they're the prosperous merchants.
08:47They'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,
08:55you know, the early modern world at this time in 1600.
08:57It's a speck.
08:58Places like the Ottomans and the Chinese don't even know who we are.
09:02So they have to fight harder.
09:04They have to be savvier.
09:06They don't have actually a big navy.
09:08They don't have huge amounts of money.
09:10They're blocked out pretty much still from the New World and the Americas
09:13and all the silver that's come in.
09:15So this is such a smart way of doing it to say,
09:18we can compete with the big boys.
09:20And really from the early 17th century then that just explodes
09:24because they've got a model which is really succeeding.
09:27So this idea of the joint stock company, that's a financial revolution.
09:31It's a revolution.
09:32The money that is flowing back in here, you know,
09:35the city becomes awash with it by the end of Elizabeth's reign.
09:38And that's been a massive turnaround from 1558.
09:42These companies, they're all about trade with Asia,
09:45but there is another form of colonialism
09:48which has been taking place in the 16th century.
09:51And that's about settlement.
09:52It's about building colonies.
09:54And this company is England's answer to that.
09:57It's the merchants of Virginia.
09:59The model here is very different.
10:00When the English go west,
10:02it's very different to when they go east
10:04with the joint stock companies in the Mediterranean
10:06and trying to reach India and China.
10:08They know that those cultures are actually much more sophisticated
10:11and they have to negotiate with them.
10:14They don't believe that with the Americas.
10:16This is about sending out groups of people
10:18who will create plantations and colonies.
10:21So this revolution, this idea of the joint stock company,
10:25the English hope it's going to give them both trade with Asia,
10:28that they've been lacking, that they've been pushed out of by the Portuguese,
10:31and also colonies in the New World.
10:34Yeah, so it is the beginning of what I think we inherit,
10:37which is a global idea of empire.
10:39Because you go west and you settle and colonise,
10:42you go east and you trade and you exchange.
10:44And both those things are at work.
10:46And I think that that is the legacy that is inherited
10:50and develops in this complex idea of what the British Empire is.
10:55In the first years of the 17th century,
10:58the joint stock companies of London,
11:00with money raised from England's merchants and her pirates,
11:04dispatched their ships across the oceans.
11:07The ships of the East India Company headed east,
11:10around Africa and into the Indian Ocean.
11:13Their mission, to take on the Portuguese and the Dutch
11:17and break into the trade in pepper and spices.
11:21Heading in the opposite direction,
11:23crossing the 3,500 miles of the Atlantic,
11:27sailed the ships of the Virginia Company.
11:36Their journey took them here,
11:38Chesapeake Bay and the banks of the James River in Virginia.
11:42And in a colony named after the late Queen Elizabeth,
11:47they founded a new settlement,
11:49Jamestown, named after the new king.
11:55It was here, far to the north of the vast empires
11:58that Spain and Portugal had forged in Mexico,
12:01South America and the Caribbean,
12:03that the English established their tiny foothold in the New World.
12:07A mere 100 colonists planted on the other side of the ocean,
12:13linked to England only by infrequent supply missions.
12:20This is a copy of the general history of Virginia, New England
12:24and the Summer Isles.
12:25And it's an account of the Jamestown colony,
12:28written by John Smith, who was the colony's leader.
12:31It describes the first of many fleets of ships sent out from London
12:36to Virginia to try to keep the colony going
12:39and keep the colonists alive.
12:41It was sent in 1607 and arrived very early in 1608.
12:46And 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 labourers.
13:00These are poor men who've been brought across the Atlantic
13:03to work for the gentlemen.
13:05And the first problem you can see
13:06is that there are a lot more gentlemen than there are labourers.
13:09But this third column are tradesmen.
13:12These are men who have skills.
13:14There's six tailors.
13:16There'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 are 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,
13:44the 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
14:03that somewhere in the soil or the rivers of Virginia
14:07they're going to strike gold.
14:09And 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.
14:16And what will happen in Virginia will be a rerun of what happened
14:20in the Spanish colonies in South America.
14:23What had happened in the Spanish colonies in South America decades earlier
14:30was that the largest deposits of silver ever discovered,
14:34along with the vast gold wealth of the Aztec people,
14:38had been conquered by the Spanish.
14:41Spain had both founded an empire
14:44and grown incredibly rich on the wealth of the New World.
14:49The English, in the vast open spaces of North America,
14:54found 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.
15:14The years 1609 to 1610 were known in Jamestown as the starving time.
15:23And that era of starvation and suffering at Jamestown,
15:28in the first years of the 17th century,
15:30is one of the founding stories in the history of the British Empire,
15:34and 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 attempts to plant a colony here,
16:02right on the edge of North America,
16:04what that must have looked like and felt like
16:07to the people for whom this land and these rivers was already home.
16:11Those people who knew these rivers were the Powhatan,
16:20a confederacy of local ethnic groups named after their great leader,
16:26a man who ruled over an empire of his own.
16:30Among the tribes ruled by the great Powhatan were the Appomatok,
16:35the Rappahannock and the Pamunkey.
16:38And they have their own historical memory of Jamestown
16:43and the beginnings of English settlement.
16:47That story and the archaeology it left behind
16:51is the focus of the work of Dr Ashley Spivey.
16:55I'm a member of the Pamunkey Indian tribe,
16:57which was the geographical and political core
17:00of the Powhatan chiefdom that the English encountered
17:04when they first arrived in 1607.
17:06So 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
17:23is how long we were here,
17:25how deep of a history that we have in the Chesapeake region of Virginia.
17:29That goes back thousands and thousands and thousands of years.
17:32Do you have any artifacts from when the English arrived?
17:35Yes. This is a rolled copper bead.
17:38Copper was a very important prestige item
17:41that people of power and significance would wear on their bodies.
17:44And is this copper that the English bought, 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 from the Powhatan by force.
17:57And the Powhatan 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 Powhatan people, the Powhatan elite wanted,
18:16were coming from a middleman out west,
18:19which were their enemies, and that would be the Monacan people.
18:22I think we often forget that when Europeans arrive
18:26in 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 down the road
18:42or over the mountains that you don't like.
18:44You do not get at the complexity of the people
18:47that were there before the Europeans arrived,
18:50and that, of course, includes the Powhatan.
18:52And the other big myth about the British Empire
18:55and other colonial empires is that the indigenous people
18:57kind of die off.
18:59They no longer exist in the contemporary world,
19:01but we're still here today,
19:03and we still are able to make a living
19:06and live our lives as indigenous people.
19:11Through 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 Powhatan.
19:24But what made this possible was, in part, a discovery
19:28made by a man who arrived in 1610.
19:32One of the English settlers who risked everything
19:36and came here to Virginia was a young guy from Norfolk
19:39called 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 that he could sell for a profit
19:55back in England.
19:56Now, it has to be said that, on paper at least,
20:00John Rolfe's plans are no less unrealistic or over-optimistic
20:05than those of the men who thought they were going to strike gold
20:08or find a trading route to China.
20:10And yet, John Rolfe not only succeeded in growing tobacco,
20:14in doing so,
20:16he utterly transformed the fortunes of the Jamestown colony
20:20and transformed the economics of Britain's whole attempt
20:23to build a permanent colony in North America.
20:27Today, 400 years later,
20:30the fields of Virginia are still covered
20:33in 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.
20:53Tobacco helped transform England's tiny foothold
20:57in North America into a string of colonies
21:00to which hundreds of thousands of English
21:03and then British people were to emigrate.
21:07The expansion of those British colonies
21:10and later the expansion of the United States
21:13involved a series of wars against the indigenous peoples
21:17that were to last for almost three centuries.
21:22It 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
21:46in 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,
21:56our social norms and mores.
21:59There was a lot that happened
22:01in a very short space of time.
22:03It has taken so much effort to rebuild
22:07and reconnect and relink our past into our present.
22:12In the same decades,
22:21the 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.
22:39This is Barbados.
22:44And in the 1620s,
22:45this became one of the first English colonies
22:48in 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,
23:21like Hispaniola and Cuba.
23:24To 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
23:40when the English first arrived here.
23:42Because this is one of the last surviving patches
23:45of the indigenous rainforest
23:47that used to cover much of this island.
23:49And what that meant was that before any crops could be planted
23:53on Barbados,
23:54and therefore before any money could be made,
23:56the settlers here had to clear these forests.
24:00Colonial Barbados became a world of small farms
24:04between the patches of surviving rainforest.
24:09The settlers grew whatever crops they could,
24:12and the work was done by indentured labourers.
24:15Poor people from England, Scotland and Ireland
24:18who sold their labour in return for food
24:21and the hope of one day getting land of their own.
24:25But right from the start,
24:27there were some among the planters who had other plans.
24:32Early on in the history of Barbados,
24:35a group of English settlers went on a fact-finding mission
24:38to Pernambuco, a Dutch colony on the coast of Brazil.
24:42And there they encountered a complicated semi-industrial agricultural process
24:49that had been developed by the Spanish and the Portuguese
24:51on Madeira and 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.
25:31To the more ambitious and the more ruthless
25:35of 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,
26:03the 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
26:20that is shown on this map from 1646?
26:24Absolutely.
26:25Specifically, we're standing on the grounds of St. James' Church.
26:29A rare instance where you can look at the original map
26:31and 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
26:38not just here on the west coast,
26:40but across the island at a very rapid rate.
26:42So what you're looking at here is one of the first places
26:44that 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,
26:52right on the coast,
26:53and then you see several other structures
26:55moving back upland towards the kind of hill region
26:58going further inland east.
27:00And it's hard to visualize now,
27:02but by the 1640s,
27:03a lot of this would have been completely deforested
27:05as they were making room for the emergence
27:07of the sugar industry.
27:09So we're seeing here the division of all this land
27:12being brought together under the ownership of a single owner
27:15who will then run a 300-acre estate
27:17for the next several decades.
27:19In the preceding years, sugar comes in
27:21in 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,
27:30not just on the west coast,
27:31but across the island very, very quickly.
27:33Because if you can see that this is the route
27:36to incredible profits,
27:38like a gold rush,
27:40you're very quickly going to abandon the cotton
27:43and tobacco and the old crops.
27:44You're going to rush in and embrace this new system.
27:47It's called a sugar revolution,
27:49and it does have the sort of pace and the speed
27:51and the violence of a revolution.
27:53Sure, and I think you also get a sense
27:55of how much sugar was actually prioritized
27:58on 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 a almost momentary panic
28:08when they recognize that there's no timber left.
28:10There's no provisions left for the laborers
28:12to feed themselves.
28:13So it really is a monoculture.
28:14There's one crop, a cash crop,
28:16and that's all that's grown here.
28:18And if you take an acre of land
28:20and you aren't growing sugar on it,
28:21you're throwing money out the window.
28:23We see a complete prioritization of sugar production.
28:26The sugar revolution that allowed plantations like Trent's
28:34to 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.
29:00These two documents between them
29:02show just how fast Barbados was 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,
29:18and what it does is it lists all of the assets
29:21that 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
29:37they have left to serve on their contract,
29:40because those years of labor
29:42are part of the valuation of the farm.
29:45So Thomas Walker has one whole year left to serve.
29:50Edward Hyde has three years.
29:52Jack Hendricks has four years.
29:55But 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
30:10associated with the farm.
30:12And again, there are indentured laborers,
30:15but 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.
30:42And these names, Tony, Maria, Judy,
30:45they aren't their names.
30:46They're the names that have been imposed upon them
30:49by the slave owner.
30:50And they have been purchased
30:52and they've been brought onto this farm
30:55as it makes the transition away from indentured laborer
30:58and into enslavement.
31:03Plantation slavery,
31:06pioneered by the Spanish and Portuguese
31:09in their New World empires,
31:11now replaced indentured labor on Barbados,
31:15and the island was consumed by sugar.
31:18Maps from the time show an island
31:21in 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
31:34and the raw sugar processed.
31:36And 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
32:08to regulate that new society.
32:11This is a copy of a 17th century document known as the Barbados Slave Code.
32:20Its full title is
32:21An Act for the Better Ordering and Governing of Negroes.
32:26And 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
32:46in 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,
32:57they have no legal rights.
32:59And what that means is that they can be punished.
33:02They can be whipped.
33:03They can be mutilated.
33:05They can have their nostrils slit open.
33:07They can have their faces burned.
33:08They 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.
33:39The 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
33:51in 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.
34:41And in one corner of one field is a patch of scrubland.
34:47Here, 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...
35:09Mm-hmm. It 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
35:31how they lived, the 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,
35:45maybe...
35:4620.
35:4720, 20 years.
35:49Periods 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?
36:21Yes.
36:22There are periods of time when people are starving.
36:25It could be that a period of distress might have been hurricane, for example,
36:29the devastation that that causes.
36:32Ships can't come in with food.
36:34People 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 foods,
36:57the last people that were 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,
37:20but 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 killings out.
37:44Yeah.
37:45And that's one of the reasons why this site, in my opinion, is so special.
37:52I find that when you work with Newton and the records and particularly the site,
37:58you hear them calling out to you.
38:00For two centuries, the Newton burial ground was just a forgotten patch of scrubland
38:06in the corner of a cane field.
38:08But now the government of Barbados have plans to transform it into a memorial
38:15where 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
38:28and 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,
38:43black 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.
38:58The fact that women would commit infanticide to not have children born into slavery,
39:03it's heartbreaking.
39:05To actually buy and sell people like objects and then use them like animals,
39:10that requires the idea of race to make that all okay.
39:16Slavery has been a very heavy burden for us as a people
39:22because you are carrying that burden all the time.
39:26However, we are very positive people and we make sure that we achieve and we have achieved a lot in life.
39:39The 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.
39:54Much 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.
40:19This 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.
40:35What this is, is a page from the rate book.
40:38It tells us how much money the people living here were paying in local tax.
40:43But it also tells us something else.
40:45It 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.
40:56So living here at number four of 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.
41:19And 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,
41:36those 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.
41:49But when you investigate the backgrounds of the wealthy families who were buying or renting townhouses in the circus back in 1768,
42:01it reveals something else about the British Empire.
42:05Because there is another group in this list whose wealth had been drawn from the Empire,
42:11but 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.
42:25This 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,
42:39because by then the British East India Company had become more profitable and more powerful
42:46than the Tudor merchants who'd established it a century and a half earlier could have possibly imagined.
42:53The company those Tudor merchants had established back in 1599,
43:00under the charter awarded to them by Queen Elizabeth,
43:04was in the decades that followed slowly drawn to what was then the most powerful state on earth, India.
43:16In the middle of the 17th century, India was ruled from this building,
43:21the 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,
43:32they found a fortified palace, almost ten times the size of Windsor Castle,
43:39and built at a cost of 6 million rupees.
43:44Then, around a quarter of the English government's entire annual income.
43:51And the residents of this fortress were the rulers of India,
43:56the Mughal emperors, the richest men on earth,
44:00with 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,
44:22that is an echo of the ways in which our 17th century ancestors marvelled at the wealth of the men who ruled over the biggest economy on earth,
44:31and their 150 million subjects from this fortress.
44:40It 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,
44:52when England was ruled by Henry VIII.
44:55The India of the Mughals became an economic and a military superpower.
45:01When the early generations of officials from the East India Company arrived here in India,
45:08the sheer power of the Indian state, military and economic,
45:13meant that they just couldn't dream of seizing land or setting up plantations
45:18the way English settlers had done in places like Virginia and Barbados.
45:23The best they could hope for was that when they were brought before the Mughal emperors in places like this in the Red Fort,
45:31that they would be granted permission to set up trading posts on the coast
45:36and be allowed to buy Indian spices and Indian textiles to be shipped for sale back to Europe.
45:42The power imbalance between the East India Company and the Mughal Empire remained largely unchanged for 100 years.
45:55Through ups and downs, diplomatic successes and setbacks,
46:00the company slowly grew its trade in Indian cloth and spices,
46:05doing its best to stay on the right side of the Mughal emperors.
46:11But in the first decades of the 18th century,
46:14that balance of power was transformed when the Mughal Empire fell into a rapid and disastrous decline.
46:24After 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.
46:41In the chaos that consumed India in the middle decades of the 18th century, new powers were on the rise.
46:53But 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.
47:06It was the British East India Company, which having hired its own army,
47:12was busy transforming itself from merely a company of merchants and into a player in Indian politics.
47:18In 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 centered here.
47:46Because Calcutta is in Bengal, which was then the richest province of India.
47:53In the countryside to the north of the city were the one million weavers of Bengal, who worked their looms in thousands of villages.
48:06The 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,
48:40the 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
49:06and, so it was claimed, to avenge the victims of the black hole.
49:11But what followed was a period of brilliant and brutal calculation,
49:17in 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,
49:29when a new and previously unimaginable phase in the history of the British Empire began.
49:38That moment was captured in a document, one that is hardly remembered in Britain today,
49:44but that remains deeply controversial and resented in modern India.
49:50This 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 at London, five windows wide,
50:09finally conquers what had been the richest empire in the world.
50:15Half of it, this side is in English, this side is in Persian, the courtly language of the Mughal Empire.
50:22This is the seal of the 17th Mughal Empire, Shah Alam.
50:27And here is the name that we know.
50:30Robert Clive.
50:31And what does this treaty empower the East India Company to now do in India?
50:37This particular page gives them the right to hand Uttar Pradesh, to hold the Gajetic 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.
50:58So this is the northeast of India, north around Calcutta, parts of Watanab, Bangladesh.
51:04The gift of the duani is what the British call it to the school textbooks.
51:07In reality, it is handing over to a private company, a place that generates more revenue than anywhere else in the world at that time.
51:16And the British...
51:17Well...
51:18And the company now have the...
51:19Not the British, that's the key part, yeah.
51:20The company, yeah.
51:21But 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.
51:27It'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.
51:36Because 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.
51:47This is a corporation, and it's there to make a profit for its shareholders.
51:52This 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.
52:18It's a tiny skeleton staff.
52:20They come out at 16, they 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.
52:28And 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.
52:38It's one of the fundamental pivot points of world history.
52:41It's literally that.
52:43You're moving from a world where England, a minor power at the beginning of the early modern period,
52:49suddenly, this is the moment, it 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.
53:24But 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, even when the rains failed and there was hunger.
53:56Because famines were common in Indian history, the Mughal emperors, although themselves often repressive,
54:03at least had a tradition of buying and storing grain for when the crops failed and the people were hungry.
54:11The East India Company, motivated solely by the search for profits, not only failed to buy and store grain,
54:18the company continued to extract taxes, sometimes violently, from people who were literally starving.
54:26We will never know the numbers, but 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 set sail down this river,
54:44the Hoogli in Calcutta bound for Britain.
54:51When news reached Britain that even famine had not been allowed to stand in the way of company profits,
54:59there was outrage.
55:01Robert 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.
55:25Today, the life of Robert Clive and the memory of what happened under company rule
55:30is better understood and more controversial than 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 sanitised 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 and pillaging the subcontinent.
56:02This is the full picture.
56:04I'm not asking you to be ashamed of it, but I am asking you to be aware of it.
56:09You do need to know it.
56:11Evan is coming after collaging the subcontinent casting around in some just as a legend.
56:15I take care of your being, and this isn't a trap,
56:18I am asking you to�� as a пой fully on social media,
56:20and even as a professor said,
56:22тора Yabers Pass good,
56:23Dr. particiuna artistic internacional
56:25goes has to be on social media,
56:27includes this educational system,
56:29but mystical,
56:32virtually all supported by everyone.
56:34Thank you,
56:35it's difficult for trying to accomplish a bit of time.
56:37You
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