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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.
01:39The oldest 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.
03:49They are members of the Gullah Geechee community.
03:54African-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. I'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. And, um, oh, wow. Here we go.
05:00That's what disturbs me. That's what disturbs me. I just want to walk through it and let them know that I came back.
05:09And that's the only thing I ever want to say about that.
05:14I'll be through. I mean...
05:19Slavery is a living trauma, an open wound for African-Americans even now in the 21st century.
05:27And the legacies of slavery also live on in Africa. But this fortress has other links.
05:36The story of this island is intimately interwoven into the history of another island, 3,000 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.
05:59The 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.
06:20Even 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,
06:42they are pound for pound the human flesh that was taken out of that fortress and set sail down that river.
06:51You got my every footsteps, the Lord made good to me.
07:01In 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.
07:20These documents are a record of human suffering, but also of a business partnership.
07:27By the 1750s, the slave trading carried out on Bunce Island was built around a friendship between two men.
07:36Richard Oswald, the Scottish owner of Bunce Island, and his business partner, Henry Lawrence,
07:43a slave owner and slave trader who lived in the British colony of South Carolina.
07:49Isatou, good to see you again.
07:52Isatou Smith is a historian, an expert in the history of Bunce Island,
07:58and in the business dealings of Oswald and Lawrence.
08:03This is a letter that Henry Lawrence sent to London to Richard Oswald in June 1756.
08:10It says, we must advise you that Captain Osborne on the ship the Carlisle arrived last night
08:18and that he has on board 141 slaves for the account of Grant and Oswald and co.
08:25120 of them were shipped at Bunce Island.
08:29We know Henry Lawrence was Richard Oswald's major agent receiving cargoes of captives from Bunce Island.
08:39So this document is a testament to that relationship that transcended into friendship.
08:46It says here that five of them died in the passage.
08:51This was a really good voyage 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, so 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.
09:24And Lawrence 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 a place like Bunce Island where they were then sold.
10:06We don't want to know about that, we just want to know that X number of captives arrived alive
10:12and we potentially stand to make X number of profits off of the sale of them.
10:17That was the primary concern.
10:20The business partnership of Oswald and Lawrence was one of thousands that made the empire extraordinarily profitable.
10:30By the 1770s, Britain was transporting 45,000 Africans into slavery each year.
10:39The slave colony of Jamaica was one of the most profitable places on earth.
10:46And half a million enslaved Africans worked the tobacco fields and the sugar plantations of the North American colonies.
10:54But in 1776, Richard Oswald and Henry Lawrence, the business partners of Bunce Island, became, in theory at least, enemies.
11:10That year, in this room, Independence Hall in Philadelphia, the Declaration of Independence was signed.
11:17And Oswald and Lawrence stood on opposite sides of what became the American Revolution.
11:25We find them again eight years later, at the end of the revolution, not through their business records, but in a work of art.
11:35This 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.
11:48That delegation included Richard Oswald.
11:52Across from them sat the American delegates, and among them was Henry Lawrence.
11:59One of the issues these former business partners debated was the fate of the black loyalists,
12:05the thousands of enslaved people who had been freed by the British during the revolution.
12:11This is Article 7 of the Treaty of Paris.
12:17And this article was inserted into the treaty at the suggestion of Henry Lawrence.
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 Lawrence,
12:44Henry Lawrence, 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.
12:59What's the role of New York City in the Revolutionary War?
13:04New York City is the hub of British operations in the North.
13:07The 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.
13:19And during that time, the city functions not only as a hub of British military operations, it also functions as a centre for Loyalist civilians who come in by the thousands from 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.
14:29And 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.
14:39And 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.
15:27The names of the thousands of black loyalists evacuated from New York Harbor were recorded in two registers.
15:39The one drafted by the Americans is today in Washington DC.
15:44The 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.
15:57And on these pages are the names of around 3,000 people, many 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.
16:28The 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.
16:42And Rachel is travelling with a child.
16:45She's travelling with her daughter who is just three weeks old.
16:49And 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.
17:02Towards 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.
17:18And 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.
17:35Who had been shipped across the Atlantic, chained to the decks of a slave ship.
17:40Who had labored 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.
18:10Because they came to the conclusion that the promises of freedom made to the people listed in these columns
18:18was more important than the terms of the peace treaty.
18:22They came to see this as a matter of honour.
18:26Personal honour, but also national honour.
18:30But what we have to remember about this astonishing moment is that not all of the black people
18:37evacuated from New York and other harbours were 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.
19:18This is one of those moments in the story of the British Empire
19:24in which it's characterised by a sense of doublethink,
19:28that it is capable of remarkable acts like this,
19:33but it is also capable of horrific acts.
19:37The Royalists, black and white, who were evacuated from New York,
19:52were scattered across the world.
19:56Some headed home to Britain, but most settled in other British colonies.
20:02Thousands 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.
20:23For 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
20:37by almost half a million square miles.
20:41The catastrophe of the American Revolution was so great
20:45that there were some who feared that the rest of the empire
20:49might soon fall apart.
20:51But the immediate crisis facing the British in 1783
20:56was not the threat of other revolutions in her other colonies,
21:00but a crisis at home.
21:02The people who got on ships and crossed the Atlantic Ocean to 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 meant that the British
21:35had suddenly lost access to colonies that were used as open-air prisons.
21:41Rather than starting to construct new and expensive prisons at home in Britain,
21:48the government adopted a temporary short-term solution.
21:54The view in this painting is that view, the 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, their 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 to the North American colonies,
22:28that's where they were imprisoned.
22:30And the idea was that the British forces would eventually, inevitably,
22:34defeat the American rebels and the flow of convicts to the colonies would resume.
22:39But victory for the United States meant that the Hulks were no longer a temporary solution to the convict crisis.
22:48They were a crisis in their own right.
22:52The end of the Revolutionary Wars and the independence of the United States meant that Britain had permanently lost its open-air prison.
23:04On board the Hulks, there were outbreaks of disease and outbreaks of rioting among the prisoners awaiting transportation.
23:11And the government launched a global search for a new prison colony.
23:18Which finally led a parliamentary committee to make one of the most astonishing decisions in the whole history of the British Empire.
23:26In 1787, eleven ships set sail from here, Portsmouth.
23:36They sailed past the Hulks that crowded the harbour.
23:39That convoy, the First Fleet, took around 1,400 men, women and children 15,000 miles to 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, the convicts were to build the new colony and make up the vast majority of its population.
24:23And over the next six decades, 165,000 people were sent as convicts to Australia.
24:32Half of them arrived here, in what was to become one of the Empire's most feared and most infamous places.
24:40The Empire's most feared and most feared and most feared and most feared and most feared and most feared and most feared and most feared.
24:46Van Diemen's Land, the island now known as Tasmania, became to the British Empire what Siberia was to the Russian Empire.
24:55And the relics of the convict system are today scattered across modern Tasmania.
25:05The roads and the bridges built by convict chain gangs.
25:09And the cemeteries in which the criminal class of late Georgian Britain and Ireland were laid to rest.
25:17But the most remarkable relics of the convict system are the documents it left behind.
25:23The conduct records that reveal the fates of each of the prisoners sent to Tasmania.
25:30So this document is a conduct record for a Patrick Fagan who arrives in Van Diemen's Land in July 1826.
25:39He'd been stealing silver spoons, which is a pretty minor offence.
25:44He's a 15-year-old child. What happens to him next?
25:49As you can see from the record, Fagan doesn't like the system, so he resists at every turn.
25:56He does the sort of things that any ordinary teenager from our perspective would do.
26:01The difference, of course, is that every time he gets punished.
26:04And we can see that Patrick hits 25 lashes here, another 25 lashes.
26:10This is a really serious punishment. This took the skin off men's backs.
26:15Patrick's record comes to an end. I mean, they literally sort of draw a line under his case.
26:22A group of convicts, including Patrick Fagan, did manage to escape.
26:26Only two come back to the settlement. These two men, Broughton and McAlbum, have murdered Fagan.
26:33So, Patrick Fagan is a teenager, and not only does he end up being transported halfway around the world and being whipped,
26:41he ends up being murdered by other convicts?
26:44Yes.
26:46There's other records here. This is Janet Morrison, and she arrives three years after Patrick in 1829.
26:54She also has a very long convict career. From 1830 right to 1839, there is infraction after infraction.
27:05Now, it's important to think about Janet as a woman in a colony where men dominate.
27:11That means that household servants are in short supply, and that works to Janet's benefit.
27:17So, what we see here is Janet being assigned to a master or mistress.
27:21Which is a free settler who wants a domestic servant.
27:24A free settler. Absolutely. She doesn't like, for whatever reason, the employment, and so she leaves.
27:29So, she goes from settler household to household, is in trouble some of the time, and then gets reassigned to another settler if she doesn't like it there.
27:38Absolutely. It's a rather mysterious record because it just ends. She might have died. She might have left the colony. She might have married. We just don't know.
27:49These records show that this system could be absolutely brutal, but there were some convicts who came to Van Diemen's land and bettered their lives.
27:58This is a man called James Thompson. This is a rather short record. We can see here at the end he gets a free pardon in 1839.
28:10James Thompson does rather well for himself. He becomes an engineer and surveyor, and today is celebrated in the Australian Dictionary of National Biography as one of the pioneers of the built landscape of what's now Tasmania.
28:25Even though he arrived in 1824 as a convict?
28:28Yes. I think it's important to remember that for many convicts, transportation meant a life cut short.
28:35But for those who survived, there were opportunities, and if you could get some good quality terrain to farm, to raise livestock, etc., you really could make a good life for yourself.
28:51The convict system in Tasmania rewarded the hard-working and the fortunate, but it crushed those who refused to submit.
29:00And that system left behind a stigma within Australian culture.
29:06Through the 19th and into the 20th centuries, many Australians descended from convicts, concealed their family histories, or were silent about their ancestors.
29:19The convict stigma, passed down from generation to generation, continued until the 1960s, when it finally began to break down.
29:28I'm really proud of them. They've overcome so much hard life. They've just been thrown onto ships. They would have gone through horrific storms. They would have gone through the tropical heat.
29:41If they survived all of that, they thrived once they got their ticket of leave and they had their freedom.
29:47It was a chance for them to reinvent themselves with my nan's Irish family. They got sent to Van Diemen's Land, and then they started to want the rest of the family to come out. In the end, they had a whole heap of them migrate to Van Diemen's Land.
30:03One of my convict family came from the Second Fleet. He became a mayor. So you work hard, you do well. You were able to create a life that you would never have back home in England.
30:18But it wasn't right. Exporting your problems to another country where there are Aboriginal people that live there, native people.
30:31The most infamous of the convict colonies was Tasmania, Van Diemen's Land.
30:38But in the first decades of the 19th century, another event took place on this island that even at the time was regarded as a stain on the reputation of the British Empire.
30:50Because the convicts and their jailers were not alone on Tasmania. For 40,000 years, this island had been home to another people who had stamped their presence onto the landscape.
31:09When the British came to Tasmania and they looked out at landscapes like this in the east of the island, they saw thousands and thousands of acres that they could profitably farm.
31:22And what they thought they were looking at was naturally occurring parkland.
31:27And so they presumed that the Tasmanian Aborigines had done nothing to this land.
31:31They hadn't farmed it, they hadn't enclosed it, and therefore they had no legitimate claim to it.
31:37But this land, in fact, isn't parkland and it isn't a wilderness.
31:42This is, in fact, a highly managed, highly artificial landscape because for thousands of years, the Tasmanians had built, they created this landscape using fire to control the growth of the trees and the bushes.
31:55And what they had created was their hunting grounds, and across those hunting grounds were the pathways they used to travel from one source of seasonal food to another.
32:08This landscape was their creation and it was absolutely fundamental to their survival.
32:14And yet, all of that was just invisible to the British.
32:18The peoples of Tasmania had a folk memory that stretched back through 300 generations.
32:29But the generations we know best are those who were living when the British arrived.
32:36These portraits were painted by an English painter called Thomas Bach, who lived and worked in the Midlands,
32:42right up until the year 1823, when he was convicted of arranging an illegal abortion and transported for 14 years to Van Diemen's land.
32:55Thanks to Bach, we have these incredible images of the Aboriginal people of Tasmania, people whose names we know.
33:02This is a portrait of a woman called Laraton, who was from Cape Grim.
33:09This is Mana Lagana, who was a leader of his people, and he's painted here with a fire stick that the Tasmanian Aborigines used to burn the vegetation and change the landscape.
33:21And this young woman is Truganini. We think she was born around the year 1812, which means she's in her early twenties in this portrait.
33:33And this is a woman whose story is critical to understand what happened here on this island to the Indigenous people.
33:43There was violence against the Aboriginal peoples from the beginnings of British settlement.
33:49But in the 1820s, the population of convicts and settlers enormously increased, and thousands of sheep were imported into Tasmania.
34:00The lands best suited to sheep farming were the hunting lands that the Aboriginal peoples had cleared with fire for thousands of years.
34:09When they fought back against the loss of their land, the settlers began to call for them to be removed from the island, or exterminated.
34:23The reality of what was happening in Tasmania in the late 1820s and early 1830s has been uncovered in official documents by the historian Nick Brodie.
34:36The documents show that settlers, convicts and the police were being sent out to clear Aboriginal people from the region of white settlement.
34:48The colonial authorities were not only aware of what was happening, they were rewarding it.
34:54This is a letter from one of the major settlers of the northern settled districts, John Batman.
35:01He becomes quite famous as the founder of Melbourne, but at this time he's just a settler trying to make a name for himself.
35:08He's leading expeditions against Aboriginal people in his area.
35:11And this is September 1829?
35:14Yeah, 1829.
35:15It's a description of a letter to the local police magistrate explaining the latest expedition.
35:21They track down some Aboriginal people, they attack the camp.
35:24You can just see words like buckshot stick out as they attack.
35:28Describing what they take, a great number of spears, wadis, blankets, etc, etc.
35:34And then over here he talks about the return journey.
35:37He's taking with him two men, a woman and child, but found it impossible that the two men could walk.
35:46And after trying them by every means in my power for some time, I found I could not get them on.
35:52So in other words, they can't keep up, they're injured, they've been hurt in the attack.
35:56I was obliged, therefore, to shoot them.
36:00So he's effectively just executed prisoners in the field who are wounded and can't keep up with the journey home.
36:06And 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, who then forwards it to the colonial secretary.
36:18So it makes its way all the way to 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.
36:37Batman's not reprimanded.
36:38Batman's not stopped from going on further expeditions.
36:41In fact, by the time that limited inquiry has finished, he's already continued his course of campaigning up in that part of Tasmania.
36:48But the fact that he even admits to it in official correspondence means 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, just 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 comeback or consequences or retribution for doing so.
37:34And so you can be relatively open about it.
37:36Yep, that's exactly what's happening.
37:38I was obliged therefore to shoot them.
37:41I was obliged therefore to shoot them.
37:42As if it was almost their fault.
37:44Obliged.
37:56As well as sending out parties to capture and kill Aboriginal people, the Governor also dispatched a missionary.
38:04George Augustus Robinson.
38:08Robinson and a group of Aboriginal people that included Truganini set out on a series of expeditions to persuade the last survivors to abandon their homelands and come with them to what they were promised would be a place of sanctuary.
38:26That supposed sanctuary was Flinders Island off the northern coast of Tasmania.
38:39And between 1830 and 1832, 220 Aboriginal people were brought here.
38:46Others were transported later.
38:48George Augustus Robinson came with them and was given the title Protector of Aborigines.
38:55and he was well paid for his work.
38:59Convicts were sent to build a new settlement for the Aboriginal people at a place called Waibelina.
39:06The remains of that settlement are still here, 200 years later.
39:13In the 1840s, an artist walked up this hill and painted this landscape of the settlement that had been built down there in the valley.
39:23It's almost two centuries since the settlement was built and 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 Waibelina is that behind the chapel was 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 in the middle of all of this space,
39:58in this huge broad valley, 14,000 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 in order to try to transform an ancient people who were hunter-gatherers,
40:30a people with their own complicated culture and spirituality,
40:34to transform them into sedentary, Christianised, obedient peasants.
40:41A 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,
41:05George Augustus Robinson marked out their cemetery.
41:11In his notebook, he listed the names, one by one, of those who died and recorded where they were buried.
41:18By 1847, of the people exiled to Flinders Island, just 47 remained alive.
41:26Those last survivors, now no longer deemed a threat to the white settlers, were brought back to the mainland.
41:37And here, the first photographs of them were taken.
41:41Among the survivors was Troganini.
41:45By 1860, there were just a handful left.
41:52As they died, their bodies were seized by race scientists,
41:56who used them as the raw material from which they built the new racial and the new Darwinian sciences of the late 19th century.
42:06Those theories claimed that the aboriginal people of Tasmania, supposedly an inferior race,
42:13had inevitably and naturally died out when confronted by the British,
42:19a supposedly superior race.
42:23The search for human remains to prove those theories took the race scientists back to the cemetery on Flinders Island.
42:32These graves are believed to be empty, the bodies of the aboriginal people exhumed and then sold to museums and universities.
42:45Among the last of the survivors was Troganini.
42:49On her deathbed in 1876, she begged that her body not be handed over to the race scientists.
42:59What 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 right up until 1947.
43:21Now, I can tell you about this photograph, but what I can't do is show it to you.
43:27And that's because over the years, this image has caused so much pain and upset that there are people here in Tasmania who would be really offended if I did.
43:38And there is an argument that I shouldn't be looking at this image.
43:43But I think, and I hope that I'm right, that you need to at least know about this in order to fully appreciate what happened to Troganini and her people.
43:54What this shows is Troganini's skeleton.
43:58It's been wired together and hung from a stand, put in a glass case alongside artefacts from Tasmanian aboriginal history.
44:09Now, this was a woman who pleaded not to have her body handed over to the race scientists and the skull measurers.
44:19But she died in 1876 and 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 of the advance of those racial sciences.
44:33In the 1970s, the mixed heritage descendants of the Tasmanian aboriginal people demanded that Australia acknowledge the crimes committed against Troganini and against her people.
44:50And in 1976, her remains were taken out of the Hobart Museum and after a service, cremated.
44:59Her ashes were scattered on waters off Tasmania.
45:03A woman who had died in 1876 didn't get the funeral she had begged for until 1976.
45:22What was done to the people of Tasmania was regarded as a moral stain on the British Empire.
45:29And at a moment when the British increasingly saw themselves as a moral light in the world.
45:36Ever since Britain had abolished the slave trade in 1807, ships of the Royal Navy had patrolled the coast of Africa, intercepting slave trading ships of other nations and freeing the African captives on board.
45:50And in 1838, slavery itself was ended, after rebellions by the enslaved and a long moral campaign by the abolitionists.
46:03But even before the final end of slavery, the man who had owned more enslaved people than any other set out to invest some of his wealth in a new system of labour.
46:16That slave owner was John Gladstone, the father of the future Prime Minister William Gladstone.
46:29And the new system of labour he pioneered ensured that his most valuable plantations, here in the British colony of Guyana, on the Caribbean coast of South America, would remain profitable.
46:43John Gladstone had been warned that the former slaves had absolutely no intention of remaining on the plantations in the sugarcane fields, working for the sorts of pitiful wages that he was planning to offer them.
46:57And so, in January 1836, Gladstone wrote a letter to a company called Galander's and Arbuthnot and Co. in Calcutta.
47:09And what he asked them was whether it might be possible for them to recruit on his behalf a moderate number of Bengalis, of Indians.
47:20And he wanted them to be sent from Calcutta to Demerara, to Guyana, in order to allow him to be independent, he says, of our Negro population.
47:32Gladstone wrote, we should require to bind them for a period of not less than five years or more than seven years, and that they would be given a free passage to Demerara, and that there they would be divided 20 to 30 placed on each plantation.
47:49Galander's and Arbuthnot recommended a particular specific ethnic group in India known by the name of Dangurs, and they described them in these terms.
47:59They are looked down upon by the more cunning natives of the plains.
48:03They are always spoken of as more akin to the monkey than the man.
48:08So it seemed to Galander's and Arbuthnot and to John Gladstone that the poor people of the hills of India might be the solution to the labour crisis caused by the abolition of slavery in the West Indies.
48:22In 1838, a ship owned by Gladstone transported 160 Indian labourers from Calcutta.
48:34A city in which the company that Gladstone had written to, Galander's and Arbuthnot, now under new Indian owners, still have their offices.
48:44The people on board were some of the poorest in India.
48:48They had been recruited into a system that for the next 80 years would transport Indians all across the British Empire.
48:57It became known as the Indian indentured labour system.
49:04Professor David Dabadine is one of millions of people who are the descendants of indentured labourers.
49:12Gladstone made sure that he had his workforce in place before slavery ended officially in August of that 1838.
49:22These people arrived in May and the abolitionists would have been horrified really.
49:27Because they'd just won this great epic half a century long crusade against the slave trade and then slavery.
49:32And now the biggest slave owner in the British Empire is replaced the enslaved.
49:36He's now back, he's back, he's back, he's back.
49:39This is why they give them documents to make it legalistic.
49:42So people can't say, well, this is slavery.
49:44No, you have a contract. How could you be a slave?
49:47And this is the sort of document produced by the British that's at the heart of this system of labour.
49:53That is the first encounter that an Indian peasant who was recruited from a little village would have had with paper and with officialdom.
50:02And so it would have been a moment of drama.
50:04Immediately your name would be misspelt.
50:07When the Englishman or the official said, what is your name?
50:10And you said, Dabadin.
50:11He will spell it however he wants to spell it.
50:13And that's you, forever.
50:15Is your name Hindi or is it the name of the British?
50:20It's a bastardized form of Hindi.
50:22It was just written as it was written and you just had to accept it.
50:25So some British official wrote whatever he heard on a document and 100 and 200 years later, this is your name?
50:33Yes.
50:34It is our name, yes.
50:35What is the one?
50:36Your age.
50:37How would you know that?
50:38There was no birth certificate and so therefore the official will just make up your date of birth.
50:43So you became completely transformed.
50:46Your name, you were given a date of birth.
50:49But between you and this other life is a sea voyage.
50:53That must have been impossible for them to imagine the distances involved.
50:58You've never been on a season before.
51:00If you imagine in the storm, you'd be completely terrified.
51:03Which is why they clung together and they supported each other.
51:06Because they had to survive the journey.
51:08Sometimes 15% of the cargo of Quillies would die.
51:12We know from oral histories of people whose parents or great-grandparents had been indentured laborers,
51:19that that idea that it was for five years or seven years, that was quite big in the minds of people that put their thumbs on these documents.
51:26Very few people ever go back to India.
51:28As a plantation owner, I can say anything.
51:31I can say I haven't got enough money at the moment.
51:33You just have to wait, right?
51:34And then I could say to you, why don't you re-indenture?
51:37My great-great-grandfather, he signed up for another five years.
51:41In Guyana?
51:42In Guyana, the same plantation.
51:44And he was given $50, which would be huge.
51:47It's almost like a year's wages.
51:49And this document is remarkable.
51:51He's only been in Guyana for 20 years.
51:54And he buys from an Englishman some land on the plantation.
51:58Dabadine, spelled differently from whatever other document he had to sign.
52:03So he's been renamed again?
52:04He's been renamed again.
52:05He's paying quite a lot of money.
52:08$575.
52:11$575.
52:14The Englishman signs his name with a flourish.
52:17And Dabadine puts his ex.
52:20And this is the ex of your...
52:22That's the ex.
52:23This is your great-great-grandfather?
52:24My great-great-grandfather.
52:25This is a man born in India.
52:27Born in India.
52:28Now buying land on the Caribbean coast of South America.
52:31Owning land for the first time.
52:33He must have been a remarkably astute man.
52:37And to see his future is in land and he will go and become a landowner.
52:42He must have been an amazingly ambitious young man.
52:46Today in Guyana, the descendants of the indentured labourers still work the sugar cane fields that were originally laid out by the slave owners of the 18th and 19th centuries.
53:04The sugar they cut is still transported through those fields along canals designed by the Dutch, the first colonisers of the region.
53:17And the cultures and religions that the indentured labourers carried with them across oceans have been transplanted here on the banks of a South American river.
53:30And Guyana was just one of the colonies to which Indians were sent in the 19th and 20th centuries.
53:36The Indian indentured labour system hardly even remembered today transformed the demographics of the world.
53:49A very distant relative was hired through the indentured servitude contracts to build the Kenyan Railway.
53:57He then set up a series of shops along where he knew the stations would be built.
54:04My great-grandparents came to Trinidad from the state of Uttar Pradesh.
54:10My grandmother came from a place called Azamgar.
54:15My grandfather came from Gazipur.
54:19We managed to find this certificate with one of my ancestors.
54:22An Indian immigrant has completed a full term of service.
54:26His name is Fuji Raudi and he was 28 when he came.
54:30And he served basically 22 years on a plantation.
54:35From the 1830s right up until 1917, somewhere between one and two million Indians left their homeland to become indentured labourers.
54:46And they took their final steps on Indian soil at the docks of Chennai and Mumbai and from right here, from the banks of the Hooghly River in Calcutta.
54:58And after the Atlantic slave trade and the emigration of millions of British and Irish people in the 19th century,
55:05this is one of the biggest movements of people in the whole story of the British Empire.
55:11These movements, they were motivated by short-term economic decisions made by men who are now in their graves.
55:20The effects of that, the communities, the cultures brought into existence by those decisions,
55:27they are the legacy of the British Empire.
55:30The backstories of millions of people in Africa, in the Caribbean, in Fiji and in Britain
55:35are all interwoven with those decisions made decades and decades ago that we've just totally forgotten about.
55:45It's become one of history's missing links, a missing piece of the jigsaw,
55:50without which it's not possible to make sense of the world as it is in the 21st century.
55:56It's demographics, it's culture and it's politics.
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