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