Dan Snow's History Hit - How Did the British Empire Build the Modern World?

Episode Date: December 25, 2025

Tobacco, sugar, rum, cotton, rubber, tea, coffee, spices, industry, borders, slavery, war - all things spread across the globe thanks to the British Empire. At its height in 1922, it was the largest empire the world had ever seen, covering around a quarter of Earth's land surface and ruling over 458 million people- that's a lot of influence. Dan is joined by journalist and author Sathnam Sanghera to measure the impact the British Empire has had on our world, for better and worse. Santhnam's new book for kids is called 'Journeys of Empire'.Produced by James Hickmann, McKenna Fernandez and edited by Matthew Wilson and Dougal Patmore. Did you know you can watch this episode on YouTube? Check it out at https://www.youtube.com/@DSHHPodcastSign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries, with a new release every week and ad-free podcasts. Sign up at https://www.historyhit.com/subscribe.You can also email the podcast directly at [e-mail]. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Hi folks, welcome to Down Snow's History. For a long time, for centuries really, the reach, the scale of the British Empire, it was just almost unfathomable. History's largest, probably its most powerful global empire, which at its peak governed over 400 million subjects. It covered a quarter of the earth, landmass. In this episode, we're going to look into how this little island, smaller than Kansas, was able to exercise such extraordinary reach, such extraordinary control, how that empire didn't just rule the world, but just rewrote the course of history, how the British Empire triggered massive diasporas, re-engineered the global ecosystem, and how the impact, the power

of that empire is still being felt so long after its collapse. Today, I'm really pleased to be welcoming back to the show, Satnam Sangerra, journalist, best-selling author of the award-winning books, Empire Land and Empire World. His new book, Journeys of Empire, explores the voyages that changed the world forever. So we're going to talk all about the legacy of that empire. Let's get into it. Satan, good to see you. It's the first time I've seen you in person on a... Is this in the flesh? Yeah, so I've got to deal with the stress of having to summarize my...

views, but also deal with your handsomeness. Come on, that should be very straightforward. Also, this is another small subject, talking about the British Empire. And as I was thinking about it, I thought, there's two dudes in a room in London speaking English. I've got Irish, Canadian, and English heritage. You've got Punjabi, Punjabi, Wolverhampton. Well, the exact English Punjabi heritage. Just this fact that this is happening is reflective of this massive impact that the British Empire's had.

Yeah, and probably some of your plants in the background, probably came from empire. Oh, interesting. Fern mania in the Victorian age. You know about Fernmania? I don't. There was a craze to fill Victorian living rooms with ferns. They all came from places like Australia, causing massive environmental damage. But I could have been drinking a cup of tea.

Yeah. You could have been having a rum and coke, rum originally from Barbados. Yeah. Could have been having genitonic, quinine, invented because of empire. So, yeah, I mean, I don't think you can understand modern Britain or the modern world without understanding the British Empire. That's extraordinary. Let's try and give people a little overview of that empire. Yes.

We're going to gallop through, do a survey of, I guess, the chronology empire. Then we're going to look at some areas in which it has to completely change the modern world. We can start, I guess, with late Tudors, a bit of Queen Elizabeth. I mean, Henry, the seventh, sending people out and exploring the coast of Canada. But, I mean, we're getting colonies. We're getting trade by the late Tudor period of Elizabeth the first time. Yeah, but in that narrative, people forget Ireland. Oh, good point.

Arguably, Ireland was the first colony, was it? Totally. My Welsh ancestor would say, don't forget the old Welsh here, lads. But, yeah, the English, then the British pushing into Ireland and then further afield. The textbooks, I guess, talk about it starting in, what, 1600s, with the creation of the East India Company, chartered by Queen Elizabeth I, The First, the hunt for spices, the trade, textiles. So trying to take advantage of the huge rewards that come from trading around the world. But how does that interact with empire?

That's trade. You're sending merchant out to get money. why do we get bits of the world painted in pink after that? What happens there? There's so many reasons. Partly just competition because someone else was doing it. So the Dutch were doing it. So it became a kind of competition.

You had to beat the Dutch to the Banda Islands and take control of the nutmeg trade. So you can't just turn up with money and buy nutmeg. You've actually got to own the plots they're being growing up. Yeah, and actually it was the hunt for nutmeg, which bizarrely ended up with us owning New York. I love that story. I love that story.

But go on, tell everyone that. I want to get it right. So basically there was only one island in the world that grew nutmeg, Run Island, about four miles long. It was the Dutch and the British fought over it. It was very, very far away. And in the end, at the end of all this fighting, the Dutch, I think, swapped.

Was it New Amsterdam? Yeah, a little place called New Amsterdam, which is today called Manhattan. Yeah. Yeah. Is that crazy? And all because of Nutmeg, which you could buy on Run Island for one pound,

say, and sell in London for 600 pounds. Really? But also, I mean, you've got the factor of bad English food is such an important motivator of empire because not only is not making, then there's sugar. Imagine if you've never eaten sugar before and suddenly you have sugar. So that craze for British-grown sugar in the Caribbean

that transformed the world. And it's transformed Britain to such a degree that until recently, the richest MP in Parliament, apart from Rishishishanak, was from a family who made a fortune from sugar trade in Barbados. there's so many different reasons why empire came about and I think that's part of the reason why we struggled to talk about it

I mean another reason it came about is Australia was a good place to send prisoners I mean that is completely disconnected from our desire for better food yeah true and then indentured labor and there's so many different reasons and there's so many different factors so yes you're right so let's get back 1600 they're going out around the world they're trying to trade

they're discovering they actually have to send a few soldiers send some officials own places. You see the growth of that empire. And then, as you say, the different kind of empire, you're totally right. Settlers. People go out to New England. They go out to Virginia and they go, actually, look, there's a bit of land here. We chase the indigenous people off the land.

And it's nice. I was penniless back home, but here I'm a prosperous farmer. Totally. Yeah, religious persecution. Yeah. So, I mean, that was a huge factor. And the Puritans, quite a small number of people. But actually, their influence over American culture remains.

I mean, in terms of their ideas about property, law, politics are still influential now. And in terms of their descendants and their numbers, hugely influential. And then, yeah, the indirect influences like the Great Potato Famine in Ireland, a million people died, but also millions of people leave Ireland. The population of Ireland apparently still hasn't recovered from that calamity. But where do they go? They go to America. So arguably, the British Empire then populates America in another way through imperial policy. like that. So we've got settler colonies, the Americas, you've got Australia eventually, well,

and settler colonies all over the world. And I guess the empire gets bigger and bigger. Commodities as well. Commodities, yep. Parm oil in Nigeria, robber in British Malaya, tea. T is very big, isn't it? It leads to the opium wars and arguably also is involved in the loss of America. So commodities are a big factor too. And then I suppose you get that interesting thing where you just get the friction on imperial fronties, as you say, whether it's in India, the British and French competing, and you start conquering great slabs of territory. And the Brits conquer Canada. The empires grow because they almost develop their own dynamic on the front. I think you're interesting about this. You've mentioned to this before. Sometimes politicians in London

are like, will you stop with this? Empire's quite expensive for governments, isn't it? You've got to send troops out there and build a few roads. But it's people on the frontier, like in Africa, Southern Africa, North America. The dynamics coming from out there, isn't it? Yeah, making up the policies as they go along. Communication is a really important factor because it could take six to nine months to get to India or for a message to get back to London. So the man on the ground is making a lot of decisions. And it also shows you how empire changed because then you have the invention of the telegraph and undersea cables. And suddenly you can get messages very quickly to India. And suddenly Britain

does have a bit more control over India. flavor of empire then is very different to the flavor of empire in the 17th century. Yeah, it's always changing. The American colonies break away. Yeah, it's fascinating. So we take that story all the way through. Lots of land is conquered in the 19th century. I mean, you ever tried to take a note of how many wars there in the 19th century? How many imperial wars? Has anyone ever tottered it up? Yes, I know how many people die. A million people died in imperial wars in the 19th century. Some academics did the numbers. Yeah. And that's just war. Zulu war in Southern Africa. It's war in Afghanistan. The Indy Mutiny.

Indy Mutiny. Lots of wars in Punjab and, yeah. Okay, so that means by what? Peak year, 1920, after the first World War? 1923. 1923. Yeah. So how big is it?

That's really good. Go on then. Quarter of the world, like landmass, a fifth of the world's population, seven times larger than the Roman Empire. Yeah. Twice the size of modern day Russia. Same surface area as the Moon. I don't know why I know that.

What? Yeah. The whole of the Moon? The whole of the Moon. But seven times size of the Roman Empire I felt like we talked a lot more about the Roman Empire at school than the British Empire and yet I think arguably it's the biggest thing we ever did right

as a country And I love the way That strange thing The Romans conquered the known world They just they just didn't Yeah They knew that they knew that Germany existed Bits of the world

They knew that uncongered stuff existed It's very weird that It's wild that this country I mean I think at one point I've got the way written down here The British Empire was 150 times the size of Great Britain. Isn't that wild? And the 1948 Nationality Act made every subject of the empire a citizen of Britain. So it made 600 million people citizens of Britain. Arguably,

our immigration policy has been trying to undo that ever since because they didn't expect anyone would come, but they did. Actually, in a way, that British imperial impact is bigger because it wasn't felt just within the empire. I'm really interested in places like Argentina or even the USA, where British investment, British skills, talent, miners, railway engineers, you know, they're founding football clubs in Buenos Aires.

So when we're talking about the British Empire's impact on the world, it actually is even bigger than the land that's formerly owned by Britain. Totally. So the majority of countries that play football directly or indirectly on the British Empire, because British period has turned up. The global system of time. Why

do we have the Greenwich Meridian? Why was it decided in a conference in the 19th century? that it should be in Greenwich. Think about it. It's because of the British Empire. And there was a master clock in Greenwich and the other clocks were called slave clocks. That's the mentality of empire, isn't it?

But there's all sorts of things in the world that could be explained by the British Empire, English language. The English language is a big one. Tax avoidance. Tax avoidance. Yeah. The existence of entire nations,

Nigeria, Pakistan, just wouldn't exist. That's a good one. There's a sort of meme, especially on US social media, isn't there, that the British Empire sort of made everything up with her pen. Jordan, Nigeria, India, Pakistan. I mean, the British Empire has

its fingerprints on a lot of, this is the political geography of the world today. And the way people dress, diet, I mean, the reason Indians drink tea is because of the British. There's an idea that Indians have always drunk tea. In the early turns of century, almost no Indians drank tea. The British realized they could make a lot of money out of it and sold it, marketed tea to Indians. So now that even Indians don't realize that. Take something like Ganja, we associate with Jamaica, intrinsic to Jamaicans, it seems. No, it was introduced by Indian indentured labourers to Jamaica, by the British. Because Gangesa is an Indian word, if you think about it, is an Indian herb. And now it's so associated with Jamaica. When you start thinking about that,

you're like, actually, there's a lot of Indian phenomena in Jamaica, like goat curry, rotis, and it's because of the British, and you just can't escape it. Okay, so modern countries that are sort of descended, well, so many of them, but from the USA, Canada, or Australia, New Zealand, Nigeria, Bangladesh, Sudan. Sudan. Myanmar. Yeah. Israel, Palestine, Jordan, you name it. So the world's map is just shaped by the British Empire and the decisions made in London elsewhere. But what about the people? I mean, what about this great global movement of people? People will be familiar with the trade in enslaved Africans that many Europeans are practicing,

but the British Empire became a particularly big player in the 18th century. and so the movement of Africans to places in the Caribbean and North and South America, that's a huge demographic change. Yeah, and the world would look entirely different if it wasn't for the British Empire. So you've got 3 million enslaved people being transported in British ships, 12 million overall in the transatlantic slave trade. Three million is quite a lot, all their descendants.

But people then forget about indenture, because when we abolish slavery, there was a mission to replace those enslaved people with Indians, indentured laborers. The word indenture means what? Which means they were contracted for between three and five years and sent to places like Mauritius, Guyana, Trinidad, Jamaica. That's one million people and their descendants.

And this is one of the main reasons why wherever you go in the world, there's Indians. Yeah. I never understood that until I looked at it. And actually, even the people in places like Mauritius don't understand the history. They say things like, oh, when my grandfather came here as a slave. And it's like, no, he wasn't a slave. It was an indentured laborer. It's a different system.

So you've got those million people and the millions of descendants. Then you've got things like partition, 15 million people displaced. Extraordid. Between what, 1 and 2 million people killed. You got the famine in Ireland, a million people die, then the millions of people who migrate. And then you've got something that British people never discuss is a number of British people who emigrated.

I know your family did, didn't they? Yeah, my Scottish family went to Canada. Yeah. And there are all these, we think of that migration. you not think also all those white European people they're not supposed to be in New Zealand and Australia and North and America that itself is a mind-blowing

distances to travel historically for those countries. And huge numbers. Something like 5% of British people emigrated between 1900 and 1914. Really? It's that amazing number, 5%. Because we're obsessed with immigration but British people are the biggest migrants in history almost.

It's that amazing fact that Britain lost more people in emigrating than they did in the first world. We think the first of all there's massive tragedy you had lost work, but actually more people just picked up sticks and migrated to the colonies and elsewhere. And then you got all the death. You got the millions of people who died in 19th century imperial wars. You've got all the disease that we sent, the Puritans arrived, and 90% of the indigenous people around them died within a few years. And they saw that as a gift from God, a sign from God that this was meant to be their land. But they were spreading disease, and

millions of indigenous people died across the British Empire, just because white people arrived. Yeah, because they had resistance to things like smallpox and other disease that hadn't yet made their way to Australasia to North America and South America. And vice versa. Yeah. So you end up in a world where the populations are very distinctive, where the map of the world looks the way it does. A lot of that is down to the British Empire and decisions that are made. What about culture, whether it's sport, food, dress, fashion, politics, law, religion, those areas are also transformed, presumably.

Yeah, so many areas. It's a very banal example, but one of my favorite cultural legacies is place names. I mean,

I was driving around Mauritius, and I found myself driving through a village called Queen Victoria. Not Victoria, Queen Victoria. And I started counting

the number of places in the world named after Queen Victoria, and I stopped about 120. I mean, there's probably thousands, right? Then you've got Jamestown.

How many James towns? Georgetown's. Burmingham, Charlott's, a lot of Charlottets around, yeah. It upsets me that my hometown of Wolverhampton was never replicated. Was it not? It's because it's unique. That's what I'm telling myself. But pretty much every other town in England has been replicated.

My favourite fact is at one point, the planet Uranus, discovered by William Herschel. He named that after King George. It was actually called Georgian Cidus, George's Star, until the rest of the world were like, no thanks. Come on. We're going to name me after a Greek god instead. But it extended to space, this obsession. with naming everything after small British towns, or big ones. You listen to Dan Snow's history hit.

The best is yet to come. Stick with us. So we covered things like tea drinking, but there's the English language. All the corporations. Right. BP was originally Anglo-Pers. oil. Shell began as a company importing shells from the empire. P&O Ferrys. What's it mean? Peninsula and Oriental. That goes back to empire. So many corporations, so many charities have there,

because a lot of British imperialists saw what they're doing as being intrinsically good. So Save the Children was set up by imperialists who were continuing the work of empire. The TIR fund, anti-slavery international, grew out of the abolition campaign. And why is it that so many British charities do so much international work? It's because of the British Empire. It's because that's what the British have always done. You can help me answer the question. When I turn on the radio in the morning, I'm listening to the news,

and the foreign secretary is being asked to make a statement about something going on that I love this country, but the Brits have got absolutely no control over. Sudan, goodness knows what it might be. Venezuela. And here's the British foreign officer going to, you know, we're really monitoring this situation. Does that happen in Austria and Italy? That reflex comes from an empire. Yeah, exactly.

But do they do that? But also when they do that, there's almost never any reflection on how we created that situation. Well, of course, I don't want to tell you. In the first place. Like, so many of the biggest problems in the world are British created. So Kashmir, basically we sold that part of the world to a tyrannical Hindu monarch. It was a Muslim majority. That wasn't going to end well.

Israel, Palestine. I recommend your incredible series on that. It's a very complicated roots. but essentially the British promised that part of the world at the same time to the Zionist Jews and to the Arabs. I mean, it got more complicated than that. But even at the time, people were saying this is going to end in war. Nigeria, even at the time, as we created Nigeria, the people who created it,

people like Lugard were saying, this is not going to end well because these are people who have nothing in common with each other. They're very different. You've got Islamic kingdoms, you've got Christians. It doesn't really make sense as a country. and guess what? Civil war. Sudan, civil war, because you're putting together groups of people who don't really belong together. And so these disputes, which continue to shape our news, often have British imperial roots. What about international trade, legal mechanisms,

parliamentary democracy, those concepts? Yeah, this is wild because it's so abstract. People often don't register to them. But like a phenomenal number of countries have the Westminster Constitution as their Constitution. So New Zealand, South Africa, India, Nepal, often one particular guy called Sir Iva Jennings was the consultant encouraging them to take on the Westminster Constitution. Even today, I think 26 different countries have a British court as their final court of appeal. So it's called the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council. So lots of territories in the Caribbean and so on. They come to London as their kind of Supreme Court. But on top of that, you've got the legacy of homophobic legislation. The majority of countries that have anti-gay sex laws

got them from the British. Is that right? Yeah. Because we got our knickers in a right twist about homosexuality in the 19th century. Often didn't understand what was happening on the ground, introduced these. But now you have this bizarre situation with the British are now liberal. They're going around the world, telling countries like Uganda to get rid of their homophobic legislation. They're like, hold on, you gave us this legislation. And suddenly they're quite into it. So it's a real crazy paradox. And you've got this, another very strange legacy where the most vibrant churches in Britain today,

in London, on Nigerian churches, they're trying to convert people who converted them who now have no interest because we're in a secular country now, right? I find that wild. It's a wild, isn't it? You mentioned the plants earlier. I'm very interested in that.

So I didn't really have known enough about that. Kew Gardens is a huge botanical gardens here in London. and it was founded really to sort of showcase plants from around the world and being early, you might call it seed bank, I don't know, but it was a way of bringing the world to Britain and showing off of that. So was that something that was going on, whether it's different strains of cereal crops, was there a big global movement in that as well, enabled by the empire?

Absolutely, and we tend to think of Key Gardens as this nice place to take your mother. But it wasn't that, it was a central part of colonialism, and they changed the world. So plants change the world. We've lost the idea that plants are technology, But say plant flight Sinchona, which is the bark that produces quinine, right? The British and the Dutch spent decades

trying to work out how to produce quinine because that quinine allowed British and European people to survive from malaria. When they mastered that, it meant that they could colonise Africa. Before that, you were dead within three months in Mali. After quinine, you could survive. So that plant changed the world. Rubber, I didn't realize came from a plant,

but it does. But that also changed the world, and we led to the war in Malaya. The Malayan emergency of 9 to 48 was basically about Britain trying to hold on to this very valuable rubber colony and led to some of the worst violence in the history of the British Empire. Then you got tea, led to the open wars, led to the change of diet, led to the exploitation of labor around the world. And it goes on, a lot of our garden plants like rhododendrons, we kind of think of as intrinsically English. But they're not. They're from empire.

So the botanical legacy is really profound. We've just lost that connection. So it's not just the people on our streets and many streets around the world. It's literally the surroundings, the plant the trees around us without us knowing. We're walking through. And it's even more intangible on that. It's also education because one of the great legacies of the British Empire is education. I mean, wherever you go, went to Lagos and found the most English school I've ever walked into.

really, you know. And that's why someone like Kemi Badenak, who grew up in Lagos, can come back here and then espouse quite imperialist views because she was educated in a system that is more colonial than our own. Even today, the majority of our world leaders are either educated in American schools or universities or British ones. And someone like Modi weaponizes it in India. He calls himself the first truly Indian leader because all the ones before him were educated at Oxbridge. or went to British schools and so on. And so he calls them colonial. The nature of history is that time passes and there are changes and these legacies slowly fade. The world in 200 years' time, I suppose inevitably the reach of that empire will be less than it is now.

Yes, but arguably there are new empires, aren't there? What are the Chinese doing? They are buying up large parts of Africa, echoing what the Europeans did. What is Trump doing? I mean, he wants to invade Greenland, Canada. He wants to deny Indigenous Americans their rights. Also, the way he approaches tech companies, I would say there's a big parallel there with the East India Company.

Eastern India Company, the first really powerful corporation, what did it do? It brought up lobbying power. It behaved terribly. It became too big to fail. Arguably, a lot of our tech companies, I like that. I mean, you saw them lined up, the leaders of Microsoft and X and so, lined up at the inauguration. I thought, oh, that is exactly why. happened in Britain, where they became too powerful, they became part of the state. So for many people around the world, they owe their biological makeup, whatever the right word is for our own selves, their language, the political system, the legal system they live under the dominant religions in their country, the physical architecture of their capital cities,

they owe that to the British Empire. Hundreds of millions, not billions of people around the world. Absolutely, yeah. And it's odd that the rest of the world understands this much more than we do. they have a reason to understand it because they have to because they remember what happened when the British came in their ships but we're an island even during the Empire arguably the British were not very aware of what they were doing because we're an island and it's quite easy for us to be oblivious it's all a long way off yeah there are there studies aren't there

19th century families and how much empire comes up and just it was not important well it's a debate historians argue about this there's a bunch of historians that argue that empire I barely touched upon the average Britain. And there's other historians who argue that actually it was quite big. I think I'm with the latter group because even if they didn't know what's happening, their daily lives, sugar, tea. I mean, arguably sugar drove the Industrial Revolution,

where were the workers getting their calories from? Food and culture and Queen Victoria and as the Empress of India and so on. Relatives going and serving in the Navy or the army on some distant frontier. And also the wealth, that fuel. all the industrial revolution, the commodities, the cotton. Right, well, that's interesting. So that's one of those historical debates that I am way out of my depth, but I find fascinating. Yeah.

You've got the British Empire in the 18th century. You've also got a British industrial revolution. Now, some historians say they are almost distinct. It just happens that a country that was busy conquering lots of chunks of the world also experienced a domestic industrial revolution. Yeah. Because of accessibility of coal or iron or depository. That feels unlikely to me.

I've always thought instinctively, surely it's got to be joined up. There are people making money from the sugar plantations who are then angel investors into railway projects. I mean, where are you on that? Because the Industrial Revolution changed the lives of every single person on this planet. We're in the realm of economic history. Yeah, that's why I'm looking at you.

It's like trying to take an egg out of a bake cake and saying, there's the egg. It's impossible because it all gets mixed up together, isn't it? I mean, there's lots of interesting books being written on this And there's definitely a very interesting argument now that a lot of the Industrial Revolution and the angel investing, a lot of that money came from slavery. And you can trace it because the slave owners were compensated

for losing their slaves, so you can follow the money. But that's work that's only really started in the last few years. It's incredible that no one really thought about it until now. So the argument is that in the 18th century, British people are getting very rich, making lots of money from this global, they're making money from slavery, sugar, other things, trade with India, all sorts of things.

and therefore there's money swilling about to build those factories to tinker about with inventions it's a place that's ripe for innovation you need money to make money I heard someone said once someone I said that exactly that's amazing so you must be cursed with just travelling through the world

seeing the hand of empire everywhere yeah it's a bit tragic really I've become that guy who spoils every visit yeah don't go around London with me yes but also you know I mean one of my main arguments is that it wasn't intrinsically good or intrinsically bad. It was complicated. It was slavery. It was abolition. It was the free press. It was press censorship. It was environmental destruction. It was the birth

of environmentalism. It was opposite things can be true at the same time. And that is something the world struggles with, especially in the world with culture wars. People want to take sides. But actually, I just see contradictions and ambiguity. Well, also, that's the nature of history. And if there had been a giant French empire, we'd be talking about other wars. and other famines and other or a giant Inca empire, we're just saying what did happen and it's had a massive impact on our present. But we could be living in a very different present.

Totally. And just look at all the imperial figures involved in the British Empire. Almost all of them were deeply contradictory. I mean, look at Gandhi, okay? And obviously an incredible guy, even the British have a statue of him in Parliament Square. But equally has some pretty racist anti-black views when he was in South Africa.

Winston Churchill, savior of liberal democracy, absolutely. also a massive racist even by the standards of his time his own colleagues were frequently outraged by some of the stuff he said opposite things can be true but you don't hear that being said or you do I mean someone could clip what I just said and make me sound like someone who hates Winston Churchill right that might well happen but you just don't hear it and it makes me depressed

I guess let's finish up on why does it matter that people need to understand that they are the product of this empire, that you're a product, I'm a product, why our kids are, why does that matter? Well, it explains a very big thing about Britain, which we've always struggled with, the biggest thing there is,

which is that we're a multicultural country, isn't it? And every day in the news, you see people struggling without a fact, why are these people coming? Why did they come in 1948 or on the Windrush? Why did my parents come in the 60s? It's because we had a multicultural empire. and you know there were black people in elizabeth the first court she was complaining about there being

too many black people in london in the 1600s and there's a reason for that there's a deep historical reason and also our national narratives world war one world war two there's an imperial element to those millions of soldiers fought from empire yeah and it doesn't mean deleting those narratives it actually makes them more interesting and explains a lot of things about us selves, no. That's true. Victory in First and Second World War. Those wars would look very different if Britain hadn't had a gigantic empire at her back. Your resources as well and people. Resources and people. That's it. That's the message of this podcast. Resources and people. Sattlam, thank you very much for coming on. You've got a new book out. What's it called?

It's called Journeys of Empire. It's for kids. Okay. And it's a kids version of Empire World, which is about how Britain shaped the world. Thanks for coming on. Thanks for having me. well thank you so much folks as ever for listening today and if you want to hear more please go and build a satanam's new book journeys of empire see you next time