Dan Snow's History Hit - The British Empire

Episode Date: June 7, 2023

The British Empire was one of the most influential and far-reaching empires in history. Dan and his guest journalist and author Sathnam Sanghera remember school lessons on the small island that rose to global dominance. From the 16th century to the 20th century, the British Empire spanned continents, encompassing vast territories and diverse cultures, controlling a quarter of the planet. But, the way we've been taught about the Empire hasn't always been the full story and today historians are building a more complex and thorough picture of what the British Empire was. Sathnam sheds light on the darker aspects of the empire's history - colonisation, slavery and exploitation and Dan confronts some difficult truths about his own family's history. Together, they consider how we teach it to the next generation in a way that acknowledges everything- the good, the bad and the difficult.Sathnam Sanghera's new children's book is called 'Stolen History'.Discover the past on History Hit with ad-free original podcasts and documentaries released weekly presented by world-renowned historians like Dan Snow, Suzannah Lipscomb, Lucy Worsley, Matt Lewis, Tristan Hughes and more. Get 50% off your first 3 months with code DANSNOW. Download the app or sign up here.We'd love to hear from you! You can email the podcast at [e-mail] can take part in our listener survey here.

Hi everybody, welcome to Dan Snow's History. You all know that I love talking about the British Empire. I was raised on stories about empire. I wrote my first book about the British Empire in Canada during the Seven Years' War, the French-Indian War, and I'm fascinated in watching how the public debate around empire develops. Some scholars are shining a light on hitherto overlooked periods of imperial history that involve, well, crimes, crimes against humanity. Other scholars here and elsewhere have responded by sort of rallying to the cause of empire, saying it was not as dark, evil, as it's now occasionally portrayed. Satnam Sangira is a writer, he's a historian, he's a leading British journalist, and he's written

the best-selling book, Empireland, How Imperialism Has Shaped Modern Britain, and he's just released a children's book in which he sets out how we think we should talk to the next generation about empire. It's great to have Satnam back on the podcast to talk about how we teach empire, how we taught it in the past, how we're teaching it in the moment, and how we're teaching it in the future. It turns into a bit of a therapy session, this one. For all those listening who, like me, grew up with stories of Empire and took great pride in Imperial episodes, well, this podcast is for you. How should we think about Empire? Are we allowed to celebrate bits of it, aspects of it, certain individuals? Or do we have to consign it all to the historical dustbin? Satnam Sangira helps me work it out. Enjoy.

T-minus 10. Atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima. God save the king. No black-white unity till there is first and black unity. Never to go to war with one another again. And lift off. And the shuttle has cleared the tower. Satnam, thanks very much for coming back on the pod. My favourite podcast, so it's a privilege.

You say that to everyone, I'm sure. You know me, you and I have talked about this a lot before. I find this a very difficult discussion. I find all of this very difficult. In the book, you talk about Our Island Story, which was a kind of huge tome, a staple for a certain generation and class of British child. My dad read it. He sort of memorized it. He loved the picture. He shared it with me. And so I was there in the 1980s when Britain didn't have an empire, having a fully like imperial education. I was like ready to, you know, march up the Nile. Have we taught empire differently over the last, well, 100 years or so? Yeah. I mean, the anxiety over the last, well, 100 years or so? Yeah, I mean, the anxiety about the teaching of empire feels like a very modern thing.

Whenever we have a crisis about racism, the Stephen Lawrence murder, Windrush, the official reports often suggest that we teach empire better. And recently, as we've had Michael Gove, Jeremy Corbyn, Jeremy Paxman, and myself saying we need to teach it better. But actually, if you look back in history, there's long been and myself saying we need to teach it better. But actually, if you look back in history, there's long been an anxiety about how well we teach empire, even at the height of empire. So at the height of empire, we had Earl Meath setting up Empire Day because he thought the children of Britain didn't understand empire properly. We had the Imperial Institute being set up, which is nowadays the Design Museum. And we have things like the Royal Colonial Institute awarding cash prizes for essays on imperial subjects. It's a

competition they had to give up on after two years because there was so little interest. It is odd, like in the 19th century and sort of Toryism and its attachments kind of empire, it's so weird for people to think that actually the British people were like insufficiently interested in empire for many members of the elite. They had to turn Britain kind of jingoistic, didn't they? It wasn't easy. Yeah. And also, I didn't realise that history wasn't a subject. When empire was eventually taught, it was mainly through geography. In 1899, just a quarter of British elementary schools offered history, whereas three quarters offered geography. quarter of British elementary schools offered history, whereas three quarters offered geography.

But the texts that eventually appeared in the early 20th century are quite bizarre to read. They're incredibly simplistic and routinely racist. I'll come on to that in a sec, but just from my childhood experience, I loved those stories, right? There was General Wolfe climbing the heights of Abraham. There was the Black Prince looking all noble in the beautiful picture. And now, you know, the embarrassing thing is I tell my kids stories from history, which are detached from recent scholarship. Let's just say that. I tell them about Sir Francis Drake, and I guess I don't emphasise the fact that he was a slave trader as well as all those other things. Where is that anxiety around teaching now? Do we want to relentlessly tell kids that history is a dark... I'm not talking about British imperial history, of course. I'm talking about the whole disastrous gamut of the human experience, from Holocaust and wars across every continent. How

should we approach the teaching history? What's it for, Matt? What's it for? I think we need to teach British empire because it's the biggest thing we ever did. Biggest empire in human history. And also, it explains our multiculturalism. The reason we're in a multicultural society today is because we had a multicultural empire. And that goes against the narrative that I grew up with, which was the idea that brown people and black people came here uninvited, took advantage of British hospitality.

And this is why we end up with scandals like the Windrush scandal, where we deport British citizens to countries they don't know because civil servants do not understand the imperial history. So I think you could teach it but also I think you can tell kids from quite a young age that history is argument, that there are opposing versions of this story and other stories and I think kids can understand that. I mean I left school thinking that history was a list of facts, but actually I wish I'd been told there is argument and they are, you can have multiple positions. Do you think it's weird the way people can, and I'm one of these people, but like somehow take pride in history? Like why am I proud of

Nelson at the Battle of Trafalgar? Like what's going on? Is that my indoctrination? Like what's happening there? And is that healthy? I don't think there's anything wrong with being proud, but I think we should seek to understand more than see this history through the prism of pride or shame. And we've got to accept that opposite things

can be true at once. So for example, Winston Churchill, saviour of liberal democracy, a great British hero, but at the same time, a massive racist, controversial even by the standards of his time, his colleagues frequently dismayed by his views on race. Both things can be true. But our popular culture can't handle that kind of dissonance. Yeah, it does feel like it's very threatening to people trying to reach that place. You're always named as part of a kind of woke history gang on certain low budget news channels that have just been introduced here in the UK. Why do you think people are threatened? Is it connecting with their kind of feeling of safety? Or are they worried other things are going to be undermined as well as their historic memory? or are they worried other things are going to be undermined as well as their historic memory?

I think it's about, I mean, people just associate the story of their country with a sense of themselves. But also when it comes to empire, whenever you start talking about it, before long you're talking about race and racism, aren't you? You're talking about slavery. You're talking about the colonisation of brown people by white people. And if it's a brown person or a black person like me or David Olusoga delivering the message that maybe empire was more complicated than it seems, you're immediately in a kind of race war with some people who see this history through the prism of race. history through the prism of race. And it's impossible to escape it. If you look back on some of these textbooks for schools, I mean, the racism is just unbelievable. There was this one textbook that was written by C.R. Fletcher and Rudyard Kipling and published in 1911, which

talks about how black people in the West Indies were lazy, vicious and incapable of any serious improvement or work except under compulsion. And that's the book that remained in print until 1930 and is reissued in 1983. So you can see why people brought up with those ideas would have the reactions that they do to people like David O. Zoga and myself. In your work, you seek to kind of talk about what you feel empire was actually like. If an old characterization was white Europeans going out on a civilizing mission, it was almost philanthropic. Well, as Cecil Rhodes said, it was kind of philanthropy plus 5%. You're allowed to make a little profit because on the whole, you're doing everyone a huge favor as well. How do you think we should

describe empire now? You need to see as a nuanced thing, because this is something I think you can explain to kids as well, is that it was different things, opposite things at different times. So for example, we abolished slavery. Wasn't that a great thing? That is true. Equally, we dominated the slave trade at different times. A certain time, it was acceptable for white men in the East India Company to marry Indian women. And then it became socially unacceptable for that to happen. Both things happened. And I think if you present empire as a bunch of contradictions, I think you're much nearer the truth than if you talk about the kind of island story version of empire. Actually, I'd love to talk about that book. I mean,

you read it when you were a kid. I only read it last year. And I read it to the prism of knowing that it was David Cameron's favorite kids book. Did you know that? I did not. A former Prime Minister, David Cameron's favorite kids book. That's amazing. Okay. And it's amazing because it's quite a long book for a kid's book.

And it goes from the Roman occupation until Queen Victoria's death. But it deals with empire in basically five very short chapters. It covers the black hole of Calcutta, the story of how Canada was won, the story of how America was lost, then two chapters on the mutiny. So you can see for one thing, the Indians do not come out well. They are murdering English people at the black hole of Calcutta. And then they're viciously taking them on during the mutiny. So you can see how skewed that is. Also, some of these famous episodes, I often get people at events saying, why haven't you talked more about the black hole of Calcutta? A famous event in 1756, you probably covered it in your podcast, 146 English men and two women

were crammed into a black hole measuring 18 feet by 14 feet. And supposedly it was so hot that most of the prisoners died. But researchers found that the number of prisoners probably wasn't that high. It was probably around 64, that there were more survivors than is commonly said to be the case. But also, if that is the way you introduce empire to children, you create the idea that Indians are there to slaughter English people. And you create a justification for empire, which is that the Indians are terrible. You don't talk about why we went there in the first place for trade, to exploit people and tax them and to kind of make money out of spices and textiles and so on. So you give a very simplistic version of empire.

And this is the version that lots of people grew up with. It's the version I grew up with. And I remember that book, as I say, I remember the illustrations are beautiful. The writing was engaging for young. My dad tried to read it to some of his grandchildren the other day, and they were having none of it, which was... There's also a bit in in the bit about America, there's a line which said,

the Red Indians nearly died out. And it's like, that's quite a passive version, a kind of expression of what happened. We didn't talk about how we killed quite a few of them through disease and actual sport and murder, you know? Also, the language, talk about the terrible rebellion, the mutiny, the dreadful deeds of the Indians. It's so incredibly one-sided.

And the way Canada, the whole story of Canada is described as a battle between the French and the British. The indigenous people don't get a look in. The reasons for why we went there aren't explained. You're listening to Dan Snow's History. We're talking about the British Empire. More after this. Sing, muses. Sing to me a history of Olympus and the deathless gods who govern Earth, Sea and Sky. That is Zeus's command. It's the Ancients from History Hit.

I'm Tristan Hughes, your host, and every month on the podcast, we're taking a deep dive into the Olympian gods. None of them are as simple or as single-faceted as we've kind of reduced them to in our heads when we think about the gods of the pantheon who do one thing each. With world-leading experts, we'll be telling the dramatic story of who they are. Aphrodite was the goddess of love and sex and passion, and specifically she was considered often to be love itself. Their myths and their meanings.

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wherever you get your podcasts. To be continued... Kings. Normans. Kings and popes. Who were rarely the best of friends. Murder. Rebellions. And crusades. Find out who we really were by subscribing to Gone Medieval from History Hit. Wherever you get your podcasts. do you think that we're teaching empire differently today better worse today are we moving the cultural goal but like are we moving the overton window do you think young people maybe i was indoctrinated by that maybe i've had to work harder to see past a younger generation now that isn't exposed to that kind of writing. Are they going to be less racist? I think there's a massive change happening.

I mean, empire is on the national curriculum. It's not a huge part, but it is on it. But the national curriculum actually isn't taught everywhere. Private schools don't need to follow it. Academies don't need to follow it. The Welsh national curriculum has just changed to include more empire and colonialism. There's conversations to change the Scottish curriculum. And also, I feel that lots of kids are turning up at school and saying to their history teachers, Miss, sir, tell me about colonialism, because it's one of the biggest issues in the world

suddenly. I mean, you cannot pick up a newspaper today without some coverage of the culture war around empire. And I feel that kids are getting their education from places beyond the classroom. They're getting it from Instagram. They're getting it from podcasts like yours. And the conversation has totally changed. And do you also think that in a world in which, first of all, kids are growing up around people of colour in a way that was less true in previous generations, but also is there a way in which first of all kids are growing up around people of colour in a way that was less true in previous generations but also is there a way in which when you look east of Suez now the world in the early 1980s it seemed like your albeit partial evidence but Britain and Europe and North America enjoyed a reasonably big material technological advantage economic advantage over those societies further east now people talk people talk about India, people talk about China, the Gulf states, you know, being these

kind of economic and technological powerhouses. They're quite aspirational, I think, for lots of young people today. And I think, is that older sort of condescending view of those cultures just simply doesn't ring true anymore? Is there an element of that? cultures, just simply doesn't ring true anymore. Is there an element of that? Absolutely. And the thing is, before our conversation on empire in Britain was a kind of a monologue, as David Olusoga has said, we talk about whether empire was good or bad. We live in a globalized world now. And each of these former colonies, they talk about empire in a very different way. You had it at the coronation where a lot of Commonwealth countries were raising post-colonial debates, right? So in India, there's a massive program of decolonization happening there. Streets are being renamed. Entire new parliament is being built because they don't

want a parliament that was built by the British. In the Caribbean, you've got a bunch of countries coming together demanding reparations. You've got protests in South Africa about the Cullinan diamond. So these debates are debates that touch a new generation because we live in a globalised world. In your new book, you tell the story of empire. It seems individuals are important. I mean, I guess when you're communicating with kids, as I found talking to my kids and keeping them slightly less bored on long car journeys, like focusing on those kind of biographies, those individual stories feels powerful. And that's what you've done.

This is something that the textbooks of old used to do. They would tell the story of empire through imperial heroes. And I think you can do that now, but just you choose more nuanced people, you know, so you can talk about Gandhi if you want. And obviously a hero who took on empire, but also in some respects, he was a fan of empire. You know, he was a fan of the rule of law. He believed in what empire could do.

And also he himself got accused of racism in South Africa. But also you could talk about abolition, but talk about the black people who were involved in that campaign. Because it's so often portrayed to be something that white men like William Wilberforce did alone, but it was a much more complicated thing. So I think you can convey a much more nuanced story

by picking more nuanced characters than, say, Charles Gordon. And as you said with Churchill, you point out that Kipling was both an imperialist, but also a harsh critic of aspects of empire as well. I mean, you point out that Kipling was both an imperialist, but also a harsh critic of aspects of empire as well. I mean, that's the nuance you need. Yeah. And I talk about Kipling because I guess most kids have come across the Jungle Book in some incarnation or adaptation, you know, and Kipling was hugely imperialistic and jingoistic. Also, if you read his writing, he was also frustrated by elements of British Empire.

And I think you can tell kids that and say, look, you're allowed to come up with your own conclusion. History is argument, just as long as it's based in actual verifiable facts. What's happening at the moment to us, Satnam? Why are we arguing and talking about empire? Is it just a conversation that we didn't want to have before or is it the information environment it's a social media it's everyone screaming each other what's what's happening at the moment i've thought about this a lot recently i've come to the conclusion that a lot of it's to do with the fact that a lot of information was deleted and not made available at the end of empire i mean operation legacy the way in which the records around the

Mau Mau were concealed until they are forced to be revealed as a result of a court case. The way founders of Nigeria, someone like Goldie, he went out of his way to delete every piece of evidence as he was working. He almost knew that the stuff he was doing was probably not that great. And I feel this repression of documentation led to a delay in us knowing what empire involved. But so much history is being done now that this information is becoming more available. And here we are. So it's about information. And is it also about politics? Is it proving useful as a wedge issue?

And you're on the front line of that. I think it's about politics internationally because we're going around the world at the moment as a result of Brexit, trying to redefine our relationship with the world. And we don't remember what we did when we last went out in the world. The problem is people, places like India, Barbados,

Nigeria, they remember what the British did. And so our amnesiac or our kind of myth-making is no use. We've got to meet them on their terms because let's face it, we're no longer the superpower that we once were. So this change in the international politics is forcing us to change the way we talk about empire. And also, it's forcing us to think about individual items of loot, as we see almost every day in the newspapers, right? Talk to me as someone who grew up with these stories of empire, whose family benefited enormously from empire. My great-great-grandpa moved from Kintyre in Scotland to farmland in Canada. Great, lovely, rolling open country, freely available land. That obviously was far more complex than that.

My relatives did well. I've had relatives that went to India as traders, and I've had relatives that were soldiers. And I've grown up with those stories, and I've grown up taught to be interested, kind of proud, I guess, of elements of that, you know, of their sort of tenacity and stuff like that. And yet now I'm coming to terms with, as you said earlier, verifiable facts. I'm coming to terms with the Black War in Tasmania from the 1820s to 30s,

you know, almost in complete destruction of the Aboriginal population of Tasmania by British settlers. What therapy advice can you give to kind of middle-aged white guys like me who are having to really rewire kind of all of our thinking about this? Isn't this what historians do? I mean, you often get people complaining in government that we shouldn't rewrite history. Sometimes it's actual historians saying that on the right. When they have themselves rewritten history, isn't that what it's actual historians saying that on the right. When they have themselves rewritten history, isn't that what it's about? It's about finding new takes on what we always thought we understood. Isn't that what you do, Dan? Yeah, it is. But it's interesting,

for some reason, the hot takes on whether or not barbarian invasions caused the collapse of the Western Empire in the 5th century AD, I'm like, yeah, I'm all about the hot takes. But on this one, I feel there's a sensitivity there. I can't lie. Like, I don't know, I find it uncomfortable. Do I feel guilty? Is that part of it? Do I feel that there's some nervousness, there's some association that this feels quite personal? I think, again, it comes to the tricky issue of racism, because I think a large part of our national identity as British people is that we defeated the evil racist Germans in World War II, we abolished slavery, and now we've got Rishi Sunak as Prime Minister. We are beyond racism. And that makes us feel good. But if we accept the fact that British Empire was proudly racist, white supremacist for at least 100 years, not through all of it, but it was proudly racist.

That's a difficult thing to tally with our self-image of ourselves. Racism, when I was taught at school, racism is something that happened in America. I was taught that slavery was mainly something that happened in America. I wasn't taught about how we dominated slave trade for large periods and sent 3 million Africans across the Atlantic, that the Royal African Company, run from royal palaces, sent 187,000 slaves across the Atlantic. And when they arrived in Barbados,

they were branded with the initials of the Duke of York. That's brutal history, and it really is difficult to tally with the rose-tinted view of empire that lots of people grew up with. And in the end, is a mature appreciation of this history essential if we're going to build a harmonious society based on respect for everyone? I mean, is that the mission? Like, what do you want to have achieved? I want Britain to have gone through a kind of phase of therapy because what we think we did is so disconnected from what the world knows that we did and empire explains so much about us from

our language to lots of our wealth our particular brand of racism our amazing museums and politics even our royal family and yet we oddly don't think about it. So I think we need to go through a period of intense therapy and then turn up as more kind of healthy individuals. I wrote a memoir about my family and discovered all sorts of dark things about my family. I didn't love my family any less afterwards. If anything, I loved them more because I knew what they'd been through.

And I feel the same about imperial history. It doesn't make me hate Britain. It just makes me realize things are really complicated. And it makes me think it's amazing that we've got to the place we are now. Well, I feel like I've been on the therapy couch today, so thank you so much. So I'm glad to be a small part of that wider conversation. But trying to draw simple judgments about things being bad or good in the past is kind of worthless, right? Totally, yeah. You don't hear people say, what are the pros and cons of Nazi Germany? Or what are the pros and cons of the rain? It's such an inane way of looking at history and

babyish. I think we need to grow up. And it's that famous line from Neil MacGregor, the former head of the British Museum. He said that something along the lines of how when Germans look at the history, they look for understanding and try to find a way forward. Whereas the British look at the history and they want comfort, which is incredibly babyish. Yeah, well, I agree. I think there's something infantile about it for sure. Satnam, thank you very much for coming on the podcast. The new book is called? Stolen History. Thank you very much for coming on the podcast the new book is called Stolen History thank you very much for coming to the podcast, good luck with the book buddy thanks Dan