Empire: World History - 224. Empire in Your Garden

Episode Date: January 28, 2025

How did plants power imperialism? Gardening may be a quintessentially British hobby, but many of the familiar plants in our lives have a global – and colonial – history. From “fern-mania” leading wealthy Victorians to decimate environments around the world collecting ferns for their drawing rooms, to mahogany harvested by enslaved workers in the Caribbean, plants played an important role in the British Empire. Even official scientific names for plants included blatantly racist language up until the 1990s.  Over-harvesting of popular imperial products created monocultures and environmental destruction on a huge scale, and the movement of native plants across continents allowed invasive species to run riot. Yet the same imperialists who caused these problems also led the way in the early environmentalist movement, creating National Parks and protection schemes for animals on the risk of extinction.  Listen as William and Anita are once again joined by Sathnam Sanghera, author of Empireworld, to explore the ways in which imperialists both destroyed and protected the natural world. Twitter: @Empirepoduk Email: [e-mail] Goalhangerpodcasts.com Assistant Producer: Becki Hills Producer: Anouska Lewis Senior Producer: Callum Hill Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

If you want access to bonus episodes reading lists for every series of Empire, a chat community. Discounts for all the books mentioned in the week's podcasts, add free listening and a weekly newsletter, sign up to Empire Club at www.mpowerpoduk.com. Hello and welcome to Empire with me, Anita Arnan. And me, William Durimple. And we are once more joined by Satland-Sengara, author of Empire World, how British imperialism has shaped the globe. His paperback is out right now. If you want to, you know, go and get it. If you want to, you just have to. It's a great, great book. It's

really interesting and it's taught us a few things as well, just chatting to him in the last episode. Just before we sort of launch ourselves on something that is more miserable, which is that that you touched on in the last part, Satemam, about the classification of plants. Linnaeus, I mean, I actually didn't realize also classified human beings. Just remind people who not have listened to the last episode of what Linnaeus did. I think a little recap of that would be interesting. Yeah, Linnaeus was a prominent botanist of the 18th century. He created the modern system of classifying plants and organisms crucially because he classified plants in this very clever way, but he put humans into the classifications according to their geographic origin

and skin colour decided that Europeans were great, Africans were crafty and indolent. And this is the way in which botany helped to reinforce imperial racism. And it's, yes, it's a deeply controversial subject. This is kind of classification is a real thing. I mean, when I did patient assassin, and I was talking about Sir Michael O'Dwyer, who was the lieutenant governor of Punjab at the time, he loved classifying people like plants. And he went through the different sort of tribes, as he called them of the Punjab, and gave them all sorts of like sort of three line, and none of them really very lovely. I mean, I think there were sort of two sets of people he quite endured.

And the rest, you know, they drink too much, they fall over, their crafty, you know, all of those kind of words. But they were presented just like the biology classifications I studied at school. So it is a real mode of thinking that you put people in boxes, like you put plants in boxes. And it continues now. It shapes because those people decided, for example, that certain people were martial races, including Sikhs. As you can tell from our physiques, we're not, right? Speak of yourself. I could have you. I could have you in a fight. But it's just a powerful idea that a lot of these people, like the Punjabi Sikhs, still see themselves as a martial race.

And they're not. They're just people. And that's just the tip of the iceberg. There was a book published in 1868 called The People of India. And it is an enormous great sort of ethno-biological study. And it contains photographs of all the different castes. tribes of South Asia, ranging from Tibetans and Aboriginals right through to the doms of Bihar. It is sort of, you know, to our ears, completely and astonishingly racist. The image with the label the Mohammedan, it is illustrated by a picture of an Aligar Labra who's given the following caption. His features are peculiarly Mohammedan and exemplify in a strong manner the obstinacy, sensuality, ignorance and bigotry of his class. It is hardly possible, perhaps, to conceive features more essentially repulsive.

Now, that's a direct quote from this. And it goes on every single ethnic and tribal group in the subcontinent over a number of volumes. Yeah, and it talks a lot about caste identity. It reinforces caste identity. You know, this is what these people are like. And again, you put somebody in a box. Yeah. And it's very hard to get out of the box.

It's exactly the reason Q Gardens is full of all these samples. There's the same reason why the British Museum has so many huge. human remains because the Victorians were obsessed with measuring skeletons and brains and noses and foreheads. Yeah, totally. And classifying people. It's the same ideology. And even though we've got rid of a lot of this weird 19th century racial science, lots of it persists.

And weirdly and depressingly, some of it's coming back. What do you mean it's coming back, Soutle? Well, there's some very controversial academics, one of whom was at Oxford recently, who have been indulging in this racial science. still believe there are differences between black people and white people and so on. And racial science is quite a big thing on X, on Twitter, part of this new online racist anglosphere. People are saying, oh, we've got this brand new, you know, transatlantic anglosphere between Musk and Tommy Robinson and so on. But as I explained in Empire World,

this existed in the 19th century. It's just the people involved were Rudyard Kipling and Roosevelt. they were talking about weird racist ideas back in the 19th century. And Rhodes. Rhodes was a big guy for the Anglosphere, wasn't he? Yeah, and you've got poems like The White Man's Burden, you know, and this is not a new thing. Can we bring it to plants again? Because I want to know a bit, I probably don't want to know, but I should know, about some of the names of plants that included words that we deem completely unacceptable and racist now.

Yeah, I mean, there's different. systems of classifying plants, there's linear system, but there's also the common plant system. And until the 1990s, it was quite frequently some plants were referred to with the N-word. You know, I could think of three in front of me, which I'm not going to say out loud, but there was also the dewbush, the kaffir plums. And when you talk about decolonization, people are very allergic to that idea and that word, but actually, if it involves the eradication of those racist common plant names, I think it's an entirely good thing. Another thing that you talked about was the difficulties that some faced,

these imperial explorers who wanted to bring back samples and see whether they could be refined and grown by empire in other territories. You talked about rubber and Singapore and Malay. I want to know about the difficulties in transportation, because you were talking about a type of seed that needs to be kept moist to transport. Now, these difficulties that face a botanist who wants to bring back samples will inevitably lead to innovation. And they did, didn't they? I mean, the one thing I'm thinking about is the thing that you write about, the Wardian case. I'm fascinated by this. Tell us a bit more about the Wardian case. Yeah, so it's a great book by Luke Keo on the wardian case. We nowadays just assume it's easy to transport plants, right? But back in the day,

in the 90th century, plants on a boat, they'd get killed by the salt in the seawater, the heat, the darkness, being manhandled, being eaten by goats. You know, it's very hard to transport any plants. But a guy called Nathaniel Bagshaw Ward solved the problem. Accidentally in 1829, in an experiment in his own home in London, he placed a moth cocoon in a sealed glass bottle with some fern fronds and some moist soil and discovered that the plant sprouted and thrived without being watered for three years. Really?

Wow. And this led to the creation. of the Wardian case, which is a portable... Named after him. Named after him. A portable glass-sided wooden or metal container that contains a kind of controlled environment for plants to thrive in. So, you know, the case creates a regulated atmosphere like a modern terranium, keeping the plants hydrated and healthy.

The glass allows them to receive sunlight. There's ventilation to keep out the rodents. And you've got batons to kind of hold the plant into place. And this object appeared in the great exhibition in 1851, and the historian Limbaugh described it as probably one of the best investments the British government has ever made. I mean, it totally transformed plant transfers. And the Warden case was how tea was moved from China to India to establish the Assam and Darjeeling tea district. That's something we're going to be dealing with in our Opium War episode, because of course it was the deficit in British. finances that the popularity of tea drinking created, which needed a solution, and the solution was

selling opium to the Chinese in order to be able to pay for the tea. The warding case involved on that, the rubber industry, the plants were transferred from Brazil to Asia with the warding case, moving bananas to the Pacific Islands and Central America and the Caribbean. That was the warding case. And also smuggling the Sinchona plant from South America to India was also the wardian case. So this, I don't know if you've ever seen one. I saw one in Q Gardens. I've seen it only because I looked it up after reading about it through you. But describe it. It's kind of like a crate, yeah.

I saw one at Kew Gardens. It's like a crate, a bit like a Fortnome and Mason Hamper. I'm saying that because I'm looking at a Fortnomer Mason hamper. You're so posh. You've changed, you've changed, Sangera. We remembered when you were a Wolverhampton boy. When you ate out of a tiffing on the beach like the rest of us. Yes, go on like Fortnham and Mason hamper.

Yeah, like it's wooden or metal. and it's got glass, it's got holes in. It's, yeah, it's a box. But incredibly simple, but changed the shape of the planet. Incredible. Would you have had ships just filled with Wardian cases? Or it was part of a voyage. So try to imagine how this all worked.

Yeah, they'd obviously be on the deck because they need sunlight, right? But yes, and it'd be a constant battle to make sure that they weren't disturbed or the glass wasn't broken and so on. But it was still easier than actually trying to transport. plant's in the old way. I mean, we've thought about tea, and we are going to talk about tea and opium a lot more in this series. But I want to know about some of the other plants that are lesser known. Now, gutta percher, am I saying it right? Gutta percher. I've got some here. Oh, what is it? So it looks like a squash ball. It looks like a squash ball. It's black and round.

Is it squitchy? You're not far off, actually. It's a 19th century golf ball. Oh, right. Yeah, gutter percher, very important, it's a natural thermoplastic. And it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, was found in a tree, found in Malaysia and Indonesia, and the gum was extracted by killing the tree and extracting it. And you might have some in your teeth because it's still used in dentistry today. For fillings. Yeah. But crucially, it made golf balls, but also more importantly, it became a vital component in waterproofing telegraph cables. So Kutapurcher made telegraph communication, Morse code, speedy news reporting, international communication possible. So this one plant changed the way in which empires were managed, the way wars were waged. Incredible.

And also the places where these wires and cables were laid are also where the cables are still laid because they chose the shortest route. So you could say this plant is the foundation of the modern internet. And when you say, I mean, we sort of gobbled up the explanation as it were, but you know, you said it's in your mouth because this stuff is used for fillings, because it is waterproof, it's a sealant, and even now, even now they use it. Though it's not used that much now for things, mainly because people went crazy about it, and they over-harvested it. And it's all but forgotten day got to perch.

I mean, we don't even know how to pronounce it, but in the Victorian era, it was a household word, you know. But the scale of the demand was such that millions of trees were destroyed, and it was one of the first great industrial ecological design. And where is it now? Is it in the wild at all? Yeah, it exists, but it's not really... Hardly anything. Yeah. Yeah. House plants. Now, looking around, I think this will be really fun for people who are listening to this while they're doing the vacuuming or, you know, thinking about folding up laundry or all the things, all the wonderful things that you share with this that you do while you're listening

to us. If people were to look around their house, I'm just thinking of like household favorites. So a lot of people have ferns, cheese plants. What are they at their origin stories? Anna. Yeah, and that's the thing. We see a lot of these plants as intrinsically British, but almost all of them came from the empire. So fern mania, convulsed 19th century Britain, became very fashionable to display ferns, actually in wardian cases. Really? But there was a massive downside of this. So people were taking ferns from around, from Australia, from America and so and bringing them back and causing huge damage just so they could have them in their drawing rooms. And the other great imperial plant in the household was the palm. You know, Queen Victoria

famously introduced the palm into her residences, and it became a symbol of empire. Roger Kipling uses the palm as a symbol of the empire in one of his famous poems. Was that part of her trip to Q Gardens you mentioned in the last episode when she spent three trips to go and see the palm house? Yeah, it's possibly related.

But yeah, I mean, palm was not only beautiful, it's an industrial super product. So that became a symbol of empire. But then the biggest thing changed was in gardens. And obviously, you know, most of our plants in our gardens come from elsewhere. The Romans gave the British great vine. The rosemary came in the 14th century. But in the 18th century, everything changed because of two men, a man called John Bartram and a man called Peter Collinson.

John Bartram was in America. He was in Philadelphia. Peter Collinson was in London. And they came up with a scheme called Bartram's boxes. And so you would order a crate for five guineas. And it would contain around 100 varieties of seeds. and dried plant specimens. And through this scheme,

we had introduced to Britain, plants including the magnolia, rhododendrons, mountain laurels, azaleas, sugar maples, and sumacs. So these plants, which are now seen as very British,

actually came from empire. I mean, that's azaleas and rhododendrons. I've been through many, a posh house garden, and, you know, they have little walkways filled with these

enormous azaleas and raidedendrums in full bloom. All brought in from the Himalayas. Yeah, and actually one of the people we bought in rhododendrons was Joseph Hooker, who was one of the directors of Kew Gardens, and he set up some very famous rhododendron gardens in Scotland, which are still thriving today. I mean, did they get enormously, irwateringly wealthy on the back of this? I mean, you talk about fern mania and this desire to have, you see them in wealthy houses,

as I say, as adios and redidendrons. Does it make them a lot of money? It's more that rich people spent an absolute equivalent of millions of pounds of going these plants. I don't know what the equivalent would be. I don't know, having a robot, if you're very rich or having a Rolls-Royce. Like, they were such status symbols in stately homes. And did people go and collect them themselves? I mean, if you were a landowner in the West Coast of Scotland, would you make a trip to Bhutan or to skim and get your roadage-endrons and azaleas? Or did you just get a Bartram-Bochson box to do it for you? If you're relatively ordinary

you had the boxes, but if you're rich, you probably employed botanists. If you were the East Indy company, you hired Joseph Banks or William Hooker to do it for you. Another plant, or rather, tree, which I'm not that familiar with, but everybody was mad for it at one time in Victorian England. It's the Jamaican lace bark tree. Now, first of all, what does it look like? What is it? I've seen a sample in Q Gardens, actually. It's basically a tree. The only way I can say it, it's a tree.

When you cut through the bark, it's got lace inside. It's incredible. It's like got a doily inside it and it's, it grows to around 13 or 30 feet. It was only found in the rocky crevices of Jamaica's mountains. But the Victorians who loved anything Lacey went crazy for it. I'm just looking it up now. It's extraordinary stuff, isn't it? And so people used it to make hard wearing clothing. People made whips out of it for enslavement, doilies and fans. Anti-McCassas.

Charles II was said to her. have been sent to suit made entirely of lace bark. And it was presented as a wonder material, again, at the great exhibition of 1851. It was a bit like graphene. I mean, you've got this bark where you've got a cloth inside. So it saves you a lot of the hassle having to create a cloth. What did you just cut it? You cut it very thinly, or is that how it works? You take away the outer bark of the tree very carefully, and it reveals inner layers, and it's like a net-like in structure. And then you soak that in water to soften it to make it plight. and then you stretch it and you can make amazing things or you can layer it.

It's very lightweight, very breathable, very unique. And people went absolutely crazy, a bit like gutter percher and guess what happened? Yeah, they killed it off. They all overharvested it. Celd it off. Although, I've just had a look at one of these posh websites that sends pot plants to your home a little bit like, you know, the Bartram boxes. And you can buy lace bark trees for your home. We can all get mail order lace bark, can me?

You can get mail order lace bark trees for 30. £25, you can get a young lace bark tree. Also, I just wanted to explain one thing that William said, because this is something that if you're posh, you know all about it. And I only found out about it quite late in life. But an anti-Makasa. This is a sort of a doily that goes on the back of a sofa so that if you've got heavily bril-creamed oiled hair, you don't stain the material. Or in a train famously. All British Rail trains used to have anti-macassas on the back of the seat so that people travelling with oiled hair would not wreck the furniture. No, I was quite an advanced age when I learned about this because, you know, in India, nobody cares. And every seat is stained, quite merrily. If not, if not with that, with parm all over the walls on the floor. Nobody cares. Okay, so that's the Jamaican lace bark tree.

And it also appeared at the great exhibition. And the great exhibition, again, of 1851, is such an interesting place because it's a shop front. Anything to be able to take a TARDIS back there, wouldn't you? An amazing thing. It was not only a flex, an imperial flex, of look how powerful. we are, look at what our reach is. But it's a shop window to say, look, this is something, you know, like the latest robot vacuum cleaner, this is what you really need in your life. And people would come, you know, I think it was one third of the population of Britain goes through,

the doors of the great exhibition. And, you know, they would see things and suddenly covered them. Because if they were in there, in this, the greatest shop window on earth, also entirely made of glass, like the palm house of the last episode at Kew Gardens. And you would want it. So these crazes, you can find their roots stretching into the soil of the great exhibition. The kind of world I grew up in in Scotland still had these plantings of trees, azaleas, rodendrons, but also things like giant hogweeds, which we sort of take for granted and are now kind of virtually native. Giant hogweed is what? Giant hogweed comes from New Zealand originally. What does it look like for those

who haven't seen a hogweed? It's like a sort of giant cauliflower, but it's something that is one of those Victorian plantings and you see all over Victorian houses all over the, particularly the West Coast of Scotland. And the same with Reded Entrance Plantations. It's extraordinary to imagine that it's a foreign platform. No, I know. It's so indigenous. It's so at home and the stately home. Absolutely right. Absolutely right. Look, let's take a break here and when we come back, let's tackle the prickly problem of the prickly pear. Welcome back. Now, it won't have escaped your notice that, you know, whenever you're traveling through an airport. And, you know, some, some countries are far more militant about this. You know, you can't even bring a sandwich in or a piece of fruit without getting jumped on and having to

throw it all in the bin or declare it. But you bring a non-indigenous plant into a country. You have every prospect of spreading mites, disease, destruction, or indeed overwhelming a native population of plants and animals. You get all of these, you know, warnings not to do it. This must have happen, Sutton, when you have these clever cases and clever means of transporting, there is no way you can ensure that you don't have. And probably you didn't even have the science to know what diseases and mites you're bringing along with them. Precisely. I mean, we've talked about all these plant transfers and it's very innovative and exciting. But at the same time as you're transporting live plants, you're also sending pests around the world. And the biologist, Richard

Mac said that the results of the 19th century nursery trade were both beautiful and disastrous. And it's the same now. So a large, a third of the invasive arthropods in Europe were introduced by the live plant trade. And in Britain, nearly 90% of the invertebrate pests first arrived on live plants. And this was part of the story right from the beginning. So when we started transporting plants, we started transporting problems. So one of the most damaging was coffee rust, which devastated the coffee plantations of Ceylon in the late 19th century, causing losses of up to $2 million a year. And live coffee plants from British Guyana and so on were thought to have introduced the fungus.

And so the planters had to turn to other crops like tea, rubber and cinchona. And there was another cautionary tale in the prickly pear, which is this cactus found in Mexico. and southern states of America. And it was introduced to Australia in 1788 by British colonelists. And it's a prickly pear. I don't know if you've seen it. It's edible. I mean, it's sort of the red thing. You know, when you've got the fork-shaped cactus, you've got the red fruit, which is also quite spiked growing on. That's the prickly pear, is it? Yeah, and really good for cattle feed. Problem is, it spread incredibly quickly, and it swamped farmland. And so by 1925, it covered more than 60 million acres.

Where did it cover so much territory? Australia. Gosh, it took over Australia. Farmers just had to abandon the land. But it's also a rare example and they almost completely solved the problem. They found that if you introduced the cactoblastis moth, this moth will lay eggs in the prickly pear and destroy it.

So they actually managed to, it's a very rare situation where they managed to solve the problem. Yes, I know. We were famously in Australia, imported rabbits to feed people, the rabbits took over, mixomatosis becomes a thing, they introduced the dingo, which then very happily starts taking over and eating livestock and stuff. You know, they're unintended consequences. And here I'm talking from Delhi, but next week I'm going to be in Jaipur. And when you go to Rajasthan, the single most common plant in this grub around Rajasthan is Mesquite, which comes from Mexico. And this was specifically

brought in by the Maharaja Jobpur, who scattered seeds from his tiger moth plain. The botanical name is prosopis Julie Flora. And it's become this sort of, it's eaten up Rajasthan. Wow. Suits Rajasthan so well. Have you been, William, to St. Helena? Never have. I'd love to go to St. Helena. Because, you know, it's interesting. It's also where Napoleon ended up. But it's the ultimate example of what could go wrong, because there were three phases of destruction by the different colonized. So first of all, the Portuguese introduced goats. I know you're a big

fan of goats, William. I love goats, yeah. But they thin the vegetation to the point of leaving the soil on the slopes very vulnerable. But they also fertilise it. Yes. Always a defender of the goat. He is. I mean, there's no talking to himself now. With goats and pigeons, you're going to lose. Just give it up. Okay, so they deplete the soil. Next, you had the East Indar company who set about chopping down all the trees for cooking and heating. And he and making booze. And finally, you had the alien plant introduction by the British imperialists, many of which became highly invasive.

So St. Helena is a microcosm of what can go wrong. I'd love to go there to see. Is there any estimate of how many species were lost during that time of imperial planting and supplanting? I think it's impossible to really measure this stuff. But St. Helena is a good place to study it because it's an island, isn't it? So it's a discrete entity where you can monitor it. The thing is that when you introduce plantations in particular, these one-crop economies, you make the nature very vulnerable because you need diversity for a healthy environment.

And so whenever you introduce sugar plantations or cinchona plantations, you create huge environmental problems. And there were so many other things that the British did. They stopped the 18th century tradition in Australia of burning controlled birds. in Southern Australia. They oversaw the cutting down of oak forests in the Himalayan regions of India and replaced them with pine plantations for resin and obviously dry pine needles become a cause of wildfires. Barbados was used to the point of utter erosion, the deforestation of Guyana, the West Indies, 60% of New Zealand's forests destroyed. Another example, not in the British Empire,

but in the Stalinist USSR is great swathes of Uzbekistan, where they had monoculture of cotton. And the entire cotton for all the Soviet armies was grown in Uzbekistan. So Stalin was very clear that it should be taken as a kind of national priority to keep this cotton coming in and growing more and more. And when you go to the area around Kiva and northern Uzbekistan, you pass miles and miles and miles of dead earth. And it's not desert.

It's earth which has been killed by monohester. cultures. And it is biologically dead. There's nothing you can do with it. And there's miles and miles of it. It's very, very striking. Moogany is a very interesting one because we all go to these stately homes and marvel at the mahogany furniture. But a lot of it was harvested from the Caribbean. And these mahogany forests were, you know, pulled down to the point of near extinction. And we don't make that connection between the beauty of these 19th century drawing rooms and the environmental destruction that we caused. So, I mean, you, you can sort of credit this monoculture with the awakening of Gandhi. I mean, he comes from South Africa. He

wants to go and do a tour of India to get to know it before he'll get involved in the Congress movement. And he comes across the indigo farmers in Champaran in Bihar in 1917. And he just sees, you know, look, they're forced by the British to grow indigo on 15% of their land, give their entire crop as rent to planters. And then harvest fail and they are starving. And this is the thing, just looking at those beleaguered farmers who are not allowed to grow the things that they need, awaken something in him. So, you know, there are so many stories. I mean, more stories than you'd think linked to this sort of imperial botany. The best example for this we're going to be dealing with is obviously opium, where opium was a crop forced on farmers throughout Bihar, the same area.

And it led to not only famines, but obviously to the addiction, as we said in an earlier episode of 30% of the Chinese population. I've just come back from Vietnam and I had no idea that the opium industry was also the main lure in terms of money for the French going into Indochina and the opium harvests in Vietnam and in Cambodia and in Laos paid for about 30 to 40% of French imperial costs. Well, I mean, it's astonishing. We'll do a big thing on the opium wars. We'll do much more. Just coming back again, circling back, I've got this sort of image of these enormous acres of Australian land being colonised by these huge Mexican cactuses holding up their little prickly bears in the air of ironly. But just thinking of some of the places, which must have lost so many of their own indigenous plants and things, and therefore indigenous knowledge and medicine and, you know, these things that stretch back thousands of years. I mean, you said it's really impossible to know what is lost,

but has anyone started doing a study of what has been lost? I think you raised something very important in that we marvel at the accomplishments of some of these imperialists, but almost everything they did, all the knowledge they got came from indigenous people, you know? So gutta percher, I mean, that was being used in Malaya for canes and handles way before the Westerners discovered it, you know? And as you know, the story of tea, you know, the Sinkpo people were drinking. tea underneath the eyes of the British who didn't realize and the British dismissed them as kind of tribal nomads with no sovereignty over their land and overlooked their use of tea plants. And when it came to rubber, there were people in South America who were using it way before the

West. And one of the things I saw at Q was a rubber item made in 1817 by South Americans. I mean, South Americans were using rubber for balls, torches, containers. Even for helping with bruises and hemorrhaging, you know, way before the West came. And then, of course, you've got Queenie and Sincona. And historians think that actually indigenous people were using this drug way before the West arrived. So we need to acknowledge that the Indigenous often were ahead of the West. Well, I mean, 100%. Those are the ones that we know about the court people's eyes, but the ones that they, you know,

weren't interested in or didn't, you know, compute in those days that are now lost, I'm just thinking about the number of times I've heard, you know, the depletion of the Amazon for, again, growing a monoculture of wood and trees, it's possibly wiping out things like cures for hideous diseases that will be lost forever, which exist in those enormously diverse places. You know, we'll never be able to bring them back because we don't know what we've lost. Again, these things are complicated, two things can be true at the same time, because Britain has done a great deal to conserve seeds from extinct species and seed banks are just one enormous contribution, I think, to the future. I think I mentioned this before and

thank God they're doing it. And biological collections. Exactly, you know, sort of saving these things until we're in position to bring them back. What do you make of this kind of paradox of also being the saviors of environment with these seed banks, but also, as you say, having depleted it all to begin with, with imperialism, whether it's British imperialism, Portuguese or wherever it is from. Well, I guess you've got to the heart of my argument I make in empire world, in that opposite things are often true at the same time. British Empire was involved in slavery and anti-slavery.

It spread the free press and press censorship, but it also destroyed the environment, but also British imperialists were involved in the birth of environmentalism. They saw what was happening. in St. Helena, they saw what was happening in Australia, and they acted upon it. You read some of these accounts from people like even Benjamin Franklin, I know he's a friend of the show, from certain 19th century scientists, and they're observing basically the greenhouse effect. And they then do things about it. So one of the earliest initiatives for soil and forest

preservation in the colonies began in St. Helena, you know, with the East India Company, starting environmental policies. And this is something that Peter, Franco Pan picks up on in his great recent book on the environment, you know, the Bombay Forest Conservancy in 1847 was set up to solve the problem that the British should cause. And soon similar policies were taken up in Australia and Canada and South Africa and so on. And you get national parks too, don't you, being introduced quite early on. 1778 in Tobago, the Tobago Main Ridge, which is sometimes said to be the earliest forest reserve in the world, spreading to America, Yellowstone National Park in 1872.

Banff in Australia, national parks in New Zealand. And we see national parks as, you know, there are definitely imperial creation as an intrinsically good thing, except they were created because the imperialist had caused the problem in the first place. And often, when they're set up, the indigenous people were often blamed for the problems and also the indigenous people living there weren't allowed to live their lives as they wanted to.

because they were restricted by these environmental policies. So increasingly, even in the 21st century, people are seeing national parks as a very problematic thing, as a contradictory thing. You have this paradox in India today, again in Rajasthan, where I'll be next week, there is this tension between trying to save the tiger and the problem of keeping out the villages who live in the parks. and in the 1980s and 90s, a lot of the killing of tigers was being done by villagers who resented being kept out of the parks. So they'd leave poison.

This happened at a place called Sariska. They'd leave poison so that the tigers would be killed, so they'd then be allowed back into the empty parks. They saw the tiger being turned in a sense into their enemy as an agent of their own exclusion. And that has now been worked through. And they found ways of not banning the villagers from collecting wood and so on and harvesting the parks in the way they need to harvest it. Yeah. And I think when we say parks, I mean, a lot of people will have in their minds

sort of manate parks, but we're talking about wildernesses of great swathes of tree-filled, fauna-filled land, which is untouched, largely untouched or should be untouched by land. The one thing we haven't talked so much about is the extinction of animals. I mean, famously, the dodo was one of the first examples of an indigenous animal, which imperialists wipe out. Madagascar, I think, was the place where dodoes were wiped out. Give us other examples of imperial extinctions. Yeah, I mean, you can think of any animal that is at risk today, and the British and German and European colonelists were hunting them to near extinction

in the 19th century. There was a massive hunting craze. Hunting memoirs would sell hundreds of thousands of copies. Whenever you go to one of those old hill station houses, you see these libraries full of unread books of so-and-so's exactly that, the hunting memoirs of pig sticking in Myrut and days with the tigers in Nanital and this sort of thing. But then the British and the Germans start panicking because these animals are no longer available. So they set up protection schemes.

I mean, there was an organisation, it's called Flora and Foreigner International Stull, working now set up at the time to preserve animals. And it's a huge paradox. So I see with the royal family, the royal family now are very keen on protection. Wild animals in Africa and India and so on. But literally the royal family were involved in these hunts. They were involved in helping to make these animals go extinct in the first place. But as were the Indian monarchs as well, I mean, I've just come back from a tour of a wildlife park where there are tigers, not many.

There's elephants, again, not as many as there should be. And you go to the lodge where you can stay in this place. And it's the Kobani Park, if anyone's wondering. Amazing place. Amazing, amazing, amazing place. You sort of stay in these hats. And the main Maharajas, what was formerly the Maharajas hunting lodge, has just got so many pictures on the walls of Maharajas on massive hunts. And then inviting, you know, the local collector or the local governor when the British come along. But there's this history of just basically blowing the bejesus out of animals, which goes back even to the Indian Maharajas. I mean, they do it as well. It's a long history when I was doing the Golden Road looking at Indian imports into Europe. Ivory is probably the single most lucrative import and live elephants. And on the Red Sea harbours at Myosomus and Bernice, which are the two really important Roman ports where Indian and Ethiopian and Arab sailors would land and where Roman ships would

leave from, the berths for the ships there are 20% larger than the ones in the Mediterranean coast. Why? Because they were bringing in elephant transports, both for military use in the Roman armies, and for hunts in the circuses, the Colosseum and so on. So tigers and elephants. And in Sicily, there is an extraordinary mosaic from the first century at Piazza Amarina. There's an image in the center of this mosaic, in this lunette of a personification of India, and she's holding a tusk of an elephant, and she, on one side is an elephant itself, and the other side is a tiger. And these are all basically images of Indian exports, which this merchant who built the villa made his fortune by selling. So I wonder if it's true to say that, you know, humans have always been shitty to animals

and they haven't really cared very much about the consequences. But with the introduction of imperialism and sort of this great, almost sort of a factory of exporting and production, it just accelerates our worst inclinations and does wipe things out in a way that actually our human proclivities dented but didn't destroy. We also created a massive hypocrisy. I mean, there's TV footage of Prince Philip killing a tiger in the 1960s. It was never broadcast. But at the same time, Prince Philip and his grandsons are massive campaigners for animal preservation and conservation.

Those two are not incompatible. You can have come from a past of killing tigers and become a conservationist. You can see a progression there. My problem is they never talk about it. So Buckingham, all these palaces are full of mahogany, ivory, animal skins. Tiger skins. And it would be much stronger. Their case would be stronger if they said, look, we've got all this stuff.

We're going to get rid of it. And we're going to set an example and we did something wrong. And for me, in an empire world, this is what my argument ultimately is. Britain pontificates in all sorts of areas, animal conservation, environmentalism, democracy. but we rarely reflect on what we did during the empire and our patchy records during the British Empire on all of these themes. We would be a healthier nation if we acknowledged what we did. So I mean, rather than, you sort of said two different things there.

You said, you know, get rid of all this stuff in the past. Wouldn't it just be better to have signage? This is mahogany that was brought over from such and such a place and this is a potted history of how that happened. Yeah, actually Prince William has talked about. about getting rid of all the ivory actually himself. Yeah, I think education has to be the aim. But we have so much talk about signage and it doesn't happen. And also, who really gets to walk around these palaces at all? I don't know. What do you think, William?

I think there is forward movement in signage. And, I mean, one example is the National Trust. And they've obviously gotten to a lot of controversy about it. They have started redoing their signage. I begin my book, The Anarchy, with a section on Powis Castle and how when I went there 10 years ago, there was all this stuff about this loot being quotes gifts from the grateful people of India to Lord Clive, who they were so pleased to be conquered by. And the National Trust, subsequent to that, because so many people who'd read the book, then went round it and complained, re-signed it only to have people like Nigel Bigger and history who came complain about the signage. and in a sense, Satnam, you and I have all contributed to a bit of the backlash.

We provoke, so when you get Kemi Badnock or before her, Liz Tras, complaining about unpatriated historians, it's us they're talking about and complaining. You've been at the centre of it, Satnam. You've had more than I have. Yeah, all I want them is to talk about it. I would love to hear Prince William, Prince Harry, talk about conservation, and talk about the royal family's history of, destroying the environment and destroying animals. And that's mainly what I want and to have a

proper conversation and to acknowledge what we did. Would that conversation involve, with the acknowledgement, necessarily need an apology as well? Is that what you want? I don't think apologies really matter that much. I think we are so far from where we need to be. We need to begin by talking. And understanding. Yeah. Understanding what we've done. Yeah, and I think basically we need what you're doing. We need to talk about this stuff and acknowledge the history. And then doing something about it, it comes much, much later, I think. Well, listen, we are delighted to have you on to talk about it.

And, you know, we talk about these things week after week. But it is always a pleasure having you on. Best of luck with the wedding. If we happen not to be there, Satnam. And the book. Available in the book. Yes. Indeed.

And until the next time we meet, it's goodbye from me, Anita Arnan. A goodbye from me, William Duremberg.