Empire: World History - 48. The History of Slavery

Episode Date: May 2, 2023

One series ends, another dawns. With the Ottomans now behind us, we move on to the history of slavery. Listen as William and Anita discuss what will be covered in the next series, why they want to do it, and tease a few of the jaw-dropping facts to come. Sign up to The Knowledge here: www.theknowledge.com/empire/ LRB Empire offer: lrb.me/empire This episode is sponsored by BetterHelp. Give online therapy a try at betterhelp.com/empirepod. Twitter: @Empirepoduk Goalhangerpodcasts.com Producer: Callum Hill Exec Producer: Jack Davenport 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 podcast, add free listening and a weekly newsletter, sign up to Empire Club at www.mpowerpoduk.com. And welcome to Empire with me Anita Arnan. And me, William Derrimple. So, we have been banging the drum for a while on this. We have a new series starting. And I think we've given you enough indication.

Few clues along the way. A, William, what this might be? What are we going to be talking about? As you know, cliffhangers, cliffhangers and me. Yes, our man of suspense. So, William, what are we doing in this series? So we thought we would do the global history of slavery. There is a great deal of discussion at the moment on slavery,

it along with colonialism in general, suddenly seems to have surfaced. And I think particularly in Britain, where Anita is, where I spend a lot of my time, there's a sudden awareness of quite how much of our national wealth and how much of our history is tied up with these two forces of colonialism and slavery. And in many ways, they're the two things that, although it's not a happy story, they're the two things that turn Britain from being a middle-ranking country in Europe, way behind Spain and Portugal, way behind France and Italy in terms of wealth to the premier economy, not just in Europe, but in the world. We've had a newspaper in this country. It's called The Guardian. For those who you live here,

you'll know what it is. But it has been digging down into the roots of its creation to see what links there are with slavery. And it has been uncovering and publishing these things. And other organisations, you've had sort of National Trust properties wrestling with this idea of, Do we declare what paid for the bricks and mortar here? Do we declare where this stuff actually came from and on whose back it was built? So it's a very red hot topic and nothing proves this more than when you get a prime ministerial comment. So just last week we had our prime minister, Rishi Sunak, standing up before the dispatch box and making this statement. So he was asked whether there should be an apology to the people of African descent living and dead for this country's role in.

slavery and colonialism. And he said, no. What I think our focus should now be on, of course, is understanding our history and all its parts, not running away from it, but right now making sure that we have a society which is inclusive and tolerant of people from all backgrounds. This is something that we on this side of the House, and he's a conservative, are committed to doing and will continue to deliver. But trying to unpick our history is not the right way forward. It's not something that we will focus our energies on. That's a complicated bag of different things he mentions there, isn't it? Because no one can quibble with the need to understand all this. And in a sense, the whole reason we're doing this podcast is to try and understand the role that colonialism and

empire has played in all our histories. But at the same time, he seems to be kind of, when he uses that word unpicking. And it's worth pointing out that the same week that he gave that answer in House of Commons, he appointed as his deputy prime minister a man who's gone on a full scale attack on any historian who made any attempt to examine empire with any degree of impartiality and to look at the dark as well as the brighter sides of 17th, 18th and 19th century British history. And I'm talking about Oliver Darden here, who waged the cultural wars against historians looking at the dark side of empire. It's also really interesting to note the contrast between what he's saying and what Tony Blair said, because he was also challenged,

and he was asked outright whether he was prepared when he was Prime Minister to say sorry for the slave trade. And he was noted as expressing deep sorrow. He said, actually, he said, I have said, we are sorry and I say it again. And that was back in 2007. It was the anniversary, 200th anniversary of the abolition of the slave trade. But compare that now to the kind of mood music that often comes out when there are those, and you may hear from some of them in the series, who are looking into their own familial histories and trying to find out whether their families were built on the wealth of slavery.

And even making the argument that there should be reparations, that is an absolute hot button issue. And there seems to be a side in this argument, a political side, that says reparations is a step too far, because who do we pay these things to? And there is a side that says, we shouldn't even talk about it because it's doing the country down. On the other side, we must pay reparations. And somewhere in the middle, there's us, which is, can we just talk about this stuff? And understand it and get to... And understand it for what it was. And that, I think, is absolutely what we're trying to do with this particular series.

And the first thing that happens, whenever anyone discusses slavery on Twitter is you get a lot of what aboutery saying, what about the white people enslaved in the Barbary Coast? What about the Vikings? What about this? What about that? And so what we've decided to do. do is to look at all of this, to really start at the beginning. Our first episode is going to be David Wengro, looking at the dawn of everything, the whole question of whether human societies have always been hierarchical, whether there are any such things as equal societies, whether there are societies that have had free and unfree, as well as societies which have not. And we want to go through, we want to go through the Romans. We've got Mary Beard on the Romans they've trade

and this extraordinary figure that one-fifth of the people in Italy around the time of Christ were slaves, extraordinary figure. We're working through Kat Jarman talking about the Vikings. We've got Nabil Matar talking about the North Europeans enslaved on the Barbary coast. But then we're going to dive deep in to the most sensitive wound of all, which is the story of the Mid-Atlantic passage. the industrialized slave trade, started by the Royal Africa Company and other slave trading organisations in the 16th, 17th and 18th centuries. And we're going to look at all of this stuff, which is one of the great things about, I think, the podcast form is that it does allow you to dive deep and to really get in the experts

who know this stuff and have spent their life studying it. There are some startling revelations that you're going to come across in this series. and, you know, we're very proud of it already. We've been working on it for a while. But just for a moment, I just want to maybe have a little pause. Of course, you know, there were other colonial European empires. We know this too, the Portuguese Empire. That was crucial in the development of the slave trade.

The Spanish, the French empires were also involved. So right from the get-go, we ask this question again and again. Is it inevitable that if you have empire building and colonialism, that they will go hand in hand with some form of slavery? So we're going to deal with those issues, but we're also going to get to the very, the micro of what it means to enslave another human being, what that feels like, what that looks like. I know, William, you've visited the Caribbean, so you've had a visceral response to that. And I'll talk about something I've seen quite recently as well, which has affected me more than I ever thought it would, actually. And it sort of haunts me.

But why don't we start with your trip to the Caribbean? What happened? Well, the Caribbean is a very complicated place, if you're a historian, because most Brits go to the Caribbean today for, tourism and pleasure. You go there with some fancy hotel and a pool in mind and time on the beach. And yet immediately behind this landscape of pleasure and leisure are these unavoidable reminders of this very, very dark past. And you see these windmills and ruination, often built a very dark stone on Barbados or Antigua. You see these British forts of very similar designs to the sort you see all over India built in the 18th century. And you see these very British

place names, often very Scottish place names. There are whole lines of plantation names in Tobago, for example, which have all the places I know best in Scotland, one after others. You know, you move from sort of Avimor to Kaluddin. And each one of these is the legacy of a Scottish family that fleeing their own poverty, their own difficulties set up deeply inhuman slave plantations in the Caribbean. And moreover, in the process, wiped out the indigenous caribs, who were the indigenous peoples there before. And my own family, or certainly people with my own name, a guy called William Dalrymple signed one of the treaties with the Caribs, which was then broken before the Caribs were massacred and driven to extinction. And also, I mean, it's not my direct part

of the family. But when you go to Trinidad or Tobago, I mean, I certainly couldn't help noticing that while there's only four or five Durumples in the London phone book in the days when we had phone books, there are 20 pages of Dalrymples in the Trinidad and Tobago phone books. Yeah, I mean, all of those things, you read between those lines and it tells a story. Sometimes, they're the story's right in your face. And there's a place that I've just very recently visited in Washington. And if you haven't, if you ever go to America, I really urge you to go see this. It's the National Museum of African American History and Culture. It is one of the most affecting museums that you could possibly visit anywhere. It is, it is startling. From the moment you see it,

the outside, the architecture is breathtaking, but it's what happens when you go inside. And there is a place of darkness down below. You go down this lift, too. The lift itself, it feels somehow they have made it in such a way that you really do feel you're going down into the darkness. Yeah, and then when you go into, and your eyes are sort of adjusting to this demi-light that's in there, what you see on this very long wall that envelops you. And it's almost quite suffocating, actually, from that moment when you go down there, for such an airy building, it's quite an extraordinary thing that they've managed to achieve this with just a feeling, all the names of ships that took slaves across the Middle Passage,

and the number of people who were chained below decks on those boats. and you go through this and then you will come out into a wider space with exhibits and they will all be horrifying or be awful. They're bills of sales of men, women and children, human beings, accounts of slaves and the way they were treated

by terrible overseers and masters. Slave halters, whips, chains. The kind of things that you think, well, human beings really did this to other human beings, the thing that I can't get out of my head And it really, really just actually, I'm not easy to make cry. I don't cry easily, you know this, William. But I just stood in front of this thing and I just couldn't stop myself because they had a pair of shackles, like manacles, for a grown man.

And underneath them, they had a tiny pair of manacles for a five-year-old child. Somebody specially thought of tiny little hands and wrists that needed to be bound. and put those together and forged them and then put them on a tiny human and sold that human. And it was just something about just seeing the size of that and just thinking about who they might have been placed on, which I just found really so difficult and still find very, very difficult. And of course there are other extraordinary things in this museum, which actually show you how current the conversation, why the conversation is still very, very current. They had this little video of Washington, as we recognize it.

You know, we've seen footage of the Million Man March. We've seen the Obama inauguration. We've seen the Trump inauguration. We've seen the Biden inauguration. You know, that whole long stretch between monuments filled with human beings. And there is this piece of footage which runs on a loop, which is taken in 1923 when the Ku Klux Klan filled that space. So you have regiments and regiments of men in white hoods, walking. walking down this enormously familiar road in Washington, demanding a time when little manacles

were made for little hands. And that to me is just astonishing. They're in different ends of the museum, but it is really quite, quite the experience. So we will be spending quite a lot of time talking about the Middle Passage. It's one of the most affecting museums in the world. And I've met a whole variety of different people that have gone there and just been in gobsmatt, literally, they just cannot understand the scale of it. So we're going to try and do, or not this podcast, something that approximates that scale and tell you stories, often very uncomfortable ones, that bring that reality to life. Let's see, we also want to do the bigger context.

We want to put this right in the wider global history of mankind and what it says about us as a species. And what it continues to say about us as a species, because although I think it might be comforting to consign this to a part of American history and Wilberforce and therefore all solved, we will speak to somebody whose grandparents own slaves. That's how close it is to our time. So I'll say no more about that. But do stay with us for this series because we care about it a lot and we think it's really quite an eye-opener. first episode is coming out later in the week. It is David Wendgro. He'll be out on Thursday talking about the dawn of everything, his extraordinary book on everything. It's about everything, William. It says it on the cover. It does what it says on the tin. So yes, do join us for that. We look forward to hearing from you on Thursday.