TRIGGERnometry - How Britain Built the Greatest Empire In History - Dan Snow

Episode Date: August 15, 2026

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And it's an extraordinary story. But the Sill Island, off the coast of Eurasia, and then around about 1700, 1750, it goes absolutely mental. We are on the doorstep of the new world. This is epic. So you've got the British and Irish archipelago locked down. You're not trying to conquer France, so you're like, lads. All that energy, boom to the West.

It will build the largest empire that the world has ever seen. In North America, the Britsch shot. They conquer Canada. Canada, they conquer the whole of the USA east of the Mississippi. They briefly conquer Cuba, they conquer several islands in the Caribbean. There were moments where it did go wrong. Oh, that's, yeah. Why did we lose the United States?

Why would you bring this up? Many of you have commented that you are seeing too many ads in our videos. We've listened to your feedback and disabled YouTube ads in the middle of our interviews. Can we ask you a favor in return? According to our analytics, most of you who watch our show are not subscribed to the channel. Please help us to continue bringing you fantastic content by subscribing today, hitting that like button and leaving a comment with your thoughts on this video. Dan Snow, welcome back to Trigononji.

Good to be back, lads. The first interview we did, the history of England, it did over a million downloads, absolutely one, no doubt, or hands down one of our favorite episodes we've ever recorded. It's really kind of me, but I think that's not, I think that's because people just love a good, chunk of history, right? We learn it at school. We learn little bits of it here and there, and it's nice to join all together sometimes. Well, we almost did that. And what I was going to say is we did a whole two hours. And at the hour 50 mark, you were like, we're just getting to the best bit. And I was like we've got 10 minutes left. Yeah. You guys look like you were about to have a stroke.

No, no, no, no, no. We wanted to talk and you said, we're getting to the good bit, which is, of course, the Industrial Revolution. This is the bit I know about. And the British Empire. Yeah. So let's get into it, starting there. All right, boys. So, yeah, it's really one of the most exciting questions in the whole of human history. I'm not saying that because I'm British, I'm British, Canadian, my mum's Canadian. So I'm a product of this imperial system, but it is one of the most extraordinary stories, right? But it's a little island off the coast of Eurasia for about 4,000 years. I don't really do very much. It plays no hugely significant part in human affairs.

And then around about 1700, 1750, it goes absolutely mental. And will build an empire. It will build the largest empire that the world has ever seen, which at its peak about 200 years later, quite short-lived empire, we can talk about that as well, but it's peak 1922-ish, roughly a quarter of the world's population and a quarter of the Earth's area, and that's underplaying it for a reason we can talk about, but a quarter of the world's area formerly under the command of this funny old island in the North Sea. I mean, it's an extraordinary story. Why? And with enormous implications,

it's why the world speaks English today, it's why many of the world's great cities exist, the form they do, global capitalism, ideas about democracy, it's why there's, you know, parliaments and speakers around the world, law, all of these ideas, universities, all that kind of stuff, very much stems from this bizarre period of hegemony. Like, why did that happen? It's such an exciting question. And what was it about this little island that meant that it could happen here before it happened anywhere else? Obviously, it's people by heroes and God was an Englishman. So, nice, good pod, lads. So that was the argument given at the time.

But, of course, the truth is, the truth is much more interesting in a way, because if you can work out, like, any, the exciting thing about history is trying to work out why you get these explosions of creativity and, you know, whether it's engineering or naval might, whatever it might be, why that happens and how do you kind of replicate that? It's quite an interesting thing, right? So there's, A, it's interesting to study, but be it, there are public policy implications in today. How do you...

Is it luck? Is it climate? If you jump through certain circumstances that can't be repeated, or are there things that you can do to sort of encourage those kind of flowerings? And it doesn't just have to be a military might. It can be in other areas as well, of course.

So look, you can start, you can start, if you like, with geography. Bear with me, folks. Britain has quite interesting advantages. There's a lot of coal on Britain. It becomes, it's actually the Saudi Arabia of coal, you might want to call it. And so in the 90s, it becomes important a bit later on when the Industrial Revolutionary gets going.

It sits upwind of Europe, guys. This is important. This is why people thought God was an Englishman, Protestant wind blue. Because Britain, if you're the Rhine estuary, if you're North Germany, your Holland, your Belgium, your France, Britain is like a giant aircraft carrier sitting upwind of you. In an age where everyone sails around, think upwind's really important. because it's quite hard to go up towards. Upwind means towards the direction the wind's coming from.

So you have to sort of zigzag towards the wind. Oh, no. But Britain, you can just, British ships can leave Portsmouth, leave Plymouth, leave Chatham, and be on the Dutch coast, be on the French coast, within a few hours, right? So that kind of matters as well. So that wind is like, we have better deep water harbours in Southern England than they do in France. Very exciting news. So we have Portsmouth, we've got Plymouth, like I mentioned.

The French have got no deep water harbours on that north coast. So people who go into Calais on your holidays, go to the harbour, what do you notice? They're all fake, they're all built out massive concrete harbors. You know, you're going on the ferry. They're lovely big harbours, but they're all constructing in the 20th century. So the French have got this permanent, nightmarish problem. Have they got nowhere that you can put a navy and an invasion fleet

full of soldiers and keep them there until the wind's good enough to sail out and invade Britain? So it's a nightmare for the French in the... we'll come, we can probably come back to that as well. So there are quite a few advantages. The big advantage, though, is that for most of a record history, you've got Eurasia, Silk Roads, spice, you know, wonderful trading networks, rich civilizations, the Persians, Alexander Great Greeks, Romans in Mughal, India. And they're all sitting in the middle of this global sort of landmash, which they think is the world, right, stretches from Korea to Cornwall and to Ireland, okay? Britain's on the edge of that.

We're all, you know, Britain's, Britain and Ireland trying to get in on the action a little bit. And we go and fight in France, and there's things that sort of happen. Suddenly, one of the greatest revolutions in the history of the world takes place. Christopher Columbus, trying to get to Asia, trying to get to Korea and Indonesia, that bit I talked about on the other side. He sails west and crashes into an entirely new world, what he thinks is a new world. And then Britain looked at the map, and it's really excited. You go to a medieval map of the world, and Britain is like, Britain and Ireland, like,

tiny squeezed on the edge, you can go to one in Hartford, like the map of Mundy in Hartford, looking at it on the wall. And then within a generation, people start producing maps, and you've got the map we recognise today, North and South America. You look at that a map and thinking, hold on a minute, what's in the middle? What's in the middle of this map? Bristol and Ireland, this archipelago. So suddenly, it's easier to sail out of Bristol, Liverpool, cork to get to the new world, like I talked about. Any European traffic's got to kind of squeeze through the English Channel up around the north of Scotland, God, for bid. So you're sort of sitting, your throat, your heel is on the windpipe of the great European

trading powers. Okay, so your venices and your genuas and your Constantinopals, that had been like in the middle of the whole thing, but suddenly they're like, oh, wait on a minute, we're nowhere now. Because so Britain and Ireland are like, wait a minute. And that's why in the 1400s, it's a mad situation. The historian says, it's the peninsulas of the peninsula, Eurasia. Here it's a little peninsula of Eurasia. It's the peninsula. It's the peninsula. of the peninsula, right? It is Portugal, northern Spain, Brittany, Cornwall, Devon, right? Those are the places that in the space of 100 years go from being backwaters to being, we are on the doorstep of the new world. This is epic. And it's the Portuguese and the Spanish started and they start sailing

around. So they do two things. They sail around Africa and access. The greatest, we're always advertising on the podcast, aren't we cut out the middleman? Well, so suddenly the whole of the silk road, is getting absolutely, you're completely hijacking the silver road because you're sailing around into the Indian Ocean, picking up pepper and spices and silk and everything you want to buy in Asia, and just bringing it back to Europe, Western Europe, Lisbon, Bristol, Plymouth, right? And then all these merchants sitting in Venice and Egypt and Baghdad are like, oh, we have our camels and we take our spices across and we charge a nice little fee on the way through. they've just been completely, they've made redundant, right?

Like the way you're broadcasting this straight to the audience on YouTube. You're not going via, you know, a publishing thing. You're not going via a TV channel. No, no. The good people of the world are watching this, you know, as we produce it. Same sort of thing. So the Spanish start pushing West to try and do the same sort of thing. They discover gold and silver in the Americas.

The English, the French get involved. The Swedes get involved. The Dutch get involved. They're all sort of piling out to West trying to take advantage of this new world. So Christopher Columbus, 1492, Henry the 7th sends a Italian guy, Giovanni Cabote, who we remember as John Cabot. And he leaves Bristol and he goes and arrives at Newfoundland, the most exciting part of the New World, although I love it. So that is sort of, they don't know about the Gulf Streams. They go, why are we on the same latitude now?

Why is everything so barren and ripping cold up here? It's a nightmare. Francis Trey goes round the world. First English captains around the world. He lands in California, claims California's New York. Albion. Very sad that didn't sustain. You know, that would have been great. He claims a couple of islands off the south of Argentina, off Cape Horn weirdly as well. We're not sure as those are. And he gets back. So there's these, so explorers are sort of landing in places. They're claiming

doesn't mean very much at this point, but they're claiming them. What we should also say is the key to the English and then the British Empire is Ireland as well. So Ireland's the first colony. So English people have been attacking into Ireland since 13th century. That colonisation process is really ramping up in the 1500s, the plantations of Ulster, lots of people, colonies, so people moving to, people being moved through native population, thrown off good farmland, Munster, Ulster, places like that. So that's the key staging point for Empire.

A learning how to do empire in Ireland, right? And then you start to get the, Queenland's, they try and have a colony, you probably heard it in Rowanoke, the lost colony in the 1580, it doesn't work out, disappears, no one knows what happens to it. So, I mean, it's just littered, with fails. Like if you, people compare this to the space race that we're in today, which is private companies, adventurers, individuals, they are trying things. They're going bankrupt, they've got rockets

exploding on the pad. They're asking, you know, this is, the row and oat goes bust, doesn't work, disappears. But you get your first, Jamestown in the early 1600s. So that's a settlement in Chesapeake that sort of just about works, Bermuda. And then you go into the Caribbean and, in the 16th, and 1620 you get Massachusetts, famously the Pilgrim fathers, and then you get just late in 1620s, Rhode Island, Connecticut. In 1620s, you get Barbados. Now, Barbados is good, because that's finally a place that will pay for itself because of sugar. Because there's a revel that you can grow sugar in Barbados. So you have indentured laborers, either the native population or prisoners from

England, Ireland, Scotland, and then eventually enslaved Africans will grow vast amount of sugar, and that is banana. That's a cash crop. That pays for the colony because the government doesn't want these to be lost leaders. That's why you establish colony and it just goes bust

and the government's, I'm not bailing this out. You're a bunch of crazy people who wouldn't try and living a rock in the New World. Like, what do you want? So that works. St. Kitts, Nevis, 1620s,

Jamaica, 1650s, Cromwell invades Hispaniola, gets kicking and goes and takes Jamaica and stuff. So that's all going on the New World. So little bits, little, little islands, some attempts to colonize, eccentric Protestantism important here because people thought they wanted to build a new world

driven by kind of evangelicalism. They wanted to escape what they saw as brutal oppression back in England and Europe because they were different kind of Protestant to the English crown. And then also Protestant mission, which is drive the hated Catholics out of the new world. So you're doing God. So it looks like fortune and glory boys. It's great. You're doing it's that wonderful cocktail that drives all of us at humans. You're making money, you're building reputation, and you're doing God's work. I mean, it's, you know, what's not the like. So you are, you're driving out the Spanish who are diabolical. You're going to make a ton of cash, and your name will be remembered. So it's, it's, that's all working. And then just as that's happening,

actually, funny thing is the first, John D is one of, he's, he's Queen Elizabeth's Astrology, Elizabeth the first structure. He's the first man who comes up the idea of a British Empire. He coins the term British Empire. He realised he's picturing this idea, our destiny is to go west, Ireland, and then the new world. Let's do this. Weirdly, the first, I think the first settlement in some ways is in Baffin Island in the Arctic. It's a mad story. And it's, I think to this day the oldest English remains of building work because Guy called Froebyshire was sent by Queen Elizabeth to try and get to Asia through the north-west passage,

which they thought might be possible. You can do it now, but it was all frozen up back then. Endless people got there and freeze and death and dying miserable. They got to Baffin Island. So that's weirdly the first and they discover some rocks there. I think it might be gold to know not to be gold. So there's just these eccentric attempts, these little pinprits. East is different because in the Western Hemisphere,

it's a matter of conquest, colonisation, move your own guys, outgrow stuff. the indigenous people sweeper sides, there's nothing very civilized going on there, right? That was their view. East is different. You're arriving in place that you acknowledge our pretty successful, coherent states quite advanced. So what you're asking for is factory, early 1600s, the first decade, the East India company, this British private company that has the monopoly on trade. It goes out and it establishes a factory there called sort of a warehouse, really, in Java, in Bantam in Java.

It's like trading out. trading outpost, Jakarta. There's a little teeny piece. I mean, the local guys are, oh, that's fine. They give them a little piece of sovereign territory, which will prove to be a mistake for those Asian rulers. So a little fact, you have a little factory, and then to guard it, you put some, you know, a little wall up,

and then you can have a few little soldiers protecting it. So the little, the virus has been injected into the way. So that's near Jakarta. That moves quite quickly to a place called Surat just north of Bombay, in India. And then, very weirdly, the first, I think the first sort of formal possession of the crowns, in a way, the first piece of some ways, the first piece of the British Empire is the, it's rather unusually as an under malucas in Indonesia called Run, which is very famous for getting particular spices and condiments from. And they, English people arrive there and they

go, we hate the Dutch. Do you know the Dutch? We hate them so much as those sort of genocidal maniacs. Please, can we swear allegiance to King James, in the hope that King James will then protect them, which is unable to. So, run is weirdly the start of the British Empire. tiny island that doesn't end up being British for much English or British for much longer. So that's the beginning. So we have a good setting for colonizing the new world effectively because of the position. What about the technological side on the industrial revolution itself? Why do these inventions happen here?

And, you know, one of the things I've also read about is how much the technology really just allowed people to work harder as opposed to revolutionizing the process, etc. Familiar to all of us. Why does it all happen here first? Why does the Industrial Revolution happen here? Well, this is such a huge question, and it's one that historians really argue about whether empire is sort of separate to, are there two things going at the same time? My guess is that they are linked because they happen in the same time and the same place. So as England and Britain are sort of pushing ahead with its trade, pushing ahead with overseas power projection.

also things in England start happening a bit later on, England and Scotland particularly start happening a bit later on. So it's certainly true that the desire to build better ships and have better navigation equipment involves having to embrace science. So you'll have heard of a longitude, latitude, things like that. So in working out to get ships safely, making these horrific journeys, both to the East Indies and to the Americas, just nightmarish. You're obviously

constantly thinking how to make the ships better, and you're constantly thinking how to navigate more effectively. And so there's a bunch of breakthroughs. The great advantage that Europe has, people use China as a counter example here, is that Europe is incredibly competitive. So you've got, if I have an invention in Europe, and if I'm Portuguese, and the Portuguese crown doesn't like it, I'm like, I'm off to Madrid, mate, and it's a few days I'm in Madrid. You have an invention in Nanking, and the emperor doesn't like it, then that's the end of you and your invention. There's no other market. There's no other set.

There's no other buyer for you. So famously, Christopher Columbus goes to, ends up going with this, funded by the Spanish. He goes to Portuguese. He goes to another aristocrat for a sort of privately funded expedition. He, annoyingly, he goes to the French, and he goes to King Henry the 7th of England, one of the great counterfactions. Magistram Henry the 7th paid for that. He goes right, shops around and eventually finds a client.

which is great, which is that's, you know, that's the kind of silicon value. There's lots and lots of bench capital around and lots of opportunities. You're not just trying to go through one. So you get a situation where they're stealing off each other constantly. The English will capture a big Spanish ship off the, it's Portuguese ship of the Azores, and the key thing is that documents on there, star charts, navigational guys. Then you bring those back. You're using printing presses to try and pump those out.

So it's driving scientific and technological change. So ships are getting ever more effective. And then so are weapons, because you're not only fighting indigenous groups in these places, you're arriving in a place like Run Island, and you have to fight the Dutch there. So Europe's competition is now being exported globally. And the Caribbean is absolute shit show, right? It's just islands everywhere. I mean, you go to St. Lucia, it changes hands like seven times.

So British ships, again, you capture a French ship, they're making some quite nice 74-gun ships at the moment. You just, you replicate it, copy it, and make it slightly better. Canon, that's true of canon. And so what's weird is initially, in the 1600s, when Britain goes out and meets the other cultures, they meet on quite an equal basis. Even in the Americas, the indigenous people are quite often able to push back,

and it's quite close in some ways. Asian people certainly are, you know, the Mugan. Emperor is mighty, and it runs much of what to say, India, and you arrive, you're like, okay, look, we're just here to trade, mate. You know, you guys are magnificent. But over the next 150 years, kind of pace of change, the radical pace of change in North West Europe and England particularly will mean that by 1800, you're able to outgun, you're able to just completely annihilate. But I cannot say this strong enough. It's shipped technology. It's the Vikings of the modern world. The Western Europeans, the Portuguese, Spanish, English, French,

together, and it's the Brits who will really take advantage of this, they work out how to put ships on the water that can go long distance, take heavy loads, and are able to pack a bigger punch than anything else anywhere in the world. Even when they get to India, on land, you can't compete with the Mughals. On sea, you absolutely trash them. They don't have anything like it. So we work out how to put heavy guns on ships

that can smash other ships to firewood, and also go to ports. Remember, this is before trains or cars port planes. everything goes by water, everything, right? You want to move food, you want to move goods, you want to move people. So India is just, the coasts of India are just alive with trade, right?

It's easier to get from Newcastle to Dunkirk that is to take a wagon of stuff over from Newcastle to Carlisle. So that's why these, oh yeah, you're like, well, British maritime, what's that mean, what's it mean? It's not about winning big battles against me, it's about arriving at your enemy port,

and just going, right, lads, we're turning off your trade until you do exactly what we want to do. So even if you're the Mughal Empire, you're like, all right. I mean, it's really annoying, but I mean, it's only, it's Goa, it's one port, and just pay them or give them trading terms that they would need. I'm running a continental-sized empire. I don't actually have ships that can compete with them, but they're sort of, they're an annoyance, but so you're able to start,

so the early English Empire, Dutch Empire is just, it's just little key nodes and in a way, we could talk about as the empire develops and becomes big red blocks on the map, actually, lots of politicians in London, like, oh, Jesus Christ, now I've got to run these places. What am I to do with the Sudan? It's total pay. Everyone hates us. You know, Christian missionaries is going and razze everyone up, and then they get chopped up, and I've got to send red coats and deal with that.

I don't. If I'm the Chinese model today, the American model, is you control key ports. You control little nodes. You get your trade done, nice and cheap, small footprint, big, you get rich and you haven't invested that much. So that's, we'll talk about that, how the empire transforms from little factories and little nodes everywhere to being big old Roman Empire style, big provinces and things like that. Here's something nobody tells you about getting older.

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Go to Buyoptimizers.com slash trigger or click the link in the description. Use code Trigonometry and grab it before it's gone. I think availability of venture capital. I think patent laws are important. So inventors come to England because they're confident that their inventions will be respected. They will be able to keep the money that will accrue to them. They'll be enjoy the profits of their invention. So you get French people come over bringing steam technology.

They don't want to develop it in France. They don't ever in Britain. So that's the law. That's patents. It's not very glamorous, but it's super important. And to a certain extent, and it's the parliamentary system. You know, if you own a factory, the king can't just go, I want that. You know, you're like, no, you need an act of parliament.

If you're going to put a railway through my land or you're going to do something. So it's imperfect. But it's what we talk about today, why liberal democracy tends to do quite well, because people are confident investing them. They're confident building long. It takes a long time to build a massive mill. And it's a lot of capital. You're not going to do it in Russia

because the Tsar's going to change his mind. Or that's the problem with capricious arbitrary monarchs, right? So a lot of that is going on in Britain. And then you get this virtuous circle. The profits of the sugar trade, the slave trade, mean that you've got lots of very rich people in Britain who are looking to invest their money. They look at these northern industrial.

who are doing interesting things with textile, you know, bit-making textiles. They're investing in that. That's producing more and more money. So you're starting to, and then, and then that tips over into armaments, the industry, you start to be able to make better cannon, heavier cannon, caronades that would smash French ships to peace at Trafalgar. And so things just, then at some point, around about sort of 1750s to 1800, the Brits get qualitatively better than other people as well, which we'll talk about.

Now, some of our American friends are going to be listening to this, Dan, and they're going to be going. So you've outlined it all beautifully. There were moments where it did go wrong. Oh, that's, yeah. So why did we lose the United States? Why would you bring this up? Too painful to talk about. So I think the thing about the great empires is that they lose a lot, and they come back.

So, like, if you look at Rome, Rome spent his whole time getting exhausted. handed to it. And the Roman people just go, another army, let's go. People should know when they've been conquered, to quote Maximus, right? And the Romans don't know when they've been conquered. The Brits are pretty good at just, they get beaten and then they just, they keep going. And in fact, the weird thing about the 1600s is Britain is an absolute basket case, right? The English kill a king. They have a, they have a Republican experiment that doesn't last.

So there's a, one of the bloodiest wars in British history, British and Irish history, the civil wars, they kill the king. Oliver Cromwell tries a republic that comes to collapses. Charles, James II, his son is expelled, or is forced out, abdicated. You know, it's a shambles. It was known as the land of revolutions, right? But what's going on on the surfaces, the politics is quite wild. What's going on the surfaces?

The other thing, this is the key point here, folks, is you get a kind of government, effectively, it's England and then Britain can borrow more money at lower rates of income. interest, the bond markets, folks. As we know, it will come down as that. So in the 1690s, partly using kind of Dutch techniques and the Dutch financial techniques they've pioneered over at Amsterdam, you get the invention of the, you know, the Bank of England, you get these kind of these financial and economic innovations like the stock exchange, it becomes easy to swap stock in companies, you know, it's a fungible market. You get, and the British, and the

British government is overseen by Parliament. So when the British government says, right, this is what we're spending, the French don't produce a budget. The King just kind of sells a bit of jewelry and pays for some shit. The British government has to like present the budget and backbenchers vote on it. And so people are happy to lend the British government money because it's backed up by parliament. They're saying, yes, we will pay land tax. You can sell a government bond. It's guaranteed by parliament. It's not guaranteed by the king. Louis XVI's like, yeah, I'm going to borrow a load of money. and if I don't pay it back too bad. So the interest payments are brutal on that money.

So England and then Britain are to borrow vast amounts of money at lower rates of interest than anyone else in the world. And that really is the end of the discussion because England, as a smaller economy than France, can build much bigger navies and spend more money on fighting than the French, for example. So it's just hugely effective. The other problem with the French is the French, a tough neighbourhood, right? French have got a problem.

The Dutch to the north. the Germans, Spanish to the South, Italy. So the French are building fleets to deal with the Brits. They've got to have a fleet in the Mediterranean, different kinds of ships in the Trinian, they can't get all the way around. They've got to have massive land armies on the Rhine. They can't decide what they are. The French can't decide what they are.

Are we a land empire? Are we trying to conquer Germany and northern Italy? Or are we trying to colonize Canada? You can't do both. The Brits is great. The best thing Henry VIII ever did was totally balls up. He's the last king. He was marching around France.

I'm going to be king of France, like all is medieval forebats. The best thing that ever happens to England and Britain is that finally, the stupid monarchs of this country give up this mad idea of trying to conquer France, right? They lose, Mary loses Calais, that's it. Calais gone 1550s. And it's like, okay, we're not a European power anymore. Oh, what we could do is turn west. So Britain's, England's able to focus its entire military strategic,

focus on the new world, on the rest of the world. It's got this, it's, it's particularly when England and Scotland are united, so you haven't got problems within the island anymore, invading the northern neighbours. So suddenly that's, that unity is quite helpful. You've thoroughly conquer islands in the late 1500s. So you've got the British and Irish archipelago locked down. You're not trying to conquer France. So you're like, lads, all that energy, boom, to the west. Now, So, the American colonies extend along the eastern seaboard through the 1600s and the 1700s. I couldn't not mention the Seven Years War here, which is the most important war in history, folks. The most successful war in British history, when really Britain is that Britain is transformed into a massive global power.

A couple of things happened, this is the 1750s. Britain for the first time, it goes, it has these little toeholds in India, but Indian Mughal power is collapsing in the centre. The Afghans have invaded Delhi, smashed the old place. a bit, Mugap is imploding. So all of the provinces, so now all these little English and British and the French and the Portuguese little ports, and they realize, in this kind of chaos that's enveloping India, they go, well, now's our opportunity to smash our European neighbours, but also we need to sort of stabilize this region, because at the moment it's absolutely chaos, we can't make any money. If there's a sort of civil war going on in Bengal between Indians, So what the Europeans start doing is they get dragged into the interior, right?

And this is something that the Chinese may discover with their kind of new policy of sort of pseudo-imperialism, is that you can have a port on the coast somewhere. What happens when the interior just collapsed, the government collapses and suddenly, you know, your port is threatened from instability or from, you know. So the Brits end up kind of pushing inland, effectively. The French are the same. So the Brits go, Brits are in Calcutta, which was a village when the Brits arrived. The French are just up the river in a place in all as I've heard of called Chandlerna Gaw,

but if the French were won, Chandlerna Gaw would be the Calcutta of the world, you know. And the Brits pushed a little force in 1757 up the Hougli River, and they smash this French fort to pieces and drive the French out of Bengal, and then install, then fight this great battle, Plessy, people who are familiar with, which largely won through bribery and install, and the British, for the first time, become the actual rulers of Bengal. They previously tried to sort of find a local ruler they can rule through, a puppet, And now they're like, we're just going to do it ourselves.

So suddenly Britain is a land empire in Asia, a completely different setup. And it will be quite a difficult transition. At the same time, there's the most successful war in history. That's going on in India. In North America, the British wrecked shot. They conquer Canada. They conquer the whole of the USA east of the Mississippi.

They conquer, they briefly conquer Cuba. They conquer several islands in the Caribbean. And by the way, in Far East, they conquer Manila as well in the Philippines. It's an astonishing war. And it was said at the time, the bells are worn threadbare for the ringing of victory. And while we're on the subject, it's the greatest name of victory in British history no one's ever heard of, right? Everyone's heard of Shafaga.

Didn't change a thing. The Battle of Kiberand Bay. The French, at the end of this war, like, we have had an absolute shocker. And so we're going to put it all on black. We're going to gamble everything. We're going to try and invade the British homeland. We've lost Canada. We have lost all of our forts in, you know, Fort Duquesne has now become Pittsburgh, named

after the British Prime Minister Pitts. You know, this is through the American Midwest. This is a catastrophe. We've lost all our lovely, fantastic Guadeloupe, these fantastically wealthy Caribbean islands. So we are going to gamble everything. Late 1759. Big problems, as you know, as I've already said. The French fleet has to leave to go and pick up the army in a different location because they can't all meet in one place.

They sail round from Brest. They try and pick up their invading army in southern Brittany. The British follow them. And as night falls, they see the British coming with a gale. It's November. And they go, the British will never. We'll hide in the shallows here in Key Brom Bay. It's a nightmare of the reef-strewn rocky hellhole, crashing waves, big gale coming in from the west.

And it's night. They can, we'll anchor in here. will stay, the Brits will be in big trouble. And Admiral Hawke, the legend, crowds, orders his fleet to put up more sails, increase speed, follow the French into this uncharted territory. And they go in there, they fire point blank broadsides at French ships. They sink immediate, like it's an absolute catastrophe for the French. Ships blasted to pieces, astonishing bravery, and seamanship is the point. So you're starting to see these ships are getting very, very better in terms of engineering. The British introduce exams for officers,

meritocracy to a certain extent. Obviously patronage still matters, but if you're going to be in command of one of the king's ships, you can't just be effectless tough. You can do that in the army, because all we've got to do in the army is stand there while bullets whiz. All you've got to do in the army is to have a ramrod straight back and give an example to your men. Is it always said in the British army, officers teach their men how to die. Sargent's teach them out of fight. So all you've got to do is a young officer if you've went, you know, come out of and just go, all right, lads, here we are. Whereas if you're in command of one of the most

expensive objects ever created that point of history, King's shit, you've got to know what you're doing. So anyway, they're going in there, absolutely annihilate this French force and that's at the end of this year of victory. 1759, when HMS victory, Nelson's HMS victory, is laid down that year and called victory because of the year of victories. So that

gives, now, come back to your question, that gives, the American, North American Empire, is now as big as the empire carved out by Alexander the Great. Very briefly, this one glorious moment in British history, Britain controls from the Arctic to Louisiana to New Orleans. A vast empire, the whole of Eastern Canada, the whole of North America, eastern Mississippi. And what do the American colonists do? Very cleverly indeed. There you go. You guys have defeated all of our enemies now. The French are gone from North America.

So why do we need to, we don't need to, we don't need you around anymore. Thank you very much. And by the way, that huge New North American Empire requires force to protect it from the Spanish, particularly the indigenous people, or the people who live in Ohio and down through the American Midwest. They know all these indigenous people at the Choctaw, the Cherokee, they still need policing and they don't want the Brits down, they want America. This is a big, complicated, messy empire now, right? And London's like, that's going to be quite expensive. Do you want to pay some taxes for that? And the Americans go, we're not paying any taxes unless we can have our representatives in London,

which, by the way, is one of my great counterfactual, one of my great moment's history, Benjamin Franklin said, we'll just send MPs to an imperial parliament in London from the American colonies. Doesn't seem that unreasonable a request, to be fair. I know. I agree.

And can imagine what a wonderful country we'll be living today. Stretching from Kent to San Francisco. It would be so cool. Anyway, didn't happen. Well, there's all sorts of interesting reasons why it didn't happen. But didn't happen. So slowly, both sides,

you know, it escalates, the British show a very, very clumsy statesmanship. The Americans don't want to pay taxes. They also realize strategically, they don't really need to be part of this empire anymore. There's going to be great opportunities now if they go off by themselves because there's no immediate, there's no kind of existential threat as there was from the Frenchmen. And so they break away. The Brits then attempt to fight. The Brits send the largest, as we are sitting here now 250 years ago, the Brits send the largest European expeditionary force ever sent abroad to retake New York in the summer of 1776, the Declaration of Independence takes place, the Brits can't defeat the Americans. And all of the European enemies of Britain

all jump in and turn it into a global war. The Spanish threatened Gibraltar, which they are hopping mad at the Brits own. They've owned it for about 70 years now. I mean, they still are. They start to still are. I understand. I mean, in a way, understand. You look at a map, I think, I must be really not. My granddad is fortress commander at Gibralto. Anyway, so they are, so they put a lot of pressure on that, which for the Brits is sort of as important, if not more important, than North America. The French are just sailing around the Caribbean Islands, wrecking shock, and the Brits are going to protect their sugar islands. And in the end, a kind of astonishing pincorote move very effectively between George Washington's American Army and the French fleet and the French army and the French army and the Chesapeake and destroy neutralize a British army in Virginia. Well, the great naval defeats of British history, folks. Very difficult to talk about. The French defeat, the British.

It's a draw really, but the British do not press the attack home and are not able to rescue this force. And the Brits go, this is too expensive. We can't cope with this. Adam Smith, by the way, so the Scottish man who's sort of coming up with the ideas, tenants of capitalism this time, he goes, you're crazy. You don't need them to be colonies.

Colonies are expensive for all the reasons I've said. You'll pay for forts. Just trade with, we'll all make much more money if we just trade open. It's a very interesting thing going on there. And indeed, it's true. American colonies break away, but become an enormous market for British goods. And obviously, the subsequent relationship between Britain and America is well established. It is quite sort of beneficial to both.

And the Brits are able to go and sell railways and enjoy access to the American market. But, yes, so those colonies break away. But most of the North American colleagues not break away, let's just remember. So Canada, Nova Scotia, and in the Caribbean colonies, not break away. So these 13 colonies have gone. And so that's disaster. That's a really interesting, weird moment in this story. In the 1780s, everyone's like Britain's doomed.

It's not. But actually, Britain had enormous friends. France bankrupted. French, you feel sorry with the French. They went all in, helping the Americans. The Americans went to the peace treaty. And the French and Americans like, we are going to make Britain pay, man. And the Americans and Brits did a little side deal.

And actually, they were both cool with that. And the Americans abandoned the French. So the French got nothing for that war, other than embarrassing the Brits. They got, and the French Revolution happens, like 10 less than 10 years later. They absolutely bankrupt themselves, going all in to try and get American defenders, achieve no concrete outcomes for them at all.

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Start your free trial at Shopify.com.uk slash trigger. Start your free trial at Shopify.com. UK slash trigger. But and then you get the great revolutionary, you know, what was called the Great War at the time. So French Revolution happens. We were in a couple of years Britain and France are at war. They're at war for a generation until 1815, so from 1793 to 1815. And in that and that is this Britain turns itself into this astonishing military power.

It's able to access the trade of the world. it's able to access capital, it's able to borrow money from the rest of the world, while block it blockading France, starving France. It gobbles up the colonies of everyone else. It takes South Africa off the Dutch. It helps to destroy Spanish power in North America. At one point in that was, they've forgotten a moment in the American, a British empire. The garrison of South Africa took it upon itself to invade Buenos Aires, the British.

Amazing, with no permission from London. That's the thing about empire. It's crumbling frontiers, we call it. So often it's not London going, next we will invade over here. It's often like you see the remnant, it's local commanders, local people going, right, we're going over there. And we're going to take that land. And London's often like, please stop doing that. Because what happens to that 18th, 9th century, is like George Washington famously accidentally started the French Indian War.

Is once British people are killed, the government's like, oh, you have to do something now. So often in the 19th in Africa, it's like missionaries going going, we're going to convert a much Christianity. They get smashed the beers, chopped the pieces, the locals. And then the, you know, the newspapers go, British Christians murdered by barbarous tribes. So the British go, right, can you please detach a column of infantry to go and take this a completely random bit of territory miles from anywhere? And it's exactly, and we talk about it today, don't we, how the cost is often born

by the public and the profits are enjoyed by the mine owners, the loggers, the loggers, you know, whatever it is, these private interests quite interesting. So anyway, so the garrison of South Africa goes and embades and enjoys some initial sessions for a very brief, exciting period for the British. They think, well, do we just take over the Spanish Empire in South America? Like, is this going to be, you know, is there going to be, you know, Canada, effectively in the north, and then Argentina, Chile, is this going to be British? And then, fascinatingly, the people of Buenos Aires fight a kind of guerrilla campaign

and kick the British out. And so that's a big, that's a reverse. So the British suffer defeats all the time in this period. But their financial, their economic and eventually, their industrial muscle ensures that they can kind of come back. And so, yeah, South America, but South Africa, start things to Africa and then islands, the India, the various Indian confederations

you might have heard of Mike Tipu Sultan in Mysore, the Brits, like four wars in Mysore against Tibuson, the 1790s, the Maratas in central India. So slowly the British are being, they control Bengal, so to protect Bengal, you have to invade the next guy, and then to do that, so again, you're all drawn into the interior. And then we'll come back to that,

and there's a great moment, and some people say the whole of the British Empire in Africa was acquired in a sort of absence of mind. Like it was, you basically want to control Cape Town and you want to control the Suez Canal. But then to do that, there's trouble to just be on the front of you. You end up controlling the largest empire of the world's ever seen

because you've got to come and go, well, you've got to control Egypt. The problem with Egypt, you've got to control Sudanis. So again, you're sucked in Sudan. You've got to pull into Central Africa. So it's strange. But yes, that's the American answer, I think that's roughly speaking true. But I should say that there were limits of British power. The British could not send anything like enough troops to conquer, reconquer the American colonies.

It was just way beyond the ability of the British state at that point. simply because we just didn't have the manpower. We just couldn't send the troops. Yeah, yeah. So the Brits are hiring Germans called Hesians. Tens of thousands of them to fight. The Brits cannot, you know, the Brits are not the Soviet Union in the 20th century. The Brits just don't have, you can't, remember what I said about the Brits. The Brits have developed quite a nice model. The poor old French is fighting the bloody Germans, fighting with Dutch, fighting, and trying to maintain the Navy. The Brits can go all. The Brits have traditionally have a tiny army, most of which based in a large.

Ireland. And that means you invest master into the Navy, which is really quite large. And then the army is almost kind of Royal Marines Force, just goes ashore from the Navy and just secures these little forts around the world, these places I've talked about. Now, to conquer the Americas requires, you know, armies on a kind of ancient scale. You've got to march from New York with a force of 100,000 men through Pennsylvania, through New Jersey to Pennsylvania. Slovenian keep going. The Brits cannot do that. They don't have the manpower, they don't have the manpower, they don't have the money to that. Because also they're trying to maintain their empire and all these other places. Well, I was going to say, I mean, one of the concerns during what the Americans called

the Revolutionary War was actually, because there was a war between Spain, France and England, you're worried about the homeland being invaded, and you've got all these other concerns. That's true. That's a good point. So you fight some big naval battle on the homeland. Really important naval battle there. So it's a nightmare. You're trying to maintain, you're trying to you're trying to blockade the American colonies. Can you imagine? Newport, Rhode Island. You're trying to blockade the Delaware. You're trying to control the southern colonies, Savannah. Vast numbers of ships required. The Americans are phenomenal mariners. Little ships going to gun running, taking cotton out, trading with the Caribbean, trading with the French nightmare.

Then you're trying to maintain naval supremacy in the Caribbean. Then you're trying to do it in the Mediterranean, where the Spanish are hammering you in Gibraltar and most of the places. And then you've got a problem in the channel as well. Nightmare. And then got near Asia. So this is, even we're saying the British Empire was like hegemonic time. I mean, this is the kind of thing that even today American carrier groups are going to struggle to sort of fight simultaneously in all these regions. In India, interestingly, they get over the problem by very, very few white British troops out there. They raise Indian troops. So there's these vast armies fighting kind of continental, that kind of

continental scale, you're invading central India, Maratha, but you're using overwhelmingly majority locally conscripted or raised Indian troops. So the British regime in India looks quite Indian. And there's the other side of the empire, which has now become a talking point, a cultural talking point, which is the slave trade. So let's talk about that. Let's talk about how it began through to the process, the process of enrichment, who was it who actually made the money, and then how it was disbanded and all the rest of it. So slavery, reasonably normal. The North Africans have been taking European slaves from southern Europe and as far away as Iceland. For a long time, in fact, there's a raid in Cornwall, raid in Ireland, whole villages being disappeared, going back to what is

today, Algeria, and particularly Tunisia places. This slavery is pretty widespread. And the Portuguese start cruising down the coast of West Africa in the 1400s, and they discover gold. So that's a huge boost to Portuguese. And they also bring back enslaved people that are buying off local African tribes that take advantage of an existing slave market there. And they're coming back to Lisbon and they're working on Portuguese farms. And then they are working in the Canary Islands. And they are starting to try and grow sugar in the canary islands, that doesn't go very well. And then so when West Africa, when Western Hemisphere is discovered by Europeans, the obvious thing is to take, you know,

indentured labour, so locals, the locals die out in astonish. Can I just pause you there? Because there'll be people who don't know the difference between a snove and indentured servant. So these are people who are almost sell themselves indentures. You agree, you're going to do 10 years hard labour, and then you'll sort of, you almost sell yourself to a company. Or you are, or you're a convicted felon. And you work for a sugar-growing company and you just go and labour in the fields.

And there may be a promise of sort of get your independence back or some land or something. at the end of it, maybe. So the population of the Caribbean, the indigenous population, there are apparently some indigenous Caribbean caribs left today in some place, but we're talking very few. So it's full of indigenous Americans, we might know that, you know, referred to as Indians. They die at appalling mortality through Western, through Eurasian disease, which they have no resistance to. So typhus, smallpox, measles, no indigenous. 90% of indigenous Americans will die within 200 years of Columbus arriving in the new world. So, astonishing, what town is.

And overwhelmingly from disease. The disease are traveling faster than Europeans. So we don't know that, so the disease will arrive in, what is now, Manitoba or Saskatchewan, years before French trappers, because the indigenous people are trading and moving around. And so there's this, so there's an outwe expression, which is the Europeans will arrive in a place, go, well, it's a great, virgin land. There's a famous expression. It wasn't virgin, it was widowed.

There had been Native Americans, indigenous, they, they, they, they, they, they, they, They existed in quite large cities at times. In Alabama, there was a city, fields, crops, settles, agriculture. By the time Europeans arrive, they go, these people as hunter-gatherers living in small little groups, because actually there's been sort of fundamental collapse of that system. So anyway, so they, I know we keep interrupting, but these are just such interesting things to get into. There have been throughout history, these mass movements of people, different people from

different parts of the world, not quite the same distance, of course. coming in contact. Is this pretty standard what happens when people encounter each other? Or was this- This was astonishing because of this weird fact that the two giant continents on Earth have never had any contact since 15, well, I think it's about the latest thinking, I think about 30,000 years ago. The Americans are just cut off from European. So there's the famous Colombian food exchange, I love. So Julius Caesar, Charlemagne, Michelangelo, had never tasted potato, tomato, chocolate, tobacco, turkey, never seen it, never heard of it.

Italians, no tomatoes in Italian cooking. Those come from the Americas. Corn as well. Corn? Very good point. In return, but there are no, this is a whole separate, fascinating issue, but why do the Europeans conquer the Americas not the way around? diseases, also in the Americas, there are no beasts of burden in the Americas.

There's a llama which can carry a certain amount of weight, but the llamas are pain in the ass to farm and reproduce. And they spit at you. They spit. They're nasty. They don't like, they don't like being domesticated, right? They're Latin in temperament. Yeah, they are. Well, that's true. I mean, what do you want? I was about to say, they're really lazy. You're not allowed to say that. You're allowed to say, yeah, I'm allowed to say, yeah, they don't like working. And so horses, cows, pigs, so, ox, all of these animals are arrive in the Americas, which weren't there for. So, by the way, that means that all of grapes of Aztec, Maya buildings.

No horses are being involved in those, no wagons, axles, all that and stuff. So they need it with labour source because they discovered these islands are really good for growing sugar, which is this wonder crop because food sucks so about, I mean, we still are addicted to sugar, but in the medieval world, trust me, food was so awful that you want sugar. And the easiest source of labour is from West Africa because there's a wind that blows very usefully directly from West Africa to the Caribbean. You're going to have to touch your sails.

It just goes all that on the great naval, nautical highways, maritime highways of the world. Very easy to do. So you buy up to say, now what happens here? The reason is it happens on just an astonishing scale. So in the course of it from 1550 to 1807, the Brits will take about three and a half million Africa.

to the new world, about a third, the overall total. And so that's just, it's just like everything else in this period, everything gets supersized. So whether it's production of textiles, whether it's production of guns, whether it's government debt, everything's becoming so much more sophisticated that the Europeans work out how to take vast numbers. So it starts and you arrive and you buy enslaved people

from local African chiefs, and then you take them across 100, 200, and then you can start doing thousands and, you know, thousands of millions. So what that does, obviously, as we all know, it's astonishing, inhumane, vast casualties, appalling. It completely disrupts the economies and the empires of West Africa because suddenly these kind of slightly overlooked coastal backwaters become incredibly rich and powerful. So they then invade their neighbours and like the king. So there's like sort of, there's a knock on effect. And in turn, then that conflict creates vast numbers of enslaved people. it is at this point too dangerous for Europeans

where you'd go inland into West Africa because of malaria and other things so until quite a long for a long time the Europeans have these forts on the coast again these little pinpricks these key forts along the coast on which can still do it say

and they take part in these slaving experiences they will go as military advisors with local chieftains things but they will help and but their voracious demand for enslaved people then adds to the conflict and instability in West Africa right so that's that's the what's going on there and then in in north america and the west indies

then slave grown agriculture is just phenomenally now again adam smith goes actually guys if we use willing workers it would be more efficient slave slavery is not economically efficient apart from being monstrous it's not economically efficient so it's quite interesting is that true apparently so apparently is that the uh the expense of what the expense of the expense of the sense of the system and the need to, and the kind of extraordinary police state you have to enforce, would mean that, in fact, they could have been economically productive using the model. But that would have involved having to convince lots of other people to go there. But that's what Adam Smith's argument was, which is quite attractive argument to us,

obviously. And so, and then you, so yeah, so then in 1807, the Brits have this kind of really radical change of, there's a long campaign for abolition and ending the slave trade, 1807, the Brits Pass. On what basis then? Why are people saying we need to end slavery? Influenced by Adam Smith, people are saying,

actually, I'm not sure this is like this system is kind of quite primitive, doesn't really work, so that's important. But also, I think we can't ignore the fact that amazing kind of cultural, moral uprising in Britain and people saying this is just inhumane and we shouldn't do it. And that's

public literacy, more news papers, formally enslaved people coming to Britain and writing very eloquently about their experiences. It just, it's, you know, why do cultural moments happen? And that sort of, so again, Christianity, Quakerism kind of forms of Protestantism that emphasize the light of God burning in everybody. So, so there's just a really interesting sort of economic and, yeah. And so 80s and they banned the slave trade. They then banned slavery itself in 1830s, and that's partly in response to what we talked about.

There's a massive slave uprising in Jamaica, which is brute, very expensive to put down, savage. And the Brits just start going, this doesn't actually, we don't think this makes, it's not, it's, it's, it's, a moral, it's, but also it's costing us money having to run these vast police stings. And they, in some ways, sadly work out, you can still run these sugar plantations by transforming these enslaved people into workers on very unequal, terms, but they are technically free. So actually, the sort of the moral cost of slavery is enormous, but so is the kind of political, the real world political costs of it. So yeah, so that's what goes on there. And I think the Brits were kind of tickled by the idea that it would also shaft their European. The British economy is at this point less dependent on slave-grown products than, say, like, Portuguese or the Americans. So they're like, well, we're a lot of good guys,

and we're actually going to shut off the Americans every do this as well. So it's a good as everything. It's a combination of politics and morality and lobbying and economics. Ridge first sponsored this show nearly six years ago. I've still got one of their wallets in my pocket right now. And I promise nobody told me to say that. Ridge makes wallets, power banks, luggage, the stuff that actually ends up in your pocket or your bag every single day,

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After you check out, they'll ask you where you heard about them. Tell them we sent you. As Francis mentioned, it's obviously a big part of the conversation about our history, almost front and center. If you say empire, slavery is the second word that follows that. How should we understanding the full context of history, some of the things you've talked about, the fact that slavery was basically the norm everywhere up until this point, the fact that most people don't know, actually, the Europeans turned up and bought slaves that had been captured by Africans from Africans,

etc., etc. But also reckoning on the other side, the immense cruelty and the scale, the technology that enabled transporting people across oceans, exploiting them in chattel slavery, etc. How should, or can we reckon with all of that in a sensible, balanced way? Not going too far in either direction. What's the right way to look at it? Well, that's a great question.

And the answer is, I don't know. It's an incredibly tricky. is that, but it's a great question about history generally, isn't it? Like, to what, the past was a monstrous place? What do we do, what do we practically do about that? It's, I mean, my, my sense is, I, the answer, I don't know, like, are gigantic cash payments, and who, like, are gigantic cash payments to Barbados or to West Africa, the answer? I don't know. And I think it is, look, Britain benefits enormously from this, because we talked about venture capital. There's clearly lots of money. These, these, you're creating capital. And that in turn benefits Britain, benefits British industry. These people are going to invest in their money. So there's no question that are wealth and power partly derived from the enslavement of Africans and putting into work in sugar plantations in the new world. But, It also derived, it was also derives from the kind of annihilation of indigenous tribes in North America, selling opium to the Chinese.

American, well, you know, the American wealth, America, which by the way has done the best job ever in disguising an empire behind the name of a nation state. Americans just conquer an empire in North America and pull it at the USA, which is what happens. That's fine. The rebrand, that's built off the back of conquest. Argentina conquers what is now southern Argentina in the 19th century. Russia's, the European conquest of, people talk about European empires in Asia coming to. Well, Russia is a mighty European empire in Asia, right? The French still have a vast empire in the South Pacific to this day. I don't know how we, the past is a terrible, brutal place. And my sense is that it's trying to shape, trying to acknowledge all that and going,

what we need to do is build a world, we need to build a kind of different world, which largely speaking we've been trying to do since 1945 and onwards. And that's what makes kind of Putin's invasion of Ukraine, I think, so scary is it's like, we sort of want this neighbor's territory and we're going to mass on the borders and invade it. That's a very 19, that's very normal throughout history, very, very dangerous, because it means other people do the same, and Putin may regret that when China decides to nibble a bit of Russian territory in the Far East. So my gut is acknowledging past monstrosities,

but the business of trying to kind of untangle it and go, well, are we paying the Chinese for the opium? And I don't, I just kind of, I don't think it's practical. I know that's not really glamorous thing to say. No, no, it makes perfect sense because it's such a difficult issue to address. And I guess one of the things that I've always found, you know, you get activists in both directions who sort of tell one version of the story, which when you look at the narrow set of facts that they present, it's true.

Like, nobody could defend without today's morality what happened during the slave trade. Nobody. And at the same time, you can't ignore the fact that literally every emperor throughout history practice slavery. and Britain was the first empire in history to actually end it properly and force others to end it at great cost to itself, including through human lives too. And it's just one of those things about, like you say,

the past was a terrible place. And I think what if you get a tiny sliver from here or from here presented to you, you can really influence people's today's feelings and political leanings and so on in a particular direction because people are so uneducated about the messiness of it. Yeah, and we talked to talk about Iron at the beginning.

I mean, the English conquest of Ireland in the 50s was unimaginably brutal. Shocking. Now, what is the, what do you do about that today? It's not your fault. I think it's, look, I'm not a politician. In pragmatic terms, it's quite hard, quite hard to make people say, we're going to, we're going to send a lot of your tax payments to, like, people in Munster, because because Munster was the scene of almost genocide in the 16th century.

I don't know how you resolve that. My sense of it is you, like people talk about like Martin Luther King, Barack Obama, this constrained of American thinking. Monstrous things have happened in our past. The key thing that we can do now is shape a new and better way to organise society, right? So we are going to try and ensure that people of colour are absorbed into this American project and have the opportunity to go to university and whatever else in a way that they traditionally haven't done.

They have the vote, all this economic opportunities to put chance to create a generational wealth that they've been denied in the past. In one sense, we're going to repudiate the idea that it's okay to invade neighbours. We're going to repudiate that it's okay to have slaves.

You know, like, that feels, and that's me talking for position of great privilege. Look, I'm someone who's almost certainly in my ancestry, I've benefited personally from this, the reason that I went to a nice school and speak nicely and went to nice universities is, of course, because of my, the generational advantages that I've had. I get that. But I don't know how you just practically arrange for the entire world to have a massive, a massive reallocation of resources on the basis of historical, monstrous historical criminality. How far back do you go?

This is the question. I go back. I go way back. No, but this is what I'm saying, though, right? It was like... Oh, I see what you mean. How does one... Yes, I think in the Holocaust... When do you start the clock? There's living people who had their art collections removed from them in Vienna.

Now, of course... Yeah, like, obviously. But I think it's difficult. And then you get into sort of really difficult territory. Like, what was it... No, what I'm saying is something else, Dan, which is should the descendants of the Normans pay reparations to the... Exactly.

No, you're right. Well, this is why the island, yeah, exactly. Or whoever... To whoever. Like, I think if you start to try and undo history, then you've got to go all the way back to the beginning. And now we're in the savannas of Africa, etc. Key way to undo history is to try and learn from the past and make the world a better place. Again, since 1995, we've been doing. We hope there was a naive dream in the 90s.

I'm old enough to remember where we thought, oh, international disputes will be resolved at the UN. We go and talk about it all. But for me, that's a really important plank at this. It's about saying, oh, we've realized a common humanity and that we're all, like, actually skin color doesn't determine your intelligence and your chances of succeeding in life and your ability to invent, you know,

those things, really embedding those things today, feels to me like the most practical and achievable antidote. Right. I mean, the thing I think about is, Well, there's millions of people in this country who, who two generations ago, they were conscripted to fight. So they're given no choice. They're conscripted to fire, effectively.

You're going to no choice. And we're just thrown into machine gun bullets on the Western Front. Like, that was an astonishing trauma that practically affected millions of families in this country. Like, of all that. So what, like, that's, that was monstrous in so many ways. Like, what do we do about? So, listen, that's, that's history. I think it's, um,

I wish I had simple answers to that. Because that's a problem, isn't it, with this entire conversation, is that people want simple answers. People want it summed up in a tweet or a post and they go, okay, I know exactly what to think about that. This is what we do. When the reality is, it's far more complex, which brings us nicely to the topic of India. Because with India, we have these similar conversations as well, don't we? about how much of it was about wealth extraction? What did we give to the Indians?

Yeah. Where do you stand on? So look at all different things, different times. Bengals, so the British takeover Bengal in the 1750s, and the result was an absolute catastrophe for the Bengalis. Partly because, so there's a series of natural. So first of all, the Brits turns out aren't very good at running a large Asian empire from an office in London by letter using sailing ships.

I mean, obviously not, right? So there is just catastrophic consequences for the people of Bengal, which I don't want to under, you know, and for example, so there are famines. And so the Brits write back, and there's a really bad famine here, should we give them a tax break, which is what would traditionally happen in India, even under Mugals, they'd say, look, clearly there's a famine. You don't have to pay a tax this year. Don't worry about it.

That letter would take six months to get to London. I'd never think that takes six months to get back. Like, it's insane, like monstrous, right? And so people are selling their kids into slavery. There's just appalling stories from Bengal. So, and then, you know, there's a big impact on the textile trade of Bengal because of, you know, the way the British choose to organize the kind of their input. So, yeah, there's, you know, there's massive negative consequences for, you know, Bengal. Then you move forward, 100 years and then India exists as part of a, I mean, the problem with all this, you don't know what they're all.

what the other alternatives are. So Winston Churchill argued that English be British because it stops, otherwise it would just be the scene of lots of fighting on the subcontinent. We don't know if he was right, because it didn't happen. So in the 19th century, Britain conquers India, there's a massive

Indian revolt in the 1850s, and it's brutally put down. So we've got last, you know, 50 years, Britain, India's reasonably stable. But what's the count, I don't know what the counterfactual is. You know, well, what does, what with the Afghans

who invaded again and slaughtered it. So all of these questions are sort of kind of there are things that politicians and people on social media like to get really involved in, but historians are sort of interested in what happens, right? Like I don't, I mean, I, like, is, was the, was the, was the,

the Prussian victory in Silesia in 1740, good or bad? I don't know, what do you mean, good or bad? Like, what are we talking about it? Like, it's just, sort of just, this is a thing that happened. We're studying history as it happened. India may have gone on. If the Brits had invaded India, India may have developed this phenomenal indigenous culture

that ruled the world and established the biggest empire the world ever seen, or it might have been locked in a series of violent civil wars in the Indian subcontinent for 150 years. We don't know. So how can you possibly say, what you can do is point, oh look, that the Brits massacred people there

during the Anglo-Maisal War? That's a thing that happened. But you can't say, but you don't know whether, it's very difficult to come to go, would more or less people have, like, would more or less people have lived longer, happier lives if the Brits hadn't invaded? It's sort of unanswerable, it's unknowable. So it's very, what you can say is that India today, there was a partition of Britain's Indian Empire, obviously in the 1940s with astonishing bloodshed and brutality, which was a tragedy. Was that a release of the natural existing tensions within... Lots of Indian scholars say, no, no, no, it was all caused by the British because the British emphasized a Muslim Hindu split in the 19th century

so that they could divide and rule. That's what people say. Other people say, yeah, that's what happens when empires fall apart, is that everyone just goes after each other. That's what happens in the Eastern Europe when empires fell apart in the 20th century. It's what... So there's lengthy debate about that. Is it what happens when you kept a lid on everything for 100 years,

and then you suddenly take it off and just go, sorry, we're out, you know? Well, that's what an empire is speaking as a layman seems to have to do, right? Like when the Ottoman Empire collapses, gigantic massacres everywhere. Soviet Union collapses. There's ethnic conflict all over the show. All over the shot. Yeah. So, yeah, was the defeat of the Ottoman Empire good or bad thing?

Well, this is a big question, right? Middle East has been unsettled for 100 years. But, like, was it better? Like, we have no idea what would happen if the Ottoman Empire had, they could have launched a genocide of Arabs. Like, they did Armenia's, like, I don't know. So all you can say is the Ottoman Empire collapses, and this is what happens in the aftermath.

I think, so in India's good example. But India is given a national coherence by the British in a way, and it's striking that the Indians, when they declared an defenders, they were quite keen to hold, they were quite keen to, that generation of Indian leaders were quite keen to hold on to Indians. They weren't that keen to. divide up into the smaller states that there had been in India in the 18th century. So you're like, let's keep the bureaucracy and the military and the sort of territorial expanse

of India whilst getting rid of the Brits like that. And you see that in, you see that off the Roman Empire in place like France or in Italy or in Spain or all that these are like, yeah, we'll throw off the Roman yoke. But by the anyway, we're keeping hold of all the things. And so, yeah, that's again, super tricky. So Winston Churchill sat there and said, I told you that would happen. The minute you pull out of India, that's what's going to happen. Everyone's going to go after each other. And then lots of people said, no, it's because you pulled out. You've mishandled the pulling out process, which is true.

Or it's what you'd stirred up by denying Indians' autonomy for so long. You know, these things are super tricky. And it's the idea of better as well. I think that's a number of it. Well, they go, it would be better like this. What is better actually mean? What's better mean, right? So in 19th century, our old history books,

better just meant, do you? you live in massive states where rulers are in charge and they can build huge buildings and it's just awesome. You know, what does better mean? Or does it mean life expectancy? Should we, should we measuring calorie intake? So interesting, after the Roman Empire in the West collapses. We now think, amazingly, calorie intake may have gone up because there's fewer, say in Britain, there's fewer British people working on industrialized farms. The industrial farms have gone. Villas smashed a bit. Everyone's like, okay, all gone a bit madmacks. But we've all got our own plots. We're growing our own We've got like little pigs in the back.

We're all, if you can avoid getting smoked by the German raiders, we're all actually, people are sort of eating a bit better. So, you know, there's loads of very complicated things going on here, right? What does best, I mean, how should we, we traditionally measured greatness and success as sort of big, powerful empires, how many soldiers you got, how many ships have you got? And by the way, are you sort of founding a few universities and that kind of nice museums, right? Well, maybe that's, maybe that's nonsense. Maybe that's, I mean, look, there's arguments, aren't there in the States?

There's this great online name. Mississippi is richer than Britain, isn't it, per capita? And they were like, what does that? Is that, what does that mean? Is it better to be in Mississippi today or to be in Bristol? And what does, how should we be measuring these things? And I think it's a huge issue for humanity, right? Now, I think one thing about big empires, they can bring internal stability and peace.

And I've got to say, we can get, we can all get a bit carried away with, you know, living in uncertainty, so that our Iraqis have an expression, better a thousand years of two or than one day of anarchy. And I think we're sitting here in this nice studio, everything's super chilled. I personally, my family haven't had to, you know, to fight for their property, their food, their children's lives domestically here for several generations. My Polish friends have said, we are the first generation that have not been involved in active conflict for 200 years. So it's very, very difficult, isn't it? Do we say, actually, you know, empire's terrible, goodness me.

It must have been quite nice not to have your village sacked by marauding coastal attackers quite regularly. So that, again, huge problem when you're trying to judge in history what is good, what is bad. Like, that's a huge problem. I think this is the way your point about just learning from history and trying to live in a better way today is really the only thing that is available to us. ultimately at the end of the day. I want to come back to the story of the British Empire, and first of all, it's peak and hayden success. You say 1922 in terms of territorially,

but energetically, though, I imagine it's a bit before that, right? Big difference, and there's partly a big difference, because this is important for people think about empire. The empire, and think about the American Empire today, Chinese Empire today, it's not about the red space on the map. That's really important to think about. So the majority of Britain trade is actually going on outside the empire. So wealth has been generated in the Ottoman, in the East, in the Ottoman Empire, South America,

huge Argentina is almost, it's not British colony. So again, the British attempt to make a colony fails. What actually happens is Argentina becomes, you know, this British sailors founding Argentinian Buenos Aires football clubs because you get an Argentinian indigenous government, who's sort of happy to go along with the British government, good trades, you know, everything's, the Brits don't have to invade. You're like, this is working out very nicely, thanks.

right, just in the... So Britain's trade with the USA are more important in this trade with Canada, even though Canada's part of the British Empire, it's British North America, right? So actually in terms of energy and sort of global clout, it's far earlier than 1920s,

it's absolutely the 1850s, why Germany doesn't really exist yet. The USA is still expanding, it's going through astonishing, growing pains, is about to have a big civil war in the 1860, new technology is coming on stream, they are building steamships. HMS warrior. You can still go and see it in Portsmouth,

the greatest thing ever created by human beings. Iron ship, immediately that ship launches every other ship in the world obsolete overnight when that thing hits the water. Iron ship, no other ship, every other ship in the world, cannonballs is going to bounce off. So this is a stop. Now that ship can sell, it doesn't in there and do this, but it could sell anywhere it wants in the world,

park itself and go, we need you to do this. And the people will do that. That's very straightforward. Britain develops trains, canals and trains, trades moving. I should have said one other thing about Britain is because of its long coastline, fantastic interlinked. It's very easy to move raw materials around.

Nightmets move right. Siberia, now 20 on. Right, wing it. Newcastle coal, you literally chop it. It rolls down the hill to the time. You put it on a boat. It's in London a day and a half later. Unbelievable.

So London has got an unlimited. energy supply from a little bit further up the coach. A little guy called Captain Cook helped help to sustain that trade. So you've got, so that geography, as I said at the beginning. So trains, though. You're inventing telegraphs, your extraordinary energy is going on. And then you get a problem. And actually trains, guys.

This is my hot take for the internet on this one. Trains are the greatest British invention that absolutely shaft the British. And you wonder about AI. America, they could be interesting. It's interesting. Trains overcome the tyranny of the oceans. Suddenly, you can

move things around your country. You don't have to take them to ports. You don't have to do coastal trade. Suddenly, you're moving vast amounts of stuff internally in your country. And that makes continental-sized superpowers possible. Trains, nothing else. Previously, you want to get from Vladivostok to St. Petersburg.

I mean, night. I sail all the way around. How are you going to do that? You've got to go to Africa, Suez. Everyone can stop you. There's choke points. You've got to go out the North Sea. Put a train in. Now you've got a country.

Now you're an empire. So trains forge the following country. The USA, suddenly, you can exploit that interior. You can move people around. You can settle the interior. You can move weapons, troops, raw materials. Or, you know, it's big time. Trains.

Germany. Which is a problem for the Brits. Germany. Shout, very, very wealthy heart of Europe. It's never been, no, not for a thousand years or so, has it been united, effectively united. It's never been effectively united. Suddenly, all the German lands can become a nation state. So you've got Prussia, you've got Hanover, you've got Bavaria, trains, trains, very, you can't, no canals, tiny little coast, suddenly you can move goods and ideas and people around that giant's place,

and then you've got Russia. Suddenly Russian troops can get from the European Russia to the, to the threaten Britain's Asian Empire, Afghanistan, or East, Far East. And its trains, they proliferate, suddenly the Royal Navy is like, oh, we can't interfere with this trade now. We can't just bombard Bremen because the trade's all going elsewhere in Germany. And they can create nation states that ultimately dwarf Britain. And you get land empires emerging, knitted together by trains, suddenly make Britain maritime empire look a bit old-fashioned, like the Venetians.

Like the Phoenicians. It's like, yeah, you know, no, it's fine. we're linked by shipping channels. Mate, we're linked by trains. You don't have to go over the ocean. The ocean becomes a sort of barrier rather than the bridge in people's minds. That begins in 1830. So towards the end of the 20th century, obviously the USA starts consolidate Russia, Germany,

and they overtake the British economy at the end of the 19th century. So while Britain's got this massive empire, it's got a major problem. And you've got policy makers in 1890s, when the big map on the wall is, oh, everything's British, mate. Quarter of the world's population, much, core to the world's surface, but actually the show's over, because what's important is,

you know, economics. Where's the energy? Where's the energy, right? And the energy, the second industrial revolution is in petrochemicals, it's in cars, that goes on in Germany. The Brits miss out on that. The Brits do textiles and coal and iron, then it goes elsewhere. The energy goes elsewhere. America overtakes Britain in the late 19th century. Just you can't compete with America, obviously, just on every level. Germany overtakes Britain. And Britain, then Britain, then Britain, is smoked by winning two world wars. Very odd. It's on the winning side in both world wars that absolutely shaft the British.

So they spend their entire money. So you can almost, the end of the British Empire, the effective end, in terms of that energy is sort of pretty much 1942, 43. It's completely overtaken by the Americans in terms of ships, in terms of, you know, in terms of the estimate and is able to put into its militaries. Was there a bit of, there's a lot of discussion

I hear about that particular part of it, Dan, which is that the Americans, you know, they took their pound of flesh for the help that they gave during World War II. And actually, the end of the British Empire was something they were pretty content with. And in fact, we... They actively worked towards. They actively worked towards. So Churchill had this naive idea that the English-speaking people of the world were going to unite.

The British and the Americans could rule the world together and defeat fascism. And he took this big gamble and he rightly identified Hitler as one of history's worst individuals and monstrous regime. and he said actually even he hoped he could sustain the British Empire and beat Hitler. But when the chips down, he really had to almost sacrifice the British Empire. He had to become, he had to just get as close as possible to America and agree to share things like nuclear research, which the Americans then shut the door and off the war, Renegi on those kind of deals. So, yeah, the Americans took their pound of flesh. The Americans saw the decline at the end of the British Empire as a strategic win for the Americans.

Still bitter about 1770s. I'm furious about it. And, but not understanding, of course they did. And they, now, amazing, they've had to step in and sort out or deal with many of the messes that the British were trying to deal with as global hedgermons. They might wish that the Brits were still running Israel to this day or, you know, or other parts of the world. And, but yes, so you get these superpowers emerging.

You get British, in the 1890s, you get the Prime Minister Lord Spalsbury, he goes, we should have, you know, we should have gone in, all in on the American Civil War, where the chance. the Americans are shafting us, we should have gone in on the Confederacy and broken up the US project. Missed the opportunity. And so they couldn't because of slavery. It was too up there. They would have been, the Brits thought about it, but just couldn't bring themselves to do it.

And so in the end, these emergence of these giant continental size, China, USSR, America, meant that little old Britain couldn't compete with that. And it comes down to something pretty basic, which is, you know, if you're joined by land, just sort of weirdly, the vibe is wrong. If you're joined by land to somewhere, it looks like, sure, you can take, you know. So no one questions the right of Russia now to be in the Far East.

That was an imperial project. It was conquered in the 16th, 700, as you well know, but that's fine, it's part of Russia. The idea that Britain could hold on to Nigeria or India or even Canada and incorporate them into Britain. Everyone, just like, don't be a seat. It doesn't work. You've got the sea in the way.

Like, what are you talking about? And then you get politicians in the 20th century, you go, why, why see, like, what's the sea got to do with it? How is it different? Britain controlling, you know, just because we're not like next door to them, but somehow it does. And what's interesting about the British Empire for me is it disintegrates just on the edge of the era where weirdly air-traveling communications

were arguably making a discontinuous empire kind of feasibly possible. You could envisage a situation where you had a parliament in Britain with like Australians, New Zealanders and Canadians, kind of in it, it's like Africans, Nigerians, whatever. And you kind of, Britain was unable to turn its empire into an, which lots of people have been told them in the 19th century, all sorts of thinkers are going, it's going to become a nation state, like Russia, it's like America.

They've got empires, and Prussia conquered an empire, but they're just, they're other German-speaking people, but they conquered an empire, of course they do. We will do the same. And they talked about how India and America, these will just, it will become like a nation state, we'll have a wonderful, a global state. And it didn't quite, it didn't happen, but I struck by the fact that partly didn't know, because obviously it was sort of bonkers, but at the same time, there were just

pressing logistical reasons why it just was pretty complicated. You could be in California and get a train to Washington, D.C. take part in the political process in the few days. If you're in Australia, a museum, that's more difficult. But weirdly, the British Empire, so by 1940, 1950, by 1990, by 1990, by 19. 1980, 2000, actually there's a world in which, particularly now, you're all working remotely and you have an imperial parliament. It doesn't matter where you are, right? So it's quite interesting that. It's very interesting, but I imagine part of the reason for that is that the core is too small. Like in Russia, the European part of Russia is by far the most dominant. The Russian ethnic group

is the biggest by far in the United States is very similar, right? Whereas if you had the British Empire today, the Brits would be a tiny minority. wouldn't they? And territorially also. And there was the issue of race and race are important. So lots of thinkers are saying, and indeed lots of black and brown British imperial subjects are going to London thinking, I'm going to take part in this empire. Queen Victoria had a West African godchild who she took great interest in and regarded as part of going to wanted to come to court, married off to a British naval officer, wanted to create a kind of mixed race imperial elite. Fascinating. On the ground, like just effectively just effectively just

can't happen. You know, there's just, if you're a planter in what's now Zimbabwe or northern India, if you're a farmer, if you're living next to Maori people in New Zealand, they're just the kind of cultural and demographic and sort of racist assumption. Like it just was, it was kind of too much. It just, it doesn't, it's hard. It's too, it was too difficult, I think, or in practice on the ground. But you get lots of scholars in the 88. For Britain to survive, they knew what was coming. For Britain to survive as an empire, we are going to have to, we're going to transition this into something else, like a nation state, which means we are going to have to accept that there's going to be brown Englishmen. And what you get is you get,

we're interesting, you get people from Burma, An San Suu's dad, you get Gandhi, other people coming to Britain and being radicalized by the experience of Britain, which is the government go, welcome, welcome, welcome, welcome, your fellow, you know, you're all welcome here in the imperial capital. But shopkeepers are like, you know, piss off. And they're radicalized by, go, hang on a minute, this doesn't work. And so, you're right, just the tension, the idea that you can, from the Maris to, you know, the Asiniboine tribe in Western Canada, the idea that you're going to try and somehow, that is a massive project that was beyond the real practical ability or in the imagination

of most people in the 19th century to achieve and beyond the kind of technology, I think, is one. And by the way, you have this extraordinary idea of nationalism that's still a full. in the world at the moment, that just encouraged people to think of themselves as kind of, as peoples, and sovereign power should lie, power should ought to be exercised by this people. And peoples were defined by ethnicity and by language, and people in the 19th century love going around, going, no, you're, you're Ukrainian, you know, you're not, you're not Ruthenian, you know, you're not Polish, no, you are, you know, and this is what you, this is the language you speak,

you know, as the Austrian Empire collapses in Eastern Europe, you know, the Czechs are told, no, you're now Czech. You're not Bohemian. You're not German-speaking behemines. You have to learn Czech, which is kind of language that we've, which poets have sort of revived from the distant part. So there's a process of encouraging people to think of themselves as separate entities. And that was far too powerful for the British Empire. I just couldn't. The British Empire was like, yeah, we'll all just come on. We'll all be great imperial subjects and just overlook. Everyone's like, no. You know, I'm a, I'm, I want to be my, I am from this group or that group, or that group, and I'm being, there's a, there's a, there's a, the philosophy, the fashion

that in the world at the moment is this idea of sort of independence and autonomy. And that tears apart the Austrian Empire, tears apart the Ottoman Empire, tears apart Tsarist Russian Empire, you know, and it's currently at work in the UK today, you know, so it's a very, very powerful force that was unleashed about 200 years ago that ultimately has destroyed many of these big, sprawling empires. And so one of the final questions I wanted to ask is we're coming towards the end of the interview, which is

legacy. What is the legacy of the British Empire? It's hard to underestimate the legacy of the British Empire in the world of the moment. It's astonishing. Partly transmitted through Americanness. I mean, this is why the British Empire had enormous impact on the world. The fact that the hegemon that followed the British

turns out to be the Americans in the same way that Greek culture and ideas are transmitted through Rome to the modern world. It's pretty useful parallel, right? So, but the English language, I mean, it's astonishing to me, isn't it? There's currently commercial negotiations taking place in Sao Paulo between Chinese people and Brazilians that are being conducted in English, you know, it's extraordinary, right? And that's because of the, because of the scale of the British Empire and then the fact that North America spoke English. Do you know something else, Dan, just from a linguistic point? It's also because English

is a very hard language to master, but it's very easy to learn relatively. I mean, I speak several languages. If you learn Russian, it is a nightmare to learn at the basic level. So English is very good to learn to beginner to intermediate level, and it's just very easy, relatively speaking, like Russian and German and other languages, it just wouldn't work because they're just too hard to learn. Interesting. Yeah. Chinese probably as well, ironically, because, you know, people go, what's the most common language is Chinese, but that's only because there's a billion Chinese people. But it's not a language that's really spread because it's tonal, you have to make different sounds. It's all very difficult. Yeah, that's true. English. Well, English is very simple.

Yeah. Yeah. I'm still trying to master. And then ideas around representative democracy. Huge important. And the idea, India, Australia, New Zealand, at the USA, Canada, these enormous countries, the Japanese system of sort of constitutional monarchy in some ways transmitted the environment, the US through to post-war thinking.

It's just, it's, and then there's capitalism. I mean, there's the British first factory of the modern world, arguably, sort of in Nottingham in the 1750s, you know, organising labour, insurance, patent protection, all of these ideas, the sort of foundational ways in which we conduct global trade. A lot of that is forge, yes, no, in Amsterdam, and it's a kind of millier in those 16, 1700s, but it's Britain, it's that British Empire that's the vehicle for exporting that. And then, well, from anything else, football will come.

It's entirely, football is exported by the Brits. It's, you know, all of these things. So, the Britain's fingerprints are on lots of the modern one. Another thing, of course, is the geography of the world. You know, Calcutta, Mumbai, Bombay, as it was, you know, British, British settlements, Hong Kong. Madras, of course, Chennai, yeah. That was, that fort built there. That's one of those little forts I was talking about.

You're still going to visit the fort in Madras, and Chennai built in the 1630s, as little pinprick of Britishness from which the entire continent, well, I mean, no one could have guessed that, right? And then Hong Kong, obviously, Singapore, you know, these are places that existed as British trading posts that helped to shape, shape the modern world we live in today. I think one of the last I'd say about the British Empire, I think there's about some of the tech giants as well, is the British definitely jumped through a gap in the market. So China was, China was sort of declining for a lot of internal reasons. Britain defeated France.

The US was getting started. It was just a, just the plates of the world were aligned. And you get the very, you got this situation where briefly, and it's quite brief the British Empire, interestingly, it just sort of rose totally dominant. And then other people just caught up. And you think about that with a big company like Amazon today, you know, they just went, okay, we'll deliver stuff to your house.

You can book it on your phone. You go, this is the club. everything I've seen. Now, in the long term, does everyone else catch up and nick those ideas and just do that? And I think in some ways, that's what happens in Britain. It just kind of finds itself as the only guy left on the dance floor for a bit. France just falls apart. The Dutch have to fight the French and just get wiped out. The Swedish collapse. Delaware used to be New Sweden. You know, there are all sorts of other options of the world. New York was famous in New Amsterdam. There are all sorts of versions of the world. But this is the version we've got.

And it's, yeah, it's fascinating. So, yeah, in New York. another example of a place like Singapore, which owes its importance to that British Empire. Do you subscribe to the view that no empire ever really dies? They just kind of change, form, and then exist almost in the water? I think there's some examples of empires that have been eradicated. But now I think, yeah, they exist in people's minds, don't they exist in the culture? So you see that in ancient, set in the ancient world, Babylon, long after it exists, independent state, people are still obsessed by Babylon. Greece, long after Greece is conquered and it's still greedness and ideas, it kind of, it rumbles along. So I suppose, the British Empire at the

moment, I mean, it still exists in some weird ways. First of all, there are bits of it. That's the weird thing about it. One of the problems we're talking about, this tree, defense review at the moment. And one of the big problems of British Empire is still like bits of territory or not the place that need defending. Or do they? You know, that's a big problem for policymakers because you need a different kind of armed forces to project power to the other side of the world

to protect, you know, whatever it might be, Cayman Islands or the Falkan Islands. And then the other thing that's fascinating is, you know, the king is still head of state, I'm half Canadian. He's on the money in Canada. It's just bizarre, isn't it? And so, and like the Roman Empire in the West, it just collapses maybe slowly.

Like, what does the end of it? What is the end of empire? When my mum was a kid in Canada, and Canada was independent, she, in geography lessons, she got about the rivers of England, not about the rivers of Canada. That was shit to remember all the rivers of England in her geography lessons in the 1950s and 60s in Canada. It's like bonkers. So empire endures a lot longer sometimes than people give it credit for. And if you were in charge of all the schools and universities in the country,

unlikely to happen, what would we teach? What would be the story of the empire that we tell people? I think we tick me. Sorry, I don't know if it happens, what that means, like how on earth it happens and what are, what that tells us about. For me, the history is all the same. You want to find, the future hasn't happened yet. The present is infinitescifully short. It's already in the, so if you want to study us what makes us tick, what makes us fight, or makes us love, steal, share, you've got to look at the past. That's all we got. What we got to go on?

And so, whether it's the British Empire or anything, I'm like, what happened here? Why did it happen? It's bonkers and what were the consequences of it happening? And so in that way, yeah, I'd like people to have abroad, because we tend to get super involved

in a particular area, which I totally understand. I also like, it's fun to have the joy of my job is I get to come on shows like this with you guys and do like a broad 300-year story, which is not what typically you do at university. But, yeah, I would, I just, luckily, I don't need to be in charge of anything because something happens really, but you're just looking, I want people to have a sense of that broader story.

But I thought some of the takeaways from what you were saying about it, why it happened were really important as well, because, look, the geographical piece we don't control. But you talked about patent law, you talked about, you know, the representative democracy, or at least parliament, having to answer to some extent. extent to the people, a rule in not being able to just on a whim do certain things or die and leave the country as had happened in this country for centuries prior to that. There were lots of things about it that seem to be good ways of doing things. And Britain bringing that into the world and birthing those ideas in many cases and exporting them around the world. That seems to me

like an important piece because it's a clue. You talk, I think rightly talk about how the best the measure of what we can do and should do and shouldn't do is looking at the past. Well, the British Empire is a fairly short period of time, historically speaking, in which so many of these great ideas get discovered and put into practice. And that seems to me important as well. Yeah, I think it's how do you generate wealth? How do you allow humans to reach their potential? I mean, it's very strange. And in the north of England, the U.S. Revolution, these people have got no formal education. Captain Cook, who grew up semi-year, literate we think but many of these people who grew up illiterate George Stevenson's got no formal

training he goes in events modern railway system effectively that says something important doesn't it how do we we should study that think about that right it's fascinating what does and then of course you think yourself isn't that weird about human history that there are George Stevenson's and James cooks and Mary Wollstonecraft and Shakespeare is just all over the world it's like wildflowers he disturbed the soil and suddenly boom they're all just come out and and the vast majority of us will never find out because we're just yoke to the soil or we're just doing what we do, podcasting. And we might be absolute geniuses. We don't know. But no, and I think that is the, that's very interesting, importantly. That's really, and of course,

we have learned those lessons. Mass public education, you know, encouraging, try and identify gifted students, scholarship. There are things that we continue to do. But I find that fascinating, on that totally, you know, and also promotion on merit. And again, we have learned people who don't know anything history. We learn quite a lot. We promote it on merit today. There's no perfect way of promotion. But on the whole, if someone drives a ship into a sandbank in their career,

it doesn't matter for the son of the Duke of Newcastle. And those are things. And by the way, that's why our world is astonishing at the moment. We have absorbed lots of those lessons. We continue to absorb. That's why we encourage learning. That's why we invest into medical science, whatever it might be. And as a result, the world is just radically changed.

Now, there's also a lesson about doing so sustainably and not causing climate rate, all the sorts of things. But we are absorbing those lessons. I just think we need to kind of be mindful of what they are. Right. And where they come from as well. Where they come from? Yeah, for sure. There was one other topic I want to address in terms of something you said, which was the

rise of nationalism is such a powerful transformative force. It changes the world and ultimately, as you say, contributes to the end of the British Empire. If that's here to stay, is Britain the British Empire the last great empire in human history? Oh, I see, interesting. Well, in some ways it is because, of course, like I say, the Germans and the Russians and the Chinese and the Americans very carefully rebranded. I mean, every state's empire. England is the Empire of Wessex. So, but, yes, in that form, I think in terms of the idea that you can sail across the seas and conquer, I mean, that's what's very interesting about some of Trump's rest of you. I don't think he means it, but the idea that Garza's trip becomes in some form American or

Venezuela, he's posted about Venezuela becoming America. That's a very, it's a very old-fashioned way of looking at it. I sort of think that on that, if you look at the polling in America, it doesn't seem very popular. In Canada, Greenland, Venezuela, there is no longer a kind of popular which is very different to the past, a popular desire to take over and own another place. So in some ways, perhaps Britain is the last of the great empires in that era. It's the last of the great empires that failed to make that jump,

like the Austrians failed, like the Turks failed, like the Amani's failed in East Africa. They failed to make that rebrand, that jump of rebranding and becoming a kind of nation state, right? So now we all think it's completely, of course, America's social. in California. I mean, why would it not? California was conquered and settled by the Americans. And yet, it's fine, because it's been reasonably successfully incorporated into the American project. It's people feel American, they vote, they are part of that American political system. So, yeah, I think my one day, Britain in some ways is both the greatest, but potentially,

in some ways, I guess, I hope, the last of those giant, far-flung global, empires. But again, we talk about this. France, France's longest land border today is with Brazil, because France owns a little portion of Northern South America, which is part of France. You've spent euros there. France attempted, by the way, different to British, Guadalu, Martinique, France incorporated those into France. They vote in the French elections. They've used euros. It's the, the Sways of the Pacific, which are still part of France. So is France no, but I don't know. But that's somehow become, you know, nation-state. But, yeah, interesting.

Dan, what an absolute pleasure. Fun, guys. It was more than fun. It was incredible. Before we move over to... Maybe for Dan, it was just fun. Yeah, I'm like, that guy. I'm like, this is a greatest time of my life,

and the woman's like, yeah, it was all right. We've all been there. We've all been there. Anyway, on that, no, what's one thing, Dan, that we're meant to be talking about, but we're not being talked about. geez, I forgot this bit. This is good this bit, isn't it? Could be related to this conversation.

You mentioned about the AI thing, and I was just like, oh, that's amazing. You were saying how there was some of the technology that we were using here, and then it could be to... Yeah, it may, look, the Americans have meant all this AI, and they're thinking, it's great, but in that case, are there ways in which other states or players will harness that AI to absolutely undermine American interest in one. I mean, that's what history teachers are.

Like the train thing with the British. Like the train thing is much fascinating, yeah. Or the Armaments Revolution, which in part is inspired. Anyway, we didn't get on to that. Actually, okay, so I think one thing we're not talking about is, as we go into space, the lessons from the past, quite interesting. I don't think we're having many conversations about what's going to be the politics of space. Like, who's in, what are we doing?

When Elon Musk goes to Mars and puts a flag in the ground, what flag is that? And what does it mean? And is it under the auspices of the UN or the US or of his own private interest? as an individual? Is it now it's a company that's partially floated? So I think I'd like to know more about the plan for moon, space, and Mars, and I'd like to be inspired by what happened in the 16th and the 17th and

the 70th centuries around the world and see if there's a really good way we can do this in a way that does not invention. Because looking at the history, as a historian, you say what will probably happen is conflict will be competition and conflict will be exported to these new territories. So how do we think about that as a species? You get the Chinese portion of Mars and you get the American portion of Mars.

And then surprise, surprise. The big bit of mineral wealth sort of in the middle. Right. And you're kind of like you're drilling from, you know, so that's, you know, that's for sure a concern based on a knowledge of history. And it may be fine, but it seems to me that we probably need to think about it before it happens because that's the best way to solve all these problems, isn't it? When there's not, you're not, you haven't landed on Mars and discovered a massive load of rare earth. So that's when it becomes, then that becomes quite attractive. Dan, before we head over to Substack where you get to answer questions from our supporters,

tell everybody about your hit podcast. I use that word advisedly. Hey, man, history. History, Dan Snow's History, available now on YouTube, inspired by you guys on YouTube. Very exciting to be recording them. So please, Dan Snow's History, please go and check that out. And they're just as good as the conversation. we've found here with you. I'm impossible. With you, I mean, with you specifically. Head on over to Triggerpod.co.ukk, where Dan's going to answer your questions. What is your favourite, what if, moment of history?

Doesn't have to be about an important moment, only that it might have led to a different present.