How Britain Built the Greatest Empire In History - Dan Snow

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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 the world has ever seen in north america the brits wrecked shop they conquer 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're 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 trigonometry goodbye lads mate the first interview we did the history of england it did over a million downloads absolutely one no doubt what happened to the history of england it's really kind of you but i think it'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 a british i'm british canadian my mom's canadian so i'm a product of this imperial system but it's one of the most extraordinary stories right it's still island off the coast of eurasia for about 4 000 years doesn't really do very much uh it is it plays no hugely significant part in in human affairs and then around about 1700 1750 it goes absolutely mental and will build an empire it will build the largest empire the world has ever seen which at its peak about 200 years later quite short-lived empire we can talk about that as well uh but it's peak 1922 ish uh roughly a quarter of the world's population and a quarter of the earth's area and that's underplaying it for reason we can talk about but of course 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 in the form they do global capitalism ideas about democracy it's why there's you know parliaments and speakers around the world uh it 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 obviously it's people by heroes and god so nice good pod lads no so that was 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 in 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 so there's a it's interesting to study but be it that there are public policy implications in today that well how do you is it luck is it is it climate is that if you jump through this certain circumstances that can't be repeated or are there things that you can do to encourage uh those kind of flowerings and it doesn't just have to be a military might could be another other area as well of course so look the you can start you can start if you like with geography bear with me folks uh britain has quite interesting advantages there's a lot of coal on britain it actually the saudi arabia of coal you might want to call it and so in the 90s that becomes important a bit later on when the industrial revolution really gets going it sits upwind of europe guys this is important okay this is why people thought god was an englishman the protestant wind blew because britain if if you're the rhine estuary if there's your north germany your holland your belgium your france britain is like a giant aircraft carrier sitting upwind of you all right in an age where everyone sails around being upwind is really important because you go up towards up 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 harbors in southern england than they do in france very exciting news so so we have portsmouth we've got plymouth like i mentioned uh the french have got no deep water harbors on that north coast so people who go to calais on your holidays go to the harbor what do you notice they're all fake they're all built out massive concrete harbors you know when you go in on the ferry they're lovely big harbors but they're all constructed 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 and we'll come we can there are quite a few advantages the big advantage though is that for most of recorder history you've got eurasia silk roads spice you know wonderful trading networks rich civilizations alex 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 island trying to get in on the action a little bit and we know we go and fight in france and we're in france and there's things that sort of happen suddenly this great one of the greatest revolutions in the history of world takes place christopher columbus trying to get to asia trying to get to korea and indonesia that that bit i talked about on the other side he sails west and crashes into an entirely new world what he thinks a new world and then britain looks at the map and he's really excited you go to a medieval map of the world and britain is like britain i like tiny squeezed on the edge you can go to one in hartford like the map of monday in hartford and then within a generation people start producing maps and you've got the map we recognize today north and south america you look at that map and think hold on a minute what's in the middle what's in the middle of this map britain and ireland this archipelago so suddenly it's it's it's easier to sail out of bristol liverpool cork to get to the new world like i talked about any european traffic's going to kind of squeeze through the english channel up around the north of scotland god forbid so you're sort of sitting your your throat your heel is on the windpipe of the great european trading powers okay so your venice's and your genoa's and your constantinople's had been like in the middle of the whole thing but suddenly they're like oh wait a minute we're nowhere now because so so britain and ireland like wait a minute and that's why in the 1400s you get this mad situation it's the historian says it's the peninsulas of the peninsula eurasia okay europe's little peninsula of eurasia it's the peninsulas of the peninsula right it is 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 you know well so suddenly the whole of the silt road is getting absolutely uh um you're completely hijacking the silt road because you're sailing around into the indian ocean picking up pepper and spices and silk and everything you want to buy in the in the 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 like oh we you know we have our camels and we take our spices across we get we charge a nice little fee on the way through they're just they've just been at they've just been completely they've made redundant right like the way you're broadcasting on youtube you're not going via you know a publishing thing you're not going by a tv channel no no no the good people of the world are watching this you know as we produce it same sort of thing so so the spanish start pushing west to try and do the same sort of thing they discover gold and silver and the americas the england the french get involved the swedes get involved the dutch get involved they're all sort of piling out to us trying to take advantage of this new world so christopher clumbus 1492 henry the seventh sends a italian guy giovano cabote who we remember as john cabot and he leaves bristol and he goes and arrives at newfoundland not the most exciting part of new world although i love it but it's that that is sort of they they don't know about the gulf streams they go why we're on the same latitude now why is everything so barren and ripping cold up here it's a nightmare francis drake goes round the world first englishman english captains go around the world he lands in california claims california's new 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 the cape horn weirdly as well we're not sure which ones those are uh and he gets so so there's these so and explorers are sort of landing in places they're claiming doesn't mean very much at this point they're claiming them what we should also say is the key to the english and 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 colonization 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 that's the key staging point point for empire a learning how to do empire in ireland right and then you start to get the queen they try to have a colony you probably heard it in roanoke the lost colony in the 1580 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 got rockets exploding on the pad they're asking you know that this is the thing that's going to happen to the people who are going to be forced to move out of the country and they're going to be forced to move out of the country and they're going to be forced to move out of the country and they're going to be forced to move out of the country and they're going to be forced to move out of the country and they're going to be forced to move out of the country and they're going to be forced to move out of the country and they're going to be forced to move out of the country and they're going to be forced to move out of the country and they're going to be road 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 revelry 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 bonanza that make that's a cash crop that will so that will that pays for the colony because the government doesn't want these to be lost leaders that's why you colon 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 living on rock in the new world like what do you want so that works st kit's nevis 1620s uh jamaica 1650s cromwell invades hispaniola gets kicking and goes and takes jamaica instead 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 uh that driven by kind of evangelicalism they wanted to escape what they saw as like brutal uh oppression back in england and europe because you were they were different kind of protestant to the the english crown um 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 you're doing it's the old that that wonderful cocktail that drives all of us at humans you're making money you're building your reputation and you're doing god's work i mean it's you know what's not to like so you are you are you're driving out the spanish who are diabolical uh you're going to make a ton of cash and your name will be remembered so it's 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 queen elizabeth's astrology elizabeth the first structure he's the first idea first man who comes up the idea of a british empire for him and he he coins the term british empire he realized he's pitching this idea our destiny is to go west island and then the new world let's do this weird the first sort of 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 i think to this day the oldest english remains of building work because a guy called frobisher was sent by queen elizabeth to try and get to asia through the north at west passage which they thought might be possible you can do it now but it was all frozen up back then endless people go there and freeze to death and die miserable but they got to baffin island so that's weirdly the sort of first and they discover some rocks i think it might be gold to know not to be gold but um so there's just these eccentric attempts these little pinpricks east is different because in the western hemisphere it's a matter of conquest colonization move your own guys out grow stuff the indigenous people sweep my side um there's nothing very civilized going on there right that's that was their view east is different right you're arriving in place that you acknowledge are pretty successful coherent states quite advanced so what you're asking for is factory 16 early 1600s first decade the east india company this british private company that has the monopoly on trade it goes out and establishes a factory they're called sort of warehouse really in java in bantam in java they're like trading out trading out jacarta there's a little teeny piece i mean the local guys 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 the wall up and then you can have a few little soldiers protecting it so it's a little little the virus of the virus has been injected into the way so that's not that's not what they're trying to do but they're trying to do what they're trying to do so that's not that's not what they're trying to do but they're trying to jacarta that moves quite quickly to uh a place called surat just north of bombay in india so and then very weirdly the first i think the first sort of formal possession of the crown so in a way the first piece of some ways the first piece of the british empire is the it's rather unusually is an under malukas 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 it's their sort of genocide maniacs please can we swear allegiance to king james and in the hope that king james will then protect them which he is unable to so run is weirdly the star of the british empire this little tiny island that that doesn't end up being british for much english or british for much longer so that's the sort of that's the beginnings so we have a good setting for colonizing the new world effectively because of the position what about the technological side and the industrial revolution itself uh why why do these inventions happen here uh 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 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 at the same time in the same place so as 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 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 longitude latitude things like that so in 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 uh the great advantage that europe has people people um have used 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 my madrid mate and it's a few days i'm in madrid if you have an invention in nanking and the emperor doesn't like it then that's the end of you and your invention you're like there's no other market there's no other set there's no other buyer right so famously christopher columbus goes to ends up going with this it's funded by the spanish he goes to portuguese he goes to a another aristocrat for a sort of privately funded expedition he annoyingly he goes to french and he goes to king henry the seventh of england it's one of the great counterfactuals imagine henry the seventh they've 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 venture 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 that will capture a big spanish ship off the it's portuguese ship of the azores and the key thing is the documents on their star charts navigational guys then you bring those back you're using printing presses to buy and pump those out so so it's a it's a it's driving scientific and technological change so ships are getting ever more effective and then so weapons because you're not only fighting indigenous groups in these places you're arriving in places 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 you know they're making some quite nice 74 gun ships at the moment you just you just you replicate it copy it and make it slightly better canon that's of canon and so what's weird is initially in the 1600s when britain goes out and meets 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 mughal emperor is mighty and it runs much what's the 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 northwest europe and england particularly will mean that it by 1800 you're able to outgun you're able to just completely annihilate but i cannot say this strongly it's ship technology it's we're like it's the vikings of the of the modern world the the western europeans the portuguese spanish english french together and and it's the brits who will really take advantage they work out how to put ships on the water that can go long distance take heavy loads 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 for 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 all right it's easier to get from uh newcastle to dunkirk than it is to take a wagon of stuff over from newcastle to carlisle like so everything's so so that's why these shit oh yeah you're like well british maritime what's that mean what's it mean it's not about winning big battles against him it's about arriving at your enemy port and just going right lads we're turning off your trade till you do exactly what we want to do so even if you're the mughal emperor you're like all right i mean it's really annoying but i mean it's only you're just it's goa it's one port and just just pay them or give them give them trading terms that they would need i'm running a concert 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 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 gonna do with the sudan it's total pay everyone hates us you know christian missionaries just go and raz everyone up and then they get chopped up and i've got to send red coats and deal with i don't what i'm if i if i'm the chinese model today the american one is you control key ports you control little nodes you get your trade done nice and cheap small footprint big outcome you get rich and you haven't invested that much that's 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 and things like that the perfect lunch combo that first bite of your favorite sub followed by ice cold pepsi add a couple of friends and now that's next level suddenly the laughs get louder the stories keep flowing and the food tastes better because pepsi brings out more flavor more fun and more of the moment food deserves pepsi grab a pepsi zero sugar today tells you about getting older you can eat well exercise do everything right and still feel like your body is running at about 70 tired after lunch sluggish after meals not ill exactly just not quite right a lot of the time it comes down to digestion whether your body is actually breaking down what you're eating and absorbing it properly if it isn't the protein the healthy fats the vitamins a lot of that passes straight through you 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in one place the link in the description the code trigonometry that's it so if you're already thinking about trying it this is the sign go to bioptimizers.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 uh patent laws are important so come to england because they're confident that their inventions will be respected they will be able to keep the product the 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've never been britain so that's the law that's patents uh it's not very glamorous but super important and to a certain extent and it's 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 i need you need an act of parliament if you're going to put a railway through my land or you're going to do something you know so there is 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 so it takes a long time to build a massive mill and it's a lot of capital you're not in russia because the czar's going to change his mind or or the you know that's the problem with capricious arbitrary monarchs right so a lot of that is going on in britain and and and then that just 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 then they look at these northern industrialists who are doing interesting things with textile you know bit making textiles they're investing in that that's producing more and more money you know so you really it's starting to and then and then that tips over into armaments the industry you start to be able to make better cannon heavier cannon carronades they'll smash french ships to pieces at trafalgar and so things just happen and at some point around about sort of 1750s to 1800 the brits get qualitatively better than other people as well which we 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 thing about great empires is that we're not going to be able to do anything about it we're not going to be able to do anything about it we're not going to be able to do anything about it we're not going to be able to is that they lose a lot and they come back so like if you look at rome i've spent this whole time getting ass handed to it and the roman people just go another army let's go they they 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 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 the english kill a king they have a they have a lot of money they have a lot of money they have a republican experiment doesn't last there's so there's a one of the bloodiest wars in british history british and irish history the civil wars they kill the king uh this oliver cromwell tries a republic that comes that collapses charles the second uh james the second is his son is uh expelled or is forced out abdicated um you know it's it's a shambles it was known as the land of revolutions right so but what's going on on the surface is the politics is quite wild what's going on is that you get you get a kind of government effectively it's england and then britain can borrow more money at lower rates of interest above markets folks because as we know it will come down as that so in the 1690s partly using kind of dutch techniques and some and some you know the dutch financial techniques they've pioneered over in amsterdam you get the invention of the bank of england you get uh the these kind of these uh financial and economic innovations like exchange it becomes easy to swap stocking companies you know there's a it's a fungible market you get um and and the british and the british government is overseen by parliament so when the british government says right this is the this is what we're spending this 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 and so so people are happy to lend the british government money 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 king louis the 15th is like yeah i'm gonna borrow a load of money and if i don't pay it back too bad so your interest payments are brutal on that money so in england 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 it just england's a smaller economy than france can build much bigger navies and spend more money on on fighting than the french for example so it's hugely effective and the other problem with the french is they the french tough neighborhood 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 Mediterranean. 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's marching around France. I'm going to be king of France, like all his medieval forebears. 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? Mary loses Calais. That's it. Calais gone, 1550s. And it's like, okay, we're not a European power anymore. Ooh, what we could do is turn west. So Britain's, England's able to focus its entire, military strategic focus on the rest of the world. It's got this, it's particularly when England and Scotland are united. So you haven't got problems within the island anymore, invading the northern neighbors. So suddenly that's, that unity is quite helpful. You've thoroughly conquered 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, America. 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. It's the most important war in history, folks. The most successful war in British history. When really Britain is, Britain is transformed into a massive global power. Couple of things happen. This is the 1750s. Britain, for the first time, it goes, it has these little toe holes in India, but Indian Mughal power is collapsing in the center. The Afghans have invaded Delhi, smashed the whole place to bits. Mughal power 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 neighbors. But also we need to sort of stabilize this region because at the moment it's absolute chaos. We can't make any money. If there's a sort of civil war going on in Bengal between Indians, we can't make any money. 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 do the same. So the French, 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 no one's ever heard of called Chandanagore. But if the French had won, Chandanagore would be the Calcutta of the world, you know. And the Brits push a little force in 1757 up the Hooghly River and they smash this French fort to pieces and drive the French out of Bengal and then install, then fight this great battle, Plassey, people you're 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, you know. And now they're like, we're just going to do it ourselves. So suddenly Britain is a land empire in Asia, 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 Brits wrecked shop. They conquer Canada. They conquer the whole of the USA, east of the Mississippi. 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 unbelievable. Like, it's an astonishing war. And it was said at the time, the bells are one threadbare for the ringing of victory. And while we're on the subject, it's the greatest name of victory in British history that no one's ever heard of, right? Everyone's heard of Trafalgar. Didn't change a thing, folks. The Battle of Quiberon 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. Fort Duquesne has now become Pittsburgh, named after the British Prime Minister Pitt. 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. They have to leave to go and pick up the army in different locations. 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, you know, with a gale. It's November. And they go, the British will never. We'll hide in the shallows here in Quiberon Bay. It's a nightmare of sort of reef-strewn, rocky hellhole, crashing waves, big gale coming in from the west. And it's night. They will anchor in here. We'll stay. The Brits will be in big trouble. And Admiral Hawke, the legend, 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 immediately. 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 a feckless toff. You can do that in the army. Because all you've got to do in the army is stand there while bullets whiz. All you've got to do in the army is have a ramrod straight back and give an example to your men. As it's always said in the British army, officers teach their men how to die. Sergeants teach their men how to fight. So all you've got to do as a young officer, if you come out of Eton and just go, all right, lads, here we are. Whereas if you're in command of one of the most expensive objects ever, accroached to that point of history, king's ship, 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, I'll come back to your question. That gives the 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. Okay, a vast empire, the whole of Eastern Canada, the whole of North America, Eastern Mississippi. And what did the American colonists do? Very cleverly indeed. They 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 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 or particularly the indigenous people, all the people who live in Ohio and down through the American Midwest. They don't. All these indigenous people at the Choctaw, the Cherokee, they still need policing and they don't want the Brits down, they want the Americans. 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 moments in 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 you imagine what a wonderful country we'll be living in today? Stretching from Kent to San Francisco. It would be so cool. Anyway, it didn't happen. Well, there's all sorts of interesting reasons why it didn't happen, but it 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 realise 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 when the French came. 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 threaten Gibraltar, which they are hopping mad that the Brits own. They've owned it for about 70 years now. I mean, they still are. They still are. And I understand. I mean, in a way, I understand. If you look at the map, you think, I must be really not. My granddad was fortress commander at Gibraltar. It's very cool. 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 go and protect their sugar islands. And in the end, a kind of astonishing pincer move, very effectively, between George Washington's American army and the French fleet, and the French army and French fleet gather on the Chesapeake and destroy and neutralize a British army in Virginia. One of the great naval defeats of British history, folks. Very difficult to talk about. The French defeat the British. It's a draw, really. the thoughts of the British people. 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 um adam smith by the way so the scottish man who's sort of coming up with the ideas tenets of capitalism this time he goes you're crazy they don't you don't need them to be colonies colonies are expensive for all the reasons i've said you'll pay for forts and roads and stupid just trade with we'll all make much more money if we just trade open it's a very it's an interesting thing going on there and indeed it's true american colonies break away but become an enormous market for british goods and and obviously the subsequent relationship between britain america is well established and it is quite sort of beneficial to both and the brits are able to go and sell railways and and and and enjoy access to the american market but yes so those colonies break away but most of the north american colonies do 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 um so that's disaster that's the 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 itself french you'll feel sorry they went all in helping the americans the americans went to the peace treaty and the french americans like we are gonna 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 you know 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 the trigonometry merch store is built on shopify because the moment someone's actually ready to pay shopify make sure they can and if they've bought before their details are already saved so it's one tap and done that's time back to grow the business instead of running it if you want to start the same way that's shopify.co.uk trigger with shopify nothing stands between your idea and a real business so go make it one start your free trial at shopify.co.uk trigger start your free trial at shopify.co.uk trigger uh but and and then and then you get the the great revolutionary you know what was called the great war at the time so french revolution happens within a couple 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 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's it gobbles up the colonies of everyone else it takes south africa off the dutch it helps to destroy spanish power in north america and at one point that was they've forgotten the moment in the america british empire uh the the garrison of south africa took it upon itself to invade buenos aires the british amazing with no no permission from london that's the thing about empire it's crumbling frontier as 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 we're going to take that land and london's often like please stop doing that because what because what happens to the 18th 19th century is like george washington famously accidentally started the french indian war is once british people are killed the government's like oh you know we have to deal with this and we're going to do this and do something now so often in the 19th africa it's like missionaries going game we're going to convert them into christianity they get smashed the beers chopped to 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 completely random bit of territory miles from anywhere and it's exactly so the cost is and when we talk about it today don't we how the cost is often borne by the public and the profits are then enjoyed by the mine owners the logger the loggers you know whatever it is these private interests quite interesting so anyway so this because the uh the garrison of south africa goes and invades buenos aires and enjoys some initial assessment for a very brief and exciting period for the british they think well do we just take over the spanish empire in south america like is this is this going to be you know is it going to be you know canada effectively in the north and then and then argentina chile is this going to be british and then in fascinatingly the people of buenos aires decide to make 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 their financial their economic intervention industrial muscle ensures that they can kind of come back and so yeah south america but south south africa start things south africa and then islands india oh the india the um various indian confederations you've heard might have heard of mike tippoo sultan in my saw the brits by four wars in my saw against tippoo sultan the same thing in the 1990s the marathas 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 you're drawn into the interior and then we'll come back to that and there's a great moment and there's the whole 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 you there's trouble to just be on the frontier and you end up controlling the largest empire the world's ever seen because you've got to come and go well you've got to control it's control suez canal you've got to control egypt problem with egypt you've got to control sudan so again you're sucked in sudan you're going to pull into central africa so it's it's strange but yes that's the american answer i think that's roughly speaking true but all right but i should say that there were limits of british power the brits could not send anything like enough troops to conquer reconquer the american colonies uh it was just way beyond the ability of the british to conquer the american colonies it was just way beyond the ability of the british state at that point it is simply because we just didn't have the manpower we just couldn't send the troops yeah yeah so you're the brits are hiring germans called hessians we call hessians tens of thousands of them to fight the brits cannot you know the brits are not the soviet union 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 dutch fighting and trying to maintain the navy the brits can go all it's traditionally have a tiny army most of which is based in ireland and that's that that means you invest massively into the navy which is really quite large and then the army is almost kind of raw marines force just goes ashore from the navy and just sort of secures these little these little forts around the world these places i've talked about now to conquer the americas requires a you know armies on a kind of ancient scale you've got to march from new york with a force of a hundred thousand men through pennsylvania through new jersey to pennsylvania and keep going that that's just never the brits cannot do that they just they don't have the manpower they don't have the money to that because they're trying to maintain their empire in all these other places well i was going to say i mean one of the concerns during the what the americans called the revolutionary war was actually because there was a war between spain france and england uh 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 in the homeland uh so really important naval battle so it's a nightmare you're trying to fight some big naval battle in the homeland so it's a nightmare you're trying to maintain you're trying to make you're trying to blockade the american colonies can you imagine newport rhode island uh you're trying to blockade the delaware pennsylvania um 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 taking you know trading with the caribbean trading with the french nightmare you can't 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 other places and then you've got a problem in the channel as well nightmare and then god near asia so this is even we're saying the british empire was like hegemonic time i mean this is 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 they raise indian they raise indian troops so there's these vast armies fighting kind of continental uh that 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 the british regime in india is is looks looks quite indian and there's the the other side of the empire which has now become a talking point a culture war 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 uh 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 in particular chinesa places uh east you know this slavery is pretty 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 portuguese and they also they also bring back enslaved people that are buying off local african tribes they're taking 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 canals that doesn't go very well and then so when west africa when the western hemisphere is discovered by europeans the obvious thing is to take effect you know indentured labor so locals the locals die out in astonish i'm the very few can i just pause you there because there'll be people who don't the difference between a snove and indentured servants. So these are people who almost sell themselves. Indenturers, you agree you're going to do 10 years hard labour, and then you almost sell yourself to a company. 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 getting 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 Caribs left today in some places, but we're talking very few. So it's full of indigenous Americans, we might know them, referred to as Indians. They die at appalling mortality 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 it's astonishing mortality. And overwhelmingly from disease. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. The disease is travelling faster than Europeans. 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 an expression which is the Europeans will arrive in a place and go, "Well, it's a great, virgin land." There's a famous expression, "It wasn't virgin, it was widowed." Native Americans, they existed in quite large cities at times. In Alabama, there was a city that had fields, crops, settles, agriculture. By the time Europeans arrive, they go, "Oh, these people are hunter-gatherers living in small, little groups." Because actually, there's been sort of fundamental collapse of that system. So anyway, so they-- Dan, sorry. 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-- 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 Europeans. So there's the famous Colombian food exchange, which I love. So Julius Caesar, Charlemagne, Michelangelo had never tasted potato, tomato, chocolate, tobacco, never. Turkey, never seen it, never heard of it. Wow. Italians, no tomatoes in Italian cooking. Those come from the Americas. Now, and-- Corn as well. Corn. Very good point. In return, and-- but there are no-- this is a whole separate fascinating issue, but why do the Europeans conquer the Americas and not the way around? Because the disease is part of it. 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 llamas are a 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. They're left in intemperament. Yeah, they are. Well, that's true. I mean, what do you want? I was about to say, they're really lazy. You're allowed to say that. Yeah, I am. I'm allowed to say, yeah, that I'm not working. And so, horses, cows, pigs, ox, all of these animals arrive in the Americas, which weren't there before. So, by the way, that means that all the grapes of Aztec Maya buildings, no horses are being involved in those. No wagons, axles, all that kind of stuff. So, yes, so they need a labor source, because they discovered these islands are really good for growing sugar, which is this wonder crop, because food sucks so bad. 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 labor is from West Africa, because there's a wind that blows very usefully directly from West Africa to the Caribbean. You don't have to touch your sails. It just goes like that, on the great naval nautical highways, maritime railways. Very easy to do. So, you buy up sails. Now, what happens here, and the reason is that it happens on just an astonishing scale. So, in the course of, from 1550 to 1807, the Brits will take about three and a half million Africans to the New World, about a third, the overall total. And so, that's just, it 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, this, everything's becoming somewhat 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 rich and powerful so they they then invade their neighbors and like the kingdom so there's like sort of it there's a 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 or you'd go inland into west africa because of malaria and other things so until quite a long but until for a long time the europeans have these forts on the coast again these little pinpricks these key forts along the coast so much you can still do it today and they and they they take part in these slaving experiences they will go as military advisors with local chieftains things but they will help and they and but their voracious demand for enslaved people then adds the conflict 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 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 yes apparently is that the uh the expense of what the expense of the system and the and the need to and the kind of extraordinary police state you have to enforce is is would would mean that in fact uh they could have been economically productive using the model but that would have involved having to you know convince lots of other people to go there but that's what i don't smith's argument was which is quite attractive argument to us obviously uh and so um and then and then you so yeah so then in 1807 the brits have this kind of really radical change of there's a there's a long campaign of again for abolition and ending the slave trade 1807 the brits on what basis then why why are people saying we need to influence by adam's people 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 in britain and people saying this is just in inhumane we shouldn't do it and and that's the public literacy more newspapers uh it formally enslaved people coming to britain and writing very eloquently about their experiences it just it's you know why why do cultural moments happen and that and that's so so again christianity quakerism kind of forms of protestantism that emphasize the light of god burning in everybody and you know so so there's just a really interesting sort of economic and um yeah and and so 80s and they banned the slave trade they then banned slavery itself in the 1830s and that's partly in response what we talked about there's a massive slave uprising in jamaica which is very expensive to put down savage and the brits just start getting this doesn't actually we don't think this makes it's not it's amoral it's but also it's it's costing us money having to run these vast police stations 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 you know so actually the sort of the moral cost of slavery is is enormous but but so is the kind of so the kind of political the real world political costs of it um so yeah so that's what goes on there and uh and i think the brits were kind of tickled by the idea that it would also shaft their european that their the british economy was at this point less dependent on slave-grown products than places like portuguese or the americans so they're like well we're a lot of good guys and we're actually going to shove the americans if we do this as well so it's as everything it's a combination of sort of 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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 question. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. But it's a great question about history generally, isn't it? The past was a monstrous place. What do we practically do about that? I mean, my sense is, the answer, I don't know, like our gigantic cash payments. And who, like our 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. 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 our wealth and power partly derived from the enslavement of Africans and putting them to work in sugar plantations in the New World. It also derived from the kind of annihilation of indigenous tribes in North America, selling opium to the Chinese. 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 out the USA, which is what happens. That's fine. The rebrand, that's built off the back of conquest. Argentina, which is the back of conquest, is built off the back of conquest. Argentina conquers what is now southern Argentina in the 19th century. Russia's European conquest of. People talk about European empires in Asia coming to an end. 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 Putin's invasion of Ukraine, I think, so scary. 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 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 just kind of. I don't think it's practical. I know that's not a very 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 is that, 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 empire throughout history practiced 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 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 all. Yeah. And we talked about iron at the beginning. I mean, the English conquest of iron in the 1500s was unimaginably brutal. Shocking. Yeah. Now, 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 to make people say, we're going to send a lot of your tax payments to, like, people in Munster, 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 kind of strand of American thinking, you go, monstrous things have happened in our past. The key thing that we can do now is shape a new and better way to organize society, right? So we are going to try and ensure that people of color 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 and all this economic opportunities to put chance to create a generational wealth that they've been denied in the past. That, in one sense, we're going to kind of repudiate the idea that it's okay to invade neighbors. We're going to repudiate the idea that it's okay to have slaves. You know, like, that feels, and that's totally, that's me talking from a 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, of historical, monstrous historical criminality. How far back do you go? This is the question. I go way back. No, but this is what I'm saying though, right? It was like. Oh, I see what you mean. How, what 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, it's difficult. And, and then you get into sort of really difficult territory. Like, what was it? So, the other thing. No, what I'm saying is something else, Dan, which is, should the descendants of the Normans pay reparations to the. No, no, you're absolutely right. Well, this is why the island, yeah, exactly. Or whoever, like, the, I think if you start to, to try and undo history, then you've got to go all the way back to the beginning. And now, now we're in the, in the savannas of Africa, et cetera. Key way to undo history is to try and make, try, try and learn from the past and make the world a better place. Again, since 1945, we've been doing, we have a, like, we hoped 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 that, for me, that's the, that's a really important plank of this. It's about saying, oh, we've realised a common humanity and that we're all, like, actually skin colour doesn't determine your intelligence and your chances of succeeding in life and your ability to invent, you know, that, those things, really embedding those things today, feels to me like the most practical and achievable antidote. Right. I mean, the thing I, this is, I think about is like, well, my, you know, there's millions of people in this country who's, who's grand, who, who two generations ago, they were conscripted to fight. So they're given no choice. They're conscripted to fight effectively, given no choice. And we're just thrown into machine gun bullets on the Western front. Like that was an astonishing, pract-, a trauma that practically affected millions of families in this country. Like of, of all the, so what, like did that, that's, that was monstrous in so many ways. Like what do we do about, so I, listen, that's, that's history. I think it's, um, I'm, I, 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 point. Yeah. On 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 to the indians yeah where do you stand so that's so look at all different things different times bengal so the british take over bengal in the 1750s and the result was an absolute catastrophe for the bengalis not 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 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 and for example so there are famines and but the 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 regards they'd say look clearly there's not there's a famine you'd have to pay a tax this year don't worry about it that letter would take six months to get to london they never think it takes six months to get back like it's insane like monstrous right and so people turn their kids into slavery there's just appalling stories from bengal so and then uh 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 empire so yeah there's you know there's massive negative consequences for you know bengal then you move forward 100 years and and then india exists as part of a i mean the problem with all this you don't know what the 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 you know in the 19th century after britain britain conquers india there's a massive indian revolt in the 1850s and it's brutally put down so they've got last you know 50 years britain um indian in india's reasonably stable but what's the i don't know what the counterfactual is you know what does what what what would the afghans have invaded again and and slaughtered so all of these questions are sort of uh uh kind of they're 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 we were talking about it like it's just sort of just this is a thing that happened we're studying history as it happened um india 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 like we don't know so what so how can you possibly say what you can do is point oh look that there was a that the brits massacred people there during the anglo-major war that's that's that's a thing that happened but you can't say but you you don't know whether it's very difficult to kind of go through the history of india or not because it's a very difficult thing to do and i think it's a very difficult thing to do and i think it's a very difficult thing to do and i think it's a very difficult thing to do and i think it's a very difficult thing to do and i think it's a very difficult thing to do and i think it's a very difficult thing to do and i think it's a very difficult thing to do and i think it's a very difficult thing to do and i think it's a very difficult thing to do and i think it's a very 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 the 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. It's what happens in Eastern Europe when empires fall apart in the 20th century." So there's lengthy debate about that. Is it what happens when you've kept a lid on everything for a hundred years and then you suddenly take it off and just go, "Sorry, we're out." Well, that's what an empire, 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 shop. All over the shop. Yeah. So, yeah, was the defeat of the Ottoman Empire a good or bad thing? Well, this is a big question, right? The Middle East has been unsettled for 100 years. But was it better? We have no idea what would happen if the Ottoman Empire had. They could have launched a genocide of Arabs like they did in Armenia. 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, it's a good example. But India is given a national coherence by the British, in a way, and it's striking that the Indian. And when they declared independence, they were quite keen to hold. They were quite keen to. That generation of Indian leaders were quite keen to hold on to India. 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." And you see that off the Roman Empire in a place like France, or in Italy, or in Spain. All of these are like, "Yeah, we'll throw off the Roman yoke." But by the way, we're keeping hold of all the things. And so yeah, that's, again, super tricky. So Winston Churchill sat there and went, "See, 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." So you mishandled the pulling out process, which is true. Or it's what you'd stirred up by denying Indians' autonomy for so long. These things are super tricky. And it's the idea of better as well. I think that's a number of it, where they go, "It would be better like this." What does better actually mean? What does better mean? So 19th century, our old history books, better just meant, do you live in massive states where rulers are in charge and they can build huge buildings and it's just awesome? Or does it mean life expectancy? Should we be 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, British people working on industrialized farms. The industrial farms have gone. Villas smashed a bit. So everyone's like, "Okay, we've all gone a bit Mad Max." But we've got our own plots. We're growing our own veg. We've got little pigs in the back. If you can avoid getting smoked by the German raiders, we're all actually-- people are eating a bit better. So 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 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 in Belak and nice museums, right? Well, maybe that's nonsense. Maybe that's-- I mean, look, there's arguments, aren't there, in the States? People-- there's this great online meme, "Mississippi is richer than Britain," isn't it? Per capita. And everyone's like, "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 living in uncertainty. So our Iraqis have an expression, better a thousand years of tyranny than one day of anarchy. And I think we're sitting here in this nice studio, everything's super chilled. I've personally-- my family haven't had to, you know, 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 where 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, its peak and heyday and success. You say 1922 in terms of territorially, but energetically, though, I imagine it's a bit before that, right? Big difference. Big difference. And it's partly a big difference because this is important for people to think about empire. The empire, you know, 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 Britain, the majority of Britain's trade is actually going on outside the empire. So that wealth is being generated in the Ottoman, in the east, in the Ottoman Empire. South America, huge. Argentina is almost, it's not a British colony. So again, the British attempt to make a colony fails. What actually happens is Argentina becomes, you know, 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 trade, you know, everything's, the Brits don't have to invade. You're like, this is working out very nicely, thanks, right? So Britain's trade with the USA are more important than this trade with Canada, even though Canada is 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 1922. It's absolutely the 1850s, 1850s. Why? Germany doesn't really exist yet. The USA is still expanding. It's going through astonishing growing pains. It's about to have a big civil war in the 1860s. New technologies coming on stream. They are building steamships, HMS Warrior. You can still go and see it in Portsmouth, 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 bounce off so this is a stop now that ship can sail it doesn't in the end 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 because of its long coastline fantastic interlinked you you it's very easy to move raw materials around nightmares before siberia now 21 all right bringing 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 unlimited energy supply from a little bit further up the coast little guy called captain cook helped help to sustain that trade so so you've got so that geography as i said at the beginning so um trains though the tell you you're inventing telegraphs your your extraordinary energy is going on and then you get a problem and actually trains guys this is the this is my hot take for the internet on this one trains the greatest british invention that absolutely shaft the british and you wonder about ai in america they could be interestingly interesting trains a lap trains overcome the tyranny of the oceans okay suddenly you can move things around your country you don't have to take 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 nightmare i'd say all the way around how you're gonna do that you're gonna give africa suez everyone can stop you there's choke points there's you gotta go out the north sea put a train in now you've got a country now you're on empire so trains forge the following country the u.s. say 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 has 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 bavaria trains trains very you can't no canals tiny little coast suddenly you can move goods and ideas and people around that giant place and then you've got russia suddenly russian troops can get from the european russia to the to the threatened britain's britain's asian empire afghanistan or east far east and and it's 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 you know so and they can create nation states that ultimately dwarf britain and you get land empires emerging knitted together by trains suddenly make the 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 like you don't have to go over the ocean the ocean becomes a sort of barrier rather than a bridge in people's minds that begins in 1830 so towards the end of the 20th century obviously the usa starts consolidating 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 pretty much quarter of 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 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 some of that energy is sort of pretty much 1942 43 it just is what it's completely overtaken by the americans in terms of ships in terms of you know in terms of investment is able to put into his 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 health that they get during world war ii and actually the end of the british empire was something they were pretty content with and in fact 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 he took this big gamble and he rightly identified hitler as one of history's worst individuals a 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 after the war reneging on those kind of deals so yeah the americans took their pound of flesh the americans saw the decline that the end of the british empire is a strategic win for the americans um still bitter about 1770s that's i'm furious about it and but no i'm understanding of course they did and they uh now amazingly 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 hegemons they might wish that the brits were still running israel to this day or you know or other parts of the world uh and um but yes so so you get these these superpowers emerging you get british in the 1890s you get the prime minister lord spoolsbury he goes we should have you know what we should 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 u.s project missed the opportunity so they couldn't because of slavery it was too up there they it would have been right it would have the brits the brits thought about it but just couldn't bring themselves to do it and uh and so the in the end these emergence of these giants 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 ethics sort of weirdly the vibe is wrong if you're joined by land to somewhere it looks like if sure you can take you know so no no one questions the right of russia now to be in the far east that was an imperial project was conquered in the 1600s 1700s 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 serious that doesn't work you got the c in the way like what are you talking about and then you get politicians in the 20th century again why why why c like what's the c got to do with it how is it different britain controlling you know is it just because we're not at night 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 travel and communications were arguably making a discontinuous empire kind of feasibly possible you couldn't have you could envisage a situation where you had a parliament in britain with like australians new zealanders and canadians kind of in it so africans nigerians whatever and and you kind of you you britain was unable to turn its empire into which lots of people in the 19th century all sorts of thinkers are going it's going to become a nation state like russia it's like america you they've got empires and what and 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 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 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 can you could be in california and get a train to washington dc take part in the political process in a few days you know if you're in australia and museum that's more difficult but weirdly the british empire so by 1940 1950 by 1980 2000 actually there's a world in which particularly now you're all like working remotely and you have an imperial parliament it doesn't matter where you are right so it's kind of 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 group is the biggest by far uh 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 the 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 regards as part of kind of wanted to come to california and she took great interest in and said well i'm going to come to california and she took great interest in and said well i'm going to married off to a british naval officer wanted to create a wanted to create a kind of mixed race imperial elite fascinating on the ground that 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 in if you're living next to maori people in new zealand they're just the kind of cultural demographic and sort of racist assumption like it just was it was kind of too much it just it it's hard it's too it was too difficult i think in practice on the ground but you get lots of scholars in the 1880s for britain to survive they knew what was coming, for Britain to survive as an empire, we're going to have 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 people from Burma, Aung San Suu Kyi'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, you're all welcome here in the imperial capital." But shopkeepers are like, "Piss off." And they're radicalized by, "Hang on a minute, this doesn't work." And so you're right, the tension, the idea that you can, from the Maoris to the Assiniboine 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, as well. And by the way, you have this extraordinary idea of nationalism. It's still afloat in the world at the moment, that just encouraged people to think of themselves as peoples, and sovereign power ought to be exercised by this people. And peoples were defined by ethnicity and by language, and people in the 19th century loved going around and going, "No, you're Ukrainian. You're not Ruthenian. You're not Polish. No, you are." And this is the language you speak, as the Austrian Empire collapses in Eastern Europe, the Czechs are told, "No, you're not Ukrainian. You're now Czech." You're not Bohemian. You're not German-speaking Bohemians. You have to learn Czech, which is the kind of language which poets have sort of revived from the distant past. 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. The British Empire was like, "Yeah, we'll all just come on. We'll all be great imperial subjects and just overlook this." Everyone was like, "No. I want to be-- I am from this group or that group. And I'm being-- There's a-- The philosophy, the fashion that's in the world at the moment is this idea of independence and autonomy. And that tears apart the Austrian Empire. It tears apart the Ottoman Empire. It tears apart Tsarist Russian Empire. And it's currently working in the UK today. 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 as we're coming towards the end of the interview, which is legacy. What is the legacy of the British Empire? Well, it's hard to underestimate the legacy of the British Empire in the world at the moment. It's astonishing, partly transmitted through Americanness. I mean, this is why, as 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. Transmitted through Rome to the modern world. It's pretty useful parallel, right? 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. It's extraordinary, right? And that's because of the scale of the British Empire and then the fact that North America spoke English. Do you know something else? Do you know something else, Dan, just from a linguistic point of view? It's also because English is a very hard language to master, but it's very easy to learn relatively. Is that right? 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 just wouldn't work because they're just too hard to learn. It's very interesting. Yeah. Chinese probably as well, ironically, because, you know, people go, what's the most common language? It's 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. English is very simple. Yeah. Yeah. I'm still trying to master it. And then ideas around representative democracy. Yeah. Hugely important. India, Australia, New Zealand, the USA, Canada, these enormous countries. The Japanese system of sort of constitutional monarchy in some ways transmitted via the US through to post-war thinking. It's just. And then there's capitalism. I mean, there's the British first factory of the modern world, arguably, in Nottingham in the 1750s, you know, organizing labor, insurance, paychecks. Yeah. Patent protection, all of these ideas, the sort of foundational ways in which we conduct global trade. A lot of that is forged, yes, in Amsterdam. And it's a kind of milieu in those 1600s, 1700s. But it's Britain. It's that British empire that's the vehicle for exporting that. And then, apart from anything else, football, welcome. Yeah. It's entirely, football is exported by the Brits. It's all of these things. So Britain's future. But Britain's fingerprints are on lots of the modern world. And another thing, of course, is the geography of the world. Calcutta, Mumbai, Bombay, as it was, British settlements, Hong Kong. Madras, as well. Madras, of course. Chennai, yeah. That was, that fort built there, it's one of those little forts I was talking about. You can still go visit the fort in Madras and Chennai built in the 1630s as a little pinprick of Britishness from which the entire continent went. I mean, no one could have guessed that, right? And then, Hong Kong, obviously, Singapore, these are places that existed as British trading posts that helped to shape the modern world we live in today. I think one of the last I'd say about the British empire, and I think this is about some of the tech giants as well, is the British definitely jumped through a gap in the market. So China was declining for a lot of reasons. China was declining for a lot of internal reasons. Britain defeated France. The US was getting started. It was 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, they just went, okay, we'll deliver stuff to your house, you can book it on your phone. You go, this is the cleverest thing I've ever 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, just get wiped out. The Swedish collapse, you know, Delaware used to be New Sweden. You know, there are all sorts of other options of the world. You know, 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, New York's another example of a place like New York. Like Singapore, which owes its importance to, to that British, British empire. Do, 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 sort of eradicated, but no, I think some, yeah, some, well, they exist in people's minds, don't they exist in the culture? So you see that in ancient. You see that in the ancient world, Babylon long after it exists, independent state, people are sort of still obsessed by Babylon. Greece long after Greece is conquered and it's still Greekness and ideas, it kind of, it rumbles along. So I suppose the British empire at the moment, it, I mean, it still exists in some weird ways. First of all, there are bits of it. That's the weird thing about them. One of the problems we're talking about is the street defense review at the moment. And one of the big problems of British empire, there's still like bits of territory all over the place that need defending or do they, you know, that, that's a big problem. It's a big problem for policy makers 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. The Cayman Islands or the Falkland 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, and so, and like the Roman empire in the West, it's just sort of collapses maybe slowly. Like what does the end of it, what is the end of empire? Like what is, when my mum was a kid in Canada and Canada was independent, she, in geography lessons, she thought about the rivers of England, not about the rivers of France. She thought 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, you know, give it credit for. And if you were in charge of all the schools and universities in the country, unlikely to happen, what, what would we teach? What would be the story of the empire that we tell people? I think we teach the story, I don't know why it happened. I don't know why it happened. is infinitesimally short it's it's already in the so if you want to study us what makes us tick what makes us fight what makes us love steal share you can look at the past that's all we got all we got to go on and so whether it's the british empire or anything i'm like what what happened here why did it happen bonkers and what were the consequences of it happening um 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 my joy of my job is i get to get you know 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 i would i just i luckily i don't need to be in charge of anything because it already happens really but you're just looking i want people to have a sense of that broader story and but i thought some of the takeaways from what you were saying about it why it happened were really important as well because look i think the geographical piece we don't control but you talked about patent law you talked about uh you know the representative democracy or at least parliament having to answer to some extent to the people a ruler 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 seemed to be good ways of doing things and 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 you i think rightly talk about how the best 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 i think it's what how do you how do you generalize and how do you look at that in terms of 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 that's revolution these people have got no formal education captain cook who's grew up semi-literate we think but many of these people grew up illiterate george stevenson's got no formal training he goes and invents modern 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 i don't know if you've ever heard of george stevenson's i don't know if you've ever heard of george stevenson's i don't know if you've ever heard of george stevenson's and james cook's and mary walson craft and shakespeare just all over the world it's like wildflowers he disturbed the soil and suddenly boom they all just come out and and the vast majority of us will never find out because we're just yoked to the soil or we're just doing what we do podcasting and you know we might be absolute geniuses we don't know but no that and i think that is the that's very interesting important like that's really and of course we have learned those lessons mass public education you know encouraging trying to identify gifted students i think there are things that we continue to do but i i find that fascinating on that totally you know that and and also promotion on merit and again we have learned people who don't know anything history we've learned quite a lot we put on merit today there's no perfect way of promotion but on the whole if someone drives a ship into a sandbank i mean their career doesn't matter for the son of the duke of newcastle yeah so um and and those are sort of those are things and that's and by the way that's why our world is astonishingly important i think that's why our world is astonishingly fascinating i think that's why our world is astonishingly at the moment we have absorbed at the moment we have absorbed at the moment we have absorbed lots of those lessons we continue to lots of those lessons we continue to lots of those lessons we continue to that's why we encourage learning that's that's why we encourage learning that's that's why we encourage learning that's why we why we why we um invest in into medical science um invest in into medical science um invest in into medical science whatever whatever it might be and as a whatever whatever it might be and as a whatever whatever it might be and as a result the world is result the world is result the world is just radically changed now there's also a just radically changed now there's also a just radically changed now there's also a lesson about doing so sustainably and not lesson about doing so sustainably and not causing climate change, all 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. And there's 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. But yes, in that form, I think in terms of the idea that you can sail across the seas and conquer. But I mean, that's what's very interesting about some of Trump's rhetoric. I don't think he means it. But the idea that Gaza's trip becomes in some form American or Venezuelan. He's posted about Venezuela becoming American. 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. 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. Britain's failed, like the Turks failed, like the Omanis 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 showed in California. I mean, why would it not? California was conquered, you know, 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 thing, 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 spend euros there. France attempted, by the way, to take over the French territory. So it's a little bit different to the British. Guadeloupe, Martinique, France incorporated those into France. They vote in the French elections. They use euros. It's the, the sway of the Pacific, which is still part of France. Is France, I don't know. But they've, they've, but that's sort of somehow become, you know, nation state. But yeah, interesting. Dan, what an absolute pleasure. Fun, guys. Oh, 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. This is the greatest time of my life. And the woman's like, yeah, it was all right. Anyway, on that note, what's one thing, Dan, that we're meant to be talking about, but we're not being talked about? Oh, 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. Like you were saying how there was some of the technology that we were using here. And then it could be to. Yeah, it may, it may. Look, the Americans have meant all this AI. And they're thinking, isn't it? It's great. But in that case, are there ways in which other states or players will harness that AI to absolutely undermine American interests in the world? I mean, that's what history teaches us. Like the train thing with the British. Like the train thing is very fascinating, yeah. Or the armaments revolution, which in part is inspired by the British. Anyway, we didn't get onto that. Actually, okay, so I think one thing we're not talking about is, as we go into space, the lessons from the past are 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, who's, 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 60s. And the 60s and 70s centuries around the world, and see if there's a really good way we can do this in a way that does not eventually, 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 kind of like, you're drilling. So 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 check that out. And they're just as good as the conversations we've had here with you. Impossible. With you, I mean, with you specifically. Head on over to triggerpod.co.uk where Dan's going to answer your questions. What is your favorite what if moment of history? Doesn't have to be about an important moment. Only the day. And it might have led to a different present. Hank joined BJ's Wholesale Club the day he became a father of 30. I coach. football now coach hank saves up to 25 off grocery store prices 30 pounds of pasta three cases of protein bars 75 sports drinks and that's just pre-game he knows teamwork and bj's knows savings this is your home coach home of the save join for just 20 at bj's.com slash mesquite and save 10 cents per gallon for six months open soon limited time offer new members only bj's home of the save