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Simon Schama. A History of Britain. “The Wrong Empire”. Subtitles.
The Wrong Empire
If there was one thing How was it that a nation which the silverware was a little
18th-century British gentlemen had simpler,
thought they knew such mistrust of military power the furniture not quite so
more about than port or ended up the biggest Hepplewhite as back home in
racehorses, military power of all? England,
it was liberty. How was it that the empire but that very simplicity
They basked in it. of the Free became one of slaves? spoke to their origins,
It was the reward, How was it that profit the quest for liberty and the drive
they told themselves, seemed to turn not on freedom, for honest self-improvement.
for nearly a century of civil wars. but on raw coercion? But it was rather small potatoes,
It helped make Britain How was it that we ended up shall we say,
the freest country in the world, with the wrong empire? if what you really wanted
safe from Catholic tyranny, Ask any British gentleman was a palazzo in England,
absolute monarchs in the middle of the 18th century rather than a picket fence
and standing armies. to draw you a map in New England.
Liberty was their religion. of the British empire, Suppose you wanted
They built temples in their and it would have looked like to make a serious fortune?
gardens this. Now, where could that happen?
devoted to it. To the east, In the mid-17th century,
They even wrote it a hymn. there were trading posts in India, the Caribbean was where.
Pity the rest of the enslaved tiny enclaves that had been there Nobody settled in the West Indies
world, for 100 years, to read the Bible unmolested.
deprived of its manifold shipping home This was not Massachusetts.
blessings! printed cottons and silks. No, you braved the fevers and
But the real payoff of liberty A commercial enterprise swamps
had been riches and power run by the East India Company, for one reason alone -
from around the globe. not the government. to make yourself very rich very
With liberty had come trade. There would be no colonies in fast.
Trade had wrought perhaps the Asia. Serious profits
most But Britain could look west were already being raked in
staggering transformation of as well as east. catering to Europe's addictions -
power And west was a whole different chocolate, coffee
in all British history. story. and, in England especially, tea.
From being a tiny outcrop To the west was America - But, as a money spinner, nothing
of insignificant islands Britain West, in fact. compared with the stuff you
off the north-west coast of Two million people between the added
Europe, Atlantic to make them more palatable -
Britain had expanded seaboard and the Appalachian sugar.
into a global power. Mountains. 0nce seen as a luxurious drug,
The shadow of Britannia They came from York to New it was now a necessity,
now fell across America, York, the cash crop of the empire.
the Caribbean, Hampshire to New Hampshire. Barbados provided the perfect
the Indian Subcontinent. And they all ate, slept, habitat
It had taken barely a century. breathed the same mantra - to grow the sugar cane -
And, unlike the Roman Empire liberty and Britishness. tropical heat and saturating rains.
they so admired, They had first arrived So the British
they dreamt of a British Empire in the early 17th century, settled in the West Indies,
that would endure. seeking their fortune transforming virgin forest
0ne based on trade, not on or religious tolerance. into a patchwork quilt
conquest. Time enough to build farms, of sugar plantations.
It would be an empire of liberty, communities, towns, cities even. But Queen Sugar was a bitch,
they thought, Certainly time enough demanding absolute service
Britain writ large, to deal with the troublesome before she'd spill her bounty.
sharing its bounty with the world. natives - She took 14 months to get ripe,
So, how was it that to make alliances where possible, all eight feet of her.
in just over a century, and, if not, to wipe them out, When she was ready, she was
the people that thought of or drive them inland. ready.
themselves Within the settlements and Cut the cane at once, get it
as the freest on earth houses to the crushers before it spoiled.
ended up subjugating of the Virginia tobacco planters Boil the juice before it degraded.
much of the world's population? and Massachusetts merchants,
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Simon Schama. A History of Britain. “The Wrong Empire”. Subtitles.
All very messy and very into work animals. What do you find? For a start,
dangerous. The scale of profits sealed you find a lot of dead slaves,
By the side of the crushing mills the conspiracy of silence. some of them manacled together,
hung a sharpened machete, Well, here's a little thing living and dead, chained as one
ready to sever the limbs of of devilish prettiness. pair.
anyone It's silver. It might be jewellery. What do you do then?
who got caught in the rollers. A hat pin or something like that. You take the pair on deck,
What she needed was a But it's not. This is an object strap them to the grating,
combination which marked the passage sort out the living from the dead,
of strength and lightning speed. of a human being to a thing. throw the dead overboard.
What she needed It's a branding iron. There are the sharks,
were human beasts of burden, 0nce the initials always the sharks, waiting,
strong, quick, durable were burnt into your flesh, grateful.
and uncomplaining. you were no longer a person. If you were one of those
0ne commodity You were an object, a who made it to land alive,
would be reaped by another. commodity. your troubles had just begun.
By slaves. You were a beast of burden. Naked but for a loincloth,
Sitting in a plantation house, Your journey into hell you were once again
next to mills turning sugar started months earlier in Africa. paraded and poked at,
into liquid gold, It's described in one your teeth inspected like horses.
what did you care if you had to of the few surviving accounts Violence, the threat or application
go by 0laudah Equiano, of it, ran the system.
to West Africa to buy the slaves one of the millions Women were the objects
and ship them back to experience the nightmare. of particular terror.
across the Atlantic? Captured as a small boy, In one year, a Jamaican overseer
0h, yes, he was separated from his sister... of a plantation, aptly called
the logistics were difficult. then dragged to the coast Egypt,
Nothing the greatest seafaring and a waiting slave ship. gave 21 floggings to women,
nation in the world couldn't When I looked aroynd the ship each no less than fifty lashes.
handle. and saw a myltityde of black Equiano says it was common
The British were good at people at the end of the beating
commodities. of every description, chained, to have the victims kneel and
A couple of thousand pounds every one of their coyntenances thank
bought you expressing dejection and sorrow, their masters for the treatment.
200 acres of Barbadian cane I no longer doybted of my fate. The same overseer also recorded,
fields, qyite overpowered with the same matter of fact
a mill and a 100-odd slaves. with horror and angyish, manner,
Within a few years, it returned I fell motionless on the deck. that he'd had sex
an equal amount every year To make the venture profitable, with 23 slave women that year,
for the rest of your life. the slaves were stacked not including his regular mistress.
You were now among the richest in two layers in the hold, 0nly Sundays
men with only about two feet between offered some moments of joy.
anywhere in the British Empire. the planks below and above them. The market and music let slaves
The slave economy in the The air soon became recreate some sense of
Caribbean ynfit for respiration, community
wasn't just a side-show of empire, from a variety of loathsome and the Africa they had left
it was the Empire. smells, behind.
3.5 million slaves were and broyght on a sickness among At no time was there more joyous
transported the slaves of which many died. music than at a funeral,
in British ships alone. This deplorable sityation because death, at last, was liberty.
They went to British plantations, was again aggravated Death was the return home.
to make British profits by the galling of the chains (BASS VOCALIST) # Deep
and build British cities... and the filth of the necessary tybs river...
Bristol, Liverpool and Glasgow, in which the children often fell It was very important
where the cult of liberty and were almost syffocated. for such a momentous journey
was still on everyone's lips The shrieks of the women to have something like this,
in smart coffee houses. and the groans of the dying African,
Apart from the occasional rendered it a scene of horror though made in Barbados.
visiting Quaker and exiled almost inconceivable. # ..Jordan...
Puritan, You're a ship's surgeon. It's your A necklace of teeth,
there was a deafening silence job to go into the hold of a shells and bones, discarded
in the land of liberty morning trinkets,
about turning fellow men and examine the cargo. copper and bronze rings.
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Simon Schama. A History of Britain. “The Wrong Empire”. Subtitles.
# ..I want to cross over it to It was commonly thought Oyr bells are worn threadbare
campgroynd... by politicians that war was with the ringing of victories.
So, a people who legally had coming, But there was no victory
no possessions at all but it wasn't a prospect as sweet or as significant
reserved what they'd hidden away anyone relished, as the one that broke the back
for this last important journey, except someone who made of French power
so their spirits could return global victory his alpha and in North America for good -
to Africa with dignity. omega. General Wolfe's conquest of
# ..I want to cross over it And that man was William Pitt. Quebec.
to campgroynd # For better or worse, It was exactly
For the British, it was William Pitt, the kind of thing Pitt adored.
it was the perfect set-up. neurotic, gouty, irascible, An attack so improbable that
Their ships dominated the oceans, either maniacally hyperactive Wolfe
their slaves brought them profit, or collapsed in a paralysing himself assumed it couldn't work.
the world was their oyster. gloom, He'd designed it more
But someone else was eager who was the British Empire's as a glorious death than a likely
to prise it open - true visionary. victory,
the French. He believed climbing the sheer cliffs
They'd fought for centuries with an almost feverish intensity that protected the city
and they would fight again. that what was at stake in the and surprising - and were
The Hundred Years' War of the struggle they surprised! - the French.
Middle Ages between France and Britain After a suicidal charge,
would become the Seven Years' was not just who would get the defenders were cut down
War the lion's share of wealth, in a monstrous volley.
of the 18th century. but whether the world would be (GUNFIRE)
Agincourt, fought, conquered by liberty or True to his script, Wolfe
not on a muddy field, despotism. took a shattering shot to the wrist,
but in battles around the globe. The first rounds went badly then bullets in the guts and chest.
It turned out that the combo for the forces of liberty. Bleeding into the arms
the British most despised - British troops were wiped out of his brother officers,
Jesuits, professional soldiers in the backwoods of New York he died as the first
and bureaucrats - State imperial romantic martyr,
were stealing the empire by the French duly set in marble
before their very eyes, and their native allies. in Westminster Abbey.
starting with continental So Pitt unleashed Victory in Quebec and then
America. his biggest weapon - Montreal
Singing patriotic anthems his war chest. totally transformed
wouldn't He would fight the first world the British Empire in North
stop them, only war would. war America.
And war, as the Romans with columns of figures Pitt had made America,
discovered, as well as columns of soldiers. as he supposed, British forever.
changes everything. Pit spent £18 million a year, And he must have felt he'd made
The first victim is liberty twice the government's annual the world safe for liberty to
and the second is profit. income. triumph.
The French had been in North This flew right in the face The age of imperial Britain
America of the Empire's basic principle - as a world power was about to
for as long as the British, that it shouldn't cost. dawn,
based in Canada to the north, But, as Pitt calculated, you can't was it not?
and Louisiana to the south, make a profit from empire There was reason for
and exploring the Mississippi if it's not your empire. the new young king, George III,
and the 0hio River valley in After one more setback, to be the first Hanoverian
between. there were nothing but glories. to admit out loud that:
It didn't take a genius to work out 1759 was a year of military I glory in the name of Britain.
that a cordon of French forts miracles. Even an American in London
linking Canada to Louisiana The French Empire's strongholds like Benjamin Franklin
would box the British colonies in. fell, couldn't help but agree.
It would be death one by one, to truly British He wrote that:
by slow strangulation. forces, The foyndations of the fytyre
The days of the ad hoc empire Highland regiments grandeyr and stability
were drawing to a close. often leading the way of the British Empire lie in
Empires were not for sharing. in India, the French sugar islands, America.
The British would have to fight West Africa and Nova Scotia. 17 years later, he was signing the
to keep theirs. Horace Walpole boasted:
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Simon Schama. A History of Britain. “The Wrong Empire”. Subtitles.
American Declaration of no taxation without consent, over-informed city, it really lit a
Independence. no standing armies, no martial fire.
So, what went wrong? law. After all, who uses official
How could it all have been When he looked documents and reads
thrown away in less than a at what Britain had become, newspapers?
generation? he no longer recognised a pristine Well, only every single lawyer,
Pitt would learn temple of liberty, and no wonder. merchant, minister, publisher
that even victories come at a cost. Thanks to the unrelenting wars and pamphleteer
And, in Britain's case, with France, across the 13 colonies.
that cost would be America. Britain had become a huge Anyone who has to deal
Perhaps the resources military state, with an official document now
of the British Empire supporting a massive army, navy, hates you.
were now terminally over- and an insatiable And who are they?
stretched. tax collecting machine. 0nly the best educated and
Perhaps that young empire might Adams's Britain, loudest
turn out to be a 30-year wonder. the shrine of freedom, of the colonial population.
At any rate, if they were going was, of course, a fantasy, Their leadership was prepared
to defend the status quo, a dream Britannia. to mobilise anger on the Boston
they were going to need But this was a dream that John streets.
a huge transcontinental army Adams The mob tore down the house
and even bigger navy. woke up with every morning. of the Governor of
And if that army and navy And from such nagging visions Massachusetts.
were to be funded, comes action. In Britain, this violent opposition
the burden of taxes had better not He would not pay the taxes, divided parliament almost as
just fall on the British and he was not alone in this strongly.
themselves. struggle. The government was outraged
So, the colonists, who were Angry, wealthy Boston in the at the insolence
supposed to enjoy their 1760s of colonials who were
protection, was exactly the kind of place protected by our care,
would have to cough up their that might breed a revolution. and demanded
share of the money. Adams, his friends and that they should yield obedience.
And they'd do it through taxes. neighbours, Up got William Pitt, the man
Taxation, the very thing that had argued about everything. who'd
triggered the British civil wars, They attended public meetings done most to make America
would do so again, in droves. British,
this time in America. Gossip flew around to demand the repeal
The taxes may have been the cobbled streets in minutes of the Stamp Act and save his
different, and roused the citizens empire.
but the result would to use their muscle - I rejoice that America has
once again be disaster. fast and fierce resisted.
What happened in America in opposition to British taxes I woyld argye that even
was really Round Two of those and those who tried to enforce ynder former arbitrary reigns,
wars, them. parliaments were ashamed of
the civil war of the British Stunned by this strength of taxing
Empire, feeling, a people withoyt their consent.
with the Hanoverians the British hit on a tax by stealth. The gentleman asks, ''When were
playing the part of the Stuarts 0ne only of interest to the colonies emancipated?''
and the Americans bureaucrats, Byt I desire to know,
the heirs of the revolutionaries - something the mob couldn't when were they made slaves?
of Cromwell and of William III, possibly As the war for public opinion
the inheritors of a true British notice, or so they thought. escalated,
liberty So, when the British government the American politician
that had somehow got lost decided to put a stamp on the and publisher, Benjamin
in its own motherland. paper Franklin,
0ne such American was John which official documents, produced an image that quickly
Adams, handbills and newspapers were seized
a Boston lawyer and politician, printed on, the public imagination -
deeply read in history and what in London a nightmare vision
philosophy, looked harmless enough, of a dismembered Britannia
and one of the most eloquent in Boston ruined by alienating her colonies.
patriot leaders in the colonies. seemed like a tax on knowledge. Tensions rose in London and
He believed fervently In that dangerously Boston.
in those hard won liberties - Parliament did eventually
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Simon Schama. A History of Britain. “The Wrong Empire”. Subtitles.
repeal the stamp duty, ''This was the most and who will die in defence
but still the Americans magnificent moment of all, of their rights as free men.
boycotted British goods. ''that I cannot but call it George III's ministers
Parliament put troops an epoch in history.'' were having none of it.
on the streets of Boston to keep How right he was. Parliament's authority as
order. To punish Boston, government
The Americans assaulted the British now closed its port, of the Empire was at stake,
and abused them. galvanising and, if necessary, it had to be
Then, in one notorious incident, all of the American colonies backed up with bullets.
the tormented Redcoats opened to come to the distressed city's So, few were surprised
fire aid. when the first blood was shed
before the State House. Cartloads of food came at Lexington, outside Boston,
Five Bostonians from colonies north and south. on April 19, 1775.
were left dead on the street. George Washington declared: Redcoats had been sent
Shocked by the killings, The cayse of Boston now is, to seize militia arms.
over the next three years, and ever will be, the cayse of They arrived just before dawn.
both sides let things calm down. America. Nobody knows who,
Eventually, the British dropped And yet, still, there was hesitation but inevitably, someone fired.
all their taxes except one - on the brink of catastrophe. And, in response,
that on tea. Few wanted irrevocable divorce the British shot their muskets
The import duty had been from the motherland. straight into the ragtag group
lowered In London, King George III of militiamen gathered before
to sweeten the cup. and his government them.
The government supposed no one believed rebellion The Redcoats stormed nearby
would had already started Concord,
notice the tax. Well, they noticed. and had to be nipped in the bud. but were then forced back to
The ships carrying the tea In parliament, William Pitt made Boston
duly arrived in Boston. a last-ditch plea for sanity and in bloody shock,
Unloading them meant reason. peppered with fire all the way!
paying the import duty. Did their lordships not The dream of somehow
0n the night of December 16, understand remaining
1773, that in fighting the Americans, British and still being free
the largest hall in Boston they were fighting their own had died along with the
was filled to capacity ghosts, militiamen
with people listening to orators the ghosts of English liberty past? at Lexington and Concord.
warning that to bring the tea What, thoygh yoy march from Now there was a different dream,
ashore, town a dream of a new country.
much less to brew it, was to to town, province to province, It was an American dream.
swallow 0nce those shots had been fired,
slavery along with a cuppa. thoygh yoy shall be able to many more bodies would be laid
At a pre-arranged signal, enforce beside those in Concord.
the doors burst open a temporary sybmission, It would be a war fought,
and a group of patriots, how shall yoy be able to secyre not just with muskets,
dressed in blankets as Mohawk the obedience of the coyntry yoy but with words and ideals.
Indians, leave, Adams and his fellow colonial
urged the crowd to storm the to grasp the dominion of 1,800 leaders,
ships. miles including Benjamin Franklin,
About 30 to 60 of our Mohawks, of continent, popyloys in meeting in Philadelphia,
with their faces all blackened up, nymbers, would publish their Declaration
blankets still in place, possessing valoyr, of Independence on July 4, 1776.
climbed aboard with lanterns. liberty and resistance? Yes, when the declaration
They used hatchets, which they The spirit which resists accused a king,
called, of course, tomahawks, yoyr taxation in this case, George III,
to break open the chests and is the same spirit which called of being a tyrant,
poured all England on its legs it did sound remarkably like
the stuff straight into the water. and, by the Bill of Rights, a chapter from a British history
For those who knew, vindicated the English book.
and the leaders of the patriot constitytion. But that's not
campaign This glorioys spirit animates what everyone remembers.
were very shrewd about this, three millions in America What we remember is something
understood that it was indeed who prefer poverty with liberty fresh,
an incredibly fateful moment. to gilded chains and sordid something profoundly American.
John Adams said: afflyence, We hold these tryths
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Simon Schama. A History of Britain. “The Wrong Empire”. Subtitles.
to be self evident, they bought brilliantly-printed It was a patchwork of successor
that all men are created eqyal... silks states, elegant, robust, vigorous,
They are endowed by their and cottons and shipped them many of them still using Persian
creator home, law
with certain ynalienable rights... where the parlours and bodies and Persian court style.
..that among these are life, liberty of the polite classes And it was
and the pyrsyit of happiness. were suddenly transformed these up and coming states,
In April 1778, by splashes of Indian colour. not the corrupt petty kingdoms
faced with the undoing A nice business, but anything which
of his life's work, more the British always complained
an alliance between the old ambitious was out of the about,
enemy, question, into which the East India
France, for there already was Company
and the new dominion of liberty, an empire in India, smashed its way
America, one of the most spectacular with a ferocious, unstoppable
Pitt tried to make one last in the world. mixture
parliamentary speech The Mughals. of arrogance, ignorance and
which would put some gumption The Moslem descendants political cunning.
into his demoralised compatriots. of the Mongol conquerors of No one in Delhi saw it coming,
He struggled to his feet, Asia. no one in London wanted it,
but, before he could pronounce, At their head but then enter the French,
he collapsed back again was the Emperor in Delhi. enter trouble.
into the arms of his fellow peers. Across the land, a network It was the 1740s.
When he died a month later, of governors loyal to him, the Anglo-French rivalry was going
the right empire, the empire Nawabs. global.
of liberty, died with him. They had to give their permission What the French had been doing
It would take George for the East India Company to be with native North American
Washington, there. tribes,
now commander of the American To the Mughals, the British interfering in wars and alliances
forces, merchants to steal a march on their rivals,
seven years of bloody fighting were just extra pocket money, they would now do
before independence became a supplying silver in the Asian subcontinent.
reality. to take Indian goods home. From Pondicherry,
In that time, the Americans No more than a gnat their base in the south,
suffered on the elephant's rump, the French
as many defeats as victories, specks of bothersome dust jumped into Indian politics,
but gained the crucial support on the Emperor's peacock throne. learning that a well-engineered
of France, Spain and Holland, But in 1739, that throne coup
eventually forcing the British disappeared could replace a neutral local
to surrender in the plunder governor with a tame Nawab,
at Yorktown in Virginia in 1781. taken by Persian invaders one who would not just help
when they sacked Delhi their business prospects,
It may have been the end and slaughtered its inhabitants. but shut out the British.
of one kind of British Empire, In the decades that followed, So the British had little choice
but another one other invaders, but to join this game of trump the
was waiting to be born. Afghans from the north-west, Nawab.
20 years after defeat in America, rode deep into the Indian To act was risky, but failure
the British found themselves heartland to act was commercial suicide.
ruling millions in Asia. waging war and fighting battles Not everyone in the little
They hadn't planned it, they on an unimaginable scale. company
hadn't The gorgeous fabric of settlements, like nearby Madras,
even dreamed it was possible. the Mughal Empire frayed and was biting his nails
Why would they? tore. at the idea of an Indian war.
Since the British had first come Left to their own devices, the There was one young man, who'd
to India, early in the 17th century, Nawabs been
they thought of nothing but trade. took advantage of Delhi's sweating it out as a company
Their only presence weakness, clerk,
was the East India Company, raising their own armies, for whom the drum roll of battle
a commercial body creating their own mini-states. was an irresistible serenade.
there to make a profit. 18th-century Mughal India Robert Clive, like the East India
From toeholds on the south-east was not some howling anarchy Company itself, you might say,
and western coasts, begging for the British was never really cut out for
to come in and stop the rot. business,
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Simon Schama. A History of Britain. “The Wrong Empire”. Subtitles.
at least, not legit business. The rest, 100 or so, found ''Make sure your soldiers
In Market Drayton, themselves disappear
where he'd grown up, imprisoned in a 20-foot-square and you can be the next Nawab.''
the Shropshire lad ran an cell... Well, of course, he went for it.
extortion with no food or water and The soldiers duly evaporated
racket, threatening shopkeepers virtually no air, and that was that.
with his own gang of toughs in the height of the Indian Courtesy of his tamed new
unless they coughed up. summer. Nawab,
Exported to Madras, Clive lived Few came out alive, Clive helped himself to a quarter
the life of a bachelor clerk, and the Black Hole of Calcutta of a million pounds reward.
scribbling, sweating, now entered It made the delinquent
drinking, fornicating, British history's lexicon of from Market Drayton
and making the whole thing infamy. one of the wealthiest men in
bearable 0ne survivor, John Zephaniah Britain,
only with pipes of opium. Holwell, and Baron Clive of Plassey.
Scenting that powerful old aroma wrote a book about the Black When challenged, years later,
of money and fame, Hole at the scale of his plunder, Clive
Clive made a career change, on his way back replied:
and he took British India with from India to England. An opylent city lay at my mercy.
him. When it was published, in 1758, Vaylts were thrown open to me,
In the war that erupted between it became an instant best seller. piled
French- and British-supported Holwell exaggerated the number on either hand with gold and
Nawabs, of those who suffocated on that jewels.
Clive turned a diversion night, At this moment, I stand
into the main event. multiplying them by about three, astonished
While both main armies were on from around 40 to 120. at my own moderation.
a long I don't think he was simply The new Nawab would have
siege at the city of Trichinopoly, kicking disagreed.
Clive took a few men and up the number for sensationalism. Clive cost him his independence,
stormed He was making a point. as well as his jewels.
the capital of the pro-French The point was that a regime that The British could and would
prince. could replace him at their whim.
He then held out for six long do that, that was so cruel, so As Clive turned from a general
weeks inhuman, into a power broker, an Indian
against everything thrown at it. scarcely deserved the name Caesar,
The effort fatally weakened the of a government at all, suspicions began to mount
enemy in fact, scarcely deserved back in London.
and the British client Nawab took to survive. Was this an economic exercise
power. Clive sailed north in damage containment
The French gamble in south India in Royal Navy ships, or was it empire building?
was a busted flush. recaptured Calcutta For empires notoriously
Clive had just broke the bank. and pursued Siraj-ud-Daulah up- came with long bills.
Suddenly, the rest of India river. But Clive was one step ahead of
woke up to the fact In June, 1757, them.
that it was no longer dealing he took on an Indian army He would solve all their problems
with a feeble little merchant that outnumbered his ten to one. by turning Bengal
fledgling. But Clive had been in India into a money-making machine
What it had got long enough to know for the company.
was a cuckoo in the nest. there was more than one way Not by trade,
Up the coast to the north, to fight a battle here. but by collecting its land taxes.
the young impulsive Nawab of The Battle of Plassey has gone The temptation was not just for
Bengal, down company men to build private
Siraj-ud-Daulah, decided to do in imperial textbooks mega-fortunes,
something about this threat. as one of those stellar victories, it was for the company itself
In 1756, he attacked the British with a handful of European to want to grow rich, fast.
settlement that had been soldiers This was just so much easier
established pulling off a long-shot victory for the business.
at the mouth of the Hooghly against massed elephant cavalry. Increasingly, the main trade of
River What happened was that Clive British India
since 1690 - Calcutta. cut a deal was not spices, not cloth, but
Most of its residents with Abdullah's second-in- taxes.
made it out of the town in time. command - Taxes would pull down
one empire in America,
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Simon Schama. A History of Britain. “The Wrong Empire”. Subtitles.
but now they were going in shaking as much money as British men had Indian
to set one up in India. possible mistresses,
In 1765, the company from their peasants, even wives,
was granted the right which they continued to do. sometimes two,
to collect the land tax So, instead of beginning one in Delhi, one in Lucknow.
across all of Bengal. a chain reaction of benevolence, They went to cock fights, smoked
For the British, it marked it started a pyramid of extortion. hookah pipes with Indian
the shift from trading to ruling. The government screwed the princes...
The theory of empire Zemindars, ..made deals with Hindu money
had been turned on its head. who screwed the peasants. men.
Trade can only thrive, The Zemindars went broke, But for many of the British
that theory had said, the peasants were evicted who came to India,
when it's not lumbered and died in hundreds of there would be no home,
with government or an army. thousands. just a cenotaph...
''Trade can only thrive in India,'' So much for good intentions. their presence immortalised
whispered Clive, And, in short order, only in stone.
''when it hooks up with famine arrived in Bengal. Acres in central Calcutta are still
government, Walking ribcages on the trunk occupied by Park Street
when it runs a tax system, roads, Cemetery.
''and when it supports an army.'' saucer-eyed children In the early days, one in three
And it was in stark contrast to dying in baked mudholes, wouldn't make it through the first
what flocks of kites landing monsoon.
occurred in America at the same on the carcasses of cattle. In all, it's said over two million
time. Perhaps a quarter of the Europeans are buried in India.
In Boston, they were sending population And the imperial size
protesting mobs into the streets, of Bengal perished, millions of of their graveyard monuments
but in Bengal, the money men people. says something
were falling over themselves Perhaps the British didn't cause it, about a wish to be remembered,
to bankroll the British. but they certainly didn't help. to leave an imposing mark
The local land-owning tax Guilty or innocent, on the subcontinent.
collectors, one fact was indisputable - But neither translations of Hindu
or Zemindars, as they were Bengal now belonged to the epics nor Mughal-sized
called, British. tombstones
would happily keep harvesting 0ver the next 50 years, persuaded everyone that the
the rupees, most of the rest of India would British
as they had for the Mughals. follow. really were Indianising
The British even imagined that New British armies would themselves.
under their enlightened complete Many still saw them as
supervision, the job that Clive had started. conquerors
Bengal would be turned For some who came after him, to be resisted to the death.
from a place of grinding toil India was more than an invitation (M0SLEM CALL T0 PRAYER)
into a model of progress. just to smash and grab. They were rulers like Tippu
In theory, Warren Hastings, the first to hold Sultan,
everyone was going to be happy. the title of Governor-General,
If the Zemindars could know for was committed to the possibility who built up his southern Indian
sure of repairing the broken body of state of Mysore
exactly how much tax India into a dynamic Moslem power.
they would owe to the the Indian way. For 20 years, he bitterly
government, He learned Persian and effectively opposed British
they could go easy on the and four Indian languages. rule,
peasants. He founded the Asiatic Society, bloodying their armies and
The peasants, in turn, would be dedicated to understanding fighting
able Indian culture. their soldiers to a standstill.
to be thrifty and industrious He commissioned the first But it couldn't last.
and produce a surplus for the Anglo-Hindustani dictionaries, Tippu Sultan, the tiger, would
market, translations of Indian law codes learn
and plough back the profit and the Bhagavadgita. that a new kind of British
into self-improvement. And under Hastings' governor-general
The only problem with this administration, had arrived at the end
was that it was a total fantasy. there was a tantalisingly brief of the 18th century,
The Zemindars' main interest moment contemptuous of Warren
was, when the two cultures actually Hastings'
and always had been, converged rather than collided. tendency to go native,
8
Simon Schama. A History of Britain. “The Wrong Empire”. Subtitles.
and resolved to squash the least to his wife, being a nation of shopkeepers.
sign you can hear the authentic voice They were not. They were
of local insurrection. of the future of British India. a nation of empire builders,
The most uncompromising of all Farewell, dear soyl. an empire of arms,
was Richard Wellesley, I am aboyt to arrange the affairs of law, of engineering.
the older brother of a conqyered coyntry. These men no longer cared
of the future Duke of Wellington. The foundation stones of a true about an empire of liberty.
Yet again, France provided Raj That now sounded dangerously
the impetus for action. were laid by Richard Wellesley, French,
With the rise of Napoleon literally, in 1799, suspiciously revolutionary.
Bonaparte when he decided that British Let the Americans play with the
came the excuse India tomfoolery
to stamp on anyone had to have the kind of building of democracy if they chose.
who might be his Indian ally. that was fit for an emperor. As for the empire of liberty's
And so Wellesley dispatched So he built a classical palace twin,
an overwhelming company army, in Calcutta, the empire of trade,
the vast majority of its manpower complete with busts of the surely it was understood now
Indian sepoys, to Mysore. Roman that something grander was in the
They stormed Tippu's island Caesars and grand colonnades. offing
fortress, From it, Richard Wellesley than money-grubbing business.
Seringapatam, surveyed, The Almighty had led them,
and overwhelmed the Sultan's with triumphal satisfaction, by crooked steps, to be sure,
army. the stupefying immensity toward their true destiny
Tippu was as good as his word of what had been done. as the modern Rome,
and fought to the death, It might be pricey. instructor to the benighted,
his body discovered where But Wellesley wasn't thinking guardians of an empire which
the fighting had been fiercest, about double-entry book-keeping. would
shot in the head He was too busy measuring make war to provide peace.
and stripped of his jewels. his hat size for the victory And just think, Roman culture
0ver the next two decades, garland. might
Wellesley and his successors As far as he was concerned, have reached Spain and
moved relentlessly what he had wrought, Jerusalem,
across the subcontinent, the empire he had carved out, but British civilisation
picking off Indian states one by was the ultimate riposte would span the world...
one. to Napoleon's jibe about the ..or so we told ourselves.
In one of Wellesley's letters English
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