- 5/16/2025
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00:00The old river rested unruffled, spread out in the tranquil dignity of a waterway leading
00:15to the uttermost ends of the earth.
00:20When the novelist Joseph Conrad was writing those words, one power governed a quarter
00:26of the world's population and covered the same proportion of the earth's land surface.
00:32From the mouth of the Thames to the Bay of Bengal, it ruled the waves of all the world's
00:36oceans.
00:39The British Empire was the biggest empire ever.
00:46What greatness had not floated on the ebb of that river into the mystery of an unknown
00:51earth?
00:54The dreams of men, the seed of commonwealths, the germs of empires.
01:04Thanks to the British Empire, I have relatives in Toronto, Alberta, Philadelphia and Perth,
01:09Australia.
01:10I even spent part of my childhood in Kenya.
01:12Nowadays, of course, the phrase British Empire conjures up images of chaps with stiff upper
01:17lips and pith helmets being waited on hand and foot by poor exploited natives.
01:23At best, it's a rather corny old joke.
01:25At worst, it's something we should say a collective sorry for.
01:30The empire's sins tend to be better remembered than its achievements.
01:35Yet travelling the world today, you keep on encountering the living legacies of Britain's
01:40age of empire.
01:41It was British traders who united the world in a single capitalist economy, while British
01:46migration changed the face of whole continents.
01:50As Protestant Christianity spread from Clapham to Cape Town, English became the world language.
01:57Western norms of law, order and government were exported too, and parliamentary democracy
02:03became the yardstick by which all political systems are judged.
02:08These are the pillars of the modern world.
02:11And if you like the modern world, you can't deny its debt to the British Empire.
02:17Today we live in a world dominated by a single superpower, the United States.
02:21Indeed, it sometimes seems a little bit as if we've become part of the American Empire.
02:26Yet Britain was the world's superpower for more than two centuries, exerting even more
02:31power beyond her borders than the US does today.
02:36First-hand memories of the empire may be fading, but there's never been a better time to understand
02:41how Britain made the modern world.
02:47In December 1663, British pirates launched a smash-and-grab raid on the Spanish outpost
03:12of Gran Granada in the Caribbean.
03:21They fired a volley, overturned 18 great guns, plundered for 16 hours, sunk all the boats
03:29and so came away.
03:36This is how the British Empire really began, in a maelstrom of seaborne violence and plunder.
03:41It wasn't so much the work of imperialists consciously imposing English rule on foreign
03:47lands or even of colonists looking for a new life in a new world.
03:51These buccaneers, as they were called, were thieves in the business of stealing from someone
03:57else's empire.
03:58What they were about was not so much grand strategy, more like grand larceny.
04:05The buccaneers had a complex system of profit-sharing, including insurance policies for injury.
04:11This was crime, alright.
04:12But it was organised crime.
04:19The buccaneers' leader was a rogue Welshman named Henry Morgan.
04:23A prickly, hard-drinking character who insisted he was descended from respectable Monmouth
04:28search-entry, Henry Morgan was anything but respectable.
04:33Morgan was a gangster, one of the generation of goodfellas who laid the foundations of
04:38the British Empire.
04:41For Morgan, buccaneering was simply a matter of getting rich quick.
04:46But for the English government, piracy was a low-budget way of waging war.
04:51And the enemy was Spain.
04:58Not that the Spaniards were too worried by the English buccaneers.
05:02By comparison with mighty Spain, England was an imperial novice.
05:08By the time England acquired her first Caribbean bases, the Spanish Empire had been around
05:13for more than a hundred years.
05:15Spain was the 17th century superpower, and its empire stretched from Madrid to Mexico.
05:21By comparison, Morgan and his buccaneers seemed little more than an irritant, certainly not
05:26a serious imperial rival.
05:29But that was about to change.
05:32In 1655, the English captured Jamaica.
05:36They quickly set about supplanting the Spanish superpower.
05:41Thousands of pounds were spent on these fortifications to protect the harbour at Port Royal.
05:46To supervise the work, the government turned to Henry Morgan.
05:50So just a few years after his epic pirate raid, Morgan was now Deputy Lieutenant Governor
05:55of Jamaica and Commandant of the Port Royal Regiment.
06:00Once a licensed pirate, the freelancer had become a respectable colonial governor.
06:07Morgan's career was typical of the transformation of the British Empire.
06:11The British shift from piracy to political power was to change the world forever.
06:19But how was it that British pirates like Henry Morgan could lay the foundations of the biggest
06:24empire the world has ever known?
06:27It's one of the great questions of history.
06:29Why Britain?
06:31Why not Spain, Holland or France?
06:34Why not India?
06:36Why us?
06:38Fundamentally, it was a matter of economic style.
06:43The Spanish Empire was based on plunder.
06:46The British too started out as plunderers, but they went beyond smash and grab.
06:53Consider what Henry Morgan did with the Spanish silver he stole.
06:57He didn't take it home.
06:59Instead, he invested it in Jamaican real estate, in what is still called Morgan's Valley.
07:06Even a hoodlum like Henry Morgan could see that bigger money could be made from legitimate
07:11business.
07:13The point about Jamaica was that it was perfect for growing sugar.
07:16And here's the key to a fundamental change in the nature of British overseas expansion.
07:21The empire had begun with the stealing of gold, but the cultivation of sugar turned
07:26out to be far more lucrative.
07:29And that was because something quite extraordinary was happening back home.
07:5019th century England was still primarily an agricultural economy.
07:54But though the wheel of change turned slowly, it turned nonetheless.
07:59More efficient farming and the first stirrings of the Industrial Revolution meant that the
08:03English were getting richer.
08:06Thanks to bumper harvests and iron bars, they could afford to indulge new and exotic appetites.
08:14England consumes within itself more goods of foreign growth than any other nation in
08:19the world.
08:21So wrote the author of bestsellers like Robinson Crusoe and Moll Flanders, Daniel Defoe, himself
08:27the son of a London merchant and an acute trendspotter.
08:32What he saw happening in late 17th century England was the birth of a new kind of economy,
08:38the world's first mass consumer society.
08:43And you only had to step inside the coffee houses of London to see what the English were
08:47consuming.
08:50This importation consists chiefly of sugars, of which the consumption in Great Britain
08:55is scarcely to be conceived of.
09:00Some people like to think the British Empire came about because of English individualism
09:04or the Protestant work ethic.
09:06But I sometimes think it had more to do with our appalling sweet tooth.
09:10During Daniel Defoe's lifetime, imports of sugar more than doubled, and that was just
09:14part of an enormous import boom.
09:17Because the English liked to mix their sugar with an orderly administered and highly addictive
09:21drug, caffeine, supplemented by an inhaled and equally addictive narcotic, tobacco.
09:29Sweet tea, coffee and tobacco taken together offered a dramatically different alternative
09:35to the traditional European drug, alcohol.
09:38If alcohols are depressant, these new drugs were the 18th century equivalent of uppers.
09:44And these were legal substances that anyone could afford, as Defoe acidly observed.
09:51Plain country Joan is now turned into a fine London madam, can drink tea, take snuff and
09:58carry herself as high as the best.
10:02Thanks to these new drugs, the English literally felt better.
10:06They soon looked better too.
10:09Although there had long been English manufactured textiles, they were nearly all coarse wools
10:13and linens.
10:15What the discerning English shopper wanted now was altogether more exotic.
10:20Like the sugar, tea and tobacco the English consumed with such gusto, silks, chintzes
10:25and calicos had to come from abroad.
10:28The result was nothing less than a fashion revolution.
10:32And again Defoe spotted the trend.
10:35It crept into our houses, our closets, our bedchambers, curtains, cushions, chairs and
10:41at last beds themselves were nothing but calicos or Indian stuffs.
10:53The wonderful thing about imported textiles is that the market for them is practically
10:58inexhaustible.
10:59Ultimately, there's a limit to how much tea or sugar any human being can consume.
11:04But people's appetite for new clothes had, and has, no such limit.
11:17In the early 1700s, there was only one place that could satisfy the English appetite for
11:22glad rags.
11:24It was the biggest economy in the world, with total output nearly ten times the size of
11:30England's, India.
11:34The fabrics, designs, workmanship and technology there were in a league of their own.
11:49All this time the Spaniards were still empire building the old-fashioned way, ransacking
11:55the wealthy civilizations of Central America.
11:58But when the English went to India, it was to trade, not to kill the golden goose.
12:12The economics of this early import trade were relatively simple.
12:17To begin with, English merchants had little they could offer Indians that the Indians
12:21didn't already make themselves.
12:23So it was a case of paying in cash rather than exchanging goods.
12:32Today we call it globalization, goods and money criss-crossing the world to form a single
12:37economic system.
12:40But in one respect, 17th century globalization was different.
12:51Taking the cash out from England and the goods home again meant sailing 12,000 miles
12:57around the world.
13:00In the age of sail, the world was no global village.
13:05Merchants had to contend with storms, shipwrecks, not to mention pirates.
13:11The real threat, however, came not from ships flying the Jolly Roger, but from other Europeans
13:16who wanted to trade with India.
13:19India was about to become the scene of a ruthless battle for market share.
13:23This would be globalization with gunboats.
13:43The Hooghly River in Bengal was one of the commercial superhighways of the first age
13:49of globalization.
13:52In one direction, hundreds of miles upstream, lies the seat of political power, Delhi.
14:00In the other, the open sea and the monsoon trade winds back to Europe.
14:04And when Europeans came to India to trade, this was one of their preferred destinations.
14:16In 1700, the population of India was more than 20 times that of England.
14:23India produced nearly a quarter of the world's economic output.
14:27The sheer wealth of the Indian economy meant that Indian merchants had little interest
14:32in overseas markets.
14:34But it made India an irresistible honeypot for European traders.
14:42These dilapidated and incongruously European buildings are in the town of Chimsura, on
14:48the banks of the Hooghly.
14:50They mark the beginnings of one of history's most successful business corporations and
14:55its immensely lucrative relationship with the Indian people.
14:59It was called the East India Company.
15:03For more than a hundred years, it dominated the trade routes between Asia and Europe.
15:10But there's a catch.
15:11I'm talking about the Dutch East India Company, not the English.
15:22The Dutch East India Company was founded in 1602.
15:27The Dutch then were at the cutting edge of capitalism.
15:31A stock exchange, a central bank, a stable currency.
15:35It was an investor's paradise.
15:38And Dutch businessmen didn't just put their money in East India Company shares.
15:43They were also more than happy to lend to their investor-friendly government.
15:49Thanks to their system of national debt, the Dutch seemed able to conjure up money out
15:54of thin air.
15:56Now they could afford to send more ships up the Hooghly than anyone else.
16:01Backed by the Dutch Navy, their East India Company soon monopolised the immensely lucrative
16:07Asian spice trade.
16:12English merchants had in fact founded their own East India Company just a couple of years
16:17before.
16:18It was run from a rather smart boardroom like this.
16:21Yet in its early days, it lagged far behind the more financially sophisticated Dutch operation.
16:26Despite the corporate splendour, it was an inferior imitation.
16:31Like its Dutch rival, the English East India Company raised money from the investing public
16:35by issuing bonds and shares, and was backed by a royal charter which granted it a monopoly
16:41over trade with the East Indies.
16:43But did it, because two companies couldn't both have a monopoly over Asian commerce.
16:51Year after year, the two East India Companies sent ships south with the trade winds round
16:56the Cape of Good Hope to the Indian Ocean.
17:00From the start, English attempts to muscle in on the Dutch Company's business led to
17:05conflict.
17:07The English fought three wars against the Dutch in an attempt to control the trade routes
17:12to the East.
17:13But the Dutch, despite having a smaller economy, could afford a bigger and better navy thanks
17:19to their sophisticated financial system.
17:24For the English, the cost of these unsuccessful wars was ruinous.
17:29There had to be an alternative.
17:32There was.
17:33A merger.
17:35Not a merger between the two companies, but a political merger.
17:40In 1688, a powerful group of English aristocrats, backed by the merchants of the City of London,
17:46invited the Dutchman, William of Orange, to invade their country.
17:51They called it the Glorious Revolution.
17:55The Glorious Revolution is usually seen as a political event, the final clinching of
17:59British constitutional liberties.
18:02But it was also a giant Anglo-Dutch business merger.
18:06Dutch businessmen were already major shareholders in the East India Company.
18:10Now their man, William of Orange, was Britain's new chief executive.
18:15The Englishmen who arranged this merger felt they needed no lessons from a Dutchman in
18:19religion or politics.
18:21They already had Protestantism, not to mention Parliament.
18:25But what they could learn from the Dutch was modern finance.
18:29A Dutch-style stock exchange was formed, allowing the government to borrow at much lower interest
18:34rates.
18:36Large-scale projects, like wars, could now be funded by a national debt.
18:41Equipped with these new institutions, England's larger economy soon powered ahead.
18:48The English became, in effect, the super-Dutch.
18:51Out in India, the company's agents were also copying the Dutch, acquiring trading
19:05bases, enterprise zones where they could safely do business by their own rules.
19:10The biggest was on the southeast coast of India.
19:14As if to advertise its Englishness, they called it Fort St George.
19:20The town the English built inside the fort, with its church, its parade ground, its villas
19:25and warehouses, was like a replica of the Dutch settlement at Chinsura.
19:30But under the new Anglo-Dutch arrangement, Chinsura belonged to the past.
19:34The future was Fort St George.
19:39The Englishmen who sailed east to work at Fort St George were gambling not just health,
19:45but life itself on the chance of Asian riches.
19:49The trouble was that the company paid peanuts.
19:54The temptation to supplement its meagre wages by moonlighting was overwhelming.
20:00It meant that the company was soon faced with a new source of competition, renegade
20:06employees.
20:09Typical of the young men on the make who entered the company's service in the late 17th century
20:15was Thomas Pitt, the son of a gently impoverished Dorset clergyman.
20:21India was to be the Pitt family's route from poverty to power.
20:27Pitt was a consummate trader, with both eyes on the main chance and his hand never far
20:32from the till.
20:34He had no desire to sit sweltering in the company's offices for next to nothing.
20:41No sooner had he arrived in India than Pitt went into business on his own.
20:46In doing so, he became an interloper, breaking the company's monopoly.
20:51To the company's bosses, Pitt was...
20:53..a desperate young fellow of a haughty, huffing, daring temper that would not stick at doing
20:59any mischief that lay in his power.
21:02His litter elegantly bewigged portraits mask Pitt's true character.
21:07Put politely, he was an operator.
21:10Put bluntly, he was a spiv.
21:16Whether they worked for the company or not, men like Pitt were crucial to the growth of
21:21Anglo-Indian trade.
21:23Alongside the company's official business, an enormous private sector was springing up.
21:28And what that meant was that the company's monopoly on Anglo-Asian trade, granted to
21:32it by the Crown, was crumbling away.
21:34It was probably just as well, because a monopoly company could never have exploited business
21:39opportunities in India the way the interlopers did.
21:42Indeed, the company itself gradually began to realise that the interlopers might be more
21:47a help than a hindrance to its business.
21:56At this stage, the English were merely parasites on the periphery of an Indian giant.
22:06It was from here, the Red Fort in Delhi, that the Mughal emperors, the Lords of the Universe,
22:13ruled India, a vast realm that dwarfed most European nations.
22:19The idea that the English might one day make the Mughal an offer he couldn't refuse would
22:24have struck a visitor to this magnificent court as preposterous.
22:30For the time being, keeping in with the Mughal emperor was an essential part of the East
22:35India Company's business.
22:36Loss of favour meant loss of money.
22:39So from an early stage, the company had to learn to play politics.
22:43And that meant coming and paying diplomatic visits here, in the Diwani Am in the heart
22:48of the Red Fort at Delhi.
22:50The Mughal emperor sat right there on the peacock throne.
22:54Complicated treaties had to be negotiated with him.
22:57Bribes had to be paid surreptitiously to his officials.
23:01All this called for men who were as adept at wheeling and dealing as they were at buying
23:06and selling.
23:09In 1698, negotiations with the Mughal were entrusted by the company to none other than
23:15the interloper Thomas Pitt.
23:19Just as the pirate Henry Morgan had been called in to defend British Jamaica against Spain,
23:24so Pitt was to be the company's persuader in India.
23:29He was appointed governor of Fort St George.
23:34When the fort itself was besieged by the Mughal's local lieutenant, the company's directors
23:39back in London instructed Pitt to take the gloves off.
23:45These native governors have the knack of trampling upon us and extorting what they please of
23:49our estate from us.
23:52They'll never forbear doing so till we've made them sensible of our power.
23:59Pitt needed to get some protection.
24:01He began garrisoning Fort St George in earnest, raising company regiments from among India's
24:07warrior castes, with British officers and the latest European weapons.
24:16Having started out in trade, the East India Company now had its own settlements, its own
24:20diplomats, even its own army.
24:23In fact, it was becoming more and more like a sovereign state.
24:27Rather smugly, it now called itself the Honourable East India Company.
24:31These political pretensions were about to run up against a new and formidable foe.
24:40For centuries, the plains of South India were dominated by this fort.
24:49But by the middle of the 18th century, it wasn't held by Indians, nor by the Dutch,
24:55nor even by the English.
24:57It was in the hands of England's oldest and most tenacious rivals, the French.
25:11The struggle between the English and the Dutch had been primarily commercial.
25:15It was strictly business, a competition for market share.
25:18The conflict with the French was political.
25:21It would decide who would govern the world.
25:24It raged in every corner of the globe, even here in the ancient Indian fortress of Gingy,
25:28and its outcome was very far from a foregone conclusion.
25:50Today the French system of education is one of the most centralised in the world.
25:55Everyone's taught the same syllabus, the same maths, the same literature, the same philosophy.
26:04It's an authentically imperial project, and that's as true here as anywhere else in the
26:09French-speaking world.
26:11The amazing thing is that this isn't Paris or even Perpignan.
26:16It's Pondicherry on the south-east coast of India.
26:19If things had gone differently in the 1750s, schools all over India would be like this,
26:24and French, not English, would be the modern world language.
26:29Pondicherry, one of the first French bases in India, was just down the coast from Fort
26:34St George, but palaces like this look down on similar courtyards in Louisiana, Canada
26:40and the Caribbean.
26:43Think of it as a race for empire.
26:45At first, Spain had made the running, but the Spaniards had frittered away the loot
26:49from their conquests.
26:51Then the Dutch pulled ahead with their financial wizardry, but the Anglo-Dutch merger shared
26:55that advantage with bigger Britain.
26:58By 1700, there was only one serious rival left.
27:03And with an economy twice the size of Britain's, France was now the favourite to win the race.
27:09In the British press, there was mounting alarm.
27:12Great Britain ought to be acquainted with the ambitious views of France.
27:16Our trade, our liberties, our country, nay, all the rest of Europe, are in a continual
27:22danger of falling prey to the common enemy.
27:25The universal cormorant that would, if possible, swallow up the whole globe itself.
27:32Commercially, the French East India Company never posed much of a threat to the English.
27:37Despite massive government subsidies, it still managed to lose more than a third of its capital
27:42in just 20 years.
27:44Maybe that was because, unlike its English counterpart, it was under such firm government
27:48control.
27:49It was run by aristocrats, royal cronies who didn't give a hoot about trade.
27:58What these men did care about was power politics.
28:02They dreamt of kicking out the British and turning India French.
28:08British rivalry, here and elsewhere, led, inevitably, to war.
28:13The decisive conflict broke out in 1755.
28:17It lasted for seven long years.
28:21The Seven Years' War is one of those arcane conflicts beloved of a certain kind of dusty
28:26schoolmaster.
28:27You can almost imagine having to swat up the causes and consequences for some ghastly exam.
28:32Yet this 18th century Armageddon was every bit as much a world war as the great global
28:38conflicts of the 20th century.
28:40The fighting raged from Calcutta to Canada, from Manila to Madras, and what was at stake
28:45was nothing less than the future of empire itself.
28:49Would the world be British, or would it, like Pondicherry, be French?
29:01The answer lay in Britain's shipyards.
29:05Prime Minister William Pitt, the grandson of the East Indian interloper Thomas Pitt,
29:10ordered an enormous and expensive naval build-up.
29:14The Royal Dockyards became the largest industrial enterprise in the world.
29:19It was the first indication of the British ability to harness industry to the cause of
29:24empire.
29:26The Royal Navy doubled in size to a total of more than 300 ships.
29:30If you want a simple answer to the question, why Britain, it was the economy, stupid.
29:38The huge naval build-up was only possible because the British had something the French
29:42didn't have, loads of money, or rather, the ability to borrow it.
29:47The financial institutions copied from the Dutch at the time of King William now came
29:51into their own, allowing Pitt's government to spread the cost of war by selling low-interest
29:56bonds to the public.
29:57By comparison, the French were reduced to begging or stealing.
30:01So finance was the key.
30:03Behind every naval victory stood the national debt.
30:11The sheer number of British ships made a permanent blockade of France possible.
30:16By 1759, the Royal Navy was in a position to intercept and destroy the French battle
30:22fleet.
30:24But in truth, the French were sunk financially before a single cannon was fired at sea because
30:34France was a bad credit risk.
30:38Like his Spanish ally, the French king was an absolute monarch with a reputation for
30:42not repaying his debts.
30:45So his government could only borrow at ruinous interest rates.
30:50This was the turning point for the French dream of global empire.
30:54Out in the French colonies, the effect of the naval blockade was devastating.
30:58With their supply lines cut, the French simply couldn't hold out.
31:03The capture of Quebec handed Canada to the British.
31:06The French sugar islands in the Caribbean fell too.
31:10Then in 1762, their Spanish allies were bundled out of Cuba and the Philippines.
31:17That same year, the French surrendered the fort here at Gingy.
31:22By then, all their bases in India had been captured.
31:28The struggle for world mastery between Britain and France wasn't yet over.
31:32It would drag on with only a few intermissions until 1815.
31:36But the Seven Years' War decided one thing for sure.
31:39India would be British, not French.
31:42And that gave Britain what for 200 years would be the jewel in its imperial crown, a huge
31:47market for British trade and an apparently inexhaustible reservoir of military manpower.
31:53Indeed, India was more than a mere jewel.
31:56It was the whole diamond mine.
31:59In the aftermath of the British victory, the Mughal emperor was forced to cede vast territories,
32:05including the whole of Bengal, to the East India Company general Robert Clive.
32:12It wasn't quite a license to print money, but it was the next best thing.
32:17The deal gave the company the right to tax over 20 million people.
32:23The company was now in the biggest and apparently most respectable business of all, the business
32:28of government.
32:32First pirates, then traders, the British had won the European race for empire with
32:36a combination of naval and financial muscle.
32:40They now found themselves the rulers of tens of millions of people overseas, the majority
32:44of them here in India.
32:46What had started out as a business proposition had evolved through warfare into a matter
32:50of government.
32:52The question they now had to ask themselves was, how should that government be carried
32:56out?
33:02After all, India was a highly sophisticated civilization.
33:07The Spanish approach would simply have been to ransack it.
33:11But British rule in Bengal was to be more than a smash and grab affair.
33:16A new hybrid society began to develop.
33:20East India Company scholars translated Indian laws and literature.
33:25Many employees married Indian women and adopted Indian customs.
33:30It was an extraordinary moment of cultural fusion.
33:35In 1773, a governor-general was appointed who was happy to encourage this mingling.
33:42Warren Hastings had joined the East India Company at the age of 17 and worked his way
33:47to the top.
33:48He was fluent in Persian and Urdu, and the more he studied Indian culture, the more respectful
33:55he became.
33:58Every instance which brings their real character home to observation will impress us with a
34:03more generous sense of feeling for their natural rights, and teach us to estimate them by the
34:08measure of our own.
34:12This was more than just a cultural merger.
34:15In some cases, it was a genetic cross-fertilization, literally producing a new breed of men, genuine
34:22Anglo-Indians.
34:24The archetype was the grandson of the mayor of Montrose, but the son of a Rajput princess,
34:30and one of the great warlords of the early empire, Colonel James Skinner.
34:37I think James Skinner is my favorite figure in the early history of Britain and India.
34:42He personified that Anglo-Indian encounter.
34:45He himself was of mixed parentage.
34:48He loved the women.
34:49He wore the clothes.
34:50He spoke the languages.
34:51And the regiment he founded, Skinner's horse, was a quintessentially Oriental outfit.
34:55There was only one part of Indian culture Skinner didn't buy into, and that was religion.
35:00Lying wounded on a battlefield, he vowed to found a church, and here it is today, in the
35:05heart of Delhi.
35:09Men like Skinner believed that a permanent bonding of European and Indian culture was
35:14a real possibility.
35:16But this was to be not so much a merger as a takeover.
35:24The company's executives never forgot that they were in India first and foremost to make
35:29money.
35:30That was the bottom line of this private sector empire.
35:37A new word was about to enter the English language, a corruption of the Indian princely
35:42title of Nawab, the Nabob.
35:48It meant an Englishman who'd made a packet in India.
35:53Thomas Pitt was one of the first of these Nabobs.
35:56When he returned from India, he built himself this elegant stately home at Swallowfield
36:01in Berkshire.
36:07As governor of Fort St. George, Pitt had found the perfect way to bring back the loot to
36:13pay for his new home.
36:15He called it,
36:16My grand affair, my great concern, my all, the finest jewel in the world.
36:26This is a replica of his grand affair, the Pitt Diamond.
36:31At the time, it was the largest the world had ever seen.
36:35Never told the full story of how he came by it, but it literally made his name.
36:40Henceforth, he would be known as Diamond Pitt.
36:44You might say he was the original Diamond Geezer.
36:48Wealth like this enabled him to found a dynasty which produced not one, but two British prime
36:54ministers.
36:56Yet the Nabobs could only make these enormous profits because the East India Company was
37:02maintaining 100,000 men under arms, an army that was in a state of constant and costly
37:09warfare.
37:12What had started out as an informal defence force to protect the East India Company's
37:17trade had evolved into its raison d'etre, fighting new battles to conquer new territory
37:23to pay for the previous battles.
37:25What's more, the Nabobs' prosperity also depended on the Royal Navy's ability to fend off the
37:30French when they returned to the fray in the 1770s, and that cost even more money.
37:36It was easy enough to see who was getting rich from the Empire.
37:39You only had to look at a place like this.
37:41The question was, who exactly was going to pay for it?
37:59Africa didn't spell riches for everyone.
38:02Even as the Nabobs were splashing out in their stately homes, most people in the British
38:07Isles were sunk in poverty, with incomes little better than those in present-day Africa.
38:13A century of fighting France on land and sea increased the national debt by a factor of
38:18twenty.
38:20But the interest on this mountain of debt was paid by hiking up the excise tax, which
38:26was charged, just as it is today, on purchases of alcohol and tobacco.
38:32It took a much bigger chunk out of poorer people's incomes than out of the vast wealth
38:36of the Nabobs, and it hit families in England and in Scotland too.
38:43The union of England and Scotland gave Scots the chance to share in the profits of England's
38:48expanding empire, but it also meant they had to contribute towards the spiralling costs
38:54of what was now a British Empire.
39:04Even in a place as remote as this, in darkest Ayrshire, the undertow of empire could be
39:09felt.
39:10This wee cottage is something of a national shrine to us Scots.
39:13It's the birthplace of Robert Burns, our greatest poet.
39:17Now unlike many another Scot in the late 18th century, Burns isn't famous for martial deeds
39:22of daring do beneath palm and pine, but his life story sheds intriguing light on both
39:28the nature and the costs of the British Empire.
39:35Burns' poetry made him famous, but it paid few bills.
39:39So bad did things get that when he was 27, Burns thought seriously of emigrating to Jamaica.
39:47It turned out, however, that he could just as well serve the British Empire by staying
39:51put here in Ayrshire.
39:56This scrap of paper gives a clue as to how Burns finally made ends meet.
40:01Our national poet was a bit of a sinner, that much we knew, but what often gets forgotten
40:06is that he was also a tax collector, working for the excise.
40:10This is one of his tax ledgers.
40:12It was something that embarrassed him a great deal more than his celebrated boozing and
40:17wenching.
40:20I will make no excuses, but I have sat down to write you on this vile paper stained with
40:25the sanguinary scores of they cursed horse leeches or the excise.
40:30For the glorious cause of lucre, I will do anything.
40:36As an excise man, Burns became a link in the great chain of imperial finance, much as he
40:42deplored the unfairness of a system which supported the stately stupidity of self-sufficient
40:48squires or the luxuriant insolence of upstart nabobs.
40:54The enterprise of empire had become so all-embracing that it was able to co-opt even its fiercest
41:00critics.
41:02Burns was forced to keep his opinions to himself, on pain of losing his job.
41:07Like the many other Scots of the period who worked for Hastings's East India Company,
41:12and they dominated the payroll in Calcutta, Burns had been bought off.
41:16Yet the poor taxpayers of Scotland were very far from being the worst-off subjects of the
41:21British Empire.
41:24The same drain of capital from India to Britain that made the nabobs rich also made the Indians
41:30poor.
41:32British taxpayers had to reckon with the excise, a government department.
41:38But more and more Indians now paid their taxes to the East India Company, and it was driven
41:43by the profit motive.
41:47At around this time, a Muslim historian by the name of Ghulam Hussain Khan began writing
41:52a melancholy history of his times.
41:55A former Mughal official, a general, indeed a go-between for the British as they took
42:00over Bengal, Ghulam Hussain lamented the drain of wealth from India represented by the nabob's
42:06diamonds.
42:08Every one of the English holds it to be a divine obligation, I mean that of scraping
42:13together as much money in this country as they can and canning it in immense sums to
42:18the Kingdom of England.
42:19These two customs blended together should be ever undermining and ruining this country.
42:26The ratcheting up of taxes coincided with a huge famine.
42:30It killed as many as a third of the population, some five million people.
42:36As the Bengalis starved, tax revenue dwindled.
42:40For the company, the only remedy seemed to be to fight more wars and collect more plunder.
42:47But these new wars proved much harder to win.
42:50The company's military overheads were soaring.
42:53Its profits were turning into whopping losses.
42:57Back in London, the shareholders were getting rattled, and you can see why when you look
43:01at this chart of the East India Company's share price.
43:04There's a bull market under Clive following the Seven Years' War, but under Hastings,
43:09the stock tanks because of famine in Bengal and war.
43:13Things got so bad that the company's directors not only had to cut the annual dividend, they
43:18had to go cap in hand to the government for a bailout.
43:24The company got its rescue package, but the shareholders, who were well represented in
43:28the corridors of power, demanded a full guy.
43:32As the arch-nabob, the East Indian fat cat, the Governor-General Warren Hastings was hauled
43:38before Parliament, and to his horror, charged with…
43:42Gross injustice, cruelty and treachery against the faith of nations, with various instances
43:49of extortion and other deeds of maladministration, with a wanton and unjust and pernicious exercise
43:56of his powers.
44:00This was more than just a backlash against chronic corporate sleaze.
44:04It was a return to the imperial drawing board.
44:08Up until now, the empire in India had been run as a purely commercial operation.
44:14Yet under Hastings, profits had turned to losses.
44:18Was it time for the government in London to take over?
44:22In the end, after seven years of legal wrangling, Hastings was acquitted, as fat cats usually
44:28are.
44:30But the system he represented was not.
44:33The days of nabob rule were over.
44:38Like many another rogue corporation, the East India Company would henceforth have to answer
44:44to a government regulator.
44:49The supreme irony was that the Prime Minister who cracked down on the now not so honourable
44:54company was William Pitt, the great grandson of that notorious nabob, Diamond Pitt.
45:02From now on, Governor-Generals in India wouldn't be company traders, but aristocratic grandees
45:09appointed directly by the Crown.
45:12When the first of the new Governors arrived in India, he took immediate steps to clean
45:16up the company's act.
45:22This palace was the new Governor-General's residence, in the heart of what had become
45:27the capital of British India, Calcutta.
45:31The telling symbol of what the British in India now aspired to.
45:35Sleazy, money-grubbing Orientalism was out.
45:38Virtuous, high-minded classicism was in.
45:46By the late 18th century, the newly reformed East India Company was just one of a web of
45:52British corporations that together dominated the global economy.
45:57From Hudson's Bay to Botany Bay.
46:00From Bengal to Barbados.
46:05But now these companies were becoming, in effect, agencies of the British government.
46:11The globalisation of British profits had become the globalisation of British political power.
46:21If ever an empire was built on economics, then this surely was it.
46:28The British had ended up with the biggest empire the world had ever seen.
46:33They had robbed the Spaniards, copied the Dutch, beaten the French, and plundered the
46:38Indians.
46:39Now they ruled supreme.
46:42No one had consciously set out to do it.
46:44Indeed, the Victorians later joked that the empire had been acquired in a fit of absence
46:50of mind.
46:51But the last thing the British suffered from was absent-mindedness.
46:56They knew exactly what they were doing, and they meant to keep on doing it.
47:11When James Skinner died, he was buried in the church he had founded in Delhi, and his
47:16descendants continued to be buried alongside him right down to the end of British rule,
47:22nearly 150 years later.
47:27This is one of those countless corners of a foreign field that will be forever British.
47:33It's a striking reminder of how a people who began as buccaneers became traders, then soldiers,
47:40and then rulers.
47:42From piracy to power in just three generations.
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