- 5/17/2025
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00:00This was the great dream of Empire, the promise of acres of virgin land at knockdown prices.
00:22Enticed by pictures of the Canadian prairies, my great aunt Agnes and her husband Ernest
00:28decided to leave behind their home in Scotland, their family and friends.
00:34It was 1911.
00:38They crossed the ocean to begin all over again on the other side of the world.
00:45Migrants like my great aunt risked not just their savings, but their very lives in pursuit
00:49of the imperial dream.
00:55According to family legend, Aggie and Ernest were supposed to sail on the Titanic, but
01:00by chance only their luggage was on board when the ship went down.
01:04To us, their decision to gamble everything on a one-way transatlantic ticket seems extraordinary.
01:09Yet without millions of such tickets, some purchased voluntarily, some not, there could
01:14have been no British Empire.
01:16For the foundation of the empire was mass migration, the biggest in human history.
01:29It wasn't just commerce and conquest that built the British Empire.
01:33Between the early 1600s and the 1950s, a human flood of more than 20 million people left
01:40Britain and turned whole continents from America to Australia white.
01:52The Britannic exodus changed the world, but at its heart, there lay a contradiction.
02:01Most of the migrants were motivated by a dream of religious or economic freedom, liberty.
02:06Most British like to think that was what set their empire apart from the Spanish, Portuguese,
02:11or Dutch.
02:12But an argument about the meaning of liberty would spark off the first great war of independence
02:17against the empire.
02:19And for those on the receiving end of British liberty, the millions of migrants seemed little
02:23better than a white plague.
02:46It all began in the 1600s, when intrepid British pioneers set sail for a primitive
02:52land inhabited by barbarous natives, Ireland.
03:01It was under King James I that Ireland was first systematically settled by Britons, most
03:07ambitiously in the north.
03:09Nowadays, we think of this as the start of Ulster's troubles, but James's advisers saw
03:15British settlement as the answer to Ireland's instability.
03:20The Irish natives, they claimed, were weeds, and Catholic weeds at that.
03:26The new settlers would be good corn.
03:29It would be a kind of social gardening.
03:33The buzzword was plantation.
03:38In theory, plantation was just another word for colonisation, the ancient Roman practice
03:43of establishing settlements of loyal subjects out there on the political margins.
03:48But in practice, the plantation of Ulster implied what we today call ethnic cleansing.
03:59From the very beginning, the plantation of Ulster was based on systematic, state-sponsored
04:04theft.
04:08Detailed survey maps spelt out how the native Irish were to be expelled from the best land
04:13to make way for British settlers.
04:19This was a business proposition, public-private partnership, Jacobean style.
04:25The Crown provided the land, but it was commercial corporations like the City of London who took
04:30the risk, investing their cash in the infrastructure of settlement, the Protestant churches and
04:37fortifications.
04:42These are the walls of Derry, or London Derry, as it was renamed in 1610.
04:51The defences were shaped like a shield to protect the new Protestant community planted
04:56here by the City of London.
04:58Catholics had to live beyond the walls, down there in the bogside.
05:03Nothing illustrates better the ethnic segregation implicit in the policy of plantation.
05:08You were either on the inside, or on the outside.
05:19Inevitably, there was resistance.
05:22In 1641, the Ulster Catholics revolted.
05:31Thousands of Protestants were slaughtered in what one contemporary called a fearful
05:35tempest of blood.
05:41But the plantation refused to be uprooted.
05:43Indeed, it soon began to flourish economically.
05:51By the 1700s, Belfast was a boomtown.
05:55Britain's first colony was here to stay.
06:00So Ireland was the experimental laboratory of British colonisation, and Ulster was the
06:05prototype plantation.
06:08What it showed was that empire could be built not only by military conquest, but by settlement,
06:13by migration.
06:14Now the challenge was to export the model further afield, not just over the Irish Sea,
06:20but across the Atlantic.
06:32For nearly half its existence, the nation now known as the United States was British.
06:41It sprang from the imperial model of plantation.
06:49The conditions of Virginia, as Sir Walter Raleigh had named the eastern seaboard around
06:53Chesapeake Bay, were high.
06:56One poet called it, Earth's only paradise.
07:01New arrivals came here not to get rich quick and go back home.
07:05They came to stay, and put down roots.
07:11But there was a problem.
07:13Virginia was thousands of miles further away than Ireland, and agriculture had to be started
07:18there from scratch.
07:20The settlers had the further misfortune to establish their first plantation on a malarial
07:26swamp.
07:28There's not a great deal left of Jamestown, Virginia, but it was Britain's first permanent
07:34colony in America.
07:35Back in 1607, the pioneers had a pretty hellish time of it.
07:40Malaria, yellow fever, plague, meant that after just a year, only 38 of the original
07:46hundred strong force were left alive.
07:49For ten years, Jamestown, and the future of Britain's American empire, teetered on the
07:54verge of extinction.
07:58With the chances of surviving your first year in British America little better than 50-50,
08:04Virginia could only appeal to desperados.
08:08The empire in America would have to be saved by very different types, by religious fundamentalists.
08:18England had been Protestant since the accession of Elizabeth I, but for those who came to
08:23be known as Puritans, it wasn't Protestant enough.
08:30What put other people off America, the fact that it was a wilderness, struck those who
08:34sought religious freedom as ideal.
08:39Where better to found a truly godly society than amid a vast and empty chaos, with no
08:45distractions from the good book?
08:51In 1620, 41 East Anglian religious dissidents set off in the Mayflower for their promised
08:58land.
09:00Faulty navigation gave the self-styled Pilgrims the cleanest possible slate, because they
09:06missed Virginia by 200 miles.
09:09They ended up planting themselves on the chillier shores explorers called New England.
09:24New England flourished through a combination of Puritanism and the profit motive.
09:30Not everyone aboard the Mayflower was driven by a religious zeal.
09:34In fact, most weren't Pilgrims at all, but economic migrants.
09:41And what attracted them to New England was the presence, in large quantities, of fish.
09:51Exporting salt cod back to Europe was a hugely lucrative business.
09:57There was one other magic ingredient in the Empire's progress.
10:02In New England's temperate climate, the British settlers bred like rabbits, quadrupling their
10:09population in just 50 years.
10:14Sex really was a key difference between British America and Latin America.
10:19Solo male settlers, like the Spanish encomenderos, tended to marry into the indigenous population,
10:25going native in the old phrase.
10:27But British settlers were encouraged to bring their wives and children with them, and that
10:32preserved their culture more or less intact.
10:35New England really was a New England, precisely because it was a family affair.
10:46Plantations meant planting, not just people, but crops.
10:51And planting crops meant tilling the land.
10:54The question was, whose land was it?
11:00The colonists could hardly pretend nobody had been living here before their arrival.
11:06The Virginian colony was smack in the middle of Powhatan Indian territory.
11:11The idea was, simple, take the land away from the Indians, but being British, we had to
11:16come up with a nice justification for doing that.
11:20The convenient idea came to mind, terra nullius, which meant, in effect, nobody's land.
11:27The great political philosopher John Locke, who on the side happened to be secretary to
11:31the Lords Proprietors of Carolina, argued that a man owned land only if he mixed his
11:38labour with it and joined it to something that is his own, which was a sort of fancy
11:43way of saying that if you didn't fence it and farm it, it was up for grabs.
11:50One Indian chief, Mianta Nomo, could see the writing on the wall.
11:55Our plains were full of deer and turkeys, but these English have gotten our land.
12:03They with scythes cut down the grass and with axes fell the trees.
12:09The cows and horses eat the grass, and we shall all be starved.
12:25Cheap land and abundant natural resources, these were the economic foundations of colonial
12:30America.
12:35Claims of American Indian tribes simply had no weight in the new economic order, as the
12:40British monarchy extended its grip on America through vast land grants.
12:47In 1682, Charles II settled a debt of £16,000 by simply giving one of his admiral's sons,
12:55William Penn, what became Pennsylvania.
13:01Overnight, this made Penn the largest individual landowner in British history, with a backyard
13:07well over the size of Ireland.
13:12Penn, a Quaker, envisaged a holy experiment of religious liberty in the city he founded,
13:19Philadelphia.
13:21The ancient Greek for brotherly love.
13:28Penn combined religious liberty with business notes.
13:32Though I desire to extend religious freedom, yet I want some recompense for my trouble.
13:41William Penn was a real estate salesman on a grand scale. He sold off huge chunks of
13:46Pennsylvania at knock-down prices. A hundred quid bought you 5,000 acres.
13:59This was a powerful lure for settler families. Freedom of conscience and almost free real estate.
14:10But there was a catch. Not everyone in this new white empire could be a landowner.
14:15In order to cultivate crops like sugar and tobacco, you needed workers.
14:19The question was, how to get them across the Atlantic?
14:23And here, the British Empire discovered the limits of liberty.
14:35From the 1660s, the British Empire, the self-styled Empire of Liberty, developed an insatiable
14:41appetite for slave labour.
14:47Millions of slaves were shipped across the Atlantic in horrific floating prisons.
14:54There was some spewing, some pishing, some shiting, some damming, some blasting their
15:00legs and thighs, some their liver, lungs, lights, and eyes.
15:05And for to make the scene the order, some cursed father, mother, sister, and brother.
15:15On arrival in America, the slaves were auctioned off like cattle.
15:23Just arrived. 139 men, women, and boys.
15:28Smiths, bricklayers, plasterers, shoemakers, a glazier, a tailor, a printer, a bookbinder,
15:35several seamstresses.
15:38These slaves were not black Africans. They were white Celts.
15:45While early emigrants to the American Empire had been pioneers, drawn by the prospect of
15:50freedom and land, the second wave gave up their liberty by selling themselves into what
15:56was, in effect, slavery on a fixed-term contract.
16:01It was several years' hard labour, with the possibility of a new life as the payoff.
16:09They called it indenture.
16:13One such indentured worker was a Scot named John Harrower.
16:17His journal reveals that emigration was far from a bid for freedom.
16:22It was a last resort.
16:26This day, I being reduced to the last shilling I had, was obliged to engage to go to Virginia
16:32for four years for bed, board, washing, and five pound during the whole time.
16:41Just under three quarters of all British emigrants in the 18th century were either Scots or Irishmen.
16:46It was men from the impoverished periphery of the British Isles who had the least to lose
16:51and the most to gain from selling themselves into servitude.
16:59But there were some parts of the Empire where even the toughest Scots couldn't go the distance.
17:04From 1764 until 1779, the parish of Olney in Northamptonshire was in the care of John Newton,
17:17a devout clergyman and composer of one of the world's best-loved hymns.
17:34Amazing grace, how sweet the sound that saved a wretch like me.
17:42Most of us at one time or another have heard or even sung that most famous of Newton's Olney hymns.
17:49But what's really amazing is that the man who wrote those pious lines
17:54was for six years a highly successful slave trader,
17:58shipping hundreds of Africans across the Atlantic from Sierra Leone to the Caribbean.
18:05We today are of course repelled by slavery.
18:10What we find hardest to understand is why a Christian like Newton wasn't.
18:15But Newton justified slavery to his wife Mary by denying that his African prisoners
18:21had any understanding of religion, love or liberty.
18:25The only liberty of which they have any notion, he assured her, is an exemption from being sold.
18:34How could you lose your liberty, went the philosophy of the time, if you didn't know what liberty meant?
18:47The numbers involved in this trade were huge.
18:51We tend to think of the British Empire as a product of white migration.
18:55But nearly three and a half million Africans came to the New World
19:00as slaves transported in British ships.
19:07That's over three times the number of white migrants in the same period.
19:17If migration turned North America white, it turned the Caribbean black.
19:31Slavery made overwhelming economic sense.
19:35Planters here in the Caribbean could make immense profits from the cultivation of sugar.
19:40But the labour was too arduous for indentured servants from Britain.
19:45You needed slaves from the tropics.
19:48And that was why planters were willing to pay eight or nine times what a slave cost on the West African coast.
19:55Well, even a born-again Christian like John Newton could hardly ignore a mark-up like that.
20:11The booming sugar business was the phenomenal success story of the 18th century economy.
20:18By the 1770s, sugar alone accounted for a fifth of all British imports.
20:27And the only way to produce it was with slaves.
20:32Slavery was an ancient institution.
20:35But it was being revived to satisfy the needs of the world's most dynamic economic sector.
20:42Here, in the oppressive tropical climate of Jamaica,
20:46you needed men you could quite literally work to death.
20:50One contemporary rule of thumb was that a planter with a hundred slaves
20:54had to buy at least eight a year just to maintain his stock.
20:58And average life expectancy of a new arrival from Africa was less than ten years.
21:04That was the appalling human price of a slave.
21:08That was the appalling human price of sugar, the white man's white gold.
21:18The original Spanish word for a sugar plantation was ingenio, engine.
21:23And they were like engines.
21:25They used powerful machines to crush the sugar cane.
21:28So this was more industry than agriculture.
21:31But with a difference.
21:33The black slaves were the raw materials.
21:37Unlike indentured servants,
21:39there was no freedom for them to look forward to at the end of years of labour.
21:44Their colonial life was nasty, British and short.
21:51Still, it would be wrong to portray all the Africans who were sold into slavery
21:56as merely passive victims.
21:58Here in Jamaica, a great many fought back against their white oppressors.
22:03In fact, slave rebellions were almost as common as hurricanes here.
22:07By one count, there were about 28
22:09between the acquisition of the island and the abolition of slavery,
22:13though most were fairly quickly and ruthlessly snuffed out.
22:17But there was always a part of the black population that was out there,
22:22in the jungle-covered hills beyond the sugar cane,
22:25beyond British control.
22:34When Jamaica was captured from Spain in 1655,
22:38there was already a well-established community of slaves
22:42who had escaped from their Spanish masters.
22:45They were known as the Maroons,
22:47a corruption of the Spanish cimarrones,
22:50which means wild or untamed.
22:53This was a unique culture,
22:55a little bit of Africa in the Jamaican badlands.
23:04The runaways were led by the imposing figure of Queen Nanny,
23:08who, according to Jamaican oral tradition,
23:10was capable of remarkable supernatural feats.
23:15Not least the ability to catch enemy bullets between her teeth.
23:23The Maroons repeatedly flouted British authority
23:26by launching guerrilla raids to liberate more of their enslaved fellow Africans.
23:34HORN HONKS
23:39Jamaican place names like the district of Don't Look Behind
23:43testify to the fear the British settlers felt.
23:53See you later.
23:56HORN HONKS
23:58The great plantation houses were losing manpower and money.
24:06In the end, the British were forced to do a deal with the Maroons.
24:10The Treaty of 1739 effectively granted them autonomy
24:14in an area of around 1,500 acres.
24:17In return, the Maroons agreed not only to stop freeing slaves,
24:22but also to return runaway slaves to their masters.
24:29So, in order to stop the plantation economy from quite literally crumbling away,
24:34the Maroons were going to be turned from poachers into gamekeepers,
24:38an early example of the way British rule worked.
24:40If the British couldn't beat you, they got you to join them.
24:44The Maroons couldn't be beaten, so they were bought off.
24:48In other words, British rule didn't need to rely exclusively on coercion.
24:53It could rely also on compromise.
24:56The trouble was, when the challenge to British rule came
24:59not from a bunch of runaway slaves, but from organised white colonists,
25:04it proved a great deal more difficult to reach that kind of compromise.
25:08GUNSHOTS
25:18MUSIC
25:23It was the moment the British ideal of liberty bit back.
25:28It was the moment the British Empire nearly fell apart.
25:34At Lexington, near Boston, Massachusetts,
25:37one stray shot provoked a bloody exchange of fire
25:40between British redcoats and armed American colonists.
25:44GUNSHOTS
25:49It was April 1775, and at this stage,
25:53London's only answer to colonial dissent seemed to be armed force.
25:58Suddenly, even to its own white settlers,
26:01the Empire of Liberty looked like an empire of oppression.
26:07The War of Independence is at the very heart
26:10of Americans' conception of themselves.
26:13The idea of a struggle against an evil empire
26:16is the country's creation myth.
26:20But just how badly was the empire treated?
26:23Maybe go inside and have coffee? Hot chocolate?
26:26By the 1770s, New Englanders were about the best-off people in the world.
26:31They had bigger farms, bigger families
26:34and better education than the folks back home.
26:37To say that the British Empire had been good for these people
26:40would be an understatement, and yet it was they,
26:43not the indentured labourers of Virginia nor the slaves of Jamaica,
26:47who first threw off the yoke of British rule.
26:50Why?
27:13The very stuff of life.
27:15Stamps, playing cards, sugar, tea.
27:21So if the very everyday things of life are being taxed
27:25to the point where every day is difficult,
27:29you are going to eventually rebel.
27:32You are going to revolt because the taxes are revolting.
27:37Tourists are still taught the story of the American Revolution
27:40in terms of unjust taxes.
27:43But on close inspection, the real story is one of taxes repealed, not imposed.
27:49The British couldn't have been more conciliatory.
27:52On all the economic issues, they were willing to compromise.
28:00Most people assume the celebrated Boston Tea Party of 1773
28:04was a protest against overpriced tea.
28:09But in fact, after an easing of British duties on the East India Company,
28:14tea in New England had never been cheaper.
28:17The riot was organised not by irate consumers,
28:21but by Boston's wealthy smugglers,
28:23who stood to lose out from affordable official imports.
28:29The colonists weren't being ground under the British heel.
28:33The burden of American taxation was trivial.
28:36The average Briton paid 26 shillings a year in taxes.
28:40The equivalent figure for a Massachusetts taxpayer was just one shilling.
28:46What was really at issue
28:48was the very thing that had driven migration in the first place, liberty.
28:54The colonists weren't yet after independence.
28:57They simply wanted freedom for their own assemblies
29:00to set their own taxes to pay for their own expenditure.
29:05They refused to accept
29:07that their interests were represented in Westminster.
29:11Sam Adams' famous slogan,
29:13no taxation without representation,
29:15wasn't so much a rejection of Britishness
29:18as an emphatic assertion of Britishness.
29:21What the colonists said they wanted was the same liberty
29:24enjoyed by their fellow British subjects on the other side of the ocean.
29:28All they aspired to was to be transatlantic Brits.
29:35The tax issue should have been easy to settle.
29:39But on the constitutional principle
29:42of Westminster's ultimate supremacy over the colonies,
29:46Parliament would not bend.
29:53That was why, in the Pennsylvania State Assembly Room,
29:57revolt turned into outright revolution.
30:00Delegates of the 13 rebel colonies
30:02adopted a declaration of independence.
30:05The transatlantic Brits had become American patriots.
30:11We hold these truths to be self-evident,
30:14that all men are created equal,
30:16that they are endowed by their Creator
30:19with certain inalienable rights,
30:21that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.
30:26Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.
30:29Today, it all sounds about as revolutionary as motherhood and apple pie.
30:33But at the time, the declaration of independence
30:36posed an explosive challenge not just to royal authority,
30:39but to the traditional values of a deeply hierarchical society.
30:45Although it coined the phrase United States,
30:49the declaration of independence
30:51Although it coined the phrase United States,
30:54the declaration left Americans anything but united.
31:02Many felt less bound to their inalienable rights
31:06than to their king and empire.
31:11The Hollywood version of the War of Independence
31:14is of a struggle between heroic patriots and red-coated Nazis.
31:18But the reality was completely different.
31:21This was a civil war.
31:24This is Christ Church in Philadelphia,
31:26and it's famous because so many of the signatories
31:28of the declaration of independence worshipped here.
31:31And yet supporters of independence
31:33were in a minority in the congregation.
31:35Only around a third were in favour,
31:38and the rest were either against or neutral.
31:41This was a church like so many in colonial America,
31:44divided by politics.
31:47The pressure on church ministers to take sides was particularly acute.
31:53They owed their allegiance to the king
31:55as head of the Church of England.
31:58One clergyman's inner struggle reveals the truth about this war.
32:03Jacob Duchesne was rector of Christ Church, an Anglican minister.
32:07So, for him, the American Revolution posed an agonising dilemma.
32:11And we can see here in his own Book of Common Prayer
32:14how he tried to cope with it.
32:16What the Book of Common Prayer originally says is,
32:19''We humbly beseech thee so to dispose and govern
32:22''the heart of George, thy servant, our king and governor.''
32:25Meaning George III.
32:26Duchesne took a pen and struck those words out
32:29and replaced them with,
32:31''We humbly beseech thee so to direct
32:33''the rulers of these United States.''
32:36A revolutionary act.
32:38And yet, when independence was formally declared,
32:41and one of the signatories was Duchesne's own brother-in-law,
32:44Duchesne got cold feet.
32:46He backed off, returned to the fold, became a loyalist.
32:50And that illustrates how the American Revolution
32:53divided even individuals.
33:00One in five of the white population of British North America
33:04remained loyal to the crown during the War of Independence.
33:09With its loyalist support and its professional army,
33:12the empire should have been able to stamp out the rebellion.
33:18Yet, despite intermittent successes on the battlefield, it failed to.
33:25The reason was that the loyalists' commitment
33:28was simply not matched by equal resolve in the old country.
33:33The government in London lacked the stomach
33:36for a fight against the American colonists.
33:39It was one thing to take on American Indians
33:42or rebellious black slaves,
33:44but it was quite another matter to fight a war
33:47against what were, in effect, your own people.
33:50Incredible though it may seem,
33:53many people in London didn't even think
33:56the American colonies were worth fighting for.
34:00Economically, America seemed like small beer.
34:04The value of British imports from Jamaica
34:07was five times greater
34:09than those from the 13 American colonies put together.
34:14In addition, the transatlantic civil war
34:17mutated into another bout of the century-long
34:20Anglo-French conflict for world domination.
34:23With Louis XVI's navy threatening British shipping,
34:27a full-scale campaign in America was out of the question.
34:38The turning point came in 1781 at Yorktown, Virginia,
34:42when the British army under General Cornwallis
34:45became trapped between George Washington's patriots
34:49and the French navy.
34:52The story goes that as Cornwallis surrendered,
34:55the band played, the world turned upside down.
34:59The disaster at Yorktown left American loyalists in the lurch,
35:03but they weren't sufficiently disillusioned with British rule
35:07to abandon it altogether.
35:09It's an extraordinary fact that 100,000 people
35:12voted with their feet against the new United States,
35:15going instead to other parts of the empire.
35:18Most of them went to Canada, which had the unintended consequence
35:22of making Canada ultra-loyal for the foreseeable future.
35:25It meant that for some people, loyalty to king and empire
35:29came before life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.
35:35The loyalists weren't the only losers.
35:38Having won their independence in the name of liberty,
35:41the American colonists proved ever more ruthless
35:44in their treatment of American Indians
35:47and would perpetuate slavery in the southern states.
35:53As Samuel Johnson put it,
35:55how is it that the loudest yelps for liberty
35:58come from the drivers of Negroes?
36:03By contrast, within a few decades of losing America,
36:06the British empire turned against slavery.
36:09From the point of view of African-Americans,
36:12the War of Independence postponed freedom for a generation.
36:17American independence could have heralded the end of the British empire,
36:21and yet the empire was far from down and out.
36:24Indeed, the loss of the 13 colonies seemed to spur a whole new phase
36:28in British overseas expansion, even further afield.
36:31So half a continent had been lost,
36:34but on the other side of the world, a whole new continent beckoned.
36:38The British had screwed it up in America.
36:41Would they get it right in Australia?
36:47MUSIC
37:00The British had been drawn to Asia by trade.
37:05They'd been attracted to America by land.
37:08Distance was an obstacle,
37:11but one that, with fair winds, could be overcome.
37:18But there was another continent that appealed to the British
37:21for diametrically different reasons.
37:24Because it was barren.
37:26Because there was no-one to trade with.
37:29Because it was impossibly distant.
37:31Because it was a natural prison.
37:34With its weird red earth and its alien life forms,
37:38Australia was the 18th century's answer to Mars.
37:42MUSIC
37:45The catastrophe of losing America refocused the British imperial effort,
37:50above all, on Australia, which was being explored
37:53just as the American colonies began to slip away.
37:59Bizarrely, the official response to Captain James Cook's discovery
38:03of New South Wales was,
38:05Aha! What a perfect dumping ground for the scum of the British Isles.
38:12EXPLOSIONS
38:26The great paradox of Australian history
38:29is that what started off as a huge prison for transported criminals
38:34ended up being a far more loyal part of the British Empire
38:38than prosperous America.
38:43In May 1787, 11 ships set sail for Australia,
38:48crammed with over 700 convicts,
38:50ranging from a nine-year-old chimney sweep
38:53who'd stolen some clothes and a pistol
38:55to an 82-year-old rag dealer who'd been found guilty of perjury.
39:01In the following years, around 150,000 men, women and children
39:06made the eight-month journey on the so-called Hell Ships to Botany Bay.
39:12But these weren't murderers. They were petty criminals.
39:17The British system of criminal justice in those days,
39:20a time when private property was the holiest of holies,
39:23routinely threw the book at people
39:25for offences we today would consider quite trivial.
39:28Australia literally began life as a nation of shoplifters.
39:33By our standards, the system of transportation seems incredibly harsh.
39:38Seven years' forced labour for nicking a couple of chickens.
39:43And yet, if you survived the voyage and your stretch as a convict,
39:49you were, in effect, being given the chance to start a new life,
39:54even if it was a new life on Mars.
39:58The elite of the convict population, men with artisan skills,
40:02were housed in Hyde Park barracks.
40:05They slept in hammocks, 100 to a room.
40:10These were the men hand-picked by the convicts
40:13to make their way through the barracks.
40:15The convicts were given the chance to make their way through the barracks.
40:19The convicts were given the chance to make their way through the barracks.
40:24These were the men hand-picked by the governor of New South Wales.
40:29They were the craftsmen who would build a proud new colonial city,
40:34Sydney.
40:38Australia could have become a huge devil's island.
40:42It was Governor Lachlan Macquarie who prevented this
40:45by giving the convicts a second chance.
40:53BELL RINGS
40:59The prospect of earning their freedom is the greatest inducement
41:03that can be held out to the reformation of the manners of the inhabitants.
41:08It should lead a man back to that rank in society which he had forfeited.
41:16A Hebridean-born career army officer
41:18who'd risen to command a regiment in India,
41:21Lachlan Macquarie was every bit as much a despot
41:24as his naval predecessors.
41:26But unlike them, he was an enlightened despot.
41:29For Macquarie, Australia had to be more than just a land of punishment.
41:33It had to become a land of redemption.
41:36Like some benign highland laird,
41:39Macquarie dreamt of turning convicts into loyal crofters.
41:46Macquarie sought to realise his vision
41:48by offering 30-acre land grants to those who'd completed their sentences.
41:55The qualities that had got them transported in the first place,
41:59the risk-taking, the acquisitiveness,
42:01turned out to make ex-convicts ideal empire builders.
42:06By 1828, for the first time, free farmers outnumbered prisoners,
42:11and soon, sheep outnumbered people.
42:19But there were familiar losers in the Australian dream.
42:23The bush, where the Australian aborigines had hunted kangaroo for millennia,
42:28was being overrun.
42:32Once again, the colonists regarded the land as terra nullius, up for grabs.
42:39Paternalist as ever, Governor Macquarie hoped that the aborigines
42:43could be fitted into the new economic order,
42:46or, as he put it, transformed from their rambling, naked state
42:50into respectable farmers.
42:55In 1815, Macquarie had the idea of settling 16 aborigines
42:59in a small farm at Middlesbrough,
43:01where they would be forced to sell their land.
43:04Macquarie had the idea of settling 16 aborigines
43:07in a small farm at Middlehead, not far from this stretch of coast,
43:11complete with purpose-built huts and a small boat.
43:14You can see what he was thinking.
43:16If convicts could be turned into model citizens
43:19by giving them some extra kit and a second chance,
43:23then why not aborigines?
43:28But to Macquarie's despair,
43:30the aborigines showed no interest in the well-ordered life
43:33he had in mind for them.
43:35They lost the boat, ignored the huts,
43:37and wandered off back into the bush.
43:41They voted with their feet against the British economic system.
43:48It was the aborigines' indifference that sealed their fate.
43:51The more they seemed to walk away from the white man's civilisation,
43:55the easier it was for land-hungry farmers
43:58to justify what amounted to a tactic of extermination.
44:03This really was one of the most sordid chapters
44:05in the history of the British Empire.
44:07To all intents and purposes,
44:09the aborigines were classified as subhumans,
44:12what the Nazis would later call Untermenschen.
44:18There's only really one thing that can be said in mitigation.
44:21If Australia had been an independent republic in the 19th century,
44:26then the genocide might have been far worse.
44:32It was the British authorities, not the local settlers,
44:35who issued proclamations on posters throughout the country
44:38to affirm the rights of aborigines.
44:42And concern in Parliament
44:44about the mistreatment of Australia's indigenous peoples
44:47led to the appointment in 1838 of official aboriginal protectors.
44:53That was one of the peculiarities of the British Empire.
44:56Out on the fringes, the colonists tended to be totally ruthless
45:00towards the indigenous populations.
45:02But the government back in London acted as a restraining influence.
45:07There was no such restraint when the United States went to war
45:11against its aborigines, the American Indians.
45:15London continued to exert control from the centre.
45:19Yet by the 1830s, the new white colonies,
45:22Loyalist Canada and Macquarie's Australia,
45:25were growing in wealth and self-confidence.
45:28The danger was that they might go their own way,
45:32just like the United States.
45:35The American experiment of going it alone as an independent republic
45:38had been undeniably successful.
45:40Would the other white colonies now follow that example?
45:43Would there be a United States of Canada or Australia?
45:46In a way, the surprising thing is that that didn't happen.
45:54The United States of America,
45:56the United States of America,
45:58the United States of America,
46:00the United States of America,
46:03the United States of America.
46:07In 1837, French-speaking Québécois and pro-Americans
46:11rose up in indignant revolt
46:13against the suffocating British government of colonial Canada.
46:19London's response to the Canadian crisis
46:22would prove crucial to the future of the British Empire.
46:28Enter, of all people, the Earl of Durham,
46:31a high-living hangover from the Regency era
46:34and a founder of London's Reform Club.
46:38It was this unlikely figure, nicknamed Radical Jack,
46:42who was packed off to Canada to sort out the mess.
46:48Radical Jack announced his arrival in Quebec
46:51by prancing through the streets on a white Charger.
46:54Yet fortunately for the Empire,
46:56Durham found the answer to the colonial conundrum.
47:00How to have both liberty and loyalty.
47:07It may be something of a slim volume,
47:09but the Durham Report was the book that saved the British Empire.
47:13What it did was to acknowledge that the American colonists had been right.
47:17From now on, power in the white colonies would be shifted fundamentally
47:21away from the royal governors
47:23towards the colonists' own elected assemblies.
47:26In the subsequent years,
47:27the same model would be applied throughout the white empire.
47:30The Durham Report was the colonists' Magna Carta.
47:36Empire had been reconciled with liberty,
47:39for white colonists, that is.
47:42Durham's blueprint handed down just enough political freedom
47:46to the white colonies to produce a durable and cooperative system.
47:51It would become the cornerstone
47:53of the biggest empire the world has ever seen.
47:58It's hard not to feel when one reads the Durham Report
48:01that its subtext is one of regret.
48:03If only the American colonists had been given representative government
48:07when they asked for it in the 1770s.
48:09If only the British had lived up to their own rhetoric of liberty.
48:13There might never have been a war of independence.
48:16There might never have been a United States of America.
48:19And my Aunt Aggie could have chosen California instead of Canada
48:23when she packed her bags to go.
48:49The Durham Report
Recommended
48:55
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