The British Empire: The Complex Truth

[Music] hello and welcome back to david starkey talks i'm sorry there's been a bit of a longer gap than there should have been but i have been very busy in the real rather than the virtual world here some of you may have seen the coverage which i did of the jubilee for gb news where in fact i am going to be adopting or being given not adopting being given a regular role very shortly you may have seen my jubilee coverage with aleister stewart um which received damn on say a claim one of the first really good reviews i think that gp news has actually received so there was that and then some of you will have spotted from the videos i was at i spent a week at the danube institute in budapest and found it extraordinarily interesting in some ways very moving experience actually very challenging one in my debates with an american or constitutionalist which was um john fontaine which was how come on put it exciting one realizes what it is like to encounter a completely different and i felt very rigid mindset no doubt he felt mine was very different and very rigid too and so there's been that um there have been lots of of uh big speaking events some of which we were able to film unfortunately rather a lot that we weren't in london and um finally an extraordinary event which we certainly weren't able to film if i possibly the most extraordinary experience i've had since i was a sixth former when i was a sixth former i played i think i have talked about this i played the part of thomas beckett in murder in the cathedral and i played it really rather well and we did so well that we removed it from the school hall to candle parish church which is fast sort of five wide structure i performed from the pulpit and all the rest of it and my english master edmund mounsey who was under his quakerism very sharp indeed looked at me as i was preening myself on this uh you know mock religious agony wagged a finger at me and said starkey don't get ideas you would have made a very good bad cardinal so there we are so but the the point of telling that story is now that for the first time in my life since then i experienced another pulpit and actually an even bigger one namely the pulpit the knave pulpit of westminster abbey where i spoke on the extraordinary occasion of the the the burly 500 the celebrations to um to mark the 500th anniversary of the birth of william sissel elizabeth the first first minister and his life and his legacy um speaking to 1500 people in westminster abbey is well a challenge and maybe you will think i've let you down but i did actually have a word for word script the problem of course with a word for word script you can't actually look at the audience so i had no real idea how they were reacting to me but they seem to be fairly pleased anyway all the witches by the way preface to say that as well as doing all of those things i've actually been thinking quite a lot and i'm hoping to present you with the fruits of those thoughts um in this video we've heard a lot i've talked about the jubilee we've heard a lot in the interim uh from prince charles and from prince william um i'm really wondering whether the english monarchy is going to begin with william the conqueror and finish with william the woke but anyway we've been hearing a lot from both william and charles about the slavery empire and from many other people arguing that that slavery needs to be a compulsory element in the history curriculum the only other one being incidentally the holocaust and that the two should be taught together now one possible reaction to all of this is to shrug one's shoulders and say basically how silly all this was a long time ago britain unlike most other countries actually came to its part came to terms with its past voluntarily and at the time rather than for example like germany with the nazis waiting until it was conquered and doing it afterwards and very inadequately and moving on as quickly as it possibly could but i think on reflection that's the position i would have adopted until very recently on reflection i think i'm wrong completely wrong i think that what is being said about the centrality of the empire which is very much bigger than slavery but clearly encompasses slavery is absolutely spot on and that we should seriously do something about it so first of all i would like to make a characteristically modest proposition i would like to reinstate empire day the celebration of the british empire but also as an opportunity to think about it and to think about it not simply how it came about its extraordinary scale in an extent but its legacy not simply for britain not simply for the immigrants to britain but for the entire world empire day those of you of my sort of age can actually remember the tale end of it in the 50s and the 60s but it really got going in the edwardian period in the aftermath of the death of queen victoria and it was celebrated on victoria's birthday her real birthday which was there wasn't an official birthday because hers took that part took place at a reasonably reasonably clement period of the year it took place on the 24th of may and the 24th of may was instituted as empire day which was of course entirely appropriate as the as it was the formal coming into existence of the british empire was when uh um the israeli is responsible for the formal creation uh by parliamentary process of victoria as empress of india and the the adoption of the imperial title alongside the title of of of king queen of the united kingdom empress of india and and so on and so on so and the great apogee of empire the apogee of empire the height of empire in terms of both uh extent and in many ways power i think is that immediate post-victorian period and it's reflected in the vast scale of the rebuilding of london to mark again victoria's death everything that we saw in the jubilee everything that i sat and watched in the jubilee from i've now forgotten which one of the gates it was with the australia gate but all the great gates with those magnificent and those of those magnificent guilt wrought iron gates around the great roundabout in front of buckingham palace they're all built at this period the mall is laid out at this period admiralty arch is laid out and designed and the the front of buckingham palace and which of course presided over the whole thing uh was when it wasn't actually obscured by the stage for the pop concert and the pageant the that extraordinary front of buckingham palace literally glued on pinned on in the summer of 1913 just before the first world war from the monies that were left over from this national monument to victoria of course which is crowned by the great statue of victoria sitting on her huge marble plinth in the center of that roundabout and with the fountains dribbling uh flowing water below so the the imperial apogee which is represented there in the imperial buildings in cardiff okay the the invention of a capital for wales similarly in the subsequent in the subsequent um uh decade the extraordinary the the wonderful lustians buildings uh of the new capital the new delhi capital of the indian empire which was approaching completion exactly at the moment that the empire was dissolved and the british handed things over rather catastrophically in terms of the actual processes of handover back to back back to the indians in the immediate aftermath of the second world war so i would like to revive empire day a day to commemorate a day to remember a day to assess but i would like to do something else i would like seriously to reconstruct the school history program and probably even the bulk of the university undergraduate history program around the idea of empire this is not it is the precise opposite of course of little englishmen um the the empire is the moment at which england reaches out to the world and then comes back again it's a moment at which the world is made one in other words the british empire and we do need just to pause and think why i am prepared to advance this notion and to advance it very seriously the british empire is not simply as people have been arguing the most important event in british history it is the most important event in world history it is the foundation of the globalized world that we live in whose extraordinary pressures we are now seeing on every side in in which you know an action in the ukraine can destabilize our prices can destabilize currencies can induce induced famine in africa and so on this extraordinary globalized world we invented it the british empire created it it transformed the world we are all living in it so i think taking behind you of empire as a central thread in first english and then british history empire is about much much more than the relations of white and black it's vastly more important debates about racism and all the rest of it it's fundamentally the debate about the destiny of human civilization so but it's a debate and what i will try and do at the various stages in that debate is highlight how all sorts of assumptions not simply about history but very much about our present are raised by this approach this kind of lens this this a combination isn't it of lens it's a microscope sometimes it's a telescope sometimes it's it's a kind of panning dish great radio telescope panning across the universe of history on other occasions so let's actually begin but when should we begin well of course we begin indeed with an empire but not the british empire the roman empire the first time that apart from all the mysticism and often nonsense i think about stonehenge that we really know about these islands is the time of their conquest and their absorption into the roman empire so we will begin with an idea of empire and remember because of the enormous prestige of roman culture the enduring importance of latin the way in which it remains the prime language of intellectual debate and communication effectively until the 19th century it means that empire isn't this sort of intrusion it's not this this this thing that sort of rather wickedly comes in it means it is the the intellectual water we are we are imperial fish we swim in the water the empires beginning particularly of course there were lots of empires before rome the roman empire which incidentally grows on under the republic the roman empire advances as most empires do by conquering other people's empires so the work of accretion and is is indeed it's a work of accretion other people have done the the the alexander the great and so on and uh and and whatever they've done the hard work of of pre pre-imperial conquest and then the the remains the shadows of their empires are conquered by rome and this vast conglomerate is made but of course what is britain in that well britain isn't what it becomes of the british empire it's not the capital it's not the master it's a remote and fringe province the one of the last to be conquered and one of the first to leave the empire so that then raises all sorts of questions doesn't it um that that [Music] and first out and we're also of course one of the one of the areas where it would appear the roman conquest left fewest long-term traces yes there are lots of archaeological traces but there is no direct trace in our language no direct trace in our institutions even very little trace in where people live yes a few roman cities like like lincoln and london survive but the overwhelming majority of centers of roman occupation did not remain continuous centers of occupation thereafter so we're part of an empire to begin with a fringe empire a rather fringe of that empire a lately conquered and quickly let go province that of course then raises an interesting question doesn't it the whole business of not what we regularly look at the growth of empires but their decline their decline and fall to use the famous title of the work by edward gibbon written at the height of the british empire in the 18th century but contemplating the fall of the roman empire he was inspired to write it as he sat in the forum in rome looking at the ruins of rome and watching the sort of patterning feat of of of the friars of catholic fires as they wandered over these sites of greatness and of course effectively presenting the argument that rome fell not because it was conquered from without but from moral decay within and daring of course he was a famous atheist much denounced by his contemporary dr johnson declaring in effect that it was the moral revolution of christianity which destroyed rome something for us to think about because clearly you could construct a very good argument that leaping right to the end of the story that i am just beginning now that woke represents a perverted form of christianity he shall bring down that which will put down the mighty from their seats and exalt them of low degree will book can be seen as that you know so you'd immediately have that big question to start off with what destroys empires because britain was a site of the that great retreat from rome in 410 under honorius the abandonment of britain and everything that follows well what does follow well and as we all know and two things happen and we get um and again there's a big debate on this isn't that what happens with rome when rome takes britain well it's a conquest or is it an immigration what happens when the anglo-saxons whatever they are and whoever they are under the extensive debate but there's sort of a consensus on it what happens when the anglo-saxons take over is it a conquest or is it an immigration or the danes and later on the normans isn't it interesting that um because there's suddenly been an interest in in these movements with the post-war and particularly the post-1990s enormous levels of immigration to britain unprecedented in their numbers and scale and the proportions of the population there's been an attempt hasn't that saying well actually we've always been a nation of immigrants people sort of arriving you know the equivalent of little boats landing on on dover beach and whatever but as far as we can tell the anglo-saxons certainly the romans we actually know didn't sort of even ask permission or even evade permission and to land they conquered they took over they destroyed they replaced so do we actually need a different model of britain the early these early stages of britain's history which of course suddenly then becomes very disturbing doesn't it not waves of immigrants that are sort of absorbed but wave after wave of conquerors who take over destroy transform decapitate the native culture destroy the native language destroy the native ruling class we can debate those issues more fully when we actually come to the norman conquest itself but of course the idea of empire although the roman empire in the west falls in the middle of the fifth century and that doesn't mean that the idea of empire disappears of course it doesn't the west the eastern empire with its capital in byzantium in in constantinople continues of course as there's a major power and similarly the idea of empire is present i think in two ways it's very much present of course we do tend to forget this the a very large part of the entire mediterranean part with the exception of italy itself and southern france of the western empire was very quickly taken over by another empire the isla islamic empire the abbasid caliphate and so again islam conquers the empty shell of rome it's one empire usually a very small group taking over another empire so there is there is that empire and but much more importantly from direct cultural point of view in western europe the idea of empire never ever goes away rome rests as a kind of collective memory awareness of a great civilization which fell and which for very very long time those of us who were its successors knew frankly that they did not match you you still go to room you look at the scale of the coliseum you look at the scale of of the pantheon and you're dwarfed and you're impressed and that's now with all the resources we have the processes of technological transformation can you imagine what those anglo-saxon immigrants or conquerors or whatever it was fought when they contemplated say the roman baths in bath which were originally roofed of course um like the bars of caracalla well if we if we look at the actual comments of people like be the anglo-saxon historian remember the idea of his the idea of the anglo-saxon church the english church is invented before the actual existence of a single english state but there he talks bead talks about that the sense that these buildings were the work of giants it was they could barely believe that they they they were the creation of humans so great was the gap between that civilization and and and what they brought this idea of empire never goes away and uh from 800 onwards of course it is literally revived by charlemagne with charlemagne's uh coronation by the pope and from that point onwards there is a new what's commonly called the holy roman empire which comes to be based primarily in germany and is a dominant part of the of the middle middle ages with england which this point is to begin with the theories of the warring anglo-saxon kingdoms and then eventually you get you get a union a union of them and uh uh in in the post alfred period um and and um the the creation uh by the late anglo-saxon period and of course with yet another semi-conquest by the danes you get the creation of i mean what appears to be a remarkable almost unitary state um in in england with more or less its present frontiers uh something quite extraordinary but then of course what is it how does it relate to the england how does it relate to um this new revived empire holy roman empire how does it relate to the other power which itself incorporates so much of the world rome um which is of course the papacy the papers are also based in rome with the popes adopting much of the ceremony much of the costume much of the actual language of imperial power of course not exercising it directly so much by armies but by by the processes of culture by the processes of law by the processes of taxation by the control of minds and and the faith and so on so anglo-saxon england in a kind of it seems a sort of semi-detached relationship it is of course very very remote from this um from those centers either in continental europe either the holy roman empire and still more remote from rome it's of course it knows latin and but it uses it's unusual in that it uses its own language it uses anglo-saxon which is is a is a germanic dialect but like german itself and it's a complex language with with case endings with with um declinations of nouns and and and conjugations of verbs and all that sort of thing complex written language but it uses anglo-saxon to write about itself to administer itself the anglo-saxon chronicle is in anglo-saxon and it's not in latin uh and and so on and and again this this remarkably tensile structure with as i said that that is a sort of unified state and but also and it's got this this structure of the counties and which themselves are um both as it were units of local power but participants in the national in the national structure it gives it a highly tensile that they're called shias at this point um county is the is is the later word so this this sort of slight i think semi-detached to the to the to the broader post-imperial european structures and then of course well what happens well it's conquered it's conquered in the norman conquest and we really can't talk about the normans as immigrants the norman conquest is an extraordinary we do need to grasp this point it is not as it were a year improvise with sort of extra violence on the contrary it is one of the most brutal decapitating conquests of the people ever carried out i want to repeat that it's one of the most brutal conquests of the people ever carried out and when prince charles talks of slavery let me give his words right as the most painful period of our history doesn't he really need to reflect that the normal conquest didn't take place in the transatlantic it didn't take place in caribbean islands the normal conquest took place here it enslaved not people who'd already been enslaved by their conquering africans re-enslaved uh by by uh by uh arab slave traders and taken across the atlantic it enslaved a free people it deliberately destroyed their language it destroyed their customs it destroyed their ruling class it changed their places of occupation it transformed their life their architecture to be an anglo-saxon in norman england was to be a semi-slave by definition you were an inferior creature it is also as one can gently remind prince charles and prince william it is the direct origin of their family's role in england it is the beginning of the english monarchy which is why we count our kings from william the conqueror now again let's not get too i've just been presenting the truth but let's not get too pious about that truth it was a rule and this is why i was making that point about conquest it is a rule of of warfare in the middle ages that and indeed right through to the present look at what we do in nazi germany that if you conquer a country absolutely if you have unconditional surrender existing systems of law rights everything else are simply an obeyance or are abolished and william the conqueror simply reinvents recreates england as he wants and as he can get away with so we have this extraordinary transformation from it comes something very remarkable in the process of time you get i was talking about one culture being the master race culture the french of the normans the other an uber mentioned and under mention a kind of a kind of underground people culture of the anglo-saxons well the two in the processes of middle ages do fuse and similarly the two languages do fuse we've talked about this before by by the end of the fourteen cent with with chaucer and so on and they create something i think very remarkable a language which has enough of the of the abstract content of latin to make it highly functioning but is not latinate in structure there are then all sorts of other questions that we need to be asking it's been argued that more survives the anger the uh the the norman conquest of anglo-saxon england that i i've sort of suggested and and one of the things that is very strongly said to survive is an idea of individualism it's the argument of alan mcfarland's remarkable book the origins of english individualism i've referred to it before it's something that has profoundly influenced me and my own thoughts on these matters but it's also it's it's something else it's very much to do with family structure anglo-saxon family structure seems comparatively weak and it is to be argued that is that relative weakness of family structure which allows for notions of individualism which of course accounts for both the notions of anglo-saxon law of english law and rights and so on because again one of the remarkable features of this this hybrid state and this hybrid culture which emerges in england after the norman conquest is that you don't simply develop this this odd language called english you develop the only system of law that's english common law that in its sophistication its complexity the way it's taught its rootedness in the professional class it's self-confidence the only system of law that rivals roman law and yet of course operates in a radically different fashion the one from the edicts of the emperor's coming down codified and so on the other essentially case decisions coming up the one deductive the roman law deductive english law emphatically inductive coming up from the bottom now so we've wondered rather a long way from empire but no we actually haven't um of course whilst all this is happening this creation of of of an odd odd culture in britain and particularly especially in england though also again it's important to acknowledge this fact something very very similar happening in southern scotland which is not remotely celtic and of although it's not ruled from london very much the same patterns of changes seem to take place there the development of a very similar language scots as opposed to english and and and very similar institutions of state having much the same kind of names and so on um but whilst all that's going on you do of course have other notions of empire developing and they're influenced i think by the roman model but they're different type and scale even under the anglo-saxons there was a notion of the the empire of britain this was the idea of the brett welder ship the idea that england clearly and the coronation of edgar which can be argued as the moment of which an idea of again of england really comes into full existence but the coronation of edgar is followed by the symbolic rowing of edgar in the d by uh tributary kinglets of of the celtic world in other words that he is not simply king of england he is an overlord of britain so a sort of general shadowing idea of a british empire but that's to say an empire of britain that's one that's very important notion you see it resurfacing with edward the first programmes of conquest of the conquest of the successful conquest of wales the failure the narrow failure to conquer scotland and the idea of a british empire revived again very much by henry viii much less successfully than by edward and so on and and arguably you could say by by oliver cromwell who is the only person successfully to have conquered catastrophic consequences especially none the only person actually to have conquered the whole of the british isles um so there's that notion of the empire of britain british empire in that sense of the word and then of course there's another sense of empire which is an empire that goes across the channel following the norman conquest the whole articulation of english politics is is shifted is reorientated in the anglo-saxon period the main lines of communication are from well they're back home aren't they they're back to scandinavia they're back to the north german coast and so on in other words going across the north sea and those roots remain very important in terms of trade but the main political route the the the the the the the thing that that exploits the fact that we are an island uh with the normal conquest is the turning to the south and here again as i've emphasized in other videos what we must remember is that the sea at this point isn't a barrier the channel is a means of communication and for most of the middle ages the from from from the norman conquest onwards england is actually part of some sort of cross-channel structure and first the the the anderlin empire which which collapses in the reign of king john and then the the the extraordinary plantation at empires particularly edward iii and henry v and henry v coming within the whisker of a joint monarchy of england and france and it's at that point the the formal notion of the imperial pretensions of the english crown are established and you have a crown and you can see it very clearly on henry's tomb at westminster abbey you can you yeah and you you will see it on images of his son the very own war like henry vi and so on and the tudors and whatever they're after you get a crown with a new characteristic essentially imperial form um which is um the band of the crown that goes around there alternate symbols of england and france the cross pate for england the fleur-de-lis france and to symbolize the fact that this is an empire it's closed it's got arches going across the top which echoes the mighty-like crown of the holy roman empire the so-called closed or the imperial crown and you get uh from this point onwards a steady elevation of the royal title it's up to this point it's your grace then it becomes highness and then uh by the end of henry the seventh and emphatically under henry viii it becomes majesty well it's all as you see we're getting back by a very odd route we're actually getting back to well roman latin aren't we what is majesty well it's maestas it is the majesty of the roman people the sovereignty the sovereign power the absolute power of the roman people which comes finally uh with the collapse of the republic to be embodied first in prince principate augustus and then more formally more absolutely and irreversibly in the emperor so we're getting back to roman this i've course the romanesque comes back in a very very large way doesn't it with the renaissance itself the renaissance is essentially bringing back into the mainstream of western european thought of the undiluted authentic thought of greece and particularly of rome and that remember we get confused don't we because roman history divides itself around caesar the famous struggles uh uh of ceases murder assassination the rise of augustus and whatever it divides itself into the republic and into the empire but of course the republic had become a great empire the it's it's caesar himself you know who accomplishes the the the the conquest um of of gaul that you've all you've already got you've got egypt just about falling and egypt conquered um and and so on and uh in in the in the immediate aftermath of all of these events the thing you know that forms the basis of shakespeare's great play of anthony and cleopatra and so on to be but all of these ideas the ideas about romans the ideas about power the idea about the the the morality of the state the the the belief in the destiny of rome the belief in the uh in in the the state's ability to demand the service of the citizen all of these things come flooding back i mean they've never entirely gone away but they come back in a much more explicit form so what i think we need to understand is that from the from the 16th from the 15th and the 16th century onwards the idea of empire is absolutely central to the education of everybody who matters it's not uni it's not a strange notion it is something which is simply there it is integral to their to the to their way of thinking the language they use and so on and it works itself out in a whole series of different ways so the renaissance then is the moment at which you get a kind of explicit how can we call this re-imperialization of of of of of our experience now this again we need to put this now into the bigger context we're roughly now aren't we at the beginning of the 16th century we're at the beginning of the reign of henry viii and this of course is the moment when there is this sudden vast expansion of europe in which england does not play any significant part at all at this point there have been signs under henry's father and with his backing for the voyages of sebastian cabo and whatever from bristol there'd been signs that he understood what was going on across the atlantic but then of course henry vii isn't really english as i've argued before he's brought up in france he's brought up in in brittany and again that western coast he's brought up at the french court and so on he has those values henry viii doesn't but the spanish and the portuguese are embarked at this point on this extraordinary series of long voyages portuguese circumnavigation in the case of the spanish across to latin america and of course there you get exactly the same process that i talked about before with the fall of the western empire to islam you get exactly the same process you get the native empires of the aztecs and of the incas collapsing to a tiny tiny handfuls of spanish troops aided by the fact of course that they have guns and the natives don't this but again it's the fall of one empire before another their empire's being this accretive process what goes on in england is of course very different you get henry um showing a very powerful interest in reinventing the the empire of um of henry v consciously harking back to that and failing but on the other hand of course the henry's turning of these new ideas these these these new approaches to literature and to learning this back to what's called the sources and fontes going back to the sources you get him turning these ideas quite i think quite cynically although of course he always persuades himself that whatever he wanted to do was the right thing to do henry had been a great defender of the catholic church this sort of imperial church and against the attacks of martin luther and he of course reversed his position completely once the catholic church refuses to give him his divorce uh from uh catherine of aragon and and instead um although he never goes by any means fully along with luther and indeed the two continue to hate each other you get a royal a royal religious revolution in england which is accompanied very important we say this with many sorts of imperial gesture henry and sees himself as exercising a combination combined power over the church which is like an old testament king it's like king solomon and zadok the priest and nathan the prophet uh crown and solomon king and all that stuff or it is and this is more precise it's like the powers of a byzantine emperor a post-constantine emperor over the eastern church he sees himself in that kind of light and there's also something else and this is i've touched about this on this before but i've never really developed it in this explicit kind of way and it was very much the experience of doing that talk on william sissel that made me think about it like this i think that the uh the the way in which sizzle and whatever start studying cicero they start looking at the uh the the their virtual property dolce de cordons brought back to amari you know sweden fitting thing to die for your country uh the fact that we are all really the equivalent of ants in the in in in the great hive of the state that we all have a duty to the commonwealth and to the raise publica and all the rest all of these kind of ideas i think these are the things that power the help to power this extraordinary takeoff of royal power in the england of henry viii and indeed two to england in general from this point onwards you get a kind of romanization of english kingship or rather i think you split english kingship sort of into two the the court the palace very much i think adopts these kind of ideas which of course emphasize royal power emphasize royal majesty the actual personal will of the king and it's the creation of all of those instruments of the privy chamber the privy council all the the secretaries of state all of the stuff that i've talked about before but at the same time there remains an earlier notion of english kingship which is embedded in the institutions of the medieval state so it's embedded in the the much more consensus broadcast based notion of parliament in which the king could really because it's a warrior monarchy that monarchy fighting in france it could it could only really rule with the effective cooperation of the landed elites and and it could it could only do so through the forms of law and that intense legalism which i've talked about before and the way i try to express it and i'm i'm increasingly sure this is the right way to to to look at it you've really got two different sorts of monarchy in england you don't have a republican view and you don't have a monarchical view you have two different views of kingship you have this roman view of king king authorities what the king wants and then you have this much broader view which is well the king is really due process the king is a kind of collective and it's embodied in the two palaces which emerges the two centers of power under henry viii the new palace of white hall built but taken over by henry from woolsey and it was originally his palace of york place and then enormously expanded to cover the whole of the area from the river through the ministry of defense across the modern white hall and industry james's park and the whole range of buildings of the treasury the british council office and uh the foreign office and all the rest of them and on that western side uh of of of of white hall so you get that you get the this vast palace complex there that represents the as it were the new attitudes to government and the older attitude in well the old palace of westminster where parliament the law courts the exchequer and so on continue to meet and it seems to me that the if you add to that the religious tensions with with the the henry of course leaving the monarch with this apparently huge increase of power of making him the headship the head of the church but also of course therefore making the monarch male or female and making the monarch also of course the center of religious controversy what religion is going to be is the most debated matter of the time and what i think happens with the civil war of the 17th century is these two views of religion and a more ceremonialized church being as it were the church of whitehall and and and the uh or or the chapel royal or of westminster abbey and so on and the uh and that more authoritarian view of kingship which of course is the only thing that can force that view of religion through and then a much less ceremonialized something much nearer to uh um what we might call it low church even to um scottish presbyterianism which is associated with with with the much broader body of the gentry and the landed classes and the world of parliament the house of commons and and and of of the palace of westminster and those two moving into conflict with of course the conflict of the civil war now what happens well in terms of empire when all this is going on well there are these floating notions of empire um that that i've said henry isn't very interested in fact shows no interest in it at all on the other hand by the time that queen elizabeth comes to the throne and her proclamation is quite extraordinary doesn't only proclaim her queen of england and france and ireland and all the rest of it it gives her this this vague title as a kind of empress of the seas from the orkness to the bay of biscay you've already got this notion again we've talked about it before the way it's henry viii who actually changes england into um gives england this sense of difference from europe that that this this sense of of of an island cut off in other words that the channel which had been this this this essentially vehicle of communication in the middle ages becomes the barrier the widest strip of water in the world as i've called it before and it's henry of course who creates the elements the continuing elements of the royal navy and its administration and of course above all and fortifies the whole of the coast from from the northeast uh from from hull and from newcastle on time the whole of the way around to milford haven so you actually create this sense of an island separate from europe and i think that's another one of the vast legacies of henry's reign which i think is the fundamental basis of the notion of english exceptionalism this sense of an island cut off i'm going to do a whole talk on this because people have asked me as as part of the q a what is the english myth and talked about things like arthur or shakespeare or um or or chaucer well actually i think the english myth is different i think the english myth is the tudors i think the tudors are the mythic figures in our history and the foundation of that idea of english exceptionism of england alone england holding off continental europe whether it is the the forces of of of rome of spain and and and of france under henry viii or the similar combination against elizabeth in the armada or again the resistance to louis xiv or again to napoleon or again to the kaiser or again to hitler well the foundation of that myth which of course is also going to feed into empire into a new and different version of empire that is laid in the in in the in the reign of henry viii but then it's given this idea of english exceptionalism is given an explicitly imperial edge through the sea it's a concept of a sea born empire which appears to be born if you like at the beginning of elizabeth's reign and this whole series of theoreticians of navigation of like hackloid of of of um mathematicians uh prognosticators of fantasies like john d they all play around with these ideas of empire and and sometimes it's it's the arthurian legends which are developed it's legends uh it's legends of of earlier voyages across the atlantic all of them aimed at giving britain a kind of england england and britain remember fusing this is the this is the thing again i've argued the arthurian legends from the 15th century onwards are increasingly anchored in england the mort arthur anchors off in england and therefore these legends of vast imaginary conquests aren't seen of as british in our sense of the word british in other words incorporating the celtic fringe they're seen as an expansion of england which is of course the dominant power so all of that then uh under elizabeth taking steps into the real world remember all the schemes of role is in virginia and all the rest none of them actually work um under elizabeth it is under james and and charles um and from that point onwards the the the actual turning of these things into into reality is the early 17th century so we've got them this um this this um england intention we've got this england that is putting its feet into empire at the beginning of the 17th century but it's also in england which is on the point of tearing itself apart in the repeated civil wars of the 17th century which again i would ask prince charles does he not think that perhaps uh one of the um um what's the word i want um one one of the most terrible moments um let me quote him correctly one of the most painful moments in our history might actually be civil war might it not be the sight of a king charles having his head cut off might it not be what happened in ireland what was done to people with white skins and not people with black skins you see this again would be one of the great advantages of this approach that i'm doing in which we see empire and and these sort of big questions is actually being embedded they don't just suddenly appear they don't just suddenly appear with one race ruling over another or taking advantage of another they are absolutely part of the culture so if we were doing this exercise properly we'd be able to have that sort of debate we'd also be able to look at again the question of most painful moment ever well civil war is pretty painful when you pit family against family when you don't ex just execute a king you execute an archbishop of canterbury you execute the king's first minister the earl of stratford um well that's very painful but then of course we've just brushed over haven't we what henry viii does with the reformation um the ripping apart of a thousand years of religious history and religious practice that's pretty painful too the religious struggles of the 16th century the enemy within the the horrors of of torture the that the horrors of religious persecution we've been through all of these and i think it's really very important that we bear in mind this complexity that we don't just reduce the past to a single theme that we don't simply see the past through the prism of race would be i think a profound distorting glass whereas if we look at it through the prism of empire then newtonian we can actually see what light is composed of that works very very differently so we've got them what what actually emerges from the civil wars of the 17th century well one i think emerges from the civil wars of the 17th century and particularly been going on a long time but it's a big subject and i'm going to try and stick with it to the end what what emerges from the civil wars of the 17th century is surely a new kind of state in england it's a new kind of state it's a more if you like a more rational state it's founded to a key extent on the extraordinary it's a chicken and egg relationship with with the the first real enlightenment the great enlightenment which isn't what goes on the showy stuff that goes on in 18th century france it's not even what happens in 18th century edinburgh it's what happens in late 17th century england the mathematical revolutions of newton which for the first time lead to a science that really does fully work um and the the the triumph of the inductive method and the triumph of the and the understanding of the results of induction via mathematics the whole world of the royal society and also the the new approaches to politics is represented to an extent by lock uh to the notions of contract and whatever that are embodied in the ideas of lock to the ideas of the rational rational management of finance uh which are associated with all of this with the statistical works of people like william petty who for the first time you know accurately measure populations and all that sort of thing give government statistics to work with to the creation of rational systems of finance rational systems of public finance which depend on that political revolution uh the political revolution of 1688-89 which gave the the the the the system of um you remember i talked about whitehall and and and westminster which gave westminster power over whitehall which is the kind of collective sense of the governing class a monarchy which had to depend on that but then of course with the genius of robert walpole in the 1720s that actually managed to fuse the two systems so you've got the extraordinary office of prime minister which acts as the commons parliament controlling the monarch but also uses the devices and power and particularly patronage of the monarch to manage parliament so you get the best of both worlds you get the ability to direct policy which you need from which which is given you by an imperial style monarchy but at the same time you get the machineries of consent and particularly consent to taxation particularly the consent of the rich to being taxed because this is the extraordinary development that takes place in england from the late 17th century the rich agreed to be taxed and this gives you a rational system of royal finance and whereas what of course what had gone on in france at this exact moment was precisely the opposite development in other words the opposite part of the roman inheritance had actually triumphed in france you get the creation under louis xiv of genuinely imperial monarchy with the king assuming full imperial control and the destruction of all institutions or the reduction to impotence of all institutions that don't correspond to that and the creation of new institutions the academy and all the rest of it which are designed to manage to manage art science manufactures and all the rest of it to the single purpose of himming the glory of the of the monarch and increasing his power and as he is the kind of leitas i am the state and the embodiment of the state in the person of the monarch whereas in england the monarch embodies the state in the other way round the monarch embodies the state in the sense of the representative figure and in france he absorbs the state into his own real personality and real will it's the opposite take and churchill with his extraordinary genius for understanding these things why you know he comes up with well why churchill is churchill why you know he comes up with the the phrase the iron curtain at fulton missouri and all the rest churchill and marlborough understand the as it were the antithetical nature of english government as against french government and he pairs something else he points to if you like the totalitarian qualities of louis xiv government again very much like the great totalitarians with the emphasis on grand grand comm project great architectural projects of of re re reshaping geography and so on and that the vast for the vast programs of fortification and all the rest but also of course he puts his finger on something else internal persecution of minorities the attack uh on the uh the attack on the uh on the huguenot and the driving out of the huguenot the bulk of whom take refuge in england to the enormous advantage in england so again one of the one of the things striking about the difference as it emerges between france and england at this point is that in england as well as this what i've been described as this rational culture you also get a culture of by no means absolute freedom of speech by no means absolute freedom of religion but relatively and in comparison with france hugely so in the direction of freedom so two very very different patterns of culture and the thing that i think we again churchill understands churchill writes about passionately vividly in the marlborough book and also in his history of the english-speaking peoples churchill understands then that what goes on in the 18th century is a duel for world empire between britain and france and that duel is overwhelmingly won by england britain because again of course the beginning of the it all goes there doesn't it really at the beginning of the 18th century you get the union of england and scotland in 1707 which is celebrated by queen anne with a magnificent service of thanksgiving in saint paul's along with all those great victories over louis xiv which had been won by churchill's ancestor the great duke of marlborough ramalison and blenheim uh and so on and and union with scotland now you get this this these two empires that first fight over first fight in europe and uh with with england of course very much as a proxy and uh um marlborough being as great a diplomat again something that churchill draws a lesson from in the second world war marlborough being his great diplomat and as he is a general i mean how on earth do you do a british army which of course is only a relatively small portion of the troops involved but how do you get a british victory at blenheim which is just outside munich southern germany think how that actually works and think of the logistics and of course above all the financial network the means of transferring money having the money to transfer because britain because because of the the rationality of its finances the fact that finances are anchored to regular recurring grants of taxation by parliament britain quickly starts to be able to borrow at low rates of interest at under five percent and often significantly less france because it's absolute is because it depends on extracting money largely from people who can't pay that's the poor because the rich to a significant extent are exempt from taxation france constantly goes bankrupt so you have enormous you have constant debt crises so you have enormously inflated rates of interest which is why a country of you know eight million can take on and defeat a country which is four or five times the size and with a population of 25 million which is what which is exactly what happens so in the course of the 18th century then and this again is what we need to understand that you cannot talk about the english empire alone there is it's part of a world complex of european empires the spanish and the portuguese by this point in relative decline the english and the french battling it out for a new style genuine world empire and that victory of course is actually one in the seven years war which churchill refers to again correctly as the first world war that war in which the victories of wolf over moncalm uh in front of quebec gives britain canada and in which the victories of clive at plessy give britain india now here again we need to pause don't we because there's been a and there's hardly any mention it's very very interesting it's hardly any mention in all the debate about empire uh of wolf um and and the the victories in canada because of course it's setting aside the the indian the the the native population the indigenous population of canada it's essentially a victory over other white people it's a victory of the french and the french settlers and the french army uh in quebec so in fact if you actually look at the famous national trust account of houses that are associated with empire general wolf's house doesn't even figure although it's in west rome and it's next door to winston churchill's house at chartwell which of course figures enormously because of churchill's later roles in india and so on and so it's this notion again that empire is only white's ruling over blacks well of course it isn't it really isn't most of the time in the 18th century it's actually white ruling over other whites and indeed colonists of the same people which is exactly the sort of thing that goes on in in in the united states of america but let's just quickly pause and look again at the business of india itself a historian called william dalrymple has been very much denouncing clive and the wickedness and the exploitativeness of the british in india i would like to ask him a question he seems to be presenting the notion that if clive hadn't existed if the british hadn't intervened in india there would have been i suppose indian independence i think that's nonsense the fate of india in the seven years war was it was going to be ruled either by the british or it was going to be ruled by the french for exactly the reason that i was giving with the fall of the aztecs and of the incas um a couple of centuries beforehand in latin america the india had already been subject to a partial conquest the islamic conquest which creates the mughal empire and by the way uh somebody who knows at least as much about india as william dalrymple vs naipool says that it is the mogul conquest the islamic semi-conquest of india which is the catastrophe of england so the catastrophe of india unlike the british conquest but the point that i'm trying to make is the notion that there would have been indian independence is simply for the birds the mughal empire was in a state of chaos and it did it did it it's its principle line was dying out it was ineffective it was fragmenting in other words it was exactly that point of the hellenistic monarchies of the uh of of of the fifth century western empire of the incas of of uh um of ptolemaic egypt it was an empire that's crumbling and is ready for takeover by another empire and the only choice frankly was between whether it would be england or france and i think therefore one should really ask a very another rather simple question which would have been better and if you want an answer then i think you need to look for example at the fate of an important west indian island it was then called half an island by the way it was called sandomang saint domingo and it's now known as haiti and this was the world's densest sugar colony uh with of course slaves and it was french it's history of an attempted independence from france is one of the most horrific stories in the history of the world and culminating in one of the most dreadful states of the world which is modern haiti and the uh there are a series of revolts and counter revolts in the time of the french revolution and napoleon when napoleon by the way restore trying to restore slavery after it had been abolished by the french revolution of the extraordinary native leader uh the black leader and tousang louverture and all the restaurants and finally this is the key thing finally finally finally it buys haiti does get independence it negotiates an independence from restoration france that's france after the fall of napoleon and the restoration of the french monarchy in the 1820s but how does it get it this is the point at which you know the british are abolishing slavery the british are beginning to uh to eliminate whether they've abolished slavery within the british empire they're moving to abolish the whole slave trade and and to and and to liberate the slaves and so on um this exact moment how does haiti get its freedom from france this desperately poor country has to buy it it pays the french agrees to pay the french 150 million gold francs and it does not finally pay that debt off until the 1940s when i mentioned this point before it's actually held by citibank of new york that's what happens when you're ruled by the french rather than by the british so i think again we would need when we were talking about the whole business of um of empire to be aware that it's not as it were just the british it's not just the english there was an actual a vast european conquest vast european competition and that one might even you know ask who was it better to be conquered by because again you see i think this is something else that we just don't really want to talk about there was no choice there was no choice there was going to be a european conquest this is because you're developing simply a new and superior in the sense of its command and material i'm not saying necessarily morally superior though i would generally are speaking argue that it was i mean notions like freedom notions like security of property and notions like um freedom of speech and notions like freedom of religion all primarily develop in europe and particularly in england and that's not in general to be found in other civilizations but the important thing at this point is simply its power it's the power that comes from transformed finance transformed state structures transformed military and naval structures and then of course resulting from all of those transformed industrial and technological structures and at that point the balance of power lies overwhelmingly in the hands of the west and particularly in these islands and this tiny area that we call england which is why this tiny area called england effectively comes to rule the world and this again is something else we've just got to address there was no choice the british empire is it's the vehicle it's the it's the it's it's a kind of fluid that carries modernity through the world and you have no choice even countries again we need to spell this point out even countries that resist direct because their own powerful structures like japan and china that resist direct imperial conquest have themselves eventually if they are to survive and they have to keep their own their own societies and power going they have to adapt to the new world that is emerged with um rationalizing industrializing 18th century england they have no choice you get the meiji restoration in japan you get the much more well the consequences the meiji restoration pretty terrifying if you look at japan's behavior in the middle years of the 20th century or the same kind of process that you see with dramatic horror and in in in mao's china and so on and in other words they have to do the processes of transformation of industrialization themselves and they are very often at least as painful as if they've been subject to imperial conquest right we've we've done an awful lot of that um which i i hope is beginning to get over some of the big debates around that let's just quickly go back to uh the whole business of of slavery clearly slavery of course is monstrous but of course it is also has to be said commonplace it simply is commonplace and england becomes a major slaving party begins to become quite an important one uh from 1680s onwards but it becomes a major slaving slave of power and in 1714 uh with the with the treaties of utrecht when britain emerges from the war of the spanish succession the dominant european power and it takes over the asciento from spain um in other words it it becomes the principal contractor for the supplier of slaves to latin essentially to latin america which remember is where the great bulk of slaves go and in the 19th century and britain is for that period of time because it is the biggest and most powerful maritime bar it is the principal shipper of slaves that fact is not in doubt but what is to be taught about slavery prince charles seems to be talking about the idea of the transatlantic slave trade being taught simply in isolation this would be madness because of course the we've talked about intensity we could go back to the roman world we could go back to the egypt we could go back to greece whatever all of which were in fact virtually all societies before mechanization have quasi-slavery because they depend simply on human muscle and effort to do very unpleasant things which we then thought to replace by machines and so slavery in that sense is is is a common place and the the the the slavery of the 18th century of course and has that element of of white dominion domineering over black in the transatlantic slave trade but then of course this completely ignores the fact if we just focus on that transatlantic trade it completely ignores the fact that the actual dominant the power that is central to slave trading is the islamic world the people who act as intermediaries between the various black potentates who are capturing rival tribes and whatever and selling them into slavery are the arab slave traders in africa and the then there's then another branch of the slave trade which is the the barbary pirates the pirates of what is really morocco raiding the coasts of western europe including cornwall and capturing white people in enormous numbers as slaves this is the world which is represented by mozart's escape from the cervalio um is his his he of course softened and made into a rather pretty opera but that's that's the world which which which is there and and so it's the arab the arab center of the slave trade but what is most important of all of course there is the enormous overland slave trade across africa into the islamic world itself particularly into into istanbul into constantinople the heart of the ottoman empire and again charles wants the the the other people do too they want the transatlantic slave trade to be taught alongside the holocaust now the holocaust is of course um you know i think genuinely unique event i've already mentioned the the horrors of the norman conquest but they do not compare with the industrialized slaughter and the deliberate attempt at the complete eradication of the jewish people which in other words it's a deliberate machinery of murder and expert extirpation that's what the final solution becomes in nazi germany and the vast territories which nazi germany occupies across europe is a deliberate attempt at the extirpation of the people which is what genocide means the transatlantic slave trade was never that it was taking slaves who'd been creamed off from africa by other africans sold via arabs and exported in horrible conditions as we all know across the atlantic but they were valuable commodities you didn't wish to lose them and if you actually look at what happens to them and when they go to the bit that's most relevant the current debate the the the numbers who go to the um to the uh the 13 colonies it's only a few hundred thousand two or three hundred thousand and and what is very striking very tiny figures compared with the you know several million uh the the the the the the that are taken to to latin america and particularly to brazil which which one is by far the portugal which is by far the largest user of slaves and so on but if you look at the the this comparatively small number of slaves who are exported to the 13 colonies by the time the 13 colonies become independent their numbers have doubled in other words from the for the sake of argument let me say that i should have the figures in front of me exact figures i don't let's say 300 000 are exported there it's 600 000 by the time of uh by the time of american independence i think that's right but it's that order of magnitude and again when we're doing big questions ordering in orders of magnitude it makes very good sense so what of conclusion do we have to come from this well is there there no genocide in slavery well actually i've talked about this again before yes there is there is a huge genocide in slavery which is the slavery that goes to the ottoman empire because there the men because they will serve in in the savage they were the the the the the the places where where where whether the harim where the women are kept the men will be castrated and the operation has a men castrating a man the death rate is perhaps as high as 90 percent and well the women of course remain fertile and the the ottomans the turks sleep with them but the babies have their brain the mulatto the mixed-race babies have their brains dashed out at birth which is why there is no black population in the islamic world the clamor for restitution as there is in the west indies in america and in britain it is precisely because one branch of the slave trade wasn't was not a genocide that descendants remain to clamor for what understandably amounts to reparations or another way of putting it to vengeance but by taking the atlantic slave trade in isolation and setting it alongside the genocide the genuine genocide of the holocaust you are comparing incomparables if you actually look to the slave trade to the islamic world you would actually find something you could compare but we don't want to do that or those pushing this idea don't want to do it for the simple reason why not because it is brown on black and not white on black so it doesn't fit the race narrative it really is i'm afraid as simple and as crude as that but there's another very very important point to be made there is the repeated comparison with the holocaust and the notion that germany has come to terms with it in a way which britain didn't this seems to me with slavery this seems to me to be sublime and absolute nonsense why does germany abandon the final solution was there a mass movement in germany were there debates in the german reichstag and right side wasn't sitting were there and petitions by the various churches well we all know the pope was very busy cozying up to hitler none of those things happened the only reason that the death camps are exposed is because and stopped and this terrible machinery of destruction interrupted is because germany is subject to absolute and total defeat germany does not come to terms with its past the allies rub its nose in it that's what happens when those extraordinary scenes of you know the disgust of our british soldiers and officers when they discover what's going on in concentration camps that's why they treat the commandants of the concentration camps in the way they did and let's also be quite blunt germany does not pay serious reparations germany does everything it can to stop paying reparations the companies that had exploited slave labor sail on regardless with not a single dent in their fortunes this of course is because the cold war the importance of the struggle uh with the soviets very quickly overcomes any notion that there needed to be serious retribution in west germany it simply doesn't happen so the notion that germany has come to terms with its past is simply a fiction it is a complete fiction yes there's been subsequently much wailing and gnashing of teeth has it produced a particularly moral approach by germany to another people's struggle for liberty in the ukraine shouldn't we be asking that question and then compare that with slavery in britain at the height of britain's power when britain really did rule the world it tore itself this question of coming to terms with slavery late 18th early 19th century britain tore itself apart it was fighting napoleon it still found type time for agonized debates for campaigns for for huge movements of public protest for public debate for taking up vast amounts of time in the house of commons to debate this issue and then finally when you settle on abolition um and and and the and the freeing of the slaves granted you do not produce reparations but remember that's a whole world view which is not yet to happen but what you do do and compare it with what happens in haiti and in haiti you have a people that's got to try to buy itself out of slavery and by mortgaging itself to the french for another 150 years right what happens in the west indies and where wherever slaves remain and almost entirely in the west indies is the slave owners are bought out at huge cost by the state so britain does come to terms but now 100 now nearly 200 in fact now almost 200 years ago in other words what poor prince charles is going on saying oh it really is time we bothered to recognize this question we did 200 years ago we did not wait to be conquered we decided slavery was an abomination of our own accord and we did something about it and we not only did something about it within britain we not only bought the slaves out we also did it throughout the world and a huge part of the efforts of the royal navy from the 1830s onwards are devoted and many lives are lost to the suppression of the slave trade in particular stopping slaves being shipped by the portuguese to brazil so the idea that there is this sort of huge unadmitted aspect of britain's past is simply not true and the thing that makes it even more absurd and what is frankly unforgivable by both prince charles and by prince william is that in 1840 victorious consort the great and by far the most intelligent member of the royal family or probably forever prince albert gave a speech effectively repeating we're not repeating anticipating word for word charles's speech so if we then look at empire properly if we then look at empire comparatively if we then look at things like slavery properly contextualize comparing it with the actual reality of the holocaust of the german reaction to the whole non-reaction to the holocaust if we actually look at the fraught debate within britain and it is purely within britain there are traces of it in america but it is it essentially draws its strength from britain um the the you know there is a a moral crisis it's a moral debate it's a it's a genuine debate of of of of self-scrutiny so we've we've then got if we did the subject empire properly and we we we we would have all of that and we'd do something else wouldn't we um although the scale of the horrors of what mao did in china uh of of again of hitler and and and and stalin and russia and can we just gently point out that even america with much later to address the question of slavery america tore itself apart in the most terrible civil war primarily on this issue that seems to me to be a measure of seriousness has there been anything serious in russia for the horrors of stalin of course not has there been anything serious in china for the horrors of mao why do we have these absurd standards that we apply to ourselves and a mere shrugging of our shoulders with others we are in a global world we cannot as it were have one rule of self-flagellation for us and then other easy nodding and acceptance it it reminds me let me this all been terribly serious let me tell another funny story we used to have extraordinary times at lse um with a man called ralph darundorf when he was director and darrendorf was terribly prussian and whatever and he used to meet us in the director's dining room this is members of staff for dinners to debate the future school and and the food was hell and the only thing that you could possibly eat was the pudding but and dundorf ate very very quickly and the moment the pudding had gone on the table i mean dundorf would have wolfed it all down and you were just picking up your spoon when ladies and gentlemen they are not here simply for these sensual pleasures but to discuss the future of the school whereupon the food was removed now if an englishman or a squad or a welshman or a brit had actually even an american had done that the place would have been torn down we just shrugged our shoulders and said oh he's german now that's what we do that's what the left that's what the self-righteous left those picking holes in our racial policies do with the rest of the world they simply shrug their shoulders oh they're russian oh they're chinese i'm sorry this is a globalized world if we have globalized standards we should apply them otherwise we're simply destroying ourselves in a kind of moral myopia which leaves us doesn't it with the final stages of empire the struggle with america the uh war of independence and very interestingly the university of cambridge which you know has had a reputation for being hideously woke um has actually started to publish rather a lot of sense on the subject of empire um the there's a paper there's a there's an article which has just come out um in the uh in the alumni magazine of of of cambridge called cam on the work of those specializing in imperial history and and particularly anglo-american relations and so on and what they point out is and again it's very important that empire in the 18th century is essentially i mean if you think of the heart of the british empire in the 18th century it is the american colonies so the the struggle of empire there is of of of rule over white colonists so it's white on white uh there is the um there is the war of american independence and followed up by the war of 1812 but what very quickly becomes apparent and they argue this very convincingly is that both america and britain recognize that they are part of joint enterprise of exploitation of industrialization of world conquest that in a sense america from a very early stage america was the central part of the british empire it separates off but despite the initial hostility the the military struggle despite the renewed struggle of 1812 the two countries the two empires very quickly established excellent relations and you re-establish the extraordinarily powerful trading bond across the atlantic so for example somebody like jp morgan you know the the the founder of the house of morgan and morgan stanley and all the rest of it and in the was worth athenaeum which is the thing that he establishes um uh in in in now where is it connecticut the name has gone out of my head but there is actually a plot to him middle of the 19th century a plot to him in the middle of the floor and what does it say jp morgan merchant boston and london middle of the 19th century so that sense of an arab that that sense of cross-atlantic compact between the two in other words the empire is a global enterprise the empire is a global enterprise and it's something else it's very different from the roman and i think the the the the experience of american the the the experience of american colonization and the american rebellion leaves a profound impact on the british empire again i've discussed this before but you get a sense that the independence of america that struggle that fight must never happen again and that what you do instead is you have the durham report which envisages the self-government and the independence in peaceful cooperative terms of canada and then you extend that idea to australia to new zealand it was clearly on the cards for uh for india in different worlds it might have been for south africa and and indeed what indeed it was for south africa it was for south africa of course it was the it was the white south africa and uh the the that in in in the wake of the boer war uh that that gained it and so on um but the the there was this idea then of a series of legacy powers i've tried to put this in in another way in which the british empire it's the first empire that actually wills its own end that that sees the creation of self-governing states as its own and its own end its own to be desired end that i think is almost where we are now that the the legacy of the british empire um is the legacy of the american empire it's the legacy of the extraordinary cooperation uh between in things and again the the cambridge article makes this point remarkably it's the legacy of cooperation between what are called the five eyes that's the if again let's we have to put it in these terms the white the white x the white ex members of of the empire that's america australia canada new zealand britain all cooperate in terms of intelligence sharing something extraordinarily unusual and they do it of course because they fundamentally share that reformed pattern of values which first emerges in 18th century in late and late 17th 18th century england they do so of course colored by the different points which they break off from britain so america again the extraordinary struggles that are going on in america at the moment america breaks off from england in the 18th century america has an 18th century feel the violence of its law enforcement the frequency of weapons the savage of its punishments all this is as well as the extraordinary wealthy creativity the flexibility and whatever all of this is characteristic of george and england canada on the other hand separates itself in the late 19th century this is the great age of liberalism australia at the beginning of the 20th with the rise of the labor party each one of them is is a kind of different flavor of britain depending at that moment of independence and separation but together they are they are the fundamentals of the west they are the countries that believe in liberty equality and property those ideas first formulated and developed in late 17th century england uh by first given explicit formation by john locke in late 17th century england um and that of course that's the world that world of liberty equality that of sorry let's get let's get this right that that world of life liberty and and and property and which which is which is propagated which is which is spelled out uh in the post-war settlement of 1945 the hope for uh united nations charter they hoped for um a universal declaration on human rights and so on that world of a rule-based international order which we thought was fully vindicated by 19 by 1989 and of course you know led to the fantasies and the silliness of fukuyama because it ain't shared it's really only fully occupied by those descendants of the british empire so but it's a jolly mix story it's been a very very long one i don't think i've ever done talk as long as this and my voice is collapsing but i want to end i've been on the whole pretty positive i want to end on a bitter note i want i think it's important one does again i've been trying to show you know the fact that the ranges i said right at the beginning the ranges of issues that we have to debate i want to end on the great catastrophe of british government and british imperialism which is ireland i've never been able to bring myself to study ireland it is of course a catastrophe and i think a pretty unmitigated catastrophe but it was white and white hello and thank you for watching david starkey talks if as i very much hope you're enjoying them why not become more actively involved and join my members club as a member you'll be able to take part in the members only weekly question and answer session suggest topics for forthcoming videos and have priority booking for my forthcoming live events and while you're at it why not have a look at the store page on my website davidstarkey.com there you can purchase t-shirts and other merchandise by signed copies of my books and if you're feeling brave and a bit flush even arrange to take me out to lunch thank you once again for watching i look forward to hearing from you and to welcoming you to my members club [Music] you

Channel: David Starkey Talks

Views: 116,762

Keywords: David Starkey, History

Id: q6zy5KusLdk

Length: 100min 31sec (6031 seconds)

Published: Fri Jul 01 2022