Media Responsibility and Future Historical Research

Palestine India . They don't often get talked about in the same conversation, but the clear parallel is the legacy of British Empire . Not just that, but the legacy of corporations, the legacy of oligarchy . And so today to have a look back, to look at what we can learn from history that might be relevant to this present moment and also our future. I'm delighted to be joined by the wonderful historian and star presenter of a brilliant podcast, William Dar ren Pole . This episode is sponsored by Crowdfunder . Bring your bold idea to life at crowdfunder. co. uk forward slash bold. William, thank you so much for joining us on Vold politics. Honored to be here Zach, thank you. There's a whole lot I want to ask you about. I think the obvious place I want to start though actually is the education system. When I studied history at school, it was for the Tudors, it was the Romans, bit of Second World War. I don't remember talking about empire or colonization . Maybe schools have got better, but I imagine we're still not there. Why is this not taught in schools? And what is the benefit of when it is taught? It's a very good question. And I think you're right. I've made this point a lot and teachers correct me that it is possible to do at A level modules on the British Empire that they are available , but they're not core curriculum and very few people do them and very few teachers feel equipped to do them. It's still very much a minority subject for most people. There are schools, particularly in London with big minority catchments that make a point of doing it, but they are, you know, a tiny proportion of the whole , which means that most British people are entirely ignorant about what is, for better or worse, the most important thing Britain ever did. Britain through its empire completely changed the face of the world over about three or four hundred years. Not only did they change it within a sort of local European context, but they completely upended flows of global trade and ecosystems which had existed for millennia . The most obvious point being that for most of history , India and China dominated the world economy and that Europe was an add on. If you look at the classical world , India and China are producing about sort of seventy percent of the world's GDP . That's still the case in the eighteenth cent ury with India producing by some estimates as much as thirty five, forty percent of the world's GDP . So first thing say is I suppose that when we're looking at the world today with seeing China already now as the world's number two economy and India, I think currently number five, but about to be number three if current trends continue by the end of the decade. It's going to overtake Japan and Germany if they haven't overtaken Germany already . And what I think we're seeing is a reversion of the world trading system to what it was in the pre colonial period. It's taken eighty years since the British left India, whatever it is, seventy five, seventy six years . We're seeing the world in a sense recover from this brief blip when Europe smashed its way around the globe, moving populations around , moving natural resources around looting some places, bringing wealth to Europe . And if you look at the big country houses in this, you know , people go off and for the weekend to the country they go and see a national house, country house and they have cream tea somewhere. And if it's a big palladian house of the sort that you might see in a Jane Austen Sunday night drama with women in bonnets and chaps striding through ponds, Colin Furth appearing in sort of gorgeous outfits. If it's on the east coast of the country, quite probably it was built from East India Company money in other words, the looting of India. If it's on the west coast of the country, someone near Liverpool or Bristol, it's more likely to be slave money. The Caribbean . But those two sources of wealth brought capital into Britain and brought also in the case of the West Indies, cotton into Britain, which was then milled in the Industrial Revolution which then gave the seed capital for Britain to accelerate massively through the Industrial Revolution and provided the wealth which catapulted England from a kind of middle upper middle position in Europe and Scotland from the very bottom. Scotland moves is even more dramatically than England from the second bottom place in Europe to the second top in the world between the beginning of the eighteenth century and the end of the nineteenth century. So this country has transformed. It transforms Britain, but it also transforms the world. And what gives us great prosperity often detracts from the prosperity of the looted count ries or the countries which have been plundered for enslaved peoples or whatever it is. And it remains a strange quirk of our history system that we learn more about the wives of Henry VIII than we do about the entire looting of India or the Caribbean slave trade, which are these two crucial moments in British but also world history . And so the podcast I do, the Empire podcast with the wonderful Anita Anand , we've made a point of trying to tell the stories that both your education and other podcasts don't tell this enormous elephant in the room, which is the British Empire . And I think to answer your question, the reason we don't learn it is that when the British Empire ended in the nineteen forties, nineteen fifties through to in Africa, the nineteen seventies , it became something which people stop talking about. For example, the most popular picture at the Tate Gallery was remnants of an army, that picture of the doctor from the Afghanistan expedition limping in on his pony with the rescue force at Kandahar . Those sort of pictures which had been enormous crowd pullers in the mid nineteenth century, got shoved into attics or in the case of that particular picture, sent off to a regional regimental museum in Taunton in Somerset. Literally the most popular painting in the Tate got expelled out of southern . A whole bunch of paintings about Australia and New Zealand got given to Australia and New Zealand just taken off the walls and dispatched and the empire disappeared. By the time you get Monty Python in the nineteen seventies or late sixties , the empire is a joke. You get sort of Ronald of the Raj as a sort of comic figure or Kariab on Lap the Kaiber . And people would mock their uncle's grandfathers and great grandfathers who'd been there, you know, fighting in India or whatever it was . And I think it's really taken the rise of a generation of post colonial kids like my co host Anita, like Satnam Sangera to redirect attention at this massive elephant in the room. The most important thing Britain did, and we don't learn about it at school. Fascinating. And alongside all of this kind of rebringing up of history, I suppose there's an interesting story about how we both acknowledge our history, look to the future, and have nuanced conversations about this. And I think one of the examples I think of is the Colonston statue in Bristol, which famously was pulled down into the river. I think there's now a plaque there and that was kind of the mesh of recognizing where history had been, but also not wanting to raise it entirely. Where do you kind of stand in how we should be talking about history? I think it's a huge mistake to remove these statues completely. There are certain places where I don't think they should be. For example, outside our foreign office, we have a picture of Clive of India, who was this sort of psychopathic character who founded the British Empire in India, was wonderful for the British, but obviously catastrophic for India. So when visiting Indian ambassadors have to come and present their credentials at the foreign office, they have to pass this thing. It's clearly not the right place. It's not what we want Britain in the twenty first century to look like. But I think to remove them completely is missing an opportunity for educ ation. I think these things are important parts of our history and therefore exactly what you say. I think the Colston thing is exactly the model I would go for personally, which is to put up a statue and I went to Shrewsbury in Shropshire last year and they've done that with their clive statue. He's up where he always was in the town square, arguably the most important person from Shrewsbury in world history. He hasn't been removed and disappeared, but he's there now with a plaque that gives both sides the debate and allows people to make their own decisions. And Clive is a good example really of someone who, in my view, as someone that studied the history, with my particular politics, is a psychopath , started off as a petty criminal in Shrewsbury and took that violence to India, but was extremely and there's no question that he changed the fortunes of Britain. A whole channel of wealth which had previously been enriching India was diverted into British pockets . First of all, by conquering great chunks of what was then the richest country of the world, the equivalent today would be to conquer the Bay Area and take on all the territory that's now controlled by Google and Microso ft and Boeing and Hewlett Packard and that kind of thing. Bengal in the mid eighteenth century was probably the richest area in the world, producing amazing textiles. There were a million looms in Bengal producing all sorts of fancy stuff like silks and cut and curries, but also basic cotton, what they call peace goods, which is basic cotton, which was so cheap and high quality that the British made their fortunes by exporting it around the world and you get de industrialization as far away as Mexico because the cloth being produced in India was so good at such quality, at such low cost that even by the time that the British shipped it across halfway ac ross the world and taken their own cart, it was still cheaper and better than they could be made in Mexico . So you have this period where Britain is enormously enriching itself by exporting this stuff. And how relevant is the story of India and Empire to twenty twenty six Britain? Well, it's a long time ago now. Its legacy lies all around us in two different forms, partly in just the sheer wealth of this country where still des,pite everything , a very wealthy country in the world rankings . And it's there in just the lumps of enormous houses built by returned nabobs which litter the country, particularly somewhere like Scotland, where it was very poor before and then became suddenly very rich. But also most of the great country houses built in the eighteenth century have some link with either the slave trade or the East Indian Company. So it is important, but it's also important in a different way, two other reasons. One in a huge proportion of this country now is descended from immigrants that came with the implosion of empire in nineteen forty seven when we left India at the same time there was this massive immigration and then again in the nineteen seventies out of East Africa. Some of our most successful communities and some of our most extraordinary communities come from that addition to the national bloodline, if you like in first of all the fifties then through to the again massive immigration in the seventies. So it's important for modern history for that reason, but also because the unraveling of the British Empire left so many of the biggest political problems on the world stage today. The most probable nuclear fault lines at the moment in the world are either India, Pakistan, which result from the hurried British retreat from India in nineteen forty seven and the mess we made of partition and the astonishing enemy that now exists , for ninettyeen seven continues to this day, in the sense unresolved because of the way that we rush partition and the mess we left behind us . Then a year later, the other biggest issue in world politics is Israel, Palestinian. And I don't think many people realize this in Britain, but at the date of the Balfa Declaration, nineteen seventeen , Palestine's population ninety six percent Muslim and Christian Palestinians, of which only twelve percent were Christian , and the rest were all Muslim . After the Balfa Declaration , you get this horrific development of the Nazis coming to power in Germany.ready Al Zionism exists initially because in the eighteen eighties anti Jewish pogoms in Russia and Ukraine . In nineteen thirties , you get the road through Kristenak towards the Holocaust by the middle of the Second World War . And Jewish refugees have no other place to go than Palestine. But Palestine , the Palestinians do not want people who want ultimately to expel them. So the British create this horrible situation where two peoples who have never had a history of enemy and in fact have got on remarkably well to that situation. At that point, you have impossible situation where it seems that the only possibility is partition. And successive British reports, including the Peel report , suggest that the only way around this now is some sort of partition, but rather than see that through and rather than police it so that there isn't a catastrophe so that neither people get massacred , the British literally walk out, leaving ultimately the stronger side which by that stage is the better armed Israeli for ces. The Ishua becomes the young IDF . The Hagen and the Palmak have all been trained up. Leaders like Moshe Dayan have been trained by British special forces and they're better armed, they're medaled and eighty five percent of Palestinians end up expelled many of them on the sand dunes in Gaza where they remain today. We made a bit of a mess of partition of India, Pakistan. A million people died there . But at least both sides had homelands by the time that that was resolved by the nineteen fifties . Astonishingly, in Palestine, we just left, we handed it over to the United Nations, walked out, leading to the Palestinians being evicted . And to this day there is no Palestinian state. We have recognized the Palestinian state on paper , but we've never been further in reality from Pal aestinian state actually existing, the Palestinian authorities is almost completely powerless. The Palestinians of Gaza are being bombed every day and are on the edge possibly of mass eviction if Netanyahu's government gets its way. While we promot ed the idea of a partition of Israel and Palestine, in the end, Israel was born and not Palestine . Palestine remains unresolved and the Palestinians remain homeless and stateless and in many cases still refugees . And that obviously is the central wound in this horror story of the modern Middle East, which remains this massively separating wound which every few years revives and in slightly different forms creates new bloodshed and new hatred . And our failure , well, not only our failure to solve that problem, but our role in creating it with the Belford Declaration , where six percent of the population were under British rule put in a position that by nineteen forty eight they could expel eighty five percent of the population . Now that is something A we need to sort out and help as far as we can in our diminished position in the twenty first centur y to find justice for the Palestinians and find some way for these two peoples to cohabit, whether in one state or two states . But it's also most shockingly and coming back to your first question today , something which at no point appears on the British curriculum . So people confronted with Gaz a's terrible situation on the news have no idea how they got there. ninety nine percent of people in Britain simply have no idea why the Palestinians in Gaza are unhappy, why they ended up there, where they from, who they are. A lot of the British population is either Christian or Muslim or Jewish, and so from whichever angle will get part of the history of that region in their religious studies and so on. But to actually have it explained in a neutral and secular fashion the history of that country and how the Palestinians came to be dispossessed is something that most British people simply have no access to in their education. And so they get very confused reports only from our media, which as we all know, is different interests, and much of it is controlled by interests which are animal to the Palestinians and are not at all sympathetic to their position . And I think a lot of the problem with the British response to Palestine, the confus ion and the moral confusion of the British response to Palestine is the ignorance, the fact that no one, even in government knows this history as they should do , understand s who the Palestinians are, what they've been through . And one of the accidents of nineteen forty eight is that in the Nakba, most Palestinians ended up either in Gaza in refugee camps or in Lebanon . Very few came to Britain, so we have only a very small Palestinian community here . We only have a very small Jewish community but they're still larger than the Palestinian community And so there's been very little domestic political weight or momentum until recently with enlarged Muslim immigration, and many Muslims do feel the Palestin ian situation more strongly than the rest of us. It's only recently that there's been, in a sense, a domestic lobby , which is interested in the fate of these people whose dispossession is our fault . We engineered the conditions under which the Nakburg could take place. First of all, with the Balford Declaration, but subsequently also, for example, in the nineteen thirty six Arab revolt or Palestinian revolt when the Palestinians realized they were heading for expulsion and extinction, they rose up against the British in that and the year that followed a year of terrific bloods hed and some terrible casualties in all the different communities. You ended up with the Palestinians being crushed by violence of such terrible intensity , torture , terrible interrogation techniques involving early versions of waterboarding. They called it the watering can , heavy violence. A lot of the black and Tans who'd fought with extradial methods in Ireland. Ireland got independent. They were shipped off to Palestine . And led by figures like Duff, when you use the phrase duff someone up, it's named after him. And so a lot of the techniques used by the IDF and the Shinbet, the Israeli Internal Security are derived from British methods initially tried in the Black and Towns of Ireland , exported to Palestine, and then instantly subsequently exported places like Malaya and Mao Mao in Kenya, and then re exported to Northern Ireland and the techniques, anti insurgency techniques, developed extrudial, many of them involving torture and extreme methods of interrogation. There's a whole history of that related and Palestine is the example where it's left this legacy. So you get the Palestinians crushed , their villages bombed. Brama Harris who later runs the British Royal Air Force bombing of Germany learns his craft bombing Palestinian villages during the Arab Revolt of nineteen thirty six . And at the same time that's happening, other British forces are training up the Hagana and the Palmat figures like Moshi Dayan, who will then go on to lead the IDF. And there are figures such as Ord Wingate, who is a British officer, extraordinary sort of strange, eccentric character who carried an alarm clock around with him, wore garlic around his neck and he'd take a bite off because he believed it warded off mosquitoes , would address his troops stark naked combing his pubic hair with a toothbrush. This sort of str thisange evange lical weirdo invented the techniques of night raids into Arab villages and what he called the special night squads that the IDF still loses today on Palestinian villages in the West B ank . And Ord Wingate is sometimes known as the father of the IDF. He was a British soldier. So we trained up the forces, which eventually expelled the Palestinians while disarming the Palestinians , crushing their villages, and expelling and imprisoning their leaders. And for another bit of history that I'm particularly interested in as a Jewish man that I think often isn't told is that from my understanding, the Balfor declaration, a lot of it was about removing Jewish people from the United Kingdom who were not welcome due to anti Semitism and a place to paraphrase to almost put people. Yeah, so it's a complicated story. Belfa himself sounds as if yes, he definitely had many antipetic traits. He was very keen on eugenics for a start, which is never a good sign in a politician . But there are a whole load of different players . And you have very strong arguments within the Jewish community in Britain at the time you have two cousins , who are very important figures, Edmund Montague, who was in the cabinet , who believed that it would put Jewish people in this country in a very awkward position and fought strongly against the Buffdo. He was the only figure in the cabinet except for Kurzen , who argued against it. And then his first cousin , who he grew up with in the same house, Geiger Herber t Samuels, who was the first British High Commissioner in Palestine , and who was a very strong Zionist, who'd written a paper in nineteen sixty when Zionism was a fairly unknown creed in Britain that found its way onto the desk of Lloyd George and Balfur . And he was one of the fathers of the Balfur Declaration. So you have a complicated picture with as today , Jewish people very divided on the issue of Zionism. That's not a new thing, the situation you found yourself in where you and many Jewish people will go on marches against what's happening in Gaza , while others in the Jewish community will strongly support Israel, which they see as the Jewish homeland . That situation is not a new one. There's a wonderful book coming out next month my friend Ben Mosa, who's an extraordinary Pulitzer Prize winner in America, has written a book called Antisionism A Jewish History , which tells exactly these stories, and I think you'd find it very interesting because it very much highlights people that have had the same sort of dilemmas I presume you must have had growing up and discovering what's going on for sure. And now a quick break with our friends from Crowdfund. We're stronger when we're together , but the reality is there's been a deliberate shift to make us forget about the things that matter in life . Kindness , community , looking out for each other. Decades of austerity and growing regional inequality has left so many towns, districts and villages with community projects underfunded. Green space is neglected , vulnerable people slipping through the cracks. And the flip side of that is if we're only looking out for ourselves , it's only going to get worse. That's why Bolditics P haveol partnered with crowdfunder to inspire people across the country to do something amazing for their communities . Whether you want to create a local litter picking group , start a community garden or turn an unused building into something useful like a food bank. And whether you've got a big idea that needs a lot of money or you just need a little bit .owd Crfunder have raised over three hundred million pounds for charities, projects and communities . And there's a crowd of people out there waiting to turn your bold idea into reality. Hey, we'll even give you fifty quid towards your first project if you raise two hundred and fifty pounds from at least five donors. What could you do for your community? Turn your bold idea into a reality at crowdfunder dot co dot UK for Slashbold . Can I return as moments are to India and Pakistan? I don't know if that's gonna be easier to talk about. No, I mean that's incredible. The interest thinging is that they're strongly related . Obviously, they're different parts of the world with very different histories traditionally . The partition of India and Pakistan happens in nineteen forty seven. Yes. What should have been the partition of Israel and Palestine, which ended up just being Israel happened in nineteen forty eight. That's partly what I'm looking for here is the link of why these two things were roughly happening in similar years, obviously after the war. The short answer is after the war, Britain was bankrupt. It had borrowed huge amounts of money from America, which it couldn't rep ay. It was therefore in a very subservient position to America. And that finally plays out in the Suits nineteen fifty three, when America blows the whistle and Britain has to pull in because they threaten to collapse the pound, which America was in a position to do at that point. So bankrupt after the war, with all these troops that had been fighting for five years against the Japanese and the Nazis and people wanted to come home. They didn't have the stomach for fighting anti insurgency campaigns in India or in Palest . And the British basically cut and run in both cases. And in both cases , there is a rush to get troops home and a rush to just sort of wash our hand s of what had become a problem In both cases they successfully get the British troops out without many British casualties, which was a strong priority at the time . And so you can compare that, for example, to the French mess in Algeria , where almost a million people die, many of them French citizens . The actual British casualties , white British casualties of soldiers and administrators in India in nineteen forty seven is in something like the Tens or twenties. And that need been the case. You could have imagined a slightly different ending of Empire where the British had not been so quick to get out where they'd chosen like the French in Algeria to fight an insurgency rather than to surrender effectively and give over independence . And so we could have made a bigger mess of it like the French did , but even so small consolation. Consolation. One to one point five million , what would be Indians and Pakistanis, Hindus and Muslims died in the course of Patricia in some of the most terrible violence and rape and horrors, which is something my son has been studying rather than me, my son Sam Drumpul has written a book called Shattered Lands. So you get this British cutting and running in India, Pakistan , and Mount Batten, arguably because he wants to move on to his next job, accelerates partition rather than slowing it down. And he says that I can't remember the exact time. I think it wasn d'uet to take a year and he does it in nine months, but he brings it forward three months rather than extending it . As a result, all sorts of safety measures which could have been put in place to ensure the safety of people are not there and one point five one to one point five million people are killed, many more raped, many more traumatized and continuing enough between India and Pakistan being the result . But Palest in isia even worse than that because no safeguards are put in place to look after , well either community , but by this stage the Jewish community is well armed. There's arms coming in from Czechoslovakia in large numbers . The Palestinian leadership is broken and the Arab revolt has only just been defeated and the Palestinian society is shattered. But even though the British are not there making any attempt to keep the two communities apart, making any attempt to try and solve the issue. They hand it over to the United Nations and they leave amid a growing civil war. And the Nakba is well underway. The early part of Napo, which is places like Jerusalem, Lida, the Daiocene Massacre , Jaffa , Romle , these towns are emptied of their Palestinian population systematically v illage by village , town by town . And the British simply are not there to intervene or to protect the people whose welfare and they were given a mandate to look after these people. The Balfar Declaration states that nothing should be done which will undermine the status of the non Jewish communities. Of course, eighty five percent of the non Jewish communities end up as refugees after this . So it's a very dark period of our history. We bear a lot of the responsibility for the continuing violence today. The fact that the situation is as it is, is our legacy and we are not taught this at school so we do not understand it. And that ignorance goes right up to the top levels of government. And frequently, anyone who does know this history is often appalled when you see politicians on chat shows answering questions from presenters clearly totally ignorant of the history. And you can't just blame them. You know, they've never learned it at school. They can tell you all about Henry VIII's wives . They can tell you all about Florence Lightingale in the Crimea. They can probably tell you about Queen Victoria . And they can certainly tell you about the Nazis, but they don't know this stuff . And we need to know it. We just badly need to know it. I mean, this is the reason why we started this podcast, Empire podcast, it's you know, a bigger problem than that. We can't educate the nation. The education curriculum is there for that purpose. And to listeners who kind of maybe are hearing some of this history for the first time themselves, when it comes to India and Pakistan, I mean, it's such a broad question in terms of why we were there in the first place and why we were trying to make these deals and botched it so badly. What would kind of be the potted history ? It's an extraordinary history, and it's one that I spent most of the last twenty five years writing about . And I'm now moving on to writing the history of the Palestinians. And looking back at that Indian history, it only gets more extraordinary in retrospect. It's such a strange story. The story is that India was not conquered by the British government . It was conquered by one British company occupying one office block in the city of London in Ledenhall Street , EC one. It's still there. It's where the Lloyd's building is today. If you excavate underneath the Lloyd's building, there will be the foundations of these India Company offices plural because it starts off just as something looking like a kind of tudor half timbered pub in the sixteen hundred . By seventeen fifty, when the British were beginning to import their new military technology to India and beginning to conquer chunks of India , it's a small Georgian house six windows wide, six windows . Gosh . And then by the very end by the mid nineteenth century it's become something that looks a bit like Buckingham Palace and spread down the street . But the East India Company is this extraordinary story and the British give a charter, Queen Elizabeth specifically gives a charter on the last day of fifteen ninety nine, the same year that Shakespeare's writing Macbeth and Julius Caesar, those both written the year that East Indian Company has its first meeting sixteen hundred and fifteen ninety nine that period . And this British corporation with one office in London goes out and starts a trading venture which in due course will conquer the richest country in the world. And for that to be possible , the Mogul Empire has to implode. And in seventeen thirty nine, there's an Persian who comes into Delhi, loots, takes everything including the Kohen Diamond called Nadisha. And by destroying the center of Mogul Power and looting , eight hundred and ninety wagons of gold leave Delhi at the end of this. And there's no money left to pay the Mogal Droops or the Moghal governors or the whole thing explodes. It's like taking a mirror and throwing it out of the top floor of a window. It shatters into a thousand pieces of glass . And where previously India was one unitary state, not just India, but modern India, modern Pakistan, Bangladesh, half of Afghanistan, the slither of Iran was one enormous politici called the Mogul Empire . Very brutal, but very administratively well run, extremely rich, the richest country in the world. Forty percent of world GDP, extraordinarily, rich, powerful country. That almost overnight dissolves into hundreds of c ity states, so Jaipur, Jabpur, hydrobat, Tangul, all these little places. When you go on holiday to India, this is what you end up as a tourist looking at. You go to Jaipur and you see the Amir Palace or you go to Job and you see Meranga. But these become little city states and this allows these British and French trading companies two rival forces to gradually conquer more and more of India than the British defeat the French and conquer the rest of it them selves . So that by seventeen ninety nine you have a situation where there are one hundred thousand troops in the British army before they rearmed to fight Napoleon. seventeen ninety nine is just before the big battles fifteen years before Waterloo, six years before Travalga. seventeen ninety nine there are a hundred thousand troops in the British Army. The East India Company has two hundred thousand troops in India. A company still run in one office , still only six windows wide , with an annual general meeting, a share price, all the things that a corporation has today . And it's the greatest example in world history of how a corporation can be more powerful than the nation state . And in the twenty five years I've been writing about the East India Company, I wrote four books called Com thepany Quart , The Anarchy , White Moghuls, Return of a King, The Last Moghul. In those twenty five years while I was writing that, we've seen the rise of all these enormous tech bros with their companies, whether it's Meta or Apple take your pick of X and Elon Musk . And at its peak, the East India Company not only is conquered India , it's discovered you can grow opium in India to pay for the growing British taste for tea . So they sell they become the largest narco operator operating out of India selling Indian drugs to the Chinese . They buy tea which they sell in India, in Europe in Britain and in America. It's East India Company tea that's dumped into Boston Harbour at the Boston Tea Party . And you have one British corporation like an enormous octopus with its tentacles, the first multinational corporation . And it is the largest employer in Britain , all people making tar and sails and ships and unloading all these ships which are turning up in rapid succession day after day loaded with opium and cotton and tea and spices and all the rest of it . And as well as being powerful enough to take down each individual Indian state, remember they've fragmented so you can take down first Jaipur, then Jaipur, then Bengal, then Tipu, then Marath as, then the Sikhs. It's not only powerful enough to do that, but it's powerful enough by the seventeen eighties to dominate our parliament . So the Easter Company in the early sixteen hundreds tries to bribe MPs with cash to extend its monopoly and it gets caught. And one of the very first governors of the East India Company ends up in the tower of London . So it's the East India Company which in a sense invents corporate lobbying and they realize that there are subtler ways of doing it and you offer campaign donations . It's a very familiar story absolutely . And they become so successful at this that by the seventeen eighties , I can't remember the exact figures. It's in my book, The Anarchy, but something like twenty percent of British MP's ex clusive. They've just had the cash to buy rotten burrows, to buy constituencies. But something like seventy five percent of British MP's have East India Company shares . So East India Company is in a position to completely not only militarily take out any of its rivals in India, but also corrupt the body politic at home in Britain . And arguably the biggest legacy of the East Indian Company and this is why we should study it, not just because of the mess it creates in India, but because it corrupts our politics and the system whereby large corporate entities can give large donations to political parties and an unspoken pro quo that is never published of what the what you get in return for your large political donation. That is the legacy of the East Indica. They're not doing it out of the good of their heart. No one gives to a political party expecting nothing in return. And yet it's never stated. It's always left transparent and suddenly you find that the person who gave the offering is at the House of Lords, or his company suddenly benefits from some quirk of British policy. Basically , you find that the interests of the corporation mysteriously become the foreign policy of the nation. One thing I've really, I don't know and really we should be centering the people who are being invaded in this, but how were British people feeling about this at the time? What was public opinion? This is really interesting question. This was the thing that surprised me most, I have to say, in my research, is that there is a huge resistance to the East India Company. We kind of I think people, if they think about it at all, assume that times were different. It was fine to guide and create an empire in the eighteenth century, and then everyone did that and it was okay . What you find is large numbers of British ordinary British people booing Clive in the street. There is a play put on the at Haymarket where Clive is satirized as Lord Vulture , presiding over an enormous Indian famine, and all the main characters in this indic ation have these nicknames which make them sound like you know vampires preying on the blood of Indians . And people begin to boo and hes these people in the streets so much so that Clive eventually commits suicide. He takes his own life in Berkeley Square . And you find that there's a huge world of liberal opinion who write very passionately against slavery. Ultimately, that's why slavery ends , but also against the looting of other countries and the responsibility the sort of British buccaneers who going out penniless and coming back thirty years later with enormous fortunes, buying up a beautiful country house, buying up a borough and a seat in parliament and lauding it like oligarchs today over our body politic. So the long history of the way that democracy can be bought by corporations and by individual oligarchs and that very much has its roots in the fortunes made in the East India Company and its rivals. And how did your average British person know what was going on because presumably the press or journalists at the time were not necessarily reporting or maybe they weren't. There's no such thing as foreign correspondents at this point. You have one or two celebrities, a guy called William Howard Russell who goes and reports the Crimean War for the times. He's the first war correspondent. He then goes to the what we in this country still call the Indian Mutiny, eighteen fifty seven, which is the Indians called the First War of Independence, the largest anti colonial revolt in history . And a lot of what you learn actually happens from whistleowersb.l So the only people that go to can India, any people who can issue passports for India at this point are the East India Company . So they're not going to allow you know kind of snoopy if they even if they existed snoopy correspondents in to see the Bengal famine of seventeen forty or whatever it is they want to cover up . And it's only when you get whistle blowers within the company writing letters. So anonymous letters in seventeen forty are written to the Gentleman's magazine, to Blackwood's magazine, to the spectator . They describe a terrible moment in seventeen forty when two successive monsoons fail. Now this happens in India. Monsoons are usually the power that provides the water for the agriculture of India. For two, three months the skies darken and water pours down in enormous quantities. But some years they fail and some years they fail two years in succession. And in those situations , Indian states know what to do. They put money aside for the lean years, like in the biblical story of Joseph advising the Pharaoh to put aside grain for lean years . And they then create public works so that starving people can earn a crust of money to buy . So some of the largest architectural wonders that you see in India such as the Great Imambara and Luckna are built as famine relief projects whereby a hundred thousand people are employed to build something that isn't really necessary, but it keeps them alive . And they're paid every day there's a soup kitchen attached to this and then a day they can go and get their five rupees, whatever it is, and some soup. And they don't die . But the East Indy Company , which is new to this game and doesn't know the ropes but also doesn't feel any particular responsibility for the people , allows one million people to die in Bengal in seventeen forty . And the first year they send out the troops to gather the taxi nonetheless and there's these descriptions of cannibalism and they hang in addition to all the rotting corps es all over Bengal, they hang people who won't pay their taxes. So people have to sell their children, sell their land, sell their farmings, but sell their grains. So the following year is nothing . And that year, they can't pay anything even if they threaten to hang them. And that year, the East India Company fails because there's no money coming . Their own greed, they've killed the goose that laid the golden egg . And rather like Lehman Brothers being too big to fail. The cindy company really is too big to fail and at that point the British government steps in and you get something called the Regulating Act and basically the British State buys a fifty percent share in the East Indian Company and bails it out . And that's the point when what had been a free market company, the East India Company becomes for the first stage under the control of the state. By eighteen fifty eight, E theaster companies abolished and the British move in as a government thing. So you have these two very different phases of control of India first as a company where it's just controlled by a corporation which is for profit. I mean it's a nightmare scenario. It's like remember the movie Avatar where the mining corporation moves to another planet? It's like that in real life, where an entire country of many millions of people are controlled by a for profit corporation that exists only to enrich its shareholders . And there is massive fatalities , but the result is that the company fails , and it becomes a British responsibility. And when the government stepped in, was this a moment again with the British public where people felt like this could be an intervention point where actually things could be for the better? Obviously we know that didn't necessarily work out, but it's hard to imagine yourself living in that time but you'd go, oh actually this is a time maybe when the government can sort out this mess . I don't think it does. You get gleeful comments people like Horace Walpole at the fact that these dig companies failed. I don't think I haven't seen any idealistic writings. I'd love to say yes, everyone we can get better. It's utopian, it's wonderful. We can take over and mend it. What you do get is hostility to the Nabobs that people dislike oligarchs then as much as they dislike them now. That's pretty interesting. And then forwarding, we've obviously spoken about Israel and Palestine, but I just wanted to ask about Lebanon as well because obviously that's very relevant speaking in twenty twenty six. What is there to learn from here in terms of looking at the future as well? Well, Lebanon is a complicated story of itself. It's a very weak state. It was always a state built with very different minority communities. It's where the minority Shia community fled away from the Sun. It's where the Christian Mar inites fled away from persecution, where the Druze ended up. So you've got these very different communities and result has been a state that historically has been too weak to defend itself or really cohere . And the situation at the moment you wouldn't know it with the BBC is that one fifth of Lebanese are now expelled from their homes. I mean, I'm not a fan of Hezbollah. Hezbollah are part of the problem, but they emer ged in the violence of the nineteen eighteen invasion of ninety two invasion of Lebanon by Israel. They didn't exist before then, and they took power at that point . There has to be some way of enforcing peace, but it can't be by giving Israel a fifth of the country, which is what's happening at the moment in which Trump seems to be okay with as we saw Mick Huckabery saying that he was fined for a greater Israel controlling great chunks of Syria and Lebanon and indeed Egypt in the maps you can see of greater Israel . And Trump didn't make him apologize or knock him into place or pull him from the job . So there seems to be quiet American support of this greater Israel idea whereby it's fine for Israel to ab justsorb a chunk of Syria, a chunk of a chunk of Lebanon . And one fifth of the population is homeless at this moment and being bombed and all those villages in South Lebanon are being destroyed. Hezbollah are definitely part of the problem, but the solution is not genocide again, destruction of hospitals, bombing of ambulances and all the other violence we've seen. Responsible leadership needs to be given to restrain Netanyahu to disarm Hezbollah. I think you need some sort of intervention by the United Nations and our own government in America in an ideal world to disarm Hezbollah, to return Israel to its borders , to force Israel to name its borders, which at the moment it hasn't done , not to absorb great chunks of Syria, which it's already doing, and to enforce a peace plan that's going to provide security and peace for all peoples in the region . It's the only possible solution until justice comes to that region, you're not going to get peace. It's an obvious and basic fact. A running theme of our conversation has been people's lack of knowledge, sometimes not their own fault. They're simply not hing not given the tools to understand the world that lies around them. I said, we can know every detail about Berlin, but we just don't know how the knackburn took place, why the Palestinians were unhappy or why Lebanon is being invaded. And when the media aren't giving us this history , how much do you see being a historian as a kind of activist moment? Because people have different competing versions of history , right? Well, it's really, really interesting. If you think of the tele in this country or the radio in the last three years , until this year, have you seen a major series on h theistory of Israel Palestine. BBC put one on funny enough last autumn after we at the Empire podcast did a twelve part history of Gaza. Now at that point when we put that out last year, twelve hours on the history of this problem, the kind of nuanced in depth study that should be on every public broadcaster. It should be in PBS, it should be on BBC, it should be in ABC in Australia. Because these are complicated problems that are not taught in school and people need to understand it. They need to understand the different views, put on people from all the different sides, put on the professors from the different traditions and the different schools of history. Let's hear it. We found that when we put it on the Empire podcast, our Gaza series last summer , we had an unbelievable response because people want to know the stuff and they're not getting it from the BBC, they're not getting it from PBS, not getting it from ABC . And we were getting in a day or two downloads of a third of a million people to listen to these things. One sense you can regard it obviously as an opportunity. But it shouldn't, that opportunity should not exist. It should not be something is as wanted and not provided. I mean, I'm horrified by the BBC's coverage of the Middle East . It's been outrageously inadequate from every point of view that I mean, most obviously the pulling of the do cumentary on the Gaza doctors which eventually went out on channel four and won every BAFTA , but also just the day to day way in which the background to the subject has not been made clear . The bias often in the reporting, particularly on the BBC website, which I think is particularly culpable. You often find much better coverage if you listen to the world service or bits of other parts like for a correspondent. BBC is a vast organization with different , but the website is particularly culpable . And luckily, as we know, people now get a lot of their news from other sources. So many of us wake up every morning on Instagram with these horrific pictures coming out of Gaza, which we never see on the BBC , which never make it into the mainstream media. And people are more and more distrustful of the mainstream media because I mean you know this better than anyone. You've had a campaign against you very clearly aimed at your chances during the last local elections . And I think you would be the first to agree that the mainstream media is not even handed or fair in these matters . But luckily, you know, more and more people are getting their news from other sources. Many other sources are available for the Middle East, I'd recommend anyone to try Middle East and Eye or Al Jazeera rather than the BBC . Middle East and Eye is a particularly good source. I find it very reliable . But there's also podcasts if you want to learn history, and obviously I'm going to promote my own podcast, the Empire podcast, which is twelve hours of the history of Gaza from the time of the Philistines right through to nineteen forty eight the Napa and then we did another series on the Arab Israeli wars. If you want to know about Suez, if you want to know about the nineteen sixty seven Wars, if you want to know about the nineteen seventy three Wars, if you want to know about the nineteen eighty two invasion of Lebanon, all these things you need to understand to understand the complete mass there today . We've got our offering for you, but there's obviously many other places you can go to. Well, I want to finish with something I said to you before we started recording actually, which was just to thank you for everything you did to thank you your commitment to the truth and commitment to the justice. As a politician, I'm pulled into today's discussions whether I want to or not because that's part of you. And you've been very brave . And I have to say I'm a big fan and more power to you. And I hope that you are given a fairer crack of the whip. Thanks Iron. Well, you've turned my compliment around because what I wanted to say was you don't have to enter that space and you've actually chosen to regularly in all of your work to go into areas where there are people who want to tell other alternative versions of history. I think you're comm itment to the truth and to justice is so important. I think there is a feeling that it's a dangerous thing for many people to talk about Palestine . We've seen this week commentators banned from entry to this country . The same is obviously happening a lot in America . People who comment on or take the Palestinian position on social media are not getting visas and so on. I'm luckily in a position where A I have my own podcast so I can put I can , which is whose boss is Gary Linaka, who's not known for cow towing to anyone. And I haven't got an academic job which can be pulled from me. I'm in a very privileged position of being able to say what I like. Plus I spent many years of my life in that region in the Middle East but also in India. And I feel strongly that these are things that people need to know and they've never been taught. There is a huge appetite to learn this. I do feel it is kind of duty . My next book will be a history of the people of Palestine. Who are these people that Goldemeer says does not exist ? What is the history of the Palestinian people? And I'm sure that that will get me in just as much trouble as you've got Zach . Well, I already want to read it. So I imagine it will do very well. Just finally, you mentioned a couple of times you have a podcast on this show. That's funny. You should mention that Zach. Yes, indeed. And if people want to find out more about you and your work, where's the best place for them to go? There's a whole variety of books mainly published by Bloomsbury, the Company Quartet, if you want to know more about the India Company, the Anarchy, particularly I'd point people towards on that subject. I have a website and the podcast. The Empire podcast as we would say. Okay . And I don't make my guest compete against each other, but if there was a competition for the amount of dense information in a short period of time, I think you're winning this podcast because that was an amazing amount of information . Thank you very much. Thank you very much. This episode was brought to you by Crowdfunder. What's your bold idea? Start at crowdfunder. com uk forward slash boolt