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EMPIRE- did you know this history?

211 replies

Needacupofteaandcrackers · 15/11/2025 07:50

Just watched Empire on BBC….. I didn’t realise the timelines of how long it was tolerated. I’ve been to a few trust sites and only now I’m made to connections on wealth. 🥹

OP posts:
ADHDHDHDHD · 15/11/2025 22:59

Gasp0deTheW0nderD0g · 15/11/2025 08:21

A good many businesses still are exploiting workers by not paying them a living wage and not providing them with safe working conditions. There's plenty of modern slavery about in the UK and sweatshops and plantations in poorer countries overseas where many UK companies have suppliers. Too many consumers either can't afford to buy ethically or can't be bothered to check.

Isn’t that what working tax credits is? People not earning a living wage, so government gives them money to prop them up. Basically us all subsidising cheapskate companies not paying staff enough and yet making millions of £ profit.

Hameth · 15/11/2025 23:12

NotDavidTennant · 15/11/2025 15:14

It came from the colonies. I acknowledged that they were a source of raw materials.

Most of the economic value is not in the raw materials but in turning them into finished products. That's why the countries that get rich are those like China that make things rather than those that simply export raw materials.

The UK got rich by being the first country to work out how to make things at industrial scale. Colonialism contributed to our wealth but it wasn't the main factor.

We took cheap raw materials and sold our goods in Imperial markets, destroying indigenous makers. Indian cotton makers early 19th century was best in the world. The Raj destroyed that to make India buy British. Not innovation, exploitation. Loads of other examples.

AmadeustheAlpaca · 15/11/2025 23:13

ViragoHandshake · 15/11/2025 22:52

i don’t think you are familiar with academia— who exactly do you think is going to check whether a history book is factually correct, other than peers who have pertinent expertise in the same period/field and familiarity with the sources and archives? Or do you imagine an editorial assistant just googles dates?

Alice Roberts, after her undergraduate degree in medicine, did a doctorate in paleopathology, and went on to do research in osteoarchaeology and physical anthropology. Her books straddle anatomy, anthropology and archaeology, the fields in which she has expertise.

So you're a well read person and 'familiar with academia" but you criticise an author and his books without having read them.
Very professional.
By the ways, thanks to the posters who suggested some books, must have a look at them. I'll read them before I comment on them.

ViragoHandshake · 15/11/2025 23:17

AmadeustheAlpaca · 15/11/2025 23:13

So you're a well read person and 'familiar with academia" but you criticise an author and his books without having read them.
Very professional.
By the ways, thanks to the posters who suggested some books, must have a look at them. I'll read them before I comment on them.

I’d stop now before you embarrass yourself further.

AmadeustheAlpaca · 15/11/2025 23:40

ViragoHandshake · 15/11/2025 23:17

I’d stop now before you embarrass yourself further.

I think you are the one who should be embarrassed. It's not very bright to slag off a book and its writer when you've not read it, considering your supposed academic career.
Actually your posts read more and more as if they are AI generated and not written by a person. I mainly came on to this thread to recommend a book and can't be bothered replying to computer generated posts.

MeouwKing · 15/11/2025 23:52

All empires have relied on slavery, so not shocked

mathanxiety · 16/11/2025 01:30

MidnightPatrol · 15/11/2025 08:28

It was a different time.

I think yes there were regrettable things that happened… but, you can’t judge the Victorian era by the standards of today.

And - it wasn’t all bad. Look at the commonwealth, many countries actually like the links to the UK.

And it wasn’t just us - all the Europeans were at it…!

Massive eyeroll...

patooties · 16/11/2025 01:36

I’m 52 - was taught nothing about it. I live in Manchester- we were the beneficiaries of this- and the weavers in Mcr went on strike with solidarity of the slaves.
We have lincoln square - based on that solidarity . With a lovely letter from him to the people is Manchester.
i only know this because i did a guided walk.
Same with Peterloo.

mathanxiety · 16/11/2025 01:40

Doggielovecharlotte · 15/11/2025 22:11

Yes what are they called the estates king James 1st took and gave to his own cronies

there’s a word for them…

i agree - people wonder why people in Ireland are prepared to spend their whole lives getting justice

Plantations.

There were several, and they involved settlers in their thousands, not just cronies of the monarchs of the plantation period (Tudor and Stuart). The settlers and their descendants formed militias to keep the natives in order.

All the methods later used farther afield to conquer and exploit various lands were first practiced in Ireland.

Much later, many of the methods used by the Irish to overthrow British rule were copied by other colonised people.

cinquanta · 16/11/2025 01:47

Papyrophile · 15/11/2025 20:49

The Commonwealth is mostly composed of former colonies, but not exclusively. Mozambique applied to join, was accepted, and is the only country that was not part of the British Empire.

Have you forgotten about Rwanda?

Are there others?

Pinkfluffypencilcase · 16/11/2025 03:49

ViragoHandshake · 15/11/2025 11:58

Yes. For me the single most interesting thing about the Barbados section of the first episode of Empire was the difference between two documents dated 14 years apart from a particular sugar estate. The first one listed the full names and rights and how much time they had left to serve of European indentured workers. The one from 14 years later had no indentured workers, but a whole new category of enslaved Africans whose names weren’t given, just the Anglo nicknames they’d been given since being enslaved, who had no rights, because they were racialised estate property, not employees, and who had no amount of time left to serve, because their slavery had no endpoint.

It’s a disturbingly quick shift to the wholesale dehumanisation of an entire category of people to fuel a growing appetite for sugar. There’s some astonishing stat like Britain consuming six times as much sugar in 1770 as it had in 1720, almost all from the Caribbean colonies.

Im from Liverpool and we learnt about the slave trade. Its history is in our street names. Been to the museum.

However I learnt a lot from this programme. David O brought the horror to life. That slaves had zero rights. That the blueprint for slavery was made by Spain.
That India was the largest economy in the world. Until the East India company got involved. That they let people starve.

So yes I was aware of slavery and the empire and the wealth creation and how Britain benefited but I found out things I wasnt aware of too.

Gasp0deTheW0nderD0g · 16/11/2025 06:36

ADHDHDHDHD · 15/11/2025 22:59

Isn’t that what working tax credits is? People not earning a living wage, so government gives them money to prop them up. Basically us all subsidising cheapskate companies not paying staff enough and yet making millions of £ profit.

I agree .

ADHDHDHDHD · 16/11/2025 08:31

Well I grew up in NI with a British education and had never heard of the plantation of Ulster. In the 80s I don’t think there even was a history curriculum for primary school! The education now is far superior to what I had. Year 8 in London does do the reformation.

i did a Wikipedia deep dive one day about Irish history. Blimey that was an education. England has a 1000 year history in Ireland. Brutal. No wonder why so many Irish people still have such a dislike for the English. It runs very deep.

and I think it is English not British as Britain became a thing during that time.

I am now wondering with all the anti immigrant protests if the notion of British is disappearing? Most English people i know consider themselves English not British.

Lastknownaddress · 16/11/2025 08:54

@Needacupofteaandcrackers I think this thread has gone a bit off topic, but I started watching last night based on your original post.

As someone who has roots in a former colony and ancestors who were indentured labourers, no I did not know some of the things covered in Ep1. We did not learn it at my UK school.

My family hails from Calcutta, and the island they landed on has - up until about 20 years ago - kept very quiet about its roots and history. For most of my life no one discussed it. Shame, poverty and a parent wanting to assimilate into UK culture made it an unspoken truth. It still plays out in my parent's homeland too. Deep divisions exist between communities who were slaves, vs indentured labourers. There are different cultural groups eyed with suspiscion. I found Ep1 fascinating, particularly the Indian history (I knew about EIC but not about the effective acquisition of NE India).

Whatever the Empire, wherever it came from it was essentially based on greed.

frizzynfrazzled · 16/11/2025 09:22

I enjoyed the series. It was very familiar as it was written in part by Karl Hack of the OU. He was in charge of the history module ‘Empire 1492-1975’ that I did for my third year (my favourite module of my BA). The module focussed across several empires, not just Britain, but you could see several topic areas from the module inside the series.

If people are genuinely interested I’m sure you can pick up the course books second hand online (I have a feeling they revised/rejigged the module- I did it in 2020, so the books would be out of date and therefore cheap). The module code was A326.

i went onto do my MA and my research project, focussing on a particular family that lived on the Newton estate in Barbados- the estate with the slave burial ground in the series.

I thought it was a great introduction to the topic for your average lay person, and and engaging watch even if you knew the subject well.

Hollyhobbi · 16/11/2025 09:32

The house in the Estate where I live in Dublin City is built on the site of a lodge house (gate house) of a huge estate house and grounds which was originally owned by an English nobleman! Empire is very real and very recent and not that far in the dim and distant past at all! There is also a street in the capital named after this fella which means our food deliveries sometimes go astray.

sashh · 16/11/2025 11:44

Gasp0deTheW0nderD0g · 15/11/2025 08:16

If you are under 40, you may well have studied this at school. I'm in my mid 60s and we didn't.

I'm 59 and we did it at school too.

DO you know about the concentration camps in South Africa OP?

Daytimetellyqueen · 16/11/2025 11:49

BlueEyedBogWitch · 15/11/2025 08:38

I think the danger is to divide the issue into ‘goodies’ and ‘baddies’.

Plenty of Africans got rich as a result of the slave trade, as well as Europeans.
A white Englishman campaigned to end it.
And there were millions of people caught up in it, who suffered terribly.

At the end of the day it was about abuse of power and inequality, which hasn’t gone anywhere.

I’d rather deal with the manifestations of that which are still everywhere today, than feel better about myself because someone put a red sticker on a painting in an art gallery to show it used to belong to a slave owner.

Edited

This!

Gasp0deTheW0nderD0g · 16/11/2025 13:06

In the days before the National Curriculum and Ofsted, there must have been huge variation in what was taught. Somebody upthread said she never studied History at all, which I find astonishing. I thought everybody educated in UK schools would have had some history lessons at some point, although only a minority would have gone on to study History to O level/CSE/GCSE. At my school both History and Geography were compulsory O levels, which I think was pretty unusual.

As far as I can remember, in what you'd now call years 7-10 we cantered through Roman Britain, raced through the Anglo-Saxons and Vikings, dwelt a bit longer on the Norman Conquest and the centuries that followed, lingered on the Tudors and Stuarts, and then leapfrogged over the political and military history of the early Georgian era entirely. We went straight on to the Agricultural and Industrial Revolutions, with a brief reference to the American War of Independence. For O level we finally studied something other than British history - World History from 1870 to the present was the syllabus. We covered British political history in the late 19th century including the battle for trade unionism, wider suffrage and the Suffragettes, and the divisions over Irish independence/self-determination; the Balkan conflicts within the Austro-Hungarian Empire and the causes of World War I; the Russian Revolution; possibly a bit about the Boer Wars (it was nearly 50 years ago - the details are a bit hazy now).

Slavery would have been mentioned in passing, I'm sure, but the triangular trade was not a topic we spent any time on at all. I didn't hear that term till several decades later. There was probably more emphasis on Wilberforce and the abolition of slavery across the Empire, i.e. the bits that showed the UK up in a better light. At that age I think I was more aware of slavery as an issue in US politics than in the UK. We watched the TV mini-series Roots, which I found horrifying.

Meadowfinch · 16/11/2025 13:11

Gasp0deTheW0nderD0g · 15/11/2025 08:16

If you are under 40, you may well have studied this at school. I'm in my mid 60s and we didn't.

I'm 62 and we did the slave trade from the Romans onwards, the history of the trade routes, abolition of slavery, in Europe and in the US.

I imagine different schools had different syllabi until the national curriculum was brought in.

PropertyTaxExpert · 16/11/2025 13:56

@Gasp0deTheW0nderD0g , that was me. I had one year of History, but it only covered the country's history (country within the UK, not England) and the Tudors. Although, strictly speaking, I did study it, reality was 2 lessons a week over one year in a class the teacher didn't have much control over.
History GCE wasn't possible because of timetable clashes. The year of it hadn't sold it to me.

I remember Roots being on tv but I think I was too young to watch it. I read the book decades later, but by then people were 'Never heard of it'.

Gasp0deTheW0nderD0g · 16/11/2025 14:01

That's a shame. I loved History at school. It's a lingering regret that I didn't study it beyond O level.

PropertyTaxExpert · 16/11/2025 15:27

I didn't dislike it. I only remember that the teacher had a phrase that was meant to get the class's attention, so I would count the number of times per lesson, and I remember who I sat next to (she didn't turn up to school all that often) and a few of the lads. The classroom was quite a sunny one, which always seemed to improve the lessons.

All my friends carried on to GCSE, but I did French instead, which I'm glad I did but I feel a bit like I missed out. I read a lot and try to read widely. I read Empire by Jeremy Paxman by chance - having seen Watching the English by Kate Fox praised on here, I read it, and got annoyed by the many reference to JP, so I got The English Book and Empire.
I've not got round to reading The English yet as I've been reading about fairly recent UK politics.

(I am one of those who probably should have done History A-level. I think the next area I should read about is the first half on the 20th century. )

Gasp0deTheW0nderD0g · 16/11/2025 16:07

Fascinating period. I've read a lot of fiction written in the first half of the 20th century, which is when my parents and grandparents were born. Not that long ago, but the pace of change since then has been immense.

PropertyTaxExpert · 16/11/2025 16:13

I've read Brideshead Revisited and Agatha Christie, does that count? Smile