If there was one thing 18th-century British gentlemen
thought they knew more about than port or racehorses,
it was liberty.
They basked in it.
It was the reward, they told themselves,
for nearly a century of civil wars.
It helped make Britain the freest country in the world,
safe from Catholic tyranny, absolute monarchs
and standing armies.
Liberty was their religion.
They built temples in their gardens devoted to it.
They even wrote it a hymn.
Pity the rest of the enslaved world, deprived of its manifold blessings!
But the real payoff of liberty
had been riches and power from around the globe.
With liberty had come trade.
Trade had wrought perhaps the most staggering transformation of power
in all British history.
From being a tiny outcrop of insignificant islands
off the north-west coast of Europe,
Britain had expanded into a global power.
The shadow of Britannia now fell across America,
the Caribbean, the Indian Subcontinent.
It had taken barely a century.
And, unlike the Roman Empire they so admired,
they dreamt of a British Empire that would endure.
One based on trade, not on conquest.
It would be an empire of liberty, they thought,
Britain writ large, sharing its bounty with the world.
So, how was it that in just over a century,
the people that thought of themselves as the freest on earth
ended up subjugating much of the world's population?
How was it that a nation which had such mistrust of military power
ended up the biggest military power of all?
How was it that the empire of the Free became one of slaves?
How was it that profit seemed to turn not on freedom,
but on raw coercion?
How was it that we ended up with the wrong empire?
Ask any British gentleman in the middle of the 18th century
to draw you a map of the British empire,
and it would have looked like this.
To the east, there were trading posts in India,
tiny enclaves that had been there for 100 years,
shipping home printed cottons and silks.
A commercial enterprise run by the East India Company,
not the government.
There would be no colonies in Asia.
But Britain could look west as well as east.
And west was a whole different story.
To the west was America - Britain West, in fact.
Two million people between the Atlantic seaboard and the Appalachian Mountains.
They came from York to New York, Hampshire to New Hampshire.
And they all ate, slept, breathed the same mantra -
liberty and Britishness.
They had first arrived in the early 17th century,
seeking their fortune or religious tolerance.
Time enough to build farms, communities, towns, cities even.
Certainly time enough to deal with the troublesome natives -
to make alliances where possible, and, if not, to wipe them out,
or drive them inland.
Within the settlements and houses of the Virginia tobacco planters
and Massachusetts merchants, the silverware was a little simpler,
the furniture not quite so Hepplewhite as back home in England,
but that very simplicity spoke to their origins,
the quest for liberty and the drive for honest self-improvement.
But it was rather small potatoes, shall we say,
if what you really wanted was a palazzo in England,
rather than a picket fence in New England.
Suppose you wanted to make a serious fortune?
Now, where could that happen?
In the mid-17th century, the Caribbean was where.
Nobody settled in the West Indies to read the Bible unmolested.
This was not Massachusetts.
No, you braved the fevers and swamps for one reason alone -
to make yourself very rich very fast.
Serious profits were already being raked in
catering to Europe's addictions -
chocolate, coffee and, in England especially, tea.
But, as a money spinner, nothing compared with the stuff you added
to make them more palatable - sugar.
Once seen as a luxurious drug, it was now a necessity,
the cash crop of the empire.
Barbados provided the perfect habitat to grow the sugar cane -
tropical heat and saturating rains.
So the British settled in the West Indies,
transforming virgin forest
into a patchwork quilt of sugar plantations.
But Queen Sugar was a bitch,
demanding absolute service before she'd spill her bounty.
She took 14 months to get ripe, all eight feet of her.
When she was ready, she was ready.
Cut the cane at once, get it to the crushers before it spoiled.
Boil the juice before it degraded.
All very messy and very dangerous.
By the side of the crushing mills hung a sharpened machete,
ready to sever the limbs of anyone who got caught in the rollers.
What she needed was a combination of strength and lightning speed.
What she needed were human beasts of burden,
strong, quick, durable and uncomplaining.
One commodity would be reaped by another.
By slaves.
Sitting in a plantation house,
next to mills turning sugar into liquid gold,
what did you care if you had to go to West Africa to buy the slaves
and ship them back across the Atlantic?
Oh, yes, the logistics were difficult.
Nothing the greatest seafaring nation in the world couldn't handle.
The British were good at commodities.
A couple of thousand pounds bought you
200 acres of Barbadian cane fields, a mill and a 100-odd slaves.
Within a few years, it returned an equal amount every year
for the rest of your life.
You were now among the richest men anywhere in the British Empire.
The slave economy in the Caribbean wasn't just a side-show of empire,
it was the Empire.
3.5 million slaves were transported in British ships alone.
They went to British plantations,
to make British profits and build British cities...
Bristol, Liverpool and Glasgow,
where the cult of liberty was still on everyone's lips
in smart coffee houses.
Apart from the occasional visiting Quaker and exiled Puritan,
there was a deafening silence in the land of liberty
about turning fellow men into work animals.
The scale of profits sealed the conspiracy of silence.
Well, here's a little thing of devilish prettiness.
It's silver. It might be jewellery. A hat pin or something like that.
But it's not. This is an object which marked the passage
of a human being to a thing.
It's a branding iron.
Once the initials were burnt into your flesh,
you were no longer a person.
You were an object, a commodity. You were a beast of burden.
Your journey into hell started months earlier in Africa.
It's described in one of the few surviving accounts
by Olaudah Equiano,
one of the millions to experience the nightmare.
Captured as a small boy, he was separated from his sister...
then dragged to the coast and a waiting slave ship.
When I looked around the ship
and saw a multitude of black people of every description, chained,
every one of their countenances expressing dejection and sorrow,
I no longer doubted of my fate.
Quite overpowered with horror and anguish,
I fell motionless on the deck.
To make the venture profitable,
the slaves were stacked in two layers in the hold,
with only about two feet between the planks below and above them.
The air soon became unfit for respiration,
from a variety of loathsome smells,
and brought on a sickness among the slaves of which many died.
This deplorable situation was again aggravated
by the galling of the chains
and the filth of the necessary tubs
in which the children often fell and were almost suffocated.
The shrieks of the women and the groans of the dying
rendered it a scene of horror almost inconceivable.
You're a ship's surgeon. It's your job to go into the hold of a morning
and examine the cargo.
What do you find? For a start, you find a lot of dead slaves,
some of them manacled together, living and dead, chained as one pair.
What do you do then?
You take the pair on deck, strap them to the grating,
sort out the living from the dead, throw the dead overboard.
There are the sharks, always the sharks, waiting, grateful.
If you were one of those who made it to land alive,
your troubles had just begun.
Naked but for a loincloth,
you were once again paraded and poked at,
your teeth inspected like horses.
Violence, the threat or application of it, ran the system.
Women were the objects of particular terror.
In one year, a Jamaican overseer of a plantation, aptly called Egypt,
gave 21 floggings to women, each no less than fifty lashes.
Equiano says it was common at the end of the beating
to have the victims kneel and thank their masters for the treatment.
The same overseer also recorded, with the same matter of fact manner,
that he'd had sex with 23 slave women that year,
not including his regular mistress.
Only Sundays offered some moments of joy.
The market and music let slaves recreate some sense of community
and the Africa they had left behind.
At no time was there more joyous music than at a funeral,
because death, at last, was liberty.
Death was the return home.
(BASS VOCALIST) # Deep river...
It was very important for such a momentous journey
to have something like this, African, though made in Barbados.
#... Jordan...
A necklace of teeth, shells and bones, discarded trinkets,
copper and bronze rings.
#... I want to cross over it to campground...
So, a people who legally had no possessions at all
reserved what they'd hidden away for this last important journey,
so their spirits could return to Africa with dignity.
#... I want to cross over it to campground #
For the British, it was the perfect set-up.
Their ships dominated the oceans,
their slaves brought them profit, the world was their oyster.
But someone else was eager to prise it open -
the French.
They'd fought for centuries and they would fight again.
The Hundred Years' War of the Middle Ages
would become the Seven Years' War of the 18th century.
Agincourt, fought, not on a muddy field,
but in battles around the globe.
It turned out that the combo the British most despised -
Jesuits, professional soldiers and bureaucrats -
were stealing the empire before their very eyes,
starting with continental America.
Singing patriotic anthems wouldn't stop them, only war would.
And war, as the Romans discovered, changes everything.
The first victim is liberty and the second is profit.
The French had been in North America for as long as the British,
based in Canada to the north, and Louisiana to the south,
and exploring the Mississippi and the Ohio River valley in between.
It didn't take a genius to work out
that a cordon of French forts linking Canada to Louisiana
would box the British colonies in.
It would be death by slow strangulation.
The days of the ad hoc empire were drawing to a close.
Empires were not for sharing.
The British would have to fight to keep theirs.
It was commonly thought by politicians that war was coming,
but it wasn't a prospect anyone relished,
except someone who made global victory his alpha and omega.
And that man was William Pitt.
For better or worse,
it was William Pitt, neurotic, gouty, irascible,
either maniacally hyperactive or collapsed in a paralysing gloom,
who was the British Empire's true visionary.
He believed with an almost feverish intensity
that what was at stake in the struggle between France and Britain
was not just who would get the lion's share of wealth,
but whether the world would be conquered by liberty or despotism.
The first rounds went badly for the forces of liberty.
British troops were wiped out in the backwoods of New York State
by the French and their native allies.
So Pitt unleashed his biggest weapon -
his war chest.
He would fight the first world war
with columns of figures as well as columns of soldiers.
Pit spent £18 million a year, twice the government's annual income.
This flew right in the face of the Empire's basic principle -
that it shouldn't cost.
But, as Pitt calculated, you can't make a profit from empire
if it's not your empire.
After one more setback, there were nothing but glories.
1759 was a year of military miracles.
The French Empire's strongholds fell, one by one, to truly British forces,
Highland regiments often leading the way
in India, the French sugar islands,
West Africa and Nova Scotia.
Horace Walpole boasted:
Our bells are worn threadbare with the ringing of victories.
But there was no victory as sweet or as significant
as the one that broke the back
of French power in North America for good -
General Wolfe's conquest of Quebec.
It was exactly the kind of thing Pitt adored.
An attack so improbable that Wolfe himself assumed it couldn't work.
He'd designed it more as a glorious death than a likely victory,
climbing the sheer cliffs that protected the city
and surprising - and were they surprised! - The French.
After a suicidal charge,
the defenders were cut down in a monstrous volley.
(GUNFIRE)
True to his script, Wolfe took a shattering shot to the wrist,
then bullets in the guts and chest.
Bleeding into the arms of his brother officers,
he died as the first imperial romantic martyr,
duly set in marble in Westminster Abbey.
Victory in Quebec and then Montreal
totally transformed the British Empire in North America.
Pitt had made America, as he supposed, British forever.
And he must have felt he'd made the world safe for liberty to triumph.
The age of imperial Britain as a world power was about to dawn,
was it not?
There was reason for the new young king, George III,
to be the first Hanoverian to admit out loud that:
I glory in the name of Britain.
Even an American in London like Benjamin Franklin
couldn't help but agree. He wrote that:
The foundations of the future grandeur and stability
of the British Empire lie in America.
17 years later, he was signing the American Declaration of Independence.
So, what went wrong?
How could it all have been thrown away in less than a generation?
Pitt would learn that even victories come at a cost.
And, in Britain's case, that cost would be America.
Perhaps the resources of the British Empire
were now terminally over-stretched.
Perhaps that young empire might turn out to be a 30-year wonder.
At any rate, if they were going to defend the status quo,
they were going to need a huge transcontinental army
and even bigger navy.
And if that army and navy were to be funded,
the burden of taxes had better not just fall on the British themselves.
So, the colonists, who were supposed to enjoy their protection,
would have to cough up their share of the money.
And they'd do it through taxes.
Taxation, the very thing that had triggered the British civil wars,
would do so again, this time in America.
The taxes may have been different,
but the result would once again be disaster.
What happened in America was really Round Two of those wars,
the civil war of the British Empire,
with the Hanoverians playing the part of the Stuarts
and the Americans the heirs of the revolutionaries -
of Cromwell and of William III, the inheritors of a true British liberty
that had somehow got lost in its own motherland.
One such American was John Adams, a Boston lawyer and politician,
deeply read in history and philosophy,
and one of the most eloquent patriot leaders in the colonies.
He believed fervently in those hard won liberties -
no taxation without consent, no standing armies, no martial law.
When he looked at what Britain had become,
he no longer recognised a pristine temple of liberty, and no wonder.
Thanks to the unrelenting wars with France,
Britain had become a huge military state, supporting a massive army, navy,
and an insatiable tax collecting machine.
Adams's Britain, the shrine of freedom,
was, of course, a fantasy, a dream Britannia.
But this was a dream that John Adams woke up with every morning.
And from such nagging visions comes action.
He would not pay the taxes, and he was not alone in this struggle.
Angry, wealthy Boston in the 1760s was exactly the kind of place
that might breed a revolution.
Adams, his friends and neighbours, argued about everything.
They attended public meetings in droves.
Gossip flew around the cobbled streets in minutes
and roused the citizens to use their muscle -
fast and fierce in opposition to British taxes
and those who tried to enforce them.
Stunned by this strength of feeling, the British hit on a tax by stealth.
One only of interest to bureaucrats,
something the mob couldn't possibly notice, or so they thought.
So, when the British government decided to put a stamp on the paper
which official documents, handbills and newspapers were printed on,
what in London looked harmless enough,
in Boston seemed like a tax on knowledge.
In that dangerously over-informed city, it really lit a fire.
After all, who uses official documents and reads newspapers?
Well, only every single lawyer, merchant, minister, publisher
and pamphleteer across the 13 colonies.
Anyone who has to deal with an official document now hates you.
And who are they?
Only the best educated and loudest of the colonial population.
Their leadership was prepared to mobilise anger on the Boston streets.
The mob tore down the house of the Governor of Massachusetts.
In Britain, this violent opposition divided parliament almost as strongly.
The government was outraged at the insolence
of colonials who were protected by our care,
and demanded that they should yield obedience.
Up got William Pitt, the man who'd done most to make America British,
to demand the repeal of the Stamp Act and save his empire.
I rejoice that America has resisted.
I would argue that even under former arbitrary reigns,
parliaments were ashamed of taxing a people without their consent.
The gentleman asks, "When were the colonies emancipated?"
But I desire to know, when were they made slaves?
As the war for public opinion escalated,
the American politician and publisher, Benjamin Franklin,
produced an image that quickly seized the public imagination -
a nightmare vision of a dismembered Britannia
ruined by alienating her colonies.
Tensions rose in London and Boston.
Parliament did eventually repeal the stamp duty,
but still the Americans boycotted British goods.
Parliament put troops on the streets of Boston to keep order.
The Americans assaulted and abused them.
Then, in one notorious incident,
the tormented Redcoats opened fire before the State House.
Five Bostonians were left dead on the street.
Shocked by the killings, over the next three years,
both sides let things calm down.
Eventually, the British dropped all their taxes except one -
that on tea.
The import duty had been lowered to sweeten the cup.
The government supposed no one would notice the tax. Well, they noticed.
The ships carrying the tea duly arrived in Boston.
Unloading them meant paying the import duty.
On the night of December 16, 1773,
the largest hall in Boston was filled to capacity
with people listening to orators warning that to bring the tea ashore,
much less to brew it, was to swallow slavery along with a cuppa.
At a pre-arranged signal, the doors burst open
and a group of patriots, dressed in blankets as Mohawk Indians,
urged the crowd to storm the ships.
About 30 to 60 of our Mohawks, with their faces all blackened up,
blankets still in place, climbed aboard with lanterns.
They used hatchets, which they called, of course, tomahawks,
to break open the chests and poured the stuff straight into the water.
For those who knew,
and the leaders of the patriot campaign were very shrewd about this,
understood that it was indeed an incredibly fateful moment.
John Adams said:
"This was the most magnificent moment of all,
"that I cannot but call it an epoch in history."
How right he was.
To punish Boston, the British now closed its port,
galvanising all of the American colonies
to come to the distressed city's aid.
Cartloads of food came from colonies north and south.
George Washington declared:
The cause of Boston now is, and ever will be, the cause of America.
And yet, still, there was hesitation on the brink of catastrophe.
Few wanted irrevocable divorce from the motherland.
In London, King George III and his government
believed rebellion had already started
and had to be nipped in the bud.
In parliament, William Pitt made a last-ditch plea for sanity and reason.
Did their lordships not understand that in fighting the Americans,
they were fighting their own ghosts, the ghosts of English liberty past?
What, though you march from town to town, province to province,
though you shall be able to enforce a temporary submission,
how shall you be able to secure the obedience of the country you leave,
to grasp the dominion of 1,800 miles of continent, populous in numbers,
possessing valour, liberty and resistance?
The spirit which resists your taxation
is the same spirit which called all England on its legs
and, by the Bill of Rights, vindicated the English constitution.
This glorious spirit animates three millions in America
who prefer poverty with liberty to gilded chains and sordid affluence,
and who will die in defence of their rights as free men.
George III's ministers were having none of it.
Parliament's authority as government of the Empire was at stake,
and, if necessary, it had to be backed up with bullets.
So, few were surprised when the first blood was shed
at Lexington, outside Boston, on April 19, 1775.
Redcoats had been sent to seize militia arms.
They arrived just before dawn.
Nobody knows who, but inevitably, someone fired.
And, in response, the British shot their muskets
straight into the ragtag group of militiamen gathered before them.
The Redcoats stormed nearby Concord, but were then forced back to Boston
in bloody shock, peppered with fire all the way!
The dream of somehow remaining British and still being free
had died along with the militiamen at Lexington and Concord.
Now there was a different dream, a dream of a new country.
It was an American dream.
Once those shots had been fired,
many more bodies would be laid beside those in Concord.
It would be a war fought, not just with muskets,
but with words and ideals.
Adams and his fellow colonial leaders, including Benjamin Franklin,
meeting in Philadelphia,
would publish their Declaration of Independence on July 4, 1776.
Yes, when the declaration accused a king,
in this case, George III, of being a tyrant,
it did sound remarkably like a chapter from a British history book.
But that's not what everyone remembers.
What we remember is something fresh, something profoundly American.
We hold these truths to be self evident,
that all men are created equal...
They are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights...
... that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.
In April 1778,
faced with the undoing of his life's work,
an alliance between the old enemy, France,
and the new dominion of liberty, America,
Pitt tried to make one last parliamentary speech
which would put some gumption into his demoralised compatriots.
He struggled to his feet, but, before he could pronounce,
he collapsed back again into the arms of his fellow peers.
When he died a month later,
the right empire, the empire of liberty, died with him.
It would take George Washington, now commander of the American forces,
seven years of bloody fighting before independence became a reality.
In that time, the Americans suffered as many defeats as victories,
but gained the crucial support of France, Spain and Holland,
eventually forcing the British to surrender
at Yorktown in Virginia in 1781.
It may have been the end of one kind of British Empire,
but another one was waiting to be born.
20 years after defeat in America,
the British found themselves ruling millions in Asia.
They hadn't planned it, they hadn't even dreamed it was possible.
Why would they?
Since the British had first come to India, early in the 17th century,
they thought of nothing but trade.
Their only presence was the East India Company,
a commercial body there to make a profit.
From toeholds on the south-east and western coasts,
they bought brilliantly-printed silks and cottons and shipped them home,
where the parlours and bodies of the polite classes
were suddenly transformed by splashes of Indian colour.
A nice business, but anything more ambitious was out of the question,
for there already was an empire in India,
one of the most spectacular in the world.
The Mughals.
The Moslem descendants of the Mongol conquerors of Asia.
At their head was the Emperor in Delhi.
Across the land, a network of governors loyal to him, the Nawabs.
They had to give their permission for the East India Company to be there.
To the Mughals, the British merchants were just extra pocket money,
supplying silver to take Indian goods home.
No more than a gnat on the elephant's rump,
specks of bothersome dust on the Emperor's peacock throne.
But in 1739, that throne disappeared
in the plunder taken by Persian invaders
when they sacked Delhi and slaughtered its inhabitants.
In the decades that followed, other invaders,
Afghans from the north-west, rode deep into the Indian heartland
waging war and fighting battles on an unimaginable scale.
The gorgeous fabric of the Mughal Empire frayed and tore.
Left to their own devices, the Nawabs took advantage of Delhi's weakness,
raising their own armies, creating their own mini-states.
18th-century Mughal India was not some howling anarchy
begging for the British to come in and stop the rot.
It was a patchwork of successor states, elegant, robust, vigorous,
many of them still using Persian law and Persian court style.
And it was these up and coming states,
not the corrupt petty kingdoms which the British always complained about,
into which the East India Company smashed its way
with a ferocious, unstoppable mixture of arrogance, ignorance and political cunning.
No one in Delhi saw it coming, no one in London wanted it,
but then enter the French, enter trouble.
It was the 1740s. Anglo-French rivalry was going global.
What the French had been doing with native North American tribes,
interfering in wars and alliances to steal a march on their rivals,
they would now do in the Asian subcontinent.
From Pondicherry, their base in the south,
the French jumped into Indian politics,
learning that a well-engineered coup
could replace a neutral local governor with a tame Nawab,
one who would not just help their business prospects,
but shut out the British.
So the British had little choice but to join this game of trump the Nawab.
To act was risky, but failure to act was commercial suicide.
Not everyone in the little company settlements, like nearby Madras,
was biting his nails at the idea of an Indian war.
There was one young man, who'd been sweating it out as a company clerk,
for whom the drum roll of battle was an irresistible serenade.
Robert Clive, like the East India Company itself, you might say,
was never really cut out for business, at least, not legit business.
In Market Drayton, where he'd grown up,
the Shropshire lad ran an extortion racket, threatening shopkeepers
with his own gang of toughs unless they coughed up.
Exported to Madras, Clive lived the life of a bachelor clerk,
scribbling, sweating, drinking, fornicating,
and making the whole thing bearable only with pipes of opium.
Scenting that powerful old aroma of money and fame,
Clive made a career change, and he took British India with him.
In the war that erupted between French- and British-supported Nawabs,
Clive turned a diversion into the main event.
While both main armies were on a long siege at the city of Trichinopoly,
Clive took a few men and stormed the capital of the pro-French prince.
He then held out for six long weeks against everything thrown at it.
The effort fatally weakened the enemy and the British client Nawab took power.
The French gamble in south India was a busted flush.
Clive had just broke the bank.
Suddenly, the rest of India woke up to the fact
that it was no longer dealing with a feeble little merchant fledgling.
What it had got was a cuckoo in the nest.
Up the coast to the north, the young impulsive Nawab of Bengal,
Siraj-ud-Daulah, decided to do something about this threat.
In 1756, he attacked the British settlement that had been established
at the mouth of the Hooghly River since 1690 - Calcutta.
Most of its residents made it out of the town in time.
The rest, 100 or so, found themselves imprisoned in a 20-foot-square cell...
with no food or water and virtually no air, in the height of the Indian summer.
Few came out alive,
and the Black Hole of Calcutta now entered British history's lexicon of infamy.
One survivor, John Zephaniah Holwell, wrote a book about the Black Hole
on his way back from India to England.
When it was published, in 1758, it became an instant best seller.
Holwell exaggerated the number of those who suffocated on that night,
multiplying them by about three, from around 40 to 120.
I don't think he was simply kicking up the number for sensationalism.
He was making a point.
The point was that a regime that could do that, that was so cruel, so inhuman,
scarcely deserved the name of a government at all,
in fact, scarcely deserved to survive.
Clive sailed north in Royal Navy ships,
recaptured Calcutta and pursued Siraj-ud-Daulah up-river.
In June, 1757, he took on an Indian army
that outnumbered his ten to one.
But Clive had been in India long enough to know
there was more than one way to fight a battle here.
The Battle of Plassey has gone down in imperial textbooks
as one of those stellar victories,
with a handful of European soldiers pulling off a long-shot victory
against massed elephant cavalry.
What happened was that Clive cut a deal with Abdullah's second-in-command -
"Make sure your soldiers disappear and you can be the next Nawab."
Well, of course, he went for it.
The soldiers duly evaporated and that was that.
Courtesy of his tamed new Nawab,
Clive helped himself to a quarter of a million pounds reward.
It made the delinquent from Market Drayton
one of the wealthiest men in Britain, and Baron Clive of Plassey.
When challenged, years later, at the scale of his plunder, Clive replied:
An opulent city lay at my mercy.
Vaults were thrown open to me, piled on either hand with gold and jewels.
At this moment, I stand astonished at my own moderation.
The new Nawab would have disagreed.
Clive cost him his independence, as well as his jewels.
The British could and would replace him at their whim.
As Clive turned from a general into a power broker, an Indian Caesar,
suspicions began to mount back in London.
Was this an economic exercise in damage containment
or was it empire building?
For empires notoriously came with long bills.
But Clive was one step ahead of them.
He would solve all their problems by turning Bengal
into a money-making machine for the company.
Not by trade, but by collecting its land taxes.
The temptation was not just for company men to build private mega-fortunes,
it was for the company itself to want to grow rich, fast.
This was just so much easier for the business.
Increasingly, the main trade of British India was not spices, not cloth, but taxes.
Taxes would pull down one empire in America,
but now they were going to set one up in India.
In 1765, the company was granted the right
to collect the land tax across all of Bengal.
For the British, it marked the shift from trading to ruling.
The theory of empire had been turned on its head.
Trade can only thrive, that theory had said,
when it's not lumbered with government or an army.
"Trade can only thrive in India," whispered Clive,
"when it hooks up with government, when it runs a tax system,
"and when it supports an army."
And it was in stark contrast to what occurred in America at the same time.
In Boston, they were sending protesting mobs into the streets,
but in Bengal, the money men were falling over themselves
to bankroll the British.
The local land-owning tax collectors, or Zemindars, as they were called,
would happily keep harvesting the rupees, as they had for the Mughals.
The British even imagined that under their enlightened supervision,
Bengal would be turned from a place of grinding toil
into a model of progress.
In theory, everyone was going to be happy.
If the Zemindars could know for sure exactly how much tax
they would owe to the government, they could go easy on the peasants.
The peasants, in turn, would be able to be thrifty and industrious
and produce a surplus for the market,
and plough back the profit into self-improvement.
The only problem with this was that it was a total fantasy.
The Zemindars' main interest was, and always had been,
in shaking as much money as possible from their peasants,
which they continued to do.
So, instead of beginning a chain reaction of benevolence,
it started a pyramid of extortion.
The government screwed the Zemindars, who screwed the peasants.
The Zemindars went broke, the peasants were evicted
and died in hundreds of thousands. So much for good intentions.
And, in short order, famine arrived in Bengal.
Walking ribcages on the trunk roads,
saucer-eyed children dying in baked mudholes,
flocks of kites landing on the carcasses of cattle.
Perhaps a quarter of the population of Bengal perished, millions of people.
Perhaps the British didn't cause it, but they certainly didn't help.
Guilty or innocent, one fact was indisputable -
Bengal now belonged to the British.
Over the next 50 years, most of the rest of India would follow.
New British armies would complete the job that Clive had started.
For some who came after him,
India was more than an invitation just to smash and grab.
Warren Hastings, the first to hold the title of Governor-General,
was committed to the possibility
of repairing the broken body of India the Indian way.
He learned Persian and four Indian languages.
He founded the Asiatic Society,
dedicated to understanding Indian culture.
He commissioned the first Anglo-Hindustani dictionaries,
translations of Indian law codes and the Bhagavadgita.
And under Hastings' administration, there was a tantalisingly brief moment
when the two cultures actually converged rather than collided.
British men had Indian mistresses, even wives,
sometimes two, one in Delhi, one in Lucknow.
They went to cock fights, smoked hookah pipes with Indian princes...
...made deals with Hindu money men.
But for many of the British who came to India,
there would be no home, just a cenotaph...
their presence immortalised only in stone.
Acres in central Calcutta are still occupied by Park Street Cemetery.
In the early days, one in three wouldn't make it through the first monsoon.
In all, it's said over two million Europeans are buried in India.
And the imperial size of their graveyard monuments
says something about a wish to be remembered,
to leave an imposing mark on the subcontinent.
But neither translations of Hindu epics nor Mughal-sized tombstones
persuaded everyone that the British really were Indianising themselves.
Many still saw them as conquerors to be resisted to the death.
(MOSLEM CALL TO PRAYER)
They were rulers like Tippu Sultan,
who built up his southern Indian state of Mysore into a dynamic Moslem power.
For 20 years, he bitterly and effectively opposed British rule,
bloodying their armies and fighting their soldiers to a standstill.
But it couldn't last.
Tippu Sultan, the tiger, would learn
that a new kind of British governor-general
had arrived at the end of the 18th century,
contemptuous of Warren Hastings' tendency to go native,
and resolved to squash the least sign of local insurrection.
The most uncompromising of all was Richard Wellesley,
the older brother of the future Duke of Wellington.
Yet again, France provided the impetus for action.
With the rise of Napoleon Bonaparte came the excuse
to stamp on anyone who might be his Indian ally.
And so Wellesley dispatched an overwhelming company army,
the vast majority of its manpower Indian sepoys, to Mysore.
They stormed Tippu's island fortress, Seringapatam,
and overwhelmed the Sultan's army.
Tippu was as good as his word and fought to the death,
his body discovered where the fighting had been fiercest,
shot in the head and stripped of his jewels.
Over the next two decades, Wellesley and his successors
moved relentlessly across the subcontinent,
picking off Indian states one by one.
In one of Wellesley's letters to his wife,
you can hear the authentic voice of the future of British India.
Farewell, dear soul.
I am about to arrange the affairs of a conquered country.
The foundation stones of a true Raj
were laid by Richard Wellesley, literally, in 1799,
when he decided that British India
had to have the kind of building that was fit for an emperor.
So he built a classical palace in Calcutta,
complete with busts of the Roman Caesars and grand colonnades.
From it, Richard Wellesley surveyed, with triumphal satisfaction,
the stupefying immensity of what had been done.
It might be pricey.
But Wellesley wasn't thinking about double-entry book-keeping.
He was too busy measuring his hat size for the victory garland.
As far as he was concerned, what he had wrought,
the empire he had carved out, was the ultimate riposte
to Napoleon's jibe about the English being a nation of shopkeepers.
They were not. They were a nation of empire builders,
an empire of arms, of law, of engineering.
These men no longer cared about an empire of liberty.
That now sounded dangerously French, suspiciously revolutionary.
Let the Americans play with the tomfoolery of democracy if they chose.
As for the empire of liberty's twin, the empire of trade,
surely it was understood now
that something grander was in the offing than money-grubbing business.
The Almighty had led them, by crooked steps, to be sure,
toward their true destiny as the modern Rome,
instructor to the benighted,
guardians of an empire which would make war to provide peace.
And just think, Roman culture might have reached Spain and Jerusalem,
but British civilisation would span the world...
...or so we told ourselves.