That famously unknown, arcane knowledge: The British Empire
Zack Polanski, "When I studied history at school. Tudors, Romans, a bit of WWII. I don't remember talking about empire or colonisation"
Historian William Dalrymple, "It is possible to do at A'Levels modules on the British empire, but very few people do them"
"Which means most British people are entirely ignorant for what is for better or worse the most important thing Britain ever did"
"Britain drew it's empire, completely changed the face of the world over the course of 300-400 years"
"Not only did they change it within a local European context, but they completely upended flows of global trade and eco-systems which had existed for millinia"
"For most of history, India and China dominated the world economy, and Europe was an add-on"
"They were producing about 70% of the world's GDP, that's still the case in the 18th century"
"When we're looking at the world today, China already the world's number two economy, and India about to be number three overtaking Japan and Germany"
"What we're seeing is a reversal of the trading system to a pr colonial period - it's taken 80 years since the British left India"
"We're seeing the world recover form this brief blip where Europe smashed its way around the globe moving populations and natural resources around, looting some places, bringing wealth to Europe"
"If you look at the big National Trust country houses, if it's a big palladian house, the sort you'd see in a Jane Austin Sunday night drama"
"If it's on the east coast of the country, quite probably it was built by the East India company money, in other words the looting of India"
"If it's on the west coast, near Liverpool or Bristol, it's more likely to be slave money, from the Caribbean"
"These two sources of wealth brought capital into Britain, and cotton into Britain, which was then milled in the industrial revolution, which gave the seed capital for Britain to accelerate massively through the industrial revolution"
"Which catapulted England from an upper middle position in Europe"
"It transforms Britain and the world"
"But what gives us great prosperity often detracted from the prosperity of the looted countries, or countries that have been plundered for enslaved people"
"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 entirely looting of India, or the Caribbean slave trade"
"Two crucial moments in Britain's and the world's history"
"The reason we don't learn it, is because when the British empire ended, it became something people stopped talking about"
"By the time you get to Monty Python in the 1970s or late 60s, the Empire is a joke"
