Empires strike back: charging through centuries of murky history

In Empire, listeners are not presented with a stiff ledger of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ or a rap sheet of historical injustices to ponder – it’s left to them to consider.

Robert Clive meeting with Mir Jafar after the Battle of Plassey. Painting by Francis Hayman.

There are good reasons, perhaps decisive, for not attempting a podcast about empire in the 2020s. In this era of post-colonial angst and culture wars, is it still possible to debate imperial legacies without inviting howls of outrage or calls for cancellation? Not so long ago, when a group of Oxford dons proposed a conference on the British Empire, it appeared the subject was beyond discussion of any kind, lest someone failed to denounce empire as the personification of all things dark and evil. John Darwin, a leading expert on global empires, said the aborted conference demonstrated how historians now felt obliged to proclaim their moral revulsion against empire, in case writing or speaking about it might be thought to endorse it.

The chief mistake, Darwin noted, was the assumption empires were somehow abnormal intrusions upon world history; to ignore them was to overlook those forces that underwrote the past and explained something of the present.

Empire is hosted by William Dalrymple and journalist Anita Anand.

In their ambitious podcast, Empire, historian William Dalrymple and journalist Anita Anand set out with a similar conviction: that empires matter and remain a force at work in the 21st century. Beginning with the rise of the East India Company in the early 1600s and ending with Selim II and the Siege of Cyprus, the pair charge through centuries of history, taking us inside the Mughal court of Bahadur Shah Zafar, through the shimmering bank vaults of the Jagat Seth and on to the bloody battlefields of Plassey and Buxar.

Refreshingly, the podcast avoids long-winded sermons about historical injustice and the black hole of the culture wars. Both Dalrymple and Anand are clear-cut on partisan myths and legends. It’s not true, Dalrymple says, that the British sliced the thumbs off Bengali weavers to safeguard their own cotton industry. Yet nor do they overlook British atrocities, particularly when it comes to Robert Clive’s ruthless campaign to asset-strip India or the Jallianwala Bagh massacre in April 1919. When describing the savagery with which the EIC re-claimed control in Delhi after the 1857 uprising, Dalrymple tells listeners: “This is not the woke imaginings of some hip historians … It’s all there in the British letters home.”

Historian William Dalrymple

Anyone familiar with Dalrymple’s histories, The Last Mughal, Return of the King or Anarchy, will not be disappointed, even if some of the podcast covers much the same territory. In Empire, his prodigious talents as historian, travel writer and storyteller are on full display, with his keen sense of historical narrative, vivid descriptions of landscape and miniature portraits of leading historical actors, including Udham Singh, Princess Sophia, Louis Mountbatten, Ranjit Singh, and of course Clive (described as “a nasty 18th-century version of Jeff Bezos”). While the EIC, the British Empire and India receive a lot of mileage during the first season, the podcast’s later episodes move swiftly on to the Byzantine Empire, the fall of Constantinople and the rise of the Ottomans.

In Empire, listeners are not presented with a stiff ledger of “good” and “bad” or a rap sheet of historical injustices to ponder – it’s left to them to consider. Behind Tom Holland and Dominic Sandbrook’s hit, The Rest Is History, Empire is provocative, erudite, funny and one of the best history podcasts available.  

Listen to Empire on your favourite podcast app.