The Wrong Empire A History of Britain by Simon Schama

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 reward, they told themselves, for nearly a century of civil wars

that had 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, and trade had wrought

perhaps the most staggering transformation of national power

in all British history.

From a tiny outcrop of insignificant islands off the northwest coast of Europe,

Britain had expanded into a global power -

The shadow of Brittania now fell across America, the Caribbean, the Indian subcontinent.

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.

How was it that people who thought themselves the freest on earth,

ended up subjugating much of the world's population?

How was it that a nation with such a deep distrust of military power

ended up the biggest military power of all?

How did the empire of the free become an empire of slaves?

And 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 cotton 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.

The west was America - Britain-West.

Two million people living between the Atlantic seaboard and the Appalachian Mountains.

They came from York to New York, Hampshire to New Hampshire.

They ate, slept and breathed the 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 and cities, even.

Certainly time enough to deal with 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 simpler, the furniture not as Hepplewhite as in England.

The simplicity spoke to their origins - the quest for liberty and the drive for self-improvement.

But it was rather "small potato" if what you had in mind was a palazzo in England

rather than a picket fence in NEW England.

Suppose you wanted to make a serious fortune - where could that happen?

In the mid-seventeenth 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 the swamps for one reason alone -

to make yourself very rich, very fast.

Serious profits were already being raked in,

catering to Europe's little addictions - chocolate, coffee and, in England, 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 sugar cane - tropical heat and saturating rains.

So the British began to settle 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.

But when she was ready, she was ready.

Cut the cane at once,

get it to the crushers before it spoilt...

Boil the juice before it degraded -

all very messy and all very dangerous.

By the side of the crushing mills hung a sharpened machete -

ready to sever the limbs

of anyone 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 the grand plantation house, next to the mills that turned sugar into liquid gold,

what did you care if you had to go to West Africa and ship the slaves across the Atlantic?

Oh, yes, the logistics were difficult,

but nothing the greatest sea-faring nation in the world couldn't handle.

The British were good at commodities.

£2,000 bought you 200 acres of Barbadian cane fields,

a mill and a hundred-odd slaves.

And within a few years, it returned an equal amount every year for the rest of your life.

You were now amongst the richest men anywhere in the British Empire.

The slave economy in the Caribbean wasn't just a sideshow of empire - it WAS the empire.

Three and a half million slaves were transported in British ships alone.

They went to British plantations to make British profits and build British cities -

Bristol, Liverpool, Glasgow - with the cult of liberty 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.

Here's a little thing of devilish prettiness.

It's silver - looks like jewellery - a hatpin or something, but it's not!

This is an object which marked the passage of a human being to a thing - this is a branding iron.

Once these initials were burnt into your flesh, you were not a person.

You were an object - 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 the waiting slave ship.

"When I looked around the ship

"and saw a multitude of black people of every description chained together,

"every one of their countenances expressing dejection and sorrow,

"I no longer doubted 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 planks 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 chains

"and the filth of the necessary tubs into 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 in the morning

and examine the condition of the ship's cargo.

What do you find? You find a lot of dead slaves, some manacled together,

the living and dead still chained as one pair.

You take the pair up on deck, strap them to the grating, sort out the living from the dead.

Throw the dead overboard.

There are 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 again paraded and poked at,

your teeth inspected like horses.

Violence - the threat or the 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 50 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 allowed slaves to recreate some sense of community

and the Africa they had left behind.

At no time was there more joyous music than at a funeral -

death, at last, was liberty.

Death was the return home.

It was very important for such a momentous journey, to have something like this,

something African, although made in Barbados.

A necklace of teeth, shells and bones, discarded trinkets, copper and bronze rings.

# I wanna cross over. #

A people with no possessions at all,

reserved what they'd hidden away for this last important journey,

so their spirits could return to Africa with dignity.

For the British, it was the perfect setup.

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 in a muddy field, but in battles around the globe.

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 was not going to 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,

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 ad hoc empire was 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 manically hyperactive or collapsed in paralysing gloom,

who was the British Empire's true visionary.

He believed that what was at stake in the life-or-death struggle between France and Britain,

was not just 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.

Pitt 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 the year of military miracles.

The strongholds of the French Empire 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, even Wolfe himself assumed it couldn't work.

He designed it more as a glorious death than a likely victory -

climbing the sheer cliffs that protected the city and surprising 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 had 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 Briton."

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."

Just 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 empire were terminally over-stretched!

Perhaps that young empire might turn out to be a 30-year wonder.

To defend the status quo,

they needed a huge transcontinental army and an even bigger navy.

And if they were going to be funded, the burden of taxes had better not fall on just the British themselves.

The colonists, who were supposed to be enjoying their protection,

were going to have to cough up their share of the money.

And they would 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, once again, would be disaster.

What happened in America was really Round Two of those wars -

the civil war of the British Empire.

The Hanoverians played the part of the Stuarts and the Americans, the heirs of the Revolutionaries -

of Cromwell and William III - inheritors of true British liberty, 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 that 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' 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 cobbled streets 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.

When the British put a stamp on the paper on which official documents 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 who reads newspapers?

Only every single lawyer, merchant, minister, publisher, printer and pamphleteer across the 13 colonies.

Anyone who deals with official documents now hates you. And who are they?

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.

Back in Britain, this violent opposition divided parliament almost as strongly.

They were 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 had 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 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 Boston streets 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 even been lowered to sweeten the cup -

the government supposed no-one would notice the tax.

They noticed.

Ships carrying the tea arrived in Boston - unloading them meant paying the import duty.

On the night of December 16th 1773,

Boston's largest hall was filled with people listening to orators,

warning that, to bring the tea ashore, much less to brew it,

was to swallow slavery along with the cuppa.

At a pre-arranged signal, the doors burst open,

and a group of patriots dressed up in blankets as Mohawk Indians, urged the crowds to storm the ships.

About 30 to 60 of our Mohawks with blackened faces and blankets still in place,

climbed aboard with lanterns.

They used hatchets, which they called tomahawks,

to break open the chests and poured the stuff straight into the water.

Those who knew, and, of course, the leaders of the patriot campaign were very shrewd about this,

understood that it was an incredibly fateful moment.

John Adams said, "This was the most magnificent moment of all. I cannot but call it, an epoch in history."

How right he was!

To punish Boston, the British closed its port,

galvanising all American colonies to come to the distressed city's aid.

Cart loads 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 that 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 and from province to province,

"though you should be able to enforce a temporary submission,

"how shall you be able to secure the obedience of the country you leave behind -

"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 million 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 the supreme 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 19th, 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 colonial 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 - 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 fellow colonial leaders - including Benjamin Franklin - meeting in Philadelphia,

would publish their Declaration of Independence on July 4th, 1776.

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 is 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,

"that 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 attempted one last parliamentary speech

to put some gumption into his demoralised compatriots.

He struggled to his feet, but before he could pronounce, collapsed 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, Commander of the American forces,

seven years of fighting before independence became reality.

The Americans had as many defeats as victories,

but gained the crucial support of France, Spain and Holland,

eventually forcing the British to surrender at Orkney 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?

Ever since the British had 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 transformed by splashes of Indian colour - a nice little business.

Anything more was out of the question for there already was an empire in India -

one of the most spectacular in the world - the Mughals...

The Muslim descendants of the Mongol conquerors of Asia.

At their head was the emperor in Delhi.

Across the land, a network of local governors, loyal to him, the Nawabs.

They had to give their permission for the East India Company to be there at all.

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 elephants rump - specks of bothersome dust on the Emperor's peacock throne.

But in 1739 that throne disappeared in the plunder by Persian invaders,

when they sacked Delhi and slaughtered its inhabitants.

In the decades that followed, other invaders - Afghans from the northwest -

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 started taking 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 step in and stop the rot.

It was a patchwork of successor states, busy, elegant, robust and vigorous.

Many used Persian law and court style.

It was these up-and-coming states,

not the decadent and corrupt petty kingdoms the British always complain about,

into which the East India Company smashed its way

with ferocious 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 -

getting mixed up in their 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 business prospects but shut out the British.

The British had little choice but to join in 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,

were biting their nails at the idea of an Indian war.

There was one young man who had 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 cut out for business, at least, not legit business.

In Market Drayton, where he'd grown up, he'd ran an extortion racket,

threatening local shopkeepers with his 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 rival French and British supported Nawabs,

Clive turned a diversion into the main event.

While both armies were on a siege of the mountain city of Trichinopoly,

Clive took a handful of men and stormed the capital of the pro-French prince.

He then held out for six long weeks.

The effort fatally weakened the enemy and the British 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 fledgeling.

It had got a cuckoo in the nest.

Up the coast to the north, the young impulsive Nawab of Bengal, Siraj Ud Daullah

decided to do something about this threat.

In 1756, he attacked the British settlement

that had been established at the mouth of the Hughli river since 1690 -

Calcutta.

Most of its residents made it out of the town in time.

The rest - a hundred 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 of the survivors, John Zephaniah Holwell,

wrote a book about the Black Hole on his way back to England.

When it was published in 1758, it became an instant best seller.

Holwell exaggerated the number who had been suffocated on that hot night,

multiplying it by three from 40 to 120.

He wasn't kicking up the number for the sake of sensationalism.

He was making a point - that a regime that could be so cruel, so inhuman,

scarcely deserved to be called a government, scarcely deserved to survive.

Clive sailed north in Royal Navy ships, recaptured Calcutta

and then pursued Siraj Ud Daullah 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 actually happened is that Clive cut a deal with Siraj Ud Daullah's second in command,

"If your soldiers disappear, you can be the next Nawab."

He went for it and that was that.

Courtesy of his tame new Nawab,

Clive helped himself to a £250,000 reward.

It made the delinquent from Market Drayton

one of the wealthiest men in Britain

and Baron Clive of Plassey.

When challenged later at the scale of his plunder, Clive would reply,

"An opulent city lay at my mercy, vaults were thrown open to me alone,

"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 general into power-broker - an Indian Caesar - suspicions began to mount in London.

Was this an economic exercise in damage containment or 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.

Not by trade but by collecting land taxes.

The temptation was not just for Company men to build private mega-fortunes,

but for the Company itself to grow rich, fast.

This was much easier than business.

Increasingly, the stock in trade of British India was not spices or cloth but taxes.

Taxes would pull down one empire in America.

But now they would 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 irrevocable shift from trading to ruling.

The theory of empire was turned on its head.

Trade can only thrive, the theory had said, when it's not lumbered with government or an army.

"Trade can only thrive in India," whispered Clive,

"when it joins with government, runs a tax system and supports an army."

And it happened in stark contrast to what was occurring in America at exactly the same time.

In Boston, they were sending protesting mobs into the streets,

but, in Bengal, money-men were falling over themselves to bankroll the British.

The local tax-collectors, or zemindars, would happily carry on harvesting the rupees,

as they had for the Mughals.

The British imagined that under their supervision

Bengal would change from a place of grinding toil into a model of progress - everyone would be happy.

If the zemindars knew exactly how much tax they would owe the government,

they could go easy on peasants who would be thrifty and industrious, producing a surplus for the market,

and ploughing profits into self-improvement.

The only problem with this, of course, was that it was a total fantasy.

The zemindars' main interest was, and always had been,

in shaking as much as possible from their peasants, which they continued to do.

Instead of a chain reaction of benevolence, it started a pyramid of extortion.

The government screwed zemindars, zemindars screwed peasants.

Zemindars went broke, 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 mud holes,

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.

But 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 Bhagavad Gita.

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 and one in Lucknow.

They went to cock fights, smoked hookah pipes with Indian princes.

They 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 is said that 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.

They were rulers like Tipu Sultan,

who had built up his Southern Indian state of Mysore into a dynamic Muslim 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.

Tipu Sultan - the Tiger - would learn that a new kind of British Governor General had arrived

at the end of the 18th century,

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.

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.

Wellesley dispatched an overwhelming Company army -

the vast majority of its manpower, Indian sepoys - to Mysore.

They stormed Tipu's island fortress, Seringapatam, and overwhelmed the sultan's army.

Tipu 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.

For the next two decades, Wellesley and his successors moved across the subcontinent,

picking off Indian states, one by one.

In one of his 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.

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, 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.

What he had wrought - the empire he had carved out -

was the ultimate riposte to Napoleon's gibe, calling the English a nation of shopkeepers.

They were builders of empires - an empire of arms, law and 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.

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 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.

Subtitles by Carla Rossi BBC Scotland, 2001

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