224. Empire in Your Garden

Summary

Summary of "Empire in Your Garden" (Episode 224)

Podcast Title: Empire
Hosts: Anita Anand and William Dalrymple
Guest: Satnam Sanghera
Release Date: January 28, 2025

---

Introduction

In Episode 224, titled "Empire in Your Garden," hosts Anita Anand and William Dalrymple engage in a profound discussion with Satnam Sanghera, author of Empire: How British Imperialism has Shaped the Globe. The conversation explores the intricate ways in which botanical practices during the British Empire have had lasting impacts on global ecosystems, economies, and societies.

---

Imperial Botany and Racial Classifications

Satnam Sanghera begins by delving into the work of Carl Linnaeus, an 18th-century botanist who not only classified plants but also human beings based on geographic origin and skin color. This classification system reinforced imperialist racism by labeling Europeans as superior and Africans as "crafty and indolent."

Notable Quote:

"Linnaeus was a prominent botanist of the 18th century... he put humans into the classifications according to their geographic origin and skin color... this is the way in which botany helped to reinforce imperial racism." ([03:01])

William Dalrymple echoes this sentiment by sharing his experiences from his book Patient Assassin, highlighting how British imperialists like Sir Michael O'Dwyer classified people similarly to plant species, perpetuating stereotypes and social hierarchies.

Notable Quote:

"It's a real mode of thinking that you put people in boxes like you put plants in boxes." ([04:11])

The discussion further explores how these classifications persist today, impacting perceptions of certain communities, such as the Sikh community being labeled as a "martial race," despite many individuals not fitting this stereotype.

---

The Wardian Case and Plant Transportation

Satnam introduces the Wardian case, a revolutionary device that enabled the safe transport of plants across long distances. Invented by Nathaniel Bagshaw Ward in 1829, the Wardian case maintained a controlled environment, protecting plants from the harsh conditions of sea voyages.

Notable Quote:

"The Wardian case... is how tea was moved from China to India to establish the salmon dodge eating tea district." ([09:06])

This innovation facilitated the spread of economically vital plants like tea, rubber, and cinchona, but also led to the unintended transportation of pests and diseases, which had devastating effects on local ecosystems. The ability to move plants seamlessly contributed to the establishment and expansion of the British Empire's agricultural dominance.

---

Impact on Global Ecosystems and Monocultures

The hosts discuss the ecological consequences of imperial botanical practices, emphasizing how monocultures introduced by imperialists often led to environmental degradation and the loss of biodiversity. Examples include the destruction of native forests in Australia, India, and the Caribbean to make way for plantations of rubber, cinchona, and other economically important species.

Satnam highlights the introduction of invasive species, such as the prickly pear in Australia, which initially posed severe problems by overwhelming native flora and farmland. Although biological control methods, like introducing the cactoblastis moth, eventually mitigated the issue, the initial impact was substantial.

Notable Quote:

"Whenever you introduce plantations, in particular, these one crop economies, you make the environment very vulnerable because you need diversity for a healthy environment." ([27:43])

---

National Parks and Conservation Paradoxes

Anita Anand and Satnam Sanghera explore the paradox of British imperialism in environmental conservation. While imperialists caused significant ecological harm through deforestation and monocultures, they were also instrumental in the establishment of national parks and early environmental policies. However, these conservation efforts often excluded indigenous populations and imposed new forms of environmental governance that disregarded local needs and knowledge.

Notable Quote:

"We see national parks as a very problematic thing, as a contradictory thing." ([34:24])

Satnam argues that acknowledging the duality of the Empire's role in both destroying and conserving the environment is crucial for understanding current conservation challenges and the legacy of imperialism.

---

Extinction of Indigenous Fauna

The discussion transitions to the extinction of indigenous animals due to imperialist activities. The British and other European colonists hunted animals to near extinction, driven by fascination and sport. This hunting frenzy was often followed by conservation efforts when species became scarce, creating a complex legacy of destruction and protection within the Empire.

Notable Quote:

"My problem is they never talk about it... the royal family were involved in these hunts. They were involved in helping to make these animals go extinct in the first place." ([37:36])

Hosts and guest reflect on how these actions are often glossed over in conservation narratives, which focus on modern preservation without fully addressing the historical context of colonization and exploitation.

---

Legacy and Modern Reflections

Satnam Sanghera concludes by emphasizing the need for honest conversations about the Empire's role in environmental degradation and conservation. He advocates for recognizing and acknowledging past wrongdoings as a step toward meaningful environmental stewardship and reconciliation.

Notable Quote:

"We need to begin by talking and understanding." ([43:07])

Hosts agree on the importance of education and acknowledgment in overcoming the complex heritage of imperialism, suggesting that understanding the past is essential for addressing present and future environmental challenges.

---

Conclusion

Episode 224 of Empire offers a nuanced examination of how British imperialism's botanical practices have left an indelible mark on the world's ecosystems, economies, and social structures. Through insightful dialogue, Anita Anand, William Dalrymple, and Satnam Sanghera uncover the intricate tapestry of imperial botany, highlighting both its advancements and its profound consequences. The episode calls for a deeper understanding and acknowledgment of this history to inform sustainable and equitable environmental practices today.

---

Transcript

[Anita Anand]

If you want access to bonus episodes, reading lists for every series of Empire, a chat community, discounts for all the books mentioned in the week's podcast ad, free listening and a weekly newsletter, sign up to empire [e-mail]. so this is an advertisement for the wonderful Jaipur Literary Festival, the greatest literary festival in the world. Teamwork Arts, their producers and my wonderful co director Namata Gokuli are in our 18th year of hosting a great celebration of books, ideas, music and art where we welcome brilliant speakers to the pink city of Jaipur. From Nobel Prize winners to Pulitzer to Booker awardees to Sahitia Academy awardees, to the people that have won all the great literary prizes across the world.

[William Dalrymple]

And.

[Anita Anand]

And we should also flag that we don't just host the festival in Jaipur, we have a whole variety of satellite festivals across the world, from Valladolid in Spain, Seattle, New York, Boulder and Houston in the United States. And in particular we have JLF London marking its 12th year at the British Library in 2025. A cross cultural voyage of literary narratives and inspirational speakers. So you should all come along. This year's dates are the 13th to 15th of June, so be sure to book your spot once the ticket link goes live. Visit jlflitfest.org London for updates. That's jlflitfest.org London welcome to NADA Yada island, next on Metro's Nadiata island podcast.

[Satnam Sanghera]

I almost fainted when the four new bombshells arrived.

[William Dalrymple]

Four free Samsung Galaxy A16, 5G phones at Metro.

[Satnam Sanghera]

No way. And finding out the fourth line is free. Thanks God he did.

[Anita Anand]

That's wild. Join Metro and get four free Samsung 5G phones only at Metro plus tax. Bring four numbers and an ID and.

[Satnam Sanghera]

Sign up for any Metro Flex plan not available currently at T Mobile or been with Metro in the past 180 days.

[William Dalrymple]

Hello and welcome to Empire with me, Anita Anand and me, William Durimple. And we are once more joined by Satnam Sangara, author of Empire How British Imperialism has Shaped the Globe. His paperback is out right now. If you want to, you know, go and get it. I mean, if you want to, you just have to. It's a great, great book. It's really interesting and it's taught us a few things as well. Just chatting to him in the last episode just before we sort of launch ourselves on something that is more miserable, which is something you touched on in the last part as Satnam about the classification of plants. Linnaeus. I mean, I actually didn't realise also classified human beings. Just remind people who may not have listened to the last episode of what Linnaeus did. I think a little recap of that would be interesting.

[Anita Anand]

Yeah.

[Satnam Sanghera]

Linnaeus was a prominent botanist of the 18th century. He created the modern system of classifying plants and organisms, crucially, because he classified plants in this very clever way, but he. He put humans into the classifications according to their geographic origin and skin color, decided that Europeans were great, Africans were crafty and indolent, and this is the way in which botany helped to reinforce imperial racism. And, yeah, it's a deeply controversial subject.

[William Dalrymple]

This kind of classification is a real thing. I mean, when I did Patient Assassin, and I was talking about Sir Michael O'Dwyer, who was the Lieutenant Governor of Punjab at the time, he loved classifying people like plants. And he went through the different sort of tribes, as he called them, of the Punjab, and gave them all sorts of like, sort of three line. And none of them really very lovely. I mean, I think there were sort of two sets of people he quite endured. And the rest, you know, they drink too much, they fall over, they're crafty, you know, all of those kind of words. But they were presented just like the biology classifications I studied at school. So it is. It is a real mode of thinking that you put people in boxes like you put plants in boxes.

[Satnam Sanghera]

And it continues now, it shapes because those people decided, for example, that certain people will martial races, including Sikhs. As you can tell from our physiques, we're not. Right.

[William Dalrymple]

Speak for yourself. I could have you. I could have you in a fight.

[Satnam Sanghera]

But it's such a powerful idea that a lot of these people, like the Punjabi Sikhs, still see themselves as a martial race. And they're not. They're just people.

[Anita Anand]

And that's just the tip of the iceberg. There was a book published in 1868 called the People of India, and it is an enormous, great sort of ethno biological study, and it contains photographs of all the different castes and tribes of South Asia, ranging from Tibetans and Aboriginals right through to the Doms of Bihar. It is sort of, you know, to our ears, completely and astonishingly racist. The image with the label the Mohammedan, it is illustrated by a picture of an aligar laborer who's given the following caption. His features are peculiarly Mohammedan and exemplify in a strong manner the obstinacy, sensuality, ignorance and bigotry of his class. It is hardly possible perhaps, to conceive features more essentially repulsive. Now, that's a direct quote from this, and it goes on every single ethnic and tribal group in the subcontinent over a number of volumes.

[William Dalrymple]

Yeah. And it talks a lot about caste identity, reinforces caste identity. You know, this is what these people are like. And again, you put somebody in a box.

[Satnam Sanghera]

Yeah.

[William Dalrymple]

And it's very hard to get out of the box.

[Satnam Sanghera]

That's exactly the reason Kew Gardens is full of all these samples. It's the same reason why the British Museum has so many human remains, because the Victorians were obsessed with measuring skeletons.

[Anita Anand]

And brains and noses and foreheads.

[Satnam Sanghera]

Yeah, totally. And classifying people. It's the same ideology. And even though we've got rid of a lot of this weird 19th century racial science, lots of it persists. And weirdly and depressingly, some of it's coming back.

[Anita Anand]

What do you mean it's coming back? Salam?

[Satnam Sanghera]

Well, there's some very controversial academics, one of whom was at Oxford lately recently, who have been indulging in this racial science, who still believe there are differences between black people and white people and so on. And racial science is quite a big thing on X on Twitter, part of this new online racist Anglosphere, people saying, oh, we've got this brand new, you know, transatlantic Anglosphere between Musk and Tommy Robinson and so on. But as I explained, in Empire World, this existed in the 19th century. It's just the people involved were Rudyard Kipling and Roosevelt. They were. They were talking about weird racist ideas back in the 19th century.

[Anita Anand]

And Rhodes, Rhodes was a big guy for the Anglosphere, wasn't he?

[Satnam Sanghera]

Yeah. And you've got poems like the White Man's Burden, you know, and this is not a new thing.

[William Dalrymple]

Can we bring it to class again? Because I want to know a bit. I mean, I probably don't want to know, but I should know about some of the names of plants that included words that we deemed completely unacceptable and racist. Now.

[Satnam Sanghera]

Yeah, I mean, there's different systems of classifying plants. There's Linnaeus system, but there's also the common plant system. And until the 1990s, it was quite frequently some plants were referred to with the N word. You know, I could think of three in front of me, which I'm not going to say out loud, but there was also the Jew bush, the kefir plums, and when you talk about decolonization, people are very allergic to that idea and that word. But actually, if it involves the eradication of those racist common plant names, I think it's an entirely good thing.

[William Dalrymple]

Another thing that you talked about was the difficulties that some faced. These imperial explorers who wanted to bring back samples and see whether they could be refined and grown by empire in other territories. You talked about rubber and Singapore and Malay. I want to know about the difficulties in transportation because you were talking about a type of seed that needs to be kept moist to transport. Now, these difficulties that face a botanist who wants to bring back samples will inevitably lead to innovation. And they did, didn't they? I mean, the one thing I'm thinking about is the thing that you write about, the Wardian case. I'm fascinated by this. Tell us a bit more about the Wardian case.

[Satnam Sanghera]

Yeah, so it's a great book by Luke Keogh on the Wardian case. We nowadays just assume it's easy to transport plants, Right? But back in the day, in the 19th century, plants on a boat, they'd get killed by the salt and the seawater, the heat, the darkness, being manhandled, being eaten by goats. You know, it's very hard to transport any plants. But a guy called Nathaniel Bagshaw Ward solved the problem accidentally in 1829 in an experiment in his own home in London. He placed a moth cocoon in a sealed glass bottle with some fern fronds and some moist soil and discovered that the plant sprouted and thrived without being watered for three years.

[William Dalrymple]

Wow.

[Satnam Sanghera]

And this led to the creation of the Warden case, which is a portable named after him. Named after him. A portable glass sided wooden or metal container that contains a kind of controlled environment for plants to thrive in. So, you know, the case creates a regulated atmosphere like a modern terrain, keeping the plants hydrated and healthy. The glass allows them to receive sunlight, there's ventilation to keep out the rodents, and you've got battens to kind of hold the plant into place. And this object appeared in the great exhibition in 1851, and the historian Lynn Barber described it as probably one of the best investments the British government has ever made. I mean, it totally transformed plant transfers. And the Warden case was how tea was moved from China to India to establish the salmon dodge eating tea district.

[Anita Anand]

That's something we're going to be dealing with in our Opium War episode. Because of course, it was the deficit in British finances that the popularity of tea drinking created, which needed a solution. And the solution was selling opium to the Chinese in order to be able to pay for the tea.

[Satnam Sanghera]

The Warden case involved in that, the rubber industry. The plants were transferred from Brazil to Asia with the Warding case moving bananas to the Pacific islands and Central America and the Caribbean. That was the warding case and also smuggling the cinchona plant from South America. To India was also the Wardian case. So this. I don't know if you've ever seen one. I saw one in Kew Gardens.

[William Dalrymple]

I. I've seen it only because I looked it up after. After reading about it through you. But describe it. I mean, just.

[Satnam Sanghera]

It's kind of like a crate. Yeah. I saw one at Kew Gardens. It's like a crate. A bit like a Fortnum and Mason hamper. I'm saying that because I'm looking at a Fortnum and Mason hamper, but so posh.

[William Dalrymple]

You've changed. You've changed. Sangara.

[Anita Anand]

We remembered when you were a wolverine.

[William Dalrymple]

On the beach like the rest of us. Yes, go on. Like a Fortnum and Mason.

[Satnam Sanghera]

Yeah. Like it's wooden or metal and it's got glass, it's got holes in it's. Yeah, it's a box. But incredibly simple. But changed the shape of the planet. Incredible.

[William Dalrymple]

Would you have had ships just filled with Wardian cases or. It was part of a voyage. So try to imagine how this. This all worked.

[Satnam Sanghera]

Yeah. They'd obviously be on the deck because they need sunlight. Right. But. Yes, and it'd be a constant battle to make sure that they weren't dist. Disturbed or the glass wasn't broken and so on. But it was still easier than actually trying to transport plants in the old way.

[William Dalrymple]

I mean, we thought about tea and we are going to talk about tea and opium a lot more in this series. But I want to know about some of the other plants that are lesser known now. Gutta percha. Am I saying it right?

[Satnam Sanghera]

Gutta percha. I've got some here.

[William Dalrymple]

Oh, what is it? So it looks like a small one you made earlier. It looks like a squash ball. It's black and round. Is it squish?

[Satnam Sanghera]

It's not squishy off, actually. It's a 19th century golf ball.

[William Dalrymple]

Oh, right.

[Satnam Sanghera]

Yeah. Gutta percha, very important, is a natural thermoplastic and it was found in a tree found in Malaysia and Indonesia. And the gum was extracted by killing the tree and extracting it. And you might have some in your teeth because it's still used in dentistry today for fillings. Yeah. But crucially, it made golf balls. But also, more importantly, it became a vital component in waterproofing telegraph cables. So gutta percha made telegraph communication, Morse code, speedy news reporting, international communication possible. So this one plant changed the way in which empires were managed, way wars were waged. Incredible. And also the places where these wires, cables were laid are also where the cables are still laid. Because they chose the shortest route. So you could say this plant is the foundation of the modern Internet.

[William Dalrymple]

And when you say. I mean, we sort of gobbled up the explanation, as it were, but you know, you said it's in your mouth because this stuff is used for fillings, because it is waterproof, it's a sealant. And even now, even now they use.

[Satnam Sanghera]

It, though it's not used that much now for things, mainly because people went crazy about it and they, they over harvested it and it's all. But. It's all but forgotten. Dagota percha. I mean, we don't even know how to pronounce it. But in the Victorian era it was a household word, you know, but the scale of the demand was such that millions of trees were destroyed and it was one of the first great industrial ecological disasters.

[Anita Anand]

And where is it now? Is it in the wild at all?

[Satnam Sanghera]

Yeah, it exists, but it's not really hardly anything. Yeah, Saudi.

[William Dalrymple]

Yeah, House plants. Now, looking around, I think this will be really fun for people who are listening to this while they're doing the vacuuming or, you know, thinking about folding up laundry or all the things, all the wonderful things that you share with us that you do while you're listening to it. If people were to look around their house, I'm just thinking of like household favorites. So a lot of people have ferns, cheese plants. What are their origin stories?

[Satnam Sanghera]

Yeah, that's the thing. We see a lot of these plants as intrinsically British, but almost all of them came from the Empire. So fern mania convulsed. 19th century Britain became very fashionable to display ferns, actually in Wardian cases.

[Anita Anand]

Really?

[Satnam Sanghera]

But there was a massive downside to this. So people were taking ferns from around, from Australia, from America and so on, bringing them back and causing huge damage just so they could have them in their drawing rooms. And the other great imperial plant in the, in the household was the palm. You know, Queen Victoria famously introduced the palm into her residences and it became a symbol of empire. Rudyard Kipling uses the palm as a symbol of the empire in one of his famous poems.

[Anita Anand]

Was that part of her trip to Kew Gardens you mentioned in the last episode when she, when she spent three trips to go and see the palm house?

[Satnam Sanghera]

Yeah, it's possibly related, but yeah, I mean, palm was not only beautiful, it's an industrial super product. So that became a similar vampire. But then the biggest thing changed was in gardens. And obviously, you know, most of our plants in our gardens come from elsewhere. The Romans gave the British grapevine the rosemary came in the 14th century. But in the 18th century everything changed because of two men. A man called John Bartram and a man called Peter Collinson. John Bartram was in America, he was in Philadelphia, Peter Collinson was in London. And they came up with a scheme called Bartram's Boxes. And so you would order a crate for five guineas and it would contain around 100 varieties of seeds and dried plant specimens. And through this scheme we had introduced to Britain plants including the magnolia, rhododendrons, mountain laurels, azaleas, sugar maples and sumac. So these plants, which are now seen as a very British, actually came from empire.

[William Dalrymple]

I mean, that's azaleas and rhododendrons. I've been through many a posh house garden and you know, they have little walkways filled with these enormous azaleas and rhododendrons in fortune, all brought in from the Himalayas.

[Satnam Sanghera]

Yeah. And actually one of the people who bought in rhododendrons was Joseph Hooker, who was one of the directors of Kew Gardens. And he set up some very famous rhododendron gardens in Scotland which are still thriving today.

[William Dalrymple]

I mean, did they get enormously eye wateringly wealthy on the back of this? I mean, as you talk about fern mania and this desire to have you see them in wealthy houses, as I say, as alias and rhododendrons, does it make them a lot of money?

[Satnam Sanghera]

It's more that rich people spent absolute the equivalent of millions of pounds of getting these plants. I don't know what the equivalent would be. I don't know. Having a robot if you're very rich or having a Rolls Royce. Like they were such status symbols in Staley Homes.

[Anita Anand]

And did people go and collect them themselves? I mean, if you were a landowner, the west coast of Scotland, would you make a trip to Bhutan or to Sikkim and get your rhododendrons and azaleas or did you just get a Bartram box?

[William Dalrymple]

You get a Bartram Collinson box if.

[Satnam Sanghera]

You'Re relatively older and you had the boxes. But if you were rich, you probably employed botanists. If you were the East India Company, you hired Joseph Banks or William Hooker to do it for you.

[William Dalrymple]

Another plant, or rather tree, which I'm not that familiar with, but everybody was mad for it at one time in Victorian England, is the Jamaican lace bark tree. Now, first of all, what does it look like? What is it?

[Satnam Sanghera]

I've seen, I've seen a sample in Kew Gardens actually. It's basically A tree. The only way I can say it, it's a tree. When you cut through the bark, it's got lace inside. It's incredible. It's like got a doily inside it and it's. It grows to around 13 or 30ft. It was only found in the rocky crevices of Jamaica's mountains. But the Victorians, who loved anything Lacy, went crazy for it.

[Anita Anand]

I'm just looking it up now. It's extraordinary, isn't it?

[Satnam Sanghera]

And so people used it to make hard wearing clothing. People made whips out of it for enslavement doilies and fans.

[Anita Anand]

Antimacassars.

[Satnam Sanghera]

Charles II was said to have been sent a suit made entirely of relate spark and it was presented as a wonder material again at the great exhibition of 1851. It was a bit like graphene. I mean, you've got this bark where you've got a cloth inside, so it saves you a lot of the hassle having to create a cloth.

[Anita Anand]

What did you just cut it? You cut it very thinly, or is that how it works?

[Satnam Sanghera]

Or you take away the outer bark of the tree very carefully and it reveals inner layers and it's like a net, like in structure. And then you soak that in water to soften it, to make it pliable and then you stretch it and you can make amazing things or you can layer it. It's very lightweight, very breathable, very unique. And people went absolutely crazy. A bit like gutta percha. And guess what happened?

[William Dalrymple]

Yeah, they killed it over, harvested it, killed it off. Although I've just had a look at one of these posh websites that sends pot plants to your home a little bit like, you know, the Bartram boxes and you can buy lace bark trees for your home.

[Anita Anand]

We can all get mail order.

[William Dalrymple]

You can get mail order lace bark trees for £35 you can get a young lace bark tree. Also, I just wanted to explain one thing that William said, because this is something that if you're posh, you, you know all about it and I only found out about it quite late in life. But an antimacassar in that this is a sort of a doily that goes on the back of a sofa so that if you've got heavily brill creamed oiled hair, you don't stain the material.

[Anita Anand]

Or in a train. Famously, all British Rail trains used to have antimacassars on the back of the seats so that people traveling with oiled hair would not wreck the furniture.

[William Dalrymple]

Now I' quite an advanced age when I learned about this because you know, in India, nobody cares. And every seat is staged primarily, if.

[Anita Anand]

Not with that, with palm all over.

[William Dalrymple]

The walls, nobody cares. Okay, so that's the Jamaican lace bark tree and it also appeared at the Great Exhibition. And the Great Exhibition again of 1851 is such an interesting place because it's.

[Anita Anand]

A shocking to be able to take a TARDIS back there, wouldn't you?

[William Dalrymple]

An amazing thing. It was. It was not only a flex, an imperial flex of, look how powerful we are, look at what our reach is, but it' shop window. To say, look, this is something, you know, like the latest robot vacuum cleaner. This is what you really need in your life. And people would come, you know, I think it was one third of the population of Britain go through the doors of the Great Exhibition and, you know, they would see things and suddenly covet them. Because if they were in there, in this, the greatest shop window on Earth, also entirely made of glass, like the palm house of the last episode at Kew Gardens, and you would want it. So these crazies, you can find their roots stretching into the soil of the Great Exhibition.

[Anita Anand]

The kind of world I grew up in in Scotland still had these plantings of trees, azaleas, rhododendrons, but also things like giant hogweeds, which we sort of take for granted and are now kind of virtually native.

[William Dalrymple]

Giant hogweed is what.

[Anita Anand]

Giant hogweed comes from New Zealand originally.

[William Dalrymple]

What does it look like? For those who haven't seen a hogweed.

[Anita Anand]

It'S like a sort of. Sort of giant cauliflower, but it's something that is one of those Victorian plantings. See all over Victorian houses all over the. Particularly the west coast of Scotland. And same with rhododendrons, plantations. It's extraordinary to imagine that it's a foreign plantation.

[William Dalrymple]

No, I know. Stately home, azalean. So at home in the stately home. Absolutely right. Absolutely right. Look, let's take a break here and when we come back, let's tackle the prickly problem of the prickly pear. If you need three new reasons to.

[Anita Anand]

Love Jack wraps at Jack in the.

[William Dalrymple]

Box even more, here they are. Chicken fajita, chicken Caesar and delicious.

[Anita Anand]

Starting at $3.

[William Dalrymple]

Coincidentally, those are the same three reasons.

[Satnam Sanghera]

You should come to Jack in the.

[William Dalrymple]

Box right now at Jack, every bite's a big deal. Welcome back. Now, it won't have escaped your notice that, you know, whenever you're traveling through an airport and, you know, some. Some countries are far more militant about this, you know, you can't even bring a sandwich in or a piece of fruit without getting jumped on and having to throw it all in the bin or declare it. But you bring a non indigenous plant into a country, you have every prospect of spreading mites, disease, destruction or indeed overwhelming a native population of plants and animals. You get all of these, you know, warnings not to do it. This must have happened. Satnam. When you have these clever cases and clever means of transporting, there is no way you can ensure that you don't have. And probably you didn't even have the science to know what diseases and mites you're bringing along with them.

[Satnam Sanghera]

Precisely. I mean, we've talked about all these plant transfers and it's very innovative and exciting. But at the same time as you're, you're transporting live plants, you're also sending pests around the world. And the biologist Richard Mack said that the Results of the 19th century Nursery trade were both beautiful and disastrous. And it's the same now. So, you know, a large, a third of the invasive arthropods in Europe were introduced by the live plant trade. And In Britain, nearly 90% of the invertebrate pests first arrived on live plants. And this was part of the story right from the beginning. So when we started transporting plants, we started transporting problems. So one of the most damaging was coffee rust, which devastated the coffee plantations of Ceylon in the late 19th century, causing losses of up to £2 million a year. And live coffee plants from British Guyana and so on were thought to have introduced the, the fungus. And so the planters had to turn to other crops like tea, rubber and cinchona. And there was another cautionary tale in the prickly pear, which is this cactus found in Mexico and southern states of America. And it was introduced to Australia in 1788 by British colonialists. And it's prickly pear. I don't know if you've seen it. It's edible.

[William Dalrymple]

I mean, it's sort of the red thing. You know, when you've got the fork shaped cactus, you've got the red fruit, which is also quite spiked growing on that. That's the prickly pear, is it?

[Satnam Sanghera]

Yeah, and really good for cattle feed. Problem is it spread incredibly quickly and it swamped farmland. And so by 1925 it covered more than 60 million acres.

[William Dalrymple]

Where did it cover so much territory?

[Satnam Sanghera]

Australia.

[William Dalrymple]

In Australia. Gosh, it took over Australia.

[Satnam Sanghera]

Farmers just had to abandon the land. But it's also a rare example and they almost completely solved the problem. They found that if you introduce the cactoblastis moth, moth will lay eggs in the prickly pear and destroy it. So they actually managed to. It's very rare situation where they managed to solve the problem.

[William Dalrymple]

Yes, I know. Famously, in Australia, they imported rabbits to feed people. The rabbits took over. Myxomatosis becomes a thing. They introduced the dingo, which then very happily starts taking over and eating livestock and stuff. You know, the unintended consequences.

[Anita Anand]

And here I'm talking from Delhi, but next week I'm gonna be in Jaipur. And when you go to Rajasthan. The single most common plant in this grub around Rajasthan is mesquite, which comes from Mexico. And this was specifically brought in by the Maharaja Jodhpur, who scattered seeds from his tiger moth plain. The botanical name is Prosopis juliflora. And it's become this sort of. It's eaten up Rajasthan.

[Satnam Sanghera]

Wow.

[Anita Anand]

Suits Rajasthan so well.

[Satnam Sanghera]

Have you been, William, to St. Helena?

[Anita Anand]

Never have. I'd love to go to St. Helena.

[Satnam Sanghera]

Because, you know, it's interesting. It's also where Napoleon ended up. But it's the ultimate example of what could go wrong. Because there were three phases of destruction by the different colonized. So first of all, the Portuguese introduced goats. I know you're a big fan of goats, William.

[Anita Anand]

I love goats.

[Satnam Sanghera]

But they thinned the vegetation to the point of leaving the soil on the slopes very vulnerable.

[Anita Anand]

But they also fertilize it.

[Satnam Sanghera]

Yes. Always a defender of the goat.

[William Dalrymple]

He is. I mean, there's no talking to himself now with goats and pigeons, you're going to lose. Just give it up. Okay, so they deplete the soil.

[Satnam Sanghera]

Next you had the East India Company, who set about chopping down all the trees for cooking and heating and making booze. And finally you had the alien plant introduction by the British imperialists, many of which became highly invasive. So St. Helena is a microcosm of what can go wrong. I'd love to go there to see.

[William Dalrymple]

Is there any estimate of how many species were lost during that time of imperial planting and supplanting?

[Satnam Sanghera]

I think it's impossible to really measure this stuff. But St. Helena is a good place to study it because it's. It's an island, isn't it? So it's a discrete entity where you can monitor it. The thing is that when you introduce plantations, in particular, these one crop economies, you make the. The nature very vulnerable because you need diversity for a healthy environment. And so whenever you introduce sugar plantations or cinchona plantations, you create huge environmental problems. And there were so many other things that the British did. They stopped the 18th century tradition in Australia of burning, controlled burning in southern Australia. They oversaw the cutting down of oak forests in the Himalayan regions of India and replaced them with pine plantations for resin. And obviously dry pine needles become a cause of wildfires. Barbados was used to the point of utter erosion. The deforestation of Guyana, the West Indies, 60% of New Zealand's forests destroyed.

[Anita Anand]

Another example, not in the British Empire, but in the Stalinist USSR is great swathes of Uzbekistan where they had monoculture of cotton. And the entire cotton for all the Soviet armies was grown in Uzbekistan. So Stalin was very clear that it should be taken as a kind of national priority to keep this cotton coming in and growing more and more. And when you go to the area around Khiva and northern Uzbekistan, you pass miles and miles and miles of dead earth. And it's not desert, it's earth which has been killed by monocultures and it is biologically dead. There's nothing you can do with it. And there's miles and miles of it. It's very, very striking.

[Satnam Sanghera]

Mahogany is a very interesting one because we all go to these stately homes and marvel at the mahogany furniture. But a lot of it was harvested from the Caribbean and these mahogany forests were, you know, pulled down to the point of near extinction. And we don't make that connection between the Beauty of these 19th century drawing rooms and the environmental destruction that we caused.

[William Dalrymple]

So, I mean, you can sort of credit this monoculture with the awakening of Gandhi. I mean, he comes from South Africa, he wants to go and do a tour of India to get to know it before he'll get involved in the, in the congress movement. And he comes across the indigo farmers in Champaran in Bihar in 1917, and he just sees, you know, look, they're forced by the British to grow indigo on 15% of their land, give their entire crop as rent to planters, and then harvests fail and they are starving. And this is the thing, just looking at those beleaguered farmers who are not allowed to grow the things that they need awakens something in him. So, you know, there are so many stories, I mean, more stories than you'd think, linked to this sort of imperial botany.

[Anita Anand]

The best example for this we're going to be dealing with is obviously opium. Where opium was, was a crop forced on farmers throughout Bihar, same area. And it led to not only famines, but obviously to the addiction, as we said in an earlier episode, to 30% of the Chinese population. I've just come back from Vietnam and I had no idea that the opium industry was also the Main lure in terms of money for the French going into Indochina, and the opium harvests in Vietnam and in Cambodia and in Laos paid for about 30 to 40% of French imperial costs.

[William Dalrymple]

Well, I mean, it's astonishing. We'll do a big thing on the opium wars. We will do much more. Just. Just coming back again, circling back, I've got this sort of image of these enormous acres of Australian land being colonized by these huge Mexican cactuses holding up their little prickly pears in the air defiantly. But just thinking of some of the places which must have lost so many of their own indigenous plants and things, and therefore indigenous knowledge and medicine and, you know, these things that stretch back thousands of years. I mean, you said it's really impossible to know what is lost, but has anyone started doing a study of what has been lost?

[Satnam Sanghera]

I think you raised something very important in that we marvel at the accomplishments of some of these imperialists, but almost everything they did, all the knowledge they got came from indigenous people. You know, so gutta percha, I mean, that was being used in Malaya for canes and handles way before the Westerners discovered it, you know, and as you know, with the story of tea, you know, the Cinquepo people were drinking tea underneath the eyes of the British, who didn't realize, and the British dismissed them as kind of tribal nomads with no sovereignty over their land and overlooked their use of tea plants. And when it came to rubber, there were people in South America who were using it way before the West. And one of the things I saw at Kew was a rubber item made in 1817 by South Americans. I mean, South Americans were using rubber for balls, torches, containers even for helping with bruises and hemorrhaging, you know, way before the west came. And then, of course, you've got quinine and cinchona. And historians think that actually indigenous people were using this drug way before the west arrived. So we need to acknowledge that the indigenous often were ahead of the West.

[William Dalrymple]

Well, I mean, 100%, those are the ones that we know about that caught people's eyes, but the ones that they, you know, weren't interested in or didn't, you know, compute in those days that are now lost as a result. I'm just thinking about the number of times I've heard, you know, the depletion of the Amazon for again, growing a monoculture of wood and trees. It's possibly wiping out things like cures for hideous diseases that will be lost forever, which exist in those enormously diverse places. You know, we'll never be able to bring them back because we don't know what we've lost again. These things are complicated and two things can be true at the same time, because Britain has done a great deal to conserve seeds from extinct species. And seed banks are just one enormous contribution, I think, to the future. I think I mentioned this before and thank God they're doing it.

[Anita Anand]

And biological collections, exactly.

[William Dalrymple]

You know, sort of saving these things until we're in a position to bring them back. What do you make of this kind of paradox of also being the saviors of environment with these seed banks, but also, as you say, having depleted it all to begin with, with imperialism, whether it's British imperialism, Portuguese or wherever it is from.

[Satnam Sanghera]

Well, I guess you've got to the heart of my argument I make in Empire World in that opposite things are often true at the same time. British Empire was involved in slavery and anti slavery. It spread the free press and press censorship, but it also destroyed the environment. But also British imperialists were involved in the birth of environmentalism. They saw what was happening in St. Helena, they saw what was happening in Australia and they acted upon it. You read some of these accounts from people like even Benjamin Franklin, I know he's a friend of the show from certain 19th century scientists. And they're observing basically the greenhouse effect and they then do things about it. So one of the earliest initiatives for soil and forest preservation in the colonies began in St. Helena, you know, with the East India Company starting environmental policies. And this is something that Peter Frankopan picks up on in his great recent book on the environment. You know, the Bombay forest conservancy in 1847 was set up to solve the problem that the British had caused. And soon similar policies were taken up in Australia and Canada and South Africa and so on.

[Anita Anand]

And you get national parks too, don't you? Being introduced quite early on 1778 in Tobago, the Tobago Main Ridge, which is sometimes said to be the earliest forest reserve in the world, spreading to America. Yellowstone National park in 1872, Banff in.

[Satnam Sanghera]

Australia, national parks in New Zealand. And we see national parks as, you know, there are definitely imperial creation as an intrinsically good thing, except they were created because the imperialists had caused the problem in the first place. And often when they're set up, the indigenous people were often blamed for the problems. And also the indigenous people living there weren't allowed to live their lives as they wanted to, you know, because they were restricted by these environmental policies. So increasingly, Even in the 21st century, people are seeing national parks as a very problematic thing, as a contradictory thing.

[Anita Anand]

You have this paradox in India today, again in Rajasthan, where I'll be next week, there is this tension between trying to save the tiger and the problem of keeping out the villagers who live in the parks. And in the 1980s and 90s, a lot of the killing of tigers was being done by villagers who resented being kept out of the parks. So they'd leave poison. This happened at a place called Sariska. They'd leave poison so the tigers would be killed, so they'd then be allowed back into the empty parks. They saw the tiger being turned, in a sense, into their enemy as an agent of their own exclusion. And that has now been worked through. And they found ways of not banning the villagers from collecting wood and so on and harvesting the parks in the way they need to harvest it.

[William Dalrymple]

Yeah, and I think when we say parks, I mean a lot of people will have in their minds sort of mannered parks, but we're talking about wildernesses of great swathes of tree filled fauna filled land which is untouched, largely untouched, or should be untouched by man.

[Anita Anand]

Sutton, one thing we haven't talked so much about is the extinction of animals. I mean, famously, the dodo was one of the first examples of an indigenous animal which imperialists wipe out. Madagascar, I think, was the place where dodos were wiped out. Give us other examples of imperial extinctions.

[Satnam Sanghera]

Yeah, I mean, you could think of any animal that is at risk today. And the British and German and European colonists were hunting them to near extinction. In the 19th century, there was a massive hunting craze. Hunting memoirs would sell hundreds of thousands of copies.

[Anita Anand]

Whenever you go to one of those old hill station houses, you see these libraries full of unread books of so and so's exactly that. The hunting memoirs of pigs sticking in Meerut and days with the tigers in Nanital and this sort of thing.

[Satnam Sanghera]

But then the British and the Germans start panicking because these animals are no longer available. So they set up protection schemes. I mean, there was an organization, it's called Flora and Fauna International, still working now, set up at the time to preserve animals. And it's a huge paradox. So I see with the Royal family. The royal family now are very keen on protecting wild animals in Africa and India and so on, but they literally, the royal family were involved in these hunts. They were involved in helping to make these animals go extinct in the first.

[William Dalrymple]

Place, but as were the Indian Monarchs as well. I mean, I've just come back from a tour of a wildlife park where there are tigers, not many. There's elephants. Again, not as many as there should be. And you go to the lodge where you can stay in this place, and it's the Kibani park, if anyone's wondering. Amazing place. Amazing, amazing place. You sort of stay in these huts and the main maharajas, what was formerly the Maharaja's hunting lodge has just got so many pictures on the walls of maharajas on massive hunts and then inviting, you know, the local collector or the local governor when the British come along. But there's this history of just basically blowing the bejesus out of animals, which goes back even to the Indian maharajas. I mean, they do it as well.

[Anita Anand]

It's a long history. When I was doing the Golden Road, looking at Indian imports into Europe, ivory is probably the single most lucrative import, and live elephants. And on the Red Sea, harbours at Maes Homos and Berenice, which are the two really important Roman ports where Indian and Ethiopian and Arab sailors would land and where Roman ships would leave. From the berths for the ships there are 20% larger than the ones in the Mediterranean coast. Why? Because they were bringing in elephant transports, both for military use in the Roman armies and for hunts in the circuses, the Colosseum and so on. So tigers and elephants. And in Sicily, there is an extraordinary mosaic from the 1st century at Piazza Amerina. There's an image in the center of this mosaic, in this lunette, of a personification of India, and she's holding a tusk of an elephant, and she. On one side is an elephant itself and the other side is a tiger. And these are all basically images of Indian exports which this merchant who built the villa made his fortune by selling.

[William Dalrymple]

So I wonder if it's true to say that, you know, humans have always been shitty to animals and they haven't really cared very much about the consequences. But with the introduction of imperialism and sort of this great, almost sort of a factory of exporting and production, it just accelerates our worst inclinations and does wipe things out in a way that actually our human proclivities dented but didn't.

[Satnam Sanghera]

Destroy, also created a massive hypocrisy. I mean, there's TV footage of Prince Philip killing a Tiger in the 1960s. It was never broadcast, but at the same time, Prince Philip and his grandsons are massive campaigners for animal preservation and conservation.

[Anita Anand]

Those two are not incompatible. You can have come from a past of killing tigers and become a conservationist, you can see a progression there.

[Satnam Sanghera]

My problem is they never talk about it. So, Buckingham, all these palaces are full of mahogany, ivory, animal skins, tiger skins. And it would be much stronger, their case would be stronger, if they said, look, we've got all this stuff, we're going to get rid of it and we're going to set an example and we did something wrong. And for me, in Empire World, this is what my argument ultimately is. Britain pontificates in all sorts of areas animal conservation, environmentalism, democracy. But we rarely reflect on what we did during the Empire and our Apache records during the British Empire on all of these themes. We would be a healthier nation if we acknowledged what we did.

[William Dalrymple]

So, I mean, rather than you sort of said two different things there. You said, you know, get rid of all this stuff in the past. Wouldn't it just be better to have signage like this is mahogany that was brought over from such and such a place and this is a potted history of how that happened.

[Satnam Sanghera]

Yeah, actually, Prince William has talked about getting rid of all the ivory, actually himself. Yeah. I think education has to be the aim, but we have so much talk about signage and it doesn't happen. And also, who really gets to walk around these palaces at all?

[William Dalrymple]

I don't know. What do you think, William?

[Anita Anand]

Well, I think. I think there is forward movement and signage and I mean, one example is the National Trust and they've obviously gotten to a lot of controversy about it. They have started redoing their signage. I begin my book, the Anarchy with a section on Powys Castle and how when I went there 10 years ago, there was all this stuff about this loot being quotes, gifts from the grateful people of India to Lord Clive, who they were so pleased to be conquered by, and the National Trust subsequent to that, because so many people who'd read the book then went round it and complained, re signed it, only to have people like Nigel Bigger and history recame complain about the signage. And in a sense, Satnam, you and I have all contributed to a bit of the backlash we've provoked. So when you get Kemi Badenoch, or before her, Liz Truss, complaining about unpatriated historians, it's us they're talking about and complaining. You've been at the center of it, Satnam. You've had more than I have.

[Satnam Sanghera]

Yeah. All I want them is to talk about it. I would love to hear Prince William, Prince Harry talk about conservation and talk about the Royal Family's history of destroying the environment and destroying animals. And that's mainly what I want and to have a proper conversation and to.

[William Dalrymple]

Acknowledge what we did Would that conversation involved with the acknowledgement necessarily need an apology as well? Is that what you want?

[Satnam Sanghera]

I don't think apologies really matter that much. I think we are so far from where we need to be. We need to begin by talking and understanding.

[Anita Anand]

Yep. Understanding what we've done.

[Satnam Sanghera]

Yeah. And I think basically we need what you're doing. We need to talk about this stuff and acknowledge the history and then doing something about it. It comes much, much later, I think.

[William Dalrymple]

Well, listen, we, we are delighted to have you on to talk about it and, you know, we talk about these things week after week, but it is always a pleasure having you on. Best of luck with the wedding. If we happen not to be there. Satnam indeed. And until the next time we meet, it's goodbye from me. Anita Arnan.

[Anita Anand]

A goodbye from me. William Durimple, Patrick Bishop here from the Battleground podcast. Saul, David and I are currently on the ground in Ukraine. A big observing, reporting and testing the mood of a nation at war as it digests what the triumphant arrival of Donald Trump means for them and their future. That noise you can hear in the background is the train we're traveling on from Kharkiv onto the next stage of our visit.

[Satnam Sanghera]

And it's not just a vital interest to Ukrainians. The conflict with Russia and what Trump plans to do to end it is of crucial importance to all of us. We're standing at a hinge moment that will determine the world's history.

[Anita Anand]

That's why we're here and that's why you should listen out for a stream of special battleground episodes that will inform, engage and sharpen your understanding. So stay tuned for some cracking special.

[Satnam Sanghera]

Episodes, starting with our response to Trump's inauguration speech, combining frontline reportage, exclusive interviews with the soldiers fighting this extraordinary war, and razor sharp analysis from real experts.

[Anita Anand]

So so do click and follow us wherever you get your podcasts.