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- [00:01]
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 club@www.empirepoduk.com. now more than ever, Lowes knows you don't just want a low price, you want the lowest price. And with our lowest price guarantee, you can count on us for competitive prices on all your home improve projects. If you find a qualifying lower price somewhere else on the same item, we'll match it Lowe's.
- [00:39]
William Dalrymple
We help you save price Match applies.
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Anita Anand
The same item current price at qualifying retailers. Exclusions and terms apply. Learn how we'll match price@lowes.com Lowest Price Guarantee Are you still quoting 30 year old movies? Have you said cool beans in the past 90 days? Do you think Discover isn't widely accepted? If this sounds like you, you're stuck in the past. Discover is accepted at 99% of places that take credit cards nationwide. And every time you make a purchase with your card, you automatically earn cash back. Welcome to the now it pays to Discover. Learn more@discover.com credit card based on the February 2024 Nielsen report oh, such a clutch pickup, Dave. I was worried we'd bring back the same team. I meant Those blackout motorized shades lines.com made it crazy affordable to replace our old blinds. Hard to install? No, it's easy. I installed these and then got some from my mom too. She talked to a design consultant for free and scheduled a professional measure and install hall of Fame son. They're the number one online retailer of custom window coverings in the world. Blinds.com is the goat. The goat.
- [01:45]
William Dalrymple
Save up to 50% with minimum purchase at blinds.com rules and restrictions may apply. Hello and welcome to Empire with me.
- [02:01]
Anita Anand
Anita Arnan and me, William Dalrymple.
- [02:05]
William Dalrymple
Why are you smirking?
- [02:06]
Anita Anand
It's back to Greenland.
- [02:07]
William Dalrymple
Back to Greenland.
- [02:08]
Anita Anand
Looking forward. I love Greenland.
- [02:10]
William Dalrymple
You do love Greenland. I mean, honestly, those last two episodes with Eleanor Barraclough were among the most chaotic I have ever taken part in.
- [02:22]
Anita Anand
Don't know why the Vikings sort of got us off on that chaotic.
- [02:26]
William Dalrymple
It was hilarious, it was informative. But it was also crude, lewd and just God knows where it was going to go next.
- [02:32]
Anita Anand
Ice queen nymphomaniacs and horny zombies. What more do you need for an empire?
- [02:36]
William Dalrymple
Yes, I know you really love the horny zombies. I mean, I love the horny zombies. Anyway, if you haven't heard, go back and listen and make whatever sense of it you can, but we continue our story of Greenland today, the largest island in the world with a population, one of the smallest populations, around 50,000 people, 89% of whom are Inuit. I mean, just, just can you recap the Viking madness in a couple of sentences in case people aren't going to go back and listen to it? I mean, I really, really hope they do because it's such a rip roaring story.
- [03:09]
Anita Anand
Sure. It's led by our favourite psycho killer, Eric the Red.
- [03:13]
William Dalrymple
I was gonna say you can't do it without doing that. I think that's the rule now on this podcast.
- [03:18]
Anita Anand
But yes, there will be so many listeners who have no idea what we're talking about. This is a reference to a talking heads record of Anitra and I's youth psycho killer. Anyway, Eric the Red identifies what Europeans and Westerners want to get out of Greenland, which is resource extraction. And it is the fate of the people of Greenland to be at the collecting end in all periods of history, of resources which other people want. And they don't really want the Inuits to actually live there. And this is as true of early Viking Greenland, when Vikings are after ivory and seal skins as it is today, when they're after rare earths. In all periods of history, people have just treated Greenland as a place to extract resources from. And the Inuits who live there are stuck with all these rival powers trying to take over their country for reasons other than wanting to look after the Inuit who live there. Now. The Norse settlement in Greenland is always a tenuous affair because there are very few resources there to support life. You can't grow wheat, for example, and while you can fish and live off seal meat or walrus meat, these are difficult things to hunt. And it relies on supplies of things that cannot be found in Greenland from the outside. And when Scandinavia is decimated by the Black Death, and when high quality African elephant ivory begins to be cheaper and more easily available than walrus ivory, the colony becomes more and more tenuous. The young leave, the old stay on, trying to live their old ways. But by the 14th century, when there's a spiral downwards of the medieval Ice age and things get colder and the habitable area diminishes and the winters lengthen and the summers shorten, the colony becomes more and more isolated, small, and in this dyeword spiral finally ends in 1500 with the Norse colony of Greenland becoming completely extinct.
- [05:33]
William Dalrymple
I mean, it's more than two sentences, but it is a comprehensive summary of what we've just done. But you sort of wait for about 200 years for the next colonization attempt to take place. And that happens again. The Danes will have a go in 1721. But it is led by God, isn't it?
- [05:55]
Anita Anand
Yes and no.
- [05:56]
William Dalrymple
Okay, which is interesting. All right, let's have a debate. Let's have a debate. Tell me why.
- [06:00]
Anita Anand
No, because the man, the Lutheran missionary and God man, as you could rightly say, Hans Egede, who leads the expedition to Greenland, is certainly partly inspired by the urge to find the old Norse colonists which he imagines are surviving still in their long houses. But he's also inspired by profit. And he establishes his own private colonial trading company, the Bergen Greenland Company.
- [06:32]
William Dalrymple
But does that, does that come. Does that come later? Because, I mean, I was under the impression that, you know, this was a Lutheran effort, that, you know what, we're going to have to go and make sure that people aren't pagans or are they Catholic? What are they? And it is, you know, sort of his desire for Protestantism to be the overwhelming religion not just of Denmark, but of the world. Doesn't that sort of launch him off first? Or is it, is it the profit motive?
- [06:58]
Anita Anand
Well, I think, I think it's both. And I think that's what's interesting about it. It's this peculiar mix of missionary and Bible in one hand, share certificates in the other with the promises of lucrative resource extraction, just like Eric the Red. And that's what's so interesting about it, that this is a period when, you know, muscular Protestant missionaries are traveling the world and we're seeing this also from Denmark in India. So there's a whole history that is often forgotten of the Danish East India Company. Have you ever been to Tranquilita?
- [07:34]
William Dalrymple
I haven't been to Tranquil. One of my.
- [07:36]
Anita Anand
It's one of the nicest places in the entire world and I strongly recommend a trip to Tranquil. But Tranquebar is this forgotten South Indian Dalish colony which, because it wasn't a great success, is perfectly preserved in its, well, not even 18th century form. It's a 17th century form.
- [07:54]
William Dalrymple
But where is it? Where in India?
- [07:56]
Anita Anand
It's a day's ride down the coast from Chennai Madras. And it's a gorgeous, gorgeous drive. And at the end of it you find this perfect late 17th century grid planned Baroque town completely intact with a barracks, a fort, the gateways, totally perfect. And the old governor's house is now a hotel and you can stay in it.
- [08:20]
William Dalrymple
How amazing.
- [08:21]
Anita Anand
And it has a very, very good museum on the Danish East India Company, which is something which I Don't think I knew existed. The place is called Fort Dansbourg. And what's interesting about it is it's founded in 1620, which is 20 years before Mudras. So the Danes get to the Coromandel coast before the English do. Or certainly they set up this settlement. And then there's one other, which again, is often forgotten, but very important, which they found in 1698 on the hoogly, originally called Fredrik Snagor, Frederick's Nagor.
- [08:53]
William Dalrymple
Really? You're joking.
- [08:55]
Anita Anand
No, I'm not. And that is today or since the 18th century, has been known as Serampore.
- [09:00]
William Dalrymple
So that's King Frederick of Denmark. It's named after Frederick of Denmark. And Nuggar means area of, in the local dialect, area, town of Frederick. Yeah.
- [09:09]
Anita Anand
And Serampur later becomes very important because it's where the missionaries base themselves, because the East India Company doesn't like missionaries. So even British missionaries base themselves in Serampore. And if I'm right, I think the first translation of the Bible into either Bengali or Hindustani takes place in Serampore. And the first printing press producing documents in Indian languages in Serampore. There's something like that. There's a long and interesting story of missionary activity taking place just upstream from Calcutta. Anyway, the point of all this is that we forget it. But the Danes also have a huge colonial trading company history. And so when our friend, the missionary Hans Egaday decides to go and try and convert the remaining Vikings from their old Catholic way, the way he envisages to do it is not to just go off with the Bible and, you know, faith and hope. But he actually founds a private colonial trading company. It's called the Bergen Greenland Company. And he gets money from the Bergen merchants, which is $9,000, the king, which is 200, and only $300 from the Copenhagen Missionary College. We should make clear here that of course, at this point, Denmark and Norway are one country under the same king. And hence why Bergen is part of the Danish attempt to recolonize Greenland. It's this unique and interesting mixture of missionary and capitalist that distinguishes this effort.
- [10:39]
William Dalrymple
But when he gets there and he has these sort of high hopes of, yes, all right, I accept your point. Making lots and lots of money, but also converting Catholics to the true faith. And if they've gone back to Norse paganism, even worse, converting them. What he finds, though, is Inuit communities living there. Is he bothered about trying to convert them as well? Or are they sort of beneath his radar and beneath his attention?
- [11:02]
Anita Anand
No, this. This mix of capitalism and missionary, which are the initial inspirations of Egidi's Greenland voyage, remain hand in hand throughout the 18th century and often compete with each other. So the Inuit are not particularly interested in converting initially to Christianity and in fact resist it in many cases quite strongly. And this gets in the way of making a profit from the colony, which is the other motive, particularly of the shareholders who put up the money for all the boats and the IKEA kits which will be unfolded on the shore and turned into dwelling houses and so on. So Egede, despite finding there are no north to convert, founds a settlement near the modern day capital Nuuk. And he begins to convert the indigenous Inuit to Christianity while encouraging them to gather the resources which will pay for the whole mission. In other words, furs, ivory, and in this age, whale blubber and oil. Remember, this is the great age of whaling. And one of the initial problems that the colony faces as well as everything else, is that the Dutch are busy whaling in this area and burned down one of the early Danish buildings and forts in Greenland at Nirnuk. And poor old Egidi's Bergen Greenland Company quickly goes bankrupt after six years, partly because of the Dutch intervention.
- [12:28]
William Dalrymple
So his company goes bankrupt, Willy. But that's not the end of the adventure because by now, I guess, you know, the king has got wind of the fact that there is profit in them there hills. And that's normally the pattern from private enterprise to royal charter that we've seen in other places, places like, you know, with the East India Company. Is that what happens here?
- [12:47]
Anita Anand
Yes, I mean, the king was already an investor in the original Bergen Greenland Company, but he now comes in on his own and he turns the small scrabbling Danish colony on Greenland into a royal monopoly. And that's very important because it means that others can't muscle in. So just like the East India Company has a monopoly that it defends very fiercely for 300 years in India, and no other British merchant bodies can can muscle in there, although several try. The royal monopoly on Greenland means that the crown has a complete control of the ivory skins, furs and blubber which are coming out of there. And this again, you know, works as a model for the king, but obviously reduces the indigenous inhabitants to selling only to one exporter who can control the price and who pays bottom dollar rather than top dollar for these products that these guys are gathering. So it's not at all a happy situation for the Inuit, many of whom do not want to convert to Christianity and many of whom want to be able to choose who they sell their goods to, but they're not allowed to.
- [13:54]
William Dalrymple
I mean, is this company sort of shareholder driven? Is it that, you know, the King has got investors just like we saw for the East India Company and so it is a dividend enterprise.
- [14:04]
Anita Anand
Exactly. So you've got a highly discriminatory system whereby the Inuits can only sell to this monopoly company and the profits go not to the Inuit, but to the shareholders in Copenhagen.
- [14:16]
William Dalrymple
Okay, but it's not. Yeah, I just sort of, you know, you might have in your mind that the King sends it out and the king pays for it and the king takes all the profit. But you forget that actually even the king's not willing to put all his money into it. He'll get shareholders on and investors on. So it immediately becomes a corporation.
- [14:32]
Anita Anand
Exactly. I think he has a majority of the shares. And this by the 1770s, becomes something called the Royal Greenlandic Trading Company and continues to have this monopoly which survives until the 1950s. Extraordinary.
- [14:49]
William Dalrymple
That's really late.
- [14:50]
Anita Anand
A complete stranglehold on all trade in the area. And then you have the usual colonial discrimination. This is the high era of colonialism around the world. And racial attitudes are obviously very different in Europe to how we look on them now. So in 1782, two, a whole series of extremely discriminatory racial laws are established. Anita, do you want to tell us about those?
- [15:15]
William Dalrymple
Well, I mean, yeah, it's a miserable list, to be honest. I mean, Danish people could only marry a Greenlander woman who has some white blood. So it's this whole miscegenation thing that happens every time you have sort of a colonial enterprise. Children had to be raised as Greenlanders, so your path is mapped out. So if you are a child of one of these, these mixed blooded Greenlander women, you're going to be a hunter and a gatherer for the corporation. So you're going to go out, you're going to get raw materials, just keep the supply line going. And all marriages had to be approved and certified by the colonial authority. So you have no autonomy at all. You don't get to fall in love with who you want. You don't get to go and decide what your children are going to be. You can't even have any hopes and aspirations for your kids because what they are, they are assets of the corporation. It is entirely dehumanizing, but it is a way the machine keeps rolling.
- [16:08]
Anita Anand
And there are travel accounts and memoirs from the time that show these very discriminatory racial attitudes at work. So the local Inuit are Treated as the natives, they are supposed to be Christian and yet they're not allowed to trade with anyone else. So it's a sort of double bind. They're forced to remain in their place, providing skins, blubber and ivory. They're meant to be Christian, they're meant to pay taxes, but they're not allowed to choose who they trade to. So all in all, it's a pretty rough deal for the Inuits. It is not a happy history any more than any other colonial history is happy for the, for the colonized. The colonial administration continues to require the Inuit to remain as hunters. And this continues right through into the 19th century when for the first time, the Americans begin to take an interest in Greenland.
- [17:02]
William Dalrymple
And, you know, we're going to deal with this in more detail in a future episode, but we're talking sort of around about 1867. So if you think Trump offering to buy Greenland is an outrage, how can you just offer to buy a country? Well, it happened before, it happened in 1867 where they were thinking about, well, I mean, Greenland could be quite good for us. You know, it's obviously doing the Danish no harm at all. And they had precedent because they'd already purchased Alaska from the Russian Empire. So, you know, you can buy country, buy yourself a country. It wasn't unknown to do that.
- [17:35]
Anita Anand
We've got our wonderful friend Daniel Immewar, who has had a great problem with his book.
- [17:42]
William Dalrymple
He's going to have to write another.
- [17:43]
Anita Anand
One, American Empire, because now it's very much out there.
- [17:47]
William Dalrymple
Yeah, but I mean, but it, but it was hidden at the time. And so, you know, these negotiations which the Secretary of State was conducting for five and a half million dollars to buy Greenland, I mean, they got quite near the wire. The negotiations had traveled quite a lot, but it was all done in secret. And in fact, William, the papers about this attempted purchase only became public fairly recently. So we'll get, we'll get into that in more detail with Daniel Imavar.
- [18:11]
Anita Anand
And then there's more because I think in 1916 the US buys another set of Danish islands which are now the US Virgin Islands.
- [18:20]
William Dalrymple
These are the Virgin Islands that, you know, people might go jetting off to in the Caribbean. This is 1916. There had been attempts previously by the United States who are trying to extend their sphere of influence to get more territory in that particular area. And they buy the Danish West Indies for quite a lot more than the five and a half million in gold that they were offering Greenland. They pay 25 million in gold and in exchange Denmark says, okay, look, we'll sell you this if you just get off our back about Greenland. Because, you know, they'd been quite sort of harassed and harried about Greenland. You know, the deal hadn't gone through before in 1867, but the Americans interest had never gone away. So they said, look, if you can just lay off Greenland, we'll sell you this and let's call it quits. And so that happens that the Danish West Indies becomes the US Virgin Islands. It's an unincorporated territory of the United States. Again, we'll get Daniel immever on because he knows all about how these deals work and they sort of fit into the sphere of influence thing.
- [19:21]
Anita Anand
We're about to take a break, but the next bit of history is something we're gonna be dealing with. And it's an extraordinary story that we're gonna deal with Daniel in the next episode, but very briefly. When the Germans take Denmark, the US takes Greenland for the course of the second World War. And in the second half, we are gonna come back to what happens when the American occupation of Greenland ends in 1945.
- [19:46]
William Dalrymple
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Anita Anand
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William Dalrymple
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- [20:15]
Anita Anand
If you went on a road trip and you didn't stop for a Big Mac or drop a crispy fry between the car seats or use your McDonald's bag as a placemat, then that wasn't the road trip. It was just a really long drive at participating McDonald's.
- [20:30]
William Dalrymple
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- [20:32]
Anita Anand
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- [20:33]
William Dalrymple
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Anita Anand
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- [20:53]
William Dalrymple
Payment of 45 dollars for three month plan equivalent to 15 dollars per month required new customer offer for first three months only. Speed slow after 35 gigabytes of network's busy taxes and fees extra. See mintmobile.com welcome back. So we've just given you Sort of the early history of. Of this Danish interest in Greenland and this tug of war that's going on between the United States and Denmark. And really, actually, it all gets taken out of the Danish hands because of this occupation that William was telling about. The Nazis are in Denmark, and so, you know, they can't really do anything about Greenland because they're occupied. So the United States says, actually, in a nutshell, we'll look after it for you. We'll talk about it later. When Denmark was eventually liberated from German occupation in 1945, the US rescinded its emergency powers over Greenland and they did transfer control back to Denmark. But this is what the United States has done before, and we've seen it sort of like, you know, look at the Chagos Islands as well, for example. They will keep a substantial presence on strategic islands, and that's what they do here. So they leave sort of. But they leave a presence in Greenland. And it's quite a substantial presence in Greenland because geographically speaking, William, it's a really important place. Now in geopolitics, it is.
- [22:12]
Anita Anand
And this is now 1946. The new United nations is asking all its members, including Denmark, if they possess colonies. And this puts Denmark in a difficult position because, of course, it does have this colony in Greenland.
- [22:28]
William Dalrymple
I mean, we should explain that the United nations doesn't like colonies. I mean, the whole thing. And this is why it chafes. The idea of the United nations chafed even when they were talking about it at Yalta, because Winston Churchill thought, you know what? They're going to start nipping at our British Empire, and I don't like it.
- [22:43]
Anita Anand
We have just recorded a wonderful session with my friend Thant Mintoo on United nations, which we must make available to all our viewers. It's a bonus episode, but it was so good. I think we must make it genuinely.
- [22:55]
William Dalrymple
Think it's one of the best bonus episodes. And. Yeah, I think that's a really good idea, William. Let's do it. We'll make it open to everybody so you can just see, you know, sort of the caliber of guests we get on the bonus. He also talks about and do listen.
- [23:07]
Anita Anand
Caliber.
- [23:08]
William Dalrymple
Caliber. I'm joking. It is. It's not like the Lewis chess set. I know what I'm doing. I thought it was a moment, but, but, but, but what Thant does talk about is that the whole birth of the. Is predicated on the fact that we're going to be a free and more equal and, you know, much nicer world after the war. And so we don't like colonies. So you know, when, when William, you say that, you know, they ask all the countries, hands up who's got a colony? And Denmark sort of half mast. We kind of do. It is a difficult thing to have colonies. After the creation of the United nations.
- [23:45]
Anita Anand
This organization which was originally founded by fdr, ends up being far more dominated by postcolonial countries like India under Nehru or Nasser in Egypt than anyone had anticipated. And the pressure is on. So in 1953, Greenland is redefined as a district of Denmark, just as for example, the French Caribbean islands become part deportment of France, as does reunion in the Indolent. So all these countries are forced to rejiggle how they look on colonies and many of them make them part of the mainland in legal terms.
- [24:25]
William Dalrymple
And that conceivably is to extend rights to the people in these places that they're no longer the colonized, they're no longer underlings. I mean, that's theoretically what should happen. If you're part of a country, you have the same rights, same access to rule of law and everything else, but in practice it doesn't happen in Greenland.
- [24:42]
Anita Anand
Yeah, so in Greenland there's a whole lot. And this is, you know, there are similar stories in Australia with the indigenous there. There's similar stories in Canada which we're going to deal with with indigenous in Canada. But in this post war period there are all these well meant attempts to take the indigenous communities and modernize them in verticommas to, to bring them into the western ways. And a Government Commission in 1950 highlights the negative consequences of Denmark's colonial policy, including the low standards of living for the Inuits, the isolation, the severe inequality. And they bring about a number of reforms. One is a sort of forced relocation of the Inuit into Nuuk and the other urban centers which are very few and villages are forcibly shut down by the Danish government if they're deemed too small or lacking in economic activity. And all this is well meant. It's paternalistic, it's the people in Copenhagen think that they're trying the Inuits, but it involves force, it involves compulsion. And so you have Inuit communities being sort of corralled into urban centers and the aim becomes to assimilate these hunters who for so long have been forced to hunt by the Danish global authorities. They're now being forced to become urbanized and this disrupts community and screws up families.
- [26:10]
William Dalrymple
What do they do about language, William? I mean, do they let Inuit keep their own language? Because that is, is a really important aspect of Self identification for people who live under. Even if it's not colonial, if you've been redefined, can you keep your language in this new.
- [26:26]
Anita Anand
You can keep your language, but there's definitely a premium on speaking Danish, like in, like in all other colonial societies. And Danish speakers are viewed as being superior to Greenlandic speakers. Civil servants born in Greenland, in other words, Inuit born civil servants only paid a fraction of the salary paid to those born in Denmark. So although Greenland is now supposed to be part of Denmark, there is the old colonial division. So the old colonial hierarchy continues. And then there are further, in the 1950s there are further social experiments to try and improve things, again, well meaning, but again with pretty catastrophic results. And in 1951, 22 Inuit children aged from five to nine are separated from their families and sent to Denmark. And again, this was encouraged by, you know, well meaning organizations like Save the Children Denmark. And the idea is to create a kind of Inuit intelligentsia or little Danes as they're called them.
- [27:29]
William Dalrymple
Oh God. Do you know what this sounds like, though? This sounds so much like, I mean, we're going to cover it in Canada in, in great detail about these sort of reform schools that children are taken from their tribes or taken from their homes and transported miles and miles away. It happens in Australia where, you know, aboriginal children are taken and they're often put into, I mean, I don't think it's the case here with Denmark. They seem to be sort of Danish schools, but certainly in those areas they're put into religious schools where they face complete humiliation and brutality often and horrible sort of legacies of death as well in those places.
- [28:04]
Anita Anand
These are not separate schools, these are normal Danish schools.
- [28:08]
William Dalrymple
Yeah, Danish schools.
- [28:09]
Anita Anand
There are only 22 of these kids in the first run, but of course they find it very difficult to fit in. And when they return to Greenland, they're forced to live in an orphanage separated from their families. They are banned from speaking their native language because they've been educated in Danish. And whether this is. They think it's a bad investment if they, they educated them in Danish and then they just go back to speaking Inuit. So these poor kids are kept in their orphanage, forced to become Danes. But of course what happens is they're seen as strangers by other Greenlanders struggling to fit in. And many of them return to Copenhagen and back to Denmark because they don't fit in in Greenland and they've got used to living without ice and without the winter darkness.
- [28:50]
William Dalrymple
The number that really strikes me is of these 22 little souls up to Half developed mental illnesses or substance abuse problems because, you know, you are fracturing a person's identity, taking them from one place, from the people who love them and who know them and who know their stories, transporting to them to a country that may not be very kind to them, whatever the paternalistic, you know, projection was here. You know, they have a really rough time when they go to Denmark and then they move back into orphanages as if their families are dead and they're not dead. So you can understand why this has a complete, you know, wounding effect on their little minds.
- [29:26]
Anita Anand
It's absolutely true. And now this is a live issue. Save the Children formally apologized for this initiative in 2015. The Danish government issued another apology in 2020, but has refused compensation. And now there's a lawsuit which I think 2021, it was filed by six survivors seeking compensation.
- [29:46]
William Dalrymple
Can I tell you about another. Another compensation claim that's going to make a. Your blood boil. I hope it will make your blood boil. Certainly makes me want to spit my teeth out in rage. It's just so horrific. In the 1960s and the 1970s, little girls, little Inuit girls, were taken in Greenland by the Danish, and they were basically sterilized. I mean, so they're, you know, as young as 12. And there's some really harrowing accounts of, you know, little girls who are in a dormitory, woken up in the middle of the night, they don't know where they're going, you know, sort of barefoot, sort of trot along to a doctor's chamber where they're fitted with IUDs, and they don't know what they are, these little coils, little tiny girls.
- [30:27]
Anita Anand
And we should clarify, this is contraceptives.
- [30:30]
William Dalrymple
In certain contraceptives, yes. They're the coil. Yes. I mean, many people, Many people may know these as the coil. And they don't have any say. They don't know what's going on. There's been no consultation with their family, but they're given these. Again, whether it's paternalistic, it's downright insulting because, you know, would they do this to little Danish girls in Denmark? I don't think so.
- [30:53]
Anita Anand
Of course not.
- [30:54]
William Dalrymple
And these girls. There is now another legal challenge which is still ongoing. At the moment, there are 67 Greenlander women who've launched a legal action against the Danish government, saying, you know, we were not asked. We were deprived of our reproductive rights. You didn't tell us. There isn't, again, an investigation going on. And it began just two years ago. And, I mean, we're expecting to hear the results this year. So let's see what happens with that.
- [31:19]
Anita Anand
What was the motive? Why did they want to sterilize them?
- [31:21]
William Dalrymple
Well, I mean, what it does do is it halves the population within about a decade. That's what it does do. But there's no actually clear purpose that's ever or declaration that's made as to why they're doing it.
- [31:34]
Anita Anand
I mean, are they trying to wipe the inhibitor out or what?
- [31:36]
William Dalrymple
Well, nobody says anything like that, but there's sort of these vague comments about healthcare and longevity, you know, that it'll improve the health of these girls. Now, what that I assume is suggesting is that girls as young as 12 and 13 in the Inuit population are going to be having sex. It is a great presumption because you wouldn't do that to Danish girls. And this is part of Denmark, you know, this whole thing of you've enveloped this land, it's not your colony, you say, but there's a very different treatment going on. And so there's not. I've not ever. I've just, you know, looked into. I can't find the clear purpose or the clear declaration as to why this is being done. And that's all part of the lawsuit that's taking place at the moment.
- [32:18]
Anita Anand
This reminds me very much of Martinique. Have you ever been to Martinique?
- [32:24]
William Dalrymple
I haven't. It turns out when I talk to you, I haven't been anywhere. This is the second time you've pointed out somewhere I haven't been. I haven't been to Martinique, no.
- [32:32]
Anita Anand
Martinique is now a department of France. It has full voting rights and everything. But again, in every way, there's massive discrimination, as you can imagine, against the Martinicians. And so you have another situation where in order to avoid opprobrium and so on, this is supposedly a full part of France, but it still have all the colonial prejudices intact. Anyway, all this leads to increasing rancor between the Inuits of Greenland and the Danish authorities in Copenhagen, who are still regarded as being, in effect, colonial in their attitudes, if not in law. And in 1979, Greenland gets home rule after a referendum votes in favor of it. And 70% of the voters vote in favor of greater autonomy from Denmark. So there's real feeling of on the part of the roots, they don't really do not want Danish control of their land, as you can completely understand. So this establishes a Greenlandic parliament, and it gives Greenland sovereignty in only education, health, fisheries and environments. And in 1985, the new parliament selects a new flag of Greenland, which Is lovely iconic red and white circle design which looks rather modernist and like a sort of igloo. Little red dome of an igloo.
- [33:53]
William Dalrymple
It looks like a mirror painting of some sort. Yeah, I know what you mean.
- [33:57]
Anita Anand
It's very nice. And self governance over everything is only secured in 2009. So this is very recent history.
- [34:04]
William Dalrymple
Yeah.
- [34:05]
Anita Anand
This is not like a settled situation which Trump has now strode into. In the 2009 referendum, the people of Greenland, all 56,000 of them, approved the Self Government Act. In a referendum, Greenlandic was recognised as the official language. Denmark still contributes two thirds of the Greenlandic budget and the rest comes mainly from fishing. But the Greenlanders understandably harbor feelings of resentment towards Denmark for these centuries of colonial exploitation as they see it.
- [34:37]
William Dalrymple
I mean, it's become more critical now because there's a lot more attention on Greenland than. Than there has been in decades. Because the ice sheets, because of global warming, are retreating. Climate change has meant that the ice is melting. And therefore the same thing that you see going on in Ukraine, which is this scramble for rare earths and minerals, a lot of. And oil. Greenland has oil to boot. People are now looking to Greenland as a cash cow once again. It used to be, you know, those sort of walrus tusks and furs.
- [35:05]
Anita Anand
Yep.
- [35:06]
William Dalrymple
Right. And now it is rare minerals and potentially oil stuff you put in your.
- [35:12]
Anita Anand
Microchips and your batteries for your Tesla cars. And of course, what the people of Greenland fear is being turned into just a sort of mining colony and having really nasty environmental horror stories of open cast mining over great areas of Greenland. And there is a very strong environmental movement at large now in Greenland. So the Prime Minister, Mute Burup Egede, got the same name as the original Lutheran missionary.
- [35:43]
William Dalrymple
Do we know if there's any relation to the Lutheran?
- [35:45]
Anita Anand
I think it's actually quite a common name because there's lots of Egede's in this story.
- [35:48]
William Dalrymple
Right, okay.
- [35:49]
Anita Anand
And he actually halted a rare earth mining project on environmental grounds as one of his very first acts. So when J.D. vance turns up saying what he really, really wants is to encourage lots of mining that's gonna make huge prosperous for the Greenlanders, that's exactly what they do not want to hear. They've just got rid of the Danes doing this. And now J.D. vance blunders in, which is why when he turned up, not one single Greenland examinee was prepared to meet him. And he had a.
- [36:18]
William Dalrymple
He just stayed on the base, didn't he? Just stayed on the base with people sort of politely clapping. Who were wearing American fatigues, literally.
- [36:25]
Anita Anand
I think they knocked on door after door in Nook, asking, is anyone.
- [36:30]
William Dalrymple
Does anyone want to come and meet.
- [36:31]
Anita Anand
The vice presidents in their home? And everyone, everyone said no.
- [36:35]
William Dalrymple
Oh, you know the Trump promise to Greenlanders. Can I just read it to you? Which is not cut any. Cut any ice. Forgive the pun. Greenlanders are listening out there. We will keep you safe, we will make you rich, and together we will take Greenland to heights like you have never thought possible before. And they still didn't open the door to J.T. vas. I know. Thanks.
- [36:55]
Anita Anand
That one.
- [36:56]
William Dalrymple
Not really.
- [36:57]
Anita Anand
So what they want is actually independence. And Egaday is pressing for this very hard. There's a quote here. The Greenlandic people's opportunity for independence has been adopted through the provisions of the Self Government act, thereby creating a legal basis for how independence can be achieved. So, as ever, the Greenlanders simply want to run themselves. They don't want the Danes, they don't want the Americans. They certainly don't want Vance. But it's not a happy place. It's a place with very severe problems. There's a 10, 10% suicide rate in Greenland, and everyone in Greenland knows somebody who has killed themselves.
- [37:31]
William Dalrymple
Okay, is that. Is that. I mean, it's partly down to the darkness, surely, because, I mean, this is darkness. Yeah.
- [37:37]
Anita Anand
Inverness, for example, or north of Scotland. I mean, not as high as that, but.
- [37:41]
William Dalrymple
Well, anywhere where it's dark, you know, you'll go through months where it's not light at all. That does have an impact. But, you know, some of it is bound to be just the pressure, you know, sort of a generation that you're also experiencing.
- [37:52]
Anita Anand
But we're going to be talking much, much more about America and Greenland with our wonderful friend Daniel in the next episode. Tell us more about what's going to come.
- [38:01]
William Dalrymple
I'm very excited to get Daniel on because partly we're going to. Well, we're going to laugh at him a little bit because his book how to Hide an Empire, I mean, it was all about how America and its increasing spheres of influence were sort of doing sort of deals on the never, never. And quite quietly now it's just out there in the open with Trump saying, you know, we're going to make you better than you ever thought possible. And he's openly presenting plans and diagrams and retweeting sort of like infomercials about what he's going to do when he takes over these places. 51st states.
- [38:32]
Anita Anand
And not just Greenland, obviously. Greenland, Panama, Panama Canal, Canada and Gaza.
- [38:37]
William Dalrymple
Yeah, yeah. All of them. I mean, it's out in the open. So we're going to get him on partly to see whether he's going to rewrite his book, but also just to give us a little bit of context. What the hell is going on now? Is the question. I think one of my first questions, questions to Daniel Imavar. But do join us. It's going to be, it's going to be a good one. And if you want to hear it right now and you don't want to wait, you know what you've got to do. What do they have to do, William? They should know what they have to do.
- [39:01]
Anita Anand
Well, it's a, it's a revolutionary idea that we've never proposed before. Empire. We've never talked about it, but why don't we break with tradition and encourage people to join our club? Anita?
- [39:11]
William Dalrymple
Oh, there's a club. We don't like to talk about it. Just join us. It's empirepoduk.com empirepod uk.com and you get sort of quick access to the whole of the series in the same big blob. And that way you can listen to your heart's content whenever suits you. You don't have to wait, binge, listen.
- [39:27]
Anita Anand
Like your favorite Netflix series.
- [39:29]
William Dalrymple
But I mean, is there anything else you want to promise the club members you do keep? Sort of.
- [39:33]
Anita Anand
I always like to offer a new thing to the club members, but I just focus on this. I want the magazine, which is fantastically good. We learn quite a lot from all the things we should have talked about.
- [39:43]
William Dalrymple
Yes. No, it's beautifully put together and we sort of think, oh, God, wish I'd seen this first. And also, can I just clarify something? Just notes and clarifications. When I said that William was going to give a kidney away to all club members, clearly I was joking. And also, you wouldn't want it, to be honest.
- [40:01]
Anita Anand
You wouldn't want my liver.
- [40:02]
William Dalrymple
Oh, God. Not unless you wanted to use it as a canoe. No. Not much use to anybody anyway. Till the next time we meet. It's goodbye from me, Anita Anand.
- [40:14]
Anita Anand
Goodbye from me, William Durable.
- [40:25]
William Dalrymple
Before you go, can we tell you about something really exciting?
- [40:28]
Anita Anand
Have you ever heard an ad on this podcast and thought, hang on, my brand would be way better here than whatever they are natting on about.
- [40:36]
William Dalrymple
I mean, it's bold of you, but you might be right. And here's the thing, you can actually make that happen. Make the dream realistic. Imagine your brand front and center on Empire and other shows across the Goal Hanger network.
- [40:48]
Anita Anand
If you don't know who Gohanger is. They are the producers of this show, and if you're looking to get the brand right into the center of everybody's routines, they are the people you want to talk to.
- [40:58]
William Dalrymple
If you're curious, just head over to goalhanger.com that's goalhanger. H-A-N-G-E-R dot com.