Loading summary
Transcript81 lines
- [00:01]
A
This episode is supported by FX's the Shards, a seductive drama from executive producer Ryan Murphy. Set in 1980s Los Angeles, the series follows a group of glamorous, deeply entangled high school seniors drawn into a life of wealth, beauty, parties and excess. At its center is Brett, whose reality begins to unravel when the arrival of a new student coincides with a series of mysterious murders. FX's the Shards premieres August 5th on FX and Hulu.
- [00:33]
B
So we think we know about the Grand Tour. It's the finishing school for the British elite. It's young men in powdered wigs gawking at Roman ruins and bringing back enough marble to fill a museum.
- [00:43]
C
But happily, it's a lot more interesting and complicated than that, because this was an era where the world was already globalized and the tour was no exception. It was part of a global network, which meant that it wasn't only the European elite who were searching for their playground, but other elites as well.
- [01:02]
B
This is. I take my hat off to you, Afra. I mean, I know a bit about Indian intellectuals traveling around the Grand Tour, but you've widened the horizons. So today we're going to be looking at travelers who've been written out of traditional narratives. Black diplomats, Indian intellectuals and the service workers who traverse the same world, but often with a far more critical eye.
- [01:21]
C
We're going to look at how these travellers turned the tables on their European hosts, critiquing Western materialism, family dynamics and raising questions about hypocrisy.
- [01:33]
B
And we're going to explore how these visitors from the east actually sustain European luxury. From commissioning custom trunks from Louis Vuitton to shampooing the British king, it turns
- [01:44]
C
out that the legacy of the Grand Tour wasn't just about white men learning Latin. It was the moment the world truly began to see itself as. And the prejudices of the other.
- [01:58]
B
Hello, and welcome to a new episode of Legacy. I'm Peter Frankenpel.
- [02:02]
C
I'm Afua Haas.
- [02:03]
B
And this is Legacy, the show that explores the lives, events and ideas that have shaped our world. And asked whether they have the reputations they truly deserve.
- [02:11]
C
This is the Other Grand Tour.
- [02:18]
B
Thanks for joining us on Legacy today. To support the show, please do sign up for us at Legacy plus you
- [02:23]
C
can enjoy early access, fewer ADs, Q&As and incredibly special bonus content, like an exclusive episode with Gary Lineker talking about race and identity in the context of his football career and the World cup.
- [02:38]
B
Or the legacy of the fish finger. Or how escalators drive both Afro and Imad when People don't observe correct escalator etiquette. Anyway, for all of those gems, please sign up at Legacy supportingcast fm. Okay, so we talked last episode Afro about how the Grand Tour is a sort of traditional rite of passage for rich men from all over Europe. But where do other people fit into the story of the Grand Tour?
- [03:02]
C
Well, the first unseen category is of course to do with class. And everybody, thanks to Downton Abbey and the Crown, knows about the upstairs downstairs dynamic of elite aristocratic life in historic periods in Britain. But of course that didn't just stay in the stately home in the English countryside. When British aristocrats travelled, they would bring servants with them, actually quite a retinue often of servants. And those servants were often from surprisingly diverse backgrounds. In fact, some of them weren't servants at all. They were enslaved black Africans who accompanied their masters on these tours they to Italy and France. And that means that these individuals with a very different lens and life experience and sense of identity were also experiencing Europe's cultural centers at the same time.
- [03:51]
B
Give me some examples, Afra, of the kind of people we're talking about. I mean, do we have obviously with the problem about people who are poor or who are servants, as their histories don't get written down, whatever their ethnicity and background. But how about some of the high status. Give us a flavor of some of the people that you know about.
- [04:05]
C
There are always some rare examples of people who'd been enslaved, for example, who managed to overcome all the odds to record their narrative. Or freed Africans like for example, Jacobus Eliza Johannes Capitaine, who managed to get a place to study theology at the University of Leiden in the Netherlands in the early 18th century, as a result of which he traveled extensively throughout Europe before returning to West Africa. And as an educated man of letters, he did write down his experience. And he wasn't the only one, Peter
- [04:40]
B
no, but there are Victorian abolitionists and again, I think this is your topic, Afra, so you should be the one talking about this, about, about the role that prominent black writers and lecturers and abolitionists who tour Europe and they're not just going or they're not going to look at the marble fountains built by the Romans and look at them and admire the statues. They're there with a, with a much more profound set of objectives. Tell us about some of them.
- [05:02]
C
Well, probably the most famous international tourist really of the era is Frederick Douglass who was a famed American abolitionist. He was born enslaved. He managed to acquire his freedom and became an incredibly high profile speaker, campaigner, advocate for the humanity of black people and for the abolition of enslavement. And he became a viral global superstar, I mean, in a really unlikely circle. And he was filling out lecture theaters throughout Europe, in Scotland, in London, but also on the continent. And he also took his share of trips to travel and experience the culture and sites of different places. So he went to Italy in 1868, for example. And one of the things I love about Frederick Douglass's Italy trip is that he met up with another famous abolitionist, although she, as a woman, unsurprisingly, is less well remembered. Sarah Parker Remond, who was a freeborn African American lecturer and abolitionist who undertook her own lecture tour throughout Europe in 1858. So there are so many layers of improbability. I mean, being a woman, women were still much less likely to take a grand tour. Being black made you in a catalog category of a handful of people and doing so on your own terms, giving a speaking tour, traveling widely, delivering speeches against slavery in Florence, for example, before actually settling in Italy to study and practice medicine. So even more unlikely is that these two characters actually were able to meet together in Rome. And that is a complete alternative grand tour, if you can imagine these two radical free black people insisting on freedom for their race, also taking in the sights of ancient Rome. And it's just, I find it so fascinating to imagine what their experience must have been like and also what their encounter of these quite privileged white aristocrats, some of whom would have been enjoying spending the money acquired through enslavement on their grand tours, that these people were in the same space at the same time.
- [06:58]
B
Yeah, and of course the grand tour's got lots of eras of chronological thresholds. I mean, you've got the kind of age of Canaletto, you've got the, you know, the height of, of baroque Rome, but you've also got the classical world. And one of the things about the classical world in ancient Rome and ancient Greece is that these are of course their slave societies. And you know, Mary Beard has written about this. Mary taught me when I was a callow student. In one of our last episodes, Afro, you said the university is wasted on the 18 year olds.
- [07:24]
C
You're never going to let go of that. I knew it as soon as it came out of my mind.
- [07:28]
B
I know exactly what you mean, which is that life is about lifelong learning. And if you, if you realized at age 18, 19, 20, that you wouldn't have the opportunity to just go to a lecture about by a world class scholar every day of the week, that those Opportunities, they don't come around that often. We might have got out of bed a bit more regularly before 9 o' clock in the morning. But, you know, one of Mary Beard's points has been about the, the role, how slavery is seen in other societies. So for example, in the 1980s, 1990s in South Africa, before the end of apartheid, conversations about slavery, conversations about race obviously in the Roman world in particular, were seen very differently depending on who was reading them. Because those societies with highly, not just racialized divides, but literal legal separation between black and white meant that these things looked different. So people like Sarah Parker, Raymond and Frederick Douglass who are talking about abolition, they're doing it in a crucible of one of the world's great slaving societies where people are, are enslaved from all parts of the world, not least for Africa, but from elsewhere too, and kept in legal separatist status. So it's quite a subversive thing to be saying, actually we're now in a society that declined. Looking at the classical world, ancient Rome is no longer here. And actually we're following in the footsteps of what an open, free society looks like. So I wonder also how that plays into the ways in which people like Douglas would have engaged with that, that canvas of history in which they're. In which they're talking. But you, you get performance art too. Tell me a bit about the, about the ways in which other overlooked peoples are taking part in the grand tour.
- [09:05]
C
Well, I am obsessed with the story of Ira Aldridge. If you haven't read it, actually, there's another book that actually neither of us wrote by another amazing author who's a friend of mine, Echo Eshan, called the Strangers. And he has kind of almost fictionalized the non fiction true story of some great black figures in history by kind of imagining their interiority and reinserting what we don't have about how they thought and felt when they saw the things that we know they saw in. Ira Aldridge, who was a renowned African American Shakespearean actor, who was a sensation in England in the 1820s, is sometimes forgotten, also became a big figure on European tours. He was performing in major European cities. So sometimes these more traditional, as we think of the classic white English aristocrat on their grand tour, would end up watching a play in which Ira Aldridge was performing Shakespeare while they were in Paris or Rome. So it's just important, I think, to remember that these characters were there. They were on their own trips. They were also performing for other people's tours. They were serving and making possible the privilege of some of these elites, British aristocrats, they were at all levels of society as well, and not just people of black heritage, but crucially, people from Asia as well. As we will see after the break.
- [10:31]
A
This episode is supported by FX's the Shards, a seductive drama from executive producer Ryan Murphy. Set in 1980s Los Angeles, the series follows a group of glamorous, deeply entangled high school seniors drawn into a life of wealth, beauty, parties and excess. At. At its center is Brett, whose reality begins to unravel when the arrival of a new student coincides with a series of mysterious murders. FX's the Shards premieres August 5th on FX and Hulu.
- [11:00]
C
Hello, I'm Monica Reinagle, host of the Nutrition Diva podcast. Summer is here, and with it the hot and sticky weather. A morning working in the garden or maybe on the golf course can leave you more depleted than you realize. And plain water isn't always the most efficient way to restore the balance. That's where Liquid IV comes in. It's science back formula is clinically proven to hydrate faster than water alone. Whether you're exercising, playing outside, or simply surviving a summer heat wave, it's an easy way to stay hydrated. Shop now@liquidiv.com Liquid IV. Hydration that goes wherever life takes you.
- [11:41]
B
So you mentioned Afro, that people from Asia and from India in particular, are taking part in the grand tour, but they're doing it in a slightly different way. I mean, wealthy and upper class Asians, particularly those from South Asia and what's today India undertake their own versions. But the European tradition is to look at classical education, to be following the footsteps of Virgil, to see where Julius Caesar was murdered, to learn about the ways in which great empires of the past functioned and how about how important Greek and Latin were to the European tradition and how Western civilization rose. But Asian travelers have a very different perspective and very different motivations.
- [12:21]
C
It's actually, it seems quite reminiscent today where, I mean, there's definitely a cultural trope about the, you know, Indian family, the pressure that the children are on to excel in education and through the professions. There's a similar kind of narrative about Africans. And, you know, sometimes it's cliche, but like a lot of these things, there's a foundation in truth. The Indian grand tourists of this era, who were also obviously from elite families, it was the kind of the top echelons of society who had the opportunity to travel and study, they weren't so much kind of sowing their wild oats around Europe just to become cultivated People, they were going with a more focused agenda to learn, to become equipped in classical education, learning Greek, Latin and continental manners, for example, but also studying technology, observing governance, learning how to negotiate treaties. They were trying to acquire skills that would have real practical value in their own societies. And so traveling around 18th and 19th century Europe gave them the opportunity to acquire those skills firsthand.
- [13:27]
B
Well, also you get a chance to learn about people you're coming into contact with. So the equivalent today is, you know, people from, from Britain or, or Europe standing outside the Taj Mahal thinking, gosh, look at this, the wealth of this society. And, and if a man builds this in honor of his wife who's just died, who he loved, you know, where did that wealth come from? So understanding the sort of the, the edited highlights that everyone else is talking about, it gives you a perspective of who, who, who you coming into contact with. And of course from an Asian perspective, the beginning of this, of the Asian experience is the grand tour. It's a time when Europeans look like they are there potentially to work with through trade rather than to colonize. So when you get one, one of the first from India is a Bengali Muslim cleric and diplomat called Itamuddin, who's widely regarded as one of the first educated and wealthy Indians to visit and travel to Europe. And he comes on a diplomatic mission to Britain and to France. And I guess like all diplomats, he wants to understand the people he's, he's swimming with and understand their history, understand their culture, understand how they think about the past and how they think about the world. And like a lot of travelers who are in of west of European traditions too, that he keeps a notebook to record his views, what he sees. And he writes a Persian travel travelogue called the Shigar Phnama Edweliat or the Wonders of Europe. And he travels like a European grand tourist. He looks at the theater, goes to visit plays, he goes to admire the buildings, he follows the social customs and he's also writing detailed critiques of European society because he recognizes that not all Europeans are the same and that there's a kind of hierarchy of who's spending the money and who's being the service culture where those tourist sites lie. How about a few of the other renowned Asian travelers?
- [15:17]
C
Afwa, I really find the story of Dean Mohammed fascinating. He was born in Bihar, India and he traveled to Ireland in Britain. And I think know this isn't just about anyone from what's now India who traveled to Europe. This is about grand tourists in the sense that like the British aristocrats traveling. These people were traveling, but then recording their findings and creating these travel narratives and helping to build this genre, really, of travel writing that's such a big part of our world today. So he Published in 1794, the Travels of Dean Muhammad, which was the first book ever written and published in English by an Indian author. And he became a really celebrated figure in Regency England. And he also had another contribution that I think is really important because many people, I think, don't know, but I think you probably do know this, that shampoo is actually a word of Hindi origin, which in itself derives from a Sanskrit word that means to press, knead or soothe. And it's rooted in these ancient Indian and Ayurvedic traditions of washing and cleansing and massaging, massaging the scalp for hair and scalp health. And Muhammad opened an enterprise called Muhammad's Baths in Brighton. It was a spa that offered these Indian medicated vapor bars, followed by a vigorous head massage with Indian oils, which he called a shampoo. And his treatments became so popular that he was eventually appointed as the personal shampooing surgeon to King George IV and King William iv and is actually credited really with introducing the concept of shampooing into Britain and Europe. So that was a product of his Grand Tour that he introduced this culture to first the British elite, but later, obviously, you know, cream rises to the top. It was such a good idea that other British people thought they might try washing, massaging and cleansing their scalp and
- [17:20]
B
hair after we record afwa. Today, I'm heading to Regency Brighton and I can think of nothing better than I like today than a shampooing bath and a head rub as well, in honor of Dean Mohammed. So he's someone else who is traveling to. Another is Mirzu Abu Talib Khan, who travels at the very end of the 1700s. He's an administrator and a scholar, and he undertakes a classic multi year, take your time European tour. And he travels through Britain, through France and Italy. He visits Paris and Lyon and Geneva, and he explicitly takes part in European high society. He goes to the opera, he meets British royalty, and he publishes a very successful and popular travel memoir detailing his observations of European culture. Because there's a real appetite back in other parts of the world to understand who are these strange, curious people in Europe and in particular, who are the British actually? Why do we behave in the way that we do? And at this point, there's the movement away from powdered wigs, but into. Into the different ways of behaving and the way that English Courtly manners take place. And that creates the kind of dynamics of long distance cultural exchange that is hugely important in things like the diplomacy of the 19th century, as Britain's tentacles start to expand around the whole world to the kind of peak of British Empire as well. But I wonder what you think about the critique offered by all of these travelers and scholars from Asia and from Africa. How do they see Europeans? Do they see Europe as the peak civilization that is doing everything right, needs to be emulated, and is the sort of acme of the highest level of heaven when it comes to societal development?
- [19:04]
C
Well, they were traveling to Europe for a reason, because Europe obviously was dominating the world stage through colonialism, enterprise, and some more dodgy land grabs, lootings, military conquests. So I think these travelers recognize the power of Europe and also their technological superiority in some respects. But that doesn't mean they came to Europe and found from their gaze a superior society. And in fact, they often remarked on how morally compromised, individualistic and spiritually hollow the Europe that they found was. And one of the, the sharpest critiques and the things they personally found most shocking was the way that people in Europe treated aging parents and aging relatives and members of the extended family in general. Because they were coming from societies that were deeply rooted in this filial piety, living in multi generational households. And they were absolutely horrified by the cold transactional dynamics as they saw them of European families. And they wrote about this. For example, Mirza Abu Taleb Khan wrote about how shocked he was that wealthy Europeans sent their elderly parents away or just completely ignored them. Thought this was completely selfish and lacking in a basic sense of duty. And he and others were also very critical of the fact that once European children reached adulthood, they were basically separated. Their emotional financial obligations, their parents ceased, and they were kind of on their own. And that was regarded as not just an impractical arrangement, but a moral failure. Because the idea that you are deeply tied to your family, that you continue to support them and ensure their well being, is just so deeply rooted in many Asian and also many African cultures that it was actually hard for them to understand. And that wasn't the only area of critique, Peter.
- [20:49]
B
No, I mean, just, just to finish on that one, I mean, I think that that idea of the family, again is a divide of northern and southern Europe. You know, where, where in, in the northern parts of Europe, even now, today, has changed to, to my generation, where there was still the kind of distant handshake with your father and no one would ever say what they think now the world has changed and people are more open about their. Their feelings. But, you know, even, even today in some Scandinavian societies, after your parents or grandparents reach into their late 70s, early 80s, the engagement is, that is very, very modest. You know, the kind of statistics about how often people go and see their elderly relatives is completely different. African and Asian friends who basically are dominated. The older you are, the more respect you get, the more you. More attention you get. And the people you should pay less attention to are the young people. Whereas in Northern Europe, it's always been that you inherit the earth and kick off. But one of the other critiques is also about atheism and about materialism and about wealth. Tell me a bit about how people in other parts of the world see the European connection with things that matter, with the divine, with morality and things like that.
- [21:52]
C
I find this super interesting because I think we have a nostalgia in modern Europe where we romanticize the past as a time when people had really strong moral values and church attendance was kind of at 100%, and everybody was really unified in these strong communities built on shared faith. I mean, that's certainly how people like to portray the past and lament its decline. Actually, from a Asian lens, even back in the early 18th century, these travelers regarded Europe already then as being essentially atheistic and lacking faith, lacking spiritual wisdom, and having a kind of companion critique, an excessive fondness for luxury. Those are the words also of Abu
- [22:34]
B
Taleb, who are a little bit guilty, though. I have an excessive fondness for luxury.
- [22:38]
C
Well, we'll come back to that. He argued that while Europeans went to church on Sundays as a social ritual, their true religion was materialism and financial greed. And that industrial wealth had outpaced the moral foundation of European societies, leaving them spiritually bankruptcy and driven entirely by profit. What is so interesting about that is that that's almost word for word something that still gets said today. For example, some of the kind of clash of civilizations has brought up this idea that the kind of Muslim world regards the west as morally bankrupt and the west regards the Muslim world as a scarily zealous. You know, these kind of cultural misunderstandings that I think are rooted in these similar ideas that really are quite different value systems systems. And they've never fully been able to reconcile each other. So I just think it's interesting that the sense of difference stretches that far back, Peter.
- [23:32]
B
And it's also early. I mean, this is the kind of roundabout, the time of the Industrial Revolution taking off. So if you think about Britain and its empire, you know, Britain is a global power in the 1750s. You know, we've got independence. I hope you've enjoyed and listened to our series on US Independence. But the kind of boom where Britain becomes great and it's kind of Great Britain in, you know, its political, military, economic power, that's really in the kind of 1800s. That's when, you know, the, the urbanization booms when industry innovation and so on. And so this is quite early and that, that call out of the fact that, you know, as, as it says, the British are a conceited race whose conversation is always an attempt to show their own superiority and to unfairly belittle other nations. You that's being picked 250 years ago, a long time before you might think that those kinds of ideas might happen because there were not very many British people knocking around different parts of the world at this point. The kind of peak of empire still arrives. But you're right, Afra, I think that kind of the legacy and the depth of the sense that Europeans deserve to be taken down a peg, British in particular. It's interesting that that's reacting before the current of the great expansion of empire. But I wonder whether you think that mockery and that suspicion and fear, are they all well judged? Are they all well placed?
- [24:52]
C
I mean, I think that there's some truth in it, like often that as is often the case with these things and some of these critiques were really sophisticated. I mean, for example, Abu Talib also was scathing about the British legal system and you know, this narrative in Britain of equality before the law, he said, was just a performance. Anyone who's been through the ordeal of a trial in Britain will probably think there's still some, some truth to that. You know, it's a system that's executed very imperfectly and you could even argue is not really structured to achieve justice for everyone across the class or racial spectrum. But I think one of the areas that gets most complex is in the area of gender. And I think it's really interesting because many of these Asian travelers were very disapproving of the public intermingling of the sexual in Europe and that they regarded the freedom of European women as incredibly inappropriate as evidence of lack morals and a lack of modesty. On and this is of course like 18th century Europe where we would now wouldn't regard women as being particularly free, especially by modern standards. But on the other side, there were some Asian travelers with more progressive values who actually looked up to the opportunities European women had. I mean, we're talking about the elite here. Obviously, women from all class backgrounds didn't have opportunities for education, and most British people didn't have the opportunity for education at the time. But elite European women were educated. They were often on their own grand tours. And he regarded this as something that should be implemented back home, that women in India should have more opportunities, that practices like child marriage and child widowhood should be replaced with more Western ideals of female literacy and opportunity. So I think it would be over simplistic to. To project the idea that it was just kind of like Asians regarding Britain as kind of morally backward and Brits regarding Asians as super Eastern and exotic. There were areas in which they were learning from each other and areas in which they were learning for each other, specifically when it came to the culture of travel and especially luxury travel. And that's something that we can talk about more after the break.
- [26:58]
A
This episode is supported by FX's the Shards, a seductive drama from executive producer Ryan Murphy. Set in 1980s Los Angeles, the series follows a group of glamorous, deeply entangled high school seniors drawn into a life of wealth, beauty, parties and excess. At its center is Brett, whose reality begins to unravel when the arrival of a new student coincides with a series of mysterious murders. FX's the Shards premieres August 5th on FX and Hulu.
- [27:34]
B
So in the 19th century, after the relationship starts to change, wealthy Asian royals start taking formal tours of Europe, while wealthy Europeans create a new itinerary called the Grand Tour of the east, where they start heading out to Asia to experience it for themselves. What about the Indian maharajas in Europe? Tell me about some of them, because they're magnificent in the lavishness of how they're spending. I mean, if you want wealth, that's the concentration of power, money and the willingness to show it off. You find much more in other parts of the world than you do in Britain.
- [28:06]
C
And this is the slight caveat to the idea that Indians came to Britain and saw them all as really materialistic and loving luxury. I don't know if you ever went to the Cartier exhibition at the Victoria and Albert, but the level of bling from the Indian maharajas who were coming to Paris on their own grand tours and commissioning Cartier pieces to take back and use in their own traditional ceremonies, coronations, rituals, I mean, it was just next level. And I, I'm, you know, I'm quite hard to impress with bling, but I've never seen anything like some of these pieces. So they were using their grand tours to kind of Bring their own aesthetic, but get Cartier to realize them with this kind of European approach to luxury. And they knew how to do luxury. I mean, they did take it to a next level. And that also affected and inspired the way Europeans saw some of their own brands. I mean, houses like Cartier are so inextricably linked to the patronage of these very wealthy Indian families.
- [29:06]
B
It's funny because that cycle has come round all over again. So you've, you've had the wealth of the 19th, 20th centuries and the rise of the West. Now we've seen Asia rise again over the course of the last 30, 40, 50 years. The ways in which big fashion houses like LVMH or Louis Vuitton launch their products often first now in Hong Kong or in mainland China. The targeting of Indian markets, the wealth that's available now in India and the size of the middle class booming means that the designs, the colors, the patterns are taking in new audiences. And I mean, you see that even here in London. I mean, because I live in uk, I don't go to hotels in London all that often. But when you do, you recognize that the tastes and the designs are aimed particularly at American, but also above all, Asian markets. So the kinds of food you offer in the restaurant, the kinds of colors, the kind of music that's being played are all designed for these new arrivals because that's where wealth is. And travel experience gap years, it's always been closely tied to the ability to pay for it. And of course one pays attention to the top end, but there's also the middle that comes through it too. And so what about luxury goods and European luxury brands? I know that's something that not only you know about, but you, you work with lots of luxury brands too.
- [30:21]
C
Yeah, well, we talked about Cartier, but it's by no means the only brand that was transformed by the patronage of Maharaja. So Louis Vuitton, which is still associated with, with luxury travel, had a massive boost from these wealthy Indians who back in the 19th century were traveling with huge entourages of servants and staff and required this very specialized heavy duty luggage. So they commissioned custom Louis Vuitton trunks made specifically to transport crucial items like for example, their polo gear.
- [30:51]
B
I'd understand that. Yeah, I'd understand that too.
- [30:53]
C
Entire wardrobes are ceremonial clothing. So when I say they did luxury, they really went all out. Rolls Royce, which of course we think of such a quintessential British brand, was the quintessential symbol of luxury travel for the Indian royalty. And they purchased fleets of Rolls Royces during their European tours and they would customize them with silver plating or mount them with hunting searchlights. And historians have actually noted that these incredibly lavish orders single handedly kept some of these European luxury manufacturers solvent during global economic downturns at home. So quite similar to the atmosphere today when, when there's a downturn in Europe, for example, these European luxury houses start turning more towards China or towards the Emirates and the Middle East. The same thing was happening then when their ability to cater to the Indian in particular, super rich, was a lifeline that's allowed them to endure over so many centuries.
- [31:53]
B
It's funny, I was in London earlier this week and as it happened, as I was tootling on my lime bike, I stopped on the traffic lights and there were two big Rolls Royces, one coming towards me and one parked alongside. And, and I, it shows my, I guess my own preconceptions, prejudice and so on. But my immediate thought was that there's no chance that either of those will be British citizens. Because if you're British, you tend to be low key. You don't show off your wealth like that. And I thought, okay, it's unlikely there'd be Americans who don't like to draw attention themselves, even though there's enormous wealth available. And those kind of status symbols are still, you know, they are, you know, how you choose to show who you are, what your status is, is something that we do in different ways in different parts of the world. In Britain, the kind of almost rule of thumb or certainly used to be, that the wealthier, more important you were, the more you played things down, the more holes you had in your jeans, the more ragged you were. And the way in which you celebrated with Cartier, with Rolls Royce and these big brands was seen as being vulgar because it was beneath you. You could afford it, but you chose not to spend that way. So that dynamic of spending is interesting.
- [32:54]
C
Actually, I was just going to add to that. Sorry. But I was thinking, you know, we talked about the Grand Tour as a kind of gap year.
- [33:00]
B
Yeah.
- [33:00]
C
One thing that's always irked me is seeing British students going on their gap years to Ghana, for example, and thinking that they're going to a poor West African country. So they'll bring their worst clothes, you know, the tattiest kind of knock off holes falling apart because they think that's what you should wear in a poor country. You get to Ghana and you will see everybody's clothes are impeccable.
- [33:22]
B
Afra, I want to come with you to Ghana and I want to pack. I want to pack my ceremonial robes in my movie contrast.
- [33:29]
C
And you know, you might be living in a really, really like small home, even a shack, might not have running water, it might not have electricity, but you will be pressing your clothes, your pleats, your outfits, your hair will be perfect. Nails done, skin done, hair done, everything. And just, you know, that a culture that places such value on how you present yourself, presentation and the aesthetic is so bound up in personal pride. And I think it is a different culture in Europe, I guess, you know, an atmosphere where you don't have to signal your respectability or you signal it in different ways. And it's almost like a kind of privilege that, yeah, I like it, you know, it's interesting. And I think there's something similar in India. I mean, I don't know if also if you've ever been to Nigeria, but if you want to see people making sure they leave you with zero doubt as to how wealthy they are, Lagos is second to none. There is no shyness whatsoever about wearing your opulence, your status in every, the car, the way you're dressed, the entourage you have around you. It is so interesting. And just the kind of cultural relativism of these ideas, they really are completely different in different places. So you can imagine, like back to the Grand Tour, how eye opening it must have been for these especially young wealthy people to be encountering each other with their super different ideas about wealth, status and privilege, you know, interacting. And so that kind of takes on a new dimension when the Grand Tour shifts from just being something Europeans do in Europe to something they can now go and do in Asia. Because as these Indian elites are coming to Britain and experiencing British opulence, they're starting to also use it to transform the hospitality industry back home. So princely states in India, for example, start to build private, ultra luxurious train carriages for their personal travels across the country. And they're featuring things like air blown blocks of ice for calling, Art deco interiors, tapestries, internal telephone networks, private dining rooms. And this starts to become attractive to wealthy Europeans who now want the Asian luxury travel experience. And I'm talking about this like a historic thing, but it's still very much alive today.
- [35:43]
B
Peter yeah, and those grand hotels, I mean, they're, they're amongst the best in the world. I mean, in terms of the service levels and everything else too. But they begin, as you say, to cater for the super rich, not just from Asia and from Europe, but from all over the world too. And that, that kind of constant improvement of the offer and the luxury getting bigger and better combined with the levels of attention. So I wonder, I mean, I've got guilty secret on some of these because we've pulled together a list of some of the world's great hotels and about whether you've stayed there. Been, have you been to Raffles in Singapore?
- [36:16]
C
I have not. Peter, have you. It's like your regular, it's your regular den in Singapore, isn't it?
- [36:25]
B
They do a mean, they do a mean vodka martini.
- [36:27]
C
You're not delivering here. Why are we not doing Legacy live from the Raffles Hotel in Singapore. Well, I agree.
- [36:35]
B
For a reasonably modest fee, they can sponsor our next episode. What about other luxury hotels all over Asia? Have you, well, have you traveled a lot in Asia?
- [36:42]
C
I haven't traveled a lot in Asia. I have traveled quite a bit in India. But this was in my early 20s when the Taj Mahal palace and the Eastern Oriental out of range were not in my budget range at all, I have to say. So that is another, another item on my bucket list that I am very ready to experience.
- [37:03]
B
The Eastern Oriental. I was very lucky to stay in one last year. It's absolutely fantastic. And in fact, the Dorman, the Eastern Oriental in Penang in Malaysia, you know, they wear Bermuda shorts, pulled up socks, you know, pith helmet. It's. It's like stepping back into colonial.
- [37:18]
C
It is very close and there's lots of places in the world. I mean, if you go to Bermuda or if you go to Barbados, if you go to Kenya or South Africa, there are so many luxury hotels that are still kind of designed to keep the colonial fantasy alive. I do have some mixed feelings about, about that dynamic, but.
- [37:37]
B
But it's a different world. Afraid so. The thing is, the guests in Penang almost all are from India, Southeast Asia, so it was, it's a different look and feel if it's just filled with Europeans coming and flashing their credit cards. So that, that colonial spin is interpreted and understood differently. Of course, it's seen as a mark of elegance. And in fact, from a British point of view, it's quite a useful marker of soft power to show that, you know, we once did something. But yeah, I think the conversations about colonialism and post colonialism would be less. Less. Well, I don't know. We'd have to, we'd modulate them a little bit, I think, if we were talking about what these mean because there's an embrace of some of this stuff because it's part of people's histories and maybe, maybe don't poke the bear. So I Wonder for how we wrap this episode up and about thinking about what happened is just has the Grand Tour, it's carried on. It's now rich kids take a year off and go to Kashmir and finding themselves and sleeping on floors. Is it, is it about the new age of kind of super luxury travel of people taking trains along the Silk Road that cost tens of thousands of dollars and you get to see the edited highlights of past civilizations? Do you think the Grand Tour is alive and well? And in other, in other, in other,
- [38:40]
C
in other names, not in the same way. I think the Grand Tour as it existed for these European and British elites definitely died. And when I read about it, it does seem like a, just a completely foreign concept. And I think what killed it off were a few things actually. The French Revolution and the Napoleonic wars. It was kind of like traveling around Russia now, you know, it's like a war zone. It's not a safe place anymore for a wealthy British aristocrat to be kind of pottering around with their, you know, super expensive Parisian couture and their retinues of staff. So that really interrupted travel. And then when peace ensued in 1815. And by the way, if you haven't, you should listen to our series on Napoleon and the, and the Napoleonic Wars. Then it was the era of the Industrial Revolution and the arrival of the steam train. And this, as you mentioned earlier, Peter, is the great democratizer of travel. Some suddenly you don't need a custom built carriage and a team of horses, you can buy a train ticket. And that allows the advent of entrepreneurs like Thomas Cook, for example, who start taking advantage of that to organize package tours and sell the ability to experience travel to the middle classes. So the idea of the Grand Tour kind of helps motivate people from other class backgrounds to have their own travel experience. But it begins to look completely different.
- [39:59]
B
You don't think that the Grand Tour today would be, you know, Magaluf, Cavos, Ayia, Nappa, all the greats. Well, and you haven't lived until you've seen them all in their glory at dawn. Absolutely. With the 40 pints inside you.
- [40:13]
C
I mean I'm. I pity the people whose kind of passion in life is preserving the cultural heritage of Magalu, for example, which. Absolutely. The history and culture of Magaluf is very real. But it's unfortunately not, I think why a lot of British tourists go there,
- [40:30]
B
but it's the same principle as a kid. So today they don't want to go and see where the Romans built their empire, but it's kind of. It's the place that people have talked of and everybody's been there before, and you need to go and experience it.
- [40:40]
C
Flawed as it was, in my opinion, at least there was a narrative that this was where you become a more cultured, educated person, that you get to connect with the philosophy of the ancients, where you.
- [40:52]
B
I can tell. You haven't been to. You haven't been to a. I can tell. Or Mykonos.
- [40:58]
C
I have been to Mykonos. I. I used to go to mykonos in the 90s before it was super popular because I had a friend who was Greek who had a gorgeous family home on me because it's so beautiful, and I actually haven't been lately. And I think I'm slightly put off by the number of American tourists I know who kind of now have it on their cruise, or I just feel like it's a very small island and it sounds like it's quite saturated, but I think.
- [41:20]
B
I think that Grand Tour is still alive and well of kind of, here are the places you need to see. And. And there's the kind of reaction of people who are either rich enough or think it's beneath them and think, I need to go to somewhere new. I need to go to Bhutan or I need to have visited Samarkand, or, you know, there's a. There's a. There's an off the beaten track that I need to go to, because I don't want to just have gone to the same place as everybody else.
- [41:41]
C
Your Instagram, by the way, is a great marketer of Samarkand and other Central Asian destinations, because you really show their beauty. And I think those are places that. That people don't know as well. I mean, look, there's a huge hypocrisy underlining this conversation, which I have to point out, because I'm very aware of it, that I might sound a bit snooty when I say I don't want to go to Mykonos now because it's full of tourists. Like, I'm a tourist, obviously, when I go to Mykonos, and I think we all want to be the only tourist in this unspoiled place. And, you know, the reality is that we're the problem because we go to places and, you know, we all want the same kind of experience. We want the beach and we want the luxury. We want the authentic local food. We might want a bit of culture. And, you know, you look at what's happening to Venice today, where it's basically sinking under the weight of tourism. That it's, you know, our. And our desire to always find somewhere new just means that more and more places are getting sucked into this kind of tourism industrial complex. We'll talk actually more about that in the next two episodes. But I think that, you know, you've got to acknowledge if you are someone who travels and enjoys holidays and tourism, that you can't really disparage other people for traveling and enjoying holidays and tourism
- [42:46]
B
look, as always, fascinating. And I think that the opening up of the ways in which people from outside Europe experience the Grand Tour, react to European cultures are dismissive. They're quite conservative. Some of those Indian voices thinking that Europeans and the British are not behaving in a way that's befitting and that they abandon their parents, they don't spend enough time with their children. All those things, they're touching quite raw nerves. But the Grand Tour does so much to shape the culture of the world we see around us. The. The fact that the British Museum and other museums in Britain are filled with objects from classical antiquity, from the golden baroque periods of Rome and Naples and so on, speaks to the wealth, speaks to the acquisitive powers and the instincts of British and other Europeans to try to acquire and connect that link back to the past. So much of our historic fabric here, from country houses to museums, to the ways in which Europeans wanted to think that they were joining this continuum that stretched back into antiquity. It's such an interesting way of looking at it, but I think it's a good place to leave it today to think about what happens when you democratize. And if you have more people having access to places and to travel, then it sort of takes some of the sheen off. And it's that process of why would I take a photo and put it on my Instagram if everybody's taking exactly the same photo in the same place?
- [44:02]
C
Well, we talked about how the era of train travel opened up the prospect of traveling and experiencing new places to a much wider social range of people in Britain. And so did another invention that we're going to talk about next week. Peter. Because they started to be able to find opportunities for leisure and escapism much closer to home.
- [44:23]
B
Please tell me it's going to be cornflakes again. That's one of my favorite episodes. I still haven't lived that down with my, with my kids. I got asked about that in Kyrgyzstan when I was there.
- [44:32]
C
Oh, no.
- [44:32]
B
Very recently someone said they love listening to Legacy, which is always nice to hear, particularly far away from home. And then there was a sort of raised eyebrow and someone just went, cornflakes. I went, it's not even breakfast time. I went, no. Your episode on Cornflakes. How did your kids react?
- [44:49]
C
If you're watching this on YouTube, you're probably wondering why I'm grimacing at the thought of Peter having to talk about our Cornflakes episode in Kyrgyzstan. What are the kind of cultural attitudes towards masturbation and Kyrgyzstan like? And how does it go down when you talk about that? On a kind of grand political I'm so curious.
- [45:03]
B
I did what any self respecting Brit would do, which I changed the subject as quickly as I could and made up an excuse there to take a phone call.
- [45:11]
C
Amazing. And if you haven't listened to our episode on Kellogg's, you you really should because this will all make sense. And then you'll also find yourself needing to change the subject in certain conversations.
- [45:21]
B
There you go. You can only get that kind of content in. Anyway, as always, thank you for listening to Legacy.
- [45:26]
C
To dive deeper and to become a beloved song, supporter of the show and member of our dear community. Sign up to Legacy plus. You will get to enjoy exclusive bonus episodes early access, fewer ads Q&As and more go to Legacy Supportingcast FM and
- [45:45]
B
for everything else, including our substacks and updates on TikTok and Instagram, just check out the show notes or search Legacy Podcast I'm Peter Franken.
- [45:53]
C
I'm Afwa Harsh. We'll see you on the next episode of Legacy.
- [46:13]
A
This episode is supported by FX's the Shards, a seductive drama from executive producer Ryan Murphy. Set in 1980s Los Angeles, the series follows a group of glamorous, deeply entangled high school seniors drawn into a life of wealth, beauty, parties and excess. At its center is Brett, whose reality begins to unravel when the arrival of a new student coincides with a series of mysterious murders. FX's the Shards premieres August 5th on FX and Hulu.