 Hello and welcome to HIST Fest 2021 and a warm welcome back to those of you with weekend or day passes. My name is Rebecca Adil and I'm the director of HIST Fest and we're so excited to share all of this weekend's events with you. Please do check out everything else that's going on via the website www.histfest.org. Before we get started I'd just like to run through some house keeping. Using the menu above you can provide feedback on the event and also if you wish donate to the British Library. The library is a charity and your support really helps to open up a world of knowledge and inspiration to everyone. Your feedback is also incredibly valuable in helping the library plan future cultural events. There you can also find a tab with a link to the library's bookshop where you can browse a range of titles from all of the festivals, authors and speakers. Below the video are social media links should you wish to continue the conversation on other platforms later on. You can also find short biographies of our speakers today. I'm going to hand you over now to our event sponsors to introduce Empireland and our speakers properly. Hello there I'm Dan Snow from History Hit. History Hit is a Netflix of history. Hundreds of hours of history documentaries for people who love history. From the story of Operation Legacy in which the British colonial authorities in Kenya tried to destroy much of their own archives, before independence I wonder why, to the reality of street life in medieval London and everything in between. Please head over to historyhit.tv to check it out. We're delighted to support Empireland. In discussion we'll be journalist, broadcaster and author of Empireland, How Imperialism Shaped Modern Britain, Satnam Sangira and Nisreen Malik, author of We Need New Stories, challenging the toxic myths behind our age of discontent. Enjoy. So today we're going to be talking to Satnam Sangira or hearing from Satnam Sangira about his smash hit book Empireland, which to start on the theme of not pretending that we're friends, he told me about about four years ago in a little sushi place he made a veil, I don't know if you remember, and said that there was a character called D. Muhammad that was the first Indian in the UK about 300 years ago, and that that started you on the trailer thinking about Empireland, so we'll get to that later. So I want to talk about a couple of things. So I want to talk about the book and your journey in coming to write the book, your journey while writing the book and what you've learned over it. I also want to talk about the response to the book. It's been out now a couple of months and I think the response to the book has been probably as illuminating and as instructive as the book itself. So I'd like to spend some time on that at the end as well. But in just to start with the background if you let us know why did you write this book? What was your thought process? It's your first non-fiction, your first book was a memoir, your second book was fiction, and this is your first book of non-fiction. So what really brought you to this genre both personally and intellectually? Well Nazrin, it feels like you're talking to me from my 1980s childhood because we had those cupboards, we had those exact same cupboards. Yes, anyway. I keep it real. As you know it was a very long complicated journey. How many years four years ago I started and you often when you finish a book you often forget how he started. You know at one stage I was just really excited about D. Muhammad who was one of the first Indians to come to London. He was the first Indian writer to write a book in English. It was a terrible book but he was the first. And then then I went to Amritsar in India with Channel 4 to make a documentary about the Januwalabagh massacre which happened a hundred years ago. And that made me realize that the way Sikhs were treated in Imperial India was the way they were treated in post-war Britain and that I didn't know anything about it. And actually we have this weird attitude in Britain where we kind of forget that we were the empire, you know. We see ourselves as a country that had had that one World War II primarily. And when we do remember empire it's in this weird kind of balance sheet where the idea we can balance the positive against the negative, the royalties against the massacres and somehow come to a conclusion that it was positive. So it just struck me that in Britain we're quite dysfunctional about empire. So I thought I'd write a kind of idiot's guide to it. The idiot being myself. And empire land happened. But there's also like a personal part of this as well. There's a sort of what you thought we needed to learn about empire. But there's also your own personal story as someone who grew up in the UK of Asian origin but who also did not have any sort of real grasp or understanding of empire because of your education. And that was something that you came to realize after the documentary. But also I think kind of slowly throughout your life it has been dawning on you little by little. So I think there's sort of parallel tracks here, no? Yeah, totally. And I realized that my ignorance is actually quite typical. I mean, there's so many examples of it. I mean, Tony Blair in his memoir famously talks about giving Hong Kong back to the Chinese and saying, I didn't really understand the history, which is incredible when you think about it. A lot of research shows that actually the level of knowledge is very low in Britain. I've heard from dozens of Oxbridge graduates in history who said they didn't study any colonialism, let alone British empire. So I think I realized quite early on that I was not untypical and that it was quite useful to be that person who could take readers on a journey. I guess the thing I really wanted when I began researching it was a kind of Bill Bryson book on empire because every book on empire I picked up was so long and I read novels. So I found like the way they don't dwell on character and dialogue and sex was quite boring. And so I ended up writing the book that didn't exist. I guess that's why a lot of people write books, right? It's probably why you wrote your last book. Yeah, I think like the point about education as someone who grew up outside the UK and got a British education outside the UK was really interesting because the British curriculum for students outside the UK is much heavier on colonialism and empire than it is within the UK. So it was really startling for me to read the detail in your book about kind of the lack of education, but also to just assume as someone who came to the UK in adulthood that people had that same level of knowledge about their own country that I had as a foreigner studying a British curriculum. And so what I find really fascinating and kind of really unfold throughout the book is this idea of like we don't tend to think of the UK as a country that has a propagandic attitude to curriculums or history. Like these are things we think about that happen in the South, like in the rest of the world. So in China or in Saudi Arabia. Then you come to realise that we do it or the British do it as well. But in ways that are just a bit more much more slick and sophisticated. Yeah, you could argue that all history is propaganda. I'm sure people will say what we think is propaganda and they want history to remain as it was. But yeah, I mean that was my experience too in that people abroad have a very deep sense of British empire. It's almost the prison through which people see Britain. At Jalil Malabar in Amaritsar, everyone I talked to, every Indian I talked to had learned about it at school. And yeah, I met Sikhs in Britain who didn't know about this massacre where hundreds of their people had died and changed the course of British empire. Same with Hong Kong. People there are taught about the open wars probably in quite a propaganda way. Whereas I don't think the knowledge of the open wars are very low in the UK. People don't really know what they were. And yeah, so I think your experience is not untypical. And so one of those things that were left out, I think that's so powerful in the book and kind of powerful in any account of empire that's not mainstream is two things, sort of the massacres and the looting. Like those are two themes that come across very strongly in empire land where you see the kind of normalization of murder, the normalization of killing, the normalization of massacres, and then the sort of whitewashing of them even at the time because then we'll get to this later that there was a kind of acceptance of these things at the time and there never was fully. And then also kind of a rapacious looting and hoarding of the wealth of empire that then came back to the UK. And one thing that you do very well and I would urge any of the people tuning in to check out is you post a quote a day on your social media from people involved with empire. And one of the most striking quotes is the ones, the most striking quotes are the ones that refer to life in the colonies as kind of a cheap disposable thing. And that's actually quite, it's really powerful. And so the book is kind of dotted with these examples of massacres and looting. Can you tell us about a couple of the examples that you've found most shocking that in the amateur massacre, I think it's a bit mainstream, but ones that you found most shocking for being so obscure? Yeah, I mean, my favourite fact is that the word loot is actually a Hindu word. And the British stole so much, they also stole the word. And actually, the British, when they raided the summer palace of the Chinese emperor, I think, they stole a dog and called it Luty and gave it to Queen Victoria. That's all you need to know, basically. But yeah, I mean, I found it very difficult spending evenings reading about massacres. And the Jolliwala Bog is pretty bad. The way the Indians were treated afterwards, the crackdown, you know, and Sikhs were not Sikhs, I guess Sikhs. This happened to Sikhs earlier, but lots of Indian sepoys were tied to the end of cannons and blown up, because that way your body parts scatter and you can't have proper funeral rites. It was a way of punishing them in the afterworld. There was a clampdown, the Moran's Bay rebellion after slavery in Jamaica. But the worst thing is what happened to the Tasmanians, I think. People often say, you know, well, you know, British Empire was bad, but there wasn't a genocide. But Tasmania was literally a genocide in the sense that it was used as an example by lawyers when they developed the international definition of genocide, you know, literally. And the British settlers just went across the island and shot them for sport and just eradicated, like you eradicate Japanese knotweed. And then there were only one or two left and they put them on display. I mean, that was particularly cruel. The one thing I would say is that, yeah, there's a lot of misery. And that was hard. But even at the time, there was within Britain, dismay. And this is the thing people often say, you can't apply modern morals to the past. But with each one of these things, there were people who were outraged at the time. And I think that's important to remember. That was kind of going to be my next question, which is one of the really important exercises that needs to be done is to contextualize those events as not just events that existed in some sort of moral black hole at the time. And that we've only developed such concepts as like justice and fairness and respect for people's lives after the end of empire in the 1950s and 1960s. And so there are very striking examples of people objecting to statues being put up because they were considered to be provocative at the time. There was lots of kind of angst in the media. If you give us a couple of examples of things that today, people who defend statues and public accounts, self-aggrandizing accounts for history, that prove that people involved at the time thought they were objectionable. Yeah, I guess the thing that comes to mind is the statue of Lord Clive, which is the one I hate the most, is very prominent in Whitehall. And I guess Rishi Sunak has to look at it every day. When that was put up, the viceroy of India himself said it was needlessly provocative. The statue of Colston, of course, famously, the guy who put it up, much so long after he died, Colston died, struggled to raise the money to put it up because Colston wasn't a popular man. And it's why it's a relatively cheap statue in terms of the material that it's made of. Oh, is that right? I didn't know that. But then, you know, you got Janet Wallerbarg, Winston Churchill himself said it was monstrous, that famously woke man of Winston Churchill. William Gladstone, of course, railed against Jingoism throughout the 19th century. Queen Victoria complained when I think it was Lord Kitchener who wanted to make an ornament out of an enemy's skull. She said it smacked too much of medieval times. Yeah, George Orwell, you know, writing throughout the late stage of colonialism about how disgusting it was. You had the looting of Ethiopia, and a lot of that stuff is now in the VNA. Gladstone said it was, you know, he deeply lamented the way in which we stole that stuff. And then there was Tibet, you know, we stole some, we basically launched a war on Tibet because we were interested in it. We wanted to gather loads of material. And when we came back with half the country's culture, you know, there was outrage in the press. You know, I think it was already illegal on an international level to pillage the Geneva convention at the time, made it illegal, but we still did it. And there was outrage. So I think that's a very important point to embrace. And also that there's a sort of arbitrary timing for when outrage and morality should start applying. So like, when does it apply? Does it apply from today, you know, from tomorrow? So when does the statute of limitations expire, basically? Yeah, that's a really good point. I mean, slavery is a very good example because people say, oh, you know, they were just doing what everyone was doing, right? But actually, no, because the abolition movement went on for a very long time. It wasn't a sudden point. It went on for decades. And so people who were dealing in slaves, they knew their friends were like joining the opposition. And yet they carried on. So you can measure them against those moral standards. But what I find really interesting is that in this in this sort of self glorifying account of abolishing slavery that we have in the UK, that you know, somebody said there's a quote that I can't remember the attribution, but that the British talk about abolishing slavery as if they only invented it so that it could abolish it. Eric Williams. That's why that's why you wrote Empire Land because you're on top of these details. And but what I find really fascinating is that there is a much better account that can be told a much more morally encouraging accounts that can be told of the abolition of slavery in the accounts of the white people who worked against it. And we just treated as this time where like, everyone was pro-slavery and then suddenly everyone wasn't and actually eliminates obviously the work of black and brown people who campaigned against it. But also the white people who were on the right side of history. And it was much more difficult than it would have been today. Yeah. I mean, people often say people like us are woke. Why do we hate British history? And it's like, what do you mean? Which bit of history? It's 500 years we're talking about. Yeah. I mean, I hate abolition. Do I hate Sadiq Khan? Do I hate slavery? You know, it's so complex. It's such an inane thing. But as we know, it works for these cultural warriors. It's a very popular attitude. And I think it's also because it's linked to, this is my next question, it's linked to this idea of white supremacy, which you say in the book, one of the biggest white supremacist enterprises in the history of humanity was the British Empire. And I think potentially, and I won't ask the question for you, but I think that in the UK, we're much less accustomed to dealing with issues of white supremacy than they are in the US, for example, because there's just this much more graphic history of slavery and it's much more intimate. But because the empire was outsourced, it was away. The kind of the language and the jargon and the kind of moral tools of talking about racism are really poor in the UK. Yeah, I think it's partly because, as you say, it all happened away from us. We've never been invaded in the modern age, right? So we've not had to face up to what happened in the way America has to every day, right? Also, it's a really complicated history. I mean, it's taken me four years to get my head around it. I think the average person finds it much easier to think about World War II, you know, six years, clear beginning, clear end, clear morality. We beat the evil German, racist Germans, right? It helps us forget the fact that we were willfully white supremacist. I mean, one of the most surreal things about writing the book, I began it, it was such an esoteric theme. By the end, Black Lives Matter had made it like an international concern. I remember putting on the news and there's a BBC News at 10 report about how Britain exported ideas of racism to America. Now, we gave America those ideas. Now, we created through this weird pseudo race science, many of the racisms that exist across the world. So if you accept that we gave the world railways and justice in the press, we also gave them quite a lot of racism. But how much do you think that understanding of racism is sort of blocked or suffocated by the fact that we are dealing with contemporary racism as well? So I think potentially the challenges that you've got racism in the past, you've got contemporary racism, which is much messier. And one thing that you hear a lot when you try and raise these issues is that Britain has atoned. Even if it did anything, it has atoned. Look, you're here. I'm here. There's a huge development in terms of progress and diversity on racism. So many of the ex-colonies are now part of the UK and their culture and their diet. So how much do you think Britain's kind of relative success and integration of its ex-empire citizens has in a weird way laundered its racism reputation and stopped us from having these conversations? Yeah, I think that empire and racism are synonymous. I mean, when you're talking about British Empire, you're talking about race, right? You're talking about white people conquering and sometimes enslaving brown people. And the reason I think we have institutional racism is because we have had the institution of empire. And the reason we're in denial about institutional racism is because we're in denial about the history of British Empire. I think it's really correlated and I explain in the book how the way brown people were dealt with in post-war Britain was precisely the way they were dealt with in empire. We weren't allowed to live in white areas. We weren't allowed to do white people's jobs. There was racial violence of the same tone and tenor that was happening at the same time in Africa with the male male. And you can really see it very clearly in post-war Britain. The question is whether you can prove that racism, that really obvious racism we had in the 60s, 70s and 80s still exists. And it gets hard to prove it, doesn't it? But I think it obviously still exists and you can prove it through all sorts of statistics. Yeah, I think the issue is the plausible deniability. And as we saw in the government's race disparity report that came out a few days ago, that when racism enters kind of institutional areas as opposed to personal racism, like playground racism or intimate racism on the street, et cetera, people then find it much easier because they want to. Find it much easier to deny its existence. So that's also legacy of empire because it's just, it's all around us. So you can't really recognize it. Yeah, and another very controversial legacy of empire, which I didn't put in the book, you could argue is using brown people to push your argument, right? So there were always, there was always divide and rule, there were always collaborators with the empire, right? That's the only way it managed to exist. And one thing that if you ever want to write a sequel to your book, it should be about the kind of the class of people in empire that without whom empire wouldn't exist. And people use them and say, well, if, you know, if colonialism was so terrible, why did the Indians accept it for hundreds of years? Yeah, why did these parties really love it? You know what I mean? They were given the best jobs. I wonder why. Yeah, exactly. And so this, this idea that sort of brown and black people have to line up 100% on in one political position or otherwise their position is invalid is something that has happened over the ages. Yeah, it's been quite weird watching white people in the last week, white politicians saying, oh, you got to listen to these brown people on this panel, on this commission, it's their lived in experience. And it's like, since when have you ever listened to people of color? You're listening to them, because they've been pre selected, because they agree with you, right? There's something quite racist about that as well, I think. Anyway, yeah. And it's one of those things that's also very hard to counter, because then as a person of color, then you're told, oh, you know, are you calling these people traitors? Are you calling them, you know, that you calling them coconuts? Are you being, are you calling them native informants? There's this whole kind of silencing culture as well, that means that it's very difficult to point these things out without falling in the trap yourself. Yeah, it's a very effective strategy. I mean, basically, there's brown people everywhere now, it's true, they tend to be Asian, but they're everywhere. So racism's over. There we go. Yeah, well, this is something that I look forward to to racism being over, I'm sure everyone will. And this is the other thing, like none of us wants it to continue. So let me get a kick out of it. So my next question is something I'm very personally interested in is about the wealth of Britain, just in terms of like the two things I think that people aren't aware of, because they happened offshore. And when they came on short, by the time they came on shore, they were laundered. And then the incidence of wealth literally. How much of Britain, can you come up with a sort of snap estimate of how much of Britain's contemporary wealth originated in Amalaya? I'm glad you asked that question, because people don't. And it was the it was the chapter that most did my head in, because it took me six months. The original chapter was 40,000 words long. I think in the end, it's about seven. It's actually quite a philosophical question. It's like trying to take the egg out of a baked cake, because the wealth entered so many different parts of British cultural life. And you can't actually point out, people often say, oh, you know, a lot about wealth comes from empire. I don't think you can really say that. But you can absolutely point at thousands of examples where it clearly did, you know, so a third of our national trust properties, you know, were built or have connections to with colonialism. We know Lord Clive came back with the equivalent of three quarters of a billion pounds from India. That's an indication of what might have been stolen. We have we have we know that William Pitt, the entire family family fortune that produced two prime ministers came from a diamond he bought from India, he smuggled it in through his trousers, I think. And then you got the fact that we have Bristol, Liverpool, London, Glasgow, these cities owe their growth to colonialism, to slavery, or to the trade with India and so on. So you can trace it individually, trace it with companies. So Shell, for instance, you know, that began, was began by a guy called Marcus Sammel, who was trading in Shells from the Far East. Liberty, your favourite shop, Nazrin, began with Liberty. Don't cancel Liberty. I'm not canceling it, but it began with the trading of Indian textiles and the building was called East India House. I think it was built from the former timbers of a ship called the HMS Hindustan. It was an abandoned town and had to be rebuilt, yeah. So it was everywhere, but when people start saying, you know, we need to give back $777 trillion to the former slave nations as reparations, I think then I don't trust the numbers because there's so many assumptions. But the important thing surely isn't at this point, I think it isn't reparations as such, but it's understanding that the sort of civilizational supremacy of Britain does not come from meritocracy. Like this is one of the most insidious things about the secret wealth accumulation of empire is that growing up as someone who is from a originally from a poor brown or black country in Asia or in Africa, you look at Britain and you look at Western Europe and you think, well, these countries are so wealthy, they must have done something right. They must be inherently much more enterprising. You kind of, you absorb these sort of stereotypes where you think, well, surely their supremacy is warranted because they work harder, they're wealthier, their countries are more developed. And that is I think the most insidious bit of denying the wealth of empire because it reifies and reinforces the sort of caste system almost internationally, which is based on nothing apart from the fact that you had the kind of violence and aggression of white supremacy to go and take over other people. That's very well put. When people say, should we have reparations, I say, you know what, we're not ready in Britain. We're still having the argument about whether racism exists. How are we ever going to go from that to say, oh, racism exists because of empire, and therefore we need to have reparations. I mean, we like to look down on America as being more screwed up than we are about race, but I think they're way ahead. There's a conversation in America about reparations. They have organizations that tackle racism, individuals like Al Sharpton who take on the cause. I feel like here we've got Lenny Henry. God bless him. He's a great guy from a brilliant part of the world, Black Country, but we need more than that. We need organizations. And if you're endlessly arguing about whether racism even exists, how are you going to solve it, man? And so it feels very backward here. But that's one of the things that's so, I think, useful about your book, Empire Land, is that there's kind of two ways to approach the issue of empire. There's a sort of angry polemical way in a justified fashion, angry justified polemics about what has been stolen and what needs to be returned, both in terms of wealth and in terms of artifacts, etc., which you also touch on. And then there's the other bit, which is the other kind of way talking about empire, we'll just talk about it in a way that is useful, that is productive, where kind of people can try and get somewhere together without going to the sort of polemical, frustrated bit immediately. And both I think have a purpose in that you need the sort of anger and frustration behind the debate, but you also need to kind of know where to start and what to pick. Did you think about that consciously when writing the book? No, I didn't, but I think I did it anyway. And that's partly because I think I'm Sikh, so I'm compromised. The Sikhs have a very complicated relationship with British Empire. We took the side of the British in the Indian mutiny. That's part of the reason why they thought we were a martial race, basically, we took their side. And so we were useful to them. And then, even at Jolliwollabag, a very awkward fact is that the soldiers, ordered by General Dyer to kill 6,900 people, some of them were Sikh. Then we fought in both world wars for empire. And we took advantage of relocating within empire, first in East Africa, and then in Britain. And now we're seen as a modern minority. So I'm a product of that. So I don't feel angry about empire. I feel like what we need to do about in the debate is to take out feeling. Because too much of the debate is about how much pride you take from empire or how much shame. I think we should instead just try to understand. You can't eradicate those feelings, because when you read about genocide, you're going to have feelings. But you can't make it entirely about your feelings, because that just ends up in this cultural war, which is going nowhere. But it also ends up in a place, this is the kind of the next one I want to take this, which is that it's bad for everyone when there is this fixation on the past. It also takes people to a place where they become delusional and they lose touch with reality. And then they get into self-harming territory. And I think Brexit, as you also touch on is a very good example of this, for the kind of hubristic adventurism of the British empire, because it still thinks it exists somehow and doesn't need to have compact with other countries or be told what to do by people in Brussels. There's also kind of corrosive elements of it, no? Yeah. And I guess in Boris Johnson and Jacob Rees-Mogg, we have two of the most imperial politicians we've ever had. Boris in his spare time is writing books about church, or Jacob Rees-Mogg is writing books about imperial Victorians, how great they are. Historically, illiterate books. Boris is reading out Rudyard Kipling, or trying to, in Burma, talking about flag-waving Picaninis. Being told to pipe down by his own ambassador. And more recently, in the middle of a global pandemic, writing a piece saying he wanted to defend Churchill's statue with his last breath. And it's like, dude, no one is trying to tear down that statue, apart from maybe one or two extremists, right? But now you've got a situation where that statue seems to be under permanent police guard with about 20 police officers. This is the way it leads to, you know? There's probably people who are dying who aren't having their 9-9 call responded to because all the police officers are guarding the statue of Winston Churchill. And they do this because it works out for them. In focus groups, there's an idea that if you defend British history, you're defending Britain, you know? So it plays really well. Unfortunately, it creates division and it makes us nowhere, no nearer to getting our heads around what happened in empire. And it also creates, it keeps repeating patterns, recreating the same patterns, politically, where we kind of idolize a certain type politician, a certain type of powerful person, because they epitomize sort of empire grandeur that everyone's been brought up with. So just on that note, I want to talk a little bit now, we're running out of time, even though I feel like we just got started. I want to talk about the response to the book, which has been really, really interesting. Both in terms of, like you said, people coming up to you and saying, I studied history at Oxford, Cambridge, I didn't know half of the stuff. So just in terms of like exposing the ignorance of people, but also the really aggressive backlash it has had from others. My first question is, do you think, just to comment this from where we started about education, how hard do you think it is for people who grew up with an education that they were told is true by their own teachers, their own government, their own parents and grandparents? And then you come along and write this book and they're like, well, what do you know that our government doesn't know? What do you know that my parents didn't know? How much do you think that the aggressive response to the book has been because of this brainwashing exercise, basically? I think it's even more basic than that. So the garden rang me about three weeks ago saying, we're going to write something about the racist crap you're doing. And I felt very, very self-conscious about it because I've been getting quite a lot of crap, but I think David Yodusoga, the black historian of empire, gets it much worse. I think women get it worse. I actually think brown women, like you, get it the absolute worst. What I get is a fraction of what you get, right, when you do TV. But they wrote the story anyway and they rang up William Dalrymple and William said, you know what, I write a very similar stuff to satanam. I've been doing it for decades. I've not had one message in my life from a British reader of the kind satanam gets. And it was that that made me realise, you know what, it's about my race. And not only is empire basically about race, we've got to remember the imperial story has, for all our lives, been told in Britain anyway, by white men of a certain age, getting off a train on BBC 2 at 6.30, talking about the glory of the Raj. But suddenly there's brown people doing that. So we've got David Yodusoga who does it. You've got me in a much more minor way. And this triggers racist people. So it's this double thing. Not only is empire about race already, but now the people in the colonised in their heads are finally in control of the narrative. And this makes people's heads explode, unfortunately. And how much do you think that is also a function of the rarity of it happening? Like I think abuse is usually, like in my experience, the more abuse you get, the more likely it is because no one has seen someone who looks like you talking about this stuff before. So it's like directly proportional, no, inversely proportional to the number of people like you in that space. So how much do you think that's related to just the fact that it's a completely rare exercise? Yeah, it's a rare exercise. And also it's just empire in general. I mean, there's such an amnesia around it. It's not confronted in the way, say, the Germans confront the Holocaust. I mean, they make films all the time about the Holocaust. I mean, how many films about the colonial era are actually made? You get kind of rose-tinted versions of depictions of the Raj, but almost nothing about colonial wars, apart from Zulu, which is very problematic. So our film scene ignores it. And I mean, I don't remember going to any museum or art exhibition as a kid that was about empire. And so we just kind of either forget about it, or if we do remember it's in this kind of absurd, you know, merchant ivory kind of way. And when people say sepia-toned, these dramas are literally sepia-toned. There's like a filter over them, where everything is kind of bathed in this gentle light, gentle benign light of empire. You see it in very actually much more basic popular TV shows, like Rick Stein. I got into trouble for tweeting about India the other day, you know. And the way he talks about India when he's walking around India is still so 1970s. Yeah. But because there's this woke versus proud framing when you make these kind of criticisms, people are just like, oh, you're just being woke now. And that's one of the most challenging things, I think. When I try and think about the value of your book and how much it has opened up a space for us to have these discussions and just get all the data. It's so rich in data. It's so rich in kind of, like you say, characters, personalities, stories, scandals, you know, human, messy human greeds and sins, all that kind of stuff. I feel like the way forward is quite complicated. It's quite gnarly to try and communicate these things without running into this defensiveness. So are you, and this is a kind of mandatory question to any author who writes something about changing culture is, are you optimistic? Well, as you know, one thing I've been really surprised by is the number of Tories who've liked the book. So Chris Patton gave me a review, Sajid Javid's reading it. A few other government ministers are probably can't name them. I don't know if they liked it or not. Baroness Warsi. And I think that's because they can see their parties being hijacked by this cult of right wing English nationalists, basically, and they want to have the information to be able to argue their way. And so I think there's a whole area in the middle. And this is what I wanted when I was researching the book, a book that wasn't left or right, that just explained things. And even the Telegraph said, they slagged me off of what I thought about Brexit, but they were like, you know what, satanam's right. You can't argue with the sheer amount of information. You can't argue that there wasn't something rotten in empire. It blew my mind when the Telegraph said that, you know, that is huge. That is there's a way of going forward, you know, and now I can't remember what your question was. No, that was, are you optimistic, basically? Yeah, I am. And actually, the other thing that makes me optimistic is young people, because they've not only embraced Black Lives Matter, they get their education from outside the classroom. So I think they're really, they're really wised up about colonialism because they follow the Brown History account, you know, on Instagram, they watch Black Panther, they talk about it, they understand systemic racism, and they're the future. I mean, obviously, they'll become more right-wing as they get older. But I don't think you can take on the fact that society is becoming more progressive. Yeah, and I think that's also a kind of inevitable outcome of the monopoly of information becoming weakened, because, you know, for the entire history of empire education, there was one purveyor of information that was the government. And now that, and there was also one acceptable race, one acceptable gender, one acceptable demographic that was vested with authority, which is like white posh men. And you and the younger generation getting access to information outside of the school are evidence of that monopoly weakening. And so is the anger. I think it's quite hard for us, like being the subject of this trolling and vicious reaction. But it's a symptoms of, it's a death throes of the white male establishment. And they're always going to fight. So they're fighting, but I think it's game over already. Yeah, I guess the question is, how long is the death throgue last? No, it's like, if it lasts like my entire lifetime, then one is less optimistic about it. But if you kind of have the long lens, I guess, then you can be a bit more hopeful. Yeah, I mean, there is something depressing because the Tories are really doubling down. I mean, they've seen where the culture wars go in America, they don't end in a good place, man. But rather than saying, we don't need to do that. And they don't need to do it because they're doing really well in the polls. They're still doing it. I think they enjoy doing it, or they do it unconsciously. It's just part of who they are. But so that is quite depressing. I think we've got probably another decade of this government. Well, what would be interesting is to see how much, how effective that kind of re-sewing of the seeds of National Victorian Empire works with younger generations. That would be really fascinating to see if there's a kind of second life in it, somehow post Brexit. I really don't know. I think it might be quite depressing to analyze that. But I really sense not because I feel like young people who read the book, they're like, yeah, this is obvious. Yeah. And I think there's also one thing, this is the note I want to end on, that reading your book and also reading kind of a similar book to it, which is cast, Isabel Wilkerson's cast was talking about America and India and Nazi Germany, just talking about kind of the underpinning concept, which is that every nation has a caste, basically. But in her book, as in yours, there is just a wealth of humanizing information. And it humanizes both the perpetrators and the victims. And one thing I came away from your book feeling, even though there was kind of moments of real anger and real sadness, and actually real darkness about the things people had to go through and that they weren't vindicated in their lifetimes, which is kind of this expansiveness of knowledge. I just felt kind of heavier with the burden of the difficult stuff in the book, but also just lighter and more positive with the sense of liberating sounds quite cheesy. It was like the liberation of data. I was like, I just know more now. And if more people know more, surely that's the way forward. No, that's very kind of you. And I feel the same. I mean, people that whole thing about, I mean, do you hate Britain? I don't hate Britain having spent four years looking at the dark history. I understand Britain. It's like going into therapy with either with yourself or with a partner, you know, you might learn some dark things about them or yourself. But the understanding and the information can actually make you stronger. And I feel, I feel that's been my journey. And it could be, it could be our national journey. If only we stop playing these culture wars. I think that's a perfect way to end the conversation. Thank you so much. I could have talked to you for another hour. No, thank you. And I want to tell people that, you know, if they're interested in M. M. Pauline, they should read your book. We need new stories, which kind of takes what I say, but makes it much more global and cleverer, frankly. That's so kind. You could have said that like right at the top. I would have been nicer to you. Thank you so much, Sant Nam. We will, I'm sure, see and hear more of you soon as M. Pauline continues to be a really, really important part of the discourse. I think there are books that are informative and there are books that are interventions. And this book is a real intervention in how we talk about our history. And I look forward to seeing how many more minds is going to change. Thank you. And thanks also to HISTFEST and Rebecca for doing the signing throughout this session. See you soon. Thank you. Thank you.