David Olusoga: More than a quarter of all the nations on Earth are former British colonies, and scattered across the world are the ruins of the British Empire-- statues to kings and viceroys, slave fortresses, plantations, schools, railways, and prisons.

At its height, the British Empire, the biggest there has ever been, ruled over a fifth of the world's land surface and almost a quarter of its people, but how did a tiny island off the coast of Europe claim power over so much of the world, and how did that vast empire, built over 3 centuries, collapse within the space of a single generation?

These questions and that history are today in the 21st century becoming more urgent and more contested than perhaps ever before because the ghosts of the British Empire have been re-awoken.

[People shouting] Olusoga: This history is today being uncovered and debated because perhaps the greatest legacy of the British Empire is a living legacy.

There are today literally billions of people whose ancestors, in different ways, were part of this story, and for this series, we invited people from across the world to take part, people for whom the history of the British Empire is also their family history.

♪ They'll share their personal views on the Empire, how it shaped Britain, and how it shaped the world, explaining how they try to make sense of this complex history and its legacy.

Man: Often, people are trying to do a tally-up-- here's what's happened on the good side, here's what happened on the bad side, where have we ended up?

It's an unhelpful way to look at it.

Walk around many cities in the UK, there is a visible legacy of Empire-- the names of streets, the statues we put up, the buildings that we have.

Woman, voice-over: It's our shared past.

You can't just cherry-pick the good things out to fit your story.

You have to pick out the good with the bad.

Man, voice-over: Yes, the British Empire has shaped the world as we know it today.

However, what was that really like for most of the people that lived under the British Empire?

And if that means discomfort, that means having to sit with what's happened in the past, I think that has to be how it is.

Olusoga: In Britain and in nations that were once part of the Empire, this is a history we are all struggling to come to terms with.

♪ There is no clear start date for the British Empire, but one key event took place here in the autumn of 1592.

In the September of that year, a ship was being sailed up this river.

Its name was the Madre de Deus, the Mother of God, and it might well have been the biggest ship then in existence anywhere in the world, and it was on this river, and being sailed towards that port because it had just been captured in a battle fought out there in the Atlantic by English privateers, state-sanctioned pirates.

The Madre de Deus was a carrack, a giant, heavily armed international trading ship, but it sailed under the flag of Portugal, which, in 1592, was, for the English, an enemy nation.

♪ The sheer size of the Madre de Deus was astonishing to the English, but when it docked in Dartmouth Harbor, what truly astonished was the cargo discovered below deck.

Amazingly, a list of that cargo, an inventory that was created at the time, has survived to the present day.

The first item on the inventory is pepper, and there's a huge amount of it.

In the 16th century, pepper came from Indonesia, and so, like many of the other items on the inventory, it's been shipped all the way across the Indian Ocean and then all the way around the coast of Africa, and that single commodity is here valued at £70,000.

After pepper, there are cloves, and there is cinnamon, then nutmeg and ginger.

There are colors for dyers and then silks and calicoes.

In 1592, all of these items were extraordinarily expensive luxuries, and it's been estimated that, taken together, these spices and drugs and silks seized from the hold of a single Portuguese ship were worth the same as around half of the entire annual trade of England, and so for some people, the capture of the Madre de Deus was a moment when they came to realize that their enemies, the Portuguese and the Spanish, had pioneered a new form of global trade with the kingdoms and with the empires of Asia, a trade that was staggeringly profitable and that they, the English, had been left disastrously behind.

♪ The biggest beneficiary of the auction of the treasures of the Madre de Deus was the investor who had put the most money into the pirate expedition that had captured the Portuguese ship.

That investor was Queen Elizabeth I.

Her share of the auction was worth £80,000, around £28 million in today's money.

Yet despite all her wealth and grandeur and despite the fact that Elizabeth's England had just defeated the Spanish Armada, England was still a relatively small, relatively poor nation.

It was the merchants of the City of London, astonished by the riches of the Madre de Deus, who began to lobby and campaign for England to establish the first beginnings of an empire-- an empire of trade but also an empire of settlement.

[Gull squawks] So back in the last decades of the 16th century, just as it is now, this part of London, the Old City, that's the center of banking and finance and of merchants, but in those decades, the big question, the big challenge that those bankers are facing is how to break into this world of trade out in Asia.

You've got a situation where the Crown doesn't have very much money, but you've got a city which is starting to build up merchant communities, so these merchants decide that they can club together and create what are called joint stock companies, and they will each put together a stash of money, will split the profits, but also deal with the startups involved, so the ships involved, and will also take the losses.

So they share the risk and the profits.

You share the risks, so the Crown sort of says, "OK. We'll support it, "but we don't bear any risk, "and there's no political issues.

"You know, if you get caught out here, "it's not our problem, but we will take some of the profits in the end."

These are some of the crests of those joint stock companies, so this is the Merchants of East-India.

The creation of the East India Company in 1600 is, I think, a real game changer.

This is about a really serious push to get to India, to go around the Cape, and to really sort of supercharge this city in terms of getting to Southeast Asia.

This is a list of the merchants who put money into the East India Company, and it starts with who you'd expect.

It's the elites.

Here's Stephen Soames, the Lord Mayor of London.

Then there's a load of aldermen who are the people who run the city.

But then when you go down this list, there are some men from more modest trades.

This is a Robert Cox, who's a grocer.

This is an ironmonger.

These are what we call the middling sorts, so they're the prosperous-- "Middling sorts."

Yeah.

They're the prosperous merchants.

They're the traders, drapers.

They're tailors.

They're grocers.

We got to remember that England is on the absolute margins of what we'd call, you know, the early modern world at this time in 1600.

It's a speck.

Places like the Ottomans and the Chinese don't even know who we are, so they have to fight harder.

They have to be savvier.

They don't have, actually, a big navy.

They don't have huge amounts of money.

They're blocked out pretty much still from the New World and the Americas and all the silver that's come in, so this is such a smart way of doing it, to say, "We can compete with the big boys," and really from the early 17th century, then that just explodes because they've got a model which is really succeeding.

So this idea of the joint stock company, that's a financial revolution.

It's a revolution.

The money that is flowing back in here, you know, the city becomes awash with it by the end of Elizabeth's reign, and that's been a massive turnaround from 1558.

These companies, they're all about trade with Asia, but there is another form of colonialism which has been taking place in the 16th century, and that's about settlement.

It's about building colonies, and this company is England's answer to that-- the Merchants of Virginia.

The model here is very different.

When the English go west, it's very different to when they go east with the joint stock companies in the Mediterranean and trying to reach India and China.

They know that those cultures are actually much more sophisticated, and they have to negotiate with them.

They don't believe that with the Americas.

This is about sending out groups of people who will create plantations and colonies.

So this revolution, this idea of the joint stock company, the English hope it's gonna give them both trade with Asia that they've been lacking, that they've been pushed out of by the Portuguese, and also colonies in the New World.

Yeah, so it is the beginning of what I think we inherit, which is a global idea of empire because you go west, and you settle and colonize; you go east, and you trade, and you exchange, and both those things are at work, and I think that that is the legacy that is inherited and develops in this complex idea of what the British Empire is.

[Creak] Olusoga: In the first years of the 17th century, the joint stock companies of London, with money raised from England's merchants and her pirates, dispatched their ships across the oceans.

The ships of the East India Company headed east around Africa and into the Indian Ocean, their mission--to take on the Portuguese and the Dutch and break into the trade in pepper and spices.

Heading in the opposite direction, crossing the 3,500 miles of the Atlantic, sailed the ships of the Virginia Company.

♪ Their journey took them here-- Chesapeake Bay and the banks of the James River in Virginia, and in a colony named after the late Queen Elizabeth, they founded a new settlement-- Jamestown, named after the new king.

It was here--far to the north of the vast empires that Spain and Portugal had forged in Mexico, South America, and the Caribbean-- that the English established their tiny foothold in the New World, a mere 100 colonists planted on the other side of the ocean, linked to England only by infrequent supply missions.

♪ This is a copy of "The Generall Historie of Virginia, New England, and the Summer Isles," and it's an account of the Jamestown colony written by John Smith, who was the colony's leader.

It describes the first of many fleets of ships sent out from London to Virginia to try to keep the colony going and keep the colonists alive.

It was sent in 1607 and arrived very early in 1608 and it lists the new colonists, the new settlers.

By far, the largest group are gentlemen.

These are men who have bought shares in the Virginia Company.

The next group are laborers.

These are poor men who've been brought across the Atlantic to work for the gentlemen, and the first problem you can see is that there were a lot more gentlemen than there are laborers.

But this third column are tradesmen.

These are men who have skills.

There's 6 tailors.

There's a blacksmith.

There's a cooper for making barrels.

There's two apothecaries, who are like pharmacists, and then there's two goldsmiths and two men who are listed as refiners.

That means they are men who are skilled at taking gold in its natural form and refining it down and removing the impurities.

Now, they have been sent to Virginia despite the fact that before these ships left, the first batch of what the settlers in Jamestown had thought was gold has already arrived in London and been shown to be pyrite, fool's gold, and yet the men of the Virginia Company, who've invested a lot of their own money in this whole scheme, are still clinging to the hope that somewhere in the soil or the rivers of Virginia, they're going to strike gold, and these goldsmiths and these refiners are gonna be the men to do it and they will make everyone involved in this fabulously wealthy and what will happen in Virginia will be a rerun of what happened in the Spanish colonies in South America.

♪ What had happened in the Spanish colonies in South America decades earlier was that the largest deposits of silver ever discovered, along with the vast gold wealth of the Aztec people, had been conquered by the Spanish.

♪ Spain had both founded an empire and grown incredibly rich on the wealth of the New World.

The English, in the vast, open spaces of North America, found not gold but starvation.

The colonists had arrived in Jamestown too late to plant crops, and the gentlemen, unused to hard labor, were of little help.

Disease cut through the settlers.

Within a year of their arrival, the majority were dead.

♪ The years 1609 to 1610 were known in Jamestown as the Starving Time, and that era of starvation and suffering at Jamestown in the first years of the 17th century is one of the founding stories in the history of the British Empire and in the history of what was to become the United States.

The story of how the Jamestown settlement did, in the end, survive is almost always told from the point of view of the English, but that is not the whole story.

There is another way of thinking about all this, which is to try to imagine what England's attempt to plant a colony here, right on the edge of North America, what that must have looked like and felt like to the people for whom this land and these rivers was already home.

♪ Those people who knew these rivers were the Powhatan, a confederacy of local ethnic groups named after their great leader, a man who ruled over an empire of his own.

♪ Among the tribes ruled by the great Powhatan were the Appomattoc, the Rappahannock, and the Pamunkey, and they have their own historical memory of Jamestown and the beginnings of English settlement.

That story and the archeology it left behind is the focus of the work of Dr. Ashley Spivey.

Spivey: I'm a member of the Pamunkey Indian tribe, which was the geographical and political core of the Powhatan chiefdom that the English encountered when they first arrived in 1607.

Olusoga: So that encounter-- let's use the word "encounter"-- between your ancestors and the English, is something that means quite a lot to you.

It means a lot to me because it set the stage for what was gonna happen for the next 400 years when it came to Indigenous people, and one of the main points that our people like to make is how long we were here, how deep of a history that we have in the Chesapeake region of Virginia that goes back thousands and thousands and thousands of years.

Do you have any artifacts from when the English arrive?

Yes.

This is a rolled copper bead.

Copper was a very important prestige item that people of power and significance would wear on their bodies.

And is this copper that the English brought, do we know?

Most likely, it is, and one of the main things that they were trading for were food in the beginning.

That began to fall apart pretty early because they started to take foodstuffs from the Powhatan by force.

And the Powhatan people, there are far more of them.

I mean, they could have-- Many, many more.

Yeah.

They could have driven them out of Jamestown.

Right.

Why were the English allowed to stay, right?

We believe that trade was the key to why the English were allowed to stay because a lot of the, especially the copper, items that the Powhatan people, the Powhatan elite, wanted were coming from a middleman out west which were their enemies, and that would be the Monacan people.

I think we often forget that when Europeans arrive in other parts of the world, they arrive in societies that have their own wars and disputes with other people...

Exactly.

and that they're viewed not as these great colonizers, but as people who might be useful...

Right.

against another people or who might make you less reliant upon the people down the road or over the mountains that you don't like.

You do not get at the complexity of the people that were there before the Europeans arrived, and that, of course, includes the Powhatan, and the other big myth about the British Empire and other colonial empires is that the Indigenous people kind of die off, they no longer exist in the contemporary world, but we're still here today, and we still are able to make a living and live our lives as Indigenous people.

♪ Olusoga: Through trade and through conquest, the colony at Jamestown survived the Starving Times, and the English were able to create other settlements, seizing land from Indigenous peoples like the Powhatan, but what made this possible was, in part, a discovery made by a man who arrived in 1610.

One of the English settlers who risked everything and came here to Virginia was a young guy from Norfolk called John Rolfe.

Now, he didn't come hoping to find gold.

He got hold of some seeds of a Caribbean strain of tobacco, and set out to discover if the soil of Virginia could grow a tobacco crop that he could sell for a profit back in England.

Now, it has to be said that-- on paper, at least-- John Rolfe's plans are no less unrealistic or overoptimistic than those of the men who thought they were gonna strike gold or find a trading route to China, and yet John Rolfe not only succeeded in growing tobacco.

In doing so, he utterly transformed the fortunes of the Jamestown colony and transformed the economics of Britain's whole attempt to build a permanent colony in North America.

Today, 400 years later, the fields of Virginia are still covered in neat rows of tobacco plants, something that would have astonished the settlers of 1607.

Tobacco was the first cash crop that showed that the empire could be profitable not from piracy or the discovery of gold, but by acquiring land.

♪ Tobacco helped transform England's tiny foothold in North America into a string of colonies to which hundreds of thousands of English and then British people were to emigrate.

♪ The expansion of those British colonies, and later the expansion of the United States, involved a series of wars against the Indigenous peoples that were to last for almost 3 centuries.

♪ Man, voice-over: It was a humiliation.

It was a devastation to say that your land is no longer yours.

Melinda: In our belief, we came out of the earth not far from where we used to live geographically in the homelands.

To be forced to leave that is just-- How can you put that into words?

Coming of a Beautiful Day: It completely changed our societal, our social norms and mores.

There was a lot that happened in a very short space of time.

It has taken so much effort to rebuild and reconnect and relink our past into our present.

♪ [Wind blowing] Olusoga: In the same decades that tobacco was transforming the fortunes of England's North American colonies, English settlers secured another foothold in another part of the world, and there they created even greater profits growing another colonial cash crop.

♪ This is Barbados, and in the 1620s, this became one of the first English colonies in the Caribbean.

♪ Barbados is one of the smaller of the Caribbean islands.

It's just 21 miles long and 14 wide, and it's on the fringes of the Caribbean, and what that meant was that when the English arrived here, it was on the edge of the area of Spanish control, and both the Spanish and the Portuguese had long known about this island, but Spain and Portugal had focused their attention on the Spanish Main, on Brazil, and on the bigger Caribbean islands, like Hispaniola and Cuba.

To them, Barbados was just too small to bother with.

And there was another reason for the indifference of the big players.

♪ This is one of the few places where you can get an idea of what Barbados must have looked like when the English first arrived here because this is one of the last surviving patches of the indigenous rainforest that used to cover much of this island, and what that meant was that before any crops could be planted on Barbados and, therefore, before any money could be made, the settlers here had to clear these forests.

Colonial Barbados became a world of small farms between the patches of surviving rainforest.

♪ The settlers grew whatever crops they could, and the work was done by indentured laborers-- poor people from England, Scotland, and Ireland who sold their labor in return for food and the hope of one day getting land of their own, but right from the start, there were some among the planters who had other plans.

Early on in the history of Barbados, a group of English settlers went on a fact-finding mission to Pernambuco, a Dutch colony on the coast of Brazil, and there they encountered a complicated, semi-industrial agricultural process that had been developed by the Spanish and the Portuguese on Madeira and in the Canary Islands and then transplanted into South America, and the cash crop at the center of all of this was cane sugar.

This is a Dutch engraving from the 1620s that shows an idealized view of Pernambuco, and here in the corner is sugar cane being harvested by a man with a scythe.

Then the outer leaves are being stripped off, and then the canes themselves that hold the sugar juice are being taken into this mill, where they're to be crushed, and then we can see the juice being heated up and then the finished sugar being put into these storage jars.

To the more ambitious and the more ruthless of the English settlers on Barbados, an image like this represented a vision.

It was almost a blueprint of their possible futures.

♪ The story of how sugar transformed Barbados and how the experiment carried out on this island was to transform the British Empire can be told through any one of the hundreds of plantations that were carved out of the rainforest, places like this-- the Trents Plantation on the west coast.

A map of Trents reveals how the drive to produce sugar was stamped onto the landscape.

♪ Olusoga: We're standing in a part of Barbados that is shown on this map from 1646.

Absolutely.

This is...

Specifically, we're standing on the grounds of St. James' Church.

A rare instance where you can look at the original map and then see a version of the original structure.

What's so remarkable about this particular document, it captures a process that's unfolding not just here on the West Coast, but across the island at a very rapid rate, so what you're looking at here is one of the first places that the English first arrived in 1625 and then officially as a colony in 1627, so we have the church right in the foreground, right on the coast, and then you see several other structures moving back upland towards the kind of hill region going further inland east, and it's hard to visualize now, but by the 1640s, a lot of this would have been completely deforested as they were making room for the emergence of the sugar industry.

So we're seeing here the division of all this land being brought together under the ownership of a single owner, who will then run a 300-acre estate for the next several decades.

In the preceding years, sugar comes in on the late 1630s, but it doesn't take off immediately, but once some of the planters start to recognize just how much profit can be extracted, we see this process taking over not just on the West coast, but across the island very, very quickly.

Because if you can see that this is the route to incredible profits, like a gold rush, you're very quickly gonna abandon cotton and tobacco and the old crops.

You're gonna rush in and embrace this new system.

It's called the sugar revolution, and it does have the sort of pace and the speed and the violence of a revolution.

Sure, and I think you also get a sense of how much sugar was actually prioritized on this landscape.

It's really within a short period of time where just about all the natural vegetation had been completely denuded from the island, and we start to see kind of a almost momentary panic when they recognize that there's no timber left, there's no provisions left for the laborers to feed themselves.

It really is a monoculture.

There's one crop, a cash crop, and that's all that's grown here, and if you take an acre of land and you aren't growing sugar on it, you're throwing money out the window.

We see a complete prioritization of sugar production.

♪ Olusoga: The sugar revolution that allowed plantations like Trents to expand and become enormously profitable was at first fueled by the work of indentured laborers shipped from England, Scotland, and Ireland, but in the middle decades of the 17th century, that changed, and the moment of transition can once again be told through the history of the Trents Plantation and the documents left behind.

These two documents between them show just how fast Barbados was changing in the 1640s.

This is a mortgage agreement for one of the farms that went on to make up part of the Trents Plantation.

It's from May 1641, and what it does is it lists all of the assets that are owned by this farm to allow for a valuation on the mortgage, and among those assets are the 14 indentured laborers.

It gives their full names, and then it also gives how many years they have left to serve on their contract because those years of labor are part of the valuation of the farm.

So Thomas Walker has one whole year left to serve; Edward Hyde has 3 years; Jaques Hendricks has 4 years.

But then you move forward just two years, and we have another mortgage agreement for the same farm, this time from December 1643, and what you see again is a listing of all of the assets associated with the farm, and, again, there are indentured laborers but this time, only 5 of them, but there is a list of other names-- Tony, Mingo, Grange, Mall, Butler, Maria, Judy, and Nell.

These 8 people aren't indentured laborers.

They're enslaved Africans, and they're listed just with a first name, not with a family name like the indentured laborers, because these people have been stripped of their family names, and these names-- Tony, Maria, Judy-- they aren't their names.

They're the names that have been imposed upon them by the slave owner, and they have been purchased, and they've been brought onto this farm as it makes the transition away from indentured labor and into enslavement.

♪ Plantation slavery, pioneered by the Spanish and Portuguese in their New World empires, now replaced indentured labor on Barbados, and the island was consumed by sugar.

Maps from the time show an island in which the last of the indigenous forest was being cleared.

Across the now-open fields are the hundreds of windmills that powered the factories in which the sugar cane was crushed and the raw sugar processed, and stamped onto the map are the names of the new planter class, the owners of the great sugar estates.

By the 1660s, there were over 800 estates, and on them 20,000 enslaved people labored and suffered.

Barbados in those years became a social laboratory from which a new sort of society emerged, and the owners of the estates drafted new laws to regulate that new society.

♪ This is a copy of a 17th-century document known as the Barbados Slave Code.

Its full title is An Act for the Better Ordering and Governing of Negroes, and this law uses the word "Negro" and the word "slave" interchangeably because what this law says is that to be Black is to be a slave, that they are the same thing.

Now, the act dealing with white, Christian indentured servants lays out what rights they have under the law in respect to their relationships with their masters.

This law does something profoundly different.

What it says is that, as Black people are property, they have no legal rights, and what that means is that they can be punished-- they can be whipped; they can be mutilated; they can have their nostrils slit open; they can have their faces burnt; they can be killed-- and that those who carry out those actions face no legal consequences because under this law, they haven't killed another human being.

They've destroyed property.

This act is the legal foundation for the creation of a new type of society-- a slave society, a racialized society.

♪ The Slave Code was enforced on plantations across Barbados, but as the British Empire grew, its influence spread.

Year by year, it was adopted by slave owners in other British colonies in the Caribbean, and parts of it were copied in Virginia when the tobacco planters there abandoned indentured labor and turned to slavery to till the tobacco fields, and as British North America expanded and new colonies established, many of them adopted the Barbados Slave Code.

The human cost of all of this can be seen back where it all began, in Barbados, at another sugar estate.

♪ This is what is left of the Newton Plantation.

From the 1650s and the early years of the sugar revolution right through until the 1830s, when slavery was abolished, Africans were made to work these fields, and in one corner of one field is a patch of scrubland.

Here, archeologists have uncovered the remains of around 600 people, and their bones tell us something shocking about slavery on Barbados.

So all of this was the estate?

Yes.

There's still sugar cane growing all around us, but this bit of land, which, I would say, is quite stony-- Mm-hmm.

It wasn't good for sugar, so they decided that they were going to situate the enslaved burial ground in this space.

There are only a handful of these sites that we know of, particularly in the sugar plantation complex, so even in Barbados, this site is very, very special because it was very difficult to find.

What do the human remains tell us anything about how they lived, the conditions that they endured?

Life as an enslaved person in the sugar plantation complex was very, very difficult.

You might have a life expectancy of up to 20 years, maybe-- 20?

20, 20 years.

Periods of malnutrition might have led to the kind of bone development, the dental development being halted.

People are not getting all of the nutrients that they require, especially from the age of weaning, so about one year.

Now, this is an incredibly fertile island-- that's one of the reasons why the sugar revolution took off here-- so there's no difficulty growing food here...

Right.

but these enslaved people have signs of malnutrition in their bones.

Yes.

There are periods of time when people are starving.

It could be that a period of distress might have been hurricane, for example, the devastation that that causes.

Ships can't come in with food.

People can't grow, obviously, their own food.

Unlike Jamaica, Dominica, St. Lucia, even Trinidad later on, Guyana, where there's ample lands to go and farm your own food, that's virtually impossible in Barbados.

So they're starving because the fertile land has been given over to sugar...

Almost completely.

and if there's a shortage of food, the last people that were gonna get the foods are the enslaved...

Yes.

Yeah.

so they're being allowed to starve.

It's not just that they're starving.

This monoculture, monocrop system almost builds malnutrition into it.

Very much so, and that's one of the enduring tragedies of slavery in the Caribbean but particularly slavery on Barbados.

When I stand here and think about the bones of enslaved people who died young, died premature, under my feet, and I look at these fields, it's not just that they were buried here.

It's that they were worked to death in these fields.

Their time came too soon because of what happened with that crop in those fields, so this is like a killing zone.

Yeah, and that's one of the reasons why this site, in my opinion, is so special.

I find that when you work with Newton and the records and particularly this site, you hear them calling out to you.

Olusoga: For two centuries, the Newton Burial Ground was just a forgotten patch of scrubland in the corner of a cane field, but now the Government of Barbados have plans to transform it into a memorial where the millions of Africans whose lives were consumed by slavery can be remembered, and the discoveries made here are just one example of how the legacy of slavery lives on and continues to shape the lives of those descended from the enslaved.

Woman, voice-over: When we think about what happened in Barbados as almost a petri dish for colonial endeavor, Black bodies and people were violated for the maintenance and the growth of that wealth to the Western world.

There's so much wealth in this country from enslaved people.

The fact that women would commit infanticide to not have children born into slavery, it's heartbreaking.

To actually buy and sell people like objects and then use them like animals, that requires the idea of race to make that all OK. Slavery has been a very heavy burden for us as a people because you are carrying that burden all the time.

However, we are very positive people, and we make sure that we achieve, and we have achieved a lot in life.

Olusoga: The profits from the sugar grown at the Newton Plantation and the thousands of plantations across the Caribbean flowed back to the center of the empire--Britain.

Much of this wealth was concentrated in places like the City of Bath.

Money from slavery helped finance Bath's boom years when it became a fashionable spa town, and among the grand homes built in those boom years were these luxurious townhouses here at The Circus.

♪ This is a page from a document that was drafted in 1768, which was exactly at the time when the last of these buildings were being completed, so these were some of the newest, most expensive, most desirable homes in the whole country.

What this is is a page from the rate book.

It tells us how much money the people living here were paying in local tax, but it also tells us something else.

It shows how much money was pouring into this city from the British Empire because a number of the families living here had made their fortunes in the Caribbean, so living here at Number 4 The Circus, we have a James Plunkett, Esquire.

His family had made their fortune owning enslaved people and plantations on the island of Jamaica, and his neighbor at Number 5 was a Lawrence Dundas from another slave-owning family with plantations in Grenada and Dominica, and 4 doors up from them at Number 9 was a man from a family that we've already met because that was the home of John Newton, the owner of the Newton Plantation.

So a century after the Newton family had purchased that land, those sugar cane fields, and 3 generations of the forced labor of enslaved Africans had meant that John Newton was wealthy enough to afford one of these luxurious houses here in Bath.

♪ But when you investigate the backgrounds of the wealthy families who were buying or renting townhouses in The Circus back in 1768, it reveals something else about the British Empire because there is another group in this list whose wealth had been drawn from the Empire, but not from the sugar islands of the Caribbean, and living in this house, Number 11 The Circus, and recorded here in the rate book was a Robert Lord Clive.

This is Clive of India, the man at the very center of the expansion of British imperial power in India, and all of this Indian wealth is flowing into places like Bath in the 1760s because by then, the British East India Company had become more profitable and more powerful than the Tudor merchants who'd established it a century and a half earlier could have possibly imagined.

♪ The company those Tudor merchants had established back in 1599 under the charter awarded to them by Queen Elizabeth was in the decades that followed slowly drawn to what was then the most powerful state on Earth--India.

[Men chanting] Olusoga: In the middle of the 17th century, India was ruled from this building-- the Red Fort in Delhi.

Back then, this was a new fortress, only just completed, and when the envoys from the East India Company arrived here, they found a fortified palace almost 10 times the size of Windsor Castle and built at a cost of 6 million rupees, then around a quarter of the English government's entire annual income... ♪ and the residents of this fortress were the rulers of India-- the Mughal emperors, the richest men on earth with annual personal private incomes greater than the annual revenue of the whole English state.

The wealth of the Mughals was, in fact, so legendary that even today it is imprinted onto the English language because when we use the word "mogul" to describe somebody who is fabulously wealthy, that is an echo of the ways in which our 17th-century ancestors marveled at the wealth of the men who ruled over the biggest economy on Earth and their 150 million subjects from this fortress.

♪ It was the Mughals, not the English, who were the great imperialists of 17th-century India.

Originally from Central Asia, they had conquered India in the early 16th century, when England was ruled by Henry VIII.

The India of the Mughals became an economic and a military superpower.

When the early generations of officials from the East India Company arrived here in India, the sheer power of the Indian state, military and economic, meant that they just couldn't dream of seizing land or setting up plantations the way English settlers had done in places like Virginia and Barbados.

The best they could hope for was that when they were brought before the Mughal emperors in places like this in the Red Fort, that they would be granted permission to set up trading posts on the coast and be allowed to buy Indian spices and Indian textiles to be shipped for sale back to Europe.

♪ The power imbalance between the East India Company and the Mughal Empire remained largely unchanged for a hundred years.

Through ups and downs, diplomatic successes and setbacks, the company slowly grew its trade in Indian cloth and spices, doing its best to stay on the right side of the Mughal emperors, but in the first decades of the 18th century, that balance of power was transformed when the Mughal Empire fell into a rapid and disastrous decline.

♪ After the death of the emperor Aurangzeb in 1707, the empire began to fall apart.

Power moved to regional princes, who constantly fought one another.

♪ [Ship's horn blows] In the chaos that consumed India in the middle decades of the 18th century, new powers were on the rise, but the most unexpected of them was the power that had transformed 3 villages here by the river in Bengal into a thriving commercial town, but that power wasn't one of the local Indian states.

It was the British East India Company, which, having hired its own army, was busy transforming itself from merely a company of merchants and into a player in Indian politics.

♪ In the same years that the Mughal Empire was being torn apart, this city was becoming a booming company town, although it was tiny compared to the giant city of today, but, because the East India Company existed to make a profit, it is no surprise that much of its activity became centered here because Calcutta is in Bengal, which was then the richest province of India.

♪ In the countryside to the north of the city were the one million weavers of Bengal, who worked their looms in thousands of villages.

[Whirring] The astonishing skills of Bengal's weavers produced the textiles for which the region was famous and upon which the company's profits rested.

♪ But in 1756, the local leader, the Nawab of Bengal, attacked and captured Calcutta.

Here in the grounds of one of the city's British churches stands a memorial to what happened after Calcutta fell.

Although exaggerated and used as proof of supposed Indian despotism, the Black Hole of Calcutta, in which British prisoners died, became a powerful legend.

It was at this moment that Robert Clive became a pivotal figure in the histories of both India and Britain.

Clive had been an unexceptional company accountant, but he was a brilliant company soldier, and he brought an army of British officers and Indian sepoys to recapture this city and, so it was claimed, to avenge the victims of the Black Hole, but what followed was a period of brilliant and brutal calculation in which Clive played the various Indian princes and the Mughal emperor off against one another, and the final transformation of the company was sealed in the year 1765, when a new and previously unimaginable phase in the history of the British Empire began.

♪ That moment was captured in a document, one that is hardly remembered in Britain today but that remains deeply controversial and resented in modern India.

Man: This is, arguably, the foundation document of the British Empire in India.

This is part of the treaty which is made at this moment of complete victory for the East India Company.

This stock company based in a single office in London 5 windows wide finally conquers what had been the richest empire in the world.

Half of it, this side, is in English.

This side is in Persian, the courtly language of the Mughal Empire.

This is the seal of the 17th Mughal emperor-- Shah Alam-- and here is a name that we know.

Robert Clive.

What does this treaty empower the East India Company to now do in India?

This particular page gives them the right to hand Uttar Pradesh, the whole Gangetic Plain, to a vassal of the company.

The earlier part, which was made 4 days before, is the other crucial bit, and that bit talks about how Shah Alam is handing over Bengal, Bihar, and Orissa completely.

So this is the northeast of India, north of around Calcutta, parts of what now are Bangladesh.

The gift of the Diwani is what the British call it in the school textbooks.

In reality, it is handing over to a private company the place that generates more revenue than anywhere else in the world at that time.

And the British-- well, and the company now have the right-- Not the British.

Excuse me.

Yeah.

The company.

Yeah.

But it's so surreal that you keep... Yeah.

I keep making the same mistake, too, because we think it's the British, but it's not.

No.

It's one corporation, and that's different from, well, the British Empire and the heyday of the Raj under Curzon and everything because that at least had some pretense to civilize the natives, to bring education, all the talk of what empire was for, but in the company, there's no hypocrisy at all.

This is a corporation, and it's there to make a profit for its shareholders.

This document gives the company the right not just to control that land, but, I mean, to intimately control it-- to control justice, to control administration, but, most importantly, to control taxation.

Yeah, and what you see immediately after this is British officials, only a few of them, sidling into the very most senior positions.

At this moment, there are only 250 British civilians, if you like, in India.

It's a tiny skeleton staff.

They come out at 16.

They want to be home by 30 with a large country estate, a rotten borough in their back pocket, and begin to live the life of a country gentleman, and this document sets them up to do that.

And so by conquering India, you're making unbelievable sums of money.

It's so astonishing.

It's one of the fundamental pivot points of world history.

It's literally that.

You're moving from a world where England, a minor power at the beginning of the early modern period, suddenly this is the moment it sets itself up to become the supreme economy in the world for 150 years.

♪ Could this point have been reached without the man who signs his signature here--Clive?

He created this world.

He's a hugely unattractive character in all sorts of ways, but he's brilliant.

He has that street fighter or mafiosi sense of how to outsmart an opponent.

Olusoga: In 1767, Robert Clive, now vastly wealthy, left India for the last time... ♪ but Robert Clive's comfortable retirement was disrupted by events in the India he had left behind.

Under company rule, the weavers of Bengal were subjected to appalling exploitation, at times being forced to sell their silks and textiles for less than the market rate.

Nothing was allowed to stand in the way of company profits, even when the rains failed and there was hunger.

Because famines were common in Indian history, the Mughal emperors, although themselves often repressive, at least had a tradition of buying and storing grain for when the crops failed and the people were hungry.

The East India Company, motivated solely by the search for profits, not only failed to buy and store grain.

The company continued to extract taxes, sometimes violently, from people who were literally starving.

We will never know the numbers, but millions of Indian people died in the Great Bengal Famine, and yet through it all, the business of making money continued, and ships loaded with Indian textiles and other commodities set sail down this river, the Hooghly in Calcutta, bound for Britain.

♪ When news reached Britain that even famine had not been allowed to stand in the way of company profits, there was outrage.

Robert Clive was condemned as a tyrant and compared to a vulture.

He was hauled before Parliament, but that story of famine and outrage faded from memory.

In its place, built through statues and heroic accounts, there emerged the legend of Clive of India.

♪ Today the life of Robert Clive and the memory of what happened under company rule is better understood and more controversial than it has been for centuries.

Woman: That statue tells us a lot about Britain's self-image in the 21st century, how it's still really closely tied with Empire.

And I find that very difficult, the way that we have sanitized history, that it's easier to turn everything inside out and put it on a plinth.

Ciara: Think in reality, Clive's legacy is one of destruction and pillaging the subcontinent.

This is the full picture.

I'm not asking you to be ashamed of it, but I am asking you to be aware of it.

You do need to know it.

♪