Hang tight while we fetch the video data and transcripts. This only takes a moment.
Connecting to YouTube player…
Fetching transcript data…
We’ll display the transcript, summary, and all view options as soon as everything loads.
Next steps
Loading transcript tools…
How the British Empire enriched itself on Five continents #dwhistoryandculture #dwespanol | DW History and Culture | YouTubeToText
YouTube Transcript: How the British Empire enriched itself on Five continents #dwhistoryandculture #dwespanol
Skip watching entire videos - get the full transcript, search for keywords, and copy with one click.
Share:
Video Transcript
[Music]
this was the beginning of the end of the
largest Empire in history in 1956
Egyptian president Gamal Abdul Nasser
nationalized the sus Canal which had
previously been under Franco British
rule this decision meant that the United
Kingdom which had previously managed the
canal and was also the majority
shareholder of the company lost control
over one of the most important
communication and trade routes in the
world to prevent this from happening
London formed a secret plan with France
and Israel Israeli forces would start a
war with Egypt allowing the French and
British to occupy the canal under the
excuse of mediating the conflict on
October 29th 1956 the Israeli Army
launched an invasion of the Sai
Peninsula and one week later the Franco
British expeditionary Corps landed in
Egypt but it didn't go according to
plan Naser issued an order to sync the
cargo ships which blocked the canal
former US president Dwight Eisenhower
cond demned the intervention but the
aiing French and British economies
depended on us loans so the two European
powers were forced to withdraw in the
end and the United Kingdom's last
Colonial occupation thus ended in
complete failure by then the British
Empire was already beginning to dissolve
ironically it had reached the height of
its power only 35 years earlier in 1921
the British Empire occupied 1/5th of all
emerged lands across five continents and
ruled over 450 million people or one qu
order of the world's population the
important thing is to say about it is
that there was never some grand plan or
conspiracy on the part of the British
Elites to end up controlling a quarter
of the world's surface but how could a
small Kingdom on a rainy North Atlantic
Island become Master of the world and
what is the legacy of that Empire it All
Began in the mid-16th century when
England was only a regional power in Northwestern
America the objective was to find
territories where gold was plentiful and
to locate the Northwest Passage through
present day Canada in order to trade
with Asia but those first Expeditions
some of those pirates went on to become
acclaimed Admirals in the English Navy
like Sir Francis Drake or even Royal
officials like Henry Morgan who
eventually became governor of Jamaica
this was a kind of economic Warfare uh
and that you know the British plundered
the Spanish ships and the Spanish
plundered the French ships and the
French plundered the Portuguese ships
and as much as possible everybody stole
or interdicted each other's each other's
uh uh trade routes along with piracy
another engine of English expansion used
they also obtained Colonial permits that
cemented British Imperial expansion
between the 17th century and 1950 some
20 million people left the British Isles
to settle in the Empire's
territories settlers were encouraged to
take their families with them Portuguese
and Spanish migration to overseas
colonies was much less extensive and
usually only men underwent the
journey one of the big structural
differences between most British
colonization as opposed to Spanish and
Portuguese colonization is that it was
it was often driven by private
Enterprise with government support you
know so you would have these companies
established like the Virginia Bay
Company for example that would uh uh you
know collect shareholders resources
invest them in settlers and then buy the
Monopoly on the goods coming out of of
of Virginia like Tobacco For example
from the British government for the
British government would collect a huge
tax on it the Dynamics of Spanish and
Portuguese colonization were very very
religion and slavery in
America the first successful permanent
English settlement in North America was
Jamestown which was founded in Virginia
in 1607 under the command of the
Virginia Company investors were
disappointed after realizing that there
weren't any gold deposits but the
settlement soon became profitable thanks
to the cultivation of
tobacco in addition to trade and the
migration of adventurers and
disinherited people from England
Christian fundamentalism was another of
the driving forces of British
colonization of North
America the Puritans were unhappy with
the Anglican Church's reforms in 1620
they boarded the Mayflower to create
their version of a Christian Utopia
under English rule that same year they
founded the colony of Plymouth in New
England or present day
Massachusetts the governor of Virginia
Francis Wyatt who served from 1621 to
1625 reported that the immigrants seized
indigenous land our first work will be
to drive out the Savages to take over
the whole country to increase cattle
pigs Etc which will be of much more use
to us for it is infinitely better not to
have heathens Among Us
there's there's nothing inherently uh uh
um contradictory between the ideology of
Christianity and the practice of slavery
I mean in the Bible there's lots of
slavery and in fact for 90% of the
history of Christianity Christians were slave
slave
owners European settlers prospered by
importing more and more African slaves
to work their North American
plantations but the most profitable
colonies were in the
Caribbean in 1655 England seized the
island of Jamaica from Spain which
became became the most profitable sugar
monoculture in the world thanks to slave
labor between 1662 and 1807 a total of
around 3.5 million African slaves
arrived in North America on British
ships and those were the ones who
survived one in seven enslaved Africans
died on the
voyage by the end of the slave trade
England had profited more from the trade
of enslaved Africans than any other
colonial power the relationship between
London and its 13 North American
colonies were ideal and it lasted almost
200 years until the second half of the
18th century when London's greed reached
his Breaking Point American colonists
they were being forced to basically pay
for a giant government bailout of the
East India Company it had become in
modern terms too big to fail these debts
but when the colonies expressed their
anger and political discourse they were
ignored no taxation without
representation was a Fame slogan by
revolutionary leader Samuel Adams one of
America's founding
fathers in 1776 one year after the
American Revolution began the United
States of America declared its
independence but the new country was not
recognized by London until
1783 after that the British crown tried
to prevent similar conflicts by giving
the white colonies more autonomy that
would later facilitate their
independence as well military rule and
looting in
Asia at the end of the 16th century the
spice trade was the biggest business in
the world pepper cloves cinnamon and
Nutmeg were produced in the malas
located in southeast Asia and
India the business returned an average
of 300 and 400% on investment and
attracted the interest of a group of
English capitalists who founded the
British East India Company in 1600 this
Enterprise targeted India at the same
time the Indian subcontinent was ruled
by the mugal Empire which extended into
present day Afghanistan and Bangladesh
it ruled over some 150 million subjects
was the richest region in the world and
the world's leading manufacturer thanks
to its coveted spices fabrics and
jewels Britain compared to say the
Spanish or the or the French which had
this you know Grand Imperial uh uh uh
monarchy the British really didn't have
that and government was always small and
cheap and the British were immensely
under taxed compared to other compared
to other European Imperial powers and
they they liked it that way right
because it's the elite and landholders
going to pay most of the tax they're
like why would I pay money to rule India
I want to I just want to make my profits
the mugal Emperors allowed the East
India Company to set up factories in
their territory like the Portuguese and
Dutch merchants in the 17th century the
company built forts in Madras Bombay and
Kolkata which became prosperous cities
as a result not only did the company
amass enormous wealth but it reached a
height of power unseen by any other
private company in the history of
mankind in fact 18th century philosopher
Edmund Burke described the British
Empire as a state disguise as a
merchant we are talking about a company
that entered its own currency had its
own courts and taxed tens of millions of people
the East India Company eventually built
a private Army of some 200,000 soldiers
that they used to conquer most of India
it took advantage of the Mughal Empire's
decline by arming Indian Mercenaries
cannons these troops took over the
Bengal region where the company began to
operate like a state by leving taxes
which were collected mercilessly even
though the population was starving this
was especially notable during a series
of bad harvests in 1770 to me this is
one of the most profound changes that
the British Implement in India is they
is they say okay you know you used to
have these Villages that were living and
admittedly was a kind of subsistence
living it was it was tough and they were
often on the margin
um so it's not like the British
introduced starvation but by forcing
people to grow say j or tea um uh uh
rather than food stuffs this made that
that agricultural system much more
vulnerable before the arrival of the
British the Mughal Emperors would use
their huge grain reserves to alleviate
the famines but during the famines of
1770 the British company did nothing
although some officials distributed food
many participated in price gouging by
buying r PR and selling it at 10 times
the price in addition the company not
only continued taxing locals but they
even increased them by 10% in some cases
SEO executed anyone who did not pay
without exception this atrocity is
described in William Del rimple book The
Anarchy the Relentless rise of the East
India Company the book features a direct
quote from a British witness who was
there one morning from my bedroom window
I counted 40 lifeless bodies lying
within 20 yards of the wall along with
many hundreds of others agonizing with
Hunger writhing with their stomachs
contracted to the bone that disaster
barely made a dent in the British
coffers according to recent research it
cost the lives of 1.2 million people
over two years but the East India
75 years later a similar disaster would
be repeated in Ireland when a plague
destroyed the potato crops on which the
impoverished Catholic majority of the
Island's peasants depended it's the same
thing with Ireland you know and the the
potato monocultures if you if you if you
kind of put you know engineer these
these vast changes to a system you make
it unstable and you make it more
vulnerable between 1845 and 1849 the
potato blight destroyed Ireland's food
system and the British government did
the same thing the East India Company
had done in Bengal nothing 1 million
Irish people died and another million
immigrated to North America the British
secret AR to the treasury at the time
Charles Edward travelan went so far as
to say God's judgment sent the Calamity
to teach the Irish a lesson plague is an
effective mechanism to control the
population in India the East India
Company controlled the population and
although its Army was larger than the
British crowns it did not treat the
Indian soldiers as equals tired of being
mistreated by the privileged British the
SE waged a rebellion in 1857 known in
India as the first war of independence
this eventually culminates in the one of
the largest acts of colonial rebellion
in history which is the which is the
Indian rebellion of 1857 and it's only
after that that the government says okay
we're going to turn this into a Crown
Colony and we're going to administer it
because we just can't this just can't go
on in 1858 the British government took
advantage of the disaster by expelling
the company and seizing control of India
afterward the country was ruled by a
Viceroy appointed by the British
Parliament Queen Victoria proclaimed a
new regime and declared a new law that
promised equal treatment for Indian
locals and British Nationals but the
seed of distrust had already been sowed
and they had every reason to be
skeptical because the new British
Viceroy once again subjected them to
starvation and abandoned them 1876 and
78 a series of bad harvests devastated
the people of Madras Bombay myor and
hydrabad the governor of Bombay allowed
a price increased for grain and reduced
Aid to starving people even employees of
the empire did not have enough food more
died the Indian population would starve
again during the last years of British
rule in 1942 during the second world war
Japan invaded Burma which produced 15%
of the grain consumed in
India even so authorities continued
exporting the little grain it did have
from Bengal to British troops fighting
the Germans and Italians in North Africa
more than 2 million Indian people died
during that famine which only ended
because of a record Harvest at the end of
of [Music]
1943 after three and a half centuries of
plunder India declared his independence
on August August 15th
1947 2 months earlier VI count Mount
baton the last Vice Roy of India
announced the partition of its
territories into two countries Pakistan and
India human and Commercial exploitation
in Africa English merchants traveled to
the west coast of Africa as early as the
second half of the 16th century to trade
with local kingdoms but they applied the
same tactics used in other regions by
employing English privateers to
Portuguese and Dutch slave gold and ivory
traders in 1681 one century later the
Royal African company began transporting
African slaves to North America and went
on to transport more slaves during the
transatlantic trade than any other
company it's really only when you have
the introduction of widescale African
chattle slavery that the history of of
of what we would call racism um you know
the idea that there are races and they
have certain intrinsic characteristics
inferior or Superior to other races it's
really only in that later period that
racism becomes Central to the
institution of
slavery but during the early 19th
century Europe's presence in Africa was
limited to a few trading posts scattered
along the coast along with a few Dutch
settlers in present day South Africa but
it was a Scottish scientist and
adventurer not a Trader who went on to
become one of the most famous Britains
in history by opening the African continent
continent
David Livingstone was a physician
motivated by Christianity and
abolitionist activism and he embarked on
several expeditions to the heart of
Africa but rather than fighting and
evangelizing on the evils of slavery he
journeyed to territories previously
unexplored by
Europeans those trips attracted the
interest of the West at the Berlin
Conference of 1885 the European powers
divided up the African continent
allowing the British Empire to continue
in 1869 the sews Canal was inaugurated
and soon became an essential route for
communications between London and the Asian
colonies in 1875 the British State
bought a large part of the shares of the
canal to control it then it invaded
Egypt in 1882 eventually turning it into
a protectorate in 1914 British officials
declared that the occupation would be
temporary but they promised to leave
more than 60 times over 40 years staying
in Egypt and continuing its expansion
South at the southernmost tip of Africa
the driving force behind British
expansion was businessman and politician
Cecil rhods an unscrupulous individual
with virulently racist beliefs by making
pacts with locals that he then broke rhs
obtained mining permits and enforced his
rule using his company's personal Army
then he moved North to persuade the
British government to establish
protectorate in the lands he controlled
as a parliamentarian and prime minister
of the cape Colony or present day South
Africa rhs enacted laws to further
colonization his dream was to create
territorial continuity between Cairo and
the cape Colony by uniting them the
British government's Imperial dreams
exacted an enormous toll in Blood and
suffering during the boore wars at the
beginning of the 19th century London
seized the cape colony from the
Netherlands this forced Dutch settlers
in South Africa the bores to move Inland
where they created their own independent
states London waged two Wars to
incorporate them into the British Empire
the second bore War which was fought
between 1899 and 1902 was the bloodiest
and most definitive of the two faced
with Fierce resistance from The
africaner Peasants the British drove
their women children and elderly into
concentration camps killing almost
30,000 people 22,000 of whom were
children the incredible levels of suff
uffing and misery that were inflicted
upon both a bore and African civilians
that didn't come out until later um that
was actually revealed by uh by a press
campaign um because uh British papers
sent to reporters um Emily Emily
hobhouse and um J Hobson to investigate
these stories and it's them uh Emily
hobhouse in particular that came back
with those shocking photos of these
emaciated children one of these photos
was taken of a child named Lizzy vanil
in 1901 we will not display the full
image because her starved condition
could be visually disturbing to some
viewers the British also placed a large
portion of the black African population
into concentration camps resulting in
the same fatal consequences the part of
the story that often doesn't get told
though is that significantly more
Africans died in those concentration
camps than white boore civilians did um
because at the time you know black lives
really did not matter expansion into
Africa accelerated after World War I
when France and the United Kingdom
divided Germany's African colonies
between them London acquired Kenya
allowing them to establish direct
territorial communication between Cairo
and the cape fulfilling Cecil roads
stream at the beginning of the 20th
century the British became the greatest
beneficiary in the Scramble for Africa
with 30% of Africa's population under
their rule but for example in their
efforts you know to colonize parts of
the African continent they certainly
didn't re recognize the uh uh political
legitimacy of of most of the of most of
the groups the the indigenous groups
they encountered same thing in Australia
this resulted in new incidents of
extreme cruelty between 1952 and 1960
British soldiers suppressed the Mau
Guerilla Insurrection waged by the
kikuyu tribe of Kenya Rebels were
captured and tortured with multiple
documented accounts of castration and
rape more than 100,000 suspects and
sympathizers were forced into concent rtion
rtion
camps subsequent investigations have
revealed more than 1,000 people were
executed without due
process a more recent example of British
colonial autocracy was the expulsion of
the chosan who were deported from Diego
1973 chosan were also descended from
black African slaves who during the 18th
century had been brought to the chos
archipelago by the French they were
still living there when Washington
became interested in the islands because
of their strategic location in the
middle of the Indian Ocean so us
authorities requested permission from
the United Kingdom to build a joint base
on Diego Garcia
Island London agreed deporting the
entire civilian population which was
forcibly transferred to the sellis and
Marias and the chians were abandoned at
the ports without any Aid and forced to
live there under miserable conditions
the chians were not offered reparations
until the
1970s from the time of their arrival in
the 16th century and throughout the wave
of Independence campaigns waged during
the 20th century the British Empire left
a trail of Destruction and Death on the African
African
continent racism and banishment in
Oceania as the furthest continent from
the United Kingdom the first British
Fleet did not arrive in Oceania until
1788 bringing more than 600 convicts to
Australia the Empire could no longer
longer transport criminals to the United
States because Britain finally
recognized its independence 5 years
earlier Australia became the new British
prison at the end of the 18th century
becoming home to some 120,000 men and 25,000
25,000
women some were convicted murderers but
others were convicted of minor offenses
like theft of clothing or farm animals
tens of thousands of colonizers
organized themselves into settlements to
occupy Aboriginal hunting grounds white
settlers spread throughout Australia
clashes with Aboriginal Nations on the
continent were especially bloody when
they were driven from their hunting
grounds indigenous communities resisted
and were massacred by the colonizers at
the beginning of the 19th century all
this gave rise to a state of undeclared
war in 1828 British colonial rule
imposed martial law in the state of
Tasmania the Army was authorized to
arrest any Aboriginal person in the
segregated white area and instructed to
kill anyone who resisted patrols were
organized to capture adults and children
creating a human chain that swept across
the island to trap indigenous people on
the peninsula in 1835 living conditions
for Aboriginal tasmanians who had been
forced off the mainland had
significantly deteriorated and the 220
who remained on nearby flenders Island
died within 14 years shortly after the
British Empire seized control of New
Zealand in 1840 colonization there also
led to major conflict with the Maori
which ended in the confiscation of their
lands after the glory
decadence the British Empire reached its
peak at the end of the 19th century it
had led the first Industrial Revolution
but the world was changing and as the
Second Industrial Revolution arrived
other countries like Germany and the
United States began to challenge its
after the war the United Kingdom was
significantly weakened economically and
the country's debts were aggravated by
the 1929 stock market crash making it
increasingly difficult to maintain
colonies that usually consumed more
money than they
earned at the same time the British
government encouraged its white colonies
namely Canada South Africa Australia and
New Zealand to become autonomous
essentially becoming independent
countries by mutual
agreement this courtesy was not extended
to non-white territories whose total
control London sought to maintain at all
cost until the second world war which
the last British colonial campaign the
failed attempt to preserve the SE canal
in 1956 accelerated a decline that would become
become
Unstoppable what's
left oh I would say that 95% of the
historians of the British Empire are
very critical of the legacy of the
British Empire I mean we mostly look at
it from the perspective of a you know a
fairly oppressive entity that was driven
forward by racial ideology um you know
and and the and the the gentlest of
these criticisms is that is that it was
a it was in theory A paternalist system
that is to say where the administrators
were you know trying to do what they
thought was for the good of everybody in
any particular region you know by
advancing an economic and the British
never would have implemented any of
those policies if they didn't know it
was to their immense economic advantage
to do so the truth is that while
deserting their colonies in Africa and
Asia the British Left Behind more chaos
than welfare they drew straight borders
on the map without considering the
territory [Music]
for for [Music]
Britain was um along with France they
were the power that was most involved in
the partition of the Middle East into
Nations that did not correspond with the
uh cultural and political patterns that
were already existent I mean you know
you know part of the boundaries of Syria
were created by an American politician
who only had his position uh because he
had made a huge contribution to the
previous presidential campaign I mean
the man sold toilets like he had no no
right to redraw the map of the middleast
the partition between India and Pakistan
nearly a century later and no longer
under British rule many of these borders
are still a source of conflict The
Remains today of this once great Empire
include distant colonies like the
fauland islands and Gibralter whose rule
is also claimed by Argentina and Spain
respectively the British Empire's Legacy
also features the promotion of
parliamentarism across five continents
and English as the lingua franka in
every corner of the planet which has
Click on any text or timestamp to jump to that moment in the video
Share:
Most transcripts ready in under 5 seconds
One-Click Copy125+ LanguagesSearch ContentJump to Timestamps
Paste YouTube URL
Enter any YouTube video link to get the full transcript
Transcript Extraction Form
Most transcripts ready in under 5 seconds
Get Our Chrome Extension
Get transcripts instantly without leaving YouTube. Install our Chrome extension for one-click access to any video's transcript directly on the watch page.
Chrome Extension