Empire with David Olusoga
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- Episode
- Episode One
- Broadcast Info
- 2025 (60 mins)
- Description
- In this landmark series award-winning historian David Olusoga explores the history of the Empire and why it is essential in the 21st Century to fully understand it’s legacy. At its height the British Empire - the biggest the world has ever seen - ruled over a fifth of the world’s land surface and almost a quarter of its people. Scattered across the World are the ruins of the Empire from slave fortresses and plantations to schools and railways. But perhaps the greatest legacy of the Empire is a living legacy. Today there are billions of people around the World whose ancestors were part of the story of Empire. This is in many ways a shared history - often full of complexities and contradictions - which has changed the demographics of the World and forged new communities and identities. In Episode One David Olusoga traces the story of Empire from its origins under Elizabeth I in the late 16th Century, when England was a relatively poor country compared to the global and lucrative empires of its European rivals, Spain and Portugal. Olusoga reveals the surprising story of how the capture of a Portuguese ship with an extraordinary cargo of luxury goods by English state sanctioned pirates, financed by Elizabeth I, helped confirm that England had been left behind by the imperial endeavours of its rivals who had forged trade links to both the Americas and the Far East. In the City of London, Olusoga reveals the subsequent emergence of private charter companies - like the Virginia Company and the East India Company - that would lead to the first beginnings of an Empire of both trade and settlement. David Olusoga travels to Jamestown, Virginia in the USA where he meets Ashley Spivey, an archaeologist and member of the Pamunkey tribe, to look at evidence of when English colonists - financed by the Virginia Company - first arrived in 1609 and discusses the impact on the indigenous people. It was here that the colonists established plantations where they grew tobacco, the first cash crop of the Empire. While tobacco made these American settlements highly profitable it was the discovery of another cash crop in another early English colony that would transform the fortunes of the Empire. In Barbados, one of the first islands in the Caribbean to become an English colony in the 1620s, David Olusoga reveals how the mass production of sugar brought astonishing wealth to the plantation owners and transformed the topography of the island. He explains how at first indentured labourers - poor workers from England, Scotland and Ireland - were employed to produce the sugar on the island, but they were replaced by enslaved Africans. It was on Barbados that slavery was first enshrined into law with the Slave Code, which determined that the enslaved were the property of their owners. This became the blueprint for slavery in colonies across the Caribbean and the Americas over the next two hundred years. In the fields of one former plantation on Barbados, historian Tara Inniss reveals to David Olusoga the story of the discovery of a mass burial of enslaved Africans and how the resulting autopsy of human remains revealed the horrific conditions they endured. The Sugar Revolution powered by the lives of the enslaved brought extraordinary wealth to England. Back in Britain, David Olusoga visits the quintessential Georgian city of Bath where the owners of slave plantations used their extraordinary wealth to build and buy the most fashionable properties of the day. However, across the other side of the world, a very different story of Empire was unfolding. At the visually stunning Red Fort in Delhi, India, Olusoga reveals how by the mid-18th Century the East India Company, who had arrived a century earlier to trade with the extraordinarily wealthy local Mughal rulers, had effectively taken full control of the Indian subcontinent. The Company’s success was in part driven by the leadership of Sir Robert Clive who prioritised company profits even when famine decimated the local population. Despite being vilified in Britain at the time, Clive was later reinvented as a hero of Empire in the early 20th Century when a statue of him was built - and stills stands - outside the Foreign Office in London.
- Genre
- History
How to cite this record
The Open University, "Empire with David Olusoga". https://learningonscreen.ac.uk/ou/search/index.php/prog/254573 (Accessed 26 Dec 2025)