Empire with David Olusoga

Episode
Episode Two
Broadcast Info
2025 (60 mins)
Description
In this episode David Olusoga reveals how the movement of people around the Empire - both voluntary and involuntary - continues to shape the World we live in today. The great migrations of the last 300 years were driven by the British Empire. Enslaved Africans were trafficked across the Atlantic to British colonies. Indians who signed up to the indenture system were sent to work in the Caribbean, Africa and Southeast India. And convicts from Britain and Ireland were dispatched to the new territory of Australia. David Olusoga joins a group of African-Americans on their unique pilgrimage to a former slave trading fort on the coast of West Africa. Bunce Island in Sierra Leone was where their enslaved ancestors were taken before being trafficked across the Atlantic to work in plantations in America. In an archive in Freetown, Sierra Leonean historian Isatu Smith reveals the identity of the men who once owned Bunce Island. Richard Oswald, from Scotland, and Henry Laurens, a slave-owner and slave-trader who lived in the British colony of South Carolina, profited vastly from the Transatlantic Slave Trade. By the 1770s Britain was transporting forty-five thousand Africans into slavery every year. Travelling to the USA, David Olusoga discovers how Oswald and Laurens found themselves on opposite sides of a war when in 1765 colonists rebelled against British rule. The victory of the rebels in the American Revolution marked the end of the British Empire in America. In New York, Olusoga meets American historian Maya Jasanoff to discover the fate of the Black Loyalists, freed slaves who joined the British to fight the American rebels. The loss of Britain’s American colonies triggered an unexpected crisis in the criminal justice system. Unable to send prison convicts to its penal colonies in America, British ships were sent out from Portsmouth Harbour to find a new land to export its criminals too. After the arrival of the First Fleet in 1788 penal colonies were set up across newly established settlements in Australia. Travelling to the island of Tasmania, 150 miles south of Australia, Olusoga reveals the harsh regime of hard labour and punishment endured by the convicts under Governor George Arthur. And yet for many convicts from Britain and Ireland, if they managed to serve their time and survive, they had the opportunity to own land for themselves and build new lives. The arrival of the British on the Australian continent also began one of the darkest chapters in the history of the Empire. Wars were fought against the indigenous people, to drive them from their land. The horrific story of the genocide which eventually wiped out the indigenous people was justified by Victorian scientists using their pseudo-scientific theories of racial hierarchy. David Olusoga tells the story of Truganini, one of the last remaining survivors, an Aboriginal woman who begged that when she died her bones not be used for scientific experiments. Despite this plea, her remains were put on display in a museum in Tasmania well into the 20th Century. It was not until the 1970s that she was finally laid to rest in a traditional ceremony. The 19th Century was a complex and contradictory era in the history of the British Empire. Britain abolished first the slave trade and then slavery itself, even deploying the Royal Navy to stop slave traders. But at the same time a new labour system was introduced to replace it - a system that would cause a huge demographic shift. This system, known as "indenture", shipped workers from the Indian subcontinent to work in Britain’s colonies in the Caribbean, East Africa and South-East Asia. While they were paid, they had few rights and often lived in the same conditions as enslaved Africans. Olusoga meets Guyanese historian and novelist David Dabydeen who reveals the story of his own ancestor who was shipped from India to Guyana. This global system of indentured labour, viewed as a replacement for slavery by Britain, helps explain why there are thriving Indian communities across the World today.
Genre
History

How to cite this record

The Open University, "Empire with David Olusoga". https://learningonscreen.ac.uk/ou/search/index.php/prog/254574 (Accessed 13 Apr 2026)