In 2012, the BBC broadcast a documentary series titled Empire, presented by Jeremy Paxman. I watched the programmes at the time of broadcast, and I remember quite an incoherent, jumpy series, leaping without chronology between continents and stories, from TE Lawrence to Robert Clive and back again. I remember a dusty game of cricket, a lot of linen shirts and quite a lot of Paxman sloping around Indian gymkhanas, chatting amiably to the post-colonial elites. I also recall him weighing up the democratic legacy of the British empire against its other records, and possibly even a mention of India’s railways. The accompanying book was of similar conjecture.
The 13 years between Paxman’s Empire and Empire with David Olusoga have seen a popular historiographical upheaval. Part of a more general re-evaluation of the nature of British and Western society, British imperialism has been “recentred”, as we like to say, and repoliticised. Out went Jan Morris’s Pax Britannica trilogy; in came Sathnam Sanghera’s Empireland. Winston Churchill went from national hero to international supervillain. I could tell something had changed – that popular memory had shifted – when, over cans of lager on Islington Green in the summer of 2021, someone my age delivered a brief lecture on the 1943 Bengal famine. We all nodded soberly.
It would be nice to call David Olusoga a telly don, but he was on telly long before he was a don, presenting his first programmes five years before his appointment as a professor at the University of Manchester. Despite this reversal of the usual run of things (a don telly?), in recent years Olusoga has emerged as one of our foremost public historians (still, I imagine the name rings a bell because of his recent drubbing on The Celebrity Traitors). And though it nods to the culture-war moment, featuring Bristol’s Colston statute de-plinthing in its introductory remarks, his Empire series is impressively free of the moralism of that time. Scrupulously even-handed, and searching without bearing an agenda, this series hopefully marks a break with the squabbles and score-settling of that restive period.
Olusoga’s narrative begins with the captured Portuguese carrack the Madre de Deus being towed up the River Dart to reveal its cargo of international treasures and spices. And this gives shape to Olusoga’s narrative which, at least at its outset, tells a story driven not by chauvinism but by avarice. Envious of the Iberian merchants, the English set about developing early capitalism to compete, establishing joint-stock companies to sail and exploit the world. At this hinge point of the early-modern period, its useful to remember the golden age of piracy leads directly into the age of discovery, and the privateer to the profiteer.
English sailors went looking for gold in North America. They found little, but they did find two things of comparable value: tobacco and cane sugar. Through these cash crops, the wheels of economic colonialism began to turn, filling the English treasury, turning continents pink and terraforming entire islands like Barbados into industrial estates, long before the steamworks of Manchester began to hiss. In their early years, these plantations were staffed by labourers from the British Isles with names like Thomas Walker and Edward Hyde. But, on the ledgers of the estates, these soon give way to mononyms like Tony, Mall and Nell. It was by such euphemisms that English farmers became English slave-owners. In India, early colonisation was similarly a story of big business, and William Dalrymple makes a jolly appearance alongside Olusoga to discuss the East India Company and the “mafiosi” instincts of Clive of India.
In subsequent episodes, Olusoga lingers on comparatively little-known tragedies, particularly the genocide of the Tasmanian people, which receives a moving treatment. And whether his subjects are dispensing Bibles or buckshot, Olusoga is an able guide, cycling through the poses of the veteran documentary frontman: squinting at documents under lamplight and striding through distant marketplaces. As ever in these programmes, though, a question is raised: did he have to fly to Calcutta to say this or, like Tom Holland and Dominic Sandbrook, could he have done it from Brixton or Chipping Norton?
[Further reading: The price of revolution]
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This article appears in the 13 Nov 2025 issue of the New Statesman, What Keir won't hear