Empire

- Season 1

(2012)

Paxman asks how a tiny island in the North Atlantic came to rule over a quarter of the world's population. He travels to India, where local soldiers and local maharajahs helped a handful of British traders to take over vast areas of land. Spectacular displays of imperial power dazzled the local peoples and developed a cult of Queen Victoria as Empress, mother and virtual God. In Egypt, Paxman explores Britain as a temporary peace-keeper whose visit turned into a seventy year occupation. He travels to the desert where Lawrence of Arabia is still remembered by elder ...

Paxman continues his story of Britain's empire by looking at how traders, conquerors and settlers spread the British way of life around the world by creating a very British home. Beginning in India where early traders wore Indian costume and took Indian wives and their descendants still look fondly on their mixed heritage which in Victorian Britain was frowned upon as inter racial mixing became taboo. In Singapore he visits a club, now open to all, where British colonials used to gather together, in Canada he finds a town of Scottish ancestry whose inhabitants proud ...

Paxman traces the growth of a peculiarly British type of hero - adventurer, gentleman, amateur, sportsman and decent chap and the British obsession with sport. He travels to East Africa in the following Victorian explorers searching for the source of the Nile; to Khartoum in Sudan to tell the story of General Gordon, and to Hong Kong where the British indulged their passion for horse racing by building a spectacular race course and to Jamaica where the greatest imperial game of all cricket became a battleground for racial equality when the West Indies formerly always ...

Paxman looks at how the empire began as a pirates' treasure hunt robbing Spanish ships and ports using privateers such as Henry Morgan and grew into an informal empire based on trade and developed into a global financial network. He travels to Jamaica where sugar made plantation owners rich on the mistreatment of African slaves, then to Calcutta where British traders became the new princes of India. Unfair trading helped start the independence movement led by Mahatma Gandhi who's visit to Britain and the mill town of Darwen in 1931 is remembered by two women, who were...

Paxman tells the story of how a desire for conquest became a mission to improve the rest of mankind, especially in Africa, and in Central Africa he travels in the footsteps of David Livingstone who though a failure as a missionary became a legend. A flood of Christian missionaries followed and founded schools one of which today has 8000 pupils. In South Africa, Paxman tells the story of Cecil Rhodes, a maverick with a different sort of mission, who believed in the white man's right to rule the world and took vast swathes of land for Britain, laying down the ...