223\. Empire of Plants: From Kew Gardens to Botany Bay
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Hello and welcome to Empire with me, Anita Arnon. And me, William Durrumpel. And it is up to me to congratulate my co-hosts on becoming Prime Minister of Canada. Can I just say how much you have absolutely eaten my time this week. So for those of you who don't know, what a jolly chapester William Durrumpel is. He literally ruined my week. So there is, can I just clarify, note some clarifications right at the top of the programme.

I am not in the running to be Prime Minister of Canada. I have never been the Defence Secretary of Canada, nor have I been the President of the Board of Trade. Can I just say, this is hilarious to you, but William did a congratulation because there is an Anita Arnott, who actually I know, who is in the shortlist to become the new Prime Minister of Canada. The new Justin Trudeau. And William very helpfully congratulated me.

And Twitter and other various social media silos went mental. And I have been fielding messages for such a long time, asking whether this might be a conflict of interest with my job at the BBC. I mean, it's not me. He was joking. I've been telling people that when you're in office, you'll still find time, given your skills in multitasking. Yes, I know you did. It'll carry on. I did also notice, with great mirth, that you nominated yourself as Foreign Secretary. What?

I thought I'd be very good for secretary. It was only a matter of time before you'd ask me. Oh, my God. And people still, even after you said the most ridiculous thing anyone could ever say, still believed it. Still coming up, little DMs, slipping into my DMs going, really? But you've done such a terrible job. I've always supported you. It's like, no. Yeah.

It's William. It's a Dalrymple thing. It isn't true. So it's not me. So glad to have clarified that right at the top of the program. I'm still holding out for office for you, Anita. One of these days, greatness calls. Somebody did say, why don't you become president of an independent Scotland, which that's

you yielded a conversation which you quickly pulled in Hamza Yousaf for your campaign. I thought Hamza should be consulted on this. Direct atting Hamza Yousaf. Anyway, shall we get on with what we're here to talk about? We should. Thank you for all your kind comments about the Mughal series. We really enjoyed doing it and, uh,

Glad you enjoyed it too. But we're taking a departure now because we're taking a stroll around the garden. That's what we're going to do. A little mini series for your delectation and delight. But this is, you know, why? Why are you talking about gardens? Why? This is no just Monty Don or Alan Titmarsh garden. This is a fancy garden. Did you say Titmarsh? We really have to talk about your pronunciation before we go. Titmarsh. Farrell. Farrell.

And latitude. Let's repeat after me. It is not titmarsh. It is not latitude. And it is so not feral. So, look, it's okay. Anyway, look, it's not that. It's not that. This is because botany is sparse.

such an integral part of empire that we thought it was very, very important to talk about it. And especially because we've got a special guest who I'm going to sort of hide away just for a little while longer, but we'll tell you in a minute who that is. Just come for a walk with us around the garden, because where are we starting here? We're going to start

with the royals. So this is where we go back to, William. Exactly. And it's the story of where botanic gardens come from. The focus of this series is going to be the way that botanic gardens became collections of imperial plants, the way that empire pulled in within it examples of botany from across the world and how that botany was exploited in the building of empire. But looking at the roots of it,

It starts with royal gardens on one hand and physic gardens on the other. Have you ever been to the Chelsea Physic Garden? I have been to the Chelsea Physic Garden. So these are what the royals vying with each other to show how very international they were, how very plugged in they were. And, you know, not just in Britain, but in Padua and India.

across Europe. They are places known for their follies and temples, their pagodas. For some reason, the garden has always attracted this idea of, as well as pulling in plants from across the globe, pulling in different kinds of architecture with it. Well, we're talking back as far as the 1500s. I mean, the Padua Garden that you mentioned is 1545. You've got Hampton Court as well. And largely, in the medieval period, it's the Arabs who are credited with

with bringing this sort of east to west transition and style and desire for plants that are exotic. I mean, they bring citrus fruits, melons, mulberry trees, cotton, sugar. And at the same time, they're expanding their spice trade that we're talking about as well.

These plants arrive in the Arab world from further east still. A lot of these plants come from Malaysia and the Malacca Straits. And the Arabs are instrumental in bringing them from India into the Arab world and then through to Spain and Europe. So they have long histories of movement before the Europeans get in on the act. But it is European empire builders who take it a whole new stage. One could say they make it biblical.

because a lot of the early collectors fantasize about reconstructing the Garden of Eden, that they are going to get the most beauteous, the most exotic flowers that might have been carried on Noah's Ark. And there is this, I mean, you can say a tsunami of new plants

that hit Europe as a result of this. The thing is that, you know, you've got all these plants coming in and then it becomes a question of how do you classify them? And then you've got to mention Linnaeus in this. Tell us about why Linnaeus is so very important and is also the springboard to the desire to get more and to fill in the gaps in the classification. Well,

As plants start pouring into Europe in the 16th and 17th centuries, as people bring them back from their imperial wanderings, there is an increasing chaos as people haven't got any means of classifying or ordering them.

And Linnaeus proposes an entirely new basis for classifying plants, one that uses, I think it's called the sexual method of classification. Because plants reproduce sexually, they should be classified by a single feature, the number and arrangement of their male stamens and female pistils, is the phrase.

So he comes up with 24 classes subdivided into orders and families and generates a system of classification that can include all plants from all over the world using this method. And botanists take this challenge up and begin to add to Linnaeus' system.

And at the same time as this is happening, the Dutch are experimenting with exotics in Cape Town in 1694, followed by the French, who established Pamplemousses on Mauritius in 1735. The British have a botanical garden on St. Vincent in the West Indies by 1764.

And when Queen Victoria ascends the throne in 1837, there are about 10 active British botanical gardens.

And by her death in 1901, that's grown to 126. Yeah. And in that British period, this is what we're focusing on today because our very, very special guest is Satnam Sanghera, author of Empire World, How British Imperialism Has Shaped the World. Welcome. I bet you thought we'd never get to you, Satnam. I enjoyed it. I listened to your podcast more than I listened to my mother. Oh, yeah.

I'm very used to it. Oh, Mrs. Sanghera, we apologize, but we're delighted secretly. After that compliment, we should point out that Satnam's wonderful book, which has won a whole variety, rich variety of literary awards.

is out in paperbacks, Adam. That's right. Yeah, I think people know about Empire Land a lot, but I don't think people realise I've written a sequel, which is about how the British Empire shaped the world more than Britain. So thank you for the plug. Not at all, not at all. And it is because it is so interesting. It's a sort of international...

look from in to out is so fascinating. You heard William talking about some of the raw botanic gardens that were created around the world or these places where these exotic things could be gathered. But when we think about botanic gardens and Britain, our mind immediately turns to places like Kew Gardens, which is a really central part of this

imperial dream, if you like. Yeah, I mean, it's not something that I particularly saw as imperial. I think the most imperial thing about Kew for me, before I started researching it, was that a lot of Asians live nearby. And actually, you two live quite close. Including Anita. I think both of you are quite close to Kew Gardens. But I would no more have viewed British Empire through the prism of plants than viewing it through the prism of, you know,

Playstations or shoe buckles. But it turns out there's a massive branch of the British Empire. And actually something you crucially need to mention in relation to Carl Linnaeus is that not only did botany shape colonialism, but colonialism shaped botany in that Linnaeus in his system of plants included human beings crucially. And he put them into four groups based on their geographic origin and skin color.

And he said that the Europeans were acute and inventive and governed by laws. And crucially, he said that the Africans were, quote, crafty, indolent, negligent, and governed by caprice. He sounds like Elon Musk. Well, yeah, exactly. It was deeply racist. And actually, until the early 90s...

Common plant names, which is a different system to Linnaeus', included the N-word, were used frequently, and phrases like dewbush and kefir plums, deeply racist language. And it just goes to show you how imperialism and botany are just totally linked together, and it all comes together at cube. And let's talk about some of the characters who are also really very important at this time. Now, we've sort of touched on Joseph Banks earlier,

and the Joseph Banks building, which carries his name. We had a big session on Joseph Banks during our Endeavour. Endeavour and Cook, indeed. It's the single episode which had more complaints than any other in our entire series because we did it after our Christmas lunch. Well, we were a little bit happy. And even more than usual, talked over each other and

Yes, yes, it's true. It's true. But let's do it with some order now. So, Sutton, tell us a little bit about Joseph Banks. A little pen portrait would be really good. Who was he and why is he important? Yeah, Joseph Banks famously went on Captain James Cook's journey to the South Pacific on the Endeavour ship.

that sparked British colonization of the region. The places they visited, it sounds like an amazing luxury cruise, doesn't it? Madeira, Rio de Janeiro, Cape Horn, New Zealand, Tahiti. And he was from a very posh family, a very wealthy family. And he basically bought his way onto that trip. He contributed everything.

10,000 pounds, which is nearly 1.5 million pounds. The king, King George III, only gave 4,000 pounds. And he goes to show you, it was equivalent of a very rich person, you know, buying a seat on a spacecraft. Exactly what I was thinking. Or to the bottom of the, to see the Titanic, right? But he was obsessed with botany, although he wasn't

a trained scientist. He'd been obsessed with botany since a kid. There's quite a strange story involving toads. At the time when he was growing up, toads were thought to cause warts

But he knew they didn't cause war. So he had a party trick where he would rub a toad against his face and shock everyone around. But as he got older, he got more serious about botany. He went to Oxford. Hang on, you haven't missed out the bit where one of the frogs jumped into his mouth, didn't it? Is that right? Yeah. I didn't know that. This was a story which I read in Peter Moore's wonderful book, Endeavour. And in the course of doing that party trick of rubbing the toad,

frog against his face. One frog didn't get as far as his face, it just jumped into his mouth. Right. Was it a frog or a toad? I think it was toads, wasn't it? It was toads. It was warty toads. Yes, that's right. He must have had a big mouth. Toads are little. Joseph Banks, you're amateur but passionate and very, very rich botanist. I mean, his dad was an MP, so he came from money and power. He buys his way onto Cook's voyage. Does

Does he do good work while he's on the voyage? What does he do and what does he see and what does he collect? Well, crucially, you know, he brought along with him two expert botanists. It often gets forgotten. Daniel Salander and Herman Sporing, who probably knew more than he did, but he did amazing work. They were drawing too, weren't they? They were doing these very beautiful illustrations of the plants that they found.

Yeah, they collected 30,000 samples. But also crucially, when they landed in Australia, Cook initially nicknamed the area where they landed Stingray Harbour. But because Banks collected so many plants, they renamed it famously Botany Bay. Also, he was the first European to sight a kangaroo. Is that right? And one of the ship's dogs, a greyhound, tried to outrun this creature. Fantastic.

The botany thing is really important, but also with banks. Do we have him to thank for subsequent deportations of criminals to Australia? Because doesn't he say, this is perfect. You've got cowardly natives and it'll be fine here. Yeah, he did loads of things like that. But yeah, that was one of his many ideas. But when he came back from this journey, he became hugely famous. He joined the Royal Society of

He started advising the East India Company on how to grow Chinese hemp in Britain. He lobbied for the government to choose Botany Bay as a penal colony for these prisoners because the extremely cowardly natives would not cause a problem. But also, crucially, this royal garden, which was basically a hobby at Kew, he became an advisor to the king and helped to turn it into something much more serious.

And another initiative he was involved in was the breadfruit project. So when he was in Tahiti, he came across the breadfruit. I don't know if you've ever eaten it or seen it. It's a very fleshy kind of fruit. And he thought it was a brilliant solution to the challenge of feeding large numbers of enslaved people.

And the way he saw it, it wasn't cost effective to be importing food from North America. And also he didn't think we should encourage the enslaved to grow their own food because that would stop them working. So he thought, let's set up breadfruit plantation because this is an amazing fruit.

And that actually led to one of the most famous mutinies in history. The Mutiny and the Bounty. Mutiny and the Bounty. There's five films on the subject. But this is all part of his project to try to set up breadfruit plantations in the Caribbean. Sandam, this is all after George III has gone mad in Kew, isn't that right? George III was kept in Kew when he was insane. And that's where he had all these sort of very...

painful treatments to try and bring him back to his senses. Yeah, and also I think there were two palaces, wasn't there? There was Richmond and there was Kew, and they ended up being part of the same thing. But what Banks crucially hadn't considered was whether the enslaved even wanted to eat breadfruit. And it turned out they didn't, and they resisted it. And this is very important because we often don't have records of how the enslaved felt about so many things.

But the evidence suggests that actually they saw it. They didn't like breadfruit. They didn't like it. And they saw it as fit only for feeding pigs. But breadfruit is now part of the Jamaican diet. And that really does suggest that there was willful resistance from

to the slave-owning class, to Joseph Banks' project. And it's something that the historian B. W. Hickman has written about. And it's a very important aspect of the breadfruit story. Well, I mean, the Joseph Banks building today now at Kew is home to a collection from the Economic Botany Department. I mean, just first of all, what is Economic Botany? Economic Botany was the Museum of Economic Botany. And this was set up in 1847 by

a successor to Joseph Banks, a man called Sir William Hooker. He and his son pretty much ran Kew Gardens during his early years. And it's very controversial that it's named after Joseph Banks because obviously he's a man who's considered to have enabled enslavement.

But the idea of the Museum of Economic Botany was to encourage investment in homegrown innovation in plants. We've lost the idea that plants are technology, but in 1853, three quarters of the total value of British imports were, quote, articles of vegetable origin. This was crucial to imperial trade. And William Hooker wanted to encourage people

to think of ways in which of using plants in innovative business-like ways. Give us some examples, Satnam, of the sort of thing you're talking about, what plant imports were crucial to Britain's economy. Yeah, so you'd go to the Museum of Economic Botany and you'd see a palm, for example, and you'd see how it has been fashioned into a walking stick. And it would show you how actually how important palm was to wood.

You'd also see one of the biggest items in the collection at the moment, I think 10% of the collection, is cinchona plants. And I think you're covering that in another episode. But cinchona is the bark that produced quinine, which in turn enabled Europeans to survive in West Africa, which in turn enabled the colonization of West Africa and led to the creation of an entire country, Nigeria.

And the survival rate of a European in Mali in the early 19th century was something like, I think you would survive for one third of the year if you were lucky. You had an annual mortality rate of 300%.

But suddenly you've got cinchona, you've got quinine, and you're still going to get sick, but you can survive. Right. And this guy, I mean, you were saying Joseph Hooker sort of takes over where Banks leaves off. And his is very much an imperial agenda. He thinks, you know what, we go, we collect, but we also, does he say take over or we claim land? I mean, does he say it as explicitly as that? I think so.

I think he's focused specifically about the plants and he realizes, you know, you've got sugar, you've got tea, you've got cinchona, you've got rubber, you've got these industries. Plants can change the world in

indirectly. And there's now a collection of around 100,000 objects in that economic botany building. And it actually led to copycat museums in all sorts of places. There was one in Missouri, there's one in Adelaide, there was one in Edinburgh and Hamburg. It was a hugely popular idea. We forget that, you know, sugar, the sugar plantations

were a botanical exercise, you know, of trial and error. And also Britain sent 1 million indentured laborers around the world to run plantations, to work on sugar plantations, cinchona plantations, indigo plantations. And these were all botanical processes. And also when these plantations failed, like when Barbados was over farmed, when the soil failed,

Those were botanical processes to revive the soil. Famously, the soil in Barbados was so bad that they tried to import new soil from another colony in a boat. Didn't work. But all of these processes were botanical.

And also the legacies of botanical. One of my favorite facts about the British Empire is that ganja, which is one of the most famous things associated with Jamaica, is so intrinsically Jamaican, but actually was brought to Jamaica by Indian indentured laborers. Ganja is a Hindi word. It's a Hindi crop.

But so much about British colonialism and colonialism in general was actually botanical. You know, I'm actually really struck by that. When you were saying breadfruit now is part of the staple of the Jamaican diet, detested at first and having a horrible history behind it.

Anyone tucking into a curry this week, the heat in your curry is also a gift of Portuguese colonialism. The Portuguese who came to India, who had brought boatloads of the stuff for trade from South America, that is where that came from. Indians didn't have heat before.

Yeah, the Columbian Exchange, famously. But also you've got another building at Kew, which symbolises the Palm House. It's probably the most famous building, right? 16,000 glass planes. It's a gorgeous building. I mean, people haven't seen it. It is like looking into an enormous glass palace. It is how many panes of glass? You just said it and I spoke over you. 16,000. 16,000, right. And originally the glass was green, literally a greenhouse. Greenhouses were green. I never knew that.

It was literally green, yeah. And we forget, we just think, oh, it's a nice place to see some pretty plants. But actually, palm in the 19th century was a massively important industrial product. You know, it produced wood, wax, oil, fiber, starch, alcohol, and sugar. And, you know...

The Palm House was a celebration of this. Also, for many visitors, when it opened in 1848, it was an insight into the British Empire because a lot of the plants, most of them, came from the Calcutta Botanic Garden. This is very much the thought at the time. This is Albert wanting to show the world how great his wife Victoria is and her empire. The Great Exhibition, 1852, around the same time, is exactly an attempt to show, look,

we have dominion over so much of the world and this is what we bring back to show you because you'll never go to see it so we bring it here for you to enjoy it. I remember meeting someone who was coming to do a BBC training course from I think Papua New Guinea and he arrives in London in January I think in the middle of winter and of course he absolutely hates it he thinks it's incredibly cold incredibly miserable and then a mutual friend of ours Anita takes him to Kew Gardens and

thereafter he spends his weekends in the Palm House and just sits in there because it's the only place in London that feels like home. Well, he's not alone. The other person who loved the Palm House was Queen Victoria. She visited it three times in six weeks when it opened in 1848. And of course she famously never visited the

the empire so it was the closest you could say she ever got to India and a lot of people visited it to get a taste of what it was like to be in India. Yes it must have been so odd actually you know the only experience she had were plates of glass and the plants that grew onto them and what was served on her plate you know famously adoring curries and you know the hotter the better she was she was delighted by all of that. We're going to take a break join us after the break where I do want to talk and we've got so many things to talk about but I want to talk about

Mariana North. There is a Mariana North gallery at Kew and I'm quite keen because I really don't know who she was.

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Hi, it's Katty Kay here from The Rest Is Politics US. We felt at this time, as America is heading into the Trump administration, that we should look back on one of the darkest moments in recent American history. So we have done just that with a series on Trump's insurrection and his attempts back in 2020 to steal the election from Joe Biden.

There was an incitement of an insurrection. They stormed the Capitol. They literally have senators running for their lives. We break it down. We give a hour by hour of all the incidents, the fences smashing, the windows breaking, gunshots firing. Trump supporters smoking joints in statutory hall. Just imagine the bedlam. And incredibly, some of these people are going to be pardoned by Mr. Trump. And so January 6th, I've never told Katty Kay this, but January 6th is my birthday. Okay, tune in.

and listen. Yeah, that's not the only extraordinary thing about the date of January the 6th, however. I mean, this is why this story in this series is so important and so gripping because so many of these characters are coming back with us today and so much has been forgiven and swept under the carpet and America decided in

the election last year that they were going to reinstate Donald Trump. With that, there really is no better time to take a look at these events. To hear more, just search the Restless Politics US wherever you get your podcasts. Hear a clip from this miniseries at the end of this week's episode. ♪

Welcome back. So just before the break, we were talking about, well, who knew? Greenhouses were green. I just genuinely thought it was because the plants were green. I didn't know it was because the plants were green. I mentioned a name, Mariana North. There is a Mariana North

gallery at Kew. Who was she and why did she get a gallery? Mariana North was this intrepid female artist and a bit like Joseph Banks, she inherited fortune from her father and then she rejected the small life expected of her and chose instead to roam the world and painting landscapes and the people she encountered. And

There's a Marianna North Gallery and in an act of solipsism, she actually set it up herself. In 1879, she persuaded the Cuse director, Joseph Hooker, that she would fund the new gallery on condition that it would display her oeuvre. So now it contains around 800 paintings by her

And they're very interesting paintings. They're very unlike the East India Company paintings of plants. They're quite garish. Oh, they're like fantasy paintings that you'd expect in Lewis Carroll, where Alice has been shrunk and is surrounded by these giant, vibrant plants. I mean, it's the kind of thing. She moved to Ceylon, didn't she, at one point? Sri Lanka. Yeah.

And she was a great friend of my great, great aunt, Julie Margaret Cameron, who photographed her. And there's a whole set of photographs of her by Julie Margaret Cameron, who was one of the very first women photographers and who brought her equipment out to Sri Lanka. I think I've seen the photograph. There's a photograph there of her dressed up, quote, as a Sri Lankan native. Exactly that, with sort of palms behind her.

I've seen that photo and she doesn't look much like a Sri Lankan to me. I mean, somebody's having a little joke with her at her expense. Yes, yes. This is what we all wear. Very, very good. So look, let's talk about another commodity which is also central to empire and that is rubber. Now, natural rubber is a sticky white sap which you can tap from certain trees. At what point does imperialism come into contact with rubber and say, you know what,

This could be an earner for us. Well, rubber was being grown mainly in Brazil and it was being extracted. It became massive, obviously, because of the Industrial Revolution and also when Thomas Goodyear invented vulcanization in 1839. Thomas Goodyear was a guy. Goodyear tires are named after Goodyear. He said, man, actually, my dad worked in a Goodyear factory in Wolverhampton. Did he? Perhaps less importantly. Yeah.

But demand for rubber boomed, but this resulted in terrible conditions for the indigenous South Americans who were murdered, enslaved, tortured. In some places, 90% of the Indian population was eliminated by atrocities and disease. In order to get the rubber? Yeah, yeah. And today, many uncontacted Indians are descendants of the survivors of that time who fled into remote areas to escape a similar fate.

But then one of the people who lobbied Kew Gardens to help the British Empire to get involved in this very lucrative trade was a manufacturer called Thomas Hancock. And he suggested in 1855 to William Hooker that the East and West Indies would be a good place for rubber cultivation. It was a very challenging thing to do because, first of all, South America had a monopoly and they weren't keen to share their knowledge and seeds. Secondly, rubber seeds are recalcitrant, which means

They die if they're permitted to dry out, which made them hard to transport. And thirdly, it could take decades of trial and error to set up a rubber plantation. But nevertheless, two men, Henry Wickham and Robert Cross, collected seeds. And between them, they managed to break into the wild rubber industry. And despite facing loads of other problems, the British...

became big rubber producers over around two decades of trial and error. And one of the first places they managed to make it work was Ceylon, Sri Lanka. But the place that it really took off was Singapore. And that's because the coffee plantations there weren't doing very well when coffee prices fell in 1896. And that's when the Malay Peninsula took

turned to rubber and planted 12,000 acres of trees over five years. What sort of date was that, Satnam? That was the late 19th century. So quite recently. I mean, it's not as if it's an indigenous plant that's been there for centuries. It's literally late 19th century. And also, it's very poorly understood, but the crude rubber at that point became Britain's top re-export. It became

It became massively lucrative. And these seeds that Kew Gardens sent helped to establish what is now a multi-billion dollar rubber industry. It's incredible that it all came from a few seeds. And even some of the brands flourishing today, like Dunlop, the British tire firm, you know, have their roots in plantations in Malaya. This is so interesting. And, you know, just when you talk about, you know, the plantation in Singapore, the 1896 adventure, if you like, I mean,

I mean, they do it with gusto. 12,000 acres of trees are planted over just five years. I mean, this is very committed planting and also sort of changing the ecosystem of a place that you have gone into. I'm really fascinated by this man Hooker though. He seems...

So very powerful. Does he work hand in glove with government somehow, being able to green light expeditions or saying, yes, I agree, I rubber stamp this, if you will, that this is a good idea to go and pursue rubber as an economic exercise? Yeah, him and his son, Joseph Hooker, both of them did incredible work. But I think it's really important to remember that

that as well as it being very impressive, it also led to one of the darkest episodes in the history of the British Empire because Malaya became hugely profitable to the British.

But then, obviously, the Malayans weren't so keen on it. And when they resisted in 1948, it led to the Malayan Emergency. And you've had Caroline Elkins on your show who describes it as one of the worst episodes in the British Empire. And do you know why it was called the Malayan Emergency rather than a war? Insurance reasons. Because if you call it a war...

the business people don't get the insurance payouts, if you call it an emergency. But it's also that euphemism is one of the reasons why it's so poorly understood because

You know, what the British did, and they resorted to starving people. It was one of the kind of experiment places for counterinsurgency techniques, wasn't it? Yeah, massacring livestock, destroying crops, but with agent origin. I mean, Caroline Elkins talks about how at the same time as the British were helping to draft the European Convention of Rights,

You know, they were involved in mass murder. And, you know, famously, 24 unarmed villagers were killed in a rubber estate in Batang Kali. You know, it's often called Britain's Mylai. It was absolutely appalling. So we should marvel at how Kew Gardens, I think, spent £1,500 establishing this industry. I've seen Caroline Elkins give a lecture about this, and she has a map in her presentation.

showing how counterinsurgency experts in inverted commas, in other words, the people doing these massacres and these horrific things, get drafted from one counterinsurgency to another. And so they move to the Suez zone and then to, I think, the Caribbean and then to various parts of Africa as the kind of decolonial struggles crop up in different places. The same characters.

are moved around to deal with this. And actually her passages in her book are so shocking. I mean, opening fire with live ammunition on detention camps, torturing detainees by starvation, locking them up in cages beneath the hot sun for days on end, force feeding them soapy water. I mean, this is what the British Empire was doing after World War II.

And also, all of this comes indirectly from Kew Gardens, a place where we take our grandmother. I mean, I go there a lot. Every happy memory I have of children toddling around is that you can go to Kew Gardens and three hours, three hours will be taken up by beautiful pointing at big ferns and big palm leaves and things like that. I mean, you are somebody who manages to find yourself

on the battlefield of culture wars on any given day. Have you found that Kew Gardens, or talking about Kew Gardens in this way, has led you into another crossfire, if you like? Kew Gardens has found itself in the centre of a culture war, inevitably, because they've been talking about wanting to decolonise. And that attracted the attention of the Daily Telegraph and certain Tory MPs.

And so after initially talking positively about decolonization, you had the Q's director, Richard Deverell, saying that, oh, you know, he didn't like the word decolonize. And also, you're not going to read anything, I think, that is critical of Q's or indeed British history. This idea...

that history is this like grandmother you need to shield from insult or attack. So what was the initial proposition, the decolonised Q proposition was what? That we put labels beside things to explain the history of why this coffee bean plant is here or why this giant palm is here. Was that what the proposition was? Paulie, it was basically in the shadow of the Black Lives Matter protests and Q Gardens published articles

a 10-year manifesto for change where it declared that it really wanted to face up to its imperial and colonial past. That was it, really. That was enough to really trigger people. But I think Hugh Gardens has found a way of talking about this history in a much more sane way, even though they made that statement earlier.

You know, they are doing lots of positive work. They've got a lot of PhD students looking into the history. They've published a bunch of books or helped to publish a bunch of books on the subject. And one brilliant one, Palace of Palms by Kate Teltzscher. Another one called Just the Tonic about tonic water and cinchona. And, you know, last time I went, they had...

Empire World on sale in the bookshop, and I went to talk to their experts. And, you know, these are academics who want to have open discussions. We're going to be coming back to Q in a later episode, because we're going to be looking at the network of botanic gardens set up, well, around the world, but also specifically in India. And it's a very distinct story, because what you get is that companies such as the East India Company are very keen to have

academic botanists working for them in order to find places where, for example, you can grow the poppy. The opium poppy, which we're going to be dealing with, and we're going to have a whole series on the opium war at some point, is something which derives from botanists discovering where you can grow your poppies.

You get this strange nexus between academic botanists who see these botanic gardens in Saharanpur or in Calcutta or wherever it is as places where they can get funding for their work. Yet, it's also being used by the East India Company to make a buck.

And in the case of, obviously, the opium poppy, spread a narcotic that is going to affect, ultimately, is it 30% of the Chinese population at some point become addicted to opium? It's like worse than the fentanyl crisis in the United States. And yet there's parts of it, just like we like go to queue and love taking our children in pushchairs, there are aspects of this story which are very attractive. And some of the most beautiful botanical art, for example,

comes from men who were sent out by Hooker, employing late Mughal artists to paint these images and producing works of great beauty. And I think this is the whole complexity and interest of this period. I've never understood why understanding the history of a thing can mar the beauty of

in your eyes. I mean, it enriches, you know, knowing more is better. It's beautiful, I think. Totally. And opposite things can be true at the same time, which I think should be your slogan, because that is what your podcast is all about. And yeah, there was great beauty and incredible innovation. But at the same time, there's colonization, vicious war, torture, espionage,

Slavery and indenture. And as you say, both those things are true at the same time. And also, I mean, the works that places like you do with seed banks and, you know, perhaps future proofing our benighted species as we sort of mess around with the climate and everything else.

Listen, can we have you back? Because I think we've just scratched the surface on this. Will you come back and talk to us about the science? Because you mentioned one thing, and I don't think we've drilled down into this. When you talked about Linnaeus and classification, come back, come back for another episode. Until the next time we meet, it is goodbye from me, Anita Arnon. And goodbye from me, William Durham-Poole.

Here is that clip from our miniseries on Trump's insurrection. And these senators are being kind of ushered out through a very narrow corridor. And one of them says we were 20 feet away from the rioters. If the rioters had just looked the other way and seen that a whole bunch of senators were coming out, who knows what would have happened? Who knows what could have happened to Mike Pence? And I think it is important to point out that Donald Trump was getting these reports and did not care.

The Senate has been evacuated at 2:18 PM. Nancy Pelosi is also pulled out of her chair by the Capitol Police and taken off the podium and taken to a safe location at Fort McNair in Southwest Washington. She originally tried to stay. She didn't want to leave the building, but because of security, she had to get out of there.

One of the Democratic members of the Congress at this point, as they realize that the rioters are starting to breach their area, one of the members, Democratic members of the Congress, yells down to the Republicans, this is because of you. And the members are getting texts. This is how they know that things are bad, because they're getting texts from their family saying, what are you doing there? Why haven't you left? Are you safe?

They haven't got a television. They're not watching it. They're trying to get on with the business of the day. I mean, it's surreal. I keep thinking how surreal it was that inside the chambers, they're trying to do business as usual. And feet away, the rioters are there saying that they want to have some of these people hung and that they want to overturn the election result. So then a few minutes after that, the House floor is evacuated.

literally in front of the rioters. The police manage again to secure a very narrow passageway through the rioters to get them out. And one member afterwards says, I could look in the eyes of those officers and I saw the fear. They knew that the officers were outnumbered. To hear more, search The Rest Is Politics US wherever you get your podcasts.