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Hello and welcome to Empire with me, Anita Arnden.

And me, William Duremple.

And we continue our mini-series with Sam D'Rimple discussing his rather excellent five partitions that reshaped modern Asia.

And in this episode, which I think is actually one of the most intriguing of all of the chapters that you've covered in this history,

is the history of the Arabian Peninsula, which honestly you would not put together with the Indian Raj at all. So let's talk about this because a century ago, a large part, we're talking

about Oman, Yemen, the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Bahrain and Kuwait were legally part of

India.

Sam Dharimple discuss, and why don't we know this?

Yes, why? Why is this forgotten? How come that none of us knew it?

It's been kind of forgotten.

And I think each of the nation-states involved, be it India, the UAE, Kuwait, Bahrain, has kind of written over this. And it was really forgotten until this guy called James Onley, this professor and archivist,

was hired by the Qatari government to create what's known as the Qatar Digital Library,

which is really good and anyone should go online, anyone who's doing research.

It's one of the best archives out there.

I got lost four weeks in that archive. It is extraordinary. I was honestly searching for a

really obscure name, a British name, that had served in India and I knew had been in Muscat.

And then suddenly you've got his handwriting, you've got the reports about him. It's replete

with these gems that I just had no idea existed

until this archive was made open. It was fabulous. So he's basically sent out to try and find

...