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Hello and welcome to Empire with me Anita Arnhann.

And me, William Durunpool.

So we're doing this series on empire and literature.

And one of the things that's really striking, Willie, is actually bits of empire that are completely absent from literature.

And, you know, that's a real thing for you, isn't it?

Well, not just bits.

It's extraordinary because over the course of, you know, 300 years, the British kind of invaded almost everywhere.

I've just checked. And there are only 22 countries in the world that the British didn't invade.

So much so that freedom from British rule is the single most popular, secular festival anywhere in the world.

Every six days, somewhere celebrates freedom from British rule.

Independence Day.

Independence Day. And yeah, if you look in British,

you know, domestic English literature of the period, it's almost completely absent to a weird extent looking from our point of view in the present. There are hints of it in the back of Thackeray,

the Z.M. Forster, there's a little bit of Kipling, echoes of it at the background of Sherlock Holmes. But most novels of the period do not deal with it. There is a small body that do and they're analysed in post-colonial literature classes. And it's extraordinary how little there is, I always think.

We're going to look at a specific period. It's sort of the cuss between

the Georgian and Victorian era. And, you know, this is a time when greats, literary greats like

Jane Austen and Charlotte Bronte wrote. And if you've done English literature anywhere in the world,

they will almost certainly have been on your curriculum. But what you don't get is the sense that they were

writing at a time when slavery was one of the major drivers of the economy and also when the abolitionists

...