If you want access to bonus episodes reading lists for every series of empire, a chat community,

discounts for all the books mentioned in the week's podcast, add free listening and a weekly

newsletter, sign up to Empire Club at

W.

W. Empire pod UK.com. Hello and welcome to a very special empire with me Anita Arnum and me William

termful.

I don't know I'm not I don't anymore.

It needs trouble.

I don't even notice it anyway look special because this is all about you it's the

Q&A sessions that we do every self and at the end of a series in particular so So we have now come to the end of our

Ottoman run. Did you like it? Did you enjoy it? We certainly really loved the

enthusiasm that you've been showing both in emails and on Twitter on

the Twitter. We quite entirely sure whether the audience that had lined up to hear about the

British India would necessarily come along to hear about the Ottomans and you have. We've brought you all with us and you're still listening, which is fantastic.

And there's no inevitability about that.

And it was a slight shot in the dark going off to around the Middle East,

and I'm very glad we did that. But that's who we are. We are like, you know,

we write the Levan Cleaves of the history world. Although I realize now he's the bad guy, but you know what I mean?

Was that pretty sure we shot off in the dark?

But also from a personal point of view for me, there was, I so nearly ended up writing about the Middle East

and the Ottoman world rather than being based in India,

which is where I've been based 30 years.

...