How Alcohol Built the British Empire

Dan Snow's History Hit

History Hit

History

4.7 • 12.9K Ratings

🗓️ 18 October 2021

⏱️ 31 minutes

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Summary

During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as the British Empire expanded across the globe an almost ubiquitous but often underappreciated commodity went with it; alcohol. The distillation, sale and drinking of booze played an essential role in trade, seafaring and colonial societies. But for many indigenous communities this came at a terrible price as, previously unfamiliar, distilled spirits wreaked havoc on their communities and reinforced the racial ideologies that legitimised imperialism. It is a more complicated story than this though and for some indigenous communities, alcohol was not ruinous instead becoming a vital source of income that enabled them to survive and in some instances flourish. For this episode, Dan is joined by Dr Deborah Toner, Associate Professor of History at the University of Leicester and author of Alcohol in the Age of Industry, Empire, and War, to uncover the central role that alcohol played in creating the British Empire.

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0:00.0	Hi everybody, welcome to Dance Know's History. I'm standing looking down at the most exciting
0:05.0	maritime building project in Britain at the moment. I'm in Woodbridge in Suffolk on the banks
0:11.2	of the River Deben and just across the river from here I can almost see out of the workshop
0:14.4	I mean now on the far side of the River Deben is where the Sutton Who ship burial was found
0:19.5	the most remarkable ship burial ever found in Britain. One that everyone of course
0:25.1	talked about recently because of the dig on Netflix but those of us who love maritime history
0:31.4	did not leave this Netflix series to get excited about it and indeed this replica building
0:34.9	project was started years ago now. I've been in support from the beginning because what they're
0:39.2	doing in this workshop is they are building a replica of that ship found in that excavation
0:45.6	just for the second world war in the 1930s. It is a thing of beauty I'm looking down at now.
0:51.1	There's a keel that's been laid. The first planks are about to be attached. The bow and stern
0:56.7	sections are about to go on. The ship is taking shape folks. There's a couple of years left to go and
1:02.3	I'll become back here for the podcast. I'll be coming back here for the TV channel and we'll be at
1:06.4	every step of the process as this ship takes shape and then we're going to launch it and I'm going
1:13.6	to take my place on one of the thwarts and I will pull an awr and we will send this beautiful
1:18.7	early medieval ship back out where it belongs down the river to the sea. It's very exciting. We're
1:24.3	filming here for history hit TV today. If you want to check out history it's the world's best
1:28.4	history channel really. We have documentaries on there about things from the Stone Age to the
1:33.1	nuclear age. This will sit beautifully in our early medieval history section alongside great
1:38.5	documentaries like the one Kat Jarman made about the great heathen army, the Viking army,
1:42.7	defeat the bow for the great and other documentaries too. So please head over you've got 30 days free
1:48.0	if you try it out today. History hit.tv is the website to go to but this episode the podcast
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