Podcast Corner: Queen's demise puts history of empire back on the agenda
William Dalrymple hosts the Empire podcast with Anita Anand.
Amid the wall-to-wall coverage of the death of Britain’s Queen Elizabeth II and the outpouring of emotion in the miles-long queue in London of people waiting to pay their respects, there has been an undercurrent of a royal reckoning, examining the realities of what’s now left of Empire.
Two years ago in this column, we looked at the six-part Audible-exclusive series We Need to Talk About the British Empire. “There are plenty of other stories left to tell about the British Empire,” we wrote. Alas no more episodes materialised considering such, but in August, another podcast, simply titled Empire, began, hosted by historian William Dalrymple and journalist Anita Anand.
It has been captivating from the outset, as Dalrymple, on the first episode, compared the East India Company to today’s tech behemoths, cutting around the tax laws of individual nation states and playing one state against each other. Corporations, like the East India Company, are calling the shots, he says.
The first series — five episodes so far — continued to look at the British in India, and then pivoted last week on the death of the queen, bringing in historian David Olusoga for a sober, unsentimental conversation that was missing from the 24-hour coverage on English news channels.
To pick one argument that stood out: “That urge to have a monologue rather than a dialogue about British Empire is absolutely breaking down and the fact that voices and opinions about the British monarchy and about the late queen are emanating from former British colonies is because it was always a dialogue we just ignored - we just didn’t listen to the other side,” says Olusoga.
For more-conventional fans of the celebrity royals, Dynasty by Vanity Fair is a 10-part series that concluded in the summer, with a bonus episode arriving last week. The show began focusing on ‘Megxit’ - Meghan and Harry leaving their royal vestiges behind as they moved to the US.
Vanity Fair’s royal correspondent Katie Nicholl and staff writer Erin Vanderhoof cover topics on episodes such as ‘Kate and her king’, ‘global press vs the royals’, and ‘Prince Charles’ rocky ascent’.
That bonus episode, ‘The future of the crown’, is more doe-eyed than Empire’s offering, Nicholl claiming that with the cost-of-living crisis, a new prime minister, and the UK “not in good shape… with the queen there as our head of state, there’s a sense that everything was going to be OK because while the queen was there and for those record-breaking seven decades that we had her, everything was OK”. Historians might disagree.
