Podcast Corner: William Dalrymple delves into links between colonisation of Ireland and India
William Dalrymple presents the Empire podcast.
As an Irish person, you might baulk at the idea of an English person doing a podcast on the colonisation of Ireland. That feeling’s not eased in the opening few minutes of episode 233 of Empire (Goalhanger Podcasts), when William Dalrymple admits: “I've always been aware that I don't know as much about Irish history as I should do.”
But he continues: “I was very much brought up by my-half Irish, half-Scottish nanny on tales of the potato famine and was taken down, I remember, to the public library in North Berwick at the age of about six or seven, and shown these woodcuts of Irish mothers turning to cannibalism and this sort of stuff. It was in the Great Hunger of 1847.”
