224. Empire in Your Garden

Empire

Jack Davenport

History

4.6 • 4.1K Ratings

🗓️ 28 January 2025

⏱️ 48 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

How did plants power imperialism? Gardening may be a quintessentially British hobby, but many of the familiar plants in our lives have a global – and colonial – history. From “fern-mania” leading wealthy Victorians to decimate environments around the world collecting ferns for their drawing rooms, to mahogany harvested by enslaved workers in the Caribbean, plants played an important role in the British Empire. Even official scientific names for plants included blatantly racist language up until the 1990s. Over-harvesting of popular imperial products created monocultures and environmental destruction on a huge scale, and the movement of native plants across continents allowed invasive species to run riot. Yet the same imperialists who caused these problems also led the way in the early environmentalist movement, creating National Parks and protection schemes for animals on the risk of extinction. Listen as William and Anita are once again joined by Sathnam Sanghera, author of Empireworld, to explore the ways in which imperialists both destroyed and protected the natural world. Twitter: @Empirepoduk Email: [email protected] Goalhangerpodcasts.com Assistant Producer: Becki Hills Producer: Anouska Lewis Senior Producer: Callum Hill Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	If you want access to bonus episodes reading lists for every series of Empire, a chat community,
0:06.7	discounts for all the books mentioned in the week's podcast, add free listening and a weekly
0:11.4	newsletter, sign up to Empire Club at www.mpowerpod.uk.com.
0:21.6	So this is an advertisement for the wonderful Jaipur Literary Festival, the greatest literary festival
0:29.5	in the world.
0:31.1	Teamwork arts, their producers, and my wonderful co-director Namitagli are in our 18th year of hosting a great celebration
0:40.7	of books, ideas, music and art, where we welcome brilliant speakers to the pink city of Jaipur,
0:47.4	from Nobel Prize winners, to Pulitzer, to Booker awardees, to Sahitya Academy awardees,
0:53.6	to the people that have won all the great literary prizes
0:56.1	across the world. And we should also flag that we don't just host the festival in Jaipo. We have a whole
1:01.9	variety of satellite festivals across the world from Valladolid in Spain, Seattle, New York,
1:08.4	Boulder and Houston in the United States. And in particular we have JLF London marking
1:14.4	its 12th year at the British Library in 2025, a cross-cultural voyage of literary narratives
1:19.8	and inspirational speakers, so you should all come along.
1:23.3	This year's dates are the 13th to 15th of June, so be sure to book your spot once the ticket link goes live.
1:29.4	Visit JLF Litfest.org slash London for updates.
1:33.8	That's JLFLitfest.org slash London.
1:39.7	This episode is brought to you by our old friends Babel.
1:44.8	Language has always been a bridge between cultures, from ancient trade routes like the
1:50.2	Golden Road to modern diplomacy.
1:53.2	Babel teaches you real-life conversations, enriched by cultural insights and supported by advanced
1:58.7	speech recognition technology.
	...

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