David Olusoga: More than a quarter of all the nations on Earth are former British colonies, and scattered across the world are the ruins of the British Empire-- statues to kings and viceroys, slave fortresses, plantations, schools, railways, and prisons.

At its height, the British Empire, the biggest there has ever been, ruled over a fifth of the world's land surface and almost a quarter of its people, and perhaps the greatest legacy of the British Empire is a living legacy.

There are today literally billions of people whose ancestors, in different ways, were part of this story.

For this series, we invited people from across the world to share their personal thoughts on how, for them, imperial history is family history.

Woman, voice-over: I describe myself as a mixed Indo-Caribbean and Egyptian woman, Muslim woman, from Wembley.

Olusoga: The great migrations of Empire were both voluntary and involuntary.

Aliyah: My mum is of mixed heritage.

She is Jamaican Maroon, English and Irish on the other side.

Her lineage links back to George Washington, who had 200 slaves.

Olusoga: In Australia, millions are reclaiming ancestors who were transported as convicts... Woman, voice-over: Oldest one would be George Munday, and he was arrested for stealing liquor from a man called Edward Beer.

Olusoga: and across the world, the forgotten history of Indian migration is re-emerging.

Kyle, voice-over: My great-great-grandmother, her name was Alice, or at least that was the name that she was given, and she traveled to Trinidad from India when she was under 12 years old.

We don't know exactly how old she was.

Olusoga: In this episode, we reveal how the Empire transformed the demographics of the world.

♪ Group: ♪ Amazing ♪ ♪ Grace ♪ ♪ How sweet ♪ ♪ The sound... ♪ Olusoga: Every few years, a pilgrimage takes place.

Come on, everybody.

Olusoga: A group of African Americans from the Southern states travel to Africa to visit one of the most shocking and, for them, one of the most painful places on Earth.

♪ I first ♪ ♪ Believed ♪ Woman: Ha ha!

Olusoga: This is Bunce Island.

It lies 20 miles up the Sierra Leone River, and here, under the trees and bushes, lies the remains of a slave fortress, a place in which tens of thousands of Africans were held captive before being sent in chains across the Atlantic.

Bunce Island is a shocking relic of the Atlantic slave trade, but for these people, it has a deeper and more personal significance.

Look at this.

She found a link to a chain.

These things are still here.

Man: Would someone have worn that?

Around their necks, their feet, and their hands.

It's heavy, too.

It is.

Olusoga: They are members of the Gullah Geechee community, African Americans who, because of a unique set of records, are able to trace their family histories through the centuries of slavery in Georgia and South Carolina all the way back to this part of Africa.

♪ Oh... [Sniffles] Olusoga: That means that they know there is a high likelihood that their own ancestors were imprisoned and sold into slavery right here on this island.

♪ To come here for you and for other Gullah Geechee people is clearly painful, but the fact you're able to do that puts you in a tiny, tiny minority...

Tiny, tiny, yeah.

and what you're able to do here, millions of African Americans would long to be able to do.

Yeah.

I'm humbled.

I feel special, but I don't feel a little bigheaded about it.

I'm just doing what I have to do, and I hear the moanings.

I hear the groaning.

I hear the crying.

I see the tears, and um-- oh wow, here we go-- that's what disturbs me.

That's what disturbs me.

I just want to walk through it and let them know that I came back, and that's the only thing I want to say about that.

[Inhales deeply] Now, are we through?

♪ Olusoga: Slavery is a living trauma, an open wound for African Americans, even now in the 21st century, and the legacies of slavery also live on in Africa, but this fortress has other links.

♪ The story of this island is intimately interwoven into the history of another island 3,000 miles to the north because the ships that anchored off Bunce Island were British ships and they'd set sail from British ports-- from Bristol, Liverpool, London.

The bricks in the walls of the defenses of Bunce Island were carried here in those ships.

The guns that defended Bunce Island had been forged in Britain.

They are still here, stamped with a symbol-- the cipher of King George III, and the bones of the traders and the clerks up there through the hills in the cemetery are those of men from Britain or the British Empire.

Even the pebbles on the beach are from Britain.

Some of these pebbles were brought here as ballast in the slave ships.

When their ships got here, they dumped that ballast because they needed to lighten their load because they had a new cargo-- men, women and children.

These British stones and pebbles and rocks on an island in a river in Africa, they are pound for pound the human flesh that was taken out of that fortress and set sail down that river.

Group: ♪ Lord, you guide my every footsteps ♪ Man: ♪ No, no ♪ ♪ Lord been good to me ♪ ♪ Olusoga: In the archives in Freetown, the capital city of Sierra Leone, are a collection of documents.

It was through these letters and ledgers that the Gullah Geechee people traced the forced migrations of their ancestors back to Bunce Island.

♪ These documents are a record of human suffering but also of a business partnership.

[Car horns honk] By the 1750s, the slave trading carried out on Bunce Island was built around a friendship between two men-- Richard Oswald, the Scottish owner of Bunce Island, and his business partner Henry Laurens, a slave owner and slave trader who lived in the British colony of South Carolina.

Isatu, good to see you again.

How you doing?

Olusoga, voice-over: Isatu Smith is a historian, an expert in the history of Bunce Island and in the business dealings of Oswald and Laurens.

♪ This is a letter that Henry Laurens sent to London to Richard Oswald in June 1756.

It says, "We must advise you that Captain Osborn "on a ship, the Carlisle, "arrived last night, "and that he has on board 141 slaves "for the account of Grant and Oswald and Co.

The 120 of them were shipped at Bunce Island."

We know Henry Laurens was Richard Oswald's major agent, receiving cargoes of captives from Bunce Island, so this document is a testament to that relationship that transcended into friendship.

It says here that 5 of them died in the passage.

This was a really good voyage for them... Only 5 dead people.

only 5 dead people, only 5, you know.

That speaks to the way in which they viewed these human captives.

It's like transporting a dozen tomatoes and only 5 are bruised upon arrival, so that is a good number.

There's a line here which I think summarizes their relationship.

It says, "Please be assured "that we will study your interests as though they were our own."

He's saying that, "I will throw myself into this business as if it was my own money."

Mm-hmm.

Laurens was making 10% commission for each batch, parcel, of captives that he sells for Oswald.

So he gets a 10%.

That means that 12 out of the 120 captives brought from Bunce Island, effectively, he will profit.

Yep.

12 captives out of that lot, it's a lot.

It's a good deal of money.

Just thinking about the fact that you'll be buying and selling fellow humans, "So many died.

Oh, well.

The insurance will cover it," with no nothing about their state of mind, no nothing about that experience that the captives have just endured from the moment they were snatched from their village during slavery and taken to the place like Bunce Island, where they were then sold.

"We don't want to know about them.

"We just want to know that X number "of captives arrived alive, "and we potentially stand to make X number of profits off of the sale of them."

That was the primary concern.

♪ Olusoga: The business partnership of Oswald and Laurens was one of thousands that made the Empire extraordinarily profitable.

By the 1770s, Britain was transporting 45,000 Africans into slavery each year.

The slave colony of Jamaica was one of the most profitable places on Earth, and half a million enslaved Africans worked the tobacco fields and the sugar plantations of the North American colonies... ♪ but in 1776, Richard Oswald and Henry Laurens, the business partners of Bunce Island, became--in theory, at least-- enemies.

♪ That year, in this room, Independence Hall in Philadelphia, the Declaration of Independence was signed, and Oswald and Laurens stood on opposite sides of what became the American Revolution.

We find them again 8 years later, at the end of the Revolution, not through their business records but in a work of art.

This painting is the Treaty of Paris.

In the empty space, the half of the painting that was never completed, was to be the British delegation sent to negotiate an end to the war.

That delegation included Richard Oswald.

Across from them sat the American delegates, and among them was Henry Laurens.

One of the issues these former business partners debated was the fate of the Black Loyalists, the thousands of enslaved people who had been freed by the British during the Revolution.

This is Article 7 of the Treaty of Paris, and this article was inserted into the treaty at the suggestion of Henry Laurens, and what it demands is that the British withdraw all their forces from every part of the United States but that they do so "without causing any destruction or carrying away any Negroes or other Property."

♪ Article 7--drafted by Henry Laurens, a man who had made his fortune as a slave trader-- created the final dilemma for the British in their final moments in their lost American colonies.

That dilemma played out here in New York City.

Olusoga: What's the role of New York City in the Revolutionary War?

New York City is the hub of British operations in the North.

The British take it over from the Americans in 1776, and they stay here until what will end up being the very last day of British presence officially in the United States in 1783, and during that time, the city functions not only as a hub of British military operations.

It also functions as a center for Loyalist civilians who come in by the thousands from the countryside, from other cities in the Northeast to feel safe under British protection.

There were also what's known as Black Loyalists here in New York.

Tell me where they'd come from.

Some of the Black Loyalists-- that is to say, the former slaves who joined the British-- ended up getting enlisted into British military service, and some of those British military personnel ended up coming to New York City.

For some of those Black Loyalists, these final months of British occupation were particularly perilous and uncertain.

They knew that in the peace treaty that was being negotiated with the Americans, the British had promised not to leave with property belonging to the Americans, and they knew that, at least according to their former owners, they were property, and they had worries that they would be walking around the streets of New York City and their Patriot owners would have come up from the South to come and reclaim them.

And they're right to do so.

They are right to think that this reclaiming of human property is on the minds of Patriots coming into New York.

There are examples of Patriots coming to New York City and looking for their formerly enslaved property, as they see them-- freemen, as these people know themselves to be-- and it's against this backdrop that the British commander in charge of the evacuation from the United States undertakes a really extraordinary project.

He decides that the appropriate thing to do is to underscore the freedom of these Black individuals, and they will be evacuated with the British from New York City.

♪ Olusoga: The names of the thousands of Black Loyalists evacuated from New York Harbor were recorded in two registers.

♪ The one drafted by the Americans is today in Washington, D.C.

The register the British forces drafted is here in London at the National Archives.

♪ The name that was given to this register was the Book of Negroes, and on these pages are the names of around 3,000 people, many of whom had escaped from slavery and come over to the British lines during the Revolutionary Wars.

These pages give us their names, their ages, and there is a place for a brief physical description.

On the opposite page it says, "Remarks," and here are listed the names of the slave owners, the people from whom these Black people have escaped, and it tells us how many years since they made their escape, so here we have a Rachel Herbert.

She's 24 years old, and Rachel is traveling with a child.

She's traveling with her daughter, who is just 3 weeks old, and under remarks, it tells us that Rachel was formerly the property of Milesy Wilkinson of Virginia and that she escaped from slavery 4 years earlier.

Towards the bottom of this page is a remarkable entry.

It is for a man called Harry Washington.

Under remarks, it tells us that Harry Washington was formerly the property of General Washington, and that, of course, is George Washington, the future first President of the United States, and now in 1783, Harry Washington is in New York.

This is a man who we know had been born in Africa, who had been shipped across the Atlantic, chained to the decks of a slave ship, who had labored on George Washington's Mount Vernon plantation, then escaped to the British, fought in the Revolutionary Wars, and is now heading to a life of freedom as a subject of the British Empire.

What is astonishing about this book is that the British authorities in New York could have abandoned these people to the slave catchers and to their former owners.

They chose not to do that because they came to the conclusion that the promises of freedom made to the people listed in these columns was more important than the terms of the peace treaty.

They came to see this as a matter of honor, personal honor but also national honor... ♪ but what we have to remember about this astonishing moment is that not all of the Black people evacuated from New York and other harbors were heading to lives of freedom.

Those whose owners had remained loyal to the British were being evacuated, but they were being sent back to slavery in other British colonies, and the British Empire that gathered these lists of names, that evacuated people, that was the same British Empire that in the exact same years was shipping thousands of Africans year by year across the Atlantic to slavery in Jamaica, Barbados, and the other slave colonies.

The 1780s were the peak years of the British slave trade.

This is one of those moments in the story of the British Empire in which it's characterized by a sense of doublethink, that it is capable of remarkable acts like this but it is also capable of horrific acts.

♪ [Distant siren] The Loyalists, Black and white, who were evacuated from New York were scattered across the world.

♪ Some headed home to Britain, but most settled in other British colonies.

Thousands moved north to Canada.

Others headed east to join the ranks of the East India Company.

White Loyalists who were slaveowners sailed south to Jamaica and Britain's other Caribbean islands, taking their human property with them.

♪ For the first time since the founding of the charter companies of the late 16th century, the imperial project had gone into reverse.

The loss of the American colonies meant that the Empire shrank in size by almost half a million square miles.

♪ The catastrophe of the American Revolution was so great that there were some who feared that the rest of the Empire might soon fall apart, but the immediate crisis facing the British in 1783 was not the threat of other revolutions in her other colonies, but a crisis at home.

♪ The people who got on ships and crossed the Atlantic Ocean to populate the early British Empire, the colonies in North America and the Caribbean, not all of those people were free settlers.

Some of them were convicts.

Tens of thousands of people convicted of crimes here in Britain were shipped to the colonies and used as cheap labor, but the outbreak of revolution in North America meant that the British had suddenly lost access to colonies that were used as open-air prisons.

Rather than starting to construct new and expensive prisons at home in Britain, the government adopted a temporary, short-term solution.

The view in this painting is that view, the view across Portsmouth Harbor.

This painting is from the early 19th century, and it shows the harbor full of warships and merchant ships, but there's also this line of vessels here.

They are ships that have been stripped of their masts, their sails, and their rigging.

These are the hulks.

They are old warships that have been converted into floating prisons, and it was on the hulks that the convicts who would have been sent to the North American colonies, that's where they were imprisoned, and the idea was that the British forces would eventually inevitably defeat the American rebels and the flow of convicts to the colonies would resume, but victory for the United States meant that the hulks were no longer a temporary solution to the convict crisis.

They were a crisis in their own right.

♪ The end of the Revolutionary Wars and the independence of the United States meant that Britain had permanently lost its open air prison.

On board the hulks, there were outbreaks of disease and outbreaks of rioting among the prisoners awaiting transportation, and the government launched a global search for a new prison colony, which finally led a parliamentary committee to make one of the most astonishing decisions in the whole history of the British Empire.

♪ In 1787, 11 ships set sail from here--Portsmouth.

They sailed past the hulks that crowded the harbor.

♪ [Gulls squawking] That convoy, the First Fleet, took around 1,400 men, women, and children 15,000 miles to a continent that no British ship had even visited for 15 years.

♪ The plan for Australia was something new in the British Empire.

♪ First and foremost, this was to be a prison colony.

Although free settlers were to follow, the convicts were to build the new colony and make up the vast majority of its population... ♪ and over the next 6 decades, 165,000 people were sent as convicts to Australia.

Half of them arrived here in what was to become one of the Empire's most feared and most infamous places.

[Wind blowing] Van Diemen's Land, the island now known as Tasmania, became to the British Empire what Siberia was to the Russian Empire... ♪ and the relics of the convict system are today scattered across modern Tasmania-- the roads and the bridges built by convict chain gangs and the cemeteries in which the criminal class of late Georgian Britain and Ireland were laid to rest, but the most remarkable relics of the convict system are the documents it left behind, the conduct records that reveal the fates of each of the prisoners sent to Tasmania.

♪ So this document is a conduct record for a Patrick Feagan, who arrives in Van Diemen's Land in July 1826.

He'd been stealing silver spoons, which is a pretty minor offense.

He's 15, a child.

What happens to him next?

As you can see from the record, Feagan doesn't like the system, so he resists at every turn.

He does the sort of things that any ordinary teenager from our perspective would do.

The difference, of course, is that every time, he gets punished.

And we can see that Patrick gets 25 lashes here, another 25 lashes.

This is a really serious punishment.

This took the skin off men's backs.

Patrick's record comes to an end.

I mean, they literally sort of draw a line under his case.

A group of convicts, including Patrick Feagan, did manage to escape, only to come back to the settlement.

These two men, Broughton and McAlboy, have murdered Feagan.

So Patrick Feagan is a teenager, and not only does he end up being transported halfway around the world and being whipped.

He ends up being murdered by other convicts.

Yes.

There's other records here.

This is Janet Morrison, and she arrives 3 years after Patrick in 1829.

She also has a very long convict career.

From 1830 right to 1839, there is infraction after infraction.

Now, it's important to think about Janet as a woman in a colony where men dominate.

That means that household servants are in short supply, and that works to Janet's benefit, so what we see here is Janet being assigned to a master or mistress.

Which is a free settler... A free settler.

who wanted a domestic servant.

Absolutely.

She doesn't like, for whatever reason, the employment, and so she leaves.

So she goes from settler household to household, is in trouble some of the time, and then gets reassigned to another settler if she doesn't like it there.

Absolutely.

It's a rather mysterious record because it just ends.

She might have died.

She might have left the colony.

She might have married.

We just don't know.

These records show that this system could be absolutely brutal, but there were some convicts who came to Van Diemen's Land and bettered their lives.

This is a man called James Thomson.

This is a rather short record.

We can see here, at the end, he gets a free pardon in 1839.

James Thomson does rather well for himself.

He becomes an engineer and surveyor and today is celebrated in the "Australian Dictionary of National Biography" as one of the pioneers of the built landscape of what's now Tasmania.

Even though he arrived in 1824 as a convict.

Yes.

I think it's important to remember that for many convicts, transportation meant a life cut short, but for those who survived, there were opportunities, and if you could get some good, quality terrain to farm, to raise livestock, et cetera, you really could make a good life for yourself.

♪ Olusoga: The convict system in Tasmania rewarded the hard-working and the fortunate, but it crushed those who refused to submit, and that system left behind a stigma within Australian culture.

Through the 19th and into the 20th centuries, many Australians descended from convicts concealed their family histories or were silent about their ancestors.

♪ The convict stigma, passed down from generation to generation, continued until the 1960s, when it finally began to break down.

Judith, voice-over: I'm really proud of them.

They've overcome so much hard life.

They've just been thrown onto ships.

They would have gone through horrific storms.

They would have gone through the tropical heat.

If they survived all of that, they thrived once they got their ticket of leave and they had their freedom.

It was a chance for them to reinvent themselves.

With my nan's Irish family, they got sent to Van Diemen's Land, and then they started to want the rest of the family to come out.

In the end, they had a whole heap of them migrate to Van Diemen's Land... Woman, voice-over: One of my convict family came from the Second Fleet.

He became a mayor, so you work hard, you do well.

You were able to create a life that you would never have back home in England.

Jodie, voice-over: but it wasn't right exporting your problems to another country where there are Aboriginal people that live there, Native people.

♪ Olusoga: The most infamous of the convict colonies was Tasmania, Van Diemen's Land, but in the first decades of the 19th century, another event took place on this island that, even at the time, was regarded as a stain on the reputation of the British Empire... because the convicts and their jailers were not alone on Tasmania.

For 40,000 years, this island had been home to another people who had stamped their presence onto the landscape.

When the British came to Tasmania and they looked out at landscapes like this in the east of the island, they saw thousands and thousands of acres that they could profitably farm, and what they thought they were looking at was naturally occurring parkland, and so they presumed that the Tasmanian Aborigines had done nothing to this land.

They hadn't farmed it, they hadn't enclosed it, and, therefore, they had no legitimate claim to it, but this land, in fact, isn't parkland, and it isn't a wilderness.

This is, in fact, a highly managed, highly artificial landscape because for thousands of years, the Tasmanians had built-- they created this landscape using fire to control the growth of the trees and the bushes, and what they had created was their hunting grounds, and across those hunting grounds were the pathways they used to travel from one source of seasonal food to another.

This landscape was their creation, and it was absolutely fundamental to their survival, and yet all of that was just invisible to the British.

♪ The peoples of Tasmania had a folk memory that stretched back through 300 generations, but the generations we know best are those who were living when the British arrived.

These portraits were painted by an English painter called Thomas Bock, who lived and worked in the Midlands right up until the year 1823, when he was convicted of arranging an illegal abortion and transported for 14 years to Van Diemen's Land.

Thanks to Bock, we have these incredible images of the Aboriginal people of Tasmania, people whose names we know.

This is a portrait of a woman called Laratong, who was from Cape Grim.

This is Mannalargenna, who was a leader of his people, and he's painted here with the fire stick that the Tasmanian Aborigines used to burn the vegetation and change the landscape, and this young woman is Truganini.

We think she was born around the year 1812, which means she's in her early 20s in this portrait, and this is a woman whose story is critical to understand what happened here on this island to the Indigenous people.

♪ There was violence against the Aboriginal peoples from the beginnings of British settlement, but in the 1820s, the population of convicts and settlers enormously increased, and thousands of sheep were imported into Tasmania.

♪ The lands best suited to sheep farming were the hunting lands that the Aboriginal peoples had cleared with fire for thousands of years.

♪ When they fought back against the loss of their land, the settlers began to call for them to be removed from the island or exterminated.

♪ The reality of what was happening in Tasmania in the late 1820s and early 1830s has been uncovered in official documents by the historian Nick Brodie.

The documents show that settlers, convicts, and the police were being sent out to clear Aboriginal people from the region of white settlement.

The colonial authorities were not only aware of what was happening.

They were rewarding it.

Brodie: This is a letter from one of the major settlers of the northern settled districts--John Batman.

He becomes quite famous as the founder of Melbourne, but at this time, he's just a settler trying to make a name for himself.

He's leading expeditions against Aboriginal people in his area.

This is September 1829.

Yep, 1829, so it's a description of a letter to the local police magistrate explaining the latest expedition.

"I tracked down some Aboriginal people.

They attacked the camp."

You can just see words like "Buck shot" stick out as they attack, describing what they take-- "a great number of spears, waddies, blankets," et cetera, et cetera-- and then over here, he talks about the return journey.

He's taking with him two men, a woman, and child, but found it impossible that the two men could walk, and "after trying them by every means in my power for some time, I found I could not get them on," so, in other words, they can't keep up.

They're injured.

They've been hurt in the attack.

"I was obliged therefore to shoot them," so he's effectively just executed prisoners in the field who are wounded and can't keep up with the journey home.

And he writes this in an official correspondence, so he's open about this.

Yeah.

This is quite open.

It's to the police, local police magistrate, who then forwards it to the colonial secretary, so it makes its way all the way to the highest level of government in Hobart.

And is there comeback when the colonial secretary reads this?

Not really.

No.

The colonial secretary notices.

He says, "Shoots wounded natives because they could not keep up."

He makes a little bit of an inquiry about what's going on, but at no point is anybody punished.

Batman's not reprimanded.

Batman's not stopped from going on further expeditions.

In fact, by the time that limited inquiry has finished, he's already continued his course of campaigning up in that part of Tasmania.

But the fact that he even admits to it in official correspondence means he must have presumed that there would not be any consequences.

Yeah, exactly.

He doesn't expect any comeback whatsoever.

Because he doesn't need to admit to this.

No.

He could have just, as so many of them do, just leave a silent gap where they describe the number of people killed.

He could have simply talked about only capturing the woman and the child, so the fact that he mentions it means he's feeling quite brazen about it.

It's just par for the course of the war at this time.

Because what that makes you think is that this is normalized.

This is just one incident, one of many, and that it is now so normal to kill Aboriginals that no one is expecting comeback or consequences or retribution for doing so, and so you can be relatively open about it.

Yep.

That's exactly what's happening.

"I was obliged therefore..." "I was obliged therefore to shoot them," as if it was almost their fault.

"Obliged."

[Exhales] Oh... ♪ Olusoga: As well as sending out parties to capture and kill Aboriginal people, the governor also dispatched a mission-- George Augustus Robinson.

Robinson and a group of Aboriginal people that included Truganini set out on a series of expeditions to persuade the last survivors to abandon their homelands and come with them to what they were promised would be a place of sanctuary.

♪ That supposed sanctuary was Flinders Island off the northern coast of Tasmania, and between 1830 and 1832, 220 Aboriginal people were brought here.

Others were transported later.

George Augustus Robinson came with them and was given the title Protector of Aborigines, and he was well-paid for his work.

Convicts were sent to build a new settlement for the Aboriginal people at a place called Wybalenna.

The remains of that settlement are still here 200 years later.

In the 1840s, an artist walked up this hill and painted this landscape of the settlement that had been built down there in the valley.

It's almost two centuries since the settlement was built, and the only building to have survived all of those years is the chapel.

This painting shows us what the whole settlement must have looked like, but the most bizarre feature of Wybalenna is that behind the chapel was built a row of British-style terraced houses.

It looks like something from industrial Manchester or Newcastle transplanted here, with all of the houses and all of the people squashed together in the middle of all of this space, in this huge, broad valley 14,000 miles away from Britain, and that terrace was built for the same reason that that chapel was built, because this place, it's been called lots of things.

It's been called a gulag, a prison, even a concentration camp.

I think it's best understood as a type of reformatory.

This was a place that was designed, built, and ran in order to try to transform an ancient people who were hunter-gatherers, a people with their own complicated culture and spirituality, to transform them into sedentary, Christianized, obedient peasants.

♪ A people who had been promised sanctuary from a terrible war were instead subjected to the systematic destruction of their culture, but Flinders Island also destroyed their health.

They began to die of pneumonia and influenza at a terrifying rate.

Just along from the chapel where they were to be converted to Christianity, George Augustus Robinson marked out their cemetery.

In his notebook, he listed the names one by one of those who died and recorded where they were buried.

By 1847, of the people exiled to Flinders Island, just 47 remained alive.

Those last survivors, now no longer deemed a threat to the white settlers, were brought back to the mainland... and here the first photographs of them were taken.

Among the survivors was Truganini.

♪ By 1860, there were just a handful left.

As they died, their bodies were seized by race scientists, who used them as the raw material from which they built the new racial and the new Darwinian sciences of the late 19th century.

♪ Those theories claimed that the Aboriginal people of Tasmania, supposedly an inferior race, had inevitably and naturally died out when confronted by the British, a supposedly superior race.

The search for human remains to prove those theories took the race scientists back to the cemetery on Flinders Island.

♪ These graves are believed to be empty, the bodies of the Aboriginal people exhumed and then sold to museums and universities.

♪ Among the last of the survivors was Truganini.

On her deathbed in 1876, she begged that her body not be handed over to the race scientists.

♪ What happened next still causes pain among Aboriginal people in Australia today.

I'm holding a photograph that was taken in the first half of the 20th century, and what it shows is an exhibit that was on public display in this museum right up until 1947.

Now, I can tell you about this photograph, but what I can't do is show it to you, and that's because over the years, this image has caused so much pain and upset that there are people here in Tasmania who would be really offended if I did, and there is an argument that I shouldn't be looking at this image, but I think-- and I hope that I'm right-- that you need to at least know about this in order to fully appreciate what happened to Truganini and her people.

What this shows is Truganini's skeleton.

It's been wired together and hung from a stand, put in a glass case alongside artifacts from Tasmanian Aboriginal history.

Now, this was a woman who pleaded not to have her body handed over to the race scientists and the skull measurers, but she died in 1876, and the views of an old, Aboriginal woman didn't count for very much, and they certainly were not allowed to get in the way of the advance of those racial sciences.

♪ In the 1970s, the mixed-heritage descendants of the Tasmanian Aboriginal people demanded that Australia acknowledge the crimes committed against Truganini and against her people, and in 1976, her remains were taken out of the Hobart Museum and, after a service, cremated.

♪ Her ashes were scattered on waters off Tasmania.

A woman who had died in 1876 didn't get the funeral she had begged for until 1976.

♪ What was done to the people of Tasmania was regarded as a moral stain on the British Empire and at a moment when the British increasingly saw themselves as a moral light in the world.

Ever since Britain had abolished the slave trade in 1807, ships of the Royal Navy had patrolled the coast of Africa, intercepting slave trading ships of other nations and freeing the African captives on board... ♪ and in 1838, slavery itself was ended after rebellions by the enslaved and a long moral campaign by the abolitionists... ♪ but even before the final end of slavery, the man who had owned more enslaved people than any other set out to invest some of his wealth in a new system of labor.

♪ That slave owner was John Gladstone, the father of the future prime minister William Gladstone... ♪ and the new system of labor he pioneered ensured that his most valuable plantations here in the British colony of Guyana on the Caribbean coast of South America, would remain profitable.

John Gladstone had been warned that the former slaves had absolutely no intention of remaining on the plantations, in the sugarcane fields, working for the sorts of pitiful wages that he was planning to offer them, and so in January 1836, Gladstone wrote a letter to a company called Gillanders and Arbuthnot & Co. in Calcutta, and what he asked them was whether it might be possible for them to recruit on his behalf "a moderate number of Bengalees," of Indians, and he wanted them to be sent from Calcutta to Demerara, to Guyana, in order to allow him to be "independent," he says, "of our Negro population."

Gladstone wrote, "We should require to bind them for a period of not less than 5 years or more than 7 years," and that they would be given "a free passage...to Demerara," and that there, "they would be divided... 20 to 30 placed on [each] plantation."

Gillanders and Arbuthnot recommended a particular specific ethnic group in India "known by the name of Dhangurs," and they described them in these terms.

They "are looked down upon "by the more cunning natives of the plains.

"[T]hey are always spoken of as more akin to the monkey than the man," so it seemed to Gillanders and Arbuthnot and to John Gladstone that the poor people of the hills of India might be the solution to the labor crisis caused by the abolition of slavery in the West Indies.

♪ In 1838, a ship owned by Gladstone transported 160 Indian laborers from Calcutta... ♪ a city in which the company that Gladstone had written to-- Gillanders and Arbuthnot, now under new Indian owners-- still have their offices.

The people on board were some of the poorest in India.

They had been recruited into a system that, for the next 80 years, would transport Indians all across the British Empire.

It became known as the Indian indentured labor system.

Professor David Dabydeen is one of millions of people who are the descendants of indentured laborers.

♪ Gladstone made sure that he had his workforce in place before slavery ended officially in August of that 1838.

These people arrived in May, and the abolitionists would have been horrified, really.

Because they've just won this great, epic, half-a- century-long crusade against the slave trade and then slavery, and now the biggest slave owner in the British Empire is replacing the enslaved.

He's now back.

He's now back.

He's back in business.

He's back.

This is why they give them documents, to make it legalistic so people can't say, "Well, this is slavery."

"No.

You have a contract.

How could you be a slave?"

And this is the sort of document produced by the British that's at the heart of this system of labor.

That is the first encounter that a Indian peasant who was recruited from a little village would have had with paper and with officialdom, and so it would have been a moment of drama.

Immediately, your name would be misspelled.

When the Englishman or the official said, "What is your name?"

and you said, "Dabydeen," he will spell it however he wants to spell it, and that's you forever.

Is your name Hindi, or is it the name that a British-- It's bastardized form of Hindi.

It was just written as it was written, and you just had to accept it.

So some British official... Yeah.

wrote whatever he heard on a document, and 100 and 200 years later, this is your name.

It is our name, yes.

What else did they want?

Your age.

How would you know that?

There was no birth certificate, and so, therefore, the official will just make up your date of birth, so you became completely transformed-- your name, you were given a date of birth.

But between you and this other life is a sea voyage.

That must have been impossible for them to imagine the distances involved.

You've never been on the seas before-- can you imagine-- in the storm, you'd be completely terrified, which is why they clung together and they supported each other, because they had to survive the journey.

Sometimes 15% of the cargo of coolies would die.

We know from oral histories of people whose parents or great-grandparents had been indentured laborers that that idea that it was for 5 years or 7 years, that was quite big in the minds of people who put their thumbs on these documents.

Very few people ever go back to India.

As the plantation owner, I can say anything.

I can say, "I haven't got enough money at the moment.

You just have to wait," right, and then I could say to you, "Why don't you re-indenture?"

My great-great-grandfather, he signed up for another 5 years, and he was-- In Guyana.

In Guyana, the same plantation, and he was given $50, which would be huge.

It's almost like a year's wages, and this document is remarkable because he's only been in Guyana for 20 years, and he buys from an Englishman some land and a plantation, "Dabeedin" spelled differently from whatever other document he had to sign.

So he's been renamed again.

He's being renamed again.

He's paying quite a lot of money--$575.

$575.

The Englishman signs his name with a flourish, and Dabeedin puts his X.

And this is the X of your-- That's the X.

This is your great- great-grandfather?

My great-great- grandfather.

This is a man born in India... Born in India.

now buying land on the Caribbean coast of South America.

Owning land for the first time.

He must have been a remarkably astute man to see his future is in land and he will go and become a landowner.

He must have been an amazingly ambitious young man.

♪ Olusoga: Today in Guyana, the descendants of the indentured laborers still work the sugarcane fields that were originally laid out by the slave owners of the 18th and 19th centuries.

♪ The sugar they cut is still transported through those fields along canals designed by the Dutch, the first colonizers of the region... ♪ [Percussion plays] and the cultures and religions that the indentured laborers carried with them across oceans have been transplanted here on the banks of a South American river, and Guyana was just one of the colonies to which Indians were sent in the 19th and 20th centuries.

♪ The Indian indentured labor system, hardly even remembered today, transformed the demographics of the world.

Man: A very distant relative was hired through indentured servitude contracts to build the Kenyan railway.

He then set up a series of shops along where he knew the stations would be built.

Woman: My great-grandparents came to Trinidad from the state of Uttar Pradesh.

My grandmother came from a place called Azamgarh.

My grandfather came from Ghazipur.

We managed to find this certificate with one of my ancestors.

"An Indian immigrant has completed a full term of service."

His name is Fuji Raudee, and he was 28 when he came, and he served basically 22 years on a plantation.

Olusoga: From the 1830s right up until 1917, somewhere between 1 million and 2 million Indians left their homeland to become indentured laborers, and they took their final steps on Indian soil at the docks of Chennai and Mumbai and from right here, from the banks of the Hooghly River in Calcutta, and after the Atlantic slave trade and the emigration of millions of British and Irish people in the 19th century, this is one of the biggest movements of people in the whole story of the British Empire.

These movements, they were motivated by short-term economic decisions made by men who are now in their graves.

The effect of that, the communities, the cultures brought into existence by those decisions, they are--they are the legacy of the British Empire.

The backstories of millions of people in Africa and the Caribbean, in Fiji, and in Britain are all interwoven with those decisions made decades and decades ago that we've just totally forgotten about.

It's become one of history's missing links, a missing piece of the jigsaw without which it's not possible to make sense of the world as it is in the 21st century, its demographics, its culture, and its politics.

♪ ♪ ♪