NARRATOR Over 2,000 years, they will forge a nation,
dominate the globe
and invent the modern world.
This is the story of how a small group of islands becomes a superpower.
The British.
This is our story.
London, September 2nd, 1 666, after midnight.
The King's bakery in Pudding Lane.
A few sparks and a gust of wind are all it takes.
(WOMAN SCREAMING)
Fires are common in this overcrowded city.
But tonight, a fierce wind spreads the flames at a terrifying speed.
London is recovering after a century of religious conflict and civil war.
Timber houses, cellars full of firewood,
gunpowder from the civil war.
The worst inferno in London until the Blitz.
How it must have been to either be caught within it or
to run out from it, it must have been cataclysmic.
I would think it would've been
sheer terror of not knowing how bad this was gonna get,
and whether you were gonna survive.
-(BABY CRYING) -Help me! Help!
Be careful!
NARRATOR 1t's a disaster that will destroy London.
DAN CRUICKSHANK The speed and enormity of the catastrophe was overwhelming.
The alarm started rippling through the city
that things could change forever.
If this fire gets out of control, the heart of our great city,
the heart of the British Empire, would be devoured.
What on earth will become of us?
NARRATOR As Londoners flee for their lives,
one man heads towards the blaze.
Samuel Pepys has lived in London his entire life.
His diary documents the fear of half a million Londoners.
Here's a man, bearing his soul,
explaining a catastrophe in the most moving way possible.
To read it now still has the power to shock and bring tears to your eyes.
SAMUEL PEPYS 1 walked through the city,
the streets full of nothing but people and carts loaden with goods.
With one's face in the wind,
you were almost burned with a shower of firedrops.
All on fire and flaming at once.
And a horrid noise the flames made.
And the cracking of houses at their ruins.
(COUGHING)
NARRATOR Directly in the fire's path, a crumbling medieval landmark,
Old St Paul's Cathedral.
Nobody believes it can burn.
1 suppose to understand the frame of mind
Londoners felt as the fire took hold,
you gotta think of the attack on the Twin Towers in New York.
You would see streets disappearing, buildings disappearing.
The incredible sense of loss, of terror.
NARRATOR On the third day,
whole streets are blown up to create firebreaks.
Smoke is seen from Oxford, 50 miles away.
PEPYS We saw the fire grow,
in corners and upon steeples,
between churches and houses,
as far as we could see.
1t made me weep to see it.
NARRATOR The fire swallows St Paul's whole.
It's kind of an apocalypse, and we're all in a religious age.
We all are, as it were, being offered a sight of hell.
NARRATOR London is left a wasteland.
Four-fifths of the old city gone.
80,000 homeless.
PEPYS We saw all the town burned,
and a miserable sight of Paul's church, with all the roofs fallen.
Paul's school, also,
Ludgate, and Fleet Street, my father's house.
NARRATOR A city 1,600 years in the making,
lost in four days.
But a new capital rises.
Workers flood into London.
The rebuilding kick-starts an economic boom.
1nspired by 33-year-old architect, Christopher Wren,
the city reinvents itself, in stone this time.
First, a sparkling modern London,
then Newcastle, Edinburgh and Dublin.
At London's heart, one of Britain's greatest buildings,
the new St Paul's Cathedral.
These first stones mark a new age,
with the motto, ''Resurgam'2
''1 shall rise again. ''
Above it, a phoenix arising from the ashes.
1t takes 35 years to build,
and remains the tallest structure in London until 1 962.
For Wren, it's more than a building.
WREN Architecture establishes a nation
and makes a people love their native country.
FLANAGAN That's what buildings are for, they're statements.
They say, ''Look how important we are, look what we can achieve. ''
And it's inspirational to people.
St Paul's... I still go to St Paul's now and marvel at it.
It's a mind-blowing building,
but back then it must have just been phenomenal.
NARRATOR By the time St Paul's is finished,
Britain has the fastest-growing economy in the world,
the largest navy,
new ideas, new freedoms, new money.
But the same forces that propelled Britain's meteoric boom
will drive the nation close to ruin.
Half a century after the Great Fire,
Britain is swept up in a gambling fever.
The first government-run lottery,
cock fighting and bare-knuckle boxing.
A nation out to get rich quick.
John Gay, an ambitious young poet, arrives in London to make his fortune.
(MEN SHOUTING)
1n a new world of social mobility,
even poor boys like him believe they can make it.
For now he lives on handouts from admirers,
but he's desperate to be rich.
JOHN GAY Some boys are rich by birth, while with dry tongue,
1 lick my lips in vain.
John Gay is writing poems which are considered a little bit risque,
he's essentially a rock star of his day.
He comes from quite a humble background,
and yet he's suddenly going to dinner with dukes
and chasing after the ladies of the court.
And, it's a totally different world
and he's determined to milk it for all he can
because this is his chance.
NARRATOR John Gay wants a taste of the new money pouring into Britain,
driven by a meteoric rise in overseas trade.
Textiles and metals are shipped all over the world.
A quarter of all Londoners now earn their living from the docks.
The country is flooded with exotic imports from Britain's new colonies.
Tea, coffee and sugar,
once luxuries, now staples of everyday life.
By the end of the century, we spend 1 0% of our food money on sugar and tea.
LENNOX LEWIS 1 can imagine how it'd feel tasting sugar for the first time.
I think it would put a lot of smiles on a lot of people's faces.
In the world that was just mainly made of mud and turnips,
to get sugar for the first time would've been absolutely mind-blowing.
It would have been the big news in the village.
NARRATOR Global trade is driving a financial revolution.
Scotsman William Paterson founds the Bank of England.
1t issues its first banknotes.
Modern insurance is invented to underwrite dangerous voyages.
And there's a new way to make money, stocks and shares.
After a decade of living beyond his means,
John Gay finally gets his big break.
A book of poems makes him over £ 1 00,000 in today's money.
He'll gamble every penny in the stock market.
Britain has a brand new institution, the coffee house.
1t's ''the''place to meet,
get the news of the day and to make deals.
To a novice investor like John Gay, the coffee house is a bear pit.
Outlandish business opportunities abound.
Company to extract silver from lead.
Company to extract sunshine from vegetables.
To make a perpetual motion wheel, £1 8.
NARRATOR The hottest shares of all are the South Sea Company.
South Sea stock selling out, South Sea.
NARRATOR 1t has a monopoly on trade with South America
and promises over 1 00% returns.
John Gay invests everything he's got.
TIM ROTH A get-rich-quick scheme anyone would take.
It's almost like the Wall Street
crap of now.
It makes perfect sense, it's completely human.
NARRATOR Behind the company is Sir John Blunt,
a man with a cavalier attitude to risk.
For his latest scheme, he takes on more than half the government's debt,
paying it off with South Sea shares.
He seals this deal with bribes.
The Chancellor of the Exchequer is promised shares worth
2.5 million pounds today.
Now, if anything goes wrong,
the government and the economy are on the line.
Joining thousands of investors is Sir 1saac Newton.
He leads a scientific revolution that's sweeping Europe.
Reason and science replace superstition and fear.
He buys £ 1,000 of South Sea stock.
1nvestments pour in,
but there's no trade with South America.
The rising share prices fuelled only by Blunt's spin
and his investor's greed.
JOHN BLUNT The people must not know what we're about.
Let confusion reign.
MOORE The thing that's really disturbing about the South Sea Bubble
is how closely tied in it was to government.
And there was the government actually
basing the sort of well-being of the country
on its ties to a company that didn't actually exist.
NARRATOR Worth £ 1 28 in January,
by June shares are selling for over £ 1,000.
John Gay is wealthy on paper.
All the investors are.
Gay dreams of a country estate in Devon.
The entire country is caught up in South Sea mania.
The city ladies buy South Sea jewels,
hire South Sea maids,
and take new South Sea country houses.
The company is now valued at £300 million,
more than all the gold in Britain.
The first financial bubble in British history.
A few lucky investors take their money and run...
Nice to do business with you.
NARRATOR ...selling at more than 300% profit.
But Blunt realises the bubble has to burst.
He secretly starts offloading his shares at the top of the market.
By late summer, the price falters,
then tumbles.
People panic and rush to sell it.
1t's too late.
By the end of the year, the stock is worthless.
MICHAEL PORTILLO These speculations are a game of musical chairs.
You're fine if you're sitting down when the music stops,
but if you're still standing, then it's going to mean ruin.
NARRATOR Businesses fold.
Banks collapse.
London suicide rate rises 40%.
Even Newton,
the man who unlocks the laws of gravity and light, is caught out.
ISAAC NEWTON 1 can calculate the motion for heavenly bodies,
but not for the madness of man.
NARRATOR John Gay is ruined.
But eventually, he will make his fortune.
He will write The Beggar's Opera,
the first West End musical hit,
a tale of greed and corruption.
''Why did 'Change Alley waste thy precious hours
''Among the fools who gaped for golden showers?
''No wonder they were caught by South Sea schemes
''Who ne'er enjoyed a guinea but in dreams''
NARRATOR The government launches a huge clean-up operation.
The Bank of England, free from the taint of corruption,
takes over the national debt.
The Chancellor is sent to the Tower.
Disgraced company directors are forced to compensate investors,
but John Blunt implicates his colleagues and gets off scot-free.
John Blunt understood that he was defrauding people,
so in that sense he is a bit like a Bernie Madoff,
but it was all a new world, no one knew anything about anything, it was...
Everybody was guessing. Even the people who were
setting the schemes up were guessing how it would all work.
NARRATOR Trade once again revives Britain's economy.
Within a year, business is thriving.
1t's the birth of boom-or-bust capitalism.
But beneath this glittering new world is a terrible industry.
An English merchant ship sails west across the Atlantic,
carrying some of Britain's most valuable cargo,
African slaves.
During the 1 8th century,
Britain becomes the world's largest slave trader,
transporting over 2.5 million abducted Africans
to work on our sugar, tobacco and cotton plantations.
It's shameful, it's disgusting.
It's one of those things that
we can't hide from, we'd much rather it went away.
NARRATOR This young boy will sell for about £ 1 5.
The name his parents gave him will be forgotten.
The village where he was born, a distant memory.
His owners will give him a new name,
Somerset.
He'll be a slave for the next 20 years.
Britain's wealth was built off the blood of those stolen Africans.
And, I think about it often, actually.
It's something that's very much part of me.
NARRATOR Goods from all over Britain
are traded for humans on the West African coast,
guns from Birmingham, textiles from Manchester,
even Samuel Whitbread beer.
The fact is that money talks.
Slavery was big business.
It brought money in and wealth into the country.
Why would anyone want it to end?
NARRATOR The profits build banks, schools, entire cities.
Slavery transforms Liverpool from a sleepy port of 5,000
to a prosperous city of 78,000.
But one day, Somerset will rock this industry to its core.
Another business that traffics human flesh is also flourishing in Britain,
the sex trade.
Britain's a commercial powerhouse,
and yet, beneath it all is a kind of engine
that is dark and grimy and dirty.
And for the 1 8th century,
those engines were the sex trade and slavery.
NARRATOR Britain's cities have always traded in sex.
Now it's big business.
1n London alone,
the sex industry is worth an estimated £20 million a year,
more than £2 billion today,
almost as much as London's entire overseas trade.
Catalogues are published to rate and review prostitutes.
Contemporary reports show one in five women in London is a sex worker,
vulnerable to violence and disease.
But for women with access to high society,
there are ways to cash in on this boom.
Hey, watch yourself or you'll get out of here!
NARRATOR Moll King,
one of the most successful businesswomen in London.
Daughter of a cobbler, she's been the mistress of aristocrats.
How you doing? I think you've had enough.
NARRATOR Now, Moll runs London's most popular salon,
a late-night coffee house in the heart of the sex industry,
Covent Garden.
Drink up, squire, it's not a library, eh?
NARRATOR 1t isn't a brothel,
but it brings together a raucous mix of prostitutes, market traders,
actors, courtiers and businessmen.
When you look at the courtesans around that time,
their ingenuity and their bravery just always thrills and astonishes me,
because if you had a personality and you were chatty and you were garrulous,
you could either become a school mistress, or a governess,
or you can become a salon keeper.
And these women found a way to take power for themselves.
NARRATOR But London's promiscuity's provoking a violent backlash.
Less than a hundred years ago, under Oliver Cromwell,
even adultery was punishable by death.
Now, Puritan vigilante societies are determined to clean up London's vice.
John Gonson, city magistrate
and moral crusader.
Tonight he's on a mission to arrest
the woman he believes is corrupting London.
But Moll has friends on the street.
For running what's called ''a disorderly house'2
Moll faces hard labour and flogging.
Gonson has been targeting her regularly.
Okay, come on back. Come on.
Hurry up! Come on, come on, get up and get out.
Get out!
Get out, get out.
1n Moll's lifetime, men like Gonson will prosecute 20,000 women.
But Moll manages to stay in business for over a decade.
Like thousands of newly rich Londoners, she invests her earnings wisely
in bricks and mortar.
She builds three houses in Hampstead,
known as Moll King's Row.
They still stand today.
They are part of a building boom
that creates the British cities we know today,
including a distinctive British style of home, the terrace,
tall houses built on small plots to maximise space and profit.
Over the next century,
cities sprawl outwards turning green fields into streets and squares.
The urban population trebles.
New opportunities open up all over the British 1sles.
Commerce is booming in England's oldest colony, 1reland.
1rish grain, beef and pork, feeding British towns.
The linen trade clothing the colonies.
Dublin is the second largest city of the Empire.
Most of 1reland's fertile land is owned by a tiny Protestant minority.
But for 1rish Catholics, there are severe restrictions.
The penal laws would not allow any Irishman to own property or land.
So it was an extraordinary repressive regime.
But it's a surprise, you see, in view of that,
that the Irish have not resented the English far more.
NARRATOR There are also laws to stop Catholics from holding public office,
joining the army and even owning a fine horse or a gun.
County Mayo, one of the poorest parts of the country.
Oppressive British rule has turned outlaws and highwaymen
like Captain Gallagher into 1rish folk heroes.
Today's raid targets the home of a wealthy landowner.
(WOMAN YELPS)
(GLASS SHATTERING)
Greyson, go take a look around.
You have a very pretty wife.
NARRATOR During the raid, Gallagher discovers
eviction notices for several tenants.
His actions become the stuff of legend.
Eat it. Eat it.
I think what made people identify so strongly with Gallagher
was that he was expressing the desires that none of them
were able to put into practice
or would ever possibly either dare to
or have the opportunity to.
He was like the rogue
that represented all their hopes and all their resentment.
NARRATOR By the time he's caught and hanged,
the British government realises that the time for reform has come.
Britain is in the middle of a century of war with France.
The army desperately needs every man it can find.
So, the ban on 1rish Catholics is lifted and thousands quickly sign up.
I think it's because of the extraordinary oppression and repression
that Ireland retained its individuality,
and continued to struggle and eventually won its freedom.
NARRATOR Back on the streets of London,
a young man is also fighting for his freedom.
Twenty years ago, Somerset was sold into slavery.
Now, living in London and baptised as James,
he's running away from his owner.
1f captured, Somerset faces a life of abuse and hard labour.
What happens to him will help change the course of history.
February, 1 772,
at Westminster Hall, Somerset's case is gripping the British public.
He is forcing the court to choose between two British aspirations,
human liberty and making money.
A small group of prosperous idealists opposes the slave trade.
They've taken Somerset's cause to the highest court in the land,
putting slavery itself on trial.
Somerset's fate is in this man's hands.
Lord Mansfield, Britain's leading judge of commercial law.
Slavery is legal in British colonies and on British ships.
But no one has ever definitively stated that slavery is legal on British soil.
Defending Somerset, a young advocate, Francis Hargrave,
offering his services for free.
But this is his first case.
He's never even spoken in court before.
The questions arising on this case
do not merely concern
the unfortunate person who is the object of it.
NARRATOR There are around 1 5,000 black people in Britain,
a mixture of slaves, ex-slaves, seamen, servants and musicians.
HARGRAVE If Charles Stewart's right is recognised...
NARRATOR Even those who are free face a constant risk
of being kidnapped and sold into slavery.
The future of every black Briton is at stake.
...domestic slavery, with its horrid train of evils
continues to torment and dishonour the human species.
NARRATOR Plantation owners financed the defence of slavery.
There are no less than 1 4,000 slaves now in England.
NARRATOR 40% of the jobs in Bristol and Liverpool
depend upon the slave trade.
And whose loss will amount to a sum no less than £700,000.
NARRATOR The legal wrangling stretches out over six months.
England has too pure an air for a slave to breathe in.
The setting of 1 4,000 men, at once, loose,
is very disagreeable in the effects it threatens.
GERZINA Mansfield was in very difficult position.
He had sympathy for the slave owners.
Wealth was enormously influential.
CHILD Somerset Case!
NARRATOR The case catches the imagination of the Empire.
Newspapers in Britain and America are filled with argument and opinion.
The Twittersphere would have blown up
with the news of the Somerset Case,
'cause it affected everybody.
It affected the city of London, it affected those in the Caribbean,
it affected finance.
Case of James Somerset...
NARRATOR On the 23rd of June, 1 772,
Lord Mansfield delivers his verdict.
The state of slavery
is so odious
that nothing can be suffered to support it.
Whatever inconveniences, therefore, may follow from this decision,
I cannot say that this case is allowed or approved
by the law of England.
And therefore,
the black
must be discharged.
I think about the Stephen Lawrence case,
and I can imagine what it must have been like
to take on a nation
and to win, personally
and politically.
NARRATOR Mansfield's judgement is carefully worded.
He rules that no slave can be forcibly deported
from England to the plantations.
Even though the Somerset Case didn't actually end slavery in Britain,
it made people believe that it had done so.
So, just that perception of slavery ended was worth the decision.
NARRATOR 1t's the beginning of the end of slavery.
The slave trade is finally banned in 1 807.
And by 1 838, nearly all slaves in the British Empire are free.
This Empire now stretches over a million square miles.
Britain has the greatest merchant fleet on earth
and controls valuable trade routes all over the world.
But Britain's supremacy of the seas is under threat.
A new power is sweeping Europe.
France prepares to invade Britain, led by their emperor, Napoleon Bonaparte.
NAPOLEON BONAPARTE With God's help, 1 will put an end to the future
and the very existence of England.
NARRATOR October the 2 1 st, 1 805, Cape Trafalgar, off the coast of Spain.
A British warship sails into the mother of all sea battles.
France and Spain have joined forces to smash Britain's control of the seas.
Britain's fleet is outnumbered,
but it has a deadly weapon.
The Victory,
a floating fortress with walls of oak two feet thick,
1 04 cannon, manned by over 800 well-drilled, battle-hardened seamen,
a symbol of Britain's maritime might.
1n command,
Admiral Horatio Nelson, 4 7, and a brilliant but maverick tactician.
He's lived and breathed the Royal Navy from the age of 1 2.
He's already lost an arm and the sight in one eye
fighting the French and Spanish.
HORATIO NELSON You must hate a Frenchman as you do the devil.
1t is annihilation that the country wants
and not merely a splendid victory.
NARRATOR Nelson has a plan.
1t is daring, maybe suicidal.
Tomorrow didn't matter, this was all there was.
There wasn't gonna be another battle, this was the only battle for Nelson.
And he was gonna do whatever it took, and he was able to think of something
that the French would never have expected him to do.
NARRATOR 1nstead of fighting a traditional side-by-side battle,
his ships sailed directly into the enemy fleet.
By breaking up the enemy line,
Nelson's men will be at their most destructive.
But until then, his ships are sitting ducks
unable to return fire.
Victory leads the attack.
All enemy cannon trained on her.
Sailors called the gun deck the ''slaughter house''.
1t will soon be strewn with body parts.
Sand is laid to soak up the blood.
Powder monkeys carry gunpowder to the cannons.
1t's one of the most dangerous jobs,
usually given to young boys and sometimes even women.
Nelson must get among the enemy ships quickly,
but the wind drops.
Britain's ships are left drifting.
Nelson rallies his troops.
NELSON England expects every man will do his duty.
At Trafalgar we see this extraordinary fighting spirit
of the ordinary British servicemen.
It takes incredible nerve but also teamwork,
because they have to trust that their fellows behind them
are gonna come up and eventually support them.
NARRATOR French guns open fire.
Enemy cannonballs fall short,
but it's just a matter of time.
I think being below decks in the Battle of Trafalgar
must have been an absolute nightmare.
You're there waiting to be blown up.
NARRATOR Now, 200 French guns are blasting the Victory.
The ship becomes a deathtrap.
Below deck, more men are killed by flying shards of wood than enemy fire.
Victory's ship's wheel is blown away,
but Nelson pushes on.
I always feel, and I think it's always true,
that when we have that kind of fire in our belly,
that I think we can have, we can give ourselves such a big lift.
When our backs are against the wall and we need to really dig in,
I think we have that great ability to do so.
NARRATOR After 40 minutes under fire,
Victory breaks through French lines.
Nelson unleashes Britain's superior firepower.
The nearest French ship loses over 1 00 men in minutes.
Nelson's plan was working.
Half an hour into the battle,
a French musket ball finds its target.
I doubt there's much you can do for me.
NARRATOR The musket ball has torn through an artery,
punctured a lung, and broken Nelson's spine.
He's drowning in his own blood.
(COUGHING)
The battle rages for nearly five hours.
Victory's gunners can reload at twice the speed of the French
and are now firing point-blank.
I'm going to give you something for the pain.
NARRATOR Napoleon's fleet is decimated.
Nelson has triumphed.
1t's the news he's been hanging on for.
Thank God I've done my duty.
1n the end, the British Navy destroys 1 8 ships,
over half the enemy's fleet.
Nelson loses none.
Forty years later, London erects Nelson's Column,
a memorial from a grateful nation.
The great lions of Trafalgar Square,
cast from metal from captured enemy cannon.
If Nelson hadn't won Trafalgar,
the British Empire would not have had the reach it had across the globe.
All the places that we colonised would not have been speaking English.
The modern world would be a completely different place
had it not been for that one victory.
NARRATOR The Royal Navy commands the ocean for the next 1 00 years.
Britain is now a superpower.
Control of world trade generates huge profits
that are about to finance the world's first industrial revolution
and utterly transform British life.