SPEAKER_04: Stick to the plan. Trust no one. From the director of Seven, Fight Club, and Gone Girl. Anticipate. Don't improvise. Michael Fassbender. Forbid empathy. Empathy is weakness. Weakness is vulnerability. This is what it takes if you want to succeed.
SPEAKER_03: The Killer. Rated R. Under 17. Not admitted without parent. Now playing only on Netflix.
SPEAKER_02: Amika is a different type of insurance company. We provide you with something more than auto, home, or life insurance. It's empathy. Because at Amika, your coverage always comes with compassion. It's one of the reasons why 98% of our customers stay with us every year. Amika. Empathy is our best policy.
SPEAKER_01: This is 99% Invisible. I'm Roman Mars. Throughout its reign, the British Empire stole a lot of stuff. Which means a show like Stuff the British Stole has an almost unlimited number of stories they can tell. But a lot of the artifacts on display behind glass have the same story. People with guns came on ships and took things that didn't belong to them. And you can only tell that story so many times. Mark Fennell and his team at the ABC-CBC podcast Stuff the British Stole, now in its third season, are geniuses at taking the amazing premise of their show and evolving it to tell more riveting stories of empire building and thievery that continue to surprise and infuriate and delight. Forwarding the conversation they started in 2020 in cool new ways. The episode we're going to play for you is about a tree of all things. And it just knocked my socks off. So we're going to play that one for you. And then play a conversation I had last week with writer, presenter and creator Mark Fennell about the series and its ongoing mission. Here's Stuff the British Stole.
SPEAKER_07: What does it taste like? It's pretty gross. Like it's not, it doesn't have a bad taste. It's just really, really bitter. Like you can try some if you want.
SPEAKER_06: 9am on a Friday feels like a weird time to be at a bar. Feels like I've made bad life choices. Don't get me wrong though, it is a lovely bar.
SPEAKER_07: So it's a cocktail bar. Very old world sort of feel. And Charlie, who you're listening to here, he's a lovely bartender.
SPEAKER_06: My name is Charles Casbin and I am a bartender.
SPEAKER_06: You look like you really had to think about it for a second. What am I? Yeah, I'm a bartender. I work at Moyer's Juniper Lounge.
SPEAKER_07: We've been open six years and we're an old world cocktail bar with a focus on gin classics.
SPEAKER_06: What isn't as lovely is the fistful of wood in my hand. It looks like shredded up cinnamon bar. Like it's sort of dry and brown with a bit of a reddy tinge. I'm going to give it a go. Alright, here we go. Do you know what it tastes like? Tastes like bark.
SPEAKER_07: Is the beer that's coming through here?
SPEAKER_05: Yeah, the beer is going to be awful.
SPEAKER_07: Then once you sort of finish it'll just...
SPEAKER_06: It's really bad. Oh yeah, good. It's a beer. The gin won't help. This bark has changed the course of history. There's actually worse than I was expecting.
SPEAKER_06: I should probably mention that the mysterious reddish wood that I just shoved down my gullet, you're not meant to eat it that way. Instead, you're meant to turn it into a liquid.
SPEAKER_07: You actually got me at a time. I'm bottling our tonic syrup.
SPEAKER_06: When you do, it becomes something that you may have heard of.
SPEAKER_07: Tonic always kind of seems to people to be a lot more complicated because they don't intuitively understand what it is, like what the flavours are. Ooh, tonic. It sounds fancy. Yeah, and it's so specific. It's like gin and tonic. It sounds like it's supposed to be a medicine, but I'm getting drunk with it. Like all my favourite medicine. It doesn't really add up these days to a lot of people. But the truth is, it's basically sugar syrup with inconabark, which has various different pronunciations depending on which branch of Latin language you might subscribe to. All of them. I subscribe to all of them.
SPEAKER_06: Yeah, the pronunciation is a bit of a thing. So it can be conconabark, conchona bark, singchona bark.
SPEAKER_07: The C-H in the C, depending on which country you're in and which vowel it follows, all sort of change. I tend to call it conconabark. And that's what we shall go with for now. Cool. A bark of a tree native to Peru. Peru?
SPEAKER_05: It's not found anywhere else on Earth. It's something that I think most Peruvians have never seen and will never see.
SPEAKER_11: So, how does this bark from Peru end up in your gin and tonic?
SPEAKER_06: This is an incredible story of botanical adventure, of exploration.
SPEAKER_05: Well, it happens with a dash of malaria...
SPEAKER_06: White people will die.
SPEAKER_05: They hoped to present it as a humanitarian effort. A squeak of competing empires...
SPEAKER_06: That's what I think the theft is.
SPEAKER_09: The Dutch and the English discovered that they could just steal it.
SPEAKER_07: A daring heist...
SPEAKER_06: The British justified these expeditions in the name of science...
SPEAKER_09: Forced their soldiers to drink it and continue their conquering ways.
SPEAKER_06: And just a hint of something much worse... As many people saw it, an act of colonial piracy.
SPEAKER_06: My name is Mark Fennell and this is Stuff the British Stole.
SPEAKER_10: Cinchona is a tree that only a few Peruvians, including myself, know how it looks like or where it grows. It is an unknown tree. To find it in its natural ecosystem, we have to travel long distance.
SPEAKER_06: If you look at the Peruvian flag, it has this hidden detail that, at least according to these two Peruvians, well, according to them, most other Peruvians don't know this surreptitious gem of history is on their flag. And, like Malú and I, we discovered things
SPEAKER_11: about this national emblem that we hadn't even thought about. They hadn't until both of these two started working together
SPEAKER_06: on a collaboration called the Fever Tree Project.
SPEAKER_11: Hi, my name is Irene Arce. I'm a researcher. My name is Malúca Bellos. I am a Peruvian visual artist.
SPEAKER_10: You see, on that flag, sandwiched between thick red and white bands,
SPEAKER_06: is a shield. And on the top right-hand corner of that shield appears to be a generic tree logo. You see, it's not a generic tree. It's a very special, very hard-to-find tree. It grows in a specific area, cloud forest,
SPEAKER_10: in an area between the Andes and the Amazon.
SPEAKER_06: Yes, between the Amazon and the Andes Mountains, high above sea level, among the clouds. That is where that infamous Cinchona tree, with its delicious bark and wild history, this is where it grows. It's very difficult to, like, get to see the Cinchona tree.
SPEAKER_11: You need to travel, like, extensively for many hours. It's, like, high mountains, like, very steep, you know, like, through dirt roads.
SPEAKER_06: This area is largely cut off from the rest of Peruvian life. The indigenous people here, they speak their own dialect, they have their own ways of doing things, and yet the tree from here is somehow considered nationally important enough to go on the flag. What is strange about this tree is, like, we see it, like, at school,
SPEAKER_11: you know, the textbooks and so forth, but, like, it's almost mythological. It's something that I think most Peruvians have. I think most Peruvians have never seen and will never see. It's an imagined tree. And we didn't know about the history of this tree.
SPEAKER_06: And that history stretches through the centuries and right around the globe. But according to these two, and many, many other Peruvians, this is the story of crime.
SPEAKER_11: Yeah, both of us were considered theft because they were taking illegally... Well, no, not illegally, unethically, yeah? They took it. It was a theft. British got away with many things they couldn't have done today. So how exactly do you steal a plant?
SPEAKER_06: And why would you steal a plant? I'll tell you this for nothing. It actually has nothing to do with genontonics. This is about a brutal disease and soldiers at war and a stunning garden almost 10,000 miles away.
SPEAKER_09: When you're bitten by an Anopheles mosquito, you will start to shiver, you'll have high temperatures, you'll have hallucinations. These parasites will live in your body. You will be left with sometimes a permanent infection for years after you first get bitten. I'm Kavitha Phillip, and I am at UBC, the University of British Columbia in Vancouver. For generations of European colonists and soldiers,
SPEAKER_06: as they ventured out around the world into Asia and India and beyond, one of the biggest fears was a disease, malaria. You could not travel in the tropical regions
SPEAKER_09: if you were the British military, if you were anybody, really, without succumbing to malaria. When military folks, mostly, you know, working-class British people who were conscripted into the military or told to work for empire, they came up against this almost invisible enemy.
SPEAKER_06: And Kavitha has seen the impacts of malaria up close. You said your dad had had it five times. What was that like to witness him going through that?
SPEAKER_09: It's a strange disease because people can't really talk much. They're sort of... They're shivering, they're under blankets, but it would severely compromise your ability to function, and certainly for the British Empire, a non-functioning military was out of the question. And that was a very real threat facing the global British Empire,
SPEAKER_06: which, remember, at its peak, dominated a quarter of the world's population and land. The mosquito almost brings the British Empire to its knees.
SPEAKER_09: The British could not travel to the tropics without dying in the millions. And it's a particularly big problem for them in India.
SPEAKER_06: When Queen Victoria becomes Empress of India, as they say,
SPEAKER_09: they need to put down the revolt in India, the 1857 First War of Independence that nationalists call it.
SPEAKER_06: It had a few different names, but it was a huge, violent uprising in India, and for the British, it was a key turning point. The revolt showed the British that they needed more troops.
SPEAKER_09: If they were going to send more troops to the tropics, they needed something, some prophylactic, some preventative to stop the troops from dying of malaria. Malaria was terrifying to them. I mean, you would sort of get hallucinations, the fever could return several times, and so malaria wasn't just a one-off thing. Troops could literally spend their lives suffering from it. So, Queenine was absolutely key to the British in order to have troops on the ground, not just in India, but in Africa, in different parts of the tropics.
SPEAKER_06: Yes, Queenine. Queenine is a medicine that is derived from a certain bark that I tried earlier with the bartender Charlie. Which was traditionally found to have properties
SPEAKER_07: that would help treat malaria, and the native Peruvians were using this for centuries. And accordingly, it was only really available
SPEAKER_06: in some hard-to-reach corners of a handful of South American countries. So, Peru, Bolivia and Ecuador know this bark,
SPEAKER_09: which is the bark of the chinchona tree, is incredibly valuable. And so they want to protect their comparative advantage in Queenine, in the bark, in the alkaloid that comes from the tree, and at the same time, they know by the 1830s, 40s and 50s that the British and Dutch really want this. Yes, the Dutch and the British, these global empires,
SPEAKER_06: determined to protect their soldiers from this invisible enemy of malaria, they want that bark. And Peru, Bolivia and Ecuador, they can see those empires are coming for them.
SPEAKER_09: For the British Empire, they have an ace in the hole, and that is Kew Gardens.
SPEAKER_06: Today, Kew Gardens, nestled along the Thames in the east of London. It is one of the UK's most loved tourist attractions. So, Kew looks like a gorgeous garden, and it is.
SPEAKER_09: It's cultivated. The gardeners are kind of showing off what they can do. There are perfectly manicured lawns everywhere you look
SPEAKER_06: and vibrant pops of colour with plants from the four corners of the globe. But you see, none of that happened by accident. You walk around Kew Gardens today,
SPEAKER_09: you'll see several glass and metal sort of pavilions, and they're sort of like massive greenhouses, and they represent continents. So, for example, the palm house represents tropical plants. You know, you'll also see a temperate house. But in each of these sort of pavilions, the palm house, the temperate house, we see plants that were native to or thrive in certain continents, if you will, that the British saw as strategic to their future. And this was going to propel the British Empire into heights of scientific control that we're still studying today.
SPEAKER_06: And the British government weaponised Kew Gardens in this fight. So, Kew Gardens helped to collect plants from the far reaches
SPEAKER_09: not only of the British Empire, but of other zones, climates and nations. So, Bolivia, Peru and Ecuador were recently independent. They won their independence from the Spanish in the 1820s. However, the British wanted quinine, but seeds are the key to imperial botany.
SPEAKER_06: And to get those seeds is a wild story of a race between spies and pirates.
SPEAKER_05: My name is Mark Honigsbaum. I'm a medical historian and I'm a lecturer at City University of London. So, how is it that you came to writing about quinine, quinine,
SPEAKER_06: there is a debate over how to pronounce it, I've realised as I've been making this, in the first place? Where did that all kind of start for you? Well, it's actually quite an extraordinary story.
SPEAKER_05: So, for the first 20, 25 years of my career, I was a journalist. I found myself in Zurich. I was doing investigation on a robbery. And after I'd done an interview with the Zurich police and various shady lawyer types, I went to look for a restaurant where I could eat and write up my notes.
SPEAKER_06: So, Mark goes and finds himself a pizza place.
SPEAKER_05: Within about five minutes of sitting down, it got quite busy and they said, excuse me, they said, do you mind if you, would you be happy to share this table? So, I said, fine, why not? And the person who sat down, didn't know him from Adam, so just to make conversation, I said, hi, what do you do? And he said, well, I'm a Swiss botanist. And I said, well, that's interesting. And I thought, what question can I ask him? So, I said, what is the most interesting plant in the history of botany? And that's when he launched into the, what I now know to be the extraordinary story of the Cinchona plant. By the 1860s, Britain has an expanding empire in India, the French are in North Africa, and, you know, the Dutch are in South East Asia, Indonesia, Java, and they all realise that they need to obtain supplies of quinine. It was the first specific drug for any disease. It's hard to quantify, but the estimates of the impact of quinine
SPEAKER_06: are horrific. 2 million people annually were dying of malaria in India. 25 million were being sickened annually.
SPEAKER_05: With multiple superpowers desperate for quinine, the resources growing already naturally in South America
SPEAKER_06: were under enormous amounts of pressure. The forest where the trees grew were rapidly being cut down and stripped of trees,
SPEAKER_05: and the stands were dying, they weren't being replenished. This caused legitimate concern that the world might run out, and, therefore, efforts were made to send botanical collectors to South America with the aim of raising plantations in the colonial possessions of European countries. So, in Britain, the plan was to plant in what's now known as Sri Lanka, the Dutch plan was Java, and the Dutch plan was to plant in South America. So, what happened was there was a race, essentially. Most of these explorations ran into difficulties quite quickly because there were civil wars raging throughout, so borders were closed or there were militias fighting each other. So it's very difficult to even cross the border, let alone venture deep into these forests. The republics are aware that there are Europeans trying to steal their produce. Following the story is literally like a story about a man
SPEAKER_09: who is literally like following a spy story.
SPEAKER_07: The Peruvian government passed a law making it illegal for anyone to take seedlings or seeds out of the country.
SPEAKER_09: They are evading the Bolivian, Peruvian, Ecuadorian governments. They're going deep into the mountains with indigenous guides.
SPEAKER_05: So the Dutch are over the blocks, the French are people, but it's really the British, of course, who do it best.
SPEAKER_06: Yes, the British had a very enthusiastic volunteer to lead this mission. Called Sir Clemence Markham.
SPEAKER_05: Sir Clemence Markham is best known as the father of polar exploration because he sponsored the expedition to the Antarctic. But he was also a historian of South America, so he knew South America very well, at least on paper, and he visited a few times. And that was his pitch for why he should be in charge.
SPEAKER_06: I, because, you know, I've travelled in South America
SPEAKER_05: and I know a lot about the Inca and the history of this area, even though I'm not a botanist and I have no knowledge at all of botany, basically, Clemence Markham was desperate to get from out behind a desk in Westminster where he was probably bored out of his head. And he wanted the glory, you know, as a member of the real, he became president of the Royal Geographical Society, you know. Looks good in a fedora.
SPEAKER_06: Yeah, you know, he looks good posing on a precipice,
SPEAKER_05: looking out across the Amazon.
SPEAKER_09: And he's a master of rhetoric. He talks about how all of this exploring, it's not for our benefit. We plant collectors, we do it not even just for our country or for love of empire, but we do it for the people. So he decided to lead an expedition in person to Peru.
SPEAKER_06: So, the British have got their team for who's going to go in to South America and collect these seeds. And, of course, at the same time, we know the French and the Dutch are hot on their heels. But here's a twist.
SPEAKER_05: The most important person of all, though, in this story, as it turned out, was someone who was not an employee of the British government, wasn't even on their radar. He was a British-born trader. His name was Charles Ledger. He had gone to South America to seek his fortune. So he had his eye on getting Cincona bark and seeds and setting himself up as a trader in Bolivia. So, the British alone have multiple different expeditions going,
SPEAKER_06: some more official than others. In Bolivia, in Peru, in Ecuador,
SPEAKER_05: and also there's another expedition to Colombia. Markham, he goes into the Peruvian Amazon. He comes out with seeds of a particular variety. The Peruvians, once the authorities heard about it, they sent people to sort of put arsenic in the earth where the plants were... ..or they drilled holes in these portable greenhouses so that air would get in and they'd get contaminated with fungus and other stuff in an attempt to sabotage the whole expedition. So he negotiated all that. He wants to send it directly to India because that's where it's going to end up and that's where the environmental conditions are perfect for raising this tree. Then they send it back to London, to Kew Gardens, first of all. And then they send it from England to India via Egypt and the Suez Canal. Unfortunately, in crossing the Suez Canal, in the heat of summer, all the plants get fried. No viable...no viable plants reach India. Which, for Markham, sucks.
SPEAKER_06: But at least one of the other official expeditions also succeeded. But when it came to planting those trees, they realised they had a certain variety that did have quinine in it. But not in very high amounts.
SPEAKER_05: Some bark is very high in the alkaloid you need to produce quinine
SPEAKER_09: and some bark is very low.
SPEAKER_05: The levels of quinine were so low that it wasn't really viable commercially.
SPEAKER_06: But then you get our mate Ledger.
SPEAKER_05: We have to return now to Charles Ledger. So Charles Ledger... He's a lot more common. He was born in the East End.
SPEAKER_06: Doesn't have the high contact with the British government that Markham does.
SPEAKER_05: He writes to people in London and asks them, you know, I've heard that the British are after this, can you tell them that I'm here? I mean, the advantage Ledger had was that he'd spent many years in Bolivia, right? As a tradesman. He'd seen all the different varieties of the cinchona tree. More importantly, he had befriended a horticulturalist called Manuel Incra Mamani. Mamani was indigenous to the area.
SPEAKER_06: All his life he'd spent going into the forest.
SPEAKER_05: Mamani knew where the trees grew. Ledger says, can you get me these seeds? Offers him some money. The money isn't nearly enough to recompense him for the danger or cost. Nevertheless, Mamani seems to share in the belief of Markham and other people that this is important for the world and that there's a real risk that this tree might be lost. He seems to share in that enthusiasm for that it's important to get this tree out of South America and make it available to everyone. So he takes great risks himself. He travels to the region. Mamani eventually finds the elusive, legendary red bark tree of Bolivia. But it's in a really inaccessible part of Bolivian Amazon. He first arrives there in 1862. But it's the wrong time of year, it's the winter, so he has to wait another season. And then he has to wait a second season. He has to wait three years until 1865 until the trees flower and produce seeds and he can take cuttings. He then walks 1,600 kilometres back from the Amazon across the Andes to where Ledger is waiting for him. He does that on foot. And then the irony of ironies is that Ledger tries to find a channel to let the British know that he's got what they've been looking for. You know, they've been sending collectors all over the Andes. He's now got the most valuable seeds. But nobody knows his name in England.
SPEAKER_09: And Ledger gives them to his brother. His brother in London is shopping these seeds around. The seeds and the saplings that come from the indigenous people of the Andes.
SPEAKER_05: And he sends his brother to Kew Gardens with a packet of the seeds and he gets turned away. They say, we've already got seeds, we don't need your seeds.
SPEAKER_09: We've got our own explorers and so we're not buying any seeds that are knocking around the London markets. The English rejected it or something. Anyway, the English passed up some sweet deal.
SPEAKER_05: And long story short, Ledger ends up having to sell those seeds cheaply to the Dutch, Britain's rivals. And the Dutch, the Dutch then plant those seeds in Java. And they end up producing the most commercially lucrative strain of cinchona, which by World War One is supplying all the world's needs for quitting.
SPEAKER_06: For Malu and Irena, who you met earlier, the Peruvians, yeah, there's not a lot of sympathy to the British here.
SPEAKER_11: At the end, like, the Dutch had the monopoly of the cinchona trade. They controlled 90% of all, like, production and exports and the British were, like, a minority. The British got away with many things they couldn't have done today.
SPEAKER_06: The Dutch would eventually name their inherited species cinchona legeriana after Charles Ledger. But Mamani, his faithful guide who did so much, would get no such recognition. He wouldn't get a plant named after him like Ledger, nor would he be knighted like Markham later was for his contributions to the empire. Instead, Mamani was severely beaten by Bolivian police and died of his injuries years later during another seed-collecting trip orchestrated by Ledger. And it's stories like this that so often get lost in the long view of history.
SPEAKER_05: It's definitely a theft. There's no doubt it was theft and the tree was lucrative. But it is also true that this was a humanitarian endeavor. You could argue that it was self-serving, but I do believe that many of the plant collectors were motivated by their concern. There was a very real risk. The most valuable strains of the tree could be harvested to extinction and that therefore humankind, and I stress humankind, would lose, you know, would be, uh, bereft, would be denied this botanical substance. To, you know, this, this stopped suffering and it stopped death. But of course it was done in such a way that no benefits accrued to those whose property was being stolen.
SPEAKER_06: The irony is that initial fear that the tree might be harvested to extinction, thanks to what we understand from modern genetics, turns out that fear was well-founded.
SPEAKER_08: So the first time I saw a cinchona tree in the wild, it was in a trip. We had to climb a very steep mountain and when I was reaching the peak of the mountain ridge, I heard my colleague and he was shouting, hey, Natalie, this is your cinchona, come, come and see it. Wow, and then next thing I know, I was just completely mesmerized and I was contemplating this tree for quite some time, which might be five minutes or one hour. I was very overwhelmed. So, hi, I'm Natalie Ayasikanales. I am original from the Peruvian Amazon. I am a geneticist. And part of Natalie Ayasikanales's research is the theory that potentially,
SPEAKER_06: thanks to all of the overharvesting, the very DNA of the existing cinchona trees has changed. 200 years ago, the super high-content trees were overharvested.
SPEAKER_08: It could mean that the trees started producing less and less quinine. They will survive in the wild more than the ones that don't because the ones that have hired will get overharvested and it's quite possible that alkaloid levels of the current trees are lower than we could find 200 years ago in natural forests. It doesn't make me feel too good about it. It makes me a bit angry, maybe. I think it's important to remind ourselves what this tree meant 200 years ago, what it's meaning now, and the rich history it has.
SPEAKER_06: I suppose for most people, the meaning of it now is, well, it's going back to that drink. It's gin and tonic.
SPEAKER_07: The Peruvians tried to guard it. The English tried to steal it. The Dutch finally did. And the English ended up basically making a syrup with it mixed with the rations for their soldiers. So the soldiers used to all get a daily ration of gin and that kept them happy and docile. And obviously if you mutiny, the gin runs out, so you don't. And so it became commonplace for the English in subcontinental Asia to have gin with this tonic syrup, which just became gin and tonic. And so the word tonic now is mostly associated with the tonic beverage, but really tonic just referred to the fact that it was some sort of medicinal treatment.
SPEAKER_06: When you see somebody pour a gin and tonic, when you walk past a bottle of tonic in a grocery store, what goes through your mind?
SPEAKER_09: Great question. Yeah, tonic to me is a result of the global smuggling empire. While many Indians will sort of drink it as an almost nationalist drink, to me represents an imperial crossroads. If not for Quinine, we might have had a different kind of tropical world.
SPEAKER_06: Stuff the British Stole is produced by Eunice Kim, Leah Simone Bowen and Zoe Ferguson. It was written, edited and created by me, Mark Fennell. The sound design and engineering is by Martin Peralta. The executive producers are Cecil Fernandez and Chris Oke for CBC Podcasts and Amrutha Slepe for ABC RN. Very special thank you to Ira Sema Vega, Maxime Holland, Matthias Wolfson and Daniel Pereira. Stuff the British Stole is a production of ABC RN in partnership with CBC Podcasts.
SPEAKER_01: After the break, my conversation with Mark Fennell.
SPEAKER_01: I have a pair of those. I love them. The Glistran 20 shoes are designed to deliver comfort on the run and designed to be lightweight, responsive and durable. Several years ago, I was running regularly for the first time and I was in constant pain and someone in the know suggested Brooks to me. And my foot pain when I was running went away immediately and I've never looked back. I run exclusively in Brooks to this day. They are the best. Find your perfect pair of running shoes now at brooksrunning.com. That's brooksrunning.com.
SPEAKER_00: Find your favorite show with Stranger Things VR. Live the action and really feel what it's like to step into the shoes of an assassin in Assassin's Creed Nexus. Even turn your couch into courtside seats for your favorite NBA team with Xstadium. With over 500 titles, it's easy to dive into whatever you're into. Expand your world with MetaQuest 3. See child safety guidance online. Accounts for 10+. Certain apps, games and experiences may be suitable for a more mature audience. Learn more at meta.com.
SPEAKER_01: Start with a professional layout that fits your brand. Upload video lessons to teach techniques and skills. And tailor your course with the powerful built-in fluid engine editor. With Squarespace courses, you can create engaging content your audience will love. Then simply add a paywall and set the price. Plus you can charge a one-time fee or sell subscriptions. Turn your creativity into income with Squarespace courses. Head to squarespace.com for a free trial. And when you're ready to launch, go to www.squarespace.com slash invisible to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain. That's squarespace.com slash invisible. Article believes in delightful design for every home. And thanks to their online only model, they have some really delightful prices too. Their curated assortment of mid-century modern, coastal, industrial and Scandinavian designs make furniture shopping simple. Article's team of designers are all about finding the perfect balance between style, quality and price. They're dedicated to thoughtful craftsmanship that stands the test of time and looks good doing it. Article's knowledgeable customer care team is there when you need them to make sure your experience is smooth and stress-free. My Article dining room table is the center of my house. My partner works at it all day long and when everyone's at home, we eat around it at night because it's the only table that fits us all. It is the greatest. Article is offering 99% invisible listeners $50 off your first purchase of $100 or more. To claim, visit article.com slash 99 and the discount will be automatically applied at checkout. That's article.com slash 99 for $50 off your first purchase of $100 or more. So Mark, tell these fine people who you are. Hello, my name is Mark Fennell and I seem to chase stolen artifacts around the world, which is a weird career.
SPEAKER_06: But here we are. I don't know how I got here, Roman. How did this happen?
SPEAKER_01: Well, you're on your third season of chasing artifacts around the world. Third season of Stuff the British Stole. So how has this idea for the show changed over the course of these seasons and, you know, what are the new angles on, you know, British theft that you're most interested in exploring as the show goes on?
SPEAKER_06: It's a few things that happened. We're on our third season of the podcast. I'm now also making the second season of a television series. So it's become, it has started to resemble an empire, which I feel like structurally might be like, like thematically might be wrong, but also feels right at the same time. I always thought I was making a niche show about like, because it really did start with me and a microphone standing in the, you know, in a museum. And what I think changed for me was the audience response. Like I was really surprised at how people kind of took it and ran with it. When we set up the show to begin with, we set up an email address where people could just email us, you know, ideas or things, even just things that they'd seen in museums that they were a bit confused by. And in every single episode, pretty much of both the podcast and the TV series has now come from the audience. But I think the big thing has been a wider view of what was stolen. It's not just things that end up in museums. This episode in particular is probably one of the sort of the more left field objects. And I always wonder if people will turn around and go, is that, I mean, is that what this show is? And actually people provided the, it still has twists and turns. And I think that I always look for like a small doorway into a big world. So something that sort of allowed like this kind of chewy idea that people can latch onto. And then it has to open up and tell you something bigger about how colonialism really worked or how the empire really worked and how all of our lives have been fundamentally changed by it. And I always think that provided that engine is still in action or, you know, still motoring along, then it probably still works. Yeah, yeah, yeah. We have that same issue when we say we are a show about design and then we talk about, you know, government systems or something like that.
SPEAKER_01: And they'll go, they'll go, is this really design? You know, and it's like, well, to us it is. So let's talk a little bit about this story, the Fever Tree, and how it's a little bit outside of the norm. It's not really a stolen object. It's a plant, although it kind of manages to be a stolen object anyway. I mean, the reason why I was so fascinated by this episode in particular is there's no reason why this tree has to be stolen. It could be found and cultivated without any indigenous people actually losing anything. But the British still managed to steal it and destroy and diminish what was left behind. And that is an amazing fact pattern. In some ways, it's also about the clash of, this is going to be the most podcast thing ever said, it's about the clash of capitalism with traditional knowledge as well.
SPEAKER_06: Where it's like, once capitalism decides that something's a worthwhile resource, I'm anthropomorphizing capitalism now, so we're deep in the weeds here. Like once capitalism decides that something's a worthwhile resource, it's almost like the traditional method of how something is grown and respected. They are incompatible. I don't think one necessarily kills the other, but they are incompatible. And because an industry will want to take it and make it en masse, and that will drastically reshape how it's seen in its original form. It's possibly more that with the story of rubber, because in the story of rubber in places like Brazil, like there was a whole industry of rubber and you know, these rubber barons who weren't like great people. But that industry is completely upended when rubber plantations start getting grown and taken by, you know, the British. Some say smuggled, some say traded out, and then they set up these plantations around the world and suddenly a whole industry in South America is changed forever. Whereas this one, in some ways, it's more grey because they can, it is still available to people in the South American countries where it's present. But it also enables, you know, large scale colonization and invasion of other parts of the world. Like the British simply couldn't have achieved, and they're not alone in this, the Dutch as well, they could not have achieved what they achieved in Southeast Asia and South Asia without these resources. Yeah.
SPEAKER_01: And this episode, it sort of starts with a gin and tonic. I just smiled when you said that. It's like 8.45 in the morning for me right now. I have a problem, Roman.
SPEAKER_01: And so, and a lot of the stories start with you interacting with the person. Like it's often starts small and it expands wide. And what is that process for you? Like having something sort of you can touch or you can hold or a person you can talk to in an Uber or something that sort of, you know, grounds these big stories about capitalism and empires and colonialism. You know, what is that mission about?
SPEAKER_06: I guess at the end of the day, the show, if it's all sort of highfalutin empires and large movements throughout history, that's great. And that can be like sweeping and beautiful and can really make you feel like you're watching a landscape picture. And I think those moments are important in the show. But at some point, either at the beginning or at the end, at some point, you need to connect with something very everyday, because that's the point of the show. The point of the show is that the legacy of the British Empire never actually ended. I mean, the fact of the matter is, if you listening to this now can understand the language that you and I are speaking right now, congratulations. You have been touched by the British Empire in some way, shape or form. Right. You know, we talk about the size of the British Empire, right? So at its peak, we're talking about a quarter of the world's population, a quarter of the world's land, roughly. But its cultural impact is so much bigger than that. Right. It reshapes, you know, huge parts of the world through hard and soft power. And that's a really impossible thing for people to wrap their heads around. It's actually too big for a human brain to encapsulate. So if you have something small, like a conversation in an Uber or, you know, the clink of a gin and tonic, there's always a moment where you're reminded that this, the legacy didn't end and it lives and breathes in your life today. Unless you don't like gin, you're more of a vodka person, in which case, just wait for stuff. The Russian style will get there, don't you worry. Like, I think I think it's just about kind of connecting it to reality more than anything. Yeah. So what are some of the other stories this season that you're most excited about? Is there anything to entice our listeners?
SPEAKER_06: This season is probably the most wild combination of objects. Many years ago, somebody slipped into my DMs on Twitter and said that there was a mummified head of an Egyptian in a high school in country Australia. And I thought they were joking. It turns out they were not. There is actually one there. The number zero, it turns out, may have been stolen. Apparently, it comes from from South Asia. But the manuscript that proves it comes from South Asia is in Britain. There's an absolutely devastating story about a prince who's from Ethiopia, who ended up being one of Queen Victoria's favourite pseudo adopted children. And his story is tragic. And the the other one that I've wanted to do for years is the story of Pocahontas. My daughter and I sat down and watched the Disney movie. And I had this brief moment of like, huh, this is aged very weirdly. And it was the sort of story that could only really be done in audio because everyone has an image in their mind of Pocahontas because of the Disney movie. And I wanted to kind of see if you started there, where could you go with that story if you told the reality of what actually happened to her? And there's a whole range of voices across the US and Canada that feed into that. That's amazing. Well, thank you again so much for for talking with me and for sharing your show with me and for continuing to do it.
SPEAKER_01: I just love it and I love how it's evolved and it's a joy to listen to. So thanks so much. The pleasure is always mine. Thank you so much.
SPEAKER_01: Jason De Leon, Loshma Dawn, Jacob Maldonado Medina, Kelly Prime, Swan Rial, Joe Rosenberg and me, Roman Mars. The 99 percent invisible logo was created by Stefan Lawrence. We are part of the Stitcher and Sirius XM podcast family now headquartered six blocks north in the Pandora building in beautiful uptown Oakland, California. You can find us on all the social media sites if you want to. But at this point, I think it's become clear that social media was a big mistake. You can find links to other Stitcher shows I love, as well as every past episode of 99 P.I. at 99 P.I. Dot org.
SPEAKER_12: Auto insurance can all seem the same until it comes time to use it. So don't get stuck paying more for less coverage. Switch to USA Auto Insurance and you could start saving money in no time. Get a quote today. Restrictions apply.
SPEAKER_00: This message is brought to you by Cologuard. Cologuard is a one of a kind, non-invasive colon cancer screening test. The test kit is delivered right to your doorstep so you can collect your sample in the privacy of your own home. There's no special prep, no need for time off and no changes to your diet or medication. Your Cologuard collection kit comes with simple instructions. But if you have any questions, they have a customer care line you can call 24-7. If you're 45 or older and average risk for colon cancer, ask your provider about Cologuard. Cologuard is available by prescription only. Learn more at Cologuard.com slash listen.
