{"id":475746,"date":"2026-05-31T06:11:15","date_gmt":"2026-05-31T06:11:15","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/475746\/"},"modified":"2026-05-31T06:11:15","modified_gmt":"2026-05-31T06:11:15","slug":"william-dalrymple-the-partitions-of-ireland-india-palestine-have-been-running-sores-the-irish-times","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/475746\/","title":{"rendered":"William Dalrymple: \u2018The partitions of Ireland, India, Palestine have been running sores\u2019 \u2013 The Irish Times"},"content":{"rendered":"

William Dalrymple has been living on and off in India<\/a> since 1989. His life and work bestride the confluence of two civilisations, East and West, and two countries, India and Britain, with the thread of colonialism between them. <\/p>\n

He is a respected historian who has written many successful books, most notably The Anarchy: The Relentless Rise of the East India Company<\/a>, published in 2019. That work took him 20 years and recounts how a privately-funded company came to appropriate and then rule an entire subcontinent. <\/p>\n

The book sold well but was still niche. In 2022 his profile became global with the start of Empire, the podcast he presents with the BBC journalist and author Anita Anand. <\/p>\n

Empire was started by Goalhanger, the company owned by former footballer Gary Lineker, which also owns The Rest is History, the podcast and cultural phenomenon presented by Dominic Sandbrook and Tom Holland. <\/p>\n

Was there enough space in the universe for two history-themed, complementary podcasts? <\/p>\n

Ninety million downloads and 360 episodes later, Empire is its own phenomenon. Anand, with her clipped tones, and the jovial Dalrymple are perfects foils for each other. He, a British-born man living in India, and she, a British-born woman with Indian parents, are indicative of how the world has been shaped by empires, ancient and modern. <\/p>\n

The timing of the launch of Empire was propitious. It was the 75th anniversary of Indian and Pakistani independence and two years after the beginning of the Black Lives Matter movement, which refocused attention on empire and the slave trade. <\/p>\n

This year marks 250 years of the USA, the most economically and politically successful colonial project. Everywhere the ghosts of empire shape the modern world. <\/p>\n

What we are seeing now are India and China resuming their place in the world which was destroyed by colonialism<\/p>\n

Empire examines empires old and new from the Roman Empire to the present. It frequently cites the modern-day phenomenon of companies \u2013 most notably Meta, Amazon and Google \u2013 who, like the East India Company in its time, are subverting the nation states of the world. <\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s changed my life completely,\u201d says Dalrymple of Empire. \u201cThere are things you struggle for and worry about in life that don\u2019t happen.\u201d And then there was this which landed on my plate out of the blue with no particular ambition of mine to have a podcast. It\u2019s kind of a bizarre accident, a very nice one.\u201d <\/p>\n

[\u00a0The Rest Is History podcasters Tom Holland and Dominic Sandbrook: \u2018There\u2019s something about our monotonous drone people just love\u2019Opens in new window<\/a>\u00a0]<\/p>\n

Dalrymple is also a founder member of the Jaipur Literature Festival<\/a>, now in its 20th year. <\/p>\n

Established in 2006, it has grown to be one of the biggest literature festivals in the world. <\/p>\n

\u201cWe started with just a group of people in a tiny room and now we are about 500,000 people a year coming to the mother ship in Jaipur in India.\u201d<\/p>\n

The festival has gone on the road in Ireland, taking in Belfast last week, Armagh earlier this week, Louth last Thursday and Dublin from yesterday until Sunday. <\/p>\n

We Scots, like you Irish, like to be the anti-colonials and the people who resisted the British Empire, but in both cases we are deeply complicit<\/p>\n

Although there will be many colonial themes, it is primarily a literary festival, with both Irish and Indian authors in attendance, along with musicians from both countries. <\/p>\n

The idea for an Irish road trip came from a previous festival at which the Trinity College Dublin historian Prof Jane Ohlmeyer and Dalrymple found themselves on the same stage. <\/p>\n

\"WilliamWilliam Dalrymple, and Anita Anand, will be doing a reprise of their Empire podcast at Trinity College Dublin\u2019s Edmund Burke Theatre. Photograph: David Levenson\/Getty Images <\/p>\n

\u201cNeither of us knew each other until we arrived on stage together, but we\u2019d read each other\u2019s books,\u201d Dalrymple says. <\/p>\n

\u201cAnd they couldn\u2019t get us off, because we were just saying, \u2018here\u2019s another thing, you know, there\u2019s another thing in common\u2019. It is extraordinary how much it dovetails.\u201d <\/p>\n

Ohlmeyer\u2019s book Making Empire: Ireland, Imperialism and the Early Modern World<\/a> demonstrates how Ireland was England\u2019s first colony and many of the practices that led to the British Empire \u2013 the appropriation of land, the erasure of native language and the assimilation of people into the colonial project \u2013 were adopted elsewhere. <\/p>\n

Scots-born Dalrymple says Ireland and Scotland<\/a> have a lot in common. Both have built a national myth around resistance to English imperialism, yet both were complicit in British imperialism. <\/p>\n

[\u00a0Jane Ohlmeyer: How Ireland served as a laboratory for the British empireOpens in new window<\/a>\u00a0]<\/p>\n

\u201cWe Scots, like you Irish, like to be the anti-colonials and the people who resisted the British Empire, but in both cases, we are deeply complicit. <\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019d say 80 per cent of Scots are completely unaware of how much a role they played in the suppression of the freedom in India. We all know about Mel Gibson [in Braveheart] shouting freedom from the scaffold, but we don\u2019t hear about the Scottish setting up the scaffolds in India.\u201d <\/p>\n

Dalrymple\u2019s prime motivation behind getting involved in Empire was to educate the British and other former colonists about their own history. <\/p>\n

In 2019 Anand published the book The Patient Assassin<\/a> about the assassination of Sir Michael O\u2019Dwyer, the lieutenant governor of the Punjab in 1940. O\u2019Dwyer was held complicit in the Amritsar Massacre of 1919 in which British troops and Indian sepoys killed hundreds of unarmed civilians. <\/p>\n

O\u2019Dwyer\u2019s story is all the more complicated for not being that of an Anglo-Irish grandee lording it over the natives. He was a Jesuit-educated Irish Catholic from Barronstown in Co Tipperary, a neighbouring parish to Soloheadbeg, where the Irish War of Independence began in 1919. <\/p>\n

In his book India As I knew It, O\u2019Dwyer revelled in the service that so many Irishmen gave to the British Empire in India. <\/p>\n

[\u00a0Soloheadbeg ambush: what really happened in January 1919?Opens in new window<\/a>\u00a0]<\/p>\n

\u201cTill the unfortunate revulsion of feeling that followed the Easter rebellion of 1916, the Jesuit schools prided themselves on the numbers that passed into the service of the Crown, in the army and civil service,\u201d he wrote. <\/p>\n

\u201cThis was, of course, good business, but it was also based on a spirit of loyal support of constituted authority. The Roll of Honour of Clongowes College in the Great War, perhaps surpassed that of any Irish school, Catholic or Protestant, and for the first two years of the war, the spirit was admirable.\u201d <\/p>\n

[\u00a0Sir Michael O\u2019Dwyer, apologist for the Amritsar massacre, was also an Irish nationalistOpens in new window<\/a>\u00a0]<\/p>\n

Dalrymple and Anand will be doing a reprise of the Empire podcast at Trinity College Dublin\u2019s Edmund Burke Theatre with the historian Caroline Elkins, whose book Legacy of Violence: A History of the British Empire<\/a> was published four years ago. <\/p>\n

Dalrymple believes India is returning to its pre-eminent place as one of the great powers in the world, which it held before the British Empire took over. It is the most populous country in the world, taking over China earlier this year with almost 1.5 billion people. It became the fourth largest economy in the world last year and is on course to be the third biggest behind the US and China by 2028, though its people are still significantly poorer than those in the West. <\/p>\n

\u201cIndia is the first or second power in history for most of history. Occasionally India outpaces China. India produced 40 per cent of the world\u2019s goods before colonialism,\u201d says Dalrymple. <\/p>\n

\u201cWhat we are seeing now are India and China resuming their place in the world which was destroyed by colonialism … It has taken India 75 years.<\/p>\n

\u201cIndia is taking longer, but it\u2019s like an elephant, slow but then unstoppable. India will resume its role as the second or third economic power in the world and will do so in our lifetime.<\/p>\n

\u201cI don\u2019t think the penny has dropped, certainly not in Britain, about the way India is just slowly but steadily moving past so many other powers.\u201d <\/p>\n

Dalrymple is writing a book about the Palestinian<\/a> people. He is a stout defender of them and a ferocious critic of those who seek to excuse Israel<\/a>\u2019s activities in Gaza. Last year Michael Gove, the former British cabinet minister and now editor of the Spectator magazine, published a book on Islamic extremism called Celsius 7\/7, which Dalrymple dismissed as a \u201cconfused epic of simplistic incomprehension, riddled with more factual errors and misconceptions than any other text I have come across in two decades of reviewing books on this subject\u201d. <\/p>\n

He is also frustrated by British government policy in relation to Palestine, believing it owes a historic debt to the Palestinian people. <\/p>\n

The Balfour Declaration of 1917 committed Britain to supporting the establishment of a \u201cJewish national home\u201d in Palestine, where most of the population was Arab.<\/p>\n

\u201cAgain, it is something that most Brits aren\u2019t aware of. As [the Hungarian author and journalist] Arthur Koestler famously said: \u2018It was one people giving away the land of another to a third\u2019,\u201d he says. <\/p>\n

\u201cI think all the different partitions of Ireland, India, Palestine and Cyprus have been running sores that have eaten up the energies of these people since.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe\u2019ve got to fight for a Palestinian state. I think the only fair solution is to find some way of getting Palestinians and Israelis to live either together or side by side. <\/p>\n

\u201cThey\u2019re almost equal in number if you add up the number of Palestinians in Israel, West Bank and Gaza, and the number of Israeli Jews. <\/p>\n

\u201cFor one people to lord over another is simply untenable, and that\u2019s even before you start thinking about the Palestinian diaspora \u2013 the descendants of the 750,000 people expelled in 1948 that are not part of it. <\/p>\n

\u201cI went to a very Catholic school [Ampleforth in York] and the Nakba [expulsion of Palestinians from Israel in 1948<\/a>] is just one of the many imperial stories that the British aren\u2019t taught. <\/p>\n

\u201cI remember being taught that Israel turned the desert into bloom, but I never heard at any point in my education about the Nakba. <\/p>\n

\u201cThe idea that other people got thrown out to create Israel was never taught to me at any point in my education. That\u2019s one of the reasons why we do these podcasts, so as to tell these stories which are off the curriculum.\u201d <\/p>\n

I put it to him that the Jews are among the most persecuted people in history and have a right to live in safety. He responds: \u201cThere is no point at this stage in Israel being undone, but I don\u2019t think there can be a right to an Israeli state without a Palestinian state beside it. <\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s no more impossible to find some accommodation than in Ireland.\u201d <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"William Dalrymple has been living on and off in India since 1989. His life and work bestride the…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":475747,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[41060,9686,8294,12560,3409,61,2568,60,3410,205256,43,4268,9036,15342,976],"class_list":["post-475746","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-ireland","tag-british-empire","tag-common-ground","tag-cyprus","tag-gary-lineker","tag-gaza-strip","tag-ie","tag-india","tag-ireland","tag-israel","tag-michael-gove","tag-news","tag-palestine","tag-scotland","tag-trinity-college-dublin-tcd","tag-weekendreview"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/475746","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=475746"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/475746\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/475747"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=475746"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=475746"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=475746"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}