Photo Illustration by Erin O’Flynn/The Daily Beast/Getty Images
When Anita Anand and William Dalrymple sat down to discuss making a podcast together, there was never really any question what it was going to be about.
“I knew at once that it had to be about empire,” Anand, a London-based journalist and author, says. “When you talk about empire, you’re talking about everything: nations, economies, the past, the present. We can go anywhere we want with it.”
They have done precisely that. After two well-received seasons of Empire, about the British East India Company and the Ottomans, Anand and Dalrymple, a Delhi-based historian, decided to do something different. Rather than go after Rome, say, or the Mongols, the USSR, or Pax Americana, they decided instead to zoom out on their titular subject and consider it through a thematic lens. Their third and thus far most successful season, a kind of potted world history of slavery in general and the trans-Atlantic slave trade in particular, has shown just how elastic, and how relevant, the concept of empire still remains.