Zack Polanski has been at the centre of some of the most contested political arguments in Britain over the past year. He was called a scumbag and a traitor by Elon Musk for asking for calm during the Belfast riots. The Times published what was described as an antisemitic cartoon of him. A Labour minister asked him whether he supported Palestine Action, knowing a yes could get him arrested. Much of the controversy around him connects to questions of history that most British people were never taught in school.
That is where William Dalrymple comes in. The historian, author and co-host of the Empire podcast joined Polanski on Bold Politics for a conversation that covered how one British corporation conquered India, how Britain created the conditions for the Palestinian displacement, and why none of it appears on the national curriculum.
Why we don’t know this history
“The most important thing Britain ever did, and we don’t learn about it in school,” Dalrymple says of the British Empire. His explanation for why is precise: when the empire ended in the 1940s through 1970s, it became something people stopped talking about. Paintings celebrating empire were moved to attics or regional museums. By the time of Monty Python, the empire had become a joke. And then it just disappeared – leaving most British people entirely ignorant about what he describes as “three to four hundred years of completely upending the flows of global trade and ecosystems which had existed for millennia.”
The result is that people who know every detail about Henry VIII’s wives – or who know about the Nazis, Florence Nightingale or Queen Victoria – have no idea why the Palestinians are in Gaza, why India-Pakistan enmity runs so deep, or why so much of Britain’s country house heritage was built on looted wealth. “99% of people in Britain have no idea why the Palestinians in Gaza are unhappy, why they ended up there, where they’re from, who they are,” Dalrymple says. “And one of the accidents of 1948 is that most Palestinians ended up in Gaza in refugee camps or in Lebanon – very few came to Britain, so there has only been a tiny Palestinian community here with almost no domestic political weight until recently.”
One company, six windows wide
The East India Company section of the conversation is extraordinary. Dalrymple describes how India and China together produced around 70% of global GDP in the classical world – with India alone responsible for up to 35-40% of world GDP in the 18th century. Bengal, in the mid-18th century, was probably the single richest area in the world. And the entity that conquered it was, at its peak, a private corporation with one office in the City of London – six windows wide.
“India was not conquered by the British government,” he says. “It was conquered by one British company occupying one office block in Leadenhall Street, EC1.” The East India Company eventually had 200,000 troops – twice the size of the British Army – while controlling the richest country in the world for profit. By the 1780s, around 75% of British MPs held East India Company shares. Perhaps 20% were former EIC figures who had used their fortunes to buy parliamentary seats.
The parallel to the present is one Dalrymple draws explicitly. “The East India Company, in a sense, invents corporate lobbying,” he says. “The system whereby large corporate entities can give large donations to political parties and an unspoken quid pro quo that is never published of what you get in return – that is the legacy of the East India Company.” He notes that he has spent 25 years writing about the company, and in those 25 years has watched the rise of Meta, Apple, X, and SpaceX. “At its peak, the East India Company not only conquered India – you have one British corporation like an enormous octopus with its tentacles, the first multinational corporation.”
Britain’s role in the Nakba
The most politically sensitive part of the conversation concerns Palestine. Dalrymple’s account of the Balfour Declaration in 1917 is historically detailed: at the time, Palestine’s population was 96% Muslim and Christian Palestinians, with Jewish residents making up only a small minority. The declaration’s consequences, combined with the subsequent Nazi persecution of Jewish people in Europe, created a situation in which refugees had no other place to go – while the Palestinians did not want people who ultimately sought to expel them.
The British role in what followed, he argues, was catastrophic in both directions. British forces trained the Haganah and Palmach – including future IDF leader Moshe Dayan – in military techniques. British anti-insurgency methods involving torture and extreme interrogation, developed during the Black and Tans campaign in Ireland, were exported to Palestine and used to crush the 1936 Arab Revolt, shattering Palestinian society and breaking its leadership. Then, in 1948, facing bankruptcy after the war and desperate to get troops home, Britain simply left – without making any attempt to protect the Palestinian population whose welfare they were mandated to ensure.
“85% of Palestinians end up expelled,” Dalrymple says. “The Balfour Declaration states that nothing should be done which will undermine the status of the non-Jewish communities. Of course, 85% of the non-Jewish communities end up as refugees.” He is emphatic: “We bear a lot of the responsibility for the continuing violence today. The fact that the situation is as it is is our legacy, and we are not taught this at school.”
The Polanski context
Dalrymple’s points connect directly to the political situation Polanski has navigated personally. He condemned Zia Yusuf’s Belfast posts as echoing 1930s antisemitic rhetoric. He joined condemnation of UK bans on US commentators speaking on Palestine. The Westminster Hall debate on pro-Israel lobbying this week – in which MPs who are members of pro-Israel lobby groups accused a 118,000-signature petition of antisemitism – is a direct illustration of Dalrymple’s point about the ignorance that persists at the highest levels of British public life.
As a Jewish man himself, Polanski’s engagement with this history is personal. He notes that the Balfour Declaration is rarely explained in terms of its internal Jewish politics – the fierce opposition from figures like Edwin Montagu, who argued it would put Jewish people in Britain in an impossible position, versus the Zionist case made by his first cousin Herbert Samuel. Dalrymple recommends a forthcoming book, Anti-Zionism: A Jewish History, noting that “Jewish people have always been very divided on the issue of Zionism – that’s not a new thing.”
Dalrymple closes by noting that he is writing a history of the Palestinian people as his next book – “who are these people that Golda Meir says do not exist?” He says he is in a privileged position to say these things because he has his own podcast, no academic job that can be pulled from him, and has spent many years in the region. “I do feel it is a kind of duty.”
You can watch the view episode below:
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