Text addendum to our recent Crowdcast Q&A (Patreon)

We wanted to provide some comments from Rob regarding a few questions that he was not able to answer directly himself on the Q&A due to timing issues (*cough* baby *cough*), so here they are! You can view the entire Q&A at https://www.crowdcast.io/e/47rk3dye 

1. Rob - off the top of your head, what do you know about James Brooke and the Kingdom of Sarawak? (Additional - aside from House Brooke and House Bernadotte (of Sweden), can you think of any other monarchial dynasties in modern(ish) times that were founded essentially with an open casting call?)

Brooke is a pretty interesting figure—for those of you who aren't familiar with him, he was an English soldier of fortune who saw what was going on with the East India Company and decided to essentially do the same thing in Borneo, but for his personal benefit. After battling piracy and restoring the Sultan of Brunei following an uprising, the Sultan made him the Rajah (prince or minor king) of Sarawak. In doing so he founded a short line of "White Rajahs" that ruled the kingdom of Sarawak.

What I find most interesting about Brooke, other than the fact that he existed at all, is that he remains pretty popular in modern Malaysia, being the subject of films and books, plus the focus of tourism, which is pretty unusual for someone who was essentially a mercenary that colonized the area. In fact, he's weirdly more popular in Malaysia than in the west, where even in his own time he faced accusations of brutality against native peoples in Malaysia. Other than that—and his appearance in Flashman's Lady—I'm not overly familiar with him.

As for "invited monarchs," the one that immediately leaps to mind for me is William III, Prince of Orange and Mary II, who were invited to overthrow James II in the Glorious Revolution. One day we should probably do a series on that, though we've been doing a lot of subjects involving Britain lately, so it would likely be well in the future.

2. While your show is very informative and entertaining, you seem to admire conquerors a lot. What is so great about waging war on random people? What is the use of it even to the country that wins, if the country gets a little bit bigger?You are usually just paying lip service to the suffering and destruction that such conquerors bring both to their own and other countries. Are you aware of what it means to conquer a country?

This is a really good question and something we actually talk about a great deal internally. I'm actually proud of the fact that we've handled a lot of topics in the last year that involve medical history (Flu Pandemic, Pellagra, TB), agricultural crisis (Potato Famine) and trade networks (Majapahit, Mali) rather than conquest or war, which was part of my goal when I was hired as head writer.
Having said that, I have a rule in writing about warfare that the audience should never feel like these people are toy soldiers moving around a map, that we communicate the humanity of the participants and make sure we never make fighting a war seem fun or inconsequential. My favorite example of this is in Hunting the Bismarck where, because the narrative is from the perspective of the Royal Navy, the first 80% of the series is intentionally distant from the humanity of the Germans. They're an outline in the fog or flashes on the horizon miles away. Then when the Bismarck does get sunk, the British sailors see young men in the water who look a lot like them. My favorite comment from that series was someone who said: "This whole series I was cheering for the British to sink that ship, but once they did I was horrified at the thought that I was rooting for this to happen."

We don't like conquerors, but many conquerors did significant things. However, this appearance of celebrating conquest is a real problem, not just in our series but in history writing in general, even in the academic community. The unfortunate fact is that at the level we're looking at history, we're mostly looking at times when major changes are occurring either on a national, regional, or global level—and those changes often involve violence and at times even conquest. We don't pick these figures or empires lightly, though, we choose them because they've made an impact on world history or can expand our audiences' understanding in some other way. For example, I didn't put Sun Yat-sen on the list just because I knew it would be an exciting series (though that is a bonus), I put him on as an option because many people in the west don't fully appreciate his impact or the role he still plays in how China perceives itself. I wanted to do the Viking Expansion because it's an unusual story of trade and exploration by a people often dismissed as thoughtless barbarians.

As for not being aware of what it means to be conquered—you're probably right there. I haven't personally experienced invasion and oppression. However, I have spent most of my life living in postcolonial societies and have seen the long-term impact that invasion and occupation have wrought. My home state of Hawaii has many problems that stem directly from its forcible annexation by the United States, and to walk around Hong Kong is to literally to see the architecture of two occupations—first the British Empire in 1841, then the Japanese Empire in 1941. When friends visit, I often take them on a "WWII Occupation" tour of Hong Kong, pointing out massacre sites and buildings the kenpeitai (Japan's equivalent to the gestapo) used to interrogate suspected resistance fighters. Again, the purpose isn't to wallow in human rights abuses, it's to help visitors understand why relations between Japan and China remain tense to this day.

Having said that, I can understand viewers watching episodes on occasion and thinking we didn't tell enough of "the other side"—the suffering caused, the human impacts of say, building an Andean empire or defeating the English at the Siege of Orleans. But that's also why we have Lies, to expand on those points if that context has to be minimized due to running time. But I can promise you we're thinking this stuff all the time, even if it's not immediately apparent.