Paxman looks at how the empire began as a pirates' treasure hunt robbing Spanish ships and ports using privateers such as Henry Morgan and grew into an informal empire based on trade and developed into a global financial network. He travels to Jamaica where sugar made plantation owners rich on the mistreatment of African slaves, then to Calcutta where British traders became the new princes of India. Unfair trading helped start the independence movement led by Mahatma Gandhi who's visit to Britain and the mill town of Darwen in 1931 is remembered by two women, who were children at the time, from Lancashire. The First Opium War when British trade in opium with the Chinese in defiance of Chinese law led to war and Britain's subsequent take over of the island of Hong Kong.
—Enzedder