Stuff the British Stole has always been a reaction to the polite ‘nonsense’ of colonial historical memory

First there was the podcast, then there was the TV show, and now there’s the book. Stuff the British Stole, across three forms. Well, the Brits stole a lot.

They pillaged and plundered across lands and throughout history, the booty of their colonial conquests now cased and housed in museums and galleries, next to little plaques that reveal almost nothing of the real story behind each piece.

That the items were taken is not in dispute. There they are, far, far, far away from their origins. But the more interesting aspect to the likes of the Rosetta Stone, the body of an Ethiopian Prince, the Gweagal shield, the Koh-i-Noor diamond, and even the legacy of explorer James Cook, is the nuance.

Marc Fennell had resisted the idea of expanding the series into book form for a long time, that is until he was in a store and had spied one of those heavy tomes with a title like 1001 Objects and Museums You Have to See Before You Die, probably sold in gift shops all over the world.

He opened it and found inside listings for many of the objects he and his team had covered on Stuff the British Stole series and podcast, but the way it was framed within the book was along the lines of “and it was collected from the Pacific”. Collected. Hmmm, interesting.

“I’m like, hold on, I know exactly how that object got there,” Fennell recalled to The Nightly. “You f—king shot two guys and then everyone got smallpox. I’m like, ‘No, no, no, this is some bulls—t’, and it enraged me ever so slightly, and that was the impetus to be, ‘All right, we’re doing a book’.

“It was probably the first time I’ve ever done anything that was motivated by rage, but it was nonsense. I remember look at these nice, polite (descriptions), but then again, this whole thing has always been a reaction to politeness, right?”

For six years, Fennell has been living and breathing Stuff the British Stole, and in each episode of the podcast and across three seasons of TV (the latest is streaming now on ABC iview), there’s the story of an object, an idea or a legacy that the Brits laid claim to, sometimes through direct violence, sometimes through the exercise of unbalanced power.

What the book was able to do was to link these stories and new ones to weave together the wider context. Throughout all the stories is complexity, because that’s what history – and therefore the present – is.

“You go through museums and galleries and they have these nice, polite plaques but actually if you know the true story behind how they got there, it’s never as simple as good guys, bad guys, it’s always way more interesting, way more dramatic, way more exciting, and way more complicated,” Fennell said.

“We can do the complicated story, the complicated story is good. With the success of the podcast, TV show and the book, I view it as vindication that audiences are interested in the complicated bits of history, the messy, grey bits that aren’t heroes or villains. People want complicated and they can take it.”

Well, not everyone. While Stuff the British Stole has a massive fanbase across the world – yes, even in the UK where the distributors there originally played with the idea of changing the title – Fennell has also seen a lot of pushback, particularly online on social media, where all good debate goes to be reduced into one-paragraph missives.

More interestingly, during the life-span of the show, those reactions have morphed.

In the current season of the TV series, there is an episode on James Cook, whose legacy provokes wildly divergent, and often quite cemented, views.

“He did do remarkable things as a navigator, that’s undeniable, but at the same time, his legacy has brought incredible disruption on certain people, so I have always been fascinated by Cook. I knew when I wanted to do Cook, it would be the third rail,” Fennell said.

“As soon as we posted stuff on socials, it was like the most unbelievable torrent of, you know, it’s interesting that people are quite openly racist.”

Fennell said he knew he was poking the bear when he created a show called Stuff the British Stole but “you don’t have to scratch very hard for people to just openly say, ‘Yeah, but brown people shouldn’t allowed to look after their own artefacts’ or ‘We won, you lost, we’ll keep it’, or ‘You people can’t be trusted with it’, and that’s me saying the polite stuff.”

He viewed it as a bit of a social experiment in people exposing themselves. But at the beginning, six years ago, the pushback was more “whataboutism” in the sense that online reactions would point to other colonial and conquering cultures such as the French, the Romans and the Mongolians.

“But we don’t start Parliament with ‘Hail Caesar’ and Genghis Khan is not on our coins. My attitude is it’s the British empire that has most shaped our land and that’s the one we’re going to pay attention to.”

What Fennell observed as changed in the past few months as the third series and the book have been released is this narrative of “We won, you lost, get over it”.

“That’s a very common response (now). It’s not even trying to morally justify it anymore,” he said.

“There’s a coarsening in our public discourse, for sure, and that’s me being diplomatic about it. I think it’s a reaction to ‘wokeness’ and I don’t wear my politics on my sleeve, although I acknowledge the title of the show makes it look like I do.

“I’m not interesting in virtue signalling, I’m interested in the messy reality of what actually happened, and sometimes that’s good and sometimes that’s bad.

“People walk about (the discourse) as a swing to the right and I think that’s true, but it misses why we’re having a swing to the right, and a part of what we’re seeing is a reaction to a couple of years of really progressive politics that maybe didn’t do enough to bring people along for the ride.”

The culture is not the same as when Stuff the British Stole launched, and Fennell said that it didn’t come out of nowhere and “there are some very dark edges of that that actually have a historical root”.

The degree of emboldened casual and not-so-casual racism has changed in the past six months.

But one thing that has also started to shift, even a little, is that there have been at least a dozen instances Fennell is aware of, where museums and galleries have changed their formerly polite plaques to be more upfront about the circumstances of how something fell into the hands of the British.

When Stuff the British Stole is in production, the museums and galleries generally won’t engage with the show, they’re resistant to the prodding.

“They won’t answer questions, they won’t let you film, they’ll just say, ‘Oh, we’re busy’,” he explained.

“Then I’ll go back in a year’s time and the label will have changed. So there is change happening, there are things being taken off display, there are things having the labels change, they’re reaching out to source communities.

“A lot of that was happening six years ago but not to the same extent. I don’t think the show is responsible for that, Black Lives Matter was probably a bigger component of that.”

Fennell doesn’t want people to stop visiting museums and galleries, it’s not about shutting it down, but it is about openness and honesty.

“What I’m interested in is ‘don’t bulls—t us with your labels’. Tell us the complicated story, we can take it.

“I want them to tell the truth.”

Stuff the British Stole book is on sale now, season three of the TV series is on ABC iview