Cautionary Tales with Tim Harford - Reason, Wrath and Rebellion on the High Seas

Episode Date: September 27, 2024

Early morning, April 1789. Captain Bligh is abruptly dragged from his cabin. Wrists bound, bayonet pressed to his chest, he and a few loyal sailors are forced into a tiny launch and set adrift on the vast Pacific Ocean. This far from land, no-one is likely to survive for long. History remembers Captain Bligh as a cruel, petty tyrant. The reality is more complicated. Bligh championed rational thought and showed his men great kindness on that famous voyage on the Bounty - yet it ended in mutiny. So what went wrong?  This is the third episode in a four-part series about fairness. It's based on David Bodanis' excellent book The Art of Fairness: The Power of Decency In A World Turned Mean. For a full list of sources, see the show notes at timharford.com.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

PUSHKIN April 1789. Early morning. A British ship and crew have been sailing home from Tahiti for three weeks. It's quiet on board. Just wind and slapping light waves. But if someone had been listening closely, they'd have heard whispers, lightly hurrying footsteps, and then, about an hour before dawn, an explosion of noise. This is HMS Bounty,

and one of the most famous mutinies in history is underway. Lieutenant Fletcher Christian has organised most of the crew who detest their captain, 34-year-old William Bly. They drag Bly from his cabin, tying his wrists behind his back. On deck, he struggles to get free. Fletcher Christian blocks him, pressing a bayonet to his chest. In England, they've been friends. Now, glaring at each other, that's over.

Pistols are at hand, and the crew calls for Christian to blow Bligh's brains out. Bligh yells back at Christian, telling him he must stop. That in England, didn't he remember, Christian had held Bly's own children on his knee. After what's happened on this voyage, however, Christian doesn't care. He forces Bly into a tiny, overloaded launch. Out on the vast Pacific, this far from land, no one is likely to survive for long.

I'm Tim Harford, and you're listening to Cautionary Tales. This episode is the third in a series exploring the famous idea that nice guys finish last, inspired by David Bedanas' book The Art of Fairness, and we'll hear a bit from David Bedanas himself later. But first, the mutiny on the bounty. It's not only an astonishing story in its own right, it also sheds light on the question of whether nice guys finish last or first. Let's start with Captain William Bly. Several movies have been made about the mutiny, and Bly is often painted as a cruel, petty tyrant. Just how cruel and petty he really was is something we'll look at closely. Certainly before he became captain

of the bounty, William Bly was a generally quiet, thoughtful fellow. He came from a fairly humble family, just an inch above the working classes. Joining the navy when he was still a teenager was a good way to rise. He developed his artistic abilities and was especially drawn to painting watercolour landscapes and discovered that he loved mathematics. That was big. Bly was awed at the sophisticated men of Britain's royal society. They were heirs to Sir Isaac Newton and the other great rational minds that were transforming the world. His ambition and his mathematical skill came together when he was lucky enough, barely past twenty, to get a position as sailing master on one of the voyages that Captain

James Cook was undertaking. Cook was the greatest explorer of the age, and exactly the sort of man Bly wanted to model himself on. Other sea captains often treated their men with staggering cruelty. On one British ship, the captain ruled that the last man to make it down from the mast was to be whipped however quickly the descent took place. Cook was the opposite. The ships he explored with weren't going to be festering slaveholds. Men from the lowest ranks of society might tend to be impulsive, but could be redeemed. There would be good light below deck, healthy

food and fresh air. Treat them well, treat them fairly, and they'd perform wonders. If you listened to our last episode about the Empire State Building, you'll recognise this idea. It's just what construction manager Paul Starrett believed over a century later. Here in the late 18th century, the 22-year-old Bligh saw Captain Cook demonstrate the power of this fairness on a global voyage. Cook's mission really was to boldly go where no man, or at least only a few men, had gone before. Bligh travelled with him deep into the Pacific and also up to the Arctic, rising to be the main navigator on board. Bly's young friend, Fletcher Christian, also came to share Cook's vision for how

to run a ship. He was ten years younger than Bly, tall and dark haired and from a notably higher social class. His older brother was a fellow at Cambridge, but he too was interested in science, in rational approaches, and that brought an affinity Bly didn't have with most others. Several years after the expedition with Cook, when Bly was briefly captaining in the merchant service, Bly and Christian got on very well on a voyage to the West Indies. Then in 1787, Bly was in his early thirties, Christian in his early twenties, Bly was given the command for a new sort of mission. Tahiti had a tree called the breadfruit tree, which produced nutritious large fruit.

If he could collect living samples and transport them to the Caribbean, that would help feed the landowners there, and also this cruel side of empire, feed the captured Africans who were forced to labour for them. Like most Britons of his time, Bly was able to put that slavery out of his mind. Instead, he was focused on what he felt was a great opportunity. In this new mission, he would follow the model of the revered Captain Cook. He'd show that he

too could run everything through logic and reason, rather than primitive impulse. The men under his command would not be brutalised into submission. Instead, they'd be shaped by the use of rational incentives, rewarded when they did well, and punished when they fell short. Bly was given command of a fast, three-masted sailing ship, HMS Bounty. He immediately set about putting his rational principles into practice. Fletcher Christian was happy to join him, and together they modified the ship, using the latest science to create good airflow and lighting. They also converted the captain's room into a huge nursery for the breadfruit seedlings

they would be transporting to the Caribbean. There were skylights and a stove to keep the new plants warm, even a clever recycling system for the fresh water that drained out. In October 1787, they finally set sail. Before departure, Fletcher Christian spent time with Bly's family and played with his children. Quite likely, they traveled to the ship together. The voyage started as well as both had imagined.

Bly created an easier watch schedule schedule because, as he put it, I have ever considered extra sleep among seamen as conducive to health. It adds much to their content and cheerfulness. Porpuses swam alongside the boat. One afternoon, a vast cloud of butterflies blew past to everyone's delight. There was dancing and music on the deck when the weather was good, for Bly had brought a fiddler along. Bly's ideas were put to a sterner test when the weather got worse. And late at night in the South Atlantic, a catastrophic wave poured tons of seawater in.

Bly rose to the challenge. He selflessly vacated his cabin, turning it over to the use of those poor fellows who had wet berths. He arranged soaked wet clothes to be dried on the stove. Fletcher Christian remained at Bly's side, and control and kindness ensured everything ran smoothly. Almost everything, that is.

Well into their voyage, the sailing master informed Bly that one of the ordinary sailors, a 20-year-old named Matthew Quintal, had been insolent. The Royal Navy had a clear command structure, so although Bligh didn't see Quintal's insolence with his own eyes, he had to accept this report. He was disappointed. Until this afternoon, he wrote, I had hopes I could have performed the voyage without punishment to anyone. But insolence was a threat to the entire mission. He had

to maintain order. And that meant a vicious flogging. Matthew Quintle's shirt was stripped off and his arms tied tight. The Catonine Tales was brought out, a fearsome whip with nine knotted cords. It was designed to rip through the skin and carve long slices where it fell. This was an excruciating sentence. This was an excruciating sentence. But when the flogging was done, that was it. Quintal was resentful, of course, but the rest of the long journey was easy.

There were no more floggings. Bly had been angry at Quintal for disrupting his perfectly organised system, but now his temper was gone. The ship was back to steady running, hour after hour, cutting through the water, its big sails catching powerful winds and pulling them along. Finally, after nearly 28,000 miles, they arrived in Tahiti. It was October 1788. They'd been at sea for a full year.

The bay they settled in was magnificent. Canoes raced to their ship, eager for trade. And by sunset, there were hogs, fruits, and bright new textiles on board. Bly's men were delighted. In England, they'd been among the lowest of the low, most of them underweight, disfigured from fights or accidents. Here, though, they were as gods.

In the next few days, a new rhythm started up. Bly went ashore with the ship's botanist and made arrangements to locate the breadfruit seedlings he needed. It would take several months for them to grow enough to be brought to the on-board nursery. So the sailors dispersed into local villages, taking up with local families where they were quickly accepted. They learned about surfing, flew kites, strolled along the perfect beaches.

Bly had brought his watercolour materials and was delighted that he would have so much time to draw the plant life and other scenes. He also wanted to improve his own language skills and make what notes he could on the culture. Life is good. Bly is content. The crew is content. But what will Bly do as time goes on and that crew is no longer under his control? Cautionary Tales will return in just a moment. So long as Bly and his crew were focused entirely on the island, the contrast with the life they'd left behind wasn't too much of a problem. But they couldn't leave their ship, HMS Bounty,

entirely uncared for. At one point, Bly brought everyone back on board so they could move it from their initial anchorage to another one nearby. But the lookout was clumsy now. And the sailor who lowered weighted chains to measure the depth was clumsy. The men in the scouting boat that travelled immediately ahead of them were clumsy too. Bligh was supposed

to be a master navigator. He was proud of that. Yet now, a sickening scrape as the bounty's bow dragged along a reef. They were stuck, which was embarrassing enough, not least because several of Bly's Tahitian friends were on board. But then the weather began to change, with dark clouds building quickly. There was a dangerous swell, and that made everything worse. The storm was rocking the ship against the sharp reef. If they didn't get the ship off, it would be pushed harder and harder until it was holed through. Then it would take in water and sink. Bly did manage to float the ship free, but the episode was dismaying. How could his men

have let this happen? By now it was December 1788, and soon all order began to break down. The crew were in heaven here. Many seemed to have settled into steady relationships, playing with the new step-children they'd acquired. Most still slept on board and spent only the daytime with these new families. But some would spend longer, go back to England and all that would disappear. A few weeks after the shift to a new anchorage, three of the crew decided to make sure they weren't going to be pulled away. Whatever happened, late one night they took supplies and an entire arms chest and quietly left

the ship. They were soon tracked down, but the officer of the watch had slept right through it. Bly lashed the three deserters when they were brought back. He was just as angry at the officer, putting him in irons for over a week. Then Bly found out that no one had been bringing the spare sails out for regular airing. That was a greater degree of danger entirely. Every one of his officers, every one of the ordinary sailors too for that matter, knew how crucial taking care of the sails was. They'd need them for the near year of sailing to get back home, but

they'd been left to mildew, and some were even beginning to rot. Bly wrote, scarce any neglect of duty can equal the criminality of this. He realized they had to get off this blasted island before matters got worse. But the breadfruit saplings still weren't ready, so they had several more months to wait. Bly grew ever more exasperated. Sir Isaac Newton's vision of a clean, logical universe was so clear, so obvious. Bly had made it come true on the voyage out. Why were his men letting it collapse here?

In the months before they left, he gave one of the sailors 12 hard lashes with a cat-o-nine tail for insolence. Another got 12 lashes for letting natives steal. A young cook's assistant, the most innocuous of crewmen, was tied down and lashed for neglecting his duty. Then the ship's butcher was just as viciously flogged for suffering his cleaver to be stolen. viciously flogged, for suffering his cleaver to be stolen. Where had the considerate Bly gone? For a perspective on that question, there is no

better person to ask than David Bedarnis, who wrote about the mutiny in his book The Art of Fairness. David, he began as a sensitive watercolour painter, he turned into a brute. Where did Bly as the defender of enlightened captainship go? Maybe that enlightened captain had never been there. Bly cared about two things. He cared about his mission and he did indeed want to show that he could be rational and scientific. But that was it.

The sailors, how he dealt with them, the sailors were a means to that end. This reminds me of the old saying that someone who believes that honesty is the best policy isn't actually an honest person. An honest person is honest whether or not he believes that honesty is the best policy. That's exactly it. And Bly is someone who believes that fairness is the best policy. He's not wholeheartedly committed to it. He just thinks it will work. It'll be efficient.

And when the going gets tough, he abandons his previous ideas. But this abandonment, it seems so sudden. What's happening is a flip from one equilibrium to another. When things were going well, Bligh extended fairness and generosity. The sailors responded with good cheer and hard work. But when they got to Tahiti and they started resenting any discipline, it began a downward spiral. The sailors were sullen.

That made Bly harsh. That made the sailors more sullen. And that made Bly even harsher. So it's a feedback loop. Exactly, a feedback loop. In the last episode, we talked about the ancient rabbi Hillel's great question of, who are we? And the idea was that it's not enough to only be for yourself,

but it's not enough either to exist only for others. All of us struggle with the balance, with getting it right. And the great insight, I think, is that there are no fixed answers. Why are there no fixed answers? I think it's because being fair or equitable, it's not a static disposition. It's not a part of our personality or set of rules that we can automatically follow. It's a process. And it's a process that depends on our circumstances.

We all try to hold steady, to be constant, and it's a process that depends on our circumstances. We all try to hold steady to be constant, but it's hard. Well, so if Bly had never gone to Tahiti, maybe the problem would never have arisen. That would have been perfect, but that's not how life works. We rarely have complete control over where we end up. And when Bly saw his sailors slip away from the proper behaviour that he had in mind, he became so furious that he overshot. Thank you David. Please stick around, I am going to want your advice again, I am sure. Finally, the breadfruit saplings had grown enough. Bly's men loaded them on board and they weighed anchor the 4th of April 1789.

Bly knew he had to get the ship operating as well as it had before. They'd be crossing half the planet to get to the Caribbean with just one stop at Cape Town along the way. He had the men practice hard, raising and shortening the sails on the masts. He also switched them to shipboard rations, knowing the fresh stock they'd brought from Tahiti would be needed later. Morale was going to be important. I need to nurse my people with care and attention, he wrote. Luckily, he still had the fiddler, so there'd be music in the long free hours on board.

He explained there would be the same generous schedule, with more sleeping time than other ships. And just as before, he'd vacate his own bunk for anyone who'd been caught up in storms on deck and needed a dry place to rest. All of that was just what he'd done on the Atlantic run. But the time in Tahiti had changed the men far more than he could grasp. After six months in paradise, who cared about a fiddler? And since the men had been changed, that would change Bly too.

Within a week at sea, Bly had ordered another flogging of a seaman, whom he charged with neglect of duty. Normally he could have expected his officers to support him without hesitation in that, but something was different, notably with his old friend Fletcher Christian. He was not the same man as he'd been on the voyage out. The reason? Christian had spent almost every night on shore and was leaving behind a woman he'd been close with and who was now pregnant with their child. Bly was frustrated, and that poured out. He cursed his men. Perhaps his pain was all the

more sharp for the loss of his friendship with Fletcher Christian. One of the crew remembered, whatever fault was found, Mr. Christian was sure to bear the brunt of the captain's anger. Christian hated it, begging Bly to stop. But Bly was past listening. In his log he wrote, Such neglectful and worthless petty officers I believe never were in a ship as are in this. Harsher punishment would be needed, he swore. When Bly cursed, he really cursed. Later, when the Admiralty learned more of how Bly spoke when angry, he was officially reprimanded for his immoderate use of language. This is staggering, given what was considered acceptable for sea captains in the 1700s.

The conflict boiled over when they were 19 days out. Coconuts were an important source of fresh water and Bly had a huge pile stacked between the guns on the top deck. The officers were responsible for guarding them, but then, on the morning of April 23rd, Bigh noticed that the pile had shrunk. Who had been stealing? One after another, the officers said they had no idea. Clearly, however, one or more of them knew something. This was infuriating.

They were defending each other over remaining loyal to their captain. Bly started swearing once again, God damn you! I'll sweat you for it! You can all go to hell! This was very far from the calm Captain Cook he had once admired. Nothing made sense to him. Sensible procedures had worked perfectly on the voyage out. Why couldn't they continue that way? Fletcher Christian tried to intervene, but that just made Bly angrier. He stormed his cabin. According to the carpenter, a William Purcell, Christian was in tears.

What's the matter, Mr. Christian? he asked. Can you ask me and hear the treatment I receive?' Christian answered. Purcell tried to console him, saying that he too had suffered blithe tongue-lashings, but that missed the difference between the two men. Since Purcell was a carpenter, he was protected by an admiralty warrant that kept him from being flogged. But Christian was only an acting lieutenant. His actual rank of master's mate meant that he could be whipped. Christian couldn't bear to imagine this humiliation. His brother was a Cambridge Don for goodness sake. If I should speak to Bly as you do, Christian told Purcell,

he would probably break me and perhaps flog me. It would be the death of us both. Bly was wild with rage. Christian was sick with fear. The journey ahead was due to last 12 more months. Cautionary Tales will return after the break. Most of the crew of the bounty was on Fletcher Christian's side. They couldn't bear to leave Tahiti behind, nor did they want a year stuck on board with

the increasingly violent Captain Blind. But to mutiny against the captain was immensely risky. Every sailor in Britain knew that the nation depended on foreign trade. That depended on the Navy. And the Navy depended on orders being followed. Break that and everything would crumble. As a result, the Royal Navy would chase any mutineers

to the ends of the earth, however long it took, however many ships needed to be sent. And mutineers, when found, would be brought back in chains and condemned and then hanged, their bodies left to rot, dangling as a warning to anyone else. Despite the incredible danger, most of the crew decided they had to get rid of Captain Bly. Once, the mutiny we began with, very early in the morning, on Tuesday, April 28, 1789, Fletcher Christian and several other conspirators got hold of the ship's musket and distributed them to their fellow mutineers.

Then they went to Bly's cabin. Before long, pandemonium had broken out, the entire ship awake, and the captain held at gunpoint. That's when Bly called out to Christian, for God's sake, drop it, you've danced my children on your knee. But it was no use. Christian ensured that Bly and the other crewmen the mutineers weren't convinced about

were pushed into the small open launch bobbing alongside. One of those with Bly called up, pleading for Fletcher Christian to stop. You know, Christian calmly replied, Captain Bly called up, pleading for Fletcher Christian to stop. You know, Christian calmly replied, that Captain Bly has treated me like a dog. I have been in hell. Christian must have felt some guilt, for he let Bly and the eighteen men with him take a compass, water, writing equipment, some cutlasses, and a few other items.

One of the men in the small launch tried to keep a rifle. Matthew Quintal, the young man Bly had flogged first on the voyage out from Britain, now had his chance. He was 100% on Christian's side and grabbed the gun back. The bounty sailed off. Christian was going to look for an isolated island, someplace the Royal Navy would never find them. Bly and his men could only watch it recede.

Its sails raised to catch the breeze, its deck high and majestic above the water. Their own launch was completely different. It was small, crowded, and rose only inches above the waterline. They couldn't head back to Tahiti, for it was likely Christian might head there first, leaving some armed men as a precaution. Everyone's assumption was that leaving Bly and these loyalists in the boat was simply a delayed death sentence. The nearest European settlement was Dutch Timor, over 3,000 miles away. No open boat like this small launch had ever crossed such a distance, not least without any proper map.

Yet, facing such hardship, Captain William Bly was in his element. He had a mission, a hard one admittedly, but he also had some tools – oars, and a compass, for materials to keep up a mast, and 18 men. Yelling and cursing would do nothing here. But calm analysis and rational, consistent action, he began a journal. As soon as I had time to reflect, Bly wrote, I found my mind most wonderfully supported and began to conceive hopes. Timor was 3,000 miles away, London 12,000. Get there, explain what happened to the Admiralty, and you could start again. Almost instantly, the old structure of command reappeared.

That's because everyone in the boat knew that only Bly had even the faintest chance of navigating their way back to safety. His personality flipped back, for in this setting, there was nothing to thwart his desire to show benevolent rationality could work. Bly worked out an ingenious way of stretching taut cloths above the launch's edge, raising the sides by several inches to help keep the waves at bay. He encouraged his men to tell stories about their past, joining in to tell his own. At night he led boat-wide singing. Bly also ensured

their food supplies were safely locked in the carpenter's chest, and created scales from coconut shells to weigh it out. Best of all, he helped the men sew a raggedy Union Jack flag out of scraps of signal flags found at the bottom of the launch. It was a reminder of home, and another way of boosting their confidence. They would need it, he said, to properly identify themselves when they reached port. It worked well.

After weeks of storms and constantly low rations, the men heard a strange roaring sound. Bly realized this meant they were almost upon the Great Barrier Reef. They needed to find an opening, and by now his men were unified to do exactly what he ordered. He had them row parallel to the reef, as fast as possible, till suddenly, when he identified what looked like an opening, he had them turn hard to cut through it.

Soon they were in calmer water and came to an island. There, safe discipline quickly broke down, and the helpful, encouraging William Bly became once again a furious man. Admittedly, he was provoked. The prime rule he set out when they landed was that they must keep any fires small in case potentially dangerous locals saw their camp.

Almost immediately, one sailor started a fire that blew out of control, sparking a grass blaze that was visible for miles. Another party had been sent out for turtles, but as the fire raged, they ran back to help put it out, and so they brought back no food. At another island, after Bly explained they needed to share any food they found, one man tried secretly to go hunting just on his own.

Bly beat him when he found out. Then the carpenter, William Purcell, also went out foraging. And when he came back, he insisted even more that he wasn't gonna share food he'd found. Bly yelled at him. Purcell yelled back. Bly had had enough. I determined to strike a final blow,

and either to preserve my command or die in the attempt. Seizing a cutlass, I ordered him to take hold of another and defend himself. That's Bly's version. But in a crew member's account, Bly was almost crazed, and when the men tried to call him off, he threatened them with death if they tried to intervene. Luckily, Purcell the Carpenter gave in before anyone was killed. And then, when they all returned to the launch, everything flipped back again. No one could start unapproved fires on their tiny boat,

no one was going to secretly search for their own food, and everyone depended on Bly to get them back. Although there were a few complaints at how low their rations were, no problems more serious than that arose. The entire launch went back to singing and storytelling, with Bly encouraging his men and tenderly taking care of those who fell ill. Until that is, they finally arrived in the safely populated island of Timor, with its large European settlement. Bly had accomplished one of the greatest feats of open-boat navigation ever recorded. But once on the way back to England, he and his men began arguing again, so much that

Bly ended up having the carpenter Purcell and another sailor arrested at Bayonet Point and held in irons for almost a month. When they finally reached Britain, the Royal Navy sent out teams to hunt the mutineers. A few were caught and ended up being hanged in London. Fletcher Christian and several of the others got away, safe at the isolated Pitcairn Island, where some of their descendants survive to this day. Bly himself undertook a second trip to Tahiti, this time with a substantial armed Marine Guard

to complete his mission of collecting breadfruit saplings. Since there was no threat to his authority, those voyages went well and he was back to being as reasonable and helpful as he'd been at his best. So what are the lessons? Well this and the last two episodes of Cautionary Tales, Investigating Fairness, drew on my friend David Bedanus' book, The Art of Fairness. And David is back with me now. David, after everything you've read and written about Captain Bly, what did you make of him as a person? You know, at first I thought the way Bly changed was pretty bizarre. But then I realized we all change, at least a little bit. It really does depend on circumstances.

The big question is how much. And that's where I saw that something we've both thought about comes up. What's that? Well, in both the writings we do, we work hard to tease out rational rules. It's the Enlightenment ideal that Captain Cook had. It's what William Bligh had too, when he wasn't acting up. For them, it was about ventilation and sleeping schedules and the like. For us, it's about behavioral economics.

Exactly. And I wonder, we try to find these insights, these principles that can help people. It's in our books. It's in all the cautionary tales. But what makes the final step happen? What makes people actually engage with those insights? And especially when they're under stress? Yeah, stress I think is a key idea. It sounds so simple, but sometimes you just need to mentally prepare yourself for this. You need to mentally rehearse. Loyal subscribers who subscribe to Pushkin Plus will have heard the story of the Tenerife air crash. There was a plane on fire on the

runway and some people got out and some people just froze. One of the explanations for why some people got out was because they'd thought about, well what happens if there is a problem? Where are the emergency exits? What would I do? If you thought about it, your mind, under pressure, may grab one of these useful scripts. If you thought about it, your mind under pressure may grab one of these useful scripts. If you haven't given it any thought and you're under intense pressure then your mind comes up with nothing and it's just like you're spinning and you're in neutral. So thinking through, you know, I'm going to have this conversation with a doctor about this diagnosis that I'm worried about. How do I want that conversation to

go? Or somebody might phone me and try to con me, or somebody might send me an email and try to con me. What am I going to do if that happens? If you recognise the patterns, it can really help. I guess Bly didn't really think it through. That was one of his problems. He didn't think through or didn't seem to think through what is going to happen if this is really going to fall apart? What is going to happen if my men don't respond to my rules? You know what it was. Bly had a single principle. Be rational and sensible. It would work for him. Clearly it would work for everybody.

All he thought about was that rule. It's like standing on a mountain and far, far away in the distance there's plateaus stretching on, but you can't see him. For Bly, those plateaus were the consequences. He wasn't thinking about the consequences. He had this rule. However, the way that other people felt when he enacted the rule, pfft, that was not his problem. But of course, it came back to leave him bobbing up and down

in a little boat in the sea. Well, we have now had three episodes of Cautionary Tales. We've investigated fairness in all three of them. We're going to have one more, the final of this series, looking at one further story from David Bidarnes' writings. And in that story, we're going to see how one woman wielded the techniques of fairness to shift the course of the largest empire the world has ever seen.

Thank you, David Bidarnes. Join us next time on Cautionary Tales. Cautionary Tales is written by me, Tim Harford, with Andrew Wright. This mini-series is based on David Bidarnes' book, The Art of Fairness. The power of decency in a world turned mean, and it was written with David Bedanis himself. For a full list of our sources, see the show notes at timharford.com. The show is produced by Alice Fiennes with Marilyn Rust.

The sound design and original music are the work of Pascal Wise. Sarah Nix edited the scripts. Cautionary Tales features the voice talents of Ben Crow, Melanie Guthridge, Stella Harford, Gemma Saunders and Rufus Wright. The show wouldn't have been possible without the work of Jacob Weisberg, Ryan Dilley, Greta Cohen, Eric Sandler, Carrie Brody, Christina Sullivan, Keira Posey and Owen Miller. Cautionary Tales is a production of Pushkin Industries. It's recorded at Wardour Studios in London by Tom Berry.

If you like the show, please remember to share, rate and review. It does really make a difference to us. And if you want to hear the show ad free, sign up to Pushkin Plus on the show page on Apple Podcasts or at pushkin.fm slash plus.