A review of the important book “Empireland” by Sathnam Sanghera
The history of Britain is not simply an account of what has happened in Britain but of Britain’s action’s outside its island borders. We know that when it comes to wars, especially when we were victors, as in the Napoleonic-era battles of Trafalgar and Waterloo and our decisive role in the two World Wars. But we are still reluctant to embrace a full account of Britain’s role in empire and to appreciate – to use the sub-title of this book – “how imperialism has shaped modern Britain”.Sanghera is the son of Indian Punjabi immigrant parents and was brought up as a Sikh in Wolverhampton. He has had a successful career as a journalist on the “Financial Times” and the “Times” and here he has written a balanced and accessible assessment of how Britain behaved over the three centuries that it created and managed the largest empire in world history and how even today that experience profoundly shapes everything from the number of our stately homes, the frequency of celebratory memorials and the content of many of our museums to our attitudes to race, immigration and Brexit to our passion for cricket and public schools.
Sanghera is not an academic, but his research has been prodigious and his bibliography runs to just over 50 pages and then there are another 30 pages of notes. His work is very readable, but he does have a trademark style of writing which frequently involves very long sentences. These sentences are immensely informative and grammatically well-constructed, but they are l-o-n-g.
I learned a lot. I knew about the Indian Uprising of 1857 and the Amitsar/Jallianwala Bagh massacre of 1919, but I had not heard of such incidents as the Vellore Mutiny of 1806, the Morant Bay Rebellion of 1865, Britain’s incursion into Ethiopia in 1868, and its invasion of Tibet in 1903. I knew that empire had involved brutality, but much of the detail in Sanghera’s book is truly shocking.
Sanghera notes that too many Britons indulge in a kind of “imperial nostalgia”, that empire was overwhelmingly decent, and “imperial exceptionalism”, that we are better than everyone else. He highlights the “imperial amnesia” of opponents of immigration who seem to forget that “we are here because you were there”. He has a whole chapter on “selective amnesia”, so that we take pride in being the first major nation to make the slave trade illegal, while forgetting that this country was the leading proponent and a major beneficiary of that slave trade, and we laud our role in the two world wars, while overlooking the major contribution of our empire’s black and brown citizens in those conflicts.
He insists that: “Our collective amnesia about the fact that we were, as a nation, wilfully white supremacist and occasionally genocidal, and our failure to understand how this informs modern-day racism, are catastrophic.”
Rightly I believe, Sanghera attributes a good deal of British exceptionalism to “the fact that we have not, as a nation, been invaded or occupied in modern times” (in fact, for a millennium – can this be said of any other nation?). He asserts: “If we don’t confront the reality of what happened in British empire, we will never be able to work out who we are or who we want to be”.
As a answer to this lacuna in our understanding of British history, Sanghera toys with the idea of an Empire Awareness Day (he points out that we used to have an Empire Day from 1916 to 1958), but his main call is for a substantial revision of the syllabus in our schools for history and associated subjects. This would be welcome but the impact would gradual and slow. I would like Britain to have a National History Museum in which our colonial enterprise is made plain and set in the wider and longer story of our nation.