Empireland: How Imperialism Has Shaped Modern Britain

by Sathnam Sanghera

But what if this ‘national identity’ embraced a simple truth: that black and Asian people had been made citizens through the imperial project? What if we accepted that, ultimately, multiculturalism is, in the words of the Jamaican poet, actor and broadcaster Louise Bennett, just ‘colonizin’ … in reverse’? The ‘debate’ would be instantly transformed. As it happens, I’m no

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Then we have the awkward fact that the thirst for travel inspired by empire has not necessarily made us tolerant of immigrants who themselves came from the empire, a tendency that podcaster Helen Zaltzman picked up on when she tweeted: ‘Britain is hostile to people arriving in boats because Britain knows what happened when Britain arrived in other countries in boats.’ The legacies of empire run deep and are sometimes contradictory. The pulling down of statues may have created the popular idea that one can erase or retain the values of empire by pulling monuments down or keeping them up, but imperialism exists within us in much more complicated ways.

immigration