Empireland: How Imperialism Has Shaped Modern Britain

by Sathnam Sanghera

imperialism has shaped modern Britain, I find myself wishing a new one into existence: Empire Awareness Day.

For one day a year, instead of being taught French or Spanish, the children of Britain could instead be instructed on how the English language itself exists as a living monument to Britain’s deep and complex relationship with the world through empire.

for example, ‘the fortieth part of a rupee’ and so low in value that it led to Britons in India employing the phrase ‘I won’t give a dumri,’ which in turn led to the popular expression ‘I don’t give a dam[n].

n].’ And ‘Juggernaut’ is a corruption of the Sanskrit ‘Jagannatha’,

‘Zombie’ is of West African origin (‘In the West Indies and southern states of America, a soulless corpse said to have been revived by witchcraft; formerly, the name of a snake-deity in voodoo cults of or deriving from West Africa and Haiti’).

The popularity of South Asian textiles was boosted by the British royal family, with Queen Victoria accepting a shawl from the Maharajah of Kashmir each year, and Kashmiri shawl fabric becoming so important that when the Kashmir Valley was officially annexed to the empire in 1846, the treaty stated that the local maharajah was to pay a yearly tribute of ‘one horse, twelve shawl goats … and three pairs of Kashmir shawls’.3

Kate Teltscher explains that the expense of the genuine article led to the creation of a domestic shawl industry in Norwich

Paisley that ‘copied Indian designs at a fraction of the price’.

one of the ships, which measured the length and height of the Liberty building, being HMS Hindustan.4

(the British Museum not only housing a load of imperial loot but being founded on the original collection of Sir Hans Sloane, whose fortune came from marrying the widow of a plantation owner)

The tearing down in Bristol of the statue of Edward Colston, some of whose wealth came directly from the slave trade, which he personally oversaw as Deputy Governor of the Royal African

Bristol is also the city from which the pioneer John Cabot set sail in 1497 in one of the voyages that arguably laid the foundations for the British empire.

in Belfast, Empire Awareness Day participants could be encouraged to visit Bombay Street, Kashmir Street, Cawnpore Street, Lucknow Street and Benares Street, all named in celebration of famous campaigns of the British empire, with nests of similar imperial street names existing across Britain,

This converged with the growing acceptance of eugenics – the idea that the success of the nation depended on breeding and maintaining a healthy Anglo-Saxon ‘stock’.

spotting the potential of rum, British merchants turned it from a niche Caribbean drink

into a global phenomenon; and the great British gin

and tonic originally became popular among the British abroad when they learned that the quinine in tonic...

comedy Spanish Fly observing that ‘gin and tonic was the cornerstone of the British empire’. Played by Terry-Thomas, the character continued: ‘The empire was built on gin and tonic. Gin to figh...

For instance, our very first official police system was tried out in Ireland before being initiated in Britain in 1829; fingerprinting was developed in India as a tool to control the population, before being brought to Britain to be used in the detection of crimes;fn3

Queen Victoria being dubbed ‘Empress of India’ (in 1876)

Empire Marketing Board came up with the notion of the ‘Empire pudding’ for the royal family,

Empire explains the feeling that we are exceptional and can go it alone when it comes to everything from Brexit to dealing with global pandemics.

And in Britain, even the imperialist Winston Churchill famously described the incident as ‘monstrous’, while the Labour politician J. C. Wedgwood declared it had ‘destroyed our reputation throughout the world … and damns

Although eventually forced to resign by the Army Council, Dyer was subsequently effectively exonerated by the House of Lords, and the Morning Post, which was eventually absorbed into the Daily Telegraph, started a public fund to support him. Contributors to the fund, who included Rudyard Kipling and ‘one who remembers 1857’, raised £26,000 (the equivalent today of £4.4

where a British missionary, Marcia Sherwood, had been attacked in the riots that preceded the massacre, which led Dyer to pronounce that the area should be turned into a ‘sacred space’. He had already subjected Amritsar to collective punishment for what he considered an uprising: both the water and electricity supplies to the city had been cut off and all Indians

were subject to flogging if they did not salute/salaam to every Englishman they encountered.

As Kim points out in his book, this method of punishment is reminiscent of the British response to the Siege of Cawnpore in 1857, when General

Neill forced Indian prisoners to lick up the blood in the house where British women and children had been killed, essentially an exercise in ritualized racial humiliation.

Nevertheless, when he stood as a Conservative MP in the general election of 1951, his election address featured the declaration that ‘I BELIEVE IN THE BRITISH EMPIRE. Without the empire, Britain would be like a head without a body.’

The historian William Dalrymple has pointed out that while the East India Company

was the prototype for many of today’s joint-stock corporations, it has no contemporary equivalent: Walmart, one of the biggest companies in the world, does not own nuclear submarines; Facebook doesn’t possess infantry.

Africans to America, but then, after Parliament had outlawed slavery, it took a leading role in abolishing it. There was a long period when missionaries were discouraged, for fear that they might disrupt the imperialists’ work, but then missionaries were encouraged, with empire beginning to see itself as a civilizing mission.

great territorial conquest in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries which historians often refer to as ‘New Imperialism’, and which Sir

Henry Campbell-Bannerman, the Liberal Prime Minister of the United Kingdom from 1905 to 1908, called ‘the vulgar and bastard imperialism of irritation and provocation and aggression … of grabbing everything even if we have

no use for it ourselves’, but there were also times when the public were oblivious to Bri...

Conservative Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli, who in 1877 had Queen Victoria proclaimed as Empress of India and ensured celebrations were held to mark the fact in Delhi, in what is known as the Delhi Durbar.

Liberal heavyweight William Gladstone. Gladstone, who served four terms as Prime Minister between 1868 and 1894, famously complained that in South Africa 10,000 Zulus had been slaughtered ‘for no other offence than their attempt to defend against your artillery with their naked bodies, their hearths and homes, their wives and families’,

Gladstone urged people to ‘Remember the rights of the savage! Remember that the happiness of his humble home, remember that the sanctity of life in the hill villages of Afghanistan … is as inviolable in the eye of Almighty God as is your own!’10

Edmund Burke led the attack on Hastings and in his opening speech labelled him variously ‘a robber’, ‘a professor, a doctor upon the subject of crime’, ‘a rat’, ‘a weasel’, ‘a keeper of a pigsty, wallowing in corruption’, and charged him ‘with injustice and treachery against the faith of nations … With various instances of extortion and other deeds of maladministration … With impoverishing and depopulating the whole country … with a wanton, and unjust, and pernicious, exercise of his powers’.fn3

National Archives rather vaguely claim that ‘the British empire reached its height in the 1920s and 1930s’, and other experts give different dates. Then there is the biggest argument of all: was the British empire good or bad? This ‘balance sheet’ view of history, with ‘colonial crimes’ such as the use of poison gas and the deaths of millions in famines being weighed against the supposed elimination of ‘native crimes’ such as sati, foot-binding, infanticide, slavery and cannibalism, is futile

You can’t apply modern ethics to the past.

One of the few things historians actually agree upon is that empire was both unplanned and a nebulous construct. Unlike history’s other famous empires – Rome’s being the most obvious example – it was never a legal entity, and had no constitution or emperor issuing top-down laws.

The Penguin Historical Atlas of the British Empire claims that ‘From the 1560s there was a growing support in England for colonization as a source of wealth and important commodities, national prestige and strategic security, partly through the spread of Protestantism in a Roman Catholic world.’

When Queen Elizabeth signed the charter of the East India Company on the last day of 1600, she did so, according to the History Channel, ‘hoping to break the Dutch monopoly of the spice trade in what is now Indonesia’. Other explanations include exploration for the sake of exploration, the desire to participate in the profitable trade of slavery, the desire to emigrate, opportunism, idealism.

Back in 1898, the historian Sir Keith Hancock described imperialism as ‘a pseudo-concept which sets out to make

everything clear and ends by making everything muddled: it is a word for the illiterates of social science’.

In 1914, H. G. Wells stated that the empire had ‘no economic, no military, no racial, no religious unity. Its only conceivable unity is a unity of language and purpose and outlook.’

Sir John Seeley, the founding father of British imperial history, who asserted in The Expansion of England that ‘the British empire was acquired in a fit of absence of mind’, arguing, as many have since, that empire was a bunch of accidents, errors and unintentional consequences, and responses to accidents, errors and unintentional consequences.fn4

He also insisted that ‘England underwent no organic change as the mistress of a world empire.’13

Simon Schama has made in relation to the removal of colonial statues: ‘History is argument.’