Empireland: How Imperialism Has Shaped Modern Britain

by Sathnam Sanghera

BBC sketch show Goodness Gracious Me – a man who insists that just about everything comes from India or was invented by Indians, including William Shakespeare, Cliff Richard and the British royal family, often to the vexation of his more

knowledgeable son. At its hardest, identifying legacies of imperialism can feel like you’re attempting the historical equivalent of demonstrating that a baked cake contains eggs: they’re probably in there, but it’s hard to prove, and there’s no getting over the awkward fact that some perfectly delicious cakes don’t actually contain any egg whatsoever.

how much British empire shaped Britain itself is yet another area of heated debate among imperial historians – so entrenched that the dispute has its...

Warren Hastings expressed dismay at how the Company was looting Bengal, writing in 1762 of ‘the oppression carried out under the sanction of the English name’

Every man who wears a hat, as soon as he gets free from Calcutta becomes a sovereign prince.’

According to the Museums Association, eight of the UK’s top ten visitor attractions are museums and three British museums are among the top ten most visited museums worldwide.

global effort to track and reinstate India’s stolen heritage’ and encourages supporters to photograph cartoon speech balloons or ‘agony shrieks’ erupting from the mouths of questionable museum artefacts, so that social networks are flooded with statues asking to be rescued.

There was a campaign that emerged briefly on Twitter to change the name of the British Museum to ‘the Museum of Empire,

Colonialism and Migration’ (a rather overambitious aim given that no serious person has ever claimed that everything in these museums is imperial loot).

The discomfort in Britain was acute. William Gladstone, the Prime Minister, told the House of Commons that he ‘deeply lamented, for the sake of the country, and for the sake of all concerned, that these articles … were thought fit to be brought away by a British army’. He urged that they ‘be held only until they could be restored’. When, in the summer of 1902, the Ethiopian Prince Ras Makonnen came to England for the coronation of King Edward VII and saw some of the manuscripts owned by Lady Meux, who resided at Theobald’s Park, he, according to The Times, knelt down and prayed for the souls of the ancestors who had once owned them and burst into tears.

would repatriate any items his country had taken from Africa and commissioned a report on the Restitution of African Cultural Heritage by the Senegalese academic and writer Felwine Sarr and the French art historian Bénédicte Savoy, which formulated measures for restitutions of collections in France to their countries of origin.