Empireland: How Imperialism Has Shaped Modern Britain

by Sathnam Sanghera

There are intense disagreements about what happened during empire and what it means. Frankly, it’s difficult to find any aspect of empire that isn’t subject to animated academic argument. Was 1783 the point when the first empire became the second empire, or was there an overlap? There are reams of articles and books taking opposite positions, and some arguing that there was such a thing as a third empire. When did empire reach its peak? Jan Morris says it was in 1933 when it became ‘the greatest expanse of territory ever presided over by one ruler in the history of mankind’, while the 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 and misleading. History and the people who made it were complicated. You can’t apply modern ethics to the past. To read history as a series of events that instil