Empireland: How Imperialism Has Shaped Modern Britain

by Sathnam Sanghera

Empire explains the global pretensions of our Foreign and Defence secretaries. 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. Empire helped to establish the position of the City of London as one of the world’s major financial centres, and also ensures that the interests of finance trump the interests of so many other groups in the twenty-first century. Empire explains how some of our richest families and institutions and cities became wealthy. Empire explains our particular brand of racism, it explains our distrust of cleverness, our propensity for jingoism. Let’s face it, imperialism is not something that can be erased with a few statues being torn down or a few institutions facing up to their dark pasts or a few accomplished individuals declining an OBE; it exists as a legacy in my very being and, more widely, explains nothing less than who we are as a nation.

Empire explains the global pretensions of our Foreign and Defence secretaries. 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. Empire helped to establish the position of the City of London as one of the world’s major financial centres, and also ensures that the interests of finance trump the interests of so many other groups in the twenty-first century. Empire explains how some of our richest families and institutions and cities became wealthy. Empire explains our particular brand of racism, it explains our distrust of cleverness, our propensity for jingoism. Let’s face it, imperialism is not something that can be erased with a few statues being torn down or a few institutions facing up to their dark pasts or a few accomplished individuals declining an OBE; it exists as a legacy in my very being and, more widely, explains nothing less than who we are as a nation.

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 pride and shame, or a balance of rights and wrongs, is as inane as listing the events in your own life as good and bad.

Given that some imperial legacies are easier to isolate than others, however, it makes sense to begin with one of the most tangible: the mounds of items stolen in such quantities from empire that the Hindi word for ‘spoils of war’ – lut – had by the 1850s entered the English language in the form of ‘loot’.

Britain has long struggled to accept the imperial explanation for its racial diversity. The idea that black and brown people are aliens who arrived without permission, and with no link to Britain, to abuse British hospitality is the defining political narrative of my lifetime.

In the imperial imagination, there are only two states: dominant and submissive, colonizer and colonized. This dualism lingers. If England is not an imperial power, it must be the only other thing it can be: a colony.’

‘What is very remarkable about German history as a whole is that the Germans use their history to think about the future, where the British tend to use their history to comfort themselves.’

But the problem is, if you don’t face up to these uncomfortable facts, you’ll never be able to navigate a path forwards. Freudian psychoanalysts believe that if you deny or repress a traumatic experience, you risk acting out versions of the original trauma in ways that can be self-defeating. 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.

If I were forced to proffer a view on what to do about controversial colonial statues, I would back a suggestion from Robert Winder – that we establish an annual, Spanish-style festival where we pelt the statues we most dislike with tomatoes. It would be fun, therapeutic, educational, those participating wouldn’t stand accused of ‘deleting history’, and we could invest more serious intellectual energy into these bigger issues and into navigating the vicious culture war that has more recently developed around the topic of empire.

Or to put it more simply: if you control the past, you control the future.

The book explains how the Germans have a word – Vergangenheitsaufarbeitung, which translates as ‘working off the past’ – to describe how they have come to terms with Nazism and the Holocaust in a deep and systematic way.