Empireland: How Imperialism Has Shaped Modern Britain

by Sathnam Sanghera

Many of us have learned more about British imperialism in a year or two of statuecide than we did during our entire schooling, but there seems to be a view that if you pull down enough statues/change enough names or fight to keep enough statues up/refuse to change names, you can delete or defend British imperialism.

But there is, of course, nothing more imperial than the most British drink of all: a cup of sweetened tea. After all, tea was originally a Chinese plant traded for opium grown in Bengal (and the subcontinent later grew tea itself); the sugar to sweeten it was originally cultivated by African slaves on West Indian plantations (and later by Indian indentured labourers).

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.

I have a GCSE in history under my belt, but it left me with little more than superficial knowledge of the world wars, the Tudors and Tollund Man.

The ‘Indian’ food in British curry houses is no such thing, rather a merging of dishes from different regions tweaked for a conservative British palate by mostly Bangladeshi chefs, but many of the staples of what is now our national cuisine – the pakoras, the samosas, the saag – are recognizably Punjabi.

What I learn leaves me bitter that my education didn’t instil this crucial knowledge into me, ashamed I didn’t find out about it myself, and the TV broadcast of my documentary reveals that I’m not alone in my ignorance. By far the most common response from viewers is ‘I had no idea’ and ‘I was taught nothing about empire at school,’

And as for the famous Koh-i-Noor diamond: far from being a celebratory reflection of great British–Sikh relations, the brutal truth is that it ended up in the Crown Jewels only after it had been seized from Maharajah Ranjit Singh’s family by the East India Company: the campaign to have it returned is very much alive.

Hundreds weren’t mowed down in parks, but our lives were circumscribed by racial violence of a colonial tenor, whether it was a white mob attacking a black household in Wolverhampton (1965), twelve discrete incidents in the city which included one where fourteen white men chanted ‘Powell’ at a black christening, inspired by Enoch Powell’s Rivers of Blood speech (1968), a judge at Birmingham Crown Court complaining that ‘roughing up of coloureds is almost a hobby in some parts of the Black Country’ (1973), five assaults on Indians in one week in Wolverhampton pubs (1976) and civil disturbances in Wolverhampton involving gratuitous police violence and football supporters sporting KKK-style hoods (1978).

A third imperial parallel lies in the discrimination Sikhs faced, along with other people of colour, in housing. In Amritsar in 1919, the British lived away from the ‘native city’ behind the ‘civil lines’, while elsewhere in India Britons talked about Indians living in ‘Black Town’ or the ‘native quarter’, reflecting a widespread attitude across empire that the ruling race should not mix with ‘darkies’ – an attitude that immigrants of my parents’ generation found themselves facing in Wolverhampton.

hundred council tenants holding an open-air meeting to protest at a decision to offer a one-bedroom flat to an Indian (1965),

We are, as a nation, rather smug about not having had formal racial segregation like the United States (in itself not much of a boast anyway), but you could argue it has operated informally for decades.

As the academic Shirin Hirsch puts it, Powell’s racial hierarchies were ‘framed by a history of British colonialism’, where white imperialists were seen to be guiding and protecting the dark ‘natives’.

Modern multiculturalism, in which, according to one dictionary definition, ‘all the different cultural or racial groups in a society have equal rights and opportunities, and none is ignored or regarded as unimportant’, was an impossibility for Powell, because it didn’t fit in with his views of how race worked in empire, where whites ruled over browns.

is also well known how empire is responsible for many of our intractable international disputes and crises, with Kwasi Kwarteng describing in Ghosts of Empire six cases where its impact is still felt most acutely – Iraq, Nigeria, Sudan, Hong Kong, Kashmir and Burma – the Tory politician going as far as to argue that ‘much of the instability in the world is a product of its legacy of individualism and haphazard policy-making’.

The tone and culture of empire varied wildly during its history. There was an extended period between 1660 and 1807 when Britain profiteered from the evils of the Atlantic slave trade, shipping around 3 million Africans to America, but then, after Parliament had outlawed slavery, it took a leading role in abolishing it.

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.

‘any study of imperialism embraces a range of controversial topics, including unequal power relations, nationalism, race, cultural confrontations, economics, warfare, and ideology.’

You can’t explore the issue casually, or express curiosity, or admit ignorance: you need to take sides.

It extends even to party politics, with former Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn announcing in the run-up to a general election that under his party children would be taught about the ‘historical injustice’ and ‘colonialism’ as part of the national curriculum,11 while Michael Gove announced early in his tenure as Secretary of State for Education that history lessons in schools needed to ‘celebrate’ the legacy of the British empire.

And there was no limit, seemingly, to what soldiers were willing to collect during war as curiosities. Simon J. Harrison tells us how in the nineteenth century British soldiers serving in the colonies sometimes even collected enemy body parts: when Hintsa, a chief of the Xhosa in the Sixth Frontier War of 1834–6 was killed, his ears were cut off as souvenirs, a military surgeon was seen trying to extract some of his teeth and someone even tried to cut out ‘the emblems of [Hintsa’s] manhood’.

programme’s obsession with the price achieved sits awkwardly with the fact that up to 3,000 Tibetans were killed on the expedition, that one private described the Tibetans being ‘knocked over like skittles’ by the British Maxim guns, and that a monk who tried to avenge the killing of a brother was hanged, his body left strung up for twenty-four hours as ‘a warning to others’.

Public museums and botanic gardensfn2 grew as empire grew, the practice of collecting, in the words of Michael Carrington, being ‘institutionalized and symptomatic of the British imperial state’s desire for artefacts with which to provide information about “exotic” societies.

This particular institution may be described online as ‘one of the top five least visited museums in Britain’, but it is by no means typical: the UK’s fifteen taxpayer-funded national museums, which together hold 100 million objects,7 including significant amounts of imperial loot, sit at the very heart of British cultural life.

Sporting a badge proclaiming ‘display it like you stole it’, Procter challenges the use of the word ‘donated’ in the museum description, arguing that ‘the label doesn’t say how it was taken and why … the Rapa Nui people see it as stolen and as a living ancestor.’

Then there is the Kayung totem pole, a 12-metre pole made by the Haida people of the American Pacific North-West, on display in the Great Court: Procter takes issue with its indoor location – ‘it is divided from its original context’ – and with the fact that the museum signage doesn’t make clear that the village it was taken from had been abandoned because ‘the population was decimated by successive smallpox epidemics in the late 1800s, introduced by colonizers.’

Some things don’t matter because of their monetary worth or academic value, they matter because they tell people who they are.

The desire to hold on to things even when you don’t value them enough to show them is surely an attitude that goes back to empire.

Germany too has agreed to make a concerted effort to repatriate items taken during colonialization, and has indicated it will begin restituting its Benin bronzes to Nigeria – bronzes which were originally looted by British soldiers in an 1897 punitive expedition which saw the Benin Royal Palace being ransacked and set alight.

We Are Here Because You Were There

Empire is why in the 1970s, as my siblings grew up, Britain wrestled with the question of what to do about the 60,000 Ugandan Asians expelled by President Idi Amin and what to do about the 23,000 Kenyan Asians driven out due to trading bans on Asian citizens.

Empire is why thousands of Somalis, Palestinians, Kurds, Iraqis, Tanzanians, Nigerians settled here and empire is largely why according to the 2011 Census people from Asian ethnic groups make up 7.5 per cent of the population, black ethnic groups make up 3.3 per cent, why, according to a study from the University of Manchester, white Britons are now a minority in Leicester, Luton and Slough and why, according to some estimates, ethnic minorities could account for almost a third of the population by 2050.

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 twenty-first century it has continued to be perpetuated in the way public figures of colour are still told to ‘go home’ on a daily basis on social networks, in endless talk of ‘second-generation immigrants’ (how can you be an immigrant if you were born here?), in the fact that Shamima Begum, one of three schoolgirls who left London to join the Islamic State group in Syria in 2015, could have her British citizenship casually removed by politicians and in the recent Windrush scandal which saw British subjects who had arrived before 1973, in particular those of Caribbean origin, refused benefits, legal rights and medical care before facing deportation.

The West Indians and South Asians who were arriving were thought of as postwar migrants rather than imperial subjects with a long history connecting them to Britain.’

Soon, the newly formed NHS, as well as companies such as London Transport, would advertise for workers in former imperial territories, sometimes offering sweeteners in the form of loans for travel fares. The Minister of Health at this time, driving the NHS overseas recruitment scheme? None other than that familiar paradox … Enoch Powell.

Health workers in Britain’s former empire answered this appeal to such a degree that in 2003 it was claimed that in the Rhondda Valley, in Wales, nearly three-quarters of all GPs had South Asian origins.7

In short, some black and Asian people were simply allowed to come to Britain – as was their legal right at the time as British citizens.

So it’s not only true that many came to fill labour shortages, and help rebuild Britain after the war, but many also came because centuries of imperialism had tied them to Britain and ultimately made them citizens.

As it happens, I’m no fanatical supporter of pure multiculturalism. I don’t think communities should be left alone to become isolated and myopic. I know from my own family’s experience that the people who suffer most if they don’t integrate, if they don’t learn English, if they live in ghettos, if they insist on practices such as FGM and forced marriages, are immigrants themselves.

In the ‘debate’ about multiculturalism, almost all the pressure is put on immigrant communities, to integrate, to pass citizenship tests, to learn English and to accept certain national values. But the ‘host’ society has responsibilities too. Chief among them, in the case of Britain, is surely to acknowledge that brown people are here because Britain, at best, had close relationships with its colonies for centuries, which included millions of the colonized putting their lives on the line for Britain during two world wars, or because Britain, at worst, violently repressed and exploited its colonies for centuries.

Mahomed’s very existence challenged the idea that has been hammered into me my entire life: that brown people are relatively recent interlopers. It’s a narrative propounded in multiple ways: through the complete absence of ethnic figures in my history education (the closest thing we got to anyone with a tan was the Tollund Man), through the elision of ethnic figures in my extended literary education (aside from Othello and Man Friday in Robinson Crusoe, a brown character didn’t appear in any of my literary studies, until I was allowed, for one term during the final year of my Literature degree, to study fiction published after 1970), through the consistent whiteness of museum and art gallery exhibitions (I was so excited when the V&A did an exhibition on the Sikhs in 1999 that I visited three times and bought the book and poster), through our absence in local history books (as Shirin Hirsch puts it: ‘In nostalgic histories such as Wolverhampton Memories the photographs show only white residents.

If I had been taught about these amazing characters, instead of endlessly being fed the idea that my family and I were some kind of novel social experiment, interlopers in a white country, it would have made a huge difference to my sense of belonging.

In fact, after the war, the appeal for foreign workers was targeted primarily at white Europeans, as well as refugees from the Soviet Union and other Communist states – after the failed 1956 revolution in Hungary, some 14,000 of its people came to Britain – and even some German prisoners of war. And if there is one book I could wish on to the national curriculum, it would be Bloody Foreigners by Robert Winder.

idea that black and Asian families had served this nation due to a historical connection, let alone that we owed them something after empire had colonized their countries, was absent from the conversation.

According to a 2014 study by the international relocation company Robinsons, which questioned 1,000 UK expats about their life overseas, ‘a quarter of Britons living overseas socialise mainly with fellow expats, and have no friends from their adopted country,’ with expats living in Africa and the United Arab Emirates being the least integrated. This contrasts sharply not only with the attitude of foreigners who relocate to Britain for work (according to the latest HSBC Expat Explorer survey, the UK is the top location for expats to socialize with locals over fellow expats), but it also contrasts with what we expect of immigrants to this country, who are endlessly instructed to integrate.

Then we have the famous and, it turns out, historical British resistance to foreign food. The sight of a British tourist tucking into a full English or fish and chips in a foreign location, literally not even doing as the Romans do when they’re in Rome, is a routine feature of modern tourism, with a recent study conducted by the flight-comparison site Jetcost confirming my worst suspicions. Apparently, almost half of Britons don’t try the local cuisine when on holiday, two-thirds of Brits will go looking for a takeaway from a brand they recognize, and one in ten British people admit to spending most of their holiday in a pub, with just 10 per cent eating local food every day.

‘Most people find coming home to be a more difficult transition than going abroad’).

‘I never felt entirely myself till I had put at least the Channel between my native country and me.’

In the nineteenth century, cities such as Singapore and Macao were melting pots for sexual liaisons between ‘natives’ and Europeans new to empire. By the twentieth century, there was even a new generation of mixed-race children such as in Rangoon, Burma, where a school was specifically built in order to educate children fathered by whites.

‘Britain has spread venereal disease around the globe along with its racecourses and botanical gardens, barracks and jails, steam engines and law books.’