Empireland: How Imperialism Has Shaped Modern Britain

by Sathnam Sanghera

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.