Empireland: How Imperialism Has Shaped Modern Britain

by Sathnam Sanghera

But the problem is, if you don’t face up to these uncomfortable facts, you’ll never be able to navigate a path forwards.

At the same time, I hope this book has demonstrated how the British empire is absolutely embedded within us and how there are many more serious and troubling imperial legacies than statues of imperialists.

More problematic is that the museums which are so part of our national life refuse to engage honestly and sincerely with the question of how they obtained their imperial artefacts. The way we fail to acknowledge that we are a multicultural society because we had a multicultural empire makes our national conversations about race tragic and absurd. The manner in which our imperial history inspires a sense of exceptionalism results in dysfunctional politics and disastrous decision-making. Our collective amnesia about the fact that we were, as a nation, wilfully white supremacist and occasionally genocidal, and our failure to understand how this informs modern-day racism, are catastrophic.

But the term ‘decolonizing’ is terrible: campaigners might have a better chance of succeeding if they talked about widening curriculums rather than decolonizing them, for that is what decolonizing involves.

And while I’m glad empire gave us our multiculturalism, our internationalism and a certain tradition of anti-racism and laid the foundations of the welfare state, and while I delight in the fact that our language, art and cuisine reflect our complex history, our imperial legacies and the ways we fail to see them are a burden. At a time of division and anxiety, when we are living through some of the greatest upheavals in modern history, we can progress only if we confront them.

Others have elsewhere suggested that it is simply another way for a particular social class to hold on to power: accepting that there are historic reasons for racism means having to fight racism and improve racial equality and, therefore, give up power to disenfranchised groups. Or to put it more simply: if you control the past, you control the future.

world has enough for everyone’s needs, but not everyone’s greed’),