Empireland: How Imperialism Has Shaped Modern Britain

by Sathnam Sanghera

‘He put his hand on my shoulder and pulled me back,’ she recalled. ‘My shoe came off and I stopped. Of course, if he hadn’t done that I should undoubtedly have been killed; but I didn’t like it all the same, and got rid of him soon after.’

‘How come some ppl have no problem telling some ppl to “go back home” but ask them to repatriate one little thing from the British Museum and it’s all “This priceless inanimate object from someone else’s culture BELONGS HERE.”’

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 1723, the Daily Journal complained: ‘A great number of Blacks come daily into this city, so that ’tis thought in a short time, if they be not suppressed, the city will swarm with them.’

Meanwhile, in Volume 6 of the 1914 Oxford Survey of the British Empire, the very first ailment to be discussed in a chapter on ‘problems of health and acclimatization in the British dominions beyond the seas’ was alcoholism, ahead of tuberculosis, diphtheria, cholera and bubonic plague.fn2

‘Britain is hostile to people arriving in boats because Britain knows what happened when Britain arrived in other

It’s the British again. They have been bombing my family for over eighty years now. Four generations have lived and died with these unwanted visitors from Britain who come to pour explosives on us from the skies … I often wonder how they would feel if we had been bombing them in England every now and again from one generation to the next, if we changed their governments when it suited us. They say that their imperial era is over now. It does not feel that way when you hear the staccato crack of fireballs from the air. It is then that you dream of real freedom – in shaa’ allah – freedom from the RAF.

This sense of exceptionalism, a feeling that we are different, better than everyone else and therefore don’t necessarily have to obey the same rules, has seduced political leaders of all hues.

and the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts (which branded the letters ‘Society’ on to the flesh of their slaves).

‘I’ll be crucified for saying this but I believe that racism is very much part of the cultural DNA of this country, and probably has been since imperial times.’

And it has been revealed that Buckingham Palace barred ‘coloured immigrants or foreigners’ from serving in clerical roles in the royal household until at least the late 1960s.22

‘Do not do unto others what you would that they do not do unto you, lest you do unto yourself what you do unto others.’

seems we are incapable of doing anything as a nation nowadays without succumbing to self-doubt and endless hand-wringing.

‘people in this country have had enough of experts’;

‘Junius Asiaticus’ in the Public Advertiser describing him, after his appearance in Parliament, as ‘an obscure urchin, picked up, fostered and very unmeritedly raised to the highest pinnacle of affluence and pageantry by that deluded Company’, and ‘Gun’s’ letter’ also in the Public Advertiser attacking him even more ferociously: ‘If the opium has not blunted every nerve, if you have one more latent spark of feeling left in your whole frame, I will search out the place where it inhabits and plant a dagger there … I will not represent Your Lordship as the Conqueror of India but as a buyer and seller of salt … surrounded by the parade of government, and the ensigns of dignity and command. Your Lordship was making a riot in the streets of Calcutta, at the