The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Review
Laying the ghost of empire to rest
This is an eye-opening history – but it is wrong to think most Brexiteers still nurse imperial fantasies
EMPIRELAND by Sathnam Sanghera
320pp, Viking, T £16.99 (0844 871 1514), RRP £18.99, ebook £9.99
Telegraph readers might be inclined to overlook Empireland because it’s praised on the cover by Lefty shock jock James O’Brien (death by endorsement) but, trust me, it’s better than that. The subject is timely. With statues being tossed in rivers and the National Trust accused of going woke, it feels as if the Right regards the past as the repository of civilisation and the Left sees it as a closet packed with skeletons of dead racists, but the reality of the British Empire, says Sathnam Sanghera, was infinitely more complex.
It was acquired, as Sir John Seeley famously described it, “in a fit of absence of mind”. Far from a coherent project, let alone a conspiracy, Sanghera calls it “unplanned” and “nebulous… it was never a legal entity, and had no constitution or emperor issuing top-down laws”. It was also controversial in its own time. When Robert Clive, the man credited with laying the foundations of the empire in India, died in 1774, he was buried in an unmarked grave; his crimes had been so great, said Samuel Johnson, that his conscience compelled him to cut his own throat.
The cultural treasures looted by Britain, now sitting in our museums, were recognised by contemporaries for what they were: booty. At the conclusion to the Mahdist War (1881-99) in East Africa, the Mahdi’s tomb was raided and his skull presented to Lord Kitchener as a gift, who toyed with turning it into an “ink stand or drinking cup” before depositing it with the College of Surgeons, an episode that Queen Victoria regarded as embarrassingly medieval. Throughout the 1846-7 Xhosa War in South Africa, “heads were taken and traded as souvenirs”.
There were imperial projects of enlightenment and improvement, yes, and many Britons so fell in love with cultures they encountered that they “went native” – for good and ill. By the 1880s, almost half the British troops in parts of Bengal had an STD. One British officer, far from the embodiment of the “stiff upper lip”, attempted sexual intercourse with literally everything he encountered, animal or mineral, including “a papaya, which proved more satisfying than a melon”.
I am sold on the larger part of Sanghera’s thesis, that the empire could be rotten and we don’t know enough about it. I’m not sold on the claim that no doubt attracts O’Brien, that empire is the fantasy that fuelled Brexit. Brexit, Remainers often say, was informed by a myth of British exceptionalism, that because we once ran large parts of the world, we thought we didn’t need Europe and could go it alone.
To prove this, the author quotes a lot of Boris Johnson, an admirer of Churchill who recites Kipling, but the PM is the product of a very unusual public school education – and Brexit was made possible by the support of the working-class, many of whom have never travelled further afield than the Costa del Sol. We are invited to swallow the paradox that the general public are simultaneously ignorant of empire and obsessed with it.
If we are uneducated – and a lot of what Sanghera documents is news
People object to the past being invoked to compel them to act in a certain way
to me – then I’d add that there’s a lot that defines us that we don’t know about, such as the Vikings, the civil war or the Wycliffe Bible. Historical amnesia is not limited to the long 19th century. But the Left focuses on that period, with some justification, because modern Britain emerged from the twin experiences of industry and colonisation, hence empire speaks to our contemporary concerns around class and race.
We are, as Sanghera notes, a multicultural country thanks to empire, yet the empire was also “a wilful, unapologetic exercise in white racial supremacy” that dehumanised black people “on a super-industrial scale”. Whites were persuaded that they were top of the food chain and had a Godgiven right to be in charge – yet also, when the colonised began to migrate here, vulnerable to invasion.
Travel beyond the playing fields of Eton, however, and you’ll find that many people voted for Brexit not to run the world but step back from it, to work on unfinished business back home. Granted, a lot of far-Right boobs backed Brexit, but so did plenty of moderates, some
socialists and a roughly a quarter of non-white voters. If they wanted to turn the clock back to any particular moment, it was probably the 1950s, to an imagined time of safe streets and strong communities – to welfare state Britain, not the buccaneering British Empire. A far greater shadow is cast over the present by the Second World War, which is popularly remembered not as a defence of empire (which it was) but as a fight for democracy against fascism – against imperialism, if you will.
Sanghera’s point, I guess, is that we are unconscious citizens of Empireland: empire made us, whether we realise it or not. He might be correct, but no one likes being told “I know you better than you know yourself ”, and I suspect that the reason why many take offence at the attempt to “decolonise” high streets or the school curriculum is not because they are protective of empire but because they see it as an attempt to politicise their culture and daily life. They also suspect that history is
being invoked to compel us to think or behave a certain way, that because Britain is guilty of crimes in the past, we must shuffle into the future with an embarrassed air, perpetually voting for whatever liberals want, to prove that we aren’t as bad as our ancestors were.
The history is on Sanghera’s side. The facts speak for themselves. But just as the history of empire cannot be reduced, like Sanghera insists, to simple binaries of good vs evil, nor can the dynamics of historical memory.