The impact of Empire was shameful but complicated argues a new book

EMPIRELAND – HOW IMPERIALISM HAS SHAPED MODERN BRITAIN

Sathnam Sanghera

Viking, £18.99

REVIEW BY IAIN MACWHIRTER

WAS the British Empire good or bad? Nowadays, it is generally thought that the Empire, which once encompassed a quarter of the globe, was a thoroughly bad thing.

It was white supremacy, racism, colonial exploitation, outright theft and too many atrocities to mention. And it lives with us today, immortalised in the shape of those much-maligned statues of imperialists like Cecil Rhodes and the slave trader, Edward Colston, who ended up in a Bristol dock during a Black Lives Matter protest.

So, it might seem surprising that the novelist and Times columnist, Sathnam Sanghera, begins his account of the lingering legacy of Empire by stating very firmly that it is “puerile” to ask whether the British Empire was good or bad. “You can’t apply modern ethics to the past,” he writes, echoing the Scottish historian Sir Tom Devine.

Mind you he then proceeds to give a comprehensive listing of all the bad, very bad and even genocidal things that were done in the name of Empire, from stealing the Koh-i-Noor diamond to the Amritsar massacre, from the Bengal famine to settler genocide in Tasmania. The biggest badness of all was, of course, slavery: the transportation of some three million black African slaves often by British ships, to plantations in the West Indies and America, often run by Brits, including Scots.

He is gracious enough to concede that the British Empire “not only ended its own slave trade but enforced its abolition across the world”. He also credits 18th-century abolitionists, like William Wilberforce, with “providing the model for countless social justice campaigns that followed”. He doesn’t expand on this however in a book which claims, essentially, that Britain is still racist to the core and that “historical amnesia” about the evils of Empire is the root of it.

But it has always struck me as one of the more remarkable aspects of the British Empire that it devoted so much of its wealth to abolishing chattel slavery, and its naval might to opposing the transportation of African slaves. This began 200 years ago when most countries still regarded slavery as an inevitable fact of life. Britain was also unusual in deciding to give up most of its empire in the 20th century largely without a fight – beginning with Australia, New Zealand and Canada in the 1930s, then India and Africa in the “winds of change” years after the Second World War.

Of course, by the 20th century, the British ruling classes had been converted to free trade, and arguably created an informal empire by dominating world markets for industrial goods. Imperialism was never really about slavery, or colonisation, as Sanghera also concedes, but about business. The Brits rather stumbled into an empire by accident rather than design.

Indeed, he questions whether the conquest was even properly imperial, since the British Empire relied on co-opting local elites into managing and administering it, especially in India.

This was how a small country with an army of only 250,000 managed to control an empire so vast that somewhere in the world, the sun was always shining upon it.

Yet Empireland is less concerned with these historical questions than with calling out contemporary Britain for being enduringly racist. “The British Empire explains our particular brand of racism,” writes Sanghera. That racism existed, and still does, is of course undeniable. British imperialists tended to regard their “white race” as superior. This percolated down through British society in the form of contempt for people derided as “wogs”.

However, the Empire’s impact was complex. As far as the British working class is concerned, the experience of Empire arguably made them less racist. The Chartist and early Labour movements were avowedly anti-racist and campaigned vigorously against British imperialism. So indeed, did the Liberal prime minister, William Gladstone. Then there was the mass participation of colonial soldiers in two world wars, which Sanghera sees as an early version of multiculturalism.

Certainly, legacies of Empire abound – even in language. (The word “loot” for instance, comes from the Punjabi word