Best books… Sathnam Sanghera
The journalist and author chooses his favourite books about the British empire. His latest, Empireland: How Imperialism Has Shaped Modern Britain, is published this week by Viking, priced at £18.99
Bloody Foreigners by Robert Winder, 2004 (Abacus, out of print). In peerless prose, Winder proffers a simple thesis that Britain is a nation of immigrants. From our German royal family to businesses created by Jews and Indians, we are, as a nation, in denial about the immigrant blood flowing through our veins. If there was one book I could wish onto the national curriculum, it would be this.
The Anarchy by William Dalrymple, 2019 (Bloomsbury £10.99). The East India Company was an unusual organisation, to say the least, beginning as a conventional trading corporation and becoming an aggressive colonial power. Dalrymple does a great job of explaining it all, in my single favourite book on Indian history.
The Trader, The Owner, The
Slave by James Walvin, 2007 (Vintage £12.99). Coming in at just over 250 pages, this is not the longest book on the subject. Nor is it the most famous. But in telling the stories of three men, Walvin deftly reveals how slavery, like so many aspects of empire, has been erased from the British consciousness and conscience.
The Pax Britannica Trilogy
by Jan Morris, 1968, 1973, 1978 (Faber £12.99 each). By her own admission, Morris was nostalgic about empire, and while I disagree with some of her conclusions, there is no doubt that she penned the single best narrative of Britain’s imperial adventures. No other writer has written so accessibly and elegantly about a complicated history that extended across five centuries.
Railways & The Raj by Christian Wolmar, 2017 (Atlantic Books £10.99). Approaching the subject not as an imperial historian, but as a specialist on transport, Wolmar dismantles the lie at the heart of a thousand documentaries: that the British bestowed railways on India in an act of benevolence. Every TV commissioner in Britain should be made to read this.