EMPIRELAND
HOW IMPERIALISM HAS SHAPED MODERN BRITAIN
SATHNAM SANGHERA
Viking, 320pp, £18.99
A journalist for the Times, Sanghera is a Sikh with Punjabi ancestors and
Empireland is the product of Sanghera’s mission to decolonise himself. Gerard Degroot, the reviewer in Sanghera’s own paper, called it ‘a noble, often poignant effort at self-education’. Finding it to be ‘gracefully written’, he declared that ‘its real beauty lies in its complete absence of dogmatism. It’s so refreshing to encounter an author who isn’t bloody certain about everything... In assessing the empire, Sanghera is again admirably equivocal. He rejects reductive “balance sheet” approaches in which colonial crimes such as torture, concentration camps and shooting natives from cannons are weighed against the elimination of slavery, footbinding and female genital mutilation. There were, he accepts, positives and negatives. Each existed; each needs to be remembered.’
As Guardian reviewer Ashish Ghadiali put it, Sanghera wants Britons ‘to reclaim intimacy with the multiracial nature of a common history’. Although he sets out to offer a balanced assessment, as he ‘grapples with details of atrocities, what takes hold, to his own surprise as much as ours, is a sense of moral outrage that in turn disrupts the way he sees himself, his past attitudes, the sense of his place in the world’. Ghadiali was impressed by the author’s ‘simple but profound response – this searching introspection and a quest for new horizons, combined with a readiness to sit with the contradictions of it all’. Another fan was Stephen Bush in the
New Statesman: ‘Although Empireland is the product of wide reading rather than original research, it is a fantastic introduction for anyone who wants to learn more about the British empire. Sanghera shares his knowledge without pretension or affectation. He also has a peerless eye for a killer fact and a great story.’