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PORTSIDE CULTURE

THE CHARGE SHEET AGAINST RULE BRITANNIA  
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Colin Grant
February 4, 2024
The Guardian
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_ In this ambitious sequel to Empireland, the journalist travels far
and wide to examine the legacy of British imperialism, piecing
together an important rebuttal of revisionist narratives _

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_Empireworld
How British Imperialism Shaped the Globe_
Sathnam Sanghera
Public Affairs
ISBN-13 9781541704978

In 1891, as the British empire
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expand, Rudyard Kipling put his pen in service to it with The English
Flag. “And what should they know of England who only England
know?” asked the poet, lamenting those of his compatriots who,
having never stepped outside of England, were ignorant of the
sacrifices made abroad in their name, and who, though patriotic, never
embraced what he saw as the civilising mission of their empire

In _Empireworld_, Sathnam Sanghera [[link removed]]
investigates the discomfiting legacy of empire across the globe (along
with Britain’s often wilful amnesia in this area). It’s a sequel
to_ Empireland_ (2021), which looked inward at legacies of empire in
Britain – from the mass migration that enabled the NHS to thrive to
the popularity of Indian restaurants.

 

 

Sanghera, who was born in Wolverhampton in 1976 to Indian migrants,
writes with the sensitivity and earnestness of someone with skin in
the game. The racial abuse he received
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after the publication of _Empireland_ became, he writes, “as
commonplace as my morning bowl of porridge”.
His new, ambitious book seeks to examine the British empire’s
evolving imprint on people and places for as long as it has had an
influence. Prudently, before laying bare the charge sheet of imperial
deficits, Sanghera punctuates his new text with reminders of things
that brought credit, even if they are contested today. They include
the English language, seen as a unifier for populations with myriad
local languages, and the Westminster model of democracy about which he
argues that “the longer a country was administered by the British,
the more likely it was to have sustained democracy” after
independence. (Richard Turnbull, the governor of Tanganyika from
1958-61, on the other hand, once remarked that empire would “leave
behind it only two monuments: one was the game of Association
Football, the other was the expression ‘Fuck off’”.)

 

Sanghera travels widely, to India, Barbados, Mauritius and Nigeria, to
gather testimonies. Barbados once proudly embraced its nickname Little
England and its own statue of Lord Nelson in its own Trafalgar Square,
but in 2021 it became a republic and recently the prime minister, Mia
Mottley, stated Barbados was owed reparations of £3.9tn
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by enslaving nations.

Given a tour of a colonial manor house, Sanghera is surprised that
slavery is barely mentioned. Later, the guide complains that: “The
[white] people who do come here, they are marvelling at the
accomplishments of their ancestors.” The guide is emblematic of a
pragmatic population working hard to suppress its anger.
When Sanghera reaches Mauritius – where, after abolition, slavery
was replaced with the mass indentureship (“semi-slavery” according
to Mahatma Gandhi) of Indian migrants – he notes that the empire’s
legacy is expressed in competing hierarchies of suffering, fuelled by
the remembrance of British administrators favouring one group over
another. This divisive approach was reproduced in colonial Nigeria and
India, when the British filled regimental ranks with groups such as
the Hausa and Sikhs, who were considered admiringly to be “martial
races” by Britain.

Sanghera’s travels are mostly too brief for him to dive deeper into
his subject. His nervous trip to Lagos in Nigeria is more rewarding to
read about because his fear (filling out a “proof of life”
document, to be used in the event of being kidnapped) illustrates the
threat of violence and disparities of wealth bequeathed partly by
colonialism. In response to the pervasive insecurity, he writes,
“many households have set themselves up as discrete, self-sufficient
entities in the absence of a properly functioning state”.

The charge sheet against imperialism grows with every page, even as
Sanghera seeks to present more nuanced reflections. He argues, for
instance, that without quinine the imperial project would not have
been viable. Quinine “didn’t prevent [white] people from getting
very ill [with malaria] but it often saved them from death”. The
chapter Useful Plants focuses on Kew Gardens’ evolution from 1841
onwards as an incubator for “economic botany”, developing, for
example, species of cinchona that would more effectively yield
quinine. Visitors strolling through its gardens today might not be
aware of its ambiguous legacy illustrated here by Sanghera: “It was
also through plants that [British colonists]… triggered ecological
and climate disaster, inspired far-reaching conservation measures,
established… one-crop economies which changed the shape of the
planet... It’s wild!”
Sanghera’s voice is present throughout the book as a generalist,
distilling the work of specialists, but a tendency towards
equivocation and qualifying comments may leave some readers pondering
the strength of his beliefs.

He does spell out that what he calls “blindfolded British justice”
distinguished between the white ruling class and the colonised so that
British transgressions were often met with impunity. He cites the
1890s case of Private John Rigby, who was fined 100 rupees for kicking
to death a punkhawallah after claiming the servant had fallen asleep
at his post. But Sanghera’s damning assessment that “the British
empire played a leading role in spreading racism across the planet”
still comes with the peculiar caveat: “but it also inspired a
massive international movement in anti-racism”.

The racism that underpinned slavery is undeniable, and though the
passage of time dampens emotional responses to it, Sanghera supports
the claim made by epigeneticists that “black people in the modern
age can suffer psychologically… from the effects of slavery many
decades after its abolition”. The late psychiatrist Frederick
Hickling
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concurred. His scholarship traces present day concerns about absent
black fathers to the slave system of barracking men and women
separately and only bringing them together to copulate, to enlarge the
enslaved population.

Hickling is one of several scholars to whose authority Sanghera
defers, with the consequence that his own analysis is squeezed out by
the cornucopia of information and references packed into
_Empireworld_,_ _which often reads like a literature review.

Nonetheless, the book is assiduously researched and Sanghera is brave
because even though his aim is “not to incite white guilt but rather
to promote understanding”, he knows that this work will not endear
him to bigoted empire nostalgists.

Britain’s genius for propaganda has previously been used to cast its
imperial identity as heroic rather than villainous. This has been
replicated in the US, where the battle over the curation of history
– in particular over alleged fears of the negative impact on
children exposed to any text that contains traumatic events – has
seen many rightwing commentators talk up the_ benefits_ of slavery to
the enslaved. Such egregious arguments have not yet found favour in
Britain, but they highlight the lure of revisionism.

Modern writing about imperialism has prised the stopper from the
genie’s bottle, releasing malodorous truths. _Empireworld_ makes it
more difficult for revisionists whose hearts swell when reciting The
English Flag to return the genie to that bottle.

 

Colin Grant is the author of six books, most recently _I’m Black So
You Don’t Have to Be_. He’s also the director of WritersMosaic, a
division of the Royal Literary Fund.

* British imperialism
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* colonialism
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* slavery
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* Racism
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