24 The New York ReviewBritain’s modern economic life is still
a powerful, even dominant current in
the country’s mainstream historiogra-
phy. Sanghera observes that P. J. Cain
and A. G. Hopkins’s major study Brit-
ish Imperialism: 1688 –2015, published
to acclaim in England in 2016, barely
mentions slavery at all.
Such erasure is not limited to dis-
cussions of the economics of empire.
Determined to control the richest of
the sugar islands following its seizure
of Guadeloupe, in 1793 Britain sent the
largest naval expedition it had ever as-
sembled to capture Saint-Domingue,
which under the leadership of Tous-
saint Louverture had risen up against
the French. The former slaves of what
would soon become Haiti, however,
defeated the British; more of their
soldiers died there in battle and from
disease than had died in the Ameri-
can Revolutionary War two decades
earlier. As Louverture said, rallying
his men to victory, “We are fighting
that liberty—that most precious of all
earthly possessions—may not perish.”
Neither the name Saint-Domingue nor
Haiti has ever appeared on a British
regimental banner in remembrance
of this campaign, unlike major de-
feats by European armies. British stu-
dents, furthermore, are rarely taught
about these events, because they run
so contrary to the preferred national
narrative.Empireland is deeply preoccupied
with questions of memory and for-
getting, with Britain’s vexed and con-
torted feelings about empire, and with
the grudging place accorded to non-whites of all backgrounds in its society.
Although he is of Indian extraction,
Sanghera, a British-born journalist
and documentary filmmaker, describes
himself as having been “clueless” about
topics like these for most of his life, and
his book opens in a confessional mode
about how the scales of ignorance tum-
bled from his eyes.
Sanghera’s personal approach—
much more anecdotal than most histor-
ical writing—is disarming and makes
his account of occasionally horrified
discovery all the more effective. De-
spite having a degree in history, he
nonetheless says that he learned more
about the dark side of Britain’s im-
perial past during the recent bout of
what he calls “statuecide”—the top-
pling of statues of some of the most
ignoble figures in the country’s impe-
rial past—than he did from all the lec-
tures he attended and books he read in
school.
A similar revelation came to him
during a visit to India, where he went to
film a documentary in 2019. Sanghera
says that he first learned about the 1919
Jallianwala Bagh Massacre, one of the
worst British atrocities in the country
of his ancestors and what he calls “one
of the key events of the twentieth cen-
tury,” from watching the movie Gandhi
while tipsy on a long flight. By confess-
ing his ignorance, though, Sanghera
is all the better equipped to invite his
readers to question their own lack of
awareness and shame about Britain’s
actions in South Asia and elsewhere.
His book begins with the atrocities
that first opened his eyes to the vio-
lence and looting (a word imported
into English from India as a direct re-sult of this history) that characterized
the British takeover of India. From
there, he dwells on London’s pro-
longed and extraordinary economic
exploitation of its rich Asian colony.
Estimates of the wealth that accrued
to Britain vary. One of Sanghera’s
Indian sources writes that his coun-
try was “bled anything between 5 to
10 percent of her GDP annually for
close to two centuries.” Another cal-
culates that the colony was “drained”
of nearly $45 trillion in today’s money
between 1765 and 1938, or seventeen
times the total annual gross domestic
product of the United Kingdom today.
Still other estimates are cited, leaving
both Sanghera and the reader uncer-
tain how exactly to appraise the eco-
nomic relationship between metropole
and colony.
More interesting is the contrast be-
tween reckonings like these and the
statements of powerful British figures
over the years, which are steeped in
denialism. Santham quotes a speech by
Benjamin Disraeli in 1872: “It has been
shown with precise, with mathematical
demonstration, that there never was a
jewel in the crown of England that was
so costly as the possession of India.”
A line can be drawn from this to the
remarks made by former British prime
minister David Cameron during a visit
to India in 2013, where he said, “I think
there is an enormous amount to be
proud of in what the British Empire
did and was responsible for.” These
two remarks share the idea that Britain
was doing others a favor by coloniz-
ing them, purportedly even at its own
expense. Here is the essence of “the
white man’s burden,” the phrase im-
mortalized in Rudyard Kipling’s 1899
poem of that name, and a keystone in
the refashioning of the country’s sense
of itself in the post-slavery nineteenth
century.Sanghera is at his best in exploring
the many contradictions raised by all
this. Britain wants its people to be
proud of the country’s grand imperial
past, but it doesn’t seem to want them
to know much about it. Another Brit-
ish prime minister, Gordon Brown, ar-
gued during a 2005 visit to East Africa
that Britain should stop apologizing
for its empire and recognize that what
he called some of the “greatest ideas”
in history came from it. It is—to say
the least—curious, then, that so little
is taught about the imperial past in
schools. Beyond the silence of his own
elite boarding school education on the
topic, Sanghera cites numerous others,
including professional historians such
as Bernard Porter, who has written
that he did “not remember the empire
ever being discussed or even men-
tioned at home as a child,” and that he
had encountered “no imperial history
whatsoever” before his postgraduate
studies. The novelist Charlotte Men-
delson claimed that she had “one of
the best educations Britain can offer”
but that she had been “taught nothing
about slavery or colonialism. Nothing.
Ever.”
“The British Empire,” Sanghera
writes,was not only the biggest thing
that ever happened to us, but one
of the biggest things that ever
happened to the world. At its
height it covered a quarter of theworld’s land surface and governed
nearly a quarter of the world’s
population.He quotes the Financial Times colum-
nist Gideon Rachman, who observed
that “for a Martian historian” this
would surely be the most interesting as-
pect of Britain’s modern history. And
yet, Sanghera says, the country’s pre-
vailing sense of itself is almost entirely
built instead around carefully tended
tales of national sacrifice, heroism, and
victory in the twentieth century’s two
world wars.
But that is not all. One of the dis-
coveries that seems to have touched
Sanghera most during his research is
the fact that during those wars mil-
lions of troops were conscripted from
all over the empire to fight on Britain’s
behalf, which receives scant mention
in standard histories and is all but ab-
sent in films or war commemorations.
This makes Sanghera ruminate about
the treatment of brown and Black peo-
ples of all descriptions who settled in
Britain in the postwar era, often as
the result of official recruitment drives
aimed at economic recovery and recon-
struction. In doing so, he returns once
again to his previous naiveté: “The
narrative that brown people imposed
themselves on Britain is so powerful
that I absorbed it myself, as a young
brown Briton.” Later he writes, “We
forget not only that black and Asian
people were invited to work here, but
that many came as citizens; we forget
more generally that Britain was built
on immigration.”
Sanghera’s most powerful question
looms throughout his book. Through
the slave trade and subsequent col-
onization, the British Empire pre-
sided over “one of the biggest white
supremacist enterprises in the history
of humanity.” How, then, should it be
recognized today? For many, he con-
cludes, understanding of empire has
merely become a shallow proxy for
nationalism. Britons don’t like to be
faced with uncomfortable details, and
they confront people like Sangh era,
sometimes angrily, with the question
of whether intellectuals like him aren’t
overemphasizing the negative.
The British, he says, take comfort in
the idea that the US is, in the popular
view, more “screwed up” than their
own country. But at least in the US,
which also struggles with denialism
about its racial history, the tragedy of
slavery has finally become a prominent
feature in popular culture. French pres-
ident Emmanuel Macron, meanwhile,
has gone much further than any British
leader, calling his country’s colonial-
ism “a crime against humanity, a real
barbarity.” This, Macron said, is “a past
that we need to confront by apologiz-
ing to those against whom we commit-
ted these acts.” For Britain, Sanghera
warns,the way we fail to acknowledge we
are a multicultural society because
we had a multicultural empire makes
our national conversations about
race tragic and absurd.... Our col-
lective amnesia about the fact that
we were, as a nation, wilfully white
supremacist and occasionally geno-
cidal, and our failure to understand
how this informs modern-day rac-
ism, are catastrophic.(^) Q
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