Empireland by Sathnam Sanghera Book Review
Empireland by Sathnam Sanghera
Penguin Books, 2021
285 pages
Introduction
Empireland speaks volumes and brilliantly highlights the connections between the British Empire and modern Britain today. It is a perfect blend of historical fact weaved amongst personal experience, whilst battling the numerous ignorances surrounding the history of the British Empire.
In a nutshell, Empireland explains how the British Empire is part of the history and fabric of Britain to a depth and breadth almost all of us never appreciated and the quicker we process and understand this in its entirety - the good, the bad and the ugly - the more balanced and critical our understanding of modern Britain and thus better informed and able, as a society, to move forward.
Review
One thing that is striking, is how contemporary and recent this book feels with its references to Tweets, COVID and Brexit. The behaviour of the Global North in respect of COVID and Britain’s behaviour in respect to Brexit being compared to patterns of behaviour first experienced during the British Empire. Alongside the extremely lucid, engaging and witty (dry British wit) writing, the inclusion and reference to contemporary events, ensures this book feels like an extremely in-depth and thorough conversation with a friend (especially when Goodness Gracious Me is referenced in chapter three).
Another point of note is that this book is filled with the type of historical facts that really help to substantiate the claims and understanding put forward. If all else fails, they’re certainly the type of facts you can use to impress your friends and family. I had the privilege to study a couple of modules regarding the British Empire whilst studying for my history degree and yet this book surprised me continuously with facts and connections that I had no idea about.
Often, the focus on the origins of certain examples of British culture lead us to questions as to why their legacy is narrated in a particular fashion. For instance, the British gin and tonic originally became popular among the British abroad when they learned that the quinine in tonic had antimalarial properties. Another example being how fingerprinting was first developed in India as a tool to control the population before being brought to Britain to be used in the detection of crimes.
The book is split into twelve chapters, each underlined through this review, starting with Empire Day 1.0. This very much is the start of outlining the popular British narrative of the British Empire, starting with ‘Empire Day’, the relationship between sports and war, the Empire Exhibition of 1924, nation building, concerns of healthy Anglo-Saxon ‘stock’, food and imperialism, how colonies served as testing grounds for fingerprinting, how Empire never left the national identity of Britain, how Empire was pivotal in establishing the City of London as one of the world’s major financial centres and why “the reason I am sitting here, as a person of colour in Britain, talking about this country as my home, is because several hundred years ago some Britains decided to take control of parts of the Asian subcontinent.”
Imperialism and Me is for me the most candid, open and honest. It starts with Sathnam’s personal lived experience of growing up in the Black Country, contending with the National Front, visits to Punjab, the legacy of the Battle of Saragarhi, the favourable view of the British Raj by relatives and contending with the idea “Sikhs did relatively well out of Empire'' by exploring events such as Jallianwala Bagh and the Martial Race theory. “The most shocking revelation for me, however, is that the Sikh reputation for being a warrior race, which you probably wouldn’t pick up on if you glazed at my physique, but which is nevertheless more central to our self-identity than beards, turbans and private numberplates on BMWs, was popularized by the British in their effects to divide and rule imperial India after the Uprising of 1857.”
The discussion relating to the Sikhs and martial race theory is one of the most important sections in the book, providing a brilliantly lucid understanding of how a particular image was tailored, supported and marketed by the British Empire in contrast to the horrifically violent racism Sikhs, along with other people of colour, faced - I’m sure many of you reading this only need to ask your parents or have experienced racism yourself. Another example of this contrast between the ways the British Empire would use people of colour and how its legacy ensured people of colour were victims of horrific racism is encapsulated in the following quote by Dayabhai Patel (1968) that ‘the only property we can buy is a slum house. Then the white turn around and say we’re creating slums.’
Difficult History is a chapter that lives up to its title. It explores the difficulty in trying to find a definitive start and end date for the British Empire. It tries to reform and reshape the monolithic understanding of the British Empire most of us are accustomed to, highlighting how ultimately there is no consensus - Britain’s relationship with its colonies varied, the tone and culture of the Empire varied, the Empire was never unanimous, there are intense disagreements about what happened during the Empire and what it means, the lack of a clear motivation for the establishment and development of the Empire. The British Empire, often viewed as a monolithic entity, was not a convalescent whole but a patch work.
The following chapter, Emotional Loot, deals with a very current and repetitive discussion - how artefacts have ended up in museums in Britain. This chapter is rich in historical detail, for instance, how following the fall of Gynaste Jong, Major Iggulden sold 169 artefacts to the British Museum, how in the 19th century British soldiers serving in the colonies sometimes collected enemy body parts and how in 1860 after Western troops pillaged and burned China’s Imperial Summer Palace, many of the items were auctioned off, raising £26,000 (equivalent to £18.9million today) and then divvied up between officers and men. The most important point made in this chapter is how often the histories of these items are often forgotten or purposefully obfuscated.
Now it’s worth pointing out that looting was routine in war and an accepted part of soldiers’ pay. However, the deprave and racialised violence enacted by representatives of the British Empire, coupled with a culture of purposefully obfuscating the facts enabled by a framework of dominance ensures this type of looting was quite distinct. One thing is clear, far more research and work is required to trace the history and provenance of the millions of items sat within the various storage containers of museums across Britain - the National Maritime Museum (perhaps not the most popular museum, but an example nonetheless) owns around 4,000 paintings and 70,000 prints and drawings and yet had 93% of its collection in storage.
We Are Here Because You Were There starts like previous chapters it starts with a personal experience and understanding before using a historical example that usurps the popular, and often lazy, historical narrative. It hasn’t just been immigration from the empire which has created the multicultural society of contemporary Britain. People of colour have been recorded as living in Britain as early as 1630, in 1723 the Daily Journal complained ‘a great number of blacks come daily into this city’ and William Cuffay is a famous chartist leader from 1866.
In this instance, Dean Mohammed being the example used to help explain how there are numerous reasons, varied and conflicting, that explain why we are here. The common denominator? Because, you were there. Ayahs, slavery, shampoo, Windrush and the 1970s Kenyan Asian influx to Britain are just some of the examples used to show how the idea that black and brown people are aliens who arrived without permission, with no link to Britain, to abuse British hospitality is a reptitiative, lazy, and for Sathnam, defining political narrative of his lifetime.
The exploration of imperial amnesia is illuminating. The tendency to forget and obfuscate history is the hallmark of someone with a vested interest, a point to prove. This chapter brilliantly explores how people of colour are every much part of the fabric of contemporary Britain as fish and chips. This chapter is the most surprising in what it unveils and how the role Britain played during the Second World War dominates narratives of the British Empire and how the British Empire dealt with its citizens, in this instance, people of colour.
The last few pages of this chapter explore race and its obsolescence, how not all immigration from the Empire was coloured and how all of this, amongst other things, led to contemporary Britain - Oscar Wilder, Indian restaurants and Mo Farah to name just a few examples.
Most poignant is the conclusion, that people of colour only seem to belong when they serve a purpose, in the most recent context, how BAME staff account for a disproportionate segment of NHS medical staff.
Home and Away is a chapter that explores how the legacy of the Empire has not just influenced contemporary British society and British habits (British resistance to foreign food and habitual drunkenness) but also impacted the world, from colonial hotels in India and Singapore, to British emigration to Canada, Australia, New Zealand and South Africa, and British expat desire to educate children in British schools. Many of these colonial legacies are very much alive in contemporary or near-contemporary British society, for instance, Britain was a net exporter of people until 1984. What is most interesting is the exploration of the reasons behind this emigration legacy - no one liked England, due to its civil war, rebellion, brutal repression, cattle plague, crop failure, unemployment, inflation, poor harvests and would rather prefer a colonial life. However, Sathnam is extremely careful to always ensure the historical narrative is unbalanced and superbly highlights how colonial life was difficult and had its own numerous challenges, so many in fact, many emigrants returned.
The remainder of this chapter dips its toe into the motivating factor of sex, amongst other things, how imperialism provided an easy range of sexual opportunities, mainly due to the exploitation of tropical territories.
The chapter that follows - World-Beating Politics - continues exploring the controversies and history of multiculturalism, this time focusing on the end of the Empire, post-colonial history, the civilising mission, nation state building, nostalgia for the Empire leading into contemporary politics, summarized succinctly by Sathnam in the following - “If England is not an imperial power, it must be the only other thing it can be: a colony.”
The bulk of the remainder of the chapter focuses on the complex relationship between trade, violence and the burden of governing colonies, directly compared to Brexit and a wider pattern of British imperial exceptionalism. “Even if you give Brexiteers the benefit of the doubt, concede that their historical wistfulness is more about nostalgia for 19th century free trading prowess rather than nostalgia about empire per se, you ignore the fact that free trade at that time was actually imperial.”
Dirty Money deals with the historical legacy of English country-house gardens and their relationship with imperialism. How wealth gained through the Empire was used to buy swathes of land in Britain, expensive jewellery or grand estates and often led to providing these families with unimaginable springboards to success. The direction of British politics was directly altered by imperial wealth, wealth drained from the various colonies of the British Empire which helped to ensure the dominance of the City and finance in British national life. As with the rest of this book, this chapter is finely balanced and this chapter concludes with answering whether the empire benefited the colonies under British rule.
The chapter that follows - The Origins of Our Racism - can be summarised by a quote used by Sathnam, “the very sight of a dark man stimulated our national enthusiasm almost to the point of frenzy. We tolerated those who wore our uniforms and bore our arms, but all else were, in our eyes, the enemies and persecutors of our race.” Once again, the relationship between war, race and the British Empire are explored - Tasmania, the history of the term race, Aryan tribes, the Curse of Ham, anti-racism, the colour bar and the imperial club and racial stereotypes.
This is perhaps the most harrowing of all the chapters in this book, mainly due to the vivid and descriptive accounts of horrific abuse and torture enacted by white colonialists against indigenous people of colour.
This chapter - Empire State of mind - is once again self-reflective and explores the history of Britain’s public schools, sports and the ‘Great Game’, Orientalism, the nation state, rewriting of history and the psychology of the colonized, amongst other things. Most pivotal to all of the aforementioned is how Britain saw themselves as key.
Selective Amnesia explores how very often the legacy of how the British Empire shaped the modern world is one sided, nostalgic and selectively forgetful of some of the more uncomfortable truths. One of the most common and popular arguments - that railway construction was built for the benefit of Indians - is superbly dissected and reduced to its bare facts. Not only was the railway constructed primarily to move British troops and goods for British trade but the system of employment on the railways was overtly racist.
The remainder of this chapter superbly dissects the relationship between British imperialism and slavery.
The final chapter - Working Off the Past - once again deals with common misconceptions, amongst them, the idea that history is altered by renaming streets or removing statues and that imperial history needs to be treated as regular history. The comfort and ease British society has discussing Roman Britain, the battle of Hastings or the Blitz needs to be repeated with even the most dark aspects of British imperial history.
Conclusion and Rating
Lucid, light and historically magnificent. A well deserved 5 out of 5 star rating.
Whilst I read this book I was continuously struck by the similarity in experience, the honesty of the constant self-reflection by Sathanm and delighted that in every chapter a plethora of books were included and recommended for you to go and explore. In chapter 2, Pradeep Barua’s “Inventing Race: The British and India’s Martial Races” is included, chapter 6 cites John MacKenzie’s “Propaganda and Empire” and James Walvin’s “The Trade, The Owner, The Slave” is referred to in chapter 11.
If you have any remote interest in British history, contemporary British society or the history of the British Empire then I would recommend this as perhaps one of the first books you should read. The narrative that is put forward is thorough from start to finish. It starts with the popular narrative, the historical complexity of the matter is then explored in magnificent detail without it being boring and dry, and perhaps most importantly, puts forward suggestions of how to move forward.
Get your copy here.