At no point in that history was the empire an organised and monolithic entity.
It’s more complicated than that, not least because we’re talking about almost 500 years of history. But Sanghera insists that it’s a fool’s errand to take the “balance sheet view of history” and draw a binary conclusion of good or bad. These sorts of observations are contentious at the moment, and likely to get people shouting at you on the internet. Explicitly so, with no shortage of imperialists on record as saying the Anglo-saxon race were the pinnacle of humanity and should rightly run everything. Empire, Sanghera reminds us, was a white supremacist project. Less positively, Britain’s exceptionalism is forged of empire, our sense of entitlement, and a specifically British brand of racism. Britain’s multiculturalism is a legacy of empire – a positive one, to my mind, as a resident of multicultural Luton. There’s no doubt that it has, for better or worse. How did it affect our sense of ourselves and our place in the world? How has it imprinted itself on our culture, demographics and attitudes? Of the many angles you can take on the empire, Sanghera’s particular interest is how it shaped Britain itself. Give it a couple of months, and it might be possible to talk about the last century of British history in some new ways. I suspect that conversation will enter a new phase with the end of Queen Elizabeth’s long reign. The complex legacies of the British empire is a matter of vigorous debate already, with a whole shelf of books on the topic in the last few years, many of them written by authors of colour. Empireland is already a bestseller and doesn’t really need my review, but it’s an interesting time to be reading about empire.
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