"To my shame, I knew barely anything about it," he says. I've noticed that being brown and having a heritage where I was colonised means people think I'm going to be too emotional about this stuff or I'm woke
There are countless vignettes in the book about the way in which the fundamentals of Britishness are, in fact, derived from the country's Empire, such as the fact that the archetypal image of sitting down to afternoon tea is really the story of a plant from China traded for opium grown in Bengal, and sweetened by sugar cultivated by African slaves on West Indian plantations.Īnd yet the breezy, sometimes baffled tone never belittles what Sanghera calls the “wilfully white supremacist and occasionally genocidal” aspect of Britain’s imperial past.Įmpireland actually grew out of a documentary Sanghera made about the 1919 massacre by the British Indian Army of at least 379 unarmed civilians, who had gathered in peace at the Jallianwala Bagh in Amritsar in the Punjab region of India. Such levity is found throughout Empireland.
Protesters throw the statue of Edward Colston into Bristol harbour during a Black Lives Matter protest rally in 2020. It was like being a fan of a really obscure pop star, and they turn out to be Britney Spears!” “The first time I’ve ever been relevant in my life. “I started out thinking this was stuff only I was interested in, but by the end of writing, it was on the news every day, which totally freaked me out,” he says, with a laugh. The events prompted Sathnam Sanghera to embark on another rewrite of his urgent new book Empireland, a remarkable look at how British imperialism has not only shaped the world, but also the way in which Britain still regards itself. Not only did it reveal to a wider public the embarrassing truth about the darker elements of British history, but it also sparked a divisive culture war about the whole notion of celebrating the British Empire. Of all the seismic images taken in the past, momentous year, the sight of British slave trader Edward Colston's statue being toppled into Br istol Harbour was surely one of the most hard-hitting.
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