Sathnam Sanghera wants to play a game with you. He’s visiting a school where the boys wear “spotless white shirts” and “dark-blue blazers”, there’s a Latin motto, an official crest, a house system, and a stirring school song that contains the lyrics “always play the game!” Is he somewhere in the Home Counties? Wrong. He’s in Lagos, Nigeria.
This is a miniature of the larger story Sanghera is telling in Empireworld, his follow-up to 2021’s bestseller Empireland. It is a vast and sprawling story about how the legacy, structures and thought of the British Empire reach around the world, even today.
So vast, in fact, is this tale that it spills out of the main body of Empireworld’s text into copious footnotes, endnotes, bibliography (this alone is 60 pages), which make up nearly half of this book. That’s because gathering all the varied strands is both complex and difficult. It is also a reflection of Sanghera’s own relationship to the material. He is a journalist by trade and, though now a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society, understandably relies on the “guidance of expert imperial historians”. So the voluminous notes are a professional safety net, a proof (if we needed it) that he’s done his reading.
The book is a mix of travelogue, memoir, newspaper column and serious historical work
They’re also something more. When Sanghera wrote Empireland, about Britain’s tangled and largely ignorant relationship with its own imperial history, he stirred up a great deal of anger among some very nasty people, who proceeded to target Sanghera with virulently racist vitriol. These notes and his reliance on experts are thus also a form of defence, a pre-emptive strike against bad faith actors who would try to claim there’s no evidence for what he’s saying. There certainly is evidence that the British Empire’s effects and after-effects are felt globally.
From the layout of New Delhi and the former sugar plantation houses on Barbados, to the bitter legacy of indentured labour in Mauritius and Kew Gardens’ greenhouse (which played “a central role” in “changing the shape of the planet”), Sanghera travels the world in pursuit of his subject. This also lends the book a strange quality, for it is a mix of travelogue, memoir, newspaper column and serious historical work. We’re with him as he fires off texts, relaxes by the pool, and then writes powerfully “the British Empire was the single most significant incubator, refiner and propagator of white supremacy in the history of the planet”. Yet despite the mêlée of facts and the discursive style it is not hard to locate Sanghera’s central aim: “It’s time to turn Britain’s hoary old monologue on the British Empire into a real dialogue” — and listen to the countries and peoples it affected. The Caricom group of Caribbean countries is reportedly seeking $33 trillion in reparations from Britain, France and Spain.
Despite the racist abuse he receives Sanghera is part of a wave of writers and historians changing the terms of debate. This book, with its varied voices and perspectives, widens them further. Though uneven in places, on that core aim it is a success.
Empireworld: How British Imperialism Has Shaped the Globe (Viking, £20) is out now
