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.
