Echoes of Imperialism

 

Sathnam Sanghera, Empireland:

How Imperialism Has Shaped Modern Britain

(Viking Press)

The mighty British empire at one point spanned a quarter of the globe and included a substantial portion of the world’s population.  Sometime after World War II, that empire ceased to exist, although there’s no consensus on the end date –– some argue that the British empire ended in 1947 with Indian independence; others cite the disastrous 1956 British-French-Israeli incursion into Egypt to regain control of the Suez Canal; still others contend for the 1997 handover of Hong Kong to the Chinese.  But whenever the sun might have finally set on the British empire, it continues to shape 21^st century Britain.  In Empireland; How Imperialism Has Shaped Modern Britain, documentary film maker and journalist Sathnam Sanghera undertakes to identify how, why and in what ways the once mighty empire lives on in British hearts and minds.

The subject of empire in Britain today, Sanghera writes, is a “veritable industrial oven of hot potatoes” (p.41), enmeshed in quarrels and polemics involving such interlocking issues as multi-culturalism, immigration, racism, and Britain’s role in slavery.  There is a rough political divide to the contemporary polemics over empire, he indicates, with Conservative Party politicians and their supporters tending to be strong defenders of empire, whereas those from the Labour Party have “generally felt the need to apologize for it” (p.120), although there are plenty of exceptions on both sides.  It is a subject that cannot be discussed casually: “you need to take sides” (p.41).   What people think about empire often says more about their politics than their knowledge of history.

Actual knowledge of imperial history in Britain is very low, Sanghera contends, despite upticks in interest when issues like whether statues of individuals with ties to the colonial period need to be torn down or defended.  A form of nostalgia often dilutes historical knowledge, leading to the routine accusation that any commentary on the darker aspects of British empire is “anti-British” (p.195).  But, as one writer whom Sanghera quotes stated, “It is probably only possible to be nostalgic for empire if you forget most of its history”  (p.197).

Sanghera doesn’t set out all the dark moments that punctuate British imperial history.  He does not intend his work to be another history of the British empire, typically long and dense.  But he provides enough examples to explain why Britons might be uncomfortable with this history.  These include the 1919 Jallianwala Bagh Massacre in British India, when Brigadier General Reginald Dyer ordered his troops to fire upon a crowd of peaceful protesters thought insufficiently loyal, killing at least 1,000; and the 1959 Hola massacre in Kenya, when guards at a detention camp for resisters to British rule clubbed to death 11 detainees, with the camp’s remaining 77 detainees sustaining permanent injuries, followed by an elaborate cover-up scheme.

At one point, Sanghera suggests that British colonial history may be “just too painful to digest” (p.208), much like dark family secrets, which for psychological reasons are often better left in the closet.  If it is important for one’s own mental health to forget those secrets, the same “might be true for nations” (p.208).  Yet, Sanghera rejects his suggestion.  The darkest moments of British colonial history cannot be left in the closet, he contends.  His broadest argument is that Britain needs to reckon with the full history of its empire.  Without facing up to the uncomfortable facts of British imperialism, Britain will “never be able to navigate a path forwards . . . If we don’t confront the reality of what happened in British empire, we will never be able to work out who we are or who we want to be” (p.215).

Sanghera confesses that like most of his fellow citizens, he was woefully ignorant of the history of the British empire before he started working on this book.  Although he attended a highly competitive, multi-cultural secondary school in his hometown, Wolverhampton, his education “taught me nothing about the history which would have explained why there were so many brown people in Wolverhampton” (p.76).  What little he learned about empire and colonialism was almost invariably presented from the perspective of the colonizers, rarely if ever from the perspective of the colonized.   Much of his education about empire came from a single trip he made to India’s Punjab province in 2019, part of his preparation for writing this book.

Sanghera provides extensive detail on this trip, and throughout explains how his background and experiences have shaped his perspective, giving the book the feel of a memoir.  Born in Britain, he recounts growing up in Wolverhampton in a family of Punjabi Sikh parents who immigrated to Britain in the 1960s.  Although thoroughly British – he cannot conceive of his identity as anything else – he is fully aware that because of his Indian Sikh ancestry and his skin color, many fellow citizens do not see him that way.  But writing in an often-lighthearted way on ultra-serious subjects, Sanghera pokes fun at those not ready to acknowledge his full Britishness – that’s their problem, he seems to respond.  Having faced his fair share of racial discrimination — and anti-immigrant sentiment even though he was born in Britain — Sanghera brings a powerful lens through which to view the complex ways in which today’s Britons think about their empire.

That lens, moreover, is rigorously objective.  Sanghera goes out of his way to temper some of the more extreme arguments about the malign character of the empire, emanating most often from the political left.  But he does not shy away from providing the facts that bolster the critiques of empire and, after considered evaluation, most frequently comes out on the left side of the ongoing, often-frenetic contemporary debate.   Despite the many advantages and attractions that Britain offers to her citizens, “our imperial legacies and the ways we fail to see them are a burden,” he writes.  We can progress “only if we confront them” (p.221).

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There is a prosaic and entertaining side to Sanghera’s analysis, in which he sets out hidden or less evident legacies of empire in today’s Britain.  Over 1,000 familiar English-language words come from India, including “bungalow,” “dam,” “jungle,’ “sandals” “pepper” and “shampoo.”   He also expounds upon how empire has affected and enhanced British cuisine.  India understandably gets special attention: curry is close to the national English dish, and it is “hard to imagine modern Britain functioning without its thousands of Indian restaurants” (p.85).  Among the drinks with imperial origins, British gin and tonic “became popular among the British abroad when they learned that the quinine in tonic had anti-malarial properties” (p.11); and there is “nothing more imperial than the most British drink of all: a cup of sweetened tea” (p.11).

Free school meals and many other social reforms that underpin the modern welfare state can be attributed to the empire, coming about because politicians “worried that the poor health of the newly urbanized working classes was endangering Britain’s ability to maintain an empire and hold its own against growing competition from Germany, America, and Japan”  (p.9).  The idea behind the founding of the Boy Scouts in 1908 was to turn a generation of boys into “good citizens or useful colonists” (p.11).  For similar reasons, Britain’s elite independent boarding schools, known as “public schools,” are another legacy of British empire – “many of them thriving during the Victorian age, and in some cases being established, because they serve as preparation, even training, for a role in empire” (p.172).

Thomas Cook pioneered Western tourism in tandem with the expansion of the British empire, making mass travel for leisure arguably another legacy of empire.  Empire helped establish London as one of the world’s great financial centers.  Policing methods used in Britain were often derived from colonial practices, on the trial-and-error method; fingerprinting, for example, was developed in India to control the local population.  But these tidbits illustrating the ubiquitous vestiges of empire in everyday British life, interesting as they are, serve primarily as a foundation for a deeper examination of the contemporary public debate over empire and the cluster of ideas that animate that debate – the “hot potatoes” in the industrial oven, to reprise Sanghera’s metaphor.

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Among these hot potatoes, Sanghera gives extensive treatment to “multi-culturalism” and the role and perception of immigrants in today’s Britain.  A dictionary which Sanghera cites defines multi-culturalism as the recognition that “all the different cultural or racial groups in a society have equal rights and opportunities, and none is ignored or regarded as unimportant” (p.30).   This anodyne definition misses the point for today’s Britain, Sanghera argues, where multi-culturalism is largely the “consequence of our having once colonized a quarter of the world” (p.14).   Contemporary Britain is a multicultural, racially diverse society quite simply because it “once had a multicultural, racially diverse empire” (p.71).

The narrative that brown people imposed themselves on Britain is “so powerful that I absorbed it myself, as a young brown Briton,” ” (p.76), Sanghera writes. The persistence of the idea that black and brown people are “aliens who arrived without permission, and with no link to Britain, to abuse British hospitality” is the “defining political narrative of my lifetime”  (p.75).  Britain could transform all conversations about multi-culturalism if it could simply acknowledge that much of its non-white population has deep ties to the country as the consequence of centuries of imperialism.  Or, as the Sri Lankan writer Ambalavaner Sivanadan once succinctly put it, “we are here because you were there” (p.71).

In today’s debates about multiculturalism and immigration, Sanghera observes, “almost all the pressure is put on immigrant communities, to integrate, to pass citizenship tests, to learn English and to accept certain national values” (p.79), none of which he considers illegitimate or out of place.  But the “host” country has responsibilities too.  In Britain, foremost among them is to acknowledge that black and brown people are present in the country “because Britain, at best, had close relationships with its colonies for centuries, which included millions of the colonized putting their lives on the line for Britain during two world wars, or because Britain, at worst, violently repressed and exploited its colonies for centuries” (p.79).

Sanghera attributes much of that centuries-long violent repression and exploitation to what we would today call racism, perhaps the hottest of the potatoes in the industrial oven of empire.  While the terms “race” and “racism” might not have had quite the same meaning during the colonial era, the inescapable bottom line for Sanghera as he looks at the era’s history is that the British empire, as it grew during the 19^th and 20^th centuries, “morphed into nothing less than a willful, unapologetic exercise in white racial supremacy” (p.157).  But does this historic white racism have any relevance to contemporary Britain?  This single question, Sanghera writes, “provokes more anger, when it comes to empire, than any other” (p.160).

The question of relevance may be provocative, but for Sanghera it is not a difficult one.  Unlike many of his fellow citizens, he hears “echoes of imperialism” in the “almost daily headlines highlighting racial injustice and inequality” (p.169), including the dearth of ethnic minorities on the boards of major companies, in senior academic leadership roles, and in high civil service positions.  Black and brown young people are three times more likely to be unemployed than their white peers and end up disproportionately in a criminal justice commonly recognized as treating minorities more harshly than whites.  In facing up to nearly every racial controversy in Britain, governments of all stripes consistently fail to acknowledge “centuries of slavery, exploitation, state racism, cultural connections and economic ties” (p.76).  While not every racial injustice can be explained in terms of the British empire and the legacy of colonialism, the endurance of institutional racism in today’s Britain should be no mystery: “our society grew out of the racist institution of British empire” (p.169).

Britain’s historic involvement in slavery and the slave trade may constitute the imperial era’s starkest manifestation of racism.  Britain wasn’t the first nation to engage in the slave trade, and slaves were not for the most part taken from what was then the British empire.  But during the 150 years that Britain engaged in the slave trade, it carried as many slaves to the New World as all other slave-shipping countries combined.  The triangular Britain-Africa-Caribbean slave trade sustained British colonies in the Caribbean throughout the 18^th century, “dehumanizing black people on a super-industrial scale” ((p.157; Sanghera likes the term “industrial”).  According to the Financial Times, 18^th century slave-related business in Britain “accounted for about the same proportion of GDP as the professional and support services sector does today” (p.xi).  Another survey found that almost a third of 300 leading English country houses and gardens were “tainted by wealth from slavery or have treasures plundered from overseas” (p.132).  There were also instances of black slavery in Britain.

But Britain’s historic involvement in slavery and the slave trade may also constitute modern Britain’s most acute case of “selective historical amnesia,” a key term in Sanghera’s analysis.  Britain’s involvement ended in the first third of the 19^th century, with Parliament abolishing slave trading in 1807 and slavery itself in 1833.  Since that time, abolition has supplanted Britain’s centuries-long engagement in slavery and the slave trade as the primary theme in the national narrative, “almost as if Britain had introduced Negro slavery solely for the satisfaction of abolishing it” (p.205), as Eric Williams, an eminent scholar of empire who also served as Prime Minister of Trinidad and Tobago, wrote in 1964.  “Few acts of collective forgetting have been as thorough and successful as the erasing of slavery from Britain’s ‘island story’” (p.209), opined historian David Olusoga.

Sanghera refers approvingly to the New York Times’ 1619 project developed by Nikole Hannah-Jones, a historical analysis of how slavery has shaped American political, social, and economic institutions.  University College London has developed “Legacies of British Slave Ownership,” which might be considered the counterpart to the 1619 Project.  Several British universities are following in the footsteps of UCL, seeking to shake historical amnesia by highlighting the role that slavery has played in Britain.  Some are even looking at the extent to which they themselves profited from the slave trade.

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Ending on an altogether positive note, Sanghera sets out other developments that give him hope that Britain may be on the cusp of reckoning with its imperial past.  There’s a movement in private school education to add fuller histories of the British empire to their curricula.  Several museums have undertaken to restitute plundered artworks, artifacts and other cultural items to former colonies.  Sanghera applauds former Prime Minister Tony Blair’s apology to Ghana’s president for Britain’s role in the transatlantic slave trade.  And he notes several instances in which, rather than tearing down statutes of former colonial notables, statutes of former colonized or notable people of color appear alongside colonials.

These developments, Sanghera concludes, augur well for an ameliorated public debate in Britain over empire and “how the present is connected to the past”  (p.232).  Sanghera’s own even-handed work, both eloquent and witty, should serve as a major contribution to that debate.

Thomas H. Peebles

Paris, France

April 20, 2023