Empireworld

March 1, 2024
The author of Empireland, which plumbed the legacy of empire in Great Britain, offers a companion book that traces its effect across the world. Writing to his fellow Britons, British Sikh journalist Sanghera strives to move beyond what he calls "balance-sheet thinking," in which "the achievements of the British empire [are put] into inane 'good' and 'bad' categories," and to find nuance and complexity in it. His quest takes him abroad to Delhi (both Old and New), Barbados, Mauritius, and Lagos, with a fascinating sojourn in Kew Gardens, as well as to a "colossal number of history books and articles" that inform his examination. (The bibliography alone occupies nearly 60 pages.) As most readers will expect, the author's survey of Britain's imperial legacy includes the scars inflicted by slavery, indenture, and white supremacy, but they may be more surprised at some of his other findings. The time spent at Kew, for instance, yields the insight that the cultivation of non-native flora in colonial plantations had economic reverberations that continue into the present day. This and countless other facts Sanghera highlights are fascinating in their own right. However, to fully understand his argument, readers who are not steeped in imperial assumptions will need to be mindful of his British audience and the fact that abolition, for instance, in the minds of many "balance-sheeters," somehow compensates for its earlier enslavement of some 3 million Africans. The author's style is often disarmingly colloquial--"We cannot proffer solutions to the world's greatest geopolitical problems without acknowledging that we created a bunch of them," he remarks--a mannerism that amplifies his sincerity. If the scope of his interrogation is vaster and therefore harder to contain than that of his earlier work, his honest attempt to reckon with it is just as compelling. A worthy, thought-provoking follow-up.

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April 15, 2024
In this follow-up to Empireland (2023), journalist Sanghera turns outward to examine the myriad impacts the British Empire had on the rest of the world. He finds imperial legacies in fields as predictable as politics and as unexpected as botany, always with exhaustive sourcing to direct interested readers to the vast array of scholarship that exists on imperial British history. At every step, the book emphasizes the need for nuanced appraisal of England's role in world events. "While British empire did instil chaos in some parts of the world," Sanghera writes, "it instilled democracy elsewhere, and ... sometimes it instilled both chaos and democracy in the same place at the same time." This duality of harm and benefit runs throughout Empireworld, as Sanghera explores education systems, the abolition of slavery, rule of law, NGOs, and much more, repeatedly revealing the inadequacy of a balance-sheet framework to understand the impact of British empire. Like its predecessor, Empireworld is a smart, illuminating exploration of how England exercised global power to create the world we know today.

COPYRIGHT(2024) Booklist, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

May 20, 2024
Journalist Sanghera follows up Empireland, his study of how Britain was shaped by its imperial past, with a comprehensive if occasionally off-key look at imperialism’s legacy abroad. Sanghera aims to bridge the “gap” between Britain’s limited sense of its global impact and the former colonies’ far more extreme perceptions of that impact. His position isn’t simply anti-empire; though he comes down in favor of Britain paying reparations and points to ongoing harms (like how international charities continue to finance businesses in former British colonies with indentured servitude–like conditions reminiscent of imperial plantations), he meditates repeatedly on the impossibility of weighing imperialism’s negatives against its positives. Instead, he focuses on establishing a baseline of facts that will help further “dialogue” between Britain and its former colonies. His analysis is fascinating insofar as it delves into the empire’s systemic ramifications, especially in chapters on its agricultural and legal systems. But the argument at times verges on absurdity in its search for balance (“It’s entirely natural that the residents of, say, Jamaica, would be exercised about Britain leaving its population impoverished after slavery, even while they benefit from another imperial legacy such as, say, the introduction of cricket”); this is likely due to the ongoing British “culture war” over scholarly work on this topic, which Sanghera touches on briefly. By turns informative and confounding, this reveals even more about Britain’s present than its past.