Sathnam Sanghera on the legacy of empire

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But the positives have been incredible. I’ve met young people who are studying history because of Empireland, which is really inspiring. But it can also be overwhelming, and it did create pressure when I was writing this sequel. In fact, I’ve felt pressure on multiple fronts. You might have noticed that the book’s footnotes are quite extensive – probably more than you’d get in your average history title. That’s because I’m paranoid: I know there are people out there who want to undermine and ridicule me, so I wanted to make sure I showed up with the receipts.

Do you think there’s a danger of accuracy being lost, on all sides of this debate?

Absolutely. Defending empire is not a new thing: it’s as old as empire itself. But I think that it has gone further than ever in recent years, with nostalgic books about the British empire being published that ignore facts, use selective quotes, or ignore the consensus that has been built up by historians of the empire. I feel that’s taken this nostalgia into a dark place – into what is essentially fake history. And that scares me.

Is the conversation we have about empire in Britain different from those that are going on elsewhere in the world?

The legacies of empire are much more tangible outside Britain than in it. People live with them on a daily basis. For instance, I think the issue of reparations is often viewed in Britain as an academic, absurd argument, whereas in the Caribbean it’s a very real political conversation.

British people don’t often know about the royal family’s involvement in slavery, either: the fact that the Royal African Company sent more enslaved people across the Atlantic than any other institution in the history of the transatlantic slave trade, for instance. Yet it’s quite well understood in the Caribbean, which led – for example – to the awkwardness surrounding the 2022 visit by the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge. The fact that they stood touching black children through a wire fence, for instance, was instantly seen as wrong by many people in the Caribbean, but I think it took a while for the penny to drop in Britain.

Debates about empire in Britain also tend to be about the idea of a balance sheet: the extent to which it was ‘good’ or ‘bad’. That’s just not the way it’s being talked about elsewhere in the world, and it’s an absurd way of looking at history. It’s like studying the climate over the past 350 years by only looking at the sunshine or only studying the rain. It’d be better if you studied both, and all the stuff in between. But we don’t do that in Britain: we look at the empire in a black-and-white way that just re-enacts imperial tensions between colonisers and the colonised. I think we need to break free of that really babyish way of looking at history. The extent of the royal family’s links to empire is an example of how its legacy can provoke strong feelings and debate.

Is it right to say a key argument of your book is that a story can have two sides?

My overall argument is that opposite things can be true at the same time. Whatever you think about the British empire’s legacies, I think the opposite is also true to a certain degree. Yes, we were heavily involved in slavery, but that also led to the antislavery movement. British presence in its former imperial territories sometimes resulted in democracy, but also to a huge amount of geopolitical chaos. We spread the free press, but also censorship.

These kind of contradictions are everywhere. I realised that the legacies of empire are almost entirely contradictory, and we don’t need to balance them against each other – we can talk about both at the same time.

You write that you had doubts about the legitimacy of some of the commonly identified legacies of slavery and empire. What were those doubts?

The legacies cited by the Caricom countries [a political and economic union of 15 nations in the Americas and Atlantic Ocean] in their demands for reparations – including, for instance, the high rates of diabetes – are all things that I agree with. Britain transformed that part of the world, turned it into a hub of industrial sugar production, and took loads of enslaved people there. Of course poor health in the region is a legacy of that slavery.

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But you sometimes hear people saying their workaholism is due to the fact that they are a descendant of an enslaved person, or that PTSD [post-traumatic stress disorder] is handed down multiple generations, which quickly leads to arguments about whether trauma can be inherited. There, I think, the links are much less clear. In your chapter on the role of the British empire in spreading racism around the world, you pre-empt the objections some readers might have to it.

Was that one of the topics you were most apprehensive about tackling?

I think you are always going to be influenced by your personal experience. I occasionally get accused of being biased, but every historian is biased. Politics is just the way you see the world, and it affects my viewpoint just as it does anyone’s.

I would say, though, that my politics are actually quite centrist. I’m a classic Centrist Dad: I’ve voted for all three of Britain’s major political parties. For some people, on the left and on the right, that might make me extreme. But I’d argue my views are mainstream, and what I write about race in the book pretty much reflects the view of most imperial historians.

One of the key points is that we forget that, when ‘race science’ emerged in the 19th century, it had a distinctly British flavour. It became something different and dark in Germany, and something else again in the United States, but our empire was often the testbed for all of those weird theories. I’m Sikh, and my community was subject to the idea that it was in some way a ‘martial race’. That’s obviously absurd – as you can see, there’s nothing martial about me – but you can see the idea of characterising races elsewhere, too. Some Brits decided that black people would only work if compelled, or that it didn’t matter if Tasmanian people were wiped out because they were regarded as the lowest of the low.

But at the same time this racism was going on – most clearly manifested, I think, in Rudyard Kipling’s 1899 poem The White Man’s Burden – the British empire officially regarded itself as non-racist. This is another way in which opposites are true: sometimes when colonists and settlers behaved in a particularly racist way, people in London became concerned and tried to intervene. So you had racism and anti-racism playing out at the same time. The empire was different things at different times and in different parts of the world. That’s how deeply complex a subject it is.

Why do you think we struggle to have a conversation about empire in Britain?

It’s partly because empire happened abroad. We’ve never had a dark night of the soul, or even a light night of the soul, in which we have had to think about its legacies, because it all happened elsewhere.

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I also think it’s because a lot of people in Britain have direct family links to empire, whether to the colonisers or the colonised. So a conversation about the empire can start to feel deeply personal very quickly. People sometimes think you’re accusing them or their ancestors personally of being racist and horrible. That’s not what’s being said, but it’s often the way it’s taken.

Do you think there are things we can do to change the political conversation?

I think we can end the ‘culture war’ that’s been going on. This absurd idea that you need to be proud of British history to be proud of being British has become quite popular among rightwing pressure groups and some sections of the political classes. To draw pride from your history is not the same thing as understanding it, so we need to uncouple pride from our history – and shame, too, because there are lots of people who say we should be ashamed of British history because of what we did. I don’t think our feelings of pride or shame have anything to do with it. We need to get rid of our feelings and reach a deeper understanding of what happened.

What would you say to people who don’t see this as a culture war, but instead that negative changes are being made to the way that Britain sees itself?

I would encourage them to look at the example of Ireland. Ireland was an imperial territory and the Good Friday Agreement was an exercise in postcolonial reconciliation, which involved the issuing of apologies and even reparations of a sort. I’d say Ireland is now a much healthier nation because of that process, and I think that the same could happen to our relationships with other countries around the world if we underwent a similar process with them, too. There are practical things that we can do to understand the world better, and to have better relations with the rest of the planet.

Have you encountered instances in which you’ve been able to persuade people to change their mind? How possible is it to change people’s views on this subject?

I work on The Times, which is a centre-right newspaper, and people often ask me: ‘Why don’t you just go and work at The Guardian?’ But I like working on The Times partly because I can feel the resistance to what I’m saying. Sometimes that resistance results in racial abuse and horrible letters, and sometimes I feel scared for my safety, but at the same time, I can definitely feel people’s minds changing. I get letters from people in their 70s and 80s who say I’ve helped them understand that something they were taught in school wasn’t true, or that the reality was much more complex. I really value that, even if it sometimes comes at a personal cost.

How would you like people to think and feel about the history of the British empire as a result of reading your book?

I hope people realise that the legacies of empire are profoundly contradictory – but also that this isn’t a history that divides us, but one that ultimately unites us. So many people in Britain today have deep links to this history, whether ‘good’ or ‘bad’. It explains our multiculturalism – and our racism, too. It explains our daily habits, whether it’s drinking tea (which I’m drinking now) or rum (which, to be clear, I’m not). It’s a history that unites us, explains us and that, actually, can liberate us.

You can listen to Sathnam Sanghera speak to Matt Elton in this HistoryExtra podcast episode.

This article was first published in the April 2024 issue of BBC History Magazine