In Britain’s case, however, the source of discord is its former empire. in 2021) describes a culture war that will seem eerily familiar to the American reader: the pulling down of statues and monuments to notorious racists on one side, and the defensive adherence to a starry-eyed view of history on the other. edition of Sathnam Sanghera’s Empireland: How Imperialism Has Shaped Modern Britain (published in the U.K. Since so many Americans are invested in a whitewashed version of our history, though, efforts to correct the record or discuss reparations for past human-rights abuses invariably spark vehement blowback.įrom this standpoint, the first U.S. Specifically, past failure to deal honestly with slavery and the truth about the Confederacy has had dire real-life consequences in terms of needless human suffering and mismatched problems and solutions. The United States is certainly no stranger to this phenomenon or its often-grotesque ramifications. But good or bad it is our birthright.Countries habitually ignore or distort their own pasts to shape national narratives and serve partisan aims. Empire as a subject is a partisan issue your opinion on it says more about your politics than your knowledge of history. The picture of the UK painted by Sanghera is of one ill-at-ease with itself.
As a remedy to our blank spots, he advocates more teaching of empire in schools, not cordoned off as a special subject, but integrated into how we learn our language, appreciate our monuments and read our great books. This is touched upon in the chapter Selective Amnesia but will become a more pressing issue as Scottish nationalism threatens to tear apart modern Britain. I would also have liked to read more about how the different nations of the United Kingdom experience empire differently. I am unconvinced that because Britons were colonisers, settlers and tourists, our modern wanderlust (principally to Spain and France, two countries largely un-colonised by Britain) is derived from empire. There is a nuance in analysing what we inherited from empire: in teasing out what is a parallel and what is a cause. This is a journey of discovery for himself too, he admits that two years ago he knew very little about the subject. One of the most lucid parts of the book comes in a footnote, in which the author attacks the notion that minorities must be grateful and uncritical of the society in which they were born, and the author of The Boy with the Top Knot threads in his own experience growing up as the child of Sikh Punjabi immigrants in Wolverhampton.
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