Empireworld — how badly did the British empire behave?

“Are we the baddies?” asked British comedian David Mitchell in a famous 2006 TV sketch in which he and Robert Webb were dressed as Nazi officers.

That line has since become a meme embodying much of the recent soul-searching in the UK about the legacy of the British empire. Weren’t “we” the “goodies” who abolished slavery, and spread democracy and the rule of law across former colonies in Asia, Africa and the Caribbean? Or did we instead leave a trail of ethnic cleansing, corporate violence and ecological disaster across a quarter of the globe?

The debate was partly inspired by Sathnam Sanghera’s previous book Empireland (2021), which concentrated on the empire’s impact on the UK. Empireworld takes a significant step further, examining the wider global significance of British imperial power. The latest book was inspired by the disgraceful personal attacks, trolling and racism that Sanghera endured following Empireland’s publication.

In our febrile post-imperial, post-Brexit climate of culture wars, the legacy of empire seems to have touched something deep and troubling in our fragmented national psyche — or, as Sanghera succinctly puts it, “Britain cannot hope to have a productive future in the world without acknowledging what it did to the world in the first place.”

India’s attempt to cleanse the country of imperial influence would be — as Sanghera puts it — like getting the ghee out of his breakfast masala omelette

In keeping with Empireworld’s global outlook, Sanghera travels between Barbados (admitting wryly that his trip began as a post-Empireland beach holiday that turned into research), Delhi, Mauritius, Lagos, Kew Gardens and — in a deeply poignant conclusion for a boy from Wolverhampton — the 2022 Commonwealth Games in Birmingham, where he glimpses the possibility of imperial reparation and reconciliation.

The book begins with a tour de force of “Spot the colonial inheritance” in New Delhi. Here, everything from language and sport to the diamonds, tobacco and booze in duty-free reveal that the current Indian government’s attempt to cleanse the country of imperial influence would be — as Sanghera puts it — like getting the ghee out of his beloved breakfast masala omelette.

The legacy of empire is baked deep into many cultures. The point is not to blame or deny, nor is it to fixate on past grievances or embrace selective amnesia; it is instead to understand the complex, contradictory and enduring ways this made the modern world.

Along the way, the blizzard of data visible in 170 pages of footnotes and sources produces a staggering and distressing read. In Barbados, Sanghera shows how the island was stripped of its indigenous people, who had lived there for 2,500 years — part of a total native Caribbean population that numbered some 3mn in 1700 and had fallen to 30,000 by 2000. Meanwhile, the island’s countryside was reshaped into identikit sugar plantations, characterised by a harrowing plantation economy where African slaves were gibbeted, raped, castrated, branded, dismembered and imprisoned. This historical “reservoir of pain” has led the Caricom Caribbean countries to seek $33tn from European nations, $19.6tn from Britain alone.

In London’s Kew Gardens, Sanghera uncovers the remarkable social engineering behind the history of imperial botany. The pursuit and transplantation of sugar, quinine (to limit malaria), rubber, tea, timber, rice and even the humble fern literally reshaped the globe, degrading St Helena’s environmental habitat, causing widespread deforestation across Africa and the Caribbean, creating landslides in Sri Lanka’s tea plantations, and occasioning innumerable massacres and imprisonments after indigenous attempts to resist. Between 1838 and 1880, it is estimated that British imperial conflicts in Afghanistan, China, India and South Africa caused more than a million deaths.

Nor is this just a story of the devastation of slavery. In Mauritius, Sanghera enumerates the staggering figures and legacy of indentured labour — the system that came into force after official abolition in 1833, which required millions of migrant labourers from places such as India and China to commit to a fixed term of labour akin to the conditions of slavery (though Sanghera is careful to distinguish between them).

In Mauritius, 70 per cent of the islands’ 1.26mn population are descended from labourers who were transported from India. Indenture here and in other former colonies such as Guyana has created a toxic, ongoing legacy of racial conflict between Indian migrants and African descendants of people who had formerly been enslaved.

Sanghera’s itemisation of chaos and destruction grows and grows. In the 1860s, British colonial lawmakers passed section 377 of the Indian Penal Code, which ended up criminalising homosexuality until well after Indian independence and partition. Partition itself led to nearly 15mn people being displaced and between 200,000 and 2mn killed. Sanghera’s list of “ethnic combat”, “corporate terrorism” and the ecological “slow violence” of corporate pollution (as defined by Rob Nixon in his book of the same name) is often shocking, but always anchored in the realities of the modern world.

This is not a book aimed at “cancelling” Britishness or provoking white guilt: it is about, Sanghera says, “a national sense of responsibility”. There are also, Sanghera argues, pragmatic economic benefits to acknowledging our imperial past. If post-Brexit Britain wants to trade with the world, “it’s simply in our own interest to show up knowing what we were responsible for the last time we turned up”. This is not some mathematical balance sheet assessing how “good” or “bad” the British empire was — a question that Sanghera drily notes “is as inane and pointless as asking whether the world’s weather has been good or bad over the last 350 years”.

Instead, the author asks for a nuanced dialogue that embraces the contradictions and paradoxes of empire. As he stresses throughout this riveting book, the British spread the rule of law but institutionalised legal inequality; propagated racism but also witnessed the spread of anti-racism; destroyed large swaths of the global environment yet kick-started environmentalism; encouraged a free press while settler newspapers propagated white supremacy; combated and propagated hunger, while both spreading education and wilful ignorance.

This brave, painful, urgent and timely book, is not, in other words, about “goodies” or “baddies”. It is about telling the truth about a nation’s imperial past in all its ambiguity — and creating dialogue between everyone who lays claim to Britishness.

Empireworld: How British Imperialism Has Shaped the Globe by Sathnam Sanghera, Penguin Viking £20, 464 pages

This article has been amended since publication to reflect that the native Caribbean population numbered 3mn in 1700 and fell to 30,000 by 2000

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