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"Empireland is brilliantly written, deeply researched and massively important. It’ll stay in your head for years.” —John Oliver, Emmy Award-winning host of "Last Week Tonight with John Oliver"
With a new introduction by the author and a foreword by Booker Prize-winner Marlon James
A best-selling journalist’s illuminating tour through the hidden legacies and modern realities of British empire that exposes how much of the present-day United Kingdom is actually rooted in its colonial past. Empireland boldly and lucidly makes the case that in order to understand America, we must first understand British imperialism. Empire—whether British or otherwise—informs nearly everything we do. From common thought to our daily routines; from the foundations of social safety nets to the realities of racism; and from the distrust of public intellectuals to the exceptionalism that permeates immigration debates, the Brexit campaign and the global reckonings with controversial memorials, Empireland shows how the pernicious legacy of Western imperialism undergirds our everyday lives, yet remains shockingly obscured from view.
In accessible, witty prose, award-winning journalist and best-selling author Sathnam Sanghera traces this legacy back to its source, exposing how—in both profound and innocuous ways—imperial domination has shaped the United Kingdom we know today. Sanghera connects the historical dots across continents and seas to show how the shadows of a colonial past still linger over modern-day Britain and how the world, in turn, was shaped by Britain’s looming hand. The implications, of course, extend to Britain’s most notorious former colony turned imperial power: the United States of America, which prides itself for its maverick soul and yet seems to have inherited all the ambition, brutality and exceptional thinking of its parent.
With a foreword by Booker Prize–winner Marlon James, Empireland is a revelatory and lucid work of political history that offers a sobering appraisal of the past so we may move toward a more just future.
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Creators
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Publisher
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Release date
February 28, 2023 -
Formats
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OverDrive Listen audiobook
- ISBN: 9780593669068
- File size: 313583 KB
- Duration: 10:53:17
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Languages
- English
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Reviews
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December 19, 2022
“Imperialism is not something that can be erased with a few statues being torn down or a few institutions facing up to their dark pasts,” according to this pointed and wide-ranging survey of how Britain’s imperialist past informs its present. Contending that most Britons remain ignorant of the many ways in which “the experience of having colonized” continues to affect British life and culture, journalist and novelist Sanghera (Marriage Material), calls for Empire Day 2.0, a reimagined version of an annual half-day school holiday from the first half of the 20th century. Among other lessons, students would learn that the expression “I don’t give a damn” originated in British India, where a dam was a low-value copper coin, and that the oil and gas company Shell started as an importer of “oriental seashells from the Far East.” Elsewhere, Sanghera turns to darker episodes in the history of British empire, including the Jallianwala Bagh Massacre that killed an estimated 600 to 1,000 Indian men, women, and children in 1919 and helped bring the British Raj to an end, and the looting of artifacts in Tibet. Ranging across the temporal length and geographical breadth of the empire, Sanghera amasses a devastating catalog of tragedies and injustices, and makes an irrefutable case that “imperial amnesia” hurts all Britons. It’s a cogent and captivating wake-up call. -
Starred review from May 1, 2023
British journalist and memoirist Sanghera (The Boy with the Topknot) explores the hidden legacy of the former British Empire, which existed for hundreds of years and continues to shape modern Britain. Sanghera presents an extensive history of the British Empire from its early days to its largest expanse in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, when the empire controlled 24 percent of the world. He reveals the empire's impact on the origins of America which continue to influence the American mythos of freedom and justice for all. In today's Britain, the sordid past of the empire is now being diffused by schools that deny the truth and instead indoctrinate students in patriotic education; Sanghera's scholarly work will likely provoke controversy. Narrator Homer Todiwala's slight Indian accent smartly conveys this work, and 2015 Booker Prize winner Marlon James's distinctive Jamaican accent enhances the foreword. The work clarifies and updates Jan Morris's more sentimental "Pax Britannica" trilogy about the former empire. VERDICT This essential and illuminating book nicely connects with Caroline Pennock's On Savage Shores, Kevin Kruse and Julian Zelizer's Myth America, and Nikole Hannah-Jones's The 1619 Project.--Dale Farris
Copyright 2023 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.
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