Summary of Empireland By Sathnam Sanghera:How Imperialism Has Shaped Modern Britain

By Willie M. Joseph

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This book does not in any capacity mean to replace the original book but to serve as a vast summary of the original book.

Summary of Empireland By Sathnam Sanghera:How Imperialism Has Shaped Modern Britain

 

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Empireland is 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. Sathnam Sanghera traces this legacy back to its source, exposing how imperial domination has shaped the United Kingdom we know today. The implications extend to Britain's most notorious former colony, the United States of America, which prides itself for its maverick soul and has inherited all the ambition, brutality and exceptional thinking of its parent. 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.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Willie M. Joseph
• Release date: Mar 5, 2023
• ISBN: 9798215560051

Willie M. Joseph

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Foreword by Marlon James

In 2015, David Cameron visited Jamaica and demanded that the Jamaicans move past the legacy of slavery. He then announced that the United Kingdom would pay 40% of the cost to build a new prison on the island. The speech was jaw-dropping and the Jamaican parliament seemed to take it like a sermon on loving their masters. Cameron seemed ignorant of how much his country's imperialism had shaped the Britain he has lived in, from its magnificent palaces to its lack of compensating slave owners for post-abolition losses. Sathnam Sanghera's book exposes the sordid legacies of Slavery and Colonialism, but it is important to remember that not all forward-thinking movements came from beyond colonial influence.

Digging, simply for its own sake, can leave us with more holes in our stories, not fewer. Sanghera's Empireland is not the historical painting some would like, but rather a mirror that reflects messy, complicated, uncomfortable truths. It is not a partisan book in the least, but still one that will provoke some readers to take sides. Imperial revisionism is nothing new, but the UK wants to have it both ways, proud to be the land that ended slavery and fought the Nazis, but also proud to have given rise to the imperially nostalgic Nigel Farage and the still-present influence of Enoch Powell. The most important lessons do not wait until you're ready to receive them.

Sanghera's book The Windrush examines the legacy of the British Empire, which has left consequences in every single country it touched. He rejects the culturally relativist trick of making everyone feel equally accountable for the legacies of the past, and argues that it is important to unearth those consequences, interrogate them, learn from them, and recognize the strands that persist within us. He also argues that Brexit was not an anomaly, but an inevitable outgrowth of the imperial position. Sanghera presents these staggering facts as if he has just discovered them himself, and even he can't hide how much they astonish. Empireland is a journey of discovery, not just for those within the empire, but also for those from the colony that took independence by force.

It shows us a way to revisit the past with eyes unflinching, yet open and generous, and suggests that we can finally reach that future together. Sanghera makes these consequences feel personal, because we have a personal stake in what he's found. He invokes the I often because the truths he's unearthed are as much for him as they are for whoever reads his book.

to the American Reader

Hollywood has long had a preference for casting villains from Britain, with Sir Anthony Hopkins playing Hannibal Lecter in The Silence of the Lambs, Jeremy Irons voicing Scar in The Lion King, Alan Rickman playing the Sheriff of Nottingham in Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves, and Christopher Lee as Count Dracula in Dracula. Hollywood also loves a German Nazi by way of Great Britain, with Ralph Fiennes playing a homicidal SS officer in Schindler's List and Laurence Olivier playing the Nazi dentist in Marathon Man. This preference has been attributed to political correctness, the British stage tradition, and the American film expert Nikolas Lloyd's argument that Englishmen are seen as the archetypal smoothtalking, well-educated slicker who is never to be trusted. This narrative emerged when the thirteen colonies declared independence in 1776, in opposition to the British empire. The United States is often portrayed as a victim of Britain's imperial oppression, even though it proclaims itself to be democratic, plural and liberal.

This version of events, which makes it easy for Hollywood to portray Brits as exploitative baddies, supposes that the thirteen colonies rejected all things colonial when they came to a confrontation with the British Crown in the 1760s over the issue of local taxation, and that the War of Independence resulted in an entirely new country committed to the principles of Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. However, the thirteen colonies were a distinct phase of British imperialism, which ran from the seventeenth century and involved large numbers of Britons settling in the American colonies and the Caribbean. The British Empire has had a profound influence on both sides of the Atlantic, from the etymology of our shared language to the burial of Pocahontas in the cemetery of St. George's Church in Gravesend, Kent. The War of Independence marked a total rejection of the British empire, but there is evidence that the influence of British empire has been profound. Every meeting between a British prime minister and a U.S. president in recent memory has alluded to deep and close links, with President Obama remarking in 2010 that the United States and the United Kingdom enjoy a truly special relationship. Jan Morris, the late chronicler of empire, noted that to many English Victorians, the United States was still hardly a foreign country at all.

Charles Dilke viewed the United States as a projection of England, and a network of prominent individuals advocated for transatlantic unification. BBC History Magazine concluded that despite the violent rupture of the revolutionary war, the United States inherited from British empire judicial procedures, political practice, and a tolerant pragmatism. Kehinde Andrews argued that the United States is the most extreme expression of the racist world order, based on the logic of Western empire. To understand American history, you must also understand British imperial history, which includes the way the United States and British empire jointly fought two world wars together. Britain's obsession with its former global superpower status, inversely proportional to America's concern with Britain, has led to a neurotic obsession with the special relationship with America and its involvement in wars like Iraq and Afghanistan.

It has also been accused of ignoring the role the transatlantic slave trade played in British empire, which was inextricable from British imperialism and the demand for goods like sugar and cotton. Recent books have argued that slavery was the foundation of both American and British growth, while critics argue that cotton's economic might is grossly exaggerated.

The debate over the value of slave-sustained trade between the United States and the British empire is complex, but the incontrovertible truth is that slavery made some British people very rich and spurred the growth of numerous British imperial institutions. Liverpool, the city that Karl Marx famously claimed waxed fat on the slave trade, is an example of the mutual dependency of America's slave economy and Britain's imperial economy. Hollywood's Gone With the Wind illustrates this connection, as does the common complaint that Britain continued to benefit from trade in slave-grown products after abolition. The connections transcend economics, pervading even the shared philosophies and values of these nations. The Enlightenment had a profound impact on the development of nations, with Tom Holland arguing that it played a particularly profound role in America.

Enlightenment thinkers such as David Hume, Kant, Locke, and Jefferson argued that non-whites were inferior to whites in the endowments of body and mind. This led to the emergence of white supremacy on both sides of the Atlantic, with Jefferson having several children with Sally Hemings, a black slave he owned and abused sexually. Centuries later, the US and Britain are still grappling with the same, intertwined imperial and anti-black legacies. Paul Gilroy argued in 1993 that black consciousness transcended the nation-state, and that it made more sense to talk about the black Atlantic experience than the black American or black British