Empireland - Sathnam Sanghera

I am now going to commit social media suicide by criticising Sathnam Sanghera’s acclaimed study of the British Empire, in spite of its huge sales and near universal acclaim. I’m white British and therefore setting myself up to be cast as an evil imperialist, and Mr Sanghera is brown and therefore another innocent victim of imperial wickedness. In short, how dare I?

But there is a reason why this book must be criticised, and that is its lack of decent analysis. Mr Sanghera is proud of this. As far as he is concerned, the Empire and all its deeds are absolute evil. To analyse, to compare this atrocity with that, or the British with any other Empire, is to keep “a balance sheet of evil” – a phrase he uses a number of times. It doesn’t matter whether we are trying to say that the Empire might have done one or two worthwhile things at some point in its long history, or whether we assert that other Empires also did bad things: to find any good point about the Empire, or any bad point about other Empires, is to make a compromise with absolute darkness. That’s what Mr Sanghera’s means by his “balance sheet” metaphor – a dirty compromise.

I have a lot of sympathy with this. Atrocities are absolute evil and were committed in large numbers by the British Empire. No excuses for the massacres of civilians, the first concentration camps, the slave trade, genocides in Australia… they are inexcusable. I even know of some deeply wicked acts committed by the British that Mr Sanghera doesn’t mention, for example the cutting off of the thumbs of Bengali weavers by their British masters to prevent them competing with the cotton mills of Lancashire, which deeply incensed my Bengali friend Patrick and should incense anybody who cares about justice and mercy.

The trouble is that when we refuse to analyse, compare and contrast, we are also refusing to understand what went wrong and, most importantly, to learn how to do better in future. Let’s take some examples. How is it that tiny British forces were able to rule hundreds of millions in India? I don’t know the answer and Mr Sanghera does not do anything to help me find out - unless it was by the diabolical power of their inveterate wickedness. But I suspect that it could never have happened unless it had been in the interests of large numbers of Indian people at the time to support the British. Maybe there were people who didn’t do that well under the previous arrangements, for whom rule from London offered a fresh set of opportunities. And the previous arrangements were, in large part, another Empire: the Moghuls. I believe (although Empireland fails to inform me either way) that these Persian rulers invaded much of India, imposed Islam on huge swathes of the population, fought incessantly against Mr Sanghera’s own Sikh ancestors and extracted a great deal of wealth from the economy. If so it is hardly surprising that there might have been benefits, at least for some, in the arrival of a new order.

Or let’s take the Amritsar Massacre. The horrific murder by armed British troops of several hundred civilians engaged in a peaceful protest quite rightly sends Mr Sanghera ballistic with fury. And yet, and yet, there is a telling comparison that demands to be made. In the Peterloo Massacre British troops were sent to cut down the working class people of England who were also engaged in peaceful protest. In both atrocities, women, children and the elderly were cut down without mercy. So the same British ruling classes that massacred brown people in Amritsar also massacred their fellow Brits at Peterloo. Doesn’t this show us that we need to look at the Empire in terms of class and not only of race here. It’s the merciless brutality of the British aristocracy to those, whether white or brown, whom they considered their inferiors. Couldn’t we have learned something useful by exploring this class element? Not it seems according to Mr Sanghera.

And so to the unsayable, or at least very rarely said, about the background to the history of British involvement in the slave trade. It seems that the great majority of slaves traded across the Atlantic were not captured and dragged from their homes by British soldiers, notwithstanding Alex Haley’s Roots. They were in fact mainly purchased from existing slave markets in West Africa, which were largely run by other black Africans. 

This by no means exculpates British slave traders. The vastly expanded markets they opened up in North America and the Caribbean immensely increased the scale of human suffering and the brutal conditions they inflicted on their human cargo were an abomination. Nothing should ever be allowed to mitigate or excuse the great evil done to millions of our fellow humans through the Atlantic slave trade. But a more nuanced picture is demanded by its history: a more complex history of race, for example. It seems that some ethnic groups enslaved and sold others because of religion rather than race. The slave markets had already been trading people into Islamic Empires for centuries before the British, sniffing a commercial opportunity, broke in. People were traded, not because they were black like their captors but because they were kaffirs – pagans – and therefore considered subhuman. 

I think it’s very typical of the British Empire that the trade in human flesh was treated as a commercial matter. As in the Opium Wars, the great sin of the Empire was to treat human beings as non-sentient, mere ciphers of profit and loss. This is the huge moral failure of the Empire that made it able to hoodwink itself into doing acts of incredible evil while hypocritically convincing itself that it was a force for good. I think Empireland might have benefitted from greater exploration of the ramifications this central issue and might even have found more to say about the new world empires being forged by multi-national corporations today. The British Empire began as the East India Company…

Just a couple more observations and then I will have done:

• I was disgusted by Sanghera’s highly personal and venomous attack on John Newton, former slave trader and who himself became a slave for two years in West Africa, but ended up as an anti-slavery campaigner very closely associated with the banning of the slave trade throughout the British Empire. Sanghera displays absolutely no acquaintance with Newton’s biography, which in itself denies any credibility to his views. It seems we don’t need to know what was done to Newton or why he did what he did, the sheer fact that he was involved in evil things means there can never be anything but condemnation for him. It’s that “no balance sheet with evil” schtick again – any attempt to understand how very brutal British life was for most Britons, at home and abroad, is a compromise with atrocity. But the really objectionable side to Sanghera’s views is that they admit no possibility that people can change. This is a conflict between a karma culture, where everybody pays to the uttermost farthing in the end, and a repentance culture where there is the possibility, even if most of the time nobody takes it up, for a real meaningful change of heart and life that can only emerge out of human brokenness. Modern cancel culture is destroying this life giving possibility but I find a culture with no hope of redemption intolerable.

• Small one – the castigation of Prof Hugh Trevor-Roper for saying in a 1970s textbook that black Africa has no history. If it is taken that he means that Black Africa has no worthwhile culture or institutions then Trevor-Roper would deserve all the condemnation S heaps on him. But I suspect he is speaking as an academic and lamenting the fact that black Africa has no Thucydides, no Herodotus, no Gibbon or Macauley. History means what is written down about the past, and if nobody wrote it down then unfortunately there just isn’t a history, to the great loss of all of us. What I’m really saying is I’m tired of Sanghera’s non-stop rush to castigate and condemn at every opportunity.

And so to my final shout – a huge omission from Empireland - there is no discussion of how and why it all ended. As far as I am aware, and as a non-academic historian I feel that I should show more humility in venturing opinions than Sanghera does, unlike the Romans or the Assyrians or the Persians or the Soviets, the British Empire is the only one that voluntarily surrendered control in order to liberate its subject peoples. Some analysis of why this happened would have been most welcome and would have shed an interesting light on what it was all about. If I am right to imagine that the key energy that drove the empire was commercial, the exploitation of opportunities to expand trade and make money, then it could simply be that, in the new circumstances of the post-war era, there was no more money to be made – that the British could no longer support an Empire that cost them more than it paid. In fact I think there is a good case to be made that one of the war aims of the USA in WW2 was to bring the British Empire to an end. But in addition there also seems to have been a growing repugnance among the people of Britain for Empire itself. The British people repudiated the massacre at Amritsar, condemned the participants and sacked the officer who commanded the murder of defenceless civilians. They’d had enough of atrocity and oppression and walked away.