Many in this country are hostile towards people arriving in boats, but we forget the damage caused when we arrived in foreign countries in boats ourselves. Contrary to what many people believe, however, immigration to the UK did not start with The Windrush generation and this book explores how the United Kingdom has welcomed people to settle here for centuries before including the remarkable Sake Dean Mahomed who was the first Indian to have a book published in England as early as 1794 and is widely credited with bring curry houses to this country. "We went there, so they came here" is often used as a simplistic way to explain multi-culturalism in the United Kingdom and, although the "we" and "they" are now blurred, Mr Sanghera considers that this is not a bad starting point. Times journalist Sathnam Sanghera has written this enlightening book which examines Britain's colonial past and the extent to which nostalgia about The Empire has shaped the British psyche. The toxic impact of nostalgic imperialism
For it is only by stepping back and seeing where we really come from that we can begin to understand who we are and what unites us. However, even among those who celebrate the empire there seems to be a desire not to look at it too closely - not to include the subject in our school history books, not to emphasise it too much in our favourite museums.Īt a time of great division, when we are arguing about what it means to be British, Sanghera's book urges us to address this bewildering contradiction. It is, as Sanghera reveals, fundamental to understanding Britain. The British Empire ran for centuries and covered vast swathes of the world.
And yet empire is a subject weirdly hidden from view. In prose that is, at once, both clear-eyed and full of acerbic wit, Sanghera shows how our past is everywhere: from how we live to how we think, from the foundation of the NHS to the nature of our racism, from our distrust of intellectuals in public life to the exceptionalism that imbued the campaign for Brexit and the government's early response to the COVID crisis. In his brilliantly illuminating new book Sathnam Sanghera demonstrates how so much of what we consider to be modern Britain is actually rooted in our imperial past. Longlisted for the Baillie Gifford Prize 2021.
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