Mar 23, 2021 10:28 PM
(This post was last modified: Mar 23, 2021 10:29 PM by C C.)
REVIEW: Empireland - How imperialism has shaped modern Britain
https://www.newstatesman.com/empireland-...ews-review
EXCERPTS: This review is the product of empire [...] I am here today because my grandmother, the South African descendant of white British colonists – who erected a complex system of racial apartheid in order to continue minority rule – met and had a child with a descendant of the enslaved Javanese population, who were brought to South Africa by the Dutch empire. Heavily pregnant, my grandmother exercised her right as a Commonwealth citizen to come to the United Kingdom. There she met my grandfather, the descendant of eastern European Jews who fled the anti-Semitic persecution of the Russian empire to come to Britain in the 19th century. Years later, while working at the Africa Centre in London, my mother met a British Zimbabwean, himself only here because his ancestors, like many Commonwealth citizens, were encouraged to come to the UK to top up the labour force.
If any of those three empires had not existed – if just one of them had collapsed due to internal strife or external defeat a little earlier – then I would not exist and you would not be reading this sentence. (I leave the question of whether this fact goes in the “pros” or “cons” column of those empires up to you.)
The legacy of Europe’s empires is so bound into our society that trying to remove their influence upon us is as futile a task as attempting to remove the egg from a baked cake, to borrow an analogy that the author and Times writer Sathnam Sanghera uses in Empireland. As he superbly chronicles, the legacy of the British empire is everywhere you look. Perhaps most fittingly of all, the word “loot” is itself appropriated from the Hindi word “lut”: the spoils of war.
Although Empireland is the product of wide reading rather than original research, it is a fantastic introduction for anyone who wants to learn more about the British empire. Sanghera shares his knowledge without pretension or affectation. [...] My time with Sanghera’s book was so enjoyable that it feels almost churlish to admit that I found its overarching argument wholly unconvincing. Nevertheless, I am churlish, so here goes.
Sanghera suggests that greater awareness of our imperial past would reshape our understanding of our post-imperial present. He argues that Brexit is, in part, “an exercise in empire nostalgia”.
There is, to my eyes, an obvious problem here: it’s hard to claim that the Netherlands has fully come to terms with the Dutch empire [...] And what about France? ... France is an essential component of the modern EU, and yet like the UK struggles to confront its imperial legacy. Sanghera is right that we can no more disentangle the UK of today from the imperial power of time gone by than we can remove the egg from a cake – but if we’re comparing it to other countries we do need to be sure that they don’t have the same problem.
Sanghera puts far too much faith in the power of historical education to change minds and thus change the present. If only people were taught that so many of Britain’s “black and Asian people had been made citizens through the imperial project”, then the debate over multiculturalism would be “instantly transformed”.
This is obviously untrue. To take the system of apartheid in South Africa: it was not erected because its architects were ignorant of their imperial legacy but because they feared terrible retribution in the event of black majority rule. Nor would anyone sensible be reassured by the idea that immigration and multiculturalism are simply “colonizin’ in reverse”, as the poet Louise Bennett puts it. Colonisation was a violent, disruptive and sometimes extinction-level event for the colonised people. Anyone who thought that immigration was the same process via a different means would be mad not to resist it.
There is much to agree with in Sanghera’s book [...] but I struggle to understand how someone who has read so much imperial history could think that a better public understanding of that past would in itself “instantly transform” our shared understanding of the world today. Even historians don’t agree on what the empire tells us about either the Britain of 1821 or the Britain of 2021.
[...] Modern ideas of racial tolerance and unity do, unquestionably, have a racist ancestor. But the germ theory of disease can also trace its development through a number of discredited ideas: the miasma theory that illnesses are spread by “bad air”; and the idea that the mere act of smelling food could eventually contribute to fattening you up. Yet our modern understanding of how disease spreads is not doomed to failure because of its ancestry in what we now know to be flawed thinking.
[...] The empire cannot plausibly be the cause of what Sanghera considers to be a unique brand of racism, not least because that would account for neither the West’s pre-imperial anti-Semitism nor its pre-imperial racism. (As Sanghera recounts, long before empire, Elizabeth I was complaining that London’s Moorish population had grown too large.)
There is a similar problem in Andrews’ approach: my African ancestors, who sold the luckless members of other tribes, were not motivated by white supremacy but by a far older and universal sin: greed, and a desire to treat the perceived “other” – whether they look like us or not – as less than themselves.
History can illuminate the present. But it is only by confronting our shared and continued capacity for brutality against those we perceive as being unlike us – for profit or convenience – that we can build a better future... (MORE - details)
https://www.newstatesman.com/empireland-...ews-review
EXCERPTS: This review is the product of empire [...] I am here today because my grandmother, the South African descendant of white British colonists – who erected a complex system of racial apartheid in order to continue minority rule – met and had a child with a descendant of the enslaved Javanese population, who were brought to South Africa by the Dutch empire. Heavily pregnant, my grandmother exercised her right as a Commonwealth citizen to come to the United Kingdom. There she met my grandfather, the descendant of eastern European Jews who fled the anti-Semitic persecution of the Russian empire to come to Britain in the 19th century. Years later, while working at the Africa Centre in London, my mother met a British Zimbabwean, himself only here because his ancestors, like many Commonwealth citizens, were encouraged to come to the UK to top up the labour force.
If any of those three empires had not existed – if just one of them had collapsed due to internal strife or external defeat a little earlier – then I would not exist and you would not be reading this sentence. (I leave the question of whether this fact goes in the “pros” or “cons” column of those empires up to you.)
The legacy of Europe’s empires is so bound into our society that trying to remove their influence upon us is as futile a task as attempting to remove the egg from a baked cake, to borrow an analogy that the author and Times writer Sathnam Sanghera uses in Empireland. As he superbly chronicles, the legacy of the British empire is everywhere you look. Perhaps most fittingly of all, the word “loot” is itself appropriated from the Hindi word “lut”: the spoils of war.
Although Empireland is the product of wide reading rather than original research, it is a fantastic introduction for anyone who wants to learn more about the British empire. Sanghera shares his knowledge without pretension or affectation. [...] My time with Sanghera’s book was so enjoyable that it feels almost churlish to admit that I found its overarching argument wholly unconvincing. Nevertheless, I am churlish, so here goes.
Sanghera suggests that greater awareness of our imperial past would reshape our understanding of our post-imperial present. He argues that Brexit is, in part, “an exercise in empire nostalgia”.
There is, to my eyes, an obvious problem here: it’s hard to claim that the Netherlands has fully come to terms with the Dutch empire [...] And what about France? ... France is an essential component of the modern EU, and yet like the UK struggles to confront its imperial legacy. Sanghera is right that we can no more disentangle the UK of today from the imperial power of time gone by than we can remove the egg from a cake – but if we’re comparing it to other countries we do need to be sure that they don’t have the same problem.
Sanghera puts far too much faith in the power of historical education to change minds and thus change the present. If only people were taught that so many of Britain’s “black and Asian people had been made citizens through the imperial project”, then the debate over multiculturalism would be “instantly transformed”.
This is obviously untrue. To take the system of apartheid in South Africa: it was not erected because its architects were ignorant of their imperial legacy but because they feared terrible retribution in the event of black majority rule. Nor would anyone sensible be reassured by the idea that immigration and multiculturalism are simply “colonizin’ in reverse”, as the poet Louise Bennett puts it. Colonisation was a violent, disruptive and sometimes extinction-level event for the colonised people. Anyone who thought that immigration was the same process via a different means would be mad not to resist it.
There is much to agree with in Sanghera’s book [...] but I struggle to understand how someone who has read so much imperial history could think that a better public understanding of that past would in itself “instantly transform” our shared understanding of the world today. Even historians don’t agree on what the empire tells us about either the Britain of 1821 or the Britain of 2021.
[...] Modern ideas of racial tolerance and unity do, unquestionably, have a racist ancestor. But the germ theory of disease can also trace its development through a number of discredited ideas: the miasma theory that illnesses are spread by “bad air”; and the idea that the mere act of smelling food could eventually contribute to fattening you up. Yet our modern understanding of how disease spreads is not doomed to failure because of its ancestry in what we now know to be flawed thinking.
[...] The empire cannot plausibly be the cause of what Sanghera considers to be a unique brand of racism, not least because that would account for neither the West’s pre-imperial anti-Semitism nor its pre-imperial racism. (As Sanghera recounts, long before empire, Elizabeth I was complaining that London’s Moorish population had grown too large.)
There is a similar problem in Andrews’ approach: my African ancestors, who sold the luckless members of other tribes, were not motivated by white supremacy but by a far older and universal sin: greed, and a desire to treat the perceived “other” – whether they look like us or not – as less than themselves.
History can illuminate the present. But it is only by confronting our shared and continued capacity for brutality against those we perceive as being unlike us – for profit or convenience – that we can build a better future... (MORE - details)