Empireworld
How British Imperialism Shaped the Globe
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- $19.99
Publisher Description
Bestselling author and journalist Sathnam Sanghera explores the global legacy of the British Empire, and the ways it continues to influence economics, politics, and culture around the world.
2.6 billion people are inhabitants of former British colonies. The empire's influence upon the quarter of the planet it occupied, and its gravitational influence upon the world outside it, has been profound: from the spread of Christianity by missionaries to the shaping international law. Even today, 1 in 3 people drive on the left hand side of the road, an artifact of the British empire. Yet Britain's idea of its imperial history and the world's experience of it are two very different things. Following in the footsteps of his bestselling book Empireland: How Imperialism Has Shaped Modern Britain, Empireworld explores the ways in which British Empire has come to shape the modern world
Sanghera visits Barbados, where he uncovers how Caribbean nations are still struggling to emerge from the disadvantages sown by transatlantic slavery. He examines how large charities--like Save the Children and the World Bank--still see the world through the imperial eyes of their colonial founders, and how the political instability of nations, such as Nigeria, for instance, can be traced back to tensions seeded in their colonial foundations. And from the British Empire's role in the transportation of 12.5 million Africans during the Atlantic slave trade, to the 35 million Indians who died due to famine caused by British policy, the British Empire, as Sanghera reveals, was responsible for some of the largest demographic changes in human history.
Economic, legal and political systems across the world continue to function along the lines originally drawn by the British Empire, and cultural, sexual, psychological, linguistic, demographic, and educational norms originally established by imperial Britons continue to shape our lives. British Empire may have peaked a century ago, and it may have been mostly dismantled by 1997, but in this major new work, Sathnam Sanghera ultimately shows how the largest empire in world history still exerts influence over planet Earth in all sorts of silent and unsilent ways.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Journalist Sanghera follows up Empireland, his study of how Britain was shaped by its imperial past, with a comprehensive if occasionally off-key look at imperialism's legacy abroad. Sanghera aims to bridge the "gap" between Britain's limited sense of its global impact and the former colonies' far more extreme perceptions of that impact. His position isn't simply anti-empire; though he comes down in favor of Britain paying reparations and points to ongoing harms (like how international charities continue to finance businesses in former British colonies with indentured servitude–like conditions reminiscent of imperial plantations), he meditates repeatedly on the impossibility of weighing imperialism's negatives against its positives. Instead, he focuses on establishing a baseline of facts that will help further "dialogue" between Britain and its former colonies. His analysis is fascinating insofar as it delves into the empire's systemic ramifications, especially in chapters on its agricultural and legal systems. But the argument at times verges on absurdity in its search for balance ("It's entirely natural that the residents of, say, Jamaica, would be exercised about Britain leaving its population impoverished after slavery, even while they benefit from another imperial legacy such as, say, the introduction of cricket"); this is likely due to the ongoing British "culture war" over scholarly work on this topic, which Sanghera touches on briefly. By turns informative and confounding, this reveals even more about Britain's present than its past.
