Stolen History: The truth about the British Empire and how it shaped us

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People were suddenly very interested in systemic racism and colonialism and Sanghera found he was writing a very timely book.

Stolen History: The truth about the British Empire and how it Stolen History: The truth about the British Empire and how it

Sanghera blends memoir, journalism and history to construct a multi-layered narrative that slowly builds toward an existential but also political question: if you take away Empire, and everything connected to it, what would be left of the elements that could be said to constitute British national identity? In Just Mercy, he paints a picture of a system riddled with racial inequality that sentences children to die in prison and, he says, provides a better outcome if you are rich and guilty than if you are poor and innocent. a lot of what Sanghera documents is news to me… Sanghera’s point, I guess, is that we are unconscious citizens of Empireland: empire made us, whether we realise it or not.

Some of them are so lazy and mean that they make their pupils do all their work for them, while punishing them and taking all the payment and credit. The British government paid out colossal sums to compensate slaveowners – but nothing to enslaved people themselves. In fact, the Romans weren’t the only ones who colonized Britain – the Vikings, the Saxons and the Normans all had a go at it too. When they had the temerity to demand better wages, thousands of other dark-skinned workers were shipped in as indentured labourers from China, India, and Africa, to take their place – as they were to countless other new British plantations around the world.

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His novel Marriage Material, originally published in 2013, was inspired in part by Arnold Bennett's The Old Wives' Tale. He highlights the empire’s hidden influence, positive and negative, on modern Britain: our politics, culture, education, ethnic make-up, language.

He explains “there is no difference between healing ourselves and healing the planet” and why “caring for the environment is not an obligation, but a matter of personal and collective happiness and survival”. Millions of others fought for Britain – in the second world war alone, 200,000 Indian soldiers were killed, wounded, or captured while serving in allied campaigns.

Stolen History by Sathnam Sanghera | Waterstones

Cotton is a crop more associated with American slavery and sugar is more imperial, more Caribbean… When you are illustrating Kipling’s Jungle Book do you echo his imperialist view of Indians? This is a contemplative text with thoughtful and detailed illustrations that roll out from the possible grey of the future to the vibrant colours of life and nature that could be reclaimed. The abolitionist vision was deeply hierarchical, racist and paternalist – freedom was something to be gradually earned by blacks and benevolently bestowed by whites.During wartime, he dared to take the side of the women instead of the men, the enemy instead of his compatriots, and the losers instead of the winners.

Stolen History - Sathnam Sanghera

Accessible and enlightening, with complex, vital history explained with clarity, SathnamSanghera’s Stolen History is, quite simply, a powerful, transformative must-read for allBritish youngsters. Sanghera wants Britons to recognise, with him, their ‘deep and complex relationship with the world through empire’, to reclaim intimacy with the multicultural nature of a common history. So does Padraic Scanlan’s engrossing and powerful Slave Empire: How Slavery Built Modern Britain, a detailed exposition of how Britain profited from slavery for 200 years, and then used its abolition to justify another century or more of imperial violence and capitalist exploitation. A remarkable look at how British imperialism has shaped the world and the way in which Britain regards itself, Empireland should be a set text in an education system that Sathnam Sanghera says failed him badly. The tongue-in-cheek writing helps one engage with a book that draws out skeletons from the closet… without leaving you with a sense of moroseness.Around 3 million Africans suffered this fate during the British Empire, with many of them dying on the journey due to terrible conditions on the ships. As the author says, we are not generally taught about the British Empire in school and he is right, I wasn’t.