Empireland: How Imperialism Has Shaped Modern Britain
SATHNAM SANGHERA
(VIKING, 320 PP, £18.99)
Tablet bookshop price £17.09 • tel 020 7799 4064

Those who have read Sathnam Sanghera’s wonderful memoir The Boy with the Topknot will not be surprised to find that this latest very well written book combines hugely readable quantities of information about our centuries as an almost inadvertent imperial power with decent, ­balanced and wise judgements. This account of how much of our “island story” was written in other countries deserves to be widely read, not least by those who have migrated to the extremes of present public debate. It is neither woke nor jingoistic; the sentiments are those of a fair-minded British citizen who comes from a Sikh family. His decency and talent remind us of how much we owe to all those immigrants from our empire who came to make their lives here and too often (but happily not always) had to face hostility with a racist hue. The racism was frequently sired by our imperial past.

Sanghera grew up in Enoch Powell’s Wolverhampton wanting to be more British than his parents without being less Sikh. He encountered one of the grimmest episodes in the history of his religion when making a documentary about the 1919 massacre of Sikhs (and other Indians) at Jallianwala Bagh, a park in Amritsar, by imperial forces under Brigadier General Reginald Dyer. This tragedy hollowed out the loyalty felt by many Indians to the Raj and helped expedite its demise.