Empireworld
SATHNAM SANGHERA
(VIKING, 464 PP, £20)
Tablet bookshop price £18 • tel 020 7799 4064

The late Stuart Hall, one of the most perceptive thinkers about British colonial history, observed in the The Empire Strikes Back (1982) that “the imperial flag has been hauled down in a hundred different corners of the globe. But it is still flying in the collective unconscious.”

Empireworld (and Sathnam Sanghera’s previous book Empireland) examines the impacts of the British empire for today’s readers, and does so in an engaging and accessible way. Where Empireland looked at the effects of empire within these shores, Sanghera goes far further in Empireworld, taking as his task the vast challenge of defining and charting the continuing legacies of the British empire across the globe.