EMPIREWORLD

The author of Empireland, which plumbed the legacy of empire in Great Britain, offers a companion book that traces its effect across the world.

Writing to his fellow Britons, British Sikh journalist Sanghera strives to move beyond what he calls “balance-sheet thinking,” in which “the achievements of the British empire [are put] into inane ‘good’ and ‘bad’ categories,” and to find nuance and complexity in it. His quest takes him abroad to Delhi (both Old and New), Barbados, Mauritius, and Lagos, with a fascinating sojourn in Kew Gardens, as well as to a “colossal number of history books and articles” that inform his examination. (The bibliography alone occupies nearly 60 pages.) As most readers will expect, the author’s survey of Britain’s imperial legacy includes the scars inflicted by slavery, indenture, and white supremacy, but they may be more surprised at some of his other findings. The time spent at Kew, for instance, yields the insight that the cultivation of non-native flora in colonial plantations had economic reverberations that continue into the present day. This and countless other facts Sanghera highlights are fascinating in their own right. However, to fully understand his argument, readers who are not steeped in imperial assumptions will need to be mindful of his British audience and the fact that abolition, for instance, in the minds of many “balance-sheeters,” somehow compensates for its earlier enslavement of some 3 million Africans. The author’s style is often disarmingly colloquial—“We cannot proffer solutions to the world’s greatest geopolitical problems without acknowledging that we created a bunch of them,” he remarks—a mannerism that amplifies his sincerity. If the scope of his interrogation is vaster and therefore harder to contain than that of his earlier work, his honest attempt to reckon with it is just as compelling.

A worthy, thought-provoking follow-up.