![]() ![]() Proud of being British, yet subject to a fair degree of ‘Paki bashing’. To put it very crudely, he has one foot in each of the camps of coloniser and colonised. Yet what makes this book truly interesting – and without doubt allows the author to develop a more complex understanding of the effects of Empire on Britain today than his everyman persona would suggest – is Sanghera’s inclusion, and seemingly honest assessment, of his personal position, as a British Sikh, within all this. For large parts of the book this allows him to project himself as a sort of everyman offering up a reader’s digest of colonial history (a synthesis of sources readily available, as the author points out, to those who chose to look for them) and the various atrocities (slavery included) it encompasses. Sanghera, a Cambridge-educated journalist of Sikh Punjabi heritage born in Wolverhampton, concedes that he is approaching his subject – surprisingly given his ethnic background unsurprisingly given his British education – as something of a novice. Despite, as Sathnam Sanghera points out, recent waves of statue-toppling, institutional renaming and corporate apologies in the UK. The answer to the second is simple: generally speaking, it isn’t. ![]() ![]() Empireland sets out to measure to what extent contemporary Britain remains shaped by the legacies of Empire and colonialism, and to what extent that influence is acknowledged in Britain today. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |