The insight that “history is written by the victors” is often attributed to Winston Churchill, although there’s no evidence he actually said it. A lot of attribution of historical quotes turns out to be wishful thinking – and sometimes what we regard as “our” British history is similarly bathed in mythological fairy dust. Perhaps history should be seen merely as an attempt to tell the best stories of the past, constructed by those who respect facts and arrange those facts in a narrative that makes sense.
What’s certainly true is that new generations of British historians, such as Sathnam Sanghera, author of Empireland and Empireworld, uncover new facts and insights because they come from different backgrounds and therefore interpret the past differently from previous, largely white, male perspectives. This can provoke the dog-whistle cry – from reactionary politicians and thinkers – that new-wave historians are shockingly “rewriting British history”. In fact, rewriting history is precisely why some of the most interesting contemporary accounts of Britain and Empire come from historians whose family roots go back into Britain’s imperial past: Sanghera’s bestselling books on Britain’s colonial past, the television programmes of Professor David Olusoga, and the brilliant and moving BBC radio series Three Million by Kavita Puri, full of shocking revelations about the 1943 Bengal famine.
The immediate attraction of Sanghera’s work comes from his admission that – along with most pupils learning history in UK schools – he barely thought about the British empire, growing up. The history of empire is even now only marginal in terms of our national curriculum. Like most of us, he was taught about “Good” Britain, such as in the abolition of the slave trade, but not about “Bad” Britain, including the vast profits accrued from the growth of the slave trade through the centuries beforehand. Certainly, when I was at school, no time was spent discussing the enormous estates built by slave traders and plantation owners or the statues in our great cities memorialising their philanthropy, paid for by unspeakable horrors abroad. The only imperial conquest I remember hearing about at school was a Latin joke. In the 1840s General Sir Charles James Napier conquered the Sindh province of India. Our Classics master told us Napier reported back to London with one word “Peccavi”. That’s Latin for “I have sinned”. Geddit? Hilarious. (That’s all I’ve got on the history of British India.)
When David Olusoga premiered his BBC series on the complex history of England, Scotland, Wales and Ireland, The Making of Britain, I told him it was only when I met Irish students as a university postgraduate that I began to be aware of a different version of British history. Olusoga replied that the same was true for him – his Irish mates at uni had given him an education. Similarly, Kavita Puri’s eye-opening series on the Bengal famine recently shocked me – and millions of other listeners, I suspect – out of my ignorance.
It was therefore with considerable excitement and trepidation that I opened Sathnam Sanghera’s new work, Empireworld, and its mission to explain “how British imperialism has shaped the globe”. It begins with an African proverb containing the same wisdom as the quote attributed to Churchill: “Until lions have their own historians, tales of the hunt will always glorify the hunter.” We took the Benin bronzes and changed the identity of the countries involved, drawing straight lines on maps to suit our own convenience. Ethnic groups were partitioned or lumped together in pink on our globes.
In the book, Sathnam points out that completely “decolonising” Africa, India or indeed anywhere else nowadays is impossible, although it’s being attempted. The name Calcutta has been changed to Kolkata, but true “decolonising” would require renaming the 35 places called York in the world, eighteen Birminghams, more than 80 Victorias and at least 53 Plymouths. A third of the world drives on the left, like the British. If the dollar is the world’s reserve currency, English is the world’s reserve language. Most Irish people will forever speak English. And even as Narendra Modi’s government tries to diminish English as a foreign tongue, “India would need to disown writers like Rohinton Mistry and Arundhati Roy, who happen to be among the best on the planet at writing in English.” Oh, and India, Pakistan and even Afghanistan are not in the business of giving up cricket. So when I speak to Sanghera for this interview, I begin by asking about his first bestseller, Empireland. What provoked his interest in our historical delusions, a kind of perpetual British empire of the mind?
“It was accidentally timely because I was researching a novel about Dean Mahomed, who was one of the first Indians to come to Britain,” he tells me. “I started working on the East India Company and realised I knew nothing about it. That’s when the research became more interesting than the novel. I started writing it, but I remember telling friends about it and they were completely confused about what I was trying to do. Then Black Lives Matter happened. Suddenly empire is everywhere and it’s a theme that the world is interested in.” (Dean Mahomed, incidentally, still deserves a novel. He lived from 1759 until 1851 and was an extraordinary adventurer, soldier, surgeon and traveller.)
We talk about Britain’s historic blind spot towards Ireland, which Sathnam’s generation saw very differently to mine. “I did study Ireland at school,” he says. “We did the Troubles for GCSE History. And the weirdest thing is, I never made the connection between that history and my family’s history. There’s so many parallels between Ireland and India. Partition, not least. The famines. Often happening at the same time as a result of imperial policy. So even when I was learning about it, none of the teachers pointed out the connections. And Ireland was the first colony: the Ulster Plantation, the Munster Plantation. It was a test bed for imperial theories and I just never really understood it. It’s odd that even when we did touch upon empire, the connections weren’t made between the different bits of empire.”
I mention my admiration for Olusoga, Puri and Sanghera himself for helping me see British history differently because of their different family histories in the empire. “There is something about that,” he agrees. “All three of us wouldn’t be around if it wasn’t for the British Empire. We’re living the fact that we’re a multicultural society because we had a multicultural empire. Growing up in Wolverhampton, the narrative was always that immigrants came here with no connection to the country, uninvited, to take advantage of the British. No one ever pointed out that we came here for a reason. The Sikhs were fighting alongside the British going back to 1857. In Enoch Powell’s Rivers of Blood speech, it’s all about how the Sikhs won’t integrate. Everyone loves the Sikhs now. But actually we were, for him, a nightmare vision of the future.”
Since Sathnam and I are talking during the climax of the Euros I suggest the England football team wouldn’t be worth much without the empire, because so many players have family roots there. He replies that there’s a surprising history lesson to be learned from London-born player Bukayo Saka, who has a Nigerian family. “Nigeria is a country entirely created by the British,” he explains. “I didn’t really appreciate that. The name Nigeria was dreamt up in a leader for the Times! It’s wild, isn’t it? …and we, as Britons, have no sense of this.”
Coincidentally, that same day I had a conversation with an aid worker trying to get help to the population of Sudan – 47m people in the Horn of Africa destroyed by ethnic and other conflicts – in part because British and other western imperial powers drew convenient lines on a map. Sathnam however suggests “there is the question of how far you can blame stuff on empire. When you go to these countries – and I found that in Nigeria – very few people wanted to blame Nigeria’s problems on the British. They blame it on the current leaders, who have been there a long time.”
He was clearly delighted by the twists and turns of researching his most recent book, Empireworld. “One of the big surprises was how many British people emigrated because the narrative here is always about immigration. My God! Britons, because of the empire have probably emigrated more than any nation on earth. I think something like five per cent of the population emigrated between 1900 and 1914. We were just everywhere.”
Black people fought in WW1… for a nation that suppressed and oppressed and colonised them, died in huge numbers, and their narratives were deleted afterwards
Another surprise discovery was that “one of the reasons there’s Indians everywhere in the world is because of British indenture – they sent a million Indians to places like Mauritius, Trinidad, Guyana. I often wonder, sitting in airports, ‘why are there so many Indians?’ It’s because of that. Those million people had children and created states like Mauritius, which are run by Indian majorities. The Indian diaspora wouldn’t be [so] big if it wasn’t for British Empire. We permanently changed the demographics of the world… which in itself reflects the incredible length and complexity of the British Empire.”
When I mention that British migrants prefer to be known as “expats”, because immigrants are always someone else, Sathnam laughs. “Yeah, and it’s happening again. You’ve probably seen the memes of all these people who are Reform supporters saying they’re going to leave the country because of immigration. So they’re going to become immigrants… and not seeing the contradiction because “we” are always expats! I also struggle with the phrase ‘second-generation immigrant’. I used to use that phrase in relation to myself but I’m not, and that’s the point. We were born in this country. In no way are we immigrants. To use that phrase implies that in some way we don’t really belong here, when we do.”
I wonder how Sathnam feels about the Scots, Welsh and Irish, who are also sometimes uncomfortable with the confusion, or elision, between being British and being English. “It’s weird,” Sathnam replies. “The Scots and Welsh, to some degree, see themselves as colonised nations. But the Scots were disproportionately involved in empire. And actually, even more complicated, the Irish. Some of the biggest bastards in imperial history were the Anglo-Irish, people like Michael O’Dwyer who was killed in an act of revenge. But yeah, in terms of identity, I generally say I’m British Asian. I say I’m from Wolverhampton. No one knows where Wolverhampton is, and it ends the conversation.”
Michael O’Dwyer, incidentally, was born in County Tipperary and became the British Governor of the Punjab. He was assassinated in 1940. He had been Lieutenant Governor in 1919 when another atrocity, the Amritsar massacre, took place. At least 1500 Sikh civilians were shot dead by the British army. Most historians regard Amritsar as a turning point in favour of the Indian independence movement. But how, I wonder, does all this revision of history impact British politics today, given the climate of nostalgia for “past greatness”?
“There was an imperial element to Brexit,” Sathnam agrees. “We struggled to see ourselves as part of a membership organisation, having [formerly] run a quarter of the world. Also, every month there’s a big story related to the fact that people still can’t handle that there were brown and black people involved in both world wars. There’s Laurence Fox complaining about a Sikh in that World War One film 1917. Or the response to Rishi Sunak coming back from D-Day. Was it Nigel Farage saying [Sunak] doesn’t understand “our culture”? I find that one of the weirdest things about my education. I sat through a dozen Remembrance Day services in my entire life at school, in one of the most diverse cities in the world and it didn’t occur to anyone to mention, ‘Oh, by the way, millions of Asians and Africans fought in both of those world wars.’ I’ve talked to my teachers since and they’ve said: ‘It never occurred to us.’”
It’s uncomfortable for some people, I observe. “Yeah, it’s very uncomfortable. The fact is that black people fought in WWI and then were deliberately not invited to the victory march afterwards. So these people fought for a nation that suppressed and oppressed and colonised them, died in huge numbers, and their narratives were deleted afterwards. This is very painful history. Much easier to remember how we won both world wars and talk about Henry VIII. Also, I hate the word decolonisation. I think it puts people’s backs up. It creates the idea that the whole thing is about deleting and stopping people from studying Jane Austen and Shakespeare. It’s not about that. It’s about widening knowledge. I think you can talk about Henry VIII and WWI and WWII, but just talk about the imperial element of all those things. Talk about how there were black people in Henry VIII’s court. Talk about the imperial contribution to both world wars. You can also talk about how Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park has a narrative about slavery, something, again, not pointed out to us as we spent six months studying that book. The most boring book I’ve ever read in my life. It could have been interesting.”
We turn eventually to the ludicrous vocabulary of the current culture wars, of supposed wokery, and the upending of public statues to British do-gooders and benefactors who turn out to have made their fortunes out of human misery and slavery. “I think there’s two things going on,” Sathnam says. “There’s British politics, where this subject has turned into a culture war and it’s toxic, and there’s a huge backlash. But then there’s the British population. If you look at what the British really think about this, they’re actually quite liberal. Something like three-quarters of British people think it’s a good idea to teach kids about slavery and colonisation. That’s a high number. Forty-four per cent of people think the royal family should pay reparations for slavery, which is incredible given the royal family’s relationship to slavery has only really been exposed in the past year. British people are much more liberal than the party-political system or media suggests. Our media is, inherently, quite right-wing. I’ve talked to kids about empire and they just don’t have any of the problems adults do, talking about this stuff. They find it easier to cope with the contradictions of empire. I think older people grew up with a warped sense of empire, whereas younger people just don’t have it. I’m not an optimistic person but I am optimistic about this. I feel like the culture war is mostly over… I feel much better about everything than I did when I began writing about this when it felt overwhelming to have [Conservative] government ministers railing against people like David Olusoga and me. It is amazing to have so many kids, students, getting in touch saying they’re studying history now because they’re inspired by the books. People are really interested in this subject, and why not? It was the biggest thing we ever did as a country. And we’ve not really talked about it.”
“Reform supporters say they’ll leave the country because of immigration, so they’ll become immigrants themselves… they don’t see the contradiction because ‘we’ are always expats!”
I draw our conversation to a close by suggesting that British exceptionalism is not actually exceptional. We have our imperial delusions. The USA has its “Make America Great Again” fear of decline. “The worst example is Russia,” Sathnam says. “It’s so nostalgic about its imperial past, it invaded Ukraine. And, if you look at surveys of European colonising powers, the most nostalgic European nation for its empire is the Netherlands, who we just beat in a football match. They’re even smaller than us. They were ahead of us. The East India Company was a copy of the Dutch East India Company. They were a global power. They ran New Amsterdam (now New York). I can see why that could create nostalgia.”
I pick Sathnam up on the fact he calls the England football team “we”, where I would not. More laughter. “That’s because you’re Scottish. Someone said to me that I use ‘we’ all the time in my books. A historian once said to me: ‘The first thing you get taught if you do an undergraduate degree is to never, ever, use the word ‘we’, because it wasn’t you.’ But I like the fact that I use ‘we’ because I think there’s so much about this history that people see as divisive. And if I’m a brown immigrant, saying ‘we’ is a kind of positive thing to say.”
That’s where our conversation ended and it left me remarkably cheerful. After all, if “we” can engage on the complex intertwined history of “us” maybe we can be a lot less fearful of those whom a few self-serving provocative politicians constantly tell us to fear: the other, the foreigners, the immigrants – “them”. History shows they’re “us” too.
Gavin Esler is a contributing editor of Perspective and author most recently of “Britain Is Better Than This”
