The Sun Never Set (2023)

Book Review from the March 2023 issue of the Socialist Standard

Empireland: How Imperialism Has Shaped Modern Britain. Sathnam Sanghera. Penguin £9.99.

Sanghera was born in Wolverhampton to Punjabi immigrant parents. Here he provides an examination of the impact of the British Empire on both the UK and the various colonised countries. The emphasis is on South Asia, but there is plenty of discussion of other areas too. The empire is seen as having consisted of two stages. Down to the 1780s, it was based on sugar plantations in the West Indies, but after the American War of Independence it involved ‘a more concerted power grab of India and Africa’, dominated at first by the East India Company.

There is no hiding much of the violence involved in building and maintaining the empire. In India, the Amritsar Massacre of 1919, also known as the Jallianwala Bagh Massacre, involved troops firing on an unarmed crowd, and may have led to over a thousand deaths. In one ‘battle’ during the invasion of Tibet in 1903, 629 Tibetans were slaughtered; large sums were paid by the Tibetan government as indemnities. Many invasions and occupations resulted in the stealing of artefacts and their transport to museums in the UK: the word loot comes from the Hindi for ‘spoils of war’. There were objections to such theft, though, such as from William Gladstone after the invasion of Ethiopia in 1868.

Taking items for museums or private collections was not the only way that Britain’s ruling class benefited from the empire. Many country houses were built from laundered colonial booty. The dogma of free trade (invoked when it suited) justified the lack of government action to alleviate the Irish Potato Famine of the 1840s and the many famines in India (in which perhaps ten million died). Armed force was employed to compel so-called free trade on colonies, so that they would export cheap goods (mostly food) to the UK. The much-lauded Indian railway system was built to allow faster movement of British troops and to enable easier access to the Indian countryside for British exports.

Other legacies of empire for Britain supposedly include wild racial stereotypes, the public school system, jingoism, and the alleged distrust of cleverness. Above all, one result is the immigrant communities in Britain, which ‘is a multicultural, racially diverse society because it once had a multicultural, racially diverse empire’. The term ‘racially diverse’ is objectionable here, but Sanghera does argue that concepts of race and racism were not really a driving force behind the empire (racism is more likely to have been a result of slavery, rather than a cause).

All in all, a useful and informative survey of the British Empire and its consequences, both historically and today.

Paul Bennett