Empireland : how imperialism has shaped modern Britain / Sathnam Sanghera.
Publisher: London : Penguin Books, 2021Content type: text Media type: unmediated Carrier type: volume001: 022665477ISBN: 9780241445310 (pbk.)Item type | Current library | Collection | Call number | Copy number | Status | Date due | Barcode | |
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Book | MAIN LIBRARY Book | 325 SAN (Browse shelf(Opens below)) | 1 | Available | 114104 |
Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:
EMPIREWORLD IS AVAILABLE TO ORDER NOW
WINNER OF THE 2022 BRITISH BOOK AWARD FOR NARRATIVE NONFICTION
***THE BOOK THAT INSPIRED THE CHANNEL 4 DOCUMENTARY 'EMPIRE STATE OF MIND'***
THE SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER
'The real remedy is education of the kind that Sanghera has embraced - accepting, not ignoring, the past' Gerard deGroot, The Times
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EMPIRE explains why there are millions of Britons living worldwide.
EMPIRE explains Brexit and the feeling that we are exceptional.
EMPIRE explains our distrust of cleverness.
EMPIRE explains Britain's particular brand of racism.
Strangely hidden from view, the British Empire remains a subject of both shame and glorification. In his bestselling book, Sathnam Sanghera shows how our imperial past is everywhere: from how we live and think to the foundation of the NHS and even our response to the COVID-19 crisis.
At a time of great division, when we are arguing about what it means to be British, Empireland is a groundbreaking revelation - a much-needed and enlightening portrait of contemporary British society, shining a light on everything that usually gets left unsaid.
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' Empireland takes a perfectly-judged approach to its contentious but necessary subject' Jonathan Coe
'I only wish this book has been around when I was at school' Sadiq Khan, Mayor of London
'This remarkable book shines the brightest of lights into some of the darkest and most misunderstood corners of our shared history' James O'Brien
Sathnam Sanghera, Sunday Times bestseller, February 2024
Excerpt provided by Syndetics
Reviews provided by Syndetics
Library Journal Review
British journalist and memoirist Sanghera (The Boy with the Topknot) explores the hidden legacy of the former British Empire, which existed for hundreds of years and continues to shape modern Britain. Sanghera presents an extensive history of the British Empire from its early days to its largest expanse in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, when the empire controlled 24 percent of the world. He reveals the empire's impact on the origins of America which continue to influence the American mythos of freedom and justice for all. In today's Britain, the sordid past of the empire is now being diffused by schools that deny the truth and instead indoctrinate students in patriotic education; Sanghera's scholarly work will likely provoke controversy. Narrator Homer Todiwala's slight Indian accent smartly conveys this work, and 2015 Booker Prize winner Marlon James's distinctive Jamaican accent enhances the foreword. The work clarifies and updates Jan Morris's more sentimental "Pax Britannica" trilogy about the former empire. VERDICT This essential and illuminating book nicely connects with Caroline Pennock's On Savage Shores, Kevin Kruse and Julian Zelizer's Myth America, and Nikole Hannah-Jones's The 1619 Project.--Dale FarrisPublishers Weekly Review
"Imperialism is not something that can be erased with a few statues being torn down or a few institutions facing up to their dark pasts," according to this pointed and wide-ranging survey of how Britain's imperialist past informs its present. Contending that most Britons remain ignorant of the many ways in which "the experience of having colonized" continues to affect British life and culture, journalist and novelist Sanghera (Marriage Material), calls for Empire Day 2.0, a reimagined version of an annual half-day school holiday from the first half of the 20th century. Among other lessons, students would learn that the expression "I don't give a damn" originated in British India, where a dam was a low-value copper coin, and that the oil and gas company Shell started as an importer of "oriental seashells from the Far East." Elsewhere, Sanghera turns to darker episodes in the history of British empire, including the Jallianwala Bagh Massacre that killed an estimated 600 to 1,000 Indian men, women, and children in 1919 and helped bring the British Raj to an end, and the looting of artifacts in Tibet. Ranging across the temporal length and geographical breadth of the empire, Sanghera amasses a devastating catalog of tragedies and injustices, and makes an irrefutable case that "imperial amnesia" hurts all Britons. It's a cogent and captivating wake-up call. (Feb.)Booklist Review
Was the British Empire a force for good or evil? Journalist and novelist Sanghera (Marriage Material, 2016) argues that this is the wrong question. Offering no simple answers, Empireland advocates for an honest reckoning with the facts of imperial history and its many legacies in the contemporary United Kingdom and across the world. Empire has left traces on British life at every level, from museum holdings to immigration patterns to travel habits to the presence in public and private buildings of monuments and statues that commemorate imperial figures like Clive of India. Sanghera writes as a perpetual student, not a historian; his approach invites the reader to share in his curiosity and discoveries, but he does not soft-pedal the horrors inflicted by the British on colonial subjects who dared to question imperial authority. Empireland does not seek to topple existing narratives about English history, but rather, to complicate them by including the stories and histories of the colonized as well as the colonizers. A lucid, measured call to grapple with the fraught history of empire.Kirkus Book Review
A British Sikh journalist and documentarian probes the lasting effects of "one of the biggest white supremacist enterprises in the history of humanity." Sanghera opens this U.S. edition (the book was published in the U.K. in 2021) with a note to American readers: "The contention that the War of Independence marked a total rejection of the British Empire is the historical equivalent of a teenager leaving home and declaring that his parents had nothing to do with shaping him." Indeed, American readers will find much that's familiar in the account that follows, in which the author probes Britain's imperial history to find its present-day influences--which are everywhere: in Britain's monuments and museums, education system, multiculturalism, racism, even its trash TV. Drawing from sources as varied as Jan Morris, Edward Said, and Twitter, Sanghera moves elegantly through one legacy to the next, frequently opposing imperial apologists against detractors. Observing that much British conversation about empire has been binary--"a veritable industrial oven of hot potatoes"--he pleads for a nuanced view of Britain's "difficult history." Acknowledging that his "quintessentially British" education "encouraged me to view my Indian heritage through patronizing Western eyes," he nevertheless loves the nation, even though immigrants are endlessly instructed to integrate." It is, as he points out passionately, his home. The author frequently strings lists of names or facts into single, long sentences, accreting evidence for his argument that, say, Britain has been multicultural for centuries in a way that is hard to deny--and when he uses the same rhetorical device in his unexpectedly optimistic conclusion, it's equally effective. Readers whose familiarity with British history and culture is not acute may find themselves reaching for external context at times, but Sanghera's exploration of the topic is consistently lively and just as often laugh-out-loud funny as it is deeply painful. Marlon James provides the foreword. The sun may have set on the British Empire, but this piercing examination of its legacies is thoroughly timely. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.There are no comments on this title.