Empireland: How Imperialism Has Shaped Modern Britain

About the book

Empireland: How Imperialism Has Shaped Modern Britain is Sathnam Sanghera's third book, first published by Viking in January 2021. It is a work of history written by a journalist: part investigation, part memoir, built on wide reading and interviews with historians, and backed by a 47-page bibliography. Sanghera's question is simple and unsettling: how much of the Britain we live in today was made by its empire, and why do so few Britons know it?

The book opens with a half-serious call to bring back Empire Day and closes with a serious one: to teach the history of empire in schools. In between, it moves chapter by chapter through the places empire still touches: language, money, food, museums, race, immigration, politics and the way Britain sees itself. Sanghera refuses the usual scorecard approach. He argues that weighing 500 years of empire as simply good or bad is historically illiterate, and he gives both the defenders and the critics of empire a hearing while showing how much of the argument rests on forgetting.

What makes the book different from a standard history is Sanghera himself. Born in Wolverhampton in 1976 to Punjabi Sikh parents, educated at Cambridge, a journalist at the Financial Times and The Times, he writes as someone who grew up inside the story he is telling. His own schooling, he says, taught him almost nothing about empire, and realising that his education had, in his words, colonised him was painful.

What does Empireland argue?

The central argument is that imperialism is everywhere in modern Britain, though Britons often choose not to see it. Sanghera traces it through small things and large ones. In language: juggernaut, bungalow, shawl and shampoo all came into English through empire. In business: Liberty of London began by selling silks and shawls from the East, and the company that became Shell started by importing oriental seashells. In sport: Wembley Stadium began as the Empire Stadium, and roads around it still carry names chosen by Rudyard Kipling.

The bigger legacies are structural. Much of Britain's wealth, its museums, its multicultural population and its attitudes to race and immigration all trace back to empire. Sanghera points out that Britain is multicultural today for a simple reason: it once ruled a vast, racially diverse empire, and the 1948 British Nationality Act made citizens of that empire into citizens of Britain. Most of the people who came in the decades after the war were invited, and arrived as citizens, not as strangers with no link to the country.

He also argues that empire shaped the way Britain talks about itself. A 2014 YouGov survey found that 59 per cent of Britons thought the empire was something to be proud of, and Sanghera shows how pride and selective amnesia sit side by side: the railways in India are remembered as a gift, while the fact that they were built for military and commercial purposes is forgotten. He even traces Brexit to imperial nostalgia, arguing that a country that once ran a quarter of the world has struggled with the idea of taking rules from anyone else.

How empire still shows up in daily life

One of the book's most striking chapters deals with race. Sanghera argues that Britain has a particular brand of racism best explained by the racial thinking of the nineteenth-century empire, from the colour bar that kept brown and white people apart in India and Africa to the colour bars in Wolverhampton nightclubs and pubs in the 1980s. The martial race idea, that Sikhs are natural soldiers, is another imperial invention: after the rebellion of 1857, the British decided which peoples were loyal and which were not, and produced handbooks praising the physiques of favoured groups.

Another chapter follows the loot. Sanghera looks at two imperial expeditions, the invasion of Tibet and the 1868 incursion into Ethiopia, which filled British museums with objects taken by force, many still on display. He notes that outrage about looting is not new: senior officials and newspapers protested at the time. And he points out that only about one per cent of the British Museum's collection is on display, so returning items would not empty it.

The book also recovers forgotten people. Sake Dean Mahomed, who left India in the late eighteenth century, opened Britain's first curry house in London, became a massage therapist to the king and popularised the word shampoo. Hundreds of lascars, Indian seamen, servants, former slaves, actors, nurses and sportsmen made homes in Britain centuries before the Windrush.

The Jallianwala Bagh starting point

The book began, Sanghera says, with a television documentary. While making a Channel 4 film about the Jallianwala Bagh massacre of 1919, in which British troops fired on a peaceful crowd in Amritsar, he realised how little he knew about the empire his own family had lived under. The massacre appears in Empireland as a touchstone: an event that most Britons, if they know it at all, treat as an aberration, but which Sanghera presents as part of a system of rule that depended on force and racial hierarchy.

That starting point matters because it sets the book's tone. Empireland is not an attack on Britain or a defence of empire. It is an attempt to measure an influence, and to show that the argument about empire in Britain today, between those who call it a source of national pride and those who call it simply evil, misses the point.

The author

Sathnam Sanghera was born in Wolverhampton in 1976 to Punjabi parents who had emigrated from India. He entered school unable to speak English and went on to graduate from Christ's College, Cambridge, with a first-class degree in English Language and Literature. He worked at the Financial Times from 1998 to 2006 and joined The Times as a columnist and feature writer in 2007.

His first book, the memoir The Boy with the Topknot (2009), was shortlisted for the Costa Biography Award and adapted by the BBC. His novel Marriage Material (2013) was also shortlisted for the Costa Book Awards. Empireland, his third book, was followed by Stolen History, a book about empire for younger readers, in 2023, and Empireworld, a sequel that takes the story around the globe, in 2024.

Reception and legacy

Empireland became an instant Sunday Times bestseller on publication. It won Narrative Non-Fiction Book of the Year at the 2022 British Book Awards, was longlisted for the Baillie Gifford Prize, and was shortlisted for the Royal Society of Literature's Ondaatje Prize and the Parliamentary Book Awards. It was named Non-Fiction Book of the Year in the Eastern Eye Arts, Culture and Theatre Awards, History Book of the Year by The Independent, and a book of the year by the Financial Times, The Times, the New Statesman and the Observer.

Sanghera adapted the book for television as Empire State of Mind, a Channel 4 documentary series broadcast in November 2021, for which he was shortlisted for Best Documentary Presenter at the 2022 Grierson Awards. An American edition, published by Pantheon in 2023 with a foreword by the Booker Prize winner Marlon James, carried the argument to readers in the United States. Its sequel Empireworld became an instant Sunday Times bestseller in 2024, and Empireland remains one of the most widely read accounts of how empire shaped the country it came from.