Summary: a gripping and elegantly written survey of the bloody British empire and its echoes in the present day

Between 1845 and 1854 the population of Ireland was halved through starvation – over a million people died – and forced emigration. The English like to refer to this horrendous period as the “Irish Potato Famine”. This suggests the blame for the cataclysm lies with Irish people’s bizarre and somewhat comical taste for spuds, rather than upon callous government policy that thought the death of hundreds of thousands of Irish people a price worth paying for British profits in the agricultural free market.

Paradoxically Sathnam Sanghera sticks with this nomenclature in his exceptional book Empireland. This book both elucidates many of the other atrocities upon which the British Empire was built, and explores the imprint that sustained bloody exercise in pillage still leaves upon contemporary British society. The term “potato famine” is part of that imprint.

There is an echo in this book of Tom Holland’s Dominion, which explores how Christian thought – such as the ideas of human rights and secularism – has so fundamentally shaped European civilisation that the origins are now generally unknown and almost unnoticed.

The British empire brought nothing so positive as human rights to the UK let alone the rest of the world. Rather it became, for much of the world a byword for bloodshed and impoverishment. But the British – in marked contrast to those societies that were on the receiving end of their colonial project – are startlingly ignorant of what Empire entailed or of its repercussions through time. Few British people now have heard of the murderous British suppression of the Sepoy rebellion of 1857, let alone of the sacking of Tibet in 1903 – even though some of the extremely valuable loot once showed up the BBC’s Flog It while Sanghera was writing this book.

And yet the consequences of all that bloodshed is with us at every turn. The British Museum is stuffed with art treasures, such as the Benin bronzes, stolen in the name of Empire. London’s position as a major financial centre is a consequence of the preferential trade terms and punitive tax regimes that the Empire imposed on subject peoples. British xenophobia towards migrants is a contemporary manifestation of the racism of Empire. The presumption of the British ruling class that the rules – whether relating to human rights, trade or public health lockdowns – that apply to others should not apply to them are also echoes of the political economy of the Empire.

Indeed, Brexit may be regarded as the inevitable consequence of the racist logic that underpinned the British Empire: having no more colonies to pillage, the British Establishment instead decided to loot the UK.

Sanghera’s book is a superb and important introduction to this inglorious period of British history and its reverberations into the present. It is elegantly written, accessible, and vital for anyone who wants to understand better why Britain finds itself in its current morass.

I just which he would quit it with his talk of “potato famines”.