Empireworld: How British Imperialism Shaped the Globe

Journalist Sanghera follows up Empireland, his study of how Britain was shaped by its imperial past, with a comprehensive if occasionally off-key look at imperialism’s legacy abroad. Sanghera aims to bridge the “gap” between Britain’s limited sense of its global impact and the former colonies’ far more extreme perceptions of that impact. His position isn’t simply anti-empire; though he comes down in favor of Britain paying reparations and points to ongoing harms (like how international charities continue to finance businesses in former British colonies with indentured servitude–like conditions reminiscent of imperial plantations), he meditates repeatedly on the impossibility of weighing imperialism’s negatives against its positives. Instead, he focuses on establishing a baseline of facts that will help further “dialogue” between Britain and its former colonies. His analysis is fascinating insofar as it delves into the empire’s systemic ramifications, especially in chapters on its agricultural and legal systems. But the argument at times verges on absurdity in its search for balance (“It’s entirely natural that the residents of, say, Jamaica, would be exercised about Britain leaving its population impoverished after slavery, even while they benefit from another imperial legacy such as, say, the introduction of cricket”); this is likely due to the ongoing British “culture war” over scholarly work on this topic, which Sanghera touches on briefly. By turns informative and confounding, this reveals even more about Britain’s present than its past. (May)