A nuanced, complicated account of the British empire’s impact on the world as we know it ... The raking light that Sanghera throws across the contradictions at the heart of the story of empire doesn’t come without some trepidation for the author ... But his larger response is to spell out the complexity of historical assessment with painstaking clarity, showing, repeatedly, the deep entwinement of the positive and negative contributions of empire.
In Empireworld Sanghera aims not to make an "overall positive or negative conclusion about British empire" but to make "qualitative judgments, on a smaller scale". Of course readers may query some of these micro-judgments ... But this is not an objective history to settle all scores. Today, 2.6 billion people are inhabitants of former British colonies. For one journalist to get to the bottom of all this is an impossible task. Nonetheless, there are plenty of new ideas, argued with passion.
The charge sheet against imperialism grows with every page, even as Sanghera seeks to present more nuanced reflections ... Sanghera’s voice is present throughout the book as a generalist, distilling the work of specialists, but a tendency towards equivocation and qualifying comments may leave some readers pondering the strength of his beliefs ... Nonetheless, the book is assiduously researched and Sanghera is brave because even though his aim is "not to incite white guilt but rather to promote understanding", he knows that this work will not endear him to bigoted empire nostalgists.
The author writes well with humour and style and he has a journalist’s eye for detail and colour. He has researched well and details his narrative with the support of "expert imperial historians" ... Sanghera is a nuanced writer and although this book at times seems a little uneven and occasionally tangential, it is nonetheless an important examination of Britain’s colonial past.
Refined, subtle, accurate, analytical, witty, engaging, and questioning ... I wish Sanghera had quoted fewer "experts" and given his quirky, reflective yet authoritative voice more space. I also found the sections on the Commonwealth and our Royals limp and risk-averse ... That said, this book puts Sanghera in the firmament of great imperial historians. Furthermore, his lucid and accessible writing reaches out to those with closed minds.
A staggering and distressing read ... The author asks for a nuanced dialogue that embraces the contradictions and paradoxes of empire ...
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This brave, painful, urgent and timely book, is not, in other words, about "goodies" or "baddies". It is about telling the truth about a nation’s imperial past in all its ambiguity — and creating dialogue between everyone who lays claim to Britishness.
A mix of travelogue, memoir, newspaper column and serious historical work ... Despite the racist abuse he receives Sanghera is part of a wave of writers and historians changing the terms of debate. This book, with its varied voices and perspectives, widens them further. Though uneven in places, on that core aim it is a success.
[Sanghera] offers rich and thoughtful engagements with bodies of scholarly work grafted on to travelogues based on his reporting trips to Nigeria, Mauritius, Barbados, New Delhi and beyond ... However, for a book about empire, it is odd that Sanghera’s only real discussion of decolonisation as such is to dismiss it rather glibly ... Sanghera’s book admirably marches us into the weeds of peer-reviewed scholarly work. His book is 246 pages of text with 176 pages of notes and bibliography. But amid all the "complexity" and "contradiction", one feels the absence of what Robin DG Kelley has called the "freedom dreams" of moments of decolonisation. The balance sheet is rejected, but we are not given a glimpse of the world that could exist beyond it.
Supremely readable ... What he brings is an inviting style, together with a conscientious journalistic ability to précis impressive amounts of historical material ... For older readers the downside to his style will be the perpetual centring of self, with his own experiences so often providing the architecture for complex historical and ethical controversies ... For all the book’s conscientious attempts to avoid the balance sheet, this is exactly what we are presented with. With heavily footnoted horror Sanghera recounts a rap sheet of extraction, brutality, capture, turmoil and depredation. He then also highlights the Empire’s legacy of humanitarianism, conservation, democracy and education. In the process we lose a deeper context where the motivation of historical actors might be unpicked, the normalcy of empire as a model of political governance explained.
The author’s style is often disarmingly colloquial... a mannerism that amplifies his sincerity. If the scope of his interrogation is vaster and therefore harder to contain than that of his earlier work, his honest attempt to reckon with it is just as compelling.
