Just over 20 years ago, perfectly timed to cheerlead the US invasion of Iraq, Niall Ferguson published a book celebrating British imperialism called Empire: How Britain Made the Modern World. The book fired the starting gun for the latest round of the culture war over empire, one that shows no sign of abating, even if it reached a provisional climax during the spread of the Black Lives Matter movement and the dunking of Edward Colston’s statue in Bristol Harbour in June 2020.
Now, Sathnam Sanghera has published a book with a similar title to Ferguson’s, but one which he hopes will undo the very terms of recent debate. He seeks to substitute what he calls the balance-sheet model of empire with the language of “nuance”, “contradiction” and “complexity”.
Content from our partners
