Key individuals ranged from General Kitchener, Cecil Rhodes, Rudyard Kipling and former Conservative Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli. For its happen-chance nature, the imperial project proved expansive. The first takes place from the 17 th century to 1780s in the West Indies, American colonies and the Caribbean, while the second phase took place from 1784 until the 1800s in India and Africa.
Sanghera notes that empire as a construct was both unplanned and ill-defined and could have happened in two distinct phases. But what makes Empireland: How Imperialism Has Shaped Modern Britain brilliant and personal is the internalised reflection: what we got from empire and what we took.Īnd yet, empire was most likely an accident. Sanghera boldly takes on the beast that is a five hundred-year empire to unravel our forgotten history in about two hundred pages.
For too long, the impacts of empire on Britain had not been given their academic due. T he conversation of the British Empire’s lasting legacy eludes us no more.
“ The legacies of empire run deep and are sometimes contradictory… but imperialism exists within us in much more complicated ways.” Illustration-collage by Zeyd Anwar New Politic
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