Why do you think Colston captured the imagination so much? It's much more important to talk about racism and multiculturalism. I could have done very easily, but decided not to, because like I say in the book, statues are a very small part of our national life. Sathnam Sanghera: I thought about adding a chapter on statues. Did what happened with Colston change the way you approached the book? VICE: I get the sense that you started writing the book and things started to move quite quickly. I spoke to Sanghera about culture wars, imperialism and, obviously, statues. If you flinch, that’s the point. After decades of misty-eyed nonsense about the British empire, it’s refreshing to read something that looks at our complicated history this squarely and assesses how it continues to play on our national psyche. But the British empire didn’t just reshape the world – it also fundamentally altered the island nation it sprang from, and not always for the better. In a time of Conservative jingoism, his book is a necessary rebuttal to the rhetoric that posits that the empire was always good and gracious. Like most people raised and educated in the UK, Sanghera was taught little about British imperial history – it was only until his final term at Cambridge that he read his first brown author. “When I started, it was quite an esoteric subject.”Įmpireland is the product of four years of intense reading (“I've basically got a whole room full of imperial books”) that begins with Sanghera cheerfully professing to know a little less than nothing about empire, and embarking on a journey of learning – one that transforms into profound self-knowledge as he begins to understand his own Sikh roots and how his family came to be in the UK. “I was like, ‘Oh my god, I’ve been writing and thinking about this for the last three years.’ Suddenly, it was on the BBC News every day,” the journalist and author tells VICE.

Sathnam sanghera empire