Tower and Town, September 2021

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Empireland by Sathnam Sanghera

Sathnam Sanghera came to the LitFest in 2014 as the Big Town Read author with his memoir The Boy with the Topknot, which reveals his story of growing up in the 1970s and 1980s in Wolverhampton, the son of Punjabi immigrant parents. He started school unable to speak English but after attending Wolverhampton Grammar School got a scholarship to Cambridge where he graduated with a first class degree in English Language and Literature. Since then he has won several prizes as a journalist with The Times and The Financial Times.

Empireland shows us with astonishing stories, statistics and humour how he thinks that modern Britain has been shaped by the past. ‘Our past is everywhere around us from how we live to how we think’

He says that it is only by stepping back and seeing where we really came from that we begin to understand who we are and what unites us

The British Empire ran for four centuries and at its height it covered a quarter of the world’s land and almost a quarter of its population.

Sanghera gives us both sides of the story recalling how the Empire provided adventure and beneficial opportunities for many through such things as looting and lucrative contracts as well as possibly fostering our thirst for travel but also producing acts of violence and repression. We mustn’t too forget the contributions that those from the Empire have made to Britain – for example, providing a significant part of the NHS workforce and huge manpower in both World Wars.

His research brings us right up to date in current thinking - including the debate on the tearing down of statues and removal of artefacts from museums. He says that there has been a desire to not look too closely at what happened; and feels that it should be talked about more, including as a subject with a more prominent part of history teaching at school.

‘If British people understood colonial history as well as they understood the details of Henry VIII’s wives, Britain would be a different country’!

Virginia Reekie