Stolen History: The truth about the British Empire and how it shaped us

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There are short biographies of Sir Walter Raleigh, Charles Ignatius Sancho, Robert Clive and more, and tips on bringing up awkward conversions or organising debates about reparations at school. In November 2021, his Channel 4 documentary series about race, Empire State of Mind, got a four star review in The Guardian from Chitra Ramaswamy. Many British people of African, Caribbean, South Asian and South-East Asian heritage are here because Britain colonized these parts of the world. When they had the temerity to demand better wages, thousands of other dark-skinned workers were shipped in as indentured labourers from China, India, and Africa, to take their place – as they were to countless other new British plantations around the world. I’m small, compared with the world, and the book that’s changed me the most in recent memory is Dear Life by Alice Munro.

Stolen History (KS2/3) - Penguin Books UK

I’m really excited that kids might soon have access to knowledge about the British Empire that I only stumbled across at the age of 45. Millions of others fought for Britain – in the second world war alone, 200,000 Indian soldiers were killed, wounded, or captured while serving in allied campaigns. Some of them are so lazy and mean that they make their pupils do all their work for them, while punishing them and taking all the payment and credit. Long before white Britons took up their cause, they fought fiercely and unremittingly against their bondage. Sanghera wants Britons to recognise, with him, their ‘deep and complex relationship with the world through empire’, to reclaim intimacy with the multicultural nature of a common history.

From the debate on the restitution of cultural artefacts to attitudes towards immigration, to Brexit exceptionalism, he contends we can only really move on as a nation when we learn to look our past squarely in the face. There are, however, some things people do agree on – or, rather, can talk about without getting too furious. A remarkable look at how British imperialism has shaped the world and the way in which Britain regards itself, Empireland should be a set text in an education system that Sathnam Sanghera says failed him badly.

Stolen History - Sathnam Sanghera

Excellent… a desire to rectify ignorance – to shed light on what has been whitewashed from mainstream knowledge – drives this rigorous examination of hidden histories… Empireland skilfully sets out the empire’s staggering scale and scope, including its geography… He delves deep through the centuries… He unflinchingly shows the sheer brutality of empire… Empireland is, most refreshingly, forward-looking, too… powerful. Understanding our history is crucial to making sense of the world around us, and this warm and informative book sets out an engaging and accessible account of how our past has shaped our present – from the language we use, to the food we eat. It is an analysis of, and solution to, our enormous food problems: food security, sustainability, farming and education. Instead it is up to each class teacher to set the rules and lessons for their class, and so all the classes do different things in a different way. It’s generally accepted that Britain’s empire began back in the 1600s during the reign of Elizabeth I, when seafaring adventurers ‘discovered’ lands rich in highly prized goods 1.We wondered how he managed to cram all those conflicting styles and emotions into the same bits of prose, so met up with him on a muggy day on Hampstead Heath and talked about the chaos that is the writing process. People were suddenly very interested in systemic racism and colonialism and Sanghera found he was writing a very timely book.

Sathnam Sanghera Empire - Sathnam Sanghera

Students will be encouraged to explore ideas around culture, identity and belonging, and build their comprehension skills. People have been arguing for centuries about whether it was a good or bad thing (spoiler alert – it’s not as simple as that), but pretty much every other aspect of it is argued over too. Empireland has been longlisted for the Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction, was named a Book of the Year at the National Book Awards of 2022, and inspired both the Channel 4 series Empire State of Mind and Sanghera's children's book about the British empire Stolen History.

Marcus Rashford and sugar are undeniably brilliant additions to Britain (although your dentist may disagree with the second), but the British Empire remains a hugely controversial subject. In assessing the empire, Sanghera is… admirably equivocal… Empireland is not an angry diatribe; there’s enough of those already. But the recent slide towards populism shows that we’re actually behind countries like her native Turkey, and are being offered a glimpse of our near-future. It crystallised so well a lot of the things that had been keeping me awake at night about the state of our politics, and the state of the world more generally.