Is Britain Ready for an Imperial Reckoning?

CHRISTIANE AMANPOUR, CHIEF INTERNATIONAL ANCHOR: Now in a few days, the eyes of the world will be on Westminster Abbey here in London, for the coronation of Britain’s new king in a ceremony meant to reflect the country’s modern multicultural society. But behind the pomp and pageantry, a reminder of Britain’s colonial legacy. And questions about King Charles’s ability to usher in a new era of accountability. Michel Martin talks now with Sathnam Sanghera whose new book, “Empireland”, examines Britain’s complicated past.

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MICHEL MARTIN, CONTRIBUTOR: Thanks, Christiane. Sathnam Sanghera, thank you so much for talking with us.

SATHNAM SANGHERA, AUTHOR, “EMPIRELAND”: Thanks for having me on your show.

MARTIN: Your book, “Empireland” was published in the U.K. in 2021. And it explores the, sort of, the modern legacies of the British Empire. You know, you’d think that somebody would have done that, but apparently, they have not. So, what gave you the idea?

SANGHERA: Yes, I mean, I got to my mid 40s and realized I knew nothing about empire and yet it explained so much about my life. The reason I’m here in North London today is that some white dudes invaded India in the 17th century. The empire explains multiculturalism, racism, a lot about wealth, the importance of the City of London and yet I knew almost nothing about it. And it turned out lots of other people felt the same. And so, I thought I’d try to plug in the gaps in my knowledge.

MARTIN: Why do you think that is though? Obviously, there’s some really loud debates going on in the United States right now about slavery and our history and stuff. But at least it’s a debate. You seem to, sort of, describe kind of a collective silence about this. Does that sound right?

SANGHERA: Yes. And it is very strange given British Empire was the biggest empire in human history. It’s the biggest thing that Britain ever did, and we don’t teach it well. We don’t talk about it. We don’t reflect it very well in our films and culture. My theory is that British Empire happened abroad. So, unlike the French or the Germans, we didn’t have a dark night of the soul where we had to confront our history because it all happened abroad. And so, we could act like it wasn’t happening even when it was happening. And it continues. And now we are talking about it, the world is talk about the legacy of slavery, the legacies of loot, and so on. And Britain still feels quite disconnected from the conversation.

MARTIN: How do you think all of this is playing out in the events that are about to unfold with the coronation of King Charles? Do you feel that this kind of reckoning is in a way, kind of, bubbling under the surface?

SANGHERA: Yes, I guess the main difference between the coronation this year and the one — last one in 1953 is that in 1953 they talked explicitly about empire occasionally. But now, we act like it never happened. So, in 1953, the queen talked about the colonies. She had a dress which was sewn with the emblems of empire. But now, all the things to do with empire, the multiculturalism of the ceremony, the fact that some of the jewels and the crown jewels were looted. The fact that “The Lord’s Prayer” is going to be said in multiple languages. People don’t connect it with the fact that we ran the biggest empire in human history. And I think it’s because if we acknowledge that fact, we’d have to talk about the legacies of slavery, we’d have to talk about reparations. And that’s a very difficult conversation for Britain to have.

MARTIN: You said that King Charles III’s coronation has failed before a single drop of holy oil has anointed his hands, breast, or head. Why do you say that?

SANGHERA: Right from the beginning, one of the first things the royal household in the run up the coronation is that they said they weren’t going to use the Koh-i-Noor diamond in the crown jewels, and that’s the diamond that the Indians won back because it was looted from a 10-year-old Singh Maharaja. And actually, the Iranian want it back. The Afghanis want it back. And so, the royal household thought, you know what, we just won’t use it. Instead, they’re using a crown which features a Cullinan Diamond, which is South African diamond, which is also highly contested. And it just shows you how they just can’t run away from the history. There’s also been a series of revelations about slavery and about the royal family’s involvement to slavery. And I think people have always understood that, you know, Queen Elizabeth I was involved in the early slave trade journeys. She loaned her ship to one of the first slave traders. But I think people didn’t realize that the Royal African Company was so involved, that 187,000 Africans were shipped across the Atlantic. That the Royal African Company was governed from royal palaces. That when the slaves arrived in places like Barbados, they had the initials of the Duke of York branded into their flesh. And I think the British public has been quite shocked by the details, and it’s quite strange that this is all coming out hundreds of years later. But it’s just one of those things. And I feel that the British establishment can’t really deal with the implications.

MARTIN: How are they dealing with it as — in the run up to the coronation? Is the royal family dealing with this legacy in any meaningful way in the course of these festivities?

SANGHERA: Well, King Charles did say something new, and very unexpected the other week, where he said he approved a research being done into how the royal family were involved in slavery. He’s also said he wants to learn about slavery, which is it feels like a bit late given he is 70 years old. And the research that he has allowed, it feels a little — not much and very late. Basically, it involves allowing one Ph.D. researcher access to the archives and she is going to report in 2026. And compared to what the Dutch royal household has done, it’s not much. I mean, they’ve commissioned an entire committee of historians to look into this history. And actually, they might reveal things about the royal household before the British do because William III was both a British monarch and a Dutch Prince. And so, it’s pretty embarrassing that another country is going to make revelations about this history before we do.

MARTIN: One of the things I was impressed about your book, too, is that your book isn’t — doesn’t, sort of, try to wash away the history. It doesn’t try to exonerate people for their behavior, but it doesn’t condemn them either. I mean, it describes the facts of life as they were. And so, what are some of those facts?

SANGHERA: I think — I’ll just say that, because I think too often this history seemed to the prism of pride or shame. And actually, we should just try to understand. And when you try to understand it, this empire was so influential. One of them — one of the main reasons we’re speaking English today to each other is because of the British Empire. The popularity of cricket, the Indian diaspora is largely the result of the fact that the British sent a million Indians around the world to do the jobs of the enslave once they abolished slavery. The existence of countries like India, Pakistan, Nigeria is all down to the British Empire. The chaos in places like Kashmir, Sudan, at the moment, and even Palestine can be explained by the British Empire. So, I think if you want to understand the world and world history, you’ve got to understand British Empire because it was one of the biggest things that ever happened. And it happened over 400 years, as well.

MARTIN: Why do you think it is that we romanticize this institution, the – – particular the royal family to the degree that we continue to do? I kind of feel like, didn’t we fight a war over here so as we could not care about these people? And yet we’re still, like, obsessed with them. And I’m just like, why is that? Why do think that is?

SANGHERA: I think it’s partly — it’s a very complicated history. It’s quite hard to get your head around. It’s much easier to say — to tell a very simplified story. This is a history that covered a quarter of the planet, it covered 400 years, and it was a very contradictory history. At one point, the British were heavily into slavery. They dominated the slavery at one point. But then they abolished it and they went around the world, trying to get rid of slavery. At one point, it wasn’t allowed for English people to get involved romantically with brown people in India. But then another time, it was OK. So, this is a very complicated history. It’s much easier to tell some of these stories, or it’s much easier to focus on World War I or World War II which have clear narratives, clear beginning, clear ends. And academics can’t even agree on when the British Empire began and when it ended.

MARTIN: The “Empireland” was published in the U.K. in 2021. But an edition published this year opens with a note specifically for American readers. As briefly as you can, could you just describe, kind of, the interplay between those two, or some of the ways that the British Empire affected the shaping of the American story.

SANGHERA: Yes, I think Americans like to see themselves as anti- imperialist. But I don’t buy it, because America itself is a creation of British Empire. The 13 colonies were a distinct face of British Empire. And the way America than expanded, echoed the way British colonies like Australian and South Africa expanded with the, kind of, recent — residential school system, the reserve confinements, this settler colonialism. And then you have people like Theodore Roosevelt, talking about how he admired the way British Empire dealt with India and how that was a model for the way America could deal with the Philippines and the West Indies. And I think British Empire and America are intricately linked.

MARTIN: Do you think the country, the countries of the United Kingdom are ready to face this history?

SANGHERA: I think so. And I think mainly because of multiculturalism. The main reason we are a multicultural nation today is because we had a multicultural empire. One of the main reasons we have an Asian prime minister is because of empire. And this is a history we’ve always struggled to explain. I grew up with a narrative that brown people came here uninvited and took advantage of British hospitality, that’s a narrative that exists in America too. What I didn’t know is that, actually in the 1940s and ’50s, brown and black people came to Britain as citizens, as British citizens. And that is very poorly understood. And it has led to a whole bunch of scandals and a whole bunch of racist policies, it resulted in, some of what they call, the Windrush scandal where these children of immigrants have been returned to countries they don’t even know. That is the level of the ignorance. And I think people have had enough. And suddenly, I think young people are going to school and saying to their teachers, teach me about colonialism. Teach me about how it shapes our modern world. And regardless of what is allowed in the national curriculum, they’re having to teach it.

MARTIN: And is there the same resentment of that as we are now seeing in the United States? I mean, as you probably know, you know, there has been this tremendous backlash against teaching of African American history, against the, you know, accurate teaching of the horrors of slavery. Is there a similar backlash? Like, how dare you, this is a this wokeism, this business.

SANGHERA: I’m afraid exactly the same thing is happening in Britain. We’ve even let — started having the book banning. People are going to libraries and saying, why are you stocking this woke book? And, it’s a — it’s reflected actually in government policy. You’ve had politicians getting involved in this. And we have a culture war in Britain where our leading politicians have gotten involved in imperial history and started things like, you know, if you want to be — if you’re proud of being British, you should be proud of the history. It is such an unnamed thing to say, because history is long and complicated. And yet, politicians are putting forward very simplistic view. And we even have Rishi Sunak say, at one point, that he was going to report people who did Britain down in history to prevent the anti-terrorism agency. So, we’ve got the unhappy scene where the children of imperial immigrants are themselves getting involved in this culture war. And I’m afraid to say what happens in America eventually happens over here and vice versa.

MARTIN: How do you understand Rishi Sunak’s view of this or how he is playing this, for one of a better word?

SANGHERA: Well, he is a conservative prime minister and he realizes that conservative politicians have to say certain things. And, actually, the British government is very ethnically diverse. And they all say things which are anti-immigration, anti-woke, and anti, you know, anti-racist, if that make sense, you know. And it seems that you can make it to the top in Britain as a brown person or a black person, but you’ve got to agree to leave things as they are when it comes to race. And I think that is a very depressing state of affairs and that is in true diversity. I get the feeling that if you’re conservative, you’re not allowed to bring your full self to the cabinet table.

MARTIN: Is there the argument that this is, it doesn’t contribute to national unity? That if you were to look at this and its totality that that somehow makes people ashamed of their country, or that it’s, you know, divisive or that it, sort of, is — it’s a — it’s dangerous to national unity.

SANGHERA: If we understand this history, it brings us close together. I mean, me — my understanding of this adversity has made me realize that people of color have been here since the days of Henry VII, you know. And a profound part of our national stories of World War I in World War II. And no one thought me at school that millions of soldiers from India and Africa fought for the British Empire. You know, I sat through dozens, probably hundreds of ceremonies for British — of World War II at school and no one ever mentioned that people like me were there. And deleting this history, that’s the thing that divides people. Knowing it and knowledge brings us together.

MARTIN: You are saying that a British education encouraged you to view your Indian heritage through patronizing western eyes. Would you just say a little bit more about that?

SANGHERA: Yes, I think one of the main tools of British imperialism was education. Even today, a lot of world leaders have a British education. And what that does enforces or spreads certain ideas about Britain, certain ideas about the west. I definitely was subjected to those. I had supposedly one of the best educations in the world. I went to a private school on a scholarship and then I went to Cambridge University. But I didn’t study as the single brown writer until my final term at university. And it was a very selective education. A failure in education, actually. And looking back, it was a form of colonization really. If that makes sense.

MARTIN: So, let’s loop back to this weekend’s events. Will this history, in any way, be visible in these ceremonies?

SANGHERA: Yes, I think it is a very multicultural ceremony. It has to be because as a king, he’s the head of a multicultural country and also the head of a multicultural commonwealth, a collection of 56 former British imperial states. So, the British government can engage in these culture wars. But the monarch can’t really because he’s got ahead to this international association of countries. And actually, one of the things they really want to talk about is the legacies of slavery and the legacies of empire, and it is something that the government doesn’t necessarily want to talk about. But I think you are going to see a very multicultural, very inclusive ceremony. I mean, “The Lord’s Prayer” has been said in multiple languages. There are people from the commonwealth. I think it is going to be reflecting of empire, although, you won’t hear the word empire.

MARTIN: Can I just go back to the whole Prince Harry and Meghan Markle situation? It did seem for a minute that her acceptance into the family signaled something. Like a willingness to live in the world as it is as opposed to the world —

SANGHERA: Yes —

MARTIN: — that was. And that does not seem to have happened at all. What is your take on that?

SANGHERA: It says a lot about the state of affairs when it comes to race. Because, finally the royal family had a person of color as part of the family which reflected multicultural Britain. This is an amazing thing for so many people of color in Britain. And I can’t help noticing it went very, very wrong, and she’s not even coming. And, you know, I’ve traveled around the former empire this year, and there is a view that this is reflective of the racism of the royal family. And actually, there is much less support in multicultural Britain for the monarchy than there is generally. I think 38 percent of ethnic people in Britain support the monarchy. Whereas, a general figure of 68 percent. And I think this is a real problem for the royal family because they also, historically, tied up in the racism of British Empire. I mean, black and Asian immigrant staff were banned from working in clerical roles in Buckingham Palace until the late 1960s. And even now, Buckingham Palace is excluded from a lot of equality legislation.

MARTIN: Do you have any sense, and I understand that you are not a royal whisper, but do you have any sense of whether the royal family writ large, particularly King Charles, cares about any of this?

SANGHERA: Actually, no. Prince Charles, when he was Prince Charles, really cared about it. You know, he ran this charity called Prince’s Trust who did loads of work for the black community, black businesses. He spoke up in defense of Islam. He is a — he called himself a defender of the faiths, plural, rather than just a defender of the Christian faith. He is pretty woke. And actually, I think, you know, the establishment disliked him for that. And it’s going to be interesting to see how he plays it because now he is the ultimate establishment. And there is a tension between what he believes and what he needs to do as the head of the commonwealth, and what this current government wants to do. And I don’t know how that is going to play out.

MARTIN: Before we let you go, have there been efforts to ban your book?

SANGHERA: My publisher gave out 15,000 copies to British schools, so that’s been nice. But, yes, I’ve had a massive backlash in terms of racism, and racist abuse, and I’ve actually stopped doing events because so many people come to them to just shout at me. But it also makes me realize I’m doing important work. And whenever people do shout at me, I have so many people buying the book and trying to engage with me to make up for that. And I think I need to focus more on the positive but that is hard to do sometimes.

MARTIN: Well, Sathnam Sanghera, thank you so much for talking with us.

SANGHERA: Thank you.