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

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The sugar and other crops produced by the enslaved made some British people very rich, but eventually, Britain accepted the trade was evil, outlawed it and took a leading role in abolishing it around the world. His idea that, deliberately or subconsciously, the British are not honest about the darker elements of the largest empire in history feels important; a lack of reckoning with the past that perpetuates exceptionalism. That’s what Britain has always done, sanitise the history, the violence, and I assumed if you wrote for kids there would be a lot of that. Magnificent Rebels: The First Romantics and the Invention of the Self by Andrea Wulf is published by John Murray . In 2016, Amitav Ghosh asked in his nonfiction polemic The Great Derangement why so few novelists had tackled the most pressing subject of our time: climate change.

Stolen History by Sathnam Sanghera (9780241623435/Paperback Stolen History by Sathnam Sanghera (9780241623435/Paperback

Although Britain was officially a Christian country, people of different religions settled here too. Because how can we ever make the world a kinder, better place for the future, if we don’t know the truth about the past? a lot of what Sanghera documents is news to me… Sanghera’s point, I guess, is that we are unconscious citizens of Empireland: empire made us, whether we realise it or not.During the two world wars, millions of citizens from the colonies fought and died alongside British soldiers. Free labour and free trade were incompatible with slavery, but not with the continued exploitation and global trafficking of low-paid workers.

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It explains so much about Britain asa nation, including where our money comes from, the stuff we find in our museums, thereason the country is home to citizens of all different backgrounds, the food we eat, thewords we use and so much more. An] impassioned and deeply personal journey through Britain’s imperial past and present… Moving effortlessly back and forth between history and journalism, Sanghera connects the racial violence and discrimination of his childhood in 1970s and 80s Wolverhampton with the attitudes and methods previously used to impose empire and white supremacy across the world… Without getting bogged down in definitions, calculations or complicated comparisons, Empireland also manages to convey something of the sheer variety of imperial experiences over four centuries… unflinching… a moving and stimulating book that deserves to be widely read. He highlights the empire’s hidden influence, positive and negative, on modern Britain: our politics, culture, education, ethnic make-up, language. I didn’t really know the British imperial history in Iraq but someone told me that the British had a mandate that caused a lot of problems. In Little Badman and the Rise of the Punjabi Zombies, caretaker Mr Kapoor mentions the Partition that took place in India in 1947.

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 couldn’t see howspending a whole term learning about the Stone Age was going to help me live my life. Sanghera blends memoir, journalism and history to construct a multi-layered narrative that slowly builds toward an existential but also political question: if you take away Empire, and everything connected to it, what would be left of the elements that could be said to constitute British national identity? Papyrus: The Invention of Books in the Ancient World by Irene Vallejo, translated by Charlotte Whittle , is published by Hodder . Since then there has been a flurry of cli-fi publications, from Ghosh’s own Gun Island to Kim Stanley Robinson’s The Ministry for the Future.