He argues that Brexit is, in part, “an exercise in empire nostalgia”. Sanghera suggests that greater awareness of our imperial past would reshape our understanding of our post-imperial present. Nevertheless, I am churlish, so here goes. My time with Sanghera’s book was so enjoyable that it feels almost churlish to admit that I found its overarching argument wholly unconvincing. Science and Technical Research and Development.Infrastructure Management - Transport, Utilities.Information Services, Statistics, Records, Archives.Information and Communications Technology.HR, Training and Organisational Development.Health - Medical and Nursing Management.Facility / Grounds Management and Maintenance.Perhaps most fittingly of all, the word “loot” is itself appropriated from the Hindi word “lut”: the spoils of war. As he superbly chronicles, the legacy of the British empire is everywhere you look. The legacy of Europe’s empires is so bound into our society that trying to remove their influence upon us is as futile a task as attempting to remove the egg from a baked cake, to borrow an analogy that the author and Times writer Sathnam Sanghera uses in Empireland. (I leave the question of whether this fact goes in the “pros” or “cons” column of those empires up to you.)

If any of those three empires had not existed – if just one of them had collapsed due to internal strife or external defeat a little earlier – then I would not exist and you would not be reading this sentence. Years later, while working at the Africa Centre in London, my mother met a British Zimbabwean, himself only here because his ancestors, like many Commonwealth citizens, were encouraged to come to the UK to top up the labour force. There she met my grandfather, the descendant of eastern European Jews who fled the anti-Semitic persecution of the Russian empire to come to Britain in the 19th century. Heavily pregnant, my grandmother exercised her right as a Commonwealth citizen to come to the United Kingdom. I am here today because my grandmother, the South African descendant of white British colonists – who erected a complex system of racial apartheid in order to continue minority rule – met and had a child with a descendant of the enslaved Javanese population, who were brought to South Africa by the Dutch empire.

This review is the product of empire, and not just because the two books in question take empire as their topic.

Sanghera empireland