Holding the Empire responsible for the state of modern Britain is becoming commonplace

It seems to have become a virtual orthodoxy of the academic and publishing worlds that history and fiction now have their ‘reserved areas’. Sathnam Sanghera’s sprawling and intimidating bibliography — more than 50 pages of it — underlines just how wide and eclectic his own reading has been, but there is one sentence, more than half way into Empireland, that might make readers think. He is talking about a passage from Jan Morris’s Heaven’s Command, dealing with British racial atrocities, that seems, to Sanghera, indecently trivialising in its tone:

The comment briefly makes me wonder whether you need to be a descendant of the colonised or a person of colour to feel the full, gut-wrenching horror of it all.

It would be a desperately sad thing if that were true, but true or not, there is no questioning Sanghera’s own credentials to write about race and racism in modern Britain. Born in Wolverhampton in 1976 to Punjabi immigrant parents, he ‘grew up under the shadow of “Paki-bashing”’, kept at home by his mother on Molineux match days for fear of violence, and forced — one of his earliest childhood memories — to hide ‘with tens of other Sikh families in the local temple, as far-right gangs terrorised Wolverhampton’.

It is not just the most violent kind of racism that Empireland addresses; it is also those omissions, silences and subtler forms of conditioning that Sanghera only became aware of himself much later in life. In every obvious way he would seem the perfect type of the immigrant role model he wished he had had as a child. But as he looks back now on his upbringing, what stands out is an education — grammar school and then Cambridge — that could leave him with little more history to his name than a selective knowledge of the two world wars, a nodding acquaintance with the Tudors and Tollund Man, and a blanket ignorance of all those historical forces that had helped shape the life of a young British Sikh.