Franz Fanon was from Martinique- which is not a colony but a part of the Republic of France and thus of the EU.
Fanon spent some time in Algeria which was settled by French people. The indigenous Arab majority, however, weren't too happy with these invaders and, I suppose, were glad to see the back of them.
Priya Satya and Sathnam Singh Sanghera are of Indian heritage. British Rule in India was nothing like French rule in Algeria or, more sadly for us Babus, Marinique's participation in the EU.
Yet Priya, writing of Sathnam's new book in the Nation, begins her review by mentioning Fanon. For heavens sake, why? India, which was never a settler colony, had been independent for a decade by the time Fanon got to Algeria.
For anti-colonial thinkers of the last century, decolonization was not a mere transfer of power. It was about reparation, including repair of the self.
Not as far as India or Kenya or Egypt of any other actual African of Asian country was concerned. The indigenous people wanted the interlopers out. Also they wanted to move into their nice shiny bungalows and offices. Still, for economic reason, they might tolerate the continued presence of some Europeans. But there was zero need to 'repair the self'. Getting back to the ancestral religion was a different matter. Repentance or 'metanoia' may have been required. But giving up Gin and Tonic and reverting to traditional garb, did not involve any great spiritual repair or reparation. The thing was salutary.
It is good to change your habits- especially as you get older. There were plenty of Europeans who thought they should give up their Citified ways and an addiction to cocaine and move back to the countryside so as to grow their own turnips. At any rate, that is what I was told by such Europeans as I was acquainted with before I took to dropping in on them so as to read out my latest translation from Dante, Goethe, or Sir Mix-a-Lot.
“Decolonization is the veritable creation of new men,” wrote Frantz Fanon in The Wretched of the Earth.
Fuck would he have known about it? The fellow was as French as onion soup. God alone knows how he was supposed to cure Arabic speaking lunatics.
I suppose, ex-slaves or the descendants of serfs might have divided loyalties or what Du Bois called 'Double Consciousness' or may have experienced cognitive dissonance. But Sikhs- Sanghera is a Jat Sikh- experienced nothing of the sort. The Brits had encouraged their religion and, in Sikh regiments, British officers encouraged and led Sikh forms of worship. Moreover, Lahore University, unlike Calcutta University, was 'Orientalist' from the first- i.e. greater stress was placed on learning Persian and Sanskrit- while British policy was favourable to the development of Punjabi language literature in the Gurumukhi script though administrative records continued to be maintained in Nastaliq.
As Jean-Paul Sartre made clear in a preface to the book, decolonization was equally required of former colonizers: “Let’s take a good look at ourselves, if we have the courage, and let’s see what has become of us.”
The Whites in Algeria hated Sartre and tried to kill him. The Algerian conflict was nothing like anything seen in the British Empire. Sartre was supposed to be some sort of Leftist philosopher. His country was pretty shitty and had seen plenty of collaboration with the Nazis. The French did need to take a good look at themselves and become a little less shitty. This also involved telling their Philosophy professors they were stupid and worthless. Fanon, poor fellow, was bucking for promotion by sucking up to these nutters. Foucault had a good Psychiatrist who did some original work on lithium salts. The Maoists forced the fellow out of Medicine. But he had a good prose style- i.e. could write vacuous bollocks- and thus got in to the French Academy.
But the “new humanism” envisioned by these thinkers could not flourish, as first the Cold War,
which was in full swing when Fanon & Sartre were writing stupid shite. Indeed, the Americans were backing nutters like Sartre (John Ford hired him to do a screenplay for a Freud bio-pic), Derrida, Foucault etc. precisely because they were stupid and useless and thus bound to embarrass or run afoul the mainstream French Communist party.
BTW, India was ahead of France in that women had the vote and Communists were free to organise and fight elections. Incidentally, Ranajit Guha, representing the Indian Communist Party, had visited Paris as part of Alexander Shelepin (the future KGB chief who was believed to have gotten rid of Kruschev) World Democratic Youth Conference for fucking to death not just Democracy, not just Youth, but the whole fucking World.
Guha was just 5 years younger than Shelepin. But then, M.N Roy had been Lenin's man in China, which is why the guy ran away to the safety of a brief spell in a British Indian jail cell. Sarojini Naidu's elder brother- Chatto- wasn't so lucky. He either starved to death in Moscow or died in a Gulag.
My point is, India was ahead of France as far as Lefty Lunacy was concerned. True maybe Communism might not arrive in Peking by way of Calcutta but- thanks to Rajni Palme Dutt and the Gaekwad giving 5000 quid to the Labor Party in 1918- it was not wholly absurd to suggest that Communism might come to Paris by way of Saigon and Algiers, or that Dutch tulips might flame red thanks to a virus imported from Djakarta.
Satia and Sanghera- being second generation shitheads too stupid to become either Rishi Sunak or Vivek Ramaswamy- must try to glom onto a genuine grievance their Muslim brothers and sisters might have- viz Bush/Blair's brutal war of revenge which under Obama Mama just turned into stupid-greedy, self-defeating, shit.
and then the so-called War on Terror,
which failed almost immediately. By 2004, Iran was emerging as the major beneficiary. By 2014 it was triumphalist. Iran boasted of controlling four ancient capitals- Baghdad, Beirut, Damascus and Sana. This wasn't too far from the truth.
The plain fact is that the financial crash at the end of Dubya's reign put paid to any notion that the West would shape, and profit by, the 'New World Order' (or 'Rules Based Comity of Nations'). Obama and the Arab Spring was an Indian Summer of hope before wintry clouds drew in.
hindered the emancipation of decolonizing nations,
They were decolonized long ago. Fanon's Algerian heroes briefly flirted with radicalism in the Sixties but soon turned into a kleptocratic junta which, in the Nineties, crushed the Islamists.
renewing the commitment to the ideas of Western civilizational superiority that had long upheld Western empire.
Portugal kept its Empire longest. Nobody thought it had civilisational superiority precisely because everybody admitted that its people were very good and decent and just lovely to get along with.
In recent years, however, calls to reckon with the West’s imperial past have regained a sense of urgency.
Fuck off! Nobody gives a shit. The UK is run by a guy called Rishi Sunak. A brash young man named Vivek Ramaswamy is running for President of America. Both are very very fucking rich. But they didn't study worthless shite at their very expensive Colleges.
The United States, Britain, and other nations in Europe are now the scene of insistent questioning of the public glorification of slavers and imperial “heroes,” the provenance of museum collections, and the inequalities dating from the colonial era that are shaping the impact of the climate crisis.
The thing is a fucking nuisance. Still, if it permits Governments to get rid of History from School curriculums, good can come out of bad.
But as the British journalist Sathnam Sanghera drives home in his new book, Empireland, widespread ignorance about the past
such as that which he himself displays. Don't forget Kwarteng's PhD was in shite of this sort. He managed to fuck up the British economy more quickly than any other Chancellor. Clearly, studying History makes you thicker than shit.
has made coming to terms with it exceedingly difficult. Sanghera sardonically proposes an “Empire Day 2.0”—an update to the pro-empire holiday that was part of the British calendar from 1902 to 1958—to promote awareness about an imperial past that continues to elude British consciousness, despite the innumerable quotidian ways in which it infuses the country’s language, economics, food, state institutions, demography (including Sanghera’s very existence as a Sikh Briton), and more.
Sanghera supports compulsory repatriation of New Commonwealth immigrants and their descendants. They were only able to settle in Britain because of the Empire which was very evil. Let us rid ourselves of this horrible reminder of those disgusting darkies who suckered us into ruling over them. BTW, I iz not bleck. It's just that I don't wash regular coz, according to a little known provision in Magna Carta, only Super-Models are allowed to lick the dirt of my lily-white skin.
Confronting this past is crucial to contending constructively with the United Kingdom’s public history, racism, relations with Europe, pandemic management, and more.
No it isn't. Rishi Sunak's family contended constructively with whatever was negative about UK history. Follow that example by all means. Don't bother with Sanghera. Affirmative action can only go so far. The guy has nothing interesting to say.
Sanghera describes his own journey in making sense of the imperial past, which began in 2019 when he visited Punjab—where his family is from—while making a documentary for the centenary of the Jallianwala Bagh Massacre in Amritsar, where British forces
Indian soldiers commanded by a British soldier born in India whose family owned a famous brewery. Brigadier Dyer went on to lead Indian soldiers to victory over the Afghans a short while later. He was made an honorary Sikh by the priests of the Golden Temple. Sadly, he forcibly enrolled the entire Amritsar bar as special constables and forced them to do work they thought degrading. That's why their fellow lawyers across the length and breadth of India went crazy.
killed hundreds of Indians gathered in a city park. Visiting the Jallianwala Bagh memorial, Sanghera learns the true extent of the brutality and injustice of the 1919 massacre and its place in a longer history of British violence toward and racial humiliation of Punjabis
there was no such history. Some Punjabis had killed or molested Whites and Dyer took revenge. This worked. The struggle shifted to one against not Whites but the Udasin Mahants. Olivier, as Secretary of State, came down on the side of the Akalis. It was the Arya Samajis whom the British Governor considered mutinous.
—a past entirely left out of his high school history curriculum.
The thing is not left out of Indian school curriculums. But Sanghera's parents didn't send him home for his education. They paid a lot of money for him to study in England.
In any case, what are a few hundred deaths compared to the million Sikhs that the Akhal Takht claims were killed during Partition? The Khalistan insurgency may have had a death toll of at least 30,000. The Brits were the best thing that happened to the Sikhs- at least in the opinion of some of their own leaders and intellectuals.
What he knew of the British Empire had, if anything, left him feeling vaguely proud as a Sikh—a community he’d long believed had done well under it.
This is perfectly true.
The Koh-i-Noor diamond, which had once belonged to the Sikh king,
who took it from an Afghan King who had swallowed it and was forced to shit it out
was now among the crown jewels as a symbol of “great British-Sikh relations,” he’d thought, but the scales fall when he learns that the diamond had been seized by the East India Company and that its return has been demanded ever since.
The scales fell from my eyes when I discovered that Iyerland- which I believed the Brits had specially created so as to house drunken Iyers like myself- had been run over by half Marathi leprechauns named Varadkar.
Sanghera reflects on his miseducation as he discovers the reality of British rule in Punjab
which was very good compared to what went before or what came after- at least from the Sikh point of view
and realizes how colonial racial notions haunt even the psyche of formerly colonized people—including those now living in the metropole.
Very true. His parents fled General Dyer and came to settle in Wolverhampton because there are no White peeps there- innit? What haunts the psyche of young Punjabis is the prospect of getting a visa to Canada or Yurop or Amrika. On the other hand, now Amritpal Singh has been arrested, perhaps Sanghera will put on turban and take over the leadership of Waris Punjab de.
Sanghera offers his book as an audit on British historical education, revealing the carelessness with which British children are taught their country’s history.
Us Brits don't want to know about shitty colonial wars. Just tell us about how the Europeans, headed by a bloke named Caesar, invaded Britain till Nigel Farage rose up and told him to fuck the fuck off back to Brussels.
Even the world wars are whitewashed, with history lessons ignoring the enormous contributions of Black and brown people to the British war efforts.
They contributed less than a quarter to the war effort. Frankly, the Imperial game was not worth the candle from the Defense point of view.
For Sanghera, this exclusion from episodes central to “our national story” was his education’s “most serious and painful omission.”
He should have been taught about how British workers had previously killed or otherwise ejected immigrants who were prepared to work for low wages. Come to think of it, the Brits were one of the first countries to expel the Jews. My point is, an accurate account of English history would have had White kids signing up with the BNP.
At a reunion for his grade school, Wolverhampton Grammar, he finds himself newly conscious of the “imperial tone” of Britain’s public schools and how they celebrate empire
rather than telling wogs and nig-nogs to fuck off back where they came from
while avoiding teaching about it. “Education,” he concludes, “can be a tool of colonialism.”
This man is a tool right enough. He may appear educated but he is as thick as shit. Still, his parents spent good money to get him into a posh school so maybe he is thick in an upper-class way- like Kwarteng, or BoJo. Shit. Sunak too is probably thick. There goes my pension!
It may surprise some that a Briton today needs to prove
to earn a little money and get affirmative action
the imperial roots of things like Britain’s racial diversity and racism.
Britain should have clamped down on coloured immigration in 1947. Apparently, it was the Governors of West Indian colonies who insisted on no Visa barriers for the 'Windrush' generation so that emigration serve as a 'safety valve'.
But Sanghera shows that such knowledge has been deliberately excised
by Leftists and anti-Racists
from British society, compelling an adult Sikh Briton to set sail to find the walls of the Truman Show world that has shaped his existence.
This is crazy shit. I personally know at least four Sikh Leftist intellectuals in the Wolverhampton area. The father of a friend of mine who was high up in Indian intelligence met one such for dinner. He wanted to know the truth about whether his Bedi ancestors had sided with the Udasin mahants who had made Brig. Dyer an honorary Sikh. The scholarly gentleman quoted chapter and verse to explain why this had been the case and, as a bonus, gave an insight into Amarinder Singh's maternal family background. Later, the Intelligence man explained to his son that this sort of information was not available in India. It wasn't just that the Brits had burned some archives. The fact is our own people had destroyed a lot of files. Leftist Sikhs in the UK pieced these things together. Why? They wanted a proper theory of 'class formation' or some such Commie drivel. Incidentally, one of the best Punjabi poets of that time had actually read Hegel. My point is that Sanghera represents a steep fall in the quality of Sikh intellectuals in this country though some of the people I am thinking of had actually worked in factories, done construction, etc. But that was why their brains weren't stuffed with shit. It was always instructive for a chap influenced by the Cambridge school of history to sit with these dignified, white bearded, men to get a bottom-up perspective. I suppose, as Punjab turned into a shit-show under AFSPA, that 'subaltern' view embittered the twilight years of the Sikh Leftist intellectual.
“The idea that black and brown people are aliens who arrived without permission, and with no link to Britain, to abuse British hospitality” has been, Sanghera writes, “the defining political narrative” of his lifetime, even as he endured routine “Paki-bashing” in 1970s and ’80s Wolverhampton, once the constituency of perhaps the most notoriously racist politician in recent British history: Enoch Powell, whose dreams of becoming viceroy of India were shattered with the country’s independence in 1947.
Kids who go to a posh school in a place like Wolverhampton are going to get bashed up one way or another.
Empireland is not a lecturing or hectoring book but rather a generously shared journey of discovery.
It is a sound enough careerist move. But Sanghera will be saddled with having to write Introductions to more and more retarded narratives penned by refugees from yet more noisome shitholes.
Sanghera is a journalist in the Orwellian mold, inviting readers to witness his experiment on himself as an example of the conclusions that a decent, acerbically witty, public-school-educated Brit might arrive at after wading through the evidence of what Britain owes to empire. (Orwell himself appears frequently in the book, as a critic of empire in its heyday.)
Orwell was either a police-spy or a genuine Lefty. Sanghera is a self-promoter. Had he studied something worthwhile at Uni, he'd be a billionaire by now.
A chapter on colonial migration to Britain is followed by an account of the massive scale of white migration out of Britain—a net exporter of people through the 1980s.
These figures are known to be misleading.
Sanghera contrasts Britons’ “sense of…entitlement” to move freely about the world and resist assimilation with their resentment toward immigrants to Britain.
Very true. Would Sikhs like Muslims to move back to East Punjab? Perhaps. What about such Hindus as they chased away? The truth is the Sikhs want Rohingyas to come and settle among them. But only if they are LGBTQ. Nothing less will do.
Using the first-person here (“our tendency as travelers,” “our racism”), he gallantly implicates himself in such habits and mentalities—an assertion of belonging, at whatever cost, that demonstrates what it is to take responsibility for the culture and deeds of one’s nation, however marginal one’s ties to them.
Indeed. I often say to my pal, King Charlie, 'Us Brits are too goshdarned pale innit? This spooks the nigh-nogs who think we might be ghosts. Tell you what, lets do black-face for the coronation. Rishi will be thrilled.'
Sanghera grew up wanting “to be more British” than the rest of his family.
I wanted to be more Chinese than the rest of my family. Bruce Lee was big back then.
He is explicit about his love of country, rejecting Paul Gilroy’s description of British national identity as “brittle and empty” and proclaiming his pride in its achievements.
Fucking over Hitler or Napoleon or the Spanish fucking Armada. The Danes were okay. They invented the Ham omelette.
He validates those moved by Boris Johnson’s 2016 speech glorifying “British soft power,” while at the same time compelling reflection on what it means to “be British.”
Being British means leaving reflection to mirrors or other shiny objects.
For Fanon, decolonization depended on moving “from national consciousness to political and social consciousness,”
which is why his island is still part of France. The locals were smart enough to see they'd be way better off as part of the EU.
from rediscovering national culture to creating it by collectively constructing a new future.
But the future will be new even if don't construct shit. All we need to do is to stop repairing stuff or else smash a statue or two just to move things along.
Sanghera calls for something similar in urging Britons to face up to uncomfortable facts in order “to navigate a path forward” and “work out…who we want to be.”
We don't want to be this sad loser. We want to be Rishi Sunak. Oh. You've been reading my diary. All right! I want to be Priti Patel and wear stiletto heels! Happy now?
Expressions of patriotism are perhaps also a necessary safeguard against the accusations of “anti-Britishness” inevitably lobbed at those proffering critical views of Britain’s past.
Very true. Priti might try to bite this fellow's face off. Gujju females can be very fierce you know.
By reminding his readers of the long tradition of British dissent about empire—Victorian
Edwardian. Victoria died before the Younghusband expedition
outrage at the looting of Tibet, for instance—Sanghera is able to frame the return of that loot as perfectly British and also dashes cold water on the argument that we can’t judge colonial activities by today’s very different standards. For good measure, he facetiously throws in a long footnote that fulfills the obligatory demand that nonwhite Britons express gratitude for all that Britain has given them.
How come nobody made any such obligatory demand of me? Is it coz Tamils are darker than Sikhs? Fuck you Whitey! Fuck you very much!
Observing how his education had made him view his Indian heritage through patronizing Western eyes,
Actually, it was his Daddy and Mummy moving to Youkay which caused him to have such eyes.
Sanghera recalls the story of Duleep Singh, the abducted Sikh boy king who was exiled to England and coercively Anglicized after the British conquered Punjab.
He married an Abyssinian alcoholic after converting to Christianity.
Singh later reeducated himself and tried, belatedly, to revive the Sikh Empire.
So did I. Whiskey can do that to you.
Sanghera recognizes that he is similarly “making an effort to decolonize myself”—present tense.
Try detox first. If that doesn't work, try an exorcism. Only if that fails should you decolonize yourself by granting independence to your arse so it can make lots of money shitting out books about decolonizing the colon.
It is difficult to “review” such a personal journey, one that seems to continue the inventory of the self that Sanghera began with The Boy With the Topknot, his earlier memoir about growing up Sikh in Wolverhampton. Empireland, after all, is not intended for professional historians like me but rather for those who don’t already know that the horror story of the Black Hole of Calcutta—the story of the crowded dungeon where dozens of British prisoners suffocated to death that long served to justify the British conquest of Bengal in 1757—is unreliable.
What justified the conquest of Bengal was that it was as easy as pie and very very fucking profitable. On the other hand, it isn't true that the Black Hole of Calcutta is Ranajit Guha's anus. He lives in Vienna.
Indeed, while scholars will find Sanghera’s pattern here somewhat nerve-wracking—first taking seriously the inaccurate claims typically invoked to deny the realities or the importance of colonialism, then showing how they don’t stand up to scrutiny—he is speaking to a lay audience that has absorbed pieties and fictions about the empire from everywhere rather than facts from today’s actual historical experts.
Some woke intellectuals did create A level papers in Empire History but few students took the bait. On the other hand, West Indians certainly had grave cause for complaint if their ancestors had been victims of the slave trade. Nothing similar can be said about India. As Disraeli pointed out, the place hadn't really been conquered. The Brits just supplied a service for a fee.
But Empireland does offer a case study in the transformative effects of a self-guided tour of scholarship on the empire.
Priya means 'Is Sardarji ka bara bajh gaya- he should have studied History properly at Uni. Instead he just opening books at random and now has gone totally doolally.
Sanghera dives headfirst into an ocean of dissertations, journal articles, and books from academic presses, citing a roll call of major scholars in the field, albeit with some notable omissions. The historian Kim Wagner
an odd choice. Punjabis think there was an agent provocateur involved. Don't forget that back in the Twenties and Thirties, there were influential families who claimed to have triggered the massacre (suggesting they could do it again) so as to restore the 'smack of firm government'. BTW, elderly Punjabis used the word 'Rowlatt' to mean disorder and confusion. But then, Ghaddar had and even worse meaning.
guides him in Amritsar and the art historian Alice Procter
again an odd choice. Still, the earlier generation of curators tended to embarrass the fuck out of plebeians like me by assuming we must be descended from some Raja or Dewan with a similar surname. Also a lot of them were homos- at least that was my assumption.
in museums, but it’s unclear whether anyone has similarly guided his reading. And so, though Sanghera learns about everything from the origins of Britain’s ownership of Manhattan to the genocide of Tasmanians, he arrives at some odd conclusions about the literature itself, such as that “very little about British empire…is certain or knowable”—a claim belied by the rest of his book.
Perhaps this is the native shrewdness of the Sikh asserting itself. The fact is nothing in Punjabi politics is as it seems. There is always another side to the story. But that is also why Punjabis are a spiritual and moral people. Material reality is deceptive. Spiritual Truth is irrefragable.
It’s not that our knowledge about the British Empire is uncertain, but that a grasp of historiography is essential to navigating writing about it.
No. You don't have to be able to write in a certain style to be able to separate what is propaganda from what is truth. Kipling- a great lover of the Punjab- made this point forcefully.
Much of the existing literature was “born imperial”—written by the empire’s scholar-administrators and boosters—as I demonstrated in my book Time’s Monster.
But James Mill wasn't a 'scholar-administrator'. He compiled a book and got a job with John Company. The primary sources for historians are administrative archives, but they predate Imperialism properly so called.
It was scholarship invested in supporting imperial aims, often verging on propaganda, to assuage continual doubt about the enterprise
No. Initially, writers wanted to show there was money to be made in a certain place. Later on, once the Flag had followed trade, there were auditor's reports. Sometimes a loss making region was retained for a a strategic or defensive purpose. But, over all, the thing had to cover its costs or else paramountcy became merely cosmetic or notional. Portuguese rule in large parts of Africa had that quality but there were also parts of India which officials were careful to leave well alone.
—explaining devastating violence in India, for instance, as part of a plan of eventual uplift.
Only because 'uplift' meant more trade and a better return on capital.
Moreover, its lasting influence has depended on the destruction of compromising official records, as Sanghera himself recognizes.
Not really. The one thing Indians know about official records is that they were filled with lies. IPS officers knew that well enough. As for the Heaven Born ICS Magistrate, they would frequently boast that they never looked at CID files and would hear no gossip about such matters at the Club.
In recent years, historians have gone to great lengths to revise this faulty, contrived view of the British Empire. It matters who writes history and which sources and methods they use. Yet despite a wealth of alternative sources, Sanghera often quotes, frustratingly, from works that he knows have been debunked
by credentialized cretins who wrote bunkum
(e.g., Jan Morris’s glorifying Pax Britannica trilogy from the 1960s and ’70s). He takes at face value a claim about the “Sikh hatred for Muslims” in the Indian Uprising of 1857 in Lawrence James’s Raj, a 1998 pro-empire narrative that was based on British sources.
Delhi's Muslims were obliged to take it at face value more particularly after Sikhs very kindly explained things to them before slitting their throats. Still, there were Sikh noblemen who owned property in Delhi and they protected their tenants even if they were Muslim.
Scientists have disproved “race science,” but when pseudoscientific racial misconceptions persist, we don’t say the science is uncertain.
We say that our current Structural Causal Model is incomplete or tentative in certain respects. This does mean that there is uncertainty as to whether a particular data set is being currently misinterpreted.
Likewise, historical knowledge about the British Empire isn’t uncertain because of a 2003 popular book written by a historian of finance
Niall Ferguson. Finance was fundamental to the Empire. What some racist wrote didn't matter at all.
who didn’t consult the vast literature on the regions and peoples that lived under it and who explicitly sought to offer “lessons for…the United States as it stands on the brink of a new era of imperial power.”
Okay. That's hilarious. The Iraq quagmire did line a few well connected pockets but it was a disaster for which we will continue to pay a very high price for decades. I'm not saying the occupation of Iraq couldn't have paid for itself. But you'd have had to disintermediate the neo-cons and the evangelicals and...urm... every fucking American blathershite except there were British and French and German blathershites who were even more demented.
Sanghera stresses that history is argument, but there are more and less accurate arguments.
Nope. There are Structural Causal Models. Arguments are second order and imperative or non-informative if based on assumed, not measured, parameters.
To suggest that making historical claims “is almost always a matter of opinion” devalues the careful scholarship that allowed Sanghera to assemble his book’s own quite clear conclusions.
Screw careful scholarship. We have become a lot better at building and testing Models. Just point us to data-sets. If we can make money out of the thing here and now, then maybe someone might be interested in our arguments. If Kwarteng had learned something useful from his Econ PhD, he'd still be Chancellor.
The portrait of an unfathomable literature does, however, play effectively to Britain’s “anti-intellectual” culture, allowing Sanghera to make his case on the very same commonsense grounds on which the Conservative MPs of the so-called “Common Sense Group” oppose any reckoning with the empire. He offers his assessments as those that any reasonable person (that very English legal standard) encountering an imposing literature might reach.
It is common sense, that people from New Commonwealth countries who came to England and began earning well above the average MUST have received benefits from English rule. Why not tax them at a higher rate so as to make reparation payments to those the Empire harmed? Race is a costly to disguise signal- i.e. scope for evasion is low. Sadly, this means the most talented will fuck off if they aren't already non-doms.
Autodidacticism has always been important to anti-colonialism, given the complicity of educational institutions in empire.
History teachers used to row over to the West Indies to whip slaves during the Summer Vac.
Fanon and Gandhi engaged in intense study and self-examination, as did the Punjabi revolutionary Bhagat Singh, who read copiously right up to his execution in 1931.
Because Netflix hadn't been invented yet. But even if it had, the fact remains that Fanon's natal place is still part of France. His study and self-examination were useless. Neither Gandhi nor Bhagat Singh moved the clock on Independence. Indeed, Gandhi probably delayed it. So what why mention them now? They were self-publicists- sure- and Bhagat Singh is a romantic hero but, in his own eyes, so was Savarkar.
Sanghera shows that rigorous independent reading (presumably enabled by institutional access to scholarly literature) produces a fairly solid understanding of imperial history, apart from a few stumbles arising from the undue deference he gives to less reliable works.
Sanghera has written self-serving shit of the 'me poor brown boy- boo hoo!' variety. Priya has written nonsense. They are well matched.
Avoiding such stumbles would require a guided tour. When Sanghera concludes‚ citing P.J. Marshall’s 1976 book East Indian Fortunes as well as remarks by a researcher at the Adam Smith Institute (a neoliberal think tank), that scholarly opinion is “divided” on whether empire mattered in Britain’s industrial revolution, one wishes that a mentor had been there to nudge him toward more recent scholarly works, such as Maxine Berg’s Luxury and Pleasure in Eighteenth-Century Britain or my own Empire of Guns (on Sanghera’s home region, the Black Country)—or toward the crucial genre of the scholarly book review.
Such work is tendentious. The plain fact is that the industrial revolution would have occurred even if Dutch ships carried British exports. What about French ships? Then, there would have been no United Kingdom.
Among serious scholars, there’s meaningful disagreement about the diverse ways that empire mattered in the industrial revolution, but not whether it did.
It didn't. The Belgian industrial revolution- kickstarted by two Brits- shows this. Essentially, if real wages had risen too much in the North, then people from there would have shifted to some similar area and industrialization would have proceeded there. This was the reason that though people read William Cobbett, they knew that it wasn't possible to turn back the clock to Merrie England. Suppress industry at home and industrialists go work for some Continental magnate or go pollute some Edenic stretch of the new world. Sadly, this would mean that the skilled workman too would go to where technology was progressing fastest. Merrie England would be stuck with inbred nitwits.
Without such a guide, Sanghera is liable to make too much of a fact like “some of the tax revenue” collected by the colonial government “went to Indian schools,” counting it against the claim that the British drained Indian wealth. But this meager instance of public expenditure was often the result of Indian movements pressing an otherwise uninterested colonial government.
The colonial government had no objection to Indians paying a cess and thus gaining schools. Most Indians, however, wanted nothing to do with edumication. We all strive to have our own sub-caste classed as 'Educationally Backward'.
Once we consider that indigenous governments might have done more (Baroda, one of the “princely states” that the British ruled indirectly through local potentates, spent much more on education),
because that was what the Gaekwad wanted. He also gave 5000 quid to the Labour Party in 1918. No doubt the Tory Viceroy had indirectly ruled that this should be done.
it’s difficult to chalk up such expenditures as a net gain for Indians—especially if colonial education aimed to make them docile subjects.
Why stop there? Why not suggest that Whitey's education is designed to cause Black dicks to shrink? Also it is making darker skinned women lose the razor sharp teeth they used to have in their voracious vaginas. Thus the only reason you see so many White peeps all over the place in Amrika Yurop is coz coloured women haven't bitten off their heads with their vagina dentata.
Wake up sheeple! Don't you get that Edumication is a trick Whitey be using to enslave you and turn you into good little Professors? Wouldn't you rather have a ginormous dick or a twat which can bite people's heads off?
It is difficult to overestimate the value of mentorship in the study of history:
If you are paying more than about twenty pence for it, you are being swindled.
Sanghera’s account of the profound costs of an impoverished historical education
which is zero. Kwarteng's PhD in stupid shit cost the UK billions.
appears in the United States at a time of the systematic gutting of social science and humanistic learning.
Wait till Vivek becomes President.
Still, even unguided, Sanghera arrives at the sturdy conclusion that Britain derived substantial material benefits from its empire
because sensible countries receive substantial material benefits from stuff that they do
(assembling an especially excellent rebuttal to imperial apologists’ desperate gesturing at “India’s railways”).
Got to say, Indians turned out to be shit at heavy engineering. Marshall was right. Indian entrepreneurs were of poor quality. But, as Visvevarayya knew, the bottleneck re. indigenous engineering and technological manpower had been removed by the mid-Thirties. If we'd had sensible leaders like Fazli Husain and Lala Harkishen Lal and the Nawab of Khatri and Nariman in Bombay (the Justice party in Madras was sensible enough) Indian could have had ten percent catch up growth for two decades more particularly because of the War.
Time and again, he demonstrates the clarity that comes with acquiring more than “a superficial understanding of imperial history.” It is reassuring, as a scholar, to learn both that the literature is sound on the whole and that our role as teachers is important.
Teachers are needed so lads can graduate from writing 'Boo hoo! I'm brown' to 'Dear Whitey, do you have to be so fucking White? Have you tried dying yourself with woad? Or would that be too Tory? '.
At times, the determined neutrality of Empireland allows Sanghera to clinch the reasonable-person argument: Whether you believe that Britain’s relations with its colonies were good or bad, it’s clear that “brown people are here because” Britain had colonies.
Few 'brown people' would be here if real wages weren't higher than back home. You'd probably have the same number of Indian billionaires in Mayfair- but the Tandoori restaurants would be run by enterprising Albanians. Seriously, they make a good curry.
But often, this studied neutrality results in contradiction. Despite chronicling Victorian dissent about colonialism, Sanghera, in a fit of fairness of mind, defends the canard that “You can’t apply modern ethics to the past.”
Or to the present because modern ethics is twisted shit about not pushing a fat man out of the path of a run-away trolley.
Despite his astute skepticism of the balance-sheet approach to empire, he nevertheless attempts to “weigh up” its legacies. After proclaiming that reading history as “a series of events that instill pride and shame [is] inane,”
though lots of Sikhs read their history in that way and have very successful careers in the military before starting up their own business.
he ends by affirming his pride in the empire as “the biggest thing that ever happened to us [and] the world.”
Yet, that's not how Brits actually feel. Defeating the Armada- okay. Dunkirk- fair enough. The Battle of Britain- now you're talking! Nobody except Niradh Babu gave a shit about the Battle of Plassey.
Attachment to the idea of descending from something that mattered on a massive scale is perhaps understandable, but by this logic, Germans might also express pride in that big thing that happened to them, whatever the destruction it caused. It might be better to simply see history (like the Germans, actually) as a means of understanding our humanity.
Coz if we don't see history that way we might misunderstand our humanity and try to live like giraffes.
A zeal for “balance” also leads Sanghera to hasty reproach of some advocates for change. He rebukes an activist’s suggestion that the presence in the Tory cabinet of several prominent British Asians whose families emigrated from East Africa may be rooted in the role of British Asians as “subcolonial agents,” describing it as an attempt to ascribe individuals’ political views to “ethnicity.”
There were plenty of Africans employed in the Colonies. They tended to be very good at their jobs and quick to spread new techniques for growing cash crops. The problem was that the terms of trade tended to fall- this is the 'immeserizing growth' theory.
Anyway, Kwarteng was from Ghana and Zahawi is Kurdish Iraqi.
But this is an argument about their history, not their ethnicity, akin to Sanghera’s own explication of the historical roots of white Britons’ racism. The peppering of criticism of campaigners for change recalls Orwell’s efforts to disarm readers against his call for socialism by assuring them of his shared distaste for vegetarians, pacifists, feminists—the “woke army” of his time.
Is Sanghera calling for Socialism? If not why compare him to Orwell- who, let's face it, wrote rather well.
Certainly, the culture war around the subject of empire has made it difficult to express curiosity or admit ignorance and thus engage in the learning essential to getting past that past. But it’s only comparable to “children fighting in a playground,” as Sanghera calls it, if we mean a situation in which one kid bravely speaking the truth is being bullied and silenced by another kid many times his size (in terms of institutional power and resources) who insists that he is actually very small and has never been that powerful. Sadly, steering this middle path hasn’t protected Sanghera from torrents of abuse, including death threats.
OMG! I was that paragon of parrhesia in the playground explaining to the bullies that their daddy put their pee pee in their Mummies chee chee place and that's how babies are born. Sadly, I got a lot of death threats and torrents of abuse from their parents until I was finally sacked from my position as Vice Principal.
For many anti-colonial thinkers, autodidacticism strengthened the bonds of community with others seeking change.
This was also true of mutual masturbation.
Upon reading Tolstoy, Gandhi began a dialogue with the author;
who was already corresponding with some young Hindu. Tolstoy had read Vivekananda and Ramakrishna.
he also read the Bhagavad Gita in the company of London’s Theosophists.
coz he hadn't read it at home due to being shit at Sanskrit
If distance from today’s activists was somehow necessary to Sanghera’s book, a sense of connection with the anti-colonial past might have been all the more empowering.
Not if anti-colonial past farted in his face.
But apart from the very late mention of the unlearning that Duleep Singh and Jawaharlal Nehru subjected themselves to,
they were under the impression they were prima ballerinas at the Bolshoi. Some rude fellow pointed out that they were Indian men. They cried and cried.
Sanghera doesn’t invoke those who made and won the argument about empire—including the role of education in sustaining it—in the past century (forcing him to often reinvent the wheel). While he knows that imperialists like Lord Salisbury acknowledged that the empire enriched Britain, apart from a brief mention of Dadabhai Naoroji, Sanghera omits the long line of brown and Black thinkers who have made this same argument.
If a rich guy does business with you, you naturally assume that he is doing well out of the deal. You don't have to be a mighty thinker to make this argument.
He explores the relevance of colonial-era white supremacist notions
which were more prevalent in parts of Europe which had no fucking colonies.
to Britain today without a sense of the intervening anti-racist struggle that renders this a question today.
This is unlikely. He would have heard about the Anti-Nazi League and their clashes with skinheads.
He is delighted when Black Lives Matter suddenly makes his “esoteric” study of the British Empire “mainstream,” but colonialism isn’t esoteric; masses of people have been thinking about and struggling against it while he was fed public school pabulum.
i.e. the sort of shite which gets you to Ivy League
BLM didn’t come out of nowhere.
It came out of America which had slavery. But America is cool and anyway West Indians can legitimately make the same complaint. Indians can't.
Without awareness of this anti-colonial tradition, Sanghera at times underestimates the suffering that empire caused. He believes Sikhs took Britain’s side in the ghadar of 1857, but Punjab only appeared loyal because of the devastation of recent conquest and preemptive British counterinsurgency action.
In other words the Punjab Service was competent whereas the Bihar and Bengal Armies were very shitty indeed.
Punjabis in California later named their movement to free India the Ghadar Party in homage to the rebels of 1857.
This is an Arabic word which means treachery. I suppose Lala Hardayal chose it. He was academically very accomplished and became a Philosophy lecturer. In other words, he was stoooopid. Bhai Parmanand persuaded him to embrace celibacy just as he had persuaded the Mahatma. But Hardayal kept marrying Swiss or Swedish damsels. You can take the boy out of Punjab, you can't take the Punjabi out of the boy.
Sanghera’s obliging concession that he has “had a better life” in Britain than he would have had in India forgets the historical tie between India’s relative poverty (if that is the measure of a good life)
says a lady living in America
and Britain’s prosperity. He perceives Punjabi migration as a kind of upward mobility facilitated by colonialism, but much of it was a desperate effort to escape colonial policies that caused hunger and landlessness. Many Punjabis arrived in Britain after the traumatic mass displacement caused by the British partition of Punjab in 1947.
Very true. Anglicans from Bedfordshire massacred Sikhs and forced them to abandon their rich agricultural lands in West Punjab. One lady, Edwina Mountbatten, raped trillions of elderly Sikh men causing them to die of exhaustion. This is why Punjabis tried to escape to the West Midlands.
It’s tragic that adults today must undergo the same process of psychological and cultural recovery that Gandhi and Nehru did ages ago.
Very true. Many adults are crying their little eyes out because they are having to go through the process of psychological and cultural recovery which caused Gandhi to prance around in an adult diaper while Nehru had to put on a sherwani.
The historical record is clear; it’s just that most people have been assiduously kept ignorant of it,
despite the very many videos on Pornhub showing Viceroy orally raping Indian peasants. British extracted gazillion gallons of jizz from starving Indians. Kingji may kindly make reparation.
and the current British government wants things to stay that way.
Rishi is suppressing the truth about theft of Indian jizz by past Viceroys.
Still, I share Sanghera’s inspiring optimism about the changes afoot in British education
Question- Which Viceroy guzzled the most Indian jizz?
a) Viceroy Deep Throat
b) Viceroy Honeytits Cumbucket
c) Viceroy Cock Gobbler
d) Viceroy Dufferin
Oddly, the answer isn't (d). It used to be when I were a lad. But many changes have been afoot in British education since then.
and in museums around the world, thanks to courageous efforts like his and those of movements like Black Lives Matter and Rhodes Must Fall.
Zelensky's Ukrainians are arrant cowards compared to those who campaigned against Cecil Rhodes.
“Sikh” means student; it is a faith based on trust in teachers (gurus) and in community, on collective service and learning.
Where is the Guru Granth Sahih and where is 'Empireland'?
And so, in fraternity, I wish Sathnam chardi kala on his ongoing journey.
But not chaddi kholo otherwise some Viceroy will gobble your knob. Mind it kindly.
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