Dr Riya Gupta - Empireworld: How British Imperialism Has Shaped the Globe

New book coming soon.

Empireworld: How British Imperialism Has Shaped the Globe

01 May 2025

Author: Sathnam Sanghera
Year of Publication: 2024

Macrohistory meets microhistory, with a side of dread and dialectics.

As I mentioned in a previous blog, I picked up Empireworld by Sathnam Sanghera thinking it might be a break from my usual reading diet of microhistories. I expected a sweeping macrohistory, a big-picture study on 'How British Imperialism Has Shaped the Globe'. But it did not quite offer the break I had imagined; instead, it led me down a thought spiral about the role of the historian and the uneasy pleasures of tracing empire. So, rather than a conventional review, this post is more of a meditation on the relationship between microhistory and macrohistory, as seen through the pages of Sanghera's work.

The blurb on the back sets up the contradiction that forms the heart of the book:

The British empire was built on slavery, but it also pioneered abolition. It spread democracy, but it also seeded geopolitical instability. It devastated nature but it also gave birth to modern notions of environmentalism.

This moral ambivalence is not a failing of the book, it is the point. And Sanghera does not shy away from it.

One of the most engaging things about Empireworld is its narration. Sanghera positions himself not as an all-knowing authority, but as a peer, someone who is just as stunned, just as exhausted, just as conflicted by the vastness and messiness of colonial history as we are. That tone especially comes through in the introduction, titled 'Spot the Colonial Inheritance', borrowed from Michela Wrong’s I Didn’t Do It for You: How the World Used and Abused a Small African Nation. She writes, with biting clarity, '[t]here are places where the colonial past seems to have left only the most cosmetic of traces on a resilient local culture, and places where the wounds inflicted seem beyond repair'. It is this oscillation between visible scars and hidden legacies that animates the entire book.

Interestingly, this participatory, open-ended structure reminded me of microhistorical strategies. Sigurður Gylfi Magnússon in What is Microhistory? Theory and Practice writes:

In order to connect it with the narrative we must offer the reader the opportunity to participate with us in the research process... So the microhistorian becomes the narrator in his/her [/their] own study.

Sanghera does just that. He brings readers along as he travels from one colonial afterlife to another, starting with a beach holiday in Barbados that morphs into an exploration of the island's brutal sugar plantation economy. In chapter two, a visit to Kew Gardens becomes an excavation of Britain's 'botanical colonialism'. Then comes Mauritius, and the bittersweet legacy of diaspora, one built on indenture, caste division and religious discord, courtesy of the Empire's classic 'divide and rule' tactics.

Each chapter has an entry point, often experiential, sometimes deeply personal. This isn't just macrohistory with footnotes (as extensive as they are). It's lived, narrated and embodied. The author shifts from geopolitics to law, discussing the afterlife of homophobic colonial legislations; to race, invoking W E B Du Bois's insight that the 'colour line' defines the twentieth century and the empire's legacy in hardening it. Sanghera quotes Du Bois who once said that whiteness meant 'the ownership of the earth forever and ever, Amen'.

By chapter seven, the contradictions become overwhelming. They begin to collapse into each other, like Harry and Tom Riddle merging in the final scene of Deathly Hallows Part Two (warning: thought spiral). Is it possible, Sanghera wonders, to quantify the empire's legacy? To say whether it left the world better or worse off? Is the historian doomed to endlessly toggle between guilt and glorification, critique and complicity? That final chapter, for me, was the most powerful as Sanghera turns the lens on himself. Why write this book? What good does it do? Can historical truth ever be anything but partial, weighted and exhausted? One cannot help but agree when he writes that such a 'history resists simplistic explanations'. Instead of looking for neat verdicts, he advocates a shift from monochrome to nuance, from monologue to dialogue. For me, it is an act of humility by the author, and oddly, an act of hope.

Which brings me back to the micro-macro conversation. For me, Empireworld is macrohistory stitched together from many microhistorical strands, such as botany, law, literature, sexuality, culture, language and more. If I may be forgiven another thought spiral, I found myself turning to Marx's dialectics: thesis and antithesis generating synthesis. Macrohistory and microhistory, too, when placed in tension, can produce something transformative. Not one or the other, but both in conversation.

So, yes, I did 'enjoy' Empireworld. And like every book, film or artwork I have ever described with fascination, the experience is laced with a dread of existentialism. Because in tracing the afterlives of empire, Sanghera does not just ask us to understand history, he asks us to carry it. And that is never easy, but perhaps necessary.