Dan Snow's History Hit - Empire with Sathnam Sanghera

Episode Date: February 10, 2021

Journalist and author Sathnam Sanghera joins me on the podcast to talk about his latest book Empireland which examines how much of what we think of as Britain and British is owed to our imperial past. We compare notes on our own family's relationships to the British Empire imperial, me being British-Canadian and Sathnam being of Punjabi descent, and discuss how imperial history should be thought about and taught today.

Douglas Adams, the genius behind The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, was a master satirist who cloaked a sharp political edge beneath his absurdist wit. Douglas Adams' The Ends of the Earth explores the ideas of the man who foresaw the dangers of the digital age and our failing politics with astounding clarity. Hear the recordings that inspired a generation of futurists, entrepreneurs and politicians. Get Douglas Adams' The Ends of the Earth now at pushkin.fm slash audiobooks or wherever audiobooks are sold. Hi there everyone, welcome to Dan Snow's History. A really interesting conversation on this podcast. Well, I found it interesting with Satnam Sangira. He's a well-known British journalist, best-selling author,

has written beautifully about many subjects, including his own autobiographical journey through life, the remarkable journey of a kid born to Indian Punjabi immigrants in Wolverhampton in the late 1970s, and the remarkable success he's enjoyed educationally and professionally ever since. His latest book is called Empire Land. And speaking of successes, this is another one. It's a look at Britain, a look at much of what we recognise as British today and how much of that owes something to our imperial past, how much of it is rooted in our imperial history. And he talks openly about how we Brits need to be thinking and talking and teaching the next generation about empire. It was such a huge privilege for me to talk to him because I'm someone who's been on quite the journey with empire. I grew up, I'm half Canadian. My whole

life, my identity, my physical being is tied up with empire. The stories I grew up on of my grandparents, grandmothers. One was born in Bangalore, another in Canada. I am the product of that imperial history. Over the years, I think I've been on just much of a learning journey as Satnam has, so it was great to compare notes. There's plenty more imperial history, both British imperial, European imperial, in fact, lots of other imperial history available on History Hit TV. It's their new digital history channel. It's like Netflix, but just for history. If you've finished Netflix and it just isn't satisfying, it's sating your thirst for history, which it probably isn't,

get yourself onto History Hit TV for a small subscription. You get a universe of history opened up to you, from prehistory right up to the present day. Please head over there and subscribe after listening to this podcast. But in the meantime, everybody, enjoy this conversation with Satnam Sangeera. Satnam, thanks so much for coming on the podcast. I'm a fan, so I'm very excited. Slightly intimidated because I only have a GCSE history as far as qualifications go. Well, that just shows how good the GCSE is because you've gone and written a great history

book. When did you set out to start on this project? Well, I've been reading about empire for probably four years, but it all crystallized when I made a documentary about the John and Wallerberg massacre for the 100th anniversary for Channel 4. And I went to India. And that's when I realised that the way Sikhs were treated in imperial India had so many echoes to how they were treated in post-war Britain. And maybe there was something in writing a book about the legacies of imperialism in modern Britain, rather than talking about empire itself. The Jallianwala massacre, so often known as Amritsar, people have heard of,

talk about this on the podcast many times. It was a great documentary. Before that, what did empire mean to you? Was it talked about in your family? Did GCSE history? What was it? Absolutely, it wasn't. And I think I'm not untypical in having very little knowledge of empire,

even though my existence is explained by empire. The reason there's so many people of colour in this country is because we had an empire. No, we weren't taught anything at school. And even when there were opportunities, it's almost as if teachers avoided the subject. So every Remembrance Day service, no one told our racially diverse student body that there were millions of imperial troops fighting for both world wars. We studied the Irish potato famine, and no one pointed out the parallel to the famines that were happening in India, often for the same reasons. And so I just feel like there's a deep amnesia in this

country about empire, even though it's the biggest thing we've ever done. What about your family story then? You mentioned that you're from a family that moved here because of empire. Tell me about that family story. Well, I'm Sikh. Sikhs have always traditionally taken advantage of all the opportunities within empire. They took the side of the British during the 1857 mutiny. They fought in large numbers in both world wars. And they traveled a lot within empire. A whole load of them went to Africa, built the railways. And then there was mass immigration in Britain too. But the way my family talked about why they came here is typical of amnesia in the sense that it was never really explained to me in a political

way why we're here. It was just that, oh, your grandfather came and so your father was entitled to come. It wasn't pointed out that actually the 1948 Nationality Act made citizens of empire, citizens of Britain. Even now, when we talk about Windrush, I think that fact is kind of overlooked. The people on the Windrush weren't coming to specific jobs. They were just coming because empire gave them citizenship and they were entitled to do so. And I think as a country, we're quite screwed up about race and multiculturalism for that reason. I'm always fascinated by that, given that the apologists for empire in the 19th century, I'm always fascinated by that given that the apologists for empire in the 19th century, a lot of the sort of more liberal apologists, talked about this imperial project as creating

brown Englishmen. That was the whole point behind it. And now the descendants of those people they're referring to are now often subjected to racist abuse here. And you're living the dream of those 19th century imperialists in a way. You and the Sikh community in the UK are, in some respects, a product of that empire, that imperial relationship. Yeah, I mean, regarded as a model community now, a model immigrant community. But I think it was another imperialist who changed the narrative is Enoch Powell. He was an MP in my hometown of Wolverhampton. He was a massive imperialist, of course. He wanted to be Viceroy of India. And his rivers of blood speech, which he made in the year my parents arrived, and which is basically inspired by his worries about mass immigration from Punjabis from India.

His objection to multiculturalism was essentially that it was an inversion of the racial hierarchy of empire. He couldn't deal with the idea of races being equal when he'd been brought up to believe that the British were a superior race. In your book, when do you start? Is it interesting for you to look at the first spasms of empire, the Atlantic slave trade, the trade with the Far East and the Indian Ocean? When does your real focus begin in this book? I basically have a chapter where I try to summarise imperial history. And one of the hardest things is I would not normally pick up a history book. I've written a novel. I read novels. I want character, dialogue,

romance, and history books generally don't focus on those things. And the other difficulty was empire was such a massive thing. Like you say, where do you begin? Do you begin in Ulster? Do you begin in America? Do you begin in India? And then there's the difficulty that empire varied so much across the globe. It was different in Australia, different in India. Even if you lived in India at a specific time, empire was a different thing to different people within the same nation. And the tone of empire changed so much as well. At one point, it was pro-slavery. Another point, it was abolishing slavery. One stage, missionaries were discouraged, and then missionaries were encouraged.

So getting my head around empire was actually one of the hardest things. And also, there's the fact that there's so much intense disagreement amongst historians. I didn't realize you guys fight so much. It's vicious. There's a lot of people dying on a lot of small hills right across this community. And God bless them. It's the bitchiest kind of trade I've ever come across. I've written about a wide variety of subjects. But history, my God, you guys. Oh, I'm sad to hear that, man. Thank you for coming in and not getting worried about that. Was this a book trying to understand your own place within the society in which you're born and raised and live now? Or is this an attempt to address some of those arguments that the

historians like to fall out about? You know, was the empire, this is obviously reductive, was it good or bad? Did it do good things? How should we think about empire? What was driving you to write this book? Well, I quickly realised that my amnesia about it, or ignorance, was quite typical in that lots of people feel like it wasn't really taught to them. And I realised that in Britain, we view empire with a really strange combination of selective amnesia and nostalgia. And amnesia comes in the fact that we don't really think of ourselves as the nation that created the biggest empire in humanity. We think of ourselves as the nation that beat the Germans in World War II. And what that does, it helps us forget or gloss over the

fact that in the 19th century, we were also terribly racist, almost white supremacist, and sometimes genocidal. And I think the nostalgia comes in the fact that we tend to look at history in the way you've just suggested, in this balance sheet view, in the idea that you can somehow balance the massacres against the world waves and come to a conclusion about whether it is positive or negative. And I just feel that that's kind of intellectually illiterate, in that it was up to 500 years of history. And it's not like a mug you bought off Amazon, you can't give it a five star rating. And so I just thought it makes much more sense to talk of British Empire in terms of its legacies now, because these are things we live with.

And also, when you start thinking of it in that way, then you can begin balancing it, actually. And overall, I would say we are definitely dysfunctional about empire and our legacies. I was so struck in the work you've done. There are so many extraordinary moments and vignettes in imperial history. There's the assault on Northeast Africa, Somalia, you could choose Ethiopia, but you chose to talk particularly about the campaign in Tibet, which is a terribly overlooked moment of British imperial history. And you brilliantly linked it through to several fascinating things in the present. Talk me through that one. Tibet was an expedition, as they used to call it euphemistically, right?

In 1903, I think. And essentially, the British just invaded Tibet because they wanted to know more about it. They wanted to collect more. It was basically the equivalent of, say, North Korea now. Nobody had really been there. There was massive intellectual intrigue. And so these men just invaded it with representatives of the British Museum and so on. And so that's why a lot of Tibetan items ended up in the British Museum and so on. But I actually came across some of the items when I was watching daytime TV one day,

I think I was watching Flog It. And this guy came on and he said, Oh, you know, I have someone in my family who just happened to come across these things. And then they sold these things. And I think they got the most money for them than for any other item in the history of the show. But at no point did the presenters and the producers say, oh, actually, maybe several hundred Tibetans have been murdered for no reason in order for us to get these artifacts. And I think that highlights the kind of dishonesty that sits at the heart of the debate about museums and whether we should repatriate items. What about the honesty that sits at the heart of families across this country? And I'm asking for me, my family's fingerprints are all

over the empire. I had a great-grandpa who fought on the Zulu War. I had another great-grandpa who went on a punitive expedition to the northeast frontier after a British colonial administrator was killed. My great-grandfather was sent as a junior officer to go and punish burned villages and kill people in a punitive expedition. I had a distant ancestor that was a nabob, you know, the so-called people that went out to India for the East India Company and made vast amounts of money and came back and built a big house in Hampshire and then bankrupted him. He died in poverty in Milton-upon-Sea. So my family's fingerprints are all over this. So not just museums, but how should I be thinking about empire?

We cannot apply modern ethics to the past. So I do not think you should walk around, Dan, with a sense of shame about what your ancestors did. But the point I make in the book was that a lot of these things were criticized at the time. So the looting that happened in Tibet was a source of incredible controversy at the time. There were newspaper articles objecting to it. And even within the establishment, empire was constantly criticized. So we had Gladstone railing against the jingoism of 19th century empire. At times, we had Queen Victoria complaining about the excesses of empire, famously when Lord Kitchener wanted to come back with some human

remains and put them on display. We had people like H.G. Wells, George Orwell, Ian Forster, writing anti-imperial stuff. Even Churchill, I mean, he famously described the Jallianwala Barg massacre as monstrous. And yet, nowadays, if someone like me points out the negative things that happened during the empire, we are regarded as woke. Sometimes people say, you should have more gratitude, get back to where you came from. But actually, if I'm woke, so is Gladstone, Churchill, and Queen Victoria. We forget how controversial these things were at the time. And as for Lord Clive, the man looted hundreds of millions of pounds from India. When he died, Samuel Johnson famously speculated that he'd cut his own throat because he was so ashamed

by what he'd done in India. And I think it's really important to remember that. Yeah, a great shout. Edmund Burke, the father of conservatism, railed against the excesses of the East India Company and British rule in India. That's totally true. Of course, yeah, it was the impeachment of Warren Hastings, wasn't it? And he went on for years. Yeah. Speaking of those who are worried about impeachment lasting and beyond the end of the term of office of the person involved, there's plenty of historical precedent for that. Don't worry. Keep at it, folks. So people say to you, shut up, don't talk about this. You should be grateful. What is your response to that? I would say about 20% of the comments I get is that.

Basically, people saying, look at you, you're living in Britain, taking advantage of all its assets, and you're working at the Times, and you have a lovely life. Otherwise, you'd be in India. It's a racist trope because I was born in Britain. I am as entitled as my white colleagues to criticize it. I criticize this country sometimes because I love it. You criticize your partner sometimes because you love them. But to insist that I be grateful and not to say the same thing to my white colleagues is based in racism. And actually, it points towards the

imperial amnesia we have in this country, this idea that we've not fully accepted that brown people who've come here because of empire are really citizens. And so we have this absurd situation where people come on the Windrush as citizens, and now they're being deported. Thank you. Florence. Each week on Echoes of History, we uncover the epic stories that inspire Assassin's Creed. We're stepping into feudal Japan in our special series, Chasing Shadows, where samurai warlords and shinobi spies teach us the tactics and skills needed not only to survive, but to conquer. Whether you're preparing for Assassin's Creed Shadows or fascinated by history and great stories, listen to Echoes of History, a Ubisoft podcast brought to you by History Hits.

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Having gone through this experience and written this book about empire, what are your recommendations? How should we think about it? How is it important to think about it? And what do you tell your kids now? What do you tell other people's kids? What's the lessons that we need to take away? Well, first of all, I think we need to break free from the balance sheet idea of empire, which began, I guess, with people like Nile Ferguson weighing up the positives and negatives of empire. I don't think it's intellectually literate. And I think we need to break free from the connection between British empire and nationalism. There's an idea now that in order to be proudly British, you need to be proud of its history.

I feel like it's a peculiarly British thing in that in America, you can talk about slavery and still be obviously proud of America. And in Germany, you can talk about the Holocaust and be proudly German. But here, we almost need to be comforted by our history, which is a very dangerous thing. But in terms of models for what we can do, I think we need to look abroad. And there's lots of countries with probably equally troublesome pasts who are managing to deal with it. So we have President Macron saying all sorts of progressive things about museums and how certain items should be repatriated. In New Zealand, they've totally rethought the curriculum and making great progress.

And even in America, which we like to look down on as being much more screwed up about race than us, there's a real conversation there happening about slavery and reparations. But the best model, I think, is Germany, because although it's always dangerous and stupid to compare empire to Nazi Germany, the way Germany has dealt with that difficult past is instructive in that they have an art scene that regularly faces up to what happened. They have memorials for the Holocaust all around the country. They have stumble stones in Berlin. I don't know if you've come across these stones where you can walk out of a house and it tells you about the Jewish family who were dragged out of the house and sent to their death. And we've got nothing like that when it comes to empire.

Why not? Do you think for some of us, it would shake us so badly to our core? And I mean, I'm talking as someone who, when I was a kid, I was obviously obsessed with history. I was steeped in history. I'm an Anglo-Canadian. My grandpa's Canadian. So our entire family origin story is about Scottish settlers going to Canada and this virgin land and picking rocks out of the fields and creating a sustainable farm.

And then each generation making that move to the urban bourgeoisie and then professors and bankers eventually insurgents and this kind of North American dream. I was raised listening to my grandmother's stories of being born in Bangalore, of tiger hunting within that community. People would go off hunting tigers and come back with tiger skins. And that was a bit odd. And I read kind of quite outdated books. I read G.A. Henty. I read C.S. Forrester. Even in the 80s, they were aging. And they were a celebratory of empire. They were a celebratory of daring do. Do you think that for somebody who's had that upbringing and hasn't had

the opportunity to then spend 20 years of his professional life thinking about it, do you think that's so alarming, so disquieting that it's almost impossible to talk about? Why are we so nervous about it? I think we've touched upon a couple of the reasons. One of the reasons is that empire is really complicated history. Compared to World War II, which has a clear beginning and end, six years, also clear morality, it's much easier to think about World War II than to think about empire. Secondly, I think we've never been invaded, well, not in the modern age, whereas other countries like France have had to face up to difficult things because they were invaded.

We never really had to. Empire is always something that happened a long way away. Even at the time, there's lots of evidence that people in Britain didn't particularly care about empire. But then I think one of the biggest reasons is that it's very painful. I am as British as I am Asian. I found it very difficult to spend two or three years reading about slavery and genocides and massacres and the way my own people, the Sikhs, were

subjugated and generalised about. And I understand why British people would not want to spend their evenings reading about this stuff. It's quite difficult. There is the exciting side that you've referred to, but there's also a very uncomfortable side. You mentioned Tibet. I like to mention the so-called Black War in Tasmania, where every Aboriginal person was killed in Tasmania. The entire garrison in the settlers formed like a beating line and just walked across the island as if they were beating for pheasants or grouse or something and killed all the Aboriginals that they found. And I think it's also because we're raised, as you say, on this parallel myth and certain elements of reality of the success of the Second World War,

which was a kind of liberal struggle against totalitarian genocidal despots, ignoring who our allies were in that war, of course. Then I think it's just so difficult, it's dissonant to also think about Britain in that way. Going through that pain, would there be a reward? Or do we just have to get on with the pain? We did the crime, we need to do the time? Or do you see Britain benefiting from that experience? Absolutely. The way I see it, and the Tasmania episode is something I go into quite a lot of length in the book, 48,000 people wiped out and actually a technical genocide. What happened there was used to come up with the international definition of genocide.

The way I see it is therapy. I mean, I've had quite a lot of therapy in my life. I don't know if you have. But the purpose of therapy, the way I see it, is that you look back at your life and you analyze it and you work out what patterns of behavior you've had in the past. And then when you're doing things, you realize why you're doing them. And you can sometimes stop yourself from repeating mistakes. And I think that's the point of history for me, at least with imperial history, in that

Brexit has happened. We're trying to redefine who we are or work out who we are. And so at this time, it's really important to remember who we were. Otherwise, it's going to come remember who we were. Otherwise, it's going to come out in weird ways. And I think it does come out in weird ways in our politics. You know, this obsession with being world beating at the time in the middle of this pandemic, I think goes straight back to empire. I argue that actually, the Brexit referendum, everything about it, had strong imperial imperatives.

Ian Duncan Smith, who for people listening in the rest of the world who might not know who Doug Smith is, is a former leader of the Conservative Party in the UK. He said, I wish I was young again when Brexit happened, because I'd be out there buccaneering, travelling the world, buccaneering. It's like a direct reference to a kind of imagined imperial past that I thought was so fascinating. Yeah, and Boris Johnson, you've got someone who goes on about global Britain, but also in his spare time writes, I would say, imperially nostalgic books about Churchill. Jacob Rees-Mogg has written quite imperially nostalgic books about the Victorians. You've got Liam Fox,

whose mission at Whitehall was dubbed Empire 2.0. And I think I remember Nigel Farage saying in his Brexit victory speech, that we've done this without having to fire a single bullet, which is the language of colonialism. So I think they're steeped in imperial nostalgia, these Brexiteers. Are things changing? Are you describing a weird generation who had the experience that I had? They're older than me, but as I was reading books that were inappropriate for my age in the 80s, they feel, I think, because I think deep down in some ways I felt at this, that they were a generation or two too late, that Britain's hegemonic peak had passed and they were all ready to go. They were all like, you know, football boots on, shin pads on, and there was nothing to do. Do you think that that's an attitude that's going to just sort of die out in looking at education and all the talks you've

had with young people about empire. That source of imperial pride, I don't think it's being refreshed. It's not being addressed, but it's not being refreshed, is it, do you think? Or do you think that hagiography of empire is still alive and well?

I think there's two things happening. First of all, the younger generation are much more aware of colonialism and empire than we ever were. So they have films like Black Panther, which address the themes. I think Black Lives Matter, young people are very animated about the colonial reasons for systemic racism. At the same time, there's a backlash against that amongst a right-wing sect

of the Conservative Party, essentially. And what they've realised is that they can weaponise it, that they can sow division around the idea of empire, and it plays well in focus groups. So you had, I think only last week, Robert Jenrick, one of our ministers, writing a column in one of the papers saying we need to introduce legislation to protect statues, imperial statues in Britain. In the week, it was revealed we have the highest death rate from coronavirus in the world. And what's that about? Basically, they've worked out that if they defend imperial history, it's seen as defending Britain in the same way as attacking the EU during the Brexit referendum was seen as British. And so I think this is the next culture war. This is something they can rely on to get votes. And as unemployment rises and the economy turns to crap, I think we're going to see more and more of this. We also have Boris Johnson, you know, at the start of the pandemic, writing a column about how he was going to defend to his last breath the Churchill statue in Parliament Square. That statue was never under any threat. Why did he feel the need to take time out of the crisis

to write that column? Again, I would say it's a quite cynical calculation. But now you've got these two trends. You've got massive empire nostalgia, which is intensifying, and you've also got a massive rebellion against colonialism, which is intensifying. Okay, cheerful thought there. So what's your strategy? Having written the book, having immersed yourself in the subject, as you say, empires are unbelievably complex.

What simple messages do you want to address to the next generation to mitigate all this lack of education they're getting? That's a good question. And when I started reading about it, I started to read widely. So I read Jan Morris and Nile Ferguson, Jeremy Paxman, Sashi Thoreau. People would say, why are you reading Nile Ferguson? He's a racist.

And or they'd say, why are you reading Jan Morris? She's nostalgic about empire. Or they'd say, why are you reading Sashi Thoreau? Thoreau is a Marxist. And I think we can make progress in this debate by just reading widely and not dismissing people for their politics. I mean, I've managed to read Jan Morris, and I enjoyed her books. I thought they're fantastic. Even though the conclusions I felt were too imperially nostalgic, It is possible to read books you disagree with. And in general, that's what we need. We need to rediscover the ability to agree

to disagree and to be intellectually curious. Well, I couldn't agree more. I very rarely have people on the podcast that didn't know much about history before an experience that they've been through. So now that you know more, how has it changed you? How has it changed the way you see your place and your family's place and your communities in Britain? How has it changed you? Actually, people ask that quite a lot. The question I get is, God, do you feel angry all the time? Because when you spend your time reading about

what was done to Indians after the mutiny in 1857, how 400 Jamaicans were killed in the Moranta Bay Rebellion of 1865, and are going to bed reading about these massacres, and vicious racism, it could make you really bitter. But actually, I feel the exact opposite. I feel now I have an even deeper sense of belonging in this country, because I now know the history of Sikhs in empire and brown people, how we were central, not only in both world wars, but we helped rebuild Britain. And I think if you read about empire and if you read my book, hopefully that's the feeling that you're left with.

Congratulations on writing this book, taking on the historians. And everyone's raving about the book, so congratulations. What's it called? It's called Empire Land, How Imperialism Has Shaped Modern Britain. There you go. It's a good selling point for your book, but also the study of history itself. So thank you very much, Satnam. Thank you for coming on the podcast. Oh, thank you. Hi everyone, thanks for reaching the end of this podcast. Most of you are probably asleep, so I'm talking to your snoring forms,

but anyone who's awake, it would be great if you could do me a quick favour, head over to wherever you get your podcasts and rate it five stars, and then leave a nice glowing review. It makes a huge difference for some reason to how these podcasts do. Madness, I know, but them's the rules.

Then we go further up the charts, more people listen to us, and everything will be awesome. So thank you so much. Now sleep well. Douglas Adams, the genius behind The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, was a master satirist who cloaked a sharp political edge beneath his absurdist wit. Douglas Adams, The Ends of the Earth, explores the ideas of the man who foresaw the dangers of the digital age and our failing politics with astounding clarity. Hear the recordings that inspired a generation of futurists, entrepreneurs and politicians.

Get Douglas Adams' The Ends of the Earth now at pushkin.fm slash audiobooks or wherever audiobooks are sold.