It happened by accident. In 1829 the naturalist Nathaniel Bagshaw Ward was trying to hatch a moth pupa. He placed it in a sealed glass container, along with some soil and dried leaves, and left it. Sometime later he was surprised to find that a fern and some grass had taken root in the soil – despite having no water. As Sathnam Sanghera writes in Empireworld, the discovery “revolutionised the logistics of international plant transportation”. Suddenly there was a means of securely transporting seeds and seedlings across vast distances.
Empireworld is Sanghera’s follow up to his wildly successful Empireland; where the latter examined the legacies of empire in Britain, Empireworld – as its title implies – seeks to apply that template to the world. What, then, do glass containers have to tell us about global imperialism? One result of Ward’s discovery was that Britain, and other imperial powers, were able to transplant the cinchona tree, which is native to South America, to their colonies worldwide, which in Britain’s case included plantings everywhere from Jamaica to Burma. The bark of the cinchona contains quinine, an alkaloid which prevents malarial fever; and it was quinine, together with the steamship and the Maxim gun, Sanghera writes, that enabled the late 19th-century conquest of Africa by European powers. Before that, large swathes of it were simply too deadly: a European arriving in Mali had a life expectancy of just four months, for example.
But the global live plant trade that the Wardian case enabled also spread pestilence: it is estimated that some 90 per cent of invertebrate pests in Britain today arrived on live plants. Imported diseases ravaged imperial plantings; one fungus alone destroyed £2m of coffee plants in Ceylon in 1869. Ward’s invention, then, was both a triumph and a disaster. It therefore makes an excellent metaphor for Sanghera’s central argument in Empireworld, which is that attempts to balance out the impacts of British imperialism by weighing ‘good’ against ‘bad’ are at best unhelpful because the most you can say is that it was both. To this end, his book attempts a more nuanced reckoning, one the one hand exploring former imperial territories such as Barbados, Nigeria and Mauritius, and on the other looking at issues such as humanitarian aid and the rule of law.
Empireworld is something of a hybrid generically: part history, part journalistic travelogue, part polemic. In places, Sanghera writes with power and eloquence: one chapter, ‘The Colour Line’, should, I think, be required reading for anyone inclined to doubt that racism played a part in British imperialism. Also fascinating were chapters what was called economic botany, which saw Britain transplant flora such as rubber trees and tea plants across the empire the better to exploit them commercially – with sometimes devastating environmental and economic consequences – and on Mauritius, the latter of which explores the issue of indentured labour. Both are particularly successful, I think, because they engage in more detail with the processes of empire.
The travel element, meanwhile, is perhaps the least satisfactory: the chapter on Barbados recounts what is avowedly a beach holiday, which surely limited Sanghera’s opportunities for research, and his experiences in Mauritius and Nigeria don’t add much more in the way of either colour or insight. It is a shame he didn’t interview local politicians, historians and academics on the ground for a more vivid, nuanced and, importantly, local range of perspectives; I counted nine quoted interviewees in these chapters, among them two activists, three entrepreneurs and a tour guide. Exploring ideas of legacy inevitably involve an assessment of the present, and for that Sanghera tends to rely on – typically British or American – news media sources.
The discussion of Nigeria’s problems seemed particularly weak, being too reliant on two books: Max Siollun’s What Britain Did to Nigeria and Kwasi Kwarteng’s Ghosts of Empire. The result is more broad brush than it might have been, with imperialism blamed for everything from kidnapping and bribery and corruption to distrust of the nation’s law enforcement agencies. Those are all widespread social phenomena far from unique either to Nigeria or the former territories of the British empire; to make a persuasive case Sanghera would have to adduce far more evidence than he does here, and the sweeping nature of the assertion undermines his argument for nuance elsewhere.
As for Sanghera’s discussion of the empire’s legal legacies, it begins with laws against homosexuality in India – not, Sanghera notes, a legacy you find in former French colonies, for example – but spends much of its time discussing injustices in British India. A torturous extended metaphor comparing imperial jurisprudence with the running of a school adds little, if any, clarity. More importantly, the focus on the maladministration and moral confusion of imperial law in India side-steps larger and more complex legacy questions – for instance, the role of the so-called Anglo-Saxon legal systems in maintaining the structures of global capitalism.
This points to a wider problem, in that, while there is a brief discussion of the democratic forms of government that Britain imposed, Sanghera is generally more interested in social and behavioural legacies – precisely those that are hardest to isolate, define and prove – than in the structural legacies whose continuing influence is both inarguable and of vast consequence. In some ways this is understandable: few of us leap with enthusiasm towards the constitutional jurisprudence section of our local Waterstones, say. But still, one might reasonably expect that a book subtitled ‘How British Imperialism Has Shaped the Globe’ give more thought to such issues, not least because the book’s own blurb actually flags up the topic of international law.
Noting that India currently ranks 79th out of 139 on the 2021 Rule of Law Index from the World Justice Project, Sanghera remarks that “citing Indian justice as a great imperial legacy… is a pretty weak boast”. Perhaps it is, at that. But here as elsewhere seems he disinclined to engage in any depth with arguments that accord agency to peoples and governments post-independence. As he writes of Nigeria, “if even half the things which academics identify as imperial legacies are direct imperial legacies… then that’s a startling quantity”. Both the implied quantitative measure of responsibility and the elision of ‘imperial legacies’ with ‘direct imperial legacies’ are, I think, indicative of a desire for moral clarity and a degree of certainty which history rarely accords. This is, I think, where the Empireland model doesn’t help Sanghera. While such legacies may be more straightforwardly identifiable in the mother country, in the wider world they have to be picked apart from a myriad social, historical and other contexts and the influences of a vast range of peoples and cultures.
Ultimately Sanghera concludes that “the history [of the British empire] resists simplistic explanations”: it should be seen primarily as “as an incredibly complex mass of contradictions”, he writes. But if the book’s arc is towards complexity, it still sweeps up some simplistic ideas along the way. In the space of just one paragraph, for example, which recounts his news consumption during a flight from Lagos to London, Sanghera makes British imperialists the fons et origo of all today’s instability and violence in Kashmir, Iraq and Myanmar. Here he is a better advocate for nuance than he is an exponent of it. Complexity requires unpacking; too many judgements here arrive ready wrapped.
Perhaps the problem is with the concept of ‘legacy’ itself, which both begs for an evaluative reckoning and demands a precisely measurable chain of cause and effect which inevitably simplifies and distorts any attempt to understand the mess of history. Late in the book, reflecting on some of the apparently conflicting legacies he has identified, Sanghera writes that it is “better to simply accept slavery, anti-slavery, destruction/preservation of animals/nature as phenomena in their own right and attempt to understand their complicated stories”. This is an important and, in its own way, complex insight which – not least because it seems at odds with the premise of the book – merited further exploration.
After all, Empireworld is in part a plea for constructive dialogue about the ways in which the history of empire continues to influence, if not shape, the lives of people both here and abroad. Reframing that as an exploration of historical phenomena in which the British empire is merely a participant seems a different conversation entirely. But if we do want to move on from our imperial inheritance, one way would certainly be to stop centering it in our debates.
Empireworld doesn’t function as a history of empire per se; it is too piecemeal an account for that. And in any case it is not clear what kind of conceptual model Sanghera has of the empire in practice. Often he seems to treat it as a monolithic institution with the ability to direct its power with both absolute precision and an autonomous kind of agency adrift from the cultural, economic and political norms of the world in which it operated. Perhaps this doesn’t matter; but while it would be absurd to posit a British empire that wasn’t bloodily coercive, a more nuanced reading would, I think, also explore the extent to which the British empire, as empires always have, relied on the co-operation – or, if you prefer, collusion – of local social, political and religious elites.
But is it right to judge Empireworld as imperial history? It is as much a narrative of personal intellectual exploration as it is an assessment of empire and it is all the stronger for that. This reader would have welcomed more self-reflection from Sanghera on how his thoughts and ideas have developed, as well as more thorough-going attempts to wrestle with the complexities he identifies. But Empireworld is nevertheless an alert and absorbing narrative of Sanghera’s ongoing encounters with imperial history’s messily irreducible core. I very much hope he continues his journey of discovery.
This is an extended version of a review that first appeared in The Spectator in February 2024.
Mathew Lyons 
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