If Gabrielsson was alive for a playlist, it would start with the hymns of her childhood and jump to the cabaret that gave her the nickname Coco. Next up, a bel canto aria played on her own grand piano. And, of course, the Beatles live in London with jazz and blues and Johnny Hallyday and Stravinsky in between.

The playlist would close with a song from Koko, the Broadway musical that starred Katharine Hepburn in the title role. Watch the film that explores this eclectic, refined musical journey on Inside Shanelle Dotcom.

Are there unwelcome downsides, history? Really interesting conversation on this podcast. Well, I found it interesting with Satnam Sanghera. He's a well-known British journalist, best selling author, 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 education in professionally ever since. His latest book is called Empire Land. And speaking of successes. This is another one.

It's a look at Britain. I 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, me talk to him, because I'm someone who's been on quite the journey with Empire, 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 as much of a learning journey as a Satnam have, so it was great to compare notes. There's plenty more imperial history, both British Imperial, European Imperial and lots of other imperial history available in history.

Hit TV. It's our new digital history channel. It's like Netflix. But just for history, if you've finished Netflix and it just isn't satisfying, insulting your thirst for history, it probably isn't get yourself into history at TV or small subscription, you get a universe of history opened up to you from prehistory right up to the present day. Please sit over there and subscribe after listening to this podcast, but in the meantime, everybody enjoy this conversation with Satnam Sanghera.

Sunlen, 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 written a great history book. When do you set out to start on this project?

I've been reading about Empire for probably four years, but it all crystallized when I made a documentary about the John Wahlberg massacre or the hundredth anniversary for Channel four. And I went to India and that's when I realized 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's something in writing a book about the legacies of imperialism in modern Britain, rather than talking about empire itself, the one about a massacre so often known as Amrit.

Some people have heard of talk about this on the podcast many times. It was a great documentary before that. What did Empire mean?

He was talked about in your family history.

What was it absolutely wasn't. And I think I'm not untypical in having very little knowledge of Empire, even though my existence is explained by AMPA. The reason that so many people come to 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 the 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 Empower. 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 travel a lot with an empire. A whole load of them went to Africa, build 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 we apologies for Empire. In the 19th century, loss of more liberal apologists talked about this imperial project is creating brown Englishmen. That was the whole point behind it. And now the descendants of those people they're referring to now often subjected to racist abuse.

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, we regard it as a model community now, model immigrant community. But I think it was another imperialist to change. The narrative is Enoch Powell, who was an MP in my hometown of Wolverhampton. He was a massive imperialist. Of course, he wanted to be viceroy of India and he's 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. It couldn't deal with the idea of racism being equal when he had been brought up to believe that the British were a superior race. In your book, when do you start? Is it interesting to 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 summarize 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 is such a massive thing like you say, where do you begin? Do you begin in all stirred up again in America? Do you begin in India?

And then there's a difficulty that empire varied so much across the globe. It was different in Australia, different in India. Even if you lived in India 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 proslavery. Another point he was abolishing slavery. One state 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 the country. And God bless the bitchiest of trade I've ever come across. I've written about a wide variety of subjects, the history. My God, you guys.

Oh, I'm sorry to hear that. 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 live now? Or is this an attempt to address some of those arguments that the historians like to fall out about was the empire? This is obviously reductive. Was it good or bad? Did it do good things?

How should we think about in politics what was driving you to write this book? Well, I quickly realized 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 Review 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 Two.

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 just tested in this balance sheet view and the idea that you can somehow balance the massacres against the railways and come to a conclusion about whether it is positive or negative. And I just feel that's kind of intellectually illiterate in that it was up to 500 years of history.

And it's not like a mug you've 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 actually. And overall, I would say we are definitely dysfunctional by empire and our legacies. I was so struck in the work you've done.

There are so many extraordinary kind of moments and vignettes in imperial history. There's the assault on North East 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 history. And you brilliantly linked it through to several fascinating things in the present to talk me through that one.

Tibet was an expedition, as they call it euphemistically, right? In 1973, 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's 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. Bano Point did the present 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? It's the heart of families across this country. And I'm asking for me my family's fingerprints all over the empire. I had a great grandpa who fought in the Zulu war. I had another great grandpa who went on a punitive expedition to the north. East 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 neighbour.

The so-called people that went out to India and for the East India Company 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 Poncey. 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 down with a sense of shame about what your ancestors did. But the point I'm making 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, enforced writing and imperial stuff. Even Churchill. I mean, he famously described the Joan Wallenberg massacre as monstrous. And yet nowadays, if someone like me points out the negative things happened during Empire, we are regarded as WOAK. Sometimes people say you should have more gratitude, get back to where you came from.

But actually, if I'm WOAK, so is Gladstone, Churchill and Queen Victoria. We forget how controversial these things were at the time, and that's why Lord Clive 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, great show.

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, there was the impeachment of Warren Hastings, isn'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 percent 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 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 opponent 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.

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? You know, what are 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. Are 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 his 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 Germany.

You can talk about the Holocaust and be proud of 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. You 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 of 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 art seen 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 our house and it tells you about the Jewish family who are 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 and surgeons 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 of people would go hunting tigers and come back with tiger skins.

And it was a bit odd. And I read kind of quite outdated books. I read G.A., I read C.S. Forester. Even in the 80s, they were aging and they were celebrative empire. They were 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, so alarming, so disquieting that it's almost impossible to talk about?

Like, 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 two, which has a clear beginning and end six years or so clear morality. It's much easier to think about World War Two and to think of empire. Secondly, I think we've never been invaded or 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 empires 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 generalized ABAB and I understand why British people would not want to spend their evenings reading where this stuff is quite difficult.

There is the exciting side that you refer to, but there's also a very uncomfortable side. You mentioned Tibet. You know, I like to mention the so-called Black War in Tasmania where every Aboriginal person was killed in Tasmania, the entire garrison, the settlers feel 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 they found. And I think it's also because we were raised, as you see on this parallel 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 and that were, 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 that 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 the Tasmania episode is something I go into Exile Island in the book, four to eight thousand 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 analyse it and you work out what patterns of behavior you've had in the past. And then when you're doing things, you realise 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 out in weird ways. And I think it does come 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, and strong imperial imperatives.

Iain Duncan Smith here for people listening and the rest of the world who might not agree with it, 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 back. And it is 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 Imperia 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 don't 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 Brexit is are things changing? Are you describing a weird generation?

Who. 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 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 die out in looking at education? All the talks about young people, about empire, that source of improprieties? 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 realised is that they can weaponize it, that they can sew division around the idea of empire and plays well in focus groups.

So you had, I think only last week, Robert Generic, one of our ministers, writing a column in one of the papers saying we need to introduce legislation to protect statues or 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, you know, 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 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're seeing a massive rebellion against colonialism, which is intensifying.

OK, cheerful thought there. So what's your strategy, having written the book, having immerse yourself in the subject, as you say, so unbelievably complex, what simple messages do not 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 read widely. I read Jean-Maurice and Ferguson, Jeremy Paxman sashay through. People say, why are you reading Niall Ferguson? He's a racist.

And or they'd say, Why are you reading Irish instead? Grandpaw they'd say, Why are you reading Shashi Tharoor throughways 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 Jean-Maurice and enjoyed their books. I thought they're fantastic, even though the conclusions I felt were to 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 and experience that they've been through. So now that you know more, how is it changed you? How has it changed the way you see your place and your family's place in the white communities in Britain? How has it changed you? Actually, people ask that.

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 1857, how 400 Jamaicans were killed in the Moresby rebellion of 1865, and I'm 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.

They go it's a good selling point for your book, but also the study of history itself. So thank you very much. Thank you for coming on the podcast now. Thank you.

Ivan, thanks for reaching the end of this podcast. Most of you probably asleep, so I'm talking to your snoring folks. But anyone who's awake, it would be great if you could do me a quick favor, 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. Martinus. I know, but them's the rules. Then we go farther up the charts, more people listen to us and everything will be awesome.

So thank you so much. I'll sleep well.

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