Review | Imperialism isn’t in the past. Neither is the damage it did. (2024)

But in “Imperial Island: An Alternative History of the British Empire,” Charlotte Lydia Riley does not conform to any of these expectations. Instead, her account begins where most standard histories end, and culminates in present-day Britain, with Brexit and the fall of the statue of Edward Colston, a slave trader long venerated in Bristol. It is also not a history of the empire as a whole but of Britain alone. The colonies are discussed only insofar as they affected politics and public opinion back home. Finally, in a curious inversion of historians’ habitual priorities, it is less interested in how British imperialism affected people in the colonies than how people from the colonies affected Britain, and British attitudes toward imperialism, immigration and race.

These are interesting choices, but Riley struggles to justify them. She posits her book explicitly as a popular history: that is to say, a history of people shaped by power rather than of those in power. Yet, as she herself notes, her field — with due allowances for the reactionaries — has been moving away from the “Great Man” tradition of writing for quite some time. What the reader then struggles to understand is how an apparently straightforward history of postwar Britain, albeit one with a welcome shift in emphasis toward people of color, could still amount to a history (however “alternative”) of the British Empire. Why confine this history to Britain? Why begin with World War II?

The answer, I think, is that Riley wants to bring together at least three different modes of understanding British imperialism, all of which reinforce and challenge one another: First, imperialism as geopolitical acts on the international stage, acts that, since World War II, have included the Suez crisis, the brutal suppression of the Mau Mau rebellion and the participation of Britain in the Iraq War. Second, imperialism as a set of political and public attitudes in Britain toward itself, and toward the outside world. And third, imperialism as a means of establishing and asserting hierarchies between peoples, whether it is the assumed superiority of Britain over former colonies, or of White people in Britain over people of color. While the dominant mode of writing about the British Empire is the first, Riley wants to devote more of her attention to the second and the third, thereby expanding the scope of what a historian can say about imperialism.

Riley’s approach makes World War II a natural starting point. People from the colonies had moved to and lived in Britain for centuries — the first English member of Parliament with African roots was elected as far back as 1767 — but it was during World War II, when soldiers from the colonies fought on the home front, that White Britons met people of color in unprecedented numbers. This forced many of them, as Riley shows, to confront their own feelings about the empire for the first time. According to testimonies and surveys compiled by Mass Observation, a research project that forms an important source for the book, British people in the 1930s and ’40s expressed a wide range of attitudes about the empire, from shame to embarrassment to sheer bewilderment that people from India or Australia would want to fight for them at all. Many thought the empire was outdated; few expressed pride. By contrast, recent polling trends suggest that most British people are neither proud nor ashamed of their imperial past: They are simply becoming indifferent to it.

After the war, people of color began to move to Britain in great numbers, thanks to the British Nationality Act of 1948, which allowed subjects from all over the empire to settle and work in the United Kingdom. One group of immigrants, in particular, caught the public imagination: 1,027 people, most of them from the Caribbean, all of them seeking work and a new life, were brought to Britain on a passenger liner called the Empire Windrush — a name that would later become indelibly attached to the Afro-Caribbean community in Britain. Windrush would prove a bellwether and an inspiration. The next two decades saw further waves of immigrants from colonies arriving on British shores, and they would contribute greatly to the country’s postwar reconstruction, as well as the establishment of infrastructure for a new welfare state. It wasn’t until the passage of the Commonwealth Immigrants Act of 1962 — explicitly racist in its intentions and designed to make it all but impossible for most people of color from the (former) colonies to move to Britain — that these numbers began to diminish significantly.

This was a critical period in British history, because the increased visibility of people of color coincided with what many White Britons saw as the beginning of a national decline. Britain was weak, its finances were in ruins, and the empire was beginning to disintegrate. Decolonization sped up, and the Suez Crisis humiliated Britain, both at home and abroad. Such precipitous loss of power became, in public discourse, intimately bound with immigration and race — rhetoric that continues to play out today — and politicians were only too keen to deflect the blame for societal ills on people of color.

Race relations in the U.K. declined considerably after the war, reaching their lowest point in the 1960s and ’70s, when, according to one poll, almost three-quarters of the British population expressed a desire to halt all non-White immigration into the country. The mood of the nation was reflected in its institutions and politics: People of color experienced systematic discrimination in housing and employment, far-right parties fed on and fomented racist sentiment, and racist violence surged. Increasingly forgotten was the decisive role that imperialism had played in changing the demographic landscape of Britain. Yet, as immigration became more central to British politics, politicians studiously avoided all allusions to colonialism, and instead fueled the myth that immigrants were coming to steal British jobs and feed off the welfare state. This, in turn, has allowed politicians such as Margaret Thatcher and Boris Johnson to mine both imperial nostalgia and xenophobia to justify, for instance, the Falklands War and Brexit, without the least sign of self-contradiction or hypocrisy.

Most British people would recoil at the suggestion that the roots of racism in their society lie in their own imperial past. But in Britain, where the word “immigrant” remains a convenient rubric behind which both history and racism can be hidden, the connection cannot be so easily forgotten, as the recent Windrush scandal, which made national headlines, proved. Mostly between 2012 and 2017, dozens of people from the Windrush generation, who had made Britain their home and had no ties elsewhere, were suddenly removed from their homes, detained, deprived of housing and medical care, and deported to the Caribbean. Supposedly, the deportees, many of whom were in their 60s or 70s, did not have sufficient documentation to prove their right to live in Britain. But they did not need any. They were British subjects when they moved, and the Nationality Act of 1948 had guaranteed them the right to do so. Britain, however, forgot about it, as it does anything to do with the empire when it’s not convenient or comfortable. And it was the British government itself, under the Labour Party, that had destroyed all the landing cards of the Windrush generation, for which, in the end, Black Britons paid the price.

“Imperial Island” touches upon all the key moments of modern British history, from the Blitz and Live Aid to Britpop and Brexit, but in its effort to be so comprehensive in so short a space, it feels somewhat thin. Indeed, the book seems rather unsure of what it wants to be, and its tone shifts uneasily between journalism and scholarship, with telling consequences. For instance, Riley does not parse the different senses in which she writes about imperialism, and so veers confusingly between “imperialism” as a psychological attitude, “imperialism” as a means of asserting hierarchies and “imperialism” as a description of Britain’s international relations. The reader is therefore at a loss as to what imperialism, now diluted to the point of losing definition, means throughout the book. What’s more, Riley begins and ends her book as if imperialism were a thing of the past — a past to be reckoned with, to be sure, and one with far-reaching consequences for Britain — but still past.

Meanwhile, the empire lives on. The British Museum continues to hoard a wealth of cultural objects from around the world, appoints itself their custodian, refuses to put most of its treasures on display and will not return any of them to their places of origin, where people might see them — a microcosm, if you will, of British colonialism. Meanwhile, thanks to British laws that are still enforced in former colonies, gay people in at least 29 countries of the Commonwealth continue to live in fear of imprisonment, sometimes death. Yet only last year, while she was home secretary, Suella Braverman — cruel and vindictive even by the standards of the Conservative Party — said that hom*ophobic discrimination alone was not reason enough to claim asylum in Britain. You see, people across the world still have to live with the British Empire. Imperialism is not history.

Balaji Ravichandran is a writer based in New York.

An Alternative History of the British Empire

By Charlotte Lydia Riley

Harvard University Press. 313 pp. $35