Among other things, both books describe personal quests to break through the societal stonewalling that hinders honest accounts of history, and both propose practical solutions for righting ignorance-fueled wrongs.īut if Britain is not alone in being haunted by its past, how is it unique? The short answer is that its empire was so vast (roughly a quarter of the world’s land mass at its peak) and spanned so many centuries (from the 1600s until after World War II) that it permeated every aspect of British life, from the words adopted into British English to the way Britons eat. Lee and Me: A Southerner’s Reckoning with the Myth of the Lost Cause. Sanghera’s description of Britain’s failure to understand or deal honestly with its imperial history - and the resultant societal warping effect - in fact bears a striking resemblance to Ty Seidule’s deconstruction of Confederate history in Robert E. These, of course, cannot be separated from U.S.

The British empire and slavery are inextricably linked, with the 17th century seeing both the dawning of the imperial age and British instigation of the transatlantic slave trade. These twin contortions on both sides of the Atlantic are more than mere coincidence. In Britain’s case, however, the source of discord is its former empire. in 2021) describes a culture war that will seem eerily familiar to the American reader: the pulling down of statues and monuments to notorious racists on one side, and the defensive adherence to a starry-eyed view of history on the other. edition of Sathnam Sanghera’s Empireland: How Imperialism Has Shaped Modern Britain (published in the U.K. Since so many Americans are invested in a whitewashed version of our history, though, efforts to correct the record or discuss reparations for past human-rights abuses invariably spark vehement blowback.įrom this standpoint, the first U.S. Specifically, past failure to deal honestly with slavery and the truth about the Confederacy has had dire real-life consequences in terms of needless human suffering and mismatched problems and solutions.

The United States is certainly no stranger to this phenomenon or its often-grotesque ramifications. Countries habitually ignore or distort their own pasts to shape national narratives and serve partisan aims.

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