The Truth About Empire

Real Histories of British Colonialism

By: Alan Lester (Editor), Sathnam Sanghera (Foreword by)

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Hardcover | 4 October 2024

At a Glance

Hardcover
304 Pages

Dimensions(cm)
21.6 x 13.8 x 3.81

Hardcover

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The Truth About Empire comes from expert historians who believe that the truth, as far as we can ascertain it, matters; that our decades of painstaking research make us worth listening to; and that our authority as leading professionals should count for something in today's polarised debates over Britain's imperial past.

Colonial history is now a battlefield in the culture war. The public's understanding of past events is continually distorted by wilful caricatures. Communities that long struggled to get their voices heard have, in their fight to highlight the hidden horrors of colonialism, alienated many who prefer a celebratory national history. The backlash, orchestrated by elements of the media, has generated a new, concerted denial of imperial racism and violence in Britain's past-a disinformation campaign sharing both tactics and motivations with those around Covid, Brexit and climate change.

From Australia and China to South Africa and Egypt, this essay collection is an accessible guide to the British Empire, and a weapon of defence against the assault on historical truth. The disturbing stories told in these pages, of Empire's culture, politics and economics, show why professional research matters, when deciding what can and cannot be known about Britain's colonial history.

Industry Reviews

'An essential contribution to scholarship on the British Empire. This is an important book for our times.'

-- Kavita Puri, author of Partition Voices: Untold British Stories

'In a time of harmful, government-backed myth-making about the past, "The Truth About Empire" offers important assurance of the value of and need for scholarly expertise and dialogue. Expert historians patiently, and devastatingly, prove the scholarly malpractice behind recent ideologically motivated attempts to whitewash the past. A lesson in the follies of peddling and trusting bogus history.'

-- Priya Satia, author of Time's Monster: How History Makes History

'A fine collection of detailed and remarkably restrained assessments of the troubling and dubious manner in which the right-wing polemicists of the culture wars have distorted the historical record in service of the political rehabilitation of colonialism.'

-- Michael Taylor, author of The Interest: How the British Establishment Resisted the Abolition of Slavery

'Lester has assembled an A Team of--can we say this now?--experts. The result is an incredibly readable collection that is nuanced, complex, calm and seriously informed--just what we need now on this vital and important subject.'

-- Matthew Parker, author of One Fine Day: Britain's Empire on the Brink

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