In my new book, Empireworld, a work of more than 100,000 words, I argue that there is a catastrophic gap between what British people think its empire did to the world and what the world knows its empire did to the world. In order to write it, I travelled to Nigeria, Mauritius, India, Barbados and other parts of the former empire, to investigate the difference between a post-colonial world that wants to discuss issues such as reparations (for slavery and indenture) and repatriation (of imperial loot), and a former mother country that doesn’t want to listen.
But I could have just got on the bus and visited the Foreign and Commonwealth Office in London. For as a group of former senior diplomats and officials point out in a new pamphlet, The World in 2040: Renewing the UK’s Approach to International Affairs, the building is packed with problematic colonial tributes which demonstrate how Britain’s approach to international relations remains trapped in the imperial past. Indeed, the building, which opened in 1866 as the base for the India Office and Colonial Office, and serves as an expression of Britain’s late 19th-century ideas about itself, is nothing short of a celebration of the British empire at its most powerful and racist.
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