My great grandparents left India around the turn of the 20th century and travelled to East Africa for new lives. In the 1960s, my parents echoed their migrant footsteps and left their homes and settled in Britain. In hindsight their trajectory followed the path of the British empire’s disintegration. This is no coincidence, as they were its subjects. India gained independence in 1947. Tanzania, my parents’ first home, became independent in 1961.
This was a period during which the empire – the one upon which the Sun never set and spanned three quarters of the world’s population – was crumbling.
Now I find myself in London in the week after the United Kingdom’s prime minister, Theresa May, formally triggered Article 50 of the Lisbon Treaty, putting the country into a two- year process towards exiting the European Union.
Scotland is reconsidering its place in the union that binds it to the UK; the status of Gibraltar is once again the subject of heated discussions between Britain and Spain. Even London is looking to retain a relationship with the EU.
There’s the potential to read this as the British empire reaching its ultimate disintegration. And it’s very much self-inflicted. The question for Britain is, if this really is the end of the empire, does anyone else really care? And more importantly, if they don’t, what do those of us who live here do next?
Domestically, the argument for leaving the EU was centred around how much the UK has to offer the world, how people will be clamouring to do business with us and how we don’t need the EU because we have the world and our Commonwealth partners. To implement this vision, Whitehall officials have even been rumoured to have been discussing “Empire 2.0”.
Historian David Olusoga expresses that hopes of reigniting the economic wealth Britain enjoyed during the empire are based on nostalgia for a relationship that never existed. And while Britain has spent time reminiscing about its greatness, slips of the tongue such as “Empire 2.0” and what “we” did, are misplaced.
He explains that African and Commonwealth journalists are busy ridiculing the notion of a revived empire. The Chinese have moved in. Buying and trading power has shifted eastward. Even large and friendly relationships have changed. The likes of Canada and Australia now move in different circles determined by the neighbourhoods they live in.
Olusoga drives home the point that “we” don’t really pay any attention to the recipients of what “we” did, and think of Britain as a kindly uncle bestowing goodness to the infantilised and wayward colonies.
He's right. Take the example of Shashi Tharoor, an Indian member of parliament and former government minister. The video of his debate at the Oxford Union arguing that Britain owes reparations to India for what it did to that country went viral. It was shared over four million times and dubbed a must-watch for every Indian. His hypothesis has been expanded into his latest book Inglorious Empire expounding that it is a myth that Britain benefited India when in fact Britain governed in the interests of Britain. He states that India's share of the world economy dropped from 23 per cent when the British arrived, to 4 per cent when they left. He says: "Britain's industrial revolution was actually premised upon the deindustrialisation of India."
Having said all that, Britain still has the potential to play a significant global economic and political role in the future. The key is to become more outward-looking and think about our core offering to the world.
This has to be a conversation about the future and what it looks like, rather than the past and attempting to reclaim it. But with Brexiteer attitudes focusing on battening down the hatches, and with Trump-esque language around making countries great again, it’s not just a new global brand that the UK needs, but a shared internal vision.
The good news is that despite colonial legacies, the British brand – whether in goods or services or as a nation state – still evokes surprising positivity and goodwill.
The challenge for us in Britain is how to reinvent ourselves not in the light of a past empire, but of an innovative, forward-looking global citizen that recognises what it has to offer in a brave new world.
Shelina Zahra Janmohamed is the author of the books Generation M: Young Muslims Changing the World and Love in a Headscarf
On Twitter: @loveinheadscarf
COMPANY PROFILE
● Company: Bidzi
● Started: 2024
● Founders: Akshay Dosaj and Asif Rashid
● Based: Dubai, UAE
● Industry: M&A
● Funding size: Bootstrapped
● No of employees: Nine
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Joker: Folie a Deux
Starring: Joaquin Phoenix, Lady Gaga, Brendan Gleeson
Director: Todd Phillips
Rating: 2/5
The specs
Engine: 2-litre or 3-litre 4Motion all-wheel-drive Power: 250Nm (2-litre); 340 (3-litre) Torque: 450Nm Transmission: 8-speed automatic Starting price: From Dh212,000 On sale: Now
On racial profiling at airports
Film: Raid
Dir: Rajkumar Gupta
Starring: Ajay Devgn, Ileana D'cruz and Saurabh Shukla
Verdict: Three stars
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UFC Fight Night 2
1am – Early prelims
2am – Prelims
4am-7am – Main card
7:30am-9am – press cons
Honeymoonish
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The specs
Engine: 3.9-litre twin-turbo V8
Power: 620hp from 5,750-7,500rpm
Torque: 760Nm from 3,000-5,750rpm
Transmission: Eight-speed dual-clutch auto
On sale: Now
Price: From Dh1.05 million ($286,000)
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The biog
Name: Greg Heinricks
From: Alberta, western Canada
Record fish: 56kg sailfish
Member of: International Game Fish Association
Company: Arabian Divers and Sportfishing Charters
Take Me Apart
Kelela
(Warp)
Tree of Hell
Starring: Raed Zeno, Hadi Awada, Dr Mohammad Abdalla
Director: Raed Zeno
Rating: 4/5
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The biog
Family: wife, four children, 11 grandchildren, 16 great-grandchildren
Reads: Newspapers, historical, religious books and biographies
Education: High school in Thatta, a city now in Pakistan
Regrets: Not completing college in Karachi when universities were shut down following protests by freedom fighters for the British to quit India
Happiness: Work on creative ideas, you will also need ideals to make people happy
APPLE IPAD MINI (A17 PRO)
Display: 21cm Liquid Retina Display, 2266 x 1488, 326ppi, 500 nits
Chip: Apple A17 Pro, 6-core CPU, 5-core GPU, 16-core Neural Engine
Storage: 128/256/512GB
Main camera: 12MP wide, f/1.8, digital zoom up to 5x, Smart HDR 4
Front camera: 12MP ultra-wide, f/2.4, Smart HDR 4, full-HD @ 25/30/60fps
Biometrics: Touch ID, Face ID
Colours: Blue, purple, space grey, starlight
In the box: iPad mini, USB-C cable, 20W USB-C power adapter
Price: From Dh2,099
START-UPS%20IN%20BATCH%204%20OF%20SANABIL%20500'S%20ACCELERATOR%20PROGRAMME
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Thank You for Banking with Us
Director: Laila Abbas
Starring: Yasmine Al Massri, Clara Khoury, Kamel El Basha, Ashraf Barhoum
Rating: 4/5
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