Far from seeking to abolish history, critical reexaminations of Britain’s past can deepen our understanding of the present. In Britain Alone (Faber), Philip Stephens shows that the last 70 years have exposed the nation’s fears about sovereignty and a lost past. Britain has often romanticised its place in the world. Sathnam Sanghera’s Empireland (Viking) argues passionately that our identity has been shaped for the worse by empire, and that we must do more to debunk national myths. For example, Britain defeated Hitler in the Second World War only with the help of thousands of soldiers from the empire.
Along with soldiers, the colonies supplied precious artefacts, like the bronzes plundered from Benin in what is now southern Nigeria. Barnaby Phillips’s damning account Loot (Oneworld) also covers the clandestine history of the Benin Bronzes on the western market. Wander round a country house and you will often find unlabelled Arab, Persian or Indian objects. As Fatima Manji discovers in Hidden Heritage (Chatto), such paintings and carvings “serve as evidence for the sons and daughters of the Orient that there are roots connecting us to these islands hundreds of years before we were born.” On a similar theme, in his charming Minarets in the Mountains (Bradt), Tharik Hussain travels in the footsteps of Ottoman gentleman Evliya Çelebi to discover the forgotten stories of Muslims in eastern Europe.
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