Empireland

Author: Sathnam Sanghera
Publisher: Pantheon
ISBN: 0593316681
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 385

Book Description
A best-selling journalist’s illuminating tour through the hidden legacies and modern realities of British empire that exposes how much of the present-day United Kingdom is actually rooted in its colonial past. Empireland boldly and lucidly makes the case that in order to understand America, we must first understand British imperialism. "Empireland is brilliantly written, deeply researched and massively important. It’ll stay in your head for years.” —John Oliver, Emmy Award-winning host of "Last Week Tonight with John Oliver" With a new introduction by the author and a foreword by Booker Prize-winner Marlon James A best-selling journalist’s illuminating tour through the hidden legacies and modern realities of British empire that exposes how much of the present-day United Kingdom is actually rooted in its colonial past. Empireland boldly and lucidly makes the case that in order to understand America, we must first understand British imperialism. Empire—whether British or otherwise—informs nearly everything we do. From common thought to our daily routines; from the foundations of social safety nets to the realities of racism; and from the distrust of public intellectuals to the exceptionalism that permeates immigration debates, the Brexit campaign and the global reckonings with controversial memorials, Empireland shows how the pernicious legacy of Western imperialism undergirds our everyday lives, yet remains shockingly obscured from view. In accessible, witty prose, award-winning journalist and best-selling author Sathnam Sanghera traces this legacy back to its source, exposing how—in both profound and innocuous ways—imperial domination has shaped the United Kingdom we know today. Sanghera connects the historical dots across continents and seas to show how the shadows of a colonial past still linger over modern-day Britain and how the world, in turn, was shaped by Britain’s looming hand. The implications, of course, extend to Britain’s most notorious former colony turned imperial power: the United States of America, which prides itself for its maverick soul and yet seems to have inherited all the ambition, brutality and exceptional thinking of its parent. With a foreword by Booker Prize–winner Marlon James, Empireland is a revelatory and lucid work of political history that offers a sobering appraisal of the past so we may move toward a more just future.

Slave Empire

Author: Padraic X. Scanlan
Publisher: Robinson
ISBN: 1472142322
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 452

Book Description
'Engrossing and powerful . . . rich and thought-provoking' Fara Dabhoiwala, Guardian 'Path-breaking . . . a major rewriting of history' Mihir Bose, Irish Times 'Slave Empire is lucid, elegant and forensic. It deals with appalling horrors in cool and convincing prose.' The Economist The British empire, in sentimental myth, was more free, more just and more fair than its rivals. But this claim that the British empire was 'free' and that, for all its flaws, it promised liberty to all its subjects was never true. The British empire was built on slavery. Slave Empire puts enslaved people at the centre the British empire in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In intimate, human detail, Padraic Scanlon shows how British imperial power and industrial capitalism were inextricable from plantation slavery. With vivid original research and careful synthesis of innovative historical scholarship, Slave Empire shows that British freedom and British slavery were made together.

Marriage Material

Author: Sathnam Sanghera
Publisher: Random House India
ISBN: 8184004826
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 253

Book Description
Arjan Banga is forced to leave London to help his lonely mother run Bains Stores, their family’s provincial corner shop. But, it’s also a return to all that he tried to leave behind: narrow worldviews and post-industrial decline—and Singhfellows, a desi pub that defines itself by a religion that officially rejects drinking. But, his mother is adamant to keep the store open, forcing Arjan to work with her, reassess his relationship with his gori fiancé and discover his family’s silent history: his aunt’s elopement, his mother’s marriage to a lower-caste man, and his family’s strange relationship with their desi neighbours, the Dhandas, whose macho heir can’t stop listening to Malkit Singh and declaring: ‘Am just gonna bun dis spliff.’ The story of modern Britain as seen through the windows of an English shop with a big Punjabi heart, Marriage Material is the humorous chronicle of finding love as a desi in England—and of English desis forging and celebrating a betwixt identity that is neither here nor there.

The Old Wives' Tale

Author: Arnold Bennett
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 352

Book Description

Nuestra América

Author: Claudio Lomnitz
Publisher: Other Press, LLC
ISBN: 1635420709
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 465

Book Description
NAMED A MOST ANTICIPATED BOOK OF THE YEAR BY KIRKUS REVIEWS A riveting study of the intersections between Jewish and Latin American culture, this immigrant family memoir recounts history with psychological insight and the immediacy of a thriller. In Nuestra América, eminent anthropologist and historian Claudio Lomnitz traces his grandparents’ exile from Eastern Europe to South America. At the same time, the book is a pretext to explain and analyze the worldview, culture, and spirit of countries such as Peru, Colombia, and Chile, from the perspective of educated Jewish emigrants imbued with the hope and determination typical of those who escaped Europe in the 1920s. Lomnitz’s grandparents, who were both trained to defy ghetto life with the pioneering spirit of the early Zionist movement, became intensely involved in the Peruvian leftist intellectual milieu and its practice of connecting Peru’s indigenous past to an emancipatory internationalism that included Jewish culture and thought. After being thrown into prison supposedly for their socialist leanings, Lomnitz’s grandparents were exiled to Colombia, where they were subject to its scandals, its class system, its political life. Through this lens, Lomnitz explores the almost negligible attention and esteem that South America holds in US public opinion. The story then continues to Chile during World War II, Israel in the 1950s, and finally to Claudio’s youth, living with his parents in Berkeley, California, and Mexico City.

Ghosts of Empire

Author: Kwasi Kwarteng
Publisher: PublicAffairs
ISBN: 1610391217
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 590

Book Description
Kwasi Kwarteng is the child of parents whose lives were shaped as subjects of the British Empire, first in their native Ghana, then as British immigrants. He brings a unique perspective and impeccable academic credentials to a narrative history of the British Empire, one that avoids sweeping judgmental condemnation and instead sees the Empire for what it was: a series of local fiefdoms administered in varying degrees of competence or brutality by a cast of characters as outsized and eccentric as anything conjured by Gilbert and Sullivan. The truth, as Kwarteng reveals, is that there was no such thing as a model for imperial administration; instead, appointees were schooled in quirky, independent-minded individuality. As a result the Empire was the product not of a grand idea but of often chaotic individual improvisation. The idiosyncrasies of viceroys and soldier-diplomats who ran the colonial enterprise continues to impact the world, from Kashmir to Sudan, Baghdad to Hong Kong.

Sickening

Author: John Abramson
Publisher: HarperCollins
ISBN: 1328956989
Category : Health & Fitness
Languages : en
Pages : 336

Book Description
The inside story of how Big Pharma’s relentless pursuit of ever-higher profits corrupts medical knowledge—misleading doctors, misdirecting American health care, and harming our health. The United States spends an excess $1.5 trillion annually on health care compared to other wealthy countries—yet the amount of time that Americans live in good health ranks a lowly 68th in the world. At the heart of the problem is Big Pharma, which funds most clinical trials and therefore controls the research agenda, withholds the real data from those trials as corporate secrets, and shapes most of the information relied upon by health care professionals. In this no-holds-barred exposé, Dr. John Abramson—one of the foremost experts on the drug industry’s deceptive tactics—combines patient stories with what he learned during many years of serving as an expert in national drug litigation to reveal the tangled web of financial interests at the heart of the dysfunction in our health-care system. For example, one of pharma’s best-kept secrets is that the peer reviewers charged with ensuring the accuracy and completeness of the clinical trial reports published in medical journals do not even have access to complete data and must rely on manufacturer-influenced summaries. Likewise for the experts who write the clinical practice guidelines that define our standards of care. The result of years of research and privileged access to the inner workings of the U.S. medical-industrial complex, Sickening shines a light on the dark underbelly of American health care—and presents a path toward genuine reform.

Bye Bye, Miss American Empire

Author: Bill Kauffman
Publisher: Chelsea Green Publishing
ISBN: 1933392800
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 322

Book Description
This book "traces the historical roots of the secessionist spirit, and introduces us to the often radical, sometimes quixotic, and highly charged movements that want to decentralize and re-localize power"--P. [4] of cover.

If You Don't Know Me by Now

Author: Sathnam Sanghera
Publisher: Gardners Books
ISBN: 9780670916702
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 323

Book Description
When Sathnam Sanghera was twenty-four years old he discovered a secret about his father that would both darken, and illuminate his life. His father had been schizophrenic for almost all his adult life and, in the early years of his marriage to Sathnam's mother, had been terrifyingly violent towards his family.The discovery would set the author on a journey into his family's past: from his father's harsh life in rural Punjab, to the terrifying early years of his parents' marriage in England; from his mother's extraordinary resilience as she brought up her young family in a foreign land, without any knowledge of its language, to the author's happy memories of his own childhood - his obsessions with George Michael and how to have the perfect top knot.And, most affectingly of all, this discovery would finally force Sanghera's own secret life into the glaring light: his longing for romantic love which he had, for fear of family rejection, kept utterly hidden from his beloved mother in the Midlands.

The Education Trap

Author: Cristina Viviana Groeger
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674259157
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 385

Book Description
Why—contrary to much expert and popular opinion—more education may not be the answer to skyrocketing inequality. For generations, Americans have looked to education as the solution to economic disadvantage. Yet, although more people are earning degrees, the gap between rich and poor is widening. Cristina Groeger delves into the history of this seeming contradiction, explaining how education came to be seen as a panacea even as it paved the way for deepening inequality. The Education Trap returns to the first decades of the twentieth century, when Americans were grappling with the unprecedented inequities of the Gilded Age. Groeger’s test case is the city of Boston, which spent heavily on public schools. She examines how workplaces came to depend on an army of white-collar staff, largely women and second-generation immigrants, trained in secondary schools. But Groeger finds that the shift to more educated labor had negative consequences—both intended and unintended—for many workers. Employers supported training in schools in order to undermine the influence of craft unions, and so shift workplace power toward management. And advanced educational credentials became a means of controlling access to high-paying professional and business jobs, concentrating power and wealth. Formal education thus became a central force in maintaining inequality. The idea that more education should be the primary means of reducing inequality may be appealing to politicians and voters, but Groeger warns that it may be a dangerous policy trap. If we want a more equitable society, we should not just prescribe more time in the classroom, but fight for justice in the workplace.