Brexit, Remainers often say, was informed by a myth of British exceptionalism, that because we once ran large parts of the world, we thought we didn’t need Europe and could go it alone.

I’m not sold on the claim that no doubt attracts O’Brien, that empire is the fantasy that fuelled Brexit. I am sold on the larger part of Sanghera’s thesis, that the empire could be rotten and we don’t know enough about it. One British officer, far from the embodiment of the “stiff upper lip”, attempted sexual intercourse with literally everything he encountered, animal or mineral, including “a papaya, which proved more satisfying than a melon”. By the 1880s, almost half the British troops in parts of Bengal had an STD. There were imperial projects of enlightenment and improvement, yes, and many Britons so fell in love with cultures they encountered that they “went native” – for good and ill. Throughout the 1846-7 Xhosa War in South Africa, “heads were taken and traded as souvenirs”. At the conclusion to the Mahdist War (1881-99) in East Africa, the Mahdi’s tomb was raided and his skull presented to Lord Kitchener as a gift, who toyed with turning it into an “ink stand or drinking cup” before depositing it with the College of Surgeons, an episode that Queen Victoria regarded as embarrassingly medieval. The cultural treasures looted by Britain, now sitting in our museums, were recognised by contemporaries for what they were: booty. When Robert Clive, the man credited with laying the foundations of the empire in India, died in 1774, he was buried in an unmarked grave his crimes had been so great, said Samuel Johnson, that his conscience compelled him to cut his own throat.

It was also controversial in its own time. Far from a coherent project, let alone a conspiracy, Sanghera calls it “unplanned” and “nebulous… it was never a legal entity, and had no constitution or emperor issuing top-down laws”. It was acquired, as Sir John Seeley famously described it, “in a fit of absence of mind”. With statues being tossed in rivers and the National Trust accused of going woke, it feels as if the Right regards the past as the repository of civilisation and the Left sees it as a closet packed with skeletons of dead racists, but the reality of the British Empire, says Sathnam Sanghera, was infinitely more complex. Telegraph readers might be inclined to overlook Empireland because it’s praised on the cover by Lefty shock jock James O’Brien (death by endorsement) but, trust me, it’s better than that.

Sanghera empireland