Stuff the British Stole
Penguin Random House NZ
This book is interesting and easy to read, but I can’t help but feel like sometimes it lacks depth of analysis. It certainly lacks any form of supporting references, which I have come to expect in books of this type.
Now, it is certainly true that the British Empire stole lots of stuff, especially when viewed with modern eyes. Were they terrible? Yes, but not unusually terrible for their time. The problem is that they industrialized that terrible much more effectively than everyone else, so the sheer scale of the hole they dug is astounding. That brings with it a time of reckoning as the standards of society change, and again, that’s going to have to be proportional to the scale of their previous behaviours.
The problem is — is the solution simply to hand everything back? Doesn’t that also trivialize some of the things which happened? It works for objects, but how do you make right a genocide? Or a random line on a map which then caused nearly a century of conflict?
That’s my problem here. This book is interesting, but it doesn’t address the larger problem. It just stays in its lane and talks about how we should hand this mosaic or that chalice back.