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Hello and welcome to the Spectator's Book Club podcast. I'm Sam Leith, the literary editor

from The Spectator. My guest this week is the journalist and historian Satnan Sangira,

whose new book is Empire World,

how British imperialism has shaped the globe. And it's a follow-up to his best-selling book,

Empire Land, which was more concerned with how British Empire had shaped Britain. Satan, welcome.

Now, can I stop asking you a bit about the inciting incident for this book?

Because based on my reading of it, it seems to be that you're just really, really bad at going on holiday.

Yeah, I think that goes back to being a British Punjabi.

We don't really do hold days.

We either go to see our relatives or go shopping.

I mean, I think we went on one day trip when I was a kid to Western Supermare.

But I haven't really learned how to do holidays.

So when I went on my first holiday after COVID to escape the British Empire, I kind of didn't.

And that was Barbados.

Yeah, my girlfriend booked it. Yeah, I guess it was Empireland had been quite an intense experience, both positive and negative, and we ended

up going Barbados to just relax. Obviously, Barbados was a really important phase of British

Empire way before India, and I inevitably started thinking about the legacies of

empire there and couldn't stop thinking about it when I came back because the royal family,

Prince William and Kate also went to the Caribbean two weeks later. So it was all over the news.

The legacies of what we did to the world there and actually also that disastrous royal trip,

which was considered a disaster even by the monarchist press at the time.

...