The New Age of (blaming everything on) Empire - book review by Zara Qureshi
Not long ago, Kehinde Andrews’ new book The New Age of Empire: How Racism and Colonialism Still Rule the World made its debut on bookshelves. Following the murder of George Floyd in 2020 and the public fury that ensued, many of the ideas that have proliferated in public discussion regarding race have been those influenced by critical race theory and postmodernism - Andrew’s new book is no exception.
Kehinde Andrews is a professor of Black Studies at the University of Birmingham. His previous works include Resisting Racism: Race, Inequality, and the Black Supplementary School Movement and Back to Black: Retelling Black Radicalism for the 21st Century. Andrews has become a household name in the UK, regularly making appearances on live television and social media. His interview with Russell Brand on Youtube, named ‘Whiteness Psychosis’, has amassed over fifty thousand views and one of his most-watched discussions include ‘Is it offensive to quote Churchill?’ on ITV and has almost hit a million views on YouTube. Besides his growing fame, Andrews is the Director of the Centre for Critical Social Research, co-chair of the UK Black Studies Association and the founder of the Organisation of Black Unity - an organisation that focuses on radical approaches inspired by Malcolm X’s Organisation of African American Unity and the idea of “black people coming together to attack the racist foundation of society by creating and supporting [their] own institutions and organisations”.
One of Andrews’ primary assertions that underpin the thesis of the book is that the Enlightenment period was not an age of reason or intellect, but was the reason for which the current ‘global order’ is “built in the image of White Supremacy”. While reading such claims, I tried to position myself in the mindset of someone who has no background knowledge on such topics given that the language and style of this book are supposed to appeal to the general public. I am sensitive to the idea that for many reading and intrigued by The New Age of Empire, it may be their first time approaching the topics of race and politics. Yet, what I found surprising is a lack of definition provided for vague concepts that were used frequently in the book, such as ‘Whitewashing’ with a capital W.
Even to the knowledgeable reader, it is certainly not clear what Andrews means when he says things like, “by burning books and Whitewashing history, Western intellectual thought was able to start from a clean state of White Supremacy” and “Wheatley was just parroting her White skills”. I remember trying to specify exactly what he meant by his conceptualisation of ‘Whitewashing’ on my Kindle, only for the Kindle to tell me that whitewashing is “the act of painting something with a solution of lime and water” or an “attempt to deliberately conceal unpleasant or incriminating facts about a person or organisation”, but given his capitalisation of the word, I do not think this is what he meant. Needless to say, my Kindle reader could not give me a suggestion as to what Andrews had possibly meant by “White skills”.
Despite this, one of the concepts that Andrews has spoken about in his other work and that has proliferated at a very rapid rate in public discourse is the idea of ‘white privilege’. The origins of the concept can be traced back to the feminist scholar Peggy McIntosh in her 1988 essay, White Privilege and Male Privilege. Despite how ‘white privilege’ is used in society today in informing education policy and debate, McIntosh’s methodology to substantiate her idea of ‘white privilege’ was deeply flawed. Much of her ‘evidence’ to ascertain ‘white privilege’ came from creating a list of all the ways that she felt privileged in life, without trying to control for factors such as demographics, class or geography. Neither her essay nor her following work made any attempt to study or even prove a causal relationship between her ‘privileges’ and her skin colour.
I notice a similar pattern of faulty methodology with Andrews’ claims- however, I assume that much of this can be attributed to the fact that Andrews’ academic training is not one of rigorous quantitative research. For example, one of the claims that imminently comes to mind is that “it is no coincidence that the poorest countries [in the world] are the darkest ones” and the ‘racialised global order’ of the world is predicated on Linnaeus’ faulty racial taxonomy of humans. I would like to probe further: How has he gone about in his methodology assigning Linnaeus’ taxonomy with the wealth of different nations? It is not clear.
Categorising the poorest countries in the world is certainly no easy feat and it is not just a case of ranking the total wealth of each country. However, for the sake of simplicity, assuming that the standard with which he was working was the gross domestic product of countries, his claims fall weak when we realise that some of the highest-ranking countries in this regard are non-Western countries, and some of them exceed former Western colonial powers. These countries include China, India, South Korea, Brazil and Indonesia. And even if we look at other indicators such as purchasing power parity, Qatar, Kuwait and Macao SAR come out on top. Confronted by the possibility that his economic claims hold little water, further into the book, Andrews dismisses non-Western countries’ economic growth as an example of them exercising ‘Whiteness’. Andrews asserts:
“But if we imagine that the development of non-Western, non-white countries proves that the racial logic of empire has changed in any substantive way, we are sorely mistaken. China’s rise is instructive, considering its predicated global dominance has been due to the logic of Western imperialism, not in spite of it.”
By contrast, I do not think that I would be alone in saying that empire has indeed changed in a deeply substantive way. For example, not only have we seen Britain fall as an empire, but it is home to diverse populations living in harmony for the most part and has experienced a paradigm shift in private and public attitudes towards race and inclusion. In 2000, The Sunday Times reported that Britain had the highest rate of interracial relationships in the world. I assume this number has since been rapidly growing.
Andrews’ claims also come about with the assumption that in the absence of the West, countries such as China, India and Saudi Arabia would not have engaged in colonial or imperialist practices. In a chapter titled ‘Building BRICS of Empire’, Andrews implies that these countries have learnt how to adapt the horrid colonial practices of the West into a softer, palatable form of neo-colonialism, and this can explicate their economic growth. We know that this is not true; China has a deep ancient history, spanning thousands of years, in imperialism; the Arabian Peninsula was the birthplace of the Arab Conquests; and the Chola Dynasty, of what we now know as South India and Sri Lanka, was responsible for the invasion of Southeast Asia. While I would agree with Andrews that China is responsible for morally reprehensible practices, such as the Uyghur genocide, I cannot help but feel that Andrews’ slap of ‘this-is-learned-White-logic’ robs the situation of its gravity.
Navigating Western colonialism and its impact on the world is a sensitive and complicated subject. Much of the assessment of Africa’s development in discourse, whether economic or political, focuses a great deal on the narrow period of Western colonisation and The New Age of Empire does not deviate from this. There is very little discussion on the role of African civilisations themselves in their own development. Therefore, the book misses an opportunity to provide a comparative analysis of former colonised African states with African states that successfully resisted colonisation. For example, it would have been interesting to see Andrews’ take on research that demonstrates that countries that were successful at resisting Western colonialism are significantly less democratic today. It is here where there is a real gap in knowledge and better questions can be asked.
In a similar sense, the book dedicates very little of its material to discuss African or black empires, colonies or brutalities. Andrews often uses Mali as a victimised exemplar of White oppression. But, we do not learn of Mali’s very own empire before Western rule, the Benin Empire, the Songhai Empire, the Kingdom of Aksum, nor the Great Zimbabwe. All of these empires had their own systems of slavery and tyrannical forms of wealth accumulation. Speaking of violence that has occurred within Africa, Andrews touches upon the Rwandan genocide, but then later absolves culpability of those responsible for the massacre of hundreds of thousands of lives, as this was “a product of the West and Enlightenment”.
All of this leads me to the conclusion that I hope even Andrews would agree with: world history is messy. There is no one racial group nor region that can claim a monopoly of victimhood in world history. Similarly, there is no one racial group nor region that can claim complete oppressor status in world history. Thomas Sowell sums this mess up neatly:
“At different periods of history, you’ll find one racial group centuries ahead of another, and then a thousand years later, it will be the other way round. The Jews and the Egyptians would be a classic example. The Jews were held as slaves during the times of the pharaohs, but clearly today Israel is far more advanced than Egypt. You can find many other kinds of reversals of that sort if you look at history. Just within the European community, Britain was very easily conquered by a relatively small force of Romans, during the days of the Roman Empire. Clearly, England has been ahead of Italy now for centuries by a vast amount.”
What I find particularly concerning in Andrews’ is his lack of care and simplistic analysis around the historical evolution of both the Enlightenment period and the Islamic Golden Age. In the section ‘Decolonising Knowledge’, Andrews attributes the decline of the Islamic Golden Age as a result of the West having destroyed Islamic civilisation through book burning, and therefore, much of the scientific knowledge produced by the West was merely theft of Islamic thought. I would agree with Andrews that the Enlightenment period was not the only period during human history of reason and intellect; a huge expanse of our modern-day technologies and advancements come from the Islamic Golden Age, such as algebra, modern medical instruments and the preservation of ancient historical texts. The Islamic Golden Age was remarkably an age of complex civilisation and thought, and I would agree with Andrews that perhaps more can be done to talk about this in public discourse. However, the Islamic world did not fail because of the West as Andrews argues, or the Mongol Invasion (another factor which Andrews misses from his analysis). Rather, empirical studies show that the downfall of this golden age is primarily due to losing a balancing act between reason and religious ideology. The prosperous Islamic Golden Age had meant that religious leaders had risen to political power, and with that power came about an increase of madrasas (i.e. Islamic schools) that prioritised the religious production of knowledge as opposed to scientific knowledge. All of this seems to suggest that the decline of the Islamic Golden Age may have been a lot more gradual than Andrews’ depiction.
This simplistic analysis is replicated in other areas of the book. In exploring the intellectual African origins of the modern world, Andrews cites the work of Cheikh Anta Diop. He states that Ancient Egyptians were black and used the word Kemet for Egypt which supposedly meant ‘land of the Blacks’. What Andrews conveniently leaves out is that Kemet, in its most literal sense, means ‘the black land’, with the majority of scholars saying Kemet refers to the black fertile soil that was left on the land after the annual flooding of the Nile. Andrews does not take an intellectually honest or humble position here, which would have included considering modern-day genomic evidence that indeed contradicts Andrews’ claims and also conceding that there is still more research yet to be done. I think we have a lesson to learn from the Ancient Egyptians. The Ancient Egyptians were not so preoccupied with skin colour as Andrews thinks they may have been. The Nile attracted people from all over the region and even Egyptian aristocracy was racially diverse. The Ancient Egyptians cared more about a shared language, culture and religion- not so much skin colour.
As I approached the final chapters of The New Age of Empire, I was hopeful that Andrews would present us with some practical solutions that we, as individuals, or as a society could implement to ameliorate the current dire situation that the book has presented. Initially, that is what I planned my book review to be about- a discussion of Andrews’ proposed solutions. However, it seems that Andrews surrenders. He argues that the ‘racialised hegemony’ of the West and the ‘psychosis’ of Whiteness are so critical and entrenched into the fabric of society, and perhaps even ourselves, that there are no solutions. In a concluding paragraph, he states:
“If you have come this far believing that white people offering a meaningful hand of friendship is the solution, then you have entirely missed the point. It is not the place of the oppressed to suggest a progressive role for those who benefit from their oppression.”
Instead, Andrews hints at an apocalyptic end; the West will eventually fall under its own weight or because of a revolution or uprising of black people against the West. While I think the potential downfall of the West is certainly an interesting idea and one that Andrews leaves the reader to explore at their own leisure, I think that even if the West did eventually fall, it will be because of suicide; I may be wrong, but its death might just be because of ideas that are indeed born of the West, yet contradict reason and the importance of individual life, such as Andrews’ “unpalatable” Marxism.
Buy The New Age of Empire: How Racism and Colonialism Still Rule the World - Kehinde Andrews here.
