Empire’s Endgame: Racism and the British State

Citation

Bhattacharyya, G., Elliott-Cooper, A., Balani, S., Nişancıoğlu, K., Koram, K., Gebrial, D., El-Enany, N., & de Noronha, L. (2021). Empire's Endgame: Racism and the British State. Pluto Press.

Chapter Summary

Context and Argument

The book is a collective work by eight authors, published in Pluto Press's FireWorks series. It argues that discussions of racism in Britain have often dwelt on individual behaviour, and sets out instead the political and economic context: the legacies of empire reshaped by global capitalism, the digital environment and an unstable nation-state. It was written around the "hostile environment" policy, the Brexit referendum, Black Lives Matter and Rhodes Must Fall, and it treats racism as a changing tool of state power in a period of crisis and imperial decline. A preface precedes the introduction, and notes and an index close the volume.

Introduction: Racialised Mythologies in Times of Neglect, Cruelty and Expulsion

The introduction presents racism as fluid and shaped by context, and links present-day policy to imperial history. It claims that racist narratives help the state justify austerity, neglect and expulsion.

Part 1, Racialising the Crisis: Chapters 1–3

• Chapter 1: Windrush. The deportation and mistreatment of long-settled Caribbean migrants is read as a product of the immigration system, not as an isolated administrative failure.
• Chapter 2: 'Knife Crime': Prevention and Order. The chapter examines the moral panic around knife crime, the image of young Black men it relies on, stop-and-search and preventive measures.
• Chapter 3: Gang Land. The idea of the "gang" is analysed as a racialised threat that supports surveillance and policing of Black communities.

Part 2, The Persistence of Nationalism: Chapters 4–6

• Chapter 4: Nationalist Convulsions. Brexit-era nationalism is connected to colonial nostalgia and racial anxiety.
• Chapter 5: Progressive Patriotism. The chapter criticises attempts on the left to reclaim patriotism, arguing that they leave imperial and racial assumptions intact.
• Chapter 6: The Limits of Representation. Greater diversity in public life is assessed and judged not enough on its own to address structural racism.

Part 3, State Patriarch: Chapters 7–9

• Chapter 7: Our Heart Belongs to Daddy. Gender, race and the nation-state are considered together, with attention to patriarchal values in state power.
• Chapter 8: 'Pakistani Grooming Gangs'. The panic around this label is examined for how it has fed profiling of Muslim communities and obscured wider questions of sexual violence.
• Chapter 9: (Powerful) Men Behaving Badly. Populist male political figures, Boris Johnson among them, are analysed for how they combine apparent buffoonery with authoritarian appeal.

Part 4, Send in the Army: Chapters 10–12

• Chapter 10: Longing for Authority. The chapter looks at calls for military and authoritarian answers to social problems.
• Chapter 11: Militarisation on the Mainland. Militarised policing and border control are traced to colonial practice.
• Chapter 12: Zero-sum Game. The logic that one group's gain is another's loss is followed through immigration, welfare and security debates.

Part 5, What Now?: Chapters 13–14

• Chapter 13: Covid-19: A Real Crisis. The pandemic is taken as a crisis that exposed racial and class inequality and the limits of neoliberal policy.
• Chapter 14: Shared Grief, Hope and Resistance. The closing chapter turns to solidarity, collective action and the building of movements.

Key Concepts

Introduction

• Racial capitalism: the connection of racism to economic crisis and the shape of global capitalism, which the publisher names as the debate the book enters.
• Racialised mythologies: stories about race that make exclusion and cruelty seem reasonable.

Parts 1–2: Chapters 1–6

• Moral panic and folk devils: the cases of knife crime and gangs show how threats are constructed and then policed.
• Authoritarian nationalism: nationalism that grows out of a sense of decline and supports exclusion.
• Representational politics: the view that more visible minority figures can answer racism, which the authors question.

Parts 3–4: Chapters 7–12

• State patriarchy: the gendered side of state authority.
• Militarisation: the spread of military methods into domestic policing and borders.

Part 5: Chapters 13–14

• Care and solidarity: collective responses proposed in place of punitive state action.

Critical Analysis

Strengths

• Concrete cases within a clear frame. Each chapter takes one episode or phenomenon, such as Windrush, knife crime, grooming-gang rhetoric or the pandemic, and uses it to show a wider logic. Readers can follow the argument case by case.
• Short chapters. Chapters run from about seven to seventeen pages, so they can be read singly, and the five parts group them by theme.
• Attention to the present. The authors engage with Brexit, Black Lives Matter, Rhodes Must Fall and the Covid-19 pandemic, so the book is useful as a reading of the political moment around 2020.
• Range of angles. Eight authors bring different fields, which allows policing, nationalism, gender, militarisation and the pandemic to be treated together.

Limitations

• Britain-specific. The cases are British and so is the state under analysis; readers wanting a general theory of race, or comparison with other countries, will need other books.
• Tied to a moment. The book engages closely with events up to the pandemic, and some of its examples will date.
• Argument rather than survey. The chapters take a critical position and do not set out rival accounts at length, so students should read it alongside an introductory text that does.

Where It Fits in the Course

In the race and ethnicity course, this is a contemporary, Britain-focused study of how the state produces and uses racism. Kivisto and Croll's Race and Ethnicity: The Basics, Rattansi's Racism: A Very Short Introduction and Garner's Racisms: An Introduction are general introductions and give the vocabulary the book assumes. Omi and Winant's Racial Formation in the United States is a theory of how race is made through state policy and political struggle in the American case, and reads well beside this book's British material. Elliott-Cooper, one of the authors, also wrote Black Resistance to British Policing, which develops the policing theme of Chapters 2 and 3 at greater length.

How to Use This Book

The book suits upper-level undergraduates and graduate students in sociology, politics, law and cultural studies. It helps to know the outline of British imperial and immigration history, and the Windrush scandal and Brexit.

Read the preface and introduction first, because they state the argument. Then read the parts in order or choose by interest: policing (Chapters 2–3), nationalism (4–6), gender and sexual violence (7–9), militarisation (10–12), or the pandemic and resistance (13–14). Chapter 14 works as a conclusion and should be read last.

For seminars, set one chapter and ask what the case shows about the state, what it leaves out, and how a comparable case elsewhere would differ. Pair it with a general introduction to racism so the vocabulary is secure.