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Colonialism: A Moral Reckoning
A new assessment of the West’s colonial record In the wake of the dissolution of the Soviet empire in 1989, many believed that we had arrived at the ‘End of History’ – that the global dominance of liberal democracy had been secured forever. Now however, with Russia rattling its sabre on the borders of Europe and China rising to challenge the post-1945 world order, the liberal West faces major threats. These threats are not only external. Especially in the Anglosphere, the ‘decolonisation’ movement corrodes the West’s self-confidence by retelling the history of European and American colonial dominance as a litany of racism, exploitation, and massively murderous violence. Nigel Biggar tests this indictment, addressing the crucial questions in eight chapters: Was the British Empire driven primarily by greed and the lust to dominate? Should we speak of ‘colonialism and slavery’ in the same breath, as if they were identical? Was the Empire essentially racist? How far was it based on the theft of land? Did it involve genocide? Was it driven fundamentally by the motive of economic exploitation? Was undemocratic colonial government necessarily illegitimate? and, Was the Empire essentially violent, and its violence pervasively racist and terroristic? Biggar makes clear that, like any other long-standing state, the British Empire involved elements of injustice, sometimes appalling. On occasions it was culpably incompetent and presided over moments of dreadful tragedy. Nevertheless, from the early 1800s the Empire was committed to abolishing the slave trade in the name of a Christian conviction of the basic equality of all human beings. It ended endemic inter-tribal warfare, opened local economies to the opportunities of global trade, moderated the impact of inescapable modernisation, established the rule of law and liberal institutions such as a free press, and spent itself in defeating the murderously racist Nazi and Japanese empires in the Second World War. As encyclopaedic in historical breadth as it is penetrating in analytical depth, Colonialism offers a moral inquest into the colonial past, forensically contesting damaging falsehoods and thereby helping to rejuvenate faith in the West’s future. Nigel Biggar's book 'Colonialism' was a Sunday Times bestseller w/c 06-02-2023.
480 pages, Hardcover
First published February 2, 2023
366 people are currently reading
2178 people want to read
About the author
Nigel Biggar
30 books58 followersNigel Biggar CBE is Emeritus Regius Professor of Moral Theology at the University of Oxford and Distinguished Scholar in Residence at Pusey House, Oxford. He holds a B.A. in Modern History from Oxford and a Ph.D. in Christian Theology & Ethics from the University of Chicago. He was appointed C.B.E. “for services to Higher Education” in the 2021 Queen’s Birthday Honours list. His most recent books are Colonialism: A Moral Reckoning (2023), What’s Wrong with Rights? (2020), In Defence of War (2013), and Between Kin and Cosmopolis: An Ethic of the Nation (2014). In the press he has written articles for the Financial Times, the (London) Times, the Daily Telegraph, the Spectator, the (Glasgow} Herald, the Irish Times, Standpoint, The Critic, The Article, Unherd and Quillette. He served on the Committee on Ethical Issues in Medicine at the Royal College of Physicians (London) from 2000 to 2014, the Royal Society’s Working Group on People and the Planet from 2010 to 2012, and the Pontifical Academy for Life from 2017 to 2022. He now chairs the board of trustees of the Free Speech Union.
He has lectured at the Royal College of Defence Studies, London; the UK Defence Academy, Shrivenham; the Führungsakademie der Bundeswehr, Hamburg; the US Military Academy, West Point; and the National Defense University, Washington, DC. His hobbies include visiting battlefields. In 1973 he drove from Scotland via Iran and Afghanistan to India. And in 2015 and 2017 he trekked across the mountains of central Crete in the footsteps of Patrick Leigh-Fermor and his comrades, when they abducted General Kreipe in April-May 1944.
He has lectured at the Royal College of Defence Studies, London; the UK Defence Academy, Shrivenham; the Führungsakademie der Bundeswehr, Hamburg; the US Military Academy, West Point; and the National Defense University, Washington, DC. His hobbies include visiting battlefields. In 1973 he drove from Scotland via Iran and Afghanistan to India. And in 2015 and 2017 he trekked across the mountains of central Crete in the footsteps of Patrick Leigh-Fermor and his comrades, when they abducted General Kreipe in April-May 1944.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 137 reviews
March 7, 2023
An interesting read, and one I would recommend, although probably not for reasons the author would approve of.
Biggar was confronted with criticism of comments he made in favour of the British Empire and a lot of this text feels like a highly embittered strop in reaction to that criticism.
Firstly this is not, despite the title, a book looking at colonialism in a wider context, his focus is entirely on defending and excusing the British Empire specifically. In fact, he is happy to, and in fact does, criticise other empires and other colonial systems extensively and repeatedly.
Biggar has certainly done his research, he presents a wide range of historical facts spanning an almost 500 year history of the British Empire, however I remain unconvinced by his argument and if I am honest I am not actually sure HE is convinced by his argument either.
Time and again throughout the book Biggar subverts the commonly understood meanings of words like racism, discrimination, genocide etc to 'show' how they cannot possibly be applied to the activities of British colonists. Time and time again, he goes into extensive detail of acts of ethnic cleansing, torture, murder etc only to brush it to one side as excusable in some obscure and questionable fashion. I find it hard to believe that a man who claims a Christian faith, and to have even an ounce of sense can be convinced by these weak and often repugnant excuses.
I believe that the vast majority of rational people are able to recognise that the British Empire, like all political systems, was not an absolute evil. Biggar makes this point, managing to praise Nazi Germany for autobahn construction, however when set against the many wrongs committed, it is difficult even for Biggar to claim that it was a net benefit and should be excused all criticism. Biggar is happy yo criticise large aspects of it, overall however he seems to feel that he should be allowed to criticise, but that every criticism has an excuse that should be used to exponged the wrong from the historical record. He seems genuinely affronted that anyone least of all anyone he does not deem to be sufficiently scholarly, should be allowed to discuss these wrongs. All criticism, even by public bodies of their own actions, is seen by Biggar as insincere, an attempt at being fashionable, rather than a recognition that wrongdoing has occurred in the past. I would question why he objects to open discussion and recognition of these wrongs and would argue that it is only by remembering and acknowledging these that we can have a clear understanding of our own and the world's history. Maybe I am simply not enough of a scholar to understand why every time a white Britain rounded up indigenous peoples, re-educated their children, removed them from their homeland, disenfranchised them, tortured them, stole their land or property, burned their cultural sites, killed their leaders, took their lives could be excused by bringing trains or Christianity to a region. Who knows?
I would definitely recommend this title for the attention to detail and so that readers can see if they are able to reconcile the multiple instances of wrongdoing against claims that the Empire's rights and wrongs cannot be weighed against one another.
Biggar was confronted with criticism of comments he made in favour of the British Empire and a lot of this text feels like a highly embittered strop in reaction to that criticism.
Firstly this is not, despite the title, a book looking at colonialism in a wider context, his focus is entirely on defending and excusing the British Empire specifically. In fact, he is happy to, and in fact does, criticise other empires and other colonial systems extensively and repeatedly.
Biggar has certainly done his research, he presents a wide range of historical facts spanning an almost 500 year history of the British Empire, however I remain unconvinced by his argument and if I am honest I am not actually sure HE is convinced by his argument either.
Time and again throughout the book Biggar subverts the commonly understood meanings of words like racism, discrimination, genocide etc to 'show' how they cannot possibly be applied to the activities of British colonists. Time and time again, he goes into extensive detail of acts of ethnic cleansing, torture, murder etc only to brush it to one side as excusable in some obscure and questionable fashion. I find it hard to believe that a man who claims a Christian faith, and to have even an ounce of sense can be convinced by these weak and often repugnant excuses.
I believe that the vast majority of rational people are able to recognise that the British Empire, like all political systems, was not an absolute evil. Biggar makes this point, managing to praise Nazi Germany for autobahn construction, however when set against the many wrongs committed, it is difficult even for Biggar to claim that it was a net benefit and should be excused all criticism. Biggar is happy yo criticise large aspects of it, overall however he seems to feel that he should be allowed to criticise, but that every criticism has an excuse that should be used to exponged the wrong from the historical record. He seems genuinely affronted that anyone least of all anyone he does not deem to be sufficiently scholarly, should be allowed to discuss these wrongs. All criticism, even by public bodies of their own actions, is seen by Biggar as insincere, an attempt at being fashionable, rather than a recognition that wrongdoing has occurred in the past. I would question why he objects to open discussion and recognition of these wrongs and would argue that it is only by remembering and acknowledging these that we can have a clear understanding of our own and the world's history. Maybe I am simply not enough of a scholar to understand why every time a white Britain rounded up indigenous peoples, re-educated their children, removed them from their homeland, disenfranchised them, tortured them, stole their land or property, burned their cultural sites, killed their leaders, took their lives could be excused by bringing trains or Christianity to a region. Who knows?
I would definitely recommend this title for the attention to detail and so that readers can see if they are able to reconcile the multiple instances of wrongdoing against claims that the Empire's rights and wrongs cannot be weighed against one another.
February 10, 2023
Don’t think I have read a book like this before. It is a repudiation of the idea that the British Empire was a force for evil and that it had no virtues whatsoever.
This book is a curious hybrid of a straight up history book and dissection of a cultural narrative, of the kind of work that Douglas Murray might write. There is a sense that book wouldn’t have been written even five years ago. Rather than being straight history of the Empire this is almost courtroom defence of it, with a good deal of the text dismantling various accusations.
I think the book is successful in presenting its case. I am grateful that a book like this exists, as I know that a lot of the history I have been told and shown I now know to be untrue.
A good portion of the physical book is notes with the substance of it a little shy of 300 pages.
This book is a curious hybrid of a straight up history book and dissection of a cultural narrative, of the kind of work that Douglas Murray might write. There is a sense that book wouldn’t have been written even five years ago. Rather than being straight history of the Empire this is almost courtroom defence of it, with a good deal of the text dismantling various accusations.
I think the book is successful in presenting its case. I am grateful that a book like this exists, as I know that a lot of the history I have been told and shown I now know to be untrue.
A good portion of the physical book is notes with the substance of it a little shy of 300 pages.
March 7, 2023
This book was abandoned by the original publisher just before it was due to be released. This demonstrates though why it needs to be read and the important information therein.
The author goes systematically through each historical setting of the British Empire and he talks specifically and in detail about all of the worst events. In this respect it does the opposite to defend, in the sense that it catalogs many events the average reader, even those especially against the British, may not have specific knowledge of.
Bigger does a very good job at presenting facts rather than opinion. He talks about the 1M, then 2.5M Indians that respectively fought in WW1 and WW2 for the Empire and we learn that 45,000 miles of railway tracks were built on the Indian subcontinent. He talks about the challenge of trying to end discrimination of untouchables, female infanticide, or the practice of suttee, the burning of wives alive during their respective husbands funeral. He tells us about the European role in transporting 11M slaves from Africa across the Atlantic, approximately 20% who didn’t even make it to the other side, but he also tells us about the 17M transported by the Ottoman Empire. The British were the first civilisation to fully realise that slavery was wrong and actively fight a full scale battle with many other nations to eradicate it. He tells us about how slavery was already present for many hundreds of years in western Africa before the Europeans arrived.
He tells us about the 3.5M Indians who died during the Bengal famine and instead of simply blaming ‘evil Churchill’ as many do these days, he gets into the very complicated events at the time. He teaches us about the Irish Potato famine and how Ireland lost 1.5M during the famine and a further 2M who had to migrate abroad - in total about a quarter of the whole population gone just in 1845.
The list goes on and on, from the Opium Wars to the Benin Bronzes to the massacre at Amritsar. Never does Nigel Bigger flich from any truth. But if we are honest there are always contradictions in history. For instance, if General Dyer murdered so many at the Amritsar massacre why was he made an honoury sihk three days later at the sacred Golden Temple. Why is it we never hear these days about Sir William Jones, who in addition to his role as a judge in Calcutta, mastered Sanskrit and then translated Indian classics and unlocked the glories of India’s long forgotten Hindu and Buddist past. Under the first Indian British Governor General, Warren Hastings, Jones founded the Asiatic Society. This was just the tip of the iceberg in terms of many generations of Englishmen who tried to restore Indian treasures and the priceless cultural heritage of India largely destroyed during the Muslim invasions.
We can see that as the British Empire was so large and existed for such a long time, many terrible events happened and that there were many victims. But it can serve only a foolhardy emotional arguement to imagine all of this taking place in a pure world of harmony and human peace and contentment. As even a very slightest equiry of history, or for that matter, the present will tell us, the world was and is, full of conflict, war, and human sufferring on a global scale since we have existed. The question we need to ask is, ‘The British, compared to what?’. How would things have been better, or different had the British never existed? We should even more poignantly ask ourselves ‘where in the world would we rather live today?’ - under a military dictatorship, in a modern day slave state, or in a society that can discuss and admit it’s mistakes of the past while equally striving to build a better future?
As the great Nigerian writer Chinua Achebe is quoted as saying ‘If you only hear one side of the story, you have no understanding at all’. Even in his fierce criticism of colonialism in Africa, Achebe is very keen to also point out the good the British achieved.
Sun Yet-Sen, the Chinese revolutionist remarked on how fascinating it was that in just 70 years the British were able to make Hong Kong into the incredible place it had become whereas under the Chinese it had remained a empty rock for thousands of years. Never had he seen anything similar to Hong Kong under Chinese rule. When we look at Hong Kong today and the challenge of basic freedom and human rights the current people face, we should be very aware that although the past does deeply matter, it is the present and the future that we need to give most of our attention to. Those who try to cancel out one side of history are very focused on creating a different world and that should strike fear into all our hearts.
The author goes systematically through each historical setting of the British Empire and he talks specifically and in detail about all of the worst events. In this respect it does the opposite to defend, in the sense that it catalogs many events the average reader, even those especially against the British, may not have specific knowledge of.
Bigger does a very good job at presenting facts rather than opinion. He talks about the 1M, then 2.5M Indians that respectively fought in WW1 and WW2 for the Empire and we learn that 45,000 miles of railway tracks were built on the Indian subcontinent. He talks about the challenge of trying to end discrimination of untouchables, female infanticide, or the practice of suttee, the burning of wives alive during their respective husbands funeral. He tells us about the European role in transporting 11M slaves from Africa across the Atlantic, approximately 20% who didn’t even make it to the other side, but he also tells us about the 17M transported by the Ottoman Empire. The British were the first civilisation to fully realise that slavery was wrong and actively fight a full scale battle with many other nations to eradicate it. He tells us about how slavery was already present for many hundreds of years in western Africa before the Europeans arrived.
He tells us about the 3.5M Indians who died during the Bengal famine and instead of simply blaming ‘evil Churchill’ as many do these days, he gets into the very complicated events at the time. He teaches us about the Irish Potato famine and how Ireland lost 1.5M during the famine and a further 2M who had to migrate abroad - in total about a quarter of the whole population gone just in 1845.
The list goes on and on, from the Opium Wars to the Benin Bronzes to the massacre at Amritsar. Never does Nigel Bigger flich from any truth. But if we are honest there are always contradictions in history. For instance, if General Dyer murdered so many at the Amritsar massacre why was he made an honoury sihk three days later at the sacred Golden Temple. Why is it we never hear these days about Sir William Jones, who in addition to his role as a judge in Calcutta, mastered Sanskrit and then translated Indian classics and unlocked the glories of India’s long forgotten Hindu and Buddist past. Under the first Indian British Governor General, Warren Hastings, Jones founded the Asiatic Society. This was just the tip of the iceberg in terms of many generations of Englishmen who tried to restore Indian treasures and the priceless cultural heritage of India largely destroyed during the Muslim invasions.
We can see that as the British Empire was so large and existed for such a long time, many terrible events happened and that there were many victims. But it can serve only a foolhardy emotional arguement to imagine all of this taking place in a pure world of harmony and human peace and contentment. As even a very slightest equiry of history, or for that matter, the present will tell us, the world was and is, full of conflict, war, and human sufferring on a global scale since we have existed. The question we need to ask is, ‘The British, compared to what?’. How would things have been better, or different had the British never existed? We should even more poignantly ask ourselves ‘where in the world would we rather live today?’ - under a military dictatorship, in a modern day slave state, or in a society that can discuss and admit it’s mistakes of the past while equally striving to build a better future?
As the great Nigerian writer Chinua Achebe is quoted as saying ‘If you only hear one side of the story, you have no understanding at all’. Even in his fierce criticism of colonialism in Africa, Achebe is very keen to also point out the good the British achieved.
Sun Yet-Sen, the Chinese revolutionist remarked on how fascinating it was that in just 70 years the British were able to make Hong Kong into the incredible place it had become whereas under the Chinese it had remained a empty rock for thousands of years. Never had he seen anything similar to Hong Kong under Chinese rule. When we look at Hong Kong today and the challenge of basic freedom and human rights the current people face, we should be very aware that although the past does deeply matter, it is the present and the future that we need to give most of our attention to. Those who try to cancel out one side of history are very focused on creating a different world and that should strike fear into all our hearts.
May 7, 2023
Okay, this is tricky to review. Not least because (like most people, if they’re honest) I didn’t approach it without some degree of confirmation bias.
I’m patriotic and socially conservative (small c) with little patience for those who enjoy the benefits of living in Britain while attempting to run the country down as worthless because of its past. As my teenage son once said - There’s not much to be proud of in British history. We just gave the world concentration camps and slavery. I find it frustrating that this lazy distortion has become the prevailing wisdom of the next generation; especially because it’s our older generation that’s allowed the Marxist revision of history to flourish, unchallenged.
So - hoorah - here’s a book which attempts to set the record straight. You might think that as a certified gammon, I’d lap it up. But I didn’t.
I get that the author is learned and passionate about his subject, and that radical leftists at the original publishing company shut the book down (a key reason why it’s important to read it, in my opinion), but this work didn’t feel… honest enough to me. There was something about this unipolar litany of refuted claims, counter-arguments and rejections that left me a bit frustrated.
Just about every subject started with some sort of erroneous or misguided historical “fact” and proceeded to demolish it with historically-evidenced counter narrative. Now, that’s OK if you’re a scholar of history who is deeply familiar with the incidents in question, but as a layman with limited subject knowledge, I was left confused and irritated, searching in vain for a coherent, balanced narrative that would help me to properly understand the history of the time. Bigger did warn me that he wasn’t trying to write a narrative history, but I was presented with an unsatisfying and disjointed collection of assertions that the empire had not been evil; only incompetent.
I’d love to find a modern history book on the subject that is both fair and logical, that doesn’t set out to trash Britain for the sake of it, and that can put the history of Britain in context with the other empires, but this wasn’t what I hoped for (please let me know if such a book exists).
Despite my obvious confirmation bias, I do try to be a critical reader. As a result, I actually finished this book less on Biggar’s side than I had been when I started reading. The British Empire may have been significantly better than the regimes it replaced, and Britain may have been instrumental in forcing the world to abandon slavery, but the long list of offences still adds up to some pretty unpleasant reading.
I remain convinced that Britain has many things to be proud of, and I agree with Biggar’s assertion that critics of Britain’s history are strangely silent when it comes to the criticism of everywhere else. But as for the more unsavoury aspects of our past, I can’t help but think that the popular refrain “it was a different time” is wearing a little thin.
I’m patriotic and socially conservative (small c) with little patience for those who enjoy the benefits of living in Britain while attempting to run the country down as worthless because of its past. As my teenage son once said - There’s not much to be proud of in British history. We just gave the world concentration camps and slavery. I find it frustrating that this lazy distortion has become the prevailing wisdom of the next generation; especially because it’s our older generation that’s allowed the Marxist revision of history to flourish, unchallenged.
So - hoorah - here’s a book which attempts to set the record straight. You might think that as a certified gammon, I’d lap it up. But I didn’t.
I get that the author is learned and passionate about his subject, and that radical leftists at the original publishing company shut the book down (a key reason why it’s important to read it, in my opinion), but this work didn’t feel… honest enough to me. There was something about this unipolar litany of refuted claims, counter-arguments and rejections that left me a bit frustrated.
Just about every subject started with some sort of erroneous or misguided historical “fact” and proceeded to demolish it with historically-evidenced counter narrative. Now, that’s OK if you’re a scholar of history who is deeply familiar with the incidents in question, but as a layman with limited subject knowledge, I was left confused and irritated, searching in vain for a coherent, balanced narrative that would help me to properly understand the history of the time. Bigger did warn me that he wasn’t trying to write a narrative history, but I was presented with an unsatisfying and disjointed collection of assertions that the empire had not been evil; only incompetent.
I’d love to find a modern history book on the subject that is both fair and logical, that doesn’t set out to trash Britain for the sake of it, and that can put the history of Britain in context with the other empires, but this wasn’t what I hoped for (please let me know if such a book exists).
Despite my obvious confirmation bias, I do try to be a critical reader. As a result, I actually finished this book less on Biggar’s side than I had been when I started reading. The British Empire may have been significantly better than the regimes it replaced, and Britain may have been instrumental in forcing the world to abandon slavery, but the long list of offences still adds up to some pretty unpleasant reading.
I remain convinced that Britain has many things to be proud of, and I agree with Biggar’s assertion that critics of Britain’s history are strangely silent when it comes to the criticism of everywhere else. But as for the more unsavoury aspects of our past, I can’t help but think that the popular refrain “it was a different time” is wearing a little thin.
January 31, 2025
Depois de anos e anos de glorificação e exaltação do colonialismo, passámos para o extremo oposto em que tudo o que se relaciona com colonialismo e imperialismo parece agora ter uma automática e irrevogável conotação negativa.
Este livro é uma lufada de ar fresco, pois nem glorifica nem vilipendia, simplesmente apresenta registos históricos, analisa diferentes pontos de vista e depois adopta uma posição, fundamentando-a com base em inúmeras fontes. Se nem sempre concordei com tudo o que foi dito, gostei da forma como o autor explica os seus pontos de vista, reconhece sem rodeios o que foi reprovável e horrível mas também não se acanha de descrever o que foi bom e proveitoso para colonizadores e colonizados.
E é no mínimo chocante ver de que forma a informação é manipulada – por vezes mesmo inventada, como no caso das imaginadas valas comuns em escolas canadianas – para servir agendas políticas e o oportunismo de alguns.
”Esta indiferença sem escrúpulos para com a verdade histórica indica que a controvérsia sobre o Império realmente não é de todo uma controvérsia sobre a História. É sobre o presente, não sobre o passado.“
Este livro foca-se sobretudo no império britânico, mas não deixa de mencionar outras realidades embora mais de passagem (as colónias portuguesas em África, a obliteração da civilização Apache das Grandes Planícies pelos Comanches, a colonização maori das ilhas que compõem a atual Nova Zelândia, entre outras).
Nigel Biggar é historiador e e teólogo e a sua especialidade, a ética, transparece ao longo de todo o livro.
Em suma, a história como ela foi, e não como gostaríamos que tivesse sido. Ou, nas palavras de Chinua Achebe:
”O legado do colonialismo não é simples, mas sim de grande complexidade, com contradições – coisas boas, tal como coisas más.”
Este livro é uma lufada de ar fresco, pois nem glorifica nem vilipendia, simplesmente apresenta registos históricos, analisa diferentes pontos de vista e depois adopta uma posição, fundamentando-a com base em inúmeras fontes. Se nem sempre concordei com tudo o que foi dito, gostei da forma como o autor explica os seus pontos de vista, reconhece sem rodeios o que foi reprovável e horrível mas também não se acanha de descrever o que foi bom e proveitoso para colonizadores e colonizados.
E é no mínimo chocante ver de que forma a informação é manipulada – por vezes mesmo inventada, como no caso das imaginadas valas comuns em escolas canadianas – para servir agendas políticas e o oportunismo de alguns.
”Esta indiferença sem escrúpulos para com a verdade histórica indica que a controvérsia sobre o Império realmente não é de todo uma controvérsia sobre a História. É sobre o presente, não sobre o passado.“
Este livro foca-se sobretudo no império britânico, mas não deixa de mencionar outras realidades embora mais de passagem (as colónias portuguesas em África, a obliteração da civilização Apache das Grandes Planícies pelos Comanches, a colonização maori das ilhas que compõem a atual Nova Zelândia, entre outras).
Nigel Biggar é historiador e e teólogo e a sua especialidade, a ética, transparece ao longo de todo o livro.
Em suma, a história como ela foi, e não como gostaríamos que tivesse sido. Ou, nas palavras de Chinua Achebe:
”O legado do colonialismo não é simples, mas sim de grande complexidade, com contradições – coisas boas, tal como coisas más.”
December 13, 2024
I enjoyed this view of the colonial era. It has long been derided unfairly. Nigel Biggar expertly cuts through the all of the accusations that are passed off as fact.
February 14, 2025
Probably more accurately a 3.5/5.
Nigel Biggar is the former Regius Professor of Moral and Pastoral Theology at Oxford University. Despite his prestigious accolades, his latest book, Colonialism: A Moral Reckoning has courted controversy. In it, Biggar contends that British colonialism was both a source of evil as well as good and that, overall, the good accomplished by the British Empire outweighed the bad. For this, he has attracted the reactionary and vicious vitriol of many, even while his book has been praised by the likes of Niall Ferguson, Tirthankar Roy, Andrew Roberts, and Tunku Varadarajan.
In Colonialism Biggar asks, is the British Empire, at its core, essentially an evil empire? Is it a domain of faultless saints? Or is it a nuanced, complicated mix of the two, possessing and championing laudable values while also being guilty of grave sins (has any nation ever been perfect)? If the British Empire lasted for roughly three centuries (16th - mid 20th century), was it an oppressive, authoritarian regime during its entire duration or were there changes along the way? Was its policies and governance of one colony different (contextual!) than in another?
Fulminating against what he sees as an overly one-sided condemnation of colonialism by leftists in general and academia and activists in particular, Biggar comes out strongly in support of the British Empire and its legacy (it should be noted that despite the book’s title, the focus is on British colonialism, rather than on colonialism overall). He seeks to offer a corrective that challenges the ensconced orthodoxy of Western liberalism. In this, I do believe that at times he tends to be overly defensive of Britain but if you posit (as both Biggar and I do) that the Overton window on colonialism is starkly on one side, then Biggar’s forthright apologetics for Britain’s global forays perhaps can help shift the conversation somewhere closer to a nuanced centre.
Colonialism is a rather unique book in that it blends historical investigation with moral assessment. Biggar takes up common critiques of the British Empire such as that it was “essentially racist” and violent, that it was responsible for genocide, that it was fuelled by a desire to exploit others, and that its undemocratic administration thus made its governance illegitimate (p. 17). As he examines each of these accusations he takes readers on a whirlwind tour of British colonialism in its various holdings, presenting British engagement with native peoples and the empire’s policies and practices. As should be obvious for an empire that lasted around three centuries, Britain’s global governance was dynamic and evolving; how Britain administered Australia is different from how it ruled India and what that looked like in 1830 was different than in 1910.
Biggar is not uncritical of the British Empire. He takes it to task for its misdeeds and failings; for instance, he has opprobrium for the Opium War. Sometimes even while critiquing an individual or a policy, he will lay out the person or authority’s thinking in enacting this or that practice which does not absolve them but at least provides 21st century readers with more of an understanding of the original context - an explanation, not an excuse. One of the recurring points Biggar makes is that at times there was disconnect between the empire’s centre and its periphery. This makes sense as for much of history there were no means of mass, instant communications; in times of great unrest, it might be impossible for the colonial administration to await directives from distant London. At times, colonists rebelled against colonial authorities and, unfortunately, it was often in these instances that indigenous people were harmed.
As a Vancouverite, I was most interested in Biggar’s assessment of colonialism in Canada. Figures such as Canada's first Prime Minister, John A. Macdonald, and Egerton Ryerson have been widely denounced (the former had his statue toppled in Montreal and the latter had the university bearing his name rebranded as “Toronto Metropolitan University”). Canada’s history with its First Nations is sadly one of pain and exploitation, alongside partnership; to wholesale condemn European-indigenous relations is problematic in its own right. For instance, at times Christian missionaries intervened as “middlemen” advocating on behalf of First Nations against schemes by colonists (including the Hudson’s Bay Company). Biggar quotes Macdonald himself who, writing to “Peter Jones (Kahkewaquonaby), a Mississauga chief and Methodist minister, ‘I hope to see some day the Indian race represented by one of themselves on the floor of the House of Commons’” (pp. 126-27). One can easily rebuke the British and other European powers for being too paternalistic towards colonized peoples but all in all, liberal democracy is a fairly recent attainment in the long arc of history; most Canadian women would only gain the right to vote federally in 1918 and it wasn’t until 1960 that voting was deemed a right regardless of ethnicity (interestingly, immediately before the North-West Rebellion, Macdonald himself had proposed a measure that would have granted voting rights to First Nations which was criticized by the opposition Liberals).
The greatest tragedy that Canada inflicted upon its First Nations is the residential school system which lasted from the latter half of the 1800s to 1996. Altogether, approximately 150,000 students attended these schools, “a third of native school-age children” (p. 128). Biggar notes that in the residential school system’s early years “Participation was entirely voluntary until 1894 and voluntary as a rule until 1920, when the government acquired the authority to compel the attendance of any child” (p. 128). Biggar bluntly declares that the residential schools were often lacking and that they failed to live up to “their humanitarian ideal:”
What Biggar does contend is that the residential school system was not a universal failure. For one, it was born out of an acknowledgement that the traditional indigenous ways of life were dying out; the Plains buffalo population had sharply declined and increasing numbers of Europeans were settling in Canada. The Canadian Pacific Railway was but one notable instance of the technological innovations that were changing Canada from coast to coast and the desire to see First Nations equipped to adapt to a modernizing culture does not strike me as sinister as it does others, though I would strongly condemn and even more, lament, that this objective was tainted and tarnished by the abuses committed at the residential schools. The aim was to integrate First Nations into the rest of Canada; those who would liken residential schools to the Holocaust thus fundamentally misconstrue their purpose.
Biggar relies extensively on the scholarship of Thomas Flanagan and J.R. Miller and he critiques some of the methodology of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s reports (pp. 349-51). For instance, he notes that “of the exonerating testimony of former pupils, which Miller faithfully records, the report makes no mention at all” and that the report privileges the “truth of lived experiences as told to us by Survivors and others”; Biggar asserts that “The notions that ‘lived experience’ is never pure, but always interpreted; that the interpretation might be misshapen by an interest in exploiting the political power of victimhood; or that it might not tell the truth at all - these notions are never allowed to intrude. Indeed, they are dismissed as racist” (p. 350). That can sound a little too conspiratorial, but I do observe that a lot of Western culture has been affected by a “victimhood culture” that uses the status of victim to elude any personal responsibility. All in all, I think that most students at residential schools had negative experiences (and I think the strategy to remove them far from their own families was inherently wrong), but there are testimonies and evidence from former students who openly confess to having had positive experiences too and their voices ought to be heard alongside others (like "de-transitioners," they complicate the prevailing narrative and are often looked upon with suspicion).
The endnotes of Colonialism are 130 pages, comprising over one-quarter of the book (or 30% if one excludes bibliography and index) and not only showcase Biggar’s exhaustive research but also serve as a space for Biggar to provide further details and nuance his argument. Anyone who reads this book ought to also read the endnotes for this reason; a line in the main text that might seem questionable is often given further explanation. Indeed, Biggar himself states that “I have consigned most of my skirmishes with historians to the endnotes” (p. 14).
Much more could be said about this book but a completely thorough review is a challenge for me to present as its wide scope would require a broad familiarity with all of the different colonies Britain governed and their unique histories; I did take a course on the British Empire over a decade ago and I read more history than most, but I will admit that my knowledge of Canadian history vastly surpasses my awareness of, say, Indian or Nigerian history. But from my general historical knowledge, I think Biggar presents a compelling case for the redeeming qualities of British colonialism. He extensively cites primary sources, including leading figures among the colonized who lauded the achievements and reforms that British rule had brought to their culture, such as B. R. Ambedkar, Sun Yat-sen, and Chinua Achebe; there were those among the colonized who genuinely took pride in being part of the British Empire.
Yet while Biggar is a Christian ethicist, the tone throughout most of the book is largely bookish and dispassionate; one doesn’t get the sense that Biggar has spent time with First Nations people who experienced residential schools even as he marshals an impressive array of facts and counterpoints. Some of Biggar’s arguments seem like stretches to me, as when he opines that a people who do not use their land for maximum benefit deserve to have it taken from them and given to those who will (yet at the same time, ownership of land is more complicated that it is often made to be; even before Europeans arrived in North America, land was continually contested by indigenous tribes and does “ownership” of the land basically come down to “finder’s keepers, loser’s weepers?”).
Reflecting on Colonialism, I’m reminded of books I read that seek to explain biblical (specifically Old Testament) violence. For Christians who take the Bible to be holy, faithful, and divinely-inspired, passages that narrate violence like the deaths of the firstborns about the Egyptians or the killing of the Canaanites are harrowing texts to reconcile with the person of Jesus Christ (and indeed, for being a Christian ethicist, Jesus doesn’t really show up in Biggar’s assessment of colonialism, though this is not a work of theological ethics and I think Biggar is seeking to present a broader case for colonialism rather than a confessional one). Scholars and apologists like Paul Copan do make compelling cases that situate Old Testament ethics in the world of antiquity but one’s pathos is not quite fully satisfied with intellectual explanation.
The past is a foreign country and many people today want to colonize history with the mores, values, and tenets of the present. Because we do not live in the past and only experience the present (and the further back in history this goes, the more the disjuncture between our present and the past), there is a tendency to smuggle in assumptions and contemporary knowledge when it comes to assessing our ancestors. But voting rights, healthcare, education - to name but a few things - have changed over time and it would be a grave error to assume that the right to vote, easy access to quality healthcare and the ability to attend a respected college was as attainable for the Scottish miner living in the Highlands in 1800 as it is today, let alone a peasant in a rural Kenyan village.
The terrible irony of critics of the British Empire is that they are often so, well, Western. Those who want to decolonize the canon, broaden curriculum to a global outlook, still possess blinders for Western/British culture. They know their Cecil Rhodes but not their Shaka Zulu. They will rebuke John A. Macdonald and defend Louis Riel, the (quite possibly mentally unstable) Metis revolutionary who wanted to found an ultramontanist theocracy. A truly global perspective would compare the exploits and histories of worldwide nations (which is what Biggar is attempting to do) but most of those advocating decolonization haven’t dug deep into non-Western history and found the skeletons buried there. How often do we hear about the Arabic slave trade? Or that Native Americans (even the ones deemed more “civilized”) owned black slaves (and used other First Nations as slaves)? Critics of empire also often condemn the Spanish conquest of Mexico but once the Spanish encountered the Aztecs, would it have been moral to placidly stand by while the Aztecs killed thousands - potentially as many as 250,000 - each year in human sacrifice? How would anti-colonialists approach practices like sati or the Hindu caste system that kept so-called “Untouchables” at the bottom of the social hierarchy? Biggar accuses his leftist critics of being too dismissive of historical facts. History is bloody, messy, and condemning or condoning the past requires an appeal to some standard of morality but as postmodern culture has demonstrated, everyone seems to have a different idea of what is moral or immoral (in an interesting book, the African writer Obianuju Ekeocha highlights how the values of radical Western liberalism are being exported to Africa but that, hypocritically, this imposition of foreign tenets are not denounced by leftist academics and activists).
Biggar closes the book with sobering reflections on how the West has arrived at this place in history where we are subjected to “the tyranny of guilt” (to use Pascal Bruckner’s phrase). Biggar wisely questions why reparations today would be moral for offences in the distant past and points out how chaotic it would be to trace a genealogy of victimhood. Would it be just to force a 20 year old Vietnamese woman to pay reparations to African Americans when she only immigrated to the USA as a baby in 2001? If Americans owe reparations to the Comanche do the Comanche in turn owe reparations to the Apache for driving them from their homelands? Biggar also sees the severe judgment against the West as a kind of secularized quest for righteousness that actually becomes a narcissistic obsession with the Self because it is so self-condemnatory that it fails to grant the Other any agency and thus, personal responsibility (pp. 295-96).
Colonialism is a bold book, incendiary to anti-colonialists and a counterpunch for those who believe the West (in this case represented by Great Britain), had redeeming qualities. Biggar seeks to nuance and complicate the anti-Western orthodoxy that has become embedded among academics and activists (and, in particular, spread by scholars who are largely neither historians nor ethicists; Biggar observes that “Usually the post-colonialist is a scholar of literature” and notes that it in The Oxford Handbook of Postcolonial Studies, “literature furnished twenty-four of the forty-four contributors…history four, political science and anthropology four, and philosophy one,” p. 294, 427).
Colonialism and empire have become dirty words but in and through Biggar’s book, the (British) empire strikes back and is found to be actually more good than evil
Nigel Biggar is the former Regius Professor of Moral and Pastoral Theology at Oxford University. Despite his prestigious accolades, his latest book, Colonialism: A Moral Reckoning has courted controversy. In it, Biggar contends that British colonialism was both a source of evil as well as good and that, overall, the good accomplished by the British Empire outweighed the bad. For this, he has attracted the reactionary and vicious vitriol of many, even while his book has been praised by the likes of Niall Ferguson, Tirthankar Roy, Andrew Roberts, and Tunku Varadarajan.
In Colonialism Biggar asks, is the British Empire, at its core, essentially an evil empire? Is it a domain of faultless saints? Or is it a nuanced, complicated mix of the two, possessing and championing laudable values while also being guilty of grave sins (has any nation ever been perfect)? If the British Empire lasted for roughly three centuries (16th - mid 20th century), was it an oppressive, authoritarian regime during its entire duration or were there changes along the way? Was its policies and governance of one colony different (contextual!) than in another?
Fulminating against what he sees as an overly one-sided condemnation of colonialism by leftists in general and academia and activists in particular, Biggar comes out strongly in support of the British Empire and its legacy (it should be noted that despite the book’s title, the focus is on British colonialism, rather than on colonialism overall). He seeks to offer a corrective that challenges the ensconced orthodoxy of Western liberalism. In this, I do believe that at times he tends to be overly defensive of Britain but if you posit (as both Biggar and I do) that the Overton window on colonialism is starkly on one side, then Biggar’s forthright apologetics for Britain’s global forays perhaps can help shift the conversation somewhere closer to a nuanced centre.
Colonialism is a rather unique book in that it blends historical investigation with moral assessment. Biggar takes up common critiques of the British Empire such as that it was “essentially racist” and violent, that it was responsible for genocide, that it was fuelled by a desire to exploit others, and that its undemocratic administration thus made its governance illegitimate (p. 17). As he examines each of these accusations he takes readers on a whirlwind tour of British colonialism in its various holdings, presenting British engagement with native peoples and the empire’s policies and practices. As should be obvious for an empire that lasted around three centuries, Britain’s global governance was dynamic and evolving; how Britain administered Australia is different from how it ruled India and what that looked like in 1830 was different than in 1910.
Biggar is not uncritical of the British Empire. He takes it to task for its misdeeds and failings; for instance, he has opprobrium for the Opium War. Sometimes even while critiquing an individual or a policy, he will lay out the person or authority’s thinking in enacting this or that practice which does not absolve them but at least provides 21st century readers with more of an understanding of the original context - an explanation, not an excuse. One of the recurring points Biggar makes is that at times there was disconnect between the empire’s centre and its periphery. This makes sense as for much of history there were no means of mass, instant communications; in times of great unrest, it might be impossible for the colonial administration to await directives from distant London. At times, colonists rebelled against colonial authorities and, unfortunately, it was often in these instances that indigenous people were harmed.
As a Vancouverite, I was most interested in Biggar’s assessment of colonialism in Canada. Figures such as Canada's first Prime Minister, John A. Macdonald, and Egerton Ryerson have been widely denounced (the former had his statue toppled in Montreal and the latter had the university bearing his name rebranded as “Toronto Metropolitan University”). Canada’s history with its First Nations is sadly one of pain and exploitation, alongside partnership; to wholesale condemn European-indigenous relations is problematic in its own right. For instance, at times Christian missionaries intervened as “middlemen” advocating on behalf of First Nations against schemes by colonists (including the Hudson’s Bay Company). Biggar quotes Macdonald himself who, writing to “Peter Jones (Kahkewaquonaby), a Mississauga chief and Methodist minister, ‘I hope to see some day the Indian race represented by one of themselves on the floor of the House of Commons’” (pp. 126-27). One can easily rebuke the British and other European powers for being too paternalistic towards colonized peoples but all in all, liberal democracy is a fairly recent attainment in the long arc of history; most Canadian women would only gain the right to vote federally in 1918 and it wasn’t until 1960 that voting was deemed a right regardless of ethnicity (interestingly, immediately before the North-West Rebellion, Macdonald himself had proposed a measure that would have granted voting rights to First Nations which was criticized by the opposition Liberals).
The greatest tragedy that Canada inflicted upon its First Nations is the residential school system which lasted from the latter half of the 1800s to 1996. Altogether, approximately 150,000 students attended these schools, “a third of native school-age children” (p. 128). Biggar notes that in the residential school system’s early years “Participation was entirely voluntary until 1894 and voluntary as a rule until 1920, when the government acquired the authority to compel the attendance of any child” (p. 128). Biggar bluntly declares that the residential schools were often lacking and that they failed to live up to “their humanitarian ideal:”
Too often, the discouragement of native languages was unnecessarily strict, native culture was generally denigrated and indiscriminately suppressed, the promotion of Christianity was aggressive, the time devoted to manual labour was excessive and the time reserved for classroom education was inadequate. The diet, clothing, and provision of medical services were generally poor - although ‘students…were conscious that the conditions from which they had come to the school were often no better, or even worse’. There was also corporal punishment, bullying, and sexual abuse - this last perpetrated sometimes by members of staff, but more often by other pupils (pp. 128-29).
What Biggar does contend is that the residential school system was not a universal failure. For one, it was born out of an acknowledgement that the traditional indigenous ways of life were dying out; the Plains buffalo population had sharply declined and increasing numbers of Europeans were settling in Canada. The Canadian Pacific Railway was but one notable instance of the technological innovations that were changing Canada from coast to coast and the desire to see First Nations equipped to adapt to a modernizing culture does not strike me as sinister as it does others, though I would strongly condemn and even more, lament, that this objective was tainted and tarnished by the abuses committed at the residential schools. The aim was to integrate First Nations into the rest of Canada; those who would liken residential schools to the Holocaust thus fundamentally misconstrue their purpose.
Biggar relies extensively on the scholarship of Thomas Flanagan and J.R. Miller and he critiques some of the methodology of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s reports (pp. 349-51). For instance, he notes that “of the exonerating testimony of former pupils, which Miller faithfully records, the report makes no mention at all” and that the report privileges the “truth of lived experiences as told to us by Survivors and others”; Biggar asserts that “The notions that ‘lived experience’ is never pure, but always interpreted; that the interpretation might be misshapen by an interest in exploiting the political power of victimhood; or that it might not tell the truth at all - these notions are never allowed to intrude. Indeed, they are dismissed as racist” (p. 350). That can sound a little too conspiratorial, but I do observe that a lot of Western culture has been affected by a “victimhood culture” that uses the status of victim to elude any personal responsibility. All in all, I think that most students at residential schools had negative experiences (and I think the strategy to remove them far from their own families was inherently wrong), but there are testimonies and evidence from former students who openly confess to having had positive experiences too and their voices ought to be heard alongside others (like "de-transitioners," they complicate the prevailing narrative and are often looked upon with suspicion).
The endnotes of Colonialism are 130 pages, comprising over one-quarter of the book (or 30% if one excludes bibliography and index) and not only showcase Biggar’s exhaustive research but also serve as a space for Biggar to provide further details and nuance his argument. Anyone who reads this book ought to also read the endnotes for this reason; a line in the main text that might seem questionable is often given further explanation. Indeed, Biggar himself states that “I have consigned most of my skirmishes with historians to the endnotes” (p. 14).
Much more could be said about this book but a completely thorough review is a challenge for me to present as its wide scope would require a broad familiarity with all of the different colonies Britain governed and their unique histories; I did take a course on the British Empire over a decade ago and I read more history than most, but I will admit that my knowledge of Canadian history vastly surpasses my awareness of, say, Indian or Nigerian history. But from my general historical knowledge, I think Biggar presents a compelling case for the redeeming qualities of British colonialism. He extensively cites primary sources, including leading figures among the colonized who lauded the achievements and reforms that British rule had brought to their culture, such as B. R. Ambedkar, Sun Yat-sen, and Chinua Achebe; there were those among the colonized who genuinely took pride in being part of the British Empire.
Yet while Biggar is a Christian ethicist, the tone throughout most of the book is largely bookish and dispassionate; one doesn’t get the sense that Biggar has spent time with First Nations people who experienced residential schools even as he marshals an impressive array of facts and counterpoints. Some of Biggar’s arguments seem like stretches to me, as when he opines that a people who do not use their land for maximum benefit deserve to have it taken from them and given to those who will (yet at the same time, ownership of land is more complicated that it is often made to be; even before Europeans arrived in North America, land was continually contested by indigenous tribes and does “ownership” of the land basically come down to “finder’s keepers, loser’s weepers?”).
Reflecting on Colonialism, I’m reminded of books I read that seek to explain biblical (specifically Old Testament) violence. For Christians who take the Bible to be holy, faithful, and divinely-inspired, passages that narrate violence like the deaths of the firstborns about the Egyptians or the killing of the Canaanites are harrowing texts to reconcile with the person of Jesus Christ (and indeed, for being a Christian ethicist, Jesus doesn’t really show up in Biggar’s assessment of colonialism, though this is not a work of theological ethics and I think Biggar is seeking to present a broader case for colonialism rather than a confessional one). Scholars and apologists like Paul Copan do make compelling cases that situate Old Testament ethics in the world of antiquity but one’s pathos is not quite fully satisfied with intellectual explanation.
The past is a foreign country and many people today want to colonize history with the mores, values, and tenets of the present. Because we do not live in the past and only experience the present (and the further back in history this goes, the more the disjuncture between our present and the past), there is a tendency to smuggle in assumptions and contemporary knowledge when it comes to assessing our ancestors. But voting rights, healthcare, education - to name but a few things - have changed over time and it would be a grave error to assume that the right to vote, easy access to quality healthcare and the ability to attend a respected college was as attainable for the Scottish miner living in the Highlands in 1800 as it is today, let alone a peasant in a rural Kenyan village.
The terrible irony of critics of the British Empire is that they are often so, well, Western. Those who want to decolonize the canon, broaden curriculum to a global outlook, still possess blinders for Western/British culture. They know their Cecil Rhodes but not their Shaka Zulu. They will rebuke John A. Macdonald and defend Louis Riel, the (quite possibly mentally unstable) Metis revolutionary who wanted to found an ultramontanist theocracy. A truly global perspective would compare the exploits and histories of worldwide nations (which is what Biggar is attempting to do) but most of those advocating decolonization haven’t dug deep into non-Western history and found the skeletons buried there. How often do we hear about the Arabic slave trade? Or that Native Americans (even the ones deemed more “civilized”) owned black slaves (and used other First Nations as slaves)? Critics of empire also often condemn the Spanish conquest of Mexico but once the Spanish encountered the Aztecs, would it have been moral to placidly stand by while the Aztecs killed thousands - potentially as many as 250,000 - each year in human sacrifice? How would anti-colonialists approach practices like sati or the Hindu caste system that kept so-called “Untouchables” at the bottom of the social hierarchy? Biggar accuses his leftist critics of being too dismissive of historical facts. History is bloody, messy, and condemning or condoning the past requires an appeal to some standard of morality but as postmodern culture has demonstrated, everyone seems to have a different idea of what is moral or immoral (in an interesting book, the African writer Obianuju Ekeocha highlights how the values of radical Western liberalism are being exported to Africa but that, hypocritically, this imposition of foreign tenets are not denounced by leftist academics and activists).
Biggar closes the book with sobering reflections on how the West has arrived at this place in history where we are subjected to “the tyranny of guilt” (to use Pascal Bruckner’s phrase). Biggar wisely questions why reparations today would be moral for offences in the distant past and points out how chaotic it would be to trace a genealogy of victimhood. Would it be just to force a 20 year old Vietnamese woman to pay reparations to African Americans when she only immigrated to the USA as a baby in 2001? If Americans owe reparations to the Comanche do the Comanche in turn owe reparations to the Apache for driving them from their homelands? Biggar also sees the severe judgment against the West as a kind of secularized quest for righteousness that actually becomes a narcissistic obsession with the Self because it is so self-condemnatory that it fails to grant the Other any agency and thus, personal responsibility (pp. 295-96).
Colonialism is a bold book, incendiary to anti-colonialists and a counterpunch for those who believe the West (in this case represented by Great Britain), had redeeming qualities. Biggar seeks to nuance and complicate the anti-Western orthodoxy that has become embedded among academics and activists (and, in particular, spread by scholars who are largely neither historians nor ethicists; Biggar observes that “Usually the post-colonialist is a scholar of literature” and notes that it in The Oxford Handbook of Postcolonial Studies, “literature furnished twenty-four of the forty-four contributors…history four, political science and anthropology four, and philosophy one,” p. 294, 427).
Colonialism and empire have become dirty words but in and through Biggar’s book, the (British) empire strikes back and is found to be actually more good than evil
June 19, 2025
I highly recommend this book to anyone interested in this question, especially with all of the bad press around concepts of “colonialism.” In this book, the author looks at each of the major areas in which contemporary authors have been attacking “colonialism,” or Western civilization. He interacts with the best arguments, and provides a very balanced approach to the subjects discussed (such as, European—specifically British—racism, oppression, and violence towards all other ethnicities and people groups).
June 2, 2023
Good overview of British colonialism, if a bit dry. Somewhat challenging to absorb so much information but thought provoking arguments (e.g., female circumcision) are worthy of consideration. The author presents the facts with the arguments on both sides for maintaining or eliminating a variety of practices (e.g., segregation) while limiting judgment of these practices. I do object to his depiction Aboriginal people as “simple minded,” although he redeemed himself when he identifies their native strengths. He concludes that residential schools for natives are currently regarded as cultural genocide. I would recommend this book to anyone interested in political anthropology, sociology, philosophy or history.
August 11, 2023
A detailed, informative and readable history of the British Empire arguing against many damaging falsehoods. The honest and detailed content of the book needs more coverage and should be on the shelves of every worthy library.
February 15, 2024
This is an incredibly detailed book that dives into the nitty-gritty historical details that allow us to address the following claims about the British empire, however uncertainly: that it was predominantly motivated by greed; that it was equivalent to slavery; that it was racist; that it was predicated on land theft; that it committed genocide; that it was fundamentally about economic exploitation; and that it was pervasively violent. Running through the responses to these questions is the counterfactual question: if the British had not been around, what would have happened otherwise, and would today's standard of living have been better or worse? Moreover, could [British] colonialism be characterized as predominantly good or evil? These are questions to which no simple, certain answers can be drawn, and Biggar demonstrates this using extensive case examples and wide-ranging scholarship.
For example, in chapter 1, Biggar argues that no single or set of unifying motives can be said to have propelled the British empire abroad. These motives included “the aversion to poverty and persecution, the yearning for a better life, the desire to make one’s way in the world, the duty to satisfy shareholders, the lure of adventure, cultural curiosity, the need to make peace and keep it, the concomitant need to maintain martial prestige, the imperative of gaining military or political advantage over enemies and rivals, and the vocation to lift oppression and establish stable self-government” (p. 50). For example, “the EIC’s [East India Company] Indian empire grew without any sense of imperial mission and without any grand plan, and simply in ad hoc response to commercial and money-making opportunities and the consequent requirements of security” (p. 33). Likewise, Egypt’s brief British rule was prolonged for various motives – as a trade route to Asia, to ensure stable rule after Britain took over, and due to the welcomed presence that many Egyptians expressed. Counterfactually, it’s not hard to make the case that Britain’s presence in Egypt led to greater human flourishing than if they had not entered the region.
Moreover, Biggar advocates for a nuanced relationship between colonialism and slavery (chapter 2) and colonialism and racism (chapter 3), questioning the equivocations made by contemporary anti-colonial movements. Biggar points out the British empire’s role in abolishing the slave trade, highlighting the moral and political efforts that led to its prohibition. Likewise, far from denying the existence of racial prejudices among the British, they were not indicative of a universally racist ideology driving the empire's actions; instead, Biggar suggests that the empire’s approach was often pragmatic, including a respect for local traditions and with an overall goal of addressing injustices and promoting equality.
Next, Biggar questions the claim that the British empire’s expansion was a mere function of conquest, instead arguing the empire was more nuanced—involving treaties, negotiations, etc.—which required navigating often irreconcilable notions of rights, land ownership and sovereignty (chapter 4). For example, Biggar questions the peaceful coexistence narrative of the native tribes of Canada, revealing a history of conflict and displacement among such peoples themselves. Likewise, their lack of conception for ownership and rights means that it’s no simple task to determine who can rightly use or own such land, which has implications for the subject of reparations.
Similarly, it is simply inaccurate to regard colonialism as tantamount to genocide (chapter 5)—and only slightly less inaccurate as “cultural genocide”. First, the British empire’s interactions with indigenous populations—in Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa, especially—was a mixed bag, which included establishing reserves, promoting agriculture, and introducing Western education and labor practices. Some of the more controversial tactics—for example, residential schools in Canada—were seen as short-term efforts to gradually assimilate indigenous peoples, but which often went awry, causing much human suffering. Much suffering and death was unintentional—for example, in the diseases brought with settlers to the overseas colonies.
Biggar quotes the American political scientist, Michael Hechter, to summarize a major counterfactual point that cuts through the book: “‘good alien governance may be better than bad native governance’” (p. 190). This doesn’t necessarily justify expansionist policies, of course, but it does make things ethically murky to sort out. Though the evils of British colonialism may be quantified with whatever degree of uncertainty, one must also weigh the goods—and weighing the two together is exceedingly difficult but must be attempted for a fair ethical assessment. Biggar offers a long list of goods, including renouncing the slave trade in the name of human equality, promoting free market economics that gave natives better economic opportunities, creating regional peace by imposing an imperial authority on warring peoples, and countless others. Biggar then summarizes, “Several of those who advocate reparations for colonial evils think that it did more evil than good – but they assume so, without arguing their case. They do not argue their case, I surmise, because they are uneasily aware that it cannot be easily argued. Nor can the counter-case. This is because the goods and evils that the empire caused, intentionally or not, are of such different kinds that they cannot be measured against one another. They are incommensurable” (p. 264). Such an ambivalent conclusion seems inevitable to me.
Some quick downsides: Biggar often writes in a rather jumbled way, penning annoyingly long sentences, spliced up by semicolons, making them quite hard to parse. There is also often extraneous detail that clouds rather than crystallizes understanding—perhaps such details should often have been relegated to footnotes/endnotes. The writing also frequently forgets to pull itself back to the bigger picture, often seemingly getting lost in details that don’t help comprehension or coherence. I found it helpful to use ChatGPT to summarize the major themes and supporting arguments from each chapter when finshed!
Overall, this is a much-needed book and breath of fresh air in a cultural climate whereby the monolithic evils of colonialism are invoked to explain modern day racial and socioeconomic disparities. Biggar shows things aren’t so simple.
For example, in chapter 1, Biggar argues that no single or set of unifying motives can be said to have propelled the British empire abroad. These motives included “the aversion to poverty and persecution, the yearning for a better life, the desire to make one’s way in the world, the duty to satisfy shareholders, the lure of adventure, cultural curiosity, the need to make peace and keep it, the concomitant need to maintain martial prestige, the imperative of gaining military or political advantage over enemies and rivals, and the vocation to lift oppression and establish stable self-government” (p. 50). For example, “the EIC’s [East India Company] Indian empire grew without any sense of imperial mission and without any grand plan, and simply in ad hoc response to commercial and money-making opportunities and the consequent requirements of security” (p. 33). Likewise, Egypt’s brief British rule was prolonged for various motives – as a trade route to Asia, to ensure stable rule after Britain took over, and due to the welcomed presence that many Egyptians expressed. Counterfactually, it’s not hard to make the case that Britain’s presence in Egypt led to greater human flourishing than if they had not entered the region.
Moreover, Biggar advocates for a nuanced relationship between colonialism and slavery (chapter 2) and colonialism and racism (chapter 3), questioning the equivocations made by contemporary anti-colonial movements. Biggar points out the British empire’s role in abolishing the slave trade, highlighting the moral and political efforts that led to its prohibition. Likewise, far from denying the existence of racial prejudices among the British, they were not indicative of a universally racist ideology driving the empire's actions; instead, Biggar suggests that the empire’s approach was often pragmatic, including a respect for local traditions and with an overall goal of addressing injustices and promoting equality.
Next, Biggar questions the claim that the British empire’s expansion was a mere function of conquest, instead arguing the empire was more nuanced—involving treaties, negotiations, etc.—which required navigating often irreconcilable notions of rights, land ownership and sovereignty (chapter 4). For example, Biggar questions the peaceful coexistence narrative of the native tribes of Canada, revealing a history of conflict and displacement among such peoples themselves. Likewise, their lack of conception for ownership and rights means that it’s no simple task to determine who can rightly use or own such land, which has implications for the subject of reparations.
Similarly, it is simply inaccurate to regard colonialism as tantamount to genocide (chapter 5)—and only slightly less inaccurate as “cultural genocide”. First, the British empire’s interactions with indigenous populations—in Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa, especially—was a mixed bag, which included establishing reserves, promoting agriculture, and introducing Western education and labor practices. Some of the more controversial tactics—for example, residential schools in Canada—were seen as short-term efforts to gradually assimilate indigenous peoples, but which often went awry, causing much human suffering. Much suffering and death was unintentional—for example, in the diseases brought with settlers to the overseas colonies.
Biggar quotes the American political scientist, Michael Hechter, to summarize a major counterfactual point that cuts through the book: “‘good alien governance may be better than bad native governance’” (p. 190). This doesn’t necessarily justify expansionist policies, of course, but it does make things ethically murky to sort out. Though the evils of British colonialism may be quantified with whatever degree of uncertainty, one must also weigh the goods—and weighing the two together is exceedingly difficult but must be attempted for a fair ethical assessment. Biggar offers a long list of goods, including renouncing the slave trade in the name of human equality, promoting free market economics that gave natives better economic opportunities, creating regional peace by imposing an imperial authority on warring peoples, and countless others. Biggar then summarizes, “Several of those who advocate reparations for colonial evils think that it did more evil than good – but they assume so, without arguing their case. They do not argue their case, I surmise, because they are uneasily aware that it cannot be easily argued. Nor can the counter-case. This is because the goods and evils that the empire caused, intentionally or not, are of such different kinds that they cannot be measured against one another. They are incommensurable” (p. 264). Such an ambivalent conclusion seems inevitable to me.
Some quick downsides: Biggar often writes in a rather jumbled way, penning annoyingly long sentences, spliced up by semicolons, making them quite hard to parse. There is also often extraneous detail that clouds rather than crystallizes understanding—perhaps such details should often have been relegated to footnotes/endnotes. The writing also frequently forgets to pull itself back to the bigger picture, often seemingly getting lost in details that don’t help comprehension or coherence. I found it helpful to use ChatGPT to summarize the major themes and supporting arguments from each chapter when finshed!
Overall, this is a much-needed book and breath of fresh air in a cultural climate whereby the monolithic evils of colonialism are invoked to explain modern day racial and socioeconomic disparities. Biggar shows things aren’t so simple.
June 26, 2023
I didn't actually finish this book, but I am definitely over it.
For context - I had a brief underlying understanding of colonial history and post colonial theory going into this, so it much of it felt like a recapitulation of what I already know.
Something that I noticed Biggar did throughout the book was describe racist, ethnocentric or orientalist ideologies and phenomena and attempt to dismantle them, ultimately to suggest that said ideologies and phenomena were not in fact racist/ethnocentric/orientalist. (It almost seemed that he had this weird grudge against Edward Said and the very notion of Orientalism).
Biggar is correct when he points out that the majority of people will judge and compare a foreign culture against their own and deem the foreign one as 'inferior'. He is just highly disagreeable when he attempts to justify this colonial mentality as not racist - or at the very least he will try to say that colonists weren't even 'that' racist. He'll posit a line of thinking by starting of: "What would have been more deeply racist is...". Like, bro what? His attempts at justification cannot negate the fact that the attitudes and institutions he outlines were racist.
I think Biggar would make a more compelling case if he could just admit that racism was and is rampant among Britain's imperial legacy. It's an unfortunate but inevitable facet of the human condition, yet his insistence that the British empire wasn't 'as' racist as it often seems comes across as rather ignorant and sheltered.
I really wanted to enjoy this book, I was so excited when I had received it. But overall, it was disappointing. I was hoping that Biggar could have taught me something I didn't know, or at least shine a new light on the matter. A varied and unique perspective on the topic was something that I was seeking going into this. Perhaps if I finished the book I could have found that, but the writing and its content simply could not captivate me.
That being said, I can admit that there's merit in the nuances that Biggar highlights - such as the benefits of colonial rule - but it's his continuous dismissal of racist paradigms that make me question his authority on the subject. You can skip this one, lol.
For context - I had a brief underlying understanding of colonial history and post colonial theory going into this, so it much of it felt like a recapitulation of what I already know.
Something that I noticed Biggar did throughout the book was describe racist, ethnocentric or orientalist ideologies and phenomena and attempt to dismantle them, ultimately to suggest that said ideologies and phenomena were not in fact racist/ethnocentric/orientalist. (It almost seemed that he had this weird grudge against Edward Said and the very notion of Orientalism).
Biggar is correct when he points out that the majority of people will judge and compare a foreign culture against their own and deem the foreign one as 'inferior'. He is just highly disagreeable when he attempts to justify this colonial mentality as not racist - or at the very least he will try to say that colonists weren't even 'that' racist. He'll posit a line of thinking by starting of: "What would have been more deeply racist is...". Like, bro what? His attempts at justification cannot negate the fact that the attitudes and institutions he outlines were racist.
I think Biggar would make a more compelling case if he could just admit that racism was and is rampant among Britain's imperial legacy. It's an unfortunate but inevitable facet of the human condition, yet his insistence that the British empire wasn't 'as' racist as it often seems comes across as rather ignorant and sheltered.
I really wanted to enjoy this book, I was so excited when I had received it. But overall, it was disappointing. I was hoping that Biggar could have taught me something I didn't know, or at least shine a new light on the matter. A varied and unique perspective on the topic was something that I was seeking going into this. Perhaps if I finished the book I could have found that, but the writing and its content simply could not captivate me.
That being said, I can admit that there's merit in the nuances that Biggar highlights - such as the benefits of colonial rule - but it's his continuous dismissal of racist paradigms that make me question his authority on the subject. You can skip this one, lol.
June 7, 2024
Summary: The road to hell is paved with good intentions. There's good and bad that came from British colonialism, and you can't quantify it by balancing it all on a scale.
June 25, 2024
Wow. What a book. Bold, straightforward, and certainly "counter(-current-)culture." Biggar writes with honesty and humility without kowtowing to the superficial, simplistic, and prejudiced perspectives of cancel culture. Biggar's research is thorough, his claims are well-supported, and he doesn't shy away from making ethical judgments of individuals/cultures/colonial policies/or governments. With his ethical judgments come proportionate condemnation and reasonable exonerations. He covers a broad window of British colonial rule, from early expansion to dismantling of the Empire. He also deftly compares and contrasts British colonial policies in far-flung places such as China, Canada, New Zealand, India, South Africa, Nigeria, Egypt, and Ireland (to name a few). Although thorough and exceptionally detailed in research, Biggar focuses exclusively on the British Empire. The title of his book is slightly misleading, therefore, in so far as he does not address any other colonial power during the 19th-century. Occasionally he contrasts other colonial and imperial policies from world history, which I suppose whets our appetite for further research and reading. Nevertheless, the book is well worth the read if you are interested in broadening and deepening your understanding of the "good, bad, and ugly" of the British Empire and her colonial legacy.
September 26, 2023
Excellent and balanced book! Should be compulsory reading in schools.
Nigel explores some of the anti-colonial arguments that are most commonly thrown around––proving that many times that they are historically out of context, fabricated, fallacious or without substance. He argues, and quite factually, that British imperialism was never inherently or essentially evil, racist or genocidal. He combs through the arguments with factual counter-arguments.
Furthermore, he argues that imperialism's intent was always good, even when in certain cases the act ended with tragic results. In other cases, he reminds the reader that a single person's view or intent does not reflect the rest of imperialism. Of course, there many other arguments that Nigel has brought to the discussion.
This book assumes that many know their history as it is not a historiography. However, whilst it can be seen as a weakness, it is also its strength; that is, it will force the reader to really do their research on the histories mentioned. Highly recommend!
Nigel explores some of the anti-colonial arguments that are most commonly thrown around––proving that many times that they are historically out of context, fabricated, fallacious or without substance. He argues, and quite factually, that British imperialism was never inherently or essentially evil, racist or genocidal. He combs through the arguments with factual counter-arguments.
Furthermore, he argues that imperialism's intent was always good, even when in certain cases the act ended with tragic results. In other cases, he reminds the reader that a single person's view or intent does not reflect the rest of imperialism. Of course, there many other arguments that Nigel has brought to the discussion.
This book assumes that many know their history as it is not a historiography. However, whilst it can be seen as a weakness, it is also its strength; that is, it will force the reader to really do their research on the histories mentioned. Highly recommend!
March 5, 2023
I wanted to read this book as I was keen to have an account of British imperialism that was not a simple condemnation. I gave this book three stars (I am not an historian) for two main reasons. First, there was an overwhelming storm of 'facts' that, for a not historian, would be difficult to assess. Second, it was obvious, even to me, that a number of Nigel's assessments could be challenged. However, the book does give a refreshing perspective on empire. In many ways what the British did was appalling. But the history of imperialism is the history of global development. The British were only one nation to have had empires. In many ways imperialism was a driving force of world development. This book is a contribution to a more nuanced perspective on imperialism.
December 10, 2025
Colonialism: A Moral Reckoning by Nigel Biggar
The author of this book is Nigel Biggar, Baron Biggar of Castle Douglas CBE (born 1955).[1] Biggar is a British Anglican priest, theologian, and ethicist who served as Regius Professor of Moral and Pastoral Theology at the University of Oxford from 2007 to 2022. Biggar is a rare conservative in the British academic community. His philosophy is rooted in Christian theology. Biggar has written in opposition to the payment of reparations. He has suffered the wrath of Liberal Democrats for his opinions and for leading a seminar in Ethics and Empire, where his fellow scholars and leftist activists attacked him for not condemning the British Empire tout court.
It is not a time for complexity.
This book is a gem. It is readable and compelling. Biggar demonstrates the complexity of history by sharing facts that run counter to conventional wisdom in modernity. That conventional wisdom is that Britain worked to acquire an empire, that its empire was based on slavery and racism, and that Britain exploited its colonies and drained them of their resources for its enrichment. The prevailing view among British elites is that Britain was built on blood and owes a debt of justice to its former colonies.
History is far more complicated than ideology. Ideology simplifies. It demands that a person completely sign on to the ideological agenda. Ryszard Legutko explains:
Ideology is always inherently simplistic and simplifying as its function is instrumental, not descriptive. The purpose of ideology is not to disclose intricacies and ambiguities but to make a clear statement: this and this reflect the interests of capitalism, and that and that reflect the interests of communism. Lenin called it, very aptly, the principle of partisanship. One is either for something or against something. Whoever is trying to find a middle-of-the-road position, or to evade the dichotomy, automatically passes to the enemy side.
Legutko, Ryszard. The Demon in Democracy: Totalitarian Temptations in Free Societies (p. 114). Encounter Books. Kindle Edition.
By simple transposition, where you find simplistic descriptions rather than an analysis that recognizes nuance and intricacies, or where someone who discusses nuances is treated as the enemy, you know that you are seeing partisan ideology.
Reification or anthropomorphism is also a red flag for ideology. The Communist Manifesto reified “Capitalism.” Trotsky reified “History.” By turning an idea into a thing and investing it with human traits, ideologues make it easier to simplify in grand sweeping gestures and demand that people take a side. “History” as a phenomenon is just a record of what happened; “History” as a reified figure is everything that leads to a glorious future. No one will submit to the former, but they will die to be on the side where the “arc of history inevitably bends.”
Biggar starts his book by addressing such a “reification.” Anti-colonialists speak about the “Colonial Project” as if there were such a thing. Thus, they invite people to believe that there was a plan from the beginning, with a coherent motive for creating the British Empire. As Biggar points out, such a thing never existed. Britain acquired its empire for a host of different reasons at different points in time. Initially, it sought control over potential rivals, as in the case of Ireland and North America. At other times, it was motivated by religion and by a sense of liberty, as when it opposed “authoritarian Catholicism,” represented by France in the 17th century, and “terroristic revolution,” represented by France in the late 18th century. Trade also motivated Britain to collect its empire. It went into India seeking trade, but when local princes could not keep the peace in their territories, Britain became involved in supporting the authority of such princes with its military. The “logic of trade, through the need for security,” led to the “acquisition of political power.” Success is its own justification, and local rulers began to gift their territories to the British.
Everywhere it went, Britain was in the abject minority. In India in 1824, there were no more than 36,400 British soldiers, while India had a population of 300 million. Imperial agents had to pay attention to the local population and maintain a light footprint. They did not overturn local customs precipitously.
British involvement in Africa up until 1870 was largely limited to the coast, where it provided a base for action against slave trading. The scope of British involvement increased when Britain began to disrupt the inland trade in slaves and started developing alternative forms of commerce to draw African kingdoms away from slavery. Biggars offers Lagos as an example:
Meanwhile, back in West Africa, the British employed a variety of means to achieve the same end. The thesis of Sir Thomas Fowell Buxton – proposed in his 1839 book The African Slave Trade and Its Remedy[57] – that the key to ending the slave trade and slavery in Africa was to promote alternative, ‘legitimate’ commerce had found wide acceptance. This led to the setting up of trading posts, and then, when the merchants complained of the lack of security, a more assertive colonial presence on land.[58] The year after strong-arming Brazil, the British attacked Lagos and destroyed its slaving facilities, having tried in vain to persuade its ruler to terminate the commerce in slaves. In 1861, when an attempt was made to revive the trade, they annexed Lagos as a colony.
Biggar, Nigel. Colonialism: A Moral Reckoning (pp. 81-82). HarperCollins Publishers. Kindle Edition.
Anti-Colonialists also fail to mention Zanzibar:
On the other side of the continent the British brought persistent diplomatic pressure to bear upon the Sultanate of Zanzibar, which was the main port for the Great Lakes slave trade, but which also depended on the Royal Navy to protect its shipping from pirates in the Indian Ocean. Treaties were signed banning trade in slaves to the Americas in 1822 and to the more important Persian Gulf in 1845. In 1873 the sultan gave way when Sir Bartle Frere, governor of Bombay and a resolute opponent of the East African slave trade, threatened a naval blockade unless the export of slaves from the African mainland ceased altogether and the slave market was shut down once and for all. Bit by bit the trade in slaves was throttled. The institution of domestic slavery, however, was tolerated until Zanzibar became a British protectorate in 1890. Between then and 1909 a series of measures gradually emancipated slaves, first of all granting them rights against maltreatment and of self-redemption, then adding a right to obtain freedom on application to the courts. Here, too, slave-owners were compensated for their loss, partly in recognition that domestic slavery was sanctioned by Islamic law, but also to minimise the economic disturbance and political opposition.
Biggar, Nigel. Colonialism: A Moral Reckoning (p. 82). HarperCollins Publishers. Kindle Edition.
Britain was more than involved in the Atlantic slave trade. Before 1807, Britain shipped more slaves across the Atlantic than any other country. Then, miraculously, in 1807, Britain threw the entire weight of its empire into eradicating the slave trade and then slavery as a matter of national importance. The costs to Britain were substantial:
The task of estimating the cost of all the empire’s various efforts to abolish the slave trade and slavery at sea and on land, worldwide, over the course of a century and a half, would present – at the very least – a major challenge both in scale and in complexity. No one, to my knowledge, has tried it. Some, however, have developed an estimate of the expense of transatlantic suppression alone. David Eltis reckoned that this cost British taxpayers a minimum of £250,000 per annum – which equates to £1.367–1.74 billion, or 9.1–11.5 per cent of the UK’s expenditure on development aid, in 2019 – for half a century.[63] Moreover ‘in absolute terms the British spent almost as much attempting to suppress the trade in the forty-seven years, 1816–62, as they received in profits over the same length of time leading up to 1807. And by any more reasonable assessment of profits and direct costs, the nineteenth-century costs of suppression were certainly bigger than the eighteenth-century benefits.’
Biggar, Nigel. Colonialism: A Moral Reckoning (p. 84). HarperCollins Publishers. Kindle Edition.
Biggar describes the military pressure that Britain exerted as follows:
In addition to the diplomatic velvet glove, the British also deployed the naval hard fist. Up to ten ships of the Royal Navy were stationed off the coast of West Africa to disrupt the export of slaves until 1833. Over the next ten years their number rose as high as nineteen, and from 1844 to 1865 it seldom fell below twenty, for several consecutive years stayed at over thirty, and twice reached a peak of thirty-six. At its height, the West African station employed 13.1 per cent of the Royal Navy’s total manpower.[55] From 1839 naval patrols extended south of the Equator, and in 1845 the Slave Trade Act authorised the Navy to treat as pirates Brazilian ships suspected of carrying slaves, to arrest those responsible and to have them tried in British Admiralty courts. In 1850 Navy ships began trespassing into Brazilian territorial waters to accost slave ships, sometimes even entering its harbours and on one occasion exchanging fire with a fort. In September of that year Brazil yielded to the pressure, enacted legislation comprehensively outlawing the slave trade and began to enforce it rigorously. Shortly before his death in 1865 Lord Palmerston, twice prime minister, wrote that ‘the achievement which I look back on with the greatest and purest pleasure was forcing the Brazilians to give up their slave trade’.
Biggar, Nigel. Colonialism: A Moral Reckoning (p. 81). HarperCollins Publishers. Kindle Edition.
Biggar also examines the racist roots of Colonialism and finds ambiguity. Some people condemned today as racists weren’t. Cecil Rhodes, for example, insisted that the ballot be extended to “civilized people” of all races. Biggar writes:
There is no doubt that the real Rhodes was a moral mixture, but he was no Hitler. Far from being racist, he showed consistent sympathy for individual black Africans throughout his life. And in an 1894 speech he made plain his view: ‘I do not believe that they are different from ourselves.’[8] Nor did he attempt genocide against the southern African Ndebele people in 1896 – as might be suggested by the fact that the Ndebele tended his grave from 1902 for decades. And he had nothing at all to do with General Kitchener’s ‘concentration camps’ during the Second Anglo-Boer War of 1899–1902, which themselves had nothing morally in common with Auschwitz. Moreover, Rhodes did support a franchise in Cape Colony that gave black Africans the vote on the same terms as whites; he helped to finance a black African newspaper; and he established his famous scholarship scheme, which was explicitly colour-blind and whose first black (American) beneficiary was selected within five years of his death.[9]
However, none of these historical details seemed to matter to the student activists baying for Rhodes’ downfall, or to the professional academics who supported them. Since I published my view of Rhodes – complete with evidence and argument – in March 2016, no one has offered any critical response at all. Notwithstanding that, when the Rhodes Must Fall campaign revived four years later in the wake of the Black Lives Matter movement, the same old false allegations revived with it, utterly unchastened. Thus, in the Guardian newspaper, an Oxford doctoral student (and former editor of the Oxford University Commonwealth Law Journal) was still slandering Rhodes as a ‘génocidaire’ in June 2020.[10]
This unscrupulous indifference to historical truth indicates that the controversy over empire is not really a controversy about history at all. It is about the present, not the past.
Biggar, Nigel. Colonialism: A Moral Reckoning (pp. 14-15). HarperCollins Publishers. Kindle Edition.[2]
There were racist Brits. There were Brits who opposed racism. In many colonies, the British colonial administration was long remembered for its rectitude and fairness. Natives who went to England never dealt with racism, but some would go back to their home country and find their opportunities foreclosed by laws and social pressures. Natives who experienced this treatment at home became the mainstays of native independence movements.
Biggars examines the stock claims of British atrocities used by anti-colonialists to argue that the British Empire was akin to the Third Reich. Although he finds British agents culpable in some cases, in other cases, they rely on misrepresentation. For example, Biggar concludes that the First Opium War of 1839-1842 has no justification under Just War Theory. The Chinese had a right to block the importation of opium into China, and Britain’s use of force to overturn China’s sovereignty was not justified. The Amritsar Massacre of 1919 was also unjustified, but the circumstances were confused, the British government immediately cashiered the responsible officer, and, strangely, that officer – General Dyer – was beloved by his Indian troops. Also, in 1984, the Indian government repeated the Amritsar massacre with less justification.
Biggar’s discussion of the Benin invasion is eye-opening. Anti-colonialists have been beating the drum for the return of the “Benin Bronzes,” which were taken after the conquest of Benin in 1897.[3] What never gets mentioned are the facts, namely, Britain had a protectorate on the Niger Coast as part of its slave-interdiction program. Benin was further inland and was engaging in slavery, human sacrifice, and disruption of trade. The British government wanted the colonial officials of the Niger Coast Protectorate to take a non-military approach to the problem. Eight unarmed members of the delegation traveled to Benin to discuss the issue. On the journey, they were attacked by Benin warriors. Two were killed, two escaped, and the rest were hauled off as human sacrifices. Britain then mounted an armed response. Biggars cites primary sources to describe what British forces witnessed on entering Benin City:
‘Once inside the city, Bacon and his comrades discovered several compounds with long altars for human sacrifice. In one case, ‘[t]he altar was deluged in blood, the smell of which was too overpowering for many of us’. Indeed, ‘[t]he one lasting remembrance of Benin in my mind is its smells. Crucifixions, human sacrifices, and every horror the eye could get accustomed to, to a large extent, but the smells no white man’s internal economy could stand. Four times in one day I was practically sick from them.’ Then there were the burial pits: ‘And these pits! … out of one a Jakri [Itsekiri] boy was pulled with drag-ropes from under several corpses; he said he had been in five days’. ‘Blood was everywhere; smeared over bronzes, ivory, and even the walls’. And there was also the ‘crucifixion tree with a double crucifixion on it, the two poor wretches stretched out facing the west, with their arms bound together in the middle … At the base were skulls and bones, literally strewn about … Down the avenue to the right was a tree with nineteen skulls … and down every main road were two or more human sacrifices.’[72]
Bacon’s account commands confidence partly by its own nature: it is not unmeasured and displays a capacity for discriminating judgement. He recognised that Benin was no longer the centre of the slave trade it had once been. He also made moral distinctions: ‘Human sacrifice undoubtedly differs in criminal degree.’ For example, it is not uncommon in some parts for a chief to kill a slave to take a message to his father ‘in the realm of shades’. ‘Again, the killing of wives and slaves to accompany the dead man to the next world is not without its redeeming side.’ But ‘the atrocities of Benin’ were of a different quality altogether. And yet, notwithstanding all this horror, he was able to write, ‘the town was not without beauty of a sort’.[73] Confidence in Bacon’s veracity gathers further strength from corroborating testimony. The expedition’s surgeon, F. N. Roth, for example, wrote in his diary:
It is a misnomer to call [Benin] a city. It is a charnel house. All about the houses and streets are dead natives, some crucified and sacrificed on trees, others on stage erections, some on the ground, some in pits, and amongst the latter we found several half-dead ones … As we neared Benin city we passed several human sacrifices, live women-slaves gagged and pegged on their backs to the ground, the abdominal wall being cut in the form of a cross, and the uninjured gut hanging out. These poor women were allowed to die like this in the sun … As our white troops passed these horrors … many were roused to fury.[74]
Biggar, Nigel. Colonialism: A Moral Reckoning (pp. 287-288). HarperCollins Publishers. Kindle Edition.
British forces deposed the king, annexed Benin, and took the Benin Bronzes in accordance with the conventions of war then in effect. The Bronzes were then brought to England, where they were sold to raise money for the pensions of those who were killed or injured in the campaign. The seizure of the Benin Bronzes was not looting. It was part of the customs of war at the time. If the warriors of Benin had won, the costs to the British would have involved human sacrifice.
I recommend this book. There is a lot of information here. Biggar’s organization of topics makes this book accessible. Biggar knows the material and relates it with style. More importantly, Biggar demonstrates several of the key points of historical study, i.e., (a) history is complicated, and (b) to understand history, one has to have a certain empathy for the people living the history. This last point applies to our ancestors.
Maybe empathy for our ancestors is not a bad thing. When I consider the involvement of the British Empire with slavery, half the time being involved in slavery like every other country, but then miraculously turning against it in 1807, thanks to a few Evangelical Christians, and then spending the second half of its imperial history fighting slavery, I am put in mind of G.W.F. Hegel’s ideas about history. Hegel believed that the great theme of history was that reified history was a spirit, or mind, using history to reach a point of maximal freedom. In reaching that point, History would pass through different phases:
https://petersbradley.substack.com/p/...
The author of this book is Nigel Biggar, Baron Biggar of Castle Douglas CBE (born 1955).[1] Biggar is a British Anglican priest, theologian, and ethicist who served as Regius Professor of Moral and Pastoral Theology at the University of Oxford from 2007 to 2022. Biggar is a rare conservative in the British academic community. His philosophy is rooted in Christian theology. Biggar has written in opposition to the payment of reparations. He has suffered the wrath of Liberal Democrats for his opinions and for leading a seminar in Ethics and Empire, where his fellow scholars and leftist activists attacked him for not condemning the British Empire tout court.
It is not a time for complexity.
This book is a gem. It is readable and compelling. Biggar demonstrates the complexity of history by sharing facts that run counter to conventional wisdom in modernity. That conventional wisdom is that Britain worked to acquire an empire, that its empire was based on slavery and racism, and that Britain exploited its colonies and drained them of their resources for its enrichment. The prevailing view among British elites is that Britain was built on blood and owes a debt of justice to its former colonies.
History is far more complicated than ideology. Ideology simplifies. It demands that a person completely sign on to the ideological agenda. Ryszard Legutko explains:
Ideology is always inherently simplistic and simplifying as its function is instrumental, not descriptive. The purpose of ideology is not to disclose intricacies and ambiguities but to make a clear statement: this and this reflect the interests of capitalism, and that and that reflect the interests of communism. Lenin called it, very aptly, the principle of partisanship. One is either for something or against something. Whoever is trying to find a middle-of-the-road position, or to evade the dichotomy, automatically passes to the enemy side.
Legutko, Ryszard. The Demon in Democracy: Totalitarian Temptations in Free Societies (p. 114). Encounter Books. Kindle Edition.
By simple transposition, where you find simplistic descriptions rather than an analysis that recognizes nuance and intricacies, or where someone who discusses nuances is treated as the enemy, you know that you are seeing partisan ideology.
Reification or anthropomorphism is also a red flag for ideology. The Communist Manifesto reified “Capitalism.” Trotsky reified “History.” By turning an idea into a thing and investing it with human traits, ideologues make it easier to simplify in grand sweeping gestures and demand that people take a side. “History” as a phenomenon is just a record of what happened; “History” as a reified figure is everything that leads to a glorious future. No one will submit to the former, but they will die to be on the side where the “arc of history inevitably bends.”
Biggar starts his book by addressing such a “reification.” Anti-colonialists speak about the “Colonial Project” as if there were such a thing. Thus, they invite people to believe that there was a plan from the beginning, with a coherent motive for creating the British Empire. As Biggar points out, such a thing never existed. Britain acquired its empire for a host of different reasons at different points in time. Initially, it sought control over potential rivals, as in the case of Ireland and North America. At other times, it was motivated by religion and by a sense of liberty, as when it opposed “authoritarian Catholicism,” represented by France in the 17th century, and “terroristic revolution,” represented by France in the late 18th century. Trade also motivated Britain to collect its empire. It went into India seeking trade, but when local princes could not keep the peace in their territories, Britain became involved in supporting the authority of such princes with its military. The “logic of trade, through the need for security,” led to the “acquisition of political power.” Success is its own justification, and local rulers began to gift their territories to the British.
Everywhere it went, Britain was in the abject minority. In India in 1824, there were no more than 36,400 British soldiers, while India had a population of 300 million. Imperial agents had to pay attention to the local population and maintain a light footprint. They did not overturn local customs precipitously.
British involvement in Africa up until 1870 was largely limited to the coast, where it provided a base for action against slave trading. The scope of British involvement increased when Britain began to disrupt the inland trade in slaves and started developing alternative forms of commerce to draw African kingdoms away from slavery. Biggars offers Lagos as an example:
Meanwhile, back in West Africa, the British employed a variety of means to achieve the same end. The thesis of Sir Thomas Fowell Buxton – proposed in his 1839 book The African Slave Trade and Its Remedy[57] – that the key to ending the slave trade and slavery in Africa was to promote alternative, ‘legitimate’ commerce had found wide acceptance. This led to the setting up of trading posts, and then, when the merchants complained of the lack of security, a more assertive colonial presence on land.[58] The year after strong-arming Brazil, the British attacked Lagos and destroyed its slaving facilities, having tried in vain to persuade its ruler to terminate the commerce in slaves. In 1861, when an attempt was made to revive the trade, they annexed Lagos as a colony.
Biggar, Nigel. Colonialism: A Moral Reckoning (pp. 81-82). HarperCollins Publishers. Kindle Edition.
Anti-Colonialists also fail to mention Zanzibar:
On the other side of the continent the British brought persistent diplomatic pressure to bear upon the Sultanate of Zanzibar, which was the main port for the Great Lakes slave trade, but which also depended on the Royal Navy to protect its shipping from pirates in the Indian Ocean. Treaties were signed banning trade in slaves to the Americas in 1822 and to the more important Persian Gulf in 1845. In 1873 the sultan gave way when Sir Bartle Frere, governor of Bombay and a resolute opponent of the East African slave trade, threatened a naval blockade unless the export of slaves from the African mainland ceased altogether and the slave market was shut down once and for all. Bit by bit the trade in slaves was throttled. The institution of domestic slavery, however, was tolerated until Zanzibar became a British protectorate in 1890. Between then and 1909 a series of measures gradually emancipated slaves, first of all granting them rights against maltreatment and of self-redemption, then adding a right to obtain freedom on application to the courts. Here, too, slave-owners were compensated for their loss, partly in recognition that domestic slavery was sanctioned by Islamic law, but also to minimise the economic disturbance and political opposition.
Biggar, Nigel. Colonialism: A Moral Reckoning (p. 82). HarperCollins Publishers. Kindle Edition.
Britain was more than involved in the Atlantic slave trade. Before 1807, Britain shipped more slaves across the Atlantic than any other country. Then, miraculously, in 1807, Britain threw the entire weight of its empire into eradicating the slave trade and then slavery as a matter of national importance. The costs to Britain were substantial:
The task of estimating the cost of all the empire’s various efforts to abolish the slave trade and slavery at sea and on land, worldwide, over the course of a century and a half, would present – at the very least – a major challenge both in scale and in complexity. No one, to my knowledge, has tried it. Some, however, have developed an estimate of the expense of transatlantic suppression alone. David Eltis reckoned that this cost British taxpayers a minimum of £250,000 per annum – which equates to £1.367–1.74 billion, or 9.1–11.5 per cent of the UK’s expenditure on development aid, in 2019 – for half a century.[63] Moreover ‘in absolute terms the British spent almost as much attempting to suppress the trade in the forty-seven years, 1816–62, as they received in profits over the same length of time leading up to 1807. And by any more reasonable assessment of profits and direct costs, the nineteenth-century costs of suppression were certainly bigger than the eighteenth-century benefits.’
Biggar, Nigel. Colonialism: A Moral Reckoning (p. 84). HarperCollins Publishers. Kindle Edition.
Biggar describes the military pressure that Britain exerted as follows:
In addition to the diplomatic velvet glove, the British also deployed the naval hard fist. Up to ten ships of the Royal Navy were stationed off the coast of West Africa to disrupt the export of slaves until 1833. Over the next ten years their number rose as high as nineteen, and from 1844 to 1865 it seldom fell below twenty, for several consecutive years stayed at over thirty, and twice reached a peak of thirty-six. At its height, the West African station employed 13.1 per cent of the Royal Navy’s total manpower.[55] From 1839 naval patrols extended south of the Equator, and in 1845 the Slave Trade Act authorised the Navy to treat as pirates Brazilian ships suspected of carrying slaves, to arrest those responsible and to have them tried in British Admiralty courts. In 1850 Navy ships began trespassing into Brazilian territorial waters to accost slave ships, sometimes even entering its harbours and on one occasion exchanging fire with a fort. In September of that year Brazil yielded to the pressure, enacted legislation comprehensively outlawing the slave trade and began to enforce it rigorously. Shortly before his death in 1865 Lord Palmerston, twice prime minister, wrote that ‘the achievement which I look back on with the greatest and purest pleasure was forcing the Brazilians to give up their slave trade’.
Biggar, Nigel. Colonialism: A Moral Reckoning (p. 81). HarperCollins Publishers. Kindle Edition.
Biggar also examines the racist roots of Colonialism and finds ambiguity. Some people condemned today as racists weren’t. Cecil Rhodes, for example, insisted that the ballot be extended to “civilized people” of all races. Biggar writes:
There is no doubt that the real Rhodes was a moral mixture, but he was no Hitler. Far from being racist, he showed consistent sympathy for individual black Africans throughout his life. And in an 1894 speech he made plain his view: ‘I do not believe that they are different from ourselves.’[8] Nor did he attempt genocide against the southern African Ndebele people in 1896 – as might be suggested by the fact that the Ndebele tended his grave from 1902 for decades. And he had nothing at all to do with General Kitchener’s ‘concentration camps’ during the Second Anglo-Boer War of 1899–1902, which themselves had nothing morally in common with Auschwitz. Moreover, Rhodes did support a franchise in Cape Colony that gave black Africans the vote on the same terms as whites; he helped to finance a black African newspaper; and he established his famous scholarship scheme, which was explicitly colour-blind and whose first black (American) beneficiary was selected within five years of his death.[9]
However, none of these historical details seemed to matter to the student activists baying for Rhodes’ downfall, or to the professional academics who supported them. Since I published my view of Rhodes – complete with evidence and argument – in March 2016, no one has offered any critical response at all. Notwithstanding that, when the Rhodes Must Fall campaign revived four years later in the wake of the Black Lives Matter movement, the same old false allegations revived with it, utterly unchastened. Thus, in the Guardian newspaper, an Oxford doctoral student (and former editor of the Oxford University Commonwealth Law Journal) was still slandering Rhodes as a ‘génocidaire’ in June 2020.[10]
This unscrupulous indifference to historical truth indicates that the controversy over empire is not really a controversy about history at all. It is about the present, not the past.
Biggar, Nigel. Colonialism: A Moral Reckoning (pp. 14-15). HarperCollins Publishers. Kindle Edition.[2]
There were racist Brits. There were Brits who opposed racism. In many colonies, the British colonial administration was long remembered for its rectitude and fairness. Natives who went to England never dealt with racism, but some would go back to their home country and find their opportunities foreclosed by laws and social pressures. Natives who experienced this treatment at home became the mainstays of native independence movements.
Biggars examines the stock claims of British atrocities used by anti-colonialists to argue that the British Empire was akin to the Third Reich. Although he finds British agents culpable in some cases, in other cases, they rely on misrepresentation. For example, Biggar concludes that the First Opium War of 1839-1842 has no justification under Just War Theory. The Chinese had a right to block the importation of opium into China, and Britain’s use of force to overturn China’s sovereignty was not justified. The Amritsar Massacre of 1919 was also unjustified, but the circumstances were confused, the British government immediately cashiered the responsible officer, and, strangely, that officer – General Dyer – was beloved by his Indian troops. Also, in 1984, the Indian government repeated the Amritsar massacre with less justification.
Biggar’s discussion of the Benin invasion is eye-opening. Anti-colonialists have been beating the drum for the return of the “Benin Bronzes,” which were taken after the conquest of Benin in 1897.[3] What never gets mentioned are the facts, namely, Britain had a protectorate on the Niger Coast as part of its slave-interdiction program. Benin was further inland and was engaging in slavery, human sacrifice, and disruption of trade. The British government wanted the colonial officials of the Niger Coast Protectorate to take a non-military approach to the problem. Eight unarmed members of the delegation traveled to Benin to discuss the issue. On the journey, they were attacked by Benin warriors. Two were killed, two escaped, and the rest were hauled off as human sacrifices. Britain then mounted an armed response. Biggars cites primary sources to describe what British forces witnessed on entering Benin City:
‘Once inside the city, Bacon and his comrades discovered several compounds with long altars for human sacrifice. In one case, ‘[t]he altar was deluged in blood, the smell of which was too overpowering for many of us’. Indeed, ‘[t]he one lasting remembrance of Benin in my mind is its smells. Crucifixions, human sacrifices, and every horror the eye could get accustomed to, to a large extent, but the smells no white man’s internal economy could stand. Four times in one day I was practically sick from them.’ Then there were the burial pits: ‘And these pits! … out of one a Jakri [Itsekiri] boy was pulled with drag-ropes from under several corpses; he said he had been in five days’. ‘Blood was everywhere; smeared over bronzes, ivory, and even the walls’. And there was also the ‘crucifixion tree with a double crucifixion on it, the two poor wretches stretched out facing the west, with their arms bound together in the middle … At the base were skulls and bones, literally strewn about … Down the avenue to the right was a tree with nineteen skulls … and down every main road were two or more human sacrifices.’[72]
Bacon’s account commands confidence partly by its own nature: it is not unmeasured and displays a capacity for discriminating judgement. He recognised that Benin was no longer the centre of the slave trade it had once been. He also made moral distinctions: ‘Human sacrifice undoubtedly differs in criminal degree.’ For example, it is not uncommon in some parts for a chief to kill a slave to take a message to his father ‘in the realm of shades’. ‘Again, the killing of wives and slaves to accompany the dead man to the next world is not without its redeeming side.’ But ‘the atrocities of Benin’ were of a different quality altogether. And yet, notwithstanding all this horror, he was able to write, ‘the town was not without beauty of a sort’.[73] Confidence in Bacon’s veracity gathers further strength from corroborating testimony. The expedition’s surgeon, F. N. Roth, for example, wrote in his diary:
It is a misnomer to call [Benin] a city. It is a charnel house. All about the houses and streets are dead natives, some crucified and sacrificed on trees, others on stage erections, some on the ground, some in pits, and amongst the latter we found several half-dead ones … As we neared Benin city we passed several human sacrifices, live women-slaves gagged and pegged on their backs to the ground, the abdominal wall being cut in the form of a cross, and the uninjured gut hanging out. These poor women were allowed to die like this in the sun … As our white troops passed these horrors … many were roused to fury.[74]
Biggar, Nigel. Colonialism: A Moral Reckoning (pp. 287-288). HarperCollins Publishers. Kindle Edition.
British forces deposed the king, annexed Benin, and took the Benin Bronzes in accordance with the conventions of war then in effect. The Bronzes were then brought to England, where they were sold to raise money for the pensions of those who were killed or injured in the campaign. The seizure of the Benin Bronzes was not looting. It was part of the customs of war at the time. If the warriors of Benin had won, the costs to the British would have involved human sacrifice.
I recommend this book. There is a lot of information here. Biggar’s organization of topics makes this book accessible. Biggar knows the material and relates it with style. More importantly, Biggar demonstrates several of the key points of historical study, i.e., (a) history is complicated, and (b) to understand history, one has to have a certain empathy for the people living the history. This last point applies to our ancestors.
Maybe empathy for our ancestors is not a bad thing. When I consider the involvement of the British Empire with slavery, half the time being involved in slavery like every other country, but then miraculously turning against it in 1807, thanks to a few Evangelical Christians, and then spending the second half of its imperial history fighting slavery, I am put in mind of G.W.F. Hegel’s ideas about history. Hegel believed that the great theme of history was that reified history was a spirit, or mind, using history to reach a point of maximal freedom. In reaching that point, History would pass through different phases:
https://petersbradley.substack.com/p/...
March 5, 2024
Before I discuss its content, I want to say a few general things about the book. It is very well written and referenced; I couldn't put it down. It's also the first time I've ever wanted to, and looked forward to, writing a full-length review for a book. I picked it up last year at a history festival as I'm interested in imperial history and how that history impacts the world today. It's also the first time I've read a book actively arguing in a debate. I learned this after buying it and what side of that debate the book would discuss. That's okay as long as you appreciate there's another side to the discussion. Still, I'd rather read a non-biased empirical review of history and have the author leave all moral judgements to myself.
Now, onto the actual content. It's engaged in a moral debate regarding British imperialism, and the book firmly argues that the British Empire was not as evil as others would have you believe. Precisely that "it was not essentially racist, exploitative or wantonly violent" and that comparisons between the empire and Nazi Germany are unfounded and unhelpful. However, he also states that the empire "contained evils and injustices, some very grave and some culpable". It's not an omission of all wrongdoing, as some harsher reviews make it seem, but more that there is more nuance to it. The empire was not entirely good, nor was it altogether bad, and Britain today should be ashamed of those aspects that were wrong while also finding some pride in the positives. This, as a general statement, is something I agree with. Still, I definitely don't agree with all the conclusions/arguments made in the book, especially when his arguments become overly semantic. For example, when discussing the Benin Bronzes, he highlights that no international law was broken (the Hague Convention prohibiting looting came into effect a few years after the Benin Bronzes were taken), meaning it was essential legal to do so and that it was customary to loot as it was a reward for the soldiers. In the same chapter, he condemns human sacrifice occurring in Benin, but I'm sure at the time in Benin, it wasn't illegal, and it was customary. But human sacrifice is morally wrong regardless, as is the looting of cultural artefacts. These technical arguments are unconvincing and morally subjective; the book loses me whenever they are used.
On the other hand, plenty of historical data is provided, and I am very impressed with the size and depth of the research done for this book. Over 200 pages of referencing/notes contain further explanation and context for the references cited in the text. This is far better evidence of argument.
He also does well breaking down opposing opinions. However, if the author couldn't refute a differing opinion, I doubt he'd reference it in the book at all. At times, he does feel too close and involved in the debate for my liking, with some rhetoric seeming too impassioned. However, the author does state all of his own biases and beliefs in the introduction, which is commendable.
In conclusion, while it may seem obvious to some if you're going to read a book like this (one on such a controversial topic), go into it with as open a mind as possible. Be open to the possibility of being convinced (or not) when the argument presented is convincing (or not). Going into this book with an already entrenched view against it isn't helpful to the debate and will only fuel argument and bitterness on both sides. An entrenched view on any side of any debate is anathema to the concept of debate in the first place. It's a very well-written book on the topic and worth a read if you're interested in the subject. I thoroughly enjoyed reading it and continue to ponder its arguments. I want to read a book on the other side of the debate to experience both sides.
Now, onto the actual content. It's engaged in a moral debate regarding British imperialism, and the book firmly argues that the British Empire was not as evil as others would have you believe. Precisely that "it was not essentially racist, exploitative or wantonly violent" and that comparisons between the empire and Nazi Germany are unfounded and unhelpful. However, he also states that the empire "contained evils and injustices, some very grave and some culpable". It's not an omission of all wrongdoing, as some harsher reviews make it seem, but more that there is more nuance to it. The empire was not entirely good, nor was it altogether bad, and Britain today should be ashamed of those aspects that were wrong while also finding some pride in the positives. This, as a general statement, is something I agree with. Still, I definitely don't agree with all the conclusions/arguments made in the book, especially when his arguments become overly semantic. For example, when discussing the Benin Bronzes, he highlights that no international law was broken (the Hague Convention prohibiting looting came into effect a few years after the Benin Bronzes were taken), meaning it was essential legal to do so and that it was customary to loot as it was a reward for the soldiers. In the same chapter, he condemns human sacrifice occurring in Benin, but I'm sure at the time in Benin, it wasn't illegal, and it was customary. But human sacrifice is morally wrong regardless, as is the looting of cultural artefacts. These technical arguments are unconvincing and morally subjective; the book loses me whenever they are used.
On the other hand, plenty of historical data is provided, and I am very impressed with the size and depth of the research done for this book. Over 200 pages of referencing/notes contain further explanation and context for the references cited in the text. This is far better evidence of argument.
He also does well breaking down opposing opinions. However, if the author couldn't refute a differing opinion, I doubt he'd reference it in the book at all. At times, he does feel too close and involved in the debate for my liking, with some rhetoric seeming too impassioned. However, the author does state all of his own biases and beliefs in the introduction, which is commendable.
In conclusion, while it may seem obvious to some if you're going to read a book like this (one on such a controversial topic), go into it with as open a mind as possible. Be open to the possibility of being convinced (or not) when the argument presented is convincing (or not). Going into this book with an already entrenched view against it isn't helpful to the debate and will only fuel argument and bitterness on both sides. An entrenched view on any side of any debate is anathema to the concept of debate in the first place. It's a very well-written book on the topic and worth a read if you're interested in the subject. I thoroughly enjoyed reading it and continue to ponder its arguments. I want to read a book on the other side of the debate to experience both sides.
October 29, 2023
The British Empire was not as bad as you think. If you had to give British Colonialism a thumbs up or thumbs down, which would you give? Nigel Biggar in his book, Colonialism, argues that on the whole it has been a positive good. At the very least not a positive evil.
I believe it. But I have always been an Anglophile. My mother was English (an evacuees during WWII), and my grandfather was a colonizer–chief inspector of the island of Cyprus.
I believe it. But I have always been an Anglophile. My mother was English (an evacuees during WWII), and my grandfather was a colonizer–chief inspector of the island of Cyprus.
February 17, 2023
Superb, fact and analysis driven look at the British empire, something that todays anti colonialists should read.
Want to read
September 2, 2023Here's a very entertaining review by Tunku Varadarajan at the WSJ:
https://www.wsj.com/arts-culture/book...
(Paywalled. As always, I'm happy to email a copy to non-subscribers.)
Excerpt:
"There is acute subversive delight in reading “Colonialism: A Moral Reckoning" ....
If Mr. Biggar’s book has a flaw, it is not anti-anticolonialism. It is that some of his accounts of British imperial history have an overly potted quality, the result, no doubt, of his having to synthesize vast quantities of secondary literature. After all, he isn’t a historian (as he reminds us) .....
To him, the truth about empire is “morally complicated and ambiguous.” ....
Although Mr. Biggar’s book is not a work of imperial nostalgia—indeed, far from it—critics will caricature it as a whitewash of colonialism. He has been pilloried for the book but appears to be blessed with skin that is as thick as his mind is clear. . ."
I'm not at all sure if I will read the book, but Mr. Varadarajan's review is wonderful.
https://www.wsj.com/arts-culture/book...
(Paywalled. As always, I'm happy to email a copy to non-subscribers.)
Excerpt:
"There is acute subversive delight in reading “Colonialism: A Moral Reckoning" ....
If Mr. Biggar’s book has a flaw, it is not anti-anticolonialism. It is that some of his accounts of British imperial history have an overly potted quality, the result, no doubt, of his having to synthesize vast quantities of secondary literature. After all, he isn’t a historian (as he reminds us) .....
To him, the truth about empire is “morally complicated and ambiguous.” ....
Although Mr. Biggar’s book is not a work of imperial nostalgia—indeed, far from it—critics will caricature it as a whitewash of colonialism. He has been pilloried for the book but appears to be blessed with skin that is as thick as his mind is clear. . ."
I'm not at all sure if I will read the book, but Mr. Varadarajan's review is wonderful.
May 10, 2024
A very well-thought-out, deeply researched, and well expressed critique of the current fashion of "anti-colonialism," as this applies to the United Kingdom and the British Empire.
In my own relatively sheltered life I had recently been coming to see the word "decolonize" showing up on things like the signage at parks or on calendars, in connection with renaming geographical features or "including" native lore with respect to local natural history. It has also become de rigueur for government, university, and museum workers to have email signatures that include text such as "on the unceded territory of the [insert First Nation name] people." Now one must be "anti-colonial" if one is to be politically correct.
This book, published in 2023, examines the anti-colonialism perspective in the specific context of the British Empire, certainly one of history's biggest "colonial" enterprises. The author, a professor of "moral and pastoral theology" at Oxford University, scrupulously and, I think, impartially examines the documented facts of a number of particularly controversial episodes in the Empire's history--including things like the British Raj of India, the Opium Wars in China, the Boer War in South Africa, and the Mau-Mau uprising in Kenya, among others. He finds that there were certainly abuses and injustices committed with respect to these things, but what he doesn't find is any support for the central claim of the anti-colonialists: that the British Empire and colonialism generally spring from a core agenda of racial hatred, slavery, and greed. He finds that the British Empire was not something planned, but rather the effect of numerous diverse causes that brought about the effect that came to be known as the empire. It was not an empire of conquest, like the empires of Alexander the Great or of Rome, but of ongoing workarounds and temporizing measures to do with an array of phenomena arising from exploration, commerce, emigration, and European politics.
The slave trade is a central pillar of anti-colonialist rhetoric. Between the 17th and 19th centuries millions of people were captured and trafficked, mostly from Africa, especially to the Americas, and Brits were heavily involved in this trade to begin with. What is not generally acknowledged by the anti-colonialists is that the British Empire also became a powerful force against slavery once this practice had been abolished in the U.K. The Royal Navy became a force for the interdiction of slavery on the Atlantic, and this was a major item in the British budget for decades. Also not acknowledged by the anti-colonialists is that African slaves were captured and sold by Africans or by Muslim slavers; Europeans mostly were buyers at the ports. And furthermore, some Britons were enslaved: whole villages on the south coast of England and Cornwall were captured by Corsairs and carried off to slavery in North Africa. The Empire was also a victim.
The author does not try to defend slavery. He's an ethicist and a Christian and deplores the practice. But the notion that the British Empire was built on the institution of slavery is contrary to historical fact. In a similar way, the other abominations of empire are also shown to be largely a matter of selective or prejudiced readings of history. It's easy to make judgments in hindsight, and it's easy and tempting to think that one could have managed complex and dangerous political situations with greater skill and integrity than one's ancestors, but a balanced, mature view is one that sees people as fallible and error prone, and is willing to give them the benefit of the doubt, at least sometimes.
I agree with all this and I think the author has done an excellent and thorough job. But I confess I was not altogether convinced when it came to his discussion of the "residential school" system for Indians in Canada--my own back yard. The author tries to show that the system was not all bad, and that it has had its supporters even among First Nations people in Canada. But the revelations over the past year or so of unmarked graves behind a number of these schools across the country show that the rot was deep and very bad indeed. The expression "death camps" is not really hyperbole in this case. It's not easy to see how we can get to justice from here--although we have to try.
Even here, though, I'm willing to accept that "colonialism" is not the root problem. I think of the Stanford Prison Experiment of 1971, in which Philip Zimbardo created a situation in which "guards" were given power over "prisoners" (all volunteer student subjects), and found he had to terminate the experiment early because of the abuses the guards were committing against the prisoners. Power is the ultimate drug, and the most addictive. Here, I think, we're getting closer to the real root issue. In the words of Alexander Solzhenitsyn:
The dominant note of anti-colonialism is self-righteousness. It's easy to point fingers at others, especially when they're dead and can no longer answer for themselves, but if we really want to lessen man's inhumanity to man, we need to look in the mirror and remind ourselves of Solzhenitsyn's words, and take responsibility, each one of us, for not being part of the problem.
Meanwhile, this book gives a sane, measured, and mature response to those who seek to make us feel bad for "not staying where we came from." If it comes to that, every human being is a "colonialist," except perhaps for the San of Botswana--the world's last true aborigines. That's where we all came from.
In my own relatively sheltered life I had recently been coming to see the word "decolonize" showing up on things like the signage at parks or on calendars, in connection with renaming geographical features or "including" native lore with respect to local natural history. It has also become de rigueur for government, university, and museum workers to have email signatures that include text such as "on the unceded territory of the [insert First Nation name] people." Now one must be "anti-colonial" if one is to be politically correct.
This book, published in 2023, examines the anti-colonialism perspective in the specific context of the British Empire, certainly one of history's biggest "colonial" enterprises. The author, a professor of "moral and pastoral theology" at Oxford University, scrupulously and, I think, impartially examines the documented facts of a number of particularly controversial episodes in the Empire's history--including things like the British Raj of India, the Opium Wars in China, the Boer War in South Africa, and the Mau-Mau uprising in Kenya, among others. He finds that there were certainly abuses and injustices committed with respect to these things, but what he doesn't find is any support for the central claim of the anti-colonialists: that the British Empire and colonialism generally spring from a core agenda of racial hatred, slavery, and greed. He finds that the British Empire was not something planned, but rather the effect of numerous diverse causes that brought about the effect that came to be known as the empire. It was not an empire of conquest, like the empires of Alexander the Great or of Rome, but of ongoing workarounds and temporizing measures to do with an array of phenomena arising from exploration, commerce, emigration, and European politics.
The slave trade is a central pillar of anti-colonialist rhetoric. Between the 17th and 19th centuries millions of people were captured and trafficked, mostly from Africa, especially to the Americas, and Brits were heavily involved in this trade to begin with. What is not generally acknowledged by the anti-colonialists is that the British Empire also became a powerful force against slavery once this practice had been abolished in the U.K. The Royal Navy became a force for the interdiction of slavery on the Atlantic, and this was a major item in the British budget for decades. Also not acknowledged by the anti-colonialists is that African slaves were captured and sold by Africans or by Muslim slavers; Europeans mostly were buyers at the ports. And furthermore, some Britons were enslaved: whole villages on the south coast of England and Cornwall were captured by Corsairs and carried off to slavery in North Africa. The Empire was also a victim.
The author does not try to defend slavery. He's an ethicist and a Christian and deplores the practice. But the notion that the British Empire was built on the institution of slavery is contrary to historical fact. In a similar way, the other abominations of empire are also shown to be largely a matter of selective or prejudiced readings of history. It's easy to make judgments in hindsight, and it's easy and tempting to think that one could have managed complex and dangerous political situations with greater skill and integrity than one's ancestors, but a balanced, mature view is one that sees people as fallible and error prone, and is willing to give them the benefit of the doubt, at least sometimes.
I agree with all this and I think the author has done an excellent and thorough job. But I confess I was not altogether convinced when it came to his discussion of the "residential school" system for Indians in Canada--my own back yard. The author tries to show that the system was not all bad, and that it has had its supporters even among First Nations people in Canada. But the revelations over the past year or so of unmarked graves behind a number of these schools across the country show that the rot was deep and very bad indeed. The expression "death camps" is not really hyperbole in this case. It's not easy to see how we can get to justice from here--although we have to try.
Even here, though, I'm willing to accept that "colonialism" is not the root problem. I think of the Stanford Prison Experiment of 1971, in which Philip Zimbardo created a situation in which "guards" were given power over "prisoners" (all volunteer student subjects), and found he had to terminate the experiment early because of the abuses the guards were committing against the prisoners. Power is the ultimate drug, and the most addictive. Here, I think, we're getting closer to the real root issue. In the words of Alexander Solzhenitsyn:
The line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either – but right through every human heart.
The dominant note of anti-colonialism is self-righteousness. It's easy to point fingers at others, especially when they're dead and can no longer answer for themselves, but if we really want to lessen man's inhumanity to man, we need to look in the mirror and remind ourselves of Solzhenitsyn's words, and take responsibility, each one of us, for not being part of the problem.
Meanwhile, this book gives a sane, measured, and mature response to those who seek to make us feel bad for "not staying where we came from." If it comes to that, every human being is a "colonialist," except perhaps for the San of Botswana--the world's last true aborigines. That's where we all came from.
March 16, 2024
I read this book just after completing Empireworld by Sathnam Sanghera – both are very good and enjoyable books and add enormously to what is a very important conversation on colonialism. I think it is clearly both foolish and invidious to draw simplistic conclusions on what is an enormously complex and nuanced subject. The management of Empire, as undertaken by the British, simply doesn’t lend itself to a one word conclusion such as right or wrong, good or bad.
With that perspective in mind, I felt that Prof Biggar’s book as the more enlightening of the two – “Colonialism: a moral reckoning” goes into greater detail on specific issues and, as a result, I think soundly makes its case that Britain and its Empire was not the malevolent presence that some now choose to depict it as being.
There is no doubt that Britain’s Empire had some truly ugly moments as well as some heinous policies at various points of time. However, by the same token it is evident that policy was not centralized and that there was no awful plan of world domination as some have tried to suggest.
Times change, as they did over the 400 year plus duration of the Empire itself; this surely makes it unprofitable to judge actions through the prism of our modern sensibilities – a cliché perhaps, but it doesn’t make it untrue. So rather than just reeling off a list of happenings in support or against one’s argument, Prof . Biggar’s approach of assessing events ethically and morally makes a lot of sense - As a result, it also means he doesn’t shy away from facing up to the worst of happenings, be that slavery, the use of force, economic exploitation etc.
Prof. Biggar makes the case that much of what went on in colonies was simply ad hoc and that generally (albeit eventually) there was accountability for particularly egregious actions. Positive change was expected and allowed to occur - humanitarian and liberal instincts eventually pushed to the fore in most instances. I think Prof. Biggar makes a strong case that self correction was possible and indeed necessary throughout Britain’s empire during the 400 years of its existence.
As a small example let’s take Mr. Sanghera’s and Prof Biggar’s retelling of the terrible rape in Burma perpetrated by 20 plus soldiers from the West Kent Regiment. Mr. Sanghera rightly focusses on the lack of justice at trial and the military hierarchy’s role in trying to cover it up – a clear miscarriage of justice, but he leaves it at that. On the other hand, while Prof Biggar doesn’t focus on the details of the trial at all, he does tell us that once Curzon (the Governor General) became aware of the miscarriage of justice the whole regiment was banished to Aden for two years without leave and many were dismissed from service.
Of course, one would rather a terrible event such as this never happened in the first place, but as with so much in the Empire, once an error, big or small was identified, some sort of redress or rectification, was attempted.
Prof Biggar really does appear to paint a full picture before giving his views. Having also read the notes and referenced the bibliography when unsure, I tended to have real confidence that I was getting a full picture. However, that does not mean that I agree with all his conclusions each and every time!
I thought the discussion points Prof. Biggar raised on racism provided most food for thought. There is no doubt that empire was discriminatory and it seems that the further one got away from the centre the more evident racism and poor treatment became – perhaps that in itself is a historically study well worth undertaking.
I have also read some of the reviews on Prof. Biggar’s book, following the opprobrium directed at him by his professional colleagues and the silly (and depressing) efforts at silencing contrarian viewpoints in academic circles. A lot of those reviews don’t stack up in the face of the evidence provided by Prof Biggar’s argument and there is also a lack of underpinning for some of the more outrageous and inflammatory anti-Empire commentary which we now see.
This an excellent book and really worth reading if you want to understand the complexity, nuance and paradoxes of empire. Essential reading (as is Empireworld) if you want to hold a view on the subject.
With that perspective in mind, I felt that Prof Biggar’s book as the more enlightening of the two – “Colonialism: a moral reckoning” goes into greater detail on specific issues and, as a result, I think soundly makes its case that Britain and its Empire was not the malevolent presence that some now choose to depict it as being.
There is no doubt that Britain’s Empire had some truly ugly moments as well as some heinous policies at various points of time. However, by the same token it is evident that policy was not centralized and that there was no awful plan of world domination as some have tried to suggest.
Times change, as they did over the 400 year plus duration of the Empire itself; this surely makes it unprofitable to judge actions through the prism of our modern sensibilities – a cliché perhaps, but it doesn’t make it untrue. So rather than just reeling off a list of happenings in support or against one’s argument, Prof . Biggar’s approach of assessing events ethically and morally makes a lot of sense - As a result, it also means he doesn’t shy away from facing up to the worst of happenings, be that slavery, the use of force, economic exploitation etc.
Prof. Biggar makes the case that much of what went on in colonies was simply ad hoc and that generally (albeit eventually) there was accountability for particularly egregious actions. Positive change was expected and allowed to occur - humanitarian and liberal instincts eventually pushed to the fore in most instances. I think Prof. Biggar makes a strong case that self correction was possible and indeed necessary throughout Britain’s empire during the 400 years of its existence.
As a small example let’s take Mr. Sanghera’s and Prof Biggar’s retelling of the terrible rape in Burma perpetrated by 20 plus soldiers from the West Kent Regiment. Mr. Sanghera rightly focusses on the lack of justice at trial and the military hierarchy’s role in trying to cover it up – a clear miscarriage of justice, but he leaves it at that. On the other hand, while Prof Biggar doesn’t focus on the details of the trial at all, he does tell us that once Curzon (the Governor General) became aware of the miscarriage of justice the whole regiment was banished to Aden for two years without leave and many were dismissed from service.
Of course, one would rather a terrible event such as this never happened in the first place, but as with so much in the Empire, once an error, big or small was identified, some sort of redress or rectification, was attempted.
Prof Biggar really does appear to paint a full picture before giving his views. Having also read the notes and referenced the bibliography when unsure, I tended to have real confidence that I was getting a full picture. However, that does not mean that I agree with all his conclusions each and every time!
I thought the discussion points Prof. Biggar raised on racism provided most food for thought. There is no doubt that empire was discriminatory and it seems that the further one got away from the centre the more evident racism and poor treatment became – perhaps that in itself is a historically study well worth undertaking.
I have also read some of the reviews on Prof. Biggar’s book, following the opprobrium directed at him by his professional colleagues and the silly (and depressing) efforts at silencing contrarian viewpoints in academic circles. A lot of those reviews don’t stack up in the face of the evidence provided by Prof Biggar’s argument and there is also a lack of underpinning for some of the more outrageous and inflammatory anti-Empire commentary which we now see.
This an excellent book and really worth reading if you want to understand the complexity, nuance and paradoxes of empire. Essential reading (as is Empireworld) if you want to hold a view on the subject.
May 3, 2024
Urgent, relevant, encyclopedic, uncompromising, fair. But the book is so hot (publishers were afraid to initially run it) that any review must address the impact your political leanings will have on your willingness to even hear what this book has to say.
Colonialism is a detailed and disciplined investigation of the British colonial legacy that is certain to ruffle feathers of orthodox ideologues who ascribe to a currently popular political worldview. To believe that Britain's colonial legacy was fundamentally and systemically racist, violent, exploitative, genocidal, oppressive, etc. requires one to ignore, distort, or just be ignorant of the historical facts (and this includes the context those facts exist within). Because of this, Biggar might seem to give short shrift to the claims of ardent anti-colonialists. This is because to his credit and unlike the ardent anti-colonialists (or as John McWhorter might call them, The Elect), Biggar uses (in the words of Franz Fanon, author of The Wretched of the Earth, self-proclaimed revolutionary, and dogmatic critic of the West), "tiresome reasoning" and "oppressive logic" instead of a worldview where the only absolute "truth is that which hurries the break-up of the colonialist regime... and ruins the foreigners." If one believes that truth is discoverable and not predetermined by positions in a social hierarchy, the axioms of devout anti-colonialists crumble quickly when examined under the light of the total historical record.
Biggar's own surprise at the visceral reactions to his initial findings before the book was released reflects that the divide goes so deep as to reveal divergent first principles between his advocates and critics. Matthew Perris, in his review of the book in The Times, predicts this polarization by pointing out that Biggar offers a "view of history that one set of modern voices will find outrageous, [while] another considers obvious and reasonable."
Colonialism is not just history and ethics - it is a solvent that washes away the build up of one-dimensional frameworks modern society uses for judging right from wrong. We live in an era where one misstep (e.g. speaking a common Chinese word which has a phonetic similarity to a racial slur in English or finding common ground with the political party 'across the aisle') is grounds for excommunication. Colonialism is using the total context of the story of the British Empire to give moral reckoning. This is not how many moderns think of ethics. One misdeed, regardless of intent, is damning of the whole person or enterprise. That this simplistic approach to ethics is strong on both sides of the political spectrum in the West makes this book an even more urgent read. Through his historical assessments, Biggar provides structures for how to think about ethics and truth that can translate elsewhere. Actions should never be divorced from context and intent.
Even if the average modern does not allow the book to cut that deep, as the author Niall Ferguson succinctly says in his quote on the front cover of my edition, "this book cannot be ignored by anyone who wishes to hold a view on the subject." Before you go protest Rhodes, or Britain's legacy with the slave trade, or the Benin bronzes, or the concentration camps of the Boer War... read this book. You would want a similarly balanced assessment if your personal moral record was being measured. And let it make you think through why you believe what you believe and whether we are better off with or without the humanizing Western tradition. For further reading, Tom Holland explores adjacent ideas in his assessment of Christianity on the Western tradition in his book Dominion.
Colonialism is a detailed and disciplined investigation of the British colonial legacy that is certain to ruffle feathers of orthodox ideologues who ascribe to a currently popular political worldview. To believe that Britain's colonial legacy was fundamentally and systemically racist, violent, exploitative, genocidal, oppressive, etc. requires one to ignore, distort, or just be ignorant of the historical facts (and this includes the context those facts exist within). Because of this, Biggar might seem to give short shrift to the claims of ardent anti-colonialists. This is because to his credit and unlike the ardent anti-colonialists (or as John McWhorter might call them, The Elect), Biggar uses (in the words of Franz Fanon, author of The Wretched of the Earth, self-proclaimed revolutionary, and dogmatic critic of the West), "tiresome reasoning" and "oppressive logic" instead of a worldview where the only absolute "truth is that which hurries the break-up of the colonialist regime... and ruins the foreigners." If one believes that truth is discoverable and not predetermined by positions in a social hierarchy, the axioms of devout anti-colonialists crumble quickly when examined under the light of the total historical record.
Biggar's own surprise at the visceral reactions to his initial findings before the book was released reflects that the divide goes so deep as to reveal divergent first principles between his advocates and critics. Matthew Perris, in his review of the book in The Times, predicts this polarization by pointing out that Biggar offers a "view of history that one set of modern voices will find outrageous, [while] another considers obvious and reasonable."
Colonialism is not just history and ethics - it is a solvent that washes away the build up of one-dimensional frameworks modern society uses for judging right from wrong. We live in an era where one misstep (e.g. speaking a common Chinese word which has a phonetic similarity to a racial slur in English or finding common ground with the political party 'across the aisle') is grounds for excommunication. Colonialism is using the total context of the story of the British Empire to give moral reckoning. This is not how many moderns think of ethics. One misdeed, regardless of intent, is damning of the whole person or enterprise. That this simplistic approach to ethics is strong on both sides of the political spectrum in the West makes this book an even more urgent read. Through his historical assessments, Biggar provides structures for how to think about ethics and truth that can translate elsewhere. Actions should never be divorced from context and intent.
Even if the average modern does not allow the book to cut that deep, as the author Niall Ferguson succinctly says in his quote on the front cover of my edition, "this book cannot be ignored by anyone who wishes to hold a view on the subject." Before you go protest Rhodes, or Britain's legacy with the slave trade, or the Benin bronzes, or the concentration camps of the Boer War... read this book. You would want a similarly balanced assessment if your personal moral record was being measured. And let it make you think through why you believe what you believe and whether we are better off with or without the humanizing Western tradition. For further reading, Tom Holland explores adjacent ideas in his assessment of Christianity on the Western tradition in his book Dominion.
August 20, 2025
“Yesterday’s oppressors were often the day before yesterday’s victims.”
Highly recommended.
Highly recommended.
January 4, 2024
This book starts from a few observations that are almost irrefutably true; (1) that not everything the British empire did was bad, and that (2) not everything about the project of empire was inherently racist or violent. However, I'm unclear what is the aim of making those arguments. I'm sure most people can find something positive with Nazi Germany, Stalin's Soviet Union, or Maoist China, but that doesn't say anything about the darker parts of those regimes.
One of the more insincere forms of argument in the book are ideas that concepts like 'war crimes' and 'crimes against humanity' don't really apply to actions conducted by British imperialists, since the actions predate the popularization of the term. Biggar is far to willing to accept the positive and virtuous aims of imperialists relying on their own words, in what seems a historically naive version of trust. Just because they said they were acting unselfishly doesn't mean they were, and similar even if they believe they were doing the right thing that doesn't mean we should. In another section, he notes that that we shouldn't hasten to condemn the British empire for killing civilians in war, because lots of other countries have done the same, including the Allies in World War Two (he frequently cites the more than 30,000 French civilians killed by the Allies in the invasion of Normandy). This form of whataboutism doesn't question that fact that maybe its always morally wrong to kill civilians, nor does it not that the mass-murder of European civilians in World War Two accomplished little in a military-strategic sense.
The overall observation isn't necessarily wrong; that the current trend of anticolonialism has led to many people making sweeping generalizations about the past. Indeed, not everything about British society in the past was evil or wrong, and not every aspect of colonialism was evil or wrong. Biggar frequently notes Nigerian author Chinua Achebe's view that colonialism in Nigeria bought both positive and negative impacts to his country. Indeed, a nuanced view of history is needed, in which we are able to critically evaluate the past in order to understand its legacies in the present. Indeed, not everything the British empire did was "wrong" or "racist". But I completely fail to see the value in making that point, especially when doing so comes at the risk of being over-apologetic of the crimes of the past, as Biggar does frequently in the book (the few examples above of the killing of civilians are only the most obvious ones; there are many more).
One insight I did gain from the book his Biggar's criticism of people who adopt the approach of condemning everything about their own society as a way of identifying with the oppressed or marginalized. He refers to it as the "paternalism of the guilty conscious" noting; "setting oneself as the kings of infamy is still putting oneself on the throne of history."
One of the more insincere forms of argument in the book are ideas that concepts like 'war crimes' and 'crimes against humanity' don't really apply to actions conducted by British imperialists, since the actions predate the popularization of the term. Biggar is far to willing to accept the positive and virtuous aims of imperialists relying on their own words, in what seems a historically naive version of trust. Just because they said they were acting unselfishly doesn't mean they were, and similar even if they believe they were doing the right thing that doesn't mean we should. In another section, he notes that that we shouldn't hasten to condemn the British empire for killing civilians in war, because lots of other countries have done the same, including the Allies in World War Two (he frequently cites the more than 30,000 French civilians killed by the Allies in the invasion of Normandy). This form of whataboutism doesn't question that fact that maybe its always morally wrong to kill civilians, nor does it not that the mass-murder of European civilians in World War Two accomplished little in a military-strategic sense.
The overall observation isn't necessarily wrong; that the current trend of anticolonialism has led to many people making sweeping generalizations about the past. Indeed, not everything about British society in the past was evil or wrong, and not every aspect of colonialism was evil or wrong. Biggar frequently notes Nigerian author Chinua Achebe's view that colonialism in Nigeria bought both positive and negative impacts to his country. Indeed, a nuanced view of history is needed, in which we are able to critically evaluate the past in order to understand its legacies in the present. Indeed, not everything the British empire did was "wrong" or "racist". But I completely fail to see the value in making that point, especially when doing so comes at the risk of being over-apologetic of the crimes of the past, as Biggar does frequently in the book (the few examples above of the killing of civilians are only the most obvious ones; there are many more).
One insight I did gain from the book his Biggar's criticism of people who adopt the approach of condemning everything about their own society as a way of identifying with the oppressed or marginalized. He refers to it as the "paternalism of the guilty conscious" noting; "setting oneself as the kings of infamy is still putting oneself on the throne of history."
April 23, 2025
A friend gave me this one and I was steeling myself up for an ultra-conservative defence of the British Empire. It's not that I'm unsympathetic to conservatives, it's just that they really can view the past in completely rose-tinted glasses.
I was pleasantly surprised by Nigel Biggar's book which did a good job of allowing me to be sceptical while I read it and then still gave me something to think about.
Essentially, Biggar takes the main current accusations about the British Empire (because it is true that people aren't usually complaining about generic historical colonialism so much as *British* colonialism) and he answers them one by one.
Was the British Empire racist? Was it built on slavery? Was it primarily about exploitation?
To answer each accusation, he dives straight into the histories of some of the messiest episodes of British colonial history: Africa, India, Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the Boer War, the Indian Uprising and others that I hadn't even heard of.
The ultimate case that he makes is that you can definitely find examples of every single thing anti-colonialists raise: racial superiority, overuse of violence, exploitation.
But what is much harder to prove is that these things were the driving philosophies and aims of the British Empire. Instead, on balance, they were much more likely to be trying to improve the lot of those nations they had colonised.
Not to mention, as really the first great empire to lead the charge in getting rid of slavery, driven by a growing Christian/humanitarian understanding of human rights, it's hard to completely demonise the Empire.
For me, it neither makes the British Empire a perfect thing to be put on a pedestal or a heritage to completely disown. If anything, it gives me pause about how we're doing things today.
Surely, even in my country of Australia, even while our ethos and philosophy across government and general society is to be against violence, racism and exploitation, aren't we currently wrestling with problems of inequality? Are our businesses running for the good of those they serve or are they mainly driven by profits? What about things like domestic violence, gang violence and the like?
But look at what we have been able to do in terms of welfare, public medicine, education, living standards, technology.
in other words, at any given period, there will be a mixture of good and bad. And there are times when there is more bad than good. But is the anti-colonial rhetoric casting the British Empire as almost completely bad because that's where the history takes us? Or because it's a handy way to make a point against anything that looks like colonialism today?
Regardless of where you stand on the issue, this book is well-argued enough to be worth the read.
I was pleasantly surprised by Nigel Biggar's book which did a good job of allowing me to be sceptical while I read it and then still gave me something to think about.
Essentially, Biggar takes the main current accusations about the British Empire (because it is true that people aren't usually complaining about generic historical colonialism so much as *British* colonialism) and he answers them one by one.
Was the British Empire racist? Was it built on slavery? Was it primarily about exploitation?
To answer each accusation, he dives straight into the histories of some of the messiest episodes of British colonial history: Africa, India, Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the Boer War, the Indian Uprising and others that I hadn't even heard of.
The ultimate case that he makes is that you can definitely find examples of every single thing anti-colonialists raise: racial superiority, overuse of violence, exploitation.
But what is much harder to prove is that these things were the driving philosophies and aims of the British Empire. Instead, on balance, they were much more likely to be trying to improve the lot of those nations they had colonised.
Not to mention, as really the first great empire to lead the charge in getting rid of slavery, driven by a growing Christian/humanitarian understanding of human rights, it's hard to completely demonise the Empire.
For me, it neither makes the British Empire a perfect thing to be put on a pedestal or a heritage to completely disown. If anything, it gives me pause about how we're doing things today.
Surely, even in my country of Australia, even while our ethos and philosophy across government and general society is to be against violence, racism and exploitation, aren't we currently wrestling with problems of inequality? Are our businesses running for the good of those they serve or are they mainly driven by profits? What about things like domestic violence, gang violence and the like?
But look at what we have been able to do in terms of welfare, public medicine, education, living standards, technology.
in other words, at any given period, there will be a mixture of good and bad. And there are times when there is more bad than good. But is the anti-colonial rhetoric casting the British Empire as almost completely bad because that's where the history takes us? Or because it's a handy way to make a point against anything that looks like colonialism today?
Regardless of where you stand on the issue, this book is well-argued enough to be worth the read.
April 6, 2024
So, this is an excellent book. It isn't a long defence of the British Empire. But nor is it short. It takes individual events that occurred across the Empire as examples. The overall framing of the book is what most interests me, however.
The book arises not, I think, as a defence of Empire, but rather as a defence of evidence-based truth, not ideologically-driven deceit. The origins of the book lie in the wake of a load of cringeworthy, ideological, blind, woke nonsense, like the movements of Black Lives Matter and Rhodes Must Fall. These movements eschew truth, balance and nuance, and put blind adherence to ideology ahead of them.
The author puts great weight into skewering the claims of these ideologues with evidence. And the evidence is nuanced, because history is nuanced, not simple, not black and white. Hence when you look at the British Empire, there is a large pile of sin and wrong, but there is also an even greater mound of goodness.
And an element that shows a Christian ethos behind much of Britain's people at the time of Empire: the ability of the Empire (its people, its governments) to learn from their sins, and do better. British governance has self-correcting mechanisms.
Perhaps the biggest and most complicated item is slavery. Britain participated in it, but its repentance was strong: it outlawed its trade, then outlawed it entirely, then used its military might to eliminate the white slavery of the Mediterannean and the black slavery of East Africa, conducted by the Arabs.
But the high point was World War II, when the many subject peoples of the Empire voluntarily fought for Britain against the evil empires of Germany and Japan. I read in another book recently of the Maori Battalion from New Zealand, fighting in North Africa, under the British flag. The Maori have a long memory. It was they who voted most strongly against the removal of the British flag from the top left corner of the New Zealand flag.
It is largely useless, narcissistic whites (but other colours too) of this modern age who are more interested in their own vanity and righteousness, by pursuing a blind ideological crusade against their forebears. The author attempts a brief psychological analysis. It isn't about 'Empire': it's about the vanity of the modern age.
The book arises not, I think, as a defence of Empire, but rather as a defence of evidence-based truth, not ideologically-driven deceit. The origins of the book lie in the wake of a load of cringeworthy, ideological, blind, woke nonsense, like the movements of Black Lives Matter and Rhodes Must Fall. These movements eschew truth, balance and nuance, and put blind adherence to ideology ahead of them.
The author puts great weight into skewering the claims of these ideologues with evidence. And the evidence is nuanced, because history is nuanced, not simple, not black and white. Hence when you look at the British Empire, there is a large pile of sin and wrong, but there is also an even greater mound of goodness.
And an element that shows a Christian ethos behind much of Britain's people at the time of Empire: the ability of the Empire (its people, its governments) to learn from their sins, and do better. British governance has self-correcting mechanisms.
Perhaps the biggest and most complicated item is slavery. Britain participated in it, but its repentance was strong: it outlawed its trade, then outlawed it entirely, then used its military might to eliminate the white slavery of the Mediterannean and the black slavery of East Africa, conducted by the Arabs.
But the high point was World War II, when the many subject peoples of the Empire voluntarily fought for Britain against the evil empires of Germany and Japan. I read in another book recently of the Maori Battalion from New Zealand, fighting in North Africa, under the British flag. The Maori have a long memory. It was they who voted most strongly against the removal of the British flag from the top left corner of the New Zealand flag.
It is largely useless, narcissistic whites (but other colours too) of this modern age who are more interested in their own vanity and righteousness, by pursuing a blind ideological crusade against their forebears. The author attempts a brief psychological analysis. It isn't about 'Empire': it's about the vanity of the modern age.
December 18, 2023
Nigel Biggar is a professor in the area of Moral/ Theology/ Ethics. In a time where debate about moral issues is often black and white and where people often hold entrenched pre-conceived opinions, Biggar offers a balanced and calm analysis with many interesting perspectives. Needless to say that Colonialism / colonial history easily qualifies for being a controversial topic.
I love Biggar’s nuanced approach. The topic is obviously so vast that one book will not be able to cover all elements (and despite the title to book is in essence only focused on British colonialism).
And Biggar offers a systematic approach and often starts with an anti-colonial position; e.g. chapter 7: “The colonial “project” is oppressive and exploitative”…. “imperial rule was bad”…. From where he then offers analysis and different perspectives which makes you think further and deeper.
In chapter 8 he picks 6 violent episodes (“Imperial Belligerency”) during British Colonial rule for further analysis and discussion, again not shunning controversial events. (Opiumwar (1839-1842)/ Indian Mutiny (1857)/ Amritsar (1919)/ Benin (1897)/ 2nd Boer war (1899-1902) and Mau Mau (1950ties).)
I would recommend the book if you are interested in the topic and can handle to be exposed to a range of different opinions and perspectives. Once more I applaud Biggar in writing this book today and once more appreciate his nuanced approach.
I love Biggar’s nuanced approach. The topic is obviously so vast that one book will not be able to cover all elements (and despite the title to book is in essence only focused on British colonialism).
And Biggar offers a systematic approach and often starts with an anti-colonial position; e.g. chapter 7: “The colonial “project” is oppressive and exploitative”…. “imperial rule was bad”…. From where he then offers analysis and different perspectives which makes you think further and deeper.
In chapter 8 he picks 6 violent episodes (“Imperial Belligerency”) during British Colonial rule for further analysis and discussion, again not shunning controversial events. (Opiumwar (1839-1842)/ Indian Mutiny (1857)/ Amritsar (1919)/ Benin (1897)/ 2nd Boer war (1899-1902) and Mau Mau (1950ties).)
I would recommend the book if you are interested in the topic and can handle to be exposed to a range of different opinions and perspectives. Once more I applaud Biggar in writing this book today and once more appreciate his nuanced approach.
March 16, 2023
This is a well-documented, well-written, well-argued account of Britain's colonial empire. It's changed my previously low opinion of Cecil Rhodes in particular. Biggar acknowledges the shameful acts and attitudes of our imperial past, as well as identifying the good that imperial officials did. He also debunks many of the ill-documented charges that are now routinely made against the empire (and its commercial beginnings), and hints a little at the very much worse practices of some rivals to the empire. He does perhaps pay too little attention to the patronizing contempt that is sometimes (and especially in the later 19th and earlier 20th century) evident in popular British attitudes (not so much in official practice). But overall, an excellent book. Biggar has certainly not deserved the insults that have been directed at him.
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