“You should tell them you want to ban Black History Month,” quipped a guest cheekily to me during a drinks party in Knighstbridge. Some quiet laughter erupted after this rather outrageous comment because only moments before I had declared my disdain for ideological attempts to ‘decolonize’ the curriculum and, in my view, whitewash history.
Admittedly, this was heavy small talk over a glass of champagne. What had initiated my remark? It was the news that I had just secured a new job at a prestigious South London school whose alumni included famous actors and the sons of prominent politicians. It was also a place where I was not yet aware of the histo-political proclivities of my confreres. Our present times have made the expression of these views so important that they surpass more banal questions such as where you went to school or where you shop.
The added irony in all of this is that I myself am of dual heritage. Lest the reader assume I am an angry ‘gammon’ or, worse, that far-right extremists are infiltrating our schools, I am simply the product of Irish and Caribbean parents, one who now lives happily in England. However, such a pedigree does raise a plethora of questions surrounding identity and belonging—and it also tends to initiate conversations on more topical themes like race, racism, empire, and slavery. Some in my position might find such conversations tiresome. However, these topics are important ones, and the customary ways of discussing them are lacking in a number of important respects. Thus, you can imagine my glee when I was asked to review Nigel Biggar’s Colonialism: A Moral Reckoning. Needless to say, there was an intense satisfaction when it arrived and I first leafed through its pages.
As an historian, it became clear from the outset that Colonialism is not an history book. Rather, it is an intelligent and measured moral assessment of the British Empire that has as its abiding strength a superb readability and forensic attention to detail. This will inevitably be a disappointment to some who may have expected a dense and complicated tome that is purchased and never read. Others will have assumed that this is a prized treatise on the merits of our colonial past, one which has sought to exalt the victors of empire instead of their lowly victims in a crude reversal of casting the mighty from their thrones. However, this is not the case either. While he ultimately concludes that progressive discussions of colonialism are flawed and overly simplistic, Biggar does not fall into the opposite extreme of writing ideological polemic in favor of every aspect of Western colonialism.
Colonialism seeks to address moral questions that naturally arise from any objective consideration of the realities of empire. The book approaches colonialism in a way free from loaded connotations and political conjecture. Biggar explains why this is so important by reminding the reader that “there is a more historically accurate, fairer, more positive story to be told about the British Empire than the anti-colonialists want us to hear.” Subsequently, the book opts for a truthful clarity that perhaps only an ethicist and theologian could achieve.
All of this is expertly begun in the introduction, which neatly roadmaps the reader through the various sections of the book and details why such a moral assessment is so important. In the introduction, Biggar is frank about his own intellectual track record—which has not been free from controversy—and illustrates it by describing a confrontation with leftists over the ‘Rhodes Must Fall’ campaign. Nevertheless, the book is far from an angry polemic and demonstrates the author’s charming skill in reestablishing views he ordinarily holds in contempt which he then replaces with a meticulously detailed riposte, executed with perfect ease. As he comments, this is because many of his critics are “really not interested in the complicated, morally ambiguous truth about the past.” Indeed, they possess an “unscrupulous indifference” to such a concept. In this sense, Biggar is doing ‘good’ history, at least by my standards, because he is fundamentally motivated by a desire for truth and is careful to avoid a politicized assessment of historical events, events that often have liberal, postmodern values superimposed on to them before any meaningful discussion can be had.
Biggar’s fundamental concern for reaching a ‘moral’ judgement about the empire should be encouraging to a wider pool of readers, because they can be secure in the knowledge that his conclusions on historical events are firmly rooted in evidence and free from competing trends of interpretation often found in other disciplines. Therefore, Colonialism ought to be recommended to those wanting to read history at university and those charged with teaching history more broadly, because there is a disproportionate propensity to progressive anti-colonialist thought within academic history and the wider humanities. This is evidenced by the distinct lack of available academic literature that argues from the same perspective as Biggar, and with the same clarity. Rather, the pluralism in which these ideas ought to be discussed is so narrow that it is incapable of tolerating any dissenting voices, and the anti-progressive orthodoxy is quickly silenced.
This view is supported by a large body of evidence from academics, including Jon A. Shields, associate professor of government at Claremont McKenna College, who has long argued that “progressives, both in and out of the academy, need to confront the strong evidence of political bias in academia.” This is said in the context of “Conservative representation [being] even worse today in the social sciences and humanities, where they have practically disappeared from many areas of inquiry.” Similar arguments are made by Professor Doug Stokes from the University of Exeter. He indicates that “there is a creeping illiberalism and technocratic managerialism developing within the worldview of UK university leadership teams.” This thesis is furthered by evidence from a report from Universities UK which suggests a “prevalence of books written by white scholars on reading lists helps ‘perpetuate existing inequalities and are unlikely to reflect the experience or viewpoints of many members of the student and staff body.’” The report calls upon young undergraduates to “audit their professors’ courses to ensure the ‘representation of diversity within materials used in lectures and tutorials.”
This makes Biggar a robust lone voice in a hostile wilderness. On reflection, it is difficult not to reason that, “time and time again in this book we have seen historians and others overegging the sins of British colonialism.” This is largely because, as Biggar puts it, “many of my critics are really not interested in the complicated, morally ambiguous truth about the past.” What remains, however, is whether we can agree that these “anti-colonialists cannot be blamed for condemning racism… but they can be blamed for letting their condemnations run ahead of the data.”
At every moment throughout, Colonialism presents a rigorous moral evaluation of the British Empire which reflects our colonial past without fear of blemish or bruise. The success of this endeavour is a remarkable achievement because what has been found is incompatible with many of the foregone conclusions of contemporary discussions of empire and colonialism. The book is peppered with numerous salient examples, many of which are worth quoting at length. Biggar argues that “to describe British colonial government as simply or generally oppressive or exploitative, as is commonly done, may satisfy certain ideological prejudices, but it obscures the complicated historical truth.”
Indeed, Biggar’s willingness to ‘complicate’ grand historical narratives is one of the book’s greatest strengths. For instance, he believes the presumption that Western nations are solely to blame or thank for colonial history is woefully ill-founded. As he puts it, “colonial rule would not have been possible at without the acquiescence, participation and cooperation of native peoples.”
This much, perhaps, is not shocking. More surprising is his discussion of the historical realities of slavery in various colonies. The popular imagination’s picture of slavery is far more informed by the horrors of American chattel slavery than by any other instances. Biggar works to complicate this picture, though, arguing that the treatment of slaves “was not always so horrific.… sometimes masters regarded [their slaves] with a certain benevolence as members of their esteemed household.” He connects this and the previous point by observing that “Africans had been enslaving Africans for centuries” and “slavery and the slave were alive and well in Africa long before Europeans arrived to develop the export market.”
These examples provide readers with a sense of how Biggar attempts to correct a number of common historical misconceptions. However, as said above, this is not a work of history. Instead, what is most valuable about the book is the way that the author uses these and other points of history as an opportunity to reconsider dominant narratives of colonialism. This is most pronounced in the book’s first three chapters—especially those on racism and slavery.
Biggar’s work throughout this book is, of course, not merely academic. These discussion have wider social impact, as demonstrated when the Edward Coulston statue was torn down by protestors responding to the George Floyd shooting in June 2020. It is clear that this is not only a symptom of an aggressive and rash sanitizing of shared spaces and national history, but is also emblematic of a corrosive attack on national identity and community cohesion. Biggar is acutely aware of this, and thus one can deduce that he is attempting to redress the situation. This elevates the book further because Biggar has accurately identified both the socio-economic motivations of the colonialists he is critically examining and the ideological motivations of the anti-colonialists he is intellectually opposing. He establishes this in his comment that “when the hard left wants to undercut Britain’s role as a major supporter of the post-1945 liberal international order… it is politically useful to recount the history of the British Empire as a litany of ugly racial prejudice, rapacious economic exploitation and violent atrocity.”
Looking beyond Biggar’s astute critical aim against Cultural Marxism, the book has a more profound moral assessment that deserves attention. The most expansive and detailed evaluation comes in Chapter Eight, which discusses Justified Force and “Pervasive Violence.” It is apt that this chapter is the last before the conclusion, because the rest of the book has carefully built up to its climatic end in which the use of lethal violence is considered with such precision as to be placed under a metaphorical microscope. This is because after a number of other misconceptions and inaccuracies about the British Empire are resolved and put to bed, like motive and intent or superiority and control, the next biggest contentious issue to be considered—in the book and perhaps the minds of average laymen—is the use of violence. He does not whitewash history in doing so and admits that “the British Empire was frequently violent.” Biggar attempts to contextualize this historical reality by observing, “All states use physical force, sometimes to lethal effect.” He qualifies this by defining the duty of the state as “suppressing disorder within society and fending off threats from without; and defending foreign innocents from unjust aggression.” He then carefully delineates the legitimate use of force within the state and makes significant caveats.
This neatly segways into a remarkably compact illustration of just war theory. This illustration allows the reader to view a series of six colonialist actions, described by Biggar as “instances of imperial belligerency that have become infamous” with greater clarity. Here, Biggar skillfully encourages readers to put historical events into their proper context, and, more importantly, to think about them as fairly and objectively as possible in order to deduce a moral judgment.
What is curious in all this, though, is the distinct absence of any sufficient reference to Ireland. The relationship between the British Government and Irish people has been fraught since almost the beginning of time. Whilst not all violent interactions between British soldiers and Irish citizens have occurred under the banner of Empire, (like the precursor to The Troubles–the Battle of the Bogside) they have sometimes taken place in more recent times and on British soil—such as with Bloody Sunday—and denote a more direct link with Britain’s colonial past and our neighbors across the water on the Emerald Isle.
Biggar is far from alone in this oversight. The academic establishment seems markedly uncomfortable with confronting the reality of English interactions with the Irish. Perhaps this is because Ireland is a typically white and liberal country and therefore not automatically considered a subject of colonial expansion and therefore outside of the remit of investigation. Or perhaps it is part of the residue of anti-Irish sentiment in the aftermath of the Northern Ireland Conflict. Regardless, it demonstrates the implicit racism of anti-colonialists, who subsequently purport that racism can only be experienced by ethnic minority people, and they cannot conceive of exploitation happening amongst Europeans. It is thus a disappointment that Biggar does not include an observation of Ireland, because such an omission appears to hinder a full and complete moral assessment. Irish history is complex, but it is still an important part of the jigsaw.
By the time the reader reaches the epilogue of the book, he will have been exposed to an alternate view of history far from what is usually encountered in public spaces and popular culture. He will instead have been confronted with an evidenced-based evaluation of British colonial history that is not politically charged with ideological grand narratives or revisionist historiographical misconceptions, and that has as its strength an ability to avoid preconceived conclusions and unfounded assertions. This will be a salutary experience for some, as the foundation of entire worldviews and personal identities begin to crumble whilst realizing their need to be re-fashioned. Others may feel quietly vindicated and reassured that the negative pressure on their relationship with the past was sometimes overzealous and wrong. I am confident that Colonialism’s successwill come because it is a competent and integral contribution to the ‘culture wars’—largely achieved through the robust manner in which it has reshaped the conversation on our understanding of issues like racism and slavery, nationalism and legitimacy, and the general consensus of how we view our colonial past. Widespread historical illiteracy will mean that this has less of a direct influence on most people, but the secondary political impact will be more profound. How we view the past affects how we view ourselves and cooperate with those around us. As Biggar notes, “the importance of that story is not just past but present, not just historical but political.”
Biggar acknowledges the wider socio-political ramifications of his moral assessment when he identifies that what is at stake is “not merely the pedantic truth about yesterday, but the self-perception and self-confidence of Britain today.” This can be understood better when we consider the social repercussions of the academic influence of ideologies like Critical Race Theory, which has impacted the teaching of history and English literature and facilitated terms like ‘white guilt’ entering common parlance and the public consciousness. The intellectual danger presents itself almost immediately because it plants in the minds of young people a cultural distrust of their ancestors and the world around them, and breeds intergenerational contempt and a disproportionate hatred of the past. If nothing else, this is socially divisive and not conducive to an orderly society—one that treasures shared customs and beliefs, and values culture and tradition—and which individuals build an identity around.
As Kenneth Clarke remarked, “order is better to chaos… knowledge is preferable to ignorance… and human sympathy is more valuable than ideology.” That is why Biggar’s accessible contribution is so important, because it is a measured antidote to rapidly spreading poison. Just as there is no smoke without fire, there is no division without strike. Why should we care? A rudimentary investigation into the aims and objectives of the Frankfurt School should close the gap in understanding why these pernicious doctrines, so often proposed by anti-colonialists, are to be avoided at all costs—and declared anathema. Especially when the cultural revolution begins with children in school.
