Well over 80 episodes and countless outtakes into my side gig as a podcast host, one remark made on our waves strikes me as having propelled our show to peak explanatory power. Back in October 2020, we hosted the late scholar György Schöpflin, by then retired and in the eve of his life, for a conversation about the nationalist and euro-skeptic populism practiced by Hungarian PM Viktor Orbán, in whose party Schöpflin had served as a Member of the European Parliament (MEP). The interview had surveyed Orbán’s every controversial initiative when the retired academic and former MEP arrived at a lucid observation about what, at bottom, set his native Hungary apart from his adopted Great Britain. “Hungary has no post-colonial guilt,” intoned Schöpflin point-blank. Rather than having colonized other territories, his thinking went, Hungary had fallen under the successive dominion of foreign powers, be it Austria or the Soviet Union. Reborn as an independent country upon the latter’s downfall in 1991, Hungary had nothing to apologize to the world for, he argued. Unlike the UK, it reentered the concert of nations unencumbered by the guilt of having wronged others.
Bar the omission of Hungary’s role as a partner in the dual Austro-Hungarian monarchy, what did Schöpflin mean about the UK? In what ways are Britain’s dealings with the world partly a function of having ruled over a vast empire in the past? Post-colonial guilt is not easy to measure. It is a milder and fuzzier form of remorse than, say, the attitudes of Germany’s postwar elite towards Nazi crimes, manifest in the country’s defense policy to this day. That doesn’t mean it’s impossible to gauge. There is a growing feeling of post-colonial repentance among large swathes of Britain’s youth, reflected in the rising popularity of reparations as a policy to compensate for the wrongs of imperialism. In January this year, a poll of 2,000 Britons by the International Press Standards Organization (IPSO) found 24% of white and 61% of black respondents favoring reparations either to former colonies or to immigrants who hail from them. Even amongst older generations, the comparatively welcoming attitude towards the latter’s presence in Britain or the support for high levels of overseas aid towards foreign countries signals at least a timid sense of contrition for having projected authority over those lands in the past.
Britain’s post-colonial guilt is, at bottom, what Nigel Biggar aims to assuage with a disruptive new book, Colonialism (2022). If the book is being critiqued by the Left as an ethnocentric, all-is-rosy defense of the British Empire, it is because the moral culpability Biggar seeks to absolve overshadows the many instances of injustice and abuse he does acknowledge. At this moment in UK politics, the author knows he swims against the tide. Biggar argues that the tendency, in the age of human rights and international justice, to critically reassess the morality of having ruled half the world from London has been compounded by the ‘Great Awokening’ imported in 2020 from the U.S. George Floyd’s death that year added, Biggar argues, a tinge of anti-white resentment to the ferment of anticolonial politics on college campuses. In a recent podcast with historian of Spain Felipe Fernández-Armesto, Biggar argued that the latter is not being so thoroughly scrutinized partly because the racial divide doesn’t run as deep in Spain’s former colonies as it does in Britain’s. Even in the Spain’s case, the two concurred, class was the deeper chasm, with colonial elites often mingling across racial boundaries.
If it weren’t for the atmospherics around the book’s release (the statue-topplers went after Cecil Rhodes’ plinth at Oxford, Biggar’s alma mater, only two years ago), the book would perhaps have been received less as imperialist apologia and more as what it hopes to be: an impartial assessment, by the standards of the time, of the underlying motivations, direct consequences, and collateral effects of British imperialism through history. In Biggar’s assessment, the British Empire fares reprehensibly in some respects, but in no way worse than other empires, from Ottoman and other Muslim empires to those of the Chinese and the Aztecs, about whom British anti-colonialists rarely make any fuss despite them presiding over at times far worse evils. Take the issue of slavery, which is too often invoked in the same breath as imperialism when in fact, Biggar argues, they’re distinct phenomena. Biggar acknowledges that Britain abetted slavery for about three and a half centuries before resorting, in 1807, to deploying all means to root it out worldwide. Even then, the transatlantic slave trade—let alone Britain’s share of it—paled in comparison to the Muslim-controlled sub-Saharan route active at roughly the same time, which in some respects continues to this day.
On the issue of the Empire’s guiding mission or underlying motivation, Biggar contradicts every bit of the academic literature, which is itself a tangle of contradictions. He sides neither with those who ascribe an inherently abusive, extractive, or otherwise exploitative motivation at the Empire’s feet, nor with the imperial enthusiasts who stress instead the civilizing, humanitarian, and egalitarian worldview of colonial rulers. Some of Biggar’s reviewers endorse a similarly equanimous viewpoint. Writing for The Times, Pratinav Anil argues that the Empire was “neither wicked or genocidal, nor was it about civilizing the world.” Profit-making for the metropolis, not subjugating colonized lands nor elevating colonized peoples, was the Empire’s telos, stresses Anil. Yet Biggar’s stance differs with all the above, simply claiming “there was no essential motivation behind the empire.” Aggregating the countless individuals involved, more or less directly, from exploring to exploiting and from evangelizing to eviscerating, no overarching motivation emerges but a cacophony of motives that demands compartmentalization for Biggar’s ethical assessment to begin to emerge.
And when it emerges, the assessment is less likely to arouse the reasoned mix of shame and pride Biggar hopes for than to be met with, simply, blunt indifference. In a 2020 YouGov poll across six formerly imperial European countries, Britain ranked second for the share of respondents declaring the Empire to be “more something to be proud of,” fifth for those choosing “more something to be ashamed of,” with no less than 49% choosing either “none of the two options” or “don’t know.” A class and ethnic breakdown, however, would have made for a more revealing dataset. It would have revealed the hostility to Britain’s colonial record displayed at the 2020 wave of woke statue-toppling to be concentrated among the campus woke and alien to working-class immigrant communities. Despite the former’s energy, post-colonial politics are settled at a zero-sum equilibrium: those taking pride in Britain’s colonial achievements tend to live a retreated existence in its ethnically homogeneous small Northern cities, with those most incensed about its abuses living clustered in London. Biggar’s book is addressed to those able to heed arguments from both sides—but that population may in turn not care enough.
