“The attempt to judge an empire would be rather like approaching an elephant with a tape measure,” the historian Margery Perham opined in 1961. Her attempts to make the case for decolonisation stand as a warning; her 1941 tract, Africans and British Rule, was banned as “anti-settler” by the governor of Kenya — yet the Caribbean economist Arthur Lewis, winner of the Nobel prize in 1979, denounced Perham as “not just smug and self-satisfied” but reeking of “that self-conceit which typifies the colonial Englishman and which is doing more than anything else to poison the relations between the races”.
In Colonialism Nigel Biggar disregards the “keep out” signs and marches into the minefield. Again. In 2016 he provoked protest with a “qualified defence” of Cecil Rhodes in the face of an attempt to remove the effigy of the old imperialist from Oriel College, Oxford. The year after, 58 fellow academics wrote an open letter demanding his Ethics and Empire course be boycotted; this group evidently was in the pub during the module on intellectual freedom.
These were early shots in what Biggar calls the “imperial history wars”. His book is the latest fusillade in the conflict, and it carries the intellectual force of a Javelin antitank missile. Colonialism is no apologia for empire. It acknowledges the occurrences of cruelty, violence, rapine, repression and sharp practice that characterised much of London’s relationship with its colonial possessions. But it also calls for balance, cheekily quoting the father of African literature, Chinua Achebe, on the legacy of colonialism: “Complexity with contradictions — good things as well as bad.”
Wisely Biggar does not claim to provide a complete compendium; he organises his story thematically, starting with slavery and racism, moving on to the takeover of land, trade relations and government. He scrupulously refers to the writings of anticolonial scholars, giving a fair summary of Eric Williams’s seminal Capitalism and Slavery. Williams, later the first prime minister of Trinidad, attributed the speed and scale of Britain’s Industrial Revolution to the profits of the slave and sugar trades. Here Biggar marshals his critique efficiently, but not entirely persuasively. Without empire Britain would never have been able to afford the innovation that propelled the age of steam.
The problem with rebuttal narratives is that they are constructed on your opponents’ scaffold. Biggar is forced to spend time debunking nonsense from writers who treat evidence contrary to their theories as a mere inconvenience.
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● Nigel Biggar: the academic who dared to say Rhodes should stay
The Oxford historian Jenifer Hart asserts that the treasury secretary Charles Trevelyan called the Irish famine of 1845-9 “the punishment of God on an indolent and (sic) unselfreliant people”. Biggar quotes the magisterial dismissal by Paul Bew: “Mainstream writers insisted on Irish qualities of hard work and intelligence . . . an assumption of Irish laziness is not a decisive clue to English attitudes.” But efforts to show even-handedness are undermined by the patronising tones of a colonial official. A governor of Jerusalem sighs: “Two hours of Arab grievances drive me into the synagogue, while after an intensive course of Zionist propaganda I am prepared to embrace Islam.”
Paradoxically the focus on the racism has resulted in a deeply Eurocentric debate on all sides. Anxieties among the colonised people that ethnic hostilities suppressed by the colonialists would flare up once the British withdrew are rarely acknowledged. Big events don’t count if they aren’t instigated by the colonialists. The 1945 Pan-African Congress in Manchester, the springboard for the continent’s liberation, was attended by the African leaders Kwame Nkrumah, Jomo Kenyatta, Hastings Banda, the Caribbean activist George Padmore and chaired by Dudley Thompson, later to become Jamaica’s foreign minister; it has virtually disappeared from memory.
As the book’s extensive notes and bibliography indicate, this war is being fought in the cloisters of academe. The historian AJP Taylor said that the past is what actually took place; history is what we tell ourselves. Many want the story of Britain to be one with nothing but racism at its heart. They demand atonement by all white people, culpable or not.
Biggar acknowledges wickedness in our nation but his version of history calls us to accept the messiness and moral compromises inherent in liberalism. Given that the alternative being presented to most of the former British Empire today is a Faustian pact with Beijing, I find it hard to disagree.
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Colonialism: A Moral Reckoning by Nigel Biggar
Wm Collins £25 pp480
