A morality tale?
JON WILSON assesses a provocative addition to debates surrounding the history of empire, which sets out to provide a more positive spin on the imperial project
“The British empire was not from its inception a coherent project, methodologically developed out of some original plan.” The first chapter of Nigel Biggar’s near-500-page “moral reckoning” with empire begins with this eminently reasonable claim. The Oxford professor emeritus of moral theology presents himself as a clear-eyed outsider who has “stumble[d], blindly, into the Imperial History Wars”, to provide complexity and nuance to an otherwise overly politicised field. But all is not what it appears to be.
Biggar presents his arguments as a challenge to a vast group of historical scholars he describes as “anti-imperialist”, and who see empire as a “unitary… colonial project” whose “persistent violence” was “oppressive and exploitative”. Some historians do hold the views Biggar criticises – Caroline Elkins in her Legacy of Violence, for example. But they are few, and publish their scholarship as part of a vibrant, global set of debates that teem with exciting disagreement about the history of empire.
Consequently, Colonialism struggles in vain for opponents. The chapter on slavery criticises an argument – that slavery fuelled the industrial revolution – which Biggar admits is held by no scholar now. The chapter on economics finds no one to oppose other than the empirically impoverished work of a politician, Shashi Tharoor. In fact, historians – this author included – tend to emphasise empire’s fractured, contradictory, sporadically violent but incoherent character rather than the existence of a “coherent project”. With Colonialism, Biggar has created a masterwork in the art of constructing straw men.
The puzzle is why Biggar can’t recognise this. What is it about the history of empire that draws such irritation? The answer is that Colonialism is not about empire at all. Nigel Biggar believes in the existence of something called “the west” – a culture that has existed for centuries, and which now provides the basis for a “liberal international order” in which he believes we’ve lived since 1945. Now “the west” is under threat from authoritarian China and Russia, and needs history to defend it. “One important way of corroding faith in the west,” he argues, “is to denigrate its record, a major part of which is the history of European empires.” Biggar’s hostility to the history of empire comes from its refusal to be a propagandist for western civilisation.
In fact, Biggar’s effort to read contemporary “western” society back into the imperial past leads him to tell a far less complex story than he professes. Biggar is unafraid to acknowledge the brutality of the slave trade. But from the 19th century he sees empire as a broadly benign process introducing law, order and prosperity to non-European societies that had been poor and, Biggar suggests, often prone to “fanatical” violence. Imperial agents had their moments of illegitimate violence and oppression, but Biggar treats the empire as a whole as a coherent agent, “capable of correcting its sins and errors, and learning from them”.
This effort to tell a moral story leads him to ignore large-scale processes that cannot be justified in present-day moral terms. For example, conquest all but disappears as the cause of imperial expansion. Biggar argues that the East India Company’s control in south Asia grew through the voluntary Indian cession of land, “not… through conquest”. In fact, Company-ruled north India was called “the ceded and conquered provinces” between 1805 and 1834. Early 19th-century officials celebrated conquering violence as the basis of their right to significant swathes of territory.
Biggar’s Colonialism has the same flaw as those few works that see empire as a vast, coherent system of exploitation. Using the history of the British empire to either condemn or, as Biggar does here, celebrate “our” civilisation ignores the difference of the world now from the imperial past. The characteristics Biggar wants to celebrate – the division of the world into self-governing nation states, the spread of democracy, what he calls “liberal humanitarian principles” – stem not from empire but from its active renunciation in the middle of the 20th century, and they are the patrimony of all peoples, not just the west. With his assumption that history should buttress our present-day identities, Biggar ignores its greater role in showing how different the present is from the past.
From the 19th century, the author sees empire as a broadly benign process introducing law, order and prosperity to nonEuropean societies