Book in the news… a salutary corrective to anti-colonial hyperbole
Colonialism
A Moral Reckoning
Nigel Biggar
William Collins, £25
The big debate about the legacy of the British Empire has got heated in recent years. Many argue that history shows that the story of Britain is “one with nothing but racism”, one for which we must atone, says Trevor Phillips in the Sunday Times. Indeed, some seem to think that it is wrong to debate the topic at all. Former professor Nigel Biggar thinks that such views are overly simplistic and ignore “the messiness and moral compromises” inherent in history. He has therefore disregarded the “keep out signs” and written Colonialism: A Moral Reckoning, with the aim of bringing some nuance to the debate. The book is impressive and “carries the intellectual force of a Javelin antitank missile”.
This is no one-sided pro-Empire polemic, but an objective account of what took place, says Jonathan Sumption in the Literary Review. Biggar acknowledges that “racism, cultural aggression, population displacement, economic exploitation, authoritarianism and political violence” were not exactly unknown in the British Empire. But he makes a good case that “many of the worst things were not the result of ideology or calculated policy” and that “the disruption brought benefits as well as suffering” – through the elimination of
“barbarous” practices, such as “slavery, cannibalism, sati and human sacrifice”, for example. The British also brought “the rule of law, constitutional government, honest administration, economic development and modern educational and research facilities”.
Biggar is right that the former empire was staffed with many “honourable men who selflessly served the downtrodden”, says Pratinav Anil in The Times. But such people “were little more than a sideshow in the story of Empire” – most involved far preferred financial balance sheets to moral ones. The real flaw of the book is that it takes the pronouncements of the colonial administrations “at face value”. It is a “salutary corrective” to recent “hyperbolic claims of racism and genocide”, but goes somewhat too far in the opposite direction.