The woke war on history aims to abolish the West itself
Straight off the train from France, I trundled along – in trainers, with bags under both eyes and arms – to the launch of Oxford professor Nigel Biggar’s controversial new book, Colonialism: A Moral Reckoning. The crowd, I knew, would be an excellent one, filled with some of the country’s finest scholars of history and theology, like Robert Tombs, David Abulafia, Anna Sapir Abulafia and Tirthankar Roy. And there was a host of genial, approving Tories, too, from former defence secretary Sir Michael Fallon to Danny Kruger, the MP for Devizes, to Michael Gove.
Looking around the room, there could be no doubt that the last laugh – at least insofar as attempts to cancel him are concerned – was Biggar’s. There were speeches – four of them – including from a glowing publisher (William Collins) and from Gove, books flying off the table and a spot on the bestseller list.
None of this, however, was inevitable. In 2021, Biggar’s original publisher, Bloomsbury – apparently taking its cue from the student mobs trying to get statues torn down, including that of Cecil Rhodes at Oriel College, Oxford – told him that it would no longer be publishing his finished manuscript as originally planned. “Conditions are not currently favourable,” they wrote. “We will therefore be postponing publication and will review the position next year.” And though Oxford told him that he could say what he liked, colleagues ostracised him, and friends abruptly cut him out. “OMG, this is serious s---. WE MUST SHUT THIS DOWN,” tweeted a Cambridge professor, with something short of professionalism.
With the successful launch of the book, however, the debate is no longer about Biggar’s cancellation, but about the “conditions” that led to Bloomsbury’s craven email – and the kind of resistance the book continues to face.
Both are rooted in an extreme set of beliefs about what history is, and who gets to write it. The central pillar of this perverse world view is that history isn’t really a study of the past, but a weapon with which to beat the present, and more specifically, the West. History apparently has no use beyond this; and there is no statute of limitations.
Thus you get the likes of the aristocratic Trevelyan family publicly apologising for having owned slaves, and paying reparations to the people of
Grenada; in 1835, the family received £26,898 (about £2.5million in today’s money) in compensation from the British government after the abolition of slavery a year earlier.
They can do what they like with their own money. But where does it end? Should everyone and every state with even the most tenuous link to historical slavery – which, depending on your definition, could mean a great many of them – pay reparations? Would that include slave-selling and owning Africans, Indians and Persians? What about Greeks, Egyptians and Italians paying reparations for the slaves of ancient Greece and Rome and Egypt? It’s not practical. Better would be to teach history properly.
One is led to believe, from the furore around Biggar’s book, that it is cheerleading for empire or erasing its crimes. It does no such thing. He opens his book with what ought to be an utterly uncontroversial assertion that “the British Empire was neither a single project nor animated by a single aim”. He proceeds to sketch out – with dates, places, wars; evidence, in other words – the motives for certain movements of troops and seizures of land. These largely coincided with the need for defence, and then, to defend commercial interests. He is not trying to eulogise empire; he seems, like all proper historians, to be interested in what is true.
But as a moral philosopher, Biggar is also interested in what is moral; indeed his first chapter is called “Motives: Good and Bad”. And here is where we reach the nub of the issue. Because the reason why scholars such as Biggar are so heroic is because their work can help us push back against the single-minded use of Britain’s past by woke mobs to confirm that we are racist today. It is about refusing to allow history to become merely a tool with which to delegitimise the UK and the West.
The people who would have Britain’s history, and that of the West, limited to vengeful tales of murder, theft and slavery, are already exerting enormous influence. Most new jobs advertised in modern history in UK universities now relate to crimes of the past, and connect back, in some way, to our supposed endemic racism.
But if we let the influential activists who are busy “decolonising” curricula and universities have their way, we will, ultimately, be left with precisely nothing of a historical record at all – bar a list of crimes, taken out of context.
Less than 100 years ago, Britain had an empire. However horrified we might be today, slavery was widely practised across the world
100 years ago, everyone was sexist, racist and homophobic by our current standards
(as, indeed, it still is in some places today). Everyone was sexist, racist and homophobic by our current standards. Are we to bin all elements of the past – namely everything until about the 1990s – that are tainted by these things? If so, we lose the good stuff as well. We lose knowledge of Britain’s world-leading and committed abolitionism, and of the foundations of culture, from the Greeks to the Vatican to Shakespeare and John Donne. We become nihilists and narcissists.
So the arrival of Biggar’s book is a corrective – a small but important one – against the desire to use and abuse history not to learn what was true, and how complex the past is, but to self-immolate and punish in the present.