Colonialism: A Moral Reckoning, by Nigel Biggar, William Collins, 651 pages.

In a village in northern India, shortly before the end of the Raj, a British officer walked down the road. It was a hot day, and a native family noticed the officer’s conspicuous perspiration; they invited him in and offered him water. He noticed that, while he was served in a poor clay cup, the family themselves drank from metal cups. After finishing his water, the officer stood wordlessly, crushed the vessel, and resumed his journey.

Before becoming the most reviled—and celebrated—British politician of his generation, Enoch Powell served in the army; he was the officer, and his hosts were brahmins, whose purity restrictions prevent the reuse of utensils handled by barbarians. Powell, who had entertained ambitions of being the British Viceroy, knew that he was not being insulted but rather shown grace—in a fully Indian context. He said through his actions I understand and assent.

Powell loved India; he occasionally lent his skills as an Urdu-speaker for the BBC’s broadcasting in the subcontinent, and in interviews, he spoke favorably of the modal Indian intelligence and character relative to those of Europeans. This sort of affinity, present in the army, was even more pronounced in the Indian Civil Service, whose name was a byword for integrity, local expertise, and concern for the governed. 

Like Gibbon, whose Rome is so like Hanoverian Britain, modern historians tend to attribute to our forebears the characteristic flaws of the contemporary order. The mechanism of whig history permeates the historic profession, although it has become distinctly un-whiggish in outlook: The events, people, and entities of the past are to be held up to the shape of present mores and judged, but the standards are of our prevailing enlightened liberal regime.

While stories like Powell’s happened all over India—indeed, unless one attributes radical incompetence or corruption to the native populations of the subcontinent, cordial cooperation must have been the rule rather than the exception—it is not the prevailing narrative of the Raj or the British Empire as a whole. Rather, the English version of the black legend prevails; Bollywood films like RRR and Mangal Pandey: The Rising give the extreme version of the standard view, that the British were rapacious, wantonly cruel, and generally bad news, suppressing noble local cultures with a mixture of brutality and dirty tricks. 

Into the politically fraught arena of imperial reception has stepped the conservative Anglican ethicist Nigel Biggar, the emeritus Regius Professor of Moral and Pastoral Theology at the University of Oxford. Imperial rehabilitation has been a chestnut of his for some years; his “Ethics and Empire” project and, specifically, his defense of Cecil Rhodes in 2015 have made him the object of much ire. His latest contribution—Colonialism: A Moral Reckoning—was dropped by Bloomsbury following controversy. It has now been published by William Collins.

Biggar’s title is something of a misnomer. It is purely an evaluation of British colonialism; the colonial projects of France, Portugal, Spain, and the rest are not considered. Those looking for a thoroughgoing Nietzschean bonanza claiming the rights of the strong, the valorization of race, and all that jazz will not find it here. Colonialism is an eminently liberal-minded work, almost off-puttingly vicarish in tone. As the subtitle declares, it is a reckoning; Biggar is keeping score. He sets out his goal simply: “What now follows is not a history of the British Empire, but a moral evaluation of it.” He aims to check the arithmetic of anti-colonialist writers and to draw his own conclusions.

A moral balance sheet does not imply that Biggar is asserting an overarching moral character to British colonialism. “There was no essential motive or set of motives that drove the British Empire,” he concludes after his first chapter examining the various impetus behind imperial expansion. This necessitates the examination of particular imperial episodes piecemeal and the errors in their reception by anti-colonial historians and theorists, a hefty undertaking. 

It also demands the establishment of moral weights and measures. Accordingly, Biggar begins each chapter by laying down his definitions for judgment and the reasons behind them. His broadly liberal and Christian outlook is presented unapologetically, but also without assuming much from his readers. It is here that the vicarish tone is chiefly evident, and also that his intended audience is revealed: the large, non-academic segment of the readers that have residually Christian impulses but have not necessarily thought out the moral problems of politics and international relations at length. In short, his audience is the sane public, also known as the silent majority—the votership that conservatives hope and pray still exists and will help put an end to the madness.

In each chapter, addressing a particular set of accusations from colonial detractors—“genocide,” “exploitation”—a litany of anti-colonialist errors follows the establishment of ethical standards for judgment. These errors are sometimes striking: a much-bruited Canadian famine that, it turns out, claimed fewer than fifty lives; statements from Rhodes claimed to illustrate racism that are excerpted from letters in which he is defending the rights of educated blacks to vote; the “Tasmanian genocide,” where colonial authorities took aboriginal Australians under state protection to ward off the predations of settlers. The list of tendentious and factually incorrect assertions that have made it into the canon of received historical knowledge is long. 

Biggar is not an academic historian, and he is in large part collating the materials of other researchers, so it is little surprise that his critics accuse him (and by extension his sources) of the same flaws he attributes to others. Some criticisms are fair; others, less so. Kenan Malik, reviewing for the Guardian, dismisses Biggar’s argument that racist attitudes were not at the heart of British imperial policy, citing the statements of several prominent Britons linking the British Empire to the superiority of the British “race.” Yet Biggar does not deny that racist attitudes were ever held by Britons in imperial government; he rather claims that they were not reflected in the legal and administrative fabric of the empire, an argument more difficult to rebut in the face of—to take one example—the British protection of the Cape Town blacks’ full citizenship against Boer agitation in South Africa.

Similarly, Malik argues that Biggar is morally unserious for his “moral exculpation” of the cannonading of rebels following the Sepoy Mutiny in 1857. Biggar acknowledges the brutality of the practice, but, unlike Malik, he notes that it originated with the rebels themselves. (Bad faith, or did Malik not actually read the book?) More importantly, Malik dismisses the idea that those executed by cannonade were tried and convicted under the law as a mitigating factor. “Where it proves impossible to locate a nugget of good, he seeks instead to find exonerating circumstances for the bad,” he avers. Malik evidently likes his executions as he likes his judgments: summary.

Biggar does not neglect the justifiable charges against the Empire, including the propagation of slavery, the First Opium War, and the Hola massacre (which was coincidentally the occasion of what Powell’s parliamentary colleagues regarded as the finest speech of his career, calling for full accountability of the colonial authorities involved because “we cannot, we dare not, in Africa of all places, fall below our own highest standards in the acceptance of responsibility”). In each case, he is careful to include context that may ameliorate, and in this he does tend to overstate his case. For example, his claim that opium use in China might not have been so bad as the prohibitionists of the era suggested warrants caution. Despite these lapses, Biggar’s most strident critics do not seem to operate entirely in good faith; and, considering the pitch of controversy that has attended his work, it is surprising that his enemies do not appear to have found much by way of factual errata in the text.

The truth is its own reward. Setting the record straight is per se a worthy endeavor. But what is, for Biggar, the point? His is not an idle self-esteem campaign for Britons and Commonwealth residents of colonial descent. It is here that Colonialism runs aground. Biggar is no nostalgist; he concedes that, while empire worked for Britain and her subjects, at least for a time, that time has passed. He argues that anti-colonial thinkers are challenging Britain’s successor, the “liberal international order” under American hegemony, which he accepts as a force for good.

He says the anti-colonialists are carrying water for the current villains: Russia and China. “Academic post-colonialism is an ally—no doubt, inadvertent—of Vladimir Putin’s regime in Russia and the Chinese Communist party, which are determined to expand their own (respectively) authoritarian and totalitarian power at the expense of the West,” he writes. “In effect, not by intent, they are supported by the West’s own hard left, whose British branch would have the United Kingdom withdraw from NATO, surrender its nuclear weapons, renounce global policing and retire to free-ride on the moral high ground alongside Switzerland.”

Colonialism is not about the American order; that would make a much longer book. But one would like to see Biggar’s treatment of the American era, given so many of the evils attributed to the British Empire are in fact American pathologies. Racial discord, “dirty wars,” military personnel running roughshod over local custom, the untrammeled predation of commercial interests abroad without assumption of the attendant responsibility: These are American problems.

Biggar sees in the American world order the successor to the British Empire’s better angel, and argues that the modern United Kingdom should be its happy handmaiden: “If it were true that the record of Britain’s three-hundred year career of using its imperial power to shape the world were a simple litany of oppression and atrocity … then contemporary Britons would be justified in repudiating any lingering ambition to promote ‘Western values’ around the world, in jettisoning their expensive capability for projecting military force overseas, in forbearing from criticism of how others choose to conduct their political affairs …. If the anti-colonialist narrative were true, Britain should abandon its post-1945 role as a main supporter of the US-dominated liberal world order and settle down instead to emulating a penitent, virtually pacifist Germany.”

In setting right the record about the motivations and mechanisms of British imperial expansion, Biggar describes the complex factors allowing and motivating the creation of empires, the conditions necessary for their prudent maintenance, and the catastrophic consequences of empires’ ends. His own documentation of the conditions enabling successful and humane imperial rule underlines the American incapacity for empire. Time and again he illustrates that economic activity—trade or development—is the frequent predecessor of political activity—imperial expansion. As markets and the rights of their participants can be guaranteed only by force, so the state extended itself over new territory to suppress banditry and enforce liberal market norms.

While America has shown a taste for foreign markets, she is hesitant to put her might where her money is by direct territorial rule. During the Cold War, because of the economic isolationism of the Soviet Union, the United States could assume the friendship or at least non-hostility of nations outside the Eastern Bloc. In these conditions, free trade could flourish free from the fear that our enemies were using their economic leverage against our political institutions; fear of the Red Menace ensured NATO partners behaved well toward the Americans to guarantee continued coverage by the nuclear umbrella. The American quasi-empire is now sustained by aid money, defense pacts, and meddling in other nations’ politics; direct rule is the exception. The “liberal international order,” it turns out, is short on liberalism.

Even were America inclined to accept her markets abroad under the mantle of state power, profound difficulties arise from her fundamental political structures. The British constitution is suited to the tasks of empire in a way that the American republic is not. The unitive monarchy allows a broad spectrum of solutions for subject territories—from administration by royal monopoly companies to direct Crown rule, with or without local self-government—without competing levels of deliberative bodies introducing chaos and incoherence to the system. Indeed, it is where Britain failed to be legally consistent about whether territories were represented in Parliament or subject to direct Crown rule with their own representative bodies, namely in America and Northern Ireland, that the Empire saw its greatest challenges; the inconsistency posed by the devolution of Scotland and Wales has been similarly threatening to the constitutional order.

These are only the constitutional difficulties; the practical difficulties of ruling far-flung territory through two levels of government, especially deliberative government, are also considerable. It is worth noting that in wartime America leaves the administration of occupied lands almost entirely in the hands of the executive; a more jaundiced eye would see the same mechanism at work in the federal government’s progressive absorption of the duties and responsibilities of state governments. For America, because there is no element of the constitutional order sitting over the representative government, subject territories will always tend toward statehood or full independence for legal as well as practical reasons; territories that are subject to Congress’s tax authority but are not there represented will always be able to appeal to the precedent of the Revolution.

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A final point: The education system that enabled the creation of competent British imperial administrators—long on language instruction and history—simply does not exist in America. Our foreign policy class is dominated by highly credentialed people who rely on Google Translate.

Biggar’s conclusions, well-meaning as they are, seem completely wrongheaded based on the valuable record he himself has compiled. The basically functional empire that he describes must operate prudently within several constraints: fair, non-exploitative markets must be guaranteed by force, which often demands the direct extension of the state over the territory where commercial activity occurs; local custom can be changed only so much, and the state can project only so much force; monarchy is a significant aid, if not a precondition, for a responsible empire. The “liberal international order” stands in varying degrees of opposition to each of these; hence its critics’ accusations that it is exploitative, anti-democratic, and homogenizing.

Colonialism is like Powell’s clay cup. It holds a refreshing record of the many benefits of the British Empire; it is a valuable sourcebook, especially for the non-academic. But the argument that surrounds and holds its historical content may be—must be—crushed and thrown away.