Colonialism – A Moral Reckoning

As the very long tem reader of the blog might recall, so long as they have an excellent memory as well, I have a passing interest in issues of colonialism, even going so far as to wonder, vaguely, whether wargaming categorization of native troops in colonial games was, itself, colonialism. At that point, in danger of disappearing into a logical vortex, colonialism took a bit of a back burner.

However, a while ago I read this:

Biggar, N., Colonialism: A Moral Reckoning (London: William Collins, 2023).

Biggar is, of course, a quite well-known trendy righty moral philosopher and theologian, emeritus Professor of Moral and Pastoral Theology the of University of Oxford. A while ago I read his in Defence of War, in which he took unfashionable views of whether warfare, in the modern world, was ever a valid response to what was going on in the world.

This book, as the background and title might suggest, tackles the anti-colonialism bent of recent years and attempt to debunk some of that movement’s key claims. Biggar is not a historian (but then, nor am I) and I think the book ran into a bit of a storm from trendy-lefty historians, as it questions some of the narratives (one might go so far as to call them tropes) of that movement.

I am not particularly committed to any side in this argument, I confess. While being a white male, my family are from poor stock and never seem to have benefited from the opportunities of imperialism. Nor do I have much time for the claims and counter-claims of ‘wokeness’, whatever the claimer might mean by that. Biggar does remark that sometimes it seems that the British Empire is targetted for anti-colonial rhetoric and demands for reparations because it is a relatively wealthy modern nation with a bit of a liberal conscience, and a significant number of people as citizens whose families came from the said colonies.

Maybe, and then again, maybe not. Topic by topic Biggar attempts to undermine the narrative of bad faith, racism, slavery, conquest, cultural and other sorts of genocide, free trade and exploitation of natural and human resources, government and nationalism and the use of violence to maintain empire. Quite a charge list, I suspect you would agree.

Does Biggar’s anti-anti-colonialism case add up?

It has to be said that some of the claims that are made by the anti-colonial academics and journalists (not to mention irrelevancies such as bloggers and twits) do seem to be rather overblown in scale, if not in the events taking place. The British Empire was as inept as the next global scale government in dealing with people and places about which it knew very little. This does not amount to racism or deliberate bad government. It may well relate to bad communications, local circumstances and general incompetence.

A bunch of bad decisions, poor decision makers and non-communicated instructions does not make an empire a necessarily bad think. Biggar observes that, in some cases at least, the citizens of some of the now independent states look back on the time of colonial rule with some fondness because it brought order and, in the form of the local white officials, people who got to know them, their culture and who could represent them to government. The book, inside its covers, has a photograph of pro-British protests in Hong Kong. Well, all right. Point made: maybe transferring from one empire to another is a bad idea.

Whether Biggar’s counter-arguments work is something I am not really competent to assess. As I said, I am not a historian and do not have access to the works he quotes from and cites. While it is true that some of the anti-colonial academics should be rather embarrassed by their overblown rhetoric, proving it to be overblown does not establish the counter-argument. 

At best, and here Biggar is probably at his strongest, or would be if he had made this point, the anti-colonial arguments need nuancing against some sort of bench-mark of international nastiness. As we continue to see in the world today, international nastiness can be very nasty indeed. The crimes of the British Empire over 200 years are probably not on the same plane as those of Nazi Germany over 12.

Of course, it is perhaps unhelpful to compare empire with empire, gruesome crime against gruesome crime. The British Empire did do some good things in the world, such as a large contribution to stopping slavery, although the timings and mechanisms are open to criticism. It also bankrupted itself in fighting international fascism, although its response to that, in trying to exploit colonies all the harder was misguided.

I think, to be fair to both sides of the rather acrimonious debate, Biggar’s case is rather unproven. It reads more like a series of counter-examples to anti-colonialism cases than anything else. It might weaken some of the anti-colonial rhetoric, but that would probably happen over time anyway as historians calm down a bit and do some real work rather than plastering social media with the iniquities of the relatively recent past.

As a side note, the book was originally to be published by Bloomsbury, who seem to have got cold feet and pulled out of the contract. The time, it seems, was not right. To be honest, this is a bit lily-livered by the publisher. The book puts forward a case to be answered and, if the intellectual left prefers to burn it in public rather than refute its claims then so much the worse for them.

I do think, however, that there can be no calculus of colonialism. It is not possible to decide whether it was a good thing (it did bring some good things) or a bad thing (it did bring bad things). We cannot balance, say, the removal of voting rights from Cape Coloureds against the restoration of financial stability in Egypt in the 1880s. That we can even have such things in the same book shows the global reach o the British Empire and the impossibility of deciding whether it was a force for good or ill in the world.