The British Empire in the Culture War: Nigel Biggar’s Colonialism: A Moral Reckoning

ABSTRACT

The British Empire has been politicised to an extent that many of us could never have predicted just a few years ago. The colonial past features especially prominently in the right wing-oriented press, where attempts to inform the public about the realities of colonialism are fiercely resisted in a ‘culture war’ against those labelled as ‘woke’. This culture war is sponsored in part by elements within the post-Brexit Conservative government and its conservative-nationalist-populist counterparts in other countries. Some of those who pursue it have enthusiastically welcomed Nigel Biggar’s Colonialism: A Moral Reckoning for giving the diminution and mitigation of British colonialism’s violence and racism the appearance of intellectual credibility. This article explores the political and psychological dimensions of this phenomenon and provides a detailed critique of Biggar’s book and its position within a historiography of imperial defensiveness. In the expectation that there are more culture war interpretations of the British Empire to come, I hope that it can act as something of a provisional guide for serious historians who are finding it increasingly difficult to avoid engagement with the contemporary politicisation of empire.

KEYWORDS:

• British Empire
• colonialism
• culture war
• Nigel Biggar

Introduction

Since around 2016 Conservative ministers and MPs under Theresa May, Boris Johnson, Liz Truss and Rishi Sunak have energised an unprecedented ‘culture war’. James Davison Hunter first applied this term to developments in US politics in the early 1990s. He was referring to the attempt by otherwise disparate groups including Christian fundamentalists, Orthodox Jews and conservative Catholics, to resist the tendencies towards secularism, the civil rights movement, sexual liberation, gay rights and feminism since the 1960s. These conservative groups saw themselves as the norm, threatened by an alien cultural invasion of liberal permissiveness. American conservatives organised and reacted to greater inclusivity by declaring that their values, including hard work, personal responsibility, individual merit and delayed gratification were under threat. The culture war that ensued marked something more fundamental than the oppositional political positions that individuals might normally adopt more contingently in relation to different issues. Conservatives began to represent those who backed one or more reformist endeavours, en masse, as a ‘liberal’ menace to the survival of the self and the nation.¹

This tendency towards political polarisation and binarism gained intensity after the 2008 financial crisis, when conservatives blamed ‘liberal’, cosmopolitan elites for the deteriorating material circumstances of working classes and re-emphasised ideals of national autarky. It reached new levels of intensity with Dominic Cummings and Boris Johnson’s Brexit strategy on one side of the Atlantic and Donald Trump’s backlash against Barack Obama’s Presidency on the other. Johnson, Trump and nationalist-conservative leaders elsewhere, proved adept at manipulating a sense of existential threat, leading populist movements that appealed to voters who felt ‘left behind’ by globalisation.

The circumstances of the last decade have provided fertile ground for political parties and leaders in many countries who employ culture war tactics to blame and demonise a menu of opponents including ‘cosmopolitan elites’, cross-border migrants, minoritised groups such as trans-gender people, and environmental and antiracist activists. Interpretations of the British Empire have become a key battlefield in the UK and its former settler colonies in North America and Australasia.² The terrain was first marked out when the Rhodes Must Fall campaign shifted from Cape Town to Oxford in 2015. It continued through Brexit and intensified after the Black Lives Matter protests, focused on the statue of Edward Colston in Bristol, in 2020.³ The targeting of this slave trader’s reputation and status in the city was antiracists’ clearest appeal yet to reflect on the racialised nature of colonial exploitation in the past and its legacies today. In the last two years ultra-conservatives have railed against both the activists highlighting persistent racism and historians who have brought discomforting aspects of the colonial past to broader public attention.⁴

The publication of Nigel Biggar’s book Colonialism: A Moral Reckoning marks a milestone in this culture war. It is the first serious attempt to lend the minimisation and justification of colonialism’s violence and racism some intellectual credibility. At the time of writing it is listed at number 10 in The Sunday Times nonfiction sales list and tops Amazon’s lists in a number of sub-categories. Like a scholarly monograph, it has extensive endnotes, stretching over 130 pages and a bibliography of over 30 pages. It purports to be a ‘balanced’, rigorously researched account of colonial practices and an analysis of the ethics of those practices. It has received glowing reviews in The Sunday Times, Telegraph, and Spectator and other, more niche, right wing outlets. Amazon purchasers have titled their reviews ‘imperious’, ‘brilliant historical research’ and ‘at last a competent book on the subject’ of empire.

Given the tendency of right-wing culture warriors to accuse anyone who disagrees with them of being driven by ‘Far Left’ politics, it is probably best if I ‘declare’ my own politics at this point. I am certainly not ‘Far Left’ and have never been an activist aside from engaging in the 1980s, in a minor way, in the anti-apartheid movement. My stance on any issue is contingent, but if pressed to stake out a general position, I would describe myself as a social democrat who concludes that liberal capitalism, mitigated through systematic redistribution, is, realistically, the least worse way of organising society. Right-wing participants in the culture war tend also to ‘accuse’ those who discuss the racism and violence intrinsic to colonialism of being either Marxists, or indoctrinated by Critical Race Theory (CRT), or both, so I will add that my first book was an argument against deterministically Marxist interpretations of South African history, and that I was not aware of CRT until I was described as a ‘CRT zealot’ by a Twitter interlocutor.⁵

I am writing this analysis of Biggar’s book and its context not because my politics differs from those of Biggar (although they do), but because of my concern as a professional academic about the way that his book and other publications are distorting the public understanding of colonial history. There is an area of disputation, occupied by historical scholars, that different interpretations of the evidence allows. This disputation is the bread and butter of our trade, but Biggar’s and others’ culture war interventions have nothing to do with the practice of the historian’s craft. They are egregious distortions, motivated wholly by politics and patriotic emotion rather than any desire to understand the past. I believe it is imperative for colonial historians, regardless of their own political disposition, to identify and challenge them as such.

Nigel Biggar’s Political and Emotional Context

The UK’s culture war is being driven in part, by the Conservative government’s post-Brexit electoral strategy. The intention is to retain the ‘red wall’, mainly northern seats captured from Labour in the 2019 general election due to the pro-Brexit attitudes of most voters. In 2021 over 50 Conservative MPs formed the ‘Common Sense’ group, publishing their manifesto, Common Sense: Conservative Thinking for a Post-liberal Age.⁶ It explained how culture war could refashion and perpetuate the divisions over Brexit that had given them their commanding majority. In a chapter titled ‘Social Conservatism – Turning the Red Wall Blue for Years to Come’, Alexander Stafford MP wrote ‘We … believe that the Conservative Party has the opportunity to adopt a political philosophy which will keep the North and the Midlands blue for decades’. That philosophy, it seems to me, was the belief that a combination of Black, Brown and Islamic migrants, metropolitan elites and antiracist, environmental and transgender activists presents true Britons, and especially gritty, White working-class northerners, with an existential threat. Defending certain interpretations of British history from critique and revision is a key part of the philosophy. ‘Britain is under attack’, wrote Gareth Bacon MP. ‘Not in a physical sense, but in a philosophical, ideological and historical sense. Our heritage is under a direct assault – the very sense of what it is to be British has been called into question, institutions have been undermined, the reputation of key figures in our country’s history have been traduced’.⁷

Commenting on a recent survey of British social attitudes, John Curtice noted that ‘There does appear to be the potential for “culture war” issues to maintain the electoral division between Remainers and Leavers that was central to how people voted in the 2019 general election’.⁸ Bacon’s visceral sense of threat, however, indicates that there is something much deeper to this culture war than a cynical electoral strategy to detach northern working-class voters more permanently from the Labour Party. As Peter Mitchell writes,

at bottom, there is the sense of betrayal and the anxiety of replacement – generational, cultural, gendered and racial. This terror is at the core of a frighteningly intense emotional charge: a sense, never quite articulated but always present, that the stakes are personal and existential.⁹

The backlash against historians and heritage professionals who tell previously hidden stories of British colonialism has come overwhelmingly from those whose self-esteem is tied especially tightly to a group identity rooted in certain ideas of Britishness, and threatened by various ‘progressive’ cultural changes.¹⁰

Research on the psychology of denial is instructive here. As Joe Kendall writes,

When presented with information about historical episodes in which their group has taken the role of perpetrator, individuals are likely to experience a sense of threat to their identity in the form of guilt or shame and may intuitively seek ways in which to avoid this threat. In such scenarios defensive reactions are often employed to negate the threat.

These strategies include denying the accuracy of the information provided; blaming the victims of British colonial acts of violence; claiming that colonial rule was necessary or enacted with good intentions; focusing on the sacrifices made by Britons; and, above all, ‘Whataboutery’: pointing out the ‘bad’ things that other groups have also done in the past, or are doing now. The reaction that ‘we might be bad, but at least we’re not as bad as them’ is a highly effective defence and deflection strategy.¹¹

Politicians like those in the Common Sense group undoubtedly share in these emotional investments and deploy these strategies of deflection, possibly subconsciously. However, as Kendall notes, ‘defensive reactions are not always instinctive and can easily be instrumentalised by political actors looking to gain from acrimonious culture wars’. Groups like History Reclaimed, which I’ll come onto shortly, help political actors to find and disseminate ‘worse’ examples of perpetration carried out by other groups. They try to establish what Kendall calls the ‘competitive innocence’ of Britons and the West more generally.¹²

Nigel Biggar, CBE is the former Regius Professor of Moral and Pastoral Theology at the University of Oxford. Despite having revealed that he voted Remain in the Brexit referendum, ¹³ Biggar contributed four articles to Briefings for Britain (formerly Briefings for Brexit), a lobbying group describing itself as ‘a small group of volunteers, originally academics’ with ‘a firm conviction that Brexit was about reasserting popular control over decision-making in the United Kingdom’.¹⁴ Biggar’s participation in the government-backed culture war is manifested more directly, though, in his founding role in History Reclaimed, and his links with the allied Restore Trust.

In August 2021, a group of scholars including Robert Tombs (appointed by Boris Johnson to a new Heritage Advisory Board in the wake of Colston’s toppling), Niall Ferguson, Andrew Roberts and Biggar, banded together to create the History Reclaimed Project.¹⁵ It has since registered as a private company. According to the supportive Daily Mail, the group was established to battle Black Lives Matter’s ‘woke war on our great leaders’.¹⁶ I would see Biggar’s Colonialism as the fullest statement of the History Reclaimed position. It contains many of the stock defences of empire and attacks on supposedly ‘woke’ academics that feature on the group’s website.¹⁷

Restore Trust is also a private company with overlapping membership. Its central mission is to block the National Trust’s efforts to tell the full history of its properties. The company’s founders were incensed by the National Trust’s publication of a report, authored by Corrine Fowler and others, which highlighted the role of slave trading, slave ownership and colonial exploitation in its property owners’ sources of wealth.¹⁸ The company has twice tried to get its candidates elected to the National Trust’s council, aiming to reverse the charity’s moves towards greater inclusivity. At least some of its members oppose the National Trust’s engagement with Gay Pride events and its rewilding projects. Two of the Restore Trust candidates for the 2022 National Trust council elections, Zareer Masani and Jeremy Black, are also members of History Reclaimed. They are regularly backed by the Telegraph, Express, Mail and Spectator. While complaining about ‘woke cancel culture’, the Telegraph anticipated that Corinne Fowler’s funding would be cut and the Mail prompted her abusive trolling.¹⁹ Biggar featured in a piece in the Mail declaring that ‘The National Trust has shot itself in the foot’ by publishing the report of slavery and colonialism. ‘It has really got a lot of its members annoyed. I am one of them’. He went on to ask, ‘What motivates people like Professor Fowler to apparently see racism everywhere, even when it isn’t there?’²⁰

Although Restore Trust has been obtuse about its own funding sources, there are indications that it is part of a network of ultra-conservative lobbying groups. One of six people in Restore Trust’s Meet the Team webpage is Neil Record, a billionaire former currency risk manager and Conservative donor who backed the Institute of Economic Affairs, the right-wing ‘think tank’, which encouraged Liz Truss’ disastrous minibudget in 2022. Record also chairs the Global Warming Policy Forum and ‘Net Zero Watch’, which believes that ‘a narrow “groupthink” and “cancel culture”’ guides climate change concerns.²¹

Aside from his connections with these activities, some of them direct, others loose, Biggar is lined up to speak at the 2023 National Conservatism Conference, the forum for an international organisation which ‘brings together public figures, journalists, scholars and students who understand that the past and future of conservatism are inextricably tied to the idea of the nation, to the principle of national independence, and to the revival of the unique national traditions that alone have the power to bind a people together and bring about their flourishing’.²² The inaugural conference in the USA was attended by ‘Fox News host Tucker Carlson’ among others who ‘showed up to help flesh out what, exactly, “conservative nationalism” or “national conservatism” should stand for’.²³ Viktor Orbán was interviewed as an inspirational figure during 2020s conference.

Writing of supposed left-wing influence in the academy, Biggar warns us that, while moral and political conviction are inevitable in the writing of history,

What is wrong … is when moral and political motives refuse to allow themselves to be tempered or corrected by data and reason. For then, the motives distort and mislead; and when they distort and mislead repeatedly and wilfully, they lie.²⁴

Now let us see if he heeds his own warning.

Colonialism: A Moral Reckoning

Colonialism begins with a story of its author’s persecution at the hands of domineering, left-wing, ‘anticolonial’ academics and activists. Biggar’s sense of righteous indignation was spurred ‘because some academics and students decided to launch a personal and political attack on me, on the ground that I had said and done things of which they did not approve’.²⁵ Historians of colonialism have, according to Biggar, combined with unruly antiracist students to put the British Empire on trial. We have found it guilty without even properly analysing the evidence. Why? Variously because we see ‘anti-colonialism’ as ‘fashionable, opening doors to posts, promotions and grants’; because we are brainwashed by Frantz Fanon’s ‘preference for “barbarous” vitality and irresponsibility over civilised reason and restraint’, or even because of our ‘degenerate Christian sensibility’, which can result in ‘a perverse bid for supreme self-righteousness’!²⁶

Worse than our motivations, however, is the effect of our work. ‘Academic post-colonialism’, we are told, ‘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’.²⁷ Critical studies of empire are indicative of the moral decadence that always triggers the collapse of dominant powers. ‘What is … at stake’ in our writing of history ‘is the very integrity of the United Kingdom and the security of the West’.²⁸ Colonialism was written not just to set the historical record straight and allow Biggar to respond to his critics, but to save a self-critical West from itself.²⁹ In adopting this stance, Biggar is reproducing the views of earlier, neoliberal, defenders of the Western colonial order like Herbert Frankel and L. H. Gann and Peter Duignan, as we will see below, but for now I will focus on his judgements on the more recent historiography.

Straw Men

Where does Biggar’s image of an ‘anticolonial’ academic orthodoxy come from? Conveniently he supplies a list of the main ‘culprits’, who come to stand for all us scholars of empire at various points throughout the book:

Time and time again in this book we have seen historians and others overegging the sins of British colonialism – whether Hilary Beckles on slavery; James Daschuk … on … Canada; Dan Hicks on 1897 Benin; Adekeye Adebajo on Rhodes in 1890s South Africa;³⁰ Thomas Pakenham on the Second Anglo-Boer War; David Anderson and (far more so) Caroline Elkins on 1950s Kenya; William Dalrymple, Madhusree Mukerjee, Rudrangshu Mukherjee, Shashi Tharoor and Kim Wagner on the British Raj in India; Robert Hughes, Henry Reynolds (somewhat) and Lyndall Ryan on 1840s Tasmania; and … David Olusoga on imperial commemoration of the war dead worldwide after 1918.³¹

With few other historians specifically named in the substantive text, it seems to be mainly from this selection that Biggar understands that ‘the axiom of post-colonialist theory’ is ‘that the British Empire was informed by a single “imperial ideology”’.³² Biggar consistently conflates Marxist and post-colonial historiographical approaches, despite the emergence of the latter in the late 1980s partly out of critique of the former, and assumes that both still dominate the field. This amalgam is what Biggar describes consistently as a dominant ‘anti-colonialist’ approach, against which he is the voice of reason and balance. ‘Anti-colonialists’ in general, according to Biggar,

often talk about “the colonial project”, as if an empire … was a single, unitary enterprise with a coherent essence. Then they characterise that supposed essence in terms of domination, despotism, oppression, racism, white supremacism, exploitation, theft or unconstrained violence. In this way they imply that its driving motives were lust for power, delight in domination, racial contempt and greed.³³

Not for nothing does Jon Wilson note that ‘With Colonialism, Biggar has created a masterwork in the art of constructing straw men’.³⁴

The main characteristic of the ‘orthodoxy’ that Biggar constructs is that it focuses solely on the ‘costs’ of colonialism while denying its ‘benefits’. What historians have done, in thousands of publications overlooked by Biggar, is of course specify benefits for whom, appreciating that they were not universal. There are, as readers of this article will know, library shelves full of monographs on how, for example, Indian merchants and princes worked alongside British officials and businessmen to enhance their status and wealth, and how sometimes fragile colonial administrations relied on negotiation and compromise with indigenous elites. There are reams of studies on the development of colonial education, agricultural, infrastructural and public health initiatives that tended to come in the later stages of imperialism, and further shelves full of books and journal articles on the intimate entanglements that constantly cut across the imposed boundaries of racial privilege.³⁵ Much to the annoyance of some, it would seem, historians seek also to tell the stories of those who experienced trauma and loss through the British takeover of their lands and assumption of sovereignty. We do not shy away from the millions who died in British wars of expansion and the great famines that colonial governments did little to mitigate, and we acknowledge the fact that colonialism guaranteed a readily exploitable labour supply to British settlers, planters and industrialists. We recognise that racially organised hierarchies of wealth, status and power were maintained in most colonies, most of the time, not because we are a bunch of anticolonial, leftist, Marxist or postcolonial activists, but because it is true.

The Ethics of Research

Professional historians are of course influenced by our individual dispositions and politics, but we try our best to set these aside and to develop our arguments through finding and reading all the relevant evidence. We tend to be curiosity – rather than politically – driven. We are interested in explaining phenomena, not allocating collective virtue or blame. We dispute interpretations – it’s the lifeblood of our discipline – but when we select quotations from a source, we do try to set them in the context of that source’s overall stance rather than cherry-picking from it to substantiate a pre-determined argument. When we come across evidence that contradicts our general interpretation, we either try to explain the discrepancy or modify that interpretation. We read widely to try to take account of other scholars’ work on our topic, and we are grateful for their efforts. In essence we try, even if we do not always succeed, to avoid writing tendentiously.

Colonialism, however, is littered with examples of what I would see as the most egregious misuse of sources. As Richard J Evans notes, mistakes that are innocent tend to be random. The ones here all tend in the direction of Biggar’s argument.³⁶ I will identify nine indicative examples:

Turning a Rebel into a Supporter

Biggar quotes the Canadian Métis leader Louis Riel’s speech at his trial after an anticolonial rebellion in 1885 to suggest that Riel recognised the cogency of Lock and De Vattel’s argument that settlers are morally justified in taking land from those who refused ‘to develop [it], both to their own benefit and to the benefit of the other people it can be made to sustain’.³⁷ The extract he uses is:

. . . [British] civilization has the means of improving life that Indians or half-breeds have not. So when they come in our savage country, in our uncultivated land, they come and help us with their civilization, but we helped them with our lands, so the question comes: Your land, you Cree or you half – breed, your land is worth today one-seventh of what it will be when the civilization will have opened it? Your country unopened is worth to you only one-seventh of what it will be when opened. I think it is a fair share to acknowledge the genius of civilization to such an extent as to give, when I have seven pairs of socks, six, to keep one.³⁸

However, Biggar omits crucial sentences before and after this extract, which drastically alter its meaning.

Riel led up to the extracted portion of his speech by saying ‘when they [the British] have crowded their country because they had no room to stay any more at home, it does not give them the right to come and take the share of all tribes besides them’. In principle then, he was saying that settlers were not entitled to any of the land, regardless of what use it was put to. Riel proceeded to note that at least the confederated Canadian colonial government had agreed a treaty which, nominally, allocated one seventh of the land to the Métis. In Biggar’s selected extract he was paraphrasing, rather than endorsing, the government’s rationale: that seizing the rest was in exchange for the ‘civilization’ that British settlement brought. Riel’s point though, was that even this nominal allocation had not been observed in practice. Biggar omits the next bit of Riel’s speech: ‘They made the treaty with us. As they made the treaty they have to observe it. And did they observe it? No’.³⁹ Intentionally or not (and the mistake may have come from relying on his secondary source, Thomas Flanagan’s own misinterpretation), Biggar uses a cherry-picked extract to suggest that Riel recognised the potential right of settlers to take Métis land, when he was arguing precisely the opposite.

Extrapolating African Brutality

Biggar consistently runs the risk of giving credence to a view that African people were unfit to govern themselves; that they required British rule for their own sakes – even to the extent of repeating slave-owners’ original arguments against emancipation: ‘Can we be sure that [descendants of enslaved people] would have been better off had their ancestors remained in West Africa – some as slaves and sacrificial funeral fodder?’⁴⁰ Biggar’s methods of establishing the necessity for British rule in Africa include frequent, seemingly innocuous asides, which seem to me to have the cumulative effect of reinforcing tropes of African savagery. Human sacrifice appears to be a favourite. He states that it ‘continued to be a part of royal funeral ceremonies in the Gold Coast as late as 1944’.⁴¹

However, there is no evidence to support this claim. What Biggar is referring to was a singular and bizarre case of suspected murder that was discussed in Britain. Three suspects were hanged in the absence of a body, but the sentencing was delayed by protests that no murder had been committed. Biggar thus converts an isolated incident that Richard Rathbone notes ‘may or may not have taken place in southern Ghana on 28 February I944’ into a barbaric cultural practice that justified continued British rule.⁴² While it is recognised by specialists that medicinal and mortuary killings periodically occurred in the region they were widely seen as aberrant and exceptional rather than a ‘part of royal funeral ceremonies’.

Using Fiction: False Accusation and Hypocrisy

Cecil Rhodes appears at multiple points throughout the book, often as a much-maligned hero. Biggar asserts that ‘The case’ made by activists ‘against Rhodes was that he was South Africa’s equivalent of Hitler’.⁴³ In his attempt to defend the mining magnate and politician, Biggar disputes three racist quotes attributed to him. Although all could be discussed further, I will focus on just the first. Biggar writes,

In a 2006 book review … [Adekeye] Adebajo sought to substantiate Rhodes’ alleged racism and genocidal intent by reporting him as saying ‘I prefer land to n – ers’ … . Appearances, however, deceived. For Adebajo had omitted to tell his readers that the … ‘quotation’ had been lifted from a novel by Olive Schreiner … – it is fiction.⁴⁴

Biggar later repeats, ‘The only documentary source is Schreiner’s 1897 novel, where the words are spoken by a character that looks like Rhodes. It’s fiction’.⁴⁵

Biggar is just plain wrong. A little research would have alerted him that the quote is not fiction. Rhodes was reported verbatim, by multiple sources, as saying these words in the Cape Parliament, six years before Schreiner drew upon them for her fictional Rhodes-like character.

The Graham’s Town Journal reported that ‘referring to the Pondoland question the premier said that he had always preferred land to n*****s (Laughter). They (the natives) were always in trouble and always breaking each others’ heads’ (4th April 1891). The Natal Mercury’s correspondent reported Rhodes as saying in the same speech that ‘Pondoland is the one cloud on the horizon of the colony. He looked upon it as a swarming beehive. Now he must say that he preferred land to n****ers’ (15 April 1891). Harriett Colenso wrote to the Manchester Guardian on 27 June 1891, complaining of this speech and this phrase in particular. Furthermore, aware of the press coverage and objections from liberals like Colenso, Rhodes went on record again to clarify that ‘what he meant was that where there was a land bereft of natives and another swarming with natives he preferred the former because he considered the latter not to be to the advantage of South Africa’. This was also reported in Britain, by Colenso, who noted his change of terminology from ‘n*****s’ to ‘natives’, and in the journal South Africa (30 May 1891).⁴⁶

To add insult to the injury that he inflicts on Adebajo by accusing him of conflating fiction and documentary sources, Bigger frequently uses the fiction of white colonial writers as substantiation for his own assertions. For example, he uses Elspeth Huxley’s fictional account of African bloodthirstiness during the Mau Mau uprising:

These men were happy because they had killed. They had bloodied their spears and affirmed a manhood they were often forced to doubt because so many ways of proving it had been taken away. Like their fathers before them, they had slain their enemies, and at last felt themselves to be whole men. (A Thing to Love, 251)

He continues,

Gerald Hanley makes the same point when he writes of (fictional) Africans engaged in a Zebra hunt in the 1930s: “They had not known how bored they were. Now, they were lit up with an almost sadistic energy, for this was all that was left for the spears to do in the world of wages and white men”. (The Year of the Lion, 93)⁴⁷

Biggar even includes this reference:

Unfortunately, I have been unable to identify the date of the letter’s publication. The same point was made memorably in an episode of the incomparable television series The West Wing, where Josh Lyman, the White House’s Deputy Chief of Staff, is talking to Jeff Breckenridge … ⁴⁸

Cherry-Picking

Where a ‘problem’ for Biggar’s argument, such as the consistent denial of colonised people’s participation in executive governance, cannot be avoided, Biggar has a tendency first to find the rationale from a contemporary British source. Then, he locates a ‘native’ source indicating acceptance of that rationale, and finally he extrapolates from that source to the ‘natives’ as a whole.⁴⁹ Sometimes the attribution to the ‘native’ source is genuine, because of course a lot of colonised people contingently supported or lent assistance to colonial authorities, as many historians have discussed. However, Biggar has a tendency to take supportive extracts out of context, as he did with Louis Riel. His use of another fiction writer, Chinua Achebe, provides an example.

Using this extract, Biggar seems to suggest that the well-known author was generally in favour of British colonialism:

A year before his death in 2013, Chinua Achebe published There Was a Country: A Personal History of Biafra, in which he reflected on the colonial rule under which he had been brought up: “Here is a piece of heresy,” he wrote. “The British governed their colony of Nigeria with considerable care. There was a very highly competent cadre of government officials imbued with a high level of knowledge of how to run a country . . . British colonies were, more or less, expertly run . . . One was not consumed by fear of abduction or armed robbery. As a result, One had a great deal of confidence and faith in the British system that we had grown up in, a confidence and faith in British institutions. One trusted that things would get where they were sent; postal theft, tampering, or loss of documents were unheard of. Today [in Nigeria], one would not even contemplate sending off materials of importance so readily, either abroad or even locally, by mail.”⁵⁰

Biggar, however, does not refer to the part where Achebe’s sets out his general argument on colonialism and sets the tone for the book as a whole:

An Igbo proverb tells us that a man who does not know where the rain began to beat him cannot say where he dried his body. The rain that beat Africa began four to five hundred years ago from the “discovery” of Africa by Europeans through the trans-Atlantic slave trade, to the Berlin conference of 1885 … which created new boundaries that did violence to Africa’s ancient societies and created tension-prone modern states. It took place without African consultation or representation to say the least … colonial rule [in the south of Nigeria] functioned through … a deeply flawed arrangement that effectively confused and corrupted the Igbo democratic spirit … because the West has had a long and uneven engagement with the continent, it is imperative that it understand what happened to Africa’.⁵¹

Biggar seems to me to be to be preventing the understanding that Achebe’s book calls for.

Inferring Non-racialism

Biggar repeatedly represents the property-based, non-racial franchise, established with representative government specifically in the Cape Colony in 1854, as evidence of a generally non-racial British approach to colonial governance. Ignoring the role of the 1850–1852 Khoisan rebellion in establishing the franchise concession, and the subsequent, complex history of the Cape Liberal tradition, ⁵² he constructs it as evidence that British governments sought consistently to protect Africans from the racist Afrikaners. Again, he uses fiction as a source:

H. Rider Haggard observed that “[t]he Englishman and the Boer look at natives from a very different point of view. The Englishman, though he may not be very fond of him, at any rate regards the Kafir as a fellow human being with feelings like his own. The average Boer does not”.⁵³

Biggar claims that

the qualified franchise was not withdrawn from black Africans before South Africa acquired the status of a dominion in 1910 and with it, effective independence in domestic policy. Up until then the Afrikaner Bond sought on several occasions to restrict the black franchise – with limited success, according to Farai Nyika and Johan Fourie.⁵⁴

He also states that ‘Because he believed in the possibility of African cultural development, Rhodes never sought to overturn the liberal, colour-blind franchise that had existed in Cape Colony since 1853’.⁵⁵ However, Biggar neglects to mention that Black voters in the British colony were, in practice, able to vote for only White representatives.⁵⁶ Furthermore, what Nyika and Fourie, his main source, actually say is:

To restrict the black franchise in the Cape Colony, successive governments under Sir Gordon Sprigg … and Cecil John Rhodes … passed two Acts: the Cape Parliamentary Registration Act of 1887 and the Cape Franchise and Ballot Act of 1892. These Acts raised the requirements for voter eligibility and … were clearly designed to remove black voters from the Cape Colony voters’ rolls. We estimate that the 1887 Act reduced black voter registrations by between 2,800 and 3,000.

The originality of Nyika and Fourie’s article was that this figure of disenfranchised Black men was far less than previously thought. They explain, ‘The lower … than expected number … may be due to [Black voters’] resistance to being stripped of the franchise’, concluding that ‘though the disenfranchisement legislation was not directly very effective in reducing black voter numbers, … it had the indirect effect of depriving … blacks of education and economic opportunities in later years’.⁵⁷

Distorting Historians’ Work

The Nyika and Fourie example is not the only instance where Biggar has found something in a serious historical study to use selectively, even if it means twisting the scholar’s general argument. The context for this next instance is Biggar’s attempt to minimise the oppression entailed in southern Africa’s late-nineteenth-century migrant compound system. He writes,

Against those historians who have likened the [compound] system to a prison, Patrick Harries argues that the function of the compound, unlike the prison, was not to punish men convicted of misdemeanours by separating them from society; its function was rather to discipline a voluntary force of migrant labourers . . . management and labour had to negotiate working conditions that were acceptable to both parties … As [Mozambican workers] were not yet compelled to sell their labour by a colonial government, they had to be attracted to the diamond fields by competitive working conditions.⁵⁸

To add credibility to his source, Biggar notes Patrick Harries’ well-deserved reputation among historians (a pattern repeated where he wants to draw selectively on an historian’s work):

Harries was professor of African history at the University of Basel until his death in 2015. His book was very well received. For example, James Derrick described it as “an exemplary study” … ; William Worger, as “a welcome contribution” … ; Kathleen Sheldon, as a “path-breaking study” … and Tshidiso Maloka, as “a crucial contribution”.⁵⁹

Now let’s look at what Harries and, indeed these supportive reviewers of his book, actually wrote.

The Sheldon review says that Harries ‘describes how Mozambicans developed new cultures and identities from options confronting them in South Africa’ (my emphasis). James Derrick’s (actually James Derrick Sidaway’s) review stresses that Harries’ contribution is to excavate African agency from the oppressive nature of British and Portuguese colonialism in the region. And here is what Worger says:

African workers, impoverished by a combination of colonial land alienation and taxation, and in the case of Mozambicans subjected to the even more overtly forced labor policies of the Portuguese, have labored for over a century in South Africa's mines and cities, have been discriminated against throughout on the basis of their color, have been paid meager wages, and have been treated as ascriptive criminals by a police state. Given the harshness of these conditions, Harries’s achievement lies in illuminating the reasons why people engaged in migrant labor, demonstrating how they used what limited power they had to structure the worlds in which they lived and worked, and assessing the impact of migrant labor on their home communities.

Finally, the Maloka review:

The efforts of the Randlords to reduce the cost of labour involved not only cutting down expenditure in procuring labour by establishing a recruiting monopoly, but also the central fact that little was spent on the housing, health and safety of African miners. Because the number of African employees was increasing even as wages were cut, mine managements struggled to find increasingly authoritarian ways of controlling the black labour force. More than the Pass Laws and Master and Servant measures which aimed at combating desertion from service, the compounds were used as a crucial instrument in this regard.

Again, Maloka notes Harries’ determination

to emphasise the flexibility and sophistication of these [migrant] men … Not only were African migrants aware of the dynamics of the “whiteman’s world” and its difference with their own, but they also developed a whole variety of complex, creative ways of dealing with their experiences.⁶⁰

But for Biggar there is none of this nuance of migrant workers exercising as much agency as they could in a colonial world dominated by White men. Harries’ painstakingly researched book is used simply to endorse Biggar’s assertion that the compounds were not so bad after all.⁶¹

While deflecting from the oppressive nature of the compounds, Biggar adds: ‘Other, more skilled, less transitory African workers were housed in accommodation of their own construction, with more or less help from the mining companies. The discriminating criterion, therefore, was not primarily race, but skill, length of contract and reliability’.⁶² He omits first that the skill level that African miners were allowed to reach was set by the companies on racial grounds, and secondly, that more skilled workers’ housing was confined to townships separated from White housing areas by buffer zones, with legislation after 1923 to enforce that segregation. The ‘discriminating criterion’ was, of course, race.⁶³

Biggar makes a similar attempt to refute the idea that racism lay behind differential wage rates for White and African mineworkers. ‘One alternative, non-racist explanation for the wage differential’, he argues,

lies in a distinction between labour markets … In the case of late nineteenth – and early twentieth-century South Africa, Europeans and Africans, coming from dramatically different cultures, would have entertained very different expectations and required different market incentives, giving the same quantity of cash a different value in their respective eyes. In that case, different remuneration might have been culturally fitting and morally just.⁶⁴

What Biggar again fails to acknowledge (apart from the likelihood that African men would have welcomed being paid the same as White men regardless of their cultural and material differences), is the fact that higher paid jobs were reserved for White men only. The job colour bar was implemented informally until 1911 and established formally under the Mines and Works Act of 1911 and its amendment in 1926.⁶⁵

Collusion in Denial

The context for this next example is a persistent diminution of settler violence and rejection of the word ‘genocide’ in the Tasmanian context. Rather than consulting the considerable historical literature on this episode in Britain’s colonial history, in which the concept of genocide is seriously debated, Biggar draws to a significant degree on Keith Windschuttle, the Australian right-wing journalist and in some respects Biggar’s forerunner in defensive history.⁶⁶

Biggar first tries to claim authority for Windschuttle’s historical interventions by stating that the highly respected Australian historian Ann Curthoys included his book in a list of ‘the key works on this aspect of Tasmanian history’.⁶⁷ Curthoys, however, merely included Windschuttle’s book in a list of those that have shaped debates in Australia. She most certainly did not endorse it. In fact Curthoys is one of the historians who has helped to undermine the credibility of Windschuttle’s work. Contrary to Biggar’s and Windschuttle’s argument, she argued, in the very piece Biggar cites, that Tasmania ‘is a clear case of colonisation without sufficient regard for the effects on the indigenous peoples of the removal of the foundations of life, wrestling in the replacement of one human group by another. It is genocide’.⁶⁸

Next, Biggar tries to undermine Lyndall Ryan and Sharon Morgan’s observation that ‘no settler was ever … brought to court for offences of assaulting or killing aboriginals’. He writes,

Windschuttle reminds us that Brian Plomley had pointed out in 1966 that the first case of a convict convicted and punished by the supreme court of Van Diemen’s Land for the manslaughter of an aboriginal occurred in May 1824, with a second following in November.⁶⁹

Had he not ignored the work of Windschuttle’s academic critics, he would have known that William Tibbs, the convict in question, killed John Jackson, who was described as ‘black’, but not Aboriginal. He was likely the crew member of a visiting sealing or whaling ship. Aboriginal people were referred to as ‘natives’ in court and the charge of manslaughter was usually reserved for bar brawls rather than frontier violence.⁷⁰ Furthermore Tibbs was not, as Biggar states, punished. As Plomley explained, his ‘sentence was later reversed and he was discharged’.⁷¹

Both Windschuttle and Biggar seek to evade the fact that, in each of the Australian colonies, settlers’ killing of Aboriginal people was condoned rather more than it was than punished.⁷² As Amanda Nettelbeck writes, after encountering the backlash to the hanging of seven settlers for the mass murder at Myall Creek in New South Wales in 1838,

officials noted that no further proceedings could, with propriety, be adopted; and that if any of the parties were placed on their trial, the result would inevitably be an acquittal. By the late 1840s, Robert Reece has argued, the NSW government had largely relinquished any concerted efforts to capture settler-Aboriginal conflict within the law … Australia’s other colonies suggest a similar dearth of successful prosecutions for settler violence. In Van Diemen's Land, Kercher argues, “it was blacks who were hanged after incomprehensible trials, not whites”.⁷³

Ignoring Context

Biggar tries to contrast supposed British non-racialism not only with Afrikaner, but also with American, racism. He asserts that when, during WWII, ‘the US Army arrived in Britain and asked the native British to accommodate its policy of racial segregation, local people indignantly refused and the secretary of state for the colonies vigorously objected’.⁷⁴ His sources include David Reynolds.⁷⁵ Once again, he seems to have been rather selective in his reading, omitting all of the following:

To understand British policy towards the black Americans, we need to look first at the Government’s attitude to British colonial manpower. In World War I the Army had avoided using West Indian troops in combat, except against non-whites in the Middle East, and they were mostly employed in labour battalions. Indian troops were, however, used in action in France, but care was taken to minimise their contact with white women and to keep them out of Britain. Similar policies were adopted at the beginning of World War II. Although black pressure groups forced the Government to announce in October 1939 that British citizens “not of pure European descent” could volunteer for the armed forces and be considered for commissions on the same basis as whites, this was only a temporary measure “during the present emergency”. The Colonial and War Offices quite explicitly noted that “for obvious reasons it is not desired to encourage coloured British subjects to come to this country for direct enlistment in the Imperial forces”—whereas that was the approved method for applicants “of pure European descent.” … This same desire to minimise the non-white presence in Britain led the Government to oppose the entry of black Americans … their preferences were overruled by the US War Department.

Furthermore, Reynolds notes,

racial discrimination was definitely evident in parts of Britain … pioneering sociological studies revealed established patterns of discrimination in housing, employment and social relationships. But Britain’s black community was minute at this time – probably no more than seven or eight thousand in 1939 – and most British people, particularly in rural areas, had never met a non-white. Moreover, the black GI was a temporary visitor. He did not pose the same “threat” to jobs, housing and womenfolk as the black Britons were felt to do. Consequently, British people on the whole treated him well, as reports from all sources concur.⁷⁶

Trusting/Mistrusting Oral Testimony

Before moving on from Biggar’s use of written sources, it is worth noting his rather inconsistent position on oral testimony. He seems to disbelieve oral testimony if it does not suit his argument but believe it if it does. When it comes to the abuses of First Nations children in Canada’s Residential Schools, for instance, ‘aboriginal oral history, uncorroborated by original documents, is “completely unreliable, just like the oral history of white people”’. On the very next page, where the emphasis lies in minimising the role of British violence in the depopulation of Tasmania: ‘Even before the arrival of the British, according to “strong oral tradition”, the aboriginal population of Tasmania had been struck by a “catastrophic epidemic”, possibly caused by contacts with passing ships, which annihilated entire tribes’.⁷⁷

From these examples, and from others, it seems to me problematic for Biggar to claim that ‘anticolonial’ historians alone ‘treat historical data as political ammunition’.⁷⁸ As his own use of sources indicates, there are certain underlying themes in Biggar’s work, which it is also likely that only specialists in colonial history would note. They include a tendency to frame the geography of empire to concentrate on the places of greatest British innocence (more often the metropole than the colonies themselves); double standards and special pleading when it comes to Black and White victims of violence, and the systematic minimisation and mitigation of British racism.

Exculpatory Geography: Colonialism Without the Colonists

Biggar has a tendency to locate the ‘essential’ nature of empire wherever he can find the greatest justification for British actions. Sometimes, for example when ‘native’ testimony can be drawn upon to suggest consent or approval, or where indications of ‘development’ can be found, this is in the colonies themselves. But more often, and especially when it comes to violence, the real spirit of empire seems to reside in Britain and not the empire ‘out there’. Thus, it is not the vicious actions of General Dyer during and after the Jallianwala Bagh (Amristar) Massacre that reflect empire (although Biggar still does his best to exonerate Dyer); it is the condemnation of the massacre that ensued in the House of Commons.⁷⁹

Repeatedly, Biggar retreats from the colonies back to Britain, as the ‘safe space’ of colonialism, away from all the violence – a space where colonialism could be considered in the abstract, rationalised and justified in a calm, controlled atmosphere; a space free of the ‘natives’ who have, continually, to be kept in their place.⁸⁰ At one point he even seems to forget that the ‘natives’ were by and large confined in the colonies rather than located in Britain:

imperial superiority did take the racist form of unfair, disparaging prejudice against native peoples, which too often manifested itself in humiliating contempt, physical brutality, gratuitous social exclusion and racial segregation but this occurred much less at the imperial centre in London than at the colonial periphery.⁸¹

‘The view that native peoples were essentially equal to Britons, possessed of the potential to become equally civilised, predominated in the imperial metropolis, even when some settlers on the colonial periphery doubted it’, he notes.⁸²

Biggar’s empire lies in the intentions of inclusivity through ‘amalgamation’ or ‘assimilation’ expressed among officials and commentators in London; not in the actions of colonial legislatures and officials who prevented such rhetoric from jeopardising their racially exclusive grip on power in the colonies, with franchise restrictions, language tests, job reservation, judicial prejudice and, where all else failed, violence.

To give an example of Biggar’s imaginative geography of the empire, he cites Christopher Saunders, who wrote that Black South Africans ‘saw Britain not as an oppressor, but instead as an actual or potential protector and liberator’. For, ‘[i]t was from Britain, the main source of their ideas about racial equality . . . that they expected help to come to improve their lot’. In an accompanying note he adds, ‘Looking to Britain as a counterpoise to local [white] racial power, the African elite was able to point out how unjustly Africans were being ruled . . . In that sense, African pro-imperialism was a kind of anti-colonialism’.⁸³ He refuses to see this ‘local colonialism’ itself, against which African elites protested, as a manifestation of the British Empire; only the ideals professed by the British Establishment count. Similarly:

when the high commissioner for Southern Africa, Hercules Robinson, supported Rhodes’ establishment of a British presence in what became Rhodesia, he argued that it would “check the inroad of adventurers”, since the rush of concessionaires to Matabeleland had “produced a condition of affairs dangerous to the peace of that country”.

As if concessionaries, encouraged in the first instance by Rhodes himself, were nothing to do with British colonialism.⁸⁴

Where is the essence of Biggar’s colonialism to be found? It seems, wherever he can find the greatest mitigation for its oppressions and exactions.

Black Lives Matter (But Maybe Not So Much)

Where Biggar deals with White victims of anticolonial violence, they tend to be identified as individuals wherever possible, and their stories told in detail. Black and Indian victims of British violence, who were of course far more numerous, are anonymous, glossed over as swiftly as possible. Often this cannot be helped because the very racialised structures of governance that Biggar diminishes meant that victims of colour were not usually identified and recorded in the same way as White victims. Nevertheless the discrepancy of detail is sometimes striking: ‘In Amritsar … on 10 April, a huge crowd of fifty thousand people streamed out of the city towards the military district where the British lived. The troops panicked and opened fire, killing several rioters’, writes Biggar. He then continues rather more graphically,

The mob then beat a British railwayman and the garrison electrician to death, doused three British bank managers with kerosene and set them alight, and beat and left for dead Miss Marcella Sherwood, superintendent of the Mission Day School for Girls. (my emphasis)⁸⁵

Whereas other empires grew through conquest and invasion, there is a strange lack of violence in Biggar’s initial telling of how the British empire came about in the first place. ‘From 1757 for a hundred years the EIC … came to rule vast swathes of Indian territory’. The British ‘acquired Hong Kong by treaty with imperial China in 1842’. ‘In West Africa British influence grew along the coast, and then into the interior’ (my emphases).⁸⁶ The facts that many Indian states were conquered in battle, that the treaty ceding Hong Kong to Britain was signed only after China’s defeat in the First Opium War, which Biggar himself later admits was unjustified (the only colonial war that was, according to him),⁸⁷ and that West African rulers were overthrown through a combination of armed force and deceit, have no place in Biggar’s explanation of how an empire came to land in Britain’s lap.

In part because he shows no awareness of how most of Britain’s colonies were ‘acquired’, Biggar suggests that Britons generally engaged only in ‘just war’. ‘As for the morally justified waging of war’, he writes,

there are two conditions: the lethal means must be “discriminate”, distinguishing between combatants and innocents (literally, the “non-harming”), and not intentionally targeting the latter; and they must be “proportionate”, fit to achieve the military objective and no more than necessary to do so. These last two criteria rule out terroristic violence, which deliberately attacks those known to be innocent with unrestrained violence, in order to terrify a population into submission. This “just war” ethic is the one to which I subscribe, and I shall use its criteria in assessing Britain’s colonial wars and counter-insurgency operations.⁸⁸

He argues further that

the state must have a “right intention” in going to war, that is, it must genuinely aim to rectify … injustice rather than use it as a pretext for doing something quite different, such as plundering resources; and it must be ready to replace the status quo with something better. Finally, going to war must be a “last resort”, all other peaceful options having been exhausted.

Biggar seems oblivious to the problematic application of these Jus ad Bellum and Jus in Bello principles to most of Britain’s colonial conquests.⁸⁹

There is no mention of the sixty five ‘small wars’ against ‘savages … deficient in courage and provided with poor weapons’ that Col. Callwell wrote of in his guide for British Army officers. Such wars, Callwell, explained, were an inevitable ‘epilogue to encroachments into lands beyond the confines of existing civilization … the great nation which seeks expansion in remote quarters of the globe must accept the consequences’, which included scorched earth policies against unarmed people and the indiscriminate shelling and burning of settlements on the route of advance.⁹⁰

Biggar tries to contest Kim Wagner’s point ‘that the British developed expanding bullets “exclusively for use in savage warfare”, that is, “against non-white enemies”’, asserting that ‘the British use of expanding bullets was not determined by racism but by the military need to disable adversaries who did not subscribe to the convention of war “that combatants should fall out of action once wounded”’.⁹¹ However, he overlooks Wagner’s response, including the observation that

In 1900 the Defence Committee of the Cabinet decided that a stock of both solid and expanding [dum dum] ammunition … should be maintained, the latter for use against savages or with an enemy who was himself using expanding bullets … In consequence of this decision the Army Board … made recommendations, which were approved by the Secretary of State, the evident intention of which was that solid bullet only should be kept where conflict with civilized troops was possible, and the expanding bullet at places where conflict with savage races is most to be expected.⁹²

Where Biggar does pays attention to colonial wars, he mitigates or excuses them entirely in the terms in which their British perpetrators rationalised them at the time, seemingly oblivious to the role of propaganda and self-justification. He goes furthest in acknowledging unarmed casualties in his discussion of the concentration camps of the South African War, where the victims were White Boers.⁹³ Even here, he compares the victims to the ‘collateral’ casualties of WWII, without any recognition of the very different motivations of fighting Nazism in the latter case and imposing one form of White supremacy over another in the former: ‘For sure’, he says ‘these measures had the effect of exposing civilians to harm – but then so did the Allied use of bombing and artillery in the invasion of Normandy, which, all told, killed 35,000 French non-combatants’.⁹⁴

This use of WWII as a comparative point of reference is a consistent resort. Even where Biggar admits to instances of ‘brutal slavery; the epidemic spread of devastating disease; economic and social disruption; the unjust displacement of natives by settlers’ and so on, which ‘merit moral condemnation’, he seeks to contextualise them against Nazi atrocities:

None of them, however, amounts to genocide in the proper sense of the concerted, intentional killing of all the members of a people, the paradigm of which was the Nazi policy of implementing a “Final Solution” to the “problem” of the Jews … Notwithstanding their harshness, the burning of property and the seizure of goods [by Britons] were quite distinct, morally, from lining up innocent civilians in front of mass graves and intentionally slaughtering them.⁹⁵

In Biggar’s sanitised empire, British colonists lack culpability not only for the direct violence of colonisation, but for most of the other things that are conventionally and uncontroversially attributed to them. When Native Americans faced ‘the end of their traditional way of life with the imminent extinction of the bison’ it seems to have had nothing to do with the arrival of settler hunters. The colonial role was, rather, to assign the Indigenous peoples

land reserves held by the Crown for their use and benefit, the granting of annual payments, a cash bonus per capita, the supply of implements and cattle for farming and ranching, the provision of schools and government aid in time of famine.⁹⁶

Biggar even manages to find a way of blaming Gandhi’s non-violent protests for the violence that ensued; the violence of Indian partition perhaps on the British being overly cautious about shooting Indians after the Jallianwala Bagh massacre; and the 1920 rebellion in Iraq on ‘the sudden efficiency of British administration, whose “thoroughness [especially in raising taxes] and even . . . probity were unfamiliar, irksome, and unnecessary”’ to the locals.⁹⁷

Biggar’s repeated claim that ‘For the second half of its life, anti-slavery, not slavery, was at the heart of imperial policy’ is absurd. The post-emancipation antislavery lobby was real and as many historians have explained, it sought to influence colonial policy.⁹⁸ Sometimes, when it could mobilise public opinion sufficiently, it succeeded. But to suggest that it generally outweighed commercial, strategic and private British interests, and infer that it was antislavery that prompted colonial wars during the post-emancipation period, is ludicrous. A reader who knew no better would be seriously mislead by passages such as this one:

Subsequent attempts by the British Empire to suppress slavery were often attended by political compromise, because however powerful the empire was, its power was not infinite … And even when it did send troops, it sometimes came off worst. Notoriously, in 1842 a British army of 4,500 (plus 12,000 camp followers) was annihilated in its retreat from Afghanistan. In 1879 1,300 British and colonial troops were overwhelmed by Zulu warriors at Isandlwana in South Africa. And in 1883 an 8,000-strong Anglo-Egyptian army was massacred at El Obeid in the Sudan by the forces of the Mahdi, the purported redeemer of Islam. In this last case, the suppression of the slave trade was among the grievances of the Mahdists. Lacking the power always to impose, the empire often had to act against slavery by increments, being careful not to excite too much opposition.⁹⁹

The insinuation is, of course, that the First Anglo-Afghan War, the Anglo-Zulu War and the expeditions to Sudan were somehow related to the suppression of slavery; nothing to do with the attempt to place a client Emir in Kabul; to forcibly confederate South Africa; or to support a compliant Egyptian government.¹⁰⁰

Ethics: Double Standards and Special Pleading

As will be clear by now, its strikes me that there is a persistent double standard in Biggar’s book; a special pleading for practices that are hard to justify morally when it was Britons engaging in them. I have given a number of examples above, but we see it too in Biggar’s contrasting treatment of British and Edo slavery, the latter of which he sees in part as justifying the attack on Benin, the plunder of its bronzes and their retention in Britain today.

Biggar’s admission that the British ‘institution of slavery was highly objectionable’ is accompanied by the mitigation:

to most of our ancestors up until the second half of the eighteenth century, slavery was a fact of life – an institution that had existed all over the world since time immemorial. There could be good or bad forms of it – some granting slaves certain rights, others not; some being merciful, others being cruel – but the institution itself was taken for granted. We should forgive our ancestors for not perceiving some moral truths quite as clearly as we do, just as we shall surely need forgiveness from our grandchildren for our own moral dullness.¹⁰¹

This indulgence granted to Britain’s industrial scale plantation slavery, however, seems not to apply to African forms of domestic slavery. Despite citing an article on Benin by Philip Igbafe, Biggar overlooks his description of Edo slavery:

slaves were usually allowed a limited amount of personal freedom … private owners could emancipate their slaves either voluntarily or through self-redemption by the slaves. According to Benin traditions, the Oba could, if appealed to, compel owners who refused to accept redemption money to emancipate the slaves affected. The Oba’s slaves did not need to undergo this process of manumission as their lot was one of comparative comfort.¹⁰²

Biggar’s description of Benin is instead drawn mainly from the British participants in the attack on the kingdom. It is that of a charnel house, full of brutal slavery and human sacrifice.

Of course I am not arguing that historians should seek to mitigate either system of slavery (or indeed set out to justify or mitigate, rather than understand and explain, any other historical phenomenon). It just seems to me that Biggar may be guilty of displaying a double standard when he writes this of Dan Hicks’ Brutish Museums:

Whereas the balm of indulgence is given the Edo, the acid of cynicism is poured relentlessly over the British … His thinking also displays symptoms of an ethical schizophrenia: on the one hand, he is morally neutral and infinitely indulgent with African culture; on the other hand, he is morally absolutist and infinitely unforgiving with regard to Western, British culture.¹⁰³

All this leaves me confused as to Biggar’s ethical position, supposedly the distinctive strength that he brings to imperial history. Despite his explanation that ‘my ethics are shaped, first and foremost, by Christian principles and tradition’ and that he is ‘inclined to believe that [the] common world is structured by universal moral principles’, his rendition of imperial history suggests rather that these ethics are culturally specific.

Biggar does not see himself as racist, because he does not believe Black or Brown peoples are biologically inferior to White people. He simply ‘observes’ that these people’s cultures were backwards compared to that of the British and other Europeans. By Biggar’s definition, the attribution of ‘cultural inferiority to a lack of development, rather than biological nature’ is not racist.¹⁰⁴ Clearly anticipating objections, he argues that ‘an uncontroversial, formal definition of “racism” would be “a pejorative attitude of a member of one race for all members of another race”’. Aside from taking ‘race’ as a natural rather than socially constructed phenomenon, that little word ‘all’ does an awful lot of work here. It is the one that allows people who believe that most members of what they think of as another ‘race’ are inferior to say ‘but this one is all right’, or ‘I can’t be racist because I have a Black friend’. ‘Far from being racist’, writes Biggar, Rhodes ‘showed consistent sympathy for individual black Africans throughout his life’, as if the two are mutually exclusive. Similarly, ‘Cromer’s pejorative characterisation of the Egyptian capacity for good government and political leadership was not indiscriminate, and it did not prevent him from recognising exceptions to the rule’.¹⁰⁵

At numerous points, Biggar’s argument runs the risk of offering support for views of empire that are based on racial prejudice, whether he is aware of it himself or not. He takes care to clarify that the cultural superiority of Britons over Africans was not absolute and was temporally specific. However, this quote from another fictional character who may or may not be ventriloquising his own position still seems to me to be racist, because it rests on the idea that Africans (for whatever environmental or evolutionary reason) lack the compassion of Europeans. The character

believed passionately that it was erroneous, patronising and downright dangerous to make comparisons between Africans living in Africa and Western man, because they had advanced on parallel but completely different planes; one neither higher nor lower than the other and one neither superior nor inferior to the other. Because their environment differed so greatly, they were aiming at entirely different goals . . . where would he [an African] be if, throughout history and up to colonial times, in the harsh environment of Africa, he had shown compassion towards neighbouring tribes and all those that were a threat to him and to his family? If he had borne the same compassion as Westerners, he could never have endured the environment where only the strong and the fittest survived.¹⁰⁶

From Cold War to Culture War

Biggar’s intervention in imperial history may seem to be purely a product of the twenty-first-century culture war, but it also has historiographical roots in a longer tradition of conservative imperial history writing. Writers like Herbert Frankel before WWII and L. H. Gann and Peter Duignan afterwards, were concerned that anti-colonial agitators and academics were undermining the Western bloc’s moral authority by critiquing its colonial record. With the coming end of empire and the emergence of the Cold War, they believed that Western morale needed urgent remedial treatment.

As Lars Cornelissen explains, a key moment in the crystallisation of this defensive imperial historiography occurred in 1947, when Friedrich Hayek invited ‘the first generation of neoliberals’ to a gathering in the Swiss Alps to found the Mont Pèlerin Society. Instead of identifying with the anticolonial nationalists of the emerging ‘Third World’, who were now being tempted by support from the Communist Bloc or non-alignment, they argued, it was Westerners’ responsibility to uphold Frankel’s explanation that colonialism had been ‘a forcing-house of civilization’.¹⁰⁷

With the Cold War having in the meantime firmly established a bipolar world order, in 1967, Gann and Duignan’s Burden of Empire, cited frequently by Biggar, set out to challenge a supposedly.

skewed intellectual consensus surrounding the moral and historical record of European colonialism in Africa, … which it presented as rhetorically exaggerated and politically dangerous. Thus, taking aim at what they called “something like a postcolonial climate of opinion” … Gann and Duignan argued instead that the imperial age had been the high point of Africa’s history. They framed this argument as a simple summative exercise in which colonialism’s advantages and disadvantages would all be tallied up. “In our view,” they wrote in the book’s conclusion, “the imperial system stands out as one of the most powerful engines for cultural diffusion in the history of Africa; its credit balance by far outweighs its debit account.”¹⁰⁸

Biggar draws heavily on these neoliberal writers’ arguments. As Cornelissen points out, they paved the way for ‘rhetorical tricks that allowed empire’s apologists to voice their support for the history of European dominance all the while avoiding charges of illiberality and racial hubris’.¹⁰⁹ Jennifer Pitts finds another way of putting it: ‘intellectual strategies … used to reconcile … declared commitment to freedom with the domination of other societies, and to shield democratic powers from the very critical inquiry they claim is essential to democracy’.¹¹⁰

Biggar and his neoliberal Cold Warrior antecedents see the West as something like a football team preparing for a tough tournament. The morale of the team must be maintained whatever the cost. Too much self-questioning will lead to self-doubt and underperformance. Facing off first against the Soviet Union and revolutionary China, and now Vladimir Putin’s Russia and Xi Jinping’ resurgent China, the West must maintain pride in its record of democratic liberalism no matter what. Any admission of weakness will lead to defeat.

However, we must not forget that there is an additional element to Biggar’s milieu that distinguishes it from the immediate post WWII world of Gann and Duignan. Biggar’s intervention should be set not just in the context of the late twentieth and twenty-first century stand-offs between the West and its Eastern Bloc enemies, but also in that of the ultra-conservative reaction within the West against antiracism, feminism, secularisation and sexual liberation. Biggar’s milieu is Culture War, not just neo-Cold War. It is not only post-imperial, but Trumpian and Johnsonian. It is, accordingly, one of vehement and dextrous denial of reality. It is just too tempting to turn Biggar’s own words against his book: ‘This unscrupulous indifference to historical truth indicates that the controversy over empire is not really a controversy about history at all. It is about the present, not the past’.¹¹¹

Conclusion

Throughout this review I have been writing as an historical scholar concerned that it is our job, as far as we are able, to tell truths about the British Empire rather than wield its history as a weapon in contemporary politics. A key problem in Biggar’s book is the pretence that it does the former rather than the latter.

In conclusion though, let me argue not as an historian, but as someone who shares Biggar’s view that Western democracy, for all its flaws, is better than authoritarianism and totalitarianism. I would suggest that a more accurate, less denialist, interpretation of British colonialism might be a better tactic. The denial, minimisation and mitigation of British colonial racism and violence seem to me counterproductive. What both his post-war neoliberal influencers and now Biggar himself fail to appreciate is that, just as the best football teams continually review their past performances to spot areas for improvement, so Western democracies are strengthened through self-reflection and reform. Indeed, as Pitts notes, the very permissibility of internal criticism, the intellectual freedom and free speech that allows it and that most conservatives champion, is one of Western democracies’ greatest virtues. While he overlooks the gap between universalist metropolitan principle and racist colonial practice, Biggar himself claims approvingly that ‘the imperial system in general had “a built-in capacity for self-criticism”’.¹¹² Yet, in Colonialism Biggar sees criticism of our imperial record as an existential threat to the West.

Perhaps if you seek to defend the virtues of Western democracy, the best place to start is not mitigation of its racist colonial oppressions, but an acknowledgement of its hypocrisies and a commitment to reform? After all, those hypocrisies are abundantly clear to many formerly colonised peoples around the world. Their historical memory is manifested in widespread support for Putin or indeed for anyone who defies the West. It is not enough to defend the British Empire on the grounds that it was not as bad as the Nazis, or to pretend that only a leftist/Marxist historical orthodoxy could draw attention to its oppressions.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Hunter, Culture Wars. See also Hartman, A War for the Soul of America.

2 In many ways, Australia’s History Wars of the late 1980s-90s pre-empted current culture war debates in the UK. See Manne, Whitewash.

3 On the relationship between Brexit and memories of empire see Ward and Rasch, Embers of Empire. For subsequent imbrications of culture war and imperial history, see Lester, Deny and Disavow.

4 The Legacies of British Slavery project and website at UCL has been a key contributor here: https://www.ucl.ac.uk/lbs.

5 The tactic of aligning anything seen to be critical of British colonists with CRT (a school of thought that originated in the analysis of the American justice system) originated with the Trump – supporting ‘Alt-Right’ in the USA. Christopher Rufo boasted that he deliberately made CRT ‘toxic, as we put all the various cultural insanities under that brand category. The goal is to have the public read something crazy in the newspaper and immediately think “critical race theory”’: War on wokeness: the year the right rallied around a made-up menace: https://www.theguardi-an.com/us-news/2022/dec/20/anti-woke-race-america-history?CMP = Share_iOSApp_Other.

6 https://www.thecommonsensegroup.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/Common-Sense.pdf.

7 Ibid.

8 https://natcen.ac.uk/news/woke-attitudes-no-more-common-britain-culture-wars-continue-divide.

9 Mitchell, Imperial Nostalgia, 16.

10 See Lester, Deny and Disavow.

11 Kendall, ‘Blood Runs Thicker Than Water’. For examples of Whataboutery, see my debate with Robert Tombs on the History Reclaimed website: https://historyreclaimed.co.uk/debating-the-british-empire/.

12 Ibid.

13 https://quillette.com/2019/08/27/the-drayton-icon-and-intellectual-vice/.

14 https://www.briefingsforbritain.co.uk/author/nigel-biggar/; https://www.briefingsforbritain.co.uk/about-the-contributors/; https://www.briefingsforbritain.co.uk/our-mission/. One of these articles is the basis for chapter 2 of Colonialism.

15 All of these figures have prominently endorsed Biggar’s Colonialism.

16 https://www.mailplus.co.uk/tv/the-michael-crick-report/101025/how-history-reclaimed-are-battling-blms-woke-war-on-british-history.

17 https://www.historyreclaimed.co.uk.

18 https://www.nationaltrust.org.uk/who-we-are/research/addressing-our-histories-of-colonialism-and-historic-slavery.

19 https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-9153499/Academic-says-GARDENING-roots-racial-injustice.html; https://lbsatucl.wordpress.com/2021/02/17/culture-wars-in-country-houses-what-the-national-trust-controversy-tells-us-about-british-history-today/.

20 https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-9153499/Academic-says-GARDENING-roots-racial-injustice.html.

21 https://bylinetimes.com/2022/10/27/the-right-wing-bid-to-capture-the-national-trust-exposed/; https://www.netzerowatch.com/who-we-are/.

22 https://nationalconservatism.org/natcon-uk-2023/.

23 https://www.vox.com/2019/7/17/20696543/national-conservatism-conference-2019-trump.

24 Biggar, Colonialism, 14.

25 Ibid., 299. Biggar’s ire was prompted mainly by his Oxford colleagues and then a wider group of scholars stating their disagreement with the approach of a centre Biggar had established to study the ethics of colonialism. Trevor Phillips’ glowing review of Colonialism in The Sunday Times included the false claim that Biggar’s Oxford colleagues had called for his centre to be shut down, citing this as an instance of ‘woke’ cancel culture. In fact they had merely expressed their intellectual disagreement with his approach to empire, and, after a complaint to the Independent Press Standards Office, the paper was obliged to issue a correction (Sunday Times, 26 Feb 2023). A call for Biggar’s project to be ‘shut down’ came from one signatory to the second letter in a personal tweet. What the public letter actually said is available here: https://theconversation.com/ethics-and-empire-an-open-letter-from-oxford-scholars-89333.

26 Biggar, Colonialism, 291, n.14, 427, 295.

27 Ibid., 5.

28 Ibid., 7.

29 It does not seem to have occurred to Biggar that arguing for the ethical justification of coercive national expansion might reinforce Putin’s project rather more directly than academic enquiry into colonial history. Nor that Putin’s main allies in the West are right-wing extremists who identify with his authoritarian, ‘anti-woke’ stance, and are willing to spread his disinformation: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/mar/16/russia-disinformation-us-far-right-republicans-ukraine.

30 Biggar’s false accusation against Adebajo in particular is analysed below.

31 Biggar, Colonialism, 290.

32 Ibid., 97.

33 Ibid., 19.

34 Wilson, “A Morality Tale,” 74. Where Biggar does engage in argument with named scholars, he sometimes picks rather obscure ones to stand for the supposed orthodoxy against which he rails. His argument that Christian converts were not forcibly recruited, a fact that will of course come as no surprise to most historians in the mission field, is based on refuting an article in the Buffalo Human Rights Law Review. While I have no wish to be dismissive of this publication or of the article’s author, it is hardly a seminal work within the large and diverse body of scholarship on the relationship between missions and empire.

35 A glance at the titles in Manchester University Press’ Studies in Imperialism series alone is sufficient indication.

36 Evans, Lying About Hitler.

37 Biggar, Colonialism, 104.

38 Biggar, Colonialism, 104, citing Flanagan, Riel and the Rebellion.

39 The transcript of the trial and Riel’s speech are available here: https://www.google.co.uk/books/edition/Sessional_Papers/kZA-AAAAYAAJ?hl=en&gbpv=1&dq=but+we+helped+them+with+our+lands,+so+the+question+comes:+Your+land,+you+Cree+or+you+half-+breed&pg=RA9-PA218&printsec=frontcover.

40 Biggar, Colonialism, 277.

41 Ibid., n. 9, 313.

42 Rathbone, “A Murder in the Colonial Gold Coast,” 45.

43 Biggar, Colonialism, 2.

44 Ibid., n. 7, 300.

45 Ibid., n. 7, 301.

46 My thanks to Tony Bryan, Michael Taylor and Robert Bickers for sending me screenshots of these digitised sources.

47 Biggar, Colonialism, n. 104, 190.

48 Ibid., n. 7, 418. At one point Biggar switches to a fictional account of a Muslim household, as far as I can tell, to infer that British slavery could be moral: 323.

49 I will come to Biggar’s use of the word ‘natives’ below.

50 Biggar, Colonialism, 199-200.

51 Achebe, There Was a Country, 1–2.

52 See for example, Lester, Imperial Networks.

53 Biggar, Colonialism, 253

54 Ibid., n. 27, 372, citing Nyika and Fourie, “Black Disenfranchisement”.

55 Ibid., 72.

56 No Africans stood for election before Union in 1910, in part because of the high property qualification. A colour bar covering membership of both houses of the Union Parliament was included in the South Africa Act of 1909: Thompson, The Unification of South Africa.

57 Nyika and Fourie, “Black Disenfranchisement,” 455–7, 469. So wedded is Biggar to the idea that the exceptional non-racial Cape franchise indicated a general British colonial preference for non-racial inclusion, that he dismisses the philosopher Táíwò as ‘a better philosopher than he is a historian’ for writing ‘that whereas the French and Portuguese “held out to their subjects the promise of full citizenship if they “assimilated”, the British “never did”’. Biggar asserts ‘That is not so. Since 1853 the franchise in Cape Colony was available to black Africans on the same conditions as whites’ (n. 1, 424).

58 Ibid., 156.

59 Ibid., 29, 361.

60 Sidaway, “Work, Culture and Identity”; Worger, “Work, Culture, and Identity”; Sheldon, “Work, Culture, and Identity”; Maloka, “Mines and Labour Migrants”.

61 What Biggar does to Patrick Harries he also does to Colin Bundy. Biggar uses Bundy’s argument that an Mfengu peasantry adapted to commercial farming well. He ignores the next part of Bundy’s findings, where the colonial government dispossessed them to protect White farmers and a White-dominated franchise (Bundy, The Rise and Fall).

62 Biggar, Colonialism, 155.

63 For early racial segregation around the mines see Worger, South Africa’s City of Diamonds.

64 Biggar, Colonialism, 162.

65 Rob Turrell notes that in 1883 ‘South Africa’s first legislated industrial colour bar’ was implemented for the control of blasting (Turrell, “Kimberley’s Model Compounds,” 59–75). Elaine Katz notes the first industrial colour bar in the Transvaal dates back to 1892 (Katz, “Revisiting the Origins”). My thanks to Rachel Bright and Tony Bryan.

66 See Manne, Whitewash.

67 Biggar, Colonialism, n. 75, 153.

68 Curthoys, “Genocide in Tasmania,” 246.

69 Biggar, Colonialism, n. 101, 355.

70 Boyce, “Fantasy Island,” 36–7.

71 Plomley and Brain, Weep in Silence, n. 42, 43. I can find no evidence relating to the claimed second case against a settler in Nov. 1824.

72 See Madley, “From Terror to Genocide”.

73 Nettelbeck, “Equals of the White Man,” 9–10.

74 Biggar, Colonialism, 290.

75 Reynolds, “The Churchill Government”.

76 Ibid., 114–17.

77 Ibid., 136, 137.

78 Biggar, Colonialism, n.14, 294

79 Biggar emphasises that Dyer had issued a proclamation warning of ‘consequences if demonstrators assembled’; notes that when warned, potential protestors had declared ‘let us be fired on’; says that Dyer ‘knew that he faced direct defiance of martial law’ and explains that he ‘had seen the chaos that threatened when the authority of civil government dissipated’ in Belfast. He asserts that Dyer could not have known that the people assembled in the enclosed park were ‘mostly unarmed’, and reproduces Dyer’s defence that, by shooting them he was seeking to prevent ‘more bloodshed, more looting, more lives lost. That is one reason why he kept on firing after his initial fear of being overwhelmed had subsided. Another reason was that the crowd was not clearly dispersing, because the exits from the park were so few and constricted – something that Dyer also did not know’ (228–9).

80 This of course necessitates overlooking the occasions when imperial violence was propelled directly from the offices of imperial governance in London, such as the wars of confederation in 1870s southern Africa.

81 Ibid., 90.

82 Ibid., 124.

83 Ibid., n. 163, 399, citing Saunders, “African Attitudes,” 140, 141, 143.

84 Ibid., 31.

85 Ibid., 227.

86 Ibid., 15.

87 As one might expect by now, Biggar nevertheless tries to mitigate the ‘offence’. The British government apparently launched the war not to protect advantageous terms of trade and Treasury revenue from the illegal opium trade, but ‘“to secure redress for insult” – which, given what we learned in the previous chapter about the political potency of national self-esteem, should not surprise us’. A selective quotation from Robert Bickers’ Scramble for China serves further to deflect from British motivations: ‘The Sino-foreign conundrum seemed partly to derive from the simple impossibility of each side according the other sufficient dignity, or understanding when the other felt wronged, or else in perceiving slight when none was offered’. To be fair, Biggar does add that ‘The mere slighting of honour is no just cause for war’. The effect of this concession is spoiled though, for me at least, by some immediate Whataboutery: ‘That said, when compared to the evils culpably inflicted on China within living memory by Chairman Mao in his Great Leap Forward of 1958–62 with its consequent deaths of more than 45 million, according to one authoritative estimate, and the Cultural Revolution of 1966–76 with its consequent deaths of at least 400,000 and perhaps 3 million, those inflicted by the British one hundred and eighty years ago fade into insignificance’! Ibid., 220.

88 Ibid., 218.

89 Ibid., 217–18.

90 Callwell, Small Wars.

91 Biggar, Colonialism, n. 69, 391, citing Bennett et al., “Studying Mars and Clio”.

92 Wagner, “Expanding Bullets and Savage Warfare”.

93 Biggar gives the lower end of estimates of the numbers of Africans who were confined to separate camps with worse conditions. His mitigations for the Boer camps include: ‘Many [Britons], including Milner, were sickened by the tactic … Louis Botha, the wartime commander-in-chief of the Boer commandos, had declined a British offer to exclude all farms from military operations … camps were established, initially to protect surrendered Boers, together with their families, against summary punishment by their former comrades … The inmates were given – free of charge – food rations, clothing, medical and nursing care, and (for children) education’. Finally, Millicent Fawcett’s commission which condemned the camps reserved some of the blame for the high death rate on the ‘the unhygienic failure of Boer women to ventilate their tents’ (202–4).

94 Biggar, Colonialism, 262.

95 Ibid., 262.

96 Ibid., 37. He later notes that ‘Unfortunately, the collapse of the bison herds … and the ensuing famine happened so suddenly that the government was caught off guard and its provision of aid proved less than sufficient’ (107–8). It will come as quite a surprise to most Indigenous people today to learn that ‘Remarkably, the European colonisers unilaterally decided to bind themselves in their treatment of native land by their own law – out of recognition of universal natural justice’ (Biggar’s emphasis, 105).

97 Ibid., 227, 231, 41. Settler violence against Indigenous peoples was, apparently often the result of frustration at ‘the latter’s failure to make [the land] more productive and by the apparent squandering of resources’ (103).

98 See for example Lester and Dussart, Colonisation and the Origins; Laidlaw, Protecting the Empire’s Humanity, and Heartfield, The Aborigines’ Protection Society.

99 Ibid., 64

100 For the background to each of these conflicts see Lester, Boehme, and Mitchell, Ruling the World.

101 Ibid., 23.

102 Ibid., 410; Igbafe, “Slavery and Emancipation in Benin,” 428. Biggar distorts Igbafe’s argument as he does so many others. He includes this extract from Igbafe’s article: ‘the British drive for . . . the abolition of slavery can be looked upon as a practical demonstration of their commitment to the principle of emancipation and manumission’. What Igbafe actually says is that such a commitment was absent in the lead up to the invasion, and was manifested only afterwards. He writes, ‘the abolition of slavery in Benin by the British was used, in contrast to many areas of Nigeria, to facilitate British occupation, and … later it became an expression of British commitment to a principle … In many parts of Nigeria the attempt to undermine domestic slavery was undertaken long after the establishment of British rule … It was … convenient for the British to abolish the slave trade and slave-raiding, while turning a blind eye on domestic slavery’.

103 Ibid., 243.

104 Ibid., 72. Nor does Biggar consider his use of the word ‘natives’ to describe all the diverse and multifarious peoples colonised by Britons, racist. It may not necessarily be racist in itself, but it is sems to me indicative of a disregard of the way that colonised peoples have tried to represent and distinguish their own views and agency, and of the ways that scholars, including Indigenous historians, have tried to tell their diverse and differentiated stories of colonialism.

105 Ibid., 82.

106 Ibid., 70.

107 Frankel, The Economic Impact, 8, cited in Cornelissen, “Neoliberal Imperialism”.

108 Cornelissen, “Neoliberal Imperialism”. Cornellisen’s analysis extends to the way that Niall Ferguson continued the tradition of neoliberal imperial apology in support of the disastrous invasion of Iraq, in the early 2000s.

109 Cornellisen, “Neoliberalism”.

110 Jennifer Pitts. Back cover endorsement of Morefield’s Empires Without Imperialism.

111 Biggar, Colonialism, 3.

112 Ibid., 287.